Two Solitudes (18 page)

“Listen, Janet,” he said quickly. “That was a slip of the tongue. It won't last much longer. By Christmas it will be over, probably.”

A pathetic hope appeared for a moment in her eyes, then faded into defiance. “You don't have to be kind to me.
I
haven't suffered.
I
haven't really given anything to help win the war.”

His mind performed a rapid calculation. It was a miracle that Harvey was alive after all this time. He had beaten the law of averages by nearly two and a half years. But he had been wounded a year ago, recovered, and was back in France again.

“I haven't heard from him for nearly five weeks,” she said. “That's too long, you know.” Even in her anxiety her voice was a clipped imitation of the British. The Englishwomen who had run the finishing school to which her mother had sent her had done all they could to prevent her from talking or thinking like a Canadian, and they had done their work well.

“Don't worry,” McQueen said. “The Canadians haven't been in the line lately. I know that for a positive fact.”

“He's not with the Canadians any more. He was transferred to the British last January.” Her voice was filled with pride. “He loved it.”

“I see.”

“Is it true they don't know what happened to the Fifth Army?”

No, McQueen thought, they know only too well what happened to it. He rose and went around to her chair, leaned over and shyly laid a hand on her shoulder. He felt the bone hard under his fingers. She wriggled out from under his touch and he flushed slightly as he withdrew his hand. It was no use; women always despised him when he touched them. He went back to his chair and sat down heavily.

“Don't worry,” he said again, calling on all his resources until his voice sounded almost resonant. He watched her respond to his unsuspected force as he had seen so many others respond. It was a quality he could tap at will, though it fatigued him to do it. A very valuable asset. “Let's be logical,” he said. “If anything had happened to him you'd have heard by now. He probably wrote all right, and the letter was lost at sea.”

She dabbed at her eyes and her nose with a white handkerchief and then got quickly to her feet, standing very straight. “Thank you, Huntly. I've been extremely silly.”

“Not at all. Not at all. Just human, Janet.” He waved her back to her chair. “You were telling me about Daphne and Heather. How are they getting along?”

Some of the strain left Janet's face, but she continued to stand, leaning on the back of the chair for support. McQueen rose and stood on his own side of the desk.

“They're quite a responsibility,” she said. “If they were only more alike. Heather's a positive hoyden. Exactly like my father.”

“But Captain Yardley is a fine man!” McQueen's voice almost purred. “After all, for a man of his age to buy a farm and run it himself–and at a time when farmers are so necessary for the country!” Janet's face continued to brighten. “And I understand he's going to make an excellent thing of it, too.”

“But he simply won't ever change,” she said. “He's so stubborn. I didn't realize he was doing this as a duty. I thought he was just being willful. Why didn't he tell me? Out there with all those French-Canadians! General Methuen hardly knew what to make of it.”

“How's Daphne?” he said.

“I'm afraid she may become a very vain girl.” Janet frowned. The smallest thought in her mind immediately exaggerated itself on her face. “Candidly, do you think Brock Hall is the right school for her?”

McQueen tried to look solemn. He was about to accept an appointment to the board of governors of Brock, a step which gave him great satisfaction. It was worth a lot socially to be on the board of a private school patronized by the Square Mile. “Brock has an excellent reputation,” he said. “And I don't know about Daphne becoming vain. I think you probably overstate the case. She'll certainly be very beautiful. A most natural development, considering her mother.”

“Oh, Huntly!” Janet seemed annoyed by the compliment and McQueen flushed. “But Heather has no discrimination at all. She's just like Father–likes everybody and everything. Why, only yesterday…”

McQueen stroked his chin and smiled as he listened to a long story. Before it was ended the buzzer sounded on his desk and Janet became confused. She made apologies for keeping him so long, as he led her to the door that opened directly into the hall. She had no idea that the signal on the
buzzer had been a pre-arranged convenience for putting an end to her call.

