The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  “Reduce everything to that,” said he, “and your world crumbles to dust.

  The abdication of Belief

  Makes the Behaviour small—

  Better an ignis fatuus

  Than no illume at all.”

  “Who said that?” I asked.

  “Emily Dickinson, if it matters. Pyke, you really ought to get over demanding authorities and attributions for everything. I suppose you pick that up at St. Helen’s.”

  “All right. If you’re happy with an ignis fatuus; it’s your affair. But I like—”

  “And stop arguing for victory all the time. Just listen, and let a few things sink in. Stop trying to win, and just let what’s said wash over you; and see if any of it lingers.”

  “But Charlie, here I am trying to knock some stuff into your head which is rooted in proven fact. If everybody thought as you do, algebra and geometry and physics and chemistry would—what was it you said—crumble into dust—”

  “I wish they would,” said he.

  “Look—we’re trying to get you into the university—any university—and if you want to be a priest that’s where you have to start. So do be a good fellow, and try to get the hang of this stuff.”

  Then we would drudge on. It was very unfair, because I was really sympathetic with Charlie’s ambition and sometimes he treated me as if I were an enemy, who was bullying him about crass trivialities. Sometimes, too, he would play the invalid’s dirty trick of suddenly looking ill and weary, as if I were pushing him too far for his strength. Brocky was no help. When he sat in on these lessons, if an argument broke out, he jumped from one side to the other, now dismissing Charlie’s view of the world as priestcraft and moonshine, and at other times treating me as a boneheaded pedant who loved elementary science and baby math—which God knows I didn’t.

  He would quote Yeats to abuse me.

  “A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind

  That never looked out of the eye of a saint

  Or out of a drunkard’s eye—”

  he would declaim, and assure me that never had poet summed up my contemptible class of intellect so cogently. “But if you’re bent on being a sawbones,” he said, “I suppose that’s the best sort of mind for you to have.”

  That always made me furious, and sometimes it seemed as though we might quarrel seriously.

  Could I be angry with him, however, when he told me so much, and with the eloquence which was his heritage and his gift, about the difficulties in his home?

  “It’s a split at the very centre,” he said. “In novels marriages are torn because the people can’t agree about sex. I don’t suppose sex ever was the top concern with my parents, Victorians as they are, at heart. It’s a question of loyalty—”

  “But surely,” said I, “they aren’t disloyal to one another? They seem to be so close. I’d have said they were tied together as tight as people can be.”

  “It’s a loyalty to a country, or an idea of civilization, or just to roots. It’s far beyond a personal thing, and yet it is deeply and inveterately personal. My mother, you see, is a real New World person. Old Loyalist stock, left the States at the time of the Revolution. Great-uncles killed defending Canada against the Yanks in 1812—the whole thing. She simply hasn’t any attachment to the Old World at all. What she knows of it, she mistrusts. But my father—he’s lived most of his life in this country, and he’s done some quite good things for the country as well as for himself—but there’s a part of him that’s never left Wales. Hen Wlad fy’Nhadau—old Land of my Fathers—it’s bred in the bone with him, you see, and she’s jealous of it. Funny, isn’t it, for a woman to be jealous not of another woman who has a hold on her husband, but of a country. But that’s it. She wants to possess him utterly, as she wants to possess me, and he won’t have it. You’ve seen what’s happening in the past two or three weeks. He’s packed his trunks and dashed off to the Old Land, explaining far too much that he must just look in on the house he has there, and the trees he’s planted there, and—you heard some of it. But it’s the pull of blood, if that isn’t too melodramatic a way of saying it. But why not be melodramatic, when you’re dealing with melodrama?”

  “And she simply won’t go with him?”

  “Can’t. Surely you see how it is, and you wanting to be a sawbones? No, no; he’s thrown me to her as a solatium. I’m the one who has to be nailed to one loyalty or the other. No chance of compromise. And she insists she couldn’t go. Not wouldn’t, but couldn’t. With her asthma, the sea-voyage would reduce her to nothing, and the climate of Wales would polish her off. That’s the story.”

