The Rebel Angels

1

Ellerman's funeral was a sad affair, which is not as silly as it sounds, because I have known funerals of well-loved or brave people which were buoyant. But this was a funeral without personal quality or grace. Funeral "homes" are places that exist for convenience; to excuse families from straining small houses with a ceremony they cannot contain, and to excuse churches from burying people who had no inclination towards churches and did nothing whatever to sustain them. People are said to be drifting away from religion, but few of them drift so far that when they die there is not a call for some kind of religious ceremony. Is it because mankind is naturally religious, or simply because mankind is naturally cautious? For whatever reason, we don't like to part with a friend without some sort of show, and too often it is a poor show.

A parson of one of the sects which an advertising man would call a Smooth Blend read scriptural passages and prayers, and suggested that Ellerman had been a good fellow. Amen to that.

He had been a man who liked a touch of style, and he had been hospitable. This affair would have dismayed him; he would have wanted things done better. But how do you do better when nobody believes anything very firmly, and when the Canadian ineptitude for every kind of ceremony reduces the obsequies to mediocrity?

What would I have done if I had been in charge? I would have had Ellerman's war medals, which were numerous and honourable, on display, and I would have draped his doctor's red gown and his hood over the coffin. These, as reminders of what he had been, of where his strengths had lain. But – Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither – so at the grave I would have stripped away these evidences of a life, and on the bare coffin I would have thrown earth, instead of the rose-leaves modern funeral directors think symbolic of the words Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; there is something honest about hearing the clods rattling on the coffin lid. Ellerman had taught English Literature, and he was an expert on Browning; might not somebody have read some passages from A Grammarian's Funeral? But such thoughts are idle; you are asking for theatricalism, Darcourt; grief must be meagre, and mean, and cheap – not in money, of course, but in expression and invention. Death, be not proud; neither the grinning skull nor the panoply of ceremonial, nor the heart-catching splendour of faith is welcome at a modern, middle-class city funeral; grief must be huddled away, as the Lowest Common Denominator of permissible emotion.

I wish I could have seen him near the last, to tell him that his notion of The New Aubrey had taken root in me, and thus, whatever his beliefs may have been, something of him should live, however humbly.

He drew a pretty good house; my professional eye put it at seventy-five, give or take a body, or so. No sign of McVarish, though he and Ellerman had been cronies. Urky ignores death, so far as possible. Professor Ozias Froats was there, to my surprise. I knew he had been brought up a Mennonite, but I would have supposed that a life given to science had leached all belief out of him in things unseen, of heights and depths immeasurable. I took my chance, as we stood outside the funeral home, to speak to him.

"I hope all this nonsense in the papers isn't bothering you," said I.

"I wish I could say it wasn't; they're so unfair in what they say. Can't be expected to understand, of course."

"It can't do any permanent harm, surely."

"It could, if I had to ease up to satisfy this guy Brown. His political advantage could cost me seven years of work that would have to be repeated if I had to reduce what I'm doing for a while."

I hadn't expected him to be so down in the mouth. Years ago I had known him when he was a great football star; he had been temperamental then, and seemingly he still was so.

"I'm sure it does as much good as harm," said I; 'thousands of people must have been made aware of what you're doing, and are interested. I'm interested myself. I don't suppose you'd let me visit you some day?"

To my astonishment he blossomed, and said: "Any time. But come at night when I'm alone, or nearly alone. Then I'd be glad to show you my stuff and explain. It's good of you to say you're interested."

So it was quite easy. I could have a look at Ozy for The New Aubrey.

2

It wouldn't be fair to Ozias Froats or to me to suggest that I was bagging him like a butterfly collector. That wasn't the light in which I saw The New Aubrey. Of course poor Ellerman, who loved everything that was quaint in English Literature, had relished John Aubrey's delightful style, and the mixture of shrewdness and naivety with which Aubrey recorded his ragbag of information about the great ones of his time. But I wasn't interested in anything like that; undergraduates love to write such stuff for their literary magazines – "The Diary of Our Own Mr. Pepys", and such arch concoctions. What I valued in Aubrey was the energy of his curiosity, his determination to find out whatever he could about people who interested him: that was the quality in him I would try to recapture.

It was not simple nosiness. It was a proper university project. Energy and curiosity are the lifeblood of universities; the desire to find out, to uncover, to dig deeper, to puzzle out obscurities, is the spirit of the university, and it is a channelling of that unresting curiosity that holds mankind together. As for energy, only those who have never tried it for a week or two can suppose that the pursuit of knowledge does not demand a strength and determination, a resolve not to be beaten, that is a special kind of energy, and those who lack it or have it only in small store will never be scholars or teachers, because real teaching demands energy as well. To instruct calls for energy, and to remain almost silent, but watchful and helpful, while students instruct themselves, calls for even greater energy. To see someone fall (which will teach him not to fall again) when a word from you would keep him on his feet but ignorant of an important danger, is one of the tasks of the teacher that calls for special energy, because holding in is more demanding than crying out.

It was curiosity and energy I brought to The New Aubrey, as a tribute to my University, of which it might not become aware until I was dead. I have done my share of scholarship – two pretty good books on New Testament Apocrypha, studies of some of the later gospels and apocalypses that didn't make it into the accepted canon of Holy Writ – and I was no longer under compulsion to justify myself in that way. So I was ready to give time and energy – and of course curiosity, of which I have an extraordinary endowment – to The New Aubrey. I was making a plan. I must have order in the work. The Old Aubrey is charming because it wholly lacks order, but The New Aubrey must not copy that.

I didn't go to Ozy's laboratories at once; I wanted to think about what I was seeking. Not a scientific appraisal, obviously, for I was incompetent for that and there would be plenty of appraisal from his colleagues and peers when his work became known. No, what I was after was the spirit of the man, the source of the energy that lay behind the work.

I was thinking on these lines one night a few days after Ellerman's funeral when there came a tap on my door, and to my astonishment it was Hollier.

We have been on good but not close terms since our days together at Spook, when I had known him fairly well. We were not intimates then because I was in Classics, heading towards Theology (Spook likes its parsons to have some general education before they push towards ordination), and we met only in student societies. Since then we were friendly when we met, but we did not take pains to meet. This visit, I supposed, must be about the Cornish business. Hollier was no man to make a social call.

So it proved to be. After accepting a drink and fussing uneasily for perhaps five minutes on the general theme of our work, he came out with it.

"There's something that has been worrying me, but because it lies in your part of the executors' work I haven't liked to mention it. Have you found any catalogue of Cornish's books and manuscripts?"

"He made two or three beginnings, and a few notes. He had no idea what cataloguing means."

"Then you wouldn't know if anything were missing?"

"I'd know if it related to his musical manuscripts, because he showed them to me often, and I have a good idea of what he possessed. Otherwise, not."

"There's one I know he had, because he acquired it last April, and I saw it one night at his place. He had bought a group of MSS for their calligraphy; they were contemporary copies of letters to and from the Papal Chancery of Paulin. You know he was interested in calligraphy in a learnedly amateurish way, and it was the writing rather than the content that had attracted him; it was a bundle from somebody's collection, and the prize piece was a letter from Jacob ben Samuel Martino and it made a passing reference to Henry VIII's divorce, on which you know Martino was one of the experts. There were corrections in Martino's own hand. Otherwise the content was of no interest; just a pretty piece of writing. Good for a footnote, no more. McVarish was there, and he and Cornish gloated over that, and as they did I looked at some of the other stuff, and there was a leather portfolio – not a big one, about ten inches by seven, I suppose – with S.G. stamped on it in gold that had faded almost to nothing. Have you come across that?"

