The Lyre of Orpheus

(1)

When the company moved to Stratford and, in Powell’s phrase, went into high gear on the production, it would have been easy to miss the fact that Schnak was deeply in love with Geraint. She tagged after him; but the Stage Manager, her assistants, and the gofer girls also tagged after him. She hung upon his words; but Waldo Harris, the Stage Director, and Dulcy Ringgold, the Designer, also hung upon his words. Nobody took any notice of Schnak’s infatuation but Darcourt; nobody else saw the special quality in her tagging and hanging. Nobody else saw the lovelight in her eyes.

They were not eyes in which one would look for the lovelight. They were small, pebbly, squinty little eyes. Nor was Schnak a figure upon whom love sat like an accustomed garment; her motion was not graceful, because, in one of Darcourt’s Old Ontario phrases, she was as bow-legged as a hog going to war; her voice was as snarly as ever, though under Gunilla’s guidance her vocabulary was larger and not so dirty; she had no graces, and the least of the gofers could have wiped the floor with her in a contest of charm. But Schnak was in love, and this was not a matter of bodily awakening and bodily satisfaction as it had been with Gunilla, but beglamoured and yearning passion. This is the romanticism in which her work has drenched and soused her; I am sure she tosses on her bed and murmurs his name to her pillow, thought Darcourt.

He took his chance to ask Gunilla if she were aware of this. “Oh, yes,” said the Doctor; “it was bound to happen. She must try everything, and Powell is an obvious mark for a young girl’s love.”

“But you don’t mind?”

“Why should I mind? The child is not my property. Oh, we have had merry hours, to the great scandal of that fat busybody Professor Raven, but that was a teacher-and-pupil thing. Not love. I have known love, Simon, and with men also, let me assure you, and I know what it is. I am not such a romantic as to think of it as the great educational force—broadening her experience, enlarging her vision, and all that nonsense—but it is something everybody feels who is not a complete cabbage. I must see that it doesn’t spoil her work; people seem to have forgotten that all this elaborate contrivance boils down to an examination exercise, and Hulda must get her degree, if there is not to be a great waste of money.”

Elaborate contrivance indeed it was. The company was lucky in having the theatre for the last three weeks of rehearsal. Not the stage; not yet. There was still a week of performances of a play which called for only one small set, but all the workrooms and both rehearsal rooms were now devoted to Arthur, and during the last two weeks the stage would be available to the singers when it was not wanted by the technicians.

The technicians bulked very large. It seemed to Darcourt that they almost swamped the opera. On huge paint-frames in one of the workrooms the scenery was being painted, for Powell wanted proper scenes, and not the usual wrinkled cyclorama, suggesting a sky that had shrunk and faded in the wash.

“In Hoffmann’s day there was no stage light, in our sense,” he said, “and anything like a lighting effect had to be painted on the scenery. And that’s how Dulcy is doing it.”

Dulcy Ringgold was not what Darcourt would have thought of as a theatrical character. She was small, she was shy, she laughed a great deal, and she seemed to regard her responsibilities as the best joke in the world.

“I’m really just a glorified dressmaker,” she said, through a mouthful of pins, as she draped something on Clara Intrepidi. “Just that nice little woman Miss Dulcy, who is so clever with her fingers.” She did something that made Miss Intrepidi look taller and slimmer. “There dear; if you can suck up your gut the teeniest bit that will do very nicely.”

“The gut is what I breathe with,” said Miss Intrepidi.

“Then we’ll drape this a little more freely,” said Dulcy, “and maybe put a wee thingy just here.”

At other times, Dulcy was to be seen with a filthy bandana wrapped around her head, on the bridge that swayed before the paintframe, putting special touches on huge drop-scenes that were being painted from her carefully squared-off watercolour designs. Sometimes she was in the basement, where the armour was made, not with the ring of the swordsmith’s hammer, but with the chemical whiff of Plexiglas being moulded. It was here, too, that all the swords, and Arthur’s sceptre, and the crowns for Arthur and his Queen were made, and studded with foil-backed glass jewels that gave a splendidly Celtic richness to post-Roman Britain. Dulcy was everywhere, and Dulcy’s taste and imagination touched everything.

“I hate theatre where the audience is told to use its imagination,” she said. “That’s cheap. The audience lays down its good money to rent imagination from somebody who has more than they ever dreamed of. Somebody like me. Imagination’s my only stock-in-trade.” She said this as she whisked off a brilliant little sketch for a fool’s head which was to be made in pretended metal and attached to the hilt of Sir Dagonet’s sword. But it was not all of her stock-in-trade. Darcourt picked up a large book from her workbench.

“What’s this?” he said.

“Oh, that’s my darling and my deario, James Robinson Planché; his Encyclopaedia of Costume, a revolutionary book in stage design. He was the first man, believe it or not, who really cared if stage dress had any roots in the realities of the past. He designed the first King John that really looked like King John’s time. I don’t copy his pictures, of course. Strictly accurate historical costume looks absurd, as a usual thing, but dear Planché is a springboard for one’s imagination.”

“I don’t suppose even Planché knew what King Arthur wore,” said Darcourt.

“No, but he would have given a jolly well-informed guess,” said Dulcy, patting the two large books tenderly. “So I load up on dear Planché, and then I guess too. Lots of dragons; that’s the stuff for Arthur. I’m putting Morgan Le Fay in a dragon head-dress. Sounds corny, but it won’t be when I’ve finished with it.”

So: the omnicompetent Planché is going to have a finger in the pie, even if we don’t use his horrible libretto, thought Darcourt. He was—just a little—losing his heart to Dulcy, but so was every other man who came near her. It appeared, however, that Dulcy was somewhat of Gunilla’s way of thinking about sex, and although she flirted outrageously with the men, it was with Gunilla she went to dinner.

Here is a world where sex is not of first, second, or perhaps even third importance, thought Darcourt. How refreshing.

Sex was, however, rearing its wistfully domestic head with the unhappy Mabel Muller. The weather in Stratford proved to be just as hot as it was in Toronto, and Mabel’s legs swelled, and her hair drooped, and she bore her burden of posterity with visible effort. She tagged everywhere after Al, who was like a man possessed, making notes here, and taking photographs with an instant camera there, and getting in everyone’s way while making obstructive efforts to avoid doing precisely that. Not that Al forgot her or excluded her; he gave her his heavy briefcase to carry, and they always ate the sandwiches Mabel brought from a fast-food shop together, while he harangued—“extrapolated” was the fine word he used—on all that he had noted, or photographed.

“This is pure gold, Sweetness,” he would say from time to time. To Sweetness it was fairy gold, no sooner touched than lost.

It would be unjust to say that Al grudged the time needed to rush Mabel to the hospital when at last her pains became too much to be ignored. “They’re coming every twenty minutes now,” she whispered, tearfully, and Al made just one more essential note before seizing her by the arm and leading her out of the rehearsal room. It was Darcourt who found them a taxi and urged the driver to lose no time in getting them to the hospital. They had made no arrangements, had not even seen a doctor, and Mabel was admitted in Emergency.

“Something is not quite right with Mabel,” said Maria, later in the day, to Darcourt. “Her pains have stopped.”

“Al was back for the end of the rehearsal,” said Darcourt. “I thought everything must be going smoothly.”

“I’d like to brain Al,” said Maria. “That’s the trouble with these irregular unions. No guts when the going is rough. I’d hang around the hospital if I could, but Arthur has to get back to his office for a couple of days and I am going with him. New developments in the Wally Crottel affair. I’ll tell you later. There’s really nothing for us to do here. Geraint seems to feel that we’re underfoot.”

“I’m sure not.”

“I’m sure yes. But Simon, will you be a darling and keep an eye on Mabel? She’s no concern of ours, but I’m concerned just the same. Will you get in touch if we should do anything?”

That was why Darcourt found himself in the comfortless waiting-room of the hospital’s maternity ward at four o’clock in the morning. Al had left at half past ten, promising to phone early next day. Darcourt was not alone. Dr. Dahl-Soot had also turned up, after Al’s departure.

“Nothing could be less in my line than this,” she said. “But that poor wretch is a stranger in a strange land, and so am I, so here I am.”

Darcourt knew better than to say it was very good of her.

“Arthur and Maria asked me to keep an eye on things,” he said.

“I like those two,” said the Doctor. “I didn’t greatly like them when we first met, but they grow better on acquaintance. They are a very solid pair. Do you think it’s the baby?”

“Partly the baby. A very fine baby. Maria is suckling it.”

“She is? That’s old style. But I believe very good.”

“I don’t know,” said Darcourt. “As we academics say, it’s not my field. But it’s a very pretty sight.”

“You are a softy, Simon. And that’s as it should be. I wouldn’t give a damn for a man who was not a softy in some ways.”

“Gunilla, do you think we single people are apt to be sentimental about love and babies and all that?”

“I am not sentimental about anything. But I have sentiment about many things. That’s an English-language difference that is very useful. Not to have sentiment is to be almost dead.”

“But you have taken—pardon me for saying so—a decidedly anti-baby-road.”

“Simon, you are too intelligent a man to be as provincial as you sometimes pretend. You know there is room in the world for everything and every kind of life. What do you think marriage is? Just babies and eating off the same fork?”

“God forbid! Because it’s either very early in the morning or very late at night, I’ll tell you what I really think. Marriage isn’t just domesticity, or the continuance of the race, or institutionalized sex, or a form of property right. And it damned well isn’t happiness, as that word is generally used. I think it’s a way of finding your soul.”

“In a man or a woman?”

“With a man or a woman. In company, but still, essentially, alone—as all life is.”

“Then why haven’t you found your own soul?”

“Oh, it isn’t the only way. But it’s one way.”

“So you think I might find my soul, some day?”

“I’d bet very heavily on it, Gunilla. People find their souls in all sorts of ways. I’m writing a book—the life of a very good friend of mine, who certainly found his soul. Found it in painting. He tried to find it in marriage, and it was the most awful mess, because he was a soppy romantic at the time, and she was one of those Sirens who inevitably leave the man with a cup of Siren tears. Rather a crook, judged by the usual standards. But in that mess Francis Cornish found his soul. I know it. I have evidence of it. I’m writing my book about it.”

“Francis Cornish? One of these Cornishes?”

“Arthur’s uncle. And it’s Francis’s money that is supporting this fantastic circus we are engaged in now.”

“But you think this Arthur will find his soul in his marriage?”

“And Maria, too. And if you want to know, I think King Arthur found his soul, or a big piece of it, in his marriage to Guenevere—who was rather a crook, if you read Malory—and that is what a lot of this opera is about. Arthur of Britain, or The Magnanimous Cuckold. He found his soul.”

“But is this Arthur a magnanimous cuckold?”

Darcourt did not need to answer, for at this moment a doctor, in his white garment and cap, came into the room.

“Are you with Mrs. Muller?”

“Yes. What’s the news?”

“I’m very sorry. Are you the father?”

“No. Just a friend.”

“Well—it’s bad. The child is stillborn.”

“What was the trouble?”

“She seems not to have had any pre-natal advice whatever. Otherwise we’d have done a Caesarian. But when we found out the foetus had a disproportionately large head for the birth canal, it was already dead. Death from foetal distress, it’s called. We’re very sorry, but these things do happen. And as I say, she hadn’t had any previous medical attention.”

“May we see her?”

“I wouldn’t advise it.”

“Does she know?”

“She’s very groggy. It was a long labour. Somebody will have to tell her in the morning. Would you do that?”

“I’ll do that,” said Dr. Gunilla, and Darcourt was grateful to her.

(2)

WHEN DR. DAHL-SOOT VISITED the hospital the next morning she did not need to give the bad news. Al was with Mabel, who was hysterical.

“There was what the English call A Scene,” she told Darcourt. “You see Al, that odious pedant, had not even troubled to find out whether the child was a boy or a girl, and when Mabel demanded to see the child the head nurse explained that it was impossible. Why? Mabel wanted to know. Because the body was no longer available, said the nurse. Why not? said Mabel, very fierce. Because nobody had asked for the body to be reserved for burial by the parents, said the nurse. Mabel understood that. ‘You mean they’ve put my baby in the garbage?’ she said, and the nurse said that was not the way the hospital thought of what it had done, which was what was most often done with stillborns. But she wouldn’t give details, except that it was a boy and perfect except for an unusually big head. Not abnormal. Apparently it’s Mabel who is slightly abnormal. You know Mabel. A fool, and weak as water, but those people can make an awful hullabaloo when they are outraged, and she was ready to kill Al. And Al—really, Al ought to have been put in the garbage at birth—kept saying ‘Calm down, Sweetness, you’ll see it all differently tomorrow.’ Not a tender word, not a hug, not a thing to suggest that he was involved in the affair at all. I kicked Al out, and talked to Mabel for a while, but she’s in a very bad way. What are you going to do?”

“Me?”

“You seem to be the one who is expected to do something when real trouble comes up. Are you going to see Mabel?”

“I think I’d better see Al first.”

Al thought Mabel was being utterly unreasonable. She knew what a load of work he had, and how important it was to his career—which meant their joint career, if they stuck together. Hadn’t he gone to the hospital with her? And returned after dinner, as Darcourt well knew? Hadn’t the doctor said the baby might be held up for several hours because first babies were unaccountable? Was he supposed to sit there all night, and then do a day’s work that he had all planned, and that would need every ounce of energy and intellect he could muster? If there hadn’t been this accident—this stillbirth business—everything would have been absolutely okay. As it was, Mabel was raising hell.

The trouble, he assured Darcourt, was that Mabel had never really freed herself from her background. Very conventional, middle-brow people, with whom Al had never hit it off. They kept asking why he and Mabel didn’t get married, as if having somebody mumble a few words, etc. Al thought he had pretty well lifted Mabel above all that crap, but under stress—and Al admitted that the loss of the child amounted to stress—it all came flooding back, and Mabel was once again the insurance salesman’s child from Fresno. Wanted the baby given what she called “decent burial”. As if having somebody mumble a few words, etc., over a thing that had never lived could change anything. Al would be frank. He wondered if the arrangement with Mabel would weather this storm. He guessed he had to face it. People on two such different levels of education—though Mabel was majoring in sociology—would never really see eye to eye.

Al wanted to do the right thing, of course. Mabel wanted to go home. Wanted her mother. Can you figure that, in a woman of twenty-two? Wanting her mother? Of course the Mullers were what is called a very close family. But Al couldn’t swing it. His grant from Pomelo was enough for one, and damned tight for two, and the fare back to Fresno would screw him up. Could Darcourt persuade Mabel to take it easy for a few days, and probably see things differently?

Darcourt said he would look into the matter and do what seemed best.

That meant that he phoned Maria, in Toronto, and put the matter to her. “I’ll come at once,” said Maria.

It was Maria who fetched Mabel from the hospital, paid all the bills, set her up in a room near her own in a hotel, and gave Al a piece of her mind that astonished them both, so conventional was it in tone and content. It was Maria who sent Al to a druggist for a breast-pump, of which Mabel had dire need, and this was Al’s lowest moment. A breast-pump! He would willingly go into a drugstore and ask for condoms. That was dashing. But a breast-pump! The squalor of domesticity engulfed him. It was Maria who drove Mabel to the airport, when she was fit to travel, and bought her ticket to Fresno and mother. Coping with Mabel, who was sentimentally grateful and woman-to-woman, and bereft-mother-to-happy-mother, tried Maria very high, but she endured all, and never uttered a word of complaint or irony, even to Darcourt. Not even Mabel’s frequent, tearful hints that fate was certainly good to the rich, and tough on the poor, provoked her to any speaking of her mind. But to herself she said it was enough to turn her milk.

“You’ve behaved beautifully,” said Darcourt. “You deserve a reward.”

“Oh, but I’ve had a reward,” said Maria. “You remember I was hinting about Wally Crottel? The most wonderful luck—the book’s turned up!”

“But you said you had thrown it away.”

“So I did. But that was the original—you know, that crumpled, stained, interlined, grubby mess that Parlabane left. When I sent it to the publishers, one of them thought a ghost might be able to wrench a book out of it, so he had a Xerox made—quite indefensibly, but you know what publishers are—and sent it to his favourite ghost, who reported that it was pretty hopeless. But recently the ghost sent back the Xerox, which he had unearthed on his desk—obviously a ghost of the uttermost degree of literary messiness—and the publisher, belatedly, but honourably, sent it to me. And I’ve sent it to Wally.”

“But Wally’s in jail, awaiting trial.”

“I know. I sent it to Mervyn Gwilt, with a teasing, palavering letter, full of nifty bits of Latin. Told him to get it published if he could.”

“Maria! You may have committed yourself to some appalling legal claim!”

