Watch that Ends the Night

by Hugh Maclennan

  “She went wild last year,” Jack told me with a knowing smile.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  He gave me another knowing smile: “She certainly surprised a lot of people. Nobody ever noticed her out here. Out here she was my idea of a mouse, but at McGill she certainly got herself talked about.”

  “What for?”

  “Late parties. She was in with quite a crowd. I heard she was on the carpet before the Dean of Women.”

  But this rumor of Jack’s was untrue. Certainly she had burned her candle at both ends and had lived with a kind of desperation, but she had also worked hard and done well in her exams. From other students I learned that she had become a considerable figure on the campus for a first year girl. Boys who had never seen her before had thought her attractive and she had been given quite a rush. And one of the girls I knew, who was wiser than Jack Buchanan or any of the boys, told me with perfect candor that she envied her.

  “I know a lot of people criticized her, but that’s only because she doesn’t care. She doesn’t expect to live more than ten years, but she intends to live those ten years. I think she’s wonderful, even though she can’t see me across the street.”

  I knew then that I had lost her and with her the best of myself, and I was afraid of going to McGill as a freshman because of the pain I would feel when we met and she was somebody and I was nothing. But this was one humiliation which turned out to be baseless, because I did not go to McGill that fall.

  During the past twelve months my father had at last contrived to do what my Aunt Agnes had always predicted he was bound to do – he had lost his money. This was one more evil for which my own failure had been responsible, for after I returned to Frobisher, Father was ashamed of his weakness before his sister. He had always consulted Aunt Agnes before making an investment, and she in turn had always consulted the best investment broker in the city. Now Father decided to be his own boss and get rich quickly.

  It was an ore development which sunk him, and like most of Father’s projects the idea behind it was eminently practical. The ore was located in the Ungava Peninsula, there was a large steel plant in Sydney hungry for it and the ore could be brought to Sydney by sea more cheaply than the ore of the Mesabi could be brought to Pittsburgh. But as in all Father’s ideas there was one fatal defect, and the defect here was that he was exactly one generation ahead of the times. Without bulldozers and aircraft it was impossible to exploit the Ungava ore, because the region was not opened up. Father sank his money and lost it.

  It was not from him, but from my Aunt Agnes, that I learned what this meant to our future. It meant the sale of the old graystone house that had been our home. It meant that Father would have to become a clerk in a commission office in the city, and that he and Mother would have to live in a small flat in Notre Dame de Grâce. And it meant that I, instead of going to McGill, would have to go to work to earn a living.

  In mid-September Catherine returned from Europe and discovered that our house had been sold and that we had been ruined. She wrote me a letter I still have. She wanted to see me. She begged me to borrow money – she promised that her Father would arrange it – and go to McGill anyway. But my pride had already driven me out of Montreal to Toronto, for I did not want to live where I had been happy for a time and where all my old friends were rich and I was as poor as a grocery clerk. I did not answer Catherine’s letter, or the one she sent after that, or the card she sent to me at Christmas. I did not see her again until years later.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER I

  Five hours after my late night talking with Sally I was up and bathed, making my breakfast and trying to think about the day ahead of me. I left the apartment before either Catherine or Sally were awake and went down in the elevator and out into the street. My eyes were stiff from lack of sleep and felt too large for my face and when I stepped outside the air was so cold I gasped. It was a cruel day, twenty below zero with a high wind blowing bright from the north under an electric blue sky. No taxis were in sight and I kept walking down Côte des Neiges turning my head to watch for cabs coming down the hill but seeing nothing but private cars slithering on the hard ice with little rabbit tails of smoke blowing back from their exhaust pipes. Montreal in this north wind looked harsh and angular and the edges of the roofs smoked with snow that made rainbows as the sun struck through them. The light hurt my eyes and I wished I had remembered to wear my colored glasses. By the time I reached the radio building my nose was running and my briefcase seemed frozen to my hand.

  Ten minutes later my skin was on fire in the dry heat of the office, and when I unlocked my filing cabinet the key made a splash of light from the static charge and the papers I took out crinkled in my hands. While waiting for Connolly, the man who produced my broadcasts, I tried to work on an article I had agreed to write for a national magazine. But I needed more sleep for a job like that, and it was a relief to drop it when the mail was delivered. I began reading the papers, worked through one French and one English paper from Montreal, then the editorial pages of The Ottawa Citizen, the Toronto Globe and Mail, the India paper edition of the Times (London), The New York Times and I was about to pick up The Chicago Tribune when the door opened and Connolly came in.

  “I feel like hell,” he said.

  “Fine. So do I.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I certainly do feel like the bottom of a bird cage on this lovely winter morning.”

