Fair Margaret
Page 78On the rare occasions when he allowed any one but his servants to enter
that room, he said that the statue was a copy, which he had caused to
be very carefully made after an original found in Lesbos and secretly
carried off by a high Turkish official, who kept it in his house and
never spoke of it. This accounted for its being quite unknown to the
artistic world. He called attention to the fact that it was really a
facsimile, rather than a copy, and he seemed pleased at the perfect
reproduction of the injured points, which were few, and of the stains,
which were faint and not unpleasing. But he never showed it to an
artist or an expert critic.
'A mere copy,' he would say, with a shrug of his shoulders. 'Nothing
that would interest any one who really knows about such things.' A very perfect copy, a very marvellous copy, surely; one that might
stand in the Vatican, with the Torso, or in the Louvre, beside the
Olympia itself, facing the Hermes, the greatest of all, and yet never
be taken for anything but the work of a supreme master's own hands. But
Constantine Logotheti shrugged his shoulders and said it was a mere
copy, nothing but a clever facsimile, carved and chipped and stained by
a couple of Italian marble-cutters, whose business it was to
manufacture antiquities for the American market and whom any one could
engage to work in any part of the world for twenty francs a day and
their expenses. Yes, those Italian workmen were clever fellows,
Logotheti admitted. But everything could be counterfeited now, as
everybody knew, and his only merit lay in having ordered this
particular counterfeit instead of having been deceived by it.
As Logotheti sat there in the quiet light, looking at it, the word
smile played upon his broad Oriental lips. The 'copy' had cost human
lives, and he had almost paid for it with his own, in his haste to have
it for himself, and only for himself.
His eyes were half-closed again, and he saw outlines of strong ragged
men staggering down to a lonely cove at night, with their marble
burden, and he heard the autumn gale howling among the rocks, and the
soft thud of the baled statue as it was laid in the bottom of the
little fishing craft; and then, because the men feared the weather, he
was in the boat himself, shaming them by his courage, loosing the sail,
bending furiously to one of the long sweeps, yelling, cheering,
cursing, promising endless gold, then baling with mad energy as the
water swirled up and poured over the canvas bulwark that Greek boats
the end, a sweep broken and foul of the next, a rower falling headlong
on the man in front of him, confusion in the dark, the crazy boat
broached to in the breaking sea, filling, fuller, now quite full and
sinking, the raging hell of men fighting for their lives amongst broken
oars, and tangled rigging and floating bottom-boards; one voice less,
two less, a smashing sea and then no voices at all, no boat, no men, no
anything but the howling wind and the driving spray, and he himself,
Logotheti, gripping a spar, one of those long booms the fishermen carry
for running, half-drowned again and again, but gripping still, and
drifting with the storm past the awful death of sharp black rocks and
pounding seas, into the calm lee beyond.