The Cunning Man

  But “they” could do nothing. Nor could they do a great deal to ease the pain which was growing in her chest. She wheezed now, coughed, suffered shortness of breath, and even Chips could not pretend that she was not losing weight; though she had always been a small, delicately formed woman, she was now a wraith.

  The disease moved rapidly, but for Emily and for Chips the time passed with leaden slowness, and every day of wretchedness made the succeeding day longer.

  I really must pay tribute to Christofferson. She contrived to do all her work in my clinic, yet to visit Glebe House three or four times a day to do things for Emily that only an experienced nurse could do, or perhaps even bear to do. Emily would not hear of having a nurse on duty and she did not like Christofferson, and showed it. Emily, without I am sure meaning to do so, became a tyrant invalid, who did not notice that Chips was getting gaunt and even grey from the stress of looking after her. To her it seemed that Christofferson was merely “giving a hand” as a neighbour, and sometimes she was very rude to her. Christofferson bore it without a sign of offence; if ever a woman deserved the term “professional” it was she. When she spoke to me about Emily she was clinical in her appraisals, and not a word of pity passed her lips. But I knew her through and through and knew that her pity was of an embracing, deeply enduring quality that had no place for pettings, or endearments, or the small change of kindness. Her gaze was cold, but her hand was wonderfully light.

  Emily’s last days were moving toward their close when Charlie reappeared in my clinic, a mortally sick man. What was I to do? He was dying, but he might be a long time about it, and the notion that until then he was to become a fixture in my bed was repugnant to me. I suppose I could have found a bed for him in a hospital, but hospitals are busy places, distracted by the demands made on them, and finding a bed for a man who must sooner or later die, but who would postpone his last day for longer than anyone could predict, would not have been easy. Nor, though I resented his presence in my bed, did I have quite the determination to turn him out, for he was utterly miserable and his mental distress was of a character that I could not brush aside as merely a symptom of what ailed him. To put him in hospital, in quarters of clinical impersonality, would have made him miserable, and though I cursed him I could not bear to add to his wretchedness.

  Oh, the tyranny of invalids! How they dominate us happy mortals who are still on our feet, able to meet in some measure the demands of life, and who feel no pain—or not very much pain. The poor wretches cannot be blamed for thinking that in an unjust world they have special privileges. They think their illnesses are visitations of a blind fate. But fate is not blind.

  The problem for a Paracelsian physician like me is that I see diseases as disguises in which people present me with their wretchedness. Of course I know all that I ought to know about the clinical side of cancer, and arthritis, and osteoporosis, and muscular dystrophy and the fifty other ills that confront me, and I can order the treatment the disease calls for. But I have no faith that the treatment will heal whatever it was that gave rise to the disease. Nor am I such a fool as to think that if I could find the root of the misery, the disease would disappear. The disease is the signal, that comes late in the day, that a life has become hard to bear.

  And of course there are baffling exceptions to that line of thinking. Paracelsus had lots of failure. He didn’t know everything and, in spite of the protests to the contrary of some of my more impressionable patients, neither do I. If I am lucky, I am able to say with Ambrose Paré, “I dressed his wounds, and God cured him.” Body and soul cannot be separated while life lasts.

  It was Chips who solved my difficulty “Move him across the courtyard,” said she. “Put him downstairs. Might as well make a hospital of the place.” Emily no longer left her room. She need not know.

  That was done. Charlie was moved into the big drawing-room of Glebe House, to a single bed that seemed to lie in the embracing arm of the big piano, which nobody played any more. He did not need much nursing. Bed made freshly from time to time, such meals as he could eat produced regularly, and a little ameliorative medicine that I was able to prescribe for him—that was all the care he required. He slept for many hours, and could not endure much company.

