VII

And as Jesus Christ, of the house of David, took upon himself human nature in order to free and to redeem mankind who were in the bonds of sin because of Adam’s disobedience, so also, in our art, the thing that is unjustly defiled by the one will be absolved, cleansed and delivered from that foulness by another that is contrary to it.

—Raymond Lully, Codicillus

That afternoon, Fuller sat on a bench, his back turned to Central Park in December. Women scuttled past him the bulks of furs, bearing gold and precious ornaments which he watched without envy. He’d only to smile, to yawn, or frankly raise his upper lip and he could show more gold than any of them could wear, even in their most offensive aspirations to taste: jewels by the pound-weight, rings so heavy that they looked like weapons. The cold wind made continuous suggestion to his hat, a narrow-brimmed, imperially high-crowned straw, to join the fuzzy commotion that passed. The hat would have none of it. It was as firm on his head as his right hand on the umbrella, or his left hand holding the leash on the black poodle.

His face remained peacefully arranged until that leash tightened, and then the lines in Fuller’s forehead and around his mouth tightened too. When they walked, the leash was taut like a bar holding them apart, instead of a binding tie. The black faces viewed one another with mistrust, but a weary mistrust which had by now settled down to resigned loathing. Though now as Fuller looked down at the dog, there was an element of glee in his expression of disgust. It was cold; and though Fuller was cold, the dog was shivering. Fuller too was inclined to shiver, but refused to give the dog that satisfaction. He sat quite tense, restraining himself, but staring directly at the dog, who could not stop shivering. But the disgust in Fuller’s face was evident. He wanted to visit a dear friend, whose office was a bare six blocks off, and sat now considering whether he could get there and back to Mr. Brown’s before the cocktail hour. Mr. Brown had gone to the doctor. Sometimes he was late, returning from the doctor. Fuller knew that he would be punished if he were late. On the other hand, he knew that Mr. Brown would hear about the visit, late or not. That was why Fuller looked at the poodle with troubled eyes now, for he was certain that this poodle and their master communicated, that if he went to see his friend, the poodle would tell on him.

Then he smiled. Today must be different, and he tried to evade the habit of fear. He had his ticket, and tomorrow he would be gone. Mr. Brown would shout for him, the poodle would bark, but he would be far away. This ticket which he carried deeply hidden was the most expensive he had ever got. Its destination must be much nearer home than any of the others.

He looked down to see that the poodle was watching him with that look which seemed to enter his mind and rummage in his memory. Was it learning about the ticket? Fuller stood, pulling the poodle to its feet roughly as it lunged toward a bird alighted near. He set off defiantly toward First Avenue, the witness a taut four feet away.

We would believe that Fuller had had a childhood only in helpless empiricism, because we all have. But it was as unreal to him by now as to anyone looking at his face, where time had long since stopped experimenting. That childhood was like a book read, misplaced, forgotten, to be recalled when one sees another copy, the cheap edition in a railway station newsstand, which is bought, thumbed through, and like as not left on the train when the station is called. The slow train of Fuller’s life had made one express dash, when Recktall Brown had found him while on a Caribbean cruise, bought him from himself with something he had prized above life, not having it, this set of gold teeth, and a promise of magic unfulfilled: he was delivered at what seemed to be the last stop, Mr. Brown, Mr. Brown’s dog, and Mr. Brown’s apartment. That promise of magic, which had appealed so to youth, never materialized, though Fuller did not doubt but what Mr. Brown could make his skin white if he wanted to, a possibility which, grown older, he regarded now more as threat than redemption, and did not speak of it.

The dog hated his singing. Today, in easily understood levity (the ticket), he sang:

—Littel girl, please leave my bachelor room.

Littel girl, littel girl please leave my bachelor room,

You are so brazen, you are so free,

You must proteck your mo-ral-i-ty:

Littel girl, please leave my bachelor room,

as they walked toward Third Avenue, and the elevated train which the dog hated too. Fuller knew this, and always waited at the corner until a train was in sight, pretending to the dog that he was looking into a cigar-store window there.

—Hello mahn, how you goin? Fuller greeted his friend after the pleasant walk (there had been two trains, from opposite directions, passing above them in a roar).

The little mortician shook hands with him. —We had a big one, a . . . I mean we had a big one today, a funeral. Why I have more, there, do you see them all, all those at the end, those flowers, I have more flowers for you than you’ll be able to carry, Fuller. He motioned at the tall erectly wired bank of lilies, browning a bit at the edges. Fuller looked distressed.

—I cannot go off with them, mahn.

—But why? I mean, why not?

—It’s that Mister Brown, mahn, sayin to me Fuller don’t you bring any more of your God-damned corpse bouquets in at this house.

—But in your own room, I mean even in your own room you can’t have them?

—No mahn, and he find out some way too if I try. Like the birds, I believe he even know about the birds. Somebody inform on me, I know, he added, looking at the poodle.

—What birds?

—I tell you about that another time, when we not under surveillance. But the gloves? You reserved another selection of gloves for me?

—Yes, I mean I have eight pairs. Eight of them, I mean sixteen. Sixteen gloves, eight pall-bearers I mean. He fetched the gloves, and Fuller looked them over carefully.

—These are very choice, Fuller said holding up one pair. —Very clean and immaculate. I suppose he don’t carry the coffin, just walk alongside to be respectable.

—But doesn’t he mind the gloves? I mean Mister Brown, he doesn’t mind you wearing these gloves that were used to carry the, a . . . well I mean there’s no harm in it but some people are peculiar, I mean to serve things wearing these?

—He think I purchase them, said Fuller. —That is how I managin to finance my trip mahn. The money I save.

—Your trip?

—Yes, I fear this is sayin farewell to you. Tomorrow I will be a distance away, goin to my home.

—To the Barbados?

—I plan departin tomorrow in the morning.

—But Fuller, I mean not like the other times, I mean you’ve started out other times . . .

—I plan departin in the morning, Fuller repeated firmly, speaking to the dog. He put the gloves under his coat. —You still have your Armenium?

—Oh yes, I mean always, he’ll always be here.

—It remain a great pity his family cannot have him back, down in the Armenium where they reside, put him in the nice groung of his homeland where he belong to be.

—Seven years. He’s been there, I mean, here, seven years. He was here when I bought this store, I mean the business. I write letters to his family, but they can’t send money out of Armenia to pay the rent, I mean to pay his . . . my keeping him here like this. I’m not even sure there is such a country as Armenia any more.

—I wish some day I could aid him to return to his homeland, Fuller said, as he put out his hand. —Goodbye, he said. —I leavin you to God to watch over and proteck you. And the Armenium.

—Goodbye Fuller, come around Thursday night if you can, there’s going to be a big . . . I mean . . . The little man had looked forward to the greatest day in his career when Fuller’s master was given over to him for the last shave and costuming, and had no doubt Fuller would see that he got the commission. It had never been discussed between them. Nevertheless it was understood. Fuller had rehearsed the scene in his own impatient imagination many times. —Goodbye Fuller, he said, disappointment in his voice. —Send me a picture postcard, Fuller.

The black companions returned to hear their master’s voice echoing the words God damn it down the halls. Fuller was greeted with the phrase when they appeared in the doorway.

—God damn it, Fuller. Do you know what time it is? The poodle ran up to his side, where it stood muzzling his hand. —You’re late. Where the hell have you been? That God damn undertaker’s? Fuller looked at the poodle, who was betraying him even as he stood there.

—I stop to say somebody hello, sar, he admitted.

—Bring in the glasses, Fuller. Then go to bed.

—But Mister Brown I don’t mean to . . .

—Bring in the glasses, Fuller.

A few minutes later, Fuller entered, bearing the tray in white-gloved hands, with three glasses, two clean linen towels, and a bucket of ice. He put them on the bar across the room, behind Recktall Brown and Basil Valentine who were sitting before the fireplace. He stood fussing at the bar. Then Recktall Brown realized that he was still in the room, waiting like a hopeful shadow to be assigned some attachment in the light.

—Before you go to bed you’d better give me that ticket, Fuller.

—Ticket, Mister Brown?

—Give me that ticket you bought for Utica New York.

—Ticket please . . . Mister Brown?

—God damn it Fuller, give me that ticket you bought this morning for Utica.

—But Mister Brown I don’t mean to . . . Fuller was shaking.

—Fuller!

Fuller reached down into an inside pocket, and drew the ticket out slowly, handed it over. —Now go to bed. And no lights. Remember, no lights.

Fuller looked, at him and then at the poodle, and turned to trudge up the stairs.

—Crazy old nigger’s scared of the dark, Recktall Brown said. —He says he’s “visited by the most terrible creatures in the whole of history,” he laughed, tearing up the ticket to Utica. He threw the bits into the fireplace. —He thinks anywhere must be on the way to Barbados.

—Your occult powers are rather impressive.

—Occult? Recktall Brown grunted the word, and paused his cigar in the air between them abruptly so that its ash fell to the Aubusson carpet like a gray bird-dropping. He looked through his thick lenses and through the smoke: there were moments when Basil Valentine looked sixteen, days when he looked sixty. In profile, his face was strong and flexible; but, when he turned full face as he did now, the narrowness of his chin seemed to sap the face of that strength so impressive an instant before. Temples faintly graying, distinguished enough to be artificial (though the time was gone when anyone might have said premature, and gone the time when it was necessary to dye them so, instead now to tint them with black occasionally), he looked like an old person who looks very young, hair-ends slightly too long, he wore a perfectly fitted gray pinstripe suit, soft powder-blue Oxford-cloth shirt, and a slender black tie whose pattern, woven in the silk, was barely discernible. He raised a gold cigarette case in long fingers. Gold glittered at his cuff.

—How did you know, that he had a ticket for Utica?

—This morning he asks me very carefully, Mr. Brown, do they use United States of America money in a place called Utica? Recktall Brown laughed, and Basil Valentine smiled, took a cigarette from the case, and laid the case on the low table before him. There was a long inscription, worn nearly smooth, on the surface of the gold, and he ran a fingertip over it before leaving the case on the glass-covered painting, on the slender column separating the tableaux Avaritia and Invidia. He raised his eyes slightly when he lit his cigarette, to the table’s center, and blew a stream of smoke toward the underclothed Figure there with its maimed hand upraised. —You keep it too warm in here, he said finally.

—I like it this way.

—Not for you, not for you. I wasn’t thinking of you. The paintings, the furniture. This steam heat will warp everything you have.

—Not before I sell them. And what the hell? Whoever buys them puts them up in steam-heated places. Recktall Brown ground an Aubusson rose under heel, turning to cross the room toward the bar. It was a small hexagonal pulpit, furnished with bottles. The carved oak leaves, and the well-pinioned figure of Christ on its face (which gave him occasion to remark, —He was innocent, and they nailed him) were stained with tricklings of gin. —Gin?

—I’d prefer whisky. Basil Valentine did not look up from the magazine he’d drawn toward him and opened again on the table. He studied the reproduction on the two-page spread of the centerfold, and his lips moved. Then he pushed the open Collectors Quarterly away and stood abruptly, to demand: —Is he always this late? accepting the glass from the heavy hand mounting the two diamonds.

—Nervous? Brown laughed, a sound which stopped in his throat, and sank back in a chair. —With somebody like him you can’t expect . . .

—You’ve been quite successful in your efforts to keep me from meeting him, Basil Valentine interrupted. —One might think . . .

—Just watch your step with him, Recktall Brown muttered from the chair he filled, and Valentine, muttering something himself, turned his back and flung his cigarette into the fireplace, and stood looking at the carved letters beneath the mantel.

The chimney piece was a massive Elizabethan affair, ponderous like the rest of the furniture, the chairs standing out from the carpeting which stretched from wall to wall, and the two refectory tables, giving the place the look of an exclusive gentlemen’s club; but only at first glance: for Recktall Brown, owner and host, was implicit everywhere. More than one guest had been provoked to make obvious remarks on the generic likeness between the head of the wart hog, mounted high on one wall, and the portrait of the host hung across the room. And even though he had been rallied often enough over that portrait (when he had been drinking), Recktall Brown would not remove it. Instead he could pause and look at it with fond veneration. They looked, too, over his shoulder, but none could find the youth he reverenced there. Instead they saw an unformed likeness of the face turned from them, ears protruding but erect, only the hands too similar. There were other paintings, especially the Patinir on the other side of the doorway, in whose neighborhood this portrait would at best have been an intrusive presence; but there was something in the thing itself which made it absurd, though it took a moment to realize what had happened. It had been painted from a photograph (the sitter too busy to sit more than that instant of the camera’s eye) in which his hands, found in the foreground by the undiscriminating lens, were marvelously enlarged. The portrait painter, directed to copy that photograph faithfully and neither talented, nor paid enough, to do otherwise, had with attentive care copied the hands as they were in the picture. And pausing, passing it hundreds of times in the years since, often catching up one hand in the other before him, his hands came to resemble these in the portrait, filling out large and heavy, so apparently flaccid that they had been referred to once, and repeated by other voices in other rooms, as prehensile udders. And the diamond ring? It appeared; though none but himself knew that its double gleam had been added long after the paint of the portrait was dry.

Year after year, the painting and the wart hog hung, avoiding each other’s eyes across the waves of pestilential heat that always filled that room.

—Damn her! Valentine brought out, turning suddenly. —That dog, lying there, licking her . . . self, can’t you discourage these disgusting little attentions in public? He stood looking impatiently at the black shape on the roses, as though expecting some sharp defense from her owner, and when there was none, brought his eyes for a moment to the cloud of smoke rising shapeless from the chair, and the dark amorphous pools behind the thick lenses: Recktall Brown just looked at him, and he brought his narrow black-shod feet together and sat down. A moment later he was leaning forward again, studying the reproduction in Collectors Quarterly, his hands drawn up under his chin, and he appeared to kiss the gold seal ring he wore on a little finger.

—What time is it? Brown asked abruptly.

—After four, Basil Valentine murmured, then looked up to repeat sharply, —after four. He’s probably drunk somewhere.

—He doesn’t do that kind of thing, going out on a drunk and getting into trouble, I already told you, he’s . . .

—Yes, you’ve told me, you’ve told me what a . . . aren’t you fortunate! Most artists have a great lunk of a man they trail around with them, they never know what to do with him, he gets drunk, gets into trouble with the law, women, money . . . yes. Aren’t you fortunate! having a protégé with no animal self.

