The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  Mrs. Chambers, Mrs. White, and Mrs. Owen all took the same tonic, composed of a pinch or two of medicinal rhubarb and Indian senna, suspended in a cheap red wine Doc bought by the demijohn, and I assume they followed instructions and shook it well before the twice-daily tablespoon. Not all tonics were mixed with wine; if a Métis woman had such a bottle, it would be her husband who would drink it at a draught. Tonics for them had to be bitter without being positively noxious, and were suspended in distilled water. Doc Ogg’s water was distilled from the product of his own well, and I did the distilling.

  “That’s where the profit comes,” the Doc would say as I lined up the bottles of water and nastiness, to be picked up at seventy-five cents a bottle.

  Doc had a fair trade in rheumatic ailments of one sort or another, though he never made much distinction among them. Salicylic acid in one form or another, suspended in alcohol, was the preferred treatment, with a salve of Vaseline mixed generously with oil of winter-green to produce heat and a strong healing smell. Of course this stuff was virtually useless, but rheumatics, as I quickly observed, are often career-invalids, and they did not so much want to be cured as to be a focus of concern and attention. In really severe cases among Métis who paid on the nail for their medications, Doc sometimes ventured on dosing with arsenic, or iodide of iron, or both, and now and again he had the luck of finding a suggestible patient who improved, for a time.

  Of course among the rheumatic patients were many who had gonorrhoeal arthritis, and Doc dosed them with quinine, for which some of them formed a genuine liking. Venereal diseases were common, and the Doc took a most unscientific and highly moral attitude toward them. I was not supposed to know about these, but the Doc was too loose-tongued and lonely to keep his mouth shut, and mumbled, about people who did not wash enough (though he was not himself an obsessive washer) and who came hobbling into his office with a well-developed chordee.

  I see now how many ailments were the consequence of a water supply that was confined to a few wells, many of them too near a seeping privy. When all water has to be carried inside in pails, bathing is a foolish indulgence and Doc often asserted, probably with truth, that some of his patients had not had a bath since the day they were born. But as things were, there was a great deal of scurfing and scabbing, and the formation of cheese-like substances in folds of skin. It is paradoxical that the more often mankind gets into hot water, the better off it is.

  Gonorrhoea in all its Protean forms was everywhere; children were born blind, or simple, men had gleet and their women had “the whites” and sometimes “pus in the tubes.” Mucus dripped from places where no fetid mucus ought to have been.

  Now and then a teamster from the forest appeared with glanders, which he had caught from his horses.

  In spite of these ills, however, the town was not a walking sickward. People went about their business and discharged it pretty adequately. Their ailments and Doc’s remedies were the subjects of long, deliberate, anecdotal evening conversations.

  Some illnesses, of course, were very bad. Syphilis Doc dosed with mercuric pills, and a few sufferers pranced about the town with the high-stepping gait of their kind. Tuberculosis was common, but only when it was incapacitating did Doc turn to his program of “unloading the disease through the bowels,” done with a mixture of boiled hops and molasses, followed by a starvation diet, to rid the body of excess carbon—which was, of course, the cause of the disease. Where this fantastic notion came from, I have no idea, but before antibiotics, treatment for tuberculosis was highly imaginative.

  It did not take me long to discover that the Doc did not really know very much, and had not added anything to his knowledge since he received his degree. That degree, from the University of Toronto, was attested to by a framed certificate which hung, always crooked, on his office wall; it was signed by a number of indecipherable names, but Doc could identify them all, and invariably spoke of them with familiar affection as “Old So-and-So” from whom he had learned the science which meant so much to him. But later, when I was myself a student at that medical school, I took the opportunity to look up Doc’s record, and discovered that he had graduated near the bottom of his year and not a prize or a distinction had ever come his way.

  “But keep this clearly before you Jon,” he would say, when he had been too many times to the brandy bottle in the kitchen cupboard, “Science rules the world. Cling to Science, boy, and keep clear of superstition. And there’s lots of that. Did you ever hear of Christian Science? That’s a what d’ye call ’em—an oxymoron, and don’t you ever get to be that kind of a moron.”

  Doc loved that joke and trotted it out often.

  However, I must not be ungrateful to Doc. I cannot say that he taught me pharmacy, because he was himself too shaky-handed and slovenly to mix anything with real accuracy, but he showed me how to teach myself a few of the elements of it. He made it possible for me to look at sick people professionally, and without either pity or contempt. And he taught me what a bugaboo Science can be in the mind of a man who, whatever his ill-luck and his limitations may have been, was simply a fool.

  That was the harsh judgement of a boy. As indeed my whole judgement of Sioux Lookout is that of a child, egotistical as children must be to survive; I am sure my vision of the place must be juvenile, but not trivial so far as it goes. Since then I have met so many fools who were vastly more learned than Doc Ogg, and a few holy fools whose lives provoked awe and sometimes terror, and scores of common or garden fools who nevertheless managed to muddle their way through life, skating on the very thin ice that divided them from any real knowledge of themselves or the world about them, without once falling through, that I do not regard the term “fool” as dismissive or even severe.

