Two Solitudes (12 page)

“The boy's excitable,” he said. “It's a bad time for boys of his age, days like these.”

“Of course. Of course.” McQueen's voice purred with sympathy. “By the way, you knew he'd disappeared after the
speech?”

An expression of suffering appeared on Athanase's face. “No,” he said quietly. “I hadn't heard. I'm sorry. I suppose he's trying to avoid conscription. I'd hoped he wouldn't do a thing like that.”

“This conscription policy of the government is a mistake anyway,” McQueen said. “It's swimming against the current. That's always a mistake.”

Athanase made a movement with one hand and his features suddenly came together again in a dominant pattern. “It's the idea of compulsion that's wrong. You English–why can't you have the sense to see that Quebec will always resist the least suggestion of compulsion?”

McQueen raised his eyebrows. “But, Tallard, you yourself–”

“I know what you're going to say. That I supported the bill. So I did. I knew the English provinces would break us if they could. If Quebec kicked back too hard she would only smash herself. I tried to cushion the shock, and of course it was useless. My own people didn't understand. Besides–there's France.”

Since the start of the war, a fear that France might be destroyed had haunted Athanase. Since the days when he had been a student in Paris he had retained a feeling that France stood behind him: French culture, French art, everything that made
la grande nation
. With France behind him he had been able to feel superior to any Englishman or American he met. When the war made England and France allies, he had hoped the alliance might be extended into Canada sufficiently to wipe out permanently the bad old memories between the two races. Something of the sort might have happened if the government had shown any sense of the situation. But the English provinces had preferred compulsion.

“Well,” McQueen said, aware of his thoughts, “no war ever brings people together permanently. It only seems to do it for a time. Organization–that's the magic we want.” He waited to see if Athanase would take up his point, then went on. “I've not forgotten that project we talked about in Saint-Marc last fall, Tallard.”

“Project?”

“The waterfall–a factory in Saint-Marc.”

“Oh, yes. That.”

“It's still a sound idea. I've made some investigations. Of course we mustn't be hasty, but–” He leaned forward and his chubby hand tapped Athanase's knee. “Listen, Tallard. I'm interested in more than money, you know. Millionaires–railway barons–I respect their ability, but they don't interest me. I want to see this country of ours properly developed. No one with sense should ever try to swim against the current. You see that, don't you? And the current is unmistakable. Wouldn't it be a lot better for your province to have its industry shared by French people than to have us run the whole thing? Believe me…”

His voice assumed an evangelical tone as he expounded his subject, and Athanase listened quietly. The train slowed before a station, echoes banged back from a row of cars standing on the next track. Athanase gestured in the direction of the window. The train beside them was crowded with troops. They were packed into old cars, the soldiers sitting three to a seat and standing in the aisles. They were sweating and their collars were open. So they would have to travel for another thirty hours down to Halifax. After that they would be crowded into the hold of a ship like fish in a can.

“An instructive picture of a country at war. No?” Athanase said. “It's revolting.” He gestured toward the politicians and
lobbyists in the comparative comfort around them. “We ought to be ashamed of ourselves.”

“You take things too seriously,” McQueen said.

“Maybe. But if those men”–he nodded toward the troop train–“if they also take things seriously…what happens then? Eh?”

McQueen's mouth turned up at the corners. “Their seriousness would not last long. Men like those can be made to forget very easily.”

“Men like those are winning the war for us.”

“Of course. They always do.”

Their train started slowly, surged ahead with a jerk, then pulsed smoothly on its way. “Now about that factory in Saint-Marc,” McQueen said.

It was half an hour before Athanase found himself alone again. He watched McQueen's back as he lurched off to his own car. The man had disturbed him again, excited him. He had wanted to rest and now his mind was filled with a flood of new ideas. If his political career was ruined, what else should he do? What else could he do? The war had made him too restless to be satisfied with doing nothing. Yet he had done very little in the fifty-eight years before the war.

