The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  “Is that so? Thanks for telling me.”

  “Aha, the drye mock. You’re not kidding me, young Hullah. You’re learning a lot from Darcy. Just take care you don’t pay too much for your lessons. Or maybe you don’t mind?”

  “Elaine! You don’t think that?”

  “Of course I don’t, darling. I’m only teasing. You’re a sweet boy.”

  “Whatever happened to Archie? Wasn’t he a sweet boy?”

  “I rather think Archie flunked his test. Not really Virgilian. I once mentioned him to Darcy, but he just said, ‘It’s no use crying over spilt milk.’ Indicative?”

  “Past indicative.”

  Of course it is pleasant to be called a sweet boy, but it does not seem to lead to anything significant with the speaker. “Darling” meant nothing. All the Guild called one another “darling.”

  I understood that Miss Wollerton had better fish to fry than I was, but that she liked me, and that was something of comfort. And I never ceased to marvel at the effect she produced by mingling her Pre-Raphaelite beauty with a racy sort of speech. The louche-angelic, shall I call it? It was a special charm, not imitable by the unskilled.

  (8)

  A frequent caller at Dwyer’s flat was Mr. Daubigny, ex-Commander in the Royal Navy and a master at Colborne. He insisted that I drop all schoolboy manners and call him Jock, although I knew very little about him except that he was rumoured to have eaten human flesh in the company of cannibals. He did not look like an Englishman, nor do I believe he was so; his appearance was distinguished and he wore a single eyeglass, which must have been the only one in Toronto at that time. His accent was slightly foreign—voice produced from some portion of his throat that was neither English nor Canadian.

  He taught German at Colborne, and when Faust was coming up in the season offered by the Players’ Guild he was often with Dwyer, taking him through the Goethe original.

  The Players’ Guild built its seasons with an eye to pleasing everybody, and Faust was to please the University. It had already done Mary Rose successfully, for Barrie was still a new playwright in Toronto, and Miss Wollerton was exactly right for the wistful heroine who is lost on The Island That Liked To Be Visited. Dwyer had no role in that sweetmeat. Nor had he been cast in Pomander Walk, a nugacity written by the industrious Louis Napoleon Parker, which had been a great success in New York in 1911. (The Guild did not blast the sensitivities of its audience with too much modernity; Barrie and Galsworthy were about as daringly contemporary as they chose to be.) Faust was to be the heavyweight of the season, and long beforehand Dwyer had been promised the role of Mephistopheles. He was determined to make it memorable.

  The translation chosen by the Guild for its production was by a Toronto lady of an earlier generation, and she was in a dither of expectancy and requited authorship. It was not, Daubigny said, a bad piece of work, but it was not as racy and colloquial as the original; few translators capture Goethe’s distinction, which he manages to achieve in an easy vocabulary, and Miss Swanwick had been too much in awe of the great man. Dwyer was determined to rid his role of Swanwickery, as he called it, and Daubigny was to help him.

  “Poor Miss Swanwick was too much a lady to cope with Goethe,” said Jock. “He hadn’t much use for ladies, except as audiences.”

  “I’ve talked to Forsyth, and he very generously says I can alter my lines, within reason, to get an effect nearer the original.”

  They spent many happy hours over the work, disputing and searching for the right word, and opposing Jock’s real comprehension of German to Darcy’s powerful feelings about Mephistopheles. Indeed, it seemed to me that Mephistopheles was eating him up, as great works of art can do to their devotees.

  This led to an odd and not really reputable adventure, in which Dwyer involved me simply because I was too curious to resist.

  “The actor’s art is a very great one,” he said one night as we were drinking Scotch after one of the translation sessions. “It isn’t really appreciated at its true worth. Mark my choice of words—its true worth. Of course movie stars have battalions of half-baked adorers, but who thinks acting in the movies is real acting, and who values the adoration of idiots? But the praise that is given to a great Hamlet, or a great Othello, or the infinitely rarer great Lear, is always diminished by the feeling that the chap simply goes on the stage and says what Shakespeare has written for him and draws his sword when the director tells him to. What did Mencken say? That there is something inherently disgusting in the actor’s profession? I suppose he was thinking of matinee idols, who can be pretty disgusting. But the actor—why is the man who gives us Shakespeare or Ibsen or Strindberg [Dwyer pronounced this name as ‘Streenberry’ which was the insider’s pronunciation and thought to be truly Swedish] thought to be less an artist than the man who gives us Beethoven, or Chopin, or Debussy in a way that speaks truly what the master intended? Eh? Why?”

  “Oh, their lives are not so hard,” said Jock. “I believe they are paid very well.”

  “Yes, but what honour have they? What continuing gratitude? How many statues have been raised to great actors?”

  “There’s a very nice thing of Goldoni in Venice.”

  “Not an actor. A playwright.”

  “There’s a statue of Irving in London.” I remembered it from an early visit with my parents.

  “Erected by his fellow-actors. Don’t wait for the state or the public to do it. They won’t.”

  “Maybe you should start an agitation for more statues of actors,” said Jock, taking a pull at his whisky.

  “Precisely what I have in mind. And I think I can count on some devout Toronto Methodists to help me,” said Dwyer.

