The Rebel Angels

by Robertson Davies

  “Yes; I thought so.”

  “Yes, and undoubtedly you thought something totally wrong. I wasn’t like some of the sniffy postulants and Brothers who hated being told off by Father Sub-Prior because he had a low-comedy Yorkshire accent. I wasn’t a social snob. But I had won my place in a demanding intellectual world before I ever heard of the Mission, and the Rule said plainly: Everybody is clever enough for what God wants of him, and strong enough for what he is set to do, if not for what he would like to be. Father Prior and my confessor were always unyielding when I asked, humbly and reverently, for work that would use what was best in me, meaning my knowledge and the intelligence with which I could employ it. They could quote the Rule as well as I: You cannot seek God’s will and your own too, unless your own is perfectly confirmed to it. If it be so, there will be no need to consider it, though if it be not, there will be much need to mortify it. So they mortified me, but as they too were fallible beings they made one wrong choice and put me on the job of getting things ready for Mass, and that meant that big jugs of Communion wine were right under my hand, and after some sipping, and swigging, and topping the jugs up with water, there was a morning when I forgot myself and they found me pissed to hell in the vestry. Never drink that cheap wine on an empty stomach, Maria. I suppose I took it too lightly, and did my penances in a froward spirit. Anyhow things went from bad to worse, and I knew I was in danger of being thrown out, and the Society made it clear when a postulant was accepted that there would be no argument or explanation if that happened.

  “I could have weathered it through, but I began to be hungry for another kind of life. The Society offered a good life, but that was precisely the trouble—it was so unremittingly good. I had known another world, and I became positively sick for the existentialist gloom, the malicious joy at the misfortunes of others, and the gallows-humour that gave zest to modern intellectual life outside the monastery. I was like a child who is given nothing but the most wholesome food; my soul yearned for unwholesome trash, to keep me somehow in balance.

  “So I sneaked a letter out with a visitor who had come for a retreat, and dear Clem sent me some money, and I went over the wall.

  “Just an expression; there was no wall. But one day at recreation time I walked down the drive in a suit and a red wig out of the box of costumes the school used for Christmas theatricals. Monasteries don’t send out dogs after escapees. I am sure they were glad to be rid of me.

  “Then off with the wig and on with the robe, which I had providentially, if not quite honestly, brought with me. It smooths the path wonderfully. On the plane and back to the embraces of my Bounteous Mother, to dear old Spook.—Brraaaaaph! Excuse me if I appear to belch—Molly, may I just have the teeniest peep at that diamond you whipped out of sight so quickly?”

  “No. It’s just like any other diamond.”

  “Not in the least, my darling. How could it be like any other diamond when it is your diamond? You give it splendour; it is not in the power of any stone to give splendour to you.”

  “We’d better go, now. I have some things to do before I go home.”

  “Aha, she has a home! Beautiful Maria Magdalena of God’s Motherhood has a home! Where do you suppose it can be?”

  “You don’t need to know.”

  “She has a home and she has a diamond ring. And that ring is greatly privileged! You know old Burton—The Anatomy of Melancholy—contemporary of Shakespeare? He has something about a diamond ring that I memorized in my pre-monastery days, and which sometimes wickedly crept into my mind in Chapel; the Devil whispered it, one supposes. And it went like this: ‘A lover, in Calcagninus’ Apologues, wished with all his heart he were his mistress’s ring, to hear, embrace, see and do I know not what; O thou fool, quoth the ring, if thou wer’st in my room, thou shouldst hear, observe and see pudenda et poenitenda, that which would make thee loathe and hate her, yea, peradventure, all women for her sake.’ But the ring was a prissy fool, because it saw what the lover would have given his soul to see.”

  “Come on, Brother John, this is foolish. Let’s be on our way.”

  “No, no, not yet—you understand what I mean? There’s even a song about it.” He sang loudly, pounding out the time on the table with the handle of a knife:

  I wish I were a diamond ring

  Upon my lady’s hand,

  Upon my lady’s hand;

  So every time she wiped her arse

  I’d see the Promised Land

  I’d see the Promised Land!

