Tempest Tost tst-1

by Robertson Davies

  “I can usually find some other way,” said Valentine, who did not wish to appear superior, but who was not going to promise to abuse the Salterton Little Theatre’s electrician merely to gratify Nellie’s desire for disagreeable frankness. She was already beginning to be uncomfortable with Nellie; after all, it was fully fifteen years since they had been on intimate terms. Not that the terms were so intimate even then as Nellie appeared to think. Curious that her memory could so distort a quite ordinary friendship. Valentine’s own memory was excellent.

  “I’m sorry about Solly Bridgetower,” said Mrs Forrester, “but you see how it was. When it looked as though you couldn’t come to us, during that two weeks, we were desperate, and somebody thought that Solly might direct instead. He’s at Cambridge, you know, only he’s at home just at present because his mother has been so dreadfully ill. I was going to help him. In fact, I cast the play provisionally before we asked him to direct. Of course he accepted. Then, when you found that you could come after all, we had to ask him to step down, and told all the people who had been promised parts that the final decision would be yours. That was when he said that he would be your assistant. I was against it, but we couldn’t very easily refuse. He says he’ll just be your errand boy, because he wants to learn, but I’ll believe that when I see it. He’s conceited.”

  “I thought he seemed rather nice.”

  “He’s a smart-alec. Education in England spoils so many Canadians—except Rhodes scholars, who come back and get Government jobs right away. There’s a kind of nice simplicity about a Canadian that education abroad seems to destroy. Lots of boys go through our Canadian universities and come out with the bloom still on them, but when they go abroad they always come home spoiled. Isn’t that so, Roscoe?”

  “What I always say is,” said Roscoe, “it takes all kinds to make a world. I like Solly. He’s a nice boy.”

  “Oh Roscoe, you like everybody,” said his wife.

  “Well, that’s pretty nearly true, hon.”

  The interior of St Agnes’ was, by Mrs Forrester’s standards, lacking in Taste. The personal preference shown in the matter of furniture and decoration was that of Mr Webster, for his wife had been dead for more than ten years. He liked things that were heavy, and he liked dark wood, intricately patterned wallpaper, and an atmosphere of over-furnishing which Griselda called “clutter”. He liked books and had a great many of them. He liked Persian and Chinese carpets, and his rooms were silent with them. He liked leather, and there was plenty of it in his house, on chairs, on fenders, on books and even on lampshades. The house was dark and somewhat oppressive in atmosphere, but it was as he desired it. Griselda had been permitted to decorate a combined bedroom and sitting-room for herself in her own taste. Freddy’s bedroom was austere, for she had cleared the nursery pictures of kittens and rabbits out of it, and had added little save a bookcase which contained her favourite works on wine and the liturgy of the Church of England as it might be if the revision of the Prayer Book could be recalled. The only picture she hung in her room was a colour print of The Feeding of the Infant Bacchus, by Poussin; the podgy godling, swigging at his bowl, was not her ideal of a wine-taster; nevertheless, something in the picture appealed to her deeply. At the head of her bed hung a little ivory crucifix.

  No, Mrs Forrester would have found St Agnes’ sadly lacking in Taste, and she would have thought it a pity, for obviously a great deal of money had been spent to make it as it was.

  Most of the people who thought about the matter at all imagined that the Websters dined in great state every night. But on this evening, after the successful assault upon The Shed by the Little Theatre, Mr Webster and his daughters were eating sandwiches and drinking coffee from a thermos in the large, gloomy dining-room. It was the servants’ night out. Mr Webster rather enjoyed these picnics.

  “The Little Theatre people were here this afternoon, Daddy,” said Griselda.

  “Oh. Did they approve of my garden?”

  “Mphm. They’d like to do the play on the upper lawn, against the background of big trees.”

  “Well, they’ll do as little harm there as anywhere. What is this bloody stuff?”

  “Some kind of fish goo.”

  “Aren’t there any peanut butter sandwiches?”

