Two Solitudes

by Hugh Maclennan

  “I suppose you came out here,” Athanase said, “because it was near your daughter?”

  “It don’t even make thet much sense.” Yardley took the pipe from his mouth and held the bowl against the breeze. “Listen, Mr. Tallard, you may think this sounds foolish, but for a long time I’ve wanted to live in Saint-Marc. It wasn’t sensible, but I did.”

  “Saint-Marc? How could you ever have heard of the place?”

  “Well, it was like this. Thirty-five years ago I was at sea with a fellow from here. He talked about the place so much I…well, I got a picture of it in my mind that stuck. When things got so I couldn’t stand it any more in Montreal, I thought maybe Luke had come back here and I’d be able to see him again.”

  Athanase shook his head. “But nobody from this parish has ever gone to sea.”

  “You never heard of Luke Bergeron?”

  “The graveyard is full of Bergerons. Luc, you said. There was a wild Bergeron once. A long time ago. He disappeared.” He stared at the captain. “You mean you knew him?”

  “Certainly did. French Luke, we called him. After a run of two hundred and eighty-seven days out of Halifax once, we found ourselves on the beach in Saigon, Luke and me and the blackest nigger thet ever came out of Barbados–and thet’s an awful black man, Mr. Tallard. Back in 1877, thet was. I was quartermaster then, and Luke was the bosun, and the nigger, he was the cook. Man, were we glad to set foot off thet ship.”

  Paul had returned and stood staring at Yardley with his dark eyes very round, his lips parted and his two buck teeth showing white.

  “I been alone so much, I talk an awful lot. I noticed thet in Montreal. I’d get talking, and I’d keep on, and when I stopped nobody would say anything. They were smart people, I guess. But living in Montreal they never got to see very much, and they never believed very much either.”

  Athanase smiled and looked at Paul. The boy leaned against the porch and kept his eyes on the captain.

  “Well, anyhow,” Yardley went on, “when Luke stepped onto the dock in Saigon he was a mighty surprised man, because outside the coolies all the white men talked French. He liked thet. And then one night ashore some of those Frenchmen started riding Luke on the kind of French he talked. They said it was something awful to have to listen to–the same way the Limeys used to make fun of the way I talk–and Luke got sorer and sorer, and then he lit into them. He was a mighty good man with his hands and he could use his feet like a lumberjack, but there was too many of those Frenchmen, and me and Luke and the nigger, we got beat up so bad we couldn’t lift ourselves off the floor when the cops came in. So they put us in the jailhouse. The ship sailed without us, and when we got out of jail we were on the beach. So we signed on a French craft running the China Seas, and we stuck her for four years. This time Luke was the first mate and I was the second, and the nigger, this time he was the bosun. Thet was how I learned to speak French.”

  Athanase’s laugh rang out and even Paul laughed, but Yardley kept his face straight and watched them both. “Those four years out East, Luke was a terrible lonesome man,” he said. “He never got any word out of here.”

  “If he came from those Bergerons up in the hills,” Athanase said, still smiling, “it’s easy enough to understand. None of them could ever read or write.”

  “Luke couldn’t either.” Yardley took out his handkerchief and blew his nose and the noise was so loud he apologized. “Funny thing, me thinking there was a chance of finding him again. But Saint-Marc’s all right anyhow. I wanted a farm some place. When McQueen said he knew you and said where you lived, and I remembered Luke, it all seemed to add up right.”

  A silence fell between them and Yardley puffed steadily at his pipe, his eyes looking across the fields and the river road to the water. The Saint Lawrence was the colour of dull steel under a cloudy sky.

  Athanase tapped the edge of the porch with his stick. “I’d like to do anything I can for you, Captain. I wish I were here more often and in Ottawa less.” He rose and looked about for Paul, but the boy had disappeared. Yardley got to his feet and they went back inside when Tallard said something about having left his hat.

