The Lyre of Orpheus

(1)

As a group of Schnak’s professors assembled in the auditorium of the Faculty of Music to see the film After Infinity, Simon Darcourt heard a good deal more about Hulda Schnakenburg than he had known before, and it surprised him. Her bad manners toward the Dean had no relation to the work she did for her instructors; they admitted, with reluctance, that it was of unusual quality. Were her exercises grubby, asked Darcourt, remembering the letter she had sent to the Cornish Foundation. No indeed; they were notably clean, clear, and almost—they hated to use the word—elegant in their musical calligraphy. As a student of harmony, counterpoint, and analysis she was exemplary, and her flights into electronic music, environmental music, and any sort of noise that could be evoked from any unusual source were admitted to be innovative, when they could be distinguished from mere racket.

It was even agreed that she had a sense of humour, though not a pleasant one. She caused a sensation with a serenade she had composed for four tenors whose larynxes had been constricted to the point of strangulation with adhesive tape; there had been some cautious approval from professors who had not noticed that its performance took place on April 1. Her manners were admitted to be dreadful, but instruction in manners was not part of the Faculty’s job. Nevertheless, it was agreed that Schnak went rather too far. As one professor, who had some recollection of the music-hall of an earlier day, sang in Darcourt’s ear,

It ain’t exactly what she sez—

It’s the nasty way she sez it!

She had qualified beyond question for her Master of Music, and her reputation as a brat and a nuisance had nothing to do with the matter—apart from making her disliked and even feared by some members of the Faculty.

Predictably Schnak had not chosen to appear at Convocation, properly gowned and dressed to receive her degree at the hands of the Chancellor. She rejected all such ceremonial, or suggestion of a rite de passage, with her favourite term of disapproval. Shit. But she had set to work immediately on preparations for her doctorate, and when autumn came, and she presented herself at the seminars in Romantic Themes in Nineteenth-Century Opera, Traditional Compositional Techniques, and History of Performance Practice, she had already done more reading than most of the other students would do during the year to come, and she threw herself into the obligatory work on Composition and Theory Research with what would have looked like enthusiasm in someone else, but seemed more like angry zealotry in Schnak.

As well as heavy involvement in her university work, she had found time to write the music for After Infinity, and the auditorium was filled with students of drama, of film, and of any manifestation of the avant-garde. An admired student genius had written the scenario and directed the film; great things were expected. There was to be no dialogue, in order that the immediacy of the early silent film might be recaptured and any taint of merely literary values avoided. There would, however, be music, for Chaplin had given his blessing to music as an accompaniment to film, particularly when he wrote the music himself. The student genius could not write music, but he discerned a fellow genius in Schnak, and she had provided music. She had rejected the idea of using a synthesizer, and had composed her score for a piano that had been doctored with pieces of parchment fastened over the strings, assisted by a Swanee whistle ingeniously played under a metal tub, and that simplest of instruments, a comb covered with tissue paper. The effect was of a vaguely melodious but unfocussed buzzing, punctuated by shrieks, and everyone agreed that it had added much to the general effect.

The film-maker was scornful of what he called “linear” quality in a script, so his film bounded along in unconnected sections, leaving the spectators to make out as best they could what was going on. It was not too difficult. Humanity was facing the ultimate predicament; a nuclear leak had rendered all mankind, male and female, sterile. What was to become of the race? Could a woman be found, almost at the point of bearing a child, whose child would have escaped the curse of sterility? If that child could be brought to birth, how should it be nourished? Its mother’s breasts would obviously—well, obviously to the film-maker—be dry, or a source of poison. Might a man, in case of dire global need, suckle a child? This question enabled several sequences to be shown in which male friends of the film-maker—the cast had all worked on a voluntary and friendly basis—strained with selfless zeal to produce milk from their flat and unlikely paps, and one or two of them actually did so, the milk being simulated very cleverly with shaving cream. But it was discovered—during one of the portions of the story that had not been thought worth filming—that one fertile female had escaped the nuclear curse. She appeared as a simple child of twelve (the daughter of the film-maker’s landlady) who must take upon her the task of continuing the race, if a male could only be found still able to impregnate her. The search for a fertile male was indicated by shots of vast emptinesses; long resonant corridors up and down which there was much coming and going by unseen searchers, whose footsteps Schnak had simulated with two halves of a coconut shell. There were scenes of the anguish of a Very Wise Man (played by the film-maker’s great and good friend, who chose unaccountably to do it in a Prince Albert coat and a flowing tie) who, in the culminating scene, had to explain to the twelve-year-old what Sex was, and what would be required of her. The child’s face, filled with a wonderment that could also have been puzzled vacuity, was photographed from unusual angles, and she emerged as an Infans Dolorosa, a Nubile Saviour, and, of course, as a Transporting Symbol. The film was greeted in the main with solemn wonderment, though there were a few coarse souls who sniggered when the child knelt before the startlingly white bare feet of the Very Wise Man emerging from the bottom of his formal trousers, and seemed to adore them. In the great tradition of student despair the fate of mankind was left undecided at the end, which Schnak marked by three descending glissandi on the Swanee whistle.

Subtle campus critics professed to detect a hint of irony in the music, but the majority, while admitting that it might be so, felt that it added a dimension to a brilliant film which would, if everybody had their rights, command a variety of international awards.

When, a few days later, the Faculty met to discuss thesis topics, they were astonished that Schnak proposed to complete her work on Arthur of Britain within one university year. She had done her year of courses for her doctorate and nothing stood in the way except the unusually short time she had allotted to her thesis-composition. A thesis of operatic length and complexity? They demurred.

“I am through with trying to control or advise Schnak,” said Dean Wintersen. “If it kills her or drives her mad, let it be so. I hope to hand over my supervision of work to a distinguished visitor.”

Of course there was curiosity about the distinguished visitor, but the Dean said it was too early to talk of what was not yet assured. As always, the Faculty wished to show its academic scruple by doubt and debate.

“This thesis exercise,” said a professor of musicological research; “who can say what it may involve? I am not at all impressed by this passion to complete what fate has ordained should be incomplete.”

“Ah, but you must admit that it has been done, and well done,” said another musicologist, who did not like the first speaker. “Look at Janet Johnson’s excellent reconstruction of Rossini’s Journey to Rheims. And what about Deryck Cooke’s completion of Mahler’s Tenth? What this girl wants to do is a forward, not a backward, step. She wants to display for us a Hoffmann who has never been heard before.”

“I have heard one of Hoffmann’s operas in Germany, which I think is something nobody else present can say, and I do not leap with joy at the prospect of another. These early-nineteenth-century operas are mostly very thin stuff.”

“Ah, but that’s the fault of the libretti,” said his enemy, who had indeed never heard a note by Hoffmann but who had a nice private specialization in libretti where nobody could challenge him. “What is the libretto for this one like?”

The question was directed to the Dean, and it gave him a chance to display those qualities which mark a dean off from ordinary professors. He did not, in fact, know anything about the Hoffmann libretto and he would not pretend that he did; if his listeners chose to think on the grounds of what he said that he had seen the libretto, the assumption was wholly their own.

“A certain amount of work will have to be undertaken before that question could be satisfactorily answered,” he said. “Of course we shall have to make sure that all that side of the work is properly handled. We are not literary experts. We shall have to arrange a committee for Schnak that includes somebody from Comparative Literature.”

This was greeted with groans.

“Yes, I know,” said the Dean. “But you must admit that they are very thorough. I had thought of asking Professor Penelope Raven to act. Would that be agreeable?”

There were other matters to be decided, and it was nearing the time when professors feel the need of a pre-dinner drink, so they said it was agreeable.

(2)

PROFESSOR RAVEN WAS NOT PLEASED to be asked to join a committee supervising a thesis in the Faculty of Music; she would be the only non-musician, and she knew that the odd man out in such an academic group was expected to be modest and keep out of what didn’t concern him, while lending scope and respectability to everything that was done. This looked like a job involving a great deal of work and very little satisfaction. She thought differently when she had lunched at the Faculty Club with her old friend Simon Darcourt, and had drunk her full share of a bottle of wine.

“I didn’t know you were in on this, Simon,” she said. “That makes a difference, of course.”

“I’m not in it academically, but I’ll have a good deal to say about what goes on,” said Simon. Then he told Penny in extreme confidence—knowing that she was as leaky as a sieve—about the Cornish Foundation, its support for Schnak, and its determination to present Arthur of Britain on the stage. He also told her that any research in which she was involved on the libretto would, of course, be generously rewarded by the Foundation. That made a great deal of difference.

“The problem seems to be that the libretto is very scrappy,” he explained.

“How much have you got?” she asked.

“I’ve taken a quick look, and to be frank there’s virtually nothing,” he said. “What the chances are of digging anything up, I couldn’t even guess. It isn’t going to be easy, Penny.”

“With my flair for research, and the money you’ve got your hands on, much may be achieved,” said Penny, looking owlish. “I’ve taken a look, you know, and it was a quick look, like yours, and there’s really nothing but a few notations in German, written by Hoffmann himself, because he had written quite a lot of music he wanted to use. I assumed that somebody must have some really solid stuff I hadn’t seen. I gather there was some sort of dispute, amounting almost to a row, between Hoffmann and the English librettist.”

“Who was—?”

“None other than the redoubtable James Robinson Planché.”

“Yes, the Dean did mention that name. What was redoubtable about him?”