  I have myself played the role of fool in so many guises that I feel a kinship with fools, much as I try to avoid being infected with their folly. For folly is one of the infections toward which Doc’s much-vaunted Science has never turned its Cyclops eye.

  But I realize that Esme is expecting me to speak. All that has gone before in these jottings in my Case Book, and which forms so much of the underpinning of my life, has presented itself to my mind in a pause of no great length. But now I must speak.

  (10)

  Esme is eyeing me expectantly, and I realize that I have not answered her question about Charlie Iredale. But as I have explained, questions can now bring back to me such a flood of feeling that I must take heed of it before answering, or I may say something I would rather keep quiet. Especially about Charlie. I suppose I have been silent for fifteen seconds.

  “Oh, of course I remember him well. We shared a room in our first year.”

  “Was that usual?”

  “Yes. The school did not have dormitories for boys older than twelve. There were rooms that served as studies and bedrooms. Very bleak they were, too.”

  “Bleak. How do you mean?”

  “The furnishing consisted of two army beds, two pine desks with one drawer, two chairs, and two clothes-presses for us to keep our things in. Oh, and a small mirror and a washstand.”

  “What’s a washstand?”

  “How lucky you are not to know. It’s a small cupboard on top of which sits a china jug and a basin and a soapdish. We had no running water in rooms; it had to be fetched from a tap in the corridor, and it was never really hot. In the cupboard underneath there ought to have been a chamber-pot, but we did not have such Persian pomps, and for our creatural needs we traipsed up the hall to the room where the urinals and bathtubs and W.C.s were.”

  “Sounds Spartan.”

  “It was Spartan.”

  “And your parents paid big fees for that?”

  “No; they paid for the education. The amenities for the body were kept at a minimum. I speak of the boarders, of course. I suppose there were a couple of hundred of us, and twice as many day-boys. We boarders regarded ourselves, reasonably enough, as the heart of the school.”

  “You could have lived better than th
at in jail.”

  “People who get into jail need luxury; they have no intellectual resources. You’re not going to trap me into moaning about the simple conditions of daily life at Colborne: I am sick to death of writers who whine about their school-days. Let’s get it over with: the food was dreadful and the living accommodation was primitive, but we knew we weren’t there to enjoy life, but to be prepared for its rigours, and on the whole I think it was a good program.”

  “Very nineteenth century.”

  “Not entirely. But it had nothing to do with the country-club concept of a boys’ school that one hears of, for instance, in the U.S. I have said many times and I’m saying it again to you, that a boy who can go through a first-rate boarding-school and emerge in one piece is ready for most of what the world is likely to bring him.”

  I am not going to tell Esme about the fagging system, which still flourished at Colborne in my day. Boys in their first year—New Boys—were assigned to boys in their third and later years to act virtually as servants; clean shoes, brush clothes, get the laundry ready to go out and count and put it away when it came back, polish the buttons on the Rifle Corps uniform and, if the fag-master happened to be an officer, polish the sword; run errands, wrestle the trunks up from the basement when holidays came, and in general do everything they were told without complaint. Some boys hated it, of course. Shelley hated it when he was at Eton, but the world cannot afford many Shelleys. For myself, I don’t think it’s a bad thing for a privileged boy to find out what it is like to be a servant.

  There were occasional tasks of an unusual character; my fag-master, a Hitler-in-embryo named Moss, conceived a passion for a girl in Bishop Cairncross’s school for girls, a few streets away; as he had no literary talent, he demanded of me that I prepare a poetic tribute to this goddess, and I laid on his desk, within an hour, a version of one of the innumerable Odes to Celia concocted by Elizabethans who were suffering from Moss’s malady. Unhappily, the goddess’s name was Putzi (for Prudence) Botham, and so my recension began, rather lumpily—

  My lovely Putzi, heavenly fair,

  As lily sweet, as soft as air,

  No more torment me, but be kind

  And with thy love ease my troubled mind.

  This love-garland was duly dispatched to Putzi, but as Moss had none of the cunning of a lover he sent it on college paper with the crest on the back of the envelope, so that when it had been handled by the girls who distributed the mail, it was all over the school that Putzi had received a mash note, and the demands to read it were too great for Miss Botham. The girls were not Elizabethan maidens, but tough lacrosse-playing little Toronto sprouts, and they thought the poem hilarious; Putzi agreed and gave Moss the air, by telephone. Understandably, Moss blamed me for this tragedy, and made my life a burden for a few days, but I was not without a valet’s resource, and spat in the glass of water he demanded every night during study-hours. Nevertheless, I gained face of a certain kind, as one who could produce a love poem, authentic if perhaps overstated, on demand.

  Of course I shared the secret of the poem with Brochwel Gilmartin, who was delighted by it, and used to make gestures of mock-reverence whenever he met Moss in the halls, as tribute to a true lover and poet.

  “A breathing Poem—woman’s smile—

  A man all poesy and buzzem,”

  Brocky would murmur, looking at Moss with dog-like admiration. Moss suspected that this was cheek, but on the other hand it might be admiration, of which he could never get enough. As I’ve said, Brocky was one of my two great resources and friends during my conerous first year at Colborne. The other was Charlie Iredale, and through sheer luck I shared a room with Charlie.

