What’s Bred in the Bone tct-2

by Robertson Davies

  How many knew what the Grail was, or why it should gleam, does not matter. Francis knew, for he had read it in a book that came, of course, from Aunt Mary-Ben. The Grail was the Cup from which Christ had drunk at the Last Supper, and anybody lucky enough to catch sight of it was ensured a very special life forever after.

  Among the art books recommended by Buggerlugs—which was what the boys called Mr. Ramsay—was one that dealt with the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and in the illustrations—Francis did not bother much with the text—was something of the Grail in the light that shone from the eyes of the men, and the rich, swooning beauty of the women. It was a light that fed the hunger he felt because of the starved, wholly external religion of the school, and a lush depiction of Nature that balanced the world of wretched desks, spattered ink, chalk dust, constipating food, and the unceasing, unimaginative, perfunctory obscenity of schoolboys’ talk. It was an enlargement that made even compulsory games and the Rifle Corps open up to a light that came from somewhere outside the school. And then the Headmaster, who kept his ears open, seized upon the slave-song of the fags and preached one of his Sunday-night sermons about the Grail, as a vision, an unresting aspiration, and with his usual fine disregard of probability urged the boys to read Malory at once, and to make the Grail quest a part of their own lives.

  Francis hunted down Le Morte d’Arthur in the school library, and was soon compelled to recognize that it was a dense, intractable, difficult book and he could not get through enough of it to find the Grail or anything else he wanted. Nor was the encyclopaedia more helpful, with its tedious explanation of where parts of the legend came from, and its dowdy, scholarly rejection of all the good stuff about Joseph of Arimathea and King Arthur—the stuff that fed his imagination and made the Grail a glowing reality. So he hugged the book about the Pre-Raphaelites, and kept it out of the library far longer than was permitted, even though nobody else wanted it. He considered stealing it, but a strong feeling from the Blairlogie past told him that A Certain Person would not like it—His wounds might even be reopened—and that a life of noble feeling could not be founded on a crime, especially a crime that would be so easily detected.

  All boys were expected to be “keen”. The most admired form of keenness was not obvious success, but pitting yourself against some form of school contest where you were not likely to succeed, but where your quality as “a good loser” might be seen and admired. Francis found it in the Oratory Contest.

  Of course, nobody expected anything that could be seriously called oratory. To excel at verbal expression was a suspect gift. But a sufficient number of boys came forward every year who could force themselves to stand before an audience of the staff and their peers, and control their terror as they talked for ten minutes on a topic that was handed to them on a folded slip of paper by the Headmaster, who arranged that each contestant should have ten minutes in a secluded room—most certainly not the library—to collect whatever thoughts he might have. The slip handed to Francis read “The Gift of Sight”.

  That was why Francis mounted the platform and embarked with considerable confidence on a criticism of the portraits that hung on all four sides of the Prayer Hall. These were, he said, pictures that everybody in the school saw every day, but that nobody really was aware of except as interruptions of the walls. The pictures were not good as works of art, and if they were not good works of art, had they a place in an institution of education? Were they worthy of the finest school in Canada? (He thought this a fine touch, certain to please his audience.) He pointed out the low level of artistic competence they represented, and asked rhetorically if any of them were by painters who could be named anybody in the audience? Two or three of them, he mentioned, were already flaking badly, although they could not be more than fifty years old, and it was clear that they had been done in inferior pigments. He was lightly jocose about the fact that the ample beard of one Headmaster of the nineteenth century was rapidly going green. He said that the painters had obviously been hacks or amateurs. He spent his last three minutes explaining how a painter of acknowledged genius, such as Michelangelo or Bouguereau, would have presented these grave figures, making them not only records of Heads past, but vivid evocations of strong intelligence and character, and a daily refreshment to the eyes of the school. He sat down amid a heavy silence.

  The Headmaster, in his judgement of the speeches, praised Cornish’s obvious sincerity. But it was a boy who laboured mightily with “Sabbath Observance: For or Against”, and who came down heavily for the closed Toronto Sunday, who was awarded the cup.

