The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  “Willingly,” said McWearie. He showed a gallantry toward Esme surprising in such a messy, dirty wee man.

  I wish I could figure out why I do not quite like Esme. No; that’s wrong. I like her well enough; I found her attractive sexually, which is unsuitable in a godfather but I might as well be honest about it, in this confidential record. But I don’t fully trust her, and there again I cannot say why. Perhaps I fear that she will trick me into some confidence about that affair at St. Aidan’s that I do not want to make public. And anything Esme knows will, sooner or later, be made public. She blabs to conquer.

  The supper is excellent. A good clear soup before the steak-and-kidney, which was substantial without being disagreeably “hearty.” Now we have a salad course while Esme is putting the finishing touches on her soufflé. And then the soufflé itself, which is perfection. Gil follows the Beaune with cognac, and the talk turns to the series, The Toronto That Was, which Gil was said to be delaying.

  “As soon as Gil gives the word I’ll be back to talk to you, Uncle Jon,” says Esme.

  “But why me, especially? I am no great expert on city history.”

  “We’re not looking for history so much as atmosphere,” said Gil. “This place has changed so dramatically in the past century. The almost colonial atmosphere of 1900 has virtually disappeared—”

  “No, no,” said McWearie. “It is still there, if you know where to look.”

  “Yes, but where do you look?” said Esme. “I know from what people tell me that social customs that used to be obligatory have wholly vanished. But what were they? People hum and haw and say they can’t remember. Why can’t they remember? It’s everybody’s bounden duty to remember as much as possible about everything that’s come under their notice.”

  “I can recall two delightful elderly ladies who owned the last private horse-drawn carriage in Toronto,” said I. “I think it was to be seen on the streets almost until 1930. I suppose the horses died. But I remember the Misses Mortimer-Clark saying to someone in my hearing that the Toronto they knew had utterly gone. Why, people had taken to locking their front doors when they went out! As if there might be intruders! And as if there were no servants to stop them, if by chance there should be.”

  “Aye, I have heard some queer tales myself,” said McWearie. “You know St. George Street? Full of decayed mansions that have become fraternity houses, and look like it? Well, somebody told me of a dinner-party he went to in one of those palaces of the plutocracy—though in fact it was the wife who had the dibs, and the husband was a clergyman and decidedly the second-in-command in that household—and my friend said it was a white-tie and spike-tailcoat affair, which had become rare in those days. It was 1925, I recollect. There were twenty guests, and they ate and drank of the best until the time came to serve the fruit and nuts, and then there was a wee tap on the door, and the hostess said, “Come in,” and in came a wee girl in virgin white, and said, ‘Mama, may I join you and your friends?’ and Mama said, ‘Of course, my dear; come and sit here by me.’

  “And would you ever guess that this was a coming-out party? The poor little wretch had come out into society, d’you see! And there wasn’t a soul in the room except herself under forty? Beat that if you can for a tribal ritual!”

  “Hugh, you made that up!” said Esme.

  “Not a bit of it! I’ll send you a notarized transcript of that story tomorrow, if you insist.”

  “Golly!”

  “All those old rituals have gone, and a very good thing too,” said Gil.

  “Not so,” said McWearie. “The Hungarians still keep it up. A ball every year, where they present their daughters to the Lieutenant-Governor, which is the nearest they can get to royalty. But I believe it’s falling off. Some of the girls are kicking over the traces.”

  “You see, Esme,” said I, “Hugh is the man you should talk to about the Toronto that was. He knows far more about it than I do. I never had the entrée to these exalted circles of which he speaks so authoritatively.”

  “Ah, but you knew the artistic community,” said Gil. “You knew the painters and especially the musicians. You used to meet them on Sunday nights at The Ladies. You told my parents about it.”

  “The Ladies? What Ladies are those?” said Esme. People are said, metaphorically, to “prick up their ears,” and I swear I saw a stirring under Esme’s hair which could have been nothing else.

