Robertson Davies - The Rebel Angels

But he does know it! Would I have let him take me on the sofa five months ago if I wasn't sure he knew I loved him? No! Don't ask that question. I can't be sure of the answer now.

The proprietor of The Rude Plenty was hovering. I gave him a beseeching glance, and he helped me get Parlabane to his feet and towards the door. The monk was as strong as a bull, and it was a tussle. Parlabane began to sing in a very loud and surprisingly melodious voice -

At last I got him into the street, and steered him back to the front door of Spook, where the night porter, an old friend of mine, took him in charge.

As I walked back to the subway station I thought: that's what comes of trying to understand Parlabane; a loud scene in The Rude Plenty. Would I go on? Yes, I thought I would.

The initiative was taken out of my hands. When I arrived at Hollier's outer room the following morning there was a note for me, placed beside a bouquet of flowers – salvia – which had too obviously been culled from the garden outside the Rector's Lodging. The note read:

Dearest and Most Understanding of Created Beings:

Sorry about last night. Some time since I had a really good swig at anything. Shall I say it will not happen again? Not with any degree of sincerity. But I must make reparation. So ask me to dinner again soon, and, I shall tell you the Story Of My Life, which is well worth whatever it may cost you.

Your crawling slave,

P.

To become a Ph.D. you must take a few courses relating to your special theme before you get down to work on your thesis. I had done almost all that was necessary, but Hollier suggested that I do two courses this year, one with Professor Urquhart McVarish in Renaissance European Culture and the other in New Testament Greek with Professor the Reverend Simon Darcourt. McVarish lectured dully; his stuff was good but he was too much the scholar to make it interesting, lest somebody should accuse him of "popularization". He was a fussy little man who was forever dabbing at his long red nose with a handkerchief he kept tucked up in his left sleeve. Somebody told me that this was a sign that he had once been an officer in a first-class British regiment. About twenty people attended the lectures.

Prof. the Rev. was different, a roly-poly parson, as pink as a baby, who did not lecture, but conducted seminars, in which everybody present was expected to speak up and have an opinion, or at least ask questions. There were only five of us: myself and three young men and one middle-aged man, all studying for the ministry. Two of the young men were modern and messy, long-haired and fashionably dirty; they were heading for advanced evangelical church work, and in their spare time assisted in services with rock music, where people like themselves danced away Evil, and embraced one another in tears when the show was over. They were taking the course in hopes, I think, of discovering from the original texts that Jesus was also a great dancer and guitar-player. The other young man was very High Church Anglican, and addressed Darcourt as "Father" and wore a dark grey suit to which he obviously hoped, very soon, to add a clerical collar. The middle-aged man had given up his job selling insurance to become a parson, and worked like a galley-slave, because he had a wife and two children and had to get himself ordained as fast as he could. Altogether, they were not an inspiring lot. God had presumably called all four to His service, but surely in a fit of absent-mindedness or perhaps as some complicated Jewish joke.

Luckily, Prof. the Rev. was far better than I could have hoped. "What do you expect from this seminar?" he asked, right away. "I'm not going to teach you a language; I suppose you all know classical Greek?" I did, but the four men looked unconfident, and admitted slowly that they had done a bit of it, or crammed some during summer courses. "If you know Greek, it may be assumed that you also know Latin," said Prof. the Rev., and this was received in glum silence. But was he downhearted? No!

"Let's find out how good you are," he said. "I'm going to write a short passage on the blackboard, and in a few minutes I'll ask you for a translation." Widespread discomfort, and one of the long-haired ones murmured that he hadn't brought a Latin dictionary with him. "You won't need it," said Darcourt; "this is easy."

He wrote: Conloqui et conridere et vicissim benevole obsequi, simul leger libros duciloquos, simul nugari et simul honestari. Then he sat down and beamed at us over his half-glasses. "That's the motto, the groundwork for what we shall do in this seminar during the year before us; that's the spirit in which we shall work. Now let's have a rendering in English. Who'll translate?"

There followed that awful hush that falls on a room when several people are trying to make themselves invisible. "Talk together, laugh together, do good to each other -" murmured the spiky youth, and fell silent. The hairy pair looked as if they hated Darcourt already.

"Ladies first," said Darcourt, smiling at me. So in I plunged.

"Conversations and jokes together, mutual rendering of good services, the reading together of sweetly phrased books, the sharing of nonsense and mutual attentions," said I.

I could see he was pleased. "Admirable. Now somebody else tell me where it comes from. Come on, you've all read the book, even if only in translation. You ought to know it well; the author ought to be a close friend."

But nobody would speak and I suspect nobody knew. Shall I make myself hated, I thought. I might as well; I've been doing it in classes all my life.

"It's Saint Augustine's Confessions," I said. The two hairy ones looked at me with loathing, the spiky one with sick envy. The middle-aged one was making a careful note; he was going to conquer this stuff or die; he owed it to the wife and kids.

"Thank you, Miss Theotoky. You gentlemen must learn not to be so shy," he said with what seemed to be a hint of irony. "That's what we're going to attempt here; talk and jokes – I hope – rising out of the reading of the New Testament. Not that it's a great book for jokes, though Christ once made a pun on Peter's new name that he had given him: "Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church". Of course Peter is petras, a stone, in Greek. If that were translated Thou art Rocky and upon this rock I will build my church, people would get the point, but it would hardly be worth it. Wouldn't have church-goers rolling in the aisles two thousand years later. Of course I suppose Christ went on calling him Cephas, which is Stone in Aramaic, but the pun suggests that Our Lord knew some Greek – perhaps quite a lot of it. And so should you, if you want to serve Him."

It seemed to me that Darcourt was being mischievous; he saw that the hairy ones did not like the line he was taking, and he was getting at them.

"This study can lead in all sorts of directions," he said, "and of course deep into the Middle Ages when the sort of Greek we are going to study was hardly known in Europe, and wasn't in the least encouraged by the Church. But there were some rum people who knew some of it – alchemists and detrimentals of that sort – and the tradition of it persisted in the Near East, where Greek was making its long journey towards the language we know as Modern Greek. Funny how languages break down and turn into something else. Latin was rubbed away until it degenerated into dreadful lingos like French and Spanish and Italian, and lo! people found out that quite new things could be said in these degenerate tongues – things nobody had ever thought of in Latin. English is breaking down now in the same way – becoming a world language that every Tom Dick and Harry must learn, and speak in a way that would give Doctor Johnson the jim-jams. Received Standard English has had it; even American English, that once seemed such an impertinent johnny-come-lately in literature, is fusty stuff compared with what you will hear in Africa, which is where the action is, in our day. But I am indulging myself – a bad professorial habit. You must check me when you see it coming on. To work, then. May I assume that you all know the Greek alphabet, and therefore can count to ten in Greek? Good. Then let's begin with changes there."