The Lyre of Orpheus

(1)

Simon Darcourt sat in his study at Ploughwright College planning his crime. A crime it undoubtedly was, for he meant to rob first the University Library, and then the National Gallery of Canada. Princess Amalie had left him in no doubt; the price of the information she had about the late Francis Cornish was possession of the preliminary studies for the drawing which she was now using to sell her new line of cosmetics. She offered that drawing to the public as coming from the hand of an Old Master—though no particular Old Master was mentioned. But the delicacy of line, the complete command of the silver-point technique, and above all the evocation of untouched but not unaware virginal beauty, spoke in unmistakable terms of an Old Master hand.

Photographs of Princess Amalie had, for some years, appeared in the gossip portions of the fashionable magazines in which she advertised, and it was clear to anybody that this finely preserved aristocrat, perhaps in her fifties, was of the same family as the virgin child in the advertising picture. Of the same family, though obviously many generations separated them. Oh, the magic of aristocracy! Oh, the romance of family descent! How beauty passed, like a blessing, through four centuries! Aristocracy cannot, of course, be bought over the counter, but something of its magic might be imparted by Princess Amalie’s lotions and unguents and pigments. Ladies and, it was known, quite a few gentlemen hastened to put down their names for appointments with the Princess’s skilled maquilleuses who would (it took a whole day) discover precisely which Old Master (the range was large and came down as near to the present time as John Singer Sargent) had dwelt upon their special type of beauty and had employed colours to preserve it for the ages—colours which only Princess Amalie could duplicate in cosmetics. It was very expensive, but certainly it was worth it thus to associate oneself with the great world of art, and the great world that the greatest artists had chosen to paint. To be seen as an Old Master type; was not that worth big money? “Selling like hot cakes” was the coarse term the advertising geniuses used to describe the success of the campaign. Don’t wear the look of the latest fashion. Look like the Old Master subject you are, in your deepest soul, and at your exquisite best!

Obviously, if it leaked out that the Old Master drawing of Princess Amalie’s ancestor was from the hand of a Canadian who had known her as a girl, millions of dollars would go straight down the drain. Or so it seemed to the advertising world. If some Nosy Parker, rummaging in the stacks of drawings preserved in the National Gallery of Canada, were to turn up preliminary drawings for the superb imposture, from the hand of the Canadian faker and scoundrel—he could be nothing less—the Princess, again in the idiom of the advertising world, would have egg all over her beautiful face. Or so it seemed to Princess Amalie, who was as sensitive as the world expects an aristocrat to be.

The Princess wanted those preliminary sketches, and the price she offered was information which, she hinted, would be the making of Simon Darcourt’s life of the late Francis Cornish, connoisseur and benefactor of his country.

Darcourt yearned for that information with the feverish lust of a biographer. Without the slightest evidence that the Princess could tell him anything important, he was convinced that she would do so, and was ready to dare greatly to find out what she knew. Surely—he felt it in his bones—it would fill in the great hole right in the middle of his book.

Much of the book was completed, in so far as a book can be completed when important information is still missing. He had written the concluding chapters, describing Francis’ later years when he had returned to Canada, and played a role as a benefactor of artists, a connoisseur of international reputation, and a generous giver to the collection of contemporary and earlier paintings in the National Gallery. Indeed, he had left the Gallery all his portfolios of drawings, many of which were by undoubted early masters, and among which those preliminary sketches of Princess Amalie lay concealed. But a book about a collector and benefactor, however well written, is not necessarily a gripping story, and readers of biographies like their meat rare.

He had finished the early part of the book, about Francis’s childhood and early years, and considering how little real information he had, it was a brilliant piece of work. Darcourt did not permit himself the use of the word “brilliant”, for he was a modest man, but he knew it was well done, and that he had made bricks of substantial value with the wrong kind of straw. It was his good fortune that the late Francis Cornish was a man who never threw away or destroyed anything, and among his personal possessions—those which now were in the keeping of the University Library—were several albums of photographs taken by Francis’s grandfather, the old Senator and founder of the family wealth. Old Hamish had been a keen amateur of photography and had made countless records of the streets, the houses, the workmen, and the more important citizens of Blairlogie, the Ottawa Valley town in which Francis had spent his early years. Every picture was carefully identified in the Senator’s neat Victorian handwriting and there they were—the grandmother, the beautiful mother and the distinguished but oddly wooden father, the aunt, the family doctor, the priests, even Victoria Cameron, the Senator’s cook, and Bella-Mae, Francis’s nurse. There were many pictures of Francis himself, a slight, dark, watchful boy, already showing the handsome, clouded face that had caused Princess Amalie to call the adult Francis le beau ténébreux. On the evidence of these photographs, which the Senator liked to call his Sun Pictures, Simon Darcourt had raised a convincing structure of Francis’s childhood. It was as good as much research, aided by Darcourt’s lively but controlled imagination, could make it.

As biography goes, it was excellent, for biography has to rely heavily on some evidence but a great deal on speculation, unless there are diaries and family papers to provide firmer ground. But biography at its best is a form of fiction. The personality and sympathies of the biographer cannot be sifted out of what is written. Darcourt had no diaries. He had a handful of school reports from Francis’s Blairlogie schools, and from Colborne College, where he had gone at a later date; there were some lists and records of grades from the university days. Of what was personal there was little, but Darcourt had done wonders with what he had.

Nevertheless, the book lacked a heart, to make it live. Did Princess Amalie have anything of that heart, however rheumatic or slow, that would give life to his book, and fill out the story of those years when, so far as he knew, Francis had messed about in Europe as an art student? Darcourt sometimes came near to desperation. A receipted bill from a bawdy-house would have filled him with gladness. Now, here was a chance, and a pretty good chance, to find information that would bridge that horrible gap between the aspiring young Canadian who had apparently gone into hiding after Oxford, and had emerged in 1945, when he was part of the commission that inspected pictures and works of art that had gone astray during the war, and were to be returned whenever possible to their original owners. The price of that information was crime. No other name for it—crime.

Darcourt did not hesitate from moral scruple. He was a clergyman, of course, though he lived as a professor of Greek; he still wore his Roman collar from time to time, but it had long ceased to be a fetter on his spirit. He now regarded himself as a biographer, and the scruples of a biographer are peculiar to the trade. Any hesitation he felt was not about how could he bring himself to steal, but how could he steal without being found out? “Prof Nabbed In NatGal Heist”—he could see the headlines in the gloating press. The exposure of a trial would be horrible. Of course he would not go to prison. Only tax-evaders go to prison nowadays. But he would be fined, and doubtless compelled to report monthly to a parole officer as to how he was getting on with his new job, teaching Latin for Berlitz.

How was it to be done? Sherlock Holmes, he recalled, sometimes solved crimes by thinking himself into the criminal mind, and thus discovering method, if not motive. But so far as he could adventure into the criminal mind, no solution to his problem occurred. Whenever he tried it, all that came up on the computer screen of his imagination was a picture of himself, wearing a black eye-mask, dressed in a turtleneck sweater and a slouch cap, emerging from the National Gallery carrying over his shoulder a large sack plainly marked SWAG. This was farce, and what he needed was a strong injection of elegant comedy.

Did he see himself then as a fictional figure, Darcourt the Clerical Cracksman? Beneath the sober dress of the cleric and the modest dignity of a professor of classics lurks the keen mind that plots thefts that baffle the keenest among the police—was that his character? Would that it might be so, but those smart crooks in fiction lived in a world where thought possessed absolute power, and careful plans never went wrong. Darcourt was well aware that he did not live in any such world. To begin with, he had discovered, now that he was well into middle age, that he did not know how to think. Of course he could pursue a logical path when he had to, but in his personal affairs his mental processes were a muddle, and he arrived at important conclusions by default, or by some leap that had no resemblance to thought, or logic, or any of the characteristics of the first-rate fictional criminal mind. He made his real decisions as a gifted cook makes soup: he threw into a pot anything likely that lay to hand, added seasonings and glasses of wine, and messed about until something delicious emerged. There was no recipe and the result could be foreseen only in the vaguest terms. Could one plan a crime like that?

To change the metaphor—he was always changing metaphors and trying not to mix them ludicrously—he ran off in the viewing-chamber of his mind scraps of film in which he saw himself doing various things in various ways until at last he found a plan of action. How was he to accomplish his crime?

It must be a twofold criminal job. To the best of his recollection, there were five drawings that were studies for the finished portrait of the Princess Amalie as a girl, in the large bundle of Francis Cornish’s Old Master portfolios, and those were what he had to abstract and take to New York. He knew that the portfolios had not been carefully examined, and certainly not catalogued, in the storage room where they lay at the National Gallery in Ottawa. But uncatalogued as they were, those drawings had probably been seen in what he hoped was a cursory inspection, and they would be missed. But would they be remembered in any detail? They had probably been numbered. Indeed, he had submitted a loose catalogue himself when, as Francis Cornish’s executor, he had sent that mass of material to Ottawa. “Pencil sketch of a girl’s head”—that sort of thing. Oh, if only the hasty, determined Arthur had not been so insistent that his uncle’s pictures and books and manuscripts and other valuable miscellany should be cleared out of his huge apartment and storehouse in Toronto in the shortest possible time! But Arthur had so insisted, and pinching pictures from a large public gallery was tricky work.

However—and a very big and hopeful “however” it was—a great mass of Francis Cornish’s personal papers had been sent to the University Library, and among those papers were pictures that seemed to Darcourt, when he bundled them up, to be of personal rather than artistic merit. Some were pictures that belonged to the Oxford period of Francis’s life, when he had been drawing from models as well as making copies of Old Master drawings in the Ashmolean Museum. Darcourt had assumed, without asking anybody for an opinion, that the National Gallery would not want such stuff, accomplished though much of it was. Could he make a switch? Could he sneak a few pictures from the Library and put them in the Gallery portfolios, and would anyone be the wiser? That seemed to be the solution to his problem, and all that remained was to decide how he might manage it.

