The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

by Robertson Davies

  -XVI-

  • SUNDAY AND METABOLISM OF ST. PANCREAS •

  To the zoo this afternoon, and watched some boys who were busy trying to goad the bear into a display of temper. Reflected that their bravery depended entirely upon the strength of the wire around the bear-pen, and wished that the prophet Elisha would suddenly appear and repeat his vindictive trick as described in 2 Kings ii; of all created creatures, there is surely none capable of such bone-headed, thoughtless cruelty as a healthy growing boy.… Looked at some owls which sat blinking and solemn in the daylight; a friend who was with me turned to me and said, “If you put that big one in an expensive suit and sat him behind a desk he could do as well as the manager of any business in the country.”

  • MONDAY •

  Saw seeds for sale in a shop today, and was sorely tempted. Every spring I have to fight the desire to go on a seed-buying spree; it has been my lifelong habit to plant three seeds where one would do, and I usually buy several packages of everything, including watermelon and century plant. I love the gay pictures on the little envelopes, and the brave, boastful directions on the back of each package. “Sow in open soil when all danger of frost is past”; “plant in a cold frame and set out in June”; “separate until plants are one-sixteenth of an inch apart”—I know all the directions, and could write a gardening-book myself. The only trouble is that I am rarely able to grow any flowers, because I always forget what I have planted, and when the time comes to thin the flowers, I never can tell them from the weeds.… And fertilizer! My garden is all fertilizer; it is really too rich for anything but jungle growths. I might be able to raise bamboo or sugar cane, but not a sprig of miserable Baby’s Breath or Old Maid’s Buttonhole, or whatever that stuff is called.

  • TUESDAY •

  Sent a telegram today containing the word “critic.” Had a hard time convincing the girl who took my message that such a word existed, and that I did not mean “cricket.” Later on I went into a bookshop and asked for Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of A Little Town. And—so help me, Jimmy Johnson—the girl in the shop had never heard of it! One of the finest, if not the finest, book ever written about Canadian life, read all over the world and translated into several foreign languages, and she had never heard of it! What do these people learn at school? What occupies the chamber in their minds where miscellaneous information should be stored? How do they manage to get through life without finding out anything? And how do these intellectual shut-ins ever get jobs?

  • WEDNESDAY •

  I may not be able to grow flowers, but my garden produces just as many dead leaves, old overshoes, pieces of rope and bushels of dead grass as anybody’s and today I bought a wheelbarrow to help in clearing it up. I have always loved and respected the wheelbarrow; it is one wheeled vehicle of which I am perfect master. I cannot drive a car, I fall off bicycles, and the only time I tried to get into a wheelchair it tipped forward and threw me out. But with a wheelbarrow I am any man’s equal: I have not only a practical, but also a theoretical mastery of it; I once won a debate on the subject “Resolved: That a wheelbarrow is of more use on a farm than an Old Maid.” I took the affirmative side, and stunned the judges with my eloquence. But until today I have never had a wheelbarrow of my own. I must have a name painted on its side: Shall I call it “Falcon” or “Zephyr”?

  • THURSDAY •

  Several of my friends who are zealous in the temperance cause are back from Toronto today with sore throats—the result of their impromptu serenade of the Premier at Queen’s Park yesterday. They tell me that they sang the four verses of Fight the Good Fight at least seventeen times, while the depraved, rum-loving M.P.P.’s sat in their velvet chairs roaring, “Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest”, and “They took the ice right off the corpse and put it in the beer”, and other gems of pot-house psalmody.… A dog-breeder tells me that the Mexican Chihuahua is given gin in puppyhood to stunt its growth. I knew that Hollywood child actors were given gin for this purpose, but I never before heard of a dog being shrunk with gin. Perhaps that accounts for the permanently sozzled expression of the Chihuahua, and its peculiar bark, which sounds so much like a hiccup.

