Robertson Davies: The Rebel Angels

"I used to think it was horrible to see couples in restaurants, simply eating and never saying a word to one another," said Maria, "but I am beginning to know better. Maybe they don't have to talk all the time to be in communication. Conversation in its true meaning isn't all wagging the tongue; sometimes it is a deeply shared silence. But Arthur and I have never stopped talking since we decided to marry."

"I'm beginning to wonder if we haven't got the legend of Eden all wrong," said Arthur. "God threw Adam and Eve out of the Garden because they gained knowledge at the price of their innocence, and I think God was jealous. "The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it" – you recognize that, Simon?"

"One of the Gnostic Gospels," said I, a little nettled at being instructed in my own business by this young man.

" The Gospel of Thomas, and very juicy stuff," said Arthur, who was in a condition to lecture the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope, if they needed any help. "Adam and Eve had learned how to comprehend the Kingdom of the Father, and their descendants have been hard at it ever since. That's what universities are about, when they aren't farting around with trivialities. Of course God was jealous; He was being asked to share some of His domain. I'll bet Adam and Eve left the Garden laughing and happy with their bargain; they had exchanged a know-nothing innocence for infinite choice."

This was all very well, and a great improvement on what I usually meet with when I talk to young couples who are approaching marriage. How dumb a lot of them are, poor dears; quite incapable of putting their expectations into words. They don't even seem to comprehend what my function in the service is – not as somebody who publicly licenses them to sleep together and use the same towels, but as an intermediary between them, the suppliants, and Whatever It Is that hears their supplication. But I had my reservations. These two were a little too articulate for my complete satisfaction. And I wanted to be satisfied, for I still loved Maria deeply.

She knew that I was not easy in my mind, and before they went she said: "What you told us in the first class I took with you is the motto for our marriage. You remember that passage from Augustine?"

"Conloqui et conridere…"

"Yes. 'Conversations and jokes together, mutual rendering of good services, the reading together of sweetly phrased books, the sharing of nonsense and mutual attentions'. And the mutual attentions of course include sex. So you mustn't look worried, Simon dear."

I would have had to be more than human not to worry. I was losing a greatly gifted pupil. I was losing a woman whom I had regarded, for a time, as the earthly embodiment of Sophia. Though I knew I could never possess her, I loved her still, and I was going to bind her to a man against whom I knew nothing that was not good, but who somehow bothered me.

I decided this was jealousy. I suppose the Rebel Angels were not above jealousy. It is an unpopular passion; people will confess with some degree of self-satisfaction that they are greedy, or have terrible tempers, or are close about money, but who admits to being jealous? It cannot easily be presented as a good quality with a dark complexion. But my job as a priest is to look human frailty in the face and call it by its right name. I was jealous of Arthur Cornish because he was going to be first in the heart of a woman I still loved. But as Maria had said, a Rebel Angel takes something of a woman's innocence as he leads her towards a larger world and an ampler life, and it is not surprising if the man who has done that is jealous of the man who reaps the benefit. I could understand and value Maria as he never could, I was sure of that; but I was equally sure that Maria could never be mine except on the mythological plane she had herself explained. What ails you, Father Darcourt, is that you want to eat your cake and have it too; you want to be first with Maria, without paying the price of that position. All right, I understand. But it still hurts.

Why was I so withholding in my feelings about Arthur? It was because, although I had seen quite a lot of his crown, I knew nothing about his root except what might be inferred from his deep feeling for music. Maria seemed to have yielded to him completely; whatever she had said in the interview just closed had a – no, not a falsity, but a somewhat un-Marialike quality that spoke of Arthur. I had observed that in plenty of brides, but Maria was not to be judged as one of them.

All this orthodoxy – what could it lead to? In my experience the essentials of Christianity, rightly understood, may form the best possible foundation for a life and a marriage, but in the case of people of strongly intellectual bent these essentials need extensive farcing out – I use the word as cooks do, to mean the extending and amplifying of a dish with other, complementary elements – if they are to prove enough. One cannot live on essences.

Young couples whom I interview before marriage are sincere in their faith, or pretend to a sincerity they think I expect, but I know that in the household they set up there will be other gods than the one God. The Romans talked of household gods, and they knew what they were talking about; in every home and every marriage there are the lesser gods, who sometimes swell to extraordinary size, and even when they are not consciously acknowledged they have great power. Every one of the household gods has a dark side, a mischievous side, as when Pride disguises itself as self-respect, Anger as the possession of high standards of behaviour, or Lust as freedom of choice. Who would be the household gods under the Cornish roof?

I knew of the special bee in Maria's bonnet; it was Honour, a concept she had seized from the work of François Rabelais, and made her own. Honour which was said to prompt people to virtuous action and hold them back from vice; was there a dark side to that god? Fruitless to speculate, but I could imagine Honour raising quite a lot of hell if it were to swell to a size where it darkened the face of the one God.

Maria's marriage was, all things considered, a great success, though there were a few oddities. Standing at the altar, waiting for the bride, I could see her, at the back of Spook Chapel, slipping off her shoes, so that she was barefoot when she confronted me, though her long white wedding-gown concealed her feet most of the time. It made her a little shorter than I had ever seen her before, and although Arthur Cornish was not especially tall, he seemed to tower above her. He was handsomely and conventionally dressed; it was plain that his morning clothes were made for him and not hired. I have seen many a wedding given a decided list towards comedy when the groom wore badly fitting hired clothes, and was all too plainly ill at ease in his first stiff collar. (I think it a bad omen when the groom is the clown of the circus; it is usually the top hat that is the betrayer.) Arthur and his best man were impeccable. The best man was Geraint Powell, a rising young actor from the Stratford Festival, handsome, self-assured, and somewhat larger than life as actors tend to be on ceremonial occasions. Where, I wondered, had Arthur picked up such a friend, who was as near as our modern age allows to what used to be called a matinee idol.

The music, too, was impeccable and I suppose it was Arthur's choice. It was strange to see Maria walking with the splendid poise of a barefoot Gypsy down that long aisle on the arm of Yerko, who padded like a huge bear, and made a great business of smiling through tears, which he clearly thought was the proper emotional tone for his role. Somewhere – God knows where – Yerko had found a purple Ascot stock, and it was pinned with a garnet like an egg.