The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  So I was to be the reader. I agreed readily because I longed to see an operation.

  The following morning Charlie ate no breakfast, as he had been bidden by his doctors, but I ate with a good appetite. We were early, because Charlie had to be at the hospital before eight o’clock. We walked together, in the morning sunlight, across the university campus, to the hospital, and mounted its front steps (for it was a building erected in the days when the number of front steps was an assurance of importance) and were met at the door by the lesser surgeon, who put Charlie in the charge of a nurse who hurried him away to be prepared for what was to follow.

  “You’re the friend, aren’t you?” said the surgeon. “Neither of his parents here? Aha. It’s very good of you to stick with him.”

  “Well,” said I, not anxious to pose as a noble creature, “I’m very interested’ in medicine, you see. I’m hoping to be a doctor myself.”

  “So?” said the surgeon; “I understand you’re going to help us. A novel sort of anaesthetist. Ha, ha. It will be longish, and it will be painful, but I know it will help him to have you near.”

  And so it was. I enjoyed “scrubbing up” and putting on a gown with the great men. At last the time came to go to the operating-room, and I was cautioned to sit behind Charlie’s head on a high stool. Reader though I was I would get a good view.

  Charlie was wheeled in on a table, looking thinner and more ill than I had ever seen him, but there was about him an air of resolution. I knew that he had been given some cocaine, but it had to be used very moderately, in these circumstances. I knew that as soon as blood began to flow, the effect of the cocaine would be greatly lessened. Charlie knew it, too. When the surgeon—not the junior but the top man, who was to do the work—whispered to me, “Ready?” I set out on the wonder tales of Saints Peter and Paul. My voice was strong and I read well. The head nurse handed the chief surgeon, a Dr. Hetherington, an instrument of some kind, and I saw Charlie’s right hand move under his sheet; I knew he was crossing himself, and in that moment I understood what this meant to him. It was martyrdom. He would offer up his suffering to the glory of God, and he trusted in God to see him through it, or perhaps even to receive him, if that were not possible. I was sure the doctors had no doubts about the outcome, but doctors do not always know what is going on in the mind of a patient, and there can be great fear of death when experiencing something which does not, in truth, bring death close. I know that, after long years of practice, when understanding the patient has been my principal concern. The relationship of the patient to Death is not by any means the same thing as the medical probability of recovery.

  The operation was long, and as I read I could not always keep my eyes from the spectacle in front of me. The head nurse cast a glance at me from time to time to see how I was holding up, but I stayed the course. If Charlie could do that, surely I, as a spectator and unconventional assistant, could do no less. Simply put, they thrust probes up Charlie’s nostrils and cut holes sideways into the impacted sinuses. There should have been natural holes, but they had been clogged, or perhaps had grown together. I could hear, in the silence of the operating-room, the grinding as the bone was fretted away. It was like rats gnawing in a wainscot. I admired the calm and assurance of the surgeon, and the efficiency with which the head nurse directed everything apart from him in the room. My concern for Charlie was intense, but I kept my breakfast down, and what I felt for him was far beyond admiration. This, I thought, must be like what those saints of his endured, in one grotesque form or another, and his resolution was saintly.

  I read as eloquently as I could. The circumstances made any colloquialism impossible; this called for the high style.

  My only breach of operating-room etiquette was a loud sneeze, which I was able to quench with a handkerchief, and, of course, the mask I wore over my nose—not my mouth—was helpful. If I had sneezed into the room I think the head nurse might have murdered me, out of hand.

  I do not know quite when it was—perhaps two-thirds of the way through the operation—Dr. Hetherington signalled to me to be silent, putting a rubber-gloved finger to his lips. I thought the reading must be too much for Charlie, and closed the book. The Victorian volume looked shabbier than before, because the chief nurse had insisted on spraying it with some sort of disinfectant and, though not sodden, it was damp.

  At last it was over, and Charlie was wheeled away. The chief surgeon turned to me. “Sorry to cut you off,” he said, “but you cannot believe how distracting your reading was. I found my mind wandering to the story, and that wouldn’t do, would it? You held up remarkably,” he continued; “I hear you intend to join us? Good luck to you.”

