Watch that Ends the Night

by Hugh Maclennan

  The professor rose from the phone, smiled and apologized for delaying me, and left the room with his head on one side. I took his place and dialed, and immediately a harsh voice spoke to me in French: “L’hôtel Eduard Sept.”

  “What?” I said, and was sure the porter had copied the number wrong. I continued in French: “My name is George Stewart. Is there anyone there who wants to speak to me?”

  “ Moment, s’vous plait,” and I was left with an idle line.

  So I waited and wondered if I wasted my time in doing so, for it seemed inconceivable that anyone I knew would be staying at a place like that. Before the war I had known several who had frequented the Edward VII, for it had been a famous institution where respectable men had gone to sleep off a bender; it had been disreputable, but to its disreputableness there had been a certain cachet in pre-war Montreal. It had no cachet now, for the war had ruined it. During the war years it had rented its rooms to soldiers and their girls by the hour, and so many soldiers requiring penicillin had mentioned its name to battalion medical officers that the army had put it out of bounds for troops. Now it was a place you never heard mentioned unless somebody died or was arrested in it.

  I heard a noise at the end of the line, heavy breathing and then a voice spoke which made my hair prickle.

  “Is that George Stewart?”

  No! the thought crashed through my stunned mind. No, this is impossible. Things never happen like this.

  “Yes,” I heard my own voice say, “this is George.”

  “Really you? Really old George?”

  “Really me.”

  “This is Jerome. Jerome Martell.”

  “I know,” I said. “I recognized your voice right away.”

  Then I began to shake and felt myself turning pale. Telepathy is more common than we care to believe. Jerome Martell was the man I just mentioned, the one I had thought dead for a decade.

  CHAPTER II

  I was shocked and startled into utter banality. “When did you get back?” I asked him.

  “If you mean Montreal, I got back this morning. I’ve just been talking to Harry Blackwell.”

  Another name from the past and I said: “Good God!”

  “He told me about you and Kate and I phoned your apartment.”

  “You mean, you’ve talked to Catherine?”

  “No, there were so many George Stewarts and G. Stewarts I gave up after the fourth try and called Blackwell instead. He told me you had this university job. Look George – he told me you’ve all thought I was dead.”

  “That’s right. We did.”

  “Kate, too?”

  “What else could she think?”

  A pause and then he said in the voice of a man who can be surprised by nothing.

  “Truly, I thought I’d got word out.”

  “Word out of where?”

  “I’ve been –” another pause, I heard his heavy breathing, and he went on. “I’ve been in Russia and I’ve been in China. I got out of China into Hong Kong and I spent a year there getting my health back. I wrote several letters from Hong Kong, but they were all returned. On the odds it would be surprising if Kate were still alive, but inside me I was sure she was. I had this inside feeling all the time about her. How long have you been married?”

  I took out a packet of cigarettes, spilled one onto the table beside the phone, put it between my lips and lit it. My right hand shook when it snapped the lighter.

  “I suppose this must be a shock,” he said.

  “That’s one way of understating it.”

  “Harry Blackwell kept repeating, ‘But it was in the papers you were dead!’ That poor sorry little man, he always believed the papers.”

  For a moment the wire sang between us and then I said: “Harry has done pretty well lately. We all under-rated him. We under-rated so many people who have done well since the war.”

  Jerome did not seem to hear me. “Didn’t even one of my letters get back?” he said.

  “Nobody has had a single word from you since 1939.”

  Again the wire sang between us.

  “Did Blackwell tell you how we thought you had died?” I asked.

  “He just said it was in the papers I was dead.”

  “Does the name Lajoie mean a thing to you? A French aviator? Captain Lajoie?”

  He waited a moment and said no.

  “Well,” I said, “this Captain Lajoie was over here for a time in the war and he said he knew you in the French underground. What he told us wasn’t pretty.”

  “He might have known me under another name,” Jerome said. “What did he say?”

  “He said the Nazis spent two days torturing you and afterwards they hung up your body on a meat hook in the square of a French market town.”

  “Was all that in the papers?”

  “No, just that you’d been killed in the French underground. The Gazette wrote you a very nice obituary, considering what they thought of your politics.”

  There was another silence.

  Then Jerome said: “Did everyone believe this story of the torture and the meat hook?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Kate believe it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” he said, “it came pretty close to being true. Did Kate believe it?”

  “I said so, Jerome.”

  Looking out the window I saw the darkness visibly flooding down over the snow with its squirrel tracks, and now a light was on and there was a yellow track from it across one part of the snow. I felt numb, unreal, and heard myself say, “Where have you been? What have you been doing?”

  “George, I can’t tell you all that now. Russia – China – the war – everything. You see I was caught with the Spanish in France in 1939 when we came over the Pyrenees and my passport was stolen. When I was in Hong Kong I read a book about one of those French concentration camps written by a man called Arthur Koestler. Did you ever read that book?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you know what it was like.” I heard him breathing so heavily that I wondered if he was sick. “When the Nazis came in, the French let me out and I had to go underground. I lasted till 1943 before they caught me. They didn’t kill me because I was a doctor. They shipped me around for a while, but I ended in Poland after I was caught escaping.”

