The Lyre of Orpheus

by Robertson Davies

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

  “You think so?”

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

  “I’m not so sure.”

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

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

  “What a man for secrets you are.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “What a strong soup! Gypsy, is she?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “If you like.”

  “I do like.”

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

  “Not so old. But rough.”

  “I have a fancy for rough women.”

  “Good. And now what about cognac?”

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

  (4)

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

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

  “Did he tell you so?”

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

  “He was distressed.”

  “And you comforted him?”

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

  “So you know all about it?”

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

  “And you are going to scold me?”

  “No.”

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

  “Then why have you come to me?”

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

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

  “But you think I’ve behaved badly.”

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

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

  “Would it have made a difference?”

  “You simply don’t understand what happened.”

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

  “Oh, so you know that, do you?”

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

  “Arthur wasn’t frank.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Then I won’t pay.”

  “Rather break up your marriage?”

  “It wouldn’t come to that.”

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

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

  “You think that’s what he’d do?”

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

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

  “I suppose so.”

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

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

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

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

  “Aha.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Which is—?”

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

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

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

  “And now you know why.”

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

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

  “How can you ask?”

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

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

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

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

  “Tell me.”

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

  “A mythical tale?”

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

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

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

  “Something about people wishing to be deceived?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Had nothing led up to that?”

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

  “So Wally Crottel seemed to think.”

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

  “Not unusual, I suppose.”

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

  “And it was Arthur?”

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

  “All very much according to Hoyle.”

  “Yes.”

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

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

  “And did he take you as Arthur?”

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

  “He didn’t speak?”

  “Not a word. He didn’t need to.”

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

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Come on, Maria. That won’t do.”

  “Well—yes and no.”

  “But you didn’t protest.”

  “Does one protest at such a time?”

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

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

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

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

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

  (5)

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