The Best of Weird Tales 1923 Read online

  “The nymphs,” I insisted, “the one of Nausicaa.”

  There I caught him. “Nausicaa—you knew?”

  “Well, I guessed.”

  “They don’t as a rule; in the general they are merely odd little maidens sporting at ball.” His smile came out as pure gold filtered from the dross of suffering—a rare, lovable smile that immediately won me to the old gentleman. “I shall be happy to paint the Nausicaa for you, sir,” he added formally, and awaited my further pleasure.

  “The name,” I said. “Perhaps you’d better jot down my name and address.”

  “Of course—the name.” Obediently he brought pad and pencil, and in a fine, scholarly hand wrote “Mr.

  Claude Van Nuys,” with my New York address.

  Absently, he permitted me to pay him and stood ready to bid me good afternoon.

  Still I lingered. “The sileni; and the goddess on the swan—Aphrodite, isn’t she?”

  “You pass, my boy—grade A,” he smiled.

  “And the Pallas Athena—that’s splendid work, only why—?”

  “Ah, the Athena!” A flicker of pain touched the old man’s face, and he grew reticent and vague again.

  I would have given him up then, had not a terrific and absolutely unheralded blast of wind come to my assistance, striking up the sand in swirling clouds about us.

  “Whew!” I whistled, covering my face against the cut of that fine shot. “We’re in for a gale, yes? I say

  —”

  But I was shocked to dumbness by the look of strained and unadulterated horror on old Mr. Twining’s face. He was breathing hard and backing into the house as though driven against the storm.

  “A bad night,” he muttered. “Wind and a sea … It was just such a night —” He rediscovered me with a start and with something approaching relief, I thought.

  “But you couldn’t stay out in this,” he reasoned, more to himself than to me. “It then becomes necessary—Sir,”—he slipped easily into the role of courteous host—“will you accept the shelter of my roof until the storm passes?”

  He waited for me to precede him into the house, saw me seated in the only comfortable chair in the dim living room, and, having first excused himself, sat down at his work bench and again took up his brush.

  Slowly the room darkened. The old man forgot me and relapsed into mutterings, quivering under each shrill onslaught of the wind, pausing to listen for the moan of the surf below.

  “You’re deucedly close to this cliff,” I ventured once, when a shower of sand swished against the window-pane.

  “Eh—the cliff? Some winter nights she’ll rise up to the very house and drench the glass of my windows—the sea will,” he shuddered. “She’s eating back—eating back; forty years ago, when I first came here, there was a front yard.”

  “But isn’t it unsafe?”

  “Perhaps,” vaguely.

  So he worked on until he could no longer see, and then he lit a candle, and turned to the tracing of a pattern from the colored plate of a book. There were several similar volumes at his elbow, and I dared to take one up and run it through. They were, as I had guessed, plates of the more famous Greek vases—

  mostly those of the red-figured period. “Douris—Euphronios—Hieron,” I read aloud. “Oh, and those exquisite old white lekythoi!”

  The effect upon the old man was instantaneous. Those names— Hieron, white lekythoi—were the magic passwords to him! He turned to me as a starved dog might turn to food:

  “Ah, you know them—the cup-painters!” And he loosed upon me such a flood of scientific enthusiasm and technicalities and dates, with such an undercurrent of reverence and love for the pure beauty of these old vases, as left me breathless, feeling that I had at last found a scientist and a poet rolled into one.

  “You know, you know!” he exulted. “Now you recall the Douris Athena —”

  “But I know nothing, really,” I interrupted him, impelled to honesty by his own intense sincerity. “My knowledge of the classics is general. We deal only in period stuff at the House of Harrow, where I’m a buyer—English and French periods mostly—for a Fifth Avenue clientele. Oh, I once dipped into Greek art on my own account, picked up the patter, but beyond that —”

  He would not have it.

  “You speak the language,” he insisted. “And do you know that it is nearly half a century since I’ve met a man who’s ever heard of Euphronios, the master cup-painter? Lord, how it takes me back!”

