“Pay me! Mamusia, I get some expenses now and again to put back in my own pocket what I have taken out of it to serve the Cornish Foundation, damn it, but not one red cent of pay have I ever had. I am always out of pocket. And I am getting sick of it. They think because I am a friend I love working my tail off for them, just to be one of the gang. And the trouble is they are right!”
“Father Simon, don’t shout! You are a very lucky man and now I know you are the Fool. The great Fool who dominates the whole spread! Don’t you take a penny! Not one penny! That is the Fool’s way, because his fortune is not made like other men’s. They pay everybody. This Powell, the baby-maker. This Doctor here, who is very good at her job, but is just La Force, you know, and sometimes puts her foot very wrong. And that girl, that child who is being given so much money for this opera job, and it may not be for her good. But you are free! You wear no golden chain! You are the Fool—Oh, I must kiss you!”
Which she did. And then Yerko insisted on kissing him too. A prickly, smelly embrace, but Darcourt recognized now that reality and truth can sometimes be very smelly. Thus the party broke up, and Darcourt took Gunilla home in a taxi, and delivered her, still limp and silent, into the hands of Schnak.
“Oh, Nilla, you poor darling! What have they been doing to you?” she said as she supported her wilted teacher.
“I have been a fool, Hulda,” said the Doctor, as the door closed.
Yes, but not the Fool! Exhilarated as he had not been in many years, Darcourt paid off the taxi and walked home, delighting in the chill air and his new character.
Searching for words to express this exultation, this state of unusual well-being, an Old Ontario phrase swam upward from the depths of his consciousness.
He felt as if he could cut a dead dog in two.
9
My heart goes out to Darcourt. The life of a librettist is the life of a dog. Worse than the playwright, who may have to satisfy monsters of egotism with new scenes, new jokes, chances to do what they have done successfully before; but the playwright can, to some degree, choose the form of his scenes and his speeches. The librettist must obey the tyrant composer, whose literary taste may be that of a peasant, and who thinks of nothing but his music.
Rightly so, of course. Opera is music, and all else must bow to that. But what sacrifices are demanded of the literary man!
Psychology, for instance. The watered-silk elegances of feeling and the double-dealing of even the most honest mind; the gushes of hot emotion that rush up from the depths and destroy the reason. Can music encompass all that? Yes, it can in a way, but never with the exactitude of true poetry. Music is too strongly the voice of emotion and it is not a good impersonator. Can it make a character have a voice that is wholly his own? It can try, but as a usual thing the voice is always that of the composer. If the composer is a very great man, like the divine Mozart or, God help us all, the heaven-storming Beethoven, we love the voice and would not change it for even the masterly characterizations of Shakespeare.
You see, my trouble is that I am torn between Hoffmann the poet and fabulist, and Hoffmann the composer. I could argue with equal conviction on either side. I want the poet to be supreme, and the musician to be his accompanist. But I also want the musician to pour out his inspiration, and the poet must carpenter something with the right vowel sounds that obediently partner the music without pushing itself into prominence. What great line of poetry can anybody quote from an opera libretto? Even Shakespeare is reduced to a hack, after the libretto hack has hacked his lines to suit Maestro Qualcuno’s demands. And then every simpleton says that Maestro Qualcuno has shown Shakespeare how it should be done.
If the musician is really sensitive to poetry, magic is the result, as in the songs of Schubert. But, alas, Schubert wrote truly terrible operas, and Weber had the fatal knack of choosing the worst possible people to write his libretti. Like that fellow Planché, who ruined Oberon. Oh, how lucky I am to have escaped the well-meaning drollery of Planché!
Now I have Darcourt, and what a task that poor wretch has been given! To prepare a libretto that will fit existing music, or rather the music that Schnak and the brilliant Doctor can make by enlarging on my notes.
