Manticore

by Robertson Davies

  “He was a doctor. I wouldn’t call him a man of wide cultivation.”

  “Good. That’s often a help. I mean, such people often retain some individuality under the professional veneer. Perhaps he said some things that stuck in your mind? Used unusual words that might be county dialect words? Do you recall anything like that?”

  I pondered. “Once he told my sister, Caroline, she had a tongue sharp enough to shave an urchin. I’ve repeated it to her often.”

  “Oh, that’s quite helpful. He did use some dialect words then. But urchin as a word for the common hedgehog is very widespread in country districts. Can you think of anything more unusual?”

  I was beginning to respect Pledger-Brown. I had always thought an urchin was a boy you didn’t like, and could never figure out why Grandfather would want to shave one. I thought further.

  “I do just remember that he called some of his old patients who stuck with him, and were valetudinarians, ‘my old wallowcrops.’ Is that of any use? Could he have made the word up?”

  “Few simple people make up words. ‘Wallowcrop’; I’ll make a note of that and see what I can discover. Meanwhile keep thinking about him, will you? And I’ll come again when I have a better idea what to do.”

  Think about Grandfather Staunton, powerful but dim in my past. A man, it seemed to me now, with a mind like a morgue in which a variety of defunct ideas lay on slabs, kept cold to defer decay. A man who knew nothing about health, but could identify a number of diseases. A man whose medical knowledge belonged to a time when people talked about The System and had spasms and believed in the efficacy of strong, clean smells, such as oil of peppermint, as charms against infection. A man who never doubted that spankings were good for children, and once soundly walloped both Caroline and me because we had put Eno’s Fruit Salts in the bottom of Granny’s chamber-pot, hoping she would have a fantod when it foamed. A furious teetotaller, malignantly contemptuous of what he called “booze-artists” and never fully reconciled to my father when he discovered that Father drank wines and spirits but had contumaciously failed thereby to become a booze-artist. A man whom I could only recall as gloomy, heavy, and dull, but pleased with his wealth and unaffectedly scornful of those who had not the wit or craft to equal it; preachers were excepted as being a class apart, and sacred, but needing frequent guidance from practical men in the conduct of their churches. In short, a nasty old village moneybags.

  A strange conduit through which to convey the good blood Father thought we Stauntons must have. But then Father had never troubled to pretend that he had much regard for Doc Staunton. Which was strange in itself, in a way, for Father was very strong on the regard children should have for parents. Not that he ever said so directly, or urged Caroline and me to honour our father and mother. But I recall that he was down on H.G. Wells, because in his Experiment in Autobiography Wells had said frankly that his parents weren’t up to much and that escape from them was his first step toward a good life. Father was not consistent. But Doc Staunton had been consistent, and what had consistency made of him?

  The hunt was up, and Doc Staunton was the fox.

  Notes from Pledger-Brown punctuated the year that followed. He wrote an elegant Italic hand, as became a genealogist, and scraps of intelligence would arrive by the college messenger service: “Wallowcrop Cumberland dialect word. Am following up this clue. A.P-B.” And, “Sorry to say nothing comes of enquiries in Cumberland. Am casting about in Lincoln.” Or, “Tally-ho! A Henry Staunton born 1866 in Somerset!” followed a week later by, “False scent; Somerset Henry died aged 3 mos.” Clearly he was having a wonderful adventure, but I had little time to think about it. I was up to my eyes in Jurisprudence, that formal science of positive law, and in addition to formal studies Pargetter was making me read Kelly’s Famous Advocates and Their Speeches and British Forensic Eloquence aloud to him, dissecting the rhetoric of notable counsel and trying to make some progress in that line myself. Pargetter was determined that I should not be what he called an ignorant pettifogger, and he made it clear that as a Canadian I started well behind scratch in the journey toward professional literacy and elegance.

