The Lyre of Orpheus Page 31

  “Not theology, Geraint. Rhetoric,” said Darcourt.

  “Sim, bach, I wish you would stop knocking rhetoric. What is it? It is what the poet calls upon when the Muse is sleeping. It is what the preacher calls on when he must reach ears that need tickling to get their attention. Those of us who live in the world of art would be flat on our arses most of the time if we had no rhetoric to hold us up. Rhetoric is only base when base men use it. With me, it is the way in which I arouse the ancient and permanent elements in the spiritual structure of man by measured, rhythmic speech. Your rejection of my rhetoric springs from a mean envy, and I am disappointed in you.”

  “Of course you’re right, Geraint; those of us who lack the gift of the gab are suspicious of those who have it. But it’s just spellbinding, you know.”

  “Just spellbinding, Sim bach! Oh, what a pitiable barrenness of spirit lurks in that pauper’s adverb just! I weep for you!” Powell helped himself to another piece of chicken.

  “You can’t weep while you’re stuffing your face,” said Darcourt. “Didn’t the Schnaks sniff anything peculiar about the bond between Nilla and their child?”

  “Such enormities are unknown to them, I imagine. My recollection of the Bible includes no instance of naughtiness between women. That’s why it has a Greek name. Those tough old Israelites thought deviance was entirely a masculine privilege. They think Schnak is putting on flesh because she has come under a Good Influence.”

  “Speaking as a woman, I don’t see the attraction of Schnak,” said Maria. “If I were of Nilla’s inclination I could find prettier girls.”

  “Ah, but Schnak has the beauty of innocence,” said Powell. “Oh, she’s a foul-mouthed, cornaptious little slut, but underneath she is all untouched wonderment. I suppose she’s been mauled by a few student morlocks, because it’s the custom in the circle in which she moves, and kids fear to go against custom. But the real, deep-down Schnak is still flower-like, and Nilla’s is just the delicate hand to pluck the flower. But you know what happens; or rather you don’t, because none of you are gardeners; I slaved in my mam’s garden all my boyhood. You pluck the first bloom, and other, stronger blooms hurry to replace it, and that is what is happening to Schnak.”

  “What blooms?” said Arthur. “God forbid that we should support a lesbian house of ill-fame. There are limits, even for the Cornish Foundation. Simon, hadn’t you better look into this?”

  “Quite right, Arthur. The bills I’ve been paying for champagne and pretty little cakes from the gourmet shops are horrendous. Can’t these women sustain their passion on hamburger?”

  “You’re quite wrong,” said Powell. “That’s not the way things are going at all. Nilla has roused Schnak’s dormant tenderness, and let me tell you, boyos, that’s chancy work. Where will it strike next? I think she has her eye on you, Sim bach.”

  Darcourt was staggered, and not at all pleased that this suggestion was greeted with hoots of laughter from Arthur and Maria.

  “I don’t see the joke,” said he. “The suggestion is grotesque.”

  “In love, nothing is grotesque,” said Powell.

  “Sorry, Simon. I don’t suggest that you are a ridiculous love-object,” said Arthur. “But Schnak—” he could not speak, and laughed himself into a coughing fit, and had to be slapped on the back.

  “You’ll have to dye your hair and go West,” said Maria.

  “Simon can look after himself, and he must stay here,” said Powell. “We need him. If need be, he can take flight after the opera is safely launched. The opera is at the root of the whole thing. It was that poetry you quoted to her, Simon. Didn’t you see her face change?”

  “You were the one who quoted poetry,” said Darcourt. “You Welsh mischief-maker, you quoted Ella Wheeler Wilcox to the girls, and Nilla very properly gagged, but Schnak ate it up.

  It is not art, but heart

  Which wins the wide world over.

  You meant it as a joke, but Schnak swallowed it whole.”

  “Because it is true,” said Powell. “Corny, but true. And I suppose it is the first bit of verse Schnak ever heard which went right to her heart, like the bolt of Cupid. But you were the one who trotted out some real poetry, and gave it to her for the culminating moment of our drama.—Simon has found the words for Arthur’s great aria,” he said to Arthur and Maria, “and it’s just the very thing we want. Right period, decent verse, and a fine statement of a neglected truth.”