  The old man laughed. The storm and his terrors were forgotten; the glow in his heart burned up in his cheeks like a fever.

  “This—these books,”—his hand swept the colored plate—“they’re all I have left—the only link I allow myself.”

  “Do you mean—? With your passion for the classics, you shut yourself up alone here—starve yourself!

  But in God’s name, man, why?”

  “That’s why—in God’s name.” The old man’s head was bowed; for a moment the pain was back on his face. But that brittle zest flamed up in him again. “You questioned about my Athena! You are the first man who would comprehend. Wait!”

  Smiling like a child with a secret, he tiptoed to a chest of drawers, brought out something wrapped in tissue paper. Very tenderly he unwound the papers, and produced before me the broken half of a red-figured cylix [a cylix is a shallow two-handled cup supported by a stemmed base —M.K.] with one handle attached but with the standard missing. He waited triumphantly for my exclamation.

  “Why,” I said lamely, “the interior is that same Athena with her flute player. It seems—a very fine fragment —”

  “Fine!”—he scorned the adjective. “Fine? Sir, this is the best of its kind—the aristocrat of the Greek vase. See!—The finished lines went something like this.”

  He caught up a pencil, laid the fragment flat on a sheet of white paper, and completed the broken figures of the Athena and the youth. I noted his hands as he sketched: fine, long-fingered hands, nervous, but sure at their work.

  “You see?” he asked. “Now on the exterior of the cylix we have Athena mounting her quadriga after the battle. Is it not a contrast, that peaceful Athena and this Athena? Is he not, indeed, an artist of variety, the man who could do those two things, each so perfectly? You will note the horses—the bold, vigorous lines—the power and swing. It is naked, masculine drawing this—yes, scriptural. Euphronios —” Old Twining broke off, returned to his more precise exposition: “The other half of the cup—the exterior—

  showed Athena sending her spear into the giant Ankelados —”

  “But where is the other half?” I wondered. “You must have seen it, since you hold the answer to the riddle.”

  “Yes,” he returned slowly, “I have seen it; God knows I do hold the answer to the riddle…”

  But he came back to me—or rather to the beloved fragment of the cylix.

  “The coloring!” he breathed. “That deep orange glow and the velvet black and that fine gloss over all …

  The secret of Greek potters, buried with them. Perfect to the very eyelashes…”

  Sitting there, he lost himself in reverent admiration of the shard. He did not touch it—it was as though the fragment were too precious to handle; but he gave his soul to it through his eyes. He was oblivious to the wail of a rising wind and the thunder of a rising surf.

  “It is,” he announced quietly at last, “the half of a genuine, unpublished Euphronios.”

  I stared. “You say this is—an unpublished Euphronios?”

  “Yes. The signature was on the other piece.”

  “But man alive, given that other piece—and you must know where it is to be so familiar with it—this fragment is worth a king’s ransom. A genuine whole Euphronios—why, the museums alone, bidding

  against each other —”

  “The other half is gone,” spoke the old man, “gone forever. But this piece itself is still worth more than a king’s ransom; not in gold, but in the coin of knowledg
e—the knowledge it will give the world of Greek art.”

  His gray eyes wandered to a vision; the poet was drowned in the farseeing scientist.

  For that instant I felt myself in the presence of nobility

  — but the old man’s dignity was abruptly shattered. With the rush as of an oncoming engine, the full blast of an Atlantic gale struck us: screamed and whined and groaned, and shook the old house until it rattled like a bag of loose bones.

  In the same moment the rain came down in a deluge, swept the window-panes and beat a very devil’s tattoo upon the roof. I flatter myself I am no coward, but I found myself clutching at the heavy work bench for anchorage. By the wavering candlelight I discovered my host pressed to his eyes. He seemed to be in physical agony; it flashed to me that he was suffering a stroke of some kind.

  I reached him in two steps: “What is it? Sir—Mr. Twining!”

