World of Wonders – The Deptford Trilogy #3 by Robertson Davies

“Aren’t you doing a lot of fancy guessing?”

“No. Staunton told Magnus and Magnus told me.”

“It was one of those situations Liesl is always talking about,” said Eisengrim. “You know: a man reaches the confessional time in his life. Sometimes he writes an autobiography; sometimes he tells his story to a group of listeners, as I have been doing. Sometimes there is only one listener, and that was how it was with Staunton.

“Surely you remember what it was like in your room that night of November 3? Staunton and I had clicked, in the way people sometimes do. He wanted to know me: I was more than commonly interested in him because he was from my past, and not at all what one would have predicted for the fattish, purse-proud kid who had shouted ‘Hoor’ at my mother. You understood that we’d clicked, and you didn’t like it at all. That was when you decided to spill the beans, and told Staunton who I was, how he had literally brought about my birth, how you knew about the rock in the snowball and had kept it all those years. You even had my mother’s ashes in a casket. And through it all Staunton was cool as a cucumber. Denied everything that he had not — quite honestly, I believe — forgotten. Chose to regard the whole affair as something only very remotely connected with himself. Considering the way you went at him, I thought he showed enviable self-possession. But he said some sharp things about you.

“When we were in his car, driving down the long avenue from the school, he expanded on what he’d said. He cursed you very thoroughly, Dunny. Told me that for boyhood friendship he had kept an eye on your money all through the years, and made you secure and even well-off. Befriended you and brought you to the notice of really important people — people in a very big way of business — as a guest in his house. Confided in you when his first marriage was going on the rocks, and was patient when you sided with his wife. Put up with your ironic attitude toward his success, because he knew it had its root in jealousy.

“He was offended that you never mentioned Mary Dempster — he never spoke of her as my mother — and her long years in asylums; he would have been glad to help a Deptford woman who had come to grief. And he was angry and hurt that you kept that damned stone on your desk to remind you of a grudge you had against him. A stone in a snowball! The kind of thing any boy might do, just for devilment. He would never have thought the dark, judgmatical Ramsay blood in you was so bitter with hate — you, who had made money out of saints.

“It was then I began to know him. Oh yes, I came to know him quite well during the next hour. We’d clicked, as I said, but I’ve always distrusted that kind of thing since I first clicked with Willard. It’s unchancy. There was sympathy of character, I suppose. There was a wolfishness in Boy Staunton that he kept very well under, and probably never recognized in himself. But I know that wolfishness. Liesl has told you I have a good measure of it in myself, and that was why she suggested I take the professional name of Eisengrim, the name of the wolf in the old fables; but the name really means the sinister hardness, the cruelty of iron itself. I took the name, and recognized the fact, and thereby got it up out of my depths so that at least I could be aware of it and take a look at it, now and then. I won’t say I domesticated the wolf, but I knew where his lair was, and what he might do. Not Boy Staunton. He had lived facing the sun, and he had no real comprehension of the shadow-wolf that loped after him.

“We wolves like to possess things, and especially people. We are unappeasably hungry. There is no reason or meaning in the hunger. It just exists, and possesses you. I saw it once, in myself, and though I didn’t know what it was at the time, I knew that it was something that was at the very heart of my being. When we played Scaramouche through Canada, I had a little meeting with Sir John, every night, just before Two, two; we had to stand in front of a mirror, to make sure every detail of costume and make-up was identical, so that when I appeared as his double the illusion would be as perfect as possible. I always enjoyed that moment, because I am wolfish about perfection. “There we stood, the night I speak of; it was in Ottawa, in his dressing-room at the old Russell, and we had a good mirror, a full-length one. He looked, and I looked. I saw that he was good. An egoist, as only a leading actor can be, but in his face, which was old under the make-up, there was gentleness and compassion toward me, because I was young, and had so much to learn, and was so likely to make a fool of myself through my driving greed. Compassion for me, and a silvery relish for himself, too, because he knew he was old, and had the mastery of age. But in my face, which was so like his that my doubling gave the play a special excitement, there was a watchful admiration beneath which my wolfishness could be seen — my hunger not just to be like him but to be him, whatever that might cost him. I loved him and served him faithfully right up to the end, but in my inmost self I wanted to eat him, to possess him, to make him mine.

“He saw it, too, and he gave me a little flick with his hand as though to say, ‘You might let me live out my life, m’boy. I’ve earned it, eh? But you look as if you’d devour my very soul. Not really necessary, quonk?’ Not a word was spoken, but I blushed under my make-up. And whatever I did for him afterward, I couldn’t keep the wolf quiet. If I was a little sharp with Roly, it was because I was angry that he had seen what I truly thought I had kept hidden.

“That was how it was with Boy Staunton. Oh, not on the surface. He had a lovely glaze. But he was a devourer.

“He set to work to devour me. He went at it with the ease of long custom, and I don’t suppose he had an instant’s real awareness of what he was doing. He laid himself out to be charming, and to get me on his side. When he had finished damning you, Dunny, he began to excuse you, in a way that was supposed to be complimentary to me: you had lived a narrow, schoolmaster’s life, and had won a certain scholarly reputation, but he and I were the glittering successes and breathed a finer air than yours.

“He was extremely good at what he was doing. It is not easy to assume an air of youth successfully, but when it is well done it has extraordinary charm, because it seems to rock Age, and probably Death, back on their heels. He had kept his voice youthful, and his vocabulary was neither stupidly up-to-the-minute nor flawed with betraying fossil slang. I had to keep reminding myself that this man must be seventy. I have to present a professional picture of physical well-being, if not actually of youth, and I know how it is done because I learned it from Sir John. But Boy Staunton — an amateur, really — could teach me things about seeming youthful without resorting to absurdities. I knew he was eager to make me his own, to enchant me, to eat me up and take me into himself. He had just discovered a defeat; he thought he had eaten you, Ramsay, but you were like those fairy-tale figures who cut their way out of the giant’s belly.

“So, not at all unlike a man who loses one girl and bounces to another, he tried to eat me.

“We really must talk, he said. We were driving down from your school to my hotel, and as we were rounding Queen’s Park, quickly he pulled off the road into what I suppose was a private entry beside the Legislature; there was a porte-cochere and a long flight of steps. It won’t be long before this is my personal entrance to this building, he said.

“I knew what he was talking about: the appointment that would be announced next morning; he was full of it.”

“I’ll bet he was,” I said; “it was just his thing — top dog in a large area — women curtsying to him — all that. And certainly his wife wanted it, and engineered it.”

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