The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks

by Robertson Davies

  • OF ABORTIVE GARDENING •

  I WORKED LIKE a demon in my garden this afternoon, raking, burning, digging, uprooting and whatnot with frenzied industry. Yet even as I toiled my heart was heavy, for I know by now that I am what psychiatrists call a Premature or Abortive Gardener; each year I am driven out-of-doors in April by a compulsion similar to that which makes the salmon seek the sea, and for two or three weeks I am the slave of the garden. But it is not to last; by the middle of May my rash, fierce blaze of energy has spent itself, and the garden settles down into a state of neglect which frequently makes people think that Marchbanks Towers has not been inhabited for years.

  He tickled the Earth with a hoe

  And she laughed in a smiling harvest.

  So runs the poem. But I tickle the Earth too early, and for six months afterward she sues me for breach of promise.

  • OF DISTINCTION •

  “DON’T YOU THINK Mr. X looks very distinguished?” the lady on my right asked me just now. As a matter of fact I think that X looks as though he had a clinker stuck in his grates, so I gave her an indirect reply. I never know what people mean by “distinguished” when they apply it to a man’s appearance. Often the person so described looks as though he smelt a bad drain, or had a nail in his shoe, or had been to the barber and got his hair down his neck; the alliance between distinction and an appearance of suffering appears to be unbreakable. Nobody who looks as though he enjoyed life is ever called distinguished, though he is a man in a million. For some reason the world has decided that an expression suggestive of pain and disgust is a mark of superior mental power, for the world assumes, quite wrongly, that to be happy is a simple thing, within the reach of any idiot.

  • OF FAUST EXAMINED •

  I WAS THINKING about the Faust legend today, and began to wonder what I would ask for if I had sold my soul to the devil, on condition that the devil grant my wishes on earth. Faust was a painfully unimaginative fellow; he asked for youth—I would prefer a hearty middle age. He asked for a fortune; I would prefer a purse which at all times contained an exact $1,000 in five dollar bills. He asked for that tiresome simpleton Gretchen, and what a sanctimonious mess she turned out to be! And in Marlowe’s play Faust asked for Helen of Troy, a notorious trouble-maker. In fact, as a philosopher, Faust appears to have been in the dunce class; money, women and the torments of youth—what a choice! I cannot think what the devil wanted with the soul of such a numbskull. With his opportunities I think that I should devote myself to politics, and for recreation I would demand the power to transform myself into a beautiful woman, and in that guise I would torment the reverend clergy. And after a few years I would command the devil to explode himself forever. How would he meet that situation, I wonder?