One night in March, as he took Francis to Devinney’s, Zadok seemed depressed. “I don’t care for this, dear lad; don’t care for it at all.”
What he did not care for, when it was taken out of the cooler, was the body of François Xavier Bouchard, a dwarf tailor, known to Blairlogie’s English-speakers as Bushy.
His one-storey tailor-shop was a mean building at the top end of Dalhousie Street, and winter and summer Bushy could be seen leaning in the door, waiting for custom. It cannot have been much: sewing on a button or perhaps turning a suit for some thrifty soul, but he seemed to keep bread in his mouth, although, like many tailors, he was shabby in his own dress. He grinned without cease, a dog-like grin that seemed to implore tolerance, respect being beyond his hopes.
There he lay, on Mr. Devinney’s table, his head huge and his trunk barrel-like, his arms and legs so short that there seemed to be little between shoulder and elbow, elbow and hand, his private parts huge above his tiny legs, although they would not have been excessive on a full-grown man. His head lay at an unusual angle.
“Hanged himself,” said Zadok. “They found him this morning. Did it two or three days ago, I should guess. Poor, poor little soul. We’ve got to do our best for old F.X., Francis, not that anything can make up for a life like his.”
The scene which preceded the final scene of Bushy’s life, as Zadok recounted it, was something wholly outside any experience known to Francis, except those terrible quarter-hours in the playground of Carlyle Rural, when boys blew up frogs and tortured cats. This would certainly have reopened the wounds of Jesus.
“The men in one of the lodges, Francis. I’m not going to tell you which one. Do you know what a lodge is? It’s a lot of chaps who get together for a kind of religion that isn’t quite the same as the real religion; they have altars and whim-whams, and they dress up in trick clothes and talk a lot of rubbish to one another. All very secret but somehow anybody who cares can find out.
“Every so often they let in some new members, and it’s all very solemn; then they have to have some fun. You know how it is: after a solemn time you have to have a change. Like at funerals, where they joke and quarrel at the party after the burial. Well, these boys got the idea a while ago that it would be great fun to shanghai Bushy and take him up to the lodge-rooms over De Marche’s hardware, and give him a bath. They did it quite a few times. Everybody had a grab at him, or pushed the soap in his face, or tried to take the hide off him with the towel. Then they’d make him run up and down the room; they’d flick him with wet towels and sool him on so they could see his little legs go, and his big what’s-its-name whack and thrash around. They had one of those affairs three days ago, and I guess the poor little mortal couldn’t stand it any more, and went home and hanged himself. In a pair of braces, I understand. Christ, Frankie, I hardly know whether to weep or puke. I’ve had a taste of humiliation myself, but poor old F.X.—” Zadok could not go on, but he bent to his work with special gentleness. Yes, let me like a soldier fall, upon some open plain.
Francis had seen pictures in Aunt’s books called The Entombment. What dignity, what compassion was shown in the faces of those who handled the body of the dead Saviour. He had seen those pictures but he did not know them, encompass them, feel them, until he saw Zadok working over the body of the dead tailor. He sketched away like a man and an artist, but now and then he could not repress a sniff. That hour was to stay with him all his life.
When all was done, Zadok and Francis both shook hands with Bushy and wished him Godspeed. And then, as always, for Zadok would not have it otherwise, he washed his hands carefully.
AT NIGHT, when he was supposed to be in bed and asleep, Francis was sometimes very much awake, and engaged in—what were they? It would not be quite exact to call them games, and he himself could not have described them if he had been called on by some indignant or sorrowing adult to do so.
Thoughts and physical urges about sex rose to torment him several times a day, and even Dr. Upper’s remedy of the cold towel was ineffective; Francis tried it once or twice, and then decided that it was silly; he did not really want to rebuke his penis for its insistence on being noticed. And noticed not only when his thoughts strayed to the mystery of The Particular, but often when he was thinking of something innocuous like food, or where he had put his tube of Chinese white. Was he wicked? But the wickedness was also thrilling. Was he in some special way afflicted or diseased, that he should be so teased by a part of his body he could not control? There was nobody to ask.