  His mutterings were part of a disjointed prayer. I laid my hand on his shoulder, and suddenly he was clinging to me, like a child who finds an unexpected hand in the dark, and was speaking rapidly, incoherently: “No, no, it’s not the storm; it’s the things it brings up here, in my head—images—scenes no human being should have … staged. I live it over again—over and over—like Macbeth. Don’t leave me—

  don’t! It’s His will. He sends you, and the storm holds you here—impossible for you to reach the village this night. You shall stay with me, be my first guest in forty years. You shall hear my tale—and judge me.”

  “Yes, yes,” I soothed him, drawing him to a chair, “of course I’ll stay.”

  III

  He subsided then, his head dropped to his arms which he had flung out on the bench before him; as the wind died down a little, he slowly regained complete control of himself.

  “It’s mad of me,” he sighed, facing me at last. “Sometimes I fear I am growing a little mad. But I’ve a fancy to tell to you—an impartial stranger—the story of how I came by the Euphronios fragment. But you must be hungry; you shall first have supper with me.”

  He became again the solicitous but unobtrusive host. He moved expertly about the kitchen, set a meticulous table with white linen cloth and pewter utensils, and served me clam broth out of a blue bowl, and brown bread and honey, and some sort of flower wine of which Horace might have sung. The old man himself supped on three steamed clams and a glass of cold water. Yet he was the perfect host with his fine, aloof hospitality.

  At last we settled to the story. Sitting there on opposite sides of his work bench, with the storm rising and falling in intermittent gusts, and with the broken fragment of the vase between us, its colors glowing out like black onyx and orange coral under the sputtering light of the candle, we dropped back into the old man’s past:

  “I was abroad,” he began, “in the middle of the eighties, on a year’s leave of absence from my college, and with me was my friend—Lutz, let us call him—Paul Lutz. I may say here that I had no right to play friend to him, for at heart I despised him—despised his methods, his creeds. One of my college colleagues, a younger man than I, he seemed to have taken a liking to me.

  “It was odd, for he was of a wealthy family, and beyond our common interest in archeology and classical subjects—an interest which was rather a fad with him, I suspected—we were at opposite poles.

  He was shrewd, brilliant even, but how shall I describe him—he had thick fingers. He was the

  handsome, spoiled, Byronic type: a full-blooded dark man, part Jewish. I have sometimes wondered if I did not keep him by me to watch him, for we were rivals in the same field, even in the same little department, and in those days I made finger exercises of the theories of other scholars and dreamed of striking a great new chord of my own. I wanted fame, you see, recognition, and I was suspicious of Lutz’s brilliance. I dare say the basis of many apparent friendships in this world in really a strong rivalry and a mutual suspicion.

  “Lutz and I were rivals in more ways than one. There was … a young lady in our college town; she received us both. Her name—it would do no harm to tell it now—was Lorna Story, and she was like her name, a fine, silver-gray girl. She had a beautiful mind … and a light shining through her gray eyes that was like the haunting line of a poem…”

  The old man sat silent for a time, as he had been silent before the fine beauty of his Greek vase, and his old, frail face was lit by the same inner glow. He moved to take up from the base of the candlestick a hurt night moth, and, cupping it gently in his two hands, opened the window a crack and released it.

  Then he continued:

  “Lutz and I were in Athens together in the spring in the interest of our college museum, which was then in its infancy. We had at our joint disposal a fund for any valuable specimens, and we haunted the excavation fields and the markets for antiquities. It was the merest chance which led us to the Acropolis at the time they had just started on the work of clearing out the debris which dated before the destruction of the Persians. And it was the merest chance which took us to the spot at the moment the workmen brought to light the vase, in two pieces.

  “A vase by the potter Euphronios—and the signature was actually visible through the coating of white earth deposits—here in this debris which went back to the days before the Persian sacking in 480! Now Euphronios had long been fixed at a date considerably later. That difference in dates was important: the inferences that followed—why, I had hit upon a tremendous, an epoch-making discovery! I saw my path to scholarly fame opening up before me.

