What's Bred in the Bone

Two

It was in a garden that Francis Cornish first became truly aware of himself as a creature observing a world apart from himself. He was almost three years old, and he was looking deep into a splendid red peony. He was greatly alive to himself (though he had not yet learned to think of himself as Francis) and the peony, in its fashion, was also greatly alive to itself, and the two looked at each other from their very different egotisms with solemn self-confidence. The little boy nodded at the peony and the peony seemed to nod back. The little boy was neat, clean, and pretty. The peony was unchaste, dishevelled as peonies must be, and at the height of its beauty. It was a significant moment, for it was Francis’s first conscious encounter with beauty—beauty that was to be the delight, the torment, and the bitterness of his life—but except for Francis himself, and perhaps the peony, nobody knew of it, or would have heeded if they had known. Every hour is filled with such moments, big with significance for someone.

It was his mother’s garden, but it would be foolish to pretend that it was Mary-Jim’s creation. She cared little for gardens, and had one only because it was the sort of thing a young matron in her position was expected to possess. Her husband would have protested if she had not had a garden, for he had determined ideas about what women liked. Women liked flowers; on certain occasions one gave them flowers; on certain occasions one told them they were like flowers—though it would not have done to tell a woman she looked like a peony, a beautiful but whorish flower. The garden was the work of Mr. Maidment, and it reflected the dull, geometrical character of Mr. Maidment’s mind.

It was uncommon for Francis to be in the garden unattended. Mr. Maidment did not like boys, whom he knew to be plant-tramplers and bloom-snatchers, but at this magical moment Bella-Mae had left him to himself because she had to go indoors for a moment. Francis knew she had gone to pee, which she did frequently, having inherited the weak bladder of her family, the Elphinstones. Bella-Mae did not know that Francis knew, because one of her jobs was to protect Francis from bruising contacts with reality, and in her confused and grubby mind, little boys ought not to know that adults had such creatural needs. But Francis did know, even though he was not fully aware who Francis was, and he felt a minute guilt at his knowledge. He was not yet such a close reasoner as to suspect that if Bella-Mae were thus burdened with the common needs of life, his parents might also share them. The life of his parents was god-like and remote. Their clothes did not come off, obviously, though they changed several times a day; but he had seen Bella-Mae take off her clothes, or at least shrug and struggle them off under her nightdress, because she slept in the nursery with him. She also brushed her coarse rusty hair a hundred times every night, for he had heard her counting, and was usually fast asleep before she had reached the century stroke.

Bella-Mae was called Nanny, because that was what the Major insisted she be called. But Bella-Mae, who was Blairlogie to the core of her being, thought it a silly thing to call her by a name that was not hers. She thought Major and Mrs. Cornish stuck-up and she took no pride in being a child’s nurse. It was a job, and she did it as well as she could, but she had her own ideas, and sometimes smacked Francis when he had not been very bad, as a personal protest against the whole Cornish manner of life, so out of tune with Blairlogie ideas.

Within the time between his meeting and recognition of the peony and his fourth year, Francis came to know that Bella-Mae was Awful. She was plain, if not downright ugly, and grown women ought to be beautiful, like his mother, and smell of expensive scent, not starch. Bella-Mae frequently made him clean his teeth with brown soap, as she did herself, and declared it to be wholesome; she took no stock in the tooth-powder with which the nursery was supplied. This was Awful. More Awful still was her lack of respect for the holy ikons which hung on the nursery wall. These were two vividly coloured pictures of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, and once a month she scrubbed their glass with Bon Ami, saying under her breath: “Come on, you two, and get your faces washed.” If the Major had known that, he would have given Bella-Mae what-for. But of course he did not know, because Francis was not a squealer, a kind of person Bella-Mae held in abhorrence. But if he was not a squealer, Francis was a noticer, and he kept a mental dossier on Bella-Mae which would certainly have led to her dismissal if his parents had known what it contained.

There was, for instance, her contumelious attitude, expressed physically but not verbally, toward the other picture in the nursery, which was of A Certain Person. Bella-Mae did not hold with images or idols; she belonged to the small assembly of the Salvation Army in Blairlogie, and she knew what was right, and a picture of A Certain Person, in a room like the nursery, was not right.

To remove the picture, or alter its position, was out of the question. It had been hung beside Francis’s bed by Aunt, Miss Mary-Benedetta McRory, who ought by rights to be called Great-Aunt. Bella-Mae was not the only one to have reservations about pictures of A Certain Person; the Major was not happy about it, but rather than have a row with Aunt he tolerated it, on the ground that women and children had soft heads about religion, and when the boy grew older he would put an end to all that nonsense. So there it hung, a brightly coloured picture of Jesus, smiling sadly as though a little pained by what his large brown eyes beheld, and with his lovely long white hands extended from his blue robe in the familiar Come-unto-me gesture. Behind him were a good many stars, and he seemed to be floating.

From time to time Aunt Mary-Ben had a secret little whisper with Francis. “When you say your prayers, dear, look first at the picture of Jesus, then close your eyes but keep the picture in your mind. Because that’s Who you’re praying to, isn’t it? And He knows all about little boys and loves them dearly.”

Bella-Mae was sure that Jesus didn’t like to see little boys naked, and she hustled Francis out of his clothes and into them with great speed and certain modest precautions. “You don’t think he wants to look at your bare B.T.M. with his big eyes, do you?” she said, managing to include both Francis and the picture in her displeasure. For her displeasure was immense. The faith of the Salvation Army expressed itself in her through a repertoire of disapprovals; she lived strongly in the faith of the Army, and from time to time she murmured the Army war-cry, “Blood and Fire”, with the vigour usually reserved for an oath.

She saw that the Army figured in Francis’s life as much as possible, though she would not have dared to take him to the Temple; the Major would not have stood for that. But at least twice a week he beheld her in the splendour of her uniform, and he was the first to see her in the glory of the Chapeau.

The Army uniform cost a good deal of money, and Bella-Mae bought hers garment by garment, as she could afford it. The sensible shoes, the black stockings, the skirt, and the tunic with its wonderful buttons, were achieved one by one, and then the great decision had to be made. Should she buy the bonnet, which was the familiar headgear of the Salvation Lassies, or should she opt for the Chapeau, a flat-crowned, broad-brimmed hat of blue fur felt, glorious with its red-and-gold ribbon, and strongly resembling (though Bella-Mae did not know this) the hats worn by Catholic priests in nearby Quebec. After deep inward searching, and prayer for guidance, she chose the Chapeau.

In full Salvation fig at last, she marched around the nursery, for Francis, singing in a style of her own, which included noises indicative of the band’s contribution:

At the Cross, at the Cross

Where I first saw the light

And my heart’s great burden roll’d away (pom, pom)

It was there through Blessed Jesus

That I turned to the Right

And now I am happy all the day! (Pish! scolded the cymbal)

At the Cro—s—s—s!

At the Cro—o—o—s!

At the Cross where I first saw the light (boomty-boom)

It was there through His mercy

That I turned toward the Right

And now I am happy all the day! (Boom, boom!)

It was irresistible. Francis hopped off his bed and paraded behind Bella-Mae, and under her guidance was able to shout, “Thine the glory!” and “Blest Redeemer!” ecstatically at the right intervals. He was elevated. He was free of the repressive influence of A Certain Person, whose sad eyes he ignored. He did not know what he was singing about, but he sang from a happy heart.

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 Emile 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.

Aunt knew all about souls. A neglected soul was an invitation for the Evil One to take it over, and, once in, he was almost impossible to banish. Francis knew a prayer—Now I lay me down to sleep—and of course he knew who Jesus was, because that picture of A Certain Person had been in the nursery for as long as he could remember. But just why Jesus was important, and that He was always present, watching you, and that although He had died long ago, He was still lurking, unseen, he did not know. As for the Holy Mother, friend and guardian of children, Francis had never heard of her. Such neglect of a child filled Aunt with pity; she could not understand how dear Mary-Jim had been so utterly consumed by her Protestant husband as to permit such a thing. What was she to do?

Little use to seek advice from Marie-Louise, whose comfortable, practical mind, when it could be said to be active at all, was now devoted to bridge. Bridge parties and vast Progressive Euchre parties at the church, devoted to raising money for war charities, possessed her. Not easy work, for so many of the Blairlogie Catholics were also French Canadians, and their zeal for a war against the enemies of England was wavering at best. But Marie-Louise had eaten the splendid cuisine of the English King, and was an ardent royalist. Madame Thibodeau was even less useful in the campaign to rescue Francis; the child had been baptized a Protestant, and was damned, and what was all the fuss about? The Senator was more helpful, but he was a man of honour and he had signed the Wooden Soldier’s hateful paper guaranteeing that Francis should be a Protestant, and he would not go back on his word; but neither would he interfere if Mary-Ben moved on her own authority. She had better talk to Dr. J.A., who had a long head on him. Don’t go to the priests till you’ve had a word with Dr. J.A.

Excellent advice! Dr. J.A. Jerome knew just what to do. “Frank’s a clever lad,” he said; “reads a great deal for a boy of his years. Lead him gently, Mary-Ben. Have you ever talked to him about his patron saint, for instance?”

Because he was born on September 12, Francis’s only possible patron was the grubby Guy of Anderlecht, a Belgian who had lost all his money in a bad speculation and turned to God in his bankruptcy. Nothing there to light the flame of devotion in a boy of nine. But it was also the day devoted to the Holy Name of Mary, a feast not much heeded, having lost out to the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, but it would do for a beginning. So one day Francis found a large oleograph of Mary hanging in his room; it was a reproduction of a Murillo, and, contrary to what might have been expected, he liked it very much. Its soft beauty reminded him of his own mother, whom he saw so rarely, and he listened with interest as Aunt explained how tender and kind the Mother of God was, and how watchful of the fate of little boys. Dr. J.A. was right, as always.

“Not that I approve of what you’re doing, Mary-Ben,” said he. “But I have to give a lot of advice that I wouldn’t think of taking myself. Far better the Blessed Mother than that Son of hers. I never knew a boy yet that I’d trust who really took to that searching, seeking fella.”

“Oh, Joe, you just say that to make me shudder.”

“Maybe I do; maybe I don’t. Half the time I don’t know what I mean. But you seem to be on the right track.”

Francis had never heard of anybody’s mother at St. Alban’s, when he went there with his parents. But he was open to stories about someone who pitied those who were in distress, and increasingly he was in distress.

This was because he had been summarily moved from the Central School, which was not far from St. Kilda, to Carlyle Rural School, which was almost two miles distant, but which included St. Kilda in the outermost reaches of its domain. His transfer was an act of covert spite directed at the Senator by the local school board; the secretary of that board, checking the lists, had discovered that Francis Cornish, by moving a hundred yards from his father’s house to his grandfather’s, had moved into the Carlyle school district, and one September morning when he was in the third grade he and two other children were told at ten o’clock to bundle up their books and report to Miss Helen McGladdery at their new school. Within an hour Francis, for all purposes sufficient to his age and stage of life, descended into Hell, and stayed there for what seemed to him an eternity.

Carlyle Rural School was not, at that time, particularly rural, for it was on the outskirts of Blairlogie in an area inhabited by workers in the Senator’s various mills and factories; it was with their children, and the children of farmers who worked the stony, wretched soil just outside the town, that Francis pursued his academic education and his vastly more significant social, ethical, and economic education.

Having now gained some measure of craftiness, he told Miss McGladdery that his name was Francis Cornish, but she had foreknowledge of his coming, and demanded to know what the C. on the secretary’s message stood for, and the misery of Chicken began all over again with new and ingenious tormentors.

At the first recess a large boy approached him, hit him hard in the face, and said, “Come on, Chicken, let’s see if you can fight.” They fought, and Francis was beaten disastrously.

After that he had to fight twice a day for three weeks, and he was beaten every time. Small boys are not skilled fighters, and though he was hurt and shaken, he suffered no serious damage. But after recess he sat at his desk, wretched and aching, and Miss McGladdery was angry with him because he was inattentive. Miss McGladdery was fifty-nine, and she was soldiering through her teaching career until, at sixty-five, she would be able to retire and, with God’s help, never see any of her former pupils again.

A strong Scots background, and thirty years at Carlyle Rural, had made her an expert disciplinarian. A short, fat, implacable woman, she ruled her three groups—for Carlyle Rural had only two rooms and she took the most advanced classes—not with a rod of iron, but with the leather strap that was issued by the school board as the ultimate instrument of justice. She did not use it often; she had only to take it from a drawer and lay it across her desk to quell any ordinary disobedience. When she did use it, she displayed a strength that even the biggest, most loutish boy dreaded, for not only did she flail his hands until they swelled to red, aching paws, but she tongue-lashed him with a virtuosity that threw her classes into an ecstasy of silent delight.

“Gordon McNab, you’re a true chip off the McNab block. (Slash!) I’ve given the strap to your father (Slash!), and both your uncles (Slash!), and I once gave it to your mother (Slash!), and I’m here to tell the world that you are the stupidest, most ignorant, no-account ruffian of the whole caboodle. (Slash!) And that’s saying something. (Slash!) Now go to your seat, and if I hear a peep out of you except in answer to a question, you’ll get it again and get it worse, because I’ve got it right here in my desk, all ready for you. Do you hear me?”

“Bluh.”

“What? Speak up. What do you say?”

“Yes, Miss McGladdery.”

McNab would slink to his seat, as boys held hands in front of their mouths, and girls, greatly daring, sharpened their fingers at him in disdain. It was useless for McNab to snarl in the schoolyard that Miss McGladdery was a dirty old bitch and her pants stank. He had lost face. Miss McGladdery had the total authority of the captain of a pirate ship.

She knew what happened in the schoolyard, but she did not interfere. Young Cornish’s grandfather was the leading Grit—the hated Liberal Party—and Miss McGladdery was an unwavering Conservative, or Tory. If the boy had so much grit in him, let him show it; she would do nothing until he complained, in which case she would take steps, but she would despise him as a complainer.

He did not complain, but one day a boy hit him in the eye hard enough to blacken it, and he went home knowing that there would be trouble.

It was not the kind of trouble he expected.

Aunt Mary-Ben, horrified, took him at once to Dr. J.A. Jerome. A black eye was nothing, said the doctor; no great harm at all. But then—

“They’re giving you a rough time, Frank? You don’t have to tell me. I know. I know everything that goes on in this town. Did you know that? They’re a rough lot at Carlyle Rural. Do you know the Queensberry Rules?”

Francis had heard something of this code from his father. You didn’t hit below the belt.

“Do you not? Well, Frank, the Queensberry Rules are all very fine in the ring but they’ve never heard of them at Carlyle Rural, or anywhere in Blairlogie, so far as I know. Did you never see the lumbermen fighting on a Saturday night? No, I don’t suppose you have. Those French boys know something about rough fighting. Now look here: you have two fists, and they wouldn’t dent a pound of butter. But you’ve two feet and good strong boots. So the trick is to let your man get close, then you rear back and let him have your right boot slap in his wind. Don’t kick him in the groin; that’s for later. But get his wind. He’ll probably fall down, if you do it right. Then jump on him and beat the stuffing out of him. Give it all you’ve got. He’ll be too busy trying to get his breath to do much. Don’t kill him, but get as near it as you dare. Get him by the ears and bang his head on the ground; you can’t hurt their heads.”

“Oh, Joe, you’ll make a tough of the boy,” said Mary-Ben, in distress.

“Just so, my dear. That’s the whole idea. If you’ve got any brains at Carlyle Rural you have to be a tough in order to keep them for yourself. In fact, Frank, it’s a good principle of life to let people understand that you’re really a terrible tough; then they’ll let you alone and you can be as delicate as you please, so long as they don’t find you out. Now, here’s some arnica to paint on the eye. Twice a day is enough. And keep him at home for the rest of the week, Mary-Ben, just to give Miss McGladdery a fright. Let her think she’s gone too far.”

And it all came to pass very much as Dr. J.A. expected. When Frank did not appear at school, Miss McGladdery was worried, and when she was worried her haemorrhoids tormented her. Of course she would not dream of consulting a Catholic doctor, but when Dr. J.A. buttonholed her on the steps of the Post Office on Saturday she could not escape.

“I hear Carlyle Rural is just as rough as it’s always been. Did you ever think you might have an ugly situation there one of these days, Miss McGladdery? It’d be a sad thing if anybody was seriously injured.”

A nod was as good as a wink to Miss McGladdery, and on Monday morning she announced that there had been too much fighting in the schoolyard, and if there were any more of it, she would strap the fighters.

Of course Frank was blamed; he had squealed. But obviously he wielded some power, and he had no more trouble with fighting. He was no better liked, and when the great spring game began, he watched from the sidelines.

Most of the boys were watchers, but unlike Frank they enjoyed what they saw. It fed something deep in them.

There was a pond in a field across the road from Carlyle Rural, and in spring it was full of frogs. The game was to catch a frog, stick a straw up its cloaca, and blow it up to enormous size. As the frog swelled, there was a delightful apprehension that it might burst. There was an even more splendid hope that the boy who was blowing might, if enough funny things were said to him, stop blowing for a moment and suck and then—why, he might even die, which would richly crown the fun.

