Two Solitudes

by Hugh Maclennan

  Emilie found work in a small restaurant at the east end of Sainte-Catherine Street, and it was there she happened to meet Marius. An order had been given to her in English. She understood nothing of what was said, and Marius had interpreted for her when he saw her confusion. When the man who had ordered in English had gone, Marius made a date to meet her when she was finished working that evening.

  At first she had been careful and suspicious of him, but he had not even tried to kiss her. After that she had trusted him. She treasured her virginity with all the tenacity of a poor girl who knows it is her only asset and never forgets that it can be lost only once. Saying little when they were together, listening closely and trying to understand him, she had gradually learned to know him better than he dreamed. It was only when he talked about his father that he frightened her. It seemed a terrible thing for a man to hate his own parents, no matter what they were. Marius said his father was a member of parliament, but Emilie’s ignorance of such matters kept her from seeing what difference that could make.

  He was still talking about himself when they reached the building where she lived. It was a drab, three-story structure with a row of one-room shops on the ground floor. The windows at the back overlooked an ash-covered square lined with billboards. Lord Kitchener beckoned from one of them, saying in English: i want you. Beside him a man with a sad expression asked: avez-vous aussi de la peau morte?

  In the shadow of the dark doorway Marius was gesturing with impatience. “…and then they boast about how cheap we work for them.”

  Emilie was sure he was wrong, and she wanted to shield him from his own mistakes, but she had no words to explain what she meant. “But the factories give P’pa a job, don’t they?” she tried. “We’d have starved for sure. P’pa says his foreman is French, too, and…”

  “Sure the foreman is French,” Marius interrupted. “They use some of us for cheap labour and then they use some more of us for cushions to fall back on.”

  “Well, I don’t know. The English boss spoke to P’pa once last week. He said he was all right.”

  “And how much did that cost him? He didn’t ask where your father lives, did he? And your father doesn’t ask where the boss lives, either.”

  “I don’t know what you’re so excited about. We live all right. And pretty soon we’ll live better. Maybe we’ll buy another farm.”

  Emilie’s stupidity hurt Marius, but it also proved where his own future lay. There were so many of his people who couldn’t understand what was obvious to him. Plenty of English-and French-Canadians worked together in stores and in factories and got on with each other. He didn’t like it; he would teach his people to hate the English the way he hated them. The fact that he knew no English-Canadians well except his stepmother didn’t enter his thoughts.

  Emilie was standing silently beside him in the dark doorway, so he drew her close and kissed her. She turned her lips to his, and he passed his hands quickly down the curve of her hips, then around her waist as he strained her close. After a moment she put her arms about his neck. He felt her short, peasant’s body press his own firmly. She was very strong. Suddenly he grew hungry for her, and feeling the surge pass through him he kissed her desperately, then abruptly let her go.

  “Good-night, Emilie,” he said. “I’ll see you in a day or so.”

  He turned and without looking back he went along the way he had come. Alone in the dingy street, a sense of relief and exhilaration came over him. He looked up at the sky. The moon was entering its last quarter, surging through a wrack of cirrus cloud high above the dark roofs. Even in the city the spring air was sweet. He found himself remembering Saint-Marc as it looked from the ridge behind the parish on such a night as this.

  He stopped at the corner to wait for a tram. And then he saw the soldier who had been at the meeting. The man had followed him, and now he was waiting. Marius looked the other way, but the fellow came and stood close beside him. He took a quick glance up and down the street, but there was no one in sight within a couple of blocks. An arc lamp overhead made a bluish splash of light on the pavement, and across the street another lamp brought out the stripes on a barber’s pole.

  The soldier edged in against him. “Listen, you goddam peasoup, you’re too fast with your mouth. Sure, I followed you. Somebody’s got to shut that trap of yours.”

  Marius was trembling. He had no defense against physical violence. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said in English.

  “No? Well, I’ll tell you.” The soldier came closer, taking his time. The smell of stale whiskey was on his breath. “I been over in France. See? There’s a war on there. And a lot of French guys from right here was in my outfit. They’re doing a job. And back home bastards like you kick them in the ass. Yellow sons of bitches like you stay here and shoot their mouths off.”

  Marius turned and looked at the soldier’s face. Everything he most hated about the English was in it. He saw hardness and coldness, a supreme ability to outrage others, a way of forcing themselves on more sensitive people, but never letting themselves be touched in the process.

  “Why don’t you run?” the soldier said. “You’re so yellow you look green.”

  Once Marius had seen a lumberjack just out of the woods handle a man in Saint-Marc who was drunk on whiskey blanc. He drove out with his foot now the way the lumberjack had done and caught the soldier on the shin. The man hopped back, lifting his leg to ease the pain. Before he could shout Marius hit him and the soldier went down. Marius fell on him, his knees taking the man in the face. He heard the soldier’s front teeth crack and his skull snap on the sidewalk. He got up and stared at the limp body. A little splutter of blood started out of the soldier’s mouth. Marius began to tremble violently, afraid he had killed the man. He looked quickly up and down the street, saw a figure moving toward them about two blocks away, then bent and placed his ear against the soldier’s chest. The man stirred and tried to grip his neck with his arm, but Marius broke loose and got to his feet again.

