The Rebel Angels tct-1

by Robertson Davies

  “Conloqui et conridere. . .”

  “Yes. ‘Conversations and jokes together, mutual rendering of good services, the reading together of sweetly phrased books, the sharing of nonsense and mutual attentions’. And the mutual attentions of course include sex. So you mustn’t look worried, Simon dear.”

  I would have had to be more than human not to worry. I was losing a greatly gifted pupil. I was losing a woman whom I had regarded, for a time, as the earthly embodiment of Sophia. Though I knew I could never possess her, I loved her still, and I was going to bind her to a man against whom I knew nothing that was not good, but who somehow bothered me.

  I decided this was jealousy. I suppose the Rebel Angels were not above jealousy. It is an unpopular passion; people will confess with some degree of self-satisfaction that they are greedy, or have terrible tempers, or are close about money, but who admits to being jealous? It cannot easily be presented as a good quality with a dark complexion. But my job as a priest is to look human frailty in the face and call it by its right name. I was jealous of Arthur Cornish because he was going to be first in the heart of a woman I still loved. But as Maria had said, a Rebel Angel takes something of a woman’s innocence as he leads her towards a larger world and an ampler life, and it is not surprising if the man who has done that is jealous of the man who reaps the benefit. I could understand and value Maria as he never could, I was sure of that; but I was equally sure that Maria could never be mine except on the mythological plane she had herself explained. What ails you, Father Darcourt, is that you want to eat your cake and have it too; you want to be first with Maria, without paying the price of that position. All right, I understand. But it still hurts.

  Why was I so withholding in my feelings about Arthur? It was because, although I had seen quite a lot of his crown, I knew nothing about his root except what might be inferred from his deep feeling for music. Maria seemed to have yielded to him completely; whatever she had said in the interview just closed had a—no, not a falsity, but a somewhat un-Marialike quality that spoke of Arthur. I had observed that in plenty of brides, but Maria was not to be judged as one of them.

  All this orthodoxy—what could it lead to? In my experience the essentials of Christianity, rightly understood, may form the best possible foundation for a life and a marriage, but in the case of people of strongly intellectual bent these essentials need extensive farcing out—I use the word as cooks do, to mean the extending and amplifying of a dish with other, complementary elements—if they are to prove enough. One cannot live on essences.

  Young couples whom I interview before marriage are sincere in their faith, or pretend to a sincerity they think I expect, but I know that in the household they set up there will be other gods than the one God. The Romans talked of household gods, and they knew what they were talking about; in every home and every marriage there are the lesser gods, who sometimes swell to extraordinary size, and even when they are not consciously acknowledged they have great power. Every one of the household gods has a dark side, a mischievous side, as when Pride disguises itself as self-respect, Anger as the possession of high standards of behaviour, or Lust as freedom of choice. Who would be the household gods under the Cornish roof?

  I knew of the special bee in Maria’s bonnet; it was Honour, a concept she had seized from the work of François Rabelais, and made her own. Honour which was said to prompt people to virtuous action and hold them back from vice; was there a dark side to that god? Fruitless to speculate, but I could imagine Honour raising quite a lot of hell if it were to swell to a size where it darkened the face of the one God.

  2

  Maria’s marriage was, all things considered, a great success, though there were a few oddities. Standing at the altar, waiting for the bride, I could see her, at the back of Spook Chapel, slipping off her shoes, so that she was barefoot when she confronted me, though her long white wedding-gown concealed her feet most of the time. It made her a little shorter than I had ever seen her before, and although Arthur Cornish was not especially tall, he seemed to tower above her. He was handsomely and conventionally dressed; it was plain that his morning clothes were made for him and not hired. I have seen many a wedding given a decided list towards comedy when the groom wore badly fitting hired clothes, and was all too plainly ill at ease in his first stiff collar. (I think it a bad omen when the groom is the clown of the circus; it is usually the top hat that is the betrayer.) Arthur and his best man were impeccable. The best man was Geraint Powell, a rising young actor from the Stratford Festival, handsome, self-assured, and somewhat larger than life as actors tend to be on ceremonial occasions. Where, I wondered, had Arthur picked up such a friend, who was as near as our modern age allows to what used to be called a matinee idol.

