Two Solitudes

by Hugh Maclennan

What Heather needed was a stable husband to make her toe the line. If she married this Paul Tallard, they would both sponge on her mother. It stood to reason the fellow was no good if he hadn’t a decent job at this age. The moment they got their hands on the Methuen house they would sell it to some contractor and the contractor would demolish it. Then he would build a ten-story apartment house on the lot. Another house on the same level as his own, a thirty-room stone mansion with a conservatory and sixteen gargoyles, had been demolished last spring, and the mahogany panelling of its dining room had been sold to a funeral parlour. That was what happened nowadays if you let your standards down. He had worked hard all his life. And for what? To be able to associate on equal terms with people like the Methuens.

  McQueen got up and wiped his forehead vigorously with a towel, then took a muffler from his bag and wrapped it around his neck. He felt much better now. He wouldn’t be surprised if he escaped the cold after all.

  He sat down and crossed his legs. There was nothing to worry about once you figured things out. He would stop this nonsense, all right. Paul Tallard might be a socialist, but he couldn’t marry without money and he couldn’t get it unless he had a job. Janet would see that Heather’s allowance was stopped if she tried any nonsense. But then–McQueen chuckled at his own sagacity–Paul Tallard was going to have a job! McQueen intended to be perfectly fair. He would do the best he could for the boy. There was a job in British Columbia and he might consider himself very lucky to get it. If he worked hard enough, he might even think of getting married in ten years. But not to Heather! Oh, no! Once they were separated by three-quarters of a continent, Heather would soon come to her senses. Later on in life she would thank him for what he had done for her. He and Janet had been agreed on that.

  McQueen picked up the newspaper and began to read. After five minutes he dropped it on the floor. Things were getting to be a nightmare. You gave a scoundrel like Hitler an inch and he tried to take everything. If a major war broke out it wouldn’t matter where a man’s money was. The government would get it somehow.

  It particularly exasperated McQueen not to know what was going to happen, not to be positive. He had been positive enough a year ago. He had maintained after Munich that Mr. Chamberlain had shown Hitler the meaning of true states manship. But now? Last week Chislett had told him in confidence that if war broke out the government had no intention of making it attractive to business. Things were certainly bad if a man like Chislett forgot himself sufficiently to make a remark like that. It was the kind of phrase that could be given a nasty twist if the wrong people got hold of it. Well, if war did come, McQueen was prepared to thank God that the Prime Minister was an able man who knew how to keep his mouth shut.

  Looking for something less disturbing to read, McQueen picked up the weekly. On the first two pages he was informed that the true cause of the world crisis was the selfish decadence of capitalists. They had made a mess out of their own affairs. They had sold Manchuria, Abyssinia and Czechoslovakia down the river, and now they were hoist with their own petard.

  In a rage, McQueen hurled the magazine across the compartment. The Mounted Police ought to keep that sort of perjury out of Canada. So he was decadent, was he? So he was supporting Hitler and Mussolini against the Bolsheviks? He’d like to see the socialist who would dare make a statement like that in a court of law. He had worked hard all his life, had saved his money, had never got drunk or gone with women. If anyone was to blame, blame the socialists. Hitler was a socialist himself. He had always said so, and he defied anyone to refute him.

  His sense of outrage mounted. Let Hitler make another move! Just let him dare! Deep in his core, McQueen felt the reverberations of fighting ancestors.

  FORTY-NINE

  On Monday morning McQueen reached his office before nine-thirty, and without taking time to glance at his letters, he ordered his secretary to get Paul Tallard on the telephone and tell him to present himself at his office at eleven forty-five.

  Since the death of Miss Drew four years ago, McQueen had never been satisfied with the way his office functioned. He had hired three different secretaries and had fired them all. His present one was a silent-mannered, prematurely bald man who was understood to have had a bad time during the depression. He was better than the others, but McQueen did not think much of him.

  He picked up the Gazette, glanced over the headlines and saw that the news had become even worse. He was about to drop the paper into the wastebasket when the secretary returned.

