The Tin Flute

by Gabrielle Roy

  A soft voice, uncertain and touched by fear, came to him in the dark:

  "Azarius, have you found some job out in the country and you're leaving here?"

  No reply.

  Then her voice came again, hoarse, almost whistling:

  "Azarius, put that light on. Let me see you."

  Quietly Azarius turned the switch on the bulb that rj hung from the ceiling.

  Dazzled at first, Rose-Anna saw only the movement of his hands, and his face, pale, determined and so young that it broke her heart.

  Then she looked down at his shoulders, his body, his legs, in a suit she didn't recognize. Her eyes opened wide, her mouth trembled, and suddenly she cried aloud just once, and the sound was lost as a screaming locomotive passed.

  Motionless, Azarius was standing there in uniform.

  THIRTY-THREE

  The waves of khaki followed on each other, rolling toward Bonaventure station, bearing along in their folds the bright shades of women's dresses, loud songs, laughter, the reek of alcohol, hiccups, sighs and all the clamour of an overexcited crowd.

  Emmanuel and Florentine had arrived early and found seats on the benches in the large waiting room. They were chatting, holding hands on top of the duffle bag which lay across both their knees. Snatches of phrases, silences, sudden recommendations — do this, don't do that — and their words, their anguish, were scattered by the scuffing of heavy boots and the thousands of sighs which rose as if relieved and happy toward the vaulted roof.

  Emmanuel watched his regiment arrive with unbelieving eyes. Most faces were radiant with joy. One of his comrades approached, staggering, supported by two other soldiers roaring with laughter. Another, his tongue thickened by drink, came by shouting in English, "We're going to see the world! You bet we're going to see the world!" From all sides came the signs of an unwholesome and artificial exuberance. Emmanuel looked away and put his arm around Florentine.

  He had thought it would be easier to leave her if they were married, that he would be reassured by this gesture of confidence in the future. But he was finding out that fragile yet powerful links had already been established between them through a whole tissue of habits. Florentine — trying on the dresses he had bought her, trying on the hats, a thousand times a day! Florentine — always wanting to go out, out in the streets, dawdling in front of store windows! Florentine — so flirtatious with him, yet so sad, so bitter at times. Then, the brief moments of tenderness when she would take his hand and say, "Oh, how I'm going to miss you when you're gone!" The days had gone by like minutes, like a dream. Gone in a flash, he thought. No, the ones who were leaving shouldn't indulge in close attachments!

  The crowd was laughing and singing around them. Why were they singing? What were they laughing about? What was so jolly about this departure?

  They stood up, silent. Florentine helped him sling his duffle bag on his shoulder and they came to the great waiting hall with arms about each other's waists, like a hundred other couples. The jostling crowd threatened to separate them and they held each other tighter. Near the main entry leading to the platforms, they found a whole group from St. Henri and made their way toward them.

  Sam Latour was there. He was shaking hands all around with paternal and comic gestures. His fat face, placid and red, clashed with the flood of violent invective that emerged from his soft mouth: "That swine of a Hitler!" he said. "Somebody try and bring me back three hairs of his moustache. Even better, fetch me his cowlick and I'll make me a floorbrush out of it."

  The voice of Azarius Lacasse rose stronger and more persuasive than any. With the authority of a sergeant he went from group to group and addressed them: "Tell the boys in France to hold on till we get there." He drew a folded newspaper from the epaulette of his uniform. He opened it wide and saw the headline: Allies fall back on Dunkirk. He struck with his fist at the paper, which ripped in two.

  "Don't let them give up till we get there! ,, he shouted. "That's all I ask! Tell them we'll soon be there, us Canadians, and maybe the Yanks as well before long." He picked on a soldier, young and bewildered, and slapped him on the back. "You there, you're good for knockin' off twenty or thirty Germans, aren't you?" But he added immediately, laughing, "Don't kill 'em all, though. Leave me a couple. Don't end the war too fast, you guys!"

  His face was glowing with the purest enthusiasm.

