The Lyre of Orpheus

(1)

Mr. Mervyn Gwilt was thoroughly enjoying himself. This, he thought, was what the practice of the law should be—fine surroundings, a captive audience of distinguished people, and he, Mervyn Gwilt, advising them, for their own good, from his rich understanding of the law and human nature.

Mr. Mervyn Gwilt was every inch a lawyer. Indeed, the expression is inadequate, for there were not many inches to Mr. Gwilt, and there was an awful lot of lawyer in him. He could not have been anything else. He habitually wore a wing collar, suggesting that only a few minutes before he had whipped off his gown and bands and was attempting to reduce his courtroom demeanour and vocabulary to the needs of common life. He always wore a dark three-piece suit, lest he be summoned to court in a hurry. He particularly liked Latin; the priests of Rome might have abandoned that language as a cloak for their mystery, but not Mervyn Gwilt. It was, he explained, so pithy, so exact, so wholly legal in its underlying philosophy and its sound, that it could not be beaten as an instrument for subduing an opponent, or a client. The law had not, up to the present, shown much favour to Mr. Gwilt, but he was ready, should such favour suddenly declare itself.

“At the outset,” he said, smiling around the table, “I want to make it amply clear that my client’s wish in pursuing this matter carries no taint ad crumenam (that’s to say he isn’t looking for money) but is actuated solely by an inborn respect for the ius naturale (meaning what’s right and proper).”

He smiled at Maria; at Hollier; at Darcourt. He even smiled at the large man with the big black moustache who had been introduced simply as Mr. Carver. Finally he smiled, with special radiance, at his client Wally Crottel, who was sitting at his side.

“That’s right,” said Wally. “Don’t think I’m just in this for what I can get.”

“Let me handle it, Wally,” said Mr. Gwilt. “Let’s put it all on the table and look at it ante litem motam (by which I mean before we think of any court action). Now look: Mr. Crottel’s father, the late John Parlabane, left at his death the manuscript of a novel, the title of which was Be Not Another. Am I right?”

Maria, Hollier, and Darcourt nodded.

“He left it to Miss Maria Magdalena Theotoky, now Mrs. Arthur Cornish, and to Professor Clement Hollier, as his literary executors. Right?”

“Not precisely,” said Hollier. “He left it with an appeal that we should get it published. The term literary executors was not used.”

“That remains to be seen,” said Mr. Gwilt. “It might well have been implied. So far my client and I have not had a chance to examine that letter. I think this is the time for us to have it on the table. Right?”

“Out of the question,” said Hollier. “It was a letter of the most intimate character, and the bit about the novel was only a small part of it. Whatever Parlabane wanted made public he sent in other letters to the newspapers.”

Mr. Gwilt made stagy business of hunting in his briefcase for some newspaper clippings. “Those were the portions that spoke of his unhappy determination to take his life because of the neglect his great novel had met with.”

“They were also the portions that described his elaborate and disgusting murder of Professor Urquhart McVarish,” said Hollier.

“That is not relevant to the matter in hand,” said Mr. Gwilt, rebuking this crude reference.

“Of course it is,” said Hollier. “He knew the murder would get a lot of publicity, and draw attention to his book. He said so. ‘The book a man murdered to have published’ was the way he suggested it should be advertised. Or words of that sort.”

“Let us not be diverted by irrelevancies,” said Mr. Gwilt, primly.

“Maybe he was off his nut and didn’t know what he was saying,” said Wally Crottel.

“Wally! Leave this to me,” said Mr. Gwilt, and kicked Wally sharply under the table. “Until we have indisputable evidence to the contrary, we assume that the late Mr. Parlabane knew precisely what he was saying, and doing.”

“He was Brother John Parlabane, I believe, even though he had gone over the wall and parted from the Order of the Sacred Mission. Let’s not forget he was a monk,” said Maria.

“In these times many men find that they are not fully attuned to the religious life,” said Mr. Gwilt. “The exact status of Mr. Parlabane at the time of his unhappy death—felo de se, and which of us dares point the finger—is not our business here. What concerns us is that he was my client’s father. And my client’s status as his heir is what we are talking about now.”

“But how do we know Wally was his son?” said Maria. As a woman she wanted to get to the point, and was restless under Mr. Gwilt’s ceremonious approach.

“Because that’s what my late mum always told me,” said Wally. “ ‘Parlabane was your dad, sure as guns; he was the only guy ever gave me a real organism.’ That’s what my mum always said.”

“Please! Please! May I be allowed to conduct this investigation?” said Mr. Gwilt. “My client was brought up as the child of the late Ogden Whistlecraft, whose name is a word of magic in the annals of Canadian poetry, and his wife, the late Elsie Whistlecraft, my client’s undisputed mother. That there had been a liaison of a passionate character—let’s just call it an ad hoc thing, maybe two or three occasions—between Mrs. Whistlecraft and the late John Parlabane, we do not propose to deny. Why should we? Who dares to point the finger? What kind of woman marries a poet? A woman of deep passions and rich feminine sympathies, obviously. Her pity extended to this family friend, likewise a man of profound literary temperament. Pity! Pity, my friends! And compassion for a lonely, great, questing genius. That was what explained it.”

“No. It was the organism,” said Wally, stoutly.

“Orgasm, Wally! For God’s sake how many times do I have to tell you? Orgasm!” Mr. Gwilt’s speech was a hiss.

“She always said organism,” said Wally, mulishly. “I know what my mum said. And don’t think I blame her. She was my mum and I stand by her, and I’m not ashamed. You said something about that, Merv; you said it was, like, Latin, De mortos or something. ‘Don’t crap on your folks’ you said it meant.”

“All right! All right, Wally! Just leave it to me.”

“Yeah, Merv, but I want to explain about my mum. And Whistlecraft—he didn’t like me to call him Dad, but he was nice about the whole thing. He never really talked to me about it, but I know he didn’t hold it against my mum. Not much. There was something he said once, in poetry—

Don’t be ashamed

When the offensive ardour blows the charge

—as the fellow says.”

“What fellow was that?” said Darcourt, speaking for the first time.

“The fellow in Shakespeare.”

“Oh—that fellow! I thought it might have been something Whistlecraft wrote himself.”

“No. Shakespeare. Whistlecraft was prepared to overlook the whole thing. He understood life, even if he wasn’t much of a hand at the organism.”

“Wally—I call your attention to the fact that there is a lady present.”

“Don’t mind me,” said Maria; “I suppose I am what used to be called a woman of the world.”

“And a fine Rabelaisian scholar,” said Hollier, smiling at her.

“Aha! Rabelaisian scholar? Old-time Frenchman? Dead?” said Mr. Gwilt.

“The truly great are never dead,” said Maria, and suddenly remembered that she was quoting her mother.

“Very well, then. Let us continue on a rather freer line,” said Mr. Gwilt. “I don’t have to remind you university people of the great changes that have taken place in public opinion, and one might almost say in public morals, in recent years. The distinction has virtually vanished, in the newspapers and also in modern fiction—though I haven’t much time for fiction—between what we may define as the O.K. and the Raw. Discretion of language—where is it? Obscenity—where is it? On stage and screen we live in the Age of the Full Frontal. Since the Ulysses case and the Lady Chatterley case the law has had to take unwilling cognizance of all this. If you are a student of Rabelais, Mrs. Cornish—not that I’ve read his stuff, but he has a certain reputation, you know, even among those who haven’t read him—we must assume that you are thoroughly broken to the Raw. But I digress. So let us get back to our real interest. We admit that the late Mrs. Whistlecraft’s life was in some degree flawed—”

“But not Raw,” said Maria. “Nowadays we call it liberated.”

“Exactly, Mrs. Cornish. I see you have an almost masculine mind. So let us proceed. My client is John Parlabane’s son—”

“Proof,” said Mr. Carver. “We’ll want proof.”

“Excuse me, my friend,” said Mr. Gwilt. “I don’t understand your position in this matter. I have assumed that you are in some way an amicus curiae—a friend of the court—but if you are going to advise and interfere I want to know why, and who you are.”

“Name’s George Carver. I was with the RCMP until I retired. I do a little private investigation work now, so as not to be bored.”

“I see. And have you been investigating this matter?”

“I wouldn’t say that. I might, if it came to anything.”

“But you don’t regard this meeting as anything?”

“Not so far. You haven’t proved anything.”

“But you think you know something relevant.”

“I know that Wally Crottel got his job as a security man in this building by saying, among other things, that he had seen some service with the RCMP. He hasn’t. Failed entry. Education insufficient.”

“That may have been indiscreet but it has nothing to do with the matter in hand. Now listen: I said at the beginning that my client and I are relying on the ius naturale—on natural justice, what’s right and proper, what decent people everywhere know to be right. I say it is his right to benefit from anything that accrues from the publication of his father’s novel, Be Not Another, because he is John Parlabane’s rightful heir. And I say that Professor Clement Hollier and Mrs. Arthur Cornish have suppressed that book for personal reasons, and all we ask is some recognition of my client’s right, or we shall be forced to resort to law, and insist on recompense, after publication of the book.”

“How would you do that?” said Darcourt. “Nobody can be forced to publish a book.”

“That’s as may appear,” said Mr. Gwilt.

“Well, it will appear that nobody wants to publish it,” said Maria. “When all the scandal blew up, a great many publishers asked to see the book, and they turned it down.”

“Aha. Too Raw for them, eh?” said Mr. Gwilt.

“No. Too dull for them,” said Maria.

“The book was chiefly an exposition of John Parlabane’s philosophy,” said Darcourt. “And as such it was derivative and tediously repetitious. He had interspersed his long philosophical passages with some autobiographical stuff that he thought was fiction, but I assure you it wasn’t. Stiff as a board.”

“Autobiographical?” said Mr. Gwilt. “And he may have included portraits of living persons that would have caused a fine stink. Political people? Big people in the world of business? And that was why the publishers wouldn’t touch it?”

“Publishers, too, have a fine sense of the O.K. and the Raw, and of that lively area where the two kiss and commingle,” said Maria. “As my dear François Rabelais puts it: Quaestio subtilissima, utrum chimaera in vacuo bombinans possit commedere secundas intentiones. I make no apologies for the Latin, as you are such a dab hand with that language.”

“Aha,” said Mr. Gwilt, imparting a wealth of legal subtlety into the exclamation, though his eyes flickered with incomprehension. “And precisely how do you apply that fine legal maxim to the matter in hand?”

“Translated very roughly,” said Maria, “it might be taken to suggest that you are standing on a banana skin.”

“Though we would not dream of disparaging your admirable argumentum ad excrementum taurorum,” said Hollier

“What’s he say?” said Wally to his legal adviser.

“Say’s it’s all bullshit. Well, we don’t have to take that kind of thing from people just because they have money and position. Our legal system guarantees a fair deal for everybody. And my client has not had a fair deal. If the book had been published, he would have a right to a share, if not all, of the payment proceeding from that publication. You have not proceeded to publication and we want to know why. That’s what we’re doing here. So I think I’d better be more direct than I’ve been up to now. Where’s this manuscript?”

“I don’t know that you have a right to ask that,” said Hollier.

“A court would have that right. You say publishers refused it?”

“To be scrupulously exact,” said Maria, “one publisher said he might take it if he could put a ghost on it and make whatever could be made of the story, leaving out all Parlabane’s philosophy and moralizing. He said it would have to be made sensational—a real murderer’s confession. But that would have been utterly false to what Parlabane wanted, and we refused.”

“I put it to you that the novel was Raw, and brought in recognizable portraits of living people, and you are protecting them.”

“No, no; so far as I remember the novel—what I read of it—it wasn’t Raw. Not for modern tastes,” said Hollier. “There were references to homosexual encounters, but Parlabane was so allusive and indirect—as compared to his description of how he murdered poor old Urky McVarish—that it came out as rather mild stuff. Not so much Raw as half-baked. He was not an experienced writer of fiction. The publisher Mrs. Cornish has spoken of wanted to make it really Raw, and we would not degrade our old associate Parlabane in that way. What’s Raw and what isn’t is really a matter of taste; the taste may be pungent, but it shouldn’t be nasty. We didn’t at all trust the taste of that publisher.”

