The Tin Flute

by Gabrielle Roy

  From St. Antoine Street there rose again the echo of those marching feet that were becoming a kind of secret texture in the suburb's life. The war! Jean had already mulled over the notion of it with a secret irresistible joy. Was this not the field where all his strong points would be deployed? How much talent lying fallow would now be called upon! He saw the war as a personal stroke of luck for him, his own chance to rise rapidly in the world. He saw himself turned loose in a life of changing values, with life itself changing every day and ready to lift him high on its crest in this raging sea of men. His strong, dark-skinned hands came down angrily on the stone parapet. What was he doing here? What could there be in common between him and a girl called Florentine Lacasse?

  In his mind he wanted to diminish her, and tried to remember her vulgar expressions, her clumsy gestures. At once an appealing idea occurred to him: he would spy on her arrival without showing himself. At least he'd have the fun of seeing her caught in his net.

  He crossed the street, slipped into the doorway of a store and waited, hands in pockets. He began to smile. She wouldn't come, and the whole thing would end right there. Yes, that would be the end of it, for he would stop bothering her unless she was so imprudent as to come to him now. He gave her five minutes more, and often wondered later what had possessed him to stay on under his stone shelter, watchful, nervous, but still anxious to have it over. Gradually his curiosity grew so acute that his pride began to hurt. Whv didn't she come? Didn't she care about him at all? Almost all the girls he had wanted from time to time had been responsive. Could Florentine be making a fool of him? He hated to think that he might be less attractive, less sure of pleasing, than he had thought.

  Peeking out of his shelter, he stared into the dark. Suddenly he gave a start.

  A thin form was taking shape near the rue du Couvent, running with tiny steps.

  He recognized her at once. She came toward him, doubled over against the wind, trotting, trotting, hurrying along, holding her hat on with one hand.

  In that moment, from the depths of his being, from a region almost unfamiliar to him, surged a strange, new feeling, composed of more than cool curiosity and vanity, something that softened and warmed him inexplicably, filling him with the naive emotion of an adolescent.

  Yes, really, he was feeling sorry for her, all of a sudden. A particle of pity had pierced beyond his rough curiosity. He was even a little moved to see her this way, hurrying toward him in the cold wind, against the storm. He would have liked to run to her, hold her, and help her to struggle against the wind and up the slope. Yet he drew back into the darkest corner of the doorway to watch her approach. Why had she come? Why was she so silly, so reckless and imprudent? Could she possibly imagine she was running to meet happiness, all alone in this furious night?

  Already a dull rage, at the thought she could so easily be won, was smothering compassion in him.

  Maybe she won't stop, he thought. And he waited for her to go on her way through the wind with her tiny steps, to disappear like an illusion. With the ounce of pity he still felt he hoped she would take flight.

  But the girl slowed down in front of the movie house. She paced, waiting, loitering in front of the posters, stop- ping to examine them, then moving out again in the cold light of the sign. He saw her look left and right, then stare out beyond the lighted circle.

  Well, he thought, and snapped his fingers, we'll not waste any more time on Florentine. Why should she be different from the others? I guess I can go home now. It's finished.

  Florentine had begun to stamp her feet to keep them warm, and her dark coat flew back from her knees. She beat her hands together, then stood stock-still in front of the poster windows.

  What do I mean, finished? What was there to be finished? And what was I feeling about her a minute ago? What's finished?

  A group of girls passed the doorway in which the form of the young man was barely distinguishable. A few steps from the theatre one of them called to Florentine.

  "Waitin' for somebodx : "

  Jean didn't hear the reply, but he saw Florentine hesitate, glancing around her. Apparently her friends were trying to coax her to go in with them. After a last searching look she went with the others into the big, brightly lit lobby. Jean was relieved. His arms fell to his sides, and his fists slowly unclenched. What's finished? If she hadn't come, would I ever have tried to see her again? Certainly not! In any case, he thought, that's the end of her. A little smile touched his lips and he went on his way, whistling.

