Two Solitudes

by Hugh Maclennan

  He laid the book down, suddenly listless. He looked out the window to the houses across the street. It was no fun having nothing to do. There was nothing he could even think of doing.

  Paul sometimes thought that being poor would not matter if only his father were alive. Then they would still count for something. Instinctively, he knew that they now counted for nothing, and that if they disappeared tomorrow nobody would care; at least, no one except Yardley and Marius. His mother had been sad when his father died, and sometimes she cried when she thought about how poor and helpless they were. But much of the time she seemed to Paul simply to be allowing time to pass over her while she did nothing. She seemed almost not to be able to care; and by not caring, she removed herself from him without even knowing it. Some nights while Paul did his homework she sat at the large table playing solitaire, concentrating on the game as though it were a great problem. Sometimes she talked to him, and tried to find games in the newspapers that would amuse them both. Sometimes after Paul was asleep she went out alone. She had made several new friends, but she preferred to go to their homes rather than have them come to her, so Paul seldom saw any of them. They all seemed to like dancing and bridge-playing, and he wondered if she went to dances so soon after his father’s death. He did not think she did, but he knew she wanted to go. Lately she had begun to talk about their luck changing. Something would turn up and they would again live in a fine house with plenty of clothes and enough of everything. When Paul got older he would have a motor car of his own and be able to do whatever he pleased. But Paul was old enough already to know that luck had nothing to do with their being alone in three rooms in this side street of Montreal.

  It had been a good street once. The grey, stuccoed Victorian houses had dignified lines, but the old families had long ago sold out to rooming-house proprietors. Beautiful old trees still grew out of holes in the concrete near the curbs and shaded the grey façades of the houses. When the light was soft, the street was like an exiled aristocrat trying to cover up his poor clothes and worthlessness with the fine manners he had never been able to forget. But during the day boys ran around on the asphalt and dodged traffic as they played catch, and trucks roared through constantly. At night the street was quiet enough. But three women, always the same three, wearing black fur-lined overshoes in winter and high heels in summer, patrolled the block regularly from eight to twelve. Occasionally a car with dimmed lights cruised past them and stopped. Then one of the women went over to the curb and talked in low tones to the driver. Sometimes the driver got out and went into a house with her, sometimes she got into his car and drove off, the car roaring fast in second and often grinding its gears loud in the silence as the driver hurried to get out of the neighbourhood. Most of the trade came to the women in cars, but occasionally a transient from the hotels wandered through the street on foot. Last night when Paul had been trying to sleep he had heard one of the women talking to a strange man just outside his window.

  Restlessly, Paul replaced the book on its shelf. He decided to go out. It was Saturday, and a boy ought to make a special day out of a Saturday. He left the apartment and went out into the common hall of the house, being careful to snap the door behind him and test it to make sure it was properly locked. Then he felt in his pocket to see if he had his key, and walked out into the street.

  He had no place to go, for he knew nobody. No games were provided at the public school he now attended. Five days in the week the boys sat fifty to a room that smelled of disinfectant when they arrived and of massed humanity an hour later. They were taught by a grim-faced spinster long in the tooth who knew that if she relaxed her face an instant the whole class would get out of hand. The school’s functions ceased abruptly on Friday afternoon at half-past three. It taught its schedule, and that was all it tried to do or could do.

  Walking with his hands in his pockets, Paul went up the slope toward the mountain. In the upper levels of town he felt some of the grey loneliness fade away from him. Here the streets were quiet as churches and canopied by stately trees: maples, and limes, and elms with fresh leaves, and horse-chestnuts spired with blossoms. Here he could smell the fresh earth of newly-turned flower-beds, look over hedges and see immaculate lawns and gardeners clipping them, the lawn-mowers singing high in the warm air. Some of the boys he had known at Frobisher lived on this street. Not many, for there were few houses on it; the houses were enormous brick-and-stone structures, some shaped like castles with gargoyles at the corners of the roofs, all with huge glass conservatories on their sides. But the boys he knew would not be here this morning. They would be playing cricket on the elm-lined field in front of the school, or breaking bounds by hiking across the river and trying to catch fish in the pool below the abandoned grist-mill near the road. He remembered that a small rod of his was concealed behind a rafter in that grist-mill. He remembered another rod he had forgotten in the scullery in the old house in Saint-Marc.

