That made him really furious. He became cold and courteous.
“Help me then,” he said. “Tell me what a swordsman is and what lies behind the mystique of the swordsman.”
I talked as well as I could about living with style, and not sticking to dowdy people’s ways. I managed to work in the word amorist because I thought he might not know it. I talked about the Cavaliers as opposed to the Roundheads, and I dragged in Mackenzie King as a sort of two-bit Cromwell, who had to be resisted. Mr King had made himself unpopular early in the war by urging the Canadian people to “buckle on the whole armour of God,” which when it was interpreted meant watering and rationing whisky without reducing the price. I said that if that was the armour of God, I would back the skill and panache of the swordsman against it any day. As I talked he seemed to be less angry, and when I had finished he was almost laughing.
“My poor Davey,” he said, “I have always known you were an innocent boy, but I have hoped your innocence was not just the charming side of a crippling stupidity. And now I am going to try to do something that I had never expected to do, and of which I disapprove, but which I think is necessary if between us we are going to save your soul. I am going to disillusion you about your father.”
He didn’t, of course. Not wholly. He talked a lot about Father as a great man of business, but that cut no ice with me. I don’t mean he suggested Father was anything but honest, because there were never any grounds for that. But he talked about the corrupting power of great wealth and the illusion it created in its possessor that he could manipulate people, and the dreadful truth that there were a great many people whom he undoubtedly could manipulate, so that the illusion was never seriously challenged. He talked about the illusion wealth creates that its possessor is of a different clay from that of common men. He talked about the adulation great wealth attracts from people to whom worldly success is the only measure of worth. Wealth bred and fostered illusion and illusion brought corruption. That was his theme.
I was ready for all of this because Father had talked a great deal to me since he began to be more at home. Father said that a man you could manipulate had to be watched because other people could manipulate him as well. Father had also said that the rich man differed from the ordinary man only in that he had a wider choice, and that one of his dangerous choices was a lightly disguised slavery to the source of his wealth. I even told Knoppy something he had never guessed. It was about what Father called the Pathological Compassion of Big Business, which seems to demand that above a certain executive level a man’s incompetence or loss of quality had to be kept from him so that he would not be destroyed in the eyes of his family, his friends, and himself. Father estimated that Corporation Compassion cost him a few hundred thousand every year, and this was a charity of a kind St Paul had never foreseen. Like a lot of people who have no money, Knoppy had some half-baked ideas about people who had it, and the foremost of these was that wealth was achieved, and held, only by people who were essentially base. I accused him of lack of charity, which I knew was a very great matter to him. I accused him of a covert, Christian jealousy, that blinded him to Father’s real worth because he could not see beyond his wealth. People strong enough to get wealth are sometimes strong enough to resist illusion. Father was such a man.
“You should do well at the Bar, Davey,” he said. “You are already an expert at making the worser seem the better cause. To be cynical is not the same as avoiding illusion, for cynicism is just another kind of illusion. All formulas for meeting life—even many philosophies—are illusion. Cynicism is a trashy illusion. But a swordsman—shall I tell you what a swordsman is? It is just what the word implies: a swordsman is an expert at sticking something long and thin, or thick and curved, into other people; and always with intent to wound. You’ve read a lot lately. You’ve read some D.H. Lawrence. Do you remember what he says about heartless, cold-blooded fucking? That’s what a swordsman is good at, as the word is used nowadays by the kind of people who use it of your father. A swordsman is what the Puritans you despise so romantically would call a whoremaster. Didn’t you know that? Of course swordsmen don’t use the word that way; they use other terms, like amorist, though that usually means somebody like your Myrrha, who is a great proficient at sex without love. Is that what you want? You’ve told me a great deal about what you feel for Judy Wolff. Now you have had some skilful instruction in the swordsman-and-amorist game. What is it? Nothing but the cheerful trumpet-and-drum of the act of kind. Simple music for simple souls. Is that what you want with Judy? Because that is what her father fears. He doesn’t want his daughter’s life to be blighted by a whoremaster’s son and, as he very shrewdly suspects, a whoremaster’s pupil.”