"No, but the Martino letter is present and correct. Very fine. And a group that goes with it, which presumably is what you saw."

"Where do you suppose S.G. has got to?"

"I don't know. I have never heard of it till this minute. What was it?"

"I'm not sure that I can tell you."

"Well, my dear man, if you can't tell me, how can I look for it? He may have put it in one of the other divisions – if those old cartons from the liquor store in which he stored his MSS can be called divisions. There is a very rough plan to be discerned in the muddle, but unless I know what this particular MS was about I wouldn't have any idea where to look. Why are you interested?"

"I was trying to find out what it really was when McVarish came along and wanted to see it, and I couldn't very well say no – not in another man's house, about something that wasn't mine – and I never got back to it. But certainly McVarish saw it, and I saw his eyes popping."

"Had your eyes been popping?"

"I suppose so."

"Come on, Clem, cut the scholarly reticence and tell me what it was."

"I suppose there's nothing else for it. It was one of the great, really great, lost manuscripts. I'm sure you know what some of those are."

"They are very common in my field. In the nineteenth century some letters appeared from Pontius Pilate, describing the Crucifixion; they were in French on contemporary notepaper and a credulous rich peasant paid quite a lot for them; it was when the same crook tried to sell him Christ's last letter to his Mother, written in purple ink, that the buyer began to smell a rat."

"I wish you wouldn't be facetious."

"Perfectly true, I assure you. I know the kind of thing you mean: Henry Hudson's lost diary; James Macpherson's Journal about the composition of Ossian – that kind of thing. And stuff does turn up. Look at the big haul of Boswell papers, found in a trunk in an attic in Ireland. Was this something of that order?"

"Yes. It was Rabelais' Stratagems."

"Don't know them."

"Neither does anybody else. But Rabelais was historiographer to his patron Guillaume du Bellay and as such he wrote Stratagems, that is to say, prowesses and ruses of war of the pious and most famous Chevalier de Langey at the beginning of the Third Caesarean War; he wrote it in Latin, and he also translated it into French, and it was supposed to have been published by his friend the printer Sebastian Gryphius, but no copy exists. So was it published or wasn't it?"

"And this was it?"

"This was it. It must have been the original script from which Gryphius published, or expected to publish, because it was marked up for the compositor – in itself an extraordinarily interesting feature."

"But why hadn't anybody spotted it?"

"You'd have to know some specialized facts to recognize it, because there was no title page – just began the text in close writing which wasn't very distinguished, so I suppose the calligraphy people hadn't paid it much heed."

"A splendid find, obviously."

"Of course Cornish didn't know what it was, and I never had a chance to tell him; I wanted to have a really close look at it."

"And you didn't want Urky to get in before you?"

"He is a Renaissance scholar. I suppose he had as good a right as anyone to the Gryphius MS."

"Yes, but you didn't want him to become aware of any such right. I quite understand. You don't have to be defensive."

"I would have preferred to make the discovery, inform Cornish (who after all owned the damned thing), and leave the disposition of it, for scholarly use, to him."

"Don't you think Cornish would have handed it over to Urky? After all, Urky regards himself as a big Rabelais man."

"For God's sake, Darcourt, don't be silly! McVarish's ancestor – if indeed Sir Thomas Urquhart was his ancestor, which I have heard doubted by people who might be expected to know – Sir Thomas Urquhart translated one work – or part of it – by Rabelais into English, and plenty of Rabelais scholars think it is a damned bad translation, full of invention and whimsy and unscholarly blethering just like McVarish himself! There are people in this University who really know Rabelais and who laugh at McVarish."

"Yes, but he is a Renaissance historian, and this was apparently a significant bit of Renaissance history. In Urky's field, and not really in your field. Sorry, but that's the way it looks."

"I wish people wouldn't talk about fields as if we were all a bunch of wretched prospectors and gold-panners, ready to shoot anybody who steps on our claim."

"Well, isn't that what we are?"

"I suppose I've got to tell you the whole thing."

"I wish you would. What have you been holding back?"

"There was the MS of the Stratagems, as I've told you. About forty pages, closely written. Not a good hand and no signature, except the signature that was written all over it – the lost Rabelais book. But in another little bundle in the back of the leather portfolio, in a sort of pocket, were the scripts of three letters."

"From Rabelais?"

"Yes, from Rabelais. They were drafts of three letters written to Paracelsus. His rough copies. But not so rough he hadn't signed them. Perhaps he enjoyed writing his name: lots of people do. It jumped at me off the page – that big ornate signature, not really the Chancery Hand, but a Mannerist style of his own –"

"Yes, Urky always insists that Rabelais was a Mannerist author."

"Urky be damned; he picked that up from me. He wouldn't know Mannerism in any art; he has no eye. But Rabelais is a Mannerist poet who happened to write in prose; he achieves in prose what Giuseppe Arcimboldo achieves in painting – fruitiness, nuttiness, leanness, dunginess, and the wildest kind of grotesque invention. But there were the letters, and there was the unmistakable, great signature. I had to take hold of myself not to fall on my knees. Think of it! Just think of it!"

"Very nice."

"Nice, you call it! Nice! Stupendous! I had a peep – the merest peep – and they contained passages in Greek (quotations, obviously) and here and there a few words in Hebrew, and half a dozen revealing symbols."

"Wholly revealing what?"

"Revealing that Rabelais was in correspondence with the greatest natural scientist of his day, which nobody knew before. Revealing that Rabelais, who was suspected of being a Protestant, was something at least equally reprehensible for a man of the Church – even a nusiance and a renegade – he was, if not a Cabbalist at least a student of Cabbala, and if not an alchemist at least a student of alchemy! And that is bloody well my field, and it could be the making of any scholar who got hold of it, and I'll be damned if I want that bogus sniggering son of a whore McVarish to get his hands on it!"

"Spoken like a true scholar!"

"And I think he has got his hands on it! I think that bugger has pinched it!"

"My dear man, calm down! If it did turn up it would have to go to the University Library, you know. I couldn't simply hand it over to you."

"You know how those things are done; a word to the Chief Librarian would be all that is necessary, and I wouldn't ask you to do it. I could do it myself. First crack at that MS – that's what I want!"

"Yes, yes, I understand. But I've got bad news for you. In one of Cornish's notebooks there's an entry that says "Lend McV. Rab. MS April 16". What do you suppose that tells us?"

"Lend. Lend – does that mean he meant to lend it or that he did lend it?"

"How do I know? But I'm afraid you're grasping at a straw. I suspect Urky has it."

"Pinched it! I knew it! The thief!"

"No, wait a minute – we can't jump to conclusions."

"I'm not jumping to anything. I know McVarish. You know McVarish. He winkled it out of Cornish and now he has it! The sodding crook!"

"Please, don't assume anything. It's simple; I have that entry, and I show it to McVarish and ask him for the MS back."

"Do you think you'll get it? He'll deny everything. I've got to have that MS, Darcourt. I might as well tell you, I've promised it to someone."

"Wasn't that premature?"

"Special circumstances."

"Now look here, Clem, I'm not being stuffy, I hope, but the books and manuscripts in Cornish's collection are my charge, and the circumstances have to be very special for you to talk about anything in that collection to anybody else until all the legal business has been completed and the stuff is safely lodged in the Library. What are these special circumstances?"

"Rather not say."

"I'm sure you'd rather not. But I think you should." Hollier squirmed in his chair. There is no other word for his uneasy twisting, as if he thought that a change of posture would help his inner unease. To my astonishment he was blushing. I didn't like it at all. His embarrassment was embarrassing me. When he spoke his manner was hangdog. The great Hollier, whom the President had described not long ago – to impress the government who were nagging about cutting our grants – as one of the ornaments of the University, was blushing before me. I'm not one of the ornaments myself (just a useful table-leg) and I am too loyal to the University to like watching an ornament squirm.

