Two Solitudes

by Hugh Maclennan

  They were returning to what they thought was good because it had been familiar. When their ships drew in to Halifax, they smelled their country before it rose to them over the horizon, and their nostrils dilated to the odour of balsam blown out to sea from the evergreen forests that cover most of Nova Scotia like a shaggy hide. On the train through the Maritime Provinces they smelled the orange peel, Lysol, spittoon and coal smoke staleness of the day coaches, and they looked through the windows with their rough khaki collars open, sweating into the stale air the sharp, animal smell of massed soldiers. They saw, as if for the first time, how empty the country looked, how silent it was. They noticed the towns like collections of grey and brown wooden boxes scattered as if by a hand’s gesture in the clearings, dirt streets running through them and perhaps a short stretch of asphalt near the brick or sandstone post-office. They noticed the red brick or board railroad stations, nearly every one the same, in Truro, Springhill, Amherst, Sackville, Moncton, Newcastle, Cambellton and Matapedia. They saw the little Nova Scotia trout streams, each one shallow and freshly splashing over amber-coloured stones. They saw the Miramichi, wide and steel grey, curving flat calm out of the spruce forests. When they woke up the next day they saw the Saint Lawrence, smooth and opaque like a strait of the sea. Then the train rumbled over the bridge and ran through the factories into Bonaventure Station in Montreal.

  That afternoon they paraded through the city, and on the reviewing stand on Sherbrooke Street generals with red tabs and red officer-faces and politicians with grey faces and silk hats saluted them under the Union Jack, the country having no flag of its own. And the soldiers marched at attention through the crowds, only their eyes preserving the traces of what they had done and where they had been. For most of the battle-tension had relaxed now; nearly all of it was gone. They were returning to the human race, floating upward into the illusion of the middle classes again. Now that they were home the last realities were fading. The war was becoming what their minds made it; not the broken instants, the clawing into the earth, the stepping out into ultimate loneliness when the earth jogs up through the feet and legs into the brain and makes each step forward a new thing; not the feel in the arms and shoulders as the bayonet slips into the belly without resistance, or stupidly sticks on bone with a trivial sound, the action so different from what it ought to be: the enemy’s face not what was expected, the instant so mind-destroying that the felt knowledge comes that the mind is nothing, the man nothing, only the fear and the outrage real, the moment so private no one can communicate it–only afterwards to look into the eyes of another and understand that he knows it too, and knows that any words about it will be stupid, for words are human and have a history, and this has none. But now the war was slipping back into pictures again, almost into the same pictures the civilians and the advertisers had made of it, whole pictures fabricated by the mind, not broken moments; place-names and dates and what the corporal said to the sergeant-major, the mind going back to its builder’s work, curing itself by making war what it never was.

  So today they marched through Montreal, and the pipers played them along with The Blue Bonnets and The Hundred Pipers, and before the French-Canadian regiment the band played the Sambre et Meuse. In the English section of town the crowd had always been behind the army, had worshipped the idea of it. In a war it had never made, the country had given everything, doubling and raising and redoubling the ante again and again until all it was and ever hoped to be was forgotten, as the stakes were piled up on the table for the great powers to manipulate into a victory. The country had suffered a quarter more action-deaths than the United States out of a population a fourteenth as large. Now it was over, and thank God. Now the whole duty of colonials was done, the surviving troops were home, now the future could rest with the great powers till the next time.

  And so, because this was the accepted military procedure, even the drill-books they used being imported, the troops marched at attention past the generals and politicians. The crowd cheered them. When the French passed, the English cheered them wildly. Sometimes French and English in the crowd caught each other’s glances and admitted a respect. The parade passed, a local celebration, not noticed elsewhere because the grief and pride of small nations is unimportant to others, strictly a family gathering, everyone knowing that if they spoke of what they had done in a voice loud enough to carry across the frontier they would only seem like a small-salaried man talking big money to the president of the company.

  The women were the ones you noticed in the crowd, for the day was more theirs than the troops’. You could see the tight, grey faces of the ones whose men were not there, and you could also see an unusually naked expression in the others. These strained for the sight of a single man, eyes leaping to the familiar face when it marched into view while in a private agony each woman hoped to find it the same, still lovable, able to be magnetized back to the cage again from what it had seen and where it had been, from the horror and the hunting and the Champs Elysées and Regent Street, to the suburban house and the tenement, the groceries, doctor’s bills, insurance premiums, pay cheques, slippers before the fire and three square meals a day. Women’s bodies, unenjoyed for several years, stirred in involuntary anticipation.

  Janet Methuen waited for the parade, standing with her father in the bay window of a friend’s house near the McGill campus. Yardley had come into town today because Harvey’s old regiment was returning, and he had thought Janet might be unstrung by the celebration.

  He found her surprisingly calm. Much of the rigid nervousness had left her during the past few months. Her thin face was pale, but her movements were quieter than they had ever been. Yardley could not tell if she had died inside and did not care any more, or if she had gained real confidence for the first time in her life.

