The Manticore

by Robertson Davies

  He had been given something by the doctor beforehand, and needed help as he walked. I had seen him the day before, in his cell where the lights always burned and where he had spent so many days without a belt, or braces, or even laces in his shoes – deprivations which seemed to rob him of full humanity, so that he appeared to be ill or insane. Now his surly look was gone, and he had to be pushed up the ladder that led to the platform. The hangman, whom he never saw, manoeuvred Jimmy gently to the right spot, then put the noose over his head and adjusted it with great care – in other circumstances one might say with loving care. Then he slid down the ladder – literally, for he put his feet on the outsides of the supports and slipped down it like a fireman – and immediately pulled the lever. Jimmy dropped out of sight behind the curtains, with a loud thump, as the cord stretched tight.

  The silence, which had been so thick before, was now broken as Jimmy swung to and fro and the rope banged against the sides of the trap. Worse than that, we heard gurgling and gaggling, and the curtains bulged and stirred as Jimmy swung within them. The hanging, as is sometimes the case, had not gone well, and Jimmy was fighting for life.

  The doctor had told us that unconsciousness was immediate, but that the cessation of Jimmy's heartbeat might take from three to five minutes. If Jimmy were unconscious, why am I sure that I heard him cry out – curses, of course, for these had always been Jimmy's eloquence? But I did hear him, and so did the others, and one of the reporters was violently sick. We looked at one another in terror. What was to be done? The hangman knew. He darted inside the curtains, and beneath them we saw a great shuffling of feet, and soon the violent swinging stopped, and the sighs and murmurings were still. The hangman came out again, flustered and angry, and mopped his brow. None of us met his eye. When five minutes had passed the doctor, not liking his work, went inside the curtains with his stethoscope ready, came out again almost at once, and nodded to the sheriff. And so it was over.

  Not quite over for me. I had promised Jimmy's mother that I would see him before he was buried, and I did. He was laid on a table in a neighbouring room, and I looked him right in the face, which took some resolution in the doing. But I noticed also a damp stain on the front of his prison trousers, and looked enquiringly at the doctor.

  "An emission of semen." he said; "they say it always happens. I don't know."

  So that was what Jimmy meant when he said he'd piss when he couldn't whistle. Where could he have picked up such a jaunty, ugly, grotesque idea of death by hanging? But that was Jimmy; he had a flair for whatever was brutal and macabre and such knowledge sought him out because he was eager for it.

  I had seen a hanging. Worse things happen in wars and in great catastrophes, but they are not directly planned and ordered. This had been the will of Jimmy's fellow-countrymen, as expressed through the legal machinery devised to deal with such people as he. But it was unquestionably a squalid business, an evil deed, and we had all of us, from the hangman down to the reporters, been drawn into it and fouled by it. If Jimmy had to be got rid of – and I fully believe that was all that could have been done with such a man, unless he were to be kept as a caged, expensive nuisance for another fifty years – why did it have to be like this? I do not speak of hanging alone; the executioner's sword, the guillotine, the electric chair are all dreadful and involve the public through its legal surrogates in a revolting act. The Greeks seem to have known a better way than these.

  Jimmy's evil had infected us all – had indeed spread far beyond his prison until something of it touched everybody in his country. The law had been tainted by evil, though its great import was for good, or at least for order and just dealing. But it would be absurd to attribute so much power to Jimmy, who was no more than a fool whose folly had become the conduit by which evil had poured into so many lives. When I visited Jimmy in prison I had sometimes seen on his face a look I knew, the look I had seen on the face of Bill Unsworth as he squatted obscenely over a pile of photographs. It was the look of one who has laid himself open to a force that is inimical to man, and whose power to loose that force upon the world is limited only by his imagination, his opportunities, and his daring. And it seemed to me then that it was with such people I had cast my lot, for I was devoting my best abilities to their defence.

