The Lyre of Orpheus
( The Cornish Trilogy - 3 )
Robertson Davies
The Cornish Foundation is thriving under the directorship of Arthur Cornish when Arthur and his beguiling wife, Maria Theotoky, decide to underetake a project worthy of Francis Cornish, whose vast fortune endows the Foundation. The remarkably unattractive, extraordinarily talented music student Hulda Schnakenburg is commissioned to complete E.T.A. Hoffmann’s unfinished opera Arthur of Britain, or The Magnanimous Cockold; and the scholarly priest Simon Darcourt finds himself charged with writing the libretto.
Complications both practical and emotional arise: the gypsy in Maria’s blood rises with a vengence; Darcourt stoops to petty crime; and various others indulge in perjury, blackmail, and other unsavory pursuits. Hoffmann’s dictum, “the lyre of Orpheus opens the door of the underworld,” seems all too true—especially when the long-hidden secrets of Francis Cornish himself are finally revealed.
The Lyre of Orpheus is the third novel in the Cornish Trilogy.
Robertson Davies
The Lyre of Orpheus
The lyre of Orpheus opens the door of the underworld.
E. T. A. Hoffmann
I
1
Arthur, who had a masterly way with meetings, was gathering this one together for a conclusion.
“Are we agreed that the proposal is crack-brained, absurd, could prove incalculably expensive, ad violates every dictate of financial prudence? We have all said in our different ways that nobody in his right mind would want anything to do with it. Considering the principles to which the Cornish Foundation is committed, are these not all excellent reasons why we should accept the proposal, and the extension of it we have been discussing, an8d go ahead?”
He really has musical flair, thought Darcourt. He treats every meeting symphonically. The theme is announced, developed in major and minor, pulled about, teased, chased up and down dark alleys, and then, when we are getting tired of it, he whips us up into a lively finale and with a few crashing chords brings us to a vote.
There are people who cannot bear to come to an end. Hollier wanted more discussion.
“Even if, by a wild chance, it succeeded, what would be the good of it?” he said.
“You have missed my point,” said Arthur. “I am simply speaking as a responsible member of the Cornish Foundation.”
“But my dear Clem, I am urging you to speak as a member of a special sort of foundation with unusual aims. I am asking you to use your imagination, which is not what foundations like to do. I am asking you to take a flyer at an extreme outside chance, with the possibility of unusual gains. You don’t have to pretend to be a business man. Be what you are—a daring professor of history.”
“I suppose if you put it like that—”
“I do put it like that.”
“But I still think my question is a good one. Why should we present the world with another opera? There are lots of operas already, and people busily writing them in every square mile of the civilized world.”
“Because this would be a very special opera.”
“Why? Because the composer died before he had gone very far with it? Because this girl Schnak-whatever-it-is wants to get a doctorate in music by completing it? I don’t see what’s special about that.”
“That’s reducing the whole plan to the obvious.”
“That’s leaving out the heart of it. That’s forgetting our proposal to mount the finished opera and offer it to the public,” said Geraint Powell, a theatre man with a career to make, who already looked on himself as the person to get the opera on the stage.
“I think we should bear in mind the very high opinion of Miss Schnakenburg that is expressed by all her supporters. They hint at genius and we are looking for genius, aren’t we?” said Darcourt.
“Yes, but do we want to get into show business?” said Hollier.
“Why not?” said Arthur. “Let me say it again: we have set up the Cornish Foundation with money left by a man who was a great connoisseur, who took all kinds of chances, and we have to decide what sort of foundation it is to be. And we’ve done that. It’s a foundation for the promotion of the arts and humane scholarship, and this plan is both art and scholarship. But haven’t we agreed that we don’t want another foundation that gives money to good, safe projects, and then stands aside, hoping for good, safe results? Caution and non-intervention are the arthritis of patronage. Let’s back our choices and stir the pot and raise some hell. We’ve already made our obeisance to safety; we’ve established our good, dull credentials by getting Simon here to write a biography of our founder and benefactor—”
“Thank you, Arthur. Oh, many, many thanks. This estimate of my work is more encouragement than I can accept without blushes.” Simon Darcourt knew too well that the biographical job was not as easy as Arthur seemed to think, and strongly aware also that he had not so far asked for or received a penny for the work he had done. Simon, like many literary men, was no stranger to feelings of grievance.
