“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it can be no bigger than the man—or woman, if you are going to be pernickety—who possesses it. And the honour of a fool, or a pygmy-in-spirit, or a redneck, or a High Tory, or a convinced democrat are all wholly different things and any one of them, under the right circumstances, could send you to the stake, or stop your wages, or just push you out into the cold. Honour is a matter of personal limitation. God is not.”
“Well, I’d rather be François Rabelais than one of your frozen sceptics, grabbing at God as a lifebelt in an Arctic sea.”
“All right; be anything you please. You are a romantic; Rabelais was a romantic. His nonsense suits your nonsense. If the lie of honour as a sole and sufficient guide to conduct suits you, well and good! You’ll end up with those English idiots who used to govern their lives by what is or is not cricket.”
“Come on, Parlabane, this is just hair-splitting and academic abuse. Don’t you make any allowance for quality of life? Isn’t the worth of what a man believes shown by what his belief makes of him? Wouldn’t you rather live nobly as François Rabelais than be stuck in the deep freeze of scepticism, wondering when, and if, God is going to open the door of the fridge and thaw you out?”
“Rabelais didn’t live nobly. Most of his life he was on the run from people who were more accurate reasoners than he was.”
“He was a great writer, a broad and copious writer, a man of wide and hospitable mind.”
“Romanticism. Sheer romanticism. You are putting forward critical opinions as if they were facts.”
“O.K., you have beaten me at the academic game, but you haven’t changed my mind, and so I don’t admit that you’ve beaten me at the real game.”
“Which is?”
“Well, look at you and look at me. I’m delighted with what I’m doing, and I’ve never heard you say one pleasant or approving thing about anything you’ve ever done, except for a single love-affair that turned out badly. So which of us is the winner?”
“You are a fool, Molly. A beautiful fool and you prattle your nonsense in such a lovely voice and with such an enchanting hint of a foreign accent that a young heterosexual like Arthur Cornish might take you for a genuine, solid-gold Aspasia.”
“So I am, or at any rate so I may be. You keep telling me that I am a woman, but you haven’t any idea what a woman is. Yours is a masculine mind, and I suppose it’s a pretty good one, though it doesn’t originate anything: my mind is feminine, and where yours delights in subtle distinctions it is all one colour, and my mind is in shades that shame the spectrum. I can’t beat you at your game, but I don’t think you can even guess what my game is.”
“Prettily put, but might I suggest that at present your game is romanticism—oh, not in any dismissive sense, but meaning a rich diffusion, and profusion, and—”
“Go on. Confusion. But only if I let you make the rules.”
“Please let me finish. I have told you that the crown of my tree is a scepticism that leaves nothing untouched but the wonder of God. But I have a root, to nourish my crown, and as usual the root is the contrary of the crown—the crown upside down, in the dark instead of in the light, working toward the depths instead of straining upward to the heights. And my root is romantic, Molly, and in the realm of romance you and I can meet and have the greatest sport together. Why do you think I am writing a novel? Sceptics don’t write novels.”
“Well, Brother John, from what I have learned about you I cannot imagine why you are writing a novel. You are talkative, but not I think imaginative; you are no romancer, no bard, no unfolder of marvels. I don’t know any novelists, but you seem an unlikely candidate for that sort of job.”
“My life has been a romance. My novel is my life, slightly disguised but not very much. I don’t need imagination: I have rich fact. I am writing about me and all the people I have met who are important to me, and about my ideas, and how they have changed. And I don’t mind telling you that when my novel appears there will be some red faces among those I have encountered along the road. I am not writing to justify myself, but to put down the evidence about a remarkable spiritual adventure, so that the readers can judge for themselves. As they certainly will.”
“Are you going to let me read it?”
“When it appears I may give you a copy. You are not going to read it in manuscript. I am only permitting that to one or two friends whose literary judgement I trust. And you, with your taste for Rabelais, cannot expect to qualify. This will be a very serious book.”
