The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  For the reading, the Gospel is brought to the lectern by a little procession, wrapped in a gold silk cover with tassels, and heavily censed before the reading. They go absolutely wild with incense and sometimes it’s a bit stifling but is supposed to carry prayers right up to the Throne of God. I suspect that in an earlier day before plentiful running water it was also helpful in dispelling the fearful pong of the unwashed faithful. But that’s an Unworthy Thought, to which Fr. Charlie says I am prone. He doesn’t know the half of it.

  But my dear, this is beauty of a very special kind. Beauty and reverence and it is like cool water in a thirsty land. So it is for the beauty we go, and give ourselves up to it and do what we can for St. Aidan’s. Short of being utterly committed believers, that’s to say. But what is belief, anyhow? Isn’t our commitment to beauty of sight and sound a kind of belief?

  The part of the service—it isn’t part of the Mass and you can leave before it begins, but that might be thought rude in friends—that gets my goat is the Sermon. Then you come down with a bang from all the splendour of the Prayer Book and the really super prose of Cranmer to what some chap thinks it would be good for you to hear. Worst of the lot is our dear friend Fr. Charlie Iredale. Sometimes I wonder if Charlie is going right off his nut. He bangs on and on about sanctity and the necessity to live the holy life.4 Not just doing your best in the job you have and behaving decently to everybody else, but giving up all and following Christ—as if we could kick off our shoes and tramp around Toronto in February snow exhorting and healing and mooching an occasional meal from the rich, like Jesus himself. There has to be reason in all things, even religion. And when he talks about sanctity he makes my flesh creep, because he obviously means Fr. Ninian Hobbes, who has just been celebrating Mass and is now either deep in private prayer or perhaps having a doze within a few feet of him! What’s Charlie up to, I wonder? Now and again he reads a passage out of The Golden Legend, and so far as I am concerned it might better be the Arabian Nights, and that all comes zeroing down, somehow, to Fr. Hobbes. Or Charlie tells us about the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola and suggests that a few saintly push-ups would do us a world of good, and make us more worthy of the pastoral care of Guess Who. This sort of thing gets on my nerves, I can tell you.

  We see Charlie quite often, and not just at our Sundays, when he usually drops in for a cream bun and a chat with Cuthbert Wagstaff or a joke with Gerry Broom. (Did I tell you about Gerry? Came to Canada with Playfair’s tour of The Beggar’s Opera, playing Filch, liked it, saw opportunities and stayed. Sings the Narrator’s role in Gow’s Matthew Passion with superb, tactful reverence, and is a great joker. Usually greets Anton Moscheles with “Sorry to see your throat’s still giving you trouble, Anton.” Meaning Anton’s handsome stock. Anton doesn’t get the Joe Miller of this, but smiles forgivingly.) Now where was I? I rattle on like Miss Mowcher. Oh yes, Charlie and his whim-whams. I tackled him one day about the Loyola business. “I once heard a very learned man at Oxford say that Loyola’s piety and all those Exercises may well have been a sublimation, or even a perversion, of his sexual drive. What do you say to that? I mean, nowadays, when there is so much sexual freedom and recognition of sex as something not just tied down to reproduction, and different kinds of love are being recognized as what they really are—love.” But Charlie just lowered his eyelids and said, “From a Divine perspective, it could be that all this genital fulfilment and concern with sex is simply a perversion of piety!” Now what is there to say to that? I put it up to Dr. Hullah, and he said he thought Charlie might have a point, and then McWearie, who loves to take the opposition side, whatever it may be, said that Loyola was a masochist and an oddball and what did Charlie make of Loyola’s campaign to reform the prostitutes of Rome, and might that not spring from repressed sexuality, as did the same odd preoccupation in the early life of Canada’s great Prime Minister, W. L. Mackenzie King?5 Charlie said that Loyola’s concern with prostitutes was Christian love, and it was easy in our science-mad day to spatter everything with so-called psychology. It was getting close to being a row, and I had to quell the fever with cream scones.

  But love—what is one to make of it? I look across the room at some of our Sundays and see Joyce Barma and Adair Scott, standing apart but with an adoration passing between them that is strong and beautiful and I swear, holy. And what about me and Dear One? The occasional appearances of Gussie Gryll goad me into a new awareness of how much she means to me, especially as she and Gussie have now struck up a friendship based on jokes and, God help us, mock gallantry from him and mock maidenliness from her. It’s enough to drive me round the bend. But not quite yet. This is too long. Sorry.

