Chapter 7

On a beatific afternoon we sat in council on Dennis's terrace awaiting the envoys. Below, the misty plain rose on and on till it gathered into an amber surge in Monte Morello and rippled away again through the Fiesolan hills. Nearer, torrid bell-towers pierced the shimmering reek, like stakes in a sweltering lagoon. In the centre of all, the great dome swam lightly, a gigantic celestial buoy in a vaporous sea. The spell that bound us all was doubly potent that day. The sense of a continuous life that had made the dome and the belfries an inevitable emanation from the clean crumbling earth, lulled us all, and we hardly stirred when Harwood bustled in, saying, "Cheer up. I have seen Crocker, and it isn't there." "You mean," said the cautious Dennis, "that Crocker still possesses only the hole, aperture, frame, or niche that the missing St. Michael may yet adorn." "I only know that it isn't there now," growled Harwood. "I deal merely in facts, but you may get theories, if you must have them, from Frau Stern, who heroically forced her way to Emma over Crocker's prostrate form."

As he spoke we heard Frau Stern's timid, well-meaning ring, and in a moment her smile filled the archway.

"We don't need to ask if you have news," cried Mrs. Dennis from afar.

"If I haf news. Guess what it is. It is too lovely. You cannot think? Well, there will be a baby next autumn, what you call it?" "Michaelmas, I suppose," grunted Harwood through his pipe-smoke and subsided into indifference.

"All this is most charming and interesting, Frau Stern," expostulated Dennis, "but, as our enthusiastic friend Harwood delicately hints, what we really let you go for was to locate the Missing St. Michael." "I haf almost forgot that," she apologised as she nibbled her _brioche_, "Emma was so happy. But for the bothersome St. Michael there is no change. I saw it in what she calls her new den. She laughed to me and said, 'I cannot let him have it, you see, you would all say he married me for it.'"

"Bravo!" shouted Dennis and Harwood in unison, and the Sage added with unction, "So she has not been able to renounce us utterly."

"It is not now for long," rejoined Frau Stern, "it is only to the time we haf said." "Michaelmas," repeated Harwood disgustedly.

"Yes, that is it," she pursued tranquilly, "Emma told me in confidence, 'To Crocker I cannot give it because of you all, but to our child I may, and it shall do with it what it will.' Now do you prevail, Misters Dennis and Harwood?"

"We are a bit downcast but not discomfited," acknowledged Dennis, while Harwood remained glumly within his smoke. "Emma has escaped us, but she still pays us the tribute of a subterfuge. It is enough, we will forgive her, even if her way lies from us dozers here. For to-day the same sunshine drenches her and us. It is a bond. Let us enjoy it while we may."

THE LUSTRED POTS

"Haul away, Sam. This is the real thing" came from the depths of the well. Sam Cleghorn stumbled in the gloom towards the windlass, avoiding on the way a rude handpump and two heaps of dirt and broken pottery that sloped threateningly upon the low curb, where balanced a perforated disc of marble, the great bottom-stone of the well. All these properties caught a little light from a beam that came through a slit in the wall, casting most of its uncertain bloom up into a low groined vault, the heavy round arches of which were separated from squat piers by clumsy brackets. Outside at the level of the reticulated stone floor one could hear the rushing of a river. As Cleghorn leaned over the well-mouth before seizing the crank, a glimmer of yellow light flooded his face and again came up the hollow impatient cry, "Haul away, Sam. This lot's a good one, and it's mine." Replying "All right, Dick," Cleghorn bent to the crank. With much creaking the coils crept along the spindle and the light burden began to rise jerkily.