  They had said little to each other, for Yardley had reached town only an hour ago, and Janet was on the point of leaving her house when he had arrived. Now they stood in the window together looking across the street to the elms of the campus, the college buildings slate grey behind them, the bluff of Mount Royal above. In the room at their back was a discreet murmur of voices. Yardley knew none of the others. The house belonged to a Mrs. Stanstead, a widow whose son had been Harvey Methuen’s best friend before both were killed.

  Yardley continued to stare out the window. Most of the flags across the street were Union Jacks, but there were also a few Tricolours and Old Glories. He noticed that the crowd here was entirely English. Farther east it would be French. It was the sort of thing you always watched for in Montreal.

  Suddenly Janet said, “General Methuen has been simply wonderful. Yesterday he told me he wants us to take over the whole second floor of the family house.”

  Yardley smiled sadly. “Thet sounds like you’ve settled on living in Montreal for good.”

  “They’ve made me a part of the family. It’s the only place I’ve ever belonged.”

  He looked over the heads of the crowd through the elms to the mountain, and his chin lifted as he heard the faint strains of the coming pipes. He thought that if sound were an element, this would be singing water. As he swung his eyes back to her face he noticed how young she still looked. It saddened him to see her so ready to sink into middle age.

  “I don’t have to think of anything any more,” she said quietly. “The children are in school. General Methuen says he’s perfectly satisfied with them. When they finish here they’ll go to Lausanne for a year. Now the war’s over things will soon be the same again.” She added, “Harvey’s mother went to Lausanne.”

  “You talk like you’d come into harbour, Janet.”

  “I know how Harvey wanted the girls brought up.”

  His pale eyes were steady behind his glasses as he looked at her long, severe face. “Child–I wish you’d marry again!”

  She was more astonished than shocked. “What a time to say such a thing!”

  “Most times I never get a chance to say anything.”

 
“At least you might…” The lips came together in a line and she said nothing more.

  He put a heavy, blue-veined hand on her shoulder and felt the bone sharp under it. “Listen, Janet–maybe I never learned to say the right things around here, but not even the Methuens are much different from anyone else, and anyhow there’s no future in saying nothing at all, the way they do. Memories may be sacred, but they don’t keep a man warm nights–no, nor a woman, neither.”

  She gave a quick glance over her shoulder, thankful that no one else in the room was close enough to hear him. “Father–will you please stop! It’s–it’s horrible!”

  But Yardley had been solitary for seven months, without any more chess games with Athanase or talks with Paul and Kathleen, with nothing but the animals and the farm work and his books; these, and his astonishing health that still permitted him to do a young man’s work. For months he had been trying to figure out how to put this to Janet and had not succeeded in writing. So he said what he thought now.

  “Thet’s fine, what you say about the Methuens. I’m right glad to hear it. But by God, Janet–you’re a fine figure of a woman and you’re still young. Most of them, they’re old people. And they don’t own Daphne and Heather. Nobody owns anyone in this world. People make a hell of a lot of mischief pretending they do.”

  The forbidding line showed between her eyes. “Father, will you ever get it into your head that everyone isn’t like the seamen and farmhands you’ve lived with all your life?”

  “They’re not so different,” he said stubbornly. “For thet matter, the way I see it, people aren’t so different even from animals. Even the wildest ones can get mighty lonely. I think sometimes we imitate the animals in most we do. It’s a sure thing we imitate them when we go hunting, and…”

  She gave a nervous laugh. “If you were anybody else I think I’d…Father, you’re rambling!”

  He had the impression that she was not listening to a word he said. He stood for a time looking out the window, dreading the approach of the troops. If Harvey were alive he would have been a major; perhaps even a lieutenant-colonel. He would have marched home at the head of a battalion. Montreal was his town. His home-coming would have been a local event, for the papers were always affectionate to the old families.

  “Where are Daphne and Heather watching from?”

  “Up the street–with the rest of the school.”

  She made no movement to show him where they would be. He did not even expect to see them before he went home to the country again. The pipe-music was louder now, and down the street he saw a rustle of movement in the waiting crowd.

  Paul was standing with more than a hundred and fifty boys of his school in a special place reserved for them along the curb of Sherbrooke Street near the reviewing stand. The older boys were in cadet uniforms, carrying Lee-Enfields. They were standing easy, and shifted restlessly, and there were sporadic noises of oiled metal clicking as they shot the bolts of their rifles and looked down them. All the boys felt very important to be there in the best place in front of the crowd. Paul was at the end of a line of younger boys, next the cadets. He was wearing a small peaked skull-cap with the Frobisher crest in gold on its front. He had a navy blue jacket piped in the school’s colours, a school tie and bare knees, and he looked exactly the same as every other boy his age in the line.

