Chapter 3

There was a long pause, during which Anitchkoff sipped his cognac nervously, waiting for my comment. I pressed him ruthlessly for the bitter end of the tale.

"Your hypnotism I grant, but what about Mantovani and Brooks?" I asked bluntly.

"For Mantovani I have no right to speak," Anitchkoff replied with dignity. "He was my master and I can admit no imputation on his memory. Besides, your guess is as good as mine. Whether he bought the picture in his precritical days, keeping it as a warning and imposing it upon his followers as a hoax--this I can merely conjecture. As for Brooks, the case is simple; he couldn't resist a Giorgione at a bargain. But since you will, you may as well hear the rest of the story--at least my part of it.

"Three years later I wintered in Paris. I had run into Bing's for a chat and a look at the Hokusais, when who should come in but Hanson Brooks in a high state of elation. An important purchase had just arrived. He urged us both to dine and inspect it. Bing was engaged; I glad to accept. At dinner Brooks teased me to the top of his bent. I was to imagine absolutely the most important old master in private possession, his for a beggarly price. I declined to humour him by guessing, and we slurred his sweets and coffee to hasten to the apartment. On a dressing table faced to the wall was a little panel which he slowly turned into view. For a moment I gasped for joy, it was the Del Puente Giorgione; and then an awful misgiving overcame me--I saw it as it was. Brooks marked my amazement and, misreading the cause, slapped me on the back and asked what I thought of that for a hundred thousand pesetas. The figure again bowled me over. For the picture as it stood it was a thousand times too much, while a mere tithe of the value of the name the panel bore. I blurted out that the price was suspiciously wrong, and added that I must see the portrait by daylight before venturing an opinion. The thought that Mantovani had owned it for twenty years and more made a sleepless night hideous; at sunrise my loyalty reasserted itself by a lame compromise.

"I daresay you will not blame me for hoping against hope, as I did the next day and for some months after, that somewhere under that modern paint there was indeed a sketch by Giorgione's hand. You must remember that I could as little doubt my own existence as Mantovani's judgment on such a point. In the sequel it seemed as if no humiliation were to be spared me. It was Mantovani's chief rival and favourite victim, Merck, who after a torturing correspondence had the pleasure of telling me he had seen the 'Zorzi' painted by the amateur Ricard; it was Campbell who, after recommending it to Brooks, publicly accused me of dishonest brokerage. That's all I can tell you about the Del Puente Giorgione."

I seized his hand impulsively, and clumsily offered him, in a breath, whisky, shuffleboard, or cowboy pool--sound Pretorian remedies for all human woes. These consolations he refused and took his leave. Midnight found me in the same chair, thinking less of Anitchkoff, whose case now lay clear, than of Mantovani and the Marquesa del Puente, about whom it seemed there still might be something to say.

The chances of a roving life have brought some slight addition to the evidence. Stopping over a boat at Dieppe, a few summers ago, I happened to see my good friend Mme. Vezin registered at the Casino, where I recognised an acquaintance or two. That decided me to spend the night and call at her villa. Her salon never failed to divert me, for, drawing together the most disparate people, she handled them with easy generalship. Under her chandelier ardent art students from the Middle West and the poor relations of royalty might be heard exchanging confidences and foreign tongues. So, as I climbed the hill at the verge of the chalk and pasture, I felt sure of the unexpected, nor was I disappointed. Shrill voices from my fellow countrywomen came down the garden path and assured me that art had accompanied Mme. Vezin in her annual retreat from the Luxembourg Gardens. Entering I found the same perfect hostess and much the old dear, queer scene. I was bracing myself for a polyglot evening--being with all my travel quite incapable of languages--when the little maid announced importantly Mme. la Marquise del Puente. All rose instinctively as there entered an erect white-haired woman simply dressed in a black gown along which hung a notable crimson scarf. Murmuring the indispensable banalities I bowed distantly, meaning to observe her impersonally before an encounter. But she disarmed me by throwing herself on my mercy. She knew me already through dear Mr. Hanson Brooks. It was her first visit here; I, she saw, was of the household. Would I not show her the curiosities and protect her from the bores? Sullenly I followed her while she discussed the bijoux that littered the shelves, and the deep modulations of her voice insensibly mollified me. I had intended in Anitchkoff's behalf to count every wrinkle of her seventy-five unhallowed years, but found myself instead admiring her cloud of silver hair, avoiding the gaze of her black eyes, and noting with a kind of fascination the precise gestures of her fine hand as she took up or set down Mme. Vezin's poor little things.