The morning after the Round Table had met to hear Penny Raven read what existed of Planché’s libretto for Arthur of Britain, Darcourt was sitting in his dressing-gown gazing at his interior movie-show when he heard a spluttering, snorting, farting uproar in the street outside his study window, and he knew that it could only be the noise that Geraint Powell’s little red sports car made when it was brought to a halt. In a very short time there was a banging on his door that was certainly Powell, who brought a Shakespearean brio to quite modest daily tasks.”

“Have you slept?” he said, as he pushed into the study, threw a heap of papers out of an armchair, and flung himself into it. The chair—a good one, which had cost Darcourt a lot of money in the shop of an antique pirate—creaked ominously as the actor lolled in it, one leg thrown over a delicate arm. There was about Powell a stagy largeness, and whatever he said was said with an actor’s precision of speech in an unusually resonant voice, from which the Welsh intonation had not wholly disappeared.

Darcourt said that no, he had not slept very much, as he had not come home until almost five in the morning. He had found the conversation, and hearing Undine, exciting and his rest had been scant. He knew, of course, that Powell wanted to tell him about his own rest, as now he did.

“I didn’t sleep a wink,” he said. “Not a wink. I have been turning this business over and over in my head and what I see before us is a gigantic obstacle race. Consider: we have no libretto, an unknown amount of music, no singers, no designs, no time reserved with all the artificers and carpenters and machinists we shall need—nothing but high hopes and a theatre. If this opera is not to be the most God-Almighty ballocks in the history of the art, we shall have to work day and night from now until it is on the stage, and at the mercy of those rapists and child-abusers, the critics. You think I exaggerate? Ha ha”—his laugh would have filled a large theatre, and it made the windows in Darcourt’s study ring—“From the depths of no trivial experience I assure you that I do not exaggerate. And upon whom are we depending, you and I? Eh? Upon whom are we depending? Upon Arthur, the best of fellows but innocent as the babe unborn in all of this world we are entering with our hands tied behind our backs. Arthur is armed only with a fine managerial spirit and barrels of money. Who next? This kid whom I have never met who is to come up with an opera score, and her supervisor—the woman with the grotesque name, who is probably some constipated pedant who will take an eternity to get anything done. There’s Penny, of course, but she’s an outsider and I don’t know how far to trust her. Of the scholarly Professor Hollier I forbear to speak; his obvious inability to distinguish between his arse and his elbow—speaking theatrically—rules him out as anything but a pest, easily dealt with. What a gang!”

“You say nothing of Maria,” said Darcourt.

“I could speak cantos of rhapsodic verse about Maria. She is the blood of my heart. But of what use is she in such a situation as this? Eh? Of what conceivable use?”

“She is the strongest possible influence with Arthur.”

“You are right, of course. But that is secondary. Why did she not stop Arthur when he decided to embark on this rashest of rash enterprises?”

“Well—why didn’t you? Why didn’t I? We were swept away. Don’t underestimate the power of Arthur’s enthusiasm.”

“Once again, you are right. But then you are so often right. And that is why I am talking to you now. You are the only member of the Round Table who seems to have enough wits to come in out of the rain. Excepting myself, naturally.”

Darcourt’s heart sank. This sort of flattery usually meant that some time-consuming task that nobody else would undertake was going to be dumped on his desk. Powell went on.

“You are the man in the Cornish Foundation who gets things done. Arthur gets ideas. He shoots them off like rockets. The rest of us are hypnotized. But if anything really happens, you are the man who makes it happen, and you can patiently persuade Arthur to listen to common sense. You know what you are, boy? They call that thing the Round Table, and if it’s the Round Table who are you? Eh? No one but Myrddin Wyllt, the great king’s counsellor. Merlin, that’s who you are. You’ve seen it, of course. How could you miss it?”

Darcourt had not seen it. He wanted Powell to develop this idea, so flattering to himself, so he pretended ignorance.

“Merlin was a magician, wasn’t he?”

“He looked like a magician to those other morlocks at the Round Table because he could do something besides fight and play Chase the Grail. In every great legend there are a lot of heroes and one really intelligent man. Our Arthur’s a hero; people admire him and eat out of his hand. I suppose Hollier is a hero in his own way. I’m a hero, fatally flawed by intelligence. But you are no hero. You’re Merlin, and I want you to work with me to get this wild scheme into some sort of workable order.”

“Geraint—”

“Call me Geraint bach. It signifies friendship, understanding, complicity.”

“Bach? You mean as in Johann Sebastian Bach?”

“Old Johann Sebastian was born a German, but in spirit he was a Welshman. The word is a diminutive. It’s as if you were calling me Geraint, my darling, or Geraint, my pretty one. Welsh is a great language for intimacies and endearments. I’ll call you Sim bach. It will signify our nearness in spirit.”

Darcourt had never been aware of any special nearness of spirit between himself and Powell, but Powell was leaning forward in his chair, his lustrous eyes gleaming, and complicity coming out of him like heat out of a stove. Well, here goes, Simon thought. He could always retreat if the intimacy became outrageous.

“So what is it you want, Geraint bach?”

Powell spoke in a hiss. “I want a dramatis personae, a cast of characters, and I want it right away.”

“Well, I don’t suppose that presents insuperable problems. Even Planché had to agree that an opera about Arthur has to have Arthur somewhere in the cast. And if you have Arthur, you must have Queen Guenevere, and a few knights of the Round Table. And Merlin, I presume. You can certainly count on the opera including those, whatever turn it may take.”

“Aha! You grasp it at once! I knew you would. You are a golden man, Sim bach. And you see what that means? We must have the Operatic Four. Soprano—Guenevere, of course, though I dislike that Frenchified version of the name. I always think of her as Gwenhwyfar. Much finer, you agree? But too difficult for the thick-tongued English-speakers. Now—who’s your contralto? There has to be one, you know.”

“Oh, dear. Let’s see? Hm. Morgan Le Fay, do you think?”

“Of course! Arthur’s wicked sister. A contralto, obviously. All wicked women in opera must have those rich, enchanting low notes. Now—who’s my tenor.”

“Surely Arthur himself?”

“No. Arthur must have authority. A baritone, I think. A fine, velvety bass-baritone. Make him both a tenor and a cuckold and you lose all sympathy, and Arthur must compel sympathy. But we need an even deeper bass for quartets as well as the plot.”

“That must be Modred, who destroys Arthur.”

“Precisely.”

“But no tenor? Can you have an opera without a tenor?”

“Of course. The public expects a tenor. Must be Lancelot, the seducer. Tenors are great seducers.”

“All right. That gives you the four you want. Five, as a matter of fact.”

“So—there we are. We’ll want another woman for Elaine, the Lily Maid. Better be a nice mezzo—good for pathos but not deep enough for villainy. And a few tenors and basses for the Knights of the Round Table, but they are really just Chorus, and not hard to find.”

“You make it all sound simple.”

“Not simple at all, Sim bach. I must get on the phone at once and see who I can round up for these parts. I told them so last night. Singers aren’t picked up at the last minute. They’re worse than hockey-players; you have to get them under contract, or at least under written agreement, as far ahead as you can do it.”

“But won’t the musical people—Schnak and this woman with the strange name—want some say? I know, and you know, that we have no libretto. How can you hire singers when you have no story and no music?”

“Must be done. Can’t wait. And anyhow, we have the skeleton of a libretto.”

“We have? Since when?”

“Since last night when I lay tossing in my bed, pulling it together. We have a story. You can’t bugger about with the story of Arthur. I have a skeleton of the plot. All it needs is some words and music. And that’s where you come in, old Merlin. You must hustle ’em up and get it on paper as soon as dammit.”

“Powell—sorry, Geraint bach—have you told anybody but me?”

“Not yet. But we’re to meet the great lady, the genius, the Muse, the shepherdess of Schnak, at dinner on Saturday night. Didn’t anybody tell you? Well, they will. And then I’ll tell her what the plot of Arthur of Britain is to be and you and Pretty Penny must start feeding her words as fast as you can go.”

“How simple you make it sound.”

“Aha—irony! I love your irony, Sim bach. It is what first drew me to you, boy. Well, I’m more happy than I can say that you agree, and I’ll go at once and get on the phone. It’s going to cost a fortune in phone bills. I send them to you, I suppose.”

Geraint seized both Darcourt’s hands and wrung them. Then he drew the astonished Simon to his breast and gave him a Shakespearean hug, during which he brushed a cheek against Simon’s, exhaling a lot of last night’s whisky, as though in an ecstasy of relief, and dashed out the door. Surprisingly soon afterward he was heard in the street, roaring abuse at some engineering students who had gathered to snoop under the hood of his car, and with snorts and hootings he was gone.

Greatly depleted in spirit, Darcourt sat down to think about his crime. Was it a crime? The law would certainly think so. The University would undoubtedly think so, for to rob the Library would create a general coldness toward himself, though criminality might not be quite enough to justify the revocation of his professorship. A tenured professor could commit the Sin Against the Holy Ghost and get away with it, if he could find the right lawyer. Still, in decency he would have to resign. Robbing the National Gallery was something else. That was crime, real crime.

Nevertheless, the law was not everything. There was a thing called natural justice, though Darcourt was not certain where it resided. Had he not been one of the late Francis Cornish’s executors, chosen by Francis Cornish himself presumably because he was expected to use his judgement in doing what the dead man would wish? And would not the dead man want the best possible story of his life written by the friend and biographer best qualified to tell it?

Well—would he? Francis Cornish had been a very odd man, and there were many corners of his character into which Darcourt had never probed or wished to probe.

That was beside the point. Francis Cornish was dead, and Darcourt was alive. A Charter of Rights for the Dead might appeal to Penny Raven, but no true biographer wants to hear about it. Darcourt had in full measure the vanity of the author, and he wanted to write the best book he could, and a good book was a better thing for his dead friend than any pallid record of scanty fact. Crime it must be, and let the consequences be as they would. The book came before everything.

As Darcourt thought in this vein, allowing all sorts of visions of crime, and Francis Cornish, and Princess Amalie, and a scene in a law court in which Darcourt defended his action to a robed judge, in whose intelligent eyes understanding could be read, he was conscious that other images were popping into view on that mental movie-show, and they were related to what Geraint Powell had said about the opera and the necessary figures to make it a reality.