  “Well, Hudson–what is it now?”

  “I spoke to Mr. Tallard, sir. He–he told me he was busy and wouldn’t come.”

  McQueen gave Hudson a blank stare. “Did you make yourself clear who it was wanted to see him?”

  “I certainly did, Mr. McQueen. His manner was very brusque, if I may say so.”

  McQueen grunted. “Call him again. When you get him on the wire, connect me at once.”

  Hudson departed noiselessly, sliding out the door on the balls of his feet. McQueen grunted again. He wouldn’t even trust Hudson to mail a letter without specific orders. It was what he had always said, the people who had been unemployed in the depression had so little confidence left they were no good for anything.

  The call came through and he picked up the telephone. He talked in his blandest voice for a full minute, then frowned as he received nothing but a monosyllable in reply. He became so irritated it required all his conscious force to keep his voice solicitous as he repeated his proposition. Another few minutes went by, and during that time Hudson entered on tip-toe with a memorandum in his hand. McQueen motioned him to lay it on the desk. “A book on Canada? My dear boy…wouldn’t it be well for you to see a little of the country first?”

  As he listened to Paul’s answer, McQueen’s eyes picked out the words on the memo. Paul went on talking, but McQueen was no longer listening to him. The words on the memo stated that Sir Rupert Irons had died fifteen minutes ago.

  McQueen heard his own voice saying, “You’re being very foolish, of course. I suppose you know what you’re doing. You can be assured I’ll report exactly what you’ve said to Mrs. Methuen tonight.”

  He slammed the receiver down, picked up the memo in both hands and stared at it again, then snapped at Hudson, “Get me Mr. Masterman at once. Get me Mr. Chislett. Get me Mr. Buchanan. Oh yes–get me Sir Roderick Horson too. He’s in Nassau in the Bahamas. Get him at once.”

  McQueen lunched that day in the Mount Royal Club. Afterwards he sat in a deep chair and brooded over the obituary picture in the afternoon paper. In spite of the world crisis, the press had gone into mourning for Sir Rupert Irons. The square head, square jaw, square mouth, square shoulders and the small biting eyes had almost crowded Hitler off the front page. Much of the second page was occupied with the list of Irons’ innumerable services to the nation, and the unbelievably large number of companies he had controlled.

  It was hard for McQueen to credit it. For more than a quarter of a century Irons had stood in Saint James Street as four-square as the Duke of Wellington. Now his empire was passing without a tremor to the oligarchy which had served under his guidance during his life. By Jove, McQueen thought, there was a lesson here! A lesson in the meaning of soundness: Irons’ affairs were in such perfect order that his death had not affected the market by so much as half a point.

  Contemplating the picture, McQueen made clucking noises with his tongue. They were all going! MacIntosh had died last February, General Methuen had passed on in the spring. Masterman was beginning to look very seedy and Chislett had been on his last legs for years. But for Irons to go! Well, he would at least escape the war, if the war came. McQueen read all the paper had to say about the life and death of Sir Rupert Irons, and was forced to admit that when his own time came the spread given him would not be as large. There was no doubt about it, Irons had personified an era. He had been the great master in soundness. The country would never be the same without him.

  As McQueen was
to be a pall-bearer at the funeral, he was kept very busy during the next two days. He barely remembered to call Janet and inform her of his conversation with Paul. A funeral of this dimension seemed to McQueen something far greater than the mere burial of a friend. Each great city had some special way of demonstrating its communal spirit and showing its face to the world. London used the Lord Mayor’s Show, New York the procession of a hero up Broadway, the French section of Montreal the parade on the day of Saint-Jean Baptiste. But in McQueen’s opinion, his own Montreal reserved itself for an occasion more personal and significant. Only on the death of one of their own number did the real controllers of the nation, the businessmen who were as unobtrusive as a hierarchy, gather in force before the public eye.

