The Lyre of Orpheus

by Robertson Davies

  “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.”

  “Can’t be done.”

  “Why not?”

  “I haven’t got it.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “Threw it away.”

  Now Darcourt was really horrified.

  “You what?” he roared.

  “I thought it was done with. I put it down the garbage chute.”

  “Maria! And you call yourself a scholar! Haven’t you learned rule number one of scholarship: never, under any circumstances, throw anything away?”

  “What was the use of it?”

  “You know the use of it now! You’ve delivered yourself, bound and gagged, into this man’s hands. How can you prove the book was worthless?”

  “If he goes to court, you mean? We can call some of those publishers who turned it down. They’ll say what it was.”

  “Oh, yes; I can hear it now. ‘Tell me, Mr. Ballantyne, when did you read the book?’ ‘Mmm? Oh, I don’t read books myself. I turned it over to one of my editors.’ ‘Yes, and did your editor present you with a written report?’ ‘That wasn’t necessary. She took a look and said it was hopeless. Just what I suspected. I took a quick peep into it myself, of course.’ ‘Very well, Mr. Ballantyne, you may stand down. You see, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, there is no evidence that the book was given serious professional attention. Are masterpieces of what is called le roman philosophe to be assessed in this casual way?’—That’s the kind of thing, Maria, that you’ll hear until every one of your publisher witnesses has trotted in and out of the witness-box. Crottel’s lawyer can assert anything he likes about this book—a philosophical masterwork, a sulphurous exposure of sexual corruption in high places—anything at all. He will say that you and Clem Hollier were professionally jealous of Parlabane, and depreciated his talent for the trivial reason that he was a self-confessed murderer. The lawyer will positively sing to the harp about Genêt, the criminal genius, and tie him up in pink string with Parlabane. Maria, you have put your foot in it right up to the hip.”

  “You’re not being very helpful, Simon. What do we do next?—Can’t we get rid of Crottel? Fire him, perhaps?”

  “Maria, you numbskull! Haven’t you understood that under our splendidly comprehensive Charter of Rights it is practically impossible to fire anybody—particularly not if they are making your life a misery? Crottel’s lawyers would crucify you.—Look, child, you need the best legal advice, and at once.”

  “Well, where do we get it?”

  “Please don’t talk about ‘we’ as if I were somehow involved in this mess.”

  “Aren’t you my friend?”

  “Being your friend is a very taxing experience.”

  “I see. A fair-weather friend.”

  “Stop being feminine. Of course I’m with you. But you must let me have my grievance. Do you think I haven’t enough trouble with this bloody opera scheme of Arthur’s? It’s enough to drive me mad! Do you know what?”

  “No. What?”

  “We’ve gone ahead much too fast. We’ve undertaken to back Schnak—I haven’t met Schnak but I hear ominous things about her—in putting this sketch for an opera together, and naturally I wanted to see what these Hoffmann papers consist of. It should have been done earlier, but Arthur has rushed ahead. So I had a look. And do you know what?”

  “I wish you’d stop asking me if I know what. It’s illiterate and unworthy of you, Simon. Oh, don’t sulk, sweetie.— Well, what?”

  “Only this. There’s no libretto. Only a few words to suggest what ought to go with the music. That’s what.”

  “So—?”

  “So a libretto has to be found, or else provided. A libretto in the early-nineteenth-century manner. And where is that to come from?”

  It seemed to Maria that the time had come to get out the whisky. She and Darcourt rolled and wallowed in their problems till after midnight, and although Maria had only one drink, Simon had several, and she had to push him into a taxi. Fortunately it was after midnight, and the night porter had gone off duty.

  (4)

  SIMON DARCOURT HAD A BAD NIGHT, and in the morning he had a hangover. He endured something more than the layman’s self-reproach. He was drinking too much, no doubt about it. He refused to think of it in the modern sociological term as “a drinking problem”; he told himself that he was becoming a boozer, and of all boozers the clerical boozer was the most contemptible.

  Excuses? Yes, plenty of them. Wouldn’t the Cornish Foundation drive a saint to the bottle? What a pack of irresponsible blockheads! And headed by Arthur Cornish, who was thought in the financial world to be such a paragon of good judgement. But, provocation or no provocation, he must not become a boozer.

