“The things you boys talk about together!” Catherine said, but she was pleased because Jerome had liked me.
“Here,” said Jerome, and handed me two ticket stubs. “Take these and sit with Kate for the rest of the show. I’ve got to go to the hospital. If I don’t have to operate I’ll be back before it’s over, but I probably will have to operate. So you go along with Kate after the show gets out and we’ll have a talk later.”
He left us and I saw a tall, dark woman who had been staring at Jerome shift her glance to Catherine and appraise her with the candor some women use on each other and her expression seemed to say: “What has she got that I haven’t?” I was amused to notice that Catherine was aware of the inspection, and that I was conscious that she was, for her gray eyes twinkled, and her expression said to me: “I have a lot more than some people would guess.”
The buzzer sounded for the second act and people began moving toward the doors, but Catherine and I stayed where we were.
“Is he always like that?” I asked her. “Pretty often. Is it any wonder his patients love him?”
“First I thought he’d be so old he’d not notice me, and then he seemed as young as myself. Do you always dress for dinner?”
“Hardly ever. We had to go to a medical banquet where Jerome had to make a speech. I wish he’d let me edit his speeches. Sometimes he does, too. But when he gets excited he throws the script away and just talks. He was excited tonight, I’m afraid.”
“What about?”
“It was Sir Rupert Irons, really. He’s the president of Jerome’s board and he was there tonight, and Jerome contrived to say about everything he could think of to raise Irons’ blood pressure. Of course Irons thinks he’s a communist.”
“Is he?”
“He’s just Jerome.”
We went in and found our seats, the lights went down and the play resumed, but I have no recollection of it. Catherine was beside me, her full white arm and her breathing presence in the tide of her life, and I still felt like a man come home. When the curtain fell and the people went out for their smokes and their inspections of each other, Catherine and I remained in our seats and talked.
“Oh,” I said in answer to her question, “after Father went broke it was bed-sitting rooms and odd jobs till finally I got a degree out of Toronto. Since then I’ve been at Waterloo. It’s a lousy job but I’m lucky to have it.”
“Teaching isn’t a job to be ashamed of.”
“I wasn’t talking about teaching, I was talking about Waterloo. And I’m not complaining, Catherine. I couldn’t get anything else. I suppose a war will change things.”
“Are you another of the ones who expect war?”
“Of course.”
“Jerome thinks it’s here already.”
“He’s right.”
“If only there weren’t so many people who want it.”
“It’s coming, wanting or not.”
“Yes,” she said quietly, “I know it’s coming.”
Her excitement had made her talkative as she seldom is.
“One consolation,” she went on, “is that when the war comes, Jerome is in the one profession where a man is allowed to do some good. When I first met him he called himself a pacifist, but I’m afraid I never took that seriously.” She gave me a rueful smile. “It’s a warrior I married, George. In his more obstreperous moments he says Ha-ha in the midst of the trumpets.”
“He’s made you very happy, hasn’t he, Catherine”
She looked at me calmly. “Yes, George, he has.”
“Do you see any of our old friends any more?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t suppose Jerome would have any time for them. I don’t see any of them, either.”
“You’re one old friend I’m going to see. Jerome likes you. I hope you like him.”
I rose to make room for a returning couple to stumble past, and when I sat down Catherine’s eyes met mine and our hands touched and joined. The third act played itself out and when the curtain fell the people gave Sir Cedric an ovation. But there was no sign of Jerome when we reached the foyer.
“Obviously he’s had to operate,” she said. “Do come with me now.”
“Where are you going?”
“Most weekends lately we’ve been meeting in various people’s houses for talk. Sometimes I’m not up to it and sometimes I leave before the party breaks up. They’re all used to me, so it doesn’t matter. But Jerome has to work so hard and read so many medical journals that it’s his only way of keeping up with things, talking with people who have the time to know about politics. He’s a wonderful doctor but he’s always dreaded the narrowness of the medical profession. There’s going to be a famous English journalist there tonight. I think he writes for the New Statesman.”