  McQueen could never remember a funeral which required so many arrangements as this one. Irons had no family or relations, and he had complicated matters by his last coherent wish. He had expressed the desire that the service be held not in his customary church, but in a small one in the factory district where he had lived as a boy. He had also required that a particular minister be summoned from Toronto to conduct the service. McQueen fussed considerably over these details, which seemed completely unnecessary to him. It was exactly like Irons to surprise everybody, right up to the last. The church he had selected was not only small and poor, it was so located that the mourners would have to walk nearly two miles before they could decently step out of the cortège. McQueen wouldn’t be surprised but what Irons had thought of that. He wondered if Chislett would be up to it. Chislett had not walked a hundred yards since he had bought his first Rolls-Royce in 1912.

  Hours before the service began, a crowd had gathered on the street opposite the church. As the mourners entered the vestry, each spoke his name to reporters stationed at the door, who wrote it hurriedly in notebooks for publication in the press the following day. English Montreal had turned out everyone from ten-thousand-a-year men up, and many had made the trip from Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa and Winnipeg. The directors of four-fifths of the nation’s major banks and corporations were there. They sat gravely together in reserved pews. The coffin was to be borne by men who between them controlled (now that Irons was dead) more than four billion dollars, paying the ultimate homage to the man who had made and controlled more money than any one of them.

  The service began. The minister’s voice, deeply overtoned with centuries of Presbyterianism, rolled over the heads of the directors, bankers, insurance presidents, railroad heads, stockbrokers, brewers, distillers, justices, corporation lawyers, the board of governors of the university, the Committee of Art, headmasters, the boardmen of the charitable societies, executives, stock-holders, four politicians, three aldermen, two cabinet ministers–and the others.

  The Scriptures, the minister said resolutely, had left no doubt that it was easier for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. But the Lord, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, had never said it was impossible. Sir Rupert Irons had known this. No man who ever lived had been more fully aware than Sir Rupert of the spiritual dangers attendant on great wealth. It was for this reason that he had avoided all ostentation in his life, that he had furnished his home with the barest of necessities, that he had never taken a holiday, in order to reserve his powers for the fuller service to mankind that his wealth had demanded. It was for this reason that he had always praised poverty as the best school of virtue. Few had known poverty more fully than Sir Rupert Irons in the days of his youth. Few had done so much by way of the thousands–nay, the hundreds of thousands–of positions created through his nation-wide enterprises, to alleviate the poverty of others. Recognizing that he lived in a commercial age, he had in all humility regarded himself as God’s trustee, a faithful steward such as Joseph had been to the rich man of Egypt.

  The minister asked the mourners how charities could exist without such men as Sir Rupert Irons. And how, without charities, could the nation thrive? He pointed out that Irons himself, remembering the Scriptures, had never failed to do his alms in secret. Legion though his benefactions had been, they were known only unto God and the recipients.

  Everyone would recall Sir Rupert’s favourite saying: “A beggar may at least spend his last ten-cent piece on a cup of coffee, but a banker must render account of the uttermost farthing!” How well had their friend lived up to that homely motto! If the financial structure of Canada was still the soundest of all nations, if she was an oasis of stability in a troubled world, the people well knew whom they must thank.

  When the organ struck up the Dead March, the coffin was wheeled noiselessly down the aisle to the vestibule, then borne to the hearse by eight directors of corporations, while press photographers snapped their pictures, and policemen saluted, and thousands watched. Then a tide of bankers, brokers, governors, justices, brewers, distillers, lawyers, executives, stockholders and politicians, each with a silk hat on his head, flowed in solemn silence down the steps.

  The street in that slum district was very narrow, and most of the mourners had not been within a mile of it in their lives. Now the sun gleamed sleekly on their silk hats, and the hats bobbed unevenly but with collective rhythm as they struggled up the hill after the hearse. Labourers, clerks, housewives, loafers, children and unemployed stood silently on the curb watching them. The street was utterly noiseless except for the shuffle of feet and the sigh of ponderous breathing, and as McQueen padded along and heard Chislett panting behind him, he was haunted by the thought that the man would never make Sherbrooke Street. There was no doubt about it, Chislett would be the next.

