Chapter Four

    For all its culture, especially musical culture, America in the middle of the twentieth century had yet to rival Europe in the creation of grand opera on the Italian or German scale. As the Met or San Francisco had amply proved was that the nation could certainly mount an opera, and then prove to bring on plenty of world class performers, but the compositions lagged behind. Gershwin's Porgy and Bess inclined toward the older models of musical drama, but not enough that it shook free the more ambitious venue. What did thunder around New York, of course, was the second daughter of that genre of inspiration, the musical, in the native tongue and full of singable songs with the sort of memorable phrases that people could use, as with the Bible and Shakespeare, as guide lines in their daily lives.
We have all heard, if not sung, we have all quoted, 'Some enchanted evening . . .' etcetera.

    But, actually, while Jelena and Toby did indeed first see other across a crowded room, the evening had not been in any way enchanted for her. She was simply out with an acquaintance from her home town, who belonged to a fraternity, and thus wound up at a fraternity dance in a very modest rented hall on the New Year's Eve of her first year in Vancouver and on the campus. She was not really having a good time, and thus was ready to be most aware of a pair of couple who were. Well, to be perfectly honest, she was not entirely sure that the girls were having an unflawed evening, but the two young men were constantly laughing and chatting, dressed as Highlanders, dancing vigourously with their dates.
    The slightly taller one, she noted especially, had very good legs below the tartan and moved like a dancer even when he was only walking. Her date, noting her interest at one point, told that the lad was not actually a member of the fraternity, but lived in the frat house. He was a musician, he had heard, and he and his roommate, the other kilt, were supposed to
be writing a play together. He knew nothing about the play, but he had heard them sing a very funny song they had written together.
 
    Jelena never saw the young man again, because by that time he was no longer about the campus, but was working in the city, until one wet night in November, ten months later, when she came lolloping down the stairs from the Green Room in the old UBC auditorium, the hang out room for the Players'Club. She was with two other girls, all of them members of the cast of the English Department's annual production of a classic, Ibsen's 'Peer Gynt' in this case. She gave a little 'whoop' when she and her companions hit the bottom of the stairs, not because of Toby and any memories she might have of the New Year's Eve event, but because he was with her most recent significant male interest. Toby was there to pick up one of her companions for a ride home. That young lady had been a very sweet and good friend of his for several months, the girl of New Year's Eve having moved on.
Noting the energy, and the big brown eyes, Toby said to his companion, "Who's that?"
 
     "Jelena Omagh," he said.
 
     "Oh," said Toby. He did not recognize her from the New Year's Eve party, where she had come dressed as a nurse, and he drove the other girl home without any more thought about the incident, as they had plenty to talk about, and then he did the long drive to his parent's house at the eastern end of Burrard Inlet, on the hill above Port Moody.
 
     This other girl was a very sweet creature. They had got together in the spring, a couple of months after the girl from the party had moved on. But it was more a case of keeping each other pleasant company than a real romance. She had spoken of a boyfriend at a different university, almost a fiancée. Toby had gathered, from the profession the lad was studying for, that he was not much inclined toward the arts, and she was. She acted, she wrote, she sang to his small guitar. But one night recently, when he had found himself, not for the first time in recent months, in a very strange, puzzling, and painful mental state, and asked her to keep him company at a movie, she had been frightened when he told her about his current state of soul. It had not helped either of them that the plot of the film, a murder mystery called "Footsteps in the Fog", was concerned with a victim who wondered if she were going crazy, over the question of being stalked. This had become a common thought for Toby. By religion, she was Anglican, which in his mind put her close to the Catholic girls he had known in his cadet corps and the university. She had entered his life like a vessel of innocence, not long before he went into the woods, and she had got hold of some philosophy texts for him while he was there, then become his companion when he got back and re-entered life on the campus. Yet between them they did not have the words for what had become the most pressing daily questions regarding the constant hammering that assaulted his soul. Time after time he seemed to startle her, and he did not know why. And he also knew he found other girls around the newspaper office just as interesting.
  
    And Jelena had started showing up in those same offices, coming down to write or deliver articles to do with the Players' Club and some other campus organizations she belonged to. Toby had his own column to write, and all sorts of friends from earlier years, but he noticed her, and once, when she seemed to be in an odd relationship with one of those friends, he wrote her a poem. It was by no means a rival of the least deliberations of Keats, but it was proof of personal notice. The poem said that she was barking up the wrong tree, and yet he would have had to admit that he was by no means certain that he was the right one.
  
    Years later, their campus got down to trying to teach courses on the subject of mysticism. It is unlikely that any of these sessions were presided over by actual mystics, as universities, and even seminaries crediting themselves with competence in ascetical and mystical theology are profoundly effective, steeped in academic vices, of contradicting real mystics as solidly as the Sanhedrin contradicted Christ, but they were at least in place, and had they existed then Toby Skinner might have had a reason to think of a university degree as representative of his own experience. As it was, his presence back on the campus and in law school, from the present academic and professional formation aspect was an enormous joke. In a sense, he was wiser and more experienced than any professor on the campus, as none of them were capable of adjudicating his intellectual bent, yet as he had no idea what he really was, he had to function, he had to be present, through the artificial means of enrollment, once again, in the law school. This had not stopped the Holy Spirit in any way from flooding him, day after day, with the intimations that would guide the rest of his adult life, much beyond anything the university could teach him, but it left Toby puzzled about his relationship with an organized world.
 
     It had also puzzled Rosalind, the sweetest of companions. She had begun to think that a dentist you knew was much safer that an artist who did not even know himself.