Paul sat down on the chair again and looked at her intently. “From what I’ve heard of McQueen, I’d hate to agree with him, but he’s got something all the same. You haven’t lived a rotten life. People haven’t been rotten to you. Why feel guilty about it?”
“I don’t. You don’t understand at all. People have been altogether too nice to me.”
He laughed shortly and she tossed her head. “Don’t despise me, Paul. It’s not my fault if I’ve never had to worry where my next meal was coming from.”
He picked up the two tea-cups and refilled them, handed her one and sat down again. “You know as well as I do there’s no meaning in that kind of niceness,” she went on. “It doesn’t cost anything.”
Paul gave his attention to the tea in his cup, though he didn’t drink it, and Heather pushed the hair back from her temples. Silence grew between them and a sense of disappointment weighed on her. After a while she said, “Do you suppose anything ever comes off the way you really want it?”
“I’m stubborn. I think sometimes it can.”
“If you really believe that, it’s wonderful.”
He felt the tension rising inside. “But it takes time. That’s the trouble. God, it takes time!” He was sitting quite still, and his stillness was giving more force to his words than he realized. “An artist’s brain is like a distillery. A distillery takes years to produce anything but hooch.”
“And I don’t take the time?”
“Nobody does any more.”
Her eyes twinkled at his seriousness. “In other words, I should go through hell and suffer first, and then try to paint?”
Paul paid no attention to her amusement. “Forget the suffering,” he said. “There’s nothing romantic about it.” He leaned forward. “You’re a happy person. You’ve got joy inside you. For God’s sake don’t be ashamed of it. The world is dying for the lack of it.”
Heather was surprised by the turn of his mind. All the students she had liked in college had been socialists, and she had accepted their point of view easily. She had never known anyone who was poor or worked with his hands, but she had taken it for granted that Paul would be bitter and even resent her because she had money. She wondered if he had never read Marx because he had been brought up a Catholic. She watched him as he pulled more of her pictures from the stack against the wall and studied them one by one. Some he dismissed with a glance, others he set on the easel and looked at from a distance. When he had gone through the lot he put them back and began to talk again. Heather listened quietly without interrupting him. If she wanted to paint, he said, she must look inside herself. If the mess of the world had crawled inside, paint it, because then it was hers. But never pretend it was there when she knew damn well it wasn’t. Did Mozart look out his window at the slums of Vienna when he wrote the E-Flat Symphony? She had one source to draw from, herself. An artist had nothing worth offering the world, absolutely nothing, except distilled parts of himself. If what she had was joyful, offer it, and to hell with the class struggle. No politician could be moved by art; all they were interested in was power.
He looked down at her. “But it takes time,” he added. “It’s got to grow inside first.”
Heather felt abashed. She also felt somewhat annoyed because he dismissed so easily the ideas she had worked hard to acquire. But her annoyance disappeared in the face of her natural good humour, and she turned her thoughts to the personal problems he represented, problems she had never considered before. “Thank you, Paul,” she said, and her face broke into a smile again. “I could believe you’ve thought that out long before this afternoon. What have you tried to do–and found it took time?”
This was touching his privacy. Instead of answering he looked at her curled up on the sofa and he thought how much he’d like to stop talking and sit beside her and relax. He looked at his shoes instead. “I want to write,” he said. “I hate admitting it. Everyone wants to get into print these days.”
Heather knew he had exposed his vulnerability, and suddenly she knew how he felt about many things. The simple statement had removed a subtle barrier between them. He no longer baffled her and she no longer felt that he was making her an outsider. A wave of gratitude warmed her. When she spoke again her voice had an intimate naturalness like the child he remembered in Saint-Marc. “How long do you think it will take you, Paul?”
“They don’t let a surgeon loose on the public until he’s been trained seven years and certified. A writer’s job is just as difficult, technically.”
He felt he could sit still no longer, but he forced himself to do so. He knew hardly anyone with whom he could discuss written books, much less writing. Sometimes it seemed just as well. There was so much self-flattery in the idea of writing books; it made him superstitiously afraid of telling anyone that this was what he wanted to do. His own voice had surprised him as he made the admission to a girl who was almost a stranger.
“It’s not just that I want to be a writer,” he said. “I told you the other night I wanted to be a physicist. I’d like to be an architect, too. Every time I really look at a building in Montreal it makes me cringe. The only buildings in this whole country that suit it are the barns. On the whole, I’d rather be an architect than anything else.”
“Why don’t you, then?”
“I told you–I’m no good in maths. My mind doesn’t work that way.”
The tension rose to his throat and he got up and began pacing the room. It was impossible to sit still any longer and watch her. She made him want to talk about himself, for a few minutes to break the solitude. To change the subject, he told her that he’d been given a berth on a ship that was sailing in a week from Halifax. He stood looking down at her, and then it overwhelmed him like a bursting wave, the quality he had always found in Yardley, the quality that had permitted his nature to unfold without being struck back, without spilling. She met his glance and held it, and after an appreciable moment she said, “It seems such a waste. With your degree you could teach.”
