“In this case, it seems to have been Wintersen. He says watching the production process will enrich Al immeasurably, and if Al develops his thesis into a book, it will give permanency to a deeply interesting and profoundly seminal experience.”

“Nilla is not pleased,” said Powell. “She knows only one meaning for seminal, and she thinks Al is being indecent in a male chauvinist way. She told him flatly there was nothing seminal in what she and Schnak were doing, and when he contradicted her she was very brusque. Said she had no time for such nonsense. Sweetness burst into tears, and Al said he fully understood the mercuriality of the artistic temperament, but the act of creation was seminal and it was his job to understand it so far as in him lay, which he seemed to think was pretty far. I just hope Al does not prove to be the condom in the act of creation.”

“Not much fear of that,” said Arthur.

“No fear at all, really. Nilla and Schnak have worked like Trojans. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Wintersen weren’t encouraging a deputation of Trojans to come and measure the energy involved. How does Wintersen get into this act, anyhow?”

“Dean of the Graduate School of Music,” said Darcourt. “I think he sees himself as richly seminal in this whole project. Did you know that Al and Sweetness have been to see Penny Raven?”

“As a collaborator with you on the libretto?”

“A fat lot of collaboration Penny has done. Those Trojans had better have a word with me, when they are learning about work. But Penny is an old academic hand. She strung them along with some high-sounding nonsense, and when she phoned me about it she could hardly speak for laughing. Quoted from The Hunting of the Snark, as she always does.”

“That Snark again,” said Arthur. “I really must read it. What did she say?”

“It’s an astonishing poem for descriptive quotes:

“Sweetness provides the smiles and soap,” said Maria. “I wonder if I shall manage not to kill Sweetness in some ingenious way. How does one get away with murder?”

“Exactly how does Sweetness come into this?” said Arthur. “Are they combining on this awful assessor game?”

“Hollier has the answer,” said Darcourt. “They visited him, but they got nowhere. He examined them with great care, however, and he says that he sees Sweetness, in anthropological-psychological-historico terms as the External Image of Al’s Soul.”

“A terrible thought,” said Maria. “Imagine looking into Sweetness’s teary eyes and saying, ‘My God, that’s the best of me!’ Al doesn’t want to do anything important without her, she tells me. I’m not sure she didn’t say she was his Muse. I wouldn’t put it past her.”

“I wish I didn’t know The Hunting of the Snark,” said Powell. “I am up to my neck in producing this opera and I keep thinking—

“You haven’t got cold feet, have you, Geraint?” said Arthur.

“No colder than usual, at this stage in a big job,” said Powell. “But I do see myself as the Bellman, when I wake up in the night, sweating. Everything is ready to go, you see. Got the score, got the cast, got the designs, got everything, and at last I must start on what Al would certainly call the seminal part. God grant that I am sufficiently seminal for the job. And now, with the greatest reluctance, I must leave this snug retreat, and go back to my desk. A million details await me.”

He pulled himself out of his chair, with some effort. He still has a lame leg, thought Darcourt. It goes well with his generally Byronic personality. He has developed a sliding walk, to disguise his lameness, just like Byron. I wonder if it’s conscious imitation—Byronic hero-worship—or if he can’t help it?

With Powell out of the way, there was nothing for it but to plunge into his news about The Marriage at Cana. He told the tale as convincingly as he could; he wanted to open a new world to his friends, not frighten them with an explosion. For the first time, he spoke to them of his visit to Princess Amalie, to confirm that her Old Master drawing was, in fact, a portrait of herself, done in girlhood by a man on whom she had had a youthful crush. He did not think it necessary to speak of his thefts in the University Library and even in the National Gallery; these were, he now assured himself, not thefts in the ordinary sense, but adventures on the journey of the Fool, guided by intuition and governed by a morality that was not to everybody’s taste. If everything worked out as he hoped, what he had done justified itself, and if he were not lucky, he might find himself in jail. With gentleness, but determination, he told of his astonishment when, in the Princess’s drawing-room, displayed among a number of convincing Old Masters, and in itself convincing to any eye but his own, he saw The Marriage, and with shocked astonishment recognized the faces as belonging to Grandfather McRory’s Sun Pictures, and to Francis Cornish’s numerous, neglected sketchbooks. There could be no doubt about it, he insisted: Francis was The Alchemical Master, and the great picture was not yet fifty years old.

Arthur and Maria heard all this more or less in silence, though now and then Arthur whistled. It was necessary to come to the real point.

“You understand what this will mean to my biography of Francis,” he said. “It is the justification of the book. The climax. It establishes Francis as a very great painter. Working in the mode of a bygone day, but a great painter nonetheless.”

“But in the mode of a bygone day,” said Arthur. “He may be a great painter, but that makes him unmistakably a faker.”

“Not at all,” said Darcourt. “There is not a shred of evidence that Francis meant to deceive anybody. The picture was never offered for sale, and if it hadn’t been for the war, he would undoubtedly have taken it with him when he left Düsterstein, and nobody will convince me that he would have tried to palm it off as a sixteenth-century work. The Princess knows about it. The picture was stashed away in a store-room of the castle, and when the castle was taken over during the occupation of Germany it disappeared with a lot of other stuff. It was restored to the Düsterstein family after the war, by the Commission that dealt with such matters, of which Francis was a member. That’s a bit fishy, but we don’t know the details. And the family—that’s to say Princess Amalie—has it still.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” said Arthur. “Why did he paint it in this sixteenth-century manner? And look at this article in Apollo, that explains it all. If it wasn’t meant to deceive, why paint it like that?”

“That’s where we come to the point that is going to be the making of my book,” said Darcourt. “You don’t remember Francis in any detail. But I do. He was the most inward-looking man I have ever known. He turned things over and over in his mind, and he reached conclusions. That picture is the most important of his conclusions. It represents what he thought most important in his life, the influences, the crosscurrents, the tapestry, as Al Crane would say if he had a chance. In that picture Francis was making up his soul, as surely as if he had been some reflective hermit, or cloistered monk. What you see in the picture is the whole matter of Francis, as he saw it himself.”