Watch that Ends the Night

by Hugh Maclennan

  Adam shrugged and made a face. “Perhaps. But don’t you think being a surgeon is rather obvious? Not quite as obvious as climbing a Himalaya. But obvious, George, obvious.”

  I knew – I had known for some time – that Catherine and Jerome were married, and now I realized that if I saw more of Adam’s friends I would be bound to meet them. I was afraid. For the Catherine I knew was a girl on the Lakeshore and the Catherine married to Jerome Martell was a mature woman far beyond me. I was a failure and knew it. I honestly believed I had found my true level in jobs at Waterloo and in women in Caroline Hall.

  Bless her wherever she is. She took me in the second time we met, and whenever I came up to town I tried to see her. She became for me what Shatwell’s widow was for him: something to look forward to in the dry weeks at Waterloo, something to keep the chalk dust from hardening into my blood.

  And yet I never loved her nor she me, for she liked many men with an equally disinterested affection. Her big, smooth, purring body was the comfort of a dozen lonelinesses. She mothered us all and she even made some of us laugh in the night. Everyone liked her, even those who said frightful things of her. Old ladies with arthritis asked especially for Caroline when they went to the hospital for treatment and she listened with a real loving kindness as they talked indirectly of their fear of death. She was born, I have often thought, to be at the disposal of others, and yet she was always herself and in the long run she always did what she liked.

  Her best friend was the most unlikely person imaginable for someone like her. She was a surgical nurse, also in Jerome’s hospital, who lived with her husband across the hall from Caroline in a rooming house not far from Adam Blore. If I talk about her and her husband now it is because they were to become far more important to this story than Caroline or Adam or anyone else I knew in those days before I met Catherine again.

  I knew little of Norah’s background, for she seldom mentioned anything about it beyond the fact that she had been raised in an Ontario puritan town. She must have got a fair education there, for she had read all over the shop in poetry and when I knew her she seemed to have read most of the books on the social revolution which were popular in the Thirties. Her voice will always haunt me, and so will her face. Her voice was Cordelia’s: soft, low and musical, a romantic man’s idea of what every woman’s voice should be. Her face was slim, delicate, flushed easily and movingly, and her mouth, full and wide, was a surprise in it. Her brown eyes were enormous and fey, her slim figure was classically formed but so fragile-looking, so innocently sensuous in its movements, that it made you feel you wanted to hold that body in your arms in order to shelter it.

  Yet this girl who seemed like a Victorian survival, almost but not quite Dresden china, was an exceedingly competent surgical nurse. Her slim, small hands were strong and deft, and in her work she thought like lightning. She could look unmoved on the grimmest of operations, and when she talked about her work she was as professionally objective as a surgeon. It was when she talked about the workers and the sufferings of humanity that she sounded like a preRaphaelite poetess who had wandered into the pulpit by mistake.

  Strangest thing of all about Norah was her choice of a husband. I am no beauty myself, but poor Harry Blackwell must have been preposterous from birth. His head was too large for a body shaped like a pear, his legs were bowed and so short that he always seemed to be trotting. If I say that his face reminded me of a Dutch cheese I don’t mean that it had the complexion of a Dutch cheese; it simply made you think of one. At thirty-two, Harry was becoming bald in the unfortunate way he did everything, for his hair, instead of falling out, looked as though it were wearing out. He was also unemployed.

  But strong passions can exist in men like that, and Harry adored his wife. Norah was his religion, his refuge, his dreams come true, his reason for being. I used to see him tagging along after her, coming into a roomful of people with a desperate smile and then making himself small in a corner and never opening his mouth while the rest of us talked. His little eyes would move from face to face, never critically – he professed liking for everybody – but in sheer delight as he searched for the admiration he was sure everyone felt for this wonderful creature who was his wife. He had gladly made himself her servant in the days when he was out of work, and even if he had been working twelve hours a day he would still have loved to serve her. It was Harry who kept the apartment, and their cramped rooms were as spotless as the kitchen of a good French-Canadian housewife. It was Harry who mended their clothes, cooked their meals and washed their dishes. And it was Harry who did most of the loving in that home and was pathetically grateful for the little he got in return.

