“Simon, let me explain. You mustn’t think Arthur is sore-headed, or pouty. That simply isn’t in his nature. But he—I should say we—thought of ourselves as impresarios, encouraging and fostering and doing all that sort of thing. Like Diaghilev, you know. Well, not really like Diaghilev. He was one of a kind. But something along those lines. You’ve seen how it was. Nary a foster or an encourage have we been permitted. Nobody wants to talk to us. So we’ve played it Geraint’s way, and everybody else’s way. But we’ve been surprised and a little bit wistful.”
“You’ve been as good as gold,” said Darcourt.
“Exactly!” said Arthur. “That’s precisely what we’ve been. As good as gold. We’ve been the gold at the bottom of the whole thing.”
“Gold isn’t really a bad part to play,” said Darcourt. “You’ve always had it, Arthur, so you don’t know how other people see it. It’s no use talking about Diaghilev; he never had a red cent. Always cadging for money from people like you. You and Maria are just gold—pure gold. You are a very rich couple, and you have genius with money, but there are things about gold you don’t know. Haven’t you any notion of the jealousy and envy mixed with downright, barefaced, reluctant worship gold creates? You’ve put your soul into gold, Arthur, and you have to take the bitter with the sweet.”
“Simon, that is positively the nastiest, ugliest thing you’ve ever said! My soul into gold! I didn’t ask to be born rich, and if I have a talent for money it doesn’t mean I put money above everything! Have you missed the fact that Maria and I have a real, gigantic, and mostly unselfish passion for the arts and we want to create something with our money? I’ll go further—no, shut up, Maria, I’m going to speak my mind—we want to be artists so far as we can, and furthermore we want to do something with Uncle Frank’s money that he would really have thought worthy. And we’re treated like money-bags. Bloody, insensitive, know-nothing money-bags! Not fit to mix on equal terms with shit-bags like Nutty Puckler and that self-delighted sorehead Virginia Poole! At the first dress rehearsal I was standing in the wings, keeping my mouth shut, and I was shushed—shushed, I tell you—by one of those damned gofers when Albert Greenlaw was snickering and whispering, as he always is! I asked the kid what ailed her, and she hissed, ‘There’s an examination going on, you know!’ As if I hadn’t known about the examination for months!”
“Yes, Arthur. Yes, yes, yes. But let me explain. When art is in the air, everybody has to eat a lot of dirt, and forget about it. When I said you have put your soul into gold I was simply talking about the nature of reality.”
“And my reality is gold? Is that it?”
“Yes, that’s it. But not the way you think. Do please listen and don’t flare up all the time. It’s the soul, you see. The soul can’t just exist as a sort of gas that makes us noble when we let it. The soul is something else: we have to lodge our souls somewhere and people project their souls, their energy, their best hopes—call it what you like—onto something. The two great carriers of the soul are money and sex. There are lots of others: power, or security (that’s a bad one), and of course art—and that’s a good one. Look at poor old Geraint. He wants to project his soul on art, and because he’s a very good man it murders him when all kinds of people think he must project it on sex, because he’s handsome and has indefinable attraction for both men and women. If he simply went in for sex he could be an absolute bastard, with his advantages. But art can’t live without gold. Romantics pretend it can, but they’re wrong. They snub gold, as they’ve snubbed you, but in their hearts they know what’s what. Gold is one of the great realities, and like all reality it isn’t all wine and roses. It’s the stuff of life, and life can be a bugger. Look at your Uncle Frank; his reality was art, but art gave him more misery than joy. Why do you suppose he became such a grubby old miser in his last years? He was trying to change his soul from a thing of art to a thing of money, and it didn’t work. And you and Maria are sitting on the heap he piled up in that attempt. You’re doing a fine thing, trying to change the heap back into art again, but you mustn’t be surprised if sometimes it brings you heartbreak.”
“What have you projected your soul on, Simon?” said Maria. Arthur needed time to think.
