The Rebel Angels

by Robertson Davies

  At last Hollier returned.

  “Clem! Dear old Clem! My dear man, how good to see you again!”

  “John—I heard you were back.”

  “And isn’t Spook delighted to see me! Haven’t I had a real Spook welcome! I’ve been brushing the frost off my habit all morning. But here I am, with my dear old friend, and charming Molly, who is going to be another dear friend.”

  “You’ve met Miss Theotoky?”

  “Darling Molly! We’ve been having a great old heart-to-heart.”

  “Well, John, you’d better come inside and talk to me. Miss T., I’m sure you want to get away.”

  Miss T. is what he calls me in semi-formality—a way-station between my true name and Maria, which he uses very seldom.

  They went up the steps into his inner room, and I trotted down the two long flights of stairs, feeling in my bones that something had gone deeply wrong. This was not going to be the wonderful term I had expected and longed for.

  (3)

  I LIKE TO BE EARLY at my work; that means being at my desk by half past nine, because academics of my kind begin late and work late. I let myself into Hollier’s outer room and breathed in a strong whiff of the stench not very clean men create when they sleep in a room with the windows closed—something like the lion’s cage at the zoo. There was Parlabane, stretched out on the sofa, fast asleep. He wore most of his clothes but his heavy monk’s robe he had used as a blanket. Like an animal, he was aware of me at once, opened his eyes, and yawned.

  “Good morning, dear Molly.”

  “Have you been here all night?”

  “The great man gave me permission to doss down here until Spook finds a room for me. I forgot to give the Bursar proper warning of my arrival. Now I must say my prayers and shave; a monk’s shave—in cold water and without soap, unless I can find some in the washroom. These austerities keep me humble.”

  He pulled on and laced a big pair of black boots, and then from a knapsack he had tucked behind the sofa he brought out a dirty bag which I suppose contained his washing things. He went out, mumbling under his breath—prayers, I assumed—and I opened the windows and gave the room a good airing.

  I suppose I had worked for about two hours, getting my papers laid out, and books arranged on the big table, and my portable typewriter plugged in, when Parlabane came back, carrying a big, scabby leather suitcase that looked as if it had been bought in a Lost Luggage shop.

  “Don’t mind me, my dear. I shall be as quiet as a mouse. I’ll just tuck my box—don’t you think ‘box’ is the best name for an old case like this?—in this corner, right out of your way.” Which he did, and settled himself again on the sofa, and began to read from a thick little black book, moving his lips but making no sound. More prayers, I supposed.

  “Excuse me, Dr. Parlabane; are you proposing to stay here for the morning?”

  “For the morning, and for the afternoon, and this evening. The Bursar has no place for me, though he is kind enough to say I may eat in Hall. If that is really kind, which my recollection of Spook food makes me doubt.”

  “But this is my workroom!”

  “It is my honour to share it with you.”

  “But you can’t! How can I possibly work with you around?”

  “The scholar’s wish for complete privacy—how well I understand! But Charity, dear Molly, Charity! Where else can I go?”

  “I’ll speak to Professor Hollier!”

  “I’d think carefully before I did that. He might tell me to go; but then there is a chance—not a bad chance—that he might tell you to go to your carrel, or whatever they call those little cupboards where graduate students work. He and I are very old friends. Friends from a time before you were born, my dear.”

  I was furious, and speechless. I left, and hung around the Library until after lunch. Then I returned, deciding that I must try again. Parlabane was on the sofa, reading a file of papers from my table.

  “Welcome, welcome dear Molly! I knew you would come back. It is not in your heart to be angry for long. With your beautiful name—Maria, the Motherhood of God—you must be filled with understanding and forgiveness. But tell me why you have been making such careful study of that renegade monk François Rabelais? I’ve been peeping into your papers, you see. Rabelais is not the kind of company I expected to find you keeping.”

  “Rabelais is one of the great misunderstood figures of the Reformation. He’s part of my special area of study.”

  How I hated myself for explaining! But Parlabane had a terrible trick of putting me on the defensive.

