The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  It is called Glebe House because it stands beside St. Aidan’s Church and I suppose it was once glebe land. The builder was an Archdeacon Cockcroft who must have been one of those nineteenth-century loonies who wanted to move as much as he could of England to this extremely un-English country, so he built St. Aidan’s with his own money (very Pugin in style and not at all a bad job) and built this house beside it, with a biggish garden between, which I gather he must have meant as a graveyard and there are a half-dozen tombstones in it. But the house! My dear, he must have had at least five indoor servants and the rooms are vast and draughty and we can only furnish in the sparsest way and lots of bedrooms are empty.2 No central heating which is obligatory in this country, and we depend on stoves and fireplaces and the lugging of coal and wood you’d never believe! And behind it a huge stable block, with a tower with a clock in it and room for a cavalry regiment to stable their horses, and God be praised! this stable has been our salvation!

  How? We have a tenant, a doctor who wants premises and he is prepared to do over the stables to suit his needs. And believe me, old dear, I think I have skinned the doctor good and proper, asking a huge rent and an agreement that if either of us is discontented with the bargain, any improvements he makes remain our property and he can claim no recompense. And he is spending a fortune! I don’t quite know what is going into it because I don’t actually like to snoop, but I know central heat, and quite a few new windows, very tactfully arranged in the Pugin style that embraces the church, house, and of course stables. Are we Gothic? Don’t ask, as the knowing ones say around here. The glory that Archdeacon Cockcroft wanted has arrived at last. He built this whole shebang when it was still outside Toronto, hoping a parish would spring up around it, and now the city has completely enclosed it, and a very decent middle-class district surrounds us, though not really any people we want to know. Worthy, but dull, if you know what I mean (and I know you do).

  The doctor is a bit of a puzzle. Long and cornery and quiet and looks like a horse with a secret sorrow.3 Agrees with practically anything I suggest, and appears to have pots of money. Don’t know what to make of him yet. Not our sort, I shouldn’t think. Will have to see his pictures before we know and it will be a while before he is settled in. Meanwhile I get a lot of fun out of taking a rise out of him now and then. When first he came to ask about the stables he stood on the mat and said very politely, “Miss Raven-Hart, I presume?” rather like Stanley meeting Livingstone in the jungle. “No,” sez I, “Miss Raven-Hart is working and can’t be disturbed. I’m Miss Freake.” You often hear about people not batting an eyelash, but he certainly batted one at that, as people always do. “Ah, yes, Miss Freake, ah—” and he seemed gravelled for lack of matter. “Don’t be surprised,” sez I, “Freake is a very old English name; means warrior, or hero. I’m very proud to be a Freake.”4 Having enjoyed his discomfiture, I kept it up for a while before admitting that Freake is just a Christian name, from Mummy’s family—who were certainly all Freakes, whichever way you like to take it.

  So there you have it. We are settled at last, until we are able to return home, which won’t be until all the parents and more intractable family members are dead. I suppose our sudden departure was a bit of a scandal, but to use words like “bolting” and “elopement” was ridiculous and worst of all was Papa Raven-Hart’s lament about having finally wangled it so that Dear One’s photograph would appear in Country Life. Can’t you see it?—“Miss Emily Raven-Hart of Colney Abbey, Bucks, will shortly be married to Captain Augustus Gryll of the Life Guards, son and heir of Sir Hamilton Gryll and the Hon. Maude Gryll of The Bossages, Hamer, Wilts.” What a sweet linking of nonentities on both sides (excepting Dear One, of course) and what a prospect of a life tied to Gussie Gryll, the biggest drunk and whoremaster in the Guards. We did right to make a run for it, and if the Raven-Harts cut her off with the equivalent of a shilling (£150 p.a.) I at least had some money in my own right, though not a lot. Can you imagine that not one of those beasts has even tried to find out where we are—not that were anxious to resume relations (ha, ha). So once we have established ourselves as artists in this cold country—which seems to need artists very badly—we shall be all right. But the past three years have not been easy. Still—mustn’t grumble as that old cleaner at the Slade was always saying.

  And that’s it for the moment, just to bring you up to date, and if by chance you do want to set up a correspondence, Barkis is willin’ and more than that.5

  Dear love from us both and dying to hear how everything works out—

  CHIPS

  (2)

  Oh, Robert Burns! I have never been one of your besotted admirers, but every now and then you hit the nail resoundingly on the head.

  O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us

  To see oursels as others see us!

  Me! Long, cornery, and looking like a horse with a secret sorrow! This from a woman I befriended and saved more than once from her own English beef-witted folly! But I suppose there is some justice in it. I am tall, and not fleshy; Nuala never stops reminding me of that review which spoke of my archaeological figure. But—“a horse with a secret sorrow”! If I were describing myself I might say that my face bore a certain morose splendour, but I am not describing myself; I am considering old Chips’ letter about her first encounter with me, when I called to see if the stables might be rented, and renovated and made into a clinic for my work. Because at last I had decided what my work was to be.

