“Dr. Verner—” I started to ask for footnotes; I should have known better.
“Dear boy . . . !” he murmured protestingly, over the preliminary surface noise of the aged pressing, and gave me one of those twinkles of bluest blue which implied that surely only a moron could fail to follow the logic of the procedure.
I sat back and listened. Irma listened too, but the eyes of the others were soon longingly intent on foils and chisel. I listened casually at first, then began to sit forward.
I have heard, in person or on records, all of the venerable names which Dr. Verner mentioned—to say nothing of Tebaldi, Russ, Ritter-Ciampi, Souez and both Lehmanns. And reluctantly I began to admit that he was right; this was the dramatic soprano. The music was strange to me—a setting of the Latin text of the Our Father, surely eighteenth century and at a guess by Pergolesi; it had his irrelevant but reverent tunefulness in approaching a sacred text. Its grave sustained lilt was admirable for showing off a voice; and the voice, unwavering in its prolonged tones, incredible in its breath control, deserved all the showing off it could get. During one long phrase of runs, as taxing as anything in Mozart or Handel, I noticed Irma. She was holding her breath in sympathy with the singer, and the singer won. Irma had let out an admiring gasp before the soprano had, still on one breath, achieved the phrase.
And then, for reasons more operatic than liturgical, the music quickened. The sustained legato phrases gave way to cascades of light bright coloratura. Notes sparkled and dazzled and brightness fell from the air. It was impeccable, inapproachable— infinitely discouraging to a singer and almost shocking to the ordinary listener.
The record ended. Dr. Verner beamed around the room as if he’d done all that himself. Irma crossed to the piano, struck one key to verify the incredible note in alt upon which the singer had ended, picked up her music, and wordlessly left the room.
Slavko had seized his chisel and the fencers were picking up their foils as I approached our host. “But Dr. Verner,” I led with my chin. “The Stambaugh case . . .”
“Dear boy,” he sighed as he readied the old one-two, “you mean you don’t realize that you have just heard the solution?”
“You will have a drop of Drambuie, of course?” Dr. Verner queried formally as we settled down in his more nearly quiet inner room.
“Of course,” I said. Then as his mouth opened, “ ‘For without Drambuie,”’ I quoted, “ ‘the world might never have known the simple solution to the problem of the mislaid labyrinth.’ ”
He spilled a drop. “I was about to mention that very fact. How . . . ? Or perhaps I have alluded to it before in this connection?”
“You have,” I said.
“Forgive me.” He twinkled disarmingly. “I grow old, dear boy.”
Ritualistically we took our first sip of Drambuie. Then:
“I well remember,” Dr. Verner began, “that it was in the autumn of the year 1901 . . .
. . . that the horror began. I was then well established in my Kensington practice, which seemed to flourish as it never had under the ministrations of its previous possessor, and in a more than comfortable financial position. I was able at last to look about me, to contemplate and to investigate the manifold pleasures which a metropolis at once so cosmopolitan and so insular as London proffers to the unattached young man. San Francisco of the same period might perhaps compare in quality; indeed my own experiences here a few years later in the singular affair of the cable cabal were not unrewarding. But a man of your generation knows nothing of those pleasures now ten lustra faded. The humours of the Music Halls, the delights of a hot bird and a cold bottle shared with a dancer from Daly’s, the simpler and less expensive delights of punting on the Thames (shared, I may add, with a simpler and less expensive companion)—these claimed what portion of my time I could salvage from my practice.
But above all I was devoted to music; and to be devoted to music meant, in the London of 1901, to be devoted to—but I have always carefully refrained from the employment of veritable and verifiable names in these narratives. Let me once more be discreet, and call her simply by that affectionate agnomen by which my cousin, to his sorrow, knew her: Carina.
I need not describe Carina as a musician; you have just heard her sing Pergolesi, you know how she combined nobility and grandeur with a technical agility which these degenerate days associate only with a certain type of light soprano. But I must seek to describe her as a woman, if woman she may be called.
When first I heard the tittle-tattle of London, I paid it small heed. To the man in the street (or even in the stalls) actress is still a euphemism for a harsher and shorter term, though my experience of actresses, extending as it has over three continents and more than my allotted three score and ten years, tends to lead me, if anywhere, to an opposite conclusion.
The individual who stands out from the herd is the natural target of calumny. I shall never forget the disgraceful episode of the purloined litter, in which the veterinarian Dr. Stookes accused me of—but let us reserve that anomaly for another occasion. To return to Carina: I heard the gossip; I attributed it to as simple a source as I have indicated. But then the evidence began to attain proportions which the most latitudinarian could hardly disregard.
First young Ronny Furbish-Darnley blew out his brains. He had gambling debts, to be sure, and his family chose to lay the stress upon them; but his relations with Carina had been common knowledge. Then Major Maclvers hanged himself with his own cravat (the Maclvers tartan, of course).
