“What did you like best about it?”
“The pictures of the past it evoked. The cavalcade of Richelieu’s nobles—all in their Louis Treize finery—the clatter of the men-at-arms down that broad, cobble-paved central street. The setting was all there. It was so easy to fill it.”
“That’s just what Tommy did,” said Clementina. “Tommy made a fancy sketch on the spot of the Cardinal entering in state in his great heavy carrosse with his bodyguard around him.”
This led them on to pictures. She found that he was familiar with all the galleries in Europe—with most of the works of the moderns. She had never suspected that he had ideas of his own on pictures. He hated what he called the “nightmare of technique” of the ultra-modern school. Clementina disliked it also. “All great art was simple,” he remarked. “Put one of Hobbema’s sober landscapes, the Saint Michael of Raphael, amidst the hysteria of the Salon des Indépendants, and the four walls would crumble into chaotic paint.
“Which reminds me,” said he, “of a curious little experience a good many years ago. It was at the first International Art Exhibition in London. Paris and Belgium and Holland poured out their violences to unfamiliar eyes—mine were unfamiliar, at any rate. There were women sitting in purple cafés with orange faces and magenta hair. There were hideous nudes with muscles on their knee-caps, writhing in decadent symbolism. There were portraits so flat that they gave you the impression of insects squashed against the wall. I remember going through, not understanding it one bit; and then in the midst of all this fever I came across a little gem—so cool, so finished, so sane, and yet full of grip, and I stood in front of it until I got better and then went away. It was a most curious sensation, like a cool hand on a fevered brow. I happened not to have a catalogue, so I’ve never known the painter.”
“What kind of a picture was it?” asked Clementina.
“Just a child, in a white frock and a blue sash, and not a remarkably pretty child either. But it was a delightful piece of work.”
“Do you remember,” she asked, “whether there was a mother-o’-pearl box on a little table to the left of the girl?”
“Yes,” said Quixtus. “There was. Do you know the picture?”
Clementina smiled. She smiled so that her white, strong teeth became visible. Quixtus had never seen Clementina’s teeth.