  I wanted to go on being a physician, but I came back from the war too badly used up by four years of hard and uncongenial work, topped off with a near-death imprisonment in cold water for just under four days. All right, many people have known worse things, but let them rejoice in their strength. I felt myself exhausted to the point where I never expected to be up to par again, and I wanted the rest of my life to be on my own terms. I wanted to practise medicine, but I did not want to sit all day in a dismal office with a steel desk, my diplomas on the wall in cheap frames, and a dusty bunch of paper flowers for a “homey touch,” giving something like ten minutes each to a procession of patients with the same ten diseases—the colds, the coughs, the ’flus, etc. etc. until I became rich and dull-witted and disgusted with myself. God forbid that I should speak ill—or very ill—of my colleagues, but I had no wish to be like them. In Ward J at my last military hospital, where I treated victims of “friendly fire” with a mixture of conventional medicine, advice which did not conform to psychiatry as it is defined, and the charms and releases of literature, I had discovered something which I could not define, but which I wished to pursue and examine. I knew it would take time and lead me in some unconventional directions.

  Jobs were open to me. The Department of Medicine at the University invited me to lecture in pathology, or diagnosis, whichever I liked. I had cut up enough people—mostly men—to be a good pathologist and my pre-war work with the police made that possibility attractive, but I did not want the responsibility of being a crime-solver and disease-tracker. Diagnosis was also attractive and I had shown some skill in it, but I wanted to do more in that line, and do it in ways that would certainly not be useful to beginners and students who might have no real flair for the work. I wanted to go it alone, and Fate kindly opened up the way for me to do just that.

  My mother died not long before I returned to Canada and all the family money came to me. It was not a vast fortune, but it was much more than I would have expected, and I popped it into an investment portfolio which brought me an annual income that would have made it unnecessary for me to do anything at all—which is what a lot of people imagine Paradise must be. There were good investment opportunities after the war.

  So far then, so good. But that “secret sorrow.” It was the discovery that my heart’s love, Nuala, had married my old friend Brochwel Gilmartin and was, it appeared, very happy with her bargain.

  “You aren’t the marrying kind,” she said, when we talked about it.

  “That’s what th
ey say about people like Darcy Dwyer.”

  “Don’t be obtuse, Jon. I don’t mean you’re a pansy. Who knows better than I that you aren’t? But marriage just isn’t in your stars. You are a lover, but you aren’t a husband. Now Brocky is a marvellous husband—mercurial, funny, tender—all the things you aren’t, and I love him dearly. But I love you dearly, too, you old fathead, and I expect I always shall. Don’t you think a woman can love two men, differently but almost equally?”

  “Almost equally? But which one is—?”

  “Whichever happens to be on top at the moment.”

  “Nuala, don’t be coarse.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. Not quite. I mean whichever one has most recently taken a new hold on my heart—mind—or both. Brocky wants children and so do I. You don’t, I imagine?”

  “Never thought that far.”

  “He’ll be a wonderful father. Have you any idea what sort of father you’d make, Jon?”

  “I thought perhaps you wanted to marry him because you liked the idea of living in Salterton.”

  “How can you be so stupid? And you call me coarse! That’s offensive, Jon! I didn’t calculate and weigh and choose what looked like the best bet. I followed my heart. I truly did.”

  “But it was a factor.”

  “You mean I had a chance to get into a good practice with another woman who had more than she could cope with? That was certainly tempting. And you mean that Brocky has a place in the English Department at Waverley and is virtually certain to end up as Head, if he writes all the books he has planned. So it all looked neat and tidy and irresistible. Is that what you mean? You must think I have a hatefully calculating mind.”

  “You’re not a fool, and that means you have a certain amount of calculation in your nature.”

  “I worried and fussed and stewed for weeks before deciding. It was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. And Brocky knows it.”

  “I didn’t have a fair chance to put my case. I was still abroad.”

  “You were very much in my mind.”

  “How’s Brocky in bed?”

  “What a question! Do you think I’m going to give you a clinical picture, as between medical colleagues?”

  “That means he’s not up to my standard.”

  “Men are always raving on and on about sex, as if it were the only thing that mattered. Let me tell you this: Brocky can talk better than any man I’ve ever known, and married couples talk more than they screw, even if screwing’s what they think matters most. Brocky makes me laugh out loud at least once every day.”

  “Can Brocky talk you into multiple orgasm?”

  “Laughter—real laughter—is a sort of orgasm and it gets better just when the other kind is dwindling to a few reluctant throbs. Now listen to me, Jon, I am not on the witness-stand, and I won’t put up with any more of this lowbrow, jealous interrogation. There’s a limit, Jon.”

  It did not appear that the limit precluded a splendid afternoon in bed with Nuala before she caught the late-afternoon train back to Salterton. And this was how it was. From time to time—every few weeks—Nuala’s affairs called her to Toronto, and she and I lunched, and retired to bed for the afternoon.