“Well—no. Not really. I showed the letter to Arthur, and he laughed a lot, but then he got one of his lawyers to rewrite it, and a fine juiceless job he made of it. Not a word of Latin. Lawyers are only half the fun they used to be when they knew Latin. But apparently it’s a watertight letter, admitting nothing, relinquishing nothing, but letting Wally have what he wanted, which was a peep at m’dad’s book.”

“And so that’s that.”

“As Wally seems likely to get seven years at least, that’s probably that.”

“Maria, you do have the Devil’s own luck!”

Al said no word of thanks to Maria about her part in his crisis. It did not occur to him, so engrossed was he in his Regiebuch, and if it had occurred to him, he would not have dared, for a woman who could talk to him as Maria had done was somebody best avoided. The musicologist in Al came uppermost; hadn’t there been an opera called All’s Well That Ends Well? He looked it up. Yes, there it was, by Edmond Audran, whose best opera was La Poupée, which meant The Baby, didn’t it? Remarkable how fate, and music, and life were all mixed up. It made you think.

(3)

DURING THIS INCIDENT, which did not impinge at all on the preoccupation of the company, preparations for the opera were going ahead rapidly. The play which had commanded the stage had finished its run of performances, and Powell and his forces had the full run of the theatre. Scenes were hung from the flies and all the forty-five sets of ropes that controlled them were adjusted and balanced for use. A splendid set of curtains was brought in from a rental warehouse and hung behind the proscenium, so that they could be swept aside and upward from the centre in the gloriously theatrical manner of the nineteenth century. Powell demanded, and got, a set of footlights installed. In vain did Waldo Harris demur that nobody used such things any more.

“Hoffmann’s theatre used ’em, and they are very becoming to the ladies,” said Powell. “We won’t make all the women look like skulls, with nothing but overhead light. And get that bloody rack of lamps taken down from in front of the proscenium; it’s totally out of character and we can do without ’em; the light from the front of the balcony will be quite enough.”

Powell was busy, so far as was possible, transforming the small opera theatre that belonged to the Stratford Festival into a charming early-nineteenth-century house.

“We’re going to use those pretty little doors that give onto the forestage,” he told Darcourt, “and we’ll just dim the house lights to half, because in Hoffmann’s day the audience sat in full light, and everybody could see their neighbours, and chat and flirt if they didn’t like the show. Flirtation’s a good old sport and due for a revival.”

He had worked with Dulcy Ringgold to prepare pretty cartouches which decorated the little boxes beside the stage; one bore the arms of the town, and the other the arms of the province, but so treated that they had a playful, rather than an official, air. They looked like fine plaster-work, but they were pressed in the same light material as the armour worn by Arthur’s Knights.

All of this activity caused a good deal of noise, but nevertheless the singers stepped onstage from time to time and bellowed or neighed into the auditorium, and agreed that it was a nice resonant house. They were still working in rehearsal rooms under the guidance of Watkin Bourke, who appeared to put in a twelve-hour day.

The company took on new vitality when they were able to claim the theatre as their own, and friendships were struck up, enmities sharpened, and jokes whispered behind hands.

One of these originated with Albert Greenlaw, one of the black singers, who played the role of Sir Pellinore. He had found a great toy in Nutcombe Puckler, who was a comedian by profession, but never thought of himself as comic.

“Do you realize,” said Greenlaw to Vincent LeMoyne, the other black Knight, “that Nutty gets letters from his dog? Yes, I’m not kidding, from his dog! The dog’s in England, of course, but the dog writes twice a week. And in Cockney, what’s more! ‘Dear Marster, I miss you terrible, but Missus says we has to be brave and go walkies every day just as if you was ’ere. My roomatism is chronic but I takes me pills reglar, and don’t have to get up in the night more than a few times, which is an improvement, Missus says. Hurry back, covered with laurels and bring lots of lovely green bones. Love from your Woofy in which Missus joins.’ Can you beat it! I’ve known dog-nuts, but I never met a dog-nut as nutty as Nutty. Why do you suppose the dog talks Cockney?”

“It’s a class thing,” said Wilson Tinney, who played Gareth Beaumains. “Dog must be loving and beloved, but not a social equal. Certainly not a superior. Can you imagine Nutty with a titled dog? ‘Dear Puckler, your wife is looking after me splendidly in your absence, and I look forward eagerly to August 12, when the grousing begins. Accept my assurance that I look upon you not as a master, but as a humble friend.’ That wouldn’t do at all.”

“Do you know what I think?” said Vincent LeMoyne; “I think Nutty’s wife writes those letters. I suspect the dog’s illiterate.”

“You astonish me!” said Greenlaw. “Do you suppose Nutty knows?”

There was a coolness between Miss Virginia Poole, who, as the Lady Clarissant, was the only member of the female chorus to have a named role, and Gwen Larking, the Stage Manager; Miss Poole thought she should have a dressing-room apart from the Chorus, but she had been put—“thrown” was the word she used—with them in a large basement room. She appeared in all three acts and had two costumes, and yet Marta Ullmann, who appeared in only one scene as Elaine, had a dressing-room of her own on the stage level. If this was an intentional slight, what lay behind it? If it was an oversight, should it not be put right as fast as possible?

There was a row, lasting for a day, between Powell and Waldo Harris, because a trapdoor that Powell had ordered had not been cut in the stage. But if it were cut, said Waldo, it would go down into the orchestra pit, rather than the undercroft of the stage proper. Why had he not been told earlier? demanded Powell. He wanted Merlin to appear as if by magic at that particular spot, downstage right, and Mr. Twentyman had been rehearsing for four weeks with that in mind. All right, said Waldo, he would have it cut, and it would mean reducing the size of the orchestra by five members. Here Dr. Dahl-Soot intervened, and the question was somehow resolved without bloodshed, and without the trapdoor.

“Perhaps I could come down from the flies on a wire,” suggested Mr. Twentyman. “I’ve done it before, you know.”

Oliver Twentyman had made himself popular with everybody in the theatre, without particularly exerting himself to do so. But his great age, and his charm, and above all his assumption that everyone wanted to please him, made slaves of the gofers (to whom he brought charming Belgian chocolates in pretty little packages), and convinced Gwen Larking that she was his champion and must shield him from all harm, and caused Waldo Harris to put a special reclining-chair in his dressing-room, as well as a little heater, in case there might be early autumn chill. In return Mr. Twentyman gave advice about how to pronounce English when singing, with Hans Holzknecht as an eager pupil, and even Clara Intrepidi as an overhearer, rather than a committed listener. She was still dubious about a language with so many vowels.

Thus matters moved toward the final rehearsals, and a controlled, highly professional excitement rose.

The stage was still pretty much in the grip of the technicians, but time was found to accustom the actors to singing in the theatre. Not always at full strength, Darcourt found; sometimes they “marked”, which meant that they sang quietly, skipped their high notes or sang them an octave below pitch, and were altogether so intimate that they seemed determined to keep the music a secret. Watkin Bourke performed prodigies on an ancient upright piano that stood on the forestage; he was still playing from a full orchestral score, and showed great firmness in keeping Al Crane from snatching this for his own information. Gunilla, who had taken a powerful scunner to Al, was determined that he should not see the music at close range if she could avoid it, and Al whined to Powell that this was a hardship, but Powell was not to be moved. Al had as yet not succeeded in getting the copies he wanted, and was not happy when he was told that he might get something for himself once the opera was in performance.

There was great activity, too, on the part of the public relations people, who wanted tasty bits of gossip to send out to the press, which had not shown much interest in Arthur. The report from the boxoffice was discouraging; even the first night had not been sold out, and would have to be papered with passes. A few of the more learned critics, who had asked for scores to study, had not been pleased when told that none were available, as Dean Wintersen had forbade any public examination of the music until Schnak’s examiners had gone over it thoroughly. As the opening drew near, the report was that less than thirty-three per cent of the tickets for all performances had been sold. If Dr. Dahl-Soot was not concerned about this, the management of the Festival was disgruntled. Darcourt, the eager amateur, wished heartily for a public success, and fretted that it appeared unlikely.

He was sitting in the balcony of the theatre, during one of the mysterious marking rehearsals, when he became aware of a presence behind him, and of a smell that he thought he recognized. It was not really a bad smell, but it was a heavy, furry smell, rather like the bears’ cage in a zoo. A soft, velvety bass rumbled in his ear.

“Priest Simon—a word, if you please.”

Turning, he found Yerko leaning forward over his shoulder.

“Priest Simon, I have been taking note. Watching with great care. Everything seems to be going well, but a vital element of opera success is still missing. You know what I mean?”

Darcourt had no idea what this large, overwhelming Gypsy could possibly mean.

“The Claque, Priest Simon. Where is your Claque? Nobody says a word about it. I have inquired. The P.Or. people do not seem to know when I speak of a Claque. But you do, surely?”

Darcourt had heard of a claque, but knew nothing about it.

“Without the Claque—nothing. How can you expect anything else? Nobody knows this opera. An opera audience must contain people who know the work intimately. Nobody will dare to applaud if they don’t know where, and when, and why. They might make an embarrassing mistake—look foolish. Now listen very carefully. I know the whole business of the Claque from top to bottom. Did I not work for years at the Vienna Opera under the great Bonci—related, but not so you could talk about it, to the noble tenor of that name? I was Bonci’s right-hand man.”

“You mean hired applause? Oh Yerko, I don’t think that would do at all.”

“Certainly it would not do if you talk of hired applause. That is not a Claque; that is a noisy, untrained rabble. No, look: a Claque is a small body of experts; applause, certainly, but not unorganized row; you must have your bisseurs who call out loud for encores; your rieurs who laugh at the right places—but just appreciative chuckles to encourage the others, not from the belly; your pleureurs who sob when sobs are needed; and, of course, the kind of clapping that encourages the uninformed to join, which is not vulgar hand-smacking that makes the clapper look like a drunk. Good clapping must sound intelligent, and that calls for skill; you must know what part of the palm to smack. And all of this must be carefully organized—yes, orchestrated—by the capo di claque. That’s me. We won’t talk money; this is a gift from my sister and me to our dear Arthur. We give him a success! But get me twelve seats—four balcony, two on each side of the ground floor well toward the front, and four in the last two rows, centre—and we can’t fail. Of course two seats for me and my sister—because we shall appear in evening dress and sit in the middle of the house—and the thing’s done.”

“But Yerko—it’s very kind, but isn’t it a sort of lie?”

“Is P.Or. a lie? Would I lie to you, my friend?”

“No, no, certainly not; but it’s lying to somebody, I feel sure.”

“Priest Simon, listen; remember the old Gypsy saying—Lies keep the teeth white.”

“I must say it’s very tempting.”

“You fix it up.”

“I’ll talk to Powell.”

“But not a word to Arthur. This is a present. A surprise.”

Darcourt did talk to Powell, and Powell was delighted. “Just in the real early-nineteenth-century style!” he said. “He’s right, you know. Unless the audience is led, most of it won’t know when to clap or what to like. A claque’s just what we need.”

So Darcourt gave Yerko the approving word. This is following the path of the Fool, he thought, and, all things considered, it’s good sport.

(4)

WHAT NOBODY COULD POSSIBLY have considered good sport was Schnak’s examination. It affected everybody in the company, from the stage crew, who thought it a pompous nuisance, to Albert Greenlaw, who said it gave him the heebie-jeebies, and to Hans Holzknecht and Clara Intrepidi, who were told by Dr. Gunilla that they must give their best in the performance involved, and that no “marking” or saving the voice was permitted.

The form of the examination was unusual. After some haggling it was agreed that it could not take place in the School of Music, and that the examiners must journey to Stratford to do their work. They were to examine the candidate orally in the morning, in the upstairs crush-bar of the theatre, and after luncheon they were to see a performance of the opera. It made a long day for them, said Dean Wintersen. He said nothing about what sort of day it made for Schnak.

There were to be three dress rehearsals before the first night of the production, which was scheduled for a Saturday. It was on the Wednesday, therefore, that a special small bus left the Music School in Toronto at a quarter to eight in the morning, with seven academics aboard.

“I must say I find this exceedingly irregular,” said Professor Andreas Pfeiffer, who was the External Examiner, a great panjandrum of musicology imported for the occasion from an important school of music in Pennsylvania.

“You mean seeing a performance of the opera?” said Dean Wintersen, who had entertained Pfeiffer at dinner the night before and had already had enough of him.

“Of that I say nothing,” said Professor Pfeiffer. “I mean this business of being haled across the countryside at an early hour. Last night I slept very poorly, thinking about what lay ahead. It is difficult to compose oneself under such circumstances.”

“You must admit the circumstances are unusual,” said the Dean, lighting his first cigarette of the day.

“Perhaps too unusual,” said Pfeiffer. “May I politely request you not to smoke? Very disagreeable in an enclosed vehicle.”

The Dean threw his cigarette out of the window.

“Ah, ah! You didn’t douse it!” said Professor Adelaide O’Sullivan. “That is how forest fires are started. Can we stop? I’ll get out and stamp on it.”

This was done, and Professor O’Sullivan, having dodged and darted a hundred yards to the rear, amid heavy traffic, found the cigarette, which had gone out of itself on the city street, and which she trampled to bits, as a matter of principle.

This put the journey off to a start marked by underground feeling. Professor George Cooper, a stout Englishman, had already gone to sleep, but Professor John Diddear was covertly pro-Dean, as he himself liked to smoke during examinations, as a way of passing the time, and he knew that it would be impossible with Pfeiffer and O’Sullivan so strongly against it. Professor Francesco Berger, who was the examiner from the University’s own department of music, and a man of peace, tried to improve the atmosphere by telling a joke, but as he was not a man with much narrative sense, he spoiled it, and made matters worse. Professor Penelope Raven, who was the seventh of the group, laughed too loudly, all alone, at the non-climax, and was stared into silence by Pfeiffer.

It took the bus a little under two hours to reach Stratford, and the driver had to put up with a good deal of cautionary exclamation from Professor Pfeiffer, who was a nervous passenger. But at last the examiners found themselves in the crush-bar of the theatre, accommodated with a large table, and lots of pencils and pads, and several jugs of coffee. Professor Pfeiffer, who never drank coffee, was given a bottle of Perrier by Gwen Larking, the Stage Manager, who had appointed herself beadle of the occasion; she left an awed gofer on the spot, to fetch, carry, and do the bidding of the academics.

The protocol of an oral examination for a doctorate in music is not extreme, but it can be severe. Schnak, who was hanging about, dressed in a skirt at Gunilla’s bidding, shook hands with all of the examiners, and shaking hands was not a courtesy that came easily to her. Gunilla introduced her to Professor Pfeiffer, who made it clear that this was an honour for Schnak; he put out his hand, which she barely touched. It was like ceremonially forgiving the headsman, before he does his work.

Then Wintersen asked Schnak to go downstairs and wait until she was called; she marched off, in the charge of the jailer-gofer, who looked as solemn as eighteen can. Dr. Gunilla, the director of the thesis project, was present as an examiner, and also in the character, familiar in courts-martial, of Prisoner’s Friend. She was greeted with cordiality by the Canadians, but Professor Pfeiffer, who had his own opinions about the Doctor’s international reputation, managed to put a chill on her reception.

The Dean, who was an old hand at such affairs, groaned in spirit. He had been warned that Pfeiffer was a bastard but his reputation as a musicologist was great, and so he must be endured.

The Dean, by virtue of his office, was the chairman of the examination, and he began according to Hoyle, by asking the examiners if they were all acquainted. They were, and in some cases too well. He drew their attention to three copies of the full score of Arthur which lay on the table for ready reference.

The Dean next called upon Professor Andreas Pfeiffer, as external examiner-in-chief, to place his report before the committee.

Professor Pfeiffer did so, taking just under an hour. It was a fine late August day outside, but by the time Pfeiffer had unpacked his budget of doubt and distaste it was February in the examination room. Professor Berger, who was a genial man and liked Schnak, managed, as internal examiner-in-chief, in twenty minutes to shove the calendar back to approximately late December, but a post-Christmas gloom was still to be felt.

The other examiners, called upon to say their say, were brief. Not more than ten minutes was taken by Penny Raven, who managed to establish that she had evolved a libretto for the opera, with some unspecified outside help from a literary man.

“I hear nothing of Planché,” said Professor Pfeiffer. Both Penny and Gunilla looked at him with deadly menace, but he was impervious to any outside influence.

