Watch that Ends the Night

by Hugh Maclennan

  “The chances are fair that things will right themselves inside the next few days,” he said. “We’ll have to wait and see. Meanwhile I must tell you that she’s very sick.”

  It sounded like a death sentence, and Jack Christopher’s face looked like the judge’s who had pronounced it, even though he had not said a word.

  “Go home, Mr. Stewart,” the surgeon said. “Take a sedative and get some sleep. You’re in for a few bad days, I’m afraid. But I think she’ll pull through. She has a marvelous constitution.”

  I got to my feet feeling an obscure indignation. “My God, if she has a marvelous constitution, how do you define a constitution?”

  He gave me a fighting look: “The capacity to survive,” he said, nodded brusquely and left us.

  Jack stayed a few minutes longer, but he sensed that his presence troubled us and said he had to see another patient and left. Alan Royce gave me a cigarette which I smoked in silence. I went to the pocket of my overcoat and took out the flask I had brought up with me, drank heavily from it, and sat down. Alan sat in the dog-like silence of youth on such occasions, Sally was tense and still and her face looked at least thirty-five years old. After a while a nurse appeared and told me I could see Catherine, but only for a moment.

  If you are familiar with the aftermaths of major surgery you know what I saw when I entered the room: a tiny form on a white bed, two splinted arms with an intravenous needle in one and a transfusion needle in the other, a gaping mouth through which the breath rasped and a tube protruded, another tube draining the wound hidden by the dressings. An unnatural warmth, the warmth of a snakehouse, pervaded the room. Five hours ago she had been gay, brave and full of love. Now she looked destroyed.

  I returned to the children numb with horror.

  “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go out and get something to eat.”

  Sally stared in tense enquiry. “You heard what Dr. Andrews said,” I said harshly. “You heard it, didn’t you? Why ask me?”

  Her underlip trembled but she did not cry. Sally too, I thought, had much room for that mysterious thing. Then Alan Royce, that great bear of a boy, put his arm about her and held her slim, tight form against his own enormous flank, he grinned at me and made a bad joke, and I was grateful. We put on our coats, went downstairs and stepped outside into the cold.

  It was a lovely night, so lovely I can see it still. It was one of those Montreal winter nights after snow when a dozen stars look like stars of Bethlehem. For a short while it was so beautiful it uplifted me.

  But two hours later, alone in my bed, the darkness descended and the ocean rose.

  CHAPTER VII

  On the third day the weather changed in the manner it so often does in Montreal. The hard, brilliant cold of the past week yielded to softer airs from the south and over the mountain was a golden light as the thermometer climbed rapidly toward the melting point. The ice on the streets had the look of ice in the first breath of a Canadian spring, blue and purple in spots, its surface spongily firm like the flesh of a fish. The taxi driver Romeo Pronovost, taking me up to the hospital in the early morning, informed me that winter was almost over and that spring, she was coming for sure.

  But there was no spring in my step and no light in my mind when I entered the corridors and trudged to her room. In the nurse’s face I read one thing only: the belief that it was a matter of hours or at most of a day or two before she would die. In the room that small form lay unconscious with the tubes coming out of it. There was nothing I could do.

  Leaving the hospital I trudged the city on dead legs. There was nothing I could do. I stopped in the bar of a hotel around noon and had two drinks and all they did was to act like a reagent on my subconscious. I came out to a beautiful day, the streets full of people looking happy because the first breath of spring was in the air, but I saw them all as they would appear in the hour of their death. A lovely, laughing girl I saw as a rotted corpse filled with writhing, white worms. Then I saw Catherine like that. Then pity and terror and horror followed, for I kept seeing her in a series of kaleidoscopic flashes from the past. That little girl’s look which said: “Here I am and please nobody mind!” Then I saw myself loving her all those years when she was married to Jerome and when I was a failure. And then I saw Jerome and hated him and wanted to kill him. I trudged the city and trudged, I wished I were somebody else, I drank more liquor, came home in mid-afternoon and shocked Sally by my appearance, went to my room and dropped into bed. The darkness roared around me.

