The Rebel Angels tct-1

by Robertson Davies

  This was Hollier’s root, not his austere scholarly crown. From time to time I heard him shouting. Sometimes things I could understand like—“And that blockhead wanted me to go to McVarish and tell him everything!” Tell what? Who was the blockhead?

  I cleaned up the mess, and was happy to do it. Hollier’s rage had cured my influenza.

  Or almost cured it. When I went home that evening, Mamusia said: “Your cold is gone, but you look white. I know what is wrong with you, my girl; you are in love. Your professor. How is he?”

  “Never better,” said I, thinking of the storm I had seen that afternoon.

  “A fine man. Very handsome. Has he made love to you?”

  “No.” I didn’t want to go into fine detail with Mamusia.

  “Ach, these gadje! Slow as snakes in autumn. I suppose there must be social occasions. They think a lot of social occasions. We must show you off to advantage. You must ask him here at Christmas.”

  We had quite a long argument about that. I was dubious about what Mamusia meant by social occasions; when Tadeusz was alive he and Mamusia never entertained anybody at home; they always took them to restaurants, to concerts or plays. The great change that had come over her since Tadeusz’s death had obliterated all that; she had never had friends among the gadjo business and professional Hungarians, and she had dropped all the acquaintances. But when Mamusia took an idea into her head it was not in my power to change her. A Christmas party now dominated her imagination, although, as a Gypsy, Christmas was not a great festival for her. I tried being outspoken.

  “I won’t let you ask him here to parade me like a Gypsy pony you want to sell. You don’t know how people like that behave.”

  “So at my age I’m a fool? I will be as high and fine as any gadji lady—so slick a louse would slip off me. Parade you? Is that how it’s done, poshrat? Never! We shall do it like the great ladies of Vienna. We shall make him see he isn’t alone in desiring you.”

  “Mamusia! He doesn’t desire me!”

  “That’s what he thinks. He doesn’t know what he desires. You leave that to me. He’s the man I want for the father of my grandchildren, and it’s high time. We’ll make him jealous. You must ask another man.”

  What other man? Arthur Cornish? Arthur and I had been going out together fairly often, and were becoming real friends, but he had never made a move towards me, except to kiss me good night once or twice, which can’t be said to count. Arthur was the last man I wanted to introduce into Mamusia’s world.

  She had been thinking. “To make Hollier jealous, you must ask somebody who is his equal, or a little better than that. Somebody with prettier manners, better clothes, more jewellery. Another professor! Do you know another professor?”

  So that was how I came to ask Professor Darcourt to dine with my family on Boxing Day. He turned rather an odd colour when I wound myself up to the point of speaking about it—a pink that started below his collar and worked up, as if somebody were filling a wineglass. I was terrified. Had he heard that my home was a Gypsy home? Was he afraid he would have to sit on the floor and eat baked hedgehog, which is all the gadje ever seem to know about gypsy food? When he said that yes, he would be delighted to come, I was hugely relieved, and as I left his seminar room I was surprised to find that he was still looking at me, and was pinker than ever. But he would do very nicely. He was near to Hollier in age, and he had lovely manners and dressed smartly for a stout man, and though he did not wear what Mamusia would have thought of as jewellery he had a natty little gold cross hanging from his watch-chain, which draped over what I assumed was the forty feet of literary gut Professor Froats had mentioned. Yes, Simon Darcourt would be just the thing.

  “A priest?” said Mamusia when I told her. “I must warn Yerko to guard his tongue.”

  “You make sure Yerko is sober,” said I.

  “Trust me,” said Mamusia. Words I interpreted as generously as I could, but with reservation.