  Behind him was another glowing face: Pitou. And behind Pitou was another face, ferocious and inflamed. Emmanuel thought he must be dreaming. Were these yesterday's unemployed? Were these the men he had seen so lifeless, miserably submissive, discouraged to the marrow? Was this Pitou, the musician, who had cheated away his years of idleness with the sound of his guitar?

  He looked at Azarius again and was more upset than ever. Was this the man he had seen so despondent no more than a week ago? Was this Rose-Anna's husband?

  Why, this man seemed barely older than himself, Emmanuel thought. He gave off a sense of almost irresistible vigour. Quite simply, he had at last become a man, and his consciousness of it gave him this measureless joy.

  So this was how salvation came to the suburb!

  Salvation through war!

  Emmanuel looked at Florentine in a silent appeal. At first he felt a hollow in his breast, a vacuum, then a storm broke loose in his mind. The anguish he had felt that night on the mountain as he looked down on the suburb came back with added violence. He was no longer asking, Why am I going? but, Why are we all going? We're leaving together, it should be for the same reason. It was no longer enough for him to know his own motive. He had to know the truth that was guiding them all, the principle which had guided the soldiers of the last Great War, without which their departure now had no meaning but was merely a repetition of the same mistake.

  He leaned over toward Florentine and asked her the question that was troubling him:

  "Why are we going, your brother and your father and I?"

  She looked up, surprised.

  u You mean, why did you join up?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, I can only see one reason," she said soberly. "It's because it served your purpose to go in the army."

  He looked at her in silence a long time. Yes, he should have thought of that before. She was closer to the people than he was. She knew them better than he did. She had the answers. And he seemed to hear the answer she had given him whispered by those thousands of sighs of relief. And distantly, through that breath of liberation rising from the crowd, he heard the chink of money.

  They've been bought, he thought. They've been bought too.

  They, above all, he thought.

  He seemed to be witnessing with his own eyes the supreme bankruptcy of humanity. Wealth had spoken the truth that night on the mountain.

  But in a moment Emmanuel recovered from his discouragement. He thought, no, that's not the whole truth. The ones who are leaving are the least of the profiteers. There are all the Leon Boisverts and Jean Lévesques who'll owe their personal advancement and maybe their fortunes to the war, without running any risks.

  But why, then? Why are the regiments on the march? There must be some deep truth, perhaps one not yet known, not even to those who had gone to the other war. Perhaps beneath the tough layer of human ignorance there was an obscure reason which man couldn't express.

  Suddenly Emmanuel heard a voice from the crowd, metallic and imperious, a voice in English shouting:

  "We'll fight to the last man for the British Empire!"

  The Empire, he thought. For the Empire, so that a territory can keep its old boundaries. So that wealth stays on one side rather than the other.

  A whole group had started to sing:

  There'll always be an England. . .

  Yes, but what about Pitou, what about Azarius? Is it for merry England and the Empire we're going to fight? Right now other soldiers, just as frenzied, are singing a hymn to their own country. They're singing in Germany, in Italy, in France. . . . Just as we could sing O Canada! No, no, no, he t
hought vehemently, I'm not going to put myself on any patriotic, national bandwagon. Am I the only one?

  He tried to reject the monstrous, paradoxical idea that came to him, but it was irresistible: none of them was going to war with the same goal as the others. Some were going to the end of the world to preserve their Empire. Some were going to the end of the world to shoot and be shot at, and that was all they knew. Still others went to the end of the world in search of their family's daily bread. But what was it there at the world's end that enlightened men on their common fate?

  The barriers opened wide and the crowd poured onto the platform. The rest was a nightmare for Emmanuel. He kissed his mother, his sister, his father. Then he embraced Florentine. He had found her frivolous, vain, nervous and sometimes irritable in their short life together. He knew now that she was weak and light-headed, but he loved her all the more for that. He loved her as one loves a child that needs one's help. He put his arms around her and saw tears on her drawn face. In the last few days he had often been disheartened by her coldness, and equally nonplussed by sudden fits of tenderness or periods of silence. Her tears now moved him deeply.

