I started: “Is that why she got married in such a hurry?”
“I suppose so. Who knocked her up – you?”
My hair prickled as I denied the possibility and Adam laughed. “The question wasn’t serious. You’d have been too careful. What a white hulk of a greedy female organism that girl is! All shapes and sizes for Caroline with more to come. You know this bastard she’s married?”
“I met him once or twice at your place.”
“I’ll lay five to one he’s not Oscar’s real father. How could anyone who rolls over the way she does know who was technically responsible for the biochemistry?” Adam scratched his beak and made a face. “Lawson smells like an undertaker’s hands. I suppose you know he’s a commie?”
“I don’t know the first thing about him.”
“Neither does Caroline.” Adam hunched over the table. “Listen, George. This Lawson’s no local puritan hot-shot who joins the party for sex. He was probably born in the baggage room of the Smolensk railway station. I know a thing or two, George, and I happen to know that son of a bitch is in a commie apparat.”
Adam bent over his coffee, which he said was getting cold, wiped his mouth and surveyed me with another sardonic grin. “You know what’s the matter with you? You just won’t admit that we all live in the merde. History sloshes through it like a truck with broken brakes and splashes it over everyone. Relax, George, relax and decay. Look at Caroline. What the hell is she but a normal woman and what’s a normal woman but a biology factory? In normal times she’d have married the local druggist and had a baby a year till the druggist ran out of gas. But now look at her. She’s so dumb she doesn’t even know what an apparat is. What a sweet cover for an apparat man that big, white, mothering piece of womanflesh is going to make!”
My eggs arrived and I began to eat. Adam called for more coffee and lit another cigarette.
“Have you been seeing Norah Blackwell tonight?” he asked with a sharp look.
“I ran into her when I was looking for Caroline.”
“A little piece of advice, George. Since you’re obviously looking for a new lay, don’t touch that little piece of puritanical nymphomania.”
“What gave you the idea I intended to?”
His eyes with the premature pouches regarded me with cynical amusement.
“This is Father Adam you’re talking to. Watch your step, she’s a mink.”
“She’s just a poor kid who happens to be a good nurse and she also happens to be married to a friend of mine.”
Adam laughed loudly and took another sip of his coffee.
After a while he said: “I used to wonder why Norah took up nursing, but after I thought about it I realized it was exactly what she would take up. She’s deep in D. H. Lawrence at the moment. Watch out, boy, watch out.”
“What’s D. H. Lawrence got to with all this?”
“Hell, they all start on him. All these puritans cut their sexual teeth on that ignorant English peasant. Lawrence a genius! He’s a semi-literate romantic with a guilt-complex the size of the Empire State.”
I surveyed the restaurant while Adam stared with distaste at the bulging backside of a female student who was eating a sundae at the counter.
After a while he said: “Did Norah Blackwell ever happen to mention Jerome Martell to you? I mean, during the various opportunities she’s doubtless taken to explain to you how noble she is, and how much she loves her husband whom nobody but she understands, did she by any chance talk about Dr. Martell?”
“Why shouldn’t she? She’s a nurse in his hospital.”
Adam looked at me sharply, then laughed. “Why go on the defensive, George? We’re all in the merde together, aren’t we? Why didn’t you tell Father Adam that Martell’s wife’s an old pal of yours?”
“How did you find that out?”
“From the lady herself. She told me. By the way, did Norah ever happen to mention Catherine Martell as well as him?”
With my eyes on my plate I nodded.
“And did she offer it as her considered opinion that Mrs. Martell is a very wonderful woman?”
My expression must have betrayed me, for Adam laughed again.
“She says that to everyone she meets,” he said. “‘Mrs. Martell is a wonderful woman’ – just like that. Can you beat it?”
I finished my eggs and leaned back: “What are you getting at, Adam?”
He scratched his nose and then he blew it.
