Silence Observed Read Online Free PDF Page A

you mean?”
    “I’m not sure that she didn’t. I had a kind of feeling they were surprising each other.”
    “Is this Jimmy Heffer sound at his job? Will he make a good curator of pictures and so forth?”
    “Dear me, yes. Jimmy has taste, which is quite useful, and a first-class visual memory, which is the really vital thing. He’ll do very well.”
    “Private means, I suppose?” Involuntarily, Appleby found himself asking the routine questions. “Picture galleries and museums, I imagine, scarcely offer royal roads to fortune.”
    “Indeed they don’t. And Jimmy has something. Not much – but enough to get him about the world, and let him buy his own books and photographs. Commercial background. Family in tea, I seem to remember. No learned or academic tradition. No artistic one either. But young Jimmy is quite reasonably presentable. Winchester and New College. Or was it Eton and King’s? I forget. But that sort of thing.”
    “I see. And was this girl with the Rembrandt Winchester and New College too?”
    “Well, yes – if you want to put it that way. Perfect young gentlewoman, and all that. But let me get back to telling you the story in an orderly fashion. On Friday morning this picture was brought in to Heffer. Wrapped in brown paper, and on its stretcher, although without its frame. Jimmy took one look at it – or it may have been two – and tumbled across the corridor into my room. Didn’t so much as knock at the door.”
    “Natural, even for a Wykehamist. In the exciting circumstances, that’s to say.”
    “Quite so. Well, I went back to his room with him. And there was this thing. This utterly monumental thing.”
    “A good Rembrandt.”
    “Just that. Jimmy had propped it up on his table, opposite the window. For a moment I thought it was the St Paul from the Widener Collection in Philadelphia. I believe I turned on Jimmy almost indignantly, and demanded how the devil he’d got hold of that . Then I realized it was a portrait I’d never seen – nor ever seen reproduced. But still, of course, it never occurred to me that it could simply have been trundled in on us in the way it was – straight off the street, as you might say.”
    “But you were instantly certain” – Appleby glanced curiously at his companion – “that it was an authentic portrait by Rembrandt?”
    “Lord, yes. Not a doubt of it.”
    “I ask because there’s a devilish lot of high-class forgery and faking about. I ran into something of the kind in this very club only a few hours ago.”
    “Is that so?” Gulliver didn’t seem interested. “Well, there was no doubt about this. A layman might suppose we’d have to make refined scientific tests before we could exclude the possibility of forgery. But that’s all my eye. Or sometimes it’s all my eye. And this was one of the times. All the photographic and chemical jiggery-pokery was ready to lay on next door, of course. And Jimmy Heffer himself was competent to do some of the latest things. But there was just no need for them. We knew .”
    “Most impressive,” Appleby said. “But I wonder why? Might it conceivably be because this good Rembrandt was a very good Rembrandt?”
    Gulliver laughed rather shortly. It was as if he was suddenly impatient with the whimsical tone he had imported into his own narrative.
    “Yes, yes. And there we were, the two of us, staring at the thing. And Jimmy telling me that he understood it had been brought in by a woman, and asking me if I would please take charge. Do you know, I had positively to wrench my attention back to the youth? The junk I live among is pretty comprehensively of the highest class, I think you’ll agree. I oughtn’t to have been all that staggered by the appearance of just one more pebble on the vast shore of the world’s art. And yet I was goggling at the fatness of that impasto as if it were an absolutely new revelation to me. It was the unexpectedness of the incident, no doubt, that made the