Now, the processions, the parades of the picadors, the recognition of the President, the preening by the matador, and all the ceremonial of the ring having been performed, it was time to bring in the bull. Dean Wintersen nodded to the gofer (by this time a thorough Shakespearean jailer), and Schnak was brought back to the table, wilted with almost two hours of solitary anxiety. She was seated next to the Dean, and asked to explain her choice of the thesis project, and her method of work in realizing it. Which she did, very badly.

Professor Pfeiffer was first let loose upon her. He was a matador of immense skill, and for thirty-five minutes he nagged and harassed the wretched Schnak, who had no verbal ease, no rhetoric of any kind, and made long, unpromising pauses before most of her answers.

Professor Pfeiffer showed disappointment. The bull had no style, no pride of the ring, seemed really unworthy of a matador of his repute.

But as the torture proceeded, Schnak took refuge more and more often in a single answer: “I did it like that because it came to me like that,” she said. And although Professor Pfeiffer greeted this with doubtful looks, and once or twice with disdainful snorts, one or two of the other examiners, notably Cooper and Diddear, smiled and nodded, for they were themselves, in a modest way, composers.

Now and again Dr. Dahl-Soot interposed. But Pfeiffer shut her up, saying, “I must not allow myself to think that the candidate’s supervisor carried undue weight in the actual work of composition; that would be wholly inadmissible.” Dr. Gunilla, fuming, but tactful, remained silent after that.

When at last, by repeatedly looking at his watch, the Dean made it clear that Professor Pfeiffer must close his interrogation, Dr. Francesco Berger took over, and was so genial, so anxious to put Schnak at her ease, suggested so often that he approved of what had been done, that he almost upset the applecart. His colleagues wished Berger would not overdo it. When their time came to ask questions, they were brief and merciful.

It was George Cooper, who had dozed through much of the examination, who asked: “I notice that you have used some keys at important moments in the opera that would not perhaps have suggested themselves first to most composers. A flat major, and C flat major, and E flat major—why those? Any special reason?”

“They were ETAH’s favourites,” said Schnak. “He had a theory about keys and their special characters, and what they suggested.”

“ETAH? Who is ETAH?” said Professor Pfeiffer.

“Sorry. E.T.A. Hoffmann; I’ve got into the way of thinking of him as ETAH,” said Schnak.

“You mean you identify yourself with him?”

“Well, working from his notes and trying to get into his mind—”

Professor Pfeiffer said nothing but made a derisive noise in his nose. But then—“These theories of key characterization were very much a thing of Hoffmann’s time,” he said. “Romantic nonsense, of course.”

“Nonsense or not, I think we ought to hear a little more about it,” said Cooper. “What did he think about those keys?”

“Well—he wrote about A flat major: ‘Those chords carry me into the country of eternal longing.’ And about C flat major: ‘It grasps my heart with glowing claws’; he called it ‘the bleak ghost with red, sparkling eyes’. And he used E flat major a lot with horns; he called it ‘longing and sweet sounds.’ ”

“Hoffmann was a drug-taker, wasn’t he?” said Professor Pfeiffer.

“I don’t think so. He boozed a lot and sometimes he came near to having the horrors.”

“I’m not surprised, if he could talk that sort of rubbish about the character of keys,” said Pfeiffer, and was ready to drop the subject. But not Schnak.

“But if that’s the way he thought, oughtn’t I to respect it? If I’m to finish his opera, I mean?” she said, and Professor Diddear made a noise in his nose, as if to suggest that Professor Pfeiffer had been caught napping.

“I suppose you explain your excessive use of extraneous modulation as coming from Hoffmann’s adulation of Beethoven?”

“Hoffmann adored Beethoven and Beethoven thought a lot of Hoffmann.”

“I suppose that is so,” said the great musicologist. “You should remember, young lady, what Berlioz thought about Hoffmann: a writer who imagined himself to be a composer. But you have chosen to devote a great deal of work to this minor figure, and that is why we are here.”

“Perhaps to suggest that Berlioz could have been wrong,” said Dr. Gunilla; “he made a fool of himself often enough, as critics always do.”

She knew that Dr. Pfeiffer had written an essay about Berlioz which accorded Berlioz about seventy marks out of a hundred, which was as far as the Professor was inclined to go. If she could use Berlioz as a stick with which to beat Pfeiffer, so be it.

It was one o’clock.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I remind you that our work this morning is only a part of this unusual examination,” said the Dean. “We assemble again at two in the theatre, for a private performance of this opera, conducted by Miss Schnakenburg, on which a portion of your decision must necessarily rest. Proof of the pudding, you know. Meanwhile the Cornish Foundation has invited us to lunch, and we are already late.”

Professor Pfeiffer did not like lunching as a guest of the Cornish Foundation. “Are they not involved?” he asked the Dean. “Is the candidate not their protégée? I do not like to use such a term, but is this an attempt to buy us?”

“I think it’s just decent hospitality,” said the Dean, “and, as you know, hospitality is a co-operative thing. The Romans very wisely used the same word for ‘host’ and ‘guest’.” Pfeiffer did not understand, and shook his head.

The luncheon took place at the best restaurant in Stratford—the small one down by the river—and Arthur and Maria did everything they could to make the examiners happy. Easy work with Berger, Cooper, Diddear, and Penny Raven. Easy work with the Dean, and even with Professor Adelaide O’Sullivan, who was only a bigot about tobacco. Professor Pfeiffer, however, and Dr. Dahl-Soot had thrown aside the decorum of the examination room and were going at it, hammer and tongs.

“I totally disagree with this procedure of witnessing a performance of this work,” said the Professor. “It brings in elements extraneous to what we are to decide.”

“You don’t care if it can be seen as effective on the stage?”

“I care only if it is effective on the page. I agree with the late Ernest Newman: a great score is more finely realized when one reads it in the tranquillity of one’s study than when one sits in a crowd and endures the ineptitudes of orchestra and singers.”

“You mean you can do it better in your head than a hundred accomplished artists can do it for you?”

“I can read a score.”

“Better than, say von Karajan? Than Haitink? Than Colin Davis?”

“I do not follow the purpose of your line of questioning.”

“I am just trying to find out how great a man you are so that I can treat you with appropriate reverence. I can read a score, too. Am pretty well known for it, in fact. But it’s still better when I raise the baton and a hundred and twenty artists set about their work. I am not an opera company in myself.”

“So? Well—make of it what you will, but I rather think I am. No, I never drink wine. A glass of Perrier, if you please.”

What Professor Pfeiffer did not drink was certainly compensated for by what the others drank. It had been a thirsty morning. Before lunch was over, all but Pfeiffer were jovial, and Professor George Cooper showed a tendency to bump into tables, and laugh at himself for doing so. They were, after all, musicians under the professorial gown, and a well-set table was one of the elements in which they lived. They all thanked Arthur and Maria with a heartiness that made Professor Pfeiffer suspect the worst. But he could not be bought. Oh no, not he.

(5)

FIRST IN THE LINE of dressing-rooms on the stage level was a small kennel reserved for the use of the conductor, when there was one, and a quick-change room if that should be needed. Here sat Schnak, desolate and alone. She had known rejection before this: had there not been the boy who said that sex with her was like sleeping with a bicycle? She had known the loneliness of leaving home and parents. She had known the bitterness of being a loner, of not fitting into any group, while being still too young and insignificant to wear loneliness like a badge of honour. But never had she known wretchedness like this, when she was about to take a great step forward in her life as an artist.

She knew that she would not fail. Francesco Berger had made it clear to her, a few weeks ago, that the examination was a rite of passage, a ceremonial and scholarly necessity; the School of Music would not permit the examination to take place if it were not ninety-five per cent certain to be a success. The examination was either the last and most demanding of the torments of student life, or the first and simplest of the torments of professional life. She had nothing to fear.

Nevertheless, she feared. Her experience as a conductor had been confined to a few bouts with a student orchestra, which was fractious enough, because inexperienced. A professional orchestra was something very different. These old pros were like livery-stable horses: they were used to all sorts of riders, and they were determined to do, so far as possible, what they chose. Oh, they wouldn’t wreck the performance; they were musicians, through and through. But they would be sticky about tempi, sluggish about entrances, perfunctory in phrasing; they wouldn’t be bossed by a raw kid. Gunilla would conduct at all the public performances, unless Gunilla was kind and let her do one or two mid-week shows. Gunilla knew how to get what she wanted out of an orchestra, and she had the kind of sharp tongue musicians respect—professionally severe, but not personal. What had she said to the harpist yesterday? “The arpeggi must be deliberate, like pearls dropping in wine, not slithering like a fat woman slipping on a banana skin.” Not Oscar Wilde, but good enough for a rehearsal. Gunilla had coached her, had allowed her to conduct a full orchestra rehearsal, and had given her an hour of notes afterward. But once she lifted her baton this afternoon, she was alone. And that old hellion Pfeiffer would be watching every minute.

The dressing-room was unbearable. She wandered out to the stage, which was set for the Prologue, and as it was lighted only by one harsh lamp high up in the flies it was as charmless as an unlit stage always is. Below her, under the device of rollers, like corkscrews, that produced the effect of gently heaving waves, she heard voices: Waldo Harris, Dulcy, and Gwen Larking, arguing with Geraint.

“They work perfectly well, but they make too much noise,” said Waldo. “I don’t suppose you’d agree to leaving them out altogether? We could probably rig up something that would look like moving water.”

“Oh, no!” said Dulcy. “These are the darlings of my heart—and absolutely authentic for the way they did things in 1820.”

“They’ve cost a fortune to make,” said Waldo. “I guess it would be a shame to scrap them.”

“But what can you do?” said Geraint.

“We’d have to dismantle the three rollers and put rubber on the parts that engage. That’d do it, I think.”

“How long will it take?” said Geraint.

“An hour, at least.”

“Then take an hour, and do it,” said Geraint. “I want to see it this afternoon.”

“Can’t,” said Gwen Larking. “The curtain must go up sharp at two. It’s Schnak’s examination, remember?”

“What of it? An hour won’t kill them, surely?”

“From what I hear about this morning, an hour’s delay would put them in a very bad temper. Especially that old fellow who makes all the trouble. We mustn’t make things difficult for Schnak.”

“Oh, damn Schnak! That miserable little runt is more bother than she’s worth!”

“Come on, Geraint, be a sport. Give the kid her chance.”

“You mean Schnak’s chance is more important than my production?”

“Yes, Geraint, from now till half past four Schnak’s chance is more important than anything else. You said so yourself, to the whole cast, yesterday,” said Dulcy.

“I say whatever is best at the moment, and you know it.”

“What’s best at the moment is that we leave this piece of machinery till later.”

“This is just the trade-unionism of women. God, how I hate women.”

“All right, Geraint; hate me,” said Gwen. “But give Schnak her chance, even if you hate her later.”

“Gwen’s right,” said Waldo. “I said an hour, but it could be two. Let’s leave it for the moment.”

“O Jesu mawr! O anwyl Crist! Have it your way then!” Geraint could be heard going off in a huff.

“Don’t fuss! We’ll manage the appearance of the sword! It’ll do for today,” said Waldo, but there was no sound of an appeased director.

Schnak threw up her lunch-time sandwich and cup of coffee into the toilet. It had turned to gall within her. When she had wiped her face and doused it with cold water, she went back to her dressing-room and looked at herself in the mirror. Damned Schnak. Miserable little runt. Yes, Geraint was right.

He’d never love me. Why would anybody love me? I love Geraint even better than I love Nilla, and he hates me. Look at me! Short. Scrawny. Awful hair. Face like a rat. Those legs! Why did Nilla say I had to wear a black jacket and this white blouse? Of course he hates me. I look just bloody awful. Why can’t I look like Nilla? Or that Maria Cornish? Why is God so mean to me?

A tap at the door, and a gofer (the prettiest gofer) put her head inside.

“Fifteen minutes, Schnak,” she said. “And the best of luck. All the girls have their fingers crossed for you.”

Schnak snarled, and the gofer withdrew quickly.

After fifteen minutes more of repetitious self-hate the last call came—from outside the door—and Schnak made her way downstairs, through the undercroft to the stage, and into the orchestra pit. There they sat, the thirty-two villains who meant to destroy her. Some of them nodded to her pleasantly; the concert-master, and Watkin Bourke at the harpsichord, whispered, “Good luck.”

If there is any applause when you step onto the podium, turn and bow to the house, Nilla had said. There was no applause, but from the tail of her eye she could see that the seven examiners had placed themselves here and there in the auditorium, and in the front row, right behind her, a full score on his knees and a flashlight in his hand, sat the ominous Professor Pfeiffer. What a seat to choose, she thought.

The little red light-signal from the Stage Manager flashed on, and at the same time the oyster eye of the closed-circuit television camera directly in front of the conductor’s desk, which would carry Schnak’s every movement to backstage monitors, for Stage Management, Chorus, and offstage sound of every kind, gave a gloomy blink, like an undersea monster.

She tapped the music desk, raised her baton—one of Gunilla’s own, specially made and perhaps intended as a talisman—and when she gave the down beat, the first mysterious chord of the Prologue rose at her.

The orchestra, aware of her nerves, but oblivious of her hatred, played well, and after fifteen slow bars of the Prologue the curtain swept upward to show the Enchanted Mere. In front of it stood Oliver Twentyman, splendid as Merlin, and Hans Holzknecht, armoured and cloaked as King Arthur. Merlin apostrophized the waves, and not quite on cue the great sword Caliburn rose above the unmoving waters. Arthur seized it, and invoked all the magic of the sword. Everything seemed to be going well, until Schnak felt herself being tapped—almost punched—in the back, and when she ignored this, there was a loud whistle, and Professor Pfeiffer’s voice crying, “Hold it! Hold it! Repeat from Letter D, please!” Schnak dropped her baton and the music stopped.

“What’s the matter?” It was Dean Wintersen’s voice.

“I want to hear it again from Letter D,” said Pfeiffer. “They are not playing what is written in the score.”

“A minor change in rehearsal,” said Gunilla’s voice. “Some addition to the wood-winds.”

“I am speaking to the conductor,” said Pfeiffer. “If there has been a change, why is it not in the score as it was presented to us? Repeat from Letter D, if you please.”

So the music was repeated from Letter D. Holzknecht, who had been pleased with his performance, was not pleased by this unexpected encore; Oliver Twentyman flashed a charming smile at Professor Pfeiffer across the footlights like someone humouring a child, and the Professor did not like it.

Nevertheless, the repeat was performed, and all went well until the end of the Prologue. It had been seen through a scrim, a transparent curtain which lent mystery to the stage, and as this was whisked up into the flies, it did not whisk obligingly, but caught on the first wing on the right side of the stage, and there was a terrible ripping. The scrim was halted in its progress, and Gwen Larking appeared at the side of the stage accompanied by a large man with a pole who fished the scrim away from what was catching it. This did not dismay the stage crew, or the singers, who were used to such mishaps, but it struck coldly into the heart of Schnak, who was sure this would be counted against her by her merciless foe.

What happened during the long afternoon was not, as Geraint wildly cried, like the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera, but it included more than the usual number of technical troubles. What really put the rehearsal to the bad was the frequent interruption of Professor Pfeiffer, who demanded, in all, seven repeats of music which he said—quite rightly—was not entirely as it appeared in the score he had been sent three weeks earlier. When he did not stop proceedings by whistling loudly through his teeth, like a policeman, he could be heard muttering, and demanding more light to help him in making notes. The opera, which should have taken two and a half hours, without the single fifteen-minute interval, took rather more than four, and the singers became demoralized, and were far below their best. Only the orchestra, firmly professional, sawed and tooted and strummed imperturbably, and did, under the circumstances, pretty well.

Six of the seven examiners had given up the struggle before the rehearsal finished. They had heard enough, had liked what they heard, had enjoyed lunch, and were ready to wrap the affair up and get back to their homes. Professor Pfeiffer, whose eyes were fixed on his score, never seemed to look at the stage and was impatient when technical problems brought the performance to a halt. Nobody, therefore, noticed that it was not Schnak who conducted the last scene, but Watkin Bourke, who did so from the harpsichord. Schnak had disappeared, and the orchestra had assumed that she was ill and were not, all things considered, surprised.

Even they were surprised, however, when a loud siren was heard outside the fire exit on the right-hand side of the auditorium, and Gwen Larking, appearing from one of the proscenium doors, jumped from the stage to open it and admit four men with a stretcher, who hurried across the front of the theatre, trampling Professor Pfeiffer’s feet as they did so, and disappeared through the pass-door on the stage left. But the music went on, somewhat rockily, until, moments later, the four men reappeared, carrying a stretcher upon which lay the body of Schnak, under a blanket. The stage had filled, meanwhile, with actors in costume, several stagehands, the gofers, and Arthur and Maria, who stood at the footlights with Geraint Powell. The body of Schnak was carried before them, thought Darcourt, who had been in the darkness at the back of the theatre, very much as if they were looking down at it from Arthurian battlements, and their astonishment and dismay were not in the least theatrical, but real and stamped with terror. The little procession reached the door, the stretcher disappeared, and the siren grew fainter as the ambulance sped away.