Frank’s eyes were upon the frog, whose contortions and wildly waving legs pierced his heart with a vivid sense of the sufferings of Jesus, which Aunt had begun to describe to him. When His Name was used as an oath, Jesus suffered, and when boys were naughty Jesus’ wounds were opened and bled afresh. How Jesus must have been agonized by the tortures of the frogs! And—horror!—what must Jesus have felt the day some boys caught a tomcat and cut off its testicles, and let it loose to rush away, howling and bleeding! Francis was dimly becoming aware of his own testicles, which were somehow associated with something Awful about which he could not get any exact information.

Animals did it, as you hurried past with blushes and shame. But surely the boys could not be right who said that people did it, too? That your own parents—but that did not bear thinking of; it was horrible and wholly incredible. Frank’s mind was becoming a horror of sick speculation. And, young as he was, his body seemed to be in the conspiracy against him.

Aunt was not his only source of information about the mysteries of life. He found great solace in the company of Victoria Cameron, his grandfather’s cook. Aunt did not like him to talk too much to Victoria, who was not simply a Protestant but a Presbyterian of the darkest hue. She knew what was going on in the Senator’s house, and she knew it was wrong. Miss McRory was trying to suck that poor boy into the abyss of Catholicism and, although Victoria, as a great artist of the kitchen, was glad enough of the high wages—a resounding thirty-seven dollars a month, and board!—that the Senator paid her, she called her soul her own, and resisted Rome as stoutly as she could without provoking a row. She knew enough about the McRorys to hang them, she told herself, but she held her tongue. Judge not that ye be not judged. Of course, you can’t be a Calvinist without judging, but as a Calvinist you know what God’s ordinances are, so it isn’t really judging. It is just knowing right from wrong.

As is so often the case with people who hold their tongues, Victoria had a vast accretion of bottled-up disapproval, and it could be sensed from the darkness of her gaze, and spells of breathing deeply through her nose that could be heard at a considerable distance.

All she could properly do, as a loyal servant, eating the Senator’s bread, was to befriend that boy, and befriend him she did, in her own stern fashion.

He asked her outright about the great mystery: did people do what animals did? Her reply was that there was an awful lot of Bad in the world, and the less you knew about it the luckier you were, and he was not to ask that question again.

Aunt Mary-Ben, dimly aware but not well informed about the opposition in the kitchen, told Frank many a wondrous story about the mercy of God’s Mother, as she had seen it evinced in the visible world. Oh, you could always go to Her, Frankie, when you were troubled. Aunt kept her promise, and during the trouble of the black eye she gave him a pretty little rosary, which she told him had been blessed by the Bishop in Ottawa; he was to keep it under his pillow, and soon she would teach him the poetry that went with it.

Frank was deeply troubled, but it would never do to ask her the question he had put to Victoria. She wouldn’t know about such things, or if she did she would be sorrowful because he knew about them. And there was always the risk of opening the wounds of Jesus afresh.

The question plagued and puzzled. There was the time that a travelling company came to the theatre his grandfather owned—the McRory Opera House and Blairlogie’s principal centre of culture—offering a play tantalizingly called The Unwanted Child. There were special matinees for Women Only, at which a Well-Known Authority would lecture on the theme of the play, which was of concern to everyone. Francis knew that Victoria had attended one of these matinees, and he pestered her without mercy to know what the play had been about.

At last she yielded. “Frankie,” she said with great solemnity, “it was about a girl who Went The Limit.” No more would she say.

The Limit? Oh, what was the Limit?

POOR WRETCH, said the Lesser Zadkiel, breaking off in his narrative; don’t you pity him?

—No, no, no, said the Daimon Maimas. Pity is a human feeling, and I have nothing whatever to do with it. Your work is so much taken up with human creatures, brother, that you are infected by their weaknesses. Those children at Carlyle Rural, for instance; they were simply what they were. But you tell the tale of Francis as if to condemn them. I never condemn. My job was to make something of Francis with the materials I had at hand. If those materials were rough, they were good enough to grind his spirit down to a surface that showed up several veins of gold. Fine polishing will come later.

—But it made the boy thin and pale and sad.

—Now, now—that’s another of your pitying judgements. Put aside pity, Zadkiel. But I forget—you can’t; it’s not in your welkin. But I can, and indeed I must, if I am to be the grinder, the shaper, the refiner. We work like the classical Greek sculptors, you and I. I must hew the creature out of my own intractable piece of rock and put a fine surface on it. Then you apply the rich colours, of which Pity and Charity are very popular pigments. They seem to give my creation a life that human beings understand and love, but when the colours are washed away by time, the reality is revealed, and I know that the reality has been there since the beginning.

—But this struggle for the boy’s soul, as they call it. Pull Devil, pull Baker.

—I hope you use the phrase metaphorically. It would be unjust to call Aunt Mary-Ben a devil; she was about as honest and wellintentioned as human beings generally are, and she wanted her own way because she thought it was the best way. You may call Victoria Cameron a baker, if you choose. There is some justice in that.

JUSTICE, INDEED, for Victoria sprang from a long line of bakers, and her father and her brothers Hugh and Dougal ran the best bakery in Blairlogie. One Friday night Victoria got permission from Aunt to rouse Francis at two o’clock in the morning and take him to the bakery to see the Cameron men knead their dough.

The dough was an immense mass in a large round wooden trough that was built with a huge pole at its centre to which were attached three long bands of linen. The three Camerons were sitting with their trouser legs rolled up to the knee, scrubbing their feet in a low sink. Scrub, scrub, scrub till you might think the skin would come off. Then they dried their feet on fresh towels, powdered their feet with flour, leapt from the sink into the dough-trough, seized a linen band each, and began what looked like a wild dance in the dough. Round and round, until the linen bands were as close to the pole as they could be; then they turned and danced the other way, as the bands unfolded, shouting Heigh, heigh, heigh, as they danced.

“D’ye want to scrub up, young master, and dance with us?” shouted Old Cameron. And, quick as a wink, Victoria had his shoes and stockings off, washed his feet and floured them, and popped him into the trough with the men, where he danced as well as he could, for the dough was resistant, like treading on some sort of flesh; but that added to the fun. Francis never forgot that night, or the heat of the ovens, into which had been thrown many bundles of fern, which burned down to a fine white ash. After the dancing, the dough was cut with paddles into what would be pound loaves, and set out to rise again, before they went into the fiercely hot, sweet-smelling brick ovens.

At breakfast the next day, Victoria assured him that he was eating bread he had helped to bake himself.

The boy’s life was not at all dark; he was not clever at school, but he attracted Miss McGladdery’s attention by the seriousness with which he applied himself in the weekly half-hour that was given to Art. Miss McGladdery taught Art, as she taught everything, and she instructed all three classes at once in the mysteries of drawing a pyramid and shading one side of it so that it appeared to have a third dimension—or as she put it the shaded side “went back” and the unshaded part “stuck out”. A pyramid and a circle which shading made into a ball, and, as the culmination of Art, an apple. Shading was done by scuffling down one side of the object with the flat of the pencil’s point. But Frank did not think that good enough; he had learned a craft at home in which shading was done with tiny parallel lines, achieved with great patience, and even by cross-hatching.

“If you take the time to do all that tick-tack-toe on your apple you won’t be finished by four, and you’ll have to stay in till it’s done,” said Miss McGladdery. So he did “stay in” with half a dozen other culprits who had work to finish before they were released for the weekend, and when he showed Miss McGladdery his apple at half past four she admitted reluctantly that it was “all right”, for she did not want to encourage the boy to be “fancy” and try to go beyond what the class demanded and what she herself knew. Frank could draw, which was something not required in Art, and Miss McGladdery had come upon a caricature of herself done in the back of his arithmetic workbook. Miss McGladdery, who was a fair-minded woman, except about religion and politics, and had no vanity, admitted to herself that it was good, so she said nothing about it. Frank was an oddity, and, like a true Scot, Miss McGladdery had a place in her approval for “a chiel o’pairts”, so long as he did not go too far.

Almost every Saturday Frank could escape into a world of imagination by going to the matinee at the McRory Opera House, where movies were shown. He got in for nothing, because the girl at the ticket office recognized him, and as he pushed his ten-cent piece across the little counter she winked and quietly pushed it back again.

Then inside, and into his favourite seat, which was on the aisle at the back; he did not crowd into the front rows, as did the other children. Riches unfolded. An episode—locally pronounced “esipode”—of a serial, in which, every week, a noble cowboy was brought to the point of a horrible death by remorseless villains who sought to rob him of the equally noble girl he loved. Of course, it all came out right at the end of Esipode Twelve, and then another great adventure was announced for the weeks to follow. After the serial, a hilarious comedy, sometimes about the Keystone Komedy Kops, who were as incapable of dealing with disaster as the girl in the serial. Occasionally Charlie Chaplin appeared, but Francis did not like him. He was a loser, and Francis knew too much about being a loser to make a pet of one. Then the feature, in several reels; the ones Francis most enjoyed were not usually those that appealed to the other children. Lorna Doone, which came from England, was certain proof that the nasty mystery about what animals did and really good people surely didn’t was a lie; the image of the beautiful Lorna, who looked exactly like the Holy Mother, but was attainable by a truly good man, who might then kiss her chastely and adore her forever, did more to shape his ideas about womanhood than Aunt’s pious confidences. Certainly Lorna was a girl who would never venture within miles of the Limit, whatever the Limit might be. A companion picture in this special group was The Passing of the Third Floor Back, in which the great English tragedian Forbes-Robertson (much was made of his eminence in the advertisements and prices were slightly raised) played the role of a man who showed a group of shabby people that they didn’t have to be shabby, and who looked so noble, so distinguished, so totally incapable of laughter or any other lively emotion, that he was plainly intended to be A Certain Person, but wearing a fine cloak and a broad-brimmed hat, instead of those sappy robes in which A Certain Person usually appeared. Frank had not yet been taken to Mass, and he had forgotten St. Alban’s, but at the movies he fed upon these things in his heart, and was thankful.

Francis had an eye for the movies that took in more than the action; he saw backgrounds, landscapes (many of them painted, if you looked carefully), and angles; he even saw light. It was to his grandfather, the Senator, that he owed this extension of his understanding, for the Senator was an amateur photographer. His techniques were not sophisticated in terms of the Great War period when Francis was so often his companion; he worked with a large box-camera and a tripod. With this load he trudged happily around Blairlogie, taking pictures of the town, and such of its more picturesque citizens as he could persuade to stand or sit still for the necessary number of seconds, and he drove out to the lumber camps from which his growing fortune flowed, and took pictures of the men at work, or standing by giant trees lying on their sides. He took pictures in his mills. He took pictures of young Blairlogie men who were going off to war, with their rifles and kit, and gave copies to their families. The Senator never thought of himself as an artist, but he had an eye for a picture and he was an enthusiastic pursuer of all the many sorts of light the Canadian seasons afford. He talked to Francis about it as if the boy were of his own age. His senatorial and grandpaternal aloofness quite disappeared on these expeditions in search of what he called “sun-pictures”.

“It’s all a question of the light, Frank,” he said repeatedly; “the light does it all.” And he explained that all that painstaking shading in Art was related to light—something which certainly had never occurred to Miss McGladdery.

His detestation was pictures that had been taken by artificial light, and he particularly liked to take portraits in a shelter he caused to be made in the garden, to which furniture and draperies and other decorations could be laboriously lugged, and in which—apparently indoors but in fact in some version of the sun’s light—he took countless pictures of Madame Thibodeau, of Marie-Louise, of the children of his second daughter, Mary-Teresa, and of his son-in-law, Gerald Vincent O’Gorman, the rising man in the McRory industrial empire. Aunt resolutely refused to be photographed. “Oh, Hamish, I’d break the camera,” she laughed. But at her insistence he photographed Father Devlin and Father Beaudry, each leaning over a table in scholarly abstraction, apparently reading a leather-bound book, one forefinger supporting a brow plainly crammed with edifying knowledge. He even persuaded Dr. Jerome to pose for him, his hand resting on a skull which was a prized possession.

Taking pictures was great fun, but it was not so entrancing as what followed, when Francis and Grand-père were locked in a bathroom with no light save that from a dim red lamp, swishing and sloshing the film in smelly liquids in the wash-basin and the bathtub, watching for each sun-picture to declare itself, with just the right quality to satisfy the Senator’s careful eye. And then—

What followed was best of all, for then Grand-père set to work with an exquisitely pointed pencil to improve on his work by retouching the negative, emphasizing shadows, or giving richness to special aspects of the picture with an intricate shading done sometimes in tiny dots, sometimes in little spiral squiggles, sometimes in cross-hatching, so that the appearance of the sitter was enhanced in a flattering way.

Or, it might be, in a way that was not wholly flattering. Gerald Vincent O’Gorman had a dark beard, and when the Senator was finished with him, his close-shaven jaw had a faintly criminal shadow on it. And Father Beaudry’s fleshy wen—not large but emphatic—on the left side of his nose was given a prominence which startled the priest when he received the print that was to be sent to his mother in Trois Rivières. Not even the dignity of soutane and biretta could diminish the prominence of that wen. But Mary-Teresa, who already had a perceptible double chin, lost it in the retouching process. The Senator never commented on these alterations to Francis, but he could be seen to smile as he brought them into being with his delicate pencil, and Francis learned, without knowing that he was learning, that a portrait is, among other things, a statement of opinion by the artist, as well as a “likeness”, which was what everybody wanted it to be.

Francis was allowed to do some retouching himself, and he longed to transform the sitters with squints and lumps and deforming wrinkles. This was not permitted, but when Grandfather was momentarily absent he did, on one occasion, manage to sharpen one of Father Devlin’s front teeth in a way that seemed to him more expressive of Father Devlin’s personality than the unaided truth. Whether Grandfather saw what had been done was never known to Francis. But Grandfather did indeed notice, and a spirit of mischief to which he could not often give rein, and a pride in the psychological perception shown by his grandson, made him hold his peace, and he printed the improved portrait. Father Devlin never understood it, and although repeated examination in the mirror, and exploratory licking, told him that his dog-tooth was not really that of a vampire, he was of that simple group of mankind that believes the camera cannot lie, and besides, he did not like to criticize the Senator.

So, in one way and another, Francis managed to get some joy in life despite the shadow of school and the harassment of virtually all other children. Without being aware of it, he took into his mind and spirit forever a world that was passing away, a world of isolated communities like Blairlogie, which knew little of the world outside that they did not learn from The Clarion or, in one or two hundred uncharacteristic households, from the Ottawa papers. There was no entertainment from outside save the films and occasional road-shows at the McRory Opera House; entertainment was provided by church groups, by fraternal orders, by innumerable card parties, and of course by gossip, often cruel and bizarre in its nature.

At the top of the class structure were a few families who kept “maids”, an order of being who paradoxically conferred distinction, but were themselves held in disdain as underlings. When a maid bought a coat at Thomson and Howat, for instance, Archie Thomson always telephoned her employer (there were about two hundred telephones in the town) to ask if the girl was “good” for it, and to find out if he could what she was paid monthly. If a maid was so audacious as to attract a suitor, her mistress never failed to pop into the kitchen suddenly, to find out if they were up to anything. To employ a maid was splendid: to be a maid was to be sneered at, especially by those ladies who did not have a servant themselves. Protestant ministers were insistent that employers should release their maids on Sunday evenings, so that they could attend late services, but they gave the maids warmed-over sermons.

It was a world in which the horse played a crucial part. Few of these horses were of the noble breed with arching neck and flashing eye; most were miserable screws, rackers, the broken-winded, the spavined, often far gone with the botts, or with nostrils dribbling from the glanders. Even the splendid Percherons that drew the Senator’s great sleighs laden with tree-trunks were not objects of pride to their drivers, for they were seldom washed or combed, and the accusation that somebody smelled like a horse had a pungency now forgotten. But all of these creatures were hearty producers of manure, and in spring, when the unploughed roads gradually lost their layers of snow, the droppings of November perfumed the air of April, appearing with the lost overshoes and the copious spittings of the tobacco-chewers that had accumulated during the long months of frost.

Where there are horses there must be smiths. Francis spent many a happy hour, of which Aunt would have disapproved, hanging around Donoghue’s, where the big horses that pulled the lumber-sleighs were shod with pointed shoes that would strike into the icy roads. There, warmed by the horses and the fire of the forge, he learned rich blasphemy and objurgation from Vincent Donoghue, learned the stench that rises when the hot shoe is placed on the horse’s hoof, and the sharper stench when a spark landed on the blacksmith’s apron. But he learned no obscenity. Donoghue was puritanical and his horse-vocabulary was for talking to horses as he understood them; he would permit no smutty stories in his forge.

The taxicab was yet to come, and people who needed a carriage for a funeral, or a visit to the hospital, rode in lurching vehicles like droshkys; for winter their wheels were removed and they were mounted on runners; inside they stank of old leather, and of the mangy buffalo-robes that were drawn over the knees of the passengers; the drivers sat on a box in front, wrapped in fur coats of incalculable age.

