The Cunning Man Read online

  “At that age? You’ve got to be kidding.” Esme thinks I am playing the old man’s game of glorifying the past.

  “I’m not. You’d be surprised how early the distinctive strain asserts itself. Win a really good young mind. Brocky had a very good young mind, and he’s become a distinguished scholar, as I expect you know.”

  “Don’t, I’m afraid. That sort of thing doesn’t often turn up in my work.”

  “Then perhaps you’ll take my word for it. And he did it by sifting the boloney out of much of his realm of scholarship, which is rare. Universities are not free from boloney. Or had you heard?”

  “Oh I’ve heard. But go on about school life. You must have been an odd lot at Colborne.”

  “No. But we had at least one weekly admonition from our Headmaster, which bit into the fabric of my mind and many another mind in that school. ‘Much has been given to you,’ he would thunder, ‘and much will be expected from you.’ And he was right. It wasn’t entirely a school of rich people’s boys, but everybody there came in some sense from a background of privilege. And the Head dinned it into us that we had to justify the position we had inherited. Of course we made fun of him, but we remembered what he said.”

  This may be putting it rather strongly, but I sense that Esme is not one for subtle distinctions. I tell her that I think the Head was sometimes puzzled by Brocky and Charlie and me, because we lacked the proper boy-like enthusiasm for sport. It was because we didn’t care who won in a game where there were strict rules, and where to be a good loser was regarded as almost better than winning: we were getting ready for the game that came after school where the rules were subject to sudden change, and we were determined to win. As we have done, in our various ways. Esme doesn’t like that.

  “In what way were you winners?”

  “I’ve told you. Brocky has a very wide reputation as a scholar and writer on his scholarly speciality. I am not unknown to the medical world as a man with a few uncommon ideas about disease. I’ve published a handful of papers which have attracted attention, and I have earned a somewhat murky reputation as a diagnostician.”

  “Murky? Why murky?”

  “I shouldn’t have said that, perhaps. It doesn’t really fit in with what you wanted to talk about.”

  “I see. Well—what about Charlie? Has anybody ever heard of him?”

  “Perhaps some day they will. He was a man of almost saint-like resolution.”

  “Ah—there’s the saint thing again. Aren’t you going to talk about that?”

  (Not on your life I’m not, young woman, and I must guard my tongue. How can I steer her away from that subject?)

  “If you want to understand Charlie perhaps you should hear more about his school-days.”

  “If you say so.”

  (11)

  School-days; what a lot of boloney—in Brocky’s term—has been written by people about their school-days! Innocent souls who recur to them as to a Golden Age, when the world was young and when a few disappointments served only to throw into prominence the splendid moments, and a succession of unsophisticated love affairs gave something like third-rate poetry to every existence. Contrast with them the sophisticated souls, who hated all subjection, suspected all precept and instruction, found love a cheat and life itself a prison, who threw themselves upon the thorns of life and bled copiously into depressing autobiographies. And yet almost all of both groups learned to read, without necessarily comprehending what they read; and to write, without necessarily being able to convey any coherent thought or opinion in what they write; and to figure, or cipher, enough to make change and do ordinary banking, but without much comprehension of what the world of figures means. It is not often that school-days are utterly lost days.

  The belly-achers who hated school are usually bores, but the larger group who saw nothing much in school except as a background to growing up, are to be gently pitied, for they began early lives crippled by incomprehension, which might, long afterward, bring them into my consulting-room, complaining of vague, but to me revealing, ailments.

  After Brocky and I had met, or at least become conscious of one another, at roll-call (where Salter declared that we were not “white men” because our names seemed unusual to him) I found myself facing him in the corridor, and there was a glint in his eye.

  “You’re a very tall chap,” said he.

  “Am I?” said I.

  “Who’s your tailor?”

  “Tailor? I haven’t got a tailor.”

  “So I had divined, with the almost uncanny intuition which is one of my outstanding characteristics. Don’t you think you ought to get one?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Sorry. I was initiating a conversation along the lines of Mr. Toots, when he first met little Paul Dombey. You’ve read Dombey and Son?”

  “No.”

