Watch that Ends the Night

by Hugh Maclennan

  “I suppose you think this embolism – well it may not be an embolism – this whatever it is – I suppose you think it wouldn’t have happened without him?”

  “I had been thinking that,” I said.

  “It could have happened anyway. At any time and at any place these last half dozen years.”

  “Is it going to mean an operation?”

  “It might,” Jack said.

  He went to the phone, dialed, and I heard him say to somebody in the hospital: “Put out a call for Dr. Andrews. I wish to see him as soon as possible.”

  I stared numbly at the floor, for Dr. Andrews was now the chief surgeon at the Beamis Memorial. I stared numbly because Catherine and I had assumed for years that she could never sustain a major operation.

  Going into the bedroom I saw her small and resigned on the bed. She said nothing while I packed her bag or even when the doorbell rang and a pair of orderlies and an intern entered with a stretcher. But once we were in the ambulance, she lying on the stretcher and I sitting beside her with an intern opposite, the ambulance rushing up Côte des Neiges with its siren hooting, her gallantry returned and she smiled a little girl’s smile and pressed my fingers.

  “Fun!” she said. “This is the next best thing to a ride on a fire engine.”

  CHAPTER III

  A man can carry a specific fear for years and believe he is sustaining it well. He can school himself so that he thinks he knows exactly what the fear is. But when the moment comes, he may find it larger, different and more mysterious than he had guessed. He may discover that its burden has changed his very nature. The moment comes, the fear explodes through him like poison, and he becomes a stranger to himself. Her zu mir! Who knows in advance how he will feel when he hears that command?

  I waited two hours at the hospital with nothing to do while the doctors consulted, made more examinations, took x-rays. Then the surgeon, followed by Jack, came out to the sunroom to see me. He said they must wait for a temperature to show before they decided what to do. An operation was possible – from the surgeon’s expression I guessed he believed it was necessary – but they would have to wait.

  “Let me drive you home?” Jack said.

  “Thanks, I prefer to walk.”

  Outside it was cold, clear and strange, the city a feet at anchor under a cold sky greenish to the north. The cold searched for me, found me, and I wanted warmth, a drink and another identity. That was it – another identity. “Before I married her, I was I,” I heard myself mutter. “Now I am her. And she is dying.” Had there been a bar on the mountain crest I would have got drunk right then because I wanted to forget I was alive. If she must die, let her die now. The process of dying is awful. Have it over with. Have it over with.

  I was not noble as I walked home in the cold.

  But I did walk home, and when I entered our building the heat struck with such a shock I became dizzy and waited several minutes before unlocking our door. I supposed Sally would be home and I recorded the thought that I should have telephoned her from the hospital, but I had not done so. Instead I had sat by myself in the sunroom feeling myself turning into something strange, new and unpleasant.

  The apartment was almost dark when I entered, and I remembered I had left all the lights burning. Was Sally asleep? Then I saw two shadowy forms move and spring apart and realized that she had brought Alan Royce home with her, had found her mother’s door closed and had assumed her asleep, had seen no sign of me and supposed me out, and that the two had been necking on the chesterfield.

  “Sir!” said Alan.

  I was too tired to answer and hung up my coat and hat in the cupboard. My ears were almost frozen because I had not worn my fur cap and the cold had found them while I was walking home. Lights came on in the room behind me and I saw Sally’s back as she stared ostentatiously out the window at nothing.

  Alan said with a mock bow: “I have been surprised, sir. You, I trust, have been merely astonished. May I get you a glass of your own whisky, sir?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “It’s the least a man in my position can do, sir.”

  Sally, her back turned, said: “Alan, stop sounding like an oaf.”

  I sat down and took out a cigarette, which Alan lit for me with a flourish. I leaned back in my chair and made an effort to think. Life about to begin. Life about to depart. At the moment I was resentful of both these common events.

  “Alan,” I said, “I think it’s time for you to go home. There’s something I want to talk to Sally about.”

  “Is it as bad as all that, sir?”

