Two Solitudes

by Hugh Maclennan

“I haven’t heard from him for nearly five weeks,” she said. “That’s too long, you know.” Even in her anxiety her voice was a clipped imitation of the British. The Englishwomen who had run the finishing school to which her mother had sent her had done all they could to prevent her from talking or thinking like a Canadian, and they had done their work well.

  “Don’t worry,” McQueen said. “The Canadians haven’t been in the line lately. I know that for a positive fact.”

  “He’s not with the Canadians any more. He was transferred to the British last January.” Her voice was filled with pride. “He loved it.”

  “I see.”

  “Is it true they don’t know what happened to the Fifth Army?”

  No, McQueen thought, they know only too well what happened to it. He rose and went around to her chair, leaned over and shyly laid a hand on her shoulder. He felt the bone hard under his fingers. She wriggled out from under his touch and he flushed slightly as he withdrew his hand. It was no use; women always despised him when he touched them. He went back to his chair and sat down heavily.

  “Don’t worry,” he said again, calling on all his resources until his voice sounded almost resonant. He watched her respond to his unsuspected force as he had seen so many others respond. It was a quality he could tap at will, though it fatigued him to do it. A very valuable asset. “Let’s be logical,” he said. “If anything had happened to him you’d have heard by now. He probably wrote all right, and the letter was lost at sea.”

  She dabbed at her eyes and her nose with a white handkerchief and then got quickly to her feet, standing very straight. “Thank you, Huntly. I’ve been extremely silly.”

  “Not at all. Not at all. Just human, Janet.” He waved her back to her chair. “You were telling me about Daphne and Heather. How are they getting along?”

  Some of the strain left Janet’s face, but she continued to stand, leaning on the back of the chair for support. McQueen rose and stood on his own side of the desk.

  “They’re quite a responsibility,” she said. “If they were only more alike. Heather’s a positive hoyden. Exactly like my father.”

  “But Captain Yardley is a fine man!” McQueen’s voice almost purred. “After all, for a man of his age to buy a farm and run it himself–and at a time when farmers are so necessary for the country!” Janet’s face continued to brighten. “And I understand he’s going to make an excellent thing of it, too.”

  “But he simply won’t ever change,” she said. “He’s so stubborn. I didn’t realize he was doing this as a duty. I thought he was just being willful. Why didn’t he tell me? Out there with all those French-Canadians! General Methuen hardly knew what to make of it.”

  “How’s Daphne?” he said.

  “I’m afraid she may become a very vain girl.” Janet frowned. The smallest thought in her mind immediately exaggerated itself on her face. “Candidly, do you think Brock Hall is the right school for her?”

  McQueen tried to look solemn. He was about to accept an appointment to the board of governors of Brock, a step which gave him great satisfaction. It was worth a lot socially to be on the board of a private school patronized by the Square Mile. “Brock has an excellent reputation,” he said. “And I don’t know about Daphne becoming vain. I think you probably overstate the case. She’ll certainly be very beautiful. A most natural development, considering her mother.”

  “Oh, Huntly!” Janet seemed annoyed by the compliment and McQueen flushed. “But Heather has no discrimination at all. She’s just like Father–likes everybody and everything. Why, only yesterday…”

  McQueen stroked his chin and smiled as he listened to a long story. Before it was ended the buzzer sounded on his desk and Janet became confused. She made apologies for keeping him so long, as he led her to the door that opened directly into the hall. She had no idea that the signal on the buzzer had been a pre-arranged convenience for putting an end to her call.

  When he was alone again, McQueen looked at his watch. It was nearly eleven-thirty. Athanase Tallard was fifteen minutes late. So the French were unpunctual, too? Or was it just Tallard, probably from long association with the English? Anyway, it was a fact to remember.

  He glanced up at his mother’s portrait, looked at it for a long time. They had gone through a lot together. Now he was reaping the fruits. He felt her pride in him like a mantle on his shoulders; she would be still more proud in twenty years’ time, and she would find a way to convey the sense of it to him if he never lost touch with her. Always it had been like that, before she died as well as since her death. Whatever he did, wherever he went, she was beside him.

  His father, a Presbyterian minister in a small Ontario town, had died when Huntly was a child. After that his mother had taken him to Toronto, wishing to be near her brother, who owned a small tool factory there. The brother’s help was limited to inviting them to Christmas dinner every year. He believed that giving financial aid only weakened the recipients’ characters. So Mrs. McQueen had supported herself and her son by tutoring backward schoolchildren and composing Sunday School quarterlies for a religious publishing house. She was paid very badly, the publishers having persuaded her that their work was profitless, done only for the greater glory of God.

  Huntly had grown up in a four-room flat, in an atmosphere saturated with education, prayers and golden texts. Some of his mother’s texts still overflowed into his business correspondence. At the public school he had been the fat boy, and bullied for it. The experience tended to make him believe that the Shorter Catechism’s view of humanity was optimistic. But he had done well in his school work, better at high school, and he had gone through the University of Toronto on scholarships.

