The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  (2)

  Sioux Lookout, in mid-August, showed already a touch of autumn. No dramatic turning of the leaves, but a melancholy in the air and some chill at night. Not a sentimental melancholy; rather a sobriety as the year accepted its death. What was I to do? I had finished school, and had a couple of finely bound prize books to show my parents, who pretended not to be impressed. I was already pointed toward the university, but I had no idea what medical studies might offer me, and no intention of trying to ready myself for the future. So I wandered aimlessly, and read aimlessly, and ate a great deal and made it clear that I was now quite old enough to have wine as something other than medicine. My father had some good wine, though how he acquired it I do not know and thought it better not to ask. Prohibition, it was well understood, was a blessing for the poor, who “couldn’t handle liquor,” and a sop to its advocates, who were chiefly Methodists, but it was not to be taken seriously by people like ourselves, hereditary handlers of liquor. Luxuries were, few in Sioux Lookout, and my father’s wine was doubly precious in consequence.

  Everything seemed peaceful, and even sleepy after the frenzied social life (as it seemed to me) of Salterton. It was not until much later that I recognized how provincial, indeed how colonial, and in the case of the older inhabitants, how Chekhovian that life was, and sensed the Chekhovian autumn that hung over it. I see now that Sioux Lookout was the enduring reality of my homeland, and Salterton a retreat into its past.

  Young as I was, what impressed me chiefly was how old everybody was growing. Doc Ogg was now an old man, and an old man, what is more, who had habitually drunk too much of the cheap sherry and rough brandy in which he suspended his foolish medicines.

  “You’re going to the greatest medical school in the world, boy. Don’t let anybody tell you different. McGill—pah! What have they got since they lost Osler? Johns Hopkins? Eh? A big name, but can they hold a candle to the U. of T.? I doubt it. And overseas? Germany’s gone to hell since the last War. France was never anything since Pasteur. And the Old Country? Eh? Who’s at Edinburgh now? Can you name anybody? No, boy, you’re headed for the greatest medical school in the world. I know, because I was there, and it was the making of me.

  “Now look, boy. I regard you as my heir, see? You’re my child in a way no natural-born child can ever be. You’re my child in science, and I’m going to give you something.”

  Here, Doc Ogg, with drunken éclat, reached from under some clutter on his desk his battered, much-worn copy of The Principles and Practice of Medicine by William Osler, M.D.; its subtitle was Designed for the Use of Practitioners and Students of Medicine. Doc’s was the Third Edition and I already knew that it was thoroughly out of date and that Sir William Osler had revised it substantially. But I received it with becoming modesty, as an aspirant to the scientific splendour of mind which was Doc’s.

  “Make that your Bible, boy, as I’ve done. Read it, read it, read it and burn it into your mind. Osler—the greatest. And never forget he was a Canadian, eh? We’ve taught the world more than the world knows.”

  “Insulin?” I suggested. I was not well up in medical discoveries, but everybody knew about insulin and how Banting and Best evolved it in a shed on the Toronto campus. “Nobel stuff, and a life-giver to thousands who don’t know where it began.”

  “Yeah—well—insulin sure enough. From the old U. of T. My alma mater. The greatest medical school in the world.”

  “Who are the big men there now?” I asked. “Who should I look out for?”

  “Oh—ah—well, it’d take a long time to name them all. Changed since my day. Everybody, I’d say. The cream. But never forget Osler. He’s the fons et irrigo. God, thinking of it makes my Latin all come pouring back.”

  It was decent of Doc to want to give me a push in the right direction, even if he didn’t have much idea of where it lay. His old Osler was dusty and yellow and spoke of neglect. But his heart was in the right place—as we so often say of people whose minds are sadly astray. I kept the Osler and have it still, re-bound and among my books relating to the history of medicine. What a lot of diseases there are now that the great doctor had never heard of. And what curious diseases he discusses, no case of which has ever come my way—such arcane ills as saturnine neuritis, rice-water stools, and scrivener’s palsy. He lived in a world where noxious chrome yellow, a fairly serious poison, might be used by bakers to give cakes a pretty colour, and patients might appear in the consulting-room suffering from “railway brain.” I do not speak in scorn; we have our fashionable, fleeting illnesses today and I see many of them in my own consulting-room.

  I would not have dreamed of visiting Doc without a balancing call on Mrs. Smoke. Doc showed the wear of years, but she looked just as I had last seen her. In the old way, I entered her cabin, which smelt, if anything, more pungently than before, and sat for a while on the floor until she was ready to speak to me. She was scraping a skin.

  “You seen Eddu?” said she, after a while.

  Yes, I had seen Eddu, who had rushed upon his fate faster than I would have thought possible, and who was now a wreck, but whether from booze or girls I do not know and did not want to find out. When he had seen me he barked a derisive greeting from a distance but I, not possessing Charlie’s notions about Christian charity, pretended not to hear.

  “The town drunk, now,” said Mrs. Smoke.

  The ice having been broken, I told Mrs. Smoke about my next move in life.

  “You remember when you first told me you wanted to be a doctor?” said she.