"A particularly able student – it would be the foundation of an academic career – I would supervise, of course –"

I have a measure of the intuition which common belief regards, quite unfairly, as being an attribute of women. I was ahead of him.

"Miss Theotoky, do you mean?"

"How on earth did you know?"

"Your research assistant, a student of mine, working at least in part on Rabelais, a girl of uncommon promise – it's not really second sight, you know."

"Well – you're right."

"What have you said?"

"Spoke of it once, in general terms. Later, when she asked me, I said a little more. But not much, you understand."

"Then it's easy. You explain to her that there will be a delay. It could take a year to get the MS from McVarish, and wind up the Cornish business, and have the MS properly vetted and catalogued by the Library."

"If you can get it away from McVarish."

"I'll get it."

"But then he may want it for himself, or for some pet of his."

"That's not my affair. You want it for a pet of yours."

"Precisely what do you imply by pet?

"Nothing much. A favoured pupil. Why?"

"I don't have pets."

"Then you're a teacher in a thousand. We all have pets. How can we avoid it? Some students are better and more appealing than others."

"Appealing?"

"Clem, you're very hot under the collar. Have another drink."

To my astonishment he seized the whisky bottle and poured himself three fingers and gulped it off in two swallows.

"Clem, what's chewing you? You'd better tell me."

"I suppose it's part of your job to hear confessions?"

"I haven't done much of that since I left parish work. Never did much there, in fact. But I know how it's done. And I know it's not good practice to hear confessions from people you know socially. But if you want to tell me something informally, go ahead. And mum's the word, of course."

"I was afraid of this when I came here."

"I'm not forcing you. Do as you please. But if I'm not your confessor I am your fellow-executor and I have a right to know what's been going on with things I'm responsible for."

"I have something to make up to Miss Theotoky. I've wronged her, gravely."

"How?"

"Took advantage of her."

"Pinched some of her good work? That sounds more like McVarish than you, Clem."

"No, no; something even more personal. I – I've had carnal knowledge of her."

"Oh, for God's sake! You sound like the Old Testament. You mean you've screwed her?"

"That is a distasteful expression."

"I know, but how many tasteful expressions are there? I can't say you've lain with her; maybe you didn't. I can't say you've had her, because she is still clearly in full possession of herself. 'Had intercourse with her' sounds like the police-court – or do they still say that 'intimacy occurred'? What really happened?"

"It was last April –"

"A month crammed with incident, apparently."

"Shut up and don't be facetious. Simon, can't you see how serious this is for me? I've behaved very wrongly. The relationship between master and pupil is a special one, a responsible one – you could say, a sacred one."

"You could say that, right enough. But we all know what happens in universities. Nice girls turn up, professors are human, and bingo! Sometimes it's rough on the girl; sometimes it may be destructive to the professor, if some scheming little broad throws herself at him. You must make allowance for the Fall of Man, Clem. I doubt if Maria seduced you; she's far too much in awe of you. So you must have seduced her. How?"

"I don't know. I honestly don't know. But what happened was that I was telling her about my work on the Filth Therapy of the Middle Ages, which had been going particularly well, and suddenly she told me something – something about her mother – that added another huge piece to the jigsaw puzzle of what I had been doing, and I was so excited by it – there was such an upsurge of splendid feeling, that before I knew what was happening, there we were, you see –"

"And Abelard and Heloise lived again for approximately ninety seconds. Or have you persisted?"

"No, certainly not. I've never spoken to her about it since."

"Once. I see."

"You can imagine how I felt at McVarish's party when he was plaguing her about being a virgin."

"But she handled that brilliantly, I thought. Was she a virgin?"

"Good God, how would I know?"

"There are sometimes indications. You're a medievalist. You must know what they looked for."

"You don't suppose I looked, do you! Do you take me for a Peeping Tom?"

"I'm beginning to take you for a fool, Clem. Have you never had any experience of this sort of thing before?"

"Well, of course. One can hardly avoid it. The commercial thing, you know, twice when travelling. Years ago. And on a conference, once, a female colleague, for a couple of days. She talked incessantly. But this was a sort of daemonic seizure – I wasn't myself."

"Oh, yes you were; these daemonic seizures are the unadmitted elements in a lopsided life. So you've promised Maria the Rabelais manuscript to make it up to her? Is that it?"

"I must make reparation."

"I don't want to talk too much like a priest, Clem, but you really can't do it like that. You think you've wronged a girl, and a handsome gift – in terms you both value greatly – will make everything right. But it won't. The reparation must be on the same footing as the wrong."

"You mean I ought to marry her?"

"I don't imagine for a minute she'd have you."

"I'm not so sure. She looks at me sometimes, in a certain way. I'm not a vain man, but you can't mistake certain looks."

"I suppose she's fallen for you. Girls do fall for professors; I've been telling you about it. But don't marry her; even if she is enough of a sap to say Yes; it would never work. You'd both be sick to death of it in two years. No, you stop fretting about Maria; she knows how to manage her life, and she'll get over you. It's yourself you need to put back on the rails. If there is any reparation, it must be made there."

"But how? Oh, I suppose you mean a penance?"

"Good medieval thinking."

"But what? I suppose I could give the College chapel a piece of silver."

"Bad medieval thinking. A penance must cost you something that hurts."

"Then what?"

"You really want it?"

"I do."

"I'll give you some tried and true penitential advice. Whom do you hate most in the world? If you had to name an enemy, who would it be?"

"McVarish!"

"I thought so. Then for your penitence go to McVarish and tell him what you have just told me."

"You're out of your mind!"

"No."

"It would kill me!"

"No, it wouldn't."

"He'd blat it all over."

"Very likely."

"I'd have to leave the University!"

"Hardly that. But you could wear a big red 'A' on the back of your raincoat for a year or so."

"You're not being serious!"

"Neither are you. Look here, Clem: you come to me and expect me to play the priest and coax me into prescribing a penance for you, and then you refuse it because it would hurt. You're a real Protestant; your prayer is 'O God, forgive me, but for God's sake keep this under Your hat.' You need a softer priest. Why don't you try Parlabane; you're keeping him, so he's safely in your pocket. Go and confess to him."

Hollier rose. "Good night," he said. "I see I made a great mistake in coming here."

"Don't be a goat, Clem. Sit down and have another drink."

He did – another great belt of Scotch. "Do you know Parlabane?" he said.

"Not as well as you do. But when we were undergraduates I saw quite a bit of him. An attractive fellow, very funny. Then I lost track of him, but I thought we were still friends. I've been wondering when he would come to see me. I didn't want to invite him; under the circumstances it might embarrass him."

"Under what circumstances?"

"When we knew one another at Spook he made great fun of me for wanting to go into the Church. He was the Great Sceptic, you remember, and he couldn't understand me believing in Christianity in the face of all reason, or what he would call reason. So I nearly fell out of my chair when I had a letter from him a few months ago, telling me that he was a monk in the Society of the Sacred Mission. Such turnabouts are common enough, especially with people in middle age, but I would never have expected it of Parlabane."

"And he wanted to leave the Brotherhood."

"Yes, that's what he told me. Needed help, which I provided."

"You mean you sent him money?"

"Yes. Five hundred dollars. I thought I'd better send it. If it did him any good it was charity towards him; if it didn't it was a charity to the Sacred Mission. He wanted to get out."

"That cost me five hundred, too."

