Two Solitudes (23 page)

At school, years ago in Montreal, she had been a shy girl without money among girls whose families were rich. She knew none of them, but they had all grown up together. When they looked pointedly at her clothes and asked where she came from, she had not been able to answer because they made her feel that she came from nowhere. Her father was at sea nearly all the time, sailing around the world, and her mother moved from one port to another to be near him while he was ashore. Before Janet had been in the Montreal school a fortnight she realized that proper people go to sea as passengers on a liner, not as sailors. From then on her father's profession was never mentioned; it was better to speak of her mother, who had been born in England.

Ursula Yardley's values were those of her class, and her class had always been the colonial civil service. Her father had upheld the white man's burden in the minor colonies and did everything so correctly he was incapable of doing anything really well, looking forward always to the day when he could retire to Sussex. She never lost the conviction that she had married beneath her, nor that she must somehow inform everyone she met in Canada of her social status in England. But John Yardley's salary had never been ample enough to permit her to take Janet back to the old country to live in the
manner to which her mother had been accustomed. So she had moved restlessly about the Empire, finding it better to be poor in the colonies than at home. She died in Montreal while Janet was still in school, proud because her daughter was finally being accepted by the right families, but regretting to her last breath the fact that she had never been able to return to England.

Janet's sense of inferiority remained long after her marriage to Harvey Methuen. She found she had married more than the boy with whom she had fallen in love at a dance; she had joined a tribe. The Methuens felt themselves as much an integral part of Montreal as the mountain around which the city was built. They had been wealthy for a sufficient number of generations to pride themselves on never making a display. Instead, they incubated their money, increasing it by compound interest and the growth of the Canadian Pacific Railway. They were all Scotch-Canadians who went to a Presbyterian church every Sunday and contributed regularly to charities and hospitals. They served as governors of schools and universities, sat as trustees on societies founded to promote the arts, joined militia regiments when they left the Royal Military College, and had the haggis piped into them at the Saint Andrew's Day dinner every winter.

Methuen women never ran to beauty because too much in the way of looks in a woman was distrusted by the family. They were expected to be irreproachable wives and solid mothers of future Methuens, not females who might stimulate those pleasures the men of the family believed had caused the ruination of the Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, French, Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, Austrians, Russians and various other minor races of the world.

No Methuen found it possible to feel inferior to the English in any respect whatever; rather they considered
themselves an extension of the British Isles, more vigorous than the English because their blood was Scotch, more moral because they were Presbyterians. Every branch of the family enjoyed a quiet satisfaction whenever visiting Englishmen entered their homes and remarked in surprise that no one could possibly mistake them for Americans.

The tribe accepted Janet and considered her a good woman, but she had never been able to feel at ease with them. At Harvey's side she had felt secure, for Harvey was greatly respected by the tribe and none of them believed he could ever do anything wrong. But since the war Janet had felt more than ever unsure of herself. Harvey was so filled with self-confidence; he had such an easy way of laughing; he was the only one who was able to joke with her and make her smile in spite of herself. After he left for overseas she missed the positive direction he gave her, and she was sure she could never uphold the standards her position in the family required.

Again and again she had a recurrent dream in which she entered General Methuen's library in the big house on the side of Mount Royal and saw her father-in-law sitting very straight in his leather armchair next to the red draperies under the gilt-framed landscape in which a French-Canadian farmer drove a white horse and a black horse through the snow. He was reading the
Strand Magazine
, and in her dream her skirt dropped to her ankles and exposed her thighs in tights like those of a chorus girl. General Methuen never spoke in her dream. He sighed heavily as he went on with his reading and pretended not to notice.

