The Lyre of Orpheus by Robertson Davies
“No.”
“You should. Without German, very poor music. The tom-cat says: ‘Is there a cosier condition than being thoroughly satisfied with oneself?’ That is the philosophy of the Philistine.”
“A cosy condition; like having a good job as a typist.”
“If that is all you want, and you cannot see beyond it. Of course not all typists are like that, or there would be no audiences at concerts.”
“I want more than a cosy condition.”
“And you shall have it. But you will find cosy places, too. This is one of them.”
Kisses. Caresses of such skill and variety as Schnak would never have thought possible. Ninety seconds of ecstasy, and then deep peace, in which Schnak fell asleep.
The Doctor did not sleep for several hours. She was thinking of Johannes Kreisler, and herself.
(4)
THE WINE WAS VERY GOOD. Beyond that, Simon Darcourt would not have dared to speak, for he did not consider himself knowledgeable about wines. But he knew a good wine when he drank it, and this was undoubtedly very good. The bottles, as Prince Max had called to his attention, bore conservative, rather spidery engraving that declared them to be reserved for the owners of the vineyard. Nothing there of the flamboyant labels, with carousing peasants or Old Master pictures of fruit, cheese, and dead animals that marked commonplace wines. But at the top of these otherwise reticent labels was an elaborate achievement of arms and underneath it a motto: Du sollst sterben ehe ich sterbe.
Thou shalt perish ere I perish, thought Darcourt. Did it refer to the owners of the display of arms, or to the wine in the bottles? Must be the aristocrats; nobody would claim that a wine would outlive anyone who might be drinking it. Suppose a very young person—sixteen, let us say—were given a glass at the family table; suppose some child of a wine-drinking home were given a little, mixed with water, so that it would not feel left out at a family feast. Was it asserted that sixty years later the wine would still be in first-rate condition? Not likely. Wines like that were sold by the greatest auctioneers, not by popular wine merchants. So the boast, or assertion, or threat—it could be all or any of those—must apply to the people whose blazon of nobility this was.
There those people were, sitting at the table with him. Prince Max, who must be well into his seventies, was as straight, as slim, and as elegant as when he had been a dashing young German officer. Only his spectacles, which he somehow managed to make distinguished, and the thinness of his yellowish-white hair, so carefully brilliantined and brushed straight back from his knobby brow, gave any sign of how old he might be. His gaiety, his exuberance, and his unquenchable flow of anecdote and chatter could have belonged to a man half his age.
As for the Princess Amalie, she was as beautiful, as well-preserved, and as becomingly dressed as when Darcourt had first seen her when, during the past summer, she had made it so tactfully clear that if he wanted to know certain facts about the late Francis Cornish he must somehow provide her with the preliminary studies, from the hand of that same Francis Cornish, that had resulted in the Old Master drawing she used so lavishly, yet with such splendid understatement, in her advertisements. And that was what he had done.
The Clerical Cracksman, as he now thought of himself, had been just as adroit and just as lucky at the National Gallery as he had been at the University Library. The same approach to the curator of drawings, who was a friend and would not think of doubting Simon; the same casual, but swift, examination of the drawings in a special portfolio; a quick substitution of the drawings he had pinched from the Library, and which he carried tucked under the back strap of his M.B. waistcoat, for those that were the price of the Princess’s confidence; the same cheerful greeting to his friend as he left the archives of the Gallery. The Gallery had not yet got around to putting those beastly little marks on the drawings that set off alarms when one passed certain snoopy ray machines; indeed, it looked as if nobody had looked into the portfolio since first it had come to the Gallery over a year before. It was a very neat job, thought Simon, if he said so himself, and he had been lucky in the day he chose for his robbery, because it was a day when the Pope was visiting Ottawa, and everybody who might have been snooping about was in a distant field, watching the charismatic Pontiff celebrate an outdoor mass, and utter instructions and adjurations for their future conduct to the people of Canada.
