The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  “A merry heart doeth good like medicine,” said I.

  “Bible, isn’t it? Never been put better,” said the surgeon.

  “But a broken spirit drieth the bones,” said I, concluding the quotation.

  “I think I want a cognac, to top off,” said the surgeon. “It’ll be my last drop for twenty-four hours. A very full schedule tomorrow. Will you fellows join me? Steward!”

  They were not callous, or devious. Merely experienced in the profession which was ruled, when all the cards were down, by Fate, against which there is no armour.

  (18)

  It was late in the day when Chips cornered me. “I’ve heard all the stuff from the doctors at the hospital,” she said; “now I want you to tell me what you know.”

  “What can I add to what they’ve told you? They are the men on the case. I haven’t examined her, nor was I at the operation.”

  “Yes, but you know her. They don’t.”

  “I don’t know her, Chips. She didn’t want to come to me and so, speaking as a physician, I really don’t know her.”

  “Jon, don’t be tactful and professional with me. You’d have spotted it, wouldn’t you?”

  “Well, if I’m not to be tactful or professional—yes, I’m pretty certain I would. Quite a while ago.”

  “I couldn’t get her to go near Dumoulin.”

  “It was her choice. I expect she knew.”

  “Of course she knew. She isn’t a fool. I suppose it was a kind of suicide bid. But Jon—she’s not going to die is she?”

  “Doctors are like fortune-tellers, Chips. That’s the one question they absolutely refuse to answer.”

  “There’s hope, isn’t there? Good hope?”

  “You have the hope, Chips. Has she? Has she the wish?”

  (19)

  Esme reasserts herself. Anyone reading this Case Book might well become confused in its time-scheme, because, while it tells a few things about my life from its beginning, I really did not begin to write them, down until rather less than four years ago when Miss Esme Barton of the Colonial Advocate came to pump me about the history of the district of Toronto in which I live, and in which the two principal places, apart from domestic dwellings and a few small businesses and shops, are St. Aidan’s Church (once famous for its music) and my clinic (still famous in a quiet way for somewhat uncommon medical practice). For me, a lifetime: for Esme, quite a short time, made vivid by her marriage to my godson Conor Gilmartin, and his murder barely a year later, under circumstances that have never been resolved, and latest of all, by the birth of her daughter, posthumous child of Gil, to my astonishment christened in St. Aidan’s with the names Marion (given by her godmother, a broadcaster friend of Esme) and Olwen (given by me as godfather, who thought Nuala’s granddaughter should have a good Celtic name to sustain her through life). To my surprise and pleasure, it was Olwen that Esme chose to use when speaking of, and to, the baby—though she showed an unhappy tendency to shorten it to Ollie, in spite of my protests that this brought to mind not a stately princess, but the fat man in the Laurel and Hardy comedy team.

  However, this is not a history, but a casual notebook, and as I am not writing it for other eyes—not yet, at least—enquirers will have to make of it what they can.

  So, Esme reasserts herself. Recovered from widowhood, and motherhood, with surprising resilience, she is back on the job, pursuing the “story” which she believes this village-like section of Toronto contains.

  She is determined to talk to Charlie, because McWearie has told her about his return, though not the circumstances surrounding it; she knows only that he is staying for a time with me, as his health is frail. Clever woman, she does not try to corner him in my clinic, but asks him to dinner, with me and McWearie as the other guests.

  It was a very good affair. Olwen was in a nursery—what used to be Gil’s study—and we were not called upon to admire her. Esme must be doing very well, to afford the luxury of even an eight-hour-a-day nurse, and occasional “sitters.”

  “What a splendid cook you are, Esme,” says McWearie, when we have come almost to the end of the meal. It was excellent, and cleverly suited to the appetite of a man like Charlie, who was still unaccustomed to civilized food.

  We began with a shrimp salad, and the principal dish was a fine cheese soufflé; fruit followed. The wine was a decent Chardonnay and there was cognac with the coffee.