But the demand was frequent, and in an alarming way delicious. Sometimes he provoked it, knowing that he should not, by looking at his small store of movie magazines. These he had bought, from time to time, at a local store called The Beehive, which sold not only movie magazines but false-faces, rings made in the shape of serpents with glittering red-glass eyes, and books which told you how to be a magician or a ventriloquist. The movie magazines showed the screen favourites of the time—Mae Murray, Margarita Fisher, Gladys Walton—in bathing suits that exposed their legs to the knee, or in short skirts with rolled stockings; a picture of Gloria Swanson in some historical epic of a period when people were obviously dead to shame (or enjoyed it) showed one of her thighs almost to the hip. Long gazing at this picture was a hot excitement. So much more exciting than the few nudes to be found in Aunt’s books, so often monumental people by Thorwaldsen, or some nineteenth-century artist with a strong hint of Dr. Upper in his attitude toward sex. They were no fun; the movie stars were alive, and exciting. But most exciting of all were the pictures of Julian Eltinge.
Francis had seen this popular female impersonator in The Countess Charming at Grand-père’s theatre. Eltinge was a plump man of unremarkable appearance who could disguise himself as a woman of elegance and charm; the film showed the lacy undergarments, the corset, the wig that made the transformation. With some odds and ends of curtains and bits of silk he concealed in his chest of drawers Francis attempted to do what Eltinge did, and although the result would not have impressed anyone else it satisfied him deeply. He had to know about the human figure: he stuffed enough rags into his top to produce a buzzem something like that of Eltinge. The legs were a great feature of the pictures of movie stars: he disposed his legs in the manner of Gloria Swanson. He had no wig but he wrapped his head in a scarf. The effect in the mirror was gratifying to the point of urgency. What had Eltinge done about The Particular? Francis’s own particular made it plain that disguise must have been extremely difficult.
Bedtime fantasies were partnered by night horrors. In dreams he was set upon by succubi who were nothing like Gloria Swanson or the tantalizing Clarine Seymour; no, in his dreams hags and women horribly like those he had seen in the embalming room tormented and whispered, until he awoke with the hot gush on his thighs that made him leap from his bed, dab at the sheets with a dampened cloth, and do what he could to wash the pants of his pyjamas. Suppose somebody found out? Suppose that Anna Lemenchick, who made the beds, told Victoria Cameron? What would happen? He could not guess, but it would be shame even beyond the rich vocabulary of Dr. Upper to describe. But he could not stop; posturing in the manner of Julian Eltinge was seductive beyond his power of resistance.
WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF THAT, my friend? said the Daimon Maimas.
—You had better tell me what you make of it, said the Lesser Zadkiel. I suppose you were at the root of it all?
—Indeed I was, said the Daimon Maimas, and I took care that nobody found Francis at his games, for he was right in supposing that there would have been a pious uproar. But surely you see what the boy was doing?
—Looking for something that his life denied him, obviously. Trying to cope with a problem for which his life in Blairlogie terms offered no solution and no solace. He seems not to have known any girls except in the most distant fashion, and the screen images were unlike anything he would have met with even if he had known some girls at school.
—Just as well, for it wasn’t any palpa
ble girl he was trying to evoke in front of his mirror, and it certainly wasn’t Julian Eltinge. Of course, he didn’t know it—they never do—but he was looking for The Girl, the girl deep in himself, the feminine ideal that has some sort of existence in every man of any substance, and my Francis was a man of substance. It wasn’t effeminacy, which is what anybody who discovered him would have supposed. It certainly wasn’t homosexuality, for Francis never had more than the usual dash of that. He was groping for the Mystical Marriage, the unity of the masculine and the feminine in himself, without which he would have been useless in his future life as an artist and as a man who understood art. Useless as any sort of man—rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief; not to speak of tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor—who is destined to see more than a few inches beyond the end of his nose. This was the beginning of the search for the Mystical Marriage, which is one of the great quests, and as usual the quest was longer and more important than the eventual discovery.
—Aha! And I suppose the quest is what poor Simon Darcourt, labouring over his biography of Francis, apprehends dimly, but without really knowing what it is.
