The Rebel Angels

by Robertson Davies

  Of course she was better prepared for New Testament Greek than students usually are; she knew Classical Greek well, and instead of treating the N.T. stuff as a degenerate language she saw it for what it was, a splendid ruin, like a Greek statue with the nose knocked off, the arms gone, the privy parts lost, but Greek nevertheless, and splendid in decay. A language, furthermore, that had been serviceable to St. Paul and the Four Evangelists, and capable of saying mighty things.

  Why was she bothering with it? She said something about her studies in Rabelais, who knew Greek as both a priest and a humanist, at a time when the Church did not encourage Greek studies. Funny about that, I told the seminar; during the Renaissance it was people outside the universities who really dug into the rediscovered classics; even Archimedes, who put forward no disturbing ideas, like Plato, but propounded some scientific discoveries and the theory of the endless screw, was not studied by the academicians. This brought a laugh from my two ultra-modern students who had been nurtured in our permissive age, and who probably thought that the endless screw, in their own interpretation of the words, might be a path to enlightenment. But Maria knew what I was really talking about, which is that universities cannot be more universal than the people who teach, and the people who learn, within their walls. Those who can get beyond the fashionable learning of their day are few, and it looked as if she might be one of them. I believed myself to be a teacher who could guide her.

  Dangerous to make pets of students, I reminded myself. But teaching Maria was like throwing a match into oil, and the others were like wet wood I was trying to blow into something like a fire. I was sorry that Cornish was claiming so much of my energy.

  Sorry too because I had become enthusiastic about The New Aubrey. Poor Ellerman’s idea had raised a flame in me, and I wanted to fan it.

  Just a few random notes about scholarly contemporaries—that was what he had suggested. But where to begin? It is easy to find eccentrics in universities if your notion of an eccentric is simply a fellow with some odd habits. But the true eccentric, the man who stands apart from the fashionable scholarship of his day and who may be the begetter of notable scholarship in the future, is a rarer bird. These are seldom the most popular figures, because they derive their energy from a source not understood by their contemporaries. Hollier, I had cause to believe, was such a man, and I must take advantage of the special opportunity Cornish had given me to study him. But the more spectacular eccentrics, the Species Dingbaticus as I had heard students call them, were attractive to me; I love a mountebank. And in Urquhart McVarish I had been brought close to a very fine mountebank indeed.

  Not that he was short on scholarship. As a scholar in Renaissance history he had a good reputation. But he was immodest about it; he is the only man of any respectability in the scholarly world whom I had ever heard refer to himself shamelessly as ‘a great scholar’. He had once been Chairman of the Centre for Renaissance Studies and for a time it seemed as if he would gain it an international reputation. He encouraged able students to work with him, but he would not interest himself in their efforts to stand on their own feet; he used them as skilled assistants, and they saw their chances of achieving the Ph.D. degree vanishing. Taxed with this, Urky replied blithely that anybody who had studied with him could go anywhere in the world and get an academic appointment on that qualification alone. No Ph.D. would be required, and anyhow it was a silly degree which manifest fools were granted every year. To be a McVarish man was a far, far better thing. The students didn’t believe it for the best of reasons—because it was untrue. So Urky had to be deposed, and the price was that he be raised to the small, highly paid group of Distinguished Professors, too fine for administrative work. Kicked upstairs.

  In a university you cannot get rid of a tenured professor without an unholy row, and though academics love bickering they hate rows. It was widely agreed that the only way to get rid of Urky would be to murder him, and though the Dean may have toyed with that idea, he did not want to be caught. Anyhow, Urky was not a bad scholar. It was simply that he was intolerable, and for some reason that is never accepted as an excuse for getting rid of anybody. So Urky became a Distinguished Professor with light duties, a devoted secretary, and few students.

  That did not content him. He took his transformation dourly, and developed what he called an ‘awfu’scunner’ to the University; he ran it down in a jokey style that was all his own to his few favourites, who might also be called toadies, among the students. I heard a few of these scorning Cornish’s money bequest to Spook. “A million dollars,” they said disdainfully; “what is it when you’ve invested it, in these days—a couple of mediocre professors, as if we needed any more mediocre professors.” It was not hard to tell where that came from. Yes, I really must not fail to capture the essence of Urquhart McVarish.

