Two Solitudes

by Hugh Maclennan

  As Janet followed the Methuen pattern, Heather followed her mother’s wishes. There had seemed no alternative. She had gone to school in Lausanne for two years, studying French as a social accomplishment rather than as a help to her in the province of Quebec. She had returned to make her debut, two years after Daphne, at a Saint Andrew’s Day Ball. Then she had gone to college for four years, if not with Janet’s enthusiasm behind the undertaking, at least without her disapproval. After that she had done nothing in particular, except attend dances with the sons of her mother’s friends and sit on the executive board of the Junior League.

  She knew that her friends were murmuring about her, considering her a failure. The majority of her school friends were already married, some of them in a fashion their elders termed brilliant. Two had married Englishmen with accents like Noel’s, one was the wife of a French count, four had married bond salesmen serving time before becoming partners in their fathers’ trust and mortgage houses. Since Daphne had been withdrawn from competition, Heather’s status had become more noticeable. Her mother was definitely worried.

  In public Janet was always considerate of her and tactful, but lately they had more than once come to the point of actually arguing at home. It always ended by a show of tears on Janet’s part and Heather’s contrite attempt at making amends. She could bear anything more easily than one of her mother’s scenes. Janet never referred directly to the fact that Heather remained unattached, but it was hardly an accident that she had decided to spend their last vacation on the same beach in Maine where Alan Farquhar was staying with his family. It was certainly no accident that McQueen kept remarking, apropos of nothing, that Alan seemed a sound young fellow.

  That was the whole trouble with Alan, Heather thought. He was so completely sound that life with him would be a gigantic redundancy. His wife would have three children within the first six years, then no more. She would live in a house in Westmount until Alan’s parents, by dying, enabled them to move into the gargoyled Farquhar mansion on the slope of the mountain above Sherbrooke Street. Their children would all go to prescribed schools where they would meet only the children of the same boys and girls she and Alan had been allowed to meet. Owing to the size of the house, they would have considerable servant trouble, and they would listen to a great deal of talk about rising taxes. They would play mild golf and tennis in the summers, ski a little in the winters and make an occasional trip to New York or London. Alan would spend the rest of his life in his father’s trust company in Saint James Street. As he was a husky lad, he would show the first signs of corpulence in his late twenties. He would begin to wear black Homburgs in his early thirties and by his middle forties he would be lunching at the Mount Royal Club as regularly as McQueen. He would read little but the newspapers and popular magazines. He would be smilingly indulgent about her painting, provided it remained poor enough to be no more than a hobby. He would be kind, gentle, honourable and an excellent parent. But as he needed absolutely nothing to complete him, being set in the mould already, Heather felt that the girl who married him would not be marrying a man at all, but a way of life.

  Since Daphne’s return from England, Heather was more certain than ever that she must find something to do on her own or suffocate. Daphne had always overshadowed her in the past. She had found nothing of which to disapprove in her mother’s way of life and she had constantly criticized Heather for not looking, thinking and acting like all their friends. But something had happened to Daphne in England. She no longer criticized Heather now; she merely scorned her. Whether or not she was satisfied with Noel Fletcher, Heather couldn’t be sure; if she was, there was something drastic the matter with her.

  However, it was one thing for Heather to say she wanted a career and a very different one to achieve it. She would certainly have to get out of Montreal. Since the depression some of her friends had found jobs of sorts, but they all pretended either to be working as a lark or to be doing it for charity. In Canada, a girl with background could seriously consider only one of three or four professions. She could nurse, teach school, work in a library, or be a dietician; she might even work in a hospital laboratory if she had the technical training. But whatever a girl chose to do in Canada, she was badly paid for it. All the careers American girls were making for themselves–advertising, designing, screen-writing, editing, decorating, selling, even executive posts in business organizations, law, medicine, architecture–were practically barred to women in Canada. Plenty of girls tried to make their way into some of them, but they were never able to get even halfway to the top.

  Heather got out of the car and walked across to the parapet of the look-off, holding her chiffon skirt off the ground as she stepped carefully in her silver slippers. Her mother would consider it most improper for her to be here alone at night. Half a dozen necking couples sat in the darkness of parked cars and others strolled down through the shrubs along a winding path that fell below the terrace.

  She leaned against the stone parapet and looked out over the city. “Oh, lovely!” she murmured. Spread below, the city was moon-coloured, the great sweep of it starred by lights; it was almost like looking upside down at a patch of night sky. Because the summit of the mountain in Westmount is lower than the summit of Mount Royal to the left, only a portion of the city could be seen, but as far as the eye travelled to right and to left, the city was there, running down the slopes and spreading out over the plain to the river. Three miles to the east the chain of lights on the Jacques Cartier Bridge flowed in parallel lines out of the city, leaped in geometric constellations at the towers in the middle of the river, swooped low over the dark mass of Saint Helen’s Island, then flowed down into the plain on the other side. Over there the land spread luminous in the moonlight to the distant Green Mountains of Vermont.

