Two Solitudes (54 page)

When the woman who owned the place discovered that Paul had been at sea she couldn't do enough for them. She gave them her best room and sent one of the children up to lay a fire in it. Because the dining room was cold and there were no other guests, she allowed them to eat in the kitchen, and they sat at a large pine table while their supper was prepared. The kitchen was the largest room in the house. It had an enormous copper boiler beside the stove and the whole room was clean and shining. There was a picture of Christ in a small frame on one wall. Some exquisite wood-carvings of saints stood on the shelf of the dresser, and colourful milk bowls were arranged along its top.

Madame Rocheleau was a tall woman with black hair neatly done, and strong Norman features. When she moved she was grave and stately. She served them a wonderful dinner of vegetable soup and fresh boiled salmon, and talked with them while they ate. Afterwards she asked them to share a small carafe of wine with her. It was an excellent light claret. Her husband was a river pilot who was absent most of the time when the Saint Lawrence was open. She had eight children: the eldest a priest and the second a sailor working for his mate's ticket on one of the C.P.R. ships. It was this son who had brought her two cases of claret from his last voyage when the ship called at Le Havre, and she was very proud of him when she spoke of it. She was quiet-voiced, shrewd and very observant, and had a way of laughing cautiously, as though it were a luxury. After a time it appeared that she wanted to know if Paul expected a war. When he made a non-committal answer she looked at him gravely and
shook her head. “My son will join the Navy if there is war,” she said.

“Does your son expect it?”

“He has been in Europe.” She shrugged her shoulders. “My son is well educated. He keeps his eyes open.”

“Do many from here go to sea?” Paul asked.

“There has always been a member of my husband's family at sea,” Madame Rocheleau said. “His brother was lost at sea in the last war. You, Monsieur–will you also be in the Navy if there is war this time?”

Heather gave Paul a quick glance. The turn of the conversation surprised her.

“It will be easier to tell that when the time comes, Madame. But if it does–yes, it is probable.”

“My son says it will come.”

“They may prevent it.”

“When people do not believe in God they do not prevent such things.”

“Do others here believe there will be war?”

“They do not think about it. I am the only one with a son who has sailed to Europe, so for me it is different.”

She rose with the lamp in her hand and showed them upstairs to their room. “You and Madame will be comfortable,” she said. “When my husband is home this is our room.”

She wished them a grave good-night and went out, drawing the heavy door behind her.

When they were alone, Heather said, “What a beautiful woman!”

Paul went over to the fire and crouched beside it. She saw the corners of his mouth move into a smile as he looked at the hot flames of the driftwood logs. “She has a respect for facts,” he said.

“Like you.”

“Not like me at all. If this country were invaded and the Germans were ten miles away and it was time to pick the potatoes, she'd be out picking them.”

“What would you be doing?”

He made no answer.

“Are there many like Madame Rocheleau in Quebec?”

“So far there have been enough to guarantee that my brother remains an unsuccessful politician.”

She dropped onto the mat beside him, looking into the fire. She felt his hand close over hers. “You're still French–aren't you, Paul?”

He laughed quietly. “I certainly would be if I stayed long enough in a place like this.”

“Would you like to stay here?”

“You know perfectly well my likes and dislikes have nothing to do with it. But yes–here I get back the old feelings. It makes me remember when I was a boy in Saint-Marc. This is Quebec–small places like this. They may be simple. They may even be superstitious. But in places like this you meet Madame Rocheleau. What's in the cities is an industrial revolution, delayed by about fifty years. When the war starts…” He paused, but went on almost immediately. “There may be quite a lot of dynamite lying around in the towns, and I don't look forward to the prospect of Marius lighting matches in the middle of it.”

“Paul–why doesn't Marius like you?”

He laughed again. “Because I'm half-English. Because I'm not the pure thing. He knows I feel both races stirring inside me all the time. The pure race is everything to him. I suppose that's why he refuses to speak English. If you're completely at home in both languages you can't help thinking differently.”

“Does it feel funny belonging to both races?”

“Well, it makes it impossible to be enthusiastic about the prejudices of either of them, and that can be uncomfortable sometimes.”

“Does it still bother you–the way it used to?”

He shook his head. “I've been away too long.” He stared into the fire. “I suppose patriotism was originally nothing but the remembrance of childhood. Childhood is always magical. No wonder the politicians got hold of it and organized it.”

He was thoughtful for nearly a minute; the burning wood cracked loudly and a violent gust of wind made the windows rattle. He got up and looked out. Cap Chat was buried in darkness under the rushing wind and there was nothing to see. Coming back to the fire, he crouched again. “Well, one thing is certain. The same brand of patriotism is never likely to exist all over Canada. Each race so violently disapproves of the tribal gods of the other I can't see how any single Canadian politician can ever imitate Hitler–at least, not over the whole country. But when the war comes…” He stopped and shrugged his shoulders.

Keeping her eyes on the fire and her voice quiet, she said, “I suppose you meant what you said about the Navy?”

“I suppose so. Why not be frank? I've made up my mind.”

“My father was killed in 1918. I can't even remember him.” She turned. “Oh Paul–do we really have to get into it again?”

“We'll be in it, all right.” He got up. “Let's not talk about it. It just pulls the guts out of me. If you've grown up in a minority you can never feel simply about war. Quebec will enter it trying to save her legend. Many will go to it. Some like Marius will begin remembering each separate insult the English threw in their faces the last time. Some like me will
have to feel for Quebec and feel for the whole country at the same time. No–let's not talk about it.”

“Paul?”

He looked down at her. She was curled on the edge of the hearth, staring into the fire. When he answered the changed inflection in her voice she still looked away from him.

“I've finished your manuscript,” she said.

