The train swung down a tawny New England river towards Prestonville as I
reviewed the stages of a great curiosity. At last I was to see the Del
Puente Giorgione. Long before, when the old pictures first began to speak
to me, I had learned that the critic Mantovani, the master of us all,
owned an early Giorgione, unfinished but of marvellous beauty. At his
death, strangely enough, it was not found among his pictures, which were
bequeathed as every one knows to the San Marcello Museum. The next word I
had of it was when Anitchkoff, Mantovani's disciple and successor,
reported it in the Del Puente Castle in the Basque mountains. He added a
word on its importance though avowedly knowing it only from a photograph.
It appeared that Mantovani in his last days had given the portrait to his
old friend the Carlist Marquesa del Puente, in whose cause--picturesque
but irrelevant detail--he had once drawn sword. Anitchkoff's full
enthusiasm was handsomely recorded after he had made the pilgrimage to
the Marquesa's crag. One may still read in that worthy but short-lived
organ of sublimity, "Le Mihrab," his appreciation of the Del Puente
Giorgione, which he describes as a Giambellino blossoming into a Titian,
with just the added exquisiteness that the world has only felt since Big
George of Castelfranco took up the brush. How the panel exchanged the
Pyrenees for the North Shore passed dimly through my mind as barely worth
recalling. It was the usual story of the rich and enterprising American
collector. Hanson Brooks had bought it and hung it in "The Curlews,"
where it bid fair to become legendary once more, but at last had lent it
with his other pictures to the Prestonville Museum of Science and the
Fine Arts, the goal of my present quest. While the picture lay _perdu_ at
Brooks's, there had been disquieting gossip; the Pretorian Club, which is
often terribly right in such matters, agreed that he had been badly sold.
None of this I believed for an instant. What could one doubt in a picture
owned by Mantovani and certified by Anitchkoff? Upon this point of
rumination the train stopped at Prestonville.
My approach to the masterpiece was reverently deliberate. At the
American House I actually lingered over the fried steak and dallied long
with the not impossible mince pie. Thus fortified, I followed Main
Street to the Museum--one of those depressingly correct new-Greek
buildings with which the country is being filled. Skirting with a shiver
the bleak casts from the antique in the atrium and mounting an absurdly
spacious staircase, I reached a doorway through which the _chef
d'oeuvre_ of my dreams confronted me cheerlessly. Its nullity was
appalling; from afar I felt the physical uneasiness that an equivocal
picture will usually produce in a devotee. To approach and study it was
a civility I paid not to itself but to its worshipful _provenance_. A
slight inspection told all there was to tell. The paint was palpably
modern; the surface would not have resisted a pin. In style it was a
distant echo of the Giorgione at Berlin. Yet, as I gazed and wondered
sadly, I perceived it was not a vulgar forgery--indeed not a forgery at
all. It had been done to amuse some painter of antiquarian bent. I even
thought, too rashly, that I recognised the touch of the youthful Watts,
and I could imagine the studio revel at which he or another had
valiantly laid in a Giorgione before the punch, as his contribution to
the evening's merriment. The picture upon the pie wrought a black
depression that some excellent Japanese paintings were powerless to
dispel. As my train crawled up the tawny river, now inky, my thoughts
moved helplessly about the dark enigma--How could Mantovani have
possessed such rubbish? How could Anitchkoff, enjoying the use of his
eyes and mind, have credited it for a moment? My reflections
preposterously failed to rest upon the obvious clue, the mysterious
Marquesa del Puente, and it was not until I met Anitchkoff, some years
later, that I began to divine the woman in the case.