  “Not well up in Dickens?”

  “I’ve read A Christmas Carol.”

  “Saints preserve us! And in Sioux Lookout, too!”

  “Look, Gilmartin, I’ve heard just about enough about Sioux Lookout. So shut up, do you hear me?”

  “O Great One, I hear and obey. But I must explain: I was beginning a conversation with you along the lines taken by the immortal Mr. Toots when first he meets little Paul Dombey at Dr. Blimber’s Academy. Sorry to be so damned literary, but it’s the colour of my mind, you see. What’s the colour of your mind?—Well, we’ll find that out later. But—and you understand I took the literary tack because I didn’t want to be too offensive—Mr. Toots asked little Paul who his tailor was because little Paul was so funnily dressed, and do you know what little Paul replied?”

  “What?”

  “He said: ‘It’s a woman makes my clothes as yet. My sister’s dressmaker I don’t suppose your clothes are made by your sister’s dressmaker?”

  “I haven’t got a sister. Are you trying to be offensive?”

  “No, but I’m obviously not charming you. I just wanted to throw out a literary hint, which hasn’t really worked—has it?—that your clothes are likely to make you an object of jocose comment here, from primitives like our friend Salter.”

  “What’s wrong with my clothes? They’re what the school Clothing List specified.”

  “Aha, that explains everything. But you ask what is wrong. My dear man, that collar—!”

  “I don’t see the other fellows wearing them.”

  “No, and you won’t, except perhaps at Hallowe’en. When did you last see a slim youth (that’s you) wearing an inch-and-a-half stiff collar which has already made a red ring around his innocent neck?”

  “Aren’t they obligatory?”

  “No. I won’t elaborate; just No. Have you got any money?”

  “Some.” I had a good deal which my father had left with me, but I was too downy to tell anybody, and kept it buttoned in an inside pocket.

  “Then the day after tomorrow, being Saturday, you and I will go downtown and get you a few things that will bring you out of the nineteenth century. Till then, I suppose you must go on with that terrible horse-collar.”

  Brocky was right. My parents, who were overjoyed when I passed the examinations (which I had to write, to my astonishment, in Doc Ogg’s office and supposedly under his supervision, as he was the only university graduate other than my father in Sioux Lookout) that admitted me to Colborne College, were very much astonished by the school Clothing List, which came with my letter of admission. It asked for puzzling things—a dozen stiff collars and a dozen white shirts to which they could be attached, long-sleeved undershirts and pants to match, three lounge suits, one at least to be black or dark blue, and a hard hat, of the kind called a Derby; spats might be worn if desired. But when my father took me to Toronto he dutifully purchased these things, though the haberdashers were surprised that they were for a boy of fourteen; they still kept a few of the stiff collars for their older customers, whose necks had grown leathery with age from wearing such gear. My father murmured a little,
for he sensed that the school Clothing List had not been revised since the turn of the century. But he assumed that these were the customs of distinguished old schools, and if the List had demanded a liver pad or a reversible dicky, he would have ferreted one out, somehow.

  Saturday was a deliverance for me, because my appearance was already a subject of ribald comment among the boys in my house, and even the Housemaster, Mr. Norfolk, looked rather askew when he saw me. Brocky had gone through my clothes and declared that the suits, shoes, socks and whatnot were all right, but the terrible underclothes and the shirts and especially the collars had to go, and he suggested the Grenfell Mission as a suitable recipient, for the Esquimaux (as they were then called) were notoriously given to hard stand-up collars. We got some decent soft shirts with attached collars, and some underwear which did not turn a September day into a Turkish bath, and I was a being transformed. Indeed, that was the way Brocky put it:

  “The Deformed Transformed,” said he. “Dramatic poem by the great Lord Byron unread by virtually anybody but me, and I assure you it’s no place to go for a laugh. But the title is remarkably handy for situations like yours, don’t you think?”

