Darcourt’s Christmas holiday was a success beyond his hopes. His hotel in the north woods pretended to be a simple chalet, but was, in fact, luxurious, giving him a large room with broad windows looking down over a valley of pine forest; a proper room, with a desk and a good armchair in it, as well as the bed, and—rarest of hotel blessings—a good light for reading; a chest of drawers, a closet for his clothes, and a bathroom where there was provision for everything he could need, and in the form of a bidet and a frank notice warning him not to put his sanitary towels down the plumbing, for things he did not need. With a sense of deep content he unpacked and hung up clothes that gave no hint of his clerical character; he had invested in two or three shirts sufficiently gaudy for a country holiday, and some handsome scarves to tuck into his open collar. He had a fine pair of corduroy trousers, and, for long walks, boots that were, he had been assured, proof against cold and wet. He had two tweed jackets, one with leather patches on the elbows, sure signal that he was an academic, and not an academic of the sort that likes to ski, or slide downhill on a luge, or engage in casual conversations about nothing in particular. There were young people among the guests, who wanted to do these things, and older people who wanted to sit in the bar and pretend that they would prefer to ski, or luge; but the discreet lady whose job it was to see that everybody had a good time knew Darcourt at once for a man whose idea of a good time was to be alone. So he was civil to his fellow guests, and obedient to the convention that required him to make remarks about the weather, and smile at children, but on the whole he was left to himself and settled to two weeks of his own company with a deep sense of gratitude.
He walked after breakfast. He walked before dinner. He read, sometimes detective novels and sometimes fat, difficult books that primed the pump of his reflections. He made notes. But most of the time he brooded, and mused, and looked inward, and thought about being the Fool, and what that might mean.
The Fool; the cheerful rogue on a journey, with a rip in his pants, and a little dog that nipped at his exposed rump, urging him onward and sometimes nudging him in directions he had never intended to take. The Fool, who had no number but the potent zero which, when it was added to any other number, multiplied its significance by ten. He had spoken truly in Mamusia’s cellar when he said that he believed that everybody had a personal myth, and that as a rule it was a myth of no great potency. He had been inclined to see his own myth as that of a servant, a drudge, not without value, but never an initiator or an important figure in anyone’s life but his own. If he had been asked to choose a card in the Tarot that would signify himself, he would probably have named the Knave of Clubs, Le Valet de Baton, the faithful, loyal servitor. Was not that the character he had played all his life? As a clergyman, loyal to his faith and his bishop until he could stand it no more and outraged nature had driven him to become a teacher? As a teacher, generous and supportive to his students, the administrative assistant to the head of his college, doing so much of the work for so little of the acclaim? As a friend, the patient helper of the Cornishes, and their crack-brained Cornish Foundation, which had embarked on such a foolish exploit as giving form to an opera that existed in no more than a few ideas, scribbled in pain by a dying man? Oh, the Knave of Clubs to the life! But now Mamusia had declared as true what he had for some time felt in his bones. He was something better. He was the Fool. Not the servitor, napkin in hand, at the behest of his betters, but the footloose traveller, urged onward by something outside the confines of intellect and caution.
Had he not felt the truth of it? Had those promptings that had led him to the Sun Pictures, and the sealed portfolio in the National Gallery hoard, not come from somewhere not accountable to reason, deduction, scholarly craft? Was not his biography of his old friend Francis Cornish, which he had undertaken as an act of friendship, and chiefly to oblige Maria and Arthur, blossoming into something that none of Francis Cornish’s heirs could have foreseen? If he could piece out the jigsaw that placed the figures in Grandfather McRory’s photographed chronicle of Blairlogie (unlikely cradle for a work of art) in the great composition called The Marriage at Cana (dated as circa 1550 and attributed to the unknown Alchemical Master), would he not have established Francis as, at worst, a brilliant faker, and at best an artistic genius of a rare and eccentric breed? And how would he have done it? Not by being a crook, stealing from a library and a gallery, but by being a Fool and acting on a morality not to be judged by common rules. He was the Fool, the only one of the Tarot figures who was happily in motion—not falling as in the Tower, not endlessly revolving as in the Wheel of Fortune, not drawn ceremonially by horses as in the Chariot, but off on foot, bound for adventure.
This sort of self-recognition does not come to a man in his forties in a sudden flash. It offers itself tentatively, and is rejected as immodest. It asserts itself in sudden, unaccountable bursts of well-being. It comes as a joke, and is greeted with incredulous laughter. But in the end it will not be denied, and then it takes a good deal of getting used to. Without being self-deprecatory, Darcourt had the humility of a man who had, with his whole heart, embraced the calling of a priest. He was a priest in the tradition of Erasmus, or the ungovernable Sydney Smith, who was said to have jested away his chances of a mitre. He was a priest of the type of the mighty Rabelais. But was not Rabelais a true priest and also a Fool of God? Was he, Simon Darcourt, professor, Vice-Warden of his college, unpaid dogsbody of the Cornish Foundation, and (he sometimes thought) the only sane man in a congeries of charming lunatics, really a Fool of God? He was too modest a man to greet such a revelation with a whoop and a holler.
It was thus he mused while taking his long, solitary walks through the pine forests that surrounded his hotel. He was not one of those people—do they exist anywhere except in books?—who think in a straight line, with unescapable logic. Walking helped him to think, but that meant that walking allowed him to bob up and down in the warm bath of a mass of disjointed reflections. The warm bath had to be reheated every day, and every day the conclusion came a little nearer, until it became a happy certainty. His fellow guests, incorrigible gossips as people in a resort hotel always are, sometimes asked each other why the man with the leather patches on his elbows seemed so often to smile to himself, and not in answer to their smiles; and why, once or twice, he laughed softly but audibly while he was eating at his lonely table.
It was in the forest that he fared farthest in his astonishing recognition of what he was and how he must live. Canadians are thought of in the great world—whenever the great world thinks about them at all—as dwellers in a northern land. But most of them dwell in communities, large or small, where their lives are dominated by community concerns and accepted ideas. When they go into their forests, if they are not there to exploit the forests by chopping them down, they are there to rush downhill on skis, or bob-sleighs, to strain after accomplishment in winter sports, to make decorous whoopee at the bar or on the dance floor when the day’s exertion is over. They do not go into the forests to seek what they are, but to forget what they suspect themselves to be. Sport numbs the concerns they have brought with them from the towns. They do not ask the forests to speak to them. But the forests will speak if they can find a listener, and Darcourt listened, as he trudged the solitary trails that had been ploughed out among the huge pines, and when—without an apparent breath of wind—powderings of snow fell from the trees onto his shoulders, he heeded the deeper suggestions which had nothing to do with the world of words.
He did not think only of himself, but of the people from whom he was taking a holiday. What a muddle of concerns had been set in action by Hulda Schnakenburg’s apparently innocent desire to piece out some manuscript notes of music, in order that she might gain the doctorate in her studies that could lead to a place in the world of her art! Arthur’s desire to escape his world of business and figure in the world of art as an intellectual and a patron; Geraint Powell’s opportunist scheme to launch himself as a director of opera on an imaginative level; the seduction of Hulda Schnakenburg by the amoral but splendidly inspiring Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot; the recognition of Clement Hollier, fine scholar and renowned paleo-psychologist, as a man wholly at sea when faced with any imaginative notion that was not safely rooted in the dark and ambiguous past; the bitterness of Professor Penelope Raven, when confronted with an aspect of herself which she had disguised for half a lifetime; the uprooting of Maria, who was trying to balance her obligations as the wife of a very rich man, bound by the conventionalities of such a fate, against her inclination to become a scholar and get away from her Gypsy heritage; and of course that baby, still an unknown factor, though a living creature, who would never have come into being if Hulda, snooping through some musical manuscripts, had not come upon the skeleton of Arthur of Britain, or The Magnanimous Cuckold. They were driven by craving, of one sort or another, and if he were really the Knave of Clubs he was the servant of their craving. But suppose he were the Fool, driven by no craving but ready to follow his path, confident that his destiny and the mischievous little dog at his heels would guide him—was not that a vastly finer thing? The Myth of the Fool was a myth indeed, and he would live it as fully and as joyously as in him lay.
He had revulsions of feeling, as a man undergoing a great change must do. What on earth was he doing—he, a modern man, a trusted instructor of the young, a servant of the university as a temple of reason and intellectual progress—abandoning himself to an old Gypsy woman’s blethers about the Tarot? If this was thinking at all, it was thinking of a superstitious, archaic nature. But then—it was so seductive, so firmly rooted in a past that it had served pretty well for millennia before the modern craze for logic. Logic, which meant not logic as a system applicable to whatever lay under the domination of inference and the scientific method, but debased logic, a means of straining out of every problem the whisperings of intuition, which was a way of seeing in the dark. Mamusia’s hunches and her Tarot were only channels for her intuition, which, combined with his own, might open doors that were closed to logic. Let logic keep its honourable place, where it served man well, but it should not take absurd airs on itself as the only way of settling a problem or finding a path. Logic could be the weapon with which fear defies fate.
A word kept popping into his head which he had heard Gunilla use when she was introducing Schnak to the finer realms of musical composition. Sprezzatura. It meant, said Gunilla, a contempt for the obvious, for beaten paths, for what seemed to be obligatory to musical underlings; it was a noble negligence, a sudden leap in art toward a farther shore that could not be reached by the ferry-boats of custom.
Such leaps could, of course, land you in the soup. Had not Arthur’s sprezzatura, arising probably from the first symptoms of mumps—the higher temperature, the irritable malaise—landed them all in this ridiculous opera venture? Was it a noble leap, or a plunge into the soup? Only time could show.
Was it part of the Arthurian myth, into which the Cornish Foundation seemed to have strayed, and which needed a great questing king, betrayed by his closest friend and his dearly beloved? Behind the time which was so imperiously signalled every noontide by the great observatory at Ottawa, and binding upon a million human activities, there lay the Time of Myth, the time of the mind, the habitation of all those nine plots of which he and Gunilla had spoken, and the landscape of quite another sort of life. Surely it is in the mind that we humans truly live, as animals do not; the mind, which is not the creature of the clock but of those moving planets and that vast universe whose mysteries are still, in the main, unknown to us?
Moonshine, thought Darcourt. Yes, perhaps it was moonshine, which the amateur logicians held in contempt because it threatened so much they held dear—their timorous certainty which was, when all was weighed up, certain of so very little. But they despised moonshine because they never looked at the moon. How many of the people he knew could, if asked to do so, say in which phase the moon was at the time they were questioned? Did the Fool travel by moonshine? If he did, he was in a happy state of confidence about where he was going, which very few of those who never looked at the moon seemed to be.
It was a fearful adventure to put off the servitor’s livery of the Knave of Clubs, and put on the motley of the Fool. But had Darcourt, in all his eminently respectable life, ever had a real adventure? That was what the Time of Myth seemed to be urging him to do. When the time comes for truth to speak, it may choose an unfamiliar tongue; the task is to heed what is said.
When he left the forests to return to his life and its burdens, Simon Darcourt was a changed man. Not a wholly new man, not a man one jot less involved in the life of his duties and his friends, but a man with a stronger sense of who he was.
(2)
IF THE OPERA VENTURE seemed madness to Darcourt, it was more and more true and compelling to Schnak and the Doctor, who now had enough completed music to be nipped and tucked and patted and dowelled into an opera score. The final form had not been achieved but it was in sight. Not one of Hoffmann’s themes and rough notes had been neglected, and the important part of the music rested upon them. But inevitably there were gaps, seams to be sewn and then concealed, bridges to be contrived to get from one piece of authentic Hoffmann to another. These were the tests that would show Schnak’s quality. The Doctor suggested nothing, but she was quick to reject anything Schnak produced which seemed unworthy or unsuitable to the whole. Developing and orchestrating Hoffmann’s notes was child’s play to Schnak; finding Hoffmann’s voice in which to devise her new material was a different matter.
The exactions of the Doctor and the exasperation of Schnak made life a hell for Darcourt. His job was to tinker scraps of language into appropriate lengths for the music which was written every day, and changed every day, until he lost all sense of a coherent narrative, or intelligible utterance. Sometimes the Doctor scolded him for the banality of what he prepared; sometimes she rejected it because it was too literary, too hard to comprehend when sung, too obtrusively poetic. Of course the Doctor, who was an artist of considerable quality, was merely expressing her dissatisfaction with herself and what she could squeeze out of her pupil; Darcourt understood that, and was prepared to put up with it. But he was not ready to take snarling impudence from Schnak, who assumed she was privileged to be rudely capricious and exacting.
“This is shit!”
“I’m the composer, I suppose?”
“You’re an illiterate brat! What you call shit is the verse of a poet of great gifts, slightly adapted by me. It’s utterly beyond your comprehension. You take it and be grateful for it!”
“No, no, Simon; Hulda is right. It won’t work. We must have something else.”
“What else?”
“I don’t know what else. That’s your job. What is wanted here is something that says the same thing, but says it with a good open vowel on the third beat of the second bar.”
“That means reshaping the whole thing.”
“Very well; reshape it. And do it now, so we can get on. We can’t wait till tomorrow while you brood over a dictionary.”
“Why can’t you reshape your bloody music?”
“The shape of music is something you know nothing about, Simon.”
“Very well. But I won’t take any more lip from this stupid kid.”
“Shit!”
“Hulda! I forbid you to use that word to the professor. Or to me. We must work without passion. Art is not born of passion, but of dedication.”
“Shit!”
Then the Doctor might slap Schnak across the face, or, under other circumstances, kiss her and pet her. Darcourt never slapped Schnak, but sometimes it was a near thing.
Not all the work proceeded in this high-stomached mode, but it did so at least once a day, and sometimes the Doctor had to fetch champagne for everybody. The bill for champagne, thought Darcourt, must be mounting at a fearful rate.
He persisted. He swallowed insult, and in his new notion of himself as the Fool, he frequently gave insult, but he never gave up. He was determined to be a professional. If this was the way artists worked, he would be an artist in so far as a librettist was permitted such presumption.
It was not the way all artists worked. At least once a week Powell dashed up from Stratford in his snorting little red car, and his artistic method was all oil and balm.
“Lovely, lovely, lovely! Oh, this is very fine stuff, Simon. Do you know, when I am working on my other production—I’m getting up Twelfth Night, you know, for a May opening—I find words coming into my head that are not Shakespeare. They are unadulterated Darcourt. You’ve missed your calling, Sim bach. You are a poet. No doubt about it.”
“No, Geraint, I am not a poet. I am exploiting a poet to produce this stuff. The arias, and the long bits, are all his—with some tinkering, I admit. Only the recitativo passages are mine, and because of the way Nilla wants things, they are absolute buggers, because they have to have all this loose accompaniment underneath, and stresses falling in places that defy any sort of poetic common sense. Why can’t the singers just speak those parts, and sound like human beings and not crazed parrots?”
