The Rebel Angels

by Robertson Davies

  “Real wool, carefully spun so that I know that not a thread of rubbish has been sneaked into it. This must be the proper lamb’s-wool, or it is not good.”

  She unwrapped the figure, which was bandaged at least six layers deep, and there we saw a violin.

  “The great lady is undressed for her sleep,” said Mamusia, and indeed the violin had no bridge, no strings, no pegs, and looked very much like someone in déshabillé. “You see that the sleep is coming on her; the varnish is already a little dulled, but she is breathing, she is sinking into her trance. In six months she will be wakened by me, her cunning servant, and I shall dress her again and she will go back to the world with her voice in perfect order.”

  Hollier put out his hand to touch the brown dust that surrounded the woollen cloth. “Damp,” he said.

  “Of course it is damp. And it is alive, too. Don’t you know what that is?”

  He sniffed at his fingers, but shook his head.

  “Horse dung,” said Mamusia. “The best; thoroughly rotted and sieved, and from horses in mighty health. This comes from a racing stable, and you wouldn’t believe what they make me pay for it. But the shit of old nags isn’t what I want. The very best is demanded for the very best. She’s a Bergonzi, this sleeper,” she said, tapping the violin lightly. “Ignorant people chatter about Strads, and Guarneris, and they are magnificent. I like a Bergonzi. But the best is a St. Petersburg Leman; that’s one over there, in her fourth month—or will be when the moon is new. They must be put to bed according to the moon,” she said, cocking an eye at Hollier to see how he would take that.

  “And where do they come from, all these great ladies and gentlemen?” he said, looking around the room, in which there were probably forty cases of various sizes.

  “From my friends the great artists,” said Mamusia. “I must not tell whose fiddles these are. But the great artists know me, and when they come here—and they all do come to this city, sometimes every year—they bring me a fiddle that needs a rest, or has come down with some trouble of the voice. I have the skill and the love to make everything right. Because you see this asks for understanding that goes beyond anything the cleverest craftsman can learn. And you must be a fiddler yourself, to test and judge. I am a very fine fiddler.”

  “Who could doubt it?” said Hollier. “I hope that some day I may have the great honour of hearing you. It would be like listening to the voice of the ages.”

  “You may say that,” said Mamusia, who was enjoying every instant of the courtly conversation. “I have played on some of the noblest instruments in the world—because these are not just violins, you know, but violas, and those big fellows over there are the violoncellos, and those biggest of all are the big-burly-bumbles, the double basses, which have a way of going very gruff when they have to travel—and I can make them speak secrets like a doctor. The great player, oh yes, he makes them sing, but Oraga Laoutaro makes them whisper what is wrong, and then sing for joy when it is wrong no longer.—This room should not be open; Yerko, cover Madame until I can come back and put her to bed again.”

  Upstairs then, and after a tremendous exchange of compliments between Hollier and Mamusia, I drove him home in my little car.

  What a success it had been! Well worth a few blows and a lot of cursing from Mamusia, for it had brought me near to Hollier again. I could feel his enthusiasm. But it was not directly for me.

  “I know you won’t be offended, Maria,” he said, “but your Mother is an extraordinary discovery, a living fossil. She might have come out of any age, from the nineteenth century in Hungary to anywhere in Europe for six or seven centuries back. That wonderful boasting! It refreshed me to hear her, because it was like Paracelsus himself, that very great man and emperor of boasters. And you remember what he said: Never hope to find wisdom at the high colleges alone—consult old women, Gypsies, magicians, wanderers, and all manner of peasant folk and random folk, and learn from them, for these have more knowledge about such things than all the high colleges.”

  “What about Professor Froats?” I said, “with his search in the dung-heap for a jewel that he suspects may be there, but of whose nature he can hardly guess?”