  “What sort of joke is this?”

  “No joke at all, my dear Jock. Will you take a little walk with me? I have something to show you.”

  We went with him, and as we crossed Queen’s Park Dwyer held forth, waving his walking-stick like a tour-guide, on the many statues that stand in front of the Ontario Legislative Building.

  “Nineteenth-century worthies,” he said. “Premiers of this province, cloaked in the respectability of their frock-coats and in some cases their spectacles. Did you ever see an uglier gang of good citizens? As works of art they inspire disgust. As memorials, they are nothing. They display none of what made the man distinct from his fellow-creatures—if anything did. The heads, we may assume, are likenesses, produced by some toilsome artisan with a pair of calipers and a feeble concept of the human spirit. These are, in so far as they are anything at all, impeccable depictions of nineteenth-century bad tailoring. Bronze pairs of pants, bronze boots, like those dreadful babies’ shoes that sentimental people have ‘eternalized’ at Birks. The frock-coats are lovingly moulded, and what do they say? They say, ‘I’m an expensive frock-coat, worthy to be preserved for the ages.’ But are these effigies evocative? Do they lift the heart and inspire the young? Would you tolerate one of them as a garden gnome? Don’t trouble to answer.

  “Aha, but here”—we were now on the west side of the park—“here we have something that looks like a statue. It has impact. It has grace. It is not astonishing in terms of statuary, but it makes those bronze statesmen look like wooden Indians. Look at the pose. A man in eighteenth-century dress, wigged and ruffled, stands pointing rhetorically toward the book he holds in his hand.

  “Who is he? Read the inscription. He is Robert Raikes and his dates are 1735 to 1811. Who is he? He is the man who instituted Sunday Schools in his native Gloucester, starting a movement that swept the world, spreading the Gospel and the arts of reading and writing among the very young, who were still unable to comprehend the homilies that were offered in churches. A great man? Undoubtedly. Why does he have a statue here, in Canada, in Toronto, in the place where we set up graven images of our political gods, who are the only gods Canada really acknowledges? Because the Sunday School Union decided that it should be so, and put up the money to have a replica made of the statue of Raikes that stands on the
Victoria Embankment in London, where all the down-and-outs, and broken men and women may see an image of the man who was their friend.

  “So there he stands. Exemplary. Deserving. A man firm in the hearts of all who hold Sunday Schools dear. But—now I am getting to our point—who does he look like?”

  “He could be quite a few people,” said Jock. “There is something about having your statue taken that drains the individuality out of you, unless you happen to have an Epstein on the job.”

  “Weren’t we talking about actors? What actor does he remind you of?”

  Neither Jock nor I had an answer.

  “David Garrick, of course! Forget Raikes and think of Garrick. The pose, pointing at the book—mightn’t it be his copy of Hamlet? The stout but graceful figure—isn’t it Garrick as he is described? Garrick, and if his name was written at the base, you would see that it was Garrick all over!”

  “Perhaps, but it isn’t Garrick,” said Jock.

  “Await the event,” said Dwyer, and would say no more on the subject.

  I suppose it was a month or more later that Dwyer insisted that Jock and I spend a translating evening with him, and it was after midnight that he rose and said, “The hour has struck. Come with me.”

  Once again we walked across Queen’s Park, but this time Dwyer had nothing to say. As we drew near the statue of Raikes, we saw a Ford truck parked a little way off. Traffic was scant.

  When we were at the base of the statue a man appeared from the truck. “I’ll need somebody to give me a hand,” said he.

  “You’re the one for that, Hullah,” said Dwyer. So I followed the man to the truck and helped him to unload a large rectangular slab, the edges of which were guarded by cardboard fitments; the face of it was covered with paper. We took it to where Dwyer and Jock were standing, and then the man and I heaved it into place against the plinth where Raikes’s name was marked out in bronze letters. The man spread the plinth with a coating of cement, or it may have been a special glue. Quickly and expertly he produced his electric drill, connected it with a battery, and proceeded to bore holes in the face of the plinth. Then, with fine bronze spikes with flowered heads, the slab was finally fixed to the plinth. It was a job of exquisite craftsmanship. I suppose the work did not take more than twenty minutes, and when it was done Dwyer stepped forward, stripped the paper from the rectangle, and there was a piece of what I suppose was thick frosted glass, which looked wondrously like the stone of the plinth, and in which an inscription had been cut.

  DAVID GARRICK

  1717–1779

  Actor

  I am disappointed by that

  stroke of death which has

  eclipsed the gaiety of

  nations and impoverished

  the public stock of harmless

  pleasure.

  DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

  Erected by lovers of the

  Player’s Art

  “There, a good night’s work, I think, and a great wrong righted,” said Dwyer.

  The man, who had scarcely spoken, now approached him.

  “Four hundred and fifty was the price we agreed on, including erection?” said Darcy. The man nodded. “I’ve added a little extra, in appreciation of your good work. And remember, not a word to a soul.”

  “No fear,” said the man. “I could get into a lot of trouble about this.”

  “Now let’s get to hell out of here before the police arrive,” said Darcy.