“Do you tell me you haven’t read the novel?” said Mr. Gwilt, with stagy incredulity.

“It was unreadable. Even a professor, who is professionally obliged to read a great deal of tedious stuff, couldn’t get through it. Outraged nature overcame me at about page four hundred, and the last two hundred and fifty pages remain unread, so far as I am concerned.”

“That’s how it was,” said Maria. “I couldn’t read it either.”

“Nor I,” said Darcourt. “And I assure you I tried my very best.”

“Aha!” said Mr. Gwilt. It was a verbal pounce. “You admit ignorance of this book, considered by its author to be one of the greatest works of fiction in the realm of the philosophical novel to be produced in history, and yet you have had the mind-boggling gall to suppress it—”

“Nobody would take it,” said Darcourt.

“Please! I’m speaking! And I’m speaking now, not as a man of the law, but as a human soul peering into an abyss of snotty intellectual infamy! Now see here—if you don’t produce that manuscript for our examination and the opinion of the experts we shall put to work on it, you face legal action which will make you smart, let me tell you!”

“No alternative of any kind?” said Maria. She and the two professors seemed calm under the threat of exposure and ignominy.

“My client and I don’t want a stink, any more than you do. I know it may seem strange for me, as a lawyer, to advise against going to court. I suggest that a composition might be made.”

“A pay-off, you mean?” said Hollier.

“Not a legal term. I say a composition in the sum of, let’s say, a million dollars.”

Hollier and Darcourt, both of whom had experience of publishing books, laughed aloud.

“You flatter me,” said Hollier. “Do you know what professors are paid?”

“You are not alone in this,” said Mr. Gwilt, smiling. “I don’t suppose Mrs. Cornish would have much trouble over a million.”

“Oh, not a bit,” said Maria. “I fling such sums to the needy, at church doors.”

“Let us keep this serious,” said Mr. Gwilt. “A million’s the word.”

“On what grounds?”

“I have already spoken of the ius naturale,” said Mr. Gwilt. “Common justice and decency. Let me recap: my client is the son of John Parlabane, and at the time of his death the late Mr. Parlabane did not know of the existence of that son. That’s the nub of it. If Mr. Parlabane had known, at the time he made that will, would he have overlooked the claim of his own child?”

“As I remember Mr. Parlabane he might have done anything at all,” said Darcourt.

“Well, the law wouldn’t allow it, if he tried to cut out his natural heir. This isn’t the eighteenth century, you know.”

“I think it’s time I put in my two cents’ worth,” said Mr. Carver, who had been as still as a very large cat during all that had been said. He now looked like a very wide-awake cat. “You can’t prove your client is the son of John Parlabane.”

“Oh, can’t I, indeed?”

“No, you can’t. I’ve made a few inquiries, and I have at least three witnesses, and I could probably find more, who had a crack at the late Mrs. Whistlecraft in her high and palmy days. If you’ll pardon a bit of the Raw, one of my informants said she was known as Pay As You Enter, and poor old Whistlecraft was laughed at as a notorious cuckold, though a decent guy and quite a poet. Who’s the father? Nobody knows.”

“Oh yes they do,” said Wally Crottel. “What about the organism? Eh? How about that? None of these guys you mention ever gave her the organism. She said so herself; she was always a very open woman. And without the organism how do you account for a child? Eh? Without the organism, no dice.”

“I don’t know what you’ve been reading, Mr. Crottel,” said Mr. Carver, “but you’re away off base. Take my wife, for instance; four fine kids, one of them just last week called to the bar (a lawyer like yourself, Mr. Gwilt), and she never had one of those things in her life. Told me so herself. And a very happy woman, adored by her family. You ought to see what goes on in our house on Mother’s Day! This organism, as you call it, may be all very well, but it’s not the real goods. So bang goes your organism. So far as it’s evidence, that’s to say.”

“Well, anyways, that’s what my mum always said,” said Wally, loyal even in defeat.

Mr. Gwilt seemed to be groping in his mind, perhaps for a useful scrap of Latin. He decided to do what he could with an old one.

“The ius naturale,” he said. “Natural justice. Are you going to fly in the face of that?”

“Yes, when it’s demanded at the point of a gun, and it’s an empty gun. That would be my advice,” said Mr. Carver, a pussy who had not yet retracted his claws.

“Come on, Merv,” said Wally. “Time to go.”

“I haven’t finished yet,” said his lawyer. “I want to get to the bottom of why that will is withheld.”

“Not a will,” said Hollier; “a personal letter.”

“The nearest thing to a will the late John Parlabane ever made. And why are these people refusing to produce the corpus delicti, by which I hasten to say I do not mean the body of the late John Parlabane, as it is commonly misunderstood, but the material object relating to the crime. I mean the manuscript of the novel about which all this dispute has arisen.”

“Because there’s no reason to produce it,” said Mr. Carver.

“Oh, there isn’t, eh? We’ll see about that?”

Mr. Carver was a pussycat again, his claws well in. He used an expression perhaps unexpected in a former member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and a working private eye.

“Fiddlesticks!” he said.

With a great display of indignation, and inaudible mutterings, Mr. Mervyn Gwilt rose slowly, like a man who goes, only to return with renewed strength, and, followed by his disgruntled client, left the apartment. He gave vent to his feelings by slamming the door.

“Thank God we’re rid of them,” said Maria.

“Rid of Gwilt, maybe. I wouldn’t be sure you’re rid of Wally Crottel,” said Mr. Carver, rising. “I know a few things about Wally. Fellows like that can be very nasty. You’d better keep your eye peeled, Mrs. Cornish.”

“Why me? Why not Professor Hollier?”

“Psychology. You’re a woman, and a rich woman. People like Wally are very jealous. There’s not much to be got out of the professor, if you’ll excuse me for saying so, but a rich woman is an awful temptation to a fellow like Wally. I just mention it.”

“Thanks, George. You’ve been wonderful,” said Darcourt. “You’ll send me your statement, won’t you?”

“Itemized and in full,” said Mr. Carver. “But I must say it’s been a pleasure. I never liked that guy Gwilt.”

Mr. Carver declined the offer of a drink, and moved out of the apartment on pussycat feet.

“Where did you find that wonderful man?” said Maria.

“I was able to do something for his oldest boy when he was a student. Taught him a little Latin—just enough,” said Darcourt. “George is my key to the underworld. Everybody ought to have one.”

“If that’s that, then I’ll be going,” said Hollier. “Some work I want to finish. But if I may say so, Maria my dear, you really oughtn’t to throw anything away; as a scholar you ought to know that. Throw things away and what is there for the scholars of the future? It’s simple trade-unionism. Throw things away and what becomes of research?”

And he went.

“Do you have to go right away, Simon?” said Maria. “There are one or two things—Would you like a drink?”

An unnecessary question, thought Simon. In his state of authorial anxiety about his book he was always ready for a drink. He would have to watch that. A drunken priest. A drunken professor. Oh, shame!

“I will make you a drink if you want one,” he said. “It seems to me you drink a great deal more than you did when you were a student.”

“I need more than when I was a student. And I have inherited my Uncle Yerko’s head. I’m a long way from being a serious drinker, Simon. I’ll never be in the class with Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot.”

“The Doctor is heroic in her application to the bottle. But somehow I don’t think she has what Americans call a Drinking Problem. She likes it and she holds a lot. Simple.”

“You won’t join me?”

“I’m afraid I’m drinking too much, and I haven’t got the splendid head of you and the Doctor. I’ll just have some bubbly water.”

“Are things getting to be too much for you, Simon?”

“This opera is worrying me, in a way that is quite absurd, because it’s really none of my business. If you and Arthur want to spend hundreds of thousands on it, the money is yours. You’re doing it for Powell, of course?”

“No, not of course, though it must look like that. He has certainly rushed us into the whole thing. I mean, we simply thought we would put up some money so that Schnak could do a job on the Hoffmann manuscripts, in so far as they exist. But Powell suggested that the opera might be presented, and was so full of enthusiasm and Welsh rhetoric that he infected Arthur, and you remember how Arthur went overboard about the whole idea. So here we are, up to our necks in something we don’t understand.”

“I suppose Powell understands it.”

“Yes, but the mixture of Arthur’s idealism and Powell’s opportunism doesn’t please me at all. The person who is going to come out on top of the heap, if the thing isn’t a horrible failure, is Geraint Powell. I suppose Schnak might benefit, though how I can’t pretend to see; but Powell, as the force behind the whole affair, is bound to get a lot of attention, which is what he wants.”

“Why are you willing that Schnak should benefit, and so hostile to Powell?”

“He’s using Arthur, and consequently he’s using me. He’s a climber. He’s been a pretty successful actor, but he understands the limitations of that, so he wants to be a director. Because he’s really very good at music, he wants to be a director of opera, and on the highest level. There’s nothing wrong with any of that. He talks as if Arthur rushed everybody into this affair, but it’s the other way around. He’s the whirlwind. I feel he really looks on Arthur and me simply as a ladder toward his own success.”

“Maria, you’d better get things straight in your head about what a patron is. I know a lot about patronage because I’ve seen it in the university. Either you exploit, or you are exploited. Either you demand the biggest slice of the pie for yourself, and get a gallery, or a theatre, or whatever it may be, named after you, and insist that people put up your portrait in the foyer, and toady to you, and listen to whatever you have to say with bated breath, or else you are simply the moneybags. And when you’re dealing with artists of any kind you are dealing with the people who have the most gall and the most outrageous self-esteem in the world. So you’ve got to be tough, and insist on being first in everything, or you’ve got to do it for the love of the art. Don’t complain about being used. Got to be magnanimous, in fact. Magnanimity, I needn’t remind you, is as rare as it is splendid.”

“I’m perfectly willing to be magnanimous, but I’m jealous for Arthur—Simon, I hate, and detest, and loathe and abhor the alternative title of this God-damned opera: The Magnanimous Cuckold. I feel that Arthur is being screwed.”

“Cuckolds aren’t screwed; they are deceived.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“Arthur is most at fault, if that’s what’s happening to him.”

“Simon, I wouldn’t say this to anybody in the world but you. You understand what I mean when I say that Arthur has a truly noble nature. But noble isn’t a word that’s used any more. Elitist, I suppose. But there’s no other word for Arthur. He’s generous and open in a way that is marvellous. But it also exposes him to terrible abuse.”

“He’s very fond of Powell. He asked him to be best man at your wedding, as I needn’t remind you.”

“Yes, and I’d never heard of Powell till he turned up then, all elegance and eloquence—full of piss and vinegar like a barber’s cat, to use the old expression.”

“You’re getting heated, and your heat makes me thirsty. I will have that drink, after all.”

“Do. I want your best advice, Simon. I’m worried, and I don’t know why I’m worried.”

“Yes you do. You think Arthur is too fond of Powell. Isn’t that it?”

“Not in the way you mean.”

“Tell me what I mean.”

“I think you mean some homosexual thing. Not a bit of that in Arthur.”

“Maria, for a very brilliant woman you are surprisingly naive. If you think homosexuality means no more than rough stuff in Turkish baths, and what Hamlet calls a pair of reechy kisses and paddling in necks with damned fingers in some seedy motel bedroom, you are right off your trolley. As you say, and as I believe, Arthur has a noble nature, and that isn’t his style at all. Nor, to be just, do I think it’s Powell’s. But an obsessive admiration for a man who has qualities he envies, and for whom he is ready to give great gifts and take great risks, without grudging—that’s homosexuality too, when the wind is right. Nobility isn’t cautious, you know. Arthur is really Arthurian: he seeks something extraordinary—a Quest, a great adventure—and Powell seems to offer it and is, therefore, irresistible.”

“Powell is a self-seeking bastard.”

“And just possibly a great man—or a great artist, which is by no means the same thing. Like Richard Wagner, another self-seeking bastard. Remember how he exploited and horn-swoggled poor King Ludwig?”

“Ludwig was a crazy weakling.”