"I wonder if he sent out a circular letter. Anyhow I don't want to seem to gloat over him, or to be asking about repayment."

"Simon, that fellow is no damned good."

"What's he been up to?"

"Leeching and bumming and sornering. And wearing that monk's outfit. And getting Maria into bad ways."

"Is he pestering Maria? I thought he was a homo?"

"Nothing so simple. A homo is just unusual; I've known some who are unusually good people. Parlabane is a wicked man. That's an old-fashioned term, but it fits."

"But what's he been doing to Maria?"

"They were thrown out of a students' restaurant a few nights ago for shouting filthy songs, and they were seen fighting in the street afterwards. I've found him a job – a fill-in in Extension. I've told him he must find another place to live, but he just yields as if I were punching a half-filled balloon, and continues to hang around my rooms and make claims on Maria."

"What kind of claims?"

"Insinuating claims. I think he knows about us. About Maria and me."

"Do you think she told him?"

"Unthinkable. But he smells things. And I find now that he's seeing McVarish."

I sighed. "It's true as it's horrible: one never regrets anything so profoundly as a kind action. We should have left him in the Society; they know a few things about penances that might have sorted him out."

"What I can't understand or forgive is the way he seems to be turning on me."

"That's his nature, Clem; he can't bear to be under an obligation. He was always proud as Lucifer. When I think back to our student days, I'd say he was as Luciferian as a not very tall fellow with a messed-up face could be; we tend to think of Lucifer as tall, dark, and handsome – fallen angel, you know. But if Parlabane was ever an angel it's a kind unknown to me; just a very good student of philosophy with a special talent for the sceptical hypotyposis."

"Mmmm…?"

"The brainy over-view or the chilling put-down or whatever you like. If you said something you thought was fine, and that meant a lot to you, he would immediately put it in a context that showed you up as a credulous boob, or a limited fellow who hadn't read enough or thought enough. But he did it with such a grand sweep and such a light touch that you felt you had been illuminated."

"Until you got sick of it."

"Yes, until you gained enough self-confidence to know you couldn't be completely wrong all of the time and that exposing things as cheats and shams or follies couldn't do much for you. Scepticism ran wild in Parlabane."

"Odd about scepticism, you know, Simon. I've known a few sceptical philosophers and with the exception of Parlabane they have all been quite ordinary people in the normal dealings of life. They pay their debts, have mortgages, educate their kids, google over their grandchildren, try to scrape together a competence precisely like the rest of the middle class. They come to terms with life. How do they square it with what they profess?"

"Horse sense, Clem, horse sense. It's the saving of us all who live by the mind. We make a deal between what we can comprehend intellectually and what we are in the world as we encounter it. Only the geniuses and people with a kink try to escape, and even the geniuses often live by a thoroughly bourgeois morality. Why? Because it simplifies all the unessential things. One can't always be improvising and seeing every triviality afresh. But Parlabane is a man with a kink."

"Years ago plenty of people thought he was a genius."

"I remember being one of them."

"Do you think it was that wretched accident to his face that kinked him? Or his family? His mother, do you suppose?"

"Once I would have supposed all those things, but I don't any longer. People triumph over worse families than his could have been, and do astonishing things with ruined bodies, and I'm sick to death of people squealing about their mothers. Everybody has to have a mother, and not everybody is going to draw the Grand Prize – whatever that may be. What's a perfect mother? We hear too much about loving mothers making homosexuals, and neglectful mothers making crooks, and commonplace mothers stifling intelligence. The whole mother business needs radical re-examination."

"You sound as if in a minute you were going to give me a lecture about Original Sin."

"And why not? We've had psychology and we've had sociology and we're still just where we were, for all practical purposes. Some of the harsh old theological notions of things are every bit as good, not because they really explain anything, but because at bottom they admit they can't explain a lot of things, so they foist them off on God, who may be cruel and incalculable but at least He takes the guilt for a lot of human misery."

"So you think there's no explanation for Parlabane? For his failure to live up to expectation? For what he is now?"

"You've lived in a university longer than I have, Clem, and you've seen lots of splendidly promising young people disappear into mediocrity. We put too much value on a certain kind of examination-passing brain and a ready tongue."

"In a minute you'll be saying that character is more important than intelligence. I know several people of splendid character who haven't got the wits of a hen."

"Stop telling me what I'm going to say in a minute, Clem, and take a good look at yourself: certainly one of the most brilliant men in this university and a man of international reputation, and the first time you get into a tiny moral mess with a girl you become a complete simpleton."

"You presume on your cloth to insult me."

"Balls! I'm not wearing my cloth; I only put on the full rig on Sundays. Have another drink."

"You don't suppose, do you, that this discussion is degenerating into mere whisky-talk?"

"Very likely. But before we sink below the surface, let me tell you what twenty years of the cloth, as you so old-fashionedly call it, have taught me. Intellectual endowment is a factor in a man's fate, and so is character, and so is industry, and so is courage, but they can all go right down the drain without another factor that nobody likes to admit, and that's sheer, bald-headed Luck."

"I would have expected you to say God's Saving Grace."

"Certainly you can call it that if you like, and the way He sprinkles it around is beyond human comprehension. God's a rum old joker, Clem, and we must never forget it."

"He's treated us well, wouldn't you say, Simon? Here's to the Rum Old Joker!"

"The Rum Old Joker! And long may he smile on us."

3

The laboratories of Professor Ozias Froats looked more than anything else like the kitchens of a first-rate hotel. Clean metal tables, sinks, an array of cabinets like big refrigerators, and a few instruments that looked as if they were concerned with very accurate calculations. I cannot say what I expected; by the time I visited him the hullabaloo stirred up by Murray Brown had so coloured the public conception of his work that I would not have been surprised if I had found Ozy in the sort of surroundings one associates with the Mad Scientists in a bad movie.

"Come on in, Simon. You don't mind if I call you Simon, do you? Call me Ozy; you always did."

It was a name he had lifted from the joke-name of a rube undergraduate to the honoured pet-name of a first-rate footballer. In the great days when he and Boom-Boom Glazebrook were the stars of the University team the crowd used to sing a revised version of a song that had been popular years earlier –

and if he was injured in the game the cheerleaders, led by his own sweetheart, Peppy Peggy, brought him to his feet with the long, yearning cry, "Come o-o-o-o-n Ozy! Come O-O-O-O-N OZY!" But everybody knew that Ozy was a star in biology, as well as football, and a Very Big Man On Campus. What he had been doing since graduation, and a Rhodes Scholarship, only God and biologists knew, but the President had named him as another Ornament to the University. So I was glad he had not wholly forgotten me.

"Murray Brown is giving you a rough time, Ozy."

"Yes. You saw that there was a parade outside the Legislature yesterday. People wanting education grants cut. Some of the signs read, "Get the Shit Out of Our Varsity". That meant me. I'm Murray's great peeve."

"Well, do you actually work with –?"

"Sure I do. And a very good thing, too. Time somebody got to grips with it. – God, people are so stupid."

"They don't understand, and they're overtaxed and scared about inflation. The universities are always an easy mark. Cut the frills away from education. Teach students a trade so they can make a living. You can't persuade most of the public that education and making a living aren't the same thing. And when the public sees people happily doing what they like best and getting paid for it, they are envious, and want to put a stop to it. Fire the unprofitable professors. Education and religion are two subjects on which everybody considers himself an expert; everybody does what he calls using his common sense. – I suppose your work costs a lot of money?"

"Not as much as lots of things, but quite a bit. It isn't public money, most of it. I get grants from foundations, and the National Research Council, and so forth, but the University backs me, and pays me, and I suppose I'm a natural scapegoat for people like Brown."

