Manticore

by Robertson Davies

  There is a simple way of handling this, and I have done the simple thing already. Cabled Huddleston to look into it and let me know: he can do whatever can be done fully as well as I. Do I now write Netty and say I am unwell, and the doctor forbids, etc., and Frederick Huddleston, Q.C., will take over? But Netty doesn’t believe there is anything wrong with me. She has let Caroline know that she is sure I am in some fancy European home for booze-artists, having a good time and reading books, which I was always too ready to do anyhow. She will think I am dodging. And in part she will be right.

  Dr Johanna has freed me from many a bogey, but she has also sharpened my already razorlike ethical sense. In her terms I have always projected the Shadow onto Matey; I have seen in him the worst of myself. I have been a heel in too many ways to count. Spying on Carol; spying on Denyse; making wisecracks to poor slobbering Lorene that she wasn’t able to understand and which would have hurt her if she had understood; being miserable to Knopwood; miserable to Louis Wolff; worst of all, miserable to Father about things where he was vulnerable and I was strong. The account is long and disgusting.

  I have accepted all that; it is part of what I am and unless I know it, grasp it, and acknowledge it as my own, there can be no freedom for me and no hope of being less a miserable stinker in future.

  Before I came to my present very modest condition of self-recognition I was a clever lad at projecting my own faults onto other people, and I could see them all and many more in Maitland Quelch, C.A. Of course he had his own quiverful of perfectly real faults; one does not project one’s Shadow on a man of gleaming virtue. But I detested Matey more than was admissible, for he never put a stone in my way, and in his damp-handed, grinning fashion he tried to be my friend. He was not a very nice fellow, and now I know that it was my covert spiritual kinship with him that made me hate him.

  So when I refuse to go back to Canada and try to get Matey off, what is my ethical position? The legal position is perfectly clear; if Matey is in trouble with the Securities Commission there is good reason for it, and the most I could do would be to try to hoodwink the court into thinking he didn’t know what he was doing, which would make him look like a fool if slightly less a crook. But if I refuse to budge and hand him over even to such a good man as Huddleston, am I still following a course that I am trying, in the middle of my life, to change?

  Oh Matey, you bastard, why couldn’t you have kept your nose clean and spared me this problem at a time when I am what I suppose must be called a psychic convalescent?

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  Dec. 18, Thurs.: Must get away. Might have stayed in Zürich over Xmas if it were not for this Matey thing, but Netty will try to get me on the telephone, and if I talk with her I will be lost…. What did she mean by “some things will never be known”? Could it possibly be that Carol was right? That Netty put Mother in the way of dying (much too steep to say she killed her) because she thought Mother had been unfaithful to Father and Father would be happier without her? If Netty is like that, why hasn’t she put rat-poison in Denyse’s martinis? She hates Denyse, and it would be just like Netty to think that her opinion in such a matter was completely objective and beyond dispute.

  Thinking of Netty puts me in mind of Pargetter’s warning about the witnesses, or clients, whose creed is esse in re; to such people the world is absolutely clear because they cannot understand that our personal point of view colours what we perceive; they think everything seems exactly the same to everyone as it does to themselves. After all, they say, the world is utterly objective; it is plain before our eyes; therefore what the ordinary intelligent man (this is always themselves) sees is all there is to be seen, and anyone who sees differently is mad, or malign, or just plain stupid. An astonishing number of judges seem to belong in this category …

  Netty was certainly one of those, and I never really knew why I was always at odds with her (while really loving the old girl, I must confess) till Pargetter rebuked me for being an equally wrong-headed, though more complex and amusing creature, whose creed is esse in intellectu solo. “You think the world is your idea,” he said one November day at a tutorial when I had been offering him some fancy theorizing, “and if you don’t understand that and check it now it will make your whole life a gigantic hallucination.” Which, in spite of my success, is pretty much what happened, and my extended experiments as a booze-artist were chiefly directed to checking any incursions of unwelcome truth into my illusion.

