For the past twenty years Athanase had owed Blanchard nearly half his wages. It was the farmer’s way of saving money: to be owed by someone he trusted. Nothing could persuade him to go near the notary. He had heard about a notary absconding from a parish on the other side of the river nearly twenty years before. And a bank seemed even less safe. He couldn’t believe that clever men would go to the trouble of building a bank and hiring clerks to run it unless they made a profit. And where was the profit to come from, except from the depositors? Blanchard preferred to be owed by Athanase, and he knew what was due him to the last cent.
“Well,” Athanase said, “when do you start the seeding?”
“Maybe Monday, I guess. Father Beaubien blessed the seeds last Sunday.” He looked up at the sky. “It could rain.”
They started walking back toward the house, the two men side by side and Paul and the dog slipping and stumbling through the furrows at the field’s edge.
“Do oats go up this year, Mr. Tallard?”
It was an important question and Athanase was supposed to know the answer better than the papers because he was a member of parliament. Every year he was asked such questions, and every year he told the questioners gravely what he and they had read in the newspapers or been told by someone else. “They’ll go up all right,” he said. “God help the country, though. It can’t stand these war prices!” The last statement he knew was unnecessary. Blanchard would dismiss it as a peculiarity a rich man could afford to have. Had a foreigner like Captain Yardley said it, he would have been considered contemptible. It was all right for Athanase; he was one of themselves.
“How would you like it, Joseph, if you had a piece of land of your own?” Athanase brought the words out casually. “Your oldest boy is about ripe to help you now. A man ought to have some land of his own.”
Blanchard shot a stream of tobacco juice from the corner of his mouth and it hit a stone with a loud smack. “Yeah, I guess he’s old enough, Mr. Tallard.”
“You’ve always liked that upper field. Your own house is on it. Maybe we can fix it up.”
Blanchard rubbed the back of one hand across his eyes.
Athanase affected not to notice the gesture and its cause. “There are going to be some changes in Saint-Marc, but you’d better not repeat what I say.” With the field in prospect, Athanase knew Blanchard would not even repeat the words to his wife. “I might as well see the notary and have him draw up a deed. We’ll get it fixed up within the next month.”
Blanchard made no reply and his lined, brown face continued to brood over the land. Athanase felt the communion close between his man and himself. It made the world seem worthwhile on a fine morning like this. Paul sensed that his elders had ceased talking their business. “Can I plant some seeds this year, Mr. Blanchard?” he said.
“Sure. Sure. If your P’pa says you can.”
“You promised I could have a garden of my own.”
“Sure, Paul. Radishes and lettuce. I guess you can’t go far wrong on them.”
Paul was disappointed. “I want to grow something hard.”
Blanchard turned to Athanase and gave a heavy wink. “Well, you come along to the barn. Maybe we got something else. Maybe carrots. They’ll be longer to grow.”
“Can I see the seeds now?”
“Take him along with you, Joseph,” Athanase said. “You’re the one to turn him into a farmer. I can’t.”
He watched the boy follow the lumbering gait of Blanchard across the barnyard and into the barn, the puppy frisking behind them. Then he took a deep breath of the fresh air, savouring the smell of manure mixed with the dry, balsamy odour of ten cords of spruce billets piled in the open woodshed. He decided he felt very well indeed today. Kathleen and the doctor exaggerated his blood pressure. The only thing that ever bothered his pressure was the mess in Ottawa and his incurable folly in expecting anything sensible ever to result from politics. Definitely there was no point in an able man wasting his time in parliament unless he was in the cabinet, and he felt he should have been considered for a ministry long ago. The party said he lacked administrative ability. Damn them, Athanase thought. Those men in Ottawa, particularly the English, thought you were impractical unless you were as dull and pompous as a village notary. What did they know about his ability? He could understand men’s characters; he knew how to handle them. All they knew was a succession of facts.
