The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  Thus my task was done, and the audience had had all of me that it wanted. The people dissolved themselves into groups, some standing beers to unsuccessful candidates, some commiserating with them, some grouped around Mrs. Limburger Cheese, who was in high feather and who, if I may diagnose her retrospectively, had not many more years to enjoy her fame.

  The man in shirtsleeves seized me by the arm; he was the kind of man who cannot establish contact with someone unless he gets his hands on them. “Come on, Doc,” he said. “You done great. Great, boy. It was masterly to give it to a woman. They’re always beefin’ that the boys keep all the big stuff for themselves. Masterly! But I know what you need now. So come on.” And he rushed me into a cluttered back office, where be poured me a big dollop of pretty good brandy. “This clears the nose,” said he, and I drank it greedily. It was indeed a proper dwale.

  When I joined Dwyer and Jock later, they heaped praise upon me. Didn’t suppose I had it in me. Had turned up trumps. Was a prankster in their own league. My speech had been—well—Mephistophelean. And so forth. It was Dwyer who had the best news.

  “We’ve finally completed casting for Faust,” he said. “You, Pyke, are to understudy Wagner, and play the nice meaty little role of the Student in the scene where Mephistopheles assumes Faust’s doctoral robe. We’ll knock their eyes out, Pyke, my lad.”

  (11)

  Rehearsals for Faust took a nasty knock when Elaine Wollerton, the obvious casting for Margaret, stepped from a street-car onto an icy piece of pavement and sprained her ankle so badly that there was no chance that she could appear in the play. Consternation! Brouhaha! Run, run, and tell the King the sky is falling! On short notice—a week—the understudy, Nuala Conor, had to undertake the part. O bliss! she knew all her lines! O rapture, she had paid attention at rehearsals and knew all her moves! She would pull through, somehow, but of course she would not be La Wollerton.

  No indeed, She would be much better, though nobody admits that an understudy can really be better than a star. But Nuala Conor looked like a virgin, which Elaine—good generous soul that she was—did not and had never done so. Some girls are born ready-deflowered. Nuala Conor was Irish, newly come to Canada; small, but not one of those tedious china-doll girls; pretty in an Irish style, with fine black hair and dark blue eyes set in black lashes. Best of all, she had a really beautiful voice, with a very slight Irish intonation, but nothing of the Pat-and-Mike order. An ideal Margaret, to any but unyielding Wollertonians, and they were many. She was obviously intelligent, but the director treated her like a ninny, because she had never acted before and thus must by all rules of art be a ninny. It soon became obvious that Miss Conor “came across” admirably when on the stage, and little by little most of the prejudice against her quieted down.

  I fell in love with Nuala Conor, like a man falling from a precipice into an abyss which has no bottom. My feeling for Elaine Wollerton faded like the flowers cursed by Mephistopheles. I was not alone in my adoration. There were other pretenders to her charms. But by some miracle I seemed to be the first in the race, and was the one who walked her home after rehearsals.

  She was the first girl I met with a genuine sense of humour. Of course I had known many girls who laughed a lot, often when there was nothing to laugh at, and behind their girlish laughter there might always be seen the mirthless faces of their mothers, grim prophecies of what those girls would in time become. Elaine Wollerton was no mean hand at the dry mocke, but Nuala’s sense of humour was a quiet, contained but effervescent delight in the vast comedy of life. She did not laugh often, but she seemed on the brink of laughter a great part of the time, and her approach to the world—and to me, of course—was one of a charming, modest mockery. With her it was possible to talk seriously of truly serious matters, but always with a sense of laughter about to triumph. It was an enchantment I had never dreamed of, and I recall it still with tenderness. She was—and remains—the love of my life. I am sure that Freudians would have some disobliging thing to say about a man whose love becomes fixed at the age of twenty-four and never dwindles, however much time and circumstances may change it, for the rest of his life. But there are things Freudians don’t know and that are known only to those of us who have fed on honey-dew and drunk the milk of Paradise.

