The Lyre of Orpheus

(1)

Arthur, who had a masterly way with meetings, was gathering this one together for a conclusion.

“Are we agreed that the proposal is crack-brained, absurd, could prove incalculably expensive, and violates every dictate of financial prudence? We have all said in our different ways that nobody in his right mind would want anything to do with it. Considering the principles to which the Cornish Foundation is committed, are these not all excellent reasons why we should accept the proposal, and the extension of it we have been discussing, and go ahead?

He really has musical flair, thought Darcourt. He treats every meeting symphonically. The theme is announced, developed in major and minor, pulled about, teased, chased up and down dark alleys, and then, when we are getting tired of it, he whips us up into a lively finale and with a few crashing chords brings us to a vote.

There are people who cannot bear to come to an end. Hollier wanted more discussion.

“Even if, by a wild chance, it succeeded, what would be the good of it?” he said.

“You have missed my point,” said Arthur.

“I am simply speaking as a responsible member of the Cornish Foundation.”

“But my dear Clem, I am urging you to speak as a member of a special sort of foundation with unusual aims. I am asking you to use your imagination, which is not what foundations like to do. I am asking you to take a flyer at an extreme outside chance, with the possibility of unusual gains. You don’t have to pretend to be a business man. Be what you are—a daring professor of history.”

“I suppose if you put it like that—”

“I do put it like that.”

“But I still think my question is a good one. Why should we present the world with another opera? There are lots of operas already, and people busily writing them in every square mile of the civilized world.”

“Because this would be a very special opera.”

“Why? Because the composer died before he had gone very far with it? Because this girl Schnak-whatever-it-is wants to get a doctorate in music by completing it? I don’t see what’s special about that.”

“That’s reducing the whole plan to the obvious.”

“That’s leaving out the heart of it. That’s forgetting our proposal to mount the finished opera and offer it to the public,” said Geraint Powell, a theatre man with a career to make, who already looked on himself as the person to get the opera on the stage.

“I think we should bear in mind the very high opinion of Miss Schnakenburg that is expressed by all her supporters. They hint at genius and we are looking for genius, aren’t we?” said Darcourt.

“Yes, but do we want to get into show business?” said Hollier.

“Why not?” said Arthur. “Let me say it again: we have set up the Cornish Foundation with money left by a man who was a great connoisseur, who took all kinds of chances, and we have to decide what sort of foundation it is to be. And we’ve done that. It’s a foundation for the promotion of the arts and humane scholarship, and this plan is both art and scholarship. But haven’t we agreed that we don’t want another foundation that gives money to good, safe projects, and then stands aside, hoping for good, safe results? Caution and nonintervention are the arthritis of patronage. Let’s back our choices and stir the pot and raise some hell. We’ve already made our obeisance to safety; we’ve established our good, dull credentials by getting Simon here to write a biography of our founder and benefactor—”

“Thank you, Arthur. Oh, many, many thanks. This estimate of my work is more encouragement than I can accept without blushes.” Simon Darcourt knew too well that the biographical job was not as easy as Arthur seemed to think, and strongly aware also that he had not so far asked for or received a penny for the work he had done. Simon, like many literary men, was no stranger to feelings of grievance.

“Sorry, Simon, but you know what I mean.”

“I know what you think you mean,” said Darcourt, “but the book may not be quite such a dud as you imagine.”

“I hope not. But what I am getting at is that the book may cost a few thousands, and, without being by any means the richest foundation in the country, we have quite a lot of money to dispose of. I want to do something with a bit of flash.”

“It’s your money,” said Hollier, still determined to be the voice of caution, “and I suppose you can do as you please.”

“No, no, no, and again no. It isn’t my money; it’s Foundation money and we are all directors of the Foundation—you Clem, and you Simon, and you Geraint, and, of course, Maria. I am simply the chairman, first among equals, because we have to have a chairman. Can’t I persuade you? Do you really want to be safe and dull? Who votes for safety and dullness? Let’s have a show of hands.”

There were no votes for safety and dullness. But Hollier had a sense of having been pushed aside by totally unfair rhetoric. Geraint Powell didn’t like meetings and wished this one to be over. Darcourt felt he had been snubbed. Maria knew well how right Hollier was and that the money was really Arthur’s money, in spite of all legal fictions. She knew that it most certainly wasn’t her money, even though, as Arthur’s wife, she might be supposed to have some extra pull. She had not been married very long, and she loved Arthur dearly, but she knew that Arthur could be a great bully when he wanted something, and he wanted passionately to be a vaunting, imaginative, daring patron. He is a bully just as I suppose King Arthur was a bully when he insisted to the Knights of the Round Table that he was no more than the first among equals, she thought.

“Are we agreed, then?” said Arthur. “Simon, would you draw up a resolution? It doesn’t have to be in final form; we can tidy it up later. Have you all got drinks? Isn’t anybody going to eat anything? Help yourselves from the Platter of Plenty.”

The Platter of Plenty was a joke, and, as jokes will, it had become a little too familiar. It was a large silver epergne that stood in the middle of the round table at which they sat. From a central, richly ornamented pedestal it extended curving arms at the end of which were little plates of dried fruits and nuts and sweets. A hideous object, thought Maria, unjustly, for it was a fine thing of its kind. It had been a wedding gift to Arthur and herself from Darcourt and Hollier and she hated it because she knew it must have cost them a great deal more than she supposed they could afford. She hated it because it seemed to her to embody much of what she disliked about her marriage—needless luxury, an assumption of a superiority based on wealth, a sort of grandiose uselessness. Her passionate desire, after making Arthur happy, was to gain a reputation for herself as a scholar, and big money and big scholarship still seemed to her to be irreconcilable. But she was Arthur’s wife, and as nobody else took anything from the epergne she took a couple of nuts, for the look of the thing.

As Darcourt worked over the resolution, the directors chatted, not altogether amicably. Arthur was flushed, and Maria was aware that he was speaking rather thickly. It couldn’t be that he had drunk too much. He never did that. He had taken a chocolate from the Platter of Plenty, but it seemed to have a bad taste, and he spat it into his handkerchief.

“Will this do?” said Darcourt. “ ‘It was resolved that the meeting should comply with the request made jointly by the Graduate Department of the Faculty of Music and Miss Hulda Schnakenburg for support to enable Miss Schnakenburg to flesh out and complete the manuscript notes now reposing in the Graduate Library (among the musical MSS left in the bequest of the late Francis Cornish) of an opera left incomplete at his death in 1822 by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, the work to be done in a manner congruous with the operatic conventions of Hoffmann’s day and for such an orchestra as he would have known; this to be done as a musicological exercise in partial fulfilment of the requirements for Miss Schnakenburg’s attainment of the degree of Doctor of Music. It was further resolved that if the work proved satisfactory the opera should be mounted and presented in public performance under Hoffmann’s title of Arthur of Britain. This part of the proposal has not yet been communicated to the Faculty of Music or Miss Schnakenburg.’ ”

“It’ll be a nice surprise for them,” said Arthur, who took a sip of his drink, and then set it down, as if it were disagreeable.

“A surprise, no doubt,” said Darcourt. “Whether a nice surprise is open to doubt. By the way, don’t you think we ought to give the work its full title in the minutes?”

“Is there more than Arthur of Britain?” said Geraint.

“Yes. In the fashion of his day Hoffmann suggested a double title.”

“I know the kind of thing,” said Geraint; “Arthur of Britain, or—something. What?”

“Arthur of Britain, or the Magnanimous Cuckold,” said Darcourt.

“Indeed?” said Arthur. The bitterness in his mouth seemed to be troubling him. “Well, I don’t suppose we need to use the full title if we don’t need it.”

Again he spat into his handkerchief, as unobtrusively as he could. But he need not have troubled, because at the announcement of the full title of the opera nobody was looking at him.

The three other directors of the Foundation were looking at Maria.

(2)

THE DAY AFTER THE MEETING, Simon Darcourt was interrupted, just as he sat down to his day’s work, by a telephone call from Maria; Arthur was in hospital with mumps, which the doctors called parotitis. They had not told Maria what Darcourt knew: mumps in the adult male is not trivial, because it causes painful swelling of the testicles, and can do permanent damage. Arthur would be out of commission for some weeks, but he had mumbled to Maria through his swollen jaws that he wanted the work of the Foundation to go on as fast as possible, and she and Darcourt were to take care of it.

How like Arthur! He had in the highest degree the superior business man’s ability to delegate responsibility without relinquishing significant power. Darcourt had known him since the death of his friend Francis Cornish; Francis’s will had made Darcourt one of his executors, to act beneath the overriding authority of Francis’s nephew Arthur, and it had been apparent at once that Arthur was a born leader. Like many leaders he was rough at times, because he never thought about anyone’s feelings, but there was nothing personal in it. He was Chairman of the Board of the huge Cornish Trust, and was admired and trusted by people who dealt in big money. But, apart from his business life, he was cultivated in a way not common among bankers; genuinely cultivated, that is to say, and not simply benevolent toward the arts as a corporation duty.

