The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  As, for instance, the night we spent at the Coburg Social Parlours, where I was the victim.

  The talk about sin had gone on, in a desultory fashion, for a few nights extending over two or three weeks, because I could not take every night away from my studies and Herculean feats of memorization. Darcy had maintained that there was no form of sin that could not be found somewhere in Toronto. It was not that Toronto was especially sinful; simply that after a place achieves a certain population—Toronto was now approaching the million count—every variety of human deviation will appear in it. Demand creates supply.

  Jock’s notions of sin were rather gloomy and Dostoevskian; he did not think there could ever be any fun in it. The argument was a self-defeating one: if something was amusing, it couldn’t be sin. But Darcy spread a wider net. If something offended strongly against good taste, to say nothing of decency, it was sin.

  “You don’t think sin can make you laugh? Or rather, you think that if it makes you laugh it can’t be sin? But what is the sin against? Morality? Taste? And where do morality and taste cease to kiss and commingle? Are you challenging me to offer you an example?”

  The night the example was to be made manifest, Darcy had warned us to dress simply. Not in such a way, he said, as to identify ourselves as persons of—how could he put it?—persons who might be assumed to be of a superior caste. This was easy for me. Then, as now, a student doesn’t usually have to dress down; the problem is to get him to dress up. Jock was not distinguished in dress, though his hawk-like profile and the betraying monocle could not be disguised, unless we called Angus on the job as an experienced costumier and make-up man. But Darcy was determined that nobody should spot him as the merchant banker he was, and he wore an extraordinary yellow overcoat (which I truly believe must have come from Angus) and a black hat with a very wide brim, pulled down to conceal his face. He looked like a conspirator in a bad amateur play, but he thought his disguise impenetrable.

  “Only the owner knows me here,” he whispered, as we went through the dimly lit door, gloomy with coloured glass. “Leave everything to me.”

  The Coburg Social Parlours, when once we had passed the poky little foyer, were brightly lit and crowded with noisy people, all of whom were sitting at tables for four, on which were glasses of beer. It looked to me like an ordinary beer-parlour, but it had a platform at one end, and there was a sense of expectation in the air.

  A little man in shirtsleeves, apparently the proprietor, darted toward us as soon as we appeared.

  “God, I began to think you’d forgotten,” said he. “The crowd’s expecting a really big night. But you’ve brought him? Eh? Is this him?” and he looked at Jock.

  “No, that is my friend Dr. Strabismus, of Utrecht, who is travelling in Canada on a sociological expedition, and he wanted to see your place. Here is the judge. Young though he may look, he is the very man for the job. I present to you Dr. Jonathan Pyke, a man rapidly rising to the top of his profession as a physician, and the very person for the delicate task you are going to confront him with.”

  “Great!” said the little man, whose name did not seem to be worth mentioning, or was so well known that everybody ignored it. “An honour to meet you, Doc. An honour and a pleasure. Now let’s get on with it. The crowd’s getting anxious and the contestants are getting worried that they can’t keep up to scratch. So let’s not lose any time. Just come with me.”

  Before I could say a word I was seized by the arm and rushed to the front of the hall and up some steps onto the stage. There the little shirtsleeved man waved his arms for silence and, though the crowd may have been eager for what was to follow, it took some time to shut them up.

  “Ladeez and Gen’lemen,” shouted the little man. “Thank you for the patience with which you have waited during this unavoidable delay. But the wait has been worthwhile, I can assure you. Hunger is the best sauce, as they say. We have secured for tonight’s contest a judge who is, I venture to say without expectation of successful contradiction, the best-qualified person in Toronto, and I would go further, and say, in Canada. The name of Dr. Jackson Peake is a household word wherever the practice of medicine is known in the civilized world, because though he is young—and I venture to say all the ladies have already noticed how young he is—and all that implies—he is at the top of the ladder in his line, which is the, uh, the medical line. So, without further ado, as they say, let’s hear your welcome for Dr. Jackson Peake, who is to be judge of the Coburg’s Seventh Annual Bad Breath Contest!”