  Finally they reached the boulevard. But not even in their own preserves would the outside world let them alone. In the near distance newsboys were bawling the afternoon’s headlines. McQueen heard Hitler’s name repeated over and over. The newsboys came nearer, running toward the crowd. hitler sends ultimatum…hitler mobilizes…hitler says he will fight…

  Why can’t they leave a man alone, McQueen thought, why can’t they leave us in peace?

  FIFTY

  In the hotels that line the Maine beaches from Portland to Kittery, the death of Sir Rupert Irons seemed, at least for a few hours, more important than the world crisis. Hardly a dozen of the thousands of Montrealers and Ontarians summering there had known Irons personally, but all of them had heard his name as long as they could remember.

  The morning after the first Montreal papers arrived with news of the event, Heather met Mrs. Falconridge as she was leaving the dining room.

  “Your Sir Rupert Irons must have been a very great man,” the American said.

  “A great many people thought so,” Heather said gravely.

  “It’s the most amazing thing! You Canadians seem to know all about our affairs down here. I’ve met so many who agree with me on Mr. Roosevelt and John L. Lewis. But we simply don’t know a thing about your country. You know, Heather, I’d never even heard of Sir Rupert Irons before this morning!”

  “But Mrs. Falconridge–it’s almost as though God had died!”

  Heather caught a suggestion of understanding in Mrs. Falconridge’s eyes as she left her. In the lounge the old ladies were still discussing Irons’ affairs. They mentioned his devoutness. They wondered if some secret sorrow had prevented his getting married. They speculated on where his money would go, and how much the death-duties would be. One old lady remembered the time when he had defied the whole Dominion Government to do its worst. They all repeated to each other that the country would never be the same without him.

  That morning Janet took her breakfast in bed. Some time after nine o’clock, Heather had poked her head in the door, seen her mother lying back on the pillows with her eyes closed, and shut the door again quietly. As soon as she had gone, Janet opened her eyes.

  Never in her life had she felt more wretched. Ever since Huntly McQueen’s telephone call the evening before, she had been so miserable that sleep was impossible. He had told her about Irons’ death, and that he was ver
y busy on account of the funeral. He had told her–she thought in a very off-hand manner–that as Paul Tallard had refused to take the job he had offered, there seemed nothing more he could do about the situation at present. Then he had gone on talking about Irons as if he had completely forgotten her problem. Who cared about Irons anyway, Janet thought. General Methuen had always called him a bounder. Why, General Methuen had said ever so many times that he could remember when Rupert Irons’ father used to drive a wagon for one of the breweries!

  Janet thought back on what a horrible night she had spent. Around two in the morning she had made up her mind that McQueen had let her down. At one of the most important moments in her life, Huntly had been so engrossed in his own selfish affairs that he had forgotten all about her! And after all the plans they had made together! Over the phone he had also wasted good time talking about the war news from Europe, as if she were incapable of reading the papers for herself. By three in the morning, Janet began to have serious doubts about McQueen’s sincerity. He was a selfish old bachelor. If he hadn’t been so engrossed in his own comfort he would have married long ago and had a family. What did he understand about what a woman–any woman–has to suffer?

  When dawn came, Janet was so restless she took a warm bath. It did nothing to make her feel any better. Heather was her own daughter, she was all she had left, she had given that child her whole life and now Heather never gave the slightest thought for her happiness. It was nothing new. Heather was always criticizing her. She had sent her to college and after that the child had felt superior. As if she didn’t understand her own daughter like an open book! Heather was always quoting outrageous opinions from things she read and expecting her to be impressed by them. It was a disgrace the sort of things they gave immature girls to study in college these days. Florence Murdoch had been saying that very thing only yesterday. They went to college and came out of it ungrateful, callous and selfish. They thought they knew more than their elders because some glib young professors without a penny to bless themselves with taught them a jargon nobody else could understand.