Piling on the agony? To Francis it seemed that his beautiful, distant mother had an air of distinction unequalled by anyone else he knew. Of course she was better than anybody else. It was unendurable that Alexander Dagg and his sluttish mother should take her name into their mouths. But—riding for a fall? Francis could not cast out the barbs planted by Alexander Dagg. All his life he would be naked to criticism, however foolish or unjust.
“D’you know what I’m going to tell yuh? There’s something funny about your house. People see lights where a light’s got no right to be. My Maw says there’s a looner in there somewheres. Somebody chained up. Does yer old aunt have to be chained up when her head gets too bad? People wonder a lot about your house. Do you know that?”
Yes, Francis knew that. Whoever lives in the finest house in a small Canadian town dwells in a House of Atreus, about which a part of the community harbours the darkest mythical suspicions. Sycophancy is present, but in small store; it is jealousy, envy, detraction, and derision that proliferate. In lesser houses there may be fighting, covert abortions, children “touched up” with a hot flat-iron to make them obedient, every imaginable aspect of parsimony, incest, and simple, persistent cruelty, but these are nothing to whatever seems amiss at the Big House. It is the great stage of its town, on which are played out the dramas that grip the imagination for years after the actors are dead, or have assumed new roles. With St. Kilda was linked its neighbour, Chegwidden Lodge, which provided in the Major and his beautiful wife a splendid addition to the cast of older actors. But only Francis had to listen, day after day, to what Blairlogie, as represented by Alexander Dagg’s Maw, thought about it.
Most of all, Francis reflected about Dr. Upper. The local board of education, persuaded by who can tell what impulse toward modernity, had secured the services of Dr. G. Courtney Upper, who was making a tour of that part of Ontario, going to any school that asked for him, giving instruction in the mysteries of sex to boys and girls. The process took two days. For the first day Dr. Upper talked mysteriously and in general terms about the necessity to love and respect one’s body, which was part of that British Empire that had shown its moral splendour in the war just ended. Any falling-off from the highest standards of clean speech, clean thought, deep breathing, daily washing of the armpits, was letting the Empire down. If you told dirty jokes you would quickly grow to look like a dirty joke. Girls were the future mothers of the Empire, and it behooved them to be models of daintiness and refinement in every possible way; boys would be the fathers of the Empire, and a slouching gait, sloppy grammar, smoking cigarettes, and spitting in the street would bring the Empire down as the Hun had never been able to do.
The Doctor himself was a pursy little man in a shabby black suit; his face was round and pudgy; his eyes ran and needed frequent mopping. But in the street he was a remarkable figure in an Inverness cape made for a bigger man, crowned by a bowler hat. His name was all over Blairlogie an hour after his arrival, for he had gone to Jim Murphy’s barber-shop for a shave, and, hearing an oath from some patron who obviously sought to undermine the Empire, he had leapt from the chair, denounced the astonished blasphemer, and rushed into the street with half his face covered with lather. Before an audience of children his manner was hypnotic and powerfully emotional.
It was on the second day of his evangel that the Doctor really got down to serious business. The girls had been taken off to another room, where a lunar nurse initiated them in lunar mysteries of their own, and the boys were at the mercy of Dr. Upper.
He began with motherhood. His style was lyrical; he seemed almost to sing to the harp. No figure in a boy’s life was so influential, so totally embracing, so holy and so good, as his mother. To her he owed the gift of life, for at the time of his birth she had gone down, down to the very gates of Hell itself, her body torn with pain, in order that her son might live. Just how this was done was not explained, which made the mystery doubly horrible. But that was what she had done, in the greatness of her love for the child she had not yet seen. Could any boy hope, however long he lived, to recompense her for that sacrifice, in which she had purchased his life at the danger of her own?
Plainly no boy could do so; but by complete obedience, and unfailing love, he might make a poor stab at it. Dr. Upper, assuming a whining voice and a cringing demeanour, spoke to a mother—whom he called Mommy—in a monologue in which worship and obedience were mingled. It would have brought blushes to the cheek of anyone not wholly under his spell, but the Doctor was a brilliant, if sickening, rhetorician. He had worked up his great Apostrophe to Mommy over many years, and of its kind it was a masterpiece.
In the afternoon the pressure was doubled—trebled. Boys had it in their power to be the fathers of a great race, but they would never do so if they relaxed for an instant their determination to be pure in every respect. Purity of mind; he had spoken of that. Purity of speech; he had shown them how unmanly were swearing and dirty talk. But purity of body—on that all else depended, and without that the race would sink into the degeneracy so plainly to be seen among foreigners.
Purity of body meant a sentimental regard for one’s testicles that was only slightly less whimpering than one’s love for Mommy. Save for occasional washing they must never be touched, though they might be addressed, if they seemed to demand attention, in the Mommy-style of love but, in this case, also of rebuke. They must be told to be patient until the day when some lovely girl, who had kept herself pure, would become your wife on her way to the final apotheosis of motherhood. Were you going to throw away what was rightfully hers on base self-gratification—or worse? (What was worse was not defined.) Dr. Upper had known a boy so curious about his testicles that he had opened them up with his pocket-knife, to see what they were like, and had died of blood-poisoning in Dr. Upper’s arms, imploring the Doctor with his last breath to warn other youths against his fatal lack of respect for his body.
If the testicles needed some stern talking-to from time to time, even more so did the penis. Yes, the Doctor urged boys always to use the medical terms, and not to sin by applying filthy names to these precious jewels. The penis might, from time to time, show a mind of its own, and when that happened, it had to be talked to kindly, but firmly (here the Doctor gave a little monologue that would bring any right-thinking penis to its senses), and wrapped in a cold wet towel until it was in a better frame of mind. On no account was it to be encouraged by thought or deed that would lead it to betray that noble mother or that almost equally wonderful girl who trusted you to bring her a love that was wholly pure and manly. Such thoughts, such deeds, were called masturbation, and it led rapidly to total degeneration of body and spirit. The Doctor had seen terrible ravages brought about by this sin of sins, and he could tell at a glance any boy who had succumbed to the loathsome practice.
Loathsome, yes, and dangerous, for the mighty gift of sex was not everlasting. Abuse it, and it would leave you, and then—what followed was too dreadful for the Doctor to say.
His peroration, the top of the show, came when the Doctor produced, after some rummaging, his own penis as an example of the adult member in its full splendour. He held it in his hand, as he thanked God for assisting him in bringing the great message of purity of life to the boys of Blairlogie.
During the two days when he listened to Dr. Upper, Francis was sickening for whooping-cough, and shortly afterward he was in bed, warm under the blankets and loaded regularly with egg-nog by dutiful Aunt. The miseries of his illness were compounded by the urgings of his body, of those very organs upon which Dr. Upper had placed such spooky emphasis. They were unruly; they demanded attention and try as he might he could not banish their assertiveness by thoughts of his mother, or the Empire, or anything at all. He was sick not only in body but in mind.