Watch that Ends the Night

by Hugh Maclennan

  “Well,” Lazenby said, “I’d like to see Martell again. I owe him more than even you can guess. If I’d gone to Spain I’d have been ruined forever. It’s an odd thing – that was the one move a man could make in those days that was never forgiven afterwards. I’d like to repay some of my debt to Jerome.”

  “How do you propose doing that, Arthur?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not exactly without influence, and he’s not exactly in the position of not needing any. If you see him in town, would you tell him I’d be glad to help in any way I can?”

  “As you like.”

  “I mean it, George.”

  “I’ll tell him that if I see him.”

  We finished our coffee and the professional mask slid back over Lazenby’s face. He changed the subject, gossiped a little more about politics, and precisely at one-twenty-five he looked at his watch and said he had an appointment at two and would have to consome papers in preparation for it. We both rose and made for the door, and by the time we reached the lobby Arthur was as suave as when I had met him.

  “It’s been good seeing you, George. And let me repeat this – the Minister was really gratified by your talk this morning. As you know as well as I, External has to tread a delicate line at the moment with the Americans and …”

  He went on with compliments which meant nothing to me because they meant nothing to him, and then we shook hands and he went out the revolving door into the arctic wind blowing across Confederation Square, leaving me feeling stale, flat and unprofitable. There but for the grace of God, I thought, went something. And what a generation I belonged to, where so many of the successful ones, after trying desperately to hitch their wagons to some great belief, ended up believing in nothing but their own cleverness.

  If it had not been so cold I would have gone to the National Gallery and spent the remainder of the afternoon with the pictures, but it was twenty-three below. I bought a magazine and sat in a corner to pass the time before my train left. I wished I were home. I wished I were home with Catherine, my rock and reason for being. I wanted the good feeling to return.

  “Well,” I said to myself, “perhaps it will.”

  But that evening on the train returning to Montreal, looking out at the lights coming on in the barns, at trees stark against the orange afterglow of a winter sunset, at snowfields dead-white and lustreless, looking out, depressed by Lazenby, I had the feeling that after all my work and minor success I had come full circle and was back where I had started with the unemployed trudging the sidewalks and the professors talking and Hitler screaming. Canada was rich now; she also was feeling the oats of success, but when I thought of Arthur Lazenby I wondered whether she was finding herself or losing herself.

  I closed my eyes and hoped for sleep and I may have dozed a while for I became aware of a numbness in my legs and of a train whistle miles away. I was tired right down into the tissues of my brain and my soul felt exhausted. I was tired of the responsibility for Sally’s education, of having to write stuff which would earn us a living when I knew it did not really matter whether it was written or not. Oh my God, I was tired of Catherine’s illness and of myself for being tired of it.

  The train stopped after a while and I looked out at a small station platform where three men in mackinaw caps stood beside a pile of farmers’ milk pails under the naked overhead lights, their faces red with cold and their breath in clouds around their heads. Suddenly I sat up straight, realizing that I knew one of these men. He was Ti-Jean Laframboise and this was the station which served Waterloo School where I had taught for five years during the depression. This was Lachance, and Ti-Jean Laframboise was probably still the porter at Waterloo. How many times had he driven me over the dirt road to this station to catch this same train coming down from Ottawa to Montreal? Sometimes the landscape was gorgeous with autumn and sometimes it was brown and sodden in the spring break-up, but I remembered it best as it was now – clean, white and cold with the smoke of farm chimneys going straight up.

  The train creaked and crept forward, its interior hot but its window panes like ice, and Ti-Jean’s face, older now and wizened like a monkey’s, slid backward out of view. It was uncanny. Nothing in this world is so permanent as a school; nothing is like a school to bring you back full circle. Forty years on is today when you return to the school where you sung it.

  I stared out the window at the shroud of the snow and remembered how I used to sit in this train, not in the parlor car where I was now but in the day coach with the gritty green plush and the hard seats, sometimes with Shatwell when we escaped from Waterloo for our weekends in Montreal, sometimes alone. Shatwell – my God, he must be seventy now!

