“Shakespeare,” said Arthur. “For once I recognize one of your quotations, Simon.”

“How one comes to depend on Shakespeare,” said Maria. “ ‘What potions have I drunk of Siren tears—’ Remember that one?”

said Darcourt. “Yes; that’s a good one. Puts it very concisely.”

“Thrice more than I have spent. Or rather, thrice more than Uncle Frank has spent,” said Arthur. “I suppose you’re right, Simon. I do think a lot about gold. Somebody must. But that doesn’t mean I’m Kater Murr. Simon, we’ve been turning over in our minds that scheme you were talking about a while ago. That would be more in Uncle Frank’s line, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t have mentioned it, otherwise,” said Darcourt.

“You said you thought the New York people would listen to an offer.”

“If it were put the right way. I think they would appeal to you, Arthur. Collectors, connoisseurs, but of course they don’t want to be made to look foolish. Not like people who have been in any way associated with a fake. They’re not Kater Murr, either. If it came out that they had been cherishing a picture which was just a simple, barefaced fake it wouldn’t do them any good, either in the art world, or in the world of business.”

“What is their business?”

“Prince Max is the head of an importing company that brings vast quantities of wine to this continent. Good wine. No cheap schlock, adulterated with Algerian piss. No fakes, in fact. I’ve seen some of his things on your table. Probably you didn’t notice the motto on the coat of arms on the bottles: ‘Thou shalt perish ere I perish’.”

“Good motto for wine.”

“Yes, but the motto is a family motto, and it means Don’t try to get the better of me, or you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

“I’ve met some of those in business.”

“But you must bear in mind that the Princess is a business woman, too. Cosmetics, in the most distinguished possible way.”

“What’s that to do with it?”

“Dear Arthur, it means simply putting the best face on things. That’s what they’ll want to do.”

“So you think they’ll want a whopping price?”

“This is an age of whopping prices for pictures.”

“Even fakes?”

“Arthur, I may be brought to crowning you with this bottle—which isn’t one of Prince Max’s, by the way. How often do I have to tell you that the picture isn’t a fake, was never meant to be a fake, and is in fact a picture of the most extraordinary and unique significance?”

“I know. I’ve heard all you’ve said about it. But who will convince the world of it?”

“I will, of course. You’re forgetting my book.”

“Simon, I don’t want to be a brute, but how many people will read your book?”

“If you follow my suggestion, hundreds of thousands of people will read it, because it will explain Francis Cornish’s life as a great artistic adventure. And a very Canadian sort of adventure, what’s more.”

“I don’t see this country as a land botching with artistic adventure, or deep concern about the soul, and if you do, I think you’re off your head.”

“I do, and I’m not off my head. I sometimes think I’m ahead of my time. You haven’t read my book. It isn’t finished, of course, and how it ends hangs entirely on the decision you make. The ending can be fantastic, in both the literal and the colloquial meanings of the word. You don’t know what a good long look at your uncle’s life brings to the surface, in a mind like mine. You’ve got to trust me, and in this sort of thing you don’t trust me, Arthur, because you’re afraid to trust yourself.”

“I trusted myself in this opera venture. I hustled the Foundation into doing something that hasn’t worked out.”

“You don’t know if it has worked out, and you won’t, until long after tomorrow night. You have the amateur’s notion that a first performance tells the whole story about a stage piece. Did you know the St. Louis people are already interested in Arthur of Britain? If the opera doesn’t cause a stir here, it may very well do so there. And in other places. Of course, you hustled us into this job. And now you think it was just the beginning of your mumps. But great achievements have sprung from stranger things than a dose of mumps.”

“All right. Let us proceed. With caution. I suppose I’d better take over, and see these New York people.”

“And I suppose you’d better do nothing of the sort,” said Maria. “You leave it to Simon. He’s a downy old bird.”

“Maria, you are beginning to sound like a wife.”

“The best wife you’ll ever have,” said Maria.

“True. Very true, my darling. By the way, I’m thinking of calling you Sweetness, in future.”

Maria put out her tongue at him.

“Before you degenerate into embarrassing public connubiality,” said Darcourt, “let me call your attention to the fact that the dress rehearsal must now have almost completed the first act of this opera Arthur has decided to hate. We’d better get over to the theatre, and be slighted and neglected, if thats the way it goes. As for this other thing, shall I go ahead?”

“Yes, Simon, you go ahead,” said Maria.

Arthur, characteristically, was calling for the bill.

It is the first night of Arthur of Britain.

Gwen Larking speaks through the intercom to all dressing-rooms and the Green Room: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your half-hour call. Half an hour till curtain, please.”

The early birds have been ready long since. In his dressing-room Oliver Twentyman lies in his reclining-chair. He is made up and dressed, except for his magician’s gown, which hangs ready to put on. His dresser has tactfully left him alone, to compose himself. Will this be his last appearance? Who can say? Certainly not Oliver Twentyman, who will go on appearing in operas as long as directors and conductors want him—and they still want him. But this will probably be his last creation of a new role; nobody has ever sung Merlin in Arthur of Britain before, and he intends to give the audience something to remember. The critics, too, those chroniclers of operatic history, upon the whole so much more reliable than their brethren who deal with the theatre. When Oliver Twentyman is no more, they will say that Merlin, undertaken when he was already over eighty, was the best thing he had done since he sang Oberon in Britten’s Dream. He liked being old—and still a great artist. Age, linked with achievement, was a splendid crown to life, and took the sting from death.

Wordsworth knew what he was talking about. Oliver Twentyman murmured the words two or three times, like a prayer. He was a praying sort of man, and often his prayers took the form of quotations.

Onstage Waldo Harris was having the last, he hoped, of many sessions with Hans Hoizknecht about Hair on the Floor. Many years ago—Hoizknecht would not say how many, nor would he identify the opera house (though it was a great one)—he had found, during the last act of Boris Godunov, that he was choking. Choking so that he could scarcely utter. Something had invaded his throat and was strangling him. Instead of singing he was on the verge of throwing up. It was a situation in which the best of the artist must unite with the best of the man to overcome a difficulty all the greater because it could not be identified. Somehow—there were times when he thought it must have been Divine intervention—he had sung his way—sung well and truly, though in agony—to the end of the act and then, when the curtain was down, he had rushed to his dressing-room, and called for the theatre doctor, who, with a forceps, had removed from his throat a twenty-inch human hair! From a wig? From some shedding soprano in the chorus in an earlier scene? Whatever the source, there it was, a hair of great length which had, in its situation, behaved with the malignance of an animate thing! In one of his great intakes of breath while lying, as the distraught Tsar, on the floor, he had sucked up that hair, and he had it yet, preserved in a plastic bag, which he showed to every stage management in every theatre where he appeared, as a warning of what could happen if the stage were not properly swept, not once, but at every possible time, during a performance. He did not want to be a nuisance, nor did he wish to appear neurotic, but a singer meets perils of which the public knows nothing, and he begged—begged with all the authority of his place in the company—that he might have the assurance of Waldo Harris that the stage would be properly swept whenever the curtain was down. Which assurance Waldo gave, sympathetic, but also wishing that Hoizknecht would accept one positive answer, and shut up about hairs on the stage.