His rapid establishment of the Cornish Foundation, using his Uncle Frank’s large fortune to do it, was proof of his intention. Arthur wanted to be a patron on a grand scale, for the fun and adventure. There could be no doubt that the Foundation was his. For the look of the thing he had set up a board to administer it, but whom had he invited to join it? Clement Hollier, because Maria had been his student and had a special affection for him. And what had Hollier proved to be? A great objector, a determined looker-on-the-other-hand whose reputation as a scholar in the realm of medieval history did little to mitigate his gloomy insufficiency as a human being. Geraint Powell was Arthur’s own choice, reputedly a rising man in the theatre, with all the exuberance and charm of the breed, who backed up Arthur’s most extravagant ideas with his Welsh superficiality. And Maria, Arthur’s wife; dear Maria, whom Darcourt had loved, and loved still, perhaps the more poignantly because there was no longer the least danger that he would ever have to play the full role of a lover, but could slave for his lady in a condition of mild romantic dejection.

These were Darcourt’s estimates of his colleagues on the Foundation. What did he think about himself?

To the world he knew he was the Reverend Simon Darcourt, a professor of Greek, much respected as a scholar and teacher; he was the Vice-Warden of Ploughwright College, an institution for advanced studies within the university; there were people who thought him a wise and genial companion. But Arthur called him the Abbé Darcourt.

What is an abbé? Was it not a title used for several centuries to describe a clergyman who was really an educated upper servant? Your abbé ate at your table, but had a small room off your palace library where he slaved away as a confidential secretary, intermediary, and fixer. Abbés on the stage or in novels were great fellows for intrigue and amusing the ladies. It is a category of society that has disappeared from the modern world under that name, but the world is still in need of abbés, and Darcourt felt himself to be one of them, but was not pleased that Arthur had put his finger on the matter so plainly.

It is to be presumed that abbés in an earlier day had salaries. Darcourt’s canker was that he received no salary from the Foundation, although he was its secretary and, as he put it to himself, worked like a dog on its behalf. Nevertheless, as he received no salary, he felt that his independence was secure. Independent as a hog on ice, he thought, in one of the Old Loyalist Ontario expressions which popped up, unbidden, in his mind when least expected. But if his university work were not to suffer, he had to slave away day and night, and he was a man to whom a certain amount of ease and creative lassitude is a necessity.

Creative lassitude, not to doze and dream but to get matters arranged in his head in the best order. This life of Francis Cornish, for instance; it was enough to drive a man mad. He had accumulated a mass of detail; he had passed an expensive summer in Europe, finding out what he could about Francis Cornish’s life in England, where it appeared he had been something-or-other in the Secret Service, about which the Secret Service maintained a blandly closed mouth. Francis had, of course, played an important part in the work of restoring looted works of art to their original owners, in so far as that could be done. But there had been something else, and Darcourt could not find out what it was. Before the Second World War Francis had been up to something in Bavaria which sounded fishier and fishier the more Darcourt dug into it, but the fish could not be hooked. There was a huge hole, amounting to about ten years, in the life of Francis Cornish, and somehow Darcourt had to fill that hole. There was a lead, possibly a valuable one, in New York, but when was he to find time to go there, and who would foot the bill? He was tired of spending what were to him large sums of money to get material for a book that Arthur treated as a matter of small consequence. Darcourt was determined that the book should be as good and as full as it was in his power to make it, but after a year of investigation he felt thoroughly ill-used.

Why did he not simply state his case and say that he had to be paid for his services, and that the writing of the book was costing him more money than he could ever expect to recover from it? Because that was not the light in which he wished to appear to Maria.

He was a fool, he knew, and rather a feeble fool, at that. It is no comfort to a man to think of himself as a feeble fool, secretary to a dummy board of directors, and burdened with an exhausting task.

And now Arthur had mumps, had he? Christian charity required that Darcourt should be properly regretful, but the Old Harry, never totally subdued in him, made him smile as he thought that Arthur’s balls were going to swell to the size of grapefruit, and hurt like the devil.

The day’s work called imperiously. After he had done some college administration, interviewed a student who had “personal problems” (about a girl, of course), taken a seminar in New Testament Greek, and eaten a sufficient but uninteresting college lunch, Darcourt made his way to the building where the Graduate Faculty of Music existed in what looked, to the rest of the university, like unseemly luxury.

The Dean’s office was handsome, in the modern manner. It was on a corner of the building and two walls were entirely of glass, which the architect had meant to give the Dean a refreshing prospect of the park outside, but, as it also gave passing students a splendid view of the Dean at work, or perhaps in creative lassitude, he had found it necessary to curtain the windows with heavy net so that the office was rather dim. It was a large room, and the decanal desk was diminished by the piano and the harpsichord—the Dean was an expert on baroque music—and the engravings of eighteenth-century musicians that hung on the walls.

Dean Wintersen was pleased that money would be forthcoming to support the research work and reasonable living expenses of Miss Hulda Schnakenburg. He became confidential.

“I hope this solves more than one problem,” said he. “This girl—I’d better call her Schnak because everybody does and it’s what she seems to like—is greatly gifted. The most gifted student, I would say, that we’ve ever had in my time or in the memory of anybody in the faculty. We get lots of people here who will do very well as performers, and a few of them may go to the top. Schnak is something rarer; she may be a composer of real gift. But the way she is going now could land her in a mess, and perhaps finish her!”

“Eccentricity of genius?” said Darcourt.

“Not if you’re thinking of picturesque behaviour and great spillings of soul. There is nothing picturesque about Schnak. She is the squalidest, rudest, most offensive little brat I have ever met as Dean, and I’ve dealt with some lulus, let me tell you. As for soul, I think she would strike you if you used the word.”

“What ails her?”

“I don’t know. Whoever does know? Background the essence of mediocrity. Parents utterly commonplace. Father a watch-repairer for one of the big jewellery stores. A dull, grey fellow who seems to have been born with a magnifying-glass in his eye. Mother a sad zero. The only thing that singles them out at all is that they are members of some ultra-conservative Lutheran group, and they never stop saying that they have given the girl a good, Christian upbringing. And what have they brought up? A failed anorexic who never washes her hair or anything else, snarls at her teachers, and habitually bites the hand that feeds her. But she has talent, and we think it is the real, big, enduring thing. Just now she’s on the uttermost extreme thrust of all the new movements. The computer stuff and the aleatory stuff is old hat to Schnak.”

“Then why does she want to do this work on the Hoffmann notes? That sounds like antiquarian stuff.”

“That’s what we all want to know. What makes Schnak want to fling herself back more than a hundred and fifty years to complete an unfinished work by a man we generally write off as a gifted amateur? Oh, Hoffmann had a few operas performed in his lifetime, but I’m told they are run-of-the-mill. In music he has a reputation as a critic; he praised Beethoven intelligently when nobody else did. Schumann thought a lot of him, and Berlioz despised him, which was a kind of inverted praise. He inspired a lot of far better talents. A literary man, I suppose one would say.”

“Is that a bad thing to be? Mind you, I only know him through that opera—you know, Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann. It’s a Frenchified version of three of his stories.”

“Odd that it’s another unfinished work; Guiraud pulled Offenbach’s score together after his death. Not a favourite of mine.”

“You’re the expert, of course. As a mere happy opera-goer I like it very much, though it’s not often intelligently done; there’s more in it than meets the eye of most opera directors.”

“Well, the puzzle of why Schnak wants to take on this job can only be solved by her. But we on the faculty are pleased, because it fits nicely into musicological research and we’ll be able to give her a doctorate for it. She’ll need that. With her personality she needs every solid qualification she can get.”

“Are you trying to coax her away from her ultra-modernity?”

“No, no; that’s fine. But for a doctoral exercise something more readily measurable is better. This may steady her, and make her more human.”

Darcourt thought this was the moment to tell the Dean about the Cornish Foundation’s plan to present the revived and refreshed opera as a stage piece.

“Oh, my God! Do they really mean that?”

“They do.”

“Have they any idea what it might mean? It could be such a flop as operatic history has never known—and that’s saying a lot, as you probably know. I know she’ll do a good job, but only so far as the material permits. I mean—cosmetic work on the orchestration, and reorganization and pulling-together and general surgery can only go so far. The Foundation, the Hoffmann basis, may not support anything the public could possibly want to see.”

“The Foundation has voted to do it. I don’t have to tell you that eccentricity isn’t confined to artists; patrons can suffer from it too.”

“You mean it’s a bee in the bonnet.”

“I’ve said nothing. As secretary of the Foundation I am just telling you what they intend. They know the risks, and they are still prepared to put a good deal of money into the project.”

“They’ll have to. Have they any idea what mounting a full-scale new opera, that nobody knows or has studied, could run to?”

“They’re game for it. They leave it to you, of course, to see that Schnak delivers the goods—in so far as there are any goods to deliver.”

“They’re mad! But don’t think I’m quarrelling with anybody’s generosity. If this is what’s in the cards, Schnak will need supervision on the highest level we can manage. A musicologist of great reputation. A composer of some distinction. A conductor who has wide experience of opera.”

