A Mixture of Frailties tst-3

by Robertson Davies

  “It was humility that nearly finished me today. Sir Benedict, may I ask you a very personal question? I don’t mean to be impertinent, but I truly want to know.”

  “Yes?”

  “With the Passion, does it make a very great difference to you—not being a Christian?”

  “Ah, I gather that the widespread notion that I am a Jew has reached you. As a matter of fact, I’m the second generation of my family to be baptized and safe in the respectable bosom of the Church of England—just like that eminently respectable fellow Mendelssohn. But to speak honestly, I’m nothing very much at all, which is reprehensible on all counts. Theologians and philosophers are terribly down on people who are nothing at all. But I find it’s the only thing that fits my work. I tackle the Passion like a Christian—quite sincerely; but I don’t carry it over into my fortunately rare assaults on Also Sprach Zarathustra. One’s personal beliefs are peripheral, really, if one is an interpreter of other men’s work; Bach was devout, but it is far more important for me to understand the quality of his devotion than to share it.”

  “Mr Molloy says you must feel the Passion in the very depths of your soul.”

  “Quite true, but don’t interpret Murtagh simple-mindedly. He knows perfectly well that you can feel Hamlet without believing in ghosts.”

  “I see. At least, I think I see.”

  “But what about you—for I assume that this inquiry about me is leading up to something about yourself. What about you and the Passion? You’ve been brought up something tremendously devout and Bibliolatrous, if I recollect aright. You mentioned humility nearly wrecking your performance today. Of course it couldn’t have been humility. What was the trouble?”

  “I’m in a muddle about my personal life.”

  “Still in love with Revelstoke?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Is it serious?”

  “As serious as it can be.”

  “And I take it from your manner that he doesn’t reciprocate?”

  “He doesn’t feel as I do.”

  “How does he feel? Now please don’t cry. And what has this got to do with humility?”

  “The music—I’m afraid I’m living a very wrong sort of life—and the music made me feel despicable.”

  “I’m driving, and I simply can’t do anything about it if you’re going to cry. However, you will find a handkerchief in my left-hand topcoat pocket, and there are others in my portmanteau. But I most earnestly beg you not to cry, but to listen very carefully to me. First, despising yourself isn’t humility; it’s just self-dramatizing. If you’re living in what is pompously called sin with Revelstoke, you’d better be sure you are enjoying it, or you will soon find that you have neither your cake nor your penny. I’ve seen a great deal of sin, one way and another, and the biggest mug in the world is the sinner who isn’t getting any pleasure from it. I’m not taking your situation lightly, though you may think so. I’m talking sense, but I’m too old to get any pleasure out of playing the sage, and making heavy weather with my trifle of worldly experience. My best advice to you is: clarify your thinking about your situation, and act as good sense dictates. Don’t torture yourself with vulgar notions about what the neighbours will think, but get this maxim into your head and reflect on it: chastity is having the body in the soul’s keeping—just that and nothing more.”

  They talked all the way to London in this strain. Monica explained, and Sir Benedict advised, but nothing new was said. When at last he stopped at Courtfield Gardens he summed up:

  “Remember: you must clarify your thinking. I know it’s the last thing you want to do, but you must do it. If necessary, take a couple of weeks off and go to Paris. Get away from him, and see things in perspective. And when you’ve made up your mind, stick to your decision. And finally, don’t suppose that I’m going to allow this to wreck your work, because I won’t.”

  Within an hour, Monica had gone to Tite Street, and discovered Giles in bed with Persis Kinwellmarshe. There was a quarrel of proportions and ferocity of which Monica had never dreamed. It ended with Giles telling her that her chief trouble was that she had no sense of humour.

  Two days later she flew to Paris.