“You know, George, you’re that very rare thing, a perfect specimen. You’re middle class to the bone. You’re a nice guy. All you want is a nice little wife and a nice little apartment and a nice little job, and yet you hang around with these hot-shots that hang around me. You’re about as revolutionary as Stanley Baldwin. Ah well – the middle-classes have driven you out, and by driving out people like you, they’re exterminating themselves. When old George howls like a wolf, what do the real wolves sound like?” He savored his own rhetoric in a moment of silence, and then went on. “Now take this old girl friend of yours, Catherine. When but in a time like this would a girl like her have married a primitive like Martell?”
“What’s the matter with him anyway?”
“Nothing. Nothing.” Adam grinned. “Pure rhumba, that’s all that’s the matter with him. Incidentally he’s one more proof of my thesis. The middle classes are driving him out too, and he’s the sort they absolutely should never drive out. He’s dumb, but he’s dangerous. He’s an idealist, and he has five times more energy than any normal man. Push a man like him outside your camp and what does he do? Nine times out of ten he tries to break in and capture it.”
“He’s not a communist, is he?”
“No, not yet.” Adam grinned. “He works too hard to be one – yet. Eighteen hours a day, they tell me. It’s plainly compulsive. Everything he does is compulsive. His wife’s a partial invalid and that may be one reason why he works so hard, for you only have to look at the man to know he’s a stallion.” The most sardonic grin of all. “This little Blackwell bitch has been heard to mention how noble he is to put up with his domestic situation without a murmur. It’s one of the remarks she makes before she tells you that Mrs. Martell is a wonderful woman. You think you’re still in love with her, don’t you, George?”
Adam Blore was the only man I knew who talked to me like this. He knew I disliked it, and my dislike gave him an obscure pleasure. I shrugged and suddenly he became serious and genuinely bitter.
“You know, George, talking about Catherine Martell makes me think. She’s a lady. Actually, she’s a real lady, and I confess that when we met I felt rather down at heel in character. Why do I go on like this anyhow? These puritans with their hot pants and their little affairs in the name of art – my God, if I’d known enough in time, I’d have got some doctor to feed me the necessary hormones and turn me into a homosexual. The pansies are the boys today. The commies make me laugh with their big talk about their great, big beautiful revolution – bah!” His sneer was so loud that several students turned and stared. “The real revolution has nothing to do with them. It’s sexual. No? Just wait and see. Fifty years from now this country of sodbreakers and salesmen is going to be a third-rate Rome. Can’t you hear the pansies titter behind their hands at the rest of us poor saps? They’re right, too. They’re the best artists because they’re clear of women. They’re not romantics. And they hang together. If I was a homosexual in good standing, I’d get shows in London right now. I might even get a show in Paris. I’d certainly get one in New York.” A loud sniff. “That bastard D. H. Lawrence. Just another of those damned romantics. Das ewig weibliche zieht uns heran. Art for the sake of a bitch with hot pants, for Christ’s sake! Goethe, Hugo, Shelley, the rest of those obscenities – name me one who could tell the difference between his soul and his balls.”
I finished my coffee and decided to get away. Adam asked me to come to his room around midnight and bring a bottle, but I said I was going early to bed. He nodded and went back to Célin
e and I left him.
There was a hunter’s moon over the city and the air was clean, northerly and almost intoxicating after the fog and talk in the restaurant. People were moving about in the early part of a Friday night and most of the ones I passed seemed young and a few were gay. On the corner of St. Catherine Street I put a quarter into the palm of an unemployed man, bought a Star and boarded a tram running west. Sitting on one of the straw-yellow seats in the bright lights I read in the paper that Stanley Baldwin believed that the situation was improving, that a man just escaped from Dachau believed that Ernst Thaelmann was still alive, that a visiting Catholic bishop believed that Franco was a Christian hero, that a visiting English journalist believed that unless Franco was destroyed our civilization would perish and that a visiting American mayor believed that Montreal was one of the four most fascinating cities in North America.