  Loneliness returned to him with a fresh surge. He climbed a long flight of wooden steps that rose up the first ridge of the mountain, he crossed Pine Avenue and went up the winding dirt road toward the summit. Here it was almost like the country, for the city was behind and below him. In Saint-Marc, in the real country, the maples would be at their greenest this weekend and the first shoots would be visible in the ploughed fields. It was almost three years since he had lived in Saint-Marc. At school in the country he had almost forgotten it, but after his father’s death the old life had come back to him vividly and he seemed to have left it only yesterday.

  Thinking of Saint-Marc, he left the road and plunged into the dry bracken of the hillside until he reached a huge rock. It was dark grey, the colour of the house he lived in now, and a dust of lichen covered it. He sat behind the rock and picked up a stick he found there. Then, taking out his scout knife, he whittled it.

  Marius said that as soon as he finished his law course–if he had enough money to finish it–he was going to sue some people to recover the old property in Saint-Marc, as well as the money his father had lost. Paul knew Marius was only talking to make himself feel important. You fell into debt and you paid your debts and then you were poor, and that was all there was to it. He wished Marius would not come around to the house so often, for whenever he did he quarrelled with his mother. Sometimes Marius would sit for minutes looking at her, his eyes shifting whenever she looked back. Then, for no reason at all, he would begin to quarrel, and Paul himself was generally the cause of it. Marius insisted that Paul ought to go to a French-language school, and this made Kathleen furious.

  Lying behind the rock whittling away the stick, Paul felt the sun pour down on him through a gap in the trees. This would be a beautiful day on the river, the clouds white and interlaced with brilliant patches of blue. The last time he had been in Saint-Marc was the day his father was buried. The sky had been grey and cold.

  Paul could not get that day out of his mind. The whole parish had attended the funeral, and important-looking men whom Paul had never seen had come from Ottawa and Montreal. But it was the old faces Paul’s eyes had caught: Frenette, Polycarpe Drouin, Blanchard, even Ovide Bissonette. Father Beaubien in his robes had stood at the head of the grave and the piled-up earth was like a brown wound against the snow. Then the coffin was lowered into the ground, the priest threw some frozen earth on top of it, and they went away, their ankles numb with cold and their ears nearly frozen. That evening Yardley drove Paul and Kathleen into Sainte-Justine in his sleigh. They took the train for the city and had not seen Saint-Marc since.

  Restless again, Paul moved from behind the rock and continued up the road toward the top of the mountain. Occasion ally horsemen came by, rising and falling on cavalry saddles. Near the top he came on a group of girls who were learning to ride. Their horses were knotted about an instructor who was explaining something to them. Paul drew near to listen to what the man said. Then one of the girls turned her head from the instructor and waved her riding crop.

  “Paul!�
� she cried. “Hi, Paul!”

  He saw the up-turned nose and wide mouth and knew it was Heather. He longed to speak to her, but was ashamed without exactly knowing why. He made an elaborate pretence of looking over his shoulder to see whom she was calling, and when he glanced back again he saw that his movement had puzzled her. “I’m sure that was Paul Tallard,” he heard her say as she turned to the girl on the horse beside her. Paul stole a quick glance and recognized Daphne. She looked tall and very slim on the horse, sure of herself, with the sunlight on her hair. But the instructor was annoyed at the interruption. He demanded attention, and before Heather could get away from the group Paul slipped off the road and disappeared in the shrubbery. There was no path from here to the top, but a sheer wall of rock with large cracks and hand-holes in its face. Concentrating on what he was doing, pretending he was like the Swiss mountaineers he had read about, he hauled himself up the rock face and finally reached the top. He saw that he had cut a hole in the shin part of one stocking and felt badly about it. His mother had told him that his clothes would have to last him for years now. He decided he must learn how to darn socks. His mother hated darning, and he did not want to make trouble for her.