  Afterward the Head said: “That was good, Cornish. Unexpected and I suppose true. But tactless, Cornish, tactless. There were two or three of our Governors in the audience, and they didn’t like it. You must be careful with words like ‘hack’: the world’s full of hacks, unfortunately. You must learn to keep your claws in. But there was one Governor who thought you ought to have some recognition. So go to the school bookseller with a note I’ll give you, and get yourself a book about art. But don’t tell anybody how you came by it. That’s an order.”

  That was the beginning of the substantial library about art in its various forms that was one of the valuable things Francis left behind him when he died. The bookseller, a kindly man, found him Burckhardt’s History of the Renaissance for four dollars—it was illustrated, and thus expensive—and threw in a second-hand set of Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, which was marked at a dollar-fifty, but which he reduced for a promising boy.

  Francis obediently kept quiet about his special prize, but he could not avoid the reputation he now had for knowing about pictures, and being what some of the hostile masters hissingly condemned as an “ESS-thete”. Francis had not heard the word before, though he knew what “aesthetic” meant; but it was plain from the way it was said that an “ESSthete” was a pretty feeble chap, wasting his time on art when he ought to be building up his character and facing the realities of life—as the hostile masters, failures to a man, understood life. But not all the masters shared this view, and in particular Mr. Mills, the senior classics master, began to look on Francis with favour.

  It was the same among the boys. Most of them thought that being interested in pictures was girls’ stuff, and not even for the kind of girls they knew—girls who were simply themselves in a different biological package. Old Money girls, in fact. But there were others, including most of the Jews, who wanted to talk about art to Francis. Art as they understood it, that is to say.

  For some years a few Canadian painters, who came to be called the Group of Seven, had been trying to reveal the Canadian landscape in a new way, seeing it freshly, and not as it would have appeared to an eye darkened by a nineteenth-century English landscape painter’s notion of what Nature ought to be. Their work was of course much derided and they were thought to be outrageously modern, although they would not have seemed so to a European or an American critic. What the parents said was parroted by the children, and Francis was beset with “Whaddya think of the Group of Seven? My mother says it looks like what our Swedish cook used to paint on her day off. My father says he could do as well, if he had the time. I mean—look at it! Can you see Georgian Bay in it? My father says he’s hunted through all that country every autumn since he was a boy, and he says he knows it better than any of those birds, and he never sees anything like that. Blue snow! I ask you!”

  Francis gave non-committal answers, not because he had any interest in new painting, but because the world he wanted to paint was not the world of Nature but the world of his imagination, dominated by the Grail Legend. This was now the food upon which he fed his spirit, and so far as he retained any of the Catholicism Aunt Mary-Ben had bootlegged into his supposedly Anglican world, it was attached to what he knew about the Grail. That was almost entirely what he derived from Tennyson; if by chance he hit on anything that associated the great legend with the pre-Christian world he left it unread; what he wanted was the world of Rossetti, of Burne-Jones,
of William Morris. It was not easy to be a Pre-Raphaelite in Canada in the third decade of the twentieth century, in a school that was cheerfully Philistine about art (though certainly not about scholarship), but in so far as it could be done, Francis did it.

  This involved a certain amount of mental contortion, and even something approaching a double consciousness. To his school companions he was just Cornish, not a bad fellow, but with a bee in his bonnet about pictures. To his schoolmasters he was Cornish, a boy somewhat above the middle except in Classics, where he showed ability. To both companions and masters Francis paid his dues; he was mediocre at games, but he played, and he took part in enough other school activities to avoid being despised as a slacker; he worked conscientiously at his studies, was always top of his class in French (but this was discounted by the School, because he had been raised to speak French, which the School regarded less as a key to another culture than as an obstacle course and a brain-teaser), and was good in Latin and Greek, which were also brain-teasers. Nobody knew how his mind was seized by the heroes of Virgil and Homer, and how easy Classics became if you cared about what they said. It was a period when educators believed that the brain could be strengthened, like a muscle, by attacking and conquering anything it might at first find difficult. Algebra, geometry, and calculus were the best developers of mental muscle; to master them was really pumping iron; but Classics wasn’t bad—indeed sufficiently repellent to the average boy’s mind to rank as a first-rate subject of study. But the inner chamber of Francis’s mind was dominated by the Grail, as it appeared to him to be—something fine, something better than his life at present could provide, something to be sought elsewhere, something that made sudden, fleeting appearances at home.