  In that moment I think I grew a foot. Spiritually, that is to say, for I was already six feet tall and showed no sign of stopping just yet. But I felt I had been welcomed into the profession which was to be mine.

  (14)

  “Where was Brocky all this time?” Esme spoke sharply. “I thought he lived in Salterton, too. Did he leave the whole care of Charlie to you?”

  I was somewhat surprised to hear her speak of her father-in-law in this accusatory manner.

  “Not at all. He came to see Charlie often, and his mother sent Charlie fruit and flowers. During the time Charlie was in hospital—people stayed a lot longer in those days than they do now—I was often asked to Brocky’s home. We spent a lot of time together.”

  How odd it was, too. The contrast between Brocky’s home and Charlie’s astonished me, and astonishes me still. It also taught me a lesson about being a doctor: you can’t really form an opinion about somebody until you have seen the place where they live.

  It was a matter of taste, I suppose. The Iredales, or at least Charlie’s mother, had unfailing Good Taste, in the sense that anything that could be reduced to a minimum in colour or design was so reduced; her walls were “off-white” with here and there a daring touch of a silvery hue; her upholstery attracted no attention, but was of wonderful materials; all the appointments of the table were so perfect you never noticed them; there were always fresh flowers in the rooms, but not what Mrs. Iredale would have laughed at as “cottage flowers,” because every bloom was so well bred that it “knew its place” and was almost unnoticeable. The pictures on the walls were competent amateur water-colours; Mrs. Iredale had once “painted” but had not “kept it up.” Charlie told me that his father said that you ought to be in the presence of a man for at least ten minutes before you noticed that he was impeccably dressed, and this principle seemed to assert itself in the house—everything was in such perfect taste that it was almost invisible.

  Not so with the Gilmartins. Colour leapt up from the Oriental carpets on the floors, shouting a greeting to the walls, one or two of which were covered in red damask. Chandeliers that did not jingle and tinkle with crystal, glowed richly with ormolu, or the latten of the Low Countries. Anything that could be polished gleamed and glistened; everything that could carry ornament was loaded with it. It was plain that the Gilmartins loved “antiques” and worked on the principle that anything that was good of its kind went splendidly with anything else that was good of its kind, let it be what it might. With a result which was rich and wondrous, or The Old Curiosity Shop, according to how you responded to Brocky’s parents. I liked them very much. There were lots of pictures, of every possible period and school, and they all rejoiced in big gold frames. Several were huge things of Welsh mountains by a painter named Leader. Professor Iredale was a learned man—professionally a learned man—but all the books in his house were confined to his study, except for an occasional novel, in vogue at the moment, which might be artfully in view in the drawing-room. But the Gilmartins had books all over the place, and some were shiny and new and others were scruffy and old; some were superbly bound in leather but next to them might be a bundle of tatty cheap reprints; they subscribed to more magazines than I had ever seen before in one place and there were newspapers everywhere, because publishing newspapers was the way in wh
ich Mr. Gilmartin—he was not yet Senator Gilmartin—had gained his fortune. The house shouted with exuberance, and I suppose a great epicure in decoration like Mrs. Iredale would have laughed that it did not “hang together.” But the Gilmartins wouldn’t have cared if they had known; I don’t think they had any notion of what “hanging together” might mean. To them stuff was stuff, and the more of it, and the richer the quality, and if possible the older, the better. They rejoiced in profusion.

  The house was called St. Helen’s, and it was on the waterfront. It was one of the oldest houses in the city and it was old in the sense that a Canadian house may be old; I suppose it was built during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. It was spacious, and friendly, and had all too plainly been built in a day when servants were many. But the Gilmartins did not seem to care; I don’t think the conception of “convenience” ever entered their heads, and with an indoor staff of a houseman, an upstairs maid, a cook, and something called “a rough girl” they got along splendidly. There were two men in the garden, which was as uproarious and I suppose as tasteless as the house itself, but it was the delight of Brocky’s mother’s heart.

