Two Solitudes (11 page)

Paul was suspicious. “A negro with a moustache?”

“Thet's what I'm telling you.”

The boy's laughter bubbled. “But negroes don't have moustaches, Captain Yardley. Not black negroes. I read that in a book. Was this a black negro?”

“Black? Say, thet fella down in the hold on a dark night was so black it's a fact not even the ship's cat could see him. Well, anyhow, one time a dirty little dago lad we had on board, he took out his knife and slit the nigger's moustache off on one end, and when the nigger woke up to stand his watch, feeling around to untie the knot, he found he had only half a moustache and he let out a yell. Man, did thet black man know how to holler! Seven years growing, thet hair was.” Yardley looked down at the boy, grinning. “Well, when he saw this dago lad laughing at him, before anyone could stop him, he jumped the dago, and the skipper heard his neck crack clear above the hatches.”

Paul laughed because the story had no sense of disaster
the way Captain Yardley told it. He started to test its veracity by asking more questions, and then he saw Father Beaubien coming down the road toward them. His black soutane was flapping in the wind and the pendant cross swayed across his lean stomach. As they passed, Yardley greeted him and Father Beaubien nodded briefly, holding back his smile.

When they were well out of earshot, Paul said, “Last week in the store I heard somebody say that Father Beaubien doesn't like P'pa.”

Yardley laughed to hide a recurrent uneasiness. “They meant it was me he don't like.”

“They said P'pa.”

“They meant me.”

“But why?” Paul was very serious. “Everyone likes you.”

“Well, I guess Father Beaubien don't think he can afford to approve of me. You see, Paul, I'm a Presbyterian. It's a hard thing to get used to, being disapproved of for being a Presbyterian.”

“Would I like it, being a Presbyterian?”

“Well,” Yardley said, “thet's hardly a thing people like. It's something a man hasn't got any choice of.”

They were now well out on the river road and the wind from the north rushed past them in raw gusts. The river was ruffled by waves blowing across the current.

“Captain Yardley,” Paul said, “do you like Montreal?”

“No. I can't say I do. Why?”

“M'ma does. She wants to go back to live there.”

Yardley made no reply.

“When I'm a man I'm going to see all the cities,” Paul said. “I'm going to sea, like you did. I'm going to see the places
where Ulysses was.”

Older people always make a mistake with children that age, Yardley thought. They consider them babies. Paul remembered everything he read or saw in books, and everything he heard. Yardley had decided that at Paul's age a human being generally knew at least nine-tenths of all he would ever know.

Paul was happy now as they walked along, thinking about the
Odyssey
. He wanted to see the place where the salt water was azure blue the way pictures showed it, and the men had straight noses and the women wore flowing robes. He thought of Ulysses tied to the mast, and the sailors with wax in their ears rowing him past the island where beautiful women, white-skinned and black-haired like his mother, sang over a heap of bones. That was a very sensible thing Ulysses had done with the wax. And on the other side of that sea there was the Holy Land where Christ was born. Paul thought it must be very gloomy there. He looked up out of his thoughts and his lips moved in a smile. He was happy at that moment, without knowing or thinking why.

When they reached Yardley's gate, the captain said, “You'd better run along home with those papers. Your father will be sore enough to whale us, the way we've kept him waiting. Soon as the weather turns and it gets warm–you and me, we'll have a summerful of fun.”

“That will be wonderful!” Paul said. He touched his cap gravely and went on home.

Yardley stood and watched the boy go off down the road, growing smaller in the flatness against the outline of bare trees tossing wildly in the wind. A sense of poignancy, of the beauty of things which derive their loveliness from their fragility, broke over him in a wave, surprising him with its contradiction of his own basic optimism. Yes, everything would be truly wonderful, even growing old till you were like a sun-bleached
hulk would be good if you could be always among people who knew no fear. Among people who never groped at their neighbours like blind men in a cave. In a world where thoughts of war never stabbed into your personal peace like a needle.

