The Lyre of Orpheus

(1)

“I simply adore Canada! What I’ve seen, that’s to say. Which isn’t the whole thing, of course. Really only Toronto and the Royal Winter Fair. I’m going to try for a stop-over in Montreal on my way home—try out my French, you know—but I mayn’t be able to spare the time. Must get back to my stud, you see. So much to be done at this time of year.”

“I’m glad you approve of us,” said Darcourt. “Now, about your father—”

“Oh, yes, Daddy. That’s what we’re here to talk about, isn’t it? That’s the reason for this lovely lunch in this absolutely super restaurant. Because you’re writing about him, aren’t you? I scribble a little myself, you know. Pony stories for children. They sell a few hundred thousand, to my surprise. But just before we get onto Daddy, there’s one thing—rather hush-hush, but I know you’re discreet—that I think isn’t just the way it should be in Canada, and unless something is done before it goes too far it could let you down fearfully. I mean, it could bring about a drop in world prestige.”

Ah, politics, thought Darcourt. Politics, which rages like the hectic in the veins of every Canadian, and quickly infects visitors—even little Charlie, otherwise Miss Charlotte Cornish, who sat before him digging into the poached salmon.

“And what is that?” he asked, without wanting to know.

Little Charlie leaned forward conspiratorially, a loaded fork poised like a wand in her hand; there was a flake of salmon clinging to her lower lip.

“It’s your farriery,” she whispered. The flake was detached by the whisper and sped across the table toward Darcourt’s plate. She was the sort of woman who combines acceptable table manners with obvious greed; the lapels of her excellent tweed jacket carried evidence of hasty, joyous gobbling.

“Farriery?” he said, puzzled. Had Canada’s farriery gone to pot, and he had not noticed? Had the word some significance unknown to him?

“Don’t imagine I’m faulting your vets,” said Little Charlie. “First-class, so far as I can judge. But it’s the degree below the vet; the farrier groom who is the real companion and confidant of the pony. The vet is there for the big stuff, of course: colic, and farcy, and strangles and all those dreadful things that can ruin a fine creature. But it’s the farrier who gives the hot mash when the beastie is a wee bit sicky-pussy from a chill, or a tumble. It’s the farrier who pets and comforts when things haven’t gone just the way the beastie would like at a show. I call the farrier the pony’s nurse. In fact, in my stud I have this most wonderful girl—well, she must be my age, but she’s a girl to me—her name’s Stella, but I always call her Nursie, and believe you me she lives up to her name. I’d trust Stella far beyond most vets, let me tell you.”

“How lucky you are to have her,” said Darcourt. “Now, about the late Francis Cornish, I suppose you have some memories of him?”

“Oh, yes,” said Little Charlie. “But just a moment; I want to tell you something that happened yesterday. I was judging—head of the judges, really—and the most exquisite little Shetland stallion was brought in. A real winner! Eyes bright and well spaced; fine muzzle and big nostrils, deep chest and splendid withers, marvellous croup—a perfect picture! I tell you, I’d have bought him, if I could raise the cash. Won’t tell you his name, because I don’t want this to get around—though of course I trust you—and at his head was this groom, not a bit the kind of fellow you’d expect to see with such a little sweetie, and when the pony tossed his head—as they’ll do, you know, because they know they’re being judged, and they have pride—he jerked the bridle and said, ‘Hold still, damn you,’ under his breath! But I heard, and I tell you my heart went out to that little creature. ‘Are you the farrier?’ I said to him—not sharply, but firmly—and he said, ‘Yeah, I look after him,’ almost insolently. And I thought, well, I’ve seen quite a lot of that this last few days, and it sickens me. Then he jerked the bridle again and the pony nipped him! And he hit the pony on the nose! Well, of course that was that as far as judging goes. Show me a biter and I’ll show you a potential bolter and probably a jibber. And all because of that brute of a groom!”

“Distressing, certainly,” said Darcourt. They were moving on toward strawberry shortcake, made with tasteless imported strawberries, but that was what little Charlie wanted, and Darcourt was trying to prime the pump of her memory. “Was your father fond of animals, do you recall?”

“Couldn’t say,” said Little Charlie, busy with her spoon. “It was pretty much all King and Country with him, as I was told it. But don’t imagine that because I said I might have bought that stallion I’m really keen on Shetlands. Of course they sell well to people with children, because they look so sweet. But they’re a deceiving kind of pony, you know. Such a short step. Keep a child too long on a Shetland and you may have spoiled her forever as a rider. What she needs as soon as she’s big enough is a good Welsh, with a strain of Arab. They’re the ones with style and action! They’re my bread-and-butter. Not for polo, mind you. There it’s Exmoor and Dartmoor, and I breed a lot of those. In fact—this is telling tales out of school but what the hell!—I sold an Exmoor stallion to His Royal Highness’s stable a couple of years ago, and HRH said—I was told this very much in confidence—he’d never seen a finer little stallion.”

“I won’t tell a soul. Now, about your father—”

“He was a four-year-old and just coming into his best. For God’s sake, I said to HRH’s man, don’t push him too hard. Give him time and he’ll get you twenty-five to forty first-class foals every year until he’s twenty. But if you push him now—! Well, you’ll never believe this, but I’ve seen a fine stallion forced to serve as many as three hundred mares a season, and after five years he’s just plain knackered! Like people. Quality, not quantity, is the root of the whole thing. Of course they can soldier on. They’re wonderfully willing, you know. But it’s the sperm. The sperm count in an overworked stallion goes down and down, and though he may look like Don Juan he’s just Weary Willie. As Stella says—she’s very broad-spoken, sometimes—his willy is willing but the trollybobs are weak. So that’s it. Never, never be greedy with your stallion!”

“I promise you I never will. But now I really think we ought to talk about your father.”

“Of course. Sorry, sorry, sorry. The ruling passion. I do rattle on. Stella says so. Well, as to Daddy, I never saw him.”

“Never?”

“Not to remember. I suppose he saw me, when I was a tiny. But not after I’d begun to notice. But he cared for me. That’s to say he sent money regularly to look after me, and all the farriery was left to my grandmother. Prudence Glasson, you know. The whole gang were related, in various distant degrees. You see, my mummy was Ismay Glasson, and her father was Roderick Glasson, who was kin to Daddy from another point of the compass. I wouldn’t have bred them that way if it had been my stud, but that’s all past and done with. My very first pony, when I was four—a sweet Shetland—had a ticket on his bridle, ‘For Little Charlie from Daddy’.”

“You remember your mother, of course?”

“No, not a bit. You see—this is the family skeleton—Mummy was a bolter. Not long after I was born she just took off, and left me to Daddy and my grandparents. Mind you, I think she was a sort of high-minded bolter; she went to Spain to fight in the war and I always assumed she was killed there, but nobody ever gave me any details. She was by way of being a beauty, but from pictures I’d say she was a bit over-bred; nervous and high-strung, and likely to bite, and bolt, and jib, and do all those things.”

“Really? That’s very helpful. I tried to see your uncle, Sir Roderick, in London at the Foreign Office, to ask a few questions about your mother, but it was impossible to make an appointment.”

“Oh, Uncle Roddy would never see you, or tell you anything if he did. He’s the original Stuffed Shirt. I’ve given up all hope of seeing him, not that I’m keen. But don’t run away with the idea that I had a neglected or unhappy childhood. It was absolutely marvellous, even though St. Columb’s was running down all the time I was growing up. I believe Daddy poured a lot of money into the family place—God knows why—but my grandfather was a hopeless estate manager. Our money from Daddy was watched rather carefully by a solicitor, so it didn’t go down the drain, and it still doesn’t, let me assure you. My little stud is built on that, and since I met Stella—you’d adore Stella, though she is a bit frank-spoken and you are a parson, after all—I’ve been as happy as a lark.”

“So you really know nothing about your father? In your letter to the Cornishes here you rather suggested that he had some Secret Service connection.”

“That was hinted at, but not much was said. Not much was known, I suppose. But you see Daddy’s father, Sir Francis, was in that, and very deep, I believe, and how far Daddy followed in his footsteps I really don’t know. It was the spy connection that kept Daddy from coming to see me, or so it was said.”

“Spy? Do you think he was really a spy?”

“It’s not a word Gran would ever hear used. If they’re British intelligence agents they certainly aren’t spies, she said. Only foreigners are spies. But you know how kids are. I used to joke about him being a spy, to raise the temperature a little. You know, the way kids do. They always told me to be very secret about it but I don’t suppose it matters now.”

“And did you know that your father was a painter, and a remarkable connoisseur, and had a reputation as an expert on pictures?”

“Never heard a word about that. Though I was knocked endways to find out he’d left a huge fortune! I did think of asking the Cornishes if they’d like to use some of it to finance some really super breeding—you know, the very best of the best. But then I thought, shut up, Charlie; that’s greedy, and Daddy has treated you very well. So shut up! And I have. —Oh, crumbs, I must be off! Heavy afternoon ahead of me. Thanks for the super lunch. I shan’t be seeing you again, shall I? Or Arthur and Maria, either. I fly on Friday. They’re a super pair. Especially Maria. By the way, you’re a great family friend, I believe; have you heard anything about her being in foal?”

“In foal? Oh, I see what you mean. No. Have you?”

“No. But I have the breeder’s eye, you know. Right away there’s something about a mare that tells the tale. If the stallion’s clicked, I mean. —And now I must dash!”

As well as a stout woman may, she dashed.

(2)

ARTHUR WEPT. He had not done so since his parents died in a motor accident when he was fourteen; he was stricken by the grief that overcame him as he sat in Darcourt’s study, a cluttered, booky room, into which a little watery November sun made its way cautiously, as if doubtful of its welcome. He wept. His shoulders shook. It seemed to him that he howled, although Darcourt, standing by the window, looking out into the college quadrangle, heard only deep-fetched sobs. Tears poured from his eyes, and salt downpourings of mucus streamed from his nose. One handkerchief was sodden and the second—Arthur always carried two—and the second was rapidly becoming useless. Darcourt was not the sort of man who has boxes of tissues in his study. It seemed to Arthur that his paroxysm would never end; new desolation heaved up into his heart as quickly as he wept out the old. But at last he sank back in his chair blear-eyed, rednosed, and conscious that his fine tie had a smear of snot on it.

“Got a handkerchief?” he said.

Darcourt threw him one. “Feel better now, do you?”

“I feel like a cuckold.”

“Ah, yes. A cuckold. Or as Dr. Dahl-Soot pronounces it, cookold. You’ll have to get used to it.”

“You’re a bloody unsympathetic friend. And a bloody unresponsive priest, Simon.”

“Not a bit of it. I am very sorry, both for you and Maria, but what good will it do if I join you in siren tears? My job is to keep a cool head and look at the thing from the outside. What about Powell?”

“I haven’t seen him. What do I do? Beat him up?”

“And signal to the whole world what’s wrong? No, you certainly do not beat him up. Anyhow, you’re in this opera thing up to your neck, and Powell is indispensable.”

“Damn it, he’s my best friend.”

“The cuckoo in the nest is often the best friend. Powell loves you, as a friend may very well love you. I love you, Arthur, though I don’t make a song and dance about it.”

“That kind of love. You have to because you’re a priest. Like God, it’s your métier.”

“You don’t know anything about priests. I know we are supposed to love mankind indiscriminately, but I don’t. That’s why I gave up practical priesthood and became a professor. My faith charges me to love my neighbour but I can’t and I won’t fake it, in the greasy way professional lovers-of-mankind do—the professionally charitable, the newspaper sob-sisters, the politicians. I’m not Christ, Arthur, and I can’t love like Him, so I settle for courtesy, consideration, decent manners, and whatever I can do for the people I really do love. And you are one of those. I can’t help you by weeping with you, though I respect your tears. The best I can do is to bring a clear head and an open eye to your trouble. I love Maria, too, you know.”

“Indeed I do know. You wanted to marry her, didn’t you?”

“I did, and in the kindest possible way she gave me the mitt. I love her even more for that, because Maria and I would have made a damned bad match.”

“Okay, old Clear Head and Open Eye. Why did you ask her, then?”

“Because I was in the grip of passion. There were a thousand reasons for loving Maria, and I now see there were a million for not marrying her. I love her still, but don’t worry that I want to play the role that Powell has played in your marriage.”

“She told me she once had le coeur tendre for Hollier, and that you had proposed to her. And looked a fine ninny as you did it, what’s more. Every woman has these boss-shots in her past. But she married me, and now she’s wrecking it.”

“Balls. You’re the one who’s wrecking it.”

“Me! She’s pregnant, damn it!”

“And you’re sure it’s not your child?”

“Yes.”

“How? You use some contraceptive, I suppose. Condoms? They’re very much in vogue at present.”

“I hate the damned things. There they are, the morning after, leering wetly at you from the bedside table or the carpet, like the Ghost of Nooky Past.”

“Maria uses something?”

“No. We wanted a child.”

“So?”

“I had mumps, you remember. Badly. The doctors told me tactfully that henceforth I would be infertile. Not impotent. Just infertile. And it’s irreversible.”

“You told Maria, of course?”

“I hadn’t got around to it.”

“So the child must have been begotten by somebody else?”

“Yes, Sherlock Holmes.”

“Must it have been Powell?”

“Who else is a possibility? You see—I hate telling you this—somebody came to me—”

“To tip you off?”

“Yes. A security man who works at night in our apartment building.”

“One Wally Crottel?”

“Yes. And he said that Mr. Powell sometimes stayed late, and occasionally overnight when I was out of town, and as a convenience would it be a good idea if he gave Mr. Powell a key to the parking area?”

“And you said no.”

“I said no. It was just a hint, you know. But it was enough.”

“It was a mistake to underestimate Wally. So then—”

“Because of this opera business Powell comes and goes quite a lot, and if he stays late he uses our guest room. I didn’t know he used it when I was away.”

