What's Bred in the Bone

by Robertson Davies

The nursery door opened. It was Aunt Mary-Ben, tiny and smiling, her little soft cap nodding pleasantly, for she was not a bit disapproving. Oh, not she! She motioned Francis back to his bed, and drew Bella-Mae toward the window, where she spoke very softly for a few minutes, after which Bella-Mae ran out of the room, crying.

  Then Aunt said, “Shall we say our prayers, Frankie? Or I’ll tell you what—you shall hear me say mine.” And Aunt knelt by the bed with the little boy, and brought out of her pocket a sort of necklace he had never seen before, made of black beads of different sizes, strung together with silver chain, and as Aunt passed the beads through her fingers she murmured what sounded like poetry. When she had finished she reverently kissed the cross that hung on the necklace and, with a sweet smile, held it out to Francis, who kissed it, too. Liked kissing it, liked the reverential quietness, liked the effect of poetry. This was every bit as good as Bella-Mae’s march, in an entirely different way. He held the cross in his hand, reluctant to let it go.

  “Would you like it for your very own, Frankie?” said Aunt. “I’m afraid you can’t have it right now, dear, but perhaps after a little while I shall be able to give you one of these. It’s called a rosary, dear, because it’s a rose-garden of prayer. It’s the garden of Jesus’ dear Mother, and when we say our prayers with it, we are very near Her, and we may even see Her sweet face. But this is our secret, dear. Don’t say anything to Daddy.”

  No fear of that. Conversation between Francis and the Major was in a very different mode. “Come here and I’ll show you my gun, Frank. Look down the barrel. See? Clean as a whistle. Always keep your gun clean and oiled. It deserves it. A fine gun deserves decent care. When you’re older I’ll get you one, and show you how to use it. Must learn to shoot like a sportsman, not like a killer.” Or it might be, “Come with me, Frank, and I’ll show you how to tie a trout-fly.” Or, “Look at my boots, Frank. Bright, what? I never let the girls do my boots. You’d never think these were eleven years old, would you? That’s what proper care does. You can always judge a man by his boots. Always get ’em from the best maker. Only cads wear dirty boots.” Or, in passing, “Stand straight, Frank. Never slump, however tired you are. Arch your back a bit, too—looks smart on parade. Come tomorrow after breakfast and I’ll show you my sword.”

  A good father, determined that his son should be a good man. Not entirely what might have been expected of the Wooden Soldier. There were depths of affection in the Major. Affection, and pride. No poetry.

  Mother was entirely different. Affectionate, but perhaps she turned it on at will. She did not see a great deal of Francis except by accident, for she had so much to do. Amusing Father, and taking care that there were no unfortunate encounters when the Cornishes set out for St. Alban’s church on Sunday morning, and the McRorys’ carriage might be making toward St. Bonaventura; reading a succession of novels with pretty pictures on the covers; and playing the phonograph, which gave out with Gems from The Wizard of the Nile, and a piece Francis loved, the words of which were:

  Everybody’s doing it

  Doing it, doing it

  Everybody’s doing it

  Doing what? The turkey-trot;

  See that rag-time couple over there,

  See them throw their feet in the air—

  It’s a bear, it’s a bear, it’s a BEAR!

  It was wonderful—better than anything. Just as good as Father’s sword, or Aunt’s mysterious beads, and far better than Bella-Mae in her uniform, which he never saw now, anyway. Mother took his hands and they danced the turkey-trot round and round her pretty drawing-room. All wonderful!

  As wonderful, in their own way, as the ecstatic first moment with the peony, but perhaps not quite, because that was all his own, and he could repeat it in summer and remember it in winter without anybody else being involved.

  All wonderful, until the shattering September morning in 1914 when he was led away by Bella-Mae to school.

