Watch that Ends the Night

by Hugh Maclennan

  “A good bath is all he needs. And what if he does have lice? I’m not as much afraid of lice as they’ll be afraid of what I’ll do to them if I find them.”

  “He can’t be bathed too soon.” Jerome heard the clergyman chuckle, and lifting an eyelid he saw the little man lean forward and place a hand on his wife’s knee. “A boy in the house, Jo! By Jove, after all these years! I wonder if they’ll let us keep him? I suppose we must speak with the police. Ah well, I know the police chief reasonably well, but there are lawyers and things. It would be altogether too fearful if some fearful relative were to crop up and claim this child.”

  “If God sent him to us,” said the woman, “I don’t for an instant believe that God intends to take him away.”

  “I wish I could be as certain as you of God’s intentions. He has always been a puzzle to me. Of course this whole affair is really so astonishing I don’t believe anything about it but the way this child smells. He might turn out to be a liar, Jo. He’s probably some ordinary boy who’s run away from some ordinary brute of a father who beat him. Perhaps his father’s a judge? Perhaps he’s a Baptist minister? One never knows. He must be at least thirteen years old. A strong little boy, Jo. Have you felt his muscles? Much stronger than mine, but of course that says little. You know, I like his hair. When we have it cut, it will grow like spikes all over his head. I envy men with spiky hair, they’re so virile. Everybody respects a man with spiky hair.

  “You can cut down my old gray suit, I suppose. It’s lucky I’m small for after he’s grown some more we can hand my clothes down. When we heard that service Edwards was preaching in Woodstock, I confess to a little envy when I saw that family of his sitting there looking up at him, even though I wondered how he manages to feed such a flock. I know he does better than me, but seven children is quite a lot for a member of the profession. I wonder if Jerome will enjoy my sermons? I don’t suppose he will, for I’m beginning to find them dull myself, though the one I preached last Good Friday wasn’t so bad if you remember. When I was his age – I’ve just thought of something. Of course that boy can’t even read and write. We’ll have to put him to it right away. Fortunately we have the whole summer before us, and I’ll tutor him every day. Do you notice the width between his eyes? Obviously a most intelligent boy.”

  The train rumbled on, whistling every now and then before it crossed a road, and Jerome lay half asleep and half awake.

  “Jo,” the little clergyman said, “have you thought of it?”

  “Of what, Giles?”

  “Of this little lad and me. I mean, of me when I was a lad his age. How strange it is that I should know how he feels! You see – I’m correct to believe in the miracles! Of all the people in the world, that he should have come to us – the only people who would want him and understand how he feels! One tells the Congregation that God watches everything and sometimes one wonders if He really does, but then something like this happens to prove it.”

  Still the train rumbled on, and after a while Jerome sensed that the little clergyman was becoming restless.

  “It’s nearly five o’clock and I haven’t had a drop all day. I think it’s time, don’t you, Jo?”

  “Giles – the people!”

  “Pshaw! How will they guess?” He touched his dog collar. “I’m perfectly disguised. I could go to the water cooler and come back with a paper cup – with two paper cups – and who would notice? I think I’ll go now.”

  “Please be careful, Giles.”

  “You know I’m careful. When am I not?”

  Jerome fell asleep again and when he woke the clergyman was gently shaking his shoulder and on the clergyman’s breath he smelled the sweet, familiar odor of rum.

  “Wake up, Jerome, we’re nearly there! Now I want you to look at something.”

  Opening his eyes, Jerome looked out the window and saw what seemed to him a vast spread of open water with a green shore on the far side shining in the sun.

  “That’s Bedford Basin where all the feets of the world could swing at their anchors without the ships even bumping each other. Over there behind that hill with the red building on it is Halifax where we live. You’ll like it there. I come from England, Jerome, and when I first arrived here I liked Halifax the moment I saw it. There are big ships and small ships and we’ll teach you how to sail – a real boat and not one of those Indian canoes you saw on your river. There are schools and churches and other boys to play with. You’ll be proud of Halifax, for it’s a fine town, a fine place to grow up in and – well, even for a grown man it’s not too bad a place. I say – I told you I came from England and something just occurred to me! Do you know what England is?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Fancy!” the clergyman said to his wife. “Fancy meeting anybody, even a child, who doesn’t know what England is!” He chuckled. “By Jove, there are some people I’d enjoy telling that to!”

  They all stood up while the clergyman took his bags down from the rack and Jerome nearly fell as the train lurched to the left and began its run along the eastern shore of Bedford Basin. A few minutes later it lurched in the opposite direction and suddenly the land and water closed in and they were running beside docks and a shipyard and saw a lean gray shape with flags hanging from its masts.

  “A cruiser, Jerome! Do you know what a cruiser is?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Oh, it’s going to be wonderful, all the interesting things you’re going to learn! That cruiser’s the Niobe. She’s so old they don’t let her out of harbor for fear she’ll sink.”

  The train’s rumble changed into a solid, heavy roar, daylight disappeared as though a shade had been drawn and they passed under the smoke-stained, glass canopy of the station and stopped.