  “ ‘The law, besides being a profession, is one of the humanities,’ ” he said to me one day, and I knew from the way he spoke he was quoting. “Who said that?” I didn’t know. “Then never forget that it was one of your countrymen, your present Prime Minister, Louis St Laurent,” he said, punching me sharply in the side, as he often did when he wanted to make a point. “It’s been said before, but it’s never been said better. Be proud it was a Canadian who said it.” And he went on to belabour me, as he had often done before, with Sir Walter Scott’s low opinion of lawyers who knew nothing of history or literature; from these studies, said he, I would learn what people were and how they might be expected to behave. “But wouldn’t I learn that from clients?” I asked, to try him. “Clients!” he said, and I would not have believed anyone could make a two-syllable word stretch out so long; “you’ll learn precious little from clients except folly and duplicity and greed. You’ve got to stand above that.”

  Working as I was under the English system I had to be a member of one of the Inns of Court and go to London at intervals to eat dinners in its Hall; I was enrolled in the Middle Temple, and reverently chewed through the thirty-six obligatory meals. I liked it. I liked the ceremony and solemnity of the law, not only as safeguards against trivializing of the law but as pleasant observances in themselves. I visited the courts, studied the conduct and courtesy of their workings, and venerated judges who seemed able to carry a mass of detail in their heads and boil it down and serve it up in a kind of strong judicial consommé for the jury when all the pleading and testimony were over. I liked the romance of it, the star personalities of the great advocates, the swishing of gowns and flourishing of impractical but traditional blue bags full of papers. I was delighted that although most people seemed to use more modern instruments, everybody had access to quill pens, and could doubtless have called for sand to do their blotting, with full confidence that sand would have been forthcoming. I loved wigs, which established a hierarchy that was palpable and turned unremarkable faces into the faces of priests serving a great purpose. What if all this silk and bombazine and horsehair awed and even frightened the simple people who came to court for justice? It would do them no harm to be a little frightened. Everybody in court, except the occasional accused creature in the dock, seemed calmed, reft from the concerns of everyday; those who were speaking on oath seemed to me, very often, to be revealing an aspect of their best selves. The juries took their duties seriously, like good citizens. It was an arena in which gladiators struggled, but the end for which they struggled was that right, so far as right could be determined, should be done.

  I was not naïve. That is how I think of courts still. I am one of the very few lawyers I know who keeps his gown beautifully clean, whose collar and bands and cuffs are almost foppishly starched, whose striped trousers are properly pressed, whose shoes gleam. I am proud that the newspapers often say I cut an elegant figure in court. The law deserves that. The law is elegant. Pargetter took good care that I should not be foolishly romantic about the law, but he knew that there was a measure of romance in my attitude toward it, and if he had thought it should be rooted out, he would have done so. One day he paid me a walloping great compliment.

  “I think you’ll make an advocate,” said he. “You have the two necessities, ability and imagination. A good advocate is his client’s alter ego; his task is to say what his client would say for himself if he had the knowledge and the power. Ability goes hand in hand with the knowledge: the power is dependent on imagination. But when I say imagination I mean capacity to see all sides of a subject and weigh all possibilities; I don’t mean fantasy and poetry and moonshine; imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground, not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.”

  I think I grew a foot, spiritually, that day.

  DR VON HALLER: So y
ou might. And how lucky you were. Not everybody encounters a Pargetter. He is a very important addition to your cast of characters.

  MYSELF: I don’t think I follow you. What I am telling you is history, not invention.

  DR VON HALLER: Oh, quite. But even history has characters, and a personal history like yours must include a few people whom it would be stupid to call stock characters, even though they appear in almost all complete personal histories. Or let us put it differently. You remember the little poem by Ibsen that I quoted to you during one of our early meetings?

  MYSELF: Only vaguely. Something about self-judgement.

  DR VON HALLER: No, no; self-judgement comes later. Now pay attention, please:

  To live is to battle with trolls

  in the vaults of heart and brain.

  To write: that is to sit

  in judgement over one’s self.

  MYSELF: But I have been writing constantly; everything I have told you has been based on careful notes; I have tried to be as clear as possible, to follow Ramsay’s Plain Style. I have raked up some stuff I have never told to another living soul. Isn’t this self-judgement?