“And his craziness has endowed us all with some magnificent opera. Not to speak of that totally insane fairy-tale castle of Neuschwanstein, which cost the people of Bavaria what was literally a king’s ransom, and has recovered them the money a dozen times over, simply as a tourist sight.”

“You’re appealing to a piece of dead history, and a messy scandal, which has nothing to do with what we’re talking about.”

“History is never dead, because it keeps on repeating itself, though never in quite the same words or on quite the same scale. Remember what we said the other night at that Arthurian dinner, about the wax and the stamp? The wax of human experience is always the same. It is we who put our own stamp on it. These shared obsessions between patron and artist are as old as the hills, and I don’t think you are going to be able to change that. Have you talked to Arthur?”

“You don’t know Arthur. When I bring it up he just tells me to be patient, and that omelettes aren’t made without breaking eggs, and all that sort of calm, uncomprehending thing.”

“Have you told him he’s in love with Powell?”

“Simon! What do you think I am?”

“I think you’re a jealous woman, among other things.”

“Jealous of Powell? I hate Powell!”

“Oh, Maria, haven’t you learned anything in your university years?”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that hatred is notoriously near to love, and both are obsessions. Passions when they are pushed too far sometimes flop over into their opposites.”

“What I feel about Arthur isn’t going to flop over into its opposite.”

“Bravely said. And what is it you feel about Arthur?”

“Doesn’t it show? Devotion.”

“An expensive devotion. As devotion always is, of course.”

“A devotion that has enlarged my life more than I can say.”

“A devotion that seems to have cost you what meant most to you in the world before you married.”

“So?”

“Yes, so. How much work have you done on your edition of that unpublished Rabelais manuscript that was found in Francis Cornish’s papers? I remember your raptures when it was turned up—thanks to that monster Parlabane—and how Hollier said it would make your reputation as a scholar. Well—that’s something like eighteen months ago. How’s it getting on? Arthur gave it to you as a wedding present, as I recall. Now there’s something significant: bridegroom gives bride a gift that will demand the best of her energies and understanding. Something that might mean more to her than her marriage. That would almost certainly mean reputation and scholarly fame of a special kind. A dangerous gift, certainly, but Arthur risked it. So what have you been doing?”

“I’ve been getting used to living with a man, and running this house, which is the exact opposite of the Gypsy tsera where I lived with my mother and uncle, and all the hair-raising crookedness of the bomari and the wursitorea that hung over that awful place. I only go there when you insist on it, Simon—”

“Don’t forget it was Arthur who settled what was left of all that Gypsy mess in the basement of this very building where you are playing the fine lady, Maria.”

“Don’t be so disgusting, Simon! I’m not playing the fine lady—My God, you sound like my mother!—I’m trying to work my way finally and utterly into modern civilization, and put all that past behind me.”

“It sounds as if modern civilization, which is largely rooted in Arthur, so far as you are concerned, had cut you off from what was best in you. I don’t mean the Gypsy connection; forget that for the moment; but from what made you a scholar. From what drew you to Rabelais—the great humane spirit and the great humour that saves us in a rough world. I remember when you first got that manuscript; you wouldn’t have called Professor M. A. Screech your uncle, and he’s a mitred abbot among you Rabelaisians, I understand. And now—well, now—”

“I have by degrees dwindled into a wife?”

“You still have a nice touch with a quotation. That’s something saved out of the wreck.”

“I won’t be called a wreck, Simon.”

“All right. And I don’t knock wives. But surely a woman of your qualities can be both scholar and wife? And the one all the better for the other?”

“Arthur takes a lot of looking after.”

“Well—don’t let him eat you. That’s what I’m saying. Why do you look after him so much? He seemed to be getting on pretty well before he married you.”

“He had needs that weren’t being gratified.”

“Aha.”

“Don’t say ‘Aha!’ like Mervyn Gwilt! You think I mean sex.”

“Well—don’t you?”

“Now you are the one who is being naive. Celibate priest that you are.”

“And whose fault is that, may I ask? I gave you your chance to enlighten me.”

“No use crying over spilt milk.”

“I don’t recall that we spilled any milk.”

“You know perfectly well it wouldn’t have done. You’d have been a worse husband than Arthur.”

“Aha! Now I can say it—Aha!”

“I’m tired and you’re bullying me.”

“That’s what women always say when they are getting the worst of things. Now come on, Maria: I’m your old friend, old tutor, old suitor. What’s wrong between you and Arthur?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Then perhaps too much is right.”

“Perhaps. It’s not that I’m panting for continual excitement and passion and all that kid stuff. But the stew could do with a little more salt.”

“How about the organism?”

“In that department I suppose I rank somewhere between Mrs. Carver and the Roman candle Elsie Whistlecraft. It takes two to make an organism, you know.—We’d better stop using that word as a joke, or we’ll use it seriously, and disgrace ourselves in the eyes of all right-thinking people.”

“It isn’t a word I find coming up much in conversation, but I suppose you’re right.—So you find marriage quieter than you expected?”

“I don’t know what I expected.”

“Maybe you expected to see more of Arthur. Where is he now?”

“In Montreal. Comes back tomorrow. He’s always dashing off on business. The Cornish Trust is very big business, you know.”

“Well—I wish I had some good advice to give you, Maria, but I haven’t. Every marriage is different and you have to find your own solutions. Apart from saying that I think you ought to get back to work, and have some business of your own—scholarly business—I haven’t a thing to suggest.”

“You don’t have to give advice, Simon. I’m grateful to you for listening. We’ve had a real, proper divano. That’s what Gypsies call it—a divano.”

“A lovely word.”

“Sorry if I’ve been a bore.”

“You could never be a bore, Maria. Not yet. But unless you recover your fine Rabelaisian spirit it just might happen, and that would be dreadful.”

“Fair’s fair. Bore me with your own problems.”

“I’ve said what they were. Or I’ve said what I feel about the opera. And of course there’s the book. It never stops nagging.”

“Aha!”

“Now who’s being Mervyn Gwilt?”

“I am. I have something for you. Something about Uncle Frank that I bet you didn’t know. Wait a minute.”

Maria went to her study, and Darcourt seized the opportunity to—no, not to pour himself another drink, but to refresh the drink he had. With a generous hand.

Maria returned with a letter. “Read this, and rejoice,” she said.

It was a letter in a square envelope, of the sort English people use for personal correspondence. A substantial letter, making quite a wad of paper, each sheet bearing the heading West Country Pony Club, and covered with that large, bold handwriting characteristic of people who write little, and squander their paper in a way that immediately sets the scholar on his guard. The letter itself was wholly in accord with its appearance. It said:

Dear cousin Arthur:

Yes, it’s cousin, right enough, because you are the nephew of my father, the late Francis Cornish, and so we are from the same stable, if I may speak professionally. I should have written to you months ago but—pressure of business, and all that, and I’m sure you know what pressure of business means. But I only got wind of you last spring, when a Canadian colleague asked if I knew you, and it seems you are quite a nob in your own country. Of course I knew there were Canadians hanging somewhere on the family tree, because my grandfather—he was a Francis Cornish too—and the father of your uncle, who was my father—Oh dear, this is getting very mixed-up! Anyhow he married a Canadian, but we never knew him, because he was in some very hush-hush stuff which I don’t pretend to understand. My father, too. The family were always very close-mouthed about him for a variety of reasons, and one of them was that he was very hush-hush too. But anyhoo (as they say) he was my father and as far as he went a very good father, because he looked after me very generously, so far as money goes, but I never saw him after I was too small to really know him, if you understand me. He married his cousin Ismay Glasson—rather a dark horse, I understand—and I was brought up on the family place—not Chegwidden Hall, but at St. Columb’s because my grandmother was his cousin Prudence and that was where she lived with granddaddy, who was Roderick Glasson. Oh, crumbs, what have I said! Of course she lived with him because she was his wife—nothing in the least funny there, I assure you! St. Columb’s had to be sold up, in the end, and the poor old place is a battery-hen place now, but I managed to buy the dower-house and it is from there that I run my little stable and am rather the High Mucky Muck of the West Country Pony Club, as you see from this paper. The only paper I have, I’m afraid, because I’m up to my ample hips in the pony biz, and it’s a handful—you’d never believe! But to come to the point, I’m coming to Canada in November, because I’m to be a judge at your Royal Winter Fair in the pony division—jumping and all that—and I understand you have some wonderfully keen kiddies showing and I can’t wait to see them! And I’d love to see you! So may I give you a tinkle when I can get away from pony business, and perhaps we could tear a herring together and exchange family news! I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of me, unless somebody mentioned Little Charlie—that’s me! And not so little now, let me say! So here’s hoping to see you, and tons of family affection, though sight unseen!

Love—

CHARLOTTE CORNISH

“Did you know Uncle Frank had a child?” said Maria.

“I knew there was somebody called Charlotte Cornish to whom he left a quarterly allowance for life, because Arthur told me so,” said Darcourt. “But I didn’t know she was a daughter. Could have been any sort of old relation. The parish register recorded the marriage of Francis and his cousin Ismay Glasson, but there was no word of a child. Fool that I was, when I was snooping around in Cornwall I discovered that Francis had been married to Ismay Glasson, but when I made inquiries about her everybody shut up and knew nothing. And nobody said a word about Little Charlie or the Pony Club. Just shows that I am not much of a detective. Of course, all the Glassons had vanished, and when I got in touch with Sir Roderick in London he couldn’t have been less forthcoming, and was too busy to see me. Well, well! Little Charlie is certainly no great letter-writer, is she?”

“But she’s a reality. She must have heard something about Uncle Frank, even if she can’t remember him. So you may have struck gold for the book, Simon.”

“I’m too cautious to expect any such thing. This letter puffs and blows and giggles a bit, doesn’t it? But it’s a ray of light in the very dark centre of Francis Cornish’s life.”

“So we’ve both got something—not much, but something—out of the divano, Simon.”

(2)

WHEN DARCOURT HAD GONE, Maria went to bed, leaving a note for Arthur, saying that he was to wake her when he came in from the airport. This was something she always did, and a request that Arthur always ignored—part of his extraordinary consideration, and his refusal to understand that she wanted to be wakened, wanted to see him, wanted to talk with him.

She did not read herself to sleep. Maria was not a reader-in-bed. Instead she set her mind to work on something that would bring sleep at last. Something substantial, some old friendly theme, but not so demanding as to keep her awake.

What should it be tonight? Darcourt had told her not to subdue her Rabelaisian nature; not to starve the full Rabelaisian humour that had been hers when she first met Arthur; not to dwindle into a wife, lest she cease to be a real wife. A good, sleepy theme might be the Seven Laughters of God. Of the angers, the vengeances, the punishments, the manifold Bellyaches of God the modern world seemed to know enough, even when it was most eager to banish God from all serious consideration. Let’s have the Laughters.

The idea of the Seven Laughters was such an odd one, in the light of modern religion. Gnostic, and of course heretical. Christianity could not countenance a merry God. That God should have rejoiced, and taken delight in what he was making, and that the whole Universe sprang from delight—how foreign to a world obsessed by solemnity, which so quickly became despair. What were the Seven Laughters?

The first was the Laughter from which came light, as Genesis says. Then the Laughter of the Firmament, which our world has just begun to explore—to put a technological toe into space, and to invent bugaboos about spaceships, and Little People with antennae growing out of their heads, who might be spying on us unseen, and a sense of our inferiority in the face of immensity. Not much laughter there for us, whatever it may be for God.

What was the Third Laughter? Mind, wasn’t it? Now there was a God one could really love, a God who laughed Mind into being just as soon as he had a place for it. Mind, the old thinkers said, was Hermes, and Hermes was a very good conception of Mind, because he was so various, so multitudinous, so many-shaped, certainly so ambiguous, but if you took him the right way, such a cheerful creation—so inventive and vigorous. Then what?

