Two Solitudes (2 page)

But Father Beaubien was not yet satisfied. The building itself was complete, yet it needed better heating equipment to make it comfortable in winter. The sheet-iron roof and the steeples were covered with bright aluminum paint, making the outside look finished and the whole glitter for miles in the sun. But he also required a new bell. The one he had was adequate when there was no wind, but when the wind blew against the sound the angelus was almost inaudible at the fringes of the parish. He also wanted more images for the chapel, and he wanted particularly an image for the gravelled area in front of the church. He saw clearly in his mind what it should be: a bronze figure of Christ with outstretched arms, about twenty-five feet high, with a halo of coloured lights above the head.

The priest breathed deeply and touched his cross again. Although the bishop had congratulated him on the church, he had also expressed concern about the size of the debt. At present, war prices were helping considerably, but the war could not last forever, and when it was over prices would fall and the debt would remain. The parishioners in Saint-Marc were nearly all farmers. They never had much ready money. And yet the priest had faith. The parish could rest indefinitely on the knees of God.

Thinking about the war, Father Beaubien's dark face set into a heavy frown. So far Saint-Marc had kept fairly clear of it. Only one member of the parish had volunteered, and he was on a spree in Trois Rivières when the recruiting sergeants got him. He was no good anyway, always missing masses. But this year the English provinces had imposed conscription on the whole
country, trying to force their conquest on Quebec a second time. Conscription officers had been in the neighbouring parish of Sainte-Justine and had taken young French-Canadians out of their homes like thieves to put them into the army.

The priest's solid jaw set hard. His superiors had ordered him not to preach against the war and he had obeyed them. He did not question their wisdom; they knew more than he did. But at least his parish knew how he stood. He thought of the war and the English with the same bitterness. How could French-Canadians–the only real Canadians–feel loyalty to a people who had conquered and humiliated them, and were Protestant anyway? France herself was no better; she had deserted her Canadians a century and a half ago, had left them in the snow and ice along the Saint Lawrence surrounded by their enemies, had later murdered her anointed king and then turned atheist. Father Beaubien had no fondness for the Germans and no wish for them to win the war; he knew nothing whatever about them. But he certainly knew that if a people deserted God they were punished for it, and France was being punished now.

He turned back toward his presbytery and paused on the lawn to pick up an acorn dropped from his great oak. As he did so the silence was cracked again by a pair of gunshots down in the marsh. The priest held the acorn in his palm, looking at it, then he polished it firmly between his thumb and forefinger. This nut was like his own parish of Saint-Marc-des-Érables. It was perfect. You could not change or improve it, you could not graft it to anything else. But you put it into the earth, and you left it to God, and through God's miracle it became another oak. His mind moving slowly, cautiously as always, the priest visioned the whole of French Canada as a seed-bed for God, a seminary of French parishes
speaking the plain old French of their Norman forefathers, continuing the battle of the Counter-Reformation. Everyone in the parish knew the name of every father and grandfather and uncle and cousin and sister and brother and aunt, remembered the few who had married into neighbouring parishes, and the many young men and women who had married the Church itself. Let the rest of the world murder itself through war, cheat itself in business, destroy its peace with new inventions and the frantic American rush after money. Quebec remembered God and her own soul, and these were all she needed.

Suddenly, as he went back to his porch, the priest heard the trotting hooves of a horse coming down the road into the village from the direction of Sainte-Justine. Shortly before dinner he had seen Athanase Tallard and Blanchard, Tallard's farm manager, drive past on their way out of the village. Now they were coming back, having met the afternoon train from the city at Sainte-Justine. Father Beaubien felt a twinge of uncertainty as the horse's hooves beat nearer.