  I cannot avoid cliché. Clichés have become worn because they embody important truths. My senses swam. There’s the cliché; my senses swam. Over the rows of upturned faces, like so many pink footballs in the half light, I could see Darcy and Jock in the back row, apparently hugging themselves with glee. But I had no time for thought and no chance of escape. The little man in shirtsleeves was holding me firmly by the arm while going on.

  “We have this evening a large and I think uniquely gifted group of contestants. Two or three may not be in the best of health and you may think this gives them some unfair advantage in the matter of halitosis, but I am assured by reliable authorities at the Medical School in the University of Toronto, of which we are all so proud,”—he paused here for applause and as always when a skilled rhetorician does so, he got it, from an audience which couldn’t have cared beans for any medical school anywhere—“that it is not so. An able-bodied halitoser may very well outstrip—or should I say outstink (roars of laughter and some slapping of thighs) somebody who is in really bad shape. So everybody starts even, tonight.

  “Please observe that we have changed our platform arrangements from that of past years, so that you are able to observe the judge, as well as the contestants, as he sits in his seat of honour, taking his notes and making up his mind. As you observe, the contestant comes up the right-hand flight of steps, unseen by the judge whose view is cut off by these screens. The contestant kneels on this little stool here, in front of the screen in which the air-conductor is affixed. The air-conductor is, as you see, a simple megaphone, the large end of which is toward the contestant, and the sharp end directly in front of the judge, who thus gets full benefit of what each contestant has to offer. I will introduce each contestant by holding up a number, by which—and by which alone—Dr. Jason Peake will identify him or her. For in the Contest the ladies are at no disadvantage with the stronger sex. (Homeric mirth and a serious case of choking in Seat 3, Table 7.) There will be a brief pause between contestants, in order to permit the judge to make his notes and also to prepare himself psychologically and medically for the next contestant. And between contestants, the transmitter of the breath will be disinfected by a registered trained nurse with Listerine, so that there may be no build-up, or cumulative effect. And now, ladeez and gen’lemen, are you ready?”

  The audience was clamorously ready.

  “So okay, then. Blow it away!”

  I suppose everybody who has lived above the cabbage level has had these moments when divine, or at least supernatural, aid seems necessary, and one calls upon it with an urgency which is as much physical as mental. I had never had any experience of appearing in public except as an unnoticeable extra in The Piper, and here I stood, marked as some sort of infallible authority, before an audience with the highest expectations—the expectations that are rooted in ignorance. For I was a Man of Science, a Great Authority; and what I said was golden, unless I betrayed myself irretrievably—choked on my words, wet my pants, ran from the stage weeping—something in that order of disgrace. These calls for help from—from what?—are one of the many forms of prayer, and it was here, as judge in the Coburg Social Parlours Annual Bad Breath Contest, that I first experienced prayer as something other than what went on, ritually, in churches and meant nothing to me whatever. This was a kind of prayer that Charlie, with his Petition, Intercession, and Meditation, had said nothing about.

  My prayer was answered. I gained possession of myself. Determination
and daring flooded through me, as if I had had one of the miraculous injections that Dr. Romeyn spoke of as infallible in cases of shock. I would astonish my audience, and I would revenge myself on Dwyer, and rather less so on Jock, who were so pleased to have put me on the spot. I’d show ’em!

  The ordeal began. I knew nothing particularly about bad breath, except as something that was part of the personalities of people like Eddu, Doc Ogg, and Père Lartigue. Something to be avoided, not studied and particularized. Mervyn Rentoul had a bad breath—or perhaps in the light of later experience, I should say a baddish breath, and nothing to the Olympic Class breaths I was to encounter in the Social Parlours—and the catty rumour at the Players’ Guild was that it was his false teeth; leading ladies shrank from his caress. But here I was, at the end of the transmitter of Great Breaths.

