“I—I mean when he comes home at night, drunk. It wasn’t as though he went to his room and sobered up. He insists on—on coming to me—in that condition. I want to know, mother, what I should do about it?”
“I’m afraid, my dear, that there isn’t anything you can do. Keep a stiff upper lip and do the best you can for the poor boy. After all, we must remember what he’s been through. Do your duty, darling, and pray to the Lord to make him sound and normal again. Remember, there is no power greater than prayer.”
≠
Little Guy looked at his father mistrustfully and was barely civil only as a result of Ruth’s continual coaching.
“You mustn’t stare at daddy so when—he’s feeling a little ill. He was in the war, Guy dear, and got hurt and now he’s unsteady on his feet.”
Once when she was speaking to him about his father’s expected return from the capital he asked very gravely:
“Mummy, is daddy really my father?”
Unsmilingly, her heart tugging desperately, she answered: “Why, of course he is, darling. What a silly question!”
Then after a frightful few seconds of silence she bundled him off to bed.
XXXVIII
Edgar sat in the Pullman smoking compartment and listened to the conversation of his fellow officers in the Pay Corps as the train sped on toward Ottawa. At first the men were concerned with the new Allied drive at Amiens, the Conscription Act—but finally they turned to women and sex. The officers told story after story humorlessly, as though the telling were a grim duty. When the outskirts of the capital flashed into view they had settled into that glutted silence which follows an avalanche of smut.
Suddenly the pasty-faced subaltern who faced Edgar straightened himself and said:
“Well, it all boils down to this—there are two kinds of frigging, domestic and imported. Personally I prefer the latter. So many wives are too damned cold and churchy. Reminds me of the fellow who was arrested for—what do they called it?—necrophilia. When the judge asked why he had done it, he said: ‘How was I to know she was dead, your honor? She always acted that way.’”
And by that time the train had pulled into the station.
XXXIX
That summer when the Canadian Corps was trekking up towards Amiens, dripping sweat under the merciless August sun, Ruth went to her beach home at Gaspé. She sent Marie ahead to put things in order and a few days later came on with Guy, leaving the butler in charge of the house. Edgar was in Ottawa and there were no prospects of his getting away until late September. At Gaspé the houses for the most part were deserted; all the young men had gone to the war, the few who had failed to enlist in the early war years had been conscripted a few months before. Now only elderly tradesmen brought supplies from the little seaside village, coming up in dilapidated vehicles and puffing as they climbed the hill leading to the house overlooking the Gulf. It seemed strangely peaceful, not a vestige of war was here apparent: no uniforms, no blaring, strident bands, and even newspapers were rigorously excluded from the household to make the escape complete. Ruth had had enough of the war. Guy, of course, could not read and Marie, being French-Canadian, was uninterested in the war. To her, it was a piece of cruel, typically Anglo-Saxon madness. If King George (next to Sir Wilfred Laurier, she supposed King George was the greatest man in the British Empire), if King George wished to send all les anglais out on to battlefields and kill off the blond snobs of Westmount and other points west of St. Lawrence Boulevard, that was none of her concern. She adored her mistress and Guy, she attended to her household duties and rigorously kept her political opinions to herself.
In the morning Ruth and the boy would dress for the beach and run down the steep hill leading to the water. The boy’s knees were a little knocked and he ran at the side of his mother like a little foal, looking up into her face and laughing nervously. He loved the water and called swimming “taking a barf in the big tub.” They sprawled naked on the sands and became browner every day.
It was here that she had first felt (she wondered as she recalled) the feeling of dread, the premonition of disaster before going back to the city. She lay face downward on the sand and watched Guy paddling in the water. Now, as at all times, the sight of the sea filled her with brooding thought. The sea, the callous, indifferent sea which went its own way, above and beyond the empty stupidities of men. What cared it that millions of men were drenching the earth with their blood? It was vast, imperturbable and could wash away the blood of countless slain, what away and render first white and then invisible the millions of corpses which men in their mad eagerness were piling up in France, in Belgium, Italy, Russia, Macedonia—everywhere. The sea had existed before this puny, arrogant two-legged thing appeared on the surface of the earth. It would be here, undulating, ceaseless, long after he was gone, destroyed, in all probability, by his inability to live in peace with his fellows.
