Two Solitudes

by Hugh Maclennan

  “Maybe thet’s where he got his start,” Yardley grunted.

  Janet eyed him severely. “Can you permit me to be serious for a moment, Father?”

  “I guess I can.”

  “Have you forgotten the facts of the situation? This young man may be perfectly all right. I have no doubt he is. But General Methuen always said it was most undesirable for mixed marriages to occur between French and English families. He had some fine French friends, too. Indeed, he was very fond of them. But he used to say that the French themselves objected to mixed marriages even more than he did.”

  “Well?” Yardley said.

  “That’s only one part of it. He’s not Heather’s kind at all. He’s worked in garages and he’s been a professional hockey player. Just imagine! Why, he was even an ordinary seaman.”

  “So was I, once.”

  Janet flushed. “It was entirely different in those days. This young man has never had a proper job in his entire life. He’s twenty-nine or thirty or perhaps even more–I don’t remember exactly. He’s out of work now. I should very much like to hear what Huntly McQueen would have to say about a young man without a decent job at his age!”

  Yardley’s hands clenched on the arms of his chair. He hated anger in anyone; in himself most of all. It was even dangerous for him to be angry now. With a great effort he kept his voice quiet as he said, “McQueen would have no more right to blame a young man for having no work today than a man thet stole the milk from a kitten would have any right blaming the cat for going hungry.”

  “Please, Father–I can’t stand it when you talk like Heather’s socialist friends.”

  “Then keep McQueen out of it. He never helped anyone in his life.”

  Janet remained determined. “Have you forgotten one thing that I can’t–as Heather’s mother–permit myself to forget?”

  “What’s thet?”

  “He’s undoubtedly a Roman Catholic.”

  “Oh,” Yardley said. “So thet’s what’s at the bottom of it!”

  “It’s one of the things that’s at the bottom of it, but even you must admit it’s decisive.”

  “Well, I guess he might have been a Buddhist. Fella I knew out East, a real Methodist he was too, he married a Buddhist girl once, a real beauty, with a figure so nice she made all the English women in Shanghai hate her something terrible. Three years they lived in Shanghai, and he found himself a Methodist chapel, and I guess she went to the temple. Got along fine, till the time came for him to come home. Then he just left her there and I guess he had the marriage annulled, or maybe just forgot all about it, for when I last saw him he was settled in with a hatchet-faced old woman with little red eyes and a nose as mean as a ferret’s, and she–”

  “Father!” she said.

  “All right, Janet.”

  “Of course, the whole thing’s unthinkable from any point of view. But just suppose the worst did happen? How would Heather like to see her children brought up as Catholics? They insist on that, you know. You haven’t a chance with them when it comes to the children.”

  Yardley’s eyes twinkled for a moment, but he sobered almost at once. “Listen, Janet–one of the unfairest things we do in this country is to turn these religious denominations into flags. Why, thet boy’s had all sorts of religion put onto him. He was a Catholic, and then he was a Protestant, and then he was a Catholic again, and between them they just about made a football out of him. What he is now I don’t know because I’ve never asked him, but I do know he’s got a personal religion of his own, and if Heather wants to find out where he goes to church all she’s got to do is ask him. It’s no more my business, or your business, than how a man makes love to his wife in his own bed after he’s married to her.”

  Janet winced. “Do you really have to use expressions like that?” Then, quickly, “They all die with candles in their hands. I remember General Methuen saying that ever so often.” She got up. “Father, my daughter simply can’t marry a person like that!”

  Suddenly Yardley felt overwhelmingly tired. He struggled against the fatigue that pressed him down. This was no good; it was coming on with far too much power. In two hours he would have to walk down three flights of stairs and all the way over to the hotel for dinner. He must save his strength for that, for Paul would be there, too. The boy would be meeting Janet face to face, and he must be at his best to help him out. If he yielded to his weakness now he would be finished until the next day.

  Janet seemed unaware of his fatigue as she continued along the train of her own thoughts. “If only Heather were not so rebellious!”

