From London Far Read online

  II

  The practical and everyday advantages of the exacting science known as Textual Criticism are admittedly few. To ponder the minute inaccuracies of long-dead scribes and thus penetrate through a corrupted text to the pristine meaning of a yet longer-dead orator or grammarian is a way of life not likely to be appealing to the actively inclined. And yet, in what was to be decidedly an active affair, Textual Criticism gave Meredith a good send-off, for it enabled him, between one rung and the next, to discover why the words London, a Poem should receive the inconsequent answer Rotterdam’s gone. He had been understood to say London’s going; and what he had exchanged with the sullen tobacconist was, in fact, a password and countersign. London’s going: Rotterdam’s gone. The second statement was as unchallengeable as it was melancholy. The first statement was an old guess and a bad one, since London, battered and beautiful, still very substantially existed all around him. An old guess; it was therefore to be inferred that the organization or racket or conspiracy – for certainly it was on something of the sort that he had stumbled – had been in existence for some time…

  Thus far did Meredith’s science take him. It could not at all tell him why he had himself done this extraordinary thing; why he should have thus unhesitatingly stepped into the melodrama so unexpectedly sprung upon him. But was it melodrama? Meredith, who was now more than halfway down the ladder, stopped, appalled. Had he come upon something merely sordid; perhaps upon a haunt of vice? Poised on the tobacconist’s ladder, he remembered a fable current in the Cambridge of his day. One went into a tobacconist’s shop (a tobacconist’s shop!), put a pound note on the counter, asked for some unlikely purchase, and was immediately ushered –

  Incontinently, a cold sweat broke out on Meredith’s brow. In horrid trepidation he peered down what was now revealed as a narrow, whitewashed corridor, dimly lit by small electric bulbs. Some twenty feet ahead it made a blank turn and disappeared – to open upon what? Had he not, in his innocence on the low life of the Metropolis, made a wholly embarrassing blunder? Meredith took a couple of paces forward, his mind unwontedly besieged by vivid, detailed and swiftly moving visual fantasies. His ignorance of the seamy side of modern London might be vast, but yet vaster was his knowledge of the seamy side of classical Rome. And this specialized information, for long sterilized and stored up for strictly learned purposes, now rioted before him in images of some vast Neronian lupanar, replete with everything that should satiate the farthest reach and curiosity of lust…

  How would one respond if one were by some black magic actually precipitated upon such surroundings – infinite artistries of the flesh amid a wilderness of marble and gold? The vision and the question hung before Meredith only for a moment and gave way to the drab conviction that he must indeed have broken across the threshold of a subterraneous brothel. And again images stirred in his mind. Memories, thirty years deep, showed him a student hurrying through these streets, and men in shabby Edwardian clothes beckoning meaningfully from doorways, and one man – his features perfectly recalled as they hung etched against gaslight – inviting to a house ‘where the girls danced on the table’. Meredith shivered. At twenty he had perhaps been a little tempted by these girls, but he had no wish to meet their granddaughters. Should he turn round and make for the ladder by which he had come?

  London’s going: Rotterdam’s gone. Who, after all, would think to choose such words as a passport to venery? Meredith’s confidence returned. He thrust his two ounces of tobacco into a pocket, clasped his dispatch-case firmly under an arm, and continued to advance down the corridor.

  The floor was swept; the whitewash had been recently renewed; round the little electric bulbs overhead no cobwebs had been allowed to gather. This was in marked contrast with the dilapidated and rather dirty shop above. It suggested the environs of a hospital, or at least of some institution markedly functional and antiseptic – but whether in this there was matter that should further allay his apprehensions Meredith felt that he was without the data for knowing. He pressed on and in a low, shadowless light turned the corner. And there, very abruptly, he stopped.