  “Come on; time for us to go now.”

  “Don’t be so prim! Do you think I haven’t seen through you? You buy my story with a cheap meal and you sit there with a face like a hanging judge. And now you fuss and want to run away as if you’d never heard a dirty song in your whole life. And I bet you haven’t! I bet you don’t know a single dirty song, you stone-faced bitch—.”

  I don’t know why I did it. No, that’s wrong—I do know. My ancestry forbids me to resist a challenge. Ancestry on both sides of my family. I was suddenly furious and disgusted with Parlabane. I threw back my head and in a loud voice—and I have a really loud voice, when I need it—I sang:

  There’s a nigger in the alley with a hard-on,

  ’Cause a woman in the window has her pants down—

  and so on.

  That caused a sensation. When Parlabane sang, the people at the other tables, most of whom were students, took care not to look. Shouting a rowdy song was within their range of what was permissible. But I had been really dirty. I had used an inexcusable racist word. ‘Nigger’ brought immediate hisses and shushes, and one young man rose to his feet, as though to address a grievance meeting. In no time the proprietor was at my elbow, lifting, urging, bustling me toward the door; he only permitted me time to pay the bill as we passed the cash-desk.

  “Not come back—not come back—not you nor priest,” he said, in an angry mumble, because he hated trouble.

  So there we were, thrown out of The Rude Plenty, and as I was not drunk, though I was aroused, I thought I ought to see Parlabane back to Spook.

  “My God, Molly,” he said, as we stumbled along the street, “where did you learn a song like that?”

  “Where did Ophelia learn her dirty song?” I said; “overheard it, probably. Soldiers singing it in the courtyard as she sat at her window, knitting bedsocks for Polonius.”

  This put Shakespeare into his mind and he began to bellow, ‘Sing me a bawdy song! Sing me a bawdy song to make my eyes red,’ and kept it up, as I struggled to keep him up.

  A car passed with two of the University police in it; they hurried by with averted gaze, because trouble of any kind was the last thing they wanted to be involved in. But what had they seen? Parlabane in his robe, and me in a longish cloak, because it was a chilly autumn night, must have looked like a couple of drunken women brawling on the pavement. Suddenly he took a dislike to me, and beat at me with his fists, but I have had a little experience in fighting and gave him a sobering wipe or two. At last I pushed him through the main gate of Spook, and put him in the hands of the porter, who looked as if these goings-on were becoming too much of a good thing.

  As indeed they were.

  (2)

  NEXT MORNING I FELT SHAKY and repentant. Not hung-over, because I never drink much, but aware of having behaved like a fool. I shouldn’t have sung that song about the nigger. Where had I picked it up? At my convent school, where girls sang songs they had learned from their brothers. I have a capacious memory for what I have heard, and dirty songs and limericks never leave me, when sometimes I have to grope for sober facts I have read. But I would not be bounced by Parlabane, and I have never hesitated to take a dare; neither my Mother nor my Father, very different as they were, would have wanted me to back down in the face of a challenge.

  I got rid of the diamond ring—miserable object of female vanity and, much worse, of an unstudentlike affluence—and didn’t drive my little car to the University. Watch your step, Maria!
Parlabane had done something that had a little unhinged me; he had awakened the Maenad in me, that spirit which any woman of any character keeps well suppressed, but shakes men badly when it is revealed. The Maenads, who tore Pentheus to bloody scraps and ate him, are not dead, just sleeping. But I don’t want to join the Political Maenads, the Women’s Lib sisterhood; I avoid them just as Parlabane said he avoided the Political Gays; they make a public cause of something too deep, too important, for political, group action. My personal Maenad had escaped control, and I had wasted her terrible energy simply to get the better of a bullying, spoiled monk. Repent, Maria, and watch your step!

  When I entered Hollier’s rooms, Parlabane was not there, but Hollier was.

  “I hear that you and Brother John had a gaudy night together,” said he.

