Then Wintersen asked Schnak to go downstairs and wait until she was called; she marched off, in the charge of the jailer-gofer, who looked as solemn as eighteen can. Dr. Gunilla, the director of the thesis project, was present as an examiner, and also in the character, familiar in courts-martial, of Prisoner’s Friend. She was greeted with cordiality by the Canadians, but Professor Pfeiffer, who had his own opinions about the Doctor’s international reputation, managed to put a chill on her reception.

The Dean, who was an old hand at such affairs, groaned in spirit. He had been warned that Pfeiffer was a bastard but his reputation as a musicologist was great, and so he must be endured.

The Dean, by virtue of his office, was the chairman of the examination, and he began according to Hoyle, by asking the examiners if they were all acquainted. They were, and in some cases too well. He drew their attention to three copies of the full score of Arthur which lay on the table for ready reference.

The Dean next called upon Professor Andreas Pfeiffer, as external examiner-in-chief, to place his report before the committee.

Professor Pfeiffer did so, taking just under an hour. It was a fine late August day outside, but by the time Pfeiffer had unpacked his budget of doubt and distaste it was February in the examination room. Professor Berger, who was a genial man and liked Schnak, managed, as internal examiner-in-chief, in twenty minutes to shove the calendar back to approximately late December, but a post-Christmas gloom was still to be felt.

The other examiners, called upon to say their say, were brief. Not more than ten minutes was taken by Penny Raven, who managed to establish that she had evolved a libretto for the opera, with some unspecified outside help from a literary man.

“I hear nothing of Planché,” said Professor Pfeiffer. Both Penny and Gunilla looked at him with deadly menace, but he was impervious to any outside influence.

Now, the processions, the parades of the picadors, the recognition of the President, the preening by the matador, and all the ceremonial of the ring having been performed, it was time to bring in the bull. Dean Wintersen nodded to the gofer (by this time a thorough Shakespearean jailer), and Schnak was brought back to the table, wilted with almost two hours of solitary anxiety. She was seated next to the Dean, and asked to explain her choice of the thesis project, and her method of work in realizing it. Which she did, very badly.

Professor Pfeiffer was first let loose upon her. He was a matador of immense skill, and for thirty-five minutes he nagged and harassed the wretched Schnak, who had no verbal ease, no rhetoric of any kind, and made long, unpromising pauses before most of her answers.

Professor Pfeiffer showed disappointment. The bull had no style, no pride of the ring, seemed really unworthy of a matador of his repute.

But as the torture proceeded, Schnak took refuge more and more often in a single answer: “I did it like that because it came to me like that,” she said. And although Professor Pfeiffer greeted this with doubtful looks, and once or twice with disdainful snorts, one or two of the other examiners, notably Cooper and Diddear, smiled and nodded, for they were themselves, in a modest way, composers.

Now and again Dr. Dahl-Soot interposed. But Pfeiffer shut her up, saying, “I must not allow myself to think that the candidate’s supervisor carried undue weight in the actual work of composition; that would be wholly inadmissible.” Dr. Gunilla, fuming, but tactful, remained silent after that.

When at last, by repeatedly looking at his watch, the Dean made it clear that Professor Pfeiffer must close his interrogation, Dr. Francesco Berger took over, and was so genial, so anxious to put Schnak at her ease, suggested so often that he approved of what had been done, that he almost upset the applecart. His Colleagues wished Berger would not overdo it. When their time came to ask questions, they were brief and merciful.

It was George Cooper, who had dozed through much of the examination, who asked: “I notice that you have used some keys at important moments in the opera that would not perhaps have suggested themselves first to most composers. A flat major, and C flat major, and E flat major—why those? Any special reason?”

“They were ETAH’s favourites,” said Schnak. “He had a theory about keys and their special characters, and what they suggested.”

“ETAH? Who is ETAH?” said Professor Pfeiffer.

“Sorry. E. T. A. Hoffmann; I’ve got into the way of thinking of him as ETAH,” said Schnak.

“You mean you identify yourself with him?”

“Well, working from his notes and trying to get into his mind—”

Professor Pfeiffer said nothing but made a derisive noise in his nose. But then—”These theories of key characterization were very much a thing of Hoffmann’s time,” he said. “Romantic nonsense, of course.”

“Nonsense or not, I think we ought to hear a little more about it,” said Cooper. “What did he think about those keys?”

“Well—he wrote about A flat major: ‘Those chords carry me into the country of eternal longing.’ And about C flat major: ‘It grasps my heart with glowing claws’; he called it ‘the bleak ghost with red, sparkling eyes’. And he used E flat major a lot with horns; he called it ‘longing and sweet sounds’.”

“Hoffmann was a drug-taker, wasn’t he?” said Professor Pfeiffer.

“I don’t think so. He boozed a lot and sometimes he came near to having the horrors.”

“I’m not surprised, if he could talk that sort of rubbish about the character of keys,” said Pfeifer, and was ready to drop the subject. But not Schnak.

“But if that’s the way he thought, oughtn’t I to respect it? If I’m to finish his opera, I mean?” she said, and Professor Diddear made a noise in his nose, as if to suggest that Professor Pfeiffer had been caught napping.

“I suppose you explain your excessive use of extraneous modulation as coming from Hoffmann’s adulation of Beethoven.”

“Hoffmann adored Beethoven and Beethoven thought a lot of Hoffmann.”

“I suppose that is so,” said the great musicologist. “You should remember, young lady, what Berlioz thought about Hoffmann: a writer who imagined himself to be a composer. But you have chosen to devote a great deal of work to this minor figure, and that is why we are here.”

“Perhaps to suggest that Berlioz could have been wrong,” said Dr. Gunilla; “he made a fool of himself often enough, as critics always do.”

She knew that Dr. Pfeiffer had written an essay about Berlioz which accorded Berlioz about seventy marks out of a hundred, which was as far as the Professor was inclined to go. If she could use Berlioz as a stick with which to beat Pfeiffer, so be it.

It was one o’clock.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I remind you that our work this morning is only a part of this unusual examination,” said the Dean. “We assemble again at two in the theatre, for a private performance of this opera, conducted by Miss Schnakenburg, on which a portion of your decision must necessarily rest. Proof of the pudding, you know. Meanwhile the Cornish Foundation has invited us to lunch, and we are already late.”

Professor Pfeiffer did not like lunching as a guest of the Cornish Foundation.

“Are they not involved?” he asked the Dean. “Is the candidate not their protégée? I do not like to use such a term, but is this an attempt to buy us?”

“I think it’s just decent hospitality,” said the Dean, “and, as you know, hospitality is a co-operative thing. The Romans very wisely used the same word for ‘host’ and ‘guest’.” Pfeiffer did not understand, and shook his head.

The luncheon took place at the best restaurant in Stratford—the small one down by the river—and Arthur and Maria did everything they could to make the examiners happy. Easy work with Berger, Cooper, Diddear, and Penny Raven. Easy work with the Dean, and even with Professor Adelaide O’Sullivan, who was only a bigot about tobacco. Professor Pfeiffer, however, and Dr. Dahl-Soot had thrown aside the decorum of the examination room and were going at it, hammer and tongs.