Was he dead to shame, Simon had asked himself? Was he now a contented, successful criminal, unhampered by his clerical vows? He did not attempt a philosophical answer; he was wholly in the grip of the biographer’s covetous, unappeasable spirit. He was on to a good thing, and nothing should stand in his way. He would chance losing his soul, if only he could write a really good book. A deathbed repentance would probably square things with God. Meanwhile, this was Life.
“My wife is quite delighted with what you have brought,” said Prince Max. “You are sure it is complete—every preliminary study?”
“To the best of my knowledge,” said Simon. “I went through all Francis Cornish’s drawings, his own and all the Old Masters he had copied, and I saw nothing related to the portrait of the Princess except the studies I have put in your keeping.”
“Admirable,” said the Prince. “I shall not say we do not know how to thank you, because we do. Amalie shall tell you all she knows about le beau ténébreux. And so shall I, though I did not know him so well as she. I only met him once, at Düsterstein. He made an immediate favourable impression. Handsome; modest, even witty, when wine had overcome his reticence, But you must continue, my dear. Meanwhile, another glass of wine?”
“Francis Cornish was everything Max says, and a great deal more,” said the Princess. She drank little; a great professional beauty and a razor-sharp woman of business cannot afford to be a soaker. “He came into my life just as I was emerging from girlhood, and was beginning to be seriously interested in men. Seriously, I say; every girl notices men and dreams about them from the time she begins to walk. But he came to my family home just when I was beginning to think about lovers.”
“It is strange to think of the Francis I knew as greatly attractive,” said Simon. “He became rather an oddity as time went on.”
“But I am sure it must have been a ruined beauty you saw as oddity,” said the Princess. “Men do not notice such things, unless their romantic interest is in other men. Surely you have photographs?”
“He hated being photographed,” said Simon.
“Then I can surprise you. I have many photographs, that I took myself. A girl’s snapshots, of course, but revealing. I have one that I used to keep under my pillow until my governess discovered it and forbade it. I told her she was jealous and she laughed, but it was a laugh that told me I had hit the mark. Very handsome, and he had a nice deep voice. Not quite American; there was a Scottish burr in it that melted my soul.”
“I am already jealous,” said the Prince.
“Oh Max, don’t be silly. You know what girls are.”
“I knew what you were, my darling. But I knew what I was, too. So at the time I was not jealous.”
“Odious vanity!” said the Princess. “Anyhow, we all have our early loves whom we keep in the back of our minds all our lives. I am sure you know what I mean, Professor.”
“There was a girl with ringlets, when I was nine,” said Darcourt, taking a sip of his wine. “I know what you mean. But please go on about Francis.”
“He had everything a very young girl could love. He even had a rather untrustworthy heart. He had to keep watch on it, and report to his doctor in London.”
The Prince laughed. “The heart was as useful to him as his skill with the brush,” he said.
“And I am sure the dicky heart was as real as the skill.”
“Of course. But we know what those reports to his doctor were, don’t we?”
“You knew,” said the Princess. “But I did not know, not then. You knew a lot of things I did not know.”
“You are going to explain, I hop
“I knew about the bad heart at the other end—the London end,” said the Prince. “Francis sent accounts of his heart to his doctor, who passed them on at once to the right people at the Ministry of Information, because they were a code. Francis was watching the trains that passed by Düsterstein two or three times a week, carrying poor souls to a nearby internment camp—a labour camp or something of the sort. Anyhow, one of those infamous camps from which very few people escaped alive.”
“Are you telling me Francis was a spy?”
“Of course he was a spy,” said the Prince. “Didn’t you know? His father was a well-known spy, and I suppose he introduced the boy to the family trade.”