  I visited him twice a day; a morning call before I saw patients; a visit after dinner, when we chatted for a while. Even a slight measure of alcohol was out of the question; his condition was advanced alcoholic cardiomyopathy—very weak heart, in lay terms. He had spells of fluttering heartbeat, and palpitations, and these alarmed him greatly, for although he knew he was dying, he had a very human dread of doing so. But in all of this his mind was clear, and he spent his waking hours in unhappy reflection. One of our later conversations was typical.

  “Made a mess of things.”

  “You could have done worse. Don’t scold yourself.”

  “Been a fool.”

  “That’s not like you, Charlie. Of all of us you seemed to be the one most sure of his way. Look at Brocky; he’s done very well indeed as a scholar, but he hasn’t written the great book he talked of. Look at me; the more I see of illness the less I know. But you dealt in unseen and unseeable certainties and I suppose you do so still.”

  “No certainties, ghastly misunderstandings.”

  “Misunderstandings about what?”

  “Everything important … God … His world.”

  “Misunderstandings about God? You wouldn’t be the first.”

  “How do you know God from Satan?”

  “I couldn’t possibly tell you. Those words don’t mean much to me, you know.”

  “You came to church.”

  “Yes, and I loved it. It gave a shape and a presence to so much that made life fine. But it was the beauty of the thing that reached me. A link with a noble past. Great prose; great music. An affirmation that life had a dimension compared with which all that we can seize and know is trifling. But as for God and Satan—they were part of the noble affirmation, not realities.”

  “Wrong.… God and Satan … just shorthand for Positive and Negative … can’t have one without the other … but Negative mustn’t prevail … did with me.”

  “You were pushed too far. That was because of somebody else’s Negative. Allchin’s. It was a mean vengeance.”

  “No, no … long before that … at school.”

  “At school?”

  “You remember those dreams?”

  “No. What dreams are you talking about?”

  “Erotic dreams … what the boys called wet dreams … everybody had them.”

  “I don’t really remember much about it. I always thought you hated that sort of talk, and hated those dreams when you had them. Which you couldn’t help, you know.”

  “I had them … but not about women.… About Christ.”

  “What!”

  “Oh, not what you’re thinking … but he came to me in dreams, and was so kind.… A smiling, young Christ.… No beard, even.… A beautiful youth.”

  “Extraordinary! And were those dreams sexual?”

  “Not as you might suppose.… It was that poem …”

  “A poem?”

  “You remember Mr. Sharpe? … English master? … Read poetry in class that wasn’t in the prescribed book … John Donne was his favourite.… That poem … ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God.’ ”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “How it ends.… ‘Take me to you, imprison me, for I … Except you enthrall me, never shall be free … Nor ever chaste, Except thou ravish me.’ ”

  The poem cost Charlie a great effort to speak. He gasped for two or three minutes, and I did not urge him on. Then—

  “You mean, Christ ravished you?”

  “Physically.… spiritually.… Those dreams were terrifying—glorious … that smiling youth … the gush of my seed.”

  “Well, of course these things take many unaccountable forms. You were exceptional. I suppose you outgrew it?”

  “No … not for ye
ars. He used to speak to me.… Give commands.… Ask for things.”

  Here there was a longish silence, for Charlie was wearing himself out. But he wanted to talk and I was eager to hear him. Christ spoke to him! Of course we know of these things, but they are the mark of the psychopath, and there was nothing in Charlie to put him in that category. Christ spoke to him! Charlie was no poet; this was not figurative language. If he said Christ spoke to him—and then something came to me, from some idle reading I had done in one of the technical journals—something about consciousness and the “bicameral mind.” A sort of mind, it appeared, once common, but since superseded by a more developed consciousness. A sort of mind familiar in the ancient world, familiar in the poetry of Homer, where great heroes acted upon promptings that had for them the authority of the voices of the gods. A sort of mind not wholly vanished, but usually controlled or rebuked by the kind of intelligence it met with in other people, teachers in particular. But Charlie had never felt the need to conform to what other people thought or how they thought it.

