Leaven of Malice Read online

  “Norm, after a thing like that, do you suppose they could ever be really happy?”

  “Well, I couldn’t say, honey-bunch. But I’ll go this far: it doesn’t look too good.”

  There was silence for a time, until Norm felt a wetness on his shoulder.

  “Lambie-pie! What’s the matter?”

  “I just can’t bear to think of those two having such a tough time, when we’re so lucky!” And the good-hearted Dutchy sobbed loudly.

  “Oh, honey, that’s wonderful of you! Gee, that’s just wonderful. Come on, now, cheer up. Give daddy a smile. Come on, just a little, teentsy-weentsy smile.”

  “How can I smile when there’s so much unhappiness in the world?”

  “Well, take that attitude, peachie, and everybody would commit suicide. It’s not normal to take other people’s troubles so hard.”

  “Yes, but Norm, these are people we know.”

  “Well now, you cheer up, honey, and we’ll see what we can do.”

  “Aw, Norm, do you really mean you can do something?”

  “Well, for heaven’s sake, isn’t that our whole life? Isn’t that what we’re trained for?”

  “You mean you think we could do some social engineering, and make everything jake for those two poor kids?”

  “We can certainly try. Now it’s plain that the place to relieve the pressure is with Professor Vambrace himself. His attitude simply isn’t normal. I don’t like to butt into a man’s private life, but this thing is bigger than our personal feelings. I’ll just have to go to him and explain to him what’s biting him.”

  “Oh, Norm! I think you’re wonderful!”

  “Yes, I’m going to have to explain to the Professor about the Oedipus Complex.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s rather a complicated concept. And, honey, I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

  “Gee, Norm, I think you’re just the most wonderful person!”

  “Don’t wriggle around like that.”

  “I’m going to get up and get us some coffee and stuff.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “You mean you don’t want to eat?”

  “Later.”

  “Oh, Norm!”

  THE COBBLERS lived in a row of small, impermanent-looking houses, all exactly alike and all—though not more than a few years old—with an air of weariness, like children who have never been strong from birth, and have a poor chance of reaching maturity. Molly Cobbler opened the door to Solly’s knock, and in her usual silent fashion nodded to him to follow her upstairs.

  When they entered the bedroom Humphrey Cobbler was invisible, but in the old-fashioned bed, shaped rather like an elegant sleigh, a heap of bedclothes showed that he was sitting up and bending forward, and a strong smell, and some very loud sniff-ings and exhalations, made it clear that he was inhaling the fumes of Friar’s Balsam.

  “Come along, now; you’ve had enough of that,” said his wife, unveiling him. His mop of black curls was more untidy than ever, and the steam had given his face a boiled look.

  “Bridgetower, you find me very low,” said he.

  Solly said that he was sorry.

  “I have a cold. It would be nothing in another man, but in me it is an affliction of the utmost seriousness. I cannot sing. Suppose I lose my voice entirely? I am not one of your fraudulent choirmasters who tells people how to sing; I show ’em. I’m at a very low ebb. Don’t come near me, or you may catch it. You wouldn’t like a precautionary sniff of this, I suppose?” He held out the steaming jug of balsam.

  “I’ve brought you the only reliable cold cure,” said Solly, producing a bottle of rye from his pocket.

  “Bridgetower, this is an act of positively Roman nobility. This is unquestionably the kind of thing that Brutus used to do for Marc Antony when he had a cold. God bless you, my dear fellow. We’ll have it hot, for our colds. Molly, let’s have hot water and lemon and sugar. Would you believe it, Bridgetower, I have been so improvident as to fall ill without a drop of anything in the house?”

  The invalid looked very much better already, and was now sitting up in bed in a ragged dressing-gown, wrapping up his head in a silk square which obviously belonged to his wife.

  “Have a chair, my dear fellow. Just throw that stuff on the floor. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this visit.” He fetched a large and unpleasant-looking rag from under his pillow and blew his nose loud and long. “E flat,” said he, when he had finished. “Funny, I never seem to blow twice on the same note. You’d think that the nose, under equal pressure, and all that, would behave predictably, but it doesn’t. See this?” He held out the rag. “Piece of an old bedsheet; never blow your nose on paper, Bridgetower. Save old bedsheets for when you have a cold. They’re the only comfort in a really bad cold, and the only way of reckoning its virulence. I consider this to be a two-sheet cold.”

