Part 6

So long as there are any ancient houses in France and Italy, just so long will the manufacturers of French and Italian antiques have enough working material of absolute genuineness. This is due to the fact that the wainscoting and all the concealed woodwork of these venerable houses have been heartily eaten by many generations of true worms. Whenever a house is pulled down, therefore, the Old Masters of furniture-making flock to the scene and acquire large stocks of truly worm-holed wood. This, when incorporated into the magnificent chests, tables, sideboards, and other pieces which are destined to fill the antique-shops of Paris, Rome, and Florence, catches and holds the eye of the purchaser. It is obvious to any one—or at least to any amateur—that any piece of furniture which contains such intricate and symmetrical worm-holes must have been made before the worms started to bore, and must, therefore, be very ancient.

The old, worm-eaten wainscoting is used to make the shelves and drawer-bottoms of sideboards which are known as _credenzas_ in Italy and _crédences_ in France. It is also drawn on for the backs and bottoms of chests, for picture-frames, for wooden stirrups, and for almost any beautiful, wonderful old thing Milady or Mimister brings home to exhibit upon the sitting-room table.

The fronts and tops of chests and sideboards may, however, be made of new wood and will probably look just as well. For example, the new wood can be carved even more prettily than the old, and when the carving is finished, the manufacturer turns over the product to three or four muscular hirelings whose sole duty is to injure furniture. They are armed with large sticks of various shapes, and their activities are limited to chastising the wood with extreme severity. In this way the chests and sideboards acquire, in a matter of half an hour, the scratches and indentations for which slow centuries might otherwise be required. The wood is given the proper color by boiling it with walnut rind. Or it may be given the peculiar irregularities of great age by applying nitric acid, which eats into the surface, and then coloring the marks of the acid with permanganate of potash.

The new wood, of course, must be carefully worm-holed. The crudest variety of worm-holing is done with a shotgun. The result looks sufficiently wormy to suit the most captious worm-hole collector; but one can always find a Number 10 shot at the bottom of each hole. The shotgun method, therefore, is not acceptable to members in good standing in our Society. The worm-hole machine, which is used by several of the leading Parisian _chineurs_, is a new and excellent invention. Its front is a square plate with serpentine grooves in it. When the plate is pressed against a piece of wood and the handle turned, a number of slender augers push out and make a cluster of worm-holes. A turn of a lever changes the position of each auger slightly, so that the worm-hole pattern does not recur.

But the best worm-holes in the world are made in Italy by hand. The auger with which they are made is bent in an irregular shape; and the purchaser of a piece of furniture which has been worm-holed with it is at liberty to thrust wires into the holes in order to investigate their wormy crookedness.

The most thorough furniture manufacturers, knowing that the careful collector will rap on the furniture in order to see whether dust falls from the worm-holes—as would be the case if the hole is the work of a normal worm—should be careful to fill the holes with wood dust.

In a number of the antique-shops along the Rue Saintes-Pères and the Boulevard Raspail in Paris, one may see many specimens of carved wooden panels about a foot and a half long and about five inches wide. Every one of these has been taken from old châteaux and palaces which have been recently torn down. This statement is obviously reasonable; for if it were untrue, practically every château in France would be standing to-day, whereas nearly all of them have long since been demolished to provide the great number of wooden panels that have been placed on sale in the past few years. The panels are attractive and not made by great pressure—a method sometimes used in France and Italy in making cheap antiques. Pressure-carvings, as they are called, always show a bent grain; whereas the small carvings show a severed grain.

But in order to save a few châteaux for tourists to visit, it was decided to make panels somewhat artificially, so to speak. That would make a tourist twice happy: he could visit a château and look at the panels; then he could return to Paris and buy them to take home. Iron moulds were heated until they were white-hot, and then pressed against very dry wood. When the moulds were removed and the burnt surface brushed with steel brushes, the wood had the color and the polish and the texture of ancient carvings. A dose of Number 10 shot from the manufacturer’s shotgun supplied the worm-holes for each panel, after which they were ready to be sold to the travelling public for about four dollars apiece. Their cost was approximately forty-five cents—twenty cents for the wood, twenty cents for the labor, and five cents for the shotgun cartridge, and thus an embarrassing problem was solved to the contentment of everybody concerned.

Articles as large as mantels for generous fireplaces are made by this burning method and passed on to eager collectors at prices that distress the proletariat greatly and cause frequent demands for an equal distribution of wealth.

There is a wood-carving company in Paris which advertises that it will be glad to deliver the furniture of any period to antique-dealers at a moment’s notice.... There are workshops of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine which produce boule cabinets decorated with birds, beasts, and flowers of which André-Charles Boule might well have been proud.... There are places in Auvergne where the best ancient artists in the world turn out furniture which Parisian dealers later are kind enough to guarantee to have been owned by Marie Antoinette.