  We were deep in October when Urky asked me to one of his parties. He gave a party every fortnight, usually for students and junior members of faculty, and there had been one famous one at which his hairdresser was the guest of honour; Urky’s hair was a quiffed and prinked wonder of silver, and there was a rumour that he wore a hair-net to bed. But I, who had long since had to admit that I possessed not a Shakespearean brow but a substantially bald head, had to be careful that Envy did not trip me up when I thought of that. This party was to include Hollier and myself, and was to have a Cornish flavour.

  Indeed it did, for Arthur Cornish was there, the only non-academic present. We assembled pretty promptly at five, for the invitation, in Urky’s elegant Italic hand, had said ‘Sherry—5 to 7’ and our university is great on punctuality. Of course it wasn’t sherry only; Scotch and gin were the favourites, but Urky liked the ‘sherry’ business, as being more elegant than cocktails.

  The apartment was a handsome one, and contained fine books on expensive shelves, and a few excellent pictures of a generally Renaissance character—Virgins and Saint Johns and a nude who looked rickety enough to be a Cranach but certainly wasn’t, and two or three nice pieces of old statuary. Be careful of Envy, I said to myself, because I like fine things, and have some, though not as good as these. There was an excellent bar on what must once have been an ambry in a small church, and a student friend was dispensing generous drinks from it. It was a splendid setting for Urky.

  There he was, in the centre of the room, wearing a smoking-jacket or a dinner-jacket or whatever it was, in a beautiful bottle-green silk. Not for Urky, as for lesser Scots, the obvious tartan jacket. He scoffed at tartars as romantic humbug, virtually unheard of until Sir Walter Scott set the Scotch tourist industry on its feet. Urky liked to play the high-born Scot. His Scots speech was high-born too; just a touch of a Highland lilt and a slight roll on some of the r’s; no hint of the Robert Burns folk speech.

  I was surprised to see Maria there. Urky had her by the arm, showing her a portrait above his mantel of a man in seventeenth-century lace cravat and a green coat the shade our host himself was wearing, whose nose was as long and whose face was as red as Urky’s own.

  “There you are, my dear, and surely a man after your own heart. My great forebear Sir Thomas Urquhart, first and still unquestionably the best translator of Rabelais. Hello, Simon, do you know Maria Theotoky? Precious on two counts, because she is a great beauty and a female Rabelaisian. They used to say that no decent woman could read Rabelais. Are you decent, Maria? I hope not.”

  “I haven’t read the Urquhart translation,” said Maria. “I stick to the French.”

  “But what you are missing! A great monument of scholarship and seventeenth-century English! And what rich neologisms! Slabberdegullion druggels, lubbardly louts, blockish grutnols, doddipol joltheads, lobdotterels, codshead loobies, ninny-hammer flycatchers, and other suchlike defamatory epithets! How on earth do we get along without them? You must read it! You must allow me to give you a copy. And is it true, Maria dear, that the thighs of a gentlewoman are always cool? Rabelais says so, and I am sure you know why he says it is so, but is it true?”


  “I doubt if Rabelais knew much about gentlewomen,” said Maria.

  “Probably not. But my ancestor did. He was a tremendous swell. Did you know that he is supposed to have died of ecstasy on hearing of the Restoration of his Sacred Majesty King Charles the Second?”

  “I might give a guess about what kind of ecstasy it was,” said Maria.

  “Oho, touché—touché. And for that you deserve a drink and perhaps you will achieve a measure of ecstasy yourself.”

  Maria turned away to the bar without waiting for Urky to steer her there. A self-possessed young person, clearly, and not impressed by Urky’s noisy, lickerish gallantry. I introduced her to Arthur Cornish, who was the stranger in this academic gathering, and he undertook to get her a drink. She asked for Campari. An unusual and rather expensive drink for a student. I took a more careful look at her clothes, although I don’t know much about such things.