  “It was the old North Street station,” Jerome told Catherine later, “the one that was destroyed in the Halifax explosion of 1917 and nearly a hundred people were killed that day when that glass roof fell in on top of them. It seemed noisy and colossal to me, and at the end of the platform there was a line of cabbies waving whips and shouting behind an anchor chain. We came through and they closed around us and I was frightened, but Mr. Martell knew one of them and soon we were out in the street getting into one of the high black cabs they had in Halifax in those days. I reached Halifax in the last decade of the horse, and the streets smelled of horse manure as well as fishmeal and salt water and the harbor smells it still has. Coming into Halifax was like coming into a world of new smells.”

  The cab drove them along Barrington Street, then over a very steep hill crowded with houses and after what seemed a long time to Jerome, it came to rest in front of a house with a little lawn before it and three cannon balls making a black triangle beside the bottom step. There was an ivy-shaded porch with a hammock concealed behind the ivy and there were white curtains at the windows. The clergyman set his bags down, took out his keys and opened the door, and Jerome smelled the closeness of a shut-up house after a warm day.

  “This is where we live,” the little man said. “It’s a small house and it’s not in the best part of town by a long chalk, but we like it.”

  That evening Jerome was given a cold meal out of tins while kettles boiled on the stove and an ancient, spluttering, English-style geyser, heated by gas, warmed the water for his bath. He was undressed and his filthy clothes were burned. He was put into the tub, which was made of tin and painted white, and the paint felt delightfully rough against the skin of his back. The warm water soothed his skin and the fresh-smelling soap made it feel slippery and clean. He laughed as Josephine Martell bathed and dried him, then he held his arms over his head while she put a fiannelette nightgown on him.

  “This is one of mine,” she said, “but I’m so small and you’re so big it will fit you quite nicely, at least for the time being.”

  Soon he found himself in bed between cool sheets looking at pictures on the wall. One was a print of Joshua Reynold’s Age of Innocence and the other was a sailing sh
ip in a storm, and he lay in the white linen smoothness and looked up at the woman and smiled. His hand, questing under the pillow, closed on a small, rough-feeling little bag which had the cleanest scent he had ever smelled.

  “That’s lavender,” she said, still smiling. “We always have it under our pillows.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a kind of flower that grows in England where Mr. Martell comes from. I’ve never been to England, but it’s the most beautiful and wonderful country in the world, and it’s where the King lives. The roses in England are the best roses in the world and it’s where the lavender grows.”

  “It’s nice.”

  “We’re not rich people, Jerome, and we don’t matter much to anybody, but we don’t mind that because we believe we matter to God. Mr. Martell came from quite a famous family in England, but he was never happy when he was young – not as I hope you’re going to be with us. Since our little girl died we’ve just had each other and a few friends in the church – I mean I’ve just had that, for Mr. Martell knows nearly everybody in Halifax, or at least he talks to them as if he does. I’m afraid some of the people in the church don’t altogether approve of Mr. Martell, and I can well understand why they don’t. But he’s a good, good man, Jerome, and you’ll soon find out for yourself how good he is.” She took the little lavender bag and smelled it, blushed a little and handed it back. “It’s a silly thing to say, but we never had lavender in my house when I was a little girl and I always had a craving for nice things like that. My father was a clergyman too, but he was a much sterner and plainer man than Mr. Martell.” She scented the lavender again and handed it back. “When I first met Mr. Martell he was visiting my father’s house – he’s quite a lot older than me, you know – and I remember smelling lavender on his handkerchief and it seemed so nice and distinguished.”

  She bent and kissed the boy’s forehead and was about to leave the room when she remembered something and came back.

  “Jerome dear – have you ever been taught to pray?”

  He shook his head, not knowing what the word meant.

  “Then I think I’d better begin teaching you your first prayer tonight. Usually you pray on your knees because that shows how much you respect God, but you’re so tired tonight I don’t think He will mind if you pray just where you are in bed. All you have to do is shut your eyes and repeat after me.”

  Jerome shut his eyes and felt the woman’s hand close over his own.

  “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep…”

  He repeated the words without understanding what they meant.

  “If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

  Again he made the repetition, she laid her hand on his forehead, he felt its cool softness, he felt her lips brush his cheek and then he closed his eyes.

  “There now, it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand what you were saying. Mr. Martell will explain all about it later on. Indeed I’m afraid the dear man will be only too eager to explain to you everything he knows himself, and that is quite a lot, even though I’m ashamed to say I don’t listen carefully enough to know how much it really is. Go to sleep now, dear. God will watch over you all night long, and in the morning we shall be waiting for you.”

  That night while Jerome slept the little clergyman and his wife sat before their empty hearth holding hands and talking for hours. Before they went to bed they fell on their knees and thanked God and promised that they would lead this child into the paths of righteousness. They believed, they believed at last, that goodness and mercy would follow them all the days of their lives, now that they had a son.

  So it was that this waif, conceived by an illiterate peasant woman heaving in the embrace of some man whose name she possibly did not even know, grew up in the old naval and garrison town of Halifax in a Christian family and became an educated man. So it happened that the name he lived under was Jerome Martell, and that he thought of Giles and Josephine Martell as his father and mother.

