The Rebel Angels tct-1

by Robertson Davies

  “Let’s do this again,” he said as he dropped me at One Hundred and Twenty Walnut Street, after that first dinner. “I hate eating alone.”

  “Surely you know lots of people,” I said. He was obviously well off; he drove a modest but expensive car. I supposed young men of means must know lots of girls.

  “Not girls as beautiful as you,” he said, but not in a way that suggested it was going to lead to further compliments, or any of that grappling which some men think is fair exchange for a meal.

  I refuse to pretend that I don’t like being told that I am beautiful. It is a fact, and though I would rather be the way I am than ugly, I don’t pay much attention to it. Sooner or later almost all the men I know make some comment about it. So I decided that this pleasant, rather cool young man thought I was ornamental, and it was satisfactory to be seen in a restaurant with me, and that was a fair deal. I liked him better for being rich: he liked me better for being beautiful. Reasonable enough.

  When I refused his second invitation, because I had to go to a special lecture, I thought that would be the end of it. But he asked me a third time, to dine and go to a symphony concert, and that surprised me a little, because he said nothing about music the first time we were alone together.

  We went to a good restaurant, but not to one of the showy ones, and it was clear from the table we were given that Arthur was known there. It was a very good meal, from quite a different world of the imagination than the offerings of The Rude Plenty. I had made some effort about clothes, and did what I could to look well, and was prepared for another bout of food, politics, and travel, but he surprised me by talking about music. He seemed to have almost a patron’s attitude towards it, which reminded me that he was the nephew of Francis Cornish. It was about his uncle he talked now.

  “Uncle Frank has left his collection of musical manuscripts to the University; I wish he had left them to me. I’d like to do something in that line myself. Of course it’s not difficult to buy manuscripts from modern composers, and I do a little in that way. But I would have liked to have his early things; there’s a beauty about them—about the manuscript itself—that the modern works don’t have. A lot of the early composers wrote the most exquisite musical hands. Had to, so that the copyist didn’t get into trouble. But they also took pride in them.”

  “You mean you like the manuscript better than the music?”

  “No, but there is a quiet beauty about a really fine original manuscript that is like nothing else. People buy manuscripts of authors and get great satisfaction from them, quite apart from any bibliographical interest they may have. Why not music? A Mendelssohn manuscript is wholly Mendelssohnian—precise, beautiful, just the tiniest bit conventional, and sensitive without being weak. It speaks of the man. And Berlioz! Fiery spirit, but splendidly legible, and dotted all over with directions in his handwriting, which is that of a man who was both a Romantic and the possessor of a thoroughgoing classical education. Bach—manuscript of a man who had to be careful with his ruled paper, which cost money he didn’t want to spend. Beethoven—scribble, scribble, scribble. It’s something of the man. My Uncle had some nice Liszt things, and I wish I had them. We’re going to hear Liszt tonight. Egressy is playing the last three Hungarian Rhapsodies.”

  “I hate that kind of music.”

  “Really? Too bad.”

  “I’ll turn off my ears while he’s playing.”

  “What do you hate about it?”

  “Everything. The spirit of it, the stress of emotion, the unchaste ornamentation.”

  “The very things I like.”

  “It’s a change for you; I have it all the time.”

  “Theotoky; a Greek name, isn’t it?”

  “My Father’s; but on my Mother’s side I am a Gypsy, and being a Gypsy in the modern world—especially the University world—simply doesn’t do.”

  “You don’t like it in yourself?”

  “I’d have to believe in heredity more than I do to admit there is much of it in myself. I’m a Canadian woman, setting out on a university career, and I don’t want any part of the Gypsy world.”

  Now what on earth made me say that? I was surprised to hear myself. It sounded so aggressive, so much like the know-it-all girls I liked least at the University. I didn’t want to go on with that theme; I had not meant to tell Arthur Cornish that I had Gypsy blood, because it sounded as if I were trying to make myself interesting in a cheap way. Let’s drop that.