  This would have figured more prominently in the life of Chegwidden Lodge if the household had not been in disorder because of the many absences, which extended from days to weeks and then to months, of the Major and his wife in Ottawa, where they were increasingly favourites at Government House. In addition there were mysterious colloquies with military authorities; the Major acted as a go-between for the Governor-General, the Duke of Connaught, who was a field marshal and knew rather more about military affairs than most of the Canadian regulars. As the representative of the Crown, the Duke could not make himself too prominent, or cause the Canadians to lose face, and it was somebody’s job to carry information to and advice from Rideau Hall without being tactless. That somebody was Major Cornish, who was tact personified. And when, at last, war was officially declared against Germany and what were called the Central Powers, the Major became something which was slow to be named, but was, in fact, Chief of Military Intelligence, in so far as Canada had such an organization, and he moved himself and Mary-Jim to Ottawa. They would not be in Blairlogie, he told the Senator, for the duration, which was not expected to be long.

  The business of arranging for Francis’s education had not been much considered. Ottawa and the pleasures and intrigues of the Vice-regal world were foremost in Mary-Jacobine’s mind, and she was the sort of mother who is certain that if she is happy, all must certainly be well with her child. Francis was too small to be sent to boarding-school, and, besides, he tended to have heavy colds and bronchial troubles. “Local schools for a while,” said the Major, but not to Francis. Indeed, nobody said anything to Francis until the evening before school opened, when Bella-Mae said, “Up in good time tomorrow; you’re starting school.” Francis, who knew every tone of her voice, caught the ring of malice in what she said.

  The next morning Francis threw up his breakfast, and was assured by Bella-Mae that there was to be none of that, because they had no time to spare. With her hand holding his firmly—more firmly than usual—he was marched off to Blairlogie’s Central School, to be entered in the kindergarten.

  It was by no means a bad school, but it was not a school to which children were escorted by nursemaids, or where boys were dressed in white sailor suits and crowned with a sailor cap with H.M.S. Renown on the ribbon. The kindergarten was housed in an old-fashioned schoolhouse, to which a large, much newer school had been joined. It stank, in a perfectly reasonable way, of floor oil, chalk powder, and many generations of imperfectly continent Blairlogie children. The teacher, Miss Wade, was a smiling, friendly woman, but a stranger, and there was not a child in the thirty or more present whom Francis had ever seen before.

  “His name’s Francis Cornish,” said Bella-Mae, and went home.

  Some of the children were crying, and Francis was of a mind to join this group, but he knew his father would disapprove, so he bit his lip and held in. Obedient to Miss Wade, and a student teacher who acted as her assistant, the children sat in small chairs, arranged in a circle marked out on the floor in red paint.

  To put things on a friendly footing at once, Miss Wade said that everybody would stand up, as his turn came, and say his name and tell where he lived, so that she could prepare something mysteriously called the Nominal Roll. The children complied, some shouting out their names boldly, some sure of their names but in the dark as to their addresses; the third child in order, a little girl, lost her composure and wet the floor. Most of the other children laughed, held their noses, and enjoyed the fun, as the student teacher rushed forward with a damp rag for the floor and a hanky for the eyes. When Francis’s turn came, he announced, in a low voice: Francis Chegwidden Cornish, Chegwidden Lodge.

  “What’s your second name, Francis?” said Miss Wade.

  “Chegwidden,” said Francis, using the pronunciation he had been taught.

  Miss Wade, kindly but puzzled, said, “Did you say Chicken, Francis?”

  “Cheggin,” said Francis, much too low to be heard above the roar of the thirty others, who began to shout, “Chicken, Chicken!” in delight. This was something
they could understand and get their teeth into. The kid in the funny suit was called Chicken! Oh, this was rich! Far better than the kid who had peed.

  Miss Wade restored order, but at recess it was Chicken, Chicken! for the full fifteen minutes, and a very happy playtime it made. Kindergarten assembled only during the mornings, and as soon as school was dismissed, Francis ran home as fast as he could, followed by derisive shouts.

  Francis announced next morning that he was not going to school. Oh yes you are, said Bella-Mae. I won’t, said Francis. Do you want me to march you right over to Miss McRory? said Bella-Mae, for in the absence of his parents, Aunt Mary-Ben had been given full authority to bind and loose if anything went beyond the nursemaid’s power. So off to school he went, in Bella-Mae’s jailer’s grip, and the second day was worse than the first.