Recktall Brown started to speak, but subsided. His own hands embraced in his short wide lap, the diamonds glittering uppermost, he watched Valentine trace a contour in the picture with the tip of a little finger, then reach out to push away the ashtray whose smoldering cigar was sending an even current of smoke over the hand and up the arm: Valentine blew at the smoke pettishly, and asked, —How old is he?

—He’s about thirty-three now. He looks more my age.

—He never goes to the showings, does he? When these paintings appear. I imagine I might have known him if he had.

—I don’t know why not either. Brown laughed to himself, leaning forward with effort to take the cigar and throw it into the fireplace. —You’d think he’d get a kick out of them, seeing these important old maids blubbering over his pictures, these critics . . .

—Yes . . . Their eyes met for a moment, and Basil Valentine smiled. —It’s heartbreaking to watch, isn’t it. They are all so fearfully serious. But of course that’s just what makes it all possible. The authorities are so deadly serious that it never occurs to them to doubt, they cannot wait to get ahead of one another to point out verifications. The experts . . .

—You said you came here for business. What is it? Brown said, not listening. He took off his glasses and lowered his sharp eyes to Basil Valentine who, as though knowing him to be near sightless this way, looked into Brown’s eyes with a penetration which seemed to freeze the blue of his own.

—I’d prefer to wait until he gets here, he said calmly. —Strictly speaking, it’s rather more than a matter of business, he went on as Brown rubbed his eyes and put his glasses on again. —It’s really quite a challenge, a piece of work that will really challenge his genius.

Brown looked up through the thick lenses. —It damn near is genius.

—Talent often is, if frustrated for long enough. Today, at any rate, most of what we call genius around us is simply warped talent.

—Look, don’t waste this kind of clever talk on me. Did you come here for business? or just because you want to meet . . .

—Of course, Valentine cut in, his voice stronger, —I am impatient to meet anyone capable of such work. Not an instant of the anxiety one always comes upon in . . . such work. To be able to move from the painstaking, meticulous strokes of Bouts to the boldness of van der Goes. Incredible! this . . . he motioned at the open reproduction, —slight uncertainty of a tremendous passion, aiming at just a fraction more than he could ever accomplish, poor fellow.

—Who?

—Van der Goes. He died mad, you know. Settled down in a convent, working and drinking. He believed himself eternally damned, finally ran about telling everyone about it. Such exquisite flowers he painted. And such magnificent hands, Basil Valentine added, looking at his own.

Recktall Brown had taken out a cigar, and he opened his gold-plated penknife. —I don’t want any slips, he said, trimming the cigar. —He’s already done three by this same one, this van Gogh . . .

—Van Gogh! . . .

—You just said . . .

—Good heavens, Brown! Valentine stood up, with the gold cigarette case. —My dear fellow, he could no more paint van Gogh than he could fly. Valentine laughed, walking out into the room, watching his narrow black shoes on the carpet. —But the minute another van der Goes appears they rush off to compare it with the last one he did. They’re never disappointed. You know, he added, turning away abruptly as he approached the black shape of the dog, —his work is so good it has almost been taken for forgery.

—What do you mean by that?

—By the lesser authorities, of course. The ones who look at paintings with twentieth-century eyes. Styles change, he mused, and stood looking up the wall behind the bar at the extensive wool tapestry hung there, originally intended to warm and decorate the bleak stone interior of some northern castle, here concealing well-heated paneling. The figures in this tapestry were engaged in some sort of hunt, or sylvan picnic, it was difficult to tell in this light. Their eyes were apparent, however, all turned in one direction, all staring at the portrait of Recktall Brown, as though arrested by its presence, and the gaze which it did not return: a flock of hard eyes, disdaining those fixed upon them now. And as though aware of their scorn, Valentine turned his back on them. —Taste changes, he went on in an irritating monotone. —Most forgeries last only a few generations, because they’re so carefully done in the taste of the period, a forged Rembrandt, for instance, confirms everything that that period sees in Rembrandt. Taste and style change, and the forgery is painfully obvious, dated, because the new period has discovered Rembrandt all over again, and of course discovered him to be quite different. That is the curse that any genuine article must endure. He had walked up behind the chair where Recktall Brown sat with thick calves extended baronially toward the fireplace, and stood looking down at the back of Brown’s head and the heavy folds of flesh over the back of the collar. Nothing moved there, but for slight twitches of the cigar as it shifted among uneven teeth. Valentine ground the knuckles of one open hand in the palm of the other, and turned away. The quickness of his movements might have indicated an extreme nervousness, but for his restraint, moving away now with the disciplined motions of a diver, every turn to some purpose, though he simply walked down the room again, and came back saying, —And incidentally, you needn’t give another thought to that contretemps with the Dalner Gallery.

—What happened?

—You remember, about three months ago they questioned one of his pictures, the small Bouts, said it was a palpable fake? Though what made them say that I cannot imagine, unless they wanted to discredit it and bring the price down. Dalner has done that before. At any rate, last week they questioned the authenticity of a di Credi belonging to a very important person, who shall be nameless. He sued for slander, and they’re settling out of court.

The broken weights of Recktall Brown’s laughter ascended in heavy smoke which rose to the silent spaces, and drifted toward the balcony across one end of the two-story room.

—Dalner won’t say a word about these van der Goes’. These vulgar attempts at honesty prove too expensive, Valentine went on. —And as for where they come from, Dalner respects secrecy as much as we do. So long as people are afraid of being found out, you have them in the palm of your hand. And everyone is, of course. How touching . . .

—I just got hold of . . .

—How touching it is, when their secrets turn out to be the most pathetic commonplaces, Valentine finished from the middle of the room.

—I just got hold of a Memling. An original.

—Eh? How? Where?

—An original Memling, right from Germany. A guy I know in the army there, this thing has been marked down as lost on the reparations claims.

—You’re certain it’s genuine?

—Their Pinakothek over there has a stack of papers on it.

—Papers? You know how much papers mean.

—Don’t worry, the papers on this are all right.

—Papers are always all right, when they’re modern affidavits. Where is it now? If the experts . . .

—The experts! Brown said, and laughed again. He did not move, nor did his unpupiled eyes betray any surprise when Valentine moved from behind him with such sudden irritation that it might have been an assault, though he went no further than to pick up his drink from the table and finish it.

—You don’t have to tell me, of course, Valentine said. —It’s probably safe in your little private gallery behind that panel, he added, glancing beyond the refectory tables to the far end of the room as he crossed again to the bar.

—It’s safe.

—This remarkable room, Valentine murmured, pouring whisky and looking round. —It’s a pity, your taste, when you show any, seems to incline to German. He was looking at the polychrome figure of Saint John Baptist in a niche on the stairway, proportioned to stand on a pier of some German cathedral at considerable height, so that the head was unnaturally large and the eyes widened in what, at such closeness, amounted to a leer. The right arm, once extended in gesture of benediction, was broken off, leaving only the close-grained scar of the elbow’s wooden marrow.

Recktall Brown shifted his weight, raised his glass, and his eyes to the balcony. —That suit of armor up there, it’s Italian, it’s not a fake either. That’s my favorite thing here. Italian fifteenth century.

—I’ve looked at it. Pity it isn’t all there.

—What do you mean, it’s all there.

—But not all Italian. The footpieces. German. Clumsy German bear-paw as can be.

—It’s my favorite thing here, Brown repeated, and put down an empty glass. Then he sat tapping his foot silently on the carpeted floor, and the fingers of one hand on the leather arm of the chair. He filled the air before him with smoke, a shapeless cloud of gray exhaled, through which the untasted smoke rising from the end of his cigar cut a clear blue line.

—You shouldn’t inhale those things, Basil Valentine said, returning to his chair. —Throat cancer. And Brown laughed again, a single guttural sound which barely reached the surface. A weight seemed to slide back and forth between these two men; and though Basil Valentine will say, sooner or later, —We are, I suppose, basically in agreement . . . , affirming the fact that most argument is no more than agreement reached at different moments, it was these instants of reversal, when the weight was ready to return, that the one who rose to cast it off did so tensely, as though afraid that when it had fallen to him, it had slid for the last time. They talked now in tones which recognized those of the other, and treated with accordingly, desultory tones and cursory remarks which might come close upon but never touch the eventuality which both appeared to await.

—And what news of the publishing empire?

—If you mean that book about art you wrote, I’ve already sent out advance copies. Brown threw the half-finished cigar into the fireplace. The dog, on the floor beside his chair, started, at the sudden motion of his arm; and Valentine, as though drawn to it, put a hand forth to the open magazine as Brown, settling back, arrested the shiny pages with splayed fingers. —That’s a nice reproduction, he said.

—No reproduction is nice. Valentine sat back, and folded his empty hands closely, one seeking the other before him. —Attempts to spread out two square feet of canvas to cover twenty acres of stupidity.

—All these God-damned little details, Brown muttered.

—Much more apparent in the Bouts he did, of course. Exquisite control of brilliant colors, the ascetic restraint in the hands and the feet. Valentine extended his legs, and crossed his ankles.

—They looked like every hair was painted on separately.

—It was, of course.

—This part is nice. Recktall Brown made a curve over the picture with the flat of his thumb. —The expression of her face.

—That. . .

—You . . .

—Please, your . . . thumb is rather like a spatula, isn’t it. But here, Valentine went on quickly, before Brown could answer in a way that a shudder of his shoulders suggested, —the flesh tones in this are incredible, even in reproduction. This ashen whiteness, and the other large masses of color, a marvelously subdued canvas. This is the sort of thing he painted late in his life. When his mind was beginning to go.

—Who?

—Who do you think I mean, your protégé?

—I like this face. He ran his thumb over that portion. The diamonds glittered; and Basil Valentine raised a hand toward it, but restrained the hand and returned it empty to the other. Brown repeated the motion with his thumb.

—It’s insured?

—For fire and theft.

—For fraud?

That brought Recktall Brown’s face up. —Fraud? he repeated. —Fraud? Then he laughed. —They could never prove a thing. Nobody could. After these experts went over it with their magnifying glasses . . .

—I know, I watched them. I even helped them along, you know, Valentine smiled. —Examining a fragment the size of a pinhead with polarized light under a microscope, to determine whether it’s isotropic or anisotropic, boring through the layers of paint . . .

—There’s no way anybody could prove a God-damned thing wrong here. There’s no proof anywhere. But the insurance, the only thing they won’t insure against is if something happens to it all by itself. In the paint.

—Inherent vice.

—What?

—They hardly need worry about something this . . . old? The care that goes into these, still . . . the three-legged man of Velasquez? Never mind. As paint ages, it becomes translucent, and work which has been altered occasionally shows through. But of course no one will insure against inherent vice. A lot of our moderns make sudden changes dictated by the total uncertainty of what they’re doing, which they call inspiration, and paint over them. The paint breaks up quite soon, of course.

Brown was looking down at the well-manicured fingertips which rested on the corner of the magazine as Valentine, his feet uncrossed and drawn together, twisted to look again at the reproduction. —What did you call it?

—Inherent vice, said Basil Valentine, looking up. His eyes were seized instantly by those which offered no centers to evade. —No one insures against inherent vice, he repeated evenly. Collectors Quarterly was abruptly shoved toward him. Recktall Brown sat back; one hand was closed like a fist round an unlit cigar.

—Sorry, Valentine said to him offering, with a gesture, to return the magazine, —if you’re not finished? . . .

Recktall Brown looked at him, and asked suddenly, —That ring, what is it? Where’d you get it?

—This? My dear fellow, you’ve seen it a thousand times. A seal ring. It might be the seal of a very old family.

—Very old family! Brown muttered, looking away.

—With a motto, Valentine persisted, —like the one you’re looking at now. Dominus providebit? He glanced at the chimney piece. —Yes . . . , sat back and lit a cigarette. He blew its light smoke out over the table, and extended his left hand on the arm of the chair. Golden hairs glistened faintly on the flesh there. —Gold rings were the peculiar ornament of Roman knights, you know. It was the way they distinguished themselves from the plebs.

Recktall Brown stood up. He was silent until he’d poured himself another drink. Then he demanded, —Why do you have to talk to him about this idea you’ve got? You didn’t even talk to me about it yet.

—It’s nothing to excite yourself about, yet. Simply an idea for another piece of work he might try, if he thinks he’s up to it. Little good our talking about it until we know how he feels. You and he must be quite thick after all this time, he added as Brown returned across the room.

—I don’t think he probably sees anybody but me any more.

—Scintillating social life. Do you talk?

—I can sit with him and not talk. Recktall Brown sat down, and stared at the low table before him. —I never knew anybody like that before. But we talk, he recovered. —When there’s business, we talk.

Basil Valentine smoothed the hair-ends at the back of his head with his fingertips. —You must drive him mad, don’t you? Insisting on business, business, business.

—Somebody has to nail him down to it. What the hell’s wrong with that? When he looks like he forgets what he’s doing. What the hell, when you’re doing work like he is, you can lose contact with things, finally you don’t have a real sense of reality.

—If he ever did, of course. You know, Brown, if by any stretch of imagination I could accuse you of being literary, I might accuse you of sponsoring this illusion that one comes to grips with reality only through the commission of evil. It’s all the rage. Basil Valentine sat running his thumb over the worn inscription on his gold cigarette case, and looking at Recktall Brown, who had returned his gaze to his ankles, thick under black silk, with white clocks, before him. —How is it I haven’t met him, in all this time? he asked finally.

—A lot of reasons.

—A lot of reasons?

—I don’t want you to interfere with him, Recktall Brown said.

—Interfere?

—I just don’t want you to get him mixed up, Brown said speaking rapidly. He strained forward to reach his glass.

—You know, Valentine said hunching behind his cigarette, —you speak as though he were a possession of some sort. Like Fuller . . . or this creature. He motioned at the dog, which had raised a leg and commenced to lick herself again. —The one really unbearable thing about females, isn’t it. All of them, always so wet.

—I just don’t want him upset from his work.

Basil Valentine stood up. —You do have some odd notions about me, don’t you.

—I don’t have any notions about anybody. This is work.

—You know, Brown, you seem to be under the same misapprehension that most people spend their lives under. That things stay as they are. I’m surprised at you, I am really. He sat back against the arm of his chair. —Tell me, he went on concisely, —just how would you expect me to interfere with him?

—I don’t expect you to, so don’t. Just don’t get him started with your smart remarks, and these smart-aleck sayings in foreign languages the Jesuits taught you, that nobody understands but you, and . . . you know God damn well what I mean now. He has to stick to business. Recktall Brown drank, and sat holding his glass and looking straight ahead.

—You never have music here, do you.

