When he said this I felt a glow of gratitude to him. He meant it just like that, for he had an enormous kindness which people who knew him only in his defiant and explosive moods never recognized.
“Well George, it’s roughly like this. Sir Rupert Irons is chairman of our board. So far as I can tell, Montreal has always had a single tycoon like that who bosses it during his lifetime, and there’s no doubt Irons is the boss now. Wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes,” I said, “I certainly would.”
“The rest of them – these real old Montreal families – they never seem able to stand up to rough boys like Irons.”
“They don’t try,” I said. “They tame the rough boys’ sons instead. Just like the Chinese.”
“By God” – Jerome grinned – “I never thought of that.” He gave a few more thrusts with his paddle and rested again. “The funny thing is, I get rather a kick out of old Irons. He’s a real fighting man, say what you will against him. He fights because he likes to fight. If his principles weren’t those of a tiger, he and I would get along a hell of a lot better than either of us gets along with the respectable people you grew up with. But of course Irons is antediluvian. He’s too old to belong to anything but the dying order. If he’d been a German he’d have done exactly what Thyssen did with Hitler, and find out too late just what Thyssen has found out now.
“Now get this. Irons doesn’t hate me personally. Not like Rodgers does. He just thinks I’m a Red and should be fired. And here’s what the Irish would call the geg of it – if it wasn’t for old Rodgers vanity, I would be fired. I wouldn’t give five cents for my position on the staff of the Beamis if my chief was like some other chiefs who’ve nothing against me personally.”
“What do you mean?”
Jerome laughed.
“I told you – Rodgers thinks of himself as a medical emperor. He’s a wonderful specimen, in his way. He had a classical education to begin with. His father was a judge and his grandfather was a professor and his great-grandfather was a soldier. He’s so gloriously Tory that he looks down on people who are in trade. In his own way the old man can be more imperious than Irons, for he knows how, and Irons is just an Ulster boy who came out here with one pair of pants and fought his way to the top of the financial heap. Rodgers takes it for granted that the professions are above business and that the top profession is medicine. Very well. When Irons calls him up – as he does about twice a year – and informs him he should get that communist Martell out of his hospital, Rodgers says, very bleakly, no. He’d probably get rid of me himself if Irons wasn’t always telling him to do it, but as it is, I’m safe. Can you beat it?”
I knew nothing then of this world of pressure and politics and all I could do was listen.
“It’s bad for the hospital,” Jerome said. “It’s bad all round. It’s certainly bad for my character.” He gave another boyish smile. “I can say this to you out here. Old Kate thinks I bring a lot of this onto myself because I like fighting. But I don’t believe I really like fighting. It’s just that I’m apt to explode. She’s afraid of that in me, and I don’t mind admitting I’m afraid of it, too.”
I looked at the cool serenity of the steely lake under that amazing sky and the silence held us.
“What made you decide to become a doctor, Jerome?”
“The war.” His face changed again – I never knew a man whose face changed so quickly as his – and became sad and haunted. “I was too good a soldier in the war, George. Before a battle I’d be so scared my throat was sand and my knees knocked together and I’d pray to be wounded before I went over the parapet. Anything not to have to do it. I’d walk out with the others and have no sensation in my legs from the hips down. But when we came up with them I’d go berserk. I killed eleven men with the bayonet, George.”
“And that decided you to go into medicine?”
“Afterwards, yes. To kill a man with a rifle at a distance means nothing much unless you’ve got imagination. But the bayonet is murder. His face is right in front of you and he wants to live. His hands drop to the knife and get sliced. I killed eleven men that way.”
He looked off into the distance and the expression on his face at that moment is with me still.
“I got one poor devil through the throat. I kicked him off it and he fell back into a shellhole. I took one step forward and the bullet smashed me in the thigh” – his right hand tapped the scar – “and I fell into the hole on top of him. He gurgled his life away before I could get off him, and then I had to spend ten hours in that hole with the body, for the machine guns were registered so close to the ground a rat couldn’t have escaped. Well George, that was something. There’d be no wars if every soldier who killed a man with the bayonet had to spend ten hours immediately afterwards in a shellhole with his body. I took that kid’s life away, and that’s all he was – a kid. A frail blond boy who never had a chance against a man as strong as me.”