  Children from the upper school had got wind of something extraordinary and at recess Francis was surrounded by older boys, anxious to look into the matter.

  “It’s not Chicken, it’s Cheggin,” said Francis, trying hard not to cry.

  “See—he says his name’s Chicken,” shouted one boy, already a leader of men, and later to do well in politics.

  “Aw, come on,” said a philosophical boy, anxious to probe deeper. “Nobody’s called Chicken. Say it again, kid.”

  “Cheggin,” said Francis.

  “Sounds like Chicken, all right,” said the philosophical boy. “Kind of mumbled, but Chicken. Gosh!”

  If the boys were derisive, the girls were worse. The girls had a playground of their own, on which no boy was allowed to set foot, but there were places where the boundary, like the equator, was an imaginary line. The boys decided that it was great fun to harry Francis across this line, because anybody called Chicken was probably a girl anyway. When this happened, girls surrounded him and talked not to but at him.

  “His name’s Chicken,” some would say, whooping with joy. These girls belonged to what psychologists would later define as the Hetaera, or Harlot, classification of womanhood.

  “Aw, let him alone. His parents must be crazy. Look, he’s nearly bawling. It’s mean to holler on him if his parents are crazy. Is your name really Chicken, kid?” These were what the psychologists would classify as the Maternal, fostering order of womankind. Their pity was almost more hateful than outright jeering.

  Teachers patrolled both playgrounds, carrying a bell by its clapper, and usually intent on studying the sky. Ostensibly guardians of order, they were like policemen in their avoidance of anything short of arson or murder. Questioned, they would probably have said that the Cornish child seemed to be popular; he was always in the centre of some game or another.

  Life must be lived, and sometimes living means enduring. Francis endured, and the torment let up a little, though it broke out anew every two or three weeks. He no longer had to go to school in the care of Bella-Mae. Kindergarten was hateful. There was stupid, babyish paper-cutting, which was far beneath his notice, and which he did easily. There was sewing crudely punched cards, so that they formed a picture, usually of an animal. There was learning to tell the time, which he knew anyway. There was getting the Twenty-third Psalm by heart, and singing a tedious hymn that began

  Can a little child like me

  Thank the Father fittingly?

  and dragged on to a droning refrain (for Miss Wade had no skill as a choral director) of

  Father, we thank Thee: (twice repeated)

  Father in Heaven, we thank Thee!

  Francis, who had a precocious theological bent, wondered why he was thanking the Father, whoever He might be, for this misery and this tedium.

  It was in kindergarten that the foundations for Francis Cornish’s lifelong misanthropy were firmly established. The sampling of mankind into which he had been cast badgered and mocked him, excluded him from secrets and all but the most inclusive games, sneered at his clothes, and in one instance wrote PRICK in indelible pencil on the collar of his sailor middy (for which Bella-Mae gave him a furious scolding).

  He could say nothing of this at home. When, infrequently, his parents came back to Blairlogie for a weekend, he was told by his mother that he must be a particularly good boy, because Daddy was busy with some very important things in Ottawa, and was not to be worried. Now: how was school going?

  “All right, I guess.”

  “Don’t say ‘I guess’ unless you really do guess, Frankie. It’s stupid.”

  Love the Lord and do your part:

  Learn to say with all your heart,

  Father, we thank Thee!

  AND SO FRANCIS LEFT the garden of childhood for the kindergarten, said the Lesser Zadkiel.

  —It was his second experience of the Fall of Man, said the Daimon Maimas. The first, of course, is birth, when he is thrust out of the paradise of his mother’s body; the second is when he leaves his happy home—if he is lucky enough to have such a thing—and finds himself in the world of his contemporaries.

  —Surely it was stupid to send him to school in white, with a nursemaid?

  —Nobody thought about it. The Major and his wife thought of nothing but the Major’s work in Ottawa, which of course was never defined for the child. But the Major was no fool, and had smelled a war in the air, long before more important people did.

  —You sound rather pleased with what happened to Francis.

  —I had a rough idea of the direction in which I was going to push him, and I always like to begin tempering my steel early. A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life. And it wasn’t all unhappy. Go on with the story, and you’ll see.