  “Strange though it may seem to you, Alan, I don’t intend to talk to Sally about you.”

  He realized from my face that something serious had occurred, and at once his voice changed and revealed the subtle courtesy I found so charming in his generation.

  “It’s none of my business, sir, but if something’s the matter, I’m awfully sorry.”

  Sally flashed around and said: “Is it Mummy?”

  I nodded: “I’ve just left the hospital.”

  And when I said this Alan almost ceased to exist for this girl who had been thinking of nobody else for days.

  “Yes, Alan,” she said, “you’d better go.”

  She got his poncho or whatever that naval garment of his was called and held it for him, and he looked like a huge shaggy dog as he bent his knees, his hair flopping, and thrust his arms into it.

  “Good-night, sir,” he said.

  “Good-night, Alan.”

  When Sally and I were alone I told her what the doctors had said and spared her nothing, for at that moment I was weaker than she. She asked me some probing questions and I felt still more inadequate, for I knew she was a competent young biologist and had boned up on her mother’s case from the medical books. When I told her the embolus seemed to be in the small bowel, Sally went pale. She knew that if it turned out to be an embolism, an operation would follow.

  “I’m going up to the hospital,” she said, and went to the cupboard for her coat.

  “No, you’re going to do nothing of the kind. Your mother’s under sedatives. If there’s a change, they’ll call us here.”

  She sat down and lit a cigarette, the frown-line deep between her eyes. Only a few nights ago she had sat on this sofa radiantly in love, and now her dream had vanished.

  “Was my father here today?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Is he responsible for this?”

  Wearily I looked away. Wearily I said: “How do I know anything? Let’s blame it on God, for He fixed that heart for her long before you were born.”

  “George, you look tired. Go to bed.”

  “I will, at that.”

  I was so tired I was lurching, and after I got to bed the room throbbed like an engine and I saw nightmares and knew I could never sleep in that condition, I felt like a drunk even though I had drunk only one whisky all day. I saw, incongruously, Arthur Lazenby’s face over lunch in the cafeteria of the Chateau Laurier. My God, was it only twelve hours ago since we’d talked about Jerome?

  Then I felt something cool on my forehead and it was Sally’s fingers and I envied Alan his good fortune. My subconscious was taking charge of me, Sally was a woman, Sally was a lovely young girl, and my subconscious wished she was my wife.

  “Nobody will ever ask ‘How is Sally?’” I heard my own voice say. “Everyone will always know that Sally’s fine. God, I’m so sick of that eternal greeting, ‘How is Catherine? How is Catherine?’ From now on let’s call her Kate. When she was Kate she was never sick. She was wonderfully well when she was Kate.”

  Sally’s fingers continued to soothe me and after a while she said: “Please don’t be hurt like this.”

  But my maturity had gone and my subconscious had taken over, I was Everyman and every frightened boy and everything and everyone but myself.

  “I can’t bear the thought of her looking at the sun,” I heard myself say.

  “What,
George? What do you mean?”

  “When they wheel her out to the operating room if the sun is shining and she knows she’s looking at it for the last time.”

  “Please relax, George. Please!”

  And her fingers continued to stroke my forehead while my subconscious, my identity almost gone, wished I were twenty years younger with none of my life lived and that she was my wife.

  “It’s going to scream like a pterodactyl,” I heard myself say.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The Russo-American Moon Express.”

  Then things blurred and I suppose I slept. I woke alone in the dawn, had an instant of happiness as I saw one of Catherine’s pictures joyous on the wall, then remembered where I was and where she was. The illuminated dial of my bedside clock showed six-thirty and it was too early to call the hospital. But I could not sleep because I kept waiting to hear the phone ring. For an hour I lay waiting for the phone to ring and the apartment was utterly still.

  “This is destruction!” I heard myself say. “Of her. Of me because of her. Yes, she has destroyed me. Jerome has destroyed me. Life has destroyed us all. All for nothing. For nothing, for nothing, for nothing!”