Nothing mattered to Ruth when she lay watching the sea. It gave her a feeling of melancholy peace; in its presence she knew that time would bleach and wash out the cruelties, all the misunderstandings. It wore away a continent with the same dogged heartlessness that it dashed a schooner to pieces; it washed one with invigorating spray with the same gentleness that it lulled one to sleep at night with the hypnotic booming of its surf.
Day after day passed with Ruth watching Guy run through the sand kicking it up in headlong sprays, looking out to sea towards Newfoundland until the white glitter of the sun turned the sea black in mid-afternoon. Then at six the tinkle of the dinner bell came over the hill and reminded them of good things to eat. When she returned with the boy, there was no running, there was no hurry. Together they climbed the hill in silence.
XL
Late in August Ruth began to tire of the loneliness of Gaspé. The endless days, the roaring surf at night, after a time again filled her with a vague sense of disaster. At first she shook off the feeling by swimming out to sea, feeling the sharp, playful spray on her face, tasting the bitter brine in her mouth, lying exhausted on the hot sands. But in the evening when the sun dipped low on the horizon and made the Gulf blood-stained and ominous the sense of catastrophe returned. Now she no longer saw the little match-box “Mathew” and its romantic crew of eighteen cutthroats out there between the peninsula and Newfoundland; instead there were destroyers and submarines, squat and gray, blackening the sky with belched heavy smoke and befouling the water with tracks of dirty oil and bilge like the slime of saurian reptiles. Suddenly the solitude of the house on the cliff and the deserted beach became intolerable. She telegraphed to Edgar at Ottawa saying that she was on her way home. She packed hurriedly, gave orders for the closing of the house for the season, and took the night train for Montreal.
The night was hot and oppressive and she slept fitfully. An hour before dawn she sat up with a feeling of panic; the train was standing still in a siding and trainload after trainload of troops passed her darkened compartment window. The young conscript soldiers sprawled in the green plush seats asleep under the sickly yellow lights like grotesque wax dummies in uniform. She dozed off and when she awoke the train was hurtling over the uneven tracks in the gray light of early dawn. Guy slept calmly, his covers thrown back and his little chest rising and falling steadily. He spoke quietly in his sleep but his words were indistinct, and once, shortly before the sun rose in full splendor, he gurgled with laughter and turned towards Ruth and smiled. But his eyes were closed.
The following afternoon the train pulled into the dingy Bonaventure Station. There were noise and confusion everywhere; troops leaving for camp and overseas, men returning to the city on leave, military police with red and black armbands, welfare workers and civilians. Ruth pushed through the crowds and made for the waiting room where she expected the chauffeur would be waiting. But he was not to be found. She wondered whether there had been a mistake; then she remembered that she had only wired to Edgar at his office in Ottawa, perhaps he hadn’t returned in time to
make all arrangements.
She called a cab and gave the driver her address. In a few minutes the car pulled up before the Sherbrooke Street house. The butler answered in response to Marie’s ring; he appeared nervous and ill at ease when he saw Ruth.
“I did not expect madame home so soon. Captain Kennedy did not tell me you were coming.” He shifted from foot to foot like a guilty schoolboy.
“Is Captain Kennedy at home?”
“Yes, madame.”
“The man is an idiot,” Ruth thought as the butler stood motionless before her. “Weren’t you told that I was coming home today?”
“No, madame.” He looked up the wide branched staircase toward her husband’s rooms.
“When did Captain Kennedy arrive?”
“He has been here about ten days.”
Of course, that explained it. The telegram had not reached him.
