From London Far (39 page)

Again Mr Neff inarticulately screamed. There was a slaver at his lips. His eye was bloodshot and gleaming. From a pedestal beside him he seized and swung a heavy bronze statuette. His scream deepened to a purposive roar of rage and thence crystallised into a single word. ‘Yellow!’ yelled Mr Neff, ‘yellow!’ His glance roved the gallery and fixed itself upon a picture which Meredith had not yet observed: a vast composition of elongated and apocalyptic figures like so many yellow and green and rose-coloured flames. It was an El Greco and one of the great paintings of the world. Mr Neff advanced upon it, his statuette flailing the air.

‘STOP!’

Flosdorf was not by nature an authoritative person. But as he burst into the gallery at this moment desperation lent him power. ‘Quit that!’ he shouted at his demented employer. ‘Quit it, I say! Don’t you know that picture’s worth close on one million dollars?’

And momentarily Mr Neff paused – as he had long been conditioned to doing when a really tidy sum of money was mentioned. Flosdorf seized his chance. ‘Listen,’ he said urgently. ‘It’s not as bad as you think by a long way. I can fix it. Only give me that darn statuette.’

‘Fix it?’ Mr Neff’s reply was a snarl – but his hand was stayed. ‘D’you realize, you damned Flosdorf, that you and your son-of-a-bitch Society sold me more than five hundred pictures I can’t ever be right about – no, not even about the planes and the masses?’

‘But I tell you I can fix it.’ And Flosdorf turned to the door. ‘Hey, you,’ he yelled, ‘come right in. Come right in and meet the patient.’

It was Higbed. Professional decorum and an abounding underlying vitality were alike indicated in his stride; his expression was that of one prepared to shed upon the
Kama-Sutra
and the
Anangaraga
– even upon the
Perfumed Garden
itself – the clear dry light of an impersonal science. He paused before a vast Rubens Rape of the Sabines – almost as if he supposed that these must be the ladies by whom his expository services were required – and then glanced in swift perplexity and distrust about the gallery. ‘What’s this?’ he asked. ‘I don’t–’

But Flosdorf had taken him unceremoniously by the buttonhole and was leading him forward. ‘Here’s the guy will fix you up,’ he said encouragingly to his employer. ‘Properjohn and I had him shipped from England specially – and a whole library with him, too. No one with just his line in the States. Psychiatrist – deals with you when you’re imagining things. And your kind of trouble in particular. Psychogenic visual disturbance – that right?’ And Flosdorf turned to Higbed. ‘Speak up, you.’

‘I have certainly made some study of visual hallucinations in relation to the hysterias.’

‘There!’ Flosdorf was triumphant. ‘And when I saw you had this trouble that time we looked at the Masaccio I figured it you might get real mad as soon as you found out. So Properjohn and I read it up. Seems if you smoke too much you may come to see everything blue, and then the blue disappears and you just don’t see any colours at all. Seems if you were a kid and were frightened by some dame dressed all in purple–’

‘This is Mr Neff,’ said Jean to the bewildered Higbed. ‘He’s colour-blind, and never knew, and now he’s mad about it. And why they kidnapped you was to work a cure before he got madder and fired this Flosdorf and the rest. So get to work.’

‘Colour-blind? Cure?’ Higbed broke away from Flosdorf, seized Mr Neff by the arm and led him up to a Pinturicchio Madonna in Glory. He pointed at the Madonna’s robe, in which there was a large area of sombre red. ‘Now then, what colour’s that?’

‘Red,’ said Mr Neff.

‘And this?’ Higbed pointed to a small patch of the same hue on the cap of a donor.

Mr Neff hesitated. ‘Kind of dark yellow,’ he said uncertainly.

‘And what about this?’ Higbed was pointing at the dull green of the donor’s hose.

‘Yellow. It’s a pale yellow. Almost the same as the little yellow flowers in the foreground.’ And Mr Neff, momentarily subdued and momentarily hopeful, looked almost timidly at his questioner.

‘Nothing of the sort. It’s green.’ Higbed, it was evident, felt extremely disgruntled at the altogether uninteresting nature of the professional task to which he had been so unscrupulously dragged across the ocean. ‘And there’s no question of any psychogenesis. Your trouble is congenital and incurable. You’ll go to your grave with it – and from your general condition I should say that will be in four or five years’ time.’

