A SMALL YACHTSMAN AND AN OLD DEALER
Coming down the stairs he was quite a different person from the man who
had gone up only half an hour before.
Only women and wine are able to work magic like that.
He felt warmed and cheered, and his work seemed worth doing. A little
appreciation goes a long way with a writer, and though Martia Hare had
said little enough in the way of appreciation, what she had said was
genuine. But though the appreciation had cheered, it was the woman who
had warmed.
For the last three months he had been leading a pretty lonely life.
When he had dropped Fleet Street he had lost touch with a great number
of people, women and men, fellow-workers and fellow human beings; the
smash his father had come in the financial world had made him chary of
approaching the people he had known in better days, and as a result
he had been living in an isolation excellent for work but bad for the
worker.
If you want to find loneliness do not go to the Sahara desert. Go to
London, with its population of seven million people crowded within a
radius of a few miles. Here you will find the real thing as Bobby had
found it, and here you will appreciate at its full value the interest
of a fellow man or woman.
Out in the desolation of roaring Fleet Street he found that he was
not alone. The pleasant image of the girl of the literary agency was
with him. She had not only attached herself to his work, but also in
some way to himself. It was not a question of love at first sight,
or of love at all, but of something more subtle; even, perhaps, more
mysterious--liking.
It was fifteen minutes to one, and reckoning that it was useless to
call on Behrens till later in the afternoon, Bobby hailed a taxi, got
in, and told the driver to take him to the Café Chianti in Old Compton
Street.
Here when he had paid and dismissed the driver, he found that he had
left his walking-stick in the cab, a fact that, so far from annoying
him, made him chuckle. How did Miss Hare know his bias in this respect?
And what an amazingly fortunate thing it was that he had not left
the picture behind in the cab instead of a half-crown walking-stick.
The picture that carried with it the good-will of the editor of the
_Paternoster Magazine_.
She had saved him from the effects of his own forgetfulness, and it was
as though another little bond had been tied between them.
The angel who looks after lonely young men was busy that day with the
affairs of Bobby, for, as he took his seat at a table to the right of
the doorway and picked up the menu, a man at the next table on the
left leaned across and touched him on the arm.
It was Hackett, unseen for several years. Samuel Hackett, otherwise
known as Sam, who had been sent down from St. John's for screwing a
tutor so firmly up in his rooms that a carpenter had to be called in.
Sam looked just the same, rather disreputable--no tailor could ever
dress him--just the same, but for an attempt at a beard and the deep
bronze of an out-of-door man.
"I've got a boat," said he, after greetings had been exchanged and
in answer to inquiries as to his doings. "I used to keep her up the
Hamble, but I've shifted to Poole Harbour. Do you know Poole Harbour?"
"No I don't," said Bobby; "only that it is near Bournemouth. But what
are you doing with the boat?"
"Living in her," said Sam. "It's the only life. No rates and taxes,
only harbour dues; no servants, only one man; fishing as much as you
want, and the whole Channel to cruise in."
"You're not married?"
"No," said Sam. "You don't want to be married if you have a boat. She
wants all your attention, and women are a nuisance, anyway, at least on
board a boat."
"Well, I'm jolly glad to see you," said Bobby. "What are you doing
to-night? Let's have some dinner somewhere and go to a theatre
afterwards."
"No," said Hackett. "I only came up to get some gadgets and a spare
suit of oilskins in the East India Dock Road. I'm going back by the
five train; but I'll always be glad to see you at Poole. Anyone will
show you my boat--she's the _Sandfly_--everyone knows me at Poole."
A feeling had come to Bobby that the joyous Sammy of other days
must have encountered strange influences to make him like this, so
indifferent to pleasure, so different from his old self. He did not
know the type yet, or the fact that he was talking to an almost perfect
specimen of the full-blown small yachtsman; a being for whom towns
existed only as suppliers of mast-winches and oilskin suits, and in
whose eyes God made the ocean as a practice ground for five to forty
tonners.
They parted outside the café, Hackett making east for the delights of
the Dock Road and Bobby north for Museum Street and the shop of Behrens.
Museum Street is the conduit that leads from Oxford Street and to-day
to where antiquity sits sheltered by the roof of the Museum and amidst
the well-preserved ruins of the world she once knew as young.
Miss Hare was right. Museums are destructive to inspiration, and
hunting for mushrooms in Labrador would be a fruitful occupation
compared to hunting for a living story amidst the marbles.
But Museum Street is a different matter, and Behrens' shop, which
stands half-way down on the right hand side, is another matter still.
I have never seen anyone pass Behrens' without stopping to look in. By
"anyone" I mean of course strangers to the street and people not in
too great a hurry.
Behrens is the man who beat Wangenheim at the great Sale of Japanese
Surinomo held in London in 1912, securing the whole of a Baron
Kamekura's collection for the British Museum.