—We mustn’t be extreme. And we certainly mustn’t underestimate Darcourt. But he wouldn’t think of describing Francis’s quest as a search and a yearning to know the feminine side of his own nature, in order that he might be a complete and spiritually whole man. An idea like that, encountered head-on, is usually rather too much for human beings. They begin to see things they don’t understand, and of course if they don’t understand them, they are sure they must be monsters.
—Like yourself, my dear Maimas?
—Yes, like me. Look at me, Zadkiel; what do you see?
—A handsome figure. Splendid breasts that any Venus might envy; a fine complexion and a glowing eye, and hyacinthine tresses of the deepest black. So far, a woman. But those elegantly narrow hips and sinewy legs; those handsome masculine organs of generation, which move and stir constantly with every change of your attitude and alteration of your thoughts. Hermes and Aphrodite wonderfully united in a single form. A simulacrum of a complete human creature, though of course you could not be what you are—a daimon—if you were not far above humanity as it now exists. Perhaps you are the creature of the future?
—Only as a symbol, brother. If humanity ever took on this form, they would have great trouble in reproducing themselves.
—Let us get on with the quest. As the Angel of Biography, that is what I have to record—indeed have recorded, for what we are watching is a record of the past. But as I have said, I can’t remember everything about all these people. Did he follow the quest through to the discovery, I wonder? Not many of them do.
—No, but every quester has hints and intimations that are very precious and bring sudden light into his life. And of course you’ve noticed that forecast, that strong hint, that we see as we watch Francis, ludicrously garbed as a woman.
—I am being very dense, I fear, said the Angel.
—Look behind the boy in his pathetic rags at the picture on the wall—the picture Aunt hung there in the goodness of her modestly wincing, power-greedy heart. Did she know it was a prophecy? Not consciously, but it was a prophecy and also the essence of life as everybody lived it at St. Kilda. The picture of Love Locked Out.
—Is Francis never to find love?
—You are unfolding the story, my dear friend. Please go on.
BUT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to go on without taking notice at this point of something with which Francis had nothing whatever to do, but which influenced his future decisively. This was the downfall—temporary only, as we shall see—of Gerald Vincent O’Gorman, who was, as the husband of Mary-Tess, his uncle.
G.V. O’Gorman was an unusually able man of business, and the Senator, with his fine eye for talent, had advanced him rapidly until Gerry, as everybody called him, was his second-in-command and managed everything in the ordinary way, giving advice when he was asked—and sometimes when he wasn’t—but leaving the major decisions to the Senator himself.
He was a big, fleshy, fine-looking Canadian-Irishman, jolly and kind of heart, a loving husband to Mary-Tess and a careful father of their sons, Gerald Lawrence and Gerald Michael. He was a staunch Catholic, and after the Senator the most prominent B.C.L. in Blairlogie and its district.
The O’Gormans came to dinner at St. Kilda every Sunday, and it did Aunt’s heart good to see how loving they were. Their amorous speciality, in public, was a sort of graveyard chivalry, a declaration that each had a proven right to “go first” into the afterlife.
“Aw, Mary-Tess, if you go first, I’ll never forgive you as long as I live, for my life would be a mockery without you, darlin’.”
“Gerry, don’t talk that way! You know it would kill me if you went before me; for the love of God, sweetness, let me go first! It will be the last of the thousand-and-one happinesses you’ve given me!”
“Aw, well; let’s hope under God it’ll be many a long day off, whichever it is. But I’ll give no promise.” Then a kiss—right at the table, after Gerry had gallantly wiped his lips with his napkin, as Aunt beamed, and Marie-Louise nodded approvingly, and the Senator looked down at his plate.
What could have been better? But then came the awful day when Mary-Tess, finding herself not far from the head office of the Senator’s business affairs, dropped in after five o’clock, to walk home with her Gerald, and found him in his office, strenuously “at it” on his desk with his secretary, Blondie Utronki.
Oh, the tears! Oh, the protestations! Oh, the dreadful come-down! For Mary-Tess’s howls attracted one of the cleaning women, who spread the tale through the whole of the Polish layer of the great fruitcake, from which it mounted rapidly to the French layer, and in no time at all had reached the top, the Scots layer, where it was a cause of righteous jubilation.
