Each Man's Son

by Hugh Maclennan

  “It is not so bad as you think it is,” she said.

  She forced herself to look away from him. For four years she had been alone except for Alan; it made her afraid of the look in his eyes. She still knew little about him. It was believed that he had run away from France to escape military service. It was an explanation which satisfied those who could think of no other reason why a young Frenchman should have been sailing under the Italian flag and then elected not to return with his mates from the wrecked ship. Whenever Mollie asked him about France his voice became wistful. His father had a business in an ancient town in the south of France, he said. Some day he might go back to it. He said he was a socialist and that a great revolution was coming. For a time he had tried to advance himself in the local of the union, but he got nowhere with the men, who were friendly enough to him personally while they dismissed him as a foreigner who talked too much. To Mollie he talked about many things she could not understand, and he wanted to talk about other things she understood only too well. That was why she was half afraid of him. She knew he wanted to be her lover and she knew he was even more lonely than she was herself. On an evening like this she tried not to think about the feeling he gave her.

  “’Ow is the boy?” he asked.

  “Oh, we had such a lovely afternoon on the shore! He is asleep now. At least I hope he is.” Her expression changed. “Louis, something is the matter with your eyes! They’re all red.”

  He shrugged. “Coal smoke is not an ointment for ophthalmia.”

  “You ought to see Dr. Ainslie.”

  “I would have to be very sick before I see ’im.”

  “But Dr. Ainslie would help you. He is the best doctor in the whole town.”

  “Me, I think ’e is a son of a bitch.”

  “If you would know him,” Mollie went on eagerly, “you would not think so. He is the kindest man. Alan goes to play by the brook near his house and the doctor lets him. Whenever Mrs. Ainslie sees him she always speaks to him.” As Camire made no comment she added, “Mrs. Ainslie is very fond of children, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  Camire rolled a cigarette, twisted the end, lifted his foot and scratched a match on the sole of his pointed tan shoe. He spoke through a puff of tobacco smoke, his eyes squinting as some of the smoke got into them and irritated their already smarting membranes.

  “This wife of the docteur,” he said, “she is another thing. She ’as a figure like a statue before the Hôtel de Ville in my town.” He made generous curving movements with his hands. “But what does she do with a figure like that, eh? Not one damn thing. No children. Name of God! Or maybe it is the docteur that is no good.”

  Mollie broke into a soft musical laugh. She knew it was only his way, to talk like this.

  “There is nothing the matter with Mrs. Ainslie,” she said. “Or with the doctor, either. Everybody knows they have had bad luck.”

  He pointed his cigarette at her. “According to you, there is nothing the matter with anybody. You like them all. When some woman ’as a baby, you go in to wash her dishes for her.” The cigarette kept jerking towards her to emphasize his points. “That docteur! Sometimes ’e says good-morning. So that makes ’im a lovely man.” Again the cigarette jerked. “That is why you are always the underdog.”

  She wanted Camire to be happy, and she wanted him to like her and to understand that people here were kind no matter what people were like in France.

  “No, Louis–the doctor is a special man. He knows more than we do and he works so hard he sometimes goes two or three whole days without even sleeping.”

  Camire shrugged his shoulders. She could not understand why he made things so hard for himself and it troubled her.

  “This docteur,” he said, “’e talks to people like dirt.”

  “He’s just tired, and everybody knows he has no patience with nonsense.”

  “’E thinks ’e is better than everybody else. Does ’e say Mister Camire? Does ’e say Mister MacDonald? No. But who pays ’im? The workers pay ’im. Every month thirty cents comes off their pay for that fine ’ouse ’e lives in. You are the bosses, but every time ’e comes along, what ’appens? You take off your caps and thank ’im for doing what you pay ’im for.” Camire kicked a pebble with his pointed shoe. “Let me tell you something. There is no future in being the underdog.”

  She put her hand on his arm to quiet his excitement. “But, Louis, nobody here is an underdog.”