There is a true benevolence in all this. Culture is spread, and many people otherwise innocent of history learn that Marie Antoinette furniture is similar to that produced under one of the Louies. It is quite untrue, however, that she sent it all over to this country in the Mayflower.

VI

OF THE VIOLENT PEWTER-COLLECTOR AND HIS PATOIS—OF THE PECULIAR PASTIMES AND PLEASURES OF THE PEWTER-HOUNDS AND OF THE DANGERS OF FOREIGN PEWTER

The pewter-collector provides a pleasant source of income to European antique-dealers; for he is one of the most ardent collectors. Pewter, as is well known, is a base metal made of tin, to which a small amount of antimony, copper, or lead has been added. It was originally made for use in the homes of the wealthy before the days of pottery and china; then it was used in kitchens of great houses; churches which couldn’t afford gold or silver services had pewter services; taverns had complete outfits of pewter pots and tankards which could be thrown promiscuously by intoxicated guests without damage to anything except the guests.

When properly cleaned, old pewter has a soft, silvery lustre that is highly esteemed by all collectors; and a true pewter-lover will travel many miles for the privilege of handling a pewter plate, hearing it cry and taking rubbings of it.

Pewter-collectors speak a technical language which has little or no meaning to persons who have never been exposed to the pewter-germ: and it is in the antique-shops that one hears the pewter-lovers running on by the hour. The _cri d’étain_, or the “cry of the tin,” is not, as might be supposed, the noise which the pewter-collector makes when he finds out the price of a piece of pewter. It is the noise which genuine pewter always makes when the collector holds it close to his ear and bends it backward and forward. Pewter always refuses to cry for some people, but it is certain that there is a cry in it, just as it is certain that there is a lady in the moon, though few of them are ever able to see her.

All the pewter made in the old days in London and Paris and the German cities bore on its back the small private mark of its maker, due to the fact that a certain standard of metal was required by law.

The chief recreation of the pewter-collector is to search out several pieces of pewter, place tissue paper or tinfoil over a mark, and then diligently rub the paper or foil with some blunt instrument until a copy of the mark has been transferred to it. Two advanced pewter-collectors will squabble for hours as to whether the best rubbings can be made with cigarette-paper and a hard pencil, or with tinfoil and an ivory penholder, and as to whether the best results can be got by heating the pewter before taking the rubbing or by leaving it cold.

The most excitable pewter-huntsmen keep little books of pewter-rubbings on their persons, and think nothing of spending two or three hours trying to locate a given mark in their books. If interrupted in this pursuit, they become violent and use hideous language to the interrupter. They exchange rubbings with each other, and can spend as much as eight or ten hours in brooding over half a dozen dilapidated pewter plates. When they have hopelessly disagreed over the proper method of taking rubbings, they can argue for weeks over the best method of cleaning pewter, which develops an almost impenetrable crust when it lies neglected in a barn for half a century, as most of the genuine appears to have done. Some hold out for ashes and vinegar; others for boiling with hay; others for oxalic acid mixed with rotten stone; others for hydrochloric acid; others for oxide of tin; others for Calais sand and elm leaves; others for soft soap, rotten stone, and turpentine. One of the most delightful things about collecting this metal is that you can experiment for years with pewter without making any progress.

The same thing is true, of course, of all sorts of antiques. Only a short time ago the official expert of the French Government carefully examined a portrait owned by a Parisian lady, and pronounced it a genuine Leonardo da Vinci. The lady was about to sell it to the Kansas City Art Institute for the modest sum of $500,000, when another celebrated dealer examined it and declared emphatically that the painting was a copy, and not a Leonardo da Vinci at all. Both of the experts had international reputations and should have been qualified to know exactly what they were talking about. The Kansas City Art Institute, however, decided not to part with its money just then; and the lady at once sued the second expert for $500,000. Our Society hopes that when she gets the money she will endow us; and we have written her to that effect; but probably she is busy just now.

I myself found a gem of a pewter inkwell in a little Parisian shop one day, properly marked and battered and time-worn. It had a cylinder for ink, a cylinder for sand, and a space for pens; and its age was declared by the dealer to be one hundred and fifty years. By haggling exhaustively with him, I beat him down from one hundred francs to fifty francs, and bore off my prize in triumph. When I got it home, I examined the interior of the ink-cylinder with an electric torch and discovered that the inside surface was bright and shiny. On a guess, it was only about eight months old; but what of that? Eight months is eight months, and what _is_ antiquity, anyhow? If you ask a geologist you will get one answer; if you ask a debutante you will get another. As for me, I used a little acid inside my inkwell and hope to dispose of it to a friend. It is already months and months antiquer than when I bought it.