  “You’ve not heard of The Ladies?” said McWearie, “Oh, but you’re a child, Esme. Hardly out of the egg. The Ladies were a very special feature of Toronto life, for God knows how long. And you were their tenant, were you not, Doctor? Your clinic was part of their property.”

  “I made an arrangement with them after the war,” said I, and Esme laughed.

  “You’re showing your age, Uncle Jon. Have you any idea how many wars there have been since the one you’re talking about? I suppose you mean the 1939–45 war?”

  “When a man talks about The War he means the one in which he fought,” said Gil. “Like my father. He had a peculiar war career; began in Intelligence, as an officer, and transferred to the Artillery because he wanted to see what the fighting was really like. And he found out. Oh yes, he found out.”

  “He found out enough to gain a Military Cross,” said I. “But I know what you mean. It was quixotic—but your father always has been quixotic.”

  “You felt no inclination to follow him into the fray?” said Esme. Damned nosy girl!

  “An Army doctor isn’t exactly out of the fray,” said Gil, who probably thought my feelings had been hurt. Did it ever occur to him that his wife had a crass streak? He was sensitive to language as she was not, and that can make a surprising difference in a marriage where both parties are writers.

  “Didn’t you go into the fighting right out of another kind of fighting?” said McWearie. “Darcy told me you had gone into—thrown yourself into, was his expression—some very rough medical work as soon as you qualified.”

  “I attached myself to the coroner’s office,” said I. “You remember how Darcy used to talk about the rough side of Toronto? I was curious about it.”

  “And that’s what I want to uncover.” Esme is a great interrupter. “The oddballs; the eccentrics. The other day an old woman in one of those Twilight Homes—I think she had been on The Game—may have been a Madam—told me there used to be a man who haunted Jarvis Street, offering the girls humbugs as payment for a lay. Can you imagine? Humbugs! The girls used to call him The Old Humbugger. Did you ever hear of him, Uncle Jon?”

  “No,” said I. “My Jarvis Street experience must have come later.”

  “Your experience? Uncle Jon, you old roué! What were you doing in Jarvis Street?”

  “It was in the line of work,” I said. “I had finished medical school and all the hospital work and interning and specialization, and other stuff that eats up so many years, and I thought I would like the experience of some tough work. I had done a spell in Emergency in a couple of hospitals. Saturday nights were revealing—”

  “Revealing in what way?” said Esme, always the news-hound.

  “Crimes of passion, committed by people who usually had no words for their feelings, and took it out in action. Stabbings. Shootings. Sometimes murders. Sexual messes—”

  “Like what?” Esme again.

  “Like a Coke bottle stuck in somebody’s rectum,” said I (She wanted it. Let her have it.) “I knew a man who invented a surgical instrument especially for their removal, and that tells you how frequent the need was. Like God knows what women had somehow got into those passages which are supposed to be of the uttermost delicacy! Like children who had been beaten up by drunken fathers—and drunken mothers too, often enough. Astonishing how people resent their young. Babies that had been treated like basketballs. Very, instructive, Esme. You ought to sit in on Emergency for a few nights.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” said Esme. “I might just do that. But why did you work for the coroner?”

&nb
sp; “A coroner is a very busy man in a city like this. He needs a few people to go out to accidents with the police. I quickly learned how fragile the human body is, when it is subjected to the violence of some of the machines mankind has invented. When you’ve wandered around a roadside field in the dark for fifteen minutes, looking for a head, you get quite a different idea of the human body from what you learned in the dissecting-rooms and the anatomy classes. Or investigating a corpse that has been under the ice for the length of a hard winter. The prettiest girls quite lose their charm under those circumstances.”

  “So the idea of war had no terrors for you?” There was no fazing Esme. She was a modern girl, determined to be tough even if it meant being a little inhuman.