Jerome stopped and looked out over the lake. “That’s why this Spanish thing has got under my skin. The big war made no sense at all, but this Spanish thing does. If we can stop fascism there, we’ll stop it for good and there won’t be another big, senseless war.”
We were silent for some time before Jerome resumed.
“I never really got over that last bayonet murder I committed. Afterwards in the hospital I was in a state of psychological shock and for weeks I couldn’t speak. In the bed next to mine was a Jewish boy from Oshawa and his name was Aronson, and this boy had that funny understanding of people a lot of Jews have. ‘Tell me about it,’ he kept saying, ‘and then maybe it will go away.’ But I couldn’t, because I couldn’t talk. Finally, one day I did talk and I told him. ‘It wasn’t you who killed that soldier,’ Aronson said. ‘You were just an instrument. It was the system, the capitalistic system.’ Then he explained to me how the system worked and for the first time I understood why every soldier who could think felt he was cheated and turned into a murderer for nothing. He changed my life, Aronson did.”
Again that haunted look returned to Jerome’s face, and with singular gentleness he looked at me and said, “You’re lucky, George.”
“What do you mean?”
“Certain things haven’t happened to you. They don’t and can’t happen to a man like you. Do you believe in God?”
“No,” I said.
“Did you ever?”
“When I was a kid.”
“So did I. I believed in God till I met Aronson. I believed in Him very much.”
He frowned and looked away, and after a while he began talking again.
“There’s another thing I feel like telling you. That time I killed this German boy” – his sensitive face winced – “yes, that time I killed him was doubly bad. The year before, I’d been through all the heavy battles and then came that spring of 1918 when Haig issued his ‘Backs to the Wall’ order and most of us expected to be sent up to the line again and get killed. Instead we were held in reserve and I got my first leave. To London for the first time, and I thought I’d be dead inside a month or two, and I was human. Some woman picked me up and I went with her and just after I got back to the line I discovered I’d contracted gonorrhea. My first woman and a dose of clap. Not pretty.”
Then he gave a smile as though the sadness of that moment had never left him.
“A boy brought up like me, naturally I felt the brand of Cain was visible on my forehead. I deliberately tried to get myself killed in that attack. I went on ahead of the rest of them in spite of the fire hoping I’d be killed.” He gave a grim smile. “And for doing that, I was given the M.M. For committing murder because I’d caught the clap, I was called a hero.
“The doctor laughed about it in the hospital and said it could quickly be dried up, and so it was. Of course I told Kate about it. But the scar is there, George.” He tapped his head. “The scar is here.”
“Meanwhile in the hospital this young Jew Aronson talked to me about Marx and socialism and the causes
of war, and it all added up and made sense. Wars are the inevitable products of the capitalist system. We’re all compelled by the capitalist system to become murderers. When I left that hospital I’d have refused to fight again, and I might have been shot or sent to the glass house, but the war ended before any question of fighting or not fighting came up. I decided to become a doctor then and there. I believed in nothing anymore, but I did like people, and I thought of them all with pity. My own life had been nothing but a series of accidents over which I never had any control. But medicine seemed to know what it was doing – at least so I thought in those days. And as soon as I got into the wards I loved the work.” His face brightened. “I wanted to be a biochemist the very first time I looked through a microscope. Why don’t some of our artist friends look at life through a microscope? Ah well, there were too many other things. I qualified, I made the usual rounds abroad, and I came home and I met Kate, and then I became sweet again inside. The first two years with her the world opened up like a rose.”
Silence for many minutes while I glanced at his face and saw truth in it. Then abruptly his face changed.
“I think I’d have stayed sweet if it hadn’t been for the way the world is.”
“Yes?”
