Not the least element in this medley of stinks was Amos McGruder, who was not a dirty man in the sense that his face was dirty, or his hands excessively dirty, but who wore the same clothes week in and week out, and who took off his shoes when he entered the house, and trod about in well-seasoned heavy socks. His smell was a powerful, masculine, farmyard smell, not unwholesome but inescapable.
Amos was a bachelor, which may have contributed a testicular element to his stench, like the cat. He lived with his sister, Miss Annie, who was by no means demonstrably insane, but who in the local parlance “lacked a round of being square.” Miss Annie was quite up to keeping house, not in the highest flights of such work, but not positively squalid, though too often there was hair in the butter. She provided a cuisine of breakfast, oatmeal porridge; dinner, stewed beef and potatoes not fully boiled; supper, bread and a variety of jams made by Miss Annie as fruits ripened in the season. All meals were washed down with stewed tea, made in a pot which was rarely emptied of leaves from which every bitter essence had been wrung.
Conversation at meals consisted of a brief weather report delivered by Amos, in which he contradicted the forecast that had been broadcast that morning on the radio; in Amos’s opinion, “they never got it right.” Miss Annie might mention that she had seen somebody pass on the road during the day. Otherwise she talked of religion.
Even the most devout priest can get enough of talk about religion, especially when it is untouched by theological stringency, or mystical insight. Miss Annie’s talk was chiefly of her dreams; Jesus often came to her in dreams, and she described his appearance in detail. Luckily for Charlie, she did not require much of her listeners except silence and an appearance of acquiescence. Amos said nothing, but ate swiftly and passed back for more.
Charlie soon learned to say nothing, and to make his plate look as much as possible as if he had eaten more than a few mouthfuls.
At the beginning of his years under the McGruder roof, Charlie had tried to institute the custom of saying grace before meat. Amos never seemed to understand why this might be done, and Miss Annie was too close to Jesus to need any such reminder. So Charlie came soon to mumbling his grace to himself, crossing himself, and then approaching the victuals that God had seen fit to grant to him. This must have been a test of faith.
Amos frowned at the crossing: to him it was something “Dogans” did.
During the day Charlie drudged at parish work, scooting around the backwood tracks on his untrustworthy steed, but when night fell he was trapped in the McGruder kitchen. He could not go to his bedroom during most of the year, for it was unheated. He could attempt to read, but Miss Annie liked to talk, and did not think that anybody could possibly want to read when she wanted to speak. Amos, from time to time, read a local paper, grunting disagreement. He had long since ceased to pay any attention to his sister.
Sunday was the day of bitterness beyond the ordinary. Charlie had to put in an appearance at two or more of his churches—small, frame buildings, obvious fire-traps, heated with stoves—and sometimes he managed to visit three. But whatever his duty might be, he had always to have midday dinner with the chief parishioner, who was probably also the Biggest Giver, and the menu and manner of these dinners was unvarying.
Now that he feeds on Christofferson’s delicate and subtly flavoured broths, Charlie can permit himself to be amusing in his descriptions of these Sunday dinners. If the principal dish were not greasy fried pork chops, it was chicken pot-pie, made from superannuated hen and with dumplings of a horror he seeks to describe, searching for precisely the right word to summon up their quality; “glabrous” and “gluteal” have to be discarded because, although the sound is right, the meaning won’t fit. We agree at last that “glairigenous” is as near as we can get, and indeed it is a fine word with its suggestion of stringy mucus and thick snot. The meal is completed by home-bottled stewed fruit, very sweet, and coffee, which the hostess describes, proudly, as “strong enough to trot a mouse.”
Charlie had never been a big eater, nor indeed do I think he was interested in food. But etiquette demanded that he should do as his hosts did, and then, when he was away on his motor-bike to his next service, he stopped and vomited the mess by the roadside.
But this was not all that was involved in the celebration of the Lord’s Day. At the McGruders’ it was Parlour Night, when the parlour was opened and if it were winter, the stove—the “base burner”—was lit and after some time diffused a smelly heat and showed a cheerful glow behind the mica windows in its door. The McGruders sat in the kitchen on weekdays because it was the only heated room in the house, but on Sundays the parlour organ was needed so that Miss Annie could reveal her latest inspiration.
Miss Annie wrote hymns of praise. She did not compose music, but she fitted her devotional rhymes to such popular tunes as she knew, and could play on the wheezing old organ; mice had been at its bellows and its voice was as vagarious as that of Miss Annie herself.
Her star piece, with which she concluded every Sunday-night concert, was set to the tune of the once-popular waltz song “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” In Miss Annie’s recension it began—
Let me call you Jesus,
I’m in love with you—
and as she sang it her face wore what Charlie described as a sanctified leer, a transfiguring lust. Poor mad old maid, her innocent religiosity was heavily tinged with her ungratified desire.
Charlie’s professional sense of charity and forgiveness was sorely tried by Miss Annie’s warblings. His mind wandered to the music offered under the direction of Dr. DeCourcy Parry in the service of God, and he bled in spirit. But compliments were expected, and proffered.
