The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  This all took a couple of hours, by which time Miss F. was absolutely played out and was glad when the doctor said that would be all for this afternoon but he would arrange for her to have some massage and baths for a week or two, after which further diagnosis would probably be possible. And that’s how it stands.

  But you know how it is when you hear about something that’s entirely new to you; in the course of the next few days you hear a lot more about it? So it is with Dr. Hullah and his unusual methods of diagnosis. I met one man at a party who asked me if I knew Hullah, and he said that the queerest thing Hullah did to him was to rest his head on his belly and apparently listen to what went on inside for about a quarter of an hour! All sorts of gurglings and squishings and croaks. But apparently Hullah has put him right—and not with medicines but with the ministrations of La Chris, who appears to be a whizz at massage and seems almost to rip your guts out. Whatever the doctor heard in his tum, Chris has put to rights. And I met another man who had a nasty skin ailment that the dermatologists couldn’t help, and Hullah banished it in six weeks by a series of baths, again supervised by the dragon. Baths that whirl you round as imagination is said to do in Shakespeare (Troilus and Cressida, if you’ve forgotten). So if he’s a quack, he is a good one. But Miss F. who rather haunts us now—is sure that some day the doctor will go too far, whatever that dark expression may mean. But it is just the least bit alarming. I’d like to get him to take a look at Dear One, who is not a bit well—not really The Thing, as they used to say, but I know she’d shrink from the steel table and perhaps cradling the doctors huge head on her dear tum.

  Must fly—all good wishes,

  CHIPS

  VIGNETTES

  1. Quite an extensive sketch, at least 5″ × 3″—which is gigantic in Chips’ terms—of a rabble of the lame, the halt, and the blind, toiling toward my clinic, on the steps of which Christofferson stands “like the blind Fury with th’ abhorred shears.”

  2. Pusey, exquisitely done by an English animal-lover of extraordinary gifts.

  3. Miss Fothergill being sniffed You Know Where. Oh, Chips, you are too funny an artist to be a real pornographer, but you might have made a fortune as a comic one. The look on my face in this vignette is that of a satyr who has had a good scientific education. Miss Fothergill is Maiden Shame grown somewhat long in the tooth.

  (9)

  Miss Fothergill was more of a nuisance than most of my patients, not because of any complexity in her case but because her resistance was uncommonly strong; she fought me every inch of the way at every consultation, because she was convinced she knew how the world wagged, and any disagreement with her opinion was rooted in a defiance of all received wisdom—received, that’s to say, in the Toronto district of Rosedale, of which she was a denizen. At the age of fifty-three she was alone, as her mother had died a few months before she came to see me. Saunders Graham, her family physician, had found her intolerable, and had dextrously shifted her off on me, saying he felt she needed very special attention. She didn’t, but these commonplace cases are often the most inveterate.

  Old Burton would have described her illness as Maids’, Nuns’, and Widows’ Melancholy, but that would not have been quite accurate. It was not sexual experience alone she was missing, but something far broader. She exemplified, with clarity the Revenge of the Unlived Life, the rejection of whatever possibilities had been open to her as a young woman, the abandonment of love or any strong emotion. She had never exerted her abilities (and she was not a fool) in any direction, but had devoted herself to the care and satisfaction of her selfish mother, to whom she had been companion and confidante until at last she nursed the old woman into the grave. She was convinced that her mother had been a woman of uncommon intelligence, wisdom, and social correctness, though she never offered me any evidence to justify such an opinion. And now that Mother was dead, she was high and dry without any reason to live. But the indomitable spirit of survival that exists far below the level of reason would not permit her to die (devout church-goer that she was, she was deeply afraid of death) and as her life was empty it had filled up with a variety of more or less disagreeable symptoms that convinced her she was seriously and fascinatingly unwell.

  As indeed she was, measured in terms of her life and temperament. She needed waking up and a reappraisal of her situation. I didn’t want to suggest that dear Mother had been an unscrupulous old bloodsucker of a quite common kind, but I wanted her to take hold of the fact that Mother was dead, and that the whole world had not thereby ground to a halt.