  At seven-thirty I got up and peered through the slats of the Venetian blind at a rose-fingered dawn reflected from the icicles of the nearest roof. Oh, what a beautiful morning! A beautiful, cold skier’s morning in the innocent northland. A beautiful morning with no shaming horrors produced by the subconscious of Everyman. To be healthy on such a morning, to be young on such a morning, to be innocent of life on such a morning, oh, to be young in that morning were very heaven!

  I put on my slippers and dressing gown and went to the phone. “There’s been no change, Mr. Stewart,” the floor nurse said. “How was her night?”

  “She was under sedation.”

  In other words her night had been full of pain, of fear, of tumbling down unknown tunnels in the endless dark.

  I turned from the phone and saw Sally’s blonde head as fresh as the dawn outside, as golden as the sun on the single cloud in the sky, and I told her what the nurse had told me. A few minutes later I lay inert in a tubful of hot water.

  Oh, pity every man who comes hard to the knowledge that underneath his bright, sure consciousness he is not himself but Everyman.

  Fate, I thought. Who is equal to it? For to be equal to fate is to be equal to the knowledge that everything we have done, achieved, endured and been proud and ashamed of is nothing. So I thought, alone as I had never been alone, on that beautiful morning.

  CHAPTER IV

  I can continue with this story and make sense of what follows only if I succeed in explaining something very difficult.

  The desperate sickness of a loved one, especially if the loved one is still young, does strange things to those involved. It causes them, as the old Greeks used to say, “to escape their own notice” doing and thinking and saying things. It makes them more familiar with their underselves than they choose to be, and strangers to their own notions of their own characters. It can shake their basic security in existence.

  There is a savage truth in Somerset Maugham’s declaration that suffering, so far from enobling people, actually degrades them. A savage truth, yes. But not the whole truth. This, I repeat, is a very difficult matter.

  An illness such as Catherine’s is fate palpable. Her character was not responsible for this fate. At the beginning of this story I said that some people have within themselves a room so small that only a minuscule amount of the mysterious thing we call the spirit can find a home in them, while others have so much of it that what the world calls their spirit explodes from the pressure. I say again that this mysterious thing, which creates, destroys and recreates, is the sole force which equals the merciless fate binding a human being to his mortality.

  Catherine’s spirit, as her fate became more obvious and unavoidable, grew larger and larger. Her courage made me feel awe; it even made the doctors feel awe. To go on like this, to struggle like this – for what? Merely to have to go through it all again at a later date. She did not seem to me like a boxer rising again and again to be punished by an invincible opponent, but more like a bird in the claws of a cat who wanted to prolong the fun. The cat was God.

  Without daring to utter the thought, this is what I believed when her ordeal began. The previous embolisms had not been like this, nor on those other occasions had I understood how serious they were. Nor had she, not entirely. I had been like a recruit in the first battles of a war: frightened, none too competent, but still believing that somebody else would be the one killed. Now I knew there was no discharge from this war. Now I knew how unavoidable – sooner or later – was her defeat. And this brought me face to face with what I truly think is the great terror of hundreds of millions of people.

  The terror is simply this. God, whom we have been taught to regard as a loving Father, appears indifferent. God, whom we have been taught to regard as all-just, is manifestly unconcerned with justice as men understand the meaning of that word. Why should Catherine have to suffer like this? Why should a scoundrel have health and she none?

  You may think I make too much of this. I don’t think I do, because these considerations lie very deep in all of us, even in atheists.

  All of us are children at heart. What gives the child the desire to grow and acquit himself well is his hope of winning his parents’ love. Without this hope, why struggle? Why care?

  But the child becomes middle-aged, and who then can fulfill the father’s role? Reason can’t do it for long. Ability and success are makeshifts. A man may install his wife or children in the role of his god, as the sanction for his existence and his reason for being. A woman, more naturally integrated into the scheme of nature than modern men seem to be, may find no difficulty at all. But a man, apparently, needs a god. So in the Thirties we tried to make gods out of political systems, and worship and serve them.

