Two Solitudes

by Hugh Maclennan

  Emilie accepted his explanation without question, as she did everything he said.

  “But don’t get the idea I’m going back to my father,” he went on. “I’m through with him. But that land out there–it’s mine as well as his. I hate Montreal anyhow.”

  “Sure, sure. Sometimes I think about the country too. Some times.” She smiled at him with a sort of vacant tenderness.

  The waiting room smelled of stale cigar smoke, spittoons, disinfectant, orange peels, unwashed clothes and sweating flesh. All the assorted bits of humanity that sat stiffly or lolled on the benches were ill at ease and unwilling to be there. They were devoid of background, without status in this interim between leaving one place and arriving at another. There were farm women with their best clothes wilted and bundles tied with cord hugged close at their sides. There were sailors and soldiers showing the effects of a weekend leave in the city. There were couples, and single men with cheap suitcases at their feet who might be anything from lunch-counter clerks to steamfitters in the normal course of their day. Now they were nothing, nobodies waiting for trains to take them some place else. For a fraction of time the big room became alive and everyone in it was united by a common interest. A girl in magenta silk, holding the arm of a man in a black suit and a bowler hat, broke away from a splash of shouting and laughter in the concourse, ducked through a shower of rice and confetti, into the waiting room, through it, and on to their train.

  Marius finished the sandwich and wiped his mouth with a rumpled handkerchief. He looked up at the clock on the wall at one end of the room. The instrument might have been put there especially to annoy him. “Wait–wait–wait! That’s the best thing I do nowadays.”

  Emilie touched his forearm with her fingers. She wanted to take the strain from him, to make him quiet, but he refused to let her. Now he jerked his arm away. She wanted to ask him where he had been and what he had been doing during all the weeks she had not seen him, but she said nothing. It was something to be thankful for that he had called her at the restaurant just before she was ready to leave.

  “I guess you got no money, maybe?” she said after a while. “Maybe that’s why you go home?”

  “Well, what if it is?”

  “You should have come to me. I’d see you weren’t hungry.”

  He laughed harshly. “I’ve been getting my education.”

  “You been back at the college?”

  “Don’t be so simple. Do you think you get an education in college?”

  “Mon Dieu, you got no need to bite me.”

  “I’ve been learning things that count. How the poor feel, for instance.”

  “I could have told you.”

  He appraised her with a sarcastic smile. “I found out the poor have no brains. They believe whatever they’re told so long as it’s easy to remember. But the main thing is, they’re all lazy.”

  He got up from the bench and thrust his hands in his pockets. All the luggage he possessed was on his back. A passing soldier glanced at him and Marius made a point of staring until the man looked the other way.

  “In this town,” he said, looking over Emilie’s head, “all the poor I met were French. We’re the ones that get splashed with the motor cars of the English.” He looked down at the girl beside him. “Did you ever stop to think how comparatively few English live in Montreal?”

  Emilie shook her head. She had no interest in what he was saying, but the way he said it gave her a sick feeling inside. He stooped down and picked up a grain of rice that had been thrown at the honeymoon couple. Eyeing it as he turned it over in his fingers, he went on. “In Montreal the French outnumber the English three to one. In the province we outnumber them more than seven to one. And yet, the English own everything!” He held the grain of rice under the nail of his thumb and stared at the floor. “The English in Montreal, they own nearly the whole of Canada. And yet once upon a time the whole of Canada belonged to the French.”

  Emilie tried to smile. She tugged at his coat in an effort to get him to sit down again, but Marius knew he talked better on his feet. “In the factories all the bosses are English. One English boss, five hundred French workers. Funny, no?” He cracked the grain of rice solemnly between two nails as though it were a flea. “But on the whole,” he went on, “it is the laziness of the poor one should first observe. The rich are equally stupid, but I think maybe the rich are frightened, and frightened men are not generally lazy.”