  Treatment: Christofferson, to begin. Mineral baths that swirled her round, as Chips said, and a good enema once a week; not really necessary but it provided a sense of well-being and—this is fanciful but I allow my fancy a voice in what I do for my patients—a reminder that what was useless should be discarded. I got Harry Hutchins to make her up a tonic, reasonably helpful in providing a bit of iron but not too much (because she had an inclination toward haemorrhoids) but nasty enough to convince her that something was being done. The bottle bore a red sticker saying, “Not On Any Account To Be Taken Beyond The Prescribed Dosage.” She could have swigged off a pint without much harm, but these things were supplementary to what I had to do in the consulting-room.

  She must find occupation, I said. What? The Art Gallery; the Museum, the Symphony—she had no interest in those and Mother had never thought much of the kind of women who threw themselves into such causes—just seeking social advancement, Mother said. No, said I; not that sort of occupation, but mental and spiritual occupation. But she had spiritual occupation; she was a regular communicant at St. Simon’s—couldn’t bear St. Paul’s, full of climbers and all sorts. No, said I, regular attendance at Communion was not helpful if nothing much went on between Sundays. Did she pray? Oh yes; she read out of the Book of Common Prayer every night; Mother had said she read so well. I gave her Charlie’s lesson of so many years ago: her prayers seemed to be Petition, but had she ever done anything about Intercession or—this was the most significant—about Contemplation? No, she had not, and thought that sort of thing sounded unhealthy. Too much thinking about yourself. (She was happily unaware that all of her illness and her expensive visits to me were nothing but thinking about herself.) I suggested that she might make an appointment with Father Iredale at St. Aidan’s, to talk about prayer, but she gave me a very old-fashioned look as if she thought that I was not merely a twat-sniffer but even more horribly a Papist. So any attempts to get her life moved on to another line by the work of religion was a failure.

  What ailed her, and what I could not hope to explain to her, was that she was body and soul an heiress. Of course she had inherited all Mother’s money, and she was determined to take the greatest care of it, and at last to hand it on to—to what? She didn’t know. She did not approve of anything sufficiently to wish to encourage it with Mother’s money. But that, and the dark old barrack in Rosedale, were not all she had inherited from Mother. The real treasure was Mother’s rich body of prejudice, ill-will, and hatred. She felt it her duty to be a witness before the world of Mother’s Values. It was not a light task, and she knew she must put her back into it. Which she did. And the result was that she was developing, quite rapidly, a promising case of arthritis deformans. Many of the ablest of my colleagues are sure this disease is caused by a virus, and it may very well be so. But there are so many viruses floating around, looking for a home, that anybody who needs one will have no trouble in picking up one that suits the need. Miss Fothergill needed something to make her firm in her belief (Mother’s beliefs); she needed—or thought she needed—something to stiffen her, and she was in a fair way to crippling illness. Not all Christofferson’s baths could do more than slightly ameliorate what was inevitable.

  My consultations with her, however, might have helped if I could have persuaded her to look at her life from another point of view, which was not wholly her Mother’s point of view. I urged her to read, to victual her mind for some helpful r
eflection. But she was not a reader. She took no pleasure in any of the arts. She was not idle. There were menus to be made out and explained to the cook; there were flowers to be “arranged”; there were letters to be written. And, of course, there was “business” to be attended to, the lawyer to be visited not less than once a month, the insurance people to be interrogated, the tax-bills to be sifted and deplored, and everything that came under the heading of “property” to be watched over. She spent her evenings poring over the annual reports of the hospitals and universities who might be worthy of her money, when—a long time hence—she could hang on to it no longer. All of this business fuelled her feeling that she was beset, beleaguered, put at bay by a world that would take advantage of her if she relaxed her vigilance for an instant. There was, it seemed to me, no way of prying her loose from the damnable inheritance she had been left by Mother. She was the keeper of Mother’s opinions, and in the house in Rosedale she was the custodian of Mother’s tomb.