There had been slight mention of Merlin. Why not? Was Merlin so trivial a figure that the plot could be managed without him? Or could the role be played by any hack, any singer recruited from a church choir at the last moment? He would have something to say about that when Geraint unfolded his opera plot at dinner on Saturday night.

Darcourt had long known that he was a man fated to do much of the world’s work when other people took the credit for it, but he was not without self-esteem.

No Merlin? Was that how Geraint bach saw the story of Arthur? Not if he, Simon Darcourt, was to play the role of Merlin in private life. He’d show ’em!

But for the moment, crime must be given his best energies.

(2)

NO TIME LIKE THE PRESENT. Darcourt made a phone call to the librarian in charge of special collections, an old friend. A man whom he would not, for the world, deceive, except when his book was at stake.

“Archie? Simon here. Look—I’ve run into a little matter in connection with my book. My life of Francis Cornish, you know. I want to verify something about his Oxford life. Would there be any objection to my taking a look among the papers we sent to you?”

No objection whatever. Come when you please. This afternoon? Certainly. Would you like to use my office? No, no need to disturb you. I’ll just look at them in the storage, or wherever they are.

That was the worry. Where were they? Would he have to look at them in a room with a lot of sub-librarians and other snoops hanging around? Not likely, but not impossible. With luck he might be able to use one of those little cubicles near a window, in which some favoured graduate students were occasionally allowed to spread their papers about.

Into the Library with a light step. Nod to right and left with the assurance of a well-known, greatly trusted member of faculty. Stop at Archie’s room and pass the time of day. Listen to Archie’s groans about the lack of funds for cataloguing. The Cornish stuff he would find just as he had bundled it up for the Library. But have no fear; it would be properly catalogued as soon as funds could be found. Might the Cornish Foundation be interested in funding that project? Darcourt assured Archie that he thought the Cornish Foundation would certainly be interested, and he would put the matter before them himself. Oh, by the way, would Archie like him to leave his briefcase in the office? Yes, yes, he knew that he was not a likely suspect—ha ha—but one should not expect other people to observe rules that one did not observe oneself. To which Archie agreed, and with each man somewhat sanctimoniously respecting the other’s high principle, the briefcase was left in a chair.

Thus, cloaked in righteousness, Darcourt went into the large room, filled with steel racks, in which the Cornish papers, among many others, were stored. A young woman who was working at the slow task of cataloguing showed him where they were, and whispered—why whispered? there was nobody else in the room, but it was a place that seemed to call for whispering—that there was a nice quiet spot at the back of the room, with a big table where he could spread out the papers he wished to examine. He knew that this was not regular, that he should declare what he wanted even though it might be difficult to find; but after all, it was he who had brought the papers to the Library in the first place, and he was a generous member of the Friends of the Library, and he should be shown all possible courtesy. Nothing like a good reputation when you are about to commit a crime.

The crime took no time at all. Darcourt knew precisely which of the big bundles he was looking for, and in a moment he had opened it, and found the group of drawings he wanted.

They were drawings Francis Cornish had done in his Oxford days, and most of them were copies of minor Old Masters he had made when learning the technique which had been one of his chief sources of pride. By the most laborious and greatly talented practice, he had found the way to draw with the costly silver pencil on the carefully prepared paper. As works of art, the drawings were of little interest. Fine student work, no more.

There were some, however, which were in the old silver-point technique, but differently labelled—for Francis labelled every copy of an Old Master with great care, naming the master, or that prodigiously productive artist Ignotus, and the date upon which the copy had been made. But several were labelled more simply: “Ismay, November 14, 1935”, or some date reaching into the spring of 1936.

Several of them were heads, or half-lengths, of a girl not precisely beautiful, but of a distinguished cast of feature. Others were of the same girl, nude, lying on a sofa, or leaning on a mantelpiece. There was something about them that made it abundantly clear that they had been drawn by a loving hand. The curves of neck and shoulder, waist and breasts, hips, thighs and calves, were rendered with an exquisite care that set them apart from the work of an art student faced with a good model. Nor had the technique the Old Master remoteness: it spoke of desire, here and now. But the face of Ismay did not speak of love. In a few of the drawings it was petulant, but in most it wore a look of amusement, as though the model felt something like pity, and a measure of superiority, toward the artist. In these there was nothing of the accomplished deadness of the Old Master copies. They were alive, and they were the work of a man who had ceased to be a student.

Who was Ismay? She was Mrs. Francis Cornish, one of the many figures in his biography about whom Darcourt could discover nothing. Or very little. The daughter of Roderick and Prudence Glasson of St. Columb Hall, in Cornwall; a girl who had left Oxford (Lady Margaret Hall) without a degree after a single year; a girl who had married Francis Cornish in St. Columb’s Church on September 17, 1936; a girl who thenceforward seemed to have no existence, so far as documents or other evidence was concerned. A girl whom Darcourt had come upon by accident, and identified by research, for Francis had never spoken of her.

The biographer had done his scholarly best. He had written to Sir Roderick Glasson at the Foreign Office in London, asking for details about his sister, and had received a cold reply saying that so far as Sir Roderick knew, his sister Ismay had died in the Blitz, in a northern city, probably Manchester, and that nothing was known of her, as it was impossible to identify many bodies found in that destruction, and many had never been recovered.

So this was Francis Cornish’s wife as she appeared before their marriage. A girl born to fascinate, and doubtless to be loved by a man of romantic disposition. But what had happened to Ismay? She was part of the gap in the middle of Francis Cornish’s life that tormented Darcourt and made his task as a biographer a nagging burden.

Darcourt could not stop long to admire. He did not want the friendly sub-librarian to approach him with offers of help, or a cup of coffee. Which to take? The heads, obviously. The nudes were too compelling to escape notice even by a hasty examiner. Darcourt, who had a weakness for female beauty that was not wholly rooted in the feelings of an amateur connoisseur, would greatly have liked to take one of them for himself, but that would be dangerous. The Clerical Cracksman must show self-denial and austerity in what he was doing. Only the heads.

So, with a rapidity that he had practised that morning as he dressed, he took off his jacket and his waistcoat—he was in clerical garb and the waistcoat was one of those broad black expanses of ribbed silk that Anglicans call an M.B. waistcoat, meaning Mark of the Beast because of its High Church and Romanist implications—and lowered his trousers. From under his shirt at the back he took a transparent plastic envelope measuring eighteen inches by twelve, slipped the drawings into it, and shoved it under his shirt again. Up with the trousers, on with the M.B., which had a convenient back strap that held the envelope firmly in place, on with the jacket, and all was completed.

“Thank you very much,” he said to the sub-librarian; “I’ve bundled everything up ready to go back on the shelf.” And he smiled in answer to her smile as he left the room.

“Many thanks, Archie,” he called to his friend, as he picked up his briefcase.

“Not at all, Simon. Any time.”

Out of the Library, step as light as ever, went the Clerical Cracksman, half of his crime completed. But not wholly completed. He must not go tearing back to his rooms at Ploughwright, like a guilty thing, to hide away his swag. No; he went to the Faculty Club, seated himself in the reading-room, and called for a beer. There was only one other member in the reading-room, and that member was to be his alibi, if one should be needed. The person who had seen him come there on his way back from the Library, as innocent as a new-laid egg.

The other member also had a beer, for it was a warm day. He lifted his glass to Darcourt.

“Cheers,” said he.

“Here’s to crime,” said the Clerical Cracksman, and the other member, a simple soul, sniggered at such a jest from a clergyman.

(3)

“I LOOK UPON YOU as a daring group, a party of adventurers of extraordinary courage, set upon great risk. Perhaps the word for you is doom-eager,” said Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot, as the Cornish Foundation sat down to dinner at the Round Table.

“That’s a fine Scandinavian word, but surely rather negative, Doctor?” said Arthur, at whose right hand the guest of honour was seated.

“No, not in the least. It is realistic. You must know that never has any opera or play about King Arthur succeeded with the public, or with the world of art. Never. Not one.”

“Didn’t Purcell write a pretty good opera about Arthur?” said Maria.

“Purcell? No. It is not an opera. I would call it almost a Posse mit Gesang, a sort of vaudeville or fairy-piece. It has some interesting pages, but it has not travelled,” said the Doctor, with immovable gloomy conviction.

“Perhaps we shall succeed where others have failed,” said Arthur.

“Ah, I admire your courage. That is in part what has brought me here. But courage alone is not enough. Certainly not if you follow Purcell. His Arthur is too full of talk. All the action is in speech, not in music. The music is mere decoration. That is not opera. An opera is not talk. Indeed, there should be no talk. Music throughout.”

“Well, isn’t that very much under your control?” said Arthur.

“It may be so. Only time will tell,” said the Doctor and drained her glass of wine at a draught. She had had her full share of the martinis before dinner; she had three at least but appeared to be thirsty still.

“Let’s not begin the evening in a spirit of defeat,” said Maria. “I’ve prepared a very special dinner. It’s an Arthurian dinner. You are going to get what Arthur’s court might have eaten—making necessary allowances.”

“Thank God for necessary allowances,” said Hollier. “I doubt if I could get through a sixth-century meal. What are we having?”

“What a question! Don’t you trust me?” said Maria. “You are beginning with poached salmon, and I’m sure Arthur had excellent salmon.”

“Yes, but this Hochheimer—do you call that Arthurian?” said the Doctor. “I thought King Arthur drank beer.”

“You forget that Arthur was a Cambro-Briton, with five centuries of Roman civilization behind him,” said Maria. “I’ll bet he drank very good wine, and took enormous care about having it transported to Camelot.”

“It may be,” said the Doctor, draining another large glass. “This is a good wine.” She spoke as if uncertain about what might follow.

Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot was not an easy guest. She seemed to bring an atmosphere of deep autumn into the penthouse, though it was still no more than early September. The dinner party felt uneasily that it might decline into a hard winter if the Doctor did not cheer up.