“Powell is a very using kind of man.”

“So it seems.”

“Have you told Maria now? About being infertile, I mean?”

“I told her after she told me she was pregnant. I didn’t think she was as happy about a child as I would have expected, but I put it down to shyness. And I suppose I looked astonished—that’s a poor word for it—and I couldn’t say a word. She asked me what was wrong. I told her.”

“Yes?”

“It took a few minutes, and all the time I was talking that hint from Crottel kept swelling in my mind, and at last I came out with it. Was it Powell? I said. She wouldn’t say a word.”

“Very unlike Maria to have nothing to say.”

“She simply closed her mouth and looked as I’ve never seen her look before. Very big-eyed and tight-lipped. But smiling. It was enough to drive me mad.”

“What did you expect? That she should fall at your feet and bathe them in her tears, and then wipe away the tears from your custom-made brogues with her hair? You don’t know your own wife, my boy.”

“You’re damned right I don’t. But it drove me crazy, and as I got hotter and hotter she just smiled that bloody smile and refused to say anything. So at last I said that her silence was answer enough. And she said, ‘If that’s what you think.’ And that was all.”

“And you haven’t spoken a word to each other since?”

“We’re not savages, Simon. Of course we speak. Very politely about commonplaces. But it’s hell, and I don’t know what to do.”

“So you have come to me for advice. Sensibly, I may say.”

“Oh don’t be so bloody smug.”

“Not smug. Don’t forget I’m an old hand at this sort of thing. So shall we get down to it?”

“If you like.”

“No, no; it’s got to be if you like.”

“All right.”

“Well, for a starter, don’t imagine I underestimate your hurt. It can’t be any fun being told that you’re not fully a man. But it’s happened before. George Washington, for instance. Another mumps casualty, it seems. No children, though he was quite a man for the ladies. But he didn’t do too badly. The Father of His Country, we are told.”

“Don’t be facetious.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it. But I refuse to take the great tragic line, either. This business of begetting children is important as one of the biological qualities of a man, but as civilization moves on, other qualities look at least equally important. You’re not some wandering nomad or medieval peasant who has to have children because they are a primitive kind of insurance. This begetting business is terribly overrated. All nature does it and Man is far from the champion. If you hadn’t had mumps you would probably be able to squirt out a few million live sperm at a go, and one of them might make a lucky hit. Your cousin Little Charlie’s favourite stallion has you backed right off the map; he probably averages ten billion possible little stallions every time Little Charlie collects her stud fee; that’s what he’s for. The boar is the real champ: eighty-five billions—and then he trots away looking for acorns, and never gives a thought to his sow, who turns again to her wallowing in the mire. But Man—proud Man—is something very different. Even the least of his kind has a soul—that’s to say a lively consciousness of individuality and Self—and you are rather a superior man, Arthur. Unfortunately Man is the only creature to have made a hobby and a fetish of Sex, and the bed is the great play-pen of the world. Now you listen to me—”

“I’m listening.”

“You come to me as a priest, don’t you? You’ve made rather a joke of that, and call me the Abbé Darcourt—the tame cleric. The learned man on your staff. I’m an Anglican priest, and even the Church of Rome has at last had to admit that my priesthood is as valid as any. When I married you and Maria you had quite a strong fit of orthodoxy, and wanted the whole thing to be on the most orthodox lines. Well—be orthodox now. God may want you for something more important than begetting children. God has lots of sexual journeymen who can attend to that. So you’d better ask God what he wants of you.”

“Don’t preach at me, Simon. And I wish you wouldn’t drag God into it.”

“Booby! Do you suppose I have the power to drag Him out of it? Or out of anything? Very well, simpleton, don’t call it God. That’s only a shorthand term anyhow. Call it Fate or Destiny or Kismet or the Life Force or the It or any damned name you like but don’t pretend it doesn’t exist! And don’t pretend that Whatever-You-Call-It doesn’t live out a portion—a tiny portion—of its purpose through you, and that your pretensions to live your own life by the dictates of your intelligence are just so much nonsense, flattering to fools.”

“No Free Will, then?”

“Oh yes. Freedom to do as you are told, by Whatever-You-Call-It, and freedom to make a good job of it or a mess, according to your inclination. Freedom to play the hand you’re dealt, in fact.”

“Preach, preach, preach!”

“I damned well will preach! And don’t imagine you can escape. If you don’t ask God, which is my word—my professional word—for what we are talking about, what He wants of you, God will certainly tell you, and in no unmistakable terms, and if you don’t heed, you’ll be so miserable your present grief will look like a child’s tantrum. You liked orthodoxy when it seemed to be picturesque. It isn’t picturesque now, and I advise you to think of yourself as a man, and a very fine man, and not as a competitor with Little Charlie’s stallion, or some snuffling wild boar that will eventually end up in a Bavarian restaurant as the speciality of the day.”

“So what do I do?”

“You make peace with your grief and take a long, thoughtful look at your luck.”

“Swallow this insult, this infidelity? Maria, the person I love more than myself?”

“Bullshit! People say that, but it’s bullshit. The person you love best is Arthur Cornish, because he’s the one God has given you to make the best of. Unless you love him truly and deeply you are not fit to have Maria as your wife. She’s a soul, too, you know, and not just a branchsoul of your own, like one of the branches of your Cornish Trust. Maybe she has a destiny that needs this fact that you call an infidelity. Ever thought of that? I mean it, Arthur. Your business is with Arthur Cornish, first and foremost, and your value to Maria and the rest of the world depends on how you treat Arthur.”

“Maria has made Arthur Cornish a cuckold.”

“Then you’d better make up your mind to one of two courses. One: You beat up Powell, or perhaps kill him, and create misery that will last for several generations. Two: you take a hint from this opera that has brought about the whole thing, and decide to be the Magnanimous Cuckold. And what that may lead to, God only knows, but in the tale of Great Arthur of Britain it has led to something that has fed the best of mankind for centuries.”

Arthur was silent, and Darcourt went again to the window and looked out at weather that had turned to dismal autumn rain. Such silences seem long to those who keep them, but in reality it could have not been more than four or five minutes.

“Why did she smile in that peculiar way?” said Arthur at last.

“Take heed when women smile like that,” said Darcourt. “It means they have sunk very deep into themselves, far below the mind of everyday, into Nature’s ruthless mind, which sees the truth and may decide not to tell what it sees.”

“And what does she see?”

“I imagine she sees that she is going to bear this child, whatever you may think about it, and care for the child, even if it means parting with you, because that’s the job Whatever-It-Is has given her and she knows that there is no denying those orders. She knows that for the next five or six years it will be her child, as it can never be any man’s. After that men may put some superficial stamp on it, but she will have made the wax that takes the seal. Maria smiles because she knows what she is going to do, and she smiles at you because you don’t.”

“So what do I do about her?” said Arthur.

“Behave as if you really loved her. What was she doing when last you saw her?”

“She didn’t look much like an independent soul, to be frank. She was throwing up her breakfast in the john.”

“Very right and proper, for a healthy young mother. Well, my advice is, love her and leave her alone.”

“You don’t think I should suggest she come to you?”

“Don’t you dare! But Maria will either come to me, or she’ll go to her mother, and my bet is she’ll come to me. Her mother and I are roughly in the same line of work, but I look more civilized, and Maria still yearns powerfully for civilization.”

(3)

DARCOURT WAS NOT ACCUSTOMED to being entertained by women; not, that is to say, entertained in restaurants by women who paid the bill. It was a ridiculous attitude, he knew, as certainly Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot would be charging this excellent dinner to the Cornish Trust. But, even though she was a fast, efficient gobbler, whereas he was a patient muncher, the Doctor was a different person as a hostess from the obstreperous guest at Maria’s Arthurian dinner. She was considerate, kindly, charming, but not particularly feminine—in a word, thought Darcourt, she is very much man-to-man.

Her notion of conversation, however, was unconventional.

“What sins would you have liked to commit?” she asked.

“Why do you ask that?”

“It is a key to character, and I want to know you. Of course, you are a parson, so I suppose you press down very hard on any sinful ideas you have, but I am sure you have them. Everybody does. What sins? What about sex? You have no wife. Is it men?”

“No indeed. I am extremely fond of women, and I have many women friends; but I am not tormented by sexual desire, if that is what you mean. Or not often. Too busy. If Don Juan had been a professor, and Vice-Warden of his college, a secretary to a large philanthropic trust, and a biographer, we should never have heard of him as a great seducer. It calls for a lot of leisure, does seduction. And a one-track mind. I imagine Don Juan must have been rather a dull dog when he wasn’t on the prowl.”

“The Freudians think Don Juan really hated women.”

“He had a funny way of showing it. I can’t imagine sex with somebody I hated.”

“You don’t always know you hate them till push comes to shove. I speak idiomatically, you understand. I am not talking smuttily.”

“Oh, quite.”

“I was married once, you know. Less than a week. Ugh!”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Why? We all have to learn. I was a quick learner. It is not my destiny to be Frau Berggrav, I decided. So—divorce, and back to my own life and my own name. Of which I am very proud, let me tell you.”

“I’m sure.”

“A lot of people here laugh when they hear it.”

“Not all names travel well.”

“Soot is an honoured name in Norway, where my Soots came from. There was a very good painter in the last century who was a Soot.”

“I didn’t know.”

“The people who laugh at my name have limited social experience.”

“Yes, yes.”

“Like Professor Raven. Is she a great friend of yours?”

“I know her well.”

“A stupid woman. Do you know she has been on the telephone to me?”

“About the libretto?”

“No. About Hulda Schnakenburg. She made an awful muddle of it, but it was clear she thinks I am being very naughty with that child.”

“I know. And are you?”

“Certainly not! But I am coaxing her into life. She has lived a life very much—how do I say it?”

“Very much denied?”

“Yes, that’s the word. No kindness. No affection. I do not say love. Horrible parents.”

“I’ve met them.”

“True followers of Kater Murr.”

“Hadn’t thought of him as a religious teacher.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t have heard of him. He was a creation of our E.T.A. Hoffmann. A tom-cat. His philosophy was, ‘Can anything be cosier than having a nice, secure place in the world?’ It is the religion of millions.”

“Indeed it is.”

“Hulda is an artist. How good or how big, who can say? But an artist, certainly. Kater Murr is the enemy of all true art, religion, science—anything of any importance whatever. Kater Murr wants nothing but certainty, and whatever is great grows in the battleground between truth and error. ’Raus mit Kater Murr! That is what Hulda says now. If I play with her a little—you understand me?—it is all for the defeat of Kater Murr.”

“All?”

“You are a sly one! No, not all. It is very agreeable to me, and to her as well.”

“I am not accusing you.”

“But you are being very clever. You have changed the conversation from what sins you would like to commit to what sins that silly, provincial woman accuses me of. Hulda will be all right. What is it she says? Okay. She will be okay.”

“A little better than just okay, I hope?”

“Oh, but you understand. She is very bad at language. She says terrible things. She says she must ‘maul over’ these sketches of Hoffmann’s. I look it up. She means ‘mull’. And she says she will ‘daybew’ with this opera. She means ‘debut’ and she uses it all wrong anyhow. But she is not a fool or a vulgarian. She just has no regard for language. It has no mystery, no overtones, for her.”

“I know. Such people make you and me feel stuffy and pernickety.”

“But she cannot be an artist in music and a hooligan in speech. You are careful about language.”

“Yes.”

“I know from what you have done on the libretto. It is really good.”

“Thank you.”

“That silly woman does not help you?”

“Certainly not so far.”

“I suppose she thinks of me and it dries up the ink in her pen. And that beautiful fool Professor Hollier, who is too much a scholar to be even a very tiny poet. But what you give to Hulda is respectable poetry.”

“No, no; you are too flattering.”

“No I’m not. But what I want to know is—is it all yours?”

“What else could it be?”

“It could be pastiche. Which I am at last persuading Hulda not to call pistache. If so, it is first-class pastiche. But pastiche of what?”

“Now listen here, Dr. Dahl-Soot, you are being very pressing. You are accusing me of stealing something. What would you say if I accused you of stealing musical ideas?”

“I would deny it indignantly. But you are too clever to be deceived, and you know that many musicians borrow and adapt ideas, and usually they come out so that only a very subtle critic can see what has happened. Because what one borrows goes through one’s own creative stomach and comes out something quite different. You know the old story about Handel? Somebody accused him of stealing an idea from another composer and he shrugged and said, ‘Yes, but what did he do with it?’ What is theft and what is influence, or homage? When Hoffmann suggests Mozart, as he does in some of his compositions, it is homage, not theft. So, do you have an influence?”

“If I’m going to talk to you in this way, I must insist on calling you Nilla.”

“I shall be honoured. And I shall call you Simon.”

“Well, Nilla, it is insulting to suggest that I am not a poet, but that I am presenting unquestionable poetry.”

“Insulting, perhaps, but I think it is true.”

“It suggests that I am a crook.”

“All artists are children of Hermes, the Arch-Crook.”

“Let me answer your earlier question: what sins would I like to commit? Very well; I have just the tiniest inclination toward imposture. I think it would be delightful to slip something not absolutely sincere and gilt-edged into a world where any sort of imposture is held in holy horror. The world of art is such a world. The critics, who themselves originate nothing, are so unforgiving if they catch an impostor! Indeed, the man whose life I am writing, and whose money is the engine behind the Cornish Foundation, once exposed an impostor—a painter—and that was the end of the poor wretch whose crime was to pretend that his masterly painting had been done by somebody long dead. Not the worst of crimes, surely?”

“So you are a crook, Simon? It makes you very interesting. And you are safe with me. Here: we drink to secrecy.”

The Doctor took her wineglass in her hand and slipped her right arm through Darcourt’s left. They lifted their arms, and drank—drained their glasses.

“To secrecy,” said Darcourt.

“So—who are you robbing?”

