The Cunning Man Read online

  I was there as a kind of general friend of everybody, and attending physician in case Gil fainted at the altar, as he looked rather likely to do.

  Now Esme had returned to my consulting-room and her job of digging up whatever was interesting and picturesque about the “village” that surrounded the Church of St. Aidan.

  “The saint bit,” she now said. “What was all that about?”

  “Oh, just a little local enthusiasm,” I replied. “Father Hobbes had been very popular. More than popular, really. He was loved. Because he was a very good old man, you know.”

  “Good in what way?”

  “Didn’t heat the rectory properly. Didn’t dress himself in anything but ancient clothes that he must have had for thirty years. Ate awful food, and expected the priests who lived with him at the rectory to do the same. Gave every penny he had to the poor. At least that’s an exaggeration in our time; he gave every penny that the government didn’t grab or that wasn’t demanded for immediate expenses, to the poor. He used to roam around the parish on winter nights, up and down all the alleys, looking for bums who might have dropped down drunk, and who might freeze. Time and again he brought one of them home and put him in his own bed, while he slept on a sofa—and the rectory sofa was penitence for a saint, let me tell you. There was some talk because he was very generous to whores who were down on their luck. He made their more prosperous sisters stump up to help them in bad times. Got the whores to come to Confession and be scrubbed up, spiritually. He used to joke with them, and they adored him. You should have seen the whores at his funeral! Got into trouble because he let the church fabric run down, giving away money that should have gone for heating, and leaks and fresh electric bulbs.

  “Of course with an example like that, money rolled in. St. Aidan’s wasn’t a rich parish by any means, but people stumped up astonishingly to help Father Hobbes, because he never spared himself. Father Iredale did everything he could to keep the church decent, and got a lot of help from people who gave vestments for the clergy, and paid the considerable bill for candles, so the services were always handsome. The whores, again, loved paying for incense. Whores can be very devout, you know. They need religion in their business. Everybody chipped in. DeCourcy Parry, who looked after the music, could have doubled his salary anywhere else, but he loved the feeling of St. Aidan’s and made its music the best in Toronto. Dwyer worked selflessly—and if you’d known Dwyer you’d know what a lot of self he had to subdue—because he loved the plainchant and the intricacies of ritual. There was an extraordinary atmosphere about the place.

  “So it wasn’t surprising when poor old Father Hobbes died, in full view of a lot of his people, at the foot of the altar which was sacred to him as the true table of God, they declared that he had been a saint, and wanted to do something about it.”

  “So what did they do?”

  “There was nothing to be done. The Bishop sent one of his archdeacons to preach a sermon in which he explained laboriously that the Anglican Church no longer created saints, without in the least diminishing the greatness of the saints of the pre-Reformation days—this was a typically Anglican example of eating your cake and having it too—and after a while it all quieted down.”

  “That’s not what I heard. I heard there was quite a ding-dong about it, and even talk of miracles. Didn’t the Bishop have to take strong measures?”

  “Oh, people love to exaggerate these things. You can take it from me it was all a tempest in a teapot. I was there, you know.”

  “Didn’t the Bishop throw Iredale out?”

  “Heavens, no! Father Iredale was in the course of time transferred to a parish in the northernmost part of his large diocese. I suppose the Bishop thought he might be glad of a rest from the over-heated atmosphere of St. Aidan’s.”

  “Jon, I smell a rat. You’re not a rat, are you?”

  “The farthest thing from it. But I have a well-cooled memory, which isn’t common.”

  “You knew Iredale well, didn’t you?”

  “Well—we were at school together.”

  (4)

  At school together. Everything that I say to Esme about Charlie is conditioned by that fact. Everything that I say to Esme is conditioned by the larger fact that I am who and what I am: Jonathan Hullah, M.D., F.R.C.P., with a wide reputation in the treatment of stubborn and chronic diseases, and a somewhat murky reputation among some of my colleagues because of the methods I use in such treatment. Everything I say to Esme is rooted in my childhood, and in the totality of who I am and what my experience of life has been. Does she understand that? She is not a fool, by any means; indeed she is a very keen-witted young woman. But she is a journalist and an interviewer who does not dig very deep, because if she did so she might blur the clarity of the “story” she will eventually write for her paper. There are depths in me that Esme will never explore, nor do I suppose she wants to do so. But those depths lie below anything I may tell her. And they must be explored in some degree in this narrative in my Case Book.

  How many interviewers, I wonder, have any conception of the complexity of the creature they are interrogating? Do they really believe that what they can evoke from their subject is the whole of the “story”? Not the best interviewers, surely. Esme is not bad, but she desires clarity above all else, and clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit.

  What I shall tell her will all be true so far as it goes, but in terms of the reality of the “story” she is seeking, with the energy of a terrier after a rat, what I shall tell her will not be even half what I know.

  Everything I am lies behind everything I say. So—Charlie and I were at school together.

  “Gilmartin?”

  “Present.”

  “Hullah?”

  “Present.”