“Very popular nineteenth-century playwright and librettist. Just about forgotten, now. Though everybody uses a phrase of his: ‘It would have made a cat laugh’, he says in one of his innumerable works. I suppose the opera world knows him, if it knows him at all, as the man who wrote the libretto for the unfortunate Weber’s Oberon, one of the resounding flopperoos of operatic history. Music splendid. Libretto—well, Schnak has a word for it.”

“Shit?”

“Of the most rejectable and excrementitious order.”

“Then why—?”

“I can’t tell you why, and if you didn’t have all that lovely money to throw around I might never find out. But I can, and I will.”

“How?”

“The Cornish Foundation—I see it all now in a vision—is going to pay my expenses to go abroad and find out.”

“Where will you look?”

“Now Simon, you know the research game better than that. Where is for me to know, and for you and Schnak and the Cornish Foundation to find out when and if I get it. But if it’s to be gotten, I’m the girl to get it.”

With that Simon had to be content. He liked Penny. She must have been nearer forty than thirty, but she had charm, and spirit, and in a favourite Rabelaisian phrase of his, she was “a jolly pug and well-mouthed wench”. And beneath all that, she had the steely core of the woman who has scrambled up the academic ladder to a full professorship, so Simon knew that it was useless to press her further.

After lunch, in order to avoid going back to his rooms in Ploughwright, where he would have to face the heap of typescript of his life of the late Francis Cornish—the biography with that disastrous, abysmal gap in the very heart of it—he went to the Club library. He looked with distaste at the table on which were displayed a selection of the less obscure among the innumerable academic quarterlies, dismal publications in which scholars paraded pieces of research that meant all the world to them, but which their colleagues in general found supremely resistible. He ought to look over those that touched on his own subject, he knew, but outside it was spring, and he could not force himself to his scholar’s task. So he strayed to another table, where unscholarly magazines lay, and picked up Vogue. He never read it, but he had hopes, inspired by the wine he had drunk and the cheering companionship of Penny Raven, that it might contain some pictures of women with very few clothes on, or perhaps none at all. He sat down to read.

He did not read. He looked at the advertisements instead. There were young women displayed there, in various stages of undress, but in the fashion of the time they looked so angry, so crazed, so furious, that they gave him little comfort, aroused no pleasing fantasy. Their hair stood on end or was wildly tangled. Their eyes glared or were pinched in squints that hinted at lunacy. But then he came to a picture so sharply contrasted with its neighbours that he looked at it for several minutes, and as he looked something in the back of his mind stirred, moved, was aroused, until he could hardly believe what he saw.

It was not a photograph, but a drawing of the head of a girl, in silver-point, touched here and there with white and red chalk; it was delicately executed but not weak, without any modern flash or challenge. Indeed, it was drawn in the manner, and also in the feeling, of a time at least four centuries before the present. The head was aristocratic, not haughty but modestly confident; the eyes were innocent but not simple-minded; the line of the cheek had neither the pudding-faced nor the lantern-jawed look of the models whose photographs appeared in the other advertisements. It was a face that challenged the viewer, particularly if he were a man, by its self-possession. This is what I am: what are you? it seemed to say. It was by far the most arresting picture in the magazine.

Beneath were a few lines in a clear, beautiful type, but again it was not attenuated or falsely elegant. Darcourt, who knew something about types, recognized it as a modern version of the type-face reputedly based upon the handwriting of a poet, churchman, bibliophile, scholar, humanist, and, in some respects, rascal, Cardinal Pietro Bembo. The message was brief and clear:

Your make-up is not a matter of current fashion. It is the realization of what you are, of that period of history to which your individual style of beauty pertains. What Old Master might have painted you, and seen you truly? We can help you to discover that, and to learn to apply the only cosmetics made to realize the Old Master quality in you. We do not seek the most customers, only the best, and our services and our products are not cheap. That is why they are obtainable only at a few selected shops from our own maquilleuses. What Master are you? We can help you to achieve the distinction that is yours alone.

The advertisement was signed, in an elegant Italic hand, “Amalie”, and below were half a dozen addresses of suppliers.

Glancing around to be sure that nobody saw him doing what was academically unspeakable, Darcourt carefully tore the page out of the magazine and hurried back to his rooms, to write a most important letter.

(3)

THE MEETING BETWEEN the Cornish Foundation and Schnak’s parents took place late in May, in the drawing-room of the penthouse. It had better be done, everyone agreed, though nobody expected anything to come of it. Two months had gone by since the decision to support Schnak in her work to revive and re-flesh and re-clothe Hoffmann’s notes for Arthur of Britain, and the meeting should have taken place earlier, had Arthur not been too much under the weather to do anything. Now, at the end of May, he was mending, but pale and subject to sudden loss of energy.

Arthur and Maria were supported by Darcourt only, for Hollier said he had nothing to contribute to such a meeting, and Geraint Powell was too busy with the forthcoming Festival season in Stratford for anything else to claim his attention. The Schnakenburgs had been asked to come at half past eight and they were prompt.

Schnak’s parents were not the nonentities Dean Wintersen’s description had led Darcourt to expect. Elias Schnakenburg was not very tall, but he was very thin, which made him look tall; he wore a decent grey suit and a dark tie; his grey hair was receding. His expression was solemn and had a distinction Darcourt had not expected; this watch-repair man was a master craftsman and nobody’s servant. His wife was as grey and thin as he; she wore a felt hat that was much too heavy for May weather, and grey cotton gloves.

Arthur explained what the Foundation had in mind, making it clear that they were prepared to back a young woman who was said to have great promise, and whose project appealed to the imagination. They expected that a good deal of money would be spent, and without in any way holding the Schnakenburgs responsible for the outcome, they felt that Hulda’s parents should be aware of what was being done.

“If you don’t hold us responsible, Mr. Cornish, just what do you expect of us?” said the father.

“Your goodwill, really. Your assent to the project. We don’t want to appear to be doing anything over your head.”

“Do you think our assent, or our doubts, would make any difference to Hulda?”

“We don’t know. Presumably she would like to have your encouragement.”

“No. It would mean nothing to her either way.”

“You regard her as an entirely free agent, then?”

“How could we do that? She is our daughter and we have not given up our feeling that we are responsible for her, nor have we stopped loving her very dearly. We think we are her natural protectors, whatever the law may say about it. Her natural protectors until she marries. We have not rejected her. We are made to feel that she has rejected us.” A slight German accent but carefully phrased English.

Mrs. Schnakenburg began to weep silently. Maria hastened to give her a glass of water—why add water to tears? she thought as she did so—and Darcourt decided that he might suitably intervene.

“Dean Wintersen has told us that the feeling between your daughter and yourselves is strained. And you see, of course, that we cannot interfere in that. But we must behave in a proper way, without being parties to any personal disagreement.”

“Very business-like and proper of you, of course, but it isn’t a matter of business. We feel that we have lost our child—our only child—and this arrangement that you intend so kindly can only make that worse.”

“Your daughter is still very young. The breach may not last long. And of course I can assure you that anything Mr. and Mrs. Cornish can do, or I can do, to put things right will be done.”

“Very kind. Very well meant. But you are not the people to do much about it. Hulda has found other advisers. Not of your sort. Not at all.”

“Would it help to tell us about it?” said Maria. She had seated herself by Mrs. Schnakenburg and was holding her hand. The mother did not speak, but her husband, after some sighing, continued.

“We blame ourselves. We want you to understand that. I guess we were too strict, though we didn’t mean it. We are very firm, you see, in our religion. We are very strict Lutherans. That was how Hulda was brought up. We never let her run wild, as so many kids do these days. I blame myself. Her mother was always kind. I wasn’t as understanding as I should have been when she wanted to go to the university.”

“Did you oppose that?” said Darcourt.

“Not entirely. Mind you, I didn’t see what good it could do. I wanted her to do a business course, find a job, be happy, find a good man, get married—kids. You know.”

“You didn’t see her musical gift?”

“Oh, yes. That was clear from when she was little. But she could have done that, too. We paid for lessons until they got too expensive. We’re not rich, you know. We thought she might give her music to the church. Lead a choir and play the organ. There’s always a place for that. But can you build a whole life on it? We didn’t think so.”

“You don’t think of music as a profession? The Dean says she has possibilities as a composer.”

“Well—I know. He told me that, too. But is that the kind of life you want your daughter—your only daughter—to get into? Do you hear much good of it? What kind of people? Undesirables, many of them, from what you hear. Of course the Dean seems to be a good man. But he’s a teacher, eh? Something solid. I tried to put my foot down, but it looks like the time for parents putting their feet down has gone.”

This was a familiar story to Darcourt. “So you have a rebellious daughter, is that it? But don’t all children rebel? They must—”

“Why must they?” said Schnakenburg, and for the first time there was a note of combat in his voice.

“To find themselves. Love can be rather stifling, don’t you agree?”

“Is the love of God stifling? Not to a truly Christian spirit.”

“I meant the love of parents. Even the kindest, most well-meaning parents.”

“The love of parents is the love of God manifesting itself in the life of their child. We prayed with her. We called on God to give her a contrite heart.”

“Yes. And what happened?”

After a silence: “I can’t tell you. I wouldn’t repeat the things she said. I don’t know where she picked up such language. Or—yes, I do know; you hear it everywhere nowadays. But I would have thought a girl brought up as she was would have deafened her ears to such filth.”

“And she left home?”

“Walked out in what she stood up in, after a few months I wouldn’t go through again for any money. Have any of you people any children?”

