Murther and Walking Spirits by Robertson Davies

Author:Robertson Davies [Davies, Robertson]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-7710-2784-0
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2015-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

(7)

“I CAN LOOK back over a remarkable career. Not only did I build – I advised other builders. Would you believe it, Gil, I was the only man around who knew how to cast a stair? Even a miserable staircase – you know, one of those things that goes up with walls on both sides. They’d struggle and mess around, and in the end they had one riser too high at the top, or the pitch was so steep it was like a ladder, or the treads were too narrow – that’s fatal to old folks, you know – you’d never believe the trouble they could get into with that simple calculation. Because they were just carpenters, you see. It would be crazy to call them builders, let alone master builders, like me. And I put it to ’em, you bet. ‘If you want me to plan your stairs, it’ll cost you twenty-five dollars,” I’d say, and they’d shrink back as if I’d stabbed ’em. But if they didn’t want a stair that was a disgrace, they had to pay up. I’ve made a hundred dollars in a month, just that way, in my time.

“But every career has to have a pinnacle, and mine came when the Wesleyan Methodists decided they had to step out in front of the Anglicans and the R.C.s and have the finest church in town. The Wesleyans had always been looked down on as poor folks, but times had changed, and they had some of the solidest people in town in their congregation and they wanted a big, fine church. So of course they got an architect.

“I must say he did a pretty good job. The design was in a style he called Mauro-Gothic. The Gothic part meant that he put in arches and pillars everywhere, though the pillars didn’t hold anything up, and the arches were just for show. And he had an atrium, and he had a belfry, and he had an apse, and a jagged thing up one side of the belfry that he said was Saracenic.”

As Mr. McOmish speaks I see the church. Time has given it a charm of its own, though it is a nightmare of needless ornament. All the styles the architect had mixed up in this Mulligan Stew of a building have blended at last; it is a Victorian Methodist Church, and could not be anything else. It looks as if it would defy an atom bomb, and it would cost a fortune to dismantle it. As it appears before me, I see that the Heritage Foundation has put a plaque on it, declaring it to be an architectural treasure. From purse-proud temple to architectural horror to national treasure in a little over a century; a truly Canadian story.

“That architect was a learned man, as architects go, but he was not dealing with learned people but powerful people. So he came to grief. They let him have his way with the outside, but the inside was another matter.

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