Almost every Parisian antique-shop will, if pressed, produce a pair of pewter plates with the salamander crest of Francis I on the bottom of each plate in _repoussé_ work—work done by hammering the under side of the plate until the desired figure is raised on the upper side. These salamander plates are charming and should be bought by the pewter collector. If he gets too many he can always use them for sinkers when fishing—or they may readily be employed as wedding-presents.

Generally speaking—speaking, that is, as our careful advice to the vast body of travellers who wish to take home a few attractive antiques as souvenirs—it is best to make purchases as soon as possible after arriving in Europe. If one remains there long enough the antiques will be absolutely genuine by the time one gets home.

———— HORSECHESTNUT ————

HORSECHESTNUT

COMPILERS’ NOTE

The subjoined paper, so happily cast in narrative form, could not have been omitted from this compilation without gravely lessening at once the charm and value of the work; its inclusion, however, has been arranged only after extraordinary efforts on the part, not only of the compilers, but also, they are happy to testify, on that of the talented author herself—a figure as impressive and delightful among antiquers as her name, among critics and patrons of the modern American novel, is authoritative and inspiring. Her charming little story, although read by her in person at the March session of the Academy, in 1923, seemed for a time to be impossible of republication here; her contract with her publisher, a person of highly developed commercial instincts, restrains her from publishing through any other channel, and in the face of united persuasion on the part of Professor Kilgallen and the author herself, this gentleman has stood firmly on the precise letter of his bargain. Fortunately, however, the advice of counsel was procured, with the result that the compilers are permitted to reproduce the paper, although denied the pleasure and privilege of accrediting it to the author by name.

This prohibition would cause them a distress far more acute, nevertheless, were they not wholly confident that the identity of the author will be transparently evident to every antiquer and to all lovers of her colorful literary art.

I

The room was subtly instinct with—James Femms admitted to an inchoate, egocentric admonition—default. Tormented by an awareness of distress, alien, vicarious, yet poignantly perceptible, his consciousness opposed, almost with petulance, his endeavors to confine it to—in fulfilment of his trust and purpose—spleening.

Loss; separation; sundering—the words formed themselves in characters feathery and funereal as the cross-stitch letter of a Garfield wall-motto; they contrived to make themselves, above the florid, valiant persuasions of the auctioneer, audible. There was, James Femms informed himself, even an overtone, as of an adscititious dolor, inexpressible by any clumsy symbolism of syllables; he seemed, indeed, to experience, at second-hand, those first lingual explorations, incredulous and baffled, of the wistful void where but the ache and memory of the tooth remain.

James Femms put forth the power of his will against his habit of thinking in such intorted, raffled inversions as these. Confronted by a problem, he resolved to ratiocinate straightforwardly, in a manner as candidly unintricate as the spleened finials of the _porte-chapeaux_ which, at the moment, engaged the brazen eloquence of the vendor. He would not think, he decided, in the style of an Empire girandole, but in the direct and honest simplicity of, say, that spleened and half-groined becket.

This was James Femms, not as he had been, but as he had come to be, a man colored by the years, so that his glass—a walnut caracole, wonderfully woodmarked—seemed to invest him with a patina, so that, indeed, he resembled one of those Victorian antiques, ornately ruinous, which were the dominant, as it were, of his existence. His passion for the lost art of the period had come to affect him in cunning, secret ways, to inform his spirit with a cold flame of rebellion against himself and his environment; he detested his body, designed, he reflected bitterly, after the Roycroft manner and as innocent of decorative values; he abandoned, in his moments of surrender, the artless names which had been foisted on his helpless infancy; he ceased to think of himself as James Femms, and softened, mellowed, ornamented the harsh, stern sounds with Gallic fancies. In his dreams he became a figure of romance, pinch-waisted, nobly whiskered, an illustration from a time-stained page of “Godey’s Lady’s-Book,” a man who could bear, with corseted grace, a name like Jambes des Femmes!

He became, for the time being, this Jambes des Femmes; he looked about him with the very elegance and grace of a des Femmes. The salon, he observed, was filled by people for whom Jambes des Femmes must feel no more than a gently supercilious distaste; there were faces familiar enough to James Femms: Kitchler, the bulbous, raffish dealer, one sienna eye cocked contemptuously at the _porte-chapeaux_, a fleshpot finger lifted in token of a careless bid; there were others as foreign to the mood of Jambes des Femmes—sly, chaffering professionals and the inevitable scattering of amateurs. Here, he concluded, there was no one capable of setting up in him those telepathic vibrations of which, baffled and distrait, he was obstinately aware.

His glance moved back to the _porte-chapeaux_. He had examined it, of course, before the sale and decided, with a lingering regret, to make no offer for it. Horsechestnut—he discarded the coarse term; James Femms must use it, when he spoke, but Jambes des Femmes might think in more gracious wise: _noisette à cheval_—it was a fine piece, des Femmes admitted, a magnificent affair, save for but the one fatal defect. And he had always, he reflected, adored _noisette à cheval_.

