Two Solitudes (41 page)

After a while McQueen replaced the book on its shelf. There was no doubt about it, Burke was a great orator. The Prime Minister ought to study some of his speeches. There was no reason why stability should necessarily be dull. His mind skipped about over the subject of his paper and inevitably back to the dinner party. If Heather was a sample of the younger generation there was going to be trouble. McQueen wanted to be just, but he doubted if he was exaggerating. Where there was smoke there was generally fire. Heather had allowed some of the younger professors at the university to put ideas into her head. She had made some very unnecessary and annoying remarks at the table about the values of socialism. McQueen saw no necessity for it whatever. He was convinced that the last thing any socialist ever wanted was to be forced to accept power. Idealists were all the same. And yet they were mischievous. They opened up the masses to the real scoundrel who invariably followed them. Look what had happened to Germany! The socialists had preached idealism but the only result of their pernicious meddling was Hitler. McQueen clucked with his tongue. It served them right.

He wondered if he could possibly introduce into his paper a paragraph on the influence of women like his mother. There had been no nonsense in the way she had brought him up, and his whole life had justified her. It was something for a boy from a small Ontario town, who had grown up in genteel poverty, to own a house at his age opposite the Methuens' on
the slope of the mountain. It was something also for that boy to be on the board of governors of the university, on two hospital boards and a charity committee, to lunch twice a week at the Mount Royal Club, and to be a member of the Committee of Art. For the past ten years his picture had appeared in the newspapers as a pall-bearer of millionaires, and he had been twice invited to dine at Rideau Hall by two different Governor-Generals. Finally, as a means of making a due return to the nation, he had drawn a will which completely satisfied him. On his death his entire fortune would be used to found and maintain a new Presbyterian theological college. It was to be located in the heart of the Ontario countryside, to have ample scholarships, and the chairs were to be so heavily endowed the trustees would be able to fill them with the ablest theologians they could import from Edinburgh and Aberdeen.

McQueen switched off the light and padded downstairs. In the last analysis, the soundness of a country was the soundness a man found in himself, in the city where he lived. It didn't take long for Montreal to brush the nonsense off a man's ideas and reduce him to scale. Look at himself. He was prepared to admit that when he was younger he had indulged his fancies more than was good for him. He had once hoped to organize the entire country. No man could have done it, not even Sir Rupert Irons, who had never even tried. It was the mark of a big man to be able to change his mind, as he had changed his. Even Irons consulted him now on occasion. Just imagine what the country would be like if it were led by the sort of men one met in Wall Street!

McQueen rubbed his hands together as he thought how he was going to prove that Canada was sounder than the United States. In the first place, so far as he could see, the Americans were as excitable as Italians. And look at the way they let their
women hound them all over the place! If you let the women get that much hold, why not hand the whole country over to them and let them run it? He wouldn't be surprised to see them do that very thing before long. He chuckled. The day they elected a female president it would serve them right.

In a state of dreamy contentment, padding slowly along the upper hall to his bedroom, McQueen thought how sharp a contrast he could make between the United States and Canada, if he went about it skillfully. In Canada, first of all, there were the two races: each could be employed to balance the other. Then there were the churches: they were filled every Sunday, and it was possible for the whole nation to excite itself over a theological dispute. But the real point was this: ten per cent of the college graduates, perhaps not the most brilliant men but certainly the most restless of the lot, found it so difficult to get what they wanted in Canada that you could always count on them drifting south to the States. That made enormously for stability above the border. Down there they could write their books and broadcast their ideas, and compared to the average American they were probably fairly stable citizens. Yes, McQueen thought with satisfaction, we have discovered a great social secret in Canada. We have contrived to solve problems which would ruin other countries merely by ignoring their existence.

