Captain Chase expressed to the Herald and Banner that in this time of national crisis, all must pitch in as was done in the War, especially those in Ontario which has been more fortunate than some. Attacked by his competitors most notably Mr. Richard Griffen of Royal Classic Knitwear in Toronto, who have accused him of dumping his overruns on the market as free giveaways and thus depriving the working man of wages, Captain Chase stated that as recipients of these items cannot afford to purchase them he is not doing anyone out of sales.
He added that all portions of the country have suffered their setbacks and Chase Industries currently faces a scale down of its operations due to reduced demand. He said he would make every attempt to keep factories running but may soon be under the necessity, of either layoffs or part hours and wages.
We can only applaud Captain Chase's efforts, a man who holds to his word, unlike the strikebreaking and lockout tactics in centres such as Winnipeg and Montreal, which has kept Port Ticonderoga a law-abiding town and clear of the scenes of Union riots, brutal violence and Communist-inspired blood-shed which have marred other cities with considerable destruction of property and injury as well as loss of life.
The Blind Assassin: The chenille spread
Is this where you're living? she says. She twists the gloves in her hands, as if they're wet and she's wringing them out.
This is where I'm staying, he says. It's a different thing.
The house is one of a row, all red brick darkened by grime, narrow and tall, with steeply angled roofs. There's an oblong of dusty grass in front, a few parched weeds growing beside the walk. A brown paper bag torn open.
Four steps up to the porch. Lace curtains dangle in the front window. He takes out his key.
She glances back over her shoulder as she steps inside. Don't worry, he says, nobody's watching. This is my friend's place anyway. I'm here today and gone tomorrow.
You have a lot of friends, she says.
Not a lot, he says. You don't need many if there's no rotten apples.
There's a vestibule with a row of brass hooks for coats, a worn linoleum floor in a pattern of brown-and-yellow squares, an inner door with a frosted glass panel bearing a design of herons or cranes. Birds with long legs bending their graceful snake-necks among the reeds and lilies, left over from an earlier age: gaslight. He opens the door with a second key and they step into the dim inner hallway; he flicks on the light switch. Overhead, a fixture with three pink glass blossoms, two of the bulbs missing.
Don't look so dismayed, darling, he says. None of it will rub off on you. Just don't touch anything.
Oh, it might, she says with a small breathless laugh. I have to touch you. You'll rub off.
He pulls the glass door shut behind them. Another door on the left, varnished and dark: she imagines a censorious ear pressed against it from the inside, a creaking, as if of weight shifting from foot to foot. Some malevolent grey-haired crone - wouldn't that match the lace curtains? A long battered flight of stairs goes up, with carpeting treads nailed on and a gap-toothed banister. The wallpaper is a trellis design, with grapevines and roses entwined, pink once, now the light brown of milky tea. He puts his arms carefully around her, brushes his lips over the side of her neck, her throat; not the mouth. She shivers.
I'm easy to get rid of afterwards, he says, whispering. You can just go home and take a shower.
Don't say that, she says, whispering also. You're making fun. You never believe I mean it.
You mean it enough for this, he says. She slides her arm around his waist and they go up the stairs a little clumsily, a little heavily; their bodies slow them down. Halfway up there's a round window of coloured glass: through the cobalt blue of the sky, the grapes in dime-store purple, the headache red of the flowers, light falls, staining their faces. On the second-floor landing he kisses her again, this time harder, sliding her skirt up her silky legs as far as the tops of her stockings, fingering the little hard rubber nipples there, pressing her up against the wall. She always wears a girdle: getting her out of it is like peeling the skin off a seal.
Her hat tumbles off, her arms are around his neck, her head and body arched backwards as if someone's pulling down on her hair. Her hair itself has come unpinned, uncoiled; he smoothes his hand down it, the pale tapering swath of it, and thinks of flame, the single shimmering flame of a white candle, turned upside down. But a flame can't burn downwards.