Sometimes the situation in which he found himself gripped him with the force of a nightmare. He was a failure, there could be no doubt of that. Always he had dreamed of pressing his mark on Quebec, his own special mark, but the substance of his province was too hard. In reality he had never even tried; always it had been easier to release himself into some kind of private adventure, or let his imagination take the place of action. He closed his eyes and the ghosts rose. His vague ghosts were missed opportunities; the more tangible ones were women.

The memories of the women he had known he handled like a collector caressing old glass. In these day-dreams he always pictured himself as a young man, but possessing the knowledge and experience he had acquired by many years of a varied life. Women had always been necessary to him, and his imagination had never been complete without the colour they gave it. A faint smile moved over his dark face and vanished again as his thoughts moved, as they always did in these dreams, to his first wife.

It was a bitter piece of irony that in marrying Marie-Adèle he had chosen the one woman he then knew who could feel no sexual attraction for him whatever. Of course he had not been able to know it in time. French-Canada had always maintained a strict society, and marriage was the absolute basis of it. Marie-Adèle's delicacy and haunting innocence had fascinated the poetry in his nature. He had hoped to play Pygmalion in making her a woman of the world. She had been very beautiful. With a figure always that of a young girl, she had been fragile and tiny, with veins distinctly visible under the skin of her hands and inner arms.

Even before the birth of Marius she had estranged herself from him, and after Marius was born she acquired a peculiar absorption in prayers and visions. Gradually her religion had become her whole life. Even now, nine years after her death, her piety was remembered in Saint-Marc. She had gone to Mass every morning, and in the afternoons she could often be seen in church on her knees before the Virgin, with her hands clasped and her head thrown back in an ecstasy of adoration.

At first her revulsion from him had been an agony to Athanase. He had convinced himself that he was a gentle husband, and he had certainly respected her innocence. But as time passed he gradually admitted that there was nothing to be
done. His stubbornness yielded to a spiritual stubbornness in her greater than his own. Life between them could be tolerable so long as it never again became intimate. Divorce was out of the question; his own form of loyalty to her would never have considered it anyway. But his nature remained imperious, and some years after Marius was born he discovered that he was still attractive to women, and that he needed them more than ever. For a time his life degenerated into a search for some woman who might give him what Marie-Adèle refused. He had found many and he remembered charming moments with them, but on the whole he bitterly regretted this period of his life as a time of waste. He found he could be neither one thing nor the other: a celibate nor a cynical boulevardier. He thought too much, and whenever he liked a woman he had known, he wanted to be loyal to her as well.

He often wondered how much Marius knew. The boy worshipped his mother's memory. Athanase sighed. There was a mystery too deeply rooted in his relations with Marius for him to comprehend its full meaning. He had loved the boy. He still did, but apparently love was inadequate where there was no understanding.

The fields, beautiful in the afternoon sun, slipped past the train. They were running through French parishes now, and on both sides of the train there were familiar figures with bowed shoulders going about their work, an essential part of the general landscape. French-Canadians in the farmland were bound to the soil more truly than to any human being; with God and their families, it was their immortality. The land chained them and held them down, it turned their walk into a plodding and their hands into gnarled tools. It made them innocent of almost everything that existed beyond their own horizon. But it also made them loyal to their race as to a family
unit, and this conception of themselves as a unique brotherhood of the land was part of the legend at the core of Quebec. Even when it exasperated him, Athanase was still proud of it.

Across the aisle two men were talking in English. Out of carelessness or indifference their voices were plainly audible.

“This whole province is hopeless,” one of them was saying as he swept the scene through the windows with his hand. “They can't think for themselves and never could and never will. Now in Toronto we…”

Athanase's lined face remained motionless as he listened to them. The satisfaction in their voices as they talked about Quebec spread like grease.