  She was an invalid. This was immediately made plain and like every well-to-do invalid she had a slave. The slave was her sister, Aunt Minnie, and one quickly sensed that Minnie was not quite like other people. I soon learned from Brocky that she had petit mal; that, although she did not positively have “fits,” she had frequent “spells,” when for a few seconds she was absent in spirit. “Away with the fairies,” was the way Brocky put it. As for the invalidism of Mrs. Gilmartin it was a complexity of ailments, of which asthma was the foremost, and a number of others, not unconnected with habitual overeating, followed after. But her invalidism did not limit her zest for conversation, gossip, and judgements shrewd and sharp—and it must be said, witty—upon people and circumstances.

  They all ate enormously, talked at once and often with their mouths full, and seemed to draw sustenance from the spoken word. Much about Brocky became clear during a meal with his family. Laughter, derision, irony, and every aspect of rhetoric were native to them; without, I think, being aware of it, they regarded language as the great unfailing plaything, and the play was unceasing.

  Their very silences were rhetorical. I ate several dinners at St. Helen’s and I cannot say with accuracy how often a silence fell over the table which was almost as though the Gilmartin family had been struck dumb, or had been silenced by some painful recollection or recognition. No, I cannot recall how often, but certainly it was often enough to impress me as a thing that happened often, and was to be dreaded. Their emotional variation was as extravagant as their taste in household furnishing and could drop from hilarity to a heavy silence without any apparent signal or reason. When it happened I kept quiet; this was a meaningful family silence and no attempt on the part of a guest to bridge the gap in conversation would have been tactful, or indeed thinkable.

  Brocky spoke about it once when we had retired to his room upstairs after a dinner where one of these paralysing silences had fallen.

  “You understand that this isn’t a happy household,” said he. “My parents simply don’t get along, though they try especially when there’s a stranger present—and every now and then the conversational steam runs out.”

  I didn’t understand about “not getting along.” I had no experience of family life except in my own home, where I don’t imagine it ever entered the heads of my parents to consider whether they “got along” or not. They were married, and that was it. If they had anything to say, they said it, and if they had not, they did not find silence disquieting. Most decidedly they did not regard talk as an art-form, or an entertainment, or indeed anything except the common drudge that carried meaning. I suppose they were boring, but I do not think the idea of boredom had meaning for them, either. I said something of this to Brocky.

  “You don’t surprise me,” he said; “when you first turned up at Colborne you hardly seemed to have a tongue in your head. But I sniffed you for a talker. You just needed to be uncorked, and I set to work to uncork you.”

  If Brocky had a fault, as a friend, it was just the tiniest assumption that he had created me out of some unlikely assemblage of oddments, as the young Frankenstein had created his Monster. I said so.

  “Not a bit of it,” he said; “keep your shirt on. No, no; I was, in so far as I was anything, the Pygmalion who released you, alive and talking, from the marble block—or I suppose I should say the Canadian granite of Sioux Lookout.

  “What was that Monster’s name? Was it Erik? I must look it up.” And look it up he did. The Monster proved not to have a name. Looking things up was the family habit. Brocky’s father—his name was Rhodri, and his wife called him Rod—told me that he was a self-educated man, and he didn’t pretend that he had made an especially fine job of it, but at least he had persisted from boyhood in looking things up.

  “For instance,” he said, “you have an unusual surname. Hullah. Now where does that come from? You don’t know? But it must come from somewhere, and if we knew we might find out a lot of interesting things about you. Brochwel, go and look in that dictionary of surnames, and see what you can find out about Hullah.”

  So Brocky had to leave the table, and Aunt Minnie put a cover over his plate, to keep his dinner warm. He was gone for about ten minutes.

  “Nothing about Hullah in the surname book,” he said, “but there’s a HuIlah in the Dictionary of National Biography. Here it is: John Pyke Hullah, born 1812—died 1884; composer and musical educator. He invented a system of reading music without notes—a system that was supplanted by Curwen’s Tonic Sol Fa—”

  “Oh, the Tonic Sol Fa!” said Mrs. Gilmartin. “Do you remember it, Min?”