  I changed my mind about that later. The law gives every accused man his chance, and there must be those who do for him what he cannot do for himself; I was one of these. But I was always aware that I stood very near to the power of evil when I undertook the cases that brought me the greatest part of my reputation. I was a highly skilled, highly paid, and cunning mercenary in a fight which was as old as man and greater than man. I have consciously played the Devil's Advocate and I must say I have enjoyed it. I like the Struggle, and I had better admit that I like the moral danger. I am like a man who has built his house on the lip of a volcano. Until the volcano claims me I live, in a sense, heroically.

  DR. VON HALLER: Good. I was wondering when he would make his appearance.

  MYSELF: Whom are we talking about now?

  DR. VON HALLER: The hero who lives on the lip of the volcano. We have talked of many aspects of your inner life, and we have identified them by such names as Shadow, Anima, and so on. But one has been seen only in a negative aspect, and he is the man you show to the outer world, the man in whose character you appear in court and before your acquaintances. He has a name, too. We call him the Persona, which means, as you know, the actor's mask. This man on the edge of the volcano, this saturnine lawyer-wizard who snatches people out of the jaws of destruction, is your Persona. You must enjoy playing the role very much.

  MYSELF: I do.

  DR. VON HALLER: Good. You would not have admitted that a few months ago, when you first sat in that chair. Then you were all for imposing him on me as your truest self.

  MYSELF: I'm not sure that he isn't.

  DR. VON HALLER: Oh. come. We all create an outward self with which to face the world, and some people come to believe that is what they truly are. So they people the world with doctors who are nothing outside the consulting-room, and judges who are nothing when they are not in court, and businessmen who wither with boredom when they have to retire from business, and teachers who are forever teaching. That is why they are such poor specimens when they are caught without their masks on. They have lived chiefly through the Persona. But you are not such a fool, or you would not be here. Everybody needs his mask, and the only intentional impostors are those whose mask is one of a man with nothing to conceal. We all have much to conceal, and we must conceal it for our soul's good. Even your Wizard, your mighty Pargetter, was not all Wizard. Did you ever find some chink in his armour?

  MYSELF: Yes, and it was a shock. He died without a will. A lawyer who dies without a will is one of the jokes of the profession.

  DR. VON HALLER: Ah, but making a will is not part of a Persona; it is, for most of us, an hour when we look our mortality directly in the face. If he did not want to do that, it is sad, but do you really think it diminishes Pargetter? It lessens him as the perfect lawyer, certainly, but he must have been something more than that, and a portion of that something else had a natural, pathetic fear of death. He had built his Persona so carefully and so handsomely that you took it for the whole man; and it must be said that you might not have learned so much from him if you had seen him more fully; young people love such absolutes. But your own Persona seems to be a very fine one. Surely it was built as a work of art?

  MYSELF: Of art, and of necessity. The pressures under which I came to live were such that I needed something to keep people at bay. And so I built what I must say I have always thought of as my public character, my professional manner, but which you want me to call a Persona. I needed armour. You see – this is not an easy thing for me to say, even to someone who listens professionally to what is usually unspeakable – women began to throw out their lures for me. I would have been a good catch. I came of a well-known family; I had money; I was at the start of
a career of a kind that some women find as attractive as that of a film actor. DR. VON HALLER: And why were you so unresponsive? Anything to do with Myrrha Martindale?

  MYSELF: That wore off, after a time. I had come to hate the fact that I had been initiated into the world of physical sex in something Father had stage-managed. It wasn't sex itself, but Father's proprietorial way with it, and with me. I was young and neither physically cold nor morally austere, but even when the urge and the opportunity were greatest I wanted no more of it. It seemed like following in the swordsman's footsteps, and I wanted none of that. But I might have married if Father had not gone before me, even there.

  DR. VON HALLER: This was the second marriage, to Denyse?