There were a few horses of the better, proud sort, and of these the Senator’s were the best: a team of good bays, and a dancing pony or two to pull the governess-cart in which Marie-Louise and frequently Madame Thibodeau went shopping. Undertakers also had good horses, for that was part of the panoply of death, and of these Devinney’s black team were the most admired.

Good horses need good keeping, and when Old Billy finally drank himself into the grave, the Senator made one of the loose arrangements that were common in Blairlogie to have Devinney’s driver and groom take care of his horses as well, and it was not long before this man, whose name was Zadok Hoyle, spent more time at St. Kilda than he did at Devinney’s Furniture and Undertaking Parlours.

Zadok Hoyle presented a fine figure on the box of carriage or hearse, for he was a large, muscular man of upright bearing, black-haired and dark-skinned, possessed of a moustache that swept from under his nose in two fine ebony curls. On closer inspection it could be seen that he was cock-eyed, that his nose was of a rich red, and that his snowy collar and stock were washed less often than they were touched up with chalk. The seams of the frock coat he wore when driving the hearse would have been white if he had not painted them with ink. His top hat was glossy, but its nap was kept smooth with vaseline. His voice was deep and caressing. The story was that he was an old soldier, a veteran of the Boer War, and that he had learned about horses in the army.

He became Francis’s hero, second only to Grandfather. Zadok Hoyle was a Cornishman by birth, and had never lost his Cornish turn of speech; he usually called Francis “me little dear”, which did not sound odd from him, and sometimes he called him “poor worm”, which was meant in an affectionate and not a derogatory way. He spoke to the horses in the same terms, and they loved him, in so far as a horse can love anybody. Best of all, he had lived near to Chegwidden Hall in Cornwall when he was a boy, and did not have to be told how to pronounce the name in the proper style. When Francis confided to him the shame of being called Chicken, Zadok said: “Pity their ignorance, me liddle dear; pity their ignorance and despise ’em.”

ON NOVEMBER 11, not long after Francis’s ninth birthday, the First World War, which for so long was called the Great War, ended, but that did not mean that Major Cornish and Mary-Jacobine returned to Blairlogie. Everyone understands that when a war is over, the cleaning-up and the arranging, and the vengeance toward the vanquished, take just as much time and clashing of brains as the conflict itself. The Major had a very good war; he remained a major, because it gave him a certain protective colouring. There were plenty of majors, and the fact that this one was apparently an unusually clever major, attached to the Canadian forces but a familiar figure in the War Office in London, was better concealed from curious people. “High up in Intelligence” was the phrase people used about him, and that was much better than being a lieutenant-colonel, for instance. Such a man could not be spared when there was so much to do, and he and his wife, that popular beauty, had to go to London almost at once, and for an indefinite time.

The fighting had finished, but disease was busily at work. Spreading, unquestionably, from the putrefying dead lying on the battlefields—Blairlogie, knew this to be a fact—the Influenza walked the earth, and killed an additional twenty millions before it subsided. But in Blairlogie, as well as the influenza there was whooping-cough, and that had hardly subsided before there was a rush of what was then called infantile paralysis, the terrible inflammation of the spinal marrow that left so many children on crutches with legs cased in cruel cages, or confined to wheelchairs, if it did not kill them. But Francis, who was not an unusually robust or sickly child, somehow managed to avoid all of these epidemics. Indeed, his first encounter with a severe illness was with whooping cough four years later. At thirteen this encounter left him whooping, as Dr. J.A. put it, like an Indian on the warpath.

“No school for this young man at least until after Christmas, Mary-Ben,” he said to Aunt, who was of course the family nurse. “Perhaps not then. We’ll see. He’s badly run down and he’ll be marked for we-both-know-what if he goes among other children too soon. Keep him in bed as much as you can, and load him up with egg-nogs. Doesn’t matter if they come up when he whoops; quite a bit of it will stay.”

So Francis settled to a long, reflective holiday, as soon as Miss McGladdery had been convinced that there was no point in sending him sheets of arithmetic problems to be solved; she was determined that the sick body should not beget the idle mind, and arithmetic was just the thing for a boy who was too weak to sit up in bed. Francis was very ill, and the injections Dr. J.A. gave him every three days, just above the kidneys, did nothing to make him placid. Indeed, on one very bad day, Aunt got into a panic and sent for Father Devlin, who murmured and sprinkled some drops of water on him. Francis was in delirium, and did not understand what had happened, but Aunt was greatly comforted. When at last he seemed a little better, the Doctor said that he was greatly “run down”, and gentle steps must be taken to “build him up.”

I SUPPOSE that was your doing, said the Lesser Zadkiel.

—Certainly, said the Daimon Maimas, though of course I take no responsibility for the epidemics. It gave me a chance to put our young friend out of the world of action for a while and introduce him to the world of thought and feeling. He had been bullied too much for any good it might do, and the insults to his mother and nasty talk about his family were beginning to wear on him. So I took the means that came to hand to put him out of action for a while. We do that often, you know, with our special people; they need leisure of the sort a bustling, active holiday can never provide. A good long illness can be a blessing. Go on with your chronicle, and you’ll see.

—You are a fierce spirit, brother.

—So it may seem, if you take a purely human point of view.

BETWEEN BOUTS OF WHOOPING Francis had plenty of time to reflect. He was glad to be secure from the torments of Alexander Dagg, who was a psychological rather than a physical bully.

“D’you know what I’m goin’ to tell yuh?” he would demand. “There’s bad blood in your family. Your old aunt has a bielding head. Did yuh know that? My Maw says so. D’you know what that comes from? Rotting brains. You’ll likely end up with a bielding head yourself.”

A bielding head? It was a Blairlogie word, used not in the kindly Scots sense of sheltering, but meaning scabby, overgrown with suppurating outbreaks. Children often had bielding fingers, and displayed them with pride; they were neglected whitlows. But a bielding head? Aunt’s head was never discussed, and Francis had never seen her without one of her little caps. He loved Aunt, and hated such talk, but he could not escape it.

“D’you know what I’m goin’ to tell yuh? Yer Maw’s riding for a fall. My Maw says so. Pride riding for a fall. When she come here last time she was lallygagging around and piling on the agony as if she was better than anybody else. That’s what my Maw says: she piles on the agony!”

Piling on the agony? To Francis it seemed that his beautiful, distant mother had an air of distinction unequalled by anyone else he knew. Of course she was better than anybody else. It was unendurable that Alexander Dagg and his sluttish mother should take her name into their mouths. But—riding for a fall? Francis could not cast out the barbs planted by Alexander Dagg. All his life he would be naked to criticism, however foolish or unjust.

“D’you know what I’m going to tell yuh? There’s something funny about your house. People see lights where a light’s got no right to be. My Maw says there’s a looner in there somewheres. Somebody chained up. Does yer old aunt have to be chained up when her head gets too bad? People wonder a lot about your house. Do you know that?”

Yes, Francis knew that. Whoever lives in the finest house in a small Canadian town dwells in a House of Atreus, about which a part of the community harbours the darkest mythical suspicions. Sycophancy is present, but in small store; it is jealousy, envy, detraction, and derision that proliferate. In lesser houses there may be fighting, covert abortions, children “touched up” with a hot flat-iron to make them obedient, every imaginable aspect of parsimony, incest, and simple, persistent cruelty, but these are nothing to whatever seems amiss at the Big House. It is the great stage of its town, on which are played out the dramas that grip the imagination for years after the actors are dead, or have assumed new roles. With St. Kilda was linked its neighbour, Chegwidden Lodge, which provided in the Major and his beautiful wife a splendid addition to the cast of older actors. But only Francis had to listen, day after day, to what Blairlogie, as represented by Alexander Dagg’s Maw, thought about it.

Most of all, Francis reflected about Dr. Upper. The local board of education, persuaded by who can tell what impulse toward modernity, had secured the services of Dr. G. Courtney Upper, who was making a tour of that part of Ontario, going to any school that asked for him, giving instruction in the mysteries of sex to boys and girls. The process took two days. For the first day Dr. Upper talked mysteriously and in general terms about the necessity to love and respect one’s body, which was part of that British Empire that had shown its moral splendour in the war just ended. Any falling-off from the highest standards of clean speech, clean thought, deep breathing, daily washing of the armpits, was letting the Empire down. If you told dirty jokes you would quickly grow to look like a dirty joke. Girls were the future mothers of the Empire, and it behooved them to be models of daintiness and refinement in every possible way; boys would be the fathers of the Empire, and a slouching gait, sloppy grammar, smoking cigarettes, and spitting in the street would bring the Empire down as the Hun had never been able to do.

The Doctor himself was a pursy little man in a shabby black suit; his face was round and pudgy; his eyes ran and needed frequent mopping. But in the street he was a remarkable figure in an Inverness cape made for a bigger man, crowned by a bowler hat. His name was all over Blairlogie an hour after his arrival, for he had gone to Jim Murphy’s barber-shop for a shave, and, hearing an oath from some patron who obviously sought to undermine the Empire, he had leapt from the chair, denounced the astonished blasphemer, and rushed into the street with half his face covered with lather. Before an audience of children his manner was hypnotic and powerfully emotional.

It was on the second day of his evangel that the Doctor really got down to serious business. The girls had been taken off to another room, where a lunar nurse initiated them in lunar mysteries of their own, and the boys were at the mercy of Dr. Upper.

He began with motherhood. His style was lyrical; he seemed almost to sing to the harp. No figure in a boy’s life was so influential, so totally embracing, so holy and so good, as his mother. To her he owed the gift of life, for at the time of his birth she had gone down, down to the very gates of Hell itself, her body torn with pain, in order that her son might live. Just how this was done was not explained, which made the mystery doubly horrible. But that was what she had done, in the greatness of her love for the child she had not yet seen. Could any boy hope, however long he lived, to recompense her for that sacrifice, in which she had purchased his life at the danger of her own?

Plainly no boy could do so; but by complete obedience, and unfailing love, he might make a poor stab at it. Dr. Upper, assuming a whining voice and a cringing demeanour, spoke to a mother—whom he called Mommy—in a monologue in which worship and obedience were mingled. It would have brought blushes to the cheek of anyone not wholly under his spell, but the Doctor was a brilliant, if sickening, rhetorician. He had worked up his great Apostrophe to Mommy over many years, and of its kind it was a masterpiece.

In the afternoon the pressure was doubled—trebled. Boys had it in their power to be the fathers of a great race, but they would never do so if they relaxed for an instant their determination to be pure in every respect. Purity of mind; he had spoken of that. Purity of speech; he had shown them how unmanly were swearing and dirty talk. But purity of body—on that all else depended, and without that the race would sink into the degeneracy so plainly to be seen among foreigners.

Purity of body meant a sentimental regard for one’s testicles that was only slightly less whimpering than one’s love for Mommy. Save for occasional washing they must never be touched, though they might be addressed, if they seemed to demand attention, in the Mommy-style of love but, in this case, also of rebuke. They must be told to be patient until the day when some lovely girl, who had kept herself pure, would become your wife on her way to the final apotheosis of motherhood. Were you going to throw away what was rightfully hers on base self-gratification—or worse? (What was worse was not defined.) Dr. Upper had known a boy so curious about his testicles that he had opened them up with his pocket-knife, to see what they were like, and had died of blood-poisoning in Dr. Upper’s arms, imploring the Doctor with his last breath to warn other youths against his fatal lack of respect for his body.

If the testicles needed some stern talking-to from time to time, even more so did the penis. Yes, the Doctor urged boys always to use the medical terms, and not to sin by applying filthy names to these precious jewels. The penis might, from time to time, show a mind of its own, and when that happened, it had to be talked to kindly, but firmly (here the Doctor gave a little monologue that would bring any right-thinking penis to its senses), and wrapped in a cold wet towel until it was in a better frame of mind. On no account was it to be encouraged by thought or deed that would lead it to betray that noble mother or that almost equally wonderful girl who trusted you to bring her a love that was wholly pure and manly. Such thoughts, such deeds, were called masturbation, and it led rapidly to total degeneration of body and spirit. The Doctor had seen terrible ravages brought about by this sin of sins, and he could tell at a glance any boy who had succumbed to the loathsome practice.

Loathsome, yes, and dangerous, for the mighty gift of sex was not everlasting. Abuse it, and it would leave you, and then—what followed was too dreadful for the Doctor to say.

His peroration, the top of the show, came when the Doctor produced, after some rummaging, his own penis as an example of the adult member in its full splendour. He held it in his hand, as he thanked God for assisting him in bringing the great message of purity of life to the boys of Blairlogie.

During the two days when he listened to Dr. Upper, Francis was sickening for whooping-cough, and shortly afterward he was in bed, warm under the blankets and loaded regularly with egg-nog by dutiful Aunt. The miseries of his illness were compounded by the urgings of his body, of those very organs upon which Dr. Upper had placed such spooky emphasis. They were unruly; they demanded attention and try as he might he could not banish their assertiveness by thoughts of his mother, or the Empire, or anything at all. He was sick not only in body but in mind.

The Doctor had told something, but not all, about the great mystery. That boys possessed some power that could make a girl a mother was clear enough, but how was it done? Not—oh, surely not by what he had seen, furtively and without comprehension, done by animals? What was the Limit, which was visited by such terrible consequences that a whole play was made about it, with Matinees for Ladies Only? There was nobody whom he could ask, of course. The atmosphere of St. Kilda was sternly Catholic, and Dr. Upper had not been asked to speak to Catholic children. Francis had made no mention of the Doctor at home, and he was sure that his knowledge was guilty knowledge, that might even reopen the wounds of Jesus. As for the Holy Mother, she must know of his plight, and would it not strain even her great pity? He was in misery, and his misery made the whooping-cough worse. When at last it abated, after six long weeks, he was left with his old enemy, tonsillitis, and looked, Victoria Cameron assured him, like a ghost.

There were compensations, the best of which was that a return to school lay unimaginably far in the future. Even Miss McGladdery had given up her notion that pages of arithmetic problems would do anything for him. The next best thing was that during the daytime he was moved, partly dressed and bundled up in rugs and shawls, into Aunt’s own sitting-room.

It was by far the most personal room in St. Kilda, for Marie-Louise notions of decoration were strictly French-Canadian, and the downstairs rooms were stiff and grand with furniture almost too delicately upholstered in blue brocade to be sat upon by mortal man. But Aunt’s room was a splendid muddle of all the things Aunt liked best, and there was a sofa for Francis in front of the fireplace, where Zadok Hoyle made him a fine fire every day. Zadok was a cheerful visitor, although his daily news for Francis consisted of a notice of what funerals he was driving for in the morning (Catholic) and afternoon (Protestant).

“I’m driving Madame V. deP. Delongpré at eleven,” he would say. “A huge woman; not easy to embalm, let me tell you. Then back to the shop and get the Cross off the top of the hearse and put on the draped Urn to get old Aaron Wrong to the Presbyterian church by two sharp. He made it to ninety-four, you know. A tiny man at the last—very easy to embalm because there was so little left of him. I’ll just have time for a sandwich in between, but Miss Cameron has promised me a great feed tonight. I’ll look in before me dinner and bring you some more wood. Keep your pecker up, dear man.”

An unfortunate expression to use to Francis, for though Zadok meant it in its English sense of keeping cheerful, it had quite another message for Francis, who was aware that his pecker was too often indefensibly up and assertive during the day. Did Zadok know? Was Zadok mocking him? Adults were incomprehensible.

Zadok never broke his promise to return in the evening, with more wood and news of the day’s diversions.

“Madame Delongpré would have been mortified,” he would say. “Church not much more than a third full. But she was a bitter old gossip. Aaron Wrong, now, pulled a full church at St. Andrew’s. I suppose it shows you what money and great old age can do. Long funeral. I was hard set to get back here to drive Madame Thibodeau home after the card-party. Between you and me, Francis, she’s getting too old and too fat for the pony-trap. But she’s still a great hand with the cards. She cleared over three dollars at the table this afternoon. D’you think she cheats?”

By such cheerful irreverences he relieved the warm, happy, but remorselessly devotional atmosphere created by Aunt, who would appear at eight o’clock to say the rosary, at its full length, with Francis, who now knew it by heart. It was not something to be mentioned to the Major, even if he should appear, which was unlikely. But now that Francis had been baptized by Father Devlin he was certainly a Catholic, and was not the poetry of the rosary his by right?

HOW MUCH of Aunt’s total dominance of their household was understood by the Senator and his wife? She was so humble, so deferential to Marie-Louise as the mistress, the wife, the mother; Aunt was so soft-voiced, so smiling, that her control of everything was hardly noticed. Marie-Louise often said that dear Mary-Ben was her Right Bower—an expression from Aunt’s favourite game of euchre. She did not aspire to bridge, which was still new in Blairlogie, and fashionable, and beyond the understanding of a poor, addled old maid like herself; that was for such powerful intellects as Marie-Louise, and Madame Thibodeau, and the card-crazed group with whom they played five times a week, displaying astonishing avarice over the modest stakes. Of course, it could not be called gambling; the money was merely to give a little additional interest to the contest of wits, the severe post-mortems, and the occasional sharping which was not quite cheating. Ample meals and the green baize table were all Marie-Louise asked of life, now. As for the Senator, he had his business, his attendance in the Chamber in Ottawa, his politics, and his sun-pictures. Let his sister manage the household; he made her an ample allowance, most of which seemed to go to the Church.

