The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks by Robertson Davies
My only assistant in the Crisis at the Towers is kindly and willing but speaks no language known to me except German, and I can only be said to speak German in a Pickwickian sense. I tried to explain about mumps and chickenpox in German, with the curious result that I forgot all the German I ever knew, but developed surprising fluency in French. Chickenpox is “la petite vérole volante”; mumps stumps me in both languages. I fell back on saying “Kinderdizeezen” with a gutteral accent, though I know this is nonsense. Nor could I think of the German word for “nurse,” though the allied word for “bedpan” rose from the depths of my memory, to my astonishment. My assistant regarded all this as highly comic, and so did some of the patients, who laughed so much that they felt better and ate hugely of a pie and a jelly which kind friends sent in. After a very full day I retired to bed, but started out of a sound sleep at 2 a.m. crying “die Krankenpflieger!” which I believe to be the word for nurse which eluded me all day, though I may be wrong. But I wish I didn’t remember my scraps of French when I want German, and a few tatters of Welsh when I am confronted by a Frenchman.
More kind friends who knew what I was Going Through sent food, and some sent flowers. This was a great help, for although I pride myself on my cooking it is aimed at healthy appetites, and invalids tend to gag and muffle their faces with the blankets when I offer it to them. They were all very glad to get tapioca pudding, which looks not unlike chickenpox—is there a subtle psychological connection here?—and jelly and such delicate fare, but they lacked stomach for my lampreys stewed in wine, devilled seagull, minced moose, and similar substantial dishes.… All through this siege of illness, I behaved wonderfully, rushing upstairs with trays, doing household tasks ill-suited to my masculine dignity, amusing sick children with displays of sleight-of-hand, and whatnot. My German-speaking assistant was lost in admiration of my energy and high spirits. “Was fur ein Avatismus!” she murmured. After a bout with a dictionary I discovered that she meant that I am a Hindoo god returned to earth. Probably one of those gods with eight arms, two pair of legs, and a grin of fixed benevolence.
I escaped from the lazar-house last evening, having tucked all the lazars (great and small) into their beds and arranged bountiful supplies of paper handkerchiefs, water, reading matter, zinc ointment, and aspirin within their reach. I went to a concert at which a handsome young man and a beautiful young woman played with great accomplishment on two pianos. But the labours of nursing the sick have dulled my critical faculty, and instead of listening to the music I kept wondering if the young woman wore a powerful corset, and if not, how did she manage to sit up so straight? I reflected also that what I wrote about this concert would be unfairly affected by the good looks of the players; I am incapable of resisting the charms of beauty, and readily attribute every virtue to its possessors, in spite of many disillusionments. I admire beautiful people, and I am strongly attracted by distinguished ugliness. It is the blank faces, empty of charm, distinction, beauty or meaning of any kind, which arouse my dislike.
Yes, thank you, things are looking up at Marchbanks Towers. All of the lazars are able to get up for a few hours, and creep painfully from room to room, clutching their rags, blankets, mufflers and bandages about them. I realize that my brief period of supremacy is over, and that as soon as the news of their recovery gets about the golden stream of food and flowers will dry up, and life will be as it was before. Saddened by this reflection I went outside this afternoon and shoveled the first snow of winter, reflecting that many people drop dead while thus employed every year.
• AVOIRDUPOIS A CROSS •
I LUNCHED EARLIER today with several men, one of whom was of generous proportions; a former athlete, the passing of years had softened his contours, while adding to his physical magnificence. I watched him with an eagle eye, and he ate consideringly, without haste or greed; calory for calory, he probably ate a little less than the others. Yet they tormented him unmercifully all through the meal about his weight, and about his entirely imaginary voracity. Gaunt, lank men who stoked themselves like furnaces, paused only in their intensive fuelling to gird at him for his bulk. This is one of the great injustices of the world. A big man is always accused of gluttony, whereas a wizened or osseous man can eat like a refugee at every meal, and no one ever notices his greed. I have seen runts who never weighed more than 96 pounds when soaking wet, outeat 200 pounders, and poke fun at the fat man even as they licked their plates and sucked the starch out of their napkins. No wonder fat men are philosophers; they are forced to it.
• OF CRUELTY TO VEGETABLES •
THIS IS THE TIME of year when newspaper offices are embarrassed by gifts of deformed turnips, arthritic beets, spastic pumpkins and glandular potatoes. Whenever a farmer digs up something which should at once be returned to the merciful and all-covering earth, he rushes with it to his local paper, requesting that his shameful trophy be displayed in the window. I know what he wants; he wants people to laugh at that poor afflicted vegetable. Now it is several centuries since deformed people were regarded as objects of mirth. Even deformed animals are not the big attraction at the country fairs that they once were. Surely it is time that our pity was extended to include the Mongoloid, the moronic and the cretinous specimens of the root world? Has the Royal Society of Vegetarians and Nut Fooders nothing to say against this cruel practice?