“Sorry, Simon, but you know what I mean.”
“I know what you think you mean,” said Darcourt, “but the book may not be quite such a dud as you imagine.”
“I hope not. But what I am getting at is that the book may cost a few thousands, and, without being by any means the richest foundation in the country, we have quite a lot of money to dispose of. I want to do something with a bit of flash.”
“It’s your money,” said Hollier, still determined to be the voice of caution, “and I suppose you can do as you please.”
“No, no, no, and again no. It isn’t my money; it’s Foundation money and we are all directors of the Foundation—you Clem, and you Simon, and you Geraint, and, of course, Maria. I am simply the chairman, first among equals, because we have to have a chairman. Can’t I persuade you? Do you really want to be safe and dull? Who votes for safety and dullness? Let’s have a show of hands.”
There were no votes for safety and dullness. But Hollier had a sense of having been pushed aside by totally unfair rhetoric. Geraint Powell didn’t like meetings and wished this one to be over. Darcourt felt he had been snubbed. Maria knew well how right Hollier was and that the money was really Arthur’s money, in spite of all legal fictions. She knew that it most certainly wasn’t her money, even though, as Arthur’s wife, she might be supposed to have some extra pull.
She had not been married very long, and she loved Arthur dearly, but she knew that Arthur could be a great bully when he wanted something, and he wanted passionately to be a vaunting, imaginative, daring patron. He is a bully just as I suppose King Arthur was a bully when he insisted to the Knights of the Round Table that he was no more than the first among equals, she thought.
“Are we agreed, then?” said Arthur. “Simon, would you draw up a resolution? It doesn’t have to be in final form; we can tidy it up later. Have you all got drinks? Isn’t anybody going to eat anything? Help yourselves from the Platter of Plenty.”
The Platter of Plenty was a joke, and, as jokes will, it had become a little too familiar. It was a large silver epergne that stood in the middle of the round table at which they sat. From a central, richly ornamented pedestal it extended curving arms at the end of which were little plates of dried fruits and nuts and sweets. A hideous object, thought Maria, unjustly, for it was a fine thing of its kind. It had been a wedding gift to Arthur and herself from Darcourt and Hollier and she hated it because she knew it must have cost them a great deal more than she supposed they could afford. She hated it because it seemed to her to embody much of what she disliked about her marriage—needless luxury, an assumption of a superiority based on wealth, a sort of grandiose uselessness. Her passion
ate desire, after making Arthur happy, was to gain a reputation for herself as a scholar, and big money and big scholarship still seemed to her to be irreconcilable. But she was Arthur’s wife, and as nobody else took anything from the epergne she took a couple of nuts, for the look of the thing.
As Darcourt worked over the resolution, the directors chatted, not altogether amicably. Arthur was flushed, and Maria was aware that he was speaking rather thickly. It couldn’t be that he had drunk too much. He never did that. He had taken a chocolate from the Platter of Plenty, but it seemed to have a bad taste, and he spat it into his handkerchief.
“Will this do?” said Darcourt. “ ‘It was resolved that the meeting should comply with the request made jointly by the Graduate Department of the Faculty of Music and Miss Hulda Schnakenburg for support to enable Miss Schnakenburg to flesh out and complete the manuscript notes now reposing in the Graduate Library (among the musical MSS left in the bequest of the late Francis Cornish) of an opera left incomplete at his death in 1822 by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, the work to be done in a manner congruous with the operatic conventions of Hoffmann’s day and for such an orchestra as he would have known; this to be done as a musicological exercise in partial fulfilment of the requirements for Miss Schnakenburg’s attainment of the degree of Doctor of Music. It was further resolved that if the work proved satisfactory the opera should be mounted and presented in public performance under Hoffmann’s title of Arthur of Britain. This part of the proposal has not yet been communicated to the Faculty of Music or Miss Schnakenburg.’ “
“It’ll be a nice surprise for them,” said Arthur, who took a sip of his drink, and then set it down, as if it were disagreeable.
