The Complete Simon Iff (6 page)

Major called the waiter to bring another bottle of Burgundy.

“Have you really formed a theory about the case?” asked Flynn. “To me it’s absolutely beyond reason.”

“Beneath it, beneath it! Ah well, no matter! As a fact, I have not made up my mind. How can I, till I’ve seen this chap’s pictures?”

“You think there was some motive of jealousy?” snapped out Major I don’t think at all till I’ve seen them. Look here! do you know his work?

“No; he hasn’t shown anything. He’s an absolute kid you know. But Tite saw a thing of his in some studio or other, and Tite said it was damned bad. So I dare say it’s pretty decent stuff.”

“Where’s his studio?”

“Don’t know,” answered the sculptor. “I’ll find out to-night, if you’re really set on this. May I call for you in the morning? We’ll go up together; perhaps you’ll let me make it déjeuner—you’ll come, of course, Jack— as I’ve been shouting for Burgundy at your dinner, you shall shout for Claret at my lunch!”

“I’m at Bourcier’s, 50 rue Vavin, as always,”1 said Simon Iff. “The best house, and the best people. in all Paris. Come round at nine.”

“Right. Meet me there, Flynn. It’s a great hunt, the truth!”

“With a hunter like Simple Simon, you’ll find it so,” said Flynn, enthusiastically.

II

The next morning saw the three friends tramping it up the Boulevard Raspail, past the great calm glory of the unconquered Lion de Belfort, along the busy Boulevard de Montrouge, and so to the very hem of Paris, the “fortifs” dear to the Apache. Here they turned west, and came presently to an old wine shop, throughwhich lay the entrance to the studio of de Bry.

He was already at work in his little garden; an old man, leaning on a spade, was posing for him.

Major advanced and offered his card. “Monsieur de Bry! I feel sure you will pardon me. I am a Sociétaire of the Beaux Arts; I have heard that your work is excellent, and I am here with two friends of the most distinguished to ask the honor of looking at it.”

“Mr. Major!” cried the boy, as he put his brushes down in his eagerness—at first he had not recognized the great man—”indeed, the honor is altogether mine. But I’ve nothing worth seeing, I assure you.”

Major introduced his friends. De Bry, telling the model to rest, led the party into the studio. With infinite diffidence the boy began to show his work.

In a few minutes Major, with his hands thrust deep into his trousers’ pockets, and his head thrown back, was reduced to utter silence. Simon Iff, who was watching him as well as the pictures, smiled his grimmest smile. The editor, inured to small talk by his profession, made the conversation. “lt’s all beginnings,” said the boy, “but this is more what I’ve tried for. I did it in the summer.” The mystic noticed with a darkening face that he seemed to speak of that summer as if it had held nothing but a holiday.

The canvas showed the rock of Dubhbheagg amidst the breakers. It had been painted from a boat on a clear day. The sky was blue; a flight of wildfowl gave life to the picture But the rock itself was more vital than the birds. It seemed the image of some great lost God of solitude, eternally contemplative, eternally alone. It was more melancholy than Dürer’s master work, or Thomson’s interpretation of it. And de Bry had not used the materials of melancholy, or images of death; he had merely painted a rock just as it was when he saw it. Yet he had made it a creature of cosmic life, as significant and vital as the universe itself—and as lonely and inexorable.

Simon Iff spoke for the first time. “Is that picture for sale?” he asked. “Yes,” said the painter, rather eagerly. They noticed that he looked ill.

“Probably hasn’t had a meal since that damned affair,” thought Major. “How much?” very stiffly from Simple Simon.

The painter hesitated. “Would you give me fifty francs for it?” he asked timidly.

The mystic rose to his feet, and shook his stick in the boy’s face. “No, you damned young scoundrel. I will not!” he roared. “How dare you ask such a price?”

The boy shrank back; he expected that the old man would strike him.

“Do you know who I am?” thundered Simon. “I’m the chairman of the Art Committee of the Hemlock Club! That’s the trouble with you artists; you’re blacklegs, every one of you. Offering a thing like that for fifty francs and pulling down the price of everything but the old Masters! Answer me straight now: how much is it worth?”

The boy was too taken aback to reply.

“Have you ever seen a worse thing offered for ten thousand francs?” asked Simon, cynically.

“Oh yes!” he stammered at last.