At last she settled into an armchair, beckoning me to a footstool, and I began to talk unconscionably, she urging me on. She professed to know my writings--it was of course impossible that she should have seen those rare anonymous letters to the most ladylike of Boston newspapers: she touched my dearest hobby, that republics and governments generally must be judged not by their politics but by the amenity of the social life they foster. Feeling that this was witchcraft or divination even more questionable, and dreading she had another Giorgione to sell, I made a last futile effort for freedom, proposing introductions. With a phrase she subdued me, and my halting French began to be eloquent. I confessed my innermost ambition, the creation of a criticism learned and judicial in substance but impressionistic in form. She dwelt upon the beauties of her eyrie in the Basque mountains which I must one day see. As we chatted on obliviously an audience of marvelling art students and baigneurs formed about us quietly. Their serried faces suddenly revealed to me my ignominious surrender. I started as from a dream and, as she bade me not forget to call, I kissed her long hand and fled with only a curt farewell to my hostess.

The channel breeze and the scent of the clover sobered me up. My pity went out to Anitchkoff and then I remembered that I had seen Fouquart at the Casino. It seemed too good to be true. Here at Dieppe were both this enigmatic Marquesa and the prime repository of all authentic scandal of our times. For the old dandy Fouquart had lived not wisely but too well through three generations of cosmopolitan gallantry. Had the censorship and his literary parts permitted, he could have written a chronicle of famous ladies that would put the Sieur de Brantôme's modest attempt to shame. I found him among the rabble, moodily playing the little horses for five-franc pieces, but at the mention of the Marquesa del Puente he kindled.

"A grand woman," he said emphatically, as he dragged me to a safe corner, "a true model to the anemic and neurotic sex of the day." When asked to specify he told me how the energy and passion of twenty generations of robber noblefolk had flowered in her. Scruples or fears she had never known. From childhood attached to the Carlist cause, she had become the soul of that movement in the Pyrenees. It was she who haggled with British armourers, traced routes, planned commissariats, and most of all drew from far and near soldiers of fortune to captain a hopeless cause. In such recruiting, Fouquart implied, her loyalty had not flinched at the most personal tests. What seemed to mystify Fouquart was that none of these whilom champions ever attained the grace of forgetfulness. Every year many of these tottering old gentlemen still reported at Castle del Puente, and there she held court as of old. He himself, although their relations had been not military but civil, occasionally made so idle a pilgrimage. "To the shrine of our Lady of the crimson teagown," I ventured. "You too, _mon vieux_!" he chuckled with ironical congratulations. Ignoring the impertinence, I interposed the name of Mantovani. "Our respected colleague," Fouquart exclaimed delightedly. Before Mantovani fuddled his head about pictures he had been a good blade, taking anyone's pay. For ten years and through half as many little wars he had been the Marquesa's titular chief of staff. Her husband? Well, her husband was a good Carlist--and a true philosopher. As I tore myself away from the impending flow of scandal, Fouquart murmured regretfully. "Must you go? It is a pity. We have only begun, _à demain_." But we had really ended, for the next morning, shaking off a nightmare of a red-robed Lilith who tried to sell me a questionable Zeuxis, I took the early steamer. Of the Marquesa del Puente, whom I believe to be still at her castle, I have seen or heard nothing since.

* * * * *

After some reflection in the corner of the Pretorian where Anitchkoff once told me his story, I have come measurably into the clear about the whole matter. Mantovani's position is plain up to a certain point. Either the 'Zorzi' was given to him or else he bought it in his hopeful youth. In either case he surely kept it merely as a solemn hoax on his learned contemporaries. He may have withheld it from Anitchkoff maliciously, or again out of simple considerateness for a trusting disciple. When Mantovani came to set his worldly affairs in order, however, it must have struck him that the joke could not be perpetuated on the walls of the San Marcello gallery, while the panel was one that a great connoisseur would not willingly have inventoried by his executors. It was at this time that he bestowed the 'Zorzi' upon the Marquesa del Puente, as a final token between them. It may fairly be assumed that he knew her to be incapable of believing the precious souvenir to be a veritable Giorgione. Such simplicity as that gift and credulity presuppose lay neither in his nature nor in hers. Beyond this point certitudes fail us lamentably, and we are reduced to an exasperating balance of possibilities. Did he send the picture as an elaborate and unavoidable slight? or was it essentially a delicate alms, in view of the Marquesa's known poverty and proved resourcefulness? or, again, did he with a deeper perversity set the thing afloat to trouble the critical world after he was gone, foreseeing perhaps some such international comedy as was actually played with the 'Zorzi' as leading gentleman? All these things must remain problematical for Mantovani cannot tell, and the Marquesa del Puente will not if indeed she knows.