  4

  There was no need to warn Yerko to guard his tongue. He returned from New York heavy with concealed money, but light of heart, for he had found a god to worship, and the name of the god was Bebby Jesus. A friend had taken him to the Metropolitan Museum where, in the medieval section, a Nativity Play was being performed in celebration of the coming of Christmas. The friend thought that Yerko might be pleased by the medieval music, played on authentic old viols and some instruments of which one resembled the cimbalom, the gypsy dulcimer Yerko played like a master. But Yerko’s incalculable fancy had settled upon the drama, the Annunciation, the Virgin Birth, the Adoration of the Shepherds, and the Journey of the Magi. In official matters, Gypsies call themselves Catholics, but Yerko’s mind, uncluttered by education or conventional religion, was wide open to marvels; at the age of fifty-eight he was transfigured by his newly found belief in the Miraculous Child. Therefore he had purchased an elaborate crèche of carved and painted wood, and as soon as he came home he set to work with his great skill as a woodworker and craftsman to make it the most splendid thing of its kind his imagination could conceive. Nor was it anything less than splendid, though a little gaudy and bedizened, in the Gypsy style.

  He set it up in our one living-room, already crammed with all the best pieces Mamusia and Tadeusz had spread through the big house when they occupied it all; the crèche dominated everything else. Yerko prayed in front of it, and never passed it without a low bow and a murmured greeting to Bebby Jesus who wore, when Yerko had finished his task of improvement, a superb little crown of beautifully worked copper and gold, and a robe of red velvet, made by Mamusia and decorated with tiny pearls.

  I was not pleased with Bebby Jesus, who went contrary to what I hoped was my scholarly austerity of mind, my Rabelaisian disdain for superstition, and my yearning for—what? I suppose for some sort of Canadian conventionality, which keeps religion strictly in its place, where it must not be mocked but need not be heeded, either. What would our party guests make of this extraordinary shrine?

  They thought it was magnificent. They arrived on our doorstep together, though Hollier had walked and Darcourt travelled by taxi, and they made the somewhat too extravagant protestations of being glad to see each other that people do make around Christmas-time. Before I could take his coat Darcourt had dashed forward and stood in front of the crèche, lost in admiration.

  I had warned Yerko that one of our guests was a priest, and, being Yerko, he assumed that it must be Hollier, who was the more austere in appearance.

  “Good father,” he said, bowing deeply, “I wish you all happiness at this Birthday of Bebby Jesus.”

  “Oh,—ah quite so, Mr. Laoutaro,” said Hollier, rather taken aback. I do not think he had heard Yerko speak on his first visit, and Yerko has a voice like someone speaking from a well of thick oil—a basso, profound and oleaginous.

  But now Yerko had spied Darcourt’s gleaming clerical collar, and I feared for a moment that he was going to kiss his hand, peasant-style. That would have put the party off to a really bad start, from my point of view.

  “This is my Uncle Yerko,” I said, stepping between them.

  Darcourt had lots of social sense, and he knew that “Mr. Laoutaro” was all wrong. “May I call you Yerko?” he said, “and you must call me Simon. Did you make this superb tableau? My dear Yerko, this brings us very close together. It is by far the loveliest thing I have seen this Christmas.” He seemed to mean it. A taste for the Baroque I had not suspected in a medieval scholar, I suppose.

  “Dear Father Simon,” said Yerko, bowing again, “you make my heart very filled up. Is all for Bebby Jesus.” And he cast a swimming eye at the crèche. “And this all for Bebby Jesus, too,” he said, gesturing at the dining-table.

  I admit it was a wonder. Mamusia had unpacked treasures not seen since the death of Tadeusz, and the table could have appeared in a pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins as an altar to Gula, or Gluttony. On a tablecloth lumpy with lace was spread a complete service of that china prized by one group o
f connoisseurs called Royal Crown Derby, gaudy with blue and red and gold and in the extreme of Gypsy taste. Tadeusz had given it to Mamusia at a time when they had some notion of entertaining at home, but it had never been used. There it was, plates resting upon larger service plates, and standing amid silver in the most highly wrought pattern Jensen had been able to devise. There was a positive forest-fire of candles burning in stands with many branches, and the flowers I had insisted on providing were already wilting in the heat.

  “It isn’t only the gadje who can do a thing well,” Mamusia had said. If Darcourt had feared that he was to be given baked hedgehog, he must now be certain that he would eat it in such style as hedgehog had never known before.

