A Mixture of Frailties tst-3

by Robertson Davies

  “As it so happens, it was. But let’s forget that; I don’t want to talk about those old dead-beats now.”

  “They weren’t dead-beats.”

  “Now Monny; it was before you ever came to the plant. How do you know?”

  “Some of them were Dad’s friends. That’s how I know.”

  “Be reasonable. Can I run my department by letting fellows get away with murder, on the chance that they’re friends of somebody in another department, who may have a daughter that I’ll get to know some day? Why, I didn’t even know your Dad then. And I won’t pretend it would have made any difference, if I had.”

  “Oh? My Dad’s an old dead-beat, too, I suppose?”

  “Say, what are we fighting about, anyway?”

  “We’re not fighting. But I just can’t stand the way you brush aside everybody that hasn’t got ahead as fast as you have. They’re human, too, you know. I know them, and Dad’s one of them. They haven’t all had your chances. Dad’s been working since he was sixteen; work’s all he’s ever known—”

  “Sure. He’s told me about it.”

  “And just what do you mean by that?”

  “That’s your Dad’s favourite routine. Work at sixteen. Work ever since. Never known anything but work. Excuses everything, I suppose.”

  “Excuses what, may I ask?”

  “Oh, nothing. Forget it.”

  “No, I won’t forget it. Come on, George. What does it excuse? You can’t hint like that about my Dad and then just brush it off.—What are you laughing at?”

  “I’m laughing at you, Monny. You know, you ought to make a fine singer. You’ve got the temperament.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “You’re what’s called a romantic. You see everything in full Technicolor all the time. Feelings before facts, that’s you. But it’s time somebody knocked some sense into your head.”

  “Go on.”

  “You swallow all that stuff about your Dad. Fine. Every kid believes what his father tells him, and so he should, but there’s got to be a day when he makes his own judgement. Your Dad’s okay, I guess; I don’t know him very well. But the reason he’s still pushing a broom here in the plant is simply because he can’t do anything better. There’s no disgrace in it. But let’s not say it’s because he’s had a raw deal, eh? He’s had the best deal he could get from life. Lots of fellows started even with him. One of them was Thurston, the plant manager—”

  “Who climbed and clawed and lickspittled and backstabbed his way to the top. Your hero, I suppose. A realist.”

  “Now Monny, don’t go in for that stuff about everybody who’s a success being a bastard. That’s for failures of sixty; not for kids of twenty.”

  “My Dad, George Medwall, is not a failure.”

  “Monny, you’re crazy. I wasn’t talking about your Dad. But I will, as you seem to have him on the brain. If your Dad and your Mother are your ideals in life, don’t take this money they’re offering you to go away and study; stay right where you are. You’ve got all you want in life; stick with it.”

  “You leave my family out of this! You talk like that awful old Miss Pottinger; you’d think she found me frozen to the bottom of a garbage can after a long winter. I’m proud of my family. Proud!”

  “Sure; sure.”

  “And don’t treat me like a fool. Don’t take that soothing tone. You make me sick, with your superior ways. What have you got to be superior about?”

  “Monny, this doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Yes it does. Now let me tell you something, and don’t ever forget it, George, because I mean every word. If there’s one thing I hate in this world, it’s ingratitude and disloyalty. And nothing, absolutely nothing, is going to make me disloyal and ungrateful. This sudden good luck isn’t going to make a fool of me.”

  “Nothing could make a fool of you, Monny. But don’t call it luck. People only get chances if they’re ready for them. It’s not luck. It’s character.”

  “Loyalty’s character, and so is decency. So don’t talk realism to me if it just means being sniffy about my family and friends. I know them a lot better than you do. What makes you think you have a right to talk to me like this?”

  Here was George’s golden opening, but his realism did not extend far enough to reveal it to him. So he took it as a rebuke, and they walked the length of the boiler building in uneasy silence. George did not know what he should do, but he decided that it might help if he ate a small—a very small—portion of crow.