Not all, however. Mary-Benedetta had her own craze. It was oil-paintings. She bought expensive reproductions from shops in Montreal, where she visited Reverend Mother Mary-Basil twice a year. Not all of these could be hung on the walls of her sitting-room, which were full from the ceiling to within three feet of the floor with Murillos, Ary Scheffers, Guido Renis, and all the masters of sweet piety that appealed to her; scores of others, unframed, were kept in portfolios, over which she brooded happily when the rosary had been said, and Francis was seated at her side, wrapped in shawls, in a reverential atmosphere. Masters of the Renaissance and masters of the nineteenth century were here, and not all the pictures were on sacred themes. Ladies languished on balconies, listening to cavaliers who played the guitar and sang in the garden below. Here was that lovely thing Sir Galahad, by G.F. Watts, O.M., R.A.—“the Order of Merit dear, and a Royal Academician, truly a great man”—in which the purity of the young man—“not a saint dear, but a great lover of our Lord”—and the purity of his horse were finely linked. And see, Francis, here is the Infant Samuel, wakened from his sleep by God’s summons; can’t you almost see the words on his lips, “Speak, for Thy servant heareth”? Remember that, Francis, if you should ever hear the Voice in the darkness. Oh, and look, dear, here is the Virgin of Consolation; see the poor soul who has lost her baby, comforted by the Holy Mother; painted by a Frenchman, dear, William Adolphe Bouguereau; oh, he must be a troubled soul, Francis, for he has painted some dreadful pagan pictures, but here he is, you see, painting this truly sacred picture that assures us of the Virgin’s mercy. And here is The Doctor by Luke Fildes; doctors are very wonderful men, Francis, right next to priests in their pity and concern for human suffering; see him as he looks at the sick little boy, just as Uncle Doctor sat and looked at you when you were so bad with the whooping-cough. Well now, this one has got in here by mistake; it’s called Flaming June, and you can see the girl is asleep, but why Lord Leighton wanted to shove her B.T.M. right into the front of the picture I’ll never know; you may well ask why I bought it, but now I have it I can’t quite bring myself to throw it away. Isn’t the colour fine?

Francis could look at pictures for hours, absorbed in the world of fantasy they created, and their assurance of a life far beyond the reach of Carlyle Rural, and the moral squalor of Alexander Dagg’s Maw. His convalescence began only a week or so before Christmas and when that day came Aunt had two gifts for him, in the choice of which she acknowledged him as a kindred spirit.

One was a head of Christ, for the picture of A Certain Person had been left in the nursery at Chegwidden Lodge. But that had been for a little child; this was unquestionably a work of the highest art. It was called St. Veronica’s Napkin, because you know, dear, that when Our Lord stumbled and fell on the terrible walk to Calvary, St. Veronica wiped His dear Face with her napkin (no, not a dinner napkin, dear, more a hanky) and lo! His Image was imprinted on it forever. Just like the Shroud of Turin. As one looked at the calm face, its closed eyes seemed to open and gaze directly into your own. The work of a great Belgian master, dear; we’ll hang it where you can see it from your bed, and you’ll know He’s looking at you all night long.

The other was secular, but though it was a “nude” it was not sensational; a boy, about Francis’s own age, stood weeping at a door that the painter’s art had made to look very firmly closed, but also as though it gave entry to something wholly delightful; it was called Love Locked Out. Painted by a lady, Francis—an American lady—but what a truly masculine grasp of art she must have to be able to think of and paint such a wonderful picture!

Love locked out. Francis knew all about that. Oh, Mother, darling Mother, why are you so far away? Why are you never here? Mother’s visits were so few and so brief. Of course, it was her work in England, in the hospitals for Canadian soldiers, that kept her away, and Francis must be a brave soldier too, and not mind. Parcels at Christmas, and occasional brief letters that seemed to be written to a much younger boy, did not really make up for Mother’s absence. Love Locked Out—even a brave little soldier could not keep back tears. The picture gave an outward, visible form to a longing that lived deep inside him, and surged to the surface whenever he was sad, or lonely, or when dusk was gathering outside the windows, and the fire made changing shadows on the wall.

That Christmas night, when Aunt thought he was fast asleep, Francis stood naked against the wall of his bedroom, and with a hand mirror he looked over his shoulder at his image in the big looking-glass on the other side of the room. Carefully composing his body, he assumed the attitude of the picture, and looked long and with sadness mixed with approval at what he saw. He could do it. He could enter and become the picture. He could do it well. He crept back into his pyjamas and returned to bed, his sadness mingled with a pleasure he did not understand but which was comforting. He would repeat that experience many times in the days to come.

YOU ARE LETTING YOUR BOY become rather odd, aren’t you? said the Lesser Zadkiel.

—My dear colleague, you are allowing yourself to talk like Alexander Dagg, said the Daimon Maimas. I am pushing him gently in the direction dictated by his destiny, and I have not infinite means of doing that. I must work with whatever is at hand. He is to be a connoisseur, a patron of art, a man who understands art—though there will be dozens of Alexander Daggs of a more sophisticated sort to assert rancorously that he knew nothing whatever about it. Don’t expect me to make an omelette without breaking eggs.

—I was thinking about breaking hearts.

—Oh, hearts! Nobody gets through life without a broken heart. The important thing is to break the heart so that when it mends it will be stronger than before. If you will allow me to say so, my dear Zadkiel, you angels are very easily pulled toward sentimentality. If you had my work to do, you would know how ruinous that can be.

—I am disposed sometimes toward pity, if that is what you are talking about.

—If Francis was an ordinary boy he might have been lucky enough to have a guardian angel assigned to him, to keep him out of trouble and put pretty things in his way. But I am no guardian angel, as you well know: I am a daimon, and my work must sometimes seem rough. We haven’t seen the last of Francis before the mirror, and next time he won’t have his back to it.

—Ah, well. Let us go on with our story.

AS AUNT MANAGED EVERYTHING in St. Kilda her taste was apparent not only in her own room, but everywhere, and especially in the pictures. In the dining-room, for instance, hung two large paintings by François Brunery, which had cost the Senator a pretty penny but which were, as Aunt explained to him, emblematic of his position in the world.

One was called, on the medallion at the bottom of the frame, The Point of the Story. At a dining-table in what was plainly a palace in Rome sat five cardinals in scarlet, and a bishop in purple. Oh, how shrewd, how intelligent were the faces (three plump, two thin) that were inclined forward, intent upon the sixth, a cardinal whose upraised forefinger and twinkling eyes showed that the point of the good story was about to break upon his hearers. What could it be? Some tale of Vatican intrigue, some subtle reverse of fortune in the Curia, or, perhaps, some scandal about a lady? The look of discreet enjoyment on the face of the major-domo in the background suggested the last. And look at the table! What gold and silver objects, what crystal glasses, what ruby wine. (Oh, that’s clever, contrasting the colour of the wine with the scarlet of the robes, without letting them swear at one another!) And what promise of further wine in the gorgeous silver wine cistern that stands in the foreground, on the finely painted hardwood floor, (Look, Hamish, there’s wood for you!) A great picture, a real work of art, and just the thing for a dining-room.

On the opposite wall was an even jollier picture; jolly, but perhaps a little sly. It was called The Tired Model. A young monk, a Dominican by his robe, stands before the easel in his studio, upon which is a picture of a saintly old cardinal, his hands pressed against his breast. Just look at that delicate old flesh against the scarlet moiré, and his gaze raised to Heaven, from which is coming the light that enfolds him! But on the model-throne sits the old man, slumped in his chair, fast asleep; the artist—a handsome young fellow with curly hair around his tonsure—is scratching his head in dismay.

Are not these pictures reverential, showing a devotion to the things of the Church and especially to its hierarchy, yet asserting that their owner shares a common humanity with the red-robed cardinals? These are such pictures as you might expect to find in the dining-room of a B.C.L. (as a Big Catholic Layman was jokingly called in Church circles), a man who knew his place, but who also knew his worth—a man who could re-gild a spire or contribute a splendid bell without having to think twice about the bill. Aunt had taken care that Hamish had what was right for him. When Father Devlin and Father Beaudry dined in that room they understood the subtle message; no domineering priests’ ways in this house, if you please, gentlemen. Drink your wine and mind your manners.

Canada had officially embraced Prohibition in 1916, in order that when the brave boys returned after the War they would find a country purged of one of the major causes of evil-doing. In such houses as the Senator’s the cellars contained stocks of wine bought long before, and there was no stint. But even substantial stocks dwindled, and this was reason for some unease. A good cellar needs regular replenishing. Marie-Louise’s friends could nip their way through a surprising amount of white wine in an afternoon of bridge, before it was time for a substantial tea.

By the standards of Blairlogie, quite a lot of entertaining was done at St. Kilda, and in this, as in everything else, Aunt was the unobtrusive manager. Unobtrusive, that is, until it came to music, and then she shone. In every realm, without any hint of undesirable bohemianism or deviation from the strictest morality, Aunt was “artistic”.

“Shall we have a little music?” she would say when, after dinner, the guests had had an hour in which to chat and digest. Nobody would think of replying that it might be more fun to go on talking; that would be an affront to the high aesthetic atmosphere of St. Kilda, which Aunt had created, to the greater glory of her brother and his wife.

When it had been enthusiastically agreed that nothing could be pleasanter than a little music, Aunt would go to the piano and, if there were someone present who had not been to dinner before, she would plunge immediately into a difficult and noisy piece, such as a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody. The guest, if not of a positively turnip-like insensitivity, would be astonished at the noise, the pell-mell speed, the sheer cultivated racket that Aunt was producing. Even more astonished when, at the conclusion, when he was about to say, “Miss McRory, I never dreamed—” the other guests would break into mocking applause, and Aunt herself would turn on the piano stool, shaking with laughter.

For the piano was a Phonoliszt (World Renowned Pianists At Your Beck and Call … no pedals to push, no levers to learn …) and this was Aunt’s little joke. The pianist had been the great Teresa Carreño, a famous matador of the instrument, imprisoned forever on a perforated roll of paper.

“But if you would like me to sing—” she would say, and all the guests agreed eagerly that they would like her to sing.

Aunt sang in English and French and it was generally agreed that her repertoire was very chaste. What was not chaste was the sound she made. She had a good voice, a true contralto, and produced a big, fruity tone surprising in such a small woman. She had always sung, and had been “finished” in Montreal in twelve lessons with Maestro Carboni. The maestro’s method was simple, and effective: “All moving utterance is based upon the cry of the child,” said he; “make a sound like a child crying—not in anger, but for love—and refine on it, Mademoiselle, and everything else will fall into place.” Aunt had done so, and her singing was both good and astonishing, for it moved and troubled even musical ignoramuses.

The songs she sang were, in one way or another, cries for love. Songs in French, from the pen of Guy d’Hardelot, or in English, by Carrie Jacobs-Bond. Strongly emotional songs. Had Aunt known it, songs orgasmic in their slow, swelling climaxes.

But beyond any doubt Aunt’s finest effort, her unfailing war-horse, was “Vale”, by Kennedy Russell. Although Francis could see plainly on the music that its name was “Vale”, Aunt and all cultivated persons pronounced it “Wally”, because it was Latin and meant “Farewell”. In two brief verses by de Burgh d’Arcy (obviously an aristocrat of some kind) it caught the very soul of Aunt, and most of her hearers.

It was about a man who was dying. He begged somebody (wife? lover?—oh, surely not a lover, not when one was dying) to stay at his side during the creeping, silent hours.

Mourn not my loss, you lov’d me faithfully

(Obviously a wife, who had done her wifely duty.) The conclusion was dramatically splendid:

Then, when the cold grey dawn breaks silently,

Hold up THE CROSS … and pray for me!

For a dying person, Aunt made a remarkable amount of noise at Hold up THE CROSS and then faded almost into silence at and pray for me! as if the singer were actually pegging out. This was done by what Maestro Carboni called “spinning the tone”, a very good Italian trick, and not easy to acquire.

Aunt sang this song often. It was always in demand when St. Bonaventura’s had one of its concerts to raise money, and Father Devlin had said, in language that might have been more happily phrased, that when Miss McRory sang “Wally” we all got as near to dying as we’d get before our time actually came.

Aunt’s music had a lighter side, not for parties, but for those quiet evenings when it was just herself and the Senator and Marie-Louise, and Dr. J.A., who often dropped in after his evening rounds, tired out and wanting relaxation.

“Sing ‘Damn Stupid’, Mary-Ben,” he would say, as he stretched his legs toward the fire.

“Oh, Joe, you do love to make fun of me,” Aunt would say, and then sing the ballad from Merrie England:

Dan Cupid hath a garden

Where women are the flowers—

Which went on to declare that the sweetest flower loved by Cupid was the Lovely English Rose. She, the wholly Highland Scots old maid, and he, the wholly Irish old bachelor, found a distilment of their own stifled, unacknowledged romance in this very English song by Edward German Jones, born on the Welsh Border. Music, as Aunt often told Francis, knows no frontiers.

Francis heard it all. Sometimes he sat in the drawing-room, already in his pyjamas, but wrapped in rugs, because he had begged to hear Aunt sing, and what singer can refuse such a tribute, so obviously sincere? Sometimes, when there were guests and he was supposed to be in bed, he sat on the stairs, in his pyjamas and without any rugs. To the pictures he responded with mind and heart, eager not only to understand what they had to say, but to know how they were made; to the music he listened with his heart alone.

He was finding out one or two things about pictures. He had the run of Aunt’s collection of prints, and a number of books she possessed, with names like Gems From the World’s Great Galleries. He was probably the only boy within a five-hundred-mile radius who knew what the Pitti was, or what putti were. But better than that, he was getting some notion of how pictures were put together.

His teacher was an unlikely one. Among Aunt’s books was one which she had bought long ago, glanced at, and decided that it had nothing to say to her. It was called How to Draw in Pen and Ink, and the author was Harry Furniss. Indeed, he was still alive, and would be alive for a further five years after Francis first met with his book. Furniss was a remarkable caricaturist, but, as he explained in his genial prose, to draw caricatures it is first necessary to be able to draw people, and if you want to draw people you had better try your hand at drawing anything and everything. You cannot make Mr. Gladstone look like an old eagle if you cannot draw a serious Mr. Gladstone and a serious old eagle. You must develop an eye; you must see everything in terms of line and form. Andrea del Sarto was no Raphael, but he could correct Raphael’s drawing; you could aim at drawing like del Sarto even if you hadn’t a hope of being anything better than a Harry Furniss—which wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to be, either.

Francis had access to unlimited paper and pencils; he had but to ask Aunt and plentiful supplies appeared. He did not tell Aunt about Harry Furniss, whom she had rejected as unworthy, and doubtless coarse in his methods. But a man who had been able, as a youth, to attend a London fire, make pages of rapid sketches, and then work them up into a full-page engraving for the London Illustrated News was just the man to catch Francis’s imagination. A man who could make such vivid caricatures of people whom Francis had never heard of, but whose essence he felt in Furniss’s drawings, was just the man to dispel the impression given by Aunt that it all had to be done by geniuses, usually foreigners, in studios, under the spooky guidance of the Holy Mother and perhaps even of A Certain Person. This was a gust of fresh air in art. This made art a possibility—remote, but still a possibility—for somebody like himself.

Always have paper in your pocket, said Harry Furniss. Never be without a notebook. Never miss a significant figure in the streets or at the theatre or in Parliament. Catch every turn of the head, every gleam in the eye. You can’t draw pretty girls if you can’t draw gutter crones. If you can’t keep files of your notes, don’t; but once having disciplined your hand and eye to capture every detail and nuance, perhaps you don’t need files, for these things are filed in your brain and your hand.

Just the sort of sea-breeze to blow away the odour of sanctity. Francis was conscious of his notebook, which marked him as an artist. But where many a boy would have made a parade of what he was doing, and attracted attention from adults who wanted to see what he was up to, he mastered the trick of sitting quietly, making his rapid sketches without signalling.

A few weeks after Christmas he was able to go outside for limited airings, but he was not anxious to attract attention from Nosy Parkers who would want to know why he was in the streets when all decent boys were either in school, or at home with infantile paralysis, or simply with swollen glands. Not to be easily noticed is an acquirement, as is always being noticed; Francis studied the art of invisibility, and made sketches wherever he was.

He was perched on a bale of straw in the stable one February day, making sketches of the horses as they ate, when Zadok Hoyle said to him: “Frank, it’s a fine day and I have to go over to The Portage this afternoon; why don’t you ask your Aunt if you can come with me?” Aunt demurred a little, but finally said yes, he might go, but he must be well bundled up.

