The Lyre of Orpheus Page 15

  “Of course that’s how we’ll do it, Nilla,” said Powell. “A minor comes right up out of the wax, hot and strong. And don’t fuss about the opera being true to the nineteenth century. It will be artistically true, but you mustn’t expect it to be literally true because—well, because a literal fidelity to the nineteenth century would be false. Do you see?”

  “Yes. I see very well,” said Arthur.

  “Arthur, you are a darling,” said Maria. “You see better than any of us.”

  “Well—I see many difficulties,” said Hollier.

  “I see the wax, and I am sure you two pros see the form, and I’m very happy about it,” said Darcourt.

  “God bless you, Sim bach,” said Powell. “You are a good old Merlin, that’s what you are, boy.”

  “This Merlin—this magician—is more important in the story you have told, Powell, than I had expected,” said the Doctor. “In opera terms, I should say he is Fifth Business, and the singer will have to be chosen with great care. What voice, do you think? We have a bass villain, and a baritone hero and a tenor lover, and a contralto villainess and a coloratura heroine and a mezzo simpleton—that deceived girl, what’s her name, Elaine. What for Merlin? What would you say to a haute contre—you know, one of those high, unearthly voices?”

  “A counter-tenor, you mean? What could be better? Makes him unlike any of the others.”

  “Yes, and very useful in ensembles. Those male altos are like trumpets, only strange—”

  “The horns of elfland faintly blowing,” said Powell.

  “You seem to be pleased with the libretto just as Geraint has outlined it,” said Arthur.

  “Oh, it will need some small changes here and there as we work,” said the Doctor. “But it is a fine schema; coherent and simple for people who can’t follow a difficult plot, but with plenty of meaning underneath. An opera has to have a foundation; something big, like unhappy love, or vengeance, or some point of honour. Because people like that, you know. There they sit, all those stockbrokers and rich surgeons and insurance men, and they look so solemn and quiet as if nothing would rouse them. But underneath they are raging with unhappy love, or vengeance, or some point of honour or ambition—all connected with their professional lives. They go to La Bohème or La Traviata and they remember some early affair that might have been squalid if you weren’t living it yourself; or they see Rigoletto and think how the chairman humiliated them at the last board meeting; or they see Macbeth and think how they would like to murder the chairman and get his job. Only they don’t think it; very deep down they feel it, and boil it, and suffer it in the primitive underworld of their souls. You wouldn’t get them to admit anything, not if you begged. Opera speaks to the heart as no other art does, because it is essentially simple.”

  “And what do you see as the deep foundation of this one?” said Arthur.

  “It’s a beauty,” said Powell. “Victory plucked from defeat. If we can bring it off, it will wring the heart. Arthur has failed in the Quest, lost his wife, lost his crown, lost life itself. But because of his nobility and greatness of spirit when he forgives Guenevere and Lancelot, he is seen to be the greatest man of all. He is Christ-like; apparently a loser, but, in truth, the greatest victor of them all.”

  “You’ll want a first-rate actor,” said Maria.

  “Yes. And I have my eye on one, but I won’t tell you until I’ve got his name on a contract.”

  “It’s the alchemical theme,” said Maria. “Gold refined from dross.”

  “Do you know,” said Hollier, “I believe you’re right. You have always been my best student, Maria. But if you get that out of an authentic nineteenth-century stage piece, you’ll be alchemists indeed.”

  “We are alchemists,” said the Doctor. “It’s our job. But now I must go home. I must be fresh tomorrow to go over all this Hoffmann stuff again with what we have been talking about fresh in my mind. I must do that before I talk with this little Schnakenburg, whoever she is. And so I shall say good-night.”

  Upright as a grenadier and without a stumble, the Doctor circled the room, shaking hands with everyone.

  “Let me call you a taxi,” said Darcourt.

  “No indeed. The walk will refresh me. It cannot be more than two miles, and the night is very fresh.”

  Saying which, the Doctor seized Maria in her arms and gave her a lingering kiss. “Do not worry, little one,” she said. “Your dinner was very good. Not authentic, of course, but better than the real thing. Like our opera.” And away she went.