  But a doubt went with him, and after a moment he realized he was not satisfied. Did she come to meet me or her little friends? he wondered. I'm no further ahead. He could see other studious evenings lost because of this unknown girl, because he would go on asking himself dozens of questions about her. Perhaps in order to get her out of his mind he needed to be sure she didn't disdain him. "Oh, who cares about that?" he said aloud, at the end of his patience.

  He had neither the desire nor the energy to go back to his studies. He felt tired, and wanted to mix with men, hear them talk, pounce on their contradictions, force them into submission and regain his certainty of superiority. To his right was the whitewashed brick facade of a little restaurant whose sign read The Two Records. He pressed the latch. Music from a nickelodeon filtered out. He stamped the snow from his feet and went inside.

  THREE

  The Two Records, like most of the joints of its kind in the neighbourhood, was not so much a restaurant as a combination cigar store and snack bar with soft drinks, and purveyor of ice cream and chewing gum. It took its name from a side activity unrelated to the restaurant: the sale of records — French and American songs whose popularity had waned in Montreal but was still high in St. Henri. As soon as you came in, you noticed records racked by the wall, and others hung on a long wire that spanned the room. Above the counter, suspended in the same way, hung all kinds of newspapers: dailies, weeklies, "illustrateds" and magazines. An occasional meal was served in the back, at small tables separated by partitions. They were rarely occupied, because The Two Records' customers preferred to eat their hot dogs or sandwiches at the counter and chat with the owner, Sam Latour.

  Of course Sam would take the trouble to go and serve an occasional stranger in the back booth, and he did it politely; but he displayed a prodigious surprise that anyone could expect him, the boss, to interrupt his conversation and walk the length of the restaurant a couple of times. If you insisted on sitting alone, the custom was to stop at the counter, wait there for your food, and take it with you into exile.

  It wasn't that Sam was grumpy or high-hat about it; but like most French-Canadians, he found serving in a restaurant distasteful, calling for a deference that went against the grain.

  Sam Latour always felt a shade humiliated when his business obliged him, for example, to leave a perfectly good argument hanging while he went back to the kitchen to warm a cup of coffee or a bowl of soup. You'd have thought he ran the place so he could chew the fat to his heart's content, as they said in the neighbourhood. He had bought the shop, it was true, with the intention of turning it into a big restaurant. But slowly he had veered toward this kind of small commerce, contented, relieved to be his own boss in a place where business jogged along peacefully and profits were never too high. A stout, jovial man with full cheeks and an easy laugh, he loved talking war and politics. He was just holding forth to four or five men half sprawled across the counter when a gust of cold air came from the doorway and Jean Lévesque appeared on the threshold.

  There was a sudden silence, then the conversation resumed, more muted this time. The Two Records, not far from the railway station and the taxi stand, and just a stone's throw from the Cartier cinema, was at the busiest part of St. Henri. A new face aroused much less curiosity there than in the little hangout on St. Ambroise. But on nights when the weather was bad, it was almost always the same people you saw gathered around the fat cast-iron stove-, a taxi-driver taking a few minutes off between trains, a
railway worker from the station, a night watchman from the switchman's cabin, a worker from the late shift. From time to time an usher from the movie house would come in on the run, splendid in his blue livery with red braid, and occasionally there would be a railway porter or messenger. A number of neighbourhood unemployed spent the whole evening there.

  These men talked a great deal about the war and particularly about conscription, which they felt was imminent. The prevalent notions of the Fifth Column and the national police pervaded these men's thoughts and left them not knowing who to trust. They stopped talking and glanced at the newcomer. Reassured by his appearance they took up their discussion again. The voices quickly grew louder and were soon at their usual pitch.

  Sam Latour stared quizzically at Jean, served him quickly, and went back behind the counter to pick up his argument:

  "That there Imaginot line, now, that Imaginot line, you just tell me what good it is, eh? If you take an' block my road on one side, an' you leave me wide open on the other, will you tell me what good your Imaginot's goin' to do? If that's all she's got to defend herself, it's my idea France is goin' to take a lickin'."