  Not all my time with Miss Fothergill was politely concealed vexation and loss. I learned something from her, and what I learned was refinement of the art of listening. Not, indeed, listening simply to her litany of complaint about the iniquities of the age, or her descriptions of her symptoms. She even at last came clean about her tiny haemorrhoid, which of course I had seen at her first examination while I was peeping between her buttocks, where it nestled like a little pink pearl. She thought it a terrible affliction, though I knew it was a trifle. Miss Fothergill knew nothing of such things, but I did, and in the army I had seen piles like bunches of grapes, which the bearers had endured for months before coming to the medical officer. (“Nobody knows de haemorrhoids I’ve seen/ Nobody knows but Jesus,” to adapt the fine spiritual.) No, what I learned from Miss Fothergill was the tune, the cadence of her speech, which lay below the words.

  Everybody’s speech has a tune, and it is always revealing. For social chat it may be a light scherzando, but when in the consulting-room it turns to themes of lower-back pain, of haemorrhoids, of gas pains, of frequent getting-up in the night, it will turn to andante lamentoso; in it the attentive physician’s ear discerns the cry of the infant, or the toddler who wants mother to kiss it and make it better. Or it may be the sound of deep grievance, of one who has been dealt a rotten hand in the game of life, of one who sees unworthy people prosper while he or she is sinking in illness and decline. Tunes and tunes.

  Simple people speak in a simple tune, whatever they may be saying. But people of more complex mind fall into a wry tune, and sometimes when I spoke with Miss Fothergill I sensed that she thought me a very simple creature indeed.

  “You have never considered marriage, I suppose,” I said one day. Her tone had the chilly brilliance and edge of cut glass.

  “Never. Mother was very perceptive about that. ‘My dear,’ I remember her saying, ‘if you think of marrying a man, ask yourself this—could you bring yourself to use his toothbrush? That will tell you everything.’ ”

  Ah, poor Miss Fothergill! Christofferson reported to me that she was virgo intacta. “A hymen like parchment,” she said, solemnly. Nobody had passed the toothbrush test.

  I am incorrigibly innocent. I frequently do not see what is under my nose. Miss Fothergill’s case became clear to me when I heard, indirectly, that she had been praising me extravagantly among her acquaintances. I was the first doctor she had ever encountered who cared to understand the true nature of her ill-health. I was a man whose very presence made her feel better for hours afterward. I was a doctor who had time to listen. She was my trumpeter.

  So, then, Miss Fothergill had found her enthusiasm, her hobby, her pursuit. It was Dr. Jonathan Hullah. The Ladies laughed their heads off, and asked me from time to time when Miss Fothergill would name the happy day, and would the wedding include a nuptial mass at St. Aidan’s?

  How coarse the raillery of women can be! Surely they understood that I could not discuss a patient, and certainly not joke about one. This is the sort of situation that tests a physician’s character. I could milk Miss Fothergill (if such a term may be applied to a woman whose breasts looked like a couple of empty wallets hanging on her chest) for as long as she lived, flattering her, listening to her blethers, and charging her inordinate fees. Playing my cards right, I could ensure a fat legacy when she died. (I could even poison her, slowly and imperceptibly, and collect within two or three years.) Was it my own substantial fortune or my ethical scruples that deterred me? Whichever it was, I managed to reduce Miss Fothergill’s appointments to one every three months, at which time I observed her gradual decline into an aching but pretty spry and cranky arthritic.

  One of the unhappy things about being a doctor is that you cannot always choose your patients; it is uncommonly hard to get rid of somebody you don’t like. I didn’t like Miss Fothergill, though I was sorry for her. She had been foisted on me by Saunders Graham, who she thought an inconsiderate man, and not really a gentleman. But I had nobody to whom I could send her. I was a Court of Last Resort. But the astonishing thing was that I appeared to have done her a great deal of good, to have set her squarely in the sort of health she desired, and to have provided a man in her life who was in no way a sexual threat, and whose toothbrush she would never be called upon to savour.

