What's Bred in the Bone

Three

When the Senator confided to Dr. J.A. that the Cornish Trust was in prospect, he was not entirely candid with his old friend; the Trust had been in his mind for at least five years, and had been in the process of assemblage for the last three. The business of the Papal knighthood had somewhat hurried matters, so far as the O’Gormans were concerned, and Gerry and Mary-Tess had already bought a house in Toronto on fashionable St. George Street. Major Cornish and Mary-Jim were talking with an architect about building a house in the rising suburb of Rosedale, appropriately near the residence of the Lieutenant-Governor. The Senator spoke to Dr. J.A. at Easter, and it was less than a month before the O’Gormans moved to Toronto, and at once made themselves known at St. James’ Anglican Cathedral.

“It’s no use trying to get a trust company on its feet unless you’re seen and known where money is,” said Gerald Vincent to his wife. She agreed, because he knew Toronto better than she; had he not been making visits to it for the last eighteen months? But she wondered aloud if in a city sometimes called “the Rome of Methodism” it might not be better to ally themselves with one of the Methodist churches where affluence and the godliness of John Wesley were mingled in a peculiarly Torontonian brew. When she discovered that the Methodist ladies appeared in the evening in a characteristic sort of gown in which the bosom was hidden as high as to the chin, and no jewellery was worn except a few discreet, chunky diamonds (good investments), she plumped for the more easy-going Anglicans. In their first three months of Toronto residence, before the Trust opened its doors to the public, the O’Gormans had caused themselves to be noticed in Toronto society. Noticed—and favourably noticed.

The question that was asked, of course, was whether they were Old Money, or New Money? The difference, though subtle to the vast population which was No Money, was important. Old Money usually reached back to colonial days, and some of it was Empire Loyalist; Old Money was Tory of an indigo that put to shame the weaknesses and follies of such wobblers as the first Duke of Wellington; Old Money sought to conserve and strengthen whatever was best in the body politic and knew precisely where this refined essence was to be found; it was in themselves and all that pertained to them. Even in the early twenties of this century, Old Money clung to its carriages, at least for ladies making calls, and had other tribal customs that spoke of assured distinction. The high priests of Old Money frequently wore top hats on weekdays, if they were going to do something priestly with money. They fought furiously against short coats for dinner dress, and white waistcoats with tailcoats. They kept mistresses, if at all, of such dowdiness they might almost have been mistaken for wives. For them the nineteenth century had not quite ended.

New Money, on the other hand, had taken its cue from Edward VII, who had a high regard for wealth however it was come by, and liked people with some “go” in them. New Money aspired to be Big Money, and did not greatly care if the drawing-rooms of Old Money were not easily opened. New Money wore dinner suits, which it called tuxedos, and smoked big cigars from which it removed the band before lighting up—an unthinkable solecism, for what if you should get a tobacco stain on your white glove? The O’Gormans knew they were New Money, but were aware that a trust company which was not on good terms with Old Money could run into quite unnecessary obstructions. The Senator, too, presented a problem. His gallant manners and handsome person recommended him anywhere, but it could not be concealed from the never-sleeping vigilance of Old Money that he was a Roman Catholic and a Liberal in politics. A difficult situation was avoided by the Cornish family, just as the Senator had foreseen.

Everything fell into place on June 3, when the Birthday Honours were announced, and Major Francis Cornish, President of the soon-to-be-opened Cornish Trust, became Sir Francis Cornish, K.B.E. How did he get it? The whisper was that he had done extraordinary work in Intelligence during the War, and not simply Canadian Intelligence, which was rather small potatoes. Non-military people, and even a lot of military people, have a notion that Military Intelligence implies uncommon brilliance of intellect, extraordinary resource and daring, ability to solve codes over which the enemy has toiled for years, and iron control over beautiful and alluring female spies. Of course, this may be quite true, but nobody knows, and everybody speculates. The passing of time had given the Wooden Soldier an air of distinction, of the grizzle-headed, frozen-faced, uncommunicative variety. His monocle gleamed with suppressed secrets; his moustache spoke of Nature subdued, tamed, domineered over. Just the man to trust your money to: just the man to ask to dinner. And his wife! What a stunner! Could she have been a spy, do you think?

Thus the Cornish name shed lustre over the sturdy understructure of McRorys and O’Gormans. Long before the announcement of the honour, and before its doors were officially opened for business, the Cornish Trust was a financial certainty. No trust company opens for business until a great deal of solid and profitable business has already been done, and promises and assurances have been given. Sir Francis’s knighthood gave strong assurance to what was already a reality.

This should by no means be taken as evidence that Toronto’s social and business communities were snobbish. They would assure you, almost before you asked, that they were pioneers and democrats to a man, or a woman. But they were well-connected pioneers and democrats, and if they kept a sharp eye on Roman Catholics and Jews it was not to be interpreted as prejudice, but because Roman Catholics and Jews—fine people among them, mind you!—had not been particularly visible when the colony began its long pull toward nationhood. Their time would come, no doubt. But just for the present it was as well for Old Money, and such New Money as showed itself worthy, to keep things on an even keel. And what better guarantee of evenness of keel than a president of the trust company who had served his country well in war, whose intelligence was of a guaranteed respectable sort, and who looked so trustworthy?

What Sir Francis thought about it, nobody ever knew. Probably he believed some of what was said about him. Undoubtedly he understood the language of finance, and had the good sense to leave the deployment of finance to his father-in-law and his brother-in-law, and to take his generous reward while keeping his mouth shut.

In these circumstances, Dr. J.A.’s ludicrously provincial notion that the third generation of the family should attend the big school kept by the Christian Brothers played no part. The young O’Gormans, Gerald Lawrence and Gerald Michael, were entered at Colborne College, a great stronghold of Old Money. At the same time the “Gerald” was discreetly dropped from their names; Mary-Tess sensed that the family habit of tacking the same dynastic label on several children might be very well for Blairlogie, but did not suit their changed situation.

Sir Francis also decided on Colborne for his son. The cousins did not see much of one another in their new school; the O’Gormans were in the Lower School because of their age, and were day-boys because their parents lived in Toronto. Sir Francis knew, and his wife (who had ceased to be Mary-Jim to anyone but her McRory family, and was known to everyone else as Jacko, which was what her husband called her) knew also, that they did not intend to be in Toronto for many months of the year. Sir Francis let it be known that his continuing relationship (never specified) with Very Important People in England would take him abroad often, and Jacko did not choose to be left behind. So Francis was to be a boarder at Colborne. Thus it was that Francis entered what looked like a new world, but which was not, in several respects that mattered to him, as new as it might appear.

Since Francis’s days at Colborne, the reading world has been subjected to a flood of books written by men who hated their boarding-schools, and whose sensitive natures were thwarted and warped by early experience. It was not so with Francis. His life hitherto had made him philosophical and ingenious—not to say devious—in his dealings with his superiors and his contemporaries, and at Colborne he was philosophical and ingenious. He was not brilliant, in the prize-winning, examination-passing mode that makes for a splendid school career, but he was not stupid. He took life as it came, and some of what came was uncommonly like what had come at Carlyle Rural.

Much may be learned about any society by studying the behaviour and accepted ideas of its children, for children—and sometimes adults—are shadows of their parents, and what they believe and what they do are often what their parents believe in their hearts and would do if society would put up with it. The dominant group, though by no means the majority of the boys at Colborne College, were the sons of Old Money, and in their behaviour the spirit of Old Money was clear. They were the conservers of tradition, and they imposed tradition without discrimination and without mercy. The tradition best calculated to reduce a New Boy to his lowest common denominator was fagging.

On the first day of the autumn term, each senior boy was assigned, by decision of the prefects, a New Boy who was to be his fag for the year that followed, and it was clearly understood that the fag was the slave and creature of his fag-master, to do his bidding without question at any hour. There was an understanding that if a fag were seriously ill-used he could complain to the prefects, but to do so was squealing, and incurred contempt. Like all such systems it was conditioned by the people who practised it, and some fags had an easy time; it was even known for a fag-master to help a junior boy with his work. A few fag-masters were brutes, and a few fags lived in hell; the majority, like all slave classes, were genially derisive of their masters when they could get away with it, respectful when they had to be, and cleaned boots and put away laundry as badly as they could without incurring punishment. If the system taught them anything at all it was that all authority is capricious, but may be appeased by a show of zeal, unaccompanied by any real work.

Francis was assigned to a large boy named Eastwood, who came from Montreal, and who was on the whole good-natured and untroubled by intelligence. He was an officer in the Cadet Corps, and it was one of his fag’s duties to polish the buttons on his uniform, and to bring his sword up to a high finish every Sunday night, ready for Monday’s parade. Francis was never guilty of cheek; he allowed Eastwood to think that he admired him and took pride in his appearance on parade, and that did the trick. In his heart he thought Eastwood was a mutt.

Fagging had been good enough for your father, and it was therefore good enough for you. A certain amount of servitude and humiliation made a man of you. There may even have been some truth in this belief. Everybody ought to have some experience of being a servant; it is useful to know what virtually unlimited authority is like for those on the receiving end.

Francis was good enough at his work to escape any particular notice; he was always in the upper half of his form, undistinguished but respectable. He was able to hold his place, while having plenty of time to study the masters, whose personal character was often more educational than anything they taught.

It was on Prize Day that they presented the most interesting spectacle, when they appeared on the platform of the Prayer Hall in their gowns, beneath which they wore, in some cases, old-fashioned morning coats, preserved from far-off weddings. About half of them were Englishmen, and rather more than half were veterans of the recent war. They wore their medals of honour, some of substantial distinction. One or two limped; Mr. Ramsay had a wooden leg and walked with a clumping gait; Mr. Riviere had an artificial hand under a black glove; Mr. Carver had a silver plate in his head, and was known to have had spells when he climbed the water-pipes in his classroom and taught from that elevation. Their hoods were old and crumpled, but some of them were from ancient universities and spoke of a brilliance that had not brought any reward except a position as a schoolmaster. In the eyes of the boys as a whole, they were glorious; but to Francis there was an air of melancholy about them, for he was perhaps the only person in the Hall who saw what was in front of his nose, who really observed how they stood, and what their faces were really saying. Of course, he never spoke to anyone about what he saw.

His life held many secrets—things he could not talk about to anyone, although he had friends, and was passably well-liked. The religion of the School, for instance; it was a kind of middle-brow Anglicanism, not too heavily stressed because the School contained boys of all denominations, including several Jews, and some richly coloured boys from South America who were probably Papists. The hymns were loud, chiefly unexceptionable admonitions to live decently and honourably, and the music to which they were sung was superior stuff from the Public School Hymnal—Holst, Vaughan Williams, and unsentimental tunes that would not have been strange to Luther. The Headmaster preached a short extempore sermon every Sunday night, and because he was a man whose enthusiasms sometimes outran his judgement, he was likely to say things which a more discreet man would have left unsaid. Musing on the theme of sin and perhaps forgetting where he was, he once quoted Nietzsche, declaring: “Sins are necessary to every society organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the only reliable weapons of power; the priest lives upon sins; it is necessary to him that there be sinning.” Fortunately few boys were listening, and of those who were, few understood what he was saying. Francis may have been the only one of those who hugged this wisdom to his heart. But upon the whole the School’s religion puzzled him. It seemed to lack heart. There was nothing in it of the mystery, the embracing warmth, the rich gravy of the religion of Mary-Ben. It was a religion well suited to Old Money and to the toadies of Old Money. It was a religion that Never Went Too Far.

Never too far. That was the constant admonition of Old Money and the toadies of Old Money. Those who had any pretension to classical education likened it to the Greek doctrine: Nothing in excess. Some, who had dabbled a little in Shakespeare, might say “Look that you o’erstep not the modesty of Nature”. Of the blatant immodesty of Nature they had no conception. But Francis had; he had sensed it in the abyss that lay at his feet in Carlyle Rural, and in what he had seen of the exactions and vengeance of life among the corpses in Devinney’s embalming room. Francis knew in his heart that life was broader, deeper, higher, more terrifying, and more wonderful than anything dreamed of by Old Money. A schoolboy is not supposed to know such things, and he scarcely admitted them even to himself. But they emerged, sometimes, in his drawings.

In the circumstances of life in a large boarding-school it is impossible to draw without being observed. As a fag he was required to do an extensive business in decorating raincoats; these were slickers made of yellow oilskin, on the back of which, between the shoulders, it was demanded that he draw a funny face, which was then shellacked, so that it was permanent. These raincoats were greatly prized. Two or three came dangerously near to being identifiable caricatures of masters; one in particular, a severe Scottish face with beetling brows and an extraordinary amount of hair growing from its nose, was certainly Mr. Dunstan Ramsay, the history master. Mr. Ramsay called Francis into his study one night after prayers.

