The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  “Not just in my arm. As if I were being bathed in very strong light all over—but especially in my arm, of course. Am I making myself clear? I don’t suppose so. Because it was all terribly clear—wonderfully clear but not in a way I can describe.”

  I had placed a thermometer in her armpit. I read it now. A surprisingly high reading. If Mrs. Vizard had not plainly been in good health I should call it a phenomenal one.

  “My suggestion is that we take you home at once, and that you get as much rest as you can. We want to see if this astonishing cure persists. I’m not disparaging the power of your experience, but you understand that we must be as prudent as we can, before letting anyone else know what has happened.”

  “Yes, Father, I understand perfectly. But it will persist, I just know it will.”

  “Pray God it may be so. Dr. Hutchins, would it be an imposition to ask you to drive Mrs. Vizard home?”

  When they had gone Charlie said, “What do you think?”

  “I think she’s an hysteric, but who can really say what that means? Lots of miraculous cures happen to hysterics, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are cured, for a while at least. This may be an unusual remission. But I wouldn’t for an instant dismiss the truth of what has happened. She prayed at the grave of a man she believed was a saint. She is cured for the moment. What do you think?”

  “I hardly dare to hope. It seems such an overwhelming wonderful thing to happen here and now. Who can say what might come of it? But we must be cautious, of course.”

  “Very cautious indeed.”

  That was what had happened in the first instance. But how were we to be cautious when Prudence Vizard was so determinedly incautious? She was cock-a-hoop, in Chips’ expression, at being the subject of a miraculous cure. She could not keep her mouth shut. She buttonholed people in church, and it was all Charlie could do to keep her from publicly “testifying” before the whole congregation that Father Hobbes, reaching back from the other world, had touched her. She was somewhat offensive about what my clinic had failed to do for her. She was disagreeable about Christofferson, whom she accused of being a sadist who liked to hurt people under pretence of doing them good. She was a nuisance, but not really unendurable until she began her exhortations beside Father Hobbes’ grave.

  (22)

  Glebe House

  Cockcroft Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  Canada

  Dearest Barb:

  It seems ages since last I wrote, but you will soon understand why. I write now though I am utterly fagged out, because writing to you rests me. Of course I can talk about anything to Dear One, but it is different talking to someone at a great distance, someone above the hullabaloo, so to speak. Because hullabaloo is precisely what we’ve been having for more than a fortnight past.

  I told you about the strange death of old Father Hobbes, but I can’t recall if I told you that he is buried in our garden. Yes, literally right under our windows because you see there is this old burying-ground, which the church used when it was still pretty much out in the country, but which has been disused for years so there is quite an Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard air about it. You know, mouldering headstones with almost obliterated names on them, and a good deal of clustering vine, mostly wild grape which looks stunning in autumn. When we bought Glebe House we bought the grounds, and the graveyard was part of it. Very picturesque.

  Well, Father Charlie was mad to have Father Hobbes buried as near St. Aidan’s as possible and so it was O please and pretty-please to Em and me, and it was proved the graveyard had never been deconsecrated. (How do you de-consecrate something? Sounds like taking the oil out of a salad dressing, if you ask me.) So we weak-mindedly agreed and now bugger-me-black the grave is a place of pilgrimage! You can guess what that means. Trampling over my garden, chattering outside the windows when Dear One is working and behaving as if the place was some kind of Mickey Mouse fun fair. And all because of a loony called Prudence Vizard.

  I do not use the word loony loosely. For years she has suffered from pains which I swear are all in her head, and she has lately been coming to Dr. Hullah’s clinic. The Dragon has been giving her healing baths and I wish she’d drowned her. Well, one evening she was leaving the clinic just as the Angelus was ringing, which is to say sixish. She says she prayed at Father Hobbes’ grave, and all of a sudden felt as if lightning had struck her and the pain in her arm vanished. She made a big fuss about it in the church and Father Charlie was delighted, to begin with, though I know he is heartily sick of her now. Because now she comes every night at Angelus to the grave, bringing with her, and assembling from all over, positively the damnedest pack of no-hopers and detrimentals you could possibly imagine, and she tells the story of her miracle—simply, she says but I swear it has grown enormously since it happened and now she says she heard a voice—and then she leads the gang in a hymn, shouting like blazes, and then she calls for prayers and offerings.

