The Lyre of Orpheus Read online

  Shall I, wasting in despair,

  Die because a woman’s fair?

  The poet who wrote that, and all the easy philosophy of love that follows it, was a hardier soul than Francis. But not all men, or all lovers, are hardy souls. It seemed to Darcourt that Francis had not died because of Ismay’s determination to follow her own star, but something within him had suffered mortal hurt, and the death that had overtaken him so many years afterward, when he died alone in his cluttered flat, was a second death, and it was not in Darcourt’s power to say which had been the most significant cessation of being.

  Darcourt would readily have admitted that he did not know much about love. He had had no youthful affairs, except in a superficial sense. His love for Maria, which he now knew to have been a folly from which he was lucky to escape, was all that he had known of passion. But he had the gift, not often given to deeply passionate men, to understand the joys and also the heart-stopping blows of fate that afflicted other people. The more he looked at the large reproduction, and also the detailed pictures of portions of The Marriage at Cana that accompanied Aylwin Ross’s brilliant, wholly mistaken article in Apollo, the more he wondered if Maria, now great with Geraint Powell’s child, had struck just such a blow to Arthur Cornish. Arthur was holding up very well, if that were true, but he had lost all débonnaireté. Arthur was certainly The Magnanimous Cuckold. But Arthur was not the clearly defined, generous, but ruthless spirit he had been when Darcourt first knew him. If it were so, who was to blame? The more Darcourt knew, the less he was inclined to blame or praise.

  The final figure in the picture, however, had to await the spring before it could be identified, so far as possible, forever.

  That was the angel who floated in the air over the heads of the bridal pair and the Mighty Mother in the central panel of the triptych. Perhaps it was not quite an angel, but if not, why was it suspended in air, without angelic wings? The first time one looked at the picture it seemed to throw the whole composition into confusion. Whereas the other figures were human, painted with love, and sometimes beautiful, sometimes noble, sometimes self-satisfied, sometimes—old St. Simon was such a portrait—as wise beyond worldly wisdom, this floating creature was a comic horror. Its pointed head, its almost idiotic expression, its suggestion of disorder of mind and deformity of body, were all out of key with the rest. And yet, the more one looked, the more it seemed to belong, to be almost necessary to whatever it was the whole composition was saying.

  From its mouth came a scroll, suggesting one of the balloons that hold the words in a comic strip, and in the scroll were the words Tu autem servasti bonum vinum usque adhuc. Not very elegant as Latin, but the words spoken to the bridegroom by the governor of the feast at the Marriage at Cana: “Thou hast kept the good wine until now.” Christ’s first miracle; a puzzle, for nothing in the Gospel suggests that anyone but Christ and His Mother and a few servants knew the secret.

  Was this picture, then, as well as an object of great beauty, a puzzle? A joke, a deeply serious joke, on future beholders?

  April brought the answer, as Darcourt had hoped it would. He made the inconvenient train journey to Blairlogie and, armed with a shovel, a broom, and his camera, he went to the Catholic cemetery and there, high on the bleak hill, he visited once again the McRory family plot. It was dominated by large, tasteless stones commemorating the Senator and his wife, and Mary-Benedetta McRory. But there were a few humbler markers, one of them not a gravestone but a memorial to somebody called Zadok Hoyle, identified as a faithful servant of the family. And—here it was—in an obscure corner behind the biggest stone was a small marble marker, flat to the ground, and when Darcourt had cleared away the last lingering snow and ice, and an accumulation of lichen, it read, plainly, FRANCIS.

  So: here it was. Among the sketches from Francis’s boyhood years there were a number of an invalid figure, confined to a bed which was almost a cage; the figure in the bed was a pitiable deformity, of the sort that cruel people used to call a pinhead, blank of eye, sparse of hair, and wearing an expression, to use the word loosely, that would draw pity from the heart of an ogre. These sketches, rapid but vivid, were identified only by the letter F, except for one on which was laboriously written, in the hand of a boy who wished to be a calligrapher but did not yet know how, what seemed to have been copied from some royal signature, François Premier.

