Two Solitudes (20 page)

He leaned back in his chair, easing out his Sam Browne belt another notch, and glanced at his watch. “Now,” he said, smiling across the table at Kathleen, “let's talk.”

She laughed at him. “What have you been doing for the past two hours, I'd like to know?” She lowered her head and the candlelight made the whiteness of her neck unbelievably soft.

“You may not believe me,” he said, “but I've been totally silent for the last three years.”

She raised her head and idly stretched out her hand to
pick up her wine glass. Kathleen knew instinctively when no words were better than any she could think to say.

“God! The way you move! I could sit here all night and watch you. There's music in your body.”

She knew what he meant. There was music in the way she felt as she listened to the sound of his voice defining the evening's magic. When he stopped talking and just sat and watched her, she said, “What do you mean–silent for three years? Where have you been?”

“In an army mess. Also in various trenches, holes, dugouts and cellars in the vicinity of Lens, Monchy and various other places I'd rather forget.”

“Don't officers talk in the mess?”

“They do. They also play gramophones. When I get to hell there will be gramophones, and they will all be playing
The Long, Long Trail
.”

“I thought you liked music?”

“Your kind of music. I'd go a long way for that.” Then his face hardened. “I was too old for it. I've outgrown the dirty joke stage. And God, those puritans when they talked about women! No matter what they pretend, that's what they are. I was too old for it.”

“You don't look very old.”

He paid no attention to her words. “Then some of them who'd been with the British would get technical and talk like staff officers. We all got technical, but you could smell the way the staff did it a mile off.” He stopped. “Does this bore you? It certainly bores me.”

“You're a funny man. You're not a bit like–”

“Like what?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

“I'd rather look at you. God, you're lovely!”

Warm and easy in his presence, she held his eyes across the table and they both smiled. He towered over the table even when he hunched his shoulders and leaned forward on his elbows, and his vitality seemed to fill the room. It made her realize how starved she had been for just such vital strength, but more than anything else she liked the way he was completely unconscious of everything else that passed in the restaurant. They were the last diners in the place and the waiters were impatient to be rid of them. From the corner of her eyes she could see the head-waiter standing motionless by the door. He looked as austere as a cardinal in the flickering shadows cast by the candlelight. But Morey was still talking.

When he paused she looked into his intense eyes. Her husky voice was warm with friendliness as she said, “When are you going to tell me about your wife?”

“How do you know I'm married?”

“The same way you know I'm not a widow.”

The wine waiter filled their glasses with more port. The glasses gleamed in the candlelight against the shadowed white cloth. Rubies, she thought. She was fascinated by the way they caught and held and transformed the light.

“She's a good woman,” he said. “She's a good mother to three children. I've got two girls and a boy. In my own way–in my own way, I said–I'm loyal to her. In this country we may be stupid, but our Goddamned puritanism makes us loyal. Even me.”

She saw his fingers tighten on the stem of his empty glass, and then the glass fell apart and lay in two pieces on the cloth. He went on as though nothing had happened. “When I joined up I thought the war might help. Or maybe I'd be killed. That's what makes wars so popular, you know. The failures, the drunks, the washouts, the fellows running away from
themselves, the ones that are plain bored…they're the ones that mob the recruiting offices the first day of any war. The sober citizens come along later. It's always been the same, and I tell you, it always will be. It's a lot easier to die than to live.” He looked up with a twisted grin. “Though of course when the time comes to die you discover even that's all balls.”

He snubbed out the cigarette in his fingers and lit another one. “Well, the war's over for me. Tonight's my last breath of freedom. And you're the one I found for it.”

She made no sound or movement.

“Ever been in Winnipeg?” he said.

She shook her head.

“Winnipeg could have been one of the cities of the world. Some of the world's best people live there. But of course, we're puritans. So the place is just Winnipeg. God help us…why do people hate beauty in this country the way they do? As if I didn't know the answer!”