There was excitement, of course, the kind of excitement over an unexpected happening that only a theatrical company can generate. What was it? Why was it? What had happened? What should be done?

It was Waldo Harris who called for order and explained. When Schnak had not appeared on the podium for the last scene, one of the gofers had gone to see what was amiss, and, not finding her in her dressing-room, had looked in the ladies’ lav. And there she was, very ill and unconscious.

Had she tried to kill herself? Nobody knew, and they must not think like that until there was more news from the hospital. Miss Intrepidi let it be known that if it was an attempt at suicide, she, for one, was not surprised, after the way the poor child had been treated during the rehearsal. An Intrepidi party formed immediately, and murmured against Professor Pfeiffer, who was unaware of it and took no notice. He was anxious to continue with the examination.

“This is unfortunate,” he said, “but not perhaps crucial. We can meet now, and make our decisions. I have a great many questions to ask, particularly about the libretto. Where can we be private?”

“But we can’t have an examination without the candidate,” said Penelope Raven.

“We’ve had an examination till I’m bloody sick of it,” said George Cooper. “Let’s give her the degree and be done with it.”

“Give her the degree when there are still vital questions to be asked?” Professor Pfeiffer was scandalized. “I am far from satisfied.”

“You must admit these are unusual circumstances,” said Dean Wintersen. “It can hardly be said we’ve cut corners. We’ve been at it all day. Surely we can come to an agreement now?”

“Agreed! I move acceptance of the thesis and the obligatory performance as completion of the work for the doctoral degree,” said Francesco Berger.

“Excuse me! As the External Examiner that is my privilege,” said Professor Pfeiffer.

“Well then, for Christ’s sake use your privilege,” said George Cooper. “This is ridiculous! That girl may be dead, or dying.”

“I fully understand the compassionate grounds for a hasty decision,” said Pfeiffer; “but in my experience compassionate grounds are rarely sound grounds, and I should like to feel that this examination has been completed in proper form. Frankly, I should like to defer a decision for a week, during which we should attend at least two more performances.”

“Sorry to sound like a dean,” said Wintersen, “but I really must overrule you, Professor. I shall call for a vote, naming the examiners in alphabetical order. Professor Berger?”

The vote was six for acceptance of the degree, Professor Pfeiffer abstaining, and the Dean forgoing his privilege of casting a vote. The examination was over, and Schnak, dead or alive, was therewith a Doctor of Music.

The Cornishes took over. Darcourt was asked to take the examiners to dinner, as they had been detained so long. Gunilla announced her determination to go to the hospital at once, with Arthur and Maria. Professor Pfeiffer said he didn’t want any dinner, but this deceived no one. The singers were shooed off to their dressing-rooms, big with the drama of the afternoon.

Geraint called Waldo and Gwen to him, and set about a long budget of notes he had taken during what was, to him, a disappointing and tediously delayed rehearsal. He would show proper emotion, he said, when everything was shipshape and Bristol fashion.

(6)

WHAT WOULD A STRANGER make of this room, if he should happen in here by mistake, thought Darcourt. A beautiful young mother sits in the dim light of the only lamp, suckling her child; the long dressingrobe she wears might belong to any time during the past two thousand years. There are two very large beds in the room and in one of them, under the heavy coverlet, lie two women; one in early middle age and of distinguished, hawk-like face and the other softly pretty, her dark eyes full of mischief. The older woman’s arm is around the neck of her companion, and caresses it. In the second bed I lie myself, fully dressed except for my shoes, and beside me lies a man of great beauty and palpable energy; his open shirt-collar and longish curly dark hair might belong to any time during the last two hundred and fifty years. We too are partly covered, for the August night is chilly, but there is no affectionate link between us. The only other figure in the room is the man whose back is turned to us; he stands at the dressing-table, which has been turned into a pretty well-stocked bar.

The room itself? It looks as if one of those half-timbered houses, perhaps from Stratford-on-Avon or Gloucestershire, had been turned inside out. Dark beams appear to support a structure of lumpy white plaster. This style of interior finish is intended, undoubtedly, as a compliment to the Shakespeare Festival which is the chief glory of this town.

This is Maria and Arthur’s room in the motel where they have been staying, intermittently, for the past three weeks observing—so far as they have been made welcome to observe—the completion of all the preparations for the presentation of Arthur of Britain, and they are entertaining Gunilla, and Dulcy Ringgold, and Geraint and myself. It is ten o’clock at night. We are gathered to talk about the strange behaviour of Hulda—henceforth and forever Doctor Hulda—Schnakenburg, who was borne from her doctoral examination on a stretcher a few hours earlier.

All things considered, the intruding stranger might think it an odd scene, a mixture of the domestic and the reposeful. Or was it some muddle of group sex, arranged for observers of peculiar tastes?

“She’s going to be all right,” said Arthur, turning to give Gunilla another strong Scotch. “But it’s bound to be a little bit embarrassing when she rejoins us. The hospital people want her for a couple of days at least. Her digestive tract has suffered what they call serious insult. They’ve been swilling her out.”

“Little fool,” said Gunilla. “Nearly a hundred Aspirin and half a bottle of gin. Where would she have got the idea that it would kill her?”

“She didn’t mean to kill herself,” said Arthur. “It was what it is now fashionable to call a gesture of despair.”

“No, no, don’t patronize her,” said Gunilla. “She meant to kill herself, undoubtedly. She was just badly informed, as many suicides are.”

“You must admit she made a very effective scene out of it,” said Dulcy. “I was moved. Blubbed quite a lot, I confess it without shame.”

“She saw herself as Elaine, the Lily Maid of Astolat,” said Maria. “Dying of love for the faithless Lancelot. Hulda has learned a great deal from this opera, quite apart from the music. She did it to make you feel cheap, Geraint, just as Elaine made Lancelot feel cheap. Now, Davy my pet, time to change sides.” She shifted the feeding child to her other breast.

“Do all babies make that slurping noise when they are feeding?” said Geraint.

“It’s a very nice noise, and no impertinent questions from you, my lad. You’re in the doghouse.”

“I’m damned if I’m in the doghouse,” said Geraint. “You can’t blame me. I won’t put up with it.”

“You’ll have to put up with it,” said Dulcy. “Of course it’s unjust, but who are you to escape all of the world’s injustice? This is one of those cases where the female side in the great struggle undoubtedly wins. You scorned her love, which God knows was obvious enough, and she tried to kill herself. Doghouse for you. Bitter shame upon you, Geraint Powell, you heart-breaker, for not less than two weeks.”

“Bullshit!”

“Coarseness ill becomes a man in your position. You are cast as the haughty, gallant, gay Lothario, and if you have any dramatic sense at all—which is what you’re paid to have—you will play the part to the hilt.”

“Is nobody on my side? Sim bach, say a few eloquent words in my defence. How am I to blame?”

“Well, to be totally fair and even-handed, Geraint, I have seen you, now and then, casting inflammatory smiles in her direction.”

“I smile at everybody, particularly when I don’t mean anything by it. Perhaps I smiled—a meaningless grimace of courtesy—at Schnak now and then when she kept getting under my feet. I swear upon the soul of my dear mother, now adding a fine mezzo to the heavenly choir, that I meant nothing, nothing whatever, by it. I smile at you Nilla, and at you, Dulcy, and God knows I don’t expect it to get me anywhere, you horrible old dikes.”

“Dikes!” said Gunilla indignantly. “How dare you use such a word to me—to us. You are a boor, Geraint.”

“Isn’t he a boor, Nilla? That’s precisely what he is. A boor.

She loved thee, boor; she loved thee, cruel boor;

Shakespeare, freely adapted for the occasion.” Dulcy was enjoying herself greatly. Indignation and Scotch were working strongly inside her.

“She didn’t love me, even if she thought she did.”

“It comes to the same thing.”

“Yes, I fear it does,” said Darcourt. “Poor old Schnak was in the grip of one of the great errors of the frenzied lover. She thought because she loved, she could provoke love in return. Everybody does it, at some time. I speak as the voice of calm reason.”

“And you ignored her cruelly,” said Arthur. “Doghouse for you, Geraint.”

“I suppose I must make a statement,” said Geraint. “What I am about to say does not spring from vanity, but from bitter experience. Listen to me, all of you. Since I was but a winsome lad, women have insisted on falling for me. It has something to do with chemistry, I suppose. Chemistry and the fact (which I state without any vanity whatever) that I am absurdly good-looking. Result, a lot of trouble for me. But am I to blame? I refuse to accept blame. Are beautiful women to blame because men fall for them? Is Maria to blame because just about everybody who sees her falls in love with her, or at least looks upon her to lust after her? I’ll bet that even Sim bach, bloodless old turnip though he is, loves Maria. Can Maria help it? The idea is too ridiculous for discussion. So why am I to blame because Schnak, who is emotionally warped and retarded, gets silly notions about me? My beauty has been a large part of my success as an actor, and I tell you I’m bloody sick of it. That’s why I want to get out of acting and into directing. I will not be sighed at and lallygagged over by audiences of hungry females. I have too keen an intelligence to value such admiration, which is simply aroused by the Livery of Hell—my physical appearance. I am close to middle age, and my beauty is giving way to a ravaged distinction. I have a gammy leg. So perhaps I can look forward to the remainder of my life in peace.”

“I wouldn’t count on that, Geraint,” said Arthur. “You must bear your cross. Even if your looks are going, the chemistry is bubbling away as merrily as ever. But we’re wandering from the point. The point is Schnak. What are you going to do about Schnak?”

“Why must I do anything about her? I’m not going to encourage her, if that’s what you have in mind. I can’t abide the shrimp. It isn’t just that she’s ugly to look at. Her voice goes through me like a rusty saw, and her impoverished vocabulary grates on me unbearably. Even if I were willing to forgo beauty, I simply must have the luxury of language. It isn’t just that she looks ugly. She sounds ugly, and I want none of her.”

“You make a terrible fuss about voices, Geraint,” said Maria.

“Because they are terribly important, and usually neglected. Listen to you, Maria; music every time you open your lips. But most women don’t even know that’s possible. It is one of the three great marks of beauty. It totally changes the face. If Medusa speaks like a goddess, you can’t tell her from Minerva.”

“Very Welsh, Geraint,” said Dulcy.

“And none the worse for that, I suppose?” said Geraint.

“There, my dumpling, that’s enough,” said Maria, and putting little David over her shoulder she patted his back gently. The child gave a mighty belch, extraordinary for his age.

“That boy is obviously going to grow up to be a sailor,” said Arthur.

“Or a great lord of finance, like his daddy,” said Maria. “Will you call Nanny, darling?”

When Nanny came she was not the stout, red-faced figure of stereotype, but a girl in her early twenties, smart in a blue uniform; David was her first charge.

“Come on, my lambie,” she said, in a Scottish voice that made Geraint glance at her approvingly. “Time for bed.”

She took the child over her shoulder, and this time David gave a long, reflective fart. “That’s the boy,” said Nanny.

“David has more sense than the lot of you,” said Geraint. “He has summed up this whole argument in a masterly blast. Let’s hear no more of it.”

“Oh, but we must,” said Maria. “You can’t get out of it. Even if you didn’t encourage Schnak, you must comfort her. The logic is clear, but it would take too long to spell it out.”

“I’ll throw up the show, first,” said Geraint, and, dragging himself from under the heavy cover, he stamped out of the room. He avoided the cliché of slamming the door.

The others chewed over the rights and wrongs of the situation for quite a long time, until Darcourt fell asleep. It was midnight when they went to their own quarters. The big motel was full of people associated with Arthur in one way or another, and Albert Greenlaw insisted on calling it Camelot. Was there a lot of gossip at Camelot about Lancelot and Elaine? Malory doesn’t say.

(7)

GERAINT WAS AT THE HOSPITAL the next day, as soon as rules permitted. Schnak was in a room for two, but by good luck the other bed was empty. She sat up in bed, wan and bedraggled, in a hospital gown that had once been blue and was now a poor grey, eating a bowl of orange Jell-O, washed down with an eggnog.

“You see how it is, old girl,” said Geraint. “Just one of those unlucky things. Neither of us to blame. The working of Fate.”

“I’ve been a selfish shit and embarrassed everybody,” said Schnak. Tears did nothing to improve her looks.

“No, you haven’t and you aren’t. And I wish you’d take a vow to stop saying ‘shit’ all the time; talk shit and your life will be shit.”

“My life is shit. Everything goes contrary with me.”

“Mrs. Gummidge!”

“Who’s Mrs. Gummidge?”

“If you’re a good girl and get well soon I’ll lend you the book.”

“Oh, somebody in a book! All you people like Nilla and the Cornishes and that man Darcourt seem to live out of books. As if everything was in books!”

“Well, Schnak, just about everything is in books. No, that’s wrong. We recognize in books what we’ve met in life. But if you’d read a few books you wouldn’t have to meet everything as if it had never happened before, and take every blow right on the chin. You’d see a few things coming. About love, for instance. You thought you loved me.”

Schnak gave a painful howl.

“All right then, you think you love me now. Come on, Schnak, say it. Say, ‘I love you, Geraint.’ ”

Another howl.

“Come on. Out with it! Say it, Schnak.”

“I’d die first.”

“Look, Schnak, that’s what comes of building your vocabulary on words like ‘shit’. Great words choke you. If you can’t say love, you can’t feel love.”

“Yes I can!”

“Then say so!”

“I’m going to be sick.”

“Good. Here’s a basin. I’ll hold your head. Up she comes! Hmm—doesn’t look too bad, for what you’ve been doing to yourself. Almost as good as new. I’ll just put this down the john, then you have a sip of water and we’ll go on.”

“Leave me alone!”

“I will not leave you alone! You’ve got to whoop up more than that eggnog if you’re to be really well. Let me wipe your mouth. Now we’ll try again: say, ‘I love you, Geraint.’ ”

The defeated Schnak buried her face in her pillow, but among the sobs she managed to whisper, “I love you.”

“That’s my brave girl! Now look at me, and I’ll sponge your eyes. I’m your friend, you know, but I don’t love you—not the way you think you love me. Oh, my dear old Schnak, don’t think I don’t understand! We’ve all had these awful hopeless passions, and they hurt like hell. But if we were romantic lovers, the kind you’re thinking of, do you suppose I’d hold your head while you puked, and mop your face, and try to make you see reason? The kind of love you’re dreaming about takes place on mossy banks, amid the scent of flowers and the song of birds. Or else in luxurious chambers, where you loll on a chaise longue, and I take off your clothes very slowly until we melt into a union of intolerable sweetness, and not a giggle or a really kind word spoken the whole time. It’s the giggles and the kind words that you need for the long voyage.”

“I feel like a fool!”

“Then you’re quite wrong. You’re not a fool, and only a fool would think you were. You’re an artist, Schnak. Maybe a very good one. Romantic Art—which is what’s kept you busy since last autumn—is feeling, shaped by technique. You’ve got bags of technique. It’s feeling that kills you.”

“If you grew up like I grew up, you’d hate the word feeling.”

“I grew up in a boiling tank of feeling. All tied up, somehow, with religion. When I said I was going to be an actor my parents raved as if they’d seen me in Hell already. But my dad was a fine actor—a pulpit actor. And my mam was Sarah Bernhardt twenty-four hours a day. They poured it all into the chapel, of course. But I wanted a bigger stage than that, because I had an idea of God, you see, and my God showed himself in art. I couldn’t trap God in the chapel. An artist doesn’t want to trap God; he wants to live and breathe God, and damned hard work it is, stumbling and falling.”

“I hate God.”

“Good for you! You don’t say, ‘There is no God,’ like a fool; you say you hate Him. But Schnak—you won’t like this, but you have to know—God doesn’t hate you. He’s made you special. When Nilla is being confidential she hints that you may be really special. So think of it this way: give God His chance. Of course He’ll take it anyway, but it’s easier for you if you don’t kick and scream.”

“How can anybody live God?”

“By living as well as they can with themselves. It doesn’t always look very well to the bystanders. Truth to yourself, I suppose you’d call it. Following your nose. But don’t expect me to explain. My dad was the explainer. He could go on about living in God’s light till your head swam. Duw, he was a fine preacher! A true God-intoxicated man. But he thought God had one, single, unwinking light for everybody, and that was where he and I fell out.”

“Now that I’ve said what you made me say—don’t you say anything?”

