“As a young parson I was a curate in some very tough parishes. That girl isn’t nearly as tough as she wants us to think. She doesn’t eat enough, and what she eats is junk. I suppose she has been on drugs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if now she was on the booze. But there’s something about her I like. If she’s a genius, she’s a genius in the great romantic tradition.”
“That’s what I hope.”
“I think Hoffmann would have liked her.”
“I’m not very well up on Hoffmann. Not my period.”
“Very much in the great romantic tradition. As a writer, he was one of its German inspirers. But there are aspects of the great romantic tradition we can do without, nowadays. Schnak will have to learn that.”
“Will she learn it from Hoffmann? Doesn’t sound like the teacher I would choose.”
“Who would you choose? Have you got the supervisor you want?”
“I’ll be talking with her by long-distance tomorrow. I’ll be as persuasive as I can and it may take time. I suppose I send the phone bill to you?”
That remark assured Darcourt that the Dean was an old hand at dealing with foundations.
5
Darcourt knew that, although he had compelled Schnak to say “please”, it was no more than a nursery victory. He had made the bad child behave herself for a moment, but that was nothing. He was deeply worried about the whole matter of Arthur of Britain.
He grumbled a lot, but he was a faithful friend, and he did not want the Cornish Foundation to fall flat on its face in its first important venture in patronage. News of Arthur’s grandiose ambitions were sure to leak out, not from Foundation directors, but from Arthur himself; he would not leak to the press intentionally, but the worst leaks are unintentional. Arthur was riding very high; he was making no secret of his wish to do what other Canadian foundations did not do; he was turning a deaf ear to proven good causes and worthy projects and if he fell, there would be a grand, eight-part chorus of “We told you so” from the right-minded. Arthur was prepared to risk large sums on what were no more than hunches, and that was un-Canadian, and the country that longed for certainties would not forgive him. It made no difference that the money was not public money; in an age when all spending is subjected to ruthless investigation and criticism, any suggestion that large sums were being employed capriciously by a private citizen would inflame the critics who, though not themselves benefactors, knew exactly how benefaction ought to be managed.
Why did Darcourt worry so about Arthur? Because he did not want Maria to be drawn into public rebuke and criticism. He still loved Maria, and remembered with gratitude that she had refused him as a suitor, and offered friendship instead. He still suffered from the lover’s idea that the loved one should be, and could be, protected from the vicissitudes of fortune. In a world where everybody gets their lumps, he did not want Maria to get any lumps. If Arthur made a goat of himself, Maria would loyally suppose herself to be a nanny-goat. But what could he do?
A man who is disposed toward the romantic aspect of religion cannot wholly divorce himself from superstition, though he may pretend to hate it. Darcourt wanted reassurance that all was well, or some unmistakable warning that it was not. And where was such a thing to be found? He knew. He wanted to consult Maria’s mother, and he knew that Maria would be strongly against any such course, because she was trying to escape from everything her mother represented.
She was not having much success.
Maria thought of herself as a determined scholar, not as a rich man’s wife, or a woman of a remarkable beauty which drew all sorts of unscholarly things into her path. She wanted a new mother, the Bounteous Mother, the Alma Mater, the university. Learning and scholarship would surely help her to rise above the fact that she was half Gypsy, and all the Romany inheritance that was abhorrent to her. Her mother was a great stone in her path.
Her mother, as Madame Laoutaro (she had returned to her family name after the death of her husband), practised the respectable profession of a luthier, a doctor of sick violins, violas, cellos, and double basses; her family had a tradition of such work, as her name implied. But she was also in partnership with her brother Yerko, a man of dark skills who saw no reason why he should not palm off instruments that were made of scraps and bits of ruined fiddles, pieced out with portions of his own and his sister’s manufacture, on people who accepted them as genuine ancient instruments. Madame Laoutaro and Yerko were not crooks in the ordinary way; it was simply that they had no moral sense at all in such matters. Gypsies through and through, aristocrats of that enduring and despised people, they thought that taking every possible advantage of the gadjo world was the normal course of life. The gadje wanted to hunt and crush their people; very well, let the gadje find out who was cleverest. Madame Laoutaro was a shop-lifter and a fiddle-taker who gloried in her witty impostures, and she supposed that her daughter had taken to education as a means of carrying on the Gypsy battle. Clement Hollier, who was Maria’s supervisor in her studies, understood and appreciated Maria’s mother pretty well; he thought of her as a wonderful cultural fossil, a hold-over from a medieval world where the dispossessed were cunningly at war with the possessors. But Maria had married a possessor, a priest of the money-morality of Canada, not to despoil him but because she loved him, and Madame Laoutaro could not fully believe it. Small wonder that Maria wanted to get as far as possible from her mother.
Fate—incorrigible joker—saw things differently.
Maria and Arthur had not been married three months before Madame Laoutaro’s house burned down, and she and Yerko were homeless. The house, so respectably situated in the Rosedale area of Toronto, looked every bit as blamelessly respectable as it had done in the days of Madame Laoutaro’s blamelessly respectable and well-doing Polish gadjo husband, the late Tadeusz Theotoky. But no sooner had Tadeusz died, rich and well-regarded, than Madame (having noisily mourned a man she had loved as deeply as Maria loved Arthur) reverted to her maiden name, and her Gypsy ways, which were the only ways she really knew, and she and Yerko despoiled the house. They cut it up into a squalor of mean apartments in which a variety of hopeless people, chiefly old women, were able to dwell, paying much more than the apartments were worth, but trusting to the protective power of their landlady. One such old woman, Miss Gretser, a virgin of ninety-two (though she gave out that she was a mere eighty-eight), fell asleep with a cigarette in her fingers and it was not much more than an hour before Miss Gretser was a cinder, and Madame Laoutaro, luthier, and her ingenious brother Yerko were homeless. Madame declared, with much outcry, that they were also penniless.
They were certainly not penniless. As soon as the fire broke out Madame and Yerko hurried to their cellar workshops, pulled two cement blocks out of a wall, and rushed to the back garden, where they threw a leather bag of money into an ornamental pool. Then they returned to the front of the house for much enjoyable despair, hair-tearing, and noisy grief. When the last ember was quenched, and the excitement was over, they rescued the bag, hurried to Maria’s splendid penthouse, and set to work to pin sodden currency in bills of large denomination to all the upholstery and curtains, to dry it out. They insisted on sleeping on the floor of the handsome drawing-room till every bill was dried, ironed, and counted; they were suspicious of Nina, the Portuguese housekeeper, who made no secret of the fact that she looked on the Laoutaros as riff-raff. Which, of course, from a Portuguese Catholic point of view, they were.