  During the war I spent several months in Halifax working on a program with the Navy, and I met a few men who had gone to school with Jerome when he was a boy. The little clergyman had been right about his intelligence. Jerome had learned so rapidly that in six years he had made up all the lost ground and was ready for college when he went to the war, which he did at the end of his seventeenth year when he was as powerfully built as the average strong man of twenty-five. He had been well thought of in Halifax, good at games and at his work and very religious, but the war, as he told me that afternoon on the lake, had destroyed his religion and launched him into a new orbit. He had come back from the war an agnostic, so full of guilt and so shocked by his experiences that he had been unable to live any longer with his foster-parents. Instead of entering Dalhousie where a scholarship was waiting for him, he wrote examinations for McGill, won a scholarship there and supported himself by various jobs until he had got his degrees and qualified as a doctor.

  Meanwhile he had almost broken the hearts of the two little people who had saved him. Catherine met Giles just before the little clergyman died. She met Josephine several times and loved her, and Josephine loved Catherine and was grateful that Jerome had found and married her. But he himself after the war could not face the gentleness and simplicity of this Christian couple, and for this he felt sorry and guilty, and after Giles died he several times went home to visit his mother and supported her and bought her a small house when the rectory fell vacant and she had to live elsewhere. He always wrote letters to her and she to him, and she died during his second visit to Spain. How lonely she was or how disappointed she never told him, but Catherine once said this of her:

  “People like her are the strongest in the world. They ask so little for themselves that almost nothing can be taken away from them. And they accept so much that almost nothing can be added heavy enough to break them.”

  In the Bible given by Giles to Jerome when he went overseas I saw these words from Pilgrim’s Progress written on the flyleaf:

  “A man of a very stout countenance went up to the keeper of the book of life and said, ‘Set down my name, sir,’ and immediately he fell on the armed men and cut his way into heaven after receiving and giving many wounds.”

  Catherine also said to me after Jerome left her:

  “Josephine told me once that I’d never understand Jerome unless I understood that while he was with them he had really thought of himself as a soldier of God. He believed the Gospels literally, and they meant far more to him than they could mean to most people, because he had such a desperate need to belong. When you were a little boy you were religious too, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but I got over it in the depression.”

  “Jerome never got over it,” Catherine said. “He lost it, and that’s different.”

  The evening after our long afternoon on the lake, after Sally had been put to bed and Jerome and I had cleaned up, the three of us sat for an hour and a half before the fire in the cottage, the oil lamps turned down and the only light coming from the burning logs on the hearth. Jerome was utterly relaxed and so was I, and I don’t think I ever saw Catherine look so well. Happiness shone from her, and in the half-light she seemed all ages of woman in one. I was grateful. I thought of Jerome’s strange story and asked myself how anyone can ever hope to plan a human life. That two such people should have met one another – it seemed to me a chance in a million.

  Around nine-thirty Jerome stretched and went outside to fill his lungs with cooler air, and Catherine and I glanced at each other.

  “This is wonderful,” I said.

  “Sometimes, like now, I’m so happy it scares me.”

  “Why should it?”

  “Because it’s so intense. It scares him too, sometimes.”

  “This afternoon he told me about his childhood. What an incredible story.”

  “I thought he might have done that. It means he likes you very much, for I don’t
think he’s told anyone that story except me. Bits and pieces to others, but not the whole thing.”

  “He’s rather amazing, isn’t he?”

  She looked into the fire and was silent.

  “Does it haunt him? I mean, does it come back in dreams the way the psychologists say?”

  “Sometimes.” Still looking into the fire, she said: “It’s still part of him and it’s not easy living with a man like that.”

  “Is it easy living with anyone?”

  She smiled. “That’s fair enough. But I couldn’t imagine myself living with anyone else – not now.”

  It hurt when she said this, and I suppose she must have realized it, but she had said it and there was no point in unsaying it.

  “It’s not easy for him either, living with me. I try to make things simpler for him. I try to plan and arrange and I’m quite good at it. But I wish I were stronger.”

  “You’re so much stronger than you used to be that nobody’d know you’d ever been sick.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not strong, George. It’s the same old heart. Jerome tells me the rest of my organism has accommodated itself to the heart and made compensations, but the heart is the center of the whole thing. You know something, George?” She looked at me with a rueful, wondering smile. “It’s been wonderful, living with Jerome. I’ve never been bored once – not for a single day. But I’ve never been able to relax, either.”

  “You’re relaxed now.”

  “Yes, perhaps I am. Perhaps it’s having you here.”

  The door creaked open and Jerome entered smoking his pipe, square and rugged in a turtle-necked homespun jersey, his hands in his pockets, a contented look on his face.

  “In case anyone’s interested, it’s getting colder. The wind has hauled and there’s some east in it. Only a few of the stars are visible.” He stood in front of the hearth in silence and after a while he gave a sort of chuckle. “I guess I talked a lot this afternoon.”

  “I was complimented.”