“Will you please bring my things upstairs?” Her request galvanized the butler into life and he seized the bags and started up the stairs ahead of her.
Near the fork of the red carpeted staircase a shout of laughter came from Edgar’s room. He was drunk again, Ruth thought. His voice was loud and his words sounded thick and tangled. He was angry and ended his sentence with a burst of obscenity which was immediately followed by a woman’s high-pitched voice. The butler paused and made conversation in a limp effort to drown out his master’s voice.
“Are there any more bags, madame, or are these all?”
At that moment the door of her husband’s room was flung open. Edgar faced his unknown guest and only his broad back was visible to Ruth as she stood frozen into immobility on the staircase. Instead of his customary Salisbury boots he wore slippers and his tunic was thrown over his shoulders as a cape.
“Now get th’ hell out of here, you little bitch. Get out of here before I throw you out,” he shouted to the person in the room.
His hair was disheveled and he shoved the door away from him until it disappeared out of Ruth’s sight, banged against the wall inside the room and slowly swung into view again. He grasped the ornate brass knob of his door to steady himself. In the few seconds which elapsed during which the door swung slowly back into Ruth’s field of vision, some obscure, irrational compulsion transformed Edgar’s drunken mood from one of rage to whining importunity.
He swayed from the waist, and he pleaded with the unseen visitor: “Now go ’way, will you go ’way? I don’t want you any more. Go ’way.”
He laughed at some humorous remark he was about to make, and, although his back was turned toward Ruth, she knew the expression of his face: mouth twisted to one side, his nervous eyes screwed up into an impotent smile.
“Now you’d better go ’way ’fore I lose my temper again.”
He laughed again and then with drunken petulance: “Say, ain’t you got no home?”
As Ruth listened to this conversation she knew that she should do something, move on or cry out in pain and humiliation, but she felt paralyzed, there was nothing she could do but stare and listen as though hypnotized by the pounding of her heart. Finally, with an almost superhuman effort she grasped Guy’s little hand and took a few steps upwards on the staircase. At that moment Edgar turned and faced Ruth. He stared for a few seconds, his jaw dropped as though it had become unhinged and he blinked, trying to piece together the situation from the indistinct pictures which his brain gave him in lieu of thought.
Then in a pitiful voice (blurred in accent but clear in tone), he said: “Oh, my God.” He swayed for a moment as if he had received a blow between the eyes from an unseen fist and turned towards the woman in his room. “See, see!” he shouted to the woman, pointing to Ruth, “that’s what you’ve done to me. Oh, my God!”
He slammed the door shut and Ruth heard a thudding sound as though some great weight had suddenly fallen to the floor. The woman’s voice within rose high in tipsy vituperation and then quickly became muffled before reaching the full force of its crescendo. It was as if (so it seemed to Ruth) a brutal hand had suddenly choked it off.
XLI
From the moment that Edgar’s door swung open until the unseen lady’s invective was abruptly choked off, the hall clock at the foot of the stairs indicated the passing of precisely thirty seconds—an inconsequential atom of time—during which Ruth stood perfectly motionless. She was aware of many things: the shrill coarseness of the woman’s voice, her husband’s stupefied condition, the pallor of the butler’s face, Marie’s expression of astonishment which turned to embarrassment and then to pity, Guy’s confused silence. Thirty seconds of transfixed inaction—and then she walked on up the stairs holding her son’s cold little hand, followed by the servants.
Once within the sanctuary of her room, she sank into a chair and allowed her emotions to flood over her. Marie had taken Guy to his room and returned to unpack. There was something so reassuring in the heavy, peasant femininity of Marie as she lifted things from the trunks and put them away in drawers, there was relief from pain in watching manual work being performed, in observing the rhythmic movements of mechanical toil. An hour passed during which she heard the opening and shutting of doors, a car pulled up before the house, the staircase creaked as someone walked stealthily down the steps, there was the shifting and metallic grinding of gears as the motor got under way. Then there were long silences.
