Watch that Ends the Night

by Hugh Maclennan

  CHAPTER X

  That summer and the years immediately following, my private life almost drowned in what seemed to be the disintegration of the world itself. As pigeon after pigeon came home to roost, as all the fearful prophecies we had made with angry defiance in the Thirties became living realities, my own life and that of everyone I knew shrank to insignificance.

  The summer after I revisited Catherine was a sweltering one. Montreal steamed in a humid heat worse than Singapore’s, the garbage smelled high in back alleys, tenement dwellers gasped for breath on their steps and porches after sunsets; even the calls from the belfries rang like dull bronze in the dead air. Thunder-weather.

  Working day after day, often night after night in that humid heat I felt like a herald of death. Strangers used to call me in the radio building and say: “Mr. Stewart, can’t you really see a ray of hope?” Or: “Mr. Stewart, please stop telling us there’s going to be a war.” Or: “Mr. Stewart, my husband was killed at Ypres and my boy is eighteen and why do you insist there’s going to be a war?”

  We entered it in September, 1939, in a trance. Catastrophe after catastrophe, the queer lull during the first winter, then Norway, Holland, Belgium and France: Narvik, Rotterdam, Eben Emael, Forges-les-Eaux and Hitler in the Forest of Compiègne. The bands played There’ll Always Be an England, the airmen signed the Kentish skies with their honor and the unemployed vanished from St. Catherine Street into the army.

  The week France fell I was in Washington on business for the organization, and while listening to a scared debate in the Senate Chamber of that neutral country I remembered Jerome. Where was he now? When last heard of, he had been seen crossing the Pyrenees into France with a beaten remnant of the Loyalist army. I believed he had been interned by the French, which indicated that his passport had been lost or stolen. The previous winter I had made enquiries in Ottawa about him, but External was far too busy with the war to spend time tracing a single citizen who had left his country to join a Spanish tragedy. Where was he now? Dead, I thought, as dead as my own past, as dead as I myself will be a year or two hence. When I returned to Montreal I went to a recruiting station to volunteer. The doctors looked me over, thanked me for coming, and rejected me on two counts. So I went back to my work in cbc and stayed with the organization throughout the war.

  Strange years which now have become a blur. While the war thundered on, Canada unnoticed grew into a nation at last. This cautious country which had always done more than she had promised, had always endured in silence while others reaped the glory – now she became alive and to us within her excitingly so. My work brought me close to the heart of this changing land. And sometimes, thinking with shame of the Thirties when nothing in Canada had seemed interesting unless it resembled something in England or the States, I even persuaded myself that here I had found the thing larger than myself to which I could belong.

  The war thundered on and the Thirties became a memory. I spent a winter in Halifax directing a series of scripts describing some aspects of the navy which then, without anyone seeming to be aware of it, was carrying on sixty percent of the convoy duty on the Atlantic. I crossed to England on a convoy and visited some of our army camps. I returned to Canada for more routine work. The war thundered on with the tide turned. I went out to the Alaska Highway, came back again and was sent to England just after the Normandy landings. I was back in Canada when the war ended, having spent all of it chairborne and out of uniform.

  It was during the war, of course, that Catherine and I finally came together.

  Late in the summer of 1939 she found a buyer for her Laurentian cottage, and a few weeks after war began she got a job with an interior decorator in the city. Yes, even then there was some business in interior decorating. She sent Sally to her own old school in the city and rapidly her confidence returned to her. In 1940 she left the interior decorator’s for war work which she was able to do in the mornings and she stayed with this for the duration. In such spare time as she had, she began learning how to paint.

  Then, early in 1941, came the news that Jerome had been tortured to death by the Nazis.

  I heard this news before Catherine did, for it reached me in my office in the cbc building. I at once got in touch with the French aviator, Captain Lajoie, and he seemed an entirely responsible man. He was in Canada organizing a fighter wing of Free Frenchmen who were training under the Empire Air Training Plan, and before the war he had been a professional officer in the French Army. There seemed no reason to doubt his word. He told me that Jerome, after being released by the French from the concentration camp for the defeated Spanish, had tried to escape to England. But the Nazis had over-run the country and he had joined the French underground. Captain Lajoie had not seen his body impaled on the meathook in that French market town, but he himself had been in the operation in which Jerome had been captured. He said an attempt had been made to rescue him from the Gestapo and that afterwards he had been told about the torture and execution by one of his own men, who swore he had seen the body.

  It seemed final and conclusive, and I left Lajoie feeling sick. But I remembered Catherine almost at once, and immediately I telephoned friends on the newspapers and asked them to repress the details of the story. Once again I was grateful to that Montreal clannishness which can be so exasperating to outsiders. The men I talked to on the papers had already heard Lajoie’s story and had decided themselves to repress the details for Catherine’s sake. And the Gazette, as I was to tell Jerome years later, wrote him an obituary notice becoming a former Montreal surgeon who had died bravely in the war.