  By this time his wife had returned, with glasses, lemon and sugar, and an electric kettle which she plugged into an outlet in the floor. Solly chatted to her, and Cobbler plied the bedsheet, until the water was hot and the toddies mixed.

  “Aha,” roared the invalid, who seemed to grow more cheerful every minute. “This calls for a toast! What’ll it be?”

  “It had better be to Solly’s engagement,” said Molly. “After all, it’s his whisky.”

  “Engagement? What engagement? Oh, yes, I remember. I heard about it last night, but this pestilent rheum knocked it right out of my head. Who are you supposed to be engaged to, Bridgetower?”

  “Pearl Vambrace was the name given in the paper,” said Solly, watching Cobbler very closely.

  “That’s nonsense,” said Cobbler. “I simply don’t believe it.”

  “Nor do I,” said Solly. “But why don’t you?”

  “It’s psychologically improbable, that’s why. You are, as everybody within a fifty-mile radius knows, an ardent but unsuccessful suitor for the hand of Miss Griselda Webster. Very well. Suppose you do get some sense? Suppose you do get it into your head that she will never marry you if you both live to be a hundred? Very well. You bounce. On the rebound you get engaged to somebody else. But would that somebody else be Pearl Vambrace? Most certainly not! Intuition and reason alike are outraged by such a supposition.” And here Cobbler took a very big drink of his boiling toddy, and for the next few minutes Molly and Solly were busy patting his back, fanning his face and assuring him that he would survive.

  “What I mean to say,” he continued in a whisper, mopping his eyes with his piece of sheeting, “is that Pearl Vambrace is not the kind of girl to catch any man on the rebound. Such girls are either the soft, squeezy kind, who secrete sympathy as a cow secretes milk, or scheming old mantraps who will accept a man when he’s not himself.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear you say so,” said Solly, “for somebody put a notice in the paper that I am engaged to her, and there is a very strong body of opinion which thinks that that person was you.”

  Once again Cobbler got himself into trouble with his hot drink, and when he had been put to rights again Solly told him of all the dark suspicions of Auntie Puss, and Cobbler told Solly of the Hallowe’en party in the Cathedral, and of his serenading Professor Vambrace in the park, which he said that he had been unable to resist.

  “Well, there you are,” said Solly. “Everybody knows you can’t resist any lunatic notion that comes into your head. And so, when something like this happens, your name is bound to crop up.”

  “Only in such a diseased fancy as that of Auntie Puss Pottinger. I am many reprehensible things, in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, because I am unlike them. But therein lies my defence. Can you conceive of any practical joke more tiresomely bourgeois, more quintessentially and ineluctably lower middle class, than shoving a fake engagement notice in the paper? Is Cobbler, the running sore of Salterton society, the man to do such a thing? Never! What’s more, this trick required careful planning, deft execution, and prolonged secrecy to assure its success.
Is Cobbler, the man of impulse, Cobbler the Blabbermouth, the man to bring it off? Once again I cry—Never! And to conclude, this has been done by someone who knows you, some false friend who is privy to your bosom, yet ready to exhibit you as a Merry Andrew to the jeers of the mob. Could this be Cobbler the True, Cobbler who has eaten your bread and salt, and drunk your rye toddy, Cobbler who is to you as secret and as dear as Anna to the Queen of Carthage was? No! The echoing air repeats it—” And Cobbler was about to shout “No” again, in a very loud voice, but he was seized with a terrible fit of coughing. “God,” he said, when he could speak again, “I’m going to fetch up the callouses off the soles of my feet in one of those spells.”

  “Well, that’s what I thought myself,” said Solly. “It just didn’t seem like you.”

  “Your simple eloquence touches my heart,” said Cobbler. “Molly, my pet, I need another length of old sheeting.”

  Molly took the sodden rag from his hand and left the room.

  “What would you do if you were me?” said Solly.

  “What would I do in your place?”

  “No, no; you’d do something fantastic and get farther into the soup. I want to know what you would do if you were intelligent but prudent. What would you do if you were me?”

