Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 700
“Of course it was to be expected,” Rossbeke said. “Could we dare imagine that after the war Captain and Mrs. Murties will reside in Middleboro, Alabama?”
“Likely!” Helena jeered at the Director’s innocence. “Live away from the Oaklin tradition, Oaklin Museum, Oaklin Symphony Hall? You do have sweet dreams! She’ll install her captain in our vermiform appendix.”
“Captain Murties looks rather sturdy, Helena. You don’t think he’d have anything to say about — —”
“Not about anything. Who ever did?” Helena said. “I’m glad the engagement’s announced; but I could still worry. A new man-cousin — a picturesquely injured one — how exciting! I wish we could lock him up even where he is now if it would keep him out of the orbit of turmoil. He couldn’t take it.”
“ ’Even where he is now’? Where’s that?”
“In the cellar,” Helena said grimly, and explained. “He has that old janitor, Anson, helping him get out our Pieter de Hooch, the Ter Borch, and the two Jacob Ruisdaels for this gallery. Since the bombing scare’s really over, I don’t see why we shouldn’t put the rest of our best on show again, do you?”
“No, I’d been going to suggest it. Poor old Anson’s rather a wreck, though. Do you think Bailey’s hearty enough to handle such heavy pictures as the Ruisdaels?”
“It’s better to let him try when he wants to,” she said. “He wouldn’t tackle it if he weren’t getting surer of himself. That’s very much to the good.”
Rossbeke agreed, then added, “I notice he still seldom looks at anybody and when he talks he speaks in a voice so low it’s hard to hear him. Is he that way at The Cranford, too?”
“Well, about,” she answered. “When he tries to be cheerful it isn’t quite so heartbreaking as it was at first. The most encouraging thing is how he’s gone at his work — the new cataloguing and all the rest of it. Last week he cleaned that faded Reynolds, got every scrap of the old varnish off and not a molecule of paint. He really knows how to handle pictures.”
“Yes, lucky for us! If he hadn’t justified us in taking up Bedge’s idea of sending him here we could have been put in a hole, Helena.”
“Put to the sword!” she more than assented. “We’re safe enough; but the cure’s still at stake, Henry. If he didn’t happen to be their cousin I’d be less uneasy about keeping him cloistered. Saturday afternoon he told me he’d noticed a middle-aged lady in a car on the driveway the other side of the Oaklin house. He said he thought it might be his Cousin Folia. He’d forgotten to leave his name with the caretaker while they were away, so now he’d have to make that call and hadn’t he better get it over with? Didn’t need to stay more than twenty minutes or so, did he? I told him I thought he could go on postponing it; but I — —”
Bailey Fount and an aged man in overalls came through one of the entrances to the gallery, bringing four pictures. Bailey carried the two heavier ones, the aged man the two lighter. Rossbeke and Helena Jyre jumped up from their bench; Rossbeke hurried to Bailey.
“Here, young fellow!” the Director said. “Those frames and the glass over the Ruisdaels weigh a ton. You’re not supposed to — —”
“I took ’em away from Anson,” Bailey interrupted. “Ought to save him for his janitoring as much as we can, oughtn’t we? I borrowed him from his own work and — —”
Rossbeke took one of the heavy pictures. “Supposed to be humoring a game leg, aren’t you?”
“Not much any more. Besides, my arms aren’t game. I’m not wholly decrepit.”
“Here!” Miss Jyre called to them from the western end of the gallery. “All four of those pictures belong down here on this end wall. I’ll help you make proper space for ’em, Bailey. We’ll have to move — —”
“No, let me, please,” he said, as he and Rossbeke set down the two paintings, letting them lean against the wall. “I have it all figured out for a new arrangement, if you’ll let Anson and me do the hanging, please.” He stood, frowning, and muttered, “Too bad!”
“What’s too bad?” she asked.
“The walls. Stony cold grey. Behind these old Dutch pictures, the grey ought to have a thin bluish wash over it. You’d hardly notice the difference; but it would be there and you’d feel it. I could do it easily.”
“Not in one day, could you, Bailey? ‘Open to the public every day except Mondays.’ You could be right about your bluish tinge, though, and some time we might close off this gallery and let you experiment. Would you really rather I didn’t help you arrange the placing of these pictures now?”
