“The Sword every time,” said Arthur. “Offer the breast and somebody will bite it. Until you’ve tried it, you can have no idea of how hard it is to give away money. Intelligently, that’s to say. Look at this Gallery. What a fight we had to get it.”
“Oh, but a very genteel, high-minded fight,” said Darcourt. “What a tricky balancing of egotisms of various weights, and varying interests, some of which you’re not supposed to know about. What a lot of jockeying so that nobody has to say thank-you in such a way that they lose face. I’ll bet old Frank is laughing his head off, if he knows anything about it. He was an ironic old devil. And his big secret—that loony angel who was his parents’ first attempt at a Francis—is still a secret, though it’s almost certain that some toilsome snoop will root it out sooner or later. Not everything is on those apparently explanatory walls.”
“It’s been an adventure, and I’ve always hankered for adventures,” said Arthur. “And the opera was an adventure, too. That was Frank’s doing, and we shouldn’t forget it.”
“How can we?” said Maria. “Isn’t it still going on? Schnak is doing well, in a quiet way.”
“Not so quiet,” said Darcourt. “The opera hasn’t been done again; not yet, but there are nibbles. But that big central passage—The Queen’s Maying—has been played several times by very good orchestras, and always with a note that it comes from the opera. Schnak is on her way, and there is even some renewed interest in Hoffmann as a composer, Nilla tells me.”
“You know I hated Nilla when I first met her,” said Maria. “She was so awful at that Arthurian dinner. But she’s the perfection of a fairy—or I suppose I should say lesbian— godmother. She sends Davy the most wonderful wooden toys, trains and farm carts and things, and she’s determined we must take him to Paris for her to see. Not like that stinker Powell. He writes now and again but he never mentions the boy. Just his own dear little self. Mind you, he’s doing marvellously well. A terrific Orfeo in Milan, when last heard of. Even Clem is a better godfather. He’s given Davy a wonderfully illustrated book of the Arthurian legend, which he will be able to read when he’s about ten. And Penny has given him a first edition of The Hunting of the Snark. Have these professors no understanding of what a child of three is?”
“Perhaps it was really meant for you,” said Darcourt. “The Snark was a pretty fair comment on that opera job, and in the end the Snark was only half a Boojum.”
“I’ve never got around to reading that poem,” said Arthur. “Simon—lighten my darkness, I beseech you. What the hell is a Snark? And a Boojum? I suppose I ought to know.”
“You won’t ever know if you don’t read it,” said Darcourt. “But just for the moment, a Snark is a highly desirable object of search which, when found, can be unexpected and dangerous—a Boojum, in fact. All Snarks are likely to be Boojums to the unresting, questing Romantic spirit. It’s a splendid allegory of all artistic adventures.”
“Allegory. Allegory—I know what an allegory is. Simon, you’ve put that quotation from Keats right over Uncle Frank’s picture. ‘A Man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory’. Do you really believe that?”
“Haven’t I convinced you?” said Darcourt. “It’s one of those magnificent flashes that Keats popped into letters. That comes from a gossipy letter to his brother and sister. Just a piece of a letter, but what an insight!”
“You’ve convinced me several times, but I keep coming unconvinced. It’s such a terrifying thought.”
“Such an enlarging thought,” said Maria. “ ‘A Man’s life of any worth’—it forces you to wonder whether your life is of no particular worth, or if it has a mystery you can’t see.”
“I think I’d rather say my life was of no particular worth than face the idea of a pattern in it that I don’t know, and probably never will know,” said Arthur.
“You mustn’t dream of saying that your life is of no particular worth, my darling,” said Maria. “Because I know better.”
“But an allegory seems such an extraordinary thing to claim for oneself,” said Arthur. “It’s like commissioning a statue of yourself, stark naked, holding a scroll.”
“Keats wrote at the gallop,” said Darcourt. “He might equally well have said that a man’s life has a buried myth.”
“I don’t see that making it any easier.”
“Arthur, you are sometimes remarkably obtuse—not to say dumb,” said Darcourt. “Now—I think I’ve had enough of this excellent Burgundy to ask you a very personal question. Haven’t you seen your own myth in all that opera business? Your myth, and Maria’s myth, and Powell’s myth? A fine myth, and as an observer I must say you all carried it through with style.”
“Well, if you want to cast me as Arthur—though how do you know it isn’t just a trick of the name?—Maria has to be Guenevere, and I suppose Powell is Lancelot. But we weren’t very Arthurian, were we? Where’s your myth?”
Darcourt was about to speak, but Maria hushed him. “Of course you don’t see it. It’s not the nature of heroes of myth to think of themselves as heroes of myth. They don’t swan around, declaiming, ‘I’m a hero of myth.’ It’s observers like Simon and me who spot the myths and the heroes. The heroes see themselves simply as chaps doing the best they can in a special situation.”
“I flatly decline to be a hero,” said Arthur. “Who could live with that?”
“You haven’t any choice,” said Darcourt. “Fish up a myth from the depths and it takes you over. Maybe it’s had its eye on you for a long time. Think—an opera. What was it Hoffmann said?—you dug it up, Maria.”
“ ‘The lyre of Orpheus opens the door of the Underworld’.”
“He must have been a wonderful little chap,” said Arthur. “I’ve always thought that, though of course I couldn’t have put it like that. But I still don’t see the myth.”
“It is the myth of the Magnanimous Cuckold,” said Darcourt. “And the only way to meet it is with charity and love.”
After a long silence, and reflective sipping of wine, Arthur spoke.
“I choose not to think of myself as magnanimous.”
“But I do,” said Maria.
Robertson Davies, The Lyre of Orpheus
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