The Rebel Angels tct-1

by Robertson Davies

  “Of course I’ll go to see him.”

  “After hours; not when his students are around or they would prevent him from being enthusiastic. They’re all green to science and all Doubting Thomases—wouldn’t believe their grandmothers had wrinkles if they couldn’t measure them with a micrometer. But in his inmost heart, Ozy is an enthusiast. So go some night after dinner. He’s always there till eleven, at least.”

  “I’ll go as soon as possible. You said there were two things you wanted me to do?”

  “Ah, well, yes I did. You don’t have to do the second if you’d rather not.”

  What a fool I am! I knew it must be something connected with our work. Perhaps something more about the manuscript he had spoken of at the beginning of term. But the crazed notion would rush into my mind that perhaps he wanted me to live with him, or go away for a weekend, or get married, or something it was least likely to be. But it was even unlikelier than any of those.

  “I’d be infinitely obliged if you could arrange to introduce me to your Mother.”

  The New Aubrey III

  1

  Ellerman’s funeral was a sad affair, which is not as silly as it sounds, because I have known funerals of well-loved or brave people which were buoyant. But this was a funeral without personal quality or grace. Funeral “homes” are places that exist for convenience; to excuse families from straining small houses with a ceremony they cannot contain, and to excuse churches from burying people who had no inclination towards churches and did nothing whatever to sustain them. People are said to be drifting away from religion, but few of them drift so far that when they die there is not a call for some kind of religious ceremony. Is it because mankind is naturally religious, or simply because mankind is naturally cautious? For whatever reason, we don’t like to part with a friend without some sort of show, and too often it is a poor show.

  A parson of one of the sects which an advertising man would call a Smooth Blend read scriptural passages and prayers, and suggested that Ellerman had been a good fellow. Amen to that.

  He had been a man who liked a touch of style, and he had been hospitable. This affair would have dismayed him; he would have wanted things done better. But how do you do better when nobody believes anything very firmly, and when the Canadian ineptitude for every kind of ceremony reduces the obsequies to mediocrity?

  What would I have done if I had been in charge? I would have had Ellerman’s war medals, which were numerous and honourable, on display, and I would have draped his doctor’s red gown and his hood over the coffin. These, as reminders of what he had been, of where his strengths had lain. But—Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither—so at the grave I would have stripped away these evidences of a life, and on the bare coffin I would have thrown earth, instead of the rose-leaves modern funeral directors think symbolic of the words Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; there is something honest about hearing the clods rattling on the coffin lid. Ellerman had taught English Literature, and he was an expert on Browning; might not somebody have read some passages from A Grammarian’s Funeral? But such thoughts are idle; you are asking for theatricalism, Darcourt; grief must be meagre, and mean, and cheap—not in money, of course, but in expression and invention. Death, be not proud; neither the grinning skull nor the panoply of ceremonial, nor the heart-catching splendour of faith is welcome at a modern, middle-class city funeral; grief must be huddled away, as the Lowest Common Denominator of permissible emotion.

  I wish I could have seen him near the last, to tell him that his notion of The New Aubrey had taken root in me, and thus, whatever his beliefs may have been, something of him should live, however humbly.

  He drew a pretty good house; my professional eye put it at seventy-five, give or take a body, or so. No sign of McVarish, though he and Ellerman had been cronies. Urky ignores death, so far as possible. Professor Ozias Froats was there, to my surprise. I knew he had been brought up a Mennonite, but I would have supposed that a life given to science had leached all belief out of him in things unseen, of heights and depths immeasurable. I took my chance, as we stood outside the funeral home, to speak to him.

  “I hope all this nonsense in the papers isn’t bothering you,” said I.

  “I wish I could say it wasn’t; they’re so unfair in what they say. Can’t be expected to understand, of course.”

  “It can’t do any permanent harm, surely.”

  “It could, if I had to ease up to satisfy this guy Brown. His political advantage could cost me seven years of work that would have to be repeated if I had to reduce what I’m doing for a while.”

  I hadn’t expected him to be so down in the mouth. Years ago I had known him when he was a great football star; he had been temperamental then, and seemingly he still was so.

  “I’m sure it does as much good as harm,” said I; ‘thousands of people must have been made aware of what you’re doing, and are interested. I’m interested myself. I don’t suppose you’d let me visit you some day?”

  To my astonishment he blossomed, and said: “Any time. But come at night when I’m alone, or nearly alone. Then I’d be glad to show you my stuff and explain. It’s good of you to say you’re interested.”

  So it was quite easy. I could have a look at Ozy for The New Aubrey.

  2

  It wouldn’t be fair to Ozias Froats or to me to suggest that I was bagging him like a butterfly collector. That wasn’t the light in which I saw The New Aubrey. Of course poor Ellerman, who loved everything that was quaint in English Literature, had relished John Aubrey’s delightful style, and the mixture of shrewdness and naivety with which Aubrey recorded his ragbag of information about the great ones of his time. But I wasn’t interested in anything like that; undergraduates love to write such stuff for their literary magazines—“The Diary of Our Own Mr. Pepys”, and such arch concoctions. What I valued in Aubrey was the energy of his curiosity, his determination to find out whatever he could about people who interested him: that was the quality in him I would try to recapture.

