Читать книгу Rumbin Galleries - Booth Tarkington - Страница 4

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Howard Cattlet’s doubt had been of the time allowed; but by moving more rapidly than was usual with him he made it sufficient and re-entered Rumbin Galleries at almost the precise moment named. His employer, whose shining broad face showed excitement, approved of him.

“Pyootiful!” Mr. Rumbin exclaimed, and turned to Miss Georgina Horne. She was delicately passing a small feather duster over the landscape in the display window. “Georchie,” Mr. Rumbin asked dramatically, “Georchie, you see it?”

Howard, slightly offended, wasn’t sure whether “it” applied to himself or to his brave apparel; then discovered that something more elaborate than either was intended. Miss Horne nodded seriously at Mr. Rumbin and said, “It’ll do.”

“Do?” the dealer cried. “It’s double a hundut per cent perfect! Me in only a nice sack suit but with a cutaway to order around—it’s a picture!” Between thumb and forefinger he took a fold of his new assistant’s sleeve, examined the texture. “Fine! Listen, Howie, I ain’t going to ring no buzzer for you. After I got her in the galleries, I commence the program myself with my great Dutch lentscape from the window here; then next I open the door and call to Georchie. ‘Miss Horne,’ I’ll say, ‘send me the Head Assistant with the Follower of Domenikos Theotocopoulos.’ Got it, Howie? It’s more connoisseur than a buzzer and like there’s more of you than just you. Get beck in the stock room so she don’t see you right first when she comes in.”

“Yes, sir.” Then, on his way to the rear of the shop, Howard heard Mr. Rumbin speaking further, though in a lowered voice, to the grey-eyed secretary.

“That puttikler dumb look he’s got when you talk to him it’s good, too; it’s aristocratic.”

Howard, reddening somewhat, went into the stock room, closed the door and sat down on the Louis Treize sofa that wasn’t. He stared at the strange furniture and at the racks of paintings, which he suspected of being even queerer than the furniture. The Follower of What’s-His-Name certainly was. “Doman—” he said aloud. “Domanigo—Follower of Domanigo Tea—” He didn’t believe he’d ever be able to remember all of El Greco’s real name. Maybe, though, he could learn to be a good Assistant Art Dealer without having to know how to pronounce everything distinctly. “Domanigo Teacupply,” he murmured, and thought that coughing in the middle of such names might help. He tried it, wasn’t satisfied, gave up, and sat apprehensive—just waiting.

Miss Horne opened the door. “It’ll be easy,” she said, comprehending the apprehension, though his expression was merely stolid. “Just watch Mr. Rumbin carefully and be natural. Mrs. Hollins is here. You’re to take the El Greco into the galleries.”

Howard rose. “El Greco? He said it was a Follower of—”

“It’s changed,” Miss Horne informed him, not smiling. “It’s the same picture. Take it in.”

He took the painting from the shelf; then paused. He’d begun to like Miss Horne’s appearance and had an impulse to talk to her. “Suppose the—the client asks me a question about one of the pictures—”

“Mr. Rumbin’ll answer it,” Miss Horne said. “When you’ve put the picture on the easel don’t stand between it and Mrs. Hollins. Go ahead.”

He obeyed, carried the picture out of the stock room, across the shop and into the “galleries”. In the center of the rather small room, a lady sat in a velvet chair, looking peevishly at the murky brown landscape, which was upon an easel at a little distance before her. She was fragile, restless-looking, thinly pretty, and what she wore was of a delicate prettiness, too; a dress of ivorine silk, a hat of cream and old rose—colors that were echoed in the frail rose-and-ivory wrap drooping from the back of her chair. Mr. Rumbin had placed an ash-tray upon a little table beside her, for her cigarette, and he stood deferentially, though with an enthusiastic facial expression, at a little distance to the right of the displayed picture. He seemed unaware of his assistant’s entrance.

“Not two people in a million,” he was saying, “not two people in t’ree million would right away said like you, Mrs. Kingsford J. Hollins, this great Seventeent’ Century Dutch School Italian lentscape it’s too brown, it’s too dark. In some people it’s a instinck to be a connoisseur; it’s born! Mrs. Kingsford J. Hollins, I congratulate you!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mrs. Hollins said. “I only know I know that picture’s too brown and it’s too dark.”

“Too brown and too dark is right! Look!” The dealer made a gracefully negligent gesture toward his new employee. “Look, it’s a young Herr Doktor from the Uniwersity, the Galleries’ Head Assistant. Even he ain’t never noticed it’s too brownish dark. Me? It shows I could be twenty-fife years a art dealer and still got something to learn. It’s mirackalous!”

