A Good Man (16 page)

He startles at the bookcase, embarrassed, when Mrs. Tarr enters the room. Clearing his throat, he says, “Your husband has a fine library.”

She carries a lacquer tray holding two glasses of iced tea. Her black eyebrows lift and a mocking smile tucks the corners of her mouth. “My husband’s library? It is mine, Mr. Case. Or rather it was my mother’s – which I have augmented over the years. Mr. Tarr never puts his nose in a book – except a law book.” She puts the tray down on an occasional table, hands Case a glass of tea, and motions him to take a seat on the sofa. He is preparing to sit when she rushes over, snatches up something and drops it in a drawer. Before the drawer closes, he catches a glimpse of a straight razor. What use could she have been making of such an article?

He seats himself on the sofa; she takes a chair directly in front of him, presses the cool glass to her forehead. It crosses his mind that Mrs. Tarr is not wearing a corset; he sees an inviting curve of belly and feels a disconcerting charge of desire. Immediately, he deflects his attention to the wallpaper above his hostess’s head. He hears her say, “My mother used to claim that one can learn more about a person by scanning their books than could be learned by years of acquaintance. Do you think that true, Mr. Case?”

He doesn’t know how to take that. Is he being chastised for snooping? He can’t be sure because of her smile, which may or may not be ironical. Perhaps she is trying to needle some reaction out of him just as she diith the crowd last night. Maybe it is her hobby to play
agent provocateur
.

“I have no opinion. I have never considered it.” Instantly, he regrets how brittle and stuffy that sounds. How foolish. If he is not careful he will soon be blushing. He takes some tea to hide his unease.

But Mrs. Tarr only laughs, leans forward eagerly, breasts swelling against the cloth of her dress. “It is only small talk, Mr. Case. Not a matter of life and death. Give it a go.”

He senses she is trying to conduct him, direct him the way she did the audience the previous night. He is to spring into action at her command. Well, if that’s what she wants, he will. Trying to adopt her insouciant manner he says, “If I were a medical man and those books were symptoms, I would diagnose a case of mortal seriousness.” Even worse, he thinks. Ponderous, silly.

Case detects a mercurial flash of intelligence in those dark eyes, a slight colouring of her extremely pale skin. But she looks more intrigued than angry. Whatever the woman thinks seems to register itself on her face. “Mortal seriousness? Particularly deadly for a woman, I take it. And what is the cure, Doctor?”

“A dose of Dickens is what I would prescribe, ma’am.” He crosses his legs; his foot begins to flick impatiently up and down. He wills it to be still.

“Oh, I don’t think Dickens will do,” says Mrs. Tarr. “My mother could not abide Dickens. She said his characters resembled no human being she had ever met. She called Dickens false to life. It was the gravest charge she could level.” Her eyes fall on Case’s shoe, which has resumed a frantic jigging.

He uncrosses his legs and shoves both feet firmly to the floor, grips both knees hard to keep them from bouncing. “I would say that it is all to Mr. Dickens’s credit that he gives us the sort of characters he does. I find them entertaining. Who would read a novel just to meet the same bores they encounter on their daily rounds?”

“Click, click, click,” says Ada, and sticks her tongue impudently in her cheek.

“Beg pardon?” says Case.

“The sound of swords crossing. I do enjoy a fencing match, a lively discussion about the respective merits of artists. It has been ages.”

“I hate to disappoint you, Mrs. Tarr. I am a shallow man. So shallow that if I were a puddle and you stood in me you would scarcely wet the soles of your shoes.” His eyes dart to the George Eliot novel lying beside him on the sofa. “So shallow that I don’t have a taste for sermons masquerading as stories.”

This only amuses her, which he finds even more aggravating. Mrs. Tarr remarks, “I think your opinion of yourself does not do you justice. Peregrine Hathaway speaks very highly of you, Mr. Case. With him it is Mr. Case this and Mr. Case that. He finds you fascinating.”

The mention of Hathaway reminds him of the boy’s feckless behaviour. “What or whoever fascinates him is not much of a recommendation. I’ve seen him held mesmerized for an hour by a cricket in the corner of the barracks.” The way Mrs. Tarr is looking at him makes him feel even more prickly. He adds, “The boy doesn’t bear listening to.”

“I like the boy. I especially like how many things delight him. We would all be better off if we had his talent for happiness.”

“And he would be better off with a swift kick in the pants. Today he has inconvenienced everyone dreadfully.”