The Fourth Laughter was called Generation, which wasn’t just sex, but growth and multiplicity. Nevertheless, sex was certainly a part of it if not the whole, and how God must have laughed when he confronted astonished Hermes with that pretty kettle of fish! And how Hermes, after his first astonishment, must have seized upon it as the splendid joke it was—though God and Hermes would certainly have known that many people would never see the joke. Would, indeed, spoil the joke. So, to cope with the people who could not understand jokes, God laughed again and Fate, or Destiny, came into being. The wax, in fact, upon which Darcourt insisted we all set our seal, without always knowing what the seal was.

God, rolling about on His Throne, knew Destiny would never work unless it had a frame, so—probably choking on the Joe Miller of the thing—laughed Time into being, so that Destiny would function serially, permitting people who never saw jokes to haggle about the nature of Time forever.

Last Laughter of all, when God, probably prompted by Hermes, had seen that He was perhaps being a little hard on the creatures who would inhabit the Creation, was Psyche—the Soul, the Laughter that would give creation, and mankind above all, a chance to come to terms with all God’s merriment. Not to master it, and certainly not to understand it fully, but to find a way to partake of some part of it. Poor old Psyche! Poor old Soul! How our world was determined to thwart her at every turn, and speak of her—when it did speak of her—as a gloomy, gaseous maiden who did not, most of the time, know her spiritual arse from her metaphysical elbow! Never for a moment seeing her as the Consort, the true mate, of Hermes.

Well, there they were, and the effort of dredging them up from memory, where Maria had filed them some time ago, had made her sleepy. Not so sleepy, however, that she did not understand afresh what Darcourt meant when he urged her not to starve the Rabelaisian nature in herself. There were her Hermes and her Psyche, and with them she must live in truest amity, or she would cease to be Maria and her marriage would go to ruin.

She must not forget that Rabelais had known and delighted in the Arthurian stories, and had drawn upon their spirit even as he parodied them. Surely she would love her own Arthur better if she did not take him quite so seriously. Magnanimous? Of course. But a virtue in excess may slither into a weakness.

She slept. When Arthur returned, about one o’clock, he smiled affectionately at her note, and went to another bedroom, so as not to waken her.

(3)

“DO YOU WANT me to cut your grass?”

A simple question, surely? Yet as Hulda Schnakenburg uttered it to Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot it was total surrender; it was Henry IV standing barefoot in the snow at Canossa; it was an act of vassalage.

Schnak had been working with the Doctor for two weeks, and this was the end of their sixth session together. The work had not begun promisingly. What the Doctor saw in Schnak was “a woman of the people”, not a peasant but an urban roughneck, and she had spoken to her very much from on high. In the Doctor, Schnak thought she had met yet another tedious instructor, perhaps greatly skilled but not greatly talented, and as snotty as they come. If she had been surly and mocking with Dean Wintersen, she was rude and ugly with the Doctor, who had countered with icy courtesy. But in a short time they had begun to respect one another.

Schnak always made it her business to find out what her instructors had achieved, and what that amounted to in most cases was a respectable body of unexceptionable music, fashionably but cautiously experimental, that had been performed a few times and had won fashionable, cautious approval; rarely had it travelled far beyond the borders of Canada. It was music, surely enough, but in Schnak’s expression it did not grab her. She wanted something more interesting than that. In the published work of Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot she found something that grabbed her, something she did not feel she could rival, an unmistakable, individual voice. Not that the Doctor was one of the world’s great composers, by any means. Critics tended to describe her work as “notable”. However, these were the best critics. She had been one of the better pupils of Nadia Boulanger, and had first attracted attention with a String Quartet, in which the idiom of an original voice had been discerned—a voice not that of her great teacher; Schnak had read the score with a reserve that began as derision, but that had to be abandoned, for this was unquestionably music marked by a fine clarity of thought, expressed through conventional techniques used in a wholly independent manner. It was not a long work; indeed, as music goes, it was terse, rigorous, strictly argued. But in the later Violin Sonata there was a quality even Schnak could not deride, and which she knew she would not rival; to speak of wit in music is uncritically vague, but there was no other word for it. Every succeeding work showed the same distinction of mind: a Suite for clarinet and strings, a Second String Quartet, a Symphony on a small scale (as compared with the blockbusters, demanding more than a hundred players, following on the nineteenth-century masters), a body of songs that were real songs and not merely measured utterance undertaken in rivalry with an argumentative piano, and last of all a Requiem for Benjamin Britten which knocked the breath out of Schnak, and made her aware beyond a doubt that she had met her master. The Requiem was not witty, but deeply felt and poignant; these were qualities Schnak knew she lacked in herself, but which, she discovered to her amazement, she desired intensely. This was the real goods, she admitted.

Every article about the Doctor in the reference books, however, emphasized that it was as a teacher that she was most influential. She had studied with Nadia Boulanger; the musical historians said that she came nearest to imparting the spirit of her great mentor. Nobody said she was as good as Nadia Boulanger, or different; it is a firm critical principle that nobody living is quite as good as somebody dead.

A teacher, then? A teacher whom Schnak could truly respect? She had not quite known that that was what she wanted more than anything else in the world, and she came to such self-knowledge with mulish resistance. Now, at the end of her sixth session, she offered to cut the Doctor’s grass. Schnak had met her master.

The grass badly wanted cutting. The Doctor had never, in her life, been a householder, but the School of Music had established her in a pleasant little house, on a street very near the University, which belonged to a professor who had gone on a year’s sabbatical, taking his wife and children with him. It was a domestic little house, and the furniture, without being in ruins, spoke of a family life that included small children. It had bookshelves in every room, in which books, chiefly of a philosophical nature, were ranged tightly, with other books laid sidewise on whatever space there was above them. Small hands had marked the walls; philosophical bottoms had made deep nests in every chair. There was no complete set of any sort of china, and the cutlery was odds and ends of stainless steel which had managed, somehow, to acquire stains. The pictures were of philosophers—not a notably decorative class of men—and photographs of conferences where the professor and his wife had been snapped with colleagues from many lands. Whatever branch of philosophy the professor taught, it was clearly not aesthetics. When the Doctor had been introduced to the house she had sighed, removed most of the pictures, and set upon the mantelpiece her great treasure, without which she never left her Paris flat for long; it was a small, exquisite bronze by Barbara Hepworth. Beyond that, she felt, there was nothing to be done.

But the grass! When she arrived, the lawn had the battlefield look of a children’s playground, and in no time at all the grass had grown long and rank. What was to be done? The Doctor did not know, and did not really care, but she could not ignore the fact that the little lawns on either side were neatly trimmed. The Doctor had never before lived in a place where grass obtruded itself, or if it did, men came from somewhere and trimmed it. As the grass grew, she began to feel like La Belle au Bois Dormant, overgrown and shut in by uncontrollable herbage. As well as the problem of the grass there was a wasps’ nest over the front door, and the windows were muddy from the rains and dusty winds of the Canadian autumn. The Doctor had no gift for domesticity.

And here, in Hulda Schnakenburg, was somebody who seemed to know what to do about grass!

Schnak went to the back premises where there was, of course, a lawn-mower in a shed. It was not a good lawn-mower, for the professor was not far above the Doctor in his understanding of bourgeois domesticity, but it worked after a fashion, tearing up whatever grass its ancient jaws could not chew, and with this antique Schnak set to work to chop the lawn, if not positively to trim it. She worked with the devotion of the willing slave, and after the lawn had been harried into submission she raked up the cuttings, and cut it again. She gathered the harvest and put it in a plastic bag, which went into the garbage can, which the Doctor regarded with disgust and used as little as she could; it was her custom to pack the leavings from her scant meals into paper bags, which she later, by stealth and in darkness, threw over a nearby fence into the back lawn of a professor of theology.

When at last Schnak was finished, the Doctor was standing at the front door.

“Thank you, my dear,” she said. “And now, your bath is ready.”

Bath? Schnak did not take baths. Now and then, under pressure from some outraged companion, she took a shower at the Women’s Union, careful not to get her hair wet. She had a horror of colds.

“You are hot and tired,” said the Doctor. “Look—you sweat. You will take cold. Come with me.”

The bath was such as Schnak had never seen before. The professor’s bathroom was not Neronian in its luxury, but it had everything that was needed, and the Doctor had banished all the smelly sponges, the balding brushes, and the celluloid ducks and rubber animals of the previous regime. The tub was contemporaneous with the house itself and was a large, old-fashioned affair with brass taps, and claw feet; it was full of hot water, bubbling fragrantly with the bath-oils the Doctor used upon herself, for she was a voluptuous bather.

What puzzled Schnak was that the Doctor seemed determined to remain in the bathroom with her, and gestured to her to take off her clothes. This was strange indeed, for in the Schnakenburg household baths were secret ceremonies, hinting of medical indecency, like enemas, and the bather always bolted the door against intruders. Schnak had stripped in front of somebody else before, because the three boys with whom she had undergone some sort of crude sexual experience were all great on what they called “skin”, but since childhood she had never stripped in front of a woman, and she felt shame. The Doctor knew it, and laughing a little, but with fastidious fingers, she pulled off Schnak’s filthy sweater, and nodded to her to kick off her degraded loafers and her stained jeans. So, very shortly, Schnak stood naked on the bathmat, and the Doctor looked at her consideringly.

“My God, you are a dirty child,” she said. “No wonder you smell so bad. Get into the water.”

Would marvels never cease? Schnak discovered that she was not to bathe, but to be bathed. The Doctor had somewhere found a large apron which she wore over her clothes, and kneeling beside the tub she gave Schnak such a bath as she had never had in twelve years, at which time she had been instructed by her mother to bathe herself. What soaping, what rubbing, what scouring of the feet in a this-little-piggy-went-to-market detail they had not known since childhood! It took a long time and the beautiful water was slick and grimy when at last the Doctor pulled out the plug and let it all drain away.

“Out with you,” said the Doctor, standing with a large towel in her hands. She rubbed and scuffled Schnak’s unaccustomedly clean body in a businesslike fashion that admitted of no assistance, and included intimacies that astonished Schnak, for they were not the rough maulings of her three engineering students. And while this was going on the Doctor was drawing another tubful of water.

“In you get again,” said she. “Now we do the hair.”

Schnak obediently stepped back into the tub, wondering greatly, but aware that out of her sight there was some very rapid undressing, and in no time the Doctor had slipped into the tub behind her, enclosing Schnak’s thin body between her long elegant legs. Much dowsing of the dirty head; much shampooing with deliciously scented oil; much rinsing and at last a rough but playful drying.

“And now,” said the Doctor, laughing, “you are a pretty clean girl. How does it feel?”

Lying back in the tub herself, she drew Schnak backward against her own body, and, slipping her arms around her, caressed Schnak’s astonished nipples with soapy hands.

Schnak could not have said how it felt. Words were not her means of expression, or she might have said that it was paradisal. But it did float into her mind that all the books of reference concluded their pieces about the Doctor by saying that she was unmarried. Well, well, well.

Later they ceremoniously burned Schnak’s discarded clothes. The Doctor wanted to do it in the fireplace, but Schnak tested the chimney by burning some paper in the grate, and the immediate belching of smoke bore out her suspicion that there was a bird’s nest in the chimney. The Doctor was much impressed by this show of domestic wisdom. They burned the clothes in the back yard, after dark, and even danced a few steps around the bonfire.

Because Schnak had no clothes, she could not go home, nor did she wish to do so. She and the Doctor retired to bed, and there they drank rum mixed with rich milk, and Schnak lay in the Doctor’s arms and told her the story of her life, as she understood it, in a version that would greatly have astonished and angered her parents.

“An old story,” said the Doctor. “The gifted child; the Philistine parents. Loveless religion: craving for a larger life. Do you know what a Philistine is, child?”

“Somebody in the Bible?”

“Yes, but now the people who are against the things that you and I love—art, and the freedom without which art cannot exist. Have you been reading Hoffmann, as I told you?”

“Some of the stories.”

“Hoffmann’s life was a long fight with the Philistines. Poor devil! You have not read Kater Murr yet?”

“No.”

“Not an easy book, but you cannot understand Hoffmann without it. It is the biography of the great musician Kreisler.”

“I didn’t know he was as old as that.”