  7

  Paris in Spring is not an easy place in which to nurse a grudge against oneself. Monica arrived with a long face and a heart full of what she conceived to be self-hatred, but her spirits began to rise almost as soon as she was in Amy Neilson’s pretty house in St Cloud, and before the first evening was over she had confided her trouble to that wise and capable woman. She had not meant to confide; she had fully meant to grapple with the problem alone. She was humiliated by her readiness to spill her story to anyone who might be sympathetic; it seemed so weak. But Amy was an American and a woman, and might understand better than Ripon, who was a man, or Domdaniel, who was English. A little to her surprise, Amy came down flatly on the side of conventional morality.

  “These affairs don’t do,” said she. “Particularly not with girls of your temperament. Their tendency is always to harden you, and what would you be like if you were hardened? You’d be very much like your mother, my dear. Oh, different in externals, I’m sure, but very much like her. And in spite of all the nice loyal things you’ve said to me about her from time to time, I don’t think that will answer. What was it you said he told you—that you had no sense of humour? Lucky for him. A woman with a sense of humour would never have taken up with him in the first place. He sounds an impossible person. Oh, a genius, perhaps. Benedict is always discovering geniuses; it’s a craze with him; he’s terribly humble about not being a composer himself, and he’s always exaggerating the talent of young men who show promise. But suppose Giles Revelstoke is a genius? Geniuses are not people to make a woman happy. The best he could do for you would be to marry you and make a drudge of you. No, you’ve done the right thing. Get over him as fast as you can.”

  “But perhaps that’s what I’m for—to drudge for somebody far above me. I’m nothing very much, and I know it.”

  “Benedict says you can become a very good singer. That’s something. Let me be very frank, dear. You’re not what I call a big person. It’s not just being young, it’s a matter of quality. You’ve got a fair amount of toughness, but essentially you’re delicate and sensitive. You must preserve that. It’s true you have no sense of humour, but very few women have. You should be glad of it. It’s not nearly such a nice or important quality as silly people make out. Wit and high spirits and a sense of fun—yes, they’re wonderful things. But a sense of humour—a real one—is a rarity and can be utter hell. Because it’s immoral, you know, in the real sense of the word: I mean, it makes its own laws; and it possesses the person who has it like a demon. Fools talk about it as though it were the same thing as a sense of balance, but believe me, it’s not. It’s a sense of anarchy, and a sense of chaos. Thank God it’s rare.”

  “Maybe what Giles has is a sense of humour.”

  “You may be right. He sounds like it. But my advice to you, dear, is to get yourself out of this before you’re hurt worse than you are—which isn’t nearly as badly as you think, I dare say. It isn’t sleeping with a man that makes you a tramp; that’s probably healthy, like tennis or yoghourt. But it’s having your feelings hurt until they scar over that makes you coarse and ugly. You’re not the temperament to survive that sort of thing.”

  And thus the pattern of Monica’s Easter in Paris was set. She was getting over Revelstoke. Amy did not refer to the matter again, but she kept Monica busy with French conversation, French literature, shopping, and visits to plays and sights. And Monica, who was beginning to recognize the chameleon strain in her nature, seemed most of the time to fit very well into the stimulating, pleasant, sensible atmosphere which Amy created.

  But in her inmost heart she was hurt and puzzled by the failure of all her advisers to comprehend anything of her feelings. They seemed to know what was expedient, and self-preservative, and what would lead to happiness when she was fifty, but
they appeared to have no comprehension at all of what it was like to be Monica Gall in love with Giles Revelstoke. Even Ripon, who was not more than a year or so older than herself, could marshal all the facts and make a judgement about them, but not even Domdaniel could grasp the irrationalities of the situation. Must one live always by balancing fact against fact? Had the irrational side of life no right to be lived? The answer did not have to be formed; the irrational things rose overwhelmingly from their deeps whenever she was not strenuously bending her mind to some matter of immediate concern.