Shaking of heads.

“Then you can’t know what Mother and I went through. We never hear from her. But of course we hear about her, because I make inquiries. She’s done well in the university, I grant you. But what has the cost been? We see her, sometimes, when we take care she doesn’t see us, and my heart is sore to see her.—I’m afraid she’s fallen.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well—what would I mean? I’m afraid she’s living an immoral life. Where else would she get money?”

“Students do get jobs, you know. They do earn money, quite legitimately. I know scores of students who finance their own studies doing jobs that only a young, strong person could do, and keep up a program of studies at the same time. They are a very honourable group, Mr. Schnakenburg.”

“You’ve seen her. Who would give her a job, looking the way she does?”

“She’s as thin as a rake,” said Mrs. Schnakenburg. It was her only contribution to the conversation.

“Do you really hate the idea of us giving her this chance?” said Maria.

“To be frank with you, Mrs. Cornish—yes, we do. But what can we say? She’s not a minor, according to law. We’re poor people and you’re rich people. You have no children, so you can’t know the pain of children. I hope for your sake it will always be so. You have ideas about all this music and art and other stuff that we don’t have and don’t want. We can’t fight you. The world would say we were standing in Hulda’s way. But the world doesn’t come first with us. There’s other things to be thought of. We’re beaten. Don’t think we don’t know it.”

“We certainly don’t want you to think that you are beaten or that we have beaten you,” said Arthur. “I wish you would try to see things a little more our way. We sincerely want to give your daughter the chance her talents entitle her to.”

“I know you mean kindly. When I say we’re beaten I guess I mean we’re beaten for the present. But we’ve given Hulda something too, you know. We’ve given her the source of all real strength. And we pray—we pray every night, for as much as an hour, sometimes—that she will come back to that before it’s too late. God’s mercy is infinite, but if you kick Him in the face enough, He can be pretty stern. We’ll bring our girl back to God if prayer can do it.”

“You don’t despair, then,” said Maria.

“Certainly not. Despair is one of the worst sins. It questions God’s intentions and His power. We don’t despair. But we are human, and weak. We can’t help being hurt.”

That was that. After a few more exchanges in which Schnakenburg yielded nothing, while remaining perfectly polite, the couple left.

There was heavy silence in the room. Arthur and Maria seemed greatly put down, but Darcourt was in good spirits. He went to the bar-cupboard in the corner and set to work to make the drinks they had not thought it polite to have while the Schnakenburgs, obviously dry types, were present. As he poured, he sang under his breath:

Tell me the old, old story

Of unseen things above,

Of Jesus and His glory

Of Jesus and His love.

“Simon, don’t be facetious,” said Maria.

“I’m only trying to cheer you up. Why are you so down in the mouth?”

“Those two have made me feel absolutely rotten,” said Arthur. “The unfeeling, fancy-pants rich man, childless and obsessed with vanities, steals away the jewel of their lives.”

“She stole herself away long before you heard of her,” said Darcourt.

“You know what I mean. The overbearingness of the rich and privileged.”

“Arthur, you are not well. You are open to subtle psychological attack. And that’s what you’ve had. That man Schnakenburg knows every trick in the book to make people feel rotten who don’t share his attitude toward life. It’s an underdog’s revenge. You are not supposed to kick the underdog, but it’s perfectly okay for the underdog to bite you. One of the insoluble injustices of society. Pay no heed. Just go right on as before.”

“I’m surprised at you, Simon. That man was talking from the depths of a profound religious feeling. We don’t share it, but we must in decency respect it.”

“Look, Arthur. I’m the expert on religion here. Don’t bother your head about it.”

“You are a High Church ritualist, and you despise their simplicity. I didn’t think you were such a snob, Simon.” Maria spoke angrily.

“In your heart you are still a superstitious Gypsy girl, and when anybody talks about God you go all of a doodah. I don’t despise anybody’s simplicity. But I know when a pretence of simplicity is a clever play for power.”

“What power has that man?” said Arthur.

“Obviously the power to make you feel rotten,” said Darcourt.

“You’re unjust, Simon,” said Maria; “he talked with such certainty and trust about God. It made me feel like a frivolous ninny.”

“Look, children—listen to old Abbé Darcourt and stop hating yourselves. I’ve listened to hundreds of people like that. They have certainty and depth of belief but they buy it at the price of a joyless, know-nothing attitude toward life. All they ask of God is a kind of spiritual Minimum Wage and in return they are ready to give up the sweets of life—which God also made, let me remind you. I call believers like that the Friends of the Minimum. God, who is an incorrigible joker, has landed them with a daughter who wants to join the Friends of the Maximum, and you can help her. Her parents’ faith is like a little candle, burning in the night; your Cornish Foundation is, let’s say for the sake of modesty, a forty-watt bulb which may light her to a better life. Don’t switch off the forty-watt bulb because the candle looks so pitiably weak. Schnak is in a mess. Indeed, Schnak looks like a mess, and is an odious little creature. But the only path for Schnak is forward, not backward toward a good job, a nice husband like Daddy, and kids born in the same chains. Father Schnakenburg is very tough. You’ve got to be tough, too.”

“I didn’t know you were a stoic, Simon,” said Arthur.

“I’m not a stoic. I’m that very unfashionable thing, an optimist. Give Schnak her chance.”

“Of course we will. We must, now. We’re committed to it. But I don’t like feeling that I’m trampling on the weak.”

“Oh, Arthur! You sentimental mutt! Can’t you see that being trampled on is victuals and drink to Schnakenburg? In the great electoral contest of life he is running for martyr, and you are helping him. He has his depth and certainty of belief. Where’s yours? You are running for the satisfaction of being a great patron. That’s a reasonable cause for certainty and belief. What ails you?”

“I suppose it’s money,” said Maria.

“Of course it is! You people both have the guilt that our society demands of the rich. Don’t give in to it! Show ’em that money can do fine things.”

“By God, I believe you really are an optimist,” said Arthur.

“Well, that’s a start. Join me in my optimism and in time you may believe a few other things that I believe, which I never mention to you, because one thing I have learned in my work as a priest is that preaching to the poor is easy work compared with preaching to the rich. They have so much guilt, and they are so bloody pig-headed.”

“We’re not pig-headed! We are the ones who feel for the Schnakenburgs. You, the Abbé Darcourt, are sneering at them and urging us to sneer. You Anglican! You ritualist! You pompous professorial poop! You disgust me!”

“That is not argument. That is vulgar abuse, for which I will not even stoop to forgive you. I’ve played a part in the sort of scene we have just gone through more times than you can imagine. The jealousy of the humble parents for the gifted child! Old, stale goods, to me. The hitting below the belt because somebody has a bigger bank account than you, and must therefore be a moral inferior! The favourite weapon of the self-righteous poor. The use of a mean form of religion to gain a status denied to the unbeliever: they tell you the Old, Old Story, and expect you to cave in. And you do. Real religion, my friends, is evolutionary and revolutionary and that’s what your Cornish Foundation had better be or it will be nothing.”

“You could have been a popular preacher, Simon,” said Maria.

“I’ve never fancied that sort of work; it inflates the ego and can lead to ruin.”

“You’ve made me feel rather better. I don’t know about Arthur.”

“You’re a good friend, Simon,” said Arthur. “I’m sorry I was nasty to you. I withdraw pompous and even poop. But you are professorial. Let’s forget the Schnakenburgs, in so far as we can. Are you making any headway with that book about Uncle Frank?”

“At last I think I am. I think I may be on to something.”

“Good. We want to see the book published, you know. I joke about it, but you understand. We trust you, Simon.”

“Thanks. I’m going ahead. By the way, you won’t see me for a week or so. I’m going hunting.”

“You can’t. It’s out of season.”

“Not for what I’m hunting. The season has just begun.”

Darcourt finished his drink, and departed, singing as he left the room,

Tell me the old, old story,

Tell me the old, old story,

Tell me the old, old story

Of Jesus and His love.

But the tone of his voice was ironic.

“A really good friend, the old Abbé,” said Arthur.

“I love him.”

“Platonically, I hope.”

“Of course. Can you doubt it?”

“In love I can doubt anything. I never take you for granted.”

“You could, you know.”

“By the way, you never told me what Mamusia told Simon while I was in hospital.”

“Just that we’ll all get our lumps, really.”

“I think I’ve had my lumps for a while. My mumps-lumps. But I’m coming round, at last. I think I’ll sleep in your bed tonight.”

“Arthur—I’d love that. But is it wise?”

“Darcourt’s doctrine of optimism. Let’s give it a go.”

And they did.

(4)

THE ROOM IN THE APARTMENT on Park Avenue was splendid beyond anything Darcourt had ever experienced. It was the work of a brilliant decorator—so brilliant that he had been able to make a room of modest size in a New York apartment building seem authentically to be a room in a great house, perhaps a minor palace, in Europe. The grisaille panelling had certainly come from a palace but had been adjusted, pieced out, and trimmed so that it gave no hint that it had ever been anywhere else. The furniture was elegant, but comfortable in a way palace furniture never is, and enough of it was modern to allow people to sit on it without the uneasiness demanded by a valuable antique. There were pictures on the walls the decorator had not chosen, for they spoke of a coherent and personal taste, and some were rather ugly; but the decorator had hung them to greatest advantage. There were tables loaded with bibelots and bijouteries—what the decorator called “classy junk”—but it was classy junk that belonged to the owner of the room. Photographs in sepia colouring stood on a bonheur du jour; they were in frames decorated with coats of arms and crests that obviously belonged to the people whose likenesses were fading inside them. A beautiful but not foolish desk marked the room as a place of business. An elegantly uniformed maidservant had seated Darcourt, saying that the Princess would be with him in a few minutes.

