chance on the island was as good as yours in a leaking dory. Who shall say?"
Old Twining merely shook his head. He returned again to the glowing fragment on the table between us.
"Ah, you are thinking that the vase is my consolation—that I wanted to keep it. And perhaps I did," he owned wistfully. "I swear to you I abhor the deed it stands for, but I can no more help loving it in itself—"
He lost himself, wandered off once more into the fine points of his treasure.
But-the wind rose up again, and the old man’s head dropped to his hands. I was with him all that night and I saw him suffer the tortures of an eternally damned soul with a razor blade conscience.
The storm over, he was the kindly, considerate host when he bade me good-bye on the following morning. I left him with the feeling that I had been in the presence of as fine a gentleman as I had ever met; that his story of the preceding night was utterly incongruous to the man as he was. It would be a physical impossibility, I protested, for that gentle old scholar to harm an insect.
His mind had wandered at times could it be that he was suffering some kind of an hallucination, the result, perhaps, of an overacute conscience? I believed there was some factor to his story which I had not got hold of, and I promised myself to visit him again.
VI.
But time passed. I was abroad in England and in France. Then two years later, back again in New York, I picked up the missing link in the old scholar’s story:
It was inevitable, I suppose, that, as buyer for the House of Harrow, I should sooner or later stumble into Max Bauer. At a private sale I lazily bid against the wealthy collector for a jade bowl and good-naturedly lost to him. I talked with him, and when he urged me to dine with him that evening and see his treassures, I assented.
I don’t know why I accepted his invitation, for I did not like the man; but I was mildly curious about his collection, and alone in the city in midsummer, I welcomed any diversion.
So he dined me and wined me—especially the latter—to repleteness in the ornate dining-room of his luxurious apartment, which was after the manner of a banquet hall. I watched him pick apart the bird that was set before him, and found something cannibalistic in the performance; and I watched him again over a rich mousse, and liked him less and less. His hand was always upon a bottle; he gave me no peace—urged things upon me, made a show of his food and his service.
The meal over, still keeping the decanter by him, he trailed me through rooms littered with oriental junk. He bragged and boasted, told the history of this piece and that: how he had robbed one man here and tricked another there. His voice thickened, as his enthusiasm grew, and I turned thoroughly uncomfortable and wondered when I could break away.
Clearly the man attracted few friends of a caliber to appreciate his art treasures, for under my perfunctory approval, he became increasingly garrulous, until at last he invited me into the inner shrine, the small room which held his most private and precious possessions.
We stopped before a water color painting of a slim girl in gray.
"My wife," said old Bauer with a flourish; "her last portrait."
I turned incredulously from that white-flower face, with its fine, subtle smile, half-ironical and half-tired, to my gross-featured host—and I shuddered.
"A handsome woman," he mumbled; "picture doesn’t do her justice. Face so-so, but a body . . . . a body for an artist to paint . . . ."
I looked away from him—followed the gray girl’s eyes to the object below her upon which she ironically smiled: it was a red-figured Greek vase, and I remember thinking that this man must have changed—that his taste, his very life, must have degenerated, like the retrogression from the fine to the decadent, since such a girl had married him.
Then something familiar in the vase struck me—like the broken pattern of a forgotten dream . . . . It was the fragment of a vase, the half of a cylix, on which an orange goddess stood with uplifted spear.
"Ah," I breathed, "the Athena—Euphronios!"
"So you’re up to it!" chuckled old Bauer. "Not many of ’em are. Classic stuff: I used to aim for a collection of the pure Greek, but I’ve grown out of that; not that I wouldn’t have achieved it if my taste hadn’t changed, y’understand, for I’m generally successful—I get the things I set out for. This"—he scowled at the vase—"is my one failure. But there’s a story"—he poured himself another whisky (to my infinite relief forgot to press me) "want to hear it, eh?"
I looked at him carefully; the plump fingers; the full, sensual lips; the dark skin and the nose—probably Jewish blood. What was the name?—Lutz, that was it!
Decidedly I did want to hear his story!
VII.
"My one failure," he emphasized it, slumping into a chair. "Not my fault, either; the fault of a stuffy old fool. He doted on me, played the fatherly role, and I tolerated him as you will such folks. I cribbed a lot off of him; I was keen on the classics at that time, and he knew a thing or two.
"Besides, he was sweet on Lorna, and you never could tell about her—odd tastes; it was best to keep track of him. We traveled together for the college—you’d never guess I’d been a college professor in my day, would you? I happened onto this thing quite by luck—a genuine Euphronios, broken clean in two pieces. I wanted it, and I managed it. This fellow—old Gooding—had a notion of turning it in to the college museum; he had some other fool’s idea of proving something-or-other—a rare old bird, a pedant, you understand. It was a shaky business; I’d no intention of publishing my Euphronios at this time. But he was set—you’d never believe how set!—and since I couldn’t afford to stir up a row there in Athens, I humored him.
"Once we were clear of Greece—once we struck home ground—But we never struck home ground on that ship. She went down!"—with a flourish of his glass. "Yes, dammit all, regular desert island stuff. We were hung up on a rock in mid-ocean, the two of us, old Gooding hugging tight to half the vase, and me nursing the other half. Can’t say I ever was more damned uncomfortable in my life.
“He had this eccentric idea of honor and he had it hard like religion, and he hung on like a bull dog. It was war between us. Oh, he doted upon me right enough, still insisted upon the paternal role, but I’d no intention of letting him pull this thing."
Again Bauer fumbled for the bottle, spilled whisky into his glass.
"The old idiot—you’d think he’d’ve seen what he was driving me to, but not him. I had a couple of matches in my pocket—I’d held out on him, y’understand. And I’d built up a pile of driftwood for a signal fire to the first ship that passed. But I’d no notion of saving him too. No, I had a contrary notion of setting him adrift in the dory.
"Oh, it was easy: he’d gone weaker than a cat, y’understand—all gray matter an’ no physh—physhique, ol’ Cheever Gooding. I’d take my chances on the