  The months and the years blurred past punctuated by international disasters which exploded like the cannon salvos which, in some countries, were used in the old days to herald an execution. Dolfuss turned his artillery on the socialist apartments in Vienna while his henchmen in Styria hanged Wallisch a foot from the ground. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and Hoare and Laval connived at it. Hitler marched into the Rhineland and the British compelled the French to accept it. Murder exploded out of the soil of Spain and the British and the French washed their hands of it. And unemployment became no less.

  I tell you, there are few people who passed through the Thirties who even dare or can recall what that time was really like or what it did to human beings. Of course the sun shone and the rain fell. I was young and there were many days when I was happy. There were nights when I was gay. There were times when, being young, I allowed myself the luxury of hope. But there was poison in the air then, and I think it spread from the rotting corpses of the first war. The Thirties lie behind us like the memory of guilt and shame.

  The months and the years blurred past and I lost them. I seemed to be fenced in with invisible walls. I was without love. I worked at Waterloo and did the best I could, but honestly I don’t think it was possible for anyone to teach very well in a school dominated by Dr. Bigbee unless he believed we were still in the nineteenth century. In the summers I got by with various mean little jobs I counted myself extremely lucky to get. Once I tutored a juvenile delinquent whose father was a rich manufacturer. Another year I sailed to the West Indies on a fruit ship. I learned the bitter language and thoughts of the period, as any sensitive man was bound to in a time when his elders and leaders betrayed him. I learned to profess a blanket hatred for whole human groups, to talk wildly about politics and to encourage others to do the same. It is not a time of my life of which I am in any way proud, and least of all am I proud of my on-and-off affair with Caroline Hall, for she deserved someone better than the man I was then. I still cannot understand why she was so generous, so genuinely fond of a man who so obstinately refused to allow himself to be loved by a whole woman. For the truth was that Catherine was still with me, she was lodged deep in my being; even in the days when I deliberately avoided meeting her, Catherine was there.

  Caroline guessed at her existence though I never mentioned her name.

  For once she said: “George, I’d want to marry you except for one thing. I’ll never marry any man unless I believe I can be good for him. You’re carrying such a torch for somebody you’ll never let any woman be good for you. Is she married to somebody else?”

  “Yes,” I said, and flushed.

  Her voice became tender and kind: “Then all I can say is that your whole attitude is unhealthy. You men are all such hopeless dreamers. Why can’t you live like we do? Why can’t you be tough like we are? George” – and the sudden appearance of tears in her eyes touched me – “I wish you’d let me love you. But since you can’t” – a smile and a shrug of her buxom shoulders – “I guess I’ll have to face that fact. Whatever happens, though, don’t blame yourself or worry about me.”

  She said this and I was afraid inside. But I did not understand how deeply she had meant it till the Friday night in late October when I came to town to take her out to dinner and got no answer when I pushed her bell.

 
I crossed the hall and rang the bell by the Blackwells’ door and when Norah opened I asked if I could come in and wait.

  “Of course,” she said, and her eyes were disconcertingly wide.

  “Where’s Harry?” I said as I sat down and lit a cigarette.

  “He’s out. It so happens that he’s got a job at last.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  Norah sat opposite me with her slim thighs pressed together and pain in those large brown eyes.

  “He’s an usher in the Capitol!” she said in the tone a wife might use if she said, “He’s dead,” or “He’s just been arrested.”

  “Well, at least it’s a job.”

  “But he wants to work, George. He wants a real job, not to show stupid people to their seats at escapist movies. Harry’s a wonderful electrical engineer. Everyone under-rates him because he hasn’t had a job lately and has never had a chance.”

  This was news to me and I said so.

