Читать книгу Rumbin Galleries - Booth Tarkington - Страница 5

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This lament of Mr. Rumbin’s, one sustained outcry, he uttered as he strode tragically through the shop, and the last and loudest of it, “I’m ruined!” was heard from within the galleries, where he seemed to wish to seclude himself with his anguish. To the new assistant, art dealing appeared to be a confounding business. Here was the very largest picture in the place sold—and the fortunate dealer expressing agony in a Latin manner! Howard again sought enlightenment from the serious, grey-eyed secretary.

“What on earth’s he mean? How’s he—”

“ ‘Ruined’?” she said sadly. “It might be. It’s a long time since we’ve made a sale. He really hasn’t had any client at all and he’d set all his hopes on getting her down here to-day; he was pretty sure it was his last chance. It’s a pity. He’s an extraordinary man and lovely to work for. I’m afraid you ought to know, Mr. Cattlet, because maybe you’d better not count on—on—”

“On my wages?”

“Yes. He mightn’t be able—”

“Yours, too?” Howard asked. For a moment the two young people looked at each other in comradely concern; he had a sympathetic inspiration. “You haven’t had yours for a long time, have you, Miss Horne?” Then, as she didn’t reply, he protested, “But since he’s just sold that big picture, why on earth—”

“It’s because—”

She got no further; Mr. Rumbin, looking as haggard as a heartily healthy fat man can, came striding vehemently from the galleries. “Try to sell her a white mice; no, she buys a elephant! Buys a work of art because she had a uncle with a stock farm! Menacheries I could sell. Old Masters? No! I’m a animals seller!”

“Don’t give up,” Georgina said. “Mr. Rumbin, it isn’t certain—”

“Certain? It ain’t certain I’m benkrupt, either; it just looks like it!” The dealer sank into a chair, wiped his forehead. “In the first place, how would I make a price? Year Eighteen eighty-eight a Rosa Bonheur sold twenty-one t’ousand dollars Christie’s. Nineteen twenty-eight it sells again, the same picture identical, at Christie’s, forty-six guineas; it’s maybe two hundut t’irty dollars. Ask anybody rich under ten t’ousand dollars for a picture that size, they think it’s no good. If I ask Mrs. Kingsford J. Rollins twenty t’ousand dollars, somebody comes in, tells her, ‘I seen a Rosa Bonheur good as yours, two hundut t’irty dollars.’ Right away she sues me!”

“No, she wouldn’t,” Miss Horne said. “She wouldn’t want her husband to know she’d been that foolish.”

“Georchie, I’m a art dealer, not a bleckmailer—not yet I ain’t. To-morrow who knows! Yet all the time, what’s the use talking the price of a mountain that starts her screeching, ‘Take it beck out!’ soon as it’s inside her apartment where I would got to hire a architect to block up windows to—”

“Mr. Rumbin, you don’t know there isn’t wall space. You haven’t seen Mrs. Hollins’s apartment. Aren’t you even going to try?”

“Try? Am I going to try?” A change almost startling took place within and upon Mr. Rumbin; he rose, grimly Napoleonic. “Them seven horses goes into Mrs. Kingsford J. Hollins’s apartment! The price it’s t’irteen t’ousand eight hundut fifty, sue me or not. Georchie, get me Schwankel’s truck on the ’phone. Howie, put on your hat; me and you ride in the truck with the Rosa Bonheur. It safes a taxi and teaches you hendling pictures. I create Mrs. Kingsford J. Hollins into my ideel client if it kills her!”

... One item of this desperate declaration the apprentice found warranted. After getting the Rosa Bonheur into and out of the freight elevator at the Park Avenue apartment building, and moved from one to another of Mr. and Mrs. Hollins’s costly rooms, Howard Cattlet indeed had learned something about the handling of pictures. The more skill he acquired, however, the less hopeful dared he be that Miss Horne’s arrears of salary might be paid (he put this first) and that he could establish himself firmly as an Art Dealer’s Assistant.

It was his chief who snuffed out the last glimmer. The two were left alone together by Mr. Hollins’s valet, who had accompanied them throughout most of the laborious tour. Mr. Rumbin descended from a stepladder, a tape-measure dangling from his flaccid hand.

“It’s over!” He spoke in a husky whisper. “The last chance—and she’d stick out nine inches across them window-curtains!” His voice grew somewhat louder and much bitterer. “The both drawing-rooms, the reception-room, the music-room, dining-room and Mr. Hollins’s damn den—if it ain’t a door it’s a window, and if it ain’t a window it’s a fireplace too narrow, and if it ain’t a fireplace it’s a alcove stops it. Look! Decorated by Moultons; I’d know ’em anywhere—reds, whites, silvers, choc’lates, overstuffed brocades, new golds, silver-gilt French ’phones, bleck marble shiny Egypt cats—it oughts to be against the law! What Moultons must stuck ’em, anyways a hundut t’ousand, I know their prices, they’re hogs, it’s criminal!” He drooped again, smiled piteously. “Howie, I might commenced liking you some time. The cutaway worked good, too. I’m sorry you ain’t going to have no chob with me. I’m finish’. It’s a receiver.”

