The Lyre of Orpheus tct-3

by Robertson Davies

  “Eccentricity of genius?” said Darcourt.

  “Not if you’re thinking of picturesque behaviour and great spillings of soul. There is nothing picturesque about Schnak. She is the squalidest, rudest, most offensive little brat I have ever met as Dean, and I’ve dealt with some lulus, let me tell you. As for soul, I think she would strike you if you used the word.”

  “What ails her?”

  “I don’t know. Whoever does know? Background the essence of mediocrity. Parents utterly commonplace. Father a watch-repairer for one of the big jewellery stores. A dull, grey fellow who seems to have been born with a magnifying-glass in his eye. Mother a sad zero. The only thing that singles them out at all is that they are members of some ultra-conservative Lutheran group, and they never stop saying that they have given the girl a good, Christian upbringing. And what have they brought up? A failed anorexic who never washes her hair or anything else, snarls at her teachers, and habitually bites the hand that feeds her. But she has talent, and we think it is the real, big, enduring thing. Just now she’s on the uttermost extreme thrust of all the new movements. The computer stuff and the aleatory stuff is old hat to Schnak.”

  “Then why does she want to do this work on the Hoffmann notes? That sounds like antiquarian stuff.”

  “That’s what we all want to know. What makes Schnak want to fling herself back more than a hundred and fifty years to complete an unfinished work by a man we generally write off as a gifted amateur? Oh, Hoffmann had a few operas performed in his lifetime, but I’m told they are run-of-the-mill. In music he has a reputation as a critic; he praised Beethoven intelligently when nobody else did. Schumann thought a lot of him, and Berlioz despised him, which was a kind of inverted praise. He inspired a lot of far better talents. A literary man, I suppose one would say.”

  “Is that a bad thing to be? Mind you, I only know him through that opera—you know, Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann. It’s a Frenchified version of three of his stories.”

  “Odd that it’s another unfinished work; Guiraud pulled Offenbach’s score together after his death. Not a favourite of mine.”

  “You’re the expert, of course. As a mere happy opera-goer I like it very much, though it’s not often intelligently done; there’s more in it than meets the eye of most opera directors.”

  “Well, the puzzle of why Schnak wants to take on this job can only be solved by her. But we on the faculty are pleased, because it fits nicely into musicological research and we’ll be able to give her a doctorate for it. She’ll need that. With her personality she needs every solid qualification she can get.”

  “Are you trying to coax her away from her ultra-modernity?”

  “No, no; that’s fine. But for a doctoral exercise something more readily measurable is better. This may steady her, and make her more human.”

  Darcourt thought this was the moment to tell the Dean about the Cornish Foundation’s plan to present the revived and refreshed opera as a stage piece.

  “Oh, my God! Do they really mean that?”

  “They do.”

  “Have they any idea what it might mean? It could be such a flop as operatic history has never known—and that’s saying a lot, as you probably know. I know she’ll do a good job, but only so far as the material permits. I mean—cosmetic work on the orchestration, and reorganization and pulling-together and general surgery can only go so far. The Foundation, the Hoffmann basis, may not support anything the public could possibly want to see.”

  “The Foundation has voted to do it. I don’t have to tell you that eccentricity isn’t confined to artists; patrons can suffer from it too.”

  “You mean it’s a bee in the bonnet.”

  “I’ve said nothing. As secretary of the Foundation I am just telling you what they intend. They know the risks, and they are still prepared to put a good deal of money into the project.”

  “They’ll have to. Have they any idea what mounting a full-scale new opera, that nobody knows or has studied, could run to?”

  “They’re game for it. They leave it to you, of course, to see that Schnak delivers the goods—in so far as there are any goods to deliver.”

  “They’re mad! But don’t think I’m quarrelling with anybody’s generosity. If this is what’s in the cards, Schnak will need supervision on the highest level we can manage. A musicologist of great reputation. A composer of some distinction. A conductor who has wide experience of opera.”

  “Three supervisors?”

  “Just one, if I can get the one I want. But with a lot of money I think I can coax her.”

  The Dean did not say who he meant.

  3

  The week after arthur fell ill, Maria could do no work at all.

  Ordinarily she had much to keep her busy. Her marriage had temporarily interrupted her academic career, but she had once again taken up her thesis on Rabelais, though marriage made it seem less pressing—she would not say less important—than before. And she had a great deal to do on behalf of the Cornish Foundation. Darcourt thought he was overworked, but Maria had her own burden. It was she who first read all the applications for assistance, and it was tedious work. The applicants seemed to want to do the same few things—write a book, publish a book, edit a manuscript, show their paintings, give a concert of music, or simply to have money to, as they always put it, “buy time” to do any of these things. Probably many of these requests were worthy, but they did not fit into Arthur’s notion of the Cornish Foundation, and it was Maria who wrote polite personal notes advising the applicants to look elsewhere. Of course there were the visionaries, who wanted to dam and dredge the Thames to discover the foundations of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre; or who wanted to establish a full-scale carillon de Flandres in every provincial capital in Canada and endow the post of carillonneur; or who wanted to be supported while they painted a vast series of historical pictures showing that all the great military commanders had been men of less than average stature; or who yearned to release some dubiously identified wreck from the Arctic ice. These had to be discouraged firmly. Borderline cases, and they were many, she discussed with Darcourt. The few proposals that might appeal to Arthur were sifted from the mass, and circulated to all the members of the Round Table.

