Robertson Davies - The Manticore

DR. VON HALLER: But did he say outright that he had arranged your adventure?

MYSELF: Never flatly. Never in so many words. But he talked about the wounding experiences young men often had learning about sex from prostitutes or getting mixed up with virgins, and said that the only good way was with an experienced older woman, and that I would bless Myrrha as long as I lived, and be grateful it had been managed so intelligently and pleasantly. That's the way the French do it, he said.

DR. VON HALLER: Was Myrrha Martindale his mistress?

MYSELF: Oh, I don't imagine so for a minute. Though he did leave some money for her in his will, and I know from things that came out later that he helped her with money from time to time. But if he ever had an affair with her, I'm sure it was because he loved her. It couldn't have been a money thing.

DR. VON HALLER: Why not?

MYSELF: It would be sordid, and Father always had such style.

DR. VON HALLER: Have you ever read Voltaire's Candide ?

MYSELF: That was what Knopwood asked me. I hadn't, and he explained that Candide was a simpleton who believed everything he was told. Knopwood was furious with Father. But he didn't know Father, you see.

DR. VON HALLER: And you did?

MYSELF: I sometimes think I knew him better than anyone. Do you suggest I didn't?

DR. VON HALLER: That is one of the things we are working to find out. Tell me about your row with Father Knopwood.

I suppose I brought it on because I went to see Knopwood a few days after returning to Toronto. I was in a confused state of mind. I didn't regret anything about Myrrha; I was grateful to her, just as Father had said, though I thought I had noticed one or two things about her that had escaped him, or that he didn't care about. Really they only meant that she wasn't as young as Judy. But I was worried about my feelings toward Judy. I had gone to see her as soon as I could after returning from Montreal; she was ill – bad headache or something – and her father asked me to chat for a while. He was kind, but he was direct. Said he thought Judy and I should stop seeing each other so much, because we weren't children any longer, and we might become involved in a way we would regret. I knew he meant he was afraid I might seduce her, so I told him I loved her, and would never do anything to hurt her, and respected her too much to get her into any kind of mess. Yes, he said, but there are times when good resolutions weaken, and there are also hurts that are not hurts of the flesh. Then he said something I could hardly believe; he said that he was not sure Judy might not weaken at some time when I was also weak, and then what would our compounded weakness lead to? I had assumed the man always led in these things, and when I said that to Dr. Wolff he smiled in what I can only describe as a Viennese way.

"You and Judy have something that is charming and beautiful," he said, "and I advise you to cherish it as it is, for then it will always be a delight to you. But if you go on, we shall all change our roles; I shall have to be unpleasant to you, which I have no wish to do, and you will begin to hate me, which would be a pity, and perhaps you and Judy will decide that in order to preserve your self-respect you must deceive me and Judy's mother. That would be painful to us, and I assure you it would also be dangerous to you."

Then he did an extraordinary thing. He quoted Burns to me! Nobody had ever done that except my Cruikshank grandfather, down by the crick in Deptford, and I had always assumed that Burns was a sort of crick person's poet. But here was this Viennese Jew, saying,

"The sacred lowe of weel-placed love,

Luxuriously indulge it;

But never tempt th' illicit rove

Tho' naething should divulge it;

I waive the quantum of the sin

The hazard of concealing;

But, och! it hardens a' within,

And petrifies the feeling.

"You are a particularly gentle boy," he said (and I was startled and resented it); it would not take many bad experiences to scar your feelings over and make you much less than the man you may otherwise become. If you seduced my daughter, I should be very angry and might hate you; the physical injury is really not very much, if indeed it is anything at all, but the psychological injury – you see I am too much caught up in the modern way of speaking to be quite able to say the spiritual injury – could be serious if we all parted bad friends. There are people, of course, to whom such things are not important, and I fear you have had a bad example, but you and Judy are not such people. So be warned, David, and be our friend always; but you will never be my daughter's husband, and you must understand that now."

"Why are you so determined I should never be Judy's husband?" I asked.

"I am not determined alone," said he. "There are many hundreds of determining factors on both sides. They are called ancestors, and there are some things in which we are wise not to defy them."

"You mean, I'm not a Jew," I said.

"I had begun to wonder if you would get to it," said Dr. Wolff.

"But does that matter in this day and age?" I said.

"You were born in 1928, when it began to matter terribly, and not for the first time in history," said Dr. Wolff. "But set that aside. There is another way it matters which I do not like to mention because I do not want to hurt you and I like you very much. It is a question of pride."

We talked further, but I knew the conversation was over. They were planning to send Judy to school abroad in the spring. They would be happy to see me from time to time until then. But I must understand that the Wolffs had talked to Judy, and though Judy felt very badly, she had seen the point. And that was that.

It was that night I went to Knopwood. I was working up a rage against the Wolffs. A question of pride! Did that mean I wasn't good enough for Judy? And what did all this stuff about being Jews mean from people who gave no obvious external evidence of their Jewishness? If they were such great Jews, where were their side-curls and their funny underwear and their queer food? I had heard of these things as belonging to the bearded Jews in velours hats who lived down behind the Art Gallery. I had assumed the Wolffs and the Schwarzes were trying to be like us; instead I had been told I wasn't good enough for them! Affronted Christianity boiled up inside me. Christ had died for me, I was certain, but I wouldn't take any bets on His having died for the Wolffs and the Schwarzes! Off to Knopwood! He would know.

I was with him all evening, and in the course of an involved conversation everything came out. To my astonishment he sided with Louis Wolff. But worst of all, he attacked Father in terms I had never heard from him, and he was amused, and contemptuous and angry about Myrrha.

"You triple-turned jackass!" he said, "couldn't you see it was an arranged thing? And you thought it was your own attraction that got you into bed with such a scarred old veteran! I don't blame you for going to bed with her; show an ass a peck of oats and he'll eat it, even if the oats is musty. But it is the provincial vulgarity of the whole thing that turns my stomach – the winesmanship and the tatty gallantries and the candlelit frumpery of it! The "good talk", the imitations of Churchill by your father, the quotations from The Rubaiyat . If I could have my way I'd call in every copy of that twenty-fourth-rate rhymed gospel of hedonism and burn it! How it goes to the hearts of trashy people! So Myrrha matched verses with you, did she? Well, did the literary strumpet quote this -

" 'Well,' murmured one, 'Let whoso make or buy,

My Clay with long Oblivion is gone dry:

But fill me with the old familiar Juice

Methinks I might recover by and by.'

Did she whisper that in your ear as Absalom went in unto his father's concubine?"