  I was not the only person who behaved badly that day, as I later learned. Harry Blackwell was also drawn into the depths of his underself.

  The little man with the absurd appearance and the pear-shaped body, now prosperous and able to afford it, had hired two private detectives to track down Jerome, and one of them had located Jerome entering our apartment building. The man had then called Harry, whose store was not far away, and Harry had come around as fast as he could in a taxi. Finding nobody in our apartment, Jerome had talked a while to the superintendent, and when he came out Harry was waiting for him. Jerome came out, did not recognize Harry, and the first knowledge he had of his presence was a not too competent punch in the face.

  Jerome did not reel; nor, considering how he had spent the last dozen years, was it a particular shock to him to be hit in the face by a stranger.

  “It’s you!” Harry gasped at him. “You’re back. It’s you, you bastard.”

  Jerome reached out both hands and took Harry’s ineffectual wrists, looked into his face and recognized him. Harry struggled like a child in that grasp, and a moment later he found himself struggling with something much more formidable than Jerome’s physical strength.

  “I’m glad you’ve found me,” Jerome said quietly, “because I’ve been trying to find you.”

  Incoherent with hatred, Harry tried to spit at him.

  “Harry,” Jerome said in the same quiet voice, “this isn’t doing any good.”

  “You’re alive!” Harry struggled to get free and Jerome released him. But now that his wrists were free, his hands dropped helplessly to his sides. “You’re alive!” he repeated in a whisper. “And she’s dead.”

  “Yes,” Jerome said.

  The two men looked at each other, and I know how Jerome’s eyes must have seemed to Harry Blackwell.

  Mumbling now, half-weeping, Harry said: “She was all I had. She was the only woman who ever loved me. Now she’s dead and you’re alive. You could have had any woman you wanted, but you had to take her, and she was all I ever had.”

  “No,” Jerome said quietly, “she was not all you ever had.”

  Harry tried to lift his hand, but it rose no higher than his waist.

  “She’s dead, Harry. None of this can bring her back.”

  “You ought to be dead, too.”

  “I’ve often thought so. But I’m not, and you can’t alter that fact, either.” Then he looked into Harry’s eyes and said: “I tried to reach you because there’s something I’ve got to say. You were the only man who ever loved Norah truly. You did everything for her a man could have done. You were the only man she ever respected. And she respected you, Harry. She did.”

  For a few seconds Harry stared at Jerome, then he began to shake and then he was sick. A delivery boy came out of the apartment and passed them without looking, as in downtown Montreal people so frequently pass human spectacles without looking at them. Harry quivered and discharged himself, and Jerome supported his weakness when he recovered and wiped his lips with his own handkerchief. There was a car parked by the curb, and Jerome opened its door and helped Harry inside, and the two men sat in that strange car while Harry recovered.

  After a while, like a wondering little boy, Harry said: “Something has happened to me.”

  Jerome did not answer.

  Then Harry said: “All these years I thought I loved her and now I don’t. She always seemed to be around and now she doesn’t. When I saw you I …” His voice trailed of
f.

  “When you saw me,” Jerome said calmly, “you discovered that after all these years you really hated her. I don’t mean while she lived with you and you loved her. I mean all these years.”

  Harry started, trembled and cried: “Don’t go near my daughter or I’ll …” Then, seeing the look on Jerome’s face, he stopped. Then he began to sob and his shoulders shook and at last he said: “Help me!”

  Jerome said: “You’ve helped yourself, Harry.”

  Harry cried: “Did you hate her, too?”

  “I hated myself on account of her.”