  Francis the First? Now, thought Darcourt, I know all I need to know, and all I am ever likely to know. Truly the best wine has been kept until the last.

  (5)

  “THE CRONES ARE COMING,” said Dean Wintersen’s voice down the telephone. “They are expected today.”

  What crones? Was this some uncanny visitation of weird old women? What crones? Darcourt had been roused from his work on the biography of the late Francis Cornish, and his mind did not readily shift to the Dean’s concern. The crones? Oh, yes! Of course! The Cranes. Had he not agreed that some people called Crane should come from an American West Coast university to do something or other of a vaguely defined order about the production of the opera? That had been months ago and, having so agreed, and having it well understood that the Cranes were not to cost the Cornish Foundation anything, he had banished the Cranes from his mind, as a problem to be dealt with when it arose. Now, it appeared, the Cranes were coming.

  “You remember them, of course,” said the Dean.

  “Remind me,” said Darcourt.

  “They’re the assessors from Pomelo U.,” said the Dean. “It was agreed they should sit in on the production of the opera. You remember the opera, don’t you?”

  Oh, yes; Darcourt remembered the opera. Had he not been slaving over the libretto for the past four months?

  “But what are they going to assess?” said Darcourt.

  “The whole affair. Everything connected with the opera from Schnak’s work on the score to the last detail of getting the thing on the stage. And then the critical and public reaction.”

  “But why?”

  “To get Al Crane his Ph.D., of course. He’s an opera major in the theatre school at Pomelo, and when he has got his assessment together he will make a Regiebuch and present it as his thesis.”

  “His what?”

  “His Regiebuch. A German expression. All the dope on the production of the opera will be in it.”

  “My God! He sounds like Divine Correction out of a medieval play. Does Dr. Dahl-Soot know? Does Geraint Powell know?”

  “I suppose they do. You’re the liaison man, or so I understood. Didn’t you tell them?”

  “I don’t think I knew. Or fully realized.”

  “You’d better tell them, then. Al and Mabel will be seeing you right away. They’re eager.”

  “Who’s Mabel?”

  “I’m not sure. I think she’s not quite Mrs. Crane, but she’s with him. Not to worry. Al has a big grant from the Pomelo Further Studies Fund to look after him. This is a courtesy schools of music frequently extend to one another. It’ll be all right.”

  How lightly the Dean took such things! Doubtless that was the secret of being a dean. When, a couple of hours after his call, Darcourt gazed at Al and Mabel Crane, as they sat in his study, he wondered if it would really be all right.

  Not that the Cranes looked menacing. Not at all. They had the look of expectancy Darcourt knew so well as an attribute of a certain kind of student. They wanted something to happen to them, and they wanted him to make it happen. They were probably in their middle twenties, but they had still the unfledged, student look. Apparently they travelled light and informally. It was cool in the Canadian spring, but Al Crane was dressed as if for a hot day. He wore chinos, a much crumpled seersucker coat, and a dirty shirt. The breast pocket of the coat hung heavily with a number of ball-point pens. His bare feet were thrust into sandals that would not last much longer. He had not shaved for two or three days, and his lantern jaws were dark. As for Mabel, the one arresting thing about her was that she was monstrously pregnant. The child she car
ried, though still unborn, was already sitting in her lap. Like Al, she was dressed for summer, the summer of Southern California, and she too was in a bad way for footwear. They both smiled, in a dog-like manner, as if hoping to be patted.

  Al, however, knew what he wanted. He wanted several days with Hulda Schnakenburg, to go over the score of the opera and examine all the scraps of Hoffmann, which he called The Documentation, and then he wanted a few days with Dr. Dahl-Soot, whose presence in the matter was, he declared, awesome. Just to talk with Gunilla Dahl-Soot would be an enrichment. He wanted access to a Xerox machine, so that he could get facsimiles of everything, every inch of Hoffmann, every draft of Schnakenburg, every page of the completed score. He wanted to go over the libretto with whoever had prepared it, and he wanted to compare it with anything by Planché, from which it derived, or did not derive. He wanted to talk with the director, the designer, the designer of lighting, and the scenic artists. He wanted copies of every design, and every rejected design. He wanted to photograph the stage that would be used, and he wanted all its measurements.

