As a physician I don’t believe it. Women who have been knocked about by their husbands (or who have fallen while climbing a ruin, as the Signora insisted) do not maintain quite that perfect beauty. What we do know about her, which seems to me to tell the story, is that she had a child, and it is hinted that the child was gotten out of wedlock, and was legitimized by an unwise marriage. (This child she referred to as “the last of the Neros” which was coming it strong.) My guess is that the birth of this child was botched by some cheap quack and that the Signora was left with a by no means uncommon injury of the time, a vesical fistula, a tear in the birth canal which permitted urine to seep into the vagina, which meant that the sufferer must at all times wear some sort of staunching diaper and could not enjoy normal activity. Consequence, invalidism and a sofa life. This injury was considered incurable until quite late in the nineteenth century, and as it was not something one could discuss, it accounted for a lot of mysterious female fragility.
Of course nothing of the sort ailed Emily, but her taking to the sofa brought it forcibly to my mind, and I recognized that I was falling victim to the author’s obsession, which is that he relates whatever life presents to him to the book he is writing or plans to write. I have not begun on my Anatomy of Fiction, but it is beginning to dominate my mind, I am making notes, and I must now search the pages of novels for ladies who may have suffered from what we knew was a very common mishap in childbirth before the efficiency of modern surgery made it a thing of the past.
(13)
“If she is determined to commit suicide in this particularly distressing way, my advice to you would be to let her get on with it, and not try to interfere.”
This was McWearie, up to his old trick of taking the opposite side in every argument, believing that by doing so he could bring about some sort of sensible resolution.
“But Hugh, that’s inhuman, surely? And for me quite impossible, because I am bound by my Hippocratic Oath to preserve life whenever I can, and not to play the philosophical jackass, which is what you are advising.”
“You know, I doubt if Hippocrates ever framed that Oath.”
“Perhaps not, but it embodies what he stood for, and it is a noble definition of my profession.”
“Handsomely spoken. But it does trim its sails, now and then. I observe that it no longer forbids a doctor to give anything to procure an abortion, or presumably to perform one. But anybody can have an abortion nowadays. I heard of a girl not long ago who wasn’t yet twenty, and she had had three.”
“There must be occasional redefinitions.”
“Oh, of course. We must move with the times. Well then, why don’t you go to Dumoulin and tell him you think he’s abetting Em Raven-Hart in a form of suicide, which may no longer be illegal but does nothing to enhance a doctor’s reputation. What Em’s up to isn’t mercy-killing, you know; it’s merciless, and not only to Em. What about Chips? Aren’t you obliged to think of her?”
“I couldn’t possibly go to Dumoulin. It would be—”
“Most unprofessional. And against your Oath. Aren’t you sworn to be loyal to the profession, even when the profession is wrong, or just cheerfully neglectful? The profession! Oh Jon, don’t talk that way! ‘My country right or wrong: my mother, drunk or sober.’ Is that the line? I thought better of you than that.”
“Very well. I’m sorry I brought the matter up.”
“So you should be, you Oath-lover. Didn’t you swear that ‘whatever you shall see or hear of the lives of men which is not fitting to be spoken, you will keep inviolably secret’? And here you are blathering away like some old woman at a tea-party. Shame on you, Doctor.”
“Hugh, much more of that, and I’ll put away the whisky bottle. You’re being bloody offensive.”
“Intentionally, I assure you. But can’t you see I’m just trying to get at the truth? You think Em’s got cancer and is neglecting it; you know that Dumoulin isn’t doing anything about it, quite likely because she has never given him a hint about it and he hasn’t got your famous intuition about patients; your professional loyalties keep you from interfering. So far, so good. You are aching to interfere, but your Hippocratic Oath takes precedence over your respect for Em’s right to do what she likes with her life.”
“Has she such a right?”
“Not by Christian reckoning. But Em’s in a mess that Christianity has always found it very hard to cope with. You say she’s in denial, which seems to me to mean exactly the same thing as saying that she’s suffering from severe Melancholy. Now why is that, do you suppose? No, don’t tell me; I want to tell you because I think I’ll get it clearer and plainer than you will, having no Hippocratic Oath to confuse me.