He removed the landscape, set it against a wall; and Howard, inwardly upset by the doctor’s degree just conferred upon him, placed the Follower upon the easel.

“There!” Mr. Rumbin cried. “My great El Greco. You like?”

“Murder, no!” Mrs. Hollins said. “I should say not!”

Mr. Rumbin’s enthusiasm for her was unbounded. He appealed to Howard passionately. “Didn’t I told you yesterday right after I got the privilege she announces me she’ll come to Rumbin Galleries, didn’t I told you then right away I got beck she’s a collector? Simply, it’s proved!” More calmly, he addressed the client. “You’re right it ain’t no positive El Greco, Mrs. Kingsford J. Hollins. More it’s like a Follower Of. If I had Mrs. Kingsford J. Hollins’s eye for collecting I wouldn’t been no art dealer; I’d be a Museum Director.” He spoke again to Howard. “Bring my great Diaz flower piece.”

“Wait. I don’t like pictures of flowers,” Mrs. Hollins said discontentedly. “Have you got anything by Leonardo da Vinci?”

“By who?” Mr. Rumbin’s ample voice was suddenly small; he seemed enfeebled. “Who?”

“Leonardo da Vinci,” Mrs. Hollins repeated. “I like that Mona Lisa of his immensely. Haven’t you—”

“Frangkly, no.” Mr. Rumbin, swallowing, convalesced after shock. “Frangkly speaking, I ain’t never carried no Leonardos. Leonardos they’re more less scarce; some people think there ain’t almost any.” Completing his recovery, he beamed upon her again. “It’s good taste, though. Vonderful taste!” He spoke hurriedly to the Head Assistant. “Leaf out that next picture, the flowers.”

“Yes, sir.” Howard intelligently returned to the stock room, came back to the galleries bringing the third picture of the program, not the second. He placed it upon the easel from which Mr. Rumbin had removed the Follower Of. The new offering was an aged wooden panel with a surface of pigments once violent but now dulled into a dingy harmony.

“Adoration of the Magi by a Pupil of the Master of the Holy Kinship of Cologne.” Standing beside the easel, Rumbin moved his right thumb in exquisite curves as though using it to repaint the ancient picture. “Them Madonna’s robes! Sweetness! Them beards on the Wise Men! Majesty! Macknificent Flemish influenced prim—”

“Not as a gift!” Mrs. Hollins said. “You must think I’m crazy.” She looked at a diamond-bordered wrist watch. “Listen. Kingsford J. and I’re going on a three weeks motor trip to-morrow; I can’t sit around here all day.”

The new assistant, beginning to understand “programs” a little, was certain that this one had gone too far in discouraging the client and that she’d passed the precise degree of fatigue after which she could be made to get excited. He had not yet learned that his employer was himself an artist.

“Mrs. Kingsford J. Hollins,” Rumbin said, in a low and breathless voice, “it makes me feel senseless. Simply, it shows a grande dame can be also a connoisseur. One look and you reckanized a Flemish influenced primitive ain’t tasteful in your apartment. Ah, but wait!” He became dramatically commanding. “Bring my great Rosa Bonheur!”

“Yes, sir,” Howard said, and turned to go; but, behind Mrs. Hollins’s chair, Rumbin strode to him, whispered fiercely.

“Ask Georchie!”

Instantly the dealer turned smiling to his client. Howard went out to the shop and approached Miss Horne. “I think he must be mixing up the program. He told me to bring his great Rosa Bonheur.”

“It’s the side of a house; you’ll need help,” she said. “Come on.”

She led the way into the stock room, and there went to an enormous picture, the largest of those that leaned, backs outward, against the wall. Coincidentally there began to stir within Howard Cattlet, as he followed the competent young figure, a new and pleasurable feeling. It seemed to him that he might become warmly interested in his new calling on its own account. An art dealer’s life, he perceived, could be absorbing.

“What’s he want to show her this one for?” he asked. “She’s beginning to be pretty sore; why doesn’t he spring the one he really wants her to buy?”

“He’s still preparing her mind for that climax.” Miss Horne took a soft cloth from a shelf and applied it carefully to the edges of the big picture’s frame. “He knows of course she’ll say this Rosa Bonheur is preposterously too large; that’s just what he wants her to say. Then, after that, he’ll suddenly show her the Clouet, the portrait of a handsome Valois gentleman in jewels and velvet—a lovely small size and a really beautiful picture, too.”

“Clouet? He was French, wasn’t he?”