* * * * *

Although neither the well nor the vaulted cellar chamber belonged to Sam Cleghorn or to Dick Webb, their presence and actions there were not surreptitious. Stanton Mayhew, who ignorantly owned the well, had given them plenary permission to pump and dig, mildly pitying their apparent lunacy. The palace above was his in virtue of his sensible preference for living twice as well on the Arno for half the cost on the Hudson. This rule of two, like so many foreign residents of Florence, he unquestioningly obeyed, and it constituted practically the whole of his philosophy and maxims. Hence he was not the man to prize a Tuscan well dug in the fourteenth century, cleaned perhaps never, and gradually filled to the brim with what the forwardlooking past benightedly took for rubbish. So when Cleghorn and Webb made him an overture for the right to clean the well, he had genially replied, "Why, go ahead, boys, and enjoy yourselves. It's you who ought to be paid, but for your healths' sake you really ought to wait till I've punched some decent windows through that damp cellar wall and let the air in."

If neither Sam nor Dick waited even a day, it was because each was a bit afraid that the other would begin alone. College mates, collectors both, they were fast friends in a way and rivals beyond dispute. Their common taste for antiquity and adequacy of means had made their graduate course chiefly one of travel. And when travel wore out its novelty they naturally settled in the easiest, as the least exacting, European city, occupying two halves of one floor in the same palace. Their apartments started full, and quickly overflowed with objects of curiosity and art--all old, for their knowledge was considerable; some fine, for neither was without taste. But taste neither had in any austere sense, for they collected art much as a dredge collects marine specimens. Nothing came amiss to them. Wood, ivory, silver, bronze, marble, plaster--they repudiated no material or period. Stuffs, glass, pictures, porcelains, potteries--it was all one to them so the object were old and rare. Inevitably, then, they had come to primitive pots, and simultaneously, for they not only watched each other closely, but almost read each other's minds. And when they came to primitive pots it was certain that they would beg, borrow, or steal a well, since in old wells, and cisterns, besides less mentionable places, primitive pots abide. Many pots were there, as we shall see, from the first, and the maids and children of the centuries, by way of concealing breakages, have usually made notable secondary contributions. So when amiable Stanton Mayhew freely conceded a most ancient well to Cleghorn and Webb, it was like receiving Pandora's box, with the difference that the well might safely be opened.

Here had ensued a most delicate negotiation concerning the division of the spoil. A mathematical partition of the fragmentary material that an old Italian well contains is extremely difficult if at all possible. After much debate it was agreed that after they struck pay dirt, each should dig in turn, each to have the bucketful that came under his trowel or fingers. Scattered fragments of the same pot and other complications were to be adjudicated by Mayhew, whose ignorance and disinterestedness were safe to assume. But the well gave up quantities of noncontentious matter before Mayhew's services were required. The first five feet had revealed nothing but fragments of kitchen pottery of our time and a fairly perfect hoopskirt of Garibaldian date. A little lower had emerged the skeleton of a cat. Similar tragedies were in evidence, on an average, at every quarter century of depth. Between the second and third cat, lay Ginori imitations of Sevres and Wedgewood, scraps too of gilded glass--the earnest of better things below. Five cats down, some eighteenth-century apothecary pots, damaged but amenable to repair, had inaugurated the alternation of buckets under the agreement. It were tedious to follow the ascending scale of excellence as the digging went deeper. Enough to say that below the mixed ingredients and the nethermost cat they found a homogeneous layer of beautiful fourteenth-century shards, affording many buckets full, and promising delicate adjudication to the referee.

Before the lustred pots themselves shed a baleful gleam over this narrative, something should obviously be said about Italian wells and why they contain pots. Beyond those casually acquired from careless or secretive servants, there is, if the well be old and of good make, a certain number of intact pieces put in to serve as a filter. Often a group of pitchers or similar crocks is imprisoned between the two bottom-stones. Sometimes there are two such layers. After this filter had been made there was frequently scattered a bushel or more of small shards above. From these by careful sorting complete or nearly complete pieces may be recovered. Through all this mass of whole or broken pottery the water had to find its way up, for the cement sides of an Italian well are watertight. Thus, barring the indiscretions of housemaids and cats, the early Italians drank pure water.