  “Ah, the Reformation, so called. What a fuss about very little! Was Rabelais truly one of those nasty, divisive reformers? Did he dig with the same foot as that pestilent fellow Luther?”

  “He dug with the same foot as that admirable fellow Erasmus.”

  “I see. But a dirty-minded man. And a great despiser of women, if I recollect properly, though it’s years since I read his blundering, coarse-fibred romance about the giants. But we mustn’t quarrel; we must live together in holy charity. I’ve seen dear Clem since last we talked, and he says it’s all right for me to stay. I wouldn’t fuss him about it if I were you. He seems to have great things on his mind.”

  So he’d won! I should never have left the room. He’d got to Hollier first. He was smiling a cat’s smile at me.

  “You must understand, my dear, that my case is a special one. Indeed, all my life, I’ve been a special case. But I have a solution for all our problems. Look at this room! The room of a medieval scholar if ever I saw one. Look at that object on the bookcase; alchemical—even I can see that. This is like an alchemist’s chamber in some quiet medieval university. And fully equipped! Here is the great scholar himself, Clement Hollier. And here are you, that inescapable necessity of the alchemist, his soror mystica, his scholarly girlfriend, to put it in modern terms. But what’s lacking? Of course, the famulus, the scholar’s intimate servant, devoted disciple, and unquestioning stooge. I nominate myself famulus in this little corner of the Middle Ages. You’ll be astonished at how handy I can be. Look, I’ve already rearranged the books in the bookcase, so that they make sense alphabetically.”

  Damn! I’d been meaning to do that myself. Hollier could never find what he wanted because he was so untidy. I wanted to cry. But I wouldn’t cry in front of Parlabane. He was going on.

  “I suppose this room is cleaned once a week? And by a woman Hollier has terrified so she daren’t touch or move anything? I’ll clean it every day so that it will be as clean—well, not as a new pin, but cleanish, which is the most a scholar will tolerate. Too much cleanliness is an enemy to creation, to speculative thought. And I’ll clean for you, dear Molly. I shall respect you as a famulus ought to respect his master’s soror mystica.”

  “Will you respect me enough not to snoop through my papers?”

  “Perhaps not as much as that. I like to know what’s going on. But whatever I find, dear girl, I shan’t betray you. I didn’t get where I am by blabbing all I know.”

  And where did he think he had got to? Shabby monk, his spectacles mended at the temple with electrician’s tape! The answer came at once: he had got into my special world, and had already taken much of it from me. I looked him squarely in the eye, but he was better at that game than I was, so very soon I was trotting down those winding stairs again, angry and hurt and puzzled about what I ought to do.

  Damn! Damn! Damn!

  The New Aubrey

  1

  Autumn, to me the most congenial of seasons: the University, to me the most congenial of lives. In all my years as a student and later as a university teacher I have observed that university terms tend to begin on a fine day. As I walked down the avenue of maples that leads toward the University Bookstore I was as happy as I suppose it is in my nature to be; my nature tends toward happiness, or toward enthusiastic industry, which for me is the same thing.

  Met Ellerman and one of the few men I really dislike, Urquhart McVarish
. The cancer look on poor Ellerman’s face was far beyond what it was when last I saw him.

  “You’ve retired, yet here you are, on the first day of full term, on the old stamping-ground,” said I. “I thought you’d be off to the isles of Greece or somewhere, rejoicing in your freedom.”

  Ellerman smiled wistfully, and McVarish released one of the wheezes that pass with him as laughter. “Surely you ought to know—you of all people, Father Darcourt—that the dog turns to his own vomit again, and the sow to her wallowing in the mire.” And he wheezed again with self-delight.

  Typical of McVarish: nasty to poor Ellerman, who was obviously deathly ill, and nasty to me for being a clergyman, which McVarish thinks no man in his right senses has any right to be.

  “I thought I’d like to see what the campus looks like when I am no longer a part of it,” said Ellerman. “And really, I thought I’d like to look at some young people. I’ve been used to them all my life.”

  “Serious weakness,” said Urky McVarish; “never allow yourself to become hooked on youth. Green apples give you the bellyache.”

