The Rebel Angels tct-1

by Robertson Davies

  These were slides showing what I understood to be extremely thin slices of faeces, cut transversely, and examined microscopically and under special light. They were of extraordinary beauty, like splendid cuttings of moss-agate, eye-agate, brecciated agate, and my mind turned to that chalcedony which John’s Revelation tells us is part of the foundations of the Holy City. But as Maria had been unsuccessful in persuading Ozy to hear about Paracelsus I thought I would have no greater success with references to the Bible. So I fished around for something which I hoped might be intelligent to say.

  “I don’t suppose there’d be such a thing as a crystal-lattice in those examples?”

  “No, but that’s a good guess—a shrewd guess. Not a crystal-lattice, of course, for several reasons, but call it a disposition towards a characteristic form which is pretty constant. And if it changes markedly, what do you suppose that means? I don’t know, but if I can find out”—Ozy became aware that he was yielding to unscientific enthusiasm—“I’ll know something I don’t know now.”

  “Which could lead to—?”

  “I wouldn’t want to guess what it might lead to. But if there is a pattern of formation which is as identifiable for everybody as a fingerprint, that would be interesting. But I’m not going to go off half-cocked. People can do that, after reading Sheldon. There was a fellow named Huxley, a brother of the scientist—I think he was a writer—and he read Sheldon and he went to foolish extremes. Of course being a writer he loved the comic extremes in the somatotypes, and he lost his head over something Sheldon keeps harping on in his two big books. And that’s humour. Sheldon keeps saying you have to deal with the somatotypes with an ever-active sense of humour, and damn it, I don’t know what he’s talking about. If a fact is a fact, surely that’s it? You don’t have to get cute about it. I’ve read a good deal, you know, in general literature, and I’ve never found a definition of humour that made any sense whatever. But this Huxley—the other one, not the scientist—goes on about how funny it would be if certain ill-matched types got married, and he thought it would be a howl to see an ectomorph shrimp and his endomorphic slob of a wife in a museum looking at the mesomorphic ideal of Greek sculpture. What’s funny about that? He rushed off in all directions about how soma affects psyche, and how perhaps the body was really the Unconscious that the psychoanalysts talk about—the unknown factor, the depth from which arises the unforeseen and uncontrollable in the human spirit. And how learning intelligently to live with the body would be the path to mental health. All very well to say, but just try and prove it. And that’s work for people like me.”

  It was getting late, and I rose to go, because it was clear that Ozy had shown us all he meant to show. But as I prepared to leave I remembered his wife. Now it is not tactful in these days to ask about the wives of one’s friends too particularly, in case they are wives no longer. But I thought I’d plunge.

  “How’s Peggy?”

  “Good of you to ask, Simon. She’ll be delighted you remembered her. Poor Peg.”

  “Not unwell, I hope? Of course I remember her as our top cheerleader.”

  “Wasn’t she marvellous? Wonderful figure, and every ounce of it rubber, you’d have said. A real fireball. God, you should see her now.”

  “Very sorry she isn’t well.”

  “She’s well enough. But her type, you know—her somato-type. She’s a PPJ—what Sheldon calls a Pyknic Practical Joke. Pyknic, you understand? Of course, Greek’s your thing. Compact: rubbery. But the balance of her three elements was just that tiny bit off, a 442, and—well, now she weighs well over two hundred, poor kid, and she’s barely five foot three. No; no children. She keeps cheerful, though. Takes a lot of night courses at one of the community colleges—Dog Grooming, Awake Alive and Aware Through Yoga, Writing for Fun and Profit—that crap. I’m here so much at night, you see.”

  I saw. The Rum Old Joker had been a bit rowdy with Ozy and Peggy, and even if Ozy’s sense of humour had been more active than it was, he could hardly have been expected to relish that one.

  As we walked up the campus together, Maria said: “I wonder if Professor Froats is a magus.”

  “I think he’d be surprised if you suggested it.”

