“But I will answer,” said the Doctor. “I like what I have seen. It is not strange at all. It is like Sweden. Why not? We are geographical near neighbours. I look out of my window and what do I see? Fir trees. Maple trees already turning to red. Big outcroppings of bare rock. It is not like New York. I have been in New York. It is not like Princeton, where I have also been. It has the smell. It smells like a northern land. Do you have terrible winters?”
“They can be difficult,” said Arthur.
“Ah,” said the Doctor, smiling for the first time. “Difficult winters make very great people, and great music. I do not, generally speaking, like the music of lands that are too far south. I will have another glass of the Hochheimer, if I may.”
This woman must have a hollow leg, thought Darcourt. A boozer? Surely not, with that ascetic appearance. Let’s tank her up and see what happens. As an old friend of the family he had made the martinis, and his was the task of serving the wine at dinner; he went to the sideboard and opened another bottle of the Hochheimer and handed it to Arthur.
“Let us hope that you can charm some fine northern music out of the fragments of Hoffmann’s score,” said Arthur.
“Let us hope. Yes, hope is the thing upon which we shall build,” said the Doctor, and down went the Hochheimer—not at a gulp, for the Doctor was too elegant to gulp—but without a pause.
“I hope you don’t think it rude of us to speak of the opera so soon,” said Maria. “It is so much on our minds, you see.”
“One should always speak of what is uppermost in one’s mind,” said the Doctor. “I want to talk about this opera, and it is uppermost in my mind.”
“You’ve looked at the music?” said Arthur.
“Yes. It is sketches and indications of the orchestration, and themes that Hoffmann wanted used to suggest important things in the plot. He seems somewhat to have anticipated Wagner, but his themes are prettier. But it is not an opera. Not yet. This student was too enthusiastic when she told you it was an opera. It is very pretty music, but not foolish. Some of it could be Weber. Some could be Schumann. I like all that. I love those wonderful failed operas by Schumann and Schubert.”
“I hope you don’t see this as another failed opera.”
“Who can say?”
“But you aren’t going to set to work with failure as your goal?” said Maria.
“Much may be learned from failure. Of course that is the theme of the opera, so far as I can see. The Magnificent Cookold, he called it. Am I right to think a cookold is a deceived husband?”
“You are. The word is pronounced cuckold, by the way.”
“As I said. Cookold.—Ah, thank you. This Hochheimer is really very good.—But, now—a cookold; why is it a man? Why not a woman?”
“You are just as right to say cookold as cuckold,” said Professor Hollier, who had also been getting into the Hochheimer with quiet determination. “That was a Middle English form. The French was, and still is, cocu. Because of the notorious goings-on of that bird.” He bowed to Dr. Dahl-Soot over his raised glass.
“Ah, you are a man who knows language? Very good. Then why is it masculine? A person deceived in marriage. Are not women also deceived in marriage? Again and again and again? So why no word for that, eh?”
“I do not know how you would form a feminine from cuckold. Cuckoldess? Clumsy. Or how about she-cuckold?”
“Not good,” said the Doctor.
“Does it matter? It is Arthur who is the cuckold in the Arthurian legends,” said Penny Raven.
“So it is. This Arthur was a fool,” said the Doctor.
“Oh, come on! I won’t have that,” said Maria. “He was a noble man, bent on lifting the whole moral tone of his kingdom.”
“But still a cookold. He did not pay enough attention to his wife. So she gave him a big pair of horns.”
“Perhaps there is no feminine of cuckold because the female of the species does not grow horns, however much she is deceived,” said Hollier, solemnly.
“She knows a better trick than that,” said the Doctor. “She gives him the ambiguous baby, eh? He looks in the cradle and he says. What the hell; this is a funny-looking baby. By God, I am a cookold.”
“But in the Arthurian legends there is no child of the adultery of Guenevere and Lancelot. So he could not have exclaimed what you have just exclaimed, madam.”
“Not madam. I prefer to be called Doctor. Unless after a long time we get on close terms; then perhaps you will call me Nilla.”
“Not Gunny?” said Powell.
“I despise Gunny. But this Arthur—this stupid king—he does not need a baby to tell him. His wife and his very good friend tell him straight out. We have been in the bed while you have been lifting the moral tone. It could be a comedy. It could be by Ibsen. He was often funny like that.”
Maria thought the time had come to change the direction of the conversation at the Round Table. “My next course is truly Arthurian. Roast pork, and with apple sauce. Very popular dish at Camelot, I am certain.”
“Pork? No, never pork! It must be roast boar,” said the Doctor.
“My butcher didn’t have a good roasting boar,” said Maria, perhaps a little too sharply; “you will have to put up with very good roast pork.”
“I am glad it isn’t roast boar,” said Hollier. “I have often eaten roast boar in my travels, and I don’t like it. A heavy, dense flesh and a great provoker of midnight melancholy. In me, anyhow.”
“You have not had good roast boar,” said the Doctor. “Good roast boar is excellent eating. I do not find it provokes to melancholy.”
“How would you know?” said Penny Raven.
“I do not understand you, Professor Raven.”
“You seem to be melancholy without any roast boar,” said Penny, who had not been neglecting the Hochheimer. “You are depressing us about our opera, and you are disparaging Maria’s wonderful roast pork.”
“If I depress you, I am sorry, but the fault may not be mine. I am not a merry person. I take a serious attitude toward life. I am not a self-deceiver.”
“Nor am I,” said Penny. “I am enjoying Maria’s fine Arthurian feast. She is Arthur’s lady and I declare her to be a splendid hlafdiga.”
“A fine what?” said the Doctor.
“A fine hlafdiga. It is the Old English word from which our word ‘lady’ is derived, and it means the person who gives the food. A very honourable title. I drink to our hlafdiga.”
“No, no, Penny, I must protest,” said Hollier. “A hlafdiga does not mean a lady. That is an exploded etymology. The hlafdiga was the dough-kneader, not the loaf-giver as you ignorantly suppose. You are muddling up the Mercian with the Northumbrian word.”
“Oh, bugger you, Clem,” said Penny. “The modern word ‘lady’ comes from hlafdiga; the hlafdiga was the loaf-giver and down through leofdi and thus down to lefdi and so to ‘lady’. Don’t try to teach me to suck eggs, or aegru if you want it in Old English. The hlafdiga was the wife of the hlaford–the lord, you pretentious ass—and thus his lady.”
“Abuse is not argument, Professor Raven,” said Hollier, with tipsy dignity. “The hlafdiga could be quite a lowly person—”
“Possibly even of Gypsy origins,” said Maria, with a good deal of heat.
“For Christ’s sake, are we going to get any pork?” said Powell. “Or are we going to get into an etymological wrangle while everything goes cold? I hereby declare that Maria is a lady in every sense of the word, and I want something to eat.”
“There are no ladies now, thank God,” said Dr. Dahl-Soot, holding out her glass. “We are all on equal footing, distinguished only by talent. Genius is the only true aristocracy. Is that a red wine you are pouring, Professor Darcourt? What is it? Let me see the bottle.”