YOU remember old Neave, of course? Little Humphrey Neave, I mean. We used to see him pottering about Rome years ago. He lived in two tiny rooms over a wine shop, on polenta and lentils, and prowled among the refuse of the Ripetta whenever he had a few soldi to spend. But you’ve been out of the collector’s world for so long that you may not know what happened to him afterward . . .
He was always a queer chap, Neave; years older than you and me, of course — and even when I first knew him, in my raw Roman days, he gave me an extraordinary sense of age and experience. I don’t think I’ve ever known any one who was at once so intelligent and so simple. It’s the precise combination that results in romance; and poor little Neave was romantic.
He told me once how he’d come to Rome. He was originaire of Mystic, Connecticut — and he wanted to get as far away from it as possible. Rome seemed as far as anything on the same planet could be; and after he’d worried his way through Harvard — with shifts and shavings that you and I can’t imagine — he contrived to get sent to Switzerland as tutor to a chap who’d failed in his examinations. With only the Alps between, he wasn’t likely to turn back; and he got another fellow to take his pupil home, and struck out on foot for the seven hills.
I’m telling you these early details merely to give you a notion of the man’s idealism. There was a cool persistency and a headlong courage in his dash for Rome that one wouldn’t have guessed in the little pottering chap we used to know. Once on the spot, he got more tutoring, managed to make himself a name for coaxing balky youths to take their fences, and was finally able to take up the more congenial task of expounding “the antiquities” to cultured travellers. I call it more congenial — but how it must have seared his soul! Fancy unveiling the sacred scars of Time to ladies who murmur: “Was this actually the spot —?” while they absently feel for their hatpins! He used to say that nothing kept him at it but the exquisite thought of accumulating the lire for his collection. For the Neave collection, my dear fellow, began early, began almost with his Roman life, began in a series of little nameless odds and ends, broken trinkets, torn embroideries, the amputated extremities of maimed marbles: things that even the rag-picker had pitched away when he sifted his haul. But they weren’t nameless or meaningless to Neave; his strength lay in his instinct for identifying, putting together, seeing significant relations. He was a regular Cuvier of bric-a-brac. And during those early years, when he had time to brood over trifles and note imperceptible differences, he gradually sharpened his instinct, and made it into the delicate and redoubtable instrument it is. Before he had a thousand francs’ worth of anticaglie to his name he began to be known as an expert, and the big dealers were glad to consult him. But we’re getting no nearer the Daunt Diana . . .
Well, some fifteen years ago, in London, I ran across Neave at Christie’s. He was the same little man we’d known, effaced, bleached, indistinct, like a poor “impression” — as unnoticeable as one of his own early finds, yet, like them, with a quality, if one had an eye for it. He told me he still lived in Rome, and had contrived, by fierce self-denial, to get a few decent bits together — “piecemeal, little by little, with fasting and prayer; and I mean the fasting literally!” he said.
He had run over to London for his annual “look-round” — I fancy one or another of the big collectors usually paid his journey — and when we met he was on his way to see the Daunt collection. You know old Daunt was a surly brute, and the things weren’t easily seen; but he had heard Neave was in London, and had sent — yes, actually sent! — for him to come and give his opinion on a few bits, including the Diana. The little man bore himself discreetly, but you can imagine his pride. In his exultation he asked me to come with him — “Oh, I’ve the grandes et petites entrees, my dear fellow: I’ve made my conditions — ” and so it happened that I saw the first meeting between Humphrey Neave and his fate.
For that collection was his fate: or, one may say, it was embodied in the Diana who was queen and goddess of the realm. Yes — I shall always be glad I was with Neave when he had his first look at the Diana. I see him now, blinking at her through his white lashes, and stroking his seedy wisp of a moustache to hide a twitch of the muscles. It was all very quiet, but it was the coup de foudre. I could see that by the way his hands trembled when he turned away and began to examine the other things. You remember Neave’s hands — thin, sallow, dry, with long inquisitive fingers thrown out like antennae? Whatever they hold — bronze or lace, hard enamel or brittle glass — they have an air of conforming themselves to the texture of the thing, and sucking out of it, by every finger-tip, the mysterious essence it has secreted. Well, that day, as he moved about among Daunt’s treasures, the Diana followed him everywhere. He didn’t look back at her — he gave himself to the business he was there for — but whatever he touched, he felt her. And on the threshold he turned and gave her his first free look — the kind of look that says: “You’re mine.“
It amused me at the time — the idea of little Neave making eyes at any of Daunt’s belongings. He might as well have coquetted with the Kohinoor. And the same idea seemed to strike him; for as we turned away from the big house in Belgravia he glanced up at it and said, with a bitterness I’d never heard in him: “Good Lord! To think of that lumpy fool having those things to handle! Did you notice his stupid stumps of fingers? I suppose he blunted them gouging nuggets out of the gold fields. And in exchange for the nuggets he gets all that in a year — only has to hold out his callous palm to have that great ripe sphere of beauty drop into it! That’s my idea of heaven — to have a great collection drop into one’s hand, as success, or love, or any of the big shining things, drop suddenly on some men. And I’ve had to worry along for nearly fifty years, saving and paring, and haggling and intriguing, to get here a bit and there a bit — and not one perfection in the lot! It’s enough to poison a man’s life.”