  It was not simple nosiness. It was a proper university project. Energy and curiosity are the lifeblood of universities; the desire to find out, to uncover, to dig deeper, to puzzle out obscurities, is the spirit of the university, and it is a channelling of that unresting curiosity that holds mankind together. As for energy, only those who have never tried it for a week or two can suppose that the pursuit of knowledge does not demand a strength and determination, a resolve not to be beaten, that is a special kind of energy, and those who lack it or have it only in small store will never be scholars or teachers, because real teaching demands energy as well. To instruct calls for energy, and to remain almost silent, but watchful and helpful, while students instruct themselves, calls for even greater energy. To see someone fall (which will teach him not to fall again) when a word from you would keep him on his feet but ignorant of an important danger, is one of the tasks of the teacher that calls for special energy, because holding in is more demanding than crying out.

  It was curiosity and energy I brought to The New Aubrey, as a tribute to my University, of which it might not become aware until I was dead. I have done my share of scholarship—two pretty good books on New Testament Apocrypha, studies of some of the later gospels and apocalypses that didn’t make it into the accepted canon of Holy Writ—and I was no longer under compulsion to justify myself in that way. So I was ready to give time and energy—and of course curiosity, of which I have an extraordinary endowment—to The New Aubrey. I was making a plan. I must have order in the work. The Old Aubrey is charming because it wholly lacks order, but The New Aubrey must not copy that.

  I didn’t go to Ozy’s laboratories at once; I wanted to think about what I was seeking. Not a scientific appraisal, obviously, for I was incompetent for that and there would be plenty of appraisal from his colleagues and peers when his work became known. No, what I was after was the spirit of the man, the source of the energy that lay behind the wor
k.

  I was thinking on these lines one night a few days after Ellerman’s funeral when there came a tap on my door, and to my astonishment it was Hollier.

  We have been on good but not close terms since our days together at Spook, when I had known him fairly well. We were not intimates then because I was in Classics, heading towards Theology (Spook likes its parsons to have some general education before they push towards ordination), and we met only in student societies. Since then we were friendly when we met, but we did not take pains to meet. This visit, I supposed, must be about the Cornish business. Hollier was no man to make a social call.

  So it proved to be. After accepting a drink and fussing uneasily for perhaps five minutes on the general theme of our work, he came out with it.

  “There’s something that has been worrying me, but because it lies in your part of the executors’ work I haven’t liked to mention it. Have you found any catalogue of Cornish’s books and manuscripts?”

  “He made two or three beginnings, and a few notes. He had no idea what cataloguing means.”

  “Then you wouldn’t know if anything were missing?”

  “I’d know if it related to his musical manuscripts, because he showed them to me often, and I have a good idea of what he possessed. Otherwise, not.”

  “There’s one I know he had, because he acquired it last April, and I saw it one night at his place. He had bought a group of MSS for their calligraphy; they were contemporary copies of letters to and from the Papal Chancery of Paulin. You know he was interested in calligraphy in a learnedly amateurish way, and it was the writing rather than the content that had attracted him; it was a bundle from somebody’s collection, and the prize piece was a letter from Jacob ben Samuel Martino and it made a passing reference to Henry VIII’s divorce, on which you know Martino was one of the experts. There were corrections in Martino’s own hand. Otherwise the content was of no interest; just a pretty piece of writing. Good for a footnote, no more. McVarish was there, and he and Cornish gloated over that, and as they did I looked at some of the other stuff, and there was a leather portfolio—not a big one, about ten inches by seven, I suppose—with S.G. stamped on it in gold that had faded almost to nothing. Have you come across that?”

  “No, but the Martino letter is present and correct. Very fine. And a group that goes with it, which presumably is what you saw.”

  “Where do you suppose S.G. has got to?”

  “I don’t know. I have never heard of it till this minute. What was it?”

  “I’m not sure that I can tell you.”

  “Well, my dear man, if you can’t tell me, how can I look for it? He may have put it in one of the other divisions—if those old cartons from the liquor store in which he stored his MSS can be called divisions. There is a very rough plan to be discerned in the muddle, but unless I know what this particular MS was about I wouldn’t have any idea where to look. Why are you interested?”

  “I was trying to find out what it really was when McVarish came along and wanted to see it, and I couldn’t very well say no—not in another man’s house, about something that wasn’t mine—and I never got back to it. But certainly McVarish saw it, and I saw his eyes popping.”

  “Had your eyes been popping?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Come on, Clem, cut the scholarly reticence and tell me what it was.”

  “I suppose there’s nothing else for it. It was one of the great, really great, lost manuscripts. I’m sure you know what some of those are.”

  “They are very common in my field. In the nineteenth century some letters appeared from Pontius Pilate, describing the Crucifixion; they were in French on contemporary notepaper and a credulous rich peasant paid quite a lot for them; it was when the same crook tried to sell him Christ’s last letter to his Mother, written in purple ink, that the buyer began to smell a rat.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t be facetious.”