By the time McQueen reached his bedroom he felt his mind had served him pretty well that evening. Without turning on the light he crossed to the window and looked out. The blinds in Janet's room, in the Methuen house across the street, were drawn, but the faint glow of lights came through them. Janet was getting ready for bed. He tried to think of her there, imagining her reflecting over his party, and again he told himself what a nice woman she was. She had done so well
against so many difficulties, and now at last she was secure. He was thankful he had been able to do so much to help her. Ever since Harvey Methuen's death he had guarded her investments free of charge, and he had nursed them so carefully that her estate was now double what it had been when he had first accepted responsibility for it. He had nursed his friendship just as carefully. He could still remember the thrill it had given him, three years ago on Christmas Eve, to get the two girls to call him by his first name.

He felt something soft rub against his legs, and bent down to pick up his cat. It was a handsome tortoise-shell Persian. He laid the animal on the bed, turned on a light, and slowly began to undress. As he took off his tie he caught sight of himself in the mirror above the dressing table. Perhaps it was not too late after all? Janet was nearly fifty now. Something like excitement pervaded his blood, but the moment soon passed. It was ridiculous to think of marriage at his age, after rejecting the idea of it thirty years ago. It was even embarrassing. Besides, there was Heather. She was still unmarried; and it would be most unsettling to have someone like Heather as a step-daughter. He wouldn't be surprised but what Janet had her hands full with that girl before long.

He put on his pajamas and went into the bathroom, took a long time washing his hands and brushing his teeth and gargling carefully. Finally he shuffled back to the bedroom with his feet encased in a pair of stuffed slippers. He fell on his knees before the bed and murmured his prayers for more than five minutes. Then he rolled between the sheets and snapped off the light by a switch at the head of the bed. The cat leaped up and snuggled into the curve of his bent knees, purring loudly.

Slowly McQueen's thoughts grew more placid. It was just as he had said, no country had weathered the depression
the way Canada had done. Difficult times had merely weeded out what was unsound and given the good plants room in which to grow. The country was sound through and through. In any kind of crisis there were always fifty ways of making a mistake and only one way of doing the right thing. Human affairs were so mysterious it was arrogant to lay down general rules for them. The deduction was obvious–it was the part of a prudent man to do nothing.

After reminding himself that he must note this last thought in his card-index first thing in the morning, McQueen fell asleep. The two round forms, his own and the cat's, lay tranquilly side by side, breathing evenly.

 

THIRTY-THREE

At the back of a small chapel in an old street near the centre of town, Paul watched Kathleen getting married again. Beside him stood a sexton in overalls. He had hay-fever and he sniffled constantly. He had been fixing a hinge on the chapel door and was still at the job when the priest called him to witness the ceremony. The door of the chapel remained ajar, and now the priest's words were dimmed by the steady noise of traffic in the street. He was an old man and he sounded very tired. Toward the end his words were punctuated by repeated barks from the horn of a taxi caught in a traffic jam at the corner.

Paul's fists and his jaw were clenched tight. It was an airless, humid day, hot even in the chapel. He felt the sweat working out from the skin above his shoulder blades, making wet patches on the back of his shirt. In the dim light of the chapel his brown eyes were very large. Shadows lay under his cheekbones. His whole body was lithe and controlled as
he stood with shoulders bent slightly forward, watching.

He tried to fix his eyes on his mother's back, but the candles winking on the altar beyond held his gaze, as candlelight always did. Beside her kneeled Henry Clayton, in process of becoming his stepfather. Paul looked at the man's rounded shoulders. They were inert and strangely humble. And yet, for Clayton this moment was the end of a quest which had occupied and taxed all his ingenuity and intelligence for at least nine years. From now on he would have her, and could tell the world he had her. At fifty-two he could take her home, to his small house in a suburb of Pittsburgh. At fifty-two, the only real purpose Henry Clayton had ever known was accomplished.

If loneliness is a man's inability to share his feelings with another, Paul had never been as lonely in his life as he was now. The whole ceremony seemed shocking to him. The food being blessed was stale; indeed it had already been eaten. Alone at the back of the chapel, he tried to tell himself that this marriage made no difference to him, but it was not that simple. His mother was at the core of his life; she was interwoven tight in the maze of feelings that threatened to choke him unless he could communicate them.

The priest raised his hand and made the sign of the cross. As his thin voice intoned the blessing another taxi horn barked outside. Clayton and Kathleen rose to their feet as man and wife. Clayton's bulk surged up jerkily, as though his knees hurt him, and Kathleen flowed from one position to another easily, with the same old languid motions. Paul and the sexton followed them to the vestry to sign the register and the priest's bony finger quivered as he held the page down for them. The sexton's signature spilled out in childish letters on to the page. Some ink splashed off the nib of the pen and made a smear on the paper, then it widened and spread when a worn blotter was
applied to it. Paul's signature was small and neat, each letter spaced as though printed, yet containing evidence of a nervous tension no print could reproduce.

Then Paul followed his mother and stepfather out to the street, they all got into Clayton's car and drove back to his hotel. The wedding breakfast was eaten in the main restaurant of the Mount Royal. Next to them two men with obvious hangovers were eating tomato juice and oysters. Once Kathleen and Clayton touched hands across the table, then drew apart on a reflex when they saw that Paul had noticed the gesture.

Paul ate in silence. He was as austere as a priest, sitting there with them at the small square table. Clayton took out a cream-coloured silk handkerchief and wiped his forehead and the bald patch on his skull. His heavy face was dissolved in sweat, and every time he smiled the moisture ran down through a network of canals to his collar. Beside him Kathleen looked tranquilly comfortable. Her rich skin bloomed in the heat like a gardenia. There was a loosening in the flesh under her eyes which gave her a puzzled, wounded expression when her face was in repose. And when she lowered her head, her chin doubled itself. Yet she was still a handsome woman, still endowed with the accepting look that caught weak men, lonely men, disappointed men, warming them and making them feel better and stronger than they had ever felt in their lives.

“You'll come to Pittsburgh and see us soon, won't you?” The familiar husky voice was pleading as she spoke to Paul. His lids dropped for a second, but lifted immediately. She loved him. She always had. She had never deserted him. He had been the one to desert her. Clayton was saving her from a barren old age, and it was senseless of him to feel as he did about it. In his own way Clayton was a good man; the kind of jolly man Kathleen should have married when she was a
young girl. He had been born a poor boy in Texas and had made his own way. He had worked on ranches and on railroads, and finally had got some sort of education and worked his way into business. Big, hearty, solid-stout, he had a laugh that filled the whole dining room. And he loved Kathleen. Looking at his mother, Paul loved her, too. He had regretted her sometimes. He had fought against the helplessness she often induced in him. Her white hand, soft as though it had never done a day's housework in her life, touched Paul lightly on the wrist. She looked at her husband, pride in her eyes. “Paul works awfully hard, Henry. He's always been such a good boy.”

Clayton tucked his handkerchief into his breast pocket. In spite of the heat he was wearing a double-breasted worsted suit with a pencil stripe. Already the creases had wilted over his knees.

“How did you make out in your exams, Paul? They're tough stuff–exams. I was too old for them when I wrote mine and…”

“All right, I think,” Paul said. “Not that exams make any difference, these days.”

“Don't you believe it,” Clayton said heartily. “What you young fellas need is confidence in the future.”

The waiter came with ham and eggs, whipped covers off plates, and disappeared.

“Henry is going to get you a good job in the States, Paul. We've talked it all over. A job with real money in it. Isn't that wonderful?”

Paul picked up his knife and fork and cut off a slice of ham.

“Why sure,” Clayton said. “Down home–with the new government–business is picking right up so it'll be climbing
flagpoles soon. Down in Pittsburgh not long ago they had an N.R.A. parade that took three hours to pass! When Americans feel that way about something there's no stopping them.” He laughed and patted Paul on the shoulder jovially. “I know you people up here think we all shoot our mouths off, but just the same…You come down and see for yourself. I'll get you a good job in no time.”