If I thought myself in love with Maria before Christmas, I was agonizingly certain of it by the beginning of the New Year. I do not use the word ‘agonizingly’ without consideration; I was a man pulled apart. My diurnal man could come to terms with his situation; so long as the sun was in the sky I could bring reason to bear on my position, but as soon as night fell—and our nights are long in January—my nocturnal man took over and I was worse off than any schoolboy mooning over his first girl.
Worse, because I knew more, had a broader range of feeling to plague me, had seen more of the world, and knew what happens to a professor who falls in love with a student. Young love is supposed to be absorbing and intense and so I know it to be; as a youth I do not think I was ever out of love for more than a week at a time. But love is expected of the young. The glassy eye, the abstracted manner, the heavy sighs are sympathetically observed and indulgently interpreted by the world. But a man of forty-five has other fish to fry. He is thought to have dealt with that side of his nature, and to be settled in his role as husband and father, or satisfied bachelor, or philanderer, or homosexual, or whatever it may be, and to have his mind on other things. But love as I was experiencing it is a mighty consumer of energy and time; it is the primary emotion in the light of which all else is felt, and at my age it is intensified by a full twenty-five years of varied experience of the world, which gives it strength but does not soften it with philosophy or common sense.
I was like a man with a devouring disease, of which he cannot complain and for which he must expect no sympathy.
That dinner party on Boxing Day had thrown my whole emotional and intellectual life out of kilter. What was Maria’s mother telling me when she read my fortune in the Tarot? Was she warning me off, with her talk of the Queen of Rods, and a difficult love affair with a dark woman? Had she guessed something about me and Maria? Had Maria guessed something from my manner, and told her mother? Impossible; I had surely been discreet. Anyhow, what right had I to think that the old woman was faking? She appeared to be a charlatan if I compared her with other Rosedale mothers—Hollier’s, for instance, from whom nothing extraordinary was ever to be expected—but Madame Laoutaro was a phuri dai and not accountable in those terms. Nothing of that extraordinary evening was in the common run of my experience, and something deep inside me gave assurance that it was not just a night out with some displaced Gypsies, but an encounter of primordial weight and significance.
Not merely my own response to it, but Hollier’s, assured me that I had been living in a mode of feeling quite different from anything I had ever known. Hollier’s fortune was a dark one, and the intensity with which the phuri dai read his cards and he listened, had made me fear that something would be said which might better be left unsaid. If she were faking, she would certainly not have told him so much that was ominous. It is true that a Great Trump came to the rescue of both of us, but in Hollier’s case that was not until he had made a second choice. No, her work with the Tarot did not smell of charlatanism; like her necklace of Maria Theresa thalers, it was from a different world, but the ring was that of real gold.
So where did that leave me? With a forecast of a love affair in which somebody was to make a difficulty, and which would end happily, though I was to know both a loss and a gain. A love affair I most certainly had.
What an evening that had been! Every detail of it was clear to my mind, even to the queer garlicky aftertaste of the coffee. Clearest was Maria’s kiss. Would I ever kiss her again? Not, I was determined, unless I kissed her as an accepted lover.
To think of her kiss and to make my resolve at night had a fine romantic flourish about it: the same thoughts in the morning filled me with something like terror. It was humiliating to face the fact that my love had a hot head and cold feet. But that was the way of it; I wanted the sweets of love but I shrank from the responsibilities of love, and whatever the rules may be for a youth, that is impossible for a middle-aged man, and, what is more, a clergyman. My love had a Janus head; one face, the youthful face, looked backward toward all the pleasures of my earlier days, the joys of love sought and achieved, the kisses, embraces, and the bedding. But the other face, the elder face, looked toward the farce of the old bachelor who marries a young wife—because for me there could be nothing short of marriage. I would offer nothing dishonourable to Maria, and my priesthood forbade any thought of the easy concubinage of the liberated young. But—marriage? Years ago I had put aside thought of any such thing, and it cost me little effort because at that time I did not want to marry anyone in particular, and had taken the view that a parish clergyman loses much if he lacks a wife, but gains more if he can give all his efforts to his work. Was I not too old to change? To confess oneself too old at forty-five to do something as natural as falling in love and getting married was to be old indeed. The more the youthful face of my Janus love sighed and pined, the sterner the look on its older face became.
Consider the realities, said my diurnal man. You live comfortably, you are answerable to nobody else for any of your ordinary habits, you have time for your profession and your private pursuits, especially that spiritual path on which you toil and which has for so long been your chief joy. You do not have to keep a car; the college servants look after you very well, because you distribute something like five hundred dollars a year in tips to them and others who smooth your path. You do not have to live in the suburbs and sweat under a mortgage and worry about bands on your children’s teeth. Your state, if not princely, is better than most men of your kind can command, so watch your step, Darcourt, and do nothing foolish. Slothful, comfort-loving beast, cried the nocturnal man. Do you truly set such pursy vulgarities before the completion of your soul? When you put forward such excuses for thwarting the flesh, how can you hope for advancement of the spirit? Fat slug, you are unworthy of the revelation that has been granted to you.
Because, you see, I had decided that Maria was a revelation, and such a revelation that I hardly dare to set it down even for my own eyes.
I left parish work and became a scholar-priest because I wanted to dig deep in mines of old belief that were related, as I have said, to those texts which the compilers of the Bible had not thought suitable for inclusion in the reputed Word of God. That was what I had done and my work had attracted some favourable attention. But he who troubles his head with apocryphal texts will not do so long before he peeps into heretical texts, and without any intention of becoming a Gnostic I found myself greatly taken up with the Gnostics because of the appeal of so much that they had to say. Their notion of Sophia seized upon my mind because it suited some ideas that I had tentatively and fearfully developed of my own accord.
I like women, and the lack of a feminine presence in Christianity has long troubled me. Oh, I am familiar with all the apologies that are offered on that point: I know that Christ had women among his followers, that he liked to talk to women, and that the faithful who remained with him at the foot of his Cross were chiefly women. But whatever Christ may have thought, the elaborate edifice of doctrine we call his church offers no woman in authority—only a Trinity made up, to put it profanely, of two men and a bird—and even the belated amends offered to Mary by the Church of Rome does not undo the mischief. The Gnostics did better than that; they offered their followers Sophia.
Sophia, the feminine personification of God’s Wisdom: ‘With you is Wisdom, she who knows your works, she who was present when you made the world; she understands what is pleasing in your eyes, and what agrees with your commandments.’ Sophia, through whom God became conscious of himself. Sophia, by whose agency the universe was brought to completion, a partner in Creation. Sophia—in my eyes at least—through whom the chill glory of the patriarchal God becomes the embracing splendour of a completed World Soul.