  Her gang includes a few sad people whom I believe to be sincere—people who have had rotten lives. But most belong to the lot that old Father Hobbes used to encourage and who he called God’s People. The Forgotten of God would be more like it.1 Many of them are crazy, but not so crazy the police can take them down to the Provincial Asylum and commit them as being unable to take care of themselves. This is a very difficult group because most of them are quite pitiful cases but somehow they can still keep afloat in a desperate kind of way. But there are also the professionals, dyed-in-the-wool beggars and con-men (and women)—the kind of people the Jews among our Sunday guests call “schnorrers.” They are a bad lot and at least one of them is a pickpocket.2 But they shout as loud as anybody, and put the touch on whoever has gathered to see what the fuss is all about. God knows wherever there is religion there will be beggars, but this goes beyond the beyonds, as the Irish say. And this seedy pack tramp all over my garden, throw down rubbish and cigarette ends and matches and wrappers off sweets and God knows what not, and make a day’s work in about half an hour.

  They are destroying our Sunday salons because they lie in wait for the guests and besiege them with their cries for money. It isn’t the money that keeps people away, I truly believe, but the hysterical nastiness of it all.

  Of course I’ve complained to the police, but they say their hands are tied because a burial ground is not a place where they can intervene unless something really illegal is happening. I explain that it’s part of our garden and private property and have got a lawyer on the job, but it seems that when we agreed to the burial we relinquished some right or other, and it’s all a mess that will take a court case to resolve.

  I have ordered them off time and again, to no effect. Once I even got into a pushing-match with Prudence Vizard but she was slippery as an eel and shrieked that I was persecuting her. God! She was wild and really I feared she might do me a mischief. But I was the stronger and daunted her, for the moment, at least.3

  I think Father Charlie curses the day he ever saw Prudence Vizard, to whom he has been very decent. She now sees herself as a Holy Woman, proclaiming the sainthood of Ninian Hobbes, and it provides a focus and outlet for her, nuttiness far more dramatic and exciting than simply plaguing doctors with her alleged arthritis. I think Father Charlie—and Dr. Hullah as well—hoped the “cure” would wear off and she would have to shut up, but it hasn’t and my bet is that it won’t so long as it brings P.V. a lot of noisy attention. The papers haven’t got hold of it yet, but they certainly will if this keeps up.

  Sorry to go on so! But I’m at my wit’s end!4

  Love as always,

  CHIPS

  VIGNETTES

  1. Heads of an assembly of ragamuffins and rising above them the head of Prudence Vizard, done to the life and exhorting the crowd.

  2. A hand lightly groping in the rear pocket of a very tight pair of trousers.

  3. Prudence Vizard and Chips in a ferocious shoving-match.

  4. A distracted face of Chips.
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  (23)

  Chips was wrong. The papers had carried brief accounts of the goings-on at St. Aidan’s and a sensational paper called Hush carried a picture of Prudence Vizard exhorting her assembly. This made it impossible for Hugh McWearie to ignore the matter any longer, and he wrote a very discreet article about an instance of faith-healing, but was as near silent as was possible about the part in the affair supposedly played by the late Father Hobbes. He did, however, follow it up with a report of what Prudence Vizard called her Holy Hour, which came, every day at Angelus and was drawing larger and larger groups. The limit was reached when Prudence turned up one evening with a loudspeaker and a microphone; she now had a crowd of around ninety people every day, and she was riding high. Charlie asked her to desist but she replied that she was compelled to speak, and his silence was a scandal and a shame to him. That went ill with Charlie, who was resentful of any sort of criticism and was aware that his own campaign inside the church for a shrine had been overcrowded by this madwoman in the open air. The matter of Father Hobbes’ sanctity had, in fact, got out of control.