She came in very quietly. A lady who might be in her fifties, but who looked much younger; a lady of great, but not professional, beauty; by far the most elegant lady Darcourt had ever encountered.

“I hope you have not been waiting long, Professor Darcourt. I was detained by a tedious telephone call.” The voice gentle, and hinting at merriment. The accent of someone who spoke English perfectly, as though instructed by an English governess, but with a hint of some underlying cradle tongue. French, perhaps? German? Darcourt could not tell.

“It is good of you to come to see me. Your letter was very interesting. You wanted to ask about the drawing?”

“If I may, Princess. It is Princess, isn’t it? The drawing caught my eye in a magazine. As of course it was intended to.”

“I am so glad to hear you say that. Of course it was meant to attract attention. You wouldn’t believe the trouble I had persuading the advertising people that it would do so. They are so very conventional, don’t you think? Oh, who is going to look at such an old-fashioned picture? they said. Everybody whose eye is wearied by the gaudy, pushy girls in the other advertisements, I said. But that is the way things are being done this year, they said. But what I am advertising is not just of this year, I said. It is meant to be more lasting. It is meant to appeal to people whose lives are not just fixed in this year, I said. I couldn’t persuade them. I had to insist.”

“And now they admit that you were right?”

“And now they are convinced it was their idea all the time. You do not know advertising men, Professor.”

“No, but I know people. I can quite believe what you tell me. Of course they have recognized the subject?”

“The head of a girl, early-seventeenth-century style? Yes, they know that.”

“They have not recognized the girl?”

“How would they?”

“By using the eyes in their heads. I knew the girl as soon as you came into this room, Princess.”

“Did you, indeed? You have a very keen eye. Possibly she was an ancestress of mine. The drawing is a family possession”

“May I come directly to the point, Princess? I have seen preparatory studies for that drawing.”

“Have you really? Where, may I ask?”

“Among the possessions of a friend of mine, who was a gifted artist—particularly gifted in assuming the styles of earlier ages. He made countless drawings, copies from collections of such things; others from life, I should imagine, from the notations he made on the studies. There are five studies for the head which resulted in the picture you own, and which you have made public in your advertisements.”

“Where are these drawings at present?”

“In the National Gallery of Canada. My friend left them all his drawings and pictures.”

“Has anybody but yourself observed this astonishing resemblance?”

“Not yet. You know how galleries are. They have masses of things they have not catalogued. I saw the drawings when I was preparing my friend’s things for transfer to the Gallery. I was his executor in such matters. It could be years before those particular studies are given any careful scrutiny.”

“What was the name of this artist?”

“Francis Cornish.”

The Princess, who had seemed amused during all their conversation, burst into laughter.

“Le beau ténébreux!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That was what my governess and I called him. He taught me trigonometry. He was so handsome and solemn and proper, and I was longing for him to throw down his pencil and seize me in his strong arms and rain kisses on my burning lips and cry Fly with me! I shall take you to my ruined castle in the mountains and there we shall love, and love, and love until the stars bend down to marvel at us! I was fifteen at the time. Le beau ténébreux! What became of him?”

“He died about two years ago. As I say, I was one of his executors.”

“Had he some profession?”

“He was a collector and connoisseur. He was very rich.”

“So he had retired?”

“No indeed; he was quite active as a connoisseur.”

“I meant from his work.”

“His work?”

“I see you did not know of his work.”

“To what work do you refer? He had studied painting, I know.”

The Princess went off into another peal of laughter.

“I don’t think I understand you, Princess.”

“Forgive me. I was just thinking about le beau ténébreux and his studies in painting. But that was not his real work, you know.”

Darcourt glowed with delight; here it was, at last! What had Francis Cornish been up to during those years of which he had no record? The Princess knew. Now was the time to spill the beans.

“I am hopeful that you are going to tell me what his real work was. Because I have undertaken to write a life of my old friend, and there is a long period from about 1937 until 1945, when he became active with the commission that was sorting out all that mass of pictures and sculptures that had gone astray during the war, about which information was very scant. Anything that you can tell me about that time in his life would be most helpful. This portrait of yourself, for instance; it suggests that you knew him on terms that go a little beyond being a tutor in trigonometry.”

“You think so?”

“I know a little about pictures. That drawing was made with unmistakable affection for the subject.”

“Oh, Professor Darcourt! I am afraid you are a dreadful flatterer!”

So I am, thought Darcourt, and I hope it works with this vain woman. But the vain woman was going on.

“Nevertheless, I think it is ungallant of you to suggest that I can remember 1937 at all, not to speak of studying trigonometry at that time. I had hoped that my looks did not betray so much.”

Damn, thought Darcourt; she must be in her middle sixties; I’ve put my foot in it. Never was good at figures.

“I assure you, Princess, that nothing of the sort entered my head.”

“You are still too young yourself, Professor, to know what time means to women. We take refuge in many helpful things. My line of cosmetics, for instance.”

“Ah, yes: I wish you every success.”

“How can you say that, when you mean to expose my very special mark of excellence, my seventeenth-century drawing, as a fake? And yet I suppose you must do it, if your book about le beau ténébreux is to be honest and complete.”

“It cannot be honest and complete unless you will tell me what you know about Francis Cornish during those years for which I have no records. And I assure you I never thought of saying anything about your drawing.”

“If you don’t, somebody else will. It could be ruinous. The cosmetic business is quite sufficiently ambiguous, without any associations of art faking creeping in.”

“No, no; I would never mention it.”

“So long as these preliminary sketches are in your National Gallery collection, there is very great danger.”

“That is unfortunate, of course.”

“Professor Darcourt”—the Princess was flirting with him—“if you had known what you know now, about my drawing and the use I am making of it, would you have sent those five sketches to your National Gallery?”

“If I had thought that you held the key to the most interesting part of Francis Cornish’s life, I doubt very much if I would have done so.”

“And now they are utterly irretrievable?”

“You see how it is. They are government property. They belong to the Canadian nation.”

“Do you suppose the Canadian nation is ever going to attach much importance to them? Can you see queues of Indians and Eskimos, and Newfoundland fishermen, and wheat-growers, standing patiently in line to look at those drawings?”

“I am afraid I do not follow you.”

“If I had those drawings in my own hands, I could tell you things about Francis Cornish that would be the making of your book. They would inspire and refresh my memory.”

“And if you do not get them into your own hands, Princess?”

“No deal, Professor Darcourt.”

(5)

THE CORNISH FOUNDATION was assembled in full palaver. The five members sat at the Round Table, upon which was the Platter of Plenty, heaped high with the fruits of late August. Dusty purple grapes hung from the various bowls of the wondrous epergne; for once, thought Maria, the damned thing looks beautiful even to my eye.

People who live in beautiful surroundings grow accustomed to them, and even indifferent to them. Neither Maria nor the other four members of the Cornish Foundation gave much attention to the room in which they sat at the Round Table. It was a very high room, and had what the architect had called a “cathedral roof” which, in the fading light of day, seemed higher and duskier than it was; below it was a row of small clerestory windows through which the green-blue sky and the first stars could be seen; on the walls below hung Arthur’s fine pictures, which were his own choosing, for the late Francis Cornish, who had enough good pictures to outfit a small museum, had left him none. There was a piano, but there was so much space that it did not dominate, as pianos sometimes do. Indeed, there was not much furniture in the room. Arthur liked space, and Maria gloried in uncluttered space, having been brought up in the more than cluttered house of her parents, even before Mamusia had reverted to Gypsydom, and established the midden in the basement beneath all this beauty. The foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart was what Darcourt had once called the Gypsy camp, and Maria had been angry with him, because it was so true.

The Foundation sat at the Round Table in candlelight, assisted by some discreet lighting under a cornice. A stranger coming suddenly into the room would have been struck and perhaps awed by its look of wealth and privilege and the elegant quietness which is one of the avails of wealth and privilege. Such a stranger was Professor Penelope Raven; she was impressed, and determined not to show it.

Expectation was high, and even Hollier had returned early from one of his expeditions to Transylvania, where he rooted for what he called cultural fossils. How handsome he is, thought Maria, and how unfairly his good looks lend weight to whatever he says; Simon isn’t in the least handsome, but he does far more for the Foundation than Hollier. Arthur is handsome, but not in the distinguished mode of Hollier; yet Arthur can set wheels to turning and kettles to boiling in a way quite out of Hollier’s range. I suppose I am as beautiful, for a woman, as Hollier is for a man, and I know just how little beauty adds up to, when things have to be done.

About the fifth member of the Foundation, Geraint Powell, Maria thought nothing at all. She did not like Powell, or the challenging way Powell looked at her; he was handsome in an actorly style—lots of wavy dark hair, rocking-horse nostrils, a large mobile mouth—and like many good actors he was better not examined at too close range. If the Cornish Foundation should ever be presented on the stage, thought Maria, Geraint Powell would be cast for the role of Clement Hollier; his overstated good looks would carry to the back of the theatre, as Hollier’s fine good looks would not.

They were all present, and eager, because Professor Penelope Raven had returned triumphant from her search abroad for the libretto to Arthur of Britain, and was on hand to tell what she had found.