“Come on, Sim bach, you know why. Because Hoffmann wanted it otherwise, that’s why. He was an adventurer, an innovator. Long before Wagner he wanted an opera that was sung clear through, not broken up with spoken passages or recitative that is simply gabble to bustle on the plot. We must be faithful to old Hoffmann, boy. We must never betray old Hoffmann.”
“Very well. But it’s killing me.”
“No it isn’t. I’ve never seen you looking better. But now I’m going to talk against everything I’ve just said. We must have one big number for Arthur in Act Three, where he says loud and clear what Love is, and why he’s forgiving Guenevere and Lancelot. And there isn’t a damned scrap of Hoffmann that does it.”
“And so?”
“Well, it’s obvious. Dear little Schnaky-Waky is going to have to write a tune all by her dear little self, and you’re going to have to find words for it.”
“No, no,” said the Doctor. “That would indeed be untrue to Hoffmann.”
“Listen, Nilla. More operas have been spoiled by too much artistic conscience than have ever been glorified by genius. Just for the moment, forget about Hoffmann. Or no, that’s not what I mean. Think of what Hoffmann would do if he were still alive. I see him now, the wonderful bright-eyed little chap, chewing his quill and thinking, ‘What we need in Act Three is a great big, smashing aria for Arthur that pulls the whole thing together, and knocks the audience out of their socks. It’s got to be the one that everybody remembers, and that the barrel-organs play in the streets.’ We don’t have barrel-organs now, but he wouldn’t know that. It’s got to get the young, and the old, and if the critics despise it the critics of the next generation will hail it as genius.”
“I will not agree to anything that has a cheap appeal,” said the Doctor.
“Nilla—dear, uncompromising Nilla fach—there is the truly cheap art, and we all know what it is, but there is another kind of art, that goes far beyond what critics call good taste. Good taste is really just a kind of aesthetic vegetarianism, you know. You go beyond it at your peril, and you end up with schmalz like ‘M’appari’ in Marta. Or maybe you come up with ‘Voi, che sapete’, or ‘Porgi amor’, which is genius. Or you get the Evening Star aria out of Tannhäuser or the Habanera out of Carmen—and you can’t say Wagner dealt in cheap goods, and Bizet wrote the one sure-fire opera. You artists really must stop kicking the public in the face. They’re not all fools, you know. You’ve got to get something into this Hoffmann job that will lift it above a fancy academic exercise to earn Schnak a degree. We’ve got to wow ’em, Nilla! Can you resist that?”
“This is very dangerous talk, Powell. I’m not sure I should let Hulda listen. These are dirtier words than any even she knows.”
“Come on, Nilla. I know this is the voice of the Tempter, but the Tempter has inspired some damned good stuff. Now listen carefully, Nilla. Have you ever heard this?
Though critics may bow to art,
And I am its own true lover,
It is not art, but heart
Which wins the wide world over.”
Darcourt, who had been listening with delight to the spellbinder, roared with laughter. He lifted his voice in imitation of Powell’s bardic chant, and continued:
And it is not the poet’s song,
Though sweeter than sweet bells chiming,
Which thrills us through and through,
But the heart which beats under the rhyming.
“Is that English poetry?” said the Doctor, her brows raised almost into her hair.
“Jesus, I think that’s wonderful!” said Schnak. “Oh, Nilla, did you ever hear it said better?”
“I am not at home in English verse,” said the Doctor, “but that sounds to me like—I will not use Hulda’s word—but it sounds like crap. That is a new word I have learned and it is very useful. Crap!”
“The expression is unquestionably crap,” said Darcourt. “But in the crap there is a precious jewel of truth. That is one of the problems of poetry. Even a terrible poet may hit on a truth. Even the blind pig sometimes finds an acorn.”
“The professor sets us right, as he always does,” said Powell. “Raw heart can’t make art but woe to art when it snubs heart. By God—I ought to be a librettist! Now—will you do it?”
“I’ll have a crack at it,” said Schnak. “I’ve had about enough of writing music wrapped in Hoffmann’s old bathrobe.”
“I’ll certainly have a crack at it,” said Darcourt. “But on one condition. I find the verse before Schnak writes the music.”
“Sim, bach, I see it in your eye! You have the verse already.”
“As a matter of fact, I have,” said Darcourt, and he recited it to them.
“Do that again, will you,” said Schnak, looking at Darcourt without suspicion and resentment for the first time since they had met.
Darcourt recited it again.
“That’s it!” said Powell. “Right on the pig’s back, Sim bach.”
“But is it good English verse?” said the Doctor.
“I’m not a man who awards marks to poets as if they were schoolboys,” said Darcourt. “It is from the best of a very good man, and far beyond the level of an opera libretto.”
“You’re surely going to tell us who the very good man is?” said Powell.
“He’s the man you spoke of as the base upon which we should rest this opera, the first time we discussed it,” said Darcourt. “It’s Sir Walter Scott.”
(3)
CAN IT BE TRUE, thought Darcourt, that I am sitting in this grand penthouse on a Sunday evening eating cold roast chicken and salad with three figures from Arthurian legend? Three people working out, in such terms as modernity dictates, the great myth of the betrayed king, the enchantress queen, and the brilliant adventurer?
Does the analogy hold? What did King Arthur attempt? He tried to extend the reach of civilization by demanding that his Knights, who belonged to an undoubted Elite of Birth, should embrace the concept of chivalry, thereby becoming an Elite of Achievement. Not just power, but the intelligent, unselfish use of power to make a better world; that was the idea.
What about Arthur Cornish, who is helping himself to currant jelly across the table? He belongs to a Birth Elite of a kind; of a Canadian kind, which thinks three generations of money are enough in themselves to make a man significant, do what he will. But Arthur wants to be an intellectual, and to advance civilization by the use of his power, which is his money; or rather, the money of the late Francis Cornish, the mysterious fortune which nobody can quite explain. Surely that is an attempt, and a very respectable attempt, to advance into an Elite of Achievement? Arthur Cornish probably commands more hard cash and more power than Arthur of Britain ever dreamed of.
Queen Guenevere lives in legend as a partner in an adulterous love that brought great grief to King Arthur. Not all the legends present her as a woman troubled by love alone; sometimes she is a discontented wife, an ambitious woman of a fretful spirit, a figure more solid and varied than Tennyson draws her.
Certainly Maria fills the bill. She had told Darcourt, not so very long ago, before she married Arthur, that she had fallen in love with him because of his frankness, his largeness of spirit, and also his attractive freedom from the academic world to which her own ambitions were confined. Arthur had offered her love, but also friendship, and she had found it irresistible. Yet a woman cannot live solely in the realm of her love; she must have a life of her own; she must shed light, as well as reflecting it. It looked as if Maria’s light, since her marriage, had been somewhat under a cloud. She had tried too hard to be Arthur’s wife, first, last, and all the time, and her spirit was in rebellion. How long had they been married? Twenty months, was it? Twenty months of forsaking all others and cleaving only unto him? It simply won’t work. No woman worth marrying is nothing but a wife, if the man is something better than a roaring egotist, which Arthur certainly is not, for all his peremptory, rich man’s ways in certain matters. Darcourt, himself unmarried, had seen many marriages, and united more couples, he thought in his Old Ontario way, than he could shake a stick at. The marriages that worked best were those in which the unity still permitted of some separateness—not a ranting independence, but a firm possession by both man and woman of their own souls.
Was it any use talking to Arthur and Maria about souls? Probably not. Souls are not fashionable, at present. People will listen with wondering acquiescence to scientific talk of such invisible entities as are said to be everywhere and very important, but they shy away from talk of souls. Souls have a bad name in the world of atomic energy.
Souls were a reality to Darcourt, however. Souls, not as gassy aspiration and unreal nobility, but as the force that divides the living human creature from the raw material for the mortician’s craft. Souls as a totality of consciousness, what man knows of himself and also that hidden vast part of himself which knows and impels him, used and abused by everybody, called upon or rejected, but inescapable.
What about Powell? Now there was a man who would assert, with passionate eloquence, that he had a soul, but who was clearly driven by that portion of his soul that was not within the range of his direct knowledge, that part of the spirit that some people—Mamusia, for instance—would call his fate. But a man’s fate is his own, more than he knows. We attract what we are. And it was Powell’s fate that had drawn him to seduce his friend’s wife, probably—no, Darcourt was sure, undoubtedly—with the complicity of Maria’s fate, just as Lancelot had seduced, or been seduced by, Guenevere.
“Do you want more dressing on your salad, Simon?” said Maria. She and Arthur and Powell had been talking while Darcourt mused.
Yes, he would like more dressing on his salad. He really must not drift off into unheeding speculation while the others were talking. And what had they been talking about?
About the impending child, of course. They talked about it a good deal, and with a frankness Darcourt found astonishing. It was five months on its way, and Maria wore becoming gowns in which she did not look pregnant, like the women Darcourt saw in the streets who wore slacks in which their distended bellies were forced upon the world, but clever gowns that enhanced, without concealing, her increasing girth.
Arthur and Geraint were rivals in solicitude. Neither had been a father before, they said, sometimes as a joke but always with an undercurrent of concern. They fussed over Maria, urging her to sit when she was perfectly comfortable standing, and rushing to fetch her things that she did not greatly want. They urged her not to drive her car, to put her feet on a stool when she sat, to get plenty of rest, to drink milk (which her doctor told her not to do), to eat heartily, to eat wisely, to drink very little wine and no spirits, to put aside the more inflammatory parts of the newspapers. They were a little disappointed that she exhibited no irrational cravings for peculiar foods; they would have been overjoyed if she had made eerie demands for pickles drenched in ice cream. These were old wives’ tales, said Maria, laughing at them. But, like prospective fathers from an earlier day, they were pestilent old wives, and they grew together in old-wifery. They were better friends than ever.
Had Arthur and Lancelot, in the mythical long ago, fretted and fussed so? Of course not; they had no ambiguous baby.
“The meeting with Schnak’s parents went very well,” said Powell.
“Who met them? Sorry, I haven’t been attending,” said Darcourt.
“Nilla insisted that Schnak ask them in. Nilla is very strict with Schnak and is teaching her manners. Won’t listen to Schnak’s fits of bad-mouthing her old folks. You must ask them here, Hulda dearest, she said, and we must be very, very sweet to them. And that’s what they did.”
“Were you there?” said Maria.
“Indeed I was. Wouldn’t have missed it for the world. If I may say so, I was the star turn, the cherry on the cake. I got on with the elder Schnaks brilliantly.”
“Tell all,” said Maria.
“Well, they turned up, in answer to a telephone call from Schnak, which she made while Nilla stood over her with a whip, if I’m not mistaken. You’ve seen them. Not what I would call clubbable people, and they were all set to resent Nilla and lecture Schnak. But not a bit of it. Nilla was charming, and there was enough high-bred European atmosphere floating around for the elder Schnaks to recognize Nilla as a genuine grandee. Not just rich people, like you Cornishes, but a person of aristocratic quality. You’d be amazed how powerful that still is. She spoke to them quite a lot of the time in German, and that kept Schnak out of things, because although she understands pretty well, she can’t say much in the old tongue. I don’t know any more German than I need to follow a Wagner libretto, but I could tell that Nilla was being really gracious. Not patronizing, but speaking to them as equals, and as an older person like themselves, deeply concerned about Schnak. She talked about art, and music, and they softened up a bit under that and the rich cakes and the coffee with lots of whipped cream. They didn’t soften much, although they were impressed by the huge heap of musical manuscript Schnak had piled up. Obviously the girl was working. What was sticking in their gullets was Schnak’s rebellion against what they think of as religion. That was where I came in very strong.”
“You, Geraint? You agreed with those bitter Puritans about religion?”
“Of course I did, Arthur, bach. Don’t forget I grew up a Calvinistic Methodist, with a father who was a mighty shaman in the faith. I let them know that, of course. But, said I, look at me, deep into the world of art, and theatre and music, and the fatherhood and splendour of God is present to me every hour of my life, and infuses everything I do. Does God speak only with a single tongue? I asked them. Does His mighty love not reach out to those who have not yet come to the full belief, to the life of total faith? May He not speak even in the theatre, in the opera house, to those who have fled from Him into a world they think frivolous and abandoned to pleasure? Oh, my friends, you are blessed in knowing the fullness of God’s revealed Word. You have not encountered, as I have, the God who knows how to speak to the fallen and the reprobate through the language of art; you have not met with the Cunning of God, by which He reaches out to His children who shut their ears to His true voice. Our God is stern with those like yourselves whom He has marked from birth as His own, but He is gentle and subtle with those who have strayed into worldly paths. He speaks with many voices, and one of the most winning is the voice of music. Your daughter has been greatly gifted in music and dare you say that she is not marked by God as one of His own, to be His instrument, His harp of Zion, to draw His erring children to Him? Do you, Elias Schnakenburg, say that your child may not be speaking—I say this with humility—through her music with the voice of God Himself? Do you? Can you presume so far? Oh, Elias Schnakenburg, I urge you, I beg you, to reflect deeply upon these mysteries, and then reject your daughter’s vocation if you dare!”
“By God, Geraint, did you say that?”
“Indeed I did, Maria. That and a good deal more. I even gave them a touch of the old Welsh hwyl; I sang my peroration. Worked like a charm.”
Maria was overcome. “Geraint, you bloody crook!” she said when she could speak.
“Maria, fach, you wound me profoundly. Sincere, every word of it. And true, what’s more. Sim, bach, you know what preaching is. Did I say a word that you would not have spoken from a pulpit?”
“I liked that about the Cunning of God, Geraint bach. About the rest of it I can only say that I am sure you were sincere while you were speaking, and I am not surprised the elder Schnaks fell for it. Yes—on consideration I would say that what you told them was true. But I am not so sure about your intention in doing so.”
“My intention was to make them like our opera, and to give them pleasure, and sew up the rent garment of the Schnakenburg family.”
“And did you succeed?”
“Ma Schnakenburg was overjoyed to see her child clean and putting on some flesh; Pa Schnakenburg was, if I do not do the man injustice, glad to find Hulda in such classy company, because there is a snob in everybody, and Pa Schnak has not forgotten the elegant world of aristocratic Europe. I just put the cherry on the cake with some fancy theology.”
“Not theology, Geraint. Rhetoric,” said Darcourt.
“Sim, bach, I wish you would stop knocking rhetoric. What is it? It is what the poet calls upon when the Muse is sleeping. It is what the preacher calls on when he must reach ears that need tickling to get their attention. Those of us who live in the world of art would be flat on our arses most of the time if we had no rhetoric to hold us up. Rhetoric is only base when base men use it. With me, it is the way in which I arouse the ancient and permanent elements in the spiritual structure of man by measured, rhythmic speech. Your rejection of my rhetoric springs from a mean envy, and I am disappointed in you.”
“Of course you’re right, Geraint; those of us who lack the gift of the gab are suspicious of those who have it. But it’s just spellbinding, you know.”
“Just spellbinding, Sim bach! Oh, what a pitiable barrenness of spirit lurks in that pauper’s adverb just! I weep for you!” Powell helped himself to another piece of chicken.