He waited, but for a time she said no more. All day Heather had been brooding over what she would say to him about his book. Each knew how tightly their future was bound up with the quality of this manuscript. “Well,” he said finally, “do you think it can be published?”

“I don't see why not.” She was still watching the fire. “Parts of it are wonderful. Your style is simply marvellous. I forget it's you when I'm reading.”

“But something is the matter with it. Something fundamental. You've spotted it. I can tell from your voice.”

His calm, factual tones made Heather's hopes sink. This book of his had completely baffled her. She was no professional critic, but her work with the museum in New York had involved a good deal of editing and she had helped write a small text book for art classes in schools. She had something of a professional approach to any form of written words. His theme was ambitious. Many sections had extraordinary power and descriptions were new and vivid. But the balance was not right and the whole was curiously unsatisfying.

They discussed the book for nearly half an hour, and he took the manuscript and went over specific sections with her. At the end of that time she knew what had puzzled her.

The book was too ambitious for him. She herself had been dazzled by the scope of the design. The young man of 1933, intended to type a world in disintegration, had seemed
so important that she had not questioned the validity of his plan. Now she saw that the trouble lay in the fact that Paul's emotions and mental analysis had not coalesced.

“Look,” she said suddenly, “I read somewhere that the novelist's principal aim is to celebrate life.”

“I suppose it is.”

“That's what you do best of all. Every time. Your characters are all naturally vital people. But your main theme never gives them a chance. It keeps asserting that they're doomed.”

He frowned thoughtfully. Then he remembered a discussion he had had with his tutor in Oxford. “Maybe I shouldn't have chosen a European scene. Of course, Europe is the focus…” He jumped up and began walking back and forth. “My God!” he shouted. “I've been a fool! A year's work! Heather–I've wasted a year's work!”

She looked at him in excitement. Her thoughts were on the same tack as his own. “Paul, why didn't you set the scene in Canada?”

He stopped in the middle of the room. “Because no world trends begin here. I thought of it, but–everything that makes the world what it is–fascism, communism, big business and depressions–they're all products of other people's philosophies and ways of doing things. A book about Canada–it would be like writing of the past century!” Having said this he wondered if it were really true. He sat down before the fire again, staring into it. Must he write out of his own background, even if that background were Canada? Canada was imitative in everything. Yes, but perhaps only on the surface. What about underneath? No one had dug underneath so far, that was the trouble. Proust wrote only of France, Dickens laid nearly all his scenes in London, Tolstoi was pure Russian. Hemingway let his heroes roam the world, but everything he
wrote smelled of the United States. Hemingway could put an American into the Italian Army and get away with it because by now everyone in the English-speaking world knew what an American was. But Canada was a country that no one knew. It was a large red splash on the map. It produced Mounted Policemen, Quintuplets and raw materials. But because it used the English and French languages, a Canadian book would have to take its place in the English and French traditions. Both traditions were so mature they had become almost decadent, while Canada herself was still raw. Besides, there was the question of background. As Paul considered the matter, he realized that his readers' ignorance of the essential Canadian clashes and values presented him with a unique problem. The background would have to be created from scratch if his story was to become intelligible. He could afford to take nothing for granted. He would have to build the stage and props for his play, and then write the play itself.

Suddenly he began to talk. He got up and paced back and forth across the floor. He lit cigarettes and threw them into the fire half-finished and lit some more. Heather had never heard such a deluge of words from him. As she listened she felt sick from apprehension. He was telling her that his present book was a total failure, that he could do nothing to save it.

Then, as abruptly as he had begun to talk, he stopped and knelt beside the fire. It had burned down until the logs were glowing coals. After a time he took a deep breath and turned to her. His face seemed several years older than it had been an hour ago, but his eyes were bright. He laughed in sudden irony.

“And what have I discovered tonight?” he said. “Something the whole world has known for centuries. An artist has to take life as he finds it. Life by itself is formless wherever it
is. Art must give it a form.” He laughed again. “So–after all these years–I learn tonight what my job is!”

Then casually, so casually she did not realize what he was doing, he picked up the manuscript and dropped it into the fire. With a cry she reached forward to save it, but the flames shot up and covered the papers. He took her by the arms and drew her back. “No,” he said, “that's finished. Burn the mistakes. Otherwise they'll haunt you permanently.”

She was frightened by the resignation in his voice, appalled by the fact that he was destroying what had taken him a year to create. She watched the mass of papers burning and her face became hot from the flames. Slowly they curled and shrivelled into quivering layers, blackening from the edges into the centre, and she knew she was watching more than an unfinished book going up in smoke. She felt she was watching the fire burn up the next two years of her own life.

 

FORTY-FOUR

It was early when they woke the next day and set out after a good breakfast. They drove fast along the river highway toward Quebec. At Rimouski they saw the wind sweeping up swathes of mist from the river like a broom brushing a floor. At Trois-Pistoles the sun was shining. When they stopped for lunch at Rivière-du-Loup the day was hot and the mountains on the far side of the river looked mauve against a brilliant sky. Steadily the Saint Lawrence narrowed as they drove inland, and by late afternoon the Île d'Orléans was on their right, its contours dark in the late afternoon sun. The land was richer here, the parishes older; they passed red-roofed barns and the lovely sloping roofs
of old stone houses. In some fields farmers were already beginning to cut the hay; in others the smell of clover was as strong as an anaesthetic. Then, as they neared Lévis, they saw Quebec across the river with the sunset flaring behind it, the Château and Citadel stark against the light and a pool of purple shadow lying like oil on the river underneath Cape Diamond. It was cool crossing on the ferry, but in the steep streets of Quebec the heat had lingered even past sundown. They found in a side street a small hotel Heather knew, left their bags and went out for dinner. Afterwards they leaned on the railing on the edge of Dufferin Terrace for nearly an hour watching the lights on the river, and then went back to bed.