The Rebel Angels

by Robertson Davies

  “And is he going to stay forever?”

  “The Bursar is getting restless. He doesn’t mind me having a guest overnight, now and then, but he spoke to me about Parlabane and said he couldn’t allow a squatter in the College, and he’d refuse to let Parlabane charge meals in Hall unless he had some assurance that he could pay his bill. Which he can’t, you see. So I shall have to do something.”

  “I hope you won’t take him on as a permanent responsibility.”

  “Ah, you hope that, do you Maria? And what right have you to hope any such thing?”

  There was no answer to that one. I hadn’t expected Hollier to turn professor on me—not after the encounter on the sofa which had now become Parlabane’s bed. I had to climb down.

  “I’m sorry. But it’s not as if it were none of my business. You did say I was to work in your outer room. How can I do that with Parlabane sitting there all day knitting those interminable socks of his? And staring. He fidgets me till I can’t stand it.”

  “Be patient a little longer. I haven’t forgotten you, or the work I want you to do. Try to understand Parlabane.”

  Then he stood up, and the talk was over. As he walked away I looked upward, and in the window of Hollier’s rooms—very high up, because Spook is nothing if not Gothic in effect—I saw Parlabane’s face looking down at us. He couldn’t possibly have heard, but he was laughing, and made a waggling gesture at me with his finger, as if he were saying, “Naughty girl; naughty puss!”

  (2)

  TRY TO UNDERSTAND HIM. All right. Up the stairs I went and before he could speak I said: “Dr. Parlabane, could you have dinner with me tonight?”

  “It would be an honour, Maria. But may I ask why this sudden invitation? Do I look as if I needed feeding up?”

  “You pinched a big block of chocolate out of my briefcase yesterday. I thought you might be hungry.”

  “And so I am. The Bursar is looking sour these days whenever I appear in Hall. He suspects I shall not be able to pay my bill, and he is right. We monks learn not to be sensitive about poverty.”

  “Let’s meet downstairs at half past six.”

  I took him to a spaghetti joint that students frequent, called The Rude Plenty; he began with a hearty vegetable broth, then ate a mountain of spaghetti with meat sauce, and drank the whole of a flask of Chianti except for my single glass. He wolfed a lot of something made with custard, coconut shreds, and plum jam, and then made heavy inroads on a large piece of Gorgonzola that came to the table whole and was removed in a state of wreckage. He had two big cups of frothed coffee, and topped off with a Strega; I even stood him a fearful Italian cigar.

  He was a fast, greedy eater and a notable belcher. He talked as he ate, giving a good view of whatever was in his mouth, plying me with questions that called for extended answers.

  “What are you doing these days, Maria? That’s to say, when you are not glaring at me as I knit my innocent, monkish long socks; we monks wear ’em long, you know, in case the robe should blow aside in the wind, and show a scandalous amount of middle-aged leg.”

  “I’m getting on with the work that will eventually make me a Doctor of Philosophy.”

  “Ah, that blessed degree that stamps us for life as creatures of guaranteed intellectual worth. But what’s your special study?”

  “That’s rather complicated. I come under the general umbrella of Comparative Literature, but that’s a house of many mansions. Working with Professor Hollier I shall certainly do my thesis on something in his line.”

  “Which isn’t just what I’d call Comparative Literature. Rooting about in the kitchen-middens and trash-heaps of the Middle Ages. What was it he made his name with?”

  “A definitive study of the establishment of the Church Calendar, by Dionysius Exiguus. A lot of it had been done before, but it was Hollier who showed why Dionysius reached his conclusions—the popular belief and ancient custom that lay behind the finished work, and all that. It was what established him as a really great paleo-psychologist.”

  “Have mercy, God! Is that some new kind of shrink?”

