The Manticore Page 21

  Pargetter must have taken to me, though he was not a man to hint at any such thing. He taught me chess, and although I was never up to his standard I grew to play well. His room never had enough light, because he didn't need it and I think he was a little cranky about making people who had their eyesight use it to the full. We would sit by his insufficient fire in a twilight that could have been dismal, but which he contrived somehow to give a legal quality, and play game after game; he sat fatly in his arm-chair, and I sat by the board and made all the moves; he would call his move, I would place the piece as he directed, and then I would tell him my counter-move. When he had beaten me he would go back over the game and tell me precisely the point at which I had gone wrong. I was awed by such a memory and such a spatial sense in a man who lived in darkness; he was contemptuous of me when I could not remember what I had done six or eight moves back, and of sheer necessity I had to develop the memory-trick myself.

  He really was alarming: he had three or four boards set up around his room, on which he played chess by post with friends far away. If I arrived for an early tutorial he would say, "There's a postcard on the table; I expect its from Johannesburg; read it." I would read a chess move from it and make the move on a board which he had not touched for perhaps a month. When my tutorial was finished he would dictate a counter-move to me, and I would rearrange the board accordingly. He won a surprising number of these long-distance, tortoise-paced games.

  He had never learned Braille. He wrote in longhand on paper he fitted into a frame which had guide-wires to keep him on the lines, and he never seemed to forget anything he had written. He had a prodigious knowledge of law books he had never seen, and when he sent me, with exact directions, to his shelves to hunt up a reference, I often found a slip of paper in the book with a note in his careful, printlike hand. He kept up with books and journals by having them read to him, and I felt myself favoured when he began to ask me to read; he would make invaluable comment as he listened, and it was always a master-lesson in how to absorb, weigh, select, and reject.

  This was precisely what I wanted and I came almost to worship Pargetter. Exactitude, calm appraisal, close reasoning applied to problems which so often had their beginning in other people's untidy emotions acted like balm on my hurt mind. It was not ordinary legal instruction and it did not result in ordinary legal practice. Many lawyers are beetle-witted ignoramuses, prey to their own emotions and those of their clients; some of them work up big practices because they can fling themselves fiercely into other people's fights. Their indignation is for sale. But Pargetter had honed his mind to a shrewd edge, and I wanted to be like Pargetter. I wanted to know, to see, to sift, and not to be moved. I wanted to get as far as possible from that silly boy who had not realized what a swordsman was when everybody else knew, and who mooned over Judy Wolff and was sent away by her father to play with other toys. I wanted to be melted down, purged of dross, and remoulded in a new and better form; Pargetter was just the man to do it. I had other instructors, of course, and some of them were very good, but Pargetter continues to be my ideal, my father in art.

  11

  I wrote to Father every week and grew aware that my letters were less and less communicative, for I was entering a world where he could not follow. I visited Canada once a year, for as short a time as I could manage, and it was when I was about to enter my third year at Oxford that he took me to dinner one night, and after some havering which I realize now was shyness about what he was going to say, he made what seemed to me to be an odd request.

  "I've been wondering about the Stauntons," he said. "Who do you suppose they could have been? I can't find out anything about Father, though I've wormed out a few facts. He graduated from the medical school here in Toronto in 1887, and the records say he was twenty then, so he must have been born in 1867. They really just gave doctors a lick and a promise then, and I don't suppose he knew much medicine. He was a queer old devil, and as you probably know, we never hit it off. All I know about his background is that he wasn't born in Canada. Mother was, and I've traced her family, and it was easy and dull; farmers culminating in a preacher. But who was Dr. Henry Staunton? I want to know. You see, Davey, though it sounds vain, I have a strong hunch that there must be some good blood somewhere in our background. Your grandfather had a lot of ability as a businessman; more than I could ever persuade him to put to work. His plunge into sugar, when nobody else could see its possibilities, took imagination. I mean, when he was a young man, a lot of people were still rasping their sugar off a loaf with a file, and it all came from the Islands. He had drive and foresight. Of course lots of quite ordinary people have done very well for themselves, but I wonder if he was quite ordinary? When I was in England during the war I wanted to look around and find out anything I could, but the time was wrong and I was very busy with immediate things. But I met two people over there at different times who asked me if I were one of the Warwickshire Stauntons. Well, you know how Englishmen like it when Canadians play simple and rough-hewn, so I always answered that so far as I knew I was one of the Pitt County Stauntons. But I tucked it away in the back of my mind, and it might just be so. Who the Warwickshire Stauntons are I haven't the slightest idea, but they appear to be well known to people who are interested in old families. So, when you go back to Oxford, I'd like you to make some enquiries and let me know what you find. We're probably bastards, or something, but I'd like to know for certain."