  “I guess I’ve said too much. If you want to disinvite me to your party, Monny, go ahead.”

  “If my family gives you such a pain, perhaps that would be best,” said Monica, hoping furiously that he would urge her to relent. But George had a terrible trick of believing that people always meant what they said. And at this unlucky moment, the one o’clock whistle blew.

  “I guess I’d better say good-bye, then,” said George; “since I’m not to see you tomorrow night.”

  “Good-bye, George,” said Monica, giving him her hand; “and lots of luck.”

  And thus she parted from the only man whom she had ever been disposed to consider as a suitor. Though George was grieved, he did his afternoon’s work with his accustomed thoroughness, but Monica spoiled several important sheets of figures, and if she had not been leaving anyway her boss would have spoken sharply to her.

  2

  At supper that night, Mrs Gall asked Monica, “bolt outright” as she herself would have described it, whether George Medwall was to be expected at the farewell party. When Monica said that he would not be there, and let it be thought that she had decided not to ask him, Ma Gall expressed great satisfaction.

  “Glad you come to your senses at last about that fella,” said she. “Now you’re going away is a good time to break off with him. I never had any time for him myself, and your Dad’ll back me up on that.”

  “Foreman at twenty-eight,” said Mr Gall. “Gone up like the rocket; he’ll come down like the stick.”

  They continued their discussion of George for some time, congratulating their daughter on her astuteness in having seen through him—a fellow who set himself up to give lip to men old enough to be his father, and one who, by accepting a foreman’s job, had automatically removed himself from the jurisdiction of the union. Mr Gall was a great partisan of the union, which was a very quiet and conservative affair at the CA&A, but which he liked to think of as a bulwark against unimaginable tyrannies. George, being outside the union, was certainly not to be trusted; he had lined himself up with the bosses. Mr Gall knew all of these bosses personally, and was known by them, and on the human level, so to speak, he got on well with them and even liked them: but in another compartment of his mind they figured as faceless, bowelless, jackbooted tyrants, and he was pledged to thwart them in every possible way. George was on the wrong side of the fence.

  For Mrs Gall, George summed up what she most feared in a young man who might become a son-in-law. He was not a Thirteener; he was not even a church-goer and felt no shame about saying so. He did not drink, he saved his money, and he was civil; she gave him all that. But there was in him a quality of ambition which disquieted her; it prevented him from being what she called likable. Furthermore, it had been clear during his two or three brief visits to the house that he thought of her only as Monica’s mother, and Mrs Gall thought of herself very much as a Character, with a capital letter. It was as a Character that she liked to meet the world, and young people especially.

  Monica had heard all that she could bear about George’s shortcomings by the time supper was over, so she quickly washed the dishes—it was her night—and got out of the house, saying that she was going to Aunt Ellen’s for a while. All the way there she reproached herself for having managed her talk with George so badly, and thought of clever defences of his character which she could have opposed to her parents’ criticism—if she had dared. But it is never easy for children to defend their friends against disapproving
parents.

  Why had she flown out at George, turning everything he said to bitterness? It was not a lovers’ quarrel, for she and George were certainly not lovers. He had never even kissed her, though once or twice it had been a near thing. If she had known it, George’s realism was of the sort which says that a fellow does not kiss a girl unless he is serious about her; seriousness means an engagement, and he would not be engaged until he had enough money saved to marry; to kiss a girl to whom he could not offer marriage would be to trifle with her, not merely emotionally, but economically, and George’s whole moral system was rooted in his conception of economics. But George and Monica worked upon each other as only lovers are supposed to do; she had more than once detected beneath his words a criticism of her family, and that she would not tolerate.