  “He’s so modest he never talks about himself,” said Norah, “but he had two years in Engineering and he had to leave college because there was no money. In Russia a man like Harry would be appreciated. Technicians are given a chance in Russia.”

  I was bored with Harry, so we talked about Russia and for half an hour we agreed that it was wonderful. I knew little about Russia beyond what I had picked up from the panegyrics I heard on Saturday nights from others who knew no more about it than I did, but Norah had read Das Kapital and several books by Lenin and some tracts by the Webbs.

  “Where the hell is Caroline?” I said after a while. “She’s at least an hour late. Do you know where she is?”

  Norah’s slim face tightened and she looked at me tragically.

  “George – I don’t think you know!”

  “Know what?”

  “You mean she didn’t even tell you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh George!” She gave a little gasp. “George dear! George – Caroline’s got married.”

  “Good God!” I said and stared. Then I flushed as a wave of anger mounted to my head.

  “She didn’t tell me, either,” said Norah. “She just got married and never told a soul till it was over. It was five days ago.”

  I sat in silence and anger and frustration. “Well,” I said after a while, “who was it?”

  “Jim Lawson, George.”

  With a slight effort I recalled a blousy man of indeterminate age who had an untidy mouth and a loose body, and had recently appeared in some of the Saturday night gatherings Caroline and I had attended.

  “For Christ’s sake!” was my comment.

  “Were you in love with her, George?”

  I looked out the window and watched a prostitute pick up a man under the corner light.

  “I swear I knew nothing,” Norah said behind me, “till last Monday night when Caroline burst in and told me she and Jim were married and were going away and would I keep a few things she didn’t have room for in her bags. It so happens that she only rented by the month and her lease was up at the end of this week. There’s a queer man moving in over there.”

  I came back and lit another cigarette. “Where did she go?”

  “New York. Jim has a job there.”

  “I never knew he was an American.”

  “She just came to see me and ran. Did you want to marry her, George?”

  I gave a short laugh: “Marriage is a luxury one doesn’t contemplate these days.”

  Her large brown eyes stared into mine, her full soft mouth quivered, and then suddenly her fists clenched and her face set and her voice hardened with exultation.

  “George – stop running away. Become one of us!”

  “What do you mean – one of us?”

  “There’s only one place for people like you and me – the Communist Party.”

  “I didn’t know you were a communist. How long has this been going on?”

  “I’ve been one for a month. Before that I was nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing ! Now I belong to the most wonderful thing in the world. Caroline used to laugh at me, but I don’t think she does now. And you won’t either. You and she should have married but –”

  “Look Norah, what has communism got to do with Caroline and me not getting married?”

  “Under a decent system you would have been able to. When the marrying time comes, people should marry. But look at this – this bourgeois filth! Look at yourself, George. You go crawling around corners after sex and –”

  “I’m not that bad.”

  “It all should be open, honest and above board. Oh George!”

  I don’t know how I felt, really. Partly lost and rejected, partly relieved because Caroline was no longer my responsibility, but mostly I felt disintegrated, and so I was.

  Norah’s eyes were hypnotic: “You know I’ve always been fond of you, George?”

  “I’ve been fond of you, Norah.”

  “Have you been terribly hurt?”

  I shrugged.

  “If I wasn’t married I’d take you into my arms.”

  I looked at her, startled, then looked away.

  “Do you mind if I talk a little?” she said. “Sometimes I feel I’ll die if I can’t talk to somebody who understands. Harry’s so sweet, and he’s so devoted I feel unworthy of him. He’s such a wonderful man if you know him. I love him, George. You must believe that. I really do love him so much. I couldn’t live with him if I didn’t love him, could I?”

  “I believe you.”

  “It’s just that sometimes I wonder if I’m going crazy. The things Harry accepts. Just everything. Just everything, George.”

  “Maybe he’s sensible.”