“Not Fritz Kreisler, stupid! A character invented by Hoffmann. One of his many alter egos. The great musician and composer Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler, the romantic genius whom nobody understands and who has to put up with insults and slights from all the Philistine crew of the society in which he lives. His life has been written by a friend, and left on the desk; the tom-cat Murr finds it and writes his own life on the back of the sheets. So off goes the copy to the printer, who stupidly prints the whole thing as a unity, Kreisler and Kater Murr all mixed up in one book. But Kater Murr is a deeply Philistine cat; he embodies in himself everything that Kreisler hates and that is hostile to Kreisler. Kater Murr sums up his philosophy of life: ‘Gibt es einen behaglicheren Zustand, als wenn man mit sich selbst ganz zufrieden ist?’ You understand German?”

“No.”

“You should. Without German, very poor music. The tom-cat says: ‘Is there a cosier condition than being thoroughly satisfied with oneself?’ That is the philosophy of the Philistine.”

“A cosy condition; like having a good job as a typist.”

“If that is all you want, and you cannot see beyond it. Of course not all typists are like that, or there would be no audiences at concerts.”

“I want more than a cosy condition.”

“And you shall have it. But you will find cosy places, too. This is one of them.”

Kisses. Caresses of such skill and variety as Schnak would never have thought possible. Ninety seconds of ecstasy, and then deep peace, in which Schnak fell asleep.

The Doctor did not sleep for several hours. She was thinking of Johannes Kreisler, and herself.

(4)

THE WINE WAS VERY GOOD. Beyond that, Simon Darcourt would not have dared to speak, for he did not consider himself knowledgeable about wines. But he knew a good wine when he drank it, and this was undoubtedly very good. The bottles, as Prince Max had called to his attention, bore conservative, rather spidery engraving that declared them to be reserved for the owners of the vineyard. Nothing there of the flamboyant labels, with carousing peasants or Old Master pictures of fruit, cheese, and dead animals that marked commonplace wines. But at the top of these otherwise reticent labels was an elaborate achievement of arms and underneath it a motto: Du sollst sterben ehe ich sterbe.

Thou shalt perish ere I perish, thought Darcourt. Did it refer to the owners of the display of arms, or to the wine in the bottles? Must be the aristocrats; nobody would claim that a wine would outlive anyone who might be drinking it. Suppose a very young person—sixteen, let us say—were given a glass at the family table; suppose some child of a wine-drinking home were given a little, mixed with water, so that it would not feel left out at a family feast. Was it asserted that sixty years later the wine would still be in first-rate condition? Not likely. Wines like that were sold by the greatest auctioneers, not by popular wine merchants. So the boast, or assertion, or threat—it could be all or any of those—must apply to the people whose blazon of nobility this was.

There those people were, sitting at the table with him. Prince Max, who must be well into his seventies, was as straight, as slim, and as elegant as when he had been a dashing young German officer. Only his spectacles, which he somehow managed to make distinguished, and the thinness of his yellowish-white hair, so carefully brilliantined and brushed straight back from his knobby brow, gave any sign of how old he might be. His gaiety, his exuberance, and his unquenchable flow of anecdote and chatter could have belonged to a man half his age.

As for the Princess Amalie, she was as beautiful, as well-preserved, and as becomingly dressed as when Darcourt had first seen her when, during the past summer, she had made it so tactfully clear that if he wanted to know certain facts about the late Francis Cornish he must somehow provide her with the preliminary studies, from the hand of that same Francis Cornish, that had resulted in the Old Master drawing she used so lavishly, yet with such splendid understatement, in her advertisements. And that was what he had done.

The Clerical Cracksman, as he now thought of himself, had been just as adroit and just as lucky at the National Gallery as he had been at the University Library. The same approach to the curator of drawings, who was a friend and would not think of doubting Simon; the same casual, but swift, examination of the drawings in a special portfolio; a quick substitution of the drawings he had pinched from the Library, and which he carried tucked under the back strap of his M.B. waistcoat, for those that were the price of the Princess’s confidence; the same cheerful greeting to his friend as he left the archives of the Gallery. The Gallery had not yet got around to putting those beastly little marks on the drawings that set off alarms when one passed certain snoopy ray machines; indeed, it looked as if nobody had looked into the portfolio since first it had come to the Gallery over a year before. It was a very neat job, thought Simon, if he said so himself, and he had been lucky in the day he chose for his robbery, because it was a day when the Pope was visiting Ottawa, and everybody who might have been snooping about was in a distant field, watching the charismatic Pontiff celebrate an outdoor mass, and utter instructions and adjurations for their future conduct to the people of Canada.

Was he dead to shame, Simon had asked himself? Was he now a contented, successful criminal, unhampered by his clerical vows? He did not attempt a philosophical answer; he was wholly in the grip of the biographer’s covetous, unappeasable spirit. He was on to a good thing, and nothing should stand in his way. He would chance losing his soul, if only he could write a really good book. A deathbed repentance would probably square things with God. Meanwhile, this was Life.

“My wife is quite delighted with what you have brought,” said Prince Max. “You are sure it is complete—every preliminary study?”

“To the best of my knowledge,” said Simon. “I went through all Francis Cornish’s drawings, his own and all the Old Masters he had copied, and I saw nothing related to the portrait of the Princess except the studies I have put in your keeping.”

“Admirable,” said the Prince. “I shall not say we do not know how to thank you, because we do. Amalie shall tell you all she knows about le beau ténébreux. And so shall I, though I did not know him so well as she. I only met him once, at Düsterstein. He made an immediate favourable impression. Handsome; modest, even witty, when wine had overcome his reticence, But you must continue, my dear. Meanwhile, another glass of wine?”

“Francis Cornish was everything Max says, and a great deal more,” said the Princess. She drank little; a great professional beauty and a razor-sharp woman of business cannot afford to be a soaker. “He came into my life just as I was emerging from girlhood, and was beginning to be seriously interested in men. Seriously, I say; every girl notices men and dreams about them from the time she begins to walk. But he came to my family home just when I was beginning to think about lovers.”

“It is strange to think of the Francis I knew as greatly attractive,” said Simon. “He became rather an oddity as time went on.”

“But I am sure it must have been a ruined beauty you saw as oddity,” said the Princess. “Men do not notice such things, unless their romantic interest is in other men. Surely you have photographs?”

“He hated being photographed,” said Simon.

“Then I can surprise you. I have many photographs, that I took myself. A girl’s snapshots, of course, but revealing. I have one that I used to keep under my pillow until my governess discovered it and forbade it. I told her she was jealous and she laughed, but it was a laugh that told me I had hit the mark. Very handsome, and he had a nice deep voice. Not quite American; there was a Scottish burr in it that melted my soul.”

“I am already jealous,” said the Prince.

“Oh Max, don’t be silly. You know what girls are.”

“I knew what you were, my darling. But I knew what I was, too. So at the time I was not jealous.”

“Odious vanity!” said the Princess. “Anyhow, we all have our early loves whom we keep in the back of our minds all our lives. I am sure you know what I mean, Professor.”

“There was a girl with ringlets, when I was nine,” said Darcourt, taking a sip of his wine. “I know what you mean. But please go on about Francis.”

“He had everything a very young girl could love. He even had a rather untrustworthy heart. He had to keep watch on it, and report to his doctor in London.”

The Prince laughed. “The heart was as useful to him as his skill with the brush,” he said.

“And I am sure the dicky heart was as real as the skill.”

“Of course. But we know what those reports to his doctor were, don’t we?”

“You knew,” said the Princess. “But I did not know, not then. You knew a lot of things I did not know.”

“You are going to explain, I hope?” said Darcourt. “Bad heart. I knew something of that. Of course it was the heart that killed him at last. But was it something else?”

“I knew about the bad heart at the other end—the London end,” said the Prince. “Francis sent accounts of his heart to his doctor, who passed them on at once to the right people at the Ministry of Information, because they were a code. Francis was watching the trains that passed by Düsterstein two or three times a week, carrying poor souls to a nearby internment camp—a labour camp or something of the sort. Anyhow, one of those infamous camps from which very few people escaped alive.”

“Are you telling me Francis was a spy?”

“Of course he was a spy,” said the Prince. “Didn’t you know? His father was a well-known spy, and I suppose he introduced the boy to the family trade.”

“But le beau ténébreux wasn’t a very good spy,” said the Princess. “Lots of spies aren’t, you know. I don’t suppose he was a very important spy. He came to Düsterstein as an assistant to that old rogue Tancred Saraceni, who was restoring the family pictures, and if Saraceni wasn’t a spy he was certainly one of the great busybodies of his time. He was on to Francis at once. And so was my grandmother.”

“Nobody put anything over on the old Gräfin,” said the Prince. “She was up to every dodge.”

“Sorry,” said Darcourt. “You’ve lost me completely. What was Düsterstein, and who was the old Gräfin, and what is all this spy business? I’m completely in the dark.”

“Then we shall be able to pay for those drawings in full,” said the Prince.

“You have the key to the missing years in Francis’s life. I knew he had been in Europe for some time as a student of painting, and that he had worked with the great Saraceni, but nothing beyond that.”

“Düsterstein was Amalie’s family home. She lived there with her grandmother, who was the old Gräfin.”

“I was an orphan,” said the Princess. “Not a pitiable orphan, or a Dickensian orphan, but just an orphan, and I was brought up at Düsterstein by my grandmother, and a governess. It was as dull as could be, till old Saraceni came to work on the family collection of pictures, and not long afterward le beau turned up to help him. Exciting, under the circumstances.”

“And he was a spy?”

“Certainly he was a spy. So was my governess, Ruth Nibsmith. Germany was full of spies during the years of the Reich. With so many spies everywhere it is astonishing that Britain made such a goat of herself as the war approached.”

“He was spying on a nearby internment camp?”

“He never went near it. Nobody could do that, and certainly not a Canadian in a little sports car. No; he just counted the number of freight cars in each train that chugged along the track not far from our house. I used to watch him. It was funny, really. There I was, in my window in a tower—sounds romantic, doesn’t it—watching Francis count—you could almost hear him—as he stood at his window, invisible, as he thought, in the darkness of night. And there in the garden below, behind some bushes, was my governess, spying on Francis. I used to watch them both, almost helpless with laughter. And I suspect that my grandmother was watching too, from a room next to her business office. She was a very big farmer, you know.”

“The thing about spies,” said the Prince, “is that unless they are of the small number of very good ones, you can almost smell them. They have balloons coming out of their heads, like people in the comic strips, with ‘I’m a snoop’ written in them. One doesn’t pay too much attention to them, because most of them are harmless. But if a strange, handsome young man turns up in your castle, to help a crook like Saraceni, with every credential including a bad heart, who sends regular letters to a Harley Street address—he’s probably a spy.”

“But Francis was a genuine assistant to Saraceni?” said Darcourt. “There was no deception about that.”

“Saraceni was the soul of deception. Not, mind you, that I think he was dishonest in a trivial or purely self-seeking way. He had an artistic passion for illusion, far beyond fakery. He thought of it as playing tricks with Time. He was a very great restorer; you know that. And when he was working on a painting of value, like the pieces in the Düsterstein collection, he worked faithfully in the spirit and the mode of the artist who had made the picture. He turned back the clock. But he could take a piece of very indifferent painting, and skilfully make something fifth-rate look second-rate. That is art of a very special kind—knowing just how far to go.”

“One of the best things of that kind to come from Saraceni’s studio was, in fact, the work of Francis Cornish,” said the Princess. “Drollig Hansel—you remember it, Max?”

“No, no; that was no patched-up thing. That was an original. The queerest little panel you ever saw, of a dwarf jester. Extraordinary little face; you felt it saw everything.”

“It frightened me,” said the Princess. “Of course I should not have seen it at all But you know what children are. Saraceni used to lock up his studio every evening, and probably thought that all his secrets were safe. But I used to take my grandmother’s key from her desk every now and then, and have a look. That dwarf seemed to me to speak of all the tragedy of human life—imprisonment in an ugly body, deformity that put him beyond the understanding of other people, the yearning for vengeance and the yearning for love. So much of the horrible pathos of life, on a panel eight inches by ten.”