  “Did you never tell your uncle you were interested in his musical manuscripts?”

  “He knew I was.”

  “Isn’t it odd that he didn’t leave you even one of them?”

  “Not odd at all. It’s fatal to let a collector know you’re interested in his things; he’s quite likely to suspect you of coveting them. He begins to think you are waiting for them. I’ll show him, says the collector, and bequeaths them to somebody else.”

  “What odd people collectors must be.”

  “Some of the oddest.”

  “How odd are you? But I suppose working with figures keeps you sane.”

  “Do I work with figures?”

  “What else is working with money?”

  “Oh—quite different. Money’s something you shove around, like electricity.”

  “Like electricity?”

  “Like large power-grids, and transformers, and that sort of thing. The diffusion of electricity is an extremely important kind of engineering. You decide where to put the energy, and how to get it there, according to the result you expect. Money is a form of power.”

  “A kind of power most people think they don’t have enough of.”

  “That’s quite different. The personal money people are always making such a fuss about depends heavily on where the big power-money is put—what bonds and industries get the heavy support, and when. People who aren’t in the money trade talk about making money; they are able to do that because of the decisions people like me make about the power-money. The money people want for their personal use is all part of the big scheme, just as the electricity they turn on at a switch in their houses is a tiny part of what happens through the big grid. Brightens things up for them but it isn’t much in the large scheme. What anybody can do with money for mere personal satisfaction is extremely limited. It’s the power-money that’s fascinating.”

  “It doesn’t fascinate me.”

  “Not the power?”

  “It’s not my world.”

  “The University world is a power world, I suppose.”

  “Oh no, you don’t understand universities. They’re not just honeycombs of classrooms, where students are labelled this, that, and the other, so they can get better jobs than their parents. It’s the world of research; the selfless pursuit of knowledge and sometimes of truth.”

  “Selfless?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Of course I was thinking of Hollier, and how much I wanted to follow him.

  “I can’t judge, of course. I never went to a university.”

  “You didn’t!”

  “I’m a heavily disguised illiterate. I deceive lots of people. No B.A.—not to speak of an M.A.—yet I usually escape undetected. You won’t turn me in, will you?”

  “But—how have you—?”

  “Where did I achieve my deceptive polish and ease in high-class conversation? In the University of Hard Knocks.”

  “Tell me about the U. of H.K.”

  “Not so very long ago there was a positive prejudice against university-trained people in the banking world, especially if they were expected to go to the top. What could a university give me that would be of any practical use? A degree in economics? You can learn economics better and quicker by reading a few books. A training in business administration? I was born to business administration. The rich gloss of cultivation? My guardians thought I could get that just as well by travelling and meeting a few Rothschilds and their like. So that’s what I did.”

  “Guardians? Why g
uardians?”

  “Oh, I had a Grandfather, and a fine old crusted money type he was. You’d have loathed him; he thought professors were fellows with holes in their pants who didn’t notice the bad food they were eating because they were reading Greek at the same time. He’s the one Uncle Frank escaped from. But my Father, who was a very good banker indeed, and not quite such a savage as Grandfather, married rather late, and having begot me was killed in a motor accident in which my young, beautiful Mother was killed too. So I had Grandfather, and guardians who were members of his banking entourage, and was to all intents and purposes an orphan. What’s more, that despair of psychiatrists, a very rich orphan. I had no parents to humble me in the great Canadian upper-bourgeois tradition, to warn me against being myself, to urge me to be like them. So far as a civilized upbringing permits, I was free. And being free I found that I had no special urge towards rebellion, but rather, a pull towards orthodoxy. Now perhaps that’s odd, if you are looking for oddity. I had a wonderfully happy childhood, suckled at the twin breasts of Trust and Equity. Then I travelled, and it was while travelling that I developed my great idea.”

  “What was it?”

  “Should I tell you? Why should I tell you?”

  “The best of reasons: I’m dying to know. I mean, there has to be more to you than banking.”

