Watch that Ends the Night

by Hugh Maclennan

  Outside in the streets it was just as cold as it had been earlier and the noonday sun was so bright it blinded me. The roofs still smoked with snow and people on Dorchester Street kept turning their backs against the wind. I walked to the King Edward Hotel with my gloved hands deep in my pockets and my fur cap well down against the iron-cold hand of that wind. Montreal on a day like this was unfit for human beings.

  When I reached the hotel it looked worse even than I remembered it, for it had been given a false front popular in cheap establishments in French-Canada with a lot of opaque glass bricks and shining chromium and harsh angles without any obvious purpose. But inside was the same old lobby.

  Blind from the sun I found my way through the lobby by my nose. It smelled like a used ash tray and it was so dark it took nearly half a minute before my pupils adjusted and I saw the shiny, black-leather chairs, the stained carpet, the small desk, a gray clerk with a pencil clamped between his ear and his temple, a gold ring on one of his fingers and an expression that looked as though he had seen nothing sweet, pleasant or happy in the last fifty years.

  “Moment s’vous plait,” he said when I asked for Dr. Armstrong.

  What a place for Jerome to have returned to, I thought as I dropped into one of the chairs and felt a stickiness on the leather and heard squeaking sounds overhead and continued to smell the used ash trays. This hotel haunted by the nightmares of alcoholics and stale with the sweat of a thousand whores, what a place for a man to reach when he came home!

  “Monsieur?”

  It was the gray clerk and I turned my head.

  “Dr. Armstrong has checked out,” he said.

  “Did he leave any message for me?”

  “Non, Monsieur.”

  “Thank you.”

  I left the hotel and walked two blocks to a restaurant where I ate a fillet of founder (called sole on the menu) and watched a young French-Canadian with a face like a hawk dining with his fiancée, who was fragile, lovely, convent-bred and clearly unequal to a life with a man like him. I knew they were engaged because I had seen their pictures while leafing through the pages of La Presse. I have that useless kind of memory which stores up such images and never loses them.

  After lunch I walked back to the studio wishing I had taken two drinks before lunch instead of one. I met Connolly, and Jacques the engineer who put me onto tape, and when I listened to the playback my Rooseveltian voice seemed to have no connection with me. But Connolly said it was a good broadcast, a dandy, and I thanked him for putting it onto tape, went out, found a taxi and drove home.

  Catherine was lying down and we had little to say beyond repeating, both of us troubled, that we loved one another.

  “I was supposed to have lunch with him,” I said, “but he’d checked out of the hotel. I don’t know where he is. Do you?”

  She shook her head. “He’ll come to see me. Perhaps this afternoon. Perhaps tomorrow. He called to ask if he could come.”

  “How did he sound to you over the phone?”

  “Familiar.”

  “No more than that?”

  “Oh, it was such a long time ago, George.”

  Going up to Ottawa that evening in the train, lying back in the chair car with the blind up, seeing the lights coming on in the barns where farmers were milking their cows, the snowy plain merging gray with the twilight and occasionally a stand of trees visible against the sky in the west, I wondered vaguely about Catherine and Jerome and myself and all the years. I knew that Catherine loved me and that I loved her. I had no vulgar anxieties about this situation. She and I had protected and touched and greeted each other reasonably well in the past nine years, but Jerome was a part of her core, the great part of her life as a woman, and now he was alive and life is dangerous. No wonder people commit suicide, I thought, for death is so safe. Catherine would never kill herself, that I knew. She had fought so hard for life she would fight to the end. She had done infinitely better than my Aunt Agnes had predicted, better far than even she herself had dreamed. She had defied all the medical prognoses and she was still here. Yet I knew that Jerome’s return would bring close to her consciousness the knowledge that the time left her was short.

  And I still felt young. Young and old. Old and young together.

  “Are you only forty-four?” I asked my reflection in the glass. “Are you actually forty-four?”

