Earth and High Heaven

by Gwethalyn Graham

  “I doubt if he thinks as badly of you as you do of us,” said Erica wearily. She had realized soon after she had met him that arguing abstract problems with René was useless and that she would never be able to alter his prejudices or change his opinions. He never gave her a fair hearing, because although he probably had more respect for her as a rational being than for most of the women he knew, he was incapable of regarding any woman as primarily rational. They were first and foremost simply women, with reason a long way in the rear.

  He dropped two lumps of sugar into her cup and she said, “I only wanted one.”

  “Don’t stir it then.” He raised his eyes to her face and said almost incredulously, “Even people like you don’t see how it looks to us.”

  “It,” she thought, “it” is the war, English Canadian domination, English Canada’s attitude toward Great Britain and the Empire, English Canada’s outlook on the world, English Canada’s superiority, hypocrisy, and ineffable Protestant self-righteousness.

  “If you want to convince us that you really mean what you say about Nazism, and your ‘democratic’ ideals, you’ve got to start at home by smashing the Orange Lodge in Toronto; you’ve got to stop exploiting French-Canadian labor and let us control our own economic life instead of having you control it for us. And just to make it really impressive, you might take down a few of your ‘Gentiles Only’ signs.”

  “As a French Canadian you’re hardly in a position to criticize us for being anti-Semitic.”

  René shrugged. “At least we don’t say one thing and do another.”

  Erica said nothing. She gathered up her gloves and her purse and her handkerchief, which had fallen on the floor, and getting up, René said, “I’m afraid I just smell another racket. Did you ever read about the last war, Eric, and how we were going to see that every nation got the raw materials it needed, how we were going to continue wartime co-operation after the war, and make a better world? You should. It’s very instructive.”

  “I don’t want to be instructed that way. You’re a Catholic, you ought to know that nothing can be accomplished without faith.”

  She got up and started toward the door, tired and discouraged for no reason at all, because René was only one person and everyone else she knew had, if not faith, at least a certain amount of hope.

  On the pavement outside René put his hand on her arm and asked, “Where are you going?”

  “Windsor Station. I told you, my sister’s arriving this afternoon.”

  “I’ve got to go home and see Madeleine.”

  There was a syringa bush which was just coming into blossom against the grey stone façade of a house across the street; she would have liked a sprig of it to hold in her hand and sniff at intervals on her way down to the station.

  He said involuntarily, “I don’t want to leave you like this, Eric!”

  Erica glanced up at him quickly and said, “It’s all right.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  He went on standing there in the middle of the pavement, looking harassed and unhappy. Erica had forgotten how young he was, only thirty-three. He was usually so sure of himself that he seemed much older.

  “I hate quarreling with people,” said René. “Particularly you. I wish you’d forget everything I said ...”

  “I will if you’ll do something for me.” She said, “I want a sprig of that syringa ...”

  The notice board in Windsor Station covered a great deal of wall space, and she was standing in front of it, making a bet with herself that the Quebec train would arrive before she had succeeded in finding out when it was due and which track it would be on, when the unforgettable voice of three weeks before said from somewhere behind her, “Hello, Erica.”

  She caught her breath, then turned and said quite casually, “Hello, Marc, what are you doing here?”

  “Meeting the train from Quebec.”

  “So am I. Is it late?”

  He pointed to a smaller board headed “Special” and said, “It’s an hour late so far. By the way,” he remarked, “you were looking at ‘Departures.’”

  “Oh, was I?” Evidently he had been watching her for some time before he had spoken to her. He was in uniform, with two pips on his shoulders. As an elderly man in spectacles got between them, he altered his position slightly. He had not really smiled yet; she had no idea whether he was really glad to see her or not.

  “Are you expecting someone too?”

  “Yes, my sister Miriam. I haven’t seen her for three years, she’s been living in England.”

  With his green eyes fixed expressionlessly on her face, as though he was looking through her, he asked, “Where’s the rest of your family?”

  “They’re away for the weekend.”

  He had his hands in his pockets and went on looking through her in silence, while Erica waited, forcing her eyes back to the long line of chalk figures running down the right-hand column on the notice board. She knew as definitely as if he had told her, that he was trying to make up his mind to go away, and that if he did, she would never see him again, but although she wanted him to stay so much, she would not turn toward him and smile, and try to influence him that way. She would not influence him at all.

  To concentrate on something else and keep her eyes away from him was somehow to neutralize the effect of her own personality, and she went on counting the trains marked “Due at ...” in order to arrive at a total which could, or could not be subtracted from the total marked “On Time.”

  “Erica,” he said at last.

  “Hello,” said Erica, coming to a full stop at the figures 4:46. “I’m still here.”

  “Have you got anything to do for the next hour?”

  “No. Have you?”

  “Yes, but I’m not going to do it. Do you want to go somewhere and have a drink?”

  “Well, I’ve just had lunch ...”

  “Let’s go over to Dominion Square then.”

  As they walked down the concourse he asked, “Where did you get the syringa?”

  “It was a peace offering,” said Erica, sniffing it.