  “Yes, he seemed very dismissive about Paracelsus. But it was Paracelsus who said that the holy men who serve the forces of nature are magi, because they can do what others are incapable of doing, and that is because they have a special gift. Surely Ozias Froats works under the protection of the Thrice-Divine Hermes. Anyway I hope so: he won’t get far if he doesn’t. I wish he’d read Paracelsus. He said that each man’s soul accords with the design of his lineaments and arteries. I’m sure Sheldon would have agreed.”

  “Sheldon appears to have had a sense of humour. He wouldn’t mind a sixteenth-century alchemist getting in ahead of him. But not Ozy.”

  “It’s a pity about science, isn’t it?”

  “Miss Theotoky, that is very much a humanist remark, and you must be careful with it. We humanists are an endangered species. In Paracelsus’s time the energy of universities resided in the conflict between humanism and theology; the energy of the modern university lives in the love-affair between government and science, and sometimes the two are so close it makes you shudder. If you want a magus, look for one in Clement Hollier.”

  With that we parted, but I thought she gave me a surprised glance.

  I walked on towards Ploughwright, thinking about faeces. What a lot we had found out about the prehistoric past from the study of fossilized dung of long-vanished animals. A miraculous thing, really; a recovery of the past from what was carelessly rejected. And in the Middle Ages, how concerned people who lived close to the world of nature were with the faeces of animals. And what a variety of names they had for them: the Crotels of a Hare, the Friants of a Boar, the Spraints of an Otter, the Werderobe of a Badger, the Waggying of a Fox, the Fumets of a Deer. Surely there might be some words for the material so near to the heart of Ozy Froats better than shit? What about the Problems of a President, the Backward Passes of a Footballer, the Deferrals of a Dean, the Odd Volumes of a Librarian, the Footnotes of a Ph.D., the Low Grades of a Freshman, the Anxieties of antjntenured Professor? As for myself, might it not appropriately be called the Collect for the Day?

  Musing in this frivolous strain I went to bed.

  4

  I thought it would not be long before Hollier pushed Parlabane in my direction, and sure enough he turned up the night after I had visited Ozias Froats.

  I was not in a good mood, because I had been haunted all day by Ozy’s humbling estimate of my physical—and by implication my spiritual—condition. A 425, soft, chunky, doubtless headed towards undeniable fat. I make frequent resolves to go to the Athletic Building every day, and get myself into trim, and if I were not so busy I would do it. Now, at a blow, Ozy had suggested that fat was part of my destiny, an inescapable burden, an outward and visible sign of an inward and only partly visible love of comfort. Had I been deceiving myself? Did my students speak of me as Fatso? But then, if the Fairy Carabosse had appeared at my christening with her spiteful gift of adiposity, there had been other and better-natured fairies who had made me intelligent and energetic. But because human nature inclines towards dissatisfaction, it was the fat that rankled.

  Worse, he had suggested that I was the sort of man who broke wind a great deal. Everyone recognizes, surely, that with the passing of time this trivial physical mannerism is likely to increase? No priest who had done much visiting among the old must be reminded of it. Need Froats have made a point of it before Maria Magdalena Theotoky?

  This was a new reason for disquiet. Why should I care what she thought? But I did care, and I cared about what people thought of her. Hollier’s revelation had annoyed me; he ought to keep his great paws off his students (no, no, that’s unjust) he should not have taken advantage of his position as a teacher, however elated he was about his work. I thought of Balzac, driven by unconquerable lust, rushing at his kitchen-m
aid and, when he had taken her against the wall, screaming in her face, “You have cost me a chapter!” and rushing back to his writing-table. I had not liked the suggestion that Maria was a singer of bawdy songs in public; if she had done so, there must have been some reason for it.

  Darcourt, I thought, you are being a fool about that girl. Why? Because of her beauty, I decided; beauty clear through, for it was beauty not only of feature but of movement, and that rarest of beauties, a beautiful low voice. A man may admire beauty, surely, without reproaching himself? A man may wish not to seem fat and ridiculous, a Crypto-Farter, in the presence of such an astonishing work of God? Froats had not, I remembered, made a guess at her type, and it could not have been reticence, for Ozy had none. Was it—good God, could it be?—that he recognized in her a PPJ, another Peppy Peggy who would explode into grossness before she was thirty? No, it could not be: Peggy had been pneumatic and exuberant, and neither word applied to Maria.

