“After all,” Mrs. Throop said, “you can’t live in a convent all your life, can you?”
“No,” Ruth admitted.
“Perhaps,” her mother went on, “you would like to take the veil.”
“I don’t know,” Ruth said after a long pause.
“If you don’t know then you haven’t a vocation. Besides I have other plans for you.” Then, putting her arm about her daughter’s waist, she said: “You will become used to things soon and then you’ll be much happier.”
“Yes, mother.” (Dutifully and without conviction.)
“You are sixteen now and you’ve got to be thinking about becoming a practical young lady—not a mooning convent girl. Goodness knows I am a devout woman—I hope—but the religion of the world is different from the devotion of a convent.”
Ruth sat silently listening to her mother and nodding her head.
So this was the world, the world of the flesh of which the sisters had repeatedly spoken. Flesh: the word described her new world with pointed aptitude. The Major, fleshy, red-faced and bloated after dinner, sipping his heavy, rich port and smoking his cigar; her mother’s perpetual concern with food and clothes; those interminable suety dinners, the endless dull conversation, the Sunday afternoon stupefaction … By four o’clock on the Sabbath, Ruth experienced a profound longing for the convent and its quiet ways; the convent—the antithesis of the world in which she now lived. She wanted to return and yet she knew that this was impossible. Inexperienced as she was, she knew that life lies ahead of one and there is no turning back.
In the summer, fortunately, there was a change of routine. The Throops spent July in the Laurentians and August at Uncle Francis’s seaside estate on the Gaspé peninsula. At the seashore Ruth fell into a happy mood, half brooding, half carefree; at the sea she found an attitude in Nature which was synonymous with the spiritual tone of the convent. There were mornings on the hot beach and in the afternoons she swam until she was exhausted and threw herself on the sand panting for breath. When she returned to Montreal in the fall, she was beginning to revel in her new freedom: there were long walks on the footpaths of the mountain, riding on the bridle paths of a week-end morning. And most fortunate of all, there were new duties, new responsibilities, new faces, new pleasures, new companions …
Early in October she entered the last grade of the Catholic High School.
X
“She is a convent girl,” the young men thought, “and therefore fair game.”
When Ruth entered a room, masculine eyes would suddenly dart up and stare at her willowy beauty with quick hot eagerness.
—A convent girl (they thought) a quiet cloistered convent, many women, girls, virginity, unspoiled freshness, dormitory girl-to-girl secrets, wonder what those young kids, no men handy, think about, talk about, do.
Of an evening, sometimes, when the drawing room was filled with men and women and the air was heavy with perfume and the dizzying odor of men (cigars, masculine cosmetics, the odor of bodies) she was asked to play for her mother’s guests. As she bent over the keyboard and beat the thrumming tom-tom deep in the bass of the Waldstein Sonata, her lips puckered in musical ecstasy; later, as her indomitable hair swayed to the tempo of the gay rondo, many pairs of masculine eyes would ravenously stare at her ivory hands, svelte waist, girlbreasts.
There was a burst of applause as she concluded the final movement and a husky voice said: “‘Pale Hands I Love’—play that, Ruth, will you please?”
At such times she saw glances of admiration, smiling faces, clapping hands. She did not, could not, see the wolfish gleam. And with a slight feeling of distaste she played the requested banal piece.
XI
In the center of Montreal stands Mount Royal after which the city is named. It protrudes suddenly from the flatlands of the center of the island, verdant and delightful, surrounded by miles of grayish dwellings and smoking, flatulent factory chimneys. From the lookout at the summit, the buildings and streets look like ruts of dun basalt at the base of a long extinct volcano. In the summertime Ruth rode up the spiraling roadways to the plateau on the top and leaned over the railing of the lookout at the serried streets and the midget people below. Here one bought spruce beer, rich and creamy, and later jog-trotted home in the family’s victoria. Sometimes Major Throop accompanied his stepdaughter. He puffed at his enormous pipe and bemoaned the fact that the beauty of the mountain was despoiled by the herd.
