The Deptford Trilogy
The Deptford Trilogy
ROBERTSON DAVIES (1913–1995) was born and raised in Ontario, and educated at a variety of schools, including Upper Canada College, Queen’s University, and Balliol College, Oxford. He had three successive careers: as an actor with the Old Vic Company in England, as publisher of the Peterborough Examiner, and as a university professor and first Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, from which he retired in 1981 with the title of Master Emeritus.
He was one of Canada’s most distinguished men of letters, with several volumes of plays and collections of essays, speeches, and belles lettres to his credit. As a novelist, he gained worldwide fame for his three trilogies, The Salterton Trilogy, The Deptford Trilogy, and The Cornish Trilogy, and for later novels Murther & Walking Spirits and The Cunning Man.
His career was marked by many honours: He was the first Canadian to be made an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he was a Companion of the Order of Canada, and he received honorary degrees from twenty-six American, Canadian, and British universities.
By Robertson Davies
NOVELS
THE SALTERTON TRILOGY
Tempest-Tost
Leaven of Malice
A Mixture of Frailties
THE DEPTFORD TRILOGY
Fifth Business
The Manticore
World of Wonders
THE CORNISH TRILOGY
The Rebel Angels
What’s Bred in the Bone
The Lyre of Orpheus
Murther & Walking Spirits
The Cunning Man
SHORT FICTION
High Spirits
FICTIONAL ESSAYS
The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks
The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks
Samuel Marchbanks’ Almanack
The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks
ESSAYS
One Half of Robertson Davies
The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies
The Merry Heart
Happy Alchemy
Selected Works on the Art of Writing
Selected Works on the Pleasures of Reading
CRITICISM
A Voice from the Attic
PLAYS
Selected Plays
THE DEPTFORD TRILOGY
Robertson Davies
The Deptford Trilogy
New Canadian Library e-Omnibus, 2015
Copyright © 2015 Robertson Davies
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Fifth Business
Copyright © 1970 Robertson Davies
First published in Canada and Great Britain by Macmillan in 1970
First published in the U.S. by Viking in 1970
e-ISBN: 9780771027772
The Manticore
Copyright © 1972 Robertson Davies
First published in Canada and Great Britain by Macmillan in 1972
First published in the U.S. by Viking in 1972
e-ISBN: 9780771029868
World of Wonders
Copyright © 1975 Robertson Davies
First published in Canada by Macmillan in 1975
First published in the U.S. by Viking in 1975
First published in Great Britain by W.H. Allen in 1975
e-ISBN: 9780771029875
E-omnibus edition published in Canada by New Canadian Library, an imprint of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company, Toronto, in 2015.
First print edition of The Deptford Trilogy published by Penguin in 1983, 1992.
McClelland & Stewart with colophon is a registered trademark.
Cover Design by Lisa Jager
Detail of original cover artwork by Bascove
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication available upon request.
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
The Deptford Trilogy
e-ISBN: 9780771027789
v3.1
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Fifth Business
Epigraph
1 Mrs Dempster
2 I Am Born Again
3 My Fool-Saint
4 Gyges and King Candaules
5 Liesl
6 The Soirée of Illusions
The Manticore
1 Why I Went to Zürich
2 David Against the Trolls
3 My Sorgenfrei Diary
World of Wonders
1 A Bottle in the Smoke
2 Merlin’s Laugh
3 Le Lit de Justice
FIFTH BUSINESS
Fifth Business … Definition
Those roles which, being neither those of
Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain,
but which were none the less essential to
bring about the Recognition or the dénouement
were called the Fifth Business in drama
and opera companies organized according
to the old style; the player who acted these
parts was often referred to as Fifth Business.
—Tho. Overskou, Den Danske Skueplads
1
Mrs Dempster
(1)
My lifelong involvement with Mrs Dempster began at 5:58 o’clock p.m. on 27 December 1908, at which time I was ten years and seven months old.
I am able to date the occasion with complete certainty because that afternoon I had been sledding with my lifelong friend and enemy Percy Boyd Staunton, and we had quarrelled, because his fine new Christmas sled would not go as fast as my old one. Snow was never heavy in our part of the world, but this Christmas it had been plentiful enough almost to cover the tallest spears of dried grass in the fields; in such snow his sled with its tall runners and foolish steering apparatus was clumsy and apt to stick, whereas my low-slung old affair would almost have slid on grass without snow.
