Two Solitudes
Page 17
Athanase frowned. “I understand he spent a night with you not so long ago.”
The two men looked at each other like strange dogs. Athanase had dropped any attempt to be gracious, and Father Beaubien was taken aback by his attitude. Even though he had expected something like it, he found it difficult to accept. Athanase Tallard was unlike any other man he had known. Once, when he had been curate in an industrial town, he had known men who had been corrupted by the life of the place, had became entangled in labour disputes and had lost their faith. But those men had been ignorant. They could only express their opposition to the priest by sullenness, and in a way he had been able to pity them. Now, looking at the ironic expression on the face of Athanase, the priest felt the beginnings of anger. All the other men in the parish knew that he loved and watched over them. All the others knew that the cloth he wore had raised him above ordinary mortals.
“He’s a good, religious boy, your elder son.”
“Good? Yes, I hope so. But hardly religious.”
“Perhaps I am a better judge of that.”
“Perhaps. But I certainly know that many attitudes manage to mask themselves under the name of religion.”
The priest’s hands clenched and unclenched on his lap. “At one time your son had a vocation. He was called by God to the priesthood.”
“No,” Athanase said reflectively, “I don’t believe that such a vague feeling in an immature person can be called the voice of God. True, Marius thought he wanted to be a Jesuit.” He shrugged his shoulders. “You know yourself what came of that.”
“I know God’s work was interfered with in this house.”
A quick flush touched Athanase’s cheekbones. “Father Beaubien–I don’t appreciate this examination you are giving me. However, let me tell you a few things. When Father Arnaud at the seminary refused to allow Marius to continue, he did so because he did not believe Marius would make a good priest. Neither did the bishop, who was my old friend before he died.” Each of the words was weighted. “The bishop had no use for political priests who act as village czars, and are never happy unless they’re pulling strings while some politician brays nationalism from their church steps. With Quebec flags all over the place. The bishop was afraid Marius would make that kind of priest. So was his rector. That is why he was advised to leave the seminary when he did. Of course,” Athanase added, “both the bishop and the rector studied in France.”
Not a muscle in the priest’s face moved as Athanase subtly insulted him. He had taken plenty of snubs in his life. He knew that Athanase affected to admire the higher clergy and despise the lower. He knew that in countries like France, where millions of the people were atheists, the power of the clergy was strictly limited. But he also knew that if Quebec was more deeply Catholic than any other part of the world, the Church could thank village priests like himself for it. They were plain men who obeyed God and understood the people; they were not mystics.
Looking straight at Athanase, he said, “I know my duty to the bishop, Mr. Tallard, and I also know my responsibility to God.” He lifted his chin. “For nearly three hundred years your family has lived in this parish as good Catholics. But what about you? Why don’t you attend Mass and confess?”
The flush deepened on Athanase’s cheeks. “That, I should say, was my own responsibility. I don’t choose to discuss it with you, Father.”
“I don’t intend to discuss it with you. You are a proud man, Mr. Tallard. But even if you were Prime Minister, you’d still be a member of a disciplined church, and I’d still be your priest.” He realized that he had made a dent and went on to force his advantage. “I am responsible to God for the souls in this parish. I have come to ask you what you intend to do about Marius.”
Athanase looked away. “What can I do?” he said. “I’ve done my best.”
“Think carefully, Mr. Tallard. He is your eldest son, your heir. Have you ever shown a father’s natural feeling toward him? Have you ever really gone out of your way to help him?”
Athanase looked back sharply into the dark eyes of the priest, enlarged behind the thick glasses. This man might be plain, but he had power. Some secret knowledge in his mind was exerting a subtle force upon him. What it was he couldn’t guess.
“I’ve done the best I could, Father. Marius is a difficult boy.”
“If Marius goes into the army”–Father Beaubien kept his eyes and his voice steady–“a horrible life will take hold of him, and it will be your fault. Think of the conditions under which he will have to live! Unbelievers in the next cot, debauched young girls in the garrison towns, too many soldiers without–”
“Father Beaubien,” Athanase interrupted him, “because I supported a war program in parliament, there is no reason for you to suppose that I believe war is good. I can do nothing to keep Marius out of the army. I’m not the law of the country.”
Silence fell between them. The priest was not convinced, but he was calculating his next move. “Your family,” he said slowly, “has always been looked up to here in Saint-Marc. What has happened to your family is a bad thing, bad for the whole parish. They see enough bad examples as it is these days. But to see a father and son at enmity–”
“There is no enmity in my heart. What Marius feels I can’t help.”
“I must question that statement, Mr. Tallard.” Again the intimation of hidden knowledge. “You are no longer seen in church. You never do anything for God that the people of the parish can see. They talk about that. What are they going to think of me if I do nothing while a man like you shows no respect for the Church?”
Athanase shrugged his shoulders.
“Ever since I was called here,” the priest went on, “you have opposed me. When young Jules Tremblay wanted to leave his father’s farm to work in the States, you advised him to go even though his father needed him. At the time of the flood, when I called for novenas to the Blessed Saint Marc, you mocked me. You completely forget that in this parish I am the representative of God.”