  My forty feet of Literary Gut was not in the best of moods when Parlabane came; I had denied it a sweet at dinner. This sort of denial may be the path to Heaven for some people, but not for me; it makes me cranky.

  “Sim, you old darling? I’ve been neglecting you, and I’m ashamed. Do you want to beat Johnny? Three on each paddy with a hard, hard ruler?”

  I suppose he thought of this as taking up from where we had left off, twenty-five years ago. He had loved to prattle in this campy way, because he knew it made me laugh. But I had never played that game except on the surface; I had never been one of his “boys”, the student gang who called themselves Gentleman’s Relish. I was interested in them—fascinated might be a better word—but I never wanted to join them in the intimacies that bound them together, whatever those may have been. That I never really knew, because although they talked a lot about homosexuality, most of them had, after graduation, married and settled into what looked like the uttermost bourgeois respectability, leavened by occasional divorce and remarriage. One was now on the Bench, and was addressed as My Lord by obsequious or mock-obsequious lawyers. I suppose that, like Parlabane himself, they had played the field; one or two, I knew, had been on gusty terms with omnivorous Elsie Whistlecraft, who had thought of herself as a great hetaera, inducting the dewy young into the arts of love. A lot of young men try varied aspects of sex before they settle on the one that suits them best, which is usually the ordinary one. But I had been cautious, discreet, and probably craven, and I had never been one of Parlabane’s “boys”. But it had once tickled me to hear him talk as if I were.

  A foolish state of mind, but who has not been foolish, one way or another? It would not do now, after a quarter of a century. I suppose I was austere.

  “Well, John, I had heard you were back, and I expected you’d come to see me some time.”

  “I’ve left it inexcusably long. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, as we say in the trade. But here I am. I hear great things of you. Excellent books.”

  “Not bad, I hope.”

  “And a priest. Well—better get it over with; you can see from my habit that I’ve had a change of mind. I think I have you to thank for that, at least in part. During the past years, I’ve thought of you often, you know. Things you used to say kept recurring. You were wiser than I. And I turned to the Church at last.”

  “You had a shot at being a monk. Let’s put it that way. But obviously it hasn’t worked.”

  “Don’t be rough on me, Sim. I’ve had a rotten time. Everything seemed to go sour. Surely you aren’t surprised that I turned at last to the place where nothing can go sour.”

  “Can’t it? Then what are you doing here?”

  “You would understand, if anybody would. I entered the S.S.M. because I wanted to get away from all the things that had made my life a hell—the worst of which was my own self-will. Abandon self-will, I thought, and you may find peace, and with it salvation. If thou bear the Cross cheerfully, it will bear thee.”

  “Thomas à Kempis – an unreliable guide for a man like you, John.”

  “Really? I’d have thought he was very much your man.”

  “He isn’t. Which is not to say I don’t pay him all proper respect. But he’s for the honest, you know, and you have never been quite honest. No, don’t interrupt, I’m not insulting you; but Thomas à Kempis’s kind of honesty is impossible for a man with as much subtlety as you have always possessed. Just as Thomas Aquinas was always too subtle a man to be a safe guide for you, because you blotted up his subtlety but kept your fingers crossed about his priciples.”

  “Is that so? You seem to be a great authority about me.”

  “Fair play; when we were younger you set up to be a great authority about me.—I gather you were not able to bear the Cross cheerfully, so you skipped out of the monastery.”

  “You lent me the money for that. I can never be grateful enough.”

  “Divide any gratitude you have between me and Clem Hollier. Unless there were others on your five-hundred-dollar campaign list.”

  “You never thought a measly five hundred would do the job, did you?”

  “That was certainly what your eloquent letter suggested.”

