There Are Victories

by Charles Yale Harrison

  She sat in the unlighted room and wished that Edgar would go. There was nothing more to be said. But he remained, vague and motionless in the dark, thumb through his belt, tunic decorated with ribbons, face haggard.

  —They took him and creased his face with the stamp of death, hardening his eyes, so that now he cannot look anywhere for fear that he will see that which he is trying to forget. The horrible odor of that woman, the sour reek of stale whisky on his breath, the clean smell of witch hazel. I had better tell him bluntly, tell him that I cannot live with him any longer. He really doesn’t need me. Will get along much better without me. Of course, his pride will be hurt and he will plead and beg like a little dog. But that is the better way, I think.

  “Why don’t you say something, Ruth?”

  “I was thinking that perhaps it will be better for both of us if we separated.”

  “Ruth—we can’t do that!”

  “Can’t? Why not?”

  “We simply can’t. Think of our families, of what people will say.” His words sounded silly and empty, frightened.

  —Of course, think of what they will say! They will say dreadful things and it will be hard to explain. Try to explain how I feel now as I sit here and smell the odors of the other woman, odors are difficult to explain to families. Yes, they will say dreadful things. But I am through. Say it to him quite definitely, say it to him while the air of this room is still foul with the odor of the woman who has just left.

  “You see, Edgar, it is not really our fault. We were married just a few months and then you went off to war. You’re different now. Let us not part too bitterly. Something happened to both of us and we cannot live together any longer.”

  “What are you talking about? We’re married, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, it can’t go on any longer. I am leaving in the morning. I am taking Guy with me.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Why can’t I?”

  “Because I’ll stop you.”

  There was nothing more to be said. The darkness, she felt, was too intimate and she snapped the lights on. His face was drawn and disfigured with suppressed anger. She felt the full fury of his impotent rage about to burst. And at that moment there was a knock at the door. It was the butler. Dinner was served.

  As they walked out into the hall Guy, pale, and eyes wide with fright, stood outside the door.

  XLII

  The evening was torture for Ruth. There was dinner with Edgar, sobered and sullen, while Guy looked on with a white, scared face. The conversation was strained and desultory and the boy sensed this nervous tension. After dinner Edgar went to his club and shortly before midnight Ruth heard him return, she heard his unsteady footsteps as he ascended the stairs to the first landing and then his lurching clumsiness as he walked to his room. Marie, exhausted with unpacking before dinner, had packed again. Now, however, everything was in readiness for the morning. She had telephoned to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and reserved a suite. She was expected sometime in the morning.

  There was a knock at her door, an unsteady, sustained knock which contained a note of defiance in its knuckled tone. Edgar entered and looked in angry astonishment at the packed trunks and valises. His face was still sullen.

  “Say, you’re not really goin’?”

  “It’s no use, Edgar, I’m very tired. I’ve had a very trying day and I want some rest. Please go.”

  “Well, I say you’re not goin’ and by God I’ll see that you don’t. You’re my wife, see, and if you make one move out of here I’m goin’ to break your god-damned neck!”

  “Please, Edgar, I am very tired. Go away.”

  Her request infuriated him, in his befuddled state it became a major affront.

  “Go ’way, eh? Go ‘way? Tha’sh how you treat your legal an’ lawful husband, eh? Me lyin’ in the god-damned mud ’n crap over in France an’ you havin’ the time o’ your life here an’ me go ’way, eh? You god-damned bitch!”

  “Edgar, please don’t shout, you’ll wake the servants. Guy has been so nervous today that—.”

  “Don’t answer me back. You’ve got too much of what the cat licks her arse with. Tha’sh what the sergeant-major used t’ say—he’s dead, poor fellow, got a bullet through his head, saw his brains run down the collar of his tunic. Laugh every time I think of him. Too much tongue, tha’sh what’s the matter with you. Now, shut up. D’yuh hear, shut up!”

  His voice rose to a scream, specks of froth appeared at the corners of his mouth. He began to pace awkwardly up and down the room. Now and then he collided with a piece of furniture and he stood off and surveyed the offending article with an air of injured righteousness.

  A terrified silence fell upon Ruth. She was filled with a vast pity for the poor wretch who paced bravely to and fro before her, frightening her into speechlessness with the threat of his fists. This was what the war had done for him, she thought, it had taken the lowest in his nature and exalted it. It had made virtues of his weaknesses, it had elevated the lust for blood into a holy thing. The brutal power of the fist which men had been curbing through all the long painful centuries was now supreme. The war had converted Edgar into a drunken, vicious sot, it had made him forget the restraints which once held men in check. It had made filth a laughing matter, the subject for marching songs as they sent youngsters to slaughter. For how could men stab at each other’s hearts while love, beauty and peace were ideals? How could one stand the maddening strain of shellfire without a compensating destruction of all the old values? She had heard of the drunken brawls, the lines of waiting men before brothels in France—she had heard these things and hoped they were not true. And now she understood. How could millions of men who bore no hate against each other kill and blind and maim unless everything that once held the bestial passion of men in thrall were not loosed, encouraged, excited? And now this thing had come into her life dragging its bloodstained feet through her home, tracking up her life with its hob-nailed putrescence. Those things which once had set men apart from beasts were now held in low esteem. Pity, beauty, music, all the things of the spirit, these were now considered effeminate, things to be laughed at in mess halls. And the brutal fist, the red, hairy fist which men had chained and bled of its senseless power was now smashing the helpless to the sound of thunder of artillery and crass trumpeting bands. The cries of the wounded and the dying were drowned out by the shouts of victories, the orations of statesmen, the chantings of priests …

  Her silence became a challenge. The quarry should struggle and scream.