“If you had to prepare this libretto, who would you rob? A poet, of course, but not a very well-known poet. And he would have to be a poet contemporaneous with Hoffmann, and a fellow-spirit, or the work would ring false. And amid the work of that poet you would have to interpose a lot of stuff in the same spirit, because nobody wrote a libretto about King Arthur that is lying around, waiting for such an occasion as this. And the result would be—”

“Pastiche!”

“Yes, and the craft of the thing would be sewing up the joins, so that nobody would notice and denounce the whole thing as—”

“Pistache! Oh, you are a clever one! Simon, I think you and I are going to be great friends!”

“Let’s drink to that, Nilla,” said Darcourt, and once again they linked arms and drank. Some people at a nearby table were staring, but the Doctor gave them a look of such Boreal hauteur that they hastily bent their heads over their plates.

“And now, Simon—who is it?”

“I won’t tell you, Nilla. Not because I think you would blab, but because it is very important to me to be the only one who knows, and if I lose that I may lose everything. Nor do I suppose the name would mean anything to you. Not at all a fashionable poet, at present.”

“But a good one. When Modred is plotting Arthur’s murder, you make him say:

Let him lean

Against his life, that glassy interval

’Twixt us and nothing:

And upon the ground

Of his own slippery breath, draw hueless dreams

And gaze on frost-work hopes.

I felt cold when I read that.”

“Good. And you saw how it fits Schnak’s musical fragment? So genuine Hoffmann is mated with my genuine poet, and with luck we may get something truly fine.”

“I wish very much I knew your poet.”

“Then look for him. He’s not totally obscure. Just a little off the beaten path.”

“Is he this Walter Scott, about whom Powell spoke?”

“Anything good you can pinch from Scott is well known, and nothing but his best is of any use.”

“Surely you will be found out when the opera is produced.”

“Not for a while. Perhaps not for a long time. How much of a libretto do you actually hear? It slips by, as an excuse for the music, and to indicate a plot.”

“You have changed the plot Powell told us about?”

“Not much. I’ve tightened it up. An opera has to have a good firm story.”

“And the music ought to carry the story and make it vivid.”

“Well—not in Hoffmann’s day. In Hoffmann’s operas and those he admired you get a chunk of plot, usually in pretty simple recitative, and then the action stops while the singers have a splendid rave-up about their feelings. It’s the rave-up that makes the opera; not the plot. Most of the plots, even after Wagner, have been disgustingly simple.”

“Simple—and few.”

“Astonishingly few, Nilla, however you dress them up.”

“Some critic said there were not more than nine plots in all literature.”

“He might as well have said, in all life. It’s amazing, and humbling, how we tread the old paths without recognizing them. Mankind is wonderfully egotistical.”

“Lucky for mankind, Simon. Don’t grudge us our little scrap of individuality. You talk like that woman Maria Cornish, with her wax-and-seal. What path is she treading, do you think?”

“How can I tell till her full story is told? At which time I shall probably not be around to have an opinion.”

“She interests me very much. Oh, not what you are thinking. I don’t want to break up her marriage, though she is a lovely creature. But somebody will.”

“You think so?”

“That husband of hers is all wrong for her.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“Yes. A cold fish. Not a scrap of feeling in him.”

“Now Nilla, I see through you. You want me to contradict you and tell you all I know about Arthur. All I’m going to tell you is that you are wrong.”

“What a man for secrets you are.”

“Secrets are the priest’s trade or he is no priest.”

“All right. Don’t tell. But that woman comes out of a very different box from Arthur Cornish, who is all money and careful plans, and Kater Murr.”

“You’re right about Maria. Wrong about Arthur. He is scrambling upward from Kater Murr just as fast as he can.”

“Oh? So he married Maria to get away from Kater Murr? You let something slip, there. That woman is no Canadian.”

“Yes she is. A Canadian can be anything. It is one of our very few gifts. Because, you see, we all bring something to Canada with us, and a few years won’t wash it out. Not even a few generations. But if you are frying with curiosity, Nilla, I would be a rotten guest if I did not tell you a few things to appease you. Maria is half Pole and the other half is Hungarian Gypsy.”

“What a strong soup! Gypsy, is she?”

“If you met her mother you would never doubt it. Maria doesn’t hurry to admit it, but she is very like her mother. And Arthur is very fond of Maria’s mother. No wise man marries a woman if he can’t stand her mother.”

“And this mother is still alive? Here? I want to meet her. I love Gypsies.”

“I don’t suppose there is any reason why you shouldn’t meet her. But don’t assume you are going to love her. Mamusia would smell patronage a mile away, and she would be rough with you, Nilla. She is what Schnak would call one rough old broad, and as wise as a serpent.”

“Ah, now you are telling! That Maria is one rough young broad, for all her silly pretence of being a nice rich man’s wife with scholarly hobbies. You have blabbed, you leaky priest!”

“It’s this excellent wine, Nilla. But I have told you nothing that everybody doesn’t know.”

“So—come on, Simon—what about Arthur?”

“Arthur is a gifted financial man, chairman of the board of a great financial house, and a man with genuine artistic tastes. A generous man.”

“And a wimp? A nerd?—You see how I learn from Hulda.”

“Not a wimp, and not a nerd or anything that Hulda would know about. What he is you will have to find out for yourself.”

“But what plot are he and his wife working out together? Which of the nine? Tell me, or I might hit you!”

“Don’t brawl in a restaurant, it will get us thrown out. That would be deeply un-Canadian. I think I smell the plot, but if you think I am going to hint to you, you can think again. You’re a clever woman; work it out for yourself.”

“I will, and then probably I’ll hit you. Or maybe kiss you. You don’t smell bad, for a man. But you will take me to Maria’s mother, at least?”

“If you like.”

“I do like.”

“You’re a rough old broad yourself, Nilla.”

“Not so old. But rough.”

“I have a fancy for rough women.”

“Good. And now what about cognac?”

“Armagnac, I think, if I may. More suitable to rough broads.”

(4)

MARIA WAS UP TO MISCHIEF, and Darcourt knew it. Why else would she present herself in his study at half past four in the afternoon, pretending that she was passing by, and thought that he might give her a cup of tea? She knew perfectly well that he did not go in for elegant tea-drinking, and that it was a nuisance for him to find a pot, and some long-kept tea, and stew up something on his electric hotplate. He knew perfectly well that if tea was what she wanted she would be welcome in the Common Room of her old college, where there was lots of tea. They both knew that she had come to talk about her adultery, but she was certainly not a repentant Magdalene. She was wearing a red pant-suit, and had a red scarf tied around her hair, and she smiled and tossed her head and rolled her eyes in a way that Darcourt had never seen before. Maria was not there to confess or repent, but to tease and defend.

“Arthur has been to see you,” she said, after some small talk which neither of them pretended was anything but a conventional overture to real conversation.

“Did he tell you so?”

“No, but I guessed it. Poor Arthur is in a terrible state just now, and you’re his refuge in terrible states.”

“He was distressed.”

“And you comforted him?”

“No. Comfort did not seem appropriate. Arthur is not a man to be given sugar-candy, and that’s what an awful lot of comfort amounts to.”

“So you know all about it?”

“I don’t imagine so for a moment. I know what he told me.”

“And you are going to scold me?”

“No.”

“Just as well. I’m not in the mood to be scolded.”

“Then why have you come to me?”

“Is it strange that I should look in on an old friend for a cup of tea?”

“Come on, Maria; don’t play the fool. If you want to talk about this state of affairs, I’ll certainly talk. I’m not the keeper of your conscience, you know.”

“But you think I’ve behaved badly.”

“Don’t tell me what I think. Tell me what you think, if you want to.”

“How was I to know that Arthur can’t beget children? He never told me that.”

“Would it have made a difference?”

“You simply don’t understand what happened.”

“In such a matter nobody understands what happened except the people directly involved, and they are not always clear about it.”

“Oh, so you know that, do you?”

“I know a few things about life. Not many, but a few. I know that when a family friend plays the cuckoo in the nest it is an old, old story. And I know that when you toss your head and roll your eyes like one of Little Charlie’s ponies you probably think that somebody has been using you badly. Was it Arthur?”

“Arthur wasn’t frank.”

“Arthur was distressed and ashamed, and you ought to know that. He would have told you, when a good time came. How frank have you been with him?”

“I haven’t been frank yet. There hasn’t been a good time.”

“Maria, what kind of marriage have you and Arthur set up? You could have made a good time.”

“A good time to crawl and weep and probably be forgiven. I absolutely refuse to be forgiven.”

“You’ve done what you’ve done, and there is a price for that. Being forgiven may be a part of that price.”

“Then I won’t pay.”

“Rather break up your marriage?”

“It wouldn’t come to that.”

“From what I know of Arthur, I don’t suppose it would.”

“It would come to being forgiven, and being one-down on the marriage score-board for the rest of my life. And I simply won’t put up with that. I’m not going to spend years of saying, ‘Yes, dear,’ about anything important because I have a debt I can’t discharge. There’s going to be a child, as I suppose you know. And every time the child is troublesome or disappointing I’m not going to have Arthur sighing and rolling his eyes and being marvellously big about the whole damned thing.”

“You think that’s what he’d do?”

“I don’t know what he’d do, but that’s what I wouldn’t endure.”

“You have the Devil’s own pride, haven’t you?”

“I suppose so.”

“You can never be wrong. Maria can never be at fault. Very well; live that way if you must. But I can tell you it’s easier and more comfortable to be wrong now and then.”

“Comfortable! You sound like Kater Murr. Do you know who Kater Murr is?”

“Why do people keep asking me that? You introduced me to Kater Murr yourself.”

“So I did. Sorry. But since then I’ve got hold of Hoffmann’s astonishing novel, and I feel as if Kater Murr had crept into my life and was making a mess of it. Kater Murr and his horrible, cosy philosophy says far too much about my marriage.”

“Aha.”

“Oh, for God’s sake don’t say Aha as if you understood everything. You don’t understand anything about marriage. I thought I was happy. Then I found out what happiness could mean. For me it meant being less than myself and less than a woman. Do you know what the Feminist League says: ‘A happy wife is a strike-breaker in the fight for female equality.’ ”

“Do they say that? But what kind of happiness are you talking about? It isn’t a simple thing, Maria.”

“It began to seem to me that happiness was what Kater Murr says it is—a cosy place where one is perfectly content with oneself.”

“Well, for a lot of people Kater Murr is dead right. But not for you. And, as if you didn’t know it, not right for Arthur. You underestimate your husband, Maria.”

“Do I? Yes, and he underestimates me! It’s all that bloody money! It cuts me off from everything I have been, and everything I want to be.”

“Which is—?”

“I want to be Maria, whoever Maria is! But I won’t find out in this marriage I’m in now, because everywhere I turn I’m not Maria; I’m Mrs. Arthur Cornish, the very rich blue-stocking whose stockings are getting to be a faded puce because all she does is be a slave to that bloody Cornish Foundation, and dish out money to people who want to do a thousand and one things that don’t interest me at all. I’ve given up everything to that Foundation, and I’ve come to the end!”

“Oh, not quite the end, I hope. What about you and Arthur?”

“Arthur’s getting very strange. He’s so God-damned considerate about everything.”

“And now you know why.”

“The mumps thing? Why did it have to be mumps? Such a silly thing, and then it turns out to have a nasty side.”

“Well, call it bilateral orchitis if you want a fancy label. Personally I prefer mumps, because it also means being melancholy, and out of sorts, and plagued by dissatisfaction. Which is what ails Arthur. He’s thoroughly dissatisfied with himself, and being the man he is he thinks he ought to be especially nice to you because you’re married to such a dud. He thinks he’s a wimp and a nerd, and he’s sorry for you. He knows that as he gets older his balls are going to shrivel up, and that won’t be the least bit funny for him. He was afraid he’d lose you, and right now he thinks he’s lost you indeed. Has he?”

“How can you ask?”

“How can I not ask? Obviously you’ve been sleeping with somebody who doesn’t have Arthur’s trouble, and you’ve been so indiscreet as to get pregnant.”

“God, Simon, I think I hate you! You talk exactly like a man!”

“Well—I am a man. And as you obviously think there is some special feminine side to this business, you had better tell me about it.”

“First of all, I haven’t been sleeping with anybody. Not a succession of sneaky betrayals. Just once. And I swear to you it seemed to be somebody I didn’t know; I have never had words with Powell that would have led to anything like that; I’m not really sure I like him. Only once, and it had to get me pregnant! Oh, what a joke! What an uproarious bit of mischief by the Rum Old Joker!”

“Tell me.”

“Yes, yes—‘Tell me the old, old story,’ as you like to sing. But it wasn’t quite the old story you think. It was a much older story—a story that goes back through the centuries and probably through the aeons, from a time when women ceased to be sub-humans cringing at the back of the cave.”

“A mythical tale?”

“By God, yes! A mythical tale. Like a god descending on a mortal woman. Do you remember one night when Powell was talking about the plot for this opera, and he was describing how Morgan Le Fay appears two or three times in disguise, and makes mischief?”

“Yes. We had a talk about stage disguise.”

“Arthur said that it had always troubled him in the old plays when somebody puts on a cloak and hat and is accepted by the others as somebody he isn’t. Disguise is impossible, he said. You recognize people by their walk, the way they hold their heads, by a thousand things that we aren’t aware of. How do you disguise your back, he said; none of us can see our backs, but everybody else does, and when you see somebody from the back you may know them much more readily than if you see them face to face. Do you remember what Powell said?”

“Something about people wishing to be deceived?”

