“Have a humbug, my dear,” he would say, approaching some thick-bodied woman who was too lazy to do kitchen work, and too stupid to do anything in an office. “Talk to me a little. Let me ask you a few questions.”
Of course he soon became known, and when he approached a girl she would shout, “Not for bloody humbugs!” and sweep past. Now and again the cry would go up, “Here comes the humbug man!” followed by laughter which Darcy said had a distinctly evil note. Sometimes men, ponces beyond a doubt, approached and we had to make a quick retreat.
Darcy did not himself approach the whores. His distaste for female sexuality, which never asserted itself with his women friends, became almost palpable when he encountered these street-women, who were repellent to anything but a starved appetite. As Jock sought confessions in return for humbugs, Darcy and I stood at a distance, and in our dark overcoats it was no wonder that the whores thought we must be informers, or perhaps the police themselves—cops whom they did not know and had not squared with money or with trade.
Darcy was not so simple as I thought him. Indeed I was the simple one, to suppose that he learned nothing at his work except the variabilities of foreign exchange. He knew about loans, and he knew about property values and mortgages. His bank held some mortgages relevant to the search for sin.
“What goes on in those houses? Officially we don’t know. But if a bank knew nothing except what comes to it from official sources it wouldn’t last long. The readiness with which the mortgage money is repaid is in itself enough to arouse suspicion. The only people who pay up so readily, so often before the due date, are either the small group of the scrupulously honest—who probably don’t go in for mortgages anyway—and those who don’t want investigations or questions.
“We have at least one mortgage on a house that offers children—quite small children—to interested clients. There are people, not numerous but enough, who are willing to rent their children to that house and collect without a word being said. Of course if the child is damaged there is hell to pay, but that side of things is taken care of. Did you know, Pyke, that there is a doctor who looks after such places? Rather heavily devoted to drugs himself, and so ordinary practice is out of his scope, but he can patch and mend in a few bawdy-houses, where some of our sober citizens may become a little rough. Not a pretty way to practise medicine, but it keeps him in funds for his indulgence. A damaged child comes dear.
“There are at least two others—I can speak only of those my bank knows—where rough stuff is offered, on an as-you-like-it basis. Do you want to be strapped down on a bed and walloped by naked wenches? It comes at a price. Do you want to wallop a naked wench? Expensive but possible. Do you simply want dirty talk, because your wife is a pillar of society and won’t let you say Shit when you stub your toe? There’s a dirty-talker—not imaginative, but neither are most of her clients—who will give you fifteen minutes of filth for thirty dollars; she sits behind a screen because if she were seen it would dampen the lust of a gorilla. Actually, that woman could be a great hetaera, if she had what it takes, which I don’t for one moment suppose she has. But if she commanded the language of sexual suggestion, she could ask a hundred dollars a half-hour from real voluptuaries of vocabulary. How many of these women know anything of the harlotry of language, the language of Théophile Gautier, for instance? What a career would lie open to her, and none of the rough-and-tumble of the harlot’s couch.”
“One can find that in Europe, but not I dare say on this continent,” said Jock. “The Americans have rubbed the bloom off the English language. I knew a woman, once, who could bring a man off in ten minutes simply by talking to him. She lived in Winchester, just a few streets from where Jane Austen used to live. A real sorceress.”
“That is the true fellatio, the real harlotry of the tongue. Jane Austen: a finer sense of language than many an acclaimed poet. Given other opportunities she might have been a great proficient at dirty talk of the highest order. Still, we must not quarrel with what we have. Toronto is not behindhand in sin.”
“But why only sexual sin?” said I. “Surely that’s only a part, perhaps a small part, of what can be called sin.”
“Oh quite. But it’s the part most people want to hear about. Financial sin is awfully dull and to appreciate it demands a head for figures. Cruel, mind you, and disastrous for somebody, but undramatic unless there’s a suicide at the end.”