“Flemish and French,” Miss Horne said, continuing to wipe the great gilt frame. “Of course there aren’t more than ten or eleven fairly certain Clouets—the French Revolution wiped out so many records and pictures, too, you see—but likely enough one of the Clouets painted Mr. Rumbin’s Clouet.”

“One of them? One of the—”

“Yes, or one of the shop-staff of one of the Clouets. Of course, though, it just might be a Sixteenth Century police portrait.”

“Sixteenth Cen—” Howard looked at the shelves laden with baffling and oppressive pictures. “Police what?”

“They didn’t have photographs in those days,” she explained. “Pretty often they sent around copies of portraits of somebody who was wanted or escaped. Then take all the copies they gave their friends, and naturally you hear a good many small French portraits being called Clouet or Corneille de Lyon or—”

“Corneille—Corneille de who?” He looked at her humbly. “Do you have to know all these things about every picture in the world? How does anybody ever learn such a business?”

She gave him a glance in which there may have been some compassion; then was brisk. “You’ll pick up a good deal from Mr. Rumbin—if you stay. We’d better be getting ahead with the Rosa Bonheur; he’s had about as much time as he wants for talking between. I’ll only go as far with you as the door to the galleries.”

One at each end of the heavy picture, they lifted it, carried it from the stock room and across the shop. Miss Horne proved to be one of those surprising girls who don’t look very strong but are; she was also capably executive. Near the door of the galleries she whispered, “Stop here!” and the two stood still. Mr. Rumbin could be heard speaking appetizingly of paintings of animals—of Paulus Potter’s immortal Bull, of superb cows by Troyon, of Monticelli’s jewelled fowls, of splendid goats by Salvatore Rosa. Other sonorous names rolled out from the unctuous voice; and Howard Cattlet, beginning to be fascinated, wished he knew something about them. Also, he hoped they were impressing Mrs. Hollins, and thus, almost unconsciously, the young man had the first symptoms of a loyal apprenticeship.

Miss Georgina Horne coughed rather loudly; her employer interrupted himself.

“Ah! She arrive’, my great Rosa Bonheur!”

He came hurrying forth, took Miss Horne’s place; and then, as he and his assistant brought their burden into the galleries and placed it before Mrs. Hollins, reproached him gayly. “Ah, these young Herr Doktors! Never should you lift a such picture alone! Why didn’t you call Schmidt or Raoul to help you?”

“Sir?”

“Never mind,” Rumbin said hastily. “She’s too pig to go on the easel, set her down on the floor; we each holt her up at a corner. There! Mrs. Kingsford J. Hollins, the greatest of all animal painters, Rosa Bonheur! You seen her works in the Louvre, in the Metropolitan. I ask you as a connoisseur, which? Them or this, which?” He used his free thumb as if repainting again. “This left ear of this horse! That little passage there! Organization! Seven horses—four great grand foreground horses putty near life size, and t’ree behind in the beckground—altogedda seven horses. Action! Movement! Power! Simply, it’s majesty!”

Howard looked at Mrs. Hollins expectantly, awaiting her denunciation of the seven horses; but, to his astonishment, her mood of bored annoyance seemed to change. She stopped smoking.

“Listen!” she said. “Why didn’t you show this one to me in the first place? I got an uncle used to have horses like that on his stock farm. I always did like horses. Yessir; that’s a right good picture.” Her appreciation increased; she nodded decisively. “I’ll take that one,” she said.

“Madame?” Mr. Rumbin stared at her, chop-fallen. “You say—you say you wish to acquire this great pig Rosa Bonheur?”

“I’ll take it,” she said, rising. “I’ll take it if you can find a nice place for it in my apartment. Send it up this afternoon.” She turned to Howard amiably. “Doctor Um, do you mind telling my chauffeur to bring up the car?”

Howard went out to the street and found a glossy cream-colored touring-car already before the door. He spoke to the chauffeur, who descended and stood by. Mrs. Hollins came from the shop. Mr. Rumbin accompanied her, voluble upon the lifelong joy she’d have in her great Rosa Bonheur and the honor her visit had done him. Bowing from where his waist should have been, he kissed her gloved hand, bowed her into the car and bowed thrice again as it moved away. Then, with a stricken face, he rapidly preceded his assistant into the shop.

“Georchie!” he cried hoarsely to Miss Horne, who was replacing the Italianate Dutch landscape in the window. “Georchie, complete hell she knocked out of the program! The Clouet she never even seen, buys the Rosa Bonheur, never asks the price, I’m ruined!”