  Emilie got up from the bench and stood close beside him. In contrast to his drawn and bitter leanness, she looked plump and healthy. Her commonsense wanted to make him stop all this talk. It was probably clever, but clever people only got into trouble. Only priests should use clever talk like Marius.

  Again she tugged at his sleeve. “What are you going to do now?”

  “How do I know?”

  “Will they get you? You think maybe they know where you’re going?”

  Marius looked at her sharply and then he walked rapidly out of the waiting room toward the tracks. Emilie had to move her short legs unnaturally fast to keep up with him and her heavy hips wobbled in time with her trot. She knew Marius was frightened. When a man talked like that he was always scared of something. Whoever was after him had found out where he’d been hiding, and now he had to get out of town.

  When they reached the gate Marius showed his ticket to the conductor. The man glanced at it and let them pass through to the platform. They walked down a line of standing coaches and Marius finally selected one that was nearly full. He stopped at the steps and looked down at Emilie. The set expression on his face melted and he looked irresolute, almost pitiful. “If I only had some money…”

  He bent and kissed her fiercely, then released her and went up the steps without looking around. She stood where he had left her and her hand rose and then fell again. He had kissed her so hard his teeth had bruised her lips. Nothing had passed from him to her but the pain. Even in kissing her he had locked her out. She turned after a few moments and walked slowly back to the station concourse. What ought she to do? She had saved seven dollars. Maybe if she went to church and put the money in the box and prayed to the Virgin, the Holy Mother of God would intercede and make Marius kinder and happy, so everything between them could be good. If she wanted to be blessed she must first deserve the blessing.

  NINETEEN

  For Paul, it was a momentous day. He got up just before dawn and dressed quietly, then went downstairs in the dark in his stocking feet so as not to wake the others in the house. He put on his shoes in the kitchen and went out to the scullery. He took his fishing rod from the corner where he had left it the night before, walked down the drive in the dark and turned into the river road toward Captain Yardley’s with the rod over his shoulder. He felt very important being up before anyone else in the parish.

  As he walked along the road the first suggestion of light began. It touched the horizon and spread out soft and grey as it crept up the sky. The world quickly grew larger. A rooster crowed, his voice musical in the distance. By the time Paul reached the captain’s back door there was just light enough to see the trees down by the river’s edge a quarter of a mile away.

  He looked in the window and saw the captain sitting at the table drinking hot cocoa and eating biscuits. The oilcloth on the table gleamed yellow in the light of a lamp. Daphne and Heather were on either side of him. Paul tapped the glass and saw the captain look around and Heather get up and leave the table. A moment later she opened the door for him. Her eyes were large and wide awake.

  “Fun, Paul!” she said.

  He rested his rod against the side of the house, put his arm about her waist and they went into the kitchen together. Daphne looked sleepy and the captain was telling her she ought to eat more. Paul noticed that her eyes were red and wondered if she had been crying on account of her father. Heather had cried a lot a few weeks ago, but now she never spoke of her father any more.

  “Drink your cocoa, Paul,” the captain said. “
Should have had porridge ready, but these two ladies here, they’re too fine to eat porridge.”

  “But Grampa,” Heather said, “you told us it would put hair on our chests. That would be horrid.”

  Yardley let the remark pass. He was unusually quiet. Paul drank two cups of cocoa and ate two pilot biscuits spread with butter. They all broke the pilot biscuits into sharp-edged pieces and dipped them into a bowl of molasses.

  Daphne looked at her sister. “Molasses on your chin again,” she said.

  Heather wiped her face absently and looked out the window. Light was spreading over the fields. “Will the fish all swim to the bottom when the sun comes up?”

  “Most of them,” Yardley said. He rose and stumped out to the porch, picked up three rods and added Paul’s. “We’d better be going. Did you leave the bait can in the boat last night?”

  “Yes, Grampa,” Heather said. She turned to Paul. “The loveliest worms. They liked it in the can. They wriggled so I could see they liked it.” Seeing that her grandfather was moving off, she bent over Paul and whispered gravely, her breath tickling his ear, “Grampa’s been awful sad lately.”

