The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  It was a pretty piece of work. It put forward, in tones of gentle grievance, the claims of the old whose sleep my bell disturbed, and the more strongly stated cases of the chronically ill, who lay awake counting the hours. There was some talk of the competition between my bell and the bells at St. Aidan’s, which nobody objected to, as a bell was an appurtenance of a church which was sanctified by time. I began to relish this neighbourhood squabble.

  After an interval, I asked for an interview with somebody in the Police Force who could guide me in this matter, and had a pleasant chat with a sergeant who did not want to get too deeply into the affair, and suggested I see somebody at City Hall. After some time taken in finding out who at City Hall I should see, I met a very decent man in the City Clerk’s office who said that the City would be reluctant to take action against me, and deplored the action of the police in making the names of the complainants known to me. I asked him what action the City might consider? Would they fine me? Perhaps jail me? Possess my bell? The very decent man was flustered by such suggestions, and said that nothing of that magnitude would be considered, but that something vaguely called “action” would undoubtedly result if I continued to ignore the letter which had now reached so high an authority as the City Clerk’s office.

  “You are committing a nuisance, you see,” he said.

  “Really?” I replied. “I didn’t know that bells could come under that heading. I always thought it meant peeing up alleys or allowing a dead dog to deliquesce in one’s backyard. So my bell is a nuisance? I’m very sorry to hear it. Really I am.”

  Again a masterly pause before doing anything, and then I sent a letter to Father Hobbes, which I asked him to read at such services as he thought appropriate. It read:

  It reaches my ears that the bell which is part of the clock in the tower of my Clinic, at the rear of Glebe House on Cockcroft Street, is found objectionable by certain elderly neighbours, and unwell neighbours whose rest it curtails. I regret that this should be so, and will therefore—as soon as a trustworthy horologist can be found to whom to entrust such a delicate operation—have the mechanism adjusted so that in future the bell will sound only between seven o’clock in the morning and twelve o’clock midnight, between which hours it serves to mark the progress of my professional appointments. I trust that this will meet with the objections expressed to the police and City authorities.

  Faithfully,

  JONATHAN HULLAH, M.D., F.R.C.P.

  (Chevalier of the Order of Polonia Restituta)

  I was by now a regular attendant at the eleven o’clock High Mass at St. Aidan’s every Sunday; and I waited eagerly to hear Father Hobbes read my letter to his flock. Dear old man, he did so with a richness of Christian unction that made me almost sorry I was feuding with his curate. He said he was sure everybody would appreciate the spirit of neighbourly charity with which I was acting, and even went so far as to say that the tenor of my bell chimed so sweetly with the bass of the church bell that he was always delighted to hear it. With a coincidence that art would never dare to employ my stable bell rang just as the old man finished the letter. Otherwise people might have heard Charlie grinding his teeth, but several obviously did hear the unseemly snort from Darcy Dwyer, in his choir stall, when he heard me defined as a Chevalier of the Order of Polonia Restituta. I believe this distinction has long been discontinued, but during my post-war holidays in Europe I had purchased, in a pawn shop, the collar of the Order and had shown it to Darcy; who recalled my triumph at the Bad Breath Contest, when I had anointed myself with that honour.

  The Ladies spoke to me about the bell imbroglio that afternoon, delighted that I had euchred Charlie in this ingenious manner; they thought the whole thing a huge joke. Charlie, who had dropped in on what was now called their salon, that particular Sunday, glared at me across the room and did not speak. Indeed, the breach between us lasted for several years and was one of the aspects of the affair of Father Hobbes’ sudden death that made it difficult for me to intervene as perhaps I should have done.