  She was weeping on his shoulder. He could not know that it was from a vague sense of relief, but also from an obscure distress hidden under vanity. She was most impressionable. The whole stage-set of this departure, the tears around them, the hands waving good-bye, all this she found moving in a way as superficial as her nature, without the slightest awareness of what lay beneath. But Emmanuel, believing that she was truly stirred at last, was gratified.

  He jumped up on the steps of the car. For a moment he was in suspense, one hand holding the bar, his face tilted, a young man running to make the offering of his youth. His avid curiosity, his interior torment, had found no answer. He was going now, and no longer knew the reason.

  Yet he had his answer. It came in a flash. ... It came suddenly, not from Florentine, who was waving, nor from his mother, so small he could barely see her in the crowd, and not from Azarius, who was running alongside the slowly moving train. Miraculously, it came from a stranger.

  She was an old woman he had never seen before, very thin, seeming gently resigned, and lost in this crowd which paid her no attention.

  For a second their eyes met, and Emmanuel understood in that same moment. This humble woman was moving her lips as if to give him one last message. The sound of her voice could not reach him, but from the movement of her lips he could see that she was saying, for him alone: "There'll be an end. Some day there'll be an end."

  So that was it.

  It was this diffused hope, unappreciated by most of mankind, which was causing humanity to rise up once more: war must be destroyed.

  Florentine was now no more than a bright patch on the platform. He managed to see her take out her compact and wipe away the few traces of her tears. He closed his eyes and, as if he were already very far away, cherished that image of Florentine and her powder puff. Then he searched the crowd one last time for her thin, small face anther burning eyes. But she had already turned her back to leave before the train was out of sight.

  Tired and irritable, Florentine pushed her way alone through the throng and hurried toward the exit without waiting for her father.

  The heat and the hubbub in the station had been terrible. Now she felt vaguely sad. There was no hurt, but the impression of a loss the extent of which she was just beginning to realize.

  She reached the terrace and stopped to collect her thoughts. What was going on in her mind?

  She had accepted Emmanuel's kindness and gentleness as her due. These qualities had not surprised her. But she had been touched by his generosity.

  Before he left Emmanuel had given her almost all his last pay, as well as his savings, now banked in her name.

  Florentine opened her purse and touched the slim cheque book and a thick roll of bills. She felt an intense satisfaction. Then she grew ashamed of herself and ran to the sidewalk.

  She was jostled by a group of young people getting out of a car. Then a woman held out her hand. She was dressed all in black, a frail old woman.

  "Have you just been seeing someone off?" she asked. "Was it your boyfriend or your father?"

  "My husband," said Florentine simply, but with a touch of haughtiness of which she became aware as the words were out.

  "You can be proud," said the old lady before she disappeared.

  Florentine stood there for a moment, thoughtful. Then a timid smile, new and fresh, appeared on her tired face. She remembered how people had looked at her during the last few days when they saw her walking arm in arm with Emmanuel. An undefined sadness plucked at her heart.

  She didn't love Emmanuel. At least, she didn't love him as she had thought she could love one day. And yet she experienced gratitude or vindication at being loved by him, along with a sincere desire to give him her affection in return.

  She looked up and froze. On the sidewalk opposite was Jean Lévesque. He had stopped to open a newspaper under a street lamp. He was wearing a well-cut new suit, which she took in avidly. She even noticed his tie, the same colour as his summer shoes, and his soft felt hat pushed carelessly back. She was comparing him with Emmanuel in his rumpled khaki uniform and his coarse boots. Suddenly she was in a rage at Jean for turning up to diminish the picture she had of Emmanuel. Then other thoughts, more perfidious, passed through her mind. One moment her heart was filled with bitterness; the next, she was on the point of going up to Jean. To show him the ring. And to let him have a good look at her pretty silk print dress and the dainty shoes Emmanuel had bought her before he left. And the beautiful suede purse. He had chosen everything for her. It was stupid, really, to be so well-dressed for nobody. Just one minute, she thought. Just to show him I can get along without him. To see his eyes flame up, and then laugh at him and leave him, revenged, contented, happy, yes, really happy! Her heart was beating so hard that she was breathless, peeking at Jean and yet fearing that he might see her.