“I’ll give you fifteen thousand. Here’s a thousand on account; I’ll send a cheque for the balance this afternoon. Send the picture to Simon Iff, 50, rue Vavin. And, if you’ve nothing to do, come and see me as soon as the light fails this afternoon. Yes, bring the picture around in a fiacre. About 5, then!”

He thrust a big thousand franc note in the boy’s hand, and withdrew stormily from the studio.

The others followed him; but Major stopped a moment. “Did you like my bust of Rodin?” asked the sculptor. The boy was still too bewildered to do more than nod. “I’ll send you a bronze, if you’d care to have it. And come and see me, any time you care to, and particularly any time you need a friend.” De Bry grasped the offered hand in silence.”

The others had reached the street when Major caught them. “I hope you don’t mean mischief by that boy,” he said to Iff. “I seem to smell a trap. For heaven’s sake leave him alone! He’s the biggest thing since Turner; if he keeps on growing, the planet won’t hold him.”

“My mind is quite made up,” returned Simon Iff, coldly. “If the lunch is still on, suppose we take a taxi. If you don’t mind, we’ll have a private room at the Café de la Paix. We shall need to go rather deeply into this matter.”

III

Simon Iff would not talk at all of anything but old times in Paris until after lunch, when the decks were Cleared of all but the three Cs—coffee, cigars, and cognac2 Then he cleared his throat.

“As you have heard me say about a million times Jack, ’Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.’ Failure to observe this precept is the root of all human error. It is our right and duty—the two are one, as Eliphaz Lévi very nearly saw—to expand upon our own true centre, to pursue the exact orbit of our destiny. To quit that orbit is to invite collisions. Suppose it to be my illusion to think it my will to pass through that closed window. I bump my head; I cut my face; I finally make a mess on the boulevard. Or I think it my will to steal my neighbor’s watch. I am caught; police-court, prison, and general disaster. Merely the result of my ignorance in regard to my true destiny. Failure in life and especially criminal failure; collision. Then where is the original collision? In myself. There is a conflict between my conscious will and my unconscious will, between the sophisticated babble of reason and the still small voice of the soul. Poe had quite an idea of this, with his ’Imp of the Perverse’; Ibsen, the greatest of all realists, a more detailed conception, with his ’troll’; but both imagined that consciousness was right and the Inner Light wrong. Now that is a mere assumption, and we mystics, who know that Light, know better. It is the first task of every man who would not only be himself, but understand himself, to make the union or harmony between these two, perfect. Now of course most men, so far as the main path of their lives is concerned, never find these two forces in conflict, never become aware of them at all. The troubles of genius are principally due to a recognition of this truer Light, and of its apparent incompatibility with the conscious will, or perhaps of a realization that they cannot execute their will, because of the pressure of circumstance upon them. Hence the well-earned celebrity of the Artistic Temperament. Frequently we observe that the artist, unable to fulfil himself in his art, turns to vice of one kind or another. It is as if a sculptor, in a gesture of impatience with his Venus, dabbed a handful of clay on her nose, and made her look like an elephant!”

“If you knew how often I’ve done just that thing!” laughed Major.

“Well,” continued the mystic, “to come to the murder of this boy Harry “

“I see where you’re driving,” broke in Jack Flynn. “And as I’m sure you noticed the perfect nonchalance of de Bry when he showed us that picture, you are going to prove that he did it unconsciously, or at least that it’s all so natural to him that he has no sense of it.”

“You would find out what I am going to prove if you would let me do it,” said Simon, in some ill-humor. Major had felt ashamed of himself for smiling; he was genuinely concerned about his great new artist.

“To come to the murder of this boy Harry,” repeated the magician, “we notice two things. First, the general surroundings. Storm, isolation, the wild weird atmosphere of the Scottish Highlands—enough to send any man, with an original touch of madness, over the line Second, the nature of the murder itself, it is in perfect keeping with the setting. Its details are elaborate. It is not an ordinary murder, but the murder of—a—I can’t find the right word.”

Major broke in grimly: “The murder of a great mind gone wrong? Of such a mind as conceived, and such a hand as executed, those masterpieces? Oh my God!”

“Your interruptions will not alter the facts of the case, or my deductions; pray let me proceed! Besides, there is still one step to take before we arrive at any such conclusion. I want you to remember a peculiar fact about the French Revolution. Here we find a whole set of people, educated, intelligent, complex, and above all humanitarian, who suddenly indulge in wholesale massacre. This, like the crime we are discussing, was a perverse crime. It was not at all in accordance with the general will of the Revolutionists, which was simply Social Justice.

