“In normal circumstances,” said Aunt Agnes calmly, “a childhood infatuation is no more serious than the measles. But the situation between you and this Carey girl is quite dangerous enough to be nipped in the bud.”
“What do you mean, Aunt Agnes?”
“It might easily grow into something very serious indeed.”
“It’s serious right now. I love Catherine.”
She gave me a pitying smile. “At seventeen?” And then she surprised me. “That’s why I’m here. I believe you really do love this little invalid. And I should not be surprised if she returns your infatuation. The both of you are lame ducks. Yes.” Her beady eyes fixed themselves on mine. “I expect she’s the first girl who ever liked you?”
I nodded.
“She’s similar to a cripple, of course, with that heart of hers. I’m told she’s quite good-looking, though I can’t see it myself. It would be much better, actually, if she had a wooden leg than a heart like that. Naturally the child is grateful to you for even noticing her. Cripples are always grateful for affection, especially if they’re female. Yes. I can see how she might be grateful for the attentions even of someone like you.”
I felt myself flushing with rage and hatred, but could think of nothing to say.
“I have made enquiries,” Aunt Agnes continued serenely, “of a doctor who understands about cases like hers. They’re quite incurable. She will be a burden on others as long as she lives. Of course at the moment she appears quite all right. But she knows she is not all right. Did this Carey girl,” asked Aunt Agnes in the same serene tones, “mention any of this to you, by any chance?”
“Of course she did.”
“What a fool you are! You’re not an idiot like your father, but you’re a fool.”
I looked at her sullenly.
“I believe I’ve under-rated Catherine. She’s shrewder than I thought. She’s played on your chivalry. Women are apt to do that, and men are always fools about it. I suppose it was she who suggested that you go to McGill in spite of my plans?”
I did not answer.
“So it was! I knew it. Yes.”
A long silence during which I felt my ears on fire.
“George,” said Aunt Agnes after a time, “I suppose you are aware that the time has come for you to think seriously about your future?”
“I have been thinking about it.”
“Indeed? What do you intend to be?”
“I don’t know yet, Aunt Agnes.”
“What do you think you could be successful at?”
“Well, I guess there’ll be quite a few things.”
“There will not be quite a few things, George. You would be useless in business. Business does not attract you, does it?”
“No.”
“Well? I can’t see you as a lawyer. You lack the kind of intelligence and drive for the law, and you would quickly be bored by it. There is only one profession where I can imagine you even earning a living, and that’s schoolmastering. In the right kind of school, of course.”
There was a ragged volley of shots outside and Aunt Agnes lifted her chin.
“What’s that?” she said.
“It’s only Father.”
She raised her eyebrows for more specific information. And feeling ashamed and resentful because Father let this woman come into his house and bully us, I spoke spitefully.
“He’s firing off brass cannons with the kids. He made them himself. He’s made models of German battleships and he and the kids are shooting at them. They’re playing the battle of Jutland.”
Aunt Agnes surveyed me. “George,” she asked sweetly, “have you any idea what kind of man your father seems to adults?”
I let the question go and she did not press it.
“George,” she said next, “before I sailed to Europe last June I thought you and I had come to a clear understanding. You were to return to Frobisher and become a prefect. Montreal is a man’s city and being a prefect will be like joining a good club. But as a freshman at McGill you’d be just one little boy in a herd of Jews.
“I have spoken with your headmaster and he believes that with diligence you will be able to get a second-class degree at the university later on. That will be adequate for you to obtain a position in a good private school.”
Another pause.
“As a schoolmaster, what will you earn?” She continued. “Do you know the answer to that question?”
I, who had no wish to become a schoolmaster, mumbled that I did not expect it would be very much.
“You will start at about a thousand a year with keep,” said Aunt Agnes. “In time you will work up. In schoolmastering, the clergy and ships the pay is never large, but there are other compensations. A clergyman, a ship’s captain and a headmaster has a position. At forty-five, if your cards are played right, you might become a headmaster.
“For a career like that – and it’s the only possible career for someone with your disadvantages – you must be scrupulously careful in your choice of a wife. Obviously it is absurd for you even to consider marriage for at least ten or a dozen more years. But when the time comes, you must marry the right kind of girl.
“For you, the right kind of a girl is a wealthy young woman who has always considered herself plain. Your appearance will improve in the twenties, and after you are thirty it will deteriorate until you are fifty, when it will no longer matter what you look like.
“You must plan to marry a plain girl with money. You must be realistic and disciplined. There are many such girls and I have my eye on several who may turn out to be suitable. They make the best wives because they are grateful to be married at all. With a plain girl of good family and a private income, you could make a tolerable success out of life in a modest way, our family would not die out and perhaps you would have children who would amount to something.
“There is no other alternative that I can see. I have talked things over with your Uncle Harry and he agrees with me.
“So you must return to Frobisher this fall. Yesterday I visited the Registrar at McGill and cancelled your enrollment there. So everything is decided.”
I lost my temper and flushed and got to my feet.
“I won’t!” I said. “I’m going to McGill. I’m going to do as I please.”
“Sit down, George, and stop being silly.”
