No Methuen found it possible to feel inferior to the English in any respect whatever; rather they considered themselves an extension of the British Isles, more vigorous than the English because their blood was Scotch, more moral because they were Presbyterians. Every branch of the family enjoyed a quiet satisfaction whenever visiting Englishmen entered their homes and remarked in surprise that no one could possibly mistake them for Americans.
The tribe accepted Janet and considered her a good woman, but she had never been able to feel at ease with them. At Harvey’s side she had felt secure, for Harvey was greatly respected by the tribe and none of them believed he could ever do anything wrong. But since the war Janet had felt more than ever unsure of herself. Harvey was so filled with self-confidence; he had such an easy way of laughing; he was the only one who was able to joke with her and make her smile in spite of herself. After he left for overseas she missed the positive direction he gave her, and she was sure she could never uphold the standards her position in the family required.
Again and again she had a recurrent dream in which she entered General Methuen’s library in the big house on the side of Mount Royal and saw her father-in-law sitting very straight in his leather armchair next to the red draperies under the gilt-framed landscape in which a French-Canadian farmer drove a white horse and a black horse through the snow. He was reading the Strand Magazine, and in her dream her skirt dropped to her ankles and exposed her thighs in tights like those of a chorus girl. General Methuen never spoke in her dream. He sighed heavily as he went on with his reading and pretended not to notice.
Janet had always known Harvey would be taken from her and she would be left alone again. As she walked fast along the river road this thought beat repeatedly at her mind, confused with scenes from the magazine story, with her mother’s tight, lined face, with her own voice like a phonograph record repeating endlessly, “I mustn’t let people see it…. I mustn’t let them see…. I mustn’t…”
Suddenly Daphne and Heather were there on the road before her. She stopped when she saw them, her hand at her lips. They must have come from the clump of maples at the corner of her father’s land. “I mustn’t let them see,” the voice in her mind repeated. Then another figure darted from behind the trees and she saw it was young Paul Tallard. His dog was at his heels and he was carrying something in his hands that looked like a dead bird. Janet let her hands drop to her sides. Paul was a nice boy even if he was a French-Canadian and had an impossible woman for a mother.
“Look, Mummy!” Heather called. “Look what we’ve got!”
The dog began to bark as he ran down the road to Janet. He frisked about her legs and she nearly tripped over him. Then she found herself standing in the middle of the road with the three children around her. Daphne was ash-blonde, very straight and neat, taller than the other two. Her clean middy blouse made a sharp contrast with Heather’s dirty smock, streaked where brown mud had been carelessly wiped from the palms of small hands. Paul’s hands were also dirty. He stood with large liquid eyes looking up at her, offering the dead bird for her to see.
“Napoléon found it in the bog,” he said.
“But he didn’t kill it,” Heather interrupted, her voice rising with excitement. “He just found it. Look, Mummy, at his leg. He’s a heron, isn’t he?”
Paul thrust the bird forward and she saw that one of its feet was missing.
“He stands on one leg anyway, so he didn’t need his other foot,” Paul said.
“Or is it a crane?” Heather said. “Which is it, Mummy?”
“It’s a blue heron,” Daphne said, standing apart from the tight group made by Paul, Heather and the dog. “We had it in school.”
Janet scarcely heard what they said. She looked over their heads and saw nothing. Then Heather said, “What’s the matter, Mummy?”
“Nothing. Why should anything be the matter?”
“Oh, I don’t know exactly.”
“Is there a letter from Daddy?” Daphne said. “If there isn’t, there ought to be.”
Janet felt she was swaying, the earth lurching under her, and her knees were numb. “Run along now,” she said. “Don’t go into the bog again.”
“But Mummy, why not?” Heather said. “It’s fun in the bog.”
“It’s dirty, Heather. And you always get so filthy. Why can’t you be like Daphne?”
“But, Mummy!”
She was walking down the road again, the children following.
“Why isn’t there a letter from Daddy?” Daphne said. They were near Yardley’s gate now. “Daddy’s a major,” she heard Daphne explain to Paul. “He’s in France.”
“I know it,” Paul said. “It must be wonderful, to be a major.”
When Janet turned into the gate she saw that her father had visitors on the porch. Yardley was sitting on a chair with his wooden leg crossed over his good knee, and Athanase Tallard and Mrs. Tallard were on either side of him. Janet turned to the children. “Run along now and play.”
“But can’t we really go into the bog any more?” Heather said. “Oh, go anywhere. But run along.”
Napoléon began to bark shrilly as he went chasing a red squirrel down the road, his tail high and his ears back and flapping. The squirrel shot up a tree and Napoléon stood underneath barking steadily. Paul dropped the bird and went after him, Heather gave a shout and followed, and Daphne turned to her mother. “Heather’s awfully noisy, don’t you think so, Mummy?”
Janet passed her hand over her forehead. “Do run along and play with them like a good girl,” she said. As she went up the drive everything blurred before her eyes. Vaguely, his image staggering in a haze, she saw Athanase lift himself from his chair as she reached the steps, and she heard her own voice asking him not to bother. No, there was no mail this morning, none at all. No, don’t bother, please don’t anybody bother, she was going upstairs to her room to write letters.