  “No?” He looked at her with a scorn she knew was not for herself but for the ideas she held. He pointed to the hideous mass of the bankhead towering up to the sky on his right. “Who owns that?”

  “The company owns it, of course.”

  “And ’ow much money would the company make if you did not let yourselves be underdogs? This is Saturday night. At MacDonald’s Corner there will soon be at least fifty men fighting each other. Do they fight the company? No, they fight with their fists against each other, every Saturday night, for the sport.”

  “But nobody wants another strike. Four years ago there was a terrible strike. And the men like fighting. It makes them feel better to show each other what they can do.”

  His short silence made her hope that he might be trying to understand her point, but when he spoke again she sighed.

  “You admire this docteur,” he said, “because you think the education is a fine thing, and ’e ’as maybe just a little bit of education. At the same time you admire that salaud Red Willie MacIsaac because le bon Dieu gave ’im a body ten times too big for the brain of the mouse that ’e ’as in ’is ’ead. You–”

  “But nobody admires Red Willie!” She was laughing at him.

  “So you stay the underdogs. Because you think it is better to be Scottish than to ’ave some sense. You think it is better to ’ave the big fist than to ’ave the big brain.”

  She pressed his arm with her fingers. “Louis, you don’t understand. Everybody admires Dr. Ainslie because he has a very big brain. The men know he likes them even when he scolds them. They know he wants them to improve.”

  He looked at her with exasperation. Then his eyes softened and he drew closer to her, folded her hand under his arm and stopped talking. They stood quietly for several minutes waiting for the tram, but the long slope down to the bridge remained empty and there was no sound of wheels grinding in the distance.

  “When I made shipwreck,” he said more quietly, “I said to myself, so–this is a new country and I am sick of waiting for the revolution to change things at ’ome. I will stay ’ere. So I stay, and what the ’ell do I find? I find it is older than France. There is no organization. Labor in France–that is something. It ’as organization. But ’ere you do not even know the most necessary thing. The men who run the world, they are sons of bitches, and you do not know that.” Then he smiled at her and his eyes were liquid. “But you are ’ere, too, and you are something else. Me, I am the one man in this place that knows what you could be.”

  She knew it was better to smile than to say anything. The loneliness in his eyes was so great she wanted to stroke his forehead to take the look away.

  Three

  SUNSETS were always lovely in the grounds of the big red house on the other side of the bridge where the doctor lived. The afterglow filtered through white birches and the light westerly air was fresh with balsam; it had reached the doctor’s house from the hinterland of the island without crossing a single colliery on the way. Shadows of trees lay in a net over the white gravel of the drive leading to the main road. The grassy intervale on the east side of the house was brimming with darkness and soft with the sound of a brook. The water bubbled around a tree-lined curve at the bottom of the intervale, ran true for seventy yards, turned again under the bridge and disappeared. It was hard to believe, in the grounds of the doctor’s house, that the beginning of the miners’ row was less than a quarter of a mile away.

  While Mollie had been preparing to leave her house, the doctor’s wife had already gone out of hers and now wa
s standing on a patch of lawn on the south side, surveying her roses. Margaret Ainslie was a tall woman, almost statuesque, with a singer’s chest, a narrow waist and splendid curving hips. Her skin was creamy and her hair a rich chestnut. Her lips were full and soft, but that Margaret herself was not soft was apparent from the line of her chin. For all the oval grace of its curve, her chin was a strong and stubborn one. Fine lines about her eyes showed how often she laughed, and the lift at the corners of her mouth revealed her essential optimism.

  When she bent over the rose bed to cut some flowers, her movements had the decisive simplicity of a woman who has always known what she wanted. Tonight she wanted two red roses and a white one and she was frustrated by the illogicality of nature. Her red roses had bloomed ten days before her whites, and now her fine Frau Karl Drueschkes, more creamy white than the skin of her own shoulders, were virtually wasted. One white rose with two or three reds was magnificent; a white rose alone looked drab. But the Frau Karls were now opening and there were no other roses ready to be cut, so she snipped two of the white roses and took them into the house.