“Yes. That you will the deception, just as you will your own deception when you watch a conjuror. He said he had once taken part in a show put on in an asylum for the insane, where a very clever conjuror worked like a dog, and didn’t get any applause whatever. Why? Because the insane were not his partners in his deceits. For them a rabbit might just as well come out of an empty hat as not. But the sane, the doctors and nurses, who were living and watching in the same world of assumptions as the conjuror, were delighted. And it was the same with disguise. On the stage, people accepted somebody in a very transparent disguise because the real deception was brought about by their own will. Show Lancelot and Guenevere a witch, and they accept her as a witch because their situation makes a witch much more acceptable than Morgan Le Fay in a ragged cloak.”

“Yes, I remember. I thought it rather a thin argument at the time.”

“But don’t you remember what he said afterward? We are deceived because we will our own deception. It is somehow necessary to us. It is an aspect of fate.”

“I think I remember. Powell talks a lot of fascinating Celtic moonshine, doesn’t he?”

“You are cynical about Powell because you are jealous of his astonishing powers of persuasion. And if you are in that mood, there’s no point in my going on.”

“Yes, do go on. I’ll promise to suspend my disbelief in Geraint Powell’s ideas.”

“You’d better. Now listen very carefully. About two months ago Powell came to see me about some business. You know he is making contracts with singers and stage people, and he is very scrupulous about showing them to Arthur, or me when Arthur’s away, before he closes his arrangement with the artist. Arthur was away on this particular evening. In Montreal, as he often is, and I didn’t know just when he might come back. That evening, late, or early the next morning. Powell and I worked late, and then we went to bed.”

“Had nothing led up to that?”

“Oh, I don’t mean we went to bed together. Powell often uses a room in our apartment when he is in town late, then he gets up early and drives off to Stratford before breakfast. It’s an established thing, and very convenient for him.”

“So Wally Crottel seemed to think.”

“To hell with Wally Crottel. So—off I went to bed and to sleep, and about two o’clock Arthur came into the room and got into bed with me.”

“Not unusual, I suppose.”

“Not entirely usual, either. Since his illness, Arthur has a room of his own, where he usually sleeps, but of course he comes into my room when it’s sex, you see. So I wasn’t surprised.”

“And it was Arthur?”

“Who else would it be? And it was wearing Arthur’s dressing-gown. You know the one. I gave it to him soon after we were married, and I had it made in King Arthur’s colours and with King Arthur’s device: a green dragon, crowned in red, on a gold shield. You couldn’t mistake it. I could feel the embroidered dragon on the back. He slipped into my bed, opened the dressing-gown, and there we were.”

“All very much according to Hoyle.”

“Yes.”

“Maria, I don’t believe a word of it.”

“But I did. Or a very important part of me did. I took him as Arthur.”

“And did he take you as Arthur?”

“That’s what’s so hard to explain. When a man comes into your very dark room, and you can feel your husband’s dressing-gown that you know so well, and he takes you so wonderfully that all the doubt and dissatisfaction of weeks past melt away, do you ask him to identify himself?”

“He didn’t speak?”

“Not a word. He didn’t need to.”

“Maria, it’s awfully fishy. I’m no great expert but surely, there are things you expect and are used to—caresses, sounds, and of course smells. Did he smell like Arthur?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Come on, Maria. That won’t do.”

“Well—yes and no.”

“But you didn’t protest.”

“Does one protest at such a time?”

“No, I don’t suppose one does. I do think I understand, you know.”

“Thanks, Simon. I hoped you might. But one can’t be sure. Men are so incalculable about things like that.”

“You said it all yourself a few minutes ago. It’s a story that roams back through the ages, and it’s a story that doesn’t grow old. It’s the Demon Lover. Have you told Arthur?”

“How can I, when he’s being so restrained and bloody saintly?”

“You’d better try. Arthur understands a lot of things you wouldn’t suspect. And Arthur isn’t perfectly in the clear in this affair. He didn’t tell you what you had a right to know. You and Arthur had better have a divano. Nothing like a good Gypsy divano to clear the air.”

(5)

THERE IS A SPECIAL FRUSTRATION that afflicts authors when they cannot claim enough time for their own work, and Darcourt was unwontedly irritable because he was not getting on with his life of the late Francis Cornish. The sudden illumination that had struck him in the drawing-room of Princess Amalie and Prince Max demanded to be explored and enlarged, and was he doing that? No, he was involved in the unhappiness of Arthur and Maria, and because he was truly a compassionate man—though he detested what the world thought was compassion—he spent a great deal of time thinking about them and indeed worrying about them. Like most dispensers of wisdom, Darcourt was bad at taking his own medicine. Worrying and fretting will do no good, he told his friends, and then when they had left him he fell into quicksands of worry and fretfulness on their behalf. He was supposed to be enjoying a sabbatical year from his university work, but the professor who does not leave his campus knows that no complete abandonment of responsibility is possible.

There was Penny Raven, for instance. Penny, who seemed to be the complete academic woman, scholarly, well-organized, and sensible, was in a dither about whatever was going on between Schnak and Gunilla Dahl-Soot. What was it? Do you know anything, Simon? Darcourt tried to be patient during her long telephone calls. I know that the Doctor and Schnak are getting on like a house afire with this opera, and are merciless in their demands on me that I should supply new material for the libretto, or change and tinker stuff I have already done: I am in and out of their house at least once a day, fussing over scraps of recitative; I never realized that a librettist lived such a dog’s life. Verdi was an old softy compared with Gunilla. They are working, Penny, working!— Yes, yes, Simon, I realize that, but they can’t work all the time. What is the atmosphere? I hate to think of that poor kid being dragged into something she can’t handle.—The atmosphere is fine: master guiding but not dominating pupil, and pupil blossoming like the rose—well, perhaps not like the rose, but at least putting on a few shy flowers—clean and well-fed and now and then giving a sandy little laugh.—Yes, Simon, but how? What price is being paid?—I don’t know, Penny, and frankly I don’t care because it’s none of my business. I am not a nursemaid. Why don’t you go and see for yourself? You were supposed to be working with me on this libretto and so far you have done sweet-bugger-all.—Oh, but you’re so good at that kind of thing, Simon, and I have this big paper to get ready for the next meeting of the Learned Societies and honestly I haven’t a moment. But I’ll come in at the end and touch up, I promise.—The hell you will, Penny. If I do it there’ll be no touching up. I get all the touching up I need from Nilla, and in English verse she has a touch like a blacksmith.—All right, if you want to disclaim all responsibility for a young person who is supposed to be in your care, at least to some extent.—Not in my care, Penny; if she’s in anybody’s care it is Wintersen’s care, and you won’t get any outraged moral action out of him. And if you insist on sticking your nose in, you may get it punched by Schnak, so I warn you.—Oh, very well. Very well. But I’m worried and disappointed.—Good, Penny; you get right on with that. Meanwhile, do you know a two-syllable word meaning “regret” that isn’t “regret”? Because “regret” isn’t a word that sings well if it has to be matched up with a quarter-note followed by an eighth-note. That’s the kind of thing I have to cope with. Listen—I think I’ve got it! How about “dolour”? Lovely word, right out of Malory, and the accent falls on the first syllable and pips off on the second. Singable! A nice big open vowel followed by a little one.—No, Simon. Won’t do at all. Too olden-timely and cutesy.—Oh, God, Penny! Get off my back, you—you critic!

Lots of conversations like that. Powell was right. Penny was jealous, mad as a wet hen because Gunilla had taken on Schnak as—what? As a pupil, of course, but also as a—what do you call it? When it’s a man there are plenty of words. A minion, a pathic, a catamite, a bardash, a bumchum—but, when it was a woman? Darcourt knew no word for it. Petite amie might do. Did Penny want Schnak for herself? No, that wasn’t Penny’s style at all. In so far as she was anything of a sexual nature, Penny was a lesbian, but of the smothery-mothery variety, brooding possessively over the successes of her little darlings. Sexually a dog-in-the-manger, who would not eat herself, or suffer others to eat. Penny resented the buccaneering success of Dr. Gunilla, the easy command, the scorn of Kater Murr.

But every day, and all day, and sometimes in dreams, the biography of Francis Cornish nagged. Was it really fated to be such a worthy, dull, unremarkable book? The spy stuff was not bad but he wanted something bigger.

It was that picture, The Marriage at Cana. Where had he seen those faces? Not among the mass of drawings and rough sketches he had sent to the National Gallery. The picture was surely the lock that secured the real life of Francis Cornish, but where was the key? Nothing to do but search, and search, and search again. But where?

It was lucky that he was so very much persona grata at the University Library, where all the left-overs from Francis Cornish’s crowded apartments were locked away, awaiting the attention of cataloguers. Certainly that material would not receive such attention quickly, because those packages were precisely what he had called them when he first transferred them to the Library. They were left-overs. Francis Cornish’s splendid pictures, his enviable collection of modern art, Canadian modern art, Old Master drawings, rare books, and expensive art books, his musical manuscript accumulation (it was not sufficiently coherent to be thought of as a collection), and everything else of any value had gone to the galleries and library where they would be, in the glacier-like progress of cataloguing, put in order. But there was still the mass of left-overs, the stuff which had been glanced at, but under the pressure of time not thoroughly examined by him in his capacity as an executor with a job to do quickly.

Without any great hope in his heart, Darcourt decided that he must rummage through the left-overs. He told his friend at the Library what he wanted to do, and was promised every help. But help was exactly what he did not want. He wanted to snoop, and seek, and see if anything would crop up that would give him a hint about that astonishing picture.

The picture itself was known to the art world, though few people had seen it. But there was, of course, the definitive article that had been written about it by Aylwin Ross, and which had appeared in Apollo a few years ago. Before Francis Cornish died, so he must have been acquainted with it. Must surely have approved it, or at least kept quiet about it. The article was well illustrated, and when Darcourt dug it out of the Library’s files of Apollo it troubled him with new urgency. He read and reread Ross’s elaborate, elegantly written explanation of the picture, its historical implications (something about the Augsburg Interim and the attempt to reconcile the Church of Rome with the Protestants of the Reformation), and Ross had concluded that the picture was the work of an unknown painter, but a master of fine attainment, whom he chose to identify simply as The Alchemical Master, because of some alchemical elements he identified in the triptych.

But those faces? Faces that seemed in some way familiar, when he saw the picture itself, in New York. They were not so compelling in the reproductions in Apollo, careful and excellent as those were. But there is a quality in an original canvas that no reproduction, however skilled, fully conveys. The people in the picture were alive in a way the people in the pages of Apollo were not. Those faces? He had seen at least some of them somewhere, and Darcourt was good at remembering faces. But where?

Nothing to do but go painstakingly through every scrap of unconsidered material that had been cleared out of Francis Cornish’s Old Curiosity Shop of a dwelling when he, and Clement Hollier, and the late unlamented Professor Urquhart McVarish had worked as executors of the dead man’s possessions. Could Urky McVarish have pinched anything vital? Probable enough, for Urky was a fine example of that rare but not unknown creature, the academic crook. (With a pang Darcourt recognized that he was already far advanced in that category himself, but, of course, being himself, it was rather different.) But it would not do to assume that there was no clue to the great picture until he had sifted every possible portfolio and parcel, and the best thing would be to start at the bottom.

So, clad in slacks and a sweat-shirt in preparation for dirty work, Darcourt went to the Library, and with Archie’s warm assent, began at the bottom.

The bottom was surely some stuff that neither he, nor Hollier, nor McVarish, had touched, because it did not seem to be directly related either to Cornish’s collections or to Cornish himself. A secretary, who had been lent to the executors by Arthur Cornish, had been asked to do the dirty work—as secretaries usually are—and bundle up all this junk and—what? Oh, put it with the stuff for the Library. They can throw it out when they get to it, which may not be for years. We are in a hurry, hustled on to complete a heavy task by the impatient Arthur Cornish.

There it was, quite a heap of it, neatly bundled and wrapped, a proper secretarial job. Many hours of tedious search in those bundles. Darcourt had been an active parson for almost twenty years before he contrived to get himself appointed a professor of Greek, and left work he had come to dislike. But the parson years had made their mark, and as he tackled the mass, he found himself humming.

Hums can be important. Hums can tell of a state of mind of which the topmost layer of consciousness is unaware. Darcourt was humming an old favourite of his own:

Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah,

Pilgrim through this barren land;

I am weak, but Thou art mighty;

Hold me with Thy powerful hand;

Bread of Heaven,

Feed me till I want no more.

A great prayer, and because it came from the depths, and not from the busy, fussing top of the mind, it was answered. Oh, surely not answered? Are prayers ever answered? Can the thoroughly modern mind admit such nonsense?

The secretary had labelled every bundle in a neat, impersonal hand. There were no letters, and anyhow Darcourt had been all through whatever correspondence Francis Cornish had preserved. But there were bundles of newspapers, containing reports of artistic matters, all jumbled together but many of them about artistic forgeries, either suspected or detected. Francis had the horrible habit of keeping the whole newspaper, in which the relevant item was marked with a blue pencil, instead of cutting out what he wanted and filing it, as a man with any regard for his heirs would have done. There were several parcels of yellowing newspapers. Darcourt felt a biographer’s guilt; he should have sifted this stuff, and he would do so, but not yet. Some of the marked articles were about the affairs, or the deaths, of people of whom Darcourt knew nothing. People suspected in Francis Cornish’s Secret Service days? It could be. It was clear that as a spy Francis was sloppy and unmethodical. But here, right at the bottom, were six big packages, marked Photographs Not Personal. Surely nothing there? Darcourt had already ferreted out photographs of all the people that he needed to illustrate his book. Photographers keep very tidy files, and that had not been difficult; merely tedious. But he had determined to look at everything, and he untied the bundles, and found that they were old-fashioned family albums.

They were neat, and they were fussy, and every picture was identified underneath it in a tidy, old-fashioned hand. Ah, yes; the handwriting of Francis’s grandfather, and the albums were the work, the beloved hobby, of the old Senator, Hamish McRory. He must have spent a good deal of money on them, for they had been specially made and every album was identified on its cover, in gold printing that had not tarnished (so it must have been true gold leaf), “Sun Pictures”.