  “On the contrary, my dear. Investigating an accident is not pretty work, but to expose yourself to becoming the raw material of an extremely nasty accident is frightening. And that is what war is. And I was frightened.”

  “But you went.”

  “I don’t suppose anything I could say would convince you how hard it would have been not to go. Public opinion has changed remarkably since 1939. The revulsion against war today is more powerful than I suppose it has ever been in human history. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t be surprised that if a war broke out next month, all that anti-war talk would be stilled, and the old sides-taking instinct, the old killer instinct, the old find-an-enemy-and-beat-him-up instinct, would all come flooding back. In 1939 people still had a great undigested chunk of patriotism stuck in their craw. For a young man to stay out of the war would have taken even more courage than it did for me to get into it.”

  I had talked a good deal, and had perhaps put on the colour with a freer hand than my real feelings warranted, but I wanted to steer Esme away from talk of St. Aidan’s and The Ladies, and I succeeded.

  Not that I told Esme, or anybody else, the real reason why I enlisted in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps. It was to get away from my mother, or rather to get away from a fate she had planned for me, and in which she could see nothing but what was good for me and good for mankind. And of course good for her. Doc Ogg had died, and she wanted me to set up practice in Sioux Lookout.

  Since my father’s death during my third year of medical school (from pneumonia working on a growing boredom with iron pyrites) my mother had been lonely, and I had done whatever I could to help her, not stopping short of suggesting that she come to live in Toronto, though God knows I hoped she wouldn’t. But Sioux Lookout had been her home for too long to make a change pleasant, and she could not see why I did not leap at the chance to establish a really modern medical practice—possibly even a modest clinic—in an area where there was now no doctor within fifty miles. Money was not wanting. My father had left a great deal more than I thought he would and my mother, who was his sole heir, would have gladly set me up in style. But I didn’t want to do it. My reasons were powerful, but not clearly defined. I admired her, and in my fashion I loved her, but I did not want to be tied to my mother’s apron-strings. If my desire to marry Nuala became a reality, could I ask her to come to a backwoods practice? She was set on being a gynaecologist, and was doing well. I had my eye on more interesting work than my police and coroner’s duties, though I was not yet sure in what direction it would lie. Explaining these things to my mother was not easy, and I had to be tactful when she felt no such obligation.

  “If this girl you speak of has a true commitment to medicine, she would surely see the good sense of working in a deprived area where so many people, especially on the reserve, get no proper care at all.”

  Oh yes, she would see it, but that did not mean that she would throw herself into it. It is so easy to plan lives of humanitarian self-sacrifice for other people. And my mother could not be expected to understand that a young doctor, after something like ten years of hard work, wants to stay where there is money, as well as genuine need for medical care. Nor does such a desire mean that the young doctor is greedy or self-seeking—or at least not more so than the generality of mankind. Not everybody wants to be a saint.

  There was no need for Esme or anybody else to know about that, so I simply said that I enlisted because everybody else seemed to be doing so.

  I had no idea what to expect, and it was all rather easier and more pleasant for a few weeks than I had expected. As a doctor, I became a First Lieutenant right away, and was sent off to Camp Borden to be taught the rudiments of being a soldier.

  For six weeks I beavered away at map-reading, marching smartly, and performing drill without a rifle because doctors were not supposed to carry rifles or use them, although they were permitted to carry side-arms for self-defence. I learned how to look like a soldier (within reason, for I was never a “smart” officer) and how to salute and whom to salute, and how to behave when I was saluted by lesser fry. The open-air life and the unwonted exercise put me in good condition, and I was so hungry all the time that I was able to eat the dreadful food that seemed to be a part of Army life. I discovered later that the cook who prepared food for the Camp had a restaurant in the nearby town, and much of the best food that was meant for us was deflected to his restaurant kitchen. War encourages chicanery of all sorts, and in unexpected places. After I had been given this lick-and-a-promise experience of soldiering, I was promoted to the rank of Captain, and posted to a unit in Eastern Ontario, a territory beyond Salterton new to me.