  But the man he had spoken to replied with unshakeable conviction:

  "Don't you worry, Latour. France's ready. France has the Maginot line. And if she didn't have Maginot she'd still have enough friends in the world to come and save her. There ain't a country in the world has more friends than France. And those totalitarian countries with their worst kind of monsters telling you, Tm better than you and I'll take power, I'm the leader. . . ' — no, you'll see, they're all alone, those countries like that. ..."

  He was a well-built man in taxi-driver's uniform. He seemed close to forty. But his fresh, clear complexion, his strong teeth which showed when he spoke, his eyes that sparkled with enthusiasm under the peak of his cap, and his strong, supple hands, showed that this man was in the prime of life with his strength intact, perhaps even all the ardour of his youth. He spoke loudly in a rich, sonorous voice, and he often used fine-sounding words which he mispronounced and only half understood; but he seemed to listen with lively pleasure to their resonance within his mind.

  "France," he went on, and the word came out with an almost tender intonation, "no sir, France cannot be beaten. And anyway, as long as the Maginot line holds. . . "

  "Now listen, Lacasse," Sam Latour interrupted, seeing an opening on the subject that interested him most, "just imagine I'm here and you're at war with me, big boy. Well, here I am behind my counter, okay? You can't get at me from the front, but what's to stop you goin' around and catchin' me on the flank? Now that" he went on, acting out the attack and the surprise, pointing to the breach in his defences, "that's war! Strategy. No, if you listen to me, it'll take more than the I maginot to keep the Germans out. And maybe France made a big mistake getting into that war."

  "France had no choice," said Azarius Lacasse in a more conciliating tone.

  "No, she didn't have much choice, indeed, with England pushing her from behind," interjected a young worker in overalls, who, absorbed in his newspaper, had kept out of the argument until now.

  The word England at once set a match to the dispute.

  "Hold on," said Azarius. "We mustn't take it out on Ingle-land neither. I got no love for them, but I got like a kind of respect for Ingle-land. You can't deny it, we've been just as well off under their rule as we would have been on our own. You can't blame everythin' on Ingle-land. To tell vou the truth, Ingle-land had no more choice than France in that Munich business. You saw Chamberlain with his umberella. . . " There were guffaws from the onlookers, but a peevish voice came from the back of the restaurant:

  "According to you, then, we're not in this war to help the English?"

  "I don't say that's not part of it," said Azarius. "But the main thing is to stop Germany, she's just as fierce as ever, going at Po-land that couldn't defend itself, and look at the way they chopped away at Austria and Czechoslovakia. There's more reasons than Ingle-land for going in the war. There's humanity. . . "

  A short-legged man with a weasel face approached the counter.

  "Don't tell me!" he said. "I suppose it's to save democracy again!"

  A fresh guffaw greeted this sally.

  "Yeah, democracy." Sam picked up the word. "They're still singin' the same old tune they did in the last war. What does it mean anyway, that highfalutin word?"

  "Well, I'll tell you," replied the weasel-faced man, "it's soup for the old folks, and charity, and no jobs. A third of the population on direct relief and poor devils working on the streets at thirteen cents an hour for three or four days in the springtime. That's what your democracy is."

  "It's the right to say what you think, too," said Azarius quietly.

  "Oh, yeah," shouted Sam Latour, his ruddy face lit up by derision and his potbelly shaking with laughter under his white apron. "Yeah, a big help that is nowadays. . . and he was on the point of adding, . . . when people are going hungry, but he held back, remembering just in time that among people he knew, Azarius Lacasse had been one of the hardest hit by the years of unemployment.

  His good nature getting the better of his love of mockery, he tried to change the subject. But Azarius, untroubled, went on quietly: "I tell you this war is for justice and punishment."