“A surprise, no doubt,” said Darcourt. “Whether a nice surprise is open to doubt. By the way, don’t you think we ought to give the work its full title in the minutes?”
“Is there more than Arthur of Britain?” said Geraint.
“Yes. In the fashion of his day Hoffmann suggested a double title.”
“I know the kind of thing,” said Geraint; “Arthur of Britain, or—something. What?”
“Arthur of Britain, or The Magnanimous Cuckold,” said Darcourt.
“Indeed?” said Arthur. The bitterness in his mouth seemed to be troubling him. “Well, I don’t suppose we need to use the full title if we don’t need it.”
Again he spat into his handkerchief, as unobtrusively as he could. But he need not have troubled, because at the announcement of the full title of the opera nobody was looking at him.
The three other directors of the Foundation were looking at Maria.
2
The day after the meeting, Simon Darcourt was interrupted, just as he sat down to his day’s work, by a telephone call from Maria; Arthur was in hospital with mumps, which the doctors called parotitis. They had not told Maria what Darcourt knew: mumps in the adult male is not trivial, because it causes painful swelling of the testicles, and can do permanent damage. Arthur would be out of commission for some weeks, but he had mumbled to Maria through his swollen jaws that he wanted the work of the Foundation to go on as fast as possible, and she and Darcourt were to take care of it.
How like Arthur! He had in the highest degree the superior business man’s ability to delegate responsibility without relinquishing significant power. Darcourt had known him since the death of his friend Francis Cornish; Francis’s will had made Darcourt one of his executors, to act beneath the overriding authority of Francis’s nephew Arthur, and it had been apparent at once that Arthur was a born leader. Like many leaders he was rough at times, because he never thought about anyone’s feelings, but there was nothing personal in it. He was Chairman of the Board of the huge Cornish Trust, and was admired and trusted by people who dealt in big money. But, apart from his business life, he was cultivated in a way not common among bankers; genuinely cultivated, that is to say, and not simply benevolent toward the arts as a corporation duty.
His rapid establishment of the Cornish Foundation, using his Uncle Frank’s large fortune to do it, was proof of his intention. Arthur wanted to be a patron on a grand scale, for the fun and adventure. There could be no doubt that the Foundation was his. For the look of the thing he had set up a board to administer it, but whom had he invited to join it? Clement Hollier, because Maria had been his student and had a special affection for him. And what had Hollier proved to be? A great objector, a determined looker-on-the-other-hand whose reputation as a scholar in the realm of medieval history did little to mitigate his gloomy insufficiency as a human being. Geraint Powell was Arthur’s own choice, reputedly a rising man in the theatre, with all the exuberance and charm of the breed, who backed up Arthur’s most extravagant ideas with his Welsh superficiality. And Maria, Arthur’s wife; dear Maria, whom Darcourt had loved, and loved still, perhaps the more poignantly because there was no longer the least danger that he would ever have to play the full role of a lover, but could slave for his lady in a condition of mild romantic dejection.
These were Darcourt’s estimates of his colleagues on the Foundation. What did he think about himself?
To the world he knew he was the Reverend Simon Darcourt, a professor of Greek, much respected as a scholar and teacher; he was the Vice-Warden of Ploughwright College, an institution for advanced studies within the university; there were people who thought him a wise and genial companion. But Arthur called him the Abbé Darcourt.
