Two Solitudes

by Hugh Maclennan

  Heather put a dressing gown over her pajamas and curled up in a large armchair by the window. “How exactly like Miss Davenant to select Antony and Cleopatra for a school play!”

  “Poor lamb! She was frustrated and never knew it.” Daphne put her arms behind her head and her long fingers reached down to undo the buttons at the back of her dress. “I wonder what she’d think if she happened to see me now.”

  “Honest, Daffy–what’s it like to come back here?”

  Daphne smiled obliquely, her hands still behind her neck. “How do you think I’ve been doing?”

  “Depends on what you’re trying to do.”

  “Well, I feel about a million years old, of course. Funny, how we were all taught to believe in sin when we were young, wasn’t it?”

  Heather laughed, and the sound appeared to annoy Daphne. “Look at me,” she said. “Would you think a girl brought up by Mummy would ever be able to stand up to Noel and give him what he wants?”

  The smile left Heather’s face. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Well, I’ve done all right,” Daphne said. “And believe me–he knows what he wants. My God, when I remember those first few months…” She dropped her hands. “Help me, will you? This damned button is caught.”

  Heather got up and unbuttoned the dress. It made her think of the days when she had helped dress Daphne for parties, two years before she had been allowed to go to parties herself. Her hand touched the fine golden hair, lingered on it for a second, then dropped. She returned to her chair and Daphne pulled the dress over her head and gave her ruffled hair a toss. “Noel was interested in you,” she said. “Maybe you didn’t guess, but I could see it.”

  Heather felt herself flushing. “But Daffy–”

  “Never mind. He has an instinct with women, though. In spite of his manner. That’s why he’s such a shock. It’s always a surprise when a man like that…you should see his father. Noel’s not really a typical Englishman at all. He was always more at home on the continent, in spite of the English manner. His father’s the reason. The old boy’s as exciting as a play.”

  Heather felt unable to feed Daphne the cues she seemed to expect. “What kind of a play?”

  Daphne’s laugh was like running water. “You are a sweet thing! It would be a shame if Noel–”

  “I’m not a child,” Heather said impatiently. “For heaven’s sake, Daffy–when will you get over treating me as if I were a ten-year-old? What’s the matter with his father?”

  “Really, I suppose he’s an eighteen-carat beast, but he’s such a terribly brilliant man one doesn’t notice it.” She went on to tell Heather that he had been a major-general in the Indian Army. He was fanatically proud of his ancestry and had been reputed a competent officer. But his military career had ended with a court-martial when he was dismissed from the service for ordering his troops to fire on a crowd in Bombay. After that he spent a lot of time in Germany until the outbreak of war in 1914. Although he had served as an agent of the foreign office while in Berlin, it had not prevented him from acquiring a great admiration for the Prussians. He was living in Germany now.

  Heather watched her sister take off the rest of her clothes until she was sitting naked on the bed. “Do you mind if I ask you something?” she said quietly. “Do you really love Noel?”

  Daphne laughed. Her slim, lissom body, golden in the shaded light, moved gracefully as she threw her silk underclothes on to a chair. “Give me a dressing gown,” she said.

  Heather went to her closet, pulled a garment from a hanger and handed it to her sister. When she had wrapped it tight about her body, Daphne stood for a moment watching Heather’s face. “Love is an old-fashioned word, darling. Why do you bother using it?”

  “Do you know a better one?”

  Instead of answering Daphne crossed to the dressing table and sat down before the mirror. “It’s not been exactly easy,” she said after a moment, “going from Mummy’s hands into Noel’s.”

  Again Heather was aware that she was irritating Daphne in a way she couldn’t define.