“But they had been thwarted for generations; thwarting was in their blood, as it were; and when they came to action, they became perverse. Thus—I beg you to believe—it is not merely the artistic temperament which produces these horrible crimes; it is simply any temperament which is suppressed long enough. It is more usual to find this manifested in artists, because they are advanced people who understand pretty well what their will is, who suffer more keenly, in consequence, from the thwarting of that will, especially as they usually perceive only too keenly the fact that it is the errors and stupidities of other people, people who have strayed far from their own orbits, that cause the thwarting in question. I will ask you to consider the case of a man who makes friends of spiders. Oh, you say, that is after he has been in the Bastille for twenty years. Precisely. He may have been a very bad man; he may himself have thwarted his own fundamental impulses of love; but the complete suppression of that instinct for so many years results in its peeping out at last, and taking an unnatural form. There are plenty of similar instances which will occur to you. In the case of the French Revolution, we must also consider the question of atavism. Humanitarian as the leaders were, their forefathers had been inured to fire and sword since the dawn of the race. It was the primitive tribal passions that broke out in them, after centuries of suppression. So you get the same phenomenon in both the man and the race.” Simon paused.

“That boy, said Major, “has one of the greatest souls ever incarnated on this planet, and I won’t believe he did it.”

“Your courage is splendid,” replied Simple Simon, “but your beliefs do not invalidate the conclusions of science. E pur si muove.”

“Is that all?” asked Flynn.

“For shame, Jack,” cried the mystic; ”I have hardly begun. But I perceive that the light is failing; we had better end this conversation in the presence of André de Bry.” Major paid the bill; and they went across Paris to the old magician’s little studio in the rue Vavin.

It was a small room, and very simply furnished; but the paintings and sculptures would have made the fame of any museum. Each was the gift of a master to Simon Iff.

“We shall wait for the young man,” said the mystic, as they seated themselves; you will see that I have no difficulty in forcing him to confess.”

“I’ll never believe it,” insisted Major.

“Don’t believe it till you hear it!” was the abrupt retort.

IV

A quarter of an hour elapsed; then the slim figure of the boy appeared. In his arms was the picture.

Simon took it and placed it upon the mantel. Major was right; there was nothing in the room to equal it. The magician went to his desk and wrote out a check for fourteen thousand francs, which he handed to the young painter. “If you would sign this receipt?” De Bry complied.

“Do not go!” said Simon. “I have much to say to you. You really like the picture? You think it worthy of you?”

“I wouldn’t have sold it if I didn’t.”

“Yet you were in sore straits? You were denying yourself food to pay your model?”

“I shouldn’t have sold it to you if I didn’t think it mine.”

“That too is worthy. But now, sit down. There are others to consider in this matter. I am going to ask my friends to remain absolutely silent while we talk.”

“I know what you are going to say,” said the boy.

“I think it unnecessary and cruel.”

“Wait till I have done. It is not only necessary and kind, but it is very urgent.”

“I can’t refuse the first man who has appreciated my work.”

“Listen while I tell you a story. Many years ago I knew a man named Thornley, a wealthy manufacturer of biscuits. He had one son, Joseph. He asked me one day to recommend a tutor for the lad. I told him of a clergyman named Drew, a man of deep scholarship, great culture, and intense love of art. He worked on the ambition of Joseph Thornley and the boy, after a year’s tuition from Drew, decided to be a painter. The tutor died suddenly; but the boy’s ambition remained. He persuaded his father to let him go to varios art schools, where he studied incessantly with the most praisewhorthv diligence.”

“Damn it!” roared Major, “he had no more capacity for art that this chair I am sitting on!”

“I asked you not to interrupt,” returned Simon mildly. “I never said he had! To continue. Backed with ample wealth and influence, and fortified with determination to succeed, Thornley’s career was one long series of triumphs. Although primarily a marine painter, he also did other work, notably portraits. His picture of the king in the uniform of a British Admiral caught the public taste more than any other of his efforts. It was in that year that he was not only elected to the presidency of the Royal Academy of Arts, but raised to the peerage with the title of Baron Cudlipp. His only sorrow was the death of his wife two years after the birth of his children.”