  With staring eyes, Harry screamed: “She was a tramp. She never valued anything I ever did for her. I lived like a woman for her and kept the house and she just took everything I did for her and what thanks did I ever get from her? I’d have died for her and she knew it. Yes, I would. I kept our place so nice and clean everybody talked about how nice it was. She never thought I was any good for anything, and nobody else did either while she was around. She saw to that, all right. But I proved they were wrong. I’ve made a lot of money. I’d have made it for her, but she never thought I was any good and she went away after something better, so she thought.”

  Jerome said nothing; he just looked at Harry Blackwell with those new eyes. And for about ten minutes, sitting beside each other in that stranger’s car, both were silent.

  Then Harry looked up and said: “You know something? I feel pretty good.”

  “You had to say those things, even though some of them aren’t true.”

  “They’re all true. All of them are true.”

  “In a few days it won’t matter so much whether they’re true or not, Harry. Poor little Norah is gone. She never meant anyone any harm. It wasn’t your fault, and I don’t think it was her fault. It was how things happened. You were strong enough to get well afterwards.”

  After a while Harry said: “Jerome, would you like to see my daughter?”

  “Yes, but I don’t think I should.”

  Harry took out his wallet, fumbled in it and removed the photograph of a young girl.

  “She’s lovely,” Jerome said.

  “She’s going to have a wonderful life, Jerome. She’s at the best school. She’s good at music. She’s good at pretty near everything, I guess.”

  “She’s a very beautiful girl, Harry. You must be proud of her.”

  “You know Norah … Joan’s so beautiful Norah would …”

  “Why don’t you say it?”

  Harry whispered: “Norah was very jealous. She …” He stopped and stared at Jerome: “You got no right making me talk like this.”

  Jerome opened the door of the car and stepped out: “I’ll go now, Harry. I’m glad you found me.”

  “Can I see you again?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Harry sat in the strange car watching Jerome’s back go away. Jerome’s limp was more pronounced than he remembered it.

  CHAPTER VIII

  That day passed and I remember nothing much about it but the blackness. The next day began the same: up and down to the hospital, two scrappy meals I did not taste, too many drinks intended to deaden the pain, Catherine unconscious and apparently remaining the same. I slept in the afternoon and it was twilight when I came out of the apartment again so tired, so nothing, I hardly knew where I was or what I was doing. I got into the back of Romeo Pronovost’s cab, heard him asking questions about Madame and saw far off a blink of green in the twilight over the mountain. I heard Pronovost assuring me that it was real warm weather, and that spring was almost here. All you got to do is smell, he said, and you smell the spring in the air.

  In the hospital at the downstairs desk I asked if Sally was there, and they told me she had been up after lunch time and had left, because Dr. Christopher had forbidden her to enter her mother’s room.

  Fear brought all my senses to the alert: “Why? Is there a change?”

  “We have no report of a change, Mr. Stewart.”

  Damn them, I thought, they never tell you anything.

  I went up in the elevator and was about to enter Catherine’s room when the special nurse appeared, laid a finger to her lips and beckoned me to follow her to the sunroom. I went in blackness expecting, dreading and hoping all at once that I would be told that Catherine had died. I sat down and the nurse sat opposite me and I observed her. Even at that moment I took in her appearance. She was a woman of fiffty, I remembered she was married with a family, she had been on one of Catherine’s earlier cases and I had liked her then very much. She looked my idea of a perfect nurse trained in the days when nursing was the most respected woman’s profession in Canada and Canadian nurses were supposed to be the best in the world.

  She gave me a good nurse’s smile and said: “Things seem a little better now.”

  “Is there any consciousness?”

  “No, but I’m hopeful now. Last night I had no hope at all, but now I do.”

  “Why don’t you let me into her room?”

  She answered calmly: “Mr. Stewart, you must not mind this, but Dr. Martell is with her now.”

  I jumped to my feet with pounding temples.

  “He is there on Dr. Christopher’s suggestion.” Another sweet smile. “He’s the finest doctor I ever knew.”

  I felt like murder with the blood pounding in my head: “What business has Dr. Christopher bringing him into this case? I didn’t ask him to be our doctor, I asked Dr. Christopher to be our doctor.”

