The Rebel Angels

A parson of one of the sects which an advertising man would call a Smooth Blend read scriptural passages and prayers, and suggested that Ellerman had been a good fellow. Amen to that.

He had been a man who liked a touch of style, and he had been hospitable. This affair would have dismayed him; he would have wanted things done better. But how do you do better when nobody believes anything very firmly, and when the Canadian ineptitude for every kind of ceremony reduces the obsequies to mediocrity?

What would I have done if I had been in charge? I would have had Ellerman's war medals, which were numerous and honourable, on display, and I would have draped his doctor's red gown and his hood over the coffin. These, as reminders of what he had been, of where his strengths had lain. But – Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither – so at the grave I would have stripped away these evidences of a life, and on the bare coffin I would have thrown earth, instead of the rose-leaves modern funeral directors think symbolic of the words Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; there is something honest about hearing the clods rattling on the coffin lid. Ellerman had taught English Literature, and he was an expert on Browning; might not somebody have read some passages from A Grammarian's Funeral? But such thoughts are idle; you are asking for theatricalism, Darcourt; grief must be meagre, and mean, and cheap – not in money, of course, but in expression and invention. Death, be not proud; neither the grinning skull nor the panoply of ceremonial, nor the heart-catching splendour of faith is welcome at a modern, middle-class city funeral; grief must be huddled away, as the Lowest Common Denominator of permissible emotion.

I wish I could have seen him near the last, to tell him that his notion of The New Aubrey had taken root in me, and thus, whatever his beliefs may have been, something of him should live, however humbly.

He drew a pretty good house; my professional eye put it at seventy-five, give or take a body, or so. No sign of McVarish, though he and Ellerman had been cronies. Urky ignores death, so far as possible. Professor Ozias Froats was there, to my surprise. I knew he had been brought up a Mennonite, but I would have supposed that a life given to science had leached all belief out of him in things unseen, of heights and depths immeasurable. I took my chance, as we stood outside the funeral home, to speak to him.

"I hope all this nonsense in the papers isn't bothering you," said I.

"I wish I could say it wasn't; they're so unfair in what they say. Can't be expected to understand, of course."

"It can't do any permanent harm, surely."

"It could, if I had to ease up to satisfy this guy Brown. His political advantage could cost me seven years of work that would have to be repeated if I had to reduce what I'm doing for a while."

I hadn't expected him to be so down in the mouth. Years ago I had known him when he was a great football star; he had been temperamental then, and seemingly he still was so.

"I'm sure it does as much good as harm," said I; 'thousands of people must have been made aware of what you're doing, and are interested. I'm interested myself. I don't suppose you'd let me visit you some day?"

To my astonishment he blossomed, and said: "Any time. But come at night when I'm alone, or nearly alone. Then I'd be glad to show you my stuff and explain. It's good of you to say you're interested."

So it was quite easy. I could have a look at Ozy for The New Aubrey.

2

It wouldn't be fair to Ozias Froats or to me to suggest that I was bagging him like a butterfly collector. That wasn't the light in which I saw The New Aubrey. Of course poor Ellerman, who loved everything that was quaint in English Literature, had relished John Aubrey's delightful style, and the mixture of shrewdness and naivety with which Aubrey recorded his ragbag of information about the great ones of his time. But I wasn't interested in anything like that; undergraduates love to write such stuff for their literary magazines – "The Diary of Our Own Mr. Pepys", and such arch concoctions. What I valued in Aubrey was the energy of his curiosity, his determination to find out whatever he could about people who interested him: that was the quality in him I would try to recapture.