  Straight ahead, a lady reclined luxuriously on a divan. She wore a tiara and three strings of pearls; she had no clothes whatever; and she looked at Meredith with a steady and infinite enticement. This was embarrassing; but far more so was Meredith’s instant knowledge that the lady – and the lady thus frankly posed – was familiar to him. He had met her like this before. Meredith, his worst fears thus copiously confirmed, was about to suppose himself an unwitting Jekyll whose Hyde familiarly haunted such places as this when he realized that the low light and his own apprehensions had deceived him. The lady existed only on canvas. In fact, she was the Horton Venus. And she had been painted by Titian just on four hundred years ago.

  Meredith, now on easy and natural terms with what was thus strangely displayed, advanced with simple pleasure for a closer inspection. The Duke of Horton, he recalled, possessed amid his great collection of pictures two which were pre-eminent: Vermeer’s Aquarium, a little miracle of virtuoso edges, of jewelled, mirrored, and refracted light; and this prodigal evocation and transmutation of some great courtesan of Venice, golden-haired, black-eyed, and of ample and resplendent flesh, over the mastering of whose subtle planes and infinite dyes the artist had toiled through oblivious, torrid days. She lay on scarlet; behind her a great emerald curtain was drawn back to reveal an angry sky and a strip of mysteriously sun-drenched sea; upon the goddess herself scattered tints from this tremendous setting were at play with the ivory and rose and gold of the curved torso, the studied relaxation of the limbs. Meredith, when he had looked at the picture for some time, remembered that it ought to be at Horton House.

  He had seen it before, and the Vermeer too – but that had been at the Italian and Dutch Exhibitions back in the thirties. Normally the Vermeer lived at Scamnum Court, the Duke’s principal country seat. And the Titian lived in Town. But only –

  And then Meredith remembered. Horton House was a burnt-out shell, and had been so these two years past. One of the last of the big raids had got it. And by what the Duke – grown old and obstinate – had chosen to leave there, exposed to the hazards of bomb and rocket, a good many people had been disturbed. That the Duke himself should stop on in the vast, almost deserted house (sleeping, it was said, very comfortably in an attic which he shared with his butler) was his own affair, but assuredly he ought to have sent away the Titian, and the Gobelin tapestries, and the famous Crispin Collection of cameos. Not but what (Meredith seemed to remember) the precious things were thought to have turned out safe and sound after all, the Duke having in fact tucked them away in cellars far below the level of the nearby Thames. But this cellar certainly had nothing to do with Horton House; it was hidden in the heart of Bloomsbury. Why, then, should the Titian be here – and stacked casually against a whitewashed wall?

  Until he asked himself this question Meredith had been so absorbed by the great painting that he had not looked farther about him. Now he shifted his gaze – this with the intention of taking a comprehensive view of his surroundings – only to have it riveted once more on an immediately adjoining object. Almost blocking the corridor was an immense conglomerate of masonry and plaster, which would have looked like the disregarded product of some large-scale work of demolition but for the fact that it was held together by an elaborate system of steel rods and screws designed for the purpose. Meredith advanced several paces until he was in a position to examine the mass on its thither side. What he found was a fresco by Giotto. A very familiar fresco, which Meredith was accustomed to view as often as he visited Italy. The fact was astounding but undeniable. The Titian had travelled some five miles from Horton House. This formidable fragment of a thirteenth-century church had travelled some seven hundred from Florence!

  London’s going: Rotterdam’s gone – Meredith began to see some appositeness in these cryptic phrases. Toledo had gone – years ago an
d as a sort of curtain-raiser on chaos. That put a big question mark against most of the world’s El Grecos. Budapest had gone – which meant Caravaggios and Tiepolos. What had happened to the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, with its host of Rembrandts; to the Mauritshuis at The Hague, with the Head of a Girl, and the View of Delft? There were people whose business it was to collect information on such matters – but Meredith suspected that it was all pretty fragmentary as yet. And other things must be pretty fragmentary too: marbles, bronzes, terracottas, great paintings, rare books, unique manuscripts – enough of these lay in scraps, rubble, dust amid the still-smoking ruins of Europe. Experts and connoisseurs had followed the armies; and, doubtless, carefully constituted commissions timelessly inquired. But sufficient confusion must remain to afford scope to a small host of depredators and thieves. Had not the crowning achievement of Botticelli been discovered lying in a granary or a stable? Meredith shut his eyes at the thought of it. When he opened them again it was to find that he was no longer alone.

