The Rebel Angels tct-1

by Robertson Davies

  McVarish and Roberta Burns were at it, hammer and tongs, across the body of Lamotte, who seemed not to relish their conversation.

  “It’s no good talking to a zoologist about love as if you meant sex,” said Professor Burns. “We see sex as it works among the humbler creation—If they are humbler—and you can count on the fingers of two hands the species that seem to show any tenderness for their mates. With the others it’s just compulsion.”

  “And what about mankind?” said Lamotte. “Do you agree with the terrible Strindberg that love is a farce invented by Nature to fool men and women into propagating their species?”

  “No, I don’t,” said Roberta. “Not a farce at all. Mankind did plenty of propagation before the notion of love had any place in his world, or we shouldn’t be here. My point is that love and sex needn’t be lumped together. You see it among students; some are sick with love and some are roasting with sex; some are both.”

  “I had a student once who wanted to be a devil with the girls,” said Urky, “and he was taking some muck he got from a quack—a sort of soup made of bull’s balls. Did him no good, really, but he thought it did, which was probably effective, but don’t let Gyllenborg know I said so. At the same time I had another student who was mooning over a ballerina he hadn’t a chance of approaching, but he beggared himself sending her an orchid every time she danced. Both silly, of course. But really, Roberta, do you mean to separate love from the old houghmagandy? Isn’t that going too far?”

  “The old houghmagandy, as you call it, is all very well in its way, but don’t take it as a measure of love, or I’ll go scientific on you and point out that the greatest lover in Nature is the boar, statistically speaking; he ejects eighty-five billion sperms at every copulation; even a stallion can only rise to thirteen billions or so. So where does man rank, with his measly dribble of a hundred and twenty-five millions? But man knows love, whereas the boar and the stallion hardly look at their mates, once they’ve done the trick.”

  “I am glad I have not had a scientific education,” said Lamotte; “I have always thought, and shall continue to think, of woman as a miracle of Nature.”

  “Of course she’s a miracle,” said Roberta, “but you don’t appreciate how much of a miracle. You’re too spiritual. Look at a splendid girl—is she a spirit? Of course she is, but she’s a lot of other things that are absolutely galvanizing, they are so miraculous. Look at me, even, though I assure you I’m not parading my middle-aged charms; yet here I sit, ears waxing, snots hardening, spit gurgling, tears at the ready, and after a dinner like this one, what miracles within! Gall and pancreas hard at it, faeces efficiently kneaded into nubbins, kidneys at their wondrous work, bladder filling up, and my sphincters—you have no idea what the whole concept of womankind owes to sphincters! Love takes all that for granted, like a greedy child that sees only the icing on the splendid cake!”

  “I can manage very happily with the icing,” said Lamotte. “To think of a woman as a walking butcher’s shop revolts me.”

  “And the icing is so various that it is a life study in itself,” said McVarish. “The tricks women get up to! I know a hairdresser who tells me that women come to the manicurist-and-superfluous-hair lady in his salon, and the things they ask for! The pubic hair plucked and shaped into hearts, or darts, and they will endure any amount of hot-wax treatment to get the desired result. Then they want it hennaed! ‘There’s fire down below’, as the sailors sing—certainly as they sing when they behold the result!”

  “They needn’t bother,” said Roberta. “People will put up with anything for the old houghmagandy. Or rather, Nature gently assists them to do so. Intercourse brings about a considerable loss of perceptive capacity; sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell are all dulled, whatever the sex-technique books pretend to the contrary. The plain lover looks handsome for the moment; the broken veins and the red nose are scarcely perceptible, the grunting is not comic, bad breath is hardly noticed. And that’s not love, René, but Nature coming to the rescue of love. And man is the only creature to know love as a complex emotion: man is also, in the whole of Nature, the only creature to turn sex into a hobby. Oh, it’s a complex study, let me tell you.”

  “ ‘Love not as do the flesh-imprisoned men,’ “ said Lamotte, pretending to stop his ears. “I’ll bet neither of you can continue the sonnet.”

  It was getting on for the time when I should suggest to the Warden that we rise for coffee and cognac, if anybody wanted it. I had some trouble getting his attention because he and Mrs. Skeldergate and Ludlow were still hard at it about the nature of a university.