  “I simply don’t believe it.”

  “Don’t you, Dr. Hullah? Well Doc, the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. Ever hear that?”

  “I thought as much. Pascal.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Liar! But remember what he said.”

  Sometimes Brocky seemed old enough to be my father—my grandfather. He laughed at me because I was so pleased with the character of Salterton, which had—at least in its oldest, central part—a colonial charm that spoke of the last of the eighteenth or the first of the nineteenth century. Handsome, sober old houses built of limestone by Scottish masons who never skimped an iota of their work; noble old elms; a domed cathedral built to remind early settlers of Home; Waverley University, which hinted of Sir Walter Scott, and had been built with a sobriety that told of a Presbyterian regard for learning; and apart from these mute testaments of a colonial past, people who seemed still to be touched with a colonial spirit. I had never lived abroad and so had never experienced anything like it. I assumed that it was indeed the Old World, and at least in part that land of romance for which Brocky’s father longed. I learned later that it was indeed, the Old World, but seen through a diminishing glass. Like so much in Canada, its spirit was Chekhovian, clothing in a present dubiously accepted, a regret for a past which had never been. All of this, when I spoke of it, made Brocky loud and derisive.

  “Do you think its Cranford? Do you think it’s a Jane Austen world? Do you think the commonest affairs of life have no place here? Come with me and I’ll show you something.”

  This was on a sunny afternoon in July. Brocky had one of his family’s cars, and he piled himself and Charlie in the front seat and me in the rumble, and sped to one of the exits of the town, where an old fort still guarded a bridge that crossed a river which at that point was joining Lake Ontario.

  The fort looked implacable, treeless and hot in the midsummer sun, and showed no sign of life except for a sentry in a box at the gate. The sentry, as we approached and parked across the road, was having a hissed altercation with a strange figure; sentries are not supposed to speak except to utter formal challenges, but this one was angry and, though he spoke low, we could hear him plainly.

  “Get t’hell outa here, you God-damned bitch! D’you hear me? Get out, or by Christ I’ll call the sergeant and put you under arrest. Now gwan—beat it!”

  But the figure did not move. When I got a good look at her I could see that she was a girl of not more than sixteen years of age, if so old. She was filthy, she was barefoot, and she wore a garment that would have been a smock if it were not so skimpy; but it was tight enough to show the very young woman’s figure below. Her hair was long and dirty; her face was smeared with what might have been the remains of a piece of bread and jam. A child of about two, dressed no better, clung to her very short skirt.

  “Aw c’mon, Jimmy. Give us a break will ya?” she said, and for another moment or two they argued, if argument may mean blasphemous abuse from the sentry, and coarse pleading from the girl.

  “Okay, you bastard,” she said at last; “but I got my livin’ to make and I got t’get what t’eat somehow. So if I can’t go in I’ll fuckin’ well stay outside. And yuh dursn’t touch me.”

  She retreated across the road, very near to our car, and in a surprising cry, which I could never have expected from so young a cr
eature, she set up her howl.

  “A hunk fer two bits!” she shrieked. “A hunk fer two bits! C’mon, yuh cheap buggers, yuh’ll never get a piece o’ tail cheaper. A hunk fer two bits!”

  She was near enough to us for me to touch her. I was frightened, as men often are by rowdy manifestations of female sexuality. Charlie was scarlet with embarrassment. But Brocky was in fits of laughter. He shouted at the girl—

  “The harlot’s cry from street to street

  Shall weave Old England’s winding sheet.”

  The girl rounded on him. “What are yuh yellin’ about, yuh little prick? Hey, d’yuh want a hunk? C’mon, show me what y’got if y’got anything in your pants. C’mon!”

  “Just quoting from our old friend Blake, Miss,” said Brocky. “Just showing my friends the sights of fragrant old Salterton. How’s trade? Thriving, I trust.”