  CHIPS

  VIGNETTES

  1. Chips cursing over a gigantic mass of heavy material.

  2. Father Whimble, eyebrows raised almost to his hairline, in the dusk of a confessional box.

  3. Isometric sketch of the procession, wonderfully evocative, as it might be seen from the church’s gallery.

  4. Charlie in the pulpit, banging on. How wild Chips makes him look! Her artist’s eye is even more perceptive than my physician’s one.

  5. Very odd picture of St. Ignatius and Mackenzie King exchanging knowing winks. What a pair of fixers!

  (15)

  Chips’ notion that Charlie was going right off his nut was an extreme statement of an opinion that was held and debated in the congregation of St. Aidan’s by all sorts of people. Some were thrilled by his vigour and exuberance and were ready to follow him in any sort of crusade. Others thought he was demanding more of them than they could reasonably give in devotion and an almost medieval approach to worship and the Christian life. But beyond a doubt St. Aidan’s was very much alive under his care; no Laodiceanism, no lukewarmness could exist in his presence. A few people fell away, and went to less exigent churches, but of these almost all came traipsing back, admitting with humility that religion was more fun at St. Aidan’s than anywhere else, and it bound together an unlikely group of people, ranging over Pullman-car porters and University intellectuals, with a large group of decent folk who wanted guidance and a place to put their lives, and found it in the splendid services and also in Charlie’s polished, brief, and burning homilies.

  He asked, as all priests do, for money, but he also demanded a change in approach to daily living, a sense of the presence of God and of Christ and the Holy Spirit in every common act.

  A servant with this clause

  Makes drudgery divine;

  Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws

  Makes that and th’ action fine.

  —he declared, and people who never read poetry and had never heard of George Herbert thrilled at the declaration, which ennobled—no, which almost sanctified—their dull jobs. But he also urged a perception of beauty upon them. In such a tree-lined city as Toronto—

  Towery city and branchy between towers

  he declared, in the words of another great priest-poet—

  Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

  World broods with warm breast and with ah!

  bright wings—

  look about you, not at the drab buildings but at the sky, the trees and the gardens with which householders have striven to declare Nature’s goodness which is God’s goodness, and see Toronto as it truly is.

  Not that beauty was a quality of Nature alone. Beauty made by man brought us into the presence of the Holy Spirit. To make this manifest Charlie found, and bought at considerable expense to himself, a fine copy of Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World, painted by F.G. Stephens, who had been one of Hunt’s pupils. The picture is familiar: Christ, crowned with thorns and haloed, stands at the door of a humble dwelling holding a lantern; His right hand is raised to knock on the door, which is partly blocked by rough growth of grass and vine; His face wears an expression of expectation, shaded perhaps by doubt. On the gold frame, as well as the name of the picture, was the text it illustrated—“Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man
hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in unto him, and sup with him, and he with me.” This was hung on one of the pillars at the main door of the church. It was a gift, Charlie said, in thanksgiving for his twenty years in the priesthood.

  Of its kind it was a fine thing, and a handsome gift. If only Charlie had not made it clear to the children who came to a special youth service that it was proper to stop before the picture and bow their heads for a moment when they entered the church! This custom quickly took on, and spread to mothers who did not wish to seem behind-hand when their little girls showed reverence. Thus Charlie’s picture became rather more than a picture, and that was when the Bishop thought the time had come for a mild remonstrance.

  Mild remonstrance is the usual episcopal manner when things begin to go askew. Firm action is deferred as long as possible. The Bishop visited St. Aidan’s once a year, for Confirmation services, and otherwise he did not appear. I think he rather liked those services for it was an occasion when he could wear a fine cope he possessed and also his mitre; he did not wear these things in churches of more evangelical leaning; a Bishop is only human, and likes to wear the full appurtenances of his office when he can do so without having to explain himself afterward to suspicious Low Churchmen, or “spleeny Lutherans” as Dwyer called them, quoting Shakespeare. The Bishop did not at this time descend upon St. Aidan’s himself; that might have put too much emphasis on the rebuke he intended. He arranged in the most courteous manner that one of his trusted subordinates, the Venerable Archdeacon Edwin Allchin, should preach at morning service—or High Mass as St. Aidan’s called it—late in November.