  He spoke again, faintly. “I wanted to do such great things … vain ambition.… Wanted to bring about a revival of deep faith … gut faith … faith that saves a city.”

  “A city?”

  “The great rebirths always began in a city … then spread … It seemed extraordinary.… Toronto … what an unlikely place … but what pride, what impertinence to think that … as if God couldn’t declare Himself in Toronto as well as anywhere else.… Save my city, He said, time and again.”

  “Save Toronto?”

  “Don’t laugh.… It seems absurd, doesn’t it?”

  “I didn’t mean that. But this city has always been called Toronto the Good, the City of Churches.”

  “Calls itself that.… Methodist humbug.… But I was to make the light shine, even here.”

  “How? To make the light shine? How Charlie?”

  “Give me a saint, He said.… Give me one saint, and I shall do it.”

  “A tall order.”

  “No … there he was.”

  Who was?”

  “Hobbes, of course.… Old Hobbes.… A saint, sure enough, but people only thought him a good old man.”

  “Yes, of course I remember him. A very good old man. And he was to have been the saint?”

  “Yes … it called for a saint’s death … and that’s how he died.”

  “On Good Friday, at Mass? I was there. I wanted to help him, but you wouldn’t allow it. I always wondered about that. What did you think you were doing, Charlie?”

  “Making sure.… I wanted no prying … Christ had asked for a saint and I didn’t want you poking your nose … into things.”

  “Charlie, what are you talking about? Did you arrange that, somehow?”

  “Of course I did, you fool … I killed him.”

  What shall I say? That it was as if a light had suddenly been turned on? No, it was rather as if an annoyance, long troubling my mind, had been removed. As if a picture that had hung crooked on the wall for—how long was it?—for eight years or thereabout, had at last been put straight. But all I said was: “How?”

  “The wafer.… The old man always ate the whole wafer himself.… If he’d given any of it to the rest of us at the altar it would have been a mass murder.… But I knew he wouldn’t.… Never did.”

  “You did something to the wafer?”

  “Jon … you’re being stupid.… I poisoned it.”

  “Don’t be absurd! He died instantly—well within ten seconds.”

  “Yes.… That’s the kind of poison it was.”

  “What kind?”

  “Jon … feel dreadful … can’t really talk any more.… Could I have a drink?”

  “No, Charlie, you damn well can’t have a drink. It could kill you. Here’s a nitroglycerine tablet. Put it under your tongue. Now tell me—what was the poison?”

  “It’s called ricinus communis … comes from castor oil … a dryer … no taste, no smell, and damn near instantaneous.”

  Could I be unjust in thinking that Charlie was looking the least bit pleased with himself? Life is not wholly a dull fabric of commonplaces and likelihoods. He was pleased with himself.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Russell.”

  “The printer? Church warden? How did he get it?”

  “He makes his own inks.… Point of pride.… He gets it from a company in St. Louis, Missouri.… The KGB used it a lot.”

  “And Russell gave it to you?”

  “Stole it.… He printed the service orders for the church … When he was out of the room I pinched a small quantity. A few drops on the wafer … no smell, no taste … and that’s it.”

  “And Christ told you to do this?”

  “I had to find the means.”

  “But Hobbes would have died in a year or two anyhow!”

  “Not in a way that was a Sign.… A saint mustn’t just peg out in bed … like me—”

  Another pause, and during this Charlie began to look very ill indeed. At last he was weeping.

  “It wasn’t Christ.”

  “You mean it was an hallucination?”

  “Oh no.… It was the Negative.… I’ve been tricked.”

  What followed was so confused and painful that I won’t attempt to suggest Charlie’s broken utterance. It was perhaps half an hour before he had fully gasped out his confession. Not Christ, though Christ may have visited him in those dreams of his boyhood, but the Negative, the Tempter, with deceptions and promises. To kill old Hobbes was surely a very minor thing in order to gain a great benefit. That was the argument. Hobbes would not live long anyway, and if he had been questioned, would he not have leapt at the chance to die at the foot of the altar, on a great day in the Christian Year, and in order that a sign might be given to a great North American city, with the salvation of not merely that city but possibly a whole continent as a consequence? Thus the voice of the Tempter.

