Two Solitudes

by Hugh Maclennan

  “I mean Nova Scotia,” Yardley said. “I bet you’ve forgotten thet’s where a good quarter of you comes from. When a man’s been born down there it stays his home no matter where he goes to live afterwards.”

  “But I thought you didn’t know anyone down there any more?”

  Yardley smiled reflectively. “Nobody knows me anywhere now, I guess. Not even in Saint-Marc. It’s been changing out there ever since your mother’s friend McQueen put thet factory into it. It’s pretty near a good-sized town now, all filled up with unemployed and every other damn thing a town needs to feel itself important. I was telling Paul just before you came in that Polycarpe Drouin died last week. Remember him–the man thet kept the store?”

  Heather shook her head.

  “So you see, it don’t matter where I live now and I guess I might as well go home. Paul’s shipping out of here too.” Seeing her troubled expression, he added, “Don’t get the notion I got anything to complain of. Man, if anyone’s had a life like mine and don’t know he’s lucky, he’s one of God’s fools.”

  Remembering how her grandfather always felt uncomfortable in the Methuen house and how seldom she had come to see him when there had been time, Heather felt a blur of tears in her eyes. “Are you going soon?” she said.

  “Not right off. But I guess pretty soon.”

  “Where will you live? In Halifax?” She had a moment’s poignant sensation that she was no longer necessary to him, and that it was her own fault. And yet, of all people in the world, he understood her best.

  “I haven’t decided yet,” he said. “There’s five thousand miles of coastline around thet province, taking in all the bays and inlets. There’s plenty to choose from.”

  “You’ve never really liked living here, have you, Grampa?”

  “Well, it’s nothing for you to worry about if I didn’t. Trouble with me is I never could take fellas like McQueen seriously, and if you want to get along in this town you’ve got to take everything seriously.” He grinned at her. “I never even tried.”

  Heather reached up and kissed his cheek. “I’ll see you soon,” she said. Paul held the door open and when she had gone out he made an appointment for the broken Greek lesson on the next night, and followed her.

  Yardley stood still in the middle of the room, listening to the doors close behind them. After a time he went to the shelf and picked out a book, adjusted his glasses and moved the light over the shoulder of the chair where Heather had been sitting. It was the Loeb translation of Xenophon’s Anabasis which Paul had brought from the college library. For nearly half an hour he tried to puzzle out the Greek with the help of the English on the right-hand page, then put the book away. He decided he was too old to learn another language, and that perhaps after all there was something ostentatious in a man like himself studying Greek if he could not learn it properly. It was partly a sense of humour that had made him start it anyway.

  He turned off the light and went into the bedroom and got undressed. Thinking of Heather and Paul, he reflected with wonder and some indignation that each was the victim of the two racial legends within the country. It was as though the two sides of organized society had ganged up on them both to prevent them from becoming themselves. Neither had much respect for their elders, but they were quiet about it. Shrewd, in a way. He wondered what Heather would have been like if she had been born without money. Or if her mother had let her alone? On both sides, French and English, the older generation was trying to freeze the country and make it static. He supposed all older generations tried to do that, but it seemed worse here than any place else. Yet the country was changing. In spite of them all it was drawing together; but in a personal, individual way, and slowly, French and English getting to know each other as individuals in spite of the rival legends. And these young people no longer seemed naive; older than he was himself, Yardley thought sometimes. Paul would never be as simple as his father had been. He would see to it that his battle to become himself remained a private one. And Paul was the new Canada. All he needed was a job to prove it.

  As he got into bed, Yardley wondered if he would live long enough to see the country merged into a whole. He smiled ruefully. Paul might, but not he. Yet, there were so many things he still wanted to see and do, there was so much left to be learned. He might have three years more, perhaps five or six. His health was still astonishing, and no matter how much he tried to tell himself that he would be eighty in four years, it didn’t make sense. He didn’t feel much different from the way he had at sixty. After all, his own father had lived to be ninety-two. With the same expectancy, that would give him sixteen years more, and a man could do quite a bit in that amount of time.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  When Paul and Heather reached the street they found that the rain had stopped, but the atmosphere was as dense with mist as though a cloud had moved into the town. Miles away thunder growled like a distant bombardment. On University Street the nearest arc-lamp cut a long cone of blue light on the pavement.

  “Could I drive you anywhere?” Heather said.

  “No thanks. I only live on Durocher.”

  “But you haven’t a raincoat.”

  He looked down at her with the darkness between them. “All right, Heather.” It felt strange to be using her name. “Maybe I’d better go with you.”

  He opened the car door, she got in and slid under the wheel, and he followed. When she turned over the motor it failed to spark. She pulled the choke all the way out and ground the starter for nearly half a minute and the result was the same. Then she snapped off the ignition lock. “Now I’ve flooded it,” she said.

  They sat for a time in silence and she tried again. The motor still did not spark.

  “I’ll take a look at it,” he said. He got out and lifted the hood, struck a match and looked inside, then put both hands in, touching something and said, “Now try it.”

  She pressed the starter and the motor roared alive. She caught and held it while he lowered the hood, then quieted it down. He got inside and closed the door.

