Watch that Ends the Night

by Hugh Maclennan

  Catherine was imperious that summer; inside she always was, yet with this wayward little girl’s feeling that if she ever wanted anything badly it was going to be taken away from her. In her desire to spread her wings and fly, she was in revolt against her whole background, and even then I knew she was unfair to Montreal. For this old city of French, Scotch and English is wiser than she seems. Ruthless on the exterior, she is inwardly kind; love her, and she will give you her heart, though not her purse. A wise woman said to me not long ago that Montreal’s real character is reflected in the faces of the women of its older families, so many of whom, even if not beautiful, contrive to give that illusion of beauty which comes to a woman who knows she has been admired, perhaps even loved, by more than one man, yet is discreet, guarding her own enrichment. The silence of Montreal people about the things that matter most to them is not really hypocritical; it is a protection of the quiet and deliberately chosen intricacy of their lives. But Catherine was in revolt that summer and so was I. I allowed her to become my judge, and I decided to go to McGill in spite of my Aunt Agnes, who seemed less terrifying because I was in love and because she herself was in Europe that summer.

  It is time to speak of my family. I have already said enough to suggest they were preposterous, but not enough to explain how a pair like my father and mother were able to survive in a world where people must live in houses and pay their bills. I had one sister six years older than myself, Edith, who had left home two years previously and now is married to an engineer living in San Francisco. It is fifteen years since I have seen her, and I mention her merely to indicate that I was not an only child. Edith has no part in this story. According to my Aunt Agnes she resembled my grandfather on my mother’s side, but as I never saw this grandfather, I must take my aunt’s word for that.

  My grandfather on my father’s side is more vivid, and there are still a few people in Montreal who recall him. He was a ruthless business man, but eccentric, a great reader of eighteenth century literature, and after making a sizable fortune he ruined himself by trying to build a railway in South America. In his will he left his house and its furnishings to Aunt Agnes, and the remnants of his financial assets to Father. My two uncles he cut out entirely, and comforted them by the following cryptic sentence: “I know that you, Arthur and James, will wonder why you have been left nothing. The fact is that you are the only ones who have been left anything that counts. I have bequeathed you two priceless assets: my own acquisitive instinct and a grudge against your father which I have no doubt will spur you both toward success.”

  If my uncles had played on Father’s good nature they might have got the estate away from him, but they had always despised him and made the mistake of bullying him. Also, my Aunt Agnes stood up for Father and forbade him to give his brothers anything. The family was permanently split, and though I have two rich uncles still alive in Montreal, all I know about them is that they both suffer from arthritis.

  With a modest competence behind him, Father established himself on the Lakeshore and began inventing things. He filed nineteen patents, all of them military and a few rather ingenious, but there was some flaw in all of them but one. The magnetic mine he invented twenty-five years before the Germans invented a workable one was detonated by a barn rat and nearly killed us all. Father’s machine gun fired so fast it melted. His one practical invention was a huge steel claw which could be fixed to the back of a locomotive and lowered in such a way that it ripped up the sleepers as the engine advanced. Its purpose was to wreck railways behind retreating armies, and in the British War Office people were so interested they might possibly have bought it had not Father gone to London to discuss it with them.

  After this disappointment, Father relapsed into the life that was natural to him. From time to time he filed a new patent, but his real occupation was playing with children, reading boys’ books and battle stories and anything he could find dealing with the habits of snakes, soldiers, sailors and savage beasts. His favorite killer among humans was Genghis Khan, among reptiles the African black mamba, and among animals the Canadian grizzly bear, which he insisted could break the back of a lion if it got in the first blow. He was also the gentlest man I ever knew. He never saw a man die a violent death, he never struck a person in his life and the only animal he ever killed was a groundhog that ate Mother’s asparagus. The look of reproach in the eyes of the dying animal haunted him for years, and though rifles and muskets were suspended all over our house, he never bought much ammunition for them and when he did so his targets were bottles and tin cans which he pretended were enemy battleships. He infested our property with traps for skunks, muskrats, otters, squirrels and ground hogs, but when he caught them he always released them. Indeed, so many skunks sprayed father when he performed acts of mercy on them that during one summer he smelled like a dead skunk whenever he got wet. Mercy was the cause of the one invention he patented which might have been useful had it not been too expensive. This was an animal trap equipped with a hypodermic needle which automatically injected its victim with morphine.

  Such was my family. I don’t expect you to believe them, but this happens to be what they were like. One more fact completes the picture: Father and Mother loved each other from the day they met.

  August passed into September and it was still warm. The moon left us for its fortnight on the other side of the world and the moonless nights were as soft as warm milk. Then after Labor Day, suddenly as happens so often in Quebec, there came a storm followed by a rush of cold air from the arctic and one morning we woke to see the ground white with a flash frost, the lake steaming with fog and the sun shining through it like a copper disk. For two days the shore was bare of children and everyone huddled around wood fires in the houses. Then with equal abruptness the cold front retired before a flood of warm air from the United States and it was Indian summer. Windlasses creaked as yachts were hauled out of the lake, boys put their tennis rackets away and went back to school, the oaks and the maples turned copper and gold. The moon was crescent again and one morning I went to town over a plain hazy with the smoke of burning leaves and registered in five courses at McGill, bought my text books and returned for the last days of holiday.

