From London Far (35 page)

‘We shall be very happy.’

The man bowed again and left the room. Prompted by a common impulse, Jean and Meredith moved to the door and peered after him. Standing perfectly still and bolt upright, Mr Neff’s butler was receding rapidly upon his conveyor belt. He was like the detached figurehead of some ancient and haughty ship borne by a strong current towards the horizon.

But the encounter with Mr Neff (Meredith felt afterwards) had much the feel which those must experience who participate in a head-on naval battle. For Mr Neff, surrounded by a whole flotilla of auxiliaries, was first sighted at a distance representing almost the extreme length of the Cottage, and as he rapidly advanced he had the appearance of an admiral issuing from his bridge all that multiplicity of orders which must prelude an engagement. Actually, Mr Neff was conducting a conversation with a business associate in Johannesburg, and this was why an attendant stood beside him on the conveyor belt dextrously paying out a telephone cord as Mr Neff and his entourage were propelled forward. On each side were girls with open writing pads, behind were two menservants carrying a variety of garments (for Mr Neff was as yet but imperfectly attired) and behind this again was a little posse of important-looking and well-dieted gentlemen – presumably clients or familiars of Mr Neff – whose attitudes wavered between the largest confidence and a covert uneasiness at their overwhelming surroundings. And as this line of battle moved rapidly towards Meredith and Jean, so did those two move rapidly towards it. It is well known that the issue of modern naval conflicts depends upon split-second decisions; the moment comes at which the order must be given, the appropriate deflection achieved, and the enemy brought instantly and fatally within the rake of one’s fire. And some such lightning strategy, Meredith felt, there ought now to be. Only on Mr Neff’s conveyor belts one was much less manoeuvreable even than a battleship; in fact one was little better than a tram.

As you near it the land approaches you
… And Mr Neff was eminently
terra incognita
, territory virgin and unexplored. He liked Alma-Tadema; he had given an El Greco to the Elks; all else was unknown. Was he a Dragon? Were his hoarded pictures a sort of megalomaniac version of the row of Pin-up Girls favoured by the simple GI? And, if so, had his attachment to those empty images of desire reached a point of embarrassment only to be coped with by a kidnapped psychiatrist? Or did he appear to be one who by the same psychiatrist could cunningly be driven mad? Of all these probabilities it should be possible to make some lightning provisional assessment now. But Meredith found so disconcerting a quality in the spectacle of a group of men, at once gesticulating and standing as stock still as waxworks, advancing like so many tin soldiers in an ambitiously mechanized window display, that he was unable to set about any appraisal whatever. He saw only what was patent for any observer to see: a small, hurried man, either dynamic or merely fussy according as to how one chose to take him, and very fairly representative of the not very interesting class of captains of industry. Mr Neff – Mr Drummey had said – had come up the hard way. And he had not, Meredith presently judged – come up quite tip-top. He had not acquired the tricks of quiet and reticence which mark your magnate who has been born (as the poet adequately puts it) lapt in a five per cent Exchequer Bond. Mr Neff – as his domicile and his swimming pool might be held to presage – abundantly asserted himself, and in this he was like lesser and less secure members of his magnate breed. Immensely successful he had quite obviously been, and yet, equally obviously, he was not quite what he would fain imagine. What then, was the flaw? Certainly it could not consist in a willingness to help himself to other people’s property: for in that, after all, lay the very essence of the part. But might it somehow lie in the fact that prominent in that property were sundry works of human craft pre-eminent for beauty, and purveyed to their present illicit owner by the International Society for the Diffusion of Cultural Objects? There was the fact that Mr Neff was after his own queer fashion artistically creative; he had thought up the swimming pool, and the brooding dove which introduced Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’, and the general idea of a country home which should symbolize the spirit of progress. There was the possibility – But these were reflections far too slow for this hurrying moment. Mr Neff had tossed the telephone to the man paying out the cord, barked a couple of sentences at each of the girls with writing pads, snatched his tuxedo and a hairbrush from the attendant valets, waved Jean and Meredith off their conveyor belt, and with an agile leap landed beside them. The rest of the party proceeded on its way, rather like a convoy of harmless merchant vessels suddenly abandoned by a darting destroyer, and the owner of Dove Cottage was immediately isolated with his new guests. ‘Mr and Mrs Pantelli?’ he barked. ‘Pleased to meet you. Keep quiet.’ And he waved them once more on to the conveyor belt. ‘Not one dam’ word – see?’