“Caricature is a rare and fine gift, Cornish, but you ought to consider it carefully before it gets you completely in its grip. It’s the exaggeration of what is most characteristic, isn’t it? But if you see nothing as characteristic except what is ugly, you’ll become a man who values nothing but ugliness, because it’s his trade. And that will make you a sniggering, jeering little creature, which is what most caricaturists have been—even the best. There are some quite good art books in the library. Look at them, and learn something larger than caricature. Don’t forget it, but don’t make it the whole of what you can do.”

Francis was glad not to be caned for lèse-majesté and super-cheek, and promised that he would look at the art books in the library. And there, in a not very extensive or distinguished collection, he found what he missed in the religion of the school.

As is likely to happen (to people who have a daimon) the discovery coincided with something else, not obviously related to it. The fags often sang, when they were mustered to haul the big roller over the cricket pitch, or sweep snow from the open-air hockey rink, and what they sang was what they liked, not what the music master made them sing in class; his taste was for “Searching for Lambs” and other folksongs he valued because they were in five-quarter time and demanded some musical skill. But the fags sang a sentimental song in waltz time that a few of them knew and the others quickly learned:

To the knights in the days of old,

Keeping watch on the mountain height,

Came a vision of Holy Grail

And a voice in the silent night,

Saying—

Follow, follow the gleam,

Banners unfurled, o’er all the world;

Follow, follow the gleam

Of the chalice that is the Grail.

How many knew what the Grail was, or why it should gleam, does not matter. Francis knew, for he had read it in a book that came, of course, from Aunt Mary-Ben. The Grail was the Cup from which Christ had drunk at the Last Supper, and anybody lucky enough to catch sight of it was ensured a very special life forever after.

Among the art books recommended by Buggerlugs—which was what the boys called Mr. Ramsay—was one that dealt with the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and in the illustrations—Francis did not bother much with the text—was something of the Grail in the light that shone from the eyes of the men, and the rich, swooning beauty of the women. It was a light that fed the hunger he felt because of the starved, wholly external religion of the school, and a lush depiction of Nature that balanced the world of wretched desks, spattered ink, chalk dust, constipating food, and the unceasing, unimaginative, perfunctory obscenity of schoolboys’ talk. It was an enlargement that made even compulsory games and the Rifle Corps open up to a light that came from somewhere outside the school. And then the Headmaster, who kept his ears open, seized upon the slavesong of the fags and preached one of his Sunday-night sermons about the Grail, as a vision, an unresting aspiration, and with his usual fine disregard of probability urged the boys to read Malory at once, and to make the Grail quest a part of their own lives.

Francis hunted down Le Morte d’Arthur in the school library, and was soon compelled to recognize that it was a dense, intractable, difficult book and he could not get through enough of it to find the Grail or anything else he wanted. Nor was the encyclopaedia more helpful, with its tedious explanation of where parts of the legend came from, and its dowdy, scholarly rejection of all the good stuff about Joseph of Arimathea and King Arthur—the stuff that fed his imagination and made the Grail a glowing reality. So he hugged the book about the Pre-Raphaelites, and kept it out of the library far longer than was permitted, even though nobody else wanted it. He considered stealing it, but a strong feeling from the Blairlogie past told him that A Certain Person would not like it—His wounds might even be reopened—and that a life of noble feeling could not be founded on a crime, especially a crime that would be so easily detected.

All boys were expected to be “keen”. The most admired form of keenness was not obvious success, but pitting yourself against some form of school contest where you were not likely to succeed, but where your quality as “a good loser” might be seen and admired. Francis found it in the Oratory Contest.

Of course, nobody expected anything that could be seriously called oratory. To excel at verbal expression was a suspect gift. But a sufficient number of boys came forward every year who could force themselves to stand before an audience of the staff and their peers, and control their terror as they talked for ten minutes on a topic that was handed to them on a folded slip of paper by the Headmaster, who arranged that each contestant should have ten minutes in a secluded room—most certainly not the library—to collect whatever thoughts he might have. The slip handed to Francis read “The Gift of Sight”.

That was why Francis mounted the platform and embarked with considerable confidence on a criticism of the portraits that hung on all four sides of the Prayer Hall. These were, he said, pictures that everybody in the school saw every day, but that nobody really was aware of except as interruptions of the walls. The pictures were not good as works of art, and if they were not good works of art, had they a place in an institution of education? Were they worthy of the finest school in Canada? (He thought this a fine touch, certain to please his audience.) He pointed out the low level of artistic competence they represented, and asked rhetorically if any of them were by painters who could be named by anybody in the audience? Two or three of them, he mentioned, were already flaking badly, although they could not be more than fifty years old, and it was clear that they had been done in inferior pigments. He was lightly jocose about the fact that the ample beard of one Headmaster of the nineteenth century was rapidly going green. He said that the painters had obviously been hacks or amateurs. He spent his last three minutes explaining how a painter of acknowledged genius, such as Michelangelo or Bouguereau, would have presented these grave figures, making them not only records of Heads past, but vivid evocations of strong intelligence and character, and a daily refreshment to the eyes of the school. He sat down amid a heavy silence.

The Headmaster, in his judgement of the speeches, praised Cornish’s obvious sincerity. But it was a boy who laboured mightily with “Sabbath Observance: For or Against”, and who came down heavily for the closed Toronto Sunday, who was awarded the cup.

Afterward the Head said: “That was good, Cornish. Unexpected and I suppose true. But tactless, Cornish, tactless. There were two or three of our Governors in the audience, and they didn’t like it. You must be careful with words like ‘hack’: the world’s full of hacks, unfortunately. You must learn to keep your claws in. But there was one Governor who thought you ought to have some recognition. So go to the school bookseller with a note I’ll give you, and get yourself a book about art. But don’t tell anybody how you came by it. That’s an order.”

That was the beginning of the substantial library about art in its various forms that was one of the valuable things Francis left behind him when he died. The bookseller, a kindly man, found him Burckhardt’s History of the Renaissance for four dollars—it was illustrated, and thus expensive—and threw in a second-hand set of Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, which was marked at a dollar-fifty, but which he reduced for a promising boy.

Francis obediently kept quiet about his special prize, but he could not avoid the reputation he now had for knowing about pictures, and being what some of the hostile masters hissingly condemned as an “ESS-thete”. Francis had not heard the word before, though he knew what “aesthetic” meant; but it was plain from the way it was said that an “ESSthete” was a pretty feeble chap, wasting his time on art when he ought to be building up his character and facing the realities of life—as the hostile masters, failures to a man, understood life. But not all the masters shared this view, and in particular Mr. Mills, the senior classics master, began to look on Francis with favour.

It was the same among the boys. Most of them thought that being interested in pictures was girls’ stuff, and not even for the kind of girls they knew—girls who were simply themselves in a different biological package. Old Money girls, in fact. But there were others, including most of the Jews, who wanted to talk about art to Francis. Art as they understood it, that is to say.

For some years a few Canadian painters, who came to be called the Group of Seven, had been trying to reveal the Canadian landscape in a new way, seeing it freshly, and not as it would have appeared to an eye darkened by a nineteenth-century English landscape painter’s notion of what Nature ought to be. Their work was of course much derided and they were thought to be outrageously modern, although they would not have seemed so to a European or an American critic. What the parents said was parroted by the children, and Francis was beset with “Whaddya think of the Group of Seven? My mother says it looks like what our Swedish cook used to paint on her day off. My father says he could do as well, if he had the time. I mean—look at it! Can you see Georgian Bay in it? My father says he’s hunted through all that country every autumn since he was a boy, and he says he knows it better than any of those birds, and he never sees anything like that. Blue snow! I ask you!”

Francis gave non-committal answers, not because he had any interest in new painting, but because the world he wanted to paint was not the world of Nature but the world of his imagination, dominated by the Grail Legend. This was now the food upon which he fed his spirit, and so far as he retained any of the Catholicism Aunt Mary-Ben had bootlegged into his supposedly Anglican world, it was attached to what he knew about the Grail. That was almost entirely what he derived from Tennyson; if by chance he hit on anything that associated the great legend with the pre-Christian world he left it unread; what he wanted was the world of Rossetti, of Burne-Jones, of William Morris. It was not easy to be a Pre-Raphaelite in Canada in the third decade of the twentieth century, in a school that was cheerfully Philistine about art (though certainly not about scholarship), but in so far as it could be done, Francis did it.

This involved a certain amount of mental contortion, and even something approaching a double consciousness. To his school companions he was just Cornish, not a bad fellow, but with a bee in his bonnet about pictures. To his schoolmasters he was Cornish, a boy somewhat above the middle except in Classics, where he showed ability. To both companions and masters Francis paid his dues; he was mediocre at games, but he played, and he took part in enough other school activities to avoid being despised as a slacker; he worked conscientiously at his studies, was always top of his class in French (but this was discounted by the School, because he had been raised to speak French, which the School regarded less as a key to another culture than as an obstacle course and a brain-teaser), and was good in Latin and Greek, which were also brain-teasers. Nobody knew how his mind was seized by the heroes of Virgil and Homer, and how easy Classics became if you cared about what they said. It was a period when educators believed that the brain could be strengthened, like a muscle, by attacking and conquering anything it might at first find difficult. Algebra, geometry, and calculus were the best developers of mental muscle; to master them was really pumping iron; but Classics wasn’t bad—indeed sufficiently repellent to the average boy’s mind to rank as a first-rate subject of study. But the inner chamber of Francis’s mind was dominated by the Grail, as it appeared to him to be—something fine, something better than his life at present could provide, something to be sought elsewhere, something that made sudden, fleeting appearances at home.

Whether Francis’s parents had neglected him is a matter about which there could be many opinions. They had left him for long periods in the care of his grandparents and Aunt Mary-Ben, but surely that was not neglect? They had not noticed that his schooling in Blairlogie had been at odds with his life at St. Kilda. They had sent him to Colborne College because it was the kind of school Sir Francis understood, without any consideration of what kind of school Francis might need. They had done everything for him that money could provide, and that they could imagine, but they had not seen much of him or given much thought to him. Their reason was, of course, the War, and the part Sir Francis had played in it as what would be called in a later, different war “a backroom boy”, and the necessity for Mary-Jacobine to do what complemented her husband’s career and augmented his position. Long after the War was officially over, these necessities seemed to prevail over any serious attention to Francis.

Did this make him feel neglected, rejected, bitter? Far from it. It made it possible for him to idealize his parents and love them as distant, glorious figures, quite apart from the everyday world. At school, and at the expensive camps where he spent his summers, he had always with him a folder in which were pictures of his father, looking distinguished, and his mother, looking beautiful, and these were holy ikons that comforted and reassured him when he doubted himself. And as the Grail took command of his inner life, they were associated with it, not directly and foolishly, but as the kind of people who made such splendour possible and perpetuated it in the modern world.

When the business of the Cornish Trust required Sir Francis to be in Canada for much of each year, his son saw him at weekends, talked with him, was sometimes taken for splendid meals at his club, and was often shown his medals. But, as the Major explained, medals were not the measure of a man’s service; it was what the chaps at the War Office and the Foreign Office thought of you that established your true measure. It was the degree of access you had to the People Who Really Knew. These people were not named, but that was not because they had no reality, for there was nothing of the phoney about the Major when it came to his profession; these significant people were not named because they were not in the limelight, although in a very real sense they controlled the limelight and chose the people on whom it should shine. These people were by no means all soldiers; some of them were scientists, some were officially explorers, some were dons. It was never said, but it was clear enough that the Major was associated in some way with what was still called the Secret Service. Secrecy was bred in Francis’s bones.

As for his mother, she was a beauty, in a time before beauties had become entirely professional beauties. It would have been vulgar and un-Grail-like to say it, but she was a Society Beauty.

Being a beauty always means constellating some ideal related to the historical period where it appears, and Mary-Jacobine, now known as Jacko Cornish, was a Beauty of the Twenties. She did not languish; she danced vigorously and joyously. She was not swathed in embroideries; she wore tight sheaths that came barely to her beautiful knees. Her figure was boyish but not flat or muscular. She smoked a great deal, and had a variety of long holders for her Turkish cigarettes. She drank cocktails to the extent that made her laugh delightfully, but never until she hiccuped. Her hair was cut short in styles that had various names from year to year, but were basically the Eton Crop. She used make-up, but her own high complexion made make-up an ornament rather than a disguise. Her underclothes were few, and although they were splendidly embroidered they were never so much so as to spoil the set of her wonderful frocks. Her scent was bought in Paris, and only somebody like the President of the Cornish Trust could have afforded it. She flirted with everybody, even her elder son.