  MYSELF: Yes, when I was twenty-nine. I had passed my third year in Pittstown with Diarmuid, and was thinking it was time to be moving, for one does not become a first-rank criminal lawyer in a town where criminals are few and of modest ambition. One day a letter came from Father; would I meet Caroline for dinner at the family house in Toronto, as he had something of great importance to tell us? Since getting into politics Father had not dwindled in self-esteem, I can assure you, and this was in what painters call his later manner. So up to Toronto I went on the appointed day, and the other guests at dinner were Caroline and Beesty. Caroline had married Beeston Bastable the year before, and it had done her a lot of good; he was no Adonis, running rather to fat, but he was a fellow of what I can only call a sweet disposition, and after Caroline had tormented and jeered at him long enough she discovered she loved him, and that was that. But Father was not there. Only a letter, to be read while we were having coffee. I wondered what it could be, and so did Beesty, but Caroline jumped to it at once, and of course she was right. The letter was rather a floundering and pompous piece of work, but it boiled down to the fact that he was going to marry again and hoped we would approve and love the lady as much as he did, and as much as she deserved. There was a tribute in it to Mother, rather stiffly worded. Stuff about how he could never be happy in this new marriage unless we approved. And, finally, the name of the lady herself. It was Denyse Hornick. Of course we knew who she was. She ran a good-sized travel agency of her own, and was prominent in politics, on the women's side.

  DR. VON HALLER: A women's liberationist?

  MYSELF: Not in any extreme way. An intelligent, moderate, but determined and successful advocate of equality for women under the law, and in business and professional life. We knew she had attached herself to Father's personal group of supporters during his not very fortunate post-war political career. None of us had ever met her. But we met her that night because Father brought her home at about half-past nine to introduce her. It wasn't an easy situation.

  DR. VON HALLER: He seems to have managed it rather heavy-handedly.

  MYSELF: Yes, and I suppose it was immature of me, but it galled me to see him so youthful and gallant toward her when they came in, like a boy bringing his girl home to run the gauntlet of the family. After all, he was sixty. And she was modest and sweet and deferential like a girl of seventeen, though she was in fact a hefty forty-one. I don't mean fat-hefty, but a psychological heavy-weight, a woman of obvious self-confidence and importance in her sphere, so that these milkmaid airs were a grotesque fancy dress. Of course we did the decent thing, and Beesty bustled around and prepared drinks with the modesty proper to an in-law at a somewhat tense family affair, and eventually everybody had kissed Denyse and the farce of seeking our approval had been played out. An hour later Denyse had so far thrown aside her role as milkmaid that when I showed some signs of getting drunk she said, "Now only one more tiny one, baa-lamb, or you'll hate yourself in the morning." I knew at that moment I couldn't Stand Denyse, and that one more very serious thing had come between me and Father.

  DR. VON HALLER: You were never reconciled to her?

  MYSELF: You doubtless have some family. Doctor. You must know of the currents that run through families? I'll tell you of one that astonished me. It was Caroline who told Netty about the approaching marriage, and Netty broke into a fit of sobs – she had no tears, apparently – and said, "And after what I've done for him!" Caroline dropped on that at once, for it could have been proof of her favourite theory that Netty killed Mother, or at least put her in the way of dying. Surely those words couldn't have simply referred to those shirts she'd ironed so beautifully? But with her notion of "her place" it wouldn't be like Netty to think that years of service gave her a romantic claim on Father. Caroline couldn't get Netty to admit, in so many words, that she had put Mother out of the way because she was an embarrassment to Father. Nevertheless, there was something fishy there. If I could have Netty in the witness-box for half an hour, I bet I could break her down. What do you think of that? This isn't some family in the mythic drama of Greece I'm telling you about; it is a family of the twentieth century, and a Canadian family at that, supposedly the quintessence of everything that is emotionally dowdy and unaware.

  DR. VON HALLER: Mythic pattern is common enough in contemporary life. But of course few people know the myths, and fewer still can see a pattern under a mass of detail. What was your response to this woman who was so soon proprietorial in her manner toward you?