THE LOMBARD RUNES

Professor Hauptmann dropped wearily into his chair at the noisy Milanese _table d'hôte_ and snarled out a surly "_Mahlzeit_" to the assembled feasters. It was echoed sweetly from his left with a languishing "_Mahlzeit, Herr Professor_." The advance disconcerted him. Resolving upon a policy of complete indifference to the fluffy and amiable vision beside him, he devoted himself singly to the food. The _risotto_ diminished as his knife travelled rhythmically between the plate and his bearded lips. Conceding only the inevitable, nay the exacted courtesies to his neighbour, he performed still greater prodigies with the green peas, and it was not until he leaned back for a deft operation with a pocket comb, that the vivacious, blue-eyed one got her chance to ask if it were not the Herr Professor Hauptmann, the great authority on the Lombard tongue. The query floored him; he could not deny that it was, and as curlylocks began to evince an intelligent interest in Lombard matters, his stiffness melted like wax under a burning glass. He was soon if not the protagonist at least the object of an animated, yes fairly intimate conversation.

To non-German eyes the pair were worth looking at. He was clad in tightfitting sage-green felt, so it appeared, with a superfluity of straps, buttons, lacings, and harness of all sorts. A conical Tyrol hat garnished with a cock's plume and faded violets was crushed between his back and that of the chair. As his large nervous feet reached for the chairlegs below, one could see an expanse of moss-green stockings, only half concealed at the extremities by resplendent yellow sandals. Bearded and moustached after the military fashion, nothing betrayed the professor except the myopic droop of the head. As for Fraülein Linda Göritz, no mere man may adequately describe her. A German new woman of the artistic stamp, she was pastelling through Lombardy where the Professor was archeologising. Short, crisp curls gathered about her boyish head. Her general effect was of a plump bonniness that might yield agreeably to an audacious arm. She cultivated an aggressive pertness that would have seemed vulgar, had it not been redeemed by something merely frank and German. Shortskirted, she wore a high-strapped variant of the prevalent sandals. The sides of her blue bolero were adorned with stilted yellow lilies in the top of the Viennese new-art mode. In front her shirtwaist appeared cool and white, at the sleeves it flowered alarmingly into something like an India shawl. A string of massive amethysts completed a discord as elaborate as a harmony of Richard Strauss. Her whole impression was almost as inviting as it was grotesque. One could not chat with her without liking her, and it is to be suspected that only a very guileless or austere male could like her without proceeding to manifest attentions.

By the cheese, she had captured her amazed professor, and then she carried him off bodily for coffee in the Arcade. He talked little, but it didn't matter, for she talked much and well. Nor could a provincial Saxon scholar be quite indifferent at finding himself known to an intelligent and much travelled Viennese. A cousin, it appeared, had followed his lectures and had highly extolled the ingenuity of his phonology of the Lombard tongue, a language which was, she must remember--a hesitating pause--yes, surely East--"East Germanic, Ja wohl!" responded the Professor thunderously, though idiots had written to the contrary. And then he told her at length the reasons why, until she pleaded her early morning sketching and firmly bound him to accompany her the next afternoon to the Certosa of Pavia. The Herr Professor rarely paid much attention to hands, but as he held Fraülein Göritz's for Good Night he could not but note that it was soft and filled his big grip so well that he was sorry when it was gone. He dismissed the observation, however, as unworthy a philologer and went to sleep pondering a new destruction for the knaves who held the Lombard tongue to be not East but West Germanic.

And here, to appreciate the weight and importance of Linda's fish, a little explanation is necessary. Hauptmann was not merely a philologer, which is a formidable thing in itself, but he belonged to the esoteric group that deals with languages which have no literature. As he had often remarked, any fool could compile a grammar of a language that has left extensive documents; the process was almost mechanical, but to reconstruct a grammar of a language that has left practically no remains, that required acumen. Hauptmann did not belong, however, to the transcendental school that creates purely inferential languages--East Germanic and West, General Teutonic, Original Slavic, Indo-European and the like. These are the _Dii majores_ and their inventions are as complete as if one should detect, say, the relation of the little to the big fleas not by the cunning use of the microscope but by sheer inference. This larger game Hauptmann sagaciously left to others, ranging himself with those who piece together the scanty and uncertain fragments of languages that have existed but have failed to perpetuate themselves in documents and inscriptions. Vandalic had powerfully allured him, and so had Old Burgundian: he had had designs also upon Visigothic, and had finally chosen Lombard rather than the others because the material was not merely defective but also delightfully vague, affording a wide opportunity for genuine philological insight. And indeed to classify a language on the basis of a phrase scratched on a brooch, the misquotations of alien chroniclers, the shifting forms of misspelled proper names, is a task compared with which the fabled reconstruction of leviathan from a single bone is mere child's play.