  The train drummed toward Ottawa and I closed my eyes. O Lord, give us some peace. Give us rest from ourselves, O God.

  CHAPTER II

  The next day in Ottawa I was a fair facsimile of the professional character I had pasted together out of various bits and pieces during the past dozen years. My interview with the Minister went pleasantly, and I had never seen him more friendly and charming. He amazed me, this man. There can’t be any department in a modern government where a minister must deal every day with more aspects of sheer villainy and horror than in the department of foreign affairs, yet this minister, deeply serious inside and absolutely honorable, was outwardly gay. He was an excellent politician and yet I could never think of him as a politician at all. He told me little new, but I left him with a feeling that I knew much more than when I entered his office.

  An hour later my temporary euphoria was dampened when I shook hands with Arthur Lazenby in front of the main desk of the Chateau Laurier. At first I did not recognize Arthur, but he recognized me and came over to shake hands with a diplomatic smile on his diplomatic face. His shake had once been hard and aggressive, but now it was so limp that I wondered if the limpness was calculated. Many people when offered a limp hand feel themselves rejected, and this leads some of them to offer more of themselves than they normally would. The new Arthur Lazenby looked like a man who might think of such things, but he may merely have been tired.

  “If you don’t mind,” he said, “we shan’t lunch at the Rideau Club. I was thinking of the cafeteria.”

  “That’s where I’d have eaten if I’d been alone.”

  We went downstairs and after we had piled our trays, he led the way to a corner table where he sat with his back to a pillar.

  “I don’t want us to be disturbed. I’d like to be invisible.”

  It occurred to me that in this city of civil servants he was almost invisible anyway. He looked like the public idea of a modern Ottawa hand: dark pinstriped suit, dark horn rimmed glasses, just the right amount of flesh on his cheeks and just the right amount of gray on his temples. A big change from the lean, hungry and generally silent young man I had known during the depression. Even more changed was his manner. In the old days Lazenby had been so unobstrusive that you hardly noticed him. Now, once you had noticed him, once you found yourself engaged with him, he was dominant. He talked suavely of politics for fifteen minutes, dropping just the right number of names in just the right way, and if there was any civil service cliché I had ever heard, he did not miss it. Yet his performance was a competent one, for he was almost entertaining, though both he and I knew that he had said nothing that could be quoted against him and nothing I did not know anyway.

  “You’ve changed, Arthur.”

  “So have you, George,” and his ever-so-slightly-conspiratorial smile left me wondering why he had asked me to lunch.

  We were on our dessert before I found out.

  “Do you ever find yourself thinking about Jerome Martell these days?”

  “Yes, I think about him occasionally.”

  “When was it he went away?” asked Lazenby smoothly. “Was it twelve years ago, or thirteen?”

  I permitted my eyebrows a slight lift, for Lazenby knew as well as I did when Jerome had gone away.

  “You heard he was killed in France, I suppose?” was his next question.

  “Tortured as well, was the story I got.”

  “I was in England when that story got out. We tended to disregard some of the more grisly details, but there’s no doubt he was presumed dead officially.”

  “That ought to make him pretty dead.”
r />   This time it was Lazenby’s eyebrows that lifted, but his voice continued smooth.

  “I’m in a position to tell you that the official report of Martell’s death was inaccurate. He’s turned up. He’s here in Canada at this very moment.”

  His eyes met mine and I knew that he knew that I knew this. “Yes,” I said, “I’ve talked to him.”

  “I rather thought you might have.”

  “How did you find out he was back, Arthur?”

  “From the RCMP One of their security men called around a few days ago to ask what I remembered of Martell before the war.”

  “How do they know you knew him then?”

  “The same way they know you knew him.”

  “I’ve often wondered if they had a dossier on me.”

  “They’ve got one, all right.” He smiled. “However, there’s no cause for concern here. The rcmp are quite happy about Martell, actually. They wanted to check a few facts with me, but chiefy they wanted to know if he’d be of interest to us in External.”