  “That’ll do to be going on with,” he said. “Then of course I’ll sit in on all the rehearsals and all the musical preparation. I’ll need a full C.V. from everybody involved. But right now, we’re wondering where we are to live.”

  “I haven’t any idea,” said Darcourt. “You’d better talk to Dean Wintersen about that. There are lots of hotels.”

  “I’m afraid a hotel would be way beyond us,” said Al. “We’ve got to watch the pennies.”

  “I understood the Dean to say that you had a generous grant from Pomelo.”

  “Generous for one,” said Al. “Tight for two. For three, I should say. You can see how it is with Mabel.”

  “Oh, Al, do you think there’s been a slip-up?” said Mabel. She was the kind of woman, Darcourt saw with alarm, who cries easily.

  “Not to worry, Sweetness,” said Al. “I’m sure the professor has everything lined up.”

  Don’t be too sure, thought Darcourt. There had been a time, before he recognized himself as the Fool, when he would have been badgered into assuming full responsibility for these Babes in the Wood. But as the Fool he had other things to attend to. So he gave the Cranes the name of Dean Wintersen’s secretary, and the telephone number at which the Doctor could be reached, and, by means of well-developed professorial will-power—the spiritual equivalent of the Chinese Chi-Kung—he shifted them off his chairs and out of his sight.

  They went, thanking him profusely and assuring him that they looked forward to seeing him again. It had already been a terrific experience, they said, just meeting him.

  (6)

  DARCOURT WAS NOT SURE how he should approach Arthur and Maria about his discovery, now his certainty, of what The Marriage at Cana really was. Although the Cornish Foundation was in no way underwriting his biography of Francis Cornish, friendship and a sense of decency about a family with whom he was strongly involved made it obligatory that he should tell them what he had found, before he said anything to Princess Amalie and Prince Max. The picture belonged to the New York people, and who could guess what they might say to his information about their treasure? Was it a brilliant piece of detection in the world of art history, or was it the harsh unmasking of a fake? And if a fake, what did that mean in loss of money? That was trouble enough, but the touchiness of the Cornishes about anything that might reflect, however faintly, on the integrity of the great financial house was incalculable. So he dawdled, dotting i’s and crossing t’s in his documentation, and hoping that a favourable moment would declare itself.

  The declaration came from an unexpected source. Wally Crottel was apprehended by the police selling marijuana to schoolchildren. In the playground of the Governor Simcoe Public School, Wally was plying a brisk trade in joints at the end of each school day, and some children, with that mixture of innocence and stupidity that marks a certain sort of childish mind, were walking home puffing proudly. Before the police could put the handcuffs on him Wally made an ill-advised break for freedom and was knocked down by a passing car; he was quite badly hurt, and was now in the General Hospital, with a policeman sitting outside his room, with nothing to do but read a paperback book which Mr. Carver told Darcourt was Middlemarch, an unexpected choice. Mr. Carver had tipped off the police about Wally’s profitable sideline, and Mr. Carver could not conceal a deep satisfaction at Wally’s fall.

  “But you have to admit the guy was very well organized,” he said. “He was growing the stuff in a corner of a parking lot behind the boarding-house building where he lived. It was quite a small job, but you don’t need an awful lot of the old Mary-Jane to make a few joints, and Wally included a good deal of dried mint with it, to make it go as far as possible, and give a flavour kids liked. Wally was doing very well, for a small operator. Where the kids got the money to pay his price I don’t know, but there are quite a few rich kids in that district, and I think some of them were retailing what they bought from Wally, adulterated with dried grass and God knows what. Little bastards! Imagine kiddy pushers! But we live in a very strange world, professor.”

  “We do, indeed. How did you get wise to Wally?”

