“So what do I do about her?” said Arthur.

“Behave as if you really loved her. What was she doing when last you saw her?”

“She didn’t look much like an independent soul, to be frank. She was throwing up her breakfast in the John.”

“Very right and proper, for a healthy young mother. Well, my advice is, love her and leave her alone.”

“You don’t think I should suggest she come to you?”

“Don’t you dare! But Maria will either come to me, or she’ll go to her mother, and my bet is she’ll come to me. Her mother and I are roughly in the same line of work, but I look more civilized, and Maria still yearns powerfully for civilization.”

Darcourt was not accustomed to being entertained by women; not, that is to say, entertained in restaurants by women who paid the bill. It was a ridiculous attitude, he knew, as certainly Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot would be charging this excellent dinner to the Cornish Trust. But, even though she was a fast, efficient gobbler, whereas he was a patient muncher, the Doctor was a different person as a hostess from the obstreperous guest at Maria’s Arthurian dinner. She was considerate, kindly, charming, but not particularly feminine—in a word, thought Darcourt, she is very much man-to-man. Her notion of conversation, however, was unconventional.

“What sins would you have liked to commit?” she asked.

“Why do you ask that?”

“It is a key to character, and I want to know you. Of course, you are a parson, so I suppose you press down very hard on any sinful ideas you have, but I am sure you have them. Everybody does. What sins? What about sex? You have no wife. Is it men?”

“No indeed. I am extremely fond of women, and I have many women friends; but I am not tormented by sexual desire, if that is what you mean. Or not often. Too busy. If Don Juan had been a professor, and Vice-Warden of his college, a secretary to a large philanthropic trust, and a biographer, we should never have heard of him as a great seducer. It calls for a lot of leisure, does seduction. And a one-track mind. I imagine Don Juan must have been rather a dull dog when he wasn’t on the prowl.”

“The Freudians think Don Juan really hated women.”

“He had a funny way of showing it. I can’t imagine sex with somebody I hated.”

“You don’t always know you hate them till push comes to shove. I speak idiomatically, you understand. I am not talking smuttily.”

“Oh, quite.”

“I was married once, you know. Less than a week. Ugh!”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Why? We all have to learn. I was a quick learner. It is not my destiny to be Fru Berggrav, I decided. So—divorce, and back to my own life and my own name. Of which I am very proud, let me tell you.”

“I’m sure.”

“A lot of people here laugh when they hear it.”

“Not all names travel well.”

“Soot is an honoured name in Norway, where my Soots came from. There was a very good painter in the last century who was a Soot.”

“I didn’t know.”

“The people who laugh at my name have limited social experience.”

“Yes, yes.

“Like Professor Raven. Is she a great friend of yours?”

“I know her well.”

“A stupid woman. Do you know she has been on the telephone to me?”

“About the libretto?”

“No. About Hulda Schnakenburg. She made an awful muddle of it, but it was clear she thinks I am being very naughty with that child.”

“I know. And are you?”

“Certainly not! But I am coaxing her into life. She has lived a life very much—how do I say it?”

“Very much denied?”

“Yes, that’s the word. No kindness. No affection. I do not say love. Horrible parents.”

“I’ve met them.”

“True followers of Kater Murr.”

“Hadn’t thought of him as a religious teacher.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t have heard of him. He was a creation of our E. T. A. Hoffmann. A tom-cat. His philosophy was, ‘Can anything be cosier than having a nice, secure place in the world?’ It is the religion of millions.”

“Indeed it is.”

“Hulda is an artist. How good or how big, who can say? But an artist, certainly. Kater Murr is the enemy of all true art, religion, science—anything of any importance whatever. Kater Murr wants nothing but certainty, and whatever is great grows in the battleground between truth and error. ‘Raus mit Kater Murr! That is what Hulda says now. If I play with her a little—you understand me?—it is all for the defeat of Kater Murr.”

“All?”

“You are a sly one! No, not all. It is very agreeable to me, and to her as well.”

“I am not accusing you.”

“But you are being very clever. You have changed the conversation from what sins you would like to commit to what sins that silly, provincial woman accuses me of. Hulda will be all right. What is it she says? Okay. She will be okay.”

“A little better than just okay, I hope?”

“Oh, but you understand. She is very bad at language. She says terrible things. She says she must ‘maul over’ these sketches of Hoffmann’s. I look it up. She means ‘mull’. And she says she will ‘day-bew’ with this opera. She means ‘debut’ and she uses it all wrong anyhow. But she is not a fool or a vulgarian. She just has no regard for language. It has no mystery, no overtones, for her.”

“I know. Such people make you and me feel stuffy and pernickety.”

“But she cannot be an artist in music and a hooligan in speech. You are careful about language.”

“Yes.”

“I know from what you have done on the libretto. It is really good.”

“Thank you.”

“That silly woman does not help you?”

“Certainly not so far.”

“I suppose she thinks of me and it dries up the ink in her pen. And that beautiful fool Professor Hollier, who is too much a scholar to be even a very tiny poet. But what you give to Hulda is respectable poetry.”

“No, no; you are too flattering.”

“No I’m not. But what I want to know is—is it all yours?”

“What else could it be?”

“It could be pastiche. Which I am at last persuading Hulda not to call pistache. If so, it is first-class pastiche. But pastiche of what?”

“Now listen here, Dr. Dahl-Soot, you are being very pressing. You are accusing me of stealing something. What would you say if I accused you of stealing musical ideas?”

“I would deny it indignantly. But you are too clever to be deceived, and you know that many musicians borrow and adapt ideas, and usually they come out so that only a very subtle critic can see what has happened. Because what one borrows goes through one’s own creative stomach and comes out something quite different. You know the old story about Handel? Somebody accused him of stealing an idea from another composer and he shrugged and said, ‘Yes, but what did he do with it?’ What is theft and what is influence, or homage? When Hoffmann suggests Mozart, as he does in some of his compositions, it is homage, not theft. So, do you have an influence?”

“If I’m going to talk to you in this way, I must insist on calling you Nilla.”

“I shall be honoured. And I shall call you Simon.”

“Well, Nilla, it is insulting to suggest that I am not a poet, but that I am presenting unquestionable poetry.”

“Insulting, perhaps, but I think it is true.”

“It suggests that I am a crook.”

“All artists are children of Hermes, the Arch-Crook.”

“Let me answer your earlier question: what sins would I like to commit? Very well; I have just the tiniest inclination toward imposture. I think it would be delightful to slip something not absolutely sincere and gilt-edged into a world where any sort of imposture is held in holy horror. The world of art is such a world. The critics, who themselves originate nothing, are so unforgiving if they catch an impostor! Indeed, the man whose life I am writing, and whose money is the engine behind the Cornish Foundation, once exposed an impostor—a painter—and that was the end of the poor wretch whose crime was to pretend that his masterly painting had been done by somebody long dead. Not the worst of crimes, surely?”