What has all this to do with Maria Magdalena Theotoky, graduate student, under my eye, of New Testament Greek? Maria who, for what I assume was an astonished and certainly not physically ecstatic three minutes, had been possessed by Clement Hollier on his terrible old wreck of a leather sofa? Oh, God, this is where my scholarly madness shows, I suppose, but anybody who concerns himself with the many legends of Sophia knows about the ‘fallen Sophia’ who put on mortal flesh and sank at last to being a whore in a brothel in Tyre, from which she was rescued by the Gnostic Simon Magus. I myself think of that as the Passion of Sophia, for did she not assume flesh and suffer a shameful fate for the redemption of mankind? It was this that led the Gnostics to hail her both as Wisdom and also as the anima mundi, the World Soul, who demands redemption and, in order to achieve it, arouses desire. Well, was not Maria’s name Theotoky—the Motherhood of God? Oh, quite useless to tell me that by the Byzantine era Theotoky was a sufficiently common Greek surname, no more to be given special significance than the fairly common English name of Godbehere. But what might be an interesting fact to most scholars was to me a sign, an assurance that my Maria was, perhaps for me alone, a messenger of special grace and redemption.
I suppose that if a man makes legend and forgotten belief his special and devout study he should not be surprised when legend invades his life and possesses his mind. For me Maria was wholeness, the glory and gift of God and also the dark earth as well, so foreign to the conventional Christian mind. The Persians believed that when a man dies he meets his soul in the form of a beautiful woman who is also infinitely old and wise, and this was what seemed to have happened to me, living though I undoubtedly was.
It is a terrible thing for an intellectual when he encounters an idea as a reality, and that was what I had done.
These were the fantasies of my nocturnal man, and all the wordly counsel of the well-set, nicely fixed, book-keeping diurnal man could not beat them down.
So what was I to do? To go backward was base: to go forward an adventure into splendour and terror. But it was forward I must go.
THOUGH I SAY, as lovers always do, that thoughts of Maria filled all my waking hours, of course it was not so. Whatever people outside universities may think, professors are busy people, made even more busy by the fact that they are often unbusinesslike by nature and thus complicate small matters, and by the fact that they either do not have secretaries or share an overdriven and not always very competent secretary with several others, so that they are involved in a lot of record-keeping, and filing and hunting for things they have lost. They are daily asked for information they never had or have thrown away, and for reports on students they have not seen for five years and have forgotten. They have a reputation for being absent-minded because they are torn between the work they are paid for—which is teaching what they know and enlarging what they know—and the work they never expected to come their way—which is sitting on committees under the direction of chairmen who do not know how to make their colleagues come to a decision. They are required to be business-like in a profession which is not a business, lacks the apparatus of a business, and deals in intangibles. In my case the usual professorial muddle was further complicated by clerical odd jobs, including the delivery of occasional sermons at short notice, and putting friends and the children of friends through the Christian rites of passage, such as baptism, marriage, and burial. Having no parish of my own I was the man many people thought of immediately whenever a parson, often in a distant suburb, fell ill with the flu and somebody had to be jobbed in at short notice to turn the crank of the dogma-mill on Sunday morning. But as I was a professor, I could not claim the usual Monday holiday of the clergyman. I am not complaining: I am merely saying that I was a busy man.
Nevertheless, Maria was never far from my thoughts, even when it seemed that the greater part of my small allowance of spare time was demanded by Parlabane and his dreadful novel.
I was never sure precisely how near the novel was to completion, because he had so many drafts and sketches and alternative versions, and because I was never shown the full text. He had all the jealousy and suspicion of an author about his work, and I really think he believed me capable of pinching his ideas if I saw too much of them. He had this same bugbear about publishers and seemed to be in what I thought a ridiculous process of selling a novel that nobody was allowed to read in full.
“You don’t understand,” he would say, when I protested. “Publishers are always buying books they haven’t seen in a completed form. They can tell from a chapter or so whether the thing is any good or not. You constantly read in the papers about huge advances they have paid to somebody on the promise or mere sketch of a work.”
“I don’t believe all I read in the papers. But I have published two or three books myself.”
“Academic stuff. Quite a different matter. Nobody expects a book of yours to sell widely. But this will be a sensation, and I am confident that if it is brought out in the right way, with the right sort of publicity, it will make a fortune.”
“Have you offered it to anybody in the States?”
“No. That will come later. I insist on Canadian publication first, because I want it read by those who are most involved before it reaches a wider public.”
“Those who are most involved?”
“Certainly. It’s a roman à clef as well as a roman philosophique. There will be some red faces when it comes out, I can tell you.”
“Aren’t you worried about libel?”
“People won’t be in a hurry to claim that they are the originals of most of the characters. Other people will do that for them. And of course I’m not such a fool as to record and transcribe doings and conversations that are too easily identified. But they’ll know, don’t you worry. And in time everybody else will know, as well.”
“It’s a revenge novel, then?”
“Sim, you know me better than that! There’s nothing small about it. Not a revenge novel. Perhaps a justice novel.”
“Justice for you?”
“Justice for me.”
I didn’t like the sound of it at all. But little by little, as he trusted me with wads of yellow paper on which were messy carbon copies of parts of the great work, I felt certain that the novel would never see publication. It was terrible.
Not terrible in the sense of being wholly incompetent or illiterate. Parlabane was far too able a man for that sort of amateurishness. It was simply unreadable. Ennui swept over me like the effect of a stupefying drug every time I tried to read some of it. It was a very intellectual novel, very complex in structure, with what seemed like armies of characters, all of whom were personifications of something Parlabane knew, or had heard about, and they said their say in chapter after chapter of leaden prose. One night I said something of the sort, as tactfully as I knew how.
Parlabane laughed. “Of course you can’t appreciate the sweep of it, because you haven’t seen it all,” he said. “The plan is there, but it reveals itself slowly. This isn’t a romance for holiday reading, you know. It’s a really great book, and I expect that when it has made its first mark, people will read and reread, and discover new depths every time. As they do with Joyce—though it’s my ideas that are complex, not my language. You are deceived by its first impression, which is that of a life-story—the intellectual pilgrimage of an uncommon and very rich mind, linked with a questing spirit. I can say this to you because you’re an old friend, and up to a point you comprehend my quality. Other readers will comprehend other things, and some will comprehend more. It’s a book in which really devoted and understanding readers will find themselves, and thus will find something of the essence of our times. The world is drawing near to the end of one of the Platonic Aeons—the Aeon of Pisces—and gigantic changes are in the air. This book is probably the first of the great books of the New Aeon, the Aeon of Aquarius, and it foreshadows what lies in the future for mankind.”
