Of all the genuine Bohemians who strayed from time to time into the
would-be Bohemian circle of the Restaurant Nuremberg, Owl Street, Soho,
none was more interesting and more elusive than Gebhard Knopfschrank. He
had no friends, and though he treated all the restaurant frequenters as
acquaintances he never seemed to wish to carry the acquaintanceship
beyond the door that led into Owl Street and the outer world. He dealt
with them all rather as a market woman might deal with chance passers-by,
exhibiting her wares and chattering about the weather and the slackness
of business, occasionally about rheumatism, but never showing a desire to
penetrate into their daily lives or to dissect their ambitions.
He was understood to belong to a family of peasant farmers, somewhere in
Pomerania; some two years ago, according to all that was known of him, he
had abandoned the labours and responsibilities of swine tending and goose
rearing to try his fortune as an artist in London.
“Why London and not Paris or Munich?” he had been asked by the curious.
Well, there was a ship that left Stolpmünde for London twice a month,
that carried few passengers, but carried them cheaply; the railway fares
to Munich or Paris were not cheap. Thus it was that he came to select
London as the scene of his great adventure.
The question that had long and seriously agitated the frequenters of the
Nuremberg was whether this goose-boy migrant was really a soul-driven
genius, spreading his wings to the light, or merely an enterprising young
man who fancied he could paint and was pardonably anxious to escape from
the monotony of rye bread diet and the sandy, swine-bestrewn plains of
Pomerania. There was reasonable ground for doubt and caution; the
artistic groups that foregathered at the little restaurant contained so
many young women with short hair and so many young men with long hair,
who supposed themselves to be abnormally gifted in the domain of music,
poetry, painting, or stagecraft, with little or nothing to support the
supposition, that a self-announced genius of any sort in their midst was
inevitably suspect. On the other hand, there was the ever-imminent
danger of entertaining, and snubbing, an angel unawares. There had been
the lamentable case of Sledonti, the dramatic poet, who had been
belittled and cold-shouldered in the Owl Street hall of judgment, and had
been afterwards hailed as a master singer by the Grand Duke Constantine
Constantinovitch—“the most educated of the Romanoffs,” according to
Sylvia Strubble, who spoke rather as one who knew every individual member
of the Russian imperial family; as a matter of fact, she knew a newspaper
correspondent, a young man who ate _bortsch_ with the air of having
invented it. Sledonti’s “Poems of Death and Passion” were now being sold
by the thousand in seven European languages, and were about to be
translated into Syrian, a circumstance which made the discerning critics
of the Nuremberg rather shy of maturing their future judgments too
rapidly and too irrevocably.
As regards Knopfschrank’s work, they did not lack opportunity for
inspecting and appraising it. However resolutely he might hold himself
aloof from the social life of his restaurant acquaintances, he was not
minded to hide his artistic performances from their inquiring gaze.
Every evening, or nearly every evening, at about seven o’clock, he would
make his appearance, sit himself down at his accustomed table, throw a
bulky black portfolio on to the chair opposite him, nod round
indiscriminately at his fellow-guests, and commence the serious business
of eating and drinking. When the coffee stage was reached he would light
a cigarette, draw the portfolio over to him, and begin to rummage among
its contents. With slow deliberation he would select a few of his more
recent studies and sketches, and silently pass them round from table to
table, paying especial attention to any new diners who might be present.
On the back of each sketch was marked in plain figures the announcement
“Price ten shillings.”
If his work was not obviously stamped with the hall-mark of genius, at
any rate it was remarkable for its choice of an unusual and unvarying
theme. His pictures always represented some well-known street or public
place in London, fallen into decay and denuded of its human population,
in the place of which there roamed a wild fauna, which, from its wealth
of exotic species, must have originally escaped from Zoological Gardens
and travelling beast shows. “Giraffes drinking at the fountain pools,
Trafalgar Square,” was one of the most notable and characteristic of his
studies, while even more sensational was the gruesome picture of
“Vultures attacking dying camel in Upper Berkeley Street.” There were
also photographs of the large canvas on which he had been engaged for
some months, and which he was now endeavouring to sell to some
enterprising dealer or adventurous amateur. The subject was “Hyænas
asleep in Euston Station,” a composition that left nothing to be desired
in the way of suggesting unfathomed depths of desolation.
“Of course it may be immensely clever, it may be something epoch-making
in the realm of art,” said Sylvia Strubble to her own particular circle
of listeners, “but, on the other hand, it may be merely mad. One mustn’t
pay too much attention to the commercial aspect of the case, of course,
but still, if some dealer would make a bid for that hyæna picture, or
even for some of the sketches, we should know better how to place the man
and his work.”
“We may all be cursing ourselves one of these days,” said Mrs.
Nougat-Jones, “for not having bought up his entire portfolio of sketches.
At the same time, when there is so much real talent going about, one does
not feel like planking down ten shillings for what looks like a bit of
whimsical oddity. Now that picture that he showed us last week,
‘Sand-grouse roosting on the Albert Memorial,’ was very impressive, and
of course I could see there was good workmanship in it and breadth of
treatment; but it didn’t in the least convey the Albert Memorial to me,
and Sir James Beanquest tells me that sand-grouse don’t roost, they sleep
on the ground.”
