“As I remember Mr. Parlabane he might have done anything at all,” said Darcourt.

“Well, the law wouldn’t allow it, if he tried to cut out his natural heir. This isn’t the eighteenth century, you know.”

“I think it’s time I put in my two cents’ worth,” said Mr. Carver, who had been as still as a very large cat during all that had been said. He now looked like a very wide-awake cat. “You can’t prove your client is the son of John Parlabane.”

“Oh, can’t I, indeed?”

“No, you can’t. I’ve made a few inquiries, and I have at least three witnesses, and I could probably find more, who had a crack at the late Mrs. Whistlecraft in her high and palmy days. If you’ll pardon a bit of the Raw, one of my informants said she was known as Pay As You Enter, and poor old Whistlecraft was laughed at as a notorious cuckold, though a decent guy and quite a poet. Who’s the father? Nobody knows.”

“Oh yes they do,” said Wally Crottel. “What about the organism? Eh? How about that? None of these guys you mention ever gave her the organism. She said so herself; she was always a very open woman. And without the organism how do you account for a child? Eh? Without the organism, no dice.”

“I don’t know what you’ve been reading, Mr. Crottel,” said Mr. Carver, “but you’re away off base. Take my wife, for instance; four fine kids, one of them just last week called to the bar (a lawyer like yourself, Mr. Gwilt), and she never had one of those things in her life. Told me so herself. And a very happy woman, adored by her family. You ought to see what goes on in our house on Mother’s Day! This organism, as you call it, may be all very well, but its not the real goods. So bang goes your organism. So far as it’s evidence, that’s to say.”

“Well, anyways, that’s what my mum always said,” said Wally, loyal even in defeat.

Mr. Gwilt seemed to be groping in his mind, perhaps for a useful scrap of Latin. He decided to do what he could with an old one.

“The ius naturale,” he said. “Natural justice. Are you going to fly in the face of that?”

“Yes, when it’s demanded at the point of a gun, and it’s an empty gun. That would be my advice,” said Mr. Carver, a pussy who had not yet retracted his claws.

“Come on, Merv,” said Wally. “Time to go.”

“I haven’t finished yet,” said his lawyer. “I want to get to the bottom of why that will is withheld.”

“Not a will,” said Hollier; “a personal letter.”

“The nearest thing to a will the late John Parlabane ever made. And why are these people refusing to produce the corpus delicti, by which I hasten to say I do not mean the body of the late John Parlabane, as it is commonly misunderstood, but the material object relating to the crime. I mean the manuscript of the novel about which all this dispute has arisen.”

“Because there’s no reason to produce it,” said Mr. Carver.

“Oh, there isn’t, eh? We’ll see about that?”

Mr. Carver was a pussycat again, his claws well in. He used an expression perhaps unexpected in a former member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and a working private eye.

“Fiddlesticks!” he said.

With a great display of indignation, and inaudible mutterings, Mr. Mervyn Gwilt rose slowly, like a man who goes, only to return with renewed strength, and, followed by his disgruntled client, left the apartment. He gave vent to his feelings by slamming the door.

“Thank God we’re rid of them,” said Maria.

“Rid of Gwilt, maybe. I wouldn’t be sure you’re rid of Wally Crottel,” said Mr. Carver, rising. “I know a few things about Wally. Fellows like that can be very nasty. You’d better keep your eye peeled, Mrs. Cornish.”

“Why me? Why not Professor Hollier?”

“Psychology. You’re a woman, and a rich woman. People like Wally are very jealous. There’s not much to be got out of the professor, if you’ll excuse me for saying so, but a rich woman is an awful temptation to a fellow like Wally. I just mention it.”

“Thanks, George. You’ve been wonderful,” said Darcourt. “You’ll send me your statement, won’t you?”

“Itemized and in full,” said Mr. Carver. “But I must say its been a pleasure. I never liked that guy Gwilt.”

Mr. Carver declined the offer of a drink, and moved out of the apartment on pussycat feet.

“Where did you find that wonderful man?” said Maria.

“I was able to do something for his oldest boy when he was a student. Taught him a little Latin—just enough,” said Darcourt. “George is my key to the underworld. Everybody ought to have one.”

“If that’s that, then I’ll be going,” said Hollier. “Some work I want to finish. But if I may say so, Maria my dear, you really oughtn’t to throw anything away; as a scholar you ought to know that. Throw things away and what is there for the scholars of the future? It’s simple trade-unionism. Throw things away and what becomes of research?”

And he went.

“Do you have to go right away, Simon?” said Maria. “There are one or two things—Would you like a drink?”

An unnecessary question, thought Simon. In his state of authorial anxiety about his book he was always ready for a drink. He would have to watch that. A drunken priest. A drunken professor. Oh, shame!

“I will make you a drink if you want one,” he said. “It seems to me you drink a great deal more than you did when you were a student.”

“I need more than when I was a student. And I have inherited my Uncle Yerko’s head. I’m a long way from being a serious drinker, Simon. I’ll never be in the class with Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot.”

“The Doctor is heroic in her application to the bottle. But somehow I don’t think she has what Americans call a Drinking Problem. She likes it and she holds a lot. Simple.”

“You won’t join me?”

“I’m afraid I’m drinking too much, and I haven’t got the splendid head of you and the Doctor. I’ll just have some bubbly water.”

“Are things getting to be too much for you, Simon?”

“This opera is worrying me, in a way that is quite absurd, because it’s really none of my business. If you and Arthur want to spend hundreds of thousands on it, the money is yours. You’re doing it for Powell, of course?”

“No, not of course, though it must look like that. He has certainly rushed us into the whole thing. I mean, we simply thought we would put up some money so that Schnak could do a job on the Hoffmann manuscripts, in so far as they exist. But Powell suggested that the opera might be presented, and was so full of enthusiasm and Welsh rhetoric that he infected Arthur, and you remember how Arthur went overboard about the whole idea. So here we are, up to our necks in something we don’t understand.”

“I suppose Powell understands it.”

“Yes, but the mixture of Arthur’s idealism and Powell’s opportunism doesn’t please me at all. The person who is going to come out on top of the heap, if the thing isn’t a horrible failure, is Geraint Powell. I suppose Schnak might benefit, though how I can’t pretend to see; but Powell, as the force behind the whole affair, is bound to get a lot of attention, which is what he wants.”

“Why are you willing that Schnak should benefit, and so hostile to Powell?”

“He’s using Arthur, and consequently he’s using me. He’s a climber. He’s been a pretty successful actor, but he understands the limitations of that, so he wants to be a director. Because he’s really very good at music, he wants to be a director of opera, and on the highest level. There’s nothing wrong with any of that. He talks as if Arthur rushed everybody into this affair, but it’s the other way around. He’s the whirlwind. I feel he really looks on Arthur and me simply as a ladder toward his own success.”

“Maria, you’d better get things straight in your head about what a patron is. I know a lot about patronage because I’ve seen it in the university. Either you exploit, or you are exploited. Either you demand the biggest slice of the pie for yourself, and get a gallery, or a theatre, or whatever it may be, named after you, and insist that people put up your portrait in the foyer, and toady to you, and listen to whatever you have to say with bated breath, or else you are simply the moneybags. And when you’re dealing with artists of any kind you are dealing with the people who have the most gall and the most outrageous self-esteem in the world. So you’ve got to be tough, and insist on being first in everything, or you’ve got to do it for the love of the art. Don’t complain about being used. Got to be magnanimous, in fact. Magnanimity, I needn’t remind you, is as rare as it is splendid.”