The Round Table had not known what to expect, and nobody had foreseen anything in the least like the Doctor. It was not that she was eccentric in any of the ways that might be expected in an academic who was also a distinguished musician. She was beautifully dressed, her figure was a marvel of slim elegance, and her face was undeniably handsome. What made her strange was that she seemed to have stepped out of a past age. She wore a finely designed version of male dress; her jacket was in appearance a man’s tight-waisted blue frock coat, and her tapering green velvet trousers descended toward elegant patent leather boots; she wore a very high, soft collar bound with a flowing cravat, and on her hands were a number of big, masculine rings. Her thick, straight brown hair was parted in the middle and hung to her shoulders, framing a long, distinguished, deeply melancholy face. She’s got herself up as Franz Liszt before he put on his abbé’s cassock, thought Darcourt. Does she get her clothes from a theatrical costumer? But odd as she is, she’s dead right for what she is. Who is she modelled on? George Sand? No, she’s much too elegant. Darcourt, who was interested in women’s clothes, and what went under them, was prepared to be fascinated by the Doctor, but her first ventures in conversation made it clear that the fascination might be a depressing experience.

“I’m glad you like our wine,” said Arthur. “Let Simon fill your glass. Do you like Canada? That’s a silly question, of course, but you must forgive me; we always ask visitors if they like Canada as soon as they step off the plane. Don’t answer.”

“But I will answer,” said the Doctor. “I like what I have seen. It is not strange at all. It is like Sweden. Why not? We are geographical near neighbours. I look out of my window and what do I see? Fir trees. Maple trees already turning to red. Big outcroppings of bare rock. It is not like New York. I have been in New York. It is not like Princeton, where I have also been. It has the smell. It smells like a northern land. Do you have terrible winters?”

“They can be difficult,” said Arthur.

“Ah,” said the Doctor, smiling for the first time. “Difficult winters make very great people, and great music. I do not, generally speaking, like the music of lands that are too far south. I will have another glass of the Hochheimer, if I may.”

This woman must have a hollow leg, thought Darcourt. A boozer? Surely not, with that ascetic appearance. Let’s tank her up and see what happens. As an old friend of the family he had made the martinis, and his was the task of serving the wine at dinner; he went to the sideboard and opened another bottle of the Hochheimer and handed it to Arthur.

“Let us hope that you can charm some fine northern music out of the fragments of Hoffmann’s score,” said Arthur.

“Let us hope. Yes, hope is the thing upon which we shall build,” said the Doctor, and down went the Hochheimer—not at a gulp, for the Doctor was too elegant to gulp—but without a pause.

“I hope you don’t think it rude of us to speak of the opera so soon,” said Maria. “It is so much on our minds, you see.”

“One should always speak of what is uppermost in one’s mind,” said the Doctor. “I want to talk about this opera, and it is uppermost in my mind.”

“You’ve looked at the music?” said Arthur.

“Yes. It is sketches and indications of the orchestration, and themes that Hoffmann wanted used to suggest important things in the plot. He seems somewhat to have anticipated Wagner, but his themes are prettier. But it is not an opera. Not yet. This student was too enthusiastic when she told you it was an opera. It is very pretty music, but not foolish. Some of it could be Weber. Some could be Schumann. I like all that. I love those wonderful failed operas by Schumann and Schubert.”

“I hope you don’t see this as another failed opera.”

“Who can say?”

“But you aren’t going to set to work with failure as your goal?” said Maria.

“Much may be learned from failure. Of course that is the theme of the opera, so far as I can see. The Magnificent Cookold, he called it. Am I right to think a cookold is a deceived husband?”

“You are. The word is pronounced cuckold, by the way.”

“As I said. Cookold.—Ah, thank you. This Hochheimer is really very good.—But, now—a cookold; why is it a man? Why not a woman?”

“You are just as right to say cookold as cuckold,” said Professor Hollier, who had also been getting into the Hochheimer with quiet determination. “That was a Middle English form. The French was, and still is, cocu. Because of the notorious goings-on of that bird.” He bowed to Dr. Dahl-Soot over his raised glass.

“Ah, you are a man who knows language? Very good. Then why is it masculine? A person deceived in marriage. Are not women also deceived in marriage? Again and again and again? So why no word for that, eh?”

“I do not know how you would form a feminine from cuckold. Cuckoldess? Clumsy. Or how about she-cuckold?”

“Not good,” said the Doctor.

“Does it matter? It is Arthur who is the cuckold in the Arthurian legends,” said Penny Raven.

“So it is. This Arthur was a fool,” said the Doctor.

“Oh, come on! I won’t have that,” said Maria. “He was a noble man, bent on lifting the whole moral tone of his kingdom.”

“But still a cookold. He did not pay enough attention to his wife. So she gave him a big pair of horns.”

“Perhaps there is no feminine of cuckold because the female of the species does not grow horns, however much she is deceived,” said Hollier, solemnly.

“She knows a better trick than that,” said the Doctor. “She gives him the ambiguous baby, eh? He looks in the cradle and he says, What the hell; this is a funny-looking baby. By God, I am a cookold.”

“But in the Arthurian legends there is no child of the adultery of Guenevere and Lancelot. So he could not have exclaimed what you have just exclaimed, madam.”

“Not madam. I prefer to be called Doctor. Unless after a long time we get on close terms; then perhaps you will call me Nilla.”

“Not Gunny?” said Powell.

“I despise Gunny. But this Arthur—this stupid king—he does not need a baby to tell him. His wife and his very good friend tell him straight out. We have been in the bed while you have been lifting the moral tone. It could be a comedy. It could be by Ibsen. He was often funny like that.”

Maria thought the time had come to change the direction of the conversation at the Round Table. “My next course is truly Arthurian. Roast pork, and with apple sauce. Very popular dish at Camelot, I am certain.”

“Pork? No, never pork! It must be roast boar,” said the Doctor.

“My butcher didn’t have a good roasting boar,” said Maria, perhaps a little too sharply; “you will have to put up with very good roast pork.”

“I am glad it isn’t roast boar,” said Hollier. “I have often eaten roast boar in my travels, and I don’t like it. A heavy, dense flesh and a great provoker of midnight melancholy. In me, anyhow.”

“You have not had good roast boar,” said the Doctor. “Good roast boar is excellent eating. I do not find it provokes to melancholy.”

“How would you know?” said Penny Raven.

“I do not understand you, Professor Raven.”

“You seem to be melancholy without any roast boar,” said Penny, who had not been neglecting the Hochheimer. “You are depressing us about our opera, and you are disparaging Maria’s wonderful roast pork.”

“If I depress you, I am sorry, but the fault may not be mine. I am not a merry person. I take a serious attitude toward life. I am not a self-deceiver.”

“Nor am I,” said Penny. “I am enjoying Maria’s fine Arthurian feast. She is Arthur’s lady and I declare her to be a splendid hlafdiga.”

“A fine what?” said the Doctor.

“A fine hlafdiga. It is the Old English word from which our word ‘lady’ is derived, and it means the person who gives the food. A very honourable title. I drink to our hlafdiga.”

“No, no, Penny, I must protest,” said Hollier. “A hlafdiga does not mean a lady. That is an exploded etymology. The hlafdiga was the dough-kneader, not the loaf-giver as you ignorantly suppose. You are muddling up the Mercian with the Northumbrian word.”

“Oh, bugger you, Clem,” said Penny. “The modern word ‘lady’ comes from hlafdiga; the hlafdiga was the loaf-giver and down through leofdi and thus down to lefdi and so to ‘lady’. Don’t try to teach me to suck eggs, or aegru if you want it in Old English. The hlafdiga was the wife of the hlaford—the lord, you pretentious ass—and thus his lady.”

“Abuse is not argument, Professor Raven,” said Hollier, with tipsy dignity. “The hlafdiga could be quite a lowly person—”

“Possibly even of Gypsy origins,” said Maria, with a good deal of heat.

“For Christ’s sake, are we going to get any pork?” said Powell. “Or are we going to get into an etymological wrangle while everything goes cold? I hereby declare that Maria is a lady in every sense of the word, and I want something to eat.”

“There are no ladies now, thank God,” said Dr. Dahl-Soot, holding out her glass. “We are all on equal footing, distinguished only by talent. Genius is the only true aristocracy. Is that a red wine you are pouring, Professor Darcourt? What is it? Let me see the bottle.”

“It is an excellent Burgundy,” said Darcourt.

“Good. You may pour.”

“Of course he may pour,” said Powell. “What do you think this is? A restaurant? That’s the wine there is and that’s the wine you are going to get, so shut up.”

Dr. Dahl-Soot drew herself up in her chair. “Monsieur, vous êtes une personne grossière.”

“You bet your sweet ass I am, Gunny, so you mind your manners and be a good girl.”

There was a pause, during which Darcourt hovered over the Doctor’s wineglass. Unexpectedly she burst into loud laughter.

“I think I like you, Powell,” she said. “You may call me Nilla. But only you.” She cast an excluding eye over the rest of the table. Then she raised her glass of Burgundy toward Powell, smiled with an elegant sweetness, and drained it to the bottom.

“More,” she said, thrusting it at Darcourt, who now was attending to Penny Raven.

“You wait your turn, Nilla,” said Powell.

“You are teaching me manners?” said the Doctor. “Which manners? In my country the guest of honour is allowed certain freedoms. But I see how it is. You think you are a lion-tamer and probably a lady-killer. Let me tell you that I am a lion who has eaten many tamers, and you shall not kill me because I am not a lady.”

“Funny thing. That had just begun to pop into my mind,” said Penny Raven. “But if you are not a lady, how do you describe yourself?”

“Not long ago we spoke of the aristocracy of genius,” said the Doctor, whose glass Darcourt had hastened to fill, out of turn.

“Now Penny, no fighting,” said Maria. “It isn’t the custom for the lady to propose toasts, but as Arthur is busy carving this authentically Celtic piglet, I shall claim the privilege of a hlafdiga and propose the health of Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot; I declare her to be not less than a countess in the aristocracy of genius. May we enjoy the proof of her genius.”

The health was drunk, with enthusiasm by all but Penny Raven, who muttered something into her glass. The Doctor rose to her feet.

