The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  Herewith a shard of the Host which fell from

  the lips of the Rev. Ninian Hobbes as he

  celebrated Communion on Good Friday, 1970.

  You may wish to preserve it.

  If he was truly a saint it may prove to

  be a very holy relic.

  She had gone with me to the vestry to see the body when I was summoned, thinking I suppose that I might need some help, medical or secretarial. Presumably she had found this crumb in the folds of his cassock. Why had she preserved it?

  I put the envelope in my desk and forgot it. I did not see any reason to get on jokey terms with Christofferson. If Charlie or The Ladies heard of it they would not like it, and as I had been snubbed by Charlie I did not want any further reason for him to think I was concerned in the matter of his saint. I settled myself to think about the Governor-General’s question.

  (20)

  Glebe House

  Cockcroft Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  Canada

  Dearest Barb:

  It never rains but it pours, doesn’t it? Of course a steady flow of commissions is old stuff to you, my God you’ve been a Dame for ages now isn’t it? but it’s a blessed change for Dear One who has had such a thin time and often she has looked so sicky-pussy I wondered if she might not really be seriously ill. But the head of the G.G. has really put her on the map here, and no less than three, I repeat THREE banks want her to do heads of their presidents for boardrooms and although this is not really very interesting work it brings in lots of lovely money.

  Just at present however she can’t get going on their unforgiving Scotch mugs because she has a very special commission from St. Aidan’s church to do a bas-relief of Ninian Hobbes. A big job, the background of which is black Belgian marble on which the face is to be mounted in a palish rosso antico and bordered with high-relief flowers in white or yellowish, whichever way the marble turns out. May turn out to be hideous—all those colours I mean and you know how wilful marble can be—but it’s a tremendous opportunity to show what she can really do, and maybe she can farm out some of the floral stuff to art students who would sell their souls to get at a chunk of marble. And who, you may ask, is putting up for this grandeur? Father Charlie assures us that the church will; he is going to put the screws on the faithful to commemorate their saint, and the saint must have an adequate shrine. I worry a bit about the marble. Frankly, she’s rarely worked in marble. Always modelling in clay. Still, nothing venture, nothing win.

  The shrine is to be in what is now a sort of cubbyhole on the right side as you look up the church, opposite the Lady Chapel. It has until now been screened off and I believe brooms and mops are kept there. But it is to be tarted up as a shrine. Father Hobbes won’t be buried there, because local laws don’t permit that sort of thing, but Charlie has got special permission to bury him in the old churchyard—he had to get it from us, too, because it is part of Glebe House garden—and there is just a modest but quite decent marker there. However, the affair in the church will certainly look like a shrine and Charlie says that in time that is how it will be accepted. Do you know what the old expression cock-a-hoop means? That’s how Charlie is about this scheme.

  Meanwhile he is hounding poor Em unmercifully to get the job done. It is useless to explain that it takes time to get decent marble—this has to be fetched up from the States—and when it comes you can’t just start whacking the hell out of it. You have to see what it has to say for itself. But look at me telling you your business! If he wants a shrine, he will have to bide the time it takes.

  But he seems almost off his head. He preaches every Sunday about sainthood, and the way in which the Anglican Church has allowed the canonization of saints to lapse ever since the Reformation. In the old Celtic church chaps became saints because everybody agreed they were saints. St. Deiniol and St. Asaph and all that lot down in Cornwal.1 Why not now? Does modern life need saints? You should hear Charlie on that. Would the modern world accept saints if some were declared? He hasn’t a doubt about it. So what’s to be done? We must press this matter. We must stir up our Bishops and Archbishops. We must take the matter to Canterbury for serious consideration. It is obvious to Charlie that the whole forward thrust of modern Christianity depends on canonizing a few saints. What are we waiting for?

  Not everybody goes along with this. Some people have left St. Aidan’s but that may be because every Sunday now Charlie insists on a special collection for what he calls the Memorial Fund. Dearest Em has been getting some black looks because everybody knows she is to create the memorial and Charlie chose her out of hand without so much as putting the matter before a committee—and Canada has always been hog-wild for committees. But Charlie is implacable.

  I say to Em, don’t you so much as lift a chisel until you have some sort of contract for this job.2 It’s a great opportunity, but it is going to take an enormous lot of work and you must have a proper fee. When I put this to Charlie he is very soapy and tells me to trust in the Lord, and when have I ever seen the righteous forsaken or their seed begging bread? (The answer to that one is lots of times, but I don’t want an outright war with Charlie.) But Em is so anxious to get her hands on all that marble that I fear she is letting herself in for a difficult time. But that’s how artists are. Or a lot of the real ones, anyway. But I do think a price ought to be agreed on, don’t you?

  Surely you regard at least some part of this work as your own contribution to the memorial, says Charlie to dear Em, with one of those smiles that only parsons seem to be able to call up. And he offers to get some other work that will really bring in money.

  This sounds fishy, but he actually does it. And you will never guess what it is! God, the things people think up!