They were more personal than the secretary had suspected from a quick examination. The first three looked like a record of a turn-of-the-century Ontario town, streets deep in mud, or snow, or baked by summer sun, with lurching, drunken telephone poles and cobwebs of wires, and in the streets were horse-and-rig equipages, huge drays laden with immense, unmilled logs drawn by four horses apiece, and citizens in the dress of the day, some blurred because the Senator’s lens had not been quick enough to stop them in action. There were scenes in a lumber-camp, where men struggled with chains and crude hoists to heave those immense logs onto the drays. There were loggers, strong men with huge beards, standing with their big woodsmen’s axes beside trees they had felled, or sawn through. There were pictures of horses, giant Percherons, poorly groomed but well fed, and they too had their names carefully entered: Daisy, Old Nick, Lady Laurier, Tommy, Big Eustache, horses that dragged the logs from the forests, patient, reliable, and strong as elephants. This is where the first Cornish money came from, thought Darcourt. From lumbering, when lumbering was a very different matter from what it is today. Pictures of saw-pits, with the top-sawyer standing on the log above his monstrous saw, and the under-sawyer peeping from the bottom of the pit. Were they proud that the Senator had wanted to take their pictures? Their stiff faces betrayed nothing, but they had a look of pride in their bodies; they were men who knew their work. Fine stuff, this. A record of a Canada gone forever. Some social historian would love to get his hands on it. But there was nothing here of the faces Darcourt hoped to find.

On to the other three. This looked more promising. Priests, in soutanes and birettas, sitting in constrained postures beside a little table, on which a book lay open. A sharp-looking little man, obviously a doctor, for on his table lay an old-fashioned straight stethoscope and a skull. But this woman, in the little cap? This woman standing at her kitchen door, holding a basin and a ladle? These were the faces Darcourt wanted. Could they be—?

Yes, indeed they were. Look, here in the fifth album! A lovely girl, and certainly Francis’s mother in her youth. A stiff, soldierly man, wearing an eyeglass. Beyond a doubt these were the Lady and the one-eyed Knight from The Marriage at Cana. Underneath, the Senator had written, “Mary-Jim and Frank, their first week in Blairlogie”. Francis’s parents but not as he knew them from later pictures; these were Mary-Jim and Frank as the child Francis first knew them. And then—this was a treasure, this was the clincher!—a handsome, dark-browed young man, perhaps not more than eighteen; this was “My grandson Francis, on leaving Colborne College, 1929”.

So there it was! He had the key to the lock in his hand at last! But was Darcourt excited, exultant? No, he was very calm, like a man from whom doubt and anxiety had all been swept away. Patience has been rewarded, he thought, and then put the thought from him as savouring of pride. There was one album left.

“Thou hast kept the best wine till the last”. The inscribed banner that floated from the mouth of that strange angel in The Marriage at Cana was proven by what he now turned over, with a feeling of wonder. “My coachman, Zadok Hoyle”; the fine-looking, soldierly, but—to the observant eye—unlucky man who stood by a fine carriage and a pair of bays was unquestionably the huissier, the jolly man with the whip in The Marriage. And then—at last Darcourt lost his calm, phlegmatic acceptance of his great good luck—here, among pictures of bearded, ancient, youthful, hearty, and unstable citizens of Blairlogie at the turn of the century, was a picture of a dwarf, standing in front of a humble shop, squinting into the sun but grinning subserviently as the Senator—the local great man—took his Sun Picture. And underneath was written, “F. X. Bouchard, tailor”. The dwarf who stood so confidently, so proudly, in The Marriage and—just possibly—the original of Drollig Hansel.

Was this—could it be—the awakening of the little man?

The kindly assistant librarian popped her head around the partition.

“Would you like a cup of coffee, Professor Darcourt?”

“By God, I would,” said Simon, and the secretary, somewhat startled by the vehemence of his reply, set before him a waxed-paper cup of the liquid which the staff of the Library called, with scholarly generosity, coffee.

It was in this lukewarm, muddy draught that Darcourt drank to his good fortune. Here he sat, amid the evidence that settled a mystery of significance to the world of art. He, Simon Darcourt, had identified the figures in The Marriage at Cana, thereby showing it to be of our own time, telling in a finely contrived riddle the life experience of the painter. He had destroyed the fine-spun theory of Aylwin Ross and identified for all time The Alchemical Master.

It was the late Francis Cornish.

But it was not of the sensation in the art world Darcourt thought. It was of his book. His biography. It was not merely lifted out of the dullness he had feared; it had taken wings.

Like a good scholar he piled up the albums neatly on the big table in the alcove he was using. Never leave a mess. He blessed Francis Cornish and the primary precept of scholarship: never throw anything away. He would return tomorrow and make copious notes.

As he worked he was humming again. One of the metrical Psalms, this time.

That stone is made head corner-stone,

Which builders did despise;

This is the doing of the Lord,

And wondrous in his eyes.

(6)

OTTAWA IS NOT A PLACE to which anyone goes at the end of November simply for pleasure. Reputedly the coldest capital city in the world, in comparison with which Moscow is merely chilly, it is preparing at the end of the year for its annual ferocious assault on the endurance, good nature, and ingenuity of its inhabitants. Darcourt was glad that the National Gallery was luxuriously warm, and he scuttled between it and his hotel, his collar turned up against the sneaping winds from the river and the canal, cold in body but deliciously warm in spirit. Everything he found out from yet another and rigorous examination of what Francis Cornish had defined as his Old Master Drawings confirmed the great discovery he had made in the University Library.

Like everything else Francis had left behind him, the many portfolios and envelopes were a jumble, but a jumble of treasures, some substantial and some of less importance. The assemblages of Francis’s own drawings were honestly labelled; student work, mostly; creditable in the detailed care they showed, and a little eccentric in the trouble the artist had taken in finding real old paper for his work, and preparing it for his silver-point studies. Why so much trouble for what was, after all, simply a student exercise? Each drawing was labelled, with detailed information about which original had been copied, and the date when the copy had been made. But there was about them a hint, which Darcourt took care not to allow to swell into a certainty, that the copy was almost as good as the original and in some cases was every bit as good—though it was identified as a copy. Francis, in another century and with a living to make, could have done well as one of those patient copyists who supplied wealthy tourists with copies of drawings they admired. The talent of the copyist may be very great—technically greater than that of many artists who would scorn such work and have no talent for it—but he remains acopyist.

There was one large brown envelope that Darcourt opened last, because he had a sense that it could contain what he was looking for. He wanted to tease himself, to work up an expectation that amounted almost to a fever, like a child that saves one parcel of its Christmas horde in vehement hope that it contains the gift most eagerly desired. Unlike the others, it was sealed; the gummed flap had been stuck down, instead of being merely tucked in, as was the case with all the others. It was labelled, not “Old Master Drawings”, but “My Drawings in Old Master style, for the National Gallery”. The Gallery authorities would probably not have allowed him to open it, or not without some Gallery representative being at his elbow as he did so, but Darcourt, who now regarded himself as a thorough-going crook, managed to sneak into the little kitchen where Gallery workers made their tea and coffee and secreted their biscuits, and quickly and efficiently steamed it open. And there it all was. If he had been a fainting man, he would have fainted.

Here were preliminary sketches for The Marriage at Cana; several plans for the groupings of the figures, and quick studies for heads, arms, clothes, and armour for the figures—and every head was a likeness, though not always a wholly faithful likeness, of somebody in the Sun Pictures taken by Grandfather James Ignatius McRory. No, not quite every head; the woman who stood in the centre panel was unknown to Grandfather, but she was very well known to Darcourt. She was Ismay Glasson, wife of Francis Cornish and mother of Little Charlie. Nor was there any source in the Sun Pictures for the figure of Judas; but he was Tancred Saraceni, caricatured in several of Francis’s notebooks and plainly labelled. And the dwarf, so vaunting in The Marriage, so self-doubting in the photography; F.X. Bouchard, beyond a doubt. And the huissier; Zadok Hoyle, Grandfather’s coachman. Why was he important enough to be included in the composition? Darcourt hoped that somehow he might find out, but it was not vital that he do so.

Most mysterious were the studies of that angel, who flew so confidently above the centre panel—so confidently that his influence extended over the whole three panels of the work. But here he was, and one of those drawings was identified as F.C., and although those were Cornish’s own initials, this angel was certainly not Francis Cornish. —Was the drawing merely signed, in an idle moment? Or was this crazed, yet inexorably compelling and potent figure—this spook, this grotesque—some notion Francis cherished of his inner self? Had he thought so strangely of himself? Another puzzle, and Darcourt hoped he might solve it, but knew that he had no need to do so. Here were the originals of the people in The Marriage, and if not all of them could be equated with people Francis and Grandfather McRory had known, that did nothing to lessen the importance of his discovery. It was with a light heart that Darcourt carefully resealed the envelope, and left the Gallery, with much affability toward those who had permitted him to seek for material which they assumed, and quite rightly, was for information that would flesh out his biography of their dead benefactor.

Darcourt wanted time to come to terms with his discovery, surely the most extraordinary piece of luck that had ever come his way, so he travelled back to Toronto by train, and the journey, which would have taken just under an hour by air, filled the greater part of a day. It was just what he needed. The train was not crowded, and its alternation of simoom-like heat and bitter November draughts was vastly preferable to the “pressurized” atmosphere of a plane. What the train lacked in food—there were sandwiches of the usual railway variety—he made good with a large bar of chocolate and nuts. He had a book in his lap, for he was the kind of man who must always have a book near as a protective talisman, but did not look at it. He thought about his find. He gloated. He looked out at the sere, desolate landscape of Eastern Ontario in November, and the bleak towns, so charmless, so humble; to his gaze it might have been the Garden of Eden and all the chilled passers-by so many Adams and Eves. Sentences formed in his mind; he fastidiously chose adjectives; he rejected tempting flights into literary extravagance; he thought of several modest ways of presenting his great discovery, which wholly changed the idea the world was to receive of the late Francis Cornish. His journey passed in something as near to bliss as he had ever known.

Bliss ended with the journey. When he arrived back at his college the porter gave him a telephone message; he was to call Arthur as soon as possible.

“Simon, I’ve rather an important favour to ask. I know you’re busy, but will you drop everything and go to Stratford at once? To see Powell.”

“What about?”

“Don’t you know? Don’t you read the papers? He’s in hospital, rather badly banged up.”

“What happened?”

“Car accident last night. Apparently he was driving recklessly. In fact he was driving through the park, next to the Festival Theatre, at great speed, and ran into a tree.”

“Skidded off the road?”

“He wasn’t on the road. He was in the park itself, zigzagging among the trees and yelling like a wild man. Very drunk, they say. He’s all smashed up. We’re terribly worried about him.”

“Naturally. But why don’t you go yourself?”

“Bit delicate. Complications. Apparently he raved a lot under anaesthetic, and the surgeon called me to explain—and see if I had anything to say. He babbled a lot about Maria and me, and if we rush down there to see him it lends colour to a lot of speculation among the theatre people. You know what they are. But somebody must go. Indecent not to. Will you? Hire a car, of course, it’s Foundation business as much as it’s anything. Do go, Simon. Please.”

“Of course I’ll go if it’s necessary. But do you mean he’s spilled the beans?”

“Quite a few beans. The surgeon said that of course people fantasize under anaesthetic, and nobody takes it seriously.”

“Except that he took it seriously enough to tip you off.”

“There were assistants and nurses around when he was patching Geraint up—and you know how hospital people talk.”

“I know how all people talk, when they think they’ve got hold of a juicy morsel.”

“So you’ll go? Simon, you are a good friend! And you’ll call us as soon as you get back?”

“Is Maria worried?”

“We’re both worried.”

That was a good thing, thought Darcourt, as he sped toward Stratford in his hired limousine. If they were both worried about the same thing, and that thing was the mess they were in with Powell, it might bring them together, and put an end to all that polite conversation about nothing. Darcourt was in a somewhat cynical frame of mind, for he had gobbled a snack while waiting for the car, and it was not sitting well with all the chocolate he had eaten in the train. Indigestion is a great begetter of cynicism. In the back seat of the car, dashing through the November darkness, he had lost the happy mood of the daytime; here he was again, good old Simon, the abbé at the court of the Cornish Foundation, the reliable old fire-engine sent off to quench a blaze of gossip that Arthur and Maria took seriously.

We live in an age of sexual liberation, he thought, when people are not supposed to take marital fidelity seriously, and when adultery, and fornication, and all uncleanness are perfectly okay—except when they come near home. When that happens, there may be uproars that awaken the gossip columnists, alert the divorce lawyers, and sometimes end in the criminal courts. Especially so among prominent people, and Arthur, and Maria, and Geraint Powell were all, in their various ways, prominent, and just as touchy as everybody else. Darcourt was of Old Ontario stock, descendant of United Empire Loyalists, and from time to time an Old Ontario saw seemed to him to sum up a situation: “It all depends whose ox is gored”. The Cornish ox had been gored, and it was probably impossible to conceal the wound. Still, he must rush to stick a Band-Aid on the bleeding place.

Powell was in one of those hospital rooms which are described as “semi-private”; this meant that he lay in the part of the room nearest the door, and on the other side of the white curtain that split the room down the middle lay somebody who had hired one of the hospital television sets; he was listening to a hockey game, apparently of the first importance, with the volume turned well up. The commentators were describing the play and discussing its significance, in a high state of excitement.

“Oh, Sim bach, you darling man! How good of you to come! Would you ask that bugger to turn down his bloody machine?”

Geraint’s head was heavily bandaged, though his face could be seen; it was bruised, but no wounds were visible. One arm was in plaster, and his left leg, swathed in some medical wrapping, was hoisted upward in a sling that hung from a metal brace attached to the bed.

“Would you please turn down the volume of your set? My friend is very ill and we want to talk.”