  Indeed I remembered, and remembered her scorn of my ambition.

  “Do you think I’m doing the right thing?” I asked.

  “You got more sense now. Then you was just a kid.”

  “But do you think I’m doing the right thing?”

  “What do you care what I think?”

  “Oh, come on, Mrs Smoke! Don’t talk to me like that! Why wouldn’t I care what you think? Do you suppose I’ve forgotten when I had scarlet fever and you saved me?”

  Mrs. Smoke made no response, and her silence pushed me to talk in a way I had not intended, and which had in it an echo of Doc Ogg.

  “You brought the shaking tent! That was magic! You can’t do magic for me, and then shut me out and say I don’t care what you think!”

  “Not magic. Magic is shit.”

  “What do you call it then? That night in the tent—what did you do?”

  A long silence, and then, when at last Mrs. Smoke spoke, it was in a voice I had never heard from her before, a young voice, not gentle but not weighted with experience, as was her common speech.

  “I guess you’re old enough to know. As much as I know, and that isn’t much. What did I do? What does anybody do in the shaking tent? I went into the Great Time and I asked for helpers. I did it because your mother and father was good about not letting the fever spread among my people. Christ knows what it would have done if it had spread. So we owed you, see? We owed you our lives. My people wanted me to help you, so I had to ask for the Helpers. And they came, and you got better.”

  “What Helpers? Who are they? Where do they come from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Would they come for anybody?”

  “No, they wouldn’t.”

  “But—if there are these Helpers, oughtn’t we to try to get them more often? Why did they come for you? What is the Great Time?”

  Mrs. Smoke’s face was like stone. I knew it was a foolish question. But since last we had talked I had read the story of Parsifal, and I knew what harm could follow if the right questions were not asked at the right time.

  “When I told you I wanted to be a doctor you said I was the wrong person, going the wrong way. That can’t be right. How can I be anybody but myself, and what way can I go except the university way, if you won’t tell me about your way? The Helpers—I really and truly do want to know about them. Haven’t I a right to know? Didn’t they come for me?”

  Again, a long pause. C
onversation with Mrs. Smoke was not a thing of urbane chit-chat, and doubtless that was the best thing about it. At last she spoke.

  “You got to find out for yourself,” she said.

  “Was that what you did? Did you find them yourself?”

  “Noboby that taught me would teach you. You’re the wrong person, going the wrong way. But maybe you could find out something for yourself. You ever get lost in the woods?”

  “Lots of times.”

  “Well, you’re here so you must have found your way out.”

  “In the woods the secret is not to go in circles. You have to look for the sun and blaze your way and sooner or later you’ll come to something.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Is that how it is? Keep on, and blaze your way so you don’t backtrack?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Mrs. Smoke, please don’t shut me out. Do you know what? You’re a kind of second mother to me. When I was dying you brought me back—you and the Helpers. You gave me life. Don’t shut me out now.”

  Another one of Mrs. Smoke’s long silences. Then—

  “Remember the snakes?”

  “Do I! You scared the life out of me! Poisonous rattlers and I nearly put my hand in the basket.”

  “You remember?”

  “Of course I do.”

  Another silence, but I saw Mrs. Smoke shaking with laughter, though not a sound escaped her. Then illumination!

  “Do you mean they were the Helpers?”

  Mrs. Smoke almost made the great leap from her inner laughter to audible mirth. Almost, but not quite. For the first time she turned from the table where she was scraping the pelt and looked me square in the face.

  “You’re not as big a fool as you look,” she said. “Now go home! I’m busy.”

  (3)

  Going home was not what it had been in earlier days. There was something uneasy in the air, and I could not grasp what it was. The Thursday nights when three other couples came in to make up two tables of bridge had been abandoned. My mother played endless patience; my father read. My parents had never been great talkers, and at meals my mother had initiated whatever conversation there was, but now she sat silent and would not have spoken if my father had not asked her some direct, harmless question. Had she been out today? Found any new plants? Talked to anyone? She had noticed the new moon, of course? Visible in daylight, with a rim where the old moon had been, which suggested rain to come. I talked, but in the uneasy manner of a boy who does not want to discuss anything that is important to him. Nothing about the Iredales, though I gave details of Charlie’s illness; nothing about the Gilmartins, except that they had a fine garden; nothing about girls, of course. A little talk about going to the university in a few days.

  Sometimes my mother would rise from the table and leave us alone. She “went to her room,” which had special significance because she and my father no longer shared a room; he slept in a poky little thing, not much better than a large cupboard, down the hall. No explanation of these sudden absentings was offered, but my father would sigh and offer me more wine.

  It was my first experience of the way in which the malaise of one family member can infect a whole household and rob it of its spirit. Since then I have seen much of it. This is one of the things not always recognized about illness; many people other than the obvious victim may be strongly affected.

  Unlike Parsifal I did not fear to ask questions.

  “What’s wrong with Ma?”

  “She’s just a little out of sorts. It will pass.”

  “Has she seen a doctor?”

  “Of course.”

  “Not Ogg, I hope?”