“My dear new friends,” she said; “you do me honour and I shall not fail you. Have I teased you just a little bit? Perhaps I have. It is my way. I am a great joker, you should know. There often lurks behind my words some double entendre which you may not understand, perhaps until much later. Perhaps even in the night, you wake up laughing. Ah, the Doctor, you say. She is deep, deep, deep. You have drunk to my health. I shall drink back at you. You, reverend sir, with the wine—may I have something in my glass? Ah, thank you.—Though I am not sure about wine at this Arthurian feast. I am not sure that our hlafdiga is right in saying that Arthur had wine at his court. Surely it was that stuff they made with fermented honey—”

“Mead,” said Hollier. “You mean mead.”

“Just so. Mead. I have drunk it. And it is nasty, sweet, awful stuff, let me tell you. I casted up my stomach—”

“Not surprising, the way you go at it,” said Penny, with a smile which did not entirely rob her remark of offence.

“I can drink anybody here under the table,” said the Doctor, with grave belligerence. “Man, woman, or dog, I can drink him under the table. But I want no nasty words here. I want to drink to you all. Though as I say, I cannot believe that King Arthur had wine—

“I’ve just thought of it,” said Hollier. “The Welsh did have wine in the ancient days. You remember the old cry—Gwin o eur—Wine from the gold! Not only did they have wine, but they drank it from golden vessels. Not out of cowhorns, like a road company doing the banquet in Macbeth. Gwin o eur!

“Clem, you’re drunk!” said Penny. “And that’s a very dubious, ill-founded quotation.”

“And your Welsh is terrible!” said Powell.

“Is that so? If this were not a friendly gathering I’d let you have one right on the nose for that, Powell.”

“Would you, boy?” said Powell. “I dare you.”

“Yes. Right on the snot-box,” said Hollier. He half rose, as if to fight, but Penny pulled him back into his chair. “The Welsh are a despicable people,” he said in a murmur.

“That’s right. Real scum. Like Gypsies,” said Powell, winking at his hostess.

“Am I, or am I not, making a speech?” said the Doctor. “Am I returning thanks for this splendid dinner, so exquisitely chosen and so elegantly served under the lustrous eye of our hlafdiga?” She bowed deeply toward Maria. “Yes, I am. So I bid all you rowdies and learned hoggleboes keep silence, until I am finished. I love this country; it is, like my own land, a socialist monarchy and thus unites the best of the past and the present; I love my hosts, they are true patrons of art. I love you all; you are comrades in a great adventure, a Quest for something a man longed for but did not achieve. I drain my glass to you.” And she did so, and sat down, rather heavily.

It must have been the martinis, thought Darcourt. They all drank martinis before dinner as if they never expected to see drink again. The Doctor certainly had three, because I gave them to her myself. Now, following her speech of thanks and her toast to Maria, the Doctor was silent, and ate a large helping of roast pork and applesauce and a variety of vegetables—probably not Arthurian but nobody questioned them—in a mood that could only be called morose. The other guests murmured, more or less politely, to one another.

The Canadians—Arthur, Hollier, Penny Raven, and Darcourt—were abashed by what the Doctor had said; they closed up at any imputation of high motives, of splendid intention, of association with what might be great, and therefore dangerous. They were not wholly of the grey majority of their people; they lived in a larger world than that, but they wore the greyness as a protective outer garment. They did not murmur the national prayer: “O God, grant me mediocrity and comfort; protect me from the radiance of Thy light.” Nevertheless, they knew how difficult and disquieting too bold a spirit might be. They settled to their plates, and made small talk.

In the hearts of the two who were not Canadians, Maria and Powell, the Doctor’s toast struck fire. Powell was possessed by ambition, but not the ambition that puts the reward and the success before the excellence of the achievement. He meant to use his colleagues, and the Cornish Foundation, for his own purposes, but he thought the purposes good, and would provide ample reward and acclaim for anyone associated with them. He would ply the whip, and drive everyone to the last inch of their abilities, in order to get what he wanted. He knew he was dealing with a group who were primarily academics, and that the horses must amble before they could be made to gallop. But he would have his way, and in the Doctor he sensed an ally.

As for Maria, she felt, for the first time since her marriage, a stirring of real adventure. Oh, it was wonderful to be Mrs. Arthur Cornish, and to share the thoughts and ambitions of a man of fine—yes, noble, she would say noble—spirit. There was nothing she could want in a man that she did not find in Arthur. And yet—was it the northern nature, or the Canadian greyness—there was just the least hint of chill about her marriage. They loved. They trusted. Their sexual life was a warm manifestation of love and trust. But, if only for a moment, there might be some hint of the improbable, of a relaxation of control. Maybe this opera would bring that. It was risky. It was a long time since she had sniffed the sharp, acrid smell of risk. Not since the time of Parlabane, over a year ago. Who would have thought of regretting Parlabane?

And yet—he had brought something rare and pungent into her life.

What her place might be in this opera adventure she did not know. She was not a musician, though she was musical. She would not be allowed to work on the libretto; Penny and Simon had that marked off for themselves. Was she to do no more than write cheques, as an official of the Cornish Foundation? Money, as a host of grant-seekers assured her, was seminal. But it was not true seed of her seed.

Darcourt was eating and wool-gathering at the same time, a frequent trick of his. I wonder what we should look like, he thought, if a mischievous genie were to pass over this table and strike us all naked? The result would be better than at most tables. Maria would be a stunning beauty, clothed or naked. Hollier was absurdly handsome for a professor (but why? Must a professor always be a broomstick or a tub?) and without his clothes would reveal, in middle age, a Michelangelesque symmetry, agreeable to his splendid head. Arthur would be sturdy; passable but not astonishing. Powell would be less than he seemed in his clothes; like many an actor he was slight, almost thin, and his head was the best part of him. As for Penny Raven—well, there were the remains of a fine woman about Penny, but to Darcourt’s probing eye the breasts were a little languid, and there was a hint of a rubber tire around the waist. The sedentary life of the scholar was running Penny down, and her jolly face was sagging a little at the chops.

As for the Doctor—well, he was reminded of a remark he had heard a student make about another student, a girl: “I’d as soon go to bed with a bicycle.” The Doctor, under the fine, Chopinesque get-up, might have the wiriness, the chill, the impracticable resistance of a bicycle to a sexual approach, but she was probably interesting. Any breasts? One cannot get beneath the coat. Any hips? The skirts of the coat concealed them, whatever they might be. But an elegantly formed waist. Long, elegant feet and hands. The Doctor might be very interesting. Not that he was the man who would find out.

As for himself, Professor the Reverend Simon Darcourt, he had to admit that he did not peel well. He had been a fatty from his mother’s womb and now the stretch-marks on his belly were the wound stripes of countless lost battles against overweight.

The table is almost silent, he thought; an angel must be passing. But not the stark-striking genie. The servant removed his plate and he got up to attend to the next service of wine. It was to be champagne. Who would be the first to protest that whatever wine Arthur of Britain may have served at the Round Table, it was certainly not champagne? Nobody. They accepted it with murmurs of pleasure.

Maria allowed the next course to be served without comment. It was a pretty confection of eggs and cream stiffened with something elusive.

“What is this?” asked the Doctor.

“Nobody can say that it isn’t a genuinely Arthurian dish,” said Maria. “Its name is washbrew.”

The company was reduced to silence. Nobody liked to ask what washbrew might be, but when they heard the name their minds misgave them.

Maria said nothing for a minute or two, then she relieved their apprehension.

“It can’t hurt you,” she said. “It is just very fine oatmeal, with a few things to give it a nice taste. Geraint’s Welsh ancestors called it flummery.”

“Buttermilk and flummery say the bells of Montgomery,” sang Powell, to the tune of “Oranges and Lemons”.

“The flavour,” said Penny. “Elusive. Delicious! Reminds me somehow of childhood.”

“That is the hartshorn,” said Maria. “Very Arthurian. You were probably given hartshorn candy for sore throats.”

“But not just hartshorn,” said Hollier. “There is another flavour, and I think it’s brandy.”

“I am certain Arthur had brandy,” said Maria. “and if anybody contradicts me I shall send it back to the kitchen and get you some raw turnips to chew, and that will be authentically Early Britain, and I hope it will satisfy all you purists. The champagne should help you to worry down a few turnips.”

“Please don’t be annoyed, dear,” said Arthur. “I’m sure nobody means to be disagreeable.”

“I am not so sure, and I’m sick and tired of having my dinner tested for archaeological accuracy. If my intuition tells me something is Arthurian, it’s thereby Arthurian, including champagne, and that’s that!”

“Of course,” said the Doctor, and her tone was as smooth as the cream they were eating. “We are all being intolerable, and I demand that everyone stop it at once. We have insulted our hlafdiga, and we should be ashamed. I am ashamed. Are you ashamed, Professor Raven?”

“Eh?” said Penny, startled. “Yes, I suppose I am. Anything served at Arthur’s Round Table is thereby Arthurian, isn’t it?”

“That is what I like about you Canadians,” said the Doctor; “you are so ready to admit fault. It is a fine, if dangerous, national characteristic. You are all ashamed. And I am ashamed, too.”

“But I don’t want anybody to feel ashamed,” said Maria. “Just happy. I do wish you could be happy and not nag and quarrel all the time.”

“Of course, my dear,” said Hollier. “We are ungrateful beasts, and this is a delightful dinner.” He leaned across Penny Raven to pat Maria’s hand, but he misjudged his distance and got his sleeve in Penny’s flummery. “Oh, hell,” he said.

“About this opera,” said Arthur. “I suppose we ought to give it some thought?”

“I’ve given it many hours of thought,” said Powell. “The first thing we must have is a story. And I have a story.”

“Have you so?” said the Doctor. “You have not seen the music, and you have not talked to me, but you have a story. I suppose we are to be permitted to hear the story, so that we little people may set to work on it?”

Powell drew himself up in his chair, and swept the table with the smile with which he could melt fifteen hundred people in a theatre.