The waiter ghosted up to the table and silently removed the wreckage of the wine glass, knocked the ashes from the tray onto a plate, then replaced the emptied tray and ghosted back to the door again. Morey froze until the waiter was gone, then he hunched forward over the table again and spread the cloth smooth, his huge hands moving like a sculptor's on clay.

“Imagine a flat plain,” he said. “Not a narrow strip like you have here by the Saint Lawrence, but hundreds of miles of prairie stretching in every direction as far as the eye can see. Imagine it green. Imagine above it a sky so blue your eyes can hardly bear to look at it, and cumulus clouds pure white. Imagine the whole sky seeming to move.” He lifted his hands from the table and fixed his eyes on hers to hold them. “Like a great majestic bowl with the earth flat beneath it. Sky the giver, earth the accepter. Male and female…”

She watched him as if mesmerized.

“Now,” he said, “imagine a building made of grey granite, reinforced with steel smelted out of the best Lake Superior ore. Imagine the building slim and light as a sword in front, and long and light in profile. Imagine it six hundred feet high, towering off that flat plain, with set-backs like decks for gods to walk on and survey the earth. Imagine the sky blue and the white clouds moving past, so close to its pinnacle that you could stare up from the ground and see the slender profile of that building and think it was moving, too. Imagine it”–he jerked the words out one by one–“clean-angled, balanced, slender, light–mercilessly right. And new, by God…like the country that made it!”

He stopped suddenly and silence fell between them until he broke it with a wan smile and a tired voice. “Maybe it's just as well not to imagine it. Canadians would never permit such a building to exist.”

“Why not? It sounds wonderful.”

His large hand seemed to sweep her words aside. “Why not? My God! Just look at this town of yours! An imitation of every example of bad taste in the universe, and as dull and almost as dirty as Liverpool. And if I ever made a statement like that in one of your fashionable clubs here–God, they'd be pleased! After all, if Montreal looks even a little like Liverpool it must be British, and that's exactly how they want it–the ones who build their monstrous buildings.”

The ideas were coming too fast for Kathleen. She couldn't keep them connected, but somehow it didn't seem to matter, for she understood perfectly how he felt. “You don't like the British much, do you?”

“I didn't say I didn't like them. I do. But Canada isn't
England, and too many Canadians try to pretend it is. Generally they're the rich ones, and they pay the money and make the choices. Does our western prairie look like anything in England, for God's sake? Then why try to cover it with English architecture?” He shrugged his shoulders. “After a while they'll get another idea. They'll pretend we're exactly the same as the States. And they'll start to imitate ideas from down there. But is there anything in the States like the Saint Lawrence valley? For that matter, is there anything in the States like us–the collective us?”

Kathleen was bewildered and she fell back on her smile. “I don't know,” she said. “Has this anything to do with your wife?”

“Not at all.” His voice dropped to a monotone. “And everything. She's a good woman. Sorry. I've already said that, haven't I? She likes roast beef and potatoes five times a week. She goes to church twice every Sunday. She belongs to the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire and does good works. She sends our three children to good schools on my army pay and sacrifices all her own comforts to do it. I've never once heard her complain about a thing. She thinks art and architecture are refined hobbies for me, but she doesn't feel we can afford to buy paintings. She's right. We never could. She bought a moose-head at an auction just before the war and hung it in the hall. She's always hoped I'd settle down. She's never done a single mean thing in her life or said an unkind word about anyone–even about me. She's thirty-five and quite pretty. She hasn't a grain of imagination, and no humour whatever, but she's a good woman, and I'm not sneering when I say it.”

He got to his feet abruptly and pulled out the table with a violent heave. “Come on,” he said. “Let's get back to the hotel.”

Kathleen sat still, taking her time. The magic that had been with them a while ago had almost melted away, and she wanted it back.

