The Rebel Angels

by Robertson Davies

  Arthur saw that I was being harried. He ran his hand appreciatively over the splendid back of the nude bronze. “Very fine,” he said.

  “Ah, but do you see what finally decided me?” said Urky. “Look at her. Doesn’t she remind you of anyone? Somebody we all four know?… Look closely. It’s Maria Magdalena Theotoky to the life.”

  “There’s a resemblance, certainly,” said Arthur.

  “Though we can’t—or I’d better say I can’t—answer for the whole figure,” said Urky. “Still, one can guess at what lies under modern clothes. Who was the model? Being Canova, it was probably a lady from Napoleon’s court. He must have known her intimately. Observe the detail of the modelling.”

  The bronze Venus was about twenty-five inches tall; the figure was seated, one foot resting on the other knee, lovingly tying the laces of a sandal. What was unusual about it was that the vulva, which sculptors usually represent as an imperforate lump of flesh, was here realistically defined. It was not pornographic; it had the grace and the love of the female figure Canova knew so well how to impart to his statuary.

  It is hard for me to be just to Urky. Certainly he appreciated the beauty of the figure, but there was a moist gleam in his eye that hinted at an erotic appreciation, as well.… And why not, Darcourt, you miserable puritan? Is this some nineteenth-century nonsense about art banishing sensuality, or some twentieth-century nonsense about a human figure being no more than an arrangement of masses and planes? No, I didn’t like Urky’s attitude toward the Venus because he had linked it with a girl we knew, and whom Hollier knew especially well, and Urky was seeking to embarrass us. What I would have accepted without qualm from another man, I didn’t like at all when it came from Urky.

  “You agree that it looks like Maria, don’t you Hollier?” he said.

  “I certainly agree that it looks like Maria,” said Arthur, unexpectedly.

  “A stunner, isn’t she?” said Urky to Arthur, but with his eye on Hollier. “Tell me, just as a matter of interest, where would you place her in the Rushton Scale?”

  We all looked blank at this.

  “Surely you know it? Devised by W.A.H. Rushton, the great Cambridge mathematician? Well, it’s this way: Helen of Troy is accepted as the absolute in female beauty, and we have it on a poet’s authority that her face launched a thousand ships. But clearly ‘face’ implies the whole woman. Therefore let us call a face that launches a thousand ships a Helen. But what is a face that launches only one ship? Obviously a millihelen. There must be a rating for all other faces between those two that have any pretension whatever to beauty. Consider Garbo; probably 750 millihelens, because although the face is exquisite, the figure is spare and the feet are big. Now Maria seems to me to be a wonder in every respect that I have had the pleasure of examining, and her clothes are plainly not meant to conceal defects. So what do we say? I’d say 850 millihelens for Maria. Anybody bid higher? What do you say, Arthur?”

  “I’d say she’s a friend of mine, and I don’t rate friends by mathematical computation,” said Arthur.

  “Oh, Arthur, that’s very square! Never mention a lady’s name in the mess, eh?”

  “Call it what you like,” said Arthur. “I just think there’s a difference between a statue and somebody I know personally.”

  “And Vive la différence!” said Urky.

  Hollier was breathing audibly and I wondered what Urky knew—because if Urky knew anything at all, it was a certainty that the whole world would know it very soon, and in a form imposed on it by Urky’s disagreeable mind. But I did not see how, under the circumstances, Urky could know anything whatever about Hollier’s involvement with Maria. Nor did I see why I should care, but plainly I did care. I thought the time had come to change the subject. The secretary from Arthur’s office was looking unhappy; she sniffed a troublesome situation she did not understand.

  “I have a suggestion to make,” I said. “Our old friend Francis Cornish’s will says that his executors are to have something to remember him by, and we have been going on the assumption that he meant the three of us. But isn’t Arthur an executor? You mentioned a picture that took your eye the first day we met here, Arthur; it was a little sketch by Varley.”

  “It was named for the Provincial Gallery,” said Urky. “Sorry, it’s spoken for.”

  “Yes, I knew that,” I said. There was no reason why Urky should be the only one to know best. “But I’ve been told you’re a music enthusiast, Arthur. A collector of musical manuscripts, indeed. There are one or two things not spoken for that might interest you.”

