The Rebel Angels

"Yes – well, I've got to have a thesis topic, and Hollier has put me to work to get some notion of what Rabelais's intellectual background was."

"Old stuff, surely?"

"He thinks I might find a few new things, or take a new look at some old things. The Ph.D. thesis isn't expected to be a thunderbolt from heaven, you know."

"Certainly not. The world couldn't stand so many thunderbolts. You haven't written anything yet?"

"I'm making preparations, I've got to bone up on New Testament Greek; Rabelais was very keen on it. It was a big thing in his time."

"Surely, with your name, you know some modern Greek?"

"No, but I know Classical Greek pretty well. And French and Spanish and Italian and German and of course Latin – the Golden, the Silver, and the awful kind they used in the Middle Ages."

"You make me quite dizzy. How so many languages?"

"My father was very great on languages. He was a Pole, and he lived quite a while in Hungary. He made it a game, when I was a child. I don't pretend to be perfect in those languages; I can't write them very well but I can read and speak them well enough. It's not difficult, if you have a knack."

"Yes, if you have a knack."

"When you know two or three, a lot of others just fall into place. People are afraid of languages."

"But your cradle tongues are Polish and Hungarian? Any others?"

"One or two. Not important."

I certainly didn't mean to tell him which unimportant language I spoke at home, when things grew hot. I hoped I had learned a lesson from my indiscretion when I told Hollier about the bomari. And I began to fear that if I were not careful, Parlabane might get that out of me. His curiosity was of a special intensity, and he bustled me in conversation so that I was apt to say more than I wanted to. Perhaps if I took the questioning out of his hands I could escape his prying? Therefore – "You ask a lot of questions, but you can never tell anything. Who are you, Dr. Parlabane? You're a Canadian, aren't you?"

"Please call me Brother John; I put aside all my academic pomps long ago, when I fell in the world and discovered that my only salvation lay in humility. Yes, I'm a Canadian. I'm a child of this great city, and also a child of this great university, and a child of Spook. You know why it's called Spook?"

"It's the College of St. John and the Holy Ghost. Spook's the Holy Ghost."

"Sometimes used as a put-down; sometimes, as I told you, affectionately. But you know the reference, surely? Mark one, verse eight: "I indeed have baptized you with water, but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost." So the college is truly an Alma Mater, a Bounteous Mother, and from one breast she gives her children the milk of knowledge and from the other the milk of salvation and good doctrine. In other words, water without which no man can live, and the Holy Ghost without which no man can live well. But the nasty little brats get Ma's boobs so mixed up they don't know which is which. I only discovered salvation and good doctrine after I had been brought very low in the world."

"How did that happen?"

"Perhaps some day I'll tell you."

"Well, you can't expect to ask all the questions, Brother John. I've been told you had an exceptionally brilliant academic career."

"And so I did. Oh, yes indeed, I was a meteor in the world of the intellect when I still knew nothing about mankind, and nothing whatever about myself."

"That was the knowledge that brought you down?"

"It was my failure to combine those two kinds of knowledge that brought me down."

I decided I would bounce Brother John a bit, and see if I could get something out of him beside all this sparring. "Too much intellect and too little character – was that it?"

That did it. "That is wholly unworthy of you, Maria Magdalena Theotoky. If you were some narrow Canadian girl who had known nothing but the life of Toronto and Georgian Bay, such a remark might seem perceptive. But you have drunk at better springs than that. What do you mean by character?"

"Guts. A good strong will to balance all the book-learning. An understanding of how many beans make five."