As biography goes, it was excellent, for biography has to rely heavily on some evidence but a great deal on speculation, unless there are diaries and family papers to provide firmer ground. But biography at its best is a form of fiction. The personality and sympathies of the biographer cannot be sifted out of what is written. Darcourt had no diaries. He had a handful of school reports from Francis’s Blairlogie schools, and from Colborne College, where he had gone at a later date; there were some lists and records of grades from the university days. Of what was personal there was little, but Darcourt had done wonders with what he had. Nevertheless, the book lacked a heart, to make it live. Did Princess Amalie have anything of that heart, however rheumatic or slow, that would give life to his book, and fill out the story of those years when, so far as he knew, Francis had messed about in Europe as an art student? Darcourt sometimes came near to desperation. A receipted bill from a bawdy-house would have filled him with gladness. Now, here was a chance, and a pretty good chance, to find information that would bridge that horrible gap between the aspiring young Canadian who had apparently gone into hiding after Oxford, and had emerged in 1945, when he was part of the commission that inspected pictures and works of art that had gone astray during the war, and were to be returned whenever possible to their original owners. The price of that information was crime. No other name for it—crime.
Darcourt did not hesitate from moral scruple. He was a clergyman, of course, though he lived as a professor of Greek; he still wore his Roman collar from time to time, but it had long ceased to be a fetter on his spirit. He now regarded himself as a biographer, and the scruples of a biographer are peculiar to the trade. Any hesitation he felt was not about how could he bring himself to steal, but how could he steal without being found out? “Prof Nabbed In NatGal Heist”—he could see the headlines in the gloating press. The exposure of a trial would be horrible. Of course he would not go to prison. Only tax-evaders go to prison nowadays. But he would be fined, and doubtless compelled to report monthly to a parole officer as to how he was getting on with his new job, teaching Latin for Berlitz.
How was it to be done? Sherlock Holmes, he recalled, sometimes solved crimes by thinking himself into the criminal mind, and thus discovering method, if not motive. But so far as he could adventure into the criminal mind, no solution to his problem occurred. Whenever he tried it, all that came up on the computer screen of his imagination was a picture of himself, wearing a black eye-mask, dressed in a turtleneck sweater and a slouch cap, emerging from the National Gallery carrying over his shoulder a large sack plainly marked SWAG. This was farce, and what he needed was a strong injection of elegant comedy.
Did he see himself then as a fictional figure, Darcourt the Clerical Cracksman? Beneath the sober dress of the cleric and the modest dignity of a professor of classics lurks the keen mind that plots thefts that baffle the keenest among the police—was that his character? Would that it might be so, but those smart crooks in fiction lived in a world where thought possessed absolute power, and careful plans never went wrong. Darcourt was well aware that he did not live in any such world. To begin with, he had discovered, now that he was well into middle age, that he did not know how to think. Of course he could pursue a logical path when he had to, but in his personal affairs his mental processes were a muddle, and he arrived at important conclusions by default, or by some leap that had no resemblance to thought, or logic, or any of the characteristics of the first-rate fictional criminal mind. He made his real decisions as a gifted cook makes soup: he threw into a pot anything likely that lay to hand, added seasonings and glasses of wine, and messed about until something delicious emerged. There was no recipe and the result could be foreseen only in the vaguest terms. Could one plan a crime like that?
To change the metaphor—he was always changing metaphors and trying not to mix them ludicrously—he ran off in the viewing-chamber of his mind scraps of film in which he saw himself doing various things in various ways until at last he found a plan of action. How was he to accomplish his crime?
