“Nevertheless,” Ruth went on, “I should imagine that the Lord—”
“Ruth,” Mrs. Throop interrupted in a commanding tone, “Ruth—please remember that Mademoiselle is better posted on these matters than we are.”
“But,” the Bishop’s sister said, speaking in a hushed voice as though she were imparting State information, “my good brother, the Bishop, tells me that His Holiness is only too anxious to act as an agent for peace—that is, when the proper time arrives.”
“Yes, of course,” Mrs. Richard Steele added, “then again you must remember, Ruth dear, that after all, the war was started by the Protestant Kaiser and it would be poor taste for the Holy Father to interfere. Imagine what the Anglican bishops would say!”
“Quite so,” the Bishop’s sister agreed. “Quite so.”
XXXIII
The broad steps of the cathedral. It was Spring once more. The Bishop greeted Ruth:
“Ah, Madame Kennedy! It is so good to see you. Mademoiselle, my sister, tells me that you are worried by the war. What news does the captain, your good husband, send? Nothing? No news, you English say, is good news.”
“It seems to me, Your Grace,” Ruth said, “that if the Holy Father threatened them all with excommunication unless the war ended, it would be over tomorrow.”
The Bishop smiled benignly. “My daughter, you are an emotional child. What a pity that you have not devoted your life to the Church. What good you could have done! The duty of every good Catholic is to be obedient to authority and today our authorities demand that the war be fought to a successful conclusion. But let us not distract our minds with thoughts such as these. You are going to confession?”
Ruth nodded and together they entered the cathedral.
XXXIV
The lilacs were in bloom again when Ruth went to the maternity hospital. The chirping of the birds and the hypnotic buzzing of the insects were interrupted by the brassy bands as battalions marched through the city. Nowhere was it possible to escape the war. She lay on her back and looked out her window at the green sides of the mountain, waiting. Her body was tightly rounded and in her face there was a gentleness which comes to women only when they are with child. Her doctor was a Norwegian woman who had come to Montreal a few years before and soon became famous as an obstetrician. Dr. Petersen was huge, built like a longshoreman, with enormous hands, and affected masculine clothes, smoked little cigars. Despite her ungainly hulk she was as gentle as the most feminine woman.
The doctor dropped into Ruth’s room occasionally and both women soon came to enjoy each other’s company. Ruth noticed that a fierce hatred of men ran through the doctor’s conversation.
“Ah, to think that we must go through this sort of thing for a man,” the doctor said.
“Did you ever—.”
“Yes, once, and be sure that no man is really worth it.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Well, perhaps I am wrong. But I can only speak from what I know, not only from my own experience but from what I have seen professionally.”
Dr. Petersen applied the stethoscope to Ruth’s chest and listened carefully. “Heart’s all right. How do you feel?”
“Splendid,” Ruth replied, “splendid—but a little frightened.”
One evening the doctor called to see Ruth. She seated herself near the bed and looked through the open windows towards the dark towering mountain. She sat silently, monstrous and grotesque, outlined against the delicate coloring of the room. Some minutes passed before she spoke.
“Where I come from,” she said, “in the north of Norway, the peasants have a splendid way with which to make the man realize the full seriousness of child-birth. To make him witness the delivery is not enough. Every young husband is compelled to have his wife sit astride his knees as the first-born comes into the world. He sits there sometimes one, two, five, six hours; he feels every tremor of his wife’s body, feels it stiffen in pain and finally feels it relax as the child is born.
“Once in our village (I was a young girl then) a young scamp had gotten one of the village girls into trouble and the elders of the village decided not to do anything about it until the time for delivery came. Then they took the young fellow under threat of violence and led him to where the girl was. We lived in the next house and I remember as though it were yesterday: the frightened, pale face of the young fellow, his staring eyes.”
“Doctor, doctor,” Ruth interrupted. “My poor boy, he’ll be a nervous wreck when he’s born.”
The doctor laughed. Her grim mood vanished instantaneously. “You are perfectly right. But how do you know it’s going to be a boy?”
≠
The following morning, shortly before dawn, Guy was born.
XXXV
But the weeping of men and women, the agonized staring into the dark by millions of distracted mothers, did not halt the war. Those who conducted it had other plans, could not reckon with so inconsequential a thing as the human heart. All her life Ruth had been told of the power of prayer and now, she thought, a veritable barrage of prayer must be assaulting the citadel of heaven. Could it be that God, like the Pope, was powerless to interfere with the madness of men?
One night, nearly eighteen months after Guy was born, she went to see the official motion pictures of the battle of the Somme. She sat terrified as the picture unfolded. This, then, was the holy patriotic duty which statesmen and prelates had elevated and sanctified. Men gouging each other with bayonets, blowing each other to shreds with hand grenades, turning living lungs to water with poisonous gases. This was what men were doing to those who were created in the likeness of God! And nobody, it seemed, could do anything to end it.