  Professor Agnes Marley approached me. “You’ve heard about poor Ellerman? It won’t be long now, I’m afraid.”

  “Really? I must go to see him. I’ll go tomorrow.”

  “They won’t let him see any visitors.”

  “I’m very sorry. There was something he said to me a few weeks ago—a suggestion. I’d like to tell him that I’m acting on it.”

  “Perhaps if you spoke to his wife—?”

  “Of course. That’s what I’ll do. I think he’d like to know.”

  Arthur Cornish, and Maria with him, joined us.

  “I see that Murray Brown has been taking a swipe at Uncle Frank,” he said.

  “On what grounds?”

  “Having so much money, and leaving so much of it to the University.”

  “A million to Spook, I hear.”

  “Oh, yes. But several millions spread around over other colleges and some of the faculties.”

  “Well, what’s wrong with that?”

  “The things that are always wrong with Murray Brown. Why should some have so much when others have so little? Why should a man be allowed to choose where his money goes without regard for where money is needed? Why should the University get anything apart from what the government chooses to give it, when it throws its money around on filth and nonsense? You know Murray; the friend of the plain people.”

  “Murray Brown is what my great ancestor would have called a scurvy sneaksby, or perhaps simply a turdy-gut,” said Urky, who had joined us.

  “Better not say turdy-gut,” said Arthur. “That’s one of Murray’s beefs; he’s heard about some scientist in the University who works on human excrement, and he wants to know where the money is coming from to support such nastiness.”

  “How does he know it’s nastiness?” said Hollier.

  “He doesn’t, but he can make other people think so. He has tied it in with vivisection, which is another of his themes: torture, and now messing about with dirty things. Is this where our money is being spent? You know his line.”

  “And where has he said all this?”

  “At one of his political rallies; he’s getting to work early in preparation for the next election.”

  “He must be talking about Ozy Froats,” said Urky, with one of his sniggering laughs; “Ozy has been playing with other people’s droppings for several years. A queer way for a once great footballer to spend his time. Or is it?”

  “I thought science was what the demagogues liked,” said Agnes Marley. “They think they can discern some practicality in it. It’s usually the humanities they have their knives into.”

  “Oh, he hasn’t neglected the humanities. He says some girl has been boasting that she is a virgin, and has been carrying water in a sieve to prove it. What the hell kind of university game is that, Murray asks, with what he would probably call justifiable heat.”

  “Oh God,” said Maria; “he’s talking about me.”

  “My dear Maria,” said Urky, “what have you been up to?”

  “Just my job. I’m a teaching assistant, and one of my assignments is to lecture first-year engineers on the history of science and technology. Not easy work, because they don’t believe science has any history—it’s all here and now. So I have to make it really interesting. I was telling them about the Vestal Virgins, and how they could prove their virginity by carrying water from the Tiber in a sieve. I challenged the handful of girls in my immense class of a hundred and forty to try it, and some of them were good sports and did—and couldn’t. Big laughs. Then I carried some water about twenty paces in a sieve without spilling a drop, and when they had Oohed and Ahed at that I invited them to examine the sieves. Of course mine was greased, which proved that the Vestal Virgins had a practical understanding of colloid chemistry. It went over very well, and now they are eating out of my hand. But I suppose some of them talked about it, and this man Murray Whatever picked it up.”

  “Clever girl,” said Arthur; “but perhaps too clever.”

  “Yes,” said Agnes Marley, “the first lesson of a teacher or a student should be, don’t be too clever unless you want to be in perpetual hot water.”

  “But does it really work?” said Urky. “I’ll get a sieve from my kitchen, and we’ll try it.”

  Which he did, with a great deal of fuss, and smeared it with butter, and managed to get a very little water to stick to it, and made a mess on his carpet.

  “But of course I’m not a virgin,” he said, with more arch giggling than was really called for.

  “And you didn’t use the right grease,” said Maria. “You didn’t consider what the Vestal Virgins would have at hand. Try lanolin and perhaps you’ll prove yourself a virgin after all.”