Parlour nights went on until nine o’clock, which was late for Amos and the neighbours—Hercules McNabb and his wife Dorsy—who were the most frequent guests. The music ceased at eight-thirty, in order that there should be time for the fried cakes and strong tea before Hercules McNabb said, “Well, I guess—” and the orgy crawled to an end.
Small wonder, then, that Charlie took to drink. Small wonder that in the portmanteau strapped to the back of the motor-bike there was always a Baby Bear of the cheapest rye. Small wonder that in his bedroom, hidden in his valise which he kept locked against the inquisitive eyes of Miss Annie, there was another Baby Bear or two. Charlie was probably the most consistent and profitable patron of the government liquor store which lay just outside his pastoral district, and which he hoped, therefore, he could visit without being known or attracting attention. Vain hope. Everybody knew the parson drank.
(Does anybody now know what a Baby Bear is? The Government of Ontario used to sell spirits—usually rye or Scotch—in three sizes of bottle: the Baby Bear (12 oz.), the Momma Bear (24 oz.), and the Daddy Bear (40 oz.). The consumer was, presumably, a Goldilocks who made free with the property of all three bears. So—Charlie was a great consumer of the easily concealed Baby Bears.)
High-minded people would doubtless assure me that intellectual degeneration does not go hand in hand with physical degeneration and that neither has anything significant to do with social degeneration. I have been a physician in extensive practice too long to be deceived by such nonsense. Devout people would certainly point out to me that determined missionaries had spent years among native tribes, eating and living as did the souls they had come to save, and had acquired a high spiritual shine. But missionaries usually hunt in pairs or even larger groups; they are not utterly cut off from people of like mind; they know the tribes among whom they work to be people unlike themselves and they do not have the daily desolation of trying to live with the McGruders without in any important way offending the McGruders nor yet yielding to what might be grandly called the McGruder Ethos.
Inevitably, after nearly eight years of this sort of life, there came a crisis. One Sunday morning, when Charlie—who, of course, fasted before celebrating the Eucharist—had fortified himself with a swig from his Baby Bear before going to the first church of the day,
and had then given himself another before the service, mingled with the sweet cheap wine he was preparing for Communion, was observed to be staggering as he offered the Communion cup to the seven faithful souls who had appeared to accept it, and in staggering he spilled the wine down the chin of a woman who was bending forward to receive it. Attempting to recover himself he tripped and fell and lay on the floor, moaning. The Blood of Christ slopped all down the front of his surplice. By the time two men picked him up, he had passed out. One drove him back to the McGruders’ while another took charge of the senile motor-bike.
Did he sleep it off? He did not. He finished the Baby Bear and then drank all of another which he had in his valise, and lay in a stupor from Sunday until Wednesday, when he rose, set off to the nearest railway station on the motor-bike, took the day’s single train to Toronto, and deserted his cure of souls forever, a priest disgraced beyond any recovery, at least in his own estimation.
In Toronto he made his way at once to St. Aidan’s, as the only place in the city that was at all familiar to him. It was changed beyond belief, but he joined God’s People in the crypt, and there he remained, sleeping long hours in the Priest’s Hole, and drinking on the sly (so as not to have to share with others in the crypt, for there were many who would have been glad to help him with his succession of Baby Bears). How did he get money? He begged. Yes, Charlie begged with the modern beggar’s cry—“Got any change?”
I suppose he had been there two weeks before I discovered him and forcibly removed him to my clinic. He was not willing to talk, but I bullied a few facts out of him: he had no resources, for his parents had left very little money and over the years it had been dissipated; the family income had depended chiefly on his mother’s life interest in a family estate, and that had perished with her; the professor, a daring but unlucky investor, had lost virtually everything he had ever had, and his university pension died with him. Thus Charlie was an indigent, and in his own opinion a ruined priest.
I urged him to go to the Bishop, say his say, be properly penitent, and ask for help and work. But here Charlie’s theological snobbery prevented him from doing anything of the kind; the Bishop was Low Church in the depths of his heart, and Charlie wanted no help from one so lost to reason and truth. I asked him what he thought he might do. He had no opinion on that matter. I asked him what he wanted to do, and he replied morosely that he wanted to die, but I was better able than he to judge whether or not that was likely, and I thought he was not assured but at least capable of many years of life yet. This Bishop was not the one who had banished him to the wilderness, but a new man and so far as I knew, not at all a bad sort. Meanwhile I had Charlie on my hands. Worse—I had him on my bed and I saw no hope of getting rid of him, for he had lost all power of will, and like most such people he remained a monstrous egotist: I do not think he knew what a nuisance he was.
I wrote to Brocky as being, like myself, one of Charlie’s oldest friends. Had he any advice? He had none, but generous fellow that he was, he sent a handsome cheque to assist Charlie, although it was made out to me. I was so foolish as to mention this to Charlie, and he was very angry: had he reached a point where he could not be trusted to manage his own affairs? I did not quite have the cruelty to say that that was his condition. But I was firm about not letting him have more than a dollar or two in his own hand, for I knew what would happen if he could get to a liquor store. I knew Charlie better than he knew himself, and that is always an uncomfortable situation for both parties.
