Art and the Man

by E. V. KNON

THESE are difficult, days, and I am not the first writer who has made the observation. All honor then to Lord Palimpsest, First Baron, who has used a great part of his fortune to buy an ancient country home, and found a family, for the strange years to come.

Thus thought I, as he led me to the West Wing of beautiful Georgian Larksbury and showed me the Long Gallery where the portraits of the ancestors are to hang.

They begin (already) with his father. “The Old Man,” said Lord Palimpsest in tones of deep reverence as we entered the room. “The HairGrip King, as the papers used to say. ‘Owd Tom’ they called him at the works.”

“Owd Tom” was not a picture but a piece of statuary. It resembled — so far as I can describe it —a slightly crouching, rather elongated polar bear, perforated by a profusion of circular holes, such as one sees in rock formations exposed to the fury of an Atlantic storm.

I gazed at it for a while in silence. “A man of determination,” I said at last.

“And humor,” said my host. “He always liked his joke, did the Old Man.”

“And full of penetration,” I murmured as we passed on.

“My Aunt Julie,”he said, as we stood before a picture on the right. “She was a wild lass in her day. A tarried four times, I believe, but a likable woman in the main.”

“I can well believe it,”I said.

His Aunt Julie was a cascade of brown rectangular planes like lids of boxes, with what seemed to be a round stone ball on a pillar in the upper left-hand corner of the composition.

“I think you have underestimated her,” I said. “She must have been a great beauty in her day.”

“My children,” he said, leading me yet forward. There were three dark green triangles on that canvas, and two large crimson whorls. But there was also, and I speak with some trepidation, what I think was a nursery fender between two of the triangles, and there was certainly a toy train and a big rubber doll.

“The little rogues,” I chuckled, and he seemed pleased.

I liked also his brother, who was a plain white surface crossed by three slanting purple lines, except in one place where the design was broken by a Romanesque arch.

“A character, evidently,” I surmised.

“In his way,” admitted Lord Palimpsest. “But he went to the bad in the tropics.”

“Tut, tut,” I rejoined. “But we can only be what we are.”

There were several other relatives whose combinations and permutations I do not clearly recall. But we came at last to a sheet of steel, shaped rather like a fish, standing on a pedestal, with a stiff wire protruding upwards, as it were, from the jaw. On the top of the wire were suspended two pieces of thin metal looking like the leaves of some exotic plant.

“And-this?” I asked.

“That is me.”

“A wonderful likeness,” I assented. “I really ought to have known.”

“That is as far as we have gone at present,” he said as we went out into the banqueting room.

I must have seemed a little pensive, for he asked me whether I had anything on my mind.

“I was only thinking,” I said, “how eerie it will be for your great-greatgrandchildren when the ghosts of their forefathers begin to walk and whisper at night in the corridors.”

“But there’ll always be an England,” he said cheerfully.

“I suppose there will. May I go back for a moment ?”

And I returned to squat for a few seconds in a reverent attitude, peering through one of the major apertures in the figure of “Owd Tom.”