  Brocky and Charlie opened a new world to me, for here were boys of my own age with minds that were grounded in worlds of which I had never dreamed. I must have been an intelligent boy, but I was like a strong youth who had never been called on to use his muscles; my mind was attuned to dreaming in the forest, and to sharp observation in the different consulting-rooms of Mrs. Smoke and Doc Ogg, but I had never before felt intellectually inferior, which is certainly one of the spurs to intellectual growth. I had never before been in a world where I was not the cleverest boy around, who therefore did not need to exert his brain.

  I had read a lot, but I never thought of using what I had read as an inexhaustible source of reference and mental high-jinks, like Brocky; when he quoted from the Bab Ballads to cheek Moss I almost jumped out of my skin, to discover somebody else who knew and treasured them.

  I had felt much and felt it deeply in the forest, but it had never occurred to me to associate such reflection with anything as remote and generally repugnant as religion, about which the little I knew was barbarous, and Charlie woke me from an ignorant stupor. The school work at Colborne gave me no trouble, but the worlds of Brocky and Charlie made my head spin.

  Of course I had been a lonely child, and to be suddenly dropped into a noisy, rattling world of six hundred boys who worked under the dominance of masters who were jocose, acerbic, dowdy-minded and, in some instances, plain bloody-minded; masters who had distinguished themselves in war, and had now taken to the only profession open to men trained for nothing but war; masters who had travelled over the whole world and had fetched up at Colborne; masters for whom great hopes had been entertained when they were young men, and who had felt those hopes fade as the decades passed; masters who were born teachers and made learning an adventure; masters who were obviously engaged in that dismal traffic between those who did not want to learn and one who did not want to teach—not that these, in their ironic despair, were not sometimes the most revelatory of all; all of this was confusing, but breathtaking, bewildering. I had been jerked into another world suddenly, and every day brought several surprises.

  One of these was that I had only recently begun to be visited by those dreams that come to all boys, in which sexual experience presented itself in a variety of forms, always terminating in an explosion of copious, hot semen which stained the bedsheets and made the pyjama trousers as stiff as those awful collars from which Brocky had delivered me. I did not know what to do about them, tried without effect to restrain them, and vaguely wondered if I were in some way unnatural, a monster of sexual desire. It was an astonishment therefore when Brocky came into my room—my room and Charlie’s—one morning, whistling cheerfully, and announced:

  “Gents, I’m on top of the world. Last night La Belle Dame Sans Merci had me in thrall, and that always brings a great clearing of the head.”

  “What are you talking about,” I said, grumpy in the first half-hour of waking.

  “You know—the lady whom one encounters in sleep and yields to—oh so gently, until gentleness gives way to ecstasy—full beautiful—a faery’s child. A couple of times a week, on average, she takes me to her elfin grot and then—whoopee! One wakes, alone and palely loitering, but one soon feels very much better. I rather pride myself that she comes to me in that splendid romantic guise. There are troglodytes in this school who can be heard snorting and blowing in their sleep whenever the dark fit is on them, and I shudder to think in what form Lilith the Succubus descends on,—well, for instance, on my fag-master Salter. He dries his pyjamas on the heating-coils, and his room reeks of the baking Salterian sperm. What will his posterity be, one wonders.”

  Charlie was blushing furiously. I knew he hated these night visitations, and did his best to conceal them, but, as I keep saying, I am an observer. I wondered in what form Lilith the Succubus—Lilith the Old, Old Mother—came to him. Too well I knew how she showed herself to me. Sometimes she came as a melting young beauty, and I did not know where I learned to form any such image, for melting young beauties were not part of my waking world. I then believed that the waking world was the only world in which truth was to be found; my acquaintance with the wisdom of the dream world came later. Sometimes the succubus was a repulsive hag, and more than once she was Mrs. Smoke, brandishing a rattler in my face and laughing hatefully as I yielded to the irresistible urgency of the dream. The boys at school all talked of these dreams, but Brocky was the only one who had anything to say that gave a broader significance to a common human experience. La Belle Dame Sans Merci—yes, that was one of the forms of that dream—love in which man is the victim, the creature who undergoes ravishment.

  Charlie never spoke about sex. When the talk among a group of boys turned in that direction, as so often and so understandably it did, he was silent and crept away as soon as possible. Once, when I got him in a corner, so to speak, he told me that he recognized it as an inescapable and necessary part of the human condition, but it was one he intended to offer up as a sacrifice to the work for which he knew he was intended. It was then that he confided to me that he wanted to become a priest.

