Yes, there was going to be a war.
The ship steamed up the enormous cleft in the Laurentian rock where people lived knowing nothing of the emotions I had felt all that past summer. Was this what had haunted Jerome – their ignorance, their innocence? Had it haunted him to the extent that he found life here intolerable? I did not know the answer to that, either.
Steadily the river narrowed, and in the late afternoon we rounded the Ile d’Orleans and stopped to let off passengers at Quebec. As we cast off an hour later the evening Angelus tolled over the stream and we sailed into the sunset toward Montreal. After dinner I walked the decks till midnight, the parish lights very close on either side most of the time, moving off occasionally as the river widened, closing in again, and the sudden thought came to me that about this country, this Canada where I had been born and lived all my life, I knew almost nothing. My forebears had been here six or seven generations, and still I knew nothing important about it. I thought of Waterloo and despised myself for having squandered so many years there. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars if we allow the Bigbees to bluff us. Walking the deck, smelling the balsam in the moist night air, I swore I would trudge St. Catherine Street rather than spend another year in Waterloo. And I thought of the half dozen scripts I had already written for Tom Storey and wondered if they would open the door at last.
The next morning in town I took the scripts to Storey and he promised to read them at once and to talk with me in his office about them early in the afternoon.
After leaving him, I phoned Catherine’s apartment and waited while the instrument buzzed ten times. Then I phoned the Beamis Memorial and learned that Dr. Christopher was now in private practice and that I should be able to reach him in his office. At noon I did reach him, and he told me that Catherine had sublet her apartment and taken Sally out to the Lakeshore to live with her parents.
“I’m sick about the whole thing,” Jack told me. “After you went away her nerves went all to pot. She was in a state of shock and didn’t know it until the middle of July, when she collapsed with a fair-sized nervous breakdown.” He hesitated – he was her physician now – but decided to tell me the rest: “Unfortunately that’s not the most serious of her symptoms. Her heart has begun to fibrillate.”
“What does that mean?”
“Omitting the details, it means that it can’t carry a normal load. In turn that means that she has aged – so far as her lifespan is concerned – approximately twenty years in the last six months. Of course she’s taking digitalis and her organism will make certain accommodations, but there can be only one long-range prognosis, and that’s progressive heart failure.”
I felt as if the bottom had fallen out of me and asked if I might see her.
“I’m sorry, but I must say no, George. She’s – no, I can’t advise that just now.”
Feeling cold and queer, I tried to steady my voice: “Tell me one thing – did Jerome anticipate this when he went away?”
Jack answered quietly: “He’s an experienced medical man.”
“You mean, he went away knowing this would happen?”
“I didn’t say that. But he knew it was bound to happen ultimately. He married her knowing that.”
“But to go away knowing it was possible!”
Jack, whom I had always assumed to be rigid and correct, surprised me.
“Don’t judge him by yourself, George. You – if you’ll pardon my saying this – may be in love with Catherine, but you were never married to her, and you’re not a man who can do about a dozen different things and wants to do them all. Jerome saw the sick all day and had to go home each night to a wife who was becoming an invalid.”
“But she was his wife! And I know he loved her.”
“Oh for God’s sake, George, what do I know? I’m getting to the place where all I know is my own plumber’s work.”
“Has Jerome written to Catherine?”
“I believe quite often. He’s even written to me asking about her health. But Catherine’s been shaken. There’s just so much a person can stand; she stood very much and she was frailer than I thought. I only knew how much she drew out of Jerome after he left and she collapsed. But don’t ask me about all this. I’m a doctor. I’m not a psychologist.”
After saying good-bye to Jack, I went out to my parents’ flat and found them delighted to see me. My trip to Russia, however, was not real to Father who had no interest in politics and had omitted Russia from his reading list. He soon began talking about the new can opener he had invented and said it was going to make money. There was a stream of correspondence about it between him and Buffalo, he said. He also spoke of another invention, but I forget what it was.
That afternoon I went to see Tom Storey, and this extraordinarily kind, modest man was as pleased with my scripts as though he had written them himself.
“But there’s nothing here that isn’t obvious,” I said. “It’s just ordinary reportage. I don’t really know anything about Russia.”
“That’s just why I like them. Everyone else is sure he knows everything about Russia. Everything I see about Russia is slanted. This stuff rings true and fresh.” He smiled. “I’m afraid it’s going to lose you any left-wing friends you may have. Now let’s go to the studio and record the first of them.”
In the studio he rehearsed me several times for emphasis and timing, then he gave the word to the engineer and we put the script onto wax.
“Now,” Storey said, “I have a proposition to make you. There’s a vacancy in our organization in Vancouver, and these scripts might just as well emanate from there as from here. I don’t want to hold out false hopes, but I’m going to Toronto tonight and I’m taking along both the scripts and this disk we’ve made. I’m going to make some of the big boys consider them, and inside a day or two I’ll have a decision one way or the other. That will give you time to resign from the school before term begins, and if you don’t come in with us – well, you can go back to the school.”