Athanase made a gesture of impatience. “I have never mocked anyone. At the time of the flood I did suggest that Saint Marc would be a lot more pleased with us if we helped him out by digging proper drains down in the marsh. Floods have been a pest there for years. Long before your time in this parish.”
The priest made no answer and Athanase ruffled some papers on his desk, then rose and walked to the window. With a flick of his hands he spread the curtains and looked out. He wanted to be on the porch in the sunshine, resting. He wanted to think about something else. All his life he had been intolerant of authority unless it was the authority of the mind, of the logical idea. Merely because this man was a priest…In the hall the grandfather’s clock began to toll the hour solemnly. When it had finished and the last stroke had ceased to reverberate, he turned back.
“I had no wish for this discussion with you, Father. Me, I am always ready to let sleeping dogs lie. But I tell you this again, I do not wish to discuss souls with you. My soul is my own responsibility, not yours or anybody else’s, and it will have to take its chances without your help.”
The priest raised his hand as if to stop the words, as if to avoid hearing them. With a mighty effort he kept calm. “Your family, Mr. Tallard–whether you like it or not”–his hand fell–“is part of my parish.”
Athanase returned to his chair and sat down heavily. “Listen, Father–we are making unnecessary difficulties. If I’ve been rude I apologize. Let this discussion terminate itself. I don’t interfere with your work in the parish. Don’t you interfere with mine.”
The priest made a brushing gesture with his large hand. “By being the sort of man you are, you interfere with God’s work. It is already known that you intend to send Paul to an English school. What do the people think of that?”
Athanase relit his pipe and puffed savagely. “That won’t change him from being French.”
“An English Protestant school?”
“He’ll still be a Catholic.”
“I want him to learn to mix naturally with English boys. I’ve never believed in this artificial separation. I want our people to feel that the whole of Canada is their land–not to grow up with the impression that the Province of Quebec is a reservation for them. Besides, I want Paul to get a scientific education.”
“And aren’t the schools of his own race and faith good enough?”
“Under certain circumstances”–in spite of his anger, Athanase smiled–“yes, quite good enough.” The smile faded. “Listen, Father–you will not dictate to me in the matter of my son’s school. That is beyond your authority. It is beyond even your own conception of it.”
Father Beaubien slipped a hand under his soutane and took out a handkerchief. He mopped his forehead and cheeks to remove the beads of perspiration that stood on them. In the silence the grandfather’s clock could be heard clacking steadily. When he had replaced his handkerchief the priest rose. “This is a good parish,” he said quietly. “It’s blessed by everything a Christian farmer could hope to have. Beyond us here, everywhere, there is the Devil’s work. Look at it, Mr. Tallard, and in the name of God, don’t be so proud and stubborn that you refuse to see it. Look at what this war has done to people’s souls. Look at the trivial, futile kind of life materialism has produced in the States. How can an ignorant, simple farmer keep his faith in God when he sees how the wicked thrive? He is lured into the towns and what sort of infidelity awaits him there? Every year the Devil’s work grows stronger.” A deep, resonant earnestness entered Father Beaubien’s voice. “To me, it is wicked to see a Canadian who does not resist these things wherever he finds them.”
Irony showed itself in the lines of Athanase’s face, in the set of his eyebrows and the turn of his mouth. “Your world is very simple, Father. I respect your simplicity. In spite of our disagreements, I presume you will still accept my parish dues, just as you accepted the extremely large cheque I gave for your church.”
Sadness touched the priest’s face as he looked away. Antagonism, of nature and of idea, stood between the two men like a living presence. It was heightened by the fact that each knew the inner core of the other so well, for stubborn, tenacious Norman blood was in both of them. Yet both, admitting a grudging respect for the other which grew out of pride in race, would have preferred to like rather than hold this enmity as a bar to friendship.
“I warn you, Mr. Tallard,” the priest said formally, “I intend to protect my parish. God is not mocked.”
Athanase moved past the priest and opened the library door. The two looked into each other’s eyes, and then Father Beaubien strode through the hall to the outer door, opened it and went down the drive to the road, his soutane swishing. Athanase followed him to the gallery and watched him go. He wished he had reminded the priest that the Church was more than any single parish, more than the spiritual leader of any parish. He wished he had said there were many ecclesiastics he greatly admired; at least said it more clearly. He wished he had left Father Beaubien in no doubt whatever that if he had approached his mind, as the old bishop had done, he would have been delighted to talk with him for hours. And yet…
He returned to the library. Although he professed to respect little but logic and mental brilliance, Athanase sensed a peculiar power in the priest. In spite of himself, he could not despise Father Beaubien. He dropped into a chair and placed the glasses firmly on his nose. Suddenly he realized that he was tired. The blood was pounding out a headache behind the bones of his forehead, and his shirt was moist with sweat.
FIFTEEN
It was a day in early July when Janet Methuen stood in Polycarpe Drouin’s store with a letter in her hand from His Majesty the King, via the Canadian Ministry of Defence. She read it through, and when she had finished she lifted her head and looked around the store, seeing nothing. She began to walk forward and bumped into the side of the Percheron model, her arms hanging at her sides, the letter in one hand and the envelope in the other.