“Too damned good for the beggars,” he said on one occasion, “coming up here and littering the driveways and walks with their filthy leavings. Picnics—huh!”
And Ruth was inclined to agree. The people who walked up the roads, singing and shouting, sitting under trees, swarms of children grouped about large and sweating parents, seemed so remote from her own life. It was as though these people were of a different species. They were loud French-Canadians from Maisonneuve and the east end of the city and swarthy Jews from St. Lawrence Boulevard and St. Urbain Street. And the Major detested FrenchCanadians; hated their simple ways, their patois (he himself spoke Parisian French with an execrable English accent), their celluloid collars (worn only by mechanics on Sunday but which the major attributed to all French-Canadians, the Bishop of Montreal excepted), their gaudy manner of dress: red and green cravats, brightly colored gingham dresses, buttoned tan shoes. “Dressed like a Frenchman,” was a terrible phrase on the lips of the Major.
“That sort of thing,” he said, thinking of the mechanics and their families on the side of the mountain, “is all right in France but it’s no damned good here. This is Canada.” By which he meant the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Governor-General, Westmount, the defeat of Montcalm by Wolfe—and all things English. “They have parks in the east end—Dominion Park and merry-go-rounds and chute-the-chutes—why do they have to come here?” (Petulantly.)
Ruth didn’t know, but even with the French-Canadians and Jews the mountain was a delightful thing. There was the cable car by which one was hauled up to its top, as though one were flying; there were long walks with her companions when they clambered up the sides picking choke-cherries and coming home with stained fingers and mouths.
And in the wintertime the mountain was the joy of every lover of winter sports. There was tobogganing down the icy Park Slide all lit up with colored electric lights, skating parties on the open-air rink on Fletcher’s Field at the eastern base of the mountain. And one winter after an early thaw it suddenly froze again and the fields were crusted with a veritable sheet of ice so that Ruth and her friends coasted up and down the rolling fields as though they were on skis, only it was infinitely faster and much more fun. Then when the snow was good and deep there were night snow-shoe parties. The boys and girls, accompanied by a few silly chaperons (who were easily lost in the woods near Outremount), made the trip half-way around the mountain, tumbled into ten-foot snow drifts, and rubbed each other’s faces with the light, feathery Canadian snow. Sometimes when the Major took his stepdaughter for a night drive in a red cutter to the top of the mountain the city below presented a miraculous appearance: thousands of arc-lights shone on the glistening snow-covered streets and one thought, if one were not too cynical, that it looked like a fairy city encrusted with diamonds—which was precisely what Ruth thought. When parties came to the top during a sleigh ride in a huge affair drawn by eight horses with colored feathers in their harness, the party invariably became silent at the sight of the white city below—afterwards there was hot chocolate with floating islands of whipped cream and dainty biscuits.
One winter there was a civic celebration on Fletcher’s Field. The city had built an enormous ice palace (it was really a castle but the aldermen thought that palace sounded more regal) made of great blocks of ice with turrets, machicolations, a towered donjon. At night the interior was illuminated by colored electric lights and, when viewed from the summit of the mountain, it was an exciting sight. On the night of the gala celebrati
on the Throops and many friends came to see the storming of the castle. Edgar Kennedy, the son of the shipping man, came along to watch the fun. At the outset he attached himself to Ruth; this was her first experience with a “young man” and she enjoyed it greatly. There was an immense crowd around the palace waiting for the storming to begin. Soon from all sides of the field massed battalions of sportsmen marched on the ice structure: French-Canadian snow-shoe clubs with their cat-gut shoes slung over their shoulders, and Westmount skiing clubs carrying their skis at the slope like rifles, tobogganers, hockey teams, skaters. As they approached the iced fosse they discharged roman candles at the bastions and other Montrealers hidden in the castle returned the red and green fire from the lancet windows. Intricate fireworks leaped up from the bailey of the castle and the night was lit up with whirling and scurrying pyrotechnics.
