The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  Mr. Russell was annoyed, but he was a moderate man and recognized the authority of a Bishop, who was another moderate man and someone who could be talked to respectfully but forcibly.

  Charlie was not a moderate man. Though I saw him now rarely, I was aware of him because of his office and his acquaintance with The Ladies. The gentle boy I had known, who possessed saintlike courage under pain, had become a determined and perhaps an arrogant man, and both his determination and his arrogance were fed by his faith. With the arrogance, which can be a good quality in a leader, there arose also a substantial measure of that snobbery which had been a quiet but firm element in his home. His professor father had an Englishman’s sense of Who’s Who, and his mother had been born and bred in the English-speaking society of Montreal, which in Canada is to say enough. He was angry that he had been rebuked for his determination to make the Glory of God manifest in the services he directed, and for the fact that the rebuke had come from a man whom he regarded as a vulgarian, a man of no aesthetic sense but—and more important—also a man with a stale breadandbutter notion of the Christian Faith.

  In Charlie’s Father’s house were many mansions and he knew deep in his heart that his mansion was at a better address than that of Ned Allchin.

  He began his campaign the Sunday following the Archdeacon’s visit.

  (16)

  Glebe House

  Cockcroft Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  Canada

  Dearest Barb:

  Mighty stirring here! I told you Charlie was going off his nut, and last Sunday I think quite a few other people thought the same. It was the Sunday before Advent—you know, the Christmas season in the Church—and the children call it Stir-Up Sunday because of the Collect for the Day—look at my capitals, I’m getting to be a real Church Mouse—begins Stir up we beseech thee O Lord, the wills of the faithful people—and by gum, did Charlie stir us up!

  I told you, didn’t I, about the visitation of a squirt called Archdeacon Allchin1 who pranced up into our pulpit and knocked my cope, which had last week made its first appearance at High Mass, worn by the much-loved Father Hobbes and if I do say it myself looking splendid!, and he spoke nastily about just about everything that makes St. Aidan’s what it is, which is to say the only church I’ve ever met with where a person with a crumb of artistic feeling could feel at home. But that’s Toronto for you—and Canada, because this country is still pretty much pioneer in its deepest feelings and thinks art is something the women amuse themselves with in the long winter evenings—you know, knitting, tatting, and barbola—while the men drink bootleg hooch in the barn. When this kind of mind gets some education and comes to the city it discovers that art can be used to raise money for more important things, or else it can be smothered under a wonderful complexity of committees, every one with a vice-president, where endless games of organization can be played. But art never comes first.

  Oh, but I’m as silly as Charlie. When art comes first it means that all the asses and incompetents who can paint or model or mess about in some way think they are the lords of creation, which they bloody well aren’t! For the artist, the real maker, art is solitary. Has to be. But for those who aren’t artists, but have an eye, or an ear, or the right kind of brain, it’s what makes life worth having. Isn’t it? Or am I wrong? You ought to know. You’re the real thing and I’m just a hanger-on, I suppose. Though my cope’s not half bad. I’ll send you a snap.

  But back to Charlie. St Aidan’s, he roared, must gird its loins for a fight with the Philistines. It must show that its devotion to art as a path to God was true religion, and not to be regulated by tea-drinkers and cookie-pushers who thought of the Church as a social centre, or pinheads who told girls preparing for Communion never to forget their date with Christ (this was a dig at a popular parson who did that sort of job for a fashionable girls’ school) meaning the Eucharist, the holy centre of the Christian Faith! it must never forget for an instant that though Works were great, they were second fiddle to Faith, and Faith found its strongest voice—after Charity and Hope—in Art, in which God spoke indirectly but with His fullest plenitude.

  There’s always a worm under the strongest stone, of course. Charlie was deeply cheesed off because Allchin had taken a nasty crack at his Light of the World—the good copy Charlie gave the Church as a thanksgiving after twenty years of priesthood. It’s a fine thing—all right, I give you that. But it has always given me the creeps and I’ll never forget my brother Ronnie—Ronnie was lost at Dunkirk, did you know, and Ma never really got over it—saying that it looked as if Christ had got up in the night to go to the privy and found that there was already somebody inside! It’s a fine piece of painting—those Pre-Raphaelites certainly could paint even if their ideas gave you the creeps—and I wouldn’t say a word against it to those who really like it, and in St. Aidan’s it looks just fine. So to have children warned against it as a temptation to idolatry was really insulting. But there was a personal edge to Charlie’s rebuttal, and righteous wrath shouldn’t be personal.

  So if it were at all possible to beef up the services at St. Aidan’s, they are being beefed up now. And Charlie promises a series of Advent sermons on the lives of the saints and the presence of sanctity in modern life. So up yours, Archdeacon Allchin.

  The name, by the way, is something he glories in. Says it is very Old English and means Wholly Marrow, or of the Very Essence—All Chine, that’s to say. Speaking as a Freake—mighty in war—I’m in no position to throw stones, but it still sounds a silly name to me.