“Well, you certainly make my humbug research look small,” said Jock. “You have established the local claim to good, run-of-the-mill sexual sin. The spirit of Ahriman is certainly felt here, at medium warmth, let us say. But has your bank a mortgage on a cucumber house, by any chance?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Ah, well. I have told you that I spent some time in the French Navy, and indeed a few months just before I was recalled to England in 1914, in the Russian Navy. My Russian fellow officers were very kind to me. Introduced me to their fiancées, and to their mistresses—very nice girls in both cases. I had had some experience with purchased pleasure in France, and indeed it was there that I discovered that a present of bon-bons often worked wonders with a fille de joie in one of the good houses. Her fee and a paper of dragées gave special zest to her performance. That was the reasoning that lay behind my humbug approach. The humbug is Toronto’s answer to the Parisian bon-bon, don’t you agree? But in St. Petersburg I met with something of which I had never dreamed. Ahriman was there, and in full power.
“One night after a mess dinner, when we were all in full dress, with fore-and-aft hats and swords and enough gold braid to keep the Stanislavsky factory working for a month, some of these young Russian aristocrats (or at least men of very good family) asked me if I would like to be introduced to a new game. An artillery game? Of course I would. So we went to a house in a quiet quarter, and very soon I found myself in a room decorated in that awful gilt and brocade style with my fellow sailors and a couple of girls, wearing only their stockings and shoes, who offered us champagne. We had already had plenty of champagne, so cognac was brought, and we had a good deal of that. Then came the artillery game. One of the girls stretched herself on a long table, while the other fetched a cucumber, and skilfully whittled it so that one half was a sharp point, and the other was in its natural green skin. Then the whittling girl thrust the point of the cucumber into the vagina of the girl who was lying on the sofa, with her legs spread and her knees raised, and everything was ready for the game.
“It appeared that this was a contest where we, each in turn, struck the reclining girl over the belly with the flat of our sword, and understandably she contracted at the blow and forced the cucumber out and across the room, where the other girl marked its place on the carpet with chalk, and the initials of the man who had struck. One by one we did this, and in the end the man whose blow had forced the cucumber farthest was declared the winner. His reward was that he had nothing to pay, and the rest of us had to stump up for the cognac and the contest. It came very high, let me tell you, and when I looked at the red belly of the girl who was the gun, so to speak, I felt that she had earned her money.
“Of course I have described it baldly, but as I have said, the spirit of Ahriman was in that room. The cigar smoke, the smell of spilled drink, the triumphant cry as each man scored his point was like nothing I have heard since, even in war. It was the laughter and chatter of hell. It was that night I became a Manichee. When we were about to leave, the leader of our party grabbed the girl who had been the gun, and kissed her heartily. I was just behind him and I saw the look in her eyes. It was not disgust, or degradation, or a sense of the brutality of what had gone on. It was simple acceptance of an evil destiny, and the look lasted only for an instant before it was replaced with the false gaiety of the purchased whore.
“That was an eye-opener to me, I can tell you. The scene recurs to me still, from time to time when people talk foolishly about sexual pleasure. For whom is it a pleasure? Who can ever say, for certain?”
/>
“Tell me, Jock,” said Darcy, and I was startled to see a hot look in his eye which I had never seen before. “Was there any blood on the girl’s belly? Those swords must have been sharp.”
“They were, but of course we struck with the flat of the blade. One or two of the company were not in complete command of themselves, and I think she was nicked in a couple of places. She was dabbing something on them as we left.”
“How did you score, yourself?”
“Out of seven, I was third. Whatever game one plays, one plays to win, if one can.”
Darcy had been drinking quite a lot of whisky. “I’ll tell you a tale,” he said; “something that happened in Constantinople, before it became Istanbul, a few years ago.” And he told a story about a bashaw or some such grandee, who wanted to amuse him, and offered a very nasty show involving a slave—there aren’t supposed to be any slaves, but there are—and a donkey and a fine ripe fig. I would have believed it, perhaps, if I had not read the same story in Rabelais. Darcy’s insistence on being wickeder than anybody else sometimes made him careless about such things. I think Jock had heard the story before, and under other circumstances, and he unkindly went to sleep as Darcy elaborated his tale of tyranny and indecency.