“Three supervisors?”

“Just one, if I can get the one I want. But with a lot of money I think I can coax her.”

The Dean did not say who he meant.

(3)

THE WEEK AFTER Arthur fell ill, Maria could do no work at all.

Ordinarily she had much to keep her busy. Her marriage had temporarily interrupted her academic career, but she had once again taken up her thesis on Rabelais, though marriage made it seem less pressing—she would not say less important—than before. And she had a great deal to do on behalf of the Cornish Foundation. Darcourt thought he was overworked, but Maria had her own burden. It was she who first read all the applications for assistance, and it was tedious work. The applicants seemed to want to do the same few things—write a book, publish a book, edit a manuscript, show their paintings, give a concert of music, or simply to have money to, as they always put it, “buy time” to do any of these things. Probably many of these requests were worthy, but they did not fit into Arthur’s notion of the Cornish Foundation, and it was Maria who wrote polite personal notes advising the applicants to look elsewhere. Of course there were the visionaries, who wanted to dam and dredge the Thames to discover the foundations of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre; or who wanted to establish a full-scale carillon de Flandres in every provincial capital in Canada and endow the post of carillonneur; or who wanted to be supported while they painted a vast series of historical pitures showing that all the great military commanders had been men of less than average stature; or who yearned to release some dubiouly identified wreck from the Arctic ice. These had to be discouraged firmly. Borderline cases, and they were many, she discussed with Darcourt. The few proposals that might appeal to Arthur were sifted from the mass, and circulated to all the members of the Round Table.

The Round Table was a joke Maria did not like. Of course the Foundation met at a circular table which was a handsome antique and had perhaps, two or three centuries ago, served as a rent-table in the workroom of some aristocrat’s agent; it was the most convenient table for their purpose in the Cornishes’ apartment. Geraint Powell insisted that, as Arthur presided over this table, it had some jokey association with the great British hero. Geraint knew a lot about the Arthurian legend, though Maria suspected that it was coloured by Geraint’s lively fancy. It was he who insisted that Arthur’s determination that the Foundation should take an unusual and intuitive path was truly Arthurian. He urged his fellow directors to “press into the forest wherever we saw it to be thickest” and would emphasize it by repeating, in what he said was Old French, là où ils la voient plus expresse. Maria did not like Geraint’s theatrical exuberance. She was in flight from exuberance of another sort, and, like a real academic, she was wary of people outside the academic world—“laymen” they called them—who seemed to know a lot. Knowledge was for professionals of knowledge.

Sometimes Maria wondered if this administrative work was what she had married Arthur to do, but she dismissed the question as foolish. This was what came immediately to hand, and she would do it as what marriage seemed to require of her. Marriage is a game for adult players, and the rules in every marriage are different.

As the wife of a very rich man, she could have become “a society woman”—but what does that mean in a country like Canada? Social life in the old sense of calls, teas, dinners, weekends, or fancy-dress parties was utterly gone. The woman who has no gainful job devotes herself to good causes. There are plenty of dogsbody jobs associated with art and music which wealthy volunteers are graciously permitted to do by the professionals. There is the great Ladder of Compassion, on which the community arranges a variety of diseases in order of the social prestige they carry. The society woman slaves on behalf of the lame, the halt, and the blind, the cancerous, the paraplegic, those variously handicapped, and, of course, the great new enthusiasm, AIDS. There are also the sociologically pitiable: the battered wives, battered children, and the raped girls, who seem to be more numerous than ever before, or else their plight is more often revealed. The “society woman” shows herself concerned with society’s problems, and patiently fights her way up the Ladder of Compassion through a net of committees, convenorships, vice-presidencies, presidencies, past presidencies, and government investigatory bodies. For some there waits, after years of work, a decoration in the Order of Canada. Now and again she and her husband eat an absurdly expensive dinner in the company of their peers, but not for pleasure; no, no, it is to raise money for some worthy cause, or for “research”, which has the prestige that belonged, a century ago, to “foreign missions”. The possession of wealth brings responsibilities; woe to the wealthy who seek to avoid them. It is all immensely worthy, but it is not much fun.

Maria had an honourable escape from this charitable treadmill. She was a scholar, engaged in research of her own, and thus she justified her seat in the social lifeboat. But with Arthur seriously ill she knew precisely what she had to do: she had to sustain Arthur in every way she could.

She visited Arthur as often and as long as the hospital would permit, chatting to a silent husband. He was very miserable, for the swelling was not only of his jaws; the doctors called it orchitis, and every day Maria lifted his sheets when the nurse was elsewhere, and grieved over the miserable swelling of his testicles, which gave him wretched pain in all the abdominal area. She had never seen him ill before, and his suffering made him dear to her in a new way. When she was not with him she thought about him too much to be able to do any other work.

The world is no respecter of such feelings, and one day she had a visit that troubled her greatly. As she sat in her handsome study—it was the first workroom she had ever had that was entirely her own, and she had made it perhaps a little too fine—her Portuguese housekeeper came to tell her that a man was anxious to speak with her.

“What about?”

“He won’t say. He says you know him.”

“Who is he, Nina?”

“The night porter. The one who sits in the lobby from five till midnight.”

“If it’s anything to do with the building, he should talk to Mr. Calder at the Cornish Trust offices.”

“He says it’s private.”

“Damn. Well, show him in.”

Maria did not know him when he appeared. Out of his porter’s uniform he might have been anybody. He was a small, not very engaging person, with a shrinking air, and Maria disliked him on sight.

“Good of you to see me, Mrs. Cornish.”

“I don’t think I know your name.”

“Wally. I’m Wally the night man.”

“Wally what?”

“Crottel. Wally Crottel. The name won’t mean anything to you.”

“What did you want to see me about?”

“Well, I’ll come right to it. You see, it’s about m’dad’s book.”

“Has your father made an application to the Foundation about his book?”

“No. M’dad’s dead. You knew him. You know the book. M ’dad was John Parlabane.”

John Parlabane, who had committed suicide more than a year ago, and had thereby hastened the courtship and marriage of Arthur Cornish. But when Maria looked at Crottel she could see nothing whatever of the stocky frame, the big head, the compelling look of malicious intelligence that had distinguished the late John Parlabane. Maria had known Parlabane far too well for her own comfort. Parlabane the runaway Anglican monk, the police spy, the drug-pusher, and parasite to the most disagreeable man she had ever known. Parlabane, who had intruded himself into her relations with her academic adviser and, as she had once hoped, lover, Clement Hollier. When Parlabane committed suicide, after having murdered his nasty master, Maria had thought she was rid of him forever, forgetting Hollier’s repeated warning that nothing is finished until all is finished. Parlabane’s book! This called for deep cunning, and Maria was not sure she had cunning of the right kind.

“I never heard that John Parlabane had any children.”

“It’s not widely known. Because of my ma, you see. For my ma’s sake it was kept dark.”

“Your mother was a Mrs. Crottel?”

“No, she was a Mrs. Whistlecraft. Wife of Ogden Whistlecraft, the great poet. You’ll know the name. He’s been dead for quite a while. I must say he was nice to me, considering he was not my real dad. But he didn’t want me to have his name, you see. He didn’t want any Whistlecrafts hanging around that weren’t the genuine article. Not of the true seed, he used to say. So I was raised under my ma’s maiden name, which was Crottel. I was supposed to be their nephew. An orphan nephew.”

“And you think your father was Parlabane.”

“Oh, I know that. My ma leaked it out. Before she passed away she told me Parlabane was the only man she’d ever had a first-class organism with. I hope you’ll excuse me mentioning it but that’s what she said. She became very liberated, you see, and talked a lot about the organism. Whistlecraft didn’t seem to have the knack of the organism. Too much the poet, I guess.”

“Yes, I see. But what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

“The book. M’dad’s book. The big important book he wrote that he left in your care when he passed away.”

“John Parlabane left a mass of material to me and Professor Hollier. He left it with a letter when he killed himself.”

“Yeah, but when he passed away he probably didn’t know he had a natural heir. Me, you see.”

“I’d better tell you at once, Mr. Crottel, that the typescript John Parlabane left was a very long, somewhat incoherent philosophical work which he had tried to give special interest by including some disguised biographical material. But he had no skill with fiction. Several people who would know about such things read it, or as much of it as they could, and said it was unpublishable.”

“Because it was too raw, wasn’t that it?”

“I don’t think so. It was just incoherent and dull.”

“Aw, now, lookit, Mrs. Cornish, m’dad was a very intelligent man. You’re not going to tell me anything he wrote was dull.”

“That’s exactly what I am telling you.”

“I heard there was some stuff in it about people high up—government people, some of them—in their youths, that they wouldn’t want the public to know about.”

“I don’t remember anything like that.”

“That’s what you say. I don’t want to be nasty, but maybe this is a cover-up. I heard a lot of publishers wanted it.”

“Several publishers saw it, and decided they didn’t want it.”

“Too hot for them to handle, eh?”

“No. They simply didn’t see any way of making a book of it.”