It was all very exciting and as the attackers made their final rush upon the castle, the crowd broke through the police lines. Edgar caught Ruth by the hand and pulled her along towards the ice moat. He was ordinarily a pale young man, but now his face was bright red with the cold, he laughed as he ran and his breath steamed with the frost, and in some strange way this reminded Ruth of the gallant knights of old. (When she thought about it later she smiled because it was the dragon which belched fire and not the knight.) There were shouts from the assailants as they took the castle and Ruth and Edgar crowded quite close to watch the official surrender. It was very romantic standing there pressed close to Edgar (the crowd was irresistible, there was simply nothing that she could do about it) watching the parabolas of light go rocketing over the battlements of the ice palace.
Of course in the excessive excitement Ruth and Edgar lost touch with the older people, and when the celebration was over they walked along St. Catherine Street and wandered off into one of the side streets and found a grill room where they had a cold bird and a bottle of wine. Ruth was terribly thrilled, although Edgar, who was nearly twenty and was going into his father’s shipping business when he got out of McGill, was quite casual about it all.
It was past midnight when Edgar brought her home and Mrs. Throop was waiting up and greeted her daughter with pretended anxiety. She was rather pleased, because the Kennedys were quite acceptable; the young man’s father, it is true, had worked up from the ranks, but that was forgotten in view of the high position he now held in the life of the business community. All in all, Ruth’s mother was satisfied and as she went to bed she smiled and told the Major, who was nearly asleep and resented pre-slumber conversation, that everything seemed to be going well with Ruth and young Kennedy.
“Imagine her scampering off and coming home at this hour,” she said. The Major merely grunted. “Of course, the Kennedys are a little tiresome but after all he is head of the Board of Trade.” The Major made no reply. “They went into the Hoffman Grill on McGill College Avenue and had some chicken and burgundy. It’s romantic, Frederick,” she said to her husband with a note of expectation in her voice, “romantic, that’s what I call it.”
But by this time the Major was sound asleep.
XII
Francis Steele—Uncle Francis as he was known in the Throop ménage—was Mrs. Throop’s oldest brother. He was a man of spotless repute: upright, God-fearing, a lay pillar of the Church. His Grace, the Bishop of Montreal, continually referred to him as “a worthy man, a very worthy man, indeed,” and the Throops were excessively and particularly proud of the fact that the fame of Uncle Francis had spread to Rome, where the Holy Father had been apprised of Mr. Steele’s benefactions. In business—his business was timberlands in Northern Quebec and Ontario—Steele was cautious, prudent and at all times realistic, which, he was fond of remarking, was as it should be. Although he was quick to seize upon all modern ideas in his business, in the matter of personal appearance he was reactionary. Until the day he died he clung to the mutton-chop whiskers of the Eighteen-Eighties, the square brown bowler hat and suit to match. His picture, which often appeared in the newspapers, revealed a high forehead and benevolent expression.
Two years before the time when Ruth left the convent, he had made a pilgrimage to Rome where he had knelt before His Holiness and kissed the papal ring. He never tired of telling of his experiences in Rome and of a Sunday when he dined at the Throops’ (he was a bachelor) he recounted the glories of the Holy City in all their minute details: St. Peter’s, the Swiss Guards, the distinctive apparel of the cardinals and the papal secretaries. It was usually tea time before he reached the part where he had genuflected before the Holy Father.
“Apparently Monsignor Bruchesi had sent word ahead of my coming,” he said, “for when I knelt before His Holiness, he looked straight into my eyes, sir—straight into my eyes, and I could have sworn that he recognized me. Perhaps it was my pictures in the Star. Well, there I was kneeling before the Pope and suddenly he smiled.”
This remark was always received in the most solemn silence, everyone being agreed that when a pope smiled it was no matter for idle levity. Satisfied with the effect his story was creating, Steele would continue:
“Of course I did not smile but simply bowed my head and leaned forward just a trifle to kiss the ring. You may think I am exaggerating, but I am not, as I put my lips to the ring, he pressed it”—Steele uttered the word he as though it were capitalized,—“firmly against my mouth. A sort of gesture of recognition, I should say.”