For there was now a second son, old enough to be sent to the Lower School at Colborne, and he was Francis’s brother Arthur. There was more than ten years between them, and Arthur did not figure largely in Francis’s life, but he was a nice kid, and Francis was civil to him. Arthur was everything Francis was not, a noisy, exuberant, strong little boy, and a great success at school. If Francis had not sat on Arthur from time to time, for his soul’s good, Arthur would have patronized Francis, whom he recognized with the instinct of his kind as the sort of fellow who would never be Captain of Games in the Upper School, which was the goal Arthur had set for himself, and which after the required number of years he attained. Francis never knew it—it was not proper that he should know it—but the Major thought more highly of Francis than he did of Arthur. The younger boy was the type who would some day be a good soldier, if he were so unlucky as to be involved in a war, but he was not a Secret Service type, and the Major rather suspected that Francis was precisely that.

It was in May 1929, when Francis was nineteen, going on twenty, that several matters which had been hanging fire resolved themselves.

The first came when he was training for Track, on the oval path that surrounded the school’s main cricket pitch. Francis was a fair runner, but not a star. On this day he ran a few yards, felt short of breath, pressed on in the best School tradition, lost consciousness, and fell to the ground. Sensation! Boys collected; the drill-sergeant rushed up shouting, “Back, back all of you; give him air!”, and when Francis came round, which he did in a few seconds, detailed four boys to take him up to the Infirmary, where Miss Grieve, the school nurse, packed him into bed at once. It was a Thursday, which was one of the days when the doctor visited the School; he listened to Francis’s heart, looked grave to hide his want of opinion, and said that he would arrange a visit to a specialist, immediately.

The following morning Francis felt perfectly well, went to Prayers as usual, and was astonished when the Headmaster announced a list of awards, in which his name appeared as winner of the School Prize in Classics. He was also named as one of those who should report to the Head’s secretary immediately Prayers were over.

“Oh, Cornish,” said Miss Semple; “you’re to be excused classes this morning. You’re to go to the General Hospital to see Dr. McOdrum at ten. So you’d better hurry.”

Dr. McOdrum was very important, but he worked in a mercilessly overheated, windowless little kennel in the basement of the big hospital, and was himself so pale and stooped and overburdened in appearance that he was a poor advertisement for his profession. He made Francis strip, hop up and down, pretend to run, step on the seat of a chair and then step down again, and finally lie on a cold, medical-smelling trolley while he went over him very carefully with a stethoscope.

“Aha,” said Dr. McOdrum, and having delivered himself of this opinion, allowed Francis to go back to school, greatly puzzled.

As it was a Friday, and Francis was a prize-winner, he was given special leave to go home for the weekend. Ordinarily he would have had to wait until Saturday morning. So it was about five o’clock when he went into the new house in Rosedale, and made for the drawing-room, hoping there might still be some tea left. There he found his mother, kissing Fred Markham.

They did not start like guilty creatures. The smiling Markham offered Francis a cigarette, which he took, and his mother said, “Hello darling, what brings you home tonight?”

“Special leave. I won the Classics Prize.”

“Oh, you clever creature! Kiss me, darling! This calls for a celebration!”

“Sure does,” said Fred Markham. “White Lady, Francis?”

“Oh, Fred, are you sure? He doesn’t have cocktails.”

“Then it’s time he started. Here you are, old man.”

The White Lady was delicious, specially the white of egg part. Francis drank, chatted, and felt worldly. Then he went up to his room, dropped on his bed, and burst into tears. Mum! Imagine it, Mum! With Fred Markham, who had a gold inlay in one of his front teeth, and must be forty if he was a day! Mum—she wasn’t a bit better than Queen Guenevere. But that would set Fred Markham up as Sir Launcelot, which was ridiculous. If Fred was anything, he was a base cullion, or perhaps a stinkard churl. Anyway, he was an insurance broker, and who did he think he was, getting fresh with Lady Cornish? But it had looked as if Mum were in on the kiss; she wasn’t resisting, and maybe it wasn’t the first. Mum! God, she must be almost as old as Markham! He had never before thought of his mother as anything but young. Older than he, but not in any exact chronological way.

The door opened and his mother came in. She saw his tears.

“Poor Francis,” she said, “were you very surprised, darling? No need to be. Doesn’t mean a thing, you know. It’s just the way people go on nowadays. You wouldn’t believe how things have changed, since I was your age. For the better, really. All that tiresome formality, and having to be old so soon. Nobody has to be old now, unless they want to. I met a man last year when we were in London who had had the Voronoff operation—monkey glands, you know—and he was simply amazing.”

“Was he like a monkey?”

“Of course not, silly! Now give me a kiss, darling, and don’t worry about anything. You’re almost done with school, and it’s time you grew up in some very important ways. Did you like the White Lady?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, they’re always rather strange at first. You’ll get to like them soon enough. Just don’t like them too much. Now you’d better wash your face and come down and talk to Daddy.”

But Francis did not hurry to talk to Daddy. Poor Father, deceived like King Arthur! What did Shakespeare call it? A cuckold. A wittoly cuckold. Francis was not pleased with the part he had played in the talk with his mother; he should have carried on like Hamlet in his mother’s bedroom. What had Hamlet accused Gertrude of doing? “Mewling and puking over the nasty sty” was it? No, that was somewhere else. She had let her lover pinch wanton on her cheek, and had given him a pair of reechy kisses, and let him paddle in her neck with his damned fingers. God, Shakespeare had a nasty mind! He must look Hamlet up again. It was a year since Mr. Blunt had coursed his special Lit. class through it, and Mr. Blunt had gloated a good deal over Gertrude’s sin. For sin it was. Had she not made marriage vows as false as dicers’ oaths? Well—must wash up and talk to Father.

Sir Francis was greatly pleased about the Classics Prize, and opened a bottle of champagne. Poor innocent, he did not know that his house was falling about his ears, and that the lovely woman who sat at the table with him was an adulteress. Francis had two glasses of champagne, and the White Lady was not altogether dead in his untried stomach. So it was that when Bubbler Graham phoned after dinner he was more ready to fall in with her suggestion that they should go to the movies than he would otherwise have been.

He still had to say where he was going at night, and what he was going to do.

“Bubbler Graham wants to go to the movies,” he mumbled.

“And you don’t want to? Oh, Francis, come off it! You don’t have to pretend to Daddy and me. She’s charming.”

“Mum—is it all right for Bubbler to call me? I thought the boy was supposed to do the calling.”

“Darling, where do you get these archaic ideas? Bubbler is probably lonely. Frank, give the prize-winner five dollars. He’s going to have a night out.”

“Ah? What? Oh, of course. Do you want the car?”

“She said she’d bring her car.”

“There, you see? A thoroughly nice girl. She doesn’t want you to carry all the expense. Have a marvellous time, darling.”

Bubbler wanted to see a film with Clara Bow in it, called Dangerous Curves, and that was where they went. Bubbler had taken Clara Bow as her ideal, and in restless energy and lively curls she was a good deal like her idol. During the show she let her hand stray near enough to Francis’s for him to take it. Not that he greatly wanted to, but he was rather in the position of the man upon whom a conjuror forces a card. Afterward they went to an ice-cream parlour, and sat on stools at the counter and consumed very rich, unwholesome messes of ice cream, syrup, and whipped cream, topped with fudge and nuts. Then, as they drove home through one of Toronto’s beautiful ravines—which was certainly not on their direct route—Bubbler stopped the car.

“Anything wrong?” said Francis.

“Out of gas.”

“Oh, come on! The tank registers more than half full.”

Bubbler bubbled merrily. “Don’t you know what that means?”

“Out of gas? Of course I do. No gas.”

“Oh, you mutt!” said Bubbler, and rapidly and expertly threw her arms around Francis’s neck and kissed him, giving a very respectable version of the way Clara Bow did it. But Francis was startled and did not know how to respond.

“Let me show you,” said the practical Bubbler. “Now ease up, Frank; it isn’t going to hurt. Easy, now.” And under her instruction Francis showed himself a quick study.

Half an hour later he was decidedly wiser than he had been. At one point Bubbler unbuttoned his shirt and put her hand over his heart. Tit for tat. Francis opened her blouse, and after some troublesome rucking up of her brassiere, and accidentally breaking a strap on her slip, he put his hand on her heart, and his scrotum (if schoolboy biology were true) sent a message to his brain that was the most thrilling thing that he had ever known, because her heart lay beneath her breast, and although she was a girl of the twenties, Bubbler had a substantial breast, crushed and bamboozled though it was by a tight binder. His kisses were now, he felt, as good as anything in the movies.

“Don’t snort so much,” said the practical Bubbler.

When she dropped him at his house Francis said slowly and intently, “I suppose this means we’re in love?”

Bubbler bubbled more than she had done at any time during a bubbling evening. “Of course not, you poor boob,” she said. “It’s just nice. Isn’t it? Wasn’t it nice, Frank?”—and she gave him another of her Clara Bow kisses.

Just nice? Frank prepared for bed, very much aware that he was “all stewed up” as Victoria Cameron would have put it. Bubbler had stewed him up, and to Bubbler it was just nice. Did girls really do all that—fumbling under the blouse and hot kissing—just because it was nice?

He was, after all, a Classics prize-winner. A line of Virgil rose in his mind—a line that Mr. Mills read with sad insistence:

Varium et mutabile simper

Femina

Even in his mind he was careful to get the arrangement of lines correct. Fickle and changeable always is woman.

Stewing, regretting, yearning for more but angry to have been used for somebody else’s pleasure, Francis went to bed, but for a long time he could not sleep.

“FRANK, I’D LIKE YOU to have lunch with me at my club,” said Sir Francis, when he met his son at breakfast.

His club was large, gloomy, untouched by any sort of modern taste, and extraordinarily comfortable. Ladies were not allowed, except on special occasions and under heavy restraints. His father ordered two glasses of sherry—not too dry—and Francis reflected that in his experience this was a weekend of heavy boozing.

“Now, about luncheon—what do you say to a bowl of oxtail, with grilled chops to follow and—Oh, I say, they’ve got tapioca pudding down for today. I always say, it’s the best tapioca pudding I get anywhere. So we’ll have that, and—waiter—a couple of glasses of club claret.

“This is a celebration, Frank. A celebration of your Classics prize.”

“Oh—thanks, Father.”

“A good sort of prize to get—what?”

“Well, lots of the fellows don’t think much of Classics. Even some of the masters wonder what use it is.”

“Pay no attention. Classics is good stuff. Anything that gives you a foot in the past is good stuff. Can’t understand the present if you don’t know the past, what? I suppose you’ll do Classics at Spook? Or will you leave that till Oxford?”

“Oxford?”

“Well, I’ve always assumed you’d go to Oxford after you’d been to Varsity here. Of course, you must go here, and I suppose Spook’s the best college for you. I mean, as I’m head of a big Canadian business, it wouldn’t do to send you out of the country for your ’varsity work altogether. Spook, then Oxford. Give you lots of time.”

“Yes, but oughtn’t I to be getting on?”

“With what?”

“I don’t know, yet. But everybody at school thinks he ought to get on with whatever he’s going to do as fast as possible.”

“I don’t think what you’re going to do needs to be hurried.”

“Oh? What am I going to do?”

“What do you want to do?”

“I’d really like to be a painter.”

“Excellent. Nothing wrong with that. That fellow who painted your mother—de Laszlo, was it?—he seems to do extremely well at it. Mind you, he has talent. Have you got talent?”

“I don’t really know. I’d have to find out.”

“Excellent.”

“I thought perhaps you might want me to go into the business.”

“Your grandfather doesn’t think you’re cut out for it. Neither do I, really. Perhaps Arthur will lean that way. He’s more the type than you are. I’d thought that you might skip the business and have a look at the profession.”

“I don’t follow—”

“My profession. Let’s not be coy about this. You know, or you probably guess, that I’ve been pretty close to Intelligence for the past while. Fascinating world. You don’t know what I’ve done, and you shan’t. I don’t have to tell you that it’s a matter of honour never to hint that I’ve even been near such work. The real work, I mean. People get wrong ideas. But I think you might have what’s wanted, and this Classics prize is nearer to what’s wanted than it would be in the financial game. But some of the best Intelligence men must be seen by the world to be doing something else—something that looks as if it took all their time. Being a painter would be very good cover. Able to mix widely, and people wouldn’t be surprised if you travelled and were a bit odd.”

“I’ve never thought about it.”

“Just as well. People who dream about it and hanker for it are just bloody hell at it. Too much zeal. At best they’re just gumshoe men—and women. You know you’ve got a heart?”

A heart? Did Father mean Bubbler Graham?