  AS CHRISTMAS DREW near it seemed that the War was going to last longer than had been expected, so the Major thought he had better close Chegwidden Lodge and move to Ottawa. It would be foolish to take Francis, for both parents were busy. Mary-Jim was deep in women’s committee work, and looked adorable in the severe clothes she thought appropriate to her role. It was arranged that Francis should move the short distance from the Lodge to St. Kilda, and live under the guidance of his grandparents and Aunt Mary-Ben.

  This meant a great improvement in his lot, for Aunt immediately bought him clothes that were more what other children in Blairlogie wore, and he was happy in his corduroy knickerbockers and a mackinaw coat, and the tuque that replaced his little velvet hat with earflaps. He was happy, too, in his room, not a nursery but full of grown-up furniture. Best of all, Bella-Mae was left at the Lodge as a caretaker, and Aunt made it gently clear that there was no need for her to bother her head about Francis. That suited Bella-Mae, as she said to herself, down to the ground, because it gave her more time to devote to advancement in her own particular Army.

  There were some great changes. Francis now ate at the table with the adults, and the manners he had learned while eating with Bella-Mae needed amendment. No grunting, to begin with; Bella-Mae had been a hearty eater and a great grunter as she ate, and as Francis never sat at his parents’ table his grunting had passed unnoticed. He had to learn to murmur grace and cross himself before and after meals. He learned to be neat with his knife and fork, and was forbidden to hound morsels of food around his plate. Most significant change of all, he had to learn to speak French.

  This had been a matter of some debate. Grand-père and Grand’mère thought it would be useful if they could speak together at the table without being understood by the boy. But, said Aunt, he would certainly learn anyhow, and had best learn properly. So he sat beside her at meals, and learned to ask for things in polite form, and finally to make a few remarks of his own, in the pleasing, clear French that Aunt had learned in her convent days; but he also learned the patois (called by Aunt woods-French) into which his grandparents retreated when they had secrets to discuss.

  The whole business of French opened a new world to Francis. Of course, he had noticed that a lot of people in Blairlogie spoke this language, with varying degrees of elegance, but he now discovered that the hardware store kept by somebody called Dejordo was, in reality, the property of Emi
le Desjardins, and that the Legarry family were, to those who spoke French, Legaré. Some tact had to be exercised here, because it was a point of honour among the English-speaking populace to mispronounce any French name, as a rebuke to those who were so foolish, and probably sneaky and disloyal as well, as to speak a private lingo. But Francis was a quick boy—“gleg in the uptake” as his Scots grandfather put it—and he learned not only two kinds of French, but two kinds of English as well. In the schoolyard a substantial quantity of anything whatever was always described as “a big bunch”, and any distance beyond what could be covered on foot was “a fur piece of a ways”. When adults greeted one another with “Fine day, eh?”, the proper reply was “Fine day altogether”. He mastered all these niceties with the same ease with which he digested his food and grew, and by the time he was nine he was not merely bilingual, but multilingual, and could talk to anybody he met in their own language, be it French, patois, Canadian-Scots English, or the speech of the Upper Ottawa Valley. He learned manners, too, and would never be so gross as to tutoyer Madame Thibodeau, whose social magnificence grew with her fat.

  As he had hitherto been chiefly the creation of Bella-Mae, he was now moulded and spiritually surrounded by Aunt. This caused the good lady many anxious hours, for the Major, when it was arranged that Francis should stay for a while at St. Kilda, had said, hastily and with obvious discomfort, that Frank was, of course, a Protestant, and furthermore C. of E., and he had asked Canon Tremaine to look in now and then to see that the boy was alright. But Canon Tremaine, who was a lazy man and not anxious to antagonize anyone so important as the Senator, had called at St. Kilda only once, to the astonishment of Marie-Louise, who had said that of course the little boy was very well, and of course he was going to the Protestant school, and of course he said his prayers, and would the Canon like another piece of cake? Which the Canon ate with pleasure, and forgot that he had meant to ask why Frank never appeared at St. Alban’s. But upon Aunt fell the burden of caring for the child’s soul.