He went into the house and took a stick from the rack, then walked down the river road away from the village, swinging the stick as his long legs moved under him like a pair of animated dividers. When he finally reached the tributary, the toll-bridge attendant, one of the many Bergerons, came out to speak to him. Collecting thirty cents from each vehicle that crossed the bridge was about all the work he was capable of doing.
Athanase left the bridge and began to walk up a bridle path that followed the stream toward the gully. The river was in spate now, swirling high along its banks. It drove so hard it would have rolled a horse under within ten feet of the shore. He plodded upwards, stopping occasionally to rest, until he reached the place where the gully became precipitous. The falls thundered down before him, a permanent cloud of spray hanging over the cauldron where the water boiled below. The slopes were at least a hundred feet on either side at that point. They formed a deep basin where cattle pastured, and the upper slopes were farmed by the Tremblay family. Athanase tried to estimate just where the Tremblay land began. If a dam were built here, Tremblay would have to sell some of his property.
Suddenly the full force of the idea exploded in his mind. All his life he had lived here without so much as dreaming of the possibilities that lay under his own nose, while McQueen had taken a single look at the falls and had seen everything at once. Why could people like himself never see such things unless they were pointed out first by someone else?
Now he could even imagine the factory standing in clean lines before him, the water backed up by a neat rampart of cement, the dynamos suave with power in the belly of the engine house. The falls continued to thunder in his ears. Power! His own land would be transformed to suit a new age, giving sense to the last ten or so years of his life!
Because his mind was always tuned to the general pattern and never could escape it, the logic of the whole project added its appeal. His earliest Canadian ancestor had come up the Saint Lawrence with Frontenac, not so long after Cartier himself. That Tallard had found nothing but a forest here, but his Norman instinct had smelled out the good land underneath the trees, and his military imagination had been gripped by the invulnerability of this whole river area. With Quebec City like a stopper in the bottle, the English fleet could never touch him here. And fanning out behind the river and the shield of the Appalachians, he and his brother officers had planned the vastest encircling movement in recorded history: a thin chain of forts through Montreal, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Saint Louis, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, penning the English into the narrow strip of the continent by the Atlantic. That was imagination on the grand scale. If there had been the same imagination at the court of Versailles to back them up, this whole continent could have become French for good.
But the English, working sporadically and generally for money, never planning anything, had inherited the continent by default when the politicians around the French king had decided to write off the Saint Lawrence area as so many acres of snow and ice. After that, the French who were left in Canada had seemed unable to discover any common purpose except to maintain their identity. How they had done it was a miracle. But the purpose had also been like a chain around their necks, making them cautious, conservative, static. Now once again the English, working sporadically for profit, were appropriating what they wanted in the Saint Lawrence Valley. His own people put toll-bridges across rivers and floated timber down them, but by instinct the English harnessed them to the future. Beyond that the English in Canada never went a step. The production, acquisition and distribution of wealth was about the only purpose they
ever seemed able to find.
This was going to be one time, Athanase decided grimly as he stood watching the water pour itself away through the gorge, when industry was going to be made to mean something more. He knew what he wanted here: the factory would become the foundation of the parish, lifting the living standards, wiping out debts, keeping the people in their homes where they had been born, giving everyone a chance. It would enable them to have a model school that could provide modern scientific training. Then they would have a hospital, a public library, a playground, finally a theatre as the parish grew into a town. It would be a revolution, and he would be the one to plan and control it. With McQueen to select the technicians and manage the finances, there was no reason why it should not be a success.
He turned and began to retrace his steps, thinking of nothing else all the way home. On the following Monday, he decided, he would tell McQueen of his decision when he went into town with Kathleen.
By the time he reached the house he realized that he was tired. He left his hat and coat in the hall and called to Kathleen. She answered from upstairs, then came running down, looking happier than he had seen her in months. “I’ll tell Julienne you’re back,” she said. “Your dinner will be ready in five minutes.”