“You got letters saying that?”

“Mr. Crottel, you are becoming very pressing. Now listen: the typescript of the book by the man you tell me, without showing me any evidence, was your father was left outright to Professor Hollier and me. And I have the letter that says so. We were to deal with it as we saw fit, and that is what we have done. That’s all there is to it.”

“I’d like to see that book.”

“Impossible.”

“Well then, I guess I’ll have to take steps.”

“What steps?”

“Legal. I’ve been mixed up with the law, you know, and I know my rights. I’m an heir. Your right may not be as strong as you think.”

“Take it to law, then, if you feel you must. But if you hope to get anything out of that book, I can tell you you’re in for a disappointment. I don’t think we have anything more to say.”

“Okay. Be like that if you want. But you’ll be hearing from my legal man, Mrs. Cornish.”

It looked as if Maria had won. Arthur always said that if someone threatened legal action the thing to do was to tell them to see what it would get them. Such talk, he said, was probably bluff.

But Maria was unhappy. When Simon Darcourt came to see her that evening she greeted him in a familiar phrase:

“Parlabane is back.”

It was an echo of what a lot of people had said, with varying degrees of dismay, two years earlier, when John Parlabane, garbed in the robes of a monk, had returned to the university. Many people remembered him and many more were aware of his legend, as a brilliant student of philosophy who had, years ago, left the university under a cloud—the usual cloud, that old, familiar cloud—and had banged about the world making trouble of several ingenious kinds. He turned up at the College of St. John and the Holy Ghost (familiarly “Spook”) as a runaway and renegade from the Society of the Sacred Mission, in England, and the Society showed no sign of wanting to get him back. Maria, Darcourt, and Hollier, and many others, hoped that his suicide about a year later—and the suicide note in which he confessed with glee to the murder of Professor Urquhart McVarish (monster of vanity and sexual weirdo)—had closed the chapter of Parlabane. Maria could not help reopening it with this theatrical flourish.

Darcourt was satisfactorily astonished and dismayed. When Maria explained, he looked a good deal better.

“The solution is simple,” he said. “Give him the typescript of the book. You don’t want it. Let him see what he can do with it.”

“Can’t be done.”

“Why not?”

“I haven’t got it.”

“What did you do with it?”

“Threw it away.”

Now Darcourt was really horrified.

“You what?” he roared.

“I thought it was done with. I put it down the garbage chute.”

“Maria! And you call yourself a scholar! Haven’t you learned rule number one of scholarship: never, under any circumstances, throw anything away?”

“What was the use of it?”

“You know the use of it now! You’ve delivered yourself, bound and gagged, into this man’s hands. How can you prove the book was worthless?”

“If he goes to court, you mean? We can call some of those publishers who turned it down. They’ll say what it was.”

“Oh, yes; I can hear it now. ‘Tell me, Mr. Ballantyne, when did you read the book?’ ‘Mmm? Oh, I don’t read books myself. I turned it over to one of my editors.’ ‘Yes, and did your editor present you with a written report?’ ‘That wasn’t necessary. She took a look and said it was hopeless. Just what I suspected. I took a quick peep into it myself, of course.’ ‘Very well, Mr. Ballantyne, you may stand down. You see, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, there is no evidence that the book was given serious professional attention. Are masterpieces of what is called le roman philosophe to be assessed in this casual way?’—That’s the kind of thing, Maria, that you’ll hear until every one of your publisher witnesses has trotted in and out of the witness-box. Crottel’s lawyer can assert anything he likes about this book—a philosophical masterwork, a sulphurous exposure of sexual corruption in high places—anything at all. He will say that you and Clem Hollier were professionally jealous of Parlabane, and depreciated his talent for the trivial reason that he was a self-confessed murderer. The lawyer will positively sing to the harp about Genêt, the criminal genius, and tie him up in pink string with Parlabane. Maria, you have put your foot in it right up to the hip.”

“You’re not being very helpful, Simon. What do we do next?—Can’t we get rid of Crottel? Fire him, perhaps?”

“Maria, you numbskull! Haven’t you understood that under our splendidly comprehensive Charter of Rights it is practically impossible to fire anybody—particularly not if they are making your life a misery? Crottel’s lawyers would crucify you.—Look, child, you need the best legal advice, and at once.”

“Well, where do we get it?”

“Please don’t talk about ‘we’ as if I were somehow involved in this mess.”

“Aren’t you my friend?”

“Being your friend is a very taxing experience.”

“I see. A fair-weather friend.”

“Stop being feminine. Of course I’m with you. But you must let me have my grievance. Do you think I haven’t enough trouble with this bloody opera scheme of Arthur’s? It’s enough to drive me mad! Do you know what?”

“No. What?”

“We’ve gone ahead much too fast. We’ve undertaken to back Schnak—I haven’t met Schnak but I hear ominous things about her—in putting this sketch for an opera together, and naturally I wanted to see what these Hoffmann papers consist of. It should have been done earlier, but Arthur has rushed ahead. So I had a look. And do you know what?”

“I wish you’d stop asking me if I know what. It’s illiterate and unworthy of you, Simon. Oh, don’t sulk, sweetie.— Well, what?”

“Only this. There’s no libretto. Only a few words to suggest what ought to go with the music. That’s what.”

“So—?”

“So a libretto has to be found, or else provided. A libretto in the early-nineteenth-century manner. And where is that to come from?”

It seemed to Maria that the time had come to get out the whisky. She and Darcourt rolled and wallowed in their problems till after midnight, and although Maria had only one drink, Simon had several, and she had to push him into a taxi. Fortunately it was after midnight, and the night porter had gone off duty.

(4)

SIMON DARCOURT HAD A BAD NIGHT, and in the morning he had a hangover. He endured something more than the layman’s self-reproach. He was drinking too much, no doubt about it. He refused to think of it in the modern sociological term as “a drinking problem”; he told himself that he was becoming a boozer, and of all boozers the clerical boozer was the most contemptible.

Excuses? Yes, plenty of them. Wouldn’t the Cornish Foundation drive a saint to the bottle? What a pack of irresponsible blockheads! And headed by Arthur Cornish, who was thought in the financial world to be such a paragon of good judgement. But, provocation or no provocation, he must not become a boozer.

This business of Parlabane’s alleged son could be a nuisance. After a queasy breakfast, which he made himself eat because not eating was one of the marks of the boozer, he put through a call to a man who was a private detective, and owed him a favour, for Simon had pushed and pulled his promising son toward a B.A.; the man had connections that were very useful. Then he talked on the telephone to Dean Wintersen, not stressing his worry about the missing libretto, but probing to see what the Dean knew. The Dean was reassuring. Probably the relevant papers had been mislaid or temporarily catalogued under another name, possibly that of the librettist himself, who was thought to be James Robinson Planché. Neither the Dean nor Darcourt knew who Planché was, but they sparred in the accustomed academic manner to find out what the other knew, and worked up a cloud of unknowing which, again in the academic manner, seemed to give them comfort. They arranged a time when Darcourt could meet Miss Hulda Schnakenburg.

When that time came, Darcourt and the Dean cooled their heels in the many-windowed office for twenty minutes.

“You see what I mean,” said Wintersen. “Don’t think I would put up with this from anyone else. But as I told you, Schnak is special.”

Special, it seemed to Darcourt, in a disagreeable way. At last the door opened, and in she came and sat down without waiting to be asked or greeted, saying, “She said you wanna see me.”

“Not I, Schnak, but Professor Darcourt. He represents the Cornish Foundation.”

Schnak said nothing, but gave Darcourt a look of what might have been malignance. She was not as unusual as he had expected, but certainly she was unusual in a Dean’s office. It was not simply that she was sloppy and dirty; lots of girls thought such an appearance obligatory because of their principles, but they were sloppy and dirty in the undergraduate fashion of their time. Schnak’s dirt was not a sign of feminine protest, but the real thing. She looked filthy, ill, and slightly crazed. Her dirty hair hung in hanks about a face that was sharp and rodent-like. Her eyes were almost closed in squinting suspicion, and on her face were lines in improbable places, such wrinkles as one does not often see today, even on ancient crones. Her dirty sweater had once been the property of a man, and was ravelled out at the elbows; below she wore dirty jeans, again not the fashionable dirt of rebellious youth, which has a certain coquetry about it; these were really dirty and even disgusting, for there was quite a large yellow stain around the crotch. Her dirty bare feet were thrust into worn-out running shoes without laces. But this very dirty girl was not aggressively dirty, as if she were a bourgeoise making some sort of statement; there was nothing striking about her. If it is possible to say so, Schnak was distinguished only by her insignificance; if Darcourt had met her on the street he would probably not have noticed her. But as someone on whom large sums of money were to be risked she struck chill into his heart.

“I suppose the Dean has told you that the Cornish Foundation is giving serious thought to presenting your enlargement of the Hoffmann score as a stage piece, Miss Schnakenburg?” he said.

“Call me Schnak. Yeah. Sounds crazy, but it’s their dough.” The voice was dry, rebarbative.