“Aha. Yes, I see. Or rather, I haven’t seen. Frankly, it seemed to me to be about you and everybody you’ve locked horns with since your childhood.”
“Well, Sim, you know I don’t mean to be nasty, but I’m afraid that is a criticism of you, rather than of my book. You’re a man who uses a mirror to see if his tie is straight, not to look into his own eyes. You’re no worse than thousands of others will be, when first they read it. But you’re a nice old thing, so I’ll give you a few clues. Perhaps another drink, just to start me off. I wish you wouldn’t measure drinks with that little dinkus. I’ll pour my own.”
Helping himself to what was really a tumbler of Scotch, with a little water on top for the sake of appearances, he launched into a description of his book, most of which I had heard before and all of which I was to hear several times again.
“It’s extremely dense in texture, you see. A multiplicity of themes, interwoven and illuminating each other, and written so that every sentence contains a complex nexus of possible meanings, giving rise to a variety of possible interpretations. Meaning is packed within meaning, so that the whole thing unfolds like the many skins of an onion. The book moves forward in the ordinary literal or historical sense, but its real movement is dialectical and moral, and the conclusion is reached by the pressure of successive renunciations, discoveries of error, and what the careful reader discerns to be partial truths.”
“Tough stuff.”
“Not really. The simple reader can be quite happy with a literal interpretation. It will seem to be the biography of a rather foolish and peculiarly perverse young man, born to live in the Spirit, but determined to escape that fate or postpone it as long as possible because he wants to explore the ways of the world and its creatures. It will be quite realistic, you see, so that it may even appear to be a simple narrative. A fool could find it idle or even tedious, but he’ll press on because of the spicy parts.
“That’s the literal aspect. But of course there is the allegorical aspect. The life of the principal character, a young academic, is the journey of a modern Everyman, on a Pilgrim’s Progress. The reader follows the movement of his soul from its infantile fantasies, through its adolescent preoccupation with the mechanical and physical aspects of experience, until he discovers logical principles, metaphysics, and particularly scepticism, until he is landed in the dilemmas of middle age—early middle age—and maturity, and finally to his recovery, through imagination, of a unified view of life, of a synthesis of unconscious fantasy, scientific knowledge, moral mythology, and wisdom that meets in a religious reconciliation of the soul with reality through the acceptance of revealed truth.”
“Hold on a minute. That isn’t all. There’s the moral dimension of the book. It’s a treatise on folly, error, frustration, and exploration of the blind alleys and false theories about life as currently propagated and ineffectually practiced. The hero—a not-too-bright adventurer—is looking for the good life in which intellect is at harmony with emotion, intelligence integrated through recollected experience, sentiment tempered by fact, desire directed toward worldly objects and controlled by a sense of humour and proportion.”
“I’m glad to hear there is going to be some humour in it.”
“Oh, it’s all humour from start to finish. The deep, rumbling humour of the fulfilled spirit is at the heart of the book. Like Joyce, but not so confined by the old Jesuit boundaries.”
“That’ll be nice.”
“But the crown of the book is the anagogical level of meaning, suggesting the final revelation of the twofold nature of the world, the revelation of experience as the language of God and of life as the preliminary to a quest that cannot be described but only guessed at, because all things point beyond themselves to a glory which is greater than any of them. And thus the hero of the tale—because it is a tale to the simple, as I said—will be found to have been preoccupied all his life with the quest for the Father Image and the Mother Idol to replace the real parents who in real life were inadequate surrogates of the Creator. The quest is never completed, but the preoccupation with Image and Idol gradually gives way to the conviction of the reality of the Reality which lies behind the shadows which constitute the actual moment as it rushes by.”
“You’ve bitten off quite a substantial chunk.”
“Yes indeed. But I can chew it because I’ve lived it, you see. I gained my philosophy in youth, took it out into the world and tested it.”
“But Johnny, I hate to say this, but what you’ve allowed me to read doesn’t make me want to read more.”
“You haven’t seen the whole thing.”
“Has anyone?”
“Hollier has a complete typescript.”
“And what does he say?”
“I haven’t been able to tie him down to a real talk about it. He says he’s very busy, and I suppose he is, though I think reading this ought to come before the trivialities that eat up his time. I’m shameless, I know. But this is a great book, and sooner or later he is going to have to come to terms with it.”
“What have you done about publication?”
“I’ve written a careful description of the book—the plan, the themes, the depths of meaning—and sent it to all the principal publishers. I’ve sent a sample chapter to each one, because I don’t want them to see the whole thing until I know how serious they are and what sort of deal they are prepared to make.”
“Any bites?”
“One editor asked me to have lunch with him, but at the last moment his secretary called to say that he couldn’t make it. Another one called to ask if there were what he called ‘explicit’ scenes in it.”
“Ah, the old buggery bit. Very fashionable now.”
“Of course there’s a good deal of that in it, but unless it’s taken as an integral part of the book it’s likely to be mistaken for pornography. The book is frank—much franker than anything else I’ve seen—but not pornographic. I mean, it wouldn’t excite anybody.”
“How can you tell?”
“Well—perhaps it might. But I want the reader to experience as far as possible everything that is experienced by the hero, and that includes the ecstasy of love as well as the disgust and filthiness of sex.”
“You won’t get far with modern readers by telling them that sex is filthy. Sex is very fashionable at present. Not just necessary, or pleasurable, or natural, but fashionable, which is quite a different thing.”
“Middle-class fucking. My jail-buggery isn’t like that at all. The one is Colonel Sanders’ finger-lickin’ chicken, and the other is fighting for a scrap of garbage in Belsen.”
“That might sell very well.”
“Don’t be a crass fool, Sim. This is a great book, and although I expect it to sell widely and become a classic, I’m not writing nastiness for the bourgeois market.”
A classic. As I looked at him, so unkempt and messy in the ruin of a once-good suit of my own, I wondered if he could truly have written a classic novel. How would I know? Identifying classics of literature is not my job and I have the usual guilt that is imposed on all of us by the knowledge that in the past people have refused to recognize classics, and have afterward looked like fools because of it. One has a certain reluctance to believe that anybody one knows, and particularly anybody looking such a failure and crook as Parlabane, is the author of something significant. Anyhow, he hadn’t permitted me to read the whole thing, so obviously he thought me unworthy, a sadly limited creature not up to comprehending its quality. The burden of declaring his book a great one had not been laid on me. But I was curious. As custodian of The New Aubrey it was up to me to find out if I could, and record genius if genius came into my ken.
