The Lyre of Orpheus Read online

  A man who is disposed toward the romantic aspect of religion cannot wholly divorce himself from superstition, though he may pretend to hate it. Darcourt wanted reassurance that all was well, or some unmistakable warning that it was not. And where was such a thing to be found? He knew. He wanted to consult Maria’s mother, and he knew that Maria would be strongly against any such course, because she was trying to escape from everything her mother represented.

  She was not having much success.

  Maria thought of herself as a determined scholar, not as a rich man’s wife, or a woman of a remarkable beauty which drew all sorts of unscholarly things into her path. She wanted a new mother, the Bounteous Mother, the Alma Mater, the university. Learning and scholarship would surely help her to rise above the fact that she was half Gypsy, and all the Romany inheritance that was abhorrent to her. Her mother was a great stone in her path.

  Her mother, as Madame Laoutaro (she had returned to her family name after the death of her husband), practised the respectable profession of a luthier, a doctor of sick violins, violas, cellos, and double basses; her family had a tradition of such work, as her name implied. But she was also in partnership with her brother Yerko, a man of dark skills who saw no reason why he should not palm off instruments that were made of scraps and bits of ruined fiddles, pieced out with portions of his own and his sister’s manufacture, on people who accepted them as genuine ancient instruments. Madame Laoutaro and Yerko were not crooks in the ordinary way; it was simply that they had no moral sense at all in such matters. Gypsies through and through, aristocrats of that enduring and despised people, they thought that taking every possible advantage of the gadjo world was the normal course of life. The gadje wanted to hunt and crush their people; very well, let the gadje find out who was cleverest. Madame Laoutaro was a shop-lifter and a fiddle-faker who gloried in her witty impostures, and she supposed that her daughter had taken to education as a means of carrying on the Gypsy battle. Clement Hollier, who was Maria’s supervisor in her studies, understood and appreciated Maria’s mother pretty well; he thought of her as a wonderful cultural fosil, a hold-over from a medieval world where the dispossessed were cunningly at war with the possessors. But Maria had married a possessor, a priest of the money-morality of Canada, not to despoil him but because she loved him, and Madame Laoutaro could not fully believe it. Small wonder that Maria wanted to get as far as possible from her mother.

  Fate—incorrigible joker—saw things differently.

  Maria and Arthur had not been married three months before Madame Laoutaro’s house burned down, and she and Yerko were homeless. The house, so respectably situated in the Rosedale area of Toronto, looked every bit as blamelessly respectable as it had done in the days of Madame Laoutaro’s blamelessly respectable and well-doing Polish gadjo husband, the late Tadeusz Theotoky. But no sooner had Tadeusz died, rich and well-regarded, than Madame (having noisily mourned a man she had loved as deeply as Maria loved Arthur) reverted to her maiden name, and her Gypsy ways, which were the only ways she really knew, and she and Yerko despoiled the house. They cut it up into a squalor of mean apartments in which a variety of hopeless people, chiefly old women, were able to dwell, paying much more than the apartments were worth, but trusting to the protective power of their landlady. One such old woman, Miss Gretser, a virgin of ninety-two (though she gave out that she was a mere eighty-eight), fell asleep with a cigarette in her fingers and it was not much more than an hour before Miss Gretser was a cinder, and Madame Laoutaro, luthier, and her ingenious brother Yerko were homeless. Madame declared, with much outcry, that they were also penniless.

  They were certainly not penniless. As soon as the fire broke out Madame and Yerko hurried to their cellar workshops, pulled two cement blocks out of a wall, and rushed to the back garden, where they threw a leather bag of money into an ornamental pool. Then they returned to the front of the house for much enjoyable despair, hair-tearing, and noisy grief. When the last ember was quenched, and the excitement was over, they rescued the bag, hurried to Maria’s splendid penthouse, and set to work to pin sodden currency in bills of large denomination to all the upholstery and curtains, to dry it out. They insisted on sleeping on the floor of the handsome drawing-room till every bill was dried, ironed, and counted; they were suspicious of Nina, the Portuguese housekeeper, who made no secret of the fact that she looked on the Laoutaros as riff-raff. Which, of course, from a Portuguese Catholic point of view, they were.