“You can’t weep while you’re stuffing your face,” said Darcourt. “Didn’t the Schnaks sniff anything peculiar about the bond between Nilla and their child?”
“Such enormities are unknown to them, I imagine. My recollection of the Bible includes no instance of naughtiness between women. That’s why it has a Greek name. Those tough old Israelites thought deviance was entirely a masculine privilege. They think Schnak is putting on flesh because she has come under a Good Influence.”
“Speaking as a woman, I don’t see the attraction of Schnak,” said Maria. “If I were of Nilla’s inclination I could find prettier girls.”
“Ah, but Schnak has the beauty of innocence,” said Powell. “Oh, she’s a foul-mouthed, cornaptious little slut, but underneath she is all untouched wonderment. I suppose she’s been mauled by a few student morlocks, because it’s the custom in the circle in which she moves, and kids fear to go against custom. But the real, deep-down Schnak is still flower-like, and Nilla’s is just the delicate hand to pluck the flower. But you know what happens; or rather you don’t, because none of you are gardeners; I slaved in my mam’s garden all my boyhood. You pluck the first bloom, and other, stronger blooms hurry to replace it, and that is what is happening to Schnak.”
“What blooms?” said Arthur. “God forbid that we should support a lesbian house of ill-fame. There are limits, even for the Cornish Foundation. Simon, hadn’t you better look into this?”
“Quite right, Arthur. The bills I’ve been paying for champagne and pretty little cakes from the gourmet shops are horrendous. Can’t these women sustain their passion on hamburger?”
“You’re quite wrong,” said Powell. “That’s not the way things are going at all. Nilla has roused Schnak’s dormant tenderness, and let me tell you, boyos, that’s chancy work. Where will it strike next? I think she has her eye on you, Sim bach.”
Darcourt was staggered, and not at all pleased that this suggestion was greeted with hoots of laughter from Arthur and Maria.
“I don’t see the joke,” said he. “The suggestion is grotesque.”
“In love, nothing is grotesque,” said Powell.
“Sorry, Simon. I don’t suggest that you are a ridiculous love-object,” said Arthur. “But Schnak—” he could not speak, and laughed himself into a coughing fit, and had to be slapped on the back.
“You’ll have to dye your hair and go West,” said Maria.
“Simon can look after himself, and he must stay here,” said Powell. “We need him. If need be, he can take flight after the opera is safely launched. The opera is at the root of the whole thing. It was that poetry you quoted to her, Simon. Didn’t you see her face change?”
“You were the one who quoted poetry,” said Darcourt. “You Welsh mischief-maker, you quoted Ella Wheeler Wilcox to the girls, and Nilla very properly gagged, but Schnak ate it up.
It is not art, but heart
Which wins the wide world over.
You meant it as a joke, but Schnak swallowed it whole.”
“Because it is true,” said Powell. “Corny, but true. And I suppose it is the first bit of verse Schnak ever heard which went right to her heart, like the bolt of Cupid. But you were the one who trotted out some real poetry, and gave it to her for the culminating moment of our drama.—Simon has found the words for Arthur’s great aria,” he said to Arthur and Maria, “and it’s just the very thing we want. Right period, decent verse, and a fine statement of a neglected truth.”
“Let’s have it, Simon,” said Arthur.
Darcourt found himself embarrassed. The verses were so apt to the situation of the three people who sat at table with him; verses that spoke of chivalry, and constancy, and, he truly believed, of the essence of love itself. In a low voice—he could not bring himself to use Powell’s full-throated bardic manner—he recited:
True love’s the gift which God has given
To man alone beneath the heaven:
It is not fantasy’s hot fire,
Whose wishes, soon as granted, fly;
It liveth not in fierce desire,
With dead desire it doth not die;
It is the secret sympathy,
The silver link, the silken tie,
Which heart to heart, and mind to mind,
In body and in soul can bind.
The verses were received in silence. It was Maria who spoke first, and like a true university woman she set out on a criticism of the words which was rooted in what she had been taught; she had a critical system, unfailing in its power to reduce poetry to technicalities and to slide easily over its content. It was a system which, properly applied, could put Homer in his place and turn the Sonnets of Shakespeare into critic-fodder. Without intending to be so, it was a system which, once mastered, set the possessor free forever, should that be his wish, from anything a poet, however noble in spirit, might have felt and imparted to the world.
“Shit!” said Powell, when she had finished. And then began a very hot discussion in which Powell was strong for the verses, and Arthur quiet and considering, and Maria determined to declare all of Walter Scott second-rate, and his easy versifying the outcome of a profuse, trivial spirit.
She is fighting for her life, thought Darcourt, and she is perversely using weapons she has learned at the university. But did anybody learn much about love in a classroom?
He kept himself apart from the wrangle. It was easy, because only by determined shouting was it possible to come between Powell and Maria. Had there ever been such a scene at Camelot, he wondered. Did Arthur, and Guenevere and Lancelot, ever haggle about what had been done, and what lay at the root of it?
If these are really modern versions of the principals in that great chivalric tale, how did they appear in terms of chivalry? The Knights, and presumably the Knights’ Ladies, were supposed to possess, or try to possess, twelve knightly virtues. There were many lists of those virtues, none wholly alike, but they all included Honour, Prowess, and Courtesy, and, all things considered, these three had those virtues in plenty. Hope, Justice, Fortitude? The men emerged from that test better than Maria. Faith and Loyalty it was perhaps not well to discuss, with Maria pregnant. And it would be tactless to speak of Chastity. Franchise, now—free and frank demeanour—they all had in their various ways. Largesse, that open-handedness which was one of the foremost attributes of a Knight, was the spirit of the Cornish Foundation. All that champagne and Viennese gateaux were largesse, as well as the great sums that were now beginning to appear on the horizon as necessary to get the opera on the stage. But Pity of Heart—that was an attribute which Arthur alone seemed to possess, and under all the ridiculous fussing about Maria’s pregnancy it was plainly to be seen in him; Maria seemed to lack it utterly. Or did she? Was her rejection of Walter Scott just a fear of what she truly felt? Débonnaireté—now that was a good virtue for a Knight, and for anybody else that could achieve it; gaiety of heart, a noble indifference to trivial difficulties, a sprezzatura, in fact—Powell was the exemplar of that virtue, and, although he still had fits of eloquent remorse for what he had done, he was contriving to rise above it. He regarded himself as co-father with Arthur, and he played the role with style.
What is that all about, thought Darcourt. A deep Freudian would almost certainly declare that there was, between Arthur and Geraint, some dank homosexual tie, working itself out in possession of the same woman. But Darcourt was not disposed to Freudian interpretations. At best, they were glum half-truths, and they explained and healed extraordinarily little. They explored what Yeats called “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart”, but they brought none of the Apollonian light that Yeats and many another poet cast upon the heart’s dunghill. Sir Walter, so plainly writing of his darling Charlotte, knew something that had escaped the unhappily married Viennese wizard. The silver link. The silken tie.
Perhaps Arthur knew it, too. Maria was wearing out with argument, and seemed near to tears.
“Come on, darling. Time you were in bed,” said Arthur. And that concluded the matter, for the moment, with Pity of Heart.
(4)
DARCOURT LONGED FOR SPRING with more than the ordinary Canadian yearning. His search for the people in The Marriage at Cana could not be completed until the snow was off the ground, and in Blairlogie the snow lingered and renewed itself until the middle of April.
Meanwhile he spent long hours at the Library, sifting the last scraps of what had been bundled up in Francis Cornish’s apartment. It was three apartments, really, every one crammed with every sort of art object. Armed with what he already knew from his biographical burrowing and fossicking about the Cornish and O’Gorman and McRory families and their hangers-on and dependents, he was able to identify almost all of the figures in the great picture.
Some of them had been identified before. Darcourt knew almost by heart the article that had been published a quarter of a century before in Apollo, written by Aylwin Ross. It had put the cap on Ross’s once-great reputation, and had established the beautiful young Canadian as an art historian to be taken seriously. How ingenious Ross had been, with his historical exposition about the Interim of Augsburg and the Catholic-Protestant row it had created in 1548. How convincing he was about his identification of Graf Meinhard of Düsterstein and his Lady, and Johann Agricola the scholar, and Paracelsus—this was a great coup, for portraits of Paracelsus are extremely rare—and even the jolly dwarf who was certainly, Ross knew, Drollig Hansel, who was, past question, the famous dwarf jester in the employ of the Fugger family of bankers. It was romance that might have rejoiced the heart of Sir Walter Scott. But it was all moonshine, and Darcourt knew it.
Graf Meinhard and his Lady were certainly portraits of the parents of Francis Cornish, and Johann Agricola was that schoolmaster at Colborne College who had put Francis’s foot on the path of historical study, and of whom a snapshot had been tucked into a sketchbook of Francis’s Blairlogie period. What was the man’s name? Ramsay, was it? Yes, Dunstan Ramsay. As for Paracelsus, the shrewd little figure in a physician’s gown who was holding a scalpel, there could be no doubt whatever that he was Dr. Joseph Ambrosius Jerome, of whom Darcourt knew little except that he had been the McRorys’ family doctor, and had once been photographed by Grandfather McRory seated, with one hand on a skull, and the other holding just such a scalpel.
Sketches—there were scores of them, and many accorded with Grandfather’s Sun Pictures. That dwarf was certainly François Xavier Bouchard, the little tailor of Blairlogie, seen by Grandfather fully clothed, but sketched by Francis lying on a table, stark naked and plainly dead. Was he being embalmed? Certainly there were several sketches among Francis’s earliest drawings of nude figures in which there was a hint—only a few lines, but eloquent—of a figure who seemed to be the huissier, the man with a whip in the painting, and also the man photographed by Grandfather standing at the head of a splendid team of carriage horses; a man of ravaged good looks, always drawn with a gleam of pity in his eye; pity for the dead which was also a knightly pity of heart for the whole of mankind.
Given the sketches and the photographs that Darcourt had unearthed in the University Library and in the preliminary studies for the picture which had been, at Francis Cornish’s express direction, sent to the National Gallery in Ottawa, the whole picture lay open. The two women disputing over the wine jars, between whom knelt the figure of Christ; beyond a doubt Francis’s aunt, Miss Mary-Benedetta McRory, and her adversary was Grandfather’s cook, Victoria Cameron. What could they have been quarrelling about? As they were at it, hammer and tongs, over the figure of Christ, perhaps Christ was at the root of their disagreement. But who was St. John, with pen and ink-horn? He eluded identification but might perhaps yield his secret later. There was no secret about the compelling portrait of Judas, holding firmly to his money-bag; there were enough sketches in the books Francis had filled at Düsterstein to mark him clearly as Tancred Saraceni, father in art to Francis, and an ambiguous éminence grise in the art world of forty years ago; a restorer of pictures of pre-eminent skill, who may perhaps have done a little more than restoration on some of his canvases.
There were other figures, not identifiable or not to be identified with utter certainty. That stout merchant and his wife; they could be Gerald Vincent O’Gorman, known after his Blairlogie beginnings as a very shrewd man in the Cornish Trust, and the woman must therefore be Mary-Teresa McRory, who had become Mrs. O’Gorman and, after a strong Catholic start, a shining light among Toronto Anglicans. But the woman with what appeared to be an astrological chart? No sign of her anywhere, either as a photograph or as a sketch. And those wretched children, in the background? They looked like Blairlogie children, but they had a vicious, depraved look that was dreadful to see on childish faces; they seemed to be saying something about childhood that is not often heard.
The central figures of the picture, who were plainly the wedding couple, offered no problem and admitted of no doubt. They suggested, but in no way imitated, Van Eyck’s famous portrait of the Arnolfini couple; the suggestion lay in the intensity of their gaze, the gravity of their expression. Beyond a doubt the bride was Ismay Glasson, of whom Darcourt had seen almost a hundred sketches, naked and clothed, and he knew her face—not quite beautiful but more compelling in its intensity than beauty usually is—as well as he knew any face in the world. This was the woman Francis had married, the mother of Little Charlie, the bolter and fanatic; although the figure of Francis extended its hand toward her, it did not quite touch the hand of Ismay, who seemed to hold back, and her gaze was not at her husband but at the handsome young man who figured as St. John.
The husband was Francis Cornish, a confession in the form of a self-portrait. Pictures of Francis were rare; apart from this picture, he had never painted himself, and none of his contemporaries had thought him sufficiently interesting for a sketch. Grandfather’s photographs showed the dark, slight boy in the hideous costume of his childhood and youth: Francis in a sailor suit, standing on a giant tree trunk, above a group of muscular, bearded timber-workers; Francis in his Sunday best, sitting beside a small table on which lay his rosary beads and a prayer-book; Francis squinting into the sun on a Blairlogie street; Francis with his beautiful mother, uneasy in a starched Eton collar; a few group photographs from Colborne days, in which Francis figured as a prize-winner; one photograph of an amateur theatrical performance—some sort of student Follies—in which a lanky, thin Francis appeared in the back row, among the stage-managers and scene-painters, hardly noticeable behind all the girls in short skirts and the boys in blazers who had obviously danced and sung greatly to their own satisfaction. Nothing at all which said anything about Francis Cornish.
In The Marriage at Cana, however, his was the dominant figure to which all the rest of the composition related. Not that the placing or presentation of the figure was aggressive; there was no Look At Me about it. But this intently gazing man, dressed in blacks and browns, drew the viewer’s eye back to himself, however intent it may have been on any of the other figures. Most self-portraits tend to glare at the onlooker. The painter, presumably looking into a mirror beside his easel, must glare, must have one eye looking straight into the eyes of the beholder, and the more self-conscious the painter, the more intent the glare becomes. Rembrandts, who dare to paint themselves full-face and objectively, are uncommon. Francis had painted himself looking not at his wife but straight out of the canvas. Yet his eyes did not meet and challenge those of the onlooker; they seemed to be looking over his head. The face was grave, almost sad, and among the faces of the others—the Bride elusive and somewhat sulky, St. John looking like an adventurer, the Knight and his Lady looking like important figures in their world, the two disputing women painted in obvious contention, and the old artisan (Grandfather McRory as St. Simon the Zealot, with his woodsman’s tools)—this face, Francis’s face, was looking out of their world into some other, private world. Darcourt had sometimes seen that look on the face of the old Francis whom he had known.
Finally—no, not quite finally—there was the woman who stood beside the bridal couple, the only figure in the pictured graced with a halo. The Mother of God? Yes, for the convention in which the picture was cast demanded that. But more probably the Mighty Mother of All. As the mother of everybody and everything, it was not necessary for her to look like anyone in particular. Her grave beauty was universal and her smile was of a serenity that rose beyond earthly considerations.
Was that serene smile intended to heal the hurt that was visible in the portraits of the bride and groom, in which the man extended a ring toward the fourth finger of his bride’s left hand, and she seemed to be holding back, or perhaps withdrawing her hand from what he offered? To Darcourt, knowing what he knew, and immersed as he was in all the Sun Pictures and the innumerable copies, sketches, and finished drawings that were all that remained of the truth of Francis Cornish’s life, it seemed as if this extraordinary picture was an allegory of a man’s ruin, of the destruction of his spirit. Had the wilful bolter Ismay really hurt him so deeply? After this picture, Francis had never painted seriously again.