  But what am I headed for? Where has Dr Johanna been taking me? I suspect toward a new ground of belief that wouldn’t have occurred to Pargetter, which might be called esse in anima: I am beginning to recognize the objectivity of the world, while knowing also that because I am who and what I am, I both perceive the world in terms of who and what I am and project onto the world a great deal of who and what I am. If I know this, I ought to be able to escape the stupider kinds of illusion. The absolute nature of things is independent of my senses (which are all I have to perceive with), and what I perceive is an image in my own psyche.

  All very fine. Not too hard to formulate and accept intellectually. But to know it; to bring it into daily life—that’s the problem. And it would be real humility, not just the mock-modesty that generally passes for humility. Doubtless that is what Dr Johanna has up her sleeve for me when we begin our sessions after Christmas.

  Meanwhile I must go away for Christmas. Netty will get at me somehow if I stay here…. Think I shall go to St Gall. Not far off and I could hire ski stuff if I wanted it. It is said to have lots to see besides the scenery.

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  Dec. 19, Fri.: Arrive St Gall early p.m. Larger than I expected; about 70,000, which was the size of Pittstown, but this place has an unmistakable atmosphere of consequence. Reputedly the highest city in Europe, and the air is thin and clean. Settle into a good hotel (Walhalla—why?) and walk out to get my bearings. Not much snow, but everything is decorated for Christmas very prettily; not in our N. American whore-house style. Find the Klosterhof square, and admire it, but leave the Cathedral till tomorrow. Dinner at a very good restaurant (Metropole) and to the Stadtheater. It has been rebuilt in the Brutalist-Modern manner, and everything is rough cement and skew-whiff instead of right-angled or curved, so it is an odd setting for Lehar’s Paganini, which is tonight’s piece. Music prettily Viennese. How simple, loud, and potent love always is in these operettas! If I understood the thing, Napoleon would not permit Pag to have his countess because he was not noble: once I could not have the girl I loved because I was not a Jew. But Pag made a lot of eloquent noise about it, where I merely went sour…. Did I love Judy? Or just something of myself in her as Dr Johanna implies? Does it matter, now? Yes, it matters to me.

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  Dec. 20, Sat.: Always the methodical sight-seer, I am off to the Cathedral by 9:30. Knew it was Baroque, but had not been prepared for something so Baroque; breath-taking enormities of spiritual excess everywhere, but no effect of clutter or gimcrackery. Purposely took no guide-book; wanted to get a first impression before fussing about detail.

  Then to the Abbey library, which is next door, and gape at some very odd old paintings and the wonders of their Baroque room. Keep my coat on as there is no heating in any serious sense; the woman who sells tickets directs me to put on huge felt overshoes to protect the parquet. Superb library to look at, and there are two or three men of priestly appearance actually reading and writing in a neighbouring room, so it must also be more than a spectacle. I gape reverently at some splendid MSS, including a venerable Nibelungenlied and a Parsifal, and wonder what a frowsy old mummy, with what appear to be its own teeth, is doing there. I suppose in an earlier and less specialized time libraries were also repositories for curiosities. Hovered over a drawing of Christ’s head, done entirely in calligraphy; dated “nach 1650.” Some painstaking penman had found a way of writing the Scripture account of the Passion with such a multitude of eloquent squiggles and crinkum-crankum th
at he had produced a monument of pious ingenuity, if not a work of art.

  At last the cold becomes too much, and I scuttle out into the sunshine, and look for a bookshop where I can buy a guide, and turn myself thereby into a serious tourist. Find a fine shop, get what I want, and am poking about among the shelves when my eye is taken by two figures; a man in an engulfing fur coat over what was obviously one of those thick Harris-tweed suits is talking loudly to a woman who is very smartly and expensively dressed, but who is the nearest thing to an ogress I have ever beheld.