  But the trouble is that none of these substitutes abides. The time comes when the wife dies, and then what is there? The time comes when children go away. The time comes when the state is seen for what it is – an organization of job-holders.

  Then, though we may deny it, comes the Great Fear. For if a man cannot believe that he serves more than himself, if he cannot believe there is meaning in the human struggle, what are his chances of emotional survival? We may assert that as flies to wanton boys, so are we to the gods who kill us for their sport. But we can’t live long believing this. Human dignity forbids it.

  I know the world is full of people who have had thoughts like mine during Catherine’s ordeal, and I know they have been shocked and ashamed by many of them. There she was – so brave, so frail, her beauty being destroyed, her life chewed away. Why? There was I, torn by pity and grief, and loathing what her plight did to me. There was she, knowing that even if she recovered she would never recover as a whole woman. There was I, knowing how she dreaded being a burden. Meanwhile there was no discharge in the war. There was only endurance. There lay ahead only the fearful tunnel with nothing at the end. Could I or could I not – could she or could she not – believe that this struggle had any value in itself?

  At first I couldn’t, and, my humanity revolting against it, something happened to me that can happen to anyone under similar circumstances.

  My subconscious rose. The subconscious – the greedy, lustful, infantile subconscious, indiscriminate and uncritical discoverer of truths, half-truths and chimaeras which are obscene fusions of foetal truths, this source of hate, love, murder and salvation, of poetry and destruction, this Everything in Everyman, how quickly, if it swamps him, can it obliterate the character a man has spent a lifetime creating!

  Then a man discovers in dismay that what he believed to be his identity is no more than a tiny canoe at the mercy of an ocean. Sharkfilled, plankton-filled, refractor of light, terrible and mysterious, for years this ocean has seemed to slumber beneath the tiny identity it received from the dark rive
r.

  Now the ocean rises and the things within it become visible. Little man, what now? The ocean rises, all frames disappear from around the pictures, there is no form, no sense, nothing but chaos in the darkness of the ocean storm. Little man, what now?

  … And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep.

  … And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said: let there be light: and there was light.

  Here, I found at last, is the nature of the final human struggle. Within, not without. Without there is nothing to be done. But within. Nobody has ever described such a struggle truly in words. Nobody can. But others have described it and I can tell you who they are.

  Go to the musicians. In the work of a few musicians you can hear every aspect of this conflict between light and dark within the soul. You can hear all the contradictory fears, hopes, desires and passions of Everyman fissioning and fusing into new harmonies out of the dead ones. You can hear – you can almost see – the inward process of destruction, creation, destruction again and re-creation into the last possible harmony, the only one there can be, which is a will to live, love, grow and be grateful, the determination to endure all things, suffer all things, hope all things, believe all things necessary for what our ancestors called the glory of God. To struggle and work for that, at the end, is all there is left.

  In music you can hear this kind of struggle translated into diapasons so universal that they wash like the light of the world over the little external truths of science. You can hear the spirit of Bach and the spirit of Beethoven explode from one vast chamber into another so enormous it fills, for an instant, the universe.

  In the end, the new harmonies resolved, nothing outward seems to have changed. The little man is still a little man. But within he has been changed.

  For within him has happened what the musicians alone seem able to record: the resolution of fear and courage, love and hate, terror and defiance, shame and honor, despair and hope – all of Everyman in the ocean of which the identity was temporarily lost – into an acceptance of humanity’s supreme invention, his concept of the Unknowable which at that instant makes available His power, and for that instant existing, becomes known. The musicians can show this happen; oddly enough, they can show it specifically. One musical idea uttered in the minor in a certain tempo is surrender, despair and suicide. The same idea restated in the major with horns and woods becomes an exultant call to life. This, which is darkness, also is light. This, which is no, also is yes. This, which is hatred, also is love. This, which is fear, also is courage. This, which is defeat, also is victory. Who knows the things of the spirit except the spirit of man which is within him? said St. Paul.