  “Yes, but I think they’re meant for us. You aren’t supposed to like peanut butter. It isn’t a masculine taste.”

  “I like it. Give me one.”

  “Daddy,” said Freddy; “don’t you think you’d better say a word to Tom about keeping them out of The Shed? All the valuable tools are in there.”

  “I don’t suppose they’ll take them,” said Mr Webster.

  “No, but they might spoil them, messing about. Anyhow, you know how Tom hates people in The Shed.”

  “Tom will have to get used to it.”

  “Freddy was rude to Mrs Forrester this afternoon,” said Griselda.

  “Good,” said her father.

  “Don’t encourage her, Daddy. She’s above herself.”

  “She was rude to me first,” said Freddy; “I get sick of being treated like a baby. I’ve got just as much brains as you, Gristle, and I ought to be treated with as much respect.”

  “When you are older, dear,” said Griselda, with a maddening air of maturity.

  “Nuts,” retorted Freddy, rudely; “there’s only four years between us. If I had a great big bosom like yours, and a fanny like a bumblebee, people would swarm over me just the way they do over you.”

  “If you are waiting for that, I fear that you will wait indeed,” said Griselda. “It’s plain now that you are the stringy type. Your secondary sexual characteristics, if and when they come, will be poor things at best.”

  “Children, don’t speak so coarsely,” said Mr Webster, who had a vague notion that some supervision should be exercised over his daughters’ speech, and that a line should be drawn, but never knew quite when to draw it. He had allowed his daughters to use his library without restraint, and nothing is more fatal to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library.

  The play is going to be directed by a woman,” said Griselda. “She looks very sensible and doesn’t say much, which is odd, because she seems to be a friend of Mrs Forrester’s. A Miss Valentine Rich. Lived here ages ago. She’s been working in professional theatre in the States. Do you know anything about her, Daddy?”

  “If you ever looked inside a newspaper, Gristle,” said Freddy, “you’d know that she is quite famous in a modest sort of way. She’s a good actress. She doesn’t often play leads, but she gets feature billing, if you know what that is, which I doubt. And she directs. She’s directed some awfully good stuff. She did a performance of The White Divell two years ago, and the critics all said the direction was fine, even if the actors were rotten and it flopped.”

  “If she’s so good, why weren’t the actors good?”

  “Perhaps she can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear; we shall see on our own upper lawn, quite soon. Anyway Americans can’t act that sort of thing. They are utterly without flair.” Freddy grandly dismissed the American stage.

  “I think I’ve heard of her,” said Mr Webster. “Her grandfather died about six weeks ago. Old Dr Savage. He was quite a bigwig at Waverley a long time ago. He wasn’t seen much during recent years.”

  “She’s come back to sell up his things,” said Freddy. “She is his heir. There’ll probably be an auction. Do you suppose it will bring in much, Daddy?”

  “Impossible to tell. Not likely. Professors rarely have interesting furniture. She might get a few thousands, if the sale went well.”

  “He probably had a lot of interesting books,” said Freddy; “if she has an auction may I go, Daddy? I mean, may I have a little money, just in case something interesting turned up?”

  “You have the instincts of a packrat, Freddy,” said Griselda. “What do you want with dirty old books out of a dead professor’s house? Aren’t there enough books here already? And how do
you know so much about Miss Rich?”

  “My eyes are turned outward, toward the world,” said Freddy. “Yours are turned inward, toward yourself. In the innermost chamber of your spirit, Gristle, you kneel in constant adoration before a mirror.”

  Griselda smiled lazily, and threw a fish sandwich at her sister. When this simple meal was finished, the Webster family dispersed to entertain itself. Mr Webster went to his library, and sat down to rummage through some volumes of the Champlain Society’s publications. This was his favourite reading. Unlike many men of wealth in Canada he had never sought gold in the wilderness or lived an explorer’s life among guides and Indians; he did not like to hunt or fish. But exploration in an armchair was his pastime, and accounts of the hardships of others were full of interest to him.