  Arthur was flattered, as rich people often are when somebody remembers that they, too, are human and that not everything lies within their grasp. I fished out the envelope I had put handy, and his eyes gleamed when he saw a delicate and elegant four-page holograph of a song by Ravel, and a scrap of six or eight bars in the unmistakable strong hand of Schoenberg.

  “I’ll take these with the greatest pleasure,” he said. “And thanks very much for thinking of me. It had crossed my mind that I might choose something, but after my experience with the Varley I didn’t want to push.”

  Yes, but we knew him and liked him much better than when he cast longing eyes at the Varley. Arthur improved with knowing.

  “If that finishes our business, I’d like to get along,” I said. “We’re expecting you at Ploughwright at six, and as I’m Vice-Warden I have some things to attend to.”

  I took up my Beerbohms, Hollier tucked two big volumes of Gesner under each arm, and McVarish, whose prize was heavy, asked the secretary to call him a taxi. To be charged, I had no doubt, to the Cornish estate.

  I left Cornish’s spreading complex of apartments, where I had often cursed the work he had imposed on me, with regret. Emptying Aladdin’s Cave had been an adventure.

  (2)

  BEING VICE-WARDEN WAS NOT heavy work, and I accepted it gladly because it ensured me a good set of rooms in the College; Ploughwright was for graduate students, a quiet and pleasant oasis in a busy University. On Guest Nights it was my job to see that things went well, guests properly looked after, and the food and wine as good as the College could manage. They cost us something, these Guest Nights, but they perpetuated a tradition modern universities sometimes appear to have forgotten, the old tradition of scholarly hospitality. This was not food and drink provided so that people might meet to haggle and drive bargains, not the indigestive squalor of the ‘working lunch’, not the tedium of a ‘symposium’ with a single topic of conversation, but a dinner held once a fortnight when the Fellows of the College asked some guests to eat and drink and make good cheer for no other reason than that this is one of civilization’s triumphs over barbarism, of humane feeling over dusty scholasticism, an assertion that the scholar’s life is a good life. Ozy Froats had typed me as a man fond of ceremonies, and he was right; our Guest Nights were ceremonies, and I made it my special care to ensure that they were ceremonies in the best sense; that is to say, that people took part in them because they were irresistible, rather than merely inevitable.

  Our guests on this November Friday night were Mrs. Skeldergate, who was a member of the Provincial Legislature at the head of a committee considering the financing of universities, and I had arranged that the others should be Hollier and Arthur Cornish—which meant the inclusion also of McVarish—as a small celebration of our completion of the work on the Cornish bequests. Arthur might well have asked us to dinner for this purpose, but I thought I would get in ahead of him; I dislike the idea that the richest person in a group must always pay the bill.

  Apart from these, fourteen of the Fellows of Ploughwright attended this Guest Night, not including the Warden and myself. We were a coherent group, in spite of the divergence of our academic interests. There was Gyllenborg, who was notable in the Faculty of Medicine, Durdle and Deloney, who were in different branches of English, Elsa Czermak the economist, Hitzig and Boys, from Physiology and Physics, Stromwell, the medievalist, Ludlow from Law, Penelop
e Raven from Comparative Literature, Aronson the computer man, Roberta Burns the zoologist, Erzenberger and Lamotte from German and French, and Mukadassi, who was a visitor to the Department of East Asian Studies. With McVarish from History, Hollier from his ill-defined but much-discussed area of medievalism, Arthur Cornish from the world of money, the Warden who was a philosopher (his detractors said he would have been happier in a nineteenth-century university where the division of Moral Philosophy still existed), and myself as a classicist, we cast a pretty wide net of interests, and I hoped the conversation would be lively.

  I was not alone in this. Urky McVarish took me by the arm as we came downstairs from Hall, to continue our dinner in the Senior Common Room, and murmured in my ear, in his most caressing voice—and Urky had a caressing voice when he wanted to use it.

