A millionaire is a force. No one was more conscious of this than Mr. Darby. And not only that: he was conscious too of what the state implies. It implies responsibility. Mr. Darby felt responsible for the unfortunate condition of the National Gallery. Not that he had caused it: the trouble, no doubt, had begun years ago. A prolonged policy of thoughtless and indiscriminate buying had reduced the place to what it was. His responsibility began now. It was his duty to bring the authorities (whoever they might be) to a sense of their shortcomings, to induce them to regard their duty with a more patriotic eye. But before taking steps, he must acquaint himself with the facts. In the first place, was there actually a scarcity of British pictures? If not, it would be absurd to suggest the transfer of British pictures from the Tate to the National. Some other method would have to be evolved. Mr. Darby felt himself at a loss. It was like the problem of the Jungle over again: the difficulty was not merely to obtain the information but to discover how to set about obtaining it. A bolder spirit would no doubt have marched straight to the National Gallery and knocked loudly and authoritatively at the private door. ‘I have come,’ he would have said, when his summons was answered, ‘to reform the gallery.’ But such brutal methods were not Mr. Darby’s. He preferred more constitutional ways.
For some time therefore he did nothing, and when at last he began to take action it was in consequence of what was nothing more than a happy accident.
He happened one day to be in Greenwich. He was there not in pursuit of artists but of Sir Christopher Wren, an architect whom he had recently taken up rather strongly. ‘You may talk,’ Mr. Darby was in the habit of saying at this time, ‘ of your Palladios and your Michelangelos ’ (his guide book had, in point of fact, talked of them), ‘but I venture to say that our Sir Christopher Wren is … ah … immeasurably superior to either. One has only to look at St. Paul’s, Chelsea Hospital, St. Stephen’s, Walbrook, and the work at Greenwich.’ Being a patriot, he did not add that to make the survey more complete one has also to look at St. Peter’s, Rome, and San Giorgio Maggiore and the Redentore, the Palladian churches of Venice.
Mr. Darby, then, was hunting Sir Christopher in Greenwich, when his roving eye was caught by an antique shop. It was not a very good antique shop, but, as every connoisseur knows, it is at the worst antique shops that the vigilant collector picks up the best bargains. Accordingly Mr. Darby halted and scrutinized the window. In a moment his practised eye had turned the shop inside out and fixed upon the essential thing there. It was a picture, a portrait of a young lady in white muslin. Her head was slightly inclined to the left, she had golden ringlets and a pink sash round her waist. Mr. Darby brought to his inspection of it all the store of artistic knowledge and experience which was his. ‘Ve … ry nice! ’ he said to himself, and there was a tinge of patronage in his tone. ‘Ve … ry pretty indeed! ‘He pursed his lips, nodded his head knowingly, and studied the picture more closely. It was then that he caught sight of a ticket tucked into the bottom right corner of the frame. On the ticket was written in a rather slovenly handwriting: ‘Nice picture by Romney. Cheap £5.’
There! That settled it. There were works of British artists still to be had. Mr. Darby’s indignation boiled up. To think that the walls of the National were covered with foreigners, and here, disregarded in Greenwich, was a British masterpiece at the mercy of the first Tom, Dick or Harry who took a fancy to it. But to stand fuming outside the shop window was a mere wasting of precious moments. Something must be done. Thereupon Mr. Darby became so excessively excited that before he realized what he was doing his legs had carried him several yards down the street. But next moment he had a tight hold on the reins, had mastered the excited animal, pulled it smartly round and forced it back to the shop-window. Something must be done, and quickly, for no doubt there were other connoisseurs about, avid American collectors perhaps who, scouring Greenwich at that very moment, would dart into the shop at first sight of the thing, capture it, and carry it off outside the bounds of the British Empire while England, in the person of Mr. Darby, vacillated on the doorstep. He shot a rapid glance up and down the street. There were few people about, and no one in the least like a collector. He had still a few moments, then, in which to make up his mind and decide what to do. He quickly inspected the picture again. It had gained enormously in appearance since he had last looked at it, a minute ago. ‘ A superb thing! ’ he said to himself. ‘A masterpiece! ’ and then, unconsciously recalling a phrase from one of his guide-books, he added: ‘Observe the natural elegance of the pose.’ He was trembling all over with excitement; but he pulled himself together. To stand there trying to make plans was madness: the thing to do was to secure the picture first and make the plans afterwards. With a rapidly beating heart he entered the shop. A very thin, seedy old man emerged from the other bric-a-brac. Mr. Darby at once became calm and casual. ‘You have a rather pretty picture in the window,’ he said unconcernedly, ‘a portrait of a young woman.’