  Something seemed to snap in Yardley’s brain. He leaned forward, flushing angrily. “Thet’s a terrible thing for you to say!”

  She stared at him in astonishment.

  “A human being tries to be herself and you condemn her because she does!”

  “But Father–I’m her mother! Please remember the things I must consider.”

  “Consider my eye! How do you expect people like Paul and Heather to feel toward people like us? Do you think we’ve deserved their respect? We’ve sat on them all our lives. We’ve managed our affairs so badly thet boys like Paul have had to spend their last eight years wandering like tramps from one end of the country to another looking for work. You talk to me about rebellion! I’m telling you something, Janet–the first word any child in the country hears said to it is ‘No,’ and the first sentence he hears is ‘Be careful.’ God only knows how it’s happened thet way, for when I was a boy it was certainly different. You and your friends–you go crazy if a girl and a boy make love to each other before they’re married. But another twenty million people can get killed because our generation can’t manage its own affairs and thet’s not even immoral! The way things’ve been going there’s sure to be a bust-up thet’ll surprise you. People get sick of hearing ‘no’ all the time. Don’t talk to me about rebellion, Janet, for I can’t stand to hear it. If you’d done a little rebelling yourself you’d be a happier woman today!”

  The anger faded and left nothing but fatigue. He had been trying to forget his illness, but his illness had not forgotten him. He was betraying his own organism by allowing himself the luxury of anger. “Forget the last part of what I said, Janet.”

  She sat very dignified, her long face severe, reproving and forgiving. “It has always been your trouble, Father. You never think before you speak. As a matter of fact, that’s precisely what Huntly says of Heather.”

  “I bet he does,” Yardley grunted.

  “And he’s perfectly right!”

  “I bet he is.”

  “Well…” Janet got up from the chair. “Let’s say no more about it. I wanted your help because Heather has always been influenced by you. But since you refuse to be sensible…”

  Yardley smiled wearily. “You should have remembered, child. I’ve never been any good at being sensible.”

  Janet forced a smile and he knew she was trying to break the barrier between them. He also knew she had not the slightest chance of succeeding. She went over to his chair and adjusted his pillow, and he leaned back gratefully.

  “Now, Father,” she said gently, “you must take your nap before dinner. You shouldn’t have excited yourself.”

  “I’ll be all right.” He grinned. “Don’t go adding me to the rest of your worries.”

  But the moment Janet had left, Yardley sank back exhausted. It was as though the anger and excitement had wiped out all the patient months of convalescing. So Heather and Paul must be harrowed by the same kind of prejudices which had been too much for Paul’s father! In the case of Athanase there had at least been a reason: the legend of a whole race had been against him, and Yardley had always taken it for granted that people prefer a legend to a reality. But for Janet to feel as she did about Paul was so depressing he could barely think about it.

  With his head back on the pillow, he dozed for a while. The room and the air outside the open window were still. When he next looked up he noticed that
the shadows had lengthened, and he had now forgotten all about Heather and Janet and Paul. He seemed to be floating in a cloud of his own thoughts alone in the armchair that was almost in touching reach of the top of the lime tree by his window. Looking over it to the harbour he was sure that George’s Island was beginning to cast just the edge of a shadow over the water. Or was it his imagination that made him think so? He could not really see from here; in fact, he was on the wrong side of the harbour to see a shadow from the island at this hour of the evening.

  But it must be getting quite late. It must be nearly time for dinner. On the grass below the window a robin was calling. Its nest was under the eaves very close to him, and in the mornings it often woke him feeding the chicks that had just been hatched. He ought to take out his watch and check the time, for surely it was near the dinner hour. Heather was going to wear a green dress he liked; she said for his own special benefit, but of course it was really for Paul. She was becoming a handsome woman. And she had learned to dress in New York. He chuckled. Her mother was upset by her style.