‘Congenital!’ Flosdorf’s voice rose to a scream almost like Mr Neff’s. ‘Didn’t you write a book saying–’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Disordered colour-sensation is sometimes functional and likely to yield to psychotherapy. But this is organic – some obscure condition of the nerve-endings. In fact, the man’s a Dalton – a modified Dalton of the kind who may never know until they really get talking about colour – but a Dalton all the same.’ And Higbed turned to Mr Neff. ‘You’re a Dalton,’ he repeated rudely; ‘just an ordinary modified Dalton.’

To Mr Neff, at once bemused and furious, this obscured insult was the last straw, ‘You, Flosdorf,’ he yelled, ‘how dare you bring a man here calls me a Dalton!’ And raising the bronze statuette he hurled it with all his force at his assistant’s head. ‘First you bring this girl says I can’t ever know art not even the planes and masses, and then you bring this man says in four years I’ll be dead.’ Flosdorf ducked; the bronze crashed against a door; a second later the door opened and Mr Gipson, followed by Mr Neff’s other friends and clients, entered the gallery.

‘Hey!’ said Mr Gipson. ‘What’s this?’

Mr Neff looked at him balefully. His breath was coming in deep painful gasps. ‘Get out of this, Jeff Gipson!’ he panted. ‘Get to hell out of here.’

‘Say! It’s his pictures.’ And Mr Gipson turned in delighted surprise to the followers. ‘Now, just come right in and listen to the connoisseur talk about the stuff he got from the giraffes and dromedaries. Any more Ardos, Neff?’ His eye fell on Higbed. ‘And is this guy Berenson, or is he just Venturi?’

‘I am Higbed.’ The harassed psychologist considered this information so important that he delivered it at a sort of bellow, thereby momentarily drowning a surprising yowling and choking noise which was now issuing from Mr Neff. ‘I am Higbed, and this screaming imbecile is I don’t know whom. But he seems to have surrounded himself with a lot of pictures which are little more good to him than if he hadn’t an eye in his head.’ And as he made this malicious overstatement Higbed grinned nastily at Mr Neff, whom he plainly held accountable for his sundry tribulations and imprisonments.

‘What’s that?’ Gipson’s voice held a wondering delight. ‘What’s that you said?’

‘The man can’t see his own pictures right. He’s colour-blind.’

‘Great snakes!’ Gipson gave a whoop of unholy joy. ‘If that doesn’t beat the band! Why, the poor cuss been and spent millions on them. Dotes on the things, too. It makes him feel all superior to reckon he knows art is beautiful. And all the time he couldn’t tell a red-head from a brunette. Jeepers creepers, it’s the cat’s pyjamas!’

Mr Neff, thus grossly brought to bay, glared round him like a demented thing. And then manfully (so that, despite the shivered Masaccio, Meredith almost admired him) he lied. ‘Pictures?’ he said. ‘Well, I never cared for them all that. A man like me must spend his money on something, and it’s kind of natural to talk big about what you put a bit of cash in.’ He waved a trembling hand round the gallery. ‘But you can take the lot, if you care for them. For some time now, I’ve been figuring to collect a little old furniture instead.’

‘Oho – so we can take the lot? I suppose that amount of money’ – and Gipson too gave a wave around the gallery – ‘don’t mean anything to a man like you?’

‘No, it doesn’t. I’m through with the stuff’, and suddenly Mr Neff’s voice rose again to a betraying scream – ‘I’m through with it, do you hear? And I don’t care what becomes of it. I don’t care, I say… I don’t care a damn!’ Mr Neff spoke chokingly and with a mounting hate which made Meredith shiver… For it came to him suddenly that it was hate directed, not against Neff’s old rival Gipson, but against those rows and vistas of immortally beautiful things by which the wretched man conceived himself to have been betrayed… ‘Pitch ’em in the lake, if you like,’ choked Mr Neff. ‘Only take ’em out of my sight.’

‘Your sight?’ jeered Gipson remorselessly. ‘Take ’em out of your screwy sight, eh? Well, as you’re offering them round, we’ll take one or two of the dirty ones – just as a memento of your old collecting days.’ And Gipson, with a quick glance round the gallery, advanced upon the great Rubens canvas which had first caught the attention of Higbed. ‘Come on, folks,’ he said. ‘Help yourselves. I’ll take this bunch of dames.’