  In the kitchen she put them in a blue Delft vase and started towards her husband’s office. Coming out into the hall with the vase in her hand, she saw the surgery door open and the library door closed. This meant that Daniel Ainslie had finished reading the article in the British Medical Journal and had shut himself up in the library to study Greek. Margaret’s face took on the strangely serene expression it always showed when she was annoyed or frustrated. She had scarcely seen her husband all week and now she knew it would be at least three hours before she saw him again.

  She sighed and entered the surgery. It was a grim room, but one she respected, for she had some notion of the quality of the work that was done in it. Its walls were brown and two of them were lined with bottle-crowded shelves. Most of the bottles contained drugs and medicines, for in Broughton there was no central dispensary and the various colliery physicians dispensed the drugs they prescribed. Behind a white screen in one corner were the burners and scales and test tubes of a small laboratory. On other shelves was a sinister array of bottles containing anatomical specimens from Ainslie’s numerous autopsies–sections of diseased livers and kidneys, of arthritic bones, of a rheumatic heart, an appendix or two, tonsils and various other organs which Margaret could identify only by inspecting the labels. Beneath the shelves of drugs was a black leather couch with a white sheet folded neatly at its head, on which thousands of patients had stretched out for examination.

  Margaret went to her husband’s desk and tidied it, looked at his engagement pad and saw that it was clear for tonight and reflected ruefully that in his practice a clear pad meant nothing. Saturday night was always busy, though there was generally a lull between dinner and eleven o’clock, when the first petty casualties from the brawls in Broughton appeared at the surgery door with hangdog faces, black eyes and broken noses.

  She set the two white roses on his desk and was about to leave the room when the telephone rang. She picked up the receiver and spoke into the telephone and as she listened her eyes fell on the three photographs which had hung on the wall over this desk all the ten years of their life together. One was Lord Lister, another was Sir William Osler, and the third was Ainslie’s chief and her own dear friend, old Dr. Dougald MacKenzie, the chief surgeon in the Broughton Hospital.

  “All right, Miss MacKay,” she said into the phone. “I’ll tell the doctor right away.”

  She hung up the receiver and left the room, and now the serenity had left her face because she was sorry for her husband. During the past three nights he had slept no more than a total of eleven hours, not counting the hour or two he might have dozed in his carriage. This morning he had performed five operations and then he had made his calls and seen patients in his surgery all afternoon.

  She opened the library door and saw Daniel’s head turned sideways as he looked up a word in the huge Greek lexicon on the left side of his desk. She hated that volume as a woman hates her husband’s mistress. She feared it because it stood for something in his nature she could never touch. Why a brilliant doctor who worked as he did should feel impelled to become a master of Greek she had never been able to understand, especially as nobody else in town except Dr. Dougald and the minister could read a line of the language.

  “Dan, I’m sorry, but Miss MacKay just called. It’s the wife of the new manager at Number Six.”

  “Oh!” But he did not turn around. He shifted his head from the lexicon to the text and made a note in the margin.

  “I told Miss MacKay you’d go in right away.”

  “All right.” Still he did not move.

  “Dan–will you be all night?”

  “Probably. It’s her first and she’s got a bad heart.”

  “Then I might as well spend the night at Mother’s. But I do wish you didn’t have to go.”

  He was still bending over his Greek, squeezing the last moment from it, when she left the room and went upstairs. When she came down again she found him moving about in the surgery. She sat on the black sofa and waited while he packed his worn doctor’s bag.

  “If it weren’t for that woman,” he said, “I could have got through at least a hundred and fifty lines tonight. I set myself the whole of the Odyssey for this year and it’s June already and I’ve only done five books so far.”

