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  Leaven of Malice

  ( The Salterton Trilogy - 2 )

  Robertson Davies

  People who do not know Salterton call it dreamy and old-world. They say it is the place where Anglican clergymen go when they die. The real Saltertons, however, know that there is nothing quaint about the place at all. With its two cathedrals, its one university, and its native sons and daughters busily scheming for their dreams, Salterton is very much in the real world.

  Robertson Davies

  Leaven of Malice

  All characters in this story are imaginary, and no reference is intended to any living person. Readers who think that they can identify the creations of the author’s fancy among their own acquaintance are paying the author an extravagant compliment, which he acknowledges with gratitude.

  Grant us to put away the

  leaven of malice and wickedness

  that we may alway serve Thee

  in pureness of living and truth.

  —The Prayer Book

  One

  It was on the 31st of October that the following announcement appeared under “Engagements”, in the Salterton Evening Bellman:

  Professor and Mrs Walter Vambrace are pleased to announce the engagement of their daughter, Pearl Veronica, to Solomon Bridgetower, Esq., son of Mrs Bridgetower and the late Professor Solomon Bridgetower of this city. Marriage to take place in St Nicholas’ Cathedral at eleven o’clock a.m., November 31st.

  Few of the newspaper’s readers found anything extraordinary about this intimation, or attached any significance to the fact that it was made on Hallowe’en.

  When fortune decides to afflict a good man and rob him of his peace, she often chooses a fine day to begin.

  The 1st of November was a beautiful day, and the sun shone with a noble autumn glory as Gloster Ridley, editor of The Bellman, walked through the park to his morning’s work. The leaves rustled about his feet and he kicked them with pleasure. It was like tramping through some flaky breakfast food, he thought, and smiled at the unromantic fancy. That was not in the least what his colleague Mr Shillito would think about autumn leaves. He recalled what Mr Shillito had written yesterday on the subject of Hallowe’en—which Mr Shillito had managed five times to call All Hallows’ Eve and twice “this unhallowed Eve”—and his face darkened; the Old Mess had been at his most flowery and most drivelling. But Ridley quickly banished Mr Shillito from his mind; that was a problem to be dealt with later in the day. Meanwhile, his walk to his office was his own, for his own agreeable musings. His day had begun well; Constant Reader had prepared an excellent breakfast for him, and the hateful Blubadub, though faintly audible in the kitchen, had kept out his sight. He sniffed the delightfully cool and smoky autumn air. The day stretched before him, full of promise.

  In less than a week he would be fifty. Middle-aged, unquestionably, but how much better he felt than ever in his youth! From his seventeenth year until quite recently, Anxiety had ridden him with whip and spur, and only when well past forty had he gained any hope of unseating her. But today…! His bosom’s lord, he told himself, sat lightly in his throne. Who said that? Romeo. Pooh, Romeo knew nothing about the quiet, well-controlled self-satisfaction of a man who might well, before he was fifty-one, be a Doctor of Civil Law.

  To be Doctor Ridley! He would not, of course, insist upon the title, but it would be his, and if he should ever chance to be introduced to a new acquaintance as Mister, there would almost certainly be someone at hand to say, probably with a pleasant laugh, “I think it should be Doctor Ridley, shouldn’t it?” Not that he attached undue importance to such distinctions; he knew precisely how matters stood. After what he had done for Waverley University they must reward him with a substantial fee or give him an honorary doctorate. Waverley, like all Canadian universities, was perpetually short of money, whereas its store of doctorates was inexhaustible. They would not even have to give him a gown, for that glorious adornment would be returnable immediately after the degree ceremony. It would be a doctorate, certainly, and he would value it. It was a symbol of security and success, and it would be another weapon with which to set his old enemy, Anxiety, at bay. He would feel himself well rewarded when he was Doctor Ridley.