“But of course,” said he. “And you must not suppose that I wish to impose my story on anyone, and least of all on the musicians. That is not the way we librettists work. We know our place in the hierarchy of operatic artists. When I say I have a story, I mean only that I have a basis on which we may begin discussions of what this opera is to be about.”

How well he manages us, thought Darcourt. He uses at least three levels of language. There is his Rough Demotic, in which he tells the Doctor to bet her pretty little ass on something, and another form of that is the speech in which he calls me “Sim bach”, and “boy”, and reverses his sentence structure in what I suppose is a translation from his cradle Welsh; and there is his Standard English, in which he addresses the world of strangers, about whom he cares little; and there is his Enriched Literary Speech, finely pronounced and begemmed with quotations from Shakespeare and the more familiar poets, and soaring at need into a form of rhapsodic, bardic chant. It’s a pleasure to be bamboozled by such a man. What lustre he gives to the language that most of us treat as a common drudge. What is he going to give us now? The Enriched, I suppose.

“The story of Arthur,” said Powell, “is impossible to gather into a single coherent tale. It comes to us in an elegant French form, and a sturdy, darkly coloured German form, and in Sir Thomas Malory’s form, which is the richest and most enchanting of all. But behind all of these forms lies the great Celtic legend, whence all the elegance and strength and enchantment take their life, and in the brief story I offer you for this opera you may be sure I have not forgotten it. But if we are to have an opera that will hold an audience, we must above all have a strong narrative that can carry the weight of music. Music can give life and feeling to an opera, but it cannot tell a tale.”

“By God, you are right,” said the Doctor. Then she turned to Darcourt. “Champagne,” she hissed.

“Yes! Gwin o eur!” said Hollier.

“Now—listen. You will agree, I hope, that there can be no tale of Arthur that leaves out Caliburn, the great magic sword; I do not like the later form Excalibur. But—economy! We cannot go back to the beginning of his life to tell about how he came by Caliburn. So I propose a device that was put in my head by Hoffmann himself. You remember how in the overture to Undine he strikes the right note at once by using the voices of the lover and the water-god, calling the name of the heroine? I propose that almost as soon as the overture to Arthur of Britain begins, we raise the curtain on a vision scene—you do it behind a scrim which makes everything misty—and we see the Magic Mere, and Arthur and Merlin on its shore. At a gesture from Merlin the great sword arises from the water, gripped in the hand of an unseen spirit, and Arthur seizes it. But as he is overcome with the grandeur of the moment, there arises from the Mere a vision of Guenevere—the name means White Ghost, as you surely know—presenting the scabbard of Caliburn; Merlin bids Arthur accept the scabbard and makes Arthur understand—don’t worry, I’ll show ’em how to do it—that the scabbard is even more important than the sword, because when the sword is in its scabbard there is peace, and peace must be his gift to his people. But as Arthur turns away, the visionary Guenevere shows by a gesture that the scabbard is herself, and that unless he knows her value and her might, the sword will avail him nothing. You follow me?”

“I follow you,” said the Doctor. “The sword is manhood and the scabbard is womanhood, and unless they are united there can be no peace, no splendour through the arts of peace.”

“You’ve got it!” said Powell. “And the scabbard is also Guenevere, and already Arthur is losing Guenevere because he trusts in the sword alone.”

“The symbolismus is very good,” said the Doctor. “Aha, the sword is also Arthur’s thing—you know, his male thing—what do you call it—?”

“His penis,” said Penny.

“Not much of a word. Latin—means his tail. How can it be a tail when it is in front? Have you no better word in English?”

“Not in decent use,” said Darcourt.

“Oh—decent use! I spit on decent use! And the scabbard is the Queen’s thing—what is your indecent word for that?”

Nobody quite liked to reply, but Penny whispered in the Doctor’s ear. “Middle English,” she added, to give it a scholarly gloss.

“Oho, that word!” said the Doctor. “We know it well in Sweden. That’s a better word than that silly tail-word. I see that this will be a very rich opera. More champagne, if you please. Perhaps the best thing would be to put a bottle here beside me.”

“Do I understand that you are telling the spectators even before the opera begins that there can be peace in the land only if there is sexual unity between the King and Queen?” said Hollier.

“Not at all,” said Powell. “This Prologue tells that the greatness of the land depends on the uniting of masculine and feminine powers, and that the sword alone cannot bring the nobility of spirit Arthur seeks. Don’t worry. I can get it across with some very nice lighting. There will be no raunchy shoving the sword in and out of the scabbard to please the people who think that sex is just something that happens in bed.”

“More to that game than four bare legs in a blanket,” said Penny, nodding sagely.

“Exactly. It is a union of two opposite but complementary sensibilities. Maybe that is what the Grail means. I leave that to the librettists, if they think it useful.”

“The wine in the gold,” said Maria.

“I never thought of the Grail like that,” said Penny. “Interesting idea.”

“Even the blind pig sometimes finds an acorn,” said Powell, bowing toward her. “Now, to get into the opera proper.

“Act One begins with Arthur’s evil sister, Morgan Le Fay (who is an enchantress and thus understandably a contralto), trying to worm secrets out of Merlin: who shall be Arthur’s heir? Merlin squirms a bit, but he can’t resist a fellow magician, and he confides that it must be someone born in the month of May, unless Arthur should have a child of his own. Morgan Le Fay is exultant, for her son Modred was born in May, and as the King’s nephew he is the nearest heir. Merlin warns her not to be too sure, for Arthur loves Guenevere greatly, and a child is very likely. Not if Arthur risks his life in war, says the contralto.

“Then we have an assembly of the Knights of the Round Table: Arthur gives them their charge—they are to disperse and seek the Holy Grail, which will bring lasting peace and greatness to Britain. The Knights accept their duty, and are sent their different ways. But when Lancelot presents himself the King refuses to give him a direction; he must remain behind to govern because the King is eager to go on the Quest himself, bearing the great Caliburn; he draws it and sings of his overmastering ambition. Guenevere pleads with Arthur to let Lancelot go on the Quest, for she fears that the guilty love she and Lancelot have for each other may bring shame to the kingdom. But Arthur is resolute, and as he is being armoured for his Quest—very spectacular that will be—Morgan Le Fay steals the scabbard and Arthur, in his exalted state, refuses to wait until it is found, and goes on the Quest, declaring that bravery and strength, symbolized by the naked sword, will suffice. Everybody buggers off in search of the Grail, and Guenevere is filled with dread, and Morgan Le Fay is exultant. End of the Act.”

“What about Modred?” said Maria. “We haven’t heard anything of him yet.”

“He’s one of the Knights, and he doubts the Grail,” said Powell. “He can scowl and sneer in the background.”

“Strong stuff, but is it nineteenth-century?” said Hollier. “A bit too psychological, perhaps?”

“No,” said the Doctor. “Nineteenth-century need not mean simple-minded. Look at Weber’s Der Freischutz. The nineteenth century had psychology too. We didn’t invent it.”

“Very well,” said Hollier. “Go on, Powell.”

“Act Two is where we get into really big operatic stuff. Begins with a scene of the Queen’s Maying; she and her ladies are in the forest, gathering the May blossoms. I think she should ride a horse. A horse is always a sure card in opera. Suggests that no expense has been spared. If the horse has been given an enema an hour before curtain time, and there are enough people to lead it, even a coloratura soprano should be able to stick on its back long enough for a very pretty effect. In the forest she meets Lancelot, and they sing of their passion—after the horse and the maidens have gone, of course. But Morgan Le Fay is eavesdropping, disguised as a hag, an old witch of the forest. She cannot contain herself. She bursts upon the couple and denounces them as traitors to the King; they protest their innocence and devotion to Arthur. When the witch has gone, Merlin appears, and warns the lovers of the evil that lurks in the May blossoms, and the danger of the month of May. But they do not understand him.”

“Stupid, like all characters in opera,” said Hollier.

“Enchanted, like all people in love,” said the Doctor. “Characters in opera are really just like ordinary people, you know, except that they show us their souls.”

“If a witch and a sorcerer warned me about something, I think I would have enough wits to heed them,” said Hollier.

“Probably. That is why there has never been an opera about a professor,” said the Doctor.

“That is only Scene One of the Act,” said Powell. “Now we have a quick change—I know how to do it—to a Tower up the river above Camelot, where Guenevere and Lancelot have gone and consummated their love. They are in ecstasy, but in the river below the Tower there appears a Black Barge guided by Morgan Le Fay, and bearing Elaine, the Lily Maid of Astolat, who accuses Lancelot of being false to her, and says that she carries his child. Guenevere is horror-struck, when Lancelot confesses that it is indeed true, but that he lay with Elaine when he was under a spell, and that he suspects the spell was cast upon him by Morgan Le Fay, who can get in a lot of very effective mockery in the ensuing quartet. But Guenevere is desolate and when the barge sweeps on, down the river to Camelot, her reproaches drive Lancelot mad. Now of course in Malory he is mad for years, and dashes about the forest banging into trees and getting into all sorts of injurious mischief, but we have no time for that, so he rages for a while. This could be quite a novelty; a Mad Scene (à la Lucia) for a tenor. Lancelot proposes to Guenevere that he should kill himself, as expiation for his faithlessness, even though it was not precisely his fault. No, says Guenevere; there shall be no needless killing, and she herself puts his sword back into its scabbard. As the scene concludes, a messenger arrives in hot haste, with news that there has been a great battle, and that Arthur has been killed. His body is being brought back to Camelot for burial. End of scene.”

“Nobody can say that this opera lacks for incident,” said Maria.

“Operas devour incident,” said the Doctor. “Nobody wants to listen to people going into musical ecstasies about love for two hours and a half. Go on, Powell. What next? You have killed Arthur. That is bad. The character who gives the name to the opera should not peg out until the end. Look at Lucia di Lammermoor; the last act is tedious. No Lucia. You’ll have to arrange something different.”

“No I won’t,” said Powell. “The next and final Act is in the Great Hall of Arthur’s palace in Camelot, and Arthur returns triumphant, though wounded. He tells of the battle in which he has been engaged, and how a Knight in black armour appeared who challenged him to single combat. But when he seemed to be overcome, and fell from his horse, he drew his shield before him just as the Black Knight was about to give him the coup de grâce—”

“The what?” said Hollier.

