"Because circumstances won't let me. I sold practically all those pictures to Whitney C. Witt. It was all right. Anyhow I thought it was all right. I put Parfitts' name and reputation on their being yours. And then one day I heard from Mr. Witt that on the back of the canvas of one of the pictures the name of the canvas-makers, and a date, had been stamped, with a rubber stamp, and that the date was after your supposed burial, and that his London solicitors had made inquiries from the artist's-material people here, and these people were prepared to prove that the canvas was made after Priam Farll's funeral. You see the fix?"
Priam did.
"My reputation--Parfitts'--is at stake. If those pictures aren't by you, I'm a swindler. Parfitts' name is gone for ever, and there'll be the greatest scandal that ever was. Witt is threatening proceedings. I offered to take the whole lot back at the price he paid me, without any commission. But he won't. He's an old man; a bit of a maniac I expect, and he won't. He's angry. He thinks he's been swindled, and what he says is that he's going to see the thing through. I've got to prove to him that the pictures are yours. I've got to show him what grounds I had for giving my guarantee. Well, to cut a long story short, I've found you, I'm glad to say!"
He sighed again.
"Look here," said Priam. "How much has Witt paid you altogether for my pictures?"
After a pause, Mr. Oxford said, "I don't mind giving you the figure. He's paid me seventy-two thousand pounds odd." He smiled, as if to excuse himself.
When Priam Farll reflected that he had received about four hundred pounds for those pictures--vastly less than one per cent, of what the shiny and prosperous dealer had ultimately disposed of them for, the traditional fury of the artist against the dealer--of the producer against the parasitic middleman--sprang into flame in his heart. Up till then he had never had any serious cause of complaint against his dealers. (Extremely successful artists seldom have.) Now he saw dealers, as the ordinary painters see them, to be the authors of all evil! Now he understood by what methods Mr. Oxford had achieved his splendid car, clothes, club, and minions. These things were earned, not by Mr. Oxford, but for Mr. Oxford in dingy studios, even in attics, by shabby industrious painters! Mr. Oxford was nothing but an opulent thief, a grinder of the face of genius. Mr. Oxford was, in a word, the spawn of the devil, and Priam silently but sincerely consigned him to his proper place.
It was excessively unjust of Priam. Nobody had asked Priam to die. Nobody had asked him to give up his identity. If he had latterly been receiving tens instead of thousands for his pictures, the fault was his alone. Mr. Oxford had only bought and only sold; which was his true function. But Mr. Oxford's sin, in Priam's eyes, was the sin of having been right.
It would have needed less insight than Mr. Oxford had at his disposal to see that Priam Farll was taking the news very badly.
"For both our sakes, cher maître," said Mr. Oxford persuasively, "I think it will be advisable for you to put me in a position to prove that my guarantee to Witt was justified."
"Why for both our sakes?"
"Because, well, I shall be delighted to pay you, say thirty-six thousand pounds in acknowledgment of--er--" He stopped.
Probably he had instantly perceived that he was committing a disastrous error of tact. Either he should have offered nothing, or he should have offered the whole sum he had received less a small commission. To suggest dividing equally with Priam was the instinctive impulse, the fatal folly, of a born dealer. And Mr. Oxford was a born dealer.
"I won't accept a penny," said Priam. "And I can't help you in any way. I'm afraid I must go now. I'm late as it is."
His cold resistless fury drove him forward, and, without the slightest regard for the amenities of clubs, he left the table, Mr. Oxford, becoming more and more the dealer, rose and followed him, even directed him to the gigantic cloak-room, murmuring the while soft persuasions and pacifications in Priam's ear.
"There may be an action in the courts," said Mr. Oxford in the grand entrance hall, "and your testimony would be indispensable to me."
"I can have nothing to do with it. Good-day!"
The giant at the door could scarce open the gigantic portal quickly enough for him. He fled--fled, surrounded by nightmare visions of horrible publicity in a law-court. Unthinkable tortures! He damned Mr. Oxford to the nethermost places, and swore that he would not lift a finger to save Mr. Oxford from penal servitude for life.
Money-getting
He stood on the kerb of the monument, talking to himself savagely. At any rate he was safely outside the monument, with its pullulating population of midgets creeping over its carpets and lounging insignificant on its couches. He could not remember clearly what had occurred since the moment of his getting up from the table; he could not remember seeing anything or anyone on his way out; but he could remember the persuasive, deferential voice of Mr. Oxford following him persistently as far as the giant's door. In recollection that club was like an abode of black magic to him; it seemed so hideously alive in its deadness, and its doings were so absurd and mysterious. "Silence, silence!" commanded the white papers in one vast chamber, and, in another, babel existed! And then that terrible mute dining-room, with the high, unscalable mantelpieces that no midget could ever reach! He kept uttering the most dreadful judgments on the club and on Mr. Oxford, in quite audible tones, oblivious of the street. He was aroused by a rather scared man saluting him. It was Mr. Oxford's chauffeur, waiting patiently till his master should be ready to re-enter the wheeled salon. The chauffeur apparently thought him either demented or inebriated, but his sole duty was to salute, and he did nothing else.
Quite forgetting that this chauffeur was a fellow-creature, Priam immediately turned upon his heel, and hurried down the street. At the corner of the street was a large bank, and Priam, acquiring the reckless courage of the soldier in battle, entered the bank. He had never been in a London bank before. At first it reminded him of the club, with the addition of an enormous placard giving the day of the month as a mystical number--14--and other placards displaying solitary letters of the alphabet. Then he saw that it was a huge menagerie in which highly trained young men of assorted sizes and years were confined in stout cages of wire and mahogany. He stamped straight to a cage with a hole in it, and threw down the cheque for five hundred pounds--defiantly.
"Next desk, please," said a mouth over a high collar and a green tie, behind the grating, and a disdainful hand pushed the cheque back towards Priam.
"Next desk!" repeated Priam, dashed but furious.
"This is the A to M desk," said the mouth.
Then Priam understood the solitary letters, and he rushed, with a new accession of fury, to the adjoining cage, where another disdainful hand picked up the cheque and turned it over, with an air of saying, "Fishy, this!"
And, "It isn't endorsed!" said another mouth over another high collar and green tie. The second disdainful hand pushed the cheque back again to Priam, as though it had been a begging circular.
"Oh, if that's all!" said Priam, almost speechless from anger. "Have you got such a thing as a pen?"
He was behaving in an extremely unreasonable manner. He had no right to visit his spleen on a perfectly innocent bank that paid twenty-five per cent to its shareholders and a thousand a year each to its directors, and what trifle was left over to its men in rages. But Priam was not like you or me. He did not invariably act according to reason. He could not be angry with one man at once, nor even with one building at once. When he was angry he was inclusively and miscellaneously angry; and the sun, moon, and stars did not escape.
After he had endorsed the cheque the disdainful hand clawed it up once more, and directed upon its obverse and upon its reverse a battery of suspicions; then a pair of eyes glanced with critical distrust at so much of Priam's person as was visible. Then the eyes moved back, the mouth opened, in a brief word, and lo! there were four eyes and two mouths over the cheque, and four for an instant on Priam. Priam expected some one to call for a policeman;