  “You know it isn’t. It’s really digging into what people thought, in times when their thinking was a muddle of religion and folk-belief and rags of misunderstood classical learning, instead of being what it is today, which I suppose you’d have to call a muddle of materialism, and folk-belief, and rags of misunderstood scientific learning. Comp. Lit. gets mixed up with it because you have to know a lot of languages, but it spills over into the Centre for the Study of the History of Science and Technology. Hollier is cross-appointed there, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “There’s a lot of talk about establishing an Institute of Advanced Studies; he’d be very important there. It will come as soon as the university can get its hands on some money.”

  “That may not be soon. Our fatherly government is growing restless about the big sums universities consume. It’s the people’s money, dear Maria, and don’t you ever forget it. And the people, those infallible judges of value, must have what they want, and what they think they want (because the politicians tell them so) is people who can fill useful jobs. Not remote chaps like Clem Hollier, who want to dig in the past. When you’ve achieved your Ph.D., what the hell good will you be to society?”

  “That depends on what you call society. I might just manage to push away a cloud or two from what people are like now, by discovering what they’ve been at some time past.”

  “Nobody is going to like you for that, sweetie. Never disturb ignorance. Ignorance is like a rare, exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. Do you know who said that?”

  “Oscar Wilde, wasn’t it?”

  “Clever girl. It was dear, dead Oscar. By no means a fool when he didn’t pretend to be thinking, and just let his imagination run. But I thought you were doing something about Rabelais.”

  “Yes—well, I’ve got to have a thesis topic, and Hollier has put me to work to get some notion of what Rabelais’s intellectual background was.”

  “Old stuff, surely?”

  “He thinks I might find a few new things, or take a new look at some old things. The Ph.D. thesis isn’t expected to be a thunderbolt from heaven, you know.”

  “Certainly not. The world couldn’t stand so many thunderbolts. You haven’t written anything yet?”

  “I’m making preparations, I’ve got to bone up on New Testament Greek; Rabelais was very keen on it. It was a big thing in his time.”

  “Surely, with your name, you know some modern Greek?”

  “No, but I know Classical Greek pretty well. And French and Spanish and Italian and German and of course Latin—the Golden, the Silver, and the awful kind they used in the Middle Ages.”

  “You make me quite dizzy. How so many languages?”

  “My father was very great on languages. He was a Pole, and he lived quite a while in Hungary. He made it a game, when I was a child. I don’t pretend to be perfect in those languages; I can’t write them very well but I can read and speak them well enough. It’s not difficult, if you have a knack.”

  “Yes, if you have a knack.”

  “When you know two or three, a lot of others just fall into place. People are afraid of languages.”

  “But your cradle tongues are Polish and Hungarian? Any others?”

  “One or two. Not important.”

  I certainly didn’t mean to tell him which unimportant language I spoke at home, when things grew hot. I hoped I had learned a lesson from my indiscretion when I told Hollier about the bomari. And I began to fear that if I were not careful, Parlabane might get that out of me. His curiosity was of a special intensity, and he bustled me in conversation so that I was apt to say more than I wanted to. Perhaps if I took the questioning out of his hands I could escape his prying?

  Therefore—“You ask a lot of questions, but you never tell anything. Who are you, Dr. Parlabane? You’re a Canadian, aren’t you?”

  “Please call me B
rother John; I put aside all my academic pomps long ago, when I fell in the world and discovered that my only salvation lay in humility. Yes, I’m a Canadian. I’m a child of this great city, and also a child of this great university, and a child of Spook. You know why it’s called Spook?”

  “It’s the College of St. John and the Holy Ghost. Spook’s the Holy Ghost.”

  “Sometimes used as a put-down; sometimes, as I told you, affectionately. But you know the reference, surely? Mark one, verse eight: ‘I indeed have baptized you with water, but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost.’ So the college is truly an Alma Mater, a Bounteous Mother, and from one breast she gives her children the milk of knowledge and from the other the milk of salvation and good doctrine. In other words, water without which no man can live, and the Holy Ghost without which no man can live well. But the nasty little brats get Ma’s boobs so mixed up they don’t know which is which. I only discovered salvation and good doctrine after I had been brought very low in the world.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “Perhaps some day I’ll tell you.”