—It makes me nervous.

—Yes. Yes, I think I understand. Tell me . . . Basil Valentine paused. —Do you think . . . Is he happy, do you think, doing this work?

—Happy? Brown asked, looking up for the first time in some minutes. —He has enough money to fly to the moon if he wants to.

Basil Valentine smiled, and nodded. —Carmina vel caelo, he commenced in precise syllables, as the doorbell rang, and Recktall Brown spilled his drink on Invidia, putting the glass down on the table of the Seven Deadly Sins.

—Charms can even bring the moon down from heaven. Sometimes, my dear fellow, he went on speaking to Recktall Brown’s back as it receded across the room, —I cannot believe that you have ever really studied your Vergil. Then as he sat staring, his eyes again lost their liquid quality of agreeable indifference. He drew his hands up under his chin, so that the gold seal ring on the little finger of his left hand almost touched his lips. He did not move until he heard a voice in the outside hall. —What did you . . . why did you want me to get out, and come all the way up here?

—Business, my boy. Business.

By the time they entered, Basil Valentine had got to a downstairs bathroom, where he washed his hands. He dried them slowly, looking at himself in the mirror as he did so. Then he smoothed the hair at the back of his head with his fingertips, paused to pull downwards at the sides of his trousers (as a woman does before entering a room, straightening her girdle), and came out to them with his well-manicured hand extended in introduction.

For Basil Valentine, who was conscious of the disposition of every lineament of his face, and whose expressions were controlled to betray no more than he wished, a face to which surprise came with cultivated precaution, this face before him was a shock. Though still as his own, it seemed to be in constant movement, neither wonder nor bewilderment but the instant of surprise sustained, surprise perhaps not for the things and occurrences before it, but at its own constant exposure. The hand Valentine clasped was quickly withdrawn, recovered like a creature which its master dared not leave at large. —How do you do, I . . . I thought you were Fuller when I . . . just now. Recktall Brown stood with a hand on his shoulder. —I’m just . . . used to seeing Fuller here.

—I’m awfully sorry, I fear there’s nothing I can do about that. Even Fuller’s command of the language is quite beyond me, Basil Valentine said, and then the smile left his face, for he realized that the man had turned his back and was walking toward one of the chairs before the fireplace, where he stood looking down at the table, and placed there the book he carried before he sat down.

—Where is Fuller? he asked. He looked up at them, and Basil Valentine stopped, looking into the sunken green eyes staring from among the lines of the face which turned immediately from him to Recktall Brown, who said, —Fuller’s busy.

—What are you . . . are you punishing him again?

—He’s working on some crucifixes, Recktall Brown said to both of them. —He’s got twenty ivory ones up there, perfect thirteenth century, softened in vinegar to be cut, and hardened up in water. I told him if he wants his prayers to come true all he has to do is rub them with a sweaty hand. I guess a nigger’s sweat will yellow them up as good as any.

—You’re not concerned about Fuller’s . . . trustworthiness? Valentine said.

—He doesn’t know what he’s doing. I gave him a big frame and told him to rub bird crap into the wormholes and hang it up in this chimney, you should have seen him. Christ only knows where he gets the bird crap. He brings it in in little white packages. Recktall Brown stood, unwrapping a cigar as he spoke.

Basil Valentine offered a cigarette across the table, took one himself and laid the case there between them. Then he held a light, waiting.

—The eggs. He did get me the eggs, did he?

—Your fresh country eggs, laid yesterday. They’re in the hall, but why the hell they have to be just laid within a matter of hours . . .

—Yes, yes, they do. They do. They have to be fresh.

—Egg tempera? Basil Valentine asked, holding the light.

—Why . . . why yes, how did you know? He looked at Valentine only long enough to get the light, and then turned to Recktall Brown with an expression which asked the same question. Brown was, for the moment, obscured by smoke himself. Basil Valentine took the opportunity to study the man seated across from him. His hair, closely cut, showed the lines of his skull clearly, a skull of squarish proportions. The dark unpadded jacket hung from shoulders which looked barely able to support it. The fingertips, too, were squared, tapping together in the smoke from the cigarette, the narrow tightly packed Virginia tobacco which Valentine preferred, lying in the ashtray between them.

Brown emerged from the cigar smoke and sat down unsteadily. —You look like hell, he said to him.

Basil Valentine watched him closely. He was staring down at the table, and his lips barely moved, shaping Soberbia, Ira, Lujuria, Pereza . . . —That’s because I’m . . . I’ve been working like hell, he said looking at Basil Valentine, a quick anxious look cast up like his words which were separate immediate sounds. When neither of them spoke he said, —You keep it too hot in here, and looked up at Brown as though to provoke him to explain everything which this observation did not include. Brown grinned. —For the art? he demanded.

—It’s just too hot. This dead steam heat. He looked down again.

—Now that you finally got here, Brown said, —we can get started.

—Yes, I was late. I was asleep.

—Sleeping now? Brown demanded.

—Yes, I . . . I work at night, you know that, and I . . . You can’t imagine how hungry I get for the night to come sometimes, he said suddenly, looking up at them both. —Sometimes it seems like it . . . won’t come at all, so I try to sleep. Waiting for it. When I was in school, a schoolboy, he went on rapidly, —we had this written on our report cards, “Here hath been dawning another blue day. Think! Wilt thou let it slip useless away?” Do you understand? That’s . . . it’s quite upsetting, that “another blue day” . . . Do you understand? he said, looking at Valentine. Then he looked down at the magazine opened in Valentine’s lap. —That . . . I didn’t know . . . I hadn’t seen that reproduction.

—Sit down, my boy, relax, we . . .

—I . . . excuse me just a minute. He left them sitting there, and hurried toward the door where Basil Valentine had gone a few minutes before.

—You know, Valentine murmured, holding the color reproduction up before him, —it’s not at all difficult to understand now, why he never comes to these showings.

—What do you mean?

—Look at this. He’s stepped right out of the canvas.

—O.K., just don’t get him started on it. You see what I mean about this, this “another blue day” stuff? You have to be careful, or he’ll end up like this van . . . van . . . Recktall Brown motioned at the opened pages with the diamond-laden hand.

—It’s all right, my dear fellow. You may say van Gogh. Van Gogh went mad too. Quite, quite mad. Valentine leaned forward and laid the magazine on the table.

They both glanced up when he returned, by way of the pulpit across the room where he stopped to get a bottle of brandy and a glass. These he placed on the table beside the book he had brought in, and picked up the Collectors Quarterly. He read the caption half aloud, —“. . . that most characteristic expression of the genius of Flemish art, which seems to enliven us with increased powers of eyesight, in this recently discovered painting, The Descent from the Cross, by the late fifteenth-century master Hugo van der Goes . . .” That’s . . . well you can’t really say “most characteristic,” whoever . . .

—Valentine here wants to . . .

—But “increased powers of eyesight,” I’ve seen that somewhere. Yes, it gives that sense of projecting illumination, instead of receiving it from outside, do you . . . don’t you read it that way?

—Yes. I wrote it, said Basil Valentine, looking him in the eyes.

—You wrote it? he repeated.

—I meant it, too. I congratulate you.

—Then you know it’s mine? That this is mine? He flattened his hand against the page on the table.

—My dear fellow, “If the public believes that a picture is by Raphael, and will pay the price of a Raphael,” Valentine said, offering a cigarette, —“then it is a Raphael.”

The cigarette was accepted heedlessly. —Yes, I . . . but the reproductions, they don’t . . . I haven’t seen this one, but they’re a bad thing all round, they . . . here, you can see, this space right here, it loses almost all its value, because the blue, it doesn’t quite . . . it isn’t . . .

—Not bad, for a reproduction, Valentine said, watching him pour brandy into his glass. —But I’ve looked at the thing itself, and it is magnificent. It is, almost perfect. Perfect van der Goes.

—Yes, but I . . . it isn’t that simple, you know. I mean, the thing itself, van der Goes, he repeated, his hand covering the sky behind the Cross, —this is . . . mine.

—Yours? Basil Valentine said, smiling, and watching him as he sat down. —You work at night, then, do you?

—Yes, I usually do now.

—This element of secrecy, it becomes rather pervasive, does it?

—No. No, don’t start that. That’s what they used to say, so don’t say that. It isn’t so simple. He drank off some of the brandy. —It’s the same sense . . . yes, this sense of a blue day in summer, do you understand? It’s too much, such a day, it’s too fully illuminated. It’s defeating that way, it doesn’t allow you to project this illumination yourself, this . . . selective illumination that’s necessary to paint . . . like this, he added, indicating the picture.

—Seeing you now, you know, it’s answered one of the questions I’ve had on my mind for some time. The first thing I saw, it was a small Dierick Bouts, I wondered then if you used a model when you worked.

—Well I . . .

—But now, it’s quite obvious isn’t it, Valentine went on, nodding at the picture between them. —Mirrors?

—Yes, yes of course, mirrors. He laughed, a constricted sound, and lit a cigarette.

—You have one, you know, Basil Valentine said, watching him levelly as he started, looked at the cigarette in his hand, and crushed it out for the one he had just accepted. —You’re very tired, aren’t you.

—Yes. Yes, I am, I . . . I’ve been tired for a long time.

—Don’t you sleep?

—I do, sometimes. During the day sometimes.

—Well, my dear fellow, Valentine said, sitting up straight and smiling, —I don’t either. I think Brown here is probably the only one of us who does enjoy the sleep of the just.

—Do you dream? he asked abruptly.

—Dream? Good heavens no, not in years. And you?

—I? Why no. No, no. No, I haven’t had a dream in . . . some time.

—You haven’t explained all this to me yet, you know, Basil Valentine said, raising his eyes from the picture, which he pushed forward with his right hand, and a glitter of gold at his cuff. —The Virgin.

—The Virgin? he repeated, staring across the table.

—Yes, here for instance. She really dominates this whole composition.

—Yes, she does. She does.

Valentine waited, watching him. —Exquisite repose in her face, he murmured, finally. —Do you find that with mirrors too?

—I . . . she . . . he stammered, picking up his glass.

Recktall Brown stood up, with great alacrity considering his stature and the heavy immobile presence he had presented, deep in the armchair, an instant before. He was a little unsteady on his feet, but his eyes swimming behind the glasses seemed to jell, and his voice rose sternly when he spoke. He had, all this time, been looking from one to the other of the two men before him, gauging their effect upon one another. —I’ll answer that, and then we’ll get down to business, he said. —This model he uses is a kid I got for him, she came up trying to sell us a book of crazy poems once. This repose she gets, she just isn’t all there. He raised a naked hand. —Sit down, my boy, and be quiet. We’ve wasted half the God damn afternoon as it is, waiting for you. He turned to Basil Valentine, raising the left hand, with the diamonds, and the cigar which dropped its ash on Gula, gluttony, before him. —Valentine here has an idea for the next thing you’re going to do, but first I want to know when you’re going to finish the one you’re fooling around with down there now.

—Fooling around? Fooling around?

—All right, my boy, God damn it, working on. Look, I’ve bought a farm up in Vermont. The family that built the place came over from England in the seventeenth century, they had plenty of money, they made bricks. They brought over everything they owned. There were about a dozen lousy paintings there when I bought the place, none of them worth more than twenty bucks, Valentine says, and some frames I want you to look at, little oak ones with red and green velvet in them around the inside, maybe you can squeeze something in. I’m going to stock this place and sell it at auction in two weeks, and this last thing of yours can be discovered there if you finish it in time. He paused. —What do you say?

Basil Valentine had started to rise, but let himself down in the chair again without making a sound, his lips open to show his teeth drawn tight together, and turned his eyes down to see the man across from him lower his eyes and seem to wilt, silent, and appearing not to breathe. Valentine waited, and then said gently, —The one you’re working on now, another van der Goes?

—Yes, yes it is. He looked up, and drew a deep breath.

—What is it, the subject?

—I . . . I . . . it was going to be an Annunciation, that, because they’re . . . well have you ever seen a bad one? I mean by any painter? He held his hands in the air before him, the fingertips almost touching. —It’s almost as though . . . just the idea of the Annunciation, a painter can’t . . . no painter could do it badly.

—The Annunciation? Valentine looked troubled.

—No, I . . . it isn’t. I was going to, I wanted to, but then I got started on this other . . . this other idea took form and . . .

—What is it, then?

—It’s a . . . the death of the Virgin.

—But there is one, you know, a splendid one of van der Goes, it’s in Brussels I think, isn’t it?

—Yes, yes, I know it, I know that one. It is splendid, that one. But this one, this one I’ve done is later, painted later in his life, when the shapes . . .

—Is it nearly done? Brown demanded, standing over them.

—Yes, it is. It’s more than finished, really, he said looking up at Brown.

—More than finished?

—Yes, I . . . you know, it’s finished, it has to be . . . damaged now.

—That must be difficult, Basil Valentine said.

—It is, it’s the most difficult part. Not the actual damaging it, but damaging it without trying to preserve the parts that cost such . . . well, you know that’s where they fail, a good many . . . painters who do this kind of work, they can’t resist saving those parts, and anyone can tell, anyone can tell.

—You call me as soon as it’s done then, do you hear me? Brown said, sitting down. He finished his drink quickly. —And we’ll get started on the next one now. Valentine’s here to . . .

—I . . . damn it, you can’t just . . . He looked up at Basil Valentine. —He talks to me as though it was like making patent medicine. He . . .

—All right my boy, I . . .

—He heard a Fra Angelico had sold somewhere for a high price once, and he thought I should do a Fra Angelico, toss off a Fra Angelico . . .

—All right now . . .

—Like making patent medicine. He turned to Brown. —Do you know why I could never paint one, paint a Fra Angelico? Do you know why? Do you know how he painted? Fra Angelico painted down on his knees, he was on his knees and his eyes full of tears when he painted Christ on the Cross. And do you think I . . . do you think I . . .

—Control yourself now, for Christ sake. We have work to do.

—Work? Work? Do you think I . . . as though I spend my time down there flying balloons . . .

—“That vice may merit, ’tis the price of toil,” Basil Valentine said, stretching his arms and smiling as he looked at both of them.

—All right, Valentine, what is it now? What is this thing of yours?

—Not mine, my dear Brown. Pope. Alexander Pope. “ ‘But sometimes virtue starves, while vice is fed,’ What then? Is . . .”

—Not that, God damn it. This idea . . .

The telephone rang. There was an extension in the hallway, as well as the one near the bar, and Recktall Brown went to the hallway extension.

