"I went up to one of them," he began, "just to see how it was done; I
stuck my nose into it. Yes, I don't think! Impossible to say whether it
was done with glue, with soap, with sealing-wax, with sunshine, with
leaven, with excrem..."
"And one make twelve!" shouted the Doctor, wittily, but just too late, for
no one saw the point of his interruption.
"It looks as though it were done with nothing at all," resumed the
painter. "No more chance of discovering the trick than there is in the
'Night Watch,' or the 'Regents,' and it's even bigger work than either
Rembrandt or Hals ever did. It's all there,--and yet, no, I'll take my
oath it isn't."
Then, just as singers who have reached the highest note in their compass,
proceed to hum the rest of the air in falsetto, he had to be satisfied
with murmuring, smiling the while, as if, after all, there had been
something irresistibly amusing in the sheer beauty of the painting: "It
smells all right; it makes your head go round; it catches your breath; you
feel ticklish all over--and not the faintest clue to how it's done. The
man's a sorcerer; the thing's a conjuring-trick, it's a miracle," bursting
outright into laughter, "it's dishonest!" Then stopping, solemnly raising
his head, pitching his voice on a double-bass note which he struggled to
bring into harmony, he concluded, "And it's so loyal!"
Except at the moment when he had called it "bigger than the 'Night
Watch,'" a blasphemy which had called forth an instant protest from Mme.
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