  “Thanks, Hugh,” said Esme. “Funny about cooking. Surely the most perishable of the arts. When I die, write on my tombstone, ‘Here lies one whose name was written in béchamel sauce.’ ”

  In treating alcoholics I have never denied them drink, but have imposed gentle restrictions on how much they may have. Charlie had been getting an appropriate ration at my clinic—a couple of drinks a day—so he had never suffered the agony of withdrawal. I thought that on this occasion—the first time he had met with anything more festive than a Parlour Night at the McGruders’ for many years—the Chardonnay and one cognac would do no harm.

  Nor did it. He talked easily and amusingly with Esme, and I remembered that it was just this charming ease with women that had always been his defence against them. How flirtatious he had been with Emily because he knew that under all the pretty speeches and easy familiarities, his priesthood and her bondage to Chips imposed a barrier which would never be seriously attacked. They had even joked about marriage, when oxen and wainropes would never have brought them to the altar. And so it was with Esme. Indeed, I envied Charlie his wonderful way with women. It was the best possible way of keeping them at a distance, and in the course of my professional life I have now and then had trouble with wistful female patients who would not keep matters on a professional footing.

  She wanted to know about St. Aidan’s in its great days and he was ready to talk. Talked of the splendid ritual so precisely and even elegantly carried out; of some of the minute details of church propriety—candles always lighted with a cigarette lighter because tradition called for flint and steel, rather than a match, for instance; of the scrupulosity about vestments; and of course about the glorious music controlled by DeCourcy Parry and to a lesser degree by Darcy Dwyer; of the crowds at Midnight Mass at Christmas, and at the Tenebrae services at Easter. There was a spirit at St. Aidan’s, he said, that could not be paralleled anywhere else in the city.

  All of which Esme took in quietly and surely; she was of that blessed class of journalists who do not rely on a tape-recorder, but on a first-rate memory which absorbs and edits as it listens.

  “But wasn’t there something about a saint?” she said.

  “Where did you hear anything about a saint?” said Charlie, humorously, as if to repress a too impressionable child.

  “From a Mr. Russell, who runs a little printing business near the church.”

  “Oh yes, Russell. A church warden at one time. Rather an opinionated fellow, as I recall. So he thought he remembered a saint, did he?”

  “Remembered him very well. A Father Hobbes, who died right in the church. During a service. Russell says Father Hobbes was enormously respected—even loved—by the people.”

  “Quite true. A very good man.”

  “But the saint bit. Wasn’t there a miracle or something?”

  “I believe there was some foolish talk.”

  “A woman suddenly cured?”

  “There are always hysterical people undergoing extraordinary cures. Dr. Hullah can tell you. Nothing happened in the church, or was associated with the church. And you can be sure if there had been anything miraculous, the Church would have investigated it and dealt with it rigorously—as of course it must when extraordinary things happen.”

  Nothing happened? Could I believe my ears? This was rewriting history indeed! Charlie certainly could not have forgotten his exhortations and assertions about the sainthood of Ninian Hobbes. He could not have wiped out all memory of that great load of marble—marble that in the end I had to pay for—which was to form the shrine of the saint. What o
f those gatherings at Father Hobbes’ grave? What about the seven days’ wonder of Prudence Vizard’s miraculous cure? Of course he was covering up. Was he ashamed? Was he trying to blot out all recollection of his terrible row with Allchin, which had resulted in his banishment? What was he saying now?

  “A tempest in a teapot.” That was what he was saying to Esme, with a lightly dismissive laugh. As for Esme, I don’t think she believed him. She had experience of people covering up inconvenient facts when talking to the press. But she was tactful. She did not turn our little dinner-party into an interview. The conversation passed on to less sensitive things.

  Charlie seemed immensely refreshed by the first social occasion he had taken part in for so many years. His colour was high. He wore his new suit and Colborne Old Boys’ tie with an almost dandified air. The clothes I had contrived for him were not in clerical style, and as a layman he appeared almost dashing. Christofferson’s massages and baths had done him a world of good. When the time came for us to leave, he whisked into his overcoat and dashed away before me and McWearie, crying that he would find us a taxi.