“I forgot to tell you,” he went on in a matter-of-fact voice, standing with the table held out, “that in civil life I was never an architect. I merely wanted to be one. I've farmed, sold insurance, worked for the Canadian Pacific and the Hudson's Bay Company, and gambled on the grain exchange. Now I haven't the slightest notion what I'll do when I'm demobbed, but whatever it is, I don't expect to like it. I'm going home tomorrow. Come on, Kitty–the life history's over.”

He picked up the check, glanced at it and threw some bills onto the table, nodded to the waiter and followed her to the door. When he had retrieved his cap, he guided her down the steps with his hand gentle under her arm, and they stood for a moment in the empty street under the trees looking up at the sky. It was deep with night-purple, star-filled. He bent and kissed her ear. “You're wonderful, Kitty. I won't talk any more. You know what I am now.”

She said nothing and they walked to the corner in step, his hand still under her arm. In the taxi neither of them spoke. When they entered the hotel lobby he took his room-key out of his pocket. “You go first,” he said. “My room?”

Her eyes were wide. “But I don't…I…”

“You don't have to say anything.”

Her eyes swung around, trying to escape him, to escape herself and the wild excitement rising within her. “Let's have coffee and talk some more,” she said.

“Let's say we'll sit in my room and talk, then.” He smiled down at her. “It's just as you want it, Kitty.”

“I don't…not to your room. I won't go there.”

He put the key back in his pocket and grinned at her. “All right. I've not forgotten your number. I'll get some cigarettes.”

She went off toward the elevators and he crossed the lobby to the newsstand. With a fresh package of cigarettes in his pocket, he picked up a copy of the
Gazette
from a stack on the counter, tossed a nickel in its place and began to read. The Allies were continuing to retreat, the British falling back through places so familiar they would still be part of him if he lived to be a hundred. As he saw the old names he could almost smell the places they represented. “To hell with it,” he said.

 

An hour later Kathleen was lost in contemplation of his head, outlined like a monolith against the lamp on the bedside table. His lips moved without a sound, and then his deep voice came out softly. “You're miraculous! Are you always like that?”

“Are you?”

“No.”

“I'm not, either.”

“It's the music in you. I knew it the moment I saw you. You don't even guess how wonderful you are.”

“More than the others?”

“More than anyone. It's a great art–like dancing.”

“You mean–as if we were made for each other?”

He turned his head and looked at her, then put one finger on her lips. “Don't say things like that. You don't have to talk. Nobody's made for anyone else.”

“I think they are.”

“People like you and me…maybe it happens for a minute and the minute makes everything else worthwhile. Not
so hard to go on. But that's all.” His great weight stirred beside her, the shoulders hunched against the light, then he relaxed.

Calm spread throughout her limbs; her mind was like a lake with ideas drifting harmlessly over its surface like clouds, memory already busily storing away the moment filled with the imperious power of the man, his fingers like iron on her yielding shoulders, on the inward-bending small of her back. Then her thoughts began to rebuke her, telling her that this was a sin, for her perhaps the worst of all. Yet more thoughts drifting cloud-like in the wake of the rebuke advised her that this had happened in accordance with some deep necessity, and that even though for others it might be a sin, for her at this particular time it had been good, and that if nobody else knew of it no harm had been done.

He seemed to be asleep and she was content to lie quietly at his side. Then with a feeling of total and accepting helplessness, and of amazement at herself, she thought for the first time that night of Paul.

 

THIRTEEN

The train left Montreal Island and entered the bridge, and a deep hoarse rumble filled the car. The day-coach was half-empty, throbbing with the iron rumble, and dust motes stirred in the reddish light shot through the windows from the setting sun. Kathleen kept her eyes fixed on the sunset. In the seat opposite, Athanase was hidden behind the spread pages of
La Presse
.

A dreamy peace was in all her limbs, a physical ease mingled with a vivid sense of relief because Athanase had
noticed no difference in her when they had met. He was so filled with his plans for the factory that he could think of nothing else. Since before lunch, after his arrival from Ottawa, he had been with McQueen. He had spared himself only half an hour to examine the new house and the lease had been signed without argument.