  Not that he made any secret of it from anyone who knew him. At a Hallowe’en evening at school he turned up at dinner with his bathrobe turned into a cassock, and a bedsheet folded to become a surplice, and he had hung a scarf around his neck as a stole; it was a great success, and certainly one of the most complete of any of the improvised costumes that were on show. But these were the external trappings of priesthood; the essence was kept very close to his heart.

  Thus we journeyed through Colborne College. We were members of the Music Club and attended concerts which meant more to me than to Brocky; he had the tin ear not uncommon among people of strongly literary temperament. He knew it. Like Yeats, he said. But he learned, though I wonder what music really meant to him. Later I knew he took great pleasure in Tschaikowsky, and while I would not say a word against that great, underestimated master, he certainly isn’t Bach, who was my special, and somewhat puritanical, admiration. I was a Bach-snob for years.

  Who would not become a Bach-snob under the tutelage of Richard Craigie, who was the senior of the two music-masters in the school? Under his guidance one might range pretty far in the fields of music, but one always returned to home-base, and home-base was Bach. I fell very much under the dominance of Mr. Craigie, and I now understand that he led me in a direction that was to open out into one of the chief interests of my life, and that was the cultural development of the city of Toronto.

  Of course I did not think of it in such terms then, for, in comparison with Sioux Lookout, Toronto was an Athens, and everything that happened there in the world of music was a revelation to me. The symphony orchestra, making yet another hopeful beginning, would not pass muster now, but it was brave and persistent. In those days musicians of good quality
might be found in the orchestras of movie theatres, because this was in the mute era of film, before sound; quite large orchestras played appropriate music while films were shown. The musicians, sick of playing Tschaikowsky’s “None But the Lonely Heart” and the finale of the William Tell Overture night after night, gathered themselves into an orchestra, and when they could escape from their servitude to Bebe Daniels and Colleen Moore—which meant at five o’clock in the afternoon—they gave concerts of music of assured worth. Mr. Craigie told me they got less than five dollars a performance, but their souls were refreshed, as were ours. Sometimes the performances were rough; now and then an amateur had to be called in who played some unusual instrument (I remember a small Anglican clergyman who would appear shyly with his bass clarinet when he was wanted); but it was a bigger orchestra and a better one than most of its audience had ever heard, and, its long-suffering conductor, Constant Gebler, called forth more music than might have been expected from what was, in the opinion of sophisticates who based their judgements on the radio broadcasts of great orchestras from the States, a scratch band.

  A dozen or so musical enthusiasts from Colborne had leave to attend these concerts, and I never missed one. To this day, I am indulgent toward orchestras that are trying to lift themselves in the world, while critics are busy assuring them that they are not the Vienna Philharmonic and never will be.

  Charlie and Brocky came to the concerts as well, but what they liked better were the first Toronto stirrings of operatic production; Hugh the Drover, which Mr. Craigie assured us was very fine, and he was right. It is still the only “grand” opera to base its romance on the outcome of a fist-fight, which is an English rather than Italian way of deciding who gets the girl; Hugh the Drover and John the Butcher have to be pugilists as well as singers, and perhaps this accounts for the neglect of a fine work. There was also an ambitious production of Hansel and Gretel, with fourteen real angels in the Vision Scene, who occasionally moulted a feather as they did their stately dance around the sleeping children. And of course there were visiting opera companies, like that of Fortune Gallo, who thrilled us by announcing an Aida which would be given a special, almost Egyptian, character by the fact that the title role would be sung by a young Red Indian soprano. Also, a Faust with designs by Norman Bel Geddes, which seemed very advanced to us. Faust puzzled me then and puzzles me still; if Faust was so clever, why did he sell his soul to deflower and impregnate Marguerite, who is manifestly a nice girl but a simpleton? Brocky had some light to throw on that question: men of brilliant intellect, he said, were often stupid about women. He proved this to be true, though not quite fatally, soon after leaving Colborne.