  An absent-minded smile, echo of the tumbling thoughts behind these words, appeared on his lips and revealed the man entirely. Not only had he stayed young in body, he had preserved a naive and incurable belief in goodness. In that moment Jean, isolated at his table and leaning over to get a look at the taxi-driver, saw the resemblance. "Florentine's father," he said to himself. And he felt a growing contempt for these working-class men, among them this hearty innocent, who thought they had a right to their own opinions about this upheaval of human forces whose very principle was beyond them.

  A murmur of disapproval around the counter had greeted the remarks of Azarius. The taxi-driver saw nothing but stern or mocking faces around him, and looked farther for support. Seeing Jean Lévesque in the back of the restaurant he called out to him:

  "Hey, what do you think, young fellow? Don't you believe it's up to the young men to go and fight? I tell you, if I was twenty again. . . "

  Jean had a secretive, disdainful smile that hardened his features.

  "What do I think?"

  He thrust his head toward the little group and then, in a calm, biting voice, went on:

  "We're saying Germany wants to destroy us. And right now in Germany a whole lot of good quiet people like us, no worse than we are, they're getting whipped into a frenzy by the same story. They're being told the others are penning them into a country that's too small, and don't want to let them live. On one side or the other somebody's being sold a bill of goods. Maybe the Germans are wrong. We don't know. All I know is, I don't want to go killing some guy that never did me any harm, and who hasn't the choice but to do what he's told. I've got nothing against that poor guy. Why should I go and stick a bayonet into him? He wants to live, just like I do. He doesn't want to die"

  The young man's insolent tone, his detachment, stunned the others. The ideas just expressed were beyond them and made no impression. In this densely populated neighbourhood they had grown used to many kinds of emotions aroused by the war, from indignation to self-interest, from violent opposition to revolt or fear. But from lack of any close acquaintance with war they could not conceive the impulse of pity behind the young man's judgement. His cold manner did the rest in turning the loafers in the shop against him. Their laughter, then, was in support of Azarius, when he said roughly:

  "Pacifist, eh?"

  "No," Levesque said calmly, amused that these men who had a mortal fear of conscription should attach so much contempt to the word "pacifist." (He knew that some of them would gladly take to the woods to escape the call-up, but would rather be labelled draft dodgers than pacifists.) "No," he said, "pacifists are heroes. They're people who sacrifice their own interests to an idea they've got int
o their heads. How many do you know? I only know profiteers. Just look, the war's been on six months, and how many people are doing well off it? Starting with the ones who got a job in the army. A buck thirty a day isn't a fortune, but it's enough to get them marching by the thousands. And the guys in munitions factories, don't you think the war suits them just fine? From one end of the scale to the other it's profit makes things run. We're all profiteers, and if you don't like that word, just so we don't hurt the war effort let's say we're all good patriots."

  He liked to sow confusion among his hearers, just as Azarius Lacasse liked to create goodwill around him.

  "But patriotism for us," he went on, "means bigger profits for the ones who stay home than for the guys that go and get their heads bashed in fighting the war. Just wait another year, there'll be a fine state of affairs in this country, and speeches to match, you'll see what those speeches will lead to."

  Azarius was pulling on his driver's gloves. Dignified, he eyed the young man from head to foot.

  "One of these days," he said, "if I come across you and I have the time, we'll talk about things a little more. In the meantime don't forget there's internment camps for people that sabotage the war effort."

  "And what about your freedom of speech?" quipped Sam Latour, laughing.

  Azarius bowed his head to hide a smile. He had his sense of humour.

  "Well, time's gettin' on," he said, ignoring Levesque, "next train'11 be in shortly."

  Around him the conversation sprang up again, tame and cautious.

  "Things going better at your place?" asked the owner.

  "Not so bad, could be worse," said Lacasse. "My daughter's still working. Just across the road from here, by the way. At the Five and Ten."

  "Oh, yes! That'd be Florentine, your oldest. She must be a big help, eh?"

  Jean caught the sound of her name, and leaned forward in his booth to get a better look at her father. He felt a mixture of curiosity and animosity toward the man. An idealist, he'll get nowhere, he thought. He imagined the family of such a dreamer: anxious, unstable.