  Dear One has completed the caduceus for Dr. Hullah and very fine it looks in his entry-way, just above the Dragon’s desk. Above it he has had painted something in Greek, which I told him was intolerable swank, but he laughed and talked about the decent obscurity of a learned language, which I believe is a quotation of some kind. The Dr. is a great one for the Learned Crack, which is fine if you recognize it but a bit of a snub if you don’t.

  So at last my cope is finished, and handsomely received and blessed, and now almost weighs down poor old Fr. Hobbes, who is getting very feeble.2

  No more now. I’ll keep you posted about the Stirring Up.

  CHIPS

  VIGNETTES

  1. A truly libellous caricature of Edwin Allchin, malign religiosity and Christian goodwill united in a gnome-like frame.

  2. Fr. Ninian Hobbes, sinking under the weight of Chips’ splendid cope. Haunting the unlovely old face is some hint of Newman.

  (17)

  Sorry Chips thought I was snubbing her with my scrap of Greek. I liked the caduceus so much that I thought I would complete it with the name of the Greek concept that, with the caduceus, seemed to me to sum up my medical philosophy: the serpents of Wisdom and Knowledge, under the rule of Hermes, the medical god, and all under the domination of Fate, or Necessity. So I got a good calligrapher to paint it in red and gold on the wall above the bronze staff. And there it stood.

  ΑNΑΓKH

  Harry Hutchins, my assistant, was much impressed. “Looks terrific,” said he, “but what does it mean, boss?”

  I explained as well as I could about the domination of Fate, or grim necessity, in life, taking precedence over all the healing god could do with his wisdom and knowledge.

  Harry whistled. “No freedom, eh?”

  “Plenty of what looks like freedom,” said I. “But in the end—of course it’s not simply a physical thing; it’s mysterious and dreadful and we don’t often catch sight of it at work, except out of the corner of an eye. In the end, it’s—well, it’s the end.”

  “Are you going to tell your patients that?” said Harry.

  “Not unless they ask, and then only if they have the philosophy to bear such knowledge.”

  “Quite right,” said Harry. “No use frightening the timid. But the word itself—Greek to me, of course. How do you say it?”

  To the surprise of both of us, Christofferson spoke up. She had been listening, sitting at her desk und
er the caduceus and the word.

  “Anangke,” said she.

  “Well, well. Rhymes with ‘a hanky,’ said Harry. “Inge, my darling, I didn’t know you knew Greek.”

  “If that were all you didn’t know, Doctor, what a wonder you would be,” said she. “And have the goodness not to call me your darling. I am nobody’s darling.”

  “Well, if you ever change your mind about that, just tip me the wink and you can be mine, like a shot,” said Harry, who liked to tease her.

  I suppose I am the only one who knows why Inge Christofferson is nobody’s darling. Just one of the wretched tales that had their root in that awful war, of which Chips writes so cheerfully.

  I liked having the word there. It kept me on the track of my medical thinking. Because I was not devising a new notion of medicine; I was seeking a very old one, a sort of perennial philosophy of the healer’s art, and fatality, or necessity, was the element in life that kept me humble, for nothing I could ever do would defeat it. People must be ill, and they must die. If I could seem to postpone the dark day people thought me a good doctor, but I knew it was a postponement, never a victory; and I could secure a postponement only if Fatality, the decision of my patient’s daimon, so directed.

  Of course I could not say that sort of thing to the anxious patient sitting in the chair opposite me. (I never sit behind a desk; always in a chair opposite to the patient and no greater in importance than his.) Who wants to hear his doctor saying that he must die sometime, and the doctor cannot say when, and that anything that can be done in the meantime will not change that fact? And in virtually all cases something could be done, some physical comfort assured, some assuagement of pain or disability; until the inevitable happened.

  I certainly did not scorn what drugs could do for my patients, or the ministrations of Christofferson, who was a brilliant practitioner of all the manipulative arts, and intuitive in her application of her skills. I was not a convinced believer in anything the enthusiasts for psychosomatic medicine have to say, though I was an intent listener. Of course the mind influences the body; but the body influences the mind, as well, and to take only one side in the argument is to miss much that is—in the true sense of the word—vital. Didn’t Montaigne say, with that splendid wisdom that was so much his own, that the close stitching of mind to body meant that each communicated its fortunes to the other? (And didn’t he immediately afterward, like the seventeenth-century sage he was, plunge into the wildest rubbish about the Evil Eye, and women marking children in the womb by their thoughts? Even my dear old Robert Burton could not escape the influence of his time, any more than my contemporaries can escape the voodoo aspect of modern science.)

  Mankind, it appears to me, seeks gloves with which to clothe the iron hand of Necessity; and these gloves he calls diseases. We doctors struggle against them, but no sooner have we got the better of tuberculosis than it appears again stronger than ever: cancer is unresting and who sees an end to AIDS? Mankind must have something upon which to hang its great Dread, which is Everyman’s Fatality.