The room is on the third floor, the servants' quarters they must once have been. Once they're inside he puts on the chain. The room is small and close and dim, with one window, open a few inches, the blind pulled most of the way down, white net curtains looped to either side. The afternoon sun is hitting the blind, turning it golden. The air smells of dry rot, but also of soap: there's a tiny triangular sink in one corner, a foxed mirror hanging above it; crammed underneath it, the square-edged black box of his typewriter. His toothbrush in an enamelled tin cup; not a new toothbrush. It's too intimate. She turns her eyes away. There's a darkly varnished bureau scarred with cigarette burns and the marks from wet glasses, but most of the space is taken up by the bed. It's the brass kind, outmoded and maidenish and painted white except for the knobs. It will probably creak. Thinking of this, she flushes.
She can tell he's taken pains with the bed - changed the sheets or at least the pillowcase, smoothed out the faded Nile-green chenille spread. She almost wishes he hadn't, because seeing this causes her a pang of something like pity, as if a starving peasant has offered her his last piece of bread. Pity isn't what she wants to feel. She doesn't want to feel he is in any way vulnerable. Only she is allowed to be that. She sets her purse and gloves down on top of the bureau. She's conscious suddenly of this as a social situation. As a social situation it's absurd.
Sorry there's no butler, he says. Want a drink? Cheap scotch.
Yes please, she says. He keeps the bottle in the top bureau drawer; he takes it out, and two glasses, and pours. Say when.
When, please.
No ice, he says, but you can have water.
That's all right. She gulps the whisky, coughs a little, smiles at him, standing with her back against the bureau.
Short and hard and straight up, he says, the way you love it. He sits down on the bed with his drink. Here's to loving it. He raises his glass. He's not smiling back.
You're unusually mean today.
Self-defence, he says.
I don't love it, I love you, she says. I do know the difference.
Up to a point, he says. Or so you think. It saves face.
Give me one good reason why I shouldn't just walk out of here.
He grins. Come over here then.
Although he knows she wants him to, he won't say he loves her. Perhaps it would leave him armourless, like an admission of guilt.
I'll take my stockings off first. They run as soon as you look at them.
Like you, he says. Leave them on. Come over here now.
The sun has moved across; there's just a wedge of light remaining, on the left side of the drawn blind. Outside, a streetcar rumbles past, bell clanging. Streetcars must have been going past all this time. Why then has the effect been silence? Silence and his breath, their breaths, labouring, withheld, trying not to make any noise. Or not too much noise. Why should pleasure sound so much like distress? Like someone wounded. He'd put his hand over her mouth.
The room is darker now, yet she sees more. The bedspread heaped onto the floor, the sheet twisted around and over them like a thick cloth vine; the single bulb, unshaded, the cream-coloured wallpaper with its blue violets, tiny and silly, stained beige where the roof must have leaked; the chain protecting the door. The chain protecting the door: it's flimsy enough. One good shove, one kick with a boot. If that were to happen, what would she do? She feels the walls thinning, turning to ice. They're fish in a bowl.
He lights two cigarettes, hands her one. They both sigh in. He runs his free hand down her, then again, taking her in through his fingers. He wonde
rs how much time she has; he doesn't ask. Instead he takes hold of her wrist. She's wearing a small gold watch. He covers its face.
So, he says. Bedtime story?
Yes, please, she says.
Where were we?
You'd just cut out the tongues of those poor girls in their bridal veils.
Oh yes. And you protested. If you don't like this story I could tell you a different one, but I can't promise it would be any more civilized. It might be worse. It might be modern. Instead of a few dead Zycronians, we could have acres of stinking mud and hundreds of thousands of . . .
I'll keep this one, she says quickly. Anyway it's the one you want to tell me.
She stubs out her cigarette in the brown glass ashtray, then settles herself against him, ear to his chest. She likes to hear his voice this way, as if it begins not in his throat but in his body, like a hum or a growl, or like a voice speaking from deep underground. Like the blood moving through her own heart: a word,a word,a word.