  Faust has long been the delight of scholars. However much Goethe protested that it was not a philosophical play, and that it contained no “message,” and was indeed the work of a poet who was, like Shakespeare, above such leaden concerns and sought only to write what his Muse brought to him, scholars cannot leave it alone. All the scholars in Toronto who could read German seemed to haunt our rehearsals, and sometimes their hissing disputes at the back of the theatre were so distracting that the director had to threaten to turn them out. Art is always in peril at universities, where there are so many people, young and old, who love art less than argument, and dote upon a text that provides the nutritious pemmican on which scholars love to chew.

  >> >> >> >> << << << <<

  “Mervyn, old chap,” calls the director from his table in the auditorium, “can you speed it up? It’s dragging.”

  “I’m working to get the thought across, old boy.”

  “Well, let the thought take care of itself. Just pep it up.”

  “As you wish, old man.” And sulky Mervyn gabbles.

  >> >> >> >> << << << <<

  “This is, of course, far from Goethe. So much has been cut! Have you observed?”

  “Oh, indeed. I know the work intimately. But what can you expect of theatre people.”

  “Of course the Great Geheimrat was himself a theatre person. Managed the Weimar court theatre for twenty years. Did you know?”

  “Certainly I know. What do you take me for? I took in Faust with my mother’s milk, if you will excuse the indelicacy. But he never mounted one of his own plays. He had to put on trash to amuse the Court. He resigned at last, rather than offer Le Chien de Montargis, ou La Forêt de Bondy.”

  “Sorry. You said—”

  “The Dog of Montargis—by Pixérécourt. You don’t know it? Well, it’s a dog-drama, and stars a trick dog who unmasks the villain. Goethe wouldn’t have it. Didn’t like dogs.”

  “Ah, I see Not my period, of course.”

  “My complaint is that this translation is so bad. And as you say, cut to buggery.”

  “Shhh! There are ladies over there!”

  >> >> >> >> << << << <<

  “This Conor kid, you know—I don’t like it. Do you suppose she’s sleeping with Forsyth?”

  “A girl? You’re out of your skull.”

  “I should have preferred Dulcy Maule. She’s thrown away in that miserable little part of Lieserl.”

  “You have a supporter in her husband, Old Decorum.”

  “Why do you call him that?”

  “Because he’s such a stick. Useful, of course, in Galsworthy. Lots of sticks there. But also because of Dulcy, don’t you see? Dulcy et Decorum. Get it?”

  “ ’Fraid not.”

  “Well, you remember Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori?”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s Horace. I should have thought everybody knew it. ‘Sweet and honourable it is to die for one’s country.’ ”

  “But what’s that got to do with the Maules?”

  “Christ, man! Dulcy and Decorum. Because her name’s Dulcy, and she’s so sweet, and he’s so decorous. Don’t you see?”

  “Not much of a joke, if you ask me.”

  “Well I certainly won’t ask you again.”

  >> >> >> >> << << << <<

  “You sympathize, I am sure, vith vot I am saying: they attempt the Walpurgisnacht and they entirely omit the Proktophantasmist, the soul of the whole ting. Gone! Utterly gone! Such an omission makes the whole scene—perhaps the whole play—sheer Travestie! I shall not attend. Not on the first night, anyway.”

  “It would be beyond their powers to cast the Proktophantasmist properly—suitably—with full comp
rehension.”

  “If I had been asked, I would myself have attempted it, however greatly modesty ah—what is it?—dazwischenkommen—what is the word I want?”

  “Interference? Intervened? Well, certainly a becoming modesty would have stood in your way. And you would have had to shave your beard.”

  “For Goethe even a beard is—how?—piffle.”

  “Sehr Umgansprachen.”