  Still calm and nursely, she said: “Dr. Martell consulted with Dr. Christopher this afternoon after lunch. I was so glad they did.” A smile all-womanly. “You see, I used to be chief floor nurse on this very floor when Dr. Martell was on the staff. There was never anyone else like him. It’s so wonderful having him back.”

  I looked at her and thought savagely: My God, did he ever make love to you once and are you remembering it? But in her smile there was nothing but this assured sweetness, this feeling of absolute confidence I remembered so many had felt when Jerome was working.

  “Is he here as a doctor, or what?” I said.

  “Let’s say he’s here.”

  “Have you any objections to my seeing my wife now, or must I wait until Dr. Martell decides to leave her?”

  “By all means see your wife, Mr. Stewart.”

  The last time I had been in that room, death had been in it. I know my language is not good, it is not scientifically accurate, but it will have to do. And more than death had been there: the fear of death had been in the room, too.

  Now, walking down the corridor, I was bringing into it the spirit of murder. I hated them both – Catherine no less than Jerome. I hated myself and I hated life. I went in and saw Jerome’s form on the far side of her bed, the usual post-surgical apparatus and Jerome’s hunched form. His shoulders were bent forward, his face in shadow leaned close to hers, the fingers of his right hand lightly touched her right wrist. I hated him and wanted to kill him. He had enjoyed her few good years and he had flung her away leaving me with the residue. He had condemned me – they both had condemned me – to feeling what I felt now, to thinking what I felt now. And there he was, back again with her to see the end. Vividly – like a human figure caught in the act by a flash of lightning – I saw Jerome with a rifle and bayonet in his hands and a fiendish look on his face driving his bayonet into the belly of a blond German boy. Now he was back. Years of concentration camps, of beatings and starvings and hatings and killings and torturings – there he was like the memory of the human race back beside her for the end, and I thought he looked like a vulture.

  Jerome’s face lifted, he saw me, he rose, I stepped forward, I looked into his eyes. Suddenly I went numb and strange.

  I had never in my life seen an expression like his. His face seemed white, very lined but the lines finely drawn, the eyes very large. His whole face seemed transparent. And in his eyes was an expression new and uncanny. They seemed to have seen everything, known everything, suffered everything. But what came ou
t of them into me was light, not darkness. A cool, sweet light came out of them into me then. It entered me, and the murderous feeling went out, and I was not afraid any more. Without a waver in his glance, Jerome put out his hand and I took it, and so after all those years we two met again with Catherine’s small, silent body between us.

  He said quietly: “Let’s go outside.”

  We walked together into the sunroom and sat for several minutes before either of us spoke, and I continued to feel this strange mysterious power of his, and the light growing inside of me. Then I heard him say in his soft voice: “She’s going to get better, George.”

  There was sweat on his forehead and a wet patch on his shirt. His clothes, which for some reason I had expected to look like a D.P.’s, were correctly English and I remembered that he had spent a year in Hong Kong before coming home. I stared out the window at the city lights and lay back in my chair feeling tired as a child feels, as a child feels tired and a man so seldom does, a purity of fatigue, the kind that comes before a perfect sleep.

  “How do you know she’s going to get better?” I said at last. “I’m a veteran at this kind of thing, George. Believe me.”

  “Have you done anything new?”

  “Of course not. Jack and Dr. Andrews have done everything possible in the medical sense.”

  Again I marvelled at the transparency of his face. This was how he had aged. His body was lighter than I remembered it, but it was a younger body than most men’s of fiffty-two. It was still active and strong. But his face had the eyes of Rembrandt.

  “Just before you came in,” I heard him say, “just before you came in I was sitting there. And I felt death brush me as it went out of the room.”

  I shook my head and stared at him. I got to my feet and stared at him and there was nothing dramatic in his expression. I saw nothing in his face but an absolute serenity, a total sureness.