Watch that Ends the Night

by Hugh Maclennan

  So the final justification of the human plight – the final vindication of God himself, for that matter – is revealed in a mystery of the feelings which understand, in an instant of revelation, that it is of no importance that God appears indifferent to justice as men understand it. He gave life. He gave it. Life for a year, a month, a day or an hour is still a gift. The warmth of the sun or the caress of the air, the sight of a flower or a cloud on the wind, the possibility even for one day more to see things grow – the human bondage is also the human liberty.

  Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding.

  So, for an instant, you may have that understanding. To have it, to feel the movement of light flood the darkness of the self – even for an instant – is the most beautiful experience anyone can ever know. And millions have known it.

  CHAPTER V

  Meanwhile darkness and inner chaos. For days Catherine was in pain and danger, and I was unequal to the pity I felt for her. My love for her was as helpless to help her as hers, years previously, had been helpless to help Jerome. My subconscious began to scream at me: Let her die. Let her go. End this.

  The doctors thought there was an excellent chance that she would die, and for professional reasons they were disturbed. They could not form an exact diagnosis. They thought it was an embolism, but they could not be sure. She seemed to be masking her symptoms. Dr. Andrews wished to operate, believing an operation was inevitable. Jack Christopher refused to permit it until a temperature showed, because she was a bad surgical risk. So she had to wait.

  Meanwhile other things crowded in. Somehow I contrived to give another lecture at the university and prepare another script for the radio. I went over my accounts and knew I would be in debt if this illness were a long one. Sally, finding no help in me, turned to Alan Royce, who was with her constantly. I became more and more frightened, more and more angry and desperate. If everything we had done and endured led to this, then everything we had done and endured led to nothing.

  Still things kept crowding in.

  On the second day Harry Blackwell telephoned, and inwardly I cursed at the sound of his voice, for I had totally forgotten him.

  “You promised to get in touch with me,” he accused. I told him I had been out of town and that my wife was dangerously sick, and hoped that would get him off the line. It didn’t.

  “I’m sorry about your trouble,” he said, “but I’ve had trouble for years. Where is Martell?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

  “Why do you lie to me? Look, I’m serious. It’s not going to do you any good, this lying to me.”

  “I’m not lying, and I don’t like your tone. I told you – I don’t know where he is.”

  Harry’s subconscious had evidently taken hold of him too, for he burst into an invective against Jerome. And then I suddenly felt he was putting into words buried feelings of my own. Up to that moment, I truly had believed, I had never disliked Jerome. Now I suddenly found myself hating him and wishing to harm him, and I felt as though I did not know precisely who I was. I felt scared, and being scared I felt angry. And then, with Harry’s hatred coming to me over the line, something screamed in my brain: “No, it’s not true. You love her! You love her!”

  I said to Harry: “Let me alone for God’s sake, I’m going nuts. I don’t know where he is.”

  “I warn you, I’m bringing detectives into this.”

  “What’s it to me if you bring in the whole police force? Just stop bothering me, that’s all.”

  “Oh,” I heard him say, “I know you’re trying to protect your wife from scandal.”

  “My wife from scandal? Are you crazy?”

  “It was all her fault to begin with,” he said in a strange, hard voice. “Women like her, they never ought to get married to men like him.” He paused and then he said something that made my hair prickle. “All they do, women like her with men like him, they give them a taste for blood.”

  “God damn you!” I shouted at him. “Get off the line!”

  And I hung up. And I went away hearing his hard voice: “It was all her fault.”

  There was work to do; with me there was always work to do. So I went back to my desk and tried to work but could not, for I heard Harry Blackwell’s astounding voice repeating over and over: “It was all her fault!” And looking out the window at the snow I heard my own voice say: “Can you imagine what you would have been like if it hadn’t been for her? How do you know what you would have been like? All those years you loved her and she was married to Jerome. Now Jerome comes back and now she’s sick again. You have her sickness. He had her health. And now you have her death and nothing beyond because you’ve spent yourself out.”

  The phone rang and it was Sally. She was in the hospital, and when she spoke, her voice was as calm as Jack Christopher’s talking to a patient.

  “George, I think you’d better eat something and come up. A temperature is showing at last.”

  I let out my breath and clutched the phone hard. “I see.”

  “The O.R. has been reserved for three o’clock.”

  “I’ll be up right away.”

  “No,” Sally said firmly, “eat something first. I’m going back to her now, and then I’ll have to get out while they prepare her. She’s in marvellous spirits and she tells me not to worry and to tell you not to worry. She’s marvellous.” There was a catch in Sally’s voice and I heard her swallow to keep herself from crying. “How can anyone be so marvellous as Mummy?”

  I drank two ounces of whisky, boiled myself an egg, made tea and two slices of toast, was bolting the food down and drinking the tea when the phone stabbed me again. This time it was Jerome. And this time I absolutely broke open.

  “So you’d like to speak to Catherine?” I said. “Well, this time you’ve fixed things so that it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever be able to speak to her again. Just after you left she had another embolus in the small bowel, and your judgment is better than mine about her chances of surviving an operation for that.”

