“No; I don’t know much about Napoleon.”
“Ah! You should. I read every book about him I can lay hands on. Gustave!”
The waiter came up and Logan ordered a very special dinner with the air of knowing the very inmost secrets of the establishment. He demanded orange bitters before the meal and a special brand of cigarette.
“My day hasn’t been wasted,” he said. “I’ve been to Cluny’s and I asked to see your stuff. The little man there looked astonished, but I told him people were talking of no one else but you, and quite rightly. I talked to him from the dealer’s point of view, and assured him that there was a big boom in pictures, coming, and that he had better be prepared for it with a handful of new men. I didn’t let him know that I was a painter, but I got him quite excited, and I did not leave him until he had hung a picture and two drawings.”
“Which picture?”
“The one of your mother’s kitchen. It is one of your best. To-morrow three men will walk into Cluny’s and they will admire your work. On the day after to-morrow a real buyer will walk in.”
Mendel’s eyes grew larger and larger. Was Logan a magician, that he could direct human beings into Cluny’s shop and conduct them straight to his work?
Logan laughed at his amazement.
“Lord love-a-duck!” he said, “you’re not going to sit still and wait for commercial fools to discover that you know your job. At my first exhibition in Liverpool I put on a false beard and went in and bought one of my own pictures, just to encourage the dealer and the timid idiots who were too shy to go and ask him the price of the drawings. It worked, and this is going to work too. When I’ve warmed Cluny up into selling you, then I’m going to make him sell me. If you don’t mind we’ll have our names bracketed,—Kühler and Logan. People will believe in two men when they won’t in one. As for three, you’ve only got to look at the Trinity to see what they’ll believe when they get three working together. . . . Oh! I forgot you were a Jew and brought up to believe in One is One and all alone.”
He laughed and gave a fat chuckle as he mimicked the little man in Cluny’s cocking his head on one side and pretending to take in the beauties of Mendel’s work as they were pointed out to him.