During the next few days he walked the streets. He entered the offices of large corporations and made inquiries. He got the old smile and the old shake of the head. During one of his walks he passed the Forum. There it was, the length of half a city block, brown and forlorn in the grey summer weather; and years ago during cold winter nights he had played nearly two hundred games in it. It was hard to believe that he had ever been an athlete. He seemed suddenly old, with no sense of time.
There was a telephone in the common hall of the lodging house and it gave him a guilty feeling every time he passed it. He knew he ought to call Marius, but he dreaded raising the old ghosts that might surround him and put him back in the strait-jacket. Marius would be bitter because he had married an English girl, a daughter of the woman who had informed on him during the war. Old arguments would be thrown in his face, and again he would have to fight for his identity. Thinking of this, remembering in detail how far he had drifted since the family had been broken up, he was overpowered by a homesickness for Saint-Marc. He had not seen it for years; not since he was eighteen. Perhaps if he saw it again it would be easier to meet Marius without quarrelling. Perhaps he might even feel at home.
One morning in the middle of the week he went down the hill to the station and bought a ticket for Sainte-Justine. His mind filled with old memories: Polycarpe Drouin and Frenette in the general store, the look of the river from the maple grove on the ridge, Yardley limping along the road telling his stories, the cool feeling of dew on the thwarts of the boat when they went fishing between dawn and sunrise, swallows dipping silently out of the eaves of the disused stone mill. With the ticket in his pocket he wandered about the station waiting for the gates to open. But when the train was called and the crowd began to pour through onto the platform, he turned and walked out of the station and back up the hill.
It would have been senseless to return to Saint-Marc. Polycarpe Drouin was dead. Yardley and his father were dead. Frenette was an old man now; after years of being his own master, he had been compelled to give up his forge and now was just another employee of the factory. Father Beaubien was in another parish. Saint-Marc was not a village any more; it was a small factory town, and some of his father’s land had been turned into a golf course by the company. Instead of playing checkers in Drouin’s store, coming into it informally whenever they felt like it, the villagers now played organized bingo games in a community hall on Saturday nights.
He knew that his home was irrevocably with Heather, in himself. His thoughts softened with recollections of her. You could be with a girl and never notice countless things about her. But afterwards, if you loved her, you remembered them. Now he recalled the expression of her face when they had loved each other: a sort of eager graciousness opening into ecstasy. Afterwards she always brushed the lobe of his right ear with her lips, held them there and breathed softly. Her life was in her breath and it entered his brain in sound.
When he reached his lodgings his neighbour’s radio was on. It was always on these days, and because the man was deaf he tuned it so loudly it blasted through the walls. The man listened to every news release. He got the cbc at eight and nine in the morning, Super Suds at ten, the bbc and cbc at the lunch-hour, and in the evening more cbc and bbc backed up by American commentators. Every single war and peace rumour, every half-baked prophecy sold to the networks at a thousand dollars a guess blared through the lodging house.
Sunday came, and a return of the heat: humid streets bleakly empty, workers uncomfortable in dark suits going to church, business men also uncomfortable driving in cars to the rich Protestant churches on Sherbrooke Street. About one o’clock, when he knew Marius would be home from High Mass, he finally forced himself to telephone. Emilie answered. He promised to have supper with them that night, and then he hung up the receiver with a faint sigh.
Marius was living in the same house in the same street into which he had moved just after he and Emilie were married. As more children came, they had taken the upper flat to get more room. Every house on the street looked as if it had been built from the same blueprint of the same contractor, of the same materials. Each was of two stories, yellow brick on the sides and back, grey stone in front. All had identical outside staircases of cast-iron which darkened the windows of the ground floor as they rose in bulging spirals from the sidewalks to the second floor. All of them had mean little protuberant balconies overcrowded by large families on hot days. When Paul arrived at six-thirty the street was loud with the noise of playing children. He counted the stairs from the end of the block until he found the correct house, remembering that Marius was eleven from the corner. As he mounted the spiral, two nieces and three nephews darted inside from the balcony.
All that evening Paul felt a total stranger in his brother’s house. It was so long since he had seen the children that he found it embarrassingly difficult to call them by their right names. He admired the way Emilie managed them. Although the clothes of the youngest had been handed down, they were all neat and clean. The supper passed pleasantly enough; even when Emilie inquired of Paul’s mother, Marius made no comment. Then she went out to the back bedrooms to put the younger children to bed, while the middle one went down to the street to play, and the oldest boy left to visit a friend. Marius took Paul into the parlour. It was cluttered with furniture bought at auction years ago, a row of law books lay on a shelf along one wall and there was a table where Marius managed to work in the evenings. Newspapers, periodicals, religious tracts, political pamphlets and notes for political speeches were stacked on the windowsill. It was easy to see that Marius had a poor law practice. But with him, it was just another cause for grievance and he seemed quite unable to understand the reason. He was confident that he understood French-Canada better than anyone else, without ever having accepted the fact that at least up to the present its basic characteristic had been common sense. Nowhere on earth was a bad lawyer spotted more quickly than in Quebec.
