Two Solitudes

by Hugh Maclennan

  Out in the water of the lake she felt wonderfully lazy and content, floating on her back, her breasts buoyantly independent under her suit, her thighs idly moving to keep her body balanced while she lay and looked up at the sky. The water caressed her nerves like a multitude of softly flowing fingers. It was good to be alone. At such a moment it was easy to see that she must get away from Montreal. She wished her painting were good enough to serve as an excuse for a year of study in New York, but she couldn’t persuade even herself of that, much less her mother.

  She stroked in to the shore, the water foaming in a steady swirl behind her fluttering calves and feet, then boiling up amber-coloured about her ankles as she waded into the beach over the stones. She rolled her suit down to her waist and lay on her back in the sun. This was what her painting had come to, lying in the sun doing nothing. But the sun was magnificent; hot and dominant it pressed her into the ground. She loved the feeling of well-being it gave her. A stream of thoughts passed through her mind, none of them very intense, and she wondered idly if she could have become a real artist if she had ever suffered. It was foolish to phrase her problem like that, foolish and romantic. She turned over to let the sun tan her back.

  A mosquito tickled her thigh and she brushed it off. Another came and another, and she stood up, beating them off, her body naked to the waist, her arms, legs and chest tawny brown, her ribs and stomach white. She heard a creak on the road about a hundred yards off where the birch grove ended. A farmer was standing in a moving wagon holding the reins while the horse dragged slowly in her direction. She thought she could see the man grinning at her, but the distance was too great to be sure. She ducked out of sight, and when the wagon was gone she dressed and drove back along the lake to Magog. The rest of the family had finished dinner when she returned that night, happy and silent with the memory of her day.

  THIRTY-SIX

  The heat wave continued to the end of the month. Every evening thunderheads bulged over Mount Royal, their sides purple and massive; shadows were dark as oil over lawns and streets, and through a few minutes of silence the birds called down the rain. The same thing happened every evening for a week. But each night, as soon as the sun had gone down, the thunderheads passed without breaking, stars came out in a hot sky, and the next morning the sun steamed the city again. Then, the last night in July, the storm broke. Lightning split a tree just above the head of the street where the Methuens lived, and McQueen sat in his library with his cat on his knees and brooded over the elements.

  Heather felt exhilarated by the rain. It whipped the house in loud, colourless sheets and poured down the windows so fast the panes looked like opaque slabs of melting ice. She sat awhile trying to read, and then she went to her room, put on a raincoat, tied a scarf over her hair and ran out through the downpour to the garage. She put up the top of the cabriolet and secured the side-curtains, then drove out and held the car in second gear down the hill. The gutters were foaming with water and falling leaves spun down through the funnels cut by her headlights through the rain. She drove for nearly an hour to the eastern end of the island and back again, and finally she drew up before the old house on University Street where her grandfather lived.

  The intensity of the rain had lessened. She ran through it up the steps, and then she opened the door into a small vestibule, passed through into the common hall of the house and pressed a doorbell beside the first door on the right.

  “Child!” Yardley said when he opened the door. “What a night for you to remember where I live!”

  As she kissed him the rain on her skin wet his cheeks. He closed the door behind her and she took off her dripping coat, then dropped into a comfortable chair, her cheeks flushed with the weather, her wet hair curling near the ears and on her forehead. “I’m saturated,” she said. She pulled off her rubbers and tossed them onto the cold hearth, one after the other, and they lay where they fell, limp and glistening. “But it’s a wonderful night out, just the same. I love rain.”

  Yardley hung her coat on a hook behind the door of a closet. His hair was white now, it receded far above his forehead, but it still covered the top and sides of his head, and it still bristled. He looked very little older than he had done the year he first went to Saint-Marc. His ears stuck out as always and lines fanned out from the corners of his eyes when he smiled. But farming had left a mark on him; his shoulders were bowed with a permanent stoop and his hands were gnarled. In his city clothes he looked like a farmer dressed for Sunday.

  As he limped to a chair near Heather she watched him, and after he was settled he returned her regard, his eyes twinkling behind his glasses. “It’s good to be here, Grampa,” she said. Her glance fell on the mantelpiece, above which hung a framed drawing of a full-rigged ship, and travelled to the windows. “You do need some flowers to brighten it up, and something more cheerful in the way of curtains at your windows.”

  Yardley grinned. “I’m surprised at you, sounding like your mother. For some reason I don’t know, she thinks I ought to move to a larger place.”

  “Oh, well–you know Mummy.” But secretly Heather agreed with her mother. Yardley had only two rooms, neither of them with much light or space. The front room had a good hearth and high ceilings, but it was cluttered with tables, chairs and the bookshelves. Behind a pair of folding doors, curtained with heavy draperies, was the bedroom, and beyond it was an alcove containing a sink, ice-box and gas burners.

  “Why don’t you come down to Labelle Street with me?” Heather said. “It’s sort of far away from the campus, of course.”

  “That’s it. I’d rather–” He left his preference unstated as the draperies over the bedroom door were parted and a young man appeared between them. Heather stared and the young man looked at her while Yardley chuckled. “You two know each other,” he said. “Don’t need any introduction from me.”