  Connolly slumped into a chair and scowled at me. He was a big man thick through the shoulders and hips bulging in an unpressed tweed suit. He was a salaried servant of the cbc who hated his work but did it because he had a family and believed he was buying time for his great novel about the war in which he himself had been a genuine hero and casualty, for he had flown forty-seven missions with Bomber Command and won a bar to his D.F.C. for staying at the controls of a flaming Lancaster long enough for the rest of the crew to escape. He limped from a shattered leg and one side of his face was shiny from a skin graft and unnaturally pink and white under his shock of black hair. But the post-war Connolly was more seriously a casualty of Ernest Hemingway. He had entered Hitler’s war so steeped in A Farewell to Arms that the Australians, Englishmen and Canadians he wrote about all talked like Italians trying to think in English, just as he in his ordinary life tried to talk like a character out of a Hemingway short story. He had showed me his script and I had not known what to say about it, for I liked and respected the man. You couldn’t call his novel a plagiarism; he was such a prisoner of the master that his script read like a parody of the later Hemingway parodying the Hemingway of the Twenties.

  “I certainly do feel like hell,” he repeated. “Do you feel like hell?”

  I shrugged.

  “What’s new?” he said. “You finished that script? I better read it if you finished that script.”

  I pushed the papers over the desk and while I read the The Chicago Tribune I heard him grunting angrily and after a while he pushed the script back at me and asked if I believed all that crap.

  “The Americans are carrying the ball,” he shouted at me, “and this country that used to be a real country what’s it turned into but a hog with its snout in the trough? What the hell are we doing out in Korea to make you talk so smug? Time was this country did the fighting and the Americans did the talking, but times sure have changed. No wonder this sweet little show of ours gets a higher rating every week with you talking about patience and time. I read my Tolstoy too.”

  “Well, what’s your policy?”

  “Go in with all we’ve got. Go in for Christ’s sake and kick those goddam Chinks in the teeth.”

  I looked at him and felt irked. He knew nothing whatever about international affairs and he thought himself a realist. In a way I suppose he was.

  “This crap about the importance of Indian opinion,” he went on. “The Americans could give those Indian bastards the whole goddam U.S. Treasury and that Nehru would make a speech about American
imperialism. For Christ’s sake, the Indians! Why can’t you ever tell the truth for a change? I bet in the 1930’s you were all for Chamberlain and appeasement. I bet the night of Munich you said it was peace in our time.”

  I raised the Tribune between him and me. “Bill,” I said, “I’m tired of you.”

  “You’re tired of me? What the hell do you think I am of you?”

  He went out slamming the door behind him and I looked at the ashtray beside me and saw it was piled with butts. I reached into a drawer for a stick of gum, a sure sign my nerves were bad, for I only chew gum when I smoke too much and I usually don’t smoke too much unless I am over-tense. Now I chewed and smoked at the same time and felt the bile rise as I thought about Connolly, and went on reading an editorial in The Chicago Tribune that made Connolly sound mild in comparison. It was developing into a thoroughly bad morning.

  Then the phone began ringing. The convener of a woman’s club wanted me to address the ladies about Korea and I gave her my regrets. A sub-editor of a national magazine wanted to buy me a lunch and talk over a few ideas and I told him I was sorry. There were some more calls, all more important to the caller than to me, but not important enough for a sensible man to have wasted his time on them, before the switchboard notified me that Ottawa was on the line and that Mr. Arthur Lazenby wanted to speak to me if I was able to speak to him.

  “Put Mr. Lazenby on,” I said, and waited for half a minute before his voice reached me.

  “Hullo, George. Do you remember me?”

  “Of course, Arthur.”

  “It’s been a long time.”

  “It certainly has.”

  “I hear you’re coming up to Ottawa tomorrow,” he went on, “and after you’ve seen the Minister I was wondering if you could have lunch with me?”

  “That would be fine, Arthur. Anything special?”

  “Nothing you could call special in the official sense. But I think we ought to have a talk.”

  “That would be very nice.”

  “How are things with you? I’ve been so out of touch with Montreal I hardly know my way around there any more.”

  “Things with me are about the same.”

  “But a little different from the old days?”

  “Not as different as with you.”

  “Well, I’ll meet you outside the Minister’s office tomorrow morning. Your appointment is for ten – you should be through around eleven.”

  “Is he going to give me all that time?”

  “You never can tell. But I don’t think I’m being indiscreet if I mention that your attitude in this Korean affair has been much appreciated by our department. And all the more so because everyone knows you’re independent.”

  “Why thank you, Arthur.”

  “I’ll meet you outside the Minister’s office then, in the East Block?”

  “Let’s make it later if you don’t mind. I’ve promised to look in on an old friend in the Press Gallery.”

  “Then we’ll meet in the lobby of the Chateau at noon? Right?”

  As I put up the phone my feeling of unreality deepened. It was months since I had thought of Arthur Lazenby and years since I had seen him, but he was another of those figures who would always be associated in my mind with the depression. In the old days he had been silent, less obviously insecure than the rest of us, an adherent to the group around Jerome Martell, and on the last occasion when we had met he had made me realize how much one can see of a man without knowing the first thing about him. His career since then had been spectacular. No sooner had he joined External than he rose like a rocket. In the war he had been stationed in London, and using London as his sally-port he had completed some confidential and even dangerous missions with great distinction. The talk in Ottawa was that he could have a top ambassadorial post for the asking, but that he probably would not ask for one yet because he was so important where he was. Remembering what he once had been like, I found it hard to believe that this was his career, but it was.