  I detested the whole business and gave Chips all the help I could in getting some legal restraint on the Vizard assemblies. But lawyers move like molasses in January as my mother used to say, and there was no chance that anything would happen for weeks and probably for months. Meanwhile the flower-beds around the graveyard which were Chips’ pride, were trampled to nothing, and the mess left by the crowd outside the door of my clinic was a continuing nuisance and I had to hire a man to come daily and clear it up. The church people were very loud in their disapproval; their strong sense of ritual was affronted by the Vizard evangelistic uproar. The hymns she encouraged the crowd to sing—nobody but herself seemed to know the words, but they all buzzed and hummed as she screamed—seemed like an ugly parody of the musical splendour that went on inside the church.

  “Some of it inevitably rubs off,” said Mr. Russell, the church warden. “She makes us look like a bunch of Holy Rollers. I don’t know why the cops can’t do something. Get her for unlawful assembly, or something. What are we paying taxes for?”

  But nothing happened to stop Prudence Vizard.

  Most decidedly nothing was to be expected from her husband. Charlie had approached him, and so had a deputation from the church. Mr. Vizard made it clear that he had no influence over his wife in such matters. He had borne with her illness for many years, and had sympathized with every manifestation of her roaming pain, and now that she was well and embarked on this new venture he preferred not to become involved. In short, he was afraid of his wife, and with good cause. She was not a brawler; she was a nagger and a weeper, which is far worse, and to top it all she was now the substance of a miracle.

  Of course the trouble was the source of many discussions in my upstairs retreat in my clinic. Dwyer always came in after the salon had drawn to a close, as did McWearie. My old friend Mr. Daubigny, the humbug-man, came frequently and he was a regular attendant after Prudence Vizard asserted herself. Mr. Daubigny was now an old man but his delight in the vagaries of life was unstinted.

  “This business of the Holy People,” he said, “is familiar to me from my Russian experience. There were thousands of them—beggars, crooks, madmen, and very possibly some deep believers. These people recall them, but they are not precisely like them. They do not smell like the Russian holy ones. Those had the unmistakable pong of people who had probably never had a bath in their lives. Of course these people of Mrs. Vizard’s assemble in the open air, but we may hope for a more pungent holiness when the cold weather comes and they have to find some shelter. I saw the pickpocket at work.”

  “I saw the snoop at work,” said Dwyer. “Didn’t you see Joe Sliter, Jon? Surely you remember him. Now who do you suppose is paying Joe to mix with that rabble?”

  “I wouldn’t mind risking a dollar—and I’m not a betting man, mind you—that it is the Bishop’s office,” said McWearie. “Ted Allchin has used private investigators before now. Always keep an eye on the man on your left at the Communion rail; he may be a snoop. Probably the Venerable Archdeacon thinks Charlie Iredale has something to do with this holy circus. That’s absurd, but when has Allchin boked at absurdity?”

  “Poor Charlie,” I said; “he mounted a tiger when be proclaimed the sainthood of Ninian Hobbes, and now the tiger is running away with him. I’ve listened to Mrs. Vizard from the windows of this room; she now blasts her message through a loudspeaker. She revels in what she thinks of as the persecution from St. Aidan’s. She doesn’t stop at proclaiming that she is following the practice of the primitive Church.”

  “Well, Charlie has only himself to blame,” Darcy said. “He has no discretion at all.”

  “That’s the effect of being Charlie’s sort of parson,” said Hugh. “A stomachy fellow. He’s the kind that knows best, and don’t you contradict him. He’s in the wrong Church, poor lad. He ought to have been an R.C.”

  “He isn’t, and he talks like a fool,” said I. “Did you hear him two weeks ago? You must have heard, Darcy.”

  “Me? Oh, I never listen to sermons,” said Dwyer.

  “Well, he preached right at Mrs. Vizard, who was sitting three rows from the front. He denounced the scandal of a woman pretending to special revelation. It was something not granted to her sex, he said. He denounced those who sought to ‘liberalize’ the faith which had been handed down to us through the ages, perfect and unchangeable.’ He denounced something he called Enthusiasm, which I don’t think I understood, but which seems to be a dreadful threat to whatever is true and certain.”