  For a time Freddy shared the room with him, quietly taking down one book after another until she had gleaned all the information the library contained about the late Dr Adam Savage. It was not much; he was named in a History of Waverley as a professor of Greek, as a contemporary of a number of other professors who, in their turn, were named as contemporaries of his. It is a habit of the writers of such histories to list the names of dead pedagogues as Homer listed the ships, hoping for glory of sound rather than for the illumination of their audience. In the memoirs of a politician who had been a Waverley man, Dr Savage was referred to as “grand”, but this was unconvincing; to politicians any teacher whom they have subsequently surpassed in notoriety is likely to appear grand. Otherwise there was nothing. Dr Savage was dead indeed. Freddy bade her father goodnight, and went to her own room.

  She removed her clothes and surveyed herself in a mirror. Griselda’s remark about her figure rankled in her memory. “I look just like a boy,” she thought. This was untrue, and if she had been more intimately acquainted with boys she would have known it. “Gristle is right; I’m stringy,” thought she. This also was untrue. Slim she undoubtedly was, and breastless and economical in the rear, but she was not stringy, and there was promise of better things to come. But Freddy was not in a mood to be satisfied with herself, and as she put on her pyjamas and jumped into bed she wondered what Daddy would say if she suggested that in a year or two she should become a postulant in an Anglican nunnery. Somewhat illogically she broke off this train of reflection to read the large illustrated Rabelais which she had abstracted from the library. She found it very good fun, and made a mental list of several abusive terms to use in her next quarrel with Griselda.

  Her older sister was likewise preparing for bed. There were four young men in Salterton all of whom were wishing, that evening, that they could take Griselda Webster out. But as none of them knew her very well, and as her beauty and her father’s wealth frightened them, and as they feared that they might be rebuffed if they called her, and as they were convinced that such a girl must have all her evenings spoken for months in advance, none of them had done anything about it, and Griselda, at eight o’clock, was in the bathtub.

  Long baths were one of her indulgences. She liked to lie in a scented tub, refreshing the hot water from time to time, smoking cigarettes, eating chocolates, and reading. She liked romances of two kinds; if she were not reading Anthony Trollope, whose slow, common-sense stories, and whose staid, common-sense lovers she greatly admired, she liked spicy tales of the type which usually appear in paper-bound copies, in which bishops are forced to visit nudist camps in their underwear, in which men are changed into women, in which bachelors are surprised in innocent but compromising situations with beautiful girls. Hers was a simple but somewhat ribald mind.

  She shifted her hips so that the warm water swept over her stomach, which had grown a little chilly. She prodded a chocolate clinically, and as it appeared to be a soft centre she popped it into her mouth. She turned a page of The Vicar of Bullhampton. Peace settled upon St Agnes’ for the night.

  At five minutes to six o’clock Hector Mackilwraith left the YMCA and walked briskly toward the Snak Shak. This restaurant, in spite of its name, was pretentious, and appealed to the students of Waverley by a display of unnecessary electricity, unceasing popular music played by a machine which lit up like a baboon’s rump with red, blue and green lights, and by quaintly scholarly touches in its decoration. One of these was a wall-painting of a goggle-eyed gnome, just identifiable as Shakespeare’s Puck, which appeared over the soda fountain and food counter; from the mouth of the gnome emerged a balloon in which the words “Lord, what foods these morsels be” were written in Old English lettering. The Snak Shak was not elegant or restful, but it was fairly clean, and it was possible to eat a three-course dinner there for sixty-five cents if you bought meal tickets by the ten dollar book. Hector was one of its most faithful supporters.

  A man enters a familiar building in quite a different manner from that which he shows when going to a new place. Hector’s steps took him to the door of the Snak Shak so neatly that he was able to seize the handle and enter without losing momentum. He walked to his accustomed stall, at the farthest possible distance from the baboon-rump music-box, hung up his raincoat and hat, and sat down to read his newspaper. In time his accustomed waitress—she had been with the Snak Shak for almost three months—came to him and greeted him with the friendliness which she reserved for “regulars” who never “tried to get fresh”.