  Both smiled hesitantly, and then the young man turned his head to look at an old photograph of a woman and two small girls that stood on a table in one corner of the room. At that moment Heather remembered his father. He had the same high forehead.

  “Hello, Paul,” she said shyly. She searched his face quickly, and immediately forgot about his father. His hair was dark and wiry, his forearms corded with muscles. His eyes, large and brown, looked straight at her. With a flash of recognition she saw that he was poor and objectively conscious of it, but that he had managed to make poverty contribute something instead of taking away what he had.

  As he smiled, lines cut his lean face about the corners of his mouth, making it quick with vitality. “I remember you now,” he said simply. “We used to have fun in Saint-Marc.”

  “It seems a life-time ago.”

  “Sixteen years.”

  “I’d have had to count up all sorts of things to know it was sixteen years.”

  Paul came forward into the room, set the bottle of beer he was carrying on a table and went back through the draperies for another glass. While he was out of the room Yardley and Heather looked at each other, Yardley still grinning, but they said nothing. Paul came back and poured two glasses of foaming ale. Yardley shook his head when Paul held one toward him, but Heather accepted it. And then Paul drew a straight-backed chair toward the hearth and sat facing them, shyness catching hold of him as the immediate need for action ceased.

  Heather broke the silence by an irrelevant comment. “What are you studying now, Grampa?”

  Yardley looked from one to the other. “Greek. Paul’s helping me.”

  “Greek? Whatever for?”

  Yardley grinned at Paul. “Well, mostly because I couldn’t take astronomy. Thet’s what I wanted. After all, I’m a navigator and I’ve been looking at the stars in kind of a personal way most of my life. The professor I talked to looked me over and thought I was crazy, and then he said they didn’t have any astronomy courses in the summer school. So I asked him what was the hardest thing a beginner could take up, and he said Greek, still not taking me seriously. I remembered th
at Cato started learning Greek when he was eighty-eight, so I thought maybe I wasn’t too old to start at seventy-six. A man’s brain goes to seed if he don’t use it.”

  “Grampa, you’re wonderful!”

  “Well, thet’s a better word than what your mother’s been calling me all these years. Preposterous, she says I am, and she got it from your grandmother. The first time your grandmother called me thet I looked it up in the dictionary. It don’t apply to me at all. ‘Contrary to nature,’ Webster calls it.”

  The strained atmosphere of the room had eased. Paul and Heather both laughed with Yardley, but beyond the sound of his voice they were each trying to adjust memories of themselves as children to the persons they now were. Heather’s face was openly eager and friendly, Paul’s more withdrawn.

  “Where’s Daffy tonight?” Yardley said.

  “She’s home playing double solitaire with Mummy.”

  “My grandson-in-law still around?”

  “No. He went down to the States on business. He wants to see you when he comes back. I think he really meant it.”

  “You remember Daphne, Paul?”

  “Yes, of course.” Affection showed openly on his face as he looked at the old man. Heather glanced at his half-profile. She liked his mouth. The lips were generous, somewhat full, but firmly set and controlled. His face reminded her of someone she felt she knew well; not the boy she had known years ago in Saint-Marc, but someone else. The resemblance haunted her for a second, then vanished as he took out a package of cigarettes and offered her one. As he lit it she noticed that his hands were hard, the fingers powerful, and that the thumb of the left hand was oversize, as though it had been injured.

  “Daphne’s married?” he said.

  “To a Limey,” Yardley replied. “With an accent you’d pay good money to hear.”

  “Seriously, Grampa,” Heather interrupted, “you’re not really learning Greek?”

  “Well, I don’t know how much I’m learning, but I’m well past the alphabet. I’ve certainly got a good tutor.”

  “He doesn’t know yet what he’s let himself in for,” Paul said.

  She looked at him with interest and wonder in her face. “Where did you learn Greek?”

  “The usual place–at school.”

  Heather flushed.

  “Paul’s a graduate of the University of Montreal,” Yardley said, looking from one to the other of his guests. “Put himself through, too. Don’t you ever read the papers, Heather? Paul’s a big-time hockey player.”

  “Not big-time,” Paul said. “Just medium.”

  “You could have been big-time,” Yardley said.

  Heather met Paul’s eyes and her shyness returned. They glanced away from each other, Paul to look at Yardley and Heather to study the beer in her glass. “I’d heard you were a hockey player,” she added hesitantly. “Do you know Alan Farquhar? He played for McGill.”

  Paul thought a moment. “There are quite a few players around.”

  “He said you were awfully good.”

  “Well, I ought to be. I played sixty-four games a season for four years. Besides, I was paid to be good.” He made the statement quite simply, as though he were stating facts no longer important to him. “But I’m through with hockey now.”

  “Didn’t you like it?”

  “I guess I must have.”

  Heather was becoming more accustomed to him now. His voice was pitched low, but there was an underlying ruggedness in it. She noticed again the corded muscles of his forearms and thought what a fine study they would make for a crayon sketch.

  “Better get some more beer,” Yardley said. “We’ll not do any more Greek tonight.”

  Heather got to her feet. “Grampa! I’m sorry. I’m spoiling your evening. I’ll go now.”