  Lines of poetry came into her mind, flashed out, returned and wove themselves into the mood of the evening. A low hum of noise came up from the city, very faint. The parked cars were as silent as stones. Just below the parapet, beyond the sloping park, large houses lay buried in the trees, and in most of them lived people she knew. She wondered how many of them were lying down there now with eyes closed in lightless rooms. How many of them were young, conscious of a warm, silent form beside them? It would be good to lie beside a man you loved, to wake at night and find him there.

  THIRTY-TWO

  As soon as his guests had gone down the walk and across the street, McQueen went up to the library at the top of his house. It was his habit to spend some time there every night before going to bed; among his books he felt it easier to catalogue the events of the day and put them in order. He also liked to read some part of a solid book for half an hour before he slept. The practice was useful to his spirit, and the information he gained increased his prestige in the literary club he had joined shortly after the war.

  The club meant a great deal to McQueen. Tonight he expected to put in an hour’s work thinking about a paper he was scheduled to read at the opening meeting in the autumn. Although the date was more than three months away, McQueen was leaving nothing to chance. The paper would be superior to anything the club had heard before, and the club had high standards. In style, he knew he could never match Masterman, the president of Minto Power and author of Gentlemen, the King! But McQueen saw no reason why he couldn’t better Masterman in facts and analysis. The title of his paper would be Canada: A Phenomenon of Stability in a Troubled World.

  McQueen smiled to himself as he thought of the impression he would make on the club. He was aware that the other members joked about him behind his back and called him a dry old stick, but it was the kind of joking he liked. There was respect and even affection in it. He had become something of a Character.

  From his library windows McQueen could look over the tops of his elms to the city. The windows were open and the night air penetrated an atmosphere stuffy with the smell of old book-bindings and printer’s ink. A soft glow from the street lights hung over the void to the south. He was
sure he could detect an odour of roses from his garden four stories below. That was pretty good, to be able to smell them from this height. There were no roses to match them north of Sherbrooke Street. Then he heard the whisper of a sprayer saturating his lawn and he made a clucking noise with his tongue. He would have to speak to the gardener about it in the morning; the man was getting careless. This was the second time in a month he had forgotten to turn it off. He must be reminded that jobs were very scarce these days.

  Faintly, like the snore of an enormous beast he had managed to control but still distrusted, the noise of the city stole up the hill, through the branches of the trees and into his windows. It was a minor sound at this hour of the night, intermittent and far away.

  He turned his thoughts back to unemployment and the aspects of the subject which he must handle in the paper for the literary club. In the whole country there were now a million and a half souls on direct relief, one-seventh of the nation. Yet in spite of this total, the country remained quiet. There were no riots anywhere, and there had never been any nonsense like the New Deal. It gave McQueen a feeling of intense personal satisfaction.

  His success had been so unbroken, his business judgment so sure, his nose for the market so acute, that he saw no reason to doubt his conclusions about anything. Take the working classes. One was supposed to feel sorry for them, but candidly McQueen believed that their troubles were of their own making. They never saved their money and their morality could be a great deal better than it was. They were also lazy; it was their laziness which prevented them from becoming a menace. They moiled about in the lower streets of Montreal, but they never thought of climbing the hill across the frontier of Sherbrooke Street to see for themselves the comfort in which their business leaders were able to live. Even though the socialists were throwing mud at men like himself, even at men like General Methuen, the working classes didn’t seem to care. They probably knew it was not his fault they were out of work. If Wall Street hadn’t been so reckless there never would have been a depression anywhere else.

  McQueen’s thoughts went off on a tack of their own without reference to the paper he must write. That had been very rude of Heather, running off from his party without a word. She was notably heedless, but he had never caught her doing a thing like that before. He wondered if Noel Fletcher might not have had something to do with it. He frowned and clucked with his tongue. There was no doubt about it, Janet was going to have trouble with that fellow yet.

  It was years since McQueen could remember having met a man who irritated him as Fletcher did by his mere existence. What was England coming to if she could produce a fellow like that? He was exactly the sort to be interested in aircraft. McQueen hated airplanes. He considered them the most diabolical invention Yankee ingenuity had so far managed to inflict upon mankind. They produced men like Fletcher; they turned settled people into nomads; they wasted money; heaven only knew how much property they would yet destroy.

  Again the image of Fletcher appeared before his mind. He had ruined the dinner party. By Jove, he wouldn’t trust a nice girl across the street with such a fellow! What was Janet thinking about, to be taken in by a man as unsound as that? See what he had done to Daphne! She had been a sweet girl a few years ago, and look at her now! He wouldn’t be surprised if…

  McQueen went back to the table and switched on a goose-neck lamp. He opened a card-index file and began to hunt through it. His mind relaxed into a more comfortable mood as he turned his thoughts once more to his paper. Last night, under Politics, he had inscribed a card for the file with what he considered a weighty thought lightly expressed. All during the day he had been remembering it with considerable pleasure. He found it and read it through again: Every revolution is started by a crank, exploited by a politician, and terminated by a soldier. That was a nice touch, about the crank. It would get a laugh when he read it at the club.

