Chapter Seven
Twice before the end of the month, John sang out of town, short trips with small payment and Lillian for his accompanist. They were not expected to stay in the towns overnight, just sing at the concert hall and catch the late train back to the city. The choirmaster, Henry Stanton, at John’s church, St. Mark’s, was influential among all the critics in the city, and the papers wrote about him, so people out of town often asked him to recommend a singer. The time they went to Oshawa, Lillian and John wanted to stay together all night but were afraid Mr. Stanton might hear about it. People in the small hotels knew them, since they were advertised as the singer and the pianist from the city, so it was hard to be together for the night in any room in town without someone knowing. But they enjoyed having a lunch in the small restaurant in the town after the concert, people at other tables staring, nudging each other and whispering about the singer and his accompanist from the city. John, clearing his throat loudly, hung up his music case with his coat and looked eagerly at Lillian, her fair hair curled under her small tightly fitting black hat, and the neck of her dress cut low. Her throat was so white and soft that three young fellows at the next table leaned over toward her, hardly talking, looking respectfully at John and mutely at Lillian. For the evening at least John felt they were celebrities, and glancing at Lillian’s white throat he said perhaps they ought to take the chance and stay the night at some town hotel. Shaking her head, Lillian said they ought to go back to the city, then to the apartment before he went home.
“Let us not move awhile. Sit there and look at me with your lovely head on one side . . . No, never mind. Move your head. Speak softly to me,” he said.
“Silly sweetheart. There. I whispered it. I’ll gladly do anything you say, and doing it I’ll selfishly get the loveliest, finest feeling I ever have when I don’t exist at all and am all a part of you.”
“But, you lovely thing, when I sit here looking at your throat . . . Show more of your white throat. Lean toward me.”
“I can’t lean any farther. The boys at the next table are looking at us and whispering. Go on talking.”
“How lovely a white slender throat and the shadow. When I’m looking at your throat like this I get the nervous, restless, helpless feeling and ache all over and then I can see your face with a background of old castles, the Middle Ages – that’s it.”
“Do I really become so remote from you? You make a dream of it and I never felt so much like flesh and blood.”
“No. It’s the bridge of your nose. You hardly see anything like it nowadays. I remember a picture of an Italian Madonna with such a profile and hair just that length.”
Laughing happily she said: “Then I’ll cut my hair and be a modern woman. What will you do then, Troubadour? We’ll be out of the opera then.”
“Oh, well, I suppose I do sound operatic. I shouldn’t sing for a living. People suspect a singer and take everything he says with a grain of salt. It’s not necessary that he have any sense, imagination or vitality. Often it’s better if he’s a bit queer, because he’s invariably treated as though he were entirely effeminate. Most of the ones around here are, anyway. Nothing is expected of me except that I sing well enough. Few of my musical acquaintances are interested in anything but their particular kind of music-making. They don’t even get drunk. Were you ever out for an evening with any of them when they were hilarious? They don’t have to get drunk as long as they have the company of the ladies. You see how you must sympathize with me and love me in spite of my vocation. Would you love me if I were a plumber, sweetheart?”
“If you were, as you would be, an insistent, greedy, insatiable, lovely plumber. Please don’t lean so close to me here.”
“I will. I must. I’m an insatiable plumber. There’s the lovely smell of you.”
“We’ll go home and talk about it. Oh, do let’s go home.”
Though they wanted to stay in the restaurant and have the young fellows and girls staring at them, they hurried and got a bus for the ride back to the city.
Later when John went home, a light was in the room. Paul Ross was waiting for him, stretched out on the bed. Mrs. Errington had said John would return late in the evening and Paul had decided to wait in the room and had fallen asleep on the bed. His feet were resting on the wood at the end of the bed so he would not soil the cover. He still had his coat on, for he had not intended to fall asleep and it was wrinkled at the sleeves. His feet hanging over the end of the bed made him appear extraordinarily tall. The scar on his forehead, a war wound, was a little redder than the rest of the skin on his face. The wound on his forehead was always there to remind him he had left the university to fight in France, and at home again he could not get started decently. He used to talk so much about soldiers’ civil reestablishment it always came easily, like a speech, to him, and now he used it as part of his sales talk, selling magazines in the country. For three years he hardly ever talked about the war, but when he became a magazine salesman he carried his two medals in his pocket, showing them to all the women who needed a final persuasive influence. Now he never thought of them as his medals, just a part of his sales talk. The war and the mud in Flanders was all a part of his sales talk.
Waking up, he said to John: “You’re looking swell. What have you been doing?”
“A little singing here and there. I was out of town with Lillian tonight.”
“How is she? She’s a great girl.”
“She’s looking lovely. How was it for you this trip?”
“Beautiful. The best trip I ever had. I sold them high, wide, and handsome. I put a magazine in every home in the country. I had a line of bull as high as a telegraph pole. I stayed three nights with a farmer’s wife whose husband had gone to the city, then sold her the magazine before I left. That’s what you call a lack of gallantry. Don’t you think? A lack of gallantry on the part of an old soldier, but I told her she’d have the magazine every month for a year to remember me by.”