  >> >> >> >> << << << <<

  Somehow, Faust was presented, and was widely approved because it showed that the Players’ Guild was really a serious group, bent on bringing the finest in drama to the city of Toronto at a time when the travelling companies from England and the States were less frequent visitors, because of rising costs and the fierce competition of the movies. We were commended for the imagination of the settings, done with cut-outs representing Nuremberg, the Witch’s Kitchen, Margaret’s prison and whatever else was wanted, standing against curtains lighted with immense art and giving “impressions” rather than crude “representations.” The music, which the great Dr. DeCourcy Parry had undertaken, was praised. Poor Mervyn Rentoul was brushed aside by the critics as having been “wooden”; they did not know how hard it is not to be wooden when onstage with Darcy Dwyer, who won all the notices as Mephistopheles. Nuala Conor was acclaimed as a new find by the Players’ Guild, and ungallant suggestions were made that she was a pleasant change after some of the other actresses; critics have no chivalry. Quite unexpectedly, I was praised, though not in terms that thrilled me with joy, in one of the papers.

  I appeared in one scene only, in an identified role, early in the play. Faust had retired, leaving his scholar’s gown, which Mephistopheles puts on, and welcomes a Student who has come for advice about his studies. The student is the creepy-crawly figure, now familiar in a hundred schools of graduate studies; he defers to everything the Devil suggests. And before he departs, he asks the supposed great scholar to write something in his book. We had great irrelevant discussions as to what this book might be. Could it be an autograph album? Surely not. Probably a volume of Aristotle. Mephistopheles takes it, and the text suggests that he writes in it; it was here that Darcy had one of his best moments; he took the book and spat in it. No fake stage spit, either, but a substantial gob. And when the student takes it reverently, and reads it, it says: Eritis sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum. The Satanic spew, it appears, spells out the serpent’s words to Eve: Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. The student is enraptured, and takes his leave, a man beside himself with glee.

  What the Toronto Mail said was: “Mr. Jonathan Hullah presented a truly Gothic image as the Student, but it was not perhaps a happy inspiration on the part of the director to include his fine archaeological figure in so many of the succeeding crowd scenes.”

  Nuala never allowed me to forget my archaeological figure from that day forward. What did it mean? Tall? Bony? Big-nosed? I accepted it as meaning Medieval rather than Classical, and have insisted on that interpretation to this day. Certainly in the Walpurgisnacht Scene I did my level best in the chorus of male witches, stripped to the waist and painted green. I could not persuade Angus to let me put on the green myself; he liked rubbing my chest and I had not the heart to rebuff him, though I took care he went no further.

  The aftermath of Faust for me was a summons to the office of the Dean of Medicine. He was fatherly. Much was expected of me, it appeared. I had shown unusual promise and was now, in my fourth year, in a critical position in my studies. Too much time wasted—oh, very enjoyably and he himself liked to see a student with interests not strictly professional—but he advised me to forget about the Players’ Guild until my medical work was completed and my professional status secured. Though even then, said the Dean, a medical man cannot be too careful about how he appears to the public. There was about the theatre a want of seriousness, a duplicity almost. He was sure I understood and understood also his true concern for my future.

  I understood an order, even when it was enclosed in such puff pastry as this. Nose to the grindstone. Pass with honours and first in First Class, if you can manage it.

  Nuala was not so gently treated. Women were still uncommon in medical studies, and she was warned in a note that if her chief interests really lay in the theatre, she had better transfer to some other work that would better fit her for such a future.

  We compared notes, and cursed our elders and betters, and did as we were told.

  (12)

  We had become lovers in the fullest sense. The fullest sense, that is to say, that her life in a women’s residence and mine in a boardinghouse permitted. But love will find out a way, and our way meant that whenever we could afford it, which was not more often than every three or four weeks, we hired a room in the Ford Hotel for a Saturday afternoon, and it became a Bower of Bliss until we rose for our evening meal, eaten usually at Child’s, which was good and cheap. On very great occasions we went to Miss Millichamp’s on Bloor Street; she had a tender heart and I think we students received portions rather larger than the ordinary.