  The music, too, was impeccable and I suppose it was Arthur’s choice. It was strange to see Maria walking with the splendid poise of a barefoot Gypsy down that long aisle on the arm of Yerko, who padded like a huge bear, and made a great business of smiling through tears, which he clearly thought was the proper emotional tone for his role. Somewhere—God knows where—Yerko had found a purple Ascot stock, and it was pinned with a garnet like an egg.

  Mamusia, in the first seat of the first pew on the bride’s side of the chapel, was a phuri dai in state attire, a complexity of skirts, gaudy petticoats, not less than three shawls, and her hair greased until she was like the God of Sion; her paths dropped fatness. No tears for Mamusia; matriarchal dignity was her role.

  I had no eyes for anyone but Maria, when once she appeared, and as she drew near me the ache I felt changed to astonishment, for she was wearing the longest necklace I have ever seen. The Lord Mayor of a great city might have envied it. It was made of gold roundels at least two inches in diameter, stamped with the image of some horned beast; without rude peering I could not read the inscription on each piece, but I could make out a word that looked like “Fyngoud”. What was this? Some Scottish treasure? Mamusia’s Maria Theresa thalers, which she wore for the occasion, were nothing to this. To increase the resemblance to a mayoral chain it was pinned far out on her shoulders and quite a lot of it hung down her back, beneath her veil; if it had simply depended from her neck, like an ordinary necklace, it would have reached almost to her thighs.

  There she was, my darling and my joy, standing beside the man to whom I was to marry her. Time to begin.

  “ ‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation’ (and what a crew they are—nobody but Mamusia on the bride’s side of the chapel, except Clement Hollier, who looked about as well pleased as I felt, and on the groom’s side a considerable group of people who could have been relatives, though some were probably board members and business associates) ‘to joyn together this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony.’ “ Which I did, marvelling, not for the first time, how short the marriage service is, and how easy and inevitable the answers are, compared with the tedious rigmarole involved in a divorce. And at the end, in duty bound, I implored God to fill Maria and Arthur with spiritual benediction and grace, so that they might so live together in this life that in the world to come they might have life everlasting. I don’t think I have ever spoken those words with a stronger sense of ambiguity.

  It was a morning wedding—the orthodox Arthur again—and afterwards there was a reception, or party, or whatever you like to call it, in one of the rooms Spook sometimes makes available for such affairs, a room of oaken academic solemnity. It was here that Mamusia held court, and was gracious in what she appeared to think an Old World Viennese style towards Arthur’s business friends, who all seemed to be called Mr. Mumble and Ms Clackety-Clack. Maria had set aside her veil for a kerchief tied in the married woman’s style. Yerko was rather drunk and extremely communicative.

  “You saw the necklace, Priest Simon?” he said. “What you think it worth, eh? You’ll never guess, so I’ll tell you.” Warmly and boozily he whispered an astounding sum into my ear. “I make it myself;
took me a week working hours and hours every day. Now, this is the big thing; all that gold except the chains, which I made out of some personal gold left by her father, Tadeusz, was Maria’s purchase price! You know—what Arthur paid me, as her uncle, to marry her. Sounds funny, you say, but it is the Gypsy way and because Arthur is rich and a gadjo, he has to pay plenty. My sister and me, we are people of wealth, too, but an old custom is an old custom. That’s why we give it back, in the necklace. You saw those big pieces? A full ounce of gold, every one. Guess what they were; come on, guess.—Kruger-rands, that’s what they are. Pure gold and Maria has them for her own if anything goes wrong. Because these gadji, their money is all paper anyways and could go phtttt any day. What do you think of that for generosity, eh? What do you say to a family that gives back all of the purchase price?”

  I could only say that it seemed extremely open-handed. Hollier was listening; he said nothing and looked sour. But Yerko was not finished with me.