  Whether Francis’s parents had neglected him is a matter about which there could be many opinions. They had left him for long periods in the care of his grandparents and Aunt Mary-Ben, but surely that was not neglect? They had not noticed that his schooling in Blairlogie had been at odds with his life at St. Kilda. They had sent him to Colborne College because it was the kind of school Sir Francis understood, without any consideration of what kind of school Francis might need. They had done everything for him that money could provide, and that they could imagine, but they had not seen much of him or given much thought to him. Their reason was, of course, the War, and the part Sir Francis had played in it as what would be called in a later, different war “a back-room boy”, and the necessity for Mary-Jacobine to do what complemented her husband’s career and augmented his position. Long after the War was officially over, these necessities seemed to prevail over any serious attention to Francis.

  Did this make him feel neglected, rejected, bitter? Far from it. It made it possible for him to idealize his parents and love them as distant, glorious figures, quite apart from the everyday world. At school, and at the expensive camps where he spent his summers, he had always with him a folder in which were pictures of his father, looking distinguished, and his mother, looking beautiful, and these were holy ikons that comforted and reassured him when he doubted himself. And as the Grail took command of his inner life, they were associated with it, not directly and foolishly, but as the kind of people who made such splendour possible and perpetuated it in the modern world.

  When the business of the Cornish Trust required Sir Francis to be in Canada for much of each year, his son saw him at weekends, talked with him, was sometimes taken for splendid meals at his club, and was often shown his medals. But, as the Major explained, medals were not the measure of a man’s service; it was what the chaps at the War Office and the Foreign Office thought of you that established your true measure. It was the degree of access you had to the People Who Really Knew. These people were not named, but that was not because they had no reality, for there was nothing of the phoney about the Major when it came to his profession; these significant people were not named because they were not in the limelight, although in a very real sense they controlled the limelight and chose the people on whom it should shine. These people were by no means all soldiers; some of them were scientists, some were officially explorers, some were dons. It was never said, but it was clear enough that the Major was associated in some way with what was still called the Secret Service. Secrecy was bred in Francis’s bones.

  As for his mother, she was a beauty, in a time before beauties had become entirely professional beauties. It would have been vulgar and un-Grail-like to say it, but she was a Society Beauty. Being a beauty always means constellating some ideal related to the historical period where it appears, and Mary-Jacobine, now known as Jacko Cornish, was a Beauty of the Twenties. She did not languish; she danced vigorously and joyously. She was not swathed in embroideries; she wore tight sheaths that came barely to her beautiful knees. Her figure was boyish but not flat or muscular. She smoked a great deal, and had a variety of long holders for her Turkish cigarettes. She drank cocktails to the extent that made her laugh delightfully, but never until she hiccuped. Her hair was cut short in styles that had various names from year to year, but were basically the Eton Crop. She used make-up, but her own high complexion made make-up an ornament rather than a disguise. Her underclothes were few, and although they were splendidly embroidered they were never so much so as to spoil the set of her wonderful frocks. Her scent was bought in Paris, and only somebody like the President of the Cornish Trust could have afforded it. She flirted with everybody, even her elder son.