  “Iredale?”

  “Present.”

  “All new boys? God, what’s happening to this school? What names! Gilmartin; Hullah; Iredale! This used to be a school for white men! Where do you bastards come from?”

  “Salterton,” said Gilmartin.

  “Salterton,” said Iredale.

  I remained silent.

  “Well, come on, Hullah? Where do you come from?” Forced to the wall, I answered, “Sioux Lookout?”

  “Never heard of it. Where is it?”

  “Northern Ontario.”

  The interrogator was a misshapen lump of devil’s dung who was the prefect on duty to take the four-thirty roll-call; his name was Salter. Salter L., because boys at Colborne College did not have given names: they had surnames and initials.

  “Sioux Lookout! God, what next?” said Salter, feigning deep grief. Then he went on with roll-call. But we three new boys—Brochwel Gilmartin, Charlie Iredale, and I, were linked together in sympathy as not being “white men” as defined by the troglodyte Salter, and we became friends from that hour.

  I needed friends. I had not been in Colborne College forty-eight hours, but already I was aware that all the other boys seemed to be cousins, or at least second cousins, and that they were all Tories by birth. I had no relatives, and my parents had always been Liberals. At that time political and religious loyalties were even more important in Canada than knowing who was related to whom, and roughly how much money they had. I felt deeply bereft, and saw myself nobody at all, but that did not last. Salter proclaimed loud and long that I hailed from an unknown place called Sioux Lookout, which must unquestionably be a dump, and I was quickly dubbed Nature Boy, a denizen of the woods.

  I was laughed at because I said “Look out” with a warning emphasis of the second syllable; I had never heard the name spoken otherwise. And it was a reasonable pronunciation, for Sioux Lookout was a point at which the Ojibwa, for centuries, had met and resisted their enemies from the south, the Sioux. So—Sioux Lookout. Why not?

  Colborne College was an admirable school, but of course that does not mean that it was a comfortable, agreeable place; the most strenuous efforts of the most committed educationalists in the y
ears since my boyhood have been quite unable to make a school into anything but a school, which is to say a jail with educational opportunities. Schools, since their beginning, have been devised to keep children out of their parents’ way, and in our time they have the added economic duty of keeping able-bodied young folk off the labour market. But they are so organized that only the most inveterate blockheads can enter at the bottom and come out at the top without having learned a few things.

  At Colborne we learned not only the set curriculum, but also the intricate politics of community life, how to behave toward our elders and presumed betters, and a certain sophistication, shallow but useful. We learned how to bend, but not break. We learned to take the rough with the smooth. We learned not to whine or lay claim to privileges which we were not able to carry successfully. We found, and adapted to, what was probably going to be our place in the world. And in the midst of all this we learned a high degree of cunning in concealing what our true nature might be. You could be an artist, or an aesthete, a philosopher, a fascist, or a con-man at Colborne, and only a few people would guess your secret.

  It was this last important lesson, the acquirement and concealment of cunning, that I had already some aptitude for and which, when I came to Colborne, I looked for in others, and found at once in Charlie Iredale and Brocky Gilmartin. Our oddity, and the thing we had to keep to ourselves, was that we knew where we were going.

  So many of the boys seemed to feel that some path would open to them after they had left school, and doubtless the university or the military college; they did not give much thought as to what it might be. They lived in a world where their parents had taken paths that they had not chosen with determination, but which they followed more or less contentedly as lawyers or stockbrokers or people caught up in the huge array of inexplicable jobs that go under the heading of “business.”

  We three could define our ambitions: Brocky wanted to be a scholar and university teacher; I wanted to be a physician; Charlie—this had to be kept dark indeed—wanted to be a priest. Yes, a priest, as the word is used in the Anglican Church. To most people at Colborne that word meant a Roman Catholic. There were a few R.C.s in the school, just as there were a few Jews, but they would never have dreamed of questioning the straight Anglican line taken by the Headmaster. I think they even enjoyed it, making mental reservations, no doubt, but savouring the fine prose and the gentlemanly formality of the whole thing. They did not seek to emphasize their differences.

  Colborne, a good school but of course not a paradise, offered a fine spread of learning useful in all three of the professions we had chosen so early in life. The masters were pleased that Brocky liked to dig deep under the surface of the lessons he learned in classics and modern languages; I could make the most of the physics and chemistry labs if I did not shirk classics; Charlie was good at history, and at nothing else.

  (5)

  Nature boy. They could have given me worse and less appropriate names, because when I went to Colborne I knew more of the wilderness than the lads whose acquaintance with nature meant a summer home at Georgian Bay and some water-sports on much-travelled lakes. I was born and passed my first fourteen years in and around Sioux Lookout, which was nearly two thousand miles north-west of Toronto. The southern world reached us by the daily appearance of the transcontinental train of the Canadian National Railway, which dropped mail and parcels when there were any. Most of the mail was for my father’s mine. It was not really his mine, but one of many mines that belonged to a company of which he was a part owner; its product was iron pyrites, an uninteresting mineral, but of value in the hardening and refining of several other metals, and in the preparation of green vitriol, which was used in the manufacture of inks and dyes.

