The question plagued and puzzled. There was the time that a travelling company came to the theatre his grandfather owned—the McRory Opera House and Blairlogie’s principal centre of culture—offering a play tantalizingly called The Unwanted Child. There were special matinees for Women Only, at which a Well-Known Authority would lecture on the theme of the play, which was of concern to everyone. Francis knew that Victoria had attended one of these matinees, and he pestered her without mercy to know what the play had been about.
At last she yielded. “Frankie,” she said with great solemnity, “it was about a girl who Went The Limit.” No more would she say.
The Limit? Oh, what was the Limit?
Poor wretch, said the Lesser Zadkiel, breaking off in his narrative; don’t you pity him?
–No, no, no, said the Daimon Maimas. Pity is a human feeling, and I have nothing whatever to do with it. Your work is so much taken up with human creatures, brother, that you are infected by their weaknesses. Those children at Carlyle Rural, for instance; they were simply what they were. But you tell the tale of Francis as if to condemn them. I never condemn. My job was to make something of Francis with the materials I had at hand. If those materials were rough, they were good enough to grind his spirit down to a surface that showed up several veins of gold. Fine polishing will come later.
–But it made the boy thin and pale and sad.
–Now, now—that’s another of your pitying judgements. Put aside pity, Zadkiel. But I forget—you can’t; it’s not in your welkin. But I can, and indeed I must, if I am to be the grinder, the shaver, the refiner. We work like the classical Greek sculptors, you and I must hew the creature out of my own intractable piece of rock and put a fine surface on it. Then you apply the rich colours, of which Pity and Charity are very popular pigments. They seem to give my creation a life that human beings understand and love, but when the colours are washed away by time, the reality is revealed, and I know that the reality has been there since the beginning.
–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.