  Cobbler pondered for a moment. “Well,” he said, “I suppose if I were you—that’s to say a somewhat inert chap, half content to be the football of fate—I’d go right on doing whatever I was doing at the moment, and hope the whole thing would blow over.”

  “Yes, but I can’t do that. I’m absolutely fed up with what I’m doing. I’m a bad teacher; I loathe teaching; I’m expected to teach English literature to people who don’t want to know about it; I’m expected to make a name for myself in Amcan; damn it, sometimes I think seriously about suicide.”

  “Lots of people do,” said Cobbler, “but don’t delude yourself. You’re not the suicidal type.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re too gabby. People who talk a lot about their troubles never commit suicide; talk’s the greatest safety-valve there is. I always laugh at that bit in Hamlet where he pretends to despise himself because he unpacks his heart with words, and falls a-scolding like a very drab; that’s why the soliloquy about suicide is just Hamlet putting on intellectual airs. A chatterbox like that would never pop himself off with a bare bodkin. No, the suicides are the quiet ones, who can’t find the words to fit their misery. We talkers will never take that way out. Anyway, you wouldn’t dare commit suicide, because it would upset your mother; she’d need more than six kinds of medicine to get her out of that.”

  Molly came back into the room. She had put on her nightdress in the bathroom, and her black hair hung loose about her shoulders. Solly had never seen her look so striking.

  “You look like one of those wonderful Cretan women,” said he, in honest admiration.

  “Thanks. I’m going to go to bed, if you don’t mind. The furnace is out. But don’t think that means you have to go. We’ll be very jolly like this.”

  And with a flash of legs she was in bed with Cobbler, and settled back against her pillows with a basket of socks to mend.

  “Solly is thinking of suicide,” said her husband, making a beginning on his new piece of sheeting.

  “Solly needs a wife,” said Molly.

  “But not Pearl Vambrace,” said Cobbler, with great decision. “She’s too much like him in temperament. Married couples should complement each other, and not merely double their losses. There’s much to be said for the square peg in the round hole, as the Cubist told the Vorticist.”

  “I don’t want a wife,” said Solly, passionately. “I’ve got a mother, and that, God knows, is enough to warn me off the female sex for life. I don’t want a wife, and I don’t want my job, and I don’t want Charles Heavysege.”

  “You want to run away to sea,” said Cobbler. “But you wouldn’t like it, you know.”

  “I suppose not,” said Solly. “Don’t pay attention to anything I say tonight. I’m utterly fed up.” He looked into his glass, which was empty.

  “Perhaps you are beflustered by the blabsome wine,” said Molly Cobbler.

  “Impossible. I’ve only had one. But where did you get that business about being beflustered by the blabsome etcetera.”

  “You used it last time you were here.”

  “That was weeks ago.”

  “Yes. But it stuck in my mind.”

  “Molly, do you realize that you have been quoting from the great Charles Heavysege?”

  “Oh? Never heard of him. Yes I have, too. You’ve mentioned him.”

  “I’ve mentioned him! What an understatement! He obsesses me. He is my incubus—my succubus. He is becoming part of the fabric of my being. I expect that within ten years there will be more of Heavysege in me than of the original material. Do you realize what Heavysege is? He is my path to fame, my immortality and the tomb of my youth. I wish I’d never heard of him.”

  “Mix us some more toddies, like a dear,” said Molly. “If he’s so important to you, why do you wish you’d never heard of him?”

  Solly busied himself with the glasses. “Do you really want to know why?” said he.

  “If it’s not too long, and not a bore,” said Molly.

  “It is very long, and it is a bore, but I’ll tell you anyhow. You can go to sleep if you like. Fortunately you are in a position to do so. It’s getting cold in here.” And Solly lifted a red eiderdown from the bed and draped himself in it.

  “I am now gowned as Dr. Bridgetower, the eminent authority on the works of Heavysege,” said he. “The great scholar in the Heavysege field will now address you.