“I see McOdrum didn’t tell you. Yes, you’ve got a dicky heart, it appears. Not bad, but you mustn’t push yourself too hard. Now, that’s just the thing for the profession. Anybody wants to know why you’re loafing around, you must tell ’em you’ve got a heart, and most of ’em will assume you’re a bit of an invalid. Loaf and paint. Couldn’t be better. They thought I was just a soldier. Still do. Nobody expects a soldier to have any brains. Rather like being an artist.”

“You mean—I’d be a spy?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Frank, don’t use that word! That’s Phillips Oppenheim stuff. No, no; just a noticing sort of chap who goes anywhere and does what he pleases, and meets all sorts of people. Not false whiskers and covering your face with walnut juice and letting on to be Abdul the Water-Carrier. Just be yourself, and keep your eye peeled. Meanwhile, go to Spook and then Oxford and pack your head with everything that looks interesting, and don’t listen to fools who want you to do something that looks important to them. You’ve got a heart, you see.”

“But what would I have to do?”

“I can’t say. Perhaps just write letters. You know—friendly letters to chaps you know, about this and that. Mind you, I’m talking rather freely. There’d be nothing doing for a while. But you ought to meet some people, as soon as possible. I can arrange for you to meet them when you’re in England this summer.”

“Am I going to England?”

“Don’t you want to?”

“Oh yes; it’s just that I hadn’t thought about it.”

“It’s time you met some of my people. I haven’t said anything about it, Frank, because after all they’re your mother’s people, but there’s more to you than just that lot at St. Kilda. I mean old Mary-Ben with her priests and her fusspot ways, and your grandmother—nice woman, of course, but she’s going to end up like old Madame Thibodeau. There are other people in your life. You ought to meet my lot. We’re half of you, you know. Maybe the half that will appeal to you more than the Blairlogie crowd.”

“Did you hate Blairlogie, Father?”

“Not hate, exactly; I don’t let myself hate any place where I have to be. But a little of Blairlogie was enough. Why do you ask?”

“I remember at the farewell party you gave at the hotel at Blairlogie, and you and Grandfather were the only men who wore evening dress, and Alphonse Legaré came up to you half-stewed and laughed in your face and struck a match on the front of your dress shirt.”

“I remember.”

“You didn’t move an inch or bat an eye. But it was worse than if you had hit him, because you didn’t think he was in the same world as you were. He couldn’t touch you. I admired that. That was real class.”

“Awful word.”

“It’s the word we use for the real goods. You had the real goods.”

“Well—thanks, my boy. That’s the profession, you understand. No losing your temper. No doing stupid things.”

“Not even if your honour is affected? Not if somebody you trusted with everything turned out to be not worthy of it?”

“You don’t trust people till you’ve learned a lot about them. Obviously you are thinking of someone. Who is it?”

“Father, what do you really think of Fred Markham?”

The Wooden Soldier rarely laughed, but he laughed now.

“He’s good enough for what he is, but that isn’t much. I think I know what’s on your mind, Frank; don’t let Fred Markham worry you. He’s a trivial person, a kind of recreation for a lot of women. But he hasn’t got what you call the real goods.”

“But Father, I saw him—”

“I know you did. Your mother told me. She thought you were taking it quite the wrong way. People must have recreations, you know. Change. But a day on the golf-course isn’t running off across the world. So don’t worry. Your mother can take care of herself. And take care of me, too.”

“But I thought—vows—”

“Loyalties, you mean? You find out that loyalties vary and change outwardly, but that doesn’t mean they are growing weaker inwardly. Don’t worry about your mother and me.”

“Does that mean that Mother is just another form of what you call cover?”

“True, and not true. Frank—I don’t suppose you know much about women?”

Who likes to admit he doesn’t know much about women? Every man likes to think he knows more about women than his father. Frank would have bet that he had seen more naked women than his father had ever dreamed of, though he was not boastful about the quality of what he had seen. Those pallid figures at Devinney’s. No beauty chorus. But Francis had long outgrown the ignorance of Blairlogie days; he knew what people did. Like animals, but love made it splendid. He thought patronizingly of poor Woodford at school, who had revealed during a bull-session that he thought children were begotten through the woman’s navel! At seventeen! How they had kidded Woodford and pictured what it would be like on his wedding night! Francis knew all about the Particular that the encyclopaedia and a lot of Colborne school-biology could tell him. And he knew anatomy, and could draw a woman without her skin on—out of a book. Father obviously meant intimacy with women, and Francis was aware that though he could draw quite a decent flayed woman he had never touched a warm one until Bubbler Graham had made it easy for him. The Wooden Soldier was going on.

“I’ve had quite a bit to do with women. Professionally, as well as personally. They can be useful in Intelligence work. D’you know, I even met the famous Mata Hari a few times. A stunner. Fine eyes, but chunkier built than they like ’em today. When they shot her at last she was forty-one—just about the age your mother is now and every bit as beautiful as your mother. In the profession, you know, their usefulness is limited, because it’s all business with them, and they’re always looking for a better deal. Now the men—lots of them are mercenary, of course, but some of the best will work for a cause, or love of country. I sometimes think a woman has no country; only a family. And of course there are the men who can’t resist adventure. Not women, though they’re often called adventuresses. They work with their bodies, you see, and of course their outlook is different. Mind you, I’ve met some astonishing women in the profession. Marvellous at code and cypher, but they’re an entirely different sort—the puzzle-solving mentality. Those are the bluestockings; not usually very interesting as women. The adventuresses are bitches. Always on the take.

“Still—I didn’t ask you here to talk about that. Just about women in general. My advice is: never have anything to do with a woman, high or low, who expects to be paid. They’re all crooks, and unless you pay very high you’re likely to end up with something you never wanted to buy. No pay: that’s a good rule. I’d say—stick to widows. There are lots of them, especially since the War, and you don’t have to go outside your own class, which is important if you have any real respect for women. Be generous, of course, and play decent and straight, and you’ll be all right. That’s that, I think. Now, what do you intend to do?”

“I don’t think I know any widows.”

“Oh, you will. But that’s not what I meant. Will you go to England this summer? Spook in the autumn?”

“Yes, Father. It sounds great.”

“Good. And when you’re in England you’d better meet one or two of the chaps. I’ll arrange it.”

FRANK MISSED HIS CHANCE to ask his father about the Looner, said the Lesser Zadkiel.

—Did you think he had a chance? The Major was a very accomplished talker—which took the form of not seeming to be accomplished at all, but never losing his grip on the way things were going. He overwhelmed Francis with new ideas—the profession, going to England to meet the Cornishes, how to cope with women. With a glass of sherry and a glass of club wine in his unhabituated gizzard, Francis never had a chance to initiate any new subject, or challenge a long-held secret. You know about secrets: they grow more and more mysterious, then suddenly they crumple away and everybody wonders why they were ever secret. The secret of the Looner was some years behind him in Blairlogie, and Francis couldn’t keep up with the extraordinary things his father was telling him—that he didn’t much mind his mother kissing Fred Markham, that he had really been in the Secret Service, that widows were the thing. The Major was an old hand at important conversations.

FRANCIS SAT IN THE RUINS of the Castle of Tintagel, trying to think about King Arthur. This was holy ground, the very place in which Arthur was begotten by Uther Pendragon upon the beautiful Igraine, wife of the Duke of Cornwall. The enchanter Merlin had made that possible. But try as he would to think about the great story, all Francis could do was to look north-west over the heaving, gleaming sea from which came, so it seemed, all the light of Cornwall. This sea-light, reflected back toward the sky as if the sea itself had some source of light beneath it, had puzzled and dominated him during the whole month he had spent with the Cornishes of Chegwidden. The light gave new meaning to the legends he had brought, as appropriate luggage for a Cornish holiday. This was not the light of the pre-Raphaelite pictures, the moony glow that bathed those impossibly noble men and perversely beautiful women; this was a world-light, a seemingly illimitable light that the sea, like a dull mirror, yielded in a form so diffused that the whole peninsula of Cornwall was pervaded by it, and although manifestly there were shadows to be seen, nevertheless the light seemed to defy shadows, and cast itself on every side of every object.

In this extraordinary, unfamiliar light—unfamiliar to Francis, who had never lived near the sea—it was surely possible to plunge oneself into the world of legend? Looking from this storied headland might one not imagine one saw the painted sails of the ship that bore Tristan and Iseult toward their meeting with King Mark? But try as he would to bully his thoughts into this legendary and poetic mode, all Francis could think of was the Cornishes of Chegwidden, and how odd they were.

Odd because they lived in this enchanted land, and appeared to be utterly impervious to enchantment. Odd because they lived where the saints of the ancient Celtic Church had proclaimed Christ’s gospel in a truly Celtic voice, long before the dark-skinned missionaries of Augustine had come from Rome with their Mediterranean Catholicism, to preach and impose belief with all the fanaticism of their kind. Apparently the Cornishes of Chegwidden had never heard of Celtic Christianity, or, if they had, could not understand that it might be something more interesting than the Low Church faith of St. Ysfael, in whose parish they lived and were the great folk. Surely the name of St. Ysfael was Celtic enough and old enough to nudge the most sluggish historical sense? The church had been there, in one form or another, since the sixth century; they knew that. But what really interested them was that in the nineteenth century a devout Cornish had contributed the thumping sum of five hundred pounds to have St. Ysfael done up in the height of Victorian Gothic style, and they were determined that not a brass ornament or an encaustic tile should be changed. There was a family story that this pious Cornish had caused a lot of old panelling—fifteenth-century or something of the sort—to be ripped out and burned, as rubbish, when the great work of restoration was done.

Odd because they seemed unaware that King Arthur might have ridden over what were now their own parklands, and that some of their oldest trees might have grown from grand acorns of trees under which the great King—the dux bellorum of the earliest records—had reined in his horse to rest and look about him in the mysterious light of the peninsula that was Cornwall. When Francis had mentioned this as a possibility, his uncle—who was named Arthur Cornish, of all things—had looked at him queerly and said that unquestionably there was a tree in the park that had been planted to celebrate the coronation of Queen Victoria, and it was coming into promising maturity, for an oak, at this very moment, having survived two serious periods of blight.

What really interested Uncle Arthur was something called the Local Bench, upon which he sat as a magistrate as every Cornish had done for as long as there had been a Bench, and which he was now disagreeably expected to share with tradesmen and even a local socialist, who could not understand that the essence of local justice lay in knowing the local people—which ones were decent folk and which were known poachers and riff-raff—and treating them accordingly. Uncle Arthur owned a good deal of property in lands and cottages, and it was on the rents of these that Chegwidden and all its ancient glory depended. If Uncle Arthur had ever heard of Oscar Wilde as anything but a damned bad type who would have received no mercy from the Local Bench, he had certainly never heard Wilde’s comment that land gives one position and prevents one from keeping it up. He would have agreed that there, at least, the bugger knew what he was talking about. The merciless exactions of modern government on landowners was his favourite topic, and if any of his kin had ever heard the word paranoia, they might have recognized that on this theme Uncle Arthur was distinctly paranoid. Modern government, he was sure, was a gigantic plot to ruin him, and in him all that was best in rural England.

His wife, Aunt May, would have described herself with appropriate modesty as a religious woman, for the doings of the parish and the services at St. Ysfael’s were her chief concern. Helping the poor, so far as the waning fortunes of the Cornishes would allow, and a repressive hand on any clergyman who showed a tendency to be High, were her great cares. What she believed, nobody knew, for she was firm in her reticence on all matters relating to the inner life. In church she was seen to pray, but to What, and what she said to It, and how It worked in her daily life, nobody knew. The chances were strong that she prayed for her son Reginald, who was with his regiment in India, and her son Hubert, who was in the Navy and hoped for a command soon, and her daughter Prudence, who had married Roderick Glasson, another oppressed neighbouring squire. Unquestionably she prayed for her tribe of grandchildren, but how efficacious such prayers were was a matter of speculation, for they were a wild lot and gave Francis a good deal of trouble.

He never, during his month at Chegwidden, got them properly sorted into families, for they came and went inexplicably, roaring in and out of the house with cricket bats and bicycles, and small guns, if they were boys. As for the girls, they were doing their uttermost, it seemed to the quiet Canadian, to get themselves killed, riding ponies in a horrible parody of polo, which they played in a meadow full of rabbit holes, so that the ponies were always stumbling, and the girls were always pitching over their heads into the path of other charging ponies. They all regarded him as a huge joke, even when he tried to impress them with his skill (learned at an expensive boys’ camp) in making a fire without matches. Because of this they called him the Last of the Mohicans, and treated his enthusiasm for King Arthur as a form of American madness. He never could be sure whose were Reginald’s, and whose Hubert’s, though he knew that two of the girls must be Prudence’s, because they assured him daily that if their older sister, Ismay Glasson, could only meet him, she would soon put him to rights. They were very proud of Ismay because she was a Terror, even among the Chegwidden lunatics. But Ismay was abroad, staying with a French family to improve her accent, and doubtless terrorizing the French.