  Standing beside him, in fact, was Mr Spackman of the Department of Antiquities in a large provincial museum. Spackman was well known to Meredith – indeed, they had been at college together – and a meeting with him was always mildly embarrassing. For Spackman, unfortunately, was never quite sober; with a man who is never quite sober learned conversation is virtually impracticable; and for conversation other than learned and impersonal Meredith had, with Spackman, no list at all. Civilities, however, must always be exchanged – and so Meredith, suspending for a moment the puzzling speculations into which his situation had led him, took off his hat. Meredith took off his hat (since this was a good academic custom and not to be abrogated even in a thieves’ kitchen) and said pleasantly: ‘Good afternoon, Spackman. How are you?’

  But Spackman, who was muttering angrily to himself, appeared unaware of the greeting. He had been shambling forward and now stopped by a table where he proceeded to thrust into a Gladstone bag a massive and shiny object which Meredith at once identified as a something worse than mediocre Graeco-Roman bust. Spackman was trembling with irritation; the hinges of the bag kept shutting on his fingers; he swore under his breath in a fashion which Meredith found extremely distasteful. Nevertheless, Meredith advanced and took hold of the bag. ‘Let me hold it while you get the thing in,’ he said.

  Spackman swung round scowling; then, as he recognized who it was that had addressed him, his expression turned to consternation and fear. The spectacle was far from pleasing; from an inebriate red, the man’s complexion turned to something like a cadaver blue – but Meredith viewed it with much the satisfaction of a chemist who achieves similar results with a scrap of litmus paper. For here was what might be termed experimental verification of a working hypothesis – to wit, that this underground retreat was the business premises of some particularly enterprising receiver of stolen goods. And Meredith tapped pleasantly on the Gladstone bag which Spackman had now shut with a snap. ‘Turned down?’ he said interrogatively. ‘Not a sufficiently high-class crib?’

  This easy command of the jargon of larceny looked like being finally unnerving to Spackman. His mouth fell open and he swayed like one about to sag nastily at the knees. But suddenly his gaze fixed itself rigidly on a spot beneath Meredith’s left shoulder; he threw back his head and uttered a shrill, unsteady laugh; the laugh was followed by what could only be described as a confidential leer; he then picked up his rejected burden with an effort and staggered off down a side corridor which Meredith had not until this moment observed. With a nasty shock Meredith realized that what had arrested the attention of this old reprobate was his dispatch-case. Spackman had supposed it to be performing the same function as his own Gladstone bag.

  And a yet nastier reflection followed. This abominable catacomb was fast becoming a sort of illicit annex of what is known in Nottinghamshire as the Dukeries. For there against the wall was the Duke of Horton’s Venus, plainly filched from its proper métier of affording a refined aesthetic delectation to an aristocratic few. And here, in this same luckless dispatch-case, was the Duke of Nesfield’s famous Juvenal manuscript, which a former Duke of Nesfield had astutely stolen from a monastic library in the Levant, and which appeared in the most present danger of being stolen anew. For Meredith was now aware of certain yet more disturbing facts of environment. He stood just where his corridor opened out into a species of lobby or ante-chamber scattered about which – and on chromium and plywood chairs which nicely combined a hint of opulence with the still dominant antisepsis – sat various displeasing persons clutching either bags, parcels, boxes, small crates, or even articles of vertu or connoisseurship frankly unwrapped. Clients evidently – and evidently there was quite a waiting-list. But this was not all. Hard by a farther door stood a heavily-built man in what had much the appearance of the type of sober livery favoured by banking establishments for their messengers and superior attendants: only this man (who was looking suspiciously at Meredith) visibly sported two impressive pistols in holsters on his hips. And hard by him, behind a simple but clearly expensive chromium and ebony desk, sat a young lady at once glamorous and severely secretarial. In front of her were two telephones, as also one of those box-like contrivances into which business magnates bark and snap and growl so impressively in Hollywood films. The young lady was flicking a switch on this instrument now, and evidently proposing to speak into it with the utmost haste. And her eye at the same time was fixed upon Meredith – upon Meredith and his dispatch-case.

  Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay…

  Dr Johnson and Juvenal had not been so far off it after all.

  To be equal to such a situation as this, Meredith reflected, one has to think quickly. In romantic fiction, the hero invariably manages to do so; his mind – often extremely unnoticeable during other parts of the narrative – rises to the occasion and works like a flash. But unfortunately Meredith’s own thinking, although tolerably reliable, was on the slow side. Could he now successfully bid the machine do double time? The case was sufficiently urgent. For an organization which left Titians and Giottos lying about its outer corridors was evidently Big Business of the most unchallengeable kind, and it was unlikely to pack up its chromium furniture and house telephones and fade away because intruded upon by an unwitting scholar.

  Rather, it would be the scholar who would fade away. The man like a bank messenger would simply draw his pistol – and subsequently disguise the body as a case of bullion and remove it in a taxi. Here – unlike Titian’s Venus – was something that Meredith had not encountered before: the prospect of being (as they say) taken for a ride. Or bumped off. And Meredith shook his head slightly – this because it occurred to him to doubt whether to bump off were any longer contemporary idiom.

  As rapid thinking, this piece of philological curiosity was a bad start. But it had a marked and unexpected effect upon the young lady at the desk. For this abstracted shake of the head of Meredith’s apparently struck her as an authoritative and inhibiting gesture. She abandoned the motion of speaking into her box and looked at Meredith expectantly, as if asking for more. And now Meredith frowned and his mouth set grimly in a thin line. This was because he had once more recalled his custodianship of the Juvenal manuscript, and was confronting the fact that it would in all probability go down river in the same sack as the body – or would conceivably, were its value discovered, go the way of the Horton Venus. Here was a thought very dreadful to Meredith; it added to the fatal affair a sort of second death. And so Meredith frowned and looked grim. And this too had its effect upon the young lady. She blanched. And the man with the revolvers, who had been lounging against the frame of a closed door, straightened himself into a statuesque and formal pose.

  It was the man’s movement that first caught Meredith’s eye. For a moment he judged it ominous, a sort of equivalent of that ‘on your marks’ position that preludes athletic action. And then – and it was decidedly a matter of a flash – Meredith realized the
situation. These outer guardians of the establishment were as apprehensive of him as he was of them.

  Did they take him to be a detective-inspector from Scotland Yard, some notable scourge of hi-jackers and Black Marketeers, who would presently put a whistle to his lips and summon an overwhelming force of heavily armed police? Meredith would have liked to think that it was so, but modesty assured him that members of the Athenaeum do not readily suggest such a figure. Moreover, the quality of the apprehensiveness in the persons before him subtly but decisively negatived this reading of the situation. Rather, they were like –

  And Meredith paused to remember. Yes, they were like undergraduates just about to come before a board of examiners for some viva voce test. Aided by this comparison – or rather, thought Meredith, by this intuitive perception of illuminating analogy – it was possible to make a bold guess. He, Meredith, was being taken for one of the bosses of the concern. And here, plainly, thought for the moment stopped and action must supervene. Only action, decisive and even inspired, would ever get that manuscript back to poor Mr Collins at Nesfield Court. Even as he entertained these reflections, Meredith found himself striding confidently towards the telephones, and the box for snarling into, and the man who carried – or was it ‘packed’? – the guns.

  Packed was indubitably correct – and even as Meredith reached this conclusion he heard a voice raised in harsh but not uncultivated reproof. ‘Get these people out of here,’ said the voice. ‘If they’re offering the same sort of rubbish as that fellow Spackman you’re all wasting your time. Clear them out, if you please. Trade’s over for the day.’ And Meredith – for the voice was Meredith’s very own – glanced round him in a menacing and authoritative manner. Anyone aware that this was the first occasion on which he had attempted to look menacing since leaving his private school would have been bound to admit that the learned pursuits to which he had given himself represented a sad deprivation in the annals of the legitimate stage.