  “Auschwitz?”

  “Yes,” he said simply.

  There was another silence and I felt even more unreal as I tried to imagine what he looked like.

  “When the Russians came in they shipped me east. The Russians wanted doctors too, and after a stretch in one of their arctic camps I was a surgeon in a Siberian town. They promised to let me go home but they never did. But they did let me go to China. It’s too long a story and it’s too commonplace. What happened to me has happened to millions of others. The Chinese let me out after I got sick. They let me out to Hong Kong.” He paused, and then he said with an intense calm more powerful than any note of passion could possibly be, “All I ever wanted was to come home. All I lived for was to come home to Kate and Sally.”

  I felt as tired as a man after a fainting spell.

  “How long did you say you and Kate have been married?”

  “I didn’t say, but we’ve been married nine years.”

  Another pause before he said: “How is she?”

  At last I recovered something of myself, for this question was the one I was most frequently asked. Whenever I met a friend on the street his first question was apt to be, ‘How is Catherine?’ I began to talk about her and with dramatic suddenness his tone changed to that of a doctor.

  “What, precisely, are the symptoms now?”

  For the next five minutes I recounted them, and from time to time he interrupted me with questions.

  When I was done he asked: “Did I understand you to say two embolisms?”

  “That’s right.” And noting the doubt in his voice I added: “She’s had the best opinions, Jerome. Jack Christopher is her physician now.”
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  “I guessed he would be. I’m glad he is.”

  But he was, at least partially, still the same Jerome, for he cross-questioned me further about her symptoms. I assured him that to look at her casually you would never guess she had even been sick, and I asked him if he was out of touch with recent medical developments. He said he supposed he was out of touch to an extent, but that he had worked for a year in a hospital in Hong Kong, having obtained the post through a chest surgeon he met there whom he had known years ago in Edinburgh. I explained to him about a new drug which had helped her, one which had been used for the first time in such cases here in Montreal, and he admitted that he had never heard of it. A professor entered the room to hunt for mail, inhibiting me by his presence, and looking out the window I saw that it had become totally dark.

  “How’s Sally?” I heard Jerome say.

  “She’s in her last year in the university.”

  “Tell me more about her, George.”

  It was then that I became haunted by the thought that I must know what he looked like if I was to continue talking to him. His age I knew – he was fifty-two. But what a fifty-two years of life he had spent! Was he white? Was he scarred? Did his eyes have that look of the men who had been in the camps? Did his face have that holy expression that sometimes comes from just the right amount of starvation?

  I tried to describe Sally to him.

  “Little Sal a biologist!” He gave a soft, wondering laugh. “Remember how I used to set up the microscope for her when she was a kid? The things she used to say when she looked through it!”

  When he said this my eyes burned and I nearly wept. Those last words of his had jumped the years, had picked him up and brought him back alive as I had known him in those depression evenings in Montreal when he was the center of rabid discussions in apartments when we sat on the floor and drank beer and talked politics and economics and dreaded the coming war and reviled Baldwin, Chamberlain and the capitalists. He was right in front of me now, Jerome Martell in the mid-Thirties, ugly-handsome with muscular cheeks, a nose flattened by an old break, hair cropped short because it defied a brush, a bulldog jaw, nostrils ardent like those of a horse, mouth strongly wide and sensual, but the eyes young, hungry and vulnerable, quick to shame as a boy’s, charming with children and the weak, quarrelsome with the strong. There he was, that oddly pure sensualist so many experimenting women had desired, the man so many of us had thought was wonderful in those depression years when we were all outcasts.

  “George,” I heard him say, “you’re probably thinking a lot you’re not saying.”

  “I suppose you’re doing the same.”

  “Does she hate me?”

  “She never did.”

  “Then she hasn’t changed! Then she’s just the same! Then what I saw in my sleep was true! Does she still talk about me?”

  “Not any more.”

  There was a long silence after I said this. Then I heard him whisper, “Kate! Kate!” And I heard him sob, and the pity of the moment was almost too much for me. I had never doubted that he loved her.

  “I’ve got to see her, George. I’ve got to see her and Sally.”

  I’m not a man with much self-confidence and when I was young I took it for granted that nobody respected me or paid me any attention. When I was young I was just another of those people who are around, for I had, and still have, a clumsy body of which I was never proud and when I was young I was timid. But living with Catherine had matured me a little and my work on the radio had taught me how to control my voice. I realized now – for I have learned to listen to my own voice as though it came from somebody else, I have learned what it sounds like from listening to play-backs in the studio – I realized now that it was resonant and steady.

  “Are you in a fit condition to see her, Jerome?”

  “What do you mean, a fit condition?”

  “Mentally and physically is what I mean.”

  He seemed surprised by the question. “I’ve got a constitution like an ox,” he said.

  “But Catherine hasn’t.”