Janet had always known Harvey would be taken from her and she would be left alone again. As she walked fast along the river road this thought beat repeatedly at her mind, confused with scenes from the magazine story, with her mother's
tight, lined face, with her own voice like a phonograph record repeating endlessly, “I mustn't let people see it…. I mustn't let them see…. I mustn't…”

Suddenly Daphne and Heather were there on the road before her. She stopped when she saw them, her hand at her lips. They must have come from the clump of maples at the corner of her father's land. “I mustn't let them see,” the voice in her mind repeated. Then another figure darted from behind the trees and she saw it was young Paul Tallard. His dog was at his heels and he was carrying something in his hands that looked like a dead bird. Janet let her hands drop to her sides. Paul was a nice boy even if he was a French-Canadian and had an impossible woman for a mother.

“Look, Mummy!” Heather called. “Look what we've got!”

The dog began to bark as he ran down the road to Janet. He frisked about her legs and she nearly tripped over him. Then she found herself standing in the middle of the road with the three children around her. Daphne was ash-blonde, very straight and neat, taller than the other two. Her clean middy blouse made a sharp contrast with Heather's dirty smock, streaked where brown mud had been carelessly wiped from the palms of small hands. Paul's hands were also dirty. He stood with large liquid eyes looking up at her, offering the dead bird for her to see.

“Napoléon found it in the bog,” he said.

“But he didn't kill it,” Heather interrupted, her voice rising with excitement. “He just found it. Look, Mummy, at his leg. He's a heron, isn't he?”

Paul thrust the bird forward and she saw that one of its feet was missing.

“He stands on one leg anyway, so he didn't need his other foot,” Paul said.

“Or is it a crane?” Heather said. “Which is it, Mummy?”

“It's a blue heron,” Daphne said, standing apart from the tight group made by Paul, Heather and the dog. “We had it in school.”

Janet scarcely heard what they said. She looked over their heads and saw nothing. Then Heather said, “What's the matter, Mummy?”

“Nothing. Why should anything be the matter?”

“Oh, I don't know exactly.”

“Is there a letter from Daddy?” Daphne said. “If there isn't, there ought to be.”

Janet felt she was swaying, the earth lurching under her, and her knees were numb. “Run along now,” she said. “Don't go into the bog again.”

“But Mummy, why not?” Heather said. “It's fun in the bog.”

“It's dirty, Heather. And you always get so filthy. Why can't you be like Daphne?”

“But, Mummy!”

She was walking down the road again, the children following.

“Why isn't there a letter from Daddy?” Daphne said. They were near Yardley's gate now. “Daddy's a major,” she heard Daphne explain to Paul. “He's in France.”

“I know it,” Paul said. “It must be wonderful, to be a major.”

When Janet turned into the gate she saw that her father had visitors on the porch. Yardley was sitting on a chair with his wooden leg crossed over his good knee, and Athanase Tallard and Mrs. Tallard were on either side of him. Janet turned to the children. “Run along now and play.”

“But can't we really go into the bog any more?” Heather said. “Oh, go anywhere. But run along.”

Napoléon began to bark shrilly as he went chasing a red squirrel down the road, his tail high and his ears back and flapping. The squirrel shot up a tree and Napoléon stood underneath barking steadily. Paul dropped the bird and went after him, Heather gave a shout and followed, and Daphne turned to her mother. “Heather's awfully noisy, don't you think so, Mummy?”

Janet passed her hand over her forehead. “Do run along and play with them like a good girl,” she said. As she went up the drive everything blurred before her eyes. Vaguely, his image staggering in a haze, she saw Athanase lift himself from his chair as she reached the steps, and she heard her own voice asking him not to bother. No, there was no mail this morning, none at all. No, don't bother, please don't anybody bother, she was going upstairs to her room to write letters.

As she opened the house door the coolness of the interior bathed her hot skin. She walked carefully upstairs, thinking about placing her foot on each tread, and by the time she reached her bed she was panting. She dropped onto the bed with relief, and as an easing of her tension set in she could hear the conversation from below as it floated up in the still air. Kathleen laughed heartily once or twice, and there was a chuckle from Mr. Tallard as her father's twangy voice went through one of his innumerable stories.

