Watch that Ends the Night

by Hugh Maclennan

  I turned to Catherine: “Now let me take you home.”

  “No,” Sally cried, “Daddy promised to wave to us.”

  Looking down at Sally I knew that she had sensed with a child’s intuition the pain and the tragedy and was trying to deny it.

  “Daddy is going to wave to us. He promised.”

  Catherine was weak, but she rallied and smiled down at Sally and together we walked along the dock under the huge white flank of the liner until we came to the hawsers. Looking up we saw the heads of a few passengers along the rail but on the concrete apron of the dock Catherine, Sally and I were the only people. We waited. Twilight had dimmed the river, had covered St. Helen’s Island with a transparent purple shroud, the air was cool and the gulls had not begun to scream. We looked, there was the flash of a white handkerchief and we saw Jerome’s head and shoulders at the railing.

  “Daddy! Daddy!” screamed the child, and began to cry.

  Jerome cupped his hands to his mouth and called down to us, but at that instant the steamer’s horn roared again and shook the air and his words were lost. Looking down the length of the dock I saw that the gangplank had been lowered. There was a swirling hiss of dirty water between the dock and the ship, the stern lines were cast off and she began to swing out rapidly, and still that tiny white handkerchief fluttered, and Sally waved back and Catherine stood like a statue.

  “Catherine, please let me take you home!”

  But I was too late. For at that instant something happened which I had dreaded all along yet could not really believe would happen. Beside Jerome’s shoulder, high and small above the railing of the fo’c’slehead, very close to him but not close enough to touch, appeared a woman’s head. That woman’s head had come by stealth, had come under the terrible compulsion of that destructive power within her of which she was utterly unaware, and all three of us saw her before Jerome did, who clearly did not know she was on board the ship. Catherine went white as chalk, she lurched and I took her arm and stared up.

  “Please let’s go! Please!” I cried. “Please come with me now!”

  Walking as though she were unconscious, her whole body trembling, Catherine went beside me along the enormous white flank of the ship. A swirl of gulls screamed at the stern, tugs pushed and pulled, but Catherine saw nothing. At the entrance to the dock we paused and I looked back and saw Sally, tiny in that colossal setting, waving frantically to her father on the ship. Then even Sally seemed to understand, for she dropped her handkerchief and turned and ran to her mother as fast as she could. The three of us walked silently through the shed to the space of cobbles on the other side, where we got into a cab. We drove across the tracks, up past the sailors’ boarding houses, up through the ancient part of the city, through an empty Place d’Armes, up Beaver Hall Hill into the traffic, the noise, the shining lights, the river-like crowds of central Montreal on a warm spring night.

  Two hours later Sally was in bed and Catherine and I were alone downstairs. She looked so exhausted that I asked if I might call Jack Christopher, but she would not let me.

  “Jerome knew nothing about her,” I said. “I know that. I absolutely know he didn’t know she’d be on that ship.”

  Calmly she said: “It doesn’t matter any more.”

  “That girl – she doesn’t know what she’s doing!”

  “Yes she does,” Catherine said. “In one part of her mind she knows perfectly well. But not even she matters now.” She turned her face away. “I don’t know where I am. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know anything.”

  Through the open window I heard the faint hum of the night city and the sound of footsteps passing below, and I think it was then that I became consciously afraid of life itself. This is what happens, I thought, when the leaders close their doors and the walls of custom collapse. This is what happens when people try to play a game making the rules as they go along. I saw Catherine, Jerome, myself and everyone I knew like lost shadows moving perilously over a crust covering a void.

  “I tried so hard, George. I tried so hard. And now I’m exhausted, and I feel so ugly.”

  “You’re not ugly. You’re beautiful.”

  “I’d like to fall asleep forever.”

  “Catherine dear – just fall asleep now. Take a sedative and sleep.”

  “I begged him to stay with me. I went down on my knees. I threw all my pride away.”