After ten years of absence he had come back to America on something like
a triumphal tour. I had promptly paid my respects and now through a
discreet persistency was to have a long evening with him at the
Pretorian. As I studied the dinner card, guessing at his gastronomic
tastes, my mind was naturally on his remarkable career. Anitchkoff,
brought from Russia in childhood, had grown up in decent poverty in a
small New England city. Very early he showed the intellectual ambition
that distinguished all the family. Our excellent public schools made his
way to the nearest country college easy and inevitable. There began the
struggle the traces of which might be read in an almost melancholy
gravity quite unnatural in a man become famous at thirty-five. With the
facility of his race he learned all the languages in the curriculum and
read ferociously in many literatures. In his junior year the appearance
of a great and genial work on psychology made him the metaphysician he
has remained through all digressions in the connoisseurship and criticism
of art. How his search for ultimate principles involved a mastery of the
minutiae of the Venetian school I could only guess. But one could imagine
the process. Seeking to ground his personal preferences in a general
esthetic, he would have found his data absolutely untrustworthy. How
could he presume to interpret a Giorgione or a Titian when what they
painted was undetermined? Upon these shifting sands he declined to rear
his tabernacle. To the work of classifying the Venetians, accordingly, he
set himself with dogged honesty. As a matter of course Mantovani became
his chief preceptor--Mantovani who first discovered that the highly
complex organism we call a work of art has a morphology as definite as
that of a trilobite; that the artist may no more transcend his own forms
than a crustacean may become a vertebrate. For a matter of ten years
Anitchkoff, espousing a fairly Franciscan poverty, gave himself to this
ungrateful task. How he contrived to live in the shadow of the great
galleries was a mystery the solution of which one suspected to be bitter
and heroic. Gradually recognition as an expert came to him and with it an
irksome success. His fame had developed duties, and while his studies in
esthetics remained fragmentary, he was persistently consulted on all
manner of trivialities. From Piedmont to the confine of Dalmatia he knew
every little master that ever made or marred panel or plaster, and he
paid the penalty of such knowledge. Surmising the tragedy of his career
and its essential nobility I had discounted the ugly rumours connecting
him with the sale of the Del Puente Giorgione. When every fool learned
that the Giorgione at "The Curlews" was false, many inferred that
Anitchkoff, having praised it, must have a hand in Brooks's bad
bargain--a conclusion sedulously put about and finally hinted in cold
type by certain rival critics. Personally I knew that Brooks had bagged
his find under quite other advice, but while I would always have sworn to
Anitchkoff's complete integrity in the whole Del Puente matter, my wonder
also grew at so hideous a lapse of judgment. I hopelessly fell back upon
such banalities as the errability of mankind, being conscious all the
time that some special and most curious infatuation must underlie this
particular error. Anitchkoff's card interrupted some such train of
thought. He came in quietly as sunshine after fog. His face between the
curtains reminded me strangely of the awful moment in the Prestonville
Museum--paradoxically, for he was as genuine and reassuring as the Del
Puente Giorgione had been baffling and false.
We began dinner with the stiffness of men between whom much is unsaid.
As the oystershells departed, however, we had found common memories. He
recalled delightfully those little northern towns in the debatable
region which from a critic's point of view may be considered Lombard or
Venetian, with a tendency to be neither but rather a Transalpine
Bavaria. To me also the glow of the Burgundy on the tablecloth brought
back strange provincial altarpieces in this territory--marvels in
crimson and gold, and a riddle for the connoisseur. Then the talk
reached higher latitudes. He mused aloud about that very simple reaction
which we call the sense of beauty and have resolutely sophisticated ever
since criticism existed--I intent meanwhile and eating most of a mallard
as sanguine as a decollation of the Baptist. By the cheese Anitchkoff
seemed confident of my sympathy, and I, having found nothing amiss in
him except an imperfect enjoyment of the pleasures of the table, was
planning how least imprudently might be raised the topic of the Del
Puente Giorgione. But it was he who spoke first. At the coffee he asked
me with admirable simplicity what people said about the affair, and I
answered with equal candour.
"You too have wondered," he continued.
"Of course, but nothing worse," I replied.
Then with the hesitancy of a man approaching a dire chagrin, and yet with
a rueful appreciation of the humour of the predicament that I despair of
reproducing, he began:
"It happened about this way. When I first came to Italy and began to meet
the friends of Mantovani, they told me of an early Giorgione he owned but
rarely showed. He used to speak of it affectionately as 'il mio Zorzi,'
to distinguish it perhaps from the more important example he had sold to
one of our dilettante iron-masters. The little unfinished portrait I
heard of, from those whose opinion is sought, as a superlatively lovely
thing. It was mentioned with a certain awe; to have seen it was a
distinction. For years I hoped my time would come, but the opportunity
was provokingly delayed. How should you feel if Mrs. Warrener should show
you all her things but the great Botticelli?" I nodded understandingly.
Mrs. Warrener, for a two minutes' delay in an appointment, had debarred
me her Whistlers for a year.
"That's the way Mantovani treated me," Anitchkoff continued. "Whenever I
dared I asked for the 'Zorzi,' and he always put me off with a smile.
That mystified me, for I knew he took a paternal pride in my studies, but
I never got any more satisfactory answer from him than that the 'Zorzi'
was strong meat for the young; one must grow up to it, like S---- and
P---- and C---- (naming some of his closest disciples). These allusions
he made repeatedly and with a queer sardonic zest. Occasionally he would
volunteer the encouragement--for I had long ago dropped the
subject--'Cheer up, my boy; your turn will come.' When he so Quixotically
gave the picture to the Marquesa del Puente, it seemed, though, as if my
turn could never come, but I noted that he had been true to his doctrine
that the 'Zorzi' was only for the mature; the Del Puente was said to be
some years his senior. One knew exasperatingly little about her. It was
said vaguely that Mantovani entertained a tender friendship for her,
having been her husband's comrade in arms in half a dozen Carlist
revolts. That seemed enough to explain the gift."
At this point Anitchkoff must have caught my raised eyebrows, for he
added contritely, "It was odd for Mantovani to give away a Giorgione.
