“But where did you learn all that—about the cotton-wool, and the needles and everything?”

“Always had a turn that way. I remember when I was just a little lad, at my grandfather’s funeral. ‘I want to see Granda, I want to see Granda’ I kept on at my mother. She thought it was love, and very creditable to me, but it was just nosiness. He went by the palsy route, you see, and I was amazed that he’d stopped shaking. I thought it was the undertaker, old Smout, that had stopped him. Of course, Smout was just a Cornish village undertaker; coffin-maker, really; and he didn’t have the scientific advantages of today. By my standards, Granda was just a mess, rigged up in a cheap shroud, his hair all combed the wrong way. But it was my start.

“Then in the war we had to bury the dead, and in my lot that work was done under a farrier-sergeant who had no training and no ideas, but he wanted it done proper. That was where my talent came to light. There wasn’t much we could do; no embalming, of course, but we could make ‘em look like soldiers of the Queen, poor lads. With a face wound you could put on a decent piece of plaster. I would have got a medal for my work if it hadn’t been for a misunderstanding, for which I bear no grudge, not now. Other outfits copied our methods, but they went too far. There was one bugger did a nasty business in hearts. He was an officer, so his mail wasn’t censored—gentlemen don’t read other gents’ letters, you see—and he would write home, ‘Dear Madam please accept my condolences on the death of your brave son, who fell like a man with the respect of all his regiment. His dying wish was that his heart should return to England and lay in the church where he learned to be a man when a boy. Can deliver said heart to you on my return to England, suitably preserved, at a very moderate fee. Yours, etc.’ Rotten trick, but what mother could resist? God damn him, wherever he is now.

“Then I got a bit of real pro training in England, and that’s where I picked up all this. Not that I learned the art of make-up in the embalmers’ parlours. Not the real art. I had that off a pal of mine who played minor clowns in the panto at Christmas. Powder. That’s the great secret.”

Zadok raised a cloud of violet-scented poudre de riz around the head. “That’s the foundation,” he said.

Old McAllister’s face, which had turned a dark putty shade, was swiftly painted with a wash that left him a light salmon, and over the cheekbones Zadok brushed some dry rouge of a startling crimson. Next he worked on Old McAllister’s mouth, gently massaging the grim, grey lips into an unaccustomed smile: this he touched up with a red salve that a harlot might have though excessive. Then he rapidly massaged some vaseline into the thin hair, and combed it forward.

“How do you suppose he did his hair—when he did it? No indications, so we’ll give him Old Faithful.” He combed the hair with a left-hand parting, then quitted the right-hand portion over his finger, giving Old McAllister a nifty, almost a dandified air. Quick work with the collar, the necktie; into the waistcoat, draping a huge silver watch-chain, from which the watch had been removed, over the sunken belly. On with the coat. A piece of card on the tip of which some white cambric was sewn was tucked into the breast pocket of the coat (Old McAllister had not used, or possessed, handkerchiefs of his own). The hands were folded on the breast, as if in Christian acceptance, and Old McAllister was a finished work of art.

Then, further astonishing Francis after an astonishing, rapturous evening, Zadok took Old McAllister’s right hand in his own and shook it cordially. “Godspeed, old man,” said he. Noticing Francis’s astonishment, he said, “I always do that. I’m the last, most personal attendant, you see; the priest is quite another matter. So I always shake the hand, and wish ‘em well. You’d better shake, too, Frankie, as you’ve been here, and drawing pictures, and all.”

Tentative, but game, Francis shook Old McAllister’s chilly paw.

“There, old cully, back into the cooler with you, and I’ll deliver you first thing in the morning, in plenty of time for the viewing. And as for you, Frankie my lad, I must get you home and to bed before anybody notices.”

To Francis’s surprise, Zadok not only took him back to St. Kilda, but came upstairs with him, and after the door had closed on his bedroom went—where? The sound was not of feet going downstairs, but of feet going upstairs, to the third floor, which was Victoria Cameron’s private domain, and to which Francis was forbidden to mount under threat of the severest reprisals, Never, never up there, Francis. So why was Zadok going up there? Another astonishment at the end of an astonishing, enlarging, enlightening day. A memorable day on his journey toward being an artist, a man of the great world of events, like Harry Furniss.

In the weeks that passed, Francis spent many an enraptured hour in Mr. Devinney’s back room, watching Zadok at work, and sketching for dear life. A variety of subjects came under his view and his pencil. The old predominated, of course, but now and then there was somebody who had, in the prime of life, suffered an accident or an unaccountably severe illness. Once there was a girl of sixteen, whom Francis did not positively know, but whom he had seen in the streets and at the McRory Opera House.

With female subjects, Zadok’s behaviour was exemplary. As he stripped them on the table, he draped a towel over the pubic region, so that Francis never saw a woman fully naked, much as he wished to do so.

“Professional discretion,” said Zadok. “No Nosy-Parkering with the ladies. So we always lay a towel over The Particular, you see, dear soul, because no man, professional though he may be, has any call to behold The Particular of any female he deals with in a purely professional capacity.”

But, oh, how Francis longed to see The Particular, about which he speculated so painfully. What could it be? The very few nudes in Aunt’s collection seemed to have no Particular, or had averted it from the gaze, or put a hand over it. What was The Particular? He put the matter tactfully to Zadok; he was an artist, and ought to know everything about the human body.

“You must find out your own way, Francis,” said Zadok solemnly; “the buzzem—well, it’s very widely seen and indeed it’s one of the first things any of us do see, but The Particular is quite another matter.”

One night in March, as he took Francis to Devinney’s, Zadok seemed depressed. “I don’t care for this, dear lad; don’t care for it at all.”

What he did not care for, when it was taken out of the cooler, was the body of François Xavier Bouchard, a dwarf tailor, known to Blairlogie’s English-speakers as Bushy.

His one-storey tailor-shop was a mean building at the top end of Dalhousie Street, and winter and summer Bushy could be seen leaning in the door, waiting for custom. It cannot have been much: sewing on a button or perhaps turning a suit for some thrifty soul, but he seemed to keep bread in his mouth, although, like many tailors, he was shabby in his own dress. He grinned without cease, a dog-like grin that seemed to implore tolerance, respect being beyond his hopes.

There he lay, on Mr. Devinney’s table, his head huge and his trunk barrel-like, his arms and legs so short that there seemed to be little between shoulder and elbow, elbow and hand, his private parts huge above his tiny legs, although they would not have been excessive on a full-grown man. His head lay at an unusual angle.

“Hanged himself,” said Zadok. “They found him this morning. Did it two or three days ago, I should guess. Poor, poor little soul. We’ve got to do our best for old F.X., Francis, not that anything can make up for a life like his.”

The scene which preceded the final scene of Bushy’s life, as Zadok recounted it, was something wholly outside any experience known to Francis, except those terrible quarter-hours in the playground of Carlyle Rural, when boys blew up frogs and tortured cats. This would certainly have reopened the wounds of Jesus.