"Your work is offensive because of what you work with. Though I should think it was cheap."

"Oh no, not at all. I'm not a night-soil man, Simon. The stuff has to be special, and it costs three dollars a bucket, and if you multiply that by a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five – and that's the smallest test-group I can use – it's three hundred dollars or more a day, seven days a week, just for starters."

"A hundred buckets a day! Quite a heap."

"If I was in cancer research you wouldn't hear a word said. Cancer's all the rage, you know, and has been for years. You can get any money for it."

"I don't suppose you could say this was related to cancer research?"

"Simon! And you a parson! That'd be a lie! I don't know what it's related to. That's what I'm trying to find out."

"Pure science?"

"Nearly. Of course I have an idea or two, but I'm working from the known towards the unknown. I'm in a neglected field and an unpopular one because nobody really likes messing with the stuff. But sooner or later somebody had to, and it turns out to be me. I suppose you want to hear about it?"

"I'd be delighted. But I didn't come to pry, you know. Just a friendly visit."

"I'm glad to tell you all I can. But will you wait a few minutes; there's somebody else coming – a girl Hollier wants to know about my work, because of something she's doing in his line, whatever that is. Anyway, she should be here soon."

Shortly she appeared, and it was my New Testament Greek student and the thorn in the flesh of Professor Hollier, that unexpected puritan: Miss Theotoky. A queer group we made: I was in my clerical clothes and back-to-front collar, because I had been at a committee dinner where it seemed appropriate, and Maria was looking like the Magdalen in a medieval illumination, though not so gloomy, and Ozias Froats looked like what was left of a great footballer who had been transformed into a controversial research scientist. He was still a giant and still very strong, but his hair was leaving him, and he had what seemed to be a melon concealed in the front of his trousers, when his white lab-coat revealed it. There were pleasantries, and then Ozy got down to his explanation.

"People have always been interested in their faeces; primitive people take a look after they've had a motion, to see if it tells them anything, and there are more civilized people who do that than you'd suppose. Usually they are frightened; they've heard that cancer can give you blood in your stools, and you'd be amazed how many of them rush off to the doctor in a sweat when they've forgotten the Harvard beets they ate the day before. In the old days doctors looked at the stuff, just the way they looked at urine. They couldn't cut into anybody, but they made quite a lot of those examinations."

"Scatomancy, they called it," said Maria. "Could they have learned anything?"

"Not much," said Ozy; "though if you know what you are doing you can find out a few things by smell – the faeces of a drug-addict, for instance, are easy to identify. Of course when real investigative science got going they did some work on faeces – you know, measured the amounts of nitrogen and ether extract and neutral fat and cholalic acid, and all the inspissated mucus and bile and bacteria, and the large amounts of dead bacteria. The quantity of food residue is quite small. That work was useful in a restricted area as a diagnostic process, but nobody carried it very far. What really got me going on it was Osier.

"Osier was always throwing off wonderful ideas and insights that he didn't follow up; I suppose he expected other people would deal with them when they got around to it. As a student I was caught by his brief remarks on what was then called catarrhal enteritis; he mentioned changes in the constitution of the intestinal secretion – said, "We know too little about the succus entericus to be able to speak of influences induced by change in its quantity or quality." He wrote that in 1896. But he proposed some associations between diarrhoea and cancer, and anaemia, and some kidney ailments, and what he said stuck in my mind.

"It wasn't till about ten years ago that I came on a book that brought back what Osier had said, though the application was radically different. It was a proposal for what the author named Constitutional Psychology – a man called W. H. Sheldon, a respected Harvard scientist. Roughly, what he said was that there was a fundamental connection between physique and temperament. Not a new idea, of course."

"Renaissance writing is full of it," said Maria.

"You wouldn't call it scientific, though. You wouldn't be able to go that far."

"It was pretty good," said Maria. "Paracelsus said that there were more than a hundred, and probably more than a thousand, kinds of stomach, so that if you collected a thousand people it would be as foolish to say they were alike in body, and treat them as if they were alike in body, as it would be to suppose they were identical in spirit. 'There are a hundred forms of health,' he said, 'and the man who can lift fifty pounds may be as able-bodied as a man who can lift three hundred pounds.' "

"He may have said it, but he couldn't prove it."

"He knew it by insight."

"Now, now, Miss Theotoky, that'll never do. You have to prove things like that experimentally."

"Did Sheldon prove what Paracelsus said experimentally?"

"He certainly did!"

"That just proves Paracelsus was the greater man; he didn't have to fag away in a lab to get the right answer."

"We don't know if Sheldon got the completely right answer; we don't have any answers yet – just careful findings. Now –"

"She's teasing you, Ozy," I said. "Maria, you be quiet and let the great man talk. Perhaps we'll give Paracelsus an innings later. You know, of course, that Professor Froats is under great criticism at present, of a kind that could be harmful."

"So was Paracelsus – hounded from one country to another, and laughed at by all the universities. And he didn't have academic tenure, either. But I'm sorry; please don't let me interrupt."

What a contentious girl she was! But refreshing. I had a sneaking feeling for Paracelsus myself. But I wanted to hear about Sheldon, and on Ozy went.

"He wasn't just saying that people are different, you know. He showed how they were different. He worked on four thousand college students, altogether. Not the best sample, of course – all young, all intelligent – not enough variety, which is what I'm trying to achieve. But he finally divided his four thousand guinea pigs into three main groups.

"They were the endomorphs, who had soft, rounded bodies, and the mesomorphs, who were muscular and bony, and then the ectomorphs, who were fragile and skinny. He did extensive research into their temperaments and their backgrounds and the way they lived and what they wanted from life, and he found that the fatties were viscerotonics, or gut-people, who loved comfort in all its forms; and the muscular, tough types were somatotonics, whose pleasure was in exercise and exertion; and the skinnies were cerebrotonics, who were intellectual and nervous – head-people, in fact.

"So far this is not big news. I suppose Paracelsus could have done that by simple observation. But Sheldon showed by measurements and a variety of tests that everybody contains some elements of all three types, and it is the mixture that influences – influences, I said, not wholly determines – temperament. He devised a scale running from one to seven to assess the quantity of such elements contained in a single subject. So you see that a 711 would be a maximum endomorph – a fatty with hardly any muscle or nerve – a real slob. And a 117 would be a physical wreck, all brain and nerve and a physical liability. Big brain, by the way, doesn't necessarily mean a capacious or well-managed intellect. The perfectly balanced creature would be a 444 but you don't see many and when you do you've probably found the secretary of an athletic club with a rich membership and first-class catering."

"Do you go around spotting the types?" said Maria.

"Certainly not. You can't type people without careful examination, and that means exact measurement. Want to see?"

Of course we did not want to see. Obviously Ozy was loving every minute of this, and in no time he had a screen set up, and a lantern, and was showing us slides of men and women of all ages and appearance, photographed naked against a grid of which the horizontal and lateral lines made it possible to judge with accuracy where they bulged and where they were wanting.

"This isn't what I'd do for the public," said Ozy. "Then the faces would be blacked out and also the genitals. But this is among friends."

Indeed it was. I recognized a paunchy University policeman, and a fellow from Physical Plant who pruned trees. And wasn't that one of the secretaries from the President's office? And a girl from the Alumni House? Several students I had seen flashed by, and – really, this is hardly the place for me – Professor Agnes Marley, heavier in the hams than her tweeds admitted, and with a decidedly poor bosom. All of these unhappy creatures had been photographed in a hard, cruel light. And in big black figures at the bottom right-hand corner of each picture was their ratio of elements, determined by Sheldon's scale. Ozy switched on the lights again.