  “I like being at the top of the class,” Daphne went on. “And you’ve got to be that to hold a man like Noel.” She scrutinized her face in the glass. “I never really understood him until I went up in a plane with him. He’s marvellous in the air. He’s–he’s new. A new species of human being.” In the mirror she caught a smile on Heather’s lips and it seemed to anger her. “My God–can’t you understand what I’m trying to tell you? A man like Noel always tries to break his women down. He’d despise me if he could and he hates me because he can’t.” She filled a dropper with yellow liquid from a small bottle, raised one eyelid and then the other, letting the lotion run beneath them. “Brilliance has been bred and beaten into him.”

  Heather watched as Daphne ran a finger over each eyebrow, pushed the hair off her temples and turned her head from side to side as she examined the line of her chin and neck. For the first time she saw that her sister’s beauty was a weapon, a destiny, all she had.

  “Never mind, darling,” Daphne went on. “One has to grow up. Sex is much more devious than simply going to bed with a man. After all, even greengrocers do that.”

  But Heather was no longer listening. Her whole attention was centred on the sudden new sense of freedom within her. All her life she had admired Daphne’s beauty, had tried to adopt her opinions, had respected her because everyone else had admired her. And now it was gone, that dependence. She was free to judge Daphne and Noel with her own mind, to feel the cold European years that had grown like a shell around Noel Fletcher, to feel them through Daphne’s words and the expression on her face. They had nothing whatever she wanted, for all they possessed was a cold surface beauty and his ability, motivated by a mechanical sensuality, to counterfeit the fire she knew was still alive in the world, somewhere, if she could find it.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The next morning Heather woke early, as though someone had called her. She lay still a moment, trying to remember what day it was and why it felt like a holiday. Then she recalled the conversation with Daphne. The rest of the house was still. She looked at the clock on her desk and saw how early it was, but she was wide awake and knew she could not return to sleep. She was filled with the clean excitement of going to new work on a clean morning in a clean place.

  In a few minutes she got out of bed and ran a bath, and then she lay in the warm water and looked up through the window over the tub to the branch of a horse-chestnut tree that grew beside the house. Its triads of heavy, thick leaves were bright in the sun. It was going to be a fine day, after days and nights of the steamy heat that so often collects in the river valley in summer like liquid in a cup.

  She lifted her arms and clasped them behind her head. The water stirred to the movement and she saw her legs shimmer and lengthen and shimmer back to normal again. She had always been self-conscious about her shortness; Daphne had called her chunky. Ever since she could remember she had longed for another four inches of height, and a slim waist descending through gentle curves at the hips into long lovely thighs. Like Daphne? Always like Daphne. But no longer. Now she seemed able for the first time to see herself as she was, not as she wanted to be. She supposed she was somewhat plain, but on the whole not too bad. Not the kind that men fell for easily, of course. A plain girl would have to be grateful for love all her life. It was too bad, in a way, because if she ever fell in love she would so much like to have something precious, something rare like Daphne’s beauty, to give in return. Was that a romantic idea, she wondered? On the whole she thought not; it seemed only plain common sense.

  She stirred in the water again. It was a fine day for something out of the ordinary. She decided to drive down the plain of the Eastern Townships to Lake Memphremagog to do some sketching. It would be good to get away from home even for a single day. The work would probably be poor, but for a little while she might be lucky and have the illusion that it was good.

  Ever since leaving college Heathe
r had missed regular work more than she had fancied it possible to miss anything. She had enjoyed every one of her four years at McGill, where she had taken honours in literature. Now she had a degree and nothing to do with it. Painting was something she had always done in one manner or another. She had always been able to draw well, and Janet had raised no objection to her taking lessons from anyone who could teach her anything in Montreal. But no one had ever taken her painting seriously except herself. She sometimes felt she might have been one of Jane Austen’s girls, with her single accomplishment. But how could her mother, or her mother’s friends, take her work seriously when they thought the pictures in McQueen’s house the ultimate in good taste?

  Heather was not bitter; she was not even unhappy. She had many friends, and it would be stupid to pretend they were not nice people. Yet none of them was able to keep her from feeling as though the realest part of her was beginning to fall asleep. Unless she did something drastic to wake up, the sleep would soon be sound. They tried to tell her in a roundabout way that it was her economic duty to be useless, but it made no sense. Who exacted such a duty? The capitalist class? Then capitalism was obviously all wrong.