  “He loves you. Didn’t you hear him say he didn’t want to go?”

  “I know.” Her calmness returned. “He will always love me, and that makes me grieve for him, for I failed him. He was born in – what? Naked he came into the world, and now naked he goes out into – what? He’s naked now. He’s in agony now and I grieve for him, alone on that ship with that girl.”

  “He probably hates her now.”

  “Yes, he probably wants to murder her now, and that will make him hate himself the more.”

  “She doesn’t matter, Catherine.”

  “That’s what’s so terrible. She doesn’t matter – in herself she never did – and yet she’s done this.”

  “He’d have gone to Spain whether he met her or not.”

  “Yes. Yes, he’d have gone. But cleanly, and not like this. Not hating himself. He’d have gone and perhaps he’d have found himself. Perhaps he’d have found what he lost in the trenches in the war.”

  “You mean his religion?”

  “I mean something that would protect him at three o’clock in the morning. He thought he’d found it in me. He did find it in me for a while. Then everything went bad. Not our life together – no, not that. But his war experience regurgitated when everything went to pieces and the fascists started this new war. And of course he tried to do too many things. He has this awful vitality, and everyone sucked it out of him, and he got himself involved. Oh, why talk? Everything’s gone out of control and I want to sleep forever.”

  “He’ll come back.”

  “Now I don’t think I can stand it if he does. Love can be such a terrible torment, George. It’s so powerful it exhausted me. What is it? God knows what it is, but it’s cruel. People break loose into sex because it’s so direct and simple. Oh, I feel so ugly and tired.”

  A long silence and the city’s hum coming in through the window. “I was too frightened. We were all too frightened. He seemed so brave and strong and everyone sucked from him. Me too. And he got tired – tired inside, tired in his soul, and this communistic thing seemed an escape. And yet he wants to do good. I don’t know. I don’t understand. All I know is that I failed him.”

  “Catherine dear, please take a sedative and rest.”

  She made a movement to rise, but stayed where she was. “What’s going to become of him, George?” I shrugged my shoulders; I was wondering what was going to become of her.

  “All right, I’ll take that sedative and I’ll try to sleep.” She rose, small and I thought beautiful, and haunted. “It’s so awful for a woman to learn that human love isn’t sufficient. We need God, and He doesn’t care. Perhaps because we don’t let Him care. But where is He? Where has He gone?”

  She went upstairs and when I guessed she was in bed I followed and she called me into the double room she had shared with Jerome. She looked tiny lying there in that huge double bed all alone, but her eyes were enormous. Her body lay still under the sheets and I sat by her bedside and we looked at each other.

  I took her hand and found myself saying: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want …”

  But the familiar words had lost their potency for both of us because the Lord who had shepherded Israel and our fathers had gone away and we had lost the habit of searching for Him.

  CHAPTER VI

  Was it only a month and a fortnight ago?

  Standing on the balcony of the Europa Hotel in Leningrad I had forgotten, for the time being, the intense little tragedy in which I had been involved the previous spring in Montreal. Now I was out in this huge, news-making, future-making – what? Who could unders
tand Europe in 1937, or Russia then or ever? The provincial walls in which I had lived had crumbled and I was out in this alone. With me was a young American I had met on the train out of Helsinki the night before, and he had come all the way from Nebraska to see with his own eyes the shape of things to come. By noon of his first day in Russia he had seen enough to daze him, to terrify him with its unknown quantities, to smash to pieces the neat little walls of theory with which he had armored himself. Now we were together, close and intimate in Russia though we barely knew each other’s names.

  The nuit blanche of Leningrad in late June made eerie the perpetual rustling of thousands of shoeless feet on the pavements below, the pavements laid out by the Czars which the communists had captured along with this hotel and the marble palaces nearby. We could just distinguish the human swarm in the nuit blanche, not the faces of individuals but the smock-wearing, shuffling swarm which flowed hour after hour without ceasing because, apparently, they had nothing else to do and no place to go.