  “Ludlow talks about the university as a town,” said the Warden, “but I’m not so sure that’s the right definition.”

  “Surely a university is a city of youth,” said Mrs. Skeldergate.

  “Not a bit of it,” said the Warden. “Lots of youth in a university, fortunately, but youth alone could not sustain such an institution. It is a city of wisdom, and the heart of the university is its body of learned men; it can be no better than they, and it is at their fire the young come to warm themselves. Because the young come and go, but we remain. They are the minute-hand, we the hour-hand of the academic clock. Intelligent societies have always preserved their wise men in institutions of one kind or another, where their chief business is to be wise, to conserve the fruits of wisdom and to add to them if they can. Of course the pedants and the opportunists get in somehow, as we are constantly reminded; and as Ludlow points out we have our scoundrels and our thieves—St. Nicholas’s clerks, indeed. But we are the preservers and custodians of civilization, and never more so than in the present age, where there is no aristocracy to do the job. A city of wisdom; I would be content to leave it at that.”

  But he was not permitted to leave it at that, for in universities nobody is ever fully satisfied with somebody else’s definition. Deloney spoke: “Not just a city, I think, Warden; more like an Empire, in a large university like this, composed of so many colleges that were once independent, and which still retain a measure of independence under the federation of the University itself. The President is an Emperor, presiding over a multitude of realms, each of which has its ruler, and the Principals, Rectors, Wardens, and so forth are very like the great dukes and rulers of mighty fiefdoms, with here and there a Prince Bishop, like the head of St. Brendan’s, or a mitred abbot, like the Rector of Spook; all jealous of their own powers, but all subject to the Emperor. Universities were creations of the Middle Ages, and much of the Middle Ages still clings to them, not only in their gowns and official trappings, but deep in their hearts.”

  “When you speak of ‘learned men’, Warden, don’t you think you should say ‘and women’, to avoid any injustice?” said Mrs. Skeldergate.

  “As the Warden’s legal counsellor I can assure you that whenever he says ‘men’ the word ‘women’ is also to be understood,” said Ludlow.

  “And neuter, to avoid any discrimination or hurt feelings in a university community,” said the Warden, who was not wholly without humour.

  “Will you take coffee, Warden?” said I, in the approved formula. The Warden rose, and the table broke up, and for the last few minutes of the evening, new groups formed.

  Arthur Cornish approached me. “I haven’t had a chance to tell you how much I appreciate what you did this afternoon,” he said. “Of course everybody assumes that I have inherited enormously from Uncle Frank, but in the complexity of a big family business it becomes impersonal, and I wanted something to remember him by. We were more alike than you might suppose. He got away young and devoted himself to his art collections; I think he pretended to be more impractical than he was to escape the burdens of business. He was extraordinarily sharp, you know, after a bargain. Steal a dead fly from a blind spider, he would, when he was among dealers. But he was kind to lots of painters, as well, so I suppose it cancels out, in a sort of way. But tell me, how did you know I was interested in musical manuscripts?”

  “A f
riend of yours, and a friend of mine, told me: Miss Theotoky. We were talking one day after class about methods of musical notation in the early Middle Ages, and she spoke of it.”

  “I remember mentioning it to her once, but I didn’t think she was paying much attention.”

  “She was. She told me everything you said.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. Her taste in music and mine aren’t very close.”

  “She’s interested in medieval music, and in trying to find out what she can about earlier music. It’s very mysterious; we know Nero fiddled, but what precisely did he fiddle? When Jesus and the Apostles had sung an hymn, they went up into the Mount of Olives; but what was the hymn? If we heard it now, would we be appalled to hear the Saviour of Mankind whining and yowling through his nose? It’s only in the past few hundred years that music of the past has been recoverable, yet music is the key to feeling, very often. Something Hollier ought to be interested in.”

  “Perhaps Maria is doing it for Hollier; she seems to be very much under his spell.”

