Two Solitudes

by Hugh Maclennan

  He picked up his suitcase and the sleeping bag and went on tiptoe to the door. A loose board creaked and he swore under his breath. He set the suitcase down while he gently opened the door and put the sleeping bag outside. As he did so the cat jumped through the opened door and he swore softly again. Then, carrying the suitcase, he went out and closed the door behind him.

  It was the next morning about eleven o’clock when Athanase called Paul into the library. His face was stern as he told him to sit down. “What happened in your room last night?” he said.

  Paul hung his head.

  “Marius was there, wasn’t he?”

  When Paul refused to answer, Athanase became angry. “What do you mean not answering your father? What did Marius tell you?”

  “He–he just took some things and left.”

  Athanase grunted. This was too much. He had slept fairly well last night, but the moment he woke up the previous day’s scene with the priest had hit his mind like a physical blow. And now, on top of everything else, there was Marius. The boy had left his traces all over the place. The icebox was almost empty and Julienne’s daughter, who cleaned the upstairs, had found his smelly clothes in the cupboard.

  “Did he tell you where he was going?”

  Paul shook his head. Without raising it, he said shyly, “What’s the matter, P’pa?”

  “Nothing–nothing. But you should have told me when he came home, that’s all. Run along now and play.”

  Paul did as he was told.

  Athanase sat thinking for several minutes, snapping his fingers spasmodically. After a bit he went out to the hall and called Kathleen in from the gallery. With a quick look around to make sure Paul was out of hearing, he drew her close. “Paul doesn’t know anything, but Marius took the sleeping bag. Do you think he’s in the sugar cabin?”

  She nodded. “Probably.”

  “The poor fool! The poor young fool!”

  He took his hat from one of the prongs of the moose’s antlers and put it on his head, selected a stick from the rack and went out to the gallery, Kathleen following.

  “You’d better not walk all the way up there yourself,” she said anxiously. “You shouldn’t walk at all on a day like this.”

  “I can’t drive the horse up, can I?”

  “Let me go too.”

  “You’d be a great help,” he said, “with Marius!”

  He walked slowly past the barns through the fields up to the ridge, stopping for breath every fifty yards. It took him half an hour to reach the sugar cabin, and when he entered it Marius was not there. The sleeping bag was rolled out on the floor and the suitcase was in one corner. There were tins of food and a small sterno set and the remains of a leg of cooked lamb, all spread out on a plank resting over the grills where the sap was boiled in March. Athanase grunted and sat down on the only bench in the place. He took a note-book from his pocket, tore out a sheet and pencilled a short note telling Marius not to be a fool and to come down to the house. Then he went out and closed the door behind him.

  On the walk back he encountered Daphne and Heather coming through the grove with Paul between them. Heather spoke up at once.

  “We just saw him, Mr. Tallard. We saw him and he wouldn’t even speak to us.”

  Athanase swore under his breath. These English children–he had forgotten at the moment that they were Yardley’s granddaughters. He was humiliated that they should have seen a son of his in hiding; also concerned lest they tell their mother. He wanted to warn them not to mention to a soul that they had seen Marius, but his pride choked him. He walked slowly home, angry that English children should be here at all under such circumstances. What business was this of theirs?

  By the time he reached his gallery he was very tired, and for nearly ten minutes he sat quite still in his rocking chair without even reaching for the newspaper Kathleen had laid on a nearby table for him. Finally he picked it up and for nearly half an hour read it carefully.

  At last, after four years, the news was good. The Canadians had actually been the ones to send the German Army on its way back to the Rhine. The Royal Twenty-Second was right up in the front, where it belonged. Why couldn’t a fool like Marius see that the Twenty-Second was as representative of Quebec as all the long-haired, big-mouthed, thin-shouldered friends he had made in college? He read the news with real satisfaction, but by the time he had finished the paper a sense of depression had returned again. The war had lasted too long. Too many men like Marius had become embittered. God knew how long it would be before these wounds healed.

  A little before noon he heard footsteps crunching on the drive and immediately his nerves tightened again. Two men were approaching, one a sergeant of military police, the other a short, square man in a business suit. Both had solid faces and the kind of eyes that stray around, concentrating on the details their superiors have told them to look for. Seeing them coming up to his gallery, Athanase became so angry he did not bother to rise from his chair when they introduced themselves as Rogers and Labelle. The sergeant was English, the other man French. Labelle did the talking, and his voice had all the mechanical solicitude for unimportant facts common to a hack policeman anywhere in the world.

  Athanase listened, then said quietly, “You’re wasting your time. My son isn’t here.”

  Labelle glanced at the sergeant, then back at Athanase. It was obvious that he did not believe the answer, or expect to be told the truth. But he had to go through with his routine.

  “We think he’s here, Mr. Tallard,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

  Athanase exploded in voluble French. Where did Labelle come from? Who was his boss in the police force? What did he think he was doing here anyway? And finally, did he want to keep his job or lose it? Labelle listened, shrugged his shoulders a few times, and looked stubbornly at the ground.

