Manticore

by Robertson Davies

  “Staunton is a hamlet about ten miles north-west of Gloucester, bearing over toward Herefordshire. In the middle of the last century it had only one public house, called the Angel, and by rights it ought to have been near a church named for the Annunciation, but it isn’t. That doesn’t matter. What is important is that in the 1860s there was an attractive girl working at the Angel who was called Maria Ann Dymock, and she must have been a local Helen, because she was known as Mary Dymock the Angel.”

  “A barmaid?” I asked, wondering how Father was going to take to the idea of a barmaid.

  “No, no,” said Adrian; “barmaids are a bee in the American bonnet. A country pub of that time would be served by its landlord. Maria Ann Dymock was undoubtedly a domestic servant. But she became pregnant, and she said the child’s father was George Applesquire, who was the landlord of the Angel. He denied it and said it could have been several other men. Indeed, he said that all Staunton could claim to be the child’s father, and he would have nothing to do with it. He or his wife turned Maria Ann out of the Angel.

  “Now, the cream of the story is this. Maria Ann Dymock must have been a girl of some character, for she bore the child in the local workhouse and in due time marched off to church to have it christened. ‘What shall I name the child?’ said parson. ‘Albert Henry,’ said Maria Ann. So it was done. ‘And the father’s name?’ said parson; ‘shall I say Dymock?’ ‘No,’ said Maria Ann, ‘say Staunton, because it’s said by landlord the whole place could be his father, and I want him to carry his father’s name.’ I get all this out of the county archaeological society’s records, which include quite an interesting diary of the clergyman in question, whose name was the Reverend Theophilus Mynors, by the way. Mynors must have been a sport, and probably he thought the girl had been badly used by Applesquire, because he put down the name as Albert Henry Staunton in the parish record.

  “It caused a scandal, of course. But Maria Ann stuck it out, and when Applesquire’s cronies threatened to make things too hot for her to stay in the parish, she walked the village street with a collecting bag, saying, ‘If you want me out of Staunton, give me something for my journey.’ She must have been a Tartar. She didn’t get much, but the Rev. Theophilus admits that he gave her five pounds on the quiet, and there were one or two other contributors who admired her pluck, and soon she had enough to go abroad. You could still get a passage to Quebec for under five pounds in those days if you supplied your own food, and infants travelled free. So off went Maria Ann in late May of 1866, and undoubtedly she was your great-grandmother.” We were eating in one of those Oxford restaurants that spring up and sink down again because they are run by amateurs, and we had arrived at the stage of eating a charlotte russe made of stale cake, tired jelly, and chemicals; I can still remember its taste because it is associated with my bleak wonder as to what I was going to report to Father. I explained to Pledger-Brown.

  “But my dear Davey, you’re missing the marvel of it,” he said; “what a story! Think of Maria Ann’s resource and courage! Did she slink away and hide herself in London with her bastard child, gradually sinking to the basest forms of prostitution while little Albert Henry became a thief and a pimp? No! She was of the stuff of which the great New World has been forged! She stood up on her feet and demanded to be recognized as an individual, with inalienable rights! She braved the vicar, and George Applesquire, and all of public opinion. And then she went off to carve out a glorious life in what were then, my dear chap, still the colonies and not the great self-governing sisterhood of the Commonwealth! She was there when Canada became a Dominion! She may have been among the cheering crowds who hailed that moment in Montreal or Ottawa or wherever it was! You’re not grasping the thing at all.”

  I was grasping it. I was thinking of Father.

  “I confess that I’ve been meddling,” said Adrian, turning very red; “Garter would be as mad as hops if he knew I’d been playing with my paint-box like this. But after all, this is my first shot at tracing a forbear independently, and I can’t help it. So I beg you, as a friend, to accept this trifle of anitergium from me.”

