The Lyre of Orpheus Read online

  As well as heavy involvement in her university work, she had found time to write the music for After Infinity, and the auditorium was filled with students of drama, of film, and of any manifestation of the avant-garde. An admired student genius had written the scenario and directed the film; great things were expected. There was to be no dialogue, in order that the immediacy of the early silent film might be recaptured and any taint of merely literary values avoided. There would, however, be music, for Chaplin had given his blessing to music as an accompaniment to film, particularly when he wrote the music himself. The student genius could not write music, but he discerned a fellow genius in Schnak, and she had provided music. She had rejected the idea of using a synthesizer, and had composed her score for a piano that had been doctored with pieces of parchment fastened over the strings, assisted by a Swanee whistle ingeniously played under a metal tub, and that simplest of instruments, a comb covered with tissue paper. The effect was of a vaguely melodious but unfocussed buzzing, punctuated by shrieks, and everyone agreed that it had added much to the general effect.

  The film-maker was scornful of what he called “linear” quality in a script, so his film bounded along in unconnected sections, leaving the spectators to make out as best they could what was going on. It was not too difficult. Humanity was facing the ultimate predicament; a nuclear leak had rendered all mankind, male and female, sterile. What was to become of the race? Could a woman be found, almost at the point of bearing a child, whose child would have escaped the curse of sterility? If that child could be brought to birth, how should it be nourished? Its mother’s breasts would obviously—well, obviously to the film-maker—be dry, or a source of poison. Might a man, in case of dire global need, suckle a child? This question enabled several sequences to be shown in which male friends of the film-maker—the cast had all worked on a voluntary and friendly basis—strained with selfless zeal to produce milk from their flat and unlikely paps, and one or two of them actually did so, the milk being simulated very cleverly with shaving cream. But it was discovered—during one of the portions of the story that had not been thought worth filming—that one fertile female had escaped the nuclear curse. She appeared as a simple child of twelve (the daughter of the film-maker’s landlady) who must take upon her the task of continuing the race, if a male could only be found still able to impregnate her. The search for a fertile male was indicated by shots of vast emptinesses; long resonant corridors up and down which there was much coming and going by unseen searchers, whose footsteps Schnak had simulated with two halves of a coconut shell. There were scenes of the anguish of a Very Wise Man (played by the film-maker’s great and good friend, who chose unaccountably to do it in a Prince Albert coat and a flowing tie) who, in the culminating scene, had to explain to the twelve-year-old what Sex was, and what would be required of her. The child’s face, filled with a wonderment that could also have been puzzled vacuity, was photographed from unusual angles, and she emerged as an Infans Dolorosa, a Nubile Saviour, and, of course, as a Transporting Symbol. The film was greeted in the main with solemn wonderment, though there were a few coarse souls who sniggered when the child knelt before the startlingly white bare feet of the Very Wise Man emerging from the bottom of his formal trousers, and seemed to adore them. In the great tradition of student despair the fate of mankind was left undecided at the end, which Schnak marked by three descending glissandi on the Swanee whistle.

  Subtle campus critics professed to detect a hint of irony in the music, but the majority, while admitting that it might be so, felt that it added a dimension to a brilliant film which would, if everybody had their rights, command a variety of international awards.

  When, a few days later, the Faculty met to discuss thesis topics, they were astonished that Schnak proposed to complete her work on Arthur of Britain within one university year. She had done her year of courses for her doctorate and nothing stood in the way except the unusually short time she had allotted to her thesis-composition. A thesis of operatic length and complexity? They demurred.

  “I am through with trying to control or advise Schnak,” said Dean Wintersen. “If it kills her or drives her mad, let it be so. I hope to hand over my supervision of work to a distinguished visitor.”

  Of course there was curiosity about the distinguished visitor, but the Dean said it was too early to talk of what was not yet assured. As always, the Faculty wished to show its academic scruple by doubt and debate.

  “This thesis exercise,” said a professor of musicological research; “who can say what it may involve? I am not at all impressed by this passion to complete what fate has ordained should be incomplete.”

  “Ah, but you must admit that it has been done, and well done,” said another musicologist, who did not like the first speaker. “Look at Janet Johnson’s excellent reconstruction of Rossini’s Journey to Rheims. And what about Deryck Cooke’s completion of Mahler’s Tenth? What this girl wants to do is a forward, not a backward, step. She wants to display for us a Hoffmann who has never been heard before.”

  “I have heard one of Hoffmann’s operas in Germany, which I think is something nobody else present can say, and I do not leap with joy at the prospect of another. These early-nineteenth-century operas are mostly very thin stuff.”

  “Ah, but that’s the fault of the libretti,” said his enemy, who had indeed never heard a note by Hoffmann but who had a nice private specialization in libretti where nobody could challenge him. “What is the libretto for this one like?”

  The question was directed to the Dean, and it gave him a chance to display those qualities which mark a dean off from ordinary professors. He did not, in fact, know anything about the Hoffmann libretto and he would not pretend that he did; if his listeners chose to think on the grounds of what he said that he had seen the libretto, the assumption was wholly their own.