  I had long known Father was a romantic, and I had once been a romantic myself – two or three years ago – so I said I would do what I could.

  How? And what? Go to Warwickshire and find Stauntons, and ask if they had any knowledge of a physician who had been Pitt County's foremost expert on constipation, and to the end of his days a firm believer in lignum vitae sap as a treatment for rheumatism? Not for me, thank you. But one day in the Common Room I was looking through the Times Literary Supplement, and my eye fell on a modest advertisement. I can see it now:

  Genealogies erected and pedigrees searched by an Oxonian

  curiously qualified. Strict confidence exacted and extended.

  This was what I wanted. I made a note of the box number, and that night I wrote my letter. I wanted a pedigree searched, I said, and if it proved possible to erect a genealogy on it I should like that, too.

  I don't know what I expected, but the advertisement suggested a pedant well past youth and of a sharp temper. I was utterly unprepared for the curiously qualified Oxonian when he arrived in my study two days later. He seemed not to be much older than myself, and had a shy, girlish manner and the softest voice that was compatible with being heard at all. The only elderly or pedantic thing about him was a pair of spectacles of a kind nobody wore then – gold-rimmed and with small oval lenses.

  "I thought I'd come round instead of writing, because we are near neighbours," he said, and handed me a cheap visiting card on which was printed -

  ADRIAN PLEDGER-BROWN

  CORPUS CHRISTI

  So this was the curiously qualified Oxonian!

  "Sit down," I said. "You erect genealogies?"

  "Oh, indeed," he breathed. "That is to say, I know precisely how it is done. That is to say, I have examined many scores of pedigrees which have already been erected, and I am sure I could do it myself if I were to be entrusted with such a task. It involves research, you see, of a kind I understand quite well and could undertake with a very fair likelihood of success. I know, you see, where to look, and that is everything. Almost everything."

  He smiled such a girlish smile and his eyes swam so unassumingly behind the comic specs that I was tempted to be easy with him. But that was not the Pargetter way. Beware of a witness who appeals to you, he said. Repress any personal response, and if it seems to be gaining the upper hand, go to the other extreme and be severe with the witness. If Ogilvie had remembered that in Cripps-Armstrong vs. Clatterbos & Dudley in 1884 he would have won the case, but he let Clatterbos's difficulty with English arouse his compassio
n; it's a famous instance. So I sprang upon Pledger-Brown, and rent him.

  "Am I right in deducing that you have never erected a genealogy independently before?"

  "That would be – well, to put it baldly – yes, you might say that."

  "Never mind what I might say or might not say. I asked a plain question, and I want a plain answer. Is this your first job?"

  "My first professional engagement? Working as an independent investigator? If you wish to put it that way, I suppose the answer must be that it is."

  "Aha! You are in a word, a greenhorn."

  "Oh, dear, no. I mean, I have studied the subject, and the method, extensively."

  "But you have never done a job of this kind before, for a fee. Yes or no?"

  "To be completely frank, yes; or rather, no."

  "But your advertisement said 'curiously qualified'. Tell me, Mr. (business of consulting card) – ah, Pledger-Brown, in precisely what direction does your curious qualification lie?"

  "I am the godson of Garter."

  "Godson of -?"

  "Garter."

  "I do not understand."

  "Quite possibly not. But that is why you need me, you see. I mean, people who want genealogies erected and pedigrees searched don't usually know these things. Americans in particular. I mean that my godfather is the Garter King of Arms."

  "What's that?"

  "He is the principal officer of the College of Heralds. I hope that one day, with luck, I may be a member of the College myself. But I must make a beginning somewhere, you see."