  • FRIDAY •

  A conference which is going on now has caused the papers to be filled with cartoonists’ ideas of what personified Peace looks like; she is either an iron-jawed, gimlet-eyed female with a bust like the prow of a destroyer, or she is a droopy, big-eyed miss with no bosom at all, who looks as though she lived entirely on marshmallows; in both cases she wears a garment equally suggestive of a modest girl’s nightie, and the glory that was Greece. Why should Peace be such a pill? … Saw a couple of handsome stuffed owls in a window today and was sorely tempted to add them to my collection. But fond as I am of owls, stuffed or on the claw, there is no disputing that they create a somewhat close atmosphere, and people are complaining about my office already. Asthmatical visitors, and those who are allergic to feathers, begin to wheeze as they cross the threshold. Some day, when I have completed my collection of native owls I am going to import one of these pretty little owls from Greece; they are about a foot high, and extremely fetching in appearance. They are the true owls of Minerva, and very intelligent; they say “Whoo!” in Greek.… I get a good deal of mail, but little of it is personal, and none of it is interesting. The strangest people and institutions choose to send me letters; for some weeks past I have been getting communications from the American Institute of Laundering, who want to tell me why it takes them so long to do the washing. Frankly, I don’t care; I would never dream of sending my laundry to the States to be done up; I have it done in the Marchbanks Institute of Laundering, an excellent institution with a 100 per cent Irish staff, and it takes no time at all; if I want anything in a hurry, I can always fish it out of the ironing-basket and wear it rough-dried.… The railways keep sending me messages, too, boasting about how much money they have made, which I think dreadfully bad taste. What would they think of me if I sent them letters saying, “Last year, after paying all bills and charges, Marchbanks had $7.68 to spend as he liked.” They would be disgusted; so am I.

  • SATURDAY •

  Discerned symptoms of a cold deep in my inner being today, and immediately set to work to circumvent it. For twenty-four hours before a cold breaks out in its unmistakable symptoms of salt rheum, cough and tædium vitæ I suffer from tremblings of the spirit and a sense of impending doom; during this period I consume glass after glass of sodium bicarbonate in hot water; sometimes it does the trick and sometimes it does not. I got the idea that it would stave off a cold from a man who subsequently died of pneumonia, so I may be on the wrong track. But the results, whether healthful or not, are certainly violent. My frail form is racked by horrendous belchings, like the roars of a lion. The Chinese are said to frighten away evil spirits by beating gongs; I have my own not wholly dissimilar method.

  -XVII-

  • SUNDAY •

  A cold, the like of which has never before confronted medical science, has me in its grip, and my head feels as though it had been roughly scooped out with a tin spoon, and stuffed with soiled laundry. My sense of taste has completely gone; I cleaned my teeth with a widely-advertised drain-opener tonight and did not even notice until it ate the bristles off my toothbrush. Went to bed, propped up on many pillows, so that I should not strangle in the night. Had a chest-rub, a hot drink, and crunched up a mouthful of aspirin before going to sleep. Woke, some hours later, having dreamed that I was in the grip of a big dog, which was tossing me from side to side and barking furiously. Was alarmed to find that in truth I was being thrown all over the bed by some mysterious agency, and the sound of deep, angry barking was deafening. As consciousness returned, I realized that I was having a Coughing Fit. As the old song has it:

  I attempt from love’s sickness

  To fly, in vain;

  For I am myself

  My own fever and pain.

  I was myself my own dog, bark and all; each paroxysm raised me at
least two feet above the bed, and then as I emitted a frightful roar it flung me down again. This went on for some time—long after I had begun to ask of Death where was its sting? But everything passes in this world, and at last I fell asleep, and dreamed that I was being suffocated.

  • MONDAY •

  Today I live in the gray, muffled, smelless, puffy, tasteless half-world of those who have colds.

  • TUESDAY •

  Made the acquaintance of a rum-drinking budgerigar this evening. Was chatting with some people who offered me a glass of rum, and after I had been convinced that they were not joking and not crazy, I settled down in the cosy beatitude which comes over a man who has unexpectedly been given a drink. At this moment their budgerigar broke out of his cage, whizzed across the room and settled on my shoulder. I thought it was my simple and child-like nature which had fascinated him, but I was wrong. He cake-walked along my sleeve, suddenly dipped his beak into my glass and took a hefty swig; luckily Nature has not equipped budgerigars with much in the way of a gullet, so he didn’t get more than his share. He had a few more gulps, and then flew off to a mirror, in which he kissed his own reflection several times, with evident satisfaction. It has been years since I had enough rum to provoke any such ecstasy; there are advantages in a limited capacity.

  • WEDNESDAY •

  A man who had been poking his nose into the MS. of this Diary told me he didn’t think it was very funny. This is the sort of comment which makes me secrete adrenalin by the bucketful. First of all, how did the ridiculous assumption spring up that my Diary was meant to be funny? What record of man’s life, shot through and through with toil and anguish, disappointment and shame, frustration and denial is ever funny? When Tolstoy gave up wealth and rank and, in an agony of pity and idealism, tilled the land with his peasants, was it funny? When Gauguin left a secure life in Paris and went to paint the beauties of Tahiti, casting his lot with savages, lepers and degenerates, was it funny? And when Marchbanks, furnace-fried and garden-torn, commits his reflections to his Diary, is that funny? No, baboon! No, donkey! Tragic, mystic, sublime, perhaps. But only a coarse and warty soul could find food for laughter here.

  • THURSDAY •

  My coal bin is empty at last. For weeks I have been feeding my furnace a mixture of coke, slack, wood-shavings, cannel coal and odds and ends of rope and raffia from the floor of my coal bin, and now it is all gone. I shall not buy any more. I am, I think, a tolerant, easy-going fellow, but when it is suggested that I should spend any more money on that accursed furnace this year, everything goes black before my eyes, and I fall on the floor, foaming at the mouth and uttering animal cries. Of course, I cannot freeze. I have a woodpile, and I shall keep my furnace burning with that. If, when it is all done, the weather is still cold, I shall move to an hotel. My furnace does not like wood, and makes horrid stinks when given wood to burn. It shoots smoke up its heating pipes, and heat up its chimney, and keeps my whole house at the temperature and atmosphere of an Indian tepee. But I do not care. I can endure anything better than spending money for another load of coal—half of which (the big half) will be coke. Anyhow, other big expenses loom before me. My lawn-mower simply must be sharpened; I avoided having this done during the war years (to avoid taking several men from more vitally necessary jobs) and now a large machine shop has undertaken the work, on a cost-plus basis.

  • FRIDAY •

  Nothing happened to me today which was not routine; my life grows duller and duller. Sometimes I think that I should take up a hobby, but the problem always is, which one? I could breed budgerigars, but I’m not sufficiently interested in budgerigars. I could become an authority on the history of something-or-other, but that would be so much like my ordinary work, that it would not recreate me. I once worked up a small enthusiasm for wood-carving, but when I found that it meant investing $100 or so in chisels and gouges, and haunting lumber yards in search of fine pieces of Spanish mahogany and sandalwood my enthusiasm waned. The trouble is that I don’t really like doing anything; I just like to sit, and when I sit I become bored. It’s a vicious circle, and I suppose I am what the psychologists call maladjusted.… I once knew a man whose hobby was making jewellery. He had a few stones and a few chunks of gold and silver, and he made rings and brooches which he gave to his friends. They were so horrible that nobody would wear them, but that was his fulfilment. I also knew a chap who did rotten bookbinding; his system was to take a book which you really liked, and bind it in suede leather which made your teeth grate. I finally got so I didn’t care whether he was fulfilled or not.