  “You shut yer fuckin’ mouth,” said the girl. “Don’t give me any a that fancy shit. D’yuh want a hunk or don’t yuh?”

  By this time several soldiers, attracted by her hullabaloo, were standing at the barrack gate, laughing and urging the girl on. “Don’t you take any lip from Pretty-Boy, Maggie,” shouted one, and “Hey, Mag, yuh wear pants?” shouted another.

  Maggie rounded on them, with a screech of laughter, and hauled her skirt up to her waist. No, Mag did not wear pants. “A hunk fer two bits,” she screamed, and Brocky took the chance to drive away, leaving the scene to resolve itself as it might.

  “Now there, gentlemen, is something you haven’t seen in Salterton. Maggie is a fixture at the barrack gate in fine weather, and so we must suppose she gets enough together to keep herself and that child. Is it her child? God only knows. Underneath the quaintness you admire so much, Pyke, the old houghmagandy is hard at work, and the harlot’s cry is loud and clear.”

  “Poor soul,” said Charlie. “I ought to have thrown her a dollar.”

  “Not on your life, Charlie,” said Brocky. “She’d haunt you forevermore. A dollar! Why that’s the price of four kicks at the cat! You’d spoil the market! Do you suppose nobody in this town knows who you are? What would your mother say if Maggie came a-tapping at your chamber door, some night?”

  “The degradation!” said Charlie, shuddering.

  “Perhaps. Or possibly a short life and a merry one, for Maggie. Remember her when you read books in which beautiful, scented Balzacian courtesans or Dostoevsky harlot-saints appear. She’s the real thing, without disguise. A hunk for two bits, in fact.”

  (16)

  I learned so much from Brocky. His mind seemed to have taken shape so much earlier than mine. He was quicker-witted, and though I never felt at a serious disadvantage with him, he had seen corners of the world that were still unknown to me. The Funnies, for instance.

  I was rather inclined to despise the Funny Papers, as they were then called; but Brocky was an avid reader, never missing a day with Mutt and Jeff or Maggie and Jiggs, Barney Google and Andy Gump, He delighted in the Falstaffian braggings of Major Hoople, and occasionally spoke in what he imagined was the Major’s voice.

  “If you’re too fine for the funnies, you’re too fine for life,” he would say. “They show you what the people are thinking who never read a book, never hear a sermon, and forget to vote. Does that make them worthless? Not on your life. The funnies give you the dreams and the opinions of l’homme moyen sensuel, and if you want to be a politician, for instance, that’s the place to start. Understand the funnies, and you’ve made a good beginning on understanding mankind.”

  One day he took me to the headquarters of his father’s newspaper, and there, after a brief colloquy with a sub-editor, he showed me the page-sized pink cardboard forms, embossed with what would be the funnies, when the sheets had been through the stereotyping machine, which would cast them in printer’s metal.

  “Here they are, you see. A full week’s issue of hilarity and hard-bitten street philosophy on every one of these sheets. They are not called stereotypes for nothing; they embody what a majority of people believe, or accept as self-evident. They make every reader feel superior to what he can recognize as the stupidity or folly of somebody else. Whenever Mutt crowns Jeff with a spittoon, a million simple minds have a thrill of triumph. When Maggie hits Jiggs with the rolling-pin and a balloon reading ‘Ka-Pow!’ springs out of his head, a million painfully endured marriages are given a momentary discharge of tension. And it’s all funny, you see. That’s what you have to bear in mind. What might be tragedy if Sophocles got hold of it, is funny in the four or five daily frames of the funnies. While the funnies live, Aristophanes is never quite dead.”

  What does Brocky think today, I wonder, if he still looks at these repositories of basic folk belief and wisdom, conditioned as they are by our modern heaviness of spirit, and the eagle eyes of the seekers after political incorrectitude? I must ask him when next I see him. Has the Aristophanic freedom of our youth fled from the earth?

  I might have been overcrowed by Brocky’s worldly wisdom if I had not been, almost daily, a witness to what seemed to me to be a deep flaw in his character. Brocky was mad about a girl.

