The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  It was the Headmaster’s doctrine (“from those to whom much has been given, much must be expected”) that was at the root of all this distress. Because Colborne was not a school in the government system, supported by taxes, but an old private institution relying on fees, paid by well-to-do parents, it had to do well, and if possible brilliantly, in the general examinations applicable to everybody. Colborne was a regular scooper of Lieutenant-Governors’ Medals, and similar distinctions; only thus could it justify its assumption of privilege in the face of a world that did not like privilege for other people. It took upon itself the mantle of leadership, and it damned well had to lead when the Matriculation results were announced, vying with the other private schools for scholarly laurels. So the pressure was great, the overwinding zealous, and boys of unusual talent were groomed like racehorses by masters who gave them special time, and analysed examination papers for years back to cast some light on what questions might be asked, and what answers might most successfully be given. Brocky and I came in heavily for this sort of fine-tuning, but poor Charlie was a hopeless case and, although nobody was downright miserable to him, he felt the chill of exclusion as one who was simply not worth extra coaching.

  Not that he did not try. He tried desperately in those last few weeks to reverse the ineptitude that had been inveterate in him for years. He sat late over his books—we were allowed to keep our lights on as long as we pleased in those last few days—but, although I now had a room to myself, being a steward, I looked in on him from time to time and tried to cheer him up. How do you cheer up a man for whom the guillotine is drawing nearer and nearer? I attempted a little coaching, but Charlie was reduced to a point where I felt that I was, in Dr. Johnson’s words, assailing an unresisting imbecility. He was so fair that his hair was almost white, and there were times now when he looked like an old man. I was aware that he was becoming physically ill, and not simply from the anxiety which was in the air we all breathed. Something ailed him, and the headaches from which he suffered were more than the result of fatigue. I bought a clinical thermometer—the first of a porcupine of such things I have owned—and took his temperature; it was never below 100 degrees. I urged him to see the school doctor, because of earaches that came and went, and a good deal of pain in his eyes. This he did, but the school doctor, who was no Galen—was, indeed, not much more than Doc Ogg in a clean shirt—patted him on the shoulder and talked soothingly of “exam fever” and gave him some Aspirin. I urged him to see another doctor, but to my surprise he refused.

  “It’s all imagination,” he said. “I must conquer it.”

  “Charlie, for God’s sake don’t be a mental Strong Man,” said I. “You’re sick. It’s obvious. You can’t go into examinations like this. It isn’t imagination.”

  But nothing would move him. He knew what the trouble was: he was malingering, his body was betraying him, and he wouldn’t put up with it. He would show his body who was boss. I knew that he prayed a great deal, of course for help in the examinations. But subsequent clinical experience has convinced me that God is not particularly interested in examinations, just as he won’t be dragged into the Stock Market, or being a backer in show business.

  Without my being in the least aware of it, this illness of Charlie’s was the strong influence that led me to become a physician, and the rather special kind of physician I am. It wasn’t his body that was betraying him, and it wasn’t possible for his mind to bully his body into subjection. It was something else, some more profound and radical Charlie that was trying to keep him out of a contest in which he would certainly be hurt. It was my fondness for Charlie, and my sympathetic but also clinical observation of his illness, that did more than the murky lessons of Mrs. Smoke, or the shallow certainties of Doc Ogg, to make me determine to be a physician, in order that I might pursue this sort of observation as far as I could.

  I understand now that Charlie was very ill far worse than I could possibly know at the time—and that what ailed him could have led to quite possibly fatal mastoid infection, and was at the moment sinus infection of a kind that cried for immediate attention. It would not have taken much of a turn in his illness to kill Charlie. But it didn’t, because disease doesn’t work as inevitably or inexorably as that. Another element, too subtle to be purely physical and too profound to be wholly mental, was at work, some Third Charlie which made him very miserable and made his examinations a wretchedness like a prolonged martyrdom, but did not mean him to die.

  June came at last. I saw nothing of Charlie during the actual examinations, because he was sitting the Junior Matriculation tests and I was in the Senior rank from which, if I were successful, I would enter on university work without having to do the obligatory First Year, during which attempts are made to teach people who will never do so in this world to write grammatical prose, and to instil a few basic facts relating to the accepted concerns of Western civilization into minds hitherto untouched in this respect. I had my own fish to fry, and very tricky fish they were. Every day I made my way from Colborne downtown to a huge drill-hall in what I believe was a Victorian armoury, and found the desk with my number on it. At that rickety and unstable desk I tackled a “paper” which was distributed by the invigilators who, under the eye of the Chief Examiner, walked the aisles and looked out for cheating, escorted girls to the lavatories improvised for them in the masculine armoury, or went with bursting boys to the urinals, where the keenest watch was kept to see that no aids to knowledge had been concealed within the flies of a pair of trousers. The invigilators must have walked miles in that vast room, but their expression of melancholy detachment never altered; if one of them had asked me what I would like for my last breakfast before the walk to the gallows I should not have been much surprised. It was an ordeal, extending over several days until all the papers necessary to my particular case had been completed.