  It was here that I learned a few things that I had not expected to discover in the Army. The unit to which I was posted was a militia outfit, which had been fattened up by wartime enlistment. What this meant was that the privates were greenhorns, who had been workmen or farm workers, but the commissioned and non-commissioned officers were peace-time, part-time soldiers whose real occupation lay far from war or any serious Army life. The Colonel, for instance, had been the manager of a large bakery business, and what he really knew was cheap bread and confectionery. The Adjutant made a great show of military smartness, and was remorselessly jokey and cheerful; he had been the backbone of a substantial insurance business in private life. The Major was a lawyer, of no great distinction. There was a considerable protestation of esprit de corps, pride in the regiment, tradition and so forth, but I would not have trusted it under any sort of stress. What became apparent quickly was that I was the most recently educated, and also the best-educated, man in the unit, and this gave me a special status.

  I was the ear into which everybody’s troubles were poured, and I was expected to advise and provide solutions to problems which I soon decided were insoluble.

  This was not so with the privates. The Army is, and I think must be, a rigidly class-conscious organization and any attempt to make it democratic weakens its effectiveness. So I saw private soldiers, and non-commissioned officers, when they had managed to get themselves on a sick-list, which was not always easy, if the sergeant happened not to like them. Their complaints were run-of-the-mill stuff: a strain, a pulled tendon, a severe cold, fungus between the toes, constipation (a great favourite and, considering the food that was offered, inescapable), fear of having “picked up a nail” from some local prostitute when on leave, and more often than not the ills that arise from homesickness, displacement, worry about the fidelity of a wife, and simple fear. Fear arising from lost freedom; fear of what the future might hold; the fear that is looking for a cause, but exists without any apparent cause, and arises from the neurosis that is as common among enlisted men as among officers.

  It was obligatory among these men to pretend to an unappeasable sexual desire. To go out for a few hours’ leave without securing the prescribed issue of three condoms in a package would have been to confess to dread of sex with an unknown woman, of having no demanding sexual appetite or—and this would have been the subject of hilarity among the tougher men—fidelity to the wife or the girlfriend at home. The idea of being a soldier is a powerful archetype; take almost any man and put him in the Army and the archetype of the brutal and licentious soldiery will manifest itself and he will behav
e in a way that perhaps surprises himself. I later found out that this archetype manifests itself also among the women who go into the armed services, sometimes with peculiar results. The soldier-archetype explains many things that are unaccountable in wartime, and the idea of a brutal and licentious soldiery is one that many men feel driven to make manifest.

  It was the officers who took most of my time. Here they were, men free from the restraints of home and accustomed occupation, with unlimited access to a medical adviser; they were determined to make the most of it.

  There were those with genuine problems, but I soon discovered that most of these were inveterate and insoluble. A life which has resulted in painful feet, or a tricky back, chronic headaches, a tendency toward severe colds, a football knee, and indigestion in its myriad forms, does not keep a man from becoming a militia officer, but it is unlikely to make him a soldier that any sensible commander would put in the field. I could do no more for these men than their civilian doctors had done already, but I was so readily accessible, so much a companion in the mess, so much a part of what they deserved for their decision to serve their country, that they were sure I must succeed where others had failed, and they came to me whenever I was in the little cubbyhole that was allotted to me for consultations and keeping records. I had an orderly to keep the records, but as he was almost illiterate and naturally stupid I had to do most of it myself.

  My real work was with the neurotics, headed by the Colonel. I had not yet faced the realization that every physician is, to some degree, a psychiatrist; his is the ear into which all woes are poured, and, although I dislike generalizations about humanity, it did seem to me during my first Army months, that the more stiff the upper lip, the more manly the bearing and the protestation when sex was discussed, the bigger the cry-baby who takes the patient’s chair in the office of the Regimental Medical Officer.