“Where is that picture now?” said Darcourt.

“I have no idea,” said the Prince. “I believe it was in Hermann Goering’s collection for a time, but I have heard nothing of it since. Unless it was destroyed—and I can’t imagine anybody destroying it—it will certainly turn up some day.”

“You speak as if Francis had really been a great painter,” said Darcourt.

“Yes,” said the Prince. “Shall we have coffee now?”

For coffee the three went into a large drawing-room. Darcourt had not been there before; his earlier talks with the Princess had been in a room she used for business, but it was so elegant that only a coarse soul would have thought of questioning any proposal of a business nature that was made there. Haggling, one presumed, was done elsewhere. But haggling there must have been, for Max and Amalie plainly conducted their businesses on a large and highly competitive level. The drawing-room seemed to occupy the whole of one side of the splendid penthouse in which they dwelt.

Darcourt was beginning to be an expert on rich people’s penthouses. The Cornishes’ penthouse in Toronto was wonderful because it was very modern, and some of its walls were composed entirely of glass, commanding a sweeping view over much of the city, and beyond it so that—enthusiasts insisted—on a fine day it was possible to see the mist rising from Niagara Falls in the farthest distance. But its modernity paradoxically gave it a somewhat timeless air, for it had no obtrusive architectural features, and took its character from the furnishings, many of which were in the seventeenth-century manner that appealed to Arthur and which Maria did not challenge. But Max and Amalie had chosen to give their dwelling a strong eighteenth-century character. That was why the picture that dominated the room was so surprising.

It was a triptych that hung against the damask covering of the south wall. Its subject was not immediately apparent, for it was filled—filled but not crowded—with figures dressed in the manner of the earliest sixteenth century; figures in ceremonial dress, figures in ceremonial armour, and some figures in the robes that artists have for so long used to clothe characters from biblical history. But a rather longer inspection told Darcourt that he was looking at a representation—a most unusual representation—of The Marriage at Cana. It was not until the Princess spoke that he became aware that he was gaping at it.

“You are admiring our treasure,” she said. “Do sit here where you can see it.”

Darcourt took his coffee, and sat by her. “A magnificent picture,” he said. “And most unusual in terms of its subject. The figure of Christ is relegated to an inferior position, and He might almost be said to be looking in wonder at the bridegroom. May I ask if it is known who the artist was?”

“The picture is one of five or six we thought of selling a few years ago,” said Prince Max. “It would have been a wrench, but we needed money badly, as I was at that time extending my wine business to North America, and you can imagine how much money that would take. The Düsterstein collection, of which we had managed to salvage some of the best pieces after the ruin and spoliation of the war, came to our rescue. We sold all but this one. Great American galleries were eager to get them. Indeed, for a time it looked as if this one might go to the National Gallery of Canada, but the deal fell through. Some trouble about finance. We had the money we needed from the other sales, so we decided to keep it.”

“But you do not know who painted it?”

“Oh, yes. We know. Indeed, it was a Canadian art historian who went as far as possible into the whole question of the picture, and attached to it the name of The Alchemical Master. Because he found elements in it that suggested a knowledge of alchemy.”

“The historian’s name was Aylwin Ross, wasn’t it?” said Darcourt.

“That was the man,” said the Prince. “A very personable fellow. He helped us a great deal in placing our other pictures. You can dig up what he wrote about The Marriage at Cana in the files of art journals. Nobody has challenged his opinion, so far as I know. So the picture will probably always be attributed to The Alchemical Master—unless we discover who he was. But here is our other guest.”

The other guest was, like the Prince, a marvel of personal preservation. Close inspection suggested that he was well over seventy, but his step was light, his figure trim, and his teeth, though of a surprising brilliance, appeared to be his own.

“Let me introduce Professor Darcourt,” said the Princess, thereby making it clear that the newcomer was, at least in her estimation, someone who outranked Darcourt. “He comes from Canada, and he has brought me the things we discussed earlier—so that is that. Professor, this is Mr. Addison Thresher. You recognize him, of course.”

Darcourt did not recognize him, but the name rang a faint bell—a tinkle—somewhere in his mind. Ah, yes; one of the Grand Panjandrums of the art world, a man who advised museums, established authenticities, and struck down deceptions with a personal Sword of Truth.

“Addison has helped us so much about pictures,” said the Princess. “And we asked him to drop in this evening because he is someone else who knew Francis Cornish. Professor Darcourt is writing a life of Cornish,” she said to the man with the wonderful teeth. “You have often spoken about Cornish.”

“Yes, indeed. I was present when Cornish leapt in a single bound from the status of a pupil of Tancred Saraceni into a place as a great detector of fraud. I saw him skewer Jean-Paul Letztpfennig. Nailed him to the cross, you might say. Exposed him as the painter of a fraudulent Van Eyck. It was a matter of an indiscreet monkey, that Letztpfennig had allowed into a picture where no such monkey could have entered by the hand of Van Eyck. The shrewdest, most elegant destruction of a fraud I have ever witnessed. But he never built on it as everybody expected him to do. Not much was heard of him afterward except as a member of that commission that attempted to restore works of art to their owners after the war.”

“Yes, I know about that,” said Darcourt. “It is the hidden days, the Düsterstein days I suppose I may call them now, that have puzzled me. What was he like then? Can you tell me?”

“I saw him at the great scene at The Hague,” said Thresher, “and, of course, I was with him on the Commission that had the job of restoring lost or looted art after the war, but we had very little direct contact then. He was impressive, as you know better than I do. Tall, quiet in manner, but with a quality that I suppose could be called Byronic. A whiff of brimstone.”

“Exactly as I remember him,” said the Princess. “A whiff of brimstone. Irresistible. And Byronic.”

“He ended as a shambling eccentric,” said Darcourt. “Agreeable, when you knew him. But a long way from le beau ténébreux.”

“Wouldn’t you have expected that?” said Thresher. “What would Byron have been like if he had lived to be an old man? A fat, bald Tory with fearful indigestion. Probably an embittered woman-hater. These romantic heroes are lucky if they die early. They are not built for long wear.”

Although the conversation continued throughout an evening that Darcourt ended by leaving sharp at eleven o’clock, he heard nothing more of significance about Francis Cornish. The talk touched on Cornish again and again, then veered away to some matter of concern to the art world, about which Thresher had an endless fund of hints and stories that might have been illuminating if Darcourt had been better informed than he was about the great sales, the great exposures, and the stupefying prices.

His evening, however, had not been quite so limited in its information as it might have seemed. Max and Amalie did their best to requite him for the drawings he had placed in their hands before dinner. They played fair in that, and when he left, the Princess gave him all her photographs of her adolescent love. But all evening his eyes turned again and again toward The Marriage at Cana, and when he caught his plane the next morning he was on fire to continue some research which would, he greatly hoped, tell him something about Francis Cornish that would make his book much more than a respectable, respectful biography.

(5)

WAS ARTHUR PLEASED that such an important meeting of the Cornish Foundation should be taking place somewhere other than at the Round Table? That instead of the nuts and fruits and sweets from the Platter of Plenty they were refreshing themselves from a slapdash smorgasbord Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot and Schnak had whipped up with a few biscuits and tins of smoked fish? That a potent aquavit was being drunk—drunk rather too freely by Hollier—with beer chasers?

No, Arthur was not pleased, but his self-control was so great that nobody would have known it, and indeed he was not fully aware of it himself, except as a generalized discomfort. He felt that control of the opera project had been taken out of his hands without any obvious snatching, and he was now an adviser only, rather than in his accustomed place as Chairman of the Board.

They had come to listen to music. There was a piano in his splendid penthouse, and if a piano was needed to learn what Hoffmann’s music was like, and what Schnak had been able to make of it, why had the Doctor somewhat imperiously demanded that they come here? Schnak was playing now.

She was a competent pianist, for a composer. That is to say, she could play anything at sight but she could not play anything really well. She could play from an orchestral score, giving what she called “a notion” of what was written there, piecing out what she could not play with her ten fingers by hoots, whistles, and shouts of “Brass!” or “Woodwind choir!”. When she wished to indicate that a melody was for a singer, she sang in a distressing voice, and as there were no words she took refuge in Yah-yah-yah.

As astonishing as Schnak’s noise was her altered appearance. Clean, to begin with. Dressed in some new clothes that looked as if they might have been chosen by the Doctor, for they were severe and might have had style if Schnak had worn them better. No longer haggard, but puffily plump, like someone who has been eating too much after a long abstinence. Her hair was now a respectable colour, an undistinguished brown, and flew about in uncontrolled wisps. She looked happy, and deeply engaged in what she was doing. A Schnak transformed.

Will I get a bill for those new clothes, or will the Doctor have the tact to conceal them among her own expenses, thought Darcourt. Reasonable enough. So many odd bills were reaching his desk that he began to feel like a Universal Provider. But it all made sense, in a way.

No member of the Round Table was a trained musician, but all were intelligent listeners—concert-goers and buyers of recordings—and they thought that what they heard was good. Melodious, certainly, and passionate. There seemed to be lots of it, and it was being presented in chunks of undeveloped, non-continuous sound. When at last Schnak ceased to play, the Doctor spoke.

“That is what we have, you see. That is what Hulda must develop and stitch together, and occasionally amplify with stuff that is akin to Hoffmann without being genuine Hoffmann. He left quite a lot of notes in prose, indicating what he had in mind. But it is a long way from being an opera. What we must have now is a detailed libretto, with action and words. Words that fit these melodies. At this moment we have not even a final list of the characters in the piece. Of course we know what the orchestration will be—the sort of thirty-two-piece group that Hoffmann would have been able to use in an opera theatre of his own. Strings, woods, a few brasses, and kettle-drums—only two, for he would not have had sophisticated modern timpani. So—what have the literary people been doing?”

“We have a scheme for the libretto. That’s to say, I have a scheme, pretty much like the one I outlined a few weeks ago,” said Powell. “As for characters, there are the seven leading roles: Arthur, Guenevere, Lancelot, Modred, Morgan Le Fay, Elaine, and Merlin.”

“And Chorus?” said the Doctor.

“For the men you have the Knights of the Round Table, and there must be twelve, to make up thirteen with Arthur. Linking it with Christ and the Disciples.”

“Oh, that’s very dubious,” said Hollier. “That’s nineteenth-century romanticism and utterly discredited now. Arthur had over a hundred Knights.”

“Well, he certainly isn’t going to have them in this opera,” said Powell. “As well as Lancelot and Modred he can have Sir Kay, the seneschal, Gawaine and Bedevere who are the good guys, and Gareth Beaumains, who can be a pretty boy if we can find one. Then we want Lucas, the butler, and Ulphius, the chamberlain. For funnies we can have Dynadan, who was a wit and lampoonist and can be a high-comedy figure, and Dagonet the Fool, who can be a jackass now and then to keep things lively. And the two blacks, of course.”

“Blacks?” said Arthur. “Why blacks in sixth-century Britain?”

“Because if you have an opera nowadays without a black or two, you’re in hot water,” said Powell. “Luckily we can use Sir Pellinore and Sir Palomides, who are both Saracens, so that takes care of that.”

“But Saracens were not black,” said Hollier.

“They will be in this show,” said Powell. “I want no trouble.”

“It will be incredible,” said Hollier.

“No it won’t. Not when I get it on the stage,” said Powell. “Nothing is incredible in opera. Now, as for women—”

“But wait,” said Hollier. “Are you sending this whole thing up? Making it into a comedy?”

“Not at all,” said the Doctor. “I see what Powell means. Opera presents mythic truth, even when it is about nineteenth-century whores with golden hearts. And mythic truth sets you free to do a lot of very practical things. What about women?”

“A woman for every Knight,” said Powell. “They don’t need names or characters. Except for the Lady Clarissant, who must be Number Two to Guenevere and carry her fan, or catch her when she faints, or whatever may be necessary. Basically, Clarissant is Chorus, though she will have to have a few more bucks because she plays a named character. So there you are. Twenty-nine in all; and a few extras for heralds and trumpeters, and of course understudies, and you’ll get out with less than forty, and never more than thirty-four on stage at one time. We can’t get any more on that stage in Stratford if it is to look like anything but the subway at rush-hour.”

