He was a fast, greedy eater and a notable belcher. He talked as he ate, giving a good view of whatever was in his mouth, plying me with questions that called for extended answers.

“What are you doing these days, Maria? That’s to say, when you are not glaring at me as I knit my innocent, monkish long socks; we monks wear ‘em long, you know, in case the robe should blow aside in the wind, and show a scandalous amount of middle-aged leg.”

“I’m getting on with the work that will eventually make me a Doctor of Philosophy.”

“Ah, that blessed degree that stamps us for life as creatures of guaranteed intellectual worth. But what’s your special study?”

“That’s rather complicated. I come under the general umbrella of Comparative Literature, but that’s a house of many mansions. Working with Professor Hollier I shall certainly do my thesis on something in his line.”

“Which isn’t just what I’d call Comparative Literature. Rooting about in the kitchen-middens and trash-heaps of the Middle Ages. What was it he made his name with?”

“A definitive study of the establishment of the Church Calendar, by Dionysius Exiguus. A lot of it had been done before, but it was Hollier who showed why Dionysius reached his conclusions—the popular belief and ancient custom that lay behind the finished work, and all that. It was what established him as a really great paleo-psychologist.”

“Have mercy, God! Is that some new kind of shrink?”

“You know it isn’t. It’s really digging into what people thought, in times when their thinking was a muddle of religion and folk-belief and rags of misunderstood classical learning, instead of being what it is today, which I suppose you’d have to call a muddle of materialism, and folk-belief, and rags of misunderstood scientific learning. Comp. Lit. gets mixed up with it because you have to know a lot of languages, but it spills over into the Centre for the Study of the History of Science and Technology. Hollier is cross-appointed there, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“There’s a lot of talk about establishing an Institute of Advanced Studies; he’d be very important there. It will come as soon as the university can get its hands on some money.”

“That may not be soon. Our fatherly government is growing restless about the big sums universities consume. It’s the people’s money, dear Maria, and don’t you ever forget it. And the people, those infallible judges of value, must have what they want, and what they think they want (because the politicians tell them so) is people who can fill useful jobs. Not remote chaps like Clem Hollier, who want to dig in the past. When you’ve achieved your Ph.D., what the hell good will you be to society?”

“That depends on what you call society. I might just manage to push away a cloud or two from what people are like now, by discovering what they’ve been at some time past.”

“Nobody is going to like you for that, sweetie. Never disturb ignorance. Ignorance is like a rare, exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. Do you know who said that?”

“Oscar Wilde, wasn’t it?”

“Clever girl. It was dear, dead Oscar. By no means a fool when he didn’t pretend to be thinking, and just let his imagination run. But I thought you were doing something about Rabelais.”

“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.”

“And an understanding of how to get a good academic appointment, and then tenure, and become a full professor without ever guessing what you’re really full of, and then soar to a Distinguished Professor who can bully the President into giving you a whopping salary because otherwise you might slip away to Harvard? You don’t mean that, Maria. That’s some fool talking out of your past. You’d better corner whatever fool it is and tell him this: the kind of character you talk about is all rubbish. What really shapes and conditions and makes us is somebody only a few of us ever have the courage to face: and that is the child you once were, long before formal education ever got its claws into you—that impatient, all-demanding child who wants love and power and can’t get enough of either and who goes on raging and weeping in your spirit till at last your eyes are closed and all the fools say, “Doesn’t he look peaceful?” It is those pent-up, craving children who make all the wars and all the horrors and all the art and all the beauty and discovery in life, because they are trying to achieve what lay beyond their grasp before they were five years old.”