Marius refused to talk of anything but politics. His bitterness had retained some of its fire, but now there was a querulous note in his voice. His gestures were as automatically dramatic as ever. He claimed he was not a fascist; he was what he had always been, a straight-forward nationalist who hadn’t changed a single opinion since the war. He criticized every other politician in Quebec: they had all betrayed the people, the whole lot of them had gone soft or been bought out. He kept repeating the same things over and over. Economics? What did economics matter? A pure race, a pure language, larger families, no more connection with the English, no interference from foreigners, a greater clerical control over everything–with these conditions Quebec would reach the millennium. Scientists could split the atom and circumnavigate the globe in a week, but Marius had no difficulty reducing everything to race, religion and politics. At one time or another he had belonged to four different political parties; after quarrelling with all his former associates, he was now trying to found a new one of his own.
For three hours Paul listened to a voice that now was sharp, now sinuous, now poignant, but always was consciously oratorical. Emilie sat in the corner quietly darning socks. Paul was obsessed by the pity of Marius, and what he stood for. With every sentence he uttered, Marius was binding the strait-jacket tighter and tighter around himself. Was this the same process he had witnessed in Europe? If so, Marius didn’t know it. To try to handle science by nationalism! God, did they have to do that here as well? It seemed as though Marius had to bind others to make himself feel free.
Once Paul protested against one of his arguments, saying that it was absurd of Marius to claim that he spoke for more than three per cent of the population. Marius started in a spurt of personal anger. “What right have you to talk? You de-raced yourself long ago!”
After that, Paul kept quiet. The frustration his brother produced in him was nothing new, but now he was more detached from it; now he could feel the pity of it. After twenty years of struggle Marius was a nerve-shot man with black hair splashed with
grey. He had too little money. He had to talk all day long to retain his hope. And Emilie stayed with him, supporting his fading confidence with a wonderful mixture of matter-of-fact and inarticulate tenderness. He neglected her; not for other women but because he was chronically unable to think of anyone but himself. She never saw it. Emilie had the bearing of a happy woman. “I hope you’re still a good Catholic,” she said to Paul at the door. “It makes it easy not to worry about little things.”
Some of the humidity had been blown away by a night wind, and as Paul walked home his mind cleared with the weather. Now he felt a terrific release and relief. In seeing Marius he had seen more than his brother; he had seen the symbol of much of his past frustration. Objectively, from the outside. Instead of going home he kept on walking till past midnight, when he stopped at a Murray’s for coffee and a sandwich. He listened to the talk of night-workers around him. They were relaxed and easy with each other, French and English together, radio technicians, theatre operators, telegraphers, men who had walked up from the railroad stations. None of them seemed worried or strained. They were together because of the nature of their jobs, and because the rest of the city was asleep.
By the time Paul reached home he had forgotten how late it was. He drew a chair up to the table, found a stack of yellow paper and sharpened a pair of pencils. Now he wished he had seen his brother days ago. Out of Marius, out of his own life, out of the feeling he had in his bones for his own province and the others surrounding it, the theme of his new book began to emerge. Its outlines grew so clear that his pencil kept moving steadily until three in the morning. He was not formulating sentences; he was drafting the design of a full novel. He had never before been able to see so far into any work he had attempted. Its material and symbols lay ready in his subconscious: the dilemma that had nearly strangled him all his life and which at last he had managed to escape. He could view it now as though it belonged to another person; with pity, with some tenderness, but clearly and at a distance. Outlines of scenes he would later create followed each other inevitably, one by one out of his subconscious. He picked up ten pages covered with scrawled notes, and as he reread them he found that each scene had retained in his mind the transparent clarity of still water.
He put the papers away and went to bed. For some minutes he lay awake staring at a patch of ceiling lit by the beam of a street light. He tried to calculate his project coolly, in relation to the future. If he had nothing else to do he might be able to complete it within six months. Carrying on another job, it would take at least a year. He had enough money to last until the end of September; that gave him two months clear in which to work. He thought of Heather and his promise to get a job as soon as possible. The imperious urgency of his project trod over it. She would understand how he felt. Until the end of September his job was here in this room, at the typewriter.
Then he laughed sardonically in the darkness. He was forgetting the war, the coming of which had given him the confidence to marry Heather Methuen. Even in Montreal, most people seemed to take it for granted that it would begin this autumn. No matter what they said, the instinctual part of the crowd, the incalculable part which is surer than the brain of a genius, knew that war was coming with the same certainty a flock of birds knows when it will rain. And it knew that Canada would be in it from the beginning. In some of the current magazines were predictions that England would stand aside a second time. Paul was sure she wouldn’t. But until war came, nothing here would outwardly change. It was just possible–not likely but certainly not inconceivable–that he could beat a world deadline.
He turned over on his side and fell asleep.
