“Is that English poetry?” said the Doctor, her brows raised almost into her hair.

“Jesus, I think that’s wonderful!” said Schnak. “Oh, Nilla, did you ever hear it said better?”

“I am not at home in English verse,” said the Doctor, “but that sounds to me like—I will not use Hulda’s word—but it sounds like crap. That is a new word I have learned and it is very useful. Crap!”

“The expression is unquestionably crap,” said Darcourt. “But in the crap there is a precious jewel of truth. That is one of the problems of poetry. Even a terrible poet may hit on a truth. Even the blind pig sometimes finds an acorn.”

“The professor sets us right, as he always does,” said Powell. “Raw heart can’t make art but woe to art when it snubs heart. By God—I ought to be a librettist! Now—will you do it?”

“I’ll have a crack at it,” said Schnak. “I’ve had about enough of writing music wrapped in Hoffmann’s old bathrobe.”

“I’ll certainly have a crack at it,” said Darcourt. “But on one condition. I find the verse before Schnak writes the music.”

“Sim bach, I see it in your eye! You have the verse already.”

“As a matter of fact, I have,” said Darcourt, and he recited it to them.

“Do that again, will you,” said Schnak, looking at Darcourt without suspicion and resentment for the first time since they had met.

Darcourt recited it again.

“That’s it!” said Powell. “Right on the pig’s back, Sim bach.”

“But is it good English verse?” said the Doctor.

“I’m not a man who awards marks to poets as if they were schoolboys,” said Darcourt. “It is from the best of a very good man, and far beyond the level of an opera libretto.”

“You’re surely going to tell us who the very good man is?” said Powell.

“He’s the man you spoke of as the base upon which we should rest this opera, the first time we discussed it,” said Darcourt. “It’s Sir Walter Scott.”

Can it be true, thought Darcourt, that I am sitting in this grand penthouse on a Sunday evening eating cold roast chicken and salad with three figures from Arthurian legend? Three people working out, in such terms as modernity dictates, the great myth of the betrayed king, the enchantress queen, and the brilliant adventurer?

Does the analogy hold? What did King Arthur attempt? He tried to extend the reach of civilization by demanding that his Knights, who belonged to an undoubted Elite of Birth, should embrace the concept of chivalry, thereby becoming an Elite of Achievement. Not just power, but the intelligent, unselfish use of power to make a better world; that was the idea.

What about Arthur Cornish, who is helping himself to currant jelly across the table? He belongs to a Birth Elite of a kind; of a Canadian kind, which thinks three generations of money are enough in themselves to make a man significant, do what he will. But Arthur wants to be an intellectual, and to advance civilization by the use of his power, which is his money; or rather, the money of the late Francis Cornish, the mysterious fortune which nobody can quite explain. Surely that is an attempt, and a very respectable attempt, to advance into an Elite of Achievement? Arthur Cornish probably commands more hard cash and more power than Arthur of Britain ever dreamed of.

Queen Guenevere lives in legend as a partner in an adulterous love that brought great grief to King Arthur. Not all the legends present her as a woman troubled by love alone; sometimes she is a discontented wife, an ambitious woman of a fretful spirit, a figure more solid and varied than Tennyson draws her.

Certainly Maria fills the bill. She had told Darcourt, not so very long ago, before she married Arthur, that she had fallen in love with him because of his frankness, his largeness of spirit, and also his attractive freedom from the academic world to which her own ambitions were confined. Arthur had offered her love, but also friendship, and she had found it irresistible. Yet a woman cannot live solely in the realm of her love; she must have a life of her own; she must shed light, as well as reflecting it. It looked as if Maria’s light, since her marriage, had been somewhat under a cloud. She had tried too hard to be Arthur’s wife, first, last, and all the time, and her spirit was in rebellion. How long had they been married? Twenty months, was it? Twenty months of forsaking all others and cleaving only unto him? It simply won’t work. No woman worth marrying is nothing but a wife, if the man is something better than a roaring egotist, which Arthur certainly is not, for all his peremptory, rich man’s ways in certain matters. Darcourt, himself unmarried, had seen many marriages, and united more couples, he thought in his Old Ontario way, than he could shake a stick at. The marriages that worked best were those in which the unity still permitted of some separateness—not a ranting independence, but a firm possession by both man and woman of their own souls.

Was it any use talking to Arthur and Maria about souls? Probably not. Souls are not fashionable, at present. People will listen with wondering acquiescence to scientific talk of such invisible entities as are said to be everywhere and very important, but they shy away from talk of souls. Souls have a bad name in the world of atomic energy.

Souls were a reality to Darcourt, however. Souls, not as gassy aspiration and unreal nobility, but as the force that divides the living human creature from the raw material for the mortician’s craft. Souls as a totality of consciousness, what man knows of himself and also that hidden vast part of himself which knows and impels him, used and abused by everybody, called upon or rejected, but inescapable.

What about Powell? Now there was a man who would assert, with passionate eloquence, that he had a soul, but who was clearly driven by that portion of his soul that was not within the range of his direct knowledge, that part of the spirit that some people—Mamusia, for instance—would call his fate. But a man’s fate is his own, more than he knows. We attract what we are. And it was Powell’s fate that had drawn him to seduce his friend’s wife, probably—no, Darcourt was sure, undoubtedly—with the complicity of Maria’s fate, just as Lancelot had seduced, or been seduced by, Guenevere.

“Do you want more dressing on your salad, Simon?” said Maria. She and Arthur and Powell had been talking while Darcourt mused.

Yes, he would like more dressing on his salad. He really must not drift off into unheeding speculation while the others were talking. And what had they been talking about?

About the impending child, of course. They talked about it a good deal, and with a frankness Darcourt found astonishing. It was five months on its way, and Maria wore becoming gowns in which she did not look pregnant, like the women Darcourt saw in the streets who wore slacks in which their distended bellies were forced upon the world, but clever gowns that enhanced, without concealing, her increasing girth.

Arthur and Geraint were rivals in solicitude. Neither had been a father before, they said, sometimes as a joke but always with an undercurrent of concern. They fussed over Maria, urging her to sit when she was perfectly comfortable standing, and rushing to fetch her things that she did not greatly want. They urged her not to drive her car, to put her feet on a stool when she sat, to get plenty of rest, to drink milk (which her doctor told her not to do), to eat heartily, to eat wisely, to drink very little wine and no spirits, to put aside the more inflammatory parts of the newspapers. They were a little disappointed that she exhibited no irrational cravings for peculiar foods; they would have been overjoyed if she had made eerie demands for pickles drenched in ice cream. These were old wives’ tales, said Maria, laughing at them. But, like prospective fathers from an earlier day, they were pestilent old wives, and they grew together in old-wifery. They were better friends than ever.