At the family table, over bad food in restricted quantities, Francis had tried to introduce some topic that would reveal whether or not the Chegwidden Cornishes knew what a great man his father was, and how intimate he was with the Chaps Who Knew, up in London. But he discovered that Sir Francis was merely a younger brother, so far as Uncle Arthur was concerned, and that in Aunt May’s mind it was a pity that if there had to be a Lady Cornish at all, that Lady Cornish should be an American—for the Cornishes were pig-headedly determined that the pretence of Canadians not to be Americans was sheer affectation, to be rebuked whenever possible. As for the fortune that the Wooden Soldier had acquired by his marriage and his value as a trust company figurehead, it was plainly a sore touch at Chegwidden; to be a younger son, and to have money, when the elder son was struggling to keep his head above water, was intolerable cheek. So Francis was made to feel that he was not only the Last of the Mohicans, but a Rich American. He was sure the Chegwidden Cornishes did not mean it unkindly; it was simply that their excellent manners were not strong enough to keep their jealousy in complete abeyance.

From the family table Francis sometimes lifted his eyes above his plate of congealing mutton stew to look at the family portraits that hung above the wainscot. They were, he had to admit, ghastly. They were worse, because older and more blackened and scabby, than the portraits in the Prayer Hall at school. But out of them all, though the form varied, stared the family face, a long, horsy face with gooseberry eyes in which, in some portraits, a distinction, an air of intelligence and command, showed itself. As he looked around the table, at Uncle Arthur and at the grandchildren (for of course Aunt May did not count, being a mere breeding machine in the great complex of Cornishes), that face, disappointed and severe in Uncle Arthur, and peering through puppy-fat, or schoolboy awkwardness, or under ill-braided pigtails, was repeated in a variety of styles, but always, in form and mannerism, the same. And, when he went to bed in his chilly room, he could see, in the whorled mirror, that even under the black hair he had from the McRorys, it was his own face, and that his black hair and his gooseberry eyes gave him a look which would some day be startling.

Chegwidden: a disappointment, really. After all he had suffered because of that difficult name, which was not only queer in itself but a nuisance in pronunciation, he had at least expected an impressive dwelling and, as the name suggested, a white building. But no: Chegwidden was a large, low, grubby-looking mansion of brownish-gray stone, with a lowering, unfriendly front door, pinched little windows, and a slate roof on which moss grew in patches. Old it unquestionably was; such inconvenience could not have been achieved in anything less than four centuries. Smelly it was, too, for a much-tinkered Victorian system of plumbing had never really come to terms with what was demanded of it. As it seemed to be a family habit never to throw anything away, it was cluttered with furniture and ornaments, pride of place being given to things that various Cornishes had brought home from military or naval service abroad. But the total effect was faded, down-at-heel, uncomfortable, and valetudinarian. School had habituated Francis to shabbiness and discomfort and stinks, but his notion of a family dwelling was the rich, velvety ugliness of St. Kilda, or his mother’s uncompromisingly fashionable house in Toronto. How did the Cornishes put up with a house where every chair, in the midst of summer, embraced the sitter like a cold sitz-bath, and every bed was dank from the sea mists?

Yet Father had assured him that at least half his root was here.

Try as he might, he could not evoke King Arthur, even in the ruins of Tintagel. He bicycled back through Camelford to Chegwidden, glad that tomorrow he would return to London, and after a few days take ship for Canada.

“DID YOU ENJOY your visit to Cornwall?”

“Thank you, sir. It was very interesting.”

“But not enjoyable?”

“Oh, very enjoyable. But I thought people living there would have been more aware of the history of the place.”

“The Cornishes are the history of the place. I suppose they think of history as something that happens elsewhere. A bit provincial, was it?”

“I wouldn’t like to say that.”

“You’re a cautious fellow, aren’t you, Francis?”

“I don’t like to make hasty judgements. This is my first time in England, you see.”

“But it certainly won’t be your last, your father tells me. Going up to Oxford eventually?”

“That’s the plan.”

“By that time you might be quite a useful chap. Your father tells me you might end up in the profession.”

So that was what it was! That was why Colonel Copplestone had asked him to lunch in the Athenaeum, an impressive club in the West End, though certainly not much ahead of Chegwidden in the matter of food. Francis had been expecting something like this, Colonel Copplestone must be one of the Chaps Who Knew.

“Father spoke about it.”

“And you liked the idea?”

“I was flattered.”

“Well—no promises, of course. Just follow your nose. But we’re always on the lookout for promising young men, and if they’re promising enough, we might make a few promises later on.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Are you a letter-writer?”

“Sir?”

“Write interesting letters, do you? If you’re really interested, I want you to write letters to me.”

“What about?”

“About what you’re doing—and seeing—and thinking. I’d like a letter from you not less than once a fortnight. Write to me at this address; it’s my country place. And in the letters you address me as Uncle Jack, because I’m an old friend of your father’s, and that’s appropriate. I’m your godfather.”

“Are you, sir? I hadn’t known.”

“Neither had I, till I met you today. But that’s what I am now. So you write to me as a godfather, which is a very good relationship, because it can mean nothing very much, or quite a lot. Just one thing, though; don’t mention that your father, or your godfather, has anything whatever to do with the profession.”

“I’m not really very sure what the profession is.”

“No, of course not. For the present, it’s just the profession of men who follow their noses and see whatever’s to be seen. I don’t think we want any blancmange, do you? Let’s take our mud coffee upstairs.”

Dear Uncle Jack:

Cornwall was really great, but I liked London better. I have never seen such pictures before. Our gallery in Toronto is small, and not very good, because we have no money to buy the really first-rate pictures. Not yet. Maybe it will come. I am trying now to find out about the new pictures, by the new men, and I went to as many private galleries in London as I could, and saw a lot of stuff that puzzled me. I might as well tell you, though, that the people who ran the galleries, or perhaps I should say the young men who showed off the pictures to possible buyers, were as interesting as the pictures themselves. They are so silky, and they talk so easily about tactile values and nouveau vague, and a lot of things that were away over my head. I hadn’t really understood what an ignoramus I am.

I’ve read a bit about the new stuff. Quite a lot, really. And I understand (or think I do) that a picture shouldn’t really be about anything. Not like those awful pictures that tell a story, or show upper-class kids feeding robins in the snow, or show you Hope, or the Soul’s Awakening or something that is intended to make you feel religious, or wistful. No, a picture is just patterns of line and colour arranged on a flat surface, because it’s no good kidding yourself that it isn’t flat, is it? I mean, perspective is all very fine if it’s mathematics, but if it tries to kid you that you are looking into depth it’s a cheat. Pictures are pure form and colour. Anyway, that’s what the new books say, and certainly that is what the silky chaps in the galleries say. Nix on emotion. Perhaps even nix on meaning anything except what is in front of one’s nose.

The trouble is that in some of the best of the new stuff emotion and meaning keep breaking in. Like this chap Picasso. I saw some of his stuff at one of the galleries, and if it’s just form and colour on a flat surface, I’m dreaming. It’s a statement of some sort. Not that I could tell you what the statement is, but I’m sure it’s there, and I’m sure that if I can stick with it long enough, I’ll find the meaning.

And Old Masters! Of course I’ve done my best with the new painting, but I admit I liked the Old Masters best. I think I know why. As you know, I was raised a Catholic—or perhaps not exactly raised one but a lot of Catholicism was bootlegged into my early days by a great-aunt, and unless I can drain every drop of it out of me—and I don’t seem to have much luck doing that—those Nativities and Adorations and Crucifixions and Transfigurations can never be simply clever arrangements of line, volume, and colour for me. They are statements, some strong, some not so strong, some fancy, some terribly plain. Were the old boys wrong? I try to think so, but it won’t work.

You are partly to blame, godfather. You say follow your nose, and if I do it takes me in some very unmodern and unfashionable directions. If I’m to see pictures the modern way, and no other way, I guess I’ll have to cut off my nose. And that would spite my face, wouldn’t it?

I don’t intend to spite my face, ever, or turn my back on old friends. Do you know of a caricaturist and illustrator called Harry Furniss? I owe a lot to him, or I should say to a book of his that was my Bible for a while. The other day, in a shop that sells drawings and pictures, I found an original sketch of an actor called Lewis Waller (never heard of him) by H.F. and I bought it, just for old sake’s sake, for ten pounds. Which is pretty steep for my pocket. But I couldn’t resist it. Just to have something H.F. had touched. How the silky boys would despise it, but it’s a wonder of artistic economy.

I have sore feet from trudging through the National Gallery, the Tate, the Wallace, the Victoria and Albert. All full of marvels. And what do you think? I have a favourite picture! I know I shouldn’t, and crushes on works of art are the worst kind of amateurism, but it absolutely stuns me. In the Nat. Gal. a big picture called An Allegory of Time by Bronzino; 1502-72 it says and otherwise I know nothing about him. But what a statement! And what is the statement and what is the allegory? I stare and stare and can’t figure it out.

Do you know it? What hits you first is the nude figure of a beautiful woman, superbly fleshly and naked as a jay-bird except for a coronet of jewels. I mean she isn’t just nude, which can be like a corpse on the embalmer’s table, but astonishingly naked. A youth who looks about fourteen stoops toward her from the left, kissing her, and it’s plain that her tongue is pushing between his lips—French kissing they call that, godfather—and if they are really mother and son it’s a pretty queer situation; furthermore his right hand is on her left breast, the nipple peeping between his index and second fingers, which it wouldn’t do unless the kiss meant more than just good-morning or something like that. His left hand is drawing her head toward him. On the right a stout baby, with a knowing smile, is winding up to throw some roses over them. So far, so good. But a vigorous, muscular old man, looking as though he wasn’t very pleased by the goings-on, is either drawing a blue curtain over this scene, or else he is revealing it. Can’t be sure. A woman is helping him, only her head visible, but beneath her and just behind Cupid’s out-thrust rump is another woman whose face is torn with pain—is it? or could it be jealousy? Behind the fat baby is a creature with a childlike but not an innocent face, and the body attaching to it ends in a serpent’s tail and the terrible feet of a lion. Two masks, one young and one old, lie on the ground.

What do you make of that fine thing? God only knows, at present, but I mean to make it my business to know, because it’s saying something, just as my great-aunt’s awful, skilful pictures of Cardinals joking and boozing say something. Those are saying that the Church is powerful and classy, but Bronzino says—something about a very different world, and a world I want to learn about. Nobody is going to tell me it’s just an arrangement of form and colour. It’s what my great-aunt calls A Good Lesson.

I am learning fast. I have already caught on that Bouguereau wasn’t really a great painter, though he was an astonishing technician. Bought another drawing yesterday, just some scratches of the Virgin and Child, with a scribble that might be one of the Magi. Cost me twenty-five pounds and I shall not be eating at the Café Royal tonight I assure you. But I’m sure it’s a Tiepolo. Maybe School Of.

Off on the boat-train in the morning. It was wonderful to see you. Shall write again soon.

Yr. affct. godson

Frank

Not bad for a lad of nineteen, thought Colonel John Copplestone, as he tucked the letter into a newly opened file.

BY THE TIME Francis had completed four years at the College of Saint John and the Holy Ghost (irreverently called Spook by all students and by faculty members when they were not obliged to be on their best behaviour) in the University of Toronto, the file in Colonel John Copplestone’s study was a fat one, and there was an additional file, not so fat, in which the Colonel’s old friend and an honoured member of the profession who simply signed himself J.B. reported now and then on things which Francis might not have told his godfather. J.B. was officially the Warden of the Students’ Union at the University of Toronto, but he was a great letter-writer, and although most of his letters were simply dutiful communications with his aged mother in Canterbury, quite a few of them went to Colonel Copplestone, and some of these went farther still, to the Chaps Who Knew. Even in a trusted, if not beloved, Dominion, things may happen about which inside information is welcome to the Secret Service of the mother country, and J.B. supplied a good deal of it.

