The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  “Charlie doesn’t need much taking care of now. He’s very low but quiet, and Christofferson will be with him soon, trying to get him to drink a little soup.”

  “All up, I suppose?”

  “Ever since Esme’s dinner-party.”

  “She’s still on the hunt for colour stuff about St. Aidan’s.”

  “I know. You encourage her?”

  “It’s my profession. That series on The Toronto That Was needs something solid about Toronto churches, and St. Aidan’s is the one I want stressed, rather than one of the evangelistic sort.”

  “Why don’t you encourage her to do something about the salon, and The Ladies?”

  “Not solid stuff. The Church is solid. She’s still sure there’s something in what she calls ‘the saint bit’ and she won’t let go till she finds it.”

  “The less said about the saint bit now, the better.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Oh—nothing.”

  “Oh yes—something. What are you hiding, Jon?”

  “Nothing that I intend to share with you, you nosy newspaperman. You blat everything you know.”

  “That’s not true, and you know it. Charlie’s told you something.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Your excellent whisky. It promotes intuition. You and Charlie must have had some good talks, during the past few weeks.”

  “Talks, but I wouldn’t call them good. But you can’t sit by a man’s bed and say nothing. Of course we’ve talked about the great days of St. Aidan’s, before it fell into the Canon’s ultramodern hands and became a social centre full of live wires.”

  “Ah, the ritual!”

  “I thought you looked on it as play-acting?”

  “Nothing wrong with a bit of play-acting. The St. Aidan’s ritual was in classic style; real Masterpiece Theatre. The ‘sincere’ stuff the Canon goes in for is Method Acting—look in your guts and fish out what you find there—and you can guess what most of it is. Ritual is a very fine guano to spread over the aridities of doctrine.”

  “Ritual as Charlie and DeCourcy Parry and Darcy Dwyer knew it belongs to the past, I fear.”

  “Balls! All eras of history are an equal distance from eternity.”

  “Who said that?”

  “What makes you think I didn’t say it just now, out of my own head?”

  “Did you?”

  “I’ve said it so often I am pretty sure it’s my own. I think I was nearer to what St. Aidan’s was about than you ever were, Jon. Don’t forget, I was once a parson. A Presbyterian, but that’s a man of faith, let me tell you. You treated Christianity at St. Aidan’s the way the pagans treated mythology—as a kind of fancy wallpaper for the mind.”

  “It may be so. But I am not without my depths, so don’t patronize me.”

  “Been talking to Charlie about your depths?”

  “His depths.”

  “Jon, I can see that you are bursting to tell me something, but your Hippocratic Oath stands in the way.”

  “It would never do. It’s a secret.”

  “I’ll make a deal with you. I know a secret, too. A secret very near to yourself. Tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine.”

  “It sounds like children playing in a barn: ‘You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.’ ”

  “And the children emerge better informed in consequence. Come along. Out with it.”

  “I’m to go first? Oh, very likely! Exchanged secrets should be of equal value. How hefty is yours?”

  “You want to know who murdered your godson, I suppose?”

  “That was very fishy.”

  “Indeed it was.”

  “All that stuff about somebody sneaking in by way of the balcony.”

  “Totally improbable.”

  “It had to be somebody who had come into the flat through the door.”

  “As you say.”

  “So, Hugh?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Somebody there with Esme?”

  “A possibility.”

  “You know, I wondered about that fellow who made such a hullabaloo at the funeral. That fellow with the fancy walking-stick.”

  “What did you wonder?”

  “You know about the old notion that if a murderer comes near the corpse of his victim, the body bleeds?”

  “I’ve heard of it. But the body was very thoroughly encased, so if it bled, no one would know.”

  “Don’t be so literal. It is simply folk-psychology for saying that murder will out.”

  “Well—did it?”

  “I have my strong suspicions of that fellow with the walking-stick.”

  “Ah, Jon, you’re very intuitive.”

  “Am I right?”

  “If you knew, what would you do?”