  But when we went into the road, he was nowhere to be seen, and after some searching I had to go home without him.

  Am I of a suspicious nature? Indeed I am. It is an offshoot of my developed intuition. As soon as I reached my quarters I looked in the drawer of my desk where there had been another cheque from Brocky—a cheque for fifteen hundred dollars which (as I had told him that Charlie resented having cheques made out to me as, so to speak, his guardian) had been made out to Charlie himself. It had been my intention to have him endorse it, and then to cash it and keep the money, for use on his behalf.

  So Charlie was at large with fifteen hundred dollars. I knew what would happen.

  It did. After two days I called the police and asked them to keep an eye out for Charlie and bring him back to me when they found him. But ten days passed and they brought him back, in an ambulance, dishevelled and unshaven and still in the toils of a bender of heroic proportion.

  He was a relapsed alcoholic. The modest ration I had allowed him kept him stable and open to treatment but a dinner-party and agreeable female society had been too much for him and off he had gone, with plenty of money and a sharpened appetite, to gratify an overwhelming craving. The police reported that he had not been a rowdy drunk; he did not offer to treat everybody in the bars he visited; indeed he had husbanded his money carefully for his own gratification. He had not become pugnacious or tearful, and thus he had not attracted much attention. He had kept pretty well on his feet, and thus did not warn barmen that he was as drunk as he was. He had even bought a bottle of vitamin pills, eating them in the belief that they were enough to make up for the meals on which he did not want to spend his money. A crafty boozer, he had kept his celebration entirely as a personal matter, until at last he caused a commotion by seeming to die in a bar. But he was not dead, though when I had examined him with care I knew that his days would not be long.

  In his ten days of freedom he had contrived to offer a massive alcoholic insult to his whole body, and he had not the resilience to overcome it. So I settled down to wait for Charlie to die.

  (20)

  Note for ANAT.: What do people die of, in fiction? As a doctor, I always long to know, but fictional illnesses are so poorly defined that I am frustrated. In Shakespeare, for instance—what really ailed Old John of Gaunt (he was only fifty-nine) who took to prophesying on his deathbed? It cannot have been a respiratory ailment, or he could never have sustained such a long dying speech. Falstaff obviously fell a victim to his boozing, and I would bet on cirrhosis of the liver; he probably had the jaundice and swollen extremities of that ailment, and he had the vastly protruding belly already. The usual decline in mental functioning would account for his ravings, his broken prayers, and his babbling, of which Mrs. Quickly tells us. But I should have liked more detail. However, Shakespeare did not write for doctors alone. He must have known something of the breed, for his darling daughter Susanna, who was said to have inherited his wit, married one, John Hall, a physician of substantial reputation, but a Puritan; was it he who put about the tale that Shakespeare died of drink? Overwork, I would suggest, at this distance.

  The only character in Shakespeare I can think of before doing some research who had a specific ailment is Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida; he complains of “a whoreson rascally tisick,” which was asthma, and that might well account for the rheum in his eyes; a man with respiratory problems. But the bone-ache about which he is so eloquent was almost certainly syphilis, which, in his line of business, he must have encountered often.

  Hamlet gives us a clinical portrait of Polonius, when he talks of old men with eyes “purging thick amber and plumtree gum”; sounds like neglected conjunctivitis in a court where there were no antibiotic drops. But Shakespeare is not properly fiction.

  That is where we meet the moribund ladies—David Copperfield’s Dora, as an example. Fictional mothers, like Mrs. Dombey, are often disposed of in childbirth, so that their infants may be wanting in loving care. Children are frequently killed off by their authors and their deaths are pathetic, as the death of a child must surely be. But what ailed Little Eva St. Clair, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin? What carried off Little Nell, who was a very young woman rather than a child, for she was sufficiently pubescent to attract the evil eye of Mr. Quilp. Nell the Nymphet. They have no clear symptoms, and seem to die of Ingrowing Virtue. Would it be possible to define in broad medical terms something that could be called Heroine’s Disease, which kills with no disagreeable accompaniment other than fatigue and a dangerous increase of blood sugar? These good girls, whether wives or children, must be got rid of, but not with the accompaniments of real death, and their creators are implacable, but vague. If I had to make out a certificate of death for any one of them I suppose myasthenia gravis would have to do.