Shall I, wasting in despair,
Die because a woman’s fair?
The poet who wrote that, and all the easy philosophy of love that follows it, was a hardier soul than Francis. But not all men, or all lovers, are hardy souls. It seemed to Darcourt that Francis had not died because of Ismay’s determination to follow her own star, but something within him had suffered mortal hurt, and the death that had overtaken him so many years afterward, when he died alone in his cluttered flat, was a second death, and it was not in Darcourt’s power to say which had been the most significant cessation of being.
Darcourt would readily have admitted that he did not know much about love. He had had no youthful affairs, except in a superficial sense. His love for Maria, which he now knew to have been a folly from which he was lucky to escape, was all that he had known of passion. But he had the gift, not often given to deeply passionate men, to understand the joys and also the heart-stopping blows of fate that afflicted other people. The more he looked at the large reproduction, and also the detailed pictures of portions of The Marriage at Cana that accompanied Aylwin Ross’s brilliant, wholly mistaken article in Apollo, the more he wondered if Maria, now great with Geraint Powell’s child, had struck just such a blow to Arthur Cornish. Arthur was holding up very well, if that were true, but he had lost all débonnaireté. Arthur was certainly The Magnanimous Cuckold. But Arthur was not the clearly defined, generous, but ruthless spirit he had been when Darcourt first knew him. If it were so, who was to blame? The more Darcourt knew, the less he was inclined to blame or praise.
The final figure in the picture, however, had to await the spring before it could be identified, so far as possible, forever.
That was the angel who floated in the air over the heads of the bridal pair and the Mighty Mother in the central panel of the triptych. Perhaps it was not quite an angel, but if not, why was it suspended in air, without angelic wings? The first time one looked at the picture it seemed to throw the whole composition into confusion. Whereas the other figures were human, painted with love, and sometimes beautiful, sometimes noble, sometimes self-satisfied, sometimes—old St. Simon was such a portrait—as wise beyond worldly wisdom, this floating creature was a comic horror. Its pointed head, its almost idiotic expression, its suggestion of disorder of mind and deformity of body, were all out of key with the rest. And yet, the more one looked, the more it seemed to belong, to be almost necessary to whatever it was the whole composition was saying.
From its mouth came a scroll, suggesting one of the balloons that hold the words in a comic strip, and in the scroll were the words Tu autem servasti bonum vinum usque adhuc. Not very elegant as Latin, but the words spoken to the bridegroom by the governor of the feast at the Marriage at Cana: “Thou hast kept the good wine until now.” Christ’s first miracle; a puzzle, for nothing in the Gospel suggests that anyone but Christ and His Mother and a few servants knew the secret.
Was this picture, then, as well as an object of great beauty, a puzzle? A joke, a deeply serious joke, on future beholders?
April brought the answer, as Darcourt had hoped it would. He made the inconvenient train journey to Blairlogie and, armed with a shovel, a broom, and his camera, he went to the Catholic cemetery and there, high on the bleak hill, he visited once again the McRory family plot. It was dominated by large, tasteless stones commemorating the Senator and his wife, and Mary-Benedetta McRory. But there were a few humbler markers, one of them not a gravestone but a memorial to somebody called Zadok Hoyle, identified as a faithful servant of the family. And—here it was—in an obscure corner behind the biggest stone was a small marble marker, flat to the ground, and when Darcourt had cleared away the last lingering snow and ice, and an accumulation of lichen, it read, plainly, FRANCIS.
So: here it was. Among the sketches from Francis’s boyhood years there were a number of an invalid figure, confined to a bed which was almost a cage; the figure in the bed was a pitiable deformity, of the sort that cruel people used to call a pinhead, blank of eye, sparse of hair, and wearing an expression, to use the word loosely, that would draw pity from the heart of an ogre. These sketches, rapid but vivid, were identified only by the letter F, except for one on which was laboriously written, in the hand of a boy who wished to be a calligrapher but did not yet know how, what seemed to have been copied from some royal signature, François Premier.
Francis the First? Now, thought Darcourt, I know all I need to know, and all I am ever likely to know. Truly the best wine has been kept until the last.
(5)
“THE CRONES ARE COMING,” said Dean Wintersen’s voice down the telephone. “They are expected today.”
What crones? Was this some uncanny visitation of weird old women? What crones? Darcourt had been roused from his work on the biography of the late Francis Cornish, and his mind did not readily shift to the Dean’s concern. The crones? Oh, yes! Of course! The Cranes. Had he not agreed that some people called Crane should come from an American West Coast university to do something or other of a vaguely defined order about the production of the opera? That had been months ago and, having so agreed, and having it well understood that the Cranes were not to cost the Cornish Foundation anything, he had banished the Cranes from his mind, as a problem to be dealt with when it arose. Now, it appeared, the Cranes were coming.
“You remember them, of course,” said the Dean.
“Remind me,” said Darcourt.
“They’re the assessors from Pomelo U.,” said the Dean. “It was agreed they should sit in on the production of the opera. You remember the opera, don’t you?”
Oh, yes; Darcourt remembered the opera. Had he not been slaving over the libretto for the past four months?
“But what are they going to assess?” said Darcourt.
“The whole affair. Everything connected with the opera from Schnak’s work on the score to the last detail of getting the thing on the stage. And then the critical and public reaction.”
“But why?”
“To get Al Crane his Ph.D., of course. He’s an opera major in the theatre school at Pomelo, and when he has got his assessment together he will make a Regiebuch and present it as his thesis.”
“His what?”
“His Regiebuch. A German expression. All the dope on the production of the opera will be in it.”
“My God! He sounds like Divine Correction out of a medieval play. Does Dr. Dahl-Soot know? Does Geraint Powell know?”
“I suppose they do. You’re the liaison man, or so I understood. Didn’t you tell them?”
“I don’t think I knew. Or fully realized.”
“You’d better tell them, then. Al and Mabel will be seeing you right away. They’re eager.”
“Who’s Mabel?”
“I’m not sure. I think she’s not quite Mrs. Crane, but she’s with him. Not to worry. Al has a big grant from the Pomelo Further Studies Fund to look after him. This is a courtesy schools of music frequently extend to one another. It’ll be all right.”
How lightly the Dean took such things! Doubtless that was the secret of being a dean. When, a couple of hours after his call, Darcourt gazed at Al and Mabel Crane, as they sat in his study, he wondered if it would really be all right.
Not that the Cranes looked menacing. Not at all. They had the look of expectancy Darcourt knew so well as an attribute of a certain kind of student. They wanted something to happen to them, and they wanted him to make it happen. They were probably in their middle twenties, but they had still the unfledged, student look. Apparently they travelled light and informally. It was cool in the Canadian spring, but Al Crane was dressed as if for a hot day. He wore chinos, a much crumpled seersucker coat, and a dirty shirt. The breast pocket of the coat hung heavily with a number of ball-point pens. His bare feet were thrust into sandals that would not last much longer. He had not shaved for two or three days, and his lantern jaws were dark. As for Mabel, the one arresting thing about her was that she was monstrously pregnant. The child she carried, though still unborn, was already sitting in her lap. Like Al, she was dressed for summer, the summer of Southern California, and she too was in a bad way for footwear. They both smiled, in a dog-like manner, as if hoping to be patted.
Al, however, knew what he wanted. He wanted several days with Hulda Schnakenburg, to go over the score of the opera and examine all the scraps of Hoffmann, which he called The Documentation, and then he wanted a few days with Dr. Dahl-Soot, whose presence in the matter was, he declared, awesome. Just to talk with Gunilla Dahl-Soot would be an enrichment. He wanted access to a Xerox machine, so that he could get facsimiles of everything, every inch of Hoffmann, every draft of Schnakenburg, every page of the completed score. He wanted to go over the libretto with whoever had prepared it, and he wanted to compare it with anything by Planché, from which it derived, or did not derive. He wanted to talk with the director, the designer, the designer of lighting, and the scenic artists. He wanted copies of every design, and every rejected design. He wanted to photograph the stage that would be used, and he wanted all its measurements.
“That’ll do to be going on with,” he said. “Then of course I’ll sit in on all the rehearsals and all the musical preparation. I’ll need a full C.V. from everybody involved. But right now, we’re wondering where we are to live.”
“I haven’t any idea,” said Darcourt. “You’d better talk to Dean Wintersen about that. There are lots of hotels.”
“I’m afraid a hotel would be way beyond us,” said Al. “We’ve got to watch the pennies.”
“I understood the Dean to say that you had a generous grant from Pomelo.”
“Generous for one,” said Al. “Tight for two. For three, I should say. You can see how it is with Mabel.”
“Oh, Al, do you think there’s been a slip-up?” said Mabel. She was the kind of woman, Darcourt saw with alarm, who cries easily.
“Not to worry, Sweetness,” said Al. “I’m sure the professor has everything lined up.”
Don’t be too sure, thought Darcourt. There had been a time, before he recognized himself as the Fool, when he would have been badgered into assuming full responsibility for these Babes in the Wood. But as the Fool he had other things to attend to. So he gave the Cranes the name of Dean Wintersen’s secretary, and the telephone number at which the Doctor could be reached, and, by means of well-developed professorial will-power—the spiritual equivalent of the Chinese Chi-Kung—he shifted them off his chairs and out of his sight.
They went, thanking him profusely and assuring him that they looked forward to seeing him again. It had already been a terrific experience, they said, just meeting him.
(6)
DARCOURT WAS NOT SURE how he should approach Arthur and Maria about his discovery, now his certainty, of what The Marriage at Cana really was. Although the Cornish Foundation was in no way underwriting his biography of Francis Cornish, friendship and a sense of decency about a family with whom he was strongly involved made it obligatory that he should tell them what he had found, before he said anything to Princess Amalie and Prince Max. The picture belonged to the New York people, and who could guess what they might say to his information about their treasure? Was it a brilliant piece of detection in the world of art history, or was it the harsh unmasking of a fake? And if a fake, what did that mean in loss of money? That was trouble enough, but the touchiness of the Cornishes about anything that might reflect, however faintly, on the integrity of the great financial house was incalculable. So he dawdled, dotting i’s and crossing t’s in his documentation, and hoping that a favourable moment would declare itself.
The declaration came from an unexpected source. Wally Crottel was apprehended by the police selling marijuana to schoolchildren. In the playground of the Governor Simcoe Public School, Wally was plying a brisk trade in joints at the end of each school day, and some children, with that mixture of innocence and stupidity that marks a certain sort of childish mind, were walking home puffing proudly. Before the police could put the handcuffs on him Wally made an ill-advised break for freedom and was knocked down by a passing car; he was quite badly hurt, and was now in the General Hospital, with a policeman sitting outside his room, with nothing to do but read a paperback book which Mr. Carver told Darcourt was Middlemarch, an unexpected choice. Mr. Carver had tipped off the police about Wally’s profitable sideline, and Mr. Carver could not conceal a deep satisfaction at Wally’s fall.
“But you have to admit the guy was very well organized,” he said. “He was growing the stuff in a corner of a parking lot behind the boarding-house building where he lived. It was quite a small job, but you don’t need an awful lot of the old Mary-Jane to make a few joints, and Wally included a good deal of dried mint with it, to make it go as far as possible, and give a flavour kids liked. Wally was doing very well, for a small operator. Where the kids got the money to pay his price I don’t know, but there are quite a few rich kids in that district, and I think some of them were retailing what they bought from Wally, adulterated with dried grass and God knows what. Little bastards! Imagine kiddy pushers! But we live in a very strange world, professor.”
“We do, indeed. How did you get wise to Wally?”
“There’s a guy lives in the basement of that building where Mr. and Mrs. Cornish have the penthouse that I’ve known for years. Looks like a slob, but he’s not a real slob. I think he had it in for Wally, who was always snooping around that basement apartment, trying to find out how this man and his sister came to be living there. Now, the sister’s a bit of a psychic, and sometimes the cops use her, when they want one. Oh, yes; we cops are not above tips from psychics, and sometimes they’re very useful. You can’t discount anything you hear, in the detective business.”
“Will it go hard with Wally, when he comes to trial?”
“That crook Gwilt is hard at work, building up a case that Wally comes from a broken home—you know what I mean? He’ll do his best to keep Wally in the hospital as long as possible, so he can do whatever he can to get Wally tried before an easy judge. Fat chance! There aren’t any easy judges when it comes to pushing drugs to kids. Wally is headed for a long, reflective retirement as a guest of the Crown.”
“What could that mean?”
“Well, professor, it says on the books you can get life for pushing. Nobody does, but some of the sentences are tough. Let’s look on the bright side and say Wally comes out of hospital with a short leg, or a hole in his head, or something showy like that. The judge might go easy on him. He’ll still go to the pen, of course, but if he’s a very good boy, and squeals on a few people he knows, and sucks up the governors and the chaplain, he might be on the street again in seven years, but not a minute less. I’d hope for nine or ten. Pushing to kids is very, very unpopular. Wally has lost face, as the Chinese say. Your friend with the book Wally was whimpering about can forget Wally. How is that nice lady?”
“At this moment, she’s expecting a baby.”
“Couldn’t be better. If you see her, wish her luck from me.”
The very night he heard of Wally’s fall Darcourt hastened to the Cornishes’ apartment, thinking that such news would create an atmosphere friendly to his real mission. He was not pleased to find Powell there before him, making himself very much at home. He could not possibly include Powell in any discussion about The Marriage at Cana. But he told Arthur and Maria about Wally, and about Carver’s forecast of Wally’s future.
“Poor old Wally,” said Maria.
Arthur was dumbfounded. “Poor old—! Maria, don’t you see? This disposes of that business of Wally wanting his father’s book. He wouldn’t get anywhere with a court case about that.”
“Aren’t the courts supposed to forget past misdeeds, when somebody has been foully wronged?”
“They’re supposed to, but they don’t. From henceforth, Wally is null and void.”
“I’m astonished at you men. Do you want to have your own way at the expense of a fellow creature’s suffering?”
“I haven’t the least objection to you getting your own way at the expense of anybody’s suffering. Except mine, of course,” said Arthur.
“Wally is suffering because he is stupid,” said Darcourt. “Trying to break away from the cops! Ah, these amateurs! He is obviously a criminal of no real flair.”
“Wouldn’t you have tried to escape?”
“If I were hanging around schoolyards, peddling dope to kids, I would hope to have more grip on my job. If I were a criminal, I would try to use the brains God gave me.”
“All right. Wally is a bad boy and Wally is stupid. But it ill becomes you, as a Christian priest, to be exulting and sniggering. Where’s your pity?”
“Maria, stop playing the Many-Breasted Mother, gushing compassion like a burst waterpipe. You’re kidding. You’re just as glad as we are that Wally’s out of the way.”