  “Do? I’d do nothing.”

  “Swear?”

  “What would be the point? What would it mean to Esme?”

  “Yes indeed. Well, there you are. A very intuitive man.”

  “You haven’t said I’m right.”

  “Nor will I. I haven’t leaked. But you’ve guessed.”

  “I see. Now it’s your turn to guess.”

  “About Ninian Hobbes? Oh, I guessed long ago.”

  “And what, or who, did you guess?”

  “My father was a policeman, you know. A very good one. Ended up as a Detective Chief Inspector. He always said that in cases of murder the first thing to do is to take a good look at the family.”

  “Poor old Hobbes had no family.”

  “Family in the sense of nearest and dearest. A son, for instance. Right-hand man. Obvious successor.”

  “You’ve got it wrong. Who would have murdered Father Hobbes to be incumbent of St. Aidan’s?”

  “That’s what I can’t figure out. Why did Charlie do it? And how did he do it? Because I’ll bet any money—and I’m speaking as a Scot, mind—Charlie did it.”

  After that, what was there but to tell why, and how?

  So there we sat, neither one having positively blabbed his secret, but with the secrets now as plainly revealed as they would ever be.

  “Those hypnagogic visions,” said Hugh; “they must be terribly convincing.”

  “Not your usual erotic dream,” said I. “But those things are stupidly underestimated.”

  (23)

  After Charlie’s funeral Hugh was unable to join me for a drink to dispel the atmosphere of mourning, so I sat alone. Chips, I knew, had returned to her packing; as soon as Emily was buried she was determined to return to England.

  “Nothing to keep me here, now,” she said.

  “Nothing to take her there, now, either,” said McWearie, when he heard. “If she expects to find a pre-1939 England she is in for a dire disappointment. I’ve seen these people who expect to find the Land of Lost Content when they go back to England, and it never is. But she’s right; there’s nothing for her here, either.”

  I knew that better, I think, than anyone else. Ten days earlier, on the night Emily died, I had been visiting Charlie downstairs and when I was leaving an impulse made me climb the stairs and tap on the door of Emily’s room. She was now so frequently unconscious that she had ceased to object to my presence, and I knew that sometimes I could lift Chips’ spirits, even if only for a few minutes.

  “Come,” said Chips’ voice.

  There was only one light in the room, shining—not brightly—on the bed, where Emily lay, and the moment I saw her I knew that it was all over. The look of pain was gone, and as sometimes happens in death, it had been supplanted by a calm which looked like youth—the best of youth.

  Chips sat with her drawing-board on her knees, composed as an artist is when confidently at work; she was drawing with one of her special pens—a flexible quill—and Indian ink, over a sketch that had been done so finely in pencil that it was almost imperceptible, but plain to the hand that had made it. I said nothing but sat down a little behind her so as not to disturb her concentr
ation, and in the half-hour that followed a drawing of the dead woman’s head took form on the paper, and its beauty, simplicity, and masterly command were like nothing I had ever seen from Chips’ hand before.

  I had known her only as an etcher, and I am not fond of etchings, and particularly not little four-by-six things showing old Toronto houses of no special interest except, presumably, to an etcher. It was not until later, when I found the letters to Barbara Hepworth, that I knew what an accomplished artist Chips was.

  This was drawing in the classic mode, in which contour was indicated by line, without resort to cross-hatching or “shading.” It would be romantic nonsense to say that its quality arose from love, but it may be said that love of a very special kind spoke through the artist.

  “I think that will do,” said Chips, coolly.

  I said nothing, because in the circumstances there was nothing to be said. My praise was not needed and could only have been a clumsy intrusion on a very private estimate of a piece of work by the maker.

  Chips turned to rise. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about all this,” said she, “and I’m pretty well convinced it was all a huge mistake.”

  “What was?”