  “No,” I heard him whisper. “No!”

  “Yes,” I heard myself say very hard. “Yes.” There was silence and then he said: “Is she in the Beamis?”

  “Yes, and you keep out of it. You nearly ruined her once, and now you’ve come back and now it looks as if you’ve finished her. I’ve read about destructive personalities, but you beat anything I’ve ever known. Dead men don’t bite, Jerome, and dead women don’t reproach.”

  “George – wait a minute. Please, I’ve got to –”

  Agony and remorse were in his voice then, and a desperate eagerness to know the facts, but I hung up before he could finish his sentence and went back to the table to my tea. The phone began stabbing again and I let it ring eight times, knowing it was Jerome. Then I put on my coat and fur cap and walked out into the cold and picked up a taxi at the stand on the end of our street.

  The driver was an old acquaintance, his name according to the photo in the cab being Romeo Pronovost, and he gave it as his opinion that sickness was a terrible thing for sure. He knew Catherine and he liked her, and he knew she had been taken to the Beamis in an ambulance several days before. “Le bon Dieu a des idées très singulières,” was Pronovost’s considered judgment, his reason being that Mrs. Stewart, who had trouble, was a nice woman, while Mrs. Allison, who lived on the same street and also used his taxi, had no trouble and was not a nice woman.

  When I paid him off he gave me a probing look and said: “This one is real bad, eh?”

  “I’m afraid it’s real bad.”

  “There is some thing I could get? Maybe some thing I could do?” I thought of Catherine on the verge of the dark and pity scalded the backs of my eyes. I thought of Catherine as a child crying out how good it was to see the squirrels return to her window, and rage at the nature of things burned my stomach. I thought of Catherine as a beautiful young girl crying: “I want to live! I want to live!” And
then I cried out inside. All her struggle, all her beauty, all her love, all her art, all her trying – all had come to this moment of extinction. Why struggle like that? Why strive so hard in such a hard existence if this was all there is?

  I said to Pronovost in French: “If you feel like it, say an ave for us.” “Ouais! Certainement. Pour sûr.”

  His eyes looked into mine, and for an instant the man’s goodness reached me and made me feel, for an instant, pure.

  I left him and went into the hospital and as I went up in the elevator, an intern in white silent beside me, out of the turbulent ocean of myself flashed a sentence from Schweitzer’s life of Bach.

  “Figured bass,” said Bach in something he wrote for his pupils, “is the most perfect foundation of music. It is executed with both hands in such a manner that the left hand plays the notes that are written, while the right adds consonances and dissonances thereto, making an agreeable harmony to the glory of God and the justifiable gratification of the soul.”

  Did God value those paintings which I knew – suddenly I knew – she lived for the sake of? Did her struggle contribute to His glory? What kind of a monster-god wants that kind of service? The image we invent in our own need? “Bah!” I said aloud, and the intern stared.

  I walked down the corridor to the sunroom where I found Sally, who told me they were still preparing Catherine for the operation.

  “Is Jack with her?”

  Sally, covering up her fear, said: “I thought I saw his statesmanlike profile towering over a herd of lesser men.”

  We waited for half an hour, all the time staring down the corridor for a sign of Jack, or of a nurse coming to tell us we could see the patient. About two-thirty Jack’s long, lean form appeared.

  “Hullo!” he said to Sally and rubbed her blonde head. “Hullo, George! Sit down and I’ll tell you what I know.”

  He told us nothing we did not know anyway, and I asked him how she was in her mind.

  “Magnificent,” he said. “She’s the best patient I ever had.”

  “Can we see her now?”

  “ You may see her, George, But this young lady” – he glanced across at Sally and made one of those ponderous medical jokes – “I’ll keep her company a few minutes and bone up on my biology.”

  In her previous crises Catherine had been half-stunned by brain embolisms. Now her mind was clear, and when I entered her room she was lying small on the bed and her expression astonished me. She was gay. She smiled. She looked at least ten years younger than she had the night before, and she even seemed to be enjoying herself.

  “There’s one thing I seem to be good at,” she said, “and it’s this. That’s probably why I like to get sick. I like to show off how good I am when I’m sick. I’ve not been so flattered in years as I’ve been by the doctors. Isn’t it nice to be good at something?”

  I took her hand and her small fingers squeezed so hard that I winced.

  “You see?” she said. “I’m as strong as a lion. Dr. Andrews tells me I’m as brave as one. What a bore to have to be as brave as a lion.”

  Her smile turned into a little girl’s, a small droop of the left eyelid, something méchant in the curve of her lips.

  “The interns are fascinated with me. I hope they’re betting on me. Maybe they’ve made a pool. I hope they have, for I’m going to fool them, George, I really am.”

  She was so much stronger than me that I felt like nothing. And this gaiety on the verge of extinction – oh no, you’re going to live, you’re going to live, you must!

  “Promise me something, George?”

  “What is it?”