  “No, no, I prefer to believe it is a genuine test,” said Urky. “I prefer to believe that you are really a virgin, dear Maria. Are you? You’re among friends, here. Are you a virgin?”

  This was the kind of conversation Urky loved. The bartending student gave a guffaw; he had a provincial look, and clearly thought he was seeing life. But Maria was not to be put in a corner.

  “What do you mean by virginity?” she said. “Virginity has been defined by one Canadian as having the body in the soul’s keeping.”

  “Oh, if you’re going to talk about the soul, I can’t pretend to be an authority. Father Darcourt must put us straight on that.”

  “I think the Vestals knew very well what they were doing,” I said. “Simple people demand simple proofs of things that aren’t at all simple. I think the writer you are talking about, Miss Theotoky, was defining chastity, which is a quality of the spirit; virginity is a physical technicality.”

  “Oh Simon, what a Jesuit you are,” said Urky. “You mean that a girl can have a high old time and then say, ‘But of course I am chaste because I had my spiritual fingers crossed’?”

  “Chastity isn’t a peculiarly female attribute, Urky,” said I.

  “Anyhow, I made my point with the engineers,” said Maria; “they have almost decided that science wasn’t invented the day they came to the University, and that maybe the ancients knew a thing or two in their fumbling way. They had a lot of tests, you know; they had a test for a wise man. Do you remember it, Professor McVarish?”

  “I take refuge in the scholar’s disclaimer, Maria dear; it’s not my field.”

  “If you are a wise man it is certainly your field,” said Maria; “they said a wise man could catch the wind in a net.”

  “And did he grease the net?”

  “It was a metaphor for understanding what could be felt but not seen, but of course not many people understood.”

  Hollier had been looking uncomfortable during this exchange, and now he rather laboriously changed the subject. “It’s despicable to attack Froats in that way; he’s a very brilliant man.”

  “But an eccentric,” said Urky. “The old Turd-Skinner is unquestionably an eccentric, and you know what capital a politician can make out of attacking an eccentric.”

  “A man of great brilliance,” said Hollier, “and an old friend of mine. Our work is more closely con
nected than a rabble-rouser like Murray Brown could ever understand. I suppose we are both trying to capture the wind in a net.”

  (3)

  COCKTAIL PARTIES ALWAYS spoil my appetite for dinner: I eat too many of the dainty bits. So I went directly back to my rooms after Urky’s affair, and bought a paper on my way, to see if Murray Brown’s attack on the University was still considered to be news.

  I am officially on the theological faculty at Spook but I do not live in Spook. I have rooms in Ploughwright College, which is nearby, a comparatively modern building, but not in the economical, spiteful mode of modern university architecture; my rooms are in the tower over the gate, so that I can look inward to the quadrangle of Ploughwright, and also out over a considerable stretch of our large and ragged campus.

  I have no kitchen, but I have a hot-plate and a small refrigerator in my bathroom. I made myself toast and coffee and brought out a jar of honey. Not the right thing for a man beginning to be stout, but I have not much zeal for the modern pursuit of trimness. Food helps me to think.

  Brown’s speech was reported spottily but sufficiently. I had met Murray Brown a few times during my years as a parish clergyman, before I became an academic. He was an angry man, who had turned his anger into a crusade on behalf of the poor. Thinking of the wrongs of the underprivileged, Murray Brown could become deliciously furious, say all kinds of intemperate things, attribute mean motives to anyone who disagreed with him, and dismiss as unimportant anything he did not understand. He was detested by conservatives, and he embarrassed liberals because he was a man without intellectual scope and without fixed aims, but he was popular with enough like-minded people to get himself elected to the Provincial Legislature over and over again. He always had some hot cause or other, some iniquity to expose, and he had turned his attention to the University. In his intellectually primitive way he was an able controversialist. Are we paying good money to keep fellows playing with shit and girls talking horny nonsense in classrooms? Of course we needed doctors and nurses and engineers; maybe we even needed lawyers. We needed some economists and we needed teachers. But did we need a lot of frills? Murray’s audience was sure that we did not.