As she opened the house door the coolness of the interior bathed her hot skin. She walked carefully upstairs, thinking about placing her foot on each tread, and by the time she reached her bed she was panting. She dropped onto the bed with relief, and as an easing of her tension set in she could hear the conversation from below as it floated up in the still air. Kathleen laughed heartily once or twice, and there was a chuckle from Mr. Tallard as her father’s twangy voice went through one of his innumerable stories.
“Well, this horse I was telling you about was called Okay, and I never saw a stallion with a better name. He could stud like a rabbit and never lose a second off his pace, and the fella thet owned him made a nice sum of money, considering it was in Nova Scotia. Calvin Slipp, his name was, and he was the hardest-shell Baptist I ever saw come out of the Annapolis Valley. And thet’s a Baptist to end all other Baptists forever. Calvin was a horse-doctor by trade, and a mighty smart one, and man, if you played poker with him on Saturday night you lost your shirt. He used to take Okay all around the Maritime Provinces to the fairs and exhibitions, year after year, till he got the piles so bad he couldn’t sit his sulky and had to hire another driver….”
Upstairs Janet listened in spite of herself with a feeling of horror. How often he had embarrassed her in Montreal with his stories! She hated herself for disapproving of him, for she loved him and he had always been gentle and kind to her. But there he was telling a story like that, with the Tallard woman listening and she upstairs with her whole world collapsed and the future breaking over her with wave after wave of horror. She turned on the bed and murmured, “God give me strength! Oh, God help me!” with her teeth clenched. How could she tell her children that their father was dead? Her beautiful children, her beautiful, beautiful children!
Through the open window floated the inexorable monologue of her father’s voice. “Now right there in thet same town was another Baptist named Luther Spry, and I guess maybe he was even harder-shelled than Calvin ever got around to being, for he was a deacon in the church. Luther was a racing man himself, owned a livery stab
le in the back part of town, and he had a mare name of Mademoiselle. In her own way she was just about as good as Okay, so the boys naturally were thinking what a great thing it would be if Okay could be put to the mare. Thet way they’d have a world-beater. But the trouble was, Calvin hated Luther’s guts ever since the time Luther beat him out for being deacon in the church, and Calvin said he’d see Mademoiselle covered by a carthorse before he’d let Okay get so much as a sniff of her. So the boys figured…”
Janet pulled herself off the bed and went into the bathroom to look at herself in the mirror. Her face was still the same. She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers over them until they hurt so much she couldn’t stand the pain. Then she washed her face in cold water. Still her senses remained paralysed. This moment, the most terrible in her life, stayed with her, it wouldn’t go away, it didn’t get larger or smaller, but it remained unreal. She continued to stare at herself in the glass, wondering if this was insanity, this paralysis of feeling. She dried her face and returned to the bedroom.
“So just after moonrise,” came her father’s voice, “Luther and the boys came into Calvin’s backyard with Mademoiselle on the end of a halter. It was a real nice October night, the way you get them down home in a good fall, with most of the leaves off the trees, and their feet were rustling in the leaves and the moon was making shadows through the bare branches. Mademoiselle began to whinny and Okay was inside the stable stamping around and kicking his stall the minute he got wind of her, and next door in the Baptist church the organ was going full blast and the whole prayer-meeting was singing Rescue the Perishing as loud as they could. The boys had to laugh, knowing Calvin was in there singing thet hymn. So they unlocked the stable door…”
Janet leaned from the window but she was unable to see the figures on the porch because of its shingled roof. It was easy to imagine them down there, her father’s wooden leg cocked over his good one, Kathleen leaning toward him in that intimate way Janet always detested, Mr. Tallard with the ironic smile that baffled her completely.
“Man, but Okay gave thet mare a beautiful cover! The sweetest ever seen in thet town. And next morning when Calvin went out to the stable…”
Suddenly Janet screamed. The sound pierced the heavy atmosphere and rested in the spine of everyone within earshot. She screamed again, and then she began to cry, “Stop! For heaven’s sake have pity and be quiet!”
She jerked herself away from the window and fell onto her bed, her whole body wracked by dry, shaking sobs. Through it all her eyes remained dry. She heard her father’s wooden leg tapping as he hurried upstairs, but she kept her head on her outstretched arms when he entered the room. She felt his hand on the back of her head and heard him uncrumple the letter on the bed beside her, while the sobs kept shaking her whole body.
“Janet,” he said softly. “Janet child!” The bed sagged as her father sat down beside her. He lifted her easily and held her in his arms and she tried to turn her face away from him. After a moment he tried to make her look at him, and for a second she did, but her eyes closed as soon as they met his own. Her lips kept opening and closing, and behind them her teeth remained tightly clenched.
“Go on and cry, Janet,” he whispered softly. “You must.”
For a long time they remained like that, but Janet did not cry. A breeze sprang up from across the river and the smoke in the air moved out of the valley. A hay-wagon rumbled down the road, dropping fragments of its load in a trail behind.