“I used to think it was religion. That was why I became a priest. But the religion the world wanted from me didn’t work, and it was killing me. Not physically, but spiritually. The world is full of priests who have been killed by religion, and can’t, or won’t, escape. So I tried scholarship, and that worked pretty well.”
“You used to tell us in class, ‘The striving for wisdom is the second paradise of the world,’ ” said Maria. “And I believed you. I believe it still. Paracelsus said that.”
“Indeed he did, the good, misunderstood man. So I took to scholarship. Or returned to it, I suppose I should say.”
“And it has served you well? Perhaps I should say you have served it well?”
“The funny thing is, the deeper I got into it, the more it began to resemble religion. The real religion, I mean. The intense yielding to what is most significant, but not always most apparent, in life. Some people find it in the Church, but I didn’t. I found it in some damned queer places.”
“So have I, Simon. I’m still trying. Will go on trying. It’s the only way for people like us. But—
The flesche is brukle, the Fiend is slee
Timor mortis conturbat me
That’s how it is, isn’t it?”
“Not for you, Maria. You’re far too young to talk about the fear of death. But you’re right about the Flesh and the Fiend, even if it makes you sound like Geraint.”
“I think of that sometimes, when I look at little David.”
“No, no,” said Arthur. “That’s all over. Forget about it. The child wipes all that out.”
“There speaks the real Arthur,” said Darcourt, and raised his glass. “Here’s to David!”
“I’m sorry I whined,” said Arthur.
“You didn’t whine—not really whine. You just let loose some wholly understandable indignation. Anyway, we all have a right to a good whine, now and then. Clears the mind. Cleanses the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart—and all that.”
“Shakespeare,” said Arthur. “For once I recognize one of your quotations, Simon.”
“How one comes to depend on Shakespeare,” said Maria. “ ‘What potions have I drunk of Siren tears—’ Remember that one?”
“ ‘So I return rebuked to my content,
And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent,’ ”
said Darcourt. “Yes; that’s a good one. Puts it very concisely.”
“Thrice more than I have spent. Or rather, thrice more than Uncle Frank has spent,” said Arthur. “I suppose you’re right, Simon. I do think a lot about gold. Somebody must. But that doesn’t mean I’m Kater Murr. Simon, we’ve been turning over in our minds that scheme you were talking about a while ago. That would be more in Uncle Frank’s line, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t have mentioned it, otherwise,” said Darcourt.
“You said you thought the New York people would listen to an offer.”
“If it were put the right way. I think they would appeal to you, Arthur. Collectors, connoisseurs, but of course they don’t want to be made to look foolish. Not like people who have been in any way associated with a fake. They’re not Kater Murr, either. If it came out that they had been cherishing a picture which was just a simple, barefaced fake it wouldn’t do them any good, either in the art world, or in the world of business.”
“What is their business?”
“Prince Max is the head of an importing company that brings vast quantities of wine to this continent. Good wine. No cheap schlock, adulterated with Algerian piss. No fakes, in fact. I’ve seen some of his things on your table. Probably you didn’t notice the motto on the coat of arms on the bottles: ‘Thou shalt perish ere I perish’.”
“Good motto for wine.”
“Yes, but the motto is a family motto, and it means Don’t try to get the better of me, or you’ll wish you hadn’t.”
“I’ve met some of those in business.”
“But you must bear in mind that the Princess is a business woman, too. Cosmetics, in the most distinguished possible way.”
“What’s that to do with it?”
“Dear Arthur, it means simply putting the best face on things. That’s what they’ll want to do.”
“So you think they’ll want a whopping price?”
“This is an age of whopping prices for pictures.”
“Even fakes?”
“Arthur, I may be brought to crowning you with this bottle—which isn’t one of Prince Max’s, by the way. How often do I have to tell you that the picture isn’t a fake, was never meant to be a fake, and is in fact a picture of the most extraordinary and unique significance?”
“I know. I’ve heard all you’ve said about it. But who will convince the world of it?”
“I will, of course. You’re forgetting my book.”