  “Number One!” shouted the man in shirtsleeves, holding up a large card on which the numeral was displayed, perhaps for the information of the deaf. From my seat behind the screens I was not supposed to be able to see the contestants, but as they approached the steps to the platform I did so, and Number One was a gangling youth who had put on his best suit for this public appearance. There was some applause from partisans and well-wishers. He scraped the stool—they all scraped the stool—that was his seat of trial, pushed his head into the megaphone’s big end, and blew.

  Yes, a bad breath, right enough. But how was I to rank it? Give him five out of ten on the Hullah Halitosis Scale—invented by me at that moment—and rank the others accordingly? That is what I did. The contestant left the stage amid a spattering of applause, and a woman who was, I suppose, one of the waitresses in the beer-parlour, came forward, dressed in rough parody of a hospital nurse, and gave the megaphone a thorough wipe with Listerine.

  I forget most of the others. There were three or four whose personal puff was pestilential, and I awarded them eights and nines. It was a procession of, in all, seventeen men and women who had neglected teeth, disordered digestion, and, in one case, something I would have supposed to be scurvy, and as the contestant looked like a sailor from one of the lake boats, it just possibly might have been so. But the winner was unmistakable; she had the Limburger cheese hogo which my medical studies told me was associated only with seriously infected tonsils; pus, indeed. When, after I had pretended to do heavy deliberation, and casting up of figures, I told, the man in shirtsleeves of my decision, he was delighted. This candidate was obviously the favourite, and a lot of money was riding, or should I say floating, on her success.

  It was for me to make the announcement, and it was here, I think after all these years, that I euchred Dwyer and Jock. There had been seventeen contestants, avid for the Halitosis Crown, and by the time the puffing was completed, what with the ceremonial manner in which the man in shirtsleeves brought each one to the chair of trial, and the fuss that the phony nurse made in cleansing the megaphone, the platform reeked of Listerine, and I doubt if the Giant Blunderbore, after a heavy meal of human flesh, could have penetrated it with his dreadful breath. It was in this heady atmosphere that I rose to speak.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, “said I; “my first duty is to congratulate all the contestants on their good sportsmanship and their willingness to come forward in what is, I think you will agree, an especially personal battle. (Applause.) For a Battle it was, I assure you. No unworthy champions appeared before you, or submitted what they had to offer to my professional judgement. I salute them all, and I know you do, as well. But before I declare the winner, I ask for your indulgence while I make a few comments on the nature of the contest. On its place of origin, so to speak.” Quick, thy tablets, memory! Here it was that my unusually retentive memory bore me stiffly up, as I searched for words.

  “Bad breath has always drawn the respectful attention of medical men, as an indicator of general health, and sometimes as a clue to some specific ailment. But medical men have come, with the passing of time and newer diagnostic methods, to shun an encounter with a patient’s breath, because it may be offensive. Oh, shame! Shame on those who put a merely personal consideration of comfort ahead of true diagnostic practice. Shame on the physician who will not dare all for his patient’s good! Modern medicine has as its banner-bearer, in this question of sampling the breath, none other than the great Sir William Osler, perhaps the most notable physician of his day, which lasted until his death in 1919. Sir William Osler who, despite the honours so deservedly showered upon him abroad, the triumphs in the United States, and later in England, where he was honoured with a knighthood by His Majesty the King (brisk applause), began life and was proud to define himself to the end, as a Canadian. (Terrific applause.) It is upon the principles laid down by Sir William that I have acted tonight, giving of Canada’s best to—in the matter of bad breath—Canada’s finest. And at this point may I—I know you will excuse any appearance of presumption on my part—call upon you to show your appreciation of the organizer of this contest, Mr.—”

  Of course I did not know his name, but of course it was not necessary. The applause was tremendous and I had only to mumble something as the crowd cheered and some cried, “Good old Perse! Great work, boy!”

  My notions of public speaking were crude, founded as they were on a handful of addresses by political spellbinders who had passed through Sioux Lookout at election times. I had flattered everybody—the contestants, the organizer, and the audience. I had raised the addled head of patriotism. Now I must impress my hearers with my own intellectual splendour. How? The historical approach seemed best.

