The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  One night, Mervyn Rentoul made one of our number. He was to play the great Dr. Faust, and, like every actor of that part, he faced the formidable task of topping his Mephistopheles. It is asserted by some critics that when Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet he had to kill off Mercutio at the beginning of Act Three or Romeo would never have stood a chance of dominating the play. (Poor Romeo—between Mercutio and Juliet he has his work cut out for him!) The situation in Faust is even worse: how many Fausts can outshine even a decent Mephistopheles? With the Devil and the pathetic Margaret sharing the stage, Faust seems rather a dull dog. So Rentoul was looking for every advantage that lay within his grasp, and because that was the kind of actor he was, he thought it could best be done through his appearance and accoutrements.

  “I’ll need some sort of stick, I suppose,” he said.

  “Are you going to totter until I renew your youth?” said Dwyer. “Better ask Angus to get you something durable, and long.”

  “I was thinking more of something that could later be my magician’s wand,” said Rentoul. “I need something to stamp me as a magician, and not simply a scholar.”

  “Get Angus to provide you with a proper physician’s stick,” said Jock. “The veritable caduceus of Hermes, with serpents twining round it.”

  “Don’t know it,” said Rentoul.

  “Oh, yes you do. The staff with two snakes curling up it. You don’t know it? You disappoint me. Listen—it’s thousands of years old, and it comes from the days when gods trod the earth. Once when Hermes walked abroad he came on two snakes fighting furiously. To make peace and establish balance, or reconciliation or whatever, he thrust his staff between the snakes and they crawled up it, still hissing, but this time in concord, and they have remained twined about the staff of the healer to this day. And what are the snakes? You could call them Knowledge and Wisdom.”

  “Aha, yes—knowledge of course,” said Rentoul, who liked to show himself quick in the uptake. It was also a way of keeping other people from speaking too long and distracting attention from himself.

  “No, not knowledge alone,” said Jock, who had been a teacher and, I suppose, a naval officer too long to be easily choked off. “Knowledge and Wisdom and they are not the same, because Knowledge is what you are taught, but Wisdom is what you bring to it. Here’s Jon, he’s right in the middle of it at this moment. He’s being taught, and what is he being taught? Science, of course. Very fine, very splendid, very indisputable until somebody comes along with a new notion that squelches the old one. But he is also bringing to it the other snake, and we’ll call it Humanism, though that doesn’t rule out the gods. Don’t forget that Hermes was a god, and descended from the gods of Egypt. These gods have not died, you know, because of whatever they teach in Darcy’s church. They, are alive, and you have only to show yourself worthy and they’ll hear you.”

  “Go on, Jock,” said I; “you’ll turn my pretty head with flattery. Me, a humanist? Get away!”

  “You don’t know what you are, shrimp,” said Jock. “I tell you you’re a humanist, and if not what are you doing here listening to me explain Goethe to these stupid actors? What does the great Goethe say?

  Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie

  Und grun des Lebens goldner Baum.

  “Translate, Jon, translate. Did you do four years German with me and you can’t translate that? Come on!”

  “It means, ‘My dear friend, all theory is grey—’ ”

  “Yes, yes; theory. We can’t live without it and we’re sunk if we live with nothing else. Go on.”

  “Life’s golden tree alone is green? Correct, sir?”

  “Correct, Hullah. Go to the top of the class. Easy to translate. Not easy to understand. The golden tree of life. Experience? Not just that. Experience understood, and that means quiet, calm consideration.”

  “That’s one of my lines,” said Dwyer. “I say it to that stupid student who comes for advice when I’m dressed up in Faust’s doctoral robe. I have a notion for giving it a special emphasis.”

  “Make sure you get it across loud and clear,” said Jock. “It’s what every university needs to have burnt in letters of fire on every lecture-room wall.”

  “I’ll speak to Angus about those snakes tomorrow,” said Rentoul. He understood visual effects better than philosophical truths, I think. But not a bad actor for all of that.

  Speak to Angus he certainly did, and Angus was not pleased, because it was fixed in his head that he knew better about costume and design than anybody else within miles of the Players’ Guild. So Angus flounced and pouted, but at last said he would see what he could do.