  I think of my patient who has now been with me for almost three years, Prudence Vizard, who seems to have a travelling malady, for it has roamed from her back to her left leg, then soared upward to the back of her neck and is now bivouacking for a while in her right arm. The pain is real and gives her a lot of disfiguring physical distress for she hobbles, then hirples, then walks with her neck twisted toward the left, and is now unable to use her right arm for anything—cannot even lift a fork to her mouth. Christofferson cannot come to grips with her, for the pain darts off to another place as soon as it has begun to show improvement in the one under treatment. She doesn’t like the saline baths and says they wear out her skin—which can’t be true, for Christofferson rubs pots of emollient guck into her after every bath. My attempts to get below her symptoms and track down what is really gnawing at her are ineffective, and all I can do is give her sedatives as mild as she can be persuaded to use. If I were a well-informed physician of the nineteenth century—a pupil of Charcot, for instance. I should call her an hysteric and forget about her, but that is not my way. Why is she hysterical? There must be a cause, physical or mental.

  Her trouble is not Nuns’, Maids’, and Widows’ Melancholy, for she is none of those things and seems to have a pretty satisfactory sexual life, so long as Vizard does not jog the suffering place in his infrequently permitted visitations to her privy parts. She is indifferent to sex, but has long believed that “men like it” and so it is a duty to be performed. Has orgasms, but not always. Eats well. Is fond of wine. Has no money worries (Vizard is in investment banking). Gets on as well with her children as a chronic sufferer may be expected to do. Is not unattractive, dresses well, doesn’t read much but likes the movies. I suggest that she make some investigation of religion, forgetting the nonsense she was taught as a child. She goes to St. Aidan’s, for which I am sorry because she is likely to tackle me after Mass about her pain, or at least to signal to me, over the heads of other worshippers, that she is bearing up bravely and, by implication, when am I going to make her well?

  It is useless to talk to Prudence Vizard about Anangke, and it is most unlikely to kill her with the mysterious ailment she complains of. She is a Sufferer—which is what Patient means, as I have rubbed into me every day of my life—and her suffering does not yield to anything I know. Is her pain in some way a complement to her character? For character lies deeper than any question of psychosomatic medicine, and contains the key to cure—or at least to courageous endurance. Mrs. Vizard is not very courageous and her endurance lays heavy burdens on her unfortunate husband and the one son who has not yet fled the nest.

  Who has character and has risen above grave misfortune? Christofferson, of course.

  Her tale is briefly told. A Danish nurse, she was carried by fate from one hospital to another in the European theatre of war, and was not always sure quite where she was. But in one battle area she was set upon one night after dark by four Allied soldiers—pray God they were not Canadians!—and raped. With courage she had gained from Voltaire’s Candide (for she came of a cultivated family) she knew that rape was not invariably fatal, but the precautions she hastened to take were too late to prevent the conception of a child with an unknown father. She determined to bear it (moral scruple) but when she did so, after great trials in besieged France, the child was hydrocephalic and the prognosis was that it could not live long. But it did live long in spite of medical wisdom, and lives still, as I know very well, in a hospital for such children in Denmark, and Christofferson supports it.

  I was able to offer her some help, medically and financially, and it was I who suggested that she might find a new life in Canada. She did so; I rediscovered her and was glad to have her as a colleague. I regarded her as one of my victims of “friendly fire” and treated her in the same way as the men in Ward J—but with better poetry—and she is now a woman of modest means, independent and with a variety of interests, but they do not include men. She is fiercely loyal to me, for which I am grateful. She too goes to St. Aidan’s, which is not so strange to her High Lutheran upbringing as it is to many Anglicans. One of my successes, and if it were not for my continuing involvement with Nuala I might look with different eyes on Christofferson. Or would I? I don’t think she would return that sort of glance.

  An affair is far harder to maintain over a long period than a marriage. In a marriage the friend may gradually and without trouble alternate with or take precedence over the lover, but in an affair there must always be a pretence that heat of passion is still what keeps the thing going—or so it seems to me and Nuala has not yet contradicted me. Of course we have moved into a relationship where friendship is stronger than love, but one cannot divide the two into apples and pears in quite that easy fashion. We are like the old Emperor Franz-Joseph and his Kathi Schratt. It is the exchanged advice, the gossip over the teacups, the sympathy that really matters, though the bed also has its place. It is knowing what
a woman or a man thinks, and how they think, that preserves these unions, not the “convulsive ardour” which, frankly, can become a bore if it is all there is between two people. In a real union sex becomes just another kind of happy talk, a song without words, a coming together which does not need explanations or considerations.

  But Nuala is no longer young nor am I. I realized this with a start when she brought her son Conor to Toronto to enter Colborne College. He was thirteen going on fourteen and to see him with his mother was to see his mother in quite a different light. She was still as beautiful as ever—or so it seemed to me—but I could also see that in the eyes of young Conor she was not a beautiful woman at all, but a presentable mother who he hoped would not kiss him in front of other boys, or call him by a nursery name. And other boys would see her as a mother, too, and never as a woman. There is a whole large class of society—called children—to whom mothers are not women, but inescapable appendages sometimes dear, sometimes not, and never full human beings but supporting players in their own intense drama.