Two Solitudes (7 page)

He looked beyond her to the shadows in one corner of the room. She was his father's wife. She was the mother of his half-brother. Paul was eight, he was pure, he knew nothing of his own origin; but he was this woman's son. She must have been a girl hardly older than he was now when his father had first gone to her.

Turning from the table Kathleen said quietly, “You're afraid they'll get you, aren't you, Marius? It's conscription.”

For a moment his eyes met hers and yielded. Then he flushed. “I'm not afraid of anything. Understand? They won't get me, either.”

“Well, I'm glad you came back. Your father will fix everything up for you. Just wait and see.”

“You think I'd beg him for anything?”

“But it wouldn't be begging–not from your own father! I'll speak to him, if you like.”

“No, you won't. He thinks the war's wonderful. Why not? He's safe. He's too old to be killed. Anyway, he sold out to the English long ago.”

“Oh, don't talk that way. Your father's a very clever man.”

“How would you know if he was clever or not?”

“A boy like you can't know as much about things like the war as his father does. You ought to be proud of him. And him a member of parliament in Ottawa, too.”

“Proud! My God! I have to apologize to everyone I know every time I see his name in the papers! I have to say, ‘Sure, I know my father sells us down the river to the English, but I'm not like him. I'm not fooled by him.' Me–having to say that to my friends about my own father!”

Kathleen made a gesture of impatience and her face showed the mounting of a slow anger. Marius suspected that she saw through him completely and knew his secret thoughts as well as he did himself. There was a dreadful instinct in her for seeing into every male she met.

“Your father's always got on well with the English,” she said. “Why not, I'd like to know? They respect him. So does everyone else.”

“Listen to what the students say and you'll find out how much he's respected.”

“Students! The English are all right. They let us alone.”

“Us?” Again the harsh laugh. “Since when did you become one of us? You can't even speak French.”

Kathleen shrugged her shoulders and turned away. “I don't know what's the matter with you. Why can't you be nice and natural? You and the English! What did they ever do to you? Next thing, you'll be saying old Captain Yardley is selling somebody out.”

Marius was lashing himself into anger. He got up and began walking back and forth in the room. “Never mind about him. He's a harmless old fool. But his friends aren't. Look at that McQueen! The biggest profiteer in the country fixes things so his friends buy French land cheap. And my own father helps him!” He threw his arms wide in a theatrical gesture. “And why not? He buys things cheap too.”

“You're crazy. Your father's not a business man.”

“He doesn't have to be. He bought you, didn't he?”

They faced each other, tense and angry. For a second he thought she was going to slap him and he made a sudden movement and caught her lifted hand. She swung in against him and he felt her body soft against his own and saw her eyes looking straight into his and for a second he forgot all about his father. So he stood there holding her wrist. Then he dropped his eyes and pushed her away, feeling shame strike his face like a wave of fire as he groped toward the door.

Footsteps sounded outside on the gallery. “Who's that?” he asked sharply, his hand on the knob.

She looked at him calmly. After the things he had said, her poise was intolerable to him. Even her voice was completely expressionless. “It's probably Captain Yardley. He's coming to dinner.”

“Where does he live–here or in his own house?”

“He likes your father.” She moved toward the door. “Your father will be back from Ottawa tonight. They're going to play chess after dinner, the way they always do.”

Marius opened the door and made for the stairs. He bumped into Julienne on her way from the kitchen to open the front door. She stared at him, not knowing he was home. He clutched her arm. “Don't tell anyone I've been here. Understand? I'm going back to town.”

Julienne stood staring after him as he ran upstairs. Then she shook her head and pursed her lips. There had always been trouble between Marius and the master. Well, it was none of her business. She went on to open the door, where Yardley's lean figure was silhouetted against the snow.