  “Well, you can’t expect to ask all the questions, Brother John. I’ve been told you had an exceptionally brilliant academic career.”

  “And so I did. Oh, yes indeed, I was a meteor in the world of the intellect when I still knew nothing about mankind, and nothing whatever about myself.”

  “That was the knowledge that brought you down?”

  “It was my failure to combine those two kinds of knowledge that brought me down.”

  I decided I would bounce Brother John a bit, and see if I could get something out of him beside all this sparring. “Too much intellect and too little character—was that it?”

  That did it. “That is wholly unworthy of you, Maria Magdalena Theotoky. If you were some narrow Canadian girl who had known nothing but the life of Toronto and Georgian Bay, such a remark might seem perceptive. But you have drunk at better springs than that. What do you mean by character?”

  “Guts. A good strong will to balance all the book-learning. An understanding of how many beans make five.”

  “And an understanding of how to get a good academic appointment, and then tenure, and become a full professor without ever guessing what you’re really full of, and then soar to a Distinguished Professor who can bully the President into giving you a whopping salary because otherwise you might slip away to Harvard? You don’t mean that, Maria. That’s some fool talking out of your past. You’d better corner whatever fool it is and tell him this: the kind of character you talk about is all rubbish. What really shapes and conditions and makes us is somebody only a few of us ever have the courage to face: and that is the child you once were, long before formal education ever got its claws into you—that impatient, all-demanding child who wants love and power and can’t get enough of either and who goes on raging and weeping in your spirit till at last your eyes are closed and all the fools say, ‘Doesn’t he look peaceful?’ It is those pent-up, craving children who make all the wars and all the horrors and all the art and all the beauty and discovery in life, because they are trying to achieve what lay beyond their grasp before they were five years old.”

  So—I had bounced him. “And have you found that child, Wee Jackie Parlabane?”

  “I think so. And rather a battered baby he has proved to be. But do you believe what I’ve said?”

  “Yes, I do. Hollier says the same thing, in a different way. He says that people don’t by any means all live in what we call the present; the psychic structure of modern man lurches and yaws over a span of at least ten thousand years. And everybody knows that children are primitives.”

  “Have you ever known any primitives?”

  Had I! This was a time to hold my tongue. So I nodded.

  “What’s Hollier really up to? Don’t say paleo-psychology again. Tell me in terms a simple philosopher can understand.”

  “A philosopher? Hollier is rather like Heidegger, if you want a philosopher. He tries to recover the mentality of the earliest thinkers; but not just the great thinkers—the ordinary people, some of whom didn’t hold precisely ordinary positions. Kings and priests, some of them, because they have left their mark on the history of the development of the mind, by tradition and custom and folk-belief. He just wants to find out. He wants to comprehend those earlier modes of thought without criticizing them. He’s deep in the Middle Ages because they really are middle—between the far past, and the post-Renaissance thinking of today. So he can stand in the middle and look both ways. He hunts for fossil ideas, and tries to discover something about the way the mind has functioned from them.”

  I had ordered another bottle of Chianti, and Parlabane had drunk most of it, because two glasses is my limit. He had had four Stregas, as well, and another asphyxiating cigar, but drunks and stinks are no strangers to me. He had begun to talk loudly, and sometimes talked through a belch, raising his voice as if to quell the interruption from within.

  “You know, when we were at Spook together I wouldn’t have given a plugged nickel for Hollier’s chances of being anything but a good, tenured professor. He’s come on a lot.”

  “Yes, he’s one of the Distinguished Professors you were sneering at. Not long ago, in a press interview, the President called him one of the ornaments of the university.”

  “Have mercy, God! Old Clem! A late-bloomer. And of course he’s got you.”

  “I am his student. A good student, too.”