Athanase Tallard was the only limit, under God and the law, to the priest's authority in Saint-Marc. Since the days of the early French colonization, the Tallards had been seigneurs. For more than two hundred years social opinion in Saint-Marc had depended not only on the parish priest, but also on whoever happened to be head of the Tallard family. Most of their seigniory had been broken up during the latter half of the nineteenth century and they collected no more rents. But the family still seemed enormously rich to the rest of the parishioners. Athanase owned by inheritance three times more land than anyone else in Saint-Marc, and he hired men to work it. He also owned a toll-bridge over a small tributary river at the lower end of the parish, and this brought him far more money than came from his crops. In many respects his
surface authority was as great as that of the priest himself, and his manner of a great gentleman increased it.

The people of Saint-Marc had always been proud of the Tallards. They were of their own stock and neighbourhood, yet they had always amounted to something in the outside world. In the historic days of the eighteenth century they had been noblemen. A Tallard had been a seigneur and officer in the colonial army of France at the same time a kinsman of the same name, back in Europe, lost the battle of Blenheim to the Duke of Marlborough. Another Tallard had won a skirmish against the English redcoats in the Rising of 1837. But along with other institutions, they had gradually become more prosaic. Since the confederation of the provinces into the Dominion of Canada just after the American Civil War, a Tallard had always sat in parliament in Ottawa.

Unlike most French-Canadians, they had never been a prolific family. Athanase himself was an only child, and after two marriages had only two sons. Although Catholics, they were traditionally anti-clerical, and apt to make trouble for their priests. Saint-Marc still talked about the grandfather of Athanase, who had once chased a priest through the village with a whip.

The horse came into Father Beaubien's view, trotting fast and pulling Tallard's best carriage. Four men were in the vehicle, two in front and two behind. It stopped before Drouin's store and Blanchard dropped off, touching his cap to Athanase before he turned to enter the store. Then the carriage drove on past the presbytery as Tallard looked and nodded to the priest, dipping his whip with a graceful flourish. The priest returned the nod and the carriage went on beyond the village along the river road.

Suddenly Father Beaubien's big hands flexed, open and shut. Recounting the scene in his mind, he realized now that
the two men in the carriage with Athanase were English-Canadians. Their faces as well as their clothes showed it clearly. He dropped his hands to his sides and walked quietly down the path to the road and looked after the carriage. The road ran straight for a mile and he could see the carriage diminish to a small black speck before it turned at a tall maple tree and disappeared. The priest frowned. They had not entered the Tallard property. It was the Dansereau place they were visiting, and it was up for sale because Dansereau was a childless widower who had contributed heavily to the new church and now was in debt.

The priest stood for several minutes in the road, his hands folded under his cross now. When he heard steps approaching he turned around to see Tallard's farm manager coming from the store with a parcel under his arm. Blanchard touched his cap and the two men looked at each other, both with brown faces and large brown hands, black hair and black eyes, so thoroughly of the same Norman stock that they could understand each other without speaking.

“Good day, Joseph.”

Blanchard touched his cap again. “Good day, Father.”

The priest spoke again and Blanchard came to a halt. “Mr. Tallard well?”

“I would think so, Father. But he's sure a busy man these days, with the war.”

There was a pause during which they continued to sense each other. In Saint-Marc people were near to the priest or near to Athanase Tallard. Blanchard was near to Athanase, but this did not mean that he was hostile to the priest, or for that matter that anyone was hostile to anyone else. It was merely a subtle and accepted alignment of interests and personalities. Since the beginning of the war, some who had been near to Athanase had
drawn imperceptibly away because Athanase had taken a strong stand with the English in favour of full mobilization.

The priest nodded down the road. “Are Mr. Tallard's friends staying over the week-end?”

Blanchard thought a moment as he looked at the ground. “I don't know for sure, Father. Mr. Tallard, he brought them over from the train.”

“Are they old friends of his?”

“I don't think so, Father. One of them he didn't know at all.”

“They've come to look at the Dansereau place?”

“I guess.” Each man knew exactly what was in the other's mind.

“They look like city men,” the priest said.

Blanchard twisted his cap in his free hand. “They were English all right, Father.” He added after a moment's reflection, “One of them got a wooden leg.”

