The Lyre of Orpheus

by Robertson Davies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Don’t be ashamed

  When the offensive ardour blows the charge

  —as the fellow says.”

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

  “The fellow in Shakespeare.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “But you think you know something relevant.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “No. Too dull for them,” said Maria.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Nobody would take it,” said Darcourt.

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

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

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

  “A pay-off, you mean?” said Hollier.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “On what grounds?”

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

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

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

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

  “Oh, can’t I, indeed?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Fiddlesticks!” he said.

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

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

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

  “Why me? Why not Professor Hollier?”

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