Two Solitudes
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THE NEW CANADIAN LIBRARY
General Editor: David Staines
ADVISORY BOARD
Alice Munro
W.H. New
Guy Vanderhaeghe
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CONTENTS
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Love consists in this,
that two solitudes protect,
and touch, and greet each other.
âRainer Maria Rilke
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FOREWORD
Because this is a story, I dislike having to burden it with a foreword, but something of the kind is necesssary, for it is a novel of Canada. This means that its scene is laid in a nation with two official languages, English and French. It means that some of the characters in the book are presumed to speak only English, others only French, while many are bilingual.
No single word exists, within Canada itself, to designate with satisfaction to both races a native of the country. When those of the French language use the word
Canadien
, they nearly always refer to themselves. They know their English-speaking compatriots as
les Anglais
. English-speaking citizens act on the same principle. They call themselves Canadians; those of the French language French-Canadians.
I should like to emphasize as emphatically as I can that this book is a story, and in no sense whatever documentary. All the characters are purely imaginary. If names of actual persons, living or dead, have been used it is a coincidence I have done my best to avoid. The parish known in the story as Saint-Marc-des-Ãrables is also imaginary. There may be other Saint-Marcs in the Province of Quebec, but they are not mine.
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PART ONE
1917â1918
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ONE
N
orthwest of Montreal, through a valley always in sight of the low mountains of the Laurentian Shield, the Ottawa River flows out of Protestant Ontario into Catholic Quebec. It comes down broad and ale coloured and joins the Saint Lawrence, the two streams embrace the pan of Montreal Island, the Ottawa merges and loses itself, and the mainstream moves northeastward a thousand miles to the sea.
Nowhere has nature wasted herself as she has here. There is enough water in the Saint Lawrence alone to irrigate half of Europe, but the river pours right out of the continent into the sea. No amount of water can irrigate stones, and most of Quebec is solid rock. It is as though millions of years back in geologic time a sword had been plunged through the rock from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes and savagely wrenched out again, and the pure water of the continental reservoir, unmuddied and almost useless to farmers, drains untouchably away. In summer the cloud packs pass over it in soft, cumulus, pacific towers, endlessly forming and dissolving to make a welter of movement about the sun. In winter when there is no
storm the sky is generally empty, blue and glittering over the ice and snow, and the sun stares out of it like a cyclops' eye.
All the narrow plain between the Saint Lawrence and the hills is worked hard. From the Ontario border down to the beginning of the estuary, the farmland runs in two delicate bands along the shores, with roads like a pair of village main streets a thousand miles long, each parallel to the river. All the good land was broken long ago, occupied and divided among seigneurs and their sons, and then among tenants and their sons. Bleak wooden fences separate each strip of farm from its neighbour, running straight as rulers set at right angles to the river to form long narrow rectangles pointing inland. The ploughed land looks like the course of a gigantic and empty steeplechase where all motion has been frozen. Every inch of it is measured, and brooded over by notaries, and blessed by priests.
You can look north across the plain from the river and see the farms between their fences tilting toward the forest, and beyond them the line of trees crawling shaggily up the slope of the hills. The forest crosses the watershed into an evergreen bush that spreads far to the north, lake-dotted and mostly unknown, until it reaches the tundra. The tundra goes to the lower straits of the Arctic Ocean. Nothing lives on it but a few prospectors and hard-rock miners and Mounted Policemen and animals and the flies that brood over the barrens in summer like haze. Winters make it a universe of snow with a terrible wind keening over it, and beyond its horizons the northern lights flare into walls of shifting electric colours that crack and roar like the gods of a dead planet talking to each other out of the dark.
But down in the angle at Montreal, on the island about which the two rivers join, there is little of this sense of new
and endless space. Two old races and religions meet here and live their separate legends, side by side. If this sprawling half-continent has a heart, here it is. Its pulse throbs out along the rivers and railroads; slow, reluctant and rarely simple, a double beat, a self-moved reciprocation.
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TWO
Father Emile Beaubien stepped onto the porch of his red brick presbytery and looked at the afternoon. It was the autumn of 1917. The October air was sharp enough to shrink his nostrils. The sky was a deep blue, a fathomless blue going up and up into heaven.