  “The whole thing. Getting into such a fury with Gussie Gryll and having a showdown with Emily and insisting it was a choice between an elopement with me or fifty years of serving tea to the county by day and putting up with Gussie’s pawing and mauling by night, and three or four kids who had to be expensively educated for just the same sort of stupid life-in-death. And forcing the choice on her because I was always the stronger one, you know—real strong prefect-guiding-the-confused-kiddie-who-has-got-herself-into-a-mess. I’m not sure our sort of life was what suited her best. Maybe she wanted a man, after all. Maybe even Gussie, ass though he was. The poor sweet wasn’t really an artist, you know. Just a nice little talent. And I was so sure I could flatter and encourage and puff her up with gas until maybe the real thing would happen.

  “And it was all because of love. I truly loved her, Jon. Love can be a bugger, can’t it?”

  (24)

  It was not long before I had personal assurance of the truth of Chips’ harsh dictum. Spring was coming, and one morning I awoke with horror and astonishment to find that I was in love with Esme.

  After the masque, the anti-masque: after the tragedy, the farce. Emily Raven-Hart and Charles Iredale had played out personal dramas that were in terms of the time, and their situation, and their limitations, tragedies. Now was the time for the harlequinade, where old, doting Pantaloon is fooled and tricked and exposed in all his senile ineptitude, to the guffaws of the mob.

  I had been seeing Esme frequently because she was now completing her story about the St. Aidan’s district for The Toronto That Was series of articles in the Advocate. She came to me for matters of fact and accuracy of detail, but she had ceased to pester me for information about “the saint bit” and the death of Father Hobbes.

  The reason? She now had all that from a thoroughly informed source—from one who indeed had experienced the saintly charisma of Father Hobbes, one who had been present at his death before the altar, and been miraculously cured of her disabling arthritis at his grave! Yes, it was Prudence Vizard who thus reappeared. Vizard had died—died to get away from his wife, I have no doubt—and she had remarried one Serge Shepilov, a choreographer and even a dancer when a ballet dancer of fifty-five was wanted, perhaps for a television commercial. As Madame Shepilov, Prudence had developed—doubtless sympathetically—a somewhat Russian accent and was, as Esme put it, “into counselling” giving advice to married couples or couples who perhaps ought to have been married, and in some mysterious fashion Prudence Shepilov was on one of the many payrolls of the City of Toronto.

  Her story was finely composed. One day, returning from a consultation with her doctor—a doctor who had shown himself utterly incompetent in his handling of her case (myself, as Prudence remembered me), she had chanced to be passing the simple grave of Father Ninian Hobbes. She was, as her custom was praying, and her prayer was that old Orthodox one: “Father, not according to my deserts but according to Thy great mercy,” and suddenly a light appeared above the grave—not a bright light, nor anything like an electric light, but a mystic light, a radiance—and the pain of her arthritis had disappeared in an instant. A blessed miracle! She had tried—God alone knows how she tried—to awaken the people in the district to the wonder that was in their midst, but in this she was thwarted by Archdeacon Edward Allchin, now Bishop of the Barren Lands, north-west of Hudson Bay and east of the Mackenzie basin. (Allchin had thwarted or double-crossed too many senior clergy and had been kicked upstairs—kicked right into the attic, in fact—as Bishop of the Barrens.) Nevertheless, a saint had been manifested to the people of Toronto, even though that blessed people had received him with thoroughly Canadian indifference. What chance has a Saint Francis, if his Assisi is a multicultured, financial, unyieldingly secular northern city, whose lepers and other detrimentals are charges on the public purse?

  Esme had accepted this story and burnished it to a high gloss. I saw no reason to trouble her with a tale of religious obsession, hypnagogic visions, deceiving Christ-figures who were in fact instruments of the Adversary, murder undertaken for the highest motives, and a deal with the Almighty that had gone tragically wrong; such a narrative would have lacked the simplicity which is vital to popular journalism. But as she talked with me in my consulting-room the warmth and charm of her personality, her youthful freshness—still glowing at the age of twenty-eight—and a softness which had not been hers when first I knew her and which I attributed to motherhood, enchanted me.

