human
After the sickening stench of personality in theatrical life, the great Madame Orloff told the doctor with her usual free-handed use of language,
gpt
You're not the only one, my dear Olga, he said,
human
Oh, humanity----!
gpt
You think it very clever, my distinguished friends, to discuss me before my face, commented the old picture-dealer indifferently. He fingered the bright-colored decorations on his breast, looking down at them with absent eyes. After a moment he added,
human
Haven't you something new to show us? asked the woman.
gpt
Some genuine Masaccio, picked up in a hill-town monastery--a real Ribera?
human
Yes, I have something new. He hesitated, opened his lips, closed them again and, looking at the fire,
gpt
Oh yes, very new indeed--new to me.
human
Is it here?
gpt
No; I have it in--you know what you call the inner sanctuary--the light here is not good enough.
human
Let me see it, she commanded.
gpt
Certainly I would like to see anything that was new to _you_!
human
You shall amuse yourself by identifying the artist without my aid,
gpt
Whom do you make the artist? he said. He did not look at the picture. He looked at the faces of his guests, and after a long silent pause, he smiled faintly into his beard.
human
Let us go back to the fire,
gpt
And what do you say?
human
By Jove! cried the doctor.
gpt
By Jove!
human
I have dreamed it,
gpt
It is real, said Vieyra.
human
You are the first to see it. I wished to observe how----
gpt
It's an unknown Vermeer! The doctor brought his big white hand down loudly on this discovery.
human
Nobody but Vermeer could have done the plaster wall in the sunlight. And the girl's strange gray head-dress must be seventeenth-century Dutch of some province I don't----
gpt
I am a rich man, for a picture-dealer, said Vieyra,
human
But you picked it up from some corner, some attic, some stable----
gpt
Yes, I picked it up from a stable,
human
Tell us--tell us, she urged.
gpt
There is something different here.
human
Yes, there is something different, he stirred in his chair and thrust out his lips.
gpt
So different that I don't know if you----
human
Try me! try me! she assured him ardently.
gpt
You have educated me well to your own hard standards all these years.
human
No, I will not tell you.
gpt
You shall---- her eyes commanded, adjured him. There was a silence.
human
I will understand,
gpt
You will not understand, he said in the same tone; but aloud he began:
human
I heard of it first from an American picture-dealer over here scraping up a mock-Barbizon collection for a new millionaire. He wanted to get my judgment, he said, on a canvas that had been brought to him by a cousin of his children's governess. I was to be sure to see it when I went to New York--you knew did you not, that I had been called to New York to testify in the prosecution of Paullsen for selling a signed copy?
gpt
Did you really go? asked the doctor.
human
I thought you swore that nothing could take you to America.
gpt
I went, said the old man grimly.
human
Paullsen did me a bad turn once, thirty years ago. And while I was there I went to see the unknown canvas. The dealer half apologized for taking my time--said he did not as a rule pay any attention to freak things brought in from country holes by amateurs, but--I remember his wording--this thing, some ways he looked at it, didn't seem bad somehow.
gpt
Then he showed it to me. It was the young girl and kitten in there.
human
By Jove!
gpt
You have too exciting a profession, my good old dear, said the actress.
human
Some day you will die of a heart failure.
gpt
Not after living through that!
human
What did you tell him?
gpt
I asked for the address of the cousin of his children's governess, of course. When I had it, I bought a ticket to the place, and when I reached there, I found myself at the end of all things--an abomination of desolation, a parched place in the wilderness. Do you know America, either of you?
human
I have toured there, three times,
gpt
Did you ever hear of a place called Vermont?
human
It sounds French, not English. Perhaps you do not pronounce it as they do.
gpt
Heaven forbid that I should do anything as 'they' do! This place, then, call it what you will, is inhabited by a lean, tall, sullenly silent race who live in preposterously ugly little wooden houses of the most naked cleanliness ... God of my Fathers! the hideousness of the huddle of those huts where I finally found the cousin! He was a seller of letter-paper and cheap chromos and he knew nothing of the picture except that it was brought to him to sell by the countryman who sold him butter. So I found the address of the butter-maker and drove endless miles over an execrable road to his house, and encountered at last a person who could tell me something of what I wanted to know. It was the butter-maker's mother, a stolid, middle-aged woman, who looked at me out of the most uncanny quiet eyes ... all the people in that valley have extraordinary piercing and quiet eyes ... and asked, 'Is it about the picture? For if it is, I don't want you should let on about it to anybody but me. Nobody but the family knows he paints 'em!
human
Gracious powers! You don't mean to say that the man who painted that picture is alive now ... in 1915!
gpt
If you want to know, let him alone!
human
And soon I had it all, the narrator went on.
gpt
Almost more than I could bear. The old woman could tell me what I wished to know, she said. He was her uncle, the only brother of her mother, and he had brought up her and her brothers and sisters. She knew... oh, she knew with good reason, all of his life. All, that is, but the beginning. She had heard from the older people in the valley that he had been wild in his youth (he has always been, she told me gravely, 'queer') and she knew that he had traveled far in his young days, very, very far.