“Hey? What did you say? You’ll have to speak up; I’m a bit deaf. Great game, eh? The Hatters have got the Soviet team on the run. My pet team. The Medicine Hatters. Best in the League. If they win this one, we might get the Cup yet. Big night, eh?”

“Yes, but could you turn it down a bit? My friend is very ill.”

“Is he? This’ll cheer him up. Would you like to pull back the curtain so he can see?”

“Thank you, a very kind offer. But he really is suffering.”

“This’ll fix him. Hey—did you see that? Just missed it! Donniker is in great shape tonight. He’s showing those Russkies what defence work is. Hey—look at that! Wowie!”

It appeared that nothing could be done. The man in the other bed was gripped by the ruling passion, and it was hopeless to talk to him.

“Well, old man, how are you?” said Darcourt.

“I am at the head of the Valley of Grief in the Uplands of Hell,” Geraint replied.

He’s had that one ready, thought Darcourt. This may be heavy going.

“I came as soon as I knew. What on earth has happened to you?”

“Retribution, Sim bach. I have made an utter balls of everything! My life is in tatters and I have nobody to blame but myself. This is punishment for sin, and I have nothing to do but accept it, swallow it, suffer it, take up my cross, prostrate myself before the Throne, and die! It runs in my family; my great-grandfather and my Uncle David both died of disgrace and despair. Turned their faces to the wall. I am trying to die. It’s the least I can do under the circumstances. Oh God, my head!”

Darcourt sought out a nurse; she was down the hall at the nursingstation, where she and a clutch of nurses and interns were huddled around a tiny television screen, watching the great game. But she came long enough to go to the other side of the white curtain and turn down the set of the enthusiast who shared the semi-private, who protested that his deafness required greater volume. She also, at his urgent request, brought Darcourt a glass of Alka-Seltzer to assuage his raging stomach. In the somewhat less uproarious atmosphere, he tried to soothe Powell.

“Now Geraint, don’t talk like that. They tell me you are doing nicely, considering everything. You are not going to die, so put that idea right out of your head. You will be up and around in about three weeks, they say, and must be quiet and help the medical people all you can.”

“A positive attitude! That’s what they keep telling me. ‘You must take a positive attitude, because it helps greatly with the healing, and in a few weeks you’ll be right as rain.’ But I don’t want to be right as rain! I don’t deserve it. Let the tempest rage!”

“Oh, come on, Geraint! Don’t carry on like that!”

“Carry on? Carry on? Sim bach, that is a bruising expression. Oh, how my head hurts!”

“Of course your head hurts when you shout like that. Just whisper. I can hear you if I come really close. Now tell me what happened.”

“Malory, Sim bach. Malory is what happened. The night before last I was reading Malory; it quiets the mind, and it brings me very near to Arthur—King Arthur, I mean—and his court and his great schemes and his afflictions. My book fell open at the Madness of Lancelot. You know it? You must; everybody does.”

“I remember it.”

“Then you know what it says: ‘he lepte oute at a bay-wyndow into a gardyne, and there wyth thornys he was all to-cracched of hys vysage and hys body, and so he ranne furth he knew not whothir, and was as wylde as ever man was. And so he ran two yere, and never man had grace to know him.’ ”

“And that is what you did?”

“In modern terms, that is what I did. I had been having a few, naturally, and reflecting on my outcast state, and the more I thought, the more of a miserable wretch I knew I was, and suddenly I couldn’t hold in any longer. I leapt out of my window—not a bay—and on the ground floor by the mercy of God. I got into my car, and drove like hell, I don’t remember where, but I ended up in that park and you know how spooky woods are at night, and as I drove the feeling became more and more Arthurian and Maloryesque, and there I was, roaring around among the trees, making sharp turns and narrow circles—all at incredible speed, boy; a great racing driver has been lost in me—and I became conscious that courtly pavilions were appearing out of the woods to the right and left—”

“The public conveniences, I understand. You very nearly smashed into them.”

“That be damned! It was a great pavilion, a mighty tent, with flags floating.”

“That must have been the Festival Theatre.”

“Armed men and peasantry were skipping about among the trees, marvelling at me.”

“The police certainly. I don’t know about the peasantry, but there were plenty of witnesses. That’s a very easily identified car you drive.”

“Don’t belittle my agony, Sim bach; don’t reduce it to mere everyday. This was an Arthurian madness—the madness of Lancelot. Then everything went black.”

“You hit a tree. You were crazy-drunk and driving very much to the public danger in a public park, and you hit a tree. I’ve been reading the papers on my way here. Now look, Geraint: I don’t underestimate your temperament, or your involvement with Malory, but facts are facts.”

“Yes, but what are the facts? I am not talking about police-court facts, or newspaper lies, but psychological facts. I was in the grip of a great archetypal experience, and what it looked like to outsiders doesn’t count. Listen; listen to me.”

“I’m listening, but you mustn’t expect me to rush off into the moonshine with you, Geraint. Understand that.”

“Sim—Sim, my dear old friend. Sim, who out of all mankind I look to for sympathetic understanding, hear me. You are very harsh, boy. Your tongue is so sharp it would draw blood from the wind. Sim, you don’t know what I am. I am the son of a man of God. My father, now singing a rich bass in the Choir Invisible, was a very well known Calvinistic Methodist minister in Wales. He brought me up in the knowledge and fear of God. You know what that means. You are a man of God yourself, though of the episcopal, ritualist sort, for which

I forgive you, but you must have the true knowledge in you someplace.”

“I hope so.”

“Sim—I have never forgotten or really forsaken my early doctrine, though my life has taken me into the world of art, which is God’s world too, though horribly flawed in many of its aspects. I have sinned greatly, but never against art. You know what has been my downfall?”

“Yes. Booze.”

“Oh, Sim, that is unworthy! A drop now and then to ease deep inner pain, but never my downfall. No, no; my downfall was the flesh.”

“Woman, you mean?”

“Not woman, Sim. I have never been dissolute. No, not woman, but Woman, that highest embodiment of God’s glory and goodness, with whom I have tried to enlarge myself and raise myself. But, wretch that I am, I took the wrong path. The flesh, Sim, the flesh!”

“Your best friend’s wife?”

“The last—and undoubtedly the greatest—of many. You see, Sim, God tempts us. Oh yes, He does. Don’t let us pretend otherwise. Why do we pray not to be led into temptation?”

“We pray not to be put to the test.”

“All right, but we are put to the test, and for some of us the test is a right bugger, let me tell you, Sim bach. Look here: why did God endow me with a Byronic temperament, Byronic beauty of face, a Byronic irresistibility?”

“I have no idea.”

“No, you haven’t. You are a great soul, Sim; a great, calm soul, but nothing to speak of in the way of physical attraction, if I may be allowed the frankness of a friend. So you don’t know what it’s like to see some marvellous woman and think, ‘That’s mine, if I choose to put out my hand and take it.’ You’ve never felt that?”

“No, I haven’t, really.”

“There you are, you see. But that has been my life. Oh, the flesh! the flesh!”

The man on the other side of the white curtain was pushing it as hard as he could with his hand. “Hey, knock it off, you guys, will you? How do you expect me to hear the game if you yell like that?”

“Shhh! Keep your voice down, Sim, like a good man. This is confidential. Call it a confession, if you like. Where was I? Yes, the flesh; that was it.

Love not as do the flesh-imprisoned men

Whose dreams are of a bitter bought caress,

Or even of a maiden’s tenderness

Whom they love only that she loves again,

For it is but thyself thou lovest then—

You know that? Santayana—and there are people who say he wasn’t a fine poet! That was me; my love was all self-love and I have been a flesh-imprisoned man.”

Geraint’s face was wet with tears. Darcourt, who felt that this interview was going all wrong, but who had not a hard heart, wiped them away with his own handkerchief. But somehow he had to reduce this outpouring to order.

“Are you telling me that you seduced Maria just to test your power? Geraint, this two-bit Byronic act of yours has brought great unhappiness into the life of Arthur, whom you insist is your friend.”

“It’s this opera. Sim. You can’t pretend a thing like that is just a stage-piece. It’s a huge influence, if it’s any good at all, and this thing is going to be good. I know it. This opera has brought me back to Malory, and Maria—whom I truly love as a friend and not as a man desires a woman—is none the less a real Malory-woman. So free, so direct, so simple, and yet so great in spirit and so enchanting. You must feel that?”

“I know what you are talking about.”

“I knew it the first time I met her. What does Malory say? ‘A fair lady and a passynge wise’. But I never said a word. I was true to Arthur.”

“But you couldn’t stay true.”

“There came that night when we were talking about disguise, and I said that the beholder in very strong situations is a partner in the deception. He wills his own belief to agree with the desire of the deceiver. And Maria was scornful of that. Which surprised me, because she is so learned in medieval things, and surely has enough sense to understand that what underlay so much medieval belief is still alive in our minds today, and only waits for the word, or the situation, to wake it up and set it to work. That is often how we fall into these archetypal involvements, that don’t seem to make any sense on the surface of things, but make irresistible, compelling sense in the world below the surface. Didn’t Maria know that? I couldn’t think otherwise for a minute.”

“Well—you may have a point there.”

“And so there came that night when Arthur was away, and I had dinner with Maria and we worked till midnight at business details; contracts and agreements and orders for materials and all the complexity of stuff that is involved in a job like getting this opera on the stage. Not a word did we say that Arthur could not have heard. But from time to time I felt her looking at me, and I knew that look. But I never looked back. Not once. If I had, I think that would have been the end of it, because Maria would have understood what was happening, and she would have checked it in herself, and in me, too, of course.”

“Let’s hope so.”

“It was when I went to bed that I found I could not forget those looks, and I could not forget the laughing, rational Maria who had made fun of my theory of disguise. There I lay in bed, remembering those looks. So—I slipped into Arthur’s room, and pinched his dressing-gown, which was that very Arthurian thing Maria had made for him, when they were newly married and were still joking about the Round Table, and the Platter of Plenty and all that, and I put it on over my nakedness, and stole barefoot into Maria’s room, and there she was, asleep or almost asleep. A vision, Sim: a vision. And I demonstrated that my theory was true.”

“Did you? Could you swear she thought you were Arthur?”

“How do I know what she thought? But she didn’t resist. Was she under a delusion? I know I was. I was deep in such a tale as Malory might have told. It was an enchantment, a spell.”

“Now, just a minute, Geraint. That wasn’t Arthur’s Queen, that was Elaine Lancelot visited in that way.”

“Don’t quibble. As a situation it was pure Malory.”

“She must have known your voice.”

“Oh, Sim, what an innocent you are! We did not speak a word. No words were wanted.”

“Well, I’m damned.”

“No, Sim, you are not damned. But I think I am damned. This was more than adultery. I was a thief in the night—a thief of honour. It was breaking faith with a friend.”

“With two friends, surely?”

“I don’t think so. With one friend. With Arthur.”

“You put Arthur before Maria, whom you seduced?”

“I know that I deceived Arthur. I can’t say if I deceived Maria.”

“Well, whatever the fine points are, Maria is going to have a child, and it’s certainly yours. Did you know that?”

“I know. Arthur told me. He wept, Sim, and every tear was like blood from my heart. That’s something I can never forget. I wish I were dead.”

“Geraint, that’s self-indulgent rubbish! You’re not going to die, and Maria is going to have your child, and Arthur will have to find some way of swallowing the pill.”

“You see it from the outside.”

“Of course. I am on the outside, but I was a friend of Arthur and Maria before you were, and I shall have to do anything I can to make things work.”

“Don’t you think of yourself as a friend of mine, Sim? Don’t I need you at least as much as the other two? Me, the flesh-imprisoned man?”

“Stop blathering about the flesh as if it were the Devil himself!”

“What else is it? The Enemy of God, the Poison of Man, the livery of hell, the image of the animal, the Sinner’s Beloved, the Hypocrite’s refuge, the Spider’s Web, the Merchant of Souls, the home of the lost, and the demon’s dung-hill.”

“My God, is that what you think?”

“That is what my father thought. I remember him thundering those words from the pulpit. He was quoting one of our Welsh poet-divines, the great Morgan Llwyd. Isn’t it lovely, Sim? Could you put it better?”

Powell, whose normal voice was impressive, had risen to a Miltonic resonance and grandeur, declaiming with bardic vehemence; the man in the neighbouring, concealed bed was cheering at the top of his voice. The Hatters had won! Won by a last-minute exploit of the redoubtable Donniker!

A small nurse, big with authority and anger, burst into the room.

“What’s going on in here? Have you people gone crazy? Everybody on the corridor is complaining. We’ve got some very sick people on this floor, if you don’t know it. You’ll have to go.”

She took Darcourt by the arm, as he was the only able-bodied rowdy, and pushed him firmly toward the door. In his astonishment and confusion at the goings-on of Geraint, he had no resistance, and allowed himself to be, in a moderate use of the term, thrown out.

(7)

DARCOURT WAS LOOKING FORWARD to his Christmas holiday. The doings of the autumn had worn him out, or so he thought. It was true that the mess of Arthur, Maria, and Powell drew heavily on his spiritual resources; although he was not at the centre of the affair, it seemed that he was expected to be confidant and adviser to all three, and that meant that he had to listen to them, give them advice—and then listen again while they rejected it. Of the three, Maria was the least troublesome. Her course was clear; she was going to have a baby, but for a woman of brains, highly educated and with a background sufficiently unusual to put her above bourgeois conventionalities, she was making heavy weather of it, and had decided that she had wronged Arthur irreparably. Arthur was being magnanimous; he had taken upon himself the role of The Magnanimous Cuckold and was acting it to the hilt. Magnanimity can be extremely vexatious to the bystanders, for it forces them into secondary roles that are not much fun to play. Powell was enjoying himself, finding new rhetorical ways of expressing his sense of guilt, and trying them out on his friend Simon whenever he visited the hospital.