  “He’s like a sacrificial lamb. When I think of what the system’s done to him! Harry in that insulting bellhop’s uniform showing moronic bourgeoisie to their seats with his flashlight. It so happens that he even has to pay for that monkey jacket out of his wages. How long before everyone starts screaming? We’re trapped, George. Harry’s been trapped all his life. His mother died when he was fourteen and then his father married a sloven. Now in the depression he couldn’t get work. And he’s so good and kind, George. He ought to have children. He’d make such a wonderful father if he had children.”

  “Well,” I said, feeling selfishly angry and totally uninterested in whether Harry Blackwell would make a wonderful father or not, “you’re both married. So if you want children at least they won’t be bastards. At least you won’t have to get an abortion if you become pregnant.”

  Tears filled those wide brown eyes.

  “I had an abortion once, George. What else could I do? I had to go on working. And I wanted children desperately, and I still do.”

  Then she flushed and changed the subject. She told me about a workman who had been brought into the hospital that afternoon with a broken back and a shattered skull. He was dead before Dr. Martell had been able to reach him.

  “I gather you think a lot of this Dr. Martell?” I said.

  “He’s the most wonderful man I ever met in my life.”

  “I knew his wife once. Do you know her?”

  “Well of course I’m not important enough to know Dr. Martell socially. But I think he respects my work, for he often asks for me specially for his operations. Of course I’ve seen his wife. Sometimes she comes to the hospital and waits in the sunroom if she and the Doctor are going out somewhere afterwards.”

  “She was only a kid when I knew her,” I said with deliberate carelessness. “What’s she like now?”

  “She’s a very wonderful woman,” said Norah.

  Suddenly I wanted to get away from there. The feeling came over me that I had reached an absolute dead-end and I wanted to be alone and above all I wanted to be alone with music, and I remembered that Adam Blore had a fine collection of Bach recordings. It was strange that he should like Bach but he did, and I wanted to hear some Bach now.

  At the door Norah put her slim arms ab
out me and kissed me gently, I kissed her back and suddenly she surged against me and I held her.

  “No, George, we mustn’t.”

  “No,” I said, and stepped away.

  Then I said good-night and walked down to the street.

  CHAPTER IV

  The pattern of that curious evening continued to unfold. There was no answer when I pressed Adam’s bell, but I remembered that he often left his room unlocked when he went out for food or cigarettes, so I turned the handle and went in. Newspapers littered the floor, the bed was unmade and the unwashed dishes of several meals were stacked on a table containing Pound’s Cantos and a little magazine called Scrutiny. In the middle of the room was a sizable statue looking vaguely like a seal with holes in it. I walked around it, stumbled over a pair of shoes, and got to the phonograph. Finding it was broken I decided to go out and eat, and a few minutes later I found Adam himself sitting in a booth in a neighboring cafe eating spaghetti and reading a novel by Céline in the original French.

  “Sit down,” he said, and brandished the book at me. “Have you read this? Tell me how I’ve managed to miss Céline all these years.”

  I ordered scrambled eggs, toast and coffee and looked around. The atmosphere was thick with the smells of over-used cooking fat, dishwater, cigarette smoke and humanity. The booths and the counter were crowded with students and Adam’s saturnine face was veiled by cigarette smoke as he leaned back and looked me over.

  “Yes, you must really read Céline. Have you gone into the public lavatory of a New York subway lately? One of those places where the unemployed sleep on the ledges above the urinals? That’s what Céline’s work smells like. By God, but he’s got integrity!”

  Having so pronounced himself, Adam inhaled his cigarette and let the smoke reek out of his nostrils. I told him I had been around to his room and he asked me if I had liked his figure. I told him I had not been able to understand it.

  “Good!” he said. “If you had, I’d have smashed it. I’m calling it Negress Awaiting Unsuccessful Abortion. Of course it’s not a negress, it’s just pure form annihilating itself. But speaking of abortions, did you know our Caroline’s pregnant?”