The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  The Cunning Man

  ROBERTSON DAVIES (1913–1995) was born and raised in Ontario, and was educated at a variety of schools, including Upper Canada College, Queen’s University, and Balliol College, Oxford. He had three successive careers: as an actor with the Old Vic Company in England; as publisher of the Peterborough Examiner; and as university professor and first Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, from which he retired in 1981 with the title of Master Emeritus.

  He was one of Canada’s most distinguished men of letters, with several volumes of plays and collections of essays, speeches, and belles lettres to his credit. As a novelist, he gained worldwide fame for his three trilogies: The Salterton Trilogy, The Deptford Trilogy, and The Cornish Trilogy, and for later novels Murther & Walking Spirits and The Cunning Man.

  His career was marked by many honours: He was the first Canadian to be made an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he was a Companion of the Order of Canada, and he received honorary degrees from twenty-six American, Canadian, and British universities.

  By Robertson Davies

  NOVELS

  THE SALTERTON TRILOGY

  Tempest-Tost

  Leaven of Malice

  A Mixture of Frailties

  THE DEPTFORD TRILOGY

  Fifth Business

  The Manticore

  World of Wonders

  THE CORNISH TRILOGY

  The Rebel Angels

  What’s Bred in the Bone

  The Lyre of Orpheus

  Murther & Walking Spirits

  The Cunning Man

  SHORT FICTION

  High Spirits

  FICTIONAL ESSAYS

  The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

  The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks

  Samuel Marchbanks’ Almanack

  The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks

  ESSAYS

  One Half of Robertson Davies

  The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies

  The Merry Heart

  Happy Alchemy

  Selected Works on the Art of Writing

  Selected Works on the Pleasures of Reading

  CRITICISM

  A Voice from the Attic

  PLAYS

  Selected Plays

  THE CUNNING MAN

  Robertson Davies

  The Cunning Man

  New Canadian Library electronic edition, 2015

  Copyright © 1994 Robertson Davies

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  First published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart in 1994

  First published in the U.S. and Great Britain by Penguin in 1994

  All rights reserved.

  e-ISBN: 9780771027833

  Electronic edition published in Canada by New Canadian Library, an imprint of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company, Toronto, in 2015.

  Cover Design by Lisa Jager

  Detail of original cover artwork by Bascove

  McClelland & Stewart with colophon is a registered trademark.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication available upon request.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Copyright

  Part I

  Part II

  Part III

  Part IV

  Cunning men, wizards, and white witches, as they call them, in every village, which, if they be sought unto, will help almost all infirmities of body and mind.…

  The body’s mischiefs, as Plato proves, proceed from the soul: and if the mind be not first satisfied, the body can never be cured.

  —Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)

  I

  (1)

  Should I have taken the false teeth? In my years as a police surgeon I would certainly have done so; who can say what might be clinging to them, or in the troughs that fit over the gums? I would have been entirely within my rights. But in this curious situation, what indisputable rights had I?

  To begin with, I was no longer a police surgeon, but a physician; primarily, I suppose, a diagnostician, in private practice, and also a professor in the Faculty of Medicine (Diagnosis). I was thus a rather unusually qualified bystander when poor old Father Hobbes died right in front of the High Altar at St. Aidan’s, on the morning of Good Friday. Instinctively, like a firehorse when it hears the bell, I darted forward as he fell. I was still not old enough to know that a doctor should never be in a hurry. When Charlie waved me back, hissing, “This is holy ground. Leave it to me,” I did not want to insist on my rights, or at any rate my privileges, as a medical man. Charlie was insisting on his rights as a priest in a way I resented, but I did not want to get into a tit-for-tat quarrel with him. We were members of two rival priesthoods, he the Man of God and I the Man of Science, and in the circumstances I thought my priest equal if not superior to his. But I did not want to show pique or press a petty advantage. We were in a church, Holy Communion had begun, and the dying man was behind the altar rails, so I suppose I thought Charlie was on his own turf and must be respected accordingly. Was this chivalry toward the weaker, or snotty contempt for a lesser creature? I suppose it was a little of both.

  If I had taken the teeth the story that this young journalist tried to extract from me would have been very different. A better story? I cannot say. But I was certainly not going to tell Ms. Esme Barron, of the Colonial Advocate, everything I knew. If I leave a few notes on the story in my poorly kept Case Book, somebody may find it when I am dead. What they will find is much more than “a few notes” but when I wrote this I did not know how much my story would possess me. I had no intention of confiding in this very attractive, tactful young woman, whom I did not trust an inch.

  She has asked a question, and I must answer.

  “Yes. I signed the death certificate. I saw the body as soon as it was removed to the vestry.”

  “Who moved it?”

  “A couple of deacons who were helping to serve Mass.”

  “What’s a deacon, exactly?”

  “A sort of priest-in-training. It’s the lowest rank of the ministry in the Anglican Church. A deacon is working his way up to becoming a fully ordained priest, and he has some clerical functions, but he can’t celebrate Communion or give the Blessing. Nor can he hear confessions, which was heavy work at St. Aidan’s.”