It must be a twofold criminal job. To the best of his recollection, there were five drawings that were studies for the finished portrait of the Princess Amalie as a girl, in the large bundle of Francis Cornish’s Old Master portfolios, and those were what he had to abstract and take to New York. He knew that the portfolios had not been carefully examined, and certainly not catalogued, in the storage room where they lay at the National Gallery in Ottawa. But uncatalogued as they were, those drawings had probably been seen in what he hoped was a cursory inspection, and they would be missed. But would they be remembered in any detail? They had probably been numbered. Indeed, he had submitted a loose catalogue himself when, as Francis Cornish’s executor, he had sent that mass of material to Ottawa. “Pencil sketch of a girl’s head”—that sort of thing. Oh, if only the hasty, determined Arthur had not been so insistent that his uncle’s pictures and books and manuscripts and other valuable miscellany should be cleared out of his huge apartment and storehouse in Toronto in the shortest possible time! But Arthur had so insisted, and pinching pictures from a large public gallery was tricky work.
However—and a very big and hopeful “however” it was—a great mass of Francis Cornish’s personal papers had been sent to the University Library, and among those papers were pictures that seemed to Darcourt, when he bundled them up, to be of personal rather than artistic merit. Some were pictures that belonged to the Oxford period of Francis’s life, when he had been drawing from models as well as making copies of Old Master drawings in the Ashmolean Museum. Darcourt had assumed, without asking anybody for an opinion, that the National Gallery would not want such stuff, accomplished though much of it was. Could he make a switch? Could he sneak a few pictures from the Library and put them in the Gallery portfolios, and would anyone be the wiser? That seemed to be the solution to his problem, and all that remained was to decide how he might manage it.
The morning after the Round Table had met to hear Penny Raven read what existed of Planché’s libretto for Arthur of Britain, Darcourt was sitting in his dressing-gown gazing at his interior movie-show when he heard a spluttering, snorting, farting uproar in the street outside his study window, and he knew that it could only be the noise that Geraint Powell’s little red sports car made when it was brought to a halt. In a very short time there was a banging on his door that was certainly Powell, who brought a Shakespearean brio to quite modest daily tasks.
“Have you slept?” he said, as he pushed into the study, threw a heap of papers out of an armchair, and flung himself into it. The chair—a good one, which had cost Darcourt a lot of money in the shop of an antique pirate—creaked ominously as the actor lolled in it, one leg thrown over a delicate arm. There was about Powell a stagy largeness, and whatever he said was said with an actor’s precision of speech in an unusually resonant voice, from which the Welsh intonation had not wholly disappeared.
Darcourt said that no, he had not slept very much, as he had not come home until almost five in the morning. He had found the conversation, and hearing Undine, exciting and his rest had been scant. He knew, of course, that Powell wanted to tell him about his own rest, as now he did.
“I didn’t sleep a wink,” he said. “Not a wink. I have been turning this business over and over in my head and what I see before us is a gigantic obstacle race. Consider: we have no libretto, an unknown amount of music, no singers, no designs, no time reserved with all the artificers and carpenters and machinists we shall need—nothing but high hopes and a theatre. If this opera is not to be the most God-Almighty ballocks in the history of the art, we shall have to work day and night from now until it is on the stage, and at the mercy of those rapists and child-abusers, the critics. You think I exaggerate? Ha ha”—his laugh would have filled a large theatre, and it made the windows in Darcourt’s study ring—”From the depths of no trivial experience I assure you that I do not exaggerate. And upon whom are we depending, you and I? Eh? Upon whom are we dependin
g? Upon Arthur, the best of fellows but innocent as the babe unborn in all of this world we are entering with our hands tied behind our backs. Arthur is armed only with a fine managerial spirit and barrels of money. Who next? This kid whom I have never met who is to come up with an opera score, and her supervisor—the woman with the grotesque name, who is probably some constipated pedant who will take an eternity to get anything done. There’s Penny, of course, but she’s an outsider and I don’t know how far to trust her. Of the scholarly Professor Hollier I forbear to speak; his obvious inability to distinguish between his arse and his elbow—speaking theatrically—rules him out as anything but a pest, easily dealt with. What a gang!”
“You say nothing of Maria,” said Darcourt.
“I could speak cantos of rhapsodic verse about Maria. She is the blood of my heart. But of what use is she in such a situation as this? Eh? Of what conceivable use?”
“She is the strongest possible influence with Arthur.”