(13)
“You know my godfather, Dr. Jonathan Hullah.”
“We have known each other for years, Gil. Keeps an eye on my capricious lungs. You observe that I am respectful, and call him ‘Doctor’ as often as I can.”
“And I suppose you know Hugh’s stuff in the Advocate, Uncle Jon.”
“Of course. I am a regular reader. And an admirer, may I say?”
“My God, what a mutual-admiration society we’ve uncovered, Gil,” said Esme. “Don’t you read my stuff, Uncle Jon?”
“I think I read more about you than by you, Esme. You’ve become a big noise in the feminist movement. And you haven’t been to see me for—it must be two months.”
“The series about The Toronto That Was is on the back burner for the time being,” said Esme. “Gil’s in charge. He thinks it’s getting out of hand.”
“I don’t think anything of the sort,” said Gil. “But it is lurching toward being rather a stuffy series of reminiscences. We’re a newspaper, after all, not the Dominion Archives.”
“My fault, I expect,” said Hugh McWearie. “Perhaps I tend to overestimate the curiosity and patience of our readers.”
“That’s your training on The Scotsman,” said Gil.
“And that’s why The Scotsman was fast going downhill,” said Esme. “Had to be rescued and brightened up by a new owner. A Canadian, let me remind you.”
“Who was it said that no newspaper ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of its readers?” said McWearie. “Wasn’t it Mencken?”
“No longer true,” said Gil. “Television has taken over the job of amusing the numbskulls. The press now has a higher purpose.”
A wrangle ensued. Esme declared that Gil wanted to make the Advocate (or the part of it for which he was responsible, which was Arts and Books) too New York Timesish and nobody would stand for it. McWearie retorted by singing the praises of The Manchester Guardian as it was, distancing himself firmly from what it has become. Gil insisted that it was possible for a newspaper to be serious and popular and readable at once; it was simply a question of getting writers who could really write. I removed myself from the argument, as I knew nothing whatever about newspapers or what they might do, and thought about the people with whom I had been asked to a Saturday night supper. These people had no “Sunday nights”; they had a paper to produce for Monday.
Conor Gilmartin, my godson; child of my boyhood friend Brocky, now an honoured senior professor at Waverley and author of a handful of influential critical books about literature. Child of Brocky’s wife Nuala, once the love of my life and now a regretted lost adored one, which is not so pitiful as it sounds, for every old man (and I am now, statistically and by government fiat, an old man) ought to have a regretted lost love; it goes with rims around the iris of the eyes, and hair in the ears. Child he may be of my loins, for although I have never as yet spoken of this to Nuala, it is a possibility; certainly he has my tall rangy body, quite unlike the stocky Welsh pony build of his purported father; he even has my big nose. My son. Do I look on him with dimmed eyes, yearning to embrace him and claim him as my own? No, I don’t. Things are very well as they are.
This apartment is his home with his fairly recently married wife Esme. It looks expensive, and it is expensively furnished in what I take to be chiefly Esme’s taste. Everything is good but not distinguished. Such antique pieces as there are have the stamp of the fashionable antique shop on them; they come from the years between 1760 and 1820; they are small, delicate, fragile, not for use. The modern pieces have the no-nonsense air of their period, which is 1985, and are pleasant but not personal, like the staff in a good hotel. There is not a good picture in the place. Not, that is to say, a picture I would give house-room to myself. They are Canadian water-colours, in the three- to four-hundred-dollar price range, and on the walls of blah colour they produce agreeable notes of blah. If there are any books they are in another room and, as Gil and Esme are both writers and he comes of a more than ordinarily literate background, there must be books somewhere. But it is not a pleasantly bookish dwelling. Why should it be? These are modern young, or youngish, people and I am an old codger with prehistoric ideas of what a son of mine should have about him.