Towards dinner time there was a knock on her door and Edgar entered. Ice and cold water had tightened the flabbiness of his face into a semblance of firmness, but his eyes were still bloodshot and bleary. His attitude alternated between befuddled contrition and self-assertive masculinity. Finally he found speech—it was lame and inadequate:
“I say, Ruth, I’m awfully sorry—I don’t know how to explain—I mean, a man might understand—”
For a few moments she found it difficult to reply to this banal evasion. Still, there was in her no desire to inflict pain or even to upbraid him; she simply wanted to be left alone. But he, with coarse masculine insistence, preferred to force matters to some sort of conclusion—uncertainty was the thing he dreaded most. He stood before her, awaiting her reply and because some remark was necessary she said:
“But, Edgar—in our own home—”
His jaws stiffened and he wetted his dry lips. Since he had come into the room he had avoided her eyes, but now he looked up and she saw that it was painful for him.
“Listen, Ruth.” There was an abject quality in his voice as he spoke. “It looks bad, I know, but you’ve got to believe me. You’ve got to. I know I shouldn’t have brought her here. Nothing—nothing happened, really. We were quite tight when we arrived last night—I suppose the butler told you—but nothing happened.”
Ruth listened with a peculiar feeling; it was as if something within her head had been anesthetized.
—Nothing happened. Would it have been worse if something, as he calls it, happened? Not a word to allay the pain which I feel. Only stupid schoolboy excuses. I have come a long way since the convent. But in my own home!
There was a strange odor in the room which was not quite successfully drowned by the clean sharp smell of his witch hazel. He still stood before her like a child caught in a naughty act. She realized that she must search in the maze of her confused thoughts and emotions for something to say, although she knew that silence would be better.
“Edgar, I cannot go on living this way. I know what you have suffered in France, but I cannot have—have this sort of thing going on in my home.”
—Another woman, a filthy person, in the bed in which we have loved one another.
“You see, Ruth, it was this way—” He halted, groping for words.
“It is not that I mind whether anything really happened,” she said, “but after these years—the pain of the war … ”
She wanted to recount their many ties: the profoundly happy days at Gaspé, the birth of Guy with his father on the battlefield, but to speak of th
ese things in the room where the odor of the other woman persisted would have soiled the tragic beauty of the years which now lay behind them, it would have been indecent. Still, she had to tell him as gently as possible some of the thoughts which cried aloud for expression now that he had come to her.
“Ever since you have returned from the war I have been frightened of you. Even Guy distrusts you. When you had been back only a few months he asked me if you were really his father.”
He winced but said nothing. He rested against the mantle of the fireplace, his thumb hooked into the waist piece of his Sam Browne belt. The blue and white ribbon of the Military Cross, the brass insignia, the polished leather made his abject humility seem more incongruous and pitiful. He said nothing and in the half darkness thoughts and powerful emotions reared through their minds like wild stallions. Down in the street below a regiment of conscripts marched by on their way to the Peel Street barracks. The band blared and thumped “Tipperary.”
—They took him away and killed him. He’s not the same Edgar who sat with me and wept when he heard the beautiful music of the Passion. They have coarsened him, made him a drunkard and a brute. The war! Dragged the filth of the brothel into my own home. They said peace, peace, and they gave me war. They said love and they gave me this!
The sound of the marching men died away, leaving the darkness still.
“God, Ruth—dear, I tell you I’m sorry.”
A dolorous aria of the Passion ran through her mind, crowding out the things she wanted to say. She found herself humming the air, and the words, like insistent, ill-mannered intruders, kept befuddling her mind, confusing her thought. She wanted to say that she was going away, that she could no longer live with him, but instead she heard the words of the singer: 0 Schmerz! hier zittert das gequalte Herz … Was ist die Ursach’ aller solcher Plagen? Strange that after all these years she should remember so distinctly a few bars of music and the rich quality of a German tenor’s voice!
There Are Victories Page 10