  Oh no, not in the least penniless. In addition to the funds in the bag, the late Tadeusz had left a lot of money behind him, tied up in a trust fund, which provided them with an ample income. There was also the matter of insurance. To Yerko and Madame Laoutaro, insurance was a form of wager; you bet with the insurance company that your house would not burn down, and if it did you were deemed the winner, and cleaned up handsomely. Unfortunately, however, when the Laoutaros converted the handsome mansion into a crowded lodging-house, they did not reinsure it as a commercial venture; they continued to pay the lower rate applicable to a dwelling. The insurance company, pernickety about such matters, threatened suit for fraud. Arthur was displeased, but Yerko managed to persuade him to allow the Gypsies to deal with the matter in their own way. Would a great financial company harass and oppress two poor Gypsies, ignorant of the complexities of business? Surely not! The Laoutaros were happily confident that they would get big money out of the insurance. But to the Gypsy mind all invisible money is fairy money and a fire is an immediate disaster. Where were these two homeless victims to go?

  Madame’s proposal that they might stay for an indefinite time in the penthouse, which was, she pointed out, big enough for a whole tribe of Gypsies, was immediately ruled out of the question by Maria. Yerko had a plan, which was that they should rent an ancient stable behind a shop a Gypsy friend of his kept on Queen Street East. A little work would make it habitable, and the luthier business and his coppersmith’s forge would be handsomely accommodated.

  This might have been acceptable if Madame had not had a bright idea which would, she said, repair their ruined fortunes. A lot of women, not nearly so gifted as herself, were advertising themselves as palm-readers, clairvoyants, and purveyors of personal counsel. A few of them openly promised restoration of lost sexual power, and reports were that business was brisk. As Madame said with scorn, these women were crooks, but if people appeared with money in their hands and positively demanded to be cheated, who was she to spit in the face of Providence?

  Darcourt asked her if she would really prostitute her considerable gift as a psychic for money. Her response was positive.

  “Never!” she said. “Never would I use my real gift in such trashy work! I would just give them the sort of thing they would get from some low sideshow mitt-camp. It would just be a hobby. I have my pride and my ethics, like anyone else.”

  This notion put a sharp spur into Arthur. As the chairman of the board of an important trust company, he could not have it known that his mother-in-law was running a mitt-joint in a depressed part of the city. Arthur had not liked the coroner’s remarks in the inquest on Miss Gretser. The coroner had been rough about the lack of proper safety precautions in a house which he described, all outer appearances to the contrary, as a slum. Had Madame Laoutaro no advisers to keep her straight in such matters? Arthur had not been at the inquest, but he felt the gimlet eye of the coroner in his luxurious office in the Cornish Tower. Therefore Arthur declared that he would find a place for the refugees to repose themselves. To Maria’s horror he offered them accommodation in the basement of the very apartment house in which she and Arthur lived, where he could keep his eye on them.

  Hollier tactlessly pointed out to her the almost mythical beauty of the scheme. She, at the very top of the splendid building, exposed to sun and air: her roots, the matrix of her being, ever present in the lowest depths of the same building. The root and the flower, beautifully exemplified. Maria could snarl, and she snarled at Hollier when he said that.


  She became accustomed to it. The Laoutaros never came up to the penthouse, not because they were forbidden, but because they did not like it; the air was thin, the food was unwholesome, they would be expected to sit on chairs at all times, the conversation was boring, and Yerko’s pungent farting was reprehended. It was no place for people with any real zest for life.

  When Darcourt next visited Maria he talked of Schnak but his mind was on Madame Laoutaro. He was a favourite with that lady, who respected him as a priest, though of a somewhat eccentric kind. She sensed the superstition in the heart of the holy man, and it established a kinship. The matter of a visit to the sibyl had to be approached with tact.

  “I’ve been boning up on Hoffmann,” said Maria. “It’s time somebody on the Foundation knew what kind of world we are getting ourselves into.”

  “Have you been reading the famous Tales?”