  He was breathless from his climb, but now he was on the top of the mountain and could see the whole city spread out beneath him. It looked magnificent in the sunshine merely because it was large and he could see so much of it. The upper part hugging the mountain was beautiful, soft lights and shadows lying among trees and the roofs of various houses quiet in the shade. But the central and eastern parts were a raw waste of masonry with an occasional square building jutting high above the flat roofs around it. In all parts were the spires and domes of churches, more to the acreage than any other commercial city in the world. About the oval shore of the island the river curved in a great distant sweep out of the Lachine Rapids under the Victoria Bridge, folded the slip of Nun’s Island and the green bluff of Saint Helen’s. Factory smoke from Verdun drifted downstream on a light southwesterly breeze, but through it he could see the plain spreading to the mountains across the American border, sloping so gradually that at this height it even seemed to be tilted downward.

  Paul wandered about the summit, moving under the trees and out again, for nearly half an hour. Then he went down the slope again to the city, reached Sainte-Catherine Street and walked east to University, his hands in his pockets. The traffic was thick at the noon-hour, the whole city beating about him: hundreds of acres of concrete, bricks, mortar, asphalt, street-cars, trucks, motors, advertising signs in flaring scarlet and white, crowds–everything hot under the sun. He saw by a clock in a store window that it was twelve-thirty. His mother would not likely be back for another two hours at least, she never knew what time it was. He walked down University Street to Beaver Hall Hill, down Victoria Square to McGill Street, down McGill to the harbour.

  He killed another hour by strolling along the waterfront watching stevedores loading and unloading ships. He saw vessels from England, France, Australia, India, Norway, Sweden, Holland, as well as the red-and-white lake boats that were always on their way past Saint-Marc in the old days. He felt a faint thrill of recognition, finding something here which fitted into the pattern of what he had read and of what he had been told by Yardley. The ships could still discover the Americas. But what was left for him to discover when he grew up? What could be new for him except old places like India and Greece? He walked along each pier to the sterns of the ships, and was fascinated by the names of their home ports: Liverpool, Glasgow, Saint-Nazaire, Sydney, Bergen, Göteborg, Amsterdam, Bombay.

  But finally he became so hungry he could watch the ships no longer. He had two miles to walk before reaching home, and no money in his pocket for a tram. He set out, going back up the successive slopes, with the hollow feeling of hunger growing inside him. The traffic became steadily thicker as he neared the centre of town, newsboys on every corner selling copies of the Star, magazines from the States, crowds speaking French and English around him, signs and billboards repeating second-hand the slogans they had learned from the Americans, beckoning with Players, Sweet Caps, British Consuls, Black Horse Ale, Mother’s Bread, the signs screaming bi-lingually in red, white and yellow: buvez coca-cola–the pause that refreshes–la biere de votre grandpere–the remedy your uncle used; streets signs telling him to keep to the right gardez votre droite no parking here ne stationnez pas ici, while in front of one movie house Theda Bara with hair flopping loose on her face was clasped by Lou Tellegen, and in front of another Mabel Normand smiled into the bleak and angular face of a huge American in a ten-gallon hat.

  When Paul reached home the place was still empty and his mother’s bed still unmade. He went into the kitchen and opened a can of beans, spilled the beans out into a saucepan and heated it on the stove. Then he cut a slice of bread and buttered it, and poured himself a glass of milk. The beans and the milk tasted good.

  Toward mid-afternoon Kathleen returned. She found Paul reading on the sofa, the bed made and the dishes washed. She put her arms about him and held him, saying how wonderful he was to have done all these things by himself. He felt her warm softness and smelled the strange, fresh, remembered sweetness of her skin. He saw also the wonderful smile that had always made her seem lovely to him. But in spite of this the loneliness struck right through him. For now that his father was dead his mother seemed changed, a different sort of person; still herself yet somehow much less than she had been before. And he knew now that although her smile was as sincere as possible, it was still somehow automatic, a gesture as natural and unconscious as the sway of her hips when she walked, and that behind it her mind was a stranger.

