The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  Theatrical? Of course it was. Darcy Dwyer may have been a banker by profession, but he was a theatre director and an actor at heart, and he was happiest when marshalling the forces at St. Aidan’s for a truly stunning effect. “If it is uplifting and awesome, Father, is not that what we seek to create?” Father Hobbes had no answer, though in his heart he may have had doubts. I do not know. I never spoke to him or was near to him until the morning when he died so suddenly at the altar, which was long in the future.

  At first I went to St. Aidan’s for the show. But as I came to understand the meaning the elaborate ritual bodied forth I gained a greater pleasure in the services. Not that I believed, deep-Freud greenhorn that I was. Not that I did not equate much of what was said and done with the reductive spirit of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, an abridgement of which I had read—once. But I could not resist the beauty of what I saw and heard. Especially the plainsong.

  Dr. Parry’s gallery choir sang splendidly the church music of the ages from Palestrina to himself; one of the secrets of this beauty was, I later learned, that he never allowed his forces to sing above a mezzo forte; there was no bawling, and the music seemed to float through the church. But it was the plainsong that seized me.

  At first I did not know what it was. At intervals the eight men in the chancel choir, or sometimes Dwyer alone, would utter what sounded like speech of a special eloquence, every word clearly to be heard, but observing a discipline that was musical, in that there was no hint of anything that was colloquial, but not like any music I had met with in my, by this time, fairly good acquaintance with music. My idea of church music at its highest was Bach, but Bach at his most reverent is still intended for performance. This music was addressed to God, not as performance, but as the most intimate and devout communication. It was a form of speech fit for the ear of the Highest.

  It was at this time, early in the third year of my university studies, that I met Darcy Dwyer, which I had never expected to do, because he seemed a remote figure, known to me only in church and on the stage.

  The university had a good theatre of its own, built during the first enthusiasm for what was for so long called Little Theatre, marking it as amateur but of a seriousness not attempted by the amateur theatricals of the nineteenth century. Toronto had a lot of keen amateur actors, some of whom had been professional before they had left that ill-requited and chancy profession, and some of the best of these were banded in a group called the Players’ Guild; one of their mainstays was Darcy Dwyer.

  The Guild from time to time performed plays that demanded more bodies than the core of the membership provided and “extras” were roped in from wherever they could be found. Such a play was Josephine Preston Peabody’s The Piper; it needed a crowd and a lot of children, and somebody whose name I have now forgotten asked me if I would like to be a German peasant of the thirteenth century for a week. I agreed, out of curiosity. I had never taken part in any of the dramatics at school, and did not consider myself a possible actor. But I was a keen patron of all the Guild’s productions, and thought it would be fun to penetrate behind the curtain.

  Josephine Preston Peabody’s play has not endured, but in its day it won an important prize, and was widely performed. It was in four acts, written in blank verse of impeccable Bostonian solemnity (Miss Peabody was a graduate of Radcliffe), and its theme was the splendid one of the conflict between good and evil. The Piper—he was of course the Pied Piper of legend—stole the children of the stingy town of Hamelin which had refused to pay him for charming away its rats, but after immense blank-verse inner conflict, he allowed them to come back. The play was rich in characters, inevitably including a lame child, and of course this role was played by a girl, for the combination of an affliction with virgin femininity was potent at the time, and nightly at our performances tears flowed almost from the moment Elsie Polson hobbled on the stage with her pathetic little crutch.

  I was not of an age to be moved by children, and I thought Elsie a little pill, for she took on airs backstage, and even eyed us poor humble “extras” with scorn. No, my eyes were fixed on Miss Wollerton, who played Barbara, the lovely daughter of the Burgomeister, and who, as the drama unfolds, becomes the wife of Michael the Sword Eater, one of the mountebank companions of the Piper. In the scene where Miss Wollerton danced, as if under enchantment, to the sound of the pipe, I thought I had never seen anything more exquisite.