  In a small body and behind an unimpressive face, Archdeacon Allchin had the spirit of a tiger. When the Bishop hinted that a rebuke was in order, Edwin Allchin girded up his loins and delivered a rebuke that the most thick-skinned transgressor could not misunderstand. He enjoyed the work just as he enjoyed some of the rather severe financial dealings on behalf of the Church that fell to his lot; the defaulting mortgagor didn’t stand a chance when he faced Allchin in his extremely businesslike office at Church House. Not that Allchin permitted many dubious mortgages or investments of Church funds. The old Anglican joke that “the Bishop is the shepherd of his flock and the Archdeacon is the crook on his staff,” was often trotted out when Allchin was spoken of. This was unjust; he was not in the slightest degree dishonest, but he was tough, unforgiving and exigent as even bankers—nay, as even insurance officials or taxgatherers—rarely manage.

  He disapproved of St. Aidan’s, and he descended upon it on the last Sunday before Advent loaded for bear, as we used to say in Sioux Lookout.

  He did not storm. Naked anger may sometimes be seen in priests of the Church of Rome, but the Church of England prefers the icy smile, the false bonhomie, the sword concealed in the palm-branch. The Archdeacon told his hearers, when he had mounted into the pulpit, that he wanted to direct their attention to one of the foundation stones of their church that was sometimes forgotten or neglected, merely because people took it for granted. He was speaking of the Thirty-Nine Articles, so discreetly placed almost at the end of the Prayer Book, and which set out the dogma of the Church of England, of which the Anglican Church of Canada was an integral part. Not that the Church cared passionately for dogma but, as we all realized, there had to be a few rules, a few guidelines, and there they were. Every good churchman and churchwoman would be wise to read them over once a year, just to be sure that the rules were not being ignored, or worn away, or simply altered.

  That was one of the reasons why we have those excellent functionaries, the church wardens, whose job it is to see that rules, elastic as they are, are not forgotten. The Church has a strong democratic foundation and we clergy need somebody to keep an eye on us, ha ha. Oh, the Archdeacon was a merry man in the pulpit!

  The temptation in the matter of all rules was to look for ways of getting round them; they invited that kind of ingenuity because Man (and Woman, ha ha) was a clever creature and always wanted to see what might be possible without actually going too far. Didn’t we all do that as children? At school? Of course we did, but we found out that the rules were made in wisdom and love, by people who had thought a lot about it, and wanted to keep us from making silly and sometimes dangerous mistakes.

  Silly and dangerous mistakes in Church affairs? Was that possible? Oh, very possible! And they came often from impulses that seemed to be of the very best—such as the love of beauty. Beauty of music—so wondrous in its effect when discreetly used, but which could so easily slide over the brink into what Allchin might call concertizing, to ravishing the spirit with sweet sounds which were loved for themselves and not as adjuncts to prayer and proper devotion. The great library of Church music of course contained much that dated from before the Reformation, and was therefore fitted to Latin texts. Oh, the temptation to sing them to those texts, so beautiful in themselves, so grateful to ears that understood the Latin tongue! But—what do we read in the thirty-fifth of the Articles? “That the Common Prayers and the Sacraments ought to be ministered in a known tongue?” Was not the temptation obvious? Indeed yes. But was it excusable? The answer must be a determined No.

  (It was at this point that a sound like stage thunder came from the gallery at the back of the Church where Dr. DeCourcy Parry and his Gallery Choir were awaiting the time when they would sing a motet, Regina coeli, laetare by Palestrina, in Latin. The noise was Dr. Parry dumping a large armful of hymnbooks on the floor, which was as near as he could come to shouting Irish obscenities at the preacher.)

  Undeterred—indeed spurred on—by this show of spirit, Archdeacon Allchin went on to quote from the Homily number Six, Against Excess of Apparel. The dignity of God’s service demanded unquestionably that his priests be dressed in seemly fashion, so that their office was made plain and their function set off from that of the people whose pastors they were. But oh, how easy it was to slide into the folly of mere dressing-up, and excessive ceremonial which he could only call play-acting. Not that he had any quarrel with play-actors. How much pleasure and indeed edification we owed to the best of them! But we knew that their function was to seem what they were not, and we certainly did not wish our priests to seem anything other than what they were—humble servants of God, and followers of a humble Saviour.