Identifying classics may be considered outside my capacity, but several fund-granting bodies are prepared to take my word about the abilities of students who want money to continue their studies, and after Parlabane had left I settled to the job of filling in several of the forms such bodies provide for the people they call referees, and the students refer to as ‘resource persons’. So I turned off whatever part of me was Parlabane’s confidant, and the part which was the compiler of The New Aubrey, and the part—the demanding, aching part—that yearned for Maria-Sophia, and set to work on a pile of such forms, all of which had been brought to me at the last moment by anxious but ill-organized students, all of which had to be sent to the grantors immediately, and upon which it was apparently my task to affix the necessary postage; the students had not done so.
Outside my window lay the quadrangle of Ploughwright and although it was still too early to be called Spring, the fountains which never quite froze were making gentle music below their crowns of ice. How peaceful it looked, even at this ruinous time of the year. ‘A garden enclosed is my sister; my spouse, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.’ How I loved her! Was it not strange that a man of my age should feel it so painfully? Get to work, Simon. Work, supposed anodyne of all pain.
As I bent over my desk, my mood sank toward misanthropy. What would happen, I wondered, if I filled out these forms honestly? First: Say how long you have known the applicant. There were few whom I could claim to know at all, in any serious sense of the word, for I saw them only in seminars. In what capacity do you know him/her? As a teacher; why else would I be filling in this form? Of the students you have known in this way, would you rank the applicant in the first five percent—ten percent—twenty-five percent? Well, my dear grantor, it depends on your standards; most of them are all right, in a general way. Aha, but here we get down to cases; Make any personal comment you consider relevant. This is where a referee or resource person is expected to pour on the oil. But I am sick of lying.
So, after an hour and half of soul-searching, I found that I had said of one young fellow, ‘He is a good-natured slob, and there is no particular harm in him, but he simply doesn’t know what work means.’ Of another: ‘Treacherous; never turn your back on him.’ Of a third: ‘Is living on a woman who thinks he is a genius; perhaps any grant you give him ought to be based on her earning capacity; she is quite a good stenographer, with a B.A. of her own, but she is plain and I suspect that once he has his doctorate he will discover that his affections lie elsewhere. This is a common pattern, and probably doesn’t concern you, but it grieves me.’ Of a young woman: ‘Her mind is as flat as Holland—the salt-marshes, not the tulip fields—stretching toward the horizon in all directions and covered by a leaden sky. But unquestionably she will make a Ph.D.—of a kind.’
Having completed this Slaughter of the Innocents—innocent in their belief that I would do anything I could to get them money—I hastily closed the envelopes, lest some weak remorse overtake me. What will the Canada Council make of that, I wondered, and was cheered by the hope that I had caused that body a lot of puzzlement and confusion. Tohubohu and brouhaha, as Maria loved to say. Ah, Maria!
Next day at lunch in the Hall of Spook I saw Hollier sitting alone at a table which is used for the overflow from the principal dons’ table, and I joined him.
“About this book of Parlabane’s,” I said; “is it really something extraordinary?”
“I’ve no idea. I haven’t time to read it. I’ve given it to Maria to read. She’ll tell me.”
“Given it to Maria! Won’t he be furious?”
“I don’t know and I don’t much care. I think she has a right to read it, if she wants to; she seems to be putting up the money to have it professionally typed.”
“He’s touched me substantially for money to have that done.”
“Are you surprised? He touches everybody. I’m sick of his cadging.”
“Has she said anything?”
“She hasn’t got far with it. Has to read it on the QT because he’s always bouncing in and out of my rooms. But I’ve seen her puzzling over it, and she sighs a lot.”
“That’s what it made me do.”
But a few days later the situation was reversed, for Hollier joined me at lunch.
“I met Carpenter the other day; the publisher, you know. He has Parlabane’s book, or part of it, and I asked him what he thought.”
“And—?”
“He hasn’t read it. Publishers have no time to read books, as I suppose you know. He handed it on to a professional reader and appraiser. The report, based on a description and a sample chapter, isn’t encouraging.”
“Really?”
“Carpenter says they get two or three such books every year—long, wandering, many-layered things with an elaborate structure, and a heavy freight of philosophy, but really self-justifying autobiographies. He’s sending it back.”
“Parlabane will be disappointed.”
“Perhaps not. Carpenter says he always sends a personal letter to ease the blow, suggesting that the book be sent to somebody else, who does more in that line. You know: the old down-ready-pass.”
“Has Maria got on any farther with it?”
“She’s beavering away at it. Chiefly because of the title, I think.”
“I didn’t know it had a title.”
“Yes indeed, and just as tricky as the rest of the thing. It’s called Be Not Another.”
“Hm. I’m not sure that I would snatch for a book called Be Not Another. Why does Maria like it?”
“It’s a quotation from one of her favourite writers. Paracelsus. She persuaded Parlabane to read some of Paracelsus and Johnny stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum. Paracelsus said, Alterius non sit, qui suus esse potest; Be not another if thou canst be thyself.”
“I know Latin too, Clem.”
“I suppose you must. Well, that’s what it comes from. Rotten, if you ask me, but he thinks it will look well on the title-page, in italic. A hint to the reader that something fine is in store.”
“I suppose it is a good title, if you look at it understandingly. Certainly Parlabane is very much himself.”
“I wish people weren’t so set on being themselves, when that means being a bastard. I’m surer than ever that McVarish has that manuscript you didn’t dig out of him. I can’t get it out of my mind. It’s becoming an obsession. Have you any idea what an obsession is?”
Yes, I had a very good idea what an obsession is. Maria.
Sophia.
(3)
“I’VE BEEN SEEING SOMETHING of that girl who was here last time you visited me,” said Ozy Froats. “You know the one—Maria.”
Indeed I know the one. And what was she doing in Ozy’s lab? Not bringing him a daily bucket for analysis, surely?
“She’s been introducing me to Paracelsus. He’s a lot more interesting than I would have suspected. Some extraordinary insights, but of course without any way of verifying them. Still, it’s amazing how far he got by guesswork.”
“You won’t yield an inch to the intuition of a great man, will you Ozy?”
“Not a millimetre. No, I guess I have to hedge on that. Every scientist has intuitions and they scare the hell out of him till he can test them. Great men are rare, you see.”
“But you’re one. This award has lifted you right above the clutch of Murray Brown, hasn’t it?”
“The Kober Medal, you mean? Not bad. Not bad at all.”
“Puts you in the Nobel class, they tell me.”
“Oh, these awards—I’m very pleased, of course—but you have to be careful not to mistake them for real achievement. I’m glad to be noticed. I have to give a lecture when I get it, you know. That’s when I’ll find out what the boys really think, by the way they take it. But I haven’t shown all I want to show, by any means.”