  “ Byprizorni,” the American kept muttering. “Byprizorni.”

  In the weird white night they swarmed like creatures mysteriously risen out of a Sargasso Sea, ourselves on the ship’s bridge looking down, and after a day in the Leningrad streets we knew that every face, to us, was a variant of the same face we had stared at since leaving the Finland Station that morning: a face wrinkled, prematurely old, unsmiling, unblinking, the face of Tolstoy’s peasant in a world he could not understand, scarred by years of cold and hunger, knowing a totality of unwantedness, the face of the millions too old, slow, ignorant and stupid for this new Soviet world.

  “See Russia,” said the American, “and let your theories die.”

  The thousands of feet shuffled with the sound of a restless sea that would never be still and never know a storm, and they shuffled like that because each one of them was wrapped in bandages and hemp, and they were wrapped in bandages and hemp because there were not enough shoes in Russia, and because the price of a pair of cheap shoes cost more than double the monthly pay of the average Soviet worker that year.

  “Where do they come from? Where are they going?”

  A voice with an English accent answered behind us: “They come from the land and they are going no place. These, my friends, are counter-revolutionaries. They are, or were, kulkas. They are the sons of serfs, and the Bolsheviks liberated them in 1917.”

  This elderly, ironical Englishman had eaten a seven-course dinner with us a couple of hours earlier, and it was he who had told us that hemp was the basic footwear of this crowd. He was in the hemp business himself and every year his firm shipped thousands of tons of the stuff into the ports of Leningrad and Odessa. He claimed to know Russia well, both before and after the revolution, and we had seen what diabolical pleasure he had taken in baiting visiting Americans in the hotel, and a few English trade unionists as well, who were fellow-travellers and spoke the jargon, and already were noting down the wonderful things they would report to their little cliques in Brooklyn, Chicago and Manchester when they got home. The moment this Englishman heard an English voice in the lobby utter one of those key words of the period (cadre, stakhanovite, the masses – any one of the key words would suffice) he would pick a conversation with the man. Pretending to seek instruction, he would lead the man into one absurdity after another, and then with a perfect innocence of expression he would agree that Russia was absolutely wonderful because she was the only country in the world which had solved her unemployment problem, providing work camps for some eighteen million, forbidding socialists to tamper with the productive powers of labor, accustoming labor to work for a quarter the pay they got in England and America, maintaining by conscription an army of twenty-one million men and tolerating no soft-headed nonsense about giving consumer goods priority over guns. With a gleam in his eye the Englishman would watch the angry flush mount to the fellow-traveller’s face until the moment came, as it inevitably did, when he would be called a fascist or a reactionary.

  To us he had been more gentle, deciding after a while that though we knew nothing we were at least not true believers. But he delighted in shocking us.

  “Those people down there,” he said calmly, “will not be entirely useless to the state. When the war comes, their hour will strike. They will be sent ahead of the tanks to blow up the enemy mine-fields.”

  “It can’t be as bad as that?”

  “Perhaps not. Time will tell. But if you had any sense, you’d say it can’t be as good as that, for whether they like it or not, the Russians are going to be our allies.” He chuckled and said to the American: “At this moment in our hotel seventeen of your countrymen are living better than they ever did in their lives. Caviar three times a day. I find them charming. Here they are, coming all the way from America to teach Russia how to outproduce America. Oh, don’t think she won’t, given the time. There aren’t any trade unions here, you see. And now let me tell you the most wonderful thing of all about Russia. These people don’t understand themselves. They haven’t reached that fatal watershed in a nation’s history when they think they should.”

  The American raised some objection to this, and the Englishman laughed.