  (7)

  As I reread what I have written I am dismayed by the confusion of tenses and the order of time. But such an irregular record does not admit of the sort of scrupulosity I should observe if I were writing for a science journal. Here, for instance, I find a huge gap: what am I doing attending services at St. Aidan’s—being in fact a regular attendant and not scanting the collection plate? How do I explain the double vision with which I observe everything that goes on in the church and around it, feeling affectionate, protective, acquiescent, ironic, amused, and satiric all at the same time? How can I think ill of Charlie for his priestly sneaking in the matter of the bell, and at the same time respect him and feel humbled by him when I receive the Bread and Wine at his hand? How can I see Father Hobbes as a saintly man and a comical, dotty old party almost at the same instant? And how can I, as a friend of Darcy Dwyer, know how carefully the services are rehearsed and performed and also be stilled and fulfilled when they take place?

  That last question may not be too hard to answer. Could I not be present at the rehearsals of a great play or opera and nevertheless be brought to an admiration approaching reverence when at last I saw it in performance? But is this not something far above a performance even of a noble human creation? Is not this a service offered to the Highest, in which I am myself a humble participator? I am not a down-and-out asking God for a handout when I kneel; I am offering something, I am making a gift, a gift of myself, and the beauty and order of the ceremonial are the outward forms in which this mutuality of affection, offering, and trust are made possible.

  Ceremonial. When I was young I thought, like a real Canadian of the twentieth century, that anything that was too carefully ordered was not “sincere” and I accepted sincerity—meaning life stripped of beauty though not wholly of decency—as the greatest of values. Anything goes, so long as it is “sincere,” however squalid, illiterate, and confused it may seem.

  The war cured me of that. I saw the sincerity, the wholehearted acquiescence, of good men fighting for a cause they could not have summed up, for a country of which they knew very little, for “values” they had never heard seriously questioned. I had seen that sincerity turned to bitterness in the men who had been brought low by “friendly fire,” and who had nothing to cling to, nothing to show them that there might be something beyond the muddle of belief, or mere acquiescence, with which the best of them had gone to war. They knew no ceremonial that might light their way. Even the worldly splendour of monarchy and patriotism was denied them, because these things had been brought low by “sincere” thinkers who saw through everything that was not on the flattest level of mediocrity. Their lives brought them nothing of magnificence. And yet—did I believe, and if so what did I believe in?

  “I take it you are not greatly impressed by ‘this fable of Christ,’ as the Borgias cynically called it, while they were making a very good thing out of it,” said McWearie, during one of our many conversations on these matters. “Well, Jon, don’t be hasty. Just about anything in history is a fable in some sense or other, and the fable of Christ has four remarkable books to support it. It’s a very fine fable and you don’t have to swallow it all as if it were the report of a hockey match. Remember that Christ himself was probably the finest fabulist that ever lived. The parables! What is like them? Because you can’t accept Christ’s economics you mustn’t neglect the sublimity of his acceptance of mankind in all its variety. Is it God that sticks in your craw? Do you have a lot of heartburn about God?”

  “The God of the Old Testament sticks in my craw,” said I. “And he certainly does some odd things in the New.”

  “As he must stick in the craw of anybody with a morsel of Christian spirit. A terrible old fella a lot of the time, but an astonishingly wise father at other times. You don’t know where to grasp him.”

  “I want none of him.”

  “There’s no need. He’s only one of a hundred gods, though we’ve had our noses so ru
bbed in his story that we have a hard time seeing beyond him. But you’re not an uneducated man, Jon. You must know that when Christ walked the earth—yes, and for centuries before—there were people in India, for instance, and in Greece beyond a shadow of a doubt, to whom Christ and his Twelve fishermen would have looked like a fine bunch of hillbillies, although possessed with a good idea. You probably—if you sorted out your notions, which you are lazily inclined not to do—believe pretty much what those Greeks believed. The Perennial Philosophy, in fact.”

  “Leibniz,” said I.

  “No, not Leibniz, you gowk! He just gave it a name. What do you know about it?”

  “Not much. We didn’t get much Leibniz at Varsity.”

  “Jon, I despair of you! Have you grown up and been through a war and confronted Death and had your heart broken—lived like a man, in fact—and you still cling to the baby stuff you learned as a boy? Leibniz at Varsity!”

  “Well, where should I learn philosophy if not at Varsity?”

