The Romantic Adventures of Mr. Darby and of Sarah His Wife (31 page)

Mr. Darby turned in his chair: there was surprise in his spectacles. ‘You've finished?'

‘I've finished, thank you, Mr. Darby. But don't let me interrupt your work except to wish you good morning.'

Mr. Darby rose and took the extended hand. He had come to the definite conclusion that this man's opinion was of no value and had resolved not to ask it, but now he unaccountably changed his mind. Was it just for the sake of something to say, a neat verbal formality with which to round off the occasion, or was it that, although he was not interested in Mr. Roden's carpings, he was prepared to welcome an official expression of enthusiasm? Even Mr. Darby himself
could not have answered this question. Whatever the truth of it, he found himself casually saying, as he shook Mr. Roden's hand: ‘Well, what do you think of them?'

The question obviously made Mr. Roden extremely uncomfortable. ‘I would rather you called in another opinion, Mr. Darby,' he said.

‘As you wish,' said Mr. Darby with dignity. ‘I should have been interested to hear …'

Mr. Roden hesitated. ‘I am perfectly willing, believe me, Mr. Darby, to give my opinion for what it is worth, if you really care to hear it. I hesitate only because I should be sorry, very sorry, to disappoint you.'

‘You don't think much of the collection, then?' asked Mr. Darby with an involuntary quaver in his voice.

‘I fear,' said Mr. Roden, ‘—and you will realize, Mr. Darby, that I am compelled to speak the truth, however disappointing—I fear that none of the pictures is genuine. Indeed two—the Reynolds No. 17 and the Gainsborough No. 39—are Medici prints, as you may discover easily for yourself if you take them from their frames. Please forgive me,' he added, seeing the sudden distressing collapse of Mr. Darby's features.' Good-morning, Mr. Darby, and thank you.'

‘Then … then …' He had meant to say: ‘Then the National Gallery refuses my gift,' but the words stuck in his throat. He turned his head and his spectacles suddenly glittered in the light from the windows. He mastered his voice sufficiently to gulp a ‘Good-morning,' then, under pretext of ringing for Princep, he averted his face, and Mr. Roden went out, closing the smoking-room door behind him.

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For an hour Mr. Darby did not stir from the armchair into which he had dropped as Mr. Roden closed the door behind him. It was as if a desolating explosion had suddenly wrecked all the wonderful many-domed edifices of the mind which it had been his delight during the last months to construct and adorn. His imagination found itself suddenly
homeless. Into whatever quarter of his mind he retired for comfort and shelter he found only wreckage. An impulse urged him to hurry to the Gallery and, safe now from hostile intrusion, comfort himself and his beloved pictures for the cruel aspersions that had been flung at them. But before he could rise from his chair the impulse had died. He was too miserable, too tired, to move. The thought that all those enthralling expeditions to strange places, all those miraculous and thrilling discoveries, the framing, labelling, hanging and cataloguing of each new prize, all his great scheme for the glorification of British Art were hope and labour and enthusiasm thrown away had reduced him to a state of mental and bodily feebleness that could not face the effort of rising from his chair. But after a while he raised his head. Strength was returning to him: the stimulating tonic of indignation was coming to his rescue. Yes, he was beginning to see the truth of what had happened. He might have known, all along, that the thing was inevitable. He had received a premonition of it when Sir Wilfred Montgomery had written that he would send ‘a representative' instead of coming himself to view the Collection. Yes, it was all obvious enough now. The ‘representative,' of course, had received his instructions before starting for Bedford Square: his decision was made before ever he cast a first glance at the first picture. Mr. Darby blamed himself now for the childish simplicity of his behaviour. It was clear enough now that instead of entering the fray single-handed he ought to have enlisted the support of powerful allies. He had failed to take into account the powers of sloth, corruption and evil tradition which he had set out to break. He had thought, in his innocence, that he would at least receive fair play from his opponents, that, though no doubt they would fight tooth and nail against his revolutionary project of ousting the foreigner from the National Gallery, they would at least be honest about the Darby Collection, would acclaim it for what it was, and would move Heaven and earth to get him to modify the conditions of his gift. But no. The threat to themselves and their hide-bound tradition had been too much even for their
honesty, and they had stooped to a base subterfuge: to preserve the status quo they had been willing to deprive the nation of the Darby Collection. Mr. Roden had urged him to take another opinion, but whose opinion was he to take? If he called in some other expert, how was he to know that he too was not in the pay of the National Gallery authorities, or if not that, anyhow a member of some unscrupulous ring who would declare that the pictures were not genuine so as to discredit them and persuade him perhaps to part with them at ridiculous prices? Why, after all, should he permit strangers to intrude into his home merely for the purpose of shaking his faith in his pictures and himself? No, he would have nothing more to do with experts.