Drouin came from behind the counter. His voice was soft and kind, his face wrinkled, his eyes friendly. “You are all right, Madame?”
Janet turned her head rigidly and saw his tap-like nose and the wrinkles about his eyes blur and then waver into focus. She saw him look at the letter in her hand and immediately she lifted her chin. She was as pale as unbleached muslin.
“I get you a drink, maybe?” Drouin said.
She heard her own voice, like a scratchy phonograph in another room, “I’m quite all right, thank you.” But she continued to stand without moving.
Drouin went to the kitchen behind the store and returned with a glass of water, spilling some of it in his hurry. When he offered it she gave him a frozen smile. “I’m quite all right, thank you,” she repeated tonelessly.
Her mind kept repeating a phrase she had read months ago in a magazine story: “I mustn’t let people see it…. I mustn’t let people see…. I mustn’t let…” The words jabbered in her mind like the speech of an idiot.
Drouin looked sideways at the only other person in the store, a farmer who had come in to buy some tar-paper. Their eyes met and both men nodded. The farmer had also seen the long envelope with O.H.M.S. in one corner.
“Get a chair, Jacques,” Drouin said in French. “The lady wants to sit down.” But before the man could get one to her, Janet went to the door and walked out. The silence in her wake was broken as the chair hit the floor. Drouin shook his head and went around behind the counter. “That’s a terrible thing,” he said.
“Her husband, maybe?”
“The old captain says her husband is overseas.”
The farmer scratched his head. “When I saw that letter this morning,” Drouin went on, “I said to my wife, that’s a bad thing, a letter like that. You never hear anything good from the government in Ottawa, I said.”
The farmer was still scratching his head. “And she didn’t cry,” he said. “Well, maybe she don’t know how.”
Drouin bent forward over the counter in his usual jack-knife position, his chin on the heels of his hands. After a time he said, “You can’t tell about the English. But maybe the old captain will be hurt bad,” he added, as though he had just thought of it.
Out on the plain the sun was overcast by smoke from distant forest-fires to the north. On the river the hull of a lake boat was lifted chunkily by the mirage. An iron-wheeled cart clanked slowly past Janet, but she was unaware of the farmer standing in the front of it, holding the reins. The tobacco stains in his heavy moustache were orange in the eerie light. His cart held a load of steaming manure. After it had gone by, Janet stopped and drew several deep, panting breaths of hot air. She looked about and saw that she was no longer hemmed in by the sides of houses and the faces of strange people. She touched her eyes with the back of her hand and took the hand away dry. Then she began to walk very fast down the road to her father’s house. All the stories she had ever read in which one of the characters received bad news of a bereavement began to chase each other through her mind. Idiotically, they got out of control, they became herself. She was each of the characters in turn, bravely keeping her personal grief from intruding on others, she was nothing but memories and the things which had made her what she was.
At school, years ago in Montreal, she had been a shy girl without money among girls whose families were rich. She knew none of them, but they had all grown up together. When they looked pointedly at her clothes and asked where she came from, she had not been able to answer because they made her feel that she came from nowhere. Her father was at sea nearly all the time, sailing around the world, and her mother moved from one port to another to be near him while he was ashore. Before Janet had been in the Montreal school a fortnight she realized that proper people go to
sea as passengers on a liner, not as sailors. From then on her father’s profession was never mentioned; it was better to speak of her mother, who had been born in England.
Ursula Yardley’s values were those of her class, and her class had always been the colonial civil service. Her father had upheld the white man’s burden in the minor colonies and did everything so correctly he was incapable of doing anything really well, looking forward always to the day when he could retire to Sussex. She never lost the conviction that she had married beneath her, nor that she must somehow inform everyone she met in Canada of her social status in England. But John Yardley’s salary had never been ample enough to permit her to take Janet back to the old country to live in the manner to which her mother had been accustomed. So she had moved restlessly about the Empire, finding it better to be poor in the colonies than at home. She died in Montreal while Janet was still in school, proud because her daughter was finally being accepted by the right families, but regretting to her last breath the fact that she had never been able to return to England.
Janet’s sense of inferiority remained long after her marriage to Harvey Methuen. She found she had married more than the boy with whom she had fallen in love at a dance; she had joined a tribe. The Methuens felt themselves as much an integral part of Montreal as the mountain around which the city was built. They had been wealthy for a sufficient number of generations to pride themselves on never making a display. Instead, they incubated their money, increasing it by compound interest and the growth of the Canadian Pacific Railway. They were all Scotch-Canadians who went to a Presbyterian church every Sunday and contributed regularly to charities and hospitals. They served as governors of schools and universities, sat as trustees on societies founded to promote the arts, joined militia regiments when they left the Royal Military College, and had the haggis piped into them at the Saint Andrew’s Day dinner every winter.
Methuen women never ran to beauty because too much in the way of looks in a woman was distrusted by the family. They were expected to be irreproachable wives and solid mothers of future Methuens, not females who might stimulate those pleasures the men of the family believed had caused the ruination of the Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, French, Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, Austrians, Russians and various other minor races of the world.