“You are right, of course. But that is secondary. Why did she not stop Arthur when he decided to embark on this rashest of rash enterprises?”
“Well—why didn’t you? Why didn’t I? We were swept away. Don’t underestimate the power of Arthur’s enthusiasm.”
“Once again, you are right. But then you are so often right. And that is why I am talking to you now. You are the only member of the Round Table who seems to have enough wits to come in out of the rain. Excepting myself, naturally.”
Darcourt’s heart sank. This sort of flattery usually meant that some time-consuming task that nobody else would undertake was going to be dumped on his desk. Powell went on.
“You are the man in the Cornish Foundation who gets things done. Arthur gets ideas. He shoots them off like rockets. The rest of us are hypnotized. But if anything really happens, you are the man who makes it happen, and you can patiently persuade Arthur to listen to common sense. You know what you are, boy? They call that thing the Round Table, and if it’s the Round Table who are you? Eh? No one but Myrddin Wyllt, the great king’s counsellor. Merlin, that’s who you are. You’ve seen it, of course. How could you miss it?”
Darcourt had not seen it. He wanted Powell to develop this idea, so flattering to himself, so he pretended ignorance.
“Merlin was a magician, wasn’t he?”
“He looked like a magician to those other morlocks at the Round Table because he could do something besides fight and play Chase the Grail. In every great legend there are a lot of heroes and one really intelligent man. Our Arthur’s a hero; people admire him and eat out of his hand. I suppose Hollier is a hero in his own way. I’m a hero, fatally flawed by intelligence. But you are no hero. You’re Merlin, and I want you to work with me to get this wild scheme into some sort of workable order.”
“Geraint—”
“Call me Geraint bach. It signifies friendship, understanding, complicity.”
“Bach? You mean as in Johann Sebastian Bach?”
“Old Johann Sebastian was born a German, but in spirit he was a Welshman. The word is a diminutive. It’s as if you were calling me Geraint, my darling, or Geraint, my pretty one. Welsh is a great language for intimacies and endearments. I’ll call you Sim bach. It will signify our nearness in spirit.”
Darcourt had never been aware of any special nearness of spirit between himself and Powell, but Powell was leaning forward in his chair, his lustrous eyes gleaming, and complicity coming out of him like heat out of a stove. Well, here goes, Simon thought. He could always retreat if the intimacy became outrageous.
“So what is it you want, Geraint bach?”
Powell spoke in a hiss. “I want a dramatis personae, a cast of characters, and I want it right away.”
“Well, I don’t suppose that presents insuperable problems. Even Planché had to agree that an opera about Arthur has to have Arthur somewhere in the cast. And if you have Arthur, you must have Queen Guenevere, and a few Knights of the Round Table. And Merlin, I presume. You can certainly count on the opera including those, whatever turn it may take.”
“Aha! You grasp it at once! I knew you would. You are a golden man, Sim bach. And you see what that means? We must have the Operatic Four. Soprano—Guenevere, of course, though I dislike that Frenchified version of the name. I always think of her as Gwenhwyfar. Much finer, you agree? But too difficult tor the thick-tongued English-speakers. Now—who’s your contralto? There has to be one, you know.”
“Oh, dear. Let’s see? Hm. Morgan Le Fay, do you think?”
“Of course! Arthurs wicked sister. A contralto, obviously. All wicked women in opera must have those rich, enchanting low notes. Now—who’s my tenor?”
“Surely Arthur himself?”
“No. Arthur must have authority. A baritone, I think. A fine, velvety bass-baritone. Make him both a tenor and a cuckold and you lose all sympathy, and Arthur must compel sympathy. But we need an even deeper bass for quartets as well as the plot.”
“That must be Modred, who destroys Arthur.”
“Precisely.”
“But no tenor? Can you have an opera without a tenor?”
“Of course. The public expects a tenor. Must be Lancelot, the seducer. Tenors are great seducers.”
“All right. That gives you the four you want. Five, as a matter of fact.”