  I could not think of anything to say, so I nodded my head, feeling not more than sixteen, and as if I were being rebuked again by Tadeusz.

  “Sit down,” said Hollier; “I want to talk to you. I want to warn you against Parlabane. I know that sounds extreme, and that you are perfectly capable of looking after yourself, and the rest of that nonsense. When I told you to try to understand him I had no idea you would go so far. But I mean precisely what I say: Parlabane is not a man you should become deeply involved with. Why? In the light of the work you and I share I don’t have to explain in modern terms; very old terms are quite sufficient and exact—Parlabane is an evil man, and evil is infectious, and you mustn’t catch the infection.”

  “Isn’t that rather hard?” I said.

  “No. You understand that I’m not talking village morality, but something that truly belongs to paleo-psychology. There are evil people; they’re not common, but they exist. It takes just as much energy to be evil as it does to be good and few people have energy enough for either course. But he has. There is a destroying demon in him, and he would drag you down, and then jeer at you because you had yielded to him. Watch your step, Maria.”

  I was startled to hear him say what I had been saying to myself ever since I woke. That was Hollier—a touch of the wizard. But one can’t just bow to the wizard as if one had no mind of one’s own. Not yet, at least.

  “I think he is rather pathetic.”

  “So?”

  “He was telling me about his life.”

  “Yes, he must have it nicely polished up by now.”

  “Well, it’s not a happy story.”

  “But amusingly told, I am sure.”

  “Are you down on him because he’s Gay?”

  “He’s a sodomite, if there’s anything gay about that. But that doesn’t make him evil, necessarily. So was Oscar Wilde, and a kinder, more generous man never walked in shoe leather. Evil isn’t what one does, it’s something one is that infects everything one does. He told you the whole thing, did he?”

  “No, he didn’t. Most people when they set out on the story of their lives give you quite a passage about childhood; he began much later.”

  “Then I’ll tell you a few things. I’ve known him since we were boys; at school together, and at summer camp together. Did he tell you what happened to his face?”

  “No, and I didn’t get a chance to ask.”

  “Well, it’s not much in the telling, but much in the consequence. One summer when I suppose we were fourteen, we were at camp, and Parlabane, who was always very good with his hands, was working at a repair on a canoe. He was under the direction of one of the counsellors, and everything seemed to be in order. But he had set a pot of glue on a flame to heat it, without putting it in a pan of water: what the counsellor was doing at that moment, God knows. It burst and covered his face with the boiling stuff. He was rushed to hospital near by, and some drastic action had to be taken, and on the whole a good job was done, for he was left with a scarred face, but still a face, and his eyes didn’t suffer as much as one might have feared. I went with him, and the camp people arranged for me to stay in the hospital because I was his best friend, and they wanted him to have a friend near by. When he wasn’t in the operating-room I sat by his bed and held his hand for three days.

  “All that time he was raging with anger, because his parents didn’t come. They could have made it in a few hours, and the camp people had been in touch, but nobody appeared. On the fourth day they turned up—mousy, ineffectual Father, and his Mother, who was quite another kettle of fish. She was big in city politics—Board of Education, and then an Alderman—and a very busy woman indeed, as she explained. She had come as soon as she could, but she couldn’t stay long. She was all affection, all charm, and, as I had cause to know, a really intelligent and capable person, but she was not rich in maternal concern.

  “The way Parlabane talked to her was so dreadful that I wanted to creep out of the room, but he wouldn’t release my hand. She was his Mother, and when he was suffering what was she doing? Labouring for the public good, and unable to set it aside for the private need.

  “She took it very well. Laughed gently and said, ‘Oh, come on, Johnny, it’s bad but it isn’t the end of the world, now, is it?’

  “Then he began to cry, and because of the injuries to his eyes, that was excruciatingly painful and soon crying became screaming, coming from the little hole they had left for his mouth in all the bandaging. It was just enough to admit a feeding-tube. When he spoke it was like a child speaking from a well, muffled and indistinct but terrible in meaning.