  For there was now a second son, old enough to be sent to the Lower School at Colborne, and he was Francis’s brother Arthur. There was more than ten years between them, and Arthur did not figure largely in Francis’s life, but he was a nice kid, and Francis was civil to him. Arthur was everything Francis was not, a noisy, exuberant, strong little boy, and a great success at school. If Francis had not sat on Arthur from time to time, for his soul’s good, Arthur would have patronized Francis, whom he recognized with the instinct of his kind as the sort of fellow who would never be Captain of Games in the Upper School, which was the goal Arthur had set for himself, and which after the required number of years he attained. Francis never knew it—it was not proper that he should know it—but the Major thought more highly of Francis than he did of Arthur. The younger boy was the type who would some day be a good soldier, if he were so unlucky as to be involved in a war, but he was not a Secret Service type, and the Major rather suspected that Francis was precisely that.

  It was in May 1929, when Francis was nineteen, going on twenty, that several matters which had been hanging fire resolved themselves.

  The first came when he was training for Track, on the oval path that surrounded the school’s main cricket pitch. Francis was a fair runner, but not a star. On this day he ran a few yards, felt short of breath, pressed on in the best School tradition, lost consciousness, and fell to the ground. Sensation! Boys collected; the drill-sergeant rushed up shouting, “Back, back all of you; give him air!”, and when Francis came round, which he did in a few seconds, detailed four boys to take him up to the Infirmary, where Miss Grieve, the school nurse, packed him into bed at once. It was a Thursday, which was one of the days when the doctor visited the School; he listened to Francis’s heart, looked grave to hide his want of opinion, and said that he would arrange a visit to a specialist, immediately.

  The following morning Francis felt perfectly well, went to Prayers as usual, and was astonished when the Headmaster announced a list of awards, in which his name appeared as winner of the School Prize in Classics. He was also named as one of those who should report to the Head’s secretary immediately Prayers were over.

  “Oh, Cornish,” said Miss Semple; “you’re to be excused classes this morning. You’re to go to the General Hospital to see Dr. McOdrum at ten. So you’d better hurry.”

  Dr. McOdrum was very important, but he worked in a mercilessly overheated, windowless little kennel in the basement of the big hospital, and was himself so pale and stooped and overburdened in appearance that he was a poor advertisement for h
is profession. He made Francis strip, hop up and down, pretend to run, step on the seat of a chair and then step down again, and finally lie on a cold, medical-smelling trolley while he went over him very carefully with a stethoscope.

  “Aha,” said Dr. McOdrum, and having delivered himself of this opinion, allowed Francis to go back to school, greatly puzzled.

  As it was a Friday, and Francis was a prize-winner, he was given special leave to go home for the weekend. Ordinarily he would have had to wait until Saturday morning. So it was about five o’clock when he went into the new house in Rosedale, and made for the drawing-room, hoping there might still be some tea left. There he found his mother, kissing Fred Markham.

  They did not start like guilty creatures. The smiling Markham offered Francis a cigarette, which he took, and his mother said, “Hello darling, what brings you home tonight?”

  “Special leave. I won the Classics Prize.”

  “Oh, you clever creature! Kiss me, darling! This calls for a celebration!”

  “Sure does,” said Fred Markham. “White Lady, Francis?”

  “Oh, Fred, are you sure? He doesn’t have cocktails.”

  “Then it’s time he started. Here you are, old man.”

  The White Lady was delicious, specially the white of egg part. Francis drank, chatted, and felt worldly. Then he went up to his room, dropped on his bed, and burst into tears. Mum! Imagine it, Mum! With Fred Markham, who had a gold inlay in one of his front teeth, and must be forty if he was a day! Mum—she wasn’t a bit better than Queen Guenevere. But that would set Fred Markham up as Sir Launcelot, which was ridiculous. If Fred was anything, he was a base cullion, or perhaps a stinkard churl. Anyway, he was an insurance broker, and who did he think he was, getting fresh with Lady Cornish? But it had looked as if Mum were in on the kiss; she wasn’t resisting, and maybe it wasn’t the first. Mum! God, she must be almost as old as Markham! He had never before thought of his mother as anything but young. Older than he, but not in any exact chronological way.