His comments on Francis, boiled down, would not have seemed particularly significant unless one happened to be recruiting for the profession. Francis was fairly well liked, but was not one of the most popular undergraduates; nothing of the Big Man on Campus about him. He seemed not to have much to do with girls, although he was not indifferent to them. On the other hand, his friendships with young men were not intense. Francis had made one or two attempts to appear in productions at the University Theatre, and was a wooden, disastrous actor, his black hair and green eyes making him look odd under theatre circumstances. Outside his studies he did not cut much of a figure, but he was a surprisingly useful member of the Union Pictures Committee; he could spot a good thing, and urge that it be bought, when the other undergraduates who worked with J.B. simply didn’t know their Picassos from a hole in the ground. Francis was already buying Canadian pictures for himself in the twenty-five-to hundred-dollar range. Though he came of a rich family he didn’t have a lot of money to throw around, and once J.B. had asked him why he was wearing no overcoat on a sub-zero day, to be told that Francis had hocked his coat to buy a Lawren Harris that he couldn’t resist. He hoarded what money he had in order to buy pictures. Spent none of it on himself, and had the reputation of being “close” with money, which probably accounted for his lack of contact with girls, who are great eaters and drinkers. He drew a good deal, and had decided talent as a caricaturist, but for some reason didn’t choose to exploit it; nevertheless the caricaturist’s gleam was often seen in his green eye, when he thought nobody was looking. Did pretty well in his studies, and astonished everybody when at the end of his fourth year he took the Chancellor’s Prize in Classics, even though Classics wasn’t in vogue. This would give him a good push forward at Oxford, and J.B., who had drag at Oxford, would see that it did not go unheeded.

A candidate for the profession? Possibly. The Oxford days would tell, thought Colonel Copplestone. After all, the boy was still only twenty-three.

DURING THE SUMMER before his departure for Oxford, Francis paid a visit to Blairlogie. He might not have thought of doing so if his mother had not urged him to make the effort. The people there are getting old, she said; you see Grand-père now and then, but Grand’mère and Aunt have not seen you for—oh, more than ten years. It’s the least you can do, darling. So, in hot August weather, off he went.

The journey, once he had left the main line and taken the train which struck northward toward Blairlogie, seemed to be almost violent in its reversal of time. From the excellent modern train in which, because his parents had paid for his ticket, he travelled in the chair-car, which had radio earphones at every seat, he changed to a primitive affair in which an ancient, puffing engine pulled a baggage coach and one passenger coach at a stately twenty miles an hour through the hinterland. The passenger coach was old without being venerable; it had a great deal of fretwork ornamentation in wood that had once been glossy, but the green plush seats were mangy and slick, the floor was poorly swept, and it stank of coal-dust and long use. Because of the heat the windows that would still open were opened, and grit and smoke from the engine occasionally swept through the car. There were stops at tiny stations in the middle of nowhere, usually in order that some small piece of freight might be unloaded. There were other stops in order that the journal-boxes might cool; the train was prone to that plague of old running-stock, the hot-box.

At noon the train halted in the midst of rocky scrubland where there was not a roof in sight. “If any of yez haven’t brought yer lunch, yez can get dinner up on the hill at th’ old lady’s. Costs a quarter,” said the conductor, and himself led a small procession up the hill where, in the old lady’s kitchen, chunks of fat bacon and fried potatoes were ready on the back of the wood-stove; on top of each plate of meat was laid a slab of rhubarb pie. The etiquette, Francis saw, was to remove the pie delicately (so as not to break it) and lay it on the pine table beside the plate, until the latter had been cleared and wiped with a chunk of bread; then the pie was lifted back to the plate to be devoured with the well-sucked fork, and washed down with the old lady’s coffee, which was boiling hot, but not strong. Fifteen minutes were allowed for this repast, and when the conductor rose everybody rose, and put a quarter into the hand of the unsmiling, unspeaking old lady. The conductor, it seemed, did not pay; he led his pilgrims in single file down the hill to the waiting train. The engine-driver and the fireman (who doubled as brakeman) had eaten thriftily from lunch-boxes by the side of the line. They clambered back into the cab, belching enjoyably, and the train resumed its sleepy, stately course.

Late in the afternoon the conductor tramped importantly through the car, shouting, “Blairlogie! End of the line! Blairlo-gie!”, as if some passengers could possibly have been in doubt about the matter. Then the conductor hastened to be first off the train and was well away up the street toward his home before Francis could get his suitcase down from the overhead rack, and set foot once again in the place of his birth.

Blairlogie had changed, if the old train had not. Few horses were to be seen on the streets, and some of the streets themselves had been paved. Shops bore different names, and the Ladies’ Emporium, where Grand’mère had always bought her hats (because the Misses Sim, though Protestants, had undoubtedly the best taste, and the deftest hands with artificial cherries and roses, in town), had vanished altogether, and weeds grew where it had stood. There was a movie-house, too, which seemed to mean that a gaudy front had been stuck on a failed grocery-store. The McRory Opera House, farther up the street, was closed, and had an offended, snubbed look. Trees were taller but buildings were smaller. Donoghue’s blacksmith-shop was not to be seen and, most significant change of all, a motor truck laden with cut timber was making its way up the street, and the name on its side was not his grandfather’s name.

But when he got away from the business street and up the hill, St. Kilda looked as it always had looked, and when he rang the bell it was undoubtedly Anna Lemenchick, though broader and seemingly shorter, who answered. She said nothing—she never did say anything when she answered the door—but there was a scampering upstairs, and Aunt Mary-Ben came rattling down, rather dangerously on the polished hardwood, and threw herself at him. She was so tiny; had he really grown so much?

“Francis! Dear, dear boy! How big you are! Oh, and so handsome! Oh, Mother of God, isn’t this a happy day! Did you take the taxi? We’d have sent, only there’s nobody to send just now—Zadok in hospital and all. Oh, what will Grand’mère say when she sees you! Come, come right away and see her, Frankie, my own dear. It’ll do her more good than anything!”

Grand’mère was in bed, a mountain of flesh, but yellow and sour-smelling. Conversation with her was in French, because she found English an effort now. She was considerably younger than the Senator—who was, as usual, away in Ottawa, or in Montreal, or in Toronto, on some business or other—but chronology had nothing to do with what ailed her, and she might have been ten years older than her real age, which was sixty-eight.

“Dr. J.A. is reserved about dear Marie-Louise,” said Aunt Mary-Ben, as she and Francis ate the bad dinner that evening. “We fear what’s wrong, of course, but he won’t be plain about it. You remember how he always was. You can’t undo nearly seventy years of overeating, he says. But could hearty eating really bring on that? I pray for her, of course, but Dr. J.A. says the age of miracles is past. Oh, Frankie, Frankie, it’s a dreadful thing, but we must all go in the end, mustn’t we, and your dear Grand’mère has led such a good life—not a thing to reproach herself with—so though it’s hard for us, we must bow to His will.”

The ruling passion, it appeared, was still strong. That night Francis played for three hours with Aunt and Grand’mère, who could summon up spirit for the game. It was euchre. The deck of thirty-two cards was ready when they went upstairs, and on and on, remorselessly and almost without speaking, they played hand after hand. Francis, as the least experienced, was euchred again and again, and he could not but notice that frequently his grandmother’s hand would disappear beneath the covers, presumably to press some aching part or to ease her bedgown, and when it reappeared—could that have been the flash of a card that had not been there before? An unworthy thought, and he pushed it down, but not quite out of sight. Mary-Ben was willing enough to lose, but Francis had not come to the time of life when he understood that winning is not always a matter of taking the trick.

As they parted at bedtime, he whispered to Aunt, “What’s the news of Madame Thibodeau?”

“She doesn’t get out much now, Francis; she’s become so stout you see. But she’s wonderful. Stone deaf, but she plays cards three times a week. And wins! Oh dear me, yes; she wins! Eighty-seven, now.”

WHERE WAS Victoria Cameron? Who was caring for the Looner?

It appeared that Aunt had been forced to get rid of Victoria Cameron. She had kicked over the traces just once too often, and Aunt had turned her out lock, stock, and barrel. She had not been replaced as cook, but Anna Lemenchick did her best, helped out by old Mrs. August’s youngest girl, who was willing, though not very bright. Anna’s best was not good, but with poor Marie-Louise reduced to a diet of liquids, Aunt had no heart to look for another first-rate cook, in spite of her brother’s urging. It seemed heartless, didn’t it, to hire somebody to cook dishes poor Grand’mère could not hope to taste?

Francis was still incapable of telling Aunt that he knew about the Looner, but on his first night at St. Kilda he crept upstairs while he knew Aunt would be busy on her prie-dieu. All the curtains that had deadened sound were gone. Nobody slept up there because Anna Lemenchick came by the day. He tried the door of the room which had once been hospital and madhouse and prison, but it was locked.

In his childhood room, which seemed to have lost substance, like everything else at St. Kilda, Francis caught sight of himself as he undressed, in the long mirror before which he had once postured in a mockery of women’s attire. A young man, with hair on his chest and legs, black curls clustering about his privates; moved by an impulse he could have denied, but to which he yielded, he once again drew the bed cover about him and looked at what he saw—looked hungrily for the girl who should have been behind the mirror, but was not. Where was she? He had not found her in any of the girls with whom, at Spook, he had sought her. She must be somewhere, that girl from the world of myth, from the real Cornwall of his imagination. He would not believe it could be otherwise. But the consequence of his gazing brought on such arousal that he had to “choke the ghost”, which was school slang for masturbation. As always, the act brought relief and disgust, and he fell asleep in a bad temper. He didn’t want crushes and affairs and the student amusements he heard so much about at Spook. He wanted love. He was twenty-three, which he thought very old to be without love, and he wondered what could possibly be the matter with him, or with his fate, or whatever decreed such things. Hell!

He had no trouble, the next morning, in finding Victoria Cameron. She was smack in the middle of the main street, in a small shop which said, over the door, CAMERON FANCY BAKED GOODS, and inside she stood behind the counter amid a profusion of her best work.

“Well, you never thought leaving your grandfather’s house would be the ruin of me, did you, Frankie? It’s been the making of me. Dad and the boys baking the bread as always, and me making the fancy stuff here, we’re doing a land-office business, let me tell you. No, I’m not married, nor will I ever be, though it’s not for want of offers, let me tell you. I’ve better things to do than slaving for some man, and you can bet on that.”

“Zadok? That’s a sad story. He wanted to marry me, but can you imagine that? I told him straight: Not as long as you do what you do at Devinney’s, I told him, and don’t give it up, because I wouldn’t marry you even if you gave it up. I’m too fond of my own way, I said. But it hurt him. You could see that. I don’t pretend that was all of it, but it may have been part of it.

“I think it was that poor boy’s death that hit him hardest. You hadn’t heard about that? No, I don’t suppose there’d be anybody tell you. Zadok felt he’d done it, in a way.”

A pause, during which a group of customers, who looked curiously at Francis, were accommodated with a half-dozen of lemoncurd tarts, another half-dozen of the raspberry tarts, two lemon pies promised for a wedding anniversary, and a big bag of cream puffs. Not to speak of two crusty white and two brown and two raisin loaves. When this press of business was completed, Victoria continued. “Zadok was always one for his beer, you remember. And after I told him flat there was nothing doing so far as I was concerned he took to bringing it up to that room on the top floor, to drink while he sang to Frankie—the other Frankie. You know, Francis, he loved that boy. You might almost have thought he was his own. Zadok had a heart in him, you’ve got to give him that. I didn’t like him bringing in the beer, but I couldn’t have stopped it without more trouble than it seemed to me to be worth. And I think there was some spite in it. Men are funny, you know, Francis. I think Zadok wanted to show me that if I wouldn’t have him, he’d go to the Devil, hoping maybe I’d change my mind to save him. But I wasn’t raised to think you can save people. If they can’t save themselves—that’s to say, as far as anybody can—nobody else can do it for them. We all have our fate to live out, and I knew it wasn’t my fate to save Zadok. So he’d drink a lot, and get silly, and drink healths to Frankie, and Frankie knew something cheerful and jolly was meant, and he’d laugh in that sort of lingo that was all he could manage. But I was firm on the one thing: I wouldn’t let Zadok give Frankie any of the beer.

“Probably that’s what did it. Instead of beer, Frankie drank a lot of water. Harmless, wouldn’t you say? He’d just piss it into his diaper, and no harm done. But one night Zadok and I had a real knock-down row, because he was drinking more than usual and making too much noise, and at last I walked out on the two of them and told Zadok he could get Frankie ready for sleep by himself.

“Of course I knew he couldn’t. The boy relied on me to get him ready for the night, and I wouldn’t fail him. So after an hour or so, when I knew Zadok had gone, I went in to settle Frankie down, and I did, but I thought he looked a little queer, and he was heavy to lift. In the morning he was dead.