The afternoon had been humiliating for him, and when Percy was humiliated he was vindictive. His parents were rich, his clothes were fine, and his mittens were of skin and came from a store in the city, whereas mine were knitted by my mother; it was manifestly wrong, therefore, that his splendid sled should not go faster than mine, and when such injustice showed itself Percy became cranky. He slighted my sled, scoffed at my mittens, and at last came right out and said that his father was better than my father. Instead of hitting him, which might have started a fight that could have ended in a draw or even a defeat for me, I said, all right, then, I would go home and he could have the field to himself. This was crafty of me, for I knew it was getting on for suppertime, and one of our home rules was that nobody, under any circumstances, was to be late for a meal. So I was keeping the home rule, while at the same time leaving Percy to himself.
As I walked back to the village he followed me, shouting fresh insults. When I walked, he taunted, I staggered like an old cow; my woollen cap was absurd beyond all belief; my backside was immense and wobbled when I walked; and more of the same sort, for his invention was not lively. I said nothing, because I knew that this spited him more than any retort, and that every time he shouted at me he lost face.
Our village was so small that you came on it at once; it lacked the dignity of outskirts. I darted up our street, putting on speed, for I had looked ostentatiously at my new Christmas dollar watch (Percy had a watch but was not let wear it because it was too good) and saw that it was 5:57; just time to get indoors, wash my hands in the noisy, splashy way my parents seemed to like, and be in my place at six, my head bent for grace. Percy was by this time hopping mad, and I knew I had spoiled his supper and probably his whole evening. Then the unforeseen took over.
Walking up the street ahead of me were the Reverend Amasa Dempster and his wife; he had her arm tucked in his and was leaning towards her in the protective way he had. I was familiar with this sight, for they always took a walk at this time, after dark and when most people were at supper, because Mrs Dempster was going to have a baby, and it was not the custom in our village for pregnant women to show themselves boldly in the streets—not if they had any position to keep up, and of course the Baptist minister’s wife had a position. Percy had been throwing snowballs at me, from time to time, and I had ducked them all; I had a boy’s sense of when a snowball was coming, and I knew Percy. I was sure that he would try to land one last, insulting snowball between my shoulders before I ducked into our house. I stepped briskly—not running, but not dawdling—in front of the Dempsters just as Percy threw, and the snowball hit Mrs Dempster on the back of the head. She gave a cry and, clinging to her husband, slipped to the ground; he might have caught her if he had not turned at once to see who had thrown the snowball.
I had meant to dart into our house, but I was unnerved by hearing Mrs Dempster; I had never heard an adult cry in pain before and the sound was terrible to me. Falling, she burst into nervous tears, and suddenly there she was, on the ground, with her husband kneeling beside her, holding her in his arms and speaking to her in terms of endearment that were strange and embarrassing to me; I had never heard married people—or any people—speak unashamedly loving words before. I knew that I was watching a “scene,” and my parents had always warned against scenes as very serious breaches of propriety. I stood gaping, and then Mr Dempster became conscious of me.
“Dunny,” he said—I did not know he knew my name—“lend us your sleigh to get my wife home.”
I was contrite and guilty, for I knew that the snowball had been meant for me, but the Dempsters did not seem to think of that. He lifted his wife on my sled, which was not hard because she was a small, girlish woman, and as I pulled it towards their house he walked beside it, very awkwardly bent over her, supporting her and uttering soft endearment and encouragement, for she went on crying, like a child.
Their house was not far away—just around the corner, really—but by the time I had been there, and seen Mr. Dempster take his wife inside, and found myself unwanted outside, it was a few minutes after six, and I was late for supper. But I pelted home (pausing only for a moment at the scene of the accident), washed my hands, slipped into my place at table, and made my excuse, looking straight into my mother’s sternly interrogative eyes. I gave my story a slight historical bias, leaning firmly but not absurdly on my own role as the Good Samaritan. I suppressed any information or guesswork about where the snowball had come from, and to my relief my mother did not pursue that aspect of it. She was much more interested in Mrs Dempster, and when supper was over and the dishes washed she told my father she thought she would just step over to the Dempsters’ and see if there was anything she could do.