Upstairs in his room Marius stood in the semi-darkness. He was trembling. The image of Kathleen's lush body still brimmed in his eyes and he felt sick from shame. He struck a match and crossed the room, shielding the flame in his cupped hands. In the far corner he lit a candle. Then he struck another match and lit five more candles and the yellow light fell on a makeshift altar he had set up three years before when he was still at the seminary and thought he was going to be a priest. Above the altar was a small crucifix.

Marius stood looking at it and then he turned slowly away, his eyes filled with tears. They came to rest on a picture on the side wall. He saw the slim face of a woman with neat black hair parted in the middle and drawn off her forehead. The woman's eyes were lowered as though in modesty before the camera. It was the virginal face, almost the nun's face, of his mother.

Tears for his own loneliness overflowed his eyes as he fell on his knees in front of the altar and clasped his hands. The points of light on the candles swam before his sight. His mind was like a swelling liquid pain as he contemplated his own misery. His hatred of his father collapsed in a longing for his father's approval, never attained because stubbornness of pride made him refuse consistently to do a single thing his father wished. The terrible thoughts his stepmother roused in him burned in the same way he was sure hell must burn, except that the torture of hell would contain more physical pain.

For many minutes he stayed on his knees, his lips moving
in prayer, and slowly he became calm. Still kneeling after finishing his prayers, he tried to think more clearly. The war had finally caught up with him. Thoughts of the army filled him with dread, mixed with bitterness against the English who were forcing the evil of war upon him. And the dread and the bitterness served to cancel out his shame.

The candlelight made his shoulders a black silhouette in the gathering dark of the airless room. He got to his feet and looked at his watch. The train from town had reached Sainte-Justine some time ago and his father would be home any minute now. After having come all the way from town to get money he would now have to go back without it. And he would have to hurry to catch the west-bound train back.

As he went down the stairs on tiptoe, and as he stood in the hall quietly putting on his coat and drawing a muffler about his throat, he listened to the voices that came through the half-open library door. There was the clink of a bottle against glass and a chuckling laugh from Kathleen, then Yardley's voice clear. “Down home we used to drink Demerara and when I was a lot younger than I am now I'd always get embarrassed, not being able to take it neat like most of them. You need a bull's gullet for neat Demerara.”

Marius missed Kathleen's reply, but he could hear Yardley go on, “Barbados is a gentleman's rum.” Then, after a moment's silence, “Mr. Tallard late again?”

Kathleen must have moved closer to the door, for he could make out her reply now. “I never worry about him. He'll be here soon.”

Marius stood in the dark hall balanced on his toes, listening intently. He might miss his train, but he could not bring himself to leave. The pleasant voices in the lighted room held him.

“He worries, though,” Kathleen went on. “Too much. He's not the way he used to be when I first met him, I can tell you that. He was fun, then.”

“The way the war's going, Kathleen, it's enough to make anyone worry.”

So he calls her by her first name, Marius thought. Well, why not? She was the kind men instinctively called by a personal name.

“Still wanting to get back to the city?” Yardley said.

“What's the use of wanting?”

“There could be a lot worse places to live than Saint-Marc.”

“Where?”

Marius shifted his feet in the hall. Then Kathleen's voice went on, “With all the other places in the world to pick from, it still beats me why you came here.”

“I'm not sorry,” Yardley said. “Must say, though, I never thought I'd have to work so hard in my sixtieth year. Lucky thing my health's still good.”

Kathleen's voice was warm and lazy as she answered. “Well, it's nice for me, your being here. He never thinks about me any more, you know. So I just drift. I guess everybody does and I guess it's nothing but luck where you drift to.” She laughed quietly. “Well, I've had my lucky days, too.”

Marius took a step nearer the front door and laid his hand on the knob, but he was arrested again by Yardley's voice. “What about that factory McQueen's so set on building here? Mr. Tallard any more interested in the idea?”

“Oh, he talks a lot about it.”

Marius was exasperated by the silence that followed. How like Kathleen to be uninterested in the only important thing Yardley had said. Factory? What factory?