  “It was on May 2nd, 1816, that Charles Heavysege first saw the light of day in Liverpool. When I write my introduction to his Collected Works I shall embellish that statement by pointing out that the shadow of the Corsican Ogre had but lately faded from the chancelleries of Europe, that the Industrial Revolution was in full flower in England, that Byron had been accused of incest by his wife, that Russia’s millions still groaned under the knout, and that in Portland, Maine, the nine-year-old Longfellow had not, so far, written a line. I’ll make it appear that little Heavysege hopped right into the middle of a very interesting time, which is a lie, but absolutely vital to any scholarly biography.

  “What happened between 1816 and 1853, when Heavysege came to Canada, I don’t know, but I’ll fake up something. He was a wood-carver by trade, which is good for a few hundred words of hokum about craftsmanship, but he soon became a reporter on the Montreal Witness.”

  “That was the trumpet-call of the Muse,” said Cobbler, and blew his nose triumphantly.

  “Exactly. From there on it’s plain sailing, as scholarship goes. Heavysege’s major work was his great triple-drama, Saul. Now Saul, ladies and gentlemen, presents the scholar with the widest possible variety of those literary problems which scholars seize upon as dogs seize upon bones. The first of these, of course, is: What is Saul? It is in three parts, and fills 315 closely-printed pages. Therefore we may fittingly describe it as “epic in scope”—meaning damned long. It is brilliantly unactable, but is it fair to call it a “closet drama”? Is it not, rather, a vast philosophical poem, like Faust? We dismiss with contempt any suggestion that it is just a plain mess; once scholarship has its grappling-hooks on a writer’s work there is no room for doubt.”

  “Nobody has ever written a great play on a Biblical theme,” said Cobbler. “Milton couldn’t pull it off. Even Ibsen steered clear of Holy Writ. There’s something about it that defies dramatization.”

  “Please do not interrupt the lecturer,” said Solly. “Heavysege did not write a mere Biblical drama; he wrote a vast, cosmic poem, like a fruit-cake with three layers. Only the middle layer concerns Saul and mankind; the top layer is all about angels, and like everything that has ever been written about angels, it is of a deadly dreariness; the bottom layer, which is thicker than the others, is about devils, and much the best of
the three. Heavysege was awed by angels, sobered by Saul, but right in his element with the devils. He makes them comic, in a jaunty, slangy, nineteenth-century way; he provides love-affairs for them. In fact, he is at his best with his devils. This obviously suggests a parallel with Milton; in scholarly work of this kind, you’ve got to have plenty of parallels, and Heavysege provides them by the bushel. Heavysege reveals traces of every influence that even the greediest scholar could require.

  “But in your eyes I see a question of the greatest import. Was Heavysege, in the truest sense, a Canadian writer? I hear you ask. Set your minds at rest. Who but a Canadian could have written Saul’s speech:

  If Prompted, follow me and be the ball

  Tiny at first, that shall, like one of snow,

  Gather in rolling.

  Does not Jehoiadah behave like a Canadian when he refuses to cheer when his neighbours are watching him? Is it not typically Canadian of Heavysege’s Hebrews that they take exception to Saul’s ‘raging in a public place’? Is it not Canadian self-control that David displays when, instead of making a noisy fuss he ‘lets his spittle fall upon his beard, and scrabbles on the door-post’? Friends, these are the first evidences of the action of our climate and our temperament upon the native drama.

  “I could go on at some length about the beauties of Heavysege, as they appear to the scholar. Saul is full of misprints. Correcting misprints is the scholar’s delight. On page 17 we find the word ‘returinag’. Did Heavysege mean ‘returning’? That’s good for a footnote. On page 19 we find the word ‘clods’ where we might expect ‘clouds’. But can Heavysege have meant something deeply poetic by ‘clods’? That’s good for a paragraph of speculation, for we must be true to the printed text at all costs, and avoid any mischievous emendations. Does the poet allow anything of his own life to colour his drama? Well, at one point Saul speaks of ‘poignant emerods’, and the adjective opens up an alluring avenue of speculation; we must find out all we can about Heavysege’s state of health in 1857, when Saul was published. Had Heavysege a personal philosophy? What else can we call the four lines which he gives to an Israelite Peasant? (Incidentally, this peasant makes his appearance smoking a pipe; Heavysege has not even denied the editor the luxury of a nice, juicy anachronism.) This Peasant says: