Two Solitudes (34 page)

“But they treated you all right?” Emilie said.

Marius showed her two stripes on his left sleeve. “I'm a corporal now. Five months after the war ends, the army gets around to making me a corporal.”

He bent to his food again, and while he ate, Emilie kept her eyes on him. He looked healthy and almost tough, he had gained weight and the whites of his eyes were clear. But he still ate as though he expected someone to jerk the plate away from him the moment he stopped. When he had finished his dessert he wiped his mouth fastidiously with his napkin. He
noticed for the first time that Emilie was much better dressed than she had been a year ago. She looked almost like a city girl now. He noticed also that her hands were smoother, and that she spoke more carefully, with better grammar.

His eyebrows rose and he asked suspiciously, “Did you get a raise?”

“I don't work in the restaurant any more.”

“Did they fire you?”

“I left. That job–it was no good for me.”

“What are you doing now, then?” His voice was sharp with suspicion.

“I got a new job.” Her eyes showed she was proud of herself and hoped he would be pleased. “In a dress factory.”

“What dress factory?”

“Greenberg–you know, up on Bleury?”

He cracked his hand down over her wrist and held it. “You mean you're working for the Jews?”

“They pay me good money. I get twelve a week. If I do better I get a raise maybe. Lots of girls…”

“So you work for the Jews!” He kept holding her wrist and staring at her as she wondered what she had said wrong this time. “I thought you called yourself a Catholic!”

She pulled her wrist away. “You stop that. You're hurting me. Maybe I do work at Greenberg. Who do you think you are–a priest? Father Gervais knows I work there. Maybe you'd like it better if I starve? Who said a Catholic can't work for a Jew?”

The noise at the fountain was rising again. A tall soldier with an angular face had stopped eating to make himself heard. “When I get home to the Missus I'm finished batting around, see. I'm going to show her right off I'm through with all that stuff. If you guys are smart you'll do the same.”

“What's the use? They can always tell.”

“My Old Lady's a very religious woman,” the angular man said, “and she can't tell on account of she never thinks about stuff like that.” He was very serious. “I'm not kidding. It was all right before the war but now it's going to be different.”

“Like hell!”

“I'm telling you, the women are all set to get their hands on us again and tame us down. You take a look at their faces. I'm telling you, they're after us.”

The man with the sodas shoved another glass across the counter and called to the Italian for more straws. He pushed a jarful across.

“You fellas better get wised up to yourselves,” the angular man went on. “I'm telling you, they're ganged up to get hold of us, for sure.”

Marius sipped his coffee and leaned back, watching Emilie. His hand was lying on the table beside hers, long and sensitive. He touched the sleeve of her dress. “You got that in the factory?”

She smiled proudly. “I worked late a whole week for that dress.”

“Nice man, this Greenberg!”

The restaurant door opened with a bang and a soldier with three valour ribbons on his chest came in with a rush. He was short enough for a bantam battalion, and as he cocked up to the big men at the bar he bent his hands backwards on his hips and flapped his elbows like a rooster's wings. He crowed. “For Chrissake!” he shouted, flapping his bent arms. “The stuff you guys are drinking! Where's your morals?”

The man with the five sodas was now on his fourth; it was chocolate and full of brown bubbles. He kept on sucking
and said out of the corner of his mouth, “I bet Pete's canned so he stinks.”

Marius set down his coffee cup again and looked at Emilie. “What are Jews like when they're drunk? Funny thing–I never saw a drunk Jew!”

“Mr. Greenberg treats me good enough. He never gets drunk.”

“He just runs his hands over you while he fits the dress–eh?” “Him!” She wished Marius would not be so unpleasant. “He's a little old man all bent over.” She giggled self-consciously. “Seventy years old, maybe.”

Marius' face twisted. “I know an old man that doesn't let a little thing like that stop him.”

Emilie blushed.

A roar of noise exploded from the soda fountain. “Who started it?” the drunk was shouting. “You mean you don't know? Bloody Limey M.P. crimed me and put me under a black sergeant for fatigue. Did that nigger jump when my bayonet started travelling up his ass!”

The man who had been eating the banana royal now had a cherry sundae with a dust of nuts over the top. He turned lazily to the drunk. “You mean a little runt like you started that riot?”

“I'm the guy that got all you bastards back home,” the drunk shouted. “If it hadn't been for me you'd still be over there now.”

The Italian behind the fountain was smiling and wringing his hands and saying “Gentlemen, gentlemen!” The man with the sodas said to him with a straight face, the straw still in his lips, nodding toward Pete, “See–he's quite a guy!”

“How do you mean you got us home?” the man with the cherry sundae said.

“We burned down the camp in the riot, didn't we? After that–hell, the Limeys couldn't get rid of us quick enough.”

The angular, serious man put his arm about the bantam's shoulder. “Now listen, Pete–you got to sober up. Last time you got so sick you couldn't eat for days. I got to look after you, Pete. I'm not forgetting what you did for me that time.”

“For Chrissake, who's talking about the war?”

“Discipline, Pete!” the angular man kept saying. “Remember that time we were sitting half a week on top of a mine? Remember that?”

“This guy a pal of yours?” the man with the sodas said.

The angular man almost shaped up to him. “Is he a pal!”

“Can the war!” Pete shouted. “Stuff it up! After what I did the whole bloody merchant marine wasn't good enough for us guys. They had to give us the
Olympic
.” He belched and staggered. “You ought to give me a statue.” He flapped his arms again and crowed like a rooster.

“Gentlemen.” The Italian smiled and showed white teeth as he leaned forward. “Gentlemen–I got customers.”

The noise quieted down and Marius rose. “Look at that oily Italian sucking up!” He lifted his voice and shouted, and the man came running, one hand holding his apron. “How much do I owe for this rotten meal?”

The Italian smiled another mouthful of white teeth. He seemed to think Marius drunk too, but he was very respectful to the uniform. “One dollar feefty,” he said.

Marius threw down a bill and a fifty-cent piece, and the coin rang on the glass top of the table. “Next time a lady eats here,” he said, “you wipe off your tables first.”

When they were outside on the street, Emilie took his arm. “The table was clean enough,” she said.

“Listen,” Marius said, “I learned one thing in the army. You shout at a man and he always gets the idea he's to blame for something. Before he has time to figure it out, you've got him where you want him.”

She did not answer, for she was not quite sure what he was talking about.

“I wonder how many sergeants are going to be out of jobs?” he said. “A sergeant without anyone to shout at–yes,” he went on, nodding, “that's going to be a useful thing to remember. The next few years whenever I see a discontented man I'll remember he used to be a sergeant.”

They walked slowly eastward along Sainte-Catherine Street. The city was alive tonight. It pulsed with the vitality of the new men who had entered it.

“What are you going to do now?” Emilie said.

“Do? What does anybody ever do in the army?”

“Sure, sure. I mean, when they let you out?”

“That's the big question,” he said, mysteriously.

“I guess maybe you go back to college, no?”

“That's another question.”

As they walked along the street together the crowds surged about them under the light, the sidewalk was packed with men and girls strolling in the warm spring evening because they had no other place to go. There was an expectant happiness in the air, and not many of the soldiers they passed were drunk. Some stood alone on street corners with quiet expressions on their faces as though it were so good to be home that just standing still was all they needed to make them happy. They passed a sergeant-major on the corner of Saint-Lawrence
Main talking in French to a tram driver. He wore five medal ribbons and the badge of the Regiment Maisonneuve. He had a great chest and shoulders, jet black hair and an eagle face, a wide moustache showing solid black against tan skin. He could have doubled for Frontenac. Marius looked at him, then jerked his eyes away.

They walked on, drifting eastward into the French part of the city.

“Let's go where you live,” Marius said suddenly. “I want to meet your father.”

“Oh, no!” she said.

His fingers squeezed her wrist sharply. “I want to meet him. I've never even seen him.”

“I told him about you. It's all right me going out with you.”

Marius stopped under an arc light and stood off, watching her face. It was pale in the flickering light. God, he thought, what an ordinary face! So ordinary he sometimes found it difficult to remember what she looked like. Why was he here with a girl like this? Out of all the women in the world, why spend his time with her?

But he knew the answer. He could not go with beautiful girls because he hated them all on sight. They traded on their looks and that made them as false as hell. And as he watched Emilie, something of her instinctive goodness softened him. What if she did not come from his own class? French girls of his own class were so strictly brought up he was afraid of them.

His searching eyes made her embarrassed, and he saw her glance away. And at that instant she touched him deeply without knowing it, and as his eyes dropped to her square figure set on its stocky legs he suddenly knew that he could not do without her. Instantly a flash of joy passed through him.
The feeling was so rare and strange it brought tears to his eyes.

“Come on,” he said gruffly, taking her arm, “let's go to your place.”

Emilie walked quietly beside him. Tomorrow she would go alone to the church and say her prayers, asking God to take away his bitterness and to make him kind.

 

TWENTY-EIGHT

Paul had been at Frobisher School for nearly three years. He was now twelve. He had become so much a part of the place that he spoke English all the time and thought and even dreamed in English. He liked it here, for he had learned how to play games. He played football in the fall and hockey from December to March. In the early spring there was boxing, and Sergeant-Major Croucher said he was a natural at it. He had a very quick straight left, the punch the English boxers like better than any other, and he was fast. In early summer, in the long days before term ended, the boys put on white flannels and played cricket very badly on the square green field in front of the school where the elm trees reminded the masters of an English close. Unofficially, they threw baseballs about behind the school at recess.

Now it was a late afternoon in February, 1921, and Paul was playing hockey for his house in a junior inter-house league. The boys played in an open-air rink behind the school with the snow piled ten feet high back of the boards. The rink rang with skates and the knocking of sticks and the banging of the puck against the boards, sometimes with a loud shout from a boy or the shrill peep of the referee's whistle. Whenever the whistle blew there was an instant's silence while they faced
off. Paul loved these moments when the game paused and he was able to get the whole feel of it: the full exhilaration of the air coldly still in the sunshine, the teams poised and the referee standing over the crouching centre-forwards, holding the puck above the crossed sticks, the sticks twitching nervously and the sweat warming on the face, the lungs charged with fresh cold air and the legs tired, yet the knowledge that you could go on like this forever if you had to.

Paul played centre-forward, and so he was in on every face-off. He had learned the trick of weaving so that his trunk swayed one way while his legs went the other. He had a quick change of pace and could keep his head up while he weaved and carried the puck, his eyes shooting left and right to see where the wings were as he went down the ice to make the openings. He was a natural play-maker and fed his wings generously, but he also had a quick low shot of his own which would have a snap in it when he got older and had more strength in his wrists. If he kept on improving he would be certain to make the senior team inside another few years. He was growing fast. Like all the Tallards, he was rangy, with long legs; but he had inherited a good chest and wide shoulders from Kathleen.

When the game was over, the boys took showers and changed in the locker room. Then, after a cold supper in the dining hall, they collected their books and went into prep. An elderly man with long front teeth and a grey moustache like an overgrown toothbrush presided on a small dais in front of the room while the boys sat at their desks and worked and squirmed and cribbed and passed notes through the two hours. Occasionally one of them jumped as the boy behind him stuck a pen-nib into his rear. When this happened the prep-master raised his eyes and tapped his pencil on the desk and the boys
all looked innocent until he lowered them again. It was a usual prep in a rather unusual school.

Frobisher had been founded nearly a hundred years ago by an Anglican canon in the days when Canada was a group of colonies run by a British governor who served the combined interests of the Crown and the compact of business families forming the upper classes. It was still an upper-class school, though not exactly aristocratic. Such snobbishness as it may have had was not conscious; it was simply an English-style school run for the sons of prosperous Canadians. The masters were all Englishmen, and most of them were young. They came out from England every fall and worked for a few years before drifting off into other jobs or other schools. The few who remained tended to become characters, each with his recognized set of mannerisms. But they all worked hard at Frobisher, and more or less enjoyed it. The school was a happy place while Paul was there, and the masters generally cheerful. Each master, no matter what his age, took the train for Montreal the day school closed in June and returned to the Old Country for the summer. They all came back on the same ship just before term re-opened in mid-September.