"You see how it goes?" he said. "By the way, I hope you didn't recognize any of those people. No harm done if you did, but people are sometimes sensitive. Everybody wants to be typed, just as they want to have their fortunes told. Me, now, I'm a 271; not much fat, but enough, as you see, to make some trouble when I'm tied to sedentary work; I'm a seven in frame and muscle – I'd be a Hercules if I had a few more units on either end of my scale. I'm only a one in the cerebrotonic aspect, which doesn't mean I'm dumb, thank God, but I've never been what you'd call nervy or sensitive. That's why this Brown thing doesn't bother me too much. – By the way, I suppose you noticed the varying hirsutism of those people? The women are sensitive about it, but it's extremely revealing to a scientist in my kind of work.

"Typing at a glance – I'd never attempt it seriously. But you can tell a lot about typology by the kind of things people say. Christ, now; tradition and all the pictures represent Him as a cerebrotonic ectomorph, and that raises a theological point that should interest you, Simon. If Christ was really the Son of Man, and assumed human flesh, you'd have thought he'd be a 444, wouldn't you? A man who felt for everybody. But no – a nervy, thin type. Must have been tough, though; great walker, spellbinding orator, which takes strength, put up with a scourging and a lot of rough-house from soldiers; at least a three in the mesomorphic range.

"It's fascinating, isn't it? There you are, Simon, a professional propagandist and interpreter of a prophet who wasn't, literally, your type at all. Just off the top of my head, I'd put you down as a 425 – soft, but chunky and possessed of great energy. You write a good deal, don't you?"

I thought of The New Aubrey, and nodded.

"Of course. That's your type, when it's combined with superior intelligence. Enough muscle to see you through; sensitive but not ridden with nerves, and a huge gut. Because that's what makes your type come out so far in front, you see? Some of your viscerotonics have a gut that is almost double the length of the gut in a real cerebrotonic. They haven't got a lot of gut, but they're beggars for sex. The muscular ones aren't sexy to nearly the same extent and the fatties would just as soon eat. It's the little, skinny ones who can never let it alone. I could tell you astonishing things. But you're a gut-man, Simon. And just right for your kind of parson: fond of ceremony and ritual, and of course a big eater. Fart much?"

How much is much? I did not take up this lead.

"I expect you do, but on the sly, because of that five at your cerebrotonic end. But writers – look at them. Balzac, Dumas, Trollope, Thackeray, Dickens in his later years, Henry James (a lifelong sufferer from constipation, by the way), Hugo, Goethe – at least forty feet of gut in every one of them."

Ozy had quite forgotten about scientific calm and was warming to his great theme.

"You'll want to know, though, what this has to do with faeces. I just got a hunch, remembering Osier, that there might be variations in composition, according to type, and that might be interesting. Because what people forget, or don't consider, is that the bowel movement is a real creation; everybody produces the stuff in an incidence that ranges with normality from three times a day to about once every ten days, with, say, once every forty-eight hours as a mean. There it is, and it'd be damned funny if there was nothing individual or characteristic about it, and it might just be that it varied according to health. You know the old country saying: "Every man's dung smells sweet in his own nose". But not in anybody else's nose. It's a creation, a highly characteristic product. So let's get to work, I thought.

"Setting up an experiment for something like that is a hell of a job. First of all, Sheldon identified seventy-six types that are within the range of the normal; of course there are some wild combinations in people who are born to severe physical trouble. Getting an experimental group together is a lot of work, because you have to interview so many people, and do a lot of explaining, and rule out the ones who could become nuisances. I guess my team and I saw well over five hundred, and managed to keep things fairly quiet to exclude jokers and nuts like Brown. We ended up with a hundred and twenty-five, who would promise to give us all their faeces, properly contained in the special receptacles we provided (and they cost a pretty penny, let me tell you), as fresh as possible, and over considerable lengths of time, because you want serial inspection if you are going to get anywhere. And we wanted as big a range of temperament as we could achieve, and not just highly intelligent young students. As I told you, Simon, we have to pay our test group, because it's a nuisance to them, and though they understand that it's important they have to have some recompense. We expect them to have tests whenever my medical assistant calls for it, and they have to mark a daily chart that records a few things – how they felt, for instance, on a one-to-seven scale ranging from Radiant to The Pits. I often wish we could do it with rats but human temperament can't be examined in any cheap way."

"Paracelsus would have liked you, Dr. Froats," said Maria: "he rejected the study of formal anatomy for a consideration of the living body as a whole; he'd have liked what you say about faeces being a creation. Have you read his treatises on colic and bowelworms?"

"I just know him as a name, really. I thought he was some kind of nut."

"That's what Murray Brown says about you."

"Well, Murray Brown is wrong. I can't tell him so for a while – maybe for a few years – but there'll be a time."

"Does that mean you've found what you are looking for?" I said. I felt that I had better get Maria away from Paracelsus.

"I'm not looking for anything. That's not how science works; I'm just looking to see what's there. If you start with a preconceived idea of what you are going to find, you are liable to find it, and be dead wrong, and maybe miss something genuine that's under your nose. Of course we're not just sitting on our hands here; at least half a dozen good papers from Froats, Redfern, and Oimatsu have appeared in the journals. Some interesting stuff has come up. Want to see some more pictures? Oimatsu prepares these. Wonderful! Nobody like the Japanese for fine work like this."

These were slides showing what I understood to be extremely thin slices of faeces, cut transversely, and examined microscopically and under special light. They were of extraordinary beauty, like splendid cuttings of moss-agate, eye-agate, brecciated agate, and my mind turned to that chalcedony which John's Revelation tells us is part of the foundations of the Holy City. But as Maria had been unsuccessful in persuading Ozy to hear about Paracelsus I thought I would have no greater success with references to the Bible. So I fished around for something which I hoped might be intelligent to say.

"I don't suppose there'd be such a thing as a crystal-lattice in those examples?"

"No, but that's a good guess – a shrewd guess. Not a crystal-lattice, of course, for several reasons, but call it a disposition towards a characteristic form which is pretty constant. And if it changes markedly, what do you suppose that means? I don't know, but if I can find out" – Ozy became aware that he was yielding to unscientific enthusiasm – "I'll know something I don't know now."

"Which could lead to –?"

"I wouldn't want to guess what it might lead to. But if there is a pattern of formation which is as identifiable for everybody as a fingerprint, that would be interesting. But I'm not going to go off half-cocked. People can do that, after reading Sheldon. There was a fellow named Huxley, a brother of the scientist – I think he was a writer – and he read Sheldon and he went to foolish extremes. Of course being a writer he loved the comic extremes in the somatotypes, and he lost his head over something Sheldon keeps harping on in his two big books. And that's humour. Sheldon keeps saying you have to deal with the somatotypes with an ever-active sense of humour, and damn it, I don't know what he's talking about. If a fact is a fact, surely that's it? You don't have to get cute about it. I've read a good deal, you know, in general literature, and I've never found a definition of humour that made any sense whatever. But this Huxley – the other one, not the scientist – goes on about how funny it would be if certain ill-matched types got married, and he thought it would be a howl to see an ectomorph shrimp and his endomorphic slob of a wife in a museum looking at the mesomorphic ideal of Greek sculpture. What's funny about that? He rushed off in all directions about how soma affects psyche, and how perhaps the body was really the Unconscious that the psychoanalysts talk about – the unknown factor, the depth from which arises the unforeseen and uncontrollable in the human spirit. And how learning intelligently to live with the body would be the path to mental health. All very well to say, but just try and prove it. And that's work for people like me."