  “Bad breath is nothing new in the history of mankind. Evidence is scant, but I venture to say that when Mr. Caveman woke in the morning after a feast of raw dinosaur, Mrs. Caveman found his breath heavy; and urged him to chew a few sprigs of mint. (Laughter and wives nudge husbands.) Bad breath is not mentioned in many ancient documents, and we may assume that it was so common an occurrence in daily life that it was not thought worth recording. There are a few references in the Middle Ages—(a wife nudges her husband and says audibly, ‘Middle of what?’ He hisses in reply, ‘Olden times. Henry the Eighth and those guys.’)—and as I do not suppose many of you trouble your heads about those, I shall mention simply that the scribe Oleaginus Silo records that the Patriarch Scrofulus of Cappadocia was sadly afflicted in this respect, but that even his best friends would not tell him. His breath was thought to arise from a rotting soul. (This horseplay with which I had expected to rouse a laugh is received with placid silence. The drye mock is not for all audiences: sometimes it falls flat.) But now to return to Sir William Osler.

  “I shall not lecture you about Sir William’s definitions. Anyone who wishes to inform himself about them can easily take down his Osler from his shelves and do so. (This was laying it on with a trowel; I don’t suppose anybody in that audience owned more than six books, at an outside figure, nor was likely to have a shelf for them. But, as I say, I had heard some political speakers at Sioux Lookout, and I knew that no flattery is too gross for a general audience.) Osler’s descriptions of the fetor oris are truly classical, beginning with the simple bad breath of indigestion, with its associated catarrhal disturbances of the mouth, pharynx, and stomach. It is important to distinguish it from the characteristic odour of acute stomatitis, of which one of the principal causes is the excessive use of tobacco. We must keep an eye on this one, lest it be a forerunner of phigoid stomatitis, and that may quickly lead to pemphigus vegetans and that, as I need hardly tell an audience like this, leads straight to the graveyard.”

  (Not bad policy to alarm an audience. Turn pleasure to terror for a fraction of a minute, and you have enriched the satisfaction.)

  “This brings us, as I am sure you know—for many of you will be ahead of me, I am certain—to the distinctive breath of pyorrhoea alveolaris, the commonest form of foul breath but not for that reason to be scorned in such a contest as this. It can be a corker, I assure you, and as I am sure many of you already know. It must not be mistaken for the odour of deca
yed teeth which is quite another matter.

  “There follows the tonsillar infections, which can create an odour powerfully characteristic, because of the epithelial debris which accumulates in the tonsillar crypts. And finally we come to unmistakable diseases of the nose, larynx, bronchi, and lungs, and I am glad to assure you that no examples of these extreme symptoms have presented themselves tonight. No, I can assure you that all the contestants, in so far as I may judge from what I have been able to experience of them, are in good health. For bad breath is in no way incompatible with satisfactory general health, as daily experience so repeatedly makes plain.

  “And now, my friends, to the winner. (Rustle of anticipation.) You do not, I am sure, want a clinical description of the offering, which belongs to one of the rarer categories among those I have set before you, on Osler’s lines. Suffice it to say that the hogo—and I do not need to tell you that our English word comes from the French haut gout, for bad breath is a truly bilingual attribute as our politicians demonstrate every day (applause and whistles)—this hogo is one of the most remarkable I have ever experienced, and it is a scientific honour to have met with it. So, without further ado (audiences love being assured that there has been a great deal of “ado” on such occasions) I call upon the winner to come forward and receive the prize. Number Eleven!”

  Amid clapping, whoops and whistles and cries of glee from those who had backed this easy favourite, Number Eleven trotted forward. She might have been fifty, I suppose, and she showed the characteristic dullness of expression of the mouth-breather. I pressed upon her the envelope which, I was told, contained a twenty-dollar bill and a typewritten certificate, which I signed in attestation of her success. Signed as Jason Peake, M.D., F.R.C.P. And since there was no use leaving stones unturned, I added to these accreditations “Chevalier of the Order of Polonia Restituta.”