“Don’t you remember that years ago we went through all this with poor old Darcy? We talked about the peculiar misery of the artist who has some talent but not a talent commensurate with his aspirations? That’s Em. She’s pretty good. Does the heads of presidents and chairmen very well, really; a touch of real distinction. Her butter sculpture which she derides was absurd, but showed amazing skill. It’s just that she’s not really an originative artist; as soon as she leaves the straight and narrow path of portraiture her ideas are just slightly above the commonplace level; what is unmistakably her own in her work is not enough to lift it very high. You know her ideal was Barbara Hepworth. Em’s work is imitative, not as good as B.H. but certainly never going far from her or beyond her.
“That’s not too bad, really, but the misery of the thing is that Em knows she isn’t quite first-rate, and it gnaws at her. The worst artistic tragedy is not to be a failure, but just to fall short of the kind of success you have marked as your own. Have you ever read the Diaries of Benjamin Robert Haydon? An interesting painter, but not good enough for the goals he had set for himself. Consequence: misery and finally suicide.”
“And that’s Em, I’m afraid. But where Haydon used a pistol, she’s chosen a very feminine and prolonged method of ending an existence that has lost all savour for her. Ghastly, but what’s one to do? It’s a private affair.”
“You talk as if she knows what she’s doing.”
“Well—doesn’t she?”
“I don’t suppose she does, on a conscious level. But are our most significant decisions made on the obviously conscious level? She wouldn’t say, ‘I’m killing myself,’ but she’d say, ‘I hate myself,’ which might come to the same thing. I wish something could be done.”
“My advice to you, Doctor, is to keep your nose out of it. If you save her, as I suppose you’d put it, what have you saved her for? More self-hatred? Don’t try to play God, Doctor. Let Anangke take its course. As it will, you know.”
“I haven’t your capacity to ignore what’s under my nose. And do you know what’s under my nose right now, as well as Emily Raven-Hart?”
“No, but I suppose you’re going to tell me.”
“I am. Charlie!”
“What Charlie? Charlie Chaplin?”
“Don’t play the fool, Hugh. The Reverend Charles Iredale.”
“Oh, that Charlie. Returned from banishment, has he? Has the Bishop given him a city church?”
“He’s living with the down-and-outs in the crypt at St. Aidan’s.”
“Oh, mercy, God! What does he say?”
“I haven’t had a chance to talk with him. I’ve almost cornered him twice but both times he has slipped through my fingers.”
“But—down-and-out! And herding with God’s People! Not what one expects of a priest. How does he look?”
“Awful. Every mark of the ruined boozer. I’ll corner him before long.”
“I wonder if I could talk with him?”
“What for?”
“I’m religious editor of the Advocate in case you’ve forgotten. There must be a story in him. What brings a priest low? That kind of thing.”
“Hugh, you are despicable.”
“Not really. There’d be money in it for him. If I can help him, I will.”
?
??Oh, will you? Not going to let Fate have its way with Charlie, but Fate can do its worst with Emily Raven-Hart?”
“Don’t ask me to be consistent; it’s the virtue of tiny minds. I always liked Charlie, ass though he could be. I’m human, you know, Jon. Philosophy is something to apply to outsiders, not to friends.”
(14)
Note for ANAT.: Charlie’s trouble is advanced alcohol addiction. A technical term for being a sodden boozer.
Astonishing how the notion of the Boozer as a great, free spirit has seized on the imagination of millions of people who ought to know better. He represents to them one who has soared above the shadows of daily care and whose mind is free of petty concerns. To deal with the Boozer in Lit. would mean that I should have to embark on a work of many volumes; I must be selective and concise. What could I not make of Seithenyn ap Seithyn Saidi, one of the three immortal drunkards of the Isle of Britain, as T. L. Peacock presents him? His greeting to Elphin and Teithryn when they present themselves at his castle has splendour: “You are welcome all four.” And when Elphin says, “We thank you; we are but two,” the great man counters, “Two or four—all is one.” But Seithenyn is a creature of mythic history, and that his drunken incompetence costs Elphin his kingdom is a mythic peccadillo. The realities of drunkenness never soar so high.
