The Lyre of Orpheus

by Robertson Davies

  So the Tarot cards were brought out, in their fine tortoise-shell box, and Mamusia shuffled them deftly. Carefully, too, for they were a fine old pack and somewhat limp with age.

  “The nine-card deal, I think,” said she.

  At her bidding Darcourt cut the deck, which had been reduced to the picture cards; he began by setting aside four cards, face down; then he put the top card in the middle of the table. It was the Empress, ruler of worldly fortune and a strong card to stand at the heart of the prediction. The next card he drew went to the left of the Empress, and it was Force, the handsome lady who is subduing a lion by tearing open its jaws, apparently without any special effort on her part. Above the Empress went the Lover, and Mamusia’s quick eye saw a change in Maria’s face. Next card, placed on the right of the Empress, was the Female Pope, the Great Mother. Last card, to go below the Empress, made Darcourt wince, for it was the Death card, the dreadful skeleton which is scything up human bodies. He hated the Death card, and hesitated.

  “Down it goes,” said Mamusia. “Don’t worry about it until you see what it means. Turn up your oracle cards.”

  These were the four that had been set aside, and they were the Tower of Destruction, at the top, the card of Judgement, next in order, the Hermit, and last of all, the Fool.

  “How do you like it?” said Mamusia.

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Don’t be afraid because there are some dark cards. Look at the Empress, who can get you men out of any mess you can make. This is a very womanly hand of cards you have found, and lucky for you, because men are awful bunglers. Look at Strength, or Force, or whatever you want to call her; is she just brute force, like a man’s? Never! She is irresistible force and she does not get it from being a man, let me tell you. And this High Priestess—this Female Pope. Who do you suppose she is? It’s a fine spread.”

  “I can never see that Death card without shuddering.”

  “Pooh! Everybody shudders at the Death card, because they don’t think what it means. But you—a priest! Doesn’t Death mean transfiguration, change, turning the whole spread into something else—and you tell us into something better? And look at your oracle cards. The Tower—well probably somebody will take a tumble; it would be queer if they didn’t considering what you tell me about your Foundation. And Judgement. Who escapes it? But look at the Hermit—the man who lives alone—that sounds like you, Priest Simon. And most powerful of all—the Fool! What’s the Fool’s number in the pack?”

  “The Fool has no number.”

  “Of course not! The Fool is zero! And what is zero? Power, no? Put zero to any number and in a wink you increase its power by ten. He is the wise joker who makes everything else in the hand conditional, and he is in the place of greatest power. The Empress and the Fool govern the spread, and with the Tower of Destruction in the first place among the oracles that probably means that there will be a lot of—what’s the word—is it higgledy-piggledy? Lots of upsets and turn-arounds—”

  “Topsy-turveydom,” said Maria.

  “Is that the word?”

  “Topsy-turveydom seems all too likely,” said Darcourt.

  “Don’t fear it! Love it! Give it the big kiss! That’s the way to deal with destiny. You gadje are always afraid of something.”

  “I didn’t ask you about my own fate, Madame, but about this venture of the Foundation’s. They are my friends and I am worried on their behalf.”

  “No use worrying on anybody else’s behalf. They must take care of themselves.”

  “Are you going to explain the spread?”

  “Why? It looks clear enough. Topsy-turveydom. I like that word.”

  “Would you consider associating the Empress, the guardian woman, with Maria?”

  Mamusia went into one of her infrequent fits of laughter; not the cackling of a witch, but a deep, gutty ho-hoing. Darcourt had been mistaken if he expected her to relate her daughter to any figure of power.

  “If I try to explain, I will just confuse you, because I am not at all sure myself. Your Fool-zero could be your Round Table, or that Fool-zero my son-in-law; I love him pretty well, I suppose, but he can be a Fool-zero as much as anybody else, when he gets too high and mighty. And that Great Mother, that High Priestess, could be your Platter of Plenty who can dish it out—but can she take it? I don’t know. It could be somebody else, somebody new in your world.”

  “Couldn’t Arthur be the Lover?” said Maria and was vexed to find herself blushing.