At this point in his narrative Steele brought his hands together, fingers tip to tip, and closed his eyes. Apart from his sideburn whiskers his hands were the most noticeable part of his person. The fingers were inordinately long and tapered toward meticulously manicured nails; they were the sort of fingers which most people associate with pianists. They were strangely lustrous as if they had an inner light which gave life to their pallor. As the family listened in respectful silence he continued:
“That wasn’t all that happened in Rome. Did you ever hear of the flagellants?” As no one replied, he remarked: “Ah, there are Catholics. Of course that sort of thing couldn’t go on in Canada, or England, for that matter. But just the same, it was splendid to see Catholics who take their religion seriously; not like the Americans, for example, who are simply trying to make Catholicism bigger and better as they do in most things.”
By this time the supper of cold cuts and a bottle of imported English ale was ready.
The story of Steele’s pilgrimage to Rome seldom varied and there was a sort of ritual about it. It was always told in the drawing room with the narrator standing with legs apart before the fireplace whether it was winter or summer, while before him the Throops, the Major, Ruth, and her mother, sat in rapt and respectful attitudes. And, indeed, Steele merited respect and the awe of his relatives, not only because of his pilgrimage to Rome and his audience with the Pope, but also because of his great wealth and power. His connections with the Steeles of London made it possible to secure positions in the Grand Trunk Railway offices for the host of lesser and importuning Steeles and Throops in Montreal. It was a known fact in Montreal that when one said Steele one meant Grand Trunk.
To Ruth, even now that she was sixteen and looked at life with the mild skepticism which marks that age in some matters, her uncle seemed too utterly important and grand to be true. His pontifical manner, his reputation as a millionaire, the Steele tradition (never very clearly defined), and his public benefactions, caused him to appear in the eyes of his niece as a species of lay archbishop. True, he lacked the white woolen pallium with its four purple crosses, but then his graying sideburn whiskers, his squarish bowler hat and his grand manner set him apart from men made of more common day. In the circumscribed provincial world in which Ruth lived, Steele was the personification of all that really mattered. To her he was the Church, morality, the British Empire (of which Canada was the pivotal point), economic security, the representative of the English-speaking race, as distinct from the teeming French-Canadians who spawned east of St. Lawrence Boulevard.
/>
During the summer the Throops used his estate on the Gaspé peninsula which jutted into the clear waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence; in the wintertime there were theater parties and concerts at His Majesty’s Theatre, and when he was abroad there were presents sent from foreign cities: shawls from Paisley, combs from Madrid, perfumes from Paris, printed music from Berlin, and on Ruth’s birthday he called in the afternoon with a little chamois bag which contained five hundred dollars in gold—jingling gold coins which he had just gotten from the St. James Street office of the Bank of Montreal, “as sound as the Bank of England.” He was always present at her birthdays and even when she was in the convent he had deposited a substantial check to the account (which he had opened on the day when she was born) of Ruth Courtney, in trust. At the parties he drank the very mild punch, made a fuss about the bringing of the birthday cake (there was always a joke about the number of candles, he deliberately made errors in counting them) and was the last to leave.
In St. James Street, where he conducted his business in pulp and paper, Steele was held in high esteem. He was shrewd, to be sure, but he was always ready to do a favor and if he sometimes wiped out a competitor, this, too, was to be expected. He was, as the British like to say, a man’s man. At five o’clock, after a day’s work, he stood up against the St. Regis bar and drank his gin and bitters with members of the banking and commercial fraternity. Here the talk was of timber land options, the grain and stock markets and the silver mines of Northern Ontario. Among the smartly dressed younger men of the street, Steele’s antiquated attire set him apart and stamped him as a businessman of the old school; safe, conservative and reliable.
There Are Victories Page 3