  “There’s a guy lives in the basement of that building where Mr. and Mrs. Cornish have the penthouse that I’ve known for years. Looks like a slob, but he’s not a real slob. I think he had it in for Wally, who was always snooping around that basement apartment, trying to find out how this man and his sister came to be living there. Now, the sister’s a bit of a psychic, and sometimes the cops use her, when they want one. Oh, yes; we cops are not above tips from psychics, and sometimes they’re very useful. You can’t discount anything you hear, in the detective business.”

  “Will it go hard with Wally, when he comes to trial?”

  “That crook Gwilt is hard at work, building up a case that Wally comes from a broken home—you know what I mean? He’ll do his best to keep Wally in the hospital as long as possible, so he can do whatever he can to get Wally tried before an easy judge. Fat chance! There aren’t any easy judges when it comes to pushing drugs to kids. Wally is headed for a long, reflective retirement as a guest of the Crown.”

  “What could that mean?”

  “Well, professor, it says on the books you can get life for pushing. Nobody does, but some of the sentences are tough. Let’s look on the bright side and say Wally comes out of hospital with a short leg, or a hole in his head, or something showy like that. The judge might go easy on him. He’ll still go to the pen, of course, but if he’s a very good boy, and squeals on a few people he knows, and sucks up the governors and the chaplain, he might be on the street again in seven years, but not a minute less. I’d hope for nine or ten. Pushing to kids is very, very unpopular. Wally has lost face, as the Chinese say. Your friend with the book Wally was whimpering about can forget Wally. How is that nice lady?”

  “At this moment, she’s expecting a baby.”

  “Couldn’t be better. If you see her, wish her luck from me.”

  The very night he heard of Wally’s fall Darcourt hastened to the Cornishes’ apartment, thinking that such news would create an atmosphere friendly to his real mission. He was not pleased to find Powell there before him, making himself very much at home. He could not possibly include Powell in any discussion about The Marriage at Cana. But he told Arthur and Maria about Wally, and about Carver’s forecast of Wally’s future.

  “Poor old Wally,” said Maria.

  Arthur was dumbfounded. “Poor old—! Maria, don’t you see? This disposes of that business of Wally wanting his father’s book. He wouldn’t get anywhere with a court case about that.”

  “Aren’t the courts supposed to forget past misdeeds, when somebody has been foully wronged?”

  “They’re supposed to, but they don’t. From henceforth, Wally is null and void.”

  “I’m astonished at you men. Do you want to have your own way at the expense of a fellow creature’s suffering?”

  “I ha
ven’t the least objection to you getting your own way at the expense of anybody’s suffering. Except mine, of course,” said Arthur.

  “Wally is suffering because he is stupid,” said Darcourt. “Trying to break away from the cops! Ah, these amateurs! He is obviously a criminal of no real flair.”

  “Wouldn’t you have tried to escape?”

  “If I were hanging around schoolyards, peddling dope to kids, I would hope to have more grip on my job. If I were a criminal, I would try to use the brains God gave me.”

  “All right. Wally is a bad boy and Wally is stupid. But it ill becomes you, as a Christian priest, to be exulting and sniggering. Where’s your pity?”

  “Maria, stop playing the Many-Breasted Mother, gushing compassion like a burst waterpipe. You’re kidding. You’re just as glad as we are that Wally’s out of the way.”

  “I shall indeed be a mother within quite a short time, and I think a show of compassion becomes me. I know my role.” Maria smiled a farcical Madonna smile.

  “Good! Then I’ll play my role as a Christian priest. Arthur, will you get on the phone and send Wally your own lawyer? Meanwhile I’ll phone the newspaper sob-sisters and shed a few tears about Wally’s sad plight. Geraint, you lodge a complaint under the Charter of Rights. Wally was an employee of this building, and thus of the Cornish Trust, of which Arthur is the Big Cheese. So Arthur must rush to the aid of a victim of our social system. Maria, prepare to appear in court, heavy with child and wearing a veil, to say what a sweet little fellow Wally always was, and how Whistlecraft’s denial of his name to Wally gave him an Anonymity Complex. Wally will have to go to jail, but we can float him in and out on a flood of tears. Of course we’ll keep mum about how Wally tried to shake you down for a million. Come on, let’s get to work. There must be more than one phone in this palace.”