  “It’s mighty kind of you,” Yardley said. “Come to think of it, I guess I stuck my neck out, coming to a place like this. But it’s up to me now. Trouble is, this leg of mine. The doctor told me it was the latest in artificial limbs. But man! Old Long John Silver on his wooden stump could do a better job behind a plough than I can. Lucky thing the priest fixed me up with a good man for the heavy work.”

  “Doctors!” Athanase said. “Mine tells me I have the high blood pressure. Life was peaceful before they invented that machine, and there was blood pressure.”

  Yardley pulled the two chairs before the fire and they sat on in the bare room, Paul crouched silently in front of the hearth listening while he looked at the glowing embers. The lost hat was forgotten.

  “One thing I’d like to ask you man to man, Mr. Tallard. I’m not a Roman Catholic. Does it make a hell of a lot of difference around here, not being a Catholic?”

  “Well, Captain,” Athanase said slowly, “this is just like any other parish in Quebec. The priest keeps a tight hold. Myself, I’m Catholic. But I still think the priests hold the people too tightly.” He raised his hand from the stick as it rested between his knees. “Here the Church and the people are almost one and the same thing, and the Church is more than any individual priest’s idea of it. You will never understand Quebec unless you know that. The Church, the people, and the land. Don’t expect anything else in a rural parish.”

  In the empty room the glow of the fire brought out the sharp lines of Tallard’s features. His long aquiline nose cast a shadow across one side of his face. His delicately pointed ears were set close to a high and narrow skull. From stiff grey hair, brushed straight back from the upward thrust of the forehead, his face tapered to a long, pointed chin. Had he worn a Vandyke beard he would have resembled Cardinal Richelieu. Tufted eyebrows slanted upward into his forehead. The eyes beneath them were large and brown. They twinkled easily, and when the face was in repose they were sensitive. The mouth was stubborn and ironic. In comparison, Yardley looked plain and workmanlike beside him.

  “Your priest here helped me a lot,” Yardley said.

  “Father Beaubien works too hard. He worries too much. He has an eye for the length of the girls’ dresses. He sees the devil every time a boy puts his arm around a girl when the moon is full. Right now his new church has put the parish in debt.” Again a quick gesture with his hands. “Me, I like a little pleasure in life.”

  Yardley grinned, and Athanase said, “Are you thinking of being converted?”

  “No. I wouldn’t feel safe doing a thing like thet. My old father, he whaled the Presbyterian catechism into me when I was a kid, so I’d feel mighty peculiar if I went permanent to another church.”

  Athanase laughed aloud and glanced at Paul. “Well, Captain, it will be taken for granted that you’re a heretic in Saint-Marc. You never saw the light. You can’t help yourself.” His smile faded. “But it is serious, this religion in Quebec. Me, I am allowed a little latitude. It is presumed I can think for myself, up to a point.”

  The talk drifted on, the fire burned itself out, and no one thought of time. Yardley told Athanase about his daughter, and his voice was wistful as he explained how difficult it had been for him to pick up any threads of intimacy with her after all the years he had been at sea. His wife had wanted Janet to be a fine lady, and when Yardley was given his own ship and some money began to come in, Janet had been sent to a finishing school in Montreal. It had finished her so well Yardley found it hard to realize now that she was his daughter at all. His wife had been dead for a number of years and Janet and her two girls were living with her husband’s family, the Methuens.

  Yardley described the place where they lived. It was a huge stone house on the southern slope of Mount Royal. Harvey Methuen’s family was decidedly rich, the money coming from government
bonds and stocks in breweries, distilleries, lumber, mines, factories and God knew how big a block of the Canadian Pacific. It was a large family, and every branch of it lived in stone houses with dark rooms hung with wine-red draperies, and they all had great dark paintings on their walls framed in gilded plaster. Yardley said they were so polite he never knew what was in their minds, and Janet was always nervous when he was around, afraid of what he might say next. He insisted that she meant well and still loved him, but he knew it was better for him to live some place where he could be near enough to see her and the children, but not in Montreal. His face softened as he added that maybe Janet would bring his granddaughters to Saint-Marc in the summer for a long visit. Away from the Methuens, he thought she might feel easier with him.