  “So you know all about cars, too,” she said.

  “It wasn’t flooded. Your choke wire was disconnected. That was all.”

  “I wouldn’t know a choke-wire from–from a magneto.”

  “Why should you? You’d only put garage hands out of work if you did.”

  She sat for a moment in the dark, touching the accelerator rhythmically with her toe. Then she turned to look at him. “There’s something the matter with that remark, Paul.”

  He made no reply as he wiped his hands on his handkerchief. Unreasonably, she had touched off the anger inside him. Unemployment could be nothing but an academic problem to her, if she ever thought about it at all.

  “It shouldn’t be economically necessary for people to be helpless,” she said. “I’m ashamed not to know anything about the car I drive.”

  His flash of anger died out; it made no sense. When he spoke again his voice was quiet. “I don’t know much about engines myself but rule of thumb. I worked in a garage for two summers.”

  She set the car in motion and drove up the hill, turned off into Prince Arthur and along to Durocher. They reached the house where he indicated he lived within a few minutes. She kept the motor running, but he made no move to get out of the car. Neither of them spoke. They merely sat in the dark car and stared through the rain-splashed windshield.

  Then she broke the silence. “You know Greek, and you understand cars, and you’re a hockey player. It’s a fascinating combination. What else have you been doing since we all went fishing together in Saint-Marc?”

  “Trying to get along, mainly. Why not tell me what you’ve been doing yourself?”

  She tested the play in the wheel. “What people like me always do, I suppose. Nothing of any importance whatever.”

  He opened the door of the car and she checked him with another question. “Paul–am I very different from what I used to be?”

  He closed the door, fished i
n his pocket for a package of cigarettes, and found them. “I don’t know, Heather.” He offered her one, from habit calculating how many he had left. “It’s a long time since we used to be.”

  “You see Grampa often, don’t you?”

  “Since he’s been in Montreal. Once or twice I went out to Saint-Marc to see him, but I didn’t manage it very often.” He added that Yardley had written to him regularly once a month for years. He still had two shoe-boxes full of his letters.

  “Do you think he’s as wonderful as I do?” Heather said.

  “I don’t even know if he’s wonderful at all. He’s just a natural man, so far as I can tell.” He added, as if to himself, “Men like him aren’t being made any more. I wish I knew why.”

  She tried to see his profile, but could discern nothing more than a blur of dark hair and eyes. “After you left Saint-Marc, you went to Frobisher, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “I seem to remember someone telling me.”

  “Frobisher, and a few other kinds of education, made a pretty good job of bastardizing me.” When she made no reply he added, “At least, according to my brother.”

  Swimming vaguely out of her memory, a lean, haunted-looking man came back to Heather. He was in a maple grove, slinking away from Daphne, Paul and herself. Then Daphne mentioning him to her mother, telling her mother what he had said to Paul. And after that she somehow knew that the man had been arrested because of something her mother had told someone, and they had left Saint-Marc with her grandfather looking sad, and never returned. It still made her uncomfortable and rather ashamed to remember.

  Paul gave a sudden, short laugh. “No wonder you don’t know what I’m talking about. After all, you’re English. It’s a tribal custom in Canada to be either English or French. But I’m neither one nor the other.”

  “I can’t see what difference it makes.”

  It was his turn to hunt for her face in the dark.

  “Why did you learn Greek, Paul? Nobody I know takes it any more.”

  He opened the door to throw out the stub of his cigarette, took hers when she handed it to him and threw it out too, then shut the door and turned back to look at her. He took his time to answer, and then he said without emotion, “I thought for a while I was going to study for the Church. Marius tried to make me believe I had a vocation. If you’re French and reasonably good in your school work, there’s nearly always someone who thinks you ought to be a priest.”

  “But you’re not French!” she said. “You haven’t the slightest trace of a French accent.”

  “I haven’t the slightest trace of an English accent when I speak French, either,” he said with irony.

  This time Heather’s flush was lost in the darkness. Paul went on without bitterness, “My father wanted me to get a scientific education. That’s why he sent me to Frobisher. Not that Frobisher was much in science, but he thought I’d have a better chance there.”

  “And science didn’t take?” Heather never let her own confusions interfere with her intense interest in other people. “What kind of science?”

  “Any kind. Sometimes I’m sorry it didn’t take. I did my best with it at the university. God knows it’s the only thing that counts these days. After all, science is the new theology. I’d still like to be a first-class physicist. Then I could stick to my own job and tell everyone to go to hell. Maybe I could even discover some new process that would send them there. The only place where science isn’t God now is in Quebec. We’re pretty old-fashioned.” He laughed shortly. “But I was no good in maths. I’m a B.Sc., but it doesn’t fool me into thinking I’m a scientist.”

  Again he opened the car door and this time he got out. “Thanks, Heather. I’d better not keep you any longer.”

  “Grampa said you were leaving Montreal soon. When are you going?”

  “I don’t know. It depends on whether I get a job. He’s written to some people he used to know in a shipping company. I hope I can get aboard a freighter.”

  “That’s wicked!”

  “You don’t have to feel uncomfortable about it,” he said quietly.