  “It was what they call High Church?”

  “Very High Church. As high as the Bishop would tolerate. This Mass of the Pre-Sanctified on Good Friday morning was very High Church stuff.”

  “Daring, would you call it?”

  “Well, if you think it daring to revive a ninth-century ceremony in 1951 in Toronto, which hasn’t what you might call strong medieval roots.”

  “What was it like? Very fancy?”

  “Fancy isn’t the word I’d choose. It gets its name from the fact that the bread and wine for the Communion are prepared and blessed the night before, and kept in a side chapel. It was something special for Good Friday, and at nine o’clock in the morning the full forces of St. Aidan’s were present: the gallery choir was there; with the famous Dr. DeCourcy Parry at the organ, and the chancel choir—they did the plainsong bits—with the notorious head of the chancel plainsong choir, Darcy Dwyer, wearing the
robes appropriate to his office—and the much-loved old Father Ninian Hobbes as celebrant, assisted by Father Charles Iredale, whom I knew well, and nearly two hundred of the faithful in the church—”

  “What kind of people? Who went to a place like that?”

  “All sorts. A typical St. Aidan’s group. Some obviously well-fixed, some obviously poor; all sorts of people, from white Anglo-Saxons to black people, because St. Aidan’s drew heavily on the black population of Toronto, many of whom at that time were employed as porters on the railways. Now and then some of them acted as servers at Mass; they and some of the congregation used to joke about Black Masses; that was the sort of joke St. Aidan’s people loved—a whiff of gunpowder amid the incense. There were nine nuns of the Order of St. John there; they had a convent and school nearby. Oh, it was a very close community at St. Aidan’s, and as it drew people from every part of Toronto, it had quite a wide influence. The diocesan authorities—”

  “Excuse me. The what?”

  “The Bishop, and the clergy who worked under him to administer the whole church district. St. Aidan’s was a thorn in the flesh because it carried such a strong hint of Rome with it—”

  “A hint of Rome? How do you mean?”

  “Ms. Barron, if I am to give you elementary lessons in Church history, we’ll never be finished. You know that the Anglican Church is a Protestant Church? Of course you do. But there is a branch of it that insists that it is a Catholic Church in every sense except that it does not acknowledge the sovereignty of the Bishop of Rome. Some people have rather fine-spun notions about its descent from the pre-Augustinian Celtic Church in Britain—”

  “Yes, I understand. I’m not stupid, you know. But I have to write for a lot of people who don’t know any of this stuff; and I’ve got to make it plain and interesting. So tell me how Rome would get into an Anglican church in Toronto?”

  “Usages, not very significant in themselves, but they mount up. Calling the parsons ‘Father,’ and calling the Communion ‘Mass’ and bowing and crossing yourself during service, and lots of incense and—dozens of things—”

  “Yes, yes; I get it now. But I’d like to get back to the moment when the old man died. Tell me exactly what happened.”

  “Everything seemed to be going splendidly. Because the bread and wine had been blessed and prepared the night before, they were brought to the altar in solemn procession after the Adoration of the Cross—some wonderful plainchant, for that. Lots of incense. Then Father Hobbes recited the pre-Communion prayers, took the wafer that had been laid out for him, held it up for everyone to see, put it in his mouth—looked odd, then dropped to the ground. There was the briefest possible pause, because I think Iredale supposed the old man was genuflecting. But why had he not done that before he took the Host? Forgetfulness of old age? But in an instant it was plain that he had fallen. Father Iredale and the deacons rushed to him and lifted him partly—but it was clear to me that the old man was already dead.”

  “So quickly?”

  “I would have put it at less than ten seconds.”

  “How did you know that he was dead?”

  “Long experience. In war, as a police surgeon—you get to know the look. Something has gone.”

  “How would you define that?”

  “Just in those words. The soul has gone.”

  “The soul?”

  “You seem surprised.”

  “I am. You, a doctor, talking about the soul.”

  “As you say.”

  “I’ve heard Dr. Roseveare, at the General, say he’s operated on over a thousand patients and he’s never yet met with anything inside them that he could identify as a soul.”

  “I know. I’ve heard him say it, too.”

  “But you wouldn’t say that?”

  “No. I wouldn’t say that.”

  “I suppose that’s why you were on hand that day when old Father Hobbes died, right at the foot of the altar.”

  “Partly that.”

  “Partly—?”

  “Let’s leave it at that.”

  “Okay. Now when can I come again?”

  “When do you have to complete your article?”

  “There’s no hurry. Several of us are working on a series: The Toronto That Used To Be. I’d like to see you a few more times, if that’s all right.”

  “Quite all right.”

  “But, just before I go, tell me—I’m trying to get the real story about this death, because there was some talk of a saint, later on, wasn’t there?”

  “Could we leave that for next time? I hear that a patient has arrived in my waiting-room.”