  He had fairly earned it. When it had occurred to some of the Governors of the University two years ago that Waverley ought to establish a course in journalism, it had been to him that they turned for advice. When the decision was taken to make plans for such a course, he had been the only person not directly associated with the University to sit upon the committee; tactfully and unobtrusively, he had guided it. He had listened, without visible emotion, to the opinions of professors upon the Press and upon the duty which some of them believed they owed to society to reform the Press. He had discussed without mirth or irony their notions of the training which would produce a good newspaperman. He had counselled against foolish spending, and he had fought tirelessly for spending which he believed to be necessary. Little by little his academic colleagues on the committee had recognized that he knew what he was talking about.

  He had triumphed in persuading them that their course should occupy three years instead of two. His had been the principal voice in planning the course, and his would certainly be the principal voice in hiring the staff. Next autumn the course would be included in the Waverley syllabus, and now his work was almost done.

  One task still lay before him, and it was a pleasant one. He was to deliver the first of the Wadsworth Lectures for the current academic year. These public lectures, founded twenty years before to inform the university opinion on matters of public importance, were to be devoted this year to “The Press and The People”. A Cabinet Minister would speak, and the United Kingdom High Commissioner; a celebrated philosopher and an almost equally celebrated psychologist were also to give their views. But the first of the five lectures would be given by himself, Gloster Ridley, editor of the Salterton Evening Bellman, and he was determined that it should be the best of the lot. For, after all, he knew at first hand what a newspaper was, and the other lecturers did not. And it was widely admitted that under his guidance The Bellman was a very good paper.

  Yes, he thought, he had a shrewd idea what the Press was. Not a cheap Press, nor yet the pipedream Press that the university reformers had talked about at those early meetings. And he knew about the People, too, for he was one of them. He had had no university education. That was one of the reasons why it would fall so sweetly upon his ear to be spoken of as Doctor Ridley.

  Oh, yes, he would tell them about the Press and the People. The Press, he would explain, belonged to the People—to all of the People, whether their tastes and needs were common or uncommon. He would speak amusingly, but there would be plenty in his lecture for them to chew on. He would begin with a quotation from Shakespeare, from All’s Well that Ends Well; a majority of his listeners, even in a university audience, would not have read the play, but he would remind them that people outside university halls could be well-read. Of a newspaper he would quote, “It is like a barber’s chair that fits all buttocks; the pin-buttock, the quatch-buttock, the brawn buttock, or any buttock”. And then he would develop his theme, which was that in any issue of a good daily paper every reader, gentle or simple, liberally educated or barely able to read, should find not only the news of the day but something which was, in a broad sense, of special concern to himself.

  It would be a good lecture. Possibly his publisher would have it reprinted in pamphlet form, and distribute it widely to other papers. Without vulgar hinting, he thought he could insinuate that idea into his publisher’s mind.

  Musing pleasantly on these things, he reached the newspaper building.

  He climbed the stairs to his second-floor
office somewhat furtively, for he did not want to meet Mr Shillito and exchange greetings with him. He was determined to do nothing which might appear two-faced, and Mr Shillito’s greetings were of so courtly and old-world a nature that he was often enticed into a geniality of which he was afterward ashamed. He must not feed the Old Mess sugar from his hand, while concealing the sword behind his back. But his path was clear, and he slipped into his office unseen by anyone but Miss Green, his secretary. She followed him through the door.

  “No personal mail this morning, Mr Ridley. Just the usual. And the switchboard says somebody called you before nine, but wouldn’t leave their name.”

  The usual was neatly marshalled on his desk. Miss Green had been solicitous about the morning’s letters since the day, more than three days ago, when somebody had sent him a dead rat, wrapped as a gift, with a card explaining that this was a comment upon The Bellman’s stand on a matter of public controversy. She had failed, since then, to intercept an envelope filled with used toilet paper (a political innuendo) but in general her monitorship was good. There were ten Letters to the Editor, and he took them up without curiosity, and with a thick black pencil ready in his hand.