Of all the great literary drunkards surely Falstaff is the chief, though we never see him overcome with drink; he is the cause that drunkenness is in other men—a very unpleasant characteristic. Generations of playgoers have adored him, and thought poorly of the prince who will not yield wholly to his spell. It is only in his brief scene with Doll Tearsheet that we see the despair beneath the jesting. Actors have loved him; stuff the pillow in the front of the breeches and speak in his richest voice and the poorest ham thinks himself splendid. And Shakespeare’s genius makes Falstaff splendid. But there was one actor who seemed destined for the part, and who refused to play it; Charles Laughton had been the manager of an hotel in his youth, and he said he had been compelled to throw too many of Falstaff’s kind out of the Pavilion at Scarborough to have any tolerance for the breed.
The truest portrait of Charlie’s sort of drunkenness that I know in literature is Marmaladov in Crime and Punishment—the sodden wretch who confided to Raskolnikov that he had sold his wife’s stockings in order to buy drink. The anguished repentance, the ravings of self-pity, the knowledge of the degradation to which he had sunk and the inability to rise from it, all these were Charlie’s, but where Marmaladov babbled, Charlie spoke with all the practised rhetoric of the lifelong preacher and exhorter.
It was plain that he had been drinking heavily for years, but like many of his kind he had not yet sunk to mania a potu; he had no sensations of crawling things on his body, nor did snakes or monsters menace him in the dark corners of his retreat. I had seen a few cases of The Horrors among God’s People, because being the nearest doctor I was often summoned when something went amiss in the crypt. I claim no merit for answering these calls. I did not want to leave my bed and spend an hour coping with a madman, before he could be carted off to the hospital. But how does one refuse? Mine is a profession of compassion, and when compassion does not arise naturally it must be faked.
Charlie is the reality of what many writers—some of the greatest—have romanticized. I shall use the measure of Charlie against the literary drunkards I write about in my Anatomy.
(15)
It was not easy to get Charlie into my care. At first, he ran—literally ran—at my approach. Where did he go? Into the crypt, but when I followed him he was nowhere to be seen, and the other down-and-outs who happened to be there denied any knowledge of him, in the over-vehement manner that betrays the liar. But at last it came to me that he was doubtless, and very appropriately, in what Darcy Dwyer had christened the Priest’s Hole.
In the penal times in Britain, when it was death for a priest of the Old Faith to be captured by the zealous Protestants, many secretly Catholic households had a hidden room, or more often a mean loft or cupboard, which was called the Priest’s Hole, because it was there that the visiting priest could hide himself from searchers. Behind the antiquated furnace at St. Aidan’s there was a hole in the wall, just big enough for a man to lie down in, which had at one time served as an ash-pit; there was a manhole above it, through which the ashes had once been removed. Since the conversion of the church furnace to oil-heating this miserable chamber had been cleaned out, though not very thoroughly, and was screened from the rest of the crypt by two or three sheets of corrugated iron which stood against the entrance. It was in this filthy retreat that I ran Charlie down at last.
It took some persuasion to get him to allow me to give him help. He was drenched in shame, and shame made him ugly and uncooperative. It was almost as though he were doing me a favour in allowing me to get him out of the Priest’s Hole and out of the crypt, and into a succession of Christofferson’s baths that finally soaked and sucked the filth out of his skin. Sucked and soaked also some of the alcohol out of his system, which left him exhausted and physically unable. The question was, what to do with him? Where to put him?
My quarters over the clinic afforded only one bedroom, which was mine and a very comfortable room indeed. There was nothing for it but to put Charlie in my room, and I had to sleep in my living-room library, on a sofa. I am sensitive to such things, and sleeping in my workroom, and having to tidy it up and stow away my bedclothes, and then settle down to a long day with my aporetics, gave me a sense of having lost caste, of having come down in the world, which was quite unreasonable but none the less real. Christofferson kept an eye on Charlie, who lay in my bed, in my pyjamas, sleeping off what must have been several years of intoxication which he had nevertheless sufficiently overcome to be able to function acceptably, if not effectively, as a priest.