“I shall indeed be a mother within quite a short time, and I think a show of compassion becomes me. I know my role.” Maria smiled a farcical Madonna smile.
“Good! Then I’ll play my role as a Christian priest. Arthur, will you get on the phone and send Wally your own lawyer? Meanwhile I’ll phone the newspaper sob-sisters and shed a few tears about Wally’s sad plight. Geraint, you lodge a complaint under the Charter of Rights. Wally was an employee of this building, and thus of the Cornish Trust, of which Arthur is the Big Cheese. So Arthur must rush to the aid of a victim of our social system. Maria, prepare to appear in court, heavy with child and wearing a veil, to say what a sweet little fellow Wally always was, and how Whistlecraft’s denial of his name to Wally gave him an Anonymity Complex. Wally will have to go to jail, but we can float him in and out on a flood of tears. Of course we’ll keep mum about how Wally tried to shake you down for a million. Come on, let’s get to work. There must be more than one phone in this palace.”
“Oh, I wasn’t suggesting that we do anything,” said Maria. “I was just suggesting that we talk a little more compassionately.”
“You don’t understand modern compassion, Sim bach. It’s a passive virtue. I see what Maria means; let’s pity Wally, and maybe send him a few grapes in the slammer. If anybody is going to be nasty to the criminal classes, it must be those horrible cops and the hard-faced men in the courts. That’s what we pay them for. To make the world cosy for us. We smash Wally without having to harbour a hateful, revengeful thought; our servants do all that kind of thing for us.”
“That’s a new dimension of the Kater Murr philosophy,” said Darcourt. “Thanks for explaining it to me, Geraint bach.”
“After the baby is born, I think I shall write a whole volume, expanding Kater Murr,” said Maria. “Hoffmann didn’t begin to get all the good out of him. Kater Murr is really the foremost social philosopher of our time.”
This was what Darcourt wanted. This was almost the old Maria, the woman infused with the spirit of François Rabelais, a spirit vowed to the highest reaches of scholarship and illuminated by a cleansing humour. Arthur, he thought, was looking decidedly better. Had some sort of new serenity descended on the Cornish household? Well—Powell was still there, and Powell was making himself very much at home.
“I must leave you shortly,” said he, “but meanwhile I am enjoying the peaceful retirement of your dwelling. This is one place where I am sure I can’t be got at by the abominable Al Crane.”
“Oh, don’t think you are safe here,” said Arthur. “Last night Al and Sweetness turned up and he cross-examined me for two hours, taking a full five minutes to formulate each question. In the modern lingo, Al lacks verbal skills; lingually, Al is a stumblebum. He brought a taperecorder, so that every precious Um and Ah would be preserved forever. He wanted to know what my Motivation was for putting the Fund behind the opera scheme. He doesn’t believe anybody might do something for a variety of reasons; he wants one great, big, juicy Motivation which would be, he says, a significantly seminal thread in a complexity of artistic inspirations. He wants to identify all the threads that are woven into the complex tapestry of a work of art—I am quoting Al, you understand—but some threads are more seminal than others, and mine is wonderfully seminal; it could even be the warp, or maybe the woof, of the whole tapestry. I thought I would faint from boredom before I finally got him out of the house.”
“Arthur did not suffer alone,” said Maria. “All the time Al had him on the spot I was being bored rigid by Sweetness, who thanked me for receiving her in my Gracious Home, and then talked about what she called Our Condition. There are countless ways of making pregnancy nauseating, and I think Sweetness explored them all.”
“Sweetness is delighted with you. She told me so,” said Darcourt. “Because of your both being pregnant, of course. You and she, greatly in pod, are what she calls an Objective Correlative of the job of bringing this opera to birth. You, and she, and the opera all burst upon a waiting world at roughly the same time.”
“Spare me Sweetness’s scholarly insights,” said Maria. “She is not an Objective Correlative of anything, and she disgusts me as parodies of oneself always do. She expects me to embrace her as a loving companion in gravidity, and if she gives me much more sisterly love I may miscarry. But she would be sure to interpret that as an ill omen for the opera, so I don’t think I’ll oblige her. Never again does she cross the threshold of my Gracious Home.”
“They didn’t get a great welcome in Nilla’s Gracious Home,” said Powell. “Nilla doesn’t know what an assessor is, and I can’t tell her. I always thought the word meant a judge, or somebody who estimated something. What is an assessor, exactly, Sim bach?”
“It is something new in the academic world,” said Darcourt. “Somebody who watches something happen, and gives an enormously detailed report on it; somebody who shares an experience, without having any real involvement with it. A sort of Licensed Snoop.”
“But who issues the licence?” said Arthur.
“In this case, it seems to have been Wintersen. He says watching the production process will enrich Al immeasurably, and if Al develops his thesis into a book, it will give permanency to a deeply interesting and profoundly seminal experience.”
“Nilla is not pleased,” said Powell. “She knows only one meaning for seminal, and she thinks Al is being indecent in a male chauvinist way. She told him flatly there was nothing seminal in what she and Schnak were doing, and when he contradicted her she was very brusque. Said she had no time for such nonsense. Sweetness burst into tears, and Al said he fully understood the mercuriality of the artistic temperament, but the act of creation was seminal and it was his job to understand it so far as in him lay, which he seemed to think was pretty far. I just hope Al does not prove to be the condom in the act of creation.”
“Not much fear of that,” said Arthur.
“No fear at all, really. Nilla and Schnak have worked like Trojans. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Wintersen weren’t encouraging a deputation of Trojans to come and measure the energy involved. How does Wintersen get into this act, anyhow?”
“Dean of the Graduate School of Music,” said Darcourt. “I think he sees himself as richly seminal in this whole project. Did you know that Al and Sweetness have been to see Penny Raven?”
“As a collaborator with you on the libretto?”
“A fat lot of collaboration Penny has done. Those Trojans had better have a word with me, when they are learning about work. But Penny is an old academic hand. She strung them along with some high-sounding nonsense, and when she phoned me about it she could hardly speak for laughing. Quoted from The Hunting of the Snark, as she always does.”
“That Snark again,” said Arthur. “I really must read it. What did she say?”
“It’s an astonishing poem for descriptive quotes:
They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care,
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap.”
“Sweetness provides the smiles and soap,” said Maria. “I wonder if I shall manage not to kill Sweetness in some ingenious way. How does one get away with murder?”
“Exactly how does Sweetness come into this?” said Arthur. “Are they combining on this awful assessor game?”
“Hollier has the answer,” said Darcourt. “They visited him, but they got nowhere. He examined them with great care, however, and he says that he sees Sweetness, in anthropological-psychological-historico terms as the External Image of Al’s Soul.”
“A terrible thought,” said Maria. “Imagine looking into Sweetness’s teary eyes and saying, ‘My God, that’s the best of me!’ Al doesn’t want to do anything important without her, she tells me. I’m not sure she didn’t say she was his Muse. I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“I wish I didn’t know The Hunting of the Snark,” said Powell. “I am up to my neck in producing this opera and I keep thinking—
The principal failing occurred in the sailing,
And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed,
Said he hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East,
That the ship would not travel due West!”
“You haven’t got cold feet, have you, Geraint?” said Arthur.
“No colder than usual, at this stage in a big job,” said Powell. “But I do see myself as the Bellman, when I wake up in the night, sweating. Everything is ready to go, you see. Got the score, got the cast, got the designs, got everything, and at last I must start on what Al would certainly call the seminal part. God grant that I am sufficiently seminal for the job. And now, with the greatest reluctance, I must leave this snug retreat, and go back to my desk. A million details await me.”
He pulled himself out of his chair, with some effort. He still has a lame leg, thought Darcourt. It goes well with his generally Byronic personality. He has developed a sliding walk, to disguise his lameness, just like Byron. I wonder if it’s conscious imitation—Byronic hero-worship—or if he can’t help it?
With Powell out of the way, there was nothing for it but to plunge into his news about The Marriage at Cana. He told the tale as convincingly as he could; he wanted to open a new world to his friends, not frighten them with an explosion. For the first time, he spoke to them of his visit to Princess Amalie, to confirm that her Old Master drawing was, in fact, a portrait of herself, done in girlhood by a man on whom she had had a youthful crush. He did not think it necessary to speak of his thefts in the University Library and even in the National Gallery; these were, he now assured himself, not thefts in the ordinary sense, but adventures on the journey of the Fool, guided by intuition and governed by a morality that was not to everybody’s taste. If everything worked out as he hoped, what he had done justified itself, and if he were not lucky, he might find himself in jail. With gentleness, but determination, he told of his astonishment when, in the Princess’s drawing-room, displayed among a number of convincing Old Masters, and in itself convincing to any eye but his own, he saw The Marriage, and with shocked astonishment recognized the faces as belonging to Grandfather McRory’s Sun Pictures, and to Francis Cornish’s numerous, neglected sketchbooks. There could be no doubt about it, he insisted: Francis was The Alchemical Master, and the great picture was not yet fifty years old.
Arthur and Maria heard all this more or less in silence, though now and then Arthur whistled. It was necessary to come to the real point.
“You understand what this will mean to my biography of Francis,” he said. “It is the justification of the book. The climax. It establishes Francis as a very great painter. Working in the mode of a bygone day, but a great painter none the less.”
“But in the mode of a bygone day,” said Arthur. “He may be a great painter, but that makes him unmistakably a faker.”
“Not at all,” said Darcourt. “There is not a shred of evidence that Francis meant to deceive anybody. The picture was never offered for sale, and if it hadn’t been for the war, he would undoubtedly have taken it with him when he left Düsterstein, and nobody will convince me that he would have tried to palm it off as a sixteenth-century work. The Princess knows about it. The picture was stashed away in a store-room of the castle, and when the castle was taken over during the occupation of Germany it disappeared with a lot of other stuff. It was restored to the Düsterstein family after the war, by the Commission that dealt with such matters, of which Francis was a member. That’s a bit fishy, but we don’t know the details. And the family—that’s to say Princess Amalie— has it still.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” said Arthur. “Why did he paint it in this sixteenth-century manner? And look at this article in Apollo, that explains it all. If it wasn’t meant to deceive, why paint it like that?”
“That’s where we come to the point that is going to be the making of my book,” said Darcourt. “You don’t remember Francis in any detail. But I do. He was the most inward-looking man I have ever known. He turned things over and over in his mind, and he reached conclusions. That picture is the most important of his conclusions. It represents what he thought most important in his life, the influences, the cross-currents, the tapestry, as Al Crane would say if he had a chance. In that picture Francis was making up his soul, as surely as if he had been some reflective hermit, or cloistered monk. What you see in the picture is the whole matter of Francis, as he saw it himself.”
“Yes, but why in this mock sixteenth-century style?”
“Because it is the last style in which a painter could do what Francis was doing. After the Renaissance do you see any pictures that reveal all that a man knows about himself? The great self-portraits, of course. But even when Rembrandt painted himself in old age, he could only show what life had done to him, not how life had done it. With the Renaissance, painting took a new turn, and threw away all that allegorical-metaphysical stuff, all that symbolic communication. You probably don’t know that Francis was an expert on iconography—the way you discover what a painter meant, instead of just what anybody can see. In The Marriage he means to tell his own truth, as clearly as he can. And he wasn’t telling it to someone else. The picture was a confession, a summing-up, intended simply for himself. It’s a magnificent thing in several different ways.”
“Who’s the peculiar angel?” said Maria. “You left him out when you told us who all the characters were. He’s obviously somebody of the greatest importance.”
“I am virtually certain he was Francis’s elder brother. Only one of the sketches is labelled, but it is identified as Francis the First, and I can only guess that he was a very deep influence on Francis the Second’s whole life.”
“How? It looks like an idiot,” said Arthur.
“Presumably it was an idiot. You didn’t know your uncle. He was a deeply compassionate man. Oh, he had the reputation for being a curmudgeon, and he didn’t suffer fools gladly, and often he seemed to have no tolerance for people at all. But I knew him, and he was far beyond what people mean when they say tender-hearted—which can mean cabbage-headed. He had a sense of the profoundly tragic fragility of human life that I have never known in anyone else, and I am as sure as I can be of anything that it was the knowledge of this grotesque creature, this parody of what he was himself, that made him so. He was a romantic in his youth; look at the way he has painted the girl who became his wife, and let him down so painfully. Look at the dwarf; Francis knew that poor wretch, alive and dead, and he did what he could to balance the scales of Fate when he painted him. All the portraits in The Marriage are judgements on people Francis knew, and they are the judgements of a man who had been rudely booted out of a youthful romanticism into a finely compassionate realism. Now Arthur, for God’s sake don’t ask me again why he painted this summing-up of his life in this bygone style. It was the only style that would contain what he had to say. The Old Masters were deeply religious men, and this is a deeply religious picture.”
“I never heard anyone suggest that Uncle Frank was religious.”
“The word is greatly misunderstood in the turmoil of our day,” said Darcourt, “but in so far as it means seeking to know, and to live, beneath the surfaces of life, and to be aware of the realities beneath the superficialities, you may take it from me that Francis was truly religious.”
“Uncle Frank a great painter!” said Arthur. “I don’t know just how to cope with it.”
“But it’s bloody marvellous!” said Maria. “A genius in the family! Aren’t you thrilled, Arthur?”
“There have been some rather bright people in the family, but if they were geniuses, or near it, they were financial geniuses. And don’t let anybody tell you that financial genius is just low cunning. It’s the real intuitive goods. But this sort of genius—For a financial family a painter is rather a skeleton in the cupboard.”
“There is something about a cupboard that makes a skeleton very restless,” said Darcourt. “Francis Cornish is loudly demanding to be let out.”
“Your problem is going to be these people in New York. How will they like it when you reveal that their treasured Old Master—the only known work of The Alchemical Master—is a phoney?”
“It isn’t a phoney, Arthur,” said Maria. “Simon has been telling us what it is, and phoney is the last word to use. It is an astonishing personal confession in the form of a picture.”
“Arthur is right, though,” said Darcourt. “They will have to be approached with the greatest tact. I can’t go to them and say, Listen, I have news for you: they must want me to come, to hear what I have to tell them. It’s the difference between ‘Come in, Barney,’ and ‘Barney, come in.’ ”
“I suppose that’s one of your Old Ontario gobbets of folk wisdom,” said Maria.
“Yes, and a very wise one, when you think about it. I can’t just tell them what I know, and stop short. I must give them an idea about where this discovery might lead.”
“And where would that be?” said Arthur.
“It certainly can’t be the devaluation and destruction of the picture as a work of art. It must point a new way.”
“Simon, I know you. I see it in your eye. I see it wriggling up your sleeve. You have a scheme. Come on—tell.”
“Well, Maria, I wouldn’t say I had a scheme. Just a vague idea, and I feel rather embarrassed about bringing it out, because it is sure to sound stupid.”
“This modesty is just camouflage for some real Darcourt craftiness. Out with it.”
So, diffidently, but not artlessly—because he had been rehearsing what he would say for several days—Darcourt told them what he had in mind.