“True. But you realize that without your full co-operation it could not be done?”

“Yeah.”

“The Foundation could count on that?”

“I guess so.”

“They’ll want better assurance than a guess. You are still a minor, aren’t you?”

“Naw. Nineteen.”

“Young for a doctoral candidate. I think I should talk with your parents.”

“Fat lot of good that’ll be.”

“Why?”

“They don’t know shit about this stuff.”

“Music, you mean? I’m talking about responsibility. We must have some guarantee that you will do what you say. I’d want their agreement.”

“Their idea of a musician is a church organist.”

“But you think they would agree?”

“How the hell should I know what they’ll do? I just know what I’ll do. But if it’s money they’ll probably go for it.”

“The Foundation is considering a grant that would pay all your expenses—living, tuition, whatever is necessary. Have you any idea what the amount might be?”

“I can live on nothing. Or I could develop some expensive habits.”

“No, Miss Schnakenburg, you couldn’t. The money would be carefully supervised. I would probably supervise it myself and anything that looked like the kind of expensive habit you hint at would conclude the agreement at once.”

“You told me you had stopped all that nonsense, Schnak,” said Wintersen.

“Pretty much. Yeah. I haven’t really got the temperament for it.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” said Darcourt. “Tell me, as a matter of interest, would you pursue this plan—this opera plan—if you did not get the grant?”

“Yeah.”

“But I understand that you have been exploring very modern paths in composition. Why this enthusiasm for the early nineteenth century?”

“It kinda grabs me, I guess. All those crazy guys.”

“Well then, tell me how you would support yourself if this grant were not forthcoming?”

“Job of some kind. Anything.”

Darcourt had had enough of Schnak’s indifference. “Would you consider, for instance, playing the piano in a bawdy-house?”

For the first time Schnak showed some sign of animation. She laughed, dustily. “That dates you, prof,” she said. “They don’t have pianos in bawdy-houses any more. It’s all hi-fi and digital, like the girls. You oughta go back and take another look.”

Important rule of professorcraft: never show resentment at a student insult—wait and get them later. Darcourt continued, silkily.

“We want you to have freedom to get on with your work, so you needn’t worry about jobs. But have you considered all the problems? There doesn’t seem to be much of a libretto to go with these scraps of music, for one thing.”

“Not my problem. Somebody would have to fix it up. I’m music. Just music.”

“Is that enough? I’m no expert on these things, but I would have imagined that the completion of an opera that exists only as sketches and rough plans would call for some dramatic enthusiasm.”

“That’s what you’d imagine, is it?”

“Yes, that’s what I’d imagine. You force me to remind you that nothing has been concluded about this matter. If your parents don’t stand behind you, and if you are so indifferent to the money and the encouragement it implies, we’re certainly not anxious to force it on you.”

Wintersen intervened. “Look, Schnak, don’t play the fool. This is a very big chance for you. You want to be a composer, don’t you? You told me so.”

“Yeah.”

“Then get this through your skull: the Cornish Foundation and the Faculty are offering you such a chance, such a springboard toward a career, such a shortcut to important attention, as very great people in the past would have given ten years of life to have. I’m telling you again: don’t play the fool.”

“Shit.”

Darcourt decided the time had come for a strategic loss of temper, a calculated outburst.

“Look here, Schnak,” he said, “I won’t be talked to in that way. Remember, even Mozart got his arse kicked when he couldn’t be civil. Make up your mind. Do you want our help or don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t yeah me, young woman. Yeah what?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“No. I want the magic word. Come on, Schnak—you must have heard it somewhere in the distant past.”

“Please—I guess.”

“That’s more like it. And keep it that way from now on. You’ll be hearing from me.”

When Schnak had gone, the Dean was genial. “I enjoyed that,” he said. “I’ve wanted to talk to Schnak like that for months, but you know how cautious we have to be with students nowadays; they’re very quick to complain to the Governors that they’re being harassed. But money still gives power. Where did you learn your lion-taming technique?”

“As a young parson I was a curate in some very tough parishes. That girl isn’t nearly as tough as she wants us to think. She doesn’t eat enough, and what she eats is junk. I suppose she has been on drugs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if now she was on the booze. But there’s something about her I like. If she’s a genius, she’s a genius in the great romantic tradition.”

“That’s what I hope.”

“I think Hoffmann would have liked her.”

“I’m not very well up on Hoffmann. Not my period.”

“Very much in the great romantic tradition. As a writer, he was one of its German inspirers. But there are aspects of the great romantic tradition we can do without, nowadays. Schnak will have to learn that.”

“Will she learn it from Hoffmann? Doesn’t sound like the teacher I would choose.”

“Who would you choose? Have you got the supervisor you want?”

“I’ll be talking with her by long-distance tomorrow. I’ll be as persuasive as I can and it may take time. I suppose I send the phone bill to you?”

That remark assured Darcourt that the Dean was an old hand at dealing with foundations.

(5)

DARCOURT KNEW THAT, although he had compelled Schnak to say “please”, it was no more than a nursery victory. He had made the bad child behave herself for a moment, but that was nothing. He was deeply worried about the whole matter of Arthur of Britain.

He grumbled a lot, but he was a faithful friend, and he did not want the Cornish Foundation to fall flat on its face in its first important venture in patronage. News of Arthur’s grandiose ambitions were sure to leak out, not from Foundation directors, but from Arthur himself; he would not leak to the press intentionally, but the worst leaks are unintentional. Arthur was riding very high; he was making no secret of his wish to do what other Canadian foundations did not do; he was turning a deaf ear to proven good causes and worthy projects and if he fell, there would be a grand, eight-part chorus of “We told you so” from the right-minded. Arthur was prepared to risk large sums on what were no more than hunches, and that was un-Canadian, and the country that longed for certainties would not forgive him. It made no difference that the money was not public money; in an age when all spend-ing is subjected to ruthless investigation and criticism, any suggestion that large sums were being employed capriciously by a private ciizen would inflame the critics who, though not themselves benefactors, knew exactly how benefaction ought to be managed.

Why did Darcourt worry so about Arthur? Because he did not want Maria to be drawn into public rebuke and criticism. He still loved Maria, and remembered with gratitude that she had refused him as a suitor, and offered friendship instead. He still suffered from the lover’s idea that the loved one should be, and could be, protected from the vicissitudes of fortune. In a world where everybody gets their lumps, he did not want Maria to get any lumps. If Arthur made a goat of himself, Maria would loyally suppose herself to be a nannygoat. But what could he do?

A man who is disposed toward the romantic aspect of religion cannot wholly divorce himself from superstition, though he may pretend to hate it. Darcourt wanted reassurance that all was well, or some unmistakable warning that it was not. And where was such a thing to be found? He knew. He wanted to consult Maria’s mother, and he knew that Maria would be strongly against any such course, because she was trying to escape from everything her mother represented.

She was not having much success.

Maria thought of herself as a determined scholar, not as a rich man’s wife, or a woman of a remarkable beauty which drew all sorts of unscholarly things into her path. She wanted a new mother, the Bounteous Mother, the Alma Mater, the university. Learning and scholarship would surely help her to rise above the fact that she was half Gypsy, and all the Romany inheritance that was abhorrent to her. Her mother was a great stone in her path.

Her mother, as Madame Laoutaro (she had returned to her family name after the death of her husband), practised the respectable profession of a luthier, a doctor of sick violins, violas, cellos, and double basses; her family had a tradition of such work, as her name implied. But she was also in partnership with her brother Yerko, a man of dark skills who saw no reason why he should not palm off instruments that were made of scraps and bits of ruined fiddles, pieced out with portions of his own and his sister’s manufacture, on people who accepted them as genuine ancient instruments. Madame Laoutaro and Yerko were not crooks in the ordinary way; it was simply that they had no moral sense at all in such matters. Gypsies through and through, aristocrats of that enduring and despised people, they thought that taking every possible advantage of the gadjo world was the normal course of life. The gadje wanted to hunt and crush their people; very well, let the gadje find out who was cleverest. Madame Laoutaro was a shop-lifter and a fiddle-faker who gloried in her witty impostures, and she supposed that her daughter had taken to education as a means of carrying on the Gypsy battle. Clement Hollier, who was Maria’s supervisor in her studies, understood and appreciated Maria’s mother pretty well; he thought of her as a wonderful cultural fosil, a hold-over from a medieval world where the dispossessed were cunningly at war with the possessors. But Maria had married a possessor, a priest of the money-morality of Canada, not to despoil him but because she loved him, and Madame Laoutaro could not fully believe it. Small wonder that Maria wanted to get as far as possible from her mother.

Fate—incorrigible joker—saw things differently.