  The star of the piece, he who played the large-souled Piper, was Mervyn Rentoul, a big, fine-looking man capable of heaving Elsie Polson into an upstairs window without unseemly exertion. Mr. Rentoul was a man of actor-like appearance (for this was still in the days when actors were expected to have good looks, or failing that, distinction) and his voice was rich and expressive, facts of which he was perhaps a little too aware. I thought him a very fine actor indeed, but now I realize that he was of the line that descended from Irving, in which descent all the beauty and diablerie of that great player had been lost, and only the mannerisms—grunting, eye-flashing, and gnawing the nether lip—remained. I began to doubt Mr. Rentoul during the seven performances we gave of the play.

  I was lurking in the wings, although that was strictly forbidden, during the great culmination of Act Three, where the Piper, grovelling before a wayside crucifix, wrestles with his soul and at last is defeated by the greater power of Christ. The theatre was full, and Mervyn Rentoul was letting them have it hot off the stove. I became aware of a figure standing just behind me, and I looked over my shoulder apprehensively, thinking it was the Assistant Stage Manager come to drive me away. But it was Darcy Dwyer, who was playing the minor role of the Burgomeister in which, his devotees in the Guild assured one another, he was quite thrown away. But there it was; he was not tall enough to boost Elsie Polson into an upstairs window (a telling piece of “business” in Act Four) and so—thrown away in a part almost anybody might have played. Well, not anybody, but one of the older men of the company, who were numerous. As the clamour of Mervyn Rentoul’s soul-struggle rose to a climax, he caught my eye and held it, and as Rentoul succumbed to the divine power with a sob, Dwyer winked.

  It was a sophisticated wink, not one of your grimacing winks that contorts the whole of one side of the face. It was the slightest descent of the upper lid of the left eye, but it spoke eloquently of gentlemanly derision. It said, as plainly as speech, that Rentoul was a Ham. For me, it was a moment of enlightenment, in which I became Dwyer’s slave, and remained so for some years.

  (6)

  When irony first makes itself known in a young man’s life, it can be like his first experience of getting drunk; he has met with a powerful thing which he does not know how to handle. Of course I had been aware of irony in its superficial form, because Brocky made great use of it; but he was not a master, a subtle and gentle employer of mockery in almost every aspect of life, as was Dwyer; it was something Brocky had learned, not flesh of his flesh. Later, when I thought I had become wiser, I tried to find out what irony really is, and discovered that some ancient writer on poetry had spoken of “Ironia, which we call the drye mock,” and I cannot think of a better term for it: the drye mock. Not sarcasm, which is like vinegar, or cynicism, which is so often the voice of disappointed idealism, but a delicate casting of a cool and illuminating light on life, and thus an enlargement. The ironist is not bitter, he does not seek to undercut everything that seems worthy or serious, he scorns the cheap scoring-off of the wisecracker. He stands, so to speak, somewhat at one side, observes and speaks with a moderation which is occasionally embellished with a flash of controlled exaggeration. He speaks from a certain depth, and thus he is not of the same nature as the wit, who so often speaks from the tongue and no deeper. The wit’s desire is to be funny; the ironist is only funny as a secondary achievement.

  One must have a disposition for irony, but it does not come without practice; like really good violin-playing, it must be practised every day. It seemed to me when I met Dwyer that I had the disposition,
but I was an unpractised hand and, like a beginner on the fiddle, I suppose my squawks and screeches were painful to those around me.

  Oh, I have been a fool! Have I at last outgrown my folly? My occasional hours with Esme, where she probes my memory and my sensibilities with the blunt end of her reporter’s pencil, hint to me that though I have become a more complicated fool, the fool that I was as a youth still lingers somewhere inside me. I have not seen that inquisitive young woman for several weeks, but I know she will return. She smells a mouse about St. Aidan’s, and she is cunning in laying out her cheese for that mouse.

  (7)

  “So you had a spell as an actor in your student days?”