There was a long silence. After a while Maria fetched drinks; whisky for the men and for herself a glass that looked like milk, but was of a rich, golden colour. They sipped, amid further silence. At last Arthur spoke.
“Ingenious,” he said, “but I mistrust ingenuity. It’s too damned clever.”
“A little better than just clever,” said Darcourt.
“Too many intangibles. Too many things that cannot be controlled. I’m afraid the answer must be no, Simon.”
“I’m not ready to take that as your final word, Arthur,” said Darcourt. “Please think about it for a while. Forget it and then think about it again. Maria, what do you think?”
“I think it’s very foxy.”
“Oh, please! Foxy is a nasty word.”
“I didn’t mean it nastily, Simon. But you must admit that it’s a poopnoddy scheme, if ever there was one.”
“Poopnoddy?” said Arthur. “Is that one of your Rabelaisian words?”
“Go to the head of the class, Arthur,” said Maria. “Rabelaisian in spirit, though I don’t know quite what he would have said in French. Avalleur de frimarts, or something like that. Intending to deceive the unwary, anyhow. I must have a few Rabelaisian words to counteract Simon’s cataract of Old Ontario folk-sayings, about Barney and all the gang.”
“If you think those people in New York are unwary, you are out of your mind,” said Darcourt.
“But I think you think Arthur and I are unwary.”
“If you had been wary, would you ever have got yourselves into this opera thing?”
“That’s beside the point.”
“I think it’s the very finest end of the point. What has it brought you?”
“We don’t know, yet,” said Arthur. “We shall have to wait and see.”
“While you’re waiting, will you give some thought to my idea?”
“Now that you’ve brought it up, I don’t see how we can help it.”
“Good. That’s all I ask. But I must talk to the New York people, you know. After all, I am going to explode their picture. From one point of view, that is.”
“Look, Simon, can’t you somehow soft-pedal the whole business of the picture?”
“No, Arthur, I can’t and I won’t. It isn’t just the heart of my book. It’s the truth, and you can’t suppress truth forever. That skeleton is banging very loudly on the doors of the cupboard, and if you don’t want to let it out my way, you may be sure somebody else will eventually let it out by smashing the cupboard. Don’t forget all those sketches Francis bequeathed to the National Gallery.”
“Will that concern us? We don’t own the picture.”
“No, but I shall have written the book and if I soft-pedal this material it will be shown up as a stupid, know-nothing book. I don’t see why I should put up with that, just to satisfy your Kater Murr notions.”
“You make a lot of fuss about your damned book.”
“My damned book will be on the shelves when all of us are dust, and I want it to be the best book I can leave behind me. And I ask you, Arthur, as a friend, to think of that. Because I am going to write it, and write it my way, whatever you choose to do, and if it costs me your friendship, that will be part of the price of authorship.”
“Simon, don’t be pompous. Maria and I value your friendship highly, but we could live without it if we had to.”
“Oh shut up, both of you!” said Maria. “Why can’t men ever disagree without all this high-stomached huffing and puffing? No friendships are going to be broken, and if you and Simon part brass rags, Arthur, I’ll leave you and live in sin with him. So shut up! Have another drink, Simon.”
“Thank you, no. I have to be going. But do you mind telling me what that stuff is you are drinking? It looks delicious.”
“It is delicious. It’s milk with a good slug of rum in it. My doctor recommends it at bedtime. I haven’t been sleeping well, and he says this is better than sleeping-pills, even if the milk is a bit fattening for a lady in an interesting condition.”
“Marvellous! Do you think I could have a small one of those? After all, I am great with book, and I need all the little comforts of one who is about to give birth.”
“Will you get it for him, Arthur? Or are you too much on your dignity to help poor Simon in his delicate state? I was drinking this last night when Al and Sweetness were here, and Sweetness was shocked.”
“Shocked by rum and milk?—Oh, thanks, Arthur.—What shocked her?”
“She gave me a long, confused talk about what she called the foetal alcohol syndrome; booze in pregnancy can lead to pixie-faced, pin-headed, mentally retarded children. I knew something about that; you have to drink rather a lot to be in danger. But Sweetness is a zealot, and she’s deep into the squalor of pregnancy, poor wretch. I heard all about her agonizing little balls of gas, which won’t come up or go down; and how she can’t do a thing with her hair—not even wash it, I thought, looking at her; and she has to be dashing off every half-hour to what she delicately calls the tinkle-pantry, because her bladder capacity is now minimal. She is paying the full price nasty old Mother Nature can exact for Al’s baby. I just hope it’s a nice baby.”
“Did she say why they don’t get married, if they are so devoted?”
“Indeed she did. Sweetness has a cliché for everything. They do not admit that their union would be hallowed more than it is, if some parson mumbled a few words over them.”
“I wonder why people like that always talk about parsons mumbling a few words. I’ve married lots of people and I never mumble. I would scorn to mumble.”
“You have no proper respect for cliché. Performing your ignominious, outdated office, you ought to mumble for very shame.”
“I see. I’ll remember that. Am I to mumble at the christening, by the way? I’d very much like to.”
“Of course, Simon dear. Mumble, mumble, mumble.”
“Have you chosen any names, yet? Always wise to be ready with names.”
“Arthur and I haven’t made up our minds, but Geraint keeps putting forward Welsh names that are crammed with ancient chivalry and bardic evocation, but are rather demanding for the Canadian thick tongue.”
Darcourt had finished his rum and milk, and took his leave. Maria was loving and kind, and Arthur was friendly, with a hint of reserve. On the whole, Darcourt thought he had achieved about as much as he expected.
As he walked home he thought about pixie-faced, pin-headed, mentally retarded children. That was what Francis the First had been. But had Francis the First’s mother been a heavy drinker? Nothing he had found in his investigations suggested it. But a biographical researcher must reconcile himself to the fact that there are many things he will never know.
(7)
“IT CERTAINLY SEEMS as though le beau ténébreux had been much more shadowy than any of us suspected,” said Princess Amalie.
“Frankly, I am astounded! Astounded!” said Prince Max, who liked to multiply his verbal effects. “I remember Cornish well. Charming, reserved fellow; spoke little but was a splendid listener; handsome, but didn’t seem aware of it. I thought Tancred Saraceni lucky to have found such a gifted assistant; his picture of the Fugger dwarf was a little gem. I wish I had it now. And certainly the Fugger dwarf looked very much like the dwarf in The Marriage.”
“I remember that curious man Aylwin Ross saying precisely that when the Allied Commission on Art had a chance to look at both pictures. Ross was no fool, though he came to grief in a rather foolish way.”
The speaker was Addison Thresher. He is the man to watch and the man to convince, thought Darcourt. The Prince and Princess Amalie know a lot about pictures, and a very great deal about business, but this man knows the art world, and his Yes or No is decisive. Until now he has given no hint that he had known The Marriage at Cana in Europe. Watch your step, Darcourt.
“Did you know Francis Cornish well?” he asked.
“I did. That’s to say, I met him in The Hague when he made that astonishing judgement on a fake Van Eyck. He played with his cards very close to his vest. But I had a few chats with him later in Munich, during the meetings of the Art Commission. He told me something then that clicks with your surprising explanation of this picture, that we have all loved for so many years. Do you know how he learned to draw?”
“I have seen the beautiful copies of Old Master drawings he made when he was at Oxford,” said Darcourt. He saw no reason to say more.
“Yes, but before that? It was one of the most extraordinary confessions I ever heard from an artist. As a boy he learned a lot about technique from a book written by a nineteenth-century caricaturist and illustrator called Harry Furniss. Cornish told me he used to do drawings of corpses in an undertaking parlour. The embalmer was his grandfather’s coachman. Furniss was an extraordinary parodist of other men’s styles; he once showed a gigantic hoax exhibition in which he parodied all the great painters of the late Victorian era. Of course they hated him for it, but I wish I knew where those pictures are now. Drawing lies at the root of great painting, of course—but imagine a child learning to draw like that from a book! An eccentric genius. Not that all genius isn’t eccentric.”
“Do you really think our picture was the work of le beau ténébreux?” said the Princess.
“When I look at these photographs Professor Darcourt has been showing us, I don’t see how I can think anything else.”
“Then that smashes the favourite in our collection. Smashes it to smithereens,” said Prince Max.
“Perhaps,” said Thresher.
“Why perhaps? Isn’t it shown to be a fake?”
“Please—not a fake,” said Darcourt. “That is what I am anxious to prove. It was never intended to deceive. There is not a scrap of evidence that Francis Cornish ever attempted to sell it, or show it, or gain any sort of worldly advantage from it. It was a picture of wholly personal importance, in which he was setting down and balancing off the most significant elements in his own life, and doing it in the only way he knew, which was by painting. By organizing what he wanted to look at in the form and style that was most personal to him. That is not faking.”
“Try telling that to the art world,” said the Prince.
“That is precisely what I shall try to do in my life of Francis. And I hope I’m not immodest in saying that I shall do it. Not to unveil a fake, or smash your picture, but to show what an astonishing man Francis Cornish was.”
“Yes, but my dear professor, you can’t do one without the other. We shall suffer. We shall be made to look like fools, or collaborators in a deception. Think of that article in Apollo that Aylwin Ross wrote, explaining the sixteenth-century importance of this picture. It’s well known in the world of art history. A very clever piece of detective work. People will think we kept our mouths shut to save our picture, or else that we were victims of Francis Cornish’s little joke. No—his big joke. His Harry Furniss joke, as Addison has told us.”
“Incidentally, that figure of the fat artist who is drawing on a little ivory tablet is Furniss to the life, now that I know what we know,” said Thresher.
“Francis was not wanting in humour. I admit it. He loved a joke and particularly a dark joke that not everybody else understood,” said Darcourt. “But that again is an argument on my side. Would a man who intended to deceive put such a portrait of a known artist—and an artist at work—in such a picture as this? I repeat: this is not a picture for anyone but the painter himself. It is a confession, a deeply personal confession.”
“Addison, what would you say was the market value of this picture, if we didn’t know what Professor Darcourt has told us?” said Princess Amalie.
“Only Christie’s or Sotheby’s could answer that question. They know what they can get. A good many millions, certainly.”
“We were ready to sell it to the National Gallery of Canada a few years ago for three millions,” said Prince Max. “That was when we wanted to raise some capital to expand Amalie’s business. Aylwin Ross was the Director then, but at the last minute he couldn’t raise the money, and not long after he died.”
“That would have been cheap,” said Thresher.
“We were rather under the spell of Ross,” said the Princess. “He was a most beautiful man. We offered him several pieces, at an inclusive price. This was by far the cheapest. But in the end they went to other buyers. We decided to keep this one. We like it so much.”
“And you have so many others,” said Thresher, not altogether kindly. “But three million was certainly a bargain. Now, if it weren’t for what we have heard this evening, you could treble or quadruple that money.”
This was Darcourt’s moment. “Would you sell now, if you could get a price that pleased you?”
“Sell it as a distinguished fake?”
“Sell it as the greatest work of The Alchemical Master, now known to be the late Francis Cornish? Let me tell you what I have in mind.”
With all the persuasive skill he could summon up, Darcourt told them what he had in mind.
“Of course, it’s extremely conditional,” he said when he had finished, and the Prince and the Princess and Thresher were deep in consideration.
“Very iffy indeed,” said Thresher. “But it’s a hell of a good idea. I don’t know when I’ve heard of a better in forty years in the art world.”
“There is no hurry,” said Darcourt. “Are you willing to leave it with me?”
And that was where the matter rested when Darcourt flew back to Canada.
(8)
“I REALLY THINK one of the names must be Arthur. After all, it was my father’s name, and it’s my name, and it’s a good name. Not unfamiliar; not peculiar; easy to pronounce; has good associations, not the least of them being this opera.”
“I entirely agree,” said Hollier. “As a godfather, with a right to give the boy a name of my choice, I declare for Arthur.”
“No regrets about Clement?” said Arthur.
“It’s not a name I’ve ever liked much.”
“Well, thank heaven one name is settled. Now, Nilla, you’re the godmother. What name have you chosen?”
“I have a weakness for Haakon, because it was my father’s name, and it is a name of great honour in Norway. But it might embarrass a Canadian child. So also with Olaf, which is another favourite of mine. So—what about Nikolas? He need not even spell it with a ‘k’ if he doesn’t want to. A fine saint’s name, and I think every child should have a saint’s name, even if it isn’t used.”
“Brilliant, Nilla. And eminently reasonable. Nikolas let it be, and I’ll undertake that he uses the ‘k’ to keep him in mind of you.”
“Oh, I’ll keep him in mind of me. I intend to take my work as godmother very seriously.”
“Well then—Geraint?”
This, thought Darcourt, is where the trouble lies. To be melodramatic, this is where the canker gnaws. Geraint has all the Welsh passion for genealogy, and names, and he wants to keep signalling that he is this child’s true father. This is going to call heavily on Arthur’s skill as a Chairman.
“Of course, I think at once of my own name,” said Powell. “A beautiful, poetic, sweetly-sounding name which I bear with pleasure. But Sim bach advises strongly against it. Of course I wish to confer a Welsh name on the boy, but you all keep nattering about how hard they are to pronounce. Hard for whom? Not for me. To me, you see, a name has great significance; it colours a child’s whole outlook on itself and gives it a role to play. Aneurin, for instance; a great bardic name. He of the Flowing Muse—”
“Yes, but bound to be pronounced ‘An Urine’ by the unregenerate Saxons,” said Arthur. “Remember poor Nye Bevan and what he went through. The Sitwells always called him Aneurism.”
“The Sitwells had a very vulgar streak,” said Powell.
“Unfortunately, so have lots of people.”
“There are other splendid names. Aidan, for instance; now there’s a saint for you, Nilla! And Selwyn, which means great ardour and zeal; that would spur him on, wouldn’t it? Or Owain, the Well Born; suggesting a distinguished descent, particularly on the father’s side. Or Hugo, a name very popular in Wales; I propose it rather than the Welsh Huw, which might look odd to an uninstructed eye; it is the Latin form. But the one I propose with pride is Gilfaethwy, not one of the greatest heroes of the Mabinogion but especially appropriate to this child, for reasons that need not be chattered about now. Gilfaethwy! Nobly wild, wouldn’t you say?”
“Pronounce it again, will you?” said Arthur.
“It is simplicity itself. Geel-va-ith-ooee, with the accent lightly on the ‘va’. Isn’t it splendid, boyos? Doesn’t it smack of the great days of legend, before Arthur, when demigods trod the earth, dragons lurked in caves, and mighty magicians like Math Mathonwy dealt out reward and punishment? Powerful stuff, let me tell you.”
“How do you spell that?” said Hollier, ready with pencil and paper. Geraint spelled it.
“Looks barbarous on the page,” said Hollier.
Powell took this very badly. “Barbarous, you say? Barbarous, in a country where every name from every part of the earth, and ridiculous invented names, are seen in the birth announcements every day? Barbarous! By God, Hollier, let me tell you that the Welsh had enjoyed five centuries of Roman civilization when your ancestors were still eating goat with the skin on and wiping their arses with bunches of thistles! Barbarous! Am I to hear that from a pack of morlocks who can think of nothing except what is easy for them to pronounce or has some sentimental association? I pity your ignorance and despise you.”