  "Somewhere? What do you imply by somewhere? You regard me as a starting-point, is that it? I would be rough material for your prentice-hand; is that what you mean?"

  "Oh, dear me, no. But I must do some independent work before I can hope to get an official appointment, mustn't I?"

  "How should I know what you must do? What I want to know is whether there is any chance that you can undertake the job I want done and do it properly."

  "Well, Mr. Staunton, I don't think anybody will do it for you if you go on like this."

  "Like this? Like this? I don't understand you. What fault have you to find with the way I have been going on, as you express it?"

  Pledger-Brown was all mildness, and his smile was like a Victorian picture of a village maiden.

  "Well, I mean playing Serjeant Buzfuz and treating me really quite rudely when I've only come in answer to your letter. You're a law student, of course. I've looked you up, you see. And your father is a prominent Canadian industrialist. I suppose you want some ancestors. Well, perhaps I can find some for you. And I want the work, but not badly enough to be bullied about it. I mean, I am a beginner at genealogy, but I've studied it: you're a beginner at the law, but you've studied it. So why are you being so horrid when we are on an even footing?"

  So I stopped being horrid, and in quite a short time he had accepted a glass of sherry and was calling me Staunton and I was calling him Pledger-Brown, and we were discussing what might be done.

  He was in his third year at Corpus, which I could almost have hit with a stone from my windows, because I was in Canterbury Quad at the rear of Christ Church. He was mad for genealogy and couldn't wait to get at it, so he had advertised while he was still an undergraduate, and his anxiety for strict confidence was because his college would have been unsympathetic if they thought he was conducting any sort of business within their walls. He was obviously poor, but he had an air of breeding, and there was a strain of toughness in him that lay well below his wispy, maidenly ways. I took to him because he was as keen about his profession as I was about mine, and for anything I knew his diffidence may have been the professional manner of his kind. Soon he was cross-examining me.

  "This Dr. Henry Staunton who has no known place of birth is a very common figure in genealogical work for people from the New World. But we can usually find the origin of such people, if we sift the parish records, wills, records of Chancery and Exchequer, and Manor Court Rolls. That takes a long time and runs into money. So we start with the obvious, hoping for a lucky hit. Of course, as your father thinks, he may be a Staunton of Longbridge in Warwickshire, but there are also Stauntons of Nottingham, Leicester, Lincolnshire, and Somerset, all of a quality that would please your father. But sometimes we can take a short cut. Was your grandfather an educated man?"

  "He was a doctor. I wouldn't call him a man of wide cultivation."

  "Good. That's often a help. I mean, such people often retain some individuality under the professional veneer. Perhaps he said some things that stuck in your mind? Used unusual words that might be county dialect words? Do you recall anything like that?"

  I pondered. "Once he told my sister, Caroline, she had a tongue sharp enough to shave an urchin. I've repeated it to her often."

  "Oh, that's quite helpful. He did use some dialect words then. But urchin as a word for the common hedgehog is very widespread in country districts. Can you think of anything more unusual?"

  I was beginning to respect Pledger-Brown. I had always thought an urchin was a boy you didn't like, and could never figure out why Grandfather would want to shave one. I thought further.

  "I do just remember that he called some of his old patients who stuck with him, and were valetudinarians, 'my old wallowcrops'. Is that of any use? Could he have made the word up?"

  "Few simple people make up words. 'Wallowcrop'; I'll make a note of that and see what I can discover. Meanwhile keep thinking about him, will you? And I'll come again when I have a better idea what to do."

  Think about Grandfather Staunton, powerful but dim in my past. A man, it seemed to me now, with a mind like a morgue in which a variety of defunct ideas lay on slabs, kept cold to defer decay. A man who knew nothing about health, but could identify a number of diseases. A man whose medical knowledge belonged to a time when people talked about The System and had spasms and believed in the efficacy of strong, clean smells, such as oil of peppermint, as charms against infection. A man who never doubted that spankings were good for children, and once soundly walloped both Caroline and me because we had put Eno's Fruit Salts in the bottom of Granny's chamber-pot, hoping she would have a fantod when it foamed. A furious teetotaller, malignantly contemptuous of what he called "booze-artists" and never fully reconciled to my father when he discovered that Father drank wines and spirits but had contumaciously failed thereby to become a booze-artist. A man whom I could only recall as gloomy, heavy, and dull, but pleased with his wealth and unaffectedly scornful of those who had not the wit or craft to equal it; preachers were excepted as being a class apart, and sacred, but needing frequent guidance from practical men in the conduct of their churches. In short, a nasty old village moneybags.