Wouldn’t you know it? Of course Blondie Utronki would be just the one for that sort of game! As if Gerry O’Gorman hadn’t been shoving her forward whenever he could: getting her those chances to sing—at a hefty five dollars a warble—in the McRory Opera House, just before the feature film, when it was a specially good one! “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”, and “Smile Awhile, I’ll Kiss You Sad Adieu” and all that! Well, she’d blown her last bubble in Blairlogie, and she’ll be kissing Gerry sad adieu now, you can bet!
And from Alexander Dagg’s Maw: bad blood in that family! I’ve always said so. Piling on the agony, and now shamelessness on a glass-topped desk! We’ll see the McRorys topple! Rot of the brain! Look at the old aunt!
Nor was this the worst. Aunt, that tireless backstairs arranger of destinies, had laboured for two years to bring about her latest coup in St. Bonaventura. Father Devlin was now Monsignor Devlin, and it was Aunt who had pushed and shoved at the Bishop to get him nominated for that honour. Indeed, it had been she who presented him with his first two pairs of violet socks, one of the distinguishing marks of his new splendour. But this was not Aunt’s finest achievement.
St. Bonaventura had been very much to the fore in wartime charities, and Gerald Vincent O’Gorman, who was a little too old to be called up, and who felt that his brother-in-law, Major Francis Chegwidden Cornish, was brilliantly upholding the family honour in the Forces, had worked like a slave, and a dog, and a Trojan, for war charities. The whist-drives, the concerts, the fowl suppers! So successful was he that St. Bonaventura left all the Protestant churches nowhere in the extent of its contributions. Look at the Cigarette Fund—a triumph of organization and achievement! And everyone knew, because Aunt let it be heard, that Gerry did innumerable good works and paid for many a beautification of the church out of his own pocket, and never breathed a word about it. Surely something was owing for devotion like that?
Devotion was rewarded, for Aunt kept on at the Bishop, who kept on at the Cardinal of Apostolic Briefs, until Gerry was honoured by the Papacy itself, and Monsignor Devlin announced one Sunday morning at High Mass that henceforth Gerry was a Knight of St. Sylvester, as a recognition
of his work for the Church, the Holy See and society at large.
Mary-Tess was the soul of modesty. Of course, it wasn’t a Commander, or a Knight Grand Cross; just a simple Knight of St. Sylvester. No, no; nothing of the honour appertained to the spouse; it was wholly a man’s thing—but of course she was very proud. External badges of honour? Well, in future on great occasions, like a visit from the Bishop or at High Mass on St. Bonaventura’s festal day, July 15, Gerry would be obliged to wear his coat with the gold buttons, and the gold embroidery on the velvet collar and cuffs, and the gold stripe down the side of the pants, and the bicorne hat with the Papal cockade. And the medal of the Order, with the Golden Spur hanging from it. And of course the sword. He’d have to put it on, whether he wanted to or not, and she’d have the job of making sure he got it all right, because you know what men are. Well, yes, Mary-Tess would admit under pressure, it was very nice.
Then—Blondie Utronki!
Monsignor Devlin, whose life was not a bed of roses, found that the hardest thing he had ever had to do was to inform Gerry that this sort of thing did not become a Papal Knight, and the Bishop had sent a peremptory inquiry. He would have to make a formal report to the Bishop, who would speed it to Rome, and the Knight would be un-knighted. Miserable in his violet socks, Monsignor Devlin made it as easy as he could. But Gerry was not inclined to take it easily.
“All I want to know—all I demand to know, Father Mick—is, who was the squealer?”
“Aw now, Gerry, no squealer was needed. The thing was all over town.”
“A little bit of local gossip. Who squealed to the Bishop? That’s what I want to know.”
“Now Gerry, you know I have to write the report myself, even if my hand withers as I do it.”
“All right; you have your duty. But who squealed to you?”
“The whole town, I tell you. The Presbyterians are laughing at us. When I met Mr. McComas in the Post Office he said to me: ‘I’m very sorry to hear of your trouble,’ he said. Me, to be pitied by a Presbyterian minister! They’re jeering at us behind our backs.”