Of these dramas Vance was the central character. By an analytical and interpretative process which, as far as I know, has never before been applied to criminal activities, he succeeded in solving many of the important crimes on which both the police and the District Attorney’s office had hopelessly fallen down.
Due to my peculiar relations with Vance it happened that not only did I participate in all the cases with which he was connected, but I was also present at most of the informal discussions concerning them which took place between him and the District Attorney; and, being of methodical temperament, I kept a fairly complete record of them. In addition, I noted down (as accurately as memory permitted) Vance’s unique psychological methods of determining guilt, as he explained them from time to time. It is fortunate that I performed this gratuitous labor of accumulation and transcription, for now that circumstances have unexpectedly rendered possible my making the cases public, I am able to present them in full detail and with all their various side-lights and succeeding steps—a task that would be impossible were it not for my numerous clippings and adversaria[5].
Fortunately, too, the first case to draw Vance into its ramifications was that of Alvin Benson’s murder. Not only did it prove one of the most famous of New York’s causes célèbres[6], but it gave Vance an excellent opportunity of displaying his rare talents of deductive reasoning, and, by its nature and magnitude, aroused his interest in a branch of activity which heretofore had been alien to his temperamental promptings and habitual predilections.
The case intruded upon Vance’s life suddenly and unexpectedly, although he himself had, by a casual request made to the District Attorney over a month before, been the involuntary agent of this destruction of his normal routine. The thing, in fact, burst upon us before we had quite finished our breakfast on that mid-June morning, and put an end temporarily to all business connected with the purchase of the Cézanne paintings. When, later in the day, I visited the Kessler Galleries, two of the water-colors that Vance had particularly desired had been sold; and I am convinced that, despite his success in the unravelling of the Benson murder mystery and his saving of at least one innocent person from arrest, he has never to this day felt entirely compensated for the loss of those two little sketches on which he had set his heart.
As I was ushered into the living-room that morning by Currie, a rare old English servant who acted as Vance’s butler, valet, major-domo and, on occasions, specialty cook, Vance was sitting in a large armchair, attired in a surah silk dressing-gown and grey suede slippers, with Vollard’s book on Cézanne open across his knees.
“Forgive my not rising, Van,” he greeted me casually. “I have the whole weight of the modern evolution in art resting on my legs. Furthermore, this plebeian early rising fatigues me, y’ know.”
He riffled the pages of the volume, pausing here and there at a reproduction.
“This chap Vollard,” he remarked at length, “has been rather liberal with our art-fearing country. He has sent a really goodish collection of his Cézannes here. I viewed ’em yesterday with the proper reverence and, I might add, unconcern, for Kessler was watching me; and I’ve marked the ones I want you to buy for me as soon as the Gallery opens this morning.”
He handed me a small catalogue he had been using as a book-mark.
“A beastly assignment, I know,” he added, with an indolent smile. “These delicate little smudges with all their blank paper will prob’bly be meaningless to your legal mind—they’re so unlike a neatly-typed brief, don’t y’ know. And you’ll no doubt think some of ’em are hung upside-down,—one of ’em is, in fact, and even Kessler doesn’t know it. But don’t fret, Van old dear. They’re very beautiful and valuable little knickknacks, and rather inexpensive when one considers what they’ll be bringing in a few years. Really an excellent investment for some money-loving soul, y’ know—inf’nitely better than that Lawyer’s Equity Stock over which you grew so eloquent at the time of my dear Aunt Agatha’s death.”[7]
Vance’s one passion (if a purely intellectual enthusiasm may be called a passion) was art—not art in its narrow, personal aspects, but in its broader, more universal significance. And art was not only his dominating interest, but his chief diversion. He was something of an authority on Japanese and Chinese prints; he knew tapestries and ceramics; and once I heard him give an impromptu causerie[8] to a few guests on Tanagra figurines, which, had it been transcribed, would have made a most delightful and instructive monograph.
Vance had sufficient means to indulge his instinct for collecting, and possessed a fine assortment of pictures and objets d’art[9]. His collection was heterogeneous only in its superficial characteristics: every piece he owned embodied some principle of form or line that related it to all the others. One who knew art could feel the unity and consistency in all the items with which he surrounded himself, however widely separated they were in point of time or métier[10] or surface appeal. Vance, I have always felt, was one of those rare human beings, a collector with a definite philosophic point of view.
His apartment in East Thirty-eighth Street—actually the two top floors of an old mansion, beautifully remodelled and in part rebuilt to secure spacious rooms and lofty ceilings—was filled, but not crowded, with rare specimens of oriental and occidental, ancient and modern, art. His paintings ranged from the Italian primitives to Cézanne and Matisse; and among his collection of original drawings were works as widely separated as those of Michelangelo and Picasso. Vance’s Chinese prints constituted one of the finest private collections in this country. They included beautiful examples of the work of Ririomin, Rianchu, Jinkomin, Kakei and Mokkei.
“The Chinese,” Vance once said to me, “are the truly great artists of the East. They were the men whose work expressed most intensely a broad philosophic spirit. By contrast the Japanese were superficial. It’s a long step between the little more than decorative souci[11] of a Hokusai and the profoundly thoughtful and conscious artistry of a Ririomin. Even when Chinese art degenerated under the Manchus, we find in it a deep philosophic quality—a spiritual sensibilité[12], so to speak. And in the modern copies of copies—what is called the bunjinga[13] style—we still have pictures of profound meaning.”
Vance’s catholicity of taste in art was remarkable. His collection was as varied as that of a museum. It embraced a black-figured amphora by Amasis, a proto-Corinthian vase in the Aegean style, Koubatcha and Rhodian plates, Athenian pottery, a sixteenth-century Italian holy-water stoup of rock crystal, pewter of the Tudor period (several pieces bearing the double-rose hall-mark), a bronze plaque by Cellini, a triptych of Limoges enamel, a Spanish retable of an altar-piece by Vallfogona, several Etruscan bronzes, an Indian Greco Buddhist, a statuette of the Goddess Kuan Yin from the Ming Dynasty, a number of very fine Renaissance wood-cuts, and several specimens of Byzantine, Carolingian and early French ivory carvings.
His Egyptian treasures included a gold jug from Zakazik, a statuette of the Lady Nai (as lovely as the one in the Louvre), two beautifully carved steles of the First Theban Age, various small sculptures comprising rare representations of Hapi and Amset, and several Arrentine bowls carved with Kalathiskos dancers. On top of one of his embayed Jacobean book cases in the library, where most of his modern paintings and drawings were hung, was a fascinating group of African sculpture—ceremonial masks and statuette-fetishes from French Guinea, the Sudan,