  I use the word carefully. This was an enchantment. I, a physician at last admitting old age and supposing himself pretty well aware of the vagaries of the human spirit and armoured against the follies of simpler folk, had fallen in love like a boy of seventeen, and I was incapable of seeing Esme except through the deceiving-glass of that passion.

  Did I blush and stammer ill-phrased compliments? Did I betray my feelings? Of course not. Outwardly, it seemed to me, I behaved to Esme as I had always done, with courteous reserve tempered by the warmth of feeling proper to a—no, not a relative, though she was the widow of my godson—but to what my mother used to call “a connection,” meaning somebody who was not quite “family” but not wholly of the outer world. It seemed to me that I betrayed nothing of what I felt, but my love possessed me and interfered seriously with my work. Did Christofferson notice? Of course she knew that I was seeing Esme oftener than ever before and did not moan and protest when I saw her name on my daily list of appointments.

  I felt that Christofferson disapproved of Esme. Rather sooner than one might have expected, Esme had begun to contribute a series of articles to the Advocate on Coping With Widowhood that had caused a good deal of comment and were soon to appear in a small book. Christofferson, who sifted the Advocate carefully every day of her life, had read these cosily phrased, grief-bravely-repressed, common-sense-triumphing-over-adversity pieces, and sometimes I observed that she was puffing from her nostrils little sounds that would have been snorts in a lesser woman. Christofferson had known adversity, and had not capitalized on it. But then, I told myself, Christofferson was not a journalist, and knew nothing of a journalist’s obligation toward the greater world. But Christofferson was as icily courteous toward Esme as she was toward everybody, whenever Esme appeared for an appointment.

  What did Christofferson make of the laughter which she must have heard through the door of my consulting-room? For one of Esme’s principal charms was that she could make me laugh, at a time when laughter was a scarce commodity in my experience. Make me laugh not with jokes, not with journalistic wisecracks, but by oddities of phrase, drolleries of perception, wit that underlay her conversation but did not frolic on the surface of it. It seemed to me, goof that I was, that the spirit of Jane Austen lived again in Esme. It did not occur to me that Jane would never have fallen for Pru
dence Shepilov.

  In brief, I was a fool, and an old fool. But not totally a fool. I had resort to my Anatomy, hoping it would have some advice for me, as I hoped that in future it would have advice for others.

  (25)

  Note for ANAT.: Fiction is rich in instances of older men falling in love with much younger women, and this is obviously because it is something literary men are prone to do. More prone than other men? Impossible to say, because other men leave no record of their experience.

  Even tough old Henrik Ibsen, when he was only a little younger than I, fell like a ton of bricks for Emilie Bardach, his “summer princess,” and later he was enchanted (as am I, at present) by Helene Raff, and what did he say: “You are youth, child, youth personified—and I need that for my work.” And after that, Hildur Andersen—Oh, the flame did not die in Henrik, though so far as we know he was never physically unfaithful to his Susannah. (But then the thought of Ibsen rolling in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed is grotesque and pitiable, and neither description ever fitted him.)

  Even Anthony Trollope, subtle Victorian psychologist, knew an autumn love, and he was psychologically astute enough to know it for what it was and to weigh it to a scruple of its worth, when he met his Kate Field.

  Certainly Charles Dickens, and that duplicitous little miss Ellen Ternan, must join the club, even as it occurs to me without having done any real research on the subject. Because of his Ellen, Dickens managed to make an astonishing number of people other than himself miserable, and unlike Ibsen or Trollope he wanted a physical fulfilment of his daft passion. Whether he got it or not remains a mystery; photographs of Miss Ternan do not suggest a passionate or even a normally warm nature, but we do know that after Dickens’ death she married a clergyman and occasionally gave readings from Dickens’ works, but only under the most respectable circumstances and never—never for money. Of course he had left her a nice lump in his will, though not a fortune. No such autumnal passion appears in Dickens’ novels, unless we accept the marriage of Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock as an example.