It would all have been so much simpler if all three had not been utterly sincere. They were sure they meant everything they said—even Powell, who said so much, and said it so gaudily, and enjoyed saying it. If they had been fools, Darcourt could have told them so and called them to order. But they were not fools; they were people who found themselves in a tangle from which they could not escape and for which their superficial modernity of opinion offered no solace. Modern opinion stood no chance against the clamour of voices from—from where? From the past, it seemed. Darcourt did his best and poured out comfort as well as he could.

His chief difficulty was that he did not, himself, place much value on comfort. He regarded it as the sugar-teat stupid mothers pop into the mouth of the crying baby. He wished his friends would use their heads, but was well aware that their trouble was not one for which the head offers much relief; it insists on testing the aching tooth to see if it hurts as much as it did yesterday. Because he mistrusted comfort, he could only recommend endurance, and was told, in a variety of disagreeable ways, that it was easy to tell other people to endure. Ah, well, I’m their punching-bag, he thought. They are lucky to have a good, reliable punching-bag.

His own luck was that he was able to put aside his punching-bag character and rejoice in his role as triumphant artistic detective and potentially successful biographer. He wrote to Princess Amalie and her husband, and said that he had some new light to throw on their wonderful picture. Their reply was cautious. They wanted to know what he knew, and he wrote again, offering to explain everything when he had all his material in order. They were courteous but guarded, as people are likely to be when somebody offers to throw new light on a valuable family possession. Meanwhile he was marshalling his evidence, for, although he was sure what it meant, he had to make it convincing to people who might take it badly.

No wonder, then, he was looking forward to two weeks at Christmas when he thought he could put other people’s troubles out of his head, and enjoy long walks, a mass of detective stories, and a great deal of good food and drink. He had made his reservation at an expensive hotel in the north woods, where there would certainly be other holiday-makers, but perhaps not of the heartiest, most athletic kind.

He had forgotten about his promise to take Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot to visit Maria’s mother, the seeress, the phuri dai, the element in Maria’s background that Maria was still anxious to put behind her.

“You really ought to talk to your mother,” he said to Maria, during a divano when they were discussing the pressing problem for, it seemed to him, the twentieth time. It was really not more than the fourth. “She’s an extremely wise old bird. You ought to trust her more than you do.”

“What would she know about it?” said Maria.

“For that matter, what do I know about it? I tell you what I think, and you tell me I don’t understand. Mamusia would at least see the thing from another point of view. And she knows you, Maria. Knows you better than you think.”

“My mother lived a reasonably civilized, modern sort of life so long as she was married to my father. When he died, she reverted as fast as she could to all the old Gypsy stuff. Of course there is something to be said for that, but not when it comes to my marriage.”

“You are more like your mother than you care to think. It seems to me you get more like her every day. You were very like her the first time you came to talk to me about this wretched business, all dolled up in red like the Bad Girl in a bad nineteenth-century play. But you have been getting stupider ever since.”

“Thanks very much.”

“Well, I have to be rough with you when you won’t listen to common sense. And I mean your common sense, not mine. And your common sense goes right back to Mamusia.”

“Why not right back to my father?”

“That devout, ultra-conventional Catholic Pole? Is it because of him you’ve never considered doing the modern thing and having an abortion? Cut the knot, clear the slate, and begin again?”

“No, it’s not. It’s because of me. I am not going to do violence to what my body has undertaken without consulting my head.”

“Good. But what you have just said sounds like your mother, though she would probably put it in much plainer terms. Listen, Maria: you’re trying to bury your mother, and it won’t work, because what you bury grows fat while you grow thin. Look at Arthur; he’s buried his justifiable anger and jealousy and is giving a very respectable impersonation of a generous man who has no complaints. None whatever. But it isn’t working, as I expect you know. Look at Powell; he’s the lucky one of you three because he has the trick of turning everything that happens to him into art of some sort, and he is chanting away all his guilt in juicy Welsh rhetoric. He’ll be off and away, one of these days, and as free as a bird. But you and Arthur will still be right here with Little What’s-His-Name.”

“Arthur and I call him Nemo. You know—Nobody.”

“That’s stupid. He is somebody, right now, and you will spend years finding out who that somebody is. Don’t forget—What’s bred in the bone, etcetera—What is bred in the bone of Nemo, as you call him? That gospel-roaring old father of Geraint’s, among other things.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous!”

“Anything I say to you that makes sense to me you dismiss as ridiculous. So what’s the good of threshing old straw?”

“Threshing old straw! One of your Old Ontario expressions, I suppose; one of your pithy old Loyalist sayings.”

“That’s what’s bred in the bone with me, Maria, and if you don’t like it, why do you keep coming back to me to hear it?”

(8)

DARCOURT AND DR. GUNILLA DAHL-SOOT arrived at the Gypsy camp in the basement of the Cornishes’ apartment building well provided with food and drink. He had insisted on it, and the Doctor had agreed that they should, if possible, avoid the enormities of Gypsy cuisine. But they understood that if they were not to eat soviako and sarmi and kindred delights, they must take something tempting with them; they had a smoked turkey, and a large, rich Christmas cake as the foundation of their feast, and a basketful of kickshaws, as well as half a dozen bottles of champagne and some excellent cognac. Mamusia was delighted.

“This is kindness! I have been so busy these last days. My Christmas shop-lifting, you know,” she confided to Gunilla, who did not blink an eye.

“It must take a lot of cleverness,” said she.

“Yes. I must not be caught. Maria says that if I am caught and it gets out that she is my daughter, she will kill me.”

“Because the Cornishes are so very Kater Murr?”

“I don’t know what that is. But Arthur has a very respectable position.”

“Yes, of course.”

Mamusia went off into a fit of deep-throated laughter. “No, no, not to be disgraced by his mother-in-law.” She looked inquiringly at Darcourt. “But you know all about this business, Father Darcourt.”

“What business are you talking about, Madame Laoutaro?”

“Father, we are old friends, aren’t we? Must we pretend? Oh, you kiss my hand, very polite, and call me ‘Madame’ but we have a real understanding, don’t we? We are old friends and old rogues, eh? Or do we have to keep quiet because of this very fine lady you have brought with you? Will she be shocked? She doesn’t look to me as if she would be very much shocked.”

“I assure you I have not been shocked in many years, Madame Laoutaro.”

“Of course not! Shock is for stupids. You are a woman of the world, like me. So—you understand this joke? I must not disgrace the great Arthur because shop-lifting is a sin against money, and money is the Big God. But disgrace of the bed, and the heart, doesn’t count. Isn’t that a good joke? That is the gadjo world.”

The door opened and Yerko came in. Unshaven, long-haired, unkempt, he was wearing a skin cap and some sort of rough skin coat. How he is reverting to his Gypsy world, thought Darcourt; who would believe that this fellow was once a business man, a gifted, inventive engineer.

“What is the gadjo world?” he said, shaking snow generously in all directions from the cap.

“We are talking of the little raklo upstairs. I will not call him the biwuzo.”

“You’d better not, or I’ll take my belt to you, sister. And you know that it is very rude to use Gypsy words when we are talking with our friends who are not Romany. You can never keep your mouth shut about the child upstairs.”

“Only because it is such a good joke.”

“I do not like your joke.” Yerko turned to Gunilla and bowed deeply. “Madame, it is an honour to greet you.” He kissed her hand. “I know you are a very great musician. I, too, am a musician. I honour greatness in our profession.”

“I hear you are a noble player on the cimbalom, Mr. Laoutaro.”

“Yerko. Call me Yerko. I am all through with Mister.”

“They have brought a feast, brother.”

“Good! I want a feast. I have at last beaten the insurance robbers.”

“They are going to give us money?”

“No; but they are not going to sue us. That is victory enough. I went to them like this, and said, ‘I am a poor Gypsy. I have nothing. Are you going to put me in jail? Are you going to put my sister in jail? We are old. We are sick. We do not understand your ways. Have mercy.’—Lots of that—At last they were tired of it, and of me, and told me to go away and never come into their grand building again. ‘You are merciful,’ I said, weeping. ‘It is Christmas. You are moved by the spirit of Bebby Jesus, and He will reward you in Heaven.’ I even tried to kiss the feet of the most important man but he jerked his foot away. Nearly kicked me on the nose. I said, ‘You have forgiven us, before these witnesses, whose names I have. That is all I ask.’ So now they can’t sue us. That is gadjo law. We have won.”

“Wonderful! We have beaten those crooks!” In her glee, Mamusia seized Darcourt by the hands and danced a few steps, in which he followed, as well as he could.

“But what about all those magnificent instruments that went up in flames?” he said, puffing.

“All gone. It is the will of God. The people who owned them must have insured them. But simple Gypsies know nothing of such things.” Mamusia laughed again. “Now we feast. Sit on the floor, great lady. That is what our real friends do.”

On the floor they sat, and immediately set about the turkey and the olives and the rye bread, using such implements as Yerko provided, some of them not very thoroughly washed. With plenty of champagne, Darcourt thought, it is not half bad. Gunilla, he saw, dug in with a good will, showing nothing of the refined manners he associated with her. Even so, he thought, the young Liszt might have feasted with Gypsies. She was especially attentive to the champagne, rivalling Yerko, and taking it straight from the neck of the bottle.

“You are a real fine lady!” said Yerko. “You do not hold away from our humble meal! That is high politeness. Only common people make a fuss about how they eat.”

“Not when I brought it myself,” said Gunilla, gnawing a drumstick.

“Yes, yes: I only meant that you are a guest in our house. No rudeness was intended.”

“You will not get the best of her,” said Mamusia. “I know who she is,” she said to Darcourt. “She is the lady in the cards—you know, the one on the left of the spread? She is La Force. Very great strength, but used without any roughness. You are in this opera thing my son-in-law is so worried about?”

“So you know about that?” said Gunilla.

“What don’t I know? You have heard about the spread? Father Simon here made me lay out the cards right at the beginning of that adventure, and there you were, though I didn’t know you then. Do you know who any of the others in the spread are now, Father? All you could think of then was that my daughter Maria must be Empress. She, an Empress! I laugh!”

Mamusia laughed, and quite a lot of turkey and champagne flew about.

“Perhaps she is not the Empress, but she may be the Female Pope. She must be one of the women in the cards.”

“I think she is the third in the oracle cards; that was Judgement, you remember? She is La Justice, who tries and weighs everything. But don’t ask me how. That will be seen when the time comes.”

“I see you have been thinking about the forecast,” said Darcourt. “Have you identified any of the other figures?”

“They are not people, you know,” said Mamusia. “They are—smoro. Yerko, what is smoro in English?”

“Things,” said Yerko, through a full mouth. “I don’t know. Big things.”

“Might we say Platonic ideas?” said Darcourt.

“If you like. You are the wise man, Priest Simon.”

“Is he the Hermit? I said so then but now I wonder,” said Mamusia. “There is too much of the devil in our good Father for him to be the Hermit.”

“You have left me behind,” said Dr. Gunilla. “Is this a prediction about our opera? What did it say? Was it a good outlook for us?”

“Good enough,” said Mamusia. “Not bad: not good. Hard to say. I was not at my best that night.”

The Doctor frowned. “Are we heading toward a mediocrity?” she said. “Failure I can endure; success I like but not too much. Mediocrity turns my stomach.”

“I know you are not a person who lives in the middle of the road,” said Mamusia. “I do not need the cards to tell me that. Your clothes, your manners, the way you drink—all of it. Let me guess. You are funny about sex, too, eh?”

“Funny, maybe. Hilarious, not. I am myself.” She turned to Darcourt. “That Raven woman has been calling me again. I had to be strong with her. ‘You know Baudelaire?’ I said. She said: ‘You insult me. I am a professor of comparative literature. Of course I know Baudelaire.’ ‘Well then, chew on this,’ I said: ‘Baudelaire says that the unique and supreme pleasure of love lies in the certainty of doing evil; both men and women know from birth that in evil every pleasure can be found. Didn’t you know that from birth? Or did you have a bad birth? A seven-months child, perhaps?’ She put down her phone with a loud bang.”

“Do you do evil in love?” said Mamusia.

“Good and evil are not my thing. I leave that to the professionals, like Simon here. I do what I do. I do not ask the world to judge it, or make it legal or give it a special place in the world or any of that. Listen, Madame; when I was quite a young girl I met the great Jean Cocteau and he said to me: ‘Whatever the public blames you for, cultivate it, because it is yourself.’ And that is what I have done. I am Gunilla Dahl-Soot, and that is all I can manage. It is enough.”

“Only very great people can say that,” said Yerko. “It is what I always say myself.”

“Don’t appeal to me as a moralist,” said Darcourt. “I gave up moralizing years ago. It never worked twice in the same way.” The champagne was getting to him, and also the cigar smoke. Good cigars are not accessible to shop-lifters, even those of Mamusia’s talent. The cigars Yerko circulated were more than merely odious: they caught at the throat, like a bonfire of noxious weeds. Darcourt got rid of his as soon as he decently could, but the others were puffing happily.

“Madame,” he said, for his biography was much on his mind. “You had some intuitions when you laid out the cards. ‘You have awakened the Little Man,’ you said, ‘and you must be ready for what follows.’ l think I know now who the Little Man is.”

“And you are going to tell us?” said Mamusia.

“Not now. If I am right, the whole world will know in plenty of time.”

“Good! Good, Father Simon. You bring me a mystery and that is a wonderful thing. People come to me for mysteries, but I need a few for myself. I am glad you remember the Little Man.”

“Mysteries,” said the Doctor, who had grown owlish and philosophical. “They are the blood of life. It is all one huge mystery. The champagne is all gone, I see. Where is the cognac? Simon, we brought cognac, didn’t we? No, no, we don’t need new glasses, Yerko. These tumblers will do very well.” The Doctor poured hearty slops of cognac into all the glasses. “Here’s to the mystery of life, eh? You’ll drink with me?”