  “My God,” said Penny, when the Doctor had gone, “did you see what that woman drank? And not once—not once in six hours—did she go to the loo. Is she human?”

  “Very human,” said Maria, wiping her mouth with a handkerchief. “She stuck her tongue almost down my throat.”

  “She didn’t kiss me, you observe,” said Penny. “Not that I care. Raunchy old lesbian lush. You watch yourself, Maria. She has her eye on you.”

  “That cigar! I’ll taste it for a week!” said Maria, and picking up her glass of champagne she gargled noisily, and spat into an empty coffee cup. “I never thought of myself as attractive in that way.”

  “You’re attractive in so many ways,” said Penny, tearfully. “It isn’t fair.”

  “When you sink into self-pity,” said Hollier, “it’s time for me to go home.”

  “I’ll drive you, Clem,” said Penny. “I have a large, forgiving soul, even if you are a rotten old bastard.”

  “Thank you, Professor Raven,” said Hollier; “I would prefer not to be driven by you. Last time you drove me home we were spoken to by a policeman because of your driving.”

  “He was just being officious.”

  “And when we arrived outside my house you honked your horn derisively to waken my mother. No, Penny, no. I won’t drive with you when you’ve got your paws in the sauce.”

  “Paws in the sauce! I like that! Who was falling asleep while Geraint was talking? You bloody old woman, Clem!”

  “In this age of female liberation, I do not understand why ‘old woman’ is still considered an insult.” And with careful dignity Hollier took his leave, closely followed by Penny, who was squealing incoherent abuse.

  “She’ll drive him, of course,” said Darcourt. “Clem is as tight as the bark to a tree. He can never resist a free ride. I’ll give them a minute, then I’ll go too.”

  “Oh, Simon, when do I see you again?” said Maria. “I’ve got something to tell you. Crottel wants to come again and nag about Parlabane’s miserable book.”

  “I’ll be here when you need me,” said Simon, and went.

  “What do you make of the Doctor, Geraint?” said Arthur to the lingering guest.

  “ ‘Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!’ ” said Powell. “I’m mad for Old Sooty. We shall get on like a house afire—literally like a house afire.”

  “She won’t yield to your charm,” said Maria.

  “Exactly. That’s why we’ll work well together. I despise easy women.” And, kissing Maria on the cheek, he went.

  Maria and Arthur looked around their large room. The candles on the Round Table were guttering. In the middle stood the Platter of Plenty, from which no guests had taken anything, whether from sixth-century scruple or not it was impossible to guess. Like all dinner tables, after prolonged dinners, it was a melancholy sight.

  “Don’t worry, my darling,” said Arthur. “It was a wonderful dinner, and a great success, really. But I never really understand your university friends. Why do they quarrel so?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” said Maria. “It’s just that they can’t bear anybody else to have an advantage, even for a moment. That woman stirred them up.”

  “She’s a disturber, no doubt about it.”

  “A good disturber, would you say?”

  “As she said herself, we must hope,” said Arthur, and led his wife off to bed. Or rather, to their separate beds, for Arthur was still not fully him
self.

  (4)

  ETAH IN LIMBO

  Old Sooty! Does Powell really understand Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot if he can speak of her thus? Yet I believe it is meant to be affectionate, and is just his theatrical way; theatre people have little reverence—except when they look in the mirror.

  The Doctor fills me with hope. Here is someone I can understand. She knows the lyre of Orpheus when she hears it, and does not fear to follow where it may lead.

  I love the Doctor. Not as a man loves a woman, but as an artist loves a friend. She reminds me gloriously of my dearest friend on earth, Ludwig Devrient. A very fine actor, and the most sympathetic and dearest of men.

  What great nights we had together, in Lutter’s tavern, just across the square from the house in which I lived. And why was I not in my house? Why was I not at the domestic hearth with my dear, faithful, long-suffering wife Michalina?

