“But Jerome?”
“Well you see, after that meeting he won’t be able to practice here any more. The girl played such a charming part in that meeting, didn’t she? It was so dignifled, that picture of her in the paper. I suppose he’d have gone to Spain anyway, but after that meeting there was no more question about it. He’s going all right.”
She said it just like that, but the emotion underneath her words was the more ominous because superficially her voice was brittle and bright.
She smiled in a way I cannot describe: “I’m not sure when he leaves, but it will be just as soon as he can complete his arrangements. That includes turning over his old patients to other men.”
“Catherine dear – I hate all this.”
“So do I. I just loathe all this. But it’s what’s happening, and if I married a man as impulsive as Jerome, don’t you think I should have known all along that something of the kind would happen?”
“He’ll come back.”
“He says so, of course. This week he’s been excited and quite manic. The last time I saw him he reminded me of somebody I knew who joined the Oxford Group. The light on the road to Damascus. For a few days after his scene with Dr. Rodgers he was very depressed, but you know Jerome. The moment he made up his mind what to do next, he bounced up again.”
I stared at the bright wilderness and tried to force myself to accept that what I was hearing was real.
“Anyway,” I said, “it’s just Spain, and the girl has nothing to do with that. She’s not going with him, is she?”
“Apparently not,” she said. “But she does have a talent for the undignified, don’t you think?” Calmly she went on: “I wish the coming week or fortnight or however long it’s going to be were over and done with. Jerome and I have had such wonderful years, and we love each other so much that the time between now and when he goes will be horrid. After that?” A smile. “Sally and I will manage somehow after that. I only hope he’ll manage half as well.”
Forcing myself to be factual, I asked how she was fixed for money. “There’ll be enough for a while. Jerome says this mess at the hospital means nothing in the long run. He thinks it’s cleared the air, as a matter of fact. He calls it a godsend because it’s fixed things for him so there is no choice. So off he goes to the Spanish crusade. He’s sure the big war will start next year or the year after, and then this mess at the hospital will be forgotten by everyone.” I sat in silence staring at the landscape which stared back: form and color and light and shade, useless to farmers, some of the oldest rock in the world cropping out of it, dark green and light green, ancient, mindless, from everlasting to everlasting without any purpose anyone could possibly understand, but there.
“I don’t know what to believe about anything any more,” I said. “Neither do I. It’s strange, not knowing what to believe about anything any more. A lot of us will have to get used to it, though.”
“He loves you. Of that I’m sure.”
“But of course he does. And I love him more than you can understand, for you’ve never been married. In these years we’ve signed ourselves on each other, and we both know that. Of course I don’t understand him. I suppose I know him better than he knows me, but the more we’ve lived together, the greater mysteries we’ve become to each other. He knows me perfectly as a woman, and I know him perfectly as a man, but what is that? Perhaps that’s why he’s panicked, for panicked he has. At the moment he’s not really thinking. He’s just moving ahead like a sleepwalker.”
“Jack Christopher says it’s a disease, this thing he’s caught. I know what he means. I nearly caught it myself.”
“What fools we’ve all been, all us clever people. We were so sure we understood. We were so positive we knew all the answers. We’re not like the man who built his house on the sand. We’re like the man who tore down all the walls of his house in November and then had to face the winter naked. It’s so hard to be married. It’s so hard to keep on going. It’s so hard just to live. Now I suppose we’ve got to make up the rules as we go along, and one gets so tired doing that. It would have been so much simpler and safer to have kept the old rules.”
Sally’s voice broke out from under the porch saying she was hungry and Catherine was glad to stop talking and go inside to prepare a lunch. I left the porch and let Sally show me some daffodils swaying in a tiny bed around the corner of the house.
“They’re mine,” she said. “I planted them last year and Daddy says they’re better than Mummy’s.”
“Well dear, they’re certainly lovely daffodils.”
“Daddy knows everything. He’s coming out this afternoon to be with us. It’s such fun being with Daddy.”
Jerome did come, arriving in his Pontiac at five-thirty with bright eyes and a strained expression on his tough face. He was surprised to see me and also relieved, for this weekend could hardly have been one he looked forward to. What words had passed between him and Catherine I did not know, but I did know that this tough-looking man was very sensitive and that his antennae were acute.
Catherine was resting upstairs when Jerome arrived and Sally, fresh from her afternoon nap, was playing alone in the woods. Jerome stretched out in the long chair and I sat in the one beside it.
“Did Kate tell you I’ve decided to go to Spain?”
“Yes.”
“All the arrangements are made. My ship sails next Friday. Southampton first, a fortnight in London getting things organized, then a freighter from the London docks to Barcelona.”
“Are you joining Bethune’s unit?”
He shook his head. “It’s probably just as well I’m not, for Beth and me in the same outfit – no, this team will be all British except me. Surgical entirely. For front line service wherever they send us.”
In profile he looked very tired, but this bright, tense excitement made his face more arresting than I had ever seen it.
“How long do you plan to be in Spain?”
“For the duration, I suppose. Now, how about a drink?” He went inside and came out with two glasses.