“Yes. I say it won’t do. Suppose I took you up on it, and we had an affair, you loving and me using you as long as it lasted—which wouldn’t be long. It would be a cheat. I haven’t time or inclination for that, and when it finished you would be bitter, and you’re quite bitter enough already. What about Gunilla? Did you love her?”

“It wasn’t the same.”

“No love ever is the same as any other. The lucky ones get the big thing. You know—‘The silver link, the silken tie’—but it’s not common. That’s one of the big mistakes, you know—that everybody loves in the same way and that everybody may have a great love. You might as well say that everybody can compose a great symphony. A lot of love is misery; bad weather punctuated by occasional flashes of sunlight. Look at this opera we’re busy with; the love in it is pretty rough. It’s not the best of Arthur’s life, or Lancelot’s, or Guenevere’s.”

“It’s the best of Elaine’s.”

“Elaine wasn’t a gifted musician, so don’t try that on. She had your trouble, though. ‘Fantasy’s hot fire, / Whose wishes, soon as granted, fly.’ You set those words to some very good music. Didn’t you learn anything from them? Schnak, if you and I set out on a love affair, you’d have had enough of it in two weeks.”

“Because I’m ugly! Because my looks make everybody sick! It isn’t fair! It’s a curse! That Cornish bitch, and Nilla and Dulcy all look great and they can do anything with you, or any man! I’ll kill myself!”

“No, you won’t. You’ve got other fish to fry. But truth’s truth, Schnak; you’re no beauty queen and that’s just something you have to put up with, and it isn’t the worst affliction, let me tell you. What do you suppose Nilla looked like at your age? A big gawk, I’ll bet. Now she’s marvellous. When you’re her age, you’ll be totally different. Success will have given you a new look. You’ll be a kind of distinguished goblin, I expect.”

Schnak howled again, and hid her face in the pillows.

“I’m sorry if that hurt your feelings, but you see, Schnak old girl, I’m under considerable stress myself. Everybody says I have to talk to you, and be nice to you, though I protest I hadn’t an inkling of the way you felt about me, and I won’t take any responsibility. I can’t run the risk of feeding your flame, and making things worse. So I’m talking entirely against my inclination. You know how I am; I love to talk and talk as gaudily as I can, just for the pleasure it gives me. But with you, I’m trying to speak on oath, you see. Not a word I don’t truly mean. If I let myself go, I could rave on about the Livery of Hell, and the demon’s dunghill, and all the rest of it. Welsh rhetoric is part of me, and my curse is that the world is full of literal-minded morlocks who don’t understand, and think I’m a crook because their tongues are wrapped in burlap and mine is hinged with gold. I’ve been as honest as I know how. You see, don’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“Good. Now I must go. A million things to attend to. Get well as fast as you can; we want you on the first night, and that’s the day after tomorrow. And—Schnak, here’s a kiss. Not a romantic one, or a brotherly one, God forbid! but a friendly one. Fellow artists—isn’t that it?”

He was gone. Schnak dozed and thought, and dozed and thought, and when Gunilla came to see her late in the afternoon, she was decidedly better.

“It must have cost him a good deal to talk like that,” said Gunilla, when Schnak had given a version of what Geraint had said. “Lots of so-called lovers wouldn’t have been as direct with you, Hulda. It isn’t easy to be like Geraint.”

(8)

IT WAS THE FINAL DRESS PARADE, on the Friday afternoon preceding the final dress rehearsal, which was to take place the same night. In Row G of the theatre sat a little group: Geraint Powell the dominant figure, with Dulcy Ringgold as his first lieutenant and Waldo Harris on his other side; in front of them sat Gwen Larking, with both her assistants, and a gofer poised to run with messages too delicate to be shouted toward the stage. One by one the actors, dressed and made up for their roles, walked to centre stage, did little excursions to right and left, bowed, curtsied, drew weapons. Now and then Geraint shouted some request to them; when they replied they shaded their eyes against the stage light, to see him if they could. Geraint whispered comments to Dulcy, who made notes, or explained, and occasionally expostulated if he wanted something that could not be managed in the time that was left before the opening.

A queer moment, thought Darcourt, who sat further back, by himself. The moment when all that is important is how the singer looks, not how he sings; the moment when everything that can be done to make the singers look like the people they represent has been done, and whatever has not been achieved must be accepted. A moment when inexplicable transformations take place.

The two black Knights, for instance, Greenlaw and LeMoyne, who looked superb in armour and the turbans Dulcy had given them to mark them as men of the East. But Wilson Tinney, as Gareth Beaumains, simply looked dumpy, although he was not an ill-looking man in his ordinary dress. His legs were too short. When he appeared without his armour he looked like a kewpie doll in his short robe. He had made himself up with very red cheeks, doubtless to suggest a life of adventure on horseback, but the effect was merely doll-like. In his robes as Merlin, Oliver Twentyman was convincingly magical, because his legs were long; he loved dressing up, and was enjoying himself. Giles Shippen, the Lancelot, looked less like a heart-breaker in costume than out of it; he was a reasonable figure, but he had Tenor written all over him, and his big chest made him look shorter than he really was.

“Did you put lifts in his shoes?” hissed Geraint to Dulcy.

“As much as I dared, without putting him in surgical boots,” said she; “he just doesn’t look like much whatever you do.”

“Nobody will believe a woman would leave Holzknecht for him. Hans looks magnificent.”

“Every inch a ruler,” said Dulcy; “but everybody knows women have funny tastes. Nothing to be done, I’m afraid, Geraint.”

As was to be expected, Nutcombe Puckler had a great deal to say, and was full of complaint. “Geraint, I simply can’t hear in this thing,” he said. He was referring to his camail, a headpiece of chain armour that hung down from his fool’s bonnet to his shoulders, over his ears. “If I can’t hear, I may make a false entrance and screw up. Can’t something be done?”

“The effect is splendid, Nutty. You look the perfection of a merry warrior. Dulcy will put some pads under it, just over your ears, and you’ll be all right.”

“It fidgets me,” said Nutty. “I can’t bear to have my ears covered on the stage.”

“Nutty, you’re far too much of a pro to let a little thing bother you,” said Geraint. “Give it a try tonight and if it really doesn’t work, we’ll find another way.”

“Like hell we will,” murmured Dulcy, making a note.

Among the women the assumption of costume brought about similar changes in emphasis. As Queen Guenevere, Donalda Roche looked handsome, but very much a woman of the present day, whereas Marta Ullman, as the Lady Elaine, looked so much a creature of the Middle Ages, and so infinitely desirable, that none of the men could take their eyes off her. Clara Intrepidi, as Morgan Le Fay, looked an undoubted sorceress in her gown of changing colours and her dragon head-dress—but a sorceress who was a fugitive from some unidentified opera by Wagner. She was taller than any of the men except Holzknecht, and her appearance suggested that when she was at home she had a full suit of armour in her closet.

“Can’t be helped,” whispered Dulcy, “unless she consents to act on her knees, or sitting down all the time. Luckily she’s Arthur’s sister; great height runs in the family. Look at it that way.”

“Yes, but look at Panisi,” said Geraint. “He’s supposed to be her son, and Arthur’s son as well. Surely a child of those two would be a giant?”

“Incest makes for funny-looking children,” said Dulcy. “Use your imagination, Geraint. You did the casting, you know.”

The ladies of the court were, upon the whole, a splendid group, except for Virginia Poole who, as the Lady Clarissant, looked like a woman with a grievance, as indeed she was, onstage and off. Dulcy had put some of the younger women in the cotehardie, a tight-fitting medieval bodice that showed off a fine bust to the utmost advantage.

“You’ve let your natural inclinations run away with you, haven’t you, dear?” said Geraint.

“You bet I have. Look at Polly Graves; it would be a black sin to muffle up such a splendid pair of jugs. And Esther Moss; an evocation of the mystic East? A whiff of Baghdad in Camelot?”

“They didn’t look quite that way in the designs.”

“Don’t fight your luck, Geraint. These girls are for the tired business man.”

“And woman, dear. I’m not complaining. Just surprised. You never know what’s under rehearsal clothes, do you?”

“Primrose Maybon looks good enough to eat with a silver spoon,” said Waldo.

“Too bad the women look so much better than the men,” said Gwen Larking. “But our sex does have its compensations, when we can show ’em off.”

“Let’s see you with your trains over the arm, girls,” said Dulcy. “Left arm, Etain. That’s the girl.”

To Darcourt they all looked wonderful, even the nuisance Puckler. Dulcy had drawn heavily on Planché’s Encyclopaedia, and she had obviously studied the work of Burne-Jones, but the result was all her own. If not all the singers looked as well as they should in their costumes, the total effect was superb, because of the way in which colours called to one another, not obviously but subtly, in every grouping. This was an element in the opera of which Darcourt, the greenhorn in the theatre, could have had no idea.

When every costume had been seen in its final form, and all the notes made and all the complaints heard, Geraint called: “Before we break, I want to rehearse the curtain calls. Stand by, will you.” And when at last these tableaux had been arranged to his satisfaction—“And of course when that’s over, you, Hans, go to stage right and bring on Nilla, who takes her bow, and then, Nilla, you beckon into the wings for Schnak. And Schnak, you must come on in full fig—the fullest fig you possess—and Nilla takes your hand and you curtsy.”

“I what?”

“You curtsy. You mayn’t bow; not old enough. If you don’t know what a curtsy is, get somebody to show you. Thank you. That’s all for now. I want to see all the animal-handlers backstage right away, please.”

“But why me?” said Darcourt to an unwontedly pleading Schnak, who had sidled up to him with her request when the rehearsal was over, and the singers had gone to their dressing-rooms.

“You know what a curtsy is, don’t you?”

“I think so. But get one of the women to show you. It’s their kind of thing.”

“I don’t want to. They hate me. They’d triumph over me.”

“Nonsense, Schnak. They don’t hate you. The younger ones are probably afraid of you, because you’re so clever.”

“Please, Simon. Be a good guy, eh?”

It was the first time she had ever called him Simon, and Darcourt, whose heart was not of stone, could not say no.

“All right. Here’s a nice quiet place. So far as I can remember from my dancing-school days, it goes like this.”

They had found a dark nook backstage, near the scenepainters’ dock.

“First of all, you must stand up straight. You tend to slump, Schnak, and it won’t do if you’re going to curtsy. Then, slowly and with dignity, you sweep your right leg behind your left, and fit the knee lightly into the left leg joint. Then you descend, gently and slowly as if you were going down in an elevator, and when you get to the bottom, bend your head forward, from the neck. Keep your back straight all the time. It’s not a cringe; it’s an acknowledgement of an obligation. Now watch me.”

Rather stiffly, and with perhaps too much of the dowager in his manner, Darcourt curtsied. Schnak had a try and fell over sideways.

“It isn’t easy. And it’s very characteristic, you know. Don’t be pert, but don’t be grandiose, either. You are a great artist, acknowledging the applause of your audience. You know you are their superior in art, but they are your patrons, and they expect the high courtesy of an artist. Try again.”

Schnak tried again. This time she did not topple.

“What the hell do I do with my hands?”

“Keep them where your lap would be if you were sitting down. Some people wave the right hand to the side in a sweeping gesture, but that’s a bit stagy and too advanced for your age. You’re getting it. Try again. And again. Keep your head straight and look at the audience; only bow when you’re all the way down. Again. Come on. You’re getting it.”

Darcourt curtsied repeatedly to Schnak, and Schnak curtsied to Darcourt. They bobbed up and down, facing one another, somewhat like a pair of heraldic animals on either side of a coat of arms; Darcourt’s knees were beginning to whimper, but Schnak was learning one of the minor accomplishments of a public performer.

From above them came a sharp burst of applause, and a cry of Bravo. They looked up; suspended well above them, on the painting-bridge, were three or four stage-hands and Dulcy Ringgold, watching with undisguised delight.

Darcourt was too old and too wily to be disconcerted. He kissed his hand to the unexpected audience. But Schnak had fled to her dressing-room, hot with shame. She had much to learn.

(9)

“WE HEAR MARVELLOUS REPORTS about you, Simon,” said Maria as she and Arthur sat with Darcourt in the favourite restaurant. “Dulcy says it was heart-lifting to see you teaching Schnak to curtsy. She says you were très grande dame.”

“Somebody had to do it,” said Simon, “and so few women these days are up to their job as females. I think of starting a small school to teach girls the arts of enchantment. They certainly won’t learn anything from their liberated sisters.”

“We live in the age of the sweat-shirt and the jeans,” said Arthur. “Charm and manners are out. But they’ll come back. They always do. Look at the French Revolution: in a generation or two the French were all hopping around like fleas, bowing and scraping to Napoleon. People love manners, really. They admit you to one or another of a dozen secret societies.”

“Schnak must look as well as possible when she takes her bow,” said Darcourt. “Did I tell you I had a phone call from Clem Hollier? He’s going to be here tomorrow night, and he wanted to know whether he should wear dinner clothes or tails. For taking his bow, you understand.”

“Is Clem taking a bow?” said Maria. “Whatever for?”

“You may well ask. But his name appears on the program as one of the concocters of the libretto, and he seems to think that a clamorous audience will demand his appearance.”

“But did he do anything?”

“Not a damned thing. Not even as much as Penny, who simply bitched and found fault and was cross because I wouldn’t tell her where the best lines came from. But Penny is coming, in full fig, and I shouldn’t be surprised if she expects to take a bow, too.”

“Are you taking a bow, Simon?”

“I haven’t been asked, and upon the whole I think not. Nobody loves a librettist. The audience wouldn’t know who I was.”

“You can lurk in the shadows with us.”

“Oh, don’t be bitter, Arthur,” said Maria. And to Darcourt, “He’s rather touchy because we’ve been cold-shouldered so much during the last few weeks.”

“During the last year,” said Arthur. “We’ve done everything we were asked, and rather more. We’ve certainly footed all the bills, and they aren’t trivial. But if we turn up at a rehearsal and cling to the walls, Geraint looks at us as if we were intruders, and the cast glare, or smile sweetly like old Twentyman, who seems to think it’s his job to spread sweetness and light even in the humblest places.”

“Don’t be hurt, darling. Or at least, don’t show it. I expect we’re on the program, somewhere.”

This was a moment Darcourt had been dreading. “There was a slip-up,” he said; “quite by accident the acknowledgement of the help of the Cornish Foundation was left off the program. Easily explained. The Festival generally arranges those things through its own administration, you see, and as this was a sort of special production, not quite of the Festival, though under its umbrella, there was an oversight. I didn’t see a proof till this afternoon. But don’t worry. Slips are being stuffed into every program at this moment, with the proper acknowledgement on it.”

“Typewritten, I suppose?”

“No, no; one of those wonderful modern multilith processes.”

“Same thing.”

“An understandable error.”

“Completely understandable, in the light of everything else that connects the Cornish Foundation with this opera. I don’t know why they bother. Who gives a damn, so long as the show goes on?”

“Oh, please, Arthur, the Festival is very much aware of its benefactors.”

“I suppose the benefactors take care, in the most unmistakable way, that it is so. We haven’t been aggressive enough, that’s the answer. Next time we must take care to push a little harder. We must learn the art of benefaction, though I must say I’m not looking forward to it.”

“You thought of yourself as a patron in the old sense, the nineteenth-century sense. Not surprising, when one thinks of the nature of this opera. But better times will come. More was lost at Mohacs Field.”

Arthur was somewhat appeased, but not entirely.

“I’m sorry you feel slighted, Arthur, but I assure you—no slight was intended.”

“Simon, let me explain. You mustn’t think Arthur is sore-headed, or pouty. That simply isn’t in his nature. But he—I should say we—thought of ourselves as impresarios, encouraging and fostering and doing all that sort of thing. Like Diaghilev, you know. Well, not really like Diaghilev. He was one of a kind. But something along those lines. You’ve seen how it was. Nary a foster or an encourage have we been permitted. Nobody wants to talk to us. So we’ve played it Geraint’s way, and everybody else’s way. But we’ve been surprised and a little bit wistful.”

“You’ve been as good as gold,” said Darcourt.

“Exactly!” said Arthur. “That’s precisely what we’ve been. As good as gold. We’ve been the gold at the bottom of the whole thing.”

“Gold isn’t really a bad part to play,” said Darcourt. “You’ve always had it, Arthur, so you don’t know how other people see it. It’s no use talking about Diaghilev; he never had a red cent. Always cadging for money from people like you. You and Maria are just gold—pure gold. You are a very rich couple, and you have genius with money, but there are things about gold you don’t know. Haven’t you any notion of the jealousy and envy mixed with downright, barefaced, reluctant worship gold creates? You’ve put your soul into gold, Arthur, and you have to take the bitter with the sweet.”