“Is his name Clifford?”
“That’s it. He’s back from Spain and Jerome wants to meet anyone who’s been in Spain. Professor John David is giving the party.”
“I read about Clifford in the paper.”
My old shyness returned and I hesitated, for in the teaching profession the university professor is an officer and the schoolmaster an N.C.O.
“Please come, George,” she begged me. “These are the kind of people you belong with. You don’t belong in that crowd around Adam Blore.”
“They’re all right,” I said.
“They’re not all right. Jerome pretends to find them stimulating, but I wish he didn’t.”
“They’ve been the only friends I’ve had lately, Catherine.”
“Do you really like them?”
“Some of them. How’s your heart these days?”
“Now you’re changing the subject on me. My heart is in the same old place making the some old sounds, but I’m not afraid of it any more. Now dear, please call us a cab.”
A few minutes later we were rolling east along Sherbrooke Street and I saw moonlight flicker off the darkened windows of a church, then the dew-covered campus of the university looking like a sheet of hoarfrost and finally we stopped in a dark street before a line of graystone houses where professors lived.
CHAPTER VI
Those Saturday evenings of the 1930s – they seem so remote in these days when we drink the better brands while the satellites flash around a planet governed by propagandists and advertising agencies. There were six professors and four laymen crowded into John David’s living room and eight women including Catherine, most of them faculty wives, and they talked of the things people talked of then. Clifford, the English journalist who wrote for the New Statesman, seemed acquainted with everyone in England who had written a book or made a speech, and to me it was exciting to hear the famous names drop from a man who knew their owners, and to know what G.B.S. had said to H.G. the night Clifford had sat between them at a dinner, and what Harold really thought of the Webbs. Clifford stood with his back to the empty hearth with his hands in his pockets, his well-bred head on one side and his loose hair cut long and brushed back along his temples, his face distinguished and diffuse as he talked about violent things.
The conversation went round and round, rising and falling in a sequence of arias and duets. In the middle of the room was a low coffee table with biscuits and Oka cheese. We drank beer, and a young man called Arthur Lazenby was the bartender for the night and kept our glasses filled. I sat on the floor with my back against several rows of books which reposed on plain pine boards resting on loose stacks of bricks. Over the fireplace was a large painting of an Ontario forest in an autumn storm, on the walls were etchings of the Oxford college where John David had lived as a Rhodes Scholar and on the mantel were souvenir beer mugs from the Bavarian town where he had learned to speak German. The names and phrases of the time cascaded learnedly through the room: Laski, Keynes, Marx, Selassie, Lenin, Ras Desta, Trotsky, Hitler, Mussolini, Blum, Azaña, Hitler, Mussolini, Litvinov, Goebbels, Suñer, Samuel Hoare, Hitler, Mussolini, Baldwin, Stavisky, Chamberlain, Lansbury, Franco, Mussolini, Hitler
, Van Paassen, Wallisch, Fey Miaja, Duranty, Roosevelt, Cabellero, Dos Passos, Hemingway, cadres, fifth column, new deal, technician, trade index, putsch, kulak, liquidation, the Ukraine, and would Hitler get it, Abyssinia and would Mussolini keep it, Cagoulard, Stormovik, the Manzanares – hands kept reaching out to the table for biscuits and cheese and Arthur Lazenby kept replenishing glasses with beer which still cost only fifteen cents a quart and Catherine sat under an etching of Tom Quad looking over-dressed among the faculty wives in their blouses and dirndls and the men in their gray flannels and tweed jackets. The 1930s was the last time for so many things; it was certainly the last time in which college professors could believe themselves capable of planning the future of humanity.
It was past midnight when the room stirred and Jerome entered, and when I stood up my eyes popped, for Norah Blackwell was with him.
“The best surgical nurse in Montreal,” he introduced her while Norah blushed. “She wants a beer and so do I. Catherine, you know Norah Blackwell, don’t you?”