  “Is he?”

  Lazenby took a cigar case from his inside pocket, offered it to me and when I refused he took a cigar himself, cut off the end and inserted it into his white face.

  “Intelligence-wise, and therefore possibly External-wise, he may be of some use. One checks such cases as a matter of routine. But it’s surprising – or is it, really? – how little there is to be learned from people with his kind of experience. They’ve come out of hell. They’ve seen little that isn’t common knowledge. Their minds are apt to be distorted and they tend to confuse fiction with fact. They’re in a state of shock and so forth. During the war I interviewed several dozen escapees from Nazi camps and I never learned anything that mattered.” He paused and asked casually: “How did Martell seem to you – bitter?”

  “He sounded sad but he didn’t sound bitter.”

  “Did he ask about any of his old friends?”

  I shook my head. “It was a personal call, Arthur. You probably know why it was.”

  Lazenby nodded, puffed on his cigar and laid it down. Still using his professional voice, he recounted some of the facts Jerome had already told me and added a new one. According to him, Jerome had been married to, or living with, a young Russian woman who later got into trouble with the Soviet authorities on account of her connection with him.

  “So apparently his life-style hasn’t altered radically,” he said. “He always attracted women and he never seemed able to protect himself against them.”

  I let this go and we were silent for nearly half a minute while we both remembered things. I was waiting for Lazenby to take off the mask and be natural, and I was beginning to wonder if there was anything natural left in him. He knew that I knew a lot of things about Arthur Lazenby in the old days, but he was still holding me off.

  “Doctors are an odd lot,” he said reflectively. “With a lawyer or an engineer you know what you’re dealing with, but you can never be sure of a doctor outside of his work. They’re rather like soldiers in that way. I suppose it’s the life-and-death aspect of their professions.” A gentle shrug of the padded shoulders. “Whatever it is, it makes most doctors and soldiers impossibly inept in politics.”

  “MacArthur, for instance?”

  “I was talking to MacArthur’s chief of staff only three weeks ago, actually.” Another smooth shrug. “Yes, he’ll do as a case in point. Politically, Truman’s paying him out enough rope for him to hang himself.” He paused and smiled. “Which doesn’t alter the fact that he’s one hundred percent in his assessment of the Far Eastern situation.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the thinking in your department.”

  “I don’t know about the thinking in my department.” Another suave smile. “I merely said he’s one hundred percent right in his assessment of the situation at the moment. That’s the trouble. In democratic politics it’s absolutely fatal to be one hundred percent right about anything. I’m not being cynical, I’m merely stating a fact. Think it over.”

  I thought it over, looked across the table at Lazenby, and waited.

  “Of course MacArthur wasn’t on my mind when I made that remark about doctors and soldiers in politics. I was thinking about Jerome Martell in the Thirties. Judged by the standards we use here – and I think you’ll agree they’re pretty basic – Martell in the Thirties was a fanatic. Not a crackpot exactly, but absolutely a lone wolf out of line with everyone. He wasn’t in with the intellectuals, though they hung around him. He wasn’t a political show-off like Laski. You found him in all those places where we used to go and talk, and you often found him doing a lot of talking himself.”

  “Yes,” I said, interrupting him, “you don’t have to remind me what he was like in those days. I also remember what you and I talked about the last time we met, Arthur. To be precise, it was the night of May 27, 1939.”

  The mask came off at last and he flushed slightly and looked down at his plate.

  “He got you your job in radio and he got me mine in External,” he said.

  “Not quite yours in External.”

  “But without him I’d have gone to Spain. Without what he told me about Spain, I mean. God, I was young then. He was absolutely right in what he told me. He was absolutely right about everything then. But because he was so absolutely right, he was absolutely wrong so far as the politics of the time were concerned. If he’d only been patient and waited. But of course he wasn’t patient.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Look at you.” Suddenly the emotion was naked in Lazenby. “You’re a success. Look at me – I’m a success. And look at him – years of misery, concentration camps, exile, sickness and hopelessness.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “He was born ahead of his time. Or perhaps behind it. He didn’t fit. Types like you and I, we fitted.”