  “A certain amount of work will have to be undertaken before that question could be satisfactorily answered,” he said. “Of course we shall have to make sure that all that side of the work is properly handled. We are not literary experts. We shall have to arrange a committee for Schnak that includes somebody from Comparative Literature.”

  This was greeted with groans.

  “Yes, I know,” said the Dean. “But you must admit that they are very thorough. I had thought of asking Professor Penelope Raven to act. Would that be agreeable?”

  There were other matters to be decided, and it was nearing the time when professors feel the need of a pre-dinner drink, so they said it was agreeable.

  (2)

  PROFESSOR RAVEN WAS NOT PLEASED to be asked to join a committee supervising a thesis in the Faculty of Music; she would be the only non-musician, and she knew that the odd man out in such an academic group was expected to be modest and keep out of what didn’t concern him, while lending scope and respectability to everything that was done. This looked like a job involving a great deal of work and very little satisfaction. She thought differently when she had lunched at the Faculty Club with her old friend Simon Darcourt, and had drunk her full share of a bottle of wine.

  “I didn’t know you were in on this, Simon,” she said. “That makes a difference, of course.”

  “I’m not in it academically, but I’ll have a good deal to say about what goes on,” said Simon. Then he told Penny in extreme confidence—knowing that she was as leaky as a sieve—about the Cornish Foundation, its support for Schnak, and its determination to present Arthur of Britain on the stage. He also told her that any research in which she was involved on the libretto would, of course, be generously rewarded by the Foundation. That made a great deal of difference.

  “The problem seems to be that the libretto is very scrappy,” he explained.

  “How much have you got?” she asked.

  “I’ve taken a quick look, and to be frank there’s virtually nothing,” he said. “What the chances are of digging anything up, I couldn’t even guess. It isn’t going to be easy, Penny.”

  “With m
y flair for research, and the money you’ve got your hands on, much may be achieved,” said Penny, looking owlish. “I’ve taken a look, you know, and it was a quick look, like yours, and there’s really nothing but a few notations in German, written by Hoffmann himself, because he had written quite a lot of music he wanted to use. I assumed that somebody must have some really solid stuff I hadn’t seen. I gather there was some sort of dispute, amounting almost to a row, between Hoffmann and the English librettist.”

  “Who was—?”

  “None other than the redoubtable James Robinson Planché.”

  “Yes, the Dean did mention that name. What was redoubtable about him?”

  “Very popular nineteenth-century playwright and librettist. Just about forgotten, now. Though everybody uses a phrase of his: ‘It would have made a cat laugh’, he says in one of his innumerable works. I suppose the opera world knows him, if it knows him at all, as the man who wrote the libretto for the unfortunate Weber’s Oberon, one of the resounding flopperoos of operatic history. Music splendid. Libretto—well, Schnak has a word for it.”

  “Shit?”

  “Of the most rejectable and excrementitious order.”

  “Then why—?”

  “I can’t tell you why, and if you didn’t have all that lovely money to throw around I might never find out. But I can, and I will.”

  “How?”

  “The Cornish Foundation—I see it all now in a vision—is going to pay my expenses to go abroad and find out.”

  “Where will you look?”

  “Now Simon, you know the research game better than that. Where is for me to know, and for you and Schnak and the Cornish Foundation to find out when and if I get it. But if it’s to be gotten, I’m the girl to get it.”

  With that Simon had to be content. He liked Penny. She must have been nearer forty than thirty, but she had charm, and spirit, and in a favourite Rabelaisian phrase of his, she was “a jolly pug and well-mouthed wench”. And beneath all that, she had the steely core of the woman who has scrambled up the academic ladder to a full professorship, so Simon knew that it was useless to press her further.

  After lunch, in order to avoid going back to his rooms in Ploughwright, where he would have to face the heap of typescript of his life of the late Francis Cornish—the biography with that disastrous, abysmal gap in the very heart of it—he went to the Club library. He looked with distaste at the table on which were displayed a selection of the less obscure among the innumerable academic quarterlies, dismal publications in which scholars paraded pieces of research that meant all the world to them, but which their colleagues in general found supremely resistible. He ought to look over those that touched on his own subject, he knew, but outside it was spring, and he could not force himself to his scholar’s task. So he strayed to another table, where unscholarly magazines lay, and picked up Vogue. He never read it, but he had hopes, inspired by the wine he had drunk and the cheering companionship of Penny Raven, that it might contain some pictures of women with very few clothes on, or perhaps none at all. He sat down to read.

  He did not read. He looked at the advertisements instead. There were young women displayed there, in various stages of undress, but in the fashion of the time they looked so angry, so crazed, so furious, that they gave him little comfort, aroused no pleasing fantasy. Their hair stood on end or was wildly tangled. Their eyes glared or were pinched in squints that hinted at lunacy. But then he came to a picture so sharply contrasted with its neighbours that he looked at it for several minutes, and as he looked something in the back of his mind stirred, moved, was aroused, until he could hardly believe what he saw.