“So—there we are. We’ll want another woman for Elaine, the Lily Maid. Better be a nice mezzo—good for pathos but not deep enough for villainy. And a few tenors and basses for the Knights of the Round Table, but they are really just Chorus, and not hard to find.”
“You make it all sound simple.”
“Not simple at all, Sim bach. I must get on the phone at once and see who I can round up for these parts. I told them so last night. Singers aren’t picked up at the last minute. They’re worse than hockey-players; you have to get them under contract, or at least under written agreement, as far ahead as you can do it.”
“But won’t the musical people—Schnak and this woman with the strange name—want some say? I know, and you know, that we have no libretto. How can you hire singers when you have no story and no music?”
“Must be done. Can’t wait. And anyhow, we have the skeleton of a libretto.”
“We have? Since when?”
“Since last night when I lay tossing in my bed, pulling it together. We have a story. You can’t bugger about with the story of Arthur. I have a skeleton of the plot. All it needs is some words and music. And that’s where you come in, old Merlin. You must hustle ‘em up and get it on paper as soon as dammit.”
“Powell—sorry, Geraint bach–have you told anybody but me?”
“Not yet. But we’re to meet the great lady, the genius, the Muse, the shepherdess of Schnak, at dinner on Saturday night. Didn’t anybody tell you? Well, they will. And then I’ll tell her what the plot of Arthur of Britain is to be and you and Pretty Penny must start feeding her words as fast as you can go.”
“How simple you make it sound.”
“Aha—irony! I love your irony, Sim bach. It is what first drew me to you, boy. Well, I’m more happy than I can say that you agree, and I’ll go at once and get on the phone. It’s going to cost a fortune in phone bills. I send them to you, I suppose.”
Geraint seized both Darcourt’s hands and wrung them. Then he drew the astonished Simon to his breast and gave him a Shakespearean hug, during which he brushed a cheek against Simon’s, exhaling a lot of last night’s whisky, as though in an ecstasy of relief, and dashed out the door. Surprisingly soon afterward he was heard in the street, roaring abuse at some engineering students who had gathered to snoop under the hood of his car, and with snorts and hootings he was gone.
Greatly depleted in spirit, Darcourt sat down to think about his crime. Was it a crime? The law would certainly think so. The University would undoubtedly think so, for to rob the Library would create a general coldness toward himself, though criminality might not be quite enough to justify the revocation of his professorship. A tenured pro
fessor could commit the Sin Against the Holy Ghost and get away with it, if he could find the right lawyer. Still, in decency he would have to resign. Robbing the National Gallery was something else. That was crime, real crime.
Nevertheless, the law was not everything. There was a thing called natural justice, though Darcourt was not certain where it resided. Had he not been one of the late Francis Cornish’s executors, chosen by Francis Cornish himself presumably because he was expected to use his judgement in doing what the dead man would wish? And would not the dead man want the best possible story of his life written by the friend and biographer best qualified to tell it?
Well—would he? Francis Cornish had been a very odd man, and there were many corners of his character into which Darcourt had never probed or wished to probe.
That was beside the point. Francis Cornish was dead, and Darcourt was alive. A Charter of Rights for the Dead might appeal to Penny Raven, but no true biographer wants to hear about it. Darcourt had in full measure the vanity of the author, and he wanted to write the best book he could, and a good book was a better thing for his dead friend than any pallid record of scanty fact. Crime it must be, and let the consequences be as they would. The book came before everything.
As Darcourt thought in this vein, allowing all sorts of visions of crime, and Francis Cornish, and Princess Amalie, and a scene in a law court in which Darcourt defended his action to a robed judge, in whose intelligent eyes understanding could be read, he was conscious that other images were popping into view on that mental movie-show, and they were related to what Geraint Powell had said about the opera and the necessary figures to make it a reality.
There had been slight mention of Merlin. Why not? Was Merlin so trivial a figure that the plot could be managed without him? Or could the role be played by any hack, any singer recruited from a church choir at the last moment? He would have something to say about that when Geraint unfolded his opera plot at dinner on Saturday night.
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