  “Yes, and if my old friend Ozy finds anything I shall borrow any part of it that can be bent to support my research on the Filth Therapy. What your Mother is doing is Filth Therapy at its highest—though to call that wonderful substance in which she buries the fiddles filth is to be victim to the stupidest modern prejudice. But I am inclined to think of Ozy as a latter-day alchemist; he seeks the all-conquering Stone of the Philosophers exactly where they said it must be sought, in the commonest, most neglected, most despised.—Please take me to see your Mother again. She enchants me. She has in the highest degree the kind of spirit that must not be called unsophisticated, but which is not bound by commonplaces. Call it the Wild Mind.”

  Another meeting would be easy, as I found the minute I returned to One Hundred and Twenty Walnut Street.

  “Your man is very handsome,” she said. “Just what I like; fine eyes, big nose, big hands. That goes with a big thing; has he a big thing?”

  This was mischief, meant to disconcert me, to make me blush, which it did to my annoyance.

  “You watch yourself with him, my daughter; he is a charmer. Such elegant speech! You love him, don’t you?”

  “I admire him very much. He is a great scholar.”

  Hoots of laughter from Mamusia. “He is a great scholar,” she peeped in a ridiculous falsetto, holding up her skirts and tiptoeing around the room in what I suppose was meant to be an imitation of me, or of whatever my university work suggested to her. “He is a man, in just the way your Father was a man. You had better be careful, or I will take him away from you! I could love that man!”

  If you try it, you’ll wish you hadn’t, I thought. But I am not half-Gypsy for nothing, and I gave her an answer to choke her with butter.

  “He thinks you are wonderful,” I said. “He raved about you all the way home. He says you are a true phuri dai.” That is the name of the greatest Gypsy women; not the so-called ‘queens’ who are often just for show to impress gadje, but the great old female counsellors without whose wisdom no Kalderash chief would think of making an important decision. I was right; that fetched her.

  “He is truly a great man,” she said. “And at my age I would rather be a phuri dai than anybody’s pillow-piece. I’ll tell you what I’ll do; I’ll make sure you get him. Then we’ll both have him.”

  Oh God, what now?

  The New Aubrey

  4

  It was near the end of November before all Cornish’s possessions were sorted and ready for removal to the public bodies for whom they were intended. The job, which had seemed unmanageable to begin with, had called for nothing but hard work to complete it and Hollier and I had worked faithfully, giving up time we wanted and needed for other tasks. Urquhart McVarish had not exerted himself to the same extent, and possessed some magic whereby a lot of his sorting and note-making was undertaken by the secretary from Arthur Cornish’s office, who in her turn was able to provide a couple of strong men who could lift and lug and shuffle things about.

  Hollier and I had nobody to blame but ourselves. McVarish was in charge of paintings and objects of art, which can be heavy and clumsy, so he could hardly have been expected to do the work by himself. But Hollier was in charge of books, and he was the kind of man who hates to have anyone else touch a book until he has examined it thoroughly, by which time he might as well put it in its final place. Except that there rarely is any final place for books, and people whose job it is to sort them seem always to be juggling and pushing them hither and yon, making heaps as tall as chimneys on the floor, when the space on tables has been filled. My job was to sort and arrange the manuscripts and portfolios of drawings, and it was not work I could very well trust out of my own hands. Indeed, I wanted no help.

  None of us wanted interference, for a reason we never completely acknowledged. Corn
ish’s will had included a special section naming in detail what was to go to the National Gallery, the Provincial Gallery, the University Library and the College of St. John and the Holy Ghost. This list had been made two or three years before his death. But between the making of the list and his last days he had continued to buy with his usual avid recklessness. Indeed, large packages continued to arrive after he was buried. Thus there was quite a lot of stuff that was not named in the will, and much of it was of the first quality. But the will had a clause that provided that each of his executors was to be free to choose something for himself, provided it was not already named as a bequest, as a recognition of the work he had undertaken and as a gift from a former friend. All else became part of his estate, under Arthur Cornish’s care. Clearly our choice was to be made from these most recent acquisitions. I suppose our behaviour could be described as devious, but we did not want the galleries and the libraries casting a possessive eye over everything that was available, because we did not want to have to argue, or perhaps wrangle with them as to what we might take. Our right was indisputable, but the high-minded covetousness of public bodies is so powerful and sometimes so rancorous that we did not wish to arouse it needlessly.