—He would absolutely have to have Alexander Pope in a box, to enjoy him. He is beyond anything I’ve ever come upon. Honestly, I never in my life could have imagined that business could live so powerfully independent of every other faculty of the human intelligence. Basil Valentine rested his head back, blowing smoke toward the ceiling, and watching it rise there. —Earlier, you know, he mentioned to me the idea of a novel factory, a sort of assembly line of writers, each one with his own especial little job. Mass production, he said, and tailored to the public taste. But not so absurd, Basil Valentine said sitting forward suddenly.

—Yes, I . . . I know. I know.

—When I laughed . . . but it’s not so funny in his hands, you know. Just recently he started this business of submitting novels to a public opinion board, a cross-section of readers who give their opinions, and the author makes changes accordingly. Best sellers, of course.

—Yes, good God, imagine if . . . submitting paintings to them, to a cross section? You’d better take out . . . This color . . . These lines, and . . . He drew his hand down over his face, —You can change a line without even touching it. No, he went on after a pause, and Valentine watched him closely, —nothing is funny in his hands. Everything becomes very . . . real.

—Oh, he’s given you some of his lectures too? “Business is cooperation with reality,” that one? The one on cleaning fluid, a chemical you can buy for three cents a gallon, which he sold at a quarter a six-ounce bottle? His chalk toothpaste? The breakfast cereal he made that gave people spasms of the colon? Has he told you about the old woman who got spastic colitis from taking a laxative he made, a by-product of heaven knows what. They threw her case out of court. A riotous tale, he entertains with it when he’s been drinking. He still makes a pretty penny from some simple chemical that women use for their menstrual periods, such a delicate necessity that the shame and secrecy involved make it possible to sell it at some absurd price . . .

—Yes, the secrecy.

—What?

—These paintings, selling these paintings, the secrecy of it.

Valentine chuckled. —Of course, he couldn’t do any of it alone. Other people do his work for him, get his ideas for him. Who do you think launched this picture here in this country? He motioned to the open reproduction. —Did you read about it?

—Where?

—In the papers. No, you probably never see the newspaper, at that. He didn’t tell you, then? He wouldn’t, of course. It might interfere.

—Interfere? with what?

—With your work, of course, he’s quite frantic about protecting you. I’ve gathered you’re quite as dedicated as those medieval forgers of classical antiquities. Valentine was speaking rapidly and with asperity. —True to your art, so to say?

—True to . . . yes, that’s like saying a man’s true to his cancer.

—Don’t be upset, don’t concern yourself with him, with his explanations of reality.

—But that’s what’s so strange, it makes so much sense at first, and then if you listen, you . . . Yes, he understands reality.

—He does not understand reality. Basil Valentine stood up, still, grasping his lapels, and looked down to the lowered face across the table. —Recktall Brown is reality, he said, and after a pause where neither of them moved, turned on a toe and idled out into the room. —A very different thing, he added over his shoulder, and stopped to light a cigarette.

Recktall Brown’s voice reached them in the separate phrases of telephone conversation, —Not a dollar more, God damn it . . . , at one point, at another, —God damn it, not a dollar less.

—But let me tell you about discovering this van der Goes. It might amuse you. It was taken to London, secretly of course, and modified with tempera before it was brought back to America, a crude job of overpainting on a glue finish, which would wash right off. It was such an obvious bad job that even customs discovered it. As much as it pained them, poor fellows, since they collect ten per cent on anything they can prove is a copy or an imitation. But there was the genuine, duty-free, original work of art underneath. As a matter of fact, I was called in to help verify it. You see how much we trust your work. And of course everyone respected the owner’s “business secret” about where he’d got it. After that incident people were predisposed to accept it.

—But . . . why? There’s no law, is there, against . . .

—Not a question of law, my dear fellow, Valentine said returning to the table. —Publicity. Publicity.

—But, a thing like this, a . . . painting like this . . .

—A painting like this or a tube of toothpaste or a laxative which induces spastic colitis. You can’t sell any of them without publicity. The people! Valentine turned away again, and commenced to walk up and down. He was talking more rapidly, in precisions of irritation as though he did not dare stop, for fear of an argument being rejected before he reached its point, or hesitate, and waste a precious instant before Brown’s return. Even the Latin came with native sharpness from his tongue when he said, —You recall the maxim, Vulgus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur? Yes, if they want to be deceived, let them be deceived. Have you looked at his hands? he demanded, stopping abruptly at the edge of the table. —At Brown’s hands, when he sits with them folded in his lap? And those diamonds? Like a great soft toad, “. . . ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head”?

—But, all this . . .

—Yes, think of the tradition you have behind you, Valentine went on, turning his back. —Lucius Mummius, and that famous story in which he charges the men carrying his plunder from Corinth back to Rome, that any of the art treasures lost or broken would have to be replaced at the expense of the man responsible. No more idea of art than the people who surround us today, not a particle of appreciation, but they brought it back to Rome by the ton. Private collecting started, a thing the Greeks never dreamt of. It started in Rome, and forgery with it. The same poseurs, the same idiots who would buy a vase if they had to pay enough for it, the same people who come to Brown, in gray waistcoats, perhaps, instead of togas, the same people in Rome, the same people, the same hands . . .

—But you, then you, if you feel this way . . .

—Because the people, the people, they’re bringing us to the point Rome reached when a court could award a painting to the man who owned the board, not the artist who had painted on it. Valentine stood with his knees against the edge of the low table. —Yes, when the Roman Republic collapsed, art collecting collapsed, art forging disappeared. And then what. Instead of art they had religion, and all the talent went into holy relics. Half the people collected them, the other half manufactured them. A forest of relics of the True Cross? Miraculous multiplication. Then the Renaissance, and they dropped the knucklebones of the saints and came back to art. His eyes, which were hard and blue now, settled on the radiant figure in the center of the table of the Seven Deadly Sins. —Intricate, cunning forgeries like this, he added, sweeping a hand with a glitter of gold over the whole table as he turned his back. —The people! he said, watching Recktall Brown approach. —Of course I loathe him.

—But it’s not. This table, it’s not a forgery.

—What’s the matter? Brown demanded, coming up to them.

—This Bosch, it’s not a forgery.

—Who the hell said it was? Look, Valentine . . .

—Listen . . .

—Have you got him all upset like this?

—Listen, this Bosch painting, it’s not a forgery.

Basil Valentine sank back in his chair and clasped a knee between his hands. —It’s not? he said quietly, with the beginning of a smile on his lips, and shrugged. —Not even a copy?

—You’re God damn right it’s not.

—It’s not. It can’t be.

—Why not? Valentine asked them. His eyes had recovered their light watery blue, agreeable indifference. —The story I heard, you know, he went on after a pause, —was that the original came from the di Brescia collection, one of the finest in Europe, most of them Flemish primitives in fact. The old man, the Conte di Brescia, found himself running out of money. He loved the pictures, and none of his family would have dared suggest he sell a single one, even if they’d known the state of their finances. Of course they were simply waiting for him to die so they could sell them all. Meanwhile they went right on living in the manner which centuries of wealth had taught them, watched the pictures go out to be cleaned and come back, none the wiser. When the old grandee died, they fell over themselves to sell the pictures, and found that every one of them was a copy. They hadn’t been sent out to be cleaned, the old man had sent them out to be copied and sold, and the copies were brought back.

—That’s right, sold, Brown said, —they sold the originals you just said, and I got this one. I got it ten or fifteen years ago.

—Where?

—Where? Never mind. Right here in America. I picked it up for just about nothing.

—The collection of copies was dispersed too, you know, Valentine said. —Soon after the scandal, in the late ’twenties. And this . . .

—But wait, listen . . .

—Don’t get yourself upset, my boy, Brown said letting himself down in his chair; and Valentine looked across the table with the faint smile still on his lips.

—Listen, this is the original, it is.

—Don’t get yourself so excited, God damn it my boy . . .

—How are you so certain? Valentine asked calmly.

—Because, listen. What happened was, I heard, I heard this somewhere, abroad, yes somewhere abroad I heard that what happened was, a boy, a boy whose father owned the original, he’d bought it himself, he bought it from the Conte di . . . Brescia, and the boy . . . the boy copied it and stole the original and left his copy in its place, and sold the original, he sold it in secret for . . . for just about nothing.

—How very interesting, Basil Valentine said quietly. The smile was gone from his lips, and he watched the quivering figure across the table from him without moving, without expression on his face.

—All right, that’s enough of that. Didn’t the two of you get started on this new thing he’s going to work on while I wasn’t here?

—Of course, Valentine said, his tone returned to its agreeable level, with an ingratiating edge to it as he turned to Brown and went on, —We decided to write a novel about you, since you don’t exist.

Recktall Brown did look startled at that. But he recovered immediately to take off his glasses and turn his sharp eyes on Basil Valentine. —We’re going to get down to business right now, he said.

—Brown doesn’t exist, you must admit, Valentine went on. —He’s a figment of a Welsh rarebit taken before retiring. A projection of my unconscious. Though a rather abiding one, I must confess.

—By God, Brown said, —if you don’t settle down and be serious . . .

—But my dear man, I am being serious. I am the only person in this room who exists. You are both projections of my unconscious, and so I shall write a novel about you both. But I don’t know what I can do with you, he said, turning to the other chair.

—With me? He almost smiled at Basil Valentine. —Why not?

—Because, my dear fellow, no one knows what you’re thinking. And that is why people read novels, to identify projections of their own unconscious. The hero has to be fearfully real, to convince them of their own reality, which they rather doubt. A novel without a hero would be distracting in the extreme. They have to know what you think, or good heavens, how can they know that you’re going through some wild conflict, which is after all the duty of a hero.

—I think about my work.

—But my dear fellow . . .

—God damn it Valentine, Brown broke in, —I’m as real as hell, and in just a minute . . .

—All right, to work, to work. Wait, there’s something I’ve meant to ask. Your own paintings, you have done work yourself, certainly. Are there any of them lying about anywhere?

—Why no, I . . . the only ones I had were destroyed in a fire.

—Good, good. If someone picked them up . . . you can’t suppress all of yourself, you know. Valentine watched the brandy bottle raised and tipped over the empty glass.

—I know, he said, watching it himself. His hand quivered somewhat, and the bottle rattled against the edge of the glass.

—Now be careful, my boy, Recktall Brown said, watching him drink it down.

—Before we go any. further with this, Valentine said, —I would like to know more about your work, because what I have in mind . . . The hard surface, for instance. Oil takes years to dry.

—Yes, that . . . getting the hard surface, it was one of the worst problems. He leaned toward them, his elbows on the table, clutching one hand in the other, and spoke rapidly but with effort. —I’ve tried everything, every different . . . I tried mixing my colors on blotting paper, to absorb the oil, and then mixing them with varnish but it dried too quickly, you see? It dried too quickly and it was unalterable. I tried a mixture of stand oil and formaldehyde, but it wasn’t right, it wasn’t what I wanted. I tried oil of lavender and formaldehyde and I like it better, the oil with an egg tempera, and a varnish glaze. In those two Bouts pictures, in those when I prepared the canvas I laid linen threads on the gesso when it was still wet, you see? in the pattern I wanted for the crackle. Then I baked it, and when it came out of the oven the threads came off and left the pattern. But the best thing, here, I used it here, he said, motioning at the van der Goes reproduction which still lay open on the table, —a thin layer of gesso, over and over on the canvas, and it cracks of its own volition, because of the atmosphere, the changes, you see? This painting is whole egg and oil of lavender, and then glue, dilute glue and the varnish. This one, this is amber varnish, the undercoat of dilute glue shrank faster than the varnish when they dried and cracked it, you see? And a little India ink in the cracks and when that dried there were only particles, like dirt, when the experts came . . .

—Now take it easy, my boy, sit down, sit down.

—And then the experts came, you see? he said, standing, and rubbed his hand over his eyes, and his chin, leaving a broad smile quivering there when he reached down for the bottle again. —There isn’t one test they don’t know, and not one that can’t be beaten. Not one. That . . . that’s why I couldn’t use that varnish medium, it dried so fast that I had to paint too fast, and you can’t do that, you can’t paint that fast and control these . . . these things that have to be controlled, do you understand? And an X-ray would have shown up those abrupt strokes, he added. He lifted the glass, and threw back his head to drink it down. —You see, this . . . controlling this damned world of shapes and smells . . .

—Sit down, my boy, Recktall Brown said as he started to walk away from them.

—But I haven’t told you, after all this work, this . . . fooling around. Do you know what the best medium is? It’s so simple I never dared try it, it’s that simple. Glair, the liquid that settles to the bottom when the whites of egg are beaten, with dry powdered pigments, and a layer of clean white of egg over it and the varnish, it’s so simple it doesn’t need anything, it doesn’t need to be baked, it crackles by itself beautifully, as though years, hundreds of years had passed over it. And that, it’s . . . and then the experts come, with their little bottles of alcohol, to see if they can dissolve the fresh paint, but the glue . . . You never have music here, do you. Never, in all this time . . .

—Come back here and sit down. We can’t talk to you way the hell out in the middle of the room.

—This glair, Basil Valentine said to him. —You sound as though you consider it practically foolproof.

—Yes, that’s the word, foolproof. Foolproof, he said, coming back to them.

—That is what we need, Basil. Valentine said, his hands drawn up beneath his chin. —The fools are the ones we must be most careful of. Most secrets are discovered by their accidents, very few by design. Very few, he repeated, looking up. —Foolproof enough, would you say, for a van Eyck?

Brown seemed to be awaiting some violent reaction to this, if it were, as he believed from Valentine’s casual tone, the challenge. But he looked up to see it greeted with no more than a shrug.

—Easily, the perfect medium for him, for Jan van Eyck, but he’s been done so often . . .

—Yes, yes, Basil Valentine interrupted impatiently, —there are probably more badly faked Jan van Eycks then any of the others. Hubert, on the other hand . . .

—Hubert van Eyck?

—It might be the art discovery of the century, if it were absolutely perfect, signed and documented . . .

—Yes, yes it might, it probably would be.

—If you could do it . . .

—If I could do it? If I could do it? he said, raising his head.

—How much? Recktall Brown demanded.

—It depends entirely on the picture. Perhaps as much as you got for all the rest put together.

—That much! What the hell have we been doing fooling around with these . . .

—If he could do it.

—If I could do it! Of course I can do it, he said more calmly, looking down at the van der Goes reproduction. —But listen, they have no right to do this, he went on, crumpling the reproduction into his hand as it tore from the magazine. —You have no right to do this, he said, as Valentine put a hand on Recktall Brown’s arm.