From the mere scraps and hints of Lombard words in Paul the Deacon and other historians anybody but a German would have declined to draw any conclusion whatever. But just as every German citizen however humble, becomes eventually a privy counsellor, a knight of various eagles of diverse classes, an overstationmaster, or a royal postman, so German science for the past hundred years has permitted no fact to languish in its native insignificance. All have been promoted to be the sponsors of imposing theories. And Hauptmann's theory, which got him the degree of Ph.D., _maxima cum laude_, was that Lombard is an East Germanic tongue. This he simple intuited, needing the degree, for the fifty mangled Lombard words displayed none of those consonants which tending to double or of those vowels which still vexing us as umlauts, mark a language as belonging to the great Eastern or Western group. But Hauptmann was first in the field, and if it was impossible for him to demonstrate that he was right, it was equally impossible for anybody else to prove that he was wrong. So he stood his ground and by dint of continually hitting the same nail on the same head he had so greatly flourished that he was mentioned respectfully as far as the Lombard tongue was known, and at thirty-four had passed from the honourable but unpaid condition of Privat-dozent to that of Professor Extraordinarius.

Now if the Lombards, having ignominiously taken to Latin after their descent upon Italy, had had to wait for Hauptmann to provide them with a language, they had left certain more substantial traces of themselves in the valley of the Po. They died and were buried in state with their arms and utensils for the other world. So that, while one might well be in doubt whether an inscription was Lombard or not, an antiquary will tell you without fail whether a clasp, a spearhead or a sword is or is not the work of this conquering but too adaptable race. In these archaeological matters Hauptmann took a forced and languid interest. During nightmarish hours, when the beer and cheese had not mingled aright, he was haunted by lines of Lombard runes. Sometimes they were East Germanic, and that was a grief, taking, as it were, the bloom from the guess that had made him great; and again they were West Germanic, and that was awful, the hallucination ending in a mortal struggle with the feather bed under which German science is incubated, and passing off with an anguished "Donnerwetter! It cannot be Lombard. It is not possible." His not infrequent Italian trips had, then, an archaeological pretext, and this had been more or less the purpose of the pilgrimage in which Fraülein Linda had become by main force an alluring if disquieting incident.

If there is anywhere in the world a more satisfactory sight than the Pavian Certosa, certainly neither Hauptmann nor his chance acquaintance had ever seen it. And indeed is there anywhere else such spaciousness of cloisters, such profusion of minutely cut marble, such incrustation, for better or worse, of semiprecious stones. Surely nothing in a sightseeing way approaches it as a money's worth. Fraülein Linda, a superior person who had begun to entertain doubts as to the externals of modern Austrian palaces and the internals of new German liners, reserved her enthusiasms for the pale Borgonones so strangely misplaced amid all that splendour. Hauptmann, on the contrary, admired it all impartially. The sense of bulk and inordinate expensiveness made him for a moment almost regret that these later Lombards who reared this pile were not of the same race-stock with himself. There was a moment in which he could have claimed them, had principle permitted, as West Germans. Rather he soon forgot the Lombards in the alternate rapture and dismay aroused by the petulant yet strangely winning personality beside him. Professor Hauptmann was used neither to being contradicted nor managed by mere women folk, and this afternoon he was undergoing both experiences simultaneously. It was with a feeling of relief that he left the Certosa, which seemed in a way her territory, and started out with her upon the neutral highroad that led to the station. They lingered, for the hour was propitious, and their plan was to kill an hour or so before the evening train. As the glow came over the lowlying fields, the weary forms of the labourers began to fill the road. At a distance Hauptmann perceived one who importunately offered a small object to the sightseers and was as regularly repulsed. Without waiting for the professor, who stood at attention while Fraülein Linda sketched, this beggar or pedlar approached and prayed to be allowed to show a rare and veritable object of antiquity. A gruff refusal had already been given when she pleaded that they hear the peasant talk, and inspect his treasure. "Who knows, Herr Professor, but it might be Lombard?" "Wohlan," he replied, and sullenly took the proffered spearhead. It was of iron, patined rather than rusted, Lombard in form, and of evident antiquity. Hauptmann gave it a nearsighted look and was about to return it contemptuously when the peasant urged, "But look again, sir, there are letters, a rarity." "I dare you to read them," cried Fraülein Linda, and the Professor read painfully and copied roughly in his notebook a short inscription in some Runic alphabet. A scowl followed the reading and the abrupt challenge "Where did you find this piece?" "In the fields, digging, Padrone," was the answer, "where I dug up also this," displaying a bronze clasp of unquestionable Lombard workmanship. "Bravo," exclaimed Linda, "now perhaps we shall know more about your dear Lombards. I congratulate you, Herr Professor, from the heart." "Aber nein," he growled back, "there were monuments enough already, and this is only a bore, for I must buy and publish it. Others too may be found in the same field, and Lombard will become a popular pastime. It is disgusting; compassionate me. It was the single language that permitted truly a-priori approach. It would be almost a duty to suppress these accursed runes for the sake of scientific method. But no; the harm is done. We must be patient."