When he was alone again, McQueen looked at his watch. It was nearly eleven-thirty. Athanase Tallard was fifteen minutes late. So the French were unpunctual, too? Or was it just Tallard, probably from long association with the English? Anyway, it was a fact to remember.

He glanced up at his mother's portrait, looked at it for a long time. They had gone through a lot together. Now he was reaping the fruits. He felt her pride in him like a mantle on his shoulders; she would be still more proud in twenty years' time, and she would find a way to convey the sense of it to him if he never lost touch with her. Always it had been like that, before she died as well as since her death. Whatever he did, wherever he went, she was beside him.

His father, a Presbyterian minister in a small Ontario town, had died when Huntly was a child. After that his mother had taken him to Toronto, wishing to be near her brother, who owned a small tool factory there. The brother's help was limited to inviting them to Christmas dinner every year. He believed that giving financial aid only weakened the recipients' characters. So Mrs. McQueen had supported herself and her son by tutoring backward schoolchildren and composing Sunday School quarterlies for a religious publishing house. She was paid very badly, the publishers having persuaded her that their work was profitless, done only for the greater glory of God.

Huntly had grown up in a four-room flat, in an atmosphere saturated with education, prayers and golden texts. Some of his mother's texts still overflowed into his business correspondence. At the public school he had been the fat boy, and bullied for it. The experience tended to make him believe that the
Shorter Catechism's view of humanity was optimistic. But he had done well in his school work, better at high school, and he had gone through the University of Toronto on scholarships.

The year he graduated from college his uncle died. The fact that he happened to die in this particular year, and left to his nephew his nearly bankrupt tool factory, seemed to McQueen a divine accident. It had saved him from becoming a professor. Within five years he had made enough money out of the factory to sell it at a decent profit. Proceeding logically, and already enormously learned in production techniques, he established the machine-tool industry in Hamilton. That was the year he acquired Miss Drew as a secretary.

When he transferred his offices to Saint James Street, a reputation had preceded him. For one thing, he had been one of the first men in the country to settle a strike by the simple expedient of offering the workers a joint labour-management committee. As he had foreseen, the strike-leaders were elected to the board by their men. After that he either divided them against each other, or used them as a colonel uses his N.C.O.'s. Before long they were more conservative than he was himself, and the suggestions they made for improved production paid many times over the small increase he had granted in the men's wages.

After that his advance had been rapid. He seemed incapable of making a bad investment. When Max Aitken made a fortune from cement, he tagged along into a nice profit for himself. He did well with railways and better with ships, and he anticipated the war precisely. By 1917 it had made him a multi-millionaire. He was called a profiteer, but he stood it equably because he knew it was unjust. When peace came everyone would see that there was no sounder man in the country than he. All he had done was to draw logical conclusions and act
accordingly. He was well read, devout, and he knew a good deal about history. Because he had made use of that knowledge, they called him names. Well, let them. In time they would change their minds.

It was only lately that he had become dissatisfied with the pattern of his career. He wanted to produce. He wanted to make himself an integral part of what he considered a world trend. He was no longer interested solely in profit. Organization was the new order of the day.

To organize Canada seemed a colossal task; impossible, most of his contemporaries would say. Economic lines ran north and south across the American border, not east and west through the country. But it could be done. If a man owned and controlled sufficient means of production, twenty years from now he might impose his will to an extent undreamed of as yet. McQueen wanted some metal mines, lumber mills, textile factories, a packing house, construction companies, engineering works…there was no limit to what he wanted to complete his picture. Further, he wanted his enterprises so well spaced over the country that his influence would touch every part of it. Sir Rupert, with his bank behind him, with his many companies, had such influence now. But Irons was interested in profit, not in organization.