I got out of the car at Guy Street and stood in the comer lights wondering what to do next. Half a block up the street Sir Cedric Hardwicke was playing at His Majesty’s and that was where I had intended to be now, for I had planned to take Caroline. Now there was no Caroline and the play had already begun, so I had nothing to do but walk back along St. Catherine Street the way I had come.
St. Catherine Street on a Friday night in the depression: the news vendors closing their stalls, the unemployed slouching along, the shop windows lit like altars, the trams jangling their bells, the boys and girls going into the movies. I stopped at a tavern and drank a beer. I crawled to another and had two beers in the company of a hairy truck driver who informed me there was no work in Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Port Arthur, North Bay, Ottawa or Montreal. In a third tavern I was told by an Englishman that everything would have been fine for him if it had not been for his wife, and on my way to the fourth tavern I was accosted by a prostitute who asked me if I wanted a good time and said the price was three dollars, and when I told her I didn’t have it she asked if I expected a girl to work for nothing. My next beer was political with a Belgian sailor who knew what Goering had said to Hitler the last time they had talked, and for half an hour he spoke learnedly about the coming war until suddenly his digestive tract gave a whoop and he was sick on the floor, and while a disgusted waiter tried to get him out of the place, he moaned that he loved his wife who had left him. Then I walked, was accosted by a gray-haired whore who asked if I wanted a good time, and after a while I found myself on a comer leaning against a light standard wondering whether I was going to be sick myself. The long street with its department stores, movies, little shops, taverns, empty banks and crowded trams wavered in and out. The moon had sunk and a rising wind was blowing scraps of paper and dust. The crowds were thinning out but there were still plenty of people and I saw a solitary whoremaster slink around a corner after the shadow of a woman. A tram crashed to a stop, I stepped out to board it but there were too many people so I turned away and walked the streets for nearly an hour until I felt steadier. Now it was past midnight. Now I was alone in St. Catherine Street at the hour when everyone is alone, and I stood on a corner and stared.
It was the bottom hole of my life up to that time. I saw then – and it is one of the most terrible things anyone can see – my own worthlessness. I told myself that if my luck had been better I too might have been better; that if I had had an opportunity for work I enjoyed and believed in it would have made the difference. But the unemployed still drifted down St. Catherine Street as the whole world drifted into the war. I heard a scratching noise and looked down and saw the front page of a newspaper dragging eastward along the pavement in the wind. Then I stared all the way down that bleak, empty street and seemed to be staring into the recesses of my own soul.
CHAPTER V
The next evening after an early supper in town I decided to escape from myself, to escape from the only kind of people I knew in Montreal, to escape from talking about politics, simply to escape. So I bought a ticket for the show at His Majesty’s to which I had intended taking Caroline the night before, and I actually enjoyed the first act. Sir Cedric Hardwicke was playing the role of an Irish canon miserable in his native land because he had been spoiled by a long sojourn in Spain, where priests had been austere and learned and not the pair of soccer-playing hobbledehoys he had for curates here. The play moved well and I was engrossed in it when the curtain fell on the first act. Thereafter I have no idea what happened on the stage that night.
For in the intermission I saw her at last; after a dozen years I saw Catherine. I saw that sable hair, the Picasso sweep of her fine shoulders, the opulence of her small figure. I trembled and my knees went loose and my throat felt like dry sand. Nor was this all. Suddenly I felt bitterly angry at her, resentful because of the bondage in which my love for her had held me, and I almost turned and went back upstairs.
I did not do so because of my fascination with the man beside her, who I knew must be Jerome Martell. He looked very different from the image I had formed of him. For one thing he was shorter than I had imagined, for another he was burlier even than Adam’s description had suggested. He looked much older than Catherine and much, much older than I fancied myself to be. There was a small blaze of gray on his temple before an ear shaped like a faun’s. He was in profile and his nose seemed to have been flattened by an old break. His forehead was corrugated with wrinkles and hooded against the irritation of the smoke spiralling up from the cigarette he held between the thumb and forefinger of a square, powerful hand. He dropped his cigarette and turned to crush it with his heel, and under the close fit of his dinner jacket a pack of shoulder-muscle shifted and I remembered that Adam Blore had called him a stallion.