I suppose I am not truly a charitable man. I do charitable things, but I can’t pretend to myself that I like doing them. I could not leave Charlie to his wretchedness, but I wanted to get rid of him—or at least to get him out of my bed. I appealed to Canon Carter. He was a Professional Good Man and expressed pity and concern, but offered no solution. Had St. Aidan’s no place for Charlie? I asked. Was there a spare room in Church House where he could live for a time? Unfortunately the two curates needed accommodation, as it was part of their stipend, and the paperwork that was involved in administering the parish filled all the space there was. The Canon and his wife had to occupy quite restricted quarters, to make room for the business which now seemed to be the principal concern of St. Aidan’s. The Canon was very sorry, but—
Could Charlie be of any use about the church itself? Sacristan, or verger, or beadle or something? The Canon smiled a smile of deep compassion for my innocence. A former incumbent, now reduced to menial work, where many people would remember him and everybody would soon know his story? Oh, no! The Canon could not possibly subject Charlie to such ignominy. Besides, Charlie was still a priest, and in a church he must do the work of one, or do nothing. And the Canon made it very clear that Charlie would do no priesting in his church.
The Canon talked about people knowing Charlie’s story, but he did not know it himself, and made no move to learn it. But little by little I knew it, and it was a story of a kind very familiar to me, a story, not of tragedy, but of endurance of a miserable fate, with no hint of relief to be seen. The gods destroy the heroes with a sudden blow, but they grind us mediocrities for weary, weary years.
Charlie’s story cannot be told without the introduction of facts which to many people might seem trivial and snobbish, but which cause great unhappiness all the same.
The work to which the Bishop, urged by Archdeacon Allchin, banished Charlie was the care of six little churches in a part of the Province of Ontario that lacked the Boreal romance of the North, but was far removed from the amenity of the South, as we in Canada understand the word “South.” This sparsely settled parish was not in the Diocese of Toronto: by a little priestly hanky-panky
Allchin had persuaded a neighbour bishop, who owed him a favour, to take Charlie under his wing, but at a remote and ragged tip of that wing. The folk in the parish eked out a poor living by a little subsistence farming, a little logging, and on rare occasions, some work on the roads. They were not a prosperous or lively group. Six churches seems a great many for one man, but he was not expected to visit all of them every Sunday and two he visited only once a month. They were not far apart—not far if you have a good car that can make light of bad roads—but which are far enough apart if what you have is a second-hand motor-bicycle, sinking into the senility of its kind, and are a total innocent—what is now called a technomoron—of everything that has to do with machinery. Charlie’s motor-bike was a joke to his scattered parishioners, but it was no joke to Charlie when it broke down, as it so often did, miles from anywhere that might afford expert help.
The parishioners—ah, this was where the snobbery showed itself. Charlie had been gently brought up, and expensively educated. He was no fool and he was not unreasonable. But he could not help longing sometimes for the sight of a tablecloth, and for knives and forks that were not of some metal which had gone dark with age, and between the tines of which lingered the reminders of earlier meals. He thought wistfully of bedclothes that were not masses of ragged quilts, and of sheets that were not flannelette from which all the nap had been worn; sheets that were changed more often than was the custom with Miss Annie McGruder, for it was with the McGruders that Charlie boarded.
How could it have been otherwise? The McGruders had always boarded the parson. It was one of their good works. They did not charge him what they might have charged somebody not doing the Lord’s work—supposing that such a person ever applied to them for board.
They ate off oilcloth, so old that it smelled of meals long past. They ate in the kitchen. Not what city-dwellers think of as a kitchen, with pretty curtains and cupboards which have been invested by modern commercial builders with what they think of as charm, and a stove powered by gas or electricity, so pleasing in appearance that it seems hardly to be a stove at all. The McGruders knew not such Persian pomps in their kitchen; the stove was black and smelled of hot old iron when it was in full action; behind the stove a hen might be hatching out a few chicks in a cardboard box; in front of the stove two smelly old dogs, famous for their sagacity as hunters and guardians, lay comatose, farting pungently in the heat; on a special chair of its own, with its own very old cushion, slept the cat, an aged Tom. All of these creatures lent something to the compound of smells that characterized the kitchen, for all the windows were wadded firmly with newspaper to keep out the winter draughts, and it was thought to be too much trouble to free them when the warmer weather came.