“The water up here in May is so delicious it’s a shame to put whisky into it. But the whisky’s good too, and by God, it’s become a necessity.”
Sipping our drinks we looked out over the lake which now was heavily shadowed along the length of its western shore with the promontories thrusting their outlines far out and deep down, the sun still bright but westerly over the hills. The wind had dropped and in the total silence of the empty north land we heard the musical sigh of a tiny stream coursing through the trees into the lake. Apart from the sound of the stream this stillness in which we sat went all the way north to the Arctic and all the way west to Hudson Bay. A robin swooped down to settle on a patch of manured ground and stood listening for worms.
“I’d like to plant tomorrow,” Jerome said. “It always used to make me feel good getting my hands into the dirt in the spring. But what’s the use now? Kate loves gardening, she’s far better at it than I am, and if I plant she’ll try to keep the damned thing up. What a woman. Did you know she’s studied botany? But she’s too much of a perfectionist, and if I plant that garden – that was part of the trouble, her perfectionism. My God, George, it’s not so easy being me.”
We were silent for a while and I said: “You’re going to miss this place.”
He looked sharply around and his eyes misted: “You think I’m a bastard, don’t you?”
I shook my head.
“You’re in love with Kate and you think I’m deserting her and Sally, don’t you?”
“I didn’t use that word.”
“But you thought it. Like the rest of them, you’re enslaved by words. Desert. It sounds very bad. But nobody owns anyone else, and who the hell do you think you are to keep your nose so clean? It’s not easy being me. Kate and I have had some good years. Who are you to judge?”
“I’m not judging, Jerome.”
“Oh yes, you are. All of you are. Did you ever read a book cal
led Foxe’s Book of Martyrs?”
I could not follow this jump of his mind and shook my head. “My father, I mean my foster-father, was the gentlest man I ever knew. He was probably the only genuine Christian I’ll ever meet in my life. He used to drink a lot of rum. Some old smuggler down in Halifax, some old man he’d done something for, this old man used to deliver the rum to the rectory in a cask at dead of night. There was always a cask in our basement, and Father used to sneak down at all hours for a nip.
“Now my mother, who was a lovely, gentle, kind woman, deplored this. Father was never exactly drunk, but he was never precisely sober, either. Mother deplored his drinking, but she understood why he had to have his rum. Quite literally that man drank rum for the love of God, for it was only when the rum was in him that he felt close to his God and was sure his God loved him. It wasn’t easy being Father, for his own father had given him a hell of a time when he was a boy. Now Mother wasn’t a perfectionist. She understood that, and she loved him, and she didn’t expect the man she loved to be perfect. She accepted his rum because it was a part of his necessity, and she never nagged or tried to change him, even though the doctor told her he’d probably die of cirrhosis of the liver, which he did, and even though she knew perfectly well that people snickered at him and criticized him because they were narrow-minded bastards who thought it a terrible thing for a clergyman to drink, and even though we were dirt poor in a poor parish, and she knew he’d never get out of it or be preferred on account of his habit, she never tried to change him. She took it, George, she took it.”
“And Catherine isn’t taking what’s in you now – is that what you mean?”
A spasm of pain crossed his face and he looked down at his feet. Then he went on:
“I began by talking about Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. My father – this gentle Christian – gave it to me to read when I was thirteen. It’s practically a handbook on torture. But it was right that it was written, and it was right that he should have given it to me, because it happens to be true, and to contain a lot of truth about human nature. Those savage priests of the Reformation time pretended that if Christ had died a horrible death on the cross, it was necessary to invent even worse tortures for sinners. As a doctor I know how fiendishly ingenious they were. Well, I used to wake up nights with my hair on end on account of that book. I saw it all. I wondered how any man, knowing what it would cost, could stand up for what he believed. Then came the war, and I saw this absolutely depersonalized butchery for absolutely nothing.”
Jerome stopped and stared at me with incandescent eyes. “Try and understand this – the fascists have brought back torture, and torture calls for martyrs. And what else is fascism but the logical product of the capitalist system?”
“What do you mean – torture calls for martyrs?”
“Simply this. Unless a man is able to stand up and look the torturer in the eye and say, ‘I’m not afraid,’ torture becomes the way of the world. It’s as simple as that.”
“Is it really as simple as that?”
“No.” He shook his head impatiently. “No, because underneath it all is the plain economic exploitation of a rotten world. The communists are the only people who understand that. How can you pretend they’re not one hundred percent right when they say that at a time like this the life of a single individual isn’t worth a snap of the fingers? Wasn’t Debs right when he said that so long as there was a soul in prison he wasn’t free? What does a single marriage count in a balance like that? It isn’t easy being me. I know what all this means. This evil inside the human animal – the fascists are charming it out like a cobra out of its hole and the capitalists let them do it because they think its good for business. You think I’m abandoning Sally by leaving for Spain. I tell you, if I don’t leave for Spain then I really do abandon her to a future of fascism and concentration camps.”
These words poured out of Jerome like a torrent of lava, and I thought of Catherine with her fragile heart having to live with a force like that, and of a force like that having to live with her fragile heart.
