“One of the problems I have had to face is to find some way of preventing high-ranking Air Force officers from sending home planes packed with art loot. They don’t know much about art but they certainly know what they like, and they’ve heard that hand-painted oils fetch big money. I needn’t tell you I haven’t solved the problem. Still—it’s the nature of fighting men to loot.” Thresher was a cheerful cynic.
In all, fourteen states were represented, usually by two experts and a secretary, who was aspiring to be an expert. Ross was one of these. An Englishman, Lieutenant-Colonel Osmotherley, who was not an art expert but a redoubtable administrator, acted as chairman.
“What an array of boffins,” said Ross. “I feel totally out of my league.”
“You are out of your league,” said Francis. “So keep your trap shut, at the sessions and everywhere else. Leave everything to me.”
“Am I not even to have an opinion?’’ said Ross.
“Not out loud. Just keep your eyes and ears open.”
Ross’s cheerful estimate of the Commission’s work showed total lack of acquaintance with the way in which such things are done. After a war in which art had not been a first consideration, the experts were determined to assert its importance. After years of serving as air-raid wardens, standing in queues for coffee made of tulip bulbs, watching powerless as the invaders snatched their dearest treasures, being snubbed by Occupation forces, and being in most cases made to feel the weight of their years, they were once again men of importance, to whom their governments turned for expert advice. After wretched food, shortages of tobacco and drink, cold rooms, and no hot water, they were lodged in a hotel which, if not functioning at pre-war standard, was the best place they had known in years. Best of all, they were once again in that world of scholarship, of connoisseurship, of hair-splitting, haggling, wrangling, and quarrelling which was their very own, and in which they moved like wizard-kings. Were they going to hurry, to cut corners, to compromise, to take any steps whatever to hasten the evil day when their work would be done and they would have to go home? As Francis explained to Ross, only a dumb-bell Canadian, fresh out of the Navy, could suppose any such absurd thing.
Of course, he knew long before they went to Munich that Ross was no dumb-bell. He was brilliant; he had, in terms of his years and experience, extraordinary knowledge of art. Best of all, he had flair. His perception was swift and sure. But what especially endeared him to Francis was that Ross was light-hearted, and thought that art was for the delight and enlargement of man, rather than a carefully guarded mystery, a battleground for experts, and a treasure-house to be plundered by the manipulators of taste, the merchants of vogue, the art dealers.
Ross was self-educated in art, but a graduate of a Canadian Western university and later of Oxford (he had been some sort of Commonwealth scholar), where he had studied modern languages. Like many young men from the prairies, he had been drawn toward the Navy, where he was fairly useful, and very ornamental. Ross was that unusual creature, a male beauty, fair but not a Scandinavian blond, fine-skinned, fine-featured, and with a good, though not markedly athletic, figure. There was nothing epicene about him: he was, quite simply, beautiful and knew it. Among the commissioners, and their serious secretaries (most of whom were already gripped by the premature age of the intellectual), he glowed like a rosebush in a forest of evergreens—a rosebush that had not already succumbed to the acid, evergreen soil.
“You preserve my sanity, Aylwin,” Francis said one night in the Munich hotel, when he had drunk rather too much. “If I have to listen once again to Schlichte-Martin and Dupanloup hashing it out about whether a canvas is a Rembrandt or simply a Goveart Flink, or if what looks like a Gerard Dou is really a Donner, I may scream and froth and have to be led from the room and plunged in a cold shower. What does it matter? Get the things back to wherever they came from.”
“You take it all too seriously,” said Ross. “You’ve simply got to hang on and not care too much. Do you realize that there were over five thousand of these pictures, most of them nothing more than classy crap, in that salt mine at Alt Aussee where so much of the Führermuseum stuff was stashed? And what about all the stuff that has turned up near Marburg? Not to speak of Göring’s immense personal loot. We shall have to consider them all, and if we did fifty a day, how many days does that make? Why don’t you relax and stop listening? Just look at the pictures, the pictures we do look at. Wonderful! How many Temptations of St. Anthony have we seen already? And in every one of them an old geezer nearly dead of starvation is being tempted by a few pesky demons but chiefly by meaty girls over whom he is in no condition to throw a saintly leg. If I were a painter I would show him being offered a lobster à la Newburg. That would have tempted him! Temptation works in the place where the weakness is greatest.”
“You speak with a banal wisdom beyond your years.”
“Always have. Born wise. You weren’t born wise, Francis. Not wise and not banal; you were born with a skin too few.”
Saraceni was not so greatly taken with Aylwin Ross as was Francis. “He has talent,” said he to Francis one day when they met over lunch, “but he is at heart a careerist. And why not? He is not an artist. He creates nothing, preserves nothing. What has he?”
“Insight,” said Francis, and told him what Ross had said about St. Anthony’s temptations.
“Shrewd,” said Saraceni. “Commonplace, but it takes shrewdness to see the wisdom in the commonplace. The temptation gets us at the point of weakness. What is your weak point, Corniche? You’d better take care it isn’t Aylwin Ross.”
Francis was offended. Of course, he was usually seen in the company of the beauty of the Commission, and he had not quite understood that some of the other commissioners, for reasons best not examined, interpreted this in their own way. In 1947 homosexuality was not so easily accepted as it became later, but for that reason it was much on people’s minds.
Because Saraceni was still the Meister in his world, Francis faced what he had said. Of course he liked Ross. Was he not a fellow-Canadian, and one for whom it was not necessary to make apologies to people who saw Canadians as a pseudo-nation of beaver-skinners? Was Ross not witty and merry in a group where wit never arose except as a weapon with which to strike down a rival? Was he not comely among the swag-bellied and the wrinkled? And—Francis did not face this quite honestly—was he not the nearest thing he had ever met to the elusive figure, apparently a girl, who was needed for the completion of himself? To make a friend, and a close and dear friend, of Aylwin Ross was the most natural thing in the world. In this association Francis did not feel himself a pupil, as he was aware that he had always been with Ruth, nor was he a gull, as he had been with the desirable, treacherous Ismay. This was, he told himself, a relationship in which emotion played as little part as it can play in anything, and kinship of mind and friendship were everything.
Nevertheless, he thought he ought to tell Ross what was apparently being said. Ross laughed.
“ ‘Helter-skelter, hang sorrow, care kill’d a cat, up-tails all, and a louse for the hangman’.”
“What’s that?”
“Ben Jonson. I did a lot of work on him at one time. Full of excellent good sense, expressed with a trumpeting masculinity. It simply means, Screw ‘em all! What does it matter what they think? We know it isn’t so, don’t we?”
Did they? Did they know that? Francis thought he knew it, but Francis’s conception of what was being hinted at was to be seen in the bold-eyed, painted youths who hung about in the shadows of the Munich nights. Of the subtler sodomy of the soul he knew nothing. As for Aylwin Ross, he knew only that he often got what he wanted by enchanting those whose lives had been poor in enchantment, and he saw no harm in it. And indeed, could there be any harm in it?