“A spirit haunts the year's last hours,
Dwelling amid these yellowing bowers:
To himself he talks;
For at eventide, listening earnestly,
At his work you may hear him sob and sigh,
In the walks;
Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks
Of the mouldering flowers:
Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave i' the earth so chilly;
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.”
“That is very pretty poetry, gentlemen,” said Morgenstern, who had come
in behind us, “but is it not a little vague? You like it, but you cannot
tell exactly what it means. I find the same fault in the picture from
my point of view. There is nothing in it to make a paragraph about, no
anecdote, no experiment in technique. It is impossible to persuade the
public to admire a picture unless you can tell them precisely the points
on which they must fix their admiration. And that is why, although the
painting is a good one, I should be willing to sell it at a low price.”
He named a sum of money in three figures, so small that Pierrepont, who
often buys pictures by proxy, could not conceal his surprise.
“Certainly I should consider that a good bargain, simply for
investment,” said he. “Falconer's name alone ought to be worth more than
that, ten years from now. He is a rising man.”
“No, Mr. Pierrepont,” replied the dealer, “the picture is worth what
I ask for it, for I would not commit the impertinence of offering a
present to you or your friend; but it is worth no more. Falconer's name
will not increase in value. The catalogue of his works is too short for
fame to take much notice of it; and this is the last. Did you not hear
of his death last fall? I do not wonder, for it happened at some place
down on Long Island--a name that I never saw before, and have forgotten
now. There was not even an obituary in the newspapers.”
“And besides,” he continued, after a pause, “I must not conceal from
you that the painting has a blemish. It is not always visible, since you
have failed to detect it; but it is more noticeable in some lights than
in others; and, do what I will, I cannot remove it. This alone would
prevent the painting from being a good investment. Its market value will
never rise.”
He turned the canvas sideways to the light, and the defect became
apparent.
It was a dim, oblong, white blot in the middle distance; a nebulous
blur in the painting, as if there had been some chemical impurity in the
pigment causing it to fade, or rather as if a long drop of some acid, or
perhaps a splash of salt water, had fallen upon the canvas while it was
wet, and bleached it. I knew little of the possible causes of such a
blot, but enough to see that it could not be erased without painting
over it, perhaps not even then. And yet it seemed rather to enhance than
to weaken the attraction which the picture had for me.
“Your candour does you credit, Mr. Morgenstern,” said I, “but you know
me well enough to be sure that what you have said will hardly discourage
me. For I have never been an admirer of 'cabinet finish' in works of
art. Nor have I been in the habit of buying them, as a Circassian father
trains his daughters, with an eye to the market. They come into my house
for my own pleasure, and when the time arrives that I can see them
no longer, it will not matter much to me what price they bring in the
auction-room. This landscape pleases me so thoroughly that, if you will
let us take it with us this evening, I will send you a check for the
amount in the morning.”
So we carried off the painting in a cab; and all the way home I was in
the pleasant excitement of a man who is about to make an addition to his
house; while Pierrepont was conscious of the glow of virtue which comes
of having done a favour to a friend and justified your own critical
judgment at one stroke.
After dinner we hung the painting over the chimney-piece in the room
called the study (because it was consecrated to idleness), and sat there
far into the night, talking of the few times we had met Falconer at the
club, and of his reticent manner, which was broken by curious flashes of
impersonal confidence when he spoke not of himself but of his art. From
this we drifted into memories of good comrades who had walked beside us
but a few days in the path of life, and then disappeared, yet left us
feeling as if we cared more for them than for the men whom we see every
day; and of young geniuses who had never reached the goal; and of many
other glimpses of “the light that failed,” until the lamp was low and it
was time to say good-night.