Again he was pervaded by the haunting awareness of an elusive, poignant melancholy. His eyes moved to the spurious becket—to the discerning scrutiny of James Femms a palpable counterfeit, a thing so obvious and crude that even Kitchler, with the three originals to scream their warning, might have noticed it—not even hand-wrought groining, des Femmes pronounced, a clumsy fraud, grouted, at a guess, and bench-gammoned to trick the eye of ignorance!

It seemed to des Femmes that his atrabilious depression found its focus here. He lifted himself to see more clearly; was it—could it be—that he felt the yearning of those sundered parts, the shame and longing of the _porte-chapeaux_ for that ravished becket? Had his sympathy, his passion for _noisette à cheval_ refined his perceptions to a delicacy so incredible, so splendid? He dallied wistfully with the thought and put it from him. Not even Jambes des Femmes could have attained a receptivity so exquisite.

Suddenly, as the voice of the auctioneer became premonitory, James Femms moved in his chair. He remembered Sonoff!

As if hours instead of years were overlaid upon the recollection he could see that _porte-chapeaux_ in Sonoff’s _entresol_, its lovely amber tone warmed by the crimson wall! It was Sonoff’s!

Jambes des Femmes saw him, as he had been—Sonoff the debonair, high on the crest of his wave, Sonoff, the greatest artist of his time! And now—abruptly, ineludibly, came the thought—and now, even the art was dead!

Dead. Since that day of Sonoff’s greatness men had been born, lived out their lives, died, without knowing that the art had ever lived! Jambes des Femmes tasted the bitterness of it; he saw Sonoff, behind the great _râtelier_ of bells, his hands flashing like the lustres of _bobèches_ on a girandole, from the elfin-tinkling tinniness of the soprano to the rugent clamor of the bass! Sonoff, a Russian, had taught the Swiss their place!

“_Grandes fromages_,” Sonoff would say. “Let them yodel!”

And now—!

Sonoff, beggared, reduced to the shrewd torment of testing the timbre of telephone bells for a niggard pittance, and Sonoff’s _porte-chapeaux_, degraded and disfigured by that pinchbeck becket, going, for the last, third time to Kitchler!

James Femms lifted his catalogue.

II

The bassines, at least, James Femms admitted, were good. Sound bronze—he stiffened as memory quickened in him. Gently his finger-nail tapped their margins and a hushed whispering resonance seemed to bring an audible perfume into the chamber. James Femms nodded. It had been Sonoff’s whimsy to have these bassines cast and toned in bell-metal—one to sound the low A flat and the other the D that Sonoff had loved best of all his bells.

The bassines, at least, were possible under James Femms’s roof. But the _porte-chapeaux_ itself, with a fraudulent becket? James Femms negated the suggestion with a resolute, peremptory movement of his head. He set his shoulder to the task of thrusting the piece before him to the open porch. He closed the door upon it. Except for the bassines, it would have been better, after all, to let Kitchler have it; perhaps, even now, he could let Kitchler persuade him to part with it—not too easily, of course; it would be simple to pick up another pair of bassines, in place of these. There were two in Reading, Femms remembered, and, he thought, another pair in a junk-shop on the edge of Camden.

Yes, he would let Kitchler have it, at a price. He lifted the two bassines and brought their edges softly together, inclining his head to catch the moonlit fragrance of their conjoined note. He carried them to his bedroom; he would keep them here, on either side of the Benjamin Harrison bureau. He set them on the twin plackets that jutted out from the mirror-frame.

III

Sleep eluded James Femms. Isolated in umbrageous stillness, the grosser sensory reactions no longer obstructed the reception of what, he now conceded, must be the telepathic apperceptions of sixth or seventh sense. Below the coverlet his body, resentful under mysterious reproaches from without, expressed its unrest in gyratory saltations; his mind ached and quivered in sympathy with baffling emotions of which his awareness was so acute that it all but equalled experience itself.

He was cognizant, dimly but with certitude, of a relation between these sufferings and the presence, the propinquity, at least, of the _porte-chapeaux_ that had been Sonoff’s. Again he contemplated the hypothesis that understanding and affection had established between James Femms and the inanimate objects of his passion, a _rapprochement_, a _rapport_ analogous to, if not identical with, the sympathy that unites the sundered halves of a spiritual union. Below, from the doorstep, the _porte-chapeaux_ of Mikail Sonoff seemed, to James Femms, to upraise a muted ululation, a sound of exquisite desire, as pitiful and penetrant as the call of the widowed wood-dove. He came, at last, to the window, a panel of translucent pressed glass surrounded by a bordure of plaquettes, each of a different primary color, now delicately diminished in the pallor of a moon as cold, Femms thought, as the belly facet of a flounder.