“Do you know what it was? Drownded! I had to get the old Aunt, and she sent for Dr. J.A., and after he looked at Frankie he said that was what it was. Drownded! You see, that poor boy wasn’t like other people. There was some gland right in the top of his head that wasn’t right, and when he went on that water toot with Zadok he must have drunk about—I don’t know—gallons maybe, and it was more than he could stand. The doctor said some of it must have got into his blood, and then into his lungs, and he drownded. The doctor called it pulmonary oedema. I’ve remembered it, because—well, you wouldn’t expect me to forget it, would you? So there had to be another funeral at night, though there was no priest this time, and now there really is a Frankie under that stone that was a fake for so long.

“No, they didn’t tell your parents. In fact, your mother never knew what was up there in the attic all those years. But your grandfather knew, of course, and he and Dr. J.A.—well, it’d be hard to say exactly what happened. They were both relieved, but it wouldn’t have done to let that show. I knew some money changed hands, to make sure Zadok kept his mouth shut. And in an awful way I suppose it was gratitude.

“The money was the end of him. Drank worse and worse, and his work at Devinney’s suffered; he did some jobs that scared the bereaved when they looked into the coffins—all swollen around the face, and a kind of boiled colour. So Devinney had to get rid of him. And the upshot of that was that he fell down drunk one winter night in the lane behind Devinney’s—because he had a sort of unnatural pull toward the place—and nearly froze, and they had to take both his legs off, and even at that they don’t seem to have been able to stop the gangrene. He’s up in the hospital now. It would be kind of you to go and see him. Yes, I go, once a week, and take a few tarts and things. That hospital food is worse than Anna Lemenchick’s.

“After poor Frankie was buried for the second time I didn’t last a week at St. Kilda. One morning the old Aunt and I went right to the mat, there in the kitchen, and she told me to go. Go, I said! It’s you that’ll go if I leave this kitchen! You and the Missus cramming yourselves at every meal worse than Zadok and his beer! Don’t think you’re firing me! I’m the one that’s doing the firing! Just see how you get along without me! You pair of old stuff-puddings! That was common of me, Francis, but I was worked up. Not even your grandfather could persuade me to stay after that. How could I stay in a place where I’d showed myself common?”

Francis knew that something had to be said, and though it is not easy for young people to say such things, he said it.

“Victoria, I don’t suppose anybody will ever know what you did for that fellow—Francis the First, I call him—but you were wonderful, and I thank you for him, and for everybody. You were an angel.”

“Well, I don’t see any need to get soft about it, Francis. I did what had to be done. As for thanks, your grandfather was very generous when the parting came. Your grandfather sees farther than most people. Who do you suppose is paying for Zadok in the hospital? And the money that allowed me to set up this place was a gift from him.”

“I’m glad. And you can play the tough Presbyterian all you please, Victoria, but I’ll go right on thinking of you as an angel.” And Francis kissed her soundly.

“Frank—for Heaven’s sake! Not in the shop! Suppose somebody saw!”

“They’d think there were more tarts in here than the ones in the showcase,” said Francis, and dodged through the door as the outraged Victoria called after him.

“That’s quite enough of that sort of talk. You’re worse than Zadok.”

WAS IT POSSIBLE to be worse than Zadok? When Francis visited him in the hospital later that day it seemed that Zadok’s decline could not be equalled. The ward was hot and stuffy; there were no patients in the other two beds, so Francis could talk freely to the wasted trunk that lay in the bed nearest the window, with a kind of cage under the sheet to lift it from where the legs had once been. The stench of disinfectant was oppressive, and from Zadok’s bed there came, from time to time, a whiff of something disgusting, a scent of evil omen.

“It’s this gang-green, they call it, Frankie. I can feel it all through me. B’God I can taste it. Can’t seem to stop it, though they’ve taken my legs. It’s an eating sore, y’know. Dr. J.A. says he’s never seen it so bad, though he’s seen some bad cases in the lumber camps. Says he doesn’t know why I’m not dead, because I’m a mass of corruption. He can talk like that to me because I’m an old soldier, me dear, and I can bear the worst. He’s not unkind; it’s just that he sees the world as a huge disease, and we’re all part of it.”

“It’s very, very bad luck, Zadok.”

“I’ve known very bad luck in my time, me dear. I’ve looked it right in its ugly mug, and it’s a terror. Yes, it’s a rum start what can happen to a man. I’ve never told you about South Africa, have I?”

“I knew you’d fought there.”

“I fought well there. I did some good work. I was up for promotion and a decoration. Then it all fell to pieces because of love. You wouldn’t think of that, would you? But love it was, and I’m not ashamed of it now.

“I was in a regiment raised in Cornwall, you see, and I went under the lead of a young man who was the son of the great family in my part. His father was an Earl, so he was a Lord. The Captain, he was. God, he was a handsome man, Frankie! We’d grown up together, almost, because I’d followed him all my life, hunting, fishing, roving, everything boys do. So of course I joined the regiment under him, and I was his batman—his personal servant, like. Before I joined I’d been two or three years in his father’s house as an under-servant, a footman that was, so it seemed a very natural thing that I should go on looking after his clothes, and even trimming his hair, like. We were friends, great friends, the way a master and a servant can be. And I swear to God he never laid a finger on me nor I on him in a way that would bring shame on either of us. It wasn’t like that; I’ve seen some o’ that, in the Army and out of it, and I swear it wasn’t like that. But I loved the Captain, the way you’d love a hero. And he was a hero. A very brave, fine man.

“Like many a hero, he was killed. Stopped a Boer sniper’s bullet. So we buried him, and I did my best for him right to the end. Dressed him, and saw his hair was washed, and he looked very fine in the cheap coffin that was all there was, of course. ‘Yes, let me like a soldier fall.’ Remember that song?

“I thought I’d die, too. At night I used to sneak out after Lights Out, and sit by his grave. One night a picket noticed me, lying on the grave and crying my heart out, and he reported me, and there was an awful fuss. I was charged, and the Colonel had a lot to say about how such behaviour was unworthy of a soldier and could be harmful to morale, and how such immoral relationships must be sharply discouraged, and I was discharged without honour and sent back home, and bang went my medal, and a big part of my life. The Colonel wasn’t one of our lot. Not a Cornishman, and he didn’t understand me. I wonder if he ever loved anything or anybody in his life. So that was very bad luck.”

“Terrible bad luck, Zadok. But I understand. It was like the love that held the Grail knights together, and the people who served them in innocent love.”

“Ah, well, I don’t know anything about that. But of course you’re part Cornish, aren’t you, Frankie? Not that I’d say they were a very loving lot, on the whole. But they’re a loyal lot.”

“What did you do in England?”

“Whatever I could. Servant, mostly, and some jobs for undertakers. But there was one thing that seemed almost as if it was meant to make up for the other, and it was love too, in a funny way.

“It was like a dream, really. That’s the way it seems to me now.

“There was one regimental sergeant-major—good bloke—that I’d known, and he was kind to me now and then. He had a funny sideline. Used to supply men—soldiers mostly—to places that wanted servants for big dos, just to dress the place up, you know; not really do much except wear the livery and look tall and trustworthy. Well, I’d been a footman, hadn’t I? Get a few bob for an easy night’s work.

“One night was a big night in one of the big hotels, and I was on the job, all gussied up in breeches and a velvet claw-hammer and white wig. No moustache then, of course. A servant must shave clean. We’d done our job and I was just about to take off the fancy clobber when some fellow—one of the upper waiters—rushed up to me and said, ‘Here, we’re short-handed; just take this up to number two-four-two will you, and give it in before you leave.’ And he handed me a tray with a bottle of champagne and some glasses on it, and dashed away. So up I went, knocked on the door, very soft as I’d been taught in the castle, and went in.

“Girl in there. Alone, so far as I could see. Beautiful girl, I remember, though I couldn’t say now what her face was like, because she was so beautifully dressed, and a servant isn’t supposed to stare, or even look anybody in the eye, unless asked. ‘Open it, please,’ she said. Soft voice; might have been French, I thought. So I opened and poured, and said, ‘Will that be all, madam?’ Because orders were that any lady had to be ‘madam’, not ‘miss’. ‘Wait a minute,’ said she. ‘I want to have a good look at you.’ And I still didn’t raise my eyes, you see, Frankie. I don’t know how long she looked. Might have been a minute. Might have been two. Then she says, very soft, ‘Do you ever go to the theatre?’ ‘Not much in my line, madam,’ said I. ‘Oh, you should,’ says she. ‘I’ve been and it’s perfectly wonderful. You haven’t seen Monsieur Beaucaire?’ ‘Don’t know the gentleman, madam,’ I said. ‘Of course you don’t,’ she said; ‘he’s imaginary. He’s in a play. He’s a valet who’s really a prince. And the actor who plays Monsieur Beaucaire is the most beautiful man in the world. His name is Mr. Lewis Waller,’ she said.

“Well, then I knew a little more. I’d heard of Lewis Waller. Matinee idol, they used to call him. A real swell. Then what she said really surprised me, and I had to look in her face.

“ ‘You’re the very image of him in Monsieur Beaucaire,’ she said. ‘The costume, the white wig. It’s astonishing! You must have a glass of champagne.’

“ ‘Strictly against orders, miss,’ I said, forgetting myself when I called her that.

“ ‘But strictly according to my orders,’ said she, very much the little princess. ‘I’m lonely, and I don’t like to drink alone. So you must have a glass with me.’

“I knew that was just swank. She wasn’t used to drinking much any time, not to speak of alone. But I did what she said. And I made my glass last, but she had three. We talked. She did, that’s to say. I kept mum.

“There was something amiss with her. Don’t know what it was. All excited, and yet not happy, as if she’d lost a shilling and found a sixpence, if you follow me.

“Well, I soon saw what it was. I had seen something of life, and I’d seen a good deal of women, of all kinds. She wanted it. You know what I mean? Not like some old woman who’s crazy with vanity and foolishness and fear of her own age. She wanted it, and I swear, Frankie, I didn’t take advantage of her. I just lived in the present, so to speak, and after some more talk I did what she wanted—not that she asked bolt outright or even seemed to know much about how it was managed. And I swear to you I was perfectly respectful, because she was a sweet kiddie and I wouldn’t have harmed her for the world. It was lovely. Lovely! And when it was over she wasn’t crying or anything, but looked as if she was ready for bed, so I carried her into the bedroom and laid her down, and gave her one good kiss, and left.

“Frank, it was the sweetest thing that ever happened in my whole life! A dream! It’d be hard to tell it to most people. They’d grin and know best, and think badly of her, and that would be dead wrong, for it wasn’t that way at all.

“When I was out in the corridor I passed a big mirror, and saw myself, in the livery and the white wig. I looked hard. Maybe I was Monsieur Beaucaire, whoever he was. Anyhow, it did something wonderful for me. I was able to put the Army disgrace and the dishonourable discharge behind me, and try to get on in the world.

“Not that I did, not in any big way But after a while I decided to try my luck in Canada, and fetched up here. And now I’ve ended like this.

“No, I never saw her again. Never knew her name. A rum start, me dear. That’s all you can say about it. A rum start.”

Zadok was weary, and Francis rose to go. “Is there anything I can do for you, Zadok?”

“Nobody can do anything for me, me dear. Nothing at all.”

“That’s not like you. You’ll get well. You’ll see.”

“Kindly meant, Frankie, but I know better. Suppose I did get well? No legs—what’d that add up to? Old soldier with no legs, playing the mouth-organ in the street? Not me! Not for Joe! So it’s good-bye, me dear.”

Zadok smiled a gap-toothed, red-nosed smile, but his moustache, once proudly dyed and now a yellowish grey, had still a dandified twist.

Francis, moved by an impulse he had no time to consider, leaned over the bed and kissed the ruined man on the cheek. Then he hurried from the room, for fear Zadok should see that he was weeping.

The little hospital was at some distance from the town. As Francis emerged, one of Blairlogie’s two taxis had just set down a passenger and was about to drive away. But the driver pulled up suddenly, and shouted: “Hey, Chicken! D’yuh want a taxi?” It was Alexander Dagg.

“No, thanks. I’ll walk.”

“Where yuh been?”

“I haven’t lived here for a good many years.”

“I know that. I ast yuh where yuh been.”

Francis did not answer.

“Visiting somebody in the hospital? That old bum Hoyle, I’ll bet. He’s dying, isn’t he?”

“Maybe.”

“No maybe about it. Say—d’yuh know what I’m going to tell yuh? Nobody was surprised what happened. My Maw says what happened to him is a warning to all boozers.”

During his time at Colborne College and Spook, Francis had learned a few things in the gymnasium he had not known when he was at Carlyle Rural. He was now more than six feet tall, and strong. He walked to the taxi, reached through the window by the driver’s seat, seized Alexander Dagg by the front of his shirt, and yanked him sharply toward the door.

“Hey! Go easy, Chicken. That hurts!”