He is doing well. Of course he has to find some words that will carry the plot they have created for my Arthur. It is not precisely the plot I would have wished for. It smells a little of the present day—their present day. But it is not bad. It is more psychological than I would have dared to make it, and I am happy with that, for I was rather a fine psychologist, in the manner of my time. My uncanny tales were not just fantasies to amuse young girls on an idle afternoon.
But Darcourt has had a really good idea. Whenever he can, he is drawing on the writings of a true poet. A poet not very well known, he says, but I would not know about that for I never read English with real understanding, and English poetry was an unknown country to me. But I like what he has fished up from his unknown. How right he is not to tell anybody who his unknown poet is! If they knew, they would want to stick a finger in the pie, and too many fingers in pies are the utter ruin of art and the curse of drama. No; let the secret remain a secret, and if anybody wants to ferret out the secret, good luck to them and probably bad luck to him.
All artistic tinkering and monkeying is slave’s work. I know. Once I undertook, as an act of friendship, to do something of the sort. I made a version of Shakespeare’s Richard III for my dearest friend, Ludwig Devrient. It almost cost me that friendship, for Ludwig wanted all sorts of things that my artistic conscience revolted against. But Shakespeare wanted it thus, I would say, and he would shout To hell with Shakespeare! Give me a great effect here, so that I can take the audience by the throat and choke it with splendour! And then, in the next scene, you must arrange matters so that I can choke them again, and reduce them to an admiring pulp! My dear Louis, I would say, you must trust your poet and you must trust me. And then he would say what I could not bear: Shakespeare is dead, and as for you, you do not have to go on the stage with a hump on your back and a sword in your hand, and win the battle every night. So do what I say! After which, there was nothing for me to do but get drunk. Ludwig got what he wanted, but Richard III was never one of his greatest roles, and I know why. After it was over, the audience came unchoked, and the critics told them that Ludwig was a barn-stormer and a mountebank. Whom did he blame, then? Shakespeare, of course, and me along with Shakespeare.
I like Darcourt, and not just because I pity him. The old Gypsy woman says he will be greatly rewarded, but old Gypsy women can be wrong. Who heeds a librettist? At the party after the performance, who wants to meet him? At whose feet do the pretty ladies fall? Whose lapel do the rich impresarios seize, clamouring for more, and greater, works? Not the librettist.
The old Gypsy is wrong. Or else I do not know as much about this affair as I hope I do.
Anyhow, I must bide the event, as Shakespeare says. Or does he? There are no reference libraries in Limbo.
VI
1
Darcourt’s Christmas holiday was a success beyond his hopes. His hotel in the north woods pretended to be a simple chalet, but was, in fact, luxurious, giving him a large room with broad windows looking down over a valley of pine forest; a proper room, with a desk and a good armchair in it, as well as the bed, and—rarest of hotel blessings—a good light for reading; a chest of drawers, a closet for his clothes, and a bathroom where there was provision for everything he could need, and in the form of a bidet and a frank notice warning him not to put his sanitary towels down the plumbing, for things he did not need. With a sense of deep content he unpacked and hung up clothes that gave no hint of his clerical character; he had invested in two or three shirts sufficiently gaudy for a country holiday, and some handsome scarves to tuck into his open collar. He had a fine pair of corduroy trousers, and, for long walks, boots that were, he had been assured, proof against cold and wet. He had two tweed jackets, one with leather patches on the elbows, sure signal that he was an academic, and not an academic of the sort that likes to ski, or slide downhill on a luge, or engage in casual conversations about nothing in particular. There were young people among the guests, who wanted to do these things, and older people who wanted to sit in the bar and pretend that they would prefer to ski, or luge; but the discreet lady whose job it was to see that everybody had a good time knew Darcourt at once for a man whose idea of a good time was to be alone. So he was civil to his fellow guests, and obedient to the convention that required him to make remarks about the weather, and smile at children, but on the whole he was left to himself and settled to two weeks of his own company with a deep sense of gratitude.