You're quite right. I was ridiculously young." "You may imagine," he
pursued, "that the flight of the Giorgione to the Pyrenees only
embittered my curiosity. For years I might have seen it--shabbily to be
sure--by merely opening a door when Mantovani was occupied, now it had
departed to another planet. Remember those were my 'prentice days when I
lived obscurely and absolutely without acquaintance in the Marquesa's
world. She seemed as inaccessible as the Grand Lama. But you know how
things will come about in least expected ways: Jane Morrison, quite the
only human being who could possibly have known both the Marquesa and me,
actually gave me a very good letter of introduction. Then almost
oppressive good luck, came a note from her mountain Castle, telling that
the Chatelaine would be glad to receive me whenever my travels led me her
way. She mentioned our common enthusiasm for the Venetians and graciously
wanted my opinion on the Giorgione, which the enemies of Mantovani, her
friend and my spiritual father, as she called him, had spitefully
slandered. Such slanders had never happened to reach my ears but I was
already eager to refute them.
"It was two years later that I made the visit on the way to the Prado.
All day long the diligence rattled up hill away from the railroad, and it
was dusk before I saw the Del Puente stronghold on its crag, evidently a
half hour's walk from the miserable _fonda_ where the diligence dropped
me. It was no hour to present an introduction, but I bribed a boy to take
the letter up that night. He returned, disappointingly, without an
answer. The next morning wore on intolerably amid a noisy squalor that I
could not escape until my summons came. It was early afternoon before an
equerry arrived on muleback bearing the Marquesa's note. She was
enchanted to meet me but desolated at the unlucky time of my arrival.
Tomorrow she crossed the Pyrenees for Paris and hoped my route might lie
that way. Meanwhile her home was wholly dismantled for the winter, and
the ordinary hospitalities were denied her. But she counted on the
pleasure of seeing me at four; we might at least chat, drink a cup of
tea, and pay our homage to Mantovani's 'Zorzi.' Nothing could have been
more charming or more tantalising. As I toiled up towards the Del Puente
barbican I could feel the precious afternoon light dwindling. Breathless
I set the castle bell a-jangling with something like despair.
"Heavy doors opened in front of me as I passed the sallyport and the
grassgrown courtyard. At the entrance a majordomo in shabby but fairly
regal livery greeted me and conducted me through empty corridors and up
a massive staircase. The castle was indeed dismantled--apparently had
been in that condition from all time. As my superb guide halted before a
door which, exceptionally, was curtained, and knocked, my heart failed
me. I dreaded meeting this strange noblewoman, almost regretted the
nearness of the 'Zorzi,' knowing the actual colours could hardly surpass
those of my fancy. The little speeches I had been rehearsing resolved
themselves into silence again as I saw her by a tiny fire; a compelling
apparition, erect, with snowy hair waving high over burning black eyes.
To-day when I coldly analyse her fascination I recall nothing but these
simple elements. She permitted not a moment of the shyness that has
always plagued me. What our words were I do not now know, but I know
that I kissed the two hands she held out to me as she called me
Mantovani's son and her friend. Then I talked as never before or since,
told her of my struggles and ambitions, and from time to time I was mute
so that I might hear the deep contralto of the French she spoke
perfectly but with Spanish resonance. There was probably tea. Anyhow the
light went away from the deep casements unnoticed, and it was she who,
with a chiding finger, recalled me to duty and the Giorgione. 'Wretch,'
said she, 'you are here to see it not me. The light is going and your
devoirs yet unpaid.'
"As she took my arm and led me through the gallery, I had an odd
presentiment of going towards a doom. While I followed her up a winding
stair, the misgiving increased. Did venerable lemurs inhabit the Basque
mountains? Could so magnificent; an old age be of this earth? An
ancestral shudder from the Steppes came over me. It was her ruddy train
rustling round the turns ahead that aroused these atavistic
superstitions. But when we stood together on the landing all doubts fell
away; a broad ray of sunlight that struck through an open doorway showed
her spectral beauty to be after all reassuringly corporeal. Over the
threshold she fairly pushed me with the warning, 'The place is holy, we
must be silent.' For a moment I was staggered by the wide pencil of light
that shot through a porthole and cut the room in two. The little octagon,
a tower chamber I took it to be, was a prism of shadow enclosing a shaft
of flying golddust. Outside it must have been full sunset. Near the
border line of light and darkness I faintly saw the 'Zorzi,' which
borrowed a glory from the moment and from her. I felt her hand on my
shoulder and knelt, it seemed for minutes, it probably was for seconds
only. The picture, which I had not seen, much less examined, swam in the
twilight and became the most gracious that had ever met my eyes. The dusk
grew as the disc of light climbed up the wall and faded. She whispered in
my ear, 'It is enough for now. You shall come again many times.' I recall
nothing more except the Marquesa's silvery hair and the long line of her
crimson gown as she bade me 'Au revoir' at the head of the great stairs.
That night in the miserable _fonda_ below I wrote out feverishly the
notes which you have doubtless read in the 'Mihrab,' and I would give my
right hand to be able to forget."
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.