Watch that Ends the Night

by Hugh Maclennan

  But these two had known their honeymoon happiness just the same, and the glow of it still was with them. Catherine told me that the first few years of their marriage had been heaven, and I believed her. Jerome had picked her up and whirled her as though she had never been sick in her life. In those early days he, too, was relaxing from a hard-driving life of constant struggle and emulation. He had qualified, he was establishing himself, he was getting rapidly better in his work; at the same time, for a few years, he was free of care and lived in the present. Every summer in those years he had taken a full month off, and the third autumn of their marriage he had taken Catherine to Europe for three months of travel and high living. Jerome loved sailing, and in his Halifax boyhood he had not only owned a sailboat; twice he had gone out to the Grand Banks for the fishing season with the great black schooners of Lunenburg. Living high, at times even past his means, he had rented a sixty-foot ketch one year for a month’s cruising in the Caribbean, and if his money had not run out he would have taken the craft through the Panama Canal.

  It was this gaiety of Jerome’s early life which had won him the initial regard of the man who now had become his enemy, Dr. Stamford Rodgers, the chief surgeon of his hospital. For Rodgers was an aristocrat and he liked to see his young protégés living large so long as they did their work. Jerome’s life might have been easy had it not been for the change that came over the whole world in the early Thirties. When the depression struck, suddenly the sun went down for him, he remembered his childhood and the war, he closed the book on fun and good times, he began working twelve and sometimes eighteen hours a day, and Catherine saw less and less of him.

  But the halcyon years of love, excitement and fun were still marked on Catherine’s face and showed in the manner of her carriage. A woman well and truly loved, had been the phrase which struck my mind the night we met in the lobby of His Majesty’s. More even than that: a woman who had known real glory and was aware of it, for it still shone out of her. I hope I don’t sound sentimental if I say that to me there is no finer sight in the world than a young mother in the full tide of joy with her husband and child. That was how Catherine had been and still was.

  My own position with the Martells was at once peculiar and simple. Jerome was unconscious of jealousy and he liked me, as I liked him, yet I doubt if he ever thought about me when I was not in his company. I desired Catherine in addition to loving her, but it takes two to make desire jump the spark-gap, and in those days all her desire was polarized to her husband. She used to tease me and tell me I ought to marry, and several times – for she was something of a stage-manager – she introduced me to girls she thought would make good wives, and in a motherly way she professed to feel responsible for my future. Yet I doubt if she ever hoped I would marry any of these girls of hers, for she knew I loved her. She supposed I occasionally went to bed with other women as I had gone to bed with Caroline Hall – I had told her about Caroline – but I did not tell her that I had almost become a celibate from necessity. So far as women were concerned, I discovered that I either had a one-track mind or lacked the animal vitality which makes it natural or even healthy for men to desire and make lusty love to women they merely like. Catherine engrossed my thoughts and feelings. Often I took out girls telling myself in advance that I would make love to them, but I seldom did. Catherine’s image always intervened.

  So I continued at Waterloo living for my weekends in town, where now I was making new friends and acquiring some self-respect. Catherine’s affection for me and Jerome’s interest in me were rapidly giving me a feeling that I was recovering a lost dignity. Adam Blore was right when he called me a bourgeois at heart. What else is a bourgeois but a man who wants a home, some respect from his fellows and a feeling that he has a future and belongs to a human group?

  But Jerome – I really came to believe this – could never belong to any particular group of human beings; he belonged to humanity itself. This he never seemed to know. He had less ordinary social sense than anyone I ever knew, and if he met the King of England he would have been interested in him solely as a human being, and if the King bored him he would have been quite capable of changing the subject or walking away to talk to somebody else. He was utterly without a sense of class distinction, and the subtle layers of these distinctions in Montreal entirely escaped his notice. I’m sure he was snubbed dozens of times; I’m equally sure he never noticed it.