  It was a very long time since I had thought of myself as “delicate” and I certainly was not delicate in my approach to the examination ordeal. I was as well prepared as it was possible for anyone of my abilities to be, and under the guidance of several masters who gave me special tutorials at Colborne I had acquired a pretty good notion of what these examinations were likely to ask. It would be vainglorious to say that I “sailed through,” but I emerged on the last day feeling that I had not done too badly; there had not been a question on any paper I could not have attempted, and because there were options I was able to choose the ones on which I thought I could make the best showing.

  Except for occasional meetings I had not had much time to attend to Charlie during the examination two weeks. I had looked in on him, of course, but anybody who has undergone rigorous examination periods will know that I was taken up with my own concerns, and had not much time for anybody else. But now, on the final day for both of us, when I had handed in my last paper, I hunted him out. When I knocked at the door of his room at the school there was no answer, so I peeped in, and there he was, sitting at his desk, looking worse than I had ever seen him.

  Without being aware of it, I did my first physical examination, there and then; I took his pulse, looked at his tongue—yellowish and heavily coated—listened as well as I could to his heart, with a tube of rolled-up foolscap; fever, loss of appetite, headache continually—not uncommon symptoms but indicative of something wrong, accompanied as they were by a leaden pallor and deep exhaustion; all indications strongly unfavourable, though of course I did not know how unfavourable, and within an hour I had phoned my parents in Sioux Lookout, and they confirmed my opinion that I should defer my return home and take Charlie to his home in Salterton, as fast as I could. They knew a little of Charlie; had met him on visits to me in Toronto, and had been charmed by him. I knew they wanted me home—they were lonely—but they believed me when I said this was an emergency. Also within the hour I telegraphed to Charlie’s parents to be ready to meet him when we arrived, later in the evening, at Salterton and where presumably there would be some sensible and affectionate ca
re for Charlie.

  I had more money than Charlie and when I bought the tickets I did the thing in style, and secured us places in that long-vanished bastion of luxury and privilege, the Parlour Car. We sat in fat chairs upholstered in dusty green velvet, on revolving bases, and thought ourselves great swells. Indeed, the bustle and sense of emergency I created raised Charlie’s spirits. For the first time in weeks he was being taken seriously as a person, and not as a dubious examination candidate. So as we sped through that unpromising land which lies east of Toronto, toward Salterton, which is halfway toward Montreal, he told me about his humiliations of the past two weeks. He thought he had not done badly in history papers, Ancient and Modern, and creditably on the papers in English Literature and Composition; he had been secure in French Grammar and Authors, and strong in Latin Grammar and Literature; but in the sciences and the maths—disaster. He knew he had failed, and felt the full ignominy of failure as it might apply to a Colborne boy.

  Colborne boys were not supposed to fail, but to succeed; it was to train them for success, in whatever they attempted, that their parents sent them to a private school. Without being too lurid, the Headmaster sometimes told us what failure meant: what employment lay open? He was not specific, but we could divine his meaning; surely the collection of garbage, or even of night-soil, would be the fate of one who did not pass his university entrance. Success was the aim, but not success in the most vulgar and crass sense—no, no, it was success as conceived by the great Dr. Arnold of Rugby that was to be sought. It was success in some worthy enterprise, success in the achievement and maintenance of character, that mattered, and money was a secondary, if not really an unworthy, aim. The Headmaster was not tied to Dr. Arnold, however; he was, for his time and profession, a daring man, and he quoted to us the words of Bernard Shaw: the true purpose of life, said that sage (still of a somewhat sulphurous savour in the nostrils of Tory Toronto), was to devote oneself to a great purpose and to exhaust oneself in that devotion, and not to live a life limited to self-satisfaction. But it was inconceivable to the Head that anyone should enter on such a life without achieving university entrance, even if he should decide not to follow that path. University entrance, in his mind, and in all right-thinking minds, was a rite of passage without which entry into true and effective manhood was unthinkable.

  So—Charlie was a failure. And I was taking him home to face his parents.

  Charlie’s parents were a puzzle to me. They seemed so distant, without being in any way neglectful or unkind. They were affectionate enough in their way; Professor Iredale sometimes called him “old man” and his mother called him “dear” but that is a term with many intonations, and the one she chose was not the most intimate. I had visited them two or three times during my school years, at mid-term breaks, and they had always been charming and agreeable but not accessible, like my own parents. I put this down to being what I thought of, with mental quotation marks, as “high born.” The Professor came of a family who had, in England, long been university dons or clergymen or both, and he was Head of Classics at Waverley; his mother was a Miss Merriam of Montreal, and like so many of the English Montrealers she had never spiritually left that city, and her talk was full of references to balls and toboggan parties, and her school-days at the establishment of the redoubtable Miss Edgar and Miss Cramp, who formed generations of Miss Merriams into irreproachable young ladies—irreproachable until you got to know them. She mentioned once—it was a family joke—that when she had announced her engagement to Herbert Iredale a concerned friend had said: “But Edith, what will you do? Nobody knows professors!” Nevertheless it seemed a successful marriage and it was plain that the Iredales “had money” and as this is uncommon in university circles it probably came from her side of the family; the Professor had brought Greek and Latin to the match and it appeared to work well. People were happy to know this particular professor. It seemed to me that his parents looked on Charlie as a man long before he had ceased to be a boy, and they took no heed whatever of the baby who lingers in us all, so long as we live, and whose demands must sometimes be met.