“Simon, that is positively the nastiest, ugliest thing you’ve ever said! My soul into gold! I didn’t ask to be born rich, and if I have a talent for money it doesn’t mean I put money above everything! Have you missed the fact that Maria and I have a real, gigantic, and mostly unselfish passion for the arts and we want to create something with our money? I’ll go further—no, shut up, Maria, I’m going to speak my mind—we want to be artists so far as we can, and furthermore we want to do something with Uncle Frank’s money that he would really have thought worthy. And we’re treated like money-bags. Bloody, insensitive, know-nothing money-bags! Not fit to mix on equal terms with shit-bags like Nutty Puckler and that self-delighted sorehead Virginia Poole! At the first dress rehearsal I was standing in the wings, keeping my mouth shut, and I was shushed—shushed, I tell you—by one of those damned gofers when Albert Greenlaw was snickering and whispering, as he always is! I asked the kid what ailed her, and she hissed, ‘There’s an examination going on, you know!’ As if I hadn’t known about the examination for months!”

“Yes, Arthur. Yes, yes, yes. But let me explain. When art is in the air, everybody has to eat a lot of dirt, and forget about it. When I said you have put your soul into gold I was simply talking about the nature of reality.”

“And my reality is gold? Is that it?”

“Yes, that’s it. But not the way you think. Do please listen and don’t flare up all the time. It’s the soul, you see. The soul can’t just exist as a sort of gas that makes us noble when we let it. The soul is something else: we have to lodge our souls somewhere and people project their souls, their energy, their best hopes—call it what you like—onto something. The two great carriers of the soul are money and sex. There are lots of others: power, or security (that’s a bad one), and of course art—and that’s a good one. Look at poor old Geraint. He wants to project his soul on art, and because he’s a very good man it murders him when all kinds of people think he must project it on sex, because he’s handsome and has indefinable attraction for both men and women. If he simply went in for sex he could be an absolute bastard, with his advantages. But art can’t live without gold. Romantics pretend it can, but they’re wrong. They snub gold, as they’ve snubbed you, but in their hearts they know what’s what. Gold is one of the great realities, and like all reality it isn’t all wine and roses. It’s the stuff of life, and life can be a bugger. Look at your Uncle Frank; his reality was art, but art gave him more misery than joy. Why do you suppose he became such a grubby old miser in his last years? He was trying to change his soul from a thing of art to a thing of money, and it didn’t work. And you and Maria are sitting on the heap he piled up in that attempt. You’re doing a fine thing, trying to change the heap back into art again, but you mustn’t be surprised if sometimes it brings you heartbreak.”

“What have you projected your soul on, Simon?” said Maria. Arthur needed time to think.

“I used to think it was religion. That was why I became a priest. But the religion the world wanted from me didn’t work, and it was killing me. Not physically, but spiritually. The world is full of priests who have been killed by religion, and can’t, or won’t, escape. So I tried scholarship, and that worked pretty well.”

“You used to tell us in class, ‘The striving for wisdom is the second paradise of the world,’ ” said Maria. “And I believed you. I believe it still. Paracelsus said that.”

“Indeed he did, the good, misunderstood man. So I took to scholarship. Or returned to it, I suppose I should say.”

“And it has served you well? Perhaps I should say you have served it well?”

“The funny thing is, the deeper I got into it, the more it began to resemble religion. The real religion, I mean. The intense yielding to what is most significant, but not always most apparent, in life. Some people find it in the Church, but I didn’t. I found it in some damned queer places.”

“So have I, Simon. I’m still trying. Will go on trying. It’s the only way for people like us. But—

The flesche is brukle, the Fiend is slee

Timor mortis conturbat me

That’s how it is, isn’t it?”

“Not for you, Maria. You’re far too young to talk about the fear of death. But you’re right about the Flesh and the Fiend, even if it makes you sound like Geraint.”

“I think of that sometimes, when I look at little David.”

“No, no,” said Arthur. “That’s all over. Forget about it. The child wipes all that out.”

“There speaks the real Arthur,” said Darcourt, and raised his glass. “Here’s to David!”

“I’m sorry I whined,” said Arthur.

“You didn’t whine—not really whine. You just let loose some wholly understandable indignation. Anyway, we all have a right to a good whine, now and then. Clears the mind. Cleanses the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart—and all that.”

“Shakespeare,” said Arthur. “For once I recognize one of your quotations, Simon.”

“How one comes to depend on Shakespeare,” said Maria. “ ‘What potions have I drunk of Siren tears—’ Remember that one?”

“ ‘So I return rebuked to my content,

And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent,’ ”

said Darcourt. “Yes; that’s a good one. Puts it very concisely.”

“Thrice more than I have spent. Or rather, thrice more than Uncle Frank has spent,” said Arthur. “I suppose you’re right, Simon. I do think a lot about gold. Somebody must. But that doesn’t mean I’m Kater Murr. Simon, we’ve been turning over in our minds that scheme you were talking about a while ago. That would be more in Uncle Frank’s line, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t have mentioned it, otherwise,” said Darcourt.

“You said you thought the New York people would listen to an offer.”

“If it were put the right way. I think they would appeal to you, Arthur. Collectors, connoisseurs, but of course they don’t want to be made to look foolish. Not like people who have been in any way associated with a fake. They’re not Kater Murr, either. If it came out that they had been cherishing a picture which was just a simple, barefaced fake it wouldn’t do them any good, either in the art world, or in the world of business.”

“What is their business?”

“Prince Max is the head of an importing company that brings vast quantities of wine to this continent. Good wine. No cheap schlock, adulterated with Algerian piss. No fakes, in fact. I’ve seen some of his things on your table. Probably you didn’t notice the motto on the coat of arms on the bottles: ‘Thou shalt perish ere I perish’.”

“Good motto for wine.”

“Yes, but the motto is a family motto, and it means Don’t try to get the better of me, or you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

“I’ve met some of those in business.”

“But you must bear in mind that the Princess is a business woman, too. Cosmetics, in the most distinguished possible way.”

“What’s that to do with it?”

“Dear Arthur, it means simply putting the best face on things. That’s what they’ll want to do.”

“So you think they’ll want a whopping price?”

“This is an age of whopping prices for pictures.”

“Even fakes?”

“Arthur, I may be brought to crowning you with this bottle—which isn’t one of Prince Max’s, by the way. How often do I have to tell you that the picture isn’t a fake, was never meant to be a fake, and is in fact a picture of the most extraordinary and unique significance?”

“I know. I’ve heard all you’ve said about it. But who will convince the world of it?”

“I will, of course. You’re forgetting my book.”

“Simon, I don’t want to be a brute, but how many people will read your book?”

“If you follow my suggestion, hundreds of thousands of people will read it, because it will explain Francis Cornish’s life as a great artistic adventure. And a very Canadian sort of adventure, what’s more.”

“I don’t see this country as a land hotching with artistic adventure, or deep concern about the soul, and if you do, I think you’re off your head.”

“I do, and I’m not off my head. I sometimes think I’m ahead of my time. You haven’t read my book. It isn’t finished, of course, and how it ends hangs entirely on the decision you make. The ending can be fantastic, in both the literal and the colloquial meanings of the word. You don’t know what a good long look at your uncle’s life brings to the surface, in a mind like mine. You’ve got to trust me, and in this sort of thing you don’t trust me, Arthur, because you’re afraid to trust yourself.”

“I trusted myself in this opera venture. I hustled the Foundation into doing something that hasn’t worked out.”

“You don’t know if it has worked out, and you won’t, until long after tomorrow night. You have the amateur’s notion that a first performance tells the whole story about a stage piece. Did you know the St. Louis people are already interested in Arthur of Britain? If the opera doesn’t cause a stir here, it may very well do so there. And in other places. Of course, you hustled us into this job. And now you think it was just the beginning of your mumps. But great achievements have sprung from stranger things than a dose of mumps.”

“All right. Let us proceed. With caution. I suppose I’d better take over, and see these New York people.”

“And I suppose you’d better do nothing of the sort,” said Maria. “You leave it to Simon. He’s a downy old bird.”

“Maria, you are beginning to sound like a wife.”

“The best wife you’ll ever have,” said Maria.

“True. Very true, my darling. By the way, I’m thinking of calling you Sweetness, in future.”

Maria put out her tongue at him.

“Before you degenerate into embarrassing public connubiality,” said Darcourt, “let me call your attention to the fact that the dress rehearsal must now have almost completed the first act of this opera Arthur has decided to hate. We’d better get over to the theatre, and be slighted and neglected, if that’s the way it goes. As for this other thing, shall I go ahead?”

“Yes, Simon, you go ahead,” said Maria.

Arthur, characteristically, was calling for the bill.

(10)

IT IS THE FIRST NIGHT of Arthur of Britain.

Gwen Larking speaks through the intercom to all dressing-rooms and the Green Room: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your half-hour call. Half an hour till curtain, please.”

The early birds have been ready long since. In his dressing-room Oliver Twentyman lies in his reclining-chair. He is made up and dressed, except for his magician’s gown, which hangs ready to put on. His dresser has tactfully left him alone, to compose himself. Will this be his last appearance? Who can say? Certainly not Oliver Twentyman, who will go on appearing in operas as long as directors and conductors want him—and they still want him. But this will probably be his last creation of a new role; nobody has ever sung Merlin in Arthur of Britain before, and he intends to give the audience something to remember. The critics, too, those chroniclers of operatic history, upon the whole so much more reliable than their brethren who deal with the theatre. When Oliver Twentyman is no more, they will say that Merlin, undertaken when he was already over eighty, was the best thing he had done since he sang Oberon in Britten’s Dream. He liked being old—and still a great artist. Age, linked with achievement, was a splendid crown to life, and took the sting from death.

… an old age, serene and bright,

And lovely as a Lapland night,

Shall lead thee to thy grave.

Wordsworth knew what he was talking about. Oliver Twentyman murmured the words two or three times, like a prayer. He was a praying sort of man, and often his prayers took the form of quotations.

ONSTAGE WALDO HARRIS was having the last, he hoped, of many sessions with Hans Holzknecht about Hair on the Floor. Many years ago—Holzknecht would not say how many, nor would he identify the opera house (though it was a great one)—he had found, during the last act of Boris Godunov, that he was choking. Choking so that he could scarcely utter. Something had invaded his throat and was strangling him. Instead of singing he was on the verge of throwing up. It was a situation in which the best of the artist must unite with the best of the man to overcome a difficulty all the greater because it could not be identified. Somehow—there were times when he thought it must have been Divine intervention—he had sung his way—sung well and truly, though in agony—to the end of the act and then, when the curtain was down, he had rushed to his dressing-room, and called for the theatre doctor, who, with a forceps, had removed from his throat a twenty-inch human hair! From a wig? From some shedding soprano in the chorus in an earlier scene? Whatever the source, there it was, a hair of great length which had, in its situation, behaved with the malignance of an animate thing! In one of his great intakes of breath while lying, as the distraught Tsar, on the floor, he had sucked up that hair, and he had it yet, preserved in a plastic bag, which he showed to every stage management in every theatre where he appeared, as a warning of what could happen if the stage were not properly swept, not once, but at every possible time, during a performance. He did not want to be a nuisance, nor did he wish to appear neurotic, but a singer meets perils of which the public knows nothing, and he begged—begged with all the authority of his place in the company—that he might have the assurance of Waldo Harris that the stage would be properly swept whenever the curtain was down. Which assurance Waldo gave, sympathetic, but also wishing that Holzknecht would accept one positive answer, and shut up about hairs on the stage.

IN THE PROMPT CORNER, Gwen Larking was fussing. She would not have thought of it as fussing, but as she was redoing and perfecting things that had already been done, and done to perfection, there is no other word for it. Gwen was, in herself, the perfection of a Stage Manager, which meant that she was impeccable in her attention to detail, alert for any mishap and capable of meeting it, and a monument of assurance to nervous artists. And the greatest fusser of them all, beneath an impassive exterior.

She was dressed for her work in an expensive pant-suit, and a blouse of deceptive simplicity. She had made her two assistants and the three gofers dress themselves similarly, as near as it was in their destiny to come to her own stripped-down elegance. Art deserves respect, and respect is mirrored in proper dress. Let those members of the audience who so wished appear in the theatre looking as if they had just come from mucking out the cowshed; it was up to the stage crew to dress as if they were about important work. The gofers had to be warned about bangles and chains that jingled; of course such things could not be heard on the stage but they might be distracting in the wings.

The Prompt Corner was called so because of tradition; nobody could possibly have prompted anyone onstage from it. Indeed, the stage could not be seen from it, except fleetingly. But over Gwen Larking’s desk, which looked like the conductor’s own, lay a full score of the opera, in which every detail of the production was recorded, for instant reference. This was what Al Crane would have given an ear to get his hands on, but Gwen guarded it jealously, just as she guarded the conductor’s full score, which lived in the safe in Waldo Harris’s office.

Gwen Larking twisted the lucky ring on the fourth finger of her left hand. Nothing would have persuaded her to admit that it was a lucky ring. She was a Stage Manager, devoted to certainty, not luck. But it was in truth a lucky ring, a Renaissance cameo, a gift from a former lover, and all the gofers knew it, and had somewhere found lucky rings of their own, for Gwen was their ideal.

DARCOURT DID NOT HEAR the half-hour call, because he was in the favourite restaurant, entertaining two eminent critics. Arthur and Maria had refused to do anything of the sort, but the line between eminent critic from New York and distinguished guest is so fine that Darcourt had decided he had better give them dinner. Very, very eminent critics can eat and drink any amount, without in the least compromising their impartiality of opinion, and have indeed been known to bite the hand that has fed them, without noticing. Darcourt was aware of this, but thought a modest dinner would give him a chance to provide the critics with some information.

In the case of Claude Applegarth, who was undoubtedly the most popular and widely read of New York critics, information was cast on stony ground, for Mr. Applegarth had been a critic of the theatre arts too long to be concerned with the background of anything. The wisecrack was his speciality; that was what his readers expected of him and was he not, after all, himself a popular entertainer? He would not have attended Arthur if it had not been that his annual visit to the Shakespearean portion of the Festival coincided with this opening so closely that it could not decently be neglected. Not that opera was his thing, at all; it was in the criticism of musicals that he was felt as a great and usually blighting influence.

It was a different matter with Robin Adair, whose word on opera was—well, not law, but rather the judgement of the Recording Angel. A notable musicologist, a translator of libretti, a man of formidable culture, and—rarest attribute of all—a real lover of opera, he was avid for any information Darcourt could give him, and questioned like a cross-examiner.

“The details I have received are just vague enough to provoke a thousand questions,” he said. “The libretto, for instance. If Hoffmann had gone no further than sketching the work, how much of a libretto existed? Had Planché any hand in it? I hope not. He ruined Oberon with his jokey nonsense. Is there a coherent libretto?”

“I gather from Dr. Dahl-Soot that the word ‘sketch’ is somewhat too dismissive for what Hoffmann left in the way of music. There was a good deal of it, all of which is in the score. The basis of it, in fact.”

“Yes, but the libretto. It can’t have been finished. Who has done it?”

“As you will see from the program, I have.”

“Ah? And on what basis? Original work of your own? You see, of course, that if this is to be considered as the completion of a work by Hoffmann—dead in, when was it, 1822?—the libretto is of greatest importance. There must be a congruity of style not at all easy to achieve. Do you think you have managed that?”

“Not really for me to say,” said Darcourt. “But I may tell you this: by far the greatest part of the libretto is either drawn exactly from, or slightly adapted from, the work of a poet of undoubted genius who was Hoffmann’s contemporary and devout co-religionist in romanticism.”

“And his name is—?”

“I am sure that a man of your reputation for out-of-the-way scholarship will recognize his hand at once.”

“A puzzle? How delightful! I love a puzzle. I shall see you afterward and give you my guess, and you must say if I am right.”

“Do you think we might have just a little more champagne?” said Mr. Applegarth. “Now listen: whoever wrote the bloody words, there has never been a good play or musical about King Arthur. Look at Camelot. A turkey.”

“A fairly tough old bird by now,” said Mr. Adair.

“Nevertheless, a turkey. I said it then and I say it now. A turkey.”

“Tell me something about this Cornish Foundation,” said Mr. Adair. “I understand it’s a man and a woman with a dummy board. They have ambitious ideas about patronage.”

“They can’t have enough money for anything really big,” said Mr. Applegarth, who now had a second bottle of champagne and was somewhat less morose. “The modern Medici! That’s what they all want. Won’t work in the modern world.”