  Angus was a great enlargement of experience for me, because he illustrated how haphazardly Fate attributes names to her unoffending children. Angus McGubbin: a Scots giant, red-haired and scowling—wouldn’t you think so? But though Angus was well over six feet tall, he looked not to be more than a foot and a half wide in his widest place. He weaved from side to side when you talked to him, and seemed always to be swaying in a warm breeze; his complexion was green—not a green such as one sees sometimes in patients who have been dosed with silver medicines; on close inspection I discovered that this iridescence was artificial: he powdered himself green, and then painted a blush on the cheek-bones and a dusky, red mouth. Strange, but looked at coolly, not a bad effect. He wore a moustache of a thinness and elegance of curve rarely seen except on the movie screen, and he assisted it with a black pencil; his manner was weary, wincing, winsome when he thought it might provoke a response in kind. Indeed, Angus was the kind of homosexual that in those days was called a “fruit.” The delight of his life was his costume department at the theatre; soft fabrics, velvets and silks, furs and chamois moved him almost to ecstasy; he delighted in dressing all players, but men especially; it was a lesser sodomy to have Angus measure one’s inner leg. I never saw him outside the theatre and perhaps he lived there.

  No less astonishing than Angus was his wife, Vera. So tall, so dark, so slim, so pallid, she might have been his sister more credibly than his wife. But wife she was and they were devoted to one another. To achieve a perfect balance between them, she should have been a Lesbian, but she was not, and I doubt if she was sexually anything at all, though she was as green as he and not unattractive; she had a ducky little moustache of her own. She designed scenery, and helped Angus make properties. They were talented and because they loved their work they were cheap, so the Guild was lucky to have them.

  One night, when perhaps I had had a little too much whisky, I raised the subject of Angus at Dwyer’s, because I wanted to find out what Darcy would say about him. Angus and Darcy were both homosexuals, but could hardly have been more different. Angus, such a howling fruit, Darcy, though of conspicuous elegance, not even faintly frugiferous.

  “Angus gives vice a bad name” said Jock.

  “He does worse; he makes it laughable,” said Darcy. “And that is a dangerous form of sin.”

  “Are there forms of sin that aren’t dangerous?” I said, hoping it was something clever, but not having time to weigh it before it popped out of my mouth.

  “Without getting into the whole question of what is sin, let’s just call it folly,” said Dwyer. “Angus turns his sin into folly, and so silly people think it doesn’t really matter. But it does matter. Sin is very serious business.”

  “Ah, the sin that I have seen,” said Jock, who, like me, had been getting into the drink. “All the world over. In my time I have been in three navies. Did you know that? Yes; first the Royal Navy, when I was young and had a splendid torpedo beard, in imitation of Georgie Gingerbeard, who was a fine sailor and made a pretty good king. Then, because I spoke French as readily as English—my Bosanquet family, you understand—I was lent to the French Navy as a liaison officer, and by some muddle which I never understood, they lent me to the Russians for eight months because I spoke elegant German, and anybody in the Russian Navy who could even read a barometer was a German. I was—yes, I assur
e you I was—an officer in the Russian Navy just before the Great War. And in those navies I travelled the globe, and I saw some things that would make your eyes start out of your skull, and was involved in certain things which I now look back on with astonishment, but without any real regret. Sins! That was why I ended up as a schoolmaster. In a boys’ school the sins are all so trivial and easily comprehensible. Teaching has been a great rest from the world. And from sin.”

  “Jock, is it true what used to be said at Colborne, that you have eaten human flesh?”

  “Oh, certainly, but that wasn’t sin. That was necessity. When in Rome—you know? When among cannibals—I was shipwrecked with half a dozen other fellows—you eat whatever happens to be in the pot and you don’t criticize the menu, or you might just be elected to provide an alternative.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Not unlike horse, but not so sweet. Rather a bitter taste, as I recall it. But it would have been different if it had been a white man; we eat so much sugar I understand we make a nasty table-dish. Like a corpse, the true cannibals say. All that about missionaries being eaten is greatly exaggerated. They were prepared for the feast, but only a lick or two was consumed. Our diet—the Englishman’s diet—makes for very poor feasting. Cannibals eat one another to possess whatever virtue or excellence the dead man had. They don’t usually think missionaries are worth consuming because they don’t want to be like them.… No, no, that was not sin. It was social custom. I have been a connoisseur of sins in my time.”