Penny flew at him. “The coup de grâce, Clem. You know: the knockout. Do pay attention. You keep nodding off.”

“I do nothing of the sort.”

“Yes you do. Sit up straight and listen.”

“As I was saying,” said Powell, “the Black Knight was about to give Arthur the coup de grâce when he saw on the shield the painting of Our Lady, whereupon he turned and fled, and Arthur, though wounded, was spared. Arthur sings in praise of Our Lady, who saved him at need. The Eternal Feminine, you see.”

“Das Ewig-Weibliche,” said the Doctor. “That ought to teach the masculine idiot. Go on.”

“Everybody is immensely chuffed that Arthur has returned. But Arthur is uneasy. He knows he has an inveterate enemy. And this is where several Knights appear, bringing in Modred, the Black Knight, and Arthur is stricken that his nephew and the child of his dear sister should have sought his life. Modred mocks him as an idealistic fool, who holds honour greater than power, and displays the scabbard of Caliburn, without which he says honour is powerless, and the sword must settle everything. He challenges the wounded King to fight, and though Guenevere, who has seized the scabbard, begs him to sheathe Caliburn, the King will not hear of it. He and Modred fight, and once again the King is wounded. As he lies dying, Guenevere and Lancelot confess their guilty love. Now—this is the culmination of the whole affair—Arthur shows himself greatly magnanimous, and declares that the greatest love is summed up in Charity, and not in sexual fidelity alone; his love for both Guenevere and Lancelot is greater than the wound they have given him. He dies, and at once the scene changes to the Magic Mere, where we see Arthur floating out into the mists in a barge, attended only by Merlin, who sheathes Caliburn for the last time and casts it back into the water from which it first came, as Arthur nears the Isle of Sleep. Curtain.”

There was applause from Darcourt and Maria. But Hollier was not content. “You drop too many people along the way,” he said. “What happens to Elaine? What about her baby? We know that baby was Galahad, the Pure Knight who saw the Grail. You can’t just dump all that after Act Two.”

“Oh yes I can,” said Powell. “This is an opera, not a Ring Cycle. We’ve got to get the curtain down around eleven.”

“You’ve said nothing about Modred being the incestuous child of Arthur and Morgan Le Fay.”

“No time for incest,” said Powell. “The plot is complicated enough as it stands. Incest would just mess things up.”

“I will have no part of any opera that includes a baby,” said the Doctor. “Horses are bad enough on the stage, but children are hell.”

“People will feel cheated,” said Hollier. “Anybody who knows Malory will know that it was Sir Bedevere, not Merlin, who threw Caliburn back into the water. And it was three Queens who bore Arthur away. It’s all so untrue to the original.”

“Let ’em write to the papers,” said Powell. “Let the musicologists paw it over for the next twenty years. We must have a coherent plot and we must wind it up before the stagehands go on overtime. How many people in an opera audience will know Malory, do you suppose?”

“I have always said the theatre was a coarse art,” said Hollier, with tipsy dignity.

“That is why it is a live art,” said the Doctor. “That is why it has vitality. Out of the ragbag about Arthur we have to find a straight story, and Powell has done so. For myself, I am very well pleased with his schema for the opera. I drink to you, Powell. You are what I call a real pro.”

“Thank you, Nilla,” said Powell. “I can’t think of a compliment that would please me better.”

“What’s a real pro?” whispered Hollier to Penny.

“Somebody who really knows his job.”

“Somebody who doesn’t know Malory, it seems to me.”

“I like it tremendously,” said Arthur; “and I am glad you agree, Doctor. Whatever you say, Clem, it’s miles ahead of that rubbish about Nob and Tit we were listening to when Penny discovered Planché’s stuff. At last I feel as if a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I was terribly worried.”

“Your worries have only begun, boy,” said Powell. “But we’ll meet ’em as they come. Won’t we, Nilla fach?”

“Powell, you go beyond what is decent,” said the Doctor. “How dare you speak to me in that way!”

“You misunderstand. The word is a Welsh endearment.”

“You are gross. Do not attempt to explain.”

“Fach is the feminine of bach. I say ‘Sim, bach’ and it is as if I said dear old Sim.”

“I want nothing to do with old dears,” said the Doctor, who was again becoming belligerent. “I am a free spirit, not the scabbard of any man’s sword. My world is a world of infinite choice.”

“I’ll bet,” said Penny.

“You will oblige me by confining yourself to the libretto, which is your business, Professor Raven,” said the Doctor. “Have you comprehended the symbolismus? This will be wonderfully modern. The true union of man and woman to save and enlarge mankind.”

“But how can it be wonderfully modern if it is true to Hoffmann and the early nineteenth century?” said Hollier. “You forget that we are to restore and complete a work of art from a day long past.”

“Professor Hollier, you are wonderfully obtuse, as only a very learned man can be, and I forgive you. But for the love of Almighty God, and for Our Lady whom Arthur bore on his shield, I beg you to shut up and leave the artists’ work to the artists, and stop all this scholarly bleating. Real art is all one, and speaks of the great things of life, whenever it is created. Get that through your great, thick, brilliantly furnished head and shut up, shut up, shut up.” The Doctor was roaring, in a rich contralto that might have done very well for Morgan Le Fay.

“All right,” said Hollier. “I am not insulted. I am above the ravings of a drunken termagant. Go ahead, the whole pack of you, and make asses of yourselves. I withdraw.”

“You mean you withdraw till next time you feel like sticking your oar in,” said Penny. “I know you, Clem.”

“Please. Please!” Now it was Darcourt who was shouting. “This is unbecoming an assembly of scholars and artists, and I won’t listen to any more. You know what the Doctor is saying, don’t you? It’s been said since—well, at least since Ovid. He says somewhere—in the Metamorphoses, I think—that the great truths of life are the wax, and all we can do is to stamp it with different forms. But the wax is the same forever—”

“I have it,” said Maria. “He says that nothing keeps its own form, but Nature who is the great renewer is always making up new forms from old forms. Nothing perishes in the whole universe—it just varies and renews its form—”

“And that’s the truth that underlies all myth,” shouted Darcourt, waving at her to be quiet. “If we are true to the great myth, we can give it what form we choose. The myth—the wax—does not change.”

The Doctor, who had been busy lighting a large black cigar she drew from a silver case, said to Powell: “I am beginning to see my way. The scene where Arthur forgives the lovers will be in A minor, and we shall dodge back and forth in and out of A minor right until the end when the magician sees Arthur sailing off to his Island of Sleep. That’s how we’ll do it.”

“Of course that’s how we’ll do it, Nilla,” said Powell. “A minor comes right up out of the wax, hot and strong. And don’t fuss about the opera being true to the nineteenth century. It will be artistically true, but you mustn’t expect it to be literally true because—well, because a literal fidelity to the nineteenth century would be false. Do you see?”

“Yes. I see very well,” said Arthur.

“Arthur, you are a darling,” said Maria. “You see better than any of us.”

“Well—I see many difficulties,” said Hollier.

“I see the wax, and I am sure you two pros see the form, and I’m very happy about it,” said Darcourt.

“God bless you, Sim bach,” said Powell. “You are a good old Merlin, that’s what you are, boy.”

“This Merlin—this magician—is more important in the story you have told, Powell, than I had expected,” said the Doctor. “In opera terms, I should say he is Fifth Business, and the singer will have to be chosen with great care. What voice, do you think? We have a bass villain, and a baritone hero and a tenor lover, and a contralto villainess and a coloratura heroine and a mezzo simpleton—that deceived girl, what’s her name, Elaine. What for Merlin? What would you say to a haute contre—you know, one of those high, unearthly voices?”

“A counter-tenor, you mean? What could be better? Makes him unlike any of the others.”

“Yes, and very useful in ensembles. Those male altos are like trumpets, only strange—”

“The horns of elfland faintly blowing,” said Powell.

“You seem to be pleased with the libretto just as Geraint has outlined it,” said Arthur.

“Oh, it will need some small changes here and there as we work,” said the Doctor. “But it is a fine schema; coherent and simple for people who can’t follow a difficult plot, but with plenty of meaning underneath. An opera has to have a foundation; something big, like unhappy love, or vengeance, or some point of honour. Because people like that, you know. There they sit, all those stockbrokers and rich surgeons and insurance men, and they look so solemn and quiet as if nothing would rouse them. But underneath they are raging with unhappy love, or vengeance, or some point of honour or ambition—all connected with their professional lives. They go to La Bohème or La Traviata and they remember some early affair that might have been squalid if you weren’t living it yourself; or they see Rigoletto and think how the chairman humiliated them at the last board meeting; or they see Macbeth and think how they would like to murder the chairman and get his job. Only they don’t think it; very deep down they feel it, and boil it, and suffer it in the primitive underworld of their souls. You wouldn’t get them to admit anything, not if you begged. Opera speaks to the heart as no other art does, because it is essentially simple.”

“And what do you see as the deep foundation of this one?” said Arthur.

“It’s a beauty,” said Powell. “Victory plucked from defeat. If we can bring it off, it will wring the heart. Arthur has failed in the Quest, lost his wife, lost his crown, lost life itself. But because of his nobility and greatness of spirit when he forgives Guenevere and Lancelot, he is seen to be the greatest man of all. He is Christ-like; apparently a loser, but, in truth, the greatest victor of them all.”

“You’ll want a first-rate actor,” said Maria.

“Yes. And I have my eye on one, but I won’t tell you until I’ve got his name on a contract.”

“It’s the alchemical theme,” said Maria. “Gold refined from dross.”

“Do you know,” said Hollier, “I believe you’re right. You have always been my best student, Maria. But if you get that out of an authentic nineteenth-century stage piece, you’ll be alchemists indeed.”

“We are alchemists,” said the Doctor. “It’s our job. But now I must go home. I must be fresh tomorrow to go over all this Hoffmann stuff again with what we have been talking about fresh in my mind. I must do that before I talk with this little Schnakenburg, whoever she is. And so I shall say good-night.”