“I’ve got it,” she said; “and, as this kind of research goes, it wasn’t too hard to find. It’s always like The Hunting of the Snark, you know; at the very last moment your Snark may turn out to be a Boojum. I guessed it would be in the British Museum library, among the theatre stuff, but as I expect you know, finding things there—if they are as obscure as this—depends a lot on research skill, and a nose for oddities, and sheer baldheaded luck. Of course I traipsed through the opera archives and libraries in Bamberg, Dresden, Leipzig, and Berlin—and I didn’t find a thing. Not a sausage. Lots of stuff about Hoffmann but nothing about this opera. I had to be thorough or I would have been wasting your money. But I had a hunch that London was where it would be.”

“Because of this man Planché,” said Arthur.

“No. Not Planché. I was on the track of Charles Kemble. Now I’m going to have to lecture you a bit, I’m afraid. Kemble was a member of the famous theatrical family; you’ll all have heard of Mrs. Siddons, who was his sister and the greatest actress of her time; you’ve seen Reynolds’ picture of her as the Tragic Muse. Charles Kemble was manager and lessee of Covent Garden Theatre from 1817 till 1823, and in spite of a lot of marvellous successes, he was always in trouble about money. Not his fault, really. It was the theatre economics of the time. The owners of the theatre demanded an immense yearly rental, and even a successful manager was often in hot water.

“Charles adored opera. He was always encouraging composers to write new ones. He was really an awfully nice man, and he encouraged anybody who had talent. He had his eye on our man, James Robinson Planché, because Planché could deliver the goods; he was a first-rate theatre man, and working with him meant success. Kemble had heard about Hoffmann—all the Kembles were awfully well educated, which wasn’t at all the usual thing among theatre people then—and I suppose he read German, or had seen something of Hoffmann’s in Germany. He persuaded Hoffmann to write him an opera, and insisted that Planché, who was still under thirty and obviously started on a successful career, should provide the libretto.

“So—the work was begun, and there was some correspondence between Planché and Hoffmann, which is lost, I fear; poor old Hoffmann was in bad health, and died before anything much came of it. And Hoffmann and Planché fought like cat and dog in the very polite epistolary fashion of the time, so I imagine Planché was relieved when the whole affair came to nothing. As it turned out he wrote a little thing to replace it, called Maid Marian, with music by a clever hack called Bishop.

“The story, so far as I could dig it up, was in Charles Kemble’s papers in the B.M. Want to hear it?”

“Yes, we certainly do,” said Arthur. “But first, can you reassure us that there actually is a libretto, of some sort, for this opera?”

“Oh there is. Yes indeed there is, and I have transcripts of it right here. But I think it would all come clearer if I read you some of the exchange between Planché and Kemble.”

“Fire away,” said Arthur.

“This is the first letter to Kemble that I found.

My dear Kemble:

I have exchanged letters with Herr Hoffmann, and it would appear that we are working at cross purposes, as he has only a very imperfect notion of the English theatre as it pertains to opera. But I am confident that we shall arrive at an agreement when I have explained the facts of the situation to him. We correspond, by the way, in French, and I may say that his command of that language may be at the root of certain of our differences, for he is far from perfect.

As you know, I like to work quickly, and having much on my hands at the moment I wrote to Hoffmann as soon as I heard from you that he would prepare the music for a piece for the approaching Covent Garden season. I outlined a plan I have had in my mind for some time for a fairy piece which might as well be attached to King Arthur as to any other popular hero. In brief, it is this: King Arthur and his companions, wearying of the pleasures of the chase, hit upon the capital notion of establishing a Round Table with a view to raising the level of chivalry in England, which has been the source of some complaint from Queen Guenevere. (Opportunity here for a duet of a comic nature between Arthur and his Queen, who thinks herself ill-used.) Arthur knows how to deal with that, so he calls upon his enchanter, Merlin, to transfer his Court tous sans exception to the Kingdom of the Grand Turk, to see how ladies are treated there, and Merlin calls upon the Fairy Court, led by King Oberon and Queen Titania, to effect this change. But the fairy rulers are at odds, as are Arthur and Guenevere, and refuse their office. (Opportunity for a fairy ballet, which is agreed by everyone at present to be a sure card, and very pretty.) Merlin seeks assistance from Pigwiggen, the only one of Arthur’s knights who is also a fairy, and they unite their enchantments to move the British Court to Turkestan. Lively end to Act One.

Turkestan is the scene of the second act, and provides opportunities which I am sure the excellent Mr. Grieve will seize upon for scenic display of a lavish and very striking order. We involve the Grand Turk, who lays siege to Queen Guenevere, arousing the jealousy of Arthur. (Great opportunity here for mischief by Pigwiggen.) To Arthur’s dismay his principal Knight, Sir Lancelot, falls in love with the Queen, and he and Arthur quarrel and nothing will settle their difference but a duel. More business for Pigwiggen, who knows that Elaine, the Lily Maid, loves Lancelot and he has encouraged her. Must get Elaine onstage in Act One. The Grand Turk will have no duelling in his kingdom and, by an opportune stroke of chance, Oberon and Titania appear, having resolved their dispute, and transport the whole Round Table back to Britain. I thought of a scene here in which the Fairy Court, all carrying tapers, lead the English away from Turkestan, climbing a mountain in darkness. (You are aware that Covent Garden has such a mountain among its scenes in store, which was used in Barbarossa three seasons ago, and could be easily refurbished to repeat the great effect it made then.) Strong conclusion to Act Two.

Act Three is again in Britain, and the duel between Arthur and Lancelot is in preparation, but first we present a Grand Parade of the Seven Champions—all played by ladies, of course—with plenty of amusing valour for St. Denis of France and St. Iago of Spain; it might be stylish if St. Anthony of Italy sang in Italian, Denis in French, and Iago in Spanish. Follow this with comical songs in characteristic dialect for St. Patrick of Ireland and St. David of Wales and St. Andrew of Scotland, with perhaps a mock combat between the three British Champions which is resolved by St. George of England, who subdues all three. Under the stewardship of St. George—a parade of Heralds at this point and a great show of heraldry, which looks splendid and costs little—Arthur and Lancelot prepare to fight—real horses, don’t you think? Horses never fail with an English audience—which is halted by the appearance of Elaine, the Lily Maid of Astolat, who enters floating down a river in a skiff, apparently dead, a scroll in her hand proclaiming her to be a petite amie of Lancelot’s whom he has jilted. Accused by Guenevere, Lancelot admits his guilt, and Elaine leaps from her bier and claims him for her own. Reconciliation of Arthur and Guenevere, assisted by Merlin and Pigwiggen, and St. George declares the triumph of chivalry and the Round Table. Grand patriotic conclusion.

I do not need to explain to you, my dear Sir, who know the resources of your theatre so well, that I have prepared this plan with singers in mind who are at once available, with the exception of Madame Catalani, who is willing to come out of retirement, and could be tempted with the role of Guenevere if opportunities for her splendid coloratura were plentifully supplied, which presents no difficulty. If Hoffmann proved not up to it our friend Bishop could write something in his usual florid style. Otherwise, who but Braham for Arthur, Duruset for Lancelot, Miss Cause for Elaine, Keeley as Merlin (his voice is gone but I conceive of Merlin as a minor comic figure), Madame Vestris as Pigwiggen—with a costume which would give ample play for her magnificent limbs? Wrench would do very well as Oberon as he can dance, as can Miss Paton, who would be sufficiently petite, despite her growing embonpoint, for Titania. I see Augustus Burroughs as a fine St. George. Neat, do you not agree?

Now there, I should certainly think, we have a splendid opera fitted, and chances innumerable for the fantasy and grotesquerie which you assure me are Herr Hoffmann’s spécialités de la maison. But no. Oh, no!

Our German friend replies with many compliments in very stiff French—honoured to be collaborating with me, conscious of the éclat deriving from association with Covent Garden, etc. etc.—and then he goes on to read me a truly German lecture about opera. As he sees it, the day of the sort of opera I propose—he actually spoke of it as ‘a delightful Christmas piece for children’!—is over, and something musically more ambitious is at hand. There are not to be single numbers, or songs, for the characters, with dialogue to link them together, but a continuous flow of music, the arias being joined by recitativo stromentato—so that, in effect, the orchestra never gets any rest at all, but saws and blows away all evening! And the music should be dramatic, rather than occasions for vocal display by specially gifted singers—‘performers on that seriously overrated instrument, the human neck’ he calls them (and what would Madame Cat make of that, if she heard it?)—and every character should have a musical ‘motto’, by which he means a phrase or instrumental flourish that signifies that character alone, and can be presented in different ways according to the spirit of the action. He declares this would make a very striking effect and signal a new mode of opera composition! As it certainly would, and empty the theatre, I am sure!

Very well. Music is his business, I suppose, though I am myself not wholly ignorant of that science, as I have shown before this. But when he laughs at my notion for the dramatic part of the piece, I think I have some cause to speak plainly. He wants to go right back to the original Arthurian tales, and dramatize them ‘seriously’ he says, and not in a spirit of ‘un bal travesti’—I suppose that is a hit at my Seven Champions being represented by ladies, which I am certain would go down well, as ladies in armour are, I may say, the rage at present—partly because of legs, of course, but what of that? Spangled tights for each Champion, in the colours of the nation represented, would create a very fine effect, and give pleasure to that part of the audience which is not intensely musical. The opera house is not, and never has been, a nunnery. He speaks of the ‘ambience Celtique’ of the Arthurian legend, not understanding, apparently, that the Arthurian tales have long been—by conquest, I suppose—the property of England, and therefore of her national opera house.