Howard had an innocently barbarous bright idea. “Mr. Rumbin, why couldn’t you trim off part of this picture and—”

“Orcas would; he’s a wandal.” The dealer shook his head. “No, any way you try to cut this picture down it leafs part of a horse. Even a chauffeur would get upset to look at it.”

Thus the end seemed to have come definitely. Master and apprentice stood silent, sharing calamity and listening to approaching voices.

Mrs. Hollins came in, accompanied by a bored little girl of thirteen, recognizably her daughter; and Howard despondently observed that the mother had changed her clothes but not her colors and that the daughter’s garments were similar in tint. Mrs. Hollins at Rumbin Galleries had worn a silk dress, cream or old ivory, with a hat and wrap in which the same color was patterned with tones of rose. Hatless, she now wore a rose chiffon dress with creamy lace; and the little girl had on a skirt of palest tan, pink socks, light tan slippers and a tan blouse embroidered in rose. The young assistant hadn’t much of an eye for ladies’ dress and he was gloomy; but the irrelevant thought came into his mind that Mrs. Hollins’s taste must run pretty strongly to these two colors.

“Well, Mr. Rumbin,” she asked brightly, “have you found a nice place for my horse picture to go?”

“You don’t get it!” Again Howard was startled by a change in his employer. Stooped in despair but a moment ago, the dealer stood erect; his voice was commanding, his look imperious and stern. “Mrs. Kingsford J. Hollins, you are a connoisseur and I am a connoisseur. I wouldn’t sell you my Rosa Bonheur for a hundut t’ousand dollars!”

“What? What’s the matter?”

“Matter? What ain’t?” Rumbin’s sternness increased to a passionate severity. “How long you had this apartment, all hot reds, cold whites, hot choc’lates, cold silvers, hots next to colds, hot over-stuffings, gilt ’phones, marble cats? How long?”

“What?” She was annoyed but puzzled. “About a year. What’s that got to do with—”

“A year!” Rumbin seemed to swell with a noble fury. “A year and already you are sick of it! I know it. What connoisseur such as you could endure this rhodomontado of colors? I don’t ask who you let decorate or what you got charged; but if it was t’irty t’ousand dollars it was a murder! For execkly half that much in t’ree weeks I would make this apartment so pyootiful it would look like connoisseurs and angels dreamed it and Mrs. Kingsford J. Hollins lived in it. Fifteen t’ousand dollars, make it eighteen t’ousand, t’ree weeks while you’re away, and it’s a heaven!”

“Nonsense! If you aren’t going to hang up that picture—”

“The Rosa Bonheur?” he cried. “Never! I sell people what they oughts to have; Rosa Bonheur you shall not. Pictures come after, not before. What you shall have, it’s this apartment all over—every room, all, all the whole of it—in just shades of two colors and no more.”

She frowned. “What two colors?”

“Rose! Rose and ivory!” he shouted. “Old rose and old ivory. Walls, curtains, draperies, carpets, everything! No reds, no whites. Just rose and ivory, Mrs. Kingsford J. Hollins, rose and ivory!”

Mrs. Hollins’s lips parted; her startled eyes grew large. Like a magician, Rumbin, glaring, held her fixed gaze with his, while the little girl, boredom suddenly gone, jumped up and down.

“Mamma, it sounds perfectly dee-vine!” she squealed. “Mamma, all we got to do I’ll tell Papa it’ll get you nervous again if he don’t like it. Mamma, let’s do it!”

“Listen,” Mrs. Hollins said. “I believe it’d be right pretty. Kingsford J.’s just come in and gone to his den. Yessir, I believe I’ll go tell him. It sounds good. Come on, Lulu; we’ll spring it on him.”

“Yay, Mamma!” The little girl, screaming with pleasure, ran out of the room and her mother followed.

Rumbin called after them. “Rose and ivory! All in tones of rose and ivory exceptings Mr. Hollins’s den. He likes it; it stays. All the rest rose and ivory. All finish’ done complete when you get beck from your t’ree weeks motor trip you start on to-morrow. Rose and ivory!”

He strode to a glossy oval table, picked up an instrument of silver-gilt and placed himself in communication with Rumbin Galleries. “Georchie, to-morrow morning I get me t’ree weeks more lease life again from the benk. Call up them inside house painters, Bort and Zolex, tell ’em be six o’clock this afternoon at the Galleries. Get me Frank the carpenter six-t’irty. Call up Orcas; tell him I maybe got a use for his Beauvais sofa and his six rose-and-cream petit point chairs, holt ’em, I see him to-morrow. The Rosa Bonheur it’s out for good; forget it. I got a deal eighteen t’ousand dollars costs me twenty-fife, I lose seven. If it comes off t’ree weeks from now, Georchie, we move to Fifty-sevent’ Street. If it don’t your celery’s maybe not and I’m sick in chail!”