“I hope you weren’t waiting for anything in particular all this time. I might have come home earlier.”
“I was lying here waiting to talk to you about Fred Thompson. The poor guy. They did hang him after all?”
“It was terrible. It gave me a bad feeling every time I thought about it. You ought to have seen the nervous faces in the crowd around the jail the night before.”
“It doesn’t make me feel as bad as it might have at one time.”
“Why?”
“It was always that way at the war. In the morning you were talking to guys you had known a long time. In the evening they weren’t there; all blown to somewhere. They were there, then they weren’t there. And you got to the point where they didn’t seem to be dead.”
“Well, Fred’s dead.”
“I know. It was something like the time the first fellow you liked got hit. That was very bad, and he seemed absolutely dead; then they all got hit, and it seemed too many of them were dead. It seemed somehow silly to think you couldn’t see them again.”
“You don’t want to go on thinking about it.”
“I should forget it, but we were friendly at one time and the way he died seems to bring everything to a head. Everything that was ever good comes suddenly to a head and then it’s gone and it’s hard to get it straightened out again.”
“You make it too personal. I thought about it at the time, and now I don’t have to.”
“I tell you, you don’t have to go to a war to be face to face with death.”
“You don’t know, you weren’t there.”
“Fred was closer to me. It’s my world, I tell you.”
“Maybe. We were in France together. He really was a swell fellow, generous, cheerful, and very fond of the ladies. He used to give a girl the last cent he had and got a big kick out of making her happy. He was violent, quick-tempered and impulsive. Do you remember the days when Fred enlisted, the days of the big recruiting meetings when the sergeants got so much a head and worked all the old
stuff on the boys? Fred enlisted right down there in the park with the jail in the corner, at the biggest recruiting meeting ever held in a war time in the city. The park was a natural amphitheatre, and a hundred thousand people were on the hills, and the flatland below was marked out into a track, and the old Indian runner Tom Longboat ran a race with someone who beat him easily. They had built a platform and soldiers put on boxing bouts and looked very healthy. In the early evening, with the hundred thousand people on the hills, they set off fireworks that shot across the sky, then they lit torches and the recruiting sergeants began working on the crowd. Fred was there with me, listening to a tough sergeant who was calling young fellows slackers, while old country girls in the crowd got behind young men, pushing them and yelling they could see yellow streaks up their back. Fred was only eighteen then. The sergeant, pointing at him, said he was living a life of ease while boys were dying in France. Some of the old country girls got behind Fred and me, jostling us, urging us to do our bit, while the sergeant bawled hoarsely. And Fred said to the sergeant that if he could punch him on the jaw first, he would have no hesitation about joining the army. The sergeant, coming close to him, shook a finger in his face and Fred punched at him, hit ing him. The sergeant started to yell for the police, but Fred offered to join the army and the sergeant said he was a fine fellow and all the girls cheered and put their arms around him, trying to kiss him. It was right down there in the park,” Paul said.
“And he looked so simple at the window in the jail.”
“I’ve got a hunch that if he hadn’t been at the war he wouldn’t have hit that cop. The cop was hurting him and it seemed reasonable to kill him.”
“Don’t go on making me think about it. What do you want to do now?”
“Walk up to a café and have a sandwich, then go home and get some sleep.”
They went downstairs quietly so they wouldn’t wake the Erringtons. No one was on the street. It was chilly, almost too cold for a light coat, though the snow wouldn’t come till the end of November. They had to walk only a few blocks to the corner café, an open-all-night quick-lunch, and they ordered hot sandwiches and coffee, though John had hardly any appetite. The food had become almost tasteless for him. He had thought he was hungry but could hardly swallow the food: it was just heavy and tasteless. Paul, eating hungrily, ordered another sandwich. John said to him suddenly:
“You know Isabelle Thompson?”
“Fred’s sister?”
“Yes.”
“I only met her two or three times. She’s rather pretty in a very determined way.”
“She still is, only she’s thin now. She was talking about you.”
“I only met her a couple of times.”
“I guess she liked you. Phone her, why don’t you?”
“What for?”
“Go out with her.”
“That’s different. She probably took Fred’s death pretty hard, didn’t she?”
“I can’t make her out at all. Once I had a notion she might go in a convent. Instead she finds it necessary to go the other way, as if she has to plunge into the mud and drag everybody with her.”
“Don’t get excited, and not so loud.”
“Oh, well I thought it might be nice if you took her out.”
They stopped talking about her. Ross got very jolly and John, laughing happily, tried to hold it in his throat, and then had to open his mouth suddenly and the laugh seemed to come through his teeth. They sat together in the lunchroom smoking and liking each other until it was two o’clock and they were too sleepy to be either shrewd or witty, and neither one was able to laugh at the other, so they paid their checks and went out, standing on the corner till a taxi came along to take Ross home.