But do not discompose yourself, my dear friend. I am writing a reply that will explain some things to Herr Hoffmann which he clearly does not know, and we shall proceed very amicably, I am confident, once I have done so.

I have the honour to subscribe myself,

Yours very sincerely,

JAMES ROBINSON PLANCHÉ.”

April 18, 1822

“My God,” said Arthur; “I foresee trouble.”

“Don’t worry,” said Geraint. “This is all familiar stuff to me. Theatre people go on like that all the time. It’s what’s called the creative ferment from which all great art emerges. At least that’s what it’s called when you are being nice about it. There’s more, I suppose?”

“Lots more,” said Penny. “Wait till you hear Letter Number Two.

My dear Kemble:

When I had conquered my understandable chagrin—for I make it a principle never to speak or write in anger—I wrote again to our friend Hoffmann, in what the Bard calls a ‘condoling’ manner, repeating my principal points and supporting them with some passages of verse which I put forward as the sort of thing we might use in the opera. For instance, I proposed a Hunting Chorus as a beginning. Something spirited, and with plenty of brass in the orchestration, along these lines:

We all went out a-hunting

The break of day before,

In hopes to stop the grunting

Of a most enormous boar!

But he made it soon appear

We’d got the wrong pig by the ear,

Till our Fairy Knight

To our delight

In his spare rib poked a spear!

—this to be followed by a thigh-slapping song for Pigwiggen (Madame Vestris, did I say?) about the hunting of the boar (with some double entendre on ‘boar’ and ‘bore’) and the Huntsmen to sing the chorus again.

I want the fairy element to be very strong, and Pigwiggen’s power to be deft and quick, like Puck’s, in contrast to the heavier comic magic of Merlin. Perhaps a song here? Pigwiggen should appeal to both the ladies and the gentlemen in the audience—to the former as a charming boy, and to the latter as a charming girl in boy’s dress—a trick the Bard knew so well. I suggested to Herr H. that Pigwiggen’s song might be along these lines:

The Fairy laughs at the wisest man

There’s none can do as the Fairy can;

Never knew a pretty girl in my life

But wished she was a Fairy’s wife.”

“That could get a very bad laugh in a modern opera,” said Darcourt. “I don’t mean to interrupt, Penny, but nowadays all fairy business has to be handled very carefully.”

“Just you wait, my boy,” said Penny, and went on with the letter.

The love scenes between Lancelot and Guenevere provide the chief romantic interest in the opera, and I sketched out a duet for Hoffmann to think about. I am not a composer—though no stranger to music, as I have said—but I think this might bring out something really fine in a man who is a composer, as we have reason to believe Hoffmann is. Lancelot sings under Guenevere’s window:

The moon is up, the stars shine bright

O’er the silent sea;

And my lady love, beneath their light

Has waited long for me.

O, sweet the song and the lute may sound

To the lover’s listening ear:

But wilder and faster his pulse will bound

At the voice of his lady dear.

Then come with me where the stars shine bright

O’er the silent sea:

O, my lady love, beneath their light

I wait alone for thee.”

“I wonder if I might trouble you for a drop more whisky?” said Hollier to Arthur in an undertone.

“Indeed you may. Much more of this and I shall want a very big one myself,” said Arthur, and circulated the decanter. Darcourt and Powell seemed to need it, as well.

“I must say a word for Planché,” said Penny; “no libretto reads well. But listen to what Guenevere replies, from her balcony window:

A latent feeling wakes

Within my breast

Some strange regard that breaks

Its wonted rest.

Let me resist, in heart,

However weak

What love with so much art

Can speak.

And then I suppose he means to follow with a love scene in prose, Lancelot mooning under Guenevere’s window.”

“Oh, not mooning, I hope,” said Powell. “First fairy knights, and then mooning ladies. You’ll have the show closed by the police.”

“No coarse jibes, if you please,” said Penny. “Not all the love songs are so sentimental. Listen to what the Grand Turk sings, when the Round Table party arrives in his court. He is immediately smitten by Guenevere and here he goes:

Though I’ve pondered on Peris and Houris,

The stars of Arabian Nights,

This fair Pagan more beautiful sure is

Than any such false Harem Lights;

No gazelle! no gazelle! no gazelle!

Has such eyes as of me took the measure!

She’s a belle! she’s a belle! she’s a belle!

I could ring with the greatest of pleasure!”

“Penny, are you offering this seriously?” said Maria.

“Planché was certainly offering it seriously—and confidently. He knew his market. I assure you this is in the real early-nineteenth-century vein, and people loved just this sort of thing. It was the Regency, you know, or as near as makes no difference. They whistled and sang and barrel-organed and played Grand Paraphrases de Concert of stuff like this on their lovely varnished pianofortes,” said Penny. “It was a time when they used to do Mozart with a lot of his music cut out, and jolly new bits by Bishop interpolated. It was before opera went all serious and sacred and had to be listened to in a holy hush. They just thought it was fun, and they treated it rough.”

“What was Hoffmann’s response to this muck?” said Hollier.

“Oh, muck’s a bit strong, don’t you think?” said Penny.

“It’s so God-damned jocose,” said Arthur.

“He seems to be patronizing the past, which I can’t bear,” said Maria. “He treats Arthur and his knights as if they had no dignity whatever.”

“Oh, very true. Very true,” said Penny. “But do we do any better, with our Camelots and Monty Pythons and such? Pretending your great-great-infinitely-great-grandfather was a fool has always appealed to the theatrical mind. Sometimes I think there ought to be a Charter of Rights for the Dead. But you’re quite right; it is jocose. Listen to this, for Elaine to sing to Lancelot when he gives her the mitt:

On some fine summer morning

If I must hope give o’er,

You’ll find, I give you warning,

My death laid at your door.

And if at your bedside leering

Some night a ghost you spy,

Don’t be surprised at hearing

’Tis I, ’tis I, ’tis I!”

“She sounds very like Miss Bailey—unfortunate Miss Bailey,” said Arthur.

“What about the grand patriotic conclusion?” said Darcourt.

“Let’s see—where is it? Yes:

From cottage and hall

To drive sorrow away,

Which in both may befall

On some bright happy day

Reign again over me, reign again over thee,

The good king we shall see!

Oh! long live the king!”

“That doesn’t even make sense,” said Hollier.

“It’s patriotism—doesn’t have to,” said Penny.

“But is this what Hoffmann set to music?” said Hollier.

“No, he didn’t. There is a final letter which seems to put an end to the whole business. Listen:

My dear Kemble:

I wish I had better news for you from our friend Hoffmann. As you know, I sent him some sketches for several songs for the Arthur piece, with the usual librettist’s assurances that I would alter them in any way he felt necessary, to fit music he had composed. And of course that I would write additional verses for theatrical situations we agreed on, and when everything else was finished, I would pull it all together with passages of dialogue. But as you see he keeps nagging away at his idée fixe. I felt that any differences there were between us were a matter of language; I do not know how well he understands English. However, he has chosen to reply to me in English, and I enclose his letter—

Honoured Sir:

In order that I may make myself as plain as possible I am writing this in German, to be translated by my esteemed friend and colleague Schauspieldirektor Ludwig Devrient, into English, of which I have myself only the most imperfect knowledge. Not so impefect, however, that I cannot seize the spirit of your beautiful verses, and declare them to be utterly unsuited to the opera I have in mind.

It has been my happiness during my life to see great changes in music, and many musicians have been so generous as to say that I have been not unhelpful in bringing such changes about. For as you doubtless do not know, I have written a great deal of musical criticism and have been happy in the commendation of the eminent Beethoven, to say nothing of the friendship of Schumann and Weber. It was Beethoven’s regret that he had at last completed his Fidelio as an opera with spoken dialogue—a Singspiel as we call it. Since the completion of my last opera, Undine, of which Weber was so generous as to speak in the highest terms, I have thought much about the nature of opera, and now—when I assure you time is running out with me, for reasons I shall not elaborate here —I greatly wish either to write the opera of my dreams, or to write no opera at all. And, distinguished Sir, though I am sorry to speak so bluntly, your proposed libretto is no opera at all, for any purpose known to me.

When I speak of the opera of my dreams, it is no forced elegance of words, I assure you, but the expression of what I believe music to be, and to be capable of expressing. For is not music a language? And of what is it the language? Is it not the language of the dream world, the world beyond thought, beyond the languages of Mankind? Music strives to speak to Mankind in the only possible language of this unseen world. In your letters you stress again and again the necessity to reach an audience, to achieve a success. But what kind of success? I am now at a point in my life—an ending, I fear—when such success has no charms for me. I have not long to speak and I can only be content to speak truth.

I beg you to be so good as to reconsider. Let us not prepare another Singspiel, full of drolleries and elfin persons, but an opera in the manner of the future, with music throughout, the arias being linked by dialogue sung to an orchestral accompaniment and not simply to the few notes from the harpsichord, to keep the singer in tune. And, O my very dear Sir, let us be serious about la Matière de Bretagne and not present King Arthur as a Jack Pudding.