  “Let’s have it, Simon,” said Arthur.

  Darcourt found himself embarrassed. The verses were so apt to the situation of the three people who sat at table with him; verses that spoke of chivalry, and constancy, and, he truly believed, of the essence of love itself. In a low voice—he could not bring himself to use Powell’s full-throated bardic manner—he recited:

  True love’s the gift which God has given

  To man alone beneath the heaven:

  It is not fantasy’s hot fire,

  Whose wishes, soon as granted, fly;

  It liveth not in fierce desire,

  With dead desire it doth not die;

  It is the secret sympathy,

  The silver link, the silken tie,

  Which heart to heart, and mind to mind,

  In body and in soul can bind.

  The verses were received in silence. It was Maria who spoke first, and like a true university woman she set out on a criticism of the words which was rooted in what she had been taught; she had a critical system, unfailing in its power to reduce poetry to technicalities and to slide easily over its content. It was a system which, properly applied, could put Homer in his place and turn the Sonnets of Shakespeare into critic-fodder. Without intending to be so, it was a system which, once mastered, set the possessor free forever, should that be his wish, from anything a poet, however noble in spirit, might have felt and imparted to the world.

  “Shit!” said Powell, when she had finished. And then began a very hot discussion in which Powell was strong for the verses, and Arthur quiet and considering, and Maria determined to declare all of Walter Scott second-rate, and his easy versifying the outcome of a profuse, trivial spirit.

  She is fighting for her life, thought Darcourt, and she is perversely using weapons she has learned at the university. But did anybody learn much about love in a classroom?

  He kept himself apart from the wrangle. It was easy, because only by determined shouting was it possible to come between Powell and Maria. Had there ever been such a scene at Camelot, he wondered. Did Arthur, and Guenevere and Lancelot, ever haggle about what had been done, and what lay at the root of it?

  If these are really modern versions of the principals in that great chivalric tale, how did they appear in terms of chivalry? The Knights, and presumably the Knights’ Ladies, were supposed to possess, or try to possess, twelve knightly virtues. There were many lists of those virtues, none wholly alike, but they all included Honour, Prowess, and Courtesy, and, all things considered, these three had those virtues in plenty. Hope, Justice, Fortitude? The men emerged from that test better than Maria. Faith and Loyalty it was perhaps not well to discuss, with Maria pregnant. And it would be tactless to speak of Chastity. Franchise, now—free and frank demeanour—they all had in their various ways. Largesse, that open-handedness which was one of the foremost attributes of a Knight, was the spirit of the Cornish Foundation. All that champagne and Viennese gateaux were largesse, as well as the great sums that were now beginning to appear on the horizon as necessary to get the opera on the stage. But Pity of Heart—that was an attribute which Arthur alone seemed to possess, and under all the ridiculous fussing about Maria’s pregnancy it was plainly to be seen in him; Maria seemed to lack it utterly. Or did she? Was her rejection of Walter Scott just a fear of what she truly felt? Débonnaireté—now that was a good virtue for a Knight, and for anybody else that could achieve it; gaiety of heart, a noble indifference to trivial difficulties, a sprezzatura, in fact—Powell was the exemplar of that virtue, and, althou
gh he still had fits of eloquent remorse for what he had done, he was contriving to rise above it. He regarded himself as co-father with Arthur, and he played the role with style.

  What is that all about, thought Darcourt. A deep Freudian would almost certainly declare that there was, between Arthur and Geraint, some dank homosexual tie, working itself out in possession of the same woman. But Darcourt was not disposed to Freudian interpretations. At best, they were glum half-truths, and they explained and healed extraordinarily little. They explored what Yeats called “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart”, but they brought none of the Apollonian light that Yeats and many another poet cast upon the heart’s dunghill. Sir Walter, so plainly writing of his darling Charlotte, knew something that had escaped the unhappily married Viennese wizard. The silver link. The silken tie.

  Perhaps Arthur knew it, too. Maria was wearing out with argument, and seemed near to tears.

  “Come on, darling. Time you were in bed,” said Arthur. And that concluded the matter, for the moment, with Pity of Heart.