“I won’t sit down.”
“You will please stop behaving like a child.”
“Then stop treating me like one.”
She eyed me and I felt the steel of her will. Since I had been a baby I had felt it, and it paralyzed me. I sat down and looked sullenly at the floor.
“Actually, George, you have no choice in this matter. Your Father will advance the money for Frobisher. He will not advance it for McGill. I have already spoken to him and the thing is settled.”
Then she rose and with a perfectly-timed exit she left the room.
A few minutes later I followed her. The banging of cannons continued on the shore and I saw Father’s little boats sailing in line ahead and the shot splashing around them. None of the boats seemed to be in any danger. Mother fluttered downstairs and began talking to Aunt Agnes. I passed them, red-faced and sullen, and walked out of the house and down the road to the Careys. I knocked on the door and nobody answered and then I remembered Catherine saying that she and her Mother were going into town that day. Wretched and despising myself, I killed the rest of the afternoon alone.
At tea time I returned and found that Aunt Agnes had left and that my mother and father were eating buns in the living room. Father gave me an evasive look and then became boyish and hearty.
“George, you should have been with us this afternoon. We sank four German ships, the boys and I. The cannon worked perfectly. We sank the König, the Kaiser, the Prinz Regent Luitpold and a cruiser. That’s more big ships than Beatty and Jellicoe sank at Jutland.”
I sat down and said nothing.
“George dear,” said my mother, “ha
ve some tea and a bun?”
I shook my head and my parents looked as uncomfortable as a pair of schoolchildren caught by the teacher in the wrong place.
Finally I said: “Why does Aunt Agnes have to come out here and treat us like that?”
“Well,” said Father, “well, you know her bark’s worse than her bite. Old Aggie,” he went on to Mother, “you know what she’s like. But I’m afraid she knows best. She’s a clever woman, you know, a very clever woman. Always was.”
“She’s a horrible woman,” I said.
“George,” said my mother, “that’s no way to talk about your aunt.”
“She told me you won’t let me go to McGill,” I said to Father.
“Well now, I wouldn’t put it quite that way, old man. Your Aunt Agnes has your interests very close to her heart and in spite of her bite – I mean her bark – she knows best, old man.”
“So she’s bullied you, too?”
“Now then, old man, that’s putting it pretty rough.”
“Can I go, Father? That’s all I ask. Can I go to McGill?”
He swallowed nervously and tried to look wise.
“George old man, when your Aunt Agnes explained things to me, I realized I’d not given the matter sufficient thought.”
I looked at him the way a boy looks at his father when he knows his father is afraid of doing what he wants.
“After all,” Father went on, “she’s a very clever woman, your aunt. I don’t know where we’d be without her. When your grandfather died she said to me I must always take her advice about important things and it’s a lucky thing I did or long ago we’d have been without a roof.”
I stared sullenly at my plate.
“After all, old man,” said Father with forced cheeriness, “what’s a year in a boy’s life? You go back to Frobisher like a good boy, now. You’ll be a prefect and that’s more than I ever was. Next year you’ll go to McGill and that’s a promise.”
“If I don’t go now,” I said, rising to my feet, “I’ll never break loose.”
“Break loose from what, dear?” My mother asked.
“Oh my God!” I said and headed for the door.
Behind me I heard my mother’s plaintive voice: “I do hope you won’t swear like that in front of Catherine, she’s so delicate.”
“Oh my God!” I repeated, and outside in the hall I hit the newel post so hard with my fist that I broke the skin over my knuckles.
CHAPTER IV
My Aunt Agnes was a thorough woman; years later I met an elderly lady who told me, in speaking of her, that she was a political hostess manquée. She was married to this cadaverous canon with the hair growing out of his ears, who was partially deaf, and was lazy and insensitive as well, and she had no children of her own and hardly any outlets for her energy. She was too snobbish to have anything to do with women’s clubs – she regarded them as middle-class and American – and she probably felt herself snubbed by people with more money than herself, She had met Catherine’s parents and despised them, and had met Catherine herself and disliked her. Whether or not she liked me I never knew, but she certainly resented the fact that I disliked her.
No sooner was Aunt Agnes back in Montreal than she wrote Catherine the kind of letter an experienced woman can write to a young girl. She was courteously cruel, and she struck Catherine exactly where she knew she would hurt her the most. She expressed sympathy with her heart-condition and admiration for her courage in living with it. But she made it very clear to Catherine that she and everyone else assumed that Catherine would accept realities and understand that it would be sinful and destructive for her to try to live as other women did. She told her that I was weak and she spoke very frankly about the kind of people my parents were. She did not blame Catherine for influencing me, but pointed out that she had.
Catherine showed me this letter and watched my face while I read it, and I felt unequal and alone. I was only seventeen and I had never had any confidence in myself. My expression betrayed me, and for the first time Catherine became formal with me.
“I never intended to intrude into your life, George.”
Strange, elderly words from a girl of eighteen, and I was too weak to face their implication. I became tongue-tied, and when I left her that day her face was frozen.