No, I see the drama as springing from King Arthur’s recognition of the noble love of Lancelot for Guenevere, and the great pain with which he accepts that love. You have all that anyone could need in your English romance Le Morte d’Arthur. Draw upon that, I beg you. Let us have that great love, and also the sorrow with which Lancelot knows that he is betraying his friend and king, and Lancelot’s madness born of remorse. Let us make an opera about three people of the highest nobility, and let us make Arthur’s forgiveness and understanding love for his Queen and his friend the culminating point of the action. The title I propose is Arthur of Britain, or The Magnanimous Cuckold. Whether that has the right ring in English I cannot tell, but you will know.

But let us, I entreat you, explore the miraculous that dwells in the depths of the mind. Let the lyre of Orpheus open the door of the underworld of feeling.

With every protestation of respect and regard I am,

Honoured Sir,

E.T.A. HOFFMANN

May 1, 1822

Post Scriptum: I enclose a quantity of rough notes I have prepared for the sort of opera I so greatly desire, hoping that they will convey to you a measure of the feeling of which I speak—a feeling, to use a word now coming much into fashion, that is profound in its Romanticism.

Now, there, my dear Kemble, what do you make of that? What do I make of that? It all sounds to me like Germans who have been smoking their long pipes and sitting up late over their thick, black beer. Of course I know what he is talking about. It is Melodrama, or verses spoken or chanted to music, and it is quite useless for the purposes of opera as we know it at Covent Garden.

But I kept my temper. Never be out of temper with a musician is a good principle, as you know from your frequent altercations with the explosive Bishop, in which you have always prevailed by your splendid Phlegm. I wrote again, trying to coax Hoffmann to see things from my point of view, which is not to push forward the frontiers of music, I assure you, or plunge into the murky world of dreams. Humour, I assured him, is what the English most value, and whatever is to be said to them must be said humorously or not at all, if music is in question. (I except, of course, Oratorio, which is a wholly different matter.) Indeed, I tried upon him a rather neat little thing I dashed off, proposing it as the song which establishes the character of the Fairy Pigwiggen (Madame Vestris):

King Oberon rules in Fairyland,

Titania by his side;

But who is their Prime Minister,

Their counsellor and guide?

’Tis I, the gay Pigwiggen, who

Keeps hold upon the helm

When their spitting and spatting

Their dogging and catting

Threatens the Fairy Realm.

Who, think you, rules in Fairyland?

Not these who hold the sceptre!

Nay, devil a bit

Not Nob and Tit,

But I, their gay preceptor!

Pigwiggen, the merry minikin

Is Nob and Tit’s preceptor!

Now, I think I may say, not in vanity but as a man who has won his place in the theatre with several pieces, all markedly successful, that this is rather neat. Do you agree?

Several weeks have elapsed, and I have had no word from our German friend. But time wears on, and I shall stir him up again, as genially as I know how.

Yours, etc.

J.R. PLANCHÉ

June 20, 1822

There is a notation on this letter in Kemble’s hand, which says: ‘News reaches me of Hoffmann’s death at Berlin, on 25 June. Inform Planché at once, and suggest an immediate council to decide on a new piece and a new composer—Bishop?—as it must be ready for Christmas.’ ”

There was heavy silence among the Cornish Foundation, as Penny helped herself to a bunch of grapes from the Platter of Plenty.

It was Hollier who spoke first. “What do you suppose poor dying Hoffmann made of Nob and Tit?”

“A modern audience would certainly see it as jocose indecency. Language has taken some queer turns since Planché’s time,” said Darcourt.

“Queer’s the word,” said Arthur.

“Don’t be too sure about a modern audience,” said Powell, who seemed to be the least depressed of the group. “You recall that song in A Chorus Line? Rather a lot about Ass and Tit, sung by a girl with magnificent limbs? The audience couldn’t get enough of it.”

“I have to agree about the changes of language,” said Penny. “I have spared you Planché’s notes for dialogue, which he sent to Kemble. He wanted Pigwiggen to talk a lot about her Knockers.”

“Her what?” said Arthur, aghast.

“Her Knockers. She meant some underground spirits who worked in the mines of Britain, and were called Knockers.”

“Is there something ambiguous about Knockers?” said Hollier. “I’m sorry. I’m not very well up on the latest indecencies.”

“Knockers nowadays means breasts,” said Powell. “Door knockers, you know, which show up so prominently on the front. ‘She has a great pair of knockers,’ people say. Probably better known in England than here.”

“Ah yes. I wondered if it were a misreading for Knackers,” said Hollier. “Meaning the testicles. Perhaps the Magnanimous Cuckold would be the person to talk about those.”

“For God’s sake try to be serious,” said Arthur. “We are in very deep trouble. Doesn’t anybody understand that? Are we seriously going to spend a great amount of Uncle Frank’s benefaction to stage an opera that is all about Knackers and Knockers and Nobs and Tits and gay fairies? Is my hair going white, Maria? I distinctly feel a withering of my scalp.”

“As a student of Rabelais, all this sniggering, half-hearted indecency makes me throw up,” said Maria.

Penny spat out a mouthful of grape seeds, not very elegantly, on her plate. “Well—you have the music, you know. Or plans and sketches for it.”

“But is it any good?” said Maria. “If it is on the Planché level, we’re through. Absolutely through, as Arthur says. Was Hoffmann any good? Does anybody know?”

“I’m not a judge,” said Penny. “But I think he wasn’t half bad. Mind you, music’s not my thing. But when I was in London the BBC broadcast Hoffmann’s Undine in a program called Early Romantic Operas, and of course I listened. Indeed, I took it on tape, and I have it here, if you’re interested. Have you got the right sort of machine?”

It was Maria who took the tapes and put them in the hi-fi equipment that was concealed in a cupboard near the Round Table. Darcourt made sure that everybody had a drink, and the Cornish Foundation, in the lowest spirits it had known since its establishment, composed itself to listen. Nobody wore an expression of hope, but Powell was the least depressed. He was a theatre man, and was accustomed to abysses in the creative process.

It was Arthur who first was jolted into new life by the music.

“Listen, listen, listen! He’s using voices in the Overture! Where have you heard that before?”

“They’re the voices of the lover and the Water Sprite, calling to Undine,” said Penny.

“If he goes on like that, maybe we’re not in too much trouble,” said Arthur. He was a musical enthusiast, a bad amateur pianist, and it was his regret that his Uncle Francis had not left him his enviable collection of musical manuscripts. He would then have had the uncompleted opera safe in his own hands.

“This is accomplished stuff,” said Maria.

As indeed it was. The Cornish Foundation, according to individual musical sensitivity, roused themselves. Darcourt knew what he was hearing; he had first become acquainted with Francis Cornish because of a shared enthusiasm for music. Powell declared music to be one of the elements in which he lived; it was his desire to extend his experience as a director of opera that had made him urge the Foundation to consider putting Arthur of Britain on the stage. Hollier was the tineared one, and he knew it, but he had a feeling for drama and, though now and then he dozed, Undine was unquestionably dramatic. By the end of the first act they were all in a happier frame of mind, and demanded drinks as cheer, rather than as pain-killers.

Undine is not a short opera, but they showed no weariness, and heard it to the end. It was then almost four o’clock in the morning and they had been at the Round Table for nine hours, but except for Hollier they were alert and happy.

“If that’s Hoffmann as a composer, it looks as if we were right on the pig’s back,” said Arthur. “I hope I’m not carried away by relief, but I think it’s splendid.”

“He truly does use the lyre of Orpheus to open the underworld of feeling,” said Maria. “He used that phrase often. He must have loved it.”

“Did you hear how he uses the wood-winds? Not just doubling the strings, as even the best Italians were apt to do when this was written, but declaring another kind of feeling. Oh, those magical deep wood-winds! This is Romanticism, right enough,” said Powell.

“New Romanticism,” said Maria. “You catch Mozartian echoes—no, not echoes, but loving recollections—and some Beethovenian beef in the big moments. And God be praised he doesn’t wallop the timpani whenever he wants intensity. I think it’s great! Oh, Arthur—” and she kissed her husband with relief and joy.

“I’m glad we heard his letter to Planché first,” said Darcourt. “You know what he’s getting at, and what he hoped to achieve in Arthur. Not music just to support stage action, but to be action in itself. What a shame he never got his chance to go ahead!”

“Well, yes; I don’t want to pour cold water,” said Hollier, “but as the least musical among you, I can’t forget that we haven’t a libretto. Assuming, as I am sure you do, that the Planché stuff is totally unusable. No libretto, and is there enough music to make an opera. Does anybody know?”

“I’ve been to the library for a look,” said Arthur, “and there’s quite a wad of music, though I can’t judge what shape it’s in. There are scribbles in German on some of the manuscript which seem to suggest action, or places where action would come. I can’t read that old German script well enough to say much about it.”

“But no words?”

“I didn’t see any words, though I could be mistaken.”

“Do you think we can really turn Schnak loose on this? Does she know German? I suppose she may have picked up some from her parents. Not poetic German, certainly. Nothing Romantic about the senior Schnaks,” said Darcourt.

“I don’t want to nag, but without a libretto, where are we?” said Hollier.

Powell was impatient. “Surely with all the brains there are around this table we can put together a libretto?”

“Poetry?” said Darcourt.

“Libretto poetry,” said Powell. “I’ve read dozens of ’em, and the poetic heights are not enough to make you dizzy. Come on! Faint heart never made fair libretto.”

“I’m afraid I’m rather the fifth wheel of the coach so far as music is concerned,” said Hollier. “But the Matière de Bretagne is right in my line, and I have a pretty clear recollection of Malory. Anything I know is at your service. I can fake a late-medieval line as well as most people, I suppose.”