  Hadn’t we read Russian literature? It was a wonderful literature, the truest there was, and if truth was what you wanted out of a literature, Tolstoy and Dostoievsky were worth a dozen Shakespeares. But it was not a literature of understanding. You couldn’t pin it down. That was why it broke all the limits and was true, because the truth couldn’t be pinned down. Oh yes, this was a great country and the fact that it was dreadful had nothing to do with its greatness. It was big enough to do what it liked with anything. Look what it had done to communism in twenty years. It had taken the Romans three centuries to take care of the Church, but the Russians had taken care of Marx in two decades. This was all right because the Russian never cared about understanding himself. That was why the future was Russia’s. We doubted that? Look at France, the only country in the world which even tried to understand herself. Yes, look how she had castrated herself with understanding. We doubted it? Wait a few years and see how that French army of critics would fight when the war came. England? Well, England had certainly had a fine run for her money, but she was finished now. For centuries the English had contrived to avoid thinking about themselves, but they were doing it now and that meant only one thing. Chamberlain knew they were finished. He was stupid, of course, he had seen better days. But he wasn’t as stupid as everyone said he was.

  “Listen, my dear boys, Mr. Chamberlain understands one thing most of you refuse to accept. He knows that Hitler is the last ace Europe has to play. If Hitler can’t knock Russia out, Europe is doomed. But he won’t knock her out because he’s a lunatic, and I don’t think he could do it even if he was sane.”

  Then he went on to say that the war was going to be so terrible that only the Russians could win it because only the Russians could suffer enough. Generalship? Forget it. Suffering was what was going to win the war, and Stalin would make it as terrible as he could, just as Hitler would, but the Russians could suffer more than the Huns. We doubted it? Wait and see, wait and see.

  At dawn the Englishman yawned and left us, and the American and I stayed a little longer watching the old Czarist palaces emerging out of the brief nuit blanche into full daylight. A bird perched on the parapet near us and called, then flew away, and we smelled the indefinable smell of a Russian city which travellers say is the smell of the doorway of Asia.

  “Well,” said the American, “I guess I’m about ready for the sack.”

  When we went downstairs a band was playing corny American jazz for the Russian officers and bureaucrats who had come into the restaurant after the fellow-travelling tourists had listened to the program of folksongs and gone to bed. I entered the huge room the Intourist had given me, undressed and lay down and tried to sleep, but I was still wide awake when the sun stared in and found me reflecting that this was the first time in my life when I had felt like
nothing. I had often felt small, I had often felt weak and afraid and inadequate, but now I felt like nothing at all.

  “This,” I had heard a fellow-traveller say at dinner, “is the future.”

  The fool had believed that reason was in control of it. Before falling asleep I remembered Jerome. The canoe in which he had issued from the forest had now taken him out into the ocean. A canoe in an ocean, at night, with a hurricane rising. Jerome, Myself, Everyone.

  CHAPTER VII

  As the liner moved into the estuary of the St. Lawrence and I looked across miles of cold water to the barren mountains of northeastern Quebec, I felt old. But at least I was coming home. It was strange, but before this sight of that barren land I had never thought of Canada as home. It had been where I was born and lived. I had never thought of Canada as having a future with a future role to play. Now I knew better. “I will work here,” I thought. “I will try to understand this country. It’s all there’s left for me now, for the rest is beyond me.”

  By arranging that summer trip for me, Tom Storey had changed the whole pattern of my life and thought. Never again would I be able to believe that there is a simple explanation for anything. Never again would I trust a politician with a theory. Now I knew that the two subjects about which we talk the most are the two about which we actually know the least: politics and the weather. There are so many factors conspiring to make politics and the weather that no human mind, not even a calculating machine, can assess them.

  Why was there going to be a war? Why, unless the very people who professed to want peace wanted war?

  Staring across the water at the mountains I recalled a conversation with a Polish travel agent on the Warsaw platform just before I boarded the train for Berlin.

  “Well, you have seen Warsaw. Inside a few years there will be no Warsaw. You’ve met me. In a year or two I will be dead.” And then he grinned and said: “But one very good thing comes out of all this. In a year or two there will not be a single Jew alive in the whole of Europe.”