  Two, from “Fair Play” and “Indignant”, took the Salterton City Council to task, the former for failing to re-surface the street on which he lived, and the latter for proposing to pave a street on which he owned property, thereby raising the rates. Both writers had allowed anonymity to go to their heads, and both had added personal notes requesting that their true names be withheld, as they feared reprisals of an unspecified nature. From “Fair Play”s’ letter Ridley deleted several sentences, and changed the word “shabby” to “ill-advised”. “Indignant” required more time, as the writer had not used enough verbs to make his meaning clear, and had apparently punctuated his letter after writing it, on some generous but poorly conceived principle of his own.

  The third letter was so badly written that even his accustomed eye could make very little of it, but it appeared to be from an aggrieved citizen whose neighbour spitefully threw garbage into his back yard. Other iniquities of the neighbour were rehearsed, but Ridley marked the letter for Miss Green’s attention; she would return it with the usual note declining to publish libellous material.

  The next three letters were legible, grammatical and reasonable, and dealt with a scheme to create a traffic circle at a principal intersection of the city. They were quickly given headings and marked for the printer.

  The seventh letter urged that a hockey coach who had trained some little boys the winter before be prevented, by force if necessary, from training them in the winter to come. He was, it appeared, a monster and a heretic whose influence would prove the ruin of hockey tactics and the downfall of that sport in Canada. It was signed with a bold signature and a street address, but the editor’s eye was not deceived. He consulted the Salterton City Directory and found, as he had suspected, that there was no such number as 183 Maple Street, and no such person as Arthur C. Brown. With a sigh for the duplicity of mankind, he threw the letter into the wastepaper basket. He was a little pleased, also, that the intuition which suggested to him that a signature was a fake was in good working order.

  The eighth letter was from a farmer who charged the Salterton Exhibition Committee with great unfairness and some measure of dishonesty in the matter of awarding prizes in the Pullet sub-section of the Poultry Division of the Livestock Competition at the fall fair. He was aware, he said, that the fair had taken place seven weeks ago, but it had taken him a little time to get around to writing his letter. It went into the waste basket.

  The ninth letter caused Ridley both surprise and annoyance. It read:

  Sir:

  Warm congratulations on the editorial headed “Whither The Toothpick” which appeared in your edition of 28/x. It is such delightful bits of whimsy as this which raise the tone of The Bellman above that of any other paper which comes to my notice and give it a literary grace which is doubly distinguished in a world where style is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. This little gem joins many another in my scrapbook. Happy the city which can boast a Bellman! Happy the Bellman which boasts a writer who can produce the felicitous “Toothpick”.

  Yours, etc.

  Eldon Bumford

  No error about that signature; old Bumford, at eighty-four, was reversing the usual tendency of old men to damn everything, and was loud in his praise of virtually everything. No reason not to publish it. Dead certainty that if it did not appear within a day or two old Bumford would be on the telephone, or worse still, in the chair opposite his desk, asking why. And yet it was out of the question that the thing should be published. Ridley laid it aside for later consideration.

  The tenth letter was in a well-known hand, in green ink. Letters in that hand, and in that ink, appeared on Ridley’s desk every two weeks, and their message was always the same: the world had forgotten God. Sometimes it showed this forgetfulness by permitting children to read the comic strips; sometimes drink—invariably referred to as “beverage alcohol”—was the villain; sometimes it was the decline in church attendance which especially afflicted the writer; in winter the iniquity of ski-trains, which travelled during church hours and bore young people beyond the sound of church bells, was complained of; in summer it was the whoredom of two-piece bathing suits, and shorts which revealed girls’ legs, which was consuming society. The writer was able to support all her arguments by copious quotations from Holy Writ, and she did so; now and then she related a modern enormity to one of the monsters in Revelation. The letter at hand urged that the Prime Minister be advised to declare November 11th a National Day of Prayer, in which, by an act of mass repentance, Canada might be cleansed of her wrong-doings, and at the end of which her iniquity might be pardoned. The letter was marked “Urgent—Print this At Once”. Wearily, Ridley laid it aside. This was, perhaps, the voice of the people, and the voice of the people, no editor is ever permitted to forget, is the voice of God. It was a pity, he reflected, that God’s utterances needed such a lot of editorial revision.