Surinomo are Japanese Christmas cards, the newest craze among
collectors, and invaluable, some of them, especially when signed by
Hokuga, whose signature looks like a corkscrew, or Korinsai, whose
device suggests three five-barred gates and a gridiron. It was Behrens
who outbid the Americans for the Hispano Mauro lustre-ware at the Huth
sale, a collection which beats even that at Warwick Castle; and it
was he who declared the wax bust of the hunting Diana, attributed to
Benvenuto Cellini by a certain great critic of art, to be an impudent
fake.
But in the windows of his shop there is little to indicate these
activities of mind and purse; a chair of Beauvais tapestry, an arquebus
inlaid with silver, a set of crystal vases, always something attractive
without ostentation, and appealing to the sense of form or colour.
Bobby pressed the latch and entered the shop of Behrens, releasing as
he did so a bell that rang wildly in the back premises and fell dumb
when the door closed on the street.
Then he stood in the silence, looking around him and waiting for
someone to come.
The centre of the shop was taken up with a show-case, flat like a table
and filled with all sorts of small coloured and glittering things
from the antique world. It was as though a magic net had been cast in
time, a net sweeping the shores of the Roman and mediæval worlds and
the world of later days, a net made only for the catching of gems and
bibelots and bringing up everything from a snuffbox of Pettio's to a
chaplet by Benvenuto Cellini.
On either side and lining the shop walls, tall glass show-cases
exhibited armour and swords, crystal cups and goblets, German
chest-locks, carvings of John Voyez, and, occupying two large cabinets,
reposed a wonderful collection of Japanese masks, almost life-sized
faces in ivory, carved to represent Diakoku the god of Wealth, the Rice
god, the god of Roads, and twenty others, to say nothing of mousmés and
mouskos, old women and comic actors.
Bobby was looking at these things, when from the back of the shop and
past a tapestried screen came Behrens.
Behrens looked exactly as a man ought to look who is seventy-five, and
who has spent sixty years of his life face to face with antiques in
the stuffy atmosphere of cities, and surrounded always by either the
silence of the show-room or the noise of the market.
He wore glasses with tortoiseshell rims, after the modern fashion, and
a grey beard and moustache that hid the expression of his lower face.
An old fellow with a grey beard and spectacles; quite commonplace to
anyone but a connoisseur of men, who would have at once noticed his
hands; delicate, extraordinary sensitive-looking hands, that seemed
never quite at rest, but always questing to touch, to weigh and to feel.
"I believe I have the pleasure of speaking to Mr. Behrens?" said Bobby.
"Miss Hare, of the firm of Beaman & Hare, asked me to call. At least,
she suggested that I should call--she said you knew her."
"I know her well," said Behrens. "And what can I do for you, Mr.----"
"Lestrange. My name is Lestrange."
"Any relationship to Mr. Nicholas Lestrange?"
"He was my father."
"Think of that now," said Behrens. "I have had many dealings with your
father, Mr. Lestrange, and now that I come to look at you closely I
seem to see a likeness. I always found him an easy customer to deal
with and I think he always found me an honest dealer, two things that
rarely come together in this world, Mr. Lestrange."
"I suppose you know that my father is dead?"
"Yes, I know that," said Behrens. He did not add that he had attended
the sale at Bramshott in Kent and bought half the pictures and all the
china, over which he had made a considerable profit.
Behrens, though a man with a heart, believed in the motto of Balzac:
"There is no friendship in business," and though he had felt an
affection for the good-hearted Nicholas Lestrange, he had had no qualms
at all about profiting from his estate.
"My father was ruined," said Bobby. "He was speculating in things and
they went the wrong way. So I've just had to set to to earn my living."
Behrens, half sitting on a great Elizabethan chest covered with red
leather, took a cigarette case from his pocket, and offered it while he
examined the young man before him with the terrible eye that could tell
worth from dross in men no less than in antiques.
"And how are you setting about that, if I may ask?" inquired he.
The question covered Bobby with confusion. It was perhaps the
matter-of-fact and businesslike air of the art dealer that made
story-writing for a living seem, suddenly, an occupation of the
feminine gender, an employment on the embroidery side of things, good
enough for girls but not good enough for a young man beginning life.
"I started with newspaper work," said he, "and then I turned from that
to writing."
"And what do you write?" asked Behrens.
"Stories."
"Ah, stories. And do you manage to sell these stories that you write?"
"Yes, some."
"And they are published?"
"I believe so," said Bobby, laughing. "I believe there are publishers
crazy enough to publish my work and pay for it."
"There are no crazy business men in London," said Behrens. "Take my
word for it as a trader. If publishers take your work and pay for it,
you may be sure that it is worth what they pay, twice over. That is
not flattery, it is an axiom. Why are you ashamed of your work?"
"I'm not," said Bobby, brought to a halt in his mind by this alarming
old man who seemed to see his thoughts. "Only sometimes it seems to me
that storytelling is too easy to be called work--isn't exactly the work
for a man."