  “Maria, that’s patronizing and silly. You know damn-all about banking, and you scorn it because it seems to have nothing to do with university life. How do you think a university keeps its doors open? Money, that’s how. The unionized professors and the unionized support staff and the meccano the scientists and doctors demand, all cost megatons of money, and how does the Alma Mater get it? Partly from her alumni, I admit; a university must truly be a Bounteous Mother if she can charm so much dough out of the pockets of her children who have long left her. But who manages the money? Who turns it into power? People like me, and don’t you forget it.”

  “All right, all right, all right; I apologize on my knees; I grovel under the table. I just meant, there is something about you that is interesting, and banking doesn’t interest me. So perhaps it’s your great idea. Please, Arthur, tell me.”

  “All right, though you don’t deserve it.”

  “I’ll be quiet and respectful.”

  “I’ve had this notion since my school days, and travel abroad strengthened it because I met some people who had made it work. I am going to be a patron.”

  “Like your Uncle Frank?”

  “No. Wholly unlike my Uncle Frank. He was a patron in a way, but it was part of his being a miser in a much bigger way. He was an accumulator; he acquired works of art and then hated to think of getting rid of them; the result is the mess I’m cleaning up now, with Hollier and McVarish and Darcourt helping me. That’s not what I call being a patron. Of course Uncle Frank put some money in the hands of living artists, and spotted some winners and encouraged them and gave them what they want most—which is sympathetic understanding—but he wasn’t a patron on the grand scale. Whatever he did was basically for the satisfaction of Francis Cornish.”

  “What’s a patron on the grand scale?”

  “A great animateur; somebody who breathes life into things. I suppose you might call it a great encourager, but also a begetter, a director who keeps artists on the tracks, and provides the power—which isn’t all money, by any means—that makes them go. It’s a kind of person—a very rare kind—that has to work in opera, or ballet, or the theatre; he’s the central point for a group of artists of various kinds, and he has to be the autocrat. That’s what calls for tact and firmness, but most of all for exceptional taste. It has to be the authoritative taste artists recognize and want to please.”

  I suppose I looked astonished and incredulous.

  “You’re taken aback because I lay claim to exceptional taste. It’s queer what people are allowed to boast about; if I told you I was an unusually good money-man and had a flair for it, you wouldn’t be surprised in the least. Why shouldn’t I say I have exceptional taste?”

  “It’s just unusual, I suppose.”

  “Indeed it is unusual, in the sense that I’m talking about. But there have been such people.”

  I scurried around in my mind for an example.

  “Like Diaghilev?”

  “Yes, but not in the way you probably mean. Everybody now thinks of him as an exotic; no, no, he was hard as nails and began life as a lawyer. But Christie at Glyndebourne wasn’t exotic at all and perhaps he achieved more than Diaghilev.”

  “It all seems a bit—hard to find a word that won’t make you angry—but a bit grandiose.”

  “We’ll see. Or I’ll see, at any rate. But I don’t want to be an art miser, like Uncle Frank; I want to show the world what I’ve made and what I am.”

  “Good luck to you, Arthur.”

  “Thanks. I can be sure of the power, but without luck, it’s not worth a damn.—Now it’s time we were going. Do you want to meet Egressy afterwards? I know him fairly well.”

  5

  I did not much like the first part of the concert, which included a Festival Overture by Dohnanyi and something by Kodaly; the conductor was giving us a Hungarian night. When Egressy appeared on the platform to play the Liszt Piano Concerto No. 2 I felt hostile towards him. I turned off my ears, as I had said I would, but if you really like music you cannot do that completely, any more than you can turn off the dreadful Muzak in a public building. You try not to be drawn into it. But when, during the second part of the programme, Egressy played the last three Hungarian Rhapsodies, I could not turn off my ears. Not to hear demanded an effort, a negation of spirit, that was utterly beyond me. During the fifteenth, in which the Rakoczy March appears in so many guises, I became a wreck, emotionally and to some degree physically, for I wept and wept beyond the power of my handkerchief to staunch my tears.