  It was not a photograph, but a drawing of the head of a girl, in silver-point, touched here and there with white and red chalk; it was delicately executed but not weak, without any modern flash or challenge. Indeed, it was drawn in the manner, and also in the feeling, of a time at least four centuries before the present. The head was aristocratic, not haughty but modestly confident; the eyes were innocent but not simple-minded; the line of the cheek had neither the pudding-faced nor the lantern-jawed look of the models whose photographs appeared in the other advertisements. It was a face that challenged the viewer, particularly if he were a man, by its self-possession. This is what I am: what are you? it seemed to say. It was by far the most arresting picture in the magazine.

  Beneath were a few lines in a clear, beautiful type, but again it was not attenuated or falsely elegant. Darcourt, who knew something about types, recognized it as a modern version of the type-face reputedly based upon the handwriting of a poet, churchman, bibliophile, scholar, humanist, and, in some respects, rascal, Cardinal Pietro Bembo. The message was brief and clear:

  Your make-up is not a matter of current fashion. It is the realization of what you are, of that period of history to which your individual style of beauty pertains. What Old Master might have painted you, and seen you truly? We can help you to discover that, and to learn to apply the only cosmetics made to realize the Old Master quality in you. We do not seek the most customers, only the best, and our services and our products are not cheap. That is why they are obtainable only at a few selected shops from our own maquilleuses. What Master are you? We can help you to achieve the distinction that is yours alone.

  The advertisement was signed, in an elegant Italic hand, “Amalie”, and below were half a dozen addresses of suppliers.

  Glancing around to be sure that nobody saw him doing what was academically unspeakable, Darcourt carefully tore the page out of the magazine and hurried back to his rooms, to write a most important letter.

  (3)

  THE MEETING BETWEEN the Cornish Foundation and Schnak’s parents took place late in May, in the drawing-room of the penthouse. It had better be done, everyone agreed, though nobody expected anything to come of it. Two months had gone by since the decision to support Schnak in her work to revive and re-flesh and re-clothe Hoffmann’s notes for Arthur of Britain, and the meeting should have taken place earlier, had Arthur not been too much under the weather to do anything. Now, at the end of May, he was mending, but pale and subject to sudden loss of energy.

  Arthur and Maria were supported by Darcourt only, for Hollier said he had nothing to contribute to such a meeting, and Geraint Powell was too busy with the forthcoming Festival season in Stratford for anything else to claim his attention. The Schnakenburgs had been asked to come at half past eight and they were prompt.

  Schnak’s parents were not the nonentities Dean Wintersen’s description had led Darcourt to expect. Elias Schnakenburg was not very tall, but he was very thin, which made him look tall; he wore a decent grey suit and a dark tie; his grey hair was receding. His expression was solemn and had a distinction Darcourt had not expected; this watch-repair man was a master craftsman and nobody’s servant. His wife was as grey and thin as he; she wore a felt hat that was much too heavy for May weather, and grey cotton gloves.

  Arthur explained what the Foundation had in mind, making it clear that they were prepared to back a young woman who was said to have great promise, and whose project appealed to the imagination. They expected that a good deal of money would be spent, and without in any way holding the Schnakenburgs responsible for the outcome, they felt that Hulda’s parents should be aware of what was being done.

  “If you don’t hold us responsible, Mr. Cornish, just what do you expect of us?” said the father.

  “Your goodwill, really. Your assent to the project. We don’t want to appear to be doing anything over your head.”

  “Do you think our assent, or our doubts, would make any difference to Hulda?”

  “We don’t know. Presumably she would like to have your encouragement.”

  “No. It would mean nothing to her either way.”

  “You regard her as an entirely free agent, then?”

  “How could we do that? She is our daughter and we have not given up our feeling that we are responsible for her, nor have we stopped loving her very dearly. We
think we are her natural protectors, whatever the law may say about it. Her natural protectors until she marries. We have not rejected her. We are made to feel that she has rejected us.” A slight German accent but carefully phrased English.

  Mrs. Schnakenburg began to weep silently. Maria hastened to give her a glass of water—why add water to tears? she thought as she did so—and Darcourt decided that he might suitably intervene.

  “Dean Wintersen has told us that the feeling between your daughter and yourselves is strained. And you see, of course, that we cannot interfere in that. But we must behave in a proper way, without being parties to any personal disagreement.”

  “Very business-like and proper of you, of course, but it isn’t a matter of business. We feel that we have lost our child—our only child—and this arrangement that you intend so kindly can only make that worse.”

  “Your daughter is still very young. The breach may not last long. And of course I can assure you that anything Mr. and Mrs. Cornish can do, or I can do, to put things right will be done.”

  “Very kind. Very well meant. But you are not the people to do much about it. Hulda has found other advisers. Not of your sort. Not at all.”

  “Would it help to tell us about it?” said Maria. She had seated herself by Mrs. Schnakenburg and was holding her hand. The mother did not speak, but her husband, after some sighing, continued.

  “We blame ourselves. We want you to understand that. I guess we were too strict, though we didn’t mean it. We are very firm, you see, in our religion. We are very strict Lutherans. That was how Hulda was brought up. We never let her run wild, as so many kids do these days. I blame myself. Her mother was always kind. I wasn’t as understanding as I should have been when she wanted to go to the university.”