Two days passed and we did not see each other. Then word came from Aunt Agnes that all had been arranged for my return to Frobisher even though the autumn term had already begun. Feeling like lead I packed my bags and walked out alone along the lakeshore in an autumn wind, and all the intimate places where I had known life and joy were dead and sad. Night fell and I ate a silent, sullen meal with my parents.
“Cheer up, old man,” said Father. “It’ll only be one more year.”
“Why don’t you go out and say good-bye to Catherine tonight?” Mother suggested brightly.
“No,” I said.
But an hour later I was walking along the road in the dark to the Carey house in a wind that whipped my hair and blew moisture from the lake through half-bare trees. The leaves had begun to fall early that year and only the oaks were fully clad and now, hearing that wind screaming through the ragged birches and maples, I could almost hear the voice of the winter.
When I reached the Carey house there were only two lights burning and I rang the bell and waited. Several minutes passed and I was about to go away, when suddenly the door opened and there was Catherine in a silk dressing gown looking tiny and dark against the dim light behind her.
“George!” And in her voice was that note of fatality which some women have when, after a long inner struggle, they have made up their minds to surrender to some decisive force. “Come in, dear.”
I followed her in and this new Catherine made me afraid. The door closed behind me and I went into the living room ahead of her, smelled the pleasant aroma of Mr. Carey’s tobacco, looked out the window at the end of the room and saw nothing but darkness. One of the lights went off behind me and I turned around.
“I’d gone to bed,” Catherine said. “Mummy and Dad are in town at some reception and Yvonne won’t be back for a couple of hours. When I heard the bell I hoped it was you.”
I sat down and she was little more than a presence in the dim light. She sat beside me, her head turned away, relaxed and tense all at once. I was aware that her hand lay beside me and I took it and felt its pressure.
“George!” she whispered, and I felt her will, her woman’s will, taking possession of my weaker male one.
Then we were in one another’s arms on the sofa and she had nothing on but her dressing grown and the nightdress underneath it. I held her and felt the house quiver and saw strange images and she was alive and stirring against me, alive and embracing me with an instinctual female knowledge wonderful and frightening.
“George!” she murmured. “Dear George! Dear George!”
Then she sat up and looked at me and I saw her eyes grave in the dim light. She slipped out of her clothes and I saw her naked and strange with the white and immense wonder of a woman’s beauty the first time a man or a boy sees it. Then again she was in my arms and I held her blindly.
“Yes,” she whispered, “yes, yes. We must, we must.”
But I trembled and was afraid not merely as a boy is who fears to make a girl pregnant, but because I was not yet a man.
She waited for me, she held me, she was as quietly restless as a quiet sea.
Finally I sat up and heard myself say: “No, I can’t.”
And when I said this I felt a kind of virtue go out of me, and became an utterly defeated boy and less of a man than I had been for months.
Silence for at least five minutes while the house quivered in the storm and then, suddenly, I was aware that the room was bright. Catherine, looking calm and now dressed again, her face appearing as though nothing unusual had happened, sat down on the chester-field and said nothing. Neither did I.
“George,” she said finally, “I wanted it to be you. You George
.”
I could say nothing, could think of nothing to say.
“I’ve got to live, George. When I go to McGill I’m not coming back here. Mummy resents me. She always has. I’ve held her down and spoiled her life. At least, that’s what she thinks. Actually she’s spoiled it herself because she’s selfish and at the same time she’s afraid not to do what everyone thinks is her duty.”
Catherine could talk like this even then, possibly because she had been alone so much that she had read far more than most of us and had not picked up the loose and easy speech rhythms the rest of us used.
She smiled at me with a gentleness for which I was grateful: “George, who ever told you that women are delicate and gentle? I’d have been good for you, dear. I’d have protected you. Don’t let some other woman spoil …” And then with a little shrug and another smile she said: “Have you got a cigarette?”
I didn’t, and she knew I didn’t because I had not yet begun to smoke.
“Daddy usually smokes pipes, but he has some stale old Three Castles around somewhere. Let’s smoke a cigarette and then I’ll send you home.”
She found a tin of her father’s cigarettes and they were stale and dry and we smoked one apiece and coughed and then, with a new formality, she extended her hand and I took it.
“Good-night, dear. A year from now I’ll see you at McGill.”
I left the house like somebody escaping from he knew not what, and the wind tearing at my hair and the rain lashing my face were grateful as I walked home.
The next morning I returned to Frobisher after failing in my first effort to be a man. A fortnight later the headmaster announced to the assembled school that I had been made a prefect, and a week later I received a letter from my Aunt Agnes congratulating me and reminding me how wise her decision had been. My last year at Frobisher was not a happy one and that is all I can remember about it. It was almost a blank in my life because of what I had lost, and I lived through it in the hope of seeing Catherine again the following summer.
But I did not see her the following summer because she had gone to Europe. We had exchanged a few letters in the interval, but hers had been correct, the kind of letters a woman writes to a man when she has closed the book on a might-have-been. It was mid-summer before I learned anything about her first year at McGill, and I learned it from Jack Buchanan, the boy Catherine had taken as an example of all that was stuffy in the life of the Montreal garrison.
Watch that Ends the Night Page 11