  Gradually I came to learn something about his background, and I suppose his background was responsible for his indifference to the social shades one learns in Montreal without even realizing one does so. He had grown up in Nova Scotia, and this small but senior province is only a part of Canada by reason of a political agreement. When I was there in the war I met a few people who reminded me slightly of Jerome in their attitude toward us of the upper provinces. Their snobbery rested on brains, ability and the kind of courage you find in navies. Their democracy was in fact a kind of aristocracy: they talked to everyone they met as though he were at least a potential equal and they were franker than we, less subtle, but in a blunt way much more sure of themselves.

  It was in the late November of that year that I discovered that Jerome was not really a Nova Scotian but had only been brought up there. He told me the story himself.

  During one of those interludes of warm weather which occasionally come to Quebec just before the permanent winter snow falls, with daytime temperatures in the high fifties and the nights well above the verge of frost, Jerome suddenly decided that we should all go up to his cottage in the Laurentians. Catherine, Sally and I joined him in his Pontiac and under a dappled sky we drove north. There were glad cries from Sally when we entered a cottage that felt like a dry icebox, put wood on the hearth and got the Quebec heater burning. While the cottage warmed up, the four of us ate a picnic lunch on the veranda, and afterwards Catherine put Sally to bed for a nap and lay down to rest herself.

  Jerome and I smoked for a while and then he became restless and said: “Let’s go down to the lake and work up a sweat.”

  “Let’s go down to the lake by all means. But you can work up the sweat.”

  “That suits me fine,” he said.

  The November silence was so profound that the crack of a breaking stick carried a mile. No weekenders had come up, there were no human voices but ours, and Jerome’s cottage was in the wilderness anyway. There was only one other cottage on that lake and it was at the other end of it. The lake itself was shallow as most Laurentian lakes are with the spruce coming down to the water and parts of the shoreline were cemeteries of gray stumps bleached smooth and eroded to fantastic shapes and the water was the color of amber. Strangest of all was the effect of the sun that afternoon; less than a month from the winter solstice, the sun was so low that its light streamed almost parallel between the sky and the earth. The lake was a dog’s leg about three miles long and half a mile wide at its widest point, and while Jerome paddled I lay in the bottom of the canoe and smoked a pipe.

  “There’s a loon over there,” he said. “He’s just come up.”

  Looking over my shoulder I saw the black bird humped by the mirage about a quarter of a mile away, and while I looked the loon gave its crazy laugh, tilted up its tail and dived.

  “When I was a kid I used to hear the loons at night. Yes, I used to hear them when I was alone at night.”

  He began to paddle solidly and I felt the strokes pulsing through the length of the canoe. I had never seen anyone paddle so well, for he wasted no effort and the prow of the canoe drove forward with a real bow wave and never a flicker to port or starboard because the angle of each stroke was so firm and perfect.

  “You must have done a lot of paddling when you were a kid,” I said.

  “I learned to paddle when I was eight. Yes, I did a lot of it.”

  We rounded the first bend and the lake opened up.

  “It’s almost as warm as early September,” Jerome said, and shipped his paddle. “I love these November days when i
t’s like this. They’re like a resurrection. There was snow a month ago, and a fortnight ago there must have been seven or eight inches here. You can see a few patches at the fringe of the woods. But now it’s like summer.”

  He pulled off his shirt and wriggled out of his trousers without even making the canoe wobble, and he sat in the stern in his jockey shorts. When he began paddling again his body was like a statue springing into life, and with each stroke those powerful shoulder and pectoral muscles tensed and relaxed. The suns of many years had left his skin permanently tanned and heavy work in his youth had muscled him so thoroughly that not even the years of medical practice without regular exercise had softened him. With the close-cropped dark hair blazed with white in front of his ears, with the prize-fighter’s body surmounted by the doctor’s face, he looked, stripped down like that, unlike any man I had ever seen. On his left thigh, dead center, was a livid splash and a pucker in the flesh, and when he saw me eyeing it he grinned like a boy.

