Two Solitudes (16 page)

This was going to be one time, Athanase decided grimly as he stood watching the water pour itself away through the gorge, when industry was going to be made to mean something more. He knew what he wanted here: the factory would become the foundation of the parish, lifting the living standards, wiping out debts, keeping the people in their homes where they had been born, giving everyone a chance. It would enable them to have a model school that could provide modern scientific training. Then they would have a hospital, a public library, a playground, finally a theatre as the parish grew into a town. It would be a revolution, and he would be the one to plan and control it. With McQueen to select the technicians and manage the finances, there was no reason why it should not be a success.

He turned and began to retrace his steps, thinking of nothing else all the way home. On the following Monday, he decided, he would tell McQueen of his decision when he went into town with Kathleen.

By the time he reached the house he realized that he was tired. He left his hat and coat in the hall and called to Kathleen. She answered from upstairs, then came running down, looking happier than he had seen her in months. “I'll tell Julienne you're back,” she said. “Your dinner will be ready in five minutes.”

He went into the library and sat down, and the moment he relaxed in his chair, fatigue and reaction set in like a wave.
He began to see the difficulties ahead. The factory would be a gamble, maybe McQueen would cheat him, maybe he was a fool to risk his money in a venture he knew nothing about technically. And there was Father Beaubien; the priest would be desperate when he learned that a factory was to be established in his parish. He had once served his time as curate in an industrial town, one of the worst of many bad ones. What would he do if he saw the possibility of Saint-Marc developing into a factory town, with English managers living on its outskirts, Protestants independent of his authority?

Athanase set his jaw. Even Father Beaubien could be handled. The bishop would certainly see advantages in the money a factory would bring to the parish; percentages of all pay envelopes could be channelled to the Church; English managers were glad to make such arrangements since it cost them nothing and helped to establish good will where they needed it most.

He passed his hands over his forehead, easing the tensed muscles between his eyes. If only he had done something as positive as building this factory long ago, while he still had the energy of his youth! It had been so much easier to enjoy life in those days than to dominate it, so much easier to spend long months in Paris than to worry about conditions in Saint-Marc and Ottawa. He could still see the sidewalk café near the Place Saint Michel where he had eaten his first Paris breakfast. The butter pats were pale yellow and the globes of water clinging to them glittered in the morning sun, the same sun that shone full on the front of Notre Dame a few minutes' walk away. He could still feel the creaking painted chair as he gave it his weight, leaning back to sniff Paris in the morning, looking at the midinette at the next table who had so willingly returned his smile. After all these years he could still remember
the thrill of being at home in the motherland of his own language, noting the differences in pronunciation between more archaic Québécois French and that of the Parisians, enjoying the quizzical expression on their faces as they tried helplessly to estimate the department of France from which he had come. No English-Canadian or American could ever know a comparable thrill at finding himself in London. You had to be a French-Canadian, one who had kept faith with the language for two centuries in the face of a hostile continent, to savour the pride and vindication of such a homecoming.

Athanase's lined, walnut-coloured face was still soft with recollections when the dinner bell rang. On his way to the dining room he remembered how he had once dreamed in a vague way of bringing back something of the spirit of revolutionary France to the older, wintry, clerical Norman France of Quebec. But he had not done it. Probably nobody could do it. On the other hand, if the spirit of France could not grow here, surely the spirit of the new world could. After all, the French in Canada were also North Americans.

He felt tired with all this remembering and sipped his soup gladly. Looking across the table at Kathleen, he winked at her gravely.

 

ELEVEN

At precisely two minutes to nine-thirty on Monday morning, Huntly McQueen stepped out of his Cadillac town-car and entered the Bank Building in Saint James Street. He was dressed in a dark suit, a black coat, a black hat, a dark blue tie very large in a winged collar. In the tie he wore a pearl pin.

He passed through a pair of bronze doors, was saluted
by the ex-sergeant of Coldstream Guards who stood there in livery, and entered a marble atrium as impersonal as a mausoleum. He joined a group of middle-aged and elderly men waiting for an elevator at the far end of the atrium. They were all dressed exactly like himself. Nods passed between them, they stepped into the elevator, shot each other a few more discreet glances as though to make certain that nothing important had happened in their lives over the weekend, then stared straight ahead as the cage moved upward.

On the second floor Sir Rupert Irons got out. He had a heavily hard body, was square in the head, face, jaws and shoulders; his hair was parted in the middle and squared off to either side of his perpendicular temples. His face was familiar to most Canadians, for it stared at them from small, plain portraits hanging on the walls of banks all the way from Halifax to Vancouver. Even in the pictures his neck was ridged with muscles acquired from a life-long habit of stiffening his jaw and pushing it forward during all business conversations.

On the fourth floor MacIntosh got out. He shuffled off toward his office, a round-shouldered, worrying man who carried in his head the essential statistics on three metal mines, two chemical factories, complicated relationships involving several international companies controlled in London and New York, and one corset factory.

On the seventh floor Masterman got out, to enter the offices of Minto Power. Although Minto harnessed the waters of one of the deepest and wildest rivers in the world, there was nothing about Masterman to suggest the elemental. He was a thin, punctilious man with a clipped moustache, a knife-edge press in his dark trousers, and a great reputation for culture among his associates in Saint James Street. He was one of the original members of the Committee of Art. He also belonged
to a literary society which encouraged its members to read to each other their own compositions at meetings; he was considered its most brilliant member because he had published a book called
Gentlemen, the King!
The work was an historical record of all the royal tours conducted through Canada since Confederation.

One floor higher, Chislett got out: nickel, copper and coal, a reputation for dominating every board he sat on, and so great a talent for keeping his mouth shut that even McQueen envied it.