Naturally Cleghorn and Webb were conversant with these refinements of mediaeval hydraulics. In fact when Webb, the sturdier of the two, hauled up the bottom-stone all dripping, Cleghorn promptly declared that in the sense of the contract it was a bucketful; hence his first go at the now uncovered pots. So heated grew the debate, that finally the grimy excavators climbed to the upper air and appealed to Mayhew, who promptly denied the quibble, deciding that stones and pots were not interchangeable. The diversion drew attention from the great perforated disc itself, and as the sullen Cleghorn let the exultant Webb down upon the ancient pots, it lay badly bestowed near the curb on the crumbling slope of a rubbish heap. And now Cleghorn with bitterness of heart was reeling up Webb's find. As the coils broadened on the windlass a small iron bucket rose above the parapet, brimming with something that glinted metallically under the dirt. Beside the bucket flapped the rude swing in which the entrances and exits of the partners were made. As Cleghorn grasped the bail and swung the precious cargo clear of the well, came up once more the voice of Webb: "Hustle, Old Man, I'm keen to see them, they feel good."

Good they were indeed. Cleghorn, who for fifteen years had haunted shops and museums had never seen the like in equal compass. As he took them cautiously one by one and held them high in the uncertain light, each revealed a desirable point. Here was a coat of arms, a date, the initial of an owner. There were grotesque birds and beasts. Differing in form and colour, the entire lot agreed in possessing that dull early Italian lustre, which perhaps accidental and less distinguished than that of Spain, is even dearer in a collector's eyes. They hinted of all enamelled things that come out of the East--of the peacock reflections of the tiles of Damascus and Cordova, of the franker polychromy of Rhodian kilns, of the subtler bloom of the dishes of Moorish Spain, of the brassier glazes of Minorca and Sicily--all these things lay enticingly in epitome in these lustred Italian pots, as they glimmered with a furtive splendour. Yes, they were a good lot, thought Cleghorn as he placed them reverently on the flagging. It was the find of a lifetime. A man with nothing else in his cupboard must be mentioned respectfully among collectors from Dan to Beersheba.

Again the impatient voice of Webb below: "Hurry up, I say. It's getting cold: the water is gaining."

"All right," called Cleghorn, giving a few strokes of the pump, but never taking his eyes from the lustred pots. Then as if by a sudden inspiration he asked, "Any more in that lot, Dick?"

"Not a one," cried Webb jubilantly, "there was just a bucketful and a squeeze at that. But there may be others beneath. There's another bottom-stone, and it's your next turn. But why don't you hurry up?"

A scowl passed over Cleghorn's thin face set unswervingly towards the pots. They glimmered in the shadow with an unholy phosphorescence--green, blue, carmine, strange purplish browns. So the glittering coils of the serpent may have bewildered our first Mother. There were other pots below, reflected Cleghorn, yes, but there never could be again such a batch as these. And then his dazed eye for a second left the fascinating pots, and mechanically searched the vaulted chamber. To his excited gaze the rubbish heaps centring about the curb seemed already in movement. The massive bottom-stone overhung the parapet, resting only on loose dirt and shards. With horror he noted that a breath might send it down. If it slipped, whose were the lustred pots? Against his will the phrase said itself over and over again throbbingly behind his eyes, and again he forgot everything in the vision of the lustred pots.

"Damn it, hurry up," came thunderously from below. Cleghorn stumbled with a curious hesitation between the crank and the poised bottom-stone. The clumsy movement loosened a handful of shards which went clattering down; the great stone slid, caught on the parapet, and hung once more in uncertain oscillation. Profanity unrestrained transpired from the mouth of the well.

It was a tremulous Cleghorn that sent down the bucket and reeled up an irate and vociferous Webb. Words abounded without explanations, and blows seemed possible, when Cleghorn, as it were apologetically raised a pitcher and a bowl into the shaft of light that came through the oubliette. "They're all like that, Dick," he protested. "It's your lucky day. I congratulate you." It was a silenced and mollified Webb that clutched at the pots, and noted wisely that every one had been brushed by the peacock's tail. With a kind of pity at last he turned to the deprecating Cleghorn and said, "That was an awkward business of yours about the shards, and the bottom-stone there is a pretty sight for a man who left it so and went down to work under it, but one couldn't wait for such pots as these. On my soul, Old Man, if you had dumped it all down on me I could hardly have blamed you."