  We kept the librarians and archivists and curators at bay, therefore, until after our final meeting; once that was over they could strip the place to the walls.

  I was first on the spot on that great November Friday, and next to come was Urquhart McVarish. This gave me the chance I needed to do the job I dreaded.

  “All the stuff in my department is accounted for,” I said, “except for one thing that is mentioned in a memo of Cornish’s that I can’t quite figure out. He speaks of a manuscript I haven’t been able to find.”

  Urky looked inquiring, but non-committal.

  “Here it is,” I said, producing the pocket-book from one of the boxes that had been packed up for the University archivists. “You see here, he speaks of what he calls a ‘Rab. MS’ that he lent to ‘McV.’ last April. What would that have been?”

  “Haven’t a clue,” said Urky.

  “But you are obviously McV. Did you borrow something from him?”

  “I’m not a borrower, because I hate lending myself.”

  “How do you explain it?”

  “I don’t.”

  “You see it puts me in a spot.”

  “There’s no sense in being too pernickety, Darcourt. Counting all the books and manuscripts and things there must be thousands of items here. Nobody in his senses would expect us to check every scrap of paper and old letter. In my department I’ve lumped a lot of things together under Miscellaneous, and I presume you and Hollier have done the same. With a man like Cornish, who was fiercely acquisitive but utterly unsystematic, things are bound to be mislaid. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Well, but I do, rather. If there’s a manuscript somewhere that ought to be here, I have an obligation to recover it and see that the Library gets it.”

  “Sorry I can’t help you.”

  “But you must be McV.”

  “Darcourt, you’re pressing me in a way I don’t much like. Are you by any chance suggesting I’ve pinched something?”

  “No, no; not at all. But you see my position; I really must follow up this note.”

  “And on the basis of that, taken from a lot of scribbles that seem to be phone numbers and addresses, and reminders of God knows what past events, you are pressing me rather forcibly. Have you traced all the rest of the stuff in all this mess of notebooks?”

  “Of course not. But this one is not like the rest; it says he lent something to you. I’m just asking.”

  “You have my word that I don’t know anything about it.”

  When somebody gives you his word, you are supposed to take it, or else be prepared to make an unpleasant fuss. There is a moment when one should be bold, but I hesitated and the moment passed. In these confrontations the stronger will prevails, and whether it was that I had eaten the wrong things for lunch, or because I am naturally a hater of rows, or because Urky’s Sheldonian type has the edge on my Sheldonian type in such matters, I lost my chance. I was resentful, but the code which is supposed to govern the dealings of scholars prevented me from saying any more. Of course I was uncomfortable, and my conviction hardened that Urky had kept the Rabelais manuscript Hollier had described. But if I couldn’t make him disgorge it by the sort of inquiry I had made, was I now to denounce him and demand—what? A search of his house? Impossible! An appeal to Arthur Cornish? But would Arthur understand that a misplaced manuscript was a serious matter, and if he did would he be willing to pursue it? Would Hollier stand by me? And if I went through all this uproar, and the manuscript finally reached the Library, would Hollier and his Maria ever get their hands on it? If McVarish produced it, might he not take the important letters from the pocket in the back of the cover, and deny any knowledge of them? All the muddle of arguments that rush into the mind of a man who has been worsted in an encounter streaked through my brain in a few seconds. Better face the fact: I had backed down, and that was all there was to it. Urky had won, and I had probably made an enemy.