“Labour's cheap here. That's one good thing. But my God, trying to do any business here gets you so tangled up with priests and notaries you don't know where you are! Now in Toronto…”

Athanase swung his chair around and turned his back on them. If there had been the slightest suggestion of kindliness, the least indication of a willingness to believe the best of Quebec in such men as this from Ontario, Canada's trenchant problem would cease to exist. He let his brows fall into a frown now and he deliberately breathed deeply as though in search of fresh air to fill his lungs. Little by little he managed to pull his thoughts back to himself.

McQueen had left him with a decision to make, and he hated decisions. He thought about the peculiar compelling power in Huntly McQueen, an attribute surprising in anyone of his rotund appearance. The man also had an enormous array of facts and figures at his disposal. As soon as possible he was going to send surveyors out to Saint-Marc to look over the ground, because he wanted the river measured for its power potential. If the reports were satisfactory, he wanted to form a
company and set up a textile factory, with Athanase Tallard as junior partner. There was no doubt that McQueen was serious about the proposition and completely confident that a factory in Saint-Marc would be profitable, providing his initial impression about the waterfall was confirmed.

Athanase sighed. It was certainly a challenge. McQueen was approaching the hard shell of Quebec from another angle, and probably from a more practical angle than politics could ever offer. In every generation there arose French-Canadians who tried to change the eternal pattern of Quebec by political action, and nearly all of them had been broken, one by one. Indeed, they broke themselves, for while they fought for change with their minds, they opposed it with their emotions. If they went far enough, they were bound to find themselves siding with the English against their own people, and if nothing else broke them, that inevitably did. It was a very old pattern.

He fingered his white moustache. But changes were certain to come, nevertheless. They would either come from the outside, from the English and Americans as they were coming now, or they would come from French-Canadians like himself. Science was too much for any static force to resist. Science was bound to crack the shell of Quebec sooner or later, and it was certain in doing so to assail the legend.

The train roared past another station without stopping, slowed down only slightly for a bridge, crossed an island and another bridge and then pulled into the station at Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue at the tip of the island of Montreal.

During the latter years of his reading he had become increasingly fascinated by the various facets of modern science. Automatically it made him critical of Catholicism. Now this scheme of McQueen's appealed to him strongly because it would put him definitely on the side of science, on
the side of the future instead of the past. He felt the power of scientific achievement, and even if he knew little enough about its technical aspects, he resented subconsciously being excluded from a share in its development. Science was sucking prestige from the old age of faith and the soil. And prestige was a matter of power. One by one other nations had surrendered to science. In time, Quebec must surrender, too, learn to master science or be crushed by others who understood how to manipulate the apparatus she neglected. But how could Quebec surrender to the future and still remain herself? How could she merge into the American world of machinery without also becoming American? How could she become scientific and yet save her legend?

Athanase felt the dilemma deeply within his own soul. Quebec wanted prestige but not change. By some profound instinct, French-Canadians distrusted and disliked the American pattern of constant change. They knew it was ruthless, blind and uncontrollable. Trying to think the matter through calmly, Athanase admitted that his arguments for science were little more than arguments against a religion he had rejected. And he had rejected it chiefly because of his resentment against the power of the priests.

When he was calm, he could admit that his failure to do anything positive in his life had been caused by this deep split within himself. Always, before the reasoned act, an unseen hand reached out of the instinct-ridden past and tapped his shoulder. It was the same with all his people. When they resisted change, they were resisting the English who were always trying to force it upon them. And he loved them for their stubbornness.

The train surged onward, the wheels clicking over the joints, and outside spring was growing out of the earth like a miracle. New grass and grain was in the fields, new leaves
were beginning to show on the trees. Only his brain was old, Athanase decided. It was as stale as an empty committee-room when the politicians have gone out for lunch. And yet through the empty staleness his thoughts refused to be still. Paul's future must soon be decided. There was no doubt about it, the boy's future depended to an enormous extent on the kind of school he attended. Unless he took a firm hand in steering Paul's career, the boy would become involved in all the same old dilemmas. The simplest way to avoid that happening would be to send him to an English school. And again the legend would be challenged.