  “A modest one. I had to be moderate because after I got my B.A. I entered the medical faculty and in those days the medical faculty didn’t like you to waste time on anything that wasn’t medicine.”

  “In those days, you say. Have they changed?”

  “Yes, greatly. In my day you got into medical school because you had high marks in your undergraduate work. That, and nothing else. Now they give much more consideration to what you are and what you’ve done. At Harvard, for instance, a candidate who hasn’t some enthusiasm for politics, or the arts, or sport, or some science other than medical science doesn’t stand a chance.”

  “They want a rounded person.”

  “If you put it like that, yes.”

  “Weren’t the people you went to medical school with rounded?”

  “I suppose some of them were. But it didn’t matter. Getting the vast amount of information that goes with Anatomy into your head and keeping it there meant far more than a taste for pictures or foreign affairs. But by means of an elaborate range of mnemonics, some of them witty, and some obscene, and a few both, it could be managed. For instance, I can still recall that ‘Some Inherit Valuable Possessions And Can Find Lucrative Foreign Investments Constantly Available,’ the initial letter of which give the points of the Right Atrium of the heart—Superior caval opening, Interior caval opening, etc. The strain on memory in Anatomy, the cynicism that seemed to underlie Pharmacology, the toughness demanded by dissecting—it took a strong constitution and it changed your outlook on the world. I remember once meeting a fellow I knew in my year, and asking him what he had been doing. “Nothing special,” he said; “took off a woman’s head this morning, then I had lunch, and now I’ve really got to get down to the anatomy of the hand.” That kind of thing. I met him again recently, nearly forty years later. He’s made a big name as a surgeon and his divorced wife owns an almost-Picasso. But whether he’s rounded or not I really couldn’t say.”

  “But you were rounded. You were an actor.”

  “I was a great reader in my childhood. I knew a lot of poetry, not all of it good, but there is an astonishing amount of nutrition in second-rate poetry. So I suppose I was a little rounder than many in my year, without being positively globular. I loved the theatre. Still do.”

  “Let’s get back to St. Aidan’s. You knew this man Dwyer, who sang in the choir?”

  That is a meagre way of putting it, Esme. Devoted by day as I was to my medical studies, I seemed to live in Dwyer’s pocket during my limited hours of freedom. I was apprentice to the ironist.

  The theatre was a good place to study and to practise irony, and even as a medical student I hung around the university stage and became a sort of tolerated underling of the Players’ Guild. A deeper irony than simple merriment underlay what went on as the plays were rehearsed and offered to their audiences. The painted and costumed figures acting out their appointed destinies in carefully calculated light seemed to be all that there was to the totality of the play. But just as much that was vital to every piece took place in the coulisses, where those who controlled the mood of the light, the thunder and lightning, the bells and trumpet-calls, and who thrust the necessary “properties” into the hands of the actors as they waited for their cues, and signalled the fall of the curtain when enough had been said, were greater figures of authority. I learned the deep satisfaction of seeing the play complete, with the illusion, the poetry, and the magic balanced against the Stage Management which set and kept it all in motion. These were the two sides of a coin, the Ying and the Yang, the opposites which Heraclitus insists are eternally flowing together and balancing one another. The result in the theatre was art, but not always fully completed art.

  In time I became a frequent visitor to Dwyer’s apartment, or as we called it in those days, his flat. It was small, but it had character and charm; because it was small, everything had to be chosen with care and there was no room for anything extraneous. There were a lot of books, but none on tables or on the floor; there were pictures, but they all seemed to be moving in the same direction, so to speak; nothing of the untidy heaping-up of what appealed to various aspects of a wandering taste, as at the Gilmartin house; in a tiny kitchen Dwyer prepared good things to eat, but never in excess, and there was good drink as well, but never more than the host thought it right for a guest to have. I never heard anybody ask for anything in the flat; all was provided, and it was ample and right, but there could be no choice; there was no space for choice.