  The train rolled down the valley and soon it was so dark I could see nothing but the reflections of other passengers in the window panes. On this line running down from Lachance I was familiar with every curve and the rumble of every culvert we crossed. I thought of Waterloo in the snow and its lights sending the shadows of bare elms over the snow-covered playing field, of the boys coming up from their supper in the long dining hall paneled by Dr. Bigbee and I thought that there but for the grace of God might I be still. Waterloo had changed hands and become an entirely different school from the one I knew; it had a fine reputation now. But a school is always a school, good or bad, and time stands still in it. It might have stood still for me. There is no man I respect more than the schoolmaster born to the job, but none I pity more than the man not born to it who falls into its trap and stays till the chalk dust passes through his pores into his bloodstream and soul. Such a man I might have been myself had I not escaped on those weekends to Montreal, and during one of them met Jerome Martell.

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER I

  The road which brought me to Waterloo was too drab and long to waste time talking about. For ten years after my father lost his money I lived in Ontario, mostly in Toronto. My first job was in a bank and I stayed with it for five years during which, out of a small salary, I saved enough money for two years in the university. I left the university in order to work again, and the year I returned the depression settled in. When I obtained a degree I was twenty-seven years old.

  During this long, drab hiatus three things happened to me, as they happened to millions of other young men at that time. I lost my faith in religion; I lost my faith in myself; I lost my faith in the integrity of human society.

  My last year in the university ended and there was no job in Toronto. My degree was worthless and there was no job anywhere. So in late June I returned to Montreal, and lived with my parents because there was no other place to go.

  Somehow Father had survived. People had always liked him, some of his old friends had rallied around and all through those years he had held a petty job in a commission office, his innocence preventing him from knowing that the job was pure charity. He had never abandoned hope in himself. He and Mother lived in a three-room apartment in Notre Dame de Grâce and he used one room for a workshop and still believed he would invent something that would make him rich and famous.

  No sooner had I come home than he put on his little boy’s expression and led me into the bedroom – I was to sleep on the living room couch – and showed me his latest invention.

  “Feel her,” he said. “Handle her. Isn’t she a beauty?”

  I felt her and handled her and asked him what she was.

  “You mean you don’t know? This can hit harder than a Mannlicher. After supper we’ll go out into the park and test her. You wait – it can hit harder than an elephant rifle.”

  Father took the contraption from me, settled it against his shoulder and at last I realized what it was. It was a crossbow made of light alloys with a shoulder fitting butt.

  “This will stop the charge of an elephant,” said Father. “It will knock a rhino backwards. It will split a lion’s skull in two. If this weapon had been invented two thousand years ago, it would have changed the history of the world.”

  I took the invent
ion from him and laid it on the bed.

  “Father,” I said, “this is 1933 and what the hell is the use of a crossbow in 1933?”

  “Hunting, of course. What’s the use of a rifle if you’re a serious hunter? It scares the game for miles around. But this” – he patted the bow affectionately – “is as silent as a baby’s breath. A hunter with a rifle meets up with a pair of rhinos and he wants ‘em both, and he’s lucky if he bags even one. The second one bolts at the shot. But with this crossbow, the first goes down and the second just stops and stares. It’s a repeater, too. Have you ever heard of a repeater crossbow? You haven’t, for this is the first in history.”

  “Oh my God!” I said, and turned away.

  A little later Father came back into the living room and sat down silently in a corner and I realized how much I had hurt him. I realized also how much older he looked, and how much older my mother looked, and I was sad and ashamed. But I was bitter, too, and unforgiving, and began to fill the silence with the kind of talk young men used in the depression.