  Did Brocky know? Nuala being what she was, I supposed he did, but he never spoke of it when we met, as now and then we did. The war, and his new way of life, had made him an even more engaging companion than when first I knew him. Like me, he had had a near brush with death—a bomb that failed to go off—and it seemed to have, so to speak, integrated him. He was quite the best talker I have ever known. Not a rattle, not a buffoon, not a wit-snapper or a wisecracker, but a man whose conversation on any theme—“from grave to gay, from lively to severe”—was deft, elegant but not ornate, and witty in the sense that it was terse and apt and made brilliant but unexpected similitudes. If, as Byron said, watching Kean act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning, that was what Brocky’s conversation was at its best. I’m not a great talker; a listener, really, as a good diagnostician should be. And I never seem to make anybody laugh—except behind my back, I expect.

  Did I hate Brocky? Did I think of him as the man who had stolen my girl? The three of us did not live on such a primitive level. I loved Nuala. Nuala loved Brocky. Nuala loved me. I am not given to using the word “love” about my relations with men, but I suppose Brocky remained my best and closest friend. If Brocky had been called on to describe his feeling for me I am sure he would have used the word “love” but he would have known how to save it from being mawkish, or evocative of some popular magazine rubbish about “male bonding.” He might even have put it in Christian terms, because he had come back from the war with profound Christian convictions, and now and then he came to Toronto to talk to Charlie, who was assistant to Father Hobbes at St. Aidan’s.

  Have I said that I considered Brocky my best and closest friend? No, I said I “supposed” it. Since returning to Toronto I had acquired another and in some respects more intimate friend than Brocky. He was Hugh McWearie, the editor of the religious stuff in the Colonial Advocate. I met him because a colleague asked me to take a look at him and give an opinion about his wheezes, which were troublesome. Of course he smoked too much and his foul old pipes made him wheeze. But was I to launch an evangelical campaign upon him, to make him ashamed of his habit, and thereby to provide him with somewhat better health but a vastly deprived life? This was the sort of problem that was now uppermost in my thoughts about my profession. Was I an apostle of health, and if so what was health? If it was bodily well-being, that was a reasonable if not a simple answer. But if it included mental well-being, or spiritual well-being, the whole thing became greatly complicated. There are people who must have their poisons, or they are not themselves. So it was with Hugh, with his whisky and his disgusting pipes.

  As he was a man of broad intelligence, I explained the problem to him. I told him that if he gave up tobacco, he might expect to live longer, but would he live better? I also told him that if he did not give up tobacco he might live a long life anyhow. Lots of puffers do. I had no plan of salvation to offer him. In the end he decided on his own regime; he stopped smoking from morning till night, and confined himself to eight large pipes a day. He bought two new pipes and threw away his stinkers. He stopped getting through most of a bottle of whisky every day, and cut out entirely his habit of having a hearty snort in bed before rising. But I forbade nothing.

  “I follow you, Doctor,” said he. “As the old music hall song puts it—‘A little o’ what you fancy does you good’—but moderation must be observed. The Golden Mean, a dash of wisely applied Platonism, and a light self-discipline. I take your meaning and I thank you for not threatening me. You have reminded me of what I ought to have known myself, great gowk that I am. But one must visit a wise man from time to time to discover what one already knows. You are a doctor in a thousand.”

  So quite a number of people were beginning to say. Many of my patients, in their phrase, “swore by me.” But many of my professional colleagues swore at me, for I appeared to them to be a heretic about health. Nevertheless, a great many of my contemporaries began to refer troublesome cases to me—cases for which they no longer felt that they could do anything helpful.

  Already a legend was growing up about me. It was suggested that I used unconventional methods and there is nothing a professional group mistrusts so nervously as it does anything that appears unconventional, and that has not been thoroughly written up in the journals. It may be quackery. Worse still, it may be effective. And if it is both quackery and effective it is utterly hateful.

  But I was not a quack. My dictionary says that a quack is somebody who professes a knowledge of which he is ignorant; but I profess nothing of the sort—I simply profess a knowledge of which a great many of my professional colleagues are ignorant. I suppose I might call it humanism. McWearie, when he came to know me better, called me a quodlibetarian physician, meaning that I mixed up all sorts of unlikely things
to make a unity, choosing what I liked or what seemed best.

  My war experience made me mistrustful of the sort of medicine that prescribes a particular remedy for a particular set of symptoms. Of course in wartime doctoring, especially when very near the fighting, that was what had to be done; there was no time for prolonged investigation, and in a few hospitals in which I worked the sole object seemed to be to get a man on his feet and back to fighting. Medicine in the peacetime world and in private practice did not drop to that level, but the weariness and boredom of the work often led to pro forma treatment, especially with dull or unappealing patients. For do not suppose that the attraction which so obviously happens between physician and patient does not work the other way. Very few people can be cured by a doctor they do not like and I have even heard people say that they could not be cured by a man who was obviously stupider than themselves. I myself have never responded to a doctor whom I thought illiterate, but that is sheer intellectual snobbery and of course I ought to be ashamed of it. But I’m not. However, I have never been able to do much for a patient I thoroughly disliked.

  I did not reject conventional methods of treatment. I just wanted to be sure they were the right ones, which it must be clear to anybody with a grain of common sense cannot always be the case.