“It’ll hurt worse if you don’t shut your big, loud mouth, Dagg. Now you listen to me: I don’t give a good god-damn what you think or what your evil-minded old bitch of a Maw thinks. Now you be on your way, or I’ll beat the shit out of you!” Francis thrust Alexander very hard against the steering-wheel, then wiped his hands on his handkerchief.

“Oh, so that’s how it is! Oh, I’m very sorry, Mr. Cornish, very sorry indeed, your royal highness. Say—d’yuh know what I’m going to tell yuh? My Maw says the McRorys are all a bunch of bloodsuckers, just using this town for whatever they can get out of it. Bloodsuckers, the lot of yez!”

This was hurled bitterly from the window as Alexander Dagg drove away, his head dangerously twisted so that he could not see where he was going; he narrowly missed hitting a tree. Francis should have kept his dignity and his undoubted victory, but he was not quite old enough for that. He picked up a stone and hurled it at the flying car, and had the satisfaction of hearing it strike with a force that undoubtedly damaged the taxi’s paint.

“OH DEAR, I had promised a duck for your last dinner, Francis, but this doesn’t seem to be a duck, does it? So what I said must have been un canard.”

“Certainly un canard, and this is un malard imaginaire, Mary-Ben. Look at this! The blood follows the knife as you cut it.”

“I’m afraid you’re right, J.A. Don’t eat it, Francis. You don’t have to be polite here.”

“I was brought up to be polite at this table by you, Aunt. I can’t stop now.”

“Yes, but not to the point of eating raw—what do you suppose it is, J.A.?”

“At a rough guess I should say that whatever is on our plates approached the oven believing itself to be a capon,” said the Doctor. “Mary-Ben, you can’t go on like this; Anna Lemenchick can’t cook and that’s all there is to it.”

“But J.A., she believes herself to be the cook.”

“Then you must shatter her illusion, before she kills you and Marie-Louise. I insist, on behalf of my patients. Ah, it was a sorry day when you let Victoria Cameron leave this house.”

“J.A., there was no help for it. She had become a tyrant—an utter tyrant. Kicked right over the traces if I made the slightest criticism—”

“Mary-Ben, learn to know yourself before it’s too late to learn anything! You nagged her without mercy because she was a Black Protestant, and you hadn’t the bigness of spirit to see that her quality as an artist raised her above mere matters of sect—”

“Joe, you are unkind! As if I could nag.”

“You’re a sweet nagger, Mary-Ben—the very worst kind. But we mustn’t wrangle on Francis’s last evening here. Now, what’s to follow this horrible duck or whatever it is? A pie, is it? God send the pastry isn’t raw.”

But the pastry was raw. Anna Lemenchick, stolid and indifferent to the amount of uneaten food she removed on the plates, now brought in a tray on which was a bowl of hot bread-and-milk for the patient upstairs. Aunt excused herself, and hurried off with the tray to feed Marie-Louise, who liked company with her meals of slops. Dr. J.A. rose and fetched a bottle of the Senator’s port from the sideboard, and sat down with Francis.

“Thank God, Anna can’t get her murderer’s hands on this,” he said, pouring out two large glasses. “This house is sinking into the earth, Francis, as you well can see.”

“I’m worried, Uncle Doctor. Nothing seems to be right here. Not just the food, but the whole feel of the place.”

“Francis, it’s stinginess. Senile parsimony is what ails Mary-Ben. She’s rolling in money, but she thinks she’s poor and won’t hire a decent cook. Your grandmother can’t eat the stuff, and Mary-Ben just eats this garbage to prove she’s right.”

“Uncle Doctor, tell me honestly—is Grand’mère going to die?”

“Oh yes, eventually. We all are. But when I couldn’t say. She hasn’t got cancer, if that’s what you’re worried about. Just a totally ruined digestion and gallstones like baseballs. But she and Mary-Ben carry on as if the retribution of a lifetime of overeating the richest possible foods was something unique in the annals of medicine. B’God they make it almost religious. ‘Behold and see, if there be any acidity like unto my acidity.’ The oddity is that Mary-Ben’s eaten the same stuff, chew for chew, as her sister-in-law, and she’s still at it—a mighty little knife-and-fork is Mary-Ben. D’you know she visits old Madame Thibodeau every day for tea? Christian charity? Get away! It’s because Madame Thibodeau gets all her cakes and tartlets from the infidel Victoria Cameron, that’s why! That’s female logic for you, Francis.”

“Then Grand’mère is not as bad as she looks?”

“No, she’s just as bad as she looks, but if she keeps on bread-and-milk and my peppermint mixture she could last a good long time. But Mary-Ben’s the one to last. The McRory strain is a very strong strain, Francis. So look after it in yourself. It’s a golden inheritance.”

“Is it all good?”

“How do you mean?”

“No madness? No oddity? I know about the fellow that was upstairs; what explains him?”

“That’s not for me to tell you, Francis. That may have been a matter of chance—what they call a sport. Or it may be something that is bred in the bone.”

“Well—it’s very important to me. If I married, and had children, how great is the danger—?”

“On chance, perhaps not very great. Look at you, and look at your brother Arthur; both perfectly sound. Or it could happen again. But let me give you some advice—”

“Yes?”

“Go ahead. Keep on with your life. If you want to have children, take the risk. Don’t stay single or childless on some sort of principle. Obey instinct; it’s always right. Look at me and Mary-Ben. There’s a lesson for you! Yes, Francis, I’ve come to the time of life when I’m less of a teacher or adviser than I’m an object lesson:

The sin I impute to each frustrate ghost

Is—the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin—

D’you know any Browning?”

“Not really.”

“Mary-Ben and I used to read him together, long ago. Very clever fellow. Away ahead of all these so-called psychologists you hear about nowadays.”

WHEN THE LONG, tedious bout of euchre was completed in Grand’mère’s room, Aunt Mary-Ben insisted that Francis should come into her sitting-room for a last chat. He was leaving early in the morning. The room was almost unchanged, only somewhat shabby from use and the passing of time.

“Aunt, why is Grand-père so seldom here now?”

“Who’s to say, Francis? He has so much business to attend to. And I dare say he finds it dull here.”

“It wouldn’t have anything to do with the food, would it?”

“Oh, Francis! What a thing to say!”

“Well, you heard what Uncle Doctor said. It’ll kill you.”

“No, no it won’t; Dr. J.A. must have his joke. But the truth is, Frank, I can’t hurt Anna Lemenchick. She’s the last of the old servants, and the only one who has never cost me a moment’s uneasiness. Old Billy, you remember, drank so terribly, and Bella-Mae has given herself up totally to that Salvation Army, and do you know sometimes they have the neck to play right outside the church, just before High Mass! And Zadok—well you know I never really trusted him; there was a look in his eye, as if he were thinking impermissible thoughts when he was driving the carriage. D’you know I once caught him imitating Father Devlin? Yes, right in the kitchen! He had a tablecloth over his shoulders, and was bowing up and down with his hands clasped, and moaning, ‘We can beat the Jews at do-min-oes!’, pretending he was singing Mass, you see. And Victoria Cameron was laughing, with her hand over her mouth! I don’t care what your grandfather and Uncle Doctor say, Francis, that woman was evil at heart!”

On the subject of Victoria Cameron, Aunt was implacable, and declared furthermore that with the wages servants wanted nowadays—forty dollars a month had been heard of!—you had to look out that you weren’t simply made use of. So Francis led the conversation to his future, in which Aunt was passionately—the word is not too strong—passionately interested.

“To be a painter! Oh, Frankie, my dear boy, if ever there was a dream come true, that’s it, for me! When you were so ill as a child, and used to sit in this room and look at the pictures, and draw pictures of your own, I used to pray that it might flower into something wonderful like this!”

“Don’t say wonderful, Aunt. I don’t know even if I have any talent, yet. Facility—probably. But talent’s something very much beyond that.”

“Don’t doubt yourself, dear. Pray that God will help you, and He will. What God has begun, He will not desert. Painting is the most wonderful thing—of course, after a life in the Church—that any man can aspire to.”

“You’ve always said that, Aunt. But I’ve wondered why you say it. I mean—why painting, rather than music, for instance, or writing books?”

“Oh, music’s all very well. You know I love it. And anybody can write; it just takes industry. But painting—it makes people see. It makes them see God’s work truly.

… we’re made so that we love

First, when we see them painted, things we have passed

Perhaps a hundred times, nor cared to see:

And so they are better, painted.

That’s Browning—Fra Lippo Lippi. I used to read a lot of Browning once, with a great friend, and that always made me cry Yes, yes, it’s true! The painter is a great moral force, Frankie. It’s truly a gift of God.”

“Well—I hope so.”

“Don’t hope. Trust. And pray. You still pray, don’t you, Francis?”

“Sometimes. When things are bad.”

“Oh my dear, pray when they are good, too. And don’t just ask. Give! Give God thanks and praise! So many people treat Him like a banker, you know. It’s give, give, give, and they can’t see that it’s really lend, lend, lend. Frankie—you’ve never forgotten what happened when you were so sick that time?”

“Well—wasn’t that just a bit of panic?”

“Oh, Frank! Shame on you! That was when Father Devlin baptized you. You’re a Catholic forever, my dear. It’s not something you can shrug off at a fashionable school, or among unthinking people, like your father, though I’m sure he’s a good man so far as he understands goodness. Frank—you still have your rosary?”

“It’s somewhere, I suppose.”

“Dear boy, don’t talk like that! Now look, Frankie; you always liked my rosary, and it’s a fine one. I want you to have it—no, no, I have others—and I want you to take it with you everywhere, and use it. Promise, Frank!”

“Aunt, how can I promise?”

“By doing so now. A solemn promise, made in love. A promise made to me. Because you know, I’m sure, that at least in part you are my child, and the only one I’ll ever have.”

So, after some further weak demurrers, Frank took the rosary, and gave the promise, and the next morning he left Blairlogie, as he then thought, forever.

SO THAT POOR WRETCH THE LOONER was the outcome of a chance meeting between the romantic Mary-Jacobine and the destroyed soldier Zadok? said the Lesser Zadkiel.

—If you wish to talk of Chance, said the Daimon Maimas. But you and I know how deceptive the concept of Chance—the wholly random, inexplicable happening—is as a final explanation of anything.

—Of course. But I am keeping in mind how dear the notion of Chance is to the people on Earth. Theirs is the short view. Rob them of Chance and you strike at their cherished idea of Free Will. They are not granted the time to see that Chance may have its limitations, just as Free Will has its limitations. Odd, isn’t it, that they are glad enough to have their scientists show them evidence of pattern in the rest of Nature, hut they don’t want to recognize themselves as part of Nature. They seem persuaded that they, alone of all Creation, so far as they know it, are uninfluenced by the Anima Mundi.

—Well, we see that they have some choice within the pattern, but the pattern is strong, and now and then it shows itself nakedly. Then something like this happens: Mary-Jacobine chooses Zadok—against probability, but because she has a crush on an actor; Zadok begets a child in a single coupling with a virgin—again against probability, but because he is a compassionate, unhappy man. Do we call that chance? But then, she does not recognize her chance lover when he appears and he does not recognize her because they are in a world they think of as the New World. Then—Marie-Louise destroys a child in the womb, which is very probable considering who and what she was. Zadok does not know his own son—how would he? Just Chance and Likelihood in their old familiar muddle, said the Daimon.

—I suppose they would call it coincidence.

—A useful, dismissive word for people who cannot bear the idea of pattern shaping their own lives.

—Coincidence is what they call pattern in which they cannot discern something they are prepared to accept as meaning, said the Lesser Zadkiel.

—But we see the meaning, do we not, brother? Of course we do. The Looner brought love back into the life of Zadok, for only love can explain his behaviour toward him. The Looner brought motherhood into the life of Victoria Cameron, who did not choose—probably feared—to seek it in the usual way.

—And for your man Francis, my dear colleague?

—Ah—for Francis the Looner was a lifelong reminder of the inadmissible primitive in the most cultivated life, a lifelong adjuration to pity, a sign that disorder and abjection stand less than a hair’s breadth away from every human creature. A continual counsel to make the best of whatever fortune had given him.

—But surely, also, a constant pointer to humility? said the Angel.

—Very much so. And I think that although I had nothing to do with the begetting of the Looner, I made good use of him in the shaping of Francis. So the Looner did not live in vain.

—Yes, you did well there, brother. And where is the helm set for now?

—For Oxford.

—Oxford certainly won’t strengthen the Blairlogie strain, said the Angel.

—Oxford will strengthen whatever is bred in the bone. And I have already made sure that the Looner, in every aspect, is bred in the bone of Francis. Francis will need all his wits and all his pity at Oxford, said the Daimon.