  He stood panting, his black hair over his eyes and his felt hat on the pavement a few yards away where it had fallen. The soldier was stirring like a knocked-out boxer trying to grope his way to his feet. Slowly he sat up, his mouth open and red with blood, bracing himself with his hands.

  Marius watched him for a moment, then he picked up his hat and walked quickly away. The sight of the man’s bleeding mouth, the sound of the cracking teeth, blazed and roared in his mind until he could see and hear nothing else. He looked back at the first intersection. The soldier was on his feet, swaying unsteadily, and a policeman was asking him questions.

  Marius turned quickly to his left and began to run. He kept on running for three blocks, his hat in his hand, the echo of his pounding feet banging back at him from the house-fronts. Suddenly he darted into an alley and then he stopped, doubled over and gasping until the wind returned to his lungs and he was able to walk again. He put on his hat, adjusted his coat, turned up his collar and pulled his hat down over his eyes. Under his coat his shirt was wet against his back. He put his hands in his pockets and began to walk west until he reached Saint-Denis Street. Here under the brighter lights he was no longer alone. A few drunks and loafers and late workers were still around, and a prostitute accosted him as he passed her. He boarded a tram and took a seat in the middle, alone in the long car with the wicker seats yellow as straw in the light.

  He felt wonderful. He felt as if he had broken all the chains that had held him all his life. His chest swelled under his coat as he filled it with more and more air, and a smile appeared on his mouth, cutting deep wrinkles on either side of it as his thoughts rolled. After tonight they would certainly try to get him. They might even print in the English papers that he was a wanted man. But no one would get him. Now or any other time. He would go to his lodgings and pack his bag and disappear. Montreal was a great city and there were many places to hide. It would have been better if he had found the money two weeks ago in Saint-Marc. But he would
still be all right. There were plenty of people ready to help him, to help anyone who was determined to keep out of the army in order to defy the English and assert his rights as a French-Canadian. And he would be doing even more than that. He was saving himself for his career, a career that he knew now would be a crusade.

  SEVEN

  Paul had thought the winter would never end, but at last it was over and now the season of break-up called spring in Quebec was with them. Farmers were sitting in their kitchens under their holy pictures waiting anxiously for the land to dry out. Geese were flying north, and wind rushed fiercely over everything. Sometimes it woke him up in the middle of the night as it rattled the bare branches of the old maple tree against his window.

  Spring was a bad time of the year. It was when they had chosen to crucify Christ. All the symbols of Holy Week were still fresh in his mind, the nails and the hammer, the ladder and the sponge, the images of the saints veiled in the church, the darkness that had covered the earth. He tried to remember autumn. That was the time he liked best. In the autumn pools of water turned sections of the sky upside down and held them fast in a mirror, while crimson maple leaves circled silently down from trees and struck the water and floated there, sending a quick shimmer of scarlet across the dust of silver bubbles thick on the bottom. Twice last autumn, on silent nights with a full moon, he had heard miles away the cough of a rutting moose.

  But it wasn’t autumn now. It was spring. Paul walked slowly along the road this Saturday morning on his way to get the mail. As he passed each field he looked at it carefully and saw how the land was emerging out of the snow like a living thing. The lower fields were brown and wet, and crows pecked and brooded in the old furrows. And above the wet flat land the whole sky was in turbulent motion. A north wind rushed through watery sunshine and made the shredded, driving clouds look like torn laundry blowing loose across the sky.

  On the river side of the road he passed an old disused stone mill. It had a cone-shaped wooden roof and a wheel that no longer turned. Swallows built their nests in it, and on summer evenings they swooped in and out of the crevices. Once it had belonged to his family, long before he was born, and all the farmers of the neighbourhood had been compelled to grind their grain in it. Eighty years ago, up on the ridge behind the parish, his great-grandfather had marshalled his company of men among the maples. The English in their red coats had formed up in the village before the old church and tried to capture the ridge. Then his great-grandfather had stood up and waved his hat and ordered his men to fire. One by one the advancing English soldiers had begun to drop until the whole line had been forced to retire. There was a book in his father’s library telling all about the battle.

  Now there were magazines in the library telling about the present war, and there was Captain Yardley whose leg had been blown off at sea only three years ago. He was part of this war. In Saint-Marc there were no marching men, no recruiting posters, no bands. But the war was there just the same, or at least just over the horizon. Paul’s father subscribed for lots of illustrated papers in both English and French, and Paul was allowed to read them and look at the pictures. He knew what Trafalgar Square and the Arc de Triomphe were like, but he was never sure how far they were from each other. Because of these papers France and England seemed much more important than his own country. Because of them, too, his mind was filled with war-images night and day: the Invincible blowing up at Jutland, and after the explosion only six sailors surviving on a single raft, cheering the other ships as they stormed past; the French army huddled behind barbed wire at Verdun under the rain; Canadians bayoneting Germans in bright moonlight in Sanctuary Wood.