It was getting late, and I rose to go, because it was clear that Ozy had shown us all he meant to show. But as I prepared to leave I remembered his wife. Now it is not tactful in these days to ask about the wives of one's friends too particularly, in case they are wives no longer. But I thought I'd plunge.

"How's Peggy?"

"Good of you to ask, Simon. She'll be delighted you remembered her. Poor Peg."

"Not unwell, I hope? Of course I remember her as our top cheerleader."

"Wasn't she marvellous? Wonderful figure, and every ounce of it rubber, you'd have said. A real fireball. God, you should see her now."

"Very sorry she isn't well."

"She's well enough. But her type, you know – her somato-type. She's a PPJ – what Sheldon calls a Pyknic Practical Joke. Pyknic, you understand? Of course, Greek's your thing. Compact: rubbery. But the balance of her three elements was just that tiny bit off, a 442, and – well, now she weighs well over two hundred, poor kid, and she's barely five foot three. No; no children. She keeps cheerful, though. Takes a lot of night courses at one of the community colleges – Dog Grooming, Awake Alive and Aware Through Yoga, Writing for Fun and Profit – that crap. I'm here so much at night, you see."

I saw. The Rum Old Joker had been a bit rowdy with Ozy and Peggy, and even if Ozy's sense of humour had been more active than it was, he could hardly have been expected to relish that one.

As we walked up the campus together, Maria said: "I wonder if Professor Froats is a magus."

"I think he'd be surprised if you suggested it."

"Yes, he seemed very dismissive about Paracelsus. But it was Paracelsus who said that the holy men who serve the forces of nature are magi, because they can do what others are incapable of doing, and that is because they have a special gift. Surely Ozias Froats works under the protection of the Thrice-Divine Hermes. Anyway I hope so: he won't get far if he doesn't. I wish he'd read Paracelsus. He said that each man's soul accords with the design of his lineaments and arteries. I'm sure Sheldon would have agreed."

"Sheldon appears to have had a sense of humour. He wouldn't mind a sixteenth-century alchemist getting in ahead of him. But not Ozy."

"It's a pity about science, isn't it?"

"Miss Theotoky, that is very much a humanist remark, and you must be careful with it. We humanists are an endangered species. In Paracelsus's time the energy of universities resided in the conflict between humanism and theology; the energy of the modern university lives in the love-affair between government and science, and sometimes the two are so close it makes you shudder. If you want a magus, look for one in Clement Hollier."

With that we parted, but I thought she gave me a surprised glance.

I walked on towards Ploughwright, thinking about faeces. What a lot we had found out about the prehistoric past from the study of fossilized dung of long-vanished animals. A miraculous thing, really; a recovery of the past from what was carelessly rejected. And in the Middle Ages, how concerned people who lived close to the world of nature were with the faeces of animals. And what a variety of names they had for them: the Crotels of a Hare, the Friants of a Boar, the Spraints of an Otter, the Werderobe of a Badger, the Waggying of a Fox, the Fumets of a Deer. Surely there might be some words for the material so near to the heart of Ozy Froats better than shit? What about the Problems of a President, the Backward Passes of a Footballer, the Deferrals of a Dean, the Odd Volumes of a Librarian, the Footnotes of a Ph.D., the Low Grades of a Freshman, the Anxieties of antjntenured Professor? As for myself, might it not appropriately be called the Collect for the Day?

Musing in this frivolous strain I went to bed.

4

I thought it would not be long before Hollier pushed Parlabane in my direction, and sure enough he turned up the night after I had visited Ozias Froats.

I was not in a good mood, because I had been haunted all day by Ozy's humbling estimate of my physical – and by implication my spiritual – condition. A 425, soft, chunky, doubtless headed towards undeniable fat. I make frequent resolves to go to the Athletic Building every day, and get myself into trim, and if I were not so busy I would do it. Now, at a blow, Ozy had suggested that fat was part of my destiny, an inescapable burden, an outward and visible sign of an inward and only partly visible love of comfort. Had I been deceiving myself? Did my students speak of me as Fatso? But then, if the Fairy Carabosse had appeared at my christening with her spiteful gift of adiposity, there had been other and better-natured fairies who had made me intelligent and energetic. But because human nature inclines towards dissatisfaction, it was the fat that rankled.

Worse, he had suggested that I was the sort of man who broke wind a great deal. Everyone recognizes, surely, that with the passing of time this trivial physical mannerism is likely to increase? No priest who had done much visiting among the old must be reminded of it. Need Froats have made a point of it before Maria Magdalena Theotoky?

This was a new reason for disquiet. Why should I care what she thought? But I did care, and I cared about what people thought of her. Hollier's revelation had annoyed me; he ought to keep his great paws off his students (no, no, that's unjust) he should not have taken advantage of his position as a teacher, however elated he was about his work. I thought of Balzac, driven by unconquerable lust, rushing at his kitchen-maid and, when he had taken her against the wall, screaming in her face, "You have cost me a chapter!" and rushing back to his writing-table. I had not liked the suggestion that Maria was a singer of bawdy songs in public; if she had done so, there must have been some reason for it.

Darcourt, I thought, you are being a fool about that girl. Why? Because of her beauty, I decided; beauty clear through, for it was beauty not only of feature but of movement, and that rarest of beauties, a beautiful low voice. A man may admire beauty, surely, without reproaching himself? A man may wish not to seem fat and ridiculous, a Crypto-Farter, in the presence of such an astonishing work of God? Froats had not, I remembered, made a guess at her type, and it could not have been reticence, for Ozy had none. Was it – good God, could it be? – that he recognized in her a PPJ, another Peppy Peggy who would explode into grossness before she was thirty? No, it could not be: Peggy had been pneumatic and exuberant, and neither word applied to Maria.

My forty feet of Literary Gut was not in the best of moods when Parlabane came; I had denied it a sweet at dinner. This sort of denial may be the path to Heaven for some people, but not for me; it makes me cranky.

"Sim, you old darling? I've been neglecting you, and I'm ashamed. Do you want to beat Johnny? Three on each paddy with a hard, hard ruler?"

I suppose he thought of this as taking up from where we had left off, twenty-five years ago. He had loved to prattle in this campy way, because he knew it made me laugh. But I had never played that game except on the surface; I had never been one of his "boys", the student gang who called themselves Gentleman's Relish. I was interested in them – fascinated might be a better word – but I never wanted to join them in the intimacies that bound them together, whatever those may have been. That I never really knew, because although they talked a lot about homosexuality, most of them had, after graduation, married and settled into what looked like the uttermost bourgeois respectability, leavened by occasional divorce and remarriage. One was now on the Bench, and was addressed as My Lord by obsequious or mock-obsequious lawyers. I suppose that, like Parlabane himself, they had played the field; one or two, I knew, had been on gusty terms with omnivorous Elsie Whistlecraft, who had thought of herself as a great hetaera, inducting the dewy young into the arts of love. A lot of young men try varied aspects of sex before they settle on the one that suits them best, which is usually the ordinary one. But I had been cautious, discreet, and probably craven, and I had never been one of Parlabane's "boys". But it had once tickled me to hear him talk as if I were.

A foolish state of mind, but who has not been foolish, one way or another? It would not do now, after a quarter of a century. I suppose I was austere.

"Well, John, I had heard you were back, and I expected you'd come to see me some time."

"I've left it inexcusably long. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, as we say in the trade. But here I am. I hear great things of you. Excellent books."

"Not bad, I hope."

"And a priest. Well – better get it over with; you can see from my habit that I've had a change of mind. I think I have you to thank for that, at least in part. During the past years, I've thought of you often, you know. Things you used to say kept recurring. You were wiser than I. And I turned to the Church at last."