  “Did I hear the name of Maria?” said McVarish, joining us. “That marvellous creature pops up everywhere. By the way, I hope you didn’t think I was being too familiar with her presence this afternoon? But ever since I spotted that little Venus among your uncle’s bits and pieces I have been obsessed by its resemblance to her, and now I’ve had it home and studied it in detail I’m even more delighted. I shall have her always near me—tying her sandal, so innocently, as if she were quite alone. If you ever want a reminder, Arthur, do come to my place. She’s very fond of you, you know.”

  “What makes you think so?” said Arthur.

  “Because I know a lot about what she thinks. A friend of mine whom you don’t know, I believe—a most amusing creature called Parlabane—knows her intimately. He devils for Hollier—calls himself Hollier’s famulus, which is delightful—and so he sees a lot of Maria, who works in Hollier’s rooms. They have great old chats, and Maria tells him everything. Not directly, I gather, but Parlabane is an old hand at reading between lines. And though of course Hollier is her great enthusiasm, she likes you a lot. As who wouldn’t, my dear boy.”

  He touched Arthur lightly on the sleeve, as he had touched me before this evening. Urky is a great toucher.

  “You mustn’t imagine I’m trying to muscle in,” he went on, “although Maria comes to my lectures and sits in the front row. Which gives me immense pleasure, because students are not, on the whole, decorative, and I can’t resist decorative women. I adore women, you know. Unlike Rabelais, but very much like Sir Thomas Urquhart, I think.” And he moved on to say good night to the Warden.

  “Sir Thomas Urquhart?” said Arthur. “Oh, yes, the translator. I’m beginning to hate the sound of his name.”

  “If you know Urky, you get a good deal of Sir Thomas,” I said. Then I added, spitefully I admit but Urky maddened me: “If you look him up in the dictionary of biography, you will find that it is widely agreed that Sir Thomas was crazy with conceit.”

  Arthur said nothing, but he winked. Then he too moved off to take leave of the Warden, and I remembered that as Sub-Warden I ought to call a taxi for Mrs. Skeldergate. And when that had been done I hurried up to my rooms over the gate, to note down, in The New Aubrey, what I had heard during the evening. How they chirped over their cups.

  3

  I was beginning to dread The New Aubrey. What I had begun as a portrait of the University, drawn from the life, was becoming altogether too much like a personal diary, and a confessional diary of the embarrassing sort. Not nearly enough about other people; far too much about Simon Darcourt.

  I don’t drink much, and what I drink doesn’t affect me, but I had a feeling after our Guest Night that I wasn’t myself in a way that a few glasses of wine, taken between six o’clock and ten, could hardly explain. I had finished a day that ought to have been enjoyable; some good work done in the morning, the completion of the Cornish business in the afternoon, and the acquisition of two first-rate Beerbohms that had never been published, and thus were very much my own and a sop to that desire for solitary possession which collectors know so well; Guest Night, which had gone well, and the Cornish executors entertained at my own expense. But I was melancholy.

  A man with a theological training ought to know how to deal with that. A little probing brought the cause to light. It was Maria.

  She was a first-rate student, and she was a girl of great personal charm. Nothing unusual there. But she played far too large a part in my thoughts. As I looked at her, and listened to her in class, I was troubled by what I knew about her and Clement Hollier; the fact that he had once had her on his wretched old sofa was not pleasing, but it was the kind of thing that happens and there is no use making a fuss over it—especially as Hollier had seemed to be in the state of lowered perception at the time that Roberta Burns had so briskly described. But Hollier thought she was in love with him, and that troubled me. Whatever for? Of course he was a fine scholar, but surely she wasn’t such a pinhead as to fall for an attribute of a man who was in so many other ways wholly unsuitable. He was handsome, if you like craggy, gloomy men who look as if they were haunted, or perhaps prey to acid indigestion. But, apart from his scholarship, Hollier was manifestly an ass.

  No, Darcourt, that is unjust. He is a man of deep feeling; look how loyal he is to that miserable no-hoper John Parlabane. Damn Parlabane! He had been prattling to McVarish about Maria, and when Urky said “reading between the lines” it was obvious that they had both been speculating in the wholly unjustified way men of unpleasant character speculate about women.

