The Lyre of Orpheus

by Robertson Davies

  “Don’t be facetious.”

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

  “I’m listening.”

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

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

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

  “No Free Will, then?”

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

  “Preach, preach, preach!”

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

  “So what do I do?”

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

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

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

  “Maria has made Arthur Cornish a cuckold.”

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

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

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

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

  “And what does she see?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  (3)

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

  Her notion of conversation, however, was unconventional.

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

  “Why do you ask that?”

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

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

  “The Freudians think Don Juan really hated women.”

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

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

  “Oh, quite.”

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

  “Sorry to hear that.”

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

  “I’m sure.”

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

  “Not all names travel well.”

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

  “I didn’t know.”

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

  “Yes, yes.”

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

  “I know her well.”

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

  “About the libretto?”

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

  “I know. And are you?”

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

  “Very much denied?”

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

  “I’ve met them.”

  “True followers of Kater Murr.”

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

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

  “Indeed it is.”

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

  “All?”

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

  “I am not accusing you.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yes.”

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

  “Thank you.”

  “That silly woman does not help you?”

  “Certainly not so far.”

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

  “No, no; you are too flattering.”

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

  “What else could it be?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “It suggests that I am a crook.”

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

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

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

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

  “To secrecy,” said Darcourt.

  “So—who are you robbing?”

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

  “Pastiche!”

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

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

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

  “And now, Simon—who is it?”

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

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

  Let him lean

  Against his life, that glassy interval

  ’Twixt us and nothing:

  And upon the ground

  Of his own slippery breath, draw hueless dreams

 
And gaze on frost-work hopes.

  I felt cold when I read that.”

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

  “I wish very much I knew your poet.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Simple—and few.”

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

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

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

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

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