“Simon, I don’t want to be a brute, but how many people will read your book?”
“If you follow my suggestion, hundreds of thousands of people will read it, because it will explain Francis Cornish’s life as a great artistic adventure. And a very Canadian sort of adventure, what’s more.”
“I don’t see this country as a land hotching with artistic adventure, or deep concern about the soul, and if you do, I think you’re off your head.”
“I do, and I’m not off my head. I sometimes think I’m ahead of my time. You haven’t read my book. It isn’t finished, of course, and how it ends hangs entirely on the decision you make. The ending can be fantastic, in both the literal and the colloquial meanings of the word. You don’t know what a good long look at your uncle’s life brings to the surface, in a mind like mine. You’ve got to trust me, and in this sort of thing you don’t trust me, Arthur, because you’re afraid to trust yourself.”
“I trusted myself in this opera venture. I hustled the Foundation into doing something that hasn’t worked out.”
“You don’t know if it has worked out, and you won’t, until long after tomorrow night. You have the amateur’s notion that a first performance tells the whole story about a stage piece. Did you know the St. Louis people are already interested in Arthur of Britain? If the opera doesn’t cause a stir here, it may very well do so there. And in other places. Of course, you hustled us into this job. And now you think it was just the beginning of your mumps. But great achievements have sprung from stranger things than a dose of mumps.”
“All right. Let us proceed. With caution. I suppose I’d better take over, and see these New York people.”
“And I suppose you’d better do nothing of the sort,” said Maria. “You leave it to Simon. He’s a downy old bird.”
“Maria, you are beginning to sound like a wife.”
“The best wife you’ll ever have,” said Maria.
“True. Very true, my darling. By the way, I’m thinking of calling you Sweetness, in future.”
Maria put out her tongue at him.
“Before you degenerate into embarrassing public connubiality,” said Darcourt, “let me call your attention to the fact that the dress rehearsal must now have almost completed the first act of this opera Arthur has decided to hate. We’d better get over to the theatre, and be slighted and neglected, if that’s the way it goes. As for this other thing, shall I go ahead?”
“Yes, Simon, you go ahead,” said Maria.
Arthur, characteristically, was calling for the bill.
(10)
IT IS THE FIRST NIGHT of Arthur of Britain.
Gwen Larking speaks through the intercom to all dressing-rooms and the Green Room: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your half-hour call. Half an hour till curtain, please.”
The early birds have been ready long since. In his dressing-room Oliver Twentyman lies in his reclining-chair. He is made up and dressed, except for his magician’s gown, which hangs ready to put on. His dresser has tactfully left him alone, to compose himself. Will this be his last appearance? Who can say? Certainly not Oliver Twentyman, who will go on appearing in operas as long as directors and conductors want him—and they still want him. But this will probably be his last creation of a new role; nobody has ever sung Merlin in Arthur of Britain before, and he intends to give the audience something to remember. The critics, too, those chroniclers of operatic history, upon the whole so much more reliable than their brethren who deal with the theatre. When Oliver Twentyman is no more, they will say that Merlin, undertaken when he was already over eighty, was the best thing he had done since he sang Oberon in Britten’s Dream. He liked being old—and still a great artist. Age, linked with achievement, was a splendid crown to life, and took the sting from death.
… an old age, serene and bright,
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Shall lead thee to thy grave.
Wordsworth knew what he was talking about. Oliver Twentyman murmured the words two or three times, like a prayer. He was a praying sort of man, and often his prayers took the form of quotations.