  “You want him to be that, but the card is in the wrong place. Life is full of lovers, for people whose minds are set on love.”

  Darcourt was disappointed and worried. He had seen Mamusia discourse on a spread of cards many times, and never had she been so reluctant to speak about what she saw, what she felt, what her intuition suggested. It was not common for her to ask somebody else to lay out the cards; did that mean something special? He began to wish he had not asked Maria to bring him to the Gypsy camp in the bottom of her apartment house, but as he had done so he wanted something from the oracle that was positive, even if in small measure. He talked, he coaxed, and at last Mamusia relented a little.

  “You must have something, eh? Something to lean on? It’s reasonable, I suppose. Three things come to me that I would be very careful about, if I had dealt this hand for myself. The first is, be careful how you give money to this child.”

  “To Schnak, you mean?”

  “Awful name. Yes, to Schnak. You tell me she has great talent as a musician. I know a lot about musicians; I’m one myself. I used to be greatly admired in Vienna, before I married Maria’s father. I sang and played the fiddle and the cimbalom and danced my way into hundreds of hearts. Rich men gave me jewels. Poor men gave me what they couldn’t afford. I could tell you—”

  “Hold your gab!” said Yerko, who had been busy with the plum brandy. “Priest Simon doesn’t want to hear you blow your horn.”

  “Yes, yes, Mamusia,” said Maria, “we all know how wonderful you used to be before you became even more wonderful as you are now. You could break hearts still, if you wanted to be cruel. But you don’t, dear little mother. You don’t.”

  “No. You have embraced your fate as a phuri dai,” said Darcourt, “and become a very wise woman and a great help to us all.”

  The flattery worked. Mamusia liked to be thought a wonderful old woman, although she could not have been far over sixty.

  “Yes, I was wonderful. Perhaps I am even more wonderful now. I’m not ashamed to speak the truth about myself. But this Schnak—keep her short. You people on Foundations ruin a lot of artists. They need to work. They thrive on hunger and destruction. So keep this child from going on the streets, but don’t drown her talent with money. Keep her short. Be careful the Platter of Plenty doesn’t become the instrument of destruction.”

  “And the second thing?”

  “Not clear at all, but it looks as if some old people, dead people, were going to say something important. Funny-looking people.”

  “And the third?”

  “I don’t know if I should say.”

  “Please, Madame.”

  “These things have nothing to do with the cards. They are just things that come to me. This third one comes very, very strong; it came when you were shivering over the Death card. I don’t think I should say. Perhaps it was something just for me, not for you.”

  “I beg you,” said Darcourt. He knew when the seeress wanted to be coaxed.

  “All right. Here it is. You are wakening the little man.”

  Mamusia had a strong sense of the dramatic, and it was plain that this was the end of the session. So, after protestations of gratitude, and astonishment, and enlargement—there could never be too much unction for Mamusia—Darcourt and Maria returned to the penthouse and whisky, of which the abbé drank more than he intended, though less than he wanted.

  Whatever Mamusia might say, he hated the Death card and it soured his feeling toward the whole of the prediction.
He knew how stupid that was. If the prediction had been all positive he would have accepted it happily, at the same time retaining in another part of his mind a patronizing feeling toward the Tarot and all Gypsy vaticination. To put full trust in a sunny future would be un-Canadian, as well as unworthy of a Christian priest. But now, when he had been shown fear by the cards, that other part of his mind told him he was a fool to play King Saul, and resort to wizards who peep and mutter. Christian priest that he was, he deserved to suffer for his folly, and suffer he did.

  The three random predictions he liked even less. He did not believe that artists should be kept short of money. Fat cats hunt better than lean. Don’t they? Does anyone know? Poverty was not good for anybody. Was it? As for utterances by funny-looking people, he felt no response at all.

  But—Wakening the little man? What little man?

  The little man he knew best was his own penis, for that was what his mother had called it. Always keep the little man very clean, dear. Later he had heard it called the old man, by friends of his days as a theological student, for to those jokers it meant the Old Man, or Old Adam, whom the Redeemed Man was bidden to cast out. As a bachelor whose sexual experience, for a man of his age, had been sporadic and slight, he suffered frequent reminders from the little man that there was a side of his nature that was not being given enough attention.