  “Get drunk tonight and have some fun for a change. I won’t be able to talk to you and I’m going to look absolutely revolting when this is over.”

  An intern entered, saw us together, gave a professional smile and left. Catherine winked at me.

  “Now there goes a really charming boy. He came all the way from California to study here and work under Dr. Andrews and he’s told me all about La Jolla. What’s it like outside?”

  “Bloody.”

  “Then this isn’t too bad a day to have all this nonsense. And there’s something else I’ve thought of – do you know, by the time I’m well again, winter will be over? I can’t wait to see those tulips you planted last autumn.”

  She was artificially gay because of the drugs they had given her, but not entirely because of them. That mysterious thing in her, that amazing power, had taken her over as it always did in a crisis. In its presence I felt like nothing at all. I looked out the window and Montreal was obliterated by snow. When Pronovost had driven me up there had been white flecks in the air but now gray snow seethed angrily around the corners of the roofs, whorls of snow swirled like pillars of salt: no sky, no city, no traffic, no people, only the snow. Well, I thought, at least you don’t have to look at the sun.

  I turned back to her and the face I loved had ceased to smile. Infinitely tender, Infinitely wise, so gentle I believed I would despair if I never saw such an expression again, she looked at me and lightly touched my hand.

  “George dear, please don’t blame any of this on Jerome.”

  “As you say.”

  “Not as I say. No. I had to see him. When this is over I’ll tell you all about it. If he phones, just tell him I’m here and am all right. You’ve always been so kind.” Her eyes searched mine and read through them. “Please – for your own sake, dear – please keep on being kind.”

  “All right.”

  She pressed my hand against her cheek and I felt the warmth of her fever.

  “I’ve been so incredibly lucky.”

  I went down on my knees to her, her head turned on the pillow and her large eyes, full of love, looked into mine.

  “We’ve had such a wonderful life together, you and I. I’ve been so amazingly lucky, and I’m so grateful I could sing.”

  “Catherine!”

  “Compared to most people’s, my life has been so wonderful.”

  “Catherine!”

  “George, dear?”

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing is going to happen – not this time, anyway. But if it does” – never had I felt more love come out of her to me – “George, if it does, promise me something so I won’t have to worry about you?”

  “What is it?”

  Her eyes smiled into mine: “If anything happens – marry again.”

  “Catherine!”

  “You must. Marriage is such fun, and you’re not like Jerome. You’re made to be a husband.”

  “Catherine! Dear Catherine!”

  “Oh, not yet. Not for a long while, I hope. But just bear it in mind.” Another gay, little girl’s smile. “I’m going to get over this and I’m going to keep on leading you a hard life. Besides all that, the pictures I’ve still got to paint! They’re all inside me, and one of them feels like Sally did the first time I felt her kick. I’m going to make you proud of me yet, George. You wait and see. When this is over I’ll paint and paint. The Sherbrooke Street galleries will rue the day when they said I was just a Sunday painter.”

  “Of course they will.”

  Her lips brushed my hand, her eyes were clear and serene, she gave me a final smile.

  “Now darling, go back to Sally. They’ll be coming for me any minute.”

  Her head turned away, her smile vanished, her face became inscrutable. Once again the Catherine I knew vanished into this force of hers which now was mobilized for the supreme contest. I looked at her and her face was a warning, a command, to leave her. I left her almost annihilated.

  CHAPTER VI

  It stopped snowing an hour before they wheeled her back from the operating room. Before they were done with her, the day itself was done and night was here. Sally and I stared out the windows and saw the whole of Montreal shimmering with the exceptional clarity of a northern city after dark on a day when a snowstorm has cleansed the air. The whole world was white and clean with a skier’s snow.
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br />   Alan Royce had joined us, entering the sunroom looking shaggy and huge in his poncho and heavy snow boots, and now he and Sally were talking behind a potted palm. This trouble had brought them closer together than ordinary young love-making would ever have done. I studied Alan’s profile: a somewhat snubbed nose but a good jaw, a firm mouth and I liked the wrinkles around his eyes. He said something that made her laugh in spite of her fear and misery. He said something else. He seemed much older than me, she seemed much closer to him than to me. She was going to be his wife, but my wife – I looked up and was aware of Jack Christopher in the doorway with Dr. Andrews behind him, and I rose to meet them on dead legs.

  The surgeon motioned me down again; motioned Sally down as she also rose to meet the news. I saw the surgeon’s gown stained with sweat and I saw his face and I thought that a general’s face might look like this after a hard battle.

  “Well,” he began, and gave me a succinct, professional summary of the operation.

  It sounded terrible. It had been an embolism in the intestines just as they had suspected, and they could not understand why a temperature had been so late in showing. I sensed a tension between the doctors. The surgeon, as I knew, had desired to operate sooner. The physician had forbidden the operation until a temperature showed. Catherine would have been in better shape if the operation had been performed two days ago, and Jack looked wretched. Anyway it was done now, and Dr. Andrews had removed two and a half feet of her small intestine. He said he would have removed another foot if he had believed her capable of surviving it.