  Wanting to see young people—I’ve observed it often in the dying. Women wanting to look at babies, and that sort of thing. Poor Ellerman. But he was going on.

  “Not just young people, Urky. Older people, too. The Univer-sity is such a splendid community, you know; every kind of creature here, and all exhibiting what they are so much more freely than if they were in business, or the law, or whatever. It ought to be recorded, you know. I’ve often thought of doing something myself, but I’m out of it now.”

  “It is being recorded,” said McVarish. “Isn’t the University paying Doyle to write its history—given her three years off all other work, a budget, secretaries, assistants, whatever her greedy historian’s heart can desire. It’ll be three heavy volumes of unilluminated crap, but who cares? It will be a history.”

  “No, no it won’t; not what I mean at all,” said Ellerman. “I mean a vagarious history with all the odd ends and scraps in it that nobody ever thinks of recording but which are the real stuff of life. What people said informally, what they did when they were not on parade, all the gossip and rumour without the necessity to prove everything.”

  “Something like Aubrey’s Brief Lives,” said I, not thinking much about it but wanting to be agreeable to Ellerman, who looked so poorly. He responded with a vigour I had not expected. He almost leapt where he stood.

  “That’s it! That’s absolutely it! Somebody like John Aubrey, who listens to everything, wonders about everything, scrawls down notes in a hurry without fussing over style. An academic magpie, a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. This university needs an Aubrey. Oh, if only I were ten years younger!”

  Poor wretch, I thought, he is clinging to the life that is ebbing away, and he thinks he could find it in the brandy of gossip.

  “What are you waiting for, Darcourt?” said McVarish. “Ellerman has described you to the life. Academic magpie; no conscience about style. You’re the very man. You sit like a raven in your tower, looking down on the whole campus. Ellerman has given you a reason for being.”

  McVarish always reminds me of the fairy-tale about the girl out of whose mouth a toad leapt whenever she spoke. He could say more nasty things in ordinary conversation than anybody I have ever known, and he could make poor innocents like Ellerman accept them as wit. Ellerman was laughing now.

  “There you are, Darcourt! You’re a made man! The New Aubrey—that’s what you must be.”

  “You could make a start with the Turd-Skinner,” said McVarish. “He must surely be the oddest fish even in this odd sea.”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Surely you do! Professor Ozias Froats.”

  “I never heard him called that.”

  “You will, Darcourt, you will. Because that’s what he does, and that’s what he gets big grants to do, and now that university money is so closely watched there may be some questions about it. Then—oh, there are dozens to choose from. But you should get on as fast as possible with Francis Cornish. You’ve heard that he died last night?”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” said Ellerman, who was particularly sorry now to hear of any death. “What collections!”

  “Accumulations, would perhaps be a better word. Great heaps of stuff and I don’t suppose he knew during his last years what he had. But I shall know. I’m his executor.”

  Ellerman was excited. “Books, pictures, manuscripts,” he said, his eyes glowing. “I suppose the University is a great inheritor?”

  “I shan’t know until I get the will. But it seems likely. And it should be a plum. A plum,” said McVarish, making the word sound very ripe and juicy in his mouth.

  “You’re the executor? Sole executor?” said Ellerman. “I hope I’ll be around to see what happens.” Poor man, he guessed it was unlikely.

  “So far as I know I’m the only one. We were very close. I’m looking forward to it,” said McVarish, and they went on their way.

  The day seemed less fine than before. Had Cornish made another will? For years I had been under the impression that I was his executor.

  (2)

  IN THE COURSE OF A FEW DAYS I knew better. I was burying Cornish, as one of the three priests in the slap-up funeral we gave him in the handsome chapel of Spook. He had been a distinguished alumnus of the College of St. John and the Holy Ghost; he was not attached to any parish church; Spook expected that he would leave it a bundle. All good reasons for doing the thing in style.