“But le beau ténébreux wasn’t a very good spy,” said the Princess. “Lots of spies aren’t, you know. I don’t suppose he was a very important spy. He came to Düsterstein as an assistant to that old rogue Tancred Saraceni, who was restoring the family pictures, and if Saraceni wasn’t a spy he was certainly one of the great busybodies of his time. He was on to Francis at once. And so was my grandmother.”
“Nobody put anything over on the old Gräfin,” said the Prince. “She was up to every dodge.”
“Sorry,” said Darcourt. “You’ve lost me completely. What was Düsterstein, and who was the old Gräfin, and what is all this spy business? I’m completely in the dark.”
“Then we shall be able to pay for those drawings in full,” said the Prince.
“You have the key to the missing years in Francis’s life. I knew he had been in Europe for some time as a student of painting, and that he had worked with the great Saraceni, but nothing beyond that.”
“Düsterstein was Amalie’s family home. She lived there with her grandmother, who was the old Gräfin.”
“I was an orphan,” said the Princess. “Not a pitiable orphan, or a Dickensian orphan, but just an orphan, and I was brought up at Düsterstein by my grandmother, and a governess. It was as dull as could be, till old Saraceni came to work on the family collection of pictures, and not long afterward le beau turned up to help him. Exciting, under the circumstances.”
“And he was a spy?”
“Certainly he was a spy. So was my governess, Ruth Nibsmith. Germany was full of spies during the years of the Reich. With so many spies everywhere it is astonishing that Britain made such a goat of herself as the war approached.”
“He was spying on a nearby internment camp?”
“He never went near it. Nobody could do that, and certainly not a Canadian in a little sports car. No; he just counted the number of freight cars in each train that chugged along the track not far from our house. I used to watch him. It was funny, really. There I was, in my window in a tower—sounds romantic, doesn’t it—watching Francis count—you could almost hear him—as he stood at his window, invisible, as he thought, in the darkness of night. And there in the garden below, behind some bushes, was my governess, spying on Francis. I used to watch them both, almost helpless with laughter. And I suspect that my grandmother was watching too, from a room next to her business office. She was a very big farmer, you know.”
“The thing about spies,” said the Prince, “is that unless they are of the small number of very good ones, you can almost smell them. They have balloons coming out of their heads, like people in the comic strips, with ‘I’m a snoop’ written in them. One doesn’t pay too much attention to them, because most of them are harmless. But if a strange, handsome young man turns up in your castle, to help a crook like Saraceni, with every credential including a bad heart, who sends regular letters to a Harley Street address—he’s probably a spy.”
“But Francis was a genuine assistant to Saraceni?” said Darcourt. “There was no deception about that.”
“Saraceni was the soul of deception. Not, mind you, that I think he was dishonest in a trivial or purely self-seeking way. He had an artistic passion for illusion, far beyond fakery. He thought of it as playing tricks with Time. He was a very great restorer; you know that. And when he was working on a painting of value, like the pieces in the Düsterstein collection, he worked faithfully in the spirit and the mode of the artist who had made the picture. He turned back the clock. But he could take a piece of very indifferent painting, and skilfully make something fifth-rate look second-rate. That is art of a very special kind—knowing just how far to go.”
“One of the best things of that kind to come from Saraceni’s studio was, in fact, the work of Francis Cornish,” said the Princess. “Drollig Hansel—you remember it, Max?”
“No, no; that was no patched-up thing. That was an original. The queerest little panel you ever saw, of a dwarf jester. Extraordinary little face; you felt it saw everything.”
“It frightened me,” said the Princess. “Of course I should not have seen it at all But you know what children are. Saraceni used to lock up his studio every evening, and probably thought that all his secrets were safe. But I used to take my grandmother’s key from her desk every now and then, and have a look. That dwarf seemed to me to speak of all the tragedy of human life—imprisonment in an ugly body, deformity that put him beyond the understanding of other people, the yearning for vengeance and the yearning for love. So much of the horrible pathos of life, on a panel eight inches by ten.”
“Where is that picture now?” said Darcourt.