  Fond of Arthur Cornish, indeed! No, “Very fond” had been his expression. More exaggeration. But was it? Why had she dragged Arthur Cornish into her conversation with me, when we were talking about medieval musical notation? Something about his uncle’s collection, but had that been relevant? I know well enough how people in love drag the name of the loved one into every conversation, simply to utter that magical word, to savour it on the tongue.

  The trouble with you, Darcourt, is that you are allowing this girl to obsess you.

  More inner tumult, upon which I tried to impose some of the theological stricture I had learned as a method of examining conscience.

  The trouble with you, Darcourt, is that you are falling in love with Maria Magdalena Theotoky. What a name! Mary Magdalene, the woman with seven devils; and Theotoky, the divine motherhood of Mary. Of course people do carry the most extraordinary names, but what a contradiction! It was the contradiction that would not give me any peace.

  Oh, fathead! Oh, jackass! Oh, triple-turned goof!

  How far can absurdity carry a supposedly sane man? You, a stoutish, middle-aged priest. . . but not a priest of a church that denies marriage to its priests, remember that. . . shut up, who said anything about marriage?. . . it was in your mind and the link between love and marriage marks you forever as a bourgeois and a creature from the past, as well. . . get back to your point. How far can absurdity carry a supposedly sane man? You have a successful career, and your way of life is comfortable. . . but lonely. . . who will smooth the pillow when you lie at the hour of death?. . . are you seriously expecting that superb creature to slide you into the grave? How far can absurdity carry a supposedly sane man? What have you to offer her? Devotion. Pooh, she can expect devotion from scores of men—handsome, young rich me, like Arthur Cornish. He must love her; remember the way he resented Urky’s references to her this afternoon, and again not an hour ago? What chance have you against him? Or Handsome Clem? You are a fool, Darcourt.

  Of course I could love her hopelessly. There has been a good deal of that sort of thing throughout the ages. Since the time Roberta Burns speaks of, when our hairy ancestors gave up biting their women and throwing them the bones after they had finished their uncooked feast. A good deal of hopeless love has saddened mankind since the Idealist and the Sex-Hobbyist became different aspects of the same, infatuated human creature.

  An
Idealist I certainly was. But a Sex-Hobbyist? I am not a wholly inexperienced creature but it has been some little time. . . and I can’t really say I’ve missed it much. But Maria is young and in the flower of her beauty. Adoration and amusing talk wouldn’t be enough for her.

  Oh, God, how did I ever get into this?

  4

  That was where I was, however. Deep in love with one of my students, a situation in which a professor must appear as either a knave or a fool. For the weeks to come I did the best I could: I never addressed Maria except in class; I was over-scrupulous in valuing her work, but as it was admirable that didn’t make much difference. I was determined to keep my folly bottled up.

  It was a blow to my resolve, but a mighty fire in my heart, therefore, when she lingered after the last lecture before Christmas, and said, shyly: “Professor Darcourt, is there any chance that you could come to my Mother’s house for dinner on Boxing Day? We’d be so happy if you could.”

  Happy! Happy!! Happy!!!

  Second Paradise V

  1

  Parlabane had become a fixture in my life and I had accepted him, without joy but with philosophy, if I may be allowed to use that word. I cannot be sure, because deeper acquaintance with Parlabane made it clear that philosophy was not a word to be used loosely. It was his academic discipline; he was a professional philosopher, in comparison with whom most people were ill-disciplined muddlers as soon as they turned their minds to large questions. But if I may be allowed to use “philosophy” merely to mean rueful resignation in the face of the inevitable, I accepted his presence in Hollier’s rooms, almost every day for the space of an hour or two, with philosophy.

  He had dropped the manner, half-obsequious and half-contemptuous, which went with his monk’s robe. He was no longer the begging friar who secretly scorned those from whom he asked alms. He had his knitting with him, however; he carried it in a brown-paper shopping-bag with a few books, and what looked like a dirty towel. As I remember what he said, I hear the click of the needles as an accompaniment to every word. He was now teaching philosophy in what used to be called Extension Courses, now Continuing Studies, lecturing at night to people who were doing their work for a degree slowly, and in bits. What he was teaching them I fear to think, because what he said to me from time to time almost froze the marrow in my bones.