  “Delightful Simon, totally delightful. Do you know what it reminds me of? Of course you know my Rabelaisian enthusiasm—because of my great forebear. Well, it puts me in mind of that wonderful chapter about the country people at the feast where Gargantua is born, chatting and joking over their drinks. You remember how Sir Thomas translates the chapter-heading?—How they chirped over their cups; it’s been splendid in Hall, and the junior scholars are so charming, but I look forward to being in the S.C.R. where we shall hear the scholars chirping over their cups even more exuberantly.”

  He darted off to the men’s room. We allow an interval at this juncture in our Guest Nights for everybody to retire, to relieve themselves, rinse their false teeth if need be, and prepare for what is to follow. I know I am absurdly touchy about everything McVarish says, but I wished that he had not compared our pleasant College occasion to a Rabelaisian feast. True, we were going to sit down in a few minutes to nuts and wine and fruit, but chiefly to conversation. No need for Urky to talk as if it were a peasant booze-up as described by his favourite author. Still—Urky was not a fool; as Vice-Warden charged with the duty of ensuring that the decanters were replenished, that Elsa Czermak had her cigar and the gouty Lamotte his mineral water, I should have a freedom given to no one else to move around the table and hear how the scholars chirped over their cups.

  “Oh, how lovely this looks!” said Mrs. Skeldergate, entering the Senior Common Room with the Warden. “And how luxurious!”

  “Not really,” said the Warden, who was sensitive on this point. “And I assure you, not a penny of government money goes to pay for it; you are our guest, not that of the oppressed taxpayers.”

  “But all this silver,” said the government lady; “it’s not what you think of in a college.”

  The Warden could not let the subject alone, and considering who the guest was, I don’t blame him. “All gifts,” said he; “and you may take it from me that if everything on this table were sold at auction it wouldn’t bring enough to support the weekly costs of such a laboratory as that of—” he groped for a name, because he didn’t know much about laboratories—“as that of Professor Froats.”

  Mrs. Skeldergate had a politician’s tact. “We’re all hoping for great things from Professor Froats; some new light on cancer, perhaps.” She turned to her left, where Archy Deloney stood, and said, “Who is that very handsome, rather careworn man near the top of the table?”

  “Oh, that’s Clement Hollier, who rummages about in the ash-heaps of bygone thought. He is handsome, isn’t he? When the President called him an ornament of the University we didn’t quite know whether he meant his looks or his work. But careworn. ‘A noble wreck in ruinous perfection’, as Byron says.”

  “And that man who is helping people find their places? I know I met him, but I have a terrible memory for names.”

  “Our Vice-Warden, Simon Darcourt. Poor old Simon is struggling with what Byron called his ‘oily dropsy’—otherwise fat. A decent old thing. A parson, as you see.”

  Did Deloney care that I overheard? Did he intend that I should? Oily dropsy, indeed! The malice of these bony ectomorphs! The chances are good that I shall still be hearty when Archy Deloney is writhen with arthritis. Here’s to my forty feet of gut and all that goes with it!

  Professor Lamotte was looking pale and patting his brow with a handkerchief, and I knew that Professor Burns must have trodden on his gouty foot. She was distressed, but “It doesn’t matter in the least,” said Lamotte, who is the perfection of courtesy. “Oh, but it does,” said Roberta Burns, an argumentative Scot, but a kind heart. “Everything matters. The Universe is approximately fifteen billion years old, and I swear that in all that time, nothing has ever happened that has not mattered, has not contributed in some way to the totality. Would it relieve you to hit me fairly hard, just once? If so, may I suggest a clout over the ear?” But Lamotte was regaining his colour, and tapped her ear playfully.

  The Warden had heard this and called out, “I heard you, Roberta, and I agree without reserve; everything matters. This is what gives vitality to the whole realm of ethical speculation.”

  The Warden has no talent for small talk, and the younger Fellows like to chaff him. Deloney broke in: “Really Warden, you must admit the existence of the trivial, the wholly meaningless. Like the great dispute now raging in Celtic Studies. Have you heard?”

  The Warden had not heard, and Deloney continued: “You know how they are always boozing—the real hard stuff, not the blood of the grape like our civilized selves. At one of their pow-wows last week Darragh Twomey was as tight as a drum, and asserted boldly that the Mabinogion was really an Irish epic, and the Welsh had stolen it and made a mess of it. Professor John Jenkin Jones took up the gauntlet, and it came to a fist-fight.”