  They crossed the street, passed the line of horses and carriages, the only vehicles except bicycles which were allowed on Mount Royal, and then started over the grass toward Dorchester Street and the broad walk leading to the Boer War Memorial up at the other end of the square.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call you, but I’ve been up to my eyes in work for the past three weeks.”

  “I know.” There were a few pigeons scattered along the walk and Erica threw them some corn from the bag she had bought from the old gaspésien at noon and which was still half full. “René told me how busy you are.”

  A little further on she heard him remark dispassionately, “That excuse sounded even more feeble than I expected.”

  “You don’t have to make excuses,” said Erica almost inaudibly.

  “I wanted to call you.”

  They found an empty bench and sat down. For a moment neither of them said anything and then Erica asked, “Who are you meeting from Quebec?”

  “My former boss, Mr. Aaronson. He’s been there on a case all week.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Mr. Aaronson?” He glanced at her absently, then at the old derelict sitting on the bench opposite them in the sunlight. Further down, on the next bench, there were three New Zealand airmen. If Marc had ever wondered what Mr. Aaronson was like, he had seldom tried to put it into words before, and with his eyes back at the derelict again he said finally, “Well, he’s about fifty-five or sixty, quite a lot shorter than I am and three times as big around the middle. He chews cigars all the time except when he’s in Court. He’s one of the best corporation lawyers in the city.”

  “Was he born here?”

  “No, he was born in a Russian ghetto. His father never got much further than the pushcart stage when his family came over here but he somehow managed to scrape enough money together to send old Aaronson to England for part of his le
gal training. He’s been going back, whenever he could, ever since — sometimes on Privy Council cases and sometimes just on holidays. He’s completely nuts on the subject of England; he thinks it’s the only really civilized country in the world, and every time we get into a political discussion, it always ends up with Mr. Aaronson making a speech on the subject of the Pax Britannica. He’s a complete Imperialist.”

  Only part of her mind was following what Marc said; most of it was concerned with Marc himself — the warmth of his voice and his unusually fine, rather small hands, and particularly, the startling change in his face when he stopped smiling. It was like a light going out. The indefinable quality of youth which was part of his charm disappeared, and then you saw that he was all of thirty-three, solitary and unsure of himself. There was a lurking bewilderment in his eyes, as though, in spite of all his common sense and most of his experience of living, he still expected things to turn out better than they usually did.

  Above all, when that smile went out like a light, his appalling vulnerability became evident, and you began to realize how much strain and effort had gone into the negative and fundamentally uncreative task of sheer resistance — resistance against the general conspiracy among the great majority of the people he met to drive him back into himself, to dam up so many of his natural outlets, to tell him what he was, and finally, to force him to abide by the definition.

  “... so all we have to do is hand it over to England and say, ‘Here, you run it.’”

  “Run what?”

  “The world,” said Marc, with a gesture which included the skyscrapers which formed one end and most of one side of the square, the Boer War Memorial on his right, the New Zealand fliers and the old derelict who had settled down full length on the bench with his shoes off and with both his feet and his face covered by newspaper.

  “Do you think the English want to run the world?” asked Erica doubtfully, running her fingers through her long fair hair and then shaking it loose so that the sun could get at it.

  “It’s not me,” protested Marc. “It’s Mr. Aaronson. Were you listening?”

  “Well, some of the time,” said Erica apologetically, and before he could go on about Mr. Aaronson or start on another subject, she asked, “Have you got any brothers and sisters?”

  “One brother.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s a bush doctor.”

  “Where?” asked Erica in surprise.

  “Up in the mining country in Ontario.” He smiled at her suddenly, to let her know that he was glad she was there, sitting on the bench beside him with the sunlight on her hair. “Give me some corn,” he said. “One of those pigeons always gets there late and he looks undernourished.”

  She poured a stream of corn into his hand and said, “Go on about your brother.”

  Marc had got up to feed the undernourished pigeon. From a few feet away he said, “Well, he’s paid by the local nickel mine because they’re required by law to employ a doctor when they employ a certain number of men, but he spends most of his time doctoring the people who live around there — mostly French-Canadian farmers and their families. It’s pretty rough country, not much good for farming and only about half cleared; the farms are half rock and half bush and the people are very poor.”

  “How does he get to them?”

  “He rides the freights up and down the line and goes in from there by car or sleigh if somebody meets him, and he just walks or snowshoes if they don’t. Sometimes he goes on horseback. There aren’t many roads and anyhow, you can’t use them except in summer and fall.”

  “Do you ever see him?”

  “Yes, I usually go up to stay with him for part of my holidays and sometimes he comes here for medical meetings or to spend a few days at one of the hospitals. Besides that, he’s had to spend his holidays in Montreal since the war started. You see,” he explained, sitting down on the bench beside her again, “we each have one thing we like to do outside of our jobs ...”

  “What do you like to do?”

  “Fish. Do you fish?” he asked hopefully.

  “Well ...” said Erica, and then the truth prevailed, “No, not much. Somebody else always has to kill them and put the worms on for me.”

  “Worms,” said Marc witheringly, “that’s not fishing.”