  It was her old problem of wanting to have her cake and eat it. She felt, and despised herself for feeling, critical of her father and mother, of her older sister Alice, of Pastor and Mrs Beamis and their son, Wesley, of the whole Thirteener connection, for everything about them ran contrary to her great dream of life. While it had remained a dream, impossible of realization, she had been able to keep that criticism in its place. She had prayed for strength against it, and now and then her prayer seemed to be answered. But this Bridgetower Trust business had upset her whole life. It had suddenly brought the dream out of the realm of the utterly impossible into the realm of the remotely possible. That afternoon with Sir Benedict Domdaniel had been at once the most elevating and releasing experience of her life, and at the same time ruinous to the balance which she had established between dream and reality. Since then criticism of her family and her circumstances had raged within her, and when George had hinted at what was so tumultuously present in her mind she had been unable to keep her head. It was as though he had read her intolerable, inadmissible thoughts, and dared to share them.

  She would get advice from Aunt Ellen. After all, Aunt Ellen was responsible for much that was wrong with her.

  Aunt Ellen was not at home, and she let herself into the little stucco cottage with the key which Aunt Ellen had given her years ago, when she was twelve. The tiny living-room was as neat as such a cluttered room could be. Monica switched on the lamp with the shade of pleated rose silk, and went at once to the bookshelves, from which she took a large, worn volume, and settled herself on the sofa with it.

  Aunt Ellen’s house, to anyone less accustomed to it than Monica, spoke all that could be known about Miss Ellen Gall. She was Mr Gall’s older sister, and in her younger days had been considered a “high-flyer” by many who knew her. She had been a milliner, during the last era in which such work was done in individual shops, at Ogilvie’s, which in those remote days had been an important “ladies’ ready-to-wear” in Salterton. She still sold hats there, though she no longer made them; indeed, for many years she had been forelady of Ogilvie’s hat department. From a pretty girl she had grown into a pretty woman, and latterly into a woman almost old, but still soft and pleasing, and very ready to smile. Her house, with all its odds and ends, was the house of a pretty woman.

  But Ellen Gall had had a soul above hats, devoted to them as she was. She had played the piano with facility, and as the Galls had been Baptists before Mr Gall and his wife took up with the Thirteeners, Ellen had found herself organist and leader of the choir at the smallest and least important of Salterton’s Baptist churches. She had never fully mastered the instrument, and she still used the pedals sparingly and tentatively, but she had played the organ, almost every Sunday, for more than twenty-five years. What she played was the piano music which she thought suitable to solemn occasions, and with an occasional gentle kick at the tonic or the dominant in the pedals she managed to the complete satisfaction of the church, which did not, by the way, pay her anything for this service. She had, at various times, given lessons in playing the piano, at fifty cents for a half-hour. But of late, when people had taken up the fad of Conservatory examinations and did not care for the sweetly pretty drawing-room music she liked, she had had no new pupils.

  There are great musicians in the world who do not live in rooms which speak so decisively of a life given to music as the living-room of Miss Ellen Gall. There was no picture which was not musical in theme. Over the piano hung a collotype of an extremely artistic girl with a birdsnest of dark hair, playing the ‘cello to a rapt old man with a white beard; it was called Träumerei. Over the bookcase was a picture of Beethoven, much handsomer than life, conducting the Rasumovsky quartet with great spirit. A little plaster bust with a broken nose, said to be Mendelssohn, sat on top of the rosewood upright piano. And everywhere on the walls were little pictures of opera singers, cut out of magazines and framed.

  There was only one picture without musical significance in the room, and that was of a middle-aged man, somewhat bald, wearing rimless pince-nez. He had been Miss Ellen’s fiancé, a high school teacher, and a man of great cultivation, for he had once had a poem printed in Saturday Night. They had been engaged for many years, waiting for his mother to die; it was agreed between them that their marriage would be too great a blow for the old lady to sustain, and they had considerately spared her. But when, at last, she did die, the high school teacher took a chill a few weeks later, and himself died of consumption the following spring. He had made Miss Ellen his heir, and she had moved his books and all his furniture into her house. But he had made her a legacy of something much greater; he had left her with the consciousness of having been loved deeply and gratefully (if not very adventurously), and this romance had sweetened Miss Ellen’s life as many a marriage has failed to do. In her crowded, fusty little house she lived with her own kind of music, and with memories which made up even for the obvious decline of Ogilvie’s.