This was hitting hard, and though I tried to answer him I knew I was squirming. Because—believe it or not, but I swear it is the truth—I had never understood that was what people meant when they talked about a swordsman, and it suddenly accounted for some of the queer responses I had met with when I applied the word so proudly to Father. I remembered with a chill that I had even used this word about him to the Wolffs, and I was sure they were up to every nuance of speech in three languages. I had made a fool of myself, and of course the realization made me both weak and angry. I lashed out at Knoppy.
“All very well for you to be so pernickety about people’s sexual tastes,” I said. “But what cap do you wear? Everybody knows what you are. You’re a fairy. You’re a fairy who’s afraid to do anything about it. So what makes you such an authority about real men and women, who have passions you can’t begin to share or understand?”
I had hit home. Or so I thought. He seemed to become smaller in his chair, and all the anger had gone out of him.
“Davey, I want you to listen very carefully,” he said. “I suppose I am a homosexual, really. Indeed, I know it. I’m a priest, too. By efforts that have not been trivial I have worked for over twenty years to keep myself always in full realization of both facts and to put what I am and the direction in which my nature leads me at the service of my faith and its founder. People wounded much worse than I have been good fighters in that cause. I have not done too badly. I should be stupid and falsely humble if I said otherwise. I have done it gladly, and I shall only say that it has not been easy. But it was my personal sacrifice of what I was to what I loved.
“Now I want you to remember something because I don’t think we shall meet again very soon. It is this; however fashionable despair about the world and about people may be at present, and however powerful despair may become in the future, not everybody, or even most people, think and live fashionably; virtue and honour will not be banished from the world, however many popular moralists and panicky journalists say so. Sacrifice will not cease to be because psychiatrists have popularized the idea that there is often some concealed, self-serving element in it; theologians always knew that. Nor do I think love as a high condition of honour will be lost; it is a pattern in the spirit, and people long to make the pattern a reality in their own lives, whatever means they take to do so. In short, Davey, God is not dead. And I can assure you God is not mocked.”
(10)
I never saw Knopwood after that. What he meant when he said we would not meet again was soon explained; he had been ordered off to some more missionary work, and he died a few years ago in the West, of tuberculosis, working almost till the end among his Indians. I have never forgiven him for trying to blacken Father. If that is what his Christianity added up to, it wasn’t much.
DR VON HALLER: As you report what Father Knopwood said about Mrs Martindale, he was abusive and contemptuous; did he know her, by any chance?
MYSELF: No, he just hated her because she was very much a woman, and I have told you what he was. He made up his mind she was a harlot, and that was that.
DR VON HALLER: You don’t think any of it was indignation on your behalf—because she had, so to speak, abused your innocence?
MYSELF: How had she done that? I think that’s silly.
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DR VON HALLER: She had been party to a plan to manipulate you in a certain direction. I don’t mean your virginity, which is simply physical and technical, but the scheme to introduce you to what Knopwood called the cheerful trumpet-and-drum, the simple music.
MYSELF: One has to meet it somehow, I suppose? Better in such circumstances than many we can imagine. I had forgotten the Swiss were so Puritanical.
DR VON HALLER: Ah, now you are talking to me as if I were Father Knopwood. True, everybody has to encounter sex, but usually the choice is left to themselves. They find it; it is not offered to them like a tonic when somebody else thinks it would be good for them. May not the individual know the right time better than someone else? Is it not rather patronizing to arrange a first sexual encounter for one’s son?
MYSELF: No more patronizing than to send him to any other school, so far as I can see.
DR VON HALLER: So you are in complete agreement with what was arranged for you. Let me see—did you not say that the last time you had sexual intercourse was on December 26, 1945?—Was Mrs Martindale the first and the last, then?—Why did you hesitate to put this valuable instruction to further use?—Take all the time you please, Mr Staunton. If you would like a glass of water there is a carafe beside you.