  This business of Parlabane’s alleged son could be a nuisance. After a queasy breakfast, which he made himself eat because not eating was one of the marks of the boozer, he put through a call to a man who was a private detective, and owed him a favour, for Simon had pushed and pulled his promising son toward a B.A.; the man had connections that were very useful. Then he talked on the telephone to Dean Wintersen, not stressing his worry about the missing libretto, but probing to see what the Dean knew. The Dean was reassuring. Probably the relevant papers had been mislaid or temporarily catalogued under another name, possibly that of the librettist himself, who was thought to be James Robinson Planché. Neither the Dean nor Darcourt knew who Planché was, but they sparred in the accustomed academic manner to find out what the other knew, and worked up a cloud of unknowing which, again in the a
cademic manner, seemed to give them comfort. They arranged a time when Darcourt could meet Miss Hulda Schnakenburg.

  When that time came, Darcourt and the Dean cooled their heels in the many-windowed office for twenty minutes.

  “You see what I mean,” said Wintersen. “Don’t think I would put up with this from anyone else. But as I told you, Schnak is special.”

  Special, it seemed to Darcourt, in a disagreeable way. At last the door opened, and in she came and sat down without waiting to be asked or greeted, saying, “She said you wanna see me.”

  “Not I, Schnak, but Professor Darcourt. He represents the Cornish Foundation.”

  Schnak said nothing, but gave Darcourt a look of what might have been malignance. She was not as unusual as he had expected, but certainly she was unusual in a Dean’s office. It was not simply that she was sloppy and dirty; lots of girls thought such an appearance obligatory because of their principles, but they were sloppy and dirty in the undergraduate fashion of their time. Schnak’s dirt was not a sign of feminine protest, but the real thing. She looked filthy, ill, and slightly crazed. Her dirty hair hung in hanks about a face that was sharp and rodent-like. Her eyes were almost closed in squinting suspicion, and on her face were lines in improbable places, such wrinkles as one does not often see today, even on ancient crones. Her dirty sweater had once been the property of a man, and was ravelled out at the elbows; below she wore dirty jeans, again not the fashionable dirt of rebellious youth, which has a certain coquetry about it; these were really dirty and even disgusting, for there was quite a large yellow stain around the crotch. Her dirty bare feet were thrust into worn-out running shoes without laces. But this very dirty girl was not aggressively dirty, as if she were a bourgeoise making some sort of statement; there was nothing striking about her. If it is possible to say so, Schnak was distinguished only by her insignificance; if Darcourt had met her on the street he would probably not have noticed her. But as someone on whom large sums of money were to be risked she struck chill into his heart.

  “I suppose the Dean has told you that the Cornish Foundation is giving serious thought to presenting your enlargement of the Hoffmann score as a stage piece, Miss Schnakenburg?” he said.

  “Call me Schnak. Yeah. Sounds crazy, but it’s their dough.” The voice was dry, rebarbative.

  “True. But you realize that without your full co-operation it could not be done?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The Foundation could count on that?”

  “I guess so.”

  “They’ll want better assurance than a guess. You are still a minor, aren’t you?”

  “Naw. Nineteen.”

  “Young for a doctoral candidate. I think I should talk with your parents.”

  “Fat lot of good that’ll be.”

  “Why?”

  “They don’t know shit about this stuff.”

  “Music, you mean? I’m talking about responsibility. We must have some guarantee that you will do what you say. I’d want their agreement.”

  “Their idea of a musician is a church organist.”

  “But you think they would agree?”

  “How the hell should I know what they’ll do? I just know what I’ll do. But if it’s money they’ll probably go for it.”

  “The Foundation is considering a grant that would pay all your expenses—living, tuition, whatever is necessary. Have you any idea what the amount might be?”

  “I can live on nothing. Or I could develop some expensive habits.”

  “No, Miss Schnakenburg, you couldn’t. The money would be carefully supervised. I would probably supervise it myself and anything that looked like the kind of expensive habit you hint at would conclude the agreement at once.”

  “You told me you had stopped all that nonsense, Schnak,” said Wintersen.

  “Pretty much. Yeah. I haven’t really got the temperament for it.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” said Darcourt. “Tell me, as a matter of interest, would you pursue this plan—this opera plan—if you did not get the grant?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But I understand that you have been exploring very modern paths in composition. Why this enthusiasm for the early nineteenth century?”

  “It kinda grabs me, I guess. All those crazy guys.”

  “Well then, tell me how you would support yourself if this grant were not forthcoming?”

  “Job of some kind. Anything.”

  Darcourt had had enough of Schnak’s indifference. “Would you consider, for instance, playing the piano in a bawdy-house?”

  For the first time Schnak showed some sign of animation. She laughed, dustily. “That dates you, prof,” she said. “They don’t have pianos in bawdy-houses any more. It’s all hi-fi and digital, like the girls. You oughta go back and take another look.”