What is an abbé? Was it not a title used for several centuries to describe a clergyman who was really an educated upper servant? Your abbé ate at your table, but had a small room off your palace library where he slaved away as a confidential secretary, intermediary, and fixer. Abbes on the stage or in novels were great fellows for intrigue and amusing the ladies. It is a category of society that has disappeared from the modern world under that name, but the world is still in need of abbés, and Darcourt felt himself to be one of them, but was not pleased that Arthur had put his finger on the matter so plainly.
It is to be presumed that abbés in an earlier day had salaries. Darcourt’s canker was that he received no salary from the Foundation, although he was its secretary and, as he put it to himself, worked like a dog on its behalf. Nevertheless, as he received no salary, he felt that his independence was secure. Independent as a hog on ice, he thought, in one of the Old Loyalist Ontario expressions which popped up, unbidden, in his mind when least expected. But if his university work were not to suffer, he had to slave away day and night, and he was a man to whom a certain amount of ease and creative lassitude is a necessity.
Creative lassitude, not to doze and dream but to get matters arranged in his head in the best order. This life of Francis Cornish, for instance; it was enough to drive a man mad. He had accumulated a mass of detail; he had passed an expensive summer in Europe, finding out what he could about Francis Cornish’s life in England, where it appeared he had been something-or-other in the Secret Service, about which the Secret Service maintained a blandly closed mouth. Francis had, of course, played an important part in the work of restoring looted works of art to their original owners, in so far as that could be done. But there had been something else, and Darcourt could not find out what it was. Before the Second World War Francis had been up to something in Bavaria which sounded fishier and fishier the more Darcourt dug into it, but the fish could not be hooked. There was a huge hole, amounting to about ten years, in the life of Francis Cornish, and somehow Darcourt had to fill that hole. There was a lead, possibly a valuable one, in New York, but when was he to find time to go there, and who would foot the bill? He was tired of spending what were to him large sums of money to get material for a book that Arthur treated as a matter of small consequence. Darcourt was determined that the book should be as good and as full as it was in his power to make it, but after a year of investigation he felt thoroughly ill-used.
Why did he not simply state his case and say that he had to be paid for his services, and that the writing of the book was costing him mor
e money than he could ever expect to recover from it? Because that was not the light in which he wished to appear to Maria.
He was a fool, he knew, and rather a feeble fool, at that. It is no comfort to a man to think of himself as a feeble fool, secretary to a dummy board of directors, and burdened with an exhausting task.
And now Arthur had mumps, had he? Christian charity required that Darcourt should be properly regretful, but the Old Harry, never totally subdued in him, made him smile as he thought that Arthur’s balls were going to swell to the size of grapefruit, and hurt like the devil.
The day’s work called imperiously. After he had done some college administration, interviewed a student who had “personal problems” (about a girl, of course), taken a seminar in New Testament Greek, and eaten a sufficient but uninteresting college lunch, Darcourt made his way to the building where the Graduate Faculty of Music existed in what looked, to the rest of the university, like unseemly luxury.
The Dean’s office was handsome, in the modern manner. It was on a corner of the building and two walls were entirely of glass, which the architect had meant to give the Dean a refreshing prospect of the park outside, but, as it also gave passing students a splendid view of the Dean at work, or perhaps in creative lassitude, he had found it necessary to curtain the windows with heavy net so that the office was rather dim. It was a large room, and the decanal desk was diminished by the piano and the harpsichord—the Dean was an expert on baroque music—and the engravings of eighteenth-century musicians that hung on the walls.
Dean Wintersen was pleased that money would be forthcoming to support the research work and reasonable living expenses of Miss Hulda Schnakenburg. He became confidential.
“I hope this solves more than one problem,” said he. “This girl—I’d better call her Schnak because everybody does and it’s what she seems to like—is greatly gifted. The most gifted student, I would say, that we’ve ever had in my time or in the memory of anybody in the faculty. We get lots of people here who will do very well as performers, and a few of them may go to the top. Schnak is something rarer; she may be a composer of real gift. But the way she is going now could land her in a mess, and perhaps finish her!”
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