  “And where do you rank Angus?”

  “Now you are talking like a Canadian: because Angus is unlike you, he must be wrong in some way, and his get-up suggests unacceptable behaviour. Unacceptable to whom? Anybody who is anybody is likely to be unacceptable to the nobodies. Look at our friend Darcy, here; the most obstreperous man in his religious observances you will meet anywhere. To go for a walk with him is to draw stares. If he passes a church in which he suspects that the Sacrament is reserved, he crosses himself and gabbles a Kyrie; if he meets a pair of nuns he sweeps off his hat to the danger of all bystanders, because nuns are the Brides of Christ and Mrs. Christ must be so honoured. His fastings are the wonder of anybody who has ever asked him to a meal; he never seems to fast from wine. But between him and Angus what is there to choose—supposing one is God, of course. They are both very much to the left of God’s word as he sets it forth in Leviticus and various other gritty guides to conduct; when God writes in English—which he does with remarkable poetic force—I believe the word He uses is ‘abomination.’ But Darcy does not paint his face or wriggle his arse and so he is not looked upon as a sinner—simply as an eccentric. And a dear fellow. I’ll just refresh my glass, if I may, Darcy.”

  “Go ahead, Jock. The drink talks amusingly in you. But let’s be frank. You speak as though Angus and I were slightly different but essentially similar specimens of some subspecies of humanity. How would you like it if I said that you and every other retired naval officer were really the same creature—?”

  “God forbid, my dear fellow! That would be abomination indeed!”

  “Precisely. And I won’t be lumped with Angus, who is a simple, blatant fruit and loves every minute of it. Loves the danger of being beaten up by thugs who reassure themselves about their own manliness by punching and kicking him. Except that I am sensitive to the beauty and charm of young men, and on a vastly superior aesthetic level, mind you, I have nothing in common with him. What appearance do I present?”

  “Well, you are not the best judge of that, my dear fellow. But when you are not crossing and waving your hat you look like what you are—a banker.”

  “Exactly. Like the head of the foreign exchange department of my bank, and as level-headed, trustworthy a chap as you’d meet anywhere.”

  “That may be going a bit far. Since you began thinking so much about Mephistopheles you have an air of—what shall I say—of not being quite what you seem, but I assure you not an air of being in the least what we are talking about. A whiff of brimstone, shall we say?”

  “Thank you Jock. That’s exactly what I want—on the stage, of course, but I suppose something is bound to spill over—a whiff of brimstone. And don’t worry too much about the Bible.”

  “I don’t, I assure you.”

  “A fascinating book, but not the guide to conduct that extreme Protestants suppose it is. If God wrote it, what pens did he command? Some rather tough old desert characters, who ate a terrible diet, and give no evidence of having read anything except what their fellow-zealots had written. Writers, in the main, with a gigantic sense of grievance, which is very attractive, of course, because everybody has a store of grievance tucked away, waiting for something to call it forth. I’m speaking of the Old Testament. When you get to the New, another air blows through the Good Book. A Greek air. If our Blessed Saviour had not been so devoted to the cause of his own people, He would have got on admirably with the Greeks, because He had a lot of their spirit. And the Greeks had plenty of room for people like me—worshippers of beauty who find it in the male, without in the least ignoring the part of it that inheres in the female.”

  “But the Bible is surely the foundation of the Church you devote so much of your best energies to,” said I, because all of this was taking me out of my depth.

  “I am a Church man, not a Bible man,” said Dwyer. “That’s where places like St. Aidan’s verge away from your Low Church God-shops. And the Church has a lot of room for Greek sophistication.”

  “But weren’t we talking about sin? Has the Church something to say about sin that the Bible didn’t say first?”