SIXTEEN
Looking at the crops and the river and the line of forest behind the parish that summer, it was hard to believe the country had now been four years at war. But the war was there, over the horizon, threatening Quebec the way so many things over the horizon had always done: not only the fighting, not the killing and the cruelty, but the enormousness of it, the way it had grown into a world industry, the new machinery and the growing madness and the altars to national gods.
In the rest of Canada no horizon held it off. In all the little towns along the double tracks that held the country together from one end to the other the war ate into everyone’s mind. People went to bed with it, and during the days it worked beside them like a shadow of themselves. They could never do enough for it. Names like Ypres, Courcelette, Lens, Vimy, Cambrai, Arras, the Somme, had become as familiar and as much a part of Canada as Fredericton, Moose Jaw, Sudbury or Prince Rupert.
Perhaps in Quebec the serene permanence of the river itself helped confirm the people in their sureness that their instinct was right; that the war was the product of the cities which constantly threatened their tradition, of English-American big business, factories, power dams, banks, trusts, heavy industry and the incessant jabbering noise of the outside world which bombarded their own idea of themselves, roaring that they were weak, unimportant, unprogressive, too backward to understand the magnificence of the war. And beside, there was the faith. All through the Laurentian country thousands of Sulpicians, Jesuits, Dominicans, Benedictines, Franciscans, Trappists, Servites, Carmelites, Ursulines, Little Sisters of the Assumption, Grey Nuns, lay-brothers and lay-sisters, bishops, parish priests, vicars and seminary students worked on in the unbroken tradition out of the Middle Ages and contemplated the Catholic God. Against the light of Eternity, the war seemed only a brutish interlude.
So the country brooded on through midsummer, each part bound to the others like a destiny, even in opposition forming a unity none could dissolve, the point and counterpoint of a harmony so subtle they never guessed its existence.
SEVENTEEN
McQueen’s surveyors appeared in Saint-Marc at the end of the first week in August and stayed six days in the parish. They were put up at the Tallard house and went out to the gorge every day with their levels and transits and notebooks. They pegged lines across the stream at various points from the falls toward the road, and worked in a flat-bottomed boat secured to the lines, while they lowered an aluminum propeller on the end of a wired shaft to measure the velocity of the current at various points along the channel. Then they plotted a course for the railroad spur which would have to be built to serve the factory. Their course took them across several farms, and Athanase went ahead of them to explain to the farmers that what the surveyors were doing was an important secret which would turn into a lucky development for them. To Tremblay he explained that if certain projects went through he might want to buy one of his fields; there would be a lot of money in it for him if no one else was told about it.
At the end of the week the surveyors went back to town and a few days later McQueen wrote to Athanase asking him to come to Montreal at once to get the organization of the firm under way. Before Father Beaubien or anyone else in Saint-Marc had quite made up their minds to question him, Athanase was gone.
In Montreal, McQueen told him the layout was perfect, there was plenty of power in the river and no difficulties about the terrain. Plans had already been drawn up by an architect for the building. Athanase studied them with keen interest and gave his approval. All arrangements for incorporation he left entirely to McQueen. He took out a first and second mortgage on his property in Saint-Marc, held in McQueen’s name, and converted the loan, together with the proceeds of the sale of his bonds, into stock in the company. All his eggs were in one basket now and the realization of what he was doing sometimes frightened him when he was alone at night. But during the day, when typewriters clacked, telephones rang, drawers were opened and closed, conferences were held, enthusiastic opinions ran high, letters and documents accumulated in files, and architects, engineers, business managers, experts on textiles, and stenographers all beamed confidence, Athanase was quite happy in the swim of so much excitement.
His own important part in the proceedings came to a head when he received word from Ottawa that the government would build the railway spur as soon as the foundation of the factory was laid. Athanase beamed when he read the letter from the minister. He had calculated the political side of this project perfectly, as McQueen had ex
pected him to do. The government had no wish to see him lose his seat, and the railway spur would be put down to his credit in the next election.
Meanwhile the spread of rumours in Saint-Marc found their focus in Polycarpe Drouin’s store. Polycarpe himself looked wise and said it meant an election for sure. Anyone using a level and transit was bound to be employed by the government, and the government never did anything except before an election. Frenette said the parish was going to be divided into two parts and a new church was to be built near the falls. Onésime Bergeron said Mr. Tallard was fixing it so the whole parish would be handed over to the English. Ovide Bissonette made no prediction, but he was sure that whatever happened, it would be something bad. Tremblay and all the farmers whose land had been touched by the surveyors kept their mouths shut. For a fortnight all conversations with the priest were shifted by monosyllables to the subject of the surveyors, but Father Beaubien, looking as stern as the general of an encircled army, merely thought hard and also kept his mouth shut.
EIGHTEEN
Marius Tallard sat on a bench in the corner of the station waiting room in Montreal and ate the sandwich Emilie had just given him. He took large bites and swallowed before he had chewed properly. The movement of his jaws showed how thin he had become, with the sharp cheekbones making deep shadows on his white skin. Emilie waited until the sandwich was half consumed and then she said, “You better be sure it’s a safe thing, you going back home now.”
Her timidity irritated him. “What’s safe anywhere?” he said, his mouth full of bread and ham. “I’m tired. I’m going home.”
Two Solitudes Page 18