“Ozy, the modesty of you great men is sickening to those of us who just plug along, doing the best we can and knowing it isn’t very much. The American College of Physicians gives you the best thing they have, and you demur and grovel. It isn’t modesty; it’s masochism. You like suffering and running yourself down. You make me sick. I suppose it’s your Sheldonian type.”
“It’s a Mennonite upbringing, Simon. Beware of pride. You people are all so nice to me, I have to watch out I don’t begin patting myself on the back too much. Maria, now, she insists I’m a magus.”
“I suppose you are one, in her terms.”
“She wrote me a sweet letter. A quotation from Paracelsus, mostly. I carry it around, which is a sign of weakness. But listen to the quote: ‘The natural saints, who are called magi, are given powers over the energies and faculties of nature. For there are holy men in God who serve the beatific life; they are called saints. But there are also holy men who serve the forces of nature, and they are called magi.… What others are incapable of doing they can do, because it has been conferred upon them as a special gift.’ If a man started thinking of himself in those terms, he’d be finished as a scientist. Doubt, doubt, and still more doubt, until you’re dead sure. That’s the only way.”
“If Maria wrote to me like that, I’d believe her.”
“Why?”
“I think she knows. She has extraordinary intuition about people.”
“Do you think so? She sent me a very queer fish, and he’s certainly an oddity in Sheldonian terms, so I’ve put him on the bucket. An interesting contributor, but only about once a week.”
“Now Simon, you know I couldn’t tell you his name. Not ethical at all. Sometimes we talk about doubt. He’s a great doubter. Used to be a monk. The interesting thing about him is his Sheldonian type. Very rare; a 376. You follow? Very intellectual and nervy, but a fantastic physique. A dangerous man, I’d say, with a makeup like that. Could get very rough. He’s abused his body just about every way that’s possible and from the whiff of his buckets I think he’s well into drugs right now, but although he’s on the small side he’s fantastically muscular and strong. He wants the money, but he isn’t a big producer. Plugged. That’s drugs. I don’t like him, but he’s a rarity, so I put up with him.”
“For Maria’s sake?”
“No. For my sake. Listen, you don’t think I’m soft about Maria, do you? She’s a nice girl right enough, but that’s all.”
“Not an interesting type?”
“Not from my point of view. Too well balanced.”
“No chance she might turn out to be a Pyknic Practical Joke?”
“Never. She’ll age well. Be a fine old woman. Slumped, probably; that’s inherent in the female build. But she’ll be sturdy, right up to the end.”
“Ozy, about these Sheldonian types; are they irrevocable?”
“How do you mean?”
“Last time I talked to you, you were very frank about me, and my tendency toward fat. Do you remember?”
“Yes; that was the first time Maria came here. What I said about you wasn’t the result of an examination, of course. Just a guess. But I’d put you down as a 425—soft, chunky, abundant energy. Big gut.”
“The literary gut, I think you said.”
“Lots of literary people have it. You can have a big gut without being literary, of course.”
“Don’t rob me of the one consolation you offered! But what I want to know is this: couldn’t somebody of that type moderate his physique, by the right kind of diet and exercise, and general care?”
“To some extent. Not without more trouble than it would probably be worth. That’s what’s wrong with all these diets and body-building courses and so forth. You can go against your type, and probably achieve a good deal as long as you keep at it. Look at these Hollywood stars—they starve themselves and get surgeons to carve them into better shapes and all that because it’s their livelihood. Every now and then one of them can’t stand it any more, then it’s the overdose. The body is the inescapable factor, you see. You can keep in good shape for what you are, but radical change is impossible. Health isn’t making everybody into a Greek ideal; it’s living out the destiny of the body. If you’re thinking about yourself, I guess you could knock off twenty-five pounds to advantage, but that wouldn’t make you a thin man; it’d make you a neater fat man. What the cost would be to your nerves, I couldn’t even guess.”
“In short, be not another if thou canst be thyself.”
“What’s that?”
“More Paracelsus.”
“He’s dead right. But it isn’t simple, being yourself. You have to know yourself physiologically and people don’t want to believe the truth about themselves. They get some mental picture of themselves and then they devil the poor old body, trying to make it like the picture. When it won’t obey—can’t obey, of course—they are mad at it, and live in it as if it were an unsatisfactory house they were hoping to move out of. A lot of illness comes from that.”
“You make it sound like physiological predestination.”
“Don’t quote me on that. Not my field at all. I have my problem and it’s all I can take care of.”
“Discovering the value that lies in what is despised and rejected.”
“That’s what Maria says. But wouldn’t I look stupid if I announced that as the theme of my Kober Lecture?”
“ ‘This is the stone which was set at naught of your builders, which is become the head of the corner.’ ”
“You don’t talk that way to scientists, Simon.”
“Then tell them it is the lapis exilis, the Philosopher’s Stone of their spiritual ancestors, the alchemists.”
“Oh, get away, get away, get away!”
Laughing, I got away.
I SET TO WORK to become a neater fat man, as that seemed to be the best I could hope for, and sank rapidly into the ill-nature that overcomes me when I deny myself a reasonable amount of rich food and creamy desserts. I thought sourly of Ozy, and great man though he might be, I reflected that I could give a better Kober Lecture than he, fattening out my scientific information with plums from Paracelsus and giving it a persuasive humanistic gloss that would wake up the audience from the puritan stupor of their scientific attitude. Whereupon I immediately reproached myself for vanity. What did I know about Ozy’s work? What was I but a silly fat ass whose pudgy body was the conning-tower from which a thin and acerbic soul peered out at the world? No: that wouldn’t do either. I wasn’t as fat as that suggested, nor was my spirit really sour when I allowed myself enough to eat. I wasted a lot of time in this sort of foolish inner wrangling, and the measure of my abjection is that once or twice—besotted lover as I was—I wondered if Maria were really worth all this trouble.
One of Parlabane’s tedious whims was that he liked to take baths in my bathroom; he said that the arrangements at his boarding-house were primitive. He was a luxurious bather and a great man for parading about naked, which was not unselfconsciousness but calculated display. He was vain of his body, as well he might be, for at the same age as myself he was firm and muscular, had slim ankles and that impressive contour of belly in which the rectus muscles may be seen, like Roman armour. It was surely unjust that a man who had drugged and boozed for twenty years and who was, by Ozy’s account, decidedly constipated, should look so well in the buff. His face, of course, was a mess, and he could not see very much without his glasses, but even so he was an impressive and striking contrast to the man who removed my old suit and some lamentable underclothes. Clothed he looked shabby and sinister; naked he looked disturbingly like Satan in a drawing by Blake. Not at all a man with whom one would want to get into a fight.
