Winter's Tale Read Online Free PDF Page A

with five rolled canvases from Knoedler’s. Pearly couldn’t wait until morning. He ordered the paintings to be restretched and called for two-dozen storm lanterns and mirrors to light an enormous loft down near the bridges, the headquarters of the moment, for the Short Tails continually shifted from place to place in imitation of the Spanish Guerrillas. Pearly had the paintings put up on stands and covered with a velvet curtain. The lamps were lit, blazing clear light against the soft cloth. He stood back and prepared for a feast. With a nod of his head, he signaled his men to drop the velvet. “What!” he yelled, instinctively putting his hands on his pistol. “Did you steal what I told you to steal?” The burglars frantically rustled through the auction catalogs, comparing the titles Pearly had circled in red to those on the plaques they had stolen along with the canvases. They matched. Pearly was shown that they matched.
    “I don’t understand,” he said, peering at his collection of great and famous names. “They’re mud, black and brown. No light in them, and hardly any color. Who would paint a picture in black and brown?”
    “I don’t know, Pearly,” answered Blacky Womble, his most trusted lieutenant.
    “Why? Why would they do that? And why do all the rich people and the experts like these things? Don’t they know? They’re rich, they must know.”
    “I told you, Pearly, I can’t figure it,” said Blacky Womble.
    “Shut up! Take ’em back. I don’t want them here. Put them back in their frames.”
    “But we cut them out,” protested the burglars, “and besides, in an hour it’ll be light. There isn’t enough time.”
    “Then put them back tomorrow night. Damn them! What a waste.”
    The next day saw a great stir when Knoedler’s discovered that half a million dollars’ worth of paintings had been stolen. And the day after that, the papers went wild reporting that the paintings had been replaced. They published on their front pages the contents of a note found pinned to one of the frames.

I don’t want these. They’re mud and they’ve got no color. Or at least the color is different from what I’m used to. Take any American city, in autumn, or in winter, when the light makes the colors dance and flow, and look at it from a distant hill or from a boat in the bay or on the river, and you will see in any section of the view far better paintings than in this lentil soup that you people have to pedigree in order to love. I may be a thief, but I know color when I see it in the flash of heaven or in the Devil’s opposing tricks, and I know mud. Mr. Knoedler, you needn’t worry about your paintings anymore. I’m not going to steal them. I don’t like them.
Sincerely yours,
P. Soames

    To comfort his wounded color gravity, Pearly’s men went out to get him emeralds, gold, and silver. He didn’t speak for days, until the warmth of the gold and the visual clatter of the fine silver healed him. Occasionally they would bring back the work of an American artist, or a Renaissance miniaturist, or any of the lively and unappreciated experimentalists, or some ancient whose work had not been boiled in linseed oil, and Pearly would have his feast—under a pier, upstairs at a stale-beer house, or amid the vats of a commandeered brewery. But the wonderful sights and scenes, the subtleties of true sacrificial color, the holiness of its coincidence in integral planes and intermingling currents, were not enough for Pearly. He wanted actually to live inside the dream that captured his eye, to spend his days and nights in a fume of burnished gold.
    “I want a room of gold,” he said, “solid, polished all the time with chamois, pure gold: the walls, ceiling, and floor of gold plate.” Even the Short Tails were stunned. The city was theirs, but they had never thought to be like Inca kings, or to build a heavenly palace, or even to have a fixed address.
    Blacky Womble risked contradicting his chief.