“Thanks for those kind words.”
“Meanwhile, you can be of the greatest practical assistance. People don’t often think of it, but writing costs the writer a good deal of money, on the way. Can you see your way to letting me have fifty dollars for a few days?”
“My little notebook tells me that you already owe me two hundred and sixty-five dollars. You have a tidy mind, Brother John; you always borrow in multiples of five. Why do you think I can go on lending at this rate?”
“Because you have money, sweet child. Far more money than the run of students.”
“What makes you think so?”
“I am an observant man. The possession of money is hard to hide. But you have lots of it.—Maybe you get it from Hollier?”
“Get out!”
But he didn’t get out, and I knew too much to get into a shoving-match with anybody as muscular as Parlabane, for even under that awful suit he looked an unusually strong man. He sat on the sofa grinning, and I turned stolidly to my work, and tried to ignore him.
Why had he said that? Surely Hollier had never said anything to him about our solitary and, it now seemed to me, meaningless and gratuitous encounter on that sofa? No; that was quite outside Hollier’s character, even allowing for the awful complicity and loyalty among men where women are concerned.
I knew I was blushing, a trick I have never been able to control. Why? Anger, I suppose. As I sat writing and fiddling with papers, increasingly aware of Parlabane’s hypnotic stare, I heard his voice, very low and surprisingly sweet, singing the song I hate most in the world—the song with which girls used to torment me at school, after they had wormed out something about my family:
Slumber on, my little Gypsy sweetheart
Wild little woodland dove;
Can you hear the song that tells you
All my heart’s true love?
That was the end. I put my head down on the table and sobbed. What a dirty fighter Parlabane was!
“Why Maria, are you unwell? Does my little song touch some chord in you that you would rather keep silent? There, there, dear little heart, don’t weep so. I suppose you are wondering how I found out? Sheer intuition, my darling. I have it, you see, very strongly. It is part of my root, not of my crown. I can sniff out all sorts of things, simply by looking and listening and letting my roots feed my crown. If you’d rather I didn’t mention it, you can rely on me. Though, as you probably know, there are people who are curious about you, because you are so beautiful and so desirable to the kind of people who desire women. They torment me for information about you, because they think knowing about you is a step toward possessing you. Sometimes they make it hard for me to resist.”
So he got his fifty dollars. He tucked it into an inner pocket and rose to go. Standing at the door he spoke again.
“Don’t suppose I think you capable of anything so stupid and low as a desire to conceal your Gypsy blood, my very dear Molly. I am not so coarse in my perceptions as that. I think you are trying to suppress it because it is the opposite of what you are trying to be—the modern woman, the learned woman, the creature wholly of this age and this somewhat thin and sour civilization. You are not trying to conceal it; you are trying to tear it out. But you can’t, you know. My advice to you, my dear, is to let your root feed your crown.”
(2)
ALL VERY WELL for Parlabane to advise me to come to terms with my root. He could not know, nor would he
care, what my root was costing me at home, which I could not accept as some hidden cavern of feeling and inherited wisdom, but a rat’s-nest of duplicity and roguery, Gypsy-style. Mamusia was getting Yerko ready for one of his piratical descents on the innocent, credulous city of New York.
Those two had, as the phrase goes, a connection there, with one of the most highly reputed dealers in stringed instruments in that city—a dealer who had also a Paris house, with which the Laoutari had long been associated. Not only some of the finest string players in the world, but an army of lesser though still considerable folk—violinists in first-rate orchestras, and their colleagues who played the viola, the violoncello, and the double-bass, all of whom, from time to time, wanted an instrument for themselves, or for a pupil—came to this celebrated dealer for what they needed, and they accepted his word as truth.