  “Tell me, Priest Simon, what kind church is this? I know you are a good priest—real priest, very strong in power—but I look everywhere and what do I see? Bebby Jesus? Nowhere! Not a picture, not a figure. Lots of old saints behind the altar, but not Bebby Jesus or his Mother. Doesn’t this church know who Bebby Jesus is?”

  “Bebby Jesus is everywhere in our chapel, Yerko, don’t doubt it for a moment.”

  “I didn’t see him. I like to see, then I believe.” And Yerko padded off to get himself some more champagne, which he drank in gulps.

  “There you are,” said I to Hollier. “I think I agree with Yerko; we ought to make the evidences of faith more obvious in our churches. We’ve refined faith almost out of existence.”

  “Nonsense,” said Hollier. “You don’t think anything of the sort. That sort of thing leads directly to plaster statuary of the most degraded kind. I’m hating all this, Sim. I loathe this self-conscious ethnicity—purchase price, and bare feet. In a few minutes we’ll all be dancing around shouting and spilling wine.”

  “I thought that was just your thing,” I said, “the Wild Mind at work. Whoop-de-doo and unbuttoned carousing.”

  “Not when it’s done simply for show. It’s like those rain-dances Indians are coaxed to do for visiting politicians.”

  He still looked unwell from his collapse, so I didn’t contradict him. But he felt what I was thinking.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I have to toast the bride, and making speeches always puts me in a bad state.”

  He needn’t have worried; the Mumbles and the Clackety-Clacks were real Canadian Wasps and unlikely to take off their shoes, or sing. Powell, the actor, was master of ceremonies, and in a few minutes he called for silence, so that Hollier might speak—which he did, with what I thought a degree of solemnity too severe for a wedding, though I was grateful for what he said.

  “Dear friends, this is a happy occasion, and I am particularly honoured at having been asked to propose the health of the bride. I do so with the deepest feeling of tenderness, for I love her as a teacher to whom she has been the most enriching and rewarding of pupils. We teachers, you know, can only rise to our best when we have great students, and Maria has made me surpass myself and surprise myself, and what I have given to her—which I will not pretend with foolish modesty has been little—she has equalled with the encompassing warmth of her response. She is surrounded at this moment by her two families. Her mother and her uncle, who so clearly represent the splendid tradition of the East and of the past, and by Father Darcourt and myself, who are here as devoted servants of that other tradition which she has claimed as her own and to which she has brought great gifts. One mother, the phuri dai, the Mother of the Earth, is splendidly present among us: but the other, the Alma Mater, the bounteous mother of the University and the whole great world of learning and speculative thought of which the University is a part, is all about us. With such a heritage it is almost superfluous to wish her happiness, but I do so from my heart, and wish her and her husband long life and every joy that the union of root and crown can bring. Those of you who know of Maria’s enthusiasm for Rabelais will understand why I wish her happiness in words for his: Vogue la galère—tout va bien!”

  Polite applause rose from the Mumbles and the Clackety-Clacks, who seemed a little subdued by what Hollier had said; probably they had expected the usual avuncular facetiousness that goes with such toasts. Then Arthur made a speech that did nothing to lighten the atmosphere. To marry, he said, was to take a hand in a dangerous game where the stakes are the highest—a fuller life or a life diminished and confined. It was a game for adult players.

  The speeches of bridegrooms are usually awful, but I found this one particularly embarrassing.

  When toasts were over, and it was time to go—for as priest I know that I should leave before anybody gets obviously drunk, and family quarrels or fist-fights occur—I went to take my leave of Maria.

  “Shall we see you again next term?” I said, because I could think of nothing that was not banal.

  “I can’t be sure, just yet. I may take a year out to get used to being married. But I’ll be back. As Clem said, this is my home and you and he are my family. Thank you, thank you, dear Simon, for marrying me to Arthur, and thank you for the year past. I learned so much from you and Clem.”

  “Very sweet of you to say so.”

  But then there came over the face of my Maria a look I had never seen on it before, a look of teasing and mischief. “But I think I learned most from Parlabane,” she said.