“I wish I were in as good shape as you are,” said I, on one of these occasions.
“Don’t wish it if you hope to be remembered as a theologian,” said he; “they are all bonies or fatties. Not one like me in the lot. Put on another forty pounds, Simon, and you’ll be about the size of Aquinas when he confuted the Manichees. You know he got so fat they had to make him a special altar with a half-moon carved out of it to accommodate his tum? You have a long way to go yet.”
“I have it on the assurance of Ozy Froats, now distinguished and justified as the latest recipient of the Kober Medal, that I am of the literary sort of physique,” said I. “I have what Ozy calls the literary gut. Perhaps if you had a gently swelling belly like mine, instead of that fine washboard of muscles that I envy, your novel might read more easily.”
“I’d gladly take on the burden of your paunch if I could get a decisive answer from a publisher.”
“Nothing doing yet?”
“Four rejections.”
“That seems decisive, so far as it goes.”
He sank into one of my armchairs, naked as he was, and though he was clearly much dejected, his muscles held firm, and he looked rather splendid (except for his thick specs), like a figure of a defeated author by Rodin.
“No. The only decisive answer that I will recognize is an acceptance of the book, on my terms, for publication as soon as possible.”
“Oh, come; I didn’t mean to be discouraging. But—four rejections! It’s nothing at all. You must simply hang on and keep pestering publishers. Lots of authors have gone on doing that for years.”
“I know, but I won’t. I feel at the end of my tether.”
“It’s Lent, as I don’t have to remind you. The most discouraging season of the year.”
“Do you do much about Lent, Simon?”
“I’m eating less, but that’s incidental. What I usually do is take on a program of introspection and self-examination—try to tidy myself up a bit. Do you?”
“I’m coming unstuck, Simon. It’s the book. I can’t get anybody to take it seriously, and it’s killing me. It’s my life, far more than I had suspected.”
“Your autobiography, you mean?”
“Hell, no! I’ve told you it isn’t meanly autobiographical. But it’s the best of me, and if it’s ignored, what of me will survive? You’re too fat to have any idea what an obsession is.”
“I’m sorry, John. I didn’t mean to be flippant.”
“It’s what I’ve salvaged from a not very square deal in this miserable hole of a world. It’s all of me—root and crown. You don’t know what I would do to get it published.”
He grew more and more miserable, but did not lose his sense of self-preservation, because before he left he had touched me for two more shirts and some socks and another hundred dollars, which was all I had in my desk. I hate to seem mean-spirited, but I was growing tired of listening to the romantic agonies of his spirit, while forking out to sustain the wants of his flesh.
He earned money. Not much, but enough to keep him. What did he spend my money, and Maria’s money, and Hollier’s money on?
Could it really be drugs? He looked too well. Drink? He drank a good deal when he could sponge on somebody, but he didn’t have any sign of being a drunkard. Where did the money go? I didn’t know but I resented being continually asked for contributions.
(5)
LENT, PROPER SEASON for self-examination, perhaps for self-mortification, but never, so far as I know, a season for love. Nevertheless, love was my daily companion, my penance, my hair shirt. Something had to be done about it, but what? Face the facts, Simon; how does a clergyman of forty-five manoeuvre himself into a position where he can tell a young woman of twenty-three that he loves her, and what does she think about that? What might she be expected to think? Face facts, fool.
But can one, in the grip of an obsession, face facts or even judge what facts are relevant?
I worked out several scenarios and planned a number of eminently reasonable but warmly worded speeches; then, as often happens, it all came about suddenly and, considering everything, easily. As Hollier’s research assistant, Maria had the privilege of eating with the dons in Spook’s Hall at dinner, and one night in late March I met her just after the Rector had said the grace that ended the meal, as we were moving toward coffee in the Senior Common Room. Or rather, I was heading toward coffee and asked her if I could bring some to her. No, she said, Spook coffee wasn’t what she wanted at the moment. I saw an opening, and snatched it.
“If you would like to walk over to my rooms in Ploughwright, I’ll make you some really good coffee. I could also give you cognac, if you’d like that.”
“I’d love it.”
Five minutes later she was helping me—watching me, really—as I set my little Viennese coffee-maker on the electric element.
Fifteen minutes later I had told her that I loved her and, rather more coherently than I had ever expected, I told her about the notion of Sophia (with which she was acquainted from her medieval studies) and that she was Sophia to me. She sat silent for what seemed a long time.
“I’ve never been so flattered in my life,” she said at last.
“Then the idea doesn’t seem totally ricidulous to you.”
“Certainly not ridiculous. How could you think of yourself as ridiculous?”
“A man of my age, in love with a woman of your age, could certainly seem ridiculous.”
“But you’re not just any man of your age. You are a beautiful man. I’ve admired you ever since the first class where I met you.”
“Maria, don’t tease me. I know what I am. I’m middle-aged and not at all good-looking.”
“Oh, that! I meant beautiful because of your wonderful spirit, and the marvellous love you bring to your scholarship. Why would anybody care what you look like?—Oh, that sounds terrible; you look just right for what you are. But looks don’t really matter, do they?”
“How can you say that? You, who are so beautiful yourself?”
“If your looks attracted as much attention as mine do, and made people think so many stupid things about you, you’d see it all differently.”
“Does what I’ve told you I think about you seem stupid?”
“No, no; I didn’t mean that. What you’ve said, coming from you, is the most wonderful compliment I’ve ever had.”
“So what do we do about it? Dare I ask if you love me?”
“Yes, most certainly I do love you. But I don’t think it’s the kind of love you mean when you tell me you love me.”
“Then—?”
“I must think very carefully about what I say. I love you, but I’ve never even called you Simon. I love you because of your power to lead me to understand things I didn’t understand before, or understand in the same way. I love you because you have made your learning the chief nourisher of your life, and it has made you a special sort of man. You are like a fire: you warm me.”
“So what are we to do about it?”
“Must we do something about it? Aren’t we doing something about it already? If I am Sophia to you, what do you suppose you are to me?”
“I’m not sure I understand. You say you love me, and I am something great to you. So are we to become lovers?”
“I think we already are lovers.”
“I mean differently. Completely.”
“You mean a love affair? Going to bed and all that?”
“Is it out of the question?”
“No, but I think it would be a great mistake.”
“Oh, Maria, can you be sure? Look, you know what I am; I’m a clergyman. I’m not asking you to be my mistress. I think that would be shabby.”
“Well, I certainly couldn’t marry you!”
“You mean it’s utterly out of the question?”
“Utterly.”
