The Manticore

by Robertson Davies

  I was not naive. 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 you 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 Archetypes, 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 Spock, isn't it?

  DR. VON HALLER: Yes, Spock 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 Spock 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 heiraldry 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 using 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 PledgerBrown, "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.

  "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?"