  He handed me a cardboard roll, and when I had pried the metal cap off one end, I found a scroll inside it. I folded it out on the table where the medical charlotte russe had given place to some coffee—a Borgia speciality of the place—and it was a coat-of-arms.

  “Just a very rough shot at something the College of Heralds would laugh at, but I couldn’t help myself,” he said. “The description in our lingo would be ‘Gules within a bordure wavy or, the Angel of the Annunciation bearing in her dexter hand a sailing-ship of three masts and in her sinister an apple.’ In other words, there’s Mary the Angel with the ship she went to Canada on, and a good old Gloucester cider apple, on a red background with a wiggly golden border around the shield. Sorry about the wavy border; it means bastardy, but you don’t have to tell everybody. Then here’s the crest: ‘a fox statant guardant within his jaws a sugar cane, all proper.’ It’s the Staunton crest, but slightly changed for your purposes, and the sugar cane says where you got your lolly from, which good heraldry often does. The motto, you see, is De forte egressa est dulcedo—‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’—from the Book of Judges, and couldn’t be neater, really. And look here—you see I’ve given the fox a rather saucy privy member, just as a hint at your father’s prowess in that direction. How do you like it?”

  “You called it something,” said I; “a trifle of something?”

  “Oh, anitergium,” said Adrian. “It’s just one of those Middle Latin terms I like to use for fun. It means a trifle, a sketch, something disposable. Well, actually the monks used it for the throw-outs from the scriptorium which they used for bum-wipe.”

  I hated to hurt his feelings, but Pargetter always said that hard things should be said as briefly as possible.

  “It’s bum-wipe, all right,” I said. “Father won’t have that.”

  “Oh, most certainly not. I never meant that he should. The College of Heralds would have to prepare you legitimate arms, and I don’t suppose it would be anything like this.”

  “I don’t mean the anitergium,” I said. “I mean the whole story.”

  “But Davey! You told me yourself your father said you were probably bastards. He must have a sturdy sense of humour.”

  “He has,” I said, “but I doubt if it extends to this. However, I’ll try it.”

  I did. And I was right. His letter in reply was cold and brief. “People talk jokingly about being bastards, but the reality is something different. Remember that I am in politics now and you can imagine the fun my opponents would have. Let us drop the whole thing. Pay off Pledger-Brown and tell him to keep his trap shut.”

  And that, for a while, was that.

  (13)

  I suppose nobody nowadays gets through a university without some flirtation with politics, and quite a few lasting marriages result. I had my spell of socialism, but it was measles rather than scarlet fever, and I soon recovered; as a student of law, I was aware that in our time whatever a man’s political convictions may be he lives under a socialist system. Furthermore, I knew that my concern for mankind disposed me toward individuals rather than masses, and as Pargetter was pushing me toward work in the courts, and especially toward criminal law, I was increasingly interested in a class of society for which no political party has any use. There was, Pargetter said, somewhat less than five per cent of society which could fittingly be called the criminal class. That five per cent were my constituents.

  I got my First Class in law at Oxford, and was in time called to the Bar in London, but I had always intended to practise in Canada, and this involved me in three more years of work. Canadian law, though rooted in English law, is not precisely the same, and the differences, and a certain amount of professional protectionism, made it necessary for me to qualify all over again. It was not hard. I was already pretty good and was able to do the Canadian work with time to spare for other reading. Like many w
ell-qualified professional men I knew very little but my job, and Pargetter was very severe on that kind of ignorance. “ ‘If practice be the whole that he is taught, practice must also be the whole that he will ever know,’ ” he would quote from Blackstone. So I read a lot of history, as my schoolwork with Ramsay had given me a turn in that direction, and quite a few great classical works which have formed the minds of men for generations, and of which I retain nothing but a vague sense of how long they were and how clever people must be who liked them. What I really liked was poetry, and I read a lot of it.