“How expensive is it likely to be?” said Darcourt.

“Expense is not our first consideration,” said Arthur. “This is an adventure, you remember.”

“A Quest. A real Arthurian Quest,” said Maria. “A Quest in search of something lost in the past. Let’s not be cheap.”

Was Maria being ironic, Darcourt asked himself. Since their talk—their divano—he had sensed something in Maria that was not new, but a return to the Maria he had known before she became Mrs. Arthur Cornish, and seemed to dwindle. Maria was returning to her former stature.

“I’m glad you feel like that,” said Powell. “The more I think about this opera the more expensive it becomes. As Maria says, the past doesn’t come cheap.”

“What are the singers likely to want?” said Darcourt.

“Their figures are pretty well fixed, according to their reputations. For this job, you want second-rank singers—”

“Need we settle for that?” said Arthur.

“Don’t misunderstand me. I mean second-rank, not second-rate. You don’t want, and couldn’t get, the biggest star names; they are booked up for three and four years ahead, and as they do a pretty restricted group of parts they wouldn’t consent to learn a new role for a few performances. They aren’t used to rehearsal, either. They just swoop in by plane, do their standard Violetta or Rigoletto or whatever it is without much reference to where they are or who they’re with, and swoop out again, clutching their money. No, I’m talking about the intelligent singers who are also musicians, who can act and who keep their fat down. There are quite a lot of them now, and they’re the opera of the future. But they’re always busy, and they don’t come cheap, so we shall have to hope luck is with us. I’ve already made a few inquiries, and I think we’ll be all right. Chorus we can get in Toronto; lots of good people.”

Admirable, thought Arthur. Just what he would have wanted. Lots of initiative in his friend Geraint. And yet—the business man in him would not be silent—money was being promised, and perhaps contracts offered, and who was authorizing all this? The would-be impresario and patron applauded, but the banker had nasty qualms. Powell was continuing.

“The singers aren’t the only problems, let me tell you. Designer—where do you look for a designer now for an opera next summer? Far too late. But we’ve had a stroke of the greatest luck. There’s a real comer who has been doing a lot of supervisory work for the Welsh National Opera, and she wants a chance to design something entirely her own. Dulcy Ringgold, her name is. I’ve talked to Dulcy on the phone, and she’s keen as mustard. But there are conditions.”

“Money?” said Darcourt.

“No. Dulcy isn’t greedy. But she wants to do the whole thing as if it were being done under Hoffmann’s supervision at one of his opera houses—Bamberg, for instance. And that means scene design in the early-nineteenth-century manner, with changes managed as if we had a staff of about fifty stage-hands, when we’ll probably have ten, and they’ll have to learn old techniques that will astonish them. Because in those days stage-hands were really scene-shifters, and not buttonpushers. It’ll cost a mint.”

“I suppose you’ve closed with her?” said Hollier. The more aquavit he drank, and the more beer he sent down to supervise the aquavit, the more dubious he became.

“I have her on hold,” said Powell. “And I hope to God you agree with her plan.”

“Does it mean monstrously heavy stuff, long intervals, mossy banks covered with artificial flowers, and a lot of rumbling behind the curtain?” said Arthur.

“Not a bit of it. This kind of stage dressing came before all that nonsense. Quite simply, it’s a system where each scene consists of a painted back-drop, and five or six sets of wings on each side of the stage; but they are arranged on wheels so that the scenes change almost instantaneously—in out—in out—so that it’s almost like movie dissolves. At the end of each scene the actors leave the stage and—whammo!—you’re already in the next scene. But it takes some very nippy work backstage.”

“Sounds wonderful,” said Maria.

“It’s magical! I don’t know how we ever changed it for all this business of fixed settings and mood lighting that reflects nothing much but the mood of the lighting-designer. Pure magic!”

“Sounds to me like pantomime,” said Hollier.

“It is a bit like pantomime. But what’s wrong with that? It’s magic, I tell you.”

“You mean like the things one sees at Drottningholm?” said Darcourt.

“Just like that.”

Nobody but Darcourt among the Foundation members had been to Drottningholm, and they were impressed.

“But why is it so expensive?” said Arthur. “It sounds to me like a few pieces of lath and a lot of canvas and paint.”

“And that’s what it is. It’s the paint that costs money. Good scenepainters are rare nowadays, but Dulcy says she could do it with six good art-students and herself to supervise and do the tricky bits. But it takes time and it costs like the devil.”

“If it’s magic, we’ll have it,” said Arthur.

“That’s the real Arthurian touch,” said Maria, and kissed him.

“I declare for it, without reserve,” said the Doctor. “It will mean that I—I mean Hulda—can have many scenes, and that is wonderful freedom for a composer. Indoor-outdoor; forests and gardens. Yes, yes, Mr. Cornish, you are man of fine imagination. I also salute you.”

The Doctor kissed Arthur. On the cheek. Not one of her tongue-in-the-mouth kisses.

“With such a scheme of production, I suppose you see no obstacle to using The Questing Beast,” said Hollier, cheering up visibly, if a little unsteadily.

“What in God’s name is The Questing Beast?” said the Doctor.

“It was the monster whose pursuit was the lifelong occupation of Sir Pellinore,” said Hollier. “I’m surprised you do not know. The Questing Beast had the head of a serpent, the body of a libbard, the rump of a lion, the hooves of a hart, and a great, swingeing tail; out of its belly came a sound like the baying of thirty couple of hounds. Just the thing for a magical opera.

“Oh Clem, you genius,” said Penny Raven, and, not to be left out when kissing was toward, she kissed Hollier, to his great abashment.

“Well—I don’t know,” said Powell.

“Oh, you must,” said Penny. “Hulda could make the Beast sing out of its belly! All those voices, in wonderful harmony. What a coup de théâtre! No, I suppose I mean a coup d’oreille. It would be the hit of the show.”

“Just what I’m afraid of,” said Powell. “You have a very minor character, Sir Pellinore, traipsing about the stage with a bloody great pantomime dragon, and taking all the attention. No! Nix on The Questing Beast.”

“I thought you wanted imagination,” said Hollier, with the hauteur of a man whose brilliant idea has been scorned.

“Imagination is not uncontrolled fantasy,” said the Doctor.

“The Questing Beast is a vital part of the Arthurian Legend,” said Hollier, raising his voice. “The Questing Beast is pure Malory. Are you throwing Malory overboard? I want to know. If I am to have any part in preparing this libretto—as you call it—I want to know the ground rules. What are your intentions toward Malory?”

“Good sense must prevail,” said the Doctor, who had not been inattentive to the aquavit. “Myth must be transmuted into art, not slavishly reproduced. If Wagner had been ruled by myth, the Ring of the Nibelungs would have been trampled to death by monsters and giants and nobody would have understood the story. I have my responsibility here, and I remind you of it. Hulda’s interests must come before everything. Besides, Hoffmann has not provided any music that could in any way be turned into a four-part chorus singing inside the belly of a monster, and probably not able to see the conductor. To hell with your Questing Beast!”

Arthur felt it was time to exert his skills as Chairman of the Board, and after five minutes, during which Hollier and Penny and Powell and the Doctor shouted and insulted each other, he was able to restore some sort of order, though the heat of passion in the room was still palpable.

“Let’s come to a conclusion, and stick with it,” he said. “We’re talking about the nature of the libretto. We have to decide the ground on which it rests. Professor Hollier is determined on Malory.”

“It’s simple reason,” said Hollier. “The libretto is to be in English. Malory is the best English source.”

“But the language, the language!” said Penny. “All that ‘yea, forsooth’, and ‘full fain’, and ‘I woll welle’. Great to read but bloody to speak, let alone sing. Do you imagine you could write verse in that lingo?”

“I agree,” said Darcourt. “We’ve got to have language that’s clear, and permits rhyme, and has a romantic flavour. So what’s it to be?”

“It’s obvious,” said Powell. “Obvious to anybody but a scholar, that’s to say. Sir Walter’s your man.”

Nobody responded to the name of Sir Walter. There were looks of incomprehension on every face but Arthur’s.

“Sir Walter Scott, he means,” said he. “Haven’t any of you read any Scott?”

“Nobody reads Scott nowadays,” said Penny. “He’s ceased to be a Figure and been demoted to an Influence. Too simple for scholarly consideration but can’t be wholly overlooked.”

“You mean in the universities,” said Arthur. “Increasingly I thank God that I never went to one. As a reader I’ve just rambled at large on Parnassus, chewing the grass wherever it seemed rich. I read an awful lot of Scott when I was a boy, and loved it. I think Geraint is right. Scott’s our man.”

“Just about every big Scott novel was made into an opera. Not operas that are done much now, but big hits in their day. Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Bizet—all those guys. I’ve looked at them. Pretty neat, I’d say.” It was Schnak who spoke. She had been almost unheard until this moment, and the others looked at her with wonder, as in one of those old tales where an animal is suddenly gifted with speech.

“We have forgotten that Hulda is fresh from her studies in musicology,” said the Doctor. “We must listen to her. After all, she is to do the most important part of the work.”

“Hoffmann read a lot of Scott,” said Schnak. “Thought he was great. Sort of operatic.”

“Schnak is right,” said Arthur. “Operatic. Lucia di Lammermoor—still a great favourite.”

“Hoffmann knew it. Probably was an influence on him, if you’re hog-wild for influences,” said Schnak. “Gimme some Scott, and let’s see what can be done. It’d have to be a pistache, naturally.”

“You must say pastiche, my dear,” said the Doctor. “But you are right.”

“Am I to understand that we are abandoning Malory?” said Hollier.

“ ’Raus mit Malory,” said Schnak. “Never heard of him.”

“Hulda! You told me you did not know German!”

“That was two weeks ago, Nilla,” said Schnak. “How do you suppose I got my musicology, without German? How do you suppose I read what Hoffmann wrote on his notes, without German? And I can even speak a little kitchen German. Honestly, you top people are dumb! You ask me questions like examiners, and you treat me like a kid. I’m supposed to be writing this thing, eh?”

“You’re right, Schnak,” said Powell. “We’ve been leaving you out. Sorry. You’ve hit the nail on the head. It must be Scott pastiche.”

“If it’s not to be Scott pistache I’ll have to get down to reading Marmion and The Lady of the Lake right away,” said Darcourt. “But how do we work?”

“Hulda will give you details about the music, and little plans that show you how the tunes go, so you can fit good words to them. And as quick as you can, please.”

“I must ask to be excused,” said Hollier. “If you need me for details of history, or costume, or behaviour, you know where to find me. Unless, of course, untrammelled, uninformed imagination is to determine everything. And so I bid you good-night.”

(6)

“WHAT GOT INTO CLEM?” said Penny, as they drove away in Arthur’s car. It was a fine car, but it was rather a squash in the back seat with Penny, Darcourt, and Powell, however politely they might try to restrain their bottoms.

“Just thwarted professorship,” said Darcourt.

“Probably mid-life crisis,” said Powell.

“What’s that?” asked Arthur, who was driving.

“It’s one of the new, fashionable ailments, like pre-menstrual bloat,” said Powell. “Excuses anything.”

“Really?” said Arthur. “Do you suppose I might have one of those? I’ve not been feeling quite the thing, lately.”

“You’re too young for it, my darling,” said Maria. “Anyway, I wouldn’t let you. It can make a man into a big baby. I thought Clem was being an awful baby.”

“I’ve known he was a baby for years,” said Darcourt. “A large, learned, very handsome baby, but still a baby. For me, the surprise of the evening was Schnak. She’s coming out of her cell with a hell of a yell, isn’t she? She’s given us our orders.”

“It’s Old Sooty,” said Penny. “I have my dark suspicions about Old Sooty. Do you know that kid has moved in with her? Now what does that mean?”

“You obviously want to tell us,” said Maria.

“Do I have to tell you? She and Schnak are poofynooks. It’s as plain as the nose on your face.”