  “What could you have learned from that ruffian?”

  “ ‘Be not another if thou canst be thyself’.”

  “But you learned that from Paracelsus.”

  “I read it in Paracelsus. But I learned it from Parlabane. He was a Rebel Angel too, Simon.”

  Hollier came away with me, and he seemed so desolate that I hesitated to leave him. “Better go home and get some rest,” I said.

  “I don’t want to go home.”

  I could understand that. The society of Hollier’s mother was not precisely what a man needs who has relinquished his love to another man. Time I spoke out.

  “Look Clem, there’s no use whatever in either of us feeling sorry for ourselves. We’ve had all of Maria that was coming to us, and we gave her all that our nature and circumstances allowed. Let’s not delight ourselves with the bitter-sweet pleasures of Renunciation. No ‘It is a far, far better thing I do—’ for us. We must be ourselves and know ourselves for what we are: Rebel Angels, we hope, and not a couple of silly middle-aged professors boo-hooing about what could never have been.”

  “But I was such a fool; I found out too late.”

  “Clem, don’t spit on your luck. You think you have lost Maria; I think you are free of her. Remember your destiny that the phuri dai read for you at Christmas? The last card was Fortune, with her ever-turning wheel? It has turned in your favour, hasn’t it? You have the Gryphius Portfolio as soon as you and Maria can get together again. That’s your destiny, at your age and with your character. You’re not a Lover; you’re too much a Wizard. Now look here; go to your rooms and have a good afternoon’s rest, and come to dinner at Ploughwright at six o’clock sharp. It’s a Guest Night.”

  “No, no, I’ll crowd your table.”

  “Not a bit of it; a guest has dropped out at the last moment, so there’s a place which Fate has obviously cleared for you. Six o’clock for drinks. Sharp, mind. don’t keep the Warden waiting.”

  3

  It was an especially genial Guest Night, because it was our last before the long summer break, and also because the calendar and a public holiday had intervened in such a way that it was our first following Easter. Downstairs, when the first part of dinner was over and the students had gone about their own affairs, all our regulars were present, and as well as Hollier, there were two other guests, George Northmore, who was a Judge of the Supreme Court of the province, and Benjamin Jubilei, from the University Library.

  I wondered how long
it would be before somebody brought up the murder of Urquhart McVarish, and who would do so; I had made a mental bet with myself that it would be Roberta Burns, and I won. Once again, for The New Aubrey, I give I some notion of how they chirped over their cups.

  “Poor old Urky. Don’t you remember him dining with us last autumn, and how proud he was of his penis-bone, poor devil? He tried to get a squeak out of me with that, but I was one too many for him; Urky simply had no idea what a tough nut an intelligent middle-aged woman can be.”

  “He was an Oxonian of the old dispensation,” said Penny Raven; “thought women were lovely creatures whose sexual coals could be blown into warmth by raunchy academic chit-chat. Well, well; one down and a few score around this campus still to go.”

  “Penny, that isn’t like you,” said Lamotte.

  “No, no, Penny,” said Deloney; “the poor fellow is dead. Let’s not beat the bones of the vanquished.”

  “Yes,” said Hitzig, “we’re not hyenas or biographers, to pee on the dead.”

  “Okay. De mortuis nil nisi hokum,” said the unrepentant Penny.

  “I was myself at Oxford at least as long ago as McVarish,” said the Warden, “and I have never thought meanly of women.”

  “Oh, but you were Balliol, Warden. Always in the van. Urky was Magdalen—quite another bed of cryptorchids.”

  The Warden smirked; Oxford rivalries died hard in him.

  “I wonder what is to become of all his erotica,” said Roberta Burns. “He had a pornographic bootjack at his door that always interested me.”

  “A pornographic b—!” Lamotte was playing the innocent, as he loved to do with women.

  “Indeed. A naked woman rendered in brass, lying on her back with her legs astraddle. You put one foot on her face, forced the other into her crotch, and hoiked off your galosh. Practical enough, but offensive to my lingering female sensibilities.”