It was as Gipson’s hands went out to the Rubens that sanity finally left Mr Neff. This second rape (as it were) of the Sabine women was too much for him. And when he acted it was with something like inspiration. Gipson, his friends and the fuming Higbed were all on the stationary conveyor belt. Mr Neff snatched up the little dial at the end of its flex and turned it. The conveyor belt moved forward. Mr Neff turned the dial again and the belt accelerated – with a rapidity so astounding that Higbed, the clients, and the unspeakable Gipson were in seconds a mere prone and supine mass, a congeries of waving legs and arms giving a momentary and nightmarish impression of some monstrous multi-limbed Hindoo god hurtling down the vista of Mr Neff’s gallery like some out-of-the-way projectile on a garish pin-table. At the farther end was an open archway giving upon a downward flight of marble steps. And such was the impetus of their flight that the enemies of Mr Neff (including the still unfortunate Dr Higbed) went straight through and down like the rebel angels raining from the Empyrean. Their shouts of terror and howls of rage changed briefly to yells and screams of pain; then Mr Neff ran to the wall and pressed a button – whereupon a great fireproof door descended at the end of the gallery. Instead of the pandemonium of a dozen soft males bemoaning bruised bodies and broken limbs, there was only the stertorous and lunatic breathing of Otis K Neff.

On all these disordered proceedings the dwarfs and grandees of Carreño and Velasquez, the peasants of van Ostade and the princes of Boltraffio, Botticelli centaurs and Duccio Madonnas, gallants by Watteau and wantons by Manet or Lautrec, Luini saints with their lurking and epicene Leonardo smiles, El Greco hermits nine feet high, impassively looked down. But not for long. Mr Neff had gabbled insanely but commandingly through a house telephone; and now he was hurling himself with demoniac fury upon those silent witnesses of his sensuous frailty. Flosdorf had disappeared. So, Meredith with consternation discovered, had Jean. The conveyor belt had been reversed, and now the Rubens came down and was pitched upon it. Appalled, Meredith stepped forward to resist. But as he did so a small army of men-servants, scared but obedient, hurried into the gallery and began tearing the pictures from the walls and piling them on the belt. Mr Neff dashed frantically about, urging on the work, screaming for more speed in corridors and elevators, commanding that everything be hurried to some lower entrance giving on the lake. His hideous purpose was plain. Art might be beautiful, but it had let him down. And so he was going to drown it – or all of it he could lay his hands on – deeper than ever Prospero drowned his book.

‘Stop!’ shouted Meredith. ‘He’s mad, demented! The pictures are stolen; they are masterpieces which no one can ever replace!’

But these rational persuasions were in vain. Mr Neff, sustained by an uncanny access of nervous force, carried everything before him. ‘Out with the lot!’ he screamed. ‘And those in the house too – plain as well as coloured! Don’t forget the statues; don’t forget that darn thing in the elevator; ring down to have the belts speeded up again; have the whole lot rowed out a good half-mile; anyone tries to keep anything on the quiet I’ll skin him alive.’ And Mr Neff charged at a Giovanni Bellini Doge as if he that instant recognized his deadliest enemy.

Helpless and aghast, Meredith watched the walls grow bare, the resplendent marble and gold gallery become an empty shell, the long procession of doomed paintings trundle ever more rapidly away down a vista of unending corridor. There was a strange wailing note in his ear, like defunctive music or the lament of the parting genius being with sighing sent: it issued from the mechanism of those conveyor belts which at the command of their inventor were sweeping more and more swiftly through the unending passages and colonnades of Dove Cottage.

Meredith made his last effort. He advanced towards Mr Neff with open and imploring hands. ‘Stop!’ he said. ‘You understood those things – loved them. Your disability has been greatly exaggerated. When you are calm again you will realize the folly and horror of what you have caused to be done. I beg you to halt before it is too late.’

‘And clear him out too.’ Mr Neff pointed a quivering finger at Meredith. ‘Pitch him in with the rest of the junk. And his wife if you can find her. Let them swim for it or drown.’

Meredith looked round for a weapon, but even as he did so he was seized by a couple of powerful men and pitched bodily upon the conveyor belt. It was travelling at a great pace; the backs and fronts of canvases and panels surrounded him; the corners of massive gilt frames gouged his ribs and thighs. He struggled and there was an ominous crack. He desisted, not knowing what damage he was doing to some priceless surface. It was true that both he and Mr Neff’s late collection seemed alike doomed to a watery grave – nevertheless, he would not trample upon these things even in this moment of their common agony. So Meredith was hurtled down a corridor and into an elevator which dropped like a stone; thence he was ejected upon a turntable and trundled down a further cavernous corridor dimly lit – an incongruously human outcrop upon this monstrous funeral procession of pigment and bronze and marble, this glyptic and plastic twilight of the gods. And everywhere the attendants of Mr Neff pervasively infected by the hysteria of their employer, like impatient mutes whose dinner awaits them, hurried the cortège forward.