  His physical desire for Maria had never been overwhelming, but it was a fretting element in his life. When they met she kissed him, and he rather wished she wouldn’t because it aroused inadmissible longings. But had they not agreed, when he had proposed marriage to her, that they should be friends? It had possessed deep meaning for him then, and their friendship was one of the fostering things in his life, but he was aware that there was a farcical side to it. We are just good friends. Wasn’t that what people said when they were denying insinuations of a love affair in the press? Oh, intolerable torment! Oh, frying lust—yet not a lust that would drive him to shoot Arthur and carry Maria away to a love-nest in the East. Oh, farce of priesthood, which demanded so much that was unnatural, but failed to give the strength to banish worldly desires! Oh, misery of being the Reverend Professor Simon Darcourt, Vice-Warden of Ploughwright College, professor of Greek, a Fellow of the Royal Society, who was, in the most pressing areas of his life, a poor fish!

  You are wakening the little man. Maria’s mother saw through him like a pane of glass. It was ignominious. Oh, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin! Oh hell!

  (6)

  ETAH IN LIMBO

  You are wakening the little man—as if the Little Man had ever been asleep! No, no, this Little Man has been wide awake in Limbo, for ever since I died I have been aware of people reading what I wrote about music, and now and then seeing Undine, my best completed opera, on the stage, and never forgetting my tales of wonder where, the critics say, the fantastic meets the everyday. The Little Man has certainly not been gnawing his nails because of earthly neglect.

  Mine was a life of better than merely respectable achievement, but I died with one thing left undone that should have been done. That was the completion of my opera Arthur of Britain, in which it would have been plain to the stupidest that my apprenticeship as a composer was finished, and that I had written a masterwork. Yes, a masterwork at least as good as, and perhaps better than, the best of my dear friend Weber. But it was not to be; I had barely laid the keel of that work before I was cut down, laid out, polished off, not suddenly, but at some wretched length. It was my own doing, I admit it freely. I was unwise in my life. I emptied my purse too readily, playing the great gentleman with my health and talents. So I was cut off untimely, and that is why I find myself now in Limbo, in that part of it reserved for those artists and musicians and writers who never fully realized themselves, never quite came to the boil, so to speak. Limbo: not the worst of hereafters, for it is free of the chains of space and time, and permits its denizens a great deal of versatility and, shall I say it, some posthumous influence?

  Still, not to be too delicate about it, Limbo is a bore. Should I complain? My fate is not the worst. There are artists and writers and scholars here who have had two thousand years of neglect, and would be grateful if some candidate for a Doctor of Philosophy degree would stumble on their work and seize it with joy, as material that nobody has hitherto pawed over and exhausted. The dullest thesis—and that is saying much—may be enough to release an artist from Limbo and allow him to go—we don’t really know where, but we hope for the best, because to people like ourselves, used to a creative life, boredom is punishment enough. When we were good children of the Church, some of us, we heard about sinners who roast on beds of coals, or stand naked in Siberian hurricanes. But we were not sinners. Just artists who, for one reason or another, never finished our work on earth and so must wait until we are redeemed, or at least justified, by some measure of human understanding. Heavenly understanding, it appears, is what brings us to Limbo; we never really did our best and that is a sin of a special kind, though not, as I say, the worst.

  Can this be my great chance? Is this extraordinary waif Schnak to be my deliverer? I must not build my hopes too high. I did that when, however long ago it was, that curious French-German-Jew Jacques Offenbach took some of my stories as the basis for his last piece, Les Contes d’Hoffmann (thank you, Jacques, for giving my name such prominence), but it proved not to be the sort of work that gets a man out of Limbo. Tuneful, mind you, and reasonably skilled in orchestration (thank God he controlled his impulse to use the bass drum too much), but Offenbach had spent too much time writing opéra bouffe to be happy with the real thing. And he had too much French humour, which can be fatal to music. I always keep my own sense of humour, which is German and therefore deeper than his, in check when I am composing. After a man has died he understands what a betrayer of great things humour can be, when it is not in the Shakespearean or Rabelaisian mode. I am glad to see that this child Schnak has no sense of humour whatever, though she is pretty well stocked with scorn and derision, which pass for humour with stupid people.