  It was comfortable in the chair. There was a time when lassitude was the most delightful thing in the world. Once in the East a Chinaman had tried to persuade him to smoke opium. He had not done so and was sorry now that he hadn’t; from what the Chinaman had said of the drug, its effects must be similar to the lassitude he felt now. It was an informing quietness. Everything was so wonderfully clear and cool, like stones under still water in the early morning. The smells of old memories were rich in his nostrils: clover hot in the sun in the valley where he had been born, mingled with the salty odour of lobster shells from the wharf a half mile away. It had been a hard life in those days; nothing worth complaining about, for he and everyone else had always had their health, but it had been hard and narrow. The sea had been great: the feel of the ship living under you, the senses stretched taut as you fought her through a storm, the personal feeling you acquired for a ship, she hard to you and you hard to her. But also narrow. It was only in retrospect that you could pretend you had liked the life. The salted horse was so fat and rotten you had to be nearly starving to eat it. His first captains had all been fierce drivers, and he had seen more than one of them force a man over the side. They had been cruel enough, though cruelty was not a word you ever thought of applying in those days, for most of them were great church-goers when ashore. The first time he had gone to sea he had been only fifteen years old, but the mate had called him a son-of-a-bitch and sent him up the mast with his backside numb from his boot. It was part of the system, and better aloft than below, because the work was really less. And that mate could quote you Isaiah by the hour if he felt like it. After letting another mate drive one poor devil so crazy with fear he leaped from the top-gallant yard into a sea hammered hill-high by a whole gale, old Captain Hance had read the burial service the same day without a quiver of conscience in his voice. The first year he himself had been second mate he’d done things he found hard to remember now. He had cracked one man’s skull with a wooden bucket and beaten another to the deck with his fists while the old man looked on. He would never ask a man to do a thing he wouldn’t do himself, but that seemed a narrow way of looking at it when one got older. Some men just couldn’t do what others did. But if he hadn’t been hard the men would have broken him. It was the system. Maybe it was human life. He hated to admit it, but on the whole the ordinary man was just as likely to choose the worst instead of the best. Again old Hance’s voice returned to his mind, that old hard-boiled son of-a-bitch reading the service: “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord!” He supposed it was people’s ignorance; his own and the others’. Always it came right back to what Jesus had said, they know not what they do. Jesus must have considered that message mighty important or he wouldn’t have saved it to the end. It was funny he’d never thought of that before. Right at the end Jesus had given the plain warning not to expect too much of people. Yardley had always supposed that if people had been intended to know what they were doing, they would have been created with the faculties to make the knowledge possible.

  It was strange how a man’s life passed like a ship through different kinds of weather. Sentimental, he supposed, but a fact. Wonder in childhood; in the twenties physical violence and pride in muscles; in the thirties ambition; in the forties caution, and maybe a lot of dirty work; and then, if you were lucky, perhaps you could grow mellow. It seemed to Yardley that with the talent and the courage there was no limit to what a man could obtain out of life if he merely accepted what lay all around him. But knowledge was necessary; other wise beauty was wasted. Beauty had come to him late in life, but now he couldn’t have enough of it. It was something a man had to understand. Pictures and colours, for instance, and fine glass.

  He had been allowed the use of the Dalhousie Library these past few years, and every day until lately he had spent some time in it. He had discovered much he had been too ignorant to enjoy in his active life. Only last winter, the week before his illness, he had found a book containing photographs of Swedish and Bohemian glass. In the lines of a single vase a man could find infinite pleasure if he were willing to let his imagination run. The old Chinaman who had tried to induce him to smoke opium had also attempted to interest him in rice-bowls and wash-drawings. He had been ashamed then of liking useless things which were merely beautiful, for he had been given a strict upbringing. And also–Yardley smiled as he remembered–he had somewhat despised them, and for no better reason than because he had possessed enough physical strength to beat up that Chinaman with one hand. It had seemed that a man grew soft if he let his mind run to those things, and that the next time a hardcase crewman shaped up to him he would be too slow with the right hook. So, after seeing the Chinaman’s drawings, he had returned to the ship, and later that evening got drunk with the second mate, gone ashore and got into a fight with some men off a Boston vessel, and the next day put to sea again with a sore jaw and a hangover.