“You are not very forgiving towards your friends,” says Ada, and for the first time Case sees that face, which hides nothing, showing disapproval.

Case’s hand bumps
Daniel Deronda
and, before he realizes it, he’s up on his feet and shoving the book at her. “Your novel, Mrs. Tarr,” he says. “I’m sure it will be better company than I have been. I thank you for the tea, and for observing my faults of character. If Hathaway appears within the next hour would you be kind enough to tell him he had better get down to the Overland? That said, I think it is time I relieved you of my presence.”

Mrs. Tarr takes the book, opens it, lowers her eyes to the page, and says, “Very well. If that is what you prefer.”

Her eyes do not lift from the book. Case sees she is actually reading. His petulant outburst fizzles. He crosses the parlour, mortified. Just then the back door rattles open; he hears the sound of hurrying footsteps, excited voices, a peal of laughter. The picnickers have returned.

Ada Tarr closes her book. “What a timely intervention, Mr. Case,” she says mildly. “So fortuitous for you. And just in the nick of time.”

EIGHT

August 9, 1876

THE AFTERNOON OF
McMullen and Hathaway’s departure for Fort Walsh, I had a long and satisfactory talk with Ilges concerning the present military situation. Next day, I dropped in on Mr. Conrad to see if he would help put me in contact with gentlemen interested in selling their land, as he had offered. Through his good offices I was directed to Mr. Worthington. Most momentous of all, yesterday I wrote to Father to inform him of my decision to remain in Fort Benton, take up ranching, and commence a useful life. Bluntly put, to turn to any other occupation than politics. Nothing to do now but batten down the hatches and brace myself for the hurricane that I suspect will soon come roaring westward from Ottawa. Having set my heart on Mr. Worthington’s property I intend to make him an offer – pending Joe’s approval when he returns from Fort Walsh. I am satisfied Mr. Worthington’s asking price is dirt cheap and the ranch a most attractive package. A thousand acres situated a mile from Fort Benton, a four-room house constructed of lumber, a small barn, several granaries, three hogs, six draught horses, a bull, fifty bred-heifers and cows, twenty steers, plus miscellaneous and sundry agricultural implements and machinery. Best of all, part of the property sits on a bend of the Missouri, providing ample water for livestock. I believe it a sound investment of the capital Mother left me.

Nothing to do now but await McMullen’s return, but waiting isn’t easy. Feeling skittish last night, I sat drinking in my room until just short of midnight when I crawled into bed half-drunk. I dreamed a terrible nightmare. I was lying on a slab of marble, absolutely naked. It came to me where I was; the surgical theatre of a medical school. Nearby was a small trolley holding a tray littered with bone saws, scalpels, and forceps. Over it was bent a surgeon in a white apron, inspecting the tools of his trade. A powerful odour of formaldehyde wafted about the room. Suddenly I realized that I had been mistaken for a corpse and that I was about to be subjected to an autopsy, dismembered piece by piece. I tried to shout, to scramble down from the slab, but my vocal cords and limbs were paralyzed. Hundreds of medical students seated in a semicircle of steeply raked benches gazed down at my naked body with detached and clinical curiosity.

In the very last row of the theatre I spotted Pudge Wilson in the midst of his little band of acolytes, the Lilies of the Field. He was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, watching the proceedings with avid interest. The look on his face told me that he was the only person in the room that knew I was alive and that he was looking forward to the moment when I would be opened up in agony, when those cruel forceps would clamp and pluck the organs from my body.

And then I lost sight of him, my view blocked by the surgeon bending over me. I saw the glittering scalpel poised in his long, delicate fingers, poised to make the first incision, and made a hopeless attempt to scream.

I woke whimpering, drenched in sweat.

It is no surprise that in my dream I cast Pudge as the all-knowing one. He always prided himself on being the master of every situation. William Tewkes Wilson even selected the nickname for himself. Good-humoured self-mockery had no part in that; he simply wanted to forestall anyone else from saddling him with a less amiable-sounding sobriquet, one more in keeping with his true nature. By naming himself he claimed ownership of himself, just as in naming us the Lilies of the Field he laid claim to owning us. It falls to the master to name his dogs.