‘Yes, sir. A lovely thing, sir. I bought it the other day locally from a private collection. Been in the family for years.’
Mr. Darby was too astute to mention Romney. To stress the name, suggest that it was well-known, might put the old man on his guard. Suddenly the shop-bell tinkled, the shop door opened, sending a thrill like a bullet through Mr. Darby. The collectors were already on the track. Mr. Darby was wonderful. In that moment of appalling national peril he did not for a moment abandon his sang-froid. ‘I might as well have it,’ he said, externally bored, internally in an agony of trepidation, and in a moment had a five pound note out of his pocket and slapped into the old man’s hand.
The old man began pottering among his specimens. ‘I’ll have it packed up at once, sir,’ he said.
Packed up, indeed, when every second was valuable. Mr. Darby swept the suggestion aside. ‘Don’t trouble,’ he said. ‘I’ll take it as it is.’ Yes, if it weighed a ton he would, somehow or other, take it as it was. But, thank God, the old man lifted it easily from its place, and Mr. Darby, laying hold of it, found that the only drawback about it was its size. In a moment he was steering it carefully towards the door. Unceremoniously and with an indignant glare of his spectacles he pushed past the waiting customer, a tall, gaunt, cleanshaven, suspiciously American-looking person. Another moment and the old man had closed the door behind Mr. Darby and Romney and they found themselves in the street.
Tenderly Mr. Darby rested the edge of the picture on the ground and gazed wildly about him. The world was a mere blur through his steaming spectacles. A vague shape, making a noise like a motor-car, glided towards him down the street. He hailed it in desperation: by the mercy of Providence it was an empty taxi, and a few seconds later he was safely installed in it, holding the picture in front of him like a shield. ‘To the Balmoral Hotel, Northumberland Avenue, Trafalgar Square! ’ he shouted. The door slammed, the taxi started, and Mr. Darby fell back against the cushions, took off his hat and his spectacles, took out his handkerchief, and with a sigh of profound relief mopped his streaming brow and face. A priceless art-treasure had been saved for the nation. Then he slowly and carefully began to polish his spectacles. He had forgotten all about our great national architect Sir Christopher Wren.
• • • • • • • •
This important purchase was the first of many. Mr. Darby, fired by his first success, became a mighty picture hunter. But he did not allow himself to be intoxicated by that first triumph: he equipped himself properly for his task. Not only did he add to his knowledge of the British School by reading many works on the subject; he went further still. Again and again he returned to the National, the Tate, the Wallace Collection, studying and observing in the light of what he had read, till soon he was able without a moment’s hesitation to distinguish easily between a Reynolds and a Gainsborough, a Turner and a Constable, a Romney and a Raeburn, to say nothing of the smaller fry among our old masters. Armed with all this highly technical knowledge he began to haunt the windows of antique-shops. He was far too acute a man to waste his time in the rooms of the great London picture dealers: he even avoided the better-class antique-shops. It was the humble, dusty, promiscuous shops that he frequented, shops hidden in the meaner streets or tucked away in the suburbs, shops in which one was as likely to find a row of grimy books, a second-hand sewing-machine or a stray commode, as the prizes that he sought. Richmond, Putney, Camberwell, Streatham, Highbury Barn, he searched them all and many places more, and he was not unrewarded. The further his investigations went, the greater grew his amazed indignation at the culpable neglect of the National Gallery authorities. So far from there being a shortage of British old masters, the whole place teemed with them. He spent his days in a fever of industrious enthusiasm. Within a fortnight he had become the owner of two Reynoldses, a Gainsborough, an immense Turner (‘As regards colour,’ Mr. Darby said of it, ‘the finest of his pictures I know.’), four large Landseers, and (descending to more recent times) five small works by the late Alma Tadema. The whole lot had cost him the trifling sum of fifty one pounds five shillings. ‘It only shows,’ Mr. Darby remarked to Miss Clatworthy, ‘what a man can do with a pair of eyes, a knowledge of art, and a little spare time.’ The question how to house them soon grew imperative. It was all very well to stack half a dozen in his bedroom, but already there were too many for that. Besides, he didn’t want to stack them: he wanted to hang them upon walls, to see them and enjoy them. When he had amassed a considerable collection he proposed, of course, to present them to the nation, to the National Gallery, with the proviso that they should be hung in place of the foreign pictures at present there. But meanwhile, why not have the enjoyment of them? He resolved to take a furnished house.