“Yes, I’d like to do it if — —”
“Go ahead. Place ’em according to your plan for ’em, and Mr. Rossbeke and I’ll come back later and find all the fault we possibly can. Go to it!”
She and Rossbeke turned away, walking noiselessly over the cork floor toward the entrance at the opposite end of the gallery, and they had about reached the center of the big room when the Director’s secretary, Mrs. Williams, came hurrying in. Her hands fluttered warnings at Rossbeke; she spoke pantingly. “Mr. Rossbeke, she’s looking for you and she’s got her new fiancé with her, so she’s sure to be you know how. You could get out through the Flemish Room. I was afraid she’d follow me and —— Oh, Golly, she has!”
Through the archway a girl in heather sport-clothes came swiftly, a long pace in advance of the officer Bailey Fount had once vaguely thought mysterious. No one could have looked less so than did Captain Murties. Plainly a taste for art was not his; and in this museum, like a business man dragged by his wife, he had the air not of an escort but of a compelled follower. “So there you are, are you, Rossbeke?” the girl cried, with a gayety too brittle to be genuine. “How many hours have I wasted hunting you how many years!” She and her military friend joined the group of three, Rossbeke, Miss Jyre and Mrs. Williams. “Can’t you ever stop giving your imitation of a lost golf ball, Rossbeke?”
He responded dryly. “Not until you make me stop wishing I were one.”
“How pat!” She laughed, not cordially. “You’ll have to meet Captain Murties, I suppose. You may have seen the announcement of his ill-starred fate; yes, we’re betrothed.” She noticeably ignored the near presence of Helena Jyre; Mrs. Williams was retiring hurriedly from the gallery. “I’ve been engaged to Captain Murties for almost two months, Rossbeke, so it’s certainly about time he saw the inside of the Oaklin Museum, isn’t it?”
Rossbeke said that indeed it was, and began to offer congratulations. He was interrupted immediately.
“Yes, it’s going to be terribly darling and all that; but see here, Rossbeke, I want you to stand up to John Horne the next time he begins interfering with my poor Mrs. Hevlin. She’s rearranged the Oaklin Chinese sculptures the way they ought to be. Old Horne’s always insisting they should be grouped to fit the Dynasties; but that’s history, not art. You’ll agree there’s a difference between æsthetics and documentation, won’t you, Rossbeke?”
“Yes,” he said, looking tired. “I’ll agree to that.”
“You’d better! Mrs. Hevlin’s put the sculptures from the Shansi Caves next to the Afghanistan stone figures that show Hellenistic influence. Horne’ll rave when he stops pouting, comes back and sees it; but I want those pieces kept precisely as they are now. The way Mrs. Hevlin’s got them, their affinities of mass, form and line are correct to an æsthetically trained eye. That’s the kind of eye I use, myself, as it happens, and I seldom see eye to eye with John Horne, thank heaven! You’ll grant me that, too, I suppose, Rossbeke?”
“Yes, readily.”
“Very well,” she said. “I’ll expect you to back up Mrs. Hevlin. There’s another matter. Somebody’s been bringing up a number of our best pictures from the basement vaults where they’re safe. Nobody’s asked me about that and it’s rather recklessly premature, isn’t it?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I suppose you wouldn’t.” Again she laughed, not cordially; then she used the tone of an adult amiably indulgent to absurd children. “You’re delightfully the scholar of course, Rossbeke, absorbed in the lore of the ages and all that; but you do have to remember, don’t you, that you’re the Director of a modern museum? Absentminded art historians are charming in their own way; but oughtn’t even they to sit up a little and begin to be aware that there’s a global war on and airplanes can be injurious? They really can — or haven’t you heard?”
At the end of the gallery, forty feet distant, the old janitor, Anson, half-way up a stepladder he’d brought, handed down a painting to Bailey Fount and informed him privately, “That’s Miss Josephine Oaklin. Her folks used to kind of own this museum; guess they still partly do or something. Pretty, ain’t she?”