  Nuala’s father, I learned, was a lawyer in Cork, and the family seemed to be well-to-do. She wanted to study medicine, and her parents, with Catholic hearts a-quake, agreed that she might do so, and even study in North America rather than in Dublin or in England; she persuaded them that North America was advanced in medicine or at least in medical education, in a way that the homeland was not. But they had their condition: she might study in Canada, but not in the U.S.A., where a girl might more readily forget the precepts of her convent education. A scientific daughter! The Conors were half afraid and half elated. But, she confided to me, their Catholicism had been eroded by education and good fortune; they wanted her to remain firmly Catholic, as a protection of her virtue, but they themselves were not heart-and-soul children of the Church.

  I took her with me to services at St. Aidan’s and she declared that they were lovely, and far above the simplicities of Roman practice; she did not laugh, but there was an unmistakable quiver in her eyes—nothing so vulgar and Hollywood-Irish as a twinkle—when she said it. Did Father Hobbes really believe that the bread and wine at Communion became the real Blood and Body of Christ? In Ireland quite a few people took that with a grain of salt, though of course they never let on to the priest, or the uneducated people who had great solace from that belief. How lovely to encounter it here in Canada, and in a church that was not quite—well, not wholly—the true Church. Oh, she quite understood why lots of people didn’t want to be R.C.s, which meant swallowing the Pope, and it took a bloody strong gulp to do that, old darling that Pius XI was. Did I know that his birth-name was Achille Ratti, and that after he became Pontiff the Ratti family all suddenly blossomed into prosperity? Chicken farms, and things like that? A blessed miracle surely, that God should spread His bounty so lavishly on the kin of his Vicar on earth. The dry mocke.

  I think our love was all the better for being stretched out by our necessity to study hard to keep up with our work. To have all the time in the world to devote to love may be idyllic for a summer, but linked sweetness long drawn out is the greater luxury. And of course Nuala returned to Ireland every summer, for she dearly loved her parents and was determined to return to her homeland for the rest of her life, when she had obtained her medical degree. This was something we did not talk about. Time would tell. During these summer absences I longed for her, and wrote to her, and loved her more than ever, abstinence sharpening the appetite.

  Thus Toronto was for us a place sanctified by our love, but on my visits to Dwyer’s flat I learned of another side to the City of Churches. Playing Mephistopheles had greatly affected Darcy; he had always had a turn for playing the Devil, and now he developed it to a point where it sometimes became a bore.

  Sin was his great theme. What was it? How could it be identified in a world where opinions about it were so various? He took the theological line: sin was the purposeful disobedience to the known will of God. Aha, but how were you to know the will
of God?

  Jock had his own answer to that. He declared himself to be the Last Manichaean. He believed that the world was a battleground between the forces of Good and Evil, and that Evil was a palpable reality and not just a whim-wham in the mind. The Devil was a fit opponent for God. They argued about it, sometimes interestingly and sometimes boringly. It was Jock, the self-declared connoisseur of sins, who demanded practical demonstration, and in search of evidence he and Darcy traipsed the streets of Toronto, night after night, in search of sin.

  Jarvis Street was one of their accustomed beats; once a fashionable residential street, it was now the haunt of many of Toronto’s whores. Why, I wondered, whenever I went with these two researchers, do people so quickly get down to sex when they talk about sin, and why does it seem to be a thing of the darkness? My Freudian enthusiasms had a great deal to say about that, but I kept my mouth shut, because I wanted to see what these lunatics might uncover, in their nocturnal mouse-hunts.

  Sometimes Jock would engage a whore in conversation, questioning her about her trade. Of course the whore, thinking he was a customer, answered as well as she could, until she discovered that talk was all he wanted, and then she sometimes became abusive and we had to take to our heels. Her “friend,” she shouted, would take care of us! Sons of bitches! Wasters of a girl’s time! Nosy Parkers!

  Jock occasionally attempted to pay for his information, but as he had a meagre schoolmaster’s salary, he preferred payment in kind rather than in cash. Kind for him took the form of bags of humbugs, which he offered to his chosen informant, with an innocence that touched my heart.