Robertson Davies - The Manticore

"Now, the cream of the story is this. Maria Ann Dymock must have been a girl of some character, for she bore the child in the local workhouse and in due time marched off to church to have it christened. "What shall I name the child?" said parson. "Albert Henry," said Maria Ann. So it was done. "And the father's name?" said parson; "shall I say Dymock?" "No," said Maria Ann, "say Staunton, because it's said by landlord the whole place could be his father, and I want him to carry his father's name." I get all this out of the county archaeological society's records, which include quite an interesting diary of the clergyman in question, whose name was the Reverend Theophilus Mynors, by the way. Mynors must have been a sport, and probably he thought the girl had been badly used by Applesquire, because he put down the name as Albert Henry Staunton in the parish record.

"It caused a scandal, of course. But Maria Ann stuck it out, and when Applesquire's cronies threatened to make things too hot for her to stay in the parish, she walked the village street with a collecting bag, saying, "If you want me out of Staunton, give me something for my journey." She must have been a Tartar. She didn't get much, but the Rev. Theophilus admits that he gave her five pounds on the quiet, and there were one or two other contributors who admired her pluck, and soon she had enough to go abroad. You could still get a passage to Quebec for under five pounds in those days if you supplied your own food, and infants travelled free. So off went Maria Ann in late May of 1866, and undoubtedly she was your great-grandmother."

We were eating in one of those Oxford restaurants that spring up and sink down again because they are run by amateurs, and we had arrived at the stage of eating a charlotte russe made of stale cake, tired jelly, and chemicals; I can still remember its taste because it is associated with my bleak wonder as to what I was going to report to Father. I explained to Pledger-Brown.

"But my dear Davey, you're missing the marvel of it," he said; "what a story! Think of Maria Ann's resource and courage! Did she slink away and hide herself in London with her bastard child, gradually sinking to the basest forms of prostitution while little Albert Henry became a thief and a pimp? No! She was of the stuff of which the great New World has been forged! She stood up on her feet and demanded to be recognized as an individual, with inalienable rights! She braved the vicar, and George Applesquire, and all of public opinion. And then she went off to carve out a glorious life in what were then, my dear chap, Still the colonies and not the great self-governing sisterhood of the Commonwealth! She was there when Canada became a Dominion! She may have been among the cheering crowds who hailed that moment in Montreal or Ottawa or wherever it was! You're not grasping the thing at all."

I was grasping it. I was thinking of Father.

"I confess that I've been meddling," said Adrian, turning very red; "Garter would be as mad as hops if he knew I'd been playing with my paint-box like this. But after all, this is my first shot at tracing a forbear independently, and I can't help it. So I beg you, as a friend, to accept this trifle of anitergium from me."

He handed me a cardboard roll, and when I had pried the metal cap off one end, I found a scroll inside it. I folded it out on the table where the medical charlotte russe had given place to some coffee – a Borgia speciality of the place – and it was a coat-of-arms.

"Just a very rough shot at something the College of Heralds would laugh at, but I couldn't help myself," he said. "The description in our lingo would be 'Gules within a bordure wavy or, the Angel of the Annunciation bearing in her dexter hand a sailing-ship of three masts and in her sinister an apple.' In other words, there's Mary the Angel with the ship she went to Canada on, and a good old Gloucester cider apple, on a red background with a wiggly golden border around the shield. Sorry about the wavy border; it means bastardy, but you don't have to tell everybody. Then here's the crest: "a fox Statant guardant within his jaws a sugar cane,

all proper." It's the Staunton crest, but slightly changed for your purposes, and the sugar cane says where you got your lolly from, which good heraldry often does. The motto, you see, is De forte egressa est dulcedo - "Out of the strong came forth sweetness" – from the Book of Judges, and couldn't be neater, really. And look here – you see I've given the fox a rather saucy privy member, just as a hint at your father's prowess in that direction. How do you like it?"

"You called it something," said I; "a trifle of something?"

"Oh, anitergium ," said Adrian. "It's just one of those Middle Latin terms I like to use for fun. It means a trifle, a sketch, something disposable. Well, actually the monks used it for the throw-outs from the scriptorium which they used for bum-wipe."

I hated to hurt his feelings, but Pargetter always said that hard things should be said as briefly as possible.

"It's bum-wipe, all right," I said. "Father won't have that."

"Oh, most certainly not. I never meant that he should. The College of Heralds would have to prepare you legitimate arms, and I don't suppose it would be anything like this."

"I don't mean the anitergium ." I said. "I mean the whole story."

"But Davey! You told me yourself your father said you were probably bastards. He must have a sturdy sense of humour."

"He has," I said, "but I doubt if it extends to this. However, I'll try it."

I did. And I was right. His letter in reply was cold and brief. "People talk jokingly about being bastards, but the reality is something different. Remember that I am in politics now and you can imagine the fun my opponents would have. Let us drop the whole thing. Pay off Pledger-Brown and tell him to keep his trap shut."

And that, for a while, was that.

I suppose nobody nowadays gets through a university without some flirtation with politics, and quite a few lasting marriages result. I had my spell of socialism, but it was measles rather than scarlet fever, and I soon recovered; as a student of law, I was aware that in our time whatever a man's political convictions may be he lives under a socialist system. Furthermore, I knew that my concern for mankind disposed me toward individuals rather than masses, and as Pargetter was pushing me toward work in the courts, and especially toward criminal law, I was increasingly interested in a class of society for which no political party has any use. There was, Pargetter said, somewhat less than five per cent of society which could fittingly be called the criminal class. That five per cent were my constituents.

I got my First Class in law at Oxford, and was in time called to the Bar in London, but I had always intended to practise in Canada, and this involved me in three more years of work. Canadian law, though rooted in English law, is not precisely the same, and the differences, and a certain amount of professional protectionism, made it necessary for me to qualify all over again. It was not hard. I was already pretty good and was able to do the Canadian work with time to spare for other reading. Like many well-qualified professional men I knew very little but my job, and Pargetter was very severe on that kind of ignorance. " 'If practice be the whole that he is taught, practice must also be the whole that he will ever know,' " he would quote from Blackstone. So I read a lot of history, as my schoolwork with Ramsay had given me a turn in that direction, and quite a few great classical works which have formed the minds of men for generations, and of which I retain nothing but a vague sense of how long they were and how clever people must be who liked them. What I really liked was poetry, and I read a lot of it.