He went into the library and sat down, and the moment he relaxed in his chair, fatigue and reaction set in like a wave. He began to see the difficulties ahead. The factory would be a gamble, maybe McQueen would cheat him, maybe he was a fool to risk his money in a venture he knew nothing about technically. And there was Father Beaubien; the priest would be desperate when he learned that a factory was to be established in his parish. He had once served his time as curate in an industrial town, one of the worst of many bad ones. What would he do if he saw the possibility of Saint-Marc developing into a factory town, with English managers living on its outskirts, Protestants independent of his authority?
Athanase set his jaw. Even Father Beaubien could be handled. The bishop would certainly see advantages in the money a factory would bring to the parish; percentages of all pay envelopes could be channelled to the Church; English managers were glad to make such arrangements since it cost them nothing and helped to establish good will where they needed it most.
He passed his hands over his forehead, easing the tensed muscles between his eyes. If only he had done something as positive as building this factory long ago, while he still had the energy of his youth! It had been so much easier to enjoy life in those days than to dominate it, so much easier to spend long months in Paris than to worry about conditions in Saint-Marc and Ottawa. He could still see the sidewalk café near the Place Saint Michel where he had eaten his first Paris breakfast. The butter pats were pale yellow and the globes of water clinging to them glittered in the morning sun, the same sun that shone full on the front of Notre Dame a few minutes’ walk away. He could still feel the creaking painted chair as he gave it his weight, leaning back to sniff Paris in the morning, looking at the midinette at the next table who had so willingly returned his smile. After all these years he could still remember the thrill of being at home in the motherland of his own language, noting the differences in pronunciation between more archaic Québécois French and that of the Parisians, enjoying the quizzical expression on their faces as they tried helplessly to estimate the department of France from which he had come. No English-Canadian or American could ever know a comparable thrill at finding himself in London. You had to be a French-Canadian, one who had kept faith with the language for two centuries in the face of a hostile continent, to savour the pride and vindication of such a homecoming.
Athanase’s lined, walnut-coloured face was still soft with recollections when the dinner bell rang. On his way to the dining room he remembered how he had once dreamed in a vague way of bringing back something of the spirit of revolutionary France to the older, wintry, clerical Norman France of Quebec. But he had not done it. Probably nobody could do it. On the other hand, if the spirit of France could not grow here, surely the spirit of the new world could. After all, the French in Canada were also North Americans.
He felt tired with all this remembering and sipped his soup gladly. Looking across the table at Kathleen, he winked at her gravely.
ELEVEN
At precisely two minutes to nine-thirty on Monday morning, Huntly McQueen stepped out of his Cadillac town-car and entered the Bank Building in Saint James Street. He was dressed in a dark suit, a black coat, a black hat, a dark blue tie very large in a winged collar. In the tie he wore a pearl pin.
He passed through a pair of bronze doors, was saluted by the ex-sergeant of Coldstream Guards who stood there in livery, and entered a marble atrium as impersonal as a mausoleum. He joined a group of middle-aged and elderly men waiting for an elevator at the far end of the atrium. They were all dressed exactly like himself. Nods passed between them, they stepped into the elevator, shot each other a few more discreet glances as though to make certain that nothing important had happened in their lives over the weekend, then stared straight ahead as the cage moved upward.
On the second floor Sir Rupert Irons got out. He had a heavily hard body, was square in the head, face, jaws and shoulders; his hair was parted in the middle and squared off to either side of his perpendicular temples. His face was familiar to most Canadians, for it stared at them from small, plain portraits hanging on the walls of banks all the way from Halifax to Vancouver. Even in the pictures his neck was ridged with muscles acquired from a life-long habit of stiffening his jaw and pushing it forward during all business conversations.
On the fourth floor MacIntosh got out. He shuffled off toward his office, a round-shouldered, worrying man who carried in his head the essential statistics on three metal mines, two chemical factories, complicated relationships involving several international companies controlled in London and New York, and one corset factory.