  “There’ll never be the slightest hope of anything improving until the whole system is changed. Here we are – for the first moment in history we are really able to abolish poverty. But there’s never been so much poverty as now. Have you seen it? Have you seen the men riding the rods? Have you seen the flat cars crossing the prairies loaded with unemployed? Meanwhile” – I was working myself up the way we used to do – “look at this city with the same people sitting on top of the nation’s wealth like incubating hens. I saw in the paper this morning that Huntley McQueen’s worked another merger. Yesterday there was a housing riot in St. Henri and when the police arrested the poor devils the jail was the first roof they’d had over their heads in weeks. Nobody does a thing. No, that’s not quite fair, Father. You’ve invented a crossbow that would have changed the history of the world if it had been invented two thousand years ago.”

  Father looked away and then back again and I saw tears in his eyes.

  “It’s just a little thing,” he mumbled. “I don’t suppose anything will come of it. Nothing ever does seem to come of my ideas. But I thought it might help your mother and you if it came off. It really does work, you know.”

  I left the apartment and walked the streets until seven o’clock, when I returned hungry and ashamed and ate some of the sausages and mash my mother had prepared for me.

  That summer I walked the sidewalks day after day, I searched the want-ads and soon gave up because no employer even bothered to advertize for help. I found nothing to do, absolutely nothing. I applied to every teachers’ agency in Canada and to half a dozen in the United States. I made a few semi-friends about the town, but most of the time I was alone. And the sexual loneliness which had been growing in me became as sour as the Dead Sea.

  Summer passed into autumn and the leaves began to fall. And then one evening in mid-October I came home and found a telegram. It was from a teachers’ agency and informed me that a job was waiting for me at Waterloo School, the salary ninety dollars a month, room and board included, and that I was to report for duty immediately.

  This was the middle of October and even the private schools had been in session for a month, so I was sure there must be a mistake. I wondered what to do and asked Father about it.

  “Why, call them up long distance, of course, and find out.”

  “Long distance calls cost money.”

  “But this is a job, George. You have to spend money before you can make it. I discovered that years ago.”

  I telephoned to Waterloo and after a wait of seven minutes an English voice, speaking as though all telephones were its personal enemies, boomed into my ear.

  “Stewart, did you say? Of course you’re wanted here. What’s been keeping you, I’d like to know? Be here tomorrow morning.”

  Without giving me a chance to ask another question, the speaker hung up. I presumed that he was the headmaster of Waterloo, but as he had not introduced himself I did not know that his name was Dr. Lionel Bigbee, much less that his doctorate was purely imaginary, and that he called himself Doctor because he believed that all headmasters should be called Doctor for the sake of morale. I tried to recall what little I had heard of Waterloo, and the little I was able to remember did not sound so good. The only person I knew who had gone there was an eccentric who had been at Frobisher when I was in the middle school, and he had only gone to Waterloo because Frobisher had expelled him. His name was Adam Blore and he claimed to be a sculptor; for a living he sold carpets in Eaton’s.

  “My God,” Adam whispered, when I called him up. “Have you been reduced to that?”

  I mentioned the pay, the room and the food.

  “You’ll get beriberi from the food. Those Englishmen out there eat like convicts. They don’t know any better. Those Englishmen out there never ate a decent meal in their lives. If old Bigbee hadn’t expelled me, I’d have died of malnutrition.”

  The next day I got off the train at Lachance and was met by a gnome-like creature in a flat cap driving an Model-A Ford he called the Waterloo bus. He was Ti-Jean Laframboise and he drove me over three miles of bumpy dirt road and then up a weedy driveway to a building the like of which I never saw before or since.

  Originally, I suppose, Waterloo School had been the house of a prosperous French-Canadian landowner. Now a cascade of marble steps poured down in front of it surmounted by a portico which in turn was decorated by four angels who gesticulated at one another and looked as though they had been stolen from a Catholic cemetery. Over the door was a shield with a coat of arms and the strange motto, Caveat Gallus.

  “Where did the steps come from?” I asked Laframboise.

  “The Doctor put them in seven years ago. Him and me. They’re beautiful.”