  Her skull was immense, and the bones must have been monstrously enlarged, for she had a gigantic jaw, and her eyes peered out of positive caverns. She had made no modest concessions to her ugliness, for her iron-gray hair was fashionably dressed, and she wore a lot of make-up. They spoke in German, but there was something decidedly un-German and un-Swiss about the man and the more I stared (over the top of a book) the more familiar his back appeared. Then he moved, with a limp that could only belong to one man in the world. It was Dunstan Ramsay. Old Buggerlugs, as I live and breathe! But why in St Gall, and who could his dreadful companion be? Someone of consequence, unquestionably, for the manageress of the shop was very attentive…. Now: was I to claim acquaintance, or sneak away and preserve the quiet of my holiday? As so often in these cases, the decision was not with me. Buggerlugs had spotted me.

  —Davey! How nice to see you.

  —Good-morning, sir. A pleasant surprise.

  —The last person I would have expected. I haven’t seen you since poor Boy’s funeral. What brings you here?

  —Just a holiday.

  —Have you been here long?

  —Since yesterday.

  —How is everyone at home? Carol well? Denyse is well, undoubtedly. What about Netty? Still your dragon?

  —All well, so far as I know.

  —Liesl, this is my lifelong friend—his life long, that’s to say—David Staunton. David, this is Fraulein Doktor Liselotte Naegeli, whose guest I am.

  The ogress gave me a smile which was extraordinarily charming, considering what it had to work against. When she spoke her voice was low and positively beautiful. It seemed to have a faintly familiar ring, but that is impossible. Amazing what distinguished femininity the monster had. More chat, and they asked me to lunch.

  The upshot of that was that my St Gall holiday took an entirely new turn. I had counted on being solitary, but like many people who seek solitude I am not quite so fond of it as I imagine, and when Liesl—in no time I was asked to call her Liesl—asked me to join them at her country home for Christmas, I had said yes before I knew what I was doing. The woman is a spellbinder, without seeming to exert much effort, and Buggerlugs has changed amazingly. I have never fully liked him, as I told Dr Johanna, but age and a heart attack he said he had had shortly after Father’s death seem to have improved him out of all recognition. He was just as inquisitorial and ironic as ever, but there was a new geniality about him. I gather he has been convalescing with the ogress, whom I suppose to be a medico. She took an odd line with him.

  —Wasn’t I lucky, Davey, to persuade Ramsay to come to live with me? Such an amusing companion. Was he an amusing schoolmaster? I don’t suppose so. But he is a dear man.

  —Liesl, you will make Davey think we are lovers. I am here for Liesl’s company, certainly, but almost as much because this climate suits my health.

  —Let us hope it suits Davey’s health, too. You can see he has been seriously unwell. But is your cure coming along nicely, Davey? Don’t pretend you aren’t working toward a cure.

  —How can you tell that, Liesl? He looks better than when I last saw him, and no wonder. But what makes you think he is taking a cure?

  —Well, look at him, Ramsay. Do you think I’ve lived near Zürich so long and can’t recognize the “analysand look”? He is obviously working with one of the Jungians, probing his soul and remaking himself. Which doctor do you go to, Davey? I know several of them.

  —I can’t guess how you know, but there’s no use pretending, I suppose. I’ve been a little more than a year with Fraulein Doktor Johanna von Haller.

  —Jo von Haller! I have known her since she was a child. Not friends, really, but we know each other. Well, have you fallen in love with her yet? All her male patients do. It’s supposed to be part of the cure. But she is very ethical and never encourages them. I suppose with her successful lawyer husband and her two almost grown-up sons it mightn’t do. Oh, yes; she is Frau Doktor, you know. But I suppose you spoke in English and it never came up. Well, after a year with Jo, you need something more lively. I wish we could promise you a really gay Christmas at Sorgenfrei, but it is certain to be dull.

  —Don’t believe it, Davey. Sorgenfrei is an enchanted castle.

  —Nothing of the sort, but it should at least be a little more friendly than a hotel in St Gall. Can you come back with us now?