  I had liked Cornish. We shared an enthusiasm for ancient music, and I had advised him about some purchases of manuscripts in that area. But it would be foolish for me to pretend that we were intimates. He was an eccentric, and I think his sexual tastes were out of the common. He had some rum friends, one of whom was Urquhart McVarish. I had not been pleased when I got my copy of the will from the lawyers to find out that McVarish was indeed an executor, with myself, and that Clement Hollier was a third. Hollier was an understandable choice: a great medieval scholar with a world reputation as something out of the ordinary called a paleo-psychologist, which seemed to mean that by a lot of grubbing in old books and manuscripts he got close to the way people in the pre-Renaissance world really thought about themselves and the universe they knew. I had known him slightly when we were undergraduates at Spook, and we nodded when we met, but we had gone different ways. Hollier would be a good man to deal with a lot of Cornish’s stuff. But McVarish—why him?

  Well, McVarish would not have a free hand, nor would Hollier nor I, because Cornish’s will appointed us not quite as executors, but as advisers and experts in carrying out the disposals and bequests of the collections of pictures, books, and manuscripts. The real executor was Cornish’s nephew, Arthur Cornish, a young business man, reputed to be able and rich, and we should all have to act under his direction. There he sat in the front pew, upright, apparently unmoved, and every inch a rich man of business and wholly unlike his uncle, the tall, shambling, short-sighted Francis whom we were burying.

  As I sat in my stall in the chancel, I could see McVarish in the front pew, doing all the right things, standing, sitting, kneeling, and so forth, but doing them in a way that seemed to indicate that he was a great gentleman among superstitious and uncivilized people, and he must not be suspected of taking it seriously. While the Rector of Spook delivered a brief eulogy on Cornish, taking the best possible view of the departed one, McVarish’s face wore a smile that was positively mocking, as though to say that he knew of a thing or two that would spice up the eulogy beyond recognition. Not sexy, necessarily. Cornish had dealt extensively in pictures, including those of some of the best Canadian artists, and in the congregation I could see quite a few people whose throats he might be said to have cut, in a connoisseur-like way. Why had they turned up at these obsequies? The uncharitable thought crossed my mind that they might have come to be perfectly sure that Cornish was dead. Great collectors and great connoisseurs
are not always nice people. Great benefactors, however, are invariably and unquestionably nice, and Cornish had left a bundle to Spook, though Spook was not officially aware of it. But I had tipped the wink to the Rector, and the Rector was showing gratitude in the only way college recipients of benefactions can do—by praying loud and long for the dead friend.

  Quite medieval, really. However much science and educational theory and advanced thinking you pump into a college or a university, it always retains a strong hint of its medieval origins, and the fact that Spook was a New World college in a New World university made surprisingly little difference.

  The faces of the congregation, which I could see so well from my place, had an almost medieval calm upon them, as they listened to the Rector’s very respectable prose. Except, of course, for McVarish’s knowing smirk. But I could see Hollier, who had not pushed himself into the front row, though he had a right to be there, and his thin, splendid features looked hawkish and solemn. Not far from him was a girl in whom I had found much to interest me, one Maria Magdalena Theotoky, who had come the day before to join my special class in New Testament Greek. Girls who want to work on that subject are usually older and more obviously given to the scholarly life than was Maria. She was beyond doubt a great beauty, though it was beauty of a kind not everybody would notice, or like, and which I suspected did not appeal greatly to her contemporaries. A calm, transfixing face, of the kind one sees in an ikon, or a mosaic portrait—it was oval in shape; the nose was long and aquiline; if she were not careful about her front teeth it would be a hook in middle age; her hair was a true black, the real raven’s-wing colour, with blue lights in it, but no hint of the dreadful shade that comes with dye. What was Maria doing at Cornish’s funeral? It was her eyes that startled you when you looked at her, because you could see some of the white below the iris, as well as above, and when she blinked—which she did not seem to do as often as most people—the lower lid moved upward as the upper lid moved down, and that is something you rarely see. Her eyes, fixed in what may have been devotion, startled me now. She had covered her head with a loose scarf, which most of the women in the chapel had not done, because they are modern, and set no store by St. Paul’s admonition on that subject. But what was she doing there?