  Of course Arthur knew that I was weeping; people on all sides knew it, though I made no noise. The remarkable thing was that he did nothing about it; no solicitous proffering of large white handkerchief, no patting of the arm, no murmur of There, there. Yet I knew he respected my weeping, knew it was private, knew it was beyond anything he could do to repair, knew it had to be. When he took me home afterwards—he said nothing more about meeting Egressy—neither of us spoke about it.

  Why had I wept? Because I had behaved like a fool at dinner, for one thing, speaking of my Gypsy blood as if it were a social embarrassment, instead of a glory and a curse. How bourgeois, how mean of spirit, how gadjo!What ailed me, to speak so to a stranger about something I never discussed with anybody? As a child I had thought innocently that it was fun to be part Gypsy, but my schoolmates soon put me straight on that matter. Gypsies were dirty, they were thieves, they knew mean tricks. The parents of several children would not allow me to play with them; I was the strange child.

  True enough, I was a little strange, for I had thoughts that do not belong to childhood. I wondered what it was like to be one of those smiling, pale-skinned, and often pale-eyed Canadian mothers, whose outward pleasantness so often enclosed a hard and narrow spirit. They lived again in their pale children, who thought me strange because I was not pale, but had red cheeks and black eyes and black hair; not even the Canadian winters could bleach me down to the prevailing skin-colour, which was like that of an arrowroot biscuit.

  Wondering what it was like to be in their skins, it was a short step to doing whatever I could to get into their skins. I used to imitate their walks and postures and their hard, high voices, but most of all their facial expressions. This was not “taking them off” as some of the girls at the convent school took off the nuns and the Old Supe; it was “putting them on” like a cloak, to find out what it felt like, as a way of knowing them. When I was fourteen I called it the Theotoky Theory of Exchangeable Personalities, and took huge delight in it. And indeed it taught me a surprising amount; walk like somebody, stand like her, try to discover how she produces her voice, and often astonishing things become clea
r.

  A strange child, perhaps, but I wouldn’t give a pinch of dust for a child who was not strange. Is not every child strange, by adult accounting, if we could only learn to know it? If it has no strangeness, what is the use of it? To grow up into another humanoid turnip? But I was stranger than the others. They were proud of being of Scots descent, or French, or Irish, or whatever it was. But Gypsy blood was not a thing to be proud of—unless one happened to have it oneself, and knew what Gypsy pride was like. Not the assertive pride of the boastful Celts and Teutons and Anglo-Saxons, but something akin to the pride of the Jews, a sense of being different and special.

  The Jews, so cruelly used by the National Socialists in Germany, so bullied, tortured and tormented, starved and done to death in every way from the most sophisticated to the most brutal, have the small comfort of knowing that the civilized world feels for them; they have themselves declared that the world will never be allowed to forget their sufferings. But the Jews, for all their pride of ancestry, are a modern people in command of all the modern world holds, and so they know how to make their voices heard. The Gypsies have no such arts, and the Gypsies too were victims of the Nazi madness.

  What happened to them has that strange tinge of reasonableness that deceived so much of the world when it heard what the Nazis were doing. At first the Fuehrer himself professed an interest in the Gypsies; they were fascinating relics of the Indo-Germanic race, and to preserve their way of life in its purity was a scientifically desirable end. They must be gathered together, and they must be numbered and their names recorded. Scholars must study them, and there is a terrible humour in the fact that they were declared to be, living creatures as they were, under the protection of the Department of Historical Monuments. So they were herded together, and then it was discovered by the same scientists who had acclaimed them that they were an impure ethnic group, and a threat to the purity of the Master Race; the obvious solution to their problem was to sterilize them, bringing an end to their tainted heritage, and the inveterate criminality it fostered. But as Germany gained power over much of Europe it was found simpler to kill them.