“So there we are,” said Powell. “Right on the pig’s back, as Arthur so Celtically puts it.”

“Oh, don’t be hasty,” said Hollier. “This will take some time to establish, even when we’ve decided which of the Arthurian paths we are going to follow. There are many, you know—the Celtic, the French, the German, and of course Malory. And what attitude do we take to Arthur? Is he a sun-god embodied in legend by a people half-Christianized? Or is he simply the dux bellorum, the leader of his British people against the invading Saxons? Or do we choose the refinement of Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes? Or do we assume that Geoffrey of Monmouth really knew what he was talking about, however improbable that may seem? We can dismiss any notion of a Tennysonian Arthur: he was wholly good and noble and a post-Freudian audience wouldn’t swallow him. It could take months of the most careful consideration before we decide how we are going to see Arthur.”

“We’re going to see him as the hero of an early-nineteenth-century opera, and no nonsense about it,” said Geraint Powell. “We haven’t a moment to lose. I’ve made it clear, I think, that the Stratford Festival will allow us to mount ten or twelve performances of Arthur during its next season and I’ve persuaded them to slot it as late as possible. Late August—just a year from now. We’ve got to get cracking.”

“But surely that’s absurd,” said Hollier. “Will the libretto be ready, not to speak of the music? And then I suppose the theatrical people will have to have a little time to get it up—”

“The theatrical people will have to be got under contract not later than next month,” said Geraint. “My God, have you no idea how opera singers work? The best are all contracted three years ahead. A thing on this scale won’t need the biggest stars, even if we could get them, but intelligent singers of the next rank won’t be easy to find, especially for an unknown work. They’ll have to shoehorn this piece into very tight schedules. And there’s the designer, and all the carpentry and painting work, and the costumes—I’d better stop, I’m frightening myself!”

“But the libretto!” said Hollier.

“The libretto is going to have to hustle its stumps. Whoever is responsible for it must get to work at once, and be quick. The words have to be fitted to whatever music exists, remember, and that is tricky work. We can’t fart around forever with sun-gods and Chrétien de Troyes.”

“If that is your attitude, I think I had better withdraw at once. I have no desire to be associated with a botch,” said Hollier, and took another very big whisky from the decanter.

“No, no, Clem, we’ll need you,” said Maria, who still cherished a tenderness for the man who had—it seemed so long ago now—taken her maidenhead, almost absent-mindedly. Not that, as a girl of her time, she had possessed anything so archaic as a maidenhead, but the word was suitable to the paleo-psychological spirit of Clement Hollier.

“I have a certain reputation as a scholar to protect. I am sorry to insist on that, but it is a fact.”

“Of course we’ll need you, Clem,” said Penny Raven. “But in an advisory capacity, I think. Better leave the actual writing to old battered hacks like me and Simon.”

“As you please,” said Hollier, with drunken dignity. “I admit without regret that I have no theatrical experience.”

“Theatrical experience is precisely what we’re going to need, and lots of it,” said Powell. “If I’m to see this thing through, I shall have to crack the whip, and I hope nobody will take offence. There are a lot of elements to be pulled together if we’re going to have a show at all.”

“As a member of the academic committee that is supposed to be midwife to this effort, I have to remind you that there is an element you’ve left out, that will have a big say in whatever is done,” said Penny.

“Meaning?”

“Schnak’s special supervisor. The very big gun who is coming to the university to be composer-in-residence for a year, for this express purpose,” said Penny.

“Wintersen keeps hinting about that,” said Darcourt; “but he’s never mentioned a name. Do you know who it is, Penny?”

“Yes, I do. It’s just been finally settled. No one less than Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot.”

“Golly! What a name!” said Darcourt.

“Yes, and what a lady!” said Penny.

“New to me,” said Arthur.

“Shame on you, Arthur. She’s acknowledged to be the successor to Nadia Boulanger, as a Muse and fosterer of talent, and general wonder-worker. Schnak is a very, very lucky child. But Gunilla is also said to be a terror, so Schnak had better look out or we shall see some fur flying.”

“From what point of the compass does this avatar appear?” asked Arthur.

“From Stockholm. Doesn’t the name tip you off?”

“We are greatly privileged to have her, I suppose?”

“Can’t say. Is she a Snark or a Boojum? Only time will tell.”

(6) ETAH IN LIMBO

I like that man Powell. He has the real professional spirit. My God, when I think what it was like for me, getting operas on the stage in Bamberg, and even in Berlin, and sometimes wondering where I would find enough musicians to make up the orchestra we needed! And what musicians some of them were! Tailors by day, and clarinetists by night! And the singers! The chorus were the worst. I remember some of them sneaking offstage when there was no work for them to do and sneaking back in three minutes, wiping their mouths with the back of a hand! And wearing their underpants beneath their tights, so that the courtiers of Count Whoever-it-was looked as if they had just stumbled in from the wastes of Lapland. Things are much better now. Sometimes I can intrude myself into a performance of something by Wagner—Wagner who wrote so very kindly of me and admitted my influence in his splendid use of the leitmotif—and, so far as a shade can weep, I weep with pleasure to see how clean all the singers are! Every man seems to have been shaved the very day of the performance. Every woman, even though fat, is not more than five months pregnant. Many of them can act, and they do, even if not well. No doubt about it, opera has come a very long way since my days in Bamberg.

To say nothing of money! The artists who appear in my Arthur will be able to go to the treasury every Friday night with confidence that a full week’s salary will be forthcoming. How well I remember the promises, and the broken promises, of opera finance in my time. Of course, as director—and that meant conductor and sometimes scene-painter as well—I usually had my money, but it was wretchedly little money. These modern theatre people don’t know they’re alive, and when I consider their good fortune I sometimes forget that I am dead. As dead, that’s to say, as anybody in Limbo is.

At last I begin to pluck up hope. I may not be in Limbo forever. If Geraint Powell puts my Arthur on the stage, and even five people stay till the end, I may win my freedom from this stoppage in my spiritual voyage, this mors interruptus (to give it a classical ring).

My own fault, of course. If I died untimely, I must admit that I died by my own hand, though not as surely as if I had used the rope or the knife. Mine was death by the bottle, and by—well, enough about that. Death by Romanticism, let us call it.

But by the Almighty’s great mercy, an existence in Limbo is not all tears of regret. We may laugh. And how I laughed when that woman professor—that is something new since my time, when a learned woman might be a bas bleu but would never have thought of intruding herself into a university—when that woman professor, I say, read those letters from Planché to Kemble.

They were new to me. I remember his letters, and the high spirits and assurance they gave off like a perfume. He was so certain that I, who had not written an opera in some time—seven years, was it—would welcome his jaunty assistance. But these letters, in which he reported our exchanges to Kemble, were quite new, and brought back all that trouble in a new and funny light. Poor Planché, industrious Huguenot, with his determination to do his best for Madame Vestris and her magnificent limbs. Poor Planché, with his certainty that an opera audience could not be persuaded to sit still while anything important was being played, or sung. Of course his notion of opera was bad Rossini, or Mozart defaced by that self-loving brigand Bishop. His Covent Garden was a theatre where nobody listened unless one of the Great Necks was shrieking or trumpeting; where people took baskets of cold grouse and champagne to their boxes and stuffed themselves during the music; where those of the right age—between fourteen and ninety—flirted and nodded, and sent billets doux from box to box, wrapped around little bags of sweets; where the soprano, if the applause was sufficiently insistent, would pause in the opera to sing some popular air; after my death it was often “Home, Sweet Home,” which was Bishop’s monumental contribution to the art of music; where a soprano’s jewels—the real thing, achieved by lying complaisantly under the bellies of rich, old fumbling noblemen—were of as much interest as her voice; as the Great Neck declined, the Grande Poitrine became the object of interest, and the bigger it was the more diamonds it would accommodate. Service medals, jealous rivals called them.

In Germany—even in Bamberg—we knew a little better than that, and we were at work to beget Romanticism, and bring it to birth.

I wept—Oh yes, we can weep here, and often do—to hear my Undine again, done better than I ever heard it in my lifetime. How good orchestral playing is now; hardly a tailor to be heard in the music the bas bleu conjured out of her astonishing musical machine. Undine was my last completed attempt to draw opera forward from the eighteenth century into the nineteenth. Not in the least rejecting Gluck and Mozart, but following them in our attempt to coax something more out of the unknown of man’s mind into his consciousness. So we turned from their formal comedies and tragedies toward myth and legend, to release us from the chains of classicism. Undine—yes, my wonderful tale of the water nymph who marries a mortal, and at last claims him for her underwater kingdom; what does it not say of the need for modern man to explore the deep waters that lie beneath his own surface? I could do it better now, I know, but I did it pretty well then. Weber—my generous, gentle friend Weber—praised the skill with which I had matched music to subject in a beautiful melodic conception. What praise from such a source!

Now, at long last, Arthur may come to something. No libretto, they say. Only the wind-eggs that Planché blew about so confidently. Where will they turn? Again, I put my faith in Powell. I think he knows more about the myth of Arthur than any of the others, especially the professors. Dare I hope that my music, so far as I was able to sketch it in, will set the tone for the work? Of course. It must.

I wish I understood everything they say. What does the bas bleu mean about a Snark or a Boojum? It sounds like some great conflict in the works of Wagner. Oh, this tedious waiting! I suppose this is the punishment, the torture, of Limbo.