  She plunged her legs in the water and rose from the tub, dried herself and left the bathroom in her bare feet. She dressed in her bedroom, putting on an old blue linen frock with large white buttons and tying up her chestnut hair with a white ribbon. Before leaving the room she glanced about; it was the only part of the house private to her. Four paintings hung on the walls, all in narrow, unpainted wooden frames. Three were her own: two simple landscapes of the Laurentian countryside, and the crayon head of a small boy. On the largest wall-space hung the nude torso of a Negro girl, done by a Czech painter she had met several years before. It was a bitter portrait, the breasts sagging and the ribs slatted like scantlings, one bony hand on a hip and a hopeless expression on the tired face.

  Janet had been horrified by the Negro girl. Its presence in Heather’s room led her to assume that her daughter was making some very unfortunate friends. She had asked McQueen to investigate the Czech and had been only partly relieved to discover that he was a quiet little man with a wife and three children and very little means. The Committee of Art had never heard of him, and Janet expostulated with Heather on the folly of buying a picture from a painter who was not only no good, but was impertinent as well. She hoped none of her friends would chance to see it hanging in the house.

  Heather’s books would have bothered Janet a great deal more than the Negro girl if she had ever read them. But books were generally safe things to leave around Janet. Heather paused now to select one to take along on the drive. If her sketching went stale she would want something to read. She glanced over the titles on the top shelf, her collection of postwar writers. All of D.H. Lawrence was there, all of Aldous Huxley and Dos Passos, some Hemingway and the social works of Bertrand Russell. She knew she was supposed to admire these writers for their realism, but actually she loved them for their style. She could not bear a book that lacked style.

  Remembering her talk of the previous evening with Daphne, Heather was seized with a fit of pure amusement. She had been relying on novelists for information about the world outside her cocoon, taking their characters quite literally instead of thinking about them as symbols, as she supposed she should have done. And now she had at last met a living character in Noel Fletcher, and he had turned out to be far more implausible than any of the people in the books on her shelves. Daphne could fit into the odd world of her favourite authors. Perhaps that was why Daphne and Noel managed to understand each other. Daphne could easily type for the wealthy nymphomaniac, and an amorous miner could get into bed with her and prove that she was no good in bed, and tell her so, and add bitterly that she was not female enough and not his woman anyway.

  Heather twinkled. I am a bitch, she thought, and then her smile widened as she looked at the American books. Art was a strange phenomenon; true in one way, utterly false in another. And the Americans were so direct about everything. Her fingers touched the backs of a row of them. I never thought of it before, she said to herself. They’re all men!

  What did it add up to, that her favourite writers were all men? It was certainly a man’s dream-world they all wrote about. Her mind played with it in parody. What a world! Everything was so lousy there was nothing you could do but take it; you could be a socialist and then the police proved their brutality by beating you up; you got some kind of venereal disease but you could take it; you seldom had a job and if you did you hated it, for everything was lousy, the men bitter, close-mouthed and inarticulate, with chips on their shoulders but sexually as potent as Hercules; to hell with everything because everything was so lousy you took a drink and kept on with it. But every girl you met rolled into bed with you if you were a man. Straight between the sheets. You were born with two strikes on you and the third was coming up. But if you were a girl in their man’s world you were struck out before you reached the plate unless you were a bitch. If you were a bitch you got by. If you were a nice girl your only way of proving it was by being good in bed, smooth and lovely under the cool sheets with rain on the windows in the dark. And then afterwards they got you for it. You died in childbirth or you died from something else because that was the way it was. And always it was tough for the man, standing by your bed close-mouthed and too manly to say anything while you died, but before the lights faded out you at least knew he could take that too.