“Ah. But I can’t make dishonourable proposals to you. Don’t think it’s just prudery—”
“No, no; I really do understand. ‘You could not love me, dear, so much/ Loved you not honour more.’ ”
“Not just honour. You can put it like that, but it’s something weightier than honour. I am a priest forever, after the order of Melchisedek; it binds me to live by certain inflexible rules. If I take you without giving you an oath before an altar it wouldn’t be long before I was something you would hate; I would be a renegade priest. Not a drunkard, or a lecher, or anything comparatively simple and perhaps forgivable, but an oath-breaker. Can you understand that?”
“Yes, I can understand it perfectly. You would have broken an oath to God.”
“Yes. You do understand it. Thank you, Maria.”
“I’m sure you will admit I’d cut a strange figure as the wife of a clergyman. And—forgive me for saying this—I don’t think it’s really a wife you want, Simon. You want someone to love. Can’t you love me without bringing in all these side-issues about marriage and going to bed and things that I don’t really think have any bearing on what we are talking about?”
“You certainly ask a lot! Don’t you know anything about men?”
“Not a great deal. But I think I know quite a lot about you.”
As soon as I had said it I wished it unsaid, but the jealous spirit was too quick for me. “You don’t know as much about me as you do about Hollier!”
She turned pale, which made her skin an olive shade. “Who told you about that? I don’t suppose I need to ask; he must have told you.”
“Maria! Maria, you must understand—it wasn’t like that! He wasn’t boasting or stupid; he was wretched and he told me because I am a priest, and I should never have given you a hint!”
“Is that true?”
“I swear it is true.”
“Then listen to me, because this is true. I love Hollier. I love him the way I love you—for the splendid thing you are, in your own world of splendid things. Like a fool I wanted him the way you are talking about, and whether it was because I wanted him or he wanted me I don’t know and never shall know, but it was a very great mistake. Because of that stupidity, which didn’t amount to a damn as an experience, I think I have put something between us that has almost lost him to me. Do you think I want to do that with you? Are all men such greedy fools that they think love only comes with that special favour?”
“The world thinks of it as the completion of love.”
“Then the world still has something important to learn. Simon, you called me Sophia: the Divine Wisdom, God’s partner and playmate in Creation. Now perhaps I am going to surprise you: I agree that I am Sophia to you, and I can be that for as long as you wish, but I must be my own human Maria-self as well, and if we go to bed it may be Sophia who lies down but it will certainly be Maria—and not the best of her—who gets up, and Sophia will be gone forever. And you, Simon dear, would come into bed as my Rebel Angel, but very soon you would be a stoutish Anglican parson, and a Rebel Angel no more.”
“A Rebel Angel?”
“You don’t mean to tell me that I can teach you something, after the very non-academic talk we have had? Oh, Simon, you must remember the Rebel Angels? They were real angels, Samahazai and Azazel, and they betrayed the secrets of Heaven to King Solomon, and God threw them out of Heaven. And did they mope and plot vengeance? Not they! They weren’t sore-headed egotists like Lucifer. Instead they gave mankind another push up the ladder, they came to earth and taught tongues, and healing and laws and hygiene—taught everything—and they were often special successes with ‘the daughters of men’. It’s a marvellous piece of apocrypha, and I would have expected you to know it, because surely it is the explanation of the origin of universities! God doesn’t come out of some of these stories in a very good light, does He? Job had to tell Him a few home truths about His injustice and caprice; the Rebel Angels showed Him that hiding all knowledge and wisdom and keeping it for Himself was dog-in-the-manger behaviour. I’ve always taken it as proof that we’ll civilize God yet. So don’t, Simon dear, don’t rob me of my Rebel Angel by wanting to be an ordinary human lover, and I won’t rob you of Sophia. You and Hollier are my Rebel Angels, but as you are the first to be told, you may choose which one you will be: Samahazai or Azazel?”
“Samahazai, every time! Azazel is too zizzy.”
“Dear Simon!”
We talked for another hour, but nothing was said that had not been said already in one way or another, and when we parted I did indeed kiss Maria, not as an ordinary lover or one who had been promised a marriage, but in a spirit I had never known before.
Since the dinner on Boxing Day I had drunk deep of Siren tears, and to my exultant delight that trial seemed to be over. I slept like a child and woke the next day immeasurably refreshed.
(6)
“HELLO? Hello—are you the Reverend Darcourt? Listen, it’s about this fella John Parlabane: he’s dead. Dead in bed with the light on. There’s a letter says to call you. So you’ll come, eh? Because something’s got to be done. I can’t be expected to deal with this kinda thing.”
Thus Parlabane’s landlady, who sounded as if she belonged to the tradition of affronted, put-upon landladies, calling me shortly after six o’clock on the morning of Easter Sunday. Doctors and parish clergymen are old hands at emergencies, and know that rarely is anything so pressing that there is not time to dress properly, and drink a cup of instant coffee while doing so. Figures of authority should be composed when they arrive at the scene of whatever human mess awaits them. Parlabane’s boarding-house was not far from the University, and it was not long before I was listening to Mrs. Mustard’s excited, angry story as we trudged upstairs. She had risen early to go to seven o’clock church, had seen a light under his door, was always telling ’em they weren’t to waste current, knocked and couldn’t rouse him, so in she went, expecting to find him drunk as he so often was—him that tried to pass himself off as some kind of a brother—and there he was on the bed with what looked like a smile on his face and couldn’t be roused and was icy cold, and no, she hadn’t called a doctor, and she certainly didn’t want any trouble.
In the small, humble room, which Parlabane had managed to invest with a squalor that was not inherent in it, he lay on his narrow iron bed, dressed in his monk’s robe, his Monastic Diurnal clasped in his hands, looking well pleased with himself, but not smiling; the dead do not smile except under the embalmer’s expert hand. Propped on his table was a letter addressed to me, with my telephone number on the envelope.
Suicide, I thought. I cannot say that I reassured Mrs. Mustard, but I calmed her down as much as I could, and then telephoned a doctor whom Parlabane and I had both known as a college friend, and asked him to come. In twenty minutes or so he was with me, also fully clothed and smelling perceptibly of instant coffee. Oh, what a boon powdered coffee is to parsons and doctors!
While waiting, I had read the letter, having got rid of Mrs. Mustard by asking if she would be so good as to make some coffee—preferably not instant coffee, I said, so as to keep her out of the way for a while.
It was a characteristic Parlabane letter.