  The book which Monica took down was The Victor Book of the Opera, which the gramophone company had produced in 1917 to demonstrate the wonders of opera to a public which knew little of that art form—and also to let it be known what recordings of opera were available. Most of the singers whose pictures appeared in it, with elaborate coiffures, or richly whiskered, were dead; the costumes in which they were represented might appear, to a modern taste, to be funny and unbecoming. But to Monica, as to Aunt Ellen, it was still the bible of a great art with which they had no direct connection, and at which they dimly guessed. They listened to the Saturday afternoon broadcasts from the Metropolitan, of course, but in the theatre of their minds it was these dead ones of the past who appeared—Nordica, Emma Eames, Scotti, Caruso, and the brothers de Reske; from the fruity voice which served as guide to the broadcasts they heard of new singers, and new costumes and settings, but these never had the reality of the pictures in the book. This was the key to a great, glorious, foreign world; but it was a key which unlocked, not the door, but a spy-hole in it. And now, breathtakingly, the Bridgetower Trust seemed to have opened the door itself.

  It was very like—well, rather like—another book in Aunt Ellen’s library, which she and Monica had both read with deep enjoyment more than once. This was The First Violin, by Jessie Fothergill; in it, a humble English girl with a lovely voice was engaged as companion to a wealthy old lady who took her to Germany to study; and there she had learned to sing from the magnetic—but daemonic and sardonic—von Francius, and had engaged in a long and sweetly agonizing romance with one Courvoisier, who was first violin in the orchestra, a man of mystery, and, in the end (for this was an English novel and such a denouement was inevitable) had proved to be a German nobleman, disguised as a musician for reasons highly creditable to himself and shaming to everybody else. It all took place in the real Germany, of course, the Germany before the end of the century, when Germans were terribly musical and cultured and even more romantic than the French. Domdaniel would do very well as von Francius, though he was rather too affable for a genuinely daemonic genius, and showed quite ordinary braces when he took off his coat. And who was to be the First Violin; who was to be Courvoisier?

  It was awful to admit the thought,
but how would it be possible to bring Courvoisier home to meet Ma? In the book he seemed to be a Catholic; wasn’t there some mention of a chapel in his ancestral Schloss? No Protestant would want a church right in the house. Ma would simply fly right off the handle at the thought of a Catholic; she might even greet Courvoisier by singing one of those Orange songs she remembered from her childhood—

  Up the long ladder

  And down the short rope;

  Hurrah for King Billy,

  To Aitch with the Pope!

  Ma always sang “To Aitch”, with an arch look, for a Thirteener would not use the word itself; but somehow that only made it worse. Ma and Pa were wonderful, of course. They had given her everything, except music. That had come entirely from Aunt Ellen. The Galls had never been able to afford a piano, though they had somehow afforded a succession of second-hand cars. But as Ellen had a piano, and obviously didn’t need a car, what was the odds? If Monny wanted a piano, she could go to Ellen’s. She owed everything to Ma and Pa, and if only the Bridgetower Trust had not suddenly disorganized her life she need never have faced the problem of confronting them with Courvoisier, and Courvoisier with them. But now this problem, and everything that went with it, possessed her, and made her quarrel with George, who was the only thing even remotely like Courvoisier on the horizon.

  Girls in novels never seemed to have parents except when they were of some use in the plot, and then they were either picturesque or funny. The Galls were neither; they were oppressively real and many-faceted. The girl in The First Violin was a vicar’s daughter, which was considered very humble by the other people in the book, but was not nearly so humble as being the daughter of one of the maintenance staff at the Glue Works. The only creature remotely like a vicar whom Monica had met was Dean Knapp, to whom she had taken an unreasonable dislike—not because of anything he had done or said, but because Miss Pottinger had hissed at her that she must address him as “Mr Dean” and not, as she had supposed proper, as “Reverend Knapp”. A vicar’s daughter would have known that. And the vicar and his wife in the novel had had the good sense to keep out of the story.