  But the wonder was before him now, it was around him everywhere, it was within him, and he wished without any pain or regret that he could have just a little more time with it. On the whole, he saw no reason why he should not. If he were careful, this illness could be weathered. They had been very good to him at Dalhousie. He had become acquainted with one of the scientists at the university. The man had a passion for ships and had presumably thought him a character. Anyway, through this professor he had even been allowed the use of some of the laboratory equipment. He had examined stars through a telescope, and after seeing the rings around Saturn and the mountains and craters in the moon, he had turned the telescope up toward Orion and space had leaped gigantic before his eyes. But the greatest revelation had come through a microscope. It seemed appalling to Yardley that he had waited until this age before even seeing what most high-school children take for granted. He had spent hours studying, out of curiosity rather than any scientific purpose, the infinitesimal life-particles that swarmed beneath the glass, past thought and counting, life everywhere and in all things and in such infinite manifestations that the brain reeled unless the harmony of the whole entered the mind to reconcile you to your own ignorance and to beautify the pattern in which you yourself were a part. Considering such things as these, it seemed past credence how men had contrived such skill to make trouble for themselves, or why they considered politicians important. Unless…unless…he could not bring himself to conclude that men were just as helpless as the organisms they studied. No, he refused to believe that.

  The robin, with a worm in its mouth, flew up to the nest beside the window. Yardley leaned forward to see what it would do, but the nest was near the corner and he could not quite get it within the focus of his eyes. He rose from the chair and gripped the raised sash with his hands. Then a sudden weakness took his knees, a sharp pain stabbed up from behind his eyes into his brain, he wavered and lapsed back into the chair and closed his eyes. A myriad of motes of light swarmed through a gathering darkness, the pain
intensified until he tried to cry out, then faded away out of its own violence. He was conscious of opening his lips to speak, of his tongue feeling a sudden moisture on them, of wanting to tell someone that these motes of light were living organisms and that he was thankful he had been able to see them. His head fell back on the pillow and his breathing stopped.

  An hour later, when Heather and Paul came to take him to dinner, they thought he was asleep.

  FORTY-TWO

  A fortnight later Heather lay watching dawn enter the room. It came on a wind from the sea with the sound of gulls and gannets crying in the distance.

  Moving carefully, she slipped out of bed and crossed on tip-toe to the open window. The scalloped cliffs known as the Three Sisters swept in knife-edged outline down to Percé bay where the great perpendicular sandstone rock stood offshore like a stranded ship. The dawn heightened, and Bonaventure Island became visible in a sea the colour of a dove’s back. Northern dawn. Spruce forests and salt water. Field of saffron rising over the sea-rim.

  Stealing back to bed she slipped in between the sheets, then rested on her elbow and looked at Paul’s face. As the dawn heightened, its outline grew more distinct. Yet now his face seemed oddly bereft of light, not withdrawn but utterly defenceless, lips parted, even breath, steady beat of the heart, one arm over the blankets with fist loosely clenched. She looked at his hand. Strange hand. Those years when they were apart it was his hands she had remembered best. They were strong and powerful, yet so strangely delicate when they touched her skin that she felt she could know him by his touch always.

  She laid her cheek against his shoulder and held it there, and he stirred quietly in his sleep, seemed to try to lift and turn, then relapsed again as she sat up. His sleeping silence seemed miraculous. With all the lines smoothed from his face he was so tranquil she felt she hardly knew him. Only the clenched hand and the rise and fall of the chest. And she thought that a whole life lay defenceless beside her in the dawn, one so different from her own that its presence was another miracle. For there was no loneliness now, not even when she was awake and he was asleep. Only fulfillment which after all these years had come to her with astonishing ease and generosity; and wonder at a kind of tenderness so fundamental she asked herself if only men with a touch of ruthlessness can ever possess it.