Dear Old Simon:
Sorry to let you in for this, but somebody must cope, and it is part of your profession, isn’t it? I really cannot expect too much of La Mustard, to whom I owe quite a bit of back rent. That, and other debts, may be discharged out of the advance of my novel, which ought to be coming along soon. You think not? Shame on you for a doubter! Meanwhile I do very deeply want a Christian burial service, so will you add that to a long list of favours—see Johnny safely into his beddy-bye as you sometimes did when we were young at Spook—though you would never take the risk of joining him there, you old fraidy-cat.… God bless you, Sim—Your brother in Xt.
John Parlabane, S.S.M.
It was a relief when the doctor came, examined the body and said unnecessarily that Parlabane was dead, and surprisingly that he couldn’t say why.
“No sign of anything,” he said; “he’s dead because his heart has stopped beating, and that’s all I can put on the certificate. Cardiac arrest, which is what finishes us all really.”
“Any suggestion that it was self-induced?” I asked.
“None. That’s what I expected, you know, when you called me. But I can’t find a puncture or a mark or anything that would account for it. No sign of poison—you know, there’s usually something. He looks so pleased with himself, there can’t have been any distress at the end. I’d have expected suicide, frankly.”
“So would I, but I’m glad it isn’t so.”
“Yes, I guess it lets you off the hook, doesn’t it?”
By which my old friend the doctor paid tribute to the widely held notion that clergymen of my persuasion are not permitted to say the burial service over suicides. In fact we are allowed great latitude, and charity usually wins the day.
So I did what was necessary, adding extra work to my Easter Sunday, which was already a busy day. There was a little unseemly trouble with Mrs. Mustard, who didn’t want the body to be taken out of her house until her debt was paid. So I paid it, wondering how long she would have held out if I had allowed her to keep Parlabane in his present state. Poor woman, I suppose she led a dog’s life, and it made her disagreeable, which she mistook for being strong.
The following day, Easter Monday morning, I read the Burial Service for Parlabane at the chapel of St. James the Less, which is handy to the crematorium. As I waited to see if anyone would turn up, I reflected on what I was about to do. There I stood, in cassock, surplice, and scarf, the Professional Dispatcher. How much did I believe of what I was about to say? How much had Parlabane believed? The resurrection of the body, for instance? No use havering about that now; he had asked for it and he should have it. The Burial Service was noble—splendid music not to be examined like an insurance policy.
Besides myself only Hollier and Maria were present. The undertaker, misled by Parlabane’s robe into thinking him a priest, had placed the body with its head toward the altar, and I did not trouble to have the position changed. I had already explained to the undertaker that the corpse did not really need underclothes; Parlabane had died naked under his robe, and that was the way I sent him to the flames; I did not want to court a reputation for eccentricity by asking for further revisions in what the undertaker thought was proper.
The atmosphere was understandably intimate, and at the appropriate moment in the service I said: “This is where the priest usually says something about the person whose human shell is being sent on its way. But as we are few, and all friends of his, perhaps we might talk about him for a while. I think he was a man to be pitied, but he would have scorned pity; his spirit was defiant and proud. He asked for a Christian burial service, and that is why we are here. In a manner that was very much his own he professed a great feeling for the Christian faith but seemed to scorn most of the virtues Christians are supposed to hold dear. It was as if faith and pride were at war in him: he knew nothing of humility. I confess I don’t know what to make of him; I think he despised me, and the last letter he wrote me was in a tone he meant to be jokey but was really contemptuous. My belief bids me forgive him, and I do; he asked for this service and it is out of the question for me to refuse it; but I wish I could honestly say that I had liked him.”
“He did everything in his power to make it impossible to like him,” said Maria. “In spite of all his smiles and caressing jokes and words of endearment, he was deeply contemptuous of everyone.”
“I liked him,” said Hollier; “but then, I knew him better than either of you. I suppose I looked on him as one of my cultural fossils; the day has gone when people feel that they can be unashamedly arrogant about superior intellect. We are hypocritical about that. He was quite open about it, he thought we were dullards and he certainly thought I was intellectually fraudulent. In this he was a throwback to the great days of Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa—yes, and of Rabelais—when people who knew a lot sneered elaborately at anybody they considered an intellectual inferior. There was something refreshing about him. Pity that novel of his was so bad; it was really one huge sneer from start to finish, whatever he may have thought about it.”
“He seems to have died believing that it would see publication,” I said. “His last letter to me says his debts could be paid out of the advance from his publisher.”
“Don’t you believe it,” said Hollier. “He simply never admitted what he knew to be the truth—that he lived by sponging. And that reminds me, Simon, who’s paying the shot for this?”
“No, no,” said Hollier; “I must put in for it. Why should you do it all?”
“Of course,” said Maria; “that’s the way it was while he was alive and it had better be the same to the end. He died owing me just under nine hundred dollars; another hundred won’t break me.”
“Oh it won’t be anything like that,” I said; “I arranged this on the cheapest terms. With the burial costs and what he owed his landlady, and odds and ends, I reckon it will run us each about—well, you’re closer than I thought, Maria; it will probably be more than two hundred apiece.—Oh, dear, this is very unseemly. I meant that we should think seriously and kindly about him for a few minutes, and here we are haggling about his debts.”
“Serve him damned well right,” said Hollier. “If he is anywhere about, he’s laughing his head off.”
“He could have left Rabelais’s will,” said Maria. “ ‘I owe much, I have nothing, the rest I leave to the poor,’ ” and she laughed.
Hollier and I caught the infection and we were laughing loudly when the undertaker’s man stuck his head into the chancel from the little room where he was lurking, and coughed. I knew the signal; Parlabane must be whisked off to the crematory before lunch.
“Let us pray,” said I.
“Yes,” said Hollier; “and afterward—the cleansing flames.”
More laughter. The undertaker’s man, though he had probably seen some queer funerals, looked scandalized. I have never laughed my way through the Committal before, but I did so now.
We met outside after I had seen the coffin on its way. There was no need for me to return for the burning.
“I can’t think when I’ve enjoyed a funeral so much,” said Hollier.
“I feel a sense of relief,” said Maria. “I suppose I ought to be ashamed of it—but no, I don’t really suppose anything of the kind. I’m just relieved. He was getting to be an awful burden, and now it’s gone.”
“What about lunch?” said I. “Please let me take you. It was good of you to come.”
“Couldn’t think of it,” said Hollier. “After all, you made the arrangements and actually read the service. You’ve done enough.”
“I won’t go unless you let me pay,” said Maria. “If you want a reason, let’s say it’s because I’m happier than either of you that he’s gone. Gone forever.”
So we agreed, and Maria paid, and lunch stretched out until after three, and we all enjoyed ourselves immensely at what we called Parlabane’s Wake. Driving to the University, where none of us had been earlier in the day, we noticed that the flag on the main campus was at half-staff. We did not bother to wonder why; a big university is always regretting the death of one of its worthies.