This uprush of righteous indignation, reinforced by the arrival of lunch, did much to rouse Mr. Darby from his prostration, and by the time he had finished his lunch he had completely reinstated the Darby Collection and their collector in his esteem. He could bear now to face the pictures again, and when he left the dining-room, before going to the smoking-room for his coffee and after-luncheon cigar, he proceeded down the corridor to the gallery.

The first glance was enough to reassure him. It was mere criminal absurdity to say that the pictures were not genuine: you only had to look at them. To any true lover of art whose mind was not obscured by prejudice and pedantry, their genuineness was self-evident. If he had not imposed those revolutionary conditions upon his offer, no doubt Mr. Roden would have sung a very different tune. Well, if it had not been for the wrecking of his cherished scheme, he would not have cared two straws about Mr. Roden's views. As for allowing them to influence his own feelings, Mr. Darby snorted and shrugged his shoulders contemptuously. After he had paced the gallery three or four times he felt the old glow warming his heart once more. The blighting influence of Mr. Roden was exorcized: the pictures blossomed again with all their old enchantment.

One trifling occurrence, however, may or may not have been the result of Mr. Roden's visit. In his leisurely course
round the gallery Mr. Darby paused before No. 17 by Reynolds and No. 39 by Gainsborough and submitted them to a somewhat severe scrutiny, and when, a few minutes later, Princep brought his cup of coffee to the smoking-room, Mr. Darby ordered him to remove these two pictures from the gallery and place them in the box-room. From which it is evident that, for one reason or another, they had ceased to appeal to him.

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It must not for a moment be presumed, because Mr. Darby's strong-minded stoicism had enabled him to ignore the attempts of a corrupt and prejudiced official to belittle his art treasures, that his spirits remained unaffected by the material result of Mr. Roden's visit. Next morning's post brought him official intimation that the National Gallery refused his gift, and with this documentary evidence of the wreck of his high-minded scheme before him on the breakfast-table, he tasted the full bitterness of injustice and ingratitude. He had never supposed that such things could happen in England. In foreign countries malice, corruption and repression were only to be expected, but he had believed in his innocence that England was the home of honesty and freedom. His disillusionment was terrible: he felt that all the zest had gone out of his life. He no longer took any pleasure in London and its sights. Trafalgar Square, which he had been accustomed to regard as the very hub of the Empire, seemed to him now nothing better than a plague spot. He could no longer bring himself to cross it, and was frequently obliged to make troublesome detours in order to avoid doing so. The one thing, besides his beloved pictures, that kept him from despair was indignation. Indignation supplied a fuel that zest could no longer afford, and soon the old resourceful Darby had warmed to action again. Sir Wilfred Montgomery and Mr. Roden, he now reminded himself, were not omnipotent: the last word was not, after all, theirs. They were no more than the servants of the Trustees, and no doubt they had been careful to conceal his offer
from them. Very well! He would write to the Board of Trustees direct. He wrote forthwith a letter telling them in dignified terms what had occurred.

Alas! He might as well have spared himself the trouble. A polite note, thanking him for his generous intentions, made it clear that the Trustees placed every confidence in the Director and his staff. Mr. Darby refused to believe that they too were corrupt. No! The truth must be that they were hoodwinked by the creatures whom they had put in power. Well, so much for the authorities. There remained the public, the great British Nation itself. It was for the Nation, not for Sir Wilfred Montgomery and Mr. Roden, that his gift had been intended, and if the Nation could be informed of what had happened, things would undoubtedly take a very different turn. Well, he would inform the Nation, through the … ah … medium of the Press.

