“Ah, but the Senator trusts me. Would he let me make the journeys to The Portage if he didn’t?”
“Well—I don’t know. But you’re a soldier, and you’ve travelled, and I just hope you know what you’re doing.”
“I do. Francis the First needs a new face to cheer him up. Shall we sing?”
Zadok struck up “Frère Jacques”, which he sang in French, pretty well. But Victoria sang
because she spoke no French—could not “parley-voo the ding-dong” as the English speakers in Blairlogie put it—and would not try. But Francis piped up with the third voice, and they made a reasonable bilingual job of it.
The Looner was enchanted. It would be false to say that his face brightened, but he stood clinging to the raised side of his bed, and turned his little eyes from face to face of the singers.
Then Zadok sang “Yes, let me like a soldier fall”, which was obviously a favourite. Most of it was in an extremely manly vein, but, as he explained to Francis, he always “came the pathetic” on
“That’s the way the Captain went in South Africa,” he said solemnly, but who the Captain was he did not reveal.
This fine operatic piece was the gem of his repertoire, but as several evenings passed, Francis came to know it all. Zadok was a very personal performer. When he sang
he looked languishingly at Victoria, who pretended not to notice, but blushed becomingly. There were rowdy music-hall songs of the Boer War period, and “Good-bye, Dolly Gray”. And there were songs that must have been the fag-ends of folksongs of great antiquity, but the words Zadok sang were those he had heard as a child, among the real folk, and not the cleansed and scholarly versions known to the English Folk Song Society.
And there was a rough version of “The Raggle-Taggle Gypsies-O” that made the Looner hop up and down in his bed. When he did this he was likely to fart loudly, and Victoria would say, almost automatically, “Now then, none o’ that, or I’ll go downstairs.” But Zadok said, “Aw now. Miss Cameron, the boy’s a natural, and you know it.” And, genially, to the Looner, “Better an empty house than a bad tenant, eh, Franko me dear?” Which seemed to comfort the dismayed Looner, who did not know what he had done that was wrong. Did he comprehend anything of the story of the gentle lady who left her noble husband and her goose-feather bed to go with the bright-eyed vagabonds? Nobody could tell how much the Looner understood of anything, but he responded to rhythm, and his favourite, which ended every concert, was a rollicking song to the beat of which Zadok, and Francis, clapped their hands:
After which Victoria demanded quieter entertainment, or Some Of Us would never get off to sleep.
Sometimes there were impromptu picnics, when Victoria brought up good things from the kitchen, and they all ate, the Looner noisily and merrily, but with an enjoyment that Francis saw as parody of the refined greed of Aunt and Grand’mère. In one caricature in his Harry Furniss manner he drew them all three at table. Yes, Grand’mère, and Aunt, and the Looner, all tucking into a huge pie. Zadok thought it wonderful, but Victoria seized and destroyed it, and gave Francis a scolding for his “badness”.
As the Looner could not talk, Zadok and Victoria talked, with now and then a nod to include the quiet, attentive figure in the bed. Zadok would wave his pipe-stem at him, and interject “Isn’t that right, old son?” as if the Looner were silent by choice, and reflecting deeply. Francis rarely spoke, but drew and drew and drew, until he had books full of pictures of the scene—the two adults, not fashionable or stylish figures but people who might have belonged to any of five preceding centuries, Victoria knitting or mending, and Zadok leaning forward with his hands on his knees. Zadok sat in the old countryman’s fashion: his back never touched the back of the chair. And, of course, there were countless quick studies of Francis the First, which were grotesque to begin, but with time became perceptive, and touched with an understanding and pity not to be expected in so young an artist.
“Is he really so bad, Victoria? Couldn’t he come downstairs now and again?”
“No, Frank, he couldn’t. Not ever. You haven’t seen all of him. He’s shameful.”
“He’s strange, right enough, but why shameful?”
Victoria shook her head. “You’d know if you had to watch over him every day. He has a festering mind.”
A festering mind? Was it rotten brains, as charged by Alexander Dagg’s Maw?
It was a few weeks before the explanation came. One night, at the beginning of Easter Week, the Looner was more than ordinarily stirred by Zadok’s rendering of a seasonable hymn, “Who is this in gory garments?”. The Looner began to puff and blow, and claw at the crotch of his pyjamas.
“Easy, Franko. Easy old man,” said Zadok.
But Victoria was harsh. “Frank, you cut that right out, do you hear? Do you want me to get your belt? Eh? Do you?”
But the Looner paid no heed. He was now masturbating, gobbling and snorting. A sight to strike shame into Francis the Second.
Quickly Zadok rose and restrained him. Victoria brought from the chest of drawers a strange affair of wire and tapes, and as Zadok pulled down the Looner’s pyjama pants she fastened it around his waist, slipped a wire cage over his bobbing genitals, pulled a tape between his legs, and fastened the whole at the back with a little padlock.
The Looner fell to his mattress, whimpering in his catlike voice, and continued to whine.
“You shouldn’t have seen that, me dear,” said Zadok. “That’s the trouble, you see. He can’t leave himself alone, and in the daytime, when Miss Cameron is needed downstairs, we have to keep that on him, or nobody knows what might come of it. Sad, and that cage is a hateful thing, but Dr. J.A. says that’s how it has to be. Now you and me had better go downstairs, and leave Miss Cameron to settle him for the night.”
So that was it! This was plain evidence of the truth of what Dr. Upper had said. Self-abuse and the festering mind, and the shameful secret of the Looner, were all part of a notion of life which began to haunt Francis again, just as he had thought he was breaking free from that torment.
He dreamed terrible dreams, and thought fearful thoughts, as he lay looking without seeing it at the picture of Love Locked Out. Sometimes he wept, though tears were a shameful thing in a boy of his age. But what was he to make of this terrible house where the pious refinement of Aunt was under the same roof as the animal lust of the Looner, and the sweet music that Aunt played in the drawing-room was set against Zadok’s singing in the attic, singing which was so vigorous, so full of gusto, that there seemed to be a hint of danger—something Dr. Upper would not have approved—about it. This house where there was so much deep concern for his welfare, but nothing of the love he needed except for the two servants, who did not precisely love him so much as accept him as a fellow-being. This house where he, the cherished Francis, was aware that in a sort of hospital-prison there was another Francis whom nobody ever mentioned, and, so far as he could find out, nobody ever visited, except the Presbyterian cook-nurse, whose opinions on the matter he sometimes heard, when she reluctantly spoke of the matter.