The outbreak was so unlike Neave that I remember every word of it: remember, too, saying in answer: “But, look here, Neave, you wouldn’t take Daunt’s hands for yours, I imagine?”
He stared a moment and smiled. “Have all that, and grope my way through it like a blind cave fish? What a question! But the sense that it’s always the blind fish that live in that kind of aquarium is what makes anarchists, sir!” He looked back from the corner of the square, where we had paused while he delivered himself of this remarkable metaphor. “God, I’d like to throw a bomb at that place, and be in at the looting!”
And with that, on the way home, he unpacked his grievance — pulled the bandage off the wound, and showed me the ugly mark it had made on his little white soul.
It wasn’t the struggling, stinting, self-denying that galled him — it was the inadequacy of the result. It was, in short, the old tragedy of the discrepancy between a man’s wants and his power to gratify them. Neave’s taste was too exquisite for his means — was like some strange, delicate, capricious animal, that he cherished and pampered and couldn’t satisfy.
“Don’t you know those little glittering lizards that die if they’re not fed on some wonderful tropical fly? Well, my taste’s like that, with one important difference — if it doesn’t get its fly, it simply turns and feeds on me. Oh, it doesn’t die, my taste — worse luck! It gets larger and stronger and more fastidious, and takes a bigger bite of me — that’s all.”
That was all. Year by year, day by day, he had made himself into this delicate register of perceptions and sensations — as far above the ordinary human faculty of appreciation as some scientific registering instrument is beyond the rough human senses — only to find that the beauty which alone could satisfy him was unattainable — that he was never to know the last deep identification which only possession can give. He had trained himself in short, to feel, in the rare great thing — such an utterance of beauty as the Daunt Diana, say — a hundred elements of perfection, a hundred reasons why, imperceptible, inexplicable even, to the average “artistic” sense; he had reached this point by a long austere process of discrimination and rejection, the renewed great refusals of the intelligence which perpetually asks more, which will make no pact with its self of yesterday, and is never to be beguiled from its purpose by the wiles of the next-best-thing. Oh, it’s a poignant case, but not a common one; for the next-best-thing usually wins . . .
You see, the worst of Neave’s state was the fact of his not being a mere collector, even the collector raised to his highest pitch of efficiency. The whole thing was blent in him with poetry — his imagination had romanticized the acquisitive instinct, as the religious feeling of the Middle Ages turned passion into love. And yet his could never be the abstract enjoyment of the philosopher who says: “This or that object is really mine because I’m capable of appreciating it.” Neave wanted what he appreciated — wanted it with his touch and his sight as well as with his imagination.
It was hardly a year afterward that, coming back from a long tour in India, I picked up a London paper and read the amazing headline: “Mr. Humphrey Neave buys the Daunt collection” . . . I rubbed my eyes and read again. Yes, it could only be our old friend Humphrey. “An American living in Rome . . . one of our most discerning collectors”; there was no mistaking the description. I clapped on my hat and bolted out to see the first dealer I could find; and there I had the incredible details. Neave had come into a fortune — two or three million dollars, amassed by an uncle who had a corset-factory, and who had attained wealth as the creator of the Mystic Super-straight. (Corset-factory sounds odd, by the way, doesn’t it? One had fancied that the corset was a personal, a highly specialized garment, more or less shaped on the form it was to modify; but, after all, the Tanagras were all made from two or three moulds — and so, I suppose, are the ladies who wear the Mystic Super-straight.)
The uncle had a son, and Neave had never dreamed of seeing a penny of the money; but the son died suddenly, and the father followed, leaving a codicil that gave everything to our friend. Humphrey had to go out to “realize” on the corset-factory; and his description of that . . . Well, he came back with his money in his pocket, and the day he landed old Daunt went to smash. It all fitted in like a Chinese puzzle. I believe Neave drove straight from Euston to Daunt House: at any rate, within two months the collection was his, and at a price that made the trade sit up. Trust old Daunt for that!
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 sc............