When he woke the next morning he was filled with a sense of urgency he had never known before. He began writing immediately after breakfast and kept it up until one o’clock. Then after lunch, he wrote until five. He slept until seven, ate a quick supper and walked for an hour. Then he worked until one in the morning. Day after day he kept up this pace, and by the end of the first week in August he had a hundred revised pages on his improvised desk and he had discharged about five hundred more into the wastebasket. The sense of sureness with which his outline had been made remained with him. The details of individual scenes cataracted constantly before his eyes, woke him up at night and kept him staring at the splash of light on his ceiling. He heard the voices of his characters talking to each other. The rhythm of the whole seemed to be pulsing in his blood.
Out of the society which had produced and frustrated him, which in his own way he had learned to accept, he knew that he was at last beating out a harmony. His fingers seemed to be feeling down through the surface of character and action to the roots of the country itself. In all his life, he had never seen an English-Canadian and a French-Canadian hostile to each other face to face. When they disliked, they disliked entirely in the group. And the result of these two group-legends was a Canada oddly naive, so far without any real villains, without overt cruelty or criminal memories, a country strangely innocent in its groping individual common sense, intent on doing the right thing in the way some children are, tongue-tied because it felt others would not be interested in what it had to say; loyal, skilled and proud, race-memories lonely in great spaces.
FORTY-SIX
Heather lay on the packed sand of Kennebunkport beach and watched the rollers coasting in. Through dark glasses she saw them arch up in the late afternoon sun, break and pause, swing in a long backward sluice into the next coming waves. The air sang like the inside of a sea shell. The sun held her firmly to the sand, it glowed on her skin, it increased and spread her happiness so that she wondered if it were visible. Tomorrow she would be going home to Paul. She wondered how he would like her now: her back and arms and legs rich with sun, the rest of her skin like milk. Tomorrow his eyes would have her again.
From his letters she knew he had no job, but that he was writing and that the book was going well. She was glad. It seemed senseless for him to break off writing to look for a job now. Tomorrow she would return with her mother, would go back to living in the Methuen house on the side of the mountain. It wouldn’t be good, but it could be done; at least until his book was finished.
She picked up her beach-robe and began walking along the sand to the hotel. It was already late afternoon. Eight people stopped to talk to her before she reached the veranda, all Montrealers. Back in her own room she took a fresh-water bath, then put on a light frock and joined her mother in the lounge. Janet felt rather disturbed because Heather refused to wear mourning for her grandfather, but Janet’s black chiffon dress, black silk stockings and black accessories seemed to Heather enough mourning for one family.
Janet was exceptionally cheerful when Heather found her in the lounge. She had been playing bridge all afternoon with friends from Montreal. Over a cocktail she told Heather some of the details of the game, including the peculiarities of her partners, and then they went in to dinner.
“I’ve been thinking, dear,” she said, “we might as well stay here until the first of September. As a matter of fact, I tried to find the manager this afternoon. I’d like to keep the rooms we have.”
“But Mummy–” Heather laid down her soup spoon. “I thought we were leaving tomorrow!”
“It’s been very good for us both,” Janet said. “When you came back from Nova Scotia you were looking dreadfully thin and tired. I know I’ve needed the rest myself after this dreadful year.”
Heather picked up the spoon again. “You’re looking much better now, Mummy.”
A couple came into the dining room and left the door open behind them. The voice of a news commentator blared after them from the radio in the lounge. The situation in Europe had noticeably deteriorated in the past twenty-four hours, he said. It was rumoured that Hitler had summoned Count Ciano to Berchtesgaden.
“I do wish they’d turn that radio off!” Janet said. “Really–the announcers down here have such dreadful voices!”
“Then let’s go home,” Heather said grav
ely. “So you can listen to the bbc.”
“One ought to be able to get it here as well. Florence was saying that very thing this afternoon. After all, there are so many quite nice Americans. Florence was saying she simply can’t understand why they don’t do something about it.” Janet finished her soup and glanced out the window. The light was fading off the beach and the incoming combers looked cold. A slight fog was drifting in from the sea. “This is quite a pleasant place, you know. It seems foolish to go home when so many of one’s friends are here. Florence and I were laughing about it this afternoon. Three past presidents of the club are here now.”
A waitress came to take their soup bowls. Heather took a deep breath. “Sorry, Mummy. I’ve made my plans to leave tomorrow.”
Janet looked at her daughter with a flash of suspicion. “But you can easily change them, dear.”
Heather looked out the window and made no reply as the next course was set before them.
“I don’t understand you, Heather,” Janet said.
“Well, let’s not talk about it until after dinner.”
“But, dear–you know I can’t stay here alone.”
“I’ve enjoyed it,” Heather said. “It’s been lovely.” She concentrated on her plate. “But you said we’d stay three weeks, and I have an appointment in Montreal.”
Janet toyed with her roast beef. “It can’t possibly be more important than staying with me. There’s no one left in Montreal in August.”
Heather waited a moment, then she said, “Tell me what Daphne said in the letter you got this afternoon.”
Two Solitudes Page 43