It was too much, she could stand it no longer. She rushed up the aisle, past the astonished ushers and out into the electric-lit night of Bleury Street. A queue had formed before the box-office; laughing men and women were patiently waiting their turn to enter and be amused. Elderly men and women, who doubtless had sons in the war, young women with husbands or fiancés in Flanders-laughing and joking. They would go inside and the orchestra would blare patriotic songs and the audience would tap out the rhythm with their feet and hum and sit watching this picture of carnage.
It seemed that all the mothers and fathers whose sons were being destroyed would rise up and rush into the streets and tear down all that stood for this insane inhumanity. But no, their eyes were clouded. This was war. It had ever been thus. It was patriotism. Kill the Huns! Instead of an overwhelming feeling of revulsion, instead of a powerful assertion of human dignity which would demand that the slaughter cease, the audience sat and cheered the sight of young lads marching up to the front. Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, boys, smile, while there’s a lucifer to light your fag, smile, boys, that’s the style. Oh, what’s the use of worrying, it never was worth while, so—but the sight of a young lad leaning up against the wire with both of his hands pressed to his stomach, bending over in agony, persisted. That was no acting, that lad had a piece of shrapnel in his entrails, he had opened his mouth on the screen and, of course, no sound reached the audience. Something in Ruth’s head shrieked in sympathy.
She walked rapidly past the bank on the corner of St. Catherine Street and on down darkened Bleury Street towards Craig: Dorchester, Lagauchetière, Vitre … On down into St. Peter Street, redolent with the pungent odor of spices and coffee, with the shriek of that young soldier ringing in her ears …
—Good God in heaven why do you allow such things to happen? Once things were not so terrible. There was the peace of the convent. Ah, the old familiar chapel and the Stations of the Cross. Thou hast made this journey to die for me with love unutterable. And that lad with shrapnel in his stomach with love unutterable. Guy, too, will grow up and will he have shrapnel in his innards doubled up like that with an audience looking and not hearing his dying shriek tapping the floor to the tune of pack up your troubles.
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She was near the river. Up there past Quebec was Gaspé and beyond that Newfoundland and beyond that England and France where the boys were dying, where Edgar was. She heard the thunder of the guns, clearly, distinctly. Her head throbbed and she felt rain on her face though it was not raining. She turned and ran frightened up St. Peter Street. At the corner of Notre Dame Street she hailed a taxi and gave the driver her address. She paid the driver when he pulled up in front of the serene red sandstone house and rushed upstairs when the butler had opened the door. In the nursery little Guy was asleep, breathing evenly, tiny beads of perspiration on his protruding forehead.
—That poor lad with the shrapnel.
She picked the sleeping child up in her arms and kissed him violently. The child opened his eyes, startled, and looked at his mother as if he were about to weep.
Then he began to cry softly, tears rolled down his face, trickling towards the corners of his mouth.
“Sh! darling, nothing’s the matter. Mummy loves you, that’s all. Kiss me, Guy darling.”
The child put his fleshy little lips up to be kissed; his eyes were heavily laden with sleep and in a few moments his head rested in the crook of his mother’s arm and he was asleep.
When Ruth got to her room she found a cablegram lying on her boudoir table. Her heart thumped as she nervously ripped the flap into jagged pieces. The cablegram was dated at Liverpool. She sighed with relieved satisfaction as she read that Edgar would arrive in Montreal in about ten days. The next day a letter came from London: he had been buried alive twice and his nerves were gone. General Martinson had arranged things so that he was being transferred to the Paymaster’s Corps for duty in Canada. The letter was terse and cold, like a military dispatch, like most of his letters lately. His handwriting seemed to have changed. It was loose and sprawled over the page like the writing of a boy of ten. When she had brushed her hair she knelt by the side of her bed and prayed, but her thoughts were confused; it seemed difficult to remember the old prayers which had come so readily to her lips when she was a girl. She recalled only one, the prayer which the Mother Superior always said in time of great sorrow or doubt:
“Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, to thee do we turn, poor banished daughters of Eve.”
XXXVI
The day on which Edgar was to arrive finally came, it came dreary with gray, cynical rain which dripped down one’s collar, oozed through clothing and chilled one to the bone. At the monstrosity which the Grand Trunk Lines called the Bonaventure Station, Ruth waited about, hour after hour. The train was late and no one seemed to know why it was delayed. She wandered through the barnlike building, listened to the sad expiring noises which locomotives make when they are at rest. In the waiting room dull people sat about, aimlessly spitting at the pot-bellied Quebec heaters. She went into the station restaurant, ordered some tea and after taking a mouthful of the pallid, weak stuff, walked out to the platform, heard the rain splash on the roof of the train shed and thought of the malicious words which Samuel Butler had written about the city: “Oh God, oh Montreal!”
She wondered how Edgar would look and if anything remained of their love after this absence of three years.
—Of course, the three years must have altered him dreadfully, three years of war and then those terrible experiences: buried alive, all that. I will be good to him, look after him, amuse him, poor boy. No good ever came of suffering, only bitterness, hatred and more suffering. But there’s nothing one can do, it seems, only keep one’s chin up and go on.