Late the following afternoon he telephoned me from Toronto to say the job was mine if I wished it. I said I did.
The next morning I took the train to Waterloo to pick up some clothes and books I had left there and to inform Dr. Bigbee I would not be returning. I was stiff with anxiety on the train, for I expected the old man to throw a tantrum or even to threaten to take measures against me if I walked out a week before the beginning of term. He never drew up a contract with any of his masters, but I had the idea he must have some hold over us and was afraid, because he made everyone feel like a child.
I need not have worried. When I gave the Doctor my news he blew his nose, looked out the window and after a while spoke.
“Well, I fancy we’ll not have any trouble filling your place. I’ve just had a cablegram from a man at home who wants to come out here. I don’t know much about him, but I fancy he’ll stop the gap.”
That was the extent of my final conversation with the Doctor after five years in his service. He did not even ask me what I intended doing, where I had been in the summer or why I had decided to leave.
Twelve days later I got off the train in Vancouver.
CHAPTER VIII
That year I began to grow up. The depression was over at last so far as I was concerned, and I came out of its deep freeze retarded by some ten years suddenly eager to live and amount to something.
By New Year’s I had established myself in the cbc organization. The series of Russian scripts were so successful that for a short while I enjoyed the mild notoriety of a new radio personality in a small country. When the original series ended, I was given a regular spot for news interpretations and began a systematic study of newspapers, journals of opinion and European and Asiatic diplomatic history. For the first time in my life I had a real job. For the first time in my life I became more than a cipher. I began to get used to knowing that all over the country people said occasionally: “Did you hear George Stewart last night?” Or, “Do you think George Stew
art is right or do you think he is crazy?”
It was one of the various ironies in my life that I owed my reputation to no less a personage than Adolf Hitler. On my return from Russia I had spent a week in Berlin, and nobody with eyes or ears could have spent even a day in Berlin at that time without knowing Hitler’s intentions. Most people I knew were emotionally unable to believe – really to believe – that Hitler intended war. I found it impossible to believe anything else, and in an odd way my own involvement with Jerome and Catherine, my witness to their break-up, had prepared me emotionally for this colossal break-up which now was under way.
That year of Munich – it has always seemed marvelous to me that people did not throw away their radios, considering what that instrument did to their nervous systems in the Munich year – I used to receive frantic letters from people abusing me for being pessimistic when I called Munich a surrender. A week after Munich, when Hitler made a truculent speech at Saarbrücken which even Chamberlain must have trembled to hear, I predicted that within six months he would gobble up the rest of Czechoslovakia. I had noticed that Hitler in those days, like a python who eats an enormous meal periodically, got starving hungry every six months. Late in the winter of 1939 Sir Samuel Hoare made the statement that a golden age for Europe was about to begin. I used this as the basis for a broadcast in which I said, without hedging, that Sir Samuel’s golden age would be ushered in before summer by still another German outrage. A fortnight later Hitler entered Prague.
I had been so consistently right – I take no credit for this, because surely all I said was obvious – that the organization decided to move me east where I would be closer to the capitals. I returned to Montreal in the late spring of 1939 and rented my first apartment, a two-room affair with a kitchenette three blocks from the little half-moon street where Jerome and Catherine had lived.
It was a strange spring, a haunted spring, and outwardly a lovely one. In late May the university campus was shadowed by elms in full leaf and empty of the students who soon would fight and die. In this fine weather the news I had to study seemed all the more atrocious. I began to become personally afraid. Raised on the novels of the old war, I could not imagine myself enduring the life of a soldier in this coming one. I often thought of Jerome, and missed his courage.
Meanwhile there was Catherine. During the winter we had corresponded, and in her letters she had told me she was picking up. I got in touch with Jack Christopher as soon as I returned to town. “Well,” I began with Jack, “what price Jerome’s opinions now?”
“It looks pretty bad,” Jack admitted. “But when the war starts, perhaps that will bring him out of Spain.”
Then I asked him about Catherine.
“Thank God she’s picked up. Her mental attitude has definitely returned to normal. She and Sally are at the lake now. She’s accommodated herself to the digitalis and she’s determined to live a new and interesting life.”
“You mean, she’s sure she and Jerome will never come together again?”
“I don’t know, George. I don’t think she does, either. Did you know he was back in town last winter?”
This startled me, for Catherine had not mentioned it in any of her letters.
“Yes, he was back for about a fortnight. He’d been slightly wounded – his left arm was in a cast, I remember. I didn’t meet him. He came home to raise funds for this surgical unit of his, but I don’t think he was successful. Spain’s become a dead issue now that so many people think we’ll be at war ourselves. The communists used him for propaganda purposes, but the papers didn’t even mention the speech he made.”
“But he did see Catherine?”
“Yes, briefly.”
“And then he went back to Spain?”
“He did. Don’t ask me why, but he did.”
“What passed between them?”
“You must ask Catherine that. I didn’t ask her, and she didn’t tell me.”