  DR VON HALLER: Not at all. This has been the history of your battle with the trolls.

  MYSELF: Another of your elaborate metaphors?

  DR VON HALLER: If you like. I use metaphor to spare you jargon. Now consider: what figures have we met so far in our exploration of your life? Your Shadow; there was no difficulty about that, I believe, and we shall certainly meet him again. The Friend: Felix was the first to play that part, and you may yet come to recognize Knopwood as a very special friend, though I know you are still bitter against him. The Anima; you are very rich there, for of course there were your mother and Caroline and Netty, who all demonstrate various aspects of the feminine side of life, and finally Judy. This figure has been in eclipse for some years, at least in its positive aspect; I think we must count your stepmother as an Anima-figure, but not a friendly one; we may still find that she is not so black as you paint her. But there are happy signs that the eclipse is almost over, because of your dream—let us be romantic and call it The Maiden and the Manticore—in which you were sure you recognized me. Perfectly in order. I have played all of these roles at various stages of our talks. Necessarily so: an analysis like this is certainly not emotion recollected in tranquillity. You may call these figures many things. You might call them the Comedy Company of the Psyche, but that would be flippant and not do justice to the cruel blows you have had from some of them. In my profession we call them archetypes, which means that they represent and body forth patterns toward which human behaviour seems to be disposed; patterns which repeat themselves endlessly, but never in precisely the same way. And you have just been telling me about one of the most powerful of all, which we may call the Magus, or the Wizard, or the Guru, or anything that signifies a powerful formative influence toward the development of the total personality. Pargetter appears to have been a very fine Magus indeed: a blind genius who accepts you as an apprentice in his art! But he has just turned up, which is unusual though not seriously so. I had expected him earlier. Knopwood looked rather like a Magus for a time, but we shall have to see if any of his influence lasted. But the other man, the possible father, the man you call Old Buggerlugs—I had expected rather more from him. Have you been keeping anything back?

  MYSELF: No. And yet … there was always something about him that held the imagination. He was an oddity, as I’ve said. But a man who never seemed to come to anything. He wrote some books, and Father said some of them sold well, but they were queer stuff, about the nature of faith and the necessity of faith—not Christian faith, but some kind of faith, and now and then in classes he would point at us and say, “Be sure you choose what you believe and know why you believe it, because if you don’t choose your beliefs, you may be certain that some belief, and probably not a very creditable one, will choose you.” Then he would go on about people whose belief was in Youth, or Money, or Power, or something like that, and who had found that these things were false gods. We liked to hear him rave, and some of his demonstrations from history were very amusing, but we didn’t take it seriously. I have always looked on him as a man who missed his way in life. Father liked him. They came from the same village.

  DR VON HALLER: But you never felt any urge to learn from him?

  MYSELF: What could he have taught me, except history and the Plain Style?

  DR VON HALLER: Yes, I see. It seemed to me for a time that he had something of the quality of a Magus.

  MYSELF: In your Comedy Company, or Cabinet of Arche-types, you don’t seem to have any figure that might correspond to my father.

  DR VON HALLER: Oh, do not be impatient. These are the common figures. You may depend on it that your father will not be forgotten. Indeed, it seems to me that he has been very much present ever since we began. We talk of him all the time. He may prove to be your Great Troll….

  MYSELF: Why do you talk of trolls? It seems to me that you Jungians sometimes go out of your way to make yourselves absurd.

  DR VON HALLER: Trolls are not Jungian; they are just part of my promise not to annoy you with jargon. What is a troll?

  MYSELF: A kind of Scandinavian spook, isn’t it?

  DR VON HALLER: Yes, spook is a very good word for it—another Scandinavian word. Sometimes a troublesome goblin, sometimes a huge, embracing lubberfiend, sometimes an ugly animal creature, sometimes a helper and server, even a lovely enchantress, a true Princess from Far Away: but never a full or complete human being. And the battle with trolls that Ibsen wrote about is a good metaphor to describe the wrestling and wrangling we go through when the archetypes we carry in ourselves seem to be embodied in people we have to deal with in daily life.