“Out here you can talk all the time and it still won't mean that anything's going to come of it,” Kathleen was saying.

“Mr. Tallard does a lot more than just talk when it comes to the war. It takes courage, what he's doing.”

Marius could imagine the supple lift to Kathleen's shoulders as she shrugged them. It was a slow sway, as though she were easing herself from under a weight.

“Maybe he knows a lot about the war,” she said. “I don't. All I know is that on account of the war I never see him any more and I'm stuck here with nothing to do. Marius was here today. He's bad enough any time, the way he feels about me, but now he's going to be conscripted he talks as if it was all his father's fault. And that means my fault, too, in his language.”

The large clock in the hall, its face hidden in the darkness except for a single corner where a shaft of light from the library struck it, was suddenly ticking very loudly.

“I'll believe in that factory when I see it,” Kathleen was saying. “But I hope it's built. Some new people would come. Nobody here could run it.”

“You know, Kathleen”–Yardley's voice was measured–“I'd kind of hate to see a thing like that happen here. And yet–I've looked over that waterfall pretty carefully. It's made to order. It probably will get built, no matter what any of us thinks about it.”

Every muscle in Marius' body was tense, waiting and listening. A new wave of anger was mounting through him. Turn a perfect old parish like Saint-Marc into a factory town! His imagination began to construct a finished picture, the deed accomplished. He saw chimneys spilling black smoke over the fields, the village cluttered with new, raw, cheap houses and cheap people imported for labour. The row of freshly-painted cottages where the English managers lived like lords of creation
would be set apart from the rest of the village. A second conquest! First the English took over the government of your own country. Then they used you for cheap labour in their factories.

Unconsciously his nostrils twitched to the odour of roast pork coming from the kitchen as Julienne took the roast from the oven. Suddenly he realized how hungry he was. And he couldn't even stay and eat in his own house! He opened the front door without a sound, closed it behind him and stepped into the evening. The last clouds had rolled away after sunset and the sky was clear, faintly saffron toward the west with some residual light over the frozen river. The stars looked bright and close and there was a promise in the air. Spring would begin any day now.

Marius had forgotten about the train back to Montreal. As he walked down the road his black brows were close together. He would have to talk to Father Beaubien. He could stop a factory. There would be plenty he could say before such a thing was allowed to happen.

Back in the library Kathleen was holding her glass against the light, studying the golden murkiness of its colour. “I'm sure it's something more than just me being his stepmother,” she was saying. “It's something from a way back he holds against his father. I wish I knew for sure what it was. It's a shame for him to be so unhappy.”

 

SIX

Marius Tallard was drunk with a new knowledge of himself. He stood in the big hall before the meeting with his feet apart, swaying from the hips, his arms folded across his chest. Now and then his right arm shot out and the long fingers of his
hand wove gestures in the air. His white teeth flashed rare and bitter smiles in his white face. His black hair was loose on his long, narrow skull. He pulled emotion out of the crowd and threw it back at them.

Marius had no idea how he was doing this, nor even what he was saying. His own unhappiness and frustration had been filling up a well inside him for ten years and now he felt he could go on speaking out of it forever. The listening crowd leaned forward and gave him back a mysterious elation in exchange for his words. They loved each other, Marius and all these strange people.

Fragments of the crowd detached themselves from the whole and he talked to them in turn. Down in the fifth row Emilie's wide, innocent face shook loose and floated up against his eyes. She was staring at him like a young girl at her first communion looking at the priest. Every little while he looked back at her, avoiding the students who were sitting just behind her. At the back of the hall four policemen stood with their arms folded across a pair of white bandoliers that met and crossed over their chests. They were huge men; in their black greatcoats with the white bandoliers and their stiff fur caps they looked like Napoleon's guards.

Marius switched his eyes from Emilie and talked over the crowd to the policemen. He was their man and they were his people. They had discovered each other and the moment was enormous.