Bailey was anxiously examining the picture he held. “What? This canvas is blooming; I’ll clean it to-morrow. Who’d you say’s pretty?”
“Her, yonder. Orders me around fairly sharp sometimes; but little I care as long as she goes on payin’ my married daughter’s hospital expenses.” The old man giggled under his breath. “Gets plenty people mad at her. Look at Miss Jyre’s face!”
Bailey turned his head and looked, not at Helena Jyre, now standing aloof from the other three in the central area of the gallery, but at Josephine Oaklin.
He saw, clarified in the cool and diffused light of the gallery, a face like a fair Florentine’s, as daintily modeled as Beauty’s own; saw a figure light as air, all symmetry, Botticellian Aphrodite in Scotch homespun; and from this exquisite creature’s every movement, from every change of her versatile lips and grey eyes, from every tone of her rich and varying voice, there radiated two informations: that she was a personage and that for men she was the most desirable of her sex. At first sight, few would not have been stirred to agree with her, women challengedly; but Bailey Fount turned back to his work untouched.
He perceived that she was what any young man would have defined as beautiful. He hadn’t caught her name when Anson spoke it; but he thought maybe he’d seen her somewhere, though that was unlikely; he didn’t try to remember. A recent memory, though, was vaguely stirred by the unusual voice octaving up from lower tones as suavely contralto as those of a ‘cello. The voice was used over-expressively, yet had the quality of a noble instrument and among a hundred would have caught the ear. It did catch Bailey’s; but he wasn’t bothering about that. He wasn’t interested in beautiful girls or beautiful voices. He wanted to cure his nerves and get back to the Army.
Thus far she hadn’t observed him noticingly, hadn’t seen his over-shoulder glance at her, and she went on talking, enjoying her own satirical instruction of the Director upon the subject of bombing, using her apparently wood-carved betrothed as audience. Wearying presently of this sport, she let her grey eyes wander and became aware of the quiet operations at the end of the room. “What the devil’s going on there?” she asked, not lowering tones easily audible to Bailey Fount. “What do those two think they’re doing, moving everything about? I saw to the arrangement of the pictures on that wall, myself, last spring. Who is all that, anyhow?”
Rossbeke’s annoyance was plain. “Who’s all what?”
“The officious person in the tweed jacket. What’s he doing here? I never could stand the type of young men that go in for museum work. They’re all delicate little supercillies hoisting their eyebrows half-way up to their hair at you to cover up what they don’t know. What’s this one? A new janitor?”
“Not precisely,” Rossbeke said. “He’s the museum’s Assistant Curator of Paintings.”
“What?” She looked affronted. “Since when?”
“Since early in August.”
“Who hired him?” she asked imperiously.
“I did — with the approval of the President of the Museum and of the Trustees’ Executive Committee.”
“Oh, indeed!” she said. “Are you aware that I happen to be a member of that committee?”
“Yes; but you were away.”
“What if I was? Why wasn’t I notified? Who’s responsible for not notifying me? Just office negligence?”
“No, I’m responsible.”
“Oh, you are?” she cried. “You accept the responsibility for making an appointment of that importance without consulting me, do you?”
Rossbeke looked dogged. “Yes. I’ve explained that you were away.”
“You think that lets you out? You’re virtually admitting, aren’t you, that you persuaded old John and that committee to act without a word to me, Thomas Oaklin’s living representative? The wishes of the Oaklin family needn’t be consulted nowadays, no matter what sacrifices we made for this institution? What are that young man’s qualifications for acting as an Assistant Curator of Paintings in the Thomas Oaklin Museum? What training has he had? Where does he come from?”
Rossbeke, goadedly conscious of Helena Jyre’s violent gaze, lifted a protesting hand. “Be careful, please! He’ll hear you.”
“You’re shushing me?” Josephine Oaklin’s eyes enlarged ominously; her piquant features took on a pink that proved even outright anger becoming to her. “Why shouldn’t he hear me? What’s that young man doing in an art museum, anyhow?”
“Please!” Rossbeke looked panicky. “You mustn’t — —”
“Oh, mustn’t I?” She set a gloved shapely hand patriotically upon Captain Murties’s dark olive sleeve and called out the injurious words at Bailey Fount’s tweed back: “Hanging pictures isn’t precisely a Four-F essential occupation, is it? Will somebody kindly inform me why that young man is not in uniform?”