  And so it was. An hour after finishing lunch I had picked up my things and was sitting beside Liesl in a beautiful sports car, with Ramsay and his wooden leg crammed into the back with the luggage, dashing eastward from St Gall on the road to Konstanz, and Sorgenfrei—whatever it might be. One of those private clinics, perhaps, that are so frequent in Switzerland? We were mounting all the time, and at last, after half a mile or so through pine woods we emerged onto a shelf on a mountainside, with a breath-taking view—really breath-taking, for the air was very cold and thinner than at St Gall—and Sorgenfrei commanding it.

  Sorgenfrei is like Liesl, a fascinating monstrosity. In England it would be called Gothic Revival; I don’t know the European equivalent. Turrets, mullioned windows, a squat tower for an entrance and somewhere at the back a much taller, thinner tower like a lead-pencil rising very high. But bearing everywhere the unmistakable double signature of the nineteenth century and a great deal of money. Inside, it is filled with bearskin rugs, gigantic pieces of furniture on which ever surface has been carved within an inch of its life with fruits, flowers, birds, hares, and even, on one thing which seems to be an altar to greed but is more probably a sideboard, full-sized hounds; six of them with real bronze chains on their collars. This is the dream castle of some magnate of 150 years ago, conceived in terms of the civilization which has given the world, among a host of better things, the music box and the cuckoo clock.

  We arrived at about five p.m., and I was taken to this room, which is as big as the boardroom of Castor, and where I am seizing my chance to bring my diary up to the minute. This is exhilarating. Is it the air, or Liesl’s company? I am glad I came.

  Later: Am I still glad I came? It is after midnight and I have had the most demanding evening since I left Canada.

  This house troubles me and I can’t yet say why. Magnificent houses, palaces, beautiful country houses, comfortable houses—I know all these either as a guest or a tourist. But this house, which seems at first appearances to be rather a joke, is positively the damnedest house I have ever entered. One might think the architect had gained all his previous experience illustrating Grimm’s fairy stories, for the place is full of fantasy—but spooky, early-nineteenth-century fantasy, not the feeble Disney stuff. Yet, on second glance, it seems all to be meant seriously, and the architect was obviously a man of gifts, for though the house is big, it is still a house for people to live in and not a folly. Nor is it a clinic. It is Liesl’s home, I gather.

  Sorgenfrei. Free of care. Sans Souci. The sort of name someone of limited imagination might give to a country retreat. But there is something here that utterly contradicts the suggestion of the rich bourgeoisie resting from their money-making.

  When I went down to dinner I found Ramsay in the library. That is to say, in an English country-house it would have been the library, comfortable and pleasant, but at Sorgenfrei it is too oppressively literary; bookshelves rise to a high, painted ceiling, on which is written in decorative Gothic script what I can just make out to be the Ten Commandments. There is a huge terrestrial globe, balanced by an equally huge ce
lestial one. A big telescope, not much less than a century old, I judged, is mounted at one of the windows that look out on the mountains. On a low table sits a very modern object, which I discovered was five chess-boards mounted one above another in a brass frame; there are chessmen on each board, arranged as for five different games in progress; the boards are made of transparent lucite or some such material, so that it is possible to look down through them from above and see the position of every man. There was a good fire, and Ramsay was warming his legs, one flesh and one artificial, in front of it. He caught my mood at once.

  —Extraordinary house, isn’t it?

  —Very. Is this where you live now?

  —I’m a sort of permanent guest. My position is rather in the eighteenth-century mode. You know—people of intellectual tastes kept a philosopher or a scholar around the place. Liesl likes my conversation. I like hers. Funny way for a Canadian schoolmaster to end up, don’t you think?

  —You were never an ordinary schoolmaster, sir.

  —Don’t call me sir, Davey. We’re old friends. Your father was my oldest friend; if friends is what we were, which I sometimes doubted. But you’re not a lad now. You’re a notable criminal lawyer; what used to be called “an eminent silk.” Of course the problem is that I haven’t any name by which all my friends call me. What did you call me at school? Was it Corky? Corky Ramsay? Stupid name, really. Artificial legs haven’t been made of cork in a very long time.