—To do what, my dear fellow?

—This . . . these reproductions, they have no right to try to spread one painting out like this. There’s only one of them, you know, only one. This . . . my painting . . . there’s only one, and these reproductions, these cheap fakes is what they are, being scattered everywhere, and they have no right to do that. It cheapens the whole . . . it’s a calumny, that’s what it is, on my work, he said, standing with the thing wadded up in his hand.

Basil Valentine took the thin cigarette from his lips and spoke coldly. —Forgery is calumny, he said. —Every piece you do is calumny on the artist you forge.

—It’s not. It’s not, damn it, I . . . when I’m working, I . . . Do you think I do these the way all other forging has been done? Pulling the fragments of ten paintings together and making one, or taking a . . . a Dürer and reversing the composition so that the man looks to the right instead of left, putting a beard on him from another portrait, and a hat, a different hat from another, so that they look at it and recognize Dürer there? No, it’s . . . the recognitions go much deeper, much further back, and I . . . this . . . the X-ray tests, and ultra-violet and infra-red, the experts with their photomicrography and . . . macrophotography, do you think that’s all there is to it? Some of them aren’t fools, they don’t just look for a hat or a beard, or a style they can recognize, they look with memories that . . . go beyond themselves, that go back to . . . where mine goes.

—Sit down, my boy.

—And . . . any knock at the door may be the gold inspectors, come to see if I’m using bad materials down there, I . . . I’m a master painter in the Guild, in Flanders, do you see? And if they come in and find that I’m not using the . . . gold, they destroy the bad materials I’m using and fine me, and I . . . they demand that . . . and this exquisite color of ultramarine, Venice ultramarine I have to take to them for approval, and the red pigment, this brick-red Flanders pigment . . . because I’ve taken the Guild oath, not for the critics, the experts, the . . . you, you have no more to do with me than if you are my descendants, nothing to do with me, and you . . . the Guild oath, to use pure materials, to work in the sight of God . . .

—You’ve had enough of this stuff now, my boy, Recktall Brown said, reaching, too late, for the brandy bottle. —You need to keep a steady hand for what you’re doing, all these God damn tiny little details . . .

Basil Valentine sat, watching him.

—A steady hand! he said, and drank down the brandy. —Do you think that’s all it is, a steady hand? He opened the rumpled reproduction. —This . . . these . . . the art historians and the critics talking about every object and . . . everything having its own form and density and . . . its own character in Flemish paintings, but is that all there is to it? Do you know why everything does? Because they found God everywhere. There was nothing God did not watch over, nothing, and so this . . . and so in the painting every detail reflects . . . God’s concern with the most insignificant objects in life, with everything, because God did not relax for an instant then, and neither could the painter then. Do you get the perspective in this? he demanded, thrusting the rumpled reproduction before them. —There isn’t any. There isn’t any single perspective, like the camera eye, the one we all look through now and call it realism, there . . . I take five or six or ten . . . the Flemish painter took twenty perspectives if he wished, and even in a small painting you can’t include it all in your single vision, your one miserable pair of eyes, like you can a photograph, like you can painting when it . . . when it degenerates, and becomes conscious of being looked at.

Recktall Brown stood up, and came toward him.

—Like everything today is conscious of being looked at, looked at by something else but not by God, and that’s the only way anything can have its own form and its own character, and . . . and shape and smell, being looked at by God.

Recktall Brown stood beside him, the heavy naked hand on his shoulder.

—And so when you’re working, it’s your own work, Basil Valentine said. —And when you attach the signature?

—Leave him alone, God damn it Valentine, he . . .

—Yes, when I attach the signature, he said dropping his head again, —that changes everything, when I attach the signature and . . . lose it.

—Then corruption enters, is that it, my dear fellow? Basil Valentine stood up smiling. He lit a cigarette. —That’s the only thing they can prosecute you for in court, you know, if you’re caught. Forging the signature. The law doesn’t care a damn for the painting. God isn’t watching them. He put a hand on the other shoulder, the hand with the gold seal ring, and his eyes met those of Recktall Brown. The liquid blue of them seemed to freeze and penetrate the uncentered pools behind the thick lenses, and to submerge there as Recktall Brown said, —Let go of him.

They stood that way for a number of seconds, any one of which might have contained the instant that one would pull him from the other; until he stepped back himself and said, —I know. I know.

Then Basil Valentine shrugged, and sauntered the few steps back to his chair. —You are mightily concerned with your own originality, aren’t you, he said, standing behind the chair, turned toward them.

—Originality! No, I’m not, I . . .

—Come now, my dear fellow, you are. But you really ought to forget it, or give in to it and enjoy it. Everyone else does today. Brown is busy with suits of plagiarism all the time, aren’t you Brown? You see? He takes it as a matter of course. He’s surrounded by untalented people, as we all are. Originality is a device that untalented people use to impress other untalented people, and protect themselves from talented people . . .

—Valentine, this is the last time . . .

—Most original people are forced to devote all their time to plagiarizing. Their only difficulty is that if they have a spark of wit or wisdom themselves, they’re given no credit. The curse of cleverness. Now wait, Brown. Stop. Stop there where you are and relax for a moment. We still have some business to straighten out. He needs to talk or he’ll come to pieces, isn’t that what you told me before he got here? Well let him talk, he’s said some very interesting things. But don’t let him talk to himself, that’s all he’s been doing, that’s all he does when he talks to you and you don’t listen, he knows you don’t. Let him talk, then, but listen to him. He may not say anything clever, but that’s just as well. Most people are clever because they don’t know how to be honest. He paused. —Come, my dear fellow. If you don’t say anything I shan’t be able to use you in this novel, the one in which Brown figures so monumentally since everyone thinks he’s honest because he doesn’t know how to be clever.

Recktall Brown had started toward him; but as Basil Valentine’s voice rose, Brown stopped beside the pitcher of martini cocktails and watched him carefully. A vein stood out on Valentine’s temple, and he raised his hand to ascertain it there with his fingertips, an impulsive gesture as though he had once done it to suppress. He touched the place, and continued his hand round to the back of his head where he smoothed the over-long ends of his hair. —Yes, he will figure monumentally, Valentine went on. —That portrait there, he said, flinging a hand toward it, —do you know why he keeps it? To humanize him, as evidence of youth always does, no matter how monstrous.

Basil Valentine watched them. When neither of them spoke he straightened up and walked across the room, watching his feet, to the low pulpit, where he turned and sat against it, drumming his long fingers against the oak leaves carved there.

—“Another blue day,” eh? he said, looking beyond Brown, at the fever-stricken eyes fixed upon him. —“Another blue day,” he repeated. And then, —Brown tells me you have another self. Oh, don’t be upset, it’s not uncommon you know, not at all uncommon. Why, even Brown has one. That’s why he drinks to excess occasionally, trying to slip up on it and grab it. Mark me, he’s going to get too close one day, and it’s going to turn around and break his neck for him. He picked up the whisky bottle. —Have you heard Brown talk about the portraits he sells? Nineteenth-century portraits of blond men with strong chins that he sells for ten times their price, he tells me, to precarious Jews who want nice ancestors, he said, pouring the whisky into a glass. He sat against the pulpit again, drew a foot up, and it swayed slightly, with the sound of bottles ringing together like the sound of bells in the distance. —To the same purpose, you know. And they believe it, when the portraits have hung about long enough, common ancestor to their vulgar selves that everyone else knows, and this other . . . more beautiful self who . . . can do more than they can, he finished, swirling the whisky in the bottom of the tumbler.

In the middle of the Aubusson carpet, the dog licked itself. That was the only sound. Then Basil Valentine put the glass of whisky down and left it there. —Where do you keep him, Brown? he demanded, looking at them, around the walls, up to the balcony.

Recktall Brown turned back to his chair. He looked up at the man whom his bulk no longer separated from Basil Valentine. —Sit down, my boy, he said, and then abruptly to Valentine, —Where are you going?

—I’m simply going in to wash my hands, if no one objects.

Recktall Brown took out a cigar. He unwrapped it, trimmed the end with his penknife, thrust it among uneven teeth, and lit it. He shook the match out in the air, and tossed it toward the ashtray. It fell to the carpet, and lay smoking on a rose. —When most people ask where the washroom is, they really mean they want to go to the toilet. He just goes in there to wash his hands. Sit down, my boy. We’ll be done in a few minutes. Recktall Brown filled the air before him with smoke. —What’s the matter? he asked, as the smoke rose, and the figure before him remained unmoved and unchanged.

—Oh, I . . . I don’t know, he said, looking down at Brown and seeming to recover. —I suppose I was surprised, when you let him go on like that.

—Never interrupt people when they’re telling you more than they know they are, no matter how mad they make you.

—Telling you?

—About themselves, my boy. Recktall Brown drew heavily on the cigar, and the smoke broke around the discolored teeth as he spoke. —I never do business with anyone until I’ve had them investigated, I never sign a thing until I’ve been through a report by a good private detective agency. I know a lot about Basil Valentine. I know about him with the Jesuits, I know what happened there, and I know what happens now, I know what his private life is. Be careful of him . . .

—He . . . studied for the priesthood?

—He’s not out of it yet.

—But then me? Even me? You had them . . . you had detectives . . . finding out about me?

—Of course I did, my boy. It’s all right, it’s all right. You’re all right, but just keep on the way you are, Brown said, laying a heavy hand on the wrist before him, —don’t let anybody interfere with you, and be careful, be God damn careful of that pansy.

—That’s funny, then you . . . we both studied . . .

—What have you two accomplished? they heard behind them. —Dear, just sitting here and holding hands. I thought we had fearfully pressing business. Basil Valentine approached rubbing his hands together. He kicked the crumpled reproduction on the floor, and paused over it to smooth it out with the narrow toe of his black shoe. —Oil of lavender, eh? he said, looking down at it. —Mansit odor, posses scire fuisse deam, he said kicking it aside. —You must remember your Ovid, my dear Brown? He touched his smooth temple and smiled as he sat down. —“An odor remained, you could tell that a goddess had appeared.” He took his eyes from Brown, and looked across the table. —But what are you looking at me that way for? Come, we have work to do. Hubert van Eyck . . .

—Why should he rate a quarter of a million? Brown interrupted.

—I was about to tell you: because he never existed.

—But he did, he did, came sharply across the table.

—All right, my dear fellow . . .

—He did, he did, of course he did, who . . . why, the Ghent altarpiece, the Steenken Madonna . . . ?

—Who the hell, what is this? Who? He never existed but he painted the what? . . . sting . . .

—All right, have it your way, Valentine went on, speaking across the table, paying Brown no attention. —After all, we will have to have it your way, won’t we. If one of his paintings is to appear?

—But he did.

—All right, he did, Brown broke in again, sitting forward. —Now that’s settled.

—It’s not settled, yet. But it will be.

—But to say he didn’t exist, to say Hubert van Eyck didn’t exist?

—God damn it, stop. Stop arguing with him, Valentine. You’re just trying to upset him.

—Don’t you understand? But don’t either of you understand? Basil Valentine brought both hands up before him. —There are authorities who still insist that Hubert van Eyck is a legend, that he never lived at all, that Jan van Eyck never had an older brother. As a matter of fact, I’m one of them myself, but, wait. He held up an arresting palm. —Now don’t you understand? If a painting appears, a signed, fully documented painting by Hubert van Eyck, they’ll be proved wrong. The others, the . . . experts and art historians who have been insisting that there was a Hubert van Eyck will pounce on this new picture. They won’t question it for a moment, because it will prove their point, and that’s all they care about. It will prove that they’ve been right all this time, and that’s all they care about. The painting itself doesn’t matter to them, their authority is all that’s important. And the dissenters? He dropped his hands, sank back in the chair and smiled across the table. —Even I may be brought around, you see.

Recktall Brown grunted an assent, and Valentine took out a cigarette and passed his case open across the table. It was snapped closed, and the worn inscription caught the light. —This? what’s this? may I read it?

—If you can, Valentine said.

—Yes, it’s difficult . . . Varé tava soskei me puchelas . . . cai soskei avillara catári . . . Gypsy?

—Why yes, a Hungarian dialect. Valentine’s face almost showed surprise, as he took the thing back and slipped it into an inside pocket. —But you don’t understand it? “Much I ponder why you ask me questions, and why you should come hither.” A gift, he added, cleared his throat, shifted in his chair, and went on speaking as though to find recovery in his own words. —Van Eyck? and what did you think I was going to suggest? another Jan van Eyck?

—But, no but . . .

—Yes, another Virgin and Child and Donor? You could do that. Paint Brown in the place of Chancellor Rolin. Lovely! on his knees at a prie-dieu, before the Virgin and Child. A pious monument to his Christian virtue as a patron of art. We’d have to take off his glasses, and get him a haircut. You wouldn’t mind running around in a tonsure for a while, Brown? But that ring . . . His eye caught the double gleam of the diamonds. —We could hardly have such vanity flaunting . . .

—What are you talking about? Brown demanded. —We decided he exists, this Herbert . . .

Valentine shrugged wearily, and went on in his irritating monotone, —Yes, we are, I suppose, basically in agreement. Now here is the point. Some time ago the will of a man named Jean de Visch was found. It is in the public domain, available as substantiation of this . . . project. The will mentions a picture by Hubert van Eyck, which goes to prove, supposedly, that such a picture was painted. Another Virgin of some sort. Proves it well enough for your purpose, at any rate. Now when they tore down that house in Ghent they hoped to find some of Hubert’s work, hidden somewhere. They didn’t. But there was a scrap of paper. It was regarded as a curiosity, and then it disappeared and was forgotten. It was a letter signed by Jodoc Vyt, the man who commissioned the Ghent altarpiece, commissioning a work by Hubert van Eyck. I can get hold of it for two thousand dollars.

—You can get it for less, Brown muttered.

—Perhaps I shall. Basil Valentine smiled at him. —You never begrudged me a commission?

—How do I know it isn’t faked?

—You haven’t made a habit of doubting my word either. But look at it this way. If it is not genuine, why should it exist at all?

—If it exists, why should I buy it?

—You are inclined to oversimplify, aren’t you Brown? To insist on carrying us back to Rome, where for all their ingenious vulgarity they never managed to evolve blackmail, at least there’s no word for it in Roman jurisdiction. They depended so heavily on the Greeks, and the Greeks apparently had no word for it either. No, it’s taken our precocious modern minds to devise this delicate relationship between human beings. You might call this blackmail in reverse. You see, if you don’t buy this slip of paper it will be destroyed.