  As I ushered Ms. Barton out, the question nagged again: should I have taken the false teeth? Charlie Iredale was eager for me to sign a certificate of death then and there, but of course I don’t carry the proper form about with me, and as I had to return to my office to do that, I could very well have insisted on taking the false teeth, for some simple tests, to see if they gave any evidence of the cause of death. As it was, I did not insist, and when one of the deacons called for it I could have sent the certificate and the teeth over to the rectory that afternoon, certifying that the old man had died of cardiac arrest. As everybody does, one way or another.

  If I had any doubts, they soon vanished.

  (2)

  I shall have to watch my step with Ms. Esme Barron. Not that there is anything in the least dishonest about her, but she has the unresting curiosity of the really good journalist, and a technique of cross-examination that is worse than anything one usually meets with in the law courts. I have been an expert witness many times, especially in my police surgeon days, and I know that lawyers like to be subtle, even when they have little gift for it. But journalists like Esme are not subtle; they ask direct, intrusive, and disconcerting questions, and are quick to spot any evasion. They will stick to a point when you are eager to get away from it; they are implacable, and, if you do not answer a question, they will hint that you are furtive.

  In my way I am just as clever as Ms. Barron. I have much to conceal, and I shall do so. I shall give her other things to dig into, without going into all the trouble that arose after the death of Father Ninian Hobbes.

  Who cares now if an old priest dropped dead while celebrating Communion, so many years ago? The answer to that, I know very well, is that thousands of people will be interested if Ms. Barron can serve them up a hot and spicy dish. She is very keen on what she calls “the public’s right to know,” which means her right to blat anything she can uncover that is scandalous or prurient. But mine is a profession sworn to priestly secrecy.

  I think I knew about this series of articles on which she is engaged—The Toronto That Used To Be—before she did. It was an idea that came to her boss, and her boss is my godson, Conor Gilmartin. He is also her lover, or she is his; I never know quite which way the pussy jumps in such affairs. He puts the plums of the series in her way, because normally it might be expected that an article on St. Aidan’s Church and its environs might be done by the Advocate’s religious editor (ambiguous expression) Hugh McWearie, whom I know well, and who would do it much better. Certainly it was Hugh, when the three of us were talking about the series, who said that the parish of St. Aidan’s was, or had been, one of Toronto’s most interesting villages, and should be thoroughly explored and written up.

  It was one of Toronto’s better mayors who had started the “village” idea. The big city, he said, was of special interest in North America, because it was composed of a number of neighbourhoods, or “villages”—the Chinese, the Italian, the Portuguese, the Muslim, the Taiwanese, and many more, to say nothing of the Jews, whose Orthodox community was virtually unknown to most of us. All tended to live in identifiable sections, with their own shops and places of assembly, even in some cases their own newspapers, and within the communities there was a neighbourly concern for the safety of children, for religious observance, for the old, which did much to keep down the rate of violent crime. The mayor�
��s concept of Toronto was substantially, if not wholly, true. The Advocate wanted to write it up and promote it, and discuss how the villages came into being and how much of their character persisted among second- and third-generation immigrants.

  The parish of St. Aidan’s was interesting because it was perhaps the only remaining Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Celtic village, the dominant presence in which was its large and active church.

  Had there been some talk of a saint, Esme had asked. Indeed there had been, and if there was any revival of it, I wanted to do whatever I could to steer it in the right direction. That was something I could do for my poor old friend, Charlie Iredale, who had made a sacrifice greater in his terms than I could possibly conceive, to bring it about. But I should have to watch my step, because Esme was no fool.

  (3)

  “I suppose I ought to call you Uncle Jack now.”

  “Please don’t. My name is Jonathan, and I’ve never had a nickname. Doesn’t go with my character. So, Uncle Jon—if you must.”

  “No I mustn’t, if you don’t like it. I didn’t want to be familiar. But as I’m married to Gil, I thought Dr. Hullah seemed a bit formal.”

  “Don’t call me uncle anything. Call me Jon if you like, and I’ll call you Esme.”

  Much had happened in the rather short time since last Esme Barron sat in the patient’s chair in my consulting-room. Because I have a consulting-room, and not an “office” like so many of my colleagues; I’ll tell you why when the time comes. Esme and my godson Conor Gilmartin had been married, and married in a church, what’s more, which surprised me, because I thought Gil had grown away from all that. It was a quiet affair and the guests were few. Esme’s parents, who were an unremarkable couple from somewhere in Western Ontario, where I gathered they had a big market garden and greenhouse, looked a little out of place; she was round, like a barrel or a zero, and wore bifocals and grey stockings; he was small, seemed very fit as a gardener might well do, and wore his best suit, which looked indestructible and was of that grey material that suggests an old corrugated iron roof. Gil’s parents, Professors Brochwel and Nuala Gilmartin from Waverley University, were old friends of mine, and rather more than friends. Otherwise, nobody except Hugh McWearie, who acted as Gil’s best man, wearing his usual look of resigned regret (which was deceptive), and a young woman whose name I never caught, who “stood up” with Esme, who looked as if she did not need, and never would need, anybody to stand up for her except herself. But Esme made a pretty bride, for she was a handsome young woman, and it’s a poor bride who cannot call up a look on her wedding day. She did not wear a white dress. Sensible girl.