The two women greeted each other formally, but behind Catherine’s easy courtesy was an alertness which made Norah uncomfortable. Lazenby appeared with foaming glasses and Jerome, after shaking hands with Clifford, began talking as though he had been present all evening.
“I don’t know why operations make me thirsty, but they do. Maybe it’s self-indulgence, maybe it’s the heat and the ether, but tonight it could be remorse.”
He found a seat on the sofa and drained half his glass.
“Remorse,” he repeated. “With Norah’s help I performed a crime tonight. If it hadn’t been for us, one of the biggest bastards in Montreal would now be dead.”
Lazenby refilled his glass, he lifted it in thanks, then drank half of it.
“There’s no doubt the man’s going to recover,” he went on. “I give him five more years at least.” Then he caught sight of me: “Hullo, George, so you came after all. I’m glad. You and Norah know each other. She told me.”
Clifford, the English journalist, was showing signs of annoyance for which I did not blame him, for he had been in the middle of an explanation when Jerome had entered and broken it up. He eyed Jerome appraisingly and I could see him disliking him.
Norah, shy and fey as she usually was with strangers, found a place beside me against the books, and when Clifford got going again I began talking to her in whispers.
“Does he always talk like this about his cases outside the hospital?”
“No, no, of course not. He’s just tired and worked up.”
“What were you doing at the hospital at this late hour?”
“Dr. Martell had this emergency and Miss Elliott, she’s the senior O.R. nurse, she suddenly had a gall bladder attack and Dr. Martell phoned me to come over.”
She was obviously pleased and proud and I asked her who the important man was whose life they had saved.
“It wasn’t me that had anything to do with it, it was Dr. Martell. He’s so wonderful. Don’t pay any attention to him when he talks like this. That old man he operated on was scared to death, and Dr. Martell treated him so gently. That’s the way he operates – gently.”
“How can you operate gently?”
Her large eyes stared at me as though I had asked a foolish question.
“If you don’t, the patient will suffer shock. Dr. Martell understands about things like that. He’s not like Dr. Rodgers at all. If he wanted to, he could operate twice as fast as Dr. Rodgers, but he’s so gentle with the patient’s organs.”
“He doesn’t look a gentle type to me,” I said. “But I must say, he does look tired.”
“Why shouldn’t he be? He’s been on his feet since six this morning and he’s done seven major operations in addition to everything else.”
Jerome relaxed on the sofa like a resting animal, smoking and drinking beer, the glass solid in his hand, his eyes hooded against the smoke.
“Some surgeons are such prima donnas,” Norah whispered to me. “The way some of them talk to a nurse, she wants to crawl off somewhere and die. That’s what Dr. Rodgers is like. And of course he’s so jealous of Dr. Martell everyone knows it.”
I wondered if she ought to be talking this way about the hospital, but there was such innocence in her expression and manner that people never seemed to notice it when she said things like this.
“Of course Dr. Rodgers is in with the capitalists,” she went on. “And that’s another reason why he hates Dr. Martell.”
Her eyes on Jerome, I suddenly noticed, were adoring. She knew I was there, but I was only somebody she could talk to. Her eyes never left Jerome’s face. I noticed that at least half the other women in the room were also turning their eyes to him. He himself seemed unconscious of their admiration. He leaned forward and cut himself a hunk of cheese, and I watched that square, powerful hand stuff the cheese into his mouth. It looked more like the hand of an able seaman than of a surgeon, except that it was clean and the fingers were supple and quick. He swallowed the cheese, took another sip of his beer, then leaned forward and entered the conversation with a crash.
“Clifford, will the Spanish people still be fighting by spring?”
“There can’t be the slightest doubt of that,” said Clifford.
“How do you know there can’t be the slightest doubt?”
“Well you see, I’ve just come from Spain.”
“Were you in the last war?”
Clifford flushed slightly. “Not really. I was turned down by you doctor chaps.”