Upright as a grenadier and without a stumble, the Doctor circled the room, shaking hands with everyone.

“Let me call you a taxi,” said Darcourt.

“No indeed. The walk will refresh me. It cannot be more than two miles, and the night is very fresh.”

Saying which, the Doctor seized Maria in her arms and gave her a lingering kiss. “Do not worry, little one,” she said. “Your dinner was very good. Not authentic, of course, but better than the real thing. Like our opera.” And away she went.

“My God,” said Penny, when the Doctor had gone, “did you see what that woman drank? And not once—not once in six hours—did she go to the loo. Is she human?”

“Very human,” said Maria, wiping her mouth with a handkerchief. “She stuck her tongue almost down my throat.”

“She didn’t kiss me, you observe,” said Penny. “Not that I care. Raunchy old lesbian lush. You watch yourself, Maria. She has her eye on you.”

“That cigar! I’ll taste it for a week!” said Maria, and picking up her glass of champagne she gargled noisily, and spat into an empty coffee cup. “I never thought of myself as attractive in that way.”

“You’re attractive in so many ways,” said Penny, tearfully. “It isn’t fair.”

“When you sink into self-pity,” said Hollier, “it’s time for me to go home.”

“I’ll drive you, Clem,” said Penny. “I have a large, forgiving soul, even if you are a rotten old bastard.”

“Thank you, Professor Raven,” said Hollier; “I would prefer not to be driven by you. Last time you drove me home we were spoken to by a policeman because of your driving.”

“He was just being officious.”

“And when we arrived outside my house you honked your horn derisively to waken my mother. No, Penny, no. I won’t drive with you when you’ve got your paws in the sauce.”

“Paws in the sauce! I like that! Who was falling asleep while Geraint was talking? You bloody old woman, Clem!”

“In this age of female liberation, I do not understand why ‘old woman’ is still considered an insult.” And with careful dignity Hollier took his leave, closely followed by Penny, who was squealing incoherent abuse.

“She’ll drive him, of course,” said Darcourt. “Clem is as tight as the bark to a tree. He can never resist a free ride. I’ll give them a minute, then I’ll go too.”

“Oh, Simon, when do I see you again?” said Maria. “I’ve got something to tell you. Crottel wants to come again and nag about Parlabane’s miserable book.”

“I’ll be here when you need me,” said Simon, and went.

“What do you make of the Doctor, Geraint?” said Arthur to the lingering guest.

“ ‘Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!’ ” said Powell. “I’m mad for Old Sooty. We shall get on like a house afire—literally like a house afire.”

“She won’t yield to your charm,” said Maria.

“Exactly. That’s why we’ll work well together. I despise easy women.” And, kissing Maria on the cheek, he went.

Maria and Arthur looked around their large room. The candles on the Round Table were guttering. In the middle stood the Platter of Plenty, from which no guests had taken anything, whether from sixth-century scruple or not it was impossible to guess. Like all dinner tables, after prolonged dinners, it was a melancholy sight.

“Don’t worry, my darling,” said Arthur. “It was a wonderful dinner, and a great success, really. But I never really understand your university friends. Why do they quarrel so?”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” said Maria. “It’s just that they can’t bear anybody else to have an advantage, even for a moment. That woman stirred them up.”

“She’s a disturber, no doubt about it.”

“A good disturber, would you say?”

“As she said herself, we must hope,” said Arthur, and led his wife off to bed. Or rather, to their separate beds, for Arthur was still not fully himself.

(4) ETAH IN LIMBO

Old Sooty! Does Powell really understand Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot if he can speak of her thus? Yet I believe it is meant to be affectionate, and is just his theatrical way; theatre people have little reverence—except when they look in the mirror.

The Doctor fills me with hope. Here is someone I can understand. She knows the lyre of Orpheus when she hears it, and does not fear to follow where it may lead.

I love the Doctor. Not as a man loves a woman, but as an artist loves a friend. She reminds me gloriously of my dearest friend on earth, Ludwig Devrient. A very fine actor, and the most sympathetic and dearest of men.

What great nights we had together, in Lutter’s tavern, just across the square from the house in which I lived. And why was I not in my house? Why was I not at the domestic hearth with my dear, faithful, long-suffering wife Michalina?

I think it was because Michalina loved me too much. Dear girl, when I was writing my tales of horror and grotesquerie, and my nerves were red-hot and I thought my mind might lose itself forever in the dangerous underworld from which my stories came, she would sit by my side, and keep my glass filled, and sometimes hold my hand when I began to tremble—for I did tremble when the ideas came too fast and were too frightening—and I swear it was she who kept me from madness. And how did I reward her? Certainly not with blows and harsh words and the brutality of a ruffian, as so many husbands do. When I was a judge, I heard awful tales of domestic tyranny. A man may be the most respectable of bourgeois to his acquaintances, but a brute and a devil at home. Not I. I loved Michalina, I respected her, I gave her whatever my earnings, which were not trifling, could command. But I was always conscious that I pitied her, and I pitied her because she was so devoted to me, never questioned me, treated me as a master rather than a lover.

Not that it could have been otherwise. Too soon after my marriage I took a pupil, Julia Marc, and I loved her with all my heart and soul; all the entrancing women in my stories are portraits of Julia Marc.

It was her voice. I was teaching her to sing, but there was little enough to teach, for she had such a gift and such a voice as comes rarely in anyone’s experience. Oh, I could refine her taste, and show her how to phrase her music, but as I sat at the harpsichord I was lost in a dream of love, and would have made a fool of myself, or perhaps a Byronic demon lover of myself, if she had given me any encouragement. She was sixteen, and she knew I loved her, though not how profoundly, because she was too young, and the devotion of such a man as I was seemed to her to be in the natural order of things. Very young girls think themselves made to be loved, and they may even be kind to their lovers, but they do not really understand them, and I think her secret dream was of some young officer, wondrous in a uniform, with a maddening moustache, who would turn her bowels to water with his valour and his aristocratic ways. So what was the music-master, a little man, with a strange, sharp face, who made her tune her scales until she sang with a melting purity and never strayed from the key? A nice old fellow, nearly twenty years older than herself, and at thirty-six already with some grey hairs in the parenthetic side-whiskers that framed his rat-like face. But I loved her until I thought I might die of it, and Michalina knew, and never spoke a jealous word or a reproach.

So what came of that? When she was seventeen, Julia’s hard-headed, Philistine mother arranged a good marriage for her to one Groepel, who was nearly sixty, but rich. I suppose she could imagine no finer future for her daughter than to be a rich widow. What the good woman did not know was that Groepel was a drunkard of terrible assiduity. Not a roaring, heroic drinker, or a romantic melancholy drinker, but a determined fuddler. I still cannot permit myself to think what her life with Groepel may have been like. Perhaps he beat her, but it is more likely that he was coarse and sullen and abusive and never knew a single thing of any importance about what my Julia was or might be. Whatever, the marriage had to be dissolved after a few years, and it was the mercy of God that it was not in my courtroom that the process was examined and the dissolution approved by law. By that time the wonderful voice was gone, and there was nothing left of my Julia but a pitiable woman of substantial means bewailing her misfortunes to her cronies over innumerable cups of coffee and rich unwholesome little cakes. It was the lovely girl of sixteen I treasured in my heart, and now I see that she was in great part my own creation. For Julia, too, was a Philistine in her heart and nothing I could do as her teacher could touch that.

What is a Philistine? Oh, some of them are very nice people. They are the salt of the earth, but not its pepper. A Philistine is someone who is content to live in a wholly unexplored world. My dear, dear faithful Michalina was a Philistine, I believe, for she never attempted to explore any world but that of her husband, and because E.T.A. Hoffmann could not love her with the fervour of his love for Julia, that was not enough.

Was this a tragedy? Oh, no, no, no my dear cultivated friends. We know what a tragedy is, don’t we? Tragedy is about heroic figures, who make their sufferings known to the world and demand that the world stand in awe of their sufferings. Not a little lawyer, who wants to be a great composer and is in reality rather an unusual writer, and his devoted Polish wife. There can be no tragedy about such ordinary people. Their lives at best are melodrama, in which the harsh realities are interspersed with scenes of comedy or even farce. They do not live under the pewter sky of tragedy. For them there are breaks in the clouds.

Such a break in the sky, such a burst of fine weather, was my friendship with Ludwig Devrient. A man most decidedly not a Philistine, but one of a great theatre family, himself a great actor, a man of such magnetism and personal beauty as might even have satisfied the girlish dreams of Julia Marc. Between us there was friendship and sympathy that perfectly suited us both, for we were both what it was then becoming fashionable to call Romantics. We did explore the world, so far as we could. And, I am sorry to say, our compass in our explorations was the bottle. The champagne bottle. In those days it was not a prohibitively expensive wine, but a wine we could apply ourselves to in seriousness and abundance. In Lutter’s tavern, night after night we did so, and a group of friends would gather to hear us talk and range over that world of which the Philistines wish to know nothing.

When I died, at forty-six, of a complication of ailments of which champagne was not the least, Devrient did something that made him the mockery of those who could not understand, and won him the respect of some who could. After my funeral he went to Lutter’s and made himself gloriously drunk. He was not a roaring drunk or a silly drunk or a stumbling drunk, but a man who had gone over entirely into that other world that the Philistines do not wish to explore or even to allow on the neat chart of their universe. He put two bottles of champagne into his pockets, and walked to the graveyard, and there he seated himself on my grave; and all the cool night of June 25, 1822, he talked to me in his best manner. Some of the wine he drank and some he spilled on the clay. Though I could not answer him, it was surely our best night together, and helped me kindly through the first loneliness of death.

In this woman I see Devrient, or something of him, once again. That was why, when the party was over, I walked at her side through the autumn streets of a strange but not unkindly city, until we came to her house, and there I sat by her bedside the whole night through. Did I speak to her in her dreams? Those who understand such things better than I must answer that question, but that was my hope. In Dr. Gunilla I recognized another Romantic, and though many aspire to that condition, it is a gift of birth, and we are few.