Bundled up he was, almost to the point of immobility, as he sat beside Zadok on the driver’s seat. The wagon was not one of his grandfather’s, but an odd cart with a low, boxed-in back; its purpose could not be immediately guessed. They drove perhaps four miles in the sharp air to a hamlet on a river-bank, which had a name of its own but from long custom was always called The Portage. Zadok pointed far beyond the river with his whip. “See that, Frankie? That’s Quebec. And some funny things happen on this river.”

They stopped on the river-bank at a shed, from which a fat, darkjowled man appeared, nodded to Zadok, returned to the shed, and shortly returned carrying a box; between them he and Zadok loaded six such boxes into the back of the cart. Not a word was said, and they drove off.

“That was the happy call,” said Zadok. “Now we make the sad call.” Happy? What was happy about it? Not a word said and the fat man had what Francis thought was a bad eye, and he wished he could have made a rapid sketch of it. And now—the sad call?

They drove somewhat less than a mile to a farmhouse, where Zadok spoke briefly with a woman in black; another, older woman, also in black, was to be seen in the background. A man appeared from the barn, and helped Zadok to carry a large package out of the house; a long package, wrapped in rough brown holland; it was clearly a man. They shoved it into the back of the cart, with the boxes, Zadok said something kindly, the man nodded and spat, and the horse was turned in the direction of Blairlogie.

“Is that a dead person, Zadok? Why are we carrying a dead person?”

“Why do you suppose, Frankie? It’s Mr. Devinney’s business; I pick ’em up, and I get ’em ready. I drive the hearse. Mr. Devinney does the business end. He sees to putting the death notice in The Clarion, and ordering and sending out the death-cards. He marches in the procession in his plug hat. He does all the condoling, which isn’t easy work, but he has quite a poetic turn, sometimes. And of course he does all the billing, reckons up the number of plumes on the hearse, and all that. This one in the back is Old McAllister—a mean old sodbuster, but a customer now—and I’ll have to get him ready for the funeral, lug him out to the farm again, and lug him back again on Friday, for the burial. Lot o’ hauling in this business. We’re riding on the death-cart, Frankie. Didn’t you know? Aw, but then a lot o’ things are kept from a boy like you.”

When they reached Blairlogie they drove up Dalhousie Street, which was the main and only business street, and stopped at a side door of Devinney’s Furniture and Undertaking Parlours. Briskly, Zadok leaped down, opened the door of the shop, pulled out a light table on rubber wheels, shifted Old McAllister on to it, threw a sheet over him and had him into the shop in approximately fifteen seconds.

“Have to be quick. People don’t like to see how things are done. A funeral’s a work of art, y’see, dear boy, and all the rough part is no business of the public’s.”

This was as he was wheeling Old McAllister on his cart through the furniture part of the store, toward the back, which was closed off by a partition with a curtained double door. Beyond the curtains, Zadok switched on the light—it was a dim light, afforded by two bulbs of modest power—and opened another double door, very heavy and with broad hinges. From inside came a cold breath, damp and stuffy, the smell of slowly melting ice. Quickly Old McAllister was wheeled inside, and doors were closed.

“Don’t want too much melting,” said Zadok. “Mr. Devinney is always complaining about the ice bill.”

“But Zadok, what are you going to do with him?” said Francis. “Do you just leave him in there till the funeral?”

“I should say not,” said Zadok. “I make him look better than he ever looked in his life. It’s an art, Frankie, and though anybody can learn the elements of it, the real art’s inborn.—You didn’t know I was an artist, did you?”

It was then that Francis made his great confession. “Zadok, I think I’m an artist too.” He rummaged in his outer clothes, and produced his sketch-book.

“By the Powers of Old Melchizedek,” said Zadok (this was his mighty oath), “you are, dear boy, and no mistake. Here’s Miss McRory to the life. Ah, Frankie, you’ve been a bit severe with the little cap, dear man. Ah, never be cruel, me dear. But b’God it’s true enough, even if it is sharp. And here’s Miss Cameron. You’ve made her look almost like one of your Aunt’s spooky pictures. But it’s true, too. And here’s me! To think I was once accounted a handsome man! Ah, ye devil! That’s the red nose to the life! Ah, Frankie, y’ rascal! You make me laugh at myself. Oh, you’re an artist. And what are you going to do about it?”

“Zadok—Zadok, promise me you won’t tell. They’d be after me, and Aunt would want me to have lessons, and I don’t want that yet. I have to find my own way first, you see. Harry Furniss says so; find your own way, and then let anybody teach you that can, but hang on to your own way.”

“Here’s Madame Thibodeau—ah, ye little scallawag—look at the way you’ve made her great bum hang off both sides of the chair. She’d have you killed if she ever saw that!”

“But that’s it, Zadok! I’ve got to learn to see what’s in front of my nose. That’s what Harry Furniss says; most people don’t see what’s in front of their nose. They just see what they think they ought to see.”

“True enough, Frankie, and don’t I know that in my own art; you just have to encourage people to see what they think they ought to see. But come along, now. I’ve got to get you home, and the horse’ll be gettin’ cold.”

On the way back to St. Kilda, Francis pleaded to know what Zadok was going to do with Old McAllister. If it was art of any kind, hadn’t he the right of a fellow-artist to know? So at last it was clapped up between them that right after he had his supper Francis was to join Zadok again, because Aunt had to go out to a meeting at St. Bonaventura’s—something about the poor and needy—and he would see Zadok at his art, and Zadok would get him home in time to slip into his bed so that nobody, not even Miss Victoria Cameron, would suspect that he had been out.

In the barn Zadok’s first care was to unload the six boxes which remained in the death-cart, and lock them in an unused stall in the stables.

“What is that, Zadok?”

“Oh, it’s just some stuff your grandfather gets from a trusted man in Quebec. Mr. Devinney gets a little slice for the use of the cart. It’s a sideline of his business that we never discuss. Everybody has his secret, Frankie. You have yours; Mr. Devinney has his.” And as he heaved the last case into the stall, Francis thought he heard Zadok say, “And I have mine.”

I QUESTION WHETHER it was a good thing to steer a boy of thirteen into an undertaking parlour that is run by a bootlegger, said the Lesser Zadkiel.

—I don’t, said the Daimon Maimas. He had been old-womaned far too much by Aunt. He needed a man in his life, and where was the Wooden Soldier? Saving the Empire across the ocean. And his mother was being wonderful to wounded soldiers, but had no time for her son. His grandfather was far too broken to be more than another gentle presence in the boy’s life, though he was very kind, when he thought about it.

—Grandfather broken?

—The Senator never got over the destruction of his idol. When Mary-Jacobine got into trouble and had to be married off to the likeliest comer—and a Protestant at that—he never quite believed in anything again. He was a strong man in business and in politics, but those are external things: only a fool gives his soul to them. The pith had been scooped out of him. Look at Marie-Louise: an aging, fat gambler. Look at Mary-Ben: she idolized her brother but she never understood more than half of him. Zadok was the strongest man around the place, as you well know.

—A rogue, my dear colleague. A rogue.

—Very well, but a kindly, decent rogue, in the thick of life and death. I had to work with what was at hand, you know.

—As you say. I have not had to do your work, so I certainly must not find fault with the way you did it.

—Quite so. And Zadok was something of an artist, as we’ll see, if you will be so good as to go on with your narrative. By the way, do you know how it comes out?

—I cannot remember all these lives in detail. Like yourself, I am simply being reminded of the life of Francis Cornish.

THE LIGHT in Mr. Devinney’s workroom was like the light in Rembrandt, thought Francis; two mean bulbs, hanging above the narrow, slanted table on which Zadok had now placed the bundle which was all that was left of Old McAllister, a mean old sodbuster. Zadok was scrubbing his hands fiercely with yellow soap at a sink.

“Cleanliness is essential,” he said. “Respect for the dead, and precaution for the living. You never really know what these people died of. So I’ll just throw around some carbolic, and you keep well in your corner, me dear.”

Well in his corner, perched on two coffin crates so that he had a good view of the scene, Francis had his notebook and pencil ready.

Respect for the dead; Zadok was gentle in unwrapping Old McAllister, who had apparently died in his long underwear, a baggy, liver-coloured extra skin. Quickly Zadok ripped the underwear with a curved knife which Francis recognized as a pruning-knife, and soon Old McAllister was naked, an unimpressive sight, but a Golconda for Francis.

This was something he had never reckoned on. He would be able to draw the nude figure, which even Harry Furniss insisted was the foremost necessity—after seeing what was in front of your eyes—in becoming an artist.

Old McAllister was balding and scrawny. His face and hands were tanned a deep brown by sixty-seven years of Ottawa Valley weather, but the rest of him was a bluey-white. His legs were like sticks, and his feet fell outward and sideways. Zadok had cut off his underwear because Old McAllister, according to local custom, had been sewed into it for the winter. Francis knew all about that; most of the children in Carlyle Rural were so encased and they stank amazingly.

“A bath, for a starter,” said Zadok. “First, though, a thorough swilling-out.” With a large squirt he neatly washed out the rectum of the corpse into a bucket. Then, with a dribble from a short hose, and frequent dabblings of carbolic, Zadok washed Old McAllister; the water fell to the cement floor and vanished down a drain. He washed Old McAllister’s hands, with plentiful lathering of yellow soap, and cleaned the nails with his jack-knife.

“Always a problem, this,” he said to the busily scribbling Francis. “These fellas never clean their nails from Easter to Easter, but they have to have hands like a barber for the viewing. It’s part of the art, you see. At the end they must look as they’d have looked on their wedding-day, or better. Probably better.”

He shaved Old McAllister with ample lather and hot water. “Lucky I had some experience as a valet,” he said, “but of course no valet could get away with this.” He deftly poked a finger into the corpse’s mouth to push out the hollow cheeks. The scrape of the razor told of the toughness of Old McAllister’s beard. “Never been shaved more than once a week in his life, I don’t suppose,” said Zadok.

“Now didn’t I have a roll of cotton-wool? For what we call the orifices.”

The orifices were the ears, the nostrils, and, to Francis’s surprise, the anus; into each a sufficient plug of wool was stuffed. Then a big chunk into the mouth, and before it was closed a large gob of beeswax was popped in and Zadok held the jaws until they were firmly clamped.

“This is easy enough in a winter funeral,” he said, “but in summer it’s another thing altogether. I’ve seen funerals where the wax went soft and the mouth opened unexpectedly and you wouldn’t believe the screaming and fainting. But we’ll have none of that with you, old boy, will we?” he said, and gave Old McAllister a friendly pat on the shoulder. “There, now we’ve done the clean-up jobs. Now comes the science. If you feel queer, dear soul, there’s the bucket just by you.”

Francis did not feel queer. He had got Old McAllister’s right hand—what a hand for knots and lumps! He had got both feet, corns and bunions complete. He was now busy on a full-length, with difficult perspective. That picture that Aunt didn’t like him to linger over in Gems—the Anatomy Lesson, was it called?—lived in his memory and came to his aid. This was great! This was life!

Zadok had drawn up a machine that sat on a wheeled cart, and looked like a tank with a hose coming out of it, beside his work-table. With a little fleam he lifted a vein in Old McAllister’s arm, inserted a thickish needle that was attached to the hose, and began slowly and watchfully to work a pump-handle on his machine. As he pumped, he sang, in a fine bass, but sotto voce:

Yes! let me like a soldier fall

Upon some open plain,

This breast, expanding for the ball

To blot out every stain.

This went on for quite a long time—time enough for Francis to do another drawing, with Zadok’s dark figure standing beside the body. He was proud of his professionalism in roughing in Old McAllister’s privy parts; just six quick lines and a shadow, like Rembrandt. Nothing of the grossness of the boys who drew such things on fences. But of course they were not artists.

“Here we go for the big one,” said Zadok. Quickly he nicked Old McAllister’s navel, thrust in a larger needle—he called it a trocar—and pumped again. Then, something very delicate, involving the corner of the eye.

“There, old lad,” he said. “That’ll hold you for a week or two. Now for the real art, Frankie.”

As he worked, Zadok, always a genial man, became positively merry. “No time to waste; don’t want him to harden on me,” he said, as he seemed to wrestle with Old McAllister, quickly getting him into socks, trousers, and a shirt that had come in a bundle from the farm. “On with your dancing-pumps, gaffer,” he said, as he fitted the huge, misshapen feet into soft kid slippers. “Now, before the collar and tie, the real fancy-work.”

“Where were you a valet, Zadok?” asked Francis.

“Oh, before the war—the Boer War, that’s to say—I was a lot o’ things. Footman for a while; very good experience that, for any future job. Then a valet, because in the war I was batman to my young lord; I’d been a footman in his father’s house, and we went into the Army together, you might say, but him as an officer and me as a private, of course. But we were never apart, not really. Keeping a young officer smart in the field, with them rotten Boers popping up everywhere you didn’t expect them, was a job, I can tell you. Do you know them Boers didn’t wear uniforms? Just fought in their farm clothes? You can’t call that war. But I learned to dress a gentleman to look like a gentleman, dead or alive, so I don’t have any trouble with a chap like this.”

“But where did you learn all that—about the cotton-wool, and the needles and everything?”

“Always had a turn that way. I remember when I was just a little lad, at my grandfather’s funeral. ‘I want to see Granda, I want to see Granda’ I kept on at my mother. She thought it was love, and very creditable to me, but it was just nosiness. He went by the palsy route, you see, and I was amazed that he’d stopped shaking. I thought it was the undertaker, old Smout, that had stopped him. Of course, Smout was just a Cornish village undertaker; coffin-maker, really; and he didn’t have the scientific advantages of today. By my standards, Granda was just a mess, rigged up in a cheap shroud, his hair all combed the wrong way. But it was my start.

“Then in the war we had to bury the dead, and in my lot that work was done under a farrier-sergeant who had no training and no ideas, but he wanted it done proper. That was where my talent came to light. There wasn’t much we could do; no embalming, of course, but we could make ’em look like soldiers of the Queen, poor lads. With a face wound you could put on a decent piece of plaster. I would have got a medal for my work if it hadn’t been for a misunderstanding, for which I bear no grudge, not now. Other outfits copied our methods, but they went too far. There was one bugger did a nasty business in hearts. He was an officer, so his mail wasn’t censored—gentlemen don’t read other gents’ letters, you see—and he would write home, ‘Dear Madam please accept my condolences on the death of your brave son, who fell like a man with the respect of all his regiment. His dying wish was that his heart should return to England and lay in the church where he learned to be a man when a boy. Can deliver said heart to you on my return to England, suitably preserved, at a very moderate fee. Yours, etc.’ Rotten trick, but what mother could resist? God damn him, wherever he is now.

“Then I got a bit of real pro training in England, and that’s where I picked up all this. Not that I learned the art of make-up in the embalmers’ parlours. Not the real art. I had that off a pal of mine who played minor clowns in the panto at Christmas. Powder. That’s the great secret.”

Zadok raised a cloud of violet-scented poudre de riz around the head. “That’s the foundation,” he said.

Old McAllister’s face, which had turned a dark putty shade, was swiftly painted with a wash that left him a light salmon, and over the cheekbones Zadok brushed some dry rouge of a startling crimson. Next he worked on Old McAllister’s mouth, gently massaging the grim, grey lips into an unaccustomed smile: this he touched up with a red salve that a harlot might have thought excessive. Then he rapidly massaged some vaseline into the thin hair, and combed it forward.

“How do you suppose he did his hair—when he did it? No indications, so we’ll give him Old Faithful.” He combed the hair with a left-hand parting, then quiffed the right-hand portion over his finger, giving Old McAllister a nifty, almost a dandified air. Quick work with the collar, the necktie; into the waistcoat, draping a huge silver watch-chain, from which the watch had been removed, over the sunken belly. On with the coat. A piece of card on the tip of which some white cambric was sewn was tucked into the breast pocket of the coat (Old McAllister had not used, or possessed, handkerchiefs of his own). The hands were folded on the breast, as if in Christian acceptance, and Old McAllister was a finished work of art.

Then, further astonishing Francis after an astonishing, rapturous evening, Zadok took Old McAllister’s right hand in his own and shook it cordially. “Godspeed, old man,” said he. Noticing Francis’s astonishment, he said, “I always do that. I’m the last, most personal attendant, you see; the priest is quite another matter. So I always shake the hand, and wish ’em well. You’d better shake, too, Frankie, as you’ve been here, and drawing pictures, and all.”

Tentative, but game, Francis shook Old McAllister’s chilly paw.

“There, old cully, back into the cooler with you, and I’ll deliver you first thing in the morning, in plenty of time for the viewing. And as for you, Frankie my lad, I must get you home and to bed before anybody notices.”

To Francis’s surprise, Zadok not only took him back to St. Kilda, but came upstairs with him, and after the door had closed on his bedroom went—where? The sound was not of feet going downstairs, but of feet going upstairs, to the third floor, which was Victoria Cameron’s private domain, and to which Francis was forbidden to mount under threat of the severest reprisals. Never, never up there, Francis. So why was Zadok going up there? Another astonishment at the end of an astonishing, enlarging, enlightening day. A memorable day on his journey toward being an artist, a man of the great world of events, like Harry Furniss.