  Edgar muttered out of the corner of his mouth: “Sittin’ there so god-damned superior—like a staff officer. Who the hell do you think you are?”

  He staggered toward her, seized her arm and pulled her to her feet. “I say you won’t leave this house.” The pressure on her arm tightened but she said nothing. “You—you—.”

  Words did not come readily to his thickened tongue and he brought his unsteady hand across her face. She staggered back and fell across her bed, stunned by the force of his blow. He threw himself on the bed at her side, putting his arm about her roughly.

  “Tha’sh where you belong—in bed with your husband.”

  She was weeping and her tears roused him to newer heights of sexual fury.

  When his insane passion had subsided he closed his eyes; in a few minutes he was breathing heavily in a deep sleep. Ruth left and roused Marie and asked that the guest’s room be prepared for her.

  Early in the morning she took Guy and Marie and went to the hotel. Before leaving she looked into her room. Edgar was still sprawling, dressed, upon her bed. He lay very still and in the gray morning light his face wore a greenish pallor and Ruth observed that his spurs had torn her Venetian lace bed spread into shreds.

  XLIII

  In the summer of 1918, Major Throop died a most inglorious death
at Étaples, the Canadian base in France. All during the war he had been shifted from one safe town to another well behind the front: St. Pol, Boulogne, Étaples. His letters contained the pathos of the elderly soldier at the base. “How I wish,” he wrote to his wife, “that I could go up the line and take my place with the splendid young fellows who are doing their bit so gallantly. During the Boer War I remember … ” He couldn’t stand the sneers of the men who returned to the base with their sleeves decorated with brassy perpendicular wound stripes, nor the youthful bravado as the youngsters marched up the muddy road leading to the troop trains. “It seems a pity that after all these years in the 17th Lancers [prancing horses on Sherbrooke Street, bright pennants, glittering lances] I should be teaching young lads how to build sanitary conveniences,” (he nearly wrote privvies), “when in reality my heart is where the fighting is thickest.”

  Then one day he walked back to camp in a heavy rain and five days later he was dead of pneumonia. “Throop, Frederick, Major; died of illness on active service.”

  The news of the Major’s death came the morning that Ruth left her home and it was not until noon that Mrs. Throop called her daughter on the telephone.

  Mrs. Throop sounded metallically tearful as her voice came over the wire: “My dear, what have you done—and on the day that your stepfather died.” There was an accusing note in her voice as though in some way Ruth was responsible for the wet weather in Northern France.

  “I am so sorry about—about father. When did you hear?”

  “I must see you, Ruth dear, and I must find a way to bring you poor children together again.”

  “I don’t want to live with Edgar again, mother, he—.”

  There was a sound of weeping at the other end which interrupted Ruth. Then, weakly tearful, Mrs. Throop chided her daughter: “How can you say such things? You know in this hour of darkness we mustn’t be selfish, Ruth dear, with our men dying on the field of battle … ”

  The nobility of her thoughts overcame Mrs. Throop’s emotions and she burst into uncontrolled tears. Later in the day, fashionably mournful in sudden widow’s weeds, she called at the hotel.

  XLIV

  When Mrs. Throop realized that she could not move Ruth she sought the aid of Bishop Villeneuve. Seated in a comfortable armchair near a window which faced the campus of McGill University, now being trampled into a mire by marching feet, the Bishop cleared his throat and said with understanding and tact: “Ruth, my child, your mother has told me everything. I understand how you feel and I sympathize deeply with you. It is in times such as these that the Church offers its greatest solace.”

  “Yes, I know,” Ruth said without animation.

  “Do you not think that wisdom would lie in going back to your home, in trying to forget and finding happiness in devotion to your child and perhaps later in redeeming your husband?”

  “I am not sure, Your Grace.”

  “It is difficult, I know. Your early training with the gentle nuns of the Sacred Heart did not prepare you for this sort of thing. I have always felt that we do not sufficiently train our girls to withstand the rigors of life. Of course, I do not hold with some of the Protestants that all the mysteries of life should be explained in a spirit of crass materialism. We teach, and it is true, to rely upon the healing power of prayer.”

  “I cannot go back. He is different now. It is as though a strange man came into my room and bruised my arms and—.”

  “Yes, yes, I understand, my child.”

  “The boy, too, is frightened of him.”

  The Bishop sat in a purple, ecclesiastical silence and fingered his rosary. Patience and sympathy, life had taught him, tempered the most rebellious spirit and a woman’s heart roweled by a brutal husband required but time and the soothing power of the Church.

