Watch that Ends the Night

by Hugh Maclennan

  Clifford’s pallor now changed to a brick-red flush. He was accustomed to being listened to with respect and without interruption, for in addition to being a journalist, he was also a professor of political science at the University of London. He believed that Jerome was deliberately needling him. Jerome was certainly needling him, but not deliberately; when I knew him better I learned that he almost never talked like this deliberately.

  “My dear sir,” said Clifford in the most formidable Winchester accent he had yet produced, “the Labour Party, as I’d presume you might have known, does not at the moment, thanks to the bankers’ ramp of 1931, happen to be ensconced on the Treasury Bench. Non-intervention is a Tory policy.”

  “If you guys were in power it would be a Labour policy, too.”

  “Really? Might I ask for your evidence?”

  “Of course it would be. Your crowd are pacifists. You’re pure. You’re still trying to stop fascism by passing resolutions.”

  “Our crowd – as you put it – cannot possibly be held responsible for any aspect of this present mess. If the 1931 election had been honest we’d have got in, and this situation would never have arisen.”

  “You mean, if you’d got in you’d have stopped Hitler by passing resolutions against him?”

  “If we’d got in, Hitler would never have got into power in Germany. A socialist victory in Britain would have confirmed the socialists on the continent. Socialism would have nipped this situation in the bud.”

  “The hell it would have. The Germans are hungry and the Germans like wars.”

  I looked at Catherine to see how she took this. It was not so much what Jerome said that was so rude; it was the physical force with which his words came out of him.

  “You see what I mean about Dr. Martell?” Norah whispered to me. “He’s real, and this Englishman is just a Social Democrat.”

  Jerome, apparently forgetting Clifford, began thinking aloud.

  “Somebody’s got to walk out to the bull and the Spaniards are the only ones who are doing it. God knows how they can win this war, but what’s that to do with us? Maybe the time to go to Spain is now, when you know they haven’t got a chance?”

  “But I insist they have every chance,” said Clifford.

  Jerome put down his empty glass and stared at his feet, and after a while he breathed heavily and stood up and looked at Clifford with a sheepish smile.

  “It’s just occurred to me I’ve been rude to you tonight,” he said.

  “Has it really?” said Clifford at last giving himself away.

  “I didn’t mean it. I get like that when I’m tired. I had two cases today I didn’t like. Tonight I wasted a good operation on a bad man who ought to be dead, but this afternoon a good man who ought to be alive died on me.” He looked across the room at Norah, who also had got to her feet. “He fell off a girder a hundred feet from the ground in a structure being built by the company tonight’s patient is the president of. He left a wife and five children and it looks as if there’s going to be an argument about compensation.” Jerome closed his eyes an instant. “By Christ, if the widow doesn’t receive compensation, that man is going to receive the biggest bill anyone ever got from a surgeon in this city.”

  Jerome swayed on his feet and Catherine stood beside him and took his arm. It was the first time I had seen him like this, but I was often to see him like this later when suddenly the energy went out of him and left a void.

  “We’d better go home now, John,” Catherine was saying to our host. “Jerome has been on his feet since dawn.” She turned to the Englishman. “It’s been lovely meeting you, Mr. Clifford.”

  Clifford murmured something polite, but he did not say it had been lovely meeting her or Jerome.

  I noticed a flutter in Catherine’s carotid artery, and saw that Jerome had also noticed it, and that their eyes were meeting with the understanding of a husband and wife. He put his fingers on her forearm and gave another sheepish smile to the company.

  “I’m sorry I talked too much, everybody.”

  Outside in the dark street, while Jerome unlocked the door of his Pontiac, Norah spoke to Catherine.

  “I think Dr. Martell was absolutely correct in every single thing he said tonight, Mrs. Martell. Don’t you think he was, too? I don’t believe he was rude to that English Social Democrat. I think everyone should speak out the way Dr. Martell does. He was so upset by the accident case this afternoon it’s a wonder he was able to operate at all tonight.”

  Catherine looked at her calmly and said: “I know he was upset by the accident case, Mrs. Blackwell. Could we drive you home now?”

  CHAPTER VII

  After that night my life changed. I still worked at Waterloo and five days of every week were still spent in those nerve-grinding classrooms with noisy boys, and one week in four on duty. Shatwell, McNish and the others were still my colleagues, but from then on my life ceased to be empty, for Catherine and Jerome took me in, and they restored my soul. They let me become a kind of uncle to Sally, then in her sixth year; they introduced me to their friends and to their friends’ interests and slowly I began to believe I might be more than an usher in that school of Dr. Bigbee’s. Jerome’s apartment in the little half-moon street near the university became the place I thought of whenever I thought of the meaning of the word “home.”

  Whenever I came up to town they insisted that I see them, and I realized that Jerome was especially glad that I should.

  “Kate’s lonely,” he told me. “Any doctor’s wife is bound to be left with the pickings of her husband’s time, but Kate gets a worse deal than most. It makes me feel better to know you’re around and can take her out occasionally when I’m tied up.”