Maria and Arthur had not been married three months before Madame Laoutaro’s house burned down, and she and Yerko were homeless. The house, so respectably situated in the Rosedale area of Toronto, looked every bit as blamelessly respectable as it had done in the days of Madame Laoutaro’s blamelessly respectable and well-doing Polish gadjo husband, the late Tadeusz Theotoky. But no sooner had Tadeusz died, rich and well-regarded, than Madame (having noisily mourned a man she had loved as deeply as Maria loved Arthur) reverted to her maiden name, and her Gypsy ways, which were the only ways she really knew, and she and Yerko despoiled the house. They cut it up into a squalor of mean apartments in which a variety of hopeless people, chiefly old women, were able to dwell, paying much more than the apartments were worth, but trusting to the protective power of their landlady. One such old woman, Miss Gretser, a virgin of ninety-two (though she gave out that she was a mere eighty-eight), fell asleep with a cigarette in her fingers and it was not much more than an hour before Miss Gretser was a cinder, and Madame Laoutaro, luthier, and her ingenious brother Yerko were homeless. Madame declared, with much outcry, that they were also penniless.

They were certainly not penniless. As soon as the fire broke out Madame and Yerko hurried to their cellar workshops, pulled two cement blocks out of a wall, and rushed to the back garden, where they threw a leather bag of money into an ornamental pool. Then they returned to the front of the house for much enjoyable despair, hair-tearing, and noisy grief. When the last ember was quenched, and the excitement was over, they rescued the bag, hurried to Maria’s splendid penthouse, and set to work to pin sodden currency in bills of large denomination to all the upholstery and curtains, to dry it out. They insisted on sleeping on the floor of the handsome drawing-room till every bill was dried, ironed, and counted; they were suspicious of Nina, the Portuguese housekeeper, who made no secret of the fact that she looked on the Laoutaros as riff-raff. Which, of course, from a Portuguese Catholic point of view, they were.

Oh no, not in the least penniless. In addition to the funds in the bag, the late Tadeusz had left a lot of money behind him, tied up in a trust fund, which provided them with an ample income. There was also the matter of insurance. To Yerko and Madame Laoutaro, insurance was a form of wager; you bet with the insurance company that your house would not burn down, and if it did you were deemed the winner, and cleaned up handsomely. Unfortunately, however, when the Laoutaros converted the handsome mansion into a crowded lodging-house, they did not reinsure it as a commercial venture; they continued to pay the lower rate applicable to a dwelling. The insurance company, pernickety about such matters, threatened suit for fraud. Arthur was displeased, but Yerko managed to persuade him to allow the Gypsies to deal with the matter in their own way. Would a great financial company harass and oppress two poor Gypsies, ignorant of the complexities of business? Surely not! The Laoutaros were happily confident that they would get big money out of the insurance. But to the Gypsy mind all invisible money is fairy money and a fire is an immediate disaster. Where were these two homeless victims to go?

Madame’s proposal that they might stay for an indefinite time in the penthouse, which was, she pointed out, big enough for a whole tribe of Gypsies, was immediately ruled out of the question by Maria. Yerko had a plan, which was that they should rent an ancient stable behind a shop a Gypsy friend of his kept on Queen Street East. A little work would make it habitable, and the luthier business and his coppersmith’s forge would be handsomely accommodated.

This might have been acceptable if Madame had not had a bright idea which would, she said, repair their ruined fortunes. A lot of women, not nearly so gifted as herself, were advertising themselves as palm-readers, clairvoyants, and purveyors of personal counsel. A few of them openly promised restoration of lost sexual power, and reports were that business was brisk. As Madame said with scorn, these women were crooks, but if people appeared with money in their hands and positively demanded to be cheated, who was she to spit in the face of Providence?

Darcourt asked her if she would really prostitute her considerable gift as a psychic for money. Her response was positive.

“Never!” she said. “Never would I use my real gift in such trashy work! I would just give them the sort of thing they would get from some low sideshow mitt-camp. It would just be a hobby. I have my pride and my ethics, like anyone else.”

This notion put a sharp spur into Arthur. As the chairman of the board of an important trust company, he could not have it known that his mother-in-law was running a mitt-joint in a depressed part of the city. Arthur had not liked the coroner’s remarks in the inquest on Miss Gretser. The coroner had been rough about the lack of proper safety precautions in a house which he described, all outer appearances to the contrary, as a slum. Had Madame Laoutaro no advisers to keep her straight in such matters? Arthur had not been at the inquest, but he felt the gimlet eye of the coroner in his luxurious office in the Cornish Tower. Therefore Arthur declared that he would find a place for the refugees to repose themselves. To Maria’s horror he offered them accommodation in the basement of the very apartment house in which she and Arthur lived, where he could keep his eye on them.

Hollier tactlessly pointed out to her the almost mythical beauty of the scheme. She, at the very top of the splendid building, exposed to sun and air: her roots, the matrix of her being, ever present in the lowest depths of the same building. The root and the flower, beautifully exemplified. Maria could snarl, and she snarled at Hollier when he said that.

She became accustomed to it. The Laoutaros never came up to the penthouse, not because they were forbidden, but because they did not like it; the air was thin, the food was unwholesome, they would be expected to sit on chairs at all times, the conversation was boring, and Yerko’s pungent farting was reprehended. It was no place for people with any real zest for life.

When Darcourt next visited Maria he talked of Schnak but his mind was on Madame Laoutaro. He was a favourite with that lady, who respected him as a priest, though of a somewhat eccentric kind. She sensed the superstition in the heart of the holy man, and it established a kinship. The matter of a visit to the sibyl had to be approached with tact.

“I’ve been boning up on Hoffmann,” said Maria. “It’s time somebody on the Foundation knew what kind of world we are getting ourselves into.”

“Have you been reading the famous Tales?”

“A few. I didn’t read his music criticism because I don’t know anything about the technical side of music. I’ve found out a little about his life, and obviously this opera, Arthur of Britain, was what he was working on when he was dying. He had lucid fits when he would call for pen and paper and do something, though his wife, who seems to have been rather a simple woman, didn’t say what it was. He was only forty-six. Rotten life, knocking about from pillar to post because Napoleon was making things so difficult for people like him; not as a musician or an author, of course, but as a lawyer, which is what he was when he had the chance. He drank, not habitually but on toots. He had two miserable love affairs, of which the marriage was not one. And he never made it as a composer, which was what he wanted more than anything.”

“Sounds like the complete Romantic.”

“Not quite. Don’t forget his being a lawyer. He was much respected as a judge, when Napoleon allowed it. I think that’s what gives his writing its wonderful quality; it’s so matter-of-fact and then—bang! You’re right out of this world. I’m trying to get a wild autobiographical novel he wrote in which half is the work of a nasty Philistine tom-cat, who jeers at everything Hoffmann held dear.”

“A real tom-cat, or a human tom-cat?”

“A real one. Name of Kater Murr.”

“Ah well—you read German. I don’t. But what about the music?”

“It doesn’t get very good marks, because musicians don’t like dabblers, and literary men don’t like people who cross boundaries—especially musical boundaries. If you’re a writer, you’re a writer, and if you’re a composer, you’re a composer—and no scabbing.”

“But lots of composers have been splendid writers.”

“Yes—but in their letters.”

“Let’s hope the music was better than its reputation, or Schnak is in the soup, and so are we.”

“My hunch is that the poor man was just hitting his stride when he died. Maybe it’ll be wonderful.”

“Maria, you’re taking sides. Already you’re an advocate for Hoffmann.”

“Why not? I don’t think of him as Hoffmann any more. His name was Ernst Theodor Amadeus (he took the name of Amadeus because he worshipped Mozart) Hoffmann. E.T.A.H. I think of him as ETAH. Makes a good pet-name.”

“ETAH. Yes, not bad.”

“So. Have you found out anything about Crottel?”

“Not yet. But my spies are everywhere.

“Hurry them up. He gives me funny looks when I come in at night.”

“A security man has to give funny looks. What kind of look does he give Yerko?”

“Yerko has his own entrance, through the professional part of the building. He and Mamusia have a special key.”

This seemed the moment to propose a visit to the Laoutaros. Maria hummed and hawed.

“I know I sound like a miserable daughter, but I don’t want to encourage too much coming and going.”

“Has there been any coming? No? Then just for this once, Maria, might we do a little going? I terribly want to get your mother’s slant on this business.”

So, after a little more demur, they sank down as far into the building as the elevator would carry them, into the basement where the owners of the condominiums had their garage space.

“ ‘The lyre of Orpheus opens the door of the underworld’,” said Maria, softly.

“What’s that?” said Darcourt.

“A quotation from ETAH,” said Maria.

“So? I wonder if it does. We’re none of us musicians, on the Foundation. Are we headed toward the underworld? Maybe your mother can say.”

“You can depend on her to say something, relevant or not,” said Maria.

“That’s unkind. You know your mother is a very deft hand with the cards.”

They walked to the farthest end of the basement, in the rather sinister light that seems appropriate to parking areas, went round an unobtrusive corner, and tapped at a faceless metal door. This gave access to an unused space where the architect had meant to put a sauna and exercise room, but in the end that idea had been abandoned.

Tapping was useless. After some banging, the door was opened a very little way on a chain, and Yerko’s voice, in its deepest bass register, was heard to say: “If it’s a professional visit please use the entrance on the floor above. I will meet you.”