I cannot name the name, for that would betray a secret which is not mine, and I do not suggest that the dealer was a crook. But the supply of fine instruments is not unlimited; there have not been hundreds of great luthiers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and although there are some thousands of fine fiddles in existence, there are even more that seem just as good, or almost as good, that come from workshops like that of Mamusia and Yerko. So when the dealer said to a buyer: ‘If you feel that this Nicolas Lupot is a little more expensive than you want to pay for a stand-by instrument, I have something here which is authentically of the Mirecourt School, but because we do not have a complete dossier on its former owners, we do not feel justified in asking quite so much for it. Probably some rich amateur has had it in his possession for a generation. It’s a beauty—and a bargain.’ And the player would try it, and probably take it away for a while to get used to it, and at last he would buy it.
I don’t pretend he didn’t get a good instrument, or that some parts of it had not at some time been fashioned at Mirecourt. But perhaps the scroll—that beautiful, suggestive, not very important part of a fiddle—had been carved by Yerko, eighteen months before, and it might be that the back, or even the belly, had been lovingly shaped by Mamusia from the beautiful silver fir, or the sycamore that she bought from piano-makers. The corner-blocks were almost certainly her work, however authentic the remainder might be. And every fiddle or viola or cello from the basement of One Hundred and Twenty Walnut Street in the city of Toronto had been re-varnished, with layer upon layer of the mixture which was a Laoutaro secret, made in the authentic old way with balsams and fossil amber that cost a lot of money and much ingenuity to secure. Oh, Mamusia and Yerko weren’t crooks, supplying cheap goods at high prices; by the time one of their fiddles had been through the bomari it was a fine instrument; it was made by piecing together portions of instruments that had come to grief in some way and so could be bought cheap, and rebuilt with new portions wherever they were needed. Wonders of ingenuity, but not precisely what they seemed.
Mamusia and Yerko were sellers of romance—the romance of antiquity. There are makers of violins living today, in unromantic places like Chicago, who make excellent instruments, as good in every physical respect as the work of the great luthiers of the past. All these instruments lack is the romance of age. And although many fiddlers are cynical men, and some are no better than unionized artisans without any more of the artist in them than is necessary to keep a chair in the back row of a modest small-town symphony, they are susceptible to the charm of antiquity. The romance and the antiquity were what Yerko and Mamusia offered, and for which the great dealer charged handsomely, because he too understood the market value of romantic antiquity.
Why did it bother me? Because I had apprenticed myself to the hard trade of scholarship, which shrieks at the thought of a fake, and disgraces a man who, let us say, pretends to the existence of a Shakespeare Quarto that nobody else is able to find. If something is not defensible on every count, it is suspect and probably worthless. A trumpery puritanism, surely? No, but impossible to reconcile with such romantic deceptions as the fine, ambiguous instruments that came from our basement.
For such journeys Yerko assembled what he always called the Kodaly String Quartet; the other three were musicians in some sort of moral or financial disarray who were glad to travel free to New York with him in a station-wagon with perhaps ten instruments which remained with the dealer; Yerko returned to Canada by a different port of entry, without his quartet, but with a good deal of rubbish—broken or dismembered instruments—in the back of the car. Yerko, so large, so dark, long-haired, and melancholy in appearance, was a Customs officer’s idea of a musician. Part of the preparation for the journey was getting Yerko sobered up so that he could drive the car and strike bargains without coming to grief, and convincing him that if he went to a gambling-house and risked any of the money Mamusia would certainly search him out and make him sorry for it. The payments were in cash, and Yerko returned from New York with bundles of bills in the lining of his musician’s baggy black overcoat. The logic of my Mother and my Uncle was that Yerko was too conspicuous and too farcically musical in appearance to attract the wrong kind of attention.
This was the staple of their business. The perfectly honest work they did for some musicians of the highest rank did not pay so well, but it flattered them as luthiers, and gave them a valuable reputation among the people who provided romance and sound fiddles for the orchestras of North America.