  “I certainly do,” said Aunt Minnie, “and I never understood why we had to learn it. I always found it harder than reading ordinary music—”

  “Go on, Brochwel,” said Rhodri. “What about the family? What about the name?”

  “The name is supposed to be Huguenot,” said Brocky.

  “Aha! then there we have it,” said Rhodri. “Huguenot. There’s an ancestor for you, and a bit of family background.”

  “But why do you think I’m related to this man?” said I.

  “Oh, sure to be! Very uncommon name. Have you ever heard of anybody else named Hullah? Don’t miss a chance to acquire an ancestor. I wish I had one—even one.”

  “You’ve got lots of them, Dad,” said Brocky. “Their pictures are all over the house. Oh, I know you bought them all, here and there, but you can say what Major-General Stanley says in The Pirates of Penzance: ‘I don’t know whose ancestors they were, but I know whose ancestors they are!’ Possession is everything.”

  “That’s not the same as an unusual name,” said Rhodri. “I’d hang on to John Pyke if I were you.”

  “I remember Hullah, now,” said Mrs. Gilmartin. “He wrote ‘Three Fishers.’ We used to sing it, Min.”

  Then, to my astonishment, these two elderly women—they seemed elderly to me—began to sing, charmingly and musically, without a hint of asthma or age in voices that spoke of membership in really good choirs—

  Three fishers went sailing

  Out into the West;

  Out into the West

  As the sun went down—

  On they went, to the refrain, with its insistent lap-lap-lapping sound, like gentle waves on the side of a skiff—

  For men must work,

  And women must weep,

  Where there’s little to earn,

  And many to keep;

  And the harbour bar is moaning.

  Very Gilmartin, this. Profoundly un-lredale. Unthinkable to the Hullahs of Sioux Lookout. Singing at the table! Singing gently and movingly. A worse solecism, surely, than putting one’s elbows on the table.

  “I haven’t heard that in donkey’s years,” said Rhodri. He wiped his eyes. “Thanks, Vina: thanks, Minnie. Thanks very much.”

 
; Minnie giggled and flushed. She giggled and flushed at everything. Mrs. Gilmartin smiled, and suddenly I saw what may have drawn her and her husband together; they had been united by music, that siren who makes so many bad matches.

  “I think I’ll have to call you Pyke,” said Brocky. “We can’t go on forever calling each other Hullah and Gilmartin, as if we were still at school. Pyke. It’s a very good name for you.”

  And it is true that to my few intimates I have been Pyke ever since.

  (15)

  Almost unnoticed, the summer wore away and, as so often with the summers of youth, I do not remember a day of bad weather. I lingered in the courtly old city of Salterton, made welcome, in their very different ways, by the Iredales and the Gilmartins. I came to know something of Charlie’s father, who seemed to me to be a great eccentric, for he confided to me that when he travelled, even overnight, the first thing he packed was Liddell and Scott’s great Greek Lexicon, in case he should feel the need to check the derivation of a word. This humanized him, in my eyes. The Greek and Roman classics were far more than stuff he taught to undergraduates and the occasional graduate who wanted to rise in the scholarly world; they were a passion, and I have always loved a man with a passion. Without the classics could he have survived his wife’s impeccable taste? As it was, I think he regarded Taste platonically, as something related only to the world of sense and having no reality in the world of thought.

  I stayed on because I was supposed to be coaching Charlie for the supplemental examinations he would attempt in the autumn. If he were successful then in improving his failure marks to pass marks, the universities would not be closed to him. We pegged away at chemistry and physics and algebra and geometry in what were, God knows, their barest and simplest elements, and with great difficulty I managed to get a few things into his head. But teaching in the garden, in the sunlight, was not the best atmosphere for that kind of drudgery and we wasted too many hours in talk, in which Charlie gave me some elementary instruction in theology, which he declared was the Queen of Sciences. He would not attach any importance to my protests against what seemed to me its kangaroo-like jumps in logic and its substitution of moving rhetoric for reason. But he did succeed in convincing me that it was another world of thought, and even in implanting some painful doubts in my mind about the logic and reason which I had assumed were the only approaches to important matters.