“Around 1933, with the depression and Hitler and everything else, all those bad days came back to me like unpaid bills. I was a doctor now. I was reasonably successful and it would have been easy to have lived a private life. But how can anyone live a private life now? All the hatred and the killing has started again and this time it’s a thousand percent worse because the killers understand what they’re doing. Anything to break the system that causes these things, George. Anything!”
Again the silence closed us about. The words had been spoken and there was no more to say. Jerome had thrown them out into this cool afternoon which was like the peace of the God neither of us then believed in, and he planted them inside of me as long as I shall live. But the peace of that afternoon has also remained inside of me. Jerome picked up his paddle and sent the canoe gliding, and looking past his shoulders I saw the November sun ball-round in a pastel-colored haze and there it was, the ancient marriage of good and evil, the goodness of this day and the compulsive evil people must see and know, but the sky dominated in the end. Pale and shining, it told me that our sins can be forgiven.
“Sally’s nice, don’t you think?” I heard him say.
“She’s grand.”
“I took an awful chance making old Kate pregnant. Why do I take chances like that? It’s almost impossible for a woman with a genuine rheumatic heart to have a child, and nobody knew it better than I. But something told me she could have one and live. I think it’s saved her as a woman. Won’t Sally be a darling when she’s eighteen?”
“I think she’s a darling now.”
“Kate thinks she’s like me. Do you?”
I answered his shy, happy smile: “I don’t know.”
Again his expression changed and startled me. “You and Kate know who you are. Everyone I meet knows who he is. It pleases me to think that Sally will always know who she is.”
“What do you mean by that, Jerome?”
“Only that I don’t know who I am.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I say – I don’t know who I am. I don’t know my father’s name or my mother’s name or even their nationality.”
“Are you a foundling?”
He shook his head. “Not in the usual sense of the word. I remember my mother quite vividly. Oh well, I’d better tell you the story. I wasn’t born in Halifax. I just grew up there after my father – I still think of him as my father – adopted me. Actually I was born in the middle of a New Brunswick forest. Or at least I think I was. It’s the first thing I remember, anyway. Have you been in New Brunswick?”
I shook my head.
“That section where the forest comes right down to the Gulf of St. Lawrence with the rivers pouring through the trees to the salt water – I’ve never seen anything like it for loneliness. What makes it so particularly lonely is that the people have been there so long. People have been there nearly two centuries, but nothing ever changes. Those fishing ports on the shore and those lumber camps upstream in the woods, they never change. They just grow old without ever growing up. I lived in one of these camps till I was ten years old.”
He bent forward, pulled his sweater on and wriggled into his trousers. Then for over an hour he recounted the story I am now going to tell you. Not all of it, but most of it that mattered, and the rest I learned later from Catherine. What I tell you now is true to the best of my ability, for somehow this story of Jerome’s childhood wove itself into me later on, when I sought to understand what made him behave as he did. Anyway, this is his story.
PART FIVE
CHAPTER I
I know that part of New Brunswick now. I have driven through it and flown over it and looking down from the aircraft I have seen those steely rivers winding through the somber green of the spruce and the outcroppings of rock and sometimes on a fine day, looking down from 14,000 feet in the tca aircraft, I have seen a sort of shimmering in the green mat of the land and recognized it as sunshine reflected upward through the trees from the water of thin swamps. I also know those little fishing ports and lumber towns along the Gulf shore and in my mind I can smell them. Such ripe combination of smells they give out: balsam, lobster pots, drying fish, oakum, new lumber, bilge and the stench of fish-offal on beaches under umbrellas of screaming gulls. But inland, even four miles inland in that country, there is no sense of ocean at all, but only of this primeval forest of spruce with the tangle of deadfalls and the sound-absorbing carpet of spruce needles that have accumulated over the centuries. The rivers run through it teeming with trout and salmon, and moose, bear, deer and all the northern animals large and small are at home in the tangle of trees. So are blackflies and mosquitoes in the spring, and in winter so is the snow. In winter this whole land is like Siberia.
