Gerald looked up. “Yes, they were right, each in his own way. You know, Stevedear, it all reminded me, in a beautifully wrong-side-out fashion, of the different witnesses in Poe’s murder story, you remember?”
“You mean the one where men of different nationalities all hear an ape chattering in the dark, and not knowing in the least what it is, each one is sure it’s some language not his own?”
“That’s right! The Frenchman, who doesn’t know Spanish, says it’s Spanish, the Englishman, who doesn’t understand German, says it’s German, while the Italian, who doesn’t know English, feels sure it’s English, and so on. But those people at the Museum were all so splendidly different from that! Each one wanted to guard and to claim for his own race the heritage of beauty breathing from the mask. The German, the little Italian girl, the French painter, the American art student—they were all alike in this. They found in that cast Nuremberg, Perugia, Reims, Chicago!”
“‘Beats Gibson, what?’” mocked Steven Grant.
“Do you think it’s a cast from nature?” asked Gerald, still intent on the face. “Perhaps a death-mask?”
The other nodded. “Without doubt, a death-mask.”
“But there’s nothing of the sharpness of death about it, is there? It seems a face unprofaned by earthly suffering.”
Again Steven Grant gazed at his nephew, as if waiting for the eyes of young manhood to see more.