  I went back to my papers and read a few more before the door opened and Connolly came back, this time looking sheepish and apologetic.

  “I’m sorry about sounding off, George. Forget the crap, eh?”

  “That’s all right.”

  “It’s not all right at all. Why do I have to shoot off my mouth at a nice guy? Why not at a bastard?”

  “I’m not so sure I’m a nice guy, Bill.”

  Connolly went on to explain that his novel had been rejected by another publisher, that he’d had a fight with his wife and got drunk afterwards and was badly hung over.

  “So I see a calm guy like you and I feel inferior and that’s why I get sore. I feel like a coated tongue.”

  “I thought you felt like the bottom of a bird cage.”

  “I feel like that, too.”

  “You were right about my script,” I said. “It’s crap all right. But it’s not crap for the reason you said. It’s crap for a different reason.”

  Then I told him about my trip to Ottawa and asked if he could put my broadcast onto tape that afternoon. Connolly was as helpful as possible: he said it would be easy to tape it and run it at the usual hour as though it were live. This was not often done without the public being told it was a recorded broadcast, and my stuff was always supposed to be live, but Connolly said there would be no need to make any mention of the technical difference this time.

  “Jacques will be free at three o’clock,” he said, “and we’ll shoot it through in time for your train. Say, that’s swell about the Minister wanting to see you. That’s real recognition.”

  “I’d hardly call it that. But I don’t mind admitting I’m pleased.”

  Connolly went out and I remembered some calls I had to make. I phoned the university and told the porter to put up a notice saying I would be unable to meet my students at the usual hour next day. Then I called the King Edward Hotel and was temporarily alarmed when the clerk told me there was no Dr. Martell registered there. But I guessed at the explanation and asked if anyone had left a message for George Stewart.

  “Moment, s’vous plait,” said the clerk and went into his routine of the night before.

  After a minute he came back on the line and asked if I was George Stewart personally – those were his words – and when I said I was, he told me there was a Dr. Armstrong who had left a message an hour ago saying I could meet him in the lobby of the King Edward at 12:30.

  “Tell the Doctor I’ll be there at 12:45,” I said, and hung up.

  I sat before the phone with my elbows on the desk and thought about Catherine and felt guilty because I had left the house without seeing her that morning. It was absurd to feel guilty because of this, for I had not opened her door lest she awake, and with her heart she needed more sleep than most people. And what did I know about the possible hours in the night when she had lain awake in the dark?

  I thought about Jerome and wondered what he had done the night before, and I thought of him as I remembered him in the past. What is time anyway? The past seemed part of the present today. Time had lost its shape. Time is a cloud in which we live while the breath is in us. When was I living, now or twenty-five years ago, or in all those periods of my life simultaneously?

  The electric clock showed 12:25 and I picked up the phone, dialed my own apartment, the phone rang four times and I heard Catherine’s voice, but there was nothing vibrant in her voice today as there had been the night before. It sounded tired and half alive.

  “How are you?” I said. “How was your night?”

  “Not very good. How was yours?”

  “Not very good. I stayed up till all hours talking to Sally.”

  “So she told me.”

  The wire sang between us.

  “Look dear,” I said, “I can call this Ottawa thing off. I don’t have to go if you want me here.”

  Again the wire sang between us.

  Then she said: “Jerome telephoned this morning.”

  I waited.

/>   “What do you want me to do, George?”

  “Whatever you want to do yourself.”

  Again there was silence.

  “Are you all right, Catherine?” I said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Listen, dear,” I said, “anything you do is perfectly all right with me.”

  “I’m not sure that anything I do will be perfectly all right with me, though.”

  “Catherine!”

  There I was, a husband pleading for comfort, but none came.

  “When will you be going to Ottawa?” she asked me.

  “I’d thought of taking the train after dinner, but – no, if it’s all right with you, I’ll take the one this afternoon. I’ll be home after lunch and pick up my bag.”

  “I’ll have it packed for you.”

  “Please don’t waste any energy doing that. Rest. You sound tired.”

  “Please don’t insist that I’m tired when I’m perfectly all right.”

  When our conversation was over I put on my fur cap and coat and went out into the hall toward the elevator. There was a mixed chatter in French and English among the usual cluster of engineers, stenographers, actors, singers, producers and executives who were waiting for the elevator to take them down to their lunch. They all seemed younger than me and when one of them addressed me I answered in the discouraged monotone of a veteran in a trade where the accent has always been on youth and novelty. The future was theirs and they knew it with the ruthlessness of the young. In the elevator I listened to a television engineer telling a girl that any time now the first tv studio would be ready for experimental shows and I wondered if this would mean the end of my work and if I would even be able to earn a living three years hence. I was an incurable product of the depression. In my heart I never believed that a job would last.