  It was during this time, too, that I became financially independent of my father. He had been making a man of me, so far as a tight check on my expenditures would do it; his training was effective, too, for I am a close man with money to this day, and have never come near to spending my income, or that part of it taxation allows me to keep. My personal fortune began quite unexpectedly when I was twenty-one.

  Grandfather Staunton had not approved of Father, who had become what the old man called a “high-flyer,” and although he left him a part of his estate, he left half of it to Caroline, in trust. To me he left what Father regarded as a joke legacy, in the form of five hundred acres of land in Northern Ontario, which he had bought as a speculation when it was rumoured that there was coal up there. Coal there may have been, but as there was no economically sane way of getting it down to places where it could be sold, the land lay idle. Nobody had ever seen it, and it was assumed that it was a wilderness of rock and scrub trees. Grandfather’s executor, which was a large trust company, did nothing about this land until my majority, and then suggested that I sell it to a company which had offered to buy it for a hundred dollars an acre; there was fifty thousand dollars to be picked up for nothing, so to speak, and they advised me to take it.

  I was stubborn. If the land was worthless, why did anyone want to pay a hundred dollars an acre for it? I had a hunch that I might as well see it before parting with it, so I set off to look at my inheritance. I am no woodsman, and it was a miserable journey from the nearest train-stop to my property, but I did it by canoe, in the company of a morose guide, and was frightened out of my wits by the desolation, the dangers of canoeing in some very rough water, and the apparent untrustworthiness of my companion. But after a couple of days we were on my land, and as I tramped around it I found that there were other people on it, too, and that they were unmistakably drilling for minerals. They were embarrassed, and I became thoughtful, for they had no authority to be doing what they were doing. Back in Toronto I made a fuss with the trust company, who knew nothing about the drillers, and I made something more than a fuss to the mining company. So after some legal huffing and puffing, and giving them the Pargetter treatment, I disposed of my northern land at a thousand dollars an acre, which would have been dirt cheap if there had been a mine. But there was nothing there, or not enough. I emerged from this adventure with half a million dollars. A nice, round sum, surely never foreseen by Grandfather Staunton.

  Father was not pleased, because the trust company who had been so casual about my affairs was one of which he was a director, and at one point I had threatened to sue them for mismanagement, which he considered unfilial. But I stuck to my guns, and when it was all over asked him if he would like me to move out of the family house. But he urged me to stay. It was large, and he was lonely when his political career allowed him to be there, and so I stayed where I was and thus came once again under the eye of Netty.

  Netty was the survivor of an endless train of servants. She had never been given the title of housekeeper, but she was the Black Pope of the domestic staff, never frankly tattling but always hinting or wearing the unmistakable air of someone who could say a great deal if asked. With no children to look after, she had become almost a valet to Father, cleaning his clothes and washing and ironing his shirts, which she declared nobody else could do to his complete satisfaction.

  When I had finished my Canadian legal studies I gave offence to Father once again, for he had always assumed that I would be content to have him find a place for me in the Alpha Corporation. But that was not at all my plan; I wanted to practise as a criminal lawyer. Pargetter, with whom I kept in constant touch (though he never raised me to the level of one of his long-distance chess opponents), urged me to get some general practice first, and preferably in a small place. “You will see more of human nature, and get a greater variety of experience, in three years in a country town than you will get in five years with a big firm in a city,” he wrote. So once again I returned, not to Deptford, but to the nearby county town, a place of about sixty thousand people, called Pittstown. I easily got a place in the law office of Diarmuid Mahaffey, whose father had once been the lawyer in Deptford and with whom there was a family connection.

  Diarmuid was very good to me and saw that I got a little work of every kind, including a few of those mad clients all lawyers seem to have if their practice extends into the country. I don’t suggest that city lawyers have no madmen on their books, but I honestly believe the countryside breeds finer examples of the paranoia querulans, the connoisseurs of litigation. He bore in mind that I wanted to work in the courts and put me in the way of getting some of those cases on which most young lawyers cut their teeth; some indigent or incompetent accused person needs a lawyer, and the court appoints a lawyer, usually a young man, to act for him.