The Mail and Empire, December 5, 1934
PLAUDITS FOR BENNETT
SPECIAL TO THE MAIL AND EMPIRE
In a speech to the Empire Club last evening, Mr. Richard E. Griffen, Toronto financier and outspoken President of Royal Classic Knitwear, had moderate praise for Prime Minister R.B. Bennett and brickbats for his critics.
Referring to Sunday's boisterous Maple Leaf Gardens rally in Toronto, when 15,000 Communists staged a hysterical welcome for their leader Tim Buck, jailed for seditious conspiracy but paroled Saturday from Kingston's Portsmouth Penitentiary, Mr. Griffen expressed himself alarmed by the Government's "caving in to pressure" in the form of a petition signed by 200,000 "deluded bleeding hearts." Mr. Bennett's policy of "the iron heel of ruthlessness" had been correct, he said, as imprisonment of those plotting to topple elected governments and confiscate private property was the only way to deal with subversion.
As for the tens of thousands of immigrants deported under Section 98, including those sent back to countries such as Germany and Italy where they face internment, these had advocated tyrannical rule and now would get a first-hand taste of it, Mr. Griffen stated.
Turning to the economy, he said that although unemployment remained high, with consequent unrest and Communists and their sympathizers continuing to profit from it, there were hopeful signs and he was confident that the Depression would be over by spring. Meanwhile the only sane policy was to stay the course and allow the system to correct itself. Any inclination towards the soft socialism of Mr. Roosevelt should be resisted, as such efforts could only further sicken the ailing economy. Although the plight of the unemployed was to be deplored, many were idle from inclination, and force should be used promptly and effectively against illegal strikers and outside agitators.
Mr. Griffen's remarks were roundly applauded.
The Blind Assassin: The messenger
Now then. Let's say it's dark. The suns, all three of them, have set. A couple of moons have risen. In the foothills the wolves are abroad. The chosen girl is waiting her turn to be sacrificed. She's been fed her last, elaborate meal, she's been scented and anointed, songs have been sung in her praise, prayers have been offered. Now she's lying on a bed of red and gold brocade, shut up in the Temple's innermost chamber, which smells of the mixture of petals and incense and crushed aromatic spices customarily strewn on the biers of the dead. The bed itself is called the Bed of One Night, because no girl ever spends two nights in it. Among the girls themselves, when they still have their tongues, it's called the Bed of Voiceless Tears.
At midnight she will be visited by the Lord of the Underworld, who is said to be dressed in rusty armour. The Underworld is the place of tearing apart and of disintegration: all souls must pass through it on their way to the land of the Gods, and some - the most sinful ones - must remain there. Every dedicated Temple maiden must undergo a visitation from the rusty Lord the night before her sacrifice, for if not, her soul will be unsatisfied, and instead of travelling to the land of the Gods she will be forced to join the band of beautiful nude dead women with azure hair, curvaceous figures, ruby-red lips and eyes like snakefilled pits, who hang around the ancient ruined tombs in the desolate mountains to the West. You see, I didn't forget them.
I appreciate your thoughtfulness.
Nothing's too good for you. Any other little thing you want added, just let me know. Anyway. Like many peoples, ancient and modern, the Zycronians are afraid of virgins, dead ones especially. Women betrayed in love who have died unmarried are driven to seek in death what they've so unfortunately missed out on in life. They sleep in the ruined tombs by day, and by night they prey upon unwary travellers, in particular any young men foolhardy enough to go there. They leap onto these young men and suck out their essence, and turn them into obedient zombies, bound to satisfy the nude dead women's unnatural cravings on demand.
What bad luck for the young men, she says. Is there no defence against these vicious creatures?
You can stick spears into them, or mash them to a pulp with rocks. But there are so many of them - it's like fighting off an octopus, they're all over a fellow before he knows it. Anyway, they hypnotize you - they ruin your willpower. It's the first thing they do. As soon as you catch sight of one, you're rooted to the spot.
I can imagine. More scotch?