  We saw a lot of girls, during that summer in Salterton. We sailed in the fine harbour in dinghies and sometimes in more impressive craft, always with girls aboard. We went to informal and improvised parties at the homes of girls whose parents liked young people, or at least presented a reasonable appearance of so doing. Sometimes we rushed along the roads, going nowhere in particular, in cars where the crowding was so great that girls were compelled—simply compelled—to sit on boys’ laps, and sometimes in the darkness they found themselves being kissed, which they bore with whatever composure they could muster. For those were days that now seem impossibly innocent, when sexual approaches and sexual play were limited by fear of “going too far” with all the disgrace for the girl and the unwanted and oppressive, but inescapable, responsibilities for the boy that an illegitimate child—no no, never illegitimacy, for marriage would be demanded, for certain—would bring with it. There were marriages that were hasty, and babies from which the callous said it was necessary to brush rice off them, but such mishaps were rare. And in spite of strict limitations about what might be done—Eddu’s game of “stink-finger” was rare among the better children of Salterton—a good time, as the social notes so often declared, was had by all.

  Now and then there was a serious “affair,” and one such which I saw take root and blossom was that between Brocky, who was just nineteen, and Julia Opitz, who was then seventeen. Julia seemed to me to be a nice girl, quite pretty and with a neat figure that looked well in a bathing-suit, a soft laugh, and a line of fashionable chatter which included every cliché and catchword of the time. Because Brocky was so engrossed with her I took a careful look at her myself and concluded that she was a self-preservative girl who would, in another five years, be a self-possessed and cool young woman; Brocky was mad about her, but I could see that she was by no means overset by Brocky, although she was flattered by his attention, his conversation, and the look of stunned adoration which, from time to time, could be seen in his eyes when he looked at her.

  These things happen, of course. There were three or four “serious affairs” observable among the group we met almost daily in Salterton, at the Yacht Club, or wherever it might be, but I think that even the most serious of the couples were aware, some place deep in their consciousness, that this was not love for keeps, and that it was to be enjoyed while it lasted. This was not cynicism, but a quality hard to define except by the blunt old word gumption. But Brocky’s gumption was in eclipse.

  Looking back on that time, I blame his mother, though she, like Brocky, was working under influences she did not understand and could not control. Rhodri had packed his trunks and, making far too many excuses, had gone off to Wales and his country home there for ten weeks. Malvina had assured him that she understood why he had to go—had indeed urged him to go—but in the depths of her heart hated his going and felt it to be a
betrayal. So when her cherished son began to bring home a girl with whom he was plainly infatuated, her outraged motherhood declared war on that girl, and she and her lieutenant Minnie waged it implacably.

  Not obviously, of course. No, it was the armoury of sighs when Brocky went out for the evening, or controlled smiles and cool glances whenever Julia came to St. Helen’s, of “bad turns” if Brocky was late coming home at night, and slight delays in acceding when Brocky suggested that Julia might come to dinner before a movie. Malvina made it plain, without anything blatant being said or done, that she found Julia a burden, but a burden she would bear, of course, if Brocky insisted.

  Aunt Minnie had no such arts. She simply asked Julia if she could sew on a button, at need, and wondered aloud if she were not chilly in the scanty summer frocks she wore. And Minnie glared. She smiled as she glared, but her eyes glared, and sometimes when Julia was slangy or unsuitably vivacious (in Aunt Minnie’s terms), she would turn her head aside and murmur almost inaudibly, “Oh, Lordy!”

  Brocky missed none of this. Indeed, he would have had to have the insensitivity of a rhinoceros to miss any of it, and he had the thin skin of a lover. It drove him to seek in Julia what he could not find in the overwhelming femininity of his mother, and his antagonism to Minnie—who often managed to have one of her “spells” at the table when Julia was present—became venomous.

  I now see what a very old drama this is, but it was new to me then and it made me uncomfortable, because it seemed to me to show up my friend as an ass.