One outing a week was his usual relaxation. It satisfied him, and the diversion enhanced the preciousness of his studious evenings. Once a week, preferably on Saturday, he would walk up St. Catherine Street, go to the Palace or the Princess theatre, then have a classy meal in a west-end restaurant. Afterwards he would go back to the obscurity of his suburb, light-footed, whistling, happy, as if he had received confirmation of his secret ambitions. Those were the times when he was most happy to be alone and free, without family or demanding friendships to distract him from his plan. This weekly excursion kept alive his hope for a splendid future. Just as he needed to wear soft, expensive materials, he also needed to mingle with the crowd to taste to the full his self-confidence, his refusal to sacrifice what he felt to be rare in himself, setting him off from others.
What worried him occasionally was his intense curiosity about people, a curiosity that at times came close to pity. Pity or contempt, he couldn't exactly say. But he felt vaguely that his constant need to be superior fed on a kind of compassion for those humans who were actually farthest from himself.
Pity or contempt? he wondered, and thought about Florentine again. Who was she? How was her life? There were a host of things he would have liked to know about her, without giving up any of his precious time or letting her encroach upon his life. Since the first day he saw her in the Five and Ten her face had followed him to the most unlikely places — sometimes in the forging hall when the blast furnace was open and the flames danced before his eyes; and even here at times, in his own room, when the wind rattled his windowpanes and infected his mind with its reckless turbulence.
Finally the obsession grew so intense that he could see no way to free himself of it except by showing himself purposely cynical and hard to the girl, forcing her to hate and fear him, so that she would avoid him and save him the trouble of avoiding her. But after one or two tries he still went back to the restaurant. And today he had so forgotten himself that he'd invited her out. Was it pity? Self-interest? Or just to raise a final barrier between them? — for she'd be bound to refuse such an abrupt and clumsy invitation. (Had he really thought she'd refuse?)
He remembered her pale face and that flicker of uneasiness in her eyes, and he wondered: Did she take me seriously? Is she not too timid to show up?
He knew, of course, that his curiosity had carried the day, that it now possessed him like a burning passion. It was the only emotion he would likely make no effort to master, because it seemed a necessary enrichment to his life. His curiosity was as ruthless as the wind tonight all through the suburb, along the canal, in the deserted streets, around the small frame houses, everywhere, and far up toward the mountain.
He tried to force his attention back on the work before him, but under his equations he scribbled the word "Florentine." Then, hesitantly, he added "Lacasse," and a second later irritably scratched it out. Florentine, he thought, was a young, happy name, a springtime name, but her surname broke the charm with its connotation of working-class drudgery. And that is likely how she was, this little waitress from the Five and Ten: half slum child, half graceful springtime, a springtime brief and quick to wither.
These idle thoughts, so foreign to his habits, set his nerves on edge. He rose and went to the window, and opened it wide to the wind and snow. He thrust his head outside and breathed deeply of the night air.
The wind was howling down the deserted pavement, and the snow, in its wake, powdery and dazzling white, whirled up in the air, ran to creep along the house walls and rose again in random leaps like a dancer pursued by a cracking whip. The wind was master with his whip, the snow was the wild, supple ballerina running before him, spinning on command and, at a word, prostrating herself on the earth before him. Then there was nothing to be seen but the long ripple of a scarf of white unrolled along the thresholds of the houses, silent and barely trembling. But the lash whistled down again and the dancer, in a rush of energy, rose once more to unfurl her powdery veil at the height of the street lamps. She rose and rose until she was flying over the rooftops and the plaintive sound of her weariness beat on the tightly closed shutters.
"Florentine . . . Florentine Lacasse . . . half song, half squalor, half springtime, half misery," the young man murmured. Staring at the snow dancing below him, he thought it had taken on human form, that of Florentine herself, who, though exhausted, was unable to stop whirling and spending her strength, and danced on there in the night, a prisoner to her own exertions. Those girls are like that, I suppose, he thought. They run this way and that like blind things, to their own ruin.