  She laughed and asked, “What does your brother like to do?”

  “Go to the theatre. Before the war he always spent his holidays in New York — he used to stay two weeks, go to the theatre every night and twice a day when there were matinees, eat enormous dinners in all the best restaurants, and then go back to the bush again for another year. Now the Foreign Exchange Control Board won’t let him have anything like enough money for twenty theatre tickets in the third row center, not to mention his dinners and his hotel bill, so he has to stay in Montreal and just go to the movies.”

  “This is really one of the saddest war stories I’ve heard. What’s your brother’s name?”

  “David.”

  “Dr. David Reiser,” she repeated. “His name sounds just as nice as he does. Doesn’t he ever get homesick?”

  “Homesick? What for?”

  “For ... well, after all, he’s stuck all by himself off in the middle of nowhere, isn’t he?”

  “Oh, I see what you mean. No, it’s the other way round. He’s quite a good surgeon and once, about five years ago, he got a job on the staff of one of the hospitals here, but after three months he was so homesick for his French-Canadian farmers that he quit and went back to the bush again.”

  Marc lit two cigarettes one after the other, handed her the second, and went on, “He tried to enlist at the beginning of the war but they found out that he was the only doctor for a couple of thousand people and wouldn’t take him.”

  “Does he mind it much?”

  “Yes, I think so. His best friend was killed in Burma last spring and he tried to enlist again but it’s too tough a life for a doctor over military age and he couldn’t get any guarantee that someone else would be sent up there in his place. The doctor the miners had before never left his house and ended up by drinking himself to death.” He said matter-of-factly, “Dave really leads a dog’s life. He’s out at all hours in every kind of weather from thunderstorms to forty below zero, and sometimes he gets paid in potatoes or half a cord of wood, but mostly he never gets paid by the farmers at all. Most doctors couldn’t stand it.”

  Erica had been listening to him with a growing surprise which made her slightly uncomfortable but which she did not wish to analyze for fear of being still more uncomfortable. She kept trying to dismiss the feeling that something about Dr. David Reiser did not seem to fit, and then, suddenly angry at her own evasiveness, she swung around and deliberately faced it. Her surprise was due to the fact that Dr. Reiser did not sound like a Jew.

  A Jew describes another Jew simply as a human being; a Gentile describes him, first and foremost, as a Jew. Even if the Gentile doesn’t happen to be generalizing at the moment, nevertheless the whole description is given in terms of that one specific frame of reference, at least by implication, so that the finished portrait is, at best, distorted and somewhat less than life size. The highest compliment the average Gentile can pay a Jew, apparently, is to say that he doesn’t look or behave like one, so that although it may only be operating in the negative, the frame of reference is still there. All the time Marc had been talking about his brother, she had been trying unconsciously to reduce the individual, David Reiser, to the size of the generalization, and because he simply could not be reduced that far and made to fit, she had been surprised.

  Evidently it was not going to be anything like as easy as she had thought; you could not rid yourself of layer upon layer of prejudice and preconceived ideas all in one moment and by one overwhelming effort of will. During the past three weeks she had become conscious of her own reactions, but that was as far as she had got. The reactions themselves remained to be dealt with.

  She had counted t
oo much on the fact that her prejudices were relatively mild and her preconceived ideas largely unstated, from an instinctive feeling dating from sometime in 1934, that so long as the Jews of Germany, and after 1938 the Jews of Europe, continued to suffer purely for their Jewishness, then to run down the Jews of Canada was in some way merely to add to that suffering. From 1934 on, whenever the subject of Jews as such had come up to their disfavour, Erica had kept her mouth shut.

  Now it occurred to her that her chief problem was not her opinions, which were conscious and had already changed considerably, but the way in which she thought and by which she had arrived at those opinions, which was still largely unconscious. There is nothing in the education of the average non-scientific human being to discourage him from the habit of generalizing from little or no evidence, and worse still and far more important, nothing to discourage him from the habit of starting with a generalization and ending up with the individual, instead of the other way round. That was precisely what she herself had done when she had tried to visualize David Reiser through a miasma of vague impressions associated with the word “Jewish” even though his religion or his race or whatever it was that the adjective actually meant, happened to be entirely irrelevant.

  “I’d like you meet David sometime. You’d like each other.”

  She had been looking at the pigeons gathered on the walk at their feet, waiting for more corn, but something in the way he said it made her turn her head quickly to glance at him, and she found that he had been watching her and knew what she was thinking. She said, “I might just as well think out loud and be done with it!”

  He touched her cheek lightly with one hand, and with his arm lying along the back of the bench again, across the space between them, he said, “We just operate on the same wavelength, that’s all.”

  Erica scattered some corn among the pigeons, and then she said suddenly, letting herself go at last, “The whole world has changed for me since I met you. I’m not being sentimental — I’m not even being particularly personal. It’s not that, it’s something else.” She paused, searching his face, and went on, “It’s as though I’d shifted position after twenty-eight years of seeing things mostly from just one standpoint, and I haven’t got used to how different everything looks. Do you understand that too?”