  “Balls! You’re his soror mystica. A child could see it. Anyhow, that extremely gifted, all-desiring Wee Johnnie Parlabane can see it, long before it reaches the bleared eyes of the grown-ups. He encloses you. He engulfs you. You are completely wrapped up in him.”

  “Don’t shout so. People are looking.”

  Now he was really shouting. “ ‘Don’t shout, I can hear you perfectly. I have the Morley Phone which fits in the ear and cannot be seen. Ends deafness instantly.’—Do you remember that old advertisement? No, of course you don’t; you know too much and you aren’t old enough to remember anything.” Now Parlabane squeaked in a falsetto: “ ‘Don’t shout so; people are looking!’ Who gives a damn, you stupid twat? Let ’em look! You love him. Worse, you’re subsumed in him, and he doesn’t know it. Oh, shame on stupid Professor Hollier!”

  But he does know it! Would I have let him take me on the sofa five months ago if I wasn’t sure he knew I loved him? No! Don’t ask that question. I can’t be sure of the answer now.

  The proprietor of The Rude Plenty was hovering. I gave him a beseeching glance, and he helped me get Parlabane to his feet and toward the door. The monk was as strong as a bull, and it was a tussle. Parlabane began to sing in a very loud and surprisingly melodious voice—

  Let the world slide, let the world go,

  A fig for care and a fig for woe!

  If I can’t pay, why I can owe,

  And death makes equal the high and the low.

  At last I got him into the street, and steered him back to the front door of Spook, where the night porter, an old friend of mine, took him in charge.

  As I walked back to the subway station I thought: that’s what comes of trying to understand Parlabane; a loud scene in The Rude Plenty. Would I go on? Yes, I thought I would.

  The initiative was taken out of my hands. When I arrived at Hollier’s outer room the following morning there was a note for me, placed beside a bouquet of flowers—salvia—which had too obviously been culled from the garden outside the Rector’s Lodging. The note read:

  Dearest and Most Understanding of Created Beings:

  Sorry about last night. Some time since I had a really good swig at anything. Shall I say it will not happen again? Not with any degree of sincerity. But I must make reparation. So ask me to dinner again soon, and I shall tell you the Story of My Life, which is well worth whatever it may cost you.

  Your crawling slave,

  P.

  (3)

  TO BECOME A PH.D. you must take a few co
urses relating to your special theme before you get down to work on your thesis. I had done almost all that was necessary, but Hollier suggested that I do two courses this year, one with Professor Urquhart McVarish in Renaissance European Culture and the other in New Testament Greek with Professor the Reverend Simon Darcourt. McVarish lectured dully; his stuff was good but he was too much the scholar to make it interesting, lest somebody should accuse him of ‘popularization’. He was a fussy little man who was forever dabbing at his long red nose with a handkerchief he kept tucked in his left sleeve. Somebody told me that this was a sign that he had once been an officer in a first-class British regiment. About twenty people attended the lectures.

  Prof. the Rev. was different, a roly-poly parson, as pink as a baby, who did not lecture, but conducted seminars, in which everybody present was expected to speak up and have an opinion, or at least ask questions. There were only five of us: myself and three young men and one middle-aged man, all studying for the ministry. Two of the young men were modern and messy, long-haired and fashionably dirty; they were heading for advanced evangelical church work, and in their spare time assisted in services with rock music, where people like themselves danced away Evil, and embraced one another in tears when the show was over. They were taking the course in hopes, I think, of discovering from the original texts that Jesus was also a great dancer and guitar-player. The other young man was very High Church Anglican, and addressed Darcourt as ‘Father’ and wore a dark grey suit to which he obviously hoped, very soon, to add a clerical collar. The middle-aged man had given up his job selling insurance to become a parson, and worked like a galley-slave, because he had a wife and two children and had to get himself ordained as fast as he could. Altogether, they were not an inspiring lot. God had presumably called all four to His service, but surely in a fit of absent-mindedness or perhaps as some complicated Jewish joke.