  I think it was because Michalina loved me too much. Dear girl, when I was writing my tales of horror and grotesquerie, and my nerves were red-hot and I thought my mind might lose itself forever in the dangerous underworld from which my stories came, she would sit by my side, and keep my glass filled, and sometimes hold my hand when I began to tremble—for I did tremble when the ideas came too fast and were too frightening—and I swear it was she who kept me from madness. And how did I reward her? Certainly not with blows and harsh words and the brutality of a ruffian, as so many husbands do. When I was a judge, I heard awful tales of domestic tyranny. A man may be the most respectable of bourgeois to his acquaintances, but a brute and a devil at home. Not I. I loved Michalina, I respected her, I gave her whatever my earnings, which were not trifling, could command. But I was always conscious that I pitied her, and I pitied her because she was so devoted to me, never questioned me, treated me as a master rather than a lover.

  Not that it could have been otherwise. Too soon after my marriage I took a pupil, Julia Marc, and I loved her with all my heart and soul; all the entrancing women in my stories are portraits of Julia Marc.

  It was her voice. I was teaching her to sing, but there was little enough to teach, for she had such a gift and such a voice as comes rarely in anyone’s experience. Oh, I could refine her taste, and show her how to phrase her music, but as I sat at the harpsichord I was lost in a dream of love, and would have made a fool of myself, or perhaps a Byronic demon lover of myself, if she had given me any encouragement. She was sixteen, and she knew I loved her, though not how profoundly, because she was too young, and the devotion of such a man as I was seemed to her to be in the natural order of things. Very young girls think themselves made to be loved, and they may even be kind to their lovers, but they do not really understand them, and I think her secret dream was of some young officer, wondrous in a uniform, with a maddening moustache, who would turn her bowels to water with his valour and his aristocratic ways. So what was the music-master, a little man, with a strange, sharp face, who made her tune her scales until she sang with a melting purity and never strayed from the key? A nice old fellow, nearly twenty years older than herself, and at thirty-six already with some grey hairs in the parenthetic side-whiskers that framed his rat-like face. But I loved her until I thought I might die of it, and Michalina knew, and never spoke a jealous word or a reproach.

  So what came of that? When she was seventeen, Julia’s hard-headed, Philistine mother arranged a good marriage for her to one Groepel, who was nearly sixty, but rich. I suppose she could imagine no finer future for her daughter than to be a rich widow. What the good woman did not know was that Groepel was a drunkard of terrible assiduity. Not a roaring, heroic drinker, or a romantic melancholy drinker, but a determined fuddler. I still cannot permit myself to think what her life with Groepel may have been like. Perhaps he beat her, but it is more likely that he was coarse and sullen and abusive and never knew a single thing of any importance about what my Julia was or might be. Whatever, the marriage had to be dissolved after a few years, and it was the mercy of God that it was not in my courtroom that the process was examined and the dissolution approved by law. By that time the wonderful voice was gone, and there was nothing left of my Julia but a pitiable woman of substantial means bewailing her misfortunes to her cronies over innumerable cups of coffee and rich unwholesome little cakes. It was the lovely girl of sixteen I treasured in my heart, and now I see that she was in great part my own creation. For Julia, too, was a Philistine in her heart and nothing I could do as her teacher could touch that.

  What is a Philistine? Oh, some of them are very nice people. They are the salt of the earth, but not its pepper. A Philistine is someone who is content to live in a wholly unexplored world. My dear, dear faithful Michalina was a Philistine, I believe, for she never attempted to explore any world but that of her husband, and because E.T.A. Hoffmann could not love her with the fervour of his love for Julia, that was not enough.

  Was this a tragedy? Oh, no, no, no my dear cultivated friends. We know what a tragedy is, don’t we? Tragedy is about heroic figures, who make their sufferings known to the world and demand that the world stand in awe of their sufferings. Not a little lawyer, who wants to be a great composer and is in reality rather an unusual writer, and his devoted Polish wife. There can be no tragedy about such ordinary people. Their lives at best are melodrama, in which the harsh realities are interspersed with scenes of comedy or even farce. They do not live under the pewter sky of tragedy. For them there are breaks in the clouds.