  But no police arrived then or for long after, so far as I know. Which raises the question: Who looks at the inscriptions on public statuary?

  (9)

  I see that I have scampered through several years of my university life without a mention of Charlie or Brocky; if Esme were here she would demand to know what became of them. Had I dropped them or had they dropped me? Neither; simply the familiar experience that in youth chance separates us from even the closest friends, and in the excitement of finding new ones we do not greatly notice the loss. Is this shallowness of spirit? No, in youth one must get on with one’s life, lickety-split, and what might be callous indifference in an older person is simply the way in which circumstances fall out.

  For a time I received long, detailed letters from Brocky about his adventures at Waverley, which did not seem especially interesting to me; I had my own adventures. The affair with Julia ravelled out and he was tedious about that. Charlie was in Quebec, at a university for English-speaking students that had a well-known theological faculty, and by various twists and turns he had been able to enter it; his engaging personality at interviews, the intervention of a friendly bishop, and the plain fact that candidates from cultivated homes were not as numerous as they had once been in the Anglican Church, stood him in good stead, and he was on his way to being a parson. He wrote from time to time; his descriptions of his fellow-theologues were funny and I especially relished his tales about their efforts to show themselves as tough, as lecherous, as foul-mouthed as any other students. It appeared that on Saturday nights some of the dominant figures among them declared their intention to go into town and explore the French part of it, expecting to “tear off a branch,” which was the current slang for sexual intercourse with a prostitute. But Charlie—charitable, funny Charlie—knew very well that they sneaked into pubs and sat in a dark corner, nursing one beer, and returned to college full of vague hints, but with all their branches still in place. Charlie never wrote of his health, so I supposed he must be all right.

  I wrote letters, too, but not readily. I had so much to do, and life was opening up to me in so many new ways that I did not want to sit at a desk and distil my experience into a letter. I wrote a lot, making copious notes of what I was learning and whatever seemed relevant from what I was reading, and my appetite for letter-writing was nibbled away in that sort of work.

  My bedside book—not always, but often—was the Religio Medici Charlie had given me. It brought a sweet humanism to the gross materialism of much medical instruction.

  There is no point in going into detail about my medical studies. What is relevant is fresh in my memory, and what proved not to be so has been banished to some dark cupboard in my mind—not wholly lost, but not at my fingers’ ends. None of it would be of interest to Esme, or of use in her investigation of a past Toronto. I was lucky in having a good memory and the drudgery of Anatomy, for instance, was within my scope without undue strain. Very early I determined that Surgery was not to be my special work; not that I couldn’t do it, in so far as I had to do it to pass my examinations. Nor was it that I was repelled by the rough stuff that goes on in the operating-room—the sawing and hammering, before much delicate work may be approached; I could saw and gouge with the best of them. But I was no surgeon by nature. It demands an extraversion of temperament which was not mine, and the irreversibility of what was done sometimes struck me as mischievous.

  What I really liked was diagnosis, and early in my work I showed an aptitude for it. I knew that some of my professors had an eye on me, but for what purpose nobody said. The spirit of the medical school was firmly hierarchical; you crept upward, begging acceptance of the greater ones above you, questioning only when questioning seemed to be asked for, and if you had the makings of a True Believer, a Saved Soul, in you, you acquired a detestation of patent medicines, of osteopaths and chiropractors, of homeopaths and herbalists, of all quacks, midwives, and pretenders to medical knowledge, which was the property of your brotherhood, and you knew with whatever modesty lay in you, that you were a creature apart. The world, for you, was becoming a world divided between patients and healers.

  It was odd, to me, what links were left unjoined in our training. We were assured, with sincerity, that our task in life was to relieve suffering. But never once did I hear anyone explain that the word patient really means “a sufferer.” I suppose it was because so few of them groaned or wept or exhibited gross malfunctioning; the majority of them just sat patiently waiting for something to be done to them. But if you took a little
time to talk to them—which as a student you rarely had an opportunity to do—you discovered that they were indeed suffering, and that often the suffering was simple fear.

  I was impressed by what everybody else in my student group took as a joke, when we had a chance to take a peep at the bottom of a professor from the University, who had a fistula of the anus.

  “We can get this right, Idris,” said the professor of surgery, who was demonstrating to us what this ailment involved. “You’ll soon be right as rain.”

  “God grant it may be so,” said Professor Rowlands, obviously putting on a music-hall Welsh accent, “but don’t suppose I count on it. We Welsh, you know—we’re convinced that if ever we get into a hospital, the chances are strong that we’ll never get out of it.”

  The surgeon laughed, obligingly, and so did we students, sycophantically, but I was the only one who sensed the truth beneath the joke. When educated people joke, it is a good idea to look at the underside of the joke; there may be a significant truth under there which less educated people could not cloak in a jest. Forty years later I know that what the professor said is by no means uncommon and is by no means confined to the Welsh.

  What made me think that? A natural disposition to look at the underside of everything, I suppose, greatly encouraged by my exploration of Faust, undertaken in Dwyer’s flat, under the guidance of Commander Daubigny. Goethe knew the secrets of the human heart, and would have made a fine physician if he had not been called to greater things. As it was, he was no trifler as a scientist.