Accordingly Mr. Darby got to work at his desk once more, and soon he had composed a dignified letter to the Trustees of the National Gallery, and another, more strongly worded, to the British Nation. Not that Mr. Darby addressed this second letter to the Nation direct: he was fully aware that such communications were addressed to the Editor of the paper in which they appeared. He made a point of studying the letters in the daily papers, and, having thus acquired the proper tone, he began as follows:

‘Sir, May I beg the hospitality of your columns for the purpose of ventilating a crying need for reform in one of our public institutions. We have long been accustomed, and justly, to boast that England, and not only England but our whole Empire, had kept her hands clean from the prejudice and corruption which are so unfortunate an element in the lives of foreign nations.' Mr. Darby then went on to expound the whole story of the Darby Collection, and ‘with apologies for trespassing on your valuable space,' he begged to remain ‘Yours, etc.: William James Darby.'

Having read over this production with pardonable satisfaction Mr. Darby had a dozen typed copies made and forthwith addressed them to twelve of our principal daily papers.
He had hit on rather a good heading for the letter: ‘Art and Corruption.'

When all this had been accomplished he went out and posted the letters in person. Restored by this formal act to something of his old self, he went on his way, alert, important, and with a smouldering fire in his spectacles, down Charing Cross Road, past the Leicester Square Tube Station, Wyndham's and the Garrick Theatres, and then, crossing the road, broke full into Trafalgar Square, descending the steps and crossing it between the fountains from the northeast to the south-west corner, turning his head repeatedly as he did so, to throw a challenging glance at the portico of the National Gallery. ‘We shall see, my friends!' he muttered to himself grimly. ‘We shall see!'

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But what was eventually seen revealed to Mr. Darby another festering sore in the public life of our Empire. To those who still cling to a faith in British journalism it will seem unbelievable that not one of the papers to which Mr. Darby had sent his letter, printed it. Day by day he ran through the correspondence columns of all twelve of them: day by day he expectantly searched the letters he himself received, for surely the editors, even if they withheld his communication from the Nation, would write and give some explanation of their behaviour. But no, not a word, public or private! Editors, then, were as apathetic or as corrupt—probably both—as those persons whom Mr. Darby had already approached. They were resolved, as a body, to stand between Mr. Darby and the Nation.

That was the last straw. No man, with all the will and all the energy in the world, can stand up single-handed against an organized obstruction of this persistence and magnitude. Yet even now Mr. Darby did not immediately give in. For an hour he considered a last desperate effort; he considered the possibility of approaching the Nation direct, of taking his stand in Hyde Park, under the Marble Arch and boldly denouncing the scandal to the populace of London. But,
after all, what was the good? For in his bitter disillusionment he told himself that the attempt would be bound to fail. One of two things would be the only possible outcome. If the populace responded, the police would at once intervene, organized opposition would again wreck his schemes. But very likely the populace itself would save the police the trouble; very likely he would find in the populace too—in the Nation itself—that deadly apathy which he had found elsewhere. In either case, then, failure was certain. No! He would spare himself this final defeat. To court certain disaster was not bravery, but folly. After an hour's thought he decided definitely against the Marble Arch. ‘Too close to Tyburn Gallows,' he reminded himself grimly.

For days the poor little man sat at home utterly crestfallen. All his alertness was gone: the light had faded out of his spectacles and out of his soul. London was hateful to him now. What was the good of being a millionaire if you were debarred from taking your part in the life of the Nation? What was the good of being alone and friendless in this large house of which he occupied only a room or two? In his loneliness and melancholy his mind turned to Newchester. After all, the old life there had been very pleasant; the comforts of home, the busy hours in the office with Mr. Marston and McNab and Pellow that left no time for moody reflection, the jolly evenings with the Stedmans, the Cribbs and his other friends, and those delightful visits to the Quayside and The Schooner. Should he, after all, pack up, abandon all those fantastic dreams of his, and go home? But home would be different now with Sarah running about all over the place inspecting hospitals. How unlike Sarah it had been to break out like that. He was very far from approving of that sort of thing for women. Woman's place, to Mr. Darby's thinking, was in the home, not rushing about making speeches like a man. Besides, whether Sarah was there or not, what could he do all day long at home? He could not go round visiting his friends: they all had work to do which kept them busy till the evening: they would not
and could not be bothered with him. No! Turn where he would, he saw that he was unwanted.