  The year he graduated from college his uncle died. The fact that he happened to die in this particular year, and left to his nephew his nearly bankrupt tool factory, seemed to McQueen a divine accident. It had saved him from becoming a professor. Within five years he had made enough money out of the factory to sell it at a decent profit. Proceeding logically, and already enormously learned in production techniques, he established the machine-tool industry in Hamilton. That was the year he acquired Miss Drew as a secretary.

  When he transferred his offices to Saint James Street, a reputation had preceded him. For one thing, he had been one of the first men in the country to settle a strike by the simple expedient of offering the workers a joint labour-management committee. As he had foreseen, the strike-leaders were elected to the board by their men. After that he either divided them against each other, or used them as a colonel uses his N.C.O.’s. Before long they were more conservative than he was himself, and the suggestions they made for improved production paid many times over the small increase he had granted in the men’s wages.

  After that his advance had been rapid. He seemed incapable of making a bad investment. When Max Aitken made a fortune from cement, he tagged along into a nice profit for himself. He did well with railways and better with ships, and he anticipated the war precisely. By 1917 it had made him a multi-millionaire. He was called a profiteer, but he stood it equably because he knew it was unjust. When peace came everyone would see that there was no sounder man in the country than he. All he had done was to draw logical conclusions and act accordingly. He was well read, devout, and he knew a good deal about history. Because he had made use of that knowledge, they called him names. Well, let them. In time they would change their minds.

  It was only lately that he had become dissatisfied with the pattern of his career. He wanted to produce. He wanted to make himself an integral part of what he considered a world trend. He was no longer interested solely in profit. Organization was the new order of the day.

  To organize Canada seemed a colossal task; impossible, most of his contemporaries would say. Economic lines ran north and south across the American border, not east and west through the country. But it could be done. If a man owned and controlled sufficient means of production, twenty years from now he might impose his will to an ext
ent undreamed of as yet. McQueen wanted some metal mines, lumber mills, textile factories, a packing house, construction companies, engineering works…there was no limit to what he wanted to complete his picture. Further, he wanted his enterprises so well spaced over the country that his influence would touch every part of it. Sir Rupert, with his bank behind him, with his many companies, had such influence now. But Irons was interested in profit, not in organization.

  In McQueen’s mind, this driving ambition was cloudy in its outlines, precise in some of its parts. Essentially he was cautious, and he would build his house brick by brick. If his plan turned out to be unworkable, and it well might, he would have enough sense to stop long before he had made a fool of himself. In his private files rested detailed schemes for projects all over the country. One of them was for a textile factory in Saint-Marc. So far, he owned nothing in Quebec. To work in French-Canada was a gamble, even though labour was cheap. The French were peculiar people and he did not know them well. There was also their Church to consider. What he needed was a liaison, and the man to fill the gap was Athanase Tallard.

  When the buzzer sounded again on his desk he smiled. “Cast your bread upon the waters,” he murmured to himself, “and it will return after many days.”

  TWELVE

  By Wednesday of that week Kathleen had found a house. It was a narrow, three-storied Georgian adaptation with low steps, grey stucco over brick walls, a fanlight above the door, and a diminutive garden in the back. It stood in one of those streets of Montreal which remind Englishmen vaguely of London, caused more by the smell and the greyness than the planning of the district itself. Most of the inhabitants of this block were English-speaking, but the house stood only a little west of Bleury, a street which runs through Montreal like a frontier, dividing the English from the French.

  Kathleen had taken no chances in making her choice. It was not her idea of a nice house to live in; she would have preferred something more modern. But she knew Athanase liked old places and she was sure he would be satisfied with this one. He had been definite about the rent, setting a maximum figure that turned out to be low. This house was going to cost more than he wanted to pay, but she was sure she could persuade him to take it.

  Now as she walked back to the hotel from a matinee at His Majesty’s, she relished the sense of the crowds around her. It was late afternoon, the air was soft with spring, clouds drifting across Mount Royal on a light west wind trailed shadows over the roofs. At the hotel newsstand she bought a Star, then passed slowly across the lobby to a chair and sat down, the paper in her hand. She opened it at the theatre page and glanced for a few minutes at the advertisements, then folded the large sheets and sat still with the paper in her lap, looking around.

  The lobby was fairly crowded. There were many officers in a variety of uniforms, and an importantly dressed Englishman with white hair and a wooden face was sitting opposite. On a leather-covered sofa beside him three elderly Americans were smoking strong cigars while they talked business in Brooklyn accents. There was a discreet and aimless coming and going of men all over the lobby, and Kathleen was pleased by it; merely the movement pleased her, the strange faces, the sense of suppressed excitement rising in herself.

  After a time she got up and walked down a long corridor of small shops to the elevator. When she got there an officer with a major’s crown in the box of his sleeve was waiting. He glanced at her quickly before fixing his eyes on the floor. When the doors opened he stood aside to let her enter and she noticed that his eyes had found her again. She looked away, but as they rode up together she was acutely conscious of his presence, and her suppressed excitement stirred with more liveliness. Giving another quick sideways glance she saw that he was still watching her. He wore a wound patch on his upper sleeve and on his chest was the purple and white ribbon of the Military Cross. Kathleen was not a small woman, but she felt tiny in the elevator beside this man. He had the chest and shoulders of a lumberjack, wiry red hair, and huge veined hands that hung straight down by his sides. She noticed through the mirror in the elevator that the top of her head came only to his shoulder.