  “Well, that’s water over the dam. I had to get out, by hook or crook.”

  “An unfortunate choice of expression.”

  “God, you’ve turned nasty! We are brothers in the Faith, surely. Haven’t you any charity?”

  “I have thought a good deal about what charity is, John, and it isn’t being a patsy. Why did you have to get out of the Sacred Mission? Were they getting ready to throw you out?”

  “No such luck! But they wouldn’t let me move towards becoming a priest.”

  “Funny thing! And why was that, pray tell?”

  “You are slipping back into undergraduate irony. Look, I’ll level with you: have you ever been in one of those places?”

  “A retreat or two when I was younger.”

  “Could you face a lifetime of it? Listen, Sim, I won’t have you treating me as some nitwit penitent. I’m not knocking the Order; they gave me what I asked for, which was the Bread of Heaven. But I have to have a scrape of the butter and jam of the intellect on that Bread, or it chokes me! And listening to Father Prior’s homilies was like first-year philosophy, without any of the doubts given a fair chance. I have to have some play of intellect in my life, or I go mad! And I have to have some humour in life—not the simple-minded jokes the Provincial got off now and then when he was being chummy with the brothers, and not the infant-class dirty jokes some of the postulants whispered at recreation hour, to show that they had once been men of the world. I’ve got to have the big salutary humour that saves—like that bloody Rabelais I hear so much about these days. I have to have something to put some yeast into the unleavened Bread of Heaven. If they’d let me be a priest I could have brought something useful to their service, but they wouldn’t have it, and I think their rejection was nothing but spite and envy!”

  “Envy of your learning and intellect?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps that was part of it. Spite and envy are no less frequent behind the monastery wall than outside it, and you have an especially shameless mind that can’t disguise itself for the sake of people who are not so gifted. But what’s done is done. The question is, what do you do now?”

  “I’m doing a little teaching.”

  “In Continuing Studies.”

  “They’re humbling me.”

  “Lots of good people teach there.”

  “But God damn it to hell, Sim, I’m not just ‘good people’! I’m the best damned philosopher this University has ever produced and you know it.”

  “Perhaps. You are also a hard man to get along with, and to fit into anything. Have you any other prospects?”

  “Yes, but I need time.”

  “And money, I’ll bet.”

  “Could you see your way—?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I’m writing a book.”

&nb
sp; “What about? Scepticism used to be your special thing.”

  “No no; quite different. A novel.”

  “I don’t suppose you are counting on it to produce much money?”

  “Not for a while, of course.”

  “Better try for a Canada Council grant; they back novelists.”

  “Will you recommend me?”

  “I recommend quite a few people every year; but I’m not known for literary taste. How do you know you can write a novel?”

  “Because I have it all clear in my head! And it’s really extraordinary! A brilliant account of life as it used to be in this city—the underground life, that’s to say—but underlying it an analysis of the malaise of our time.”

  “Great God!”

  “Meaning what, precisely?”

  “Meaning that roughly two-thirds of the first novels that people write are on that theme. Very few of them get published.”

  ‘“Don’t be so ugly! You know me; you remember the things I used to write when we were students. With my mind—”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. Novels aren’t written with the mind.”

  “With what, then?”

  “Ask Ozy Froats; the forty-foot gut, he says. Look at you—a heavy mesomorphic element combined with substantial ectomorphy, but hardly any endomorphy at all. You’ve lived a terrible life, you’ve boozed and drugged and toughed around, and you’re still built like an athlete. I’ll bet you’ve got a miserable little gut. When did you last go to the w.c.?”

  “What the hell is all this?”

  “It’s the new psychology. Ask Froats.—Now I’ll make a deal with you, John—”

  “Just a few dollars to tide me over—”

  “All right, but I said a deal, and here it is. Stop wearing that outfit. You disgust me, parading around as a man in God’s service when you’re in no service but your own—or perhaps the Devil’s. I’ll give you a suit, and you’ve got to wear it, or no money and not one crumb of help from me.”