Welcomed with a loud laugh by its maker, the joke jarred on Cleghorn, who merely answered, "It's very good of you, Dick, to say so."

"But there may be quite as good ones below," pursued Webb genially. "We'll rest up a bit and then you have your go and finish the job."

"If you don't mind, Dick, I'd rather not," was the embarrassed answer. "The fact is I'm too nervous and absentminded for this work." He looked down into the blackness with a shudder and said. "No, I don't want to go down there again. One can't tell what might happen there."

"Then you've dropped your nerve. Sorry for it," came from a baffled and disgusted partner, but as he spoke a smile drew across the broad, amiable face, and he added insinuatingly, "Then the rest are mine, Old Man?"

"Yes they're yours fast enough."

"It's mighty good of you, Sam. I won't forget it. I'll share sometime on a good thing like this. I'm all ready to go down again when you've had a smoke. Only we'll set that stone right and you'll be more careful about the shards."

"If you'll excuse me, Dick, I'd rather not." Cleghorn looked at his watch. "You see I ought to be out of these duds already. I have a very particular tea outside. Didn't I tell you about it? I'll send Mayhew down to help."

"All right, just as you please," was the indifferent reply. But as Cleghorn turned up the narrow steps, Webb muttered perplexedly, "To funk at this point and for a tea! The man is touched or in love."

* * * * *

Webb with Mayhew's dispassionate aid made a considerable haul below the second stone, though in truth there was nothing there to compare with the first lot. The batch of lustred pots is the pride of his eye, and when it is suggested that he values them highly he answers, "Well rather, they're pretty good, you know, and then they nearly cost me a broken head. I was so keen for them that I set a big stone where it might easily have tumbled on me." Then the rest of the anecdote, which Cleghorn, in whose presence it frequently is told, never hears with complete equanimity. The causes of his uneasiness I do not engage to analyse, for, unlike Webb, Cleghorn is imaginative and difficult.

THE BALAKLAVA CORONAL

As the dinner wore on endlessly, I consoled myself by the thought of the Balaklava Coronal. There in the toastmaster's seat was Morrison who had bought it, at my right loomed Vogelstein who had sold it, far across, towards the foot of the board, sat the critic Brush in whose presence I understood the infamous sale had been made. I missed only Sarafoff, the marvellous peasant-silversmith, who wrought the coronal in his prison workshop in the Viennese ghetto. Now there was nothing strange about Vogelstein's selling it, nor yet about Morrison's buying it; only the making of it by the illiterate Sarafoff and the silence of Brush when it was sold required explanation. Vogelstein, who breathed heavily beside me, undoubtedly held the secret. I felt so hopeful that time and the champagne which we were drinking for the sake of art would give him to me that I took no pains meanwhile to disturb his elaborate indifference to my presence.

Between him and me little love was lost. As the editor of a moneylosing art magazine in the interior, it was my duty occasionally to visit his galleries. After such visits the remnant of my New England conscience usually forced me to diminish or actually to spoil many a sale of the dubious or merely fashionable antiquities in which he dealt. But in the main my power to harm him was slight. He held in a knowing grip the strings of his patrons' vanity and taste. So he regarded me with something between scorn and uneasiness--as a pachyderm might take a predatory bee. For the sake of my steady production of the honey of free advertising he forgave a sting from which he was after all immune. At the beginning of the dinner he had greeted me with what was meant for a civility and then had relapsed into silence. To escape the loquacity of my other neighbour I gave myself to parallel observation of Vogelstein and Morrison--the great dealer and his greater customer.

