The Lyre of Orpheus

by Robertson Davies

  “I know what you are talking about.”

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

  “But you couldn’t stay true.”

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

  “Well—you may have a point there.”

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

  “Let’s hope so.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “She must have known your voice.”

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

  “Well, I’m damned.”

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

  “With two friends, surely?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You see it from the outside.”

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

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

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

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

  “My God, is that what you think?”

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

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

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

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

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

  (7)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Thanks very much.”

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

  “Why not right back to my father?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous!”

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

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

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

  (8)

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

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

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

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

  “Because the Cornishes are so very Kater Murr?”

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

  “Yes, of course.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Only because it is such a good joke.”

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

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

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

  “They have brought a feast, brother.”

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

  “They are going to give us money?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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