ONSTAGE WALDO HARRIS was having the last, he hoped, of many sessions with Hans Holzknecht about Hair on the Floor. Many years ago—Holzknecht would not say how many, nor would he identify the opera house (though it was a great one)—he had found, during the last act of Boris Godunov, that he was choking. Choking so that he could scarcely utter. Something had invaded his throat and was strangling him. Instead of singing he was on the verge of throwing up. It was a situation in which the best of the artist must unite with the best of the man to overcome a difficulty all the greater because it could not be identified. Somehow—there were times when he thought it must have been Divine intervention—he had sung his way—sung well and truly, though in agony—to the end of the act and then, when the curtain was down, he had rushed to his dressing-room, and called for the theatre doctor, who, with a forceps, had removed from his throat a twenty-inch human hair! From a wig? From some shedding soprano in the chorus in an earlier scene? Whatever the source, there it was, a hair of great length which had, in its situation, behaved with the malignance of an animate thing! In one of his great intakes of breath while lying, as the distraught Tsar, on the floor, he had sucked up that hair, and he had it yet, preserved in a plastic bag, which he showed to every stage management in every theatre where he appeared, as a warning of what could happen if the stage were not properly swept, not once, but at every possible time, during a performance. He did not want to be a nuisance, nor did he wish to appear neurotic, but a singer meets perils of which the public knows nothing, and he begged—begged with all the authority of his place in the company—that he might have the assurance of Waldo Harris that the stage would be properly swept whenever the curtain was down. Which assurance Waldo gave, sympathetic, but also wishing that Holzknecht would accept one positive answer, and shut up about hairs on the stage.
IN THE PROMPT CORNER, Gwen Larking was fussing. She would not have thought of it as fussing, but as she was redoing and perfecting things that had already been done, and done to perfection, there is no other word for it. Gwen was, in herself, the perfection of a Stage Manager, which meant that she was impeccable in her attention to detail, alert for any mishap and capable of meeting it, and a monument of assurance to nervous artists. And the greatest fusser of them all, beneath an impassive exterior.
She was dressed for her work in an expensive pant-suit, and a blouse of deceptive simplicity. She had made her two assistants and the three gofers dress themselves similarly, as near as it was in their destiny to come to her own stripped-down elegance. Art deserves respect, and respect is mirrored in proper dress. Let those members of the audience who so wished appear in the theatre looking as if they had just come from mucking out the cowshed; it was up to the stage crew to dress as if they were about important work. The gofers had to be warned about bangles and chains that jingled; of
course such things could not be heard on the stage but they might be distracting in the wings.
The Prompt Corner was called so because of tradition; nobody could possibly have prompted anyone onstage from it. Indeed, the stage could not be seen from it, except fleetingly. But over Gwen Larking’s desk, which looked like the conductor’s own, lay a full score of the opera, in which every detail of the production was recorded, for instant reference. This was what Al Crane would have given an ear to get his hands on, but Gwen guarded it jealously, just as she guarded the conductor’s full score, which lived in the safe in Waldo Harris’s office.
Gwen Larking twisted the lucky ring on the fourth finger of her left hand. Nothing would have persuaded her to admit that it was a lucky ring. She was a Stage Manager, devoted to certainty, not luck. But it was in truth a lucky ring, a Renaissance cameo, a gift from a former lover, and all the gofers knew it, and had somewhere found lucky rings of their own, for Gwen was their ideal.
DARCOURT DID NOT HEAR the half-hour call, because he was in the favourite restaurant, entertaining two eminent critics. Arthur and Maria had refused to do anything of the sort, but the line between eminent critic from New York and distinguished guest is so fine that Darcourt had decided he had better give them dinner. Very, very eminent critics can eat and drink any amount, without in the least compromising their impartiality of opinion, and have indeed been known to bite the hand that has fed them, without noticing. Darcourt was aware of this, but thought a modest dinner would give him a chance to provide the critics with some information.
In the case of Claude Applegarth, who was undoubtedly the most popular and widely read of New York critics, information was cast on stony ground, for Mr. Applegarth had been a critic of the theatre arts too long to be concerned with the background of anything. The wisecrack was his speciality; that was what his readers expected of him and was he not, after all, himself a popular entertainer? He would not have attended Arthur if it had not been that his annual visit to the Shakespearean portion of the Festival coincided with this opening so closely that it could not decently be neglected. Not that opera was his thing, at all; it was in the criticism of musicals that he was felt as a great and usually blighting influence.