“I have no idea,” said the Prince. “I believe it was in Hermann Goering’s collection for a time, but I have heard nothing of it since. Unless it was destroyed—and I can’t imagine anybody destroying it—it will certainly turn up some day.”
“You speak as if Francis had really been a great painter,” said Darcourt.
“Yes,” said the Prince. “Shall we have coffee now?”
For coffee the three went into a large drawing-room. Darcourt had not been there before; his earlier talks with the Princess had been in a room she used for business, but it was so elegant that only a coarse soul would have thought of questioning any proposal of a business nature that was made there. Haggling, one presumed, was done elsewhere. But haggling there must have been, for Max and Amalie plainly conducted their businesses on a large and highly competitive level. The drawing-room seemed to occupy the whole of one side of the splendid penthouse in which they dwelt.
Darcourt was beginning to be an expert on rich people’s penthouses. The Cornishes’ penthouse in Toronto was wonderful because it was very modern, and some of its walls were composed entirely of glass, commanding a sweeping view over much of the city, and beyond it so that—enthusiasts insisted—on a fine day it was possible to see the mist rising from Niagara Falls in the farthest distance. But its modernity paradoxically gave it a somewhat timeless air, for it had no obtrusive architectural features, and took its character from the furnishings, many of which were in the seventeenth-century manner that appealed to Arthur and which Maria did not challenge. But Max and Amalie had chosen to give their dwelling a strong eighteenth-century character. That was why the picture that dominated the room was so surprising.
It was a triptych that hung against the damask covering of the south wall. Its subject was not immediately apparent, for it was filled—filled but not crowded—with figures dressed in the manner of the earliest sixteenth century; figures in ceremonial dress, figures in ceremonial armour, and some figures in the robes that artists have for so long used to clothe characters from biblical history. But a rather longer inspection told Darcourt that he was looking at a representation—a most unusual representation—of The Marriage at Cana. It was not until the Princess spoke that he became aware that he was gaping at it.
“You are admiring our treasure,” she said. “Do sit here where you can see it.”
Darcourt took his coffee, and sat by her. “A magnificent picture,” he said. “And most unusual in terms of its subject. The figure of Christ is relegated to an inferior position, and He might almos
“The picture is one of five or six we thought of selling a few years ago,” said Prince Max. “It would have been a wrench, but we needed money badly, as I was at that time extending my wine business to North America, and you can imagine how much money that would take. The Düsterstein collection, of which we had managed to salvage some of the best pieces after the ruin and spoliation of the war, came to our rescue. We sold all but this one. Great American galleries were eager to get them. Indeed, for a time it looked as if this one might go to the National Gallery of Canada, but the deal fell through. Some trouble about finance. We had the money we needed from the other sales, so we decided to keep it.”
“But you do not know who painted it?”
“Oh, yes. We know. Indeed, it was a Canadian art historian who went as far as possible into the whole question of the picture, and attached to it the name of The Alchemical Master. Because he found elements in it that suggested a knowledge of alchemy.”
“The historian’s name was Aylwin Ross, wasn’t it?” said Darcourt.
“That was the man,” said the Prince. “A very personable fellow. He helped us a great deal in placing our other pictures. You can dig up what he wrote about The Marriage at Cana in the files of art journals. Nobody has challenged his opinion, so far as I know. So the picture will probably always be attributed to The Alchemical Master—unless we discover who he was. But here is our other guest.”
The other guest was, like the Prince, a marvel of personal preservation. Close inspection suggested that he was well over seventy, but his step was light, his figure trim, and his teeth, though of a surprising brilliance, appeared to be his own.
“Let me introduce Professor Darcourt,” said the Princess, thereby making it clear that the newcomer was, at least in her estimation, someone who outranked Darcourt. “He comes from Canada, and he has brought me the things we discussed earlier—so that is that. Professor, this is Mr. Addison Thresher. You recognize him, of course.”