  That was good for me, and good for Charlie, as well, because some of his habits might have caused him trouble if he had another room-mate. The very first night he surprised me by kneeling beside his bed, and praying for at least ten minutes. I was not one to pray, myself; my parents, though nominal Christians, had no Christian observances except the festivals of Christmas and Easter. But I had heard about prayer, and was surprised to see it in one so young; I had thought it was something people came to in old age, if at all. I do not suppose there was another boarder in Colborne who prayed as Charlie did, though a few may have muttered something as they lay under the sheets. Prayer was a thing you did in obligatory church, on Sunday morning. But there was Charlie, obviously devout, kneeling by his bed.

  I would not have mentioned it, but he did, a week or so later.

  “I never see you pray,” he said.

  “I don’t.”

  “How do you keep your accounts balanced?”

  “What accounts?”

  “Your life. How do you keep track of which way you are going, and if anything’s wrong, why is it wrong, and how do you ask for help when you need help?”

  “What’s that got to do with praying?”

  “Everything. That’s part of what praying is.”

  “Part? How do you mean, part? Isn’t prayer just asking for stuff?”

  “What a benighted heathen you are, Hullah! Listen—”

  And then to my astonishment Charlie, who was just my own age, gave me a brief but pithy lecture on the three modes of prayer: Petition—asking for help and strength for oneself; Intercession—asking for help and strength for others, and for the world; Meditation—placing yourself, silent, before the greatness of God.

  “And you think that does some good?”

  “I know it does. And so would you, if you thought about it. It’s an important part of the big struggle against the Devil. And everybody ought to get into it. You just let everything slide, and then complain when the Devil gets to work on you.”

  I was not at that time much worried by the Devil, nor was I persuaded to become a prayer myself, but I thought too highly of Charlie to scoff at him. My attitude, I now see, was that of millions of grown-up people; religion may be a very good thing, but it’s spooky and too many nuts believe in it, and I didn’t want to be bothered. Charlie had other customs, too, not so impressive, which I observed without comment, but which I thought—well, possibly unwholesome.

  He fasted on Fridays and on some other days; not obviously, but he ate little and of the plainest foods at table. Nobody noticed, or if they did they thought he was not well. And every day he read in a little black book, which was not quite an ordinary prayer book, called The Monastic Diurnal. And when he had any leisure for reading (which was not often because he was slow at school work and needed every minute of study-time to get through the heavy preparation for the next day’s lessons) he read a thick book which I could see was called The Golden Legend. As he kept this and the Diurnal in his desk—and it was a point of honour not to snoop in anybody’s desk—I never had more than a passing look at it.

  Apart from this unboylike preoccupation with religion, he was a normal schoolboy, or a little brighter than normal, though not at school work. Brochwel Gilmartin and I both thought highly of Charlie because of the charm of his character, and his wit, which took the form of a rattling, gossipy kind of conversation which was full of pointed comment on the behaviour of some of the boys who were at the top of the school, and thought well of themselves and did not understand why everybody else should not do the same. Charlie was never spiteful, but he was observant, and his recounting of a conversation or any sort of encounter with one of these great ones had just enough merrily ironic edge to make it irresistible to Brocky and me. It was as though Charlie saw life from a special angle, as of course he did, for he was describing our Colborne life sub specie aeternitatis, in so far as a schoolboy may. He laughed, and laughed infectiously, and Brocky and I were delighted with his company.

  This would not have been odd, if we had not been separated by a gulf, which is very important in school; Charlie was not clever at school work, except that he really understood history and in the end, after an undistinguished school career, won the History Prize in his last year. But he was often in hot water for tests not
passed, or work not done up to a sufficient standard, and by the end of the week he usually had a load of PDs—punishment drills—to be worked off, so that his Saturday afternoons were not free. Brocky and I, however, were good at our work, and won prizes and distinctions, and if we got a PD or so, it was for an ill-defined but clearly understood offence called “cheek,” which was impudence toward, or failure in reverence to, our elders and supposed betters. Brocky was full of cheek.

  It was the cheek of a boy who knew himself to be intellectually superior to virtually all the other boys in the school, and a few of the masters, as well. For the masters were the usual mixed bag, ranging from men of genuine learning, wide experience of life, bravery in war or something else that made them worthy of admiration, to dullards who drudged efficiently through the same lessons year after year, clods untroubled by a spark. Brocky came from a home dominated by a father who was a self-made man, and unlike some in that category he had made rather a good job of himself, and had given his son the outlook on life of one who has seen the world as it appears to somebody who is getting, and keeping, his head above the waves. Brocky wanted a life of scholarship but he was under no illusion that it was a superior life to that of those more immediately engaged in politics or industry. Under his father’s tutelage he had acquired a strong objection to what in those days it was fashionable to call “boloney,” and which was to be discerned everywhere. “That’s boloney,” he would comment several times a day, and usually with good reason. But he was not a shallow scoffer. He distinguished what was worthy from what was unworthy in many things; as he sometimes said to me, when I had confided to him that my father’s work was the extraction and refinement of iron pyrites, he knew fool’s gold from the real thing.