  Darcourt had brought a large and splendid Christmas cake, which he offered to Mamusia with ceremony. She took it with approval: such tribute from guests fitted well into her mid-European idea of hospitality. Hollier had no gift, but I was pleased to see him in a good, if impressed, suit of clothes.

  There were no preliminaries. We sat down to eat at once. I had murmured about cocktails, but Mamusia was firm; such things had never appeared in any of the first-class Budapest restaurants in which she had played as a girl; Tadeusz had thought cocktails an American folly and not really high style, in the Polish mode; and so there were no cocktails. Of course Darcourt was asked to say grace, which he did in Greek, as the language most congruous with the Crown Derby, I suppose. Mamusia sat at the head of the table with Hollier on her left, and Darcourt on her right; Yerko sat at the other end. To my extreme annoyance I had been cast in the role of serving-wench, and though I had a place at table next to Darcourt I was not expected to sit in it often. I was to bring food from the kitchen, where an over-driven Portuguese, who asked double pay for working on a holiday, was in charge, ribbed and confined by Mamusia’s orders.

  “It becomes a daughter to serve the guests,” Mamusia had said. “And take care you smile and beg them to take more. Show yourself open-handed. This is to show your professor that you know how such things should be done. And wear a low dress. Gadjo men like to peep.”

  I know that gadjo men like to peep. But Gypsies do not much care if they peep or not. Gypsies are modest about legs, not about breasts, and I suppose Parlabane would have said that it was part of my root asserting itself that I had never been able to bother my head if men peeped down my front. This night I wore skirts to my ankles, as did Mamusia, but we both were pretty well to the fore in the matter of shoulders and bosom. I did not wear a kerchief, however, as Mamusia did. Nor did I wear any jewellery except for a chain or two and a few rings. But Mamusia was the most ornamented object, save for Bebby Jesus, in the room. She was hung with gold—real gold—and had large hoops in her ears and a necklace made of Maria Theresa thalers that must have weighed thirty ounces.

  “You are looking at my gold,” she said to Hollier; “this is my dowry-gold. I brought it to my marriage with Maria’s father. But it is mine. In case the marriage had not been a success, I would not have been poor. But it was a success. Oh, yes, a great success! We Laoutaro women are wonderful wives. Famous for it.” This was said with what I can only call a leer, which embarrassed me horribly and I blushed. Then I was angry and blushed even more because I could see that both Hollier and Darcourt were looking at me, and I was playing the role of the modest maiden before possible husbands. Real Gypsy stuff.

  God damn it to hell! Here was I, a modern girl in the New World, rigged up like a Gypsy, serving food at her mother’s table, simply because I had not the power to resist Mamusia. Or perhaps because my root was still greater than my crown. My root was assuring me, as I raged inwardly, that I was looking my best, and that it was because I was blushing. How much more complicated life is than the attainment of a Ph.D. would lead one to believe!

  The meal was according to the plan Mamusia had observed in the restaurants of her girlhood and I think—indeed I know—it was an astonishment to our guests. Not all of it had been stolen. The wines, in particular, had been purchased, because in our part of the world all wines and spirits are a government monopoly, and stealing from the stores maintained by the Liquor Control Board is difficult even for such a talented booster as Mamusia. The government, which has its hand in everybody’s pocket, and its nose thrust deep into everybody’s glass, is careful of its own. So the heavy red wine and the Tokaji we drank had been purchased with real money, though in a store that was on the self-service principle Mamusia had been able to swipe a bottle of a pear liqueur, a Hubertus, and a couple of bottles of apricot Barack. So we were not ill supplied, for five people, not counting an occasional snort for the Portuguese, who needed encouragement.

  We began with a lobster soup, stolen in the can by Mamusia and much improved by sherry and the thickest cream that could be bought. We then moved on to a rabbit pie, which was really excellent, and had been bought at a French patisserie. Our guests ate heartily of this unaccustomed dish, and I was glad, for it had cost a fortune. Perhaps they did not realize that a large stuffed carp was to follow, with a garlic sauce in which you could have stood a spoon, and a mélange of vegetables, so sophisticated that they hardly seemed to be vegetables at all. Darcourt’s brow showed some dampness by the time he had done justice to it.