  They had all come in from the country that morning to see the parade, and the day before the headmaster had assembled the school and given the boys a lecture about how the homecoming of troops had been celebrated since the days of the Romans. Frobisher had lost ninety-two old boys killed in the war. During the three months of the past autumn the school had suffered a casualty a week, and every time news was received of a death, the boys were assembled and the headmaster read the name of the one killed in a solemn voice, and told of his record at school and in the army, remembering some particular thing he had done or said when he was at school, or how he had scored a goal in a hockey match against Bishop’s, or how he had made a long run in football, or perhaps how he had won a prize for his work. Once the headmaster read a personal letter addressed to him by General Sir Arthur Currie about an old boy. Each time after a name was read, the school bowed heads for a short prayer and then stood at attention and sang God Save the King, looking up to the picture of King George, draped with the Union Jack, their eyes lighting at the same time on the large group-photograph that also hung behind the platform, containing the picture of Sir Rupert Irons, surrounded by Chislett, Masterman and MacIntosh, the men who formed the guiding committee of the board of governors.

  Next to Paul in the line, a freckle-faced boy called Fraser was arguing with a blond boy called Andrews about their elder brothers.

  “My brother killed three Germans with a bayonet,” Fraser said. “That takes a hell of a lot more than to kill them with an aeroplane.”

  “He was only in the infantry!” Andrews said. “Infantry’s old-fashioned.”

  “The hell it is! My brother said if the war’d gone on a bit longer the infantry’d be using stuff like you never heard tell of. They’d of sat in the trenches and squirted liquid fire at the Germans for miles. You can’t squirt fire out of any aeroplane.”

  “That’s nothing, my brother said aeroplanes were all ready to use rays and stuff. They were going to fly over cities and press buttons and the Germans down there, they were just going to fall apart, he said.”

  “The infantry could have rays too!”

  “I bet they don’t give any rays to the infantry!”

  “Anyhow,” Fraser said, “it takes more to kill a German with a bayonet than with an aeroplane. Sergeant-Major Croucher said so.”

  “How do you know your brother killed anyone with a bayonet? Good soldiers don’t say if they kill anyone. They just kill them and they don’t say anything afterwards.”

  “My brother didn’t say anything,” Fraser said. “Sergeant-Major Croucher told me about it, see.”

  “Good soldiers don’t talk,” Andrews said. He turned to Paul. “Isn’t that a fact, good soldiers don’t talk?”

  “How does he know? He hasn’t got a brother in the army.”

  “I have so!” Paul said.

  The pipes sounded far down the street, and a rustle went through the waiting crowd like wind through leaves. Paul heard Sergeant-Major Croucher’s voice bellowing at the cadets to stand at ease, then at attention, then at ease again, then easy. Rifle butts banged the asphalt, followed by silence. Croucher stood in front of his cadets, very straight with a swagger-stick under the clamp of his arm. He was a two-hundred pounder with a face like Old Bill, and had fought through the retreat from Mons with the Grenadier Guards. He had been twice wounded, won the Military Medal, been invalided out of the army in 1917, and since then had been gym and cadet instructor at Frobisher.

  “Now watch carefully,” he said to the cadets, “and don’t forget what I told you.” He made no effort to raise his voice, but it was so naturally loud it carried the length of a block. “Mark how the troops salute when they pass the stand and remember next inspection day how they done it.”

  Croucher always told his cadets that troops that were too lazy to salute with a bang were troops he wouldn’t trust to hold a brewery cellar in an election riot. On inspection day you could hear the Guards salute half a mile away.

  Paul looked across the street. Farther down were boys from a city school who looked different from the boys in Frobisher because they did not wear caps and jackets like a uniform. Directly opposite Paul were the girls from Brock Hall. The younger ones wore their hair in pig-tails down their backs and all of them were dressed in navy-blue smocks and black ribbed stockings. They had been marched in a crocodile under a pair of long-striding Englishwomen down to Sherbrooke Street to take their appointed places. Beyond them were groups from the public schools as far as you could see for two blocks.

  Paul looked at the bristly back of Croucher’s neck and again at the wiggling figures across the street. The girls s
tood more quietly than the boys, turning their heads until the pig-tails bobbed but keeping their feet still. Suddenly in the blurred rows of faces Paul saw someone familiar. It was Daphne, stiff in her school uniform. If Daphne was there, perhaps Heather was too. He saw a sailor hat move in the second row and under it Heather’s face with the nose turned pertly up and the chin wagging as she talked. He hoped she would not see him, for she might wave if she did and then the fellows would jeer at him for knowing a girl. You had to be as old as a cadet to know a girl without being jeered at. He pulled the peak of his cap farther down, hoping he would look so tough she would not recognize him. He wished the school wore ordinary caps so you could break the brim and pull the loose part down over one ear and look really tough, spitting out of the corner of your mouth the way the hard fellows did. No one could spit and look tough as if he meant it wearing a pea-bouncer English cap and an old school tie.

  The pipes drew nearer, and leaning out of the line, Paul saw the swaying kilts of the band and then the flash of sunlight on fixed bayonets. He wondered if these were the actual bayonets that had fleshed Germans in France.