–But this struggle for the boy’s soul, as they call it. Pull Devil, pull Baker.
–I hope you use the phrase metaphorically. It would be unjust to call Aunt Mary-Ben a devil; she was about as honest and well-intentioned as human beings generally are, and she wanted her own way because she thought it was the best way. You may call Victoria Cameron a baker, if you choose. There is some justice in that.
Justice indeed, for Victoria sprang from a long line of bakers, and her father and her brothers Hugh and Dougal ran the best bakery in Blairlogie. One Friday night Victoria got permission from Aunt to rouse Francis at two o’clock in the morning and take him to the bakery to see the Cameron men knead their dough.
The dough was an immense mass in a large round wooden trough that was built with a huge pole at its centre to which were attached three long bands of linen. The three Camerons were sitting with their trouser legs rolled up to the knee, scrubbing their feet in a low sink. Scrub, scrub, scrub till you might think the skin would come off. Then they dried their feet on fresh towels, powdered their feet with flour, leapt from the sink into the dough-trough, seized a linen band each, and began what looked like a wild dance in the dough. Round and round, until the linen bands were as close to the pole as they could be; then they turned and danced the other way, as the bands unfolded, shouting Heigh, heigh, heigh, as they danced.
“D’ye want to scrub up, young master, and dance with us?” shouted Old Cameron. And, quick as a wink, Victoria had his shoes and stockings off, washed his feet and floured them, and popped him into the trough with the men, where he danced as well as he could, for the dough was resistant, like treading on some sort of flesh; but that added to the fun. Francis never forgot that night, or the heat of the ovens, into which had been thrown many bundles of fern, which burned down to a fine white ash. After the dancing, the dough was cut with paddles into what would be pound loaves, and set out to rise again, before they went into the fiercely hot, sweet-smelling brick ovens.
At breakfast the next day, Victoria assured him that he was eating bread he had helped to bake himself.
The boy’s life was not at all dark; he was not clever at school, but he attracted Miss McGladdery’s attention by the seriousness with which he applied himself in the weekly half-hour that was given to Art. Miss McGladdery taught Art, as she taught everything, and she instructed all three classes at once in the mysteries of drawing a pyramid and shading one side of it so that it appeared to have a third dimension—or as she put it the shaded side “went back” and the unshaded part “stuck out”. A pyramid and a circle which shading made into a ball, and, as the culmination of Art, an apple. Shading was done by scuffling down one side of the object with the flat of the pencil’s point. But Frank did not think that good enough; he had learned a craft at home in which shading was done with tiny parallel lines, achieved with great patience, and even by cross-hatching.
“If you take the time to do all that tick-tack-toe on your apple you won’t be finished by four, and you’ll have to stay in till it’s done,” said Miss McGladdery. So he did “stay in” with half a dozen other culprits who had work to finish before they were released for the weekend, and when he showed Miss McGladdery his apple at half past four she admitted reluctantly that it was “all right”, for she did not want to encourage the boy to be “fancy” and try to go beyond what the class demanded and what she herself knew. Frank could draw, which was something not required in Art, and Miss McGladdery had come upon a caricature of herself done in the back of his arithmetic workbook. Miss McGladdery, who was a fair-minded woman, except about religion and politics, and had no vanity, admitted to herself that it was good, so she said nothing about it. Frank was an oddity, and, like a true Scot, Miss McGladdery had a place in her approval for “a chiel o’ pairts”, so long as he did not go too far.
Almost every Saturday Frank could escape into a world of imagination by going to the matinee at the McRory Opera House, where movies were shown. He got in for nothing, because the girl at the ticket office recognized him, and as he pushed his ten-cent piece across the little counter she winked and quietly pushed it back again.
Then inside, and into his favourite seat, which was on the aisle at the back; he did not crowd into the front rows, as did the other children. Riches unfolded. An episode, locally pronounced “esipode”, of a serial, in which, every week, a noble cowboy was brought to the point of a horrible death by remorseless villains who sought to rob him of the equally noble girl he loved. Of course, it all came out right at the end of Episode Twelve, and then another great adventure was announced for the weeks to follow. After the serial, a hilarious comedy, sometimes about the Keystone Komedy Kops, who were as incapable of dealing with disaster as the girl in the serial. Occasionally Charlie Chaplin appeared, but Francis did not like him. He was a loser, and Francis knew too much about being a loser to make a pet of one. Then the feature, in several reels; the ones Francis most enjoyed were not usually those that appealed to the other children. Lorna Doone, which came from England, was certain proof that the nasty mystery about what animals did and really good people surely didn’t was a lie; the image of the beautiful Lorna, who looked exactly like the Holy Mother, but was attainable by a truly good man, who might then kiss her chastely and adore her forever, did more to shape his ideas about womanhood than Aunt’s pious confidences. Certainly Lorna was a girl who would never venture within miles of the Limit, whatever the Limit might be. A companion picture in this special group was The Passing of the Third Floor Back, in which the great English tragedian Forbes-Robertson (much was made of his eminence in the advertisements and prices were slightly raised) played the role of a man who showed a group of shabby people that they didn’t have to be shabby, and who looked so noble, so distinguished, so totally incapable of laughter or any other lively emotion, that he was plainly intended to be A Certain Person, but wearing a fine cloak and a broad-brimmed hat, instead of those sappy robes in which A Certain Person usually appeared. Frank had not yet been taken to Mass, and he had forgotten St. Alban’s, but at the movies he fed upon these things in his heart, and was thankful.
Francis had an eye for the movies that took in more than the action; he saw backgrounds, landscapes (many of them painted, if you looked carefully), and angles; he even saw light. It was to his grandfather, the Senator, that he owed this extension of his understanding, for the Senator was an amateur photographer. His techniques were not sophisticated in terms of the Great War period when Francis was so often his companion; he worked with a large box-camera and a tripod. With this load he trudged happily around Blairlogie, taking pictures of the town, and such of its more picturesque citizens as he could persuade to stand or sit still for the necessary number of seconds, and he drove out to the lumber camps from which his growing fortune flowed, and took pictures of the men at work, or standing by giant trees lying on their sides. He took pictures in his mills. He took pictures of young Blairlogie men who were going off to war, with their rifles and kit, and gave copies to their families. The Senator never thought of himself as an artist, but he had an eye for a picture and he was an enthusiastic pursuer of all the many sorts of light the Canadian seasons afford. He talked to Francis about it as if the boy were of his own age. His senatorial and grandpaternal aloofness quite disappeared on these expeditions in search of what he called “sun-pictures”.