He shook his head. “I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to see something else. Besides, there aren’t even teaching jobs now.”
“Are you very bitter?”
He began pacing again. “Sometimes,” he said from the other end of the room. “But bitterness has stopped making sense.”
“It ought to be easy for everyone to have a job and plenty of everything, but people like Huntly McQueen just sit on their tails and do nothing.”
He gave a short, derisive laugh, and then he turned and grinned at her.
“You think I’m childish, don’t you?” she said.
“No. Only optimistic.”
“But I’m not at all!”
He continued to laugh at her. “You’re probably a socialist,” he said. “Or think you are.”
“But Paul!” She flushed with anger. “Why should you be against socialism? Why should a man like you agree with McQueen?”
“I’m not against it. And so far as I know, I don’t agree with McQueen, either.”
“But you said…”
“I’m sorry, Heather. I don’t want to argue with you.”
She looked away, baffled and hurt. Then she picked up the tea-cups and carried them to the paint-splashed sink and let water run into them.
“You make me want to talk about myself,” he said, still from the other end of the room. “Like your grandfather. It’s simply that…” He hesitated. “I don’t seem able to look at politics as if it were a science. I look at people instead.”
She kept her back turned to him. “But doesn’t the system produce the people?”
“It would be pleasant to think so. At least you could change a system.”
“But you don’t think so?”
When he made no answer she turned around to look at him. His face was in shadow, his back to the window, and his hands were clenched in his pockets. She returned to the sofa and curled up on one end again, and when she motioned him back he dropped down onto the oth
er end, his knees spread and his hands clenched between them.
“Maybe it’s just the way I’ve lived,” he said. “Maybe I’m wrong.”
“I asked you the other night what you’d been doing. Will you tell me now?”
Their eyes met. He looked away and back again. For a time he said nothing, then keeping his eyes on the floor he began talking, almost as though to himself. Ever since the family had moved from Saint-Marc, he told her, he had had no real home. Everything seemed to come back to that. He’d no place to go. At Frobisher it was all right, but then his father died and they were very poor. Gradually he found out what had ruined his father, mainly the fact that even when he had his land and was a member of parliament, he’d never found out how to get out of the strait-jacket of his own nature. No one deliberately trapped him. Whatever it was, it was inside himself.
He paused and Heather felt a warmth spreading within her, entering softly like a visitor afraid of being noticed. Paul needed her, and the knowledge was new and rewarding. But she sensed a peculiar dominance in him, and an increased awareness of his strangeness, and she wanted to hold her breath, to say nothing that would cause him to with draw again.
“I can barely remember your father,” she said quietly.
He seemed not to hear her. But he added that his father was a remarkable man. He would have been completely at home in nineteenth-century Europe, and that made him about fifty years ahead of his time in Canada. Paul had found some of his papers, and only then was he able to appreciate the quality of his father’s mind. But the set-up had been too much for him.
“I must be stupid,” Heather said, “but I don’t understand. What do you mean?”
“You aren’t French. You aren’t in a minority. You English have always been on top of the world. You don’t know the feeling of the strait-jacket.”
“Do you feel in a strait-jacket?”
“In a couple of them. If you have no money you’re always in one. But a French-Canadian is born in one. We’re three million people against a whole continent.” He looked around at her, smiling to take the drama from his words. “I don’t intend to stay this way.”
His voice became low and slow as he picked his words carefully. He had found one of her pencils on the couch beside him and he began to twist it in his fingers, end for end, end for end.
“When I was a kid, in the old library in Saint-Marc, I used to read stories from the Odyssey in a book of my father’s. I realized a long while later that the Odyssey is a universal story. It applies on all sorts of levels. Science and war–and God knows what else–have uprooted us and the whole world is roaming. Its mind is roaming, Heather. Its mind is going mad trying to find a new place to live.” He got up suddenly and went back to walking the floor. “It sounds melodramatic. But it’s true. I feel it–right here in myself. I’ve been living in the waiting room of a railway station.”
In the sunlit air outside the window a hawker was calling fish for sale. The man’s voice, roaring an atrocious French, reverberated along the street from house to house. Paul returned to the sofa, and when he sat down he looked into her grey eyes. Had he intruded himself on her? Had he lost anything? Searching her face, he knew it was all right. When she asked if he wanted to go back to Saint-Marc he smiled and said that not even Marius thought he could go home by going back to Saint-Marc.
He told her a little about Marius, not because she asked but because he wanted to tell her. Marius was married, with more children than he could afford to support. When the Tallard land was lost he was old enough to understand what he was losing, but his idea of going home was to be a successful politician. He’d nursed his hatred of the English so carefully it was now a pretty fine flower. He could speak perfect English, but if anyone addressed him in English he affected not to understand a word of it. What he really wanted, of course, was vengeance. The only thing he really loved was a crowd. He always believed they were with him, and for a few minutes they generally were, but ninety per cent of them would go off and vote Liberal no matter what he said. “If Marius were a European he might get somewhere,” Paul said. “But not here. There are others like him. They’re the safety valves for the minority. That’s all they are, and God help them, they never know it. When one fizzles out another comes to take his place.”