MYSELF: It was Judy, I suppose.
DR VON HALLER: Yes. About Judy—do you realize that in what you have been telling me Judy remains very dim? I am getting to know your father, and I have a good idea of Father Knopwood, and you implied much about Mrs Martindale in a very few words. But I see very little of Judy. A well-bred girl, somewhat foreign to your world, Jewish, who sings. Otherwise you say only that she was kind and delightful and vague words like that which give her no individuality at all. Your sister suggested that she was cowlike; I attach quite a lot of significance to that.
MYSELF: Don’t. Carol is very sharp.
DR VON HALLER: Indeed she is. You have given a sharp picture of her. She is very perceptive. And she said Judy was cowlike. Do you know why?
MYSELF: Spite, obviously. She sensed I loved Judy.
DR VON HALLER: She sensed Judy was an Anima-figure to you. Now we must be technical for a little while. We talked about the Anima as a general term for a man’s idea of all a woman is or may be. Women are very much aware of this figure when it is aroused in men. Carol sensed that Judy had suddenly embodied the Anima for you, and she was irritated. You know how women are always saying, “What does he see in her?” Of course what he sees is the Anima. Furthermore, he is usually only able to describe it in general terms, not in detail. He is in the grip of something that might as well be called an enchantment; the old word is as good as any new one. It is notorious that when one is enchanted, one does not see clearly.
MYSELF: Judy was certainly clear to me.
DR VON HALLER: Even though you do not seem to remember one thing she said that is not a commonplace? Oh, Mr Staunton—a pretty, modest girl, whom you saw for the first time in enchanting circumstances, singing—an Anima, if ever I heard of one.
MYSELF: I thought you people weren’t supposed to lead your witnesses?
DR VON HALLER: Not in Mr Justice Staunton’s court, perhaps, but this is my court. Now tell me; after your talk with your father, in which he referred to Judy as “your little Jewish piece,” and your talk with her father, when he said you must not think of Judy as a possible partner in your life, and after your talk with that third father, the priest, how did matters stand between you and Judy?
MYSELF: It went sour. Or it lost its gloss. Or anything you like to express a drop in intensity, a loss of power. Of course we met and talked and kissed. But I knew she was an obedient daughter, and when we kissed I knew Louis Wolff was near, though invisible. And try as I would, when we kissed I could hear a voice—it wasn’t my father’s, so don’t think it was—saying “your Jewish piece.” And hateful Knopwood seemed always to be near, like Christ in his sentimental picture, with His hand on the Boy Scout’s shoulder. I don’t know how it would have worked out because I had rather a miserable illness. It would probably be called mononucleosis now, but they didn’t know what it was then, and I was out of school for a long time and confined to the house with Netty as my nurse. When Easter came I was still very weak, and Judy went to Lausanne to a school. She sent me a letter, and I meant to keep it, of course, but I’ll bet any money Netty took it and burned it.
DR VON HALLER: But you remember what it said?
MYSELF: I remember some of it. She wrote, “My father is the wisest and best man I know, and I shall do what he says.” It seemed extraordinary, for a girl of seventeen.
DR VON HALLER: How, extraordinary?
MYSELF: Immature. Wouldn’t you say so? Oughtn’t she to have had more mind of her own?
DR VON HALLER: But wasn’t that precisely your attitude toward your own father?
MYSELF: Not after my illness. Nevertheless, there was a difference. Because my father really was a great man. Dunstan Ramsay once said he was a genius of an unusual, unrecognized kind. Whereas Louis Wolff, though very good of his kind, was just a clever doctor.
DR VON HALLER: A very sophisticated man; sophisticated in a way your father was not, it appears. And what about Knopwood? You seem to have dismissed him because he was a homosexual.
MYSELF: I see a good many of his kind in court. You can’t take them seriously.
DR VON HALLER: But you take very few people seriously when you have them in court. There are homosexuals we do well to take seriously and you are not likely to meet them in court. You spoke, I recall, of Christian charity?
