Edith Wharton
The Daunt Diana
TALES OF MEN
Wharton, Edith. "The Daunt Diana."
Scribner's Magazine 46 (July 1909): 35-41.
About the print version
The Daunt Diana
Wharton, Edith
Scribner's Magazine July 1909
Note: Volume 46
Published: 1909
I
"WHAT'S become of the Daunt Diana? You mean to say you never heard the
sequel?"
Ringham Finney threw himself back into his chair with the smile of the
collector who has a good thing to show. He knew he had a good listener, at any
rate. I don't think much of Ringham's snuff-boxes, but his anecdotes are usually
worth while. He's a psychologist astray among bibelots, and the best bits he
brings back from his raids on Christie's and the Hotel Drouot are the fragments
of human nature he picks up on those historic battle-fields. If his flair in
enamel had been half as good we should have heard of the Finney collection by
this time.
He really has -- queer fatuous investigator! -- an unusually sensitive touch
for the human texture, and the specimens he gathers into his museum of
heterogeneous memories have almost always some mark of the rare and chosen. I
felt, therefore, that I was really to be congratulated on the fact that I didn't
know what had become of the Daunt Diana, and on having before me a long evening
in which to learn. I had just led my friend back, after an excellent dinner at
Foyot's, to the shabby pleasant sitting-room of my rive-gauche hotel; and I knew
that, once I had settled him in a good arm-chair, and put a box of cigars at his
elbow, I could trust him not to budge till I had the story.
II
YOU remember old Neave, of course? Little Humphrey Neave, I mean. We used to
see him pottering about Rome years ago. He lived in two tiny rooms over a wine
shop, on polenta and lentils, and prowled among the refuse of the Ripetta
whenever he had a few soldi to spend. But you've been out of the collector's
world for so long that you may not know what happened to him afterward. . .
He was always a queer chap, Neave; years older than you and me, of course --
and even when I first knew him, in my raw Roman days, he gave me an
extraordinary sense of age and experience. I don't think I've ever known any one
who was at once so intelligent and so simple. It's the precise combination that
results in romance; and poor little Neave was romantic.
He told me once how he'd come to Rome. He was originaire of Mystic,
Connecticut -- and he wanted to get as far away from it as possible. Rome seemed
as far as anything on the same planet could be; and after he'd worried his way
through Harvard -- with shifts and shavings that you and I can't imagine -- he
contrived to get sent to Switzerland as tutor to a chap who'd failed in his
examinations. With only the Alps between, he wasn't likely to turn back; and he
got another fellow to take his pupil home, and struck out on foot for the seven
hills.
I'm telling you these early details merely to give you a notion of the man's
idealism. There was a cool persistency and a headlong courage in his dash for
Rome that one wouldn't have guessed in the little pottering chap we used to
know. Once on the spot, he got more tutoring, managed to make himself a name for
coaxing balky youths to take their fences, and was finally able to take up the
more congenial task of expounding "the antiquities" to cultured travellers. I
call it more congenial -- but how it must have seared his soul! Fancy unveiling
the sacred scars of Time to ladies who murmur: "Was this actually the spot -- ?"
while they absently feel for their hatpins! He used to say that nothing kept him
at it but the exquisite thought of accumulating the lire for his collection. For
the Neave collection, my dear fellow, began early, began almost with his Roman
life, began in a series of little nameless odds and ends, broken trinkets, torn
embroideries, the amputated extremities of maimed marbles: things that even the
rag-picker had pitched away when he sifted his haul. But they weren't nameless
or meaningless to Neave; his strength lay in his instinct for identifying,
putting together, seeing significant relations. He was a regular Cuvier of bric-a-brac. And during those early years,
when he had time to brood over trifles and note imperceptible differences, he
gradually sharpened his instinct, and made it into the delicate and redoubtable
instrument it is. Before he had a thousand francs' worth of anticaglie to his
name he began to be known as an expert, and the big dealers were glad to consult
him. But we're getting no nearer the Daunt Diana. . .
Well, some fifteen years ago, in London, I ran across Neave at Christie's. He
was the same little man we'd known, effaced, bleached, indistinct, like a poor
"impression" -- as unnoticeable as one of his own early finds, yet, like them,
with a quality, if one had an eye for it. He told me he still lived in Rome, and
had contrived, by fierce self-denial, to get a few decent bits together --
"piecemeal, little by little, with fasting and prayer; and I mean the fasting
literally!" he said.
He had run over to London for his annual "look-round" -- I fancy one or
another of the big collectors usually paid his journey -- and when we met he was
on his way to see the Daunt collection. You know old Daunt was a surly brute,
and the things weren't easily seen; but he had heard Neave was in London, and
had sent -- yes, actually sent! -- for him to come and give his opinion on a few
bits, including the Diana. The little man bore himself discreetly, but you can
imagine his pride. In his exultation he asked me to come with him -- "Oh, I've
the grandes et petites entrees, my dear fellow: I've made my conditions -- " and
so it happened that I saw the first meeting between Humphrey Neave and his fate.
For that collection was his fate: or, one may say, it was embodied in the
Diana who was queen and goddess of the realm. Yes -- I shall always be glad I
was with Neave when he had his first look at the Diana. I see him now, blinking
at her through his white lashes, and stroking his seedy wisp of a moustache to
hide a twitch of the muscles. It was all very quiet, but it was the coup de
foudre. I could see that by the way his hands trembled when he turned away and
began to examine the other things. You remember Neave's hands -- thin, sallow,
dry, with long inquisitive fingers thrown out like antennae? Whatever they hold
-- bronze or lace, hard enamel or brittle glass -- they have an air of
conforming themselves to the texture of the thing, and sucking out of it, by
every finger-tip, the mysterious essence it has secreted. Well, that day, as he
moved about among Daunt's treasures, the Diana followed him everywhere. He
didn't look back at her -- he gave himself to the business he was there for --
but whatever he touched, he felt her. And on the threshold he turned and gave
her his first free look -- the kind of look that says: "You're mine."
It amused me at the time -- the idea of little Neave making eyes at any of
Daunt's belongings. He might as well have coquetted with the Kohinoor. And the
same idea seemed to strike him; for as we turned away from the big house in
Belgravia he glanced up at it and said, with a bitterness I'd never heard in
him: "Good Lord! To think of that lumpy fool having those things to handle! Did
you notice his stupid stumps of fingers? I suppose he blunted them gouging
nuggets out of the gold fields. And in exchange for the nuggets he gets all that
in a year -- only has to hold out his callous palm to have that great ripe
sphere of beauty drop into it! That's my idea of heaven -- to have a great
collection drop into one's hand, as success, or love, or any of the big shining
things, drop suddenly on some men. And I've had to worry along for nearly fifty
years, saving and paring, and haggling and intriguing, to get here a bit and
there a bit -- and not one perfection in the lot! It's enough to poison a man's
life."
The outbreak was so unlike Neave ...
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