  Important rule of professorcraft: never show resentment at a student insult—wait and get them later. Darcourt continued, silkily.

  “We want you to have freedom to get on with your work, so you needn’t worry about jobs. But have you considered all the problems? There doesn’t seem to be much of a libretto to go with these scraps of music, for one thing.”

  “Not my problem. Somebody would have to fix it up. I’m music. Just music.”

  “Is that enough? I’m no expert on these things, but I would have imagined that the completion of an opera that exists only as sketches and rough plans would call for some dramatic enthusiasm.”

  “That’s what you’d imagine, is it?”

  “Yes, that’s what I’d imagine. You force me to remind you that nothing has been concluded about this matter. If your parents don’t stand behind you, and if you are so indifferent to the money and the encouragement it implies, we’re certainly not anxious to force it on you.”

  Wintersen intervened. “Look, Schnak, don’t play the fool. This is a very big chance for you. You want to be a composer, don’t you? You told me so.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then get this through your skull: the Cornish Foundation and the Faculty are offering you such a chance, such a springboard toward a career, such a shortcut to important attention, as very great people in the past would have given ten years of life to have. I’m telling you again: don’t play the fool.”

  “Shit.”

  Darcourt decided the time had come for a strategic loss of temper, a calculated outburst.

  “Look here, Schnak,” he said, “I won’t be talked to in that way. Remember, even Mozart got his arse kicked when he couldn’t be civil. Make up your mind. Do you want our help or don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t yeah me, young woman. Yeah what?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “No. I want the magic word. Come on, Schnak—you must have heard it somewhere in the distant past.”

  “Please—I guess.”

  “That’s more like it. And keep it that way from now on. You’ll be hearing from me.”

  When Schnak had gone, the Dean was genial. “I enjoyed that,” he said. “I’ve wanted to talk to Schnak like that for months, but you know how cautious we have to be with students nowadays; they’re very quick to complain to the Governors that they’re being harassed. But money still gives power. Where did you learn your lion-taming technique?”

  “As a young parson I was a curate in some very tough parishes. That girl isn’t nearly as tough as she wants us to think. She doesn’t eat enough, and what she eats is junk. I suppose she has been on drugs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if now she was on the booze. But there’s something about her I like. If she’s a genius, she’s a genius in the great romantic tradition.”

  “That’s what I hope.”

  “I think Hoffmann would have liked her.”

  “I’m not very well up on Hoffmann. Not my period.”

  “Very much in the great romantic tradition. As a writer, he was one of its German inspirers. But there are aspects of the great romantic tradition we can do without, nowadays. Schnak wil
l have to learn that.”

  “Will she learn it from Hoffmann? Doesn’t sound like the teacher I would choose.”

  “Who would you choose? Have you got the supervisor you want?”

  “I’ll be talking with her by long-distance tomorrow. I’ll be as persuasive as I can and it may take time. I suppose I send the phone bill to you?”

  That remark assured Darcourt that the Dean was an old hand at dealing with foundations.

  (5)

  DARCOURT KNEW THAT, although he had compelled Schnak to say “please”, it was no more than a nursery victory. He had made the bad child behave herself for a moment, but that was nothing. He was deeply worried about the whole matter of Arthur of Britain.

  He grumbled a lot, but he was a faithful friend, and he did not want the Cornish Foundation to fall flat on its face in its first important venture in patronage. News of Arthur’s grandiose ambitions were sure to leak out, not from Foundation directors, but from Arthur himself; he would not leak to the press intentionally, but the worst leaks are unintentional. Arthur was riding very high; he was making no secret of his wish to do what other Canadian foundations did not do; he was turning a deaf ear to proven good causes and worthy projects and if he fell, there would be a grand, eight-part chorus of “We told you so” from the right-minded. Arthur was prepared to risk large sums on what were no more than hunches, and that was un-Canadian, and the country that longed for certainties would not forgive him. It made no difference that the money was not public money; in an age when all spend-ing is subjected to ruthless investigation and criticism, any suggestion that large sums were being employed capriciously by a private ciizen would inflame the critics who, though not themselves benefactors, knew exactly how benefaction ought to be managed.

  Why did Darcourt worry so about Arthur? Because he did not want Maria to be drawn into public rebuke and criticism. He still loved Maria, and remembered with gratitude that she had refused him as a suitor, and offered friendship instead. He still suffered from the lover’s idea that the loved one should be, and could be, protected from the vicissitudes of fortune. In a world where everybody gets their lumps, he did not want Maria to get any lumps. If Arthur made a goat of himself, Maria would loyally suppose herself to be a nannygoat. But what could he do?