I think I could stand it. Thanks. The girl - what do you think her name should be?
I don't know. You choose. You know the territory.
I'll think about it. Anyway, there she lies on the Bed of One Night, a prey to anticipation. She doesn't know which will be worse, having her throat cut or the next few hours. It's one of the open secrets of the Temple that the Lord of the Underworld isn't real, but merely one of the courtiers in disguise. Like everything else in Sakiel-Norn this position is for sale, and large amounts are said to change hands for the privilege - under the table, of course. The recipient of the payoffs is the High Priestess, who is as venal as they come, and known to be partial to sapphires. She excuses herself by vowing to use the money for charitable purposes, and she does use some of it for that, when she remembers. The girls can hardly complain about this part of their ordeal, being without tongues or even writing materials, and anyway they're all dead the next day. Pennies from heaven, says the High Priestess to herself as she totes up the cash.
Meanwhile, off in the distance a large, ragged horde of barbarians is on the march, intent on capturing the far-famed city of Sakiel-Norn, then looting it and burning it to the ground. They've already done this very same thing to several other cities farther west. No one - no one among the civilized nations, that is - can account for their success. They are neither well clothed nor well armed, they can't read, and they possess no ingenious metal contraptions.
Not only that, they have no king, only a leader. This leader has no name as such; he gave up his name when he became the leader, and was given a title instead. His title is the Servant of Rejoicing. His followers refer to him also as the Scourge of the All-Powerful, the Right Fist of the Invincible, the Purger of Iniquities, and the Defender of Virtue and Justice. The barbarians' original homeland is unknown, but it is agreed that they come from the northwest, where the ill winds also originate. By their enemies they're called the People of Desolation, but they term themselves the People of Joy.
Their current leader bears the marks of divine favour: he was born with a caul, is wounded in the foot, and has a star-shaped mark on his forehead. He falls into trances and communes with the other world whenever he is at a loss as to what to do next. He's on his way to destroy Sakiel-Norn because of an order brought to him by a messenger of the Gods.
This messenger appeared to him in the guise of a flame, with numerous eyes and wings of fire shooting out. Such messengers are known to speak in torturous parables and to take many forms: burning thulks or stones that can speak, or walking flowers, or bird-headed creatures with human bodies. Or else they might look like anyone at all. Travellers in ones or twos, men rumoured to be thieves
or magicians, foreigners who speak several languages, and beggars by the side of the road are the most likely to be such messengers, say the People of Desolation: therefore all of these need to be handled with great circumspection, at least until their true nature can be discovered.
If they turn out to be divine emissaries, it's best to give them food and wine and the use of a woman if required, to listen respectfully to their messages, and then to let them go on their way. Otherwise, they should be stoned to death and their possessions confiscated. You may be sure that all travellers, magicians, strangers or beggars who find themselves in the vicinity of the People of Desolation take care to provide themselves with a stash of obscure parables - cloud words, they're called, or knotted silk - enigmatic enough to be useful on various occasions, as circumstances may dictate. To travel among the People of Joy without a riddle or a puzzling rhyme would be to court certain death.
According to the words of the flame with eyes, the city of Sakiel-Norn has been marked out for destruction on account of its luxury, its worship of false gods, and in especial its abhorrent child sacrifices. Because of this practice, all the people in the city, including the slaves and the children and maidens destined for sacrifice, are to be put to the sword. To kill even those whose proposed deaths are the reason for this killing may not seem just, but for the People of Joy it isn't guilt or innocence that determines such things, it's whether or not you've been tainted, and as far as the People of Joy are concerned everyone in a tainted city is as tainted as everyone else.
The horde rolls forward, raising a dark dust cloud as it moves; this cloud flies over it like a flag. It is not however close enough to have been spotted by the sentries posted on the walls of Sakiel-Norn. Others who might give warning - outlying herdsmen, merchants in transit, and so forth - are relentlessly run down and hacked to pieces, with the exception of any who might possibly be divine messengers.
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