On the face of it this was a curious decision of my mother’s, for of course we were Presbyterians, and Mrs Dempster was the wife of the Baptist parson. Not that there was any ill-will among the denominations in our village, but it was understood that each looked after its own, unless a situation got too big, when outside help might be called in. But my mother was, in a modest way, a specialist in matters relating to pregnancy and childbirth; Dr McCausland had once paid her the great compliment of saying that “Mrs Ramsay had her head screwed on straight”; she was ready to put this levelness of head at the service of almost anybody who needed it. And she had a tenderness, never obviously displayed, for poor, silly Mrs Dempster, who was not twenty-one yet and utterly unfit to be a preacher’s wife.
So off she went, and I read my Christmas annual of the Boy’s Own Paper, and my father read something that looked hard and had small print, and my older brother Willie read The Cruise of the “Cachalot,” all of us sitting round the baseburner with our feet on the nickel guard, till half-past eight, and then we boys were sent to bed. I have never been quick to go to sleep, and I lay awake until the clock downstairs struck half-past nine, and shortly after that I heard my mother return. There was a stovepipe in our house that came from the general living-room into the upstairs hall, and it was a fine conductor of sound. I crept out into the hall—Willie slept like a bear—put my ear as near to it as the heat permitted and heard my mother say:
“I’ve just come back for a few things. I’ll probably be all night. Get me all the baby blankets out of the trunk, and then go right down to Ruckle’s and make him get you a big roll of cotton wool from the store—the finest he has—and bring it to the Dempsters’. The doctor says if it isn’t a big roll to get two.”
“You don’t mean it’s coming now?”
“Yes. Away early. Don’t wait up for me.”
But of course he did wait up for her, and it was four in the morning when she came home, self-possessed and grim, as I could tell from her voice as I heard them talking before she returned to the Dempsters’—why, I did not know. And I lay awake too, feeling guilty and strange.
That was how Paul Dempster, whose reputation is doubtless familiar to you (though that was not the name under which he gained it), came to be born early on the morning of 28 December in 1908.
(2)
In making this report to you, my dear Headmaster, I have purposely begun with the birth of Paul Dempster, because this is the cause of so much that is to follow. But why, you will ask, am I writing to you at all? Why, after a professional association of so many years, during which I have been reticent about my personal affairs, am I impelled now to offer you such a statement as this?
It is because I was deeply offended by the idiotic piece that appeared in the College Chronicle in the issue of midsummer 1969. It is not merely its illiteracy of tone that disgusts me (though I think the quarterly publication of a famous Canadian school ought to do better), but its presentation to the public of a portrait of myself as a typical old schoolmaster doddering into retirement with tears in his eyes and a drop hanging from his nose. But it speaks for itself, and here it is, in all its inanity:
FAREWELL TO THE CORK
A feature of “break-up” last June was the dinner given in honour of Dunstan (“Corky”) Ramsay, who was retiring after forty-five years at the school, and Assistant Head and Senior History Master for the last twenty-two. More than 168 Old Boys, including several MPs and two Cabinet Ministers, were present, and our able dietician Mrs Pierce surpassed herself in providing a truly fine spread for the occasion. “Corky” himself was in fine form despite his years and the coronary that laid him up following the death of his lifelong friend, the late Boy Staunton, D.S.O., C.B.E., known to us all as an Old Boy and Chairman of the Board of Governors of this school. He spoke of his long years as a teacher and friend to innumerable boys, many of whom now occupy positions of influence and prominence, in firm tones that many a younger man might envy.
“Corky’s” career may serve both as an example and a warning to young masters for, as he said, he came to the school in 1924 intending to stay only a few years and now he has completed his forty-fifth. During that time he has taught history, as he sees it, to countless boys, many of whom have gone on to a more scientific study of the subject in the universities of Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. Four heads of history departments in Canadian universities, former pupils of “Corky’s,” were head-table guests at the dinner, and one of them, Dr E. S. Warren of the University of Toronto, paid a generous, noncritical tribute to “The Cork,” praising his unfailing enthusiasm and referring humorously to his explorations of the borderland between history and myth.