“The only reason I asked,” said Jerome, “was to get some idea of how you’d look at a war. A civilian usually misses the signs that count – you know, the things you notice if you’ve lived for years with troops.” He paused and frowned. “I don’t like one damned bit what I read about Spain in the papers.”
“I’d presume anybody’d know that the capitalist press is lying,” Clifford’s clipped voice said sharply. He pronounced “capitalist” with the accent on the second syllable, “capit′alist.”
Jerome reached for more cheese, and while he munched it Clifford resumed his monologue. But the moment Jerome had swallowed the cheese, he interrupted him again.
“You can’t dodge it, Clifford. Those poor bloody Loyalists are taking one hell of a beating. Their generals are obviously useless and their troops are obviously untrained. On the other hand this Franco seems a reasonably good general.”
Clifford flared angrily. “You really believe that? My information is that Franco’s nothing but a routine Spanish army officer.”
“I don’t know what your information is. Probably it’s right. If so, so much the worse. For he’s winning.”
“There’s such a thing as morale,” said Clifford, now thoroughly annoyed. “You see, the Loyalists happen to know what they’re fighting for.”
“You found the morale of Franco’s Moors bad? Or the morale of those fascists who held out in the Alcazar?” Jerome heaved himself forward. “Do you really believe it when you tell me the fascists don’t know what they’re fighting for? They’re fighting for their lives, that’s what they’re fighting for.”
“If you saw Spain,” said Clffford, now pale with suppressed anger, “you couldn’t compare the morale of the fascists to the morale of the Loyalists.”
Jerome shrugged: “I only hope you’re right.”
Then he leaned back and drank some more beer, and it took the frustrated conversation several minutes to get going again. I looked at him in fascination. Never in my life had I seen a man who had this singular capacity to set a room on fire. That was the only word for it – he set that room on fire because somehow he struck right through to people’s underselves. I looked at Catherine’s calm, heart-shaped face, at her small, beautifully formed body outlined by her evening dress and wondered how she could stand the exhaustion of living with a personality like this. Rude? In one sense as rude as anyone I had ever met. Yet underneath I did not think he was rude at all, for he was not seeking to humiliate Cli
fford. He simply lost himself in whatever interested him. Clifford did not interest him now but the beer and cheese did and he gave to both the attention he had given to the argument a moment before. Then he interrupted again.
“I got a letter from Norman Bethune today.” For Clifford’s benefit he explained that Bethune was another Montreal surgeon. “He’s over on the other side and he’s gone to Spain. He asked me what I thought of a new idea of his. He wants to organize a blood transfusion service for the front lines. He also wants to know if I’d be interested in joining in.”
Catherine’s face paled slightly but she did not move or speak. Norah sucked in her breath and stared at Jerome as though he were a god.
“Beth’s one of those impetuous men who says what he thinks and does what he likes and relies on his energy to get by. He’s also a terrific surgeon. I wish he wasn’t so impetuous, though.”
What do you think you are? I thought when I heard Jerome say this.
“I believe in going more carefully and scouting the ground. What’s the use of people like Beth and me in Spain if the Loyalists are going to collapse?”
“There’s not the slightest possibility of that,” Clifford said sharply. “Almost with their bare hands they’ve –”
“Wars aren’t won with bare hands, Clifford.”
“May I ask,” Clifford said, straining to be polite, “just what is the purpose of a blood transfusion unit?”
“The purpose of a blood transfusion unit is to keep people from dying of shock. It’s never been used on a battlefield before. In the last war, at a rough estimate, about a third of the men who died of wounds actually died of shock. However, to get back to Beth and myself, what’s the point of two busy men throwing up their work if mismanagement and incompetence wrecks the whole Loyalist resistance before we get there? I don’t see how they’re going to win. How can they, with this non-intervention?”
“If you don’t mind an interruption,” said Clifford, “it’s my impression that I’d been talking about that subject for some time.”
“I heard you,” said Jerome, “and while I listened I couldn’t help wondering why you’re a member of the Labour Party.”
Watch that Ends the Night Page 18