  “Learn it as the philosophers learned it—by the inward quest. Avoid philosophic systems. Idiots love them because they can all band together and piss in a quill and look down on the unenlightened majority. But nobody can teach you more than somebody else’s philosophy. You have to make it your own before it’s any good.”

  “Why can’t I do that beginning with Leibniz?”

  “I’d throw this bottle at you if it were empty, which God be praised it’s not. Leibniz was a good chap, but he was intellectually constipated; didn’t get enough olive oil in his thinking, olive oil, meaning Plato. Not that Plato was the whole thing in what I’m talking about. He was the fella who linked together what the Greeks knew centuries before him—Pythagoras and Heracleitus and half a dozen more—and men who have had their heads screwed on have been with him in spirit ever since. Disraeli, now. D’you know the story about the lady who asked Dizzy what his religion was? His real religion, that’s to say, because he certainly wasn’t a model Jew. And he said, ‘It is the religion of all wise men.’ And the woman persisted; ‘What’s that?’ says she. ‘Wise men never tell,’ said Dizzy, not wanting to get into a long palaver with her.”

  “Hugh, that wasn’t Disraeli. It was the Earl of Shaftesbury, a couple of centuries earlier.”

  “It sounds better as Disraeli.”

  “Journalism has rotted your respect for truth.”

  “Ah, whoever it was, he meant Platonism. You know Platonism. Did you get any of that at Varsity?”

  “No. Are you going to enlighten me?”

  “I’ll tell you. Any enlightenment must come from yourself. It’s rooted in the Divine Reality that we find in our minds—mind in the largest definition and not just the calculator inside your head—that recognizes and reflects the Divine Reality in all things. There is that within us which partakes of the Divine Reality, which is immanent, immemorial, and universal. There are about twenty-five centuries of experience and thinking behind it. It doesn’t accommodate itself to systems or religions, but it may be approached through them—which is what you and I do at St. Aidan’s, I suppose. But it isn’t just St. Aidan’s or what Father Hobbes gives out in his sermons, good old josser though he is. The Perennial Philosophy has much to do with beauty, and there’s plenty of beauty to be going on with in St. Aidan’s.”

  “I’d have to think a long time about that.”

  “Yes, but not perhaps as long as you think. This kind of medicine you practise, and which you won’t define for fear somebody will contradict you, seems to me to have its roots in the Perennial Philosophy. So bite down on that, Jon, and chew until it’s part of you.”

  That’s what I did, and in time it became clearer. Platonism, or what Hugh called the Perennial Philosophy, lay at the root of my medical practice. No—was the root of it.

  (8)

  I am not going to include all the letters Pansy Todhunter wrote to her friend Barbara; as in all extended correspondence, much of it is dull and much also irrelevant to my own story. This letter tells what my medical practice, rooted in the Perennial Philosophy, looked like to the world around me.

  Glebe House

  Cockcroft Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  Canada

  Dearest Barbara:

  Queer business Dear One and I seem to be mixed up in, but surely if anything disastrous happens we as landlords cannot be involved. It’s our doctor tenant, who has made himself so cosy in our stables—not that they look a bit like a stables any longer.

  Of course we’ve been aware of the patients who visit him in substantial numbers every day, because they come right up the walk to Glebe House until they take a sharp left (indicated by a neat little sign) toward the stable area, which is a cobbled yard surrounded by neat flower-beds. (The doctor spares no expense to make his place look nice, which is for some minds almost conclusive evidence that he is a quack of some sort; proper doctors never bother about appearances, or not in Toronto.) The patients are of all kinds—invalids who have to be helped, young people looking worried, people in what used to be called “well-worn clothes and mended gloves,” rich people who leave classy motor cars in the street, mostly women but a good sprinkling of men.1 Working in the garden I can’t help but see them, and they have to pass Dear One’s conservatory studio at the side of the house, and sometimes stare in quite rudely. But we’ve never known any of them until recently.