“Oh, surely fine things have been done by patrons even during this year,” said Mr. Adair.

“Listen,” said Mr. Applegarth. “Patronage only worked when artists were humble. Some of ’em wore livery. An art patron today is a victim. The artists will crucify him and mock him and caricature him and strip him naked, if he hasn’t got the drop on them from the start. Only when the Medici or the Esterhazys had their heel on the artist’s neck did it work. Admit artists to equality and the jig’s up, because they don’t believe in equality. Only in their own superiority. Sons of bitches!” he said, gloomily filling his glass.

“The Cornishes have tried very much to leave the artists to their own devices in this affair,” said Darcourt. “I must admit they feel that they have been somewhat shouldered aside by the artists.”

“You don’t surprise me at all,” said Mr. Applegarth.

“Ah, well—the artistic temperament. Not all sweetness and light,” said Mr. Adair, rather as though he felt he had a foot in the artist’s world.

“I see that it’s half past six,” said Darcourt. “Perhaps we should be getting to the theatre. Seven-o’clock curtain, you know.”

“I hate these early curtains,” said Mr. Applegarth. “They ruin dinner.”

“Oh come along, Claude,” said Mr. Adair. “It’s for our benefit you know. Early curtain so the critics can make their deadline.”

“Not on a Saturday night,” said Mr. Applegarth, who had passed from the morose, through the sardonic, to the combative stage of critical preparation. “Bloody Arthur. Why can’t they leave him in his grave?”

“Nobody knows where his grave is,” said Mr. Adair, Scottish fount of information as he was.

“It’ll be on this stage, tonight,” said Mr. Applegarth, obviously ready to assure that it should be so.

GWEN HAD CALLED the quarter-hour. From the dressing-rooms could be heard the humming, the buzzing, now and then the full-throated vocalization, of singers getting their voices under command. In front of the curtain early birds among the audience—the kind of people who like lots of time to study their programs—could be heard arriving. Up and down the corridors among the dressing-rooms walked Hans Holzknecht, wishing the company good luck. “Hals und beinbruch!” he shouted, and if it was a man, he gave him a sharp knee in the rump.

IN THE WINGS, out of earshot of Gwen Larking, Albert Greenlaw was about his favourite sport of instructing the gofers in the lore and tradition of the theatre. They stood about him, devouring the fine Belgian chocolates they had been given earlier by Oliver Twentyman, who believed in first-night presents, especially to the humbler members of the company.

“I don’t know if I ought to tell you,” he said, “because it is not the thing little girls ought to know. But if you’re really set on a stage career—”

“Oh yes, Albert. Be a sport. Tell us.”

“Well then, honey-child, you ought to know about critics. There are some in the audience tonight who are of the cream of that very creamy cream. And you can tell those real ones from the fellows who are just from local papers by one infallible sign, and it is this.” His voice sank to a whisper. “They never go to the john.”

“Not during the show?” said the prettiest gofer.

“Not ever. From womb to tomb—not ever. Nobody has ever met a critic in the Men’s, anywhere on this earth.”

“Albert, that can’t be,” said a dubious gofer, but in a tone that betrayed that she very much wished it to be so, and thirsted for marvels.

“Would I kid you? Have you ever known me to kid you? I’ll tell you something that will be invaluable to you when you are all happy wives and mothers—or maybe just mothers, in these carefree days. When your child is born, take a look right away at where its teeny-weeny exit ought to be. If it isn’t there, honey, you’ve borne a critic.”

“Albert, I don’t believe it!”

“Fact. Medical fact. Imperforate anus, it’s called, in medical circles. And it’s the mark of the critic. The real, top-flight critic. They have two or three of them, pickled, in the medical museum at Johns Hopkins and there you can observe the phenomenon as plain as if it were labelled No Exit. The little fellows, they’re like you and me; they have the normal disposal facilities. But not the biggies. No, no, no. Remember your Uncle Albert told you.”

“THEY SAY Claude Applegarth is here tonight,” said Schnak. She and Dr. Gunilla were in the small dressing-room reserved for the conductors. It was very close, for the Doctor was smoking one of her black cigars.

“Who is Claude Applegarth?” she asked.

“He’s supposed to be the most influential critic in New York. And I suppose that means the world,” said Schnak, who had all the Canadian awe of New York.

“I do not know his name.” said the Doctor. “And I blow my nose in his hair,” she added. This was to encourage Schnak, who was trying to dissemble her terror. Gunilla would conduct in the pit tonight, of course, but Schnak was to be offstage conductor; when the Chorus sang in the wings, it was she who must direct them, taking her time from a monitor on which appeared a ghostly, grey Gunilla. She must do this with an unwieldy baton that was, in fact, a small red lamp on the end of a metal stick, and her beat, never elegant, became ridiculous when she waved what the Chorus called her fairy wand.

Conducting! Oh, conducting! Would she ever master it? Conduct the libretto, not just the score, Gunilla was always saying. Easy for Gunilla, tall, elegant, romantic figure. In the evening dress that Dulcy had rigged up for her, Schnak felt like a scarecrow. With a razor she had painfully hoicked the hair from her armpits, and now, in Dulcy’s creation, they did not show. But they hurt. At this moment, Schnak would gladly have forgone any future as a public performer.

“Five minutes, please, ladies and gentlemen. Overture and beginners in five minutes.” Gwen’s voice, low and clear, came from the speaker on the wall.

“Perhaps you should go to your post,” said the Doctor.

“I haven’t anything until after the Overture.”

“But I have,” said the Doctor. “And I should like to be by myself.”

DARCOURT, STANDING IN THE FOYER, saw that at the five-minute call, which he could not hear but which he knew was being given, a special group of people arrived, and quickly dispersed themselves into twos and threes. There was nothing positively disturbing about them, but they seemed somewhat overdressed for the occasion. Of course, many of the people who had already entered the theatre were in evening clothes—dinner suits and dinner frocks—but several of these men wore full dress and white ties that spoke of antiquity. The ladies tended to be dressed in plushy materials, well worn and somewhat sprung in the seat. One had a plume in her hair, and another sported a metal headpiece studded with impressive, but not totally convincing, gems. It was the Yerko Claque, and in the midst of them Yerko rose like a mountain in shirt and tie that had grown yellow with time, and a coat, the tails of which hung to his calves; beside him was Mamusia, and it was she who wore the paste jewels and kid gloves that had once been white; they reached well above her elbows. The group comported itself with a stateliness rarely seen on the North American continent, and certainly never in Stratford.

Yerko’s eye met Darcourt’s, without a spark of recognition.

Well, God help us, here we go, thought Darcourt, and went inside to claim his seat.

ARTHUR OF BRITAIN

AN OPERA IN THREE ACTS planned and sketched by E.T.A. HOFFMANN and completed from his notes by Hulda Schnakenburg under the direction of Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot.

CHARACTERS

King Arthur of Britain

Hans Holzknecht

Modred, the King’s nephew

Gaetano Panisi

Sir Lancelot

Giles Shippen

Merlin

Oliver Twentyman

Sir Kay the Seneschal

George Sudlow

Sir Gawaine

Jean Morant

Sir Bedevere

Yuri Vollmer

Sir Gareth Beaumains

Wilson Tinney

Sir Lucas, Butler

Mark Horrebow

Sir Ulphius, Chamberlain

Charles Bland

Sir Dynadan

Mark Luppino

Sir Dagonet, the Fool

Nutcombe Puckler

Sir Pellinore

Albert Greenlaw

Sir Palomides

Vincent LeMoyne

Queen Guenevere

Donalda Roche

Morgan Le Fay, sister to the King

Clara Intrepidi

The Lady Elaine

Marta Ullmann

The Lady Clarissant

Virginia Poole

Ladies of the Court: Ada Boscawen, Lucia Pozzi, Margaret Calnan, Lucy-Ellen Osler, Appoline Graves, Etain O’Hara, Esther Moss, Miriam Downey, Hosanna Marks, Karen Edey, Minnie Sainsbury

Heralds: James Mitchell, Ulick Carman

Attendants: Bessie Louth, Jane Holland, Primrose Maybon, Noble Grandy, Ellis Cronyn, Eden Wigglesworth

Costumes and settings designed by Dulcy Ringgold, and executed in the Festival workshops.

Scenic Artist: Willy Grieve

Head Carpenter: Dicky Plaunt

Lighting Director: Waldo Harris

Stage Manager: Gwenllian Larking

Concert-Master: Otto Klafsky

Répétiteur and Harpsichordist: Watkin Bourke

Director: Geraint Powell

Conductor: Gunilla Dahl-Soot

The Libretto realized by Simon Darcourt, assisted by Penelope Raven and Clement Hollier.

The public relations people had done their job efficiently. The house was decently full and not with an audience of despair, recruited from nurses’ residences and old folks’ homes. Darcourt found himself sitting next to Clement Hollier; he reflected that he had never seen Hollier in evening dress before, and the learned man stank pungently of some spicy toilet water or after-shave. This may be hard to endure, thought Darcourt. But he could not ponder long on this, for the house lights dimmed, and Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot strode into the orchestra pit, shook hands with the concert-master, and bowed elegantly to the audience.

The audience responded eagerly. They had never seen anything like Gunilla, with her masculine good looks, her magnificent green tailcoat, and her ample white stock, and their expectations for the evening rose. The show, they felt, had begun.

Gunilla raised her baton, and the first heavy chords, stating the theme of Caliburn, were heard, and gave way to a firm but melancholy theme, the theme of Chivalry, which was developed for perhaps three minutes, until the point in the score marked by Letter D was reached; then the splendid red curtains swept upward and back, to disclose King Arthur and Merlin standing on the brink of the Enchanted Mere.

This was something for which the audience was wholly unprepared. Geraint, Waldo Harris, and Dulcy Ringgold had laboured faithfully to reproduce the stage-dressing of the early years of the nineteenth century—the stage as Hoffmann would have known it. From the footlights—for there were footlights—the stage rose in a gentle rake which reached backward to the full forty feet of stage space, and on each side were six sets of wings, painted to represent a British forest in springtime as perhaps Fuseli might have imagined it; at the back, in front of a splendidly painted backcloth, the rollers which had been so much trouble a few days before were revolving silently, giving an impression of gently heaving water. It was a perspective scene in the nineteenth-century manner, designed to be beautiful and to complement the stage action, rather than to persuade anyone that it mimicked some natural reality.

An “objective correlative” to the music, thought Al Crane, and scribbled a note in the darkness. He was not entirely sure what the phrase meant, but he thought it meant something that helped you to understand something else and that was good enough.

The audience, which had never seen anything like it, burst into loud applause. Canadians are great applauders of stage settings. But Gunilla, who was not aware of this national custom, turned upon them with the face of a Gorgon. She gave a hiss of menace and waved a hand as if to quell the sound. Assistance came from an unforeseen quarter; there were gentle shushings, not angry but politely rebuking, from all over the house. Yerko’s Claque had moved into action and from then onward it directed the applause with fine certainty of taste. The clappers were quieted, and the voice of Oliver Twentyman, high and pure as a silver trumpet, was heard invoking the power of Caliburn to elevate and refine the life of Arthur’s Court, and to give a new meaning to Chivalry.

Darcourt breathed with relief. A very tricky corner had been turned. He gave himself up to the music, and in time the curtains closed, and the Overture—for it was a true Hoffmann overture, employing the voices of singers—moved to its completion.

When the curtains rose immediately on Act One, the scene was a hall in the Court of Arthur, and a fine sight, but not one that suggested chivalry, particularly; the Knights and their Ladies had not that look of stricken consecration which is associated with chivalry on the stage. Nutcombe Puckler was, as Geraint had directed him, “horsing around and playing the goat” with a cup-and-ball, but not too distractingly. The Knights paid him little heed. The Ladies—Polly Graves’ splendid jugs well downstage and Primrose Maybon equally prominent—declared themselves, and their situation, in the best operatic manner. Darcourt was well pleased with the old ballad he had adapted to a theme of Hoffmann’s and which put the opera off to a somewhat folkloric start.

Arthur our King lives in merry Caerleon

And seemly is to see:

And there he hath with him Queen Guenevere

That bride so bright of blee.

Thus sang the Knights. “So bright of what?” hissed Hollier in his ear.

“Blee! You know—blee! Complexion. Shut up!”

The Ladies took up the ballad strain:

And there he hath with him Queen Guenevere

That is so bright in bower:

And all his brave knights around him stand

Of chivalry the flower.

The Knights, pleased with this handsome compliment, make what might be called a statement of policy, joined by the Ladies:

O Jesu, Lord of mickle might,

That died for us on rood,

So maintain us in all our right,

For we come of a noble blood.

But they are not permitted to take their ease in this Kater Murr conception of their society. Preceded by four pages holding in check four very large Irish wolfhounds, King Arthur and his Queen appear, and Arthur tells them of the revelation at the Enchanted Mere:

Leaf after leaf, like a magician’s book

Turned in a dragon-guarded hermitage

By trees—dishevelling spirits of the air—

My plan unfolds.

And he charges them with his chivalric code, in which noble blood must be partnered by noble deeds. Let them henceforth be bons, sages et cortois, preux et vaillans. And as an act of good faith, he pledges himself to the service of the Christ of Chivalry, and in only slightly less degree to the service of his Queen, as the Vessel of his Honour, the scabbard of Caliburn. The scene ends when the Knights bind themselves in the same terms to their Ladies.

This was received with warm approval by the audience, and Darcourt began to feel somewhat more at ease. But—what is this? Darcourt knew, but the audience did not, and Darcourt could not have foreseen their astonishment when, with no interfering curtain, and the barest minimum of mechanical sound, the scene changed visibly from Arthur’s Court to a nearby chapel, where Morgan Le Fay and her son Modred were plotting the theft of the scabbard of Caliburn. What happened, if you knew, was that the twelve wings that flanked the court scene were drawn silently back out of sight, and wings suited to the ruin were left in view; at the same moment a drop scene was lowered at the back of the stage, and the great hall seemed to have melted imperceptibly into its successor.

“Those nineteenth-century people knew a trick or two,” whispered Hollier.

Indeed they did, thought Darcourt, but he said nothing, for the scenery-applauders were hard at it, and Yerko’s Claque were quietly reducing them to silence.

Morgan Le Fay and her son plotted. Good stuff, thought Darcourt, as Modred—Gaetano Panisi, a splendid bass, though a stumpy figure—gave velvety utterance to his scorn for Arthur and the chivalric ideal:

… Let him lean

Against his life, that glassy interval

’Twixt us and nothing: and upon the ground

Of his own slippery breath, draw hueless dreams,

And gaze on frost-work hopes.

Back to the hall in the Court—another swift transformation. Back to Arthur, charging his Knights to undertake the Holy Quest for the Grail, which shall be the heart and splendour of his new chivalry. He lifts the great sword to ask a blessing on it, and while he does so Morgan Le Fay steals the scabbard. Splendid scene of mounting vigour culminating in a great Chorale of the Grail, almost Wagnerian in conception.

“Going well,” said Hollier, as he and Darcourt made their way up the aisle. But when Darcourt went into the little room behind the manager’s office he found Geraint, drinking whisky in huge swigs, and furious.

“What in the name of God do those morlocks think they’re up to?” he said. “Applauding the scenery!”

“It’s very fine scenery,” said Darcourt. “Most of them have never seen such scenery. It was outlawed sixty years ago when there was all that blethers about letting the audience use its imagination. A fat lot of good that was!”

“I think it’s the acting they like,” said Hollier. “Do you remember what Byron said? ‘I am acquainted with no immaterial sensuality so delightful as good acting.’ You must remember, Powell; you’re a great Byron enthusiast. That little chap Panisi is marvellous. And Holzknecht, too, of course, but one always admires villains more than heroes.”

It was plain that Hollier had something on his mind, and after he had accepted a drink he overcame his diffidence. “Geraint, about curtain calls—I suppose it will be expected that those of us who have provided the libretto for the opera should make some appearance? Not that I am anxious to do so. I really hate all this sort of public nonsense. But if it’s expected—?”

“Just go around through the pass-door when the final curtain comes down,” said Geraint. “Gwen will show you what to do, and you’ll have lots of time, because there will be plenty of applause—that’s guaranteed. When Gwen shoves you on, you’ll be blinded by the lights, so don’t fall into the orchestra. Try not to look any more of a mutt than literary people usually do on a stage full of actors. Just bow. Don’t do anything fancy. And don’t leave the stage till all the hullabaloo is over.”

“You’ll be there, yourself, of course?”

“I may, or I may not.”

“But you’re the director!”

“Indeed I am, and since this afternoon at four o’clock I have been the most unnecessary creature involved in this opera. Nobody needs me. My work is done. I am wholly superfluous.”