  “Perfectly true, I assure you. I know the kind of thing you mean: Henry Hudson’s lost diary; James Macpherson’s Journal about the composition of Ossian—that kind of thing. And stuff does turn up. Look at the big haul of Boswell papers, found in a trunk in an attic in Ireland. Was this something of that order?”

  “Yes. It was Rabelais’ Stratagems.”

  “Don’t know them.”

  “Neither does anybody else. But Rabelais was historiographer to his patron Guillaume du Bellay and as such he wrote Stratagems, that is to say, prowesses and ruses of war of the pious and most famous Chevalier de Langey at the beginning of the Third Caesarean War; he wrote it in Latin, and he also translated it into French, and it was supposed to have been published by his friend the printer Sebastian Gryphius, but no copy exists. So was it published or wasn’t it?”

  “And this was it?”

  “This was it. It must have been the original script from which Gryphius published, or expected to publish, because it was marked up for the compositor—in itself an extraordinarily interesting feature.”

  “But why hadn’t anybody spotted it?”

  “You’d have to know some specialized facts to recognize it, because there was no title page—just began the text in close writing which wasn’t very distinguished, so I suppose the calligraphy people hadn’t paid it much heed.”

  “A splendid find, obviously.”

  “Of course Cornish didn’t know what it was, and I never had a chance to tell him; I wanted to have a really close look at it.”

  “And you didn’t want Urky to get in before you?”

  “He is a Renaissance scholar. I suppose he had as good a right as anyone to the Gryphius MS.”

  “Yes, but you didn’t want him to become aware of any such right. I quite understand. You don’t have to be defensive.”

  “I would have preferred to make the discovery, inform Cornish (who after all owned the damned thing), and leave the disposition of it, for scholarly use, to him.”

  “Don’t you think Cornish would have handed it over to Urky? After all, Urky regards himself as a big Rabelais man.”

  “For God’s sake, Darcourt, don’t be silly! McVarish’s ancestor—if indeed Sir Thomas Urquhart was his ancestor, which I have heard doubted by people who might be expected to know—Sir Thomas Urquhart translated one work—or part of it—by Rabelais into English, and plenty of Rabelais scholars think it is a damned bad translation, full of invention and whimsy and unscholarly blethering just like McVarish himself! There are people in this University who really know Rabelais and who laugh at McVarish.”

  “Yes, but he is a Renaissance historian, and this was apparently a significant bit of Renaissance history. In Urky’s field, and not really in your field. Sorry, but that’s the way it looks.”

  “I wish people wouldn’t talk about fields as if we were all a bunch of wretched prospectors and gold-panners, ready to shoot anybody who steps on our claim.”

  “Well, isn’t that what we are?”

  “I suppose I’ve got to tell you the whole thing.”

  “I wish you would. What have you been holding back?”

  “There was the MS of the Stratagems, as I’ve told you. About forty pages, closely written. Not a good hand and no signature, except the signature that was written all over it—the lost Rabelais book. But in another little bundle in the back of the leather portfolio, in a sort of pocket, were the scripts of three letters.”

  “From Rabelais?”

  “Yes, from Rabelais. They were drafts of three letters written to Paracelsus. His rough copies. But not so rough he hadn’t signed them. Perhaps he enjoyed writing his name: lots of people do. It jumped at me off the page—that big ornate signature, not really the Chancery Hand, but a Mannerist style of his own—”

  “Yes, Urky always insists that Rabelais was a Mannerist author.”

  “Urky be damned; he picked that up from me. He wouldn’t know Mannerism in any art; he has no eye. But Rabelais is a Mannerist poet who happened to write in prose; he achieves in prose what G
iuseppe Arcimboldo achieves in painting—fruitiness, nuttiness, leanness, dunginess, and the wildest kind of grotesque invention. But there were the letters, and there was the unmistakable, great signature. I had to take hold of myself not to fall on my knees. Think of it! Just think of it!”

  “Very nice.”

  “Nice, you call it! Nice! Stupendous! I had a peep—the merest peep—and they contained passages in Greek (quotations, obviously) and here and there a few words in Hebrew, and half a dozen revealing symbols.”

  “Wholly revealing what?”

  “Revealing that Rabelais was in correspondence with the greatest natural scientist of his day, which nobody knew before. Revealing that Rabelais, who was suspected of being a Protestant, was something at least equally reprehensible for a man of the Church—even a nusiance and a renegade—he was, if not a Cabbalist at least a student of Cabbala, and if not an alchemist at least a student of alchemy! And that is bloody well my field, and it could be the making of any scholar who got hold of it, and I’ll be damned if I want that bogus sniggering son of a whore McVarish to get his hands on it!”

  “Spoken like a true scholar!”

  “And I think he has got his hands on it! I think that bugger has pinched it!”

  “My dear man, calm down! If it did turn up it would have to go to the University Library, you know. I couldn’t simply hand it over to you.”

  “You know how those things are done; a word to the Chief Librarian would be all that is necessary, and I wouldn’t ask you to do it. I could do it myself. First crack at that MS—that’s what I want!”