Both plainly belonged to the same species and it pleased my whim to symbolise them as a mastodon and a rogue elephant. Morrison, the dreaded agent and operator, was unquestionably the finer creature. He moved more precisely and with a sense of wieldy power. His phrases cut where Vogelstein's merely smote. His bigness had something genial about it. He looked the amateur, and indeed does not the rogue elephant trample down villages chiefly for the joy of the affray? One felt that something more than Morrison's preposterous winnings had been involved in the clashes of railroads and cataclysms on the exchange which had for years past been his major recreation. Vogelstein, though evidently of coarser fibre, belonged to the same formidable breed. The mastodon, we must suppose, lacked much of the finesse of the rogue elephant of later evolution. And Vogelstein's Semitism was of the archaic, potent, monumental type. His abundant fat looked hard. For all the sagging double chin, his jaw retained the character of a clamp. Among the strong race of art dealers he was feared. Whole collections not single objects were his quarry. He paid lavishly, foolishly, counting as confidently on the ignorance and vanity of his clients, as ever Morrison upon the brute expansion of the national wealth. But Vogelstein looked and was as completely the professional as Morrison the amateur. There remained this essential difference that if nothing could be too big to stagger Vogelstein, nothing likewise could be too small to deter him. I knew his shop, or rather his palace, and had observed the relish with which he could shame a timorous art student into giving three prices for a print. It afforded him no more pleasure, one could surmise, to impose a false Rembrandt at six figures upon a wavering iron-master, or, indeed to unload an historic but rather worthless collection upon Morrison himself. For Vogelstein was after all of primitive stamp, to wit the militant publican. So he took toll and plenty, it mattered little where or whence.

To Morrison and Vogelstein no better foil could be imagined than Brush. If they recalled the tusked monsters that charged in the van of Asiatic armies, his analogue was the desert horse. Small, spare, sensitive, shy, his every posture suggested race, training, spirit, and docility. His _flair_ for classical art had become proverbial. By mere touch he detected those remarkable counterfeits of Syracusan coins. It was he who segregated the Renaissance intaglios at Bloomsbury only the winter before he exposed the composite figurines at Berlin. To him the Balaklava Coronal must have proclaimed its nullity as far as its red gold could be seen. For that matter the coronal was a bye-word, and why not? The same dealers who had landed the more famous Tiara in the Louvre had the selling of it. The greater museums in Europe and America had refused it at a bargain. On Fifth Avenue and the Rue Lafitte all the dealers were joking about the Balaklava Coronal. The name of Sarafoff, its maker, had even become accepted slang. For a season we "Sarafoffed" our intimates instead of hoaxing them. And in the face of all this Vogelstein had sold the Coronal to Morrison under Brush's very nose. It seemed so wholly incredible that I began counting Vogelstein's heavy respirations, to make sure I was really awake.

Then the pale, tense mask of Brush--so isolated in the apoplectic row across the table--calmed me. That he was Vogelstein's or anyone's tool was unthinkable. Mercenary suspicions, to be sure, had been put about, but those who knew him merely laughed at such a notion. Vogelstein also laughed, shaking volcanically within, whenever the Coronal, the genuineness of which he still maintained, was mentioned. And he always treated Brush with a curious and almost tender condescension, much in fact as the mastodon might have regarded that fragile ancestor of the horse, the five-toed protohippos.

I have neglected to explain that the occasion which brought me at one table with such major celebrities as Morrison, Vogelstein, and Brush was a public dinner in behalf of civic art. For just as we find the celestial compromised by the naughty Aphrodite, so we distinguish two antithetical sorts of art. There is a bad private art which is produced for dealers and millionaires and takes care of itself, and there is a virtuous public art which we hope to have some day and meanwhile has to be taken care of by special societies. It was one of these that was now dining for the good of the cause. Under the benevolent eye of Morrison, our acting president, we had put pompano upon a soup underlaid with oysters, and then a larded fillet upon some casual tidbit of terrapins. Whereupon a frozen punch. Thus courage was gained, the consecrated sequence of sherry, hock, claret and champagne being absolved, for the proper discussion of woodcock in the red with a famous old burgundy--Morrison's personal compliment to the apostolate of civic art.