  It seemed to me then that my father was the king of the place. Certainly he was its most substantial citizen. But I now understand that he cannot have been a man of much ambition, as he was content to live in an out-of-the-way place, managing an easy mine, and without much company of his own degree of education or cultivation. What he really liked was hunting and fishing, and he was able to do that all the year round, because there were no forest rangers very near to question him, and as the Indians on the adjacent reserve hunted and fished legally whenever they pleased, a man doing the same thing would have attracted no attention if a ranger had passed through.

  My father was a man of kindly, easygoing disposition. He was very good to me, teaching me quite a lot about engineering and mathematics without actually making lessons of it, and taking me with him into the forest, and canoeing on Lac Seul. With him I learned to know the trees, the white and the black spruce, the balsam firs, the jack-pines, the queenly birches growing in stands by themselves, and the trembling aspens that threw such a varied and magical light when the sun shone, and offered a shuddering, nervous presence in a forest otherwise still and at times alarming. Not that I was alarmed, except when there was an unexpected storm; I will not say that I loved the stillness of the forest, because it was too much a part of my life to be singled out for notice, but that stillness became for me the measure and norm of what life should be and I carry it in my soul still. When I am most in need of rest in the racket and foolish bustle of modern Toronto, I lock my doors and close my curtains and try to recapture the stillness of the forest in which I grew up, and shared with my father.

  My mother was quite a different sort of person. She had been well-educated, in the manner of her youth, which meant that it never occurred to her to go to a university, but she acquired a cultivation and a range of knowledge that few university-bred girls seem to have. I think she did what many women did in her time, and allowed her life to be conditioned by the circumstances of her marriage and the tastes of her husband. He was an engineer and soon after their marriage became the boss of a mine in Sioux Lookout; very well, to Sioux Lookout she would go and see what it had to offer her. What it offered was a wide range of possibilities for nature study and botanizing, and she took to these with enthusiasm. It offered what was much valued by women of her sort at that time, and that was an opportunity to “do good,” to help those less fortunate than herself, to teach new ideas of sanitation and child-care, to make my father “read the Riot Act” to drunks who beat their women, and to try to help, when help was needed, the Indian women on the reserve nearby. She was a Good Influence, and though that is much mocked in our time, it was an indisputable fact in her time and she filled the role with good sense and enthusiasm… Everybody liked and respected Mrs. Hullah, even though they didn’t always want to do what she thought best.

  In the home, she was determined that I should not be what she called “a woods child,” and very often the C.N.R. train dropped parcels of books and gramophone records from Toronto, and our house rang with Beethoven and Brahms (this was before the craze for Mozart had begun) and on Saturday nights with Gilbert and Sullivan, which my father loved. I took in the Savoy operas almost before I could speak, and liked them better than Faust, which my mother had complete in large albums of records. I liked the Devil, but I didn’t know how Faust had wronged Marguerite, and nobody thought it proper to tell me.

  I look back on those days in Sioux Lookout as if to a lost paradise. I was a lonely child, but I liked loneliness and like it still. Despite my mother I was a woods child, and what the woods taught me is still at the heart of my life. And unlike so many of the people I meet in my consulting-room I loved and admired my parents and was grateful to them, and am so still. Oh, of course, I had the usual adolescent revolt, but it passed as childhood diseases should.

  (6)

  Not, however, as all childhood diseases do. When I was eight I fell ill of scarlet fever, and I bear some of the marks of it still.

  How did I get it? (Or should I say how, and why, did I “catch” it, for as a physician I have always been aware of the wisdom that lies in the notion that one “catches” a disease, rather than being caught by it.) From time to time I wandered down to our little railway station, which was not mu
ch more than a shed, and stared at and mingled with the passengers who got down on the platform for the five minutes or so that the train halted, to stretch their legs and perhaps to wonder at the nearness of the forest and the great silence that enwrapped it. Did some infected carrier of the disease cough or sneeze near me? That was the received wisdom of the time about scarlet fever. That was how it was passed on.

  One day a queer thing happened, which I never told my mother. The train halted, and among the passengers who stepped down to the platform to take the air were three girls, rather older than I—eleven or twelve, I should say—and they eyed me curiously as I scowled back at them. They whispered and giggled among themselves, and then the boldest—she had ringlets and wore a white bunny-skin coat and overshoes trimmed with the same fur—darted forward and kissed me full on the mouth. They hurried back into the train, squealing with juvenile sexual excitement, and left me, red in the face, in the middle of a group of laughing adults. Was that how the infection was passed on? Whatever, or however, I think I caught scarlet fever from that young hussy, and after a few days of moping, sore throat, and occasional vomiting, I was extremely ill.

  My mother consulted the clinical thermometer. My temperature was 103 F, and I was covered with a flaming rash. Dr. Ogg was called at once.