  He did not seem to have heard me. “I know this must seem strange and sudden to you, but listen, George – I’ve gone over most of the frontiers and I tell you, I’m still a doctor and a reasonably good one. It will be all right. I must see her, George. I think it would be quite wrong if I didn’t. I’m not in trouble with the police or anything like that. I spoke with the police in Vancouver. It was Kate who kept me alive and I tell you, George, I believe she will know it. Once in a dream she said, ‘I’ve never left you.’”

  “When did she say that to you in a dream?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I think it may.”

  “Well” – he seemed to be making an effort to calm himself – “well, it was quite a while ago. But it was real. Those things – if you’ve had them yourself you’ll know they can be real sometimes.” Another pause. “Of course the Nazis had me in their power, and of course they did torture me, but it could have been much worse even though my hands have been damaged so there are a few operations I can’t do any more. Except for my hands the other scars are all covered by my clothes. I don’t think I’m shocking to look at. Children don’t stop and stare.”

  “I see.”

  But I didn’t; not really. How could I even pretend to understand a man who had lived as he had lived these dozen years?

  After a while I said: “Jerome, you must understand this. Catherine has no reserves at all. There’s been a certain amount of neurological destruction, if I’m using the right words. Besides, she’s assumed these last nine years that you were dead.”

  Then I felt a wave of feeling that astounded me. I realized that I was glad, that I was thankful and very glad that he was back and not dead.

  “She may refuse to see you,” I said.

  “Forgive me for saying this, but I don’t think she will.”

  “I’ll try to talk to her tonight. I’ll call you tomorrow around noon.”

  “Can’t I see her tonight?”

  “No, you can’t.” Then another idea struck me. “What about money? Do you need any?”

  “Oh, money! No, I still have some I earned in Hong Kong and the ship passage cost me nothing because I signed on as a surgeon. The rail fare from Vancouver ran into a lot, but I have a little left and I’ll soon be on my feet again.”

  “You intend to live in Montreal?”

  “I don’t know where I intend to live. I haven’t even thought about it. I suppose things have changed. The whole country seems to have changed.”

  “Jerome, please don’t call the apartment. I’ll be in my office tomorrow at ten in the cbc building and you can call me there. Otherwise I’ll call you in that ghastly hotel you’re staying at. But I will have to talk to Catherine first. I can’t have her hearing your voice over the phone without any preparation for it.” I gave a laugh out of sheer tension. “Do you by any chance remember that it was you who got me into radio work?”

  “Did I? Oh yes, so I did. I remember all sorts of things, George.”

  “Well, I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER III

  There it is just as it happened, my conversation with Jerome Martell after twelve years in which a war had been fought and the British Empire had crumbled and Europe had become like the succession states of ancient Greece and America had turned into a new Rome. I looked at my watch and it was hard to believe that only twenty-five minutes had passed since I had given my students a pleasant and at times witty lecture on the witty and at times pleasant eighteenth century.

  The staff room was still empty and I went into a small lavatory adjoining it and bathed my face and eyes, and after drying my hands I surveyed myself in the mirror.

  I suppose I am a presentable enough person, but my Aunt Agnes, the dominant female in our family when I was young, had long ago made me self-conscious about my face and general appearance. I was not fat, but I was not thin, either. Aunt Agnes had believed I would
run to flesh and had told me I must think of myself always as a thin man, and so I tried to do. I was too clumsy ever to be an athlete but I had always enjoyed walking and physical exercise like digging in gardens and chopping wood and paddling canoes. But I was certainly not a man people notice in a crowd. I was no Jerome Martell, whom everyone had noticed wherever he was.

  Going to the phone I dialed my own number and after three rings Catherine’s voice came to me warmly. I had always loved that contralto voice of hers with its cello note and hint of gaiety.

  “I’ve felt so well today, George, I’ve felt so well it’s been glorious.”

  “That’s grand.”

  “And the light this afternoon – were you too busy to see it? It was delicious. That’s the only word for it – delicious. In spite of the cold and everything, I walked down to the gallery and I crossed the street afterwards and bought a new record you’ll hear after supper and it was so lovely there should have been birds singing in the snow. Now – how was your day?”

  “Not bad.” Then I remembered a call that had come in the Radio Building early that afternoon. “External called me from Ottawa and it seems that the Minister wants to talk to me the day after tomorrow. I suppose that means I’ll have to leave on tomorrow afternoon’s train, for the appointment’s for ten in the morning.”

  Her voice rose to the news: “But that’s simply marvellous. George – I’m so proud of you!”

  “I don’t think it’s all that important, but this is the first time the Minister has ever wanted to see me for a private interview. I wonder what he wants?”

  “You’ll find out and then you’ll tell me. I’m getting excited already.”

  But the truth was that this invitation meant only one thing to me: it was one more small reassurance that I had recovered from the depression. It was a tiny indication that in my work I had done well enough to know that I would always be able to earn a living.

  “Did you paint after you got home?” I asked her.

  “Well, first I lay down and tried to sleep, but after a few minutes I felt so well I got up and got busy. I liked what I did, too.”