FullReads

I was in Rome the following spring, and you’d better believe I looked him up. A big porter glared at me from the door of the Palazzo Neave: I had almost to produce my passport to get in. But that wasn’t Neave’s fault–the poor fellow was so beset by people clamouring to see his collection that he had to barricade himself, literally. When I had mounted the state Scalone, and come on him, at the end of half a dozen echoing saloons, in the farthest, smallest reduit of the vast suite, I received the same welcome that he used to give us in his little den over the wine shop.

“Well–so you’ve got her?” I said. For I’d caught sight of the Diana in passing, against the bluish blur of an old verdure–just the background for her poised loveliness. Only I rather wondered why she wasn’t in the room where he sat.

He smiled. “Yes, I’ve got her,” he returned, more calmly than I had expected.

“And all the rest of the loot?”

“Yes. I had to buy the lump.”

“Had to? But you wanted to, didn’t you? You used to say it was your idea of heaven–to stretch out your hand and have a great ripe sphere of beauty drop into it. I’m quoting your own words, by the way.”

Neave blinked and stroked his seedy moustache. “Oh, yes. I remember the phrase. It’s true–it is the last luxury.” He paused, as if seeking a pretext for his lack of warmth. “The thing that bothered me was having to move. I couldn’t cram all the stuff into my old quarters.”

“Well, I should say not! This is rather a better setting.”

He got up. “Come and take a look round. I want to show you two or three things–new attributions I’ve made. I’m doing the catalogue over.”

The interest of showing me the things seemed to dispel the vague apathy I had felt in him. He grew keen again in detailing his redistribution of values, and above all in convicting old Daunt and his advisers of their repeated aberrations of judgment. “The miracle is that he should have got such things, knowing as little as he did what he was getting. And the egregious asses who bought for him were no better, were worse in fact, since they had all sorts of humbugging wrong reasons for admiring what old Daunt simply coveted because it belonged to some other rich man.”

Never had Neave had so wondrous a field for the exercise of his perfected faculty; and I saw then how in the real, the great collector’s appreciations the keenest scientific perception is suffused with imaginative sensibility, and how it’s to the latter undefinable quality that in the last resort he trusts himself.

Nevertheless, I still felt the shadow of that hovering apathy, and he knew I felt it, and was always breaking off to give me reasons for it. For one thing, he wasn’t used to his new quarters–hated their bigness and formality; then the requests to show his things drove him mad. “The women–oh, the women!” he wailed, and interrupted himself to describe a heavy-footed German Princess who had marched past his treasures as if she were inspecting a cavalry regiment, applying an unmodulated Mugneeficent to everything from the engraved gems to the Hercules torso.

“Not that she was half as bad as the other kind,” he added, as if with a last effort at optimism. “The kind who discriminate and say: ‘I’m not sure if it’s Botticelli or Cellini I mean, but one of that school, at any rate.’ And the worst of all are the ones who know–up to a certain point: have the schools, and the dates and the jargon pat, and yet wouldn’t know a Phidias if it stood where they hadn’t expected it.”

He had all my sympathy, poor Neave; yet these were trials inseparable from the collector’s lot, and not always without their secret compensations. Certainly they did not wholly explain my friend’s attitude; and for a moment I wondered if it were due to some strange disillusionment as to the quality of his treasures. But no! the Daunt collection was almost above criticism; and as we passed from one object to another I saw there was no mistaking the genuineness of Neave’s pride in his possessions. The ripe sphere of beauty was his, and he had found no flaw in it as yet…