  “Oh, a great deal, my dear Pyke. The Church, like all great and successful rulers, has learned tolerance, which is not simply turning a blind eye to things you think are wrong. There is a lot of Law, you know, that isn’t the Law of the Prophets, and it even makes fleeting appearances in our law-courts right here in Toronto. Honeste vivere, alterum non laedere, suum cuique tribuere; Roman law, but it came down to them from the Greeks. Do you understand what I’ve said?”

  “I’m the only one here with a right to demand that Jon translate,” said Jock. “He understands, I expect, but you tell him, Darcy, and I’ll judge you on your translation.”

  “To live honourably, to injure no man, to render to each his own. How’s that?”

  “Very good. Top of the class.”

  “Good law and good Church, but doesn’t fit easily into the Bible, you see. The Roman concept of honour wasn’t a Hebrew idea at all, and they lambasted it as Pride, which to some extent it is. But Roman Law, and what the Church has taken from it, is for sophisticated, many-layered societies, and the Bible isn’t. It was for a cantankerous people who had to keep their heads above water by sticking together, if I may mix a metaphor.”

  “So the Church has a place for people like—well, like you,” said I, and was aware that for the first time Darcy and I were talking about something I hadn’t thought it polite to mention.

  “It had better have a place for people like me,” said Dwyer, “because it needs what we artists can give it. And when I say people like me, I don’t mean riff-raff like Angus; I mean Michelangelo, and Raphael, and scores of others, not forgetting the opprobriously named Sodoma. Musicians, it goes without saying. The people who have style. Because a Church with no style is a dismal affair, as is proven every Sunday in this godly city which smugly refers to itself as The City of Churches.”

  “But all the artists aren’t—”

  “Nobody said they were. Not all, or even most. But some conspicuous examples.”

  “Not Bach, Not Handel. Certainly not Dr. DeCourcy Parry.”

  “Certainly not, Pyke. Don’t be such a whole-hogger.”

  “No, no; but its just that people like you so often make people like me seem clumsy and crass and we have to struggle for our lives. Here’s Jock talking about being a connoisseur of sins, and here’s you talking about the Church as a guide to life that runs contrary to the Bi
ble, and I’m just a dumb medical student from Sioux Lookout who seems not to have a leg to stand on. All I can be sure of is Gray’s Anatomy, and that’s chilly comfort, especially after a morning in the dissection lab.”

  “Poor old Pyke,” said Dwyer, and refilled my glass. “Don’t worry so. Learn to enjoy the pleasures of talk for talk’s sake, without thinking you have to reshape your life every time a new idea comes along.”

  “What’s that silly song the boys are singing in the corridors?” said Jock, and burst into stentorian bass roarings:

  “Life is just a bowl of cherries,

  Don’t take it serious—

  It’s too mysterious—”

  “Precisely,” said Darcy, quenching this Russian outburst (because a few months in the Russian Navy seemed to have had a deep influence on Jock’s character); “precisely. All I’m getting at—apart from divorcing myself from Angus and his crew of Hallowe’en spooks and poufs—is that life needs style—style applied to everything—and religion is just the place to get it. Curious though that may seem to those whose spirits sink whenever religion is mentioned. Life is best lived according to a noble rhythm, under certain ethical restraints, and with certain metaphysical assumptions; the Church can offer that.”

  “Doesn’t philosophy offer it, without all the flummery?” said I, for that which had made them drunk had made me bold.

  “No, darling, philosophy doesn’t and you have only to look at philosophers’ wives, beginning with Xantippe, to see that it doesn’t. That’s because philosophy excludes poetry; and the Church is wide open to poetry. And that’s why I’m as happy as a sandboy.”

  “Why is a sandboy supposed to be happy? And what exactly is a sandboy?”

  But I received no answer. Both my gurus were asleep.

  (10)

  I really must put on the brakes or this Case Book, which I intend only as an aide-mémoire, will turn into one of those German Bildungsromanen, about the growth of a human spirit. Yet I suppose I cannot wholly escape it. My spirit was indeed growing under the guidance of Darcy and Jock, and when I look back now I see how very gentle and kind they were to me, though at the time I thought they were snubbing me and bringing me up every instant. It was not all gas and whisky. We had some good times, and now and then one of Darcy’s Mephistophelian practical jokes.