• OF BLOODTHIRST IN THE YOUNG •
SOMEHOW OR OTHER the rumour has spread among some children I know that I am a conjuror, and they are always teasing me to do magic. My skill is not great, but their standards are very low, and usually I manage to satisfy them. This afternoon a little girl demanded that I should do something miraculous, so I swallowed a fork and after feigning indigestion very laughably, I produced it from the sole of my boot. She was impressed, but not completely satisfied. “There’s no blood on it,” said she.… Children have disgustingly literal minds, and hearts of stone.
• SCOTTISH SPORTS AND PASTIMES •
THIS IS ST. ANDREW’S DAY, and although I do not belong to the Scottish Branch of the family (it spells its name Marjoribanks, which is wasteful, and therefore un-Scotch) I can never let the day pass unnoticed. My uncle Hamish Marjoribanks was an implacable Jacobite to his dying day, and at breakfast on St. Andrew’s Day he would throw great gobs of porridge at the chromo of Queen Victoria which hung on his diningroom wall, crying “There’s for ye, Hanover!” in a fierce voice. His wife, who was somewhat more reconciled to Culloden and the Act of Union, would spend the rest of the day swabbing the Royal Likeness with a dampened cloth. Uncle Hamish insisted on a grand dinner at night, and when the capercailzie was brought in and carried round the table, he would insist that we all jump up on the seats of our chairs, put one foot on the table, and drink a largish glass of neat whisky, crying something which sounded like “Slachan!” at one another; then we all threw our glasses into the fire place. After dinner Uncle Hamish would tell us how, if everyone had his rights, some obscure Bavarian prince would be King of England and he (Uncle Hamish) would undoubtedly be a powerful figure at Court. It was all very exhausting, and cost a fortune in glass.
• GIVE MAMMON HIS DUE •
I SPENT A LOT of time this afternoon wrapping parcels, using $1.58 worth of cord, tags and stickers (none of which would stick). All of this gaudy junk will be stripped eagerly from the parcels by the recipient of my gifts, but I do not grudge the expense. In honouring the birthday of the Prince of Peace one is expected also to make substantial sacrifice to Mammon, so as not to offend his many worshippers. The paper and string which I have laid on Mammon’s altar will, I trust, provide an agreeable scent in his nostrils.
• OF MERRIMENT IN A MONASTERY •
THE GENTLEMAN across the table was very much interested in my assertion before dinner that I hoped to spend the Christmas Season in a Trappist monastery in Quebec and asked me when I was going there. The fact is, I am not going at all. The Trappists won’t have me. I spent a Christmas with them a few years ago and made
• A SYSTEM OF CALISTHENICS •
FROM TIME TO TIME I am bothered by the thought that I ought to take some exercise. Usually I am successful in fighting down this ugly notion, but sometimes I toy with the idea of getting one of those machines which exercise a man against his will by rolling, hauling, squeezing and folding him. What I really want is a series of searching exercises which can be done while sitting in a chair. Years ago I read that caged lions and tigers keep themselves fit by stretching and for a while I used to stretch whenever I had a spare minute, straining my halliards and squirming my binnacle to the accompaniment of alarming cracks, creaks, and pops. But it is awfully easy to stop stretching. I think I shall re-examine this theory, and perhaps evolve Marchbanks Torso Tensions for the Sedentary. Advertisements will appear of me wrapped around my office chair, with the message: “Puny? Flabby? Torpid? In Thirty Days You can be like this Masked Marvel! No Costly Equipment! No Time Required! No Effort! Tear the Seat Off your Chair and send with Five Hundred Dollars for Trial Booklet! Be Muscular the Marchbanks Way!”
• OF SNOW REMOVAL •
I PERCEIVE THAT your city has no municipal arrangement for clearing the streets. As a result, when I went out for a walk this afternoon, I experienced a wide variety of footing. Before the houses of young and vigorous men, full of Civic Spirit and holiday food, the walk was clear to the cement; where less hearty citizens had their abode, there was a track about as wide as a snow shovel, and lumpy; the walks of the aged, the arthritic and the hung-over were pitiful muddles, with snow everywhere; in front of vacant lots it was necessary to break a track. Some citizens were shovelling as I passed. It is a pitiful sight, in a city renowned for learning, to see a graduate of the class of ’07 with a prolapsed abdomen and eyes dimmed by much study, trying to do a job which could be done much better by a horse or even, in these mad, rushing days, by a bulldozer.