It is the right setting for Esme. She is sufficiently well-educated to want some pretty antiques, but not sufficiently well-educated to have any determined taste. The modern furniture reflects her spirit perfectly, for it is good, well-made, functional, and agreeably if conventionally designed, but it could belong to thousands of other young Toronto professional women without a stick or a scrap of upholstery being changed. The pictures are those of somebody who recognizes the need to have pictures that are “hand-done” but does not care a damn for pictures. The drinks and the food, however, are unexceptionable and Esme gets them on and off the table without the least fuss. There is no painful “daintiness” in evidence in the choice of foods or wine. She has good manners in the modern style: frank, no nonsense, but genuine care for what guests may want or need. A girl of a hundred good points (including good looks) and perhaps twenty bad ones and thirty more that might belong to anybody. I wish she would not call me Uncle Jon so often; she is not even an in-law and I feel the use of my name as an intrusion.
Why? Why have I a scunner against Esme that I try to fight down as unworthy and potentially mischievous? Why do I watch her, and listen to her, waiting to pounce on any unhappy phrase, any trivial solecism, any flaw? Is it because I know her parents to be humble people? If, that is, a well-run market garden in St. Catharines is humility in our egalitarian society. Have I, the boy from Sioux Lookout, become a Toronto snob? Horrible thought; why can’t I treat her in my mind with the same sort of courtesy I extend to my patients? But I am sure my behaviour toward her is perfectly well-mannered. I tell myself that I am, like Dr. Samuel Johnson, well-bred to a point of needless scrupulosity.
As for Hugh McWearie, I was honest when I said I read his stuff in the Advocate regularly. He writes like a learned man who knows how to make his learning available to his readers without patronizing them. He writes about religion not as some journalists do, as a subject for derision, nor yet as if it deserved a kid-glove handling not accorded to science, or scholarship, or politics, or the arts; he has kept his head all through the Dead Sea Scrolls Donnybrook and he writes about fundamentalists as human beings and not as primitives deserving of pity and laughter. A first-rate journalist, in fact.
Time has done nothing to alter his appearance of chronic dyspepsia (he eats like a refugee just out of prison-camp) and his unpressed, food-spotted clothes, and his rag of a bow tie, and his scuffed shoes. But who cares? What if he does not appear to brush or wash his hair? Such thin hair does not command attention from its owner. W
hat if his spectacles appear to have fallen into the mashed potato, and to have been imperfectly wiped? The splendid flow of his conversation, his range of ideas, his occasional new-minted phrases, his sly jokes, and his beautiful Edinburgh accent make everything else unimportant. This man is a talker to rejoice the heart of old Rhodri Gilmartin, and I am not surprised to find him a close friend of old Rhodri’s grandson.
“Thank you, yes, a little more of the steak-and-kidney, Esme, if you please. Did you make it yourself? Ah, clever girl—not above domestic skills. More wine? Oh yes, I will certainly. A handsome Beaune, just the right thing to accompany the pie. We bachelors seldom dine in this degree of style, Gil. We envy you married men, don’t we, Dr. Hullah?”
“Yes, yes; certainly we do.”
“Don’t cry a poor mouth, Hugh,” said Gil. “You could dine like this every night in the week on the vast salary we pay you. So why don’t you?”
“My inborn Caledonian frugality, my dear man. It gives me positive pain to spend money on myself. It is something in the air of Scotland, I am convinced. I am an uncharacteristic Scot; my parents were very well set, because my father was a Chief Constable and had inherited some house property. A shrewd man. In childhood I had every reasonable comfort and no small degree of luxury. My education was on a very good level; I am proud to be one of the red gowns of St. Andrews. I found work without much trouble and I have always been well paid—though not, I assure you Dr. Hullah, on the scale of Sardanapalian profusion Gil pretends that the Advocate offers. No, mine has been a pampered life, compared with that of the legendary Scot. And yet—and yet I am as mean as the Devil and part with money as if it were not merely my blood but my marrow. I think it must be the air North of the Tweed. We pinch pennies as the Belgians eat horse-meat, because something in our genes requires it. Or am I speaking extravagantly?”
“It seems to be your one extravagance, Hugh,” said Esme. “Help me carry out the plates and watch me complete the soufflé; my nose tells me the moment has come when it demands my whole attention.”
The Cunning Man Page 20
