“It cannot be honest and complete unless you will tell me what you know about Francis Cornish during those years for which I have no records. And I assure you I never thought of saying anything about your drawing.”
“If you don’t, somebody else will. It could be ruinous. The cosmetic business is quite sufficiently ambiguous, without any associations of art faking creeping in.”
“No, no; I would never mention it.”
“So long as these preliminary sketches are in your National Gallery collection, there is very great danger.”
“That is unfortunate, of course.”
“Professor Darcourt”—the Princess was flirting with him—”if you had known what you know now, about my drawing and the use I am making of it, would you have sent those five sketches to your National Gallery?”
“If I had thought that you held the key to the most interesting part of Francis Cornish’s life, I doubt very much if I would have done so.”
“And now they are utterly irretrievable?”
“You see how it is. They are government property. They belong to the Canadian nation.”
“Do you suppose the Canadian nation is ever going to attach much importance to them? Can you see queues of Indians and Eskimos, and Newfoundland fishermen, and wheat-growers, standing patiently in line to look at those drawings?”
“I am afraid I do not follow you.”
“If I had those drawings in my own hands, I could tell you things about Francis Cornish that would be the making of your book. They would inspire and refresh my memory.”
“And if you do not get them into your own hands, Princess?”
“No deal, Professor Darcourt.”
5
The Cornish Foundation was assembled in full palaver. The five members sat at the Round Table, upon which was the Platter of Plenty, heaped high with the fruits of late August. Dusty purple grapes hung from the various bowls of the wondrous epergne; for once, thought Maria, the damned thing looks beautiful even to my eye.
People who live in beautiful surroundings grow accustomed to them, and even indifferent to them. Neither Maria nor the other four members of the Cornish Foundation gave much attention to the room in which they sat at the Round Table. It was a very high room, and had what the architect had called a “cathedral roof” which, in the fading light of day, seemed higher and duskier than it was; below it was a row of small clerestory windows through which the green-blue sky and the first stars could be seen; on the walls below hung Arthur’s fine pictures, which were his own choosing, for the late Francis Cornish, who had enough good pictures to outfit a small museum, had left him none. There was a piano, but there was so much space that it did not dominate, as pianos sometimes do. Indeed, there was not much furniture in the room. Arthur liked space, and Maria gloried in uncluttered space, having been brought up in the more than cluttered house of her parents, even before Mamusia had reverted to Gypsydom, and established the midden in the basement beneath all this beauty. The foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart was what Darcourt had once called the Gypsy camp, and Maria had been angry with him, because it was so true.
The Foundation sat at the Round Table in candlelight, assisted by some discreet lighting under a cornice. A stranger coming suddenly into the room would have been struck and perhaps awed by its look of wealth and privilege and the elegant quietness which is one of the avails of wealth and privilege. Such a stranger was Professor Penelope Raven; she was impressed, and determined not to show it.
Expectation was high, and even Hollier had returned early from one of his expeditions to Transylvania, where he rooted for what he called cultural fossils. How handsome he is, thought Maria, and how unfairly his good looks lend weight to whatever he says; Simon isn’t in the least handsome, but he does far more for the Foundation than Hollier. Arthur is handsome, but not in the distinguished mode of Hollier; yet Arthur can set wheels to turning and kettles to boiling in a way quite out of Hollier’s range. I suppose I am as beautiful, for a woman, as Hollier is for a man, and I know just how little beauty adds up to, when things have to be done.
About the fifth member of the Foundation, Geraint Powell, Maria thought nothing at all. She did not like Powell, or the challenging way Powell looked at her; he was handsome in an actorly style—lots of wavy dark hair, rocking-horse nostrils, a large mobile mouth—and like many good actors he was better not examined at too close range. If the Cornish Foundation should ever be presented on the stage, thought Maria, Geraint Powell would be cast for the role of Clement Hollier; his overstated good looks would carry to the back of the theatre, as Hollier’s fine good looks would not.
They were all present, and eager, because Professor Penelope Raven had returned triumphant from her search abroad for the libretto to Arthur of Britain, and was on hand to tell what she had found.
“I’ve got it,” she said; “and, as this kind of research goes, it wasn’t too hard to find. It’s always like The Hunting of the Snark, you know; at the very last moment your Snark may turn out to be a Boojum. I guessed it would be in the British Museum library, among the theatre stuff, but as I expect you know, finding things there—if they are as obscure as this—depends a lot on research skill, and a nose for oddities, and sheer baldheaded luck. Of course I traipsed through the opera archives and libraries in Bamberg, Dresden, Leipzig, and Berlin—and I didn’t find a thing. Not a sausage. Lots of stuff about Hoffmann but nothing about this opera. I had to be thorough or I would have been wasting your money. But I had a hunch that London was where it would be.”
“Because of this man Planché,” said Arthur.
“No. Not Planché. I was on the track of Charles Kemble. Now I’m going to have to lecture you a bit, I’m afraid. Kemble was a member of the famous theatrical family; you’ll all have heard of Mrs. Siddons, who was his sister and the greatest actress of her time; you’ve seen Reynolds’ picture of her as the Tragic Muse. Charles Kemble was manager and lessee of Covent Garden Theatre from 1817 till 1823, and in spite of a lot of marvellous successes, he was always in trouble about money. Not his fault, really. It was the theatre economics of the time. The owners of the theatre demanded an immense yearly rental, and even a successful manager was often in hot water.
“Charles adored opera. He was always encouraging composers to write new ones. He was really an awfully nice man, and he encouraged anybody who had talent. He had his eye on our man, James Robinson Planché, because Planché could deliver the goods; he was a first-rate theatre man, and working with him meant success. Kemble had heard about Hoffmann—all the Kembles were awfully well educated, which wasn’t at all the usual thing among theatre people then—and I suppose he read German, or had seen something of Hoffmann’s in Germany. He persuaded Hoffmann to write him an opera, and insisted that Planché, who was still under thirty and obviously started on a successful career, should provide the libretto.
“So—the work was begun, and there was some correspondence between Planché and Hoffmann, which is lost, I fear; poor old Hoffmann was in bad health, and died before anything much came of it. And Hoffmann and Planché fought like cat and dog in the very polite epistolary fashion of the time, so I imagine Planché was relieved when the whole affair came to nothing. As it turned out he wrote a little thing to replace it, called Maid Marian, with music by a clever hack called Bishop.
“The story, so far as I could dig it up, was in Charles Kemble’s papers in the B.M. Want to hear it?”
“Yes, we certainly do,” said Arthur. “But first, can you reassure us that there actually is a libretto, of some sort, for this opera?”
“Oh there is. Yes indeed there is, and I have transcripts of it right here. But I think it would all come clearer if I read you some of the exchange between Planché and Kemble.”