The camp where Jerome lived as a child was an old one; for all I know, men worked there a century and a half ago when the Royal Navy harvested this forest for masts. He grew up in a works-barracks where his mother was the cook and almost the only woman; almost the only woman because, so Jerome said, it is impossible for a body of men to be located anywhere without at least a few women finding them. The camp lay on the left bank of one of the larger rivers and was bordered by a branch of quieter water flowing down through the woods from the north. Around a barnshaped cookhouse in the center of a chip-covered clearing were the log bunkhouses of the lumberjacks, a stable for horses and an unpainted shack housing a stationary engine which drove the power saws. There were corduroy roads leading off in various directions into the woods, some of them for miles, but all of them ended in forest. Between the camp and the river estuary there was no road at all in those days, though I believe there is one now. In winter the men went down on the ice and in summer in boats and canoes, and when Jerome was a boy the first motorboat appeared on the river.
Those days are gone in Canada. Now the lumbermen eat fresh meat and fare reasonably well, and in some camps they tell me they sleep between sheets. But in those days it was pork and beans, scouse and salted horse and lime juice against the scurvy, it was boils and the savagery of melancholy temper which comes when men live and eat like that. The workmen wore red and black mackinaws and caps, broad leather belts and oiled leather top boots with metal hooks for the laces, and Jerome told me that some of them could be utterly silent for days and would never talk unless there was drink in them. Then they talked violently and fought. Rum got into the camp smuggled up the river, and raw alcohol and essence of lemon, and when the liquor came the fights broke out.
“Those fights were a substitute for sex,” Jerome said. “That greedy look of a crowd of sex-hungry men watching a fight. It’s in us, George, it’s in us. Once I saw a man flogged. He was seized up just like the feet sailors used to be, and the man who did the flogging wa
s a white-haired man who’d been a bosun’s mate in the Royal Navy. Why the man was flogged I never knew, but he was, and the men were for it. I heard him scream. Yes, that was in this country. Not now but then. I saw it and I heard it, George.”
There was no school in the camp, no store or church or any other boys for Jerome to play with, and when he was a child he thought this was how it was for all children, for he knew nothing different. Yet in a way he was privileged, not only because he was the only boy but because his mother was the principal woman.
He lived with her in the kitchen attached to the eating barn, the bedroom they shared being a narrow room back of the kitchen, and not even the foreman could enter their quarters without his mother’s permission. She was absolute ruler of the kitchen, and more than once she drove men out of it by throwing boiling water at them or threatening them with a carving knife. At meals the men lined up outside in the main cookhouse with tin plates in their hands and Jerome, helping his mother inside, would watch her ladling out the food from the big pot and dispensing it to each man as he held his plate through the hole in the wall between the kitchen and the eating barn itself. It was in this posture that he best remembered her: a short, square, powerful woman with moist beefy arms and a bead of sweat around the line of her yellow hair. Behind her in the kitchen was the big, wood-burning stove, the sink with the pump that drew water from the river, and the walls of the kitchen were yellow pine stained with dark knots and festooned with black pots and pans.
“That’s what I meant by saying I don’t know who I am,” said Jerome. “I don’t know anything about my mother at all. Where did she come from? I don’t know. Was she local? Somehow I don’t think so. A Balt? A Norwegian or a Swede? Somehow I think she was a Balt though I don’t know. Who was my father? He’d disappeared long before I could remember anything about him. I don’t suppose he was ever married to my mother, but he may have been.”
It haunted Jerome that he did not know her surname. The men called her “Anna” or “Mrs. Anna” and he remembered her presence in certain smells like porridge and salt codfish and the strong yellow kitchen soap they called Surprise Soap in the Maritime Provinces. She had a wide, straight mouth with thin lips, and as his own lips were rather full, and his stiff hair was dark brown while his mother’s had been yellow, he had conjured up a picture of his unknown begetter as a swarthy man, Portuguese in his swarthiness, surly, haughty and sly, and probably quick with a knife. But this was pure fantasy, for nobody ever told him what his father was like and his mother never mentioned his name.
Watch that Ends the Night Page 21