—And he can’t paint the picture without this scrap of paper?

—He can. Of course he can. But with this attached to it, it will be irreproachable. He paused. —This isn’t a thing to scrimp on, and you know it.

—All right.

—Well?

They both looked across the table. —It isn’t the first time I’ve thought of it, he said, watching the brandy he swirled in the bottom of his glass. —A Virgin by Hubert van Eyck.

—An Annunciation.

—Yes, he said, holding the glass up. —Isn’t that an exquisite color? The cc o. of the sixth heaven, jacinth. I remember a story my father told me, about the celestial sea. Instead of bedtime stories he used to read to me. The same things he was reading.

—Now this Herbert picture, Recktall Brown said, interrupting.

—When I was sick in bed, he read to me from Otia Imperialia. The twelfth century, Gervase of Tilbury, when people could believe that our atmosphere was a celestial sea, a sea to the people who lived above it. This story was about some people coming out of church, and they saw an anchor dangling by a rope from the sky. The anchor caught in the tombstones, and then they watched and saw a man coming down the rope, to unhook it. But when he reached the earth they went over to him and he was dead . . . He looked up at both of them from the glass. —Dead as though he’d been drowned.

—All right, my boy, is there anything else? Anything you need to go ahead with this? I had to buy him a God damn expensive egg-beater a couple of months ago, Brown said, turning to Basil Valentine, who stood up saying, —I have a number of photographs, blown-up details of the brushwork, you know. The foreground figures in the Ghent altarpiece, the Steenken Madonna . . .

—Or imagine heaven and earth joined by a tree, he went on, as Valentine reached over and picked up the book he had laid before him, some time before. —The sky is a roof, with windows in it for rain to fall through. People live up there, you see. And if you climb up high enough you can visit them. They’re just like you are, he said, turning to Recktall Brown.

—The hell they are, Brown said, getting to his feet. —Do you want to talk any more about this Herbert picture you’re going to do, or . . .

—But I am, he said. —I am. He looked from one of them to the other, from Recktall Brown to Basil Valentine, who stood over him. He looked bewildered. —Someone, who was it? said maybe we’re fished for?

—Come along, my dear fellow. I’m going downtown, I’ll drop you off.

—Or the seven heavens of the Arabs, he said decisively, making a hemisphere with one hand, which trembled as he held it forth. —Emerald, white silver, white pearls, then ruby, then gold, red gold, and then yellow jacinth, and the seventh of shining light . . .

Recktall Brown looked at his cigar. It had burned on the bias. —Look at this God-damned thing, he muttered. —This is the way they make cigars today. It’s the way they do everything today, he said, and threw it into the fireplace. —Everybody but him, he added, and, walking over, put a hand on his shoulder as he got up.

—That vase, he said, motioning toward a glass-enclosed bookcase.

—That’s not a fake, it’s real. Early Netherlands ceramic.

—Can I take it? For a week or two.

—What do you need it for, it’s damn valuable, Brown said.

—Lilies . . .

—Lilies, they’re expensive here too, Brown went on, leading him toward the door slowly. —Fuller used to bring them in here by the armload, all held up by wires. I don’t like them, they make me sick to my stomach. I told him to quit it. Nobody likes lilies much, why don’t you use some other kind of a flower?

—In an Annunciation . . .

The dog followed them on one side, Basil Valentine on the other.

—Those little oak frames I got, I’ll show them to you the next time, the ones with velvet inside them.

Basil Valentine Held out the book he had picked up from the table before the fireplace. —Your Thoreau?

—Why . . . why yes, I . . .

—Hardly fifteenth-century reading. Though I’m as far in the other direction, I’m afraid. Valentine picked up the book which lay with his coat. —Dear Tertullian, he muttered. —And I suppose you’re going to have your usual vulgar gathering this Christmas eve, Brown?

—I get more business done at those than a month in an office. This picture you’ve got now, he went on, turning, —as soon as you’re done with it call me, I’ll send down for it. And be careful with that vase. It’s going to be a damn good auction, he said to Valentine. —You remember that Queen Anne sofa upstairs? There was enough perfect inlay in that to make two sofas and two chairs, part of the original in each one. Some smart guy says it’s a fake, and you show him the original piece.

—Rather like Osiris, Basil Valentine said, pulling on his coat.

—What’s that?

—They cut Osiris up in fourteen pieces, and later Isis modeled his body fourteen times, with an original piece in each one.

—Like a saint?

Basil Valentine smiled, lifting his coat by the lapels as he straightened it. —Precisely, my dear fellow.

Recktall Brown had taken a pigskin pad from his pocket. —Glassware, he mumbled, —for this auction. I’ve got some beautyful glassware, it’s been in a manure pile out in the country, gives it that nice glittery effect, colors like you see in bubbles, that old glass has. Some wop taught me that trick.

—Italia irredenta. Basil Valentine reached down his hat. —That fine Italian hand, he said wearily, —which has taught us to make antiques by inflicting every possible indignity and abuse upon beautiful objects. He walked on toward the outside door.

Brown put the pad back into his pocket. —Be careful of that vase now, he muttered. —And don’t forget what I told you. He nodded ahead of them. —Be careful of him.

—I . . . I wish you hadn’t said what you did, he said, as Brown put the diamond-laden hand on his shoulder. —About her.

—About who?

—Her. Esme.

—Come on, my boy. Is she a good model for you?

—Yes, yes, she . . . why she can sit for three hours without moving.

—No needle marks on your Annunciation’s arm, now.

—But you . . .

—She’s a nice little piece, my boy, I know that too. But don’t let that get in the way of your work. Don’t let nothing get in the way of it. Here, don’t forget your eggs.

—She says it’s because she hasn’t got any stomach, he said, smiling.

—Who?

—Esme. She says that’s why she’s a good model, because she hasn’t got any stomach.

Recktall Brown stood in the hall, tapping his foot, until the outside door closed. Then he turned and went back to the vast room they had just left. The dog watched him approach, and got up when he came near, moving her stump of a tail slowly; but he stopped before he reached her, and she sat down. In the middle of the room, Recktall Brown took out a cigar and looked around him. He looked at the extensive wool tapestry on the wall to his right; but all their eyes were looking past him, in the other direction. He looked at the refectory table, where books and publications lay accounted for, and nothing moved. Then he turned abruptly, as though someone in the room with him had gone the instant his broad back was turned; but his youthful portrait was there, hanging silent as everything else. He raised his head, and looked up at the balcony where he saw the back of a rosewood chest, and the suit of armor standing patiently before the deed it had waited centuries to commit.

—Fuller! he shouted.

Then he turned toward the fireplace, and raised his cigar to the array of uneven teeth that had framed his cry. He looked at the Latin inscription over the fireplace, and bit off the end of the cigar. At his feet lay the crumpled reproduction from Collectors Quarterly. He noticed it, as he did anything which broke the pattern of the Aubusson roses, and with some effort he stooped over and picked it up. In four steps, he reached one of the leather chairs, where he sat down on the arm and raised his leg far enough to lay the crumpled paper against it. The unlighted cigar made erratic motions as it moved in his teeth, and he stared through the thick lenses, smoothing the picture out against his broad knee and its ample trouser with a wide thumb, which he exchanged, abruptly, for the edge of his hand.

His cry had risen to the balcony and beyond, into other rooms and withered, finding them empty, down a corridor then, to break against the wall and rebound, fractured, into the last crevice where it found asylum, embraced, however unwillingly, by Fuller’s consciousness. Having written REKTIL BROWN on a piece of paper and put it into his drawer some time earlier, Fuller sat on the edge of his bed in the windowless room, in sagging white underclothes, rubbing a yellow figure (drawn against the prospect of a cross) with his moist palm in the darkness.

—Don’t tell me you’ve come out without a coat?

—Yes, I . . . I must have left it behind.

—Or don’t own one, is that it?

They walked toward the corner. It was almost dark. Basil Valentine talked. —There was an eighteenth-century Spanish bishop named Borja, who said “I don’t speak French,” when he was addressed in Latin. I think of him whenever I meet our remarkable benefactor. That portrait, you know. Did you notice the ears? How erect and sharp they are, sticking right out. He tried to have them corrected, brought closer to his head, years ago. A cheap operation, and he goes to the plastic surgeon every week now, sitting under a green lamp there for hours. The cartilage is gone. It’s quite useless.

He silenced as two young men passed. One of them was saying, —tsa great sperchul achievement . . .

—You see what I mean. Valentine hailed a cab. —It seems to follow quite consistently, he went on as they got in, —people so bound to reality usually have something physically out of order about them.

Black-shod feet together on the shifting floor of the cab, he moved closer and took the vase. —It’s a fake, you know, he said holding it up in both hands. —Are you surprised?

—In a way, it . . . but it is beautiful.

—Beautiful? Valentine lowered it to his lap. —It suggests beauty, perhaps. At the sudden draft on him, he looked up. —Yes, do roll your window down. You don’t look well at all.

—I just . . . had to have some air.

—Are you free for dinner?

—Well, I don’t usually . . . don’t you have anything else?

—My dear fellow, there’s only one engagement that cannot be broken, and I don’t plan it for some little time. Come along up to my place for dinner then, and you can pick up these photographic details.

The cab halted, started off as though to accomplish a mile in a minute, and halted abruptly twenty yards on, where the driver exchanged twilight expletives with a bus driver. The sea of noise poured in, striking the leather seats, penetrating the occupants with thrusts of chaos, sounds of the world battling with night, primordial ages before music was discovered on earth. —I know your name. I’ve tried to think where.

—The Collectors Quarterly? Basil Valentine suggested easily; but his eyes turned, incisive, searching.

—No. Longer ago. Further away than that. But I’ve lost it now.

—You don’t mean the ninth century Pope? Valentine sat back, relaxed, his tone cordial. —There was one by that name, but alas! he said, turning, to smile, —he reigned for barely forty days. He took out the cigarette case, and it opened in his hand. —Well?

—Brown told me, you see, he mentioned that you were . . . that you had studied with the Jesuits.

—Dear heaven! Basil Valentine almost laughed aloud. —For Brown, that probably has the most weird connotations, the most frightening implications. My dear fellow . . .

—But you did . . . for awhile you did train for the priesthood?

—In a manner of speaking. You have something of the priest in you yourself, you know.

—Damned little.

—Far more of that than the renegade painter.

—Are they so . . . separate then?

—My dear fellow, the priest is the guardian of mysteries. The artist is driven to expose them.

—A fatal likeness, then.

—A fatal dissension, and a fatal attraction. Tell me, does Brown pay you well?

—Pay me? I suppose. The money piles up there.

—Why?

—The money? It . . . binds the contract. It’s the only thing he understands.

The clear eyes of drained blue no longer darted with assumed pleasure but glittered steadily, like water frozen so quickly. Valentine clutched Tertullian in his narrow lap. —You don’t dislike him, do you.

—No.

—No. In fact you rather like him. And this contract?

—Contract? Yes, a debt . . . a debt which the person to whom you owe it refuses to acknowledge, is impossible to bear.

—And the money? . . . Valentine was studying every line in the face beside him, details suddenly broken with a constricted sound like laughter,

—The money? you . . . can’t spend love.

The cab had stopped at a light and people were passing around it: the voice of a girl penetrated in clear Boston accents,—Somerset Maugham? Haha, hahahahaha, Somerset Maugham my ahss . . .

—Money buys privacy, my dear fellow, said Basil Valentine, leaning across his lap to roll up the window. —It frees one from the turmoil of those circumstances which the vulgar confuse with necessity. And necessity after all . . . what are you laughing at?

—Something earlier, something I thought of earlier but I didn’t laugh then, when I thought of, when you were talking about, a novel? Writing a novel, We don’t know what you’re thinking, you said. I thought of Momus and Vulcan, I thought of my wife then. You remember the homunculus that Vulcan made? and Momus said, You should have put a little window in him, so we could see his innermost thoughts. And I remembered . . . listen,

—You’re married?

—What happens? In this novel?

—What happens? Basil Valentine turned his full face.

—To me. The cab jolted to a start.

—Why, to you? Good heavens, I haven’t the faintest notion. Valentine laughed shortly, looking ahead again. —I was about to say earlier, of necessity . . . but tell me, when you were a child . . .

—Necessity, yes. Yes, a hero? John Huss . . .

—Huss? Hardly, today, eh? John Huss? Someone’s said, you know, anyone who accepts a martyr’s part today is a coward. And you? what happens to you? he went on hurriedly. —I suppose you . . . well, let’s say you eat your father, canonize your mother, and . . . what happens to people in novels? I don’t read them. You drown, I suppose.

—That’s too romantic.

—Novels are romantic.

—As though, death could end it?

—Have it your way, there is a step after death then. Valentine sat back and clasped his knee with folded hands. —After all, my dear fellow, you are an artist, and nothing can happen to you. An artist does not exist, except as a vehicle for his work. If you live simply in a world of shapes and smells? You’re bound to become just that. Why your life, the way you live . . .

—Yes, I don’t live, I’m . . . I am lived, he whispered.

Valentine turned to see him gripping his face in the breadth of a hand, whose finger-ends had gone white at the temple. —But, do you know how I feel sometimes? The hand dropped to clutch Valentine’s arm, and Valentine looked up into the feverish eyes. —Like . . . as though I were reading a novel, yes. And then, reading it, but the hero fails to appear, fails to be working out some plan of comedy or, disaster? All the materials are there, yes. The sounds, the images, telephones and telephone numbers? The ships and subways, the . . . the . . .

—The half-known people, Valentine interrupted easily, —who miss the subways and lose each other’s telephone numbers? Cavorting about dressed in the absurd costumes of the author’s chaotic imagination, talking about each other . . .

—Yes, while I wait. I wait. Where is he? Listen, he’s there all the time. None of them moves, but it reflects him, none of them . . . reacts, but to react with him, none of them hates but to hate with him, to hate him, and loving . . . none of them loves, but, loving . . .

—Loving?

The cab swerved suddenly. Basil Valentine was thrown against the window beside him, where he caught himself on his elbow. The man they had almost hit had seemed to hang in the air before them, the empty face a terrible exposure of nakedness.

—Idiot!

Basil Valentine’s face in profile showed the vein standing out beneath the hat-brim, a face strong, unsympathetic, bearing all of the force which sympathy lacks, in lineaments (shaded now under the black brim of this Homburg) which belied childhood and youth.

—Idiot, he repeated, sitting back, unaware of the feverish stare fixed upon him.