(16)
Note for ANAT.: One of the problems surrounding Charlie’s stay in my clinic was his cranky resistance to the ministrations of Christofferson, which I knew to be good for him. He could not endure to have a woman see him naked, or almost so. But I wanted him to have an oatmeal bath, following a thorough massage, every second day. Christofferson would not permit a patient to lie in a bath unless she had frequent access to the bath-chamber, for baths can be dangerous to the unable or disturbed. Charlie was one of those people in whom lingers the medieval notion that a bath is necessarily an erotic experience, and I truly believe he supposed that Christofferson looked in on him in order to feast her eyes on his naked body, and especially his privy parts. He fussed and fumed and besought me to order her to keep out of his bath-chamber, but I had no intention whatever of doing so. Modesty, in the world of medicine, is nonsense.
“Man is nothing else than fetid sperm, a sack of dung, the food of worms,” I would say to him, quoting St. Bernard. “Do you suppose the admirable Frau Inge Christofferson does not know that, and values your exposed body accordingly? Do use your head, Charlie. This is a clinic, not a brothel, and Christofferson is a thorough professional at her work.”
But it was useless. His attitude seemed to be that of the nineteenth century, when nakedness was not utterly decried, but was cloaked in a terrible high-mindedness. Frequently quoted was a Mrs. Bishop, a celebrated traveller, who said, “A woman may be naked, and yet behave like a lady.” At the tea-table, one presumes. But it was a far, far better thing for the lady never, never to be naked. It appears that the Brownings, through all their happy married life, never saw one another naked. Did curiosity, one wonders, never assert itself? No wonder men of perfectly normal instincts resorted to brothels, where modesty was not obsessive, though beauty might be scant.
In literature the matter rarely comes up, but in the enormously popular romance Trilby (written, if I recall aright, in 1894 or 5) the hero is thrown into a state of nervous collapse when he discovers that the girl he adores, an artist’s model in Paris, actually allows men to paint her in what was modestly called “the altogether.” And his mother (Oh, those Victorian mothers!) and his sister (Oh, those Victorian mothers-in-training!) do their modest best to assuage his desolation. What, one wonders, happened on his wedding-night, when at last he had one, but not with the shop-worn Trilby? One thinks of Ruskin, who was reduced to impotence on his wedding night by the discovery that his bride—a notable beauty, be it known—had pubic hair, an adornment which had apparently never entered his consciousness in spite of his high-minded familiarity with the world’s great art. He was twenty-nine at the time.
Modesty, surely, means moderation, something between the squalor of mind I recall from Eddu, and the perversity shown by Charlie, fussing lest a horrid great girl (Christofferson!) might “see” him in his bath.
But Christofferson would have none of it and insisted on drying Charlie with a large rough towel, as she knew what patchy dryers invalids can be.
“He is like a silly little boy,” she said to me. Yes, and what an odd little boy I was later to learn.
(17)
At last, things came to a crisis with Emily Raven-Hart. She was nagged lovingly by Chips until at last she consulted Dumoulin again to report that the pills he had been giving her were not working; they were one of the early “mood-changers” and capricious in their effect. He was finally given the proper signal by her appearance and behaviour, and insisted on an examination which showed a right breast far advanced in cancer, the nipple inverted, the flesh crêpey, and that very day she was taken to hospital and the following morning underwent a radical mastectomy and axillary node dissection. I knew very well that this might not be the complete solution of her trouble, and I arranged matters so that I happened, quite casually, to meet both Dumoulin and the surgeon later in the day, for they both lunched at my Club.
“I expect you’ll get her onto radiation as soon as possible,” said the surgeon, who was practising his art on a pair of lamb chops.
“Oh certainly. Not an instant’s delay,” said Dumoulin, who was busy with some gravy soup; “goes without saying.”
“But what precisely are you going to say to her?” I said. I was having oysters before my chops.
“That it’s the best course to pursue,” said Dumoulin. “We’d be very remiss if we neglected it.”
“But you won’t tell her it will put her back at work, I suppose?” said I.
“Tha
t would be premature,” said Dumoulin.
“Look, George,” said I, “you don’t have to pull your punches with me.”
“Well, you are a friend of the patient, after all.”
“But a physician, like yourself. It’s all up, isn’t it?”
“I never say that,” said the surgeon, who was a large fleshy, powerful man who looked as if he never said anything disagreeable under any circumstances. “I’ve seen the most extraordinary recoveries in cases where you could never have predicted them.”
“But more often you’ve seen metastases that proliferated and made short work of things, haven’t you?” said I.
“That’s always a possibility; of course,” said Dumoulin, “but we must wait for the X-rays. Never does to be in a hurry.”
“What are you going to tell her?” said I.
“Least said, soonest mended, is what I always find. A cheerful attitude, you know. No long faces.”
The Cunning Man Page 42