In McQueen's mind, this driving ambition was cloudy in its outlines, precise in some of its parts. Essentially he was cautious, and he would build his house brick by brick. If his plan turned out to be unworkable, and it well might, he would have enough sense to stop long before he had made a fool of himself. In his private files rested detailed schemes for projects all over the country. One of them was for a textile factory in Saint-Marc. So far, he owned nothing in Quebec. To work in French-Canada was a gamble, even though labour was cheap.
The French were peculiar people and he did not know them well. There was also their Church to consider. What he needed was a liaison, and the man to fill the gap was Athanase Tallard.

When the buzzer sounded again on his desk he smiled. “Cast your bread upon the waters,” he murmured to himself, “and it will return after many days.”

 

TWELVE

By Wednesday of that week Kathleen had found a house. It was a narrow, three-storied Georgian adaptation with low steps, grey stucco over brick walls, a fanlight above the door, and a diminutive garden in the back. It stood in one of those streets of Montreal which remind Englishmen vaguely of London, caused more by the smell and the greyness than the planning of the district itself. Most of the inhabitants of this block were English-speaking, but the house stood only a little west of Bleury, a street which runs through Montreal like a frontier, dividing the English from the French.

Kathleen had taken no chances in making her choice. It was not her idea of a nice house to live in; she would have preferred something more modern. But she knew Athanase liked old places and she was sure he would be satisfied with this one. He had been definite about the rent, setting a maximum figure that turned out to be low. This house was going to cost more than he wanted to pay, but she was sure she could persuade him to take it.

Now as she walked back to the hotel from a matinee at His Majesty's, she relished the sense of the crowds around her. It was late afternoon, the air was soft with spring, clouds drifting across Mount Royal on a light west wind trailed
shadows over the roofs. At the hotel newsstand she bought a
Star
, then passed slowly across the lobby to a chair and sat down, the paper in her hand. She opened it at the theatre page and glanced for a few minutes at the advertisements, then folded the large sheets and sat still with the paper in her lap, looking around.

The lobby was fairly crowded. There were many officers in a variety of uniforms, and an importantly dressed Englishman with white hair and a wooden face was sitting opposite. On a leather-covered sofa beside him three elderly Americans were smoking strong cigars while they talked business in Brooklyn accents. There was a discreet and aimless coming and going of men all over the lobby, and Kathleen was pleased by it; merely the movement pleased her, the strange faces, the sense of suppressed excitement rising in herself.

After a time she got up and walked down a long corridor of small shops to the elevator. When she got there an officer with a major's crown in the box of his sleeve was waiting. He glanced at her quickly before fixing his eyes on the floor. When the doors opened he stood aside to let her enter and she noticed that his eyes had found her again. She looked away, but as they rode up together she was acutely conscious of his presence, and her suppressed excitement stirred with more liveliness. Giving another quick sideways glance she saw that he was still watching her. He wore a wound patch on his upper sleeve and on his chest was the purple and white ribbon of the Military Cross. Kathleen was not a small woman, but she felt tiny in the elevator beside this man. He had the chest and shoulders of a lumberjack, wiry red hair, and huge veined hands that hung straight down by his sides. She noticed through the mirror in the elevator that the top of her head came only to his shoulder.

The elevator clicked to a stop on the third floor and let her out. The corridor was dark and airless as the crypt of a church, and the heavy red carpet on the stone floor so silenced her footsteps that her own movement gave her an eerie sensation. Before she had reached the door of her room she realized that the major was following at a discreet distance. He passed while she was unlocking the door, and he did not turn around to look at her again. After she had closed the door she removed her hat and coat, then her dress and her shoes. She put on slippers and a flowered silk kimono and sat in an armchair by the open window, looking at the city.

Her old sense of the city's wholeness returned to her; it gripped her feelings and imagination the way she remembered it from girlhood. She heard the street cars banging across the nearest intersection, the intermittent sound of motor horns, the faint shuffling of thousands of moving feet. The crowds passing under the window seemed all about her. She stretched out her long legs as far as they would go. The stretched toes touched, and her arms went up behind her head as her eyes closed. She smiled. It was good to be peaceful again, to be one's self; it was wonderful to be unknown in the crowd.