MYSELF: I am no longer a Christian, and too often I have uncovered pitiable weakness masquerading as charity. Those who talk about charity and forgiveness usually lack the guts to push anything to a logical conclusion. I’ve never seen charity bring any unquestionable good in its train.
DR VON HALLER: I see. Very well, let us go on. During your illness I suppose you did a lot of thinking about your situation. That is what these illnesses are for, you know—these mysterious ailments that take us out of life but do not kill us. They are signals that our life is going the wrong way, and intervals for reflection. You were lucky to be able to keep out of a hospital, even if it did return you to the domination of Netty. Now, what answers did you find? For instance, did you think about why you were so ready to believe your mother had been the lover of your father’s best friend, whereas you doubted that Mrs Martindale had been your father’s mistress?
MYSELF: I suppose children favour one parent more than the other. I have told you about Mother. And Father used to talk about her sometimes when he visited me when I was ill. Several times he warned me against marrying a boyhood sweetheart.
DR VON HALLER: Yes, I suppose he knew what was wrong with you. People often do, you know, though nothing would persuade them to bring such knowledge to the surface of their thoughts or admit what they so deeply know. He sensed you were sick for Judy. And he gave you very good advice, really.
MYSELF: But I loved Judy. I really did.
DR VON HALLER: You loved a projection of your own Anima. You really did. But did you ever know Judy Wolff? You have told me that when you see her now, as a grown woman with a husband and family, you never speak to her. Why? Because you are protecting your boyhood dream. You don’t want to meet this woman who is somebody else. When you go home you had better make an opportunity to meet Mrs Professor Whoever-It-Is, and lay that ghost forever. It will be quite easy, I assure you. You will see her as she is now, and she will see the famous criminal lawyer. It will all be smooth as silk, and you will be delivered forever. So far as possible, lay your ghosts…. But you have not answered my question: why adultery for mother but not for father?
MYSELF: Mother was weak.
DR VON HALLER: Mother was your father’s Anima-figure, whom he had been so unfortunate, or so unwise, as to marry. No wonder she seemed weak, poor woman, with such a load to carry for such a man. And no wonder he turned against her, as you would probably have tu
rned against poor Judy if she had been so unfortunate as to fall into the clutch of such a clever thinker and such a primitive feeler as you are. Oh, men revenge themselves very thoroughly on women they think have enchanted them, when really these poor devils of women are merely destined to be pretty or sing nicely or laugh at the right time.
MYSELF: Don’t you think there is any element of enchantment in love, then?
DR VON HALLER: I know perfectly well that there is, but has anybody ever said that enchantment was a basis for marriage? It will be there at the beginning, probably, but the table must be laid with more solid fare than that if starvation is to be kept at bay for sixty years.
MYSELF: You are unusually dogmatic today.
DR VON HALLER: You have told me you like dogma…. But let us get back to an unanswered question: why did you believe your mother capable of adultery but not your father?
MYSELF: Well—adultery in a woman may be a slip, a peccadillo, but in a man, you see—you see, it’s an offence against property. I know it doesn’t sound very pretty, but the law makes it plain and public opinion makes it plainer. A deceived husband is merely a cuckold, a figure of fun, whereas a deceived wife is someone who has sustained an injury. Don’t ask me why; I simply state the fact as society and the courts see it.
DR VON HALLER: But this Mrs Martindale, if I understood you, had left her husband, or he had left her. So what injury could there be?
MYSELF: I am thinking of my mother: Father knew her long before Mother’s death. He may have drifted away from Mother, but I can’t believe he would do anything that would injure her—that might have played some part in her death. I mean, a swordsman is one thing—a sort of chivalrous concept, which may be romantic but is certainly not squalid. But an adulterer—I’ve seen a lot of them in court, and none of them was anything but squalid.
DR VON HALLER: And you could not associate your father with anything you considered squalid? So: you emerged from this illness without your beloved, and without your priest, but with your father still firmly in the saddle?