  • SATURDAY •

  Having averted my face from it for several weeks, I tackled the problem of Income Tax today. People of a mathematical turn of mind tell me that the forms are very simple if you attack them logically, but I am incapable of attacking an Income Tax form logically, or even coolly. Whatever my Better Self may say about citizenship and duty, my Worser Self remains convinced that it is a wicked shame that the government should take a big chunk of my earnings away from me, without so much as telling me what the money is to be used for. I know about the Baby Bonus, of course, but whose baby, specifically, am I bonussing with my money? Probably a damp, sour-smelling baby which I should hate if I met it face to face. Whose Old Age Pensions am I paying? Probably those of some lifelong prohibitionists, if the truth were known! People to whom I would not give a used paper handkerchief if I met them in the street are picking my pockets by means of this iniquitous Income Tax! The whole thing puts me into such a passion that I am incapable of adding and subtracting correctly. Clutching hands seem to snatch at me out of the paper until I scream and scream and scream.

  -XVIII-

  • SUNDAY AND MAY DAY •

  A man who spent part of the winter up in the Kapuskasing district told me that the best-dressed people in Canada live there. They haven’t much to spend their money on beside personal adornment, and they go in for rich and colourful raiment of a kind never seen in the city. Manufacturers prepare special lines of Babylonian parkas and Tyrian windbreakers for the northland which are unknown in the cities of Ontario, where men dress in gray and blue sacking and allow their wives to choose their ties for them. In the north, this man told me, the trappers and loggers are great patrons of the beauty shops, and like to have their hair and beards arranged in crinkly marcels. I was not surprised to hear this, for man in a natural state is a vainglorious creature; it is only when he puts on the shackles of civilization that he becomes colourless, shamefaced, and slinking.… May Day today, which I celebrated by organizing a dance round the May Pole for some children, after which I treated them to chunks of May Pole sugar, which is scarce this season.

  • MONDAY •

  Today at lunchtime I saw a girl’s hat blow off into the street; she was a pretty girl (well—fairly pretty—not fat, anyhow), nicely dressed, and her distress was pitiable to see. The hat was a small round gray felt gourd, and after rolling about in the dirt for a while, it came to rest under a parked car. With the alertness of an old campaigner in the Sex War, I at once took cover in a shop door, for I knew that that girl would immediately be on the lookout for a man to get her hat for her, and I had no mind to crawl on my ulcers in the street, under somebody else’s oily old jalopy. Sure enough, she had her victim within three minutes; simpering pathetically he fished out the hat, and his reward was a smile—not nearly enough in these days of trouser shortage.… But at five o’clock I saw a young workman lose his cap in the street, and what happened? His companions jeered coarsely, young women sniggered and sharpened their fingers at him, and a big fat capitalist in a blue car rode right over his hat just as he was snatching for it. This typical display of the inequalities under which men struggle in the modern world saddened me so much that I hardly had strength to resist a young Jehovah’s Witness who tried to sell me a magazine on my way home.

  • TUESDAY •

  My cold is not better; it is worse, and I am confronted by one of those vexing problems for w
hich there is no wholly satisfactory solution. Shall I stay at home, and enjoy the delights of mild invalidism, or shall I do my day’s work, and enjoy the gloomy pleasures of martyrdom? … To lie in bed, cosseted with hot-water bags and flannel chest-warmers, supping gruel, syllabubs, and tansy tea—that is the ideal state on a vile, rainy, soggy day like this. But again, to snuffle at my work, to throw paper handkerchiefs into the waste basket in monotonous rhythm, to cough pitifully and roll my rheumy eyes toward Heaven whenever anyone reproaches me—this, too, is bliss.… Then again a man with a cold is a privileged snarler; he can be as abrupt as he likes with his colleagues, and they are forced to believe that it is his illness which speaks through his lips, and not his habitual sweet spirit. Lying in bed, there is no one to snarl at, for if one snarls at one’s nurse she may retaliate with a mustard plaster—which is, of course, for one’s own good, and has nothing whatever to do with revenge.… I eventually decided in favour of work, and developed a cough which sounds like coal pouring down a chute.