“That, by the way, is a Dickensian quotation,” said Hollier. “I’m sure you could find something more bardic to express your contempt.”
“Now, now, let’s not come to harsh words,” said Darcourt. “Let’s make a decision, because I have things to say to you, parents and godparents, and we must make up our minds.”
But Powell was in a black sulk, and it took a lot of cajoling to make him speak.
“Let the child have the commonest of Welsh names, if you must have it so,” he said at last. “Let his name be David. Not even Dafydd, mark you, but bloody English David.”
“Now that’s a good name,” said Gunilla.
“And another saint’s name,” said Darcourt. “David let it be. Now—what order? Arthur Nikolas David?”
“No. It would spell AND on his luggage,” said Hollier, who seemed to be suffering an unexpected bout of practicality.
“His luggage! What a consideration,” said Powell. “If you insist on this damned reductive nonsense, why don’t you call the child SIN?”
Arthur and Darcourt looked at each other bleakly. Was Geraint going to let the cat out of the bag? This was what nobody wanted, except Powell, whose Welsh dander was up.
“Sin?” said Hollier. “You’re joking. Why sin?”
“Because that is what he will be called by his bloody country,” shouted Powell. “Social Insurance Number 123 dash 456789, and when he gets his pension in old age he will be SOAP 123 dash 456789. By the time he is SOAP nobody will have any other name except the one the God-damned civil servants have given him! So why don’t we steal a march on them and call him SOAP from the start? This is a land dead to poetry, and I say the hell with it!” In his indignation he drained a large whisky at a gulp, and filled his glass again, to the brim.
It was a time to rise above passing furies and disdains, so Darcourt said, in his most honeyed tones, “Then it’s to be Arthur David Nikolas, is it? An excellent name. I congratulate you. I shall pronounce the names with my warmest approval. Now, about the other matters.”
“Let me remind you right away that I am a convinced unbeliever,” said Hollier. “I know too much about religions to be humbugged by them. So you don’t get around me with your priestcraft, Simon. I am simply doing this out of friendship for Arthur and Maria.”
Yes, and because you were the first to have carnal knowledge of the child’s mother, thought Darcourt. You don’t fool me, Clem. But what he said was, “Oh yes, I have long experience of unbelieving godparents, and I know how to respect your reservations. All I ask is assurance of your willingness to cherish the child, and help him when you can, and advise him when he needs it, and do the decent thing if his parents should not see him into manhood. Which God forbid.”
“Obviously I’ll agree to that. I’ll take part in the ceremony as an ancient observance. But don’t ask for acceptance as a spiritual force.”
“No, none of that. But if there is to be a ceremony, it must have a form, and I know the form which is appropriate. Now, Nilla, what about you?”
“No doubts and no reservations,” said Gunilla. “I was brought up as what the grocer Shakespeare calls ‘a spleeny Lutheran’, and I am very fond of children, especially boys. I am delighted to have a godson. You can rely on me.”
“I’m sure we can,” said Darcourt. “And you, Geraint?”
“You know what I am, Sim bach. A Calvinist to the soles of my boots. I am not sure that I trust you. What are you going to ask me to promise?”
“I shall ask you, in the child’s name, to renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of this world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the flesh.”
“By God, Sim, that’s very fine. Did you write that?”
“No, Geraint, Archbishop Cranmer wrote it.”
“A good hand with the pen, that Archbishop. And I renounce these things for the child, not for myself?”
“That’s the idea.”
“You see how it is. As a man of the theatre—as an artist—I couldn’t really set aside pomp and glory, because that’s what I live by. As for covetousness, my whole life and work is hedged with contracts, drawn up by covetous agents and the monsters who regulate the economics of the theatre. But for the boy—for young Dafydd, whom I shall call Dai when we get to know each other—I’ll renounce away like billy-o.”
“Do we really promise that?” said Hollier. ‘’I like that about the devil. That’s getting down to realities. I hadn’t realized the baptismal service delved quite so deep into the ancient world. You must lend me the book, Simon. There’s good stuff in it.”
“What trivial minds you men have,” said Gunilla. “When you talk about artists living for pomp and glory, Powell, speak for yourself. What you say, Simon, seems to me to mean keeping the boy up to high principles. Making a man of him. You need have no doubts about me.”
“Good,” said Darcourt. “May I see you all at the chapel on Sunday, then, at three o’clock? Sober and decently dressed?”
When they were leaving, Powell going off to his accustomed bedroom, Darcourt took his opportunity to speak to Maria alone.
“You said nothing about names, Maria. Have you no preference as to what the child should be named?”
“I haven’t forgotten my Gypsy ways, Simon dear. When the child came out of me and gave a cry, they laid it on my breast, and I named him. Gave him his real name. Whispered it into his tiny ear. And whatever you do on Sunday, that will be his name forever.”
“Are you going to tell me what the name is?”
“Certainly not! He will never hear it again until he reaches puberty, when I shall whisper it to him again. He has a proper Gypsy name, and it will go with him and protect him as long as he lives. But it is a secret between him and me.”
“You have been ahead of me, then?”
“Of course. I didn’t think I’d do it, but just before he left my body forever, I knew I would. What’s bred in the bone, you know.”
(9)
EXCEPT FOR ONE MINOR MISHAP, the christening went smoothly. Only the parents, the godparents, and the baby were present; the Cranes had to be told plainly that they might not come. Al murmured incoherently about objective correlatives and the link between the birth of the child and the birth of the opera. It would, he said, make a terrific and unexpected footnote to the Regiebuch. Mabel begged to be allowed to come simply on the ground that she wanted to see what a christening was like. But when Darcourt suggested that she could manage that by having her own impending child christened, she and Al were quick to say that they did not believe that a few words mumbled by a parson over their child could make any difference to his future life.
Darcourt forbore to tell them that he thought they were wrong, and silly in their wrongness. He had reservations about many of the things which he, as a clergyman, was expected to believe and endorse publicly, but about the virtues of baptism he had no doubt. Its solely Christian implications apart, it was the acceptance of a new life into a society that thereby declared that it had a place for that new life; it was an assertion of an attitude toward life that was expressed in the Creed which was a part of the service in a form archaic and compressed but full of noble implication. The parents and godparents might think they did not believe that Creed, as they recited it, but it was plain to Darcourt that they were living in a society which had its roots in that Creed; if there had been no Creed, and no cause for the formulation of that Creed, vast portions of civilization would never have come into being, and those who smiled at the Creed or disregarded it altogether nevertheless stood firmly on its foundation. The Creed was one of the great signposts in the journey of mankind from a primitive society toward whatever was to come, and though the signpost might be falling behind in the march of civilization, it had marked a great advance from which there could be no permanent retreat.
Hollier had decided to accept the baptismal ceremony as a rite of passage, an acceptance of a new member into the tribe. Good enough, thought Darcourt, but such rites had a resonance not heard by the tin ear of the rationalist. Rationalism, thought Darcourt, was a handsomely intellectual way of sweeping a lot of significant, troublesome things under the rug. But the implications of the rite were not banished because some very clever people did not feel them.
Powell wanted to be a godfather with his fingers crossed. He wanted to make promises he had no intention of keeping—and indeed who can hope to keep the promises of a godfather in all their ramifications? Very well. But Powell wanted to be a godfather because it was as near as he was likely to come to being acknowledged as the real father of the child. Powell could not resist a solemn ceremony of any kind. He was one of the many, who should not therefore be despised, who wanted serious inner matters given a serious outer form, and this was what made him a true and devout child of the drama, which at its best is precisely such an objectification of what is important in life. Darcourt thought he knew what Powell meant better than Powell did himself.
He had no misgivings about Gunilla. There was a woman who could see beyond the language of a creed to the essence of a creed. Gunilla was sound as a bell.
As for Arthur and Maria, the birth of the child seemed to have drawn them nearer than they had ever been before. The blessing that children bring is a cliché. It is as corny as the rhymes of Ella Wheeler Wilcox about art. But one of the most difficult tasks for the educated and sophisticated mind is to recognize that some clichés are also important truths.
It is a cliché that the birth of a child is a symbol of hope, however disappointed and distressed that hope may at last prove to be. The baptism is a ceremony in which that hope is announced, and Hope is one of the knightly virtues in a sense that the Cranes, for instance, had not understood, and might perhaps never understand. The hope embodied in the small body of Arthur David Nikolas as Darcourt took him in his arms and sained him, was, in part, the hope of the marriage of Arthur and Maria. The silver link, the silken tie.
It was after the blessing of the child, and the saining with water, that the slight accident occurred. Following an old custom, now revived by ritualists like Darcourt, he lighted three candles from the great candle that stood beside the font, and handed them to the godparents, saying, “Receive the light of Christ, to show that you have passed from darkness to light.”
Hollier and Gunilla, understanding that they did this on behalf of the child, took their candles with dignity, and Gunilla bowed her head in reverence.
Powell, startled, dropped his candle, spilling wax down his clothes, and scrambled for it on the floor, murmuring, unsuitably, “Oh, my God!” Maria giggled and the child, which had been an angel of propriety even when its head was wetted, gave a loud wail.
Darcourt took the candle from Powell, relighted it, and said, “Receive the light of Christ, in your astonishment of heart, to show that you have passed from darkness to light.”
“That was a bloody good ad lib of yours, Sim bach,” said Powell, at the party afterward. “I’ve never heard a better on the stage.”
“I think yours was even better, Geraint bach,” said Darcourt.
(10)
THE ARTISTS AND ARTIFICERS who are assembled to put an opera on the stage make up a closed society, and no one who is not of the elect may hope to penetrate it. There is no ill-will in this; it is simply that people deep in an act of creation take their whole lives with them into that act, and the world outside becomes shadowy until the act is completed, the regular schedule of performances established, and the strength of association somewhat relaxed.
Those who are on the outside feel this keenly. As the last weeks of work on Arthur of Britain progressed, Arthur and Maria sensed the chill. Of course they were welcome everywhere—which is to say that nobody quite liked to ask them to go away. They were known to be the “angels”. They paid the bills, the salaries, all the multifarious costs of a complicated project, and therefore they had to be treated with courtesy; but it was cold courtesy. Even their intimate friend Powell whispered to their other intimate friend Darcourt, “I wish Arthur and Maria weren’t always bumming around while we’re working.”
Darcourt had his place in the adventure; he was the librettist, and however unlikely it was that any words would be changed at so late a point in the proceedings, he was free to come and go, and if Powell suddenly wanted him to explain a difficult passage to a singer, it was a nuisance if he were not at the rehearsal. Because of her shadowy association with the libretto, even Penny Raven appeared at rehearsals without any questioning looks. But not the angels.
“I feel as conspicuous and out of place as tan shoes on a pallbearer,” said Arthur, who was not given to simile in the ordinary way.
“But I want to see what they’re doing,” said Maria. “After all, we must have some rights. Have you looked at the bills lately?”
Perhaps they had expected lively doings, with Powell standing in front of a stage filled with singers, shouting and waving his arms like a policeman at a riot. Nothing of the sort. The rehearsals were quiet and orderly. The unpunctual Powell was always present half an hour before a rehearsal began, and he was stern with latecomers, though these were few, and always had reasonable excuses. The ebullient Powell was quiet and restrained; he never shouted, was never discourteous. He had absolute command and used it with easy authority. Was this artistic creation? Apparently it was, and Arthur and Maria were astonished at how quickly and surely the opera began to take shape.
Not that it seemed like an opera, as they conceived of an opera, in the first two weeks of rehearsal. These took place in Toronto in large, dirty rooms belonging to the Conservatory, and the Graduate School of Music, which had been hired for the work. In charge of these was Waldo Harris, the first assistant to Powell; he was a bland, large young man who never lost his calm in the midst of complexity, and he seemed to know everything. He had an assistant, Gwen Larking, who was called Stage Manager; she had two other girls to do her lightest bidding. Miss Larking occasionally and excusably showed some emotion, and the assistants, who were beginners, did run and fuss, and brandish their clip-boards until Miss Larking frowned at them, and even hissed at them to shut up. But these young women were serenity itself compared with the three students called gofers (because they were always being told to go for coffee, or go for sandwiches, or go for somebody who was wanted in a hurry). The gofers were the lowest, most inconsiderable form of theatrical life. At rehearsals these seven clustered around Powell like iron filings around a magnet, and talked in whispers. They all dealt very largely in paper, and took notes without cease. The provision of new, sharp pencils was part of the gofers’ job.
But these were all less than Mr. Watkin Bourke, who was called the répétiteur, or coach.
It was Watty’s job to see that the singers knew their music, and this meant everything from long hours at the piano with the principals who knew their music but wanted advice about phrasing, to principals who read music with difficulty (though they never admitted this) and had to be taught their parts almost by rote. It was Watty’s job to train the Chorus, and this meant the ten gentlemen, apart from Giles Shippen, the tenor lead, and Gaetano Panisi, who played Modred, who made up King Arthur’s Knights, and the Ladies who were their vocal counterparts. The Chorus were all good musicians, but twenty-two good singers do not make a chorus, and they had to be gently persuaded to sing together, and not merely to sing in tune, but to sing in tune as a unity, and to vary their intonation subtly to agree with leading singers who might become the teeniest bit flat or sharp under dramatic stress. In all of this Watty, a small, hatchet-faced, intense man, and a brilliant pianist, was masterly.
Watty, like Powell, never shouted or lost his temper, though from time to time a great weariness might be seen to pass over his small, intelligent face. Such weariness, for instance, as was brought about by his encounter with Mr. Nutcombe Puckler, a bass baritone entrusted with the role of Sir Dagonet.
“I quite understand that Mr. Powell wants us to have individuality, as Knights of the Round Table,” he said. “Now, the other chaps are all pretty straightforward, aren’t they? Knights, you see. Just brave chaps. But Sir Dagonet is described as Arthur’s Fool, and of course that’s why I have been cast for it. Because I’m not a chorus singer or a small-parts man—not at all; I’m a comprimario with quite a big reputation as a comic. My Frosch, in Die Fledermaus, is known all over the operatic world. So presumably I’m cast as Sir Dagonet to get some comedy into the opera. But how? I haven’t a single comic bit to sing. So something has to be introduced, you see, Watty? Some comic relief? I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and I’ve found just the place. Finale of Act One, when Arthur is haranguing the Knights about the wonders of Knighthood. It’s heavy. Lovely music, of course, but heavy. So—that’s surely where we bring in the comic relief. Now what’s it to be—my Blurt or my Sneeze?”
“I don’t follow,” said Watty.