There was no phone in Catherine’s Laurentian cottage and the second-hand car I had bought two days ago had not yet been overhauled. I was very busy in the office anyway, so I put off visiting Catherine until the weekend. But I wanted to talk to somebody who had seen Jerome, and the first person who came to my mind was Arthur Lazenby. I called him up and around eight-thirty that night he came to my apartment.
The change in Lazenby’s appearance startled me. He looked like a man who had seen his own ghost and had not got over it yet, he smoked constantly, he was nervous and figeted, there was a temporary tick in his left cheek. But what startled me most was the change in his mental attitude.
“I listened to every one of your Russian talks over the air,” he said, “and by God, they were good.”
“I’m surprised to hear that from you.”
Lazenby winced: “This last year I’ve been on the verge of going out of my mind. It started with Jerome Martell.”
“What do you mean?”
“I met him when he was back from Spain and he let down the boom on me. Do you know why I went to see him? I wanted him to help me get into the International Brigade. In case you’re interested, I’ve been a communist. All the time the rest of you talked, you may remember I said very little. But I was a communist and you weren’t. I won’t go into the details of why the Party didn’t want me to go to fight in Spain. Let’s say they didn’t. But Jerome had influence – or at least so I thought – and I went to him. And do you know what he told me?”
“Go on, tell me.”
“He just looked at me in that way he has and shook his head: ‘I wouldn’t help my worst enemy get into Spain now,’ he said. I was so taken aback by this I could only stutter.
“‘This whole miserable tragic business,’ Jerome said, ‘inside a couple of months it will be over. Stalin’s murdered the Revolution in his own country and to him Spain is nothing but an embarrassment. He’ll never risk a war with Hitler for the sake of Spain. With him it’s been political from the start. Look what he’s done. He’s sent a few advisers. He’s let thousands of non-Russian communists commit suicide in the Brigade. He’s spread the myth that the communists are the only people on the Loyalist side who are fighting, and all the time he’s been using Spain as a slaughterhouse to get rid of every element in the workers’ movement that doesn’t follow him the way the Germans follow Hitler.”
I listened to this and much more and said: “Then why in God’s name did he go back to Spain himself?”
Lazenby stared at me as though he had been asking himself that same question for months.
“Don’t ask me. He beats me, that man. He’s a divine fool, I guess. Or maybe he’s just one of those who sticks when the rats run out – the rats like me. He had this surgical unit and maybe he went back to that because he felt it was his duty. But what he told me about Spain” – Lazenby winced and his cheek ticked – “it was terrible for me, it was terrible, George. But it was the truth.”
“You’re a communist and you say that?”
“ Was a communist. Was a communist. Of course I refused to believe him. Of course I used all the commie words of insult.” Lazenby winced again. “All right, maybe I’d better give you the whole of it.”
Apparently Jerome, as he often did when somebody attacked him, had struck back. He told Lazenby that the real underlying reason why he, Lazenby, wanted to go to Spain was to get in on the ground floor of the Revolution. He told him he’d been mesmerized by the very propaganda he disseminated.
Lazenby looked at me with an expression I shall never forget. He looked humiliated, still hostile to Jerome, yet stubborn and defiant. He was the first person I knew who had been a communist and had left the party, and I was unfamiliar with the utter desiccation of soul that this experience caused in people who had accepted communism as a religion.
“Three days after I talked to Jerome,” Lazenby said, “I remembered something he’d said to me – something I’d forgotten because I was so scared and sore. He’d told me that the place for a man like me was External A
ffairs, and that he’d write Dr. Scrimgeour in my behalf. He said Dr. Scrimgeour was an old patient of his.”
Lazenby lit another cigarette, and with his whole personality seeming to twitch, he said: “Two months ago I sat my exams for External.”
“Did you get in?”
“I don’t know yet. But I admitted to Dr. Scrimgeour in my interview that I’d been a communist and had got out. I told him I thought a man like me would be useful just because I’d been a communist. And it’s a good thing I did, for they knew anyway. Scrimgeour talked about Jerome to me privately. He thinks he’s a great man, but he thinks he’s a tragic one. And there’s one more thing, George.” Lazenby gave me a bitter, sardonic look. “Do you think the big war will start this year?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know how it will start?”
“I suppose by Hitler invading Poland.”
“But before that?” Lazenby shook his head. “Before that – you watch – Stalin and Hitler are going to get together. It’ll be us against the fascists with Russia sitting pretty on the side.”
The same idea had occurred to me, but I could not believe it; I could not see how it could be worked.
“You wait,” Lazenby said. “I told that to the people in External and they smiled. But you wait.” And then he added: “It was Jerome who told me, and three days later I knew he was right. You wait and see.”
Another day passed. I worked in the office, I bought a few more necessities for my flat, I wrote the first draft of a new script and I picked up my second-hand Ford from the dealer. It was my first car and I spent several hours driving around town in it, climbing and descending the Westmount hills looking at the tulips in the gardens and occasionally staring off over the downward sweep of the city to the distant, blue bend of the St. Lawrence. Around seven I came home and made myself supper, and I was just sitting down before my typewriter when the phone rang and a familiar voice spoke.
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