This was discouraging, for the pleasure which Mr Neff could experience in meeting persons whom he thus peremptorily forbade to converse must surely be of the most conventional sort. It was true, Meredith reflected, that Jean was decidedly pleasant just to look at, but this was scarcely a fact that should warrant a really courteous host’s demanding that she keep her mouth shut.

But now Mr Neff spoke again. ‘Talk!’ he said.

Meredith looked at him in astonishment. ‘But you have just required–’

‘That’s better.’ Mr Neff nodded approvingly and jerked his thumb forwards. ‘Talk natural-like, so those folks won’t be wondering. But don’t talk art, or buying art; just keep mum on it – see? Too many people have been hearing this story I collect art big. Take Gipson there’ – and Mr Neff indicated what appeared to be the most consequential of the group forging steadily ahead before him – ‘Gipson keeps on leading round to pictures how I don’t like. Curiosity. Taking liberties with a man’s private interests. And it’s all wrong this story I collect art big.’

The idiom of Mr Neff, it occurred to Meredith, was distinguishably akin to that of the disgraced Properjohn. Perhaps this pillar of progressive Americanism, like Homer and other great men, had also a dubious ancestry amid many cities. Meredith glanced at Mr Neff, thinking to discern if there were also some physical resemblance to Don Perez’s demoted controller of crates and boxes. And as Meredith glanced at Neff it so chanced that Neff glanced at Meredith – with the result that the latter found himself with several pieces of intelligence to review.

The eye of Mr Neff was by no means mad; rather it was shrewd and calculating. But it was also irascible. Indeed, there smouldered in it the hint of certain wrathful fires which might well make Flosdorf or another quail. Mr Neff might be a man of peace; he might own a gold and ruby dove; he might be fond of massed choirs proposing to build Jerusalem in England’s – or Michigan’s – green and pleasant land. Nevertheless, he was a dangerous man, very well able to turn from such laudable constructive assertions to a simple raising hell. But this was not all – or indeed what was chiefly striking – in Mr Neff’s eye.

For the eye so far was alien to Meredith’s experience – and yet Mr Neff’s eye was a familiar eye as well. In precisely what the familiarity consisted he found himself unable to say; it was an eye, so to speak, on some fringe of his own world which he could not at the moment further define. But now it appeared necessary to talk, and Meredith boldly decided to talk art despite the ban which Mr Neff had placed upon it. For he had, after all, no intention of really selling someone else’s Giorgiones or near Giorgiones to this unscrupulous collector, and there was the less need therefore of deference or tact.

‘But it’s quite plain’, said Meredith, ‘that you do collect art big. Just look at all that.’ And he pointed to the panelled walls which were flowing smoothly past them on either side. As far as the eye could see these were hung with etchings: Rembrandt’s etchings to the number of several hundred. ‘No wonder your friend Mr Gipson keeps leading round to pictures in a way you don’t like.’

‘But we must put something on the walls; it wouldn’t be natural not. Suspicious.’

What Properjohn – thought Meredith – would call fishlike. ‘But it is suspicious,’ he said aloud, ‘–hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of Rembrandt hanging along a corridor.’

‘It strikes you that way?’ And Mr Neff looked fleetingly and with a queer distrustfulness at these ranked masterpieces. ‘Flosdorf arranges all that: the pictures we give away and the pictures we hang about the place for folks to see. Clever at it, I’ve always thought. Quiet and in good taste. Nothing to catch the eye, but the quality right. Same as if you had a custom-made suit with a neat pin stripe – nothing loud or dressy.’

‘I see.’ And Meredith looked again at the labours of Rembrandt thus likened to the products of a discreet tailor. ‘No doubt they are quiet in one sense. On the other hand, a good many of them are highly dramatic – perhaps a little too much so.’

‘For instance,’ said Jean, ‘look at that one – the Blinding of Samson.’

Mr Neff cast a rapid glance up the corridor to where the rest of the party were just disappearing on a turntable. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘look at it.’ And grabbing the arms of his two companions he jerked them off the conveyor belt in front of the etching. ‘Look at it,’ he repeated – and proceeded to do so himself, squarely and with no apparent disposition to speech. Samson in his agony confronted the three of them.