“Well, this horse I was telling you about was called Okay, and I never saw a stallion with a better name. He could stud like a rabbit and never lose a second off his pace, and the fella thet owned him made a nice sum of money, considering it was
in Nova Scotia. Calvin Slipp, his name was, and he was the hardest-shell Baptist I ever saw come out of the Annapolis Valley. And thet's a Baptist to end all other Baptists forever. Calvin was a horse-doctor by trade, and a mighty smart one, and man, if you played poker with him on Saturday night you lost your shirt. He used to take Okay all around the Maritime Provinces to the fairs and exhibitions, year after year, till he got the piles so bad he couldn't sit his sulky and had to hire another driver….”

Upstairs Janet listened in spite of herself with a feeling of horror. How often he had embarrassed her in Montreal with his stories! She hated herself for disapproving of him, for she loved him and he had always been gentle and kind to her. But there he was telling a story like that, with the Tallard woman listening and she upstairs with her whole world collapsed and the future breaking over her with wave after wave of horror. She turned on the bed and murmured, “God give me strength! Oh, God help me!” with her teeth clenched. How could she tell her children that their father was dead? Her beautiful children, her beautiful, beautiful children!

Through the open window floated the inexorable monologue of her father's voice. “Now right there in thet same town was another Baptist named Luther Spry, and I guess maybe he was even harder-shelled than Calvin ever got around to being, for he was a deacon in the church. Luther was a racing man himself, owned a livery stable in the back part of town, and he had a mare name of Mademoiselle. In her own way she was just about as good as Okay, so the boys naturally were thinking what a great thing it would be if Okay could be put to the mare. Thet way they'd have a world-beater. But the trouble was, Calvin hated Luther's guts ever since the time Luther beat him out for being deacon in
the church, and Calvin said he'd see Mademoiselle covered by a carthorse before he'd let Okay get so much as a sniff of her. So the boys figured…”

Janet pulled herself off the bed and went into the bathroom to look at herself in the mirror. Her face was still the same. She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers over them until they hurt so much she couldn't stand the pain. Then she washed her face in cold water. Still her senses remained paralysed. This moment, the most terrible in her life, stayed with her, it wouldn't go away, it didn't get larger or smaller, but it remained unreal. She continued to stare at herself in the glass, wondering if this was insanity, this paralysis of feeling. She dried her face and returned to the bedroom.

“So just after moonrise,” came her father's voice, “Luther and the boys came into Calvin's backyard with Mademoiselle on the end of a halter. It was a real nice October night, the way you get them down home in a good fall, with most of the leaves off the trees, and their feet were rustling in the leaves and the moon was making shadows through the bare branches. Mademoiselle began to whinny and Okay was inside the stable stamping around and kicking his stall the minute he got wind of her, and next door in the Baptist church the organ was going full blast and the whole prayer-meeting was singing
Rescue the Perishing
as loud as they could. The boys had to laugh, knowing Calvin was in there singing thet hymn. So they unlocked the stable door…”

Janet leaned from the window but she was unable to see the figures on the porch because of its shingled roof. It was easy to imagine them down there, her father's wooden leg cocked over his good one, Kathleen leaning toward him in that intimate way Janet always detested, Mr. Tallard with the ironic smile that baffled her completely.

“Man, but Okay gave thet mare a beautiful cover! The sweetest ever seen in thet town. And next morning when Calvin went out to the stable…”

Suddenly Janet screamed. The sound pierced the heavy atmosphere and rested in the spine of everyone within earshot. She screamed again, and then she began to cry, “Stop! For heaven's sake have pity and be quiet!”

She jerked herself away from the window and fell onto her bed, her whole body wracked by dry, shaking sobs. Through it all her eyes remained dry. She heard her father's wooden leg tapping as he hurried upstairs, but she kept her head on her outstretched arms when he entered the room. She felt his hand on the back of her head and heard him uncrumple the letter on the bed beside her, while the sobs kept shaking her whole body.