  “I bet your Mummy’s sadder,” he said in a hoarse attempt to whisper in turn.

  “Mummy’s heart’s broken,” Heather said. She followed Daphne onto the porch, Paul beside her. “I should be sad too. It’s no fun being an orphan.” But almost immediately she forgot what she had been talking about and ran ahead of the others down the path to the road.

  They walked in Indian file down to the river through a path in a field planted for oats, and the dew-bent stalks brushed their legs. At the river’s edge Yardley unlocked a flat-bottomed boat from its stake among the reeds and shoved it into the water. The timbers of the boat scraped hoarsely on the shingle, the water took its weight and the stern slid out into the river so smoothly it seemed to kiss it. Paul stood by the bow while the girls got in. The boat was wet with dew, the moisture making a veil of tiny beads over the paint, and when Paul put his hand on it he felt the coldness wash his skin and saw the beads dissolve into a film of water the same grey colour as the paint. Heather upset the bait can and the rolling tin tinkled sharply. She went down on her knees and pushed the escaping worms back again.

  “Are you ready?” Yardley called.

  They said they were.

  In the small backwater where they were the river had no current. It looked as broad as a lake, and because there was a mist over it they couldn’t see the other shore. It seemed very mysterious to Paul as he thought of all the water in the river sliding through the country under the mist.

  Yardley stepped in and balanced himself, then went past the girls on the centre thwarts to the stern. “Shove off, Paul!” His shout cracked the wet stillness. It was loud enough to reach a masthead. Paul gave a heave and the boat went clear. He followed it and rested his knee on the stem, then slid inside and sat in the bow. Yardley brought the boat around and sent it forward into the river and the mist, standing with his wooden stump braced against the side and sculling over the stern with a long, flat oar.

  “Is that the way the fishermen scull the dories in Nova Scotia?” Heather asked.

  “That’s how.”

  They moved into deep water with no sound but the creaking of the oar and an occasional splash as it broke water. The bow nodded gently back and forth as the sculling oar propelled them onward. When they came to a shoal where a stake was driven into the river-bed Paul moored the boat and they cast their lines. By sunrise Paul and Heather had caught two fish apiece and the captain had four. Daphne had not taken any, though she had lost two.

  While they fished, the sun rose. It rolled like a ball out of the river and its rays shot through the mist like red arrows. The ball mounted and paled to gold, shredding the clouds apart. Paul thought it was like the candles blazing over the altar, gleaming on the cloth-of-gold chasuble of the priest at Mass, the cry going up to the roof and the suggestion that this golden light was the colour of glory. The mist stirred and lifted in veils. Flashes of light struck out from the church steeple in the village. Farther upstream there was a similar gleam from the steeple of Sainte-Justine, and across the river another. Then the aluminum paint on the church roofs began to shine; the world was bright and it was day. In all the parishes up and down the river the angelus rang. The notes had a muted, rolling sound as they came over the water. Paul bowed his head and Daphne looked at him oddly. He kept his head bowed as he murmured a prayer to himself, and Daphne finally glanced at Heather with a smile that was half embarrassed and half amused. The captain frowned at her.

  When the angelus ceased ringing Daphne said, “Do you always do that?”

  “Yes. When I’m awake. It’s for the angelus.”

  “It’s a funny thing to do.”

  “Thet’s rude,” Yardley said. “Talking about other people’s religions.”

  “But I just think it’s funny Paul being a Catholic, that’s all.”

  “Catholics think it’s a hell of a lot worse, us being Protestants.”

  “Mummy says you shouldn’t say hell,” Daphne said.

  Yardley eyed her reflectively. “Listen, young lady–some day I’m going to tan you.”

  Heather said, “Don’t mind Daffie, Paul. She’s nasty. She’s a horrid little girl.” She picked a worm from the bait can and dangled it before her sister’s face. It was an earthy red, smooth and shiny, and as it dangled its corrugated tail curled up. Daphne made a face and shivered.