A rush of people from the waiting room interrupted her thoughts. The train had arrived! There was much pushing and shoving at the barrier and then a few grinning soldiers came through the gate. The first was a private; one of his arms was amputated and with a cry his mother fell upon him. The lad’s peasant face remained stolid under his mother’s weeping, then, gradually, his granite face softened, twisted itself up into a painful grimace and he wept, holding the wizened, creased woman in his arms. They stood helpless, clinging to each other as the crowds pushed past them. The woman looked fixedly at her son and he kept saying, “excuse me, excuse me,” to the jostling passers-by. Other soldiers walked into the station and stared about them like children waiting for someone to care for them.
Then came Edgar. His face was haggard but bronzed and Ruth noticed with astonishment that his hair was quite gray at the temples. The left side of his face twitched nervously as she ran forward to greet him. He kissed her awkwardly and drew away quickly. The odor of whisky was on his breath.
“Edgar, Edgar, how are you? Are you ill? You look tired. Come, let’s hurry. The car is here.”
He answered in an abstracted manner and it was not until the car had pulled past the Windsor Hotel that he asked about Guy. His face was thin and he smoked his cigarette without removing it once from his mouth. As the car turned east along St. Catherine Street he leaned his head against the cushioned side of the car and closed his eyes. In a few seconds he breathed heavily and drooled at the mouth. When the car pulled up at their home he sat up and said: “Sorry, Ruth, seems as though I haven’t slept in years. Sorry.”
The servants were assembled at the door when they entered. Marie uttered a loud cry when she saw her master and Edgar turned to Ruth with a snarl:
“For Christ’s sake—take that babbling idiot away.”
Ruth stared at him in amazement and without speaking he turned and walked to his room.
A little later, after he had washed and brushed his hair he came to her room and stood shamefaced as he offered his apologies. He was tired, hadn’t slept all night.
“Rotten trip across and that God-damned stretch from Halifax—” He smiled a tired, broken smile and swayed unsteadily as he walked toward her.
“Really, Ruth, I’m damned glad to get home.” Then, slumping into a seat he watched her prepare for dinner. Suddenly he remembered that he hadn’t seen his son. He returned in a little while and remarked off-handedly that the little son-of-a-gun didn’t seem a bit pleased to see him.
“Sat up in bed and looked at me as though I were a stranger.”
“Well, you are, aren’t you, dear?” she smiled.
Edgar poured himself a whisky and gulped it with the eagerness of one who feels that he is lost without drink. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Ruth watching him.
“Got into the habit in the line. Christ, you couldn’t live through that bloody mess for a week without the stuff.”
“Yes, I understand, but be careful, darling, will you?”
He walked over to her and embraced her, holding her tightly in his arms.
“I haven’t had anyone call me darling for—for nearly three years.”
“Poor thing.”
“It’s funny—coming home. I expected it would be different.”
“How?”
“Quiet like. Quiet like a dead sector up the line. When you lie in the mud you always think of this—coming home. You imagine all sorts of things: fireworks and excitement. Well, here I am”—he poured another drink—“at home and nothing’s happened.”
He stood erect near her table, his thumb was thrust through his Sam Browne belt. He was a soldier, tanned, hard, military; but there was something gone out of him, as though his spine had been removed and a ramrod inserted in its place. Then, too, his eyes! They were weak, shifty, as though he had seen something frightful and was afraid to look too suddenly in any direction for fear he would see it again.
“When’s dinner?” he asked. “I’m starved.”
But at dinner during the meat course, his head sank to his chest and he fell asleep.
XXXVII
Edgar’s duties were light, but even these taxed his shattered ability to the utmost. In the morning he awoke haggard and pale, his hands shook and his nerves seemed taut to the point of snapping. He was bad-tempered and the servants were terrified of him when he lost his self-control. Each morning was a sep
arate hell during which Ruth moved in dread of her husband, and the nights were equally fearful. In the dark he would reach for her with brutal, unloving hands and when she locked her door against him there was a scene. Only when his duties took him to Ottawa did Ruth find peace.
It was during the last few months of the war that her situation became intolerable and she went to her mother for advice and consolation. Mrs. Throop was deeply engaged in war work. She was incensed at the anti-conscription riots in the city of Quebec and before Ruth had an opportunity to talk, her mother had started:
“If I were Borden,” she said, “I would call out the troops and shoot down every habitant. Think of it, my dear, our men are overseas giving their lives and blood for their country and the Empire and these cowardly ruffians are rioting and refusing to do their bit. I’d turn machine guns on every mother’s son of them. That’s what I’d do.”
She sat back belligerently in her chair and faced Ruth as if daring her to take issue with her.
“What do you think, my dear?” she asked after a moment’s pause.
“I don’t know. I haven’t been thinking about the riots. I wanted to see you about Edgar.”
“Poor lad. There you are, here is your own husband back from the war all shattered by shell fire and these traitors are stabbing him and his comrades in the back. You see, it comes right into one’s own home.”
“He’s drinking and it’s becoming almost intolerable. The servants refuse to stay. His language and his actions are—.”
“The poor boy’s been through hell-fire and you must be patient and sympathetic with him.”
There Are Victories Page 9