Physically ruthless – that was my first thought. But an instant later this impression disappeared. For an usher approached Jerome with a message, and when he turned to read it I saw his face full front and the eyes were wide, intelligent and young. The mouth was sensual but it was also broad and strong; the cheekbones were high and forceful and the features were disciplined. In any crowd I would have recognized that for a doctor’s face.
He crumpled the message and looked at Catherine with a rueful smile that was completely charming. When he walked away to the cloakroom I saw that his powerful body moved with a limp.
I waited. Then Catherine turned. She saw me and her whole face opened up. An instant later we were together.
“I’ve so often wanted to write,” she was saying. “I’ve so often wanted to see you.”
The anger I had felt an instant ago went out and I was with her again and her voice vibrated through me.
“It was my fault,” I mumbled. “I was afraid even to let you know where I was.”
“Oh George – why?”
“I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stand how things have turned out for me.”
In spite of a defensive habit of depreciating myself, I am a proud man and it was not easy for me to say this to her. But I thought it must be obvious to her that I had not fulfilled myself, and also I had forgotten her kindness. Ruthless her mind could be at times, demanding her nature could be, but I had forgotten her wonderful kindness, and now there seemed much more of it than there had ever been before, and as I stood looking down at her I felt it enfold me, and I felt something like a vast weight, a cloudy weight under which I had labored for years, a Sinbad-weight, melt away and leave me light.
Somebody jostled us, apologized and passed.
“When you didn’t even acknowledge my wedding invitation, I gave up finally. I wondered what I’d done to offend you. George, dear!”
Then she reached up and in front of all the people she kissed me.
“Catherine!”
Her eyes twinkled and the intensity disappeared behind the mask of a happily smiling woman at ease with herself and the world.
“There’s so much to tell you I don’t know where to begin. Oh yes I do, though. I’ve got a family. Can you believe it? Not a big family, but one very nice, vigorous, impish little girl. Her name’s Sally and I’m very proud of her an
d me.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“You didn’t even know?”
“No Catherine. Nobody told me.”
“You see” – a little droop of the eyelid, a recall to the old defiant impishness which was also so deeply serious with her – “you see, I fooled them again.”
Over my shoulder I saw Jerome emerging from the inner vestibule with his hat crushed sideways on his head and a navy blue gabardine over his dinner jacket. He came slowly through the press with his forehead wrinkled against the smoke that filled the foyer with a blue haze, and I wondered how old he was. Thirty-four? Thirty-nine? Perhaps even older than that.
“Jerome dear, here is somebody I’ve wanted you to meet always. This is George Stewart.”
At first he did not seem to hear my name. Then he took it in and as he lifted his bulldog jaw I felt his personality strike me with an almost physical impact. His face broke open in a welcoming smile. His hand closed on mine so hard I winced, but I liked it and I liked him.
“Well!” he said. “Well! I certainly have wanted to meet you. Aren’t you the first man Kate fell in love with? Why the devil didn’t you marry her when you had the chance?”
I mumbled something incoherent and Jerome gave a frank laugh.
“I suppose I shouldn’t say things like this to a man I’ve only just met, but I’m going to just the same. You know,” he said with another laugh, “there’s nothing worse this side of hell than to be married to a woman who thinks herself unattractive. Kate would have been that kind of woman if it hadn’t been for you. You were the only person in that god-awful place where you were raised who gave her any self-confidence. I’ve been drawing interest on it ever since. Thanks, George, thanks very much.” He put his arm about her waist and smiled at me like a boy. “How do you think she looks?”
She looked like a woman well and truly loved, but all I said was that she looked grand.
Watch that Ends the Night Page 17