He turned away to change his train of thought, and as if he were trying with a single glance to gather up all the strength, all the certainty of his life and preserve his pride in his chosen path, he stared around his room. From the low, mildewed ceiling hung an electric cord pulled sideways to his table with a string. The light from the bulb fell stark and unshaded on his open books, on the bits of paper with scribbled notes and a pile of heavy volumes rising in a tier. In one corner of the room was a hot plate on which drops of dark foam from his coffee pot fell and sputtered. His bed was unmade. A few books lay on the pillow and others were strewn pell-mell along with his clothes on an ancient plush armchair. No shelves, no cupboards, no closet. No place to put anything. The room seemed in the throes of a perpetual preparation to move. But that was precisely what he liked about it. He took pains to remind himself that his presence here was transitory, that he was neither made for poverty nor resigned to it. He needed ugliness around him as well as beauty to stiffen his resolve. This room had the same effect on him as his lonely walks among the bright lights of Montreal. It excited and uplifted him, gave him an immediate obstacle to be overcome. Usually when he came into this room he felt all his projects, ambitions and delight in studying come alive. He felt all other desires fade away. Then he knew what he wanted. But tonight the spell held back. He was there like a caged animal. And always with the question, "Is she going to be there or not?"
He realized that he wouldn't stop thinking of Florentine. With a shrug he told himself there were other experiences as valuable as study, and that satisfying his curiosity had always quieted and enriched his mind.
Quickly he got ready and went out. The street was silent. Nothing is as quiet as St. Ambroise Street on winter nights. A passerby will slip past from time to time, drawn to the feebly lit window of a grocery-restaur ant. A door opens, light splashes on the snowy sidewalk, the sound of a voice comes from far away. The passerby disappears, the door slams shut and in the deserted street, between the pale fire of family lamps in the houses on one side and the sombre walls bordering the canal on the other, nothing is left but the heavy power of night.
In other days this was where the suburb stopped. St. Henri's last houses had stood there facing waste fields, and an almost limpid, rustic air hung about their simple gables and tiny gardens. From those better days St. Ambroise now has no more than two or three great trees, their roots still digging in beneath the concrete of the sidewalk. Textile mills, grain elevators and warehouses have risen to face the frame houses, slowly, solidly, walling them in. The houses are still there with their little wrought-iron balconies, their tranquil fa$ades and the faint, sweet music that sometimes filters out from behind closed shutters, trickling into the silence like the voice of another age: little lost islands to which the wind bears odours of all the continents. There is no night so cold that it does not carry from the warehouse halls the smells of milled wheat, ground grains, rancid oil, molasses, peanuts, furs, white flour and resinous pine.
Jean had chosen to live there because in that distant street, almost unknown, rents had remained very low; but also because the neighbourhood, with its rumbling, rattling and whistling at the day's end and the deep silence of its nights, switched his mind to the world of his work.
It's true that in spring the nights were not so quiet. As soon as navigation was open the deep cry of the foghorn, repeated a hundred times, came from down at t
he end of St. Ambroise from sunset until dawn, rising over the suburb, carried by the wind, until it even reached Mount Royal.
The house where Jean had found his little furnished room was just in front of the swing-bridge of St. Augustin street. It could watch the passage of flatboats, tankers that stank of oil or gasoline, wood barges, colliers, all of them giving a triple blast with their foghorns just before its door: their demand to be let out from the narrows of the towns into the wide, rough waters of the Great Lakes.
But the house was not only on the path of the freighters. It was also near the railway, at the crossroads of the eastern and western lines and the maritime routes of the great city. It was on the pathways of the oceans, the Great Lakes and the prairies.