  Disposing of the remainder of the morning’s mail was easy. Ridley ran his fingers quickly through it: propaganda, some of it expert and much of it amateurish, from a dozen bureaux maintained by a dozen foreign Governments. The Bellman was invited to espouse two opposed causes in India; it was offered a ringing denunciation of the partition of Ireland; it was urged to celebrate the 25oth anniversary of a French poet whom Ridley could not recall having heard of; it was reminded of seven quaint celebrations which would take place in Britain during November.

  There were four long mimeographed statements from four trades unions, setting forth extremely complex grievances which the Government was admonished to settle at once. There was a pamphlet from a society which wanted to reform the calendar and had received the permission of Ecuador, Liberia, Iceland and the Latvian Government-in-exile to go ahead and do it. There was a mass of material from United Nations. There were five printed communications of varying length from religious and charitable societies. There was something stamped “Newsflash” in red ink, advertising a new oil well in terms which were not intended to sound like advertisement. A blue-book, to which was attached the visiting card of a Cabinet Minister, presented a mass of valuable statistics, eighteen months out of date. Four packages offered The Bellman new comic strips of unparalleled funniness, which Ridley read through with undisturbed gravity.

  He threw the whole lot into the waste basket, filling it almost to the brim.

  There was a rich, rumbling sound outside his door, a voice which said, “Ah, Miss Green, as charming as ever, I see. Nobody with the Chief, I presume?” and the door opened, admitting Mr Swithin Shillito.

  Mr Shillito was seventy-eight years old, and frequently put people into a position where they had to tell him that he did not look it. His white hair, parted in the middle, swept back in two thick waves. His white moustache was enormous, and was shaped like the horns of a ram. Lesser moustaches, eq
ually white, thick and sweeping, served him for eyebrows. His very large, handsome head appeared to be attached to his small, meagre body by a high stiff collar and a carefully knotted tie, in which a nugget of gold served as a pin. On his waistcoat hung a watch-chain with huge links, from one of which depended an elk’s tooth, mounted in gold. Other interesting elements in his dress were brightly shined high boots, an alpaca working coat, and wicker cuffguards on his sleeves. Gold pince-nez hung from a little reel on his waistcoat, ready to be hauled out and nipped on his large nose when needed. He carried some papers in his hand.

  “Nothing strange or startling this morning, Chief,” said he, advancng with a jaunty step. “I thought I’d do my stint a little early. Nothing heavy: just one or two odds and ends that may prove amusing, and fill up a corner here and there. I wanted to get my day clear, in order to do some digging. I tell these young chaps in the news room, ‘Dig, dig, it’s the secret of the Newspaper Game. I’m seventy-eight and still digging,’ I say. Some of them won’t believe it. You’ll do the leader yourself, I suppose?”

  “Yes Mr Shillito,” said Ridley. “I have two or three things I want to write about today.”

  “And I dare swear you have them written in your head at this moment,” said Mr Shillito, wagging his own head in histrionic admiration. “Plan, plan; it’s the only way to get anything done on a newspaper. They won’t believe it, the young chaps won’t, but it’s the gospel truth.” “I have been reading one or two reports on the seaway scheme which suggested some ideas to me.”

  “Ah, that’s it! Read, read. Dig, dig. Plan, plan. That’s what takes a journalist to the top. But the young chaps won’t listen. Time will weed ‘em out. The readers, the diggers, the planners will shoot to the top and the rest—well, we know what happens to them. Do you want to cast your eye over those things while I wait?”