  Is this my great chance? I must do everything I can to help. I shall stand at Schnak’s shoulder and push her in the right direction, so far as I can. So all those crazy guys grab her, do they? Crazy guys like Weber, and Schumann, I suppose. What about that magnificently sane guy Mozart, whose name I took as an act of homage? Is Schnak biting off more than she can chew? Schnak is going to need luck, or she will simply make a mess of my hastily scribbled intentions. I must be Schnak’s Luck. Her greatest luck would be not to find that terrible libretto, in which that ass Planché was in a fair way to make a mess of Arthur when I died. Same trouble as Offenbach; too much sense of humour—English this time—too much experience of what would “go” in the theatre—meaning what “went” last time and which the public was beginning to be tired of. Again, I thank God that Schnak knows nothing about the theatre and has no sense of humour. If it is possible to keep her from those two plagues I shall be at hand to do it.

  Did I really die in order to save my opera from Planché’s dreadful libretto? Even now I cannot tell. There are limits to what one can know about one’s former life, even in Limbo.

  Why did the old woman, the seeress, tell that well-meaning fellow Darcourt, and her lovely but uncomprehending daughter, that they were wakening the little man, as if that were something that should not be done? I am very happy to be awakened in this way. Luckily Darcourt thinks she meant his pizzle, egotistical jackass that he is. But does the old woman know something I cannot know, placed as I am? Is it likely?

  By God, I am thoroughly awake, and I shall not rest until I have seen this thing through to the end. Then, if my luck enables me to be Schnak’s Luck, I may have a chance to sleep eternally, my work accomplished.

  2

  As a group of Schnak’s professors assembled in the auditorium of the Faculty of Music to see the film After Infinity, Simon Darcourt heard a good deal more about Hulda Schnakenburg than he had known before, and it surpris
ed him. Her bad manners toward the Dean had no relation to the work she did for her instructors; they admitted, with reluctance, that it was of unusual quality. Were her exercises grubby, asked Darcourt, remembering the letter she had sent to the Cornish Foundation. No indeed; they were notably clean, clear, and almost—they hated to use the word—elegant in their musical calligraphy. As a student of harmony, counterpoint, and analysis she was exemplary, and her flights into electronic music, environmental music, and any sort of noise that could be evoked from any unusual source were admitted to be innovative, when they could be distinguished from mere racket.

  It was even agreed that she had a sense of humour, though not a pleasant one. She caused a sensation with a serenade she had composed for four tenors whose larynxes had been constricted to the point of strangulation with adhesive tape; there had been some cautious approval from professors who had not noticed that its performance took place on April 1. Her manners were admitted to be dreadful, but instruction in manners was not part of the Faculty’s job. Nevertheless, it was agreed that Schnak went rather too far. As one professor, who had some recollection of the music-hall of an earlier day, sang in Darcourt’s ear,

  It ain’t exactly what she sez—

  It’s the nasty way she sez it!

  She had qualified beyond question for her Master of Music, and her reputation as a brat and a nuisance had nothing to do with the matter—apart from making her disliked and even feared by some members of the Faculty.

  Predictably Schnak had not chosen to appear at Convocation, properly gowned and dressed to receive her degree at the hands of the Chancellor. She rejected all such ceremonial, or suggestion of a rite de passage, with her favourite term of disapproval. Shit. But she had set to work immediately on preparations for her doctorate, and when autumn came, and she presented herself at the seminars in Romantic Themes in Nineteenth-Century Opera, Traditional Compositional Techniques, and History of Performance Practice, she had already done more reading than most of the other students would do during the year to come, and she threw herself into the obligatory work on Composition and Theory Research with what would have looked like enthusiasm in someone else, but seemed more like angry zealotry in Schnak.