The elevator continued with McQueen to the top floor. The thought crossed his mind that if an accident had occurred between the first and second floors, half a million men would at that instant have lost their masters. It was an alarming thought. It was also ironic, for these individuals were so remote from the beings they governed, they operated with such cantilevered indirections, that they could all die at once without even ruffling the sleep of the remote employees on the distant end of the chain of cause and effect. The structure of interlocking directorates which governed the nation's finances, subject always to an exceptionally discreet parliament, seemed to McQueen so delicate that a puff of breath could make the whole edifice quiver. But no, McQueen smiled at his own thoughts, the structure was quite strong enough. The men who had ridden together in the elevator this morning were so sound they seldom told even their wives what they thought or did or hoped to do. Indeed, Sir Rupert Irons was so careful he had no wife at all. They were Presbyterians to a man, they went to church regularly, and Irons was known to believe quite literally in predestination.

The elevator stopped to let McQueen out. His own preserves occupied half the top floor of the Bank Building.
Beyond a sizable reception room there were half a dozen small offices in which carefully selected executives did their work. McQueen's private office was in the far corner, reached through the room of his private secretary.

His round face smiled abstractedly at the switchboard girl and the typists as he went through the large room. It was his practice to enter his office by this route rather than through the private door from the outside hall to which he alone had a key, but he never lingered on his way. As he opened the door to his secretary's room she looked up brightly. “Good morning, Mr. McQueen.”

“Good morning, Miss Drew.”

“It's a fine day.”

“Yes,” he said. “It may well turn out a fine day.” He let a cool smile fall in her direction before he went into his own office, where he took off his hat and coat, hung them methodically in a cupboard, straightened his tie, pulled his coat down in the rear, and stood looking out the window as he did every morning before he settled down to work.

McQueen's office overlooked one of the panoramas of the world. Its windows opened directly on the port of Montreal, and from them he could look across the plain to the distant mountains across the American border. The Saint Lawrence, a mile wide, swept in a splendid curve along the southern bend of the island on which the city stood. Everything below the window seemed to lead to the docks, but there were few ships in them now. Since the war most of the ocean-going craft sailed under convoy from Halifax. The few vessels that were visible were all painted North Atlantic grey, with guns under tarpaulins pointing astern.

McQueen's satisfaction constantly renewed itself through his ability to overlook all this. He felt himself at the exact
centre of the country's heart, at the meeting place of ships, railroads and people, at the precise point where the interlocking directorates of Canada found their balance. Saint James Street was by no means as powerful as Wall Street or The City, but considering the small population of the country behind it, McQueen felt it ranked uniquely high. There was tenacity in Saint James Street. They knew how to keep their mouths shut and take the cash and let the credit go. They were bothered by no doubts. They had definite advantages over the British and Americans, for they could always play the other two off one against the other. Americans talked too much and the British made the mistake of underrating them. McQueen smiled. That gave the Canadians an advantage both ways. More than one powerful American of international reputation had lost his shirt to Sir Rupert Irons.

McQueen turned from the window, letting his glance rest casually on the furnishings of the room before he became immersed in work. By the window was an oversized globe on a heavy wooden stand. Behind his desk was a relief map of Canada, ceiling-high, dotted with coloured pins at various points to indicate where his enterprises and interests were located. An oriental rug covered the floor. Opposite his desk was an oil painting of his mother, with fresh flowers in a bowl beneath it.

Because of the manner of its furnishing, this office had acquired something of a romantic reputation in Saint James Street. Some men considered it eccentric. Few were permitted to enter it, and those who did exaggerated the luxury of its furnishings afterwards. It did nothing to lessen the respect in which McQueen was held as a man who kept his mouth shut about all important matters, talked freely of trivialities, and was uncannily successful.

A change of expression appeared on his face as he crossed to his mother's portrait. Every morning Miss Drew put a dozen fresh flowers in the cut glass bowl on the small table beneath it. The flowers were never arranged quite to suit him, and now he spent some time moving the stem of each daffodil until the effect met his approval. He looked up at the picture. His mother's was a small, sad face, lips tight, hair in a frizz over her forehead, neck enclosed by the sort of dog-collar made fashionable by Queen Alexandra. Her face as a whole distilled a Scottish kind of sternness, a Scottish melancholy that finds pleasure only in sad ideas. Except when he was alone in the room McQueen never even glanced at the portrait, but whenever he had a decision to make he shut everyone out and communed with the picture, and after he had looked at it long enough he was usually able to feel that his mother was silently advising him what to do. It was the most closely guarded of all his secrets.

Now he turned to his desk and his expression changed again. His eyes, widely set and intelligent in his moon-face, became opaque in their blueness. His lips compressed themselves. Deliberately he read through his mail and the letters crackled as he thumbed them through. When he reached the bottom of the pile he buzzed for his secretary.

Miss Drew opened the door soundlessly and stood waiting. She was fifty, she wore nothing but tweeds winter and summer, her hair was dull grey and she had been with him since the beginning of his career in Ontario twenty years before. He suspected that she knew the details of his enterprises as well as he did himself. But not the sense of balance, the delicate grip of the whole; not the logical feel for cause and effect that pulled the future out of mystery and sometimes caused McQueen to wonder if he were a genius.

Gaunt and angular, spectacles on her long nose and note-book in hand, she waited until McQueen indicated that he was ready to give her dictation. She pulled a chair to the side of his desk, opened her book and held her pencil poised. Nothing could have been less personal than Miss Drew at this hour of the morning.

“Any calls?” he said at last.

“Mr. Masterman's secretary phoned to remind you of the meeting on Friday. Mr. Buchanan called. I put the memorandum with your letters. Mr. Tallard called. He wants to come in today before lunch.”