  You know—I don’t really suppose you do, but you know what I mean—that Toronto has a huge Exhibition every autumn, a sort of fall fair on a gigantic scale. All sorts of stuff is shown, and there is great rivalry about how attractive or merely astonishing the exhibits can be. And Charlie has somehow persuaded the Daughters of the Empire (you can guess what they are) and the Ontario Dairy Farmers’ Union to unite on a great project which is to celebrate the forthcoming birthday of the Queen Mother by having a life-size statue of her moulded in the top grade of Ontario Creamery Butter to be on show at the Exhibition!!!!! And Em is to be the sculptor!!!!!

  Impossible, you’ll say. Prostitution of art, and all that. Anyhow, how would you go about it?

  They have the answers. First of all, a simply whacking fee, at the thought of which the senses reel—or at least mine do. As for prostitution, isn’t it rather bringing Art to the People, hundreds of thousands will flock to see a popular character, realistic right down to the ferrule of her umbrella? And thirdly, you do it and show it in a sort of giant glass fridge, which has to be well below freezing, and you have to work in a kind of Arctic explorer’s outfit, and the inconvenience is recognized in the fee.

  So, how do you like them apples?

  Em is attracted. There is a lot of schoolgirl still left in her, and she wants to do something outlandish and mess with unlimited butter.3 And think of the ease with which any error or misjudgement could be corrected? And Charlie is urging her toward it, and of course expects the fee for the edible monarch to be subtracted from the costs of the marble saint.

  Time will tell. Doesn’t it always?

  CHIPS

  VIGNETTES

  1. Very funny picture of four Celtic Saints, Irish, Welsh, Cornish—fat and stumpy (Irish), fat and benign (Welsh), gaunt and angry (Cornish), and one with his back turned to the rest, eating a piece of cheese, whom I take to be Breton.

  2. Chips, wagging an upraised finger.

  3. Emily in Eskimo dress, surveying with a speculative eye a mass of pound packages, each labelled “No. 1 Creamery.”

  (21)

  The Governor-General’s question did not wholly astonish me. I have been asked the same question many times by lesser folk. It was the manner in which he l
ed up to it, and the language in which he cloaked his enquiry that surprised me and gave me unusual pleasure. It is always a pleasure—unfortunately an infrequent one to encounter literary taste in an official personage.

  The question simply put was this: could he, at his present age which was pushing seventy—resume sexual intercourse without fearing for his heart, which was not entirely reliable? But this was cloaked in some science and much splendour. He had read the Kinsey Reports—both of them—and he knew from those sources that many people continued sexual activity into their eighties and a few into their nineties. It was true that none of these long-distance runners appeared to be people in the upper levels of education or income. They had not, it appeared, much else on their minds. But on the other hand, literature had much to say that was encouraging. Did I know the Earl of Rochester’s poem “A Song of a Young Lady to Her Ancient Lover”? I didn’t. He quoted with unction:

  Ancient Person, for whom I

  All the flatt’ring youth defy;

  Long be it ere thou grow Old

  Aching, shaking, crazy, cold.

  But still continue as thou art,

  Ancient Person of my heart.

  Ah yes, charming, said I. Ah, said he but listen to a later verse:

  Thy Nobler Part, which but to name,

  In our Sex would be counted shame,

  By Age’s frozen grasp possessed

  From his Ice shall be released:

  And, soothed by my reviving Hand

  In former Warmth and Vigour stand.

  Delightful, was it not, how a poet who was also a wit could clothe a thought of that sort in language which was explicit but never smutty?

  Delightful indeed, said I, wondering when we were going to come to the Young Lady. In my experience these matters always arose in connection with some charmer, often under twenty and rarely over thirty, who had blown the sleepy ashes into flame. But it was not like that at all; he came at last to the lady herself, and it appeared that she was only a year or two younger than he, but splendidly preserved—a fine figure—and a witty, far-sighted, entrancing companion. But what about—? He had been a widower and abstinent for—good Lord—nearly twenty years. Would it now be possible to pursue with success the project which, I gathered, he had hinted at, and what might the pursuit of the right true end of love lead to, with a couple so matched in years and intellect but—one must face it—not young?

  I hemmed and hawed. What else was there to do? Who could foresee whether such a mating might be a glorious winter idyll, gaining rather than losing from the accumulated years of the lovers, or whether it might be a disappointment, ending in humiliation and recrimination? Nature is cruel and the most keenly felt emotion may suddenly be made absurd by some trifle like an untimely fit of coughing, a trumpeting of flatus (rectal or vaginal) brought on by unwonted excitement, the clanking of false teeth? But I was expected to say something.

  “Have you talked of this to the lady?” said I.

  “I have spoken in terms that a woman of her experience and discernment could hardly misunderstand,” he replied, “and she has not changed the subject nor appeared to discourage me.”

  I saw that all this stately minuetting would not lead us far.

  “Tell me, Your Excellency,” I said, “why you have chosen to come to me about this problem? You have official physicians attached to your office who could advise you—”

  “But who cannot be absolutely trusted to keep their mouths shut,” said he. “I do not want this to be a subject of Ottawa gossip.”

  “And you think I can keep my mouth shut?”