"You had a shot at being a monk. Let's put it that way. But obviously it hasn't worked."

"Don't be rough on me, Sim. I've had a rotten time. Everything seemed to go sour. Surely you aren't surprised that I turned at last to the place where nothing can go sour."

"Can't it? Then what are you doing here?"

"You would understand, if anybody would. I entered the S.S.M. because I wanted to get away from all the things that had made my life a hell – the worst of which was my own self-will. Abandon self-will, I thought, and you may find peace, and with it salvation. If thou bear the Cross cheerfully, it will bear thee."

"Thomas à Kempis – an unreliable guide for a man like you, John."

"Really? I'd have thought he was very much your man."

"He isn't. Which is not to say I don't pay him all proper respect. But he's for the honest, you know, and you have never been quite honest. No, don't interrupt, I'm not insulting you; but Thomas à Kempis's kind of honesty is impossible for a man with as much subtlety as you have always possessed. Just as Thomas Aquinas was always too subtle a man to be a safe guide for you, because you blotted up his subtlety but kept your fingers crossed about his priciples."

"Is that so? You seem to be a great authority about me."

"Fair play; when we were younger you set up to be a great authority about me. – I gather you were not able to bear the Cross cheerfully, so you skipped out of the monastery."

"You lent me the money for that. I can never be grateful enough."

"Divide any gratitude you have between me and Clem Hollier. Unless there were others on your five-hundred-dollar campaign list."

"You never thought a measly five hundred would do the job, did you?"

"That was certainly what your eloquent letter suggested."

"Well, that's water over the dam. I had to get out, by hook or crook."

"An unfortunate choice of expression."

"God, you've turned nasty! We are brothers in the Faith, surely. Haven't you any charity?"

"I have thought a good deal about what charity is, John, and it isn't being a patsy. Why did you have to get out of the Sacred Mission? Were they getting ready to throw you out?"

"No such luck! But they wouldn't let me move towards becoming a priest."

"Funny thing! And why was that, pray tell?"

"You are slipping back into undergraduate irony. Look, I'll level with you: have you ever been in one of those places?"

"A retreat or two when I was younger."

"Could you face a lifetime of it? Listen, Sim, I won't have you treating me as some nitwit penitent. I'm not knocking the Order; they gave me what I asked for, which was the Bread of Heaven. But I have to have a scrape of the butter and jam of the intellect on that Bread, or it chokes me! And listening to Father Prior's homilies was like first-year philosophy, without any of the doubts given a fair chance. I have to have some play of intellect in my life, or I go mad! And I have to have some humour in life – not the simple-minded jokes the Provincial got off now and then when he was being chummy with the brothers, and not the infant-class dirty jokes some of the postulants whispered at recreation hour, to show that they had once been men of the world. I've got to have the big salutary humour that saves – like that bloody Rabelais I hear so much about these days. I have to have something to put some yeast into the unleavened Bread of Heaven. If they'd let me be a priest I could have brought something useful to their service, but they wouldn't have it, and I think their rejection was nothing but spite and envy!"

"Envy of your learning and intellect?"

"Yes."

"Perhaps that was part of it. Spite and envy are no less frequent behind the monastery wall than outside it, and you have an especially shameless mind that can't disguise itself for the sake of people who are not so gifted. But what's done is done. The question is, what do you do now?"

"I'm doing a little teaching."

"In Continuing Studies."

"They're humbling me."

"Lots of good people teach there."

"But God damn it to hell, Sim, I'm not just 'good people'! I'm the best damned philosopher this University has ever produced and you know it."

"Perhaps. You are also a hard man to get along with, and to fit into anything. Have you any other prospects?"

"Yes, but I need time."

"And money, I'll bet."

"Could you see your way –?"

"What do you want to do?"

"I'm writing a book."

"What about? Scepticism used to be your special thing."

"No no; quite different. A novel."

"I don't suppose you are counting on it to produce much money?"

"Not for a while, of course."

"Better try for a Canada Council grant; they back novelists."

"Will you recommend me?"

"I recommend quite a few people every year; but I'm not known for literary taste. How do you know you can write a novel?"

"Because I have it all clear in my head! And it's really extraordinary! A brilliant account of life as it used to be in this city – the underground life, that's to say – but underlying it an analysis of the malaise of our time."

"Great God!"

"Meaning what, precisely?"

"Meaning that roughly two-thirds of the first novels that people write are on that theme. Very few of them get published."

"Don't be so ugly! You know me; you remember the things I used to write when we were students. With my mind –"

"That's what I'm afraid of. Novels aren't written with the mind."

"With what, then?"

"Ask Ozy Froats; the forty-foot gut, he says. Look at you – a heavy mesomorphic element combined with substantial ectomorphy, but hardly any endomorphy at all. You've lived a terrible life, you've boozed and drugged and toughed around, and you're still built like an athlete. I'll bet you've got a miserable little gut. When did you last go to the w.c.?"

"What the hell is all this?"

"It's the new psychology. Ask Froats. – Now I'll make a deal with you, John –"

"Just a few dollars to tide me over –"

"All right, but I said a deal, and here it is. Stop wearing that outfit. You disgust me, parading around as a man in God's service when you're in no service but your own – or perhaps the Devil's. I'll give you a suit, and you've got to wear it, or no money and not one crumb of help from me."

We looked over my suits. I had in mind one that was becoming a little tight, but Parlabane, by what course of argument I can't recall, walked off with one of my best ones – a smart clerical grey, though not of clerical cut. And a couple of very good shirts, and a couple of dark ties, and some socks, and a few handkerchiefs, and even an almost new pair of shoes.

"You've certainly put on weight," he said, as he preened in front of the mirror. "But I'm handy with the needle; I can take a reef or two in this."

At last he was going, so – sheer weakness – I gave him one drink.

"How you've changed," he said. "You know, you used to be a soft touch. We seem to have changed roles. You, the pious youth, have become as hard as nails: I, the unbeliever, have tried to become a priest. Has your faith been so eroded by your life?"

"Strengthened, I should say."

"But when you recite the Creed, do you really mean what you say?"

"Every word. But the change is that I also believe a great many other things that aren't in the Creed. It's shorthand, you know. Just what's necessary. But I don't live merely by what is necessary. If you are determined on the religious life, you have to toughen up your mind. You have to let it be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, and among them you must make choices. You remember what Goethe said – that he'd never heard of a crime he could not imagine himself committing? If you cling frantically to the good, how are you to find out what the good really is?"

"I see. – Do you know anything about a girl called Theotoky?"

"She's a student of mine. Yes."

"I see something of her. She's Hollier's soror mystica, did you know? And as I'm his famulus – though he's doing his damnedest to shake me – I see her quite often. A real scrotum-stirring beauty."

"I know nothing about that."

"But Hollier does, I think."

"Meaning what?"

"I thought you might have heard something."

"Not a word."

"Well, I must go. Sorry you've become such a bad priest, Sim."

"Remember what I said about the habit."

"Oh, come on – just now and then. I like to lecture my mature students in it."

"Be careful. I could make things difficult for you."

"With the bishop? He wouldn't care."

"Not with the bishop. With the R.C.M.P. You've got a record, remember."

"I bloody well have not!"

"Not official. Just a few notes in a file, perhaps. But if I catch you in that fancy-dress again, I'll grass on you, Brother John."

He opened his mouth, then shut it. He had learned something after all; he had learned not to have an answer for everything.

He finished his drink, and after a longing look at the bottle, which I ignored, he went. But there was a pathetic appeal at the door which cost me fifty dollars. And he took his monk's robe, bundled up and tied with its own girdle.