  “Sit down, child,” he said. “I don’t want to work tonight. You’re doing me a lot of good.”

  Paul came back from the ice-box with a dark green bottle in one hand and a glass in the other. Heather watched him take the cap off the bottle and fill three glasses, gauging the bead to the exact level of the top. She was acutely aware that she had been an intimate companion of this strange man in her childhood. When Paul held out the third glass to Yardley, he took it and Paul went back to the chair by the hearth.

  For over an hour the talk went on, Yardley and Heather doing most of it. From time to time Paul glanced at her. Without knowing what she was doing, Heather was relaxing the tension inside him. He felt it and it disturbed him, along with the memories she called up in his mind. Her presence seemed to be saying, “Tell me and I’ll understand, and that will be enough because I like you.” He looked at his shoes and sat very still, an ability he had inherited from his mother. It fooled people into thinking he was calm, and all the time the tension grew inside.

  For a long time now it had been growing, all through his teens, and getting steadily tighter. It woke him nearly every morning except when he was physically exhausted after a hard game. It was more than a physical state of nerves; it was a quality of mind, breeding a kind of solitude of its own. Soldiers’ books written on their experiences in the war talked about the same thing: not so much the tightness produced by near danger as the way they had to lock a door inside themselves to prevent what mattered from spilling out. You had a choice: you could let it spill out, you could pretend it wasn’t there, or you could guard and protect it and suffer with it. If you did either of the first two things you were finished. You became an empty pail if you let it spill out, or what counted inside you dry-rotted if you pretended it wasn’t there. In the latter case, you knew it yourself even if others didn’t see it, and then you were finished.

  He noticed the glasses were empty and quietly rose to refill them. The other two went on talking. This was not one of his times to say much. He liked to talk, but he had also acquired the faculty of sitting in on a conversation, saying nothing and yet appearing a full part of it.

  Heather said, “Truly, if I hear Huntly McQueen tell me I mustn’t be hasty once more, I’ll do something to him. When you were young, Grampa, did all the older people tell you not to be hasty?”

  Paul thought: so you feel that way too! Then maybe you know what it is?

  Yardley grinned. “Most often they told me to get a move on.”

  Heather said, “Some time I’m going to do a cartoon of Huntly McQueen sitting on top of a boiling kettle on the summit of Mount Royal telling the water it hasn’t been boiling long enough to be sure the heat’s going to last. It’s too bad there aren’t any really good cartoonists of human nature in Canada.”

  Paul thought: is that knowledge of hers real? Does she know it comes down to people every time? Does she realize that the whole trouble now is that everyone is trying to make the facts fit their feelings instead of making their knowledge fit the facts? The sheep call themselves idealists, and the wolves call themselves realists. Does she know anyone like Marius? Would she understand that Marius finished himself the moment he began blaming everyone else for what he lacked himself? In Marius’ mind, those who don’t agree with him are traitors. What his theories add up to is as crude as voodoo. But if they shut you out everywhere, what do they expect to get but voodoo? For four years the depression has been screaming at people to surrender and go into the woods together and beat the tom-tom. What has happened in Germany is only what happens to any single man when he lets what matters spill out. So now there’s a gigantic involuntary conspiracy to make everyone surrender in the name of everyone else, in the name of some abstract idea. You’re young and they tell you it’s dangerous to be in a hurry to live. You work for an education and they tell you it’s superfluous. Gradually you begin to think of the whole world as “they,” and then you feel madness rise, and you want to say to hell with them, and let what matters spill out, and go into the woods and beat the tom-tom with the rest.

  He watched Heather from under his long, dark lashes. He was as suspicious of words as Marius was suspicious of people. She was too natural an
d easy in her nature to know in her bones what her words really meant. Besides, she was a rich girl with background. How could she know?

  Yardley concealed a yawn with the back of his hand and Heather got to her feet once more. “I’ve stayed too long, Grampa. Forgive me.”

  Yardley shook his head, his eyes twinkled for a moment, and then became serious as he studied her. “Come a little oftener, Heather. And a little sooner. I’ve got so used to getting up at dawn thet ten o’clock to me is like past midnight to you.”

  “I’ve wanted to come oftener, Grampa. Honestly I have. Daffy and I tried twice last week, but you weren’t in either time. And since you insist on not having a telephone…”

  Both Yardley and Paul stood watching her, then Paul went into the bedroom and returned with his coat and necktie. “Funny thing,” Yardley was saying, “up in Cape Breton I once talked over what must have been the first telephone there ever was. Up in Bell’s place there. Thet was years ago. We used to sit on the wharf and talk about all sorts of things. He was a wonderful man. But I got a prejudice against telephones all the same. Maybe my ears are too big for them. Besides, look what they do to a business man in an office. Specially if he’s got a lot of them.”

  Paul adjusted his tie and waited for Heather to make the first move to the door.

  “Why don’t you ever come to see us?” she said to her grandfather. “I’ll call for you with the car, any day you say.”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking thet maybe after this year I’ll ship out of here for good and go back home.”

  Paul moved to the door and paused with his hand on the knob.

  “But I thought you’d sold the farm,” Heather said.