Bailey’s back seemed to crumble inside the tweed coat. Helena Jyre took five fast steps forward and spoke in a hot low voice, face to face with Josephine. “You ask where he comes from? He comes from the Southwest Pacific. That was a rotten thing to say!”
Even upon that, Josephine Oaklin was able to continue her ignoring of Miss Jyre; but Captain Murties, though remaining stolid, spoke his mind. “Right,” he said. “Nobody has any business talking like that.”
The unloverlike speech brought no change in Josephine’s expression; but she removed her hand from Captain Murties’s sleeve, stepped aside from him and away from the angry Helena’s confrontation of her. She turned to Rossbeke. “What did you say his name is?”
“Bailey Fount.”
“What? Why, I’ve got a cousin named that. Of course this wouldn’t be — —”
“He is, though,” Rossbeke said. “Mr. Horne especially wanted him here because his mother was Mary Oaklin. He’s a nephew of the Founder.”
“What? Why, really!” Josephine’s displeasure seemed to vanish; she looked eager. “So that’s Bailey Fount! Mother was talking about that branch of our family only the other day, wondering what had become of young Bailey Fount. She’d never seen him; I think she hadn’t liked his father or somebody and neither had my grandfather. How in the world’s he ever happened to turn up here?”
She didn’t wait for an answer, but, evidently the creature of any contradictory impulse, ran lightly to the end of the gallery and stood beside Bailey Fount.
“Here!” she said, and caught him by the arm. “Let’s see what you look like!”
X
FLACCIDLY OBEDIENT, BAILEY let the jerk upon his sleeve turn him to face her; but after a meek upward glance kept his gaze upon the floor.
“Bailey Fount, I’m your cousin, Josephine Oaklin! Why haven’t you been to see me? Wouldn’t you like to know me? Anyhow, don’t you think you ought to?”
“Why — why, yes.”
“That all?” She let go his sleeve, flourished a hand at him, and was now of an almost dancing gayety. “You might at least look me over, mightn’t you? You could be that daring, couldn’t you?” Then, as again he glanced up and troubledly down, “Hurrah!” she cried. “That’s a brave lad; but don’t be so tragic at me! Haven’t I seen you before somewhere? Yes, I’ll swear I have! Haven’t I?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why, yes,” she said. “Yes, certainly I have! I was home one day last summer and somebody tried to come through the passage between the museum and our library. I slapped his ears down; but afterwards I kept remembering his face. Wasn’t that you? Don’t you remember?”
“Yes — I believe so.”
“Why, of course it was you, Cousin! I’m pretty clever to remember about that, aren’t I? — because then you were in a saggy uniform and all withered-up looking and now you’re really quite impressive. It must have been a kind of Oaklin look about you that made me remember you. Yes, you’ve got it. I see it. You were just from the Pacific then, weren’t you?”
“No. Hospital.”
“How dreadful! I’m afraid you heard what I said just now about your not being in uniform. What a shame! How disgusting of me!” She caught his arm again and was all new-cousinly affection. “I’m going to make that up to you; you’ll see! Do you know you’re the only cousin I’ve got? Did you know that?”
“No, I doubt if I did.”
“You actually are, though, Bailey Fount! Mother and I were talking about how run-out our family is on the Oaklin side, and she said we have only one Oaklin relative left. That’d be you, and think how strange it is my finding you here, right in the Oaklin Museum! You haven’t answered: Why haven’t you been to see me?”
“I — I’d meant to. I heard you and your mother were away.”
“Well, I’m not away any more!” she cried. “You’re an acquisition, and if you’ll stop being so shy Mother and I’ll prove it to you. First, I want you to meet my fiancé.” Her fingers slid down his sleeve, took his hand tightly and she brought him irresistibly back with her to the inanimately watching group in the center of the room. “Harold!” she called, laughing excitedly as she came. “Look what I’ve found! This is the only new cousin I’ll be able to give you, except those withered old creatures on Mother’s side. Captain Murties, Mr. Fount.”