To its left were shining rails. Directly in front of it shone red and green signals. In the night, coal dust and soot flew around it, amid a cavalcade of wheels, the frenzied gallop of puffing steam, the long wailing of whistles, the short, chopped blast from the chimneys of the flatboats; among these sounds tripped the shrill, broken ringing of the alarm and, prolonged beyond this clamour, the slow purring of a ship's screw. Often, when he woke at night with all these sounds about him, Jean imagined he was on a voyage, sometimes on a freighter, sometimes in a Pullman car. He would close his eyes and go to sleep with the agreeable impression that he was escaping, constantly escaping.
The house with its narrow front looked askance at the street, twisted as if to brace itself against all the shocks to which it was exposed. Its side walls sloped outward in a V, like a clumsy ship whose immovable prow strove to cleave the surrounding noise and darkness.
Jean hesitated on the threshold of the street door. He loved this house as he had likely never loved anything else in the suburb. He and the house were two long-allied forces, equally unyielding.
A gust of wind caught him from the side and sent him staggering. Pushed and battered toward the west, he went down the street hugging the house fronts. At the corner of St. Ferdinand Street the throb of a guitar escaped through a rattly store window. He went close to the steamed-up glass and saw, between the display cards, in a tiny free space at the back, the pink, beaming face of Ma Philibert, the owner. She was perched on a high stool behind the counter, one hand caressing a black cat whose tail tapped the worn and polished wood. Damp overcoats, caps and gloves, tossed over the sheet-iron that served as a fire screen, gave off a thick, hot vapour that blurred the sur- rounding faces. Jean couldn't see the guitarist but he had a glimpse of the instrument and the hand plucking the strings. To one side he could make out another musician playing the spoons: two tablespoons back to back giving out the staccato of metallic castanets. The gang, he thought, was having fun as usual, and on the cheap.
At the back of the shop there were two or three newcomers whose faces he could barely see. Sometimes they brought a guest to these evening get-togethers, newly hired textile workers or perhaps a few young people out of work whom Ma Philibert greeted with the same enthusiasm she showed her paying customers. Her little restaurant-store had always been the refuge of a noisy, squabbling group, usually penniless.
Jean remembered the time when he worked as a spinner and went to the little restaurant every evening except payday, for even then it seemed a tradition that on Saturday night everyone went down to the movie theatre on Notre Dame; on other evenings they returned to the soiled packs of cards, music and other cheap amusements they found at Emma Philibert s.
"Fat Emma," they called her. The most maternal and gentle influence in his life had certainly been this exuberant woman, Jean reflected. He could still hear her rough tone when she gave in to someone asking for credit: "Y 1 darn fool, you'll never have a penny to your name." Then, edging grumpily off her stool, she would add in a low, conspiratorial voice, "I guess it's some tobacco you want, to poison your health an' rot your teeth? Here y'are. I suppose you're goin' to pay, one of these days in a month of Sundays?" Then aloud: "D'you think Emma Philibert's stupid enough to fall for that? I don't give nothin' away, not a scrap!"
Jean was on the point of going inside. Maybe an evening here would give his mind a change, and confirm how well he had spent the last years and how far he had risen above his former companions. Ma Philibert would cluck, like a mother hen, take him in her arms, feel the material in his suit, marvel at his healthy looks. When she saw one of her former poor boys come back prosperous, she was happy as a mother superior who sees her predictions about a prize student finally come true. She'd seen all kinds in her "goodies shop" since she'd bought it to keep her husband alive during the bad years. Some of them depressed, some raging to succeed; strong men, weak men, disillusioned, mistreated, rebellious, boastful or silent men, she'd seen the whole between-the-wars generation pass by. If anybody could write about that strange time, Jean thought, it would be Ma Philibert. What experiences she must have collected! What spicy stories she could tell! But there it is, he thought, these big red-faced, happy mommas probably see ' nothing and understand nothing, and think everything's
jusr lovely. l-^His vanity egged him on to go in and be seen by her and the little gang in all his new importance. He felt the old urge to show off to these simple young men, with his superior judgement and sometimes vehement style. But the futility of all those arguments came back to him, and the space of solitude they had cleared around him.