  “G’devening,” said she. “Terrible out, eh?”

  “Yes. A wet night.”

  “Yeah. Terrible. Juice or soup?”

  “The mixed vegetable juice, please.”

  “Yeah. And then?”

  “Hm. The chicken a la king?”

  “I’ll tell you—not so good tonight. The hamburger’s good.”

  “All right.”

  “Heavy on the onions as usual, eh?”

  “Thank you. Yes.”

  “What pie?”

  The coconut chiffon.”

  “I was bettin’ with myself you’d say that. You got a sweet tooth, y’know that?”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Yeah. And why not? You’re not so fat. What’s your beverage?”

  “Tea, please. With two teabags.”

  “OK. Right away.”

  Hector turned once again to his paper. He was usually a methodical reader, taking in the world news, the local news, and the editorials, in that order, and then glancing briefly at the rest. He always finished by reading all the comic strips; he did not particularly enjoy them, and persuaded himself that he read them only in order to know what his pupils were reading; but the fact was that they had become an addiction, of which he was rather ashamed.

  Tonight his reading progressed slowly. He read the same report twice without realizing it, for his mind was elsewhere. Hector was debating a weighty matter within himself. He was trying to make up his mind whether he should ask for a part in The Tempest.

  To many people, such problems are simple. If they want something they set to work to get it, and if they do not want it they leave it alone. But Hector was a schoolteacher, and a teacher of mathematics at that, and he prided himself upon the orderliness of his thinking. He was as diligent as any Jesuit at arranging the arguments in every case under Pro and Contra and examining them thoroughly. When at last he recognized what was troubling him he folded his paper neatly and laid it in the seat by him, and drew out his black notebook, a book feared by hundreds of pupils. On a clean page he wrote his headings, P and C, and drew a line down the middle. Quickly, neatly—for this was his accustomed way of making up his mind, even upon such matters as the respective merits of two Chinese laundries—he wrote as follows:

  PC

  HM Been treasurer Little Theatre HM teacher—do nothing foolish

  6 yrs—served LT well—deserves

  well of LTCouldn’t take part of lover, clown

  or immoral person—plays full of

  HM Probably as gd an actor as these—Shakes often vulgar

  most of LT crowd

  Heavy demands on time—do

  Feel need of au
gmented social nothing to forfeit respect of pupils,

  life—all work no play, etc. have colleagues, etc.—not in position

  enough money to take place with to entertain—Invading field of

  best of LTEnglish Dept. ?—remember

  specialist certificate in maths

  Be fun to wear costume, false

  whiskers, etc.—Shakes v. cultural

  He considered the page before him. The waitress brought his meal, all on one tray, and he drank his mixed vegetable juice absently, as he pondered. He was deep in his problem as he attacked his hamburger and vegetables, but he reflected momentarily that with onions he should have ordered a glass of milk, to kill the smell on his breath; still, he was not going anywhere that evening, and there was no need to consider himself; he liked the smell of onion. But he pulled himself up sharply: that was slovenly thinking and slovenly living; a gentleman, his mother had often said, was a man who used a butter knife even when alone. A slovenly action, thrice repeated, has become a habit. He called the waitress and ordered the milk. To thine own self be true, etc.; Shakes.

  The problem gnawed. Usually either the Pro or the Contra column was markedly longer or weaker than the other; in this matter they were pretty evenly matched. From a folder in his inner pocket he drew a letter, and re-read it, as he had done twice before that day.

  GOVERNMENT OF ONTARIO

  DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

  Dear Hec:

  Just a line to let you know that you are going to be asked to be one of the Revision Board in Maths this summer—to head it up, in fact. The list has not been finalized by the Deputy, but it won’t be changed now. You know what this means. You’ll be Head Examiner in Maths next year, or the year after. And that means you can have a Department job if you want it, eh? Your friends here can fix it if you put up a good show on the Revision. Remember what Churchill says; Give us the tools and we’ll finalize the commitment. So long Hec, old boy.