  The Archdeacon had by this time stamped firmly on the corns of the church wardens, who were supposed to keep an eye on the Thirty-Nine Articles and act as brakes on headstrong parsons. DeCourcy Parry certainly did not believe that any first-rate music was out of place in what he had been heard to speak of as “his” church, and it was certainly more edifying than any amount of half-baked preaching. Charlie, the ritualist, was red in the face, not with shame but with rage. Chips, I could judge from the back of her neck, was feeling snubbed about her cope, and the splendid embroidery she was lavishing on it, and Chips did not take snubs kindly.

  Only Father Hobbes seemed happy. He was nodding gently and was probably thinking about something else.

  Archdeacon Allchin was coming to his conclusion. How he smiled, how his bald head glowed, how his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he spoke gall in words of honey! He had not meant to speak of any such thing, he said (he was a good rhetorician and knew the value of a pretended departure from his set text) but he could not help observing that as some of the members of the congregation entered the church this morning, they paused, as if in reverence, before a picture that hung near the entrance. The picture was certainly arresting in its beauty; but reverence—? He had seen some of the children, the little girls, bending a knee and the little boys bobbing their heads; did these precious little souls have any idea of the danger they were in? Let their parents consider the warning in Article Thirty-five against the peril of Idolatry.

  He knew—for he was sensitive to the feeling of his hearers—that what he was saying must appear as rebuke to the good people of St. Aidan’s. He would not mince words; it was indeed rebuke but certainly not in terms of a ruler. (H
e knew, by the bye, that the term Ruler had been revived in St. Aidan’s, and he deplored such revival, for it gave a most un-Anglican impression, however it might be meant.) No, the Bishop spoke, through him, his servant Edwin Allchin, in that spirit of “quieting and appeasing” which they would find enjoined upon bishops in the Original Preface to the Prayer Book, which still had its place in the book they all possessed and loved.

  And now to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost … Archdeacon Allchin concluded, but did not cross himself, as St. Aidan’s expected a real preacher to do.

  This was not simply the fat in the fire; this was a declaration of war, and the church buzzed with it like a hive of angry bees.

  Business took me to the shop of a very important bee on the succeeding Monday. He was Mr. Albert Russell, who ran a very good job-printing office a few streets away. I frequented his place of business because he printed all my stationery—I seemed to need a good deal—and he was an excellent typographer. My personal writing-paper, my professional letterheads, the forms of my statements—“To domiciliary attendance—” “To private consultation—” “To auxiliary treatments and medicines—” and everything I needed, with a fine caduceus in the upper left-hand corner of each. I liked a buff paper, and a colour of ink that Mr. Russell called Ancient Red.

  Mr. Russell was the Vicar’s Warden at St. Aidan’s.

  “Did you ever hear such impudence?” said he. “Says it comes from the Bishop. I know the Bishop. Known him since he was vicar at St. Paul’s. Didn’t sound a bit like him. I expect the Bishop told him to step around to St. Aidan’s and just suggest a little moderation. But all that detailed attack! Even griping about Father Iredale deciding to call Darcy Dwyer the Ruler; its just an old name for whoever leads the chancel choir; it was a nice recognition of Darcy’s twenty years’ service to the church; I think in fact it was Dr. Parry suggested it. Means Darcy can wear a cope on big days, which of course he likes. They all like dressing up and where’s the harm? Gives variety and cheers up the services. Ties in beautifully with the notion of the Christian Year—you know, all the liturgical colours on the altar and vestments. We’re getting a really good selection of that stuff now at St. Aidan’s, and all gifts. That job Miss Todhunter is working on now—a knockout. Let’s have lots of colour. Of course, colour’s part of my work, so it’s no wonder I approve. But so does Milliken approve, and he’s the other warden. We know our business; we don’t need to be told how to be wardens by an outsider from Church House. I’ll see the Bishop one of these days, and I might just drop a hint that Ed Allchin is putting words in his mouth he never intended.”