  After my luggage was inside, Laframboise led me upstairs and along a corridor that boomed like a sounding board to a cell-like, rugless room where the pipes were exposed, the plaster flaking and the smell ratty.

  “I guess this is your room,” he said. “Now I guess you better see the Doctor.”

  I followed downstairs once more, then along another corridor where the stuffed heads of lions, tigers, impalas, rhinos and African buffalo stared at each other like family portraits in an English country house.

  “Did the Doctor shoot these?” I asked Laframboise.

  “He bought them at an auction. But you wait till you see his birds. They’re beautiful.”

  He knocked on a door, a loud voice boomed, “Come in!” and I entered to make the acquaintance of the man described by hundreds of old boys of Waterloo as the greatest personality they had ever known in their lives.

  Dr. Lionel Bigbee was as thin as a stork’s neck and stood five feet five in his socks. But at that moment he was not standing; he was leaning back in a wooden chair with his feet on his desk, his left hand stroking a pink, bald, shining skull, a pair of watery blue eyes peering out from under tufted white brows, his right hand flapping as though I were a taxi and he were hailing it. He was entirely surrounded by stuffed birds. Quails and geese perched on the floor, on the window sill were an eagle and an owl, an albatross spread wings in one corner and a swarm of lesser fowl clustered on tables and shelves.

  “Well Stewart,” said Dr. Bigbee in a male alto boom, “you’ve taken your own good time getting here, I’m bound to say. You should have been here five weeks ago. What have you been up to? Missed your sailing?”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “I’m not seasick or any other kind of sick myself, but I notice a lot of men are. Were you?”

  “I beg your pardon, sir.”

  “There’s no chair for you, so don’t look for one. The other chair’s fractured and Laframboise is mending it. But standing never hurt a man. Speak up, Stewart. What have you got to say for yourself?”

  I muttered that I was sorry, but that I had only heard from him the day before and did not understand what he meant by ships and seasickness. The Doctor listened, rubbed his skull an
d stared out the window.

  “You aren’t from home, not with that accent, Stewart.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir.”

  There was a knock and Laframboise entered with another wooden chair, which I sat on. I looked past the Doctor’s head to bookshelves containing some battered school texts, the complete Oxford Dictionary from A to E, and five bound volumes of Punch, 1888 to 1892 inclusive. Behind the doctor was the room’s sole decoration apart from the birds; it was an engraving of a seventeenth century battleship firing a broadside.

  The Doctor spoke: “These agencies aren’t worth the price of a stamp. I know picking a new master’s pretty much a matter of putting one’s hand into the poke and coming out with what it grabs, but at least the agencies understand that I take my men from home.” His blue eyes appraised me. “Where did you say you were from, Stewart?”

  “Montreal.”

  “Mmmm,” said the Doctor. His eyebrows jumped quickly up and down and settled themselves. “Well, I must have a master and you’re here. I suppose you have some kind of a degree?”

  I told him I had an honors degree in history from Toronto University.

  “Mmmm,” said the Doctor. “Well, you can’t teach history here. Ponson does it in the uppers, McNish in the lowers. Ponson’s old Boer War and McNish is Royal Navy. The socialists axed him and the poor chap had to come out here. What else can you teach?”

  I told him my French was pretty fair and that I could probably teach English as well, but the Doctor did not seem to listen.

  “We’ll find plenty for you to teach,” he said as he stared sideways out the window. “Don’t you worry on that score. Do you know any French?”

  “Yes, sir,” I repeated.

  “Then I fancy you’ll teach some French in the middle school where there are always gaps that need stopping. Far better not having a Frenchman for French, the boys can never understand a word he says. I expect you’ll stop that particular gap very nicely.” The Doctor swung around and his voice became confidential. “Let me tell you something, Stewart. When you’ve been in this profession as long as I have, you’ll understand that the least important part of schoolmastering is teaching. Show the flag, set an example, give a tone. Can you remember anything you were taught in school? I can’t. But I jolly well remember my school, and a jolly good school it was, too.”