“It’s not professional, it’s friendly,” said Darcourt. “It’s me, Yerko—Simon Darcourt.”

The door opened wide. Yerko, in a purple shirt and corduroy trousers that had once been a rich crimson, clasped Darcourt in a bear’s embrace. He was a huge and impressive man with a face as big as one of his own fiddles, and a Gypsy’s mane of inky hair.

“Priest Simon! My very dear friend! Come in, come in, come in! Sister, it’s Priest Simon. And your daughter,” he added in a markedly less welcoming tone.

Only the Laoutaros could have turned a derelict space, enclosed in concrete and in the highest degree impersonal and comfortless, into a version of Aladdin’s cave, part workshop and part chaotic dwelling, stinking of glue, fumes from the forge, the reek of two raccoon skins that were drying on the wall, the wonderful scent of precious old wood, and food kept too long without refrigeration. Some of the concrete walls were bare, covered with calculations done in chalk and corrected by erasures of spit, and here and there hung rugs of Oriental designs. Hovering over a pan of burning charcoal, the fumes from which escaped through a stovepipe that ran to one of the windows just below the ceiling, was Maria’s mother, the phuri dai herself, stirring something smelly in a pan.

“You are in time for supper,” she said. “Maria, get two more bowls. They are in the abort. I’ve been making rindza and pixtia. Wonderful against this flu that everybody has. Well, my daughter, you have been a long time coming, but you are welcome.”

It was wonderful to Darcourt to see how the beautiful Maria was diminished in the presence of her mother. Filial respect works in many ways, and Maria was suddenly a Gypsy daughter, disguised in some fine contemporary clothes, though she immediately kicked off her shoes.

The Gypsies are not great kissers, but Maria kissed her mother, and Darcourt kissed her sooty hand, which he knew she liked, because it recalled her youthful days as an admired Gypsy musician in Vienna.

They all ate bowls of rindza and pixtia, which was tripe seethed in pig’s-foot jelly, and not as bad as it sounds. Darcourt showed great appetite, as was expected; those who consult oracles must not be choosy. The dish was followed by something heavy and cheesy called saviako. Darcourt thanked God for a strong shot of Yerko’s homemade plum brandy, which was stupefying to the palate, but burned a hole through the heavy mixture in the stomach.

The god of hospitality having been adequately appeased, there followed at least half an hour of general conversation. When consulting an oracle, there should be no haste. At last it was possible to get to Darcourt’s questions.

He told Mamusia—for that was what Maria called her—about the Cornish Foundation, of which she had some slight and inaccurate knowledge.

“Yes, yes; it is the Platter of Plenty,” she said.

“The Platter of Plenty is just a joke,” said Maria.

“It doesn’t sound like a joke,” said Mamusia.

“Yes, it is a joke,” said Darcourt. “It is that big silver epergne that Maria puts on the table when we meet. It is filled with snacks—olives and anchovies, and pickled oysters, and sweets and little biscuits, and things like that. Calling it the Platter of Plenty is a joke by one of our directors. He’s a Welshman, and he says it reminds him of a Welsh legend about a chieftain who had a magic platter on his table from which his guests could ask for and receive anything they desired.”

“I know that story from other lands. But it’s a good name. Isn’t that what your Foundation is? A heaping platter from which anybody can get anything he wants?”

“We hadn’t really thought of that.”

“This Welshman must have a good head on him. You are guardians of plenty, aren’t you? It’s simple.”

Darcourt thought it might be a little too simple, when he thought of what the Platter of Plenty was offering to Schnak. He explained as well as he could, in terms he thought Mamusia would understand, about the uncompleted opera, and Schnak, and his misgivings. He made the easy mistake of being too simple with someone who, although not educated in the ordinary sense, was highly intelligent and intuitive. Maria did not speak; in her mother’s presence she was silent unless spoken to. Mamusia’s glance moved constantly between her daughter’s face and Darcourt’s and in her own terms she understood them better than they knew.

“So—you want to know what is going to happen and you think I can tell you. Don’t you feel shame, Father Darcourt? You are not a real Catholic, but you are some kind of priest. Isn’t there something in the Bible that tells you to keep away from people like me?”

“In several places we are warned against them that have familiar spirits, and wizards that peep and mutter. But we live in a fallen world, Madame. Last time I visited my bishop he was very busy over Church investments, and he could not see me because he was deep in discussion with an investment counsel, who was peeping and muttering about the bond market. If there is any risk to my soul in consulting you, I take it upon me gladly.”

So the Tarot cards were brought out, in their fine tortoise-shell box, and Mamusia shuffled them deftly. Carefully, too, for they were a fine old pack and somewhat limp with age.

“The nine-card deal, I think,” said she.

At her bidding Darcourt cut the deck, which had been reduced to the picture cards; he began by setting aside four cards, face down; then he put the top card in the middle of the table. It was the Empress, ruler of worldly fortune and a strong card to stand at the heart of the prediction. The next card he drew went to the left of the Empress, and it was Force, the handsome lady who is subduing a lion by tearing open its jaws, apparently without any special effort on her part. Above the Empress went the Lover, and Mamusia’s quick eye saw a change in Maria’s face. Next card, placed on the right of the Empress, was the Female Pope, the Great Mother. Last card, to go below the Empress, made Darcourt wince, for it was the Death card, the dreadful skeleton which is scything up human bodies. He hated the Death card, and hesitated.

“Down it goes,” said Mamusia. “Don’t worry about it until you see what it means. Turn up your oracle cards.”

These were the four that had been set aside, and they were the Tower of Destruction, at the top, the card of Judgement, next in order, the Hermit, and last of all, the Fool.

“How do you like it?” said Mamusia.

“I don’t like it.”

“Don’t be afraid because there are some dark cards. Look at the Empress, who can get you men out of any mess you can make. This is a very womanly hand of cards you have found, and lucky for you, because men are awful bunglers. Look at Strength, or Force, or whatever you want to call her; is she just brute force, like a man’s? Never! She is irresistible force and she does not get it from being a man, let me tell you. And this High Priestess—this Female Pope. Who do you suppose she is? It’s a fine spread.”

“I can never see that Death card without shuddering.”

“Pooh! Everybody shudders at the Death card, because they don’t think what it means. But you—a priest! Doesn’t Death mean transfiguration, change, turning the whole spread into something else—and you tell us into something better? And look at your oracle cards. The Tower—well probably somebody will take a tumble; it would be queer if they didn’t considering what you tell me about your Foundation. And Judgement. Who escapes it? But look at the Hermit—the man who lives alone—that sounds like you, Priest Simon. And most powerful of all—the Fool! What’s the Fool’s number in the pack?”

“The Fool has no number.”

“Of course not! The Fool is zero! And what is zero? Power, no? Put zero to any number and in a wink you increase its power by ten. He is the wise joker who makes everything else in the hand conditional, and he is in the place of greatest power. The Empress and the Fool govern the spread, and with the Tower of Destruction in the first place among the oracles that probably means that there will be a lot of—what’s the word—is it higgledy-piggledy? Lots of upsets and turn-arounds—”

“Topsy-turveydom,” said Maria.

“Is that the word?”

“Topsy-turveydom seems all too likely,” said Darcourt.

“Don’t fear it! Love it! Give it the big kiss! That’s the way to deal with destiny. You gadje are always afraid of something.”

“I didn’t ask you about my own fate, Madame, but about this venture of the Foundation’s. They are my friends and I am worried on their behalf.”

“No use worrying on anybody else’s behalf. They must take care of themselves.”

“Are you going to explain the spread?”

“Why? It looks clear enough. Topsy-turveydom. I like that word.”

“Would you consider associating the Empress, the guardian woman, with Maria?”

Mamusia went into one of her infrequent fits of laughter; not the cackling of a witch, but a deep, gutty ho-hoing. Darcourt had been mistaken if he expected her to relate her daughter to any figure of power.

“If I try to explain, I will just confuse you, because I am not at all sure myself. Your Fool-zero could be your Round Table, or that Fool-zero my son-in-law; I love him pretty well, I suppose, but he can be a Fool-zero as much as anybody else, when he gets too high and mighty. And that Great Mother, that High Priestess, could be your Platter of Plenty who can dish it out—but can she take it? I don’t know. It could be somebody else, somebody new in your world.”

“Couldn’t Arthur be the Lover?” said Maria and was vexed to find herself blushing.

“You want him to be that, but the card is in the wrong place. Life is full of lovers, for people whose minds are set on love.”

Darcourt was disappointed and worried. He had seen Mamusia discourse on a spread of cards many times, and never had she been so reluctant to speak about what she saw, what she felt, what her intuition suggested. It was not common for her to ask somebody else to lay out the cards; did that mean something special? He began to wish he had not asked Maria to bring him to the Gypsy camp in the bottom of her apartment house, but as he had done so he wanted something from the oracle that was positive, even if in small measure. He talked, he coaxed, and at last Mamusia relented a little.

“You must have something, eh? Something to lean on? It’s reasonable, I suppose. Three things come to me that I would be very careful about, if I had dealt this hand for myself. The first is, be careful how you give money to this child.”