Though Yardley had never had an academic education, he had slowly learned how to read books and how to think. As a sailor, and then as a ship's master, he had known solitude in strange places. He was persuaded that all knowledge is like a painted curtain hung across the door of the mind to conceal from it a mystery so darkly suggestive that no one can face it alone for long. Of ultimate solitude he had no fear, for he never let himself think about it. But he knew that if he once started, fear would be there.

Once in the tropics he had moored his ship in the lee of a promontory hundreds of miles from any charted habitation. Through a whole afternoon he had waited while some of the crew went ashore under the second mate to look for water. Leaning over the taffrail he had watched the fish gliding through ten fathoms of sunlit water below. Sharks and barracuda moved in their three-dimensional element, self-centred, beautiful, dangerous and completely aimless, coming out from a water-filled cavern hidden beneath the promontory and slipping under the ship's keel, fanning themselves for seconds under the rudder, then circling back into the cavern again. A moment he saw them in the golden water and then they were gone, and the water was as if they had never been there. The first mate had come to him for an order and broken his contemplation, but the memory of the hour had never left him. Self-centred, beautiful, dangerous and aimless: that was how they had been, and he could never forget it.

Here in Saint-Marc, where he had planted himself of his own volition, he had been lonely. He had come to love young
Paul as though the boy were his own son. And he knew they would all fight over him yet. The obscure conflict within the Tallard family would certainly centre on this youngest member. Beyond that, the constant tug of war between the races and creeds in the country itself would hardly miss him, for people seemed so constructed that they were unable to use ideas as instruments to discover truth, but waved them instead like flags.

As Yardley limped up the path to his house his mind saw a vision of all the Tallards pulling Paul; Marius on one arm and his mother on the other, Athanase at the head, and the priest with his powerful hands on both feet. He smiled to himself, deciding that the image was nonsense. A windy day was always a bad time to start figuring things out, especially if a man had been too much alone.

He closed the door on the day and threw some logs on the fire. Then he went into his kitchen to heat a bowl of soup and cut a slice of bread for his lunch.

 

EIGHT

The two parlour cars on the early afternoon train from Ottawa to Montreal were filled with politicians and lobbyists on their way home for the weekend, and Athanase Tallard was among them. On his knees were two newspapers, one French, the other English. He had read each of them through once. For a while he sat quietly, occasionally looking out the windows, then he opened the French paper, turned to the editorial page and re-read what the editor had to say about the speech he had made in the House the previous afternoon.

“The career of M. Athanase Tallard is excellent proof that no man can run with the hare and hunt with the hounds,” it said. “At least not in the province of Quebec. In the first half of his latest speech he tells us that the rest of the country does not understand Quebec. In the last half he talks about conscription like a Toronto jingo. As spokesman for French-Canada, he has completely discredited himself. Your protestations, M. Tallard, deceive no one but yourself. You can be with us, or you can be against us. You cannot stand in the middle, supporting the English Imperialists with one hand and trying to appease us with the other.”

Athanase put the paper down. The editorial hurt him; it also made him exceedingly angry. He picked up the English Toronto paper. In its editorial columns he read: “This last speech of Mr. Tallard, who in the past has given the impression of being an enlightened French-Canadian, is a pitiful example of the kind of hedging which the eternal Quebec pressure forces even on its better members of parliament. Mr. Tallard's words of yesterday cannot fail to give comfort to those dissident elements…”

Athanase threw both papers on the floor. What place did reason or intelligence have in politics? The newspapers were like kids picking sides for a fight. The crisis of the war was only making them worse, not better.

He looked down the row of red plush chairs and saw nothing but the bald heads of politicians and business men. There was a single man in uniform in the car, a major with a desk job in the military district in Montreal, but in spite of his polished boots and buttons the man was no soldier. He was merely a contractor in uniform, looking perfectly at home as he talked to a politician in the next chair.

Athanase could hear snatches of their conversation.