His requirements being so particular, it was some time before Mr. Darby found a place to suit him. For himself he could have put up with a modest flat, but a room big enough to play the part of a picture gallery was imperative. At last he found a furnished house in Bedford Square with just the room he required. It was a large, long ball-room on the ground floor, the very room to house the Darby Collection. It had another advantage: the domestic staff, including a man and wife, he the butler, she the cook, was available. The owners were going to South Africa for a year. As they stepped out, Mr. Darby stepped in, and soon, under his personal supervision, the Darby Collection was handsomely framed and suitably hung. It amounted now to over twenty pictures. Mr. Darby, recollecting the seating accommodation in the National Gallery, hired four settees and set them in pairs back to back down the centre of the room, a happy touch which turned the room into an unmistakable gallery. Each picture was properly labelled, under the name of each painter was his date, and on the lintel of the double doors which opened into the room was painted in bold gilt capitals: THE PICTURE GALLERY. And often, when he had been dining alone, Mr. Darby would proceed after dinner to the gallery, switch on, with an opulent hand, a flood of light and warmth, and pace up and down; pausing from time to time, with hands in pockets and cigar in mouth, to contemplate with profound aesthetic satisfaction one or other national masterpiece. The masterpieces, unperturbed and vague, gazed back at Mr. Darby, much less impressed by him, it seemed, than he by them. For to him they were at this time more, much more, than mere pictures. These flat, shadowy personages, animals, scenes, provided his life with an aim, a gusto, a focus which it would otherwise have lacked. They were helping him triumphantly over a difficult period. For the bare fact of being a millionaire and the task of amassing knowledge and culture were not always, for one of Mr. Darby’s temperament, enough to compensate for human relationships. He was almost friendless in London: if it had not been for Princep, his Bedford Square butler, whose austerity he gradually beguiled into conversation, he would have been completely so. Since leaving the Balmoral he had lost sight of Miss Clatworthy; but, as companionship, Miss Clatworthy’s vague, wistful virginity had soon proved to be very meagre fare. After a week or two she had, as it were, simply evaporated, deteriorating as she faded, like an inexpensive and too sweet perfume. It was not only her art that was miniature.
So it was that from time to time Mr. Darby found himself nowadays in the presence of a grim spectre which, try as he would, he could not exorcize, the spectre of loneliness and aimlessness. He had discovered how terribly lonely a man may be among millions of other men. Was his new power and freedom leading him only to a cruel deception? Generally he averted his eyes when he caught sight of the spectre at his elbow, but sometimes he dared for a moment or two to face it, and then he admitted to himself that he longed for the old, easy, comfortable companionships from which he had rashly fled. He longed for Sarah, for the Stedmans and the Cribbs, for Mr. Marston and McNab and Pellow and Miss Suninngdale and his other friends, for the old routine whose ordered ebb and flow relieved him of the difficult problem of organizing his life into some sort of meaning and coherence. When these moods of depression were upon him, the huge empty mornings and afternoons, once filled by the pleasant activities of office-work, appeared to him as terrifying deserts in which he was hopelessly lost. But when the spectre, grown overbold, urged him to give it all up and return to Savershill, as Sarah had done, Mr. Darby’s courage always reasserted itself. He lifted his head, pursed his lips, and threw out his chest. No, he would never stoop to that. And in this mood of self-assertion he was able to recall what in his fits of dejection he kept forgetting, that these happy memories were only one face of the old life. He conjured up the reverse, the black depression, that sense of spiritual bankruptcy which had so overpoweringly settled down upon him between the dates of his birthday party and of the news of Uncle Tom Darby’s bequest. These horrible memories effectually laid the ghost which haunted him now. He knew it for what it was, a deceiving demon mischievously bent on luring him back into the old captivity. And so, when Mr. Darby detected it lurking beside his chair in the evening— for, like other ghosts, it was generally in the evening that it put in an appearance—he gradually accustomed himself to face it and stare it out of countenance. Then, rising with dignity from his chair, he proceeded to the Picture Gallery, and with a snap of the switches conjured out of nonentity the Darby Collection, that living symbol of his new duties and enthusiasms. In its presence the spectre faded, the old zest returned, and he awoke next morning, happy and vigorous once more, sang in his bath, and set off, aglow with the fires of patriotism, to ransack yet another suburb for lost masterpieces.