  More unpleasantness was avoided because the man from the lawyer’s office and the man from Sotheby’s arrived, and the secretary Cornish had put on the job, and shortly afterward came Hollier and Arthur Cornish. Necessary business was completed: the Sotheby representative swore that the valuation his firm had prepared was in conformity with modern estimates of such things; we three swore that we had carried out our duties to the best of our abilities, and that was that. It was all eyewash, really, because the only way to find the current value of Cornish’s art collections was to sell them, and our abilities as executors rested on Cornish’s opinion of us, rather than on any professional experience. But documents were necessary for probate, and we did what was necessary. The lawyer and the Sotheby man went away, and the moment came that we had all been waiting for.

  “Now gentlemen, what are you going to choose?” said Arthur Cornish. He looked at McVarish, who was the oldest.

  “This, for me,” said Urky, going to a table in a far corner of the room and putting his hand on a bronze figure that stood with a huddle of similar pieces. But though similar, they were not of equal value. Urky had chosen the best, and why not? It was a Venus; the Sotheby man had identified it as a Canova, and a good one.

  I was grateful that Urky had in this way set the tone for Hollier and myself; what he had chosen was unquestionably valuable, but among Cornish’s treasures it was not conspicuous. There were obviously better things. It was a substantial, but not a grabby, choice.

  “Professor Hollier?” said Arthur.

  I knew how much Hollier hated having to reveal his choice. There was about it too much the air of the child who is taken into a candy-shop on its birthday and told to choose, under the eye of indulgent adults. For such a private man this was deeply distasteful. But he spoke up.

  “These books, if nobody objects.”

  He had chosen the four volumes of Konrad Gesner’s Historia Animalium, a splendid piece of sixteenth-century book-making.

  “Well done, Hollier,” said Urky; “the German Pliny—just your boy.”

  “Professor Darcourt?” said Arthur.

  I suppose I disliked revealing my choice as much as Hollier, but there is no sense in being a fool about such things. When would such an opportunity come again? Never. So after some pretence of not knowing where to look, I laid on the table a brown paper folder containing two caricatures, elegantly drawn and palely coloured, that could have come from one hand only.

  “Beerbohms!” said Urky, darting forward. “How sly of you, Simon! If I’d known there were any of those I might have changed my mind.”

  Not a very serious comment, but why did I feel that I should like to kill him?

  Our choices made, we moved the things to a central table, and everybody had a look. The secretary asked us for descriptions that could be included in the information for the lawyers
. She was a nice woman; I wished that she too could have something. Arthur Cornish asked Hollier about Gesner, and Hollier was unwontedly communicative.

  “He was a Swiss, actually; not a German. An immensely learned man, but greatest as a botanist, I suppose. In these four volumes he brought together everything that was known about every animal that had been identified by scholars up to 1550. It is a treasure-house of fact and supposition, but it aims at being scientific. It’s not like those medieval bestiaries that deal simply in legend and old wives’ tales.”

  “I thought old wives’ tales were your stock in trade, Hollier,” said Urky.

  “The growth of scientific knowledge is my stock in trade, if that’s what you want to call it,” said Hollier, without geniality.

  “Let’s see the Beerbohms,” said Urky. “Oh, marvellous! College Types; look at Magdalen, would you! What a swell! And Balliol, all bulging brow and intellectual pride; and Brasenose—huge shoulders and a head like a child’s! And Merton—my gosh, it’s a lovely little portrait of Max himself!—What’s the other one? The Old Self and the Young Self; Cosmo Gordon Lang. What are they saying? Young Self: I really can’t decide whether to go on the Stage or into the Church. Both provide such opportunities… Old Self: You made the right choice; the Church gave me a rôle in a real Abdication. Oh Simon, you old slyboots! That’s really valuable you know.”

  Of course it was valuable, but that wasn’t the point; it was authentic Max. How Ellerman would have loved it!

  “It won’t be sold,” I said, perhaps more sharply than was wise. “I’ll leave it as a treasure in my will.”

  “Not to Spook, I hope,” said Urky.

  What a busybody the man was!