  “Scared to put a worm on your own hook,” Heather said. “Paul has to do it for you.”

  “Grampa,” Daphne said with dignity, “make Heather stop.”

  “Thet’s not nice, Heather,” Yardley said.

  “Look at her hands,” Daphne said. “They’re filthy.”

  Paul shouted and stood up in the boat. “I’ve got a fish!”

  They forgot everything else as they watched him play it in. He stood very serious with his lips parted and his two buck teeth showing, his brown eyes large as he drew the fish through the water, the line darting in quick circling jerks from side to side as it cut disappearing ellipses on the surface. Yardley manoeuvred the boat away from the fish until Paul had it alongside, then bent over the gunwale and dipped it in.

  “Not bad!” he said. He picked the fish up in both hands, one on the head and the other on the body, and broke its back behind the gills. Daphne winced at the crunching sound made by the snapping backbone.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that, Grampa,” she said. “You know I hate it.”

  Yardley looked at her for the space of several breaths, as if trying to figure her out. “Can’t let him gasp out his life on the bottom of the boat. Thet’s cruel, thet is. Besides, it spoils the meat. Some fish got such strong juices in their stomachs they go right on working if you leave them lie. A dying fish pretty near digests some of himself.” He pulled out his watch and looked up at the sky. “Well, I guess we better go back now. Your mother will be up for breakfast soon.”

  TWENTY

  Father Beaubien had not slept all night. Marius had come to him after dark and he had given the boy supper in his presbytery and a bed in his spare room. They had talked together for several hours. Marius was still asleep and he would have sanctuary for the rest of the day, then he would leave.

  In the early morning while it was still dark Father Beaubien had left his bed, dressed and entered the church to pray. He had prayed for the soul of Athanase Tallard and he had prayed for Marius. The boy was too bitter, too unforgiving; if he continued to develop this bitter cynicism the priest did not know what would become of him. Finally Father Beaubien had prayed for himself, asking God to give him grace and wisdom to protect his parish.

  Shortly after ten he presented himself at the door of the Tallard house and was shown into the library. In a few minutes Athanase joined him there. Without preliminaries this time the priest said, “I’ve been talking to your son again, Mr. Tallard.”

  “Marius? Where?”
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  “That’s unimportant. He is well, so far as his health is concerned. But he doesn’t want to see you now, and I don’t think he should. Later, perhaps, I hope he will see things differently.”

  “Is he still in the village?”

  The priest looked about the room and Athanase offered him a chair. “I didn’t come here to speak of Marius, Mr. Tallard. I came to speak of you.”

  Athanase knocked the dead ashes from his pipe. “Well?”

  “I’ve been talking to Tremblay. And some of the other farmers whose land you propose to take away.”

  “Well?”

  “You can’t do this to Saint-Marc, Mr. Tallard. You know that as well as I do.”

  “What can’t I do?”

  The priest made a gesture of impatience but immediately his hand returned to the lap of his soutane. Spreading his legs under the black cloth he leaned forward in his chair. “I know all about it,” he said. “The details make no difference. You’re trying to build a factory here.”

  “Is that against the law?”

  “Lawyer’s arguments are useless with me. Are you, or are you not, planning to buy the Tremblay land for a factory?”

  “And if I am?”

  “I will tell Tremblay not to sell. I will tell every farmer you have already talked to not to sell.”

  Athanase flushed and rose from his chair. A sharp wind pushed in the curtains at the window, ruffling the papers on the desk. As he closed the window Athanase saw that a sudden storm had arisen. A black thunder cloud was rolling across the sky, its shadow rushing like an eclipse over the land and swallowing up the sunshine on the river. A splatter of rain struck the window, there was a sharp flash, followed a second later by the roar of thunder. The room was dark now and the books brooded on their shelves. Athanase returned to his chair. The flush had left his face.

  “You exceed your authority, Father. What am I to think of these visits you make to me? You have no cause to hate me.”