  Margaret tried to laugh. “Dan, for goodness’ sake–what you need is a rest, not more Greek. Why don’t you call in a locum and take a trip somewhere? You haven’t been away for six years.”

  “What’s the use? Unless I put at least two thousand miles between me and this practice, I’d be called back in less than a week.”

  She knew he was keeping his emotional distance from her. They had quarreled far too much lately, Margaret thought, and she knew now–had known it clearly since talking with Dr. Dougald last Thursday–that much of the misunderstanding had been her own fault. Now more than anything else she wanted him to stay home and after a while go upstairs with her where they could lie warmly in bed together like other people and she could show him how much she loved him. But he was tired so much of the time and his hours were so irregular. Beyond that, he had never been an easy man to love. There seemed to be a diamond in him in place of a heart.

  Yet as she followed his movements as he went between instrument cabinet and his brown leather bag, she knew her judgment was wrong. It was only his surface that was hard; inside was a hungry tenderness which she seemed powerless to answer. Inside Dan Ainslie was a humility so basic and profound it frightened her. No matter how good his work might be, she knew it would never be good enough to satisfy him. Not once had it occurred to him how strong was his own personality; how much men and women were moved to try to earn his approval. In his own eyes he was always falling short of an ideal she had never seen clearly enough to understand. He grumbled about the stupidity of others and wounded nearly everyone by his surface rudeness, and of course it never occurred to those he hurt that this was one of his ways of finding fault with himself.

  Margaret smiled, but he was too engrossed to notice her change of expression. If it were not for his work, she thought, he would be intolerable. He was one of those rare doctors who invariably seem able to take a patient’s ills upon themselves. She knew this and she reverenced the devotion which made him exhaust himself. There had been innumerable nights when she lay awake upstairs and heard his feet pacing the floor, back and forth from the surgery to the hall, the library, the dining room, while she had lain helplessly alone in bed knowing that he was doing more than ponder a case. He was trying to be his patient, to find a way to convince him that he would not die.

  As he bent over his desk to make a note on his pad, a lock of hair fell over his forehead and he brushed it back with a gesture unnecessarily quick and impatient. He had soft black hair which he was ashamed of because his father, whom he had both feared and revered, had been a burly, red-haired Highlander. The dark hair came from the ra
rely mentioned mother who had died when Daniel was ten. His lithe physique came from her, too, and his large, dark eyes which tonight looked like those of an animal who has been chased for miles and knows he has still farther to run.

  With an abrupt movement he straightened his shoulders and clenched his fingers on the handles of his bag. “All right,” he said. “Are you ready? I didn’t take the harness off the mare. I knew something like this would happen. All I have to do is back her into the shafts.”

  They went out together, the surgery door clicked behind them, and while Ainslie prepared the carriage Margaret stood on the white gravel drive and looked up at the sky. Colored clouds, darkening fast, were sailing seaward over the treetops and the sound of the brook was as soft as sleep. It was an hour of day that always made her feel lonely, and the persistent wish for children filled her once again. When Ainslie led the horse by the bridle to the door, she stepped into the carriage and they drove out to the main road, turned left, passed over the bridge and settled back against the seat while the mare plodded up the steep slope in front of the miners’ row. They passed the women on the steps and Angus the Barraman still sitting half-naked with the suds on his face. Gaunt against the darker sky of the east, but rose-colored in the lingering light of sunset, the bankhead of the colliery rose before them. They neared the corner with Ainslie silent and absorbed, and it was Margaret who saw the waiflike figure of Mollie MacNeil standing under the lamppost waiting for the tram. Camire, on seeing the approaching carriage, had drawn away from her, and Mollie seemed to be alone.

  “Let’s stop and drive her into town,” Margaret said.

  Without looking up, Ainslie said out of his thoughts, “Drive who into town?”

  “Mollie MacNeil. She’s such a nice girl and she’s having such a hard time.”

  “What else did she expect when she married that black-guard?”