IN THE WEEKS THAT PASSED, Francis spent many an enraptured hour in Mr. Devinney’s back room, watching Zadok at work, and sketching for dear life. A variety of subjects came under his view and his pencil. The old predominated, of course, but now and then there was somebody who had, in the prime of life, suffered an accident or an unaccountably severe illness. Once there was a girl of sixteen, whom Francis did not positively know, but whom he had seen in the streets and at the McRory Opera House.

With female subjects, Zadok’s behaviour was exemplary. As he stripped them on the table, he draped a towel over the pubic region, so that Francis never saw a woman fully naked, much as he wished to do so.

“Professional discretion,” said Zadok. “No Nosy-Parkering with the ladies. So we always lay a towel over The Particular, you see, dear soul, because no man, professional though he may be, has any call to behold The Particular of any female he deals with in a purely professional capacity.”

But, oh, how Francis longed to see The Particular, about which he speculated so painfully. What could it be? The very few nudes in Aunt’s collection seemed to have no Particular, or had averted it from the gaze, or put a hand over it. What was The Particular? He put the matter tactfully to Zadok; he was an artist, and ought to know everything about the human body.

“You must find out your own way, Francis,” said Zadok solemnly; “the buzzem—well, it’s very widely seen and indeed it’s one of the first things any of us do see, but The Particular is quite another matter.”

One night in March, as he took Francis to Devinney’s, Zadok seemed depressed. “I don’t care for this, dear lad; don’t care for it at all.”

What he did not care for, when it was taken out of the cooler, was the body of François Xavier Bouchard, a dwarf tailor, known to Blairlogie’s English-speakers as Bushy.

His one-storey tailor-shop was a mean building at the top end of Dalhousie Street, and winter and summer Bushy could be seen leaning in the door, waiting for custom. It cannot have been much: sewing on a button or perhaps turning a suit for some thrifty soul, but he seemed to keep bread in his mouth, although, like many tailors, he was shabby in his own dress. He grinned without cease, a dog-like grin that seemed to implore tolerance, respect being beyond his hopes.

There he lay, on Mr. Devinney’s table, his head huge and his trunk barrel-like, his arms and legs so short that there seemed to be little between shoulder and elbow, elbow and hand, his private parts huge above his tiny legs, although they would not have been excessive on a full-grown man. His head lay at an unusual angle.

“Hanged himself,” said Zadok. “They found him this morning. Did it two or three days ago, I should guess. Poor, poor little soul. We’ve got to do our best for old F.X., Francis, not that anything can make up for a life like his.”

The scene which preceded the final scene of Bushy’s life, as Zadok recounted it, was something wholly outside any experience known to Francis, except those terrible quarter-hours in the playground of Carlyle Rural, when boys blew up frogs and tortured cats. This would certainly have reopened the wounds of Jesus.

“The men in one of the lodges, Francis. I’m not going to tell you which one. Do you know what a lodge is? It’s a lot of chaps who get together for a kind of religion that isn’t quite the same as the real religion; they have altars and whim-whams, and they dress up in trick clothes and talk a lot of rubbish to one another. All very secret but somehow anybody who cares can find out.

“Every so often they let in some new members, and it’s all very solemn; then they have to have some fun. You know how it is: after a solemn time you have to have a change. Like at funerals, where they joke and quarrel at the party after the burial. Well, these boys got the idea a while ago that it would be great fun to shanghai Bushy and take him up to the lodge-rooms over De Marche’s hardware, and give him a bath. They did it quite a few times. Everybody had a grab at him, or pushed the soap in his face, or tried to take the hide off him with the towel. Then they’d make him run up and down the room; they’d flick him with wet towels and sool him on so they could see his little legs go, and his big what’s-its-name whack and thrash around. They had one of those affairs three days ago, and I guess the poor little mortal couldn’t stand it any more, and went home and hanged himself. In a pair of braces, I understand. Christ, Frankie, I hardly know whether to weep or puke. I’ve had a taste of humiliation myself, but poor old F.X.—” Zadok could not go on, but he bent to his work with special gentleness. Yes, let me like a soldier fall, upon some open plain.

Francis had seen pictures in Aunt’s books called The Entombment. What dignity, what compassion was shown in the faces of those who handled the body of the dead Saviour. He had seen those pictures but he did not know them, encompass them, feel them, until he saw Zadok working over the body of the dead tailor. He sketched away like a man and an artist, but now and then he could not repress a sniff. That hour was to stay with him all his life.

When all was done, Zadok and Francis both shook hands with Bushy and wished him Godspeed. And then, as always, for Zadok would not have it otherwise, he washed his hands carefully.

AT NIGHT, when he was supposed to be in bed and asleep, Francis was sometimes very much awake, and engaged in—what were they? It would not be quite exact to call them games, and he himself could not have described them if he had been called on by some indignant or sorrowing adult to do so.

Thoughts and physical urges about sex rose to torment him several times a day, and even Dr. Upper’s remedy of the cold towel was ineffective; Francis tried it once or twice, and then decided that it was silly; he did not really want to rebuke his penis for its insistence on being noticed. And noticed not only when his thoughts strayed to the mystery of The Particular, but often when he was thinking of something innocuous like food, or where he had put his tube of Chinese white. Was he wicked? But the wickedness was also thrilling. Was he in some special way afflicted or diseased, that he should be so teased by a part of his body he could not control? There was nobody to ask.

But the demand was frequent, and in an alarming way delicious. Sometimes he provoked it, knowing that he should not, by looking at his small store of movie magazines. These he had bought, from time to time, at a local store called The Beehive, which sold not only movie magazines but false-faces, rings made in the shape of serpents with glittering red-glass eyes, and books which told you how to be a magician or a ventriloquist. The movie magazines showed the screen favourites of the time—Mae Murray, Margarita Fisher, Gladys Walton—in bathing suits that exposed their legs to the knee, or in short skirts with rolled stockings; a picture of Gloria Swanson in some historical epic of a period when people were obviously dead to shame (or enjoyed it) showed one of her thighs almost to the hip. Long gazing at this picture was a hot excitement. So much more exciting than the few nudes to be found in Aunt’s books, so often monumental people by Thorwaldsen, or some nineteenth-century artist with a strong hint of Dr. Upper in his attitude toward sex. They were no fun; the movie stars were alive, and exciting. But most exciting of all were the pictures of Julian Eltinge.

Francis had seen this popular female impersonator in The Countess Charming at Grand-père’s theatre. Eltinge was a plump man of unremarkable appearance who could disguise himself as a woman of elegance and charm; the film showed the lacy undergarments, the corset, the wig that made the transformation. With some odds and ends of curtains and bits of silk he concealed in his chest of drawers Francis attempted to do what Eltinge did, and although the result would not have impressed anyone else it satisfied him deeply. He had to know about the human figure: he stuffed enough rags into his top to produce a buzzem something like that of Eltinge. The legs were a great feature of the pictures of movie stars: he disposed his legs in the manner of Gloria Swanson. He had no wig but he wrapped his head in a scarf. The effect in the mirror was gratifying to the point of urgency. What had Eltinge done about The Particular? Francis’s own particular made it plain that disguise must have been extremely difficult.

Bedtime fantasies were partnered by night horrors. In dreams he was set upon by succubi who were nothing like Gloria Swanson or the tantalizing Clarine Seymour; no, in his dreams hags and women horribly like those he had seen in the embalming room tormented and whispered, until he awoke with the hot gush on his thighs that made him leap from his bed, dab at the sheets with a dampened cloth, and do what he could to wash the pants of his pyjamas. Suppose somebody found out? Suppose that Anna Lemenchick, who made the beds, told Victoria Cameron? What would happen? He could not guess, but it would be shame even beyond the rich vocabulary of Dr. Upper to describe. But he could not stop; posturing in the manner of Julian Eltinge was seductive beyond his power of resistance.

WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF THAT, my friend? said the Daimon Maimas.

—You had better tell me what you make of it, said the Lesser Zadkiel. I suppose you were at the root of it all?

—Indeed I was, said the Daimon Maimas, and I took care that nobody found Francis at his games, for he was right in supposing that there would have been a pious uproar. But surely you see what the boy was doing?

—Looking for something that his life denied him, obviously. Trying to cope with a problem for which his life in Blairlogie terms offered no solution and no solace. He seems not to have known any girls except in the most distant fashion, and the screen images were unlike anything he would have met with even if he had known some girls at school.

—Just as well, for it wasn’t any palpable girl he was trying to evoke in front of his mirror, and it certainly wasn’t Julian Eltinge. Of course, he didn’t know it—they never do—but he was looking for The Girl, the girl deep in himself, the feminine ideal that has some sort of existence in every man of any substance, and my Francis was a man of substance. It wasn’t effeminacy, which is what anybody who discovered him would have supposed. It certainly wasn’t homosexuality, for Francis never had more than the usual dash of that. He was groping for the Mystical Marriage, the unity of the masculine and the feminine in himself, without which he would have been useless in his future life as an artist and as a man who understood art. Useless as any sort of man—rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief; not to speak of tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor—who is destined to see more than a few inches beyond the end of his nose. This was the beginning of the search for the Mystical Marriage, which is one of the great quests, and as usual the quest was longer and more important than the eventual discovery.

—Aha! And I suppose the quest is what poor Simon Darcourt, labouring over his biography of Francis, apprehends dimly, but without really knowing what it is.

—We mustn’t be extreme. And we certainly mustn’t underestimate Darcourt. But he wouldn’t think of describing Francis’s quest as a search and a yearning to know the feminine side of his own nature, in order that he might be a complete and spiritually whole man. An idea like that, encountered head-on, is usually rather too much for human beings. They begin to see things they don’t understand, and of course if they don’t understand them, they are sure they must be monsters.

—Like yourself, my dear Maimas?

—Yes, like me. Look at me, Zadkiel; what do you see?

—A handsome figure. Splendid breasts that any Venus might envy; a fine complexion and a glowing eye, and hyacinthine tresses of the deepest black. So far, a woman. But those elegantly narrow hips and sinewy legs; those handsome masculine organs of generation, which move and stir constantly with every change of your attitude and alteration of your thoughts. Hermes and Aphrodite wonderfully united in a single form. A simulacrum of a complete human creature, though of course you could not be what you are—a daimon—if you were not far above humanity as it now exists. Perhaps you are the creature of the future?

—Only as a symbol, brother. If humanity ever took on this form, they would have great trouble in reproducing themselves.

—Let us get on with the quest. As the Angel of Biography, that is what I have to record—indeed have recorded, for what we are watching is a record of the past. But as I have said, I can’t remember everything about all these people. Did he follow the quest through to the discovery, I wonder? Not many of them do.

—No, but every quester has hints and intimations that are very precious and bring sudden light into his life. And of course you’ve noticed that forecast, that strong hint, that we see as we watch Francis, ludicrously garbed as a woman.

—I am being very dense, I fear, said the Angel.

—Look behind the boy in his pathetic rags at the picture on the wall—the picture Aunt hung there in the goodness of her modestly wincing, power-greedy heart. Did she know it was a prophecy? Not consciously, but it was a prophecy and also the essence of life as everybody lived it at St. Kilda. The picture of Love Locked Out.

—Is Francis never to find love?

—You are unfolding the story, my dear friend. Please go on.

BUT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to go on without taking notice at this point of something with which Francis had nothing whatever to do, but which influenced his future decisively. This was the downfall—temporary only, as we shall see—of Gerald Vincent O’Gorman, who was, as the husband of Mary-Tess, his uncle.

G.V. O’Gorman was an unusually able man of business, and the Senator, with his fine eye for talent, had advanced him rapidly until Gerry, as everybody called him, was his second-in-command and managed everything in the ordinary way, giving advice when he was asked—and sometimes when he wasn’t—but leaving the major decisions to the Senator himself.

He was a big, fleshy, fine-looking Canadian-Irishman, jolly and kind of heart, a loving husband to Mary-Tess and a careful father of their sons, Gerald Lawrence and Gerald Michael. He was a staunch Catholic, and after the Senator the most prominent B.C.L. in Blairlogie and its district.

The O’Gormans came to dinner at St. Kilda every Sunday, and it did Aunt’s heart good to see how loving they were. Their amorous speciality, in public, was a sort of graveyard chivalry, a declaration that each had a proven right to “go first” into the afterlife.

“Aw, Mary-Tess, if you go first, I’ll never forgive you as long as I live, for my life would be a mockery without you, darlin’.”

“Gerry, don’t talk that way! You know it would kill me if you went before me; for the love of God, sweetness, let me go first! It will be the last of the thousand-and-one happinesses you’ve given me!”

“Aw, well; let’s hope under God it’ll be many a long day off, whichever it is. But I’ll give no promise.” Then a kiss—right at the table, after Gerry had gallantly wiped his lips with his napkin, as Aunt beamed, and Marie-Louise nodded approvingly, and the Senator looked down at his plate.

What could have been better? But then came the awful day when Mary-Tess, finding herself not far from the head office of the Senator’s business affairs, dropped in after five o’clock, to walk home with her Gerald, and found him in his office, strenuously “at it” on his desk with his secretary, Blondie Utronki.

Oh, the tears! Oh, the protestations! Oh, the dreadful come-down! For Mary-Tess’s howls attracted one of the cleaning women, who spread the tale through the whole of the Polish layer of the great fruitcake, from which it mounted rapidly to the French layer, and in no time at all had reached the top, the Scots layer, where it was a cause of righteous jubilation.

Wouldn’t you know it? Of course Blondie Utronki would be just the one for that sort of game! As if Gerry O’Gorman hadn’t been shoving her forward whenever he could: getting her those chances to sing—at a hefty five dollars a warble—in the McRory Opera House, just before the feature film, when it was a specially good one! “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”, and “Smile Awhile, I’ll Kiss You Sad Adieu” and all that! Well, she’d blown her last bubble in Blairlogie, and she’ll be kissing Gerry sad adieu now, you can bet!

And from Alexander Dagg’s Maw: bad blood in that family! I’ve always said so. Piling on the agony, and now shamelessness on a glass-topped desk! We’ll see the McRorys topple! Rot of the brain! Look at the old aunt!

Nor was this the worst. Aunt, that tireless backstairs arranger of destinies, had laboured for two years to bring about her latest coup in St. Bonaventura. Father Devlin was now Monsignor Devlin, and it was Aunt who had pushed and shoved at the Bishop to get him nominated for that honour. Indeed, it had been she who presented him with his first two pairs of violet socks, one of the distinguishing marks of his new splendour. But this was not Aunt’s finest achievement.

St. Bonaventura had been very much to the fore in wartime charities, and Gerald Vincent O’Gorman, who was a little too old to be called up, and who felt that his brother-in-law, Major Francis Chegwidden Cornish, was brilliantly upholding the family honour in the Forces, had worked like a slave, and a dog, and a Trojan, for war charities. The whist-drives, the concerts, the fowl suppers! So successful was he that St. Bonaventura left all the Protestant churches nowhere in the extent of its contributions. Look at the Cigarette Fund—a triumph of organization and achievement! And everyone knew, because Aunt let it be heard, that Gerry did innumerable good works and paid for many a beautification of the church out of his own pocket, and never breathed a word about it. Surely something was owing for devotion like that?

Devotion was rewarded, for Aunt kept on at the Bishop, who kept on at the Cardinal of Apostolic Briefs, until Gerry was honoured by the Papacy itself, and Monsignor Devlin announced one Sunday morning at High Mass that henceforth Gerry was a Knight of St. Sylvester, as a recognition of his work for the Church, the Holy See and society at large.

Mary-Tess was the soul of modesty. Of course, it wasn’t a Commander, or a Knight Grand Cross; just a simple Knight of St. Sylvester. No, no; nothing of the honour appertained to the spouse; it was wholly a man’s thing—but of course she was very proud. External badges of honour? Well, in future on great occasions, like a visit from the Bishop or at High Mass on St. Bonaventura’s festal day, July 15, Gerry would be obliged to wear his coat with the gold buttons, and the gold embroidery on the velvet collar and cuffs, and the gold stripe down the side of the pants, and the bicorne hat with the Papal cockade. And the medal of the Order, with the Golden Spur hanging from it. And of course the sword. He’d have to put it on, whether he wanted to or not, and she’d have the job of making sure he got it all right, because you know what men are. Well, yes, Mary-Tess would admit under pressure, it was very nice.

Then—Blondie Utronki!

Monsignor Devlin, whose life was not a bed of roses, found that the hardest thing he had ever had to do was to inform Gerry that this sort of thing did not become a Papal Knight, and the Bishop had sent a peremptory inquiry. He would have to make a formal report to the Bishop, who would speed it to Rome, and the Knight would be un-knighted. Miserable in his violet socks, Monsignor Devlin made it as easy as he could. But Gerry was not inclined to take it easily.

“All I want to know—all I demand to know, Father Mick—is, who was the squealer?”

“Aw now, Gerry, no squealer was needed. The thing was all over town.”