  “Neat, don’t you think? It was so perfectly done it ought to have been from aimed fire, but it was just a browning shot from a traversing machine gun. A beautiful fracture of the left femur. I was walking straight into that bullet. By God, bullet wounds hurt.”

  “Does it still hurt?”

  “When the weather turns damp, it does. It’s my private barometer. It makes my skiing a joke, but my skiing would have been a joke anyway. Down home in Nova Scotia when I was a kid nobody did any skiing. I played a lot of hockey down there and football. We played English rugger – not this game you have up here – but the first time I was on skis I was on the top of an Alp and I rolled most of the way down.”

  He paddled to the far end of the lake and turning the canoe he paddled slowly back to the widest part in the center, when he rested. Around us the lake and forest and sky were silent as glass, and the silence went a thousand miles to Hudson Bay. There was not a breath of wind, not a human or animal sound, just the canoe and its shadow, the lake and forest and sky with the sun streaming pale from west to east.

  “George,” he said after a while, “I’m glad Kate’s found you again. Believe me.”

  “I’m glad you don’t mind.”

  He lit a pipe and looked up at that immense November sky and sniffed the air like an animal.

  “It’s going to snow tomorrow and it’s going to be the real winter snow.” A little later he said: “Why does a sky like that look so wise? Do you remember that scene in War and Peace when Prince Andrei lay wounded and looked up at the righteous sky? That was wonderful. Nothing like that ever happened to me when I was wounded.”

  In the uncanny stillness I heard the sound of tobacco burning in his pipe.

  “George,” he said shyly, “please tell me the truth. What do you think of me?”

  “It’s hardly a question I would answer even if I could.”

  “You Montreal people.” He grinned. “All right, it was a stupid question. All right. But you do like me, don’t you?”

  “You know that.”

  “I like you, too. Tell me something else. Is Kate happy?”

  “Don’t you know she is?”

  He shook his head and looked away. “I’m not sure. I’m not easy. But you’d know, and that’s why I asked you.”

  “What she feels is bigger than happiness.”

  “You really mean that?” He was as grateful as a boy. “You know her much better than I do. When I see you together I recognize that. She’s easy with you. She’s not so easy with me, you know. She needs friends. I have my work, but a woman married to a man like me, she needs friends. She has this peculiar feeling that people are careful with her. I think she’s getting over it, though. It came from being sick when she was a child. My God, George, I’d hate to hurt that woman.”

  He looked away into the woods, then his eyes traversed the lake and settled on the loon which had risen from a long dive and was sitting on the water a hundred yards off.

  “I’ve never liked those birds,” he said.

  He shouted at the loon which rose and flew away, and the silence closed in after its departure.

  A little later: “A day like this makes me believe I might be a good man.”

  It was such an unusual thing to say that I laughed.

  “No,” he said, “I’m being serious. I’m afraid of hurting Kate.”

  “How can you be afraid of doing that?”

  “We’re beginning to disagree about too many things. She wants above all to protect her home, and so she should. As for me – I wish she didn’t get hurt so easily. I wish she wasn’t so vulnerable. And I wish I were an easier man.” He knocked out his pipe, stuffed it with more tobacco and relit it. “You know Adam Blore and that gang. What do you think of their work?”

  “Not much. Some of them may be good, but who am I to say?”

  “What do you think of them?”

  “Some of them I like very much, but Adam is pretty hard to take.”

  Jerome gave me an appraising look: “For his age, that young man understands quite a lot of things.”

  “Such as?”

  “Cruelty, for instance. Kate thinks he’s just plain evil. But if he’s evil because of what he knows, then I am too. Cruelty to me is the ultimate evil. Sex – that’s nothing one way or the other unless it’s connected with cruelty.”

  He began paddling again and the canoe pulsed gently onward in that amazing silence and I looked at his abstracted face and wondered what he meant by this apparent association of himself with cruelty.