“To Schnak, you mean?”

“Awful name. Yes, to Schnak. You tell me she has great talent as a musician. I know a lot about musicians; I’m one myself. I used to be greatly admired in Vienna, before I married Maria’s father. I sang and played the fiddle and the cimbalom and danced my way into hundreds of hearts. Rich men gave me jewels. Poor men gave me what they couldn’t afford. I could tell you—”

“Hold your gab!” said Yerko, who had been busy with the plum brandy. “Priest Simon doesn’t want to hear you blow your horn.”

“Yes, yes, Mamusia,” said Maria, “we all know how wonderful you used to be before you became even more wonderful as you are now. You could break hearts still, if you wanted to be cruel. But you don’t, dear little mother. You don’t.”

“No. You have embraced your fate as a phuri dai,” said Darcourt, “and become a very wise woman and a great help to us all.”

The flattery worked. Mamusia liked to be thought a wonderful old woman, although she could not have been far over sixty.

“Yes, I was wonderful. Perhaps I am even more wonderful now. I’m not ashamed to speak the truth about myself. But this Schnak—keep her short. You people on Foundations ruin a lot of artists. They need to work. They thrive on hunger and destruction. So keep this child from going on the streets, but don’t drown her talent with money. Keep her short. Be careful the Platter of Plenty doesn’t become the instrument of destruction.”

“And the second thing?”

“Not clear at all, but it looks as if some old people, dead people, were going to say something important. Funny-looking people.”

“And the third?”

“I don’t know if I should say.”

“Please, Madame.”

“These things have nothing to do with the cards. They are just things that come to me. This third one comes very, very strong; it came when you were shivering over the Death card. I don’t think I should say. Perhaps it was something just for me, not for you.”

“I beg you,” said Darcourt. He knew when the seeress wanted to be coaxed.

“All right. Here it is. You are wakening the little man.”

Mamusia had a strong sense of the dramatic, and it was plain that this was the end of the session. So, after protestations of gratitude, and astonishment, and enlargement—there could never be too much unction for Mamusia—Darcourt and Maria returned to the penthouse and whisky, of which the abbé drank more than he intended, though less than he wanted.

Whatever Mamusia might say, he hated the Death card and it soured his feeling toward the whole of the prediction. He knew how stupid that was. If the prediction had been all positive he would have accepted it happily, at the same time retaining in another part of his mind a patronizing feeling toward the Tarot and all Gypsy vaticination. To put full trust in a sunny future would be un-Canadian, as well as unworthy of a Christian priest. But now, when he had been shown fear by the cards, that other part of his mind told him he was a fool to play King Saul, and resort to wizards who peep and mutter. Christian priest that he was, he deserved to suffer for his folly, and suffer he did.

The three random predictions he liked even less. He did not believe that artists should be kept short of money. Fat cats hunt better than lean. Don’t they? Does anyone know? Poverty was not good for anybody. Was it? As for utterances by funny-looking people, he felt no response at all.

But—Wakening the little man? What little man?

The little man he knew best was his own penis, for that was what his mother had called it. Always keep the little man very clean, dear. Later he had heard it called the old man, by friends of his days as a theological student, for to those jokers it meant the Old Man, or Old Adam, whom the Redeemed Man was bidden to cast out. As a bachelor whose sexual experience, for a man of his age, had been sporadic and slight, he suffered frequent reminders from the little man that there was a side of his nature that was not being given enough attention.

His physical desire for Maria had never been overwhelming, but it was a fretting element in his life. When they met she kissed him, and he rather wished she wouldn’t because it aroused inadmissible longings. But had they not agreed, when he had proposed marriage to her, that they should be friends? It had possessed deep meaning for him then, and their friendship was one of the fostering things in his life, but he was aware that there was a farcical side to it. We are just good friends. Wasn’t that what people said when they were denying insinuations of a love affair in the press? Oh, intolerable torment! Oh, frying lust—yet not a lust that would drive him to shoot Arthur and carry Maria away to a love-nest in the East. Oh, farce of priesthood, which demanded so much that was unnatural, but failed to give the strength to banish worldly desires! Oh, misery of being the Reverend Professor Simon Darcourt, Vice-Warden of Ploughwright College, professor of Greek, a Fellow of the Royal Society, who was, in the most pressing areas of his life, a poor fish!

You are wakening the little man. Maria’s mother saw through him like a pane of glass. It was ignominious. Oh, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin! Oh hell!

(6) ETAH IN LIMBO

You are wakening the little man—as if the Little Man had ever been asleep! No, no, this Little Man has been wide awake in Limbo, for ever since I died I have been aware of people reading what I wrote about music, and now and then seeing Undine, my best completed opera, on the stage, and never forgetting my tales of wonder where, the critics say, the fantastic meets the everyday. The Little Man has certainly not been gnawing his nails because of earthly neglect.

Mine was a life of better than merely respectable achievement, but I died with one thing left undone that should have been done. That was the completion of my opera Arthur of Britain, in which it would have been plain to the stupidest that my apprenticeship as a composer was finished, and that I had written a masterwork. Yes, a masterwork at least as good as, and perhaps better than, the best of my dear friend Weber. But it was not to be; I had barely laid the keel of that work before I was cut down, laid out, polished off, not suddenly, but at some wretched length. It was my own doing, I admit it freely. I was unwise in my life. I emptied my purse too readily, playing the great gentleman with my health and talents. So I was cut off untimely, and that is why I find myself now in Limbo, in that part of it reserved for those artists and musicians and writers who never fully realized themselves, never quite came to the boil, so to speak. Limbo: not the worst of hereafters, for it is free of the chains of space and time, and permits its denizens a great deal of versatility and, shall I say it, some posthumous influence?

Still, not to be too delicate about it, Limbo is a bore. Should I complain? My fate is not the worst. There are artists and writers and scholars here who have had two thousand years of neglect, and would be grateful if some candidate for a Doctor of Philosophy degree would stumble on their work and seize it with joy, as material that nobody has hitherto pawed over and exhausted. The dullest thesis—and that is saying much—may be enough to release an artist from Limbo and allow him to go—we don’t really know where, but we hope for the best, because to people like ourselves, used to a creative life, boredom is punishment enough. When we were good children of the Church, some of us, we heard about sinners who roast on beds of coals, or stand naked in Siberian hurricanes. But we were not sinners. Just artists who, for one reason or another, never finished our work on earth and so must wait until we are redeemed, or at least justified, by some measure of human understanding. Heavenly understanding, it appears, is what brings us to Limbo; we never really did our best and that is a sin of a special kind, though not, as I say, the worst.

Can this be my great chance? Is this extraordinary waif Schnak to be my deliverer? I must not build my hopes too high. I did that when, however long ago it was, that curious French-German-Jew Jacques Offenbach took some of my stories as the basis for his last piece, Les Contes d’Hoffmann (thank you, Jacques, for giving my name such prominence), but it proved not to be the sort of work that gets a man out of Limbo. Tuneful, mind you, and reasonably skilled in orchestration (thank God he controlled his impulse to use the bass drum too much), but Offenbach had spent too much time writing opéra bouffe to be happy with the real thing. And he had too much French humour, which can be fatal to music. I always keep my own sense of humour, which is German and therefore deeper than his, in check when I am composing. After a man has died he understands what a betrayer of great things humour can be, when it is not in the Shakespearean or Rabelaisian mode. I am glad to see that this child Schnak has no sense of humour whatever, though she is pretty well stocked with scorn and derision, which pass for humour with stupid people.

Is this my great chance? I must do everything I can to help. I shall stand at Schnak’s shoulder and push her in the right direction, so far as I can. So all those crazy guys grab her, do they? Crazy guys like Weber, and Schumann, I suppose. What about that magnificently sane guy Mozart, whose name I took as an act of homage? Is Schnak biting off more than she can chew? Schnak is going to need luck, or she will simply make a mess of my hastily scribbled intentions. I must be Schnak’s Luck. Her greatest luck would be not to find that terrible libretto, in which that ass Planché was in a fair way to make a mess of Arthur when I died. Same trouble as Offenbach; too much sense of humour—English this time—too much experience of what would “go” in the theatre—meaning what “went” last time and which the public was beginning to be tired of. Again, I thank God that Schnak knows nothing about the theatre and has no sense of humour. If it is possible to keep her from those two plagues I shall be at hand to do it.

Did I really die in order to save my opera from Planché’s dreadful libretto? Even now I cannot tell. There are limits to what one can know about one’s former life, even in Limbo.

Why did the old woman, the seeress, tell that well-meaning fellow Darcourt, and her lovely but uncomprehending daughter, that they were wakening the little man, as if that were something that should not be done? I am very happy to be awakened in this way. Luckily Darcourt thinks she meant his pizzle, egotistical jackass that he is. But does the old woman know something I cannot know, placed as I am? Is it likely?

By God, I am thoroughly awake, and I shall not rest until I have seen this thing through to the end. Then, if my luck enables me to be Schnak’s Luck, I may have a chance to sleep eternally, my work accomplished.