The two men looked at each other, and then Father Beaubien nodded and returned to his porch. Blanchard walked off down the road with a plodding gait, one arm hanging, the other clutching his parcel.

The priest stood motionless for a long time. He could hardly believe that even Athanase Tallard would arrange for the sale of French land, land that belonged to his own people and once to his own family, to an English stranger. No English-Canadian had ever owned land in this parish.

Father Beaubien made a quick calculation. He had thought of taking an option on the Dansereau place in the name of the Church, but it had not seemed necessary. Saint-Marc was not like the parishes in the Eastern Townships with English communities near at hand. In those places the Church always had to be quick with its option on
available land, whether it happened to be French or English. But there was nothing to interest an Englishman in Saint-Marc. He thought the situation through carefully and was reassured after deciding there was no cause for alarm. It was in his nature to refuse to believe anything until it was proved.

After a last look down the road he went into his presbytery and closed the door behind him.

 

THREE

Two hours later Athanase Tallard showed his guests into the library of his old seigniory house. The men stood for a few minutes warming themselves before a fire of birch logs that burned on a huge, smoke-blackened stone hearth. As they talked they turned now and then to look out the windows to the alley of Lombardy poplars that ran straight as an avenue from the gallery to the river road, and beyond to the late afternoon sun glinting on the Saint Lawrence.

Although the three men were outwardly unconscious of the differences between them, they were so unlike in appearance as well as in manners that they might have come from three distinct countries and cultures. Athanase Tallard was tall and finely drawn. His aristocratic features were as brown as a walnut shell, the dark pigments of the skin heightened by a large white moustache. His movements were quick with an abundance of nervous vitality, and there was distinction in the way he gestured with his long hands.

Beside him stood Huntly McQueen, whose name was well known in the financial circles of Montreal. Beyond the fact that he had been born obscurely somewhere in Ontario, that he was a bachelor, that he was a great churchgoer, and that he was
rapidly becoming one of the richest men in Canada, little was known of his personal affairs. He was scarcely more than forty, but his manner and his habit of dress made him seem nearly as old as his host. Until today he had known Tallard only casually, though they had met fairly often in Ottawa.

John Yardley, the third man, was a retired sea captain from Nova Scotia. He was about the same age as Tallard, nearly sixty, and he was equally tall. Behind rimless glasses his eyes were pale blue and they twinkled easily. He was lean and muscular, his face showed the marks of years of sunburn and windburn, his greying hair was cropped close to his skull, and his ears stuck out like fans on either side of his head. An artificial leg made him limp heavily, but otherwise his movements suggested the relaxed awareness of a man who has lived most of his life in the open, and some of it close to danger. It was Yardley who had wanted to inspect the Dansereau farm. Through his daughter, who had married into one of the old families in Montreal and had been living there many years, he had met McQueen, and McQueen had arranged this meeting with Tallard.

Seeing that his guests were at ease, Athanase excused himself. He explained that his wife was in bed with grippe and he must see how she was. It was a great pity, her illness, for visitors were rare in Saint-Marc and she would have enjoyed meeting them. He promised to return shortly.

When they were alone, Yardley let his eyes wander over the room. “This must be one of the oldest houses in Canada,” he said. “You know Quebec pretty well. How old would you say it was?”

“I can tell you precisely,” McQueen said. “It was built by the first member of the family who came to Canada in 1672. When Tallard comes back you might compliment him on the place. The French are proud as Lucifer about houses like this.”

Yardley let a kind of smile play over his face and changed the subject. “Too bad Mrs. Tallard's sick. I'd like to meet her, specially if I'm going to be her neighbour.”

“Surely you haven't made up your mind already!”

“Why not? I know what I want, and I think I've found it. I guess that's all there is to it.”

McQueen studied his friend with an expression of slow calculation. Although his face was as round as a full moon, there was a curious ruggedness about his features. His nose was dominant and his mouth firmly set, his eyes wide and intelligent. This expression of force did not extend to his ponderously soft body. As he crossed to the window he walked with a padding movement, setting his feet down cautiously with each step.