  The Round Table was a joke Maria did not like. Of course the Foundation met at a circular table which was a handsome antique and had perhaps, two or three centuries ago, served as a rent-table in the workroom of some aristocrat’s agent; it was the most convenient table for their purpose in the Cornishes’ apartment. Geraint Powell insisted that, as Arthur presided over this table, it had some jokey association with the great British hero. Geraint knew a lot about the Arthurian legend, though Maria suspected that it was coloured by Geraint’s lively fancy. It was he who insisted that Arthur’s determination that the Foundation should take an unusual and intuitive path was truly Arthurian. He urged his fellow directors to “press into the forest wherever we saw it to be thickest” and would emphasize it by repeating, in what he said was Old French, là où ils la voient plus expresse. Maria did not like Geraint’s theatrical exuberance. She was in flight from exuberance

  of another sort, and, like a real academic, she was wary of people outside the academic world—”laymen” they called them—who seemed to know a lot. Knowledge was for professionals of knowledge.

  Sometimes Maria wondered if this administrative work was what she had married Arthur to do, but she dismissed the question as foolish. This was what came immediately to hand, and she would do it as what marriage seemed require of her. Marriage is a game for adult players, and the rules in every marriage are different.

  As the wife of a very rich man, she could have become “a society woman”—but what does that mean in a country like Canada? Social life in the old sense of calls, teas, dinners, weekends, or fancy-dress parties was utterly gone. The woman who has no gainful job devotes herself to good causes. There are plenty of dogsbody jobs associated with art and music which wealthy volunteers ar
e graciously permitted to do by the professionals. There is the great Ladder of Compassion, on which the community arranges a variety of diseases in order of the social prestige they carry. The society woman slaves on behalf of the lame, the halt, and the blind, the cancerous, the paraplegic, those variously handicapped, and, of course, the great new enthusiasm, AIDS. There are also the sociologically pitiable: the battered wives, battered children, and the raped girls, who seem to be more numerous than ever before, or else their plight is more often revealed. The “society woman” shows herself concerned with society’s problems, and patiently fights her way up the Ladder of Compassion through a net of committees, convenorships, vice-presidencies, presidencies, past presidencies, and government investigatory bodies. For some there waits, after years of work, a decoration in the Order of Canada. Now and again she and her husband eat an absurdly expensive dinner in the company of their peers, but not for pleasure; no, no, it is to raise money for some worthy cause, or for “research”, which has the prestige that belonged, a century ago, to “foreign missions”. The possession of wealth brings responsibilities; woe to the wealthy who seek to avoid them. It is all immensely worthy, but it is not much fun.

  Maria had an honourable escape from this charitable treadmill. She was a scholar, engaged in research of her own, and thus she justified her seat in the social lifeboat. But with Arthur seriously ill she knew precisely what she had to do: she had to sustain Arthur in every way she could.

  She visited Arthur as often and as long as the hospital would permit, chatting to a silent husband. He was very miserable, for the swelling was not only of his jaws; the doctors called it orchitis, and every day Maria lifted his sheets when the nurse was elsewhere, and grieved over the miserable swelling of his testicles, which gave him wretched pain in all the abdominal area. She had never seen him ill before, and his suffering made him dear to her in a new way. When she was not with him she thought about him too much to be able to do any other work.

  The world is no respecter of such feelings, and one day she had a visit that troubled her greatly. As she sat in her handsome study—it was the first workroom she had ever had that was entirely her own, and she had made it perhaps a little too fine—her Portuguese housekeeper came to tell her that a man was anxious to speak with her.

  “What about?”

  “He won’t say. He says you know him.”

  “Who is he, Nina?”

  “The night porter. The one who sits in the lobby from five till midnight.”

  “If it’s anything to do with the building, he should talk to Mr. Calder at the Cornish Trust offices.”

  “He says it’s private.”

  “Damn. Well, show him in.”

  Maria did not know him when he appeared. Out of his porters uniform he might have been anybody. He was a small, not very engaging person, with a shrinking air, and Maria disliked him on sight.

  “Good of you to see me, Mrs. Cornish.”

  “I don’t think I know your name.”

  “Wally. I’m Wally the night man.”

  “Wally what?”

  “Crottel. Wally Crottel. The name won’t mean anything to you.”

  “What did you want to see me about?”

  “Well, I’ll come right to it. You see, it’s about m’dad’s book.”

  “Has your father made an application to the Foundation about his book?”

  “No. M’dad’s dead. You knew him. You know the book. M’dad was John Parlabane.”