“Haven’t you seen me? They’re my two best laugh-getters. When Arthur’s going on about Knighthood, couldn’t I have a cup of wine? Then, just at the right moment, I give ’em my Blurt. I choke on the wine and spew a lot of it over the people near by. Never fails. Or, if that’s a bit too strong, there’s my Sneeze—just a simple, loud sneeze, you see—to relieve the atmosphere. My Blurt is really a comic extension of my Sneeze, and of course I don’t want to obtrude, so the Sneeze might be best. But you ought to hear my Blurt before you make a decision. I’d like to know now, you see, before we go into rehearsal on the floor, so I can be thinking about it and tailor my Blurt—or my Sneeze—to come in just at the right moment. Because timing is everything in comedy, as I’m sure you know.”
“You must talk to Mr. Powell,” said Watty. “I have nothing to do with the staging.”
“But you see my point?”
“I don’t want to be obtrusive, you understand; I just want to bring what I can to the ensemble.”
“It’s Mr. Powell’s department.”
“But may I say which you think best? The Blurt or the Sneeze?”
“I have no opinion. It’s not my department.”
It was an astonishment to Arthur and Maria, and to Darcourt as well, that Watty played from a full orchestral score, instructing the singers what they might expect to hear as they sang, and when they were momentarily silent; the singers worked from sketchy music, giving their vocal line and a hint or two of orchestration; the preparation of all this music, which was in Schnak’s wondrous hand, had cost a small fortune.
At the musical rehearsals Dr. Dahl-Soot was present, but not a voice. She spoke to no one but Watty, and very quietly. She whispered now and then to Schnak, who was her shadow, learning her craft—learning eagerly and rapidly.
The first general rehearsal took place in a dirty, ill-lit basement room in the Conservatory. It smelled of the economical lunches that had been consumed there for years by students; there was a pervasive atmosphere of bananas in their last stages of edibility, mingled with peanut butter. There was not much space, for there were three sets of timpani stored there, and in a corner an assembly of double-bass cases with nothing in them, like a conference of senators.
“How are we going to work here?” said Nutcombe Puckler. “There isn’t room to swing a cat.”
“Will you all please sit down,” said Gwen Larking. “There are chairs for everybody.”
“As this is a new work,” said Powell to the group, “and because the libretto offers some complexities, I want to begin today by reading through all three acts.”
“No piano,” said Nutcombe Puckler, who had a fine grasp of the obvious, as became an opera comic.
“Not a musical reading,” said Powell. “You all know your music—or you should—and we won’t sing for a day or two. No; I want you simply to read the words, as if this were a play. The librettist is with us, and he will be glad to clear up any difficulties about meanings.”
The company was in the main an intelligent one, perhaps because it was not what conventional critics would call a company of the first order. The singers were, upon the whole, young and North American; though they had all had plenty of opera experience they were not accustomed to the usages of the greatest opera theatres of the world. Reading held no terrors for them. There were one or two, of whom Nutcombe Puckler was the leader, who could not see any reason to speak anything that could possibly be sung, but they were willing to give it a try, to humor Powell, in whom they sensed a man of ideas who knew what he was doing. Some, like Hans Holzknecht, who was to sing the role of Arthur, did not read English with ease, and Miss Clara Intrepidi, who was to be Morgan Le Fay, stumbled over words that she had sung with no difficulty in her rehearsals with Watty. The one who read like an actor—an intelligent actor—was Oliver Twentyman, and the best of the group found that by Act Two they were trying, with varying success, to read like Oliver Twentyman.
If the company was youthful in the main, Oliver Twentyman balanced matters by being old. Not astronomically old, as some people insisted; not in his nineties. But he was said to be over eighty, and he was one of the wonders of the operatic world. His exquisitely produced, silvery tenor was always described by critics as small, but it had been heard with perfect clarity in all the great opera theatres of the world, and he was a favourite at Glyndebourne and several of the more distinguished, smaller American festivals. His particular line of work was characters of fantasy—Sellem in The Rake’s Progress, the Astrologer in Le Coq d’Or, and Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It had been a great coup to get him for Merlin. His reading of his part in the libretto was a delight.
“Marvellous!” said Powell. “Ladies and gentlemen, I beg you to take heed of Mr. Twentyman’s pronunciation of English; it is in the highest tradition.”
“Yes, but are not the vowels very distorted?” said Clara Intrepidi. “I mean, impure for singing. We have our vowels, right? The five? Ah, Ay, Ee, Oh, Oo. Those we can sing. You would not ask us to sing these impure sounds?”
“There are twelve vowel sounds in English,” said Powell; “and as it is a language which I myself had to acquire, not being born to it, you must not think me prejudiced. What are those vowels? They are all in this advice:
Who knows ought of art must learn
And then take his ease.
Every one of the twelve sings beautifully, and none gives such delicacy as the Indeterminate Vowel which is often a ‘y’ at the end of a word. ‘Very’ must be pronounced as a long and a short syllable, and not as two longs. I am going to nag you about pronunciation, I promise you.”
Miss Intrepidi pouted slightly, as though to suggest that the barbarities of English speech would have no effect on her singing. But Miss Donalda Roche, an American who was to sing Guenevere, was making careful notes.
“What was that about knowing art, Mr. Powell?” she said, and Geraint sang the vowel sequence for her, joined by Oliver Twentyman, who seemed, with the greatest politeness, to wish to show Miss Intrepidi that there were really twelve differentiated sounds, and that none of them were describable as impure.
On the whole, the singers enjoyed reading the libretto, and the day’s work showed clearly which were actors who could sing, and which singers who had learned to act. Marta Ullmann, the tiny creature who was to sing the small but impressive role of Elaine, came out very well with
No tears, no sighing, no despair
No trembling, dewy smile of care
No mourning weeds
Nought that discloses
A heart that bleeds;
But looks contented I will bear
And o’er my cheeks strew roses.
Unto the world I may not weep,
But save my Sorrow all, and keep
A secret heart, sweet soul, for thee,
As the great earth and swelling sea.
But it was not quite such a good moment when Donalda Roche and Giles Shippen tried to read, in unison,
O Love!
Time flies on restless pinions
Constant never:
Be constant
And thou chainest time forever.
Nor was Miss Intrepidi the celebrated audience-tamer she was reputed to be when faced with her words to the villain Modred:
I know there is some maddening secret
Hid in your words (and at each turn of thought
Comes up a skull) like an anatomy
Found in a weedy hole, ’mongst stones and roots
And straggling reptiles, with his tongueless mouth
That tells of Arthur’s murder.
But Miss Intrepidi was a real pro, and having made a mess of her words she cried, “I’ll get it; don’t worry—I’ll get it!” and Powell assured her that nobody had the least doubt she would.
When the reading was completed, late in the afternoon, Gunilla spoke to the company for the first time.
“You see what our Director is doing?” she said. “He wants you to sing words, not tones. Anybody can sing the music; it takes an artist to sing the words. That’s what I want, too. Simon Darcourt has found us a brilliant libretto; Hulda Schnakenburg has realized a fine score from Hoffmann’s notes, and we must think of this opera as, among other things, an entirely new look at Hoffmann as a composer; this is music-drama before Wagner had put pen to paper. So—sing it like early Wagner.”
“Ah—Wagner!” said Miss Intrepidi. “So now I know.”
All of this, and the careful rehearsals which followed—on the floor, as Powell said, meaning that he was planning the moves and when necessary the gestures of the singers—was victuals and drink to the Cranes. (They were always referred to as the Cranes, though Mabel took pains to explain that she was still Mabel Muller, and had sacrificed nothing of her individuality—though she had obviously sacrificed her figure—in their spiritual union.) Al cornered and buttonholed everybody, and made himself conspicuous in his desire not to be obtrusive. He was on the prowl to capture and note down every motivation, and the notes for the great Regiebuch swelled to huge proportions. Oliver Twentyman was a Golconda to Al.
Here was tradition! Twentyman had, in his young days, sung with many famous conductors, and his training had become legendary in his lifetime. He had worked, when not much more than a boy, with the great David ffrangcon-Davies, and repeated to Al many of that master’s precepts. More wonderful still, he had worked for three years with the redoubtable William Shakespeare—not, he explained to the gaping Al, the playwright, but the singing-teacher, who had been born in 1849 and had worked with many of the great ones until his death in 1931—who had always insisted that singing, even at its most elaborate, was based upon words, upon words, upon words.
“It’s like a dream!” said Al.
“It’s a craft, my boy,” said Nutcombe Puckler, who was still waiting for a decisive word about the Blurt, or possibly just the Sneeze. “And never forget the funny stuff. Wagner hadn’t much use for it; he thought Meistersinger was a comic opera, of course, and you should have seen my Beckmesser in St. Louis a few years ago! I stopped the show twice!”
Al was a special nuisance to Darcourt. “This libretto—some of it gets close to poetry,” he said.
“That was the idea,” said Simon.
“Nobody would take you for a poet,” said Al.
“Probably not,” said Darcourt; “when are you expecting the baby?”
“That’s a worry,” said Al. “Sweetness is getting pretty tired. And worried, too. We’re both worried. We’re lucky to be sharing this great experience, to take our minds off it.”
Mabel nodded, hot, heavy, and dispirited. She longed for the move to Stratford, out of the terrible, humid heat of a Toronto summer. As she lay on the bed in their cheap lodgings at night, while Al read aloud to her from the macabre tales of Hoffmann, she sometimes wondered if Al knew how much she was sacrificing to his career. As women have wondered, no doubt, since first mankind was troubled by glimmerings of what we now call art, and scholarship.
“Will you give my feet a rub, Al? My ankles are killing me.”
“Sure, Sweetness, just as soon as we finish this story.”
Why, he wondered, was Sweetness crying when, twenty minutes later, he got around to rubbing her feet?
(11)
ETAH IN LIMBO
What an amusing drama life is when one is not obliged to be one of the characters! No, no; that sounds like Kater Murr! But I have enjoyed myself more in the past few weeks than at any time since my death. Homer was quite wrong about the gloomy half-life of the dead. The remoteness, the removal, of my afterlife is vastly agreeable. I see all the people who are preparing my opera; I comprehend their feelings without needing to share them painfully; I applaud their ambitions and I pity their follies. But as I am wholly unable to do anything about them, I am not torn by guilt or responsibility. It is thus, I suppose, that the gods view humankind. (I apologize if, by speaking of “the gods” in the plural, I am being offensive to whatever awaits me when I move into the next phase of my afterlife.) Of course, the gods could intervene, and frequently did so, but not always happily from a human standpoint.
The trials of Powell and Watkin Bourke are very familiar to me. How often have I wrangled with singers who thought Italian was the only language of song, and who cried down our noble German as barbarous. Of course they made exquisite sounds, some of them, but they had a limited range of meanings for their sounds; Italian is a dear language and we owe much to it, but our northern tongues are richer in poetic subtlety, in shadows, and shadows were the essence of my work both as composer and as author. How I have struggled with singers whose one desire was to “vocalize”—a word that had just come into fashion and seemed to them the height of elegance and musical refinement. How deliciously they yelled when one wished that they should utter some meaning! How pressingly they would urge me to change German words to others with which they could make a prettier sound! And how incomprehensible was the word that lay ravaged at the bottom of any sound they made, as they roared, or cooed, or squalled, or sobbed with such richness of inane musicality! “Gracious lady and supreme artist,” I would say to some fat bully of a soprano, “if you pronounce the word on the tone no louder than you could speak it, it will be sound enough, and replete with significance that will ravish your hearers.” But they never believed me. Nothing encourages self-esteem like success as a singer.
And why not? If you can stir an audience to its depths with your A altissimo, what need you care for anything else?
Or if you can make an audience laugh, is it surprising if you cease to care how? This man who wants to sneeze, or blurt his wine in somebody’s face, is different only in kind from the Jack Puddings of my time. With them all comedy was rooted in sausage; give them a sausage to eat and they would undertake to keep a sufficient part of the audience in roars of mirth for five minutes; allow them to add an onion to the sausage and it was eight minutes. How sad such merriment is! How divorced from the Comic Spirit!
I am becoming devoted to Schnak. Devoted, that is to say, only as a spirit may be; she is cleaner since the Swedish woman seduced her, but she is without charm. It is her musical genius that enslaves me. Yes, genius is the word I shall use. By that word I mean that she will have enough individual quality to impose herself upon the music of her time as a truly serious artist, and she may achieve fame, even if it follows her death. After all, Schubert is now known as a genius of the first order, yet when I became aware of his work very few people in my part of Germany had heard of him, and he did not survive me by more than five years. Of all the music I know, Schnak’s, working on the foundations I laid down, most resembles that of Schubert. When she has done it best, our work together has that melancholy serenity, that acceptance of the pathos of human life, that speaks of Schubert. Dr. Dahl-Soot knows it, but the others say the music is like Weber, because they know that Weber was my friend.
That strange ass Crane is tracing all the music to Weber. He is one of those scholars who is certain that everything in art is laboriously derived from something that came before it. Much as I admired Weber, I never saw a Weber score to which I would willingly have signed my own name.
Poor Schubert, dying slowly, as I did, and of what was essentially the same disease. Nobody, so far as I know, has found out why that disease causes one man to die a driveller and a horror, and another to compose, in his last year, three of the supreme pianoforte sonatas in all the realm of music.
I should not be hard on Crane. Perhaps he is worrying about that baby, or his swollen woman, Mabel Muller. There is an erotic unction about Al that must not be ignored. Mabel, poor wretch, must be ranked low on the list of the victims of art.
There are other victims, of course, and, from my point of view, greater ones. I am sad for the Cornishes, Arthur and Maria. They long so humbly to be counted among the artists, but they are not given even the artistic status accorded to Nutcombe Puckler. Without meaning to be cruel, the artists, and even those novices in art, the gofer girls, reject them because they do not appear to be doing anything, although it is their money that is the underpinning of the whole affair. Not doing anything, when every day they write fat cheques for this, that, and the other? Writing those cheques because they truly love art and wish it to prosper! Writing those cheques because they would sing if they could, or paint their faces and join the crowd on the stage!
I sometimes saw people like them in the theatres where I worked as Powell works now. Wealthy merchants, or minor nobility, who footed the bills, and not always to gain a place in the ranks of society but because they so greatly loved those things that they could not do. A patron has one of two courses: he may domineer and spoil the broth by insisting on too much salt or pepper; or he may simply do what God has enabled him to do, and that is to pay, pay, pay! I was as bad as anyone in my time. I kissed hands, bowed low, and paid compliments, but I eagerly wished them all in hell, because they were underfoot when my work was being done. Seeing myself as my own creation, the master-musician Johannes Kreisler, I scorned my patrons and saw in them nothing but the disciples of the odious Kater Murr! As if there were no self-seeking among artists! I wish I could comfort Arthur and Maria, who feel the subtle cold of the artists’ scorn, but placed as I am, I cannot do it.
I can see, however, that their fate is different, and who may hope to escape his fate? They are living out, in a comic mimesis, the fate of Arthur and Guenevere, but to be ruled by a comic fate is not to feel oneself as a figure of comedy. It is their fate to be rich, and to seem powerful, in a world of art where riches are not of first importance, and their power is unavailing.
Like all the others, I long for the move to Stratford.