  McQueen got up and padded around his library, pince nez adjusted to his nose, its black ribbon flaring down to his breast pocket. He couldn’t help admiring his shelves. Not many men in Saint James Street collected things; what money they spent on luxuries tended to go for golf, cars, clubs and whiskey. But McQueen collected books. No man in Saint James Street had a library as good as this. He picked out a volume of the collected speeches of Edmund Burke, hunting for a phrase he might be able to use. He took the volume to the table and sat down to read, wondering as he did so how many of his business friends had even heard of Burke.

  Leaning over the table, McQueen looked thoroughly solid. His head rose like a domed globe out of his jowls as they rested firmly on the edges of his winged collar. His tufted eyebrows turned up and his heavy mouth turned down. His hair was grey and frizzy about the ears, the top of his head bald except for a single lock brushed carefully across its centre from one side to the other. His lips moved as he read and every now and then he scratched his right ear.

  After a while McQueen replaced the book on its shelf. There was no doubt about it, Burke was a great orator. The Prime Minister ought to study some of his speeches. There was no reason why stability should necessarily be dull. His mind skipped about over the subject of his paper and inevitably back to the dinner party. If Heather was a sample of the younger generation there was going to be trouble. McQueen wanted to be just, but he doubted if he was exaggerating. Where there was smoke there was generally fire. Heather had allowed some of the younger professors at the university to put ideas into her head. She had made some very unnecessary and annoying remarks at the table about the values of socialism. McQueen saw no necessity for it whatever. He was convinced that the last thing any socialist ever wanted was to be forced to accept power. Idealists were all the same. And yet they were mischievous. They opened up the masses to the real scoundrel who invariably followed them. Look what had happened to Germany! The socialists had preached idealism but the only result of their pernicious meddling was Hitler. McQueen clucked with his tongue. It served them right.

  He wondered if he could possibly introduce into his paper a paragraph on the influence of women like his mother. There had been no nonsense in the way she had brought him up, and his whole life had justified her. It was something for a boy from a small Ontario town, who had grown up in genteel poverty, to own a house at his age opposite the Methuens’ on the slope of the mountain. It was something also for that boy to be on the board of governors of the university, on two hospital boards and a charity committee, to lunch twice a week at the Mount Royal Club, and to be a member of the Committee of Art. For the past ten years his picture had appeared in the newspapers as a pall-bearer of millionaires, and he had been twice invited to dine at Rideau Hall by two different Governor-Generals. Finally, as a means of making a due return to the nation, he had drawn a will which completely satisfied him. On his death his entire fortune would be used to found and maintain a new Presbyterian theological college. It was to be located in the heart of the Ontario countryside, to have ample scholarships, and the chairs were to be so heavily endowed the trustees would be able to fill them with the ablest theologians they could import from Edinburgh and Aberdeen.

  McQueen switched off the light and padded downstairs. In the last analysis, the soundness of a country was the soundness a man found in himself, in the city where he lived. It didn’t take long for Montreal to brush the nonsense off a man’s ideas and reduce him to scale. Look at himself. He was prepared to admit that when he was younger he had indulged his fancies more than was good for him. He had once hoped to organize the entire country. No man could have done it, not even Sir Rupert Irons, who had never even tried. It was the mark of a big man to be able to change his mind, as he had changed his. Even Irons consulted him now on occasion. Just imagine what the country would be like if it were led by the sort of men one met in Wall Street!

  McQueen rubbed his hands together as he thought how he was going to prove that Canada was sounder than the United States. In the first place, so far as he could see, the Americans were as excitable as Ita
lians. And look at the way they let their women hound them all over the place! If you let the women get that much hold, why not hand the whole country over to them and let them run it? He wouldn’t be surprised to see them do that very thing before long. He chuckled. The day they elected a female president it would serve them right.

  In a state of dreamy contentment, padding slowly along the upper hall to his bedroom, McQueen thought how sharp a contrast he could make between the United States and Canada, if he went about it skillfully. In Canada, first of all, there were the two races: each could be employed to balance the other. Then there were the churches: they were filled every Sunday, and it was possible for the whole nation to excite itself over a theological dispute. But the real point was this: ten per cent of the college graduates, perhaps not the most brilliant men but certainly the most restless of the lot, found it so difficult to get what they wanted in Canada that you could always count on them drifting south to the States. That made enormously for stability above the border. Down there they could write their books and broadcast their ideas, and compared to the average American they were probably fairly stable citizens. Yes, McQueen thought with satisfaction, we have discovered a great social secret in Canada. We have contrived to solve problems which would ruin other countries merely by ignoring their existence.

  By the time McQueen reached his bedroom he felt his mind had served him pretty well that evening. Without turning on the light he crossed to the window and looked out. The blinds in Janet’s room, in the Methuen house across the street, were drawn, but the faint glow of lights came through them. Janet was getting ready for bed. He tried to think of her there, imagining her reflecting over his party, and again he told himself what a nice woman she was. She had done so well against so many difficulties, and now at last she was secure. He was thankful he had been able to do so much to help her. Ever since Harvey Methuen’s death he had guarded her investments free of charge, and he had nursed them so carefully that her estate was now double what it had been when he had first accepted responsibility for it. He had nursed his friendship just as carefully. He could still remember the thrill it had given him, three years ago on Christmas Eve, to get the two girls to call him by his first name.