  John Parlabane, who had committed suicide more than a year ago, and had thereby hastened the courtship and marriage of Arthur Cornish. But when Maria looked at Crottel she could see nothing whatever of the stocky frame, the big head, the compelling look of malicious intelligence that had distinguished the late John Parlabane. Maria had known Parlabane far too well for her own comfort. Parlabane the runaway Anglican monk, the police spy, the drug-pusher, and parasite to the most disagreeable man she had ever known. Parlabane, who had intruded himself into her relations with her academic adviser and, as she had once hoped, lover, Clement Hollier. When Parlabane committed suicide, after having murdered his nasty master, Maria had thought she was rid of him forever, forgetting Hollier’s repeated warning that nothing is finished until all is finished. Parlabane’s book! This called for deep cunning, and Maria was not sure she had cunning of the right kind.

  “I never heard that John Parlabane had any children.”

  “It’s not widely known. Because of my ma, you see. For my ma’s sake it was kept dark.”

  “Your mother was a Mrs. Crottel?”

  “No, she was a Mrs. Whistlecraft. Wife of Ogden Whistlecraft, the great poet. You’ll know the name. He’s been dead for quite a while. I must say he was nice to me, considering he was not my real dad. But he didn’t want me to have his name, you see. He didn’t want any Whistlecrafts hanging around that weren’t the genuine article. Not of the true seed, he used to say. So I was raised under my ma’s maiden name, which was Crottel. I was supposed to be their nephew. An orphan

  nephew.”

  “And you think your father was Parlabane.”

  “Oh, I know that. My ma leaked it out. Before she passed away she told me Parlabane was the only man she’d ever had a first-class organism with. I hope you’ll excuse me mentioning it but that’s what she said. She became very liberated, you see, and talked a lot about the organism. Whistlecraft didn’t seem to have the knack of the organism. Too much the poet, I guess.”

  “Yes, I see. But what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

  “The book. M’dad’s book. The big important book he wrote that he left in your care when he passed away.”

  “John Parlabane left a mass of material to me and Professor Hollier. He left it with a letter when he killed himself.”

  “Yeah, but when he passed away he probably didn’t know he had a natural heir. Me, you see.”

  “I’d better tell you at once, Mr. Crottel, that the typescript John Parlabane left was a very long, somewhat incoherent philosophical work which he had tried to give special interest by including some disguised biographical material. But he had no skill with fiction. Several people who would know about such things read it, or as much of it as they could, and said it was unpublishable.”

  “Because it was too raw, wasn’t that it?”

  “I don’t think so. It was just incoherent and dull.”

  “Aw, now, lookit, Mrs. Cornish, m’dad was a very intelligent man. You’re not going to tell me anything he wrote was dull.”

  “That’s exactly what I am telling you.”

  “I heard there was some stuff in it about people high up—government people, some of them—in their youths, that they wouldn’t want the public to know about.”

  “I don’t remember anything like that.”

  “That’s what you say. I don’t want to be nasty, but maybe this is a cover-up. I heard a lot of publishers wanted it.”

  “Several publishers saw it, and decided they didn’t want it.”

  “Too hot for them to handle, eh?”

  “No. They simply didn’t see any way of making a book of it.”

  “You got letters saying that?”

  “Mr. Crottel, you are becoming very pressing. Now listen: the typescript of the book by the man you tell me, without showing me any evidence, was your father was left outright to Professor Hollier and me. And I have the letter that says so. We were to deal with it as we saw fit, and that is what we have done. That’s all there is to it.”

  “I’d like to see that book.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Well then, I guess I’ll have to take steps.”

  “What steps?”

  “Legal. I’ve been mixed up with the law, you know, and I know my rights. I’m an heir. Your right may not be as strong as you think.”

  “Take it to law, then, if you feel you must. But if you hope to get anything out of that book, I can tell you you’re in for a disappointment. I don’t think we have
anything more to say.”

  “Okay. Be like that if you want. But you’ll be hearing from my legal man, Mrs. Cornish.”

  It looked as if Maria had won. Arthur always said that if someone threatened legal action the thing to do was to tell them to see what it would get them. Such talk, he said, was probably bluff.

  But Maria was unhappy. When Simon Darcourt came to see her that evening she greeted him in a familiar phrase:

  “Parlabane is back.”

  It was an echo of what a lot of people had said, with varying degrees of dismay, two years earlier, when John Parlabane, garbed in the robes of a monk, had returned to the university. Many people remembered him and many more were aware of his legend, as a brilliant student of philosophy who had, years ago, left the university under a cloud—the usual cloud, that old, familiar cloud—and had banged about the world making trouble of several ingenious kinds. He turned up at the College of St. John and the Holy Ghost (familiarly “Spook”) as a runaway and renegade from the Society of the Sacred Mission, in England, and the Society showed no sign of wanting to get him back. Maria, Darcourt, and Hollier, and many others, hoped that his suicide about a year later—and the suicide note in which he confessed with glee to the murder of Professor Urquhart McVarish (monster of vanity and sexual weirdo)—had closed the chapter of Parlabane. Maria could not help reopening it with this theatrical flourish.

  Darcourt was satisfactorily astonished and dismayed. When Maria explained, he looked a good deal better.

  “The solution is simple,” he said. “Give him the typescript of the book. You don’t want it. Let him see what he can do with it.”