  MYSELF: But people are people, not trolls or archetypes.

  DR VON HALLER: Yes, and our great task is to see people as people and not clouded by archetypes we carry about with us, looking for a peg to hang them on.

  MYSELF: Is that the task we are working at here?

  DR VON HALLER: Part of it. We take a good look at your life, and we try to lift the archetypes off the pegs and see the people who have been obscured by them.

  MYSELF: And what do I get out of that?

  DR VON HALLER: That depends on you. For one thing, you will probably learn to recognize a spook when you see one, and keep trolls in good order. And you will recover all these projections which you have visited on other people like a magic lantern projecting a slide on a screen. When you stop doing that you are stronger, more independent. You have more mental energy. Think about it. And now go on about the genealogist.

  (12)

  I didn’t pay much attention to him, because as I told Dr von Haller, I was greatly taken up with my final year of law studies. Pargetter expected me to get a First, and I wanted it even more than he. The notes kept arriving with reports of nothing achieved in spite of impressive activity. I had written to Father that I had a good man on the job, and had his permission to advance money as it was needed. Pledger-Brown’s accounts were a source of great delight to me; I felt like Diogenes, humbled in the presence of an honest man. Sometimes in the vacations he went off hunting Stauntons and sent me bills detailing third-class tickets, sixpenny rides on buses, shillings spent on beer for old men who might know something, and cups of tea and buns for himself. There was never any charge for his time or his knowledge, and when I asked about that he replied that we would agree on a fee when he produced his results. I foresaw that he would starve on that principle, but I cherished him as an innocent. Indeed, I grew to be very fond of him, and we were Adrian and Davey when we talked. His besotted enthusiasm for the practise of heraldry refreshed me; I knew nothing about it, and couldn’t see the use of it, and wondered why anybody bothered with it, but in time he brought me to see that it had once been necessary and was still a pleasant personal indulgence, and—this was important—that using somebody else’s armorial bearings was no different in spirit from u
sing his name; it was impersonation. It was, in legal terms, no different from imitating a trade-mark, and I knew what that meant. Undoubtedly Pledger-Brown was the best friend I made at Oxford, and I keep up with him still. He got into the College of Heralds, by the way, and is now Clarencieux King of Arms and looks exceedingly peculiar on ceremonial occasions in a tabard and a hat with a feather.

  What finally bound us into the kind of friendship that does not fade was complicity in a secret.

  Early in the spring term of my third year, when I was deep in work for my Final Schools, a message arrived: “I have found Henry Staunton. A.P-B.” I had a mountain of reading to do and had planned to spend all afternoon at the Codrington, but this called for something special, so I got hold of Adrian and took him to lunch. He was as nearly triumphant as his diffident nature would allow.

  “I was just about to offer you a non-grandfather,” said he; “there was a connection of the Stauntons of Warwickshire—not a Longbridge Staunton but a cousin—who cannot be accounted for and might perhaps have gone to Canada at the age of eighteen or so. By a very long shot he might have been your grandfather; without better evidence it would be guesswork to say he was. But then during the Easter vacation I had a flash. You otiose ass, Pledger-Brown, I said to myself, you’ve never thought of Staunton as a place-name. It is an elementary rule in this work, you know, to check place-names. There is Staunton Harold in Leicestershire and two or three Stantons, and of course I had quite overlooked Staunton in Gloucestershire. So off I went and checked parish records. And there he was in Gloucestershire: Albert Henry Staunton, born April 4, 1866, son of Maria Ann Dymock, and if you can find a better West Country name than Dymock, I’d be glad to hear it.”

  “What kind of Staunton is he?” I asked.

  “He’s an extraordinarily rum Staunton,” said Pledger-Brown, “but that’s the best of it. You get not only a grandfather but a good story as well. You know, so many of these forbears that people ferret out are nothing at all; I mean, perfectly good and reputable, but no personal history of any interest. But Albert Henry is a conversation-piece. Now listen.