  Heather pulled a copy of A Farewell to Arms from the shelf and opened it. Immediately she lost herself in the splendour of the prose, and forgot her irony. She read the first ten pages without moving, and then she closed the book and kept it in her hand as she left the room. It was vibrant, it was beautiful, it was life! She would give anything to be able to create something as good as that.

  She ate breakfast alone, and then she took her cabriolet out of the garage, drove down the hill and ran east along Sherbrooke to her studio in Labelle Street. It was a small room on the third floor of an old house. It cost her twenty dollars a month and many arguments with her mother. She took an easel, paints, brushes, pencils and a sketch-book to the car and set out through a network of narrow streets toward the river.

  It was not yet eight o’clock. Stores and offices were not open, but a trickle of shabby men flowed down the sidewalks on either side of the street, hands in pockets, clothes looking as if they had been rained on, some without collars or ties. Many of them were her own age. She felt acutely uncomfortable as she drove past them. If she had earned the money that purchased her car she would have felt a little better, but she had never earned a cent in her life. She wished she could help people like these men, but there seemed no way of doing so. The idea of serving in a canteen supported by the Junior League had revolted her after a week of working in one. Girls who spent more money on their complexions than these men spent on food for their families flattered their egos by passing out hand outs to the unemployed in their spare time. The implicit insult had horrified Heather; she had seen the sardonic glances of some of the men she had served. Lots of the girls were completely sincere about it, but to Heather the whole notion of charity was repulsive. There seemed no excuse for girls like herself to exist so long as there was any need for charity. McQueen would say it was the men’s own fault; he would add that they should have saved their money when they had it.

  Crossing the Jacques Cartier Bridge she saw the river blue against the white background of the grain elevators and the profile of the city stretching off to either side hazed by the heat. Too few factories were working to make much smoke. At the far end of the bridge the usual knot of hitch-hikers stood waiting for a lift. There were too many men of all ages for her to stop and single one out, so she drove by without looking. She followed the twisting road through Longueuil and then she was out in the open, running at sixty miles an hour across the flat plain with the sun in her eyes and on her lap. Maturing crops made the fields look painted green, and at the roadside white
daisies and purple clover edged the asphalt. Her hair blew out beyond the white ribbon that held it away from her face, like a flag in the wind.

  Soon the tall trees surrounding the church steeple in Chambly came over the horizon and grew steadily larger. She pressed the accelerator into the floor and the motor whined higher. The speedometer needle crept upwards and clung quivering to seventy-three. Blue water on Chambly Basin could be seen through trees, holding a million points of light from the sun. Her body was in alert and tense communion with the car, tuned to the high whine of the motor and the whirr of the trees, almost mindless with speed. She sang to herself:

  “I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he,

  I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three…”

  It was like Flanders: just as flat, but greener, more innocent, without the Flanders sadness. She raised her foot from the accelerator and the car slowed down into the village of Chambly Basin, past wooden houses hugging the street, under a garland of Papal banners strung across the road. In the further extension of Chambly Canton a priest crossed in front of her looking hot in his black soutane.

  When she reached the tip of Memphremagog two hours later the lake looked cool and very blue in its pan of surrounding mountains. She turned south down the far shore of the lake toward Georgeville and finally stopped at a spit of land, found the location she wanted, and took her easel and kit from the car. She set the easel in the lee of a birch grove so the sun would be off her back and she could have a clear view of the lake. Her hands on her hips, her short legs apart, she stood analyzing the rhythm of the landscape.

  Today’s light made all the contours as soft as a Constable. It was the last thing she was interested in painting. She wanted the lines and colours hard and brilliant, as they so often were in this part of the country. After a time she began sketching, but from the beginning she realized that nothing new was being created under her pencil. Mosquitoes buzzed about her ears and she had to stop work to slap them off. More mosquitoes arrived and began to bite her arms. She crushed them one by one and doggedly continued with her work, but more mosquitoes came in their place, and before an hour had passed she gave up. She went to the car and changed into a bathing suit, with a cow in a far pasture for audience.