  Sometimes I did take her out: to concerts or shows and once to a hockey game, for during the first year there were several weekends when I never saw Jerome at all and when Catherine never saw him either. Sometimes she would be asleep when he came to bed and still be asleep when he got up, and she would see the bed had been used and would wonder when she would see him next. We worked long hours at Waterloo, but compared to Jerome we were loafers, for on the average he slept no more than five hours a night and sometimes only two or three. His daily routine called for about six operations in addition to his calls, he lectured in the university, he spent two hours every day in a free clinic he had established for the unemployed, and he was involved in various public causes. Besides all this he managed to find time to read, to help people in trouble and even to play with his child. The one thing he almost always did: he came home for dinner and reserved the half-hour before it for Sally.

  Weeks passed and my life came close to theirs. Catherine I thought I knew, for she was in my bones, and in some ways she could talk to me more easily than to Jerome; I really think I was able to lessen the loneliness that came to her from loving strongly a person very different. But Jerome I liked without even pretending to understand him, for in those days he seemed to me more like a force of nature than a man. Also he was so much older and abler, and he had under him what I and all my other friends lacked, a real career.

  It eased Catherine to talk about Jerome and their life together.

  “When Jerome likes a person he goes all the way and tends to take it for granted the other person does the same. He’s so reckless. At the same time he can sometimes be incredibly aware. But he won’t calculate except in his work. In his work they tell me he’s bold – the boldest surgeon in Montreal, they say – and he’s never reckless in that. But in his life he’s so reckless he makes me shiver sometimes. That way he has of jumping out at people like electricity jumping a spark gap – have you ever seen anything like it?”

  I hadn’t, and to me this quality had seemed wonderful, for I was shy in those days and in any case I was unaccustomed to people taking me in like that. Already, without my knowing it, I had come to think of Jerome as a protector, almost as a substitute for the father I never had except in the biological sense.

  I was awa
re of Catherine regarding me with critical amusement.

  “I disliked him intensely the first time I met him,” she said. I laughed: “Did he dislike you, too?”

  “He never even saw me. That may have been why I disliked him. I used to go to far too many parties in those days. I was so insecure and afraid of being unpopular and left out of things. I made a fool of myself pretty often and got myself talked about and more than once I did things that shocked me. I could be reckless too – or did you know that already?”

  There was a fond little twinkle in her eyes and I said: “Yes dear, I’ve not forgotten.”

  “I wanted men to like me in the most outrageous way, and I used to get so annoyed with myself for wanting that.”

  She seemed so calm now and sure of herself in her own home, the tea cups on a tray in front of her.

  “Those first times I saw Jerome,” she said ruefully, “were probably the last times I’ll ever be able to see him as others do. I had no idea where he came from. I thought he talked too much. I thought he was abominably opinionated. You know how we are in Montreal – the way we keep our opinions to ourselves if we think people will disagree with them. I knew he was a Canadian but he was almost a foreigner to me. Then suddenly we met. I mean we really met.”

  Her gray eyes looked frankly into mine.

  “George dear, I’m not blind and I know how you feel. I’m being very bad for you.”

  “You’re being very wonderful for me.”

  “If I weren’t so selfish and fond of you I’d be mean and horrible so you’d run away and forget me. You’re much too fond of me for your own good. And I love it too much for the good of either of us.”

  I laughed: “I thought you were talking about the time you met Jerome.”

  She gave me a small twinkle. “So I was to be sure. It was at a cocktail party in July and there he was again. He wasn’t a party-goer, at least not in those days. It just happened that over the past six months I’d met him a few times. Well, this time he actually saw me. We’d been introduced before but I knew he’d forgotten all about that. But this time he saw me and came shouldering across the room and said: ‘Why haven’t we met before?’

  “That was really too much, so I said, ‘Dr. Martell, we’ve actually met six times and I think it’s simply marvellous that you never even noticed it.’”

  She gave me another ruefully pleased smile: “He was perfect then, George. Just perfect. Do you know what he said? ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said. ‘I don’t see any particular reason why we should get out of here,’ I said to him. So naturally, five minutes later both of us were on our way to Chez Stien in his car. In the middle of dinner he left to call up the hospital and came back to say he’d got another doctor to take an operation. I never knew him to do such a thing since. ‘It’s just a simple appendectomy,’ he said, and I was too ignorant to know what it meant, him doing a thing like that.

  “Does he seem terribly direct to you, George?”

  “I don’t know about terribly. But direct – yes.”

  “He explodes. Do you realize that, George – Jerome explodes. It scares me. Sometime he’s bound to explode wrong.”

  “But this time he exploded right.”

  A beatific smile: “Oh, but beautifully right. He took me up to the Lookout on Westmount Mountain and we stood staring down for hours like a single person. And then, try to guess what he said. ‘What’s your other name besides Kate?’ he said. Now try to guess what I said.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “‘If I didn’t adore you I’d want to kill you for that,’ I said. Then I said: ‘In case you’re not interested, I come from a very old and obscure family in these parts. And in case you’re interested any further, nobody but you has ever called me Kate.’ And then I told the man my name and he said he liked it. ‘Your name means Hammer,’ I said next. ‘Where did you get it from?’