  “A few. I didn’t read his music criticism because I don’t know anything about the technical side of music. I’ve found out a little about his life, and obviously this opera, Arthur of Britain, was what he was working on when he was dying. He had lucid fits when he would call for pen and paper and do something, though his wife, who seems to have been rather a simple woman, didn’t say what it was. He was only forty-six. Rotten life, knocking about from pillar to post because Napoleon was making things so difficult for people like him; not as a musician or an author, of course, but as a lawyer, which is what he was when he had the chance. He drank, not habitually but on toots. He had two miserable love affairs, of which the marriage was not one. And he never made it as a composer, which was what he wanted more than anything.”

  “Sounds like the complete Romantic.”

  “Not quite. Don’t forget his being a lawyer. He was much respected as a judge, when Napoleon allowed it. I think that’s what gives his writing its wonderful quality; it’s so matter-of-fact and then—bang! You’re right out of this world. I’m trying to get a wild autobiographical novel he wrote in which half is the work of a nasty Philistine tom-cat, who jeers at everything Hoffmann held dear.”

  “A real tom-cat, or a human tom-cat?”

  “A real one. Name of Kater Murr.”

  “Ah well—you read German. I don’t. But what about the music?”

  “It doesn’t get very good marks, because musicians don’t like dabblers, and literary men don’t like people who cross boundaries—especially musical boundaries. If you’re a writer, you’re a writer, and if you’re a composer, you’re a composer—and no scabbing.”

  “But lots of composers have been splendid writers.”

  “Yes—but in their letters.”

  “Let’s hope the music was better than its reputation, or Schnak is in the soup, and so are we.”

  “My hunch is that the poor man was just hitting his stride when he died. Maybe it’ll be wonderful.”

  “Maria, you’re taking sides. Already you’re an advocate for Hoffmann.”

  “Why not? I don’t think of him as Hoffmann any more. His name was Ernst Theodor Amadeus (he took the name of Amadeus because he worshipped Mozart) Hoffmann. E.T.A.H. I think of him as ETAH. Makes a good pet-name.”

  “ETAH. Yes, not bad.”

  “So. Have you found out anything about Crottel?”

  “Not yet. But my spies are everywhere.

  “Hurry them up. He gives me funny looks when I come in at night.”

  “A security man has to give funny looks. What kind of look does he give Yerko?”

  “Yerko has his own entrance, through the professional part of the building. He and Mamusia have a special key.”

  This seemed the moment to propose a visit to the Laoutaros. Maria hummed and hawed.

  “I know I sound like a miserable daughter, but I don’t want to encourage too much coming and going.”

  “Has there been any coming? No? Then just for this once, Maria, might we do a little going? I terribly want to get your mother’s slant on this business.”

  So, after a little more demur, they sank down as far into the building as the elevator would carry them, into the basement where the owners of the condominiums had their garage space.

  “ ‘The lyre of Orpheus opens the door of the underworld’,” said Maria, softly.

  “What’s that?” said Darcourt.

  “A quotation from ETAH,” said Maria.

  “So? I wonder if it does. We’re none of us musicians, on the Foundation. Are we headed toward the underworld? Maybe your mother can say.”

  “You can depend on her to say something, relevant or not,” said Maria.

  “That’s unkind. You know your mother is a very deft hand with the cards.”

  They walked to the farthest end of the basement, in the rather sinister light that seems appropriate to parking areas, went round an unobtrusive corner, and tapped at a faceless metal door. This gave access to an unused space where the architect had meant to put a sauna and exercise room, but in the end that idea had been abandoned.

  Tapping was useless. After some banging, the door was opened a very little way on a chain, and Yerko’s voice, in its deepest bass register, was heard to say: “If it’s a professional visit please use the entrance on the floor above. I will meet you.”

  “It’s not professional, it’s friendly,” said Darcourt. “It’s me, Yerko—Simon Darcourt.”

  The door opened wide. Yerko, in a purple shirt and corduroy trousers that had once been a rich crimson, clasped Darcourt in a bear’s embrace. He was a huge and impressive man with a face as big as one of his own fiddles, and a Gypsy’s mane of inky hair.