“A little bit of local gossip. Who squealed to the Bishop? That’s what I want to know.”

“Now Gerry, you know I have to write the report myself, even if my hand withers as I do it.”

“All right; you have your duty. But who squealed to you?”

“The whole town, I tell you. The Presbyterians are laughing at us. When I met Mr. McComas in the Post Office he said to me: ‘I’m very sorry to hear of your trouble,’ he said. Me, to be pitied by a Presbyterian minister! They’re jeering at us behind our backs.”

“Yes, and to our faces, let me tell you! Yesterday in the office some joker stuck a memo up on the board saying, ‘All swords that are to be returned to Rome must be left in the umbrella stand before Friday.’ ”

“Aw, that’s very small! You must frown ’em down.”

“D’you know who I bet it was? Now, don’t take offence, but you know I’ve never liked him. Father Beaudry! I’ll bet it was his letter put the Bishop on to you!”

“Now Gerry, I can’t listen to that kind of thing.”

“Oh, can’t you? Well, priest though he is, he’s a squealer and a whistle-tricker, and you can bet he’ll never wear violet socks if I can stop it!”

“Now Gerry, you know the Order prescribes ‘Unblemished character’ end that’s all there is to it. No more to be said.—Where’s Blondie?”

“Gone to Montreal.”

“Not the worst girl I’ve known. I hope you gave her something handsome? You’ve ruined her, you know.”

“Aw Mick, don’t talk so soft! She was wise enough when she came to me. I’m the one that’s ruined.”

Besides much of this, Monsignor Devlin had to listen to the wails and beseechings of his benefactress, Mary-Ben.

This was the Dark Night of the Soul for the McRorys, except perhaps for the Senator, who had government business that kept him in Ottawa for several weeks.

FRANCIS KNEW NOTHING of the domestic and public miseries of the O’Gormans, as he was not going to school, and the morose atmosphere in St. Kilda did not greatly affect him. He had a scandal of his own.

He now knew for a certainty that several nights in every week Zadok Hoyle mounted the staircase that was forbidden to himself, because it led to Victoria Cameron’s private domain. What went on up there? What was the relationship between these two important figures in his own life? If there was nothing fishy about it, why did Zadok take off his boots and go upstairs in his socks?

There were noises, too. Laughter, which he could distinguish as belonging to Zadok and Victoria. Singing, in what was plainly Zadok’s voice. Sometimes thumps and bumps and scuffling. Seldom, but often enough to puzzle him, there was a sound that might have been a cat, but louder than a cat. He didn’t like to ask Aunt; it might be squealing. Certainly he couldn’t ask Zadok and Victoria, because if they were up to something they shouldn’t be up to—something to do with the great mystery, perhaps, and related to the dark world half-unveiled by Dr. Upper—they would be angry with him, and his long, philosophical talks with Victoria, and his visits to Devinney’s embalming parlour which were so necessary to his study of drawing, would be at an end. But he must know.

So, one night as Lent began, he crept slowly up the stairs in his pyjamas, feeling his way in the darkness until he became aware that the walls were covered with something soft, which felt like blanketing. On the landing he could see, by moonlight from a window high in the wall, that it was indeed blanketing, and that a heavy curtain of blankets hung directly in front of him. This was odd, for he knew that Victoria’s room was in the other direction, and what lay toward the front of the house, beyond this curtain, was above his grandparents’ large bedroom. An unlucky stumble, though a boy in his bare feet does not make much noise. But suddenly light, as a door opened, and there stood Zadok.

“You see, Miss Cameron, I told you he’d find his way up here one of these days. Come in, me little dear.”

“Are you prepared to take responsibility for this?” said Victoria’s voice. “You know what my orders are.”

“Circumstances alter cases: Shorter pants need longer braces,” said Zadok. “He’s here, and if you turn him away now, you’ll regret it.” And he beckoned Francis into the room, the door of which had been thickened and padded amateurishly but effectively.

The room was large and bare, and suggested a sick-room, for there was a table covered with white oilcloth, on which were a basin and pitcher. The floor was covered with what used to be called battleship linoleum. The light was harsh, from a single large bulb hanging from the ceiling, with a white glass shade that threw the light downward. But what Francis saw first, and what held his eyes for a long time, was the bed.

It was a hospital bed with sides that could be slid up and down, so that at need it became a sort of topless cage. In the cage was an odd being, smaller than Francis himself, dressed in crumpled flannelette pyjamas; its head was very small for its body, and the skull ran, not to a point, but to a knob, not very big, on which grew black hair. Because the top of the head was so small, the lower part seemed larger than it was, the nose longer, the jaw broader, and the very small eyes peeped out at the world without much comprehension. They were now fixed on Francis. The child, or the creature, or whatever it was, opened its lips and made the mewing sound that Francis had sometimes heard downstairs.

“Come along, Francis, and shake hands with your older brother,” said Zadok. Then to the figure in the bed, “This is your brother, Franko, come to see you.”

Francis had been taught to obey. He walked toward the cage, his hand out, and the figure sank back on its blankets, whimpering.

“This is Francis the First,” said Zadok. “Be gentle with him; he’s not very well.”

Francis the Second had been ill for some months, and he was still weak. He fainted.

When he came to himself again, he was in his bed, and Victoria was sitting by him, dabbing at his brow with a cold towel.

“Now Frankie, you must promise me on your Bible oath that you will never tell where you’ve been or what you’ve seen. But I expect you want to know what’s going on, and I’ll answer a few questions. But not too many.”

“Victoria, is that really my brother?”

“That is Francis Chegwidden Cornish the first.”

“But he’s in the graveyard. Aunt showed me the stone.”

“Well, as you’ve seen, he’s not in the graveyard. That was just something I can’t explain. Maybe you’ll find out when you’re older.

“But he’s not like a human person.”

“Don’t say that, Frankie. He’s not well and he’ll never be any better, but he’s human right enough.”

“But why is he up there?”

“Because it would be very hard on everybody if he was down here. There are problems. It wouldn’t be nice for your grandparents. Or your parents. He may not live a long time, Frankie. Nobody expected he’d live as long as this.”

“But you and Zadok spend a lot of time with him.”

“Somebody must, and I was asked to do it by your grandfather, and I’m doing it. I’m not much good at cheering him up. Zadok does that. He’s wonderful at it. Your grandfather trusts Zadok. Now you’d better go to sleep.”

“Victoria—”

“Well?”

“Can I go to see him again?”

“I don’t think it would be for the best.”

“Victoria, I get so lonesome. I could be up there with you and Zadok sometimes. Maybe I could cheer him up.”

“Well—I don’t know.”

“Oh, please!”

“Well, we’ll see. Now you go to sleep.”

Grown-ups always think children can go to sleep at will. An hour later, when Victoria looked in again, Francis was still awake, and she had to take the extraordinary step of giving him a glass of hot milk with some of his grandfather’s rum in it to induce sleep.

During that hour his mind had raced over and over the same ground. He had a brother. His brother was very strange. This must be the Looner that Alexander Dagg’s hateful Maw declared that McRorys kept in their attic. A Looner! He could not encompass the idea.

But one thing was uppermost and demandingly powerful in his mind. He wanted to draw the Looner.

The very next night he was there, with his pad and pencil, and Victoria Cameron was angry: did he mean to mock the poor boy, and make a display of his trouble? No, certainly not; nothing more than he had been doing at Devinney’s—just carrying out the advice of Harry Furniss to draw anything and everything. But in his heart Francis knew that his urge to draw the Looner was more than art-student zeal; drawing was his way of making something his own, and he could not hope to comprehend the Looner, to accept him as something related to himself, if he could not draw him, and draw him again, and capture his likeness in every possible aspect.

How much Victoria understood of that Francis could not tell, but the revelation about Devinney’s made her open her eyes very wide, and breathe heavily through her nostrils, and look fiercely at Zadok. But Zadok showed no discomposure.

“We have to recognize, Miss C., that Francis isn’t just your run-of-the-mill young scallawag, and circumstances alter cases, as I’m always saying. I wouldn’t take just any boy to Devinney’s, but for Francis, it’s part of his education. It’s not that he’s nosy; he’s a watcher, and a noter, and they’re not the commonest people. Francis is deep, and with a deep ’un you have to give ’em something deeper than a teacup to swim in. This here’s a deep situation. Francis the Second downstairs, sharp as a razor; Francis the First up here, and Dr. J.A. giving orders right and left about how to keep him as he ought to be. Aren’t they ever to meet? Haven’t they anything for one another? I put it to you fairly, Miss C., haven’t they?”

Was Victoria convinced? Francis could not tell. But it was plain that she put great trust in the coachman-embalmer.

“I don’t know, Zadok. I know what my orders are, and it wasn’t easy for me to convince His Nibs that you should come up here sometimes—which you’ve extended to nearly every night.”

“Ah, but the Senator trusts me. Would he let me make the journeys to The Portage if he didn’t?”

“Well—I don’t know. But you’re a soldier, and you’ve travelled, and I just hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I do. Francis the First needs a new face to cheer him up. Shall we sing?”

Zadok struck up “Frère Jacques”, which he sang in French, pretty well. But Victoria sang

Are you sleeping, are you sleeping

Brother John? Brother John?

because she spoke no French—could not “parley-voo the ding-dong” as the English speakers in Blairlogie put it—and would not try. But Francis piped up with the third voice, and they made a reasonable bilingual job of it.

The Looner was enchanted. It would be false to say that his face brightened, but he stood clinging to the raised side of his bed, and turned his little eyes from face to face of the singers.

Then Zadok sang “Yes, let me like a soldier fall”, which was obviously a favourite. Most of it was in an extremely manly vein, but, as he explained to Francis, he always “came the pathetic” on

I only ask of that proud race

Which ends its blaze in me,

To die the last, and not disgrace

Its ancient chivalry!

“That’s the way the Captain went in South Africa,” he said solemnly, but who the Captain was he did not reveal.

This fine operatic piece was the gem of his repertoire, but as several evenings passed, Francis came to know it all. Zadok was a very personal performer. When he sang

There ain’t a lady

Livin’ in the land

As I’d swap for my dear old Dutch …

he looked languishingly at Victoria, who pretended not to notice, but blushed becomingly. There were rowdy music-hall songs of the Boer War period, and “Good-bye, Dolly Gray”. And there were songs that must have been the fag-ends of folksongs of great antiquity, but the words Zadok sang were those he had heard as a child, among the real folk, and not the cleansed and scholarly versions known to the English Folk Song Society.

The cock sat up in the yew-tree,

King Herod come riding by,

If you can’t gimme a penny

Please to gimme a mince-pie.

God send you happy (three times)

A Happy New Year.

And there was a rough version of “The Raggle-Taggle Gypsies-O” that made the Looner hop up and down in his bed. When he did this he was likely to fart loudly, and Victoria would say, almost automatically, “Now then, none o’ that, or I’ll go downstairs.” But Zadok said, “Aw now, Miss Cameron, the boy’s a natural, and you know it.” And, genially, to the Looner, “Better an empty house than a bad tenant, eh, Franko me dear?” Which seemed to comfort the dismayed Looner, who did not know what he had done that was wrong. Did he comprehend anything of the story of the gentle lady who left her noble husband and her goose-feather bed to go with the bright-eyed vagabonds? Nobody could tell how much the Looner understood of anything, but he responded to rhythm, and his favourite, which ended every concert, was a rollicking song to the beat of which Zadok, and Francis, clapped their hands:

Rule Britannia!

God Save The Queen!

Hard times in England

Are very seldom seen!

Hokey-pokey, penny a lump,

A taste before you buy,

Singing O what a happy land is England!

After which Victoria demanded quieter entertainment, or Some Of Us would never get off to sleep.

Sometimes there were impromptu picnics, when Victoria brought up good things from the kitchen, and they all ate, the Looner noisily and merrily, but with an enjoyment that Francis saw as parody of the refined greed of Aunt and Grand’mère. In one caricature in his Harry Furniss manner he drew them all three at table. Yes, Grand’mère, and Aunt, and the Looner, all tucking into a huge pie. Zadok thought it wonderful, but Victoria seized and destroyed it, and gave Francis a scolding for his “badness”.

As the Looner could not talk, Zadok and Victoria talked, with now and then a nod to include the quiet, attentive figure in the bed. Zadok would wave his pipe-stem at him, and interject “Isn’t that right, old son?” as if the Looner were silent by choice, and reflecting deeply. Francis rarely spoke, but drew and drew and drew, until he had books full of pictures of the scene—the two adults, not fashionable or stylish figures but people who might have belonged to any of five preceding centuries, Victoria knitting or mending, and Zadok leaning forward with his hands on his knees. Zadok sat in the old countryman’s fashion: his back never touched the back of the chair. And, of course, there were countless quick studies of Francis the First, which were grotesque to begin, but with time became perceptive, and touched with an understanding and pity not to be expected in so young an artist.

“Is he really so bad, Victoria? Couldn’t he come downstairs now and again?”

“No, Frank, he couldn’t. Not ever. You haven’t seen all of him. He’s shameful.”

“He’s strange, right enough, but why shameful?”

Victoria shook her head. “You’d know if you had to watch over him every day. He has a festering mind.”

A festering mind? Was it rotten brains, as charged by Alexander Dagg’s Maw?

It was a few weeks before the explanation came. One night, at the beginning of Easter Week, the Looner was more than ordinarily stirred by Zadok’s rendering of a seasonable hymn, “Who is this in gory garments?”. The Looner began to puff and blow, and claw at the crotch of his pyjamas.

“Easy, Franko. Easy old man,” said Zadok.

But Victoria was harsh. “Frank, you cut that right out, do you hear? Do you want me to get your belt? Eh? Do you?”

But the Looner paid no heed. He was now masturbating, gobbling and snorting. A sight to strike shame into Francis the Second.

Quickly Zadok rose and restrained him. Victoria brought from the chest of drawers a strange affair of wire and tapes, and as Zadok pulled down the Looner’s pyjama pants she fastened it around his waist, slipped a wire cage over his bobbing genitals, pulled a tape between his legs, and fastened the whole at the back with a little padlock.

The Looner fell to his mattress, whimpering in his catlike voice, and continued to whine.

“You shouldn’t have seen that, me dear,” said Zadok. “That’s the trouble, you see. He can’t leave himself alone, and in the daytime, when Miss Cameron is needed downstairs, we have to keep that on him, or nobody knows what might come of it. Sad, and that cage is a hateful thing, but Dr. J.A. says that’s how it has to be. Now you and me had better go downstairs, and leave Miss Cameron to settle him for the night.”

So that was it! This was plain evidence of the truth of what Dr. Upper had said. Self-abuse and the festering mind, and the shameful secret of the Looner, were all part of a notion of life which began to haunt Francis again, just as he had thought he was breaking free from that torment.

He dreamed terrible dreams, and thought fearful thoughts, as he lay looking without seeing it at the picture of Love Locked Out. Sometimes he wept, though tears were a shameful thing in a boy of his age. But what was he to make of this terrible house where the pious refinement of Aunt was under the same roof as the animal lust of the Looner, and the sweet music that Aunt played in the drawing-room was set against Zadok’s singing in the attic, singing which was so vigorous, so full of gusto, that there seemed to be a hint of danger—something Dr. Upper would not have approved—about it. This house where there was so much deep concern for his welfare, but nothing of the love he needed except for the two servants, who did not precisely love him so much as accept him as a fellow-being. This house where he, the cherished Francis, was aware that in a sort of hospital-prison there was another Francis whom nobody ever mentioned, and, so far as he could find out, nobody ever visited, except the Presbyterian cook-nurse, whose opinions on the matter he sometimes heard, when she reluctantly spoke of the matter.

“We’re not to judge, Frank, but something like what’s upstairs doesn’t happen just by chance. Nothing comes by chance. Everything’s written down somewhere, you know, and we have to live the lives that are foreseen for us long before the world began. So you mustn’t look on your brother as a judgement on anyone. But I won’t say he isn’t a warning—a rebuke to pride, maybe.

In Adam’s Fall

We sinned all.

My grandmother worked that into a sampler when she was a girl, and we’ve still got it on the wall.”

“All sinners, Victoria?”

“All sinners, Frank, however your aunt throws scent over it with her religious pictures and fancy prayers. That’s just the R.C. way of deceiving yourself, as if life was a fancy-dress party, with purple socks, and all. Life isn’t just for fun, you know.”

“But aren’t we ever to be happy?”

“Show me the place in the Bible where it says we are to be happy in this world. Happiness for sinners means sin. You can’t get away from it.”

“Are you a sinner, Victoria?”

“Maybe the worst of sinners. How can I tell?”

“Then why are you so good to the fellow upstairs?”

“We sinners have to stick together, Frank, and do the best we can in our fallen state. That’s what religion is. I don’t make the judgements. For all the silver and thick carpets and hand-painted pictures—your pictures too, clever though they are—this is a House of Sin.”

“But Victoria, that’s awful. And it isn’t an answer. If you’re a sinner, why don’t you sin?”