“The trouble is, the war hasn't been sold to Quebec.”

“Can you sell a war?”

“You can sell anything.”

Athanase noted that the major's shoulders had a permanent stoop. Not even three years in the army had cured him of the habit of leaning forward in order to be confidential in all his conversations.

“The point about Quebec is,” the major went on, “you need a man really sympathetic to the French-Canadians. But what does the government do? They send Toronto Orangemen to us in Montreal to help with recruiting. An Orangeman couldn't even sell a bonus in Quebec. Now what I'd like to see…”

What you'd like, Athanase thought, is a job with more rank and more money in it. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. To rest his mind he thought about Saint-Marc. It was now the first week in May and the land should be nearly dry. Blanchard would probably be ready to start planting by Monday. Sitting there with his head resting on the antimacassar of the chair, Athanase looked old and very dignified. His face was like a tired eagle's. Against his walnut-coloured cheeks the spray of his moustache was blue-white.

Groping for sleep, all he found was a welter of thoughts swirling out of the dark of his mind. He tried to keep them back but it was useless. Ultimately all the various tides of a man's nature rose up together, he thought, and unless he managed to resolve them, they broke him apart. Well, at least one thing was clear: his political life was a failure. His stand on the war had done no one any good. It had merely destroyed all the old pleasure of his days and the work that
filled them.

He remembered how he had once been able to enjoy himself easily, how he used to like food and occasionally to drink to excess in a highly witty and civilized way. Sometimes he and Kathleen had gone to horse-races and made special trips into town to see a play. And before Kathleen there had always been hockey. Once he had owned a share in one of the professional clubs, and for three seasons he had watched every game from the players' bench, knowing every man in the league to call by his first name.

Those had been good days before everything got complicated by the war. He liked the French style of hockey, a team with small, stickhandling forwards and defensemen built like beer barrels. Every year a few new boys would come into the league from the smaller towns, and before the season began he and the other owners, with the manager and trainer, would sit in fur coats in the empty rink, windows open to let the water freeze, and size up the new boys. All those youngsters had retired as veterans long ago. He remembered the big times in the dressing room on the nights when the season ended. The brewery sent over a barrel of beer and they broached it together, the beer tasting exactly right in the fuggy room with the smell of sweat and liniment, and the boys horsing around, and then everyone relaxed on the benches and beginning to boast. It had seemed a good world when hockey was important in it.

“Hullo, Tallard!”

He opened his eyes and saw the heavy face of Huntly McQueen looking down at him. He took off his pince-nez and pressed his fingers into his eyes, gently stroking them open, then replaced the glasses on the bridge of his nose and sat up. McQueen dropped into the vacant chair next his own and sat with his knees apart, his jowls sunk in his high stiff collar.

“Well, how's everything in Saint-Marc these days? How's Captain Yardley getting along?”

“Quite well, I should think,” Athanase said.

McQueen looked out the window and studied the farms of the lower Ottawa Valley through which they were running. The sun was bright on the river and the Gatineau Hills climbed to their left. Then after a moment he turned from the window and said with a chilly smile, “Your son made quite a speech the other night.”

Athanase stared at him. “What speech?”

“Didn't you know? I assumed you had seen the press reports. About a fortnight ago, or maybe less. In Montreal.”

Athanase shook his head. “I hadn't heard about it. At the university? I believe he's a member of the debating society.”

McQueen made a deprecating motion with his chubby hand. “No. It was one of those anti-conscription rallies Marchand's been holding. As a matter of fact, he mentioned me–your son, I mean.”

“I knew nothing about it. Should I apologize for him?”

“No…. No. One has to expect that sort of thing. Though I must admit I have an aversion to seeing my name in the papers.”

Athanase set his teeth as he felt the blood-beat quicken in his forehead. Was it his fault that he had never been able to do anything for Marius except pay for his education? What was this thing that rose between a father and his son? Kathleen? Partly, but it was more than that.