  “But it is wicked. And it’s stupid. You–an ordinary seaman!”

  “It will be a job. I’ve had a good many doors closed in my face lately, Heather.”

  “Is that what you want? To be a sailor?”

  He looked both ways up and down the street. “I certainly want to see the world,” he said when he turned back. “And I suppose that’s one way of seeing it.”

  A woman passed, walking under an umbrella with her head bent. She almost bumped into him, and he stopped talking until she had merged with the misty darkness again. “Anyway, I’ve got to get out of here. It’s choking me.”

  A breath of wind rustled the elm tree overhead, and a small shower of rain came down with a whisper.

  “Paul–let’s see each other again!” When he hesitated, she went on quickly, “I’m trying to learn how to paint. Will you come down to my studio some day and tell me why I’m no good?”

  He laughed suddenly in the darkness. “I don’t know much about painting. Where’s your studio?”

  “It’s just a little room on Labelle Street. Here.” She opened her bag and took out a pencil and a card and wrote a number on it. “Not tomorrow. I’ve got to do something with Mummy. But the next afternoon?”

  “I’ve no job to keep me away, God knows!”

  “You’ll really come then? About three?”

  “All right, Heather. Yes, I’d like to.”

  She drove away, leaving him on the sidewalk. He stood watching the tail-light of the car recede down the street, then disappear around the corner. In the distance, far beyond the immediate darkness that surrounded him, thunder growled again, and another puff of wind sent another shower of rain whispering down from the leaves to the pavement.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Paul stood in the window of Heather’s studio and looked across the street. The brick walls of the buildings opposite were a dull red. They looked very old and European with their painted doors flush with the pavement. The storm which had lasted for nearly thirty-six hours had cleared the air. Now sunlight sparkled on the roofs, made the leaves bright green and dappled the pavement with mauve shadows.

  He turned back into the room to take the cup of tea Heather was offering him. She had a single electric plate in one corner, a small table, a few chairs, a couch covered with gay chintz against one wall, and a work table covered with painting paraphernalia. He liked the smell of oil and turpentine, the look of paint stains on the floor, the composition of the canvases stacked against another wall.

  Heather curled up on the couch, her feet tucked against her hips, and Paul sat rather stiffly on one of the chairs. She drew his attention to the canvas resting on an easel. “Now tell me the truth about that one,” she said.

  Paul looked at it again, as he had been doing off and on ever since he had arrived. He hardly knew what to say, for he knew nothing about the technique of painting. He did know there was a lack in it. He glanced from the picture to the girl on the sofa. There was no lack in her. He saw the curved outlines of her thighs and the mounds of her breasts rising and falling beneath the plain linen frock. Her small nose gave her face a frank openness, and the frown she wore at the moment made her seem very young. Perhaps she was too much like Yardley to be an artist? He could imagine Yardley building a ship, but never painting a picture.

  He got up and set his tea-cup on the table. “I’m not very good at this sort of thing,” he said. “I know why I like it better than why I don’t.”

  It was a pleasant scene, an oil landscape of a Laurentian road, and it was well drawn. It showed a sweep of country beyond Piedmont, and it indicated that she had enjoyed being there. But she had missed the vastness of such a scene, the sense of the cold wind stretching so many hundreds of miles to the north of it, through ice and tundra and desolation.

  “Maybe it would have been better if I’d finishe
d it with a rougher surface,” she said, still frowning. “I used composition board on purpose. I was afraid it would look like an imitation of A.Y. Jackson if I made it too rugged. That’s the whole trouble. The Laurentians have been painted too much and too well already. It would take a really great person to say anything new about them, don’t you think?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I’ve not seen many Canadian paintings. Or any other kind, for that matter.”

  “But Paul, you ought to! There’s some really wonderful Canadian painting. It’s the best expression in the arts that we have.”

  “I’m full of gaps,” he said.

  She uncurled herself from the couch and removed the canvas, replacing it with another. In this one, figures climbed the flight of wooden steps that led up to Pine Avenue from the head of Drummond Street on the face of the mountain. It also had a mat surface, and the design showed a smooth rhythm of hips and shoulders as the figures mounted the steps. Paul stood away from it, trying to estimate how much originality it contained, but he lacked the frame of reference to judge properly. Because it responded to an idea of his own, he liked the picture, and still he felt there was something wrong with it. It was intended to be grim. The women were poorly dressed, almost in uniform like convicts, and their individual features were removed.

  He swung around and looked at her. “Did you believe it, when you did it?” he said.

  She waited a moment before she answered, then she said, “I think so. It’s meant to be stylized. I wanted it to be a particular study.” She indicated certain parts of the composition. “I wanted those lines to compensate for these…. It was the uniformity of their movement I was after.”

  “You certainly got that.”

  She was disappointed. “But I’ve missed something else?”

  He pointed to a splash of colour in one corner. “That’s the only part of yourself I see in it. That’s joyful. It’s good.”

  She removed the canvas and went back to the couch. Suddenly her laughter bubbled. “Huntly McQueen said something to me the other night that sounded just the same. He said I thought it was my duty to be miserable on account of the unemployed.”