"How old are you?" asked Behrens.
Bobby told, and the art dealer was silent for a moment. Then he spoke.
"What work is easy that is difficult? And is a man any the less a man
because his work has pleasure for its objective and not utility or
destruction? All the same, I see what you mean. But if you go about the
world collecting material for your stories, you will find the business,
I think, eminently the work for a man."
"How do you mean collecting material?"
"How do I mean? Well now, look here. How can any man who paints
pictures or writes stories or poems convey to his audience the effects
of hate, of love, of passion, of dread, of fear, on the human mind if
he has not experienced those emotions? How can he show you Spain if
he has never seen Spain, or a storm at sea if he has never known the
sea except at Margate? You think you are talking to an art dealer,
Mr. Lestrange. You are not. You are talking to Jacob Behrens, who has
always been a dealer in Life, and who owes all the money he has in the
bank to his recognition that a real work of art is a living thing, and
that the study of man is as important to the success of an art dealer
as the study of textures and surfaces and forms. Also," added Behrens,
with a chuckle, "to the fact that he is an adventurer at heart.
"Do you want my advice? Well, then, throw down your pen for a while
and go and have adventures: see the world in all its various forms,
get robbed, get heart-broken by women, get anything you like, but
get experience, before you get rheumatism, like me, and wealth and
possessions, which are worse than rheumatism as far as the adventurous
spirit of a man is concerned."
"I'd like nothing better," said Bobby; "only knocking round the world
takes money."
"Then knock around the world and make money," said Behrens, with
another of his little chuckles.
"How?"
"Well, that depends. You are talking to Jacob Behrens, who never wastes
time and who knows that the surest way of wasting time is to spend it
in giving advice to young men."
"Well, seems to me you have been doing it."
"No, I have just been preparing the ground for a suggestion. When I had
been speaking to you only a few minutes and found you were the son of
your father and read your face, I said to myself, 'Here is the man you
want. Here is a young man strong and healthy and to be trusted. The
only question is, has he the spirit for a big adventure?' That I have
not yet found out."
Bobby said nothing. Things were taking a strange turn--unless, indeed,
Behrens was a little bit touched in the head, which he did not seem to
be.
"It's sudden," said the old man, "my talking like this and asking a
question like that, seeing I've only known you ten minutes. But my name
is Jacob Behrens, and if I hadn't been sudden all my life, I wouldn't
have the money I have in the bank to-day. I can't abide slow thinking
or dilatory acting, and I'm going to ask you a snap question. Would you
on the chance of making anything from five to twenty thousand pounds
take a risk, pack a bag, and go where I tell you?"
"Depends on what you call the risk," said Bobby.
"That's a fair answer," replied Behrens, "and shows your head is
screwed on right. Well, now, I've no more time to waste to-day, but
if you will call upon me to-morrow evening at nine o'clock and have a
cigar and a cup of coffee, I'll tell you what is in my mind, unless I
have concluded the business with someone else--which is possible, but
not probable."
"I'll come," said Bobby.
Mad or not, Behrens pleased him. Like the guns in the shop window, the
old gentleman had induced in his mind the atmosphere of adventure. One
could not fancy Behrens chasing as much as a rabbit, and yet the effect
of his talk was almost as though some bold buccaneer had clapped the
young man on the shoulder.
"If I have no business to offer you," said Behrens, "you shall at
least have a good cigar and we will talk of art and these things." He
waved his hand at the treasures around whilst he began to walk Bobby
to the door. "These pretty trifles from the courts of France and the
old courts of Italy, and these pieces of armour from a greater age than
ours."
He opened the door, and Bobby was about to say good-day when he
remembered something that he had forgotten, something even more
important than the walking-stick he had forgotten in the cab.
"That reminds me," said he. "The reason I came to you to-day was to
find out all about Tanagra statuettes. I had to write a story about
them. It's stupid of me, for now I have taken up so much of your time I
don't like to bother you on the subject."
"You are talking of the figurines found in the olive groves of Tanagra
and dating from the fourth and fifth century before Christ. Well, it
is an interesting subject, and to-morrow night, if we have no better
business to discuss, we will talk about them."
Saying this, Behrens bowed his visitor into Museum Street and closed
the door.
In the street, and released from the spell of the old gentleman and his
shop, Bobby felt for a moment cheap. He had failed in the business he
had set out upon, and, instead of gathering the information he desired,
had allowed himself to be hypnotised by an interesting personality,
wound up in a bobbin of talk, and dismissed like a child.
This unbusinesslike habit of forgetting things had gone against him
in the newspaper world and was pursuing him in Storyland. He felt
depressed, but the depression did not last long. The spell of Behrens
returned on him, and, as he walked towards the Museum, failure was
forgotten in the interest of the question: "What on earth can he want
to see me about to-morrow night?"