  “I talked with the young Greek who was directing operations there, and secured his promise that I should examine the specimen when it had been thoroughly cleaned. Lutz edged close to me, and I saw that he, too, was excited by the vase, though concealing his excitement under an air of indifference. But I had no time for Lutz. I got away from him. I pursued those inferences for miles through the streets of Athens, and then tested out my conclusions in the classical library out at the American School. There was no error in my facts, no flaw in my logic.

  “I walked the streets longer—hours longer—bit by bit built up my article. Then, in the flush of masterly achievement, I turned back to the small hotel where we were stopping.

  “I opened the door of our room to find Lutz bent low over the table. He was gloating over something:

  “You beauty! And to fit with never a flaw—’

  “‘Good Lord!’ I discovered. ‘It’s the vase!’

  “‘Right, old boy,’ Lutz grinned up at me. ‘I’ve finished giving her a bath with aqua fortis—oh, my caution was extreme, never fear. Now what do you think?’

  “Think! What could I think? The colors were as you see them now, startling, like black and orange enamel. Forgetful of theories, I fell into rhapsodies with him. Lutz caressed the glossy, painted surface with his plump hands and fairly purred; I darted from the tracery of face and garments to the Greek letters of the signature and sipped the honey of our rare find after my own fashion.

  “We were like two eager boys who have come upon Captain Kidd’s treasure. We dropped into heated argument, I recall: Lutz preferred the strong, battling Athena who hurled her spear at the giant, while I maintained that the quiet Athena, who sat with her head bowed to the music of her flute player was the greater art. Laughingly, I took possession of my favorite half of the vase and left Lutz to his savage goddess.

  “Then the serious significance of the vase and my intended article intruded, and I returned to earth.

  “‘But how under heaven did you come by it, Lutz?’

  “He laughed, cast an apprehensive glance toward the hallway: ‘It’s a long story. I say, will you lock that door behind you? Thanks. Whether that Greek was a fool that he should let this slip through his fingers, or whether it was a question of drachmas or whether it was a little of both—idiocy and greed—what does it matter? The vase is here—mine. Well, then—’

  “‘But it belongs by right to the Greek government—the Museum of the Acropolis,’ I protested, weakl
y enough.

  “‘Naturally, I know.’ He smiled. ‘But it does not go to the Greek government, nor to the Acropolis. Now why quibble, Twining? You know these things are done every day.’

  “I did know: in spite of laws, valuable classical pieces were continually turning up in the States; indeed, our own college had purchased specimens of doubtful past.

  “‘How much, then?’

  “‘Guess!’ And he named a sum that startled me.

  “‘It’s a lot,’ I grumbled. ‘And look here, Lutz, I expect to be consulted at least in the disposal of the fund. Still, anything within reason for it … a superb nucleus of our collection…’ Then the thrill of my discovery caught me again: ‘Its value is greater than you realize, Lutz. You saw nothing strange in finding a vase by Euphronios in the Persian rubbish? Why, wake up, man! If Euphronios and his

  contemporaries lived and painted before the Persians, it simply means that the whole chronology of Greek vases must be pushed back half a century. And that’s going to mean that Greek painting

  developed before Greek sculpture, instead of the contrary, as we’ve always believed. Now do you see!

  Do you begin to see how this one small vase is going to revolutionize all of our concepts of Greek art?

  Why, it’s colossal! When my article appears—when it’s published and quoted and discussed and

  rediscussed in all the periodicals—’

  “‘Hold on!’ commanded Lutz. ‘We’ll not make a splurge of this vase yet. You’ll hang off on that article a while—promise me?’

  “‘I don’t follow you,’ I returned, stiffening. ‘Why should I make promises—?’

  “‘But I insist that you shall!’

  “‘And I reply that I won’t!’

  “Lutz’s black eyes narrowed, his face tightened to an expression of hard shrewdness. ‘As I see it, your theory depends upon your establishing the fact that the vase came out of that Persian junk; unless you can guarantee that, the whole theory goes smash. I think you’ll find no one who’ll swear to that. You’d have to swear to it alone. And if it came to a showdown, it would be your one word against our several words. Since the thing you’re trying to prove is contrary to accepted ideas, the public would find it easier to believe us.’