  “Priest Simon! My very dear friend! Come in, come in, come in! Sister, it’s Priest Simon. And your daughter,” he added in a markedly less welcoming tone.

  Only the Laoutaros could have turned a derelict space, enclosed in concrete and in the highest degree impersonal and comfortless, into a version of Aladdin’s cave, part workshop and part chaotic dwelling, stinking of glue, fumes from the forge, the reek of two raccoon skins that were drying on the wall, the wonderful scent of precious old wood, and food kept too long without refrigeration. Some of the concrete walls were bare, covered with calculations done in chalk and corrected by erasures of spit, and here and there hung rugs of Oriental designs. Hovering over a pan of burning charcoal, the fumes from which escaped through a stovepipe that ran to one of the windows just below the ceiling, was Maria’s mother, the phuri dai herself, stirring something smelly in a pan.

  “You are in time for supper,” she said. “Maria, get two more bowls. They are in the abort. I’ve been making rindza and pixtia. Wonderful against this flu that everybody has. Well, my daughter, you have been a long time coming, but you are welcome.”

  It was wonderful to Darcourt to see how the beautiful Maria was diminished in the presence of her mother. Filial respect works in many ways, and Maria was suddenly a Gypsy daughter, disguised in some fine contemporary clothes, though she immediately kicked off her shoes.

  The Gypsies are not great kissers, but Maria kissed her mother, and Darcourt kissed her sooty hand, which he knew she liked, because it recalled her youthful days as an admired Gypsy musician in Vienna.

  They all ate bowls of rindza and pixtia, which was tripe seethed in pig’s-foot jelly, and not as bad as it sounds. Darcourt showed great appetite, as was expected; those who consult oracles must not be choosy. The dish was followed by something heavy and cheesy called saviako. Darcourt thanked God for a strong shot of Yerko’s homemade plum brandy, which was stupefying to the palate, but burned a hole through the heavy mixture in the stomach.

  The god of hospitality having been adequately appeased, there followed at least half an hour of general conversation. When consulting an oracle, there should be no haste. At last it was possible to get to Darcourt’s questions.

  He told Mamusia—for that was what Maria called her—about the Cornish Foundation, of which she had some slight and inaccurate knowledge.

  “Yes, yes; it is the Platter of Plenty,” she said.


  “The Platter of Plenty is just a joke,” said Maria.

  “It doesn’t sound like a joke,” said Mamusia.

  “Yes, it is a joke,” said Darcourt. “It is that big silver epergne that Maria puts on the table when we meet. It is filled with snacks—olives and anchovies, and pickled oysters, and sweets and little biscuits, and things like that. Calling it the Platter of Plenty is a joke by one of our directors. He’s a Welshman, and he says it reminds him of a Welsh legend about a chieftain who had a magic platter on his table from which his guests could ask for and receive anything they desired.”

  “I know that story from other lands. But it’s a good name. Isn’t that what your Foundation is? A heaping platter from which anybody can get anything he wants?”

  “We hadn’t really thought of that.”

  “This Welshman must have a good head on him. You are guardians of plenty, aren’t you? It’s simple.”

  Darcourt thought it might be a little too simple, when he thought of what the Platter of Plenty was offering to Schnak. He explained as well as he could, in terms he thought Mamusia would understand, about the uncompleted opera, and Schnak, and his misgivings. He made the easy mistake of being too simple with someone who, although not educated in the ordinary sense, was highly intelligent and intuitive. Maria did not speak; in her mother’s presence she was silent unless spoken to. Mamusia’s glance moved constantly between her daughter’s face and Darcourt’s and in her own terms she understood them better than they knew.

  “So—you want to know what is going to happen and you think I can tell you. Don’t you feel shame, Father Darcourt? You are not a real Catholic, but you are some kind of priest. Isn’t there something in the Bible that tells you to keep away from people like me?”

  “In several places we are warned against them that have familiar spirits, and wizards that peep and mutter. But we live in a fallen world, Madame. Last time I visited my bishop he was very busy over Church investments, and he could not see me because he was deep in discussion with an investment counsel, who was peeping and muttering about the bond market. If there is any risk to my soul in consulting you, I take it upon me gladly.”