  “That is the reputation you have. Also, I have heard that you are a man of unusual breadth of interest in literature. You are not a hundred-per-cent pragmatist. You are said to be able to see through a brick wall. And as you can understand that this matter is a sensitive one—which is why I have contrived this visit under cover of an appointment with our friend Miss Raven-Hart—I wanted an opinion from a doctor who is also, may I say it, a humanist.”

  “It sounds to me as if you really wanted to consult a fortune-teller,” said I.

  “That is not so far wide of the mark as you may think. A man of my temperament, as he grows older, becomes increasingly aware of influences that younger men dismiss as occult. To be frank, everything I hear of you suggests that you can give me an answer that is not tied to scientific examinations, or statistically determined probabilities. Now, Doctor, what does your intuition say to you about this matter I have broached?”

  “If you put it like that, my intuition says—‘Give it a go.’ All for love, and if the world is lost thereby, call it the world well lost.”

  But don’t be found dead in her bed, I wanted to add, but knew it to be impracticable advice.

  “That’s what I hoped you might say. And now—as I do not wish this consultation to exist on record—may we deal with the matter of your fee?”

  “No fee, Your Excellency. Your confidence is sufficient reward. And now shall I let Major Gryll know that you are ready for your car?”

  But when I went to speak to Gussie Gryll he was staring fixedly at an uproar in the courtyard outside my door.

  “His Ex won’t want to get mixed up in this,” he said. “Have you got a back door—so he can sling his hook and get away without being seen?”

  That was easily arranged, and the G.G. and Gussie made off with rather more than official haste to the waiting Daimler.

  Christofferson put her head around the door as soon as they had left. “Miss Todhunter needs you urgently in the garden,” said she.

  What was going on in the courtyard? That damnable nuisance Prudence Vizard was up to her tricks again, and had gathered fifteen or twenty people—most of them “God’s people” who had depended heavily on the charity of Father Hobbes—and was defying Chips, who was using language unbecoming a lady, but entirely to be expected from an artist—even an etcher.

  This was something Charlie had brought about with his sermons on the nature and the necessity of saints in our deprived North American life. Three or four weeks ago, Mrs. Vizard had left my clinic, where Christofferson had been dousing her with hot and cold, fresh and saline water, and massaging her with searching pertinacity. Did she feel refreshed, helped to endure her misery—which we had agreed to call arthritis, a grab-bag of a word for many sorts of pain—and ready to face the week ahead with courage. Not on your life. She was very much down in the mouth. But as she was walking toward the street she took a notion to look at Father Hobbes’ grave—why she did not know or could not subsequently remember. She found herself looking intently at the simple stone, on which was cut—

  NINIAN HOBBES

  Priest

  R.I.P.

  followed by his dates.

  She felt herself impelled to utter what she later described as “a mouthful of prayer,” and then—!

  And then a shooting pain of indescribable severity in her bad arm, followed by a glow of warmth—of heat, really—and relief from the misery which had pursued her through her body for years, and which had defied every doctor she had consulted, and me the last of the list.

  In the Bible women who were healed of diseases—issues, pains, fevers and the rest—rejoiced aloud, and so did Prudence Vizard. She howled her astonishment and delight, and flung herself face downward on the grave and wept uncontrollably. This hullabaloo roused Chips, who was weeding a bed of irises and enjoying the late spring sunshine. She hurried to the spot, which was just around the corner of her house, and hauled Mrs. Vizard to her feet, as she babbled forth the story of her miracle. She was determined that it was a miracle. The saint, of his great charity, had healed her, and though her arm was still hot—Chips felt it and it was indeed very hot—it was cured.

  Chips summoned me, and fortunately I was not engaged with a patient. She appealed to Christofferson. Harry Hutchins, sensing something unusual afoot, dropped his laboratory work and came dashing to the scene in his white coat. We stood and gaped at Mrs
. Vizard, and listened to her hymns of praise.

  What does a physician feel when a patient over whom he has worked diligently for three years is suddenly cured by what she declares is a miracle? I felt some pique that a saint had done in a flash what I could not do in three years. I felt an unkind joy that my personal diagnosis of Mrs. Vizard, that she was an hysteric and that her roaming pain was a whim-wham of a disordered personality, had been suddenly confirmed. I was professionally interested in the flush that had come into her cheeks, and that she looked as if she had dropped ten weary years of age. I felt, well, here’s a lark, and won’t Charlie be pleased? And where is this likely to lead?

  The immediate question was what to do with the emotionally overcharged woman? The sensible thing seemed to be to take her back into my consulting-room and give her a cup of tea, and that is what we did. Christofferson went off in search of Charlie, who was luckily in the vicarage, instructing a Confirmation class, which he was able to conclude immediately and come to the clinic. The sight of him set Mrs. Vizard going again at full steam. She repeated over and over the story of her depression, the cloud she felt over her mind and spirits—this was thickening with every repetition—and her prayer at the grave of the old priest.

  “What form of prayer did you use?” asked Charlie.

  “Oh, Father, the simplest. I just said, ‘O God, be merciful to me, a sinner,’ and then came this extraordinary feeling in my arm—like a very strong light being turned on—”

  “Light? A light in your arm? How do you mean?”