  Did she want to be a singer? She had been assured so often that it lay within her power to be one, but not since she left Canada had anyone thought of asking if that were truly her desire. What was it, after all, to be a public performer of any kind? One morning, when Amy was busy elsewhere, Monica strayed into the museum of the Opera to pass the time. She had been there before, but under Amy’s firmly enthusiastic guidance; she had been told to marvel, and she had obediently marvelled. But now, alone, she looked about her. How dreary it was! So many pompous busts of Gounod; Gounod’s real immortality was through the wall, on the great stage. But here was the monocle of someone called Diaghilev; Amy had said something about him, but who was he, and what had he done? Where was his immortality? And these pianos of the great—how small they seemed; they bore about them a suggestion that they must have been played by very small men. And these worn-out ballet shoes to which names, presumably great, were attached—was this trash all that the darlings of the public left behind them? There were things here which had belonged to great singers, bits of costume and pitiful, dingy stage jewellery. This was what remained of people who had breathed the muhd as she could hardly hope to breathe it; was this worth the struggle? Would it not be better to be Revelstoke’s drudge and his trull, contributing thereby to something which might live when they both were dead?

  She brought herself near to tears with these gloomy broodings. She looked out of a window across the Rue Auber, where a sign caught her eye; it said “Canada Furs”, and suddenly she was sick with longing for the cold, clean, remorseless land of her birth. Why had she ever come away, to get herself into this mess?

  Luncheon raised her spirits, and she was a little surprised to discern that what she had really been thinking about, and longing for, was immortality—and a vain, earthly immortality at that, the very kind of thing which the Thirteeners (who were in no great danger of attaining it) condemned so strongly.

  Ah, the Thirteeners! After that shaking hour in the Sheldonian, when she had sung her seven bars, and felt herself sealed of the seal of Bach, she could no longer be one of them. But what, then, was she? A whirligig, like Domdaniel, who confessed that he took the colour of whatever work he was engaged on at the moment? But that was unjust to a man whom the world called great, and who was certainly the greatest man in every way that she had ever met. It was, indeed, a moral judgement. And what was it that Domdaniel had said to her, on that drive from Oxford, concerning her own harsh judgement on herself?—”Moral judgements belong to God, and it is part of God’s mercy that we do not have to undertake that heavy part of His work, even when the judgement concerns ourselves.” But wasn’t that just gas? If you didn’t make moral judgements, what were you? Well, of course Domdaniel said that you were an adult human being, and as such ought to have some clear notion of what you were doing with your life. Clarity, always clarity. The more she puzzled, the less clear anything became.

  Reflection, even on these somewhat elementary lines, was hard work for Monica, and it made her very hungry. After her lunch, she continued her wandering through familiar tourist sights, putting in time until she should meet Amy again, and return to St Cloud. Her wanderings took her to the Panthéon.

  A vivid imagination is not of great use in the Pantheon, unless one knows much of the earthly history of the great ones who lie buried there, and can summon splendid visions of them to warm the grey, courteous unfriendliness of its barren stones. In spite of Amy’s cramming, Voltaire was not a living name to Monica, nor was Balzac, or any of the others who gave the place meaning, and everywhere the bleak, naked horror of enthroned Reason was ghastly palpable. Within five minutes she had left the place, and wandered on a few paces into the church of St Étienne du Mont.

  All she knew of this church was that it possessed a remarkable rood-screen which Amy, stuffing her charges with culture like Strasbourg geese, had insisted that she see and admire. And there it was, its two lovely staircases twining upward toward a balcony surrounding the High Altar; Monica, as upon her first visit, longed to climb one of them and look down into the church; she yearned, for no reason that she could define, to see that balcony filled with singing, trumpeting, viol-playing angels. She sat down in a corner, and stared, trying to see what existed only in her imagination.

  She saw no musical angels, but she became conscious of the windows, so strong and jewel-like in colour. She was warmed and soothed by the dark splendour, and some of the pain in her head—the fullness and muddle—began to go away. She hated thinking, and was ashamed of hating it. But thought was like the Panthéon. Here was feeling, and feeling was reality. If only life could be lived in terms of those windows, of that aspiring, but not frightening, screen! If only things and feelings existed, and thoughts and judgements did not have to trouble and torture!