  Paul was still thinking about it when he reached Polycarpe Drouin’s store. For some time the post-office had been here, too, and now it had the added interest of a single gasoline pump before the door. Cars had become fairly numerous on the road, and a number of English-speaking men stopped each day for gasoline or tobacco. Lately Drouin had put up signs which he felt would help the public to understand better what he sold. In raised white letters on one window were the words Épiceries and Groceries; on the other Magasin Général and General Store. Two letters of Épiceries had fallen off the week after Polycarpe put them up, and he had not yet got around to replacing them. The rest of the store front looked like the backs of popular magazines. Every brand of tobacco and soft drink sold in the province was represented by coloured tin plates nailed on the wooden frame of the store window, each one designed in the hope of taking the eye away from all the others.

  A year ago Drouin had introduced another decoration for the storefront, a small bracket over the door holding three faded flags. One was the Red Ensign of the British Mercantile Marine with a Canadian crest in the corner. Another was a square white cross on an azure field with a fleur-de-lis in each corner which had come to be accepted as the flag of Quebec. The third and middle one was the white and yellow ensign of the Pope.

  Paul entered the store, and when his eyes had accustomed themselves to the darkness inside, he saw Drouin doubled forward over the counter like a jack-knife, with his pointed chin on his hands. Frenette, the blacksmith, was sitting on the counter and Ovide Bissonette was chewing tobacco as he sat on a table piled with overalls, his feet dangling over the side. Without a word Drouin reached to a shelf behind his head for Mr. Tallard’s mail. He passed over three letters and two bulky newspapers, and Paul put the letters in the pocket of his jacket and folded the papers under his arm. The other men recognized this regular morning event as a proof of Mr. Tallard’s importance. None of them ever received mail unless an absent relative became sick or died.

  “P’pa wants a pound of tobacco, too,” Paul said. “You know the kind.”

  Drouin took a red tin of Hudson’s Bay Imperial Mixture from a confusion of other tobacco tins and pushed it across the counter. His thin face took on a look of shrewdness, drawing it even thinner. His long hooked nose hung like a tap over his lips, and except when he smiled he looked like an undertaker. When he smiled his face broke into a maze of kindly wrinkles.

  “That means your Pa must’ve got back from Ottawa last night,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I bet he must have a lot on his mind.”

  Paul had nothing to say to this. Drouin shook his head again. “Your Pa smokes too much. He wants to look out for the ulcers.”

  Paul’s eyes, dark brown and wide-set, were unusually earnest. “What are they?”

  “You get them from smoking too much. An uncle of mine, he smoked like a stove, all the time his pipe, and he got them. He died last year.” Drouin shook his head and leaned forward on his elbows again and became silent.

  The other men in the store were also quiet. They knew each other too well to feel that talk was necessary. The principal news was the weather, but they had finished discussing that. Paul drifted away from the counter and tried to peer beyond some food advertisements in the window to see if Captain Yardley was coming. He had promised to meet him at the store this morning. There was no sign of the captain so he turned back. He always liked it here. He liked the smell of raw, useful merchandise mingled with the strong odour of tobacco burning in old pipes. He liked looking at the bags of feed and the farm tools and listening to the monosyllables as the men talked.

  Frenette was built like a hogshead. He was wearing an old pair of overalls and heavy farm boots. He lurched away from the end of the counter and moved toward the boy. His huge hand, thick with bone and black with hair, tapped the papers under Paul’s arm. A grin opened his wide face. “What’s the news today, Paul?”

  He took the papers from under the boy’s arm and spread them out on the counter. The English paper he pushed aside, but he followed the headlines of La Presse with his forefinger, pronouncing each word aloud. “Bad, eh?” he said. “You see this? The English, they put everyone in the army and still they lose the war.”

  He handed the papers back to Paul and the boy folded them and replaced them under his arm. The
door opened and two more men came in. One was a farmer from the upper end of the parish, the other a hired man from the farm beyond Yardley’s. They were both lean, with earth-coloured faces and drooping moustaches and sun-squinted eyes. Nods were exchanged as they slumped into comfortable positions against the counter.

  “The weather, she’s a bastard for sure,” said one of them.

  Drouin took two plugs of Master Mason and tossed them onto the counter. Each of the newcomers extracted a ten-cent coin from a pocket, dropped it on the counter, picked up a plug, bit off a chew and slipped the plug into another pocket. Their actions were automatic and almost in unison.

  “Three pounds of sugar,” the farmer said.

  Drouin set a pan on the scale and began scooping out sugar from a large white bag behind the counter while the farmer kept his eyes carefully on the scale, making sure that Drouin’s finger did not lie on it while he calculated the weight. The sugar was poured into a paper bag and passed over the counter. The farmer paid for it and let it lie there.

  “You hear the news from Sainte-Justine?” the hired man said.

  Drouin shook his head slowly and Frenette lifted his chin to show he was listening. Bissonette gave no sign of interest.

  “Some soldiers came in there last night. They walked around the town, trying to get people talking. Then they started throwing some liquor around. Then, round about midnight it was, they went up to Etienne Laflamme’s place and took Napoléon–that’s Etienne’s oldest boy–right out of his bed.”