He came to with a start and went on toward Notre Dame Street. Nothing, it seemed, nothing tonight could take his mind off that skinny girl, with her burning eyes which he could see like an enigma behind the steaming counter of the Five and Ten.
The clock of St. Henri's Church stood at a quarter to eight when he reached the heart of the neighbourhood.
He stopped in the middle of St. Henri Square, a vast area furrowed by the railway and two streetcar tracks, a crossroads planted with black and white posts and level-crossing gates, a clearing of asphalt and dirty snow, open between bell towers and domes to the assault of howling locomotives, the peal of the great bells, the raucous streetcar gong and the unending traffic of Notre Dame and St. James streets. Almost every night now, adding to the anguish and darkness of St. Henri, came the distant tramp of heavy boots and the roll of drums, sometimes coming from Notre Dame, sometimes from as far away as the armouries up on the heights of Westmount, when the wind blew down from the mountain.
Then all these noises were drowned.
A drawn-out trembling shook the suburb.
At Atwater Street, at Rose-de-Lima, at the rue du Couvent and now at St. Henri Square, the level-crossing gates were being lowered. Here, where two main streets entered the square, their eight wooden arms, black and white with gleaming red signal lamps, met and brought the traffic to a stop.
At these four neighbouring crossings, morning and evening, the crowd of pedestrians paused to let the train go by, and impatient lines of cars idled in their stifling exhaust, many sounding their horns in fury, as if St. Henri were suddenly giving vent to its exasperation at these howling trains which sliced it violently in two with such intolerable frequency.
The train rolled by. The acrid smell of coal filled the street. A swirl of soot rose just above the rooftops, then, as it began to swoop down, the belfry of St. Henri's Church appeared, floating, without a base, like a phantom arrow amid the clouds. Then the clock appeared. Its lighted face pierced an opening in the trail of smoke, and little by little the whole church was to be seen, high architecture in the Jesuit style. In the middle of the front yard a Sacred Heart statue received the last particles of soot with open arms. The parish appeared again out of the smog, falling into place with its own tranquil durability. School, church, convent: a close-knit, centuries-old alliance, as strong in the heart of the urban jungle as in the Laurentian valleys. Beyond them, streets with low houses descended in two directions toward the areas of greater poverty, on this side to Workman Street and St. Antoine, and, on the other, down to the Lachine Canal where St. Henri stuffs its mattresses, spins its thread of silk or cotton, runs its looms, reels off
its spools, while the earth trembles at the rushing trains, and the foghorns blast, and the ships, engines, screws, rails and whistles spell out the adventure of the world.
Jean felt, with a certain joy, that he was like the ship or the train, or anything else that picked up impetus as it passed through the suburb to reach its full speed elsewhere. For him it was not a punishment to spend a while in St. Henri; it was only a time of waiting and preparation.
He arrived at the Notre Dame viaduct, almost on top of the little red-brick train station. With its small tower and wooden platform squeezed between minuscule backyards, it made you think of a middle-class pensioner on a quiet vacation or, even more, of farm folk in their Sunday best, if you stopped at its rustic appearance. But beyond it, in a large notch in the suburb, the town of Westmount climbs in tiers toward the mountain's ridge in its stiff English luxury. Thus the little station is an invitation to the infinite travels of the mind. Here poverty and superfluity will stare tirelessly at each other, as long as Westmount lasts, as long as St. Henri lies at its feet. Between the two the bell towers soar.
The young man's gaze wandered from the campanile of St. Thomas Aquinas to the colonnaded tower of the convent and the spire of St. Henri, and from there directly to the flank of the mountain. He loved stopping at this spot in daytime to stare at the cold, high portals and the fine homes in grey or pink stone that stood out clearly on the hillside, and at night to see their lights shining in the distance like signals on his path. His ambitions and resentments would rise around him then and enclose him in their familiar net of anguish. In the face of this domineering mountain he felt hatred and at the same time inklings of his own power.
The Tin Flute Page 3