  She was conscious of movement and sound nearby, but it was not for some time that she looked to see what it was. Quite close was a canopy, not very high, of stone, under which was a tomb, not particularly impressive. A grille surrounded it, but an old woman was reaching through this fence, as she knelt, and as she prayed she rubbed the stone gently with her arthritic hand. Tears stood in her eyes, but did not fall. A Negro came near, knelt until he was almost prostrate, prayed briefly, and left.

  What could it be? Monica found a sacristan, and soon had her answer. It was the tomb of St Genevieve, the patroness of the city of Paris.

  “Formerly in the Panthéon,” said the man, “but it was taken from there and publicly burned when the church was re-dedicated to Reason; the ashes and relics were brought here when all that foolishness was over.”

  Then, in the darkness beneath the canopy, there was something of a saint? A saint who had found a haven here after the persecutions of Reason? She had never considered saints before. But, with a sense of awe and wonder that she had never known, Monica went to the tomb and, when no one was near, knelt and stretched her hand through the grille.

  “Help me,” she prayed, touching the smooth stone, “I can’t think; I can’t clarify; I don’t know what I want. Help me to do what is right—No! Help me—help me—.” She could not put any ending on her supplication, for none would express what she wanted, because she did not know what she wanted.

  Nevertheless, when she met Amy at the end of the afternoon, she seemed in splendid spirits, and Amy was convinced that she was forgetting Giles Revelstoke, and that the whole thing had been one of those fusses about very little, which were so common among girls who matured late.

  8

  Within three hours of her return to London, Monica was at the flat in Tite Street; her excuse was that it was hopeless to try to reach Revelstoke by telephone, and she must make her own arrangement about future lessons, or else give an embarrassing explanation to Domdaniel. Giles greeted her more warmly than he had ever done.

  “I’ve something that I think you’ll like,” said he, handing her a bundle of music paper. It was a solo cantata for a soprano voice with piano accompaniment. She looked quickly through it; the manner was very much his own—the old solo cantata form, recitatives alternating with melodic passages, but in a modern idiom; she saw immediately that the tessitura of the lyric passages was unusually high and that the recitatives lay in a lower register. Yet it was for one voice.

  “You haven’t looked at the title,” he said.

  It read:

  KUBLA KHAN

  a setting of Coleridge’s poem, by

  Giles Revelstoke />
  for Monica Gall

  “A present,” said he. “We’ll work on it, and you’ll sing it the first time it’s heard which, if my plans don’t fall through, will be quite early next autumn—Third Programme again.”

  She did not dare to ask if this were an amends for the quarrel before Easter. And what did it matter? She did not dare to ask if this meant that he loved her; even that did not seem to matter, now. The great fact was that he was in better spirits than she had ever known, and that they were to work together again. On something written specially for me—it was that voice which she had heard within herself before, that voice of which she was afraid, because it spoke so selfishly and so powerfully.

  But—Oh, Saint Genevieve, was this your doing?

  “There’s another thing,” said Giles. “I’ve been approached—only approached, mind you—by the Association for English Opera; they wanted to know if I had anything in their line. It was Discoverie that interested them; they were very complimentary.”

  “Giles!”

  “Yes, I know. I can’t tell you what it was like, talking about it to people who really knew, and could understand what was implicit in it, as well as what was staring out of the score. The upshot of it was, they want something. Now don’t go off the deep end, because it’s all very tentative. I haven’t anything—not on paper—but I’ve been tinkering with a notion for years. So I’m to make a sketch, and rough out some of the scenes, and they’ll hear it. Wait, wait—don’t exult too much; there’s a sticker even if they like it. They’re broke. They can’t commission a new work, but they can do one if it’s up to standard. Production here; perhaps production in Venice. But I don’t see how it’s to be done.”

  “But it must be done! It’s unthinkable that it shouldn’t. Why can’t you do it? Would it take too long? How long does it take to write an opera?”