  (4)

  DARCOURT LONGED FOR SPRING with more than the ordinary Canadian yearning. His search for the people in The Marriage at Cana could not be completed until the snow was off the ground, and in Blairlogie the snow lingered and renewed itself until the middle of April.

  Meanwhile he spent long hours at the Library, sifting the last scraps of what had been bundled up in Francis Cornish’s apartment. It was three apartments, really, every one crammed with every sort of art object. Armed with what he already knew from his biographical burrowing and fossicking about the Cornish and O’Gorman and McRory families and their hangers-on and dependents, he was able to identify almost all of the figures in the great picture.

  Some of them had been identified before. Darcourt knew almost by heart the article that had been published a quarter of a century before in Apollo, written by Aylwin Ross. It had put the cap on Ross’s once-great reputation, and had established the beautiful young Canadian as an art historian to be taken seriously. How ingenious Ross had been, with his historical exposition about the Interim of Augsburg and the Catholic-Protestant row it had created in 1548. How convincing he was about his identification of Graf Meinhard of Düsterstein and his Lady, and Johann Agricola the scholar, and Paracelsus—this was a great coup, for portraits of Paracelsus are extremely rare—and even the jolly dwarf who was certainly, Ross knew, Drollig Hansel, who was, past question, the famous dwarf jester in the employ of the Fugger family of bankers. It was romance that might have rejoiced the heart of Sir Walter Scott. But it was all moonshine, and Darcourt knew it.

  Graf Meinhard and his Lady were certainly portraits of the parents of Francis Cornish, and Johann Agricola was that schoolmaster at Colborne College who had put Francis’s foot on the path of historical study, and of whom a snapshot had been tucked into a sketchbook of Francis’s Blairlogie period. What was the man’s name? Ramsay, was it? Yes, Dunstan Ramsay. As for Paracelsus, the shrewd little figure in a physician’s gown who was holding a scalpel, there could be no doubt whatever that he was Dr. Joseph Ambrosius Jerome, of whom Darcourt knew little except that he had been the McRorys’ family doctor, and had once been photographed by Grandfather McRory seated, with one hand on a skull, and the other holding just such a scalpel.

  Sketches—there were scores of them, and many accorded with Grandfather’s Sun Pictures. That dwarf was certainly François Xavier Bouchard, the little tailor of Blairlogie, seen by Grandfather fully clothed, but sketched by Francis lying on a table, stark naked and plainly dead. Was he being embalmed? Certainly there were several sketches among Francis’s earliest drawings of nude figures in which there was a hint—only a few lines, but eloquent—of a figure who seemed to be the huissier, the man with a whip in the painting, and also the man photographed by Grandfather standing at the head of a splendid team of carriage horses; a man of ravaged good looks, always drawn with a gleam of pity in his eye; pity for the dead which was also a knightly pity of heart for the whole of mankind.

  Given the sketches and the photographs that Darcourt had unearthed in the University Library and in the preliminary studies for the picture which had been, at Francis Cornish’s express direction, sent to the National Gallery in Ottawa, the whole picture lay open. The two women disputing over the wine jars, between whom knelt the figure of Christ; beyond a doubt Francis’s aunt, Miss Mary-Benedetta McRory, and her adversary was Grandfather’s cook, Victoria Cameron. What could they have been quarrelling about? As they were at it, hammer and tongs, over the figure of Christ, perhaps Christ was at the root of their disagreement. But who was St. John, with pen and ink-horn? He eluded identification but might perhaps yield his secret later. There was no secret about the compelling portrait of Judas, holding firmly to his money-bag; there were enough sketches in the books Francis had filled at Düsterstein to mark him clearly as Tancred Saraceni, father in art to Francis, and an ambiguous éminence grise in the art world of forty years ago; a restorer of pictures of pre-eminent skill, who may perhaps have done a little more than restoration on some of his canvases.

  There were other figures, not identifiable or not to be identified with utter certainty. That stout merchant and his wife; they could be Gerald Vincent O’Gorman, known after his Blairlogie beginnings as a very shrewd man in the Cornish Trust, and the woman must therefore be Mary-Teresa McRory, who had become Mrs. O’Gorman and, after a strong Catholic start, a shining light among Toronto Anglicans. But the woman with what appeared to be an astrological chart? No sign of her anywhere, either as a photograph or as a sketch. And those wretched children, in the background? They looked like Blairlogie children, but they had a vicious, depraved look that was dreadful to see on childish faces; they seemed to be saying something about childhood that is not often heard.