  There they were, at the old limestone station of Salterton. They received Charlie with smiles, and his mother kissed him, and they greeted me with what seemed almost to be greater warmth, because I had “put myself out,” as they said, to bring the sick boy home. It was apparent they did not think there was much the matter with him, and assumed that he was suffering only from examination fatigue, and the sense of failure—for they were not unaccustomed to Charlie’s failures. But money is a great cushion against academic failure.

  It was plain very soon that there was indeed something serious wrong with Charlie. The fever and the headache did not disappear after a few days of egg-nogs spiked with rum, and the leaden pallor increased. Charlie vomited too often even for someone whose stomach was freighted with unaccustomed egg-nog. The family doctor—who was a family friend, and not a man of keen perception, who took his cue from the parents, rather than from the patient—decided that somebody else, a “specialist,” ought to look at him. Salterton was the most sophisticated medical centre between Toronto and Montreal; its university had a good medical school, and it possessed a decent hospital, so at last Charlie was assured of the attention he had, in my amateur opinion, long needed. The specialist hummed and hawed, and called in colleagues, and they announced after a conference that Charlie was suffering, at bottom, from badly impacted nasal sinuses—of which there appeared to be several—and these must be drained. The draining was undertaken, and worked pretty well, it seemed, but there were two—the medical terms meant nothing to me then, but they were the ones on either side of the nose, under the eyes—which simply would not drain, and probing revealed that they were so badly impacted that no draining was possible. The only recourse was to do what the specialists called a “fenestration operation” to open the stubborn sinuses. This would not have caused deep concern except for one thing: in the state of anaesthesia at that time, there was no sort of injection that would knock Charlie out during the operation—everything was given by inhalation—and so the work would have to be done without anaesthetic. The doctors did not enlarge on this point, but it did not need great imagination to know what it could mean.

  Charlie’s parents received this news characteristically. His mother said, “Oh, darling!” at intervals, which was an advance on “dear” but it was plain that she had no way of meeting such a situation. His father was jocose, and said Charlie would just have to think of Nelson’s men having legs sawed off in the bowels of a rolling ship, with nothing but rum and a bullet to bite on to keep them steady. I knew the Professor had been a soldier, and apparently a good one, in the First World War, and had seen dreadful things, but it was plain enough that he was brushing Charlie’s approaching ordeal aside; he simply would not face it imaginatively. Nor, perhaps, would it have done much good if he had done so.

  During the fortnight that this was going on, I hung about, for the Iredales had urged me to stay with Charlie. I am sure they knew that in some ways I was closer to him than they were. If I say anything about this to Esme, I shall have to be cautious; nowadays, and in Esme’s world, any strong friendship between males is at once pronounced to be “gay,” but Charlie and I were certainly not in that league. My attitude toward him was protective; his toward me was trusting. I did not lord it over him, nor did he lean on me, but that was how it was. I can swear with my hand on my heart that no thought of sex entered our minds, and if this now appears to be a limitation, it was one that Colborne certainly encouraged. I think this sort of strong male friendship has always existed, and needs to be understood by those to whom Sex is Lord of All. In his parents’ home we shared a room, but most decidedly there were two beds.

  During his illness Charlie lay for hours reading The Golden Legend. His old copy, which he had brought to school, had been a grubby little nineteenth-century reprint in Latin, and Charlie was adept at reading the bad, late Latin of the author, Jacobus de Vora
gine; his ability in the classical Latin we were taught at school was rooted in this experience. But after that notable meeting of the Curfew Club Mr. Ramsay had seen quite a lot of Charlie, and finding him to be an enthusiast for the Legend he had presented him with a translation into stuffy but serviceable Victorian English. Charlie cherished it, because he had won history prizes at school, and anything from Ramsay—known popularly as Old Buggerlugs—was a prize because of its rarity. There it was, with “To Charles Iredale from a fellow enthusiast, Dunstan Ramsay.”

  The night before the operation I think Charlie most have read and prayed all night; I slept, but I was aware from time to time that his light was on. I had taken a look at the English version of the Legend now and again, but could not long stomach the whoppers that were recorded as saintly acts. Charlie was not open to argument. “Moral truth overrides mere fact,” he would say, and years later I was to hear this pronouncement more than once. That night I knew that he was fortifying himself with moral truth, as he understood it.

  Charlie was reading his old Latin Legend: I was reading the English version. Why? Because the doctors who were to operate had pondered long on the subject of what might help him to bear the pain, which would be severe and of long endurance. At last they had hit on the most unprofessional plan of consulting the patient. And Charlie had said that he thought it would help him if someone read to him as the surgeons worked, and the doctors agreed to give it a try.

  Who should read? Mrs. Iredale declared that it was utterly beyond her. The very thought appalled her. The Professor said he would have done so, certainly, but unluckily the Learned Societies were having their annual meeting at Waverley that week, and as Department Head he was compelled to chair a Classics symposium at the very hour of the operation and thus—we could see that his hands were tied.