The priest drew in deep breaths of the still air. For his noon dinner he had just eaten roast duck. This good meal, and many other blessings, made him feel content and thankful. He decided he could relax a little from the constant strain under which he had worked since coming to this parish as a rather young priest seven years ago. Last Sunday the new church had been consecrated by the bishop: his church, the largest within many miles. This year also the harvest had been bountiful, and owing to the war farm prices had never been better.
He walked briskly back and forth, one hand on his pendant cross, the skirts of his black soutane swishing as he moved. There was great energy in his steps; energy also in the lines of his face. The cheekbones and nose were very large, the mouth wide and straight, the eyes seemingly magnified by the thick lenses of the glasses he wore. Two deep lines, like a pair of dividers, cut the firm flesh of his face above the flanges of the nose to the corners of the lips. His hair was black and closely cropped, somewhat like a monk's cap. His face was
brown; his hands too were brown, and big-boned, and his posture gave the suggestion that under the soutane the bones were all big, the shoulders strong as a ploughman's.
The motionless air was suddenly cracked by two gunshots, and the priest paused in his walk to look up at the sky above the river. He saw three specks rise in it, and with eager interest he watched them. Two more shots cracked the air. One of the specks stopped, wavered and fell straight down. Frenette, the blacksmith, must be shooting ducks from his blind in the marsh near the river. It was years since the priest had done any duck-shooting himself, and he missed it because it had been the only recreation he had ever known. When he was a boy there had been little time from farm work even to shoot food; nor for that matter enough money to buy cartridges for his uncle's old gun.
He resumed his walking. By long habit his mind was vigilant to the parish about him. He carried the whole of Saint-Marc-des-Ãrables constantly in his thoughts. Quite literally he believed that God held him accountable for every soul in the place.
On this Saturday afternoon the village which was the core of the parish was deserted even by the dogs. Across the dirt road the brown houses, their steps edging shyly forward into the road, were silent. There was no sign of life in their airless front parlours, concealed behind white lace curtains drawn as close and tight as blinds. The men were out in the fields for the fall ploughing, the women in the kitchens, the smaller children asleep, the older children at work. Farther down the road, the priest could see the sun glinting on the metal advertising posters that plastered the front of Polycarpe Drouin's general store with a strange mixture of French and English:
La Farine Robin Hood
,
Black Horse Ale
,
Magic Baking Powder
,
Fumez le Tabac Old Chum
. The store would be empty now except for Ovide Bissonette, who was getting more feeble-minded every year. Ovide would be asleep on a table piled with overalls, his eyes wide open and his legs dangling over the side. Polycarpe himself would be asleep in his rocking chair in the back kitchen.
Father Beaubien stepped down from the porch and walked slowly across a stretch of grass fronting the presbytery toward the new church. His feet rustled crisply in the newly fallen leaves. At one corner of his house was a large oak tree, its leaves yellow; at the other corner was a giant rock maple. The maple was a tower of silence, a miraculous upward rush of cool flame, every leaf scarlet and dry and so delicately poised that the first wind would tear the whole tower apart and scatter it on the lawn and over the road.
The priest passed over the rustling leaves onto the brown, packed-gravel area before the church. He stood still with his powerful hands folded under his pendant cross, his eyes lifted to the twin spires. He could not look at his church often enough. Sometimes at night during the past week he had wakened after a few hours' sleep and dressed himself and gone out of the presbytery, to cross to the new building. He entered it by his own door and stood in the darkness, watching the votive candles burning before the images; or wandered through the nave under the great canopy of the roof, with the stone cold as a grave-marker under his feet and the whole church shadow-haunted, and so still he could hear his own blood pulsing in his ears: the sound of God.
Now he stood staring at the solid grey stone mass. After everything critics had said against the size of his church, it had been built. He felt both humble and proud that God had permitted a man like himself to build Him such a monument. It
was the largest within forty miles. It was larger even than the largest Protestant church in Montreal where millionaires were among the parishioners. And Saint-Marc numbered less than a hundred and thirty families.