  I learned a valuable lesson from my first case of this kind. A Maltese labourer was charged with indecent assault; it was not a very serious matter, because the aspiring rapist had trouble with his buttons, and the woman, who was considerably bigger than he, hit him with her handbag and ran away. “You must tell me honestly,” said I, “did you do it? I’ll do my best to get you off, but I must know the truth.” “Meester Stown,” said he, with tears in his eyes, “I swear to you on the grave of my dead mother, I never did no such dirty thing. Spit in my mouth if I even touch this woman!” So I gave the court a fine harangue, and the judge gave my client two years. My client was delighted. “That judge, he’s very clever man,” he said to me afterward; “he knew all the time I done it.” Then he shook my hand and trotted off with the warder, pleased to have been punished by such an expert in human nature. I decided then that the kind of people with whom I had chosen to associate myself were not to be trusted, or at least not taken literally.

  My next serious case was a far bigger thing, nothing less than a murderess. Poor woman, she had shot her husband. He was a farmer, known far and wide to be no good and brutal to her and his livestock, but he was decisively dead; she had poked a shotgun through the back window of the privy while he was perched on the seat and blown his head off. She made no denial, and was indeed silent and resigned through all the preliminaries. But they still hanged women in those days, and it was my job to save her from the gallows if I could.

  I spent a good deal of time with her and thought so much about the case that Diarmuid began to call me Sir Edward, in reference to Marshall Hall. But one night I had a bright idea, and the next day I put a question to my client and got the answer I expected. When at last the case came to trial I spoke of extenuating circumstances, and at the right moment said that the murdered man had repeatedly beaten his wife in order to make her perform fellatio.

  “Know your judge” was one of Diarmuid’s favourite maxims; of course no barrister knows a judge overtly, but most of the Bar know him before he is elevated to the Bench and have some estimate of his temperament. Obviously you don’t take a particularly messy divorce before a Catholic judge, or a drunk who has caused an accident before a teetotal judge, if you can help it. I was lucky in this case because our assize judge that season was Orley Mickley, known to be a first-rate man of the law, but in his private life a pillar of rectitude and a great deplorer of sexual sin. As judges often are, he was innocent of things that lesser people know, and the word fellatio had not come his way.

  “I assume that is a medical term, Mr. Staunton,” said he; “will you be good enough to explain i
t to the court.”

  “May I ask your lordship to order the court cleared?” said I; “or if your lordship would call a recess I should be glad to explain the term in your chambers. It is not something that any of us would take pleasure in hearing.”

  I was playing it up for all it would stand, and I had an intimation—Dr von Haller says I have a good measure of intuition—that I was riding the crest of a wave.

  The judge cleared the court and asked me to explain to him and the jury what fellatio was. I dragged it out. Oral and lingual caress of the erect male organ until ejaculation is brought about was the way I put it. The jury knew simpler terms for this business, and my delicacy struck them solemn. I did not need to labour the fact that the dead man had been notably dirty: the jury had all seen him. Usually performed by the woman on her knees, I added, and two women jurors straightened up in their chairs. A gross indignity exacted by force; a perversion for which some American states exacted severe penalties; a grim servitude no woman with a spark of self-respect could be expected to endure without cracking.

  It worked like a charm. The judge’s charge to the jury was a marvel of controlled indignation; they must find the woman guilty but unless they added a recommendation of clemency his faith in mankind would be shattered. And of course they did so, and the judge gave her a sentence which, with good conduct, would not be more than two or three years. I suppose the poor soul ate better and slept better in the penitentiary than she had ever done in her life.

  “That was a smart bit of business,” said Diarmuid to me afterward, “and I don’t know how you guessed what the trouble was. But you did, and that’s what matters. B’God, I think old Mickley would have hung the corpse, if it’d had a scrap of neck left to put in a rope.”