  The sudden change in Lazenby’s manner was understandable to someone who knew as much about him as I did, but as I saw a civil servant from another department pass us, I thought how astonished he would be if he knew that Lazenby’s mask could crack like this. For Arthur Lazenby was a new man in a new Canada; he was a type we had never produced until the war. He was as polished, as hard and as expert as any of his opposite numbers in the British Foreign Office, he was at home in any capital in the world. He was competent, he had turned in a remarkable record during the war in our London office, he had come a long way from the place where we first had met and had turned himself into a being different in kind from the self-effacing young man I had first seen filling glasses with beer in the apartment of one of Jerome’s friends.

  “It’s a miracle he’s alive, of course,” Lazenby went on. “The torture story was at least three-quarters true. The Gestapo gave him a pretty bad working over. The rcmp man told me his back’s a mass of weals from their steel whips. It’s quite useless even to try to guess what kind of a life he’s led since. He used to have a home. He used to have a wife and child and a first-class medical reputation and he threw it all away. Why? Those God damned commies, I hate them so much I almost distrust my judgment when I deal with them. I’d like so much to see them wiped off the face of the earth I’m afraid I’m going to make a mistake one of these days.”

  He picked up his cigar, puffed rapidly and looked around.

  “You see – I was a card-holder myself once.”

  “I know. You told me.”

  “Did I? When?”

  “That night in 1939 when you talked to me about Jerome.”

  “I was off my head that night. I can’t remember much of what I said. I didn’t think I told you that.”

  Now I knew why he had invited me to lunch, and also why I disliked him. By showing such an interest in me, he had made it clear that my meeting with the Minister, which had flattered me, had been arranged by himself. But I disliked him because he could not think of Jerome, or of anything, except in terms of his own political interests.

  “It would be inconvenient if my name came up before o
ne of those American congressional committees,” he said as casually as he could.

  “I suppose your department knows you held a card?”

  “Naturally. I told them before I entered. It was a big chance, but it would have been fatal if I hadn’t, for they’d have found out. I argued that I’d be useful for that very reason. I argued that I could read the commie mind, and so I could. Old Dr. Scrimgeour bought it. He was a shrewd old man. Did you know him?”

  Ignoring his last question, I said: “I suppose you’re worrying that Jerome may spill the beans in the States?”

  He nodded.

  “Do you think he’s that kind of man?”

  Lazenby gave me a hard, shrewd look. “How do I know what kind of a man he is now? He’s been through the camps. The quickest way for him to win sympathy and rehabilitate himself would be to go to one of those damned American committees and give them some names.”

  The unpleasant thought came to me that if Lazenby were in a similar spot he would do that himself. There was a mess of dirty dishes on our table and they bothered me, so I picked them up and laid them on the empty table beside our own.

  “For what my judgment is worth,” I said slowly, “I think Jerome is lonely, and I don’t think he wants to talk to anyone even about Russia, much less about that old pre-war stuff.”

  Lazenby appraised me, shrugged and sighed.

  “You’re probably right,” he said. “Yes, you’re probably right.” And then: “Do you ever have the feeling that time stopped in 1939?”

  “Often.”

  “We were alive before then, weren’t we?” And his voice was wistful.

  “I suppose we were.”

  “And since then we’ve had our careers. Successful careers!” He gave a contemptuous laugh. “One of these days I’d like to meet an intelligent man who really believes that it matters what any of us does any more. But the odd thing is, I’m good at my job. It doesn’t say much for the worth of the job, does it?”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jack Lubliner, the stepfather of Sally’s boyfriend Alan Royce, emerge from the counter with a tray in his hand and seat himself at an empty table in the center of the room with his back toward me.