“It’s all a question of the light, Frank,” he said repeatedly; “the light does it all.” And he explained that all that painstaking shading in Art was related to light—something which certainly had never occurred to Miss McGladdery.
His detestation was pictures that had been taken by artificial light, and he particularly liked to take portraits in a shelter he caused to be made in the garden, to which furniture and draperies and other decorations could be laboriously lugged, and in which—apparently indoors but in fact in some version of the sun’s light—he took countless pictures of Madame Thibodeau, of Marie-Louise, of the children of his second daughter, Mary-Teresa, and of his son-in-law, Gerald Vincent O’Gorman, the rising man in the McRory industrial empire. Aunt resolutely refused to be photographed. “Oh, Hamish, I’d break the camera,” she laughed. But at her insistence he photographed Father Devlin and Father Beaudry, each leaning over a table in scholarly abstraction, apparently reading a leather-bound book, one forefinger supporting a brow plainly crammed with edifying knowledge. He even persuaded Dr. Jerome to pose for him, his hand resting on a skull which was a prized possession.
Taking pictures was great fun, but it was not so entrancing as what followed, when Francis and Grand-père were locked in a bathroom with no light save that from a dim red lamp, swishing and sloshing the film in smelly liquids in the washbasin and the bathtub, watching for each sun-picture to declare itself, with just the right quality to satisfy the Senator’s careful eye. And then—
What followed was best of all, for then Grand-père set to work with an exquisitely pointed pencil to improve on his work by retouching the negative, emphasizing shadows, or giving richness to special aspects of the picture with an intricate shading done sometimes in tiny dots, sometimes in little spiral squiggles, sometimes in cross-hatching, so that the appearance of the sitter was enhanced in a flattering way.
Or, it might be, in a way that was not wholly flattering. Gerald Vincent O’Gorman had a dark beard, and when the Senator was finished with him, his close-shaven jaw had a faintly criminal shadow on it. And Father Beaudry’s fleshy wen—not large but emphatic—on the left side of his nose was given a prominence which startled the priest when he received the print that was to be sent to his mother in Trois Rivieres. Not even the dignity of soutane and biretta could diminish the prominence of that wen. But Mary-Teresa, who already had a perceptible double chin, lost it in the retouching process. The Senator never commented on these alterations to Francis, but he could be seen to smile as he brought them into being with his delicate pencil, and Francis learned, without knowing that he was learning, that a portrait is, among other things, a statement of opinion by the artist, as well as a “likeness”, which was what everybody wanted it to be.
Francis was allowed to do some retouching himself, and he longed to transform the sitters with squints and lumps and deforming wrinkles. This was not permitted, but when Grandfather was momentarily absent he did, on one occasion, manage to sharpen one of Father Devlin’s front teeth in a way that seemed to him more expressive of Father Devlin’s personality than the unaided truth. Whether Grandfather saw what had been done was never known to Francis. But Grandfather did indeed notice, and a spirit of mischief to which he could not often give rein, and a pride in the psychological perception shown by his grandson, made him hold his peace, and he printed the improved portrait. Father Devlin never understood it, and although repeated examination in the mirror, and exploratory licking, told him that his dog-tooth was not really that of a vampire, he was of that simple group of mankind that believes the camera cannot lie, and besides, he did not like to criticize the Senator.
So, in one way and another, Francis managed to get some joy in life despite the shadow of school and the harassment of virtually all other children. Without being aware of it, he took into his mind and spirit forever a world that was passing away, a world of isolated communities like Blairlogie, which knew little of the world outside that they did not learn from The Clarion or, in one or two hundred uncharacteristic households, from the Ottawa papers. There was no entertainment from outside save the films and occasional road-shows at the McRory Opera House; entertainment was provided by church groups, by fraternal orders, by innumerable card parties, and of course by gossip, often cruel and bizarre in it nature.
At the top of the class structure were a few families who kept “maids”, an order of being who paradoxically conferred distinction, but were themselves held in disdain as underlings. When a maid bought a coat at Thomson and Howat, for instance, Archie Thomson always telephoned her employer (there were about two hundred telephones in the town) to ask if the girl was “good” for it, and to find out if he could what she was paid monthly. If a maid was so audacious as to attract a suitor, her mistress never failed to pop into the kitchen suddenly, to find out if they were up to anything. To employ a maid was splendid: to be a maid was to be sneered at, especially by those ladies who did not have a servant themselves. Protestant ministers were insistent that employers should release their maids on Sunday evenings, so that they could attend late services, but they gave the maids warmed-over sermons.
It was a world in which the horse played a crucial part. Few of these horses were of the noble breed with arching neck and flashing eye; most were miserable screws, rackers, the broken-winded, the spavined, often far gone with the botts, or with nostrils dribbling from the glanders. Even the splendid Percherons that drew the Senator’s great sleighs laden with tree-trunks were not objects of pride to their drivers, for they were seldom washed or combed, and the accusation that somebody smelled like a horse had a pungency now forgotten. But all of these creatures were hearty producers of manure, and in spring, when the unploughed roads gradually lost their layers of snow, the droppings of November perfumed the air of April, appearing with the lost overshoes and the copious spittings of the tobacco-chewers that had accumulated during the long months of frost.
Where there are horses there must be smiths. Francis spent many a happy hour, of which Aunt would have disapproved, hanging around Donoghue’s, where the big horses that pulled the lumber-sleighs were shod with pointed shoes that would strike into the icy roads. There, warmed by the horses and the fire of the forge, he learned rich blasphemy and objurgation from Vincent Donoghue, learned the stench that rises when the hot shoe is placed on the horse’s hoof, and the sharper stench when a spark landed on the blacksmith’s apron. But he learned no obscenity. Donoghue was puritanical and his horse-vocabulary was for talking to horses as he understood them; he would permit no smutty stories in his forge.
The taxicab was yet to come, and people who needed a carriage for a funeral, or a visit to the hospital, rode in lurching vehicles like droshkys; for winter their wheels were removed and they were mounted on runners; inside they stank of old leather, and of the mangy buffalo-robes that were drawn over the knees of the passengers; the drivers sat on a box in front, wrapped in fur coats of incalculable age.
There were a few horses of the better, proud sort, and of these the Senator’s were the best: a team of good bays, and a dancing pony or two to pull the governess-cart in which Marie-Louise and frequently Madame Thibodeau went shopping. Undertakers also had good horses, for that was part of the panoply of death, and of these Devinney’s black team were the most admired.
Good horses need good keeping, and when Old Billy finally drank himself into the grave, the Senator made one of the loose arrangements that were common in Blairlogie to have Devinney’s driver and groom take care of his horses as well, and it was not long before this man, whose name was Zadok Hoyle, spent more time at St. Kilda than he did at Devinney’s Furniture and Undertaking Parlours.