  Hollier, I was concerned to observe, was a noisy eater, and to seem to eat noisily when Yerko was at the table was to be noisy in demanding company. Hollier was a chomper, his jaws working up and down like pistons, and without seeming to be greedy he ate a great deal. Dear man, did he not get enough to eat in his lonely professorial life? Or had his mother, who was not far away from us, loaded him up with the turkey and plum pudding their sort of Canadian thought appropriate to Christmas? But he was of a Sheldonian type that can eat a great deal without putting on any flesh.

  The carp was followed by a sorbet, a water-ice, served not as a sweet, to bring the meal to a close, but merely, as Mamusia said, to joke a little with our stomachs before getting on with the next serious course. This was a true gulyás-hus, again with a lot of garlic, and plentiful, because Mamusia thought it the really serious offering, the crown of the feast.

  That was that, except for a fruit flan of apricots, with bran-died cream, and a Sachertorte, which Mamusia insisted everyone should try, because it recalled great days in Vienna, and gave therefore a cosmopolitan air to a meal which she insisted was otherwise truly Hungarian. And, of course, we all had to eat a piece of Darcourt’s cake.

  The guests ate everything, drank the heavy, red wine, and moved on happily to the Tokaji.

  Conversation had been animated all through the meal, and became much more animated as it drew towards its close. I was busy taking things to the kitchen, bringing things from the kitchen, and managing the Portuguese, whom I had somewhat over-encouraged with drink. Her sighs and moans could have been overlooked, but as the meal wore on she began to talk animatedly to herself, and now and then opened the door to stare in, with groggy solemnity, to see how things were going.

  Mamusia was very much the high-born hostess, as she understood the role, and wanted to talk to our guests about the University and what they did there. Darcourt’s work she could understand; he taught priests, like himself. He tried to explain that he was not a priest in quite the meaning of that word known to Mamusia and Yerko.

  “I am an Anglican, you see,” he said at one point, “and therefore although I am unquestionably a priest, I suppose I might say I am a priest in a Pickwickian sense, if you know what I mean.”

  They did not know what he meant. “But you love the Bebby Jesus?” said Yerko.

  “Oh, yes indeed. Just as much, I assure you, as our brethren at Rome. Or, for that matter, in the Orthodox Church.”

  Hollier had, at his first visit, explained to Mamusia what his work was; he enlarged on that, without suggesting that he regarded her as a cultural fossil, or a possessor of the Wild Mind. “I look into the past,” he said.

  “Oho, so do I!” said Mamusia. “All we Romany women can look into the past. Doe
s it give you a pain? When I have looked backward sometimes I have a very bad pain in my women’s parts, if I may speak of such things. But we are not children here. Except for my daughter. Maria, go to the kitchen and see what Rosa is doing. Tell her if she chips one of those plates I will cut out her heart. Now, dear Hollier, you teach looking into the past. Do you teach that to my daughter, eh?”

  “Maria is busy studying a remarkable man of past times, one François Rabelais. He was a great humorist, I suppose one might say.”

  “What is that?”

  “He was a man of great wisdom, but he expressed his wisdom in wild jokes and fantasies.”

  “Jokes? Like riddles, you mean?”

  “I suppose every joke is a riddle, because it says one thing and means another.”

  “I know some good riddles,” said Yerko. “Mostly not riddles I could ask in front of the Bebby Jesus. But can you guess this one? Now listen good. What big, laughing fellow can go into the queen’s bedroom—yes even the Queen of England—without knocking on the door?”

  There was the usual embarrassing silence that always follows a riddle, while people pretend to search for the answer, but are really waiting for the asker to tell them.

  “You can’t guess? A big, laughing, hot fellow, he even maybe lets himself down on the queen’s bed and sees through her peignoir? Hey?—You don’t know such a fellow?—Oh, yes you do.—The Sun, that’s who! Ah, priest Simon, you thought I meant for dirty, eh?” And Yerko laughed loudly and showed the inside of his mouth right back to the pillars of his throat, in enjoyment of his joke.