“Oh, I wasn’t suggesting that we do anything,” said Maria. “I was just suggesting that we talk a little more compassionately.”
“You don’t understand modern compassion, Sim bach. It’s a passive virtue. I see what Maria means; let’s pity Wally, and maybe send him a few grapes in the slammer. If anybody is going to be nasty to the criminal classes, it must be those horrible cops and the hard-faced men in the courts. That’s what we pay them for. To make the world cosy for us. We smash Wally without having to harbour a hateful, revengeful thought; our servants do all that kind of thing for us.”
“That’s a new dimension of the Kater Murr philosophy,” said Darcourt. “Thanks for explaining it to me, Geraint bach.”
“After the baby is born, I think I shall write a whole volume, expanding Kater Murr,” said Maria. “Hoffmann didn’t begin to get all the good out of him. Kater Murr is really the foremost social philosopher of our time.”
This was what Darcourt wanted. This was almost the old Maria, the woman infused with the spirit of François Rabelais, a spirit vowed to the highest reaches of scholarship and illuminated by a cleansing humour. Arthur, he thought, was looking decidedly better. Had some sort of new serenity descended on the Cornish household? Well—Powell was still there, and Powell was making himself very much at home.
“I must leave you shortly,” said he, “but meanwhile I am enjoying the peaceful retirement of your dwelling. This is one place where I am sure I can’t be got at by the abominable Al Crane.”
“Oh, don’t think you are safe here,” said Arthur. “Last night Al and Sweetness turned up and he cross-examined me for two hours, taking a full five minutes to formulate each question. In the modern lingo, Al lacks verbal skills; lingually, Al is a stumblebum. He brought a tape-recorder, so that every precious Um and Ah would be preserved forever. He wanted to know what my Motivation was for putting the Fund behind the opera scheme. He doesn’t believe anybody might do something for a variety of reasons; he wants one great, big, juicy Motivation which would be, he says, a significantly seminal thread in a complexity of artistic inspirations. He wants to identify all the threads that are woven into the complex tapestry of a work of art—I am quoting Al, you understand—but some threads are more seminal than others, and mine is wonderfully seminal; it could even be the warp, or maybe the woof, of the whole tapestry. I thought I would faint from boredom before I finally got him out of the house.”
“Arthur did not suffer alone,” said Maria. “All the time Al had him on the spot I was being bored rigid by Sweetness, who thanked me for receiving her in my Gracious Home, and then talked about what she called Our Condition. There are countless ways of making pregnancy nauseating, and I think Sweetness explored them all.”
“Sweetness is delighted with you. She told me so,” said Darcourt. “Because of your both being pregnant, of course. You and she, greatly in pod, are what she calls an Objective Correlative of the job of bringing this opera to birth. You, and she, and the opera all burst upon a waiting world at roughly the same time.”
“Spare me Sweetness’s scholarly insights,” said Maria. “She is not an Objective Correlative of anything, and she disgusts me as parodies of oneself always do. She expects me to embrace her as a loving companion in gravidity, and if she gives me much more sisterly love I may miscarry. But she would be sure to interpret that as an ill omen for the opera, so I don’t think I’ll oblige her. Never again does she cross the threshold of my Gracious Home.”
“They didn’t get a great welcome in Nilla’s Gracious Home,” said Powell. “Nilla doesn’t know what an assessor is, and I can’t tell her. I always thought the word meant a judge, or somebody who estimated something. What is an assessor, exactly, Sim bach?”
“It is something new in the academic world,” said Darcourt. “Somebody who watches something happen, and gives an enormously detailed report on it; somebody who shares an experience, without having any real involvement with it. A sort of Licensed Snoop.”
“But who issues the licence?” said Arthur.
“In this case, it seems to have been Wintersen. He says watching the production process will enrich Al immeasurably, and if Al develops his thesis into a book, it will give permanency to a deeply interesting and profoundly seminal experience.”
“Nilla is not pleased,” said Powell. “She knows only one meaning for seminal, and she thinks Al is being indecent in a male chauvinist way. She told him flatly there was nothing seminal in what she and Schnak were doing, and when he contradicted her she was very brusque. Said she had no time for such nonsense. Sweetness burst into tears, and Al said he fully understood the mercuriality of the artistic temperament, but the act of creation was seminal and it was his job to understand it so far as in him lay, which he seemed to think was pretty far. I just hope Al does not prove to be the condom in the act of creation.”
“Not much fear of that,” said Arthur.
“No fear at all, really. Nilla and Schnak have worked like Trojans. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Wintersen weren’t encouraging a deputation of Trojans to come and measure the energy involved. How does Wintersen get into this act, anyhow?”
“Dean of the Graduate School of Music,” said Darcourt. “I think he sees himself as richly seminal in this whole project. Did you know that Al and Sweetness have been to see Penny Raven?”
“As a collaborator with you on the libretto?”
“A fat lot of collaboration Penny has done. Those Trojans had better have a word with me, when they are learning about work. But Penny is an old academic hand. She strung them along with some high-sounding nonsense, and when she phoned me about it she could hardly speak for laughing. Quoted from The Hunting of the Snark, as she always does.”
“That Snark again,” said Arthur. “I really must read it. What did she say?”
“It’s an astonishing poem for descriptive quotes:
“Sweetness provides the smiles and soap,” said Maria. “I wonder if I shall manage not to kill Sweetness in some ingenious way. How does one get away with murder?”
“Exactly how does Sweetness come into this?” said Arthur. “Are they combining on this awful assessor game?”
“Hollier has the answer,” said Darcourt. “They visited him, but they got nowhere. He examined them with great care, however, and he says that he sees Sweetness, in anthropological-psychological-historico terms as the External Image of Al’s Soul.”
“A terrible thought,” said Maria. “Imagine looking into Sweetness’s teary eyes and saying, ‘My God, that’s the best of me!’ Al doesn’t want to do anything important without her, she tells me. I’m not sure she didn’t say she was his Muse. I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“I wish I didn’t know The Hunting of the Snark,” said Powell. “I am up to my neck in producing this opera and I keep thinking—
“You haven’t got cold feet, have you, Geraint?” said Arthur.
“No colder than usual, at this stage in a big job,” said Powell. “But I do see myself as the Bellman, when I wake up in the night, sweating. Everything is ready to go, you see. Got the score, got the cast, got the designs, got everything, and at last I must start on what Al would certainly call the seminal part. God grant that I am sufficiently seminal for the job. And now, with the greatest reluctance, I must leave this snug retreat, and go back to my desk. A million details await me.”