  A strange conduit through which to convey the good blood Father thought we Stauntons must have. But then Father had never troubled to pretend that he had much regard for Doc Staunton. Which was strange in itself, in a way, for Father was very strong on the regard children should have for parents. Not that he ever said so directly, or urged Caroline and me to honour our father and mother. But I recall that he was down on H. G. Wells, because in his Experiment in Autobiography Wells had said frankly that his parents weren't up to much and that escape from them was his first step toward a good life. Father was not consistent. But Doc Staunton had been consistent, and what had consistency made of him?

  The hunt was up, and Doc Staunton was the fox.

  Notes from Pledger-Brown punctuated the year that followed. He wrote an elegant Italic hand, as became a genealogist, and scraps of intelligence would arrive by the college messenger service: "Wallowcrop Cumberland dialect word. Am following up this clue. A.P-B." And, "Sorry to say nothing comes of enquiries in Cumberland. Am casting about in Lincoln." Or, "Tally-ho! A Henry Staunton born 1866 in Somerset!" followed a week later by, "False scent; Somerset Henry died aged 3 mos." Clearly he was having a wonderful adventure, but I had little time to think about it. I was up to my eyes in Jurisprudence, that formal science of posit
ive law, and in addition to formal studies Pargetter was making me read Kelly's Famous Advocates and Their Speeches and British Forensic Eloquence aloud to him, dissecting the rhetoric of notable counsel and trying to make some progress in that line myself. Pargetter was determined that I should not be what he called an ignorant pettifogger, and he made it clear that as a Canadian I started well behind scratch in the journey toward professional literacy and elegance.

  " 'The law, besides being a profession, is one of the humanities,' " he said to me one day, and I knew from the way he spoke he was quoting. "Who said that?" I didn't know. "Then never forget that it was one of your countrymen, your present Prime Minister, Louis St. Laurent," he said, punching me sharply in the side, as he often did when he wanted to make a point. "It's been said before, but it's never been said better. Be proud it was a Canadian who said it." And he went on to belabour me, as he had often done before, with Sir Walter Scott's low opinion of lawyers who knew nothing of history or literature; from these studies, said he, I would learn what people were and how they might be expected to behave. "But wouldn't I learn that from clients?" I asked, to try him. "Clients!" he said, and I would not have believed anyone could make a two-syllable word stretch out so long; "you'll learn precious little from clients except folly and duplicity and greed. You've got to stand above that."

  Working as I was under the English system I had to be a member of one of the Inns of Court and go to London at intervals to eat dinners in its Hall; I was enrolled in the Middle Temple, and reverently chewed through the thirty-six obligatory meals. I liked it. I liked the ceremony and solemnity of the law, not only as safeguards against trivializing of the law but as pleasant observances in themselves. I visited the courts, studied the conduct and courtesy of their workings, and venerated judges who seemed able to carry a mass of detail in their heads and boil it down and serve it up in a kind of strong judicial consomme for the jury when all the pleading and testimony were over. I liked the romance of it, the star personalities of the great advocates, the swishing of gowns and flourishing of impractical but traditional blue bags full of papers. I was delighted that although most people seemed to use more modern instruments, everybody had access to quill pens, and could doubtless have called for sand to do their blotting, with full confidence that sand would have been forthcoming. I loved wigs, which established a hierarchy that was palpable and turned unremarkable faces into the faces of priests serving a great purpose. What if all this silk and bombazine and horsehair awed and even frightened the simple people who came to court for justice? It would do them no harm to be a little frightened. Everybody in court, except the occasional accused creature in the dock, seemed calmed, reft from the concerns of everyday; those who were speaking on oath seemed to me, very often, to be revealing an aspect of their best selves. The juries took their duties seriously, like good citizens. It was an arena in which gladiators struggled, but the end for which they struggled was that right, so far as right could be determined, should be done.