“Too proud, Frank. God made me a sinner, and I can’t change that. But I don’t have to give in, even to Him, and I won’t. I won’t give it to Him to say. Though He slay me, yet will I worship Him. But I won’t throw in the towel, even if He’s damned me.”

Thus, in addition to a little lukewarm Anglicanism, and much hot, sweet Catholicism, Frank imbibed a stern and unyielding Calvinism. It was no help with his personal difficulties. But he loved Victoria and he believed her, just as he believed Aunt. The only person who didn’t seem to have a God who was out for his scalp was Zadok.

Zadok’s religion, if it may be so called, was summed up briefly. “Life’s a rum start, me little dear. I’ve good cause to know!”

THE HOUSE OF SIN was, in its way, splendid, and Frank took satisfaction in its richness without having a clear idea of its ugliness. The drawing-room, so silvery blue, so crammed with uncomfortable “Louis” furniture, relieved only by the fierce mahogany gloss of the Phonoliszt, and the portly Victrola, repository of great music, including several records by the man-god Caruso. The dining-room, battleground of two great indigestions—Aunt’s manifesting itself in sternly repressed gas, and Grand’mère’s in a recurrent biliousness. Neither lady ever thought of moderating her diet. “I can take cream,” Aunt would say, as if many other luxuries were denied her; she took cream at every meal. “Oh, I shouldn’t, but I’ll venture,” was what Grand’mère would say, as she helped herself to another slice of Victoria’s superb pastry, usually manifesting itself as the casing of a sweet fruit pie. The dining-room, with its red velvety paper and its pictures of cardinals, seemed an outward enlargement of two outraged, overloaded stomachs. And then, Grand-père’s study, so complex and tormented in its panelling, where much the most interesting books were his many albums of sun-pictures. A House of Sin? Certainly a house of vexations and disappointments, quite apart from those that plagued Francis.

Late on the night of Good Friday, when in deference to Mary-Ben and Marie-Louise the Senator had taken no wine at the salmon dinner (a day of abstention and fasting, you see), the Senator sat in the hideous study, refreshing himself with a little of his excellent bootleg whisky. A tap at the door, which opened just wide enough for Dr. Joseph Ambrosius Jerome to slip in, smiling widely but not mirthfully, as was usual with him.

“Come in, Joe; I was hoping you’d look in. Will you take any spirits?”

“In spite of the day, Hamish, I will. And I’d like a word with you about the fellow upstairs.”

“No change?”

“Just growing older, like the rest of us. You well know, Hamish, that I didn’t give him long, years ago, when we moved him up there. He’s proved me wrong.”

“That was a bad decision, Joe.”

“Don’t I know it! But you remember we went into all that, and decided for Mary-Jim’s sake, and the sake of the baby that was coming, it was the best we could do.”

“Yes, but to pretend he had died! To pretend even to Mary-Jim! That awful pretended funeral—if Mick Devlin had known there was nothing in the coffin but some gravel he’d have had the hide off us both!”

“We had the support of Marie-Louise and Mary-Ben; they were sure we were doing the best thing. Do they ever speak of it now?”

“Not a word from either of them in years. Nobody goes up there but Victoria Cameron, and I believe Zadok, sometimes. I never go up. Can’t stand the sight of him. My grandson! Now why, Joe, why?”

“Reasons better not gone into, Hamish.”

“That’s not an answer. Have you any notion, yourself? What’s science got to say about it?”

“Did you read the book I lent you?”

“By that fellow Krafft-Ebing? I read some of it. When I read about the fellow who liked to eat his mistress’s earwax, b’God I thought I’d spew. You can take it away with you when you go. What’s all that got to do with Mary-Jacobine McRory, a beautiful, sweet-souled girl who got into a mess that might have happened to any girl, under the circumstances.”

“Ah, but what were the circumstances? I told you at the time: go whoring after the English and a life of fashion, I said, and you’ll be a sorry man. And what are you today, and what have you been ever since? A sorry man.”

“Oh, of course, Joe, we know you’re always right. And what has your rightness got you? You’re a cranky, half-crazy old bachelor, and my sister is a cranky, religious-crazy old maid, and however much you looked at her torn-off scalp you’d have been better together than the way you are now—which is together but tortured apart. So don’t preach to me.”

“There, there, Hamish. Don’t let’s have any of your Hielan’man’s hysterics. It hasn’t been all bad. When last I saw Mary-Jim she look happy enough.”

“Happy enough isn’t as happy as can be. Perhaps I was wrong. But I was trying to do the best for my child.”

“God, Hamish, nobody can do the best for anyone. People can only rarely do the best for themselves. Mary-Jim’s not over-bright, but God knows she’s beautiful, and that entirely robbed you of good sense. Good intentions can make terrible mischief, but so long as love lasts, they’ll last, and there you are. You didn’t do too badly. You landed your Englishman.”

“I wasn’t fishing for any Englishman! But she had to marry, and where in this place, or in Ottawa even, would there have been anybody good enough for her?”

“The old problem of the rich Catholic girl: where is she to find a husband on her own level?”

“I met some very fine Catholics in England.”

“Very fine? Well-born, I suppose you mean, and rich and educated? And I’m not saying that doesn’t count for a lot. But you ended up with Cornish.”

“And what’s so bad about Cornish?”

“Oh, get away, Hamish! You know fine what’s wrong with Cornish. What about that paper he made you sign?”

“He overreached me; I don’t say he didn’t. But he’s not turned out so badly. Listen, Joe, keep this under your hat, but there’s to be some interesting news soon of Cornish.”

“What’s he up to now?”

“It’s what he was up to all through the War. Working very much on the Q.T. and sometimes in serious danger, I understand. Well, when the next Honours List appears, he’ll be a K.B.E.—Sir Francis—and my girl will be Lady Cornish. What d’you think of that?”

“I think I’m happy for you, Hamish, and for Mary-Jim. Maybe not so happy for Gerry O’Gorman and Mary-Tess. To lose one knighthood only to have another pop up in the same family won’t sit well with them.”

“Oh, that was only a Papal knighthood; this is a far more solid thing.”

“Hamish, you astonish me! ‘Only a Papal knighthood’! You’re beginning to sound almost like a Prot.”

“In this country if you’re in the money business you have to learn to sit at the table with the Prots. They have most of it their own way. R.C.s and Jews needn’t apply. And I’m thinking very hard about the money business.”

“Surely you have all you need?”

“What a man needs and what he wants may be very different things. Don’t forget, I came from very poor people, and the hatred of poverty is in my blood. Now listen: the lumbering business isn’t what is was; it’s changing, and I don’t want to change with it; I want something new.”

“At your age?”

“What about my age? I’m only sixty-seven. I’ve other people to think of. Now, you know that for years people—widows and old people and the like—have been coming to me and asking me to look after their money for them.”

“And you’ve done it, and made money for them. For me, too.”

“Yes, but I don’t like it. You trust me, and I’m pleased you do, but this thing of private trust is no way to do business; in business nobody should have total responsibility for anybody else’s money. So I’m thinking of unloading the lumber trade, and setting up one of these trust companies.”

“In Blairlogie? Wouldn’t it be very small potatoes?”

“No, not in Blairlogie. In Toronto.”

“Toronto? Man, are you crazy? Why not Montreal, where the big money is?”

“Because there’s other big money, and it’s in the West, and Toronto will be the centre for that. Not yet, but you have to be ahead of the procession.”

“You’re away ahead of me.”

“And properly so. Why wouldn’t I be? You’re a doctor and you look after my health; I’m a financier, and I look after your money.”

“Well—when do you take the big step?”

“I’ve taken it. Not many people know, but recent events are pushing me ahead fast. Gerry O’Gorman and Mary-Tess want to get out of Blairlogie; after that comedown over the Knight of St. Sylvester business they’re very much out of love with this little place. They’ll move to Toronto, and Gerry’ll set the thing on its feet.”

“God! Is Gerry up to a big thing like that?”

“Yes. Gerry has powers that have never been roused. And he’s honest.”

“Honest! What about Blondie Utronki?”

“Honest about money. Women are quite a different thing. And I’ve told Gerry there’s to be no more of that monkey-business, and Mary-Tess has him under her thumb forever. He can do it. Gerry has great ability as an organizer, and people like him.”

“He’s no Prot.”

“Not yet. But Gerry isn’t nearly as good a Catholic as he was before that little sanctified rat Beaudry did the dirty on him. Give him time, and give him Toronto, and we shall see what we shall see. Anyhow, that needn’t show too clearly. Didn’t I tell you Cornish is to be a knight?”

“I don’t follow you at all.”

“Well—look here. The Cornish Trust—Gerry is Managing Director, I’m Chairman of the Board (and I’ll keep the real power in my own hands, you may be sure), and Sir Francis Cornish is President, and the grand show-piece of the business. And Cornish is a bigoted Prot, as I have good cause to know.”

“Will he do it?”

“Indeed he will. He’s always been pestering me for a place in the business, and now there’s a place just right for him.”

“Can he manage it?”

“He’s very far from being a fool. He’s got a splendid war record, and that counts for a lot. And he doesn’t want to come back to Blairlogie. As president he’ll have no power I don’t choose to give him, and Gerry’ll watch him like a hawk. It’s tailor-made, Joe.”

“Hamish, I’ve always said you were a downy one, but this beats everything.”

“It’s not bad. Not bad at all. Everything has suddenly clicked into place.”

“All things work together for good for those that love the Lord.”

“Don’t be cynical, Joe. But if you mean that, you’re right. Even the third generation is taken care of. Gerry’s boys are good lads, and they’ll grow up to banking and trust business.”

“And what about young Francis? Will Cornish let you cut his son out of this big game?”

“Francis is a fine boy. I like him best of the lot, and I won’t see him pushed aside. But he’s not just what I look for in a boy who’s to grow up to be a banker. However, that’s not too great a problem; Mary-Jim writes to her mother that there’s another young Cornish on the way. If it’s a boy—and as you always tell your patients, it’s fifty-fifty that it will be—he can grow up to the family trade, which will be money, and a very good trade it is.”

“I just hope he’s all right.”

“What do you mean, Joe?”

“Are you forgetting the lad upstairs?”

“He wasn’t Cornish’s son. Cornish is sound. The father of that poor creature must have been a degenerate.”

“But he is Mary-Jim’s son as well.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Now Hamish, you know I hate to say unpleasant things—”

“I know only too well that you love to say unpleasant things, Joe.”

“That’s a nasty dig at an old friend, Hamish. But you must remember I’m a man of science, and science has to come to terms with facts, however unpleasant they may be. It takes two to make a child, and if there’s something wrong with the child, which of the two is responsible? You told me the father of that poor idjit upstairs was an unknown man, a soldier—”

“God knows what he may have been. Rotten with disease, probably.”

“No, not probably at all, for Mary-Jim has never shown any hint of what you’d expect from any such association, so you can’t blame it all on the man.”

“Are you blaming it on my daughter?”

“Easy, now, Hamish! Easy, man. Just give me another dram of that fine whisky, and I’ll explain. Because I’ve thought a lot about this matter, I can tell you, and I’ve read every book I can get hold of that might throw light on it. I lent you that book by Krafft-Ebing hoping you’d get a clue, but it seems you haven’t.”

“That book was full of dirty rubbish.”

“Life’s full of dirty rubbish. I’m a doctor and I know. If you’d read that book in a scientific spirit you’d have understood what it says. Krafft-Ebing’s the great name in this field still, you know, though he died a while back. But I’ve been reading Kraepelin, his successor, who’s the foremost man in this sort of medicine now, and there are certain points on which he and Krafft-Ebing are in full agreement. Now, if you’d read that book instead of skipping over to the earwax stories, you’d have taken in a very pertinent fact to what we’re discussing: a healthy, well-brought-up young woman has no sexual desire whatever. Oh, some romantic notions out of books, maybe, but not the real thing. She’s no notion of it, even if she has a rough idea how babies come. Now, look here: A very closely guarded, well-educated Catholic girl finds herself in a hotel room with a strange man. A servant, trained to keep his mind on his job, never to betray anything you might call humanity. Does he rape her? Not so far as we’ve been told. She said to you that one thing led to another. What thing was that one thing, Hamish?”

“That’s enough, Joe. You’d better be on your way.”

“No, it’s not enough, Hamish. You’ve got your head in the sand, man. And don’t order me to go, because I’m speaking to you as your family’s medical adviser—have been since I don’t know when—and this is nasty medicine I’m giving you, to make you well. I’m not saying Mary-Jim is a light woman. May this whisky be my poison if I ever thought any such thing! But even the purest woman may be victim of a disease of the mind—”

“Joe—you don’t mean Mary-Jim’s touched?”

“It’s not a permanent thing, Hamish, so far as I know. But it exists, and it attacks the young. In the profession we call it the furor uterinus.”

“You know I have no Latin. What’s that mean?”

“Well—I’d translate it as the rage o’ the womb. Uncontrollable desire. I’ve seen it in some cases of women—low women down at the end o’ the town—and God forbid you should ever meet with such a thing. I mean, desire—well, sometimes a married woman, accustomed to that way of life—might feel something. On a hot night, for instance, in July. But many fine women never know any such trouble. So—what are we to make of it in poor Mary-Jim?”

“God! You tell me a terrible thing!”

“There are a lot of terrible things known to science, Hamish. And I don’t say that some terrible people don’t make capital of them. For instance this fellow Freud that we’re beginning to hear about now that we’re getting hold of medical books in German again. But nobody heeds him, and he’ll soon peter out—or be run out of the profession. But well-authenticated medical science, based on great experience—you can’t go against it.”

“Joe, you hint at a world ridden and rotted with sex.”

“I don’t hint. I know. Why do you suppose I’m a single man? Even though I know that Mary-Ben would have taken me years ago, and perhaps even now. It’s because I’ve seen too much, and I decided against it. Science has its celibates, as well as religion. And now the craze is for blathering about sex all over the place. Like that scoundrel Upper who was speaking in the public schools here, and telling innocent children God knows what! Did Francis say anything about him?”

“I never heard him mention the name.”

“Perhaps he escaped, then. He’s a frail lad. I don’t imagine anything like that has come into his head yet. When the time comes, I’d better have a talk with him. Put him on his guard.”

“Perhaps so. But—Joe, do you suggest that this—this trouble you say Mary-Jim had—might affect the child that’s coming?”

“I can say truthfully that I don’t know. But she has been leading the life of a married woman for many years now, and perhaps it’s burned itself out. That’s what we’ll hope.”

“Another like that one upstairs would kill Marie-Louise. It might finish me. Joe—can nothing be done?”

“Hamish, I told you once I wouldn’t kill, and that’s my answer now. Indeed, I’m sworn to keep that idjit alive; it’s my sacred profession. That’s why I had that wire affair made, to restrain his lust. Without it, he might rage and rip himself into the grave, but that’s not for me to encourage or condone. We must all of us just wait it out. But listen, Hamish: if family interests are moving to Toronto, why don’t you send Francis to school there? Mary-Tess and Gerry would keep an eye on him. I hear the Christian Brothers have a fine school in Toronto. Get him out of here. Get him away from these women. Just suppose by bad luck he happens on that thing upstairs. What a brother for him!”

Dr. Jerome finished his third drink, shook hands warmly with his old friend, and left, with the warm consciousness that he was a man who had done a duty certainly painful, but in the best interests of everyone concerned.

STILL NO PITY FOR FRANCIS, BROTHER? said the Lesser Zadkiel, pausing in the unfolding of his story.

—I have told you repeatedly, said the Daimon Maimas, that pity is not one of the instruments with which such agencies as I do our work. Pity at this stage of his life would not make Francis better; it would dull his perceptions and rob him of the advantages I have managed for him.

—Rough on the bystanders, would you not say?

—The bystanders are no concern of mine. I am Francis’s daimon, not theirs. He has already met his Dark Brother. Everybody has one, but most people go through their lives without ever recognizing him or feeling any love or compassion for him. They see the Dark Brother in the distance, and they hate him. But Francis has his Dark Brother securely in his drawing-books, and more than that. He has him in his hand, and his artist’s sensibility.

—Nevertheless, my dear colleague, reluctant as I am to criticize or appear to teach you your business, is it good to conceal from everyone who the Dark Brother is, or how he came about?

—Well, in the obvious, physical sense, the Dark Brother in Francis’s life is the outcome of Marie-Louise’s well-intentioned meddling in London, when she made her daughter do everything she knew that might bring about a miscarriage. Those people thought a child had no real life until it was pushed into the outer world; they know nothing of the life in the womb, which is the sweetest and most secure time of all. If you jolt and shake and parboil the child, and batter it with cathartics and stun it with gin, you may kill it, or if it is very strong—and Francis the First was very strong or he wouldn’t have survived the dance they led him—you may have an oddity to deal with. But Francis’s Dark Brother is much more than an obvious, physical thing. He’s a precious gift from me, and I think I did rather well to seize my opportunity of bringing him to Francis’s notice so early.

—I suppose you know best, brother.

—I do. So let us go on and see how my gift to Francis shows itself. It’s begun by getting him out of Blairlogie.