Poor Schubert, dying slowly, as I did, and of what was essentially the same disease. Nobody, so far as I know, has found out why that disease causes one man to die a driveller and a horror, and another to compose, in his last year, three of the supreme pianoforte sonatas in all the realm of music.

I should not be hard on Crane. Perhaps he is worrying about that baby, or his swollen woman, Mabel Muller. There is an erotic unction about Al that must not be ignored. Mabel, poor wretch, must be ranked low on the list of the victims of art.

There are other victims, of course, and, from my point of view, greater ones. I am sad for the Cornishes, Arthur and Maria. They long so humbly to be counted among the artists, but they are not given even the artistic status accorded to Nutcombe Puckler. Without meaning to be cruel, the artists, and even those novices in art, the gofer girls, reject them because they do not appear to be doing anything, although it is their money that is the underpinning of the whole affair. Not doing anything, when every day they write fat cheques for this, that, and the other? Writing those cheques because they truly love art and wish it to prosper! Writing those cheques because they would sing if they could, or paint their faces and join the crowd on the stage!

I sometimes saw people like them in the theatres where I worked as Powell works now. Wealthy merchants, or minor nobility, who footed the bills, and not always to gain a place in the ranks of society but because they so greatly loved those things that they could not do. A patron has one of two courses: he may domineer and spoil the broth by insisting on too much salt or pepper; or he may simply do what God has enabled him to do, and that is to pay, pay, pay! I was as bad as anyone in my time. I kissed hands, bowed low, and paid compliments, but I eagerly wished them all in hell, because they were underfoot when my work was being done. Seeing myself as my own creation, the master-musician Johannes Kreisler, I scorned my patrons and saw in them nothing but the disciples of the odious Kater Murr! As if there were no self-seeking among artists! I wish I could comfort Arthur and Maria, who feel the subtle cold of the artists’ scorn, but placed as I am, I cannot do it.

I can see, however, that their fate is different, and who may hope to escape his fate? They are living out, in a comic mimesis, the fate of Arthur and Guenevere, but to be ruled by a comic fate is not to feel oneself as a figure of comedy. It is their fate to be rich, and to seem powerful, in a world of art where riches are not of first importance, and their power is unavailing.

Like all the others, I long for the move to Stratford.

When the company moved to Stratford and, in Powell’s phrase, went into high gear on the production, it would have been easy to miss the fact that Schnak was deeply in love with Geraint. She tagged after him; but the Stage Manager, her assistants, and the gofer girls also tagged after him. She hung upon his words; but Waldo Harris, the Stage Director, and Dulcy Ringgold, the Designer, also hung upon his words. Nobody took any notice of Schnak’s infatuation but Darcourt; nobody else saw the special quality in her tagging and hanging. Nobody else saw the lovelight in her eyes.

They were not eyes in which one would look for the lovelight. They were small, pebbly, squinty little eyes. Nor was Schnak a figure upon whom love sat like an accustomed garment; her motion was not graceful, because, in one of Darcourt’s Old Ontario phrases, she was as bow-legged as a hog going to war; her voice was as snarly as ever, though under Gunilla’s guidance her vocabulary was larger and not so dirty; she had no graces, and the least of the gofers could have wiped the floor with her in a contest of charm. But Schnak was in love, and this was not a matter of bodily awakening and bodily satisfaction as it had been with Gunilla, but beglamoured and yearning passion. This is the romanticism in which her work has drenched and soused her; I am sure she tosses on her bed and murmurs his name to her pillow, thought Darcourt.

He took his chance to ask Gunilla if she were aware of this. “Oh, yes,” said the Doctor; “it was bound to happen. She must try everything, and Powell is an obvious mark for a young girl’s love.”

“But you don’t mind?”

“Why should I mind? The child is not my property. Oh, we have had merry hours, to the great scandal of that fat busybody Professor Raven, but that was a teacher-and-pupil thing. Not love. I have known love, Simon, and with men also, let me assure you, and I know what it is. I am not such a romantic as to think of it as the great educational force—broadening her experience, enlarging her vision, and all that nonsense—but it is something everybody feels who is not a complete cabbage. I must see that it doesn’t spoil her work; people seem to have forgotten that all this elaborate contrivance boils down to an examination exercise, and Hulda must get her degree, if there is not to be a great waste of money.”

Elaborate contrivance indeed it was. The company was lucky in having the theatre for the last three weeks of rehearsal. Not the stage; not yet. There was still a week of performances of a play which called for only one small set, but all the workrooms and both rehearsal rooms were now devoted to Arthur, and during the last two weeks the stage would be available to the singers when it was not wanted by the technicians.

The technicians bulked very large. It seemed to Darcourt that they almost swamped the opera. On huge paint-frames in one of the workrooms the scenery was being painted, for Powell wanted proper scenes, and not the usual wrinkled cyclorama, suggesting a sky that had shrunk and faded in the wash.

“In Hoffmann’s day there was no stage light, in our sense,” he said, “and anything like a lighting effect had to be painted on the scenery. And that’s how Dulcy is doing it.”

Dulcy Ringgold was not what Darcourt would have thought of as a theatrical character. She was small, she was shy, she laughed a great deal, and she seemed to regard her responsibilities as the best joke in the world.

“I’m really just a glorified dressmaker,” she said, through a mouthful of pins, as she draped something on Clara Intrepidi. “Just that nice little woman Miss Dulcy, who is so clever with her fingers.” She did something that made Miss Intrepidi look taller and slimmer. “There dear; if you can suck up your gut the teeniest bit that will do very nicely.”

“The gut is what I breathe with,” said Miss Intrepidi.

“Then we’ll drape this a little more freely,” said Dulcy, “and maybe put a wee thingy just here.”

At other times, Dulcy was to be seen with a filthy bandana wrapped around her head, on the bridge that swayed before the paint-frame, putting special touches on huge drop-scenes that were being painted from her carefully squared-off watercolour designs. Sometimes she was in the basement, where the armour was made, not with the ring of the sword-smith’s hammer, but with the chemical whiff of Plexiglas being moulded. It was here, too, that all the swords, and Arthur’s sceptre, and the crowns for Arthur and his Queen were made, and studded with foil-backed glass jewels that gave a splendidly Celtic richness to post-Roman Britain.

Dulcy was everywhere, and Dulcy’s taste and imagination touched everything.

“I hate theatre where the audience is told to use its imagination,” she said. “That’s cheap. The audience lays down its good money to rent imagination from somebody who has more than they ever dreamed of. Somebody like me. Imagination’s my only stock-in-trade.” She said this as she whisked off a brilliant little sketch for a fool’s head which was to be made in pretended metal and attached to the hilt of Sir Dagonet’s sword. But it was not all of her stock-in-trade.