  “Listen, Mr. Tallard,” the sergeant interrupted in English. “We got a job to do. We don’t want any trouble. Your son’s got to go sooner or later. All we want is a look around.”

  “You won’t look around my house.”

  “He’s been seen around here,” Labelle said.

  “You’re a liar,” Athanase said. “Even if he were seen, no one in this parish would tell you, and you know it.”

  “Now look here…”

  Athanase pointed his long forefinger. “Both of you,” he said coldly, “get off my property! If you try to set foot inside my house–by God, I’ll break the pair of you! Finish! Understand?” He picked up his newspaper and began to read.

  The men looked at each other and again Labelle shrugged his shoulders. The sergeant’s mouth lifted at one corner. “All right,” he said, “if that’s how you want it. Don’t blame us if there’s trouble, that’s all. We got a job to do.”

  They went off down the drive together, and Athanase kept watching them around the edge of his paper until they were out of sight. They were moving back toward the village. He laughed shortly. They wouldn’t get any news there.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Marius sat on a log outside the sugar cabin and smoked his pipe in the dark. The air was warm, and the night throbbed with sound like the inside of a sea-shell. The hoarse noise of the falls underlay all other sounds, but he could hear crickets in the fields, and even the ringing of frogs floating up in slow waves from the marsh near the river. Somewhere in the village a dog’s barks came in quick, broken volleys softened by distance as the animal barked at the moon. Marius looked down through the boles of the trees and saw the fields pale in the light of a first-quarter moon, the glimmer reflected from the church roof, and the wide path of light on the river beyond. The maple grove was a huge net of shadows suspended from the treetops with the open patches of ground whitened by the moon. As he looked down the ridge he saw the whole parish spread below him like a map. A little spit of land jutting out into the river was black with shadow on one side and white with moon-colour on the other. A thin spire of smoke rose from a single chimney in the Tallard house. He checked t
he chimneys off one by one and estimated that the fire was in the kitchen.

  He did not move. His mind was tired from three months of worrying and scheming and dreaming of the things he would have to do if he were ever to appease the soreness within him. But tonight the peace and familiarity of the scene almost made him feel well again. He told himself that he was home. He would never go away from here if he could possibly stay. He had never wished to have this hatred in his life, this battle he was doomed to wage. He repeated that all he and his people had ever wished was to be let alone. And thinking this, he asked himself in sudden incredulity why he must wage a battle at all, why he had always been so wretched that a life’s work would be too little to make up for it?

  His right hand was in his pocket, and his moving fingers were crumpling the note his father had left in the cabin that morning. Words entered his mind: “I will arise and go unto my father…” God knew he wanted to go home. His father had written in the note: “This attitude you have, blaming everything you don’t like on the English, is senseless. No one is harming you but yourself. If an Englishman heard you talking he’d think you were crazy. Come home and talk to me. You are only twenty-one and many things seem more important at that age than…”

  In the darkness Marius’ lips tightened. It was easy to say he was young; as easy as to say that the English had done him no harm. They had hounded him like a criminal for the past three months because he wished no part of their imperialism, that was all.

  Normally, Marius would have let it go at that. But tonight he was not normal. The summer night and the sounds in the throbbing air had made him quiet. He asked himself if he really did hate the English, and why. By nature suspicious, he was suddenly suspicious even of himself. The face of Kathleen rose before his mind. But his hatred was caused by more than one woman alone. He had always hated them.

  He got up and began slowly to walk among the maple trunks in the moonlight, his hands in his pockets and his head down. He felt he would become as empty as a broken bottle if he did not get an answer; that the sense would run out of everything unless he knew. His father’s words returned: “You are only twenty-one…” But perhaps that was just why he did see the truth, because he was too young to have sold out any part of himself? The English lessened him…that was it. Merely by their existence, they lessened a man. You could become great and powerful only if your own people were also great and powerful. But what could his people do when the English constantly choked them? What could the French do, alone against an entire continent, except breed children and hope?

  He came back and sat on the log again, tapped out his pipe and refilled it. His father was fond of saying that the average Quebec farmer was not a nationalist; that he was the plainest, most decent land-worker in the world. But he, Marius, he was no average man. He could see the truth even if ignorant people couldn’t. And the truth was that under the English a French-Canadian could not become great. You had to imitate the English or they refused to look at you. You had to do things their way. If you were different, they automatically regarded you as second-rate. If you wanted different ends they called you backward. The Americans were just as bad. And all the time the English took what they wanted. They had the big business. They had the army, the railroads, the banks, they had everything. What was left to a man like himself but the Church, medicine, or the law? Father Arnaud at the seminary had said he was too personally ambitious to make a good priest. He set his teeth. Some day Father Arnaud…But now nothing was left but the law, for he knew he could never have the patience necessary to become a doctor. And in Quebec you could pick up lawyers at a dime a dozen.

  He knocked out his pipe and rose, took a long look down the ridge and went back to the cabin. His nostrils caught the smell of dried-out lumber and the remaining reek of stale wood smoke. Inside the cabin the moonlight lay in a rectangle on the floor, preserving the cross made by the joints in the single window. He lit the candle, took off his boots and jacket and crawled into the sleeping bag with a sigh. He puffed out his cheeks and blew. The candle flickered; he blew again and it went out.