On the seventh floor Masterman got out, to enter the offices of Minto Power. Although Minto harnessed the waters of one of the deepest and wildest rivers in the world, there was nothing about Masterman to suggest the elemental. He was a thin, punctilious man with a clipped moustache, a knife-edge press in his dark trousers, and a great reputation for culture among his associates in Saint James Street. He was one of the original members of the Committee of Art. He also belonged to a literary society which encouraged its members to read to each other their own compositions at meetings; he was considered its most brilliant member because he had published a book called Gentlemen, the King! The work was an historical record of all the royal tours conducted through Canada since Confederation.
One floor higher, Chislett got out: nickel, copper and coal, a reputation for dominating every board he sat on, and so great a talent for keeping his mouth shut that even McQueen envied it.
The elevator continued with McQueen to the top floor. The thought crossed his mind that if an accident had occurred between the first and second floors, half a million men would at that instant have lost their masters. It was an alarming thought. It was also ironic, for these individuals were so remote from the beings they governed, they operated with such cantilevered indirections, that they could all die at once without even ruffling the sleep of the remote employees on the distant end of the chain of cause and effect. The structure of interlocking directorates which governed the nation’s finances, subject always to an exceptionally discreet parliament, seemed to McQueen so delicate that a puff of breath could make the whole edifice quiver. But no, McQueen smiled at his own thoughts, the structure was quite strong enough. The men who had ridden together in the elevator this morning were so sound they seldom told even their wives what they thought or did or hoped to do. Indeed, Sir Rupert Irons was so careful he had no wife at all. They were Presbyterians to a man, they went to church regularly, and Irons was known to believe quite literally in predestination.
The elevator stopped to let McQueen out. His own preserves occupied half the top floor of the Bank Building. Beyond a sizable reception room there were
half a dozen small offices in which carefully selected executives did their work. McQueen’s private office was in the far corner, reached through the room of his private secretary.
His round face smiled abstractedly at the switchboard girl and the typists as he went through the large room. It was his practice to enter his office by this route rather than through the private door from the outside hall to which he alone had a key, but he never lingered on his way. As he opened the door to his secretary’s room she looked up brightly. “Good morning, Mr. McQueen.”
“Good morning, Miss Drew.”
“It’s a fine day.”
“Yes,” he said. “It may well turn out a fine day.” He let a cool smile fall in her direction before he went into his own office, where he took off his hat and coat, hung them methodically in a cupboard, straightened his tie, pulled his coat down in the rear, and stood looking out the window as he did every morning before he settled down to work.
McQueen’s office overlooked one of the panoramas of the world. Its windows opened directly on the port of Montreal, and from them he could look across the plain to the distant mountains across the American border. The Saint Lawrence, a mile wide, swept in a splendid curve along the southern bend of the island on which the city stood. Everything below the window seemed to lead to the docks, but there were few ships in them now. Since the war most of the ocean-going craft sailed under convoy from Halifax. The few vessels that were visible were all painted North Atlantic grey, with guns under tarpaulins pointing astern.
McQueen’s satisfaction constantly renewed itself through his ability to overlook all this. He felt himself at the exact centre of the country’s heart, at the meeting place of ships, railroads and people, at the precise point where the interlocking directorates of Canada found their balance. Saint James Street was by no means as powerful as Wall Street or The City, but considering the small population of the country behind it, McQueen felt it ranked uniquely high. There was tenacity in Saint James Street. They knew how to keep their mouths shut and take the cash and let the credit go. They were bothered by no doubts. They had definite advantages over the British and Americans, for they could always play the other two off one against the other. Americans talked too much and the British made the mistake of underrating them. McQueen smiled. That gave the Canadians an advantage both ways. More than one powerful American of international reputation had lost his shirt to Sir Rupert Irons.
Two Solitudes Page 12