“Jerome,” I stammered, “you’re only a single man, and what can a single man do unless the governments act? Is this reasonable?”
He stared at me and for an instant I felt I was being annihilated. I had felt his force before, but never anything like this. Then he smiled with a surprising new sweetness and touched my knee.
“George, you’re a very nice fellow, and I’m going to say something you may think is an insult. Just because you’re nice, you don’t know what you’re up against. People like you – left to your own devices – you’ll be crushed like nuts in the jaws. You don’t want to fight. Neither do I. But you don’t know how to fight. And I do. I wish I were like you. I really do wish it. I don’t want to fight, George – I tell you, I don’t want to fight. I hate this thing in myself that makes me. But at the same time” – he stared out over the lake – “at the same time let me tell you this. No civilization has a chance unless it has civilized men in it who can and will fight when they have to.”
“All I’ve been thinking about – ” I began. “You think all you’re thinking about is Kate. But I wonder?” His eyes burned against mine, and then they misted. “That wonderful woman, she loves me. She’s a fighter, too. But against her fate, George. And she’s a woman all the way through, and that means she’s a private person. Do I betray her?” A shrug. “I’m honest, George, and honestly I don’t know.”
A long silence fell and his profile brooded over the lake. Jerome loved the stark grandeur of the Laurentian Shield which evoked a response in him it has never called out of me, for I prefer a gentler land where flowers and fruits grow. But now with the sun sloping westward and the shadows of the hills thrusting easterly over the lake, with the clean, innocent smell of the sun-warmed spruce and the utter stillness of this empty land, now I thought it must be unbearable for him to leave this place where he had been happy.
He said slowly and heavily: “A man must belong to something larger than himself. He must surrender to it. God was so convenient for that purpose when people could believe in Him. He was so safe and so remote.” A wistful smile. “Now there is nothing but people. In Russia our generation is deliberately sacrificing itself for the future of their children. That’s why the Russians are alive. That’s why they’re happy. They’re not trying to live on dead myths.”
I said nothing and my thoughts wandered back to Norah Blackwell, and Jerome – one of the most animal-like things about him was his on-and-off capacity to be a medium – suddenly startled me.
“You think I’m a hypocrite, don’t you?”
“I said nothing of the kind, Jerome.”
“But you’re thinking Norah is back of this?”
“Since you ask me, I don’t think she’s helped.”
He passed a hand over his eyes and breathed heavily: “I wish to God I’d never laid eyes on her.”
I said nothing.
“As the world understands the word, I’m not a lecher. I make no excuses. But perhaps you can tell me what there is to protect a man like me against his own impulses?”
For a while I said nothing, but after a time I said: “Do you feel responsible for her?”
“In a way, yes, I do. I suppose you think this thing with her – it’s over now and it never amounted to much – you think it sullies my motives?”
I said nothing. “Norah is very gentle and kind and troubled. Oh well! I’d have gone to Spain in any case. But has she affected my motives? Does this thing with her have anything to do with them?”
I said nothing, he scrutinized my expression and shrugged. “I suppose it does. Can I help my own vitality? But the motives were there anyway, and they have nothing to do with Norah.”
“I was thinking of Catherine.”
He stared at me with deep pain in his face: “Do you think I don’t, too? She tried to use her will against me this winter, and she’s got a strong one.”
“I was thinking of her hea
lth.”
“Are you a doctor? Are you her husband? She and I – we’ve set our seals on each other.”
I had a vision of Jerome in his tiny canoe going down the New Brunswick river and of Catherine on the shore trying to beckon him in.
“We’re both casualties,” he said. “She and I.”
“But you’re leaving her.”
“The only way I could do that is to write my own life off. I married her knowing what her heart is. You didn’t marry her. You didn’t take – what’s life and death anyway? When I operate on a serious case I don’t think of saving a life. I think of saving a few years. If the patient’s young, perhaps quite a few years. But in a lot of cases I bargain for five, or three, or even for one.”
I sat without answering and he said: “The only immortality is mankind.”
“Can anyone love a thing as big as that?”
“What’s love to do with what I’m saying?”
“Is Norah going to Spain with you?”
“Not if I know it. My God, but you’ve got a middle-class mind! Do you think this thing is as vulgar as that?”
Had I been older or more experienced I might have been able to stand up against him, but in those days I had no inner authority against a man I had installed as a substitute father in my own mind. In any case I was up against the whole climate of the period, some of which was within myself. To people who had exiled themselves from the establishment, as most of us had at least partially done, the volunteer for Spain had a special aura about him. I rose from my chair and stood by the railing with my back to Jerome looking down the shadowed slope to the lake and again I asked myself how he could bear to leave all this. I remembered Adam Blore’s remark that I was a middle-class man. Jerome had just said the same thing. I knew then better than ever before how greatly I had longed for a home and a family, and how much I would surrender to have them if the chance ever came.
I heard Catherine’s step descending the stair inside the cottage and expected her to appear, but the step receded toward the kitchen at the back.
“I think I’d better leave and go back to town,” I said.
Watch that Ends the Night Page 32