  As for Charlie himself, was not talk of murder an absurdity? Great affairs demand great actions and often there is somebody who must take a great risk. Remember Judas? The Betrayer, and the Execrated One, but could anybody seriously doubt that at this moment Judas has his place in Paradise, because he made possible the great drama upon which the world’s salvation hangs? Every tragic action needs a Judas: no Hero without a Villain. Is it not the blackest ingratitude and the stupidest philosophical error to condemn that necessary figure? Charlie was not called upon to play Judas. Merely to arrange a death to the greatest advantage in the mighty work of saving mankind. We minor actors must “play as cast” and be glad of the work.

  On and on Charlie raved, gasping out his words with increasing difficulty. And the final horror of the whole thing was that he was now convinced that it was not his Master, but the Adversary who had led him on this path, disappointed his great hopes, worn out his spirit in a barren place, and at last had brought him now to the threshold of what must undoubtedly be eternal damnation. Not a stupid Hell. Not an eternal burning, but a place of No Hope, in which the Mercy of God might be understood, but not enjoyed, a place of ultimate desolation.

  When at last I had heard him out, I gave him a shot of morphine and went back to my own quarters, thinking what a fool I had been, so many years ago.

  Of course when I was asked to sign that certificate of Father Hobbes’ death, I should have asked to examine his false teeth—just in case. Would I have found the poison? Perhaps; perhaps not. If I had found it and informed the police, what then? Russell the printer would have been in trouble, I suppose, as the only person with access to that deadly stuff. And rather than see Russell implicated, Charlie would perhaps have confessed. Would anyone have been better off? What would his explanation, as I had heard it on his deathbed, have meant in a law court? He would probably have received the ultimate insult—committal to an asylum for the insane. A man whose hypnagogic visions had taken a tragic turn. No; meddling would have done little good.

  (22)

 
If life happened along the lines of popular fiction, Charlie should have died after his confession to me, but life has a different sense of dramatic form. He lived on for another five weeks, almost to a day. He outlived Emily Raven-Hart. Each unconscious of the other they had been dying in Glebe House, each nursed by Chips and Christofferson, each surrounded by the mystery and pathos of those whom Fate allows to die in their beds. Emily was first to go; she could be seen relaxing her hold on life, and speaking, when she spoke at all, in terms of bitter stoicism. But she spoke hardly at all, and spent most of her time wearing her oxygen mask. It was obvious that she suffered a great deal of pain, as the disease spread to her bones and her lungs; she relapsed into silence and indifference several days before at last she died. It was the coma of death but neither Dumoulin nor I stressed that because Chips, who knew precisely what was happening nevertheless did not want to speak of it. As so often, I thought that the real heroism of death was seen in the one who stood by.

  The funeral was a very quiet affair. I know a lot of old friends from the days of the salon would have come, but Chips wanted it to be as private as such things can be. There was a surprising amount of flowers, including a huge thing from the Dairy Association, which did not forget its own, and a more modest wreath from the Canadian Club. And several from banks, universities, and other bodies to whose great men Emily had given a bronze immortality. The Advocate published a brief obituary, headed “Butter Sculptress Dies At 57,” in which the facts were in the main, correct, but the emphasis far astray. The mourners were Chips, Christofferson, McWearie, and myself, and the burial service was read by one of the curates at St. Aidan’s; the Canon had meant to do it but at the last moment he had been called away to an utterly unavoidable diocesan meeting. It was as cheerless an affair as I have ever attended, and professionally I have attended many.

  Hugh and I retired to my quarters for a heartening drink. “Who’s taking care of Charlie?” he asked.