John did not see Ross the rest of the week, mainly because he and Lillian were busy arranging the details of a recital they intended to give in Hart House. The recital, to be successful, had to have the patronage of many rich and well-known people in the city, whose names attracted musical critics from all the papers. It was not really the fault of the musical critics that they had this attitude; the editors, John knew from newspaper friends, usually intimated if a recital had any social importance they expected their critic to take advantage of the opportunity to write impressively. The small details of the recital interested Lillian, and they spent many an evening together in her apartment talking excitedly. But she was not really happy. Many small unguarded gestures, when they sat at the table, the light from the reading lamp on her face, expressed her notion of the way a woman ought to act who has a lover and looks forward to being his mistress for a number of years. Moved by a strong feeling she was richly happy, but her emotion had to be advanced beyond a point before she could enjoy the many intimacies that gave her the strong excitement. When John argued, she told him reluctantly it was always in her mind that if she quarreled with him she would go on in the same way of living, only with someone else. She was so lovely, John could not properly express his sympathy, though it seemed more important that she should be easy in her thoughts than that he should be able to go on loving her. Sitting across from her, talking slowly, he tortured himself, sympathizing with her, and was eager to rebuke Isabelle for encouraging her to live in the apartment.
The next time he met her at Lillian’s apartment he offered to walk home with her. Her cheerful jauntiness had irritated him when the three of them were talking, and he resented, though he didn’t know why, the too vivid red on her lips and the heavy pencil marks on her eyebrows. Her clothes fitted her neatly; her dress was too tight across the hips and under her breasts.
It was almost a straight walk down the long sloping street, the rows of lights undulating on the hill.
“Why did you want Lillian to take the apartment?” he said directly.
“But she wanted something like that, darling.”
“You knew that after the first few weeks it would bother her.”
“But she loves you and needs something like that.”
“It’s making her miserable.”
“And you’re blaming me?”
“You knew it would make her miserable.”
For a block they walked and she was hanging heavily on his arm, when she spoke again, holding her lower lip with her teeth. He was astonished to see that she was ready to cry. “Oh, if you only knew how Lillian used to talk about wanting to love you,” she said. “She used to talk about it all the time and she merely wanted someone to encourage her.” Isabelle’s feeling was so sincere he was ashamed of himself and without any words to explain his anger. All the resentment was gone out of him. He felt suddenly friendly. A cold wind was coming up the street from the lake and she held on to his arm tightly. She said: “It was sweet of you to tell Paul Ross to phone me.”
“Did he do it?”
“The other night. We went to a show.”
“Well, I’d rather see you with him than with Henley.”
“That’s over,” she said abruptly.
They were walking through the old district to Isabelle’s house, and under a street lamp two girls dressed jauntily were talking easily with two fellows who had whistled from the other side of the road and crossed over. The slow movements and low laughter of the girls and the fellows under the street lamp made John feel that his conversation with Isabelle was not so very important because he was happier than he had been all evening, simply because he was talking confidentially and walking with Isabelle, who was pretty, along poorly lighted streets in the evening and a wind had come up from the lake blowing strongly against their legs, making them half turn their backs as they held arms.
“Will you come in the house for a while?” she said.
“I will. I’d like to see your mother, too.”
So they went into the house together, and Mrs. Thompson, looking clean and tidy, said to John, when Isabelle was upstairs, “Why don’t you come oftener, John? I like seeing you.”
“I will come.”
“I can’t get Isabelle to look afte
r herself at all. I’ll tell her she’ll be in her grave soon and she’ll simply shrug her shoulders. I don’t like to think of a girl not caring whether she lives or dies.” Mrs. Thompson was speaking softly and looking at him intently as if he ought to understand far more than she would be able to express.
“You think she’s really not well?”
“I don’t know. I seem to be watching her get worse.”
“Watching her get worse?”
“It just seems to me that I’m here watching her.”
“We’re all here watching her.”
But he enjoyed the rest of the evening, sitting in the front room talking with Isabelle, who played for him new records, Negro spirituals, on the talking machine. Sometimes she stood in the middle of the floor swaying slowly with the rhythm, and laughing excitedly at the end when she changed the record. Her body did not seem so slim when she moved with so much animation. Her body curved with the rhythm of the music. She was having such a good simple time, amusing herself and him, she went on talking over her shoulder, changing the needle for the disk, explaining about the piece and a dance she had seen on the stage, a Negro whose body was like a strand of rubber, quivering when touched. Laughing gaily she, too, tried to shake her shoulders but couldn’t do it, and flushed and tired she sat down.
“Heavens, I’m all in,” she said.
“You’ve been working hard; you oughtn’t to do it.”
“I’ve been enjoying myself.”
Leaning back, her eyes closed and still breathing heavily, she was smiling, remembering her own pleasure, then opening her eyes quickly she insisted on get ing him something to eat.
Before he went home she sat beside him showing him a privately printed book writ en by a friend of hers, a silly book beautifully printed, written by a man who wrote stories like nursery rhymes and whose mother paid for having them printed, and they laughed, taking turns reading the funny lines.
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