Then the driver burst out over his shoulder, —You just try drivin a cab, Mac, if you think it’s such a fuckin easy job.

Basil Valentine leaned forward. He was livid; but his voice was controlled. —I have no faint intention of wasting an instant considering such an absurd pastime. Now turn around and keep your obscenities to yourself, before you do run down someone as stupid as yourself.

—Listen Mac, don’t give me any of that, who the hell are you, this is a fuckin free country . . .

—Pull up over here, driver.

The cab came to a precipitous stop. Basil Valentine looked at the vase, the eggs, the books, and chose the books to be seen with, carrying in the street. He read the meter as they got out, and was reaching deep into his change pocket when the cab roared away.

—But you . . . you really hate people, don’t you, came the voice beside him.

—You see? Valentine said, not listening. He took out his cigarette case. —When I exclaimed, “idiot,” of course I meant the . . . idiot whom we almost ran down. You see? They’re the same, the ones who construct their own disasters so skillfully, in accord with the deepest parts of their ignorant nature, and then call it accident. He stood looking after the cab, a light poised before his cigarette.

—But . . . you really hate other people.

—My dear fellow, remember Emerson’s advice, Basil Valentine said, and paused. There was a crash at the corner. From where they stood they could see that the cab had hit a bus. —We are advised to treat other people as though they were real, he said then, lighting his cigarette, —because, perhaps they are.

—I . . . I have to go.

—We’re not dining, then?

—No, I . . . I have to get to work, I . . . it’s late.

—But my dear fellow, of course I understand. And the van Eyck details, I’ll drop them off at your place some time, shall I?

—Oh no, no don’t, don’t come down there, don’t bother, I . . . goodbye, goodbye . . .

—Not goodbye, Basil Valentine said, extending his hand. —People don’t say goodbye any more. You look up and they’re gone, missing. You hear of them, in a country with exotic postage stamps, or dead at sea. I’ll see you very soon. He smiled, and held the hand in his as though it were a creature he would suffocate.

In another cab a minute later, Basil Valentine found two books in his lap instead of one. He picked up the copy of Thoreau, and looked out of the rear window; but there, almost a block behind, people merged from all directions, and all that he could see at the point where they had separated were the tops of some lilies on a flower cart, stopped in the neon glow of a bar.

He faced forward again, thumbing the pages of the book, gold glittering at his cuff as he paused to glance at occasional sentences. The cab had turned east. As it stopped at a corner, the smile of a great and private pleasure drew out his lips, and he looked out the closed window. People who passed, passed quickly and silently, leaving behind a figure barely taller than the barrel organ mounted on a stick, whose handle he turned, his only motion, the hand, clockwise, barely more enduring than the sounds he released on the night air, sounds without the vanity of music, sounds unattached, squeaks and drawn wheezes, pathos in the minor key and then the shrill of loneliness related to nothing but itself, like the wind round the fireplace left standing after the house burned to the ground.

When the cab started again, he returned his eyes to the words underlined on the page before him: What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it, you become its prey. And he was still looking at this line, and he was still smiling, when the cab stopped before his door.

—Seven lilies?

Seven celestial fabrics, seven spheres, the colors of the seven planetary bodies: all these revolved above the flower cart. But above seventh heaven, we are told, there are seven seas of light, and then the veils, separating the Substances seven of each kind, and then, Paradise: seven stages, one above the other, canopied by the Throne of the Compassionate, discreetly remote from the tumult going on here in the middle distance. The lights changed, traffic moved, and waves of figures crested with faces dumbly unbroken, or spotted with the foam of confusion, or shattering their surfaces with speech, ebbed and flowed on a sea of noise, disdaining the music of the spheres.

The moment of evening loss is suggested in restricted portions of the sky which only suggest infinity, and that such an intimacy is possible when something rises from inside, to be skewered on the peaks or continue to rise untrammeled: a desperate moment for those with nowhere to go, the ones who lose their balance when they look up, passing on all sides here, invited nowhere, enjoying neither drink nor those they drank with but suddenly desolated, glancing up, stepping down from the curb alone, to seek anywhere (having forgot to make a date for “cocktails,” asylum of glass, brittle words, olives from across the sea, and chromium) a place to escape this transition from day to night: a grotesque time of loneliness, for what has been sought is almost visible, and requires, perhaps, no more than a priest to bring it forth. Restricted above the seven lilies, the sky lay in just such a portion as the Etruscan priest might have traced with his wand when, building the temple, he outlined on the sky the foundation at his feet, delivering the residence of deity to earth.

Seven days, seven seals, seven bullocks in burnt offering; seven times Jacob bowed before Esau; seven stars the angels of the seven churches, seven lamps which are the seven spirits, seven stars in his right hand; seven years in Eden; and seven times seven years to the jubilee trumpet; seven years of plenty, seven years of famine; so Nebuchadnezzar heated the furnace seven times more than it was wont to be heated, to purge the three who refused to bow down before the golden image sixty forearms (counting to the end of the middle finger) high, and six wide; and when they came through unscathed and unscorched, the king exclaimed, —Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and quite sensibly joined them in their fearful subscription to a Hostility Who could afford no other gods before Him, and would seem to have triumphed in this fracas which took place not too far distant from India, where things remained quiet enough that many heard a serene voice saying, Even those who worship other gods worship me although they know it not.

—A priest?

—You remember me.

—Look out, chum. Look out of the way, said the flower-cart man.

—Don’t you remember me?

—Here wait, I . . . could you sell me these lilies?

—Hurry up then, there’s a cop coming. I’ll leave you have all seven for a dollar, said the flower-cart man.

—Your face, yes, your face, but . . .

—Come on, chum. Talk to your friend here or give me a buck. There’s a cop coming, the flower-cart man interrupted.

—I knew your face, but the round collar . . .

—And I knew you half a block away. But up close you don’t look like yourself at all. It must be two years . . . ?

—Two years?

—Since I saw you, that night, New Year’s Eve, with your wife in the street. John picked up his suitcase again. It was a large, and apparently heavy Gladstone bag, which he’d put down to shake hands, stood with his palm open, extended, and withdrawn it when the confusion his gesture had caused threatened upset among the driving currents of people, the threat of smashed eggs, fallen lilies, and a broken vase, which he stood over now protecting with his large black-coated frame, ballasted by the heavy bag. —But I have to make a train, he said. He took half a step back. Then his face streamed crimson: for a full second his large features were at once exposed stilled by surprise and swimming in the harsh brilliance of the three neon letters above. He recovered his half-step, dropped the bag with another step forward and brought up a supporting arm. —What’s the matter? Are you all right? His eyes fell under the shadow of the soft black hat-brim, and were gone as the lower part of his face, the moving lips, shone livid under the letters BAR blazing green. —Are you all right?

—Yes, good night. Good night.

—But I can’t just leave you . . .

—Your train, your train.

—But what is it? You’re shaking. John’s features showed no shape now, his whole face shaded under the soft black hat-brim as his shoulders and both extended arms were caught again in the blazing letters, and an empty hand, then two, as the laden figure turned from his support. —But here . . .

—Good night. Your train. And you can’t come in here. It’s a bar.

—Bar? Certainly I can, I’ll help you. John caught up his bag with one hand, and caught an elbow with the other. A lily dropped.

—Wait!

—What?

—The lily?

—I’ll get it. Now, here . . . be careful of the door.

In the dim-lit end of the bar, shadows were contorted in the effervescent illumination of the juke-box; which also played Let’s Do It. John cleared his throat and spoke in an attempted convivial tone, —What are you doing with lilies and, eggs is it?

—Yes, a little brandy.

—Overwork? Here. Do you feel better? Take a lesson from the lilies. John smiled, and extended a hand. —They toil not . . . The wrist on the bar was jerked away from him. —Are you all right? he asked again, seeking for some sign in the profile of the face turned from him, and he found none, and faced forward himself. There his eyes rose to the mirror behind the bar, where a fevered stare pinioned them for an instant.

—Did either of you guys . . . excuse me, father, did either of you gentlemen put in a call to Miami? the bartender intruded between them and the mirror. John shook his head; and when the bulk of the bartender moved on, he saw the reflection of his own face overcome with youth in such proximity to one who looked twice his age. —When I mentioned to your father . . . he commenced.

—My father!

—Yes. I mentioned I’d seen you, I didn’t say . . .

—You saw my father?

—Why yes, traveling. On church business, I happened to stop in your town, and saw him.

—What did he say?

—What did he say? Why . . . John repeated. —He didn’t say . . . we talked church business, that’s about all. He smiled again, but drew back.

—But my father?

—Church business, John faltered, and cleared his throat again. —You see, I do a good deal of traveling, among out-of-the-way parishes where enrollment has fallen down, it’s part of the revival in religious . . . interest going on all over the country, a lot of it is inter-denominational . . .

—But my father? What did he say?

—Well to tell you the truth, John commenced, and looked down again, catching a cuff against his coat to draw it back and look at his wrist watch, —to tell the truth . . . he’s quite old, isn’t he. And he wasn’t . . . very co-operative. The pressing necessities of the times . . .

—But what did he say?

Looking up, John’s face startled more at finding itself uncomposed in the glass. —It was strange, he said, and paused at the apparently unfamiliar resonance in his own voice, going on, —I got there on Sunday, Sunday morning. I thought, Why not go in and hear his sermon? That’s always a good way to get a picture of the problems a congregation . . . a minister may be up against, but . . . It was strange. When I went into church, there was almost the feeling the sunlight had stopped. He’s a big man, but it was his voice. He towered over the pulpit, he was holding onto it with both hands when I came in, and afterward I looked around at the faces . . . the sermon, his sermon was on some primitive Australian religion, but you see, to tell the truth . . .

—What?

John looked up. The lilies on the bar were browning at the edges. He shifted his eyes only far enough to reach the image beside his own in the mirror, but found only a stare of feverish continence which was lost below the mirror’s edge. —I remember every word of that Australian . . . legend, the parallel he was drawing with . . . Christianity, I can’t get it out of my mind. John had clutched the edge of the bar, lowering his voice and slowing his words, —Boyma big man; very budgery man. Him sit on big glass stone. Him son Grogoragally can see everything and go everywhere. See budgery man, like him; see bad man, plenty too much devil devil. Likes budgery man; no likes bad man: he growl too much. Budgery man die, Grogoragally tell Boyma; Boyma say, “Take him Ballima way, plenty budgery place.” Bad man die; Boyma say, “Take him Oorooma way, plenty too hot, him growl there.” Grogoragally plenty strong, him not so strong as Boyma . . .

Several people in the bar were looking in their direction. One detached himself and set out toward them, slowly, with the care of a navigator. Before him, his hands composed a shivering binnacle for what served, on this voyage, as a compass, a glass of whisky, perilously plumb between the gimbals of his fingers.

—It was strange, it was as though he could lead every good Protestant there . . . Oorooma way, if he wanted to. And then, when I walked home with him he would hardly talk about it, he would hardly talk about any of the things that a . . . man with the pressing responsibilities . . .

—Say, gentlemen, said a voice behind them. —I enjoyed your sermon. It was the figure from down the bar, a dilapidated bark indeed, heaving in toward shore now and seeking anchorage.

—But . . . me? He didn’t ask about me?

—Well, to tell the truth I . . . scarcely mentioned . . . I said I’d seen you, and he asked in an absent way . . . it’s an absent way he seems to have about everything, everything except when I saw him in the church. When I was talking to him, I’d turn to see he’d stopped, standing staring straight up at the sun . . .

—Gentlemen, I have a religion too, said the voice. —I’m a drunkard. Would you like to join my church?

—But you, John said, bringing a hand up, and the wrist beside the lilies on the bar did not draw away from his touch, —you need a rest, don’t you. As his arm had come up, the sleeve drew back to expose the face of his wrist watch. —I have to hurry, but I wish . . . to tell the truth, when I saw you out there on the street I thought I recognized you and then I thought No, it can’t be, it’s an old man.

—Gentlemen . . .

—I have to hurry now, I have to make that train. Will you be all right?

—Gentlemen, I have a religion too . . .

—If you could come up to visit us, you and your wife? We could talk like we did when we were . . . because I’ve wondered about you, I’ve thought about you, I’ve wished you hadn’t changed your mind about . . .

—Gentlemen . . .

—Here, don’t forget your eggs. Will you be all right now?

—Would you like to join my church?

Down from the surface of earth led the steps of the subway, one creation beneath another: the earth upon water; the water upon rock; the rock on the back of the bull; the bull on the bed of sand; the sand on the fish; the fish upon a still suffocating wind; the wind on a vale of darkness; the darkness on a mist.

And there beneath the mist? Jahennem, which consists of seven stages, one beneath another.

—The story about the lady saint, do you remember. You told me about her. So precious little you have told me, Esme said, —so precious little . . . running her fingers down the edge of a drawn shade, her back turned on the basement room. The bare electric bulb in the center of the low ceiling cast her shadow before her on the shade; she moved her hand to follow the outline of that dark shape laid there upon the light. —The lady saint they followed in the convent, for she left behind her a sweet odor clinging to the flags. The odor of sanc-tity. That is what you told me, she said turning to where her profile became almost apparent in the shadow. —What are you doing? What are you doing now?

Air never came through the room; but now, behind her a fresh new smell penetrated the weight of the others which had filled the air so long, resting there on the heavy smell of boiled stand oil risen from what looked like a pot of honey, to support the scent of lavender which was even now being driven away by something more fresh and pungent. —This color, he murmured.

—What color? She came across the room quickly to look into the pan where Venice turpentine was being heated with verdigris.

—The green, the green forming here.

—It is beautiful green. Beautiful green from a long time ago, before us. And before my mother, but it is not the blue. How quiet it is for now, she went on. —What was her name? She watched him take the pan from the hot coil to the table beside the empty easel, off near another wall where canvases were stacked, some unprepared, and some begun; behind them, two panels of thin aging oak; and then the mirrors. —And everything she touched held the delicious odor of sanctity days after she had touched it. What was her name? Esme sat on a stool in front of the fireplace, her chin in her hand, watching him. He seldom talked to her; she sat now where she had sat silent times she could not number while he studied her in the strong artificial light, not (he once explained) to find what was there, but to find what he could put there, and take away: for at first, wanting to hide her face, fearing close scrutiny, she had behaved as though someone from outside might discover something in her she did not know about herself, so unprepared was she to conceal or defend it. But the paintings done of her not to be of her at all, she found; and sat now, watching his lips move silently, and hers moved silently. Not to be of her at all, —but my bones and my shadows those of someone so long since dead, dead if she ever lived at all. Esme abandoned this exhibit of herself entirely, permitting what she showed to be indeed a counterfeit creature: the things she wore were nothing Esme would ever have worn: here half in profile, the blue cloth of velvet broken over her shoulder and across her breasts, and her hair drawn straightly down, she was safe away, her uninhabited face left in austere perfection, for him to search with clinical coldness, —but not to discover me here; rather academic disinterest, technical intensity, —not the eyes of a lover.