  Such a break in the sky, such a burst of fine weather, was my friendship with Ludwig Devrient. A man most decidedly not a Philistine, but one of a great theatre family, himself a great actor, a man of such magnetism and personal beauty as might even have satisfied the girlish dreams of Julia Marc. Between us there was friendship and sympathy that perfectly suited us both, for we were both what it was then becoming fashionable to call Romantics. We did explore the world, so far as we could. And, I am sorry to say, our compass in our explorations was the bottle. The champagne bottle. In those days it was not a prohibitively expensive wine, but a wine we could apply ourselves to in seriousness and abundance. In Lutter’s tavern, night after night we did so, and a group of friends would gather to hear us talk and range over that world of which the Philistines wish to know nothing.

  When I died, at forty-six, of a complication of ailments of which champagne was not the least, Devrient did something that made him the mockery of those who could not understand, and won him the respect of some who could. After my funeral he went to Lutter’s and made himself gloriously drunk. He was not a roaring drunk or a silly drunk or a stumbling drunk, but a man who had gone over entirely into that other world that the Philistines do not wish to explore or even to allow on the neat chart of their universe. He put two bottles of champagne into his pockets, and walked to the graveyard, and there he seated himself on my grave; and all the cool night of June 25, 1822, he talked to me in his best manner. Some of the wine he drank and some he spilled on the clay. Though I could not answer him, it was surely our best night together, and helped me kindly through the first loneliness of death.

  In this woman I see Devrient, or something of him, once again. That was why, when the party was over, I walked at her side through the autumn streets of a strange but not unkindly city, until we came to her house, and there I sat by her bedside the whole night through. Did I speak to her in her dreams? Those who understand such things better than I must answer that question, but that was my hope. In Dr. Gunilla I recognized another Romantic, and though many aspire to that condition, it is a gift of birth, and we are few.

  4

  Mr. Mervyn Gwilt was thoroughly enjoying himself. This, he thought, was what the practice of the law should be—fine surroundings, a captive audience of distinguished people, and he, Mervyn Gwilt, advising them, for their own good, from his rich understanding of the law and human nature.

  Mr. Mervyn Gwilt was every inch a lawyer. Indeed, the expression is inadequate, for there were not many inches to Mr. Gwilt, and there was
an awful lot of lawyer in him. He could not have been anything else. He habitually wore a wing collar, suggesting that only a few minutes before he had whipped off his gown and bands and was attempting to reduce his courtroom demeanour and vocabulary to the needs of common life. He always wore a dark three-piece suit, lest he be summoned to court in a hurry. He particularly liked Latin; the priests of Rome might have abandoned that language as a cloak for their mystery, but not Mervyn Gwilt. It was, he explained, so pithy, so exact, so wholly legal in its underlying philosophy and its sound, that it could not be beaten as an instrument for subduing an opponent, or a client. The law had not, up to the present, shown much favour to Mr. Gwilt, but he was ready, should such favour suddenly declare itself.

  “At the outset,” he said, smiling around the table, “I want to make it amply clear that my client’s wish in pursuing this matter carries no taint ad crumenam (that’s to say he isn’t looking for money) but is actuated solely by an inborn respect for the ius naturale (meaning what’s right and proper).”

  He smiled at Maria; at Hollier; at Darcourt. He even smiled at the large man with the big black moustache who had been introduced simply as Mr. Carver. Finally he smiled, with special radiance, at his client Wally Crottel, who was sitting at his side.

  “That’s right,” said Wally. “Don’t think I’m just in this for what I can get.”

  “Let me handle it, Wally,” said Mr. Gwilt. “Let’s put it all on the table and look at it ante litem motam (by which I mean before we think of any court action). Now look: Mr. Crottel’s father, the late John Parlabane, left at his death the manuscript of a novel, the title of which was Be Not Another. Am I right?”

  Maria, Hollier, and Darcourt nodded.

  “He left it to Miss Maria Magdalena Theotoky, now Mrs. Arthur Cornish, and to Professor Clement Hollier, as his literary executors. Right?”