(3)
GYPSIES HAVE A POOR OPINION of ill health, and nobody was permitted to ail in our house. Therefore, when I caught quite bad influenza I did what I could to conceal it. Mamusia supposed I had a cold, and there could be no thought of staying in my bed, that couch in the communal living-room; she insisted on her single treatment for all respiratory diseases—cloves of garlic shoved up the nose. It was disgusting, and made me feel worse, so I dragged myself to the University and took refuge in Hollier’s outer room, where I sat on the sofa when he was likely to appear, and lay on it when he was not, and was sorry for myself.
Why not? Had I not troubles? My home was a place of discomfort and moral duplicity, where I had not even a proper bed to lie in. (You are rich, fool; get yourself an apartment and turn your back on them. Yes, but that would hurt their feelings, and with all their dreadful tricks, I love them and to leave them would be to leave what Tadeusz would have expected me to cherish.) My infatuation with Hollier was wearing me out, because there was never any sign from him that our single physical union might be repeated or that he cared very much for me. (Then bring him to the point. Have you no feminine resource? You are not of an age, nor is this a time in history for such shilly-shallying. Yes, but it shames me to think of thrusting myself on him. All right then, if you won’t put out a hand for food you must starve! But how would I do it?—‘There’s a woman in the window with her pants down!’ Shut up! Shut up! Stop singing! I’m singing from the root, Maria: what did you expect? Fairy bells? Oh God, this is Gretchen, listening to the Devil in the church! No, it’s your good friend Parlabane, Maria, but you are not worthy of such a friend: you are a simpering fool.)
My academic work was hanging fire. I was pegging away at Rabelais, whose existing texts I now knew well, but I had been promised a splendid manuscript that would bring me just the kind of attention I needed—that would lift me above the world in which Mamusia and Yerko could disgrace me—and apart from that one reference to it in September Hollier had never said a single word about it further. (Ask him about it. I wouldn’t dare; he would just say that when he had anything further to tell, he would tell me.) I felt dreadful, I had a fever, my head felt as if it were stuffed with oily rags. (Take two aspirin and lie down.)
I was lying down, in a deep sleep and almost certainly with my mouth open, when Hollier returned one afternoon. I tried to leap up, and fell down. He helped me back to the sofa, felt my head and looked grave. I wept a few feeble tears and told him why I could not be ill at home.
“I suppose you’re worried about your work,” he said. “You don’t know where you’re going, and that is my
fault. I had expected to be able to talk to you about that manuscript before this, but the bloody thing has vanished. No, by God, it’s been stolen, and I know who has it.”
This was exciting, and by the time he had told me about the Cornish bequests, and Professor Darcourt’s attempt to nail down Professor McVarish about the manuscript he had certainly borrowed, and McVarish’s unsatisfactory attitude toward the whole thing, I felt much better and was able to get up and make us some tea.
I had never seen Hollier in this mood before. “I know that scoundrel has it,” he kept saying; “he’s hugging it to himself, like the dog in the manger he is. What in God’s name does he expect he can do with it?”
I tried being the voice of reason. “He’s a Renaissance historian,” I said, “so I suppose he wants to make something of it in his own line.”
“He’s the wrong kind of Renaissance historian! What does he know about the history of thought? He knows politics and he knows something about Renaissance art, but he hasn’t the slightest claim to be a cultural or intellectual historian, and I am, and I want that manuscript!”
This was glorious! Hollier was angry and unreasonable; only once before, when first I told him about the bomari, had I seen him so excited. I didn’t care if he was talking rather foolishly. I liked it.
“I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say that eventually the manuscript must come to light because McVarish will write about it, and I’ll be able to ask to see it, and undoubtedly expose a lot of his nonsense. You’re going to say that I should go to Arthur Cornish and demand a show-down. But what would young Cornish know about such things! No, no; I want that manuscript before anybody else has monkeyed with it. I told you I didn’t have time to look at those letters for more than a glance. But a glance is all it needed to show that they are written in Latin, of course, but Latin with plenty of what I suppose was quotation in Greek and several words in Hebrew, sticking out in those big, chunky, uncompromising Hebrew characters—and what do you suppose that means?”
The Rebel Angels Page 23