  A kind of inner trembling had come simultaneously to Catherine and to myself and we found it hard to speak to one another. We became shy now that the moment of truth was near. It came on the night of the hunter’s moon.

  The moon rose imperiously out of the haze to the northeast where the city lay, it rode clear of the wrack into an enormous sky emptied of stars by its own might and it moved southward until it stood over the lake. There it hung with a ring glittering about it and dominated the world. Catherine and I met and touched hands and went down through the dewy grass to the sailing dock, knowing that nobody would be there, now that the season was over and the yachts were high and dry. The benches where the people watched the finish of the sailing races gleamed as though quicksilver had been spilled, and I found an old sack and wiped one of them dry. We sat down together, our hands in one another’s, and the glory of the world entered us. Catherine’s hand trembled in mine and mine in hers, and I could not believe it was myself beside her, myself feeling this mysterious power and beauty, for myself was as I had thought, ‘a more or less fat boy at school with the face described by my Aunt Agnes as a cross between a muffin and a goblin, with a kindly idiot for a father and no confidence. Myself was the person who wished he was a hero, and had been born clumsy and had grown up without much courage. But Catherine’s hand was in mine and I saw her profile against the moon with the strong bones under the petal-skin, and I saw her wide, calm eyes and the delicate upward sweep of her brows, and something broke inside me and I was a boy no longer.

  Catherine’s head turned, it turned as though at that instant she had heard my boyhood break, and the next moment I was kissing her. I thought of an orchard with dew on it, but her lips were soft, giving and receiving, and she took my head in her hands and bent it downward until my
ear was against her, and I felt her breasts lifting and falling and lifting as she breathed, and this was the first time I had ever touched a woman so. She took my hands and drew them to where my head had been and I held her as though my hands were receiving two holy cups. “George!” she whispered, and I whispered “Catherine!”

  She said: “Last night I couldn’t sleep for telling myself we’re too young to be in love. But we are.”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose this means we’ve grown up?”

  “Yes.”

  The hunter’s moon stared down, the St. Lawrence lapped so gently at the reeds that its sound was barely audible, and far out in the channel were the riding lights of a moving ship.

  “George?”

  “Yes.”

  “Unless I can tell the truth I can’t live. I love you, and that’s the truth.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you love me, and that’s the truth, too.”

  “Yes.”

  “George, I’ve been so unfair!”

  She turned away, her hand clasping mine convulsively, and I felt the emotion strike out of her like a physical power. I tell you, I felt her soul. My body longed for hers, but my soul thirsted for her essence. Fearfully, wonderingly, pretending it was a caress, I lifted my hand to her cheek and found it wet. She surged against me with a kiss and I felt her tears warm and salt, and I knew she was not crying as a girl but as a mature woman, and I did not know why.

  “I’ve wanted to live so much,” she whispered. “I’ve wanted to live so much I’ve been unfair for I’ve made you fall in love with me. I wanted you to love me so much. And I’ve been so unfair.”

  “Why?” I whispered. “Why?”

  “Because I can never get married. Never, never, never.”

  “Why?” I repeatedly blindly.

  “Because I can never have children.”

  Again I asked her why and she said: “Please don’t pretend. Pretend with anyone else you like, but never with me.”

  “But isn’t your heart better now?”

  There was a silence and then she said with her odd factuality: “Dear, put your head here and listen to it.”

  Again I bent my head and felt the warm, sacred, living fullness of her breasts receiving its weight, and all I could think of at the instant was how beautiful she felt, and all I could feel was this wonder inside of myself that it was I who was holding her.

  “Listen, dear,” she said.

  Then for the first time I heard the stroke of that hidden, treacherous organ, Catherine’s heart. Chunka-ha, chunk-ha, chunk-ha, and then a pause with no sound at all, and then a little stutter, and then the heart took up its litany again – chunk-ha, chunk-ha, chunk-ha.

  “It’s enlarged,” she said simply, “and both its valves have been damaged. With that kind of a heart I can never have children, so I can never get married.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I would die even before they were born.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Last year the doctor came and I heard him talking to my father when they didn’t know I was in the house. ‘I suppose Catherine could marry,’ the doctor said to Father, ‘but only if it’s clearly understood that she never attempts to have a child. The labor of carrying a child, much less giving it birth, would finish her with a heart like hers.’ Afterwards when he went away I saw Father sitting in the garden and I saw from his face he had been crying. He hasn’t had much happiness in his own marriage, but he knows what happiness can be, and he wants it for me and that’s why he was sad. Someone like me, George, can bring nothing but sadness to anyone who loves her. Father knows that, and so he cried.”

  I stared out at the lake and smelled the reeds and followed the lights of the ship ploughing up the channel toward the Soulanges Canal.