Suddenly talk seemed stupid. He turned and took her in his arms and his lips found hers. Desire broke within him like an explosion. He felt the firmness of her back against the palms of his hands, her breasts yielding against his chest, her hips with an involuntary movement surging in to him, and for a second their thighs and shoulders were almost one. Then she pushed him away and swung back out of reach.
“Please, no,” she said. But her face was filled with wonder. “Not now. It’s…it’s not…”
He looked about the room as though it were a cage, then he crossed once more to the window and Heather watched the line of his head and back as he leaned out. She wondered at the queer, sudden sense of fear he had given her. She felt as if she had never been touched before.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “There’s still a fine lot of day left outside.”
As he turned he saw her sitting upright smoothing her frock. Then she looked up and smiled, her wide lips making her whole face generous and open, bringing back to it a young gaiety without a trace of smouldering emotion. He felt overcome with gratitude because that was how she was.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s. My car’s downstairs. Let’s drive. Let’s even go for a swim, if you’d like.”
“Where?”
“Well, I know a place in Dorval. It’s the house of a friend of mine. They’re away for a month. It’s got a beach.”
“All right. You’ll have to stop at my place to pick up my suit.”
They went hand in hand down to the car. On the way to Dorval they decided to get sandwiches and beer at a roadside stand, and by the time they reached Lac Saint-Louis the sun was moving low, but it was still warm. Heather parked her car in the driveway of a large house on the lake front and led Paul through a garden to a private beach. At one end of the beach stood a boathouse. Beside the door Heather lifted a stone and found a key under it, unlocked a padlock and led the way in. She pointed to a pair of canoes upturned on the floor. “You undress here,” she said. “I’ll go upstairs.”
“This is communism,” he said, “the way you use your friends’ property. Didn’t they even leave a dog here?”
“No dog,” she said, her voice coming through the floor above.
Paul removed his clothes and laid them over one of the canoes. He was in his swimming trunks and on the beach before Heather came down. They swam for a bit, but the water was uninvitingly muddy and it smelled flatly of reeds, so they went back to the beach and lay and watched the sun ruddy-gold over the lake. From where they were it was difficult to realize that Lac Saint-Louis was part of the Saint Lawrence. Relaxed by the swim and the sun, Paul lay with his eyes half-closed as he watched a red-and-white lake boat ploughing upstream. She was ugly like all of them; the propeller foamed as she passed slowly up the channel marked by red cone-buoys; soon she would be in the Soulanges, passing up through a narrow canal with fields flush with her decks. Half a mile away her upper works would seem to be sliding miraculously over the surface of farms.
One summer he had worked on a lake boat and he knew the route. It was strange recalling it now. He could remember only a few moments out of the general routine, but they were so vivid he would never forget them. One was his first trip to the lakehead. A sunset burned through Fort William and Port Arthur and hurled gigantic shadows of the grain elevators forward on to the trembling waters of Thunder Bay. After the grain had been hosed into the ship, they moved away, and as he looked back another grain-ship was caught in the flaming corona of the sunset like a black speck in a huge eye, the waters of the lake extending from the sun in a nervous, desolate plain, radiating into the darker east. As night closed over the ship the colour had died, and nothing was l
eft but the sounds of millions of shallow waves turning over in the darkness, an astringent wind keening blindly out of the empty forest to the north, the quick spatterings of lifeless fresh water whipped by the wind over the waist of the ship and wetting the deck. It was only a few days later, away from this sense of desolation in the heart of a continent, that they were passing so close to shore in eastern Ontario he could look into the windows of houses when the lights were on after dark. He had seen men reading in armchairs and children going to bed, and once a naked woman had thoughtfully combed her hair before a window, her lips open as though she were singing to herself. The ship passed and left her there with a peculiar immortality in his mind, strangely transfigured.
Paul’s thoughts came back to the present. Next week he would step aboard another ship in Halifax, quite different from the lake boats. He had no idea where she was bound. It might be Europe or South America, maybe only Newfoundland or New York. All he knew for certain was the fact that she was a four-thousand-ton freighter of British registry called Liverpool Battalion.
Yardley had said the Limeys were all right to ship with. He had added there would most likely be a Nova Scotian aboard, and if he turned out to be the cook, all Paul would have to do would be to show his appreciation of the old province and the cook would be with him, hair and shoulders against any son-of-a-bitch of a squarehead that shaped up to him.
Paul smiled to himself. It was eighteen years since Yardley had been at sea. He wondered if the pictures he gave of it would turn out to be true, or merely a part of Yardley himself. Only once, in all the countless stories Yardley had told him, had there been anything like tragedy or grimness. So apparently things were what a man’s mind made them. You had to find out for yourself.
“What are you thinking about?” Heather’s voice came to him softly, floating into the red mist the sun made on his closed lids, floating in among the moving nets of darkness that crossed and recrossed the redness.
Two Solitudes Page 36