  “I love that woman, George, but the two of us have pretty strong personalities. She’s much more sensible than I am, I know. And yet this situation in the world – to me she doesn’t understand it at all. She doesn’t even try to understand it. She’d be very happy if I turned my back on it. She can’t see – I mean, she can’t feel how it’s got into my bones. Meantime in these wonderful years we’ve had together look what have I gone and done?” He gave a boyish laugh. “I’ve gone and made her my judge. And sometimes these days it makes me feel damned lonely. In fact it makes me feel damned guilty, when I do some of the things my reason tells me is right to do and she disapproves. Do many people call me a Red?”

  “I suppose some do.”

  The fighting look came over his face: “That’s become the word they smear over everyone who’s against them. Look at the hospital where I work. Oh sure, if I went along with the current I’d be safe and rich and they’d all say I was grand. Nearly all the medical people do that. They’re conniving at the whole situation we have in this city.” The bulldog jaw thrust forward. “The place to attack disease is where it starts, and where it starts – a good deal of it – is in economic conditions. Not enough to eat. Not enough of the right food. The slums. The insecurity. The whole damned nineteenth century set-up Sir Rupert Irons represents. The hospitals fawn on those millionaires for grants, and the millionaires compete to get themselves onto their boards because it proves they’ve arrived and amount to something. Do you know anything about the chief surgeon at my hospital?”

  I shook my head: “Only that Norah Blackwell told me once that you and Dr. Rodgers don’t get along any too well.”

  “Does she go around saying that?” His voice was sharp. “I should slap her backside for saying things like that in the city.”

  “I don’t think she says it to other people.”

  A pleased look came over his face. “I like that little girl. She’s a first-class nurse, though you’d never think it to look at her. She’s had a hard time, and she’s intelligent. Is it true that husband of hers is a moron? Adam Blore tells me he is.”

  “When did Adam tell you that?”

  “Oh, I ran into him about a week ago and he told me.”

  “The bastard!” I said.

  “For saying that?”

  “That’s what I meant. Harry’s not a moron, even though he’s not any too bright. And he’s very fond of Norah.”

  With his singular imperviousness to a key person
al remark, Jerome returned to the subject of his hospital.

  It was a small hospital and a relatively modern one, and its name was the Beamis Memorial. Old Joshua Beamis had made a sizable fortune in my grandfather’s day in the lumber business and had left the bulk of it to endow a hospital in his own memory. There had been a contest over the will and it was a long time before it was settled, with the result that the Beamis was then only twenty-one years old. From the beginning its chief surgeon had been Dr. Stamford Rodgers, who looked like William Ewart Gladstone without the whiskers and enjoyed an international reputation. According to Jerome his work was no longer what it had been. According to Jerome an excess of adulation, especially of the kind lavished on top flight medical men in a city proud of its medicine as Montreal is, had affected the old doctor’s vanity.

  “It’s a vanity of the super-colossal kind, actually. To most people it passes for pure austerity. For instance. He hates my guts as a person now, but he’s not small. The very fact that he loathes me protects me from old Rupert Irons, who’d like to have me fired from the staff. Rodgers goes to the clubs with the big business men, but in his heart he despises them. He’s a kind of medical emperor in his own mind and he thinks the rest of us should be his subjects. He’s also getting old.”

  I lay back and watched this strange man’s face. He was so boyish and yet he was so competent, he was so rugged and yet so vulnerable, so intelligent in some things and yet so naive in others. The word “insecurity” was not used in those days as often as it is now, but if it had been, I would have applied it to Jerome. And if I had known as much about life then as I do now, I would have recognized that here was a man to be deeply concerned about if you loved him, for his very vitality – the thing which marked him out from everyone else – made him violently impulsive.

  “Is this situation between you and Dr. Rodgers really serious?” I asked him. “Or is the question none of my business?”

  “I don’t mind telling you about it. Not you, George. You’re one of the family.”