Whatever talent or genius the Pomeranian artist might possess, it
certainly failed to receive commercial sanction. The portfolio remained
bulky with unsold sketches, and the “Euston Siesta,” as the wits of the
Nuremberg nicknamed the large canvas, was still in the market. The
outward and visible signs of financial embarrassment began to be
noticeable; the half-bottle of cheap claret at dinner-time gave way to a
small glass of lager, and this in turn was displaced by water. The
one-and-sixpenny set dinner receded from an everyday event to a Sunday
extravagance; on ordinary days the artist contented himself with a
sevenpenny omelette and some bread and cheese, and there were evenings
when he did not put in an appearance at all. On the rare occasions when
he spoke of his own affairs it was observed that he began to talk more
about Pomerania and less about the great world of art.
“It is a busy time there now with us,” he said wistfully; “the schwines
are driven out into the fields after harvest, and must be looked after.
I could be helping to look after if I was there. Here it is difficult to
live; art is not appreciate.”
“Why don’t you go home on a visit?” some one asked tactfully.
“Ah, it cost money! There is the ship passage to Stolpmünde, and there
is money that I owe at my lodgings. Even here I owe a few schillings.
If I could sell some of my sketches—”
“Perhaps,” suggested Mrs. Nougat-Jones, “if you were to offer them for a
little less, some of us would be glad to buy a few. Ten shillings is
always a consideration, you know, to people who are not over well off.
Perhaps if you were to ask six or seven shillings—”
Once a peasant, always a peasant. The mere suggestion of a bargain to be
struck brought a twinkle of awakened alertness into the artist’s eyes,
and hardened the lines of his mouth.
“Nine schilling nine pence each,” he snapped, and seemed disappointed
that Mrs. Nougat-Jones did not pursue the subject further. He had
evidently expected her to offer seven and fourpence.
The weeks sped by, and Knopfschrank came more rarely to the restaurant in
Owl Street, while his meals on those occasions became more and more
meagre. And then came a triumphal day, when he appeared early in the
evening in a high state of elation, and ordered an elaborate meal that
scarcely stopped short of being a banquet. The ordinary resources of the
kitchen were supplemented by an imported dish of smoked goosebreast, a
Pomeranian delicacy that was luckily procurable at a firm of
_delikatessen_ merchants in Coventry Street, while a long-necked bottle
of Rhine wine gave a finishing touch of festivity and good cheer to the
crowded table.
“He has evidently sold his masterpiece,” whispered Sylvia Strubble to
Mrs. Nougat-Jones, who had come in late.
“Who has bought it?” she whispered back.
“Don’t know; he hasn’t said anything yet, but it must be some American.
Do you see, he has got a little American flag on the dessert dish, and he
has put pennies in the music box three times, once to play the
‘Star-spangled Banner,’ then a Sousa march, and then the ‘Star-spangled
Banner’ again. It must be an American millionaire, and he’s evidently
got a very big price for it; he’s just beaming and chuckling with
satisfaction.”
“We must ask him who has bought it,” said Mrs. Nougat-Jones.
“Hush! no, don’t. Let’s buy some of his sketches, quick, before we are
supposed to know that he’s famous; otherwise he’ll be doubling the
prices. I am so glad he’s had a success at last. I always believed in
him, you know.”
For the sum of ten shillings each Miss Strubble acquired the drawings of
the camel dying in Upper Berkeley Street and of the giraffes quenching
their thirst in Trafalgar Square; at the same price Mrs. Nougat-Jones
secured the study of roosting sand-grouse. A more ambitious picture,
“Wolves and wapiti fighting on the steps of the Athenæum Club,” found a
purchaser at fifteen shillings.
“And now what are your plans?” asked a young man who contributed
occasional paragraphs to an artistic weekly.
“I go back to Stolpmünde as soon as the ship sails,” said the artist,
“and I do not return. Never.”
“But your work? Your career as painter?”
“Ah, there is nossing in it. One starves. Till to-day I have sold not
one of my sketches. To-night you have bought a few, because I am going
away from you, but at other times, not one.”
“But has not some American—?”
“Ah, the rich American,” chuckled the artist. “God be thanked. He dash
his car right into our herd of schwines as they were being driven out to
the fields. Many of our best schwines he killed, but he paid all
damages. He paid perhaps more than they were worth, many times more than
they would have fetched in the market after a month of fattening, but he
was in a hurry to get on to Dantzig. When one is in a hurry one must pay
what one is asked. God be thanked for rich Americans, who are always in
a hurry to get somewhere else. My father and mother, they have now so
plenty of money; they send me some to pay my debts and come home. I
start on Monday for Stolpmünde and I do not come back. Never.”
“But your picture, the hyænas?”
“No good. It is too big to carry to Stolpmünde. I burn it.”
In time he will be forgotten, but at present Knopfschrank is almost as
sore a subject as Sledonti with some of the frequenters of the Nuremberg
Restaurant, Owl Street, Soho.