  Outside the street was hot in the afternoon sun, and the murmur of Montreal came in through the window.

  PART THREE

  1934

  THIRTY-ONE

  Huntly McQueen was giving a dinner party. For the first time in many months, the huge house he had purchased twelve years before, on the mountain-side opposite the Methuens, had guests in it. Daphne had just returned from England with her husband and the party was in their honour. It was the first time she had been home since her marriage two years previously to the Honourable Noel Fletcher. They had been living in London.

  The guests sat around a thick-legged mahogany table in a dining room which had given McQueen special satisfaction ever since he had come to possess it. A better example of a style he considered correct could be found nowhere else in the city. It was a thoroughly solid kind of room and he felt it reflected his personality. The walls were panelled shoulder-high in dark mahogany; above the panels rough tan wall paper reached to a lofty ceiling. The bay window at the end of the room was screened by draperies the colour of port wine with dust in it. From the ceiling hung a gigantic chandelier, at least two hundredweight of metal and cut-glass prisms, almost enough potential energy to smash the table to pieces if it ever fell. On one wall was a line engraving, four feet by three, of Sir Walter Scott meeting Robert Burns at the Edinburgh Literary Society. On another wall was the painting of McQueen’s mother which had formerly hung in his office. There were peonies under it now in a cut-glass vase.

  When dinner ended they filed into the drawing room. This was another lofty chamber, furnished with oriental rugs, three ormolu clocks, walnut tables, chairs covered with rose brocade, imitation Constables surrounded by ponderous gilt frames, two bronze statuettes on marble bases and several Dresden figurines. The walls were covered with more tan paper. Heavy red draperies were drawn across all the windows, though this side of the house was overlooked by nothing but McQueen’s own garden. He could never stand being in a lighted room with the windows unshaded.

  Janet Methuen entered the drawing room first, wearing a severe black evening gown. Daphne followed in white with gold trimming, svelte about the hips and breasts. Heather was in lime green, which suited her cheerful youth. After a few moments they were joined by the men: Noel Fletcher, a head taller than the others; General Methuen, who came
along with a stiff, stalking movement, both hands in his waistcoat to ease it; then McQueen with a benign smile on his wide face and one hand on the general’s shoulder.

  McQueen’s smile concealed a discomfort which during dinner had verged on irritation. Twenty years of increasing recognition by Montreal society had done more than mellow him. It had made him feel at one with his environment, which he was inclined to think was in many ways superior to any other in the world. It was an environment in which a man was not accustomed to being disturbed.

  But during dinner Noel Fletcher had exasperated him. It was not so much what he had said as what he hadn’t bothered to say. His arrogance was a new kind to McQueen. It went deeper than the arrogance one expected to find in certain Englishmen visiting what they considered a colony. Although only thirty-seven, Fletcher made everyone around him feel themselves to be his junior. He did it effortlessly, simply by existing in the same room with them.

  Then there was Daphne. The change she had made in herself seemed to McQueen to be deplorable. She had acquired a flippant way of speaking about everything. She dressed like a Parisienne, and in her own way she had become as overbearing as her husband. McQueen wondered what her grandfather thought about her now. The general was really marvellous. At seventy-seven years of age he had eaten a full dinner and had not once complained about any of his vital organs.

  “How about a rubber of bridge?” McQueen said.

  Daphne turned in the middle of the drawing room, one long-fingered hand on her golden hair. “But Huntly, aren’t there six of us?”

  The general stalked across the room to the screened fireplace, turned his back to it, his head on a level with the ormolu clock which centred the mantel. “We’ll take turns,” he said. To McQueen he added, “Always like to play with you. Keep your mind on the game. Damned if I can see why no one in our house can do it too.”