The Rebel Angels by Robertson Davies

Author:Robertson Davies [Davies, Robertson]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-7710-2786-4
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2015-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

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BEING VICE-WARDEN WAS NOT heavy work, and I accepted it gladly because it ensured me a good set of rooms in the College; Ploughwright was for graduate students, a quiet and pleasant oasis in a busy University. On Guest Nights it was my job to see that things went well, guests properly looked after, and the food and wine as good as the College could manage. They cost us something, these Guest Nights, but they perpetuated a tradition modern universities sometimes appear to have forgotten, the old tradition of scholarly hospitality. This was not food and drink provided so that people might meet to haggle and drive bargains, not the indigestive squalor of the ‘working lunch’, not the tedium of a ‘symposium’ with a single topic of conversation, but a dinner held once a fortnight when the Fellows of the College asked some guests to eat and drink and make good cheer for no other reason than that this is one of civilization’s triumphs over barbarism, of humane feeling over dusty scholasticism, an assertion that the scholar’s life is a good life. Ozy Froats had typed me as a man fond of ceremonies, and he was right; our Guest Nights were ceremonies, and I made it my special care to ensure that they were ceremonies in the best sense; that is to say, that people took part in them because they were irresistible, rather than merely inevitable.

Our guests on this November Friday night were Mrs. Skeldergate, who was a member of the Provincial Legislature at the head of a committee considering the financing of universities, and I had arranged that the others should be Hollier and Arthur Cornish—which meant the inclusion also of McVarish—as a small celebration of our completion of the work on the Cornish bequests. Arthur might well have asked us to dinner for this purpose, but I thought I would get in ahead of him; I dislike the idea that the richest person in a group must always pay the bill.

Apart from these, fourteen of the Fellows of Ploughwright attended this Guest Night, not including the Warden and myself. We were a coherent group, in spite of the divergence of our academic interests. There was Gyllenborg, who was notable in the Faculty of Medicine, Durdle and Deloney, who were in different branches of English, Elsa Czermak the economist, Hitzig and Boys, from Physiology and Physics, Stromwell, the medievalist, Ludlow from Law, Penelope Raven from Comparative Literature, Aronson the computer man, Roberta Burns the zoologist, Erzenberger and Lamotte from German and French, and Mukadassi, who was a visitor to the Department of East Asian Studies. With McVarish from History, Hollier from his ill-defined but much-discussed area of medievalism, Arthur Cornish from the world of money, the Warden who was a philosopher (his detractors said he would have been happier in a nineteenth-century university where the division of Moral Philosophy still existed), and myself as a classicist, we cast a pretty wide net of interests, and I hoped the conversation would be lively.

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