  Marius was asleep when the English sergeant and the French plainclothes man flashed their electric torches on him. He tried to jump clear of the light. One light winked out, but the other followed him like a staring eye and his feet were caught in the sleeping bag and he knew he was helpless. He pulled himself half out of the bag and leaned back on his elbows.

  A voice said in English, “It’s him, all right.”

  Marius took a deep gulp of air and tried again to get his head free of the light; it was all he could see. The light followed him and he put his hand over his eyes.

  The hidden voice spoke again, “Get up!”

  There was nothing else to do. He crawled out of the bag and rose without a word, sat on the bench and put on his shoes. A hand holding his jacket stretched out into the beam of the torch. “You’ll need this too. You’re going places.”

  He took the jacket. Then the light partially swung away from him, his pupils dilated in the semi-darkness and he was able to see the shadows of the men’s forms. The one in uniform looked big and tough. He was the one with the light. He was leaning with his back to the closed door and the light revolved slowly as he played it from his wrist.

  Marius straightened and put on his hat. “What time is it?” he said.

  He got no answer. He looked around and saw Labelle standing in the patch of moonlight thrown through the window.

  “Don’t make trouble and you won’t be hurt,” Labelle said in French.

  Marius stared at him. This was the last humiliation; one of his captors was French. When he reached the door the sergeant made a grab at his wrist, and before Marius knew what was happening, a handcuff was locked on it.

  “Goddamn bastard!” Marius said.

  He jerked his hand up to hit the sergeant, and the man’s arm lifted with it. Then slowly, easily, the sergeant pressed his arm down again. Labelle came up on the other side and took his other arm and with his free hand pulled the door open. They jerked him outside, and the moonlight flowed over the three of them. They stood there in a clear patch in the maple grove, Marius panting softly as he strained with both arms locked by the men on either side of him, his chest expanded with air. Then, as the men jerked him forward, he stumbled and nearly fell.

  “Come on,” Labelle said. “You show some sense, eh?”

  His eyes bright and angry in the moon, Marius scrambled to his feet. They walked through the shadows of the grove to the brink of the ridge, then down the path along the edge of the field. They were three tiny black smudges moving down the wide, moon-washed cloth of the hillside.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The next morning the whole parish knew that Marius had been arrested. Mme Drouin had been wakened shortly after midnight by a Ford backfiring outside the store and had got out of bed and gone to the window to see what was happening. The sergeant and Labelle were driving away with another man between them, and she had recognized Marius by the set of his hat. One of the Bergerons also knew about it. He had been in the store playing checkers and had left when Drouin closed up. He had then got a lift into Sainte-Justine from François-Xavier Latulippe. In Sainte-Justine he knew a girl who worked in the station hotel, and when he was leaving the hotel by the back door he had seen the sergeant and Labelle drive up in the Ford and drag Marius out. Marius was handcuffed, and the police had kept him in a room in the hotel all night.

  All morning people kept coming into Drouin’s with more stories. A woman claimed she had heard a shot in the night and that Marius had been killed. When told he was not dead, she said he had certainly been wounded, because there was a bloodstain on the road near her house. Drouin said he didn’t know for sure, but he wouldn’t be surprised but what the surveyors had something to do about it. The surveyors were from the government, and nothing good ever happened when the government had anything to do with it. Then Frenette came in and said he had been speaking with Father Beaubien. The
priest had told him only one thing: that he knew who had reported Marius’ hiding place to the police.

  When Athanase entered the store for his mail, just before noon, the men all glanced at each other and only Drouin spoke to him. He immediately guessed what had happened, and his face was sharp with anger as he took his letters and walked out. He climbed into his carriage and started the mare on her way home. Then he saw Father Beaubien coming down to the road from the porch of his presbytery to speak to him.

  Athanase reined in the mare and glanced over his shoulder. He saw that the men had all come out of the store and were now standing around the gasoline pump watching.

  The priest’s face was stern. “You’d better come inside with me, Mr. Tallard.”

  Athanase continued to hold the reins. “I don’t think that is necessary, Father.”

  The priest walked to the side of the carriage and stood very erect, one hand on his pendant cross, the other at his side. “I take it you know the police have arrested Marius? He was taken off your own land like a criminal.” A quiet intensity entered Father Beaubien’s voice. “That is what comes of your friendship with foreigners, Mr. Tallard. It was Mrs. Methuen who told the police where to find your son.”

  Athanase flushed with anger. It seemed incredible. Then he remembered that the children had seen Marius up in the maple grove. They had probably seen him leave the sugar cabin.

  “Do you need any more proof that I was right? You let Paul play with those English children, you make friends with them yourself. Now are you satisfied?”

  Again Athanase glanced over his shoulder. There were nearly twenty people in front of the store now, all watching.

  “I intend to protect my parish, Mr. Tallard,” the priest said slowly. “The sort of thing that happened last night–it is only one of many such examples we can look forward to if you have your way. Now then, I insist that you drop all plans for this factory. I insist that you come back to the Church and live like a Christian.”