But presently Mr Neff did speak. ‘Take Goya,’ he said. ‘Goya did a whole heap of things much like this – people maiming and torturing each other in some war way back in history. I got the whole lot of his stuff in a folio upstairs. It’s not what you could put on a wall; not if you are a man of peace same as I am. But the point is that you’re wrong about Rembrandt and his having too much drama. Goya’s got that, but this hasn’t.’ Mr Neff made this pronouncement quite without absoluteness; indeed he frowned over it like an anxiously open-minded professor. ‘Or so it’s always seemed to me, Mrs Pantelli, after looking a good many times at both. And why? It just seems that this Rembrandt got more art all the time. It’s the way the lines go across the paper.’ Mr Neff offered this accurate if unsurprising information much as if it were his own unassuming contribution to aesthetic theory. ‘That and how the light come here’ – he made a curiously subtle gesture – ‘and here. And I’ll tell you another thing. Hang this upside down so you’d think it couldn’t make sense, and you’d find it still looked somehow as if it had been put together on purpose. Now that doesn’t work with the Goyas – or not with many of them – because I’ve tried with them often enough. And why is this Rembrandt still most the same van Rinjn even if you hang him topside down? just because he got more art all the time. Step back folks, or we’ll be late for the soup.’

They resumed their progress. Meredith was as persuaded of the essential soundness of the observations just offered as he was surprised at Mr Neff’s making them. ‘About Rembrandt again,’ he said curiously, ‘would you say he had more art all the time than even Alma-Tadema?’

For a moment Mr Neff stared; then he burst out into large laughter. ‘Art’s tiring,’ he said. ‘Art’s the darn’dest tiring thing I know. Ever felt that?’

‘Well, I think I know what you mean.’

‘And there’s nothing like that Tadema if you want a break. I bought dozens of him just to have a bit of a joke now and then. Dirt cheap, too.’ And Mr Neff laughed again. ‘Not that I let Flosdorf in on that. Mean nothing to him. Clever man, of course. But he doesn’t understand art.’ Mr Neff lowered his voice. ‘Doesn’t even really know that art is beautiful. Kind of queer, isn’t it?’

Meredith considered. ‘I suppose it to be not uncommon.’

Mr Neff shook his head. ‘It’s wonderful’, he murmured, ‘how art is beautiful. Keeps on surprising me every time.’ He looked from Meredith to Jean with the largest innocence. ‘But about having only quiet things showing, so as not to have too much talk. You’ll find it the same in the dining-room here. Just cartoons by Leonardo and Raphael, and things in soft chalks by Dürer. Nothing striking. All plain, nothing coloured.’ Again he lowered his voice. ‘Say,’ he said, ‘I’ll do for you folks what I don’t often. I’ll show you the coloured ones tonight.’

‘Thank you very much.’ Meredith looked with increasing wonder at his host. ‘I suppose a good many experts and connoisseurs come here?’

Mr Neff nodded. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said – and his more assertive self abruptly returned to him. ‘Only to see what’s on show, of course. It’s modest and not striking, as I say; still it’s brought big museum men and critics to the Cottage more than once.’

‘With your fondness for these matters, you must find conversation with them very interesting.’

‘And they do too.’ Mr Neff was now frankly assertive. ‘It’s a remarkable thing. We talk art and understand each other.’ His voice rose in sudden, surprising triumph. ‘We understand each other all the time.’

Mr Neff, then, was a Dragon after all – a Dragon with pronounced if untutored aesthetic sensibilities and no morals whatever. He knew that art was beautiful. And he helped himself.

Nor was he altogether a solitary Dragon, crouched unyieldingly upon his hoard. For although that part of it which was two pence coloured was securely hidden away, over the penny plain residue he was in the habit of conversing with authorities, and of finding satisfaction in the exercise. Indeed, it had become clear that in this was the man’s peculiar pride. And Meredith, as the tedious banquet to which he was set moved elaborately forward, considered the implications of this.

Mr Neff had come up the hard way, which meant that he had battled towards affluence with no pause for anything that could be called cultivation, with no glimmering intimation of what does in fact really constitute the good life, without access to that traditional body of philosophy, literature, art which a little serves to unsensualize the mind. And yet Mr Neff had never belonged quite sheerly to his type, had never been wholly and simply the Acquisitive Man. The queer streak of restless inventiveness which had evoked his home, his dove, his swimming pool, his conveyor belts would have, been creativeness in a more genial environment. Almost, in fact, Mr Neff was an artist. Almost – but not quite.