  “The little northern hospital was heavy with summer heat, because there was no air-conditioning in the wards; the bandages must have been insupportably hot, and the wounds sore, and the sedatives sickening to feel at work. The screaming brought a doctor with a syringe and soon John screamed no more, but Mrs. Parlabane never lost her composure.

  “ ‘You’ll stay with him, won’t you, Clement?’ she said to me, ‘because I really must get back to the City.’ And away she and the biddable husband went. I noticed that he reached out and patted John’s insensible hand before he left.

  “So that was it, and after a while the bandages came off, and the face you know was seen for the first time. He was no beauty before, but now he was like a man in a red mask, which has faded with time. I am sure Toronto plastic surgeons could have done a good deal for him in the years that followed, but the Parlabane family did nothing about it.”

  “Didn’t make a fuss with the camp?”

  “The people who owned the camp were friends; they didn’t want to injure them. John thought it a great injustice.”

  “And that was what made him the way he is?”

  “In part, I suppose. Certainly it did nothing to make him otherwise. He and his Mother were cat and dog after that. He called her The Bitch Goddess, after Henry James’s Bitch Goddess Success. She was a success, in her terms. He insisted she had deserted him when he most needed her; she said to me more than once that she had seen that everything was done that could be done, and she thought he was making a great deal of a misfortune that could happen to anyone. But that’s by the way—though I suppose it throws some light on him, and on her, of course. The fact that he could not bear to tell you—though I am sure he told you in affecting terms about his other great betrayal by that egotistical catamite Henry Loewi III, the Beauty of Princeton—shows how much it affected him.

  “I hope things may look up a little for him now. I’ve managed to get a job for him and he’s away at this minute arranging about it. Appleton, who does some lecturing in Extension, has broken his hip, and even when he gets back on the job he will have to lighten his load. So I have persuaded the director of that division to take Parlabane on to finish out the year; once a week on Basic Principles in Philosophy, and twice a week on Six Major Philosophical Texts.”

  “That’s marvellous.”

  “I’m afraid he doesn’t think so. Extension means teaching at night, and most of the people in the classes are middle-aged and opinionated; it won’t be the thrill of moulding the young, which is what he likes.”

  “Rough on the young, I’d imagine.”


  “His real teaching days are over, I fear. He has a good mind—used to have a fine mind—but he rambles and blathers too much. He wants me to take him on, you know.”

  “How?”

  “Special research assistant.”

  “But I’m your research assistant!”

  “He’d be happy to supplant you. But don’t give it a thought; I won’t have it.”

  “The snake!”

  “Oh, that’s not the worst of him; that’s just his normal way of behaving. But there’s a limit to what I can, and will, do for him; I’ve got him a job, and that’s as far as it goes.”

  “I think you’ve been wonderful to him.”

  “He’s an old friend. And we don’t always choose our old friends, you know; sometimes we’re just landed with them. You know somebody for a few years, and you’re probably stuck with them for life. Sometimes you must do what you can.”

  “Well, at least he’s out of here.”

  “Don’t count on that. I’ll urge him to get a room somewhere, but he will have no campus office. He’ll be back to mooch books, and he’ll be back for you.”

  “For me?”

  “He fancies you, you know. Oh, yes; being a homosexual doesn’t matter. Just about all men need a woman in one way or another, unless they’re very strange indeed. Tormenting you refreshes him. And you shouldn’t underestimate the gratitude all men feel for women’s beauty. Men who truly don’t like flowers are very uncommon and men who don’t respond to a beautiful woman are even more uncommon. It’s not primarily sexual; it’s a lifting of the spirits beauty gives. He’ll be in to torment you, and tease you, and enrage you, but really to have a good, refreshing look at you.”

  I decided to dare greatly. “Is that why you keep me here?” I asked.

  “Partly. But mostly because you’re much the best and most intellectually sympathetic student and assistant I’ve ever had.”

  “Thank you. I’ll bring you some flowers.”

  “They’d be welcome. I never get around to buying any myself.”