  Athanase shook his head up and down as Yardley talked. After a while he said, “Those Methuens are a pretty old family in Canada. I suppose that makes them set in their ways.”

  “Well, I don’t know Montreal so well. But I notice this. If a man has anything to do with brewing beer or the C.P.R., it seems he’s something like a duke is in England.”

  “He is certainly the big fish in the little puddle. We French, we watch them and smile.” He rose abruptly, looked about, found his hat, and stood with it, gesturing as he went on. “The trouble with this whole country is that it’s divided up into little puddles with big fish in each one of them. I tell you something. Ten years ago I went across the whole of Canada. I saw a lot of things. This country is so new that when you see it for the first time, all of it, and particularly the west, you feel like Columbus and you say to yourself, ‘My God, is all this ours!’ Then you make the trip back. You come across Ontario and you encounter the mind of the maiden aunt. You see the Methodists in Toronto and the Presbyterians in the best streets of Montreal and the Catholics all over Quebec, and nobody understands one damn thing except that he’s better than everyone else. The French are Frencher than France and the English are more British than England ever dared to be. And then you go to Ottawa and you see the Prime Minister with his ear on the ground and his backside hoisted in the air. And, Captain Yardley, you say God damn it!”

  Yardley blew his nose loudly and Paul got to his feet and edged around the chair beside him.

  “I don’t see why you don’t get out of parliament, Mr. Tallard,” Yardley said. “With your ideas, and with a place here like yours, I wouldn’t think you’d ever want to leave it.”

  Athanase shrugged his shoulders and moved to the door. “I’m not important to the land. I just own it. Maybe I’d get bored if I were here all the time. My manager and his men do the real work. You’ve seen Blanchard. He’s a good man.” He added thoughtfully, “Our people feel about the land the way they do in Europe, I think. It would be sentimental to say they love it, but I tell you one true thing–they look after it better than they look after themselves. They hoard it. It was a bold thing, Captain, your moving into a place like Saint-Marc. I hope you won’t regret it.”

  Yardley scratched the bristly grey hair behind his right ear. “I got the same kind of feeling myself. Man to man, Mr. Tallard, I put most of what I got into this land. I aimed to stay when I bought it. It’s good land and it suits me.”

  Athanase nodded and his lean face was charming as he smiled. “It’s going to turn out all right, Captain. No one is going to make it hard for you here. I give you my word for that. But you may find it lonely. I do myself sometimes. My wife, she finds it lonely all the time.”

  They shook hands, each conscious of a real pleasure in the discovery of the other.

  “Tell me, Captain. Do you play chess?”

  “I certainly do. I even got a set of men I picked up in India with elephants in place of bishops.”

  “I prefer bishops. After all, the movement of the piece is diagonal.” His grin was raffish. He followed Paul out the door and on to the porch and then he turned. For a moment he hesitated, and then he said, “Would you have dinner with us tonight? Madame Tallard is eager to meet you. It would make us both a very great pleasure.”

  With Yardley’s acceptance of the invitation, the man and the boy went off together the way they had come.

  That afternoon it blew cold from the northeast, the wind built itself up, toward evening the air was flecked with a scud of white specks, and then the full weight of the snow began to drive. It whipped the land, greyed it, then turned it white and continued to come down hissing invisibly after dark all night long until mid-morning of the next day. For a few days after that the river was like black ink pouring between the flat whiteness of the plains on either side. Then the frost cracked down harder, the river stilled and froze. Another blizzard came and covered the ice, and then the whole world was so white you could hardly look at it with the naked eye against the glittering sun in the mornings. The farmhouses seemed marooned and silent, and after dark the trees cracked with frost, and there were muffled sounds of animals moving in their stalls. Manure heaps grew outside the barns and stained the snow like iodine on a bandage. For months it was the same.