  (10)

  Glebe House

  Cockcroft Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  Canada

  Dearest Barb:

  In your last you say that I keep on referring to our “Sundays” but never really say what they are. Sorry. I’m a rotten correspondent. No system.

  Our Sundays have become quite a Toronto institution without our ever having really done much about it. Hugh McWearie (I’ve told you about him) calls it our “salon” which is pitching the note too high and suggests that Dear One lies on a Récamier couch and smiles wearily at compliments, while I dominate a tremendously intellectual conversation at the other end of the room. Not a bit like that. We both work like stink from Friday through Sat., preparing the goodies, which I must say are pretty lavish—scones with jam and whipped cream are a popular item and cucumber sandwiches by the hod. Because they eat like refugees, being musicians mostly and a lot of them foreigners. Isn’t it odd how much foreigners seem to eat?

  But I haven’t said who they are. Artists, or people somehow connected with the arts—and those managers and agents are some of the biggest eaters! We seem to specialize in musicians because they are really the most clubbable of the artistic community here. And there is one. You’d be astonished at what a lot of artists of one sort and another there are in this place, which doesn’t really seem to pay much attention to them. There is even a club for them, but it doesn’t prosper as our salon does. I suppose it’s the food.

  Why musicians? It just happens but I suppose there is some deep reason for it. The painters are a very special lot and feel themselves beleaguered because they are trying to drag Toronto taste into the twentieth century and it’s an uphill pull. Sculptors hardly to be found; no call for it except effigies of dead politicians and they are getting very expensive (bronze, of course) and are generally farmed out to somebody in Montreal who specializes in that sort of thing and does it from photographs. Writers—well, we’ve tried with writers but no go; they are so quarrelsome, and they expect booze, which we can’t run to. Certainly not the way writers guzzle it. So it’s musicians, chiefly.

  Not opera, though there is some. But Dear One nauseates opera, though I rather fancy it. Poor darling, she nauseates so many things now, it seems.

  A few stage people but they are scarce on the ground and few in the pod, if you take me. Theatre here is still very much an import and the movies give most people all they want. Except for the Players’ Guild, a really good semi-amateur group & Darcy Dwyer wants to rope us in for some design work—unpaid, of course. We get some Guild people and one or two odd bods like the woman who tries to encourage children to act, but my dear how! She got her early experience with Ben Greet, so you can gues
s what the style is—definitely not Gerald du Maurier or Noel Coward. Dulcy and Decorum—a man and wife team, she a really good comic and he that sorry sight, a decayed jeune-premier, are pretty regular. And a poor old chap, Watkin Tinney, very moth-eaten, who asserts that he was Beerbohm Tree’s secretary—but there must be a platoon of his ex-secs.1 He gets himself up à la Henry Irving and gives the girls lessons in elocution at Moulton College. Also, I fear a toucher—$5 here and $10 there, while he is inveighing loudly against “amachoors”—and we really can’t have a toucher as one of our regulars if we must have him at all. But the poor old chap looks so hungry.

  No, it’s the musicians and I must say they are an accomplished bunch, but odd, as musicians tend to be. Is it the vibration from their instruments, do you suppose, working on the brain? All that fraught buzzing?

  The very top of the heap, the star turn, is Neil Gow, who actually is a native born of Scots forebears as you would have guessed and could not be anything else.2 He conducts the local symphony orchestra and is pummelling them into quite decent shape. He also conducts the big choral group, so he has rather a corner on the best jobs and is very much an object of envy to the men and erotic excitement to the women who are always trying to shove him into “affairs” and sometimes putting themselves forward as likely candidates. (They have the innocent notion that “affairs” are good for art, whereas they’re really only good for gossip.) But he is faithful to his Elsie, and I suspect that he relies on her to bring common sense into a complicated life. A born leader, but Dear One says not really a first-rate conductor. I wouldn’t know, but certainly a leader is what’s wanted. An inspirer, and that is what Neilie so triumphantly is.