Silence Observed Read Online Free PDF Page B

Olympus, hers is a ballerina mask.”
    “No doubt. I’m talking at random, I don’t deny. An old fellow, you know, rather whips up feelings about those things – a girl’s face, and so on – when he knows he’s a bit beyond them.”
    Appleby said nothing to this, and the consequence was a moment’s pause. There was something frustrated or baffled, he was thinking, beneath Gulliver’s urbanity. He was a man not reconciled to the direction in which life had taken him. And perhaps a woman had started the trouble long ago.
    “And indeed,” Gulliver went on, “I’m testifying to something against my own convictions. I don’t believe that there is anything that can be called feminine beauty in an absolute sense. It’s only some informing – and perhaps evanescent – sensibility which makes any lass worth looking at twice. So let us pass on. Here was a really striking girl, we’ll say. And here was my young athlete struck all of a heap by her. Naturally it fell to me to do the talking. And that was just as well. Jimmy Heffer, I’m convinced, couldn’t have uttered a word.”
    “This didn’t work the other way round as well? The young person wasn’t struck all of a heap by the athlete?”
    “Well, as I think I said, I had a feeling that they were surprising each other. I’d say she found Jimmy more unexpected than she found me. Her notion of the sort of person who looks after pictures would be quite conventional. But remember that I wasn’t in on their first glance at each other. I was still looking at the picture.”
    “Yes, I see.” Appleby thought for a moment. “What sort of girl was she – apart from this Aphrodite aspect?”
    “A well-bred girl, but far from sophisticated. Indeed she was shy and rather awkward.”
    “An awkward Aphrodite? That’s rather disappointing, I’m bound to say.”
    “She was in a novel situation. And, when she spoke, she was composed enough. She apologized for bothering us, and hoped it wasn’t entirely out of order. That sort of thing. I asked her to sit down, and thanked her for bringing the picture along. I said it interested me very much, and I asked her whether she herself had any idea of who might have painted it. She seemed to hesitate. And then she said no, but it did seem to her that it might be very old. At that young Heffer chipped in – rather abruptly and dogmatically for him. He said the picture was very probably within a month or two of its three hundredth birthday.”
    “And how did the young lady take that?”
    “She looked at Jimmy almost as if she were scared of him. I suppose she regarded such precision as a sort of black magic. Then I asked her a question which seemed perfectly legitimate in itself, but which certainly scared her a good deal more.”
    “Whether she owned the thing?”
    “I didn’t put it exactly that way. I asked her whether it had been in her family a long time. She looked at me with all the grave candour of that Botticelli face – but I had a strong impression that she didn’t, for a moment, know what to reply. Then she said: ‘Oh, yes – we haven’t just bought it, or anything like that.’”
    Sir Gabriel Gulliver had paused in his narrative, and Appleby took a moment before asking a question.
    “There was a point, it seems, at which you became uneasy about the whole business. Was this it?”
    “I think it was. And I think that Jimmy Heffer was uneasy too. He was refraining from looking at the girl, as if he didn’t want to give the appearance of challenging her. For my own part, and in spite of her charms, I felt we’d better get rid of her, and think a little. So I said the picture might well be by Rembrandt–”
    “Did that register? She’d heard of him?”
    “Oh, yes. She was a simple girl, no doubt, but not to the extent of being utterly without ordinary information. I said that we didn’t, however, care to make a positive statement at once, and that she had better leave the canvas for thorough