“Surely not!”

“Surely yes! If I cut my throat at this minute the opera would progress through its appointed number of performances not a whit the worse.”

“But you’ve made it.”

“I have not made it. Hoffmann, and Gunilla and Schnak, and all those singers and musicians have made it. And even you fellows have made it. I have supplied the trickery and whoredom of the show. The stuff that appeals to people who don’t care much for music.”

“Rubbish, Geraint,” said Darcourt, who saw a fine Powell tantrum coming. “You’ve been the energy and encouragement of the whole affair. We’ve all warmed ourselves at your fire. Don’t think we don’t know it. You’re indispensable. So cheer up.”

“I know you, Sim bach. In a minute you’ll be rebuking me for self-pity.”

“Perhaps so.”

“You don’t know what an artist is, you nice, controlled, reasonable man. You don’t know the shadow of the artist—the sieve of vanity, the bile of bitterness, the bond of untruth that is bound with icy chains to all the sunlight and encouraging and he’s-a-jolly-good-fellow of being an opera director. I am exhausted and I am not needed. I am sinking into such a slough of despond as only an artist whose job is finished must endure. Go on, both of you! Go back to your seats. Float in the warm waters of assured success. Leave me! Leave me!” By this time he was drinking straight from the bottle.

“I really think we’d better go,” said Darcourt. “I couldn’t bear to miss what’s coming next. But do try to pull yourself together, Geraint bach. We all love you, you know.

What was coming next, to begin Act Two, was the scene of the Queen’s Maying, over which Powell, and Waldo, and Dulcy had toiled and contrived for months. As the curtains drew back, after a brief and lovely prelude, it seemed to the audience that they could see immeasurably deep into a grove of hawthorn trees in snowy bloom. Far in the blossom-misted distance appeared Queen Guenevere, mounted on a black horse, riding at ease in her side-saddle, as a page led the horse forward. One by one, wearing white mantles, the Ladies of the Court made their way into the front of the scene, but never so far as to obscure the figure of the distant Queen. They did not sing; they seemed enchanted, as the whole scene was one of enchantment, and while the music rose and fell, they grouped themselves in a tableau of expectation. They carried garlands of May blossom. Something truly wonderful was happening.

Darcourt knew how the effect was achieved. He had attended most of the rehearsals and heard many of the arguments during which the notable scene had been planned. Nevertheless, he was caught in its magic and he understood, what he had not known before, that much of the magic of a great theatrical moment is created by the audience itself, a magic impalpable but vividly present, and that what begins as trickery of lights and paint is enlarged and made fine by the response of the beholders. There are no great performances without great audiences, and this is the barrier that film and television, by their utmost efforts, cannot cross, for there can be no interaction between what is done, and those to whom it is done. Great theatre, great music-drama, is created again and again on both sides of the footlights.

He enjoyed the extra pleasure of the man who knows how it has been done. It had been the suggestion of Waldo Harris, not to the casual eye an imaginative man, that for this scene the forty-foot depth of the stage should be increased by opening the huge sliding doors to the storage rooms, and beyond them into the workshops, so that in the end a vista of a hundred feet could be attained. Not a great depth, surely, but with the aid of perspective painting it could be made to seem limitless. And—this had tickled Waldo and Dulcy so that they giggled for days—when first Queen Guenevere was seen, at the farthest distance, on her black steed, it was not Donalda Roche, a woman of operatic sturdiness of figure, but a child of six, mounted on a pony no bigger than a St. Bernard. At a point perhaps sixty feet from the footlights the midget Guenevere rounded a grove of trees to be replaced by a larger child, mounted on a larger pony, led by a larger page. This Guenevere, forty feet from the footlights, disappeared for a moment in May blossom and it was Donalda Roche from then onward, on a black horse of normal stature. Behind her, pages led two magnificent white goats with gilded horns. Waldo and Dulcy had played with this illusion, and refined it, until it changed from a simple trick of perspective into a thing of beauty.

Of course, it would not have been possible without the finest pages in Schnak’s score. There had been three related themes, obviously meant as the foundation for an extended piece of music in Hoffmann’s notes, and Schnak and Gunilla had decided that these should be developed into a prelude to Act Two, a preparation for the scenes of love and betrayal in which Guenevere and Lancelot, under the malign influence of Morgan Le Fay, would consummate their passion and suffer a double remorse, for Lancelot had also been tricked into a union with the maiden Elaine. But when Geraint heard the first developments of the prelude, he demanded that it should be the music for The Queen’s Maying, and overbore the musicians, who of course wanted it as pure music. This was the passage which, at her examination, had persuaded Schnak’s examiners (all but the difficult Dr. Pfeiffer) that Schnak was certainly a doctor of music, and probably a good deal more than that.

So here it was, not as a symphonic piece, but as an accompaniment to an act of lovely trickery, or, if you prefer, a masterwork of stage magic.

When it was being rehearsed, some of the singers were not pleased that what was probably the finest part of the score made no use of their voices. Nutcombe Puckler, indeed, referred to it as “this silent music”, and Hans Holzknecht had some hard words about pantomime. But it proved itself masterly in performance.

The audience, partly quelled by Yerko’s Claque, which had been stealthily teaching them to wait for their cues, and partly because they were enthralled by what they saw and heard, were still as mice until the end, when the Queen, joined by her special Knights, bearing white shields, moved gently off the stage to the place where Gwen had cleared space for what was—Queen, horse, Knights and Ladies—rather a crowd which must on no account be halted in its progress. Then they broke into three minutes of sustained applause. Three minutes is a long time for furious clapping, and when the first minute had passed Yerko let loose his forces in every part of the house, and their cries of Bravo were so heart-lifting that several non-claquers joined in. But as they were not trained mid-European bawlers, they had little chance against the professionals in approbation.

Was a voice heard to cry, “Bravo, Hoffmann”? There was, and it was the voice of Simon Darcourt.

Gunilla, though not by inclination apt to recognize an audience except with frosty courtesy, bowed again and again. Gunilla was, after all, a great artist, and such approbation is very sweet to the performer’s ear.

“That’s fetched ’em,” shouted Hollier in Darcourt’s ear. “I think we’ve got ’em now!”

We? thought Darcourt, applauding till his hands smarted. Who’s we? What had you to do with this? What had I to do with it? The music, of course, is Hoffmann-cum-Schnak, and very fine, too. But this magic belongs to Geraint Powell, and to Dulcy and Waldo, whom he fired and inspired with his own sense of theatre.

And to Hoffmann. He had raised his voice for Hoffmann. Not solely Hoffmann the composer, who might not have been as good a musician as Schnak, but Hoffmann who lived and died when Romance was blossoming in all the arts. To the spirit of Hoffmann, indeed. This was certainly the Little Man who had been aroused by the Cornish Foundation and all the people it had touched.

The Second Act moved rapidly. The scene outside Merlin’s cave, where the enchantress Morgan tricks the good old man into the revelation: Arthur can only be destroyed by one born in the month of May. The exultation of Morgan, for it is her son—also, by incest, the son of Arthur, though Arthur does not know it—who is the Mayborn. The fateful words of Morgan:

The trembling ray

Of some approaching thought, I know not what

Gleams on my darkened mind.

And Modred’s response:

I feel it growing, growing

Like a man’s shadow when the moon floats slowly

Through the white border of a baffled cloud:

And now the pale conception furls and thickens—

The temptation of Guenevere by Lancelot. His declaration of love and her sad cry:

Oh no! I’ll not believe you; when I do

My heart will crack to powder.

The revelation to the lovers Guenevere and Lancelot that the Maid Elaine, whom Lancelot deflowered when under Morgan’s evil spell, must die of her love, but die gladly:

Oh, that sweet influence of thoughts and looks!

That change of being, which to one who lives

Is nothing less divine than divine life

To the unmade! Love? Do I love? I walk

Within the brilliance of another’s thought

As in a glory.

And Lancelot’s recognition of the treachery of his love, and his bitter acceptance of implacable destiny:

I never felt my nature so divine

As at this saddest hour.

The audience—not, one would have supposed, greatly susceptible to Arthurian romance—were now wholly in the grip of the opera, and the buzz of enthusiasm at the interval was heartening.

Darcourt had something very much on his mind.

“Penny,” he said, cornering her in the foyer, “will you let Clem have your seat for the third act? I’d like you to be with me for at least a part of this.”

“Nicely said, Simon, but I know what you mean. I’ve been talking with Clem, and whatever he has been dousing himself with, he’s overdone it. I was almost asphyxiated, and I know what you must have been going through. ‘A bundle of myrrh is my well beloved to me: he lieth all night between my breasts’. But not if I can help it. I’ll be delighted to relieve you. We’ve pulled it off nicely, don’t you think?”

We, again. What have you done? thought Darcourt. A few sessions of bitchy criticism of my work.

“My guess, for what it’s worth, is that our Snark is really a Snark, and not a speck of a Boojum. Did you ever hear such enthusiasm? In Canada, I mean, the Home of Modified Rapture.”

“It is certainly going well,” said Darcourt, who had sighted Yerko leaning, with pachydermatous elegance, over a very small but excitable lady with orange hair. “Let’s go in. Third Act any minute now.”

The Third Act was very much as Geraint had outlined it, so long ago as it now seemed, when they had dined unhappily on Maria’s Arthurian feast. Perhaps inevitably the emphasis was different. The music for Merlin, when he denounced the villain Modred, was arresting:

Thy gloomy features, like a midnight dial,

Scowl the dark index of a fearful hour.

And later:

Transparent art thou as a poisoned glass

Through which the drinker sees his murderer smiling.

Then Modred’s unrepentant, properly villainous death:

Why, what’s the world and time? A fleeting thought

In the great meditating universe;

A brief parenthesis in chaos.

But it was Hans Holzknecht, as the King, who had the best of it. Fine actor, fine singer, he drew the most from the shattered Arthur’s recognition of his unrecognized incest, the bitterness of his son Modred’s hate, and—heaviest of all—the betrayal by his beloved wife and his beloved friend. But his invocation to Love, as a charity beyond even the poetry of fleshly possession, was his best moment, and his conclusion—

It is the secret sympathy,

The silver link, the silken tie,

Which heart to heart, and mind to mind,

In body and in soul can bind.

—moved many of the audience, somewhat to their embarrassment, to tears.

Walter Scott is very good, but Schnak has raised him to another level, thought Darcourt. I wonder if she really understood what she was setting to music? If so, there’s hope for her, tormented child as she is. But with musicians you can never be quite sure.

At the death of Arthur, the scene melted magically again to the shores of the Enchanted Mere, which had not been seen since the Overture. But it was not quite the same scene, for this was deeply autumnal; leaves, and a few snowflakes, scudded across the stage where the Knights stood, leaning on their swords. They sang:

The wind, dead leaves and snow,

Doth hurry to and fro,

And once, a day shall break

O’er the wave,

When a storm of ghosts shall shake

The dead, till our King wake

From the grave.

The body of Arthur—but not the living Holzknecht—was placed in a shallow craft in which it sailed across the water, and as it disappeared Merlin flung after it Caliburn, now safely in its scabbard, and an armoured hand rose from the waves and seized it. The great chords that had introduced the opera were heard again, and the curtain fell.

Marshalled by Gwen Larking, Penny Raven, Clement Hollier, and Simon Darcourt appeared during the final curtain-call. Nobody knew who they were or why they were there, but at the end of every operatic first night a few people make inexplicable appearances, and the charity of the audience includes them.

Geraint, surprisingly steady on his feet, was thunderously applauded. He appeared to be in excellent spirits and looked wondrously romantic in full evening dress. He and Gunilla were, indeed, the commanding figures in the rather untidy tableau at the final curtain.

Schnak, Darcourt observed with satisfaction, managed a number of curtsies without a stagger.

(11) ETAH IN LIMBO

Champagne! So much of it, and not a drop for me. It is one of the inconveniences of Limbo that one retains all one’s carnal appetites but is utterly debarred from satisfying them. So, as I move unseen through the party that follows the first public performance of my Arthur, I am aware of brimming glasses and full bottles everywhere, and because of my spiritual condition—we are very chaste in Limbo, oh yes, very chaste — I am denied even the elfin satisfaction of tipping a few glasses down shirt-fronts and into the crannies of bosoms. I, who once drank champagne from pint pots! But I gather that the wine has gone up in the world and this crowd sips it reverently.

I suppose this is my night of triumph. My opera, projected but never finished, has now been finished indeed, and on the whole to my satisfaction. Am I a little jealous of the Schnakenburg child? Certainly she has a deft hand with orchestration, and what I sense to be a developing gift for melody, but I do not feel the true Romantic fervour in her, not yet. Perhaps it will never come again, as we knew it who first felt its pain and beauty; we, of whom it was my luck to be among the foremost.

Did I like the performance? Ah, there we move into a realm where I cannot be sure of my answer. The music was played and sung vastly better than it would have been in my Dresden days. The orchestra far outshone the assemblage of villains I had to put up with, and the Dahl-Soot woman had much of the daemonic spirit of my own Kapellmeister Kreisler. The stage pictures were thrilling. The singers, marvellous in the telling, could act, and did so, even when they were not singing. What would the Eunike family—three of whom I had to use in my production of Undine—have said to that? This was indeed a music drama, performed with a unity of style and intent quite impossible in my time.

But—one is a creature of one’s time. I missed elements in this production that were familiar, rather than good.

The prompter, for one. Oh, those prompters of my time, who all seemed to have been born old, all born with a cold in the head, all addicted to snuff and brandy, all foul-tempered and all soured from the nape to the chine with their personal failure as composers, or singers, or conductors! They crouched in the little hutch among the footlights, which was shielded from the audience, as a usual thing, by an ornamental shell, bent forward into a hood. Only their heads showed above the stage level, and their heads were heated to roasting-point by the oil lamps in the footlights. Below stage level they were frozen by the draughts of the undercroft of the stage, and every time the stage-hands set a trap in action there was a rush of air as some god or demon was whisked upward onto the stage, and the prompter was choked with the dust of years. In this living hell the prompter hissed his directions to the singers and flung them their cues just before they were to sing, often giving them the note in the cracked voice of a man dying of phthisic, complicated by snuff and the scenery dust—which some of the more spiteful singers took care to kick in his face

Why would I miss the prompter? Believe me, one often misses the afflictions and inadequacies of the past as truly as its splendours. I knew many prompters, and attended the funerals of several, and these singers who are such good musicians that they can manage without him seem to me to be, somehow, unnatural.

I miss the backstage life. The Green Room, where the singers congregated when they were not wanted onstage, and where one’s consequence in the troupe determined with mathematical exactitude how near one might sit, or stand, to the stove. But even more I miss the dressing-rooms, so tiny, so characteristically redolent of the scent preferred by the singer, beneath which might often be discerned the reek from the chamber-pot, which lived in a little cupboard by itself, on top of which was the basin and ewer so the singer might wash his hands, when he could persuade his servant to bring him some hot water from its only source—the carpenter’s room under the stage. The stove in the Green Room was very precious to the poorer folk of the theatre, for the dressing-rooms, if they were heated at all, had only a little iron box in which some charcoal could be burnt, and charcoal cost money and had to be fetched by servants who had to be tipped.

What complexity of romance and delicious intrigue took place in those dressing-rooms, the best of which contained a couch or even, sometimes, a bed for one, which could, with some contrivance, become a bed for two!

This handsome theatre is so much better than any I ever knew. This audience is so much more polite—yes, polite and well-bred, as audiences in my day never were—and I swear this audience was more musically receptive than any I could count upon. They hardly needed a claque, though the one they had was efficient. The spirit of Kater Murr was present—indeed, when is that ultra-respectable Philistine ever absent from public performance—but Kater Murr has learned much with the passing of time. His fur has a new gloss. Yes, yes; times change, and in some things times even grow better.

But—one is a creature of one’s time. Does the divine Mozart, I wonder, ever look in at the countless presentations of his operas, so psychologized and philosophized? Could it be that he feels as strange, as wistful, as I have done at the realization and presentation of my Arthur?

Shall I hear it again?

I suppose I could hang about, but I do not think I shall do anything of the kind. I have watched Arthur brought into being, I have watched the complexities it has introduced into so many lives, and, as an artist, it becomes me to know when enough, even of one’s own art, is enough.

Besides, I have had intimations from—I do not know who whispered, and am too tactful to inquire—that my time in Limbo is completed. After all, it was a piece of unfinished work that brought me here, and that work is now done. Arthur is done, and sufficiently well done, and I’m off and away.

Farewell, whoever you are. Remember Hoffmann.