  The elevator clicked to a stop on the third floor and let her out. The corridor was dark and airless as the crypt of a church, and the heavy red carpet on the stone floor so silenced her footsteps that her own movement gave her an eerie sensation. Before she had reached the door of her room she realized that the major was following at a discreet distance. He passed while she was unlocking the door, and he did not turn around to look at her again. After she had closed the door she removed her hat and coat, then her dress and her shoes. She put on slippers and a flowered silk kimono and sat in an armchair by the open window, looking at the city.

  Her old sense of the city’s wholeness returned to her; it gripped her feelings and imagination the way she remembered it from girlhood. She heard the street cars banging across the nearest intersection, the intermittent sound of motor horns, the faint shuffling of thousands of moving feet. The crowds passing under the window seemed all about her. She stretched out her long legs as far as they would go. The stretched toes touched, and her arms went up behind her head as her eyes closed. She smiled. It was good to be peaceful again, to be one’s self; it was wonderful to be unknown in the crowd.

  She thought of Saint-Marc with loathing, as she told herself that if it had not been for Paul she would have left Athanase rather than go on living there any longer. In Saint-Marc she had never been permitted to be herself. She was the wife of Athanase Tallard, an institution, and the people despised her because she was a foreigner. She knew they gossiped about her, saying that any woman with a figure like hers ought to be ashamed of herself for not having a child a year. What the young men said was worse, even if their thoughts were secret. The faces of one or two of them showed how often they wondered what she was like naked, never boldly or purposely, as if they considered themselves candidates for her body, but with a sort of sly shame. She knew that expression far too well ever to miss it. Besides thinking her sinful, they also assumed that she was not naturally a lady. Ultimately they found out everything in Saint-Marc. Father Beaubien had once criticized her for wearing a dress she particularly liked, saying it was too bold. After that she had deliberately worn ugly, unquestionably decent dresses in Saint-Marc, but she was afraid to tell Athanase why she did so, for fear he would quarrel with the priest and make matters still worse. Could it be possible she would be finished with Saint-Marc after another summer?

  Outside in the spring air the evening had not yet begun, but it was late enough for her to feel hungry. She rose and shed the kimono, letting it drop to the floor and stay there. She crossed to the long mirror in the door of the wardrobe and wriggled out of her underclothes. Finally she peeled off her stockings and stood looking at her reflection. After a time she picked up a brush and began to stroke her hair, not thinking of the arc her arm made in its rhythmical movement, nor of the dutiful reflection in the glass.

  She knew what she wanted. She wanted men; not to sleep with, not necessarily to touch or even to hold, but men who would look at her in a way suggesting that these things could be if she wished. She wanted men who would laugh with her at the kind of jokes she liked and not be forever serious about the Quebec problem and the Ontario problem and the religious problem. As far as she could see there was only one problem in the whole country that mattered, and that was everyone minding other people’s business and never letting anyone have any fun.

  Except in the city. The way she remembered her old life in Montreal, she had at least been free. Maybe the respectable ones were not free, but for people like her there had been liberty of a kind. In the Rue de l’Assomption where Kathleen had grown up, the street counted, not the people. They were in work or were out of work, occasionally the neighbours would help when somebody was sick, but beyond this anything could happen and nobody would really care. In that street you were born knowing there was no sense in caring. There was luck in the street, good and bad, but nobod
y could plan his own future. You could only take luck when it came and use it while it lasted.

  An old whorehouse had stood on one corner of the Rue de l’Assomption and nobody worried about it. Night and day it stood there with blinds drawn, and in the twenty years she lived next door to it, no light had ever showed from any of its windows. It was quieter than any church. As long as anyone remembered, it had been like that and she guessed it was probably like that still. The men who visited it used to walk quickly up the high front steps with their hats pulled down over their foreheads and their coat collars turned up, and they looked straight at the door while they waited for it to open. Later they walked quickly away without glancing right or left. Every Sunday the Madam walked down her front steps dressed in black, her figure a neat right-angled triangle from her projecting bosom to her tiny ankles. A black prayer-book was always clasped in her gloved hands. Leo Ryan, the youngest son of the family next door, told Kathleen when she was fourteen that the Madam was very strict and permitted no swearing or drinking in the house.

  But the whorehouse had little part in the life on the Rue de l’Assomption. It was not for the neighbours. Most of them were working people, not even bound together by class since they did not have common schools or a common language. The French children went to French-language schools where they were taught by French-speaking nuns, and the Irish and the Poles went to other church-controlled schools where English was spoken. The English and the Jews on the street went to a Protestant school where teachers who were paid the same wages as unskilled mechanics taught in a system no one had examined for defects in the last thirty years.

  Kathleen was the youngest in a family of four. In a three-story house, they lived in the right half of the second floor. Below them was a family of Jews from Galicia and above them was a crazy Englishman who said he was the younger son of a bleeding earl and that it was a bleeding shaime, him having to live in a place like this.