“To mystery,” said Mamusia. “Everybody wants everything explained, and that is nonsense. The people that come to me with their mysteries! Mostly about love. You remember that stupid song—

Ah, sweet mystery of life

At last I’ve found you!

They think the mystery must be love, and they think love is snuggling up to something warm, and that’s the end of everything. Bullshit! I say it again. Bullshit! Mystery is everywhere, and if it is explained, where’s your mystery then? Better not to know the answer.”

“The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it,” said Darcourt. “That’s what mystery is.”

“Mystery is the sugar in the cup,” said the Doctor. She picked up the container of white crystals the delicatessen had included in the picnic basket and poured a large dollop into her cognac.

“I don’t think I’d do that, Gunilla,” said Darcourt.

“Nobody wants you to do it, Simon. I am doing it, and that’s enough. That is the curse of life—when people want everybody to do the same wise, stupid thing. Listen: Do you want to know what life is? I’ll tell you. Life is a drama.”

“Shakespeare was ahead of you, Gunilla,” said Darcourt. “ ‘All the world’s a stage,’ ” he declaimed.

“Shakespeare had the mind of a grocer,” said Gunilla. “A poet, yes, but the soul of a grocer. He wanted to please people.”

“That was his trade,” said Darcourt. “And it’s yours, too. Don’t you want this opera to please people?”

“Yes, I do. But that is not philosophy. Hoffmann was no philosopher. Now be quiet, everybody, and listen, because this is very important. Life is a drama. I know. I am a student of the divine Goethe, not that grocer Shakespeare. Life is a drama. But it is a drama we have never understood and most of us are very poor actors. That is why our lives seem to lack meaning and we look for meaning in toys—money, love, fame. Our lives seem to lack meaning but”—the Doctor raised a finger to emphasize her great revelation—“they don’t, you know.” She seemed to be having some difficulty in sitting upright, and her natural pallor had become ashen.

“You’re off the track, Nilla,” said Darcourt. “I think we all have a personal myth. Maybe not much of a myth, but anyhow a myth that has its shape and its pattern somewhere outside our daily world.”

“This is all too deep for me,” said Yerko. “I am glad I am a Gypsy and do not have to have a philosophy and an explanation for everything. Madame, are you not well?”

Too plainly the Doctor was not well. Yerko, an old hand at this kind of illness, lifted her to her feet and gently, but quickly, took her to the door—the door to the outside parking lot. There were terrible sounds of whooping, retching, gagging, and pitiful cries in a language which must have been Swedish. When at last he brought a greatly diminished Gunilla back to the feast, he thought it best to prop her, in a seated position, against the wall. At once she sank sideways to the floor.

“That sugar was really salt,” said Darcourt. “I knew it, but she wouldn’t listen. Her part in the great drama now seems to call for a long silence.”

“When she comes back to life I shall give her a shot of my personal plum brandy,” said Yerko. “Will you have one now, Priest Simon?”

“Thanks, Yerko, I don’t think I will. I shall have to get the great philosopher back to her home and her pupil.”

“Is that the girl who is doing the opera?” said Mamusia.

“The same. Present appearances to the contrary, I think the Doctor is doing her a lot of good.”

“Now she is out of the way, what about this baby?” said Mamusia.

“Well, what about it? It’s a fact.”

“Yes, but a queer fact. It’s not her husband’s.”

“If I may ask, how do you know that?”

“He can’t make babies. I could see it as soon as he came home from the hospital. There is a look. This actor who haunts their house made the baby.”

“How do you know?”

“Wally Crottel says so.”

“Mamusia, Wally Crottel is an enemy to Maria, and to Arthur, and you mustn’t trust him or listen to him. He wants to destroy them.”

“Oh, you don’t need to warn me against Wally. I have read his palm. A little good-for-nothing, but one can find out things from such people. Don’t worry about Wally. I saw an accident in his palm. Yerko is maybe taking care of the accident.”

“My God, Yerko! You’re not going to rub him out?”

“Priest Simon, that would be criminal! But if he is to have an accident, it had better be the right one. Leave it to me.”

“This baby,” said Mamusia. “Maria wants a baby more than anything. Deep down she is a real Gypsy girl and she wants a baby at the breast. Now she has a baby and she would be happy if Arthur would be happy too.”

“It’s rather a lot to expect, wouldn’t you say?”

“In these queer days people hire women to have babies when the wife can’t do it. Why not hire a father? Doesn’t this fellow Powell work for them?”

“I don’t suppose they thought he would work for them in quite this way.”

“That Powell is not an ordinary man. I think he is the Lover in the spread. You know how that card looks. A young man between two people and the one on the right is a woman, but who is that on the left? Some people say it is another woman, but is it? They say it is a woman because it has no beard, but what is a man without a beard? Not a man in every way, but still important enough to rule the beautiful woman. That figure wears a crown. A king, of course. Every spread is personal. Maybe in this spread that figure is King Arthur, and he looks as if he is pushing the young man toward the beautiful woman. And the beautiful woman is pointing to the lover as if she is saying, ‘Is it this one?’ And over their heads is the god of love and he is shooting an arrow right into the heart of the beautiful woman.”

“You make it sound very plausible.”

“Oh, the cards can be very wise. Also very tricky. So you know who the Little Man is? And you won’t tell?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, be careful. Maybe the Fool is tied up with the Little Man I had that hunch about. Father Simon, have you ever looked hard at that card of the Fool?”

“I think I remember it pretty clearly.”

“What is the dog doing?”

“I don’t remember the dog.”

“Yerko, get the cards. And maybe just a thimbleful of your plum brandy.”

While Yerko was busy, Darcourt looked at the prostrate Doctor. Her colour was better, and so far as a woman of her distinguished demeanour could do so, she was snoring.

“Look now. There he is. The Fool. You see he is going on a journey and he looks very happy. He is always going someplace, is the Fool. And he has a good fool’s dress, but see, the pants are torn at the back. Part of his arse is showing. And that is very true, because when the Fool comes into our life, we always show our arses a little bit. And what does the little dog do with the bare arse? He is maybe nipping at it. What is the dog, anyway? He is a thing of nature, isn’t he? Not learning, or thinking, but nature in a simple form, and the little dog is nipping at the Fool’s arse to make him go in a path that the mind would not think of. A better path. A natural path that Fate chooses. Maybe a path the mind would not approve of, because the mind can be a fool too—but not the great, the very fine Fool that takes the special journey. The little dog is nipping, but maybe he is also sniffing. Because you cannot nip without you also sniff. You know how dogs sniff everybody? The crotch? The arse? They have to be trained not to do it, but they forget because they have the great gift of scent, which wise, thinking Man has almost murdered. The nose speaks when the eyes are blind. Man, when he thinks he is civilized, pretends he does not smell, and if he is afraid he stinks he puts on some stuff to kill his stink. But the little dog knows that the arse and the smell are part of the real life and part of the Fool’s journey, and the natural things cannot be got rid of if you want to live with the real world and not in the half-world of stupid, contented people. The Fool is going just as fast as he can to something he thinks good. What do people say when somebody goes as hard as he can for something?”

“They say he goes for it bald-headed.”

“People I know say he goes for it bare-arsed,” said Yerko.

“You see, Father Simon? Somebody in all this destiny that is told in that spread of cards is going bare-arsed for something very important. Is it you?”

“You have amazed me, Mamusia, and in my amazement I shall speak the truth. Yes, I think it is me.”

“Good. I thought you were the Hermit, but now I am sure you are the Fool. You are going far, and instinct is nipping at your arse, and you will have to understand that instinct knows you better than you know yourself. Instinct knows the smell of your arse—your backside that you can never see.—Listen, how much does my son-in-law pay you for what you do?”

“Pay me! Mamusia, I get some expenses now and again to put back in my own pocket what I have taken out of it to serve the Cornish Foundation, damn it, but not one red cent of pay have I ever had. I am always out of pocket. And I am getting sick of it. They think because I am a friend I love working my tail off for them, just to be one of the gang. And the trouble is they are right!”

“Father Simon, don’t shout! You are a very lucky man and now I know you are the Fool. The great Fool who dominates the whole spread! Don’t you take a penny! Not one penny! That is the Fool’s way, because his fortune is not made like other men’s. They pay everybody. This Powell, the baby-maker. This Doctor here, who is very good at her job, but is just La Force, you know, and sometimes puts her foot very wrong. And that girl, that child who is being given so much money for this opera job, and it may not be for her good. But you are free! You wear no golden chain! You are the Fool—Oh, I must kiss you!”

Which she did. And then Yerko insisted on kissing him too. A prickly, smelly embrace, but Darcourt recognized now that reality and truth can sometimes be very smelly.

Thus the party broke up, and Darcourt took Gunilla home in a taxi, and delivered her, still limp and silent, into the hands of Schnak.

“Oh, Nilla, you poor darling! What have they been doing to you?” she said as she supported her wilted teacher.

“I have been a fool, Hulda,” said the Doctor, as the door closed.

Yes, but not the Fool! Exhilarated as he had not been in many years, Darcourt paid off the taxi and walked home, delighting in the chill air and his new character.

Searching for words to express this exultation, this state of unusual well-being, an Old Ontario phrase swam upward from the depths of his consciousness.

He felt as if he could cut a dead dog in two.

(9) ETAH IN LIMBO

My heart goes out to Darcourt. The life of a librettist is the life of a dog. Worse than the playwright, who may have to satisfy monsters of egotism with new scenes, new jokes, chances to do what they have done successfully before; but the playwright can, to some degree, choose the form of his scenes and his speeches. The librettist must obey the tyrant composer, whose literary taste may be that of a peasant, and who thinks of nothing but his music.

Rightly so, of course. Opera is music, and all else must bow to that. But what sacrifices are demanded of the literary man!

Psychology, for instance. The watered-silk elegances of feeling and the double-dealing of even the most honest mind; the gushes of hot emotion that rush up from the depths and destroy the reason. Can music encompass all that? Yes, it can in a way, but never with the exactitude of true poetry. Music is too strongly the voice of emotion and it is not a good impersonator. Can it make a character have a voice that is wholly his own? It can try, but as a usual thing the voice is always that of the composer. If the composer is a very great man, like the divine Mozart or, God help us all, the heaven-storming Beethoven, we love the voice and would not change it for even the masterly characterizations of Shakespeare.

You see, my trouble is that I am torn between Hoffmann the poet and fabulist, and Hoffmann the composer. I could argue with equal conviction on either side. I want the poet to be supreme, and the musician to be his accompanist. But I also want the musician to pour out his inspiration, and the poet must carpenter something with the right vowel sounds that obediently partner the music without pushing itself into prominence. What great line of poetry can anybody quote from an opera libretto? Even Shakespeare is reduced to a hack, after the libretto hack has hacked his lines to suit Maestro Qualcuno’s demands. And then every simpleton says that Maestro Qualcuno has shown Shakespeare how it should be done.

If the musician is really sensitive to poetry, magic is the result, as in the songs of Schubert. But, alas, Schubert wrote truly terrible operas, and Weber had the fatal knack of choosing the worst possible people to write his libretti. Like that fellow Planché, who ruined Oberon. Oh, how lucky I am to have escaped the well-meaning drollery of Planché!

Now I have Darcourt, and what a task that poor wretch has been given! To prepare a libretto that will fit existing music, or rather the music that Schnak and the brilliant Doctor can make by enlarging on my notes.

He is doing well. Of course he has to find some words that will carry the plot they have created for my Arthur. It is not precisely the plot I would have wished for. It smells a little of the present day—their present day. But it is not bad. It is more psychological than I would have dared to make it, and I am happy with that, for I was rather a fine psychologist, in the manner of my time. My uncanny tales were not just fantasies to amuse young girls on an idle afternoon.

But Darcourt has had a really good idea. Whenever he can, he is drawing on the writings of a true poet. A poet not very well known, he says, but I would not know about that for I never read English with real understanding, and English poetry was an unknown country to me. But I like what he has fished up from his unknown. How right he is not to tell anybody who his unknown poet is! If they knew, they would want to stick a finger in the pie, and too many fingers in pies are the utter ruin of art and the curse of drama. No; let the secret remain a secret, and if anybody wants to ferret out the secret, good luck to them and probably bad luck to him.

All artistic tinkering and monkeying is slave’s work. I know. Once I undertook, as an act of friendship, to do something of the sort. I made a version of Shakespeare’s Richard III for my dearest friend, Ludwig Devrient. It almost cost me that friendship, for Ludwig wanted all sorts of things that my artistic conscience revolted against. But Shakespeare wanted it thus, I would say, and he would shout To hell with Shakespeare! Give me a great effect here, so that I can take the audience by the throat and choke it with splendour! And then, in the next scene, you must arrange matters so that I can choke them again, and reduce them to an admiring pulp! My dear Louis, I would say, you must trust your poet and you must trust me. And then he would say what I could not bear: Shakespeare is dead, and as for you, you do not have to go on the stage with a hump on your back and a sword in your hand, and win the battle every night. So do what I say! After which, there was nothing for me to do but get drunk. Ludwig got what he wanted, but Richard III was never one of his greatest roles, and I know why. After it was over, the audience came unchoked, and the critics told them that Ludwig was a barn-stormer and a mountebank. Whom did he blame, then? Shakespeare, of course, and me along with Shakespeare.

I like Darcourt, and not just because I pity him. The old Gypsy woman says he will be greatly rewarded, but old Gypsy women can be wrong. Who heeds a librettist? At the party after the performance, who wants to meet him? At whose feet do the pretty ladies fall? Whose lapel do the rich impresarios seize, clamouring for more, and greater, works? Not the librettist.

The old Gypsy is wrong. Or else I do not know as much about this affair as I hope I do.

Anyhow, I must bide the event, as Shakespeare says. Or does he? There are no reference libraries in Limbo.