  “You don’t say so,” said the Warden, pretending to be aghast.

  “That’s absolutely not true, Archy,” Professor Penelope Raven said; she was circling the table looking for her place-card. “Not a blow was struck; I was there, and I know.”

  “Penny, you’re just defending them,” said Deloney. “Blows were exchanged. I have it on unimpeachable authority.”

  “Not blows!”

  “Pushing, then.”

  “Perhaps some pushing.”

  “And Twomey fell down.”

  “He slipped. You’re making an epic of it.”

  “Perhaps. But University violence is so trifling. One longs for something full-blooded. One wants a worthy motive. One must exaggerate or feel oneself a pygmy.”

  This is not the way a Guest Night is supposed to be conducted. When we are seated we converse politely to left and right, but with people like Deloney and Penny Raven there is a tendency to yell, and interfere in conversations to which they are not party. The Warden was looking woeful—his way of suggesting disapproval—and Penny turned to Aronson, and Deloney to Erzenberger and behaved themselves.

  “Isn’t it true that when you cut Irishmen open, four out of five have brass stomachs?” Penny whispered. Gyllenborg, a Swede, pondered for a moment, and said, “That has not come within the range of my experience.”

  HITZIG SAID TO LUDLOW: “What have you been doing today?”

  “Reading the papers,” said Ludlow, “and I am tired of them. Every day a score of Chicken Lickens announce over their bylines that the sky is falling.”

  “Don’t tell me you are one of those who asks why the big news must always be bad news,” said Hitzig. “Mankind delights in mischief; always has, always will.”

  “Yes, but the mischief is so repetitious,” said the lawyer. “Nobody finds a variation on the old themes. As our friends down the way were complaining, crime is trivialized by its dowdiness. That’s why detective stories are popular; the crimes are always ingenious. Real crime is not ingenious; the same old story, again and again. If I wanted to commit a murder I should devise a truly novel murder weapon. I think I should go to my wife’s freezer, and take out a frozen loaf of bread. Have you looked at those? They are like large stones. You bash your victim—let’s say, your wife—with the frozen loaf, melt it out and eat it. The police seek in vain for the murder weapon. A novelty, you see?”


  “They would discover you,” said Hitzig, who knew a lot about Nietzsche, and was apt to be dismal; “I think that notion has been tried.”

  “Very likely,” said Ludlow. “But I should have added a novelty to the monotonous tale of Othello. I should go down in the annals of crime as the Loaf Murderer. Admittedly we live in a violent world, but my complaint is that the violence is unimaginative.”

  “I gather that it is some time since violence has played much part in student life,” said Mrs. Skeldergate to the Warden.

  “God be praised,” said he. “Though I think people exaggerated the violence there was; they spoke and wrote as though it were something wholly without precedent. But European universities are unceasingly violent, and the students are tirelessly political. History rings with the phrase ‘The students rioted in the streets’. Of course we treat our students much more humanely than the European universities have ever done. I have colleagues at the Sor-bonne who boast that they have never spoken to a student except in the lecture-hall, and do not choose to know them personally. Quite unlike the English and American tradition, as you know.”

  “Then you don’t think the uproars really changed anything, Warden?”

  “Oh, they did that, right enough. Our tradition of the relationship between student and professor had always been that of the aspirant toward the adept; part of the disturbances arose from a desire to change it to a consumer-retailer arrangement. That caught the public fancy too, you know, and consequently governments began to talk in the same way, if you will allow me to say so. ‘We shall require seven hundred head of engineers in the next five years, Professor; see to it, will you?’—that sort of thing. ‘Don’t you think philosophy a frill in these stern times, Professor? Can’t you cut down your staff in that direction?’ Education for immediate effective consumption is more popular than ever, and nobody wants to think of the long term, or the intellectual tone of the nation.”

  Mrs. Skeldergate, to her dismay, had turned on a tap she could not shut off, and the Warden was in full spate. But she was an experienced listener, and there was no disturbance in her appearance of interest.