  MYSELF: Derision tending toward hatred; with Caroline it was just derision. Every family knows how to make the newcomer feel uncomfortable, and we did what we dared. And I did more than spar with her when we met. I found out everything I could about her through enquiries from credit agencies and by public records; I also had some enquiries made through underworld characters who had reason to want to please me -

  DR. VON HALLER: You spied on her?

  MYSELF: Yes.

  DR. VON HALLER: You have no doubts about the propriety of that?

  MYSELF: None. After all, she was marrying considerably over a hundred million dollars. I wanted to know who she was.

  DR. VON HALLER: And who was she?

  MYSELF: There was nothing against her. She had married a serviceman when she was in the W.R.N.S. and divorced him as soon as the war was over. That was where Lorene came from.

  DR. VON HALLER: The retarded daughter?

  MYSELF: An embarrassing nuisance, Denyse's problem. But Denyse liked problems and wanted to add me to her list.

  DR. VON HALLER: Because of your drinking. When did that begin?

  MYSELF: In Pittstown it began to be serious. It is very lonely living in a small town where you are anxious to seem quite ordinary but everybody knows that there is a great fortune, as they put it, "behind you". How far behind, or whether you really have anything more than a romantic claim on it, nobody knows or cares. More than once I would hear some Pittstown worthy whisper of me, "He doesn't have to work, you know; his father's Boy Staunton." But I did work; I tried to command my profession. I lived in the best hotel in town, which, God knows, was a dismal hole with wretched food; I confined my living to a hundred and twenty-five dollars a week, which was about what a rising young lawyer might be expected to have. I wanted no favours and if it had been practical to take another name I would have done it. Nobody understood, except Diarmuid, and I didn't care whether they understood or not. But it was lonely, and while I was hammering out the character of David Staunton the rising criminal lawyer, I also created the character of David Staunton who drank too much. The two went well together in the eyes of many romantic people, who like a brilliant man to have some large, obvious flaw in his character.

  DR. VON HALLER: This was the character you took with you to Toronto, where I suppose you embroidered it.

  MYSELF: Embroidered it richly. I achieved a certain courtroom notoriety; in a lively case I drew a good many spectators because they wanted to see me win. They also had the occasional thrill of seeing me stagger. There were rumours, too, that I had extensive connections in the underworld, though that was nonsense. Still, it provided a whiff of sulphur for the mob.

  DR. VON HALLER: In fact, you created a romantic Persona that successfully rivalled that of the rich, sexually adventuro
us Boy Staunton without ever challenging him on his own ground?

  MYSELF: You might equally well say that I established myself as a man of significance in my own right without in any way wearing my father's cut-down clothes.

  DR. VON HALLER: And when did the clash come?

  MYSELF: The -?

  DR. VON HALLER: The inevitable clash between your father and yourself. The clash that gave so much edge to the guilt and remorse you felt when he died, or was killed, or whichever it was.

  MYSELF: I suppose it really came into the light when Denyse made it clear that her ambition was to see Father appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario. She made it very clear to me that what she insisted on calling my "image" – she had a walletful of smart terms for everything – would not fit very well with my position as son of a man who was the Queen's representative.

  DR. VON HALLER: In effect she wanted to reclaim you and make you into your father's son again.

  MYSELF: Yes, and what a father! She is a great maker of images, is Denyse! It disgusted and grieved me to see Father being filed and pumiced down to meet that inordinate woman's idea of a fit candidate for ceremonial office. Before, he had style – his personal style: she made him into what she would have been if she had been born a man. He became an unimaginative woman's creation. Delilah had shorn his locks and assured him he looked much neater and cooler without them. He gave her his soul, and she transformed it into a cabbage. She reopened the whole business of the Staunton arms because he would need something of the sort in an official position and it looked better to take the position with all the necessary trappings than to cobble them up during his first months in office. Father had never told her about Maria Ann Dymock, and she wrote boldly to the College of Arms, and I gather she pretty much demanded that the arms of the Warwickshire Stauntons, with some appropriate differences, be officially granted to Father.