  Of course honest Anthony Trollope killed Mrs. Proudie quickly and with comparatively brief pain by means of a heart attack, which seems to have been brought on by self-knowledge. Slowly and reluctantly Mrs. Proudie got wise to herself, and the knowledge was unendurable. Trollope as a psychologist has been shamefully neglected. Mrs. Proudie died of being herself, as in the end we all do. Anangke.

  The wretchedness of the long death has not been much explored, but Tolstoy, who is an exception to so many rules, shows us such a death in War and Peace. Prince Andrew Bolkonsky’s thigh is shattered by an exploding shell at Borodino, and after a time he is taken to the field hospital. “One of the doctors came out of the tent in a bloodstained apron, holding a cigar between the thumb and little finger of one of his small bloodstained hands, so as not to smear it.” How much that tells us! The operation is so agonizing that Prince Andrew faints, but is later brought round when water is sprinkled on his face. Astonishing detail!—“the doctor bent over, kissed him silently on the lips, and hurried away.” Did the doctor’s lips taste of his cigar? It is 1812, and the horrors of the field hospital are fully described by Tolstoy; the Prince had inflammation of the bowels—who is surprised?—and died at last, agonizingly, of gangrene. Chekov, a doctor and a writer, has commented on this death with wonder that in 1812 a man might die whom he himself, as the century ended, could have saved.

  Tolstoy neglects no clinical details. Do I wish more authors would follow his example? On the whole, I think not. Emily Raven-Hart and Charles Iredale must die—must die of being themselves—and I, without art, must record their deaths in this, my Case Book. But I shall not make a clinical report of it, in this diary-like book. Just a few facts.

  (21)

  Chips was delighted when Emily was permitted to leave the hospital and return to Glebe House. I took a different view of the matter; experience told me that my colleagues had done all they could for her, that the radiation treatment had not been able to overtake the metastases from the cancer, which were now spreading to her lungs and possibly to her bones. Oh, subtle, implacable cancer! She was allowed to go home in p
art as an act of mercy—people like Emily do not like hospitals—and partly because the overstrained hospital system needed the bed she would occupy, without any hope of recovery, for some weeks.

  Chips was determined that loving care would work wonders. Emily would, of course, have to have a room to herself; bed-sharing must be postponed until she was well again. There was a room adjacent to the master-bedroom, with a connecting door; it had doubtless been a dressing-room in Victorian days. Chips took this for herself, and Emily lay alone in the big bed in the big room, but the door was open and, at the slightest call, Chips could hasten to her side. Much had been done to make the big room pretty, and when Emily was brought home, it was filled with flowers.

  Emily did not now like flowers. She who had loved them and taken so much pleasure in Chips’ garden found the scent of flowers nauseating. So the flowers had to be banished at once. Emily found it painful to lie in bed too long, and so she had to be helped downstairs, to walk in the long drawing-room, and on fine days in the open air. I did not visit Glebe House, because Emily did not want to see me; I suppose my gaze, which so many patients found disconcerting, troubled her. And so I kept out of the way, though at night, when Emily was in bed and trying to fall asleep, I made quiet visits to Chips, who was always anxious to know what I thought about Emily’s appearance when she walked in the garden. Didn’t I think she was gaining a little every day? Was she not “filling out,” though she continued to eat very little. I gave what comfort I could, but to my eye Emily looked like a dying woman. She wore loose-fitting tunics, to conceal the damage of her operation, Chips said, as if Emily’s little breasts were so prominent that anyone would notice that one had vanished. What could not be concealed was that her right arm was swelling with lymphadenosis, and she wore a glove to conceal the bronzing of the skin on her hand.

  “Of course it’s her sculptor’s arm,” said Chips, “and she can’t use it at all—and just when I’m trying to get her to do a little work—just a little modelling in clay, to distract her. Surely they can do something?”