—Saint Catherine de Ricci, he said aloud, speaking the words of the pattern his lips had rehearsed. —A Dominicaness. She was a stig-matist, he added in a murmur.

—A stig-ma-tist? Saint Catherine de Ricci, a stig-matist.

Littered about the room were details of paintings, magnified reproductions of details from Bouts, van der Weyden, van der Goes; and some photographs of such high magnification that few experts could have told whose work they represented, details of brushwork.

—You did not tell me where those old flowers came from. You cannot paint them. They are almost dead. But I like the vase you brought. It is a very lovely vase.

—You . . . you may have it, he said quickly. —Yes, when I’m done with it, you may have it if you like. He stood beside the end-table whose top served as a palette.

—And the flowers too. Yes, and the flowers, too?

—Then they will be dead.

—Yes, they will. Where did you find them? How?

—A man sold them. A man in a hurry to be given a dollar. A policeman’s coming, he says to me. A cop’s coming.

—Is it against the law, then, to sell lilies? She waited. She looked up from them to him. He had only murmured, answering, busy over the table. She looked back down at them. —They are the flower of pur-i-ty, she said.

He stopped and looked up. —Lilies in India, he said clearly. —Great heart-shaped leaves on a fourteen-foot stem, and a dozen white flowers stained with purple . . . He broke off, and returned to what he was doing.

—Why did you go to In-dia?

—No. No, I didn’t.

—And the lilies there?

—I remember them, he said, not looking up.

—I know, like I remember Baby and I were baked in a pie. And sometimes I try to write a poem and I cannot; and so I write down something I remember. It is the same feeling. I wrote down the poem about Baby and I were baked in a pie and some silly boy thought it was my po-em! Then she said, —I dreamt about you. She paused. —I dreamt you came to visit me. But when you knocked on the door, I opened the door and there was no one there. No one was there.

He was grinding something in a mortar. He did not stop.

—But I dreamt about you again. That was a terrible dream and I will tell you about it now because the mirrors are put away. Do not put them up again.

—Why not? He glanced up, because even across the room her shudder came, and the braying pestle stopped.

—Because they have terrible memories. There you were, as you are when you paint. With a long piece of rough brown cloth draped round your shoulders like you were, holding a stick that was the long handle of a spade, and unshaved too on your face, leaping from one mirror to another which held you whenever you stopped to fix it in the paint, flesh drawn over the hard bones, fixing only something lost and curious to be found again, staring out four times from the paint, reflecting itself in age and emptiness, so curious to be rescued each time you stopped. That big mirror was almost behind you, you kept looking over your shoulder like you do, pursuing yourself there, and then it caught you, you were caught in the mirror. And I could not help you out. Could that happen? Could that happen? I could not help you out.

He put down the mortar, and the pestle into it, and raised his hand to his eye, and rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand.

—Could that happen? she whispered.

The easel, erect between them, was empty. He looked beyond it to her and said, —Why have you put that . . . that blue thing on you now?

—So you may work, she said. —So that I am the lady in the picture.

—But I . . . I’m not working now, not on that. No, isn’t it finished? Isn’t it finished? he said suddenly, loudly. He went to the wall, and moved two books on the floor with his foot, to turn the large surface of the painting out. —Yes, yes. Yes it is, I thought it was. Good God, I thought it was. He brought it out and leaned it on the floor against the easel. —Now I . . . I have to work on it now. But it’s finished. He looked up to her. —I . . . I didn’t notice that you’d . . . that you thought you were going to sit tonight. Yes, yes, that’s why 1 was surprised when you came. When you came I thought, maybe it wasn’t finished.

—Then I am not to be the lady in the painting any more? The blue cloth slipped from her shoulder, taking the strap of her slip with it. She drew it back slowly. —And then I must . . . dress like they are now.

—You . . . you . . . what you like, he said turning away, to look for a knife on the table.

—To play you the lute, she said, getting down all of a sudden, —like you said they did for him. In the convent where he came, they tried to soothe and comfort him, playing the lute, she said gently, standing near to him. He looked up. —You told me, she said, gently, as though defending herself against the eyes he turned upon her.

—And did it help, their damned lute? And did it help?

—You told me, it did not, she said. She took three steps past him. —You don’t need me then?

—I don’t need you.

—Shall I go away?

He did not answer.

—Shall I go away?

Then he said, —Is there someone there, waiting?

—If there is no one there, and there is no one here?

He said nothing; but stood before the painting with a sketch of it in one hand, a sketch on which large blemishes were indicated.

She picked a book up from the floor. —I could read to you, she said. His lips parted, but he did not speak. He tapped his thumb on the knife blade. She sat on the edge of the low bed, running her fingertips over the print on the page. Then she commenced, —In den alten Zeiten, wo das Wünschen noch geholfen hat, lebte ein König, dessen Töchter waren alle schön, aber die jüngste war so schön, dass die Sonne selber, die doch so vieles gesehen hat, sich verwunderte, so oft sie ihr ins Gesicht schien. She looked up, smiling.

—But you read it beautifully. I . . . I didn’t know you could.

—Nor did I, she said.

—Where did you learn it, to read German?

—Just now, she answered.

—You don’t understand it?

—Not the words, she answered. —It is very beautiful.

—I learned in this book, he said, taking it from her, and he stared at the cover. —Die Brüder Grimm . . . He handed it back. —Shall I tell you what they mean, the words?

She smiled to him, in answer.

—“In olden times, when wishes still availed, there lived a king, whose daughters all were fair, but the youngest was so fair . . .”

Her lips followed his voice from the page, —aber die jüngste war so schön, dass die Sonne selber . . .

—“That the sun itself . . .” He stood over her, looking down at her shoulder, and he stopped. —Wait, he said. —Have you . . . have you got . . . you don’t have to go now?

—No, she said looking up, her eyes widely open. —I’m here.

—Will you sit up there for a minute? He gestured to the far stool, and went to the wall where he pulled one canvas after another aside.

She sat, her head half turned; and her face emptied of the curiosity and life of an instant before. If anything of life was left, it was a vague look of yearning, but that without expectation. All that moved in the room were his eyes, and his arm, touching with a pencil at the monochrome on the soiled surface of the gesso, pausing, rubbing the lines away with his thumb.

Suddenly she turned. —What’s that?

—Be quiet. What?

—That. You were working on a piece of wood, and here is a piece of canvas.

—Linen, he said. —Be quiet. Turn your head back. Where it was. Where it was, damn it.

—When?

—There. Yes, yes, he said in a hoarse whisper. She was silent, beyond the outlines which she fitted perfectly enough to have cast them there in a quick reflection done without intent, without knowing. Some time passed. With each motion of his hand the form under it assumed a reality to exclude them both, to empty their words of content if they spoke, or, breathing, their breath of that transitory detail of living measured to one end; but left them, his motions only affirmations of this presence which projected her there in a form it imposed, in lines it dictated and colors it assumed, and the accidents of flesh which it disdained.

—Draw the cloth up, he said. —There, draw it up there. Just that part.

She turned, as quickly as a thing is dropped, and broken. His eyes were fixed part closed as though looking into a strong light. —A part every day, she cried, laughing, for his arm had stopped moving. —That’s the way you wash when you have no tub, you wash a part every day, Monday is for the feet, Tuesday is knees day, Wednesday is thighs day . . . She stopped speaking, and hid her face away from him in embarrassment. He had not been looking at her arm or shoulder, or the line of the bone around her eye, not just a part but at her.

—Thursday? he asked, smiling, from the stool where he sat.

She got up, shedding the length of blue cloth to the dirty floor between them. She came and stood over him. She stood with a hand on his shoulder, gripping him there, bending over him, and her small breast spilled toward him, breaking its shape easily.

—It’s my picture! You’re making a picture of me!

—Do you think so? he asked quietly.

—Why does it look so old? A picture of me that looks so old.

—It’s a study. The next picture, the next . . . painting I’m going to do, this . . . little . . .

—You . . .

—I . . .

She had both arms around his shoulders; and the breath denied by the form before them came the more quickly. He straightened up and stood, straightened her to her feet and turned away from her. —That’s all, he said. —We’ll stop for today, very much the way he always said it. He took the soiled thing down from the easel. —I have to work on this, he said, approaching the large finished painting which stood on the floor almost between them. —Can you help me lift it up.

She stood staring at him, as though to stop his motions with the seizure of her eyes.

—Esme?

She lifted the other end of the thing, and they raised it. He picked up the knife again.

Kinder- und Hausmärchen lay at her feet, one of half a dozen books in the place. —How beautiful she is, no longer me, Esme said, looking at the prolonged figure in the painting, —for she is dead.

Over the emphatic drawing and the underpainting, translucent colors were fixed in intimate detail upon the established forms, colors added separately, unmixed on the palette, layer upon layer, constructed from within as necessity disposed these faces emptied in this perfect moment of the transient violence of life.

Round the closed eyes of the Virgin, where she looked now, the highlights were not opaque colors on the surface, but from the light underpainting tinted with ultramarine.

—Dead before death was defamed, she said, —as it is by those who die around us now, dying absurdly, for no reason, in embarrassment that the secret, the dirty secret kept so long, is being exposed, and they cannot help it, cannot hide it longer, nor pretend as they have spent their life in doing, that it does not exist. Yes, the blue, the beautiful blue of Her mantle there. How abashed they are to leave us, making up excuses and apologies with every last breath, so ashamed are we to die alone. How shocking it will be to see the day come again, out where they are, where the law does not permit him to sell lilies.

She moved away, to pull on a dress, and a coat, and treading on the length of blue cloth she approached him again from behind, where he stood in the strong light with the knife, and raised it to the face laid with closed eyes near the top of the composition.

—Before death was dishonored, she said, watching his hand move, —as you are dishonoring it now.

He continued to work. For some minutes there was no sound but the scratching of his blade. Then he turned round, raising his eyebrows in a mild surprise at the empty room, drawing his nostrils at the delicate scent which had returned and remained (for the brief pungence of the Venice turpentine had penetrated and was gone), as affirmative of recognition as the sight of blood, as the blood gushing on every Friday from the stigmata of Francesca de Serrone, blood with the odor of violets.

On the door, locked and bolted, she pinned a sign: Do Not Disturb Me I Am Working Esme. What worse thing could have happened, than had happened that morning. She had hidden the needle, the good silver (No. 22) needle with the glass syringe, in the black metal box on the wall over the sink. Who would think of looking there? Who, but a man in uniform. He entered carrying a flashlight, to walk past her and open the black box there on the wall over the sink without hesitating. He turned his light into the box, wrote something on a pad, then took the needle out and handed it to her. —You shouldn’t put things in here, ma’am. It’s liable to interfere with the meter. He saluted her hand-to-cap and went away.

She sat with a piece of white paper before her, the penholder’s end in her mouth like a child told to write a letter home, being watched writing it, the letter to be read by her familiar jailer before it is mailed home. Over the paper she followed the course of an ant, pursuing its frantic flight with the scrupulously cruel point of the pen, leaving behind a trail of black crossing and recrossing until the ant escaped to the rust-colored arm of her chair.

How were they all so certain? calling her “Esme”: they knew she was Esme when she did not know, who she was or who Esme, if both were the same, every moment, when they were there, or when she was alone, both she. But she could not deny that they were right, for who would be making that denial? and if who could not be no one, it must be Esme. She thought now of undressing; and the thought was too much to bear, to undress alone, and stand there naked alone; with nothing, even shadows in this bare room, to cover her.

Across the bottom of the page where the terror of the ant was drawn she wrote, An ant going home who does not live anywhere.

Worse had been two nights before: asked her age, earlier, she had told it: twenty-nine. (That was the way she did, adding a year to this slow number when May appeared, and passed, taking another year with it.) Then alone at night, she had thought of the indelible year of her birth, subtracted it from this year whose number she shared with everyone, and come out with thirty. A year missing? She turned on the light, and covered three pages with numbers: the year, and her age opposite; and then the year and the month and her age; then the year, the month, her age, and where she had been and what doing. Still a year lacked, unaccounted for. And when she put down the year of her daughter’s birth and worked toward it from the past and the present, it was the year missing. Was her daughter unborn? Whence was the year missing? from her life? or from time? Unsolved, it became a part in that world where she lay alone, unasleep at night, her limbs cold and her feet almost blue (though the room was not cold) she saw before she turned out the light: moving none of her body (thinking about other things) and then with abrupt horror remembered her body which she could not feel, all awareness gone from her legs. Was one resting against the other? or alone? The slightest move would tell, were they there? would have told immediately, if she had moved immediately this doubt came. But not having turned a foot, nor thrown back a hand in that instant of doubt the doubt grew, deepened and she in it engulfed in paralytic terror, unable to see in that darkness whether those limbs had melted into an amorphous mass, or into nothing; unable to turn on the light, without moving, then she would try to think of something else, and move unconsciously; but she was unable to deceive herself so, unable to move until some extreme of her moved itself in exhaustion.

Esme stared at a fresh page of paper. Her face, more and more forgotten as effort worked through her, took a sulking look: one of fear, remembering now a sculpture of her head and bust made once by a student who did not know that, when the plaster dried, it would shrink one-tenth the size he had modeled it, so that he made the cord tight which supported the neck, and when it dried they found death’s excellent likeness of her head pendent, swinging gently with the door they had opened upon it. She hated herself for the fear which rose and choked her at that instant: the same terror that came at other times when, almost asleep, she woke suddenly with a deep breath of life, and the certainty that she had not been breathing, had recovered herself with her breath at the last instant of living possible: and then hating herself for her direct thankfulness at recovery, she who never wanted to recover.

She wrote slowly, with no effort apparent but as from memory, in confident trust as poetry is written,

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic

orders? And even if one of them suddenly

pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his

stronger existence. For Beauty’s nothing

but beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear,

and why we adore it so is because it serenely

disdains to destroy us. Each single angel . . .

Then a knock sounded on her door, and drew her cold limbs abruptly in to her, startled and afraid.