“His name’s Chicken,” some would say, whooping with joy. These girls belonged to what psychologists would later define as the Hetaera, or Harlot, classification of womanhood.
“Aw, let him alone. His parents must be crazy. Look, he’s nearly bawling. It’s mean to holler on him if his parents are crazy. Is your name really Chicken, kid?” These were what the psychologists would classify as the Maternal, fostering order of womankind. Their pity was almost more hateful than outright jeering.
Teachers patrolled both playgrounds, carrying a bell by its clapper, and usually intent on studying the sky. Ostensibly guardians of order, they were like policemen in their avoidance of anything short of arson or murder. Questioned, they would probably have said that the Cornish child seemed to be popular; he was always in the centre of some game or another.
Life must be lived, and sometimes living means enduring. Francis endured, and the torment let up a little, though it broke out anew every two or three weeks. He no longer had to go to school in the care of Bella-Mae. Kindergarten was hateful. There was stupid, babyish paper-cutting, which was far beneath his notice, and which he did easily. There was sewing crudely punched cards, so that they formed a picture, usually of an animal. There was learning to tell the time, which he knew anyway. There was getting the Twenty-third Psalm by heart, and singing a tedious hymn that began
and dragged on to a droning refrain (for Miss Wade had no skill as a choral director) of
Francis, who had a precocious theological bent, wondered why he was thanking the Father, whoever He might be, for this misery and this tedium.
It was in kindergarten that the foundations for Francis Cornish’s lifelong misanthropy were firmly established. The sampling of mankind into which he had been cast badgered and mocked him, excluded him from secrets and all but the most inclusive games, sneered at his clothes, and in one instance wrote PRICK in indelible pencil on the collar of his sailor middy (for which Bella-May gave him a furious scolding).
He could say nothing of this at home. When, infrequently, his parents came back to Blairlogie for a weekend, he was told by his mother that he must be a particularly good boy, because Daddy was busy with some very important things in Ottawa, and was not to be worried. Now: how was school going?
“All right, I guess.”
“Don’t say ‘I guess’ unless you really do guess, Frankie. It’s stupid.”
And so Francis left the garden of childhood for the kindergarten, said the Lesser Zadkiel.
–It was his second experience of the Fall of Man, said the Daimon Maimas. The first, of course, is birth, when he is thrust out of the paradise of his mother’s body; the second is when he leaves his happy home—if he is lucky enough to have such a thing—and finds himself in the world of his contemporaries.
–Surely it was stupid to send him to school in white, with a nursemaid?
–Nobody thought about it. The Major and his wife thought of nothing but the Major’s work in Ottawa, which of course was never defined for the child. But the Major was no fool, and had smelled a war in the air, long before more important people did.
–You sound rather pleased with what happened to Francis.
–I had a rough idea of the direction in which I was going to push him, and I always like to begin tempering my steel early. A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life. And it wasn’t all unhappy. Go on with the story, and you’ll see.
As Christmas drew near it seemed that the War was going to last longer than had been expected, so the Major thought he had better close Chegwidden Lodge and move to Ottawa. It would be foolish to take Francis, for both parents were busy. Mary-Jim was deep in women’s committee work, and looked adorable in the severe clothes she thought appropriate to her role. It was arranged that Francis should move the short distance from the Lodge to St. Kilda, and live under the guidance of his grandparents and Aunt Mary-Ben.
This meant a great improvement in his lot, for Aunt immediately bought him clothes that were more what other children in Blairlogie wore, and he was happy in his corduroy knickerbockers and a mackinaw coat, and the tuque that replaced his little velvet hat with earflaps. He was happy, too, in his room, not a nursery but full of grown-up furniture. Best of all, Bella-Mae was left at the Lodge as a caretaker, and Aunt made it gently clear that there was no need for her to bother her head about Francis. That suited Bella-Mae, as she said to herself, down to the ground, because it gave her more time to devote to advancement in her own particular Army.
There were some great changes. Francis now ate at the table with the adults, and the manners he had learned while eating with Bella-Mae needed amendment. No grunting, to begin with; Bella-Mae had been a hearty eater and a great grunter as she ate, and as Francis never sat at his parents’ table his grunting had passed unnoticed. He had to learn to murmur grace and cross himself before and after meals. He learned to be neat with his knife and fork, and was forbidden to hound morsels of food around his plate. Most significant change of all, he had to learn to speak French.
This had been a matter of some debate. Grand-père and Grand’mère thought it would be useful if they could speak together at table without being understood by the boy. But, said Aunt, he would certainly learn anyhow, and had best learn properly. So he sat beside her at meals, and learned to ask for things in polite form, and finally to make a few remarks of his own, in the pleasing, clear French that Aunt had learned in her convent days; but he also learned the patois (called by Aunt woods-French) into which his grandparents retreated when they had secrets to discuss.
The whole business of French opened a new world to Francis. Of course, he had noticed that a lot of people in Blairlogie spoke this language, with varying degrees of elegance, but he now discovered that the hardware store kept by somebody called Dejordo was, in reality, the property of Emile Desjardins, and that the Legarry family were, to those who spoke French, Legare. Some tact had to be exercised here, because it was a point of honour among the English-speaking populace to mispronounce any French name, as a rebuke to those who were so foolish, and probably sneaky and disloyal as well, as to speak a private lingo. But Francis was a quick boy—”in the uptake” as his Scots grandfather put it—and he learned not only two kinds of French, but two kinds of English as well. In the schoolyard a substantial quantity of anything whatever was always described as “a big bunch”, and any distance beyond what could be covered on foot was “a fur piece of a ways”. When adults greeted one another with “Fine day, eh?”, the proper reply was “Fine day altogether”. He mastered all these niceties with the same ease with which he digested his food and grew, and by the time he was nine he was not merely bilingual, but multilingual, and could talk to anybody he met in their own language, be it French, patois, Canadian-Scots English, or the speech of the Upper Ottawa Valley. He learned manners, too, and would never be so gross as to tutoyer Madame Thibodeau, whose social magnificence grew with her fat.