  “Then he told me his father was an Englishman and that the name was of Huguenot origin. He told me he had grown up in Halifax and he didn’t understand Montreal.

  “‘All I knew was the Maritime Provinces before I went to the war,’ he said. ‘After the war I did my basic medicine here at McGill and after I qualified I did the usual rounds in Scotland and England and got my f.r.c.s. I’ve been practicing here about four years, but I haven’t had a chance to meet many people except doctors.’

  “‘You had six chances to meet me and you didn’t take them,’ I said.”

  Catherine gave me another of her charmingly helpless smiles: “George, how can any woman feel safe married to a man who behaves like that? But let me go on. He didn’t even hear what I said, for while I was waiting for him to answer he said: ‘I suppose you’re worried about that heart of yours?’

  “Now that was the last straw, for I’d never mentioned my heart and of course I supposed somebody’d told him about it. I was so mad when he said that. Here was developing a lovely, surprising, exciting evening and the man had to begin talking about my confounded heart. I got flustered and said something idiotic like did my heart show on my face.

  “And then he looked at me, George, the way he does sometimes, with that wonderful, gentle expression which makes you forget everything else: ‘No Kate,’ he said, ‘your heart doesn’t show on your face, but I’m afraid it does in your wrist. I’ve been taking your pulse. Rheumatic, isn’t it?’

  “Then I tried to tease him – I’d no idea that he can’t be teased – and asked him if it was a new line with doctors to diagnose a girl’s ailments the first time they met her. And do you know what he did? He just turned and took me and kissed me, and George – from that minute I was a gone goose.”

  Catherine was so queen-like in her appearance that when she said things like this they always sounded odd and incongruous. Yet they were perfectly natural to her, for the little girl in Catherine never died.

  She continued: “Later when we were driving back down the slope of the mountain, he began talking about my heart again.

  “‘I suppose you’ve been told the usual thing?’ he said. ‘I suppose some bright member of my profession has put on his best bedside manner and shaken his head in the solidest way and said it’s too bad, Miss Carey, but it’s my duty to inform you that with a heart condition like yours you must never contemplate child-bearing? Well,’ he said, ‘am I right or wrong?’

  “I told him he was more or less right and he let out that snort of his.

  “‘To hell with him whoever he was! He said it to protect himself, not you. Mind you, I’m not pretending that heart of yours won’t bear watching. I’m going to see a cardiogram of it in a day or two. But I think you’re going to be all right. You want children very much, don’t you?’

  “I asked him how he could tell, and I said there were plenty of women who didn’t choose to bring children into a world like ours, but he cut me short.

  “‘You mean there are plenty of women who say that to plenty of men when they want to marry some guy who doesn’t see how he can swing it.’

  “By this time we’d reached the upper streets of the town and Jerome kept the car ambling along through the traffic.

  “‘You know,’ he said, ‘the purpose of medicine is supposed to be the preservation of life. But that’s not my idea of the purpose of medicine. My idea is to help people get the most out of what life they have.’”

  Catherine stopped and gave me a rueful smile. “George, it’s wonderful for me to be able to tell someone this. I’ve never told anyone. I haven’t many close friends, you know. Do you mind?”

  I told her I didn’t, even though her recital was making me ache, for I remembered how I had feared to take her when she had offered herself, and I knew I could never have accepted the kind of responsibility Jerome had accepted. She looked at me shyly and flushed.

  “Do you mind if I tell you something else? What he said to me then?”

  I said, “Of course not,” and her flush deepened. She looked away and her eyes misted with tears which came fr
om joy and pride, not from sadness.

  “Jerome suddenly stopped the car and turned to me and said: ‘Catherine, you’re going to marry me and I’m going to make you pregnant and you’re going to have at least one child and you’re not going to die for a long time. At least you’re not going to die till you’ve had a chance to use a lot of that life of yours.’”

  So that night they became lovers and three weeks afterwards they got married, and Sally was born so soon that Catherine believed she had been conceived before they went to the church. Sally’s birth came close to killing Catherine, but her vast will to live combined with Jerome’s force pulled her through. After Sally there could be no more children.

  “I don’t have to ask anyone what Jerome means to his patients,” she told me, “because twice I’ve been his patient myself. I’d never believed it possible for a doctor to take away a patient’s fear as he does.”

  That was her story and she told me I was the only person who knew all of it. She had not told many of the details to her parents, and indeed she saw her parents seldom, for Mrs. Carey disliked Jerome and disapproved of him, and Mr. Carey had retired from business and had become absorbed in his garden and scholarship as though he were trying to forget that he was alive. Catherine now lived with Jerome in what to me is the most interesting part of the whole of Montreal, the no man’s land between the English and French blocs, almost unknown to both of them, which contains international people with interests all over the world.

  I was not particularly observant in those days, and I was slow to recognize something which an experienced man, or any normal woman, would have seen immediately. It was this. No matter how much Catherine might love Jerome, she was lonely with him: nor was the loneliness caused entirely by the fact that his practice absorbed so much of his time. Maybe Adam Blore had been right to call him a primitive, for the little coddlings a woman likes to bestow on a man were wasted on Jerome. He never noticed them except when he was exhausted.