  Now we know Miss Fothergill. I met her one day as she was coming through the garden from the clinic, and stopped to pet Pusey, the Anglo-Cat.—Have I told you about Pusey? Since we have become such church mice at St. Aidan’s we thought when we acquired a kitten—a black darling with three white paws—that he ought to have some sanctified name. So we thought, of course, of Father Iredale’s hero, the Rev. Edward Bouverie Pusey, one of the fathers of the Anglo-Catholic Movement. (Newman would also be a nice name for a cat, but as we had our kitten removed from the temptations of sex very early in his life we plumped for Pusey, the Anglo-Cat and that is how he is now known—though I don’t think Father Charlie thinks it as funny as we do.)2 Well, anyhow, a few weeks ago Miss Fothergill stopped to pet Pusey and that led to conversation, and she seemed rather fagged so I asked her to step in for a cup of tea. And what a tale she told!

  She enjoys ill-health—and my dear, how she enjoys it—and her own physician, exhausted and worn out I expect, had referred her to Dr. Hullah, to see if he could help her. A lot of doctors do that, I gather. Hullah is a sort of Court of Last Resort and has patients other drs. have given up, or perhaps just found intolerable. So she made an appointment and, she tells me, bugging her already rather bug-like eyes, she never had such a going-over in her whole puff.

  Before she even saw the great man she had quite a session with the dragon, Nurse Christofferson. All the usual details recorded on paper, and then whisked into the examination-room and ordered to strip, and not just to her undies, but ballock-naked which she made sound utterly horrible; she has an awful lot of shame for a rather small woman. Then up on that platform I told you about, and Christofferson disappeared under the black cloth of a big camera like an old-fashioned portrait camera, and turns on several cruel and searching lights and takes her picture in a wide variety of unbecoming poses. “I trust that these pictures are confidential,” sez La Fothergill. “Yes,” sez Christofferson with more humour than I would have suspected, “any views you want for sale or distribution must be taken elsewhere.” This shook up Miss F. quite a bit. But not so much as when she was invited to lie on the big steel table (having yielded up the usual medical tribute of some pee and a few drops of blood on the way) and Dr. Hullah came in and greeted her as if she were fully clothed and in a drawing-room. He even shook hands with her! Darling, have you ever had your hand shaken when you were starkers? I suppose you have, I’m forgetting we don’t live in the Fothergill world. But this was a handshake from a complete stranger.

  Then he went to work. It was long and deeply embarrassing. Not that he demanded to peep up her
chimney, or anything like that, for Christofferson had done all those embarrassing tests beforehand. But be stared at her until she said she blushed from head to toe. Then he poked her with an enquiring finger simply everywhere! He grabbed her tum until she thought he was trying to dislodge something inside, but it appears it was just an unusually prolonged and searching investigation of the spleen. He made her turn over and did the same sort of investigation of her back, including a prolonged parting of the buttocks while he seemed to be staring at her exit—about which she seems to be extremely secretive. He did a lot about feet. Then—and this is what really shook her—he began to sniff at her, very close up, and he sniffed her from head to foot, very slowly and even quite a lot of sniffing in that area which Miss Fothergill described as You Know Where, which was far worse than Christofferson’s searching finger.3 But after an hour or so of the most acute embarrassment she had ever suffered in her life—which seems to have been rich in embarrassment of one sort and another, for she has many areas where embarrassment is possible, social, intellectual, moral, sexual, you name it—he left and the dragon helped her to dress and even showed her a wee powder-room where she could make repairs to her make-up.

  By this time Miss F. was in a perfect tizzy and when she was at last in the doctor’s impressive office she wept hysterically and demanded what he thought he was doing. Securing information for a preliminary diagnosis, said he, cool as the proverbial cuke. But did he continue? Not he. It seems that he simply sat and stared at her until she could stand it no longer, and wept a lot more and at last took hold of herself and asked if he didn’t want her to tell him what ailed her? But you are telling me that, sez he. Every minute you tell me more and more. Your tears are eloquent. But now perhaps you will tell me what you think ails you. And she did.