  FIVE

  Marius Tallard was alone in his father’s library. It was early evening and early April. He stood at the window looking at the watery sunlight pale on the sugar snow that lay flat on the plain. The poplar trees lining the drive were leafless and bare as brooms, their shadows long and very dark on the snow. Beyond the road, the river was a white expanse of rotted ice, streaked here and there with pallid yellow stains where moisture had seeped upward to the wind-crusted snow on top. An ice-breaker with a clubbed bow was hammering its way upstream to Montreal. The ship looked squat and tiny in the flat distance, but its power crashed far ahead of it. As it piled itself up on the ice and broke it, shuddering cracks ran miles ahead through the ice. The smoke from its funnel lay in a long scarf behind, veiling the opened channel.

  Marius looked over the white fields that spread around the house and drew a deep breath. All that he could see was part of himself, and it made him feel important in a way he believed was mystical. Earlier in the day he had examined again the old familiar objects in the house that made it unique: the fine metal work of the chandelier in the dining room, made a hundred years ago by a local craftsman; the carved pine armoires in the upper hall, the row of pewter drinking vessels, all nearly two centuries old, lining the plate-rail above his father’s desk. Because his family had been rooted here since the settlement of the river, he fancied that the spirit of French-Canada breathed with a special purity and understanding through himself. Because ordinary people failed to sense this the moment they saw him, he held a deep, subconscious grievance against them.

  He turned from the window back into the library. In the shadows the room looked pleasantly shabby, but dignified and old; in a sense, it was noble. The dry smell of the book bindings was redolent of antiquity, like the books in the library of the seminary he had attended until three years ago in Montreal.

  He moved to his father’s desk, stood looking at it for a moment or two, then inserted his fingers under the cover and lifted. It yielded a little, but did not rise. He went to the door and opened it into the hall. Here everything was dusk. A moose head with fourteen points on the antlers loomed at him from the wall opposite the door, and above it a solid staircase with an oak banister mounted to the second floor. Marius listened for a moment without moving. There were faint noises from the kitchen at the back of the house, but upstairs no sound.

  He went back into the library and closed the door behind him. Oil lamps set on heavy marble pedestals were on the table and the mantelpiece, and one swung in a cradle secured to a stand near his father’s desk. The great hearth, its stones blackened by a century of wood smoke, looked in the half-light like a bottomless cave. The room was cold as well as dark, but he lit neither lamps nor fire.

  Marius opened a drawer in the lower part of the desk and hunted until he found a small, bent key. He unlocked the desk and lifted the top. Sitting down in his father’s swivel chair he began nervously to search through th
e papers in it. On top of everything there was a copy of the previous Saturday’s Gazette. He picked it up and glanced at the leading story. The Germans had broken through the British in their drive from St. Quentin. The British were being beaten again. He threw the paper down. What did it matter to the British? They would never admit they were beaten. They would only blame the French again, or they would find some other excuse. But maybe this time it was not going to be so easy for them to talk their way out of it. He wouldn’t be surprised if the Germans rolled the British right back into the Channel. He didn’t want Germany to win the war, but it would be a pleasure to see the British forced to admit at last that someone had beaten them.

  He went on to search through a confusion of old bills and letters, careful to note exactly where each paper lay so he could leave them as he had found them. Underneath a pile of letters he picked up a large sheet of yellow paper covered with his father’s script. He held the paper so the light from the window fell on it. The material on the page must be notes for the book he knew his father meant to write. He had been talking about it for years, but so far as Marius knew, he had never got past the talking stage. In an undertone he read to himself: “Marx is only half right when he calls religion the opium of the people. It may turn a lot of people into sheep, but it turns far too many of them into tigers. Its whole history is violent. Look at the Aztecs, Mahomet and Torquemada!”

  Marius frowned. This was not what he was looking for, but it interested him enormously. He tilted back in the swivel chair and again paused to listen. The house was still silent. He read on, passing his left hand through his long black hair. His face carried a strained, tense expression, and his hair kept falling over his narrow forehead every time he bent his head forward. His face was thin and pale, with high cheekbones underlined by shadows. His body was slender and still pliable with adolescence. His eyes were large, like his father’s, but without any humour, and as he strained to read in the bad light a sharp line formed between his brows and shot up to his forehead where a single vein was visible under the skin.