  The central figures of the picture, who were plainly the wedding couple, offered no problem and admitted of no doubt. They suggested, but in no way imitated, Van Eyck’s famous portrait of the Arnolfini couple; the suggestion lay in the intensity of their gaze, the gravity of their expression. Beyond a doubt the bride was Ismay Glasson, of whom Darcourt had seen almost a hundred sketches, naked and clothed, and he knew her face—not quite beautiful but more compelling in its intensity than beauty usually is—as well as he knew any face in the world. This was the woman Francis had married, the mother of Little Charlie, the bolter and fanatic; although the figure of Francis extended its hand toward her, it did not quite touch the hand of Ismay, who seemed to hold back, and her gaze was not at her husband but at the handsome young man who figured as St. John.

  The husband was Francis Cornish, a confession in the form of a self-portrait. Pictures of Francis were rare; apart from this picture, he had never painted himself, and none of his contemporaries had thought him sufficiently interesting for a sketch. Grandfather’s photographs showed the dark, slight boy in the hideous costume of his childhood and youth: Francis in a sailor suit, standing on a giant tree trunk, above a group of muscular, bearded timber-workers; Francis in his Sunday best, sitting beside a small table on which lay his rosary beads and a prayer-book; Francis squinting into the sun on a Blairlogie street; Francis with his beautiful mother, uneasy in a starched Eton collar; a few group photographs from Colborne days, in which Francis figured as a prize-winner; one photograph of an amateur theatrical performance—some sort of student Follies—in which a lanky, thin Francis appeared in the back row, among the stage-managers and scene-painters, hardly noticeable behind all the girls in short skirts and the boys in blazers who had obviously danced and sung greatly to their own satisfaction. Nothing at all which said anything about Francis Cornish.

  In The Marriage at Cana, however, his was the dominant figure to which all the rest of the composition related. Not that the placing or presentation of the figure was aggressive; there was no Look At Me about it. But this intently gazing man, dressed in blacks and browns, drew the viewer’s eye back to himself, however intent it may have been on any of the other figures. Most
self-portraits tend to glare at the onlooker. The painter, presumably looking into a mirror beside his easel, must glare, must have one eye looking straight into the eyes of the beholder, and the more self-conscious the painter, the more intent the glare becomes. Rembrandts, who dare to paint themselves full-face and objectively, are uncommon. Francis had painted himself looking not at his wife but straight out of the canvas. Yet his eyes did not meet and challenge those of the onlooker; they seemed to be looking over his head. The face was grave, almost sad, and among the faces of the others—the Bride elusive and somewhat sulky, St. John looking like an adventurer, the Knight and his Lady looking like important figures in their world, the two disputing women painted in obvious contention, and the old artisan (Grandfather McRory as St. Simon the Zealot, with his woodsman’s tools)—this face, Francis’s face, was looking out of their world into some other, private world. Darcourt had sometimes seen that look on the face of the old Francis whom he had known.

  Finally—no, not quite finally—there was the woman who stood beside the bridal couple, the only figure in the pictured graced with a halo. The Mother of God? Yes, for the convention in which the picture was cast demanded that. But more probably the Mighty Mother of All. As the mother of everybody and everything, it was not necessary for her to look like anyone in particular. Her grave beauty was universal and her smile was of a serenity that rose beyond earthly considerations.

  Was that serene smile intended to heal the hurt that was visible in the portraits of the bride and groom, in which the man extended a ring toward the fourth finger of his bride’s left hand, and she seemed to be holding back, or perhaps withdrawing her hand from what he offered? To Darcourt, knowing what he knew, and immersed as he was in all the Sun Pictures and the innumerable copies, sketches, and finished drawings that were all that remained of the truth of Francis Cornish’s life, it seemed as if this extraordinary picture was an allegory of a man’s ruin, of the destruction of his spirit. Had the wilful bolter Ismay really hurt him so deeply? After this picture, Francis had never painted seriously again.