The Outcry: -1911

'An alibi?'

'By 'raving,' as you say, the saddle on the wrong horse. I don't think you at all believe you'll get the Sir Joshua—but meanwhile we shall have cleared up the question of the Moretto.'

Mr. Bender, imperturbable, didn't speak till he had done justice to this picture of his subtlety. 'Then, why on earth do you want to boom the Moretto?'

'You ask that,' said Hugh, 'because it's the boomed thing that's most in peril.'

'Well, it's the big, the bigger, the biggest things, and if you drag their value to the light why shouldn't we want to grab them and carry them off—the same as all of you originally did?'

'Ah, not quite the same,' Hugh smiled—'that I will say for you!'

'Yes, you stick it on now—you have got an eye for the rise in values. But I grant you your unearned increment, and you ought to be mighty glad that, to such a time, I'll pay it you.'

Our young man kept, during a moment's thought, his eyes on his companion, and then resumed with all intensity and candour: 'You may easily, Mr. Bender, be too much for me—as you appear too much for far greater people. But may I ask you, very earnestly, for your word on this, as to any case in which that happens—that when precious things, things we are to lose here, are knocked down to you, you'll let us at least take leave of them, let us have a sight of them in London, before they're borne off?'

Mr. Bender's big face fell almost with a crash. 'Hand them over, you mean, to the sandwich men on Bond Street?'

'To one or other of the placard and poster men—I don't insist on the inserted human slice! Let the great values, as a compensation to us, be on view for three or four weeks.'

'You ask me,' Mr. Bender returned, 'for a general assurance to that effect?'

'Well, a particular one—so it be particular enough,' Hugh said—'will do just for now. Let me put in my plea for the issue—well, of the value that's actually in the scales.'

'The Mantovano-Moretto?'

'The Moretto-Mantovano!'

Mr. Bender carnivorously smiled. 'Hadn't we better know which it is first?'

Hugh had a motion of practical indifference for this. 'The public interest—playing so straight on the question —may help to settle it. By which I mean that it will profit enormously—the question of probability, of identity itself will—by the discussion it will create. The discussion will promote certainty——'

'And certainty,' Mr. Bender massively mused, 'will kick up a row.'

'Of course it will kick up a row!'—Hugh thoroughly guaranteed that. 'You'll be, for the month, the best-abused man in England—if you venture to remain here at all; except, naturally, poor Lord Theign.'

'Whom it won't be my interest, at the same time, to worry into backing down.'

'But whom it will be exceedingly mine to practise on'—and Hugh laughed as at the fun before them—'if I may entertain the sweet hope of success. The only thing is—from my point of view,' he went on—'that backing down before what he will call vulgar clamour isn't in the least in his traditions, nothing less so; and that if there should be really too much of it for his taste or his nerves he'll set his handsome face as a stone and never budge an inch. But at least again what I appeal to you for will have taken place—the picture will have been seen by a lot of people who'll care.'

'It will have been seen,' Mr. Bender amended—'on the mere contingency of my acquisition of it—only if its present owner consents.'

''Consents'?' Hugh almost derisively echoed; 'why, he'll propose it himself, he'll insist on it, he'll put it through, once he's angry enough—as angry, I mean, as almost any public criticism of a personal act of his will be sure to make him; and I'm afraid the striking criticism, or at least animadversion, of this morning, will have blown on his flame of bravado.'

Inevitably a student of character, Mr. Bender rose to the occasion. 'Yes, I guess he's pretty mad.'

'They've imputed to him'—Hugh but wanted to abound in that sense—'an intention of which after all he isn't guilty.'

'So that'—his listener glowed with interested optimism—'if they don't look out, if they impute it to him again, I guess he'll just go and be guilty!'

Hugh might at this moment have shown to an initiated eye as fairly elated by the sense of producing something of the effect he had hoped. 'You entertain the fond vision of lashing them up to that mistake, oh fisher in troubled waters?' And then with a finer art, as his companion, expansively bright but crudely acute, eyed him in turn as if to sound him: 'The strongest thing in such a type—one does make out—is his resentment of a liberty taken; and the most natural furthermore is quite that he should feel almost anything you do take uninvited from the groaning board of his banquet of life to be such a liberty.'

Mr. Bender participated thus at his perceptive ease in the exposed aristocratic illusion. 'Yes, I guess he has always lived as he likes, the way those of you who have got things fixed for them do, over here; and to have to quit it on account of unpleasant remark—'

But he gave up thoughtfully trying to express what this must be; reduced to the mere synthetic interjection 'My!'

'That's it, Mr. Bender,' Hugh said for the consecration of such a moral; 'he won't quit it without a hard struggle.'

Mr. Bender hereupon at last gave himself quite gaily away as to his high calculation of impunity. 'Well, I guess he won't struggle too hard for me to hold on to him if I want to!'

'In the thick of the conflict then, however that may be,' Hugh returned, 'don't forget what I've urged on you— the claim of our desolate country.'