  “I know I will suffer for this,” Ruth said; “the people in the hotel look strangely at me. A married woman, separated from her husband, it seems, is fair game. But our marriage, Your Grace, is at an end.”

  The Bishop smiled sadly. “You are mistaken. In your sorrow you have fallen into a great error. A Christian marriage cannot come to an end. It is deathless.”

  At this point a vague helplessness seized Ruth. These were words against which she could not prevail. They were the words of her childhood, she had heard them from the lips of the gentle Mother Superior, this was the language of her childhood prayers, words such as these, mystical and pervasive, were recited by her as she stood before the picture of the bleeding Christ. How could she now pit herself against the basic truths of her early life? A tumult arose in her mind. There was the chapel at the convent with its tendrils deep in her being, and again there was the war, the casualty lists; there was the healing power of confession and against this stood the cruel brass of the strident military bands. On the one hand there was the tranquil peace of the cathedral, the majestic tones of the B minor Mass, the flickering candles in the musty stone nave making the rich shadows tremble on the cool flagged floor; on the other hand there was that terrible look which never left Edgar’s eyes (cold, terrified) as though something dreadful was stamped on his eyeballs that even his eyelids could not blot from his vision.

  There was the odor of death upon her husband; it was as though he had been touched with the finger of a nameless plague and now the exhalation of this mass putrescence rose to her nostrils: the pungent redolence of barrooms, the sour, musty odor of brothels, the perfume of many bodies, living and dead. But no matter, this thing must not pollute her life and the life of her son. It must not drag its slimy belly across her life. And now, at once, she felt helpless, for she realized there was no sanctuary from this anywhere in the world. This was what the world wanted; it glorified the monster in song and in speech. The world was happy to destroy the old temples, young girls were glad to throw off the old restraints, young women were free of the old responsibilities.

  One night, before a regiment left for France, she had seen a soldier and a woman under the light of a street lamp lying unashamed performing the most intimate of all human acts before the gaze of passers-by. True, it was near an alley on Craig Street, near the cesspit of the city, in the shadow of the row upon row of brothels; it was on the sidewalk where the filth of many feet sullied the act. And when this could happen, she thought, the time was at hand, even though it never happened again.

  —It is impossible that my marriage with Edgar cannot end. I must make him realize what I have suffered, my arm, his hand across my face, the sight of him sprawling on my bed, his spurs tearing the bedclothes. It seemed as if he always came to me wearing spurs, always except those first few months before he went away …

  “But, Your Grace, is it deathless—I hope you will not think me impertinent—when my husband brings a loose woman, a street-walker, into my home?”

  The Bishop said nothing.

  “It would be different if that were all, but ever since he came back from France he has been so calloused and brutal. He forced himself upon me, there were times—.”

  The Bishop raised his hand as though to ward off the painfulness of the conversation, as though he were holding the cross between the devil and himself.

  “There were times when he treated me like a prostitute, his terms of endearment were coarse and dirty and when I stiffened and drew away from him—I say these things because I think you should know, Your Grace—he sneeringly called me a wife, as though the word were a term of reproach.”

  “In spite of these things, my child—.”

  “That isn’t all. After I had reproached him for having brought a woman into my home, he struck me.

  She walked to the window to hide her emotion and looked through the haze of her tears at the gray buildings of the university at the foot of the mountain.

  “Be sure, my daughter, that my heart is only with you at this moment. I feel your pain and humiliation and I understand your resentment and rebelliousness. But you must remember that C
hristian marriage is a sacrament. It was given to us as a symbol of the marriage of Christ and the Church, it therefore carries with it the grace of God which makes it possible for men and women who are united in holy matrimony to overcome all the temptations, difficulties and sorrows which sometimes accompany this state. In calling your marriage ended you declare that you wish to destroy this symbol. This means that you are prepared to attack the very cornerstone on which the Church is built. Surely this is not what you have in mind?”

  —Shall I tell him of the night when he turned from me as though I were something he had not bargained for and said: “There’s two kinds of f—ing, domestic and imported, and you’re just domestic.” Shall I ask him if this is part of the sacrament? No, it wouldn’t be fair. He means well and I shouldn’t cause him any pain. It’s simply that we aren’t talking the same language.

  “No—that is not what I had in mind.”

  “You see, if marriage is a sacrament, as indeed it is, then it is this blessed state which raises human beings to heavenly dignity. It raises them above the status of animals, for without marriage men and women would be like the beasts of the field. It is, therefore, your duty as a good Catholic daughter to bear your cross with humility and in fear of the Lord.”

  “Do you then advise me to return to Edgar?”

  “Yes, my child, forgive him, help him to find himself. Answer him with love and charity. Pray for him—and for me.” The Bishop crossed himself and lowered his eyes for a moment.

  “Is this all that the Church, in which I have always lived and trusted, has to offer? To go back to a man who reeks of other women, to love him and be charitable to him? This is all that you have to offer me, Your Grace?”