  Not that there was anything niggardly or domineering about it. Dwyer made everything seem so natural and right that it would have been improper to suggest any alteration. He was the most generous of hosts, but he knew precisely what he meant to do and he did it, and it seemed that it could not possibly have been otherwise.

  The guests, of whom there could never have been more than three, apart from myself, were usually men; the only woman I saw there more than once was Elaine Wollerton, whom I worshipped and who did not seem to be in the least aware of it. I call her a woman but she was what we called in those days a girl—for the word had not become an offence against feminist sensibility. Was she a virgin? I pondered much on this question, because in those romantic days I set great store by virginity, and no amount of Freudian reading ever made me think ill of it. She was about twenty-two or -three, I suppose, and thus a year older than myself, but as girls normally do, she had a worldly wisdom far beyond mine. She thought of herself as an actress, even though she was an amateur one, and her conversation had the freedom popularly supposed to go with the profession. She smoked, which was not remarkable; she swore in good mouth-filling oaths, but never smutty ones, and that was uncommon. She knew the prosody of profanity, as the Montreal and Salterton girls I had met did not: she knew the tune, as well as the words. She was not a raving beauty, but she had fine eyes and a Pre-Raphaelite air of being too good for this world while at the same time exhibiting much of what this world desires in a woman, and I suppose I gaped at her and behaved clownishly.

  Or so it seems to me now. Nobody remarked on it at the time, so it cannot have been as palpable as it felt. Dwyer never told me to behave myself, and certainly he would have done so if I had been laughably callow. One remembers one’s youthful behaviour as nobody else does; one blushes for gaucheries nobody else has noticed.

  At first I wondered if there was some intimate relationship between Elaine and Darcy Dwyer, but even I was not so stupid as to keep that delusion for long. Dwyer was the kind of homosexual who greatly likes women’s company and whom women greatly like, without any active sexual involvement. I suppose Elaine was fond of him because he was more fun to be with than any of the young men who dangled after her, of which group I was one and far from Number One. Where Dwyer was there was lots of sex in the air, but it was not likely to manifest itself in any tedious action and that is a very agreeable state of affairs, as I myself came to think later in life. The erotic tease: very agreeable.

  It was in Dwyer’s flat that I learned how much more there is to sex than puffing and blowing and snorting and scrambling about in the bed, or on the seashore, or in the woods. I would not say a word against the joys of physical sex, but it is not the whole story, or even half of it, as every wise man’s son doth know, my dear Shakespeare.

  Greatly daring, I brought this u
p one night when I was accompanying Miss Wollerton to her streetcar; we all used the street railway in those happy days.

  “I suppose Darcy is a homosexual,” said I.

  “You’d better not let him hear you say that, if you want to keep in with him,” said she. “He loathes the word.”

  “What does he prefer to call it?”

  “Not that. He calls it a barbarously hybrid word, and so it is, for the homo is Greek and the sexual is Latin. There’s a kind of aptness in the word, really. An unnatural union. No; if Darcy has to speak of it—and I don’t advise you to bring it up—he prefers the term ‘invert.’ ”

  “I’ll watch my step.”

  “Not only about that. I think he has a kind of lech for you, but whether it’s just a protective, educative dry lech, or the messier kind, I don’t know. But perhaps you do?”

  “It never entered my head.”

  “Make room for it now. You’re not such a bad-looking fellow. Has he ever talked to you about plainsong hymns?”

  “Never.”

  “Well, if he does, mind your eye. Do you know a fathead called Archie Featherstone?”

  “No.”

  “I was at the flat one night when Darcy was putting the spell on Archie. He’d bring out some rare hymn-book with Latin hymns in it, and push them at the poor sap. He’d say, ‘You’re recently enough from school, Archie, to catch the Virgilian echo in this one. Astonishing how the tradition endured, as I’m sure you know.’ Of course Archie didn’t know but the flattery was going to his head, I could see. Flattery is the real expert’s technique of seduction. Beats knee-squeezing forty different ways.”