  He looked up, folded his paper and walked toward her. Holding her breath, her palms moist, she turned her back to him and slipped into the shadow of a parked car, waiting for him to pass, her temples throbbing. She had to hold back not to cry out or make some gesture. Then she left, hurrying. She crossed the street almost at a run and went toward the suburb. She ran as she had never run in her life.

  Later, she walked far and fast, her hair in the wind, not noticing where she went. She was still out of breath, and stopped to rest a second. It was then she was surprised to notice that she was pleased with herself. A satisfaction she had never experienced — self-esteem — astonished her. She felt she was starting a new life.

  Emmanuers return, about which she had never been able to think without fright, now seemed natural. Her path was clear. She was going toward her future without any great joy, but without distress. After the upheaval of the last months, the calm that enfolded her was as comforting as a bench in the sun to one who has walked for many nights. There was scarcely any malice left in her heart. She was able to begin thinking about her child almost without resentment. It seemed that it was no longer Jean's, but Emmanuers and hers. She still couldn't think of it with love, perhaps she never would; but slowly she would learn to dissociate it from her own mistake, her grievous error. Emmanuel would take care of them.

  Emmanuel. . . . With him she had to admit she was better off than she would have been with Jean. Emmanuel gave himself away by a look, a word, and you knew what to expect. There wouldn't be the exciting emotions, but she could now see the freedom and peace of mind that would make up for them. And she extended these advantages to her mother and the whole family, with the proud sensation of having redeemed herself. For a second she thought of the domineering side of Emmanuel's character, which could be violent on occasion, and wondered if she shouldn't have told him everything. But then she allowed herself a smile at the very idea, and for the hundredth time congratulated herself on the way she had managed the whole business. And no
w there was no sin, no fault, no past. Only the future counted.

  She went down St. James Street, growing dark as she approached St. Henri. All sorts of projects came to mind, new factors in her life, agreeable and consoling. With her mother's allowance and her own they could live well now. Emmanuel had begged her not to go on working, but she thought in her grasping way, I'll go on as long as I can. It'll just be that much more. She became ambitious and felt a secret solidarity with her family. By that she meant her own family and Emmanuel, but not the Létourneaus. Without admitting it to herself, she had been hurt by their coldness, and embarrassed when she was with them.

  Reckless with pride and envy, she thought of a house on Lasalle Boulevard, almost as fine as her in-laws', and she knew it was for rent. Why not? she thought. We're certainly not going to go on living in St. Henri! She wouldn't admit to herself that she wanted to break with everything that might remind her of her silly love for Jean Lévesque. She would buy new clothes for her mother and the children. At last we're going to live well, she repeated with satisfaction and a vanity that filled her with contentment. She thought, Mamma can't get over it, but Pappa did the right thing, he did well to join up. It's the most beautiful thing he ever did in his life. And Mamma will just have to get used to the idea. Funny how hard she takes it! She never had so much money in her life!

  She was walking quickly, calculating how much they would have when it was added together. She was surprised how well they were going to get along. She was organizing their life logically, cleverly, with a seriousness quite new to her. She saw their troubles fly away — they were gone already. Oh, yes, it was a new life they were beginning.

  It bothered her somewhat to think that they, the women, were getting all this money while the men risked their lives; but these scruples were dismissed, and her calculations began again. She thought herself rich, she planned what she would buy, and was delighted at the turn of events. Where would they all have been without the war? She was dazzled by their prospects, very proud and relieved . . . while farther down the train picked up speed through the suburb and Emmanuel leaned out to catch a glimpse of the Lacasse house. A light was burning downstairs. That must be Rose-Anna's room.