What a little clique of young wastrels we were. Tommy Richards, Packard Trelawney, Caleb Morrow, and Wesley Case, boys whose fathers’ prosperity gave Pudge the notion of christening us the Lilies of the Field. As a Church of England bishop’s son, William Tewkes Wilson had had enough scripture drummed into his head that the appropriate Bible passage was always on the tip of his tongue. “ ‘Consider the lilies of the field how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these,’ ” he intoned one day with sonorous sanctity, making a gesture that resembled a priest gesticulating in the pulpit, illustrating how the lost sheep are drawn back into the fold.

No, we had no need to toil or spin. Our fathers arrayed us in bespoke tailoring; we wore handmade boots on our feet; our faces were shaved and patted with scent, our hair cut and dressed with lime cream by Toronto’s most exclusive barber, fresh off the boat from England.

Not to say that membership in the Lilies was simply carefree and easy; it had its obligations. Pudge decreed that our shoes must always be polished bright as a new penny, but our cravats sloppily knotted. Servants buffed shoesut gentlemen tied their own cravats – let the contrast be stark. No more than three fobs to a watch chain, tie pins forbidden. As Pudge liked to say, “I will not be mistaken for a vulgar Jew like Disraeli.” Drunkenness required, a minimum of four times a week. Attempts on the virtue of servant girls an absolute necessity, although I believe only Pudge lived up to the high standard he set for the rest of us – he had the necessary streak of ruthlessness to get what he wanted.

At his insistence the Lilies joined the militia. Anyone could call himself a gentleman – haberdashers were unscrupulous enough to refer to themselves in that way – but officer and gentleman was a distinction beyond the grasp of shopkeepers. Besides, regimental balls, cotillions, parades, and military picnics added a little spice and variety to what passed for society in a dim, parochial backwater.

Pudge was midwife to the Lilies; he guided our first steps, and soon was leading us everywhere by the nose. We provided him with a mission in life, a mission he pursued with the same single-mindedness that evangelicals pursue the baptizing of black babies in Darkest Africa. He wanted to introduce a bit of flair into dreary, sabbatarian Toronto, to thumb his nose at our elders and their dreadful solidity. “It is our duty,” Pudge was fond of declaring, “to shock Presbyterians into gaiety.”

He wished to turn us into walking advertisements for the Gracious Life. But in the end we scarcely differed from those shabby, defeated men who shuffle up and down Yonge and Front Streets strapped into sandwich boards that urge on the public miraculous patent medicines, shoddy hardware, bad tobacco. No one sees the shufflers. They become the signs they carry. And like them, I too became invisible, wore a sandwich board too, one hand-painted by Pudge, with no mark of my own on it.

He surprised us all by marching us off to the saloon bar of the Queen’s Hotel to finish our education, not the most picturesque or salubrious academy, and a surprising choice for the usually fastidious Pudge. Hard by the lake, the Queen’s was a victim of the harbour’s weather and nasty smells. In winter when gales came ripping off Lake Ontario, slapping sleet and wet snow to the windows, the fireplace moaned and coughed smoke, and all its patrons with their feet up on the bar rail smelled like wet dogs. Summer did nothing to improve it. When the ships and tugs stoked their boilers, a greasy black fog of coal smoke swirled along the docks, and everybody hurried through a free-for-all of smuts and cinders. The hot, oppressive air stank of rotting vegetables, ripening fish, tar, horse manure, and tallow. As for scenic views of the lake, they were limited to glimpses of grey-blue snatched between the barriers of hulls, casks, drays, towers of stacked crates, the sky a tangle of spars and masts, smears of dirty canvas sail. A din of stevedore curses, screaming steam whistles, squealing winches, clanking and clattering chains rattled the hotel’s windows.

What attracted Pudge to the Queen’s was the group of men who clustered around a trestle table there every evening, hard-eyed, malarial-looking fellows who wore their hair longer than was customary in Toronto. Drawls dripped from their tongues like thick molasses; their antique courtliness hearkened back to an earlier time. That was my first impression of the secession men, the Southerners who had escaped from Union prisoner-of-war camps and made their way to Canada, the sympathizers of the Cause from Ohio and Indiana who belonged to grandiloquently named societies such as the Kn of the Golden Circle and the Sons of Liberty, the agents doing Jefferson Davis’s business in our midst. Fifteen thousand of them was the number estimated by the newspapers. It was an open secret that the Queen’s was their unofficial headquarters, the place where they hatched their plots against the North. The authorities turned a blind eye to them and their conspiracies. If our powerful neighbouring nation, which had coveted and menaced our lands since the War of 1812, chose to tear itself to pieces, our government had no objection.