  “A good man in Winnipeg. Dr. Cameron says it will pass.”

  I suppose it did pass, at least in part, but not before a distressing scene between me and my mother in which she tried to involve my father, but the cause of it could not have been farther from his realm of understanding.

  My father suggested that he and I spend a couple of nights camping on the shores of Lac Seul and pretending to fish during the day while in fact looking at the silent, calm beauty around us. We returned refreshed and as quiet in spirit as it was in our nature to be. But my mother was sitting in the living-room, holding a closed book in her hand and looking, appropriately, like something out of Greek tragedy. She held out the book to my father.

  “Did you know he was reading this?” she asked. I had never truly understood what the word “fraught” meant, though it was popular in the fiction of the day. Her speech was heavily fraught, and her question was rhetorical, for my father took the book and looked at it uncomprehendingly.

  “The Interpretation of Dreams,” he read from the spine. “No. I never heard of it.”

  “If ever a book ought to be banned, that book ought to be banned. It’s filth! The purest filth from beginning to end. Degenerate, German filth. I won’t have that book in this house! You read it, Jim. You just read the pages I’ve marked with those slips of paper. Then you’ll know! Then you’ll see! I won’t stay in the same room with that evil, vile, degenerate, filthy book!”

  She rose, and “went to her room.” My father held the book in astonishment. Neither of us had ever seen her like that.

  “What in hell was all that about?” he said.

  “I suppose Ma has been reading Freud and it has upset her.”

  “Well, let’s have dinner and then I suppose I’ll have to dig into this thing. It doesn’t look like my kind of book. Is it really filthy?”

  “Not in any way that would give pleasure,” I said. It was a smart-alec remark and I should have held my tongue. My father gave me a glance that disturbed me more than my mother’s rage. But I was angry that my mother had been snooping in my room. Mrs. Iredale would never have done such a thing. What was she looking for? Pictures of girls?

  After dinner my father sat down patiently to read the book. He seemed the most unlikely reader for that work, with his bifocals halfway down his nose and his partly bald head gleaming under the light of the oil lamp by his chair; we still lit with oil in Sioux Lookout. He should have been reading something by John Galsworthy, full of controlled social consciousness, detailed but not probing investigation of character, and unimpeachable sanity, justice, and compassion. I was reading Point Counter Point which was new then, and gave me a warm illusion of sophistication. From time to time my father sighed, as I had heard him sigh over particularly tedious pamphlets about industrial mining.

  It was about ten o’clock when my mother appeared. I had not thought she would be able to stay away all evening, and here she was, and loaded for bear, as we Sioux Lookouters say when we mean that somebody is in a peak state of fury.

  “Well, Jim? What do you think?”

  “Eh? Oh, well I can’t say I’ve read very far. Not easygoing. Fine style, mind you. Smooth as silk. But every two or three sentences you have to stop and think.”

  “And have you any doubts about what you think?”

  “So far as I’ve got he makes a strong case for taking dreams seriously. This stuff about sleep releasing depths of the mind—I can see what he means. Anybody who gets really quiet—like in the woods, for instance—knows how stuff comes up that surprises you and sometimes startles you. But when he gets into interpretation, I’m all at sea. Symbolism. Not my kind of thing at all. That’s really more your line of country. But I haven’t come to anything yet that I’d call filthy, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “You’ve always been a slow reader.”

  “Yes, yes; you say that often. But I really get hold of what I read. I can’t skim a book like this and have a quick opinion about it.”

  “That book is a devilishly clever apology for filthy thought, and we all know that filthy thought leads to filthy action.”

  (Does it? Did Eddu behave filthily because he thought filthily or vice versa? It seemed to me then to be one of those chicken-and-egg things.)

  “I can’t agree with you there. We’ve all—I suppose I
mean all men, because women are admittedly different—we’ve all had dreams we wouldn’t like to publish in the Winnipeg Free Press. But we don’t act them out. Maybe the dreams are a safety-valve.”

  “I suppose men haven’t as much control as women; after all, they’re not as fine-natured. But what you say has nothing to do with that book. It’s not just about coarse thoughts; it’s about the mainsprings of civilization, and human thought; it’s about how we see one another; it claims to know our inmost wishes. And if that man is right every decent human feeling is tainted and Christianity is a fraud and we’re no better than the beasts that perish. We’re just slightly tamed monkeys. And that man is trying to drag us back. Where did you get that book?”

  “Some of my prize-money was a credit on a very good bookshop. I got it there.”

  “Doesn’t that school exercise any control over how you spend prize-money?”

  “They give us credit for common sense.”

  “Jonathan, don’t you speak like that to me! Are you insinuating that I haven’t got common sense?”

  “I just think you’ve misunderstood the book.”

  “I’ve understood it perfectly well, young man. I’m not a fool, whatever your witty friends might think.”

  “I didn’t say you were a fool, Ma.”

  “Your whole attitude ever since you came home makes it quite clear what you think of your father and me—”

  “Just a minute, Lil. You’re going too far. He hasn’t said or hinted anything of the kind to my knowledge and I’ve just spent forty-eight hours alone with him.”