  But the details got out just the same; they always do. One day a woman Catherine barely knew telephoned her to ask if the story about the torture was true. Catherine was shocked enough anyway, but now this woman gave her the details and nearly killed her. She had to rest in bed for nearly a week, and when I visited her she looked as though she were under the torture herself.

  She recovered. Once again she crossed a frontier and grew strong on the other side. I visited her more and more often, we became more and more essential to one another and at last she ceased holding me off. By the end of that summer she had persuaded herself that I would never marry anyone else. Also by the end of that summer she received from the Canadian government a formal confirmation of Jerome’s death.

  It was on the weekend of our Thanksgiving in 1941 that I drove Catherine down to a friend’s cottage beside a lake south of the city and there we spent three days in the cathedral silence of a land which in that season is surely the loveliest on earth. For this was hardwood country with deep, clear lakes. Maples of three species, birches, oaks, beech and butternut trees flamed all the way from southern Quebec to the New England sea, mirrored in lakes while flocking birds flew south.

  “Yes, George,” she said, “yes!”

  Three weeks later we were married.

  CHAPTER XI

  Happiness is one of the hardest things to write about, and the difficulty of doing so makes me long to be a musician or a painter, for painters and musicians are at ease with the supreme emotion, which is not grief but joy abounding. To be able to make a joyful noise to the Lord or a praise of colors and forms would seem to me to equate any man with gods or little children. Happiness annihilates time. We measure history by its catastrophes, we recall the weather by its storms, but the periods of peace and joy – who can describe them?

  “Many a green isle needs must be …” But is it not also true that years later it is the green isles of happiness that we remember best, even if we cannot tell about them? Is it not also true that though we can describe pain, we cannot remember what it was like? Jerome once said to me that nature’s greatest mercy could be found in the singular fact that nobody can remember pain. You can remember that you felt pain and you can dread its return, but pain itself, the surgeon’s saw across the unanaesthetized bone – that you cannot remember. But moments of joy you can, even the feelings of it. The feelings of making love in peace and ex
citement can return years later and live.

  Happiness did not come to Catherine and me in a rush; rather it grew like summer weather after a cool spring in a northern land. I heard her laughing again, I watched her face shed some of its lines and grow younger again, I saw a new ease with the growing Sally. Happiness revealed its presence in the faces of new friends, and to me its fairest aspect was my own witness of the world’s beauty once again establishing itself upon Catherine. She had been lost and now she was found. As I, lost for years, had also been found. As the world, apparently lost for more than a decade, now seemed to be finding itself, too.

  Now Catherine understood what beauty was; now in her painting she was learning to capture some of it; now in the acceptance of her own infirmity she had no need to resist the knowledge that beauty’s most exquisite property is its evanescence.

  The war ended and still the country grew, and now I had a small but established reputation. Now we lived a quiet life and the Thirties seemed to have sunk back into the past. Good years, rich years, wonderful years. Many a green isle needs must be … We lived, and we lived well, in those years before the first of the harsh inevitable commands came from her damaged heart. We lived and it was real and I remember nearly all of it. Even now on a spring morning in the country I can see again the joy in Catherine’s face when she used to come out to greet a morning similar. Or on an evening of mists in the country I can still see living the serene happiness in her eyes. Or across a dinner table in candlelight, sometimes I see a handsome woman in early middle-age smile at the man beside her and remember how Catherine too had smiled at some man, hitherto a stranger, who had become her dinner companion and in whom she had discovered something she liked. Good years and full ones. I could not count all the lives that crossed and touched our own during them, each contributing to the other some atom of experience. Now when the first snow falls in the city and the apartment is suddenly brighter owing to the sun’s reflection on the snow, I see again the look in her eyes which says: “How good to see this again!” Her painting became joyful: such riots of color I had seldom seen in the work of a painter in this land which so many painters see as somber except in the fall. In our country place we planted a garden and there was a spring of water beside it where warblers fanned themselves on hot days. Together we grew intimate with the seasons, and we planted our lives in one another without trying to annul the past. She, who had said ‘yes’ with all her might to Jerome, now said ‘yes’ to me.

  The odd thing about this period was that we both were young in years yet felt all ages within our imaginations. In terms of a normal life-span we should have been standing at high noon. Yet, though we never used such terms to one another, we knew that our actual time was early evening. We knew, and never mentioned, that it was sure to be limited. Fortunately the evening was the part of the day we both loved the best, for the early evening of a good day holds within itself the dawn and the morning no less than the promise of the night.

  Sally grew and entered college and the first touch of gray appeared in Catherine’s sable hair. The country grew and became rich, and a generation to whom Hitler and the depression were mere names now stood six feet tall. Good and wonderful years when the voice of the turtle was truly heard in the spring. For Catherine’s soul seemed healed. Her love for Jerome had gone down like a wounded living thing to the floor of the sea and time had covered it, the deep time which enfolds and exposes to chemical change all living things, time full of new friends and interests and life and love, and of the quiet joy of watching her child grow into a woman.