  “Catherine?” I whispered.

  “Say anything you feel like saying. Say it. That’s all I beg. Just that you tell me the truth always.”

  “It’s not as if I was any first prize,” I said.

  She surged against me. “Never, never let me hear you say a thing like that again about yourself. You’re lovable.”

  “I’ll never be able to believe that about myself, Catherine.”

  “Then believe it because you’ve heard me say it. Listen to me, George. I’m not like these other girls you know. I’m far older than any of them, really. If I had health I sometimes think there’s nothing I couldn’t do. I don’t care whether I live a year or thirty years – oh yes I do, though. But I know that what counts is what you do with your life and not how long you live. I want to live, but I don’t want to hurt anyone just because I want to live. Not you, not you least of all the people in the world. But you’re lovable and I know it, and if I say so, then you must believe that you are, for I want you to love me, and nobody can ever love another person if he despises himself. There’s only one person I hate, and that’s your Aunt Agnes. And I hate her because of what she’s done to you.”

  Then she held her face away from mine and looked at me in the bright moonlight.

  “Don’t be frightened, George. Take what I can offer you. Take me and use me, please. Let me help you stop being a frightened little boy, and then you can grow older and marry somebody who is strong and healthy.”

  She kissed me with a maturity of passion equal to any I ever found in her afterwards. The moon continued to stare down on us and we sat on the cold damp bench in one another’s arms until at last a wandering cloud covered the moon and the lake gave a shiver and went dark.

  She said: “You’re the only person who ever made me feel I was a woman and not a sick little girl.”

  And I said: “You’re the only person who ever made me feel I was anything.”

  People talk of calf-love with wistful disdain, but mine was as intense as any emotion I knew until I crossed the frontier, years later, when I discovered that all loving is a loving of life in the midst of death.

  We rose and went home with our hands entwined.

  The next day I woke with the feeling that I was in a different world and so, outwardly, I was. The house trembled and shook, and I looked out the window and saw waves on the lake four feet high. They smashed against the shore in short, sharp volleys, the wind whipped off their tops and blew water like hail against the front of the house, the trees screamed and groaned in the wind and rain, their trunks turned black and sleek, their dying leaves stained the air scarlet and bronze as they streamed through it and the light was weird on account of the carpet of wet leaves on the ground. Indian summer was over, and with it my time in Arcadia. Another set of gates swung to and locked, and when I came down to breakfast I found my parents looking at one another, and then at me, like a pair of guilty children.

  “Your Aunt Agnes has just telephoned from the city,” my mother said, “and I’m afraid she’s coming out to spend tomorrow with us.”

  “Oh?” I said, and sat down at the table.

  “She’s heard about you and Catherine. I thought I’d better warn you. She’s heard about McGill, too.”

  That was quite a house to grow up in, one where my parents turned into a pair of frightened children at the arrival of an aunt.

  CHAPTER III

  The next morning was clear and cold and Aunt Agnes came at noon. The moment she entered the house she behaved as though she owned it, and because I was accustomed to this, I did not think it exceptional that she should say to Father, “I’ll speak to you alone,” and that he should follow her into his own library and come out of it ten minutes later looking sheepish and shifting from one foot to another while he stood and told us that lunch was ready, though it wasn’t.

  While lunch was being served Aunt Agnes was dramatically silent. When lunch was over she turned to me:

  “I’ve come out to talk to you, George,” she said, and added to my parents: “I don’t wish to be disturbed when I talk to George.”

  Then it was my turn for the library, an absurd room filled with boys�
� books and military histories and a stuffed python.

  “Sit down, George,” said Aunt Agnes, and she herself sat down on a horsehair chair with her back straight.

  The four uncles I never knew loathed Aunt Agnes, and the most ribald of them is supposed to have said that she would have made an excellent madam of a bawdy house. As a masterful character is traditionally associated with that position in life, it is possible that my Uncle Leslie was right. Aunt Agnes wore her hair in bangs like Queen Alexandra and she dyed it. She wore small, black-buttoned shoes and dresses that rustled. I believe she also wore whalebone stays, because without them her body could hardly be as stiff as it looked. As I see her in retrospect it occurs to me that had she been another kind of woman she might have been attractive to men, as some belles laides are, for she had a well-turned bosom, a wasp waist, a melodious voice and her height was five feet and one half inch; even the tiny mole on her chin might have been an asset if she had wished to attract. But she didn’t.

  “George,” she said, in her melodious and oh so reasonable voice, “I understand that you’ve made a double fool of yourself this summer.”

  I mumbled something negative.

  “First it was this Carey girl and then it was McGill.”

  “What’s the matter with Catherine?” I said defiantly.

  Aunt Agnes looked at me as my Grandfather had looked at me and created a moment of dramatic silence.

  “You mean to say you don’t know what’s the matter with her?”

  “Catherine’s not sick any more,” I said. Aunt Agnes looked out the window and my eyes, following her glance, saw Father scuttling past the house holding something bulky under each arm.