  “Och, it’s anathema to people of Charlie’s way of thinking,” said Hugh. “It’s revolution against discipline and structure in religion. It’s hot and rowdy and lets the worshippers have a big part in worship instead of sitting still and letting the priest do it for them. It’s fiercely personal, but of course it has to have leaders and all these popular evangelists are the sort of leaders it breeds. All the way from John Wesley (whom God preserve) to the most ignorant Bible-pounder in the American South. Its theology is simple. Say you love God—say it as loud as you can—and that’s all there is to it.”

  “But there are often deeply interesting manifestations,” said Daubigny. “The Pentecostal thing; speaking with tongues. I once heard a Russian holy creature speak incomprehensibly for ten minutes and in the end he foamed at the mouth and had a fit. The bystanders thought it was a very holy moment, because he was speaking the language the blessed ones speak in Paradise.”

  “We’ve had a snatch of that,” I said. “Last week a little woman interrupted Prudence when she was in full spate and began to gabble incomprehensibly. There was a kind of power in her strange talk, too.”

  “I heard about her from Anton Moscheles,” said Hugh. “He was on his way to Glebe House to pick up some music. He said he recognized the sound and he supposed she had gone meshuga—which means nutty but implies possession, as well. Anton made a run for it. It was too much like Old Russia for his delicate nerves.”

  “But Prudence shut her up quickly,” said I. “She demanded that a couple of people take her out of the garden and into the street and make sure she could not come back. Prudence wants no rivals in sanctity. Suppose that woman had said she was bringing a message from Ninian Hobbes in his new—what’s the word?—bodhissatva, his compassionate enlightenment? I must say she sounded a bit like Hobbes in his less coherent moments, when his false teeth weren’t in perfect control.”

  “All this uproar about Ninian Hobbes sets my teeth on edge,” said Dwyer. “He was a good old joker, but he wasn’t very learned, or very wise, and he couldn’t keep in tune when he was chanting. He fed the poor, did he? So do I, because I’m a taxpayer on a bigger income than Ninian Hobbes ever dreamed of.”

  “But he smiled on the poor,” said McWearie, “and you don’t smile when you pay your taxes, Darcy, and if you did our Civil Service wouldn’t know how to smile back. You’ve got to leave some place in the worl
d for private charity. It’s a two-way thing, is charity: you give a blessing, and you receive a blessing in return. You can’t do that by mail; it’s a face-to-face thing. What do you receive from your taxes? Well-kept roads and snow clearance, I suppose.”

  “Charlie’s mistake was in being so courteous to Prudence Vizard when first she declared she had been healed,” said I.

  “But that’s Charlie all over,” said Hugh. “Nothing like courtesy for keeping a woman in her place.”

  “Practically the first lesson we learn in the Navy,” said Daubigny.

  “And a very good principle,” said Dwyer. “It’s how we gentlemen of the special persuasion gain such a good opinion among what is sometimes called the fair sex.”

  “It’s the way we polished villains hold our own in the sex-war,” said McWearie.

  “Where is it to end?” said Daubigny.

  “In destruction, I fear,” said Dwyer. “Places like St. Aidan’s seem secure, but they are very delicately balanced. Is all that beauty, and scholarship, and real devotion to be overturned by Prudence Vizard? I have my serious misgivings.”

  “We shall see the outcome,” said I, “and meanwhile we must await the decree of Fate. Anangke, which I proclaim in my entryway, is a power to rival even that of St. Aidan’s.”

  “You are growing philosophical, and it is time for me to leave you,” said McWearie. “My guess is that it will blow over. The church is an anvil that has worn out many hammers, as the church itself is verra fond of saying. St. Aidan’s will pull through.”

  “You misunderstand me,” said Dwyer. “I don’t mean that anything will happen that you can see from outside. But Enthusiasm will win. At a heavy cost in some directions. I may not see it. I’m off in ten days.”

  “Lucky man,” said Daubigny. “I wish I could afford to travel. I’m land-locked. That’s fatality for you, Hullah. A sailor—and land-locked.”