• OF HIS PROCRASTINATION •
I worked like a dog yesterday. (Though why a dog, a notoriously lazy and useless animal, should be a symbol of industry, I do not know. It is the same with niggers. People say “I worked like a nigger,” though it is well-known that niggers, being intensely sensible and practical, never work unless they are driven to it. But enough of this—I worked desperately.) For weeks at a time I drift along, saying “Mañana, mañana” to every task that does not demand immediate attention. But mañana always comes; it arrived yesterday, and I toiled from nine in the morning until eleven at night, with brief pauses for refresment. Oh, that I were a systematic plodder! Oh, that I left my desk as clean as a hound’s tooth every night! But it is so long since the top of my desk was clear that I have forgotten what colour it is.
• OF SHOES •
IN SPITE OF MY deep objection to buying new clothes of any sort, I had to get a pair of shoes today. This is no weather for going barefoot. I like new things well enough once I have them; it is the buying which fills me with dread. To be confronted with oneself in a mirror, wearing one conspicuously new garment amid one’s degraded rags, is an experience for sturdier egos than mine. This is particularly my bug-bear at the tailor’s; those mirrors which show me myself in three unaccustomed aspects—horrible! I have seen men preen and primp in front of those things without a sign of embarrassment, but they fill me with confusion.… In the matter of shoes I always have to make a decision between style and fit. I admire long, narrow, pointy-toed shoes which have a worldly air about them, but Nature demands that I wear things like those leather boxes which horses wear on their hooves when pulling mowers over precious sward. My struggle between the Ideal and the Real in a shoe shop would delight the heart of a philosopher, but it invariably ruins my day.
• OF A DRAMA FESTIVAL •
I WENT TO THE Eastern Ontario Drama Festival last week, a function which, being of a cultural nature, was conducted with appropriate sedateness, as though a body were lying in the next room. Except for a few people of uncommon distinction, the gentlemen present forebore to dress; in histories of fashion, this will be known as The Century of The Sack Suit; I myself wore a dainty elephant-grey number, and a white shirt which I borrowed from my Uncle Fortunatus.
On the Friday I went to see a group of accomplished Ottawa amateurs play Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, which, as everybody knows, is about a man who has two wives—one alive and one a ghost—and enchants the audience with a spectacle of bigamy agreeably spiced with adultery. The final fit of the Festival was on Saturday night, and as some of the plays failed to grip my attention, I permitted myself to reflect on a few matters such as: (a) why amateurs in society plays never black the soles of their boots, which professionals are always careful to do; (b) why amateurs whose voices and deportment suggest a barn-raising at Pumpkin Centre choose to do plays about hoity-toity English people; (c) why plays about farm life (including the works of S. Marchbanks) invariably include a character who is crazy, or religious, or both. Perhaps the solution lies in a play by S. Marchbanks about the bon ton of Toronto or Ottawa—a play abounding in references to such hallmarks of high-toned society as butter knives, finger bowls, adultery and flush toilets.
• OF WEEDICULTURE •
THIS HAS BEEN a great day for me! This morning the judges from the Horticultural Society arrived at the Towers, and made a tour of the grounds, murmuring with admiration. I was pleased by their approbation, but judge of my excitement when my name appeared in the Prize List. Let me show you my citations:
FINEST SHOW OF MIXED WEEDS (for garden tended solely by the owner): First Prize—S. Marchbanks. FINEST SINGLE WEED IN NATIVE STATE: A magnificent Amaranthus retroflexus (Common Pigweed)—property of S. Marchbanks. LARGEST FOLIAGE ON ANY WEED: A stupendous Rumex obtusifolius (Burdock)—reared with great care by S. Marchbanks. FINEST RARE OR SPECIMEN WEED: Cicuta Maculata (Cowbane)—cherished under glass by S. Marchbanks.
At last I have found a branch of gardening in which I excel! From now on my course is clear, and the Marchbanks Weed Sanctuary begins tonight.
• OF RADIO •
I BOUGHT A NEW RADIO licence today, although I don’t suppose I use my radio more than 20 times a year, having full use of my vision, and being able to read advertisements for coffee, stomach medicine, and soap in the newspapers at my leisure. I grudged the $2.50, and I hope that the C.B.C. will not regard it as my personal endorsation of their artistic policy. Then I went to see a radio broadcast put on the air, and yearned mightily to get my hands on a Hammond organ which was being played. It has been a lifelong ambition of mine to lie at full length on the pedal-board of an organ, with the power full on, just to see what kind of apocalyptic roar the thing would emit.
• OF CONUNDRUMS •
RIDDLES AND CONUNDRUMS are making a surprising return to popularity to my great grief, for I detest them. I suppose they follow naturally from the craze for quizzes of all sorts. I have never guessed the answer to a riddle in my life; when confronted with one, I simply sit in mute embarrassment until the questioner stops urging me “not to give up” and springs his silly surprise. Conundrums are even more agonizi