“It seems to be doing Schnak a power of good,” said Arthur. “Clean, putting on a little flesh, finding her tongue, and she doesn’t look at us any more as if she was just about to order up the tumbrils. If that’s what lesbianism does, three cheers for lesbianism, I say.”

“Yes, but haven’t we some responsibility? I mean, are we delivering this kid gagged and bound into the hands of that old bull-dyke? Didn’t you hear ‘Nilla’ and ‘dear Hulda’ all evening until you nearly threw up?”

“What about it?” said Maria. “She’s probably the first person who has ever been nice to Schnak—really nice, I mean. Very likely the first person to talk to Schnak about music seriously and not just as an instructor. If it means a few rolls in the hay, the occasional bout of kindly kissing and clipping, what about it? Schnak’s nineteen, for God’s sake, and an exceedingly bright nineteen. The word genius has been whispered.”

“What do you think, Simon?” said Penny. “You’re the professional moralist.”

“I think what Maria thinks. And as a professional moralist I think you have to take love where you find it.”

“Even if it means being mauled and clapper-clawed by Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot? Thank you, Father Darcourt, for these advanced opinions.”

“I’m in the dark about this business,” said Arthur. “What do they do?”

“Oh, Arthur, that’s what every man asks about lesbians,” said Maria. “I suppose they do whatever comes into their heads. I’m sure I could think of lots of things.”

“Could you really?” said Arthur. “You must show me. I’ll be Schnak and you be Gunny, and we’ll find out what happens in the gunnysack. A new window on the wonders of the world.”

“I think you’re being frivolous and irresponsible,” said Penny. “I am more and more convinced that this Snark of ours is going to turn out to be a Boojum.”

“What is all this Snark and Boojum stuff?” said Arthur. “You’ve talked about it ever since you came in with us on this operatic venture. Some obscure literary reference, I suppose, designed to keep the uneducated in their proper place. Instruct me, Penny; I am just a humble, teachable money-man. Let me into your Druid Circle.”

“Sorry, sorry Arthur; I suppose it is a private lingo but it says so much in a few words. You see, there’s a very great poem by Lewis Carroll about the Hunting of the Snark; a lot of crazy creatures set off, they know not whither, in search of they know not what. The hunt is led by a Bellman—that’s you, Arthur—full of zeal and umph, and his crew includes a Boots and a Banker, and a Billiard Marker and a Beaver who makes lace—probably you, Simon, because ‘he often saved them from wreck, / Though none of the sailors knew how’. And there’s a very peculiar creature who seems to be a Baker but turns out to be a Butcher, and he is omnicompetent—

He would answer to ‘Hi!’ or to any loud cry,

Such as ‘Fry me!’ or ‘Fritter-my-wig!’

To ‘What-you-may-call-um!’ or ‘What-was-his name!’

But especially ‘Thing-um-a-jig!’

While, for those who preferred a more forcible word,

He had different names for these:

His intimate friends called him ‘Candle-ends’

And his enemies, ‘Toasted-cheese’

—so that’s obviously you, Geraint, you Cymric mystifier, because you have us all buffaloed about this opera business. It’s just about a crazy voyage that somehow, in an unfathomable way, makes a kind of eerie sense. I mean, so many of us are professors—well, Clem and Simon and me, which is quite a few—and listen to this from the Bellman’s definition of a Snark—

The third is its slowness in taking a jest

Should you happen to venture on one,

It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed:

And it always looks grave at a pun.

Isn’t that what we’ve been doing all evening? Yammering about Malory and the scholarly approach to something that is utterly unscholarly in the marrow of its bones, because it’s Art. And Art is rum stuff—the very rummest. It may look like a nice, simple Snark, but it can suddenly prove to be a Boojum, and then, look out!

‘For, although common Snarks do no manner of harm

Yet I feel it my duty to say,

Some are Boojums—’ The Bellman broke off in alarm,

For the Baker had fainted away.

Do you get what I mean, Arthur? Do you see how it fits in and haunts my mind?”

“I might see it if I had your mind, but I haven’t,” said Arthur. “Literary reference leaves me gaping.”

“I bet it would have left King Arthur gaping,” said Maria loyally, “if Merlin had got off a few quaint cracks from his Black Book.”

“Yes, but I see how this whole thing could go very queer,” said Penny. “And I had a hint of it tonight. That poor kid Schnak thinks she’s tough, but she’s just a battered baby, and she’s being let in for something she certainly can’t handle. It worries me. I don’t want to be a busybody, or a soul-saver, or any of that, but surely we ought to do something!”

“I think you’re jealous,” said Powell.

“Jealous! Me! Geraint, I hate you! I’ve just decided. Ever since I met you I’ve wondered what I really think about you, you blathering, soapy Welsh goat, and now I know. You’re in this for what you can get, and you don’t give a maggoty shit for anybody else, and I hate you!”

“We’re all in everything for what we can get, professor,” said Powell. “And if not, why are we in it? What are you in it for? You don’t know, but you hope to find out. Fame? Fun? Something to fill up the gaps in your life? What’s your personal Snark? You really ought to find out.”

“This is where I get out,” said Penny. “Thank you for driving me home, Arthur. I can’t get out unless you get out first, Geraint.”

Powell stepped on to the pavement and bowed as he held the door for the furious Penny.

“You shouldn’t have said that, Geraint,” said Maria, when they drove away.

“Why not? I think it’s true.”

“All the more reason not to say it,” said Maria.

“You could be right about Penny,” said Darcourt. “Why is such an attractive woman unattached at her age? Why is she so flirtatious with men but it never leads to anything? Perhaps our Penny is looking asquint at something she doesn’t want to see.”

“A fight over Schnak is just what we need to relieve the dowdy simplicity of this opera venture,” said Powell. “Art is so lacking in passion, don’t you think? With the Doctor and Penny contesting like the Bright and the Dark Angel for the body and soul of Hulda Schnakenburg, we shall add a little salt to the dreary porridge of our lives.”

(7) ETAH IN LIMBO

What do they do? Arthur wants to know, and I, happy in my privileged position, may say that I do know.

I must be careful about my privileged position. “Is there a cosier condition than being thoroughly pleased with oneself?” I must be careful not to become like Kater Murr. Even in Limbo, I suppose, one can sink into Philistinism.

But what Dr. Gunilla and Hulda Schnakenburg do is far from Philistine, and indeed far from the anti-Philistine world as I knew it when I was a part of what is now flatteringly called The Romantic Movement. Of course there were intense and intimate friendships between women then, but whatever physical amusement they generated was not known or seriously considered. Certainly some young ladies hung about each other’s necks in public; they often dressed in identical gowns; they swooned or had hysterics at the same time, for both swooning and hysterics were high among the feminine luxuries of the day, and were thought to show great delicacy of feeling. But it was always assumed that these sensitive creatures would marry at last, and after marriage the intimacy with the female friend might become even more precious. I suppose if, after the first raptures of marriage, your husband was in the habit of coming to bed drunk, or smelling of the bawdy-house, or in a mood to black an eye or give a few hard slaps to a critical wife, it was delightful to have a friend who treated you with delicate respect and who could perhaps rouse an ecstasy that your disappointing husband thought was outside the emotional range of a well-bred woman. That was how it was, you see: that special ecstasy was thought to be the prerogative of whores, and whores became expert at faking it, and thereby flattering their clients.

It was all quite different, in my day. Love was an emotion greatly valued, but it was valued for its own sake, and an unhappy love or a torturing love was perhaps even more valued than a love that was fulfilled. After all, love is an ecstasy, but sex is an appetite, and one does not always satisfy an appetite at the best restaurant in town. The bordel where Devrient and I used to go in Berlin was quite a humble affair, and the women there knew their trade and their place; they did not presume to intimacy with the visitors, who were always called Mein Herr, unless the visitors liked endearments and smutty talk, which was extra, and had to be considered in the tip. It was in Russia and Poland that people who liked that sort of thing became familiar with the whore and, in my opinion, made fools of themselves. I cannot recall the face of a single whore, though I employed many.

Why? Why did I go to the bordel, even when I was out of my mind with love for the unattainable pupil, the lovely Julia Marc? Even in my most love-stricken hours I did not cease to eat, or drink—or visit the bordel. Love was not an appetite, but an ecstasy. Whores were not women, but servants.

What about my wife? Do you suppose that when I was head over ears in love with another woman I would insult my wife, my dearest Michalina Rohrer, by seeking out her bed? Do you suppose I had no respect for her, and all she meant to me? She was a fact, and an extremely important fact, of my life, and I would not have insulted her, even if she were unconscious of the insult—and I do not for a moment suppose she was ignorant of my passion for Julia. She had a close friend, by the way, and I never made inquiry or interfered in whatever may have passed between them. Nor, I suppose, did Dante, when he was sighing for his Beatrice. Dante was a very good family man, and so was I, in the manner of my time. Romantic love and a firm domestic life were not incompatible, but they were not expected to mingle. Marriage was a contract, to be taken seriously, and the fidelity it demanded was not to he trifled with. But the obsession of love might, and often did, lie elsewhere.

Is there love between Gunilla and Hulda? On Hulda’s side I am sure it is so, and whether either of them expects it to last, as marriage is expected to last, I cannot say. It was Hulda’s initiation into that sweet ecstasy; Gunilla is a woman of great experience. It was she, for instance, who introduced Hulda to what they called the Love Potion.

It was a sort of jam, really. Jam was the heart of it; the very best raspberry jam made by Crabtree and Evelyn. With the jam was mixed honey and a few chopped walnuts. Gunilla would spread a path of it on Hulda’s tender belly, beginning at the navel and extending downward. Having licked the jam out of the navel, Gunilla would lick slowly and gently in a southward direction and in time—it all had to be done lentissimo e languidamente—to the pintle of ecstasy, and then there were sighs and sometimes cries. After a restful period of kissing, Hulda took her turn, anointing Gunilla’s belly and performing the same slow ritual. With Gunilla it always ended in quite loud cries. It was she who most appreciated the walnuts, which gave, she said, a sort of traction that was very exciting.

All innocent and delightful, concluding with a bath together (enlivened with a couple of aquavits apiece) and a refreshing sleep. Who was harmed? Nobody. And there was no resorting to the bordel, simply as a convenience.

That is what I envy them. For it was in the bordel, somewhere—I cannot tell in what city of the many where I pursued my career—it came about that I acquired the disease that was one of the contributing elements in my early death. I underwent a cure, of course, but the cures in those days cured nothing except the debts of the physicians. I thought I had been cured, but later I knew better. That was in 1818, and when I became horribly ill and died in 1822 I knew that it was not simply the liver ailment that grew from all that champagne, or the mysterious paralysis that was at last diagnosed as tabes dorsalis—one of the many names given to the old, old disease—that carried me off. As it carried off poor Schubert, who, as I saw from the vantage of Limbo, was brought to wearing an absurd wig, to disguise the baldness that syphilis had brought upon him. And Schumann, who died of a self-inflicted starvation: but it sprang from the madness that had so long possessed him—madness that arose from the Morbus Gallicus.

It was my legs that first became useless to me, then the paralysis settled in my hands and I could not hold a pen. I was determined to complete Arthur of Britain if I could, and when writing was impossible I dictated my music to my wife, my dear faithful Michalina, who was a skilled amanuensis. But I could achieve nothing but sketches for the music I wanted—the sketches from which Schnak is so cleverly divining what was in my mind. The disease that made me unable to control the pen seemed to enlarge and enrich my musical imagination; I have long believed that certain poisons—tobacco and wine, to name two of the commonest—may do that in minds of fine quality, where the poisons do not induce the usual stupor. A truly Romantic notion, some would say. But the tortures and wrenchings that came with the inspirations were terrible, and it was to them that I at last succumbed.

It is the disease of genius, many people have said, because so many men of note, and many of them my contemporaries, died of it, or were hastened to the grave because syphilis underlay whatever it was the doctors said had killed them. Would I have sacrificed my genius to avoid the pain and degradation? Fortunately there is no necessity to answer that question.