  CHAPTER XII

  The last line uttered by the Devil in the first part of Goethe’s Faust is the abrupt command, Her zu mir! Faust’s adventure is over, his dream of eternal happiness gone. The Devil, who had been waiting ironically, says “Come to me!” and it is over. I think of that line whenever I hear the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth where, time and again with a compulsive beauty, the key changes to that ominous note of pity and terror against which all but courage and art quails. From the statement of the opening theme this key-change has been inevitable. One senses, even if one does not know, that it is sure to come, and it does. So came the change in our lives with Catherine’s first embolism.

  It struck like a sword, it threatened her life, it paralyzed her entire left side for days. And for days I was terrified not only for her but also for myself. I learned to hate sickness as Jews learned to hate Hitler.

  But Catherine recovered from this. That enormous life-force in her, after being nearly extinguished, gathered a mysterious strength not even the doctors professed to understand. After a long convalescence she got better, and a season in the country restored her. The lid of her left eye drooped from the damage done to her nervous system, but this droop gave her features a singular charm. By the fall of that year she was almost normal again.

  Almost, I said. For in our minds neither of us could ever be quite like other people again. The inevitable had now happened. It did lie ahead of us, a beyond-this-nothing, as the war had lain ahead of us in the Thirties. Now it was here, as the war was here in the Forties. Previously she had known that she lived with the sword dangling over her head by a horsehair. Now she had felt its point; now she looked up and saw it there.

  A year passed and the sword fell again. Once more that astonishing life-force in Catherine rallied and after paralysis she again got better.

  I make these statements factually and coldly because it is the only thing I can do. Each of these attacks was an assault on her life by an enemy who had aimed at her. Suddenly it seemed to me that we were almost isolated by her fate. I became aware that some of our friends regarded Catherine’s plight with awe. They spoke of her courage and outward cheerfulness, they were kind and thoughtful, but it must have been painful at times for them to think about us. They, too, were nearing early middle age. They were reaching the place where the final enemy ceases to be a mere word. They had seen his tracks in the forest, they had heard his horns in the night, they had come upon the traces of his fires. They knew he was planting his little fifth columns in their arteries and valves and organs and the cigarettes they smoked and the tensions under which they lived. A few of them looked at Catherine, I sometimes thought, as I myself had looked at some small, defenseless country near to Hitler’s Germany in the years when Hitler seemed as omnipotent as fate. She would get it first. She, still so young in years, was a preview of what lay in wait for all.

  The change of key, the turn of the dragonfly’s wing – was it only to us that the whole mood and tenor of life seemed so suddenly different in the last two years of the 1940s? I don’t think so. For surely the whole world went over a frontier in that time and since has been compelled to live very strangely.

  In the Thirties all of us who were young had been united by anger and the obviousness of our plight; in the war we had been united by fear and the obviousness of the danger. But now, prosperous under the bomb, we all seemed to have become atomized. Wherever I looked I saw people trying to live private lives for themselves and their families. Nobody asked the big questions any more. Why think, when the thing to be thought about is so huge it is impossible to think about it? Why ask where you are going, when you know you can’t stop even if you wish? Why ask why, when it does no good to know why?

  In the Thirties old John Donne had spoken for all of us when he declared that no man is an island entire of itself, that every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. In the bleak years we at least were not alone. In these prosperous years we were. The gods, false or true, had vanished. The bell which only a few years ago had tolled for all, now tolled for each family in its prosperous solitude. So with us; so with so many. How private my life with Catherine had become! How outmoded so many of my friends felt! How different was this new key!

  But of course for Catherine there was the knowledge that most of her life was lived, that the best was inevitably over. Now in her final phase what I used to think of as her characte
r ceased to matter in Catherine; her character almost disappeared into her spirit. The Catherine I knew and loved was still present and visible, was even fun to be with. But the essential Catherine – what now was the essential Catherine – sometimes seemed to me like the container of a life-force resisting extinction.

  Yet she was often gay. In public she never let out a word of how she felt except by way of excuse when there was some place people wanted her to go to and she was not well enough. Sally seemed almost unconscious of her mother’s struggle, so well did Catherine conceal it from her. And does it make any sense to say that she was inwardly sad when she painted such pictures? Every fortnight or so she changed the picture which hung on the wall facing the foot of my bed, and when I woke in the dawn there this thing was, this expression – not of Catherine but of a love of life itself which in her had become so intense as to be almost impersonal.

  Finally we reached this winter which I described at the beginning of the story, when I, too, almost persuaded myself that I was equal to my destiny of living under the sword with her until at last the sword fell. When I, too, almost believed I was at peace. When I, too, flattered myself that my courage was equal to hers.

  Few fighters are knocked out by a single blow. One after the other in combination is the way a trained man strikes down his enemy. And after each blow the situation changes, and so do the reflexes and capacities of the person hit.

  Little did I know – though I believed I knew all about it – how little I actually knew of the enormous and terrible implications of absolute finality.

  The shark in the ocean may be invisible, but he is there. So also is fear in the ocean of the subconscious.

  A man standing on a rock may believe himself strong enough to stand there forever. But if an earthquake comes, where is he? What is he?