Two Solitudes (24 page)

“Janet,” he said softly. “Janet child!” The bed sagged as her father sat down beside her. He lifted her easily and held her in his arms and she tried to turn her face away from him. After a moment he tried to make her look at him, and for a second she did, but her eyes closed as soon as they met his own. Her lips kept opening and closing, and behind them her teeth remained tightly clenched.

“Go on and cry, Janet,” he whispered softly. “You must.”

For a long time they remained like that, but Janet did not cry. A breeze sprang up from across the river and the smoke in the air moved out of the valley. A hay-wagon rumbled down the road, dropping fragments of its load in a trail behind.

 

SIXTEEN

Looking at the crops and the river and the line of forest behind the parish that summer, it was hard to believe the country had
now been four years at war. But the war was there, over the horizon, threatening Quebec the way so many things over the horizon had always done: not only the fighting, not the killing and the cruelty, but the enormousness of it, the way it had grown into a world industry, the new machinery and the growing madness and the altars to national gods.

In the rest of Canada no horizon held it off. In all the little towns along the double tracks that held the country together from one end to the other the war ate into everyone's mind. People went to bed with it, and during the days it worked beside them like a shadow of themselves. They could never do enough for it. Names like Ypres, Courcelette, Lens, Vimy, Cambrai, Arras, the Somme, had become as familiar and as much a part of Canada as Fredericton, Moose Jaw, Sudbury or Prince Rupert.

Perhaps in Quebec the serene permanence of the river itself helped confirm the people in their sureness that their instinct was right; that the war was the product of the cities which constantly threatened their tradition, of English-American big business, factories, power dams, banks, trusts, heavy industry and the incessant jabbering noise of the outside world which bombarded their own idea of themselves, roaring that they were weak, unimportant, unprogressive, too backward to understand the magnificence of the war. And beside, there was the faith. All through the Laurentian country thousands of Sulpicians, Jesuits, Dominicans, Benedictines, Franciscans, Trappists, Servites, Carmelites, Ursulines, Little Sisters of the Assumption, Grey Nuns, lay-brothers and lay-sisters, bishops, parish priests, vicars and seminary students worked on in the unbroken tradition out of the Middle Ages and contemplated the Catholic God. Against the light of Eternity, the war seemed only a brutish interlude.

So the country brooded on through midsummer, each part bound to the others like a destiny, even in opposition forming a unity none could dissolve, the point and counterpoint of a harmony so subtle they never guessed its existence.

 

SEVENTEEN

McQueen's surveyors appeared in Saint-Marc at the end of the first week in August and stayed six days in the parish. They were put up at the Tallard house and went out to the gorge every day with their levels and transits and notebooks. They pegged lines across the stream at various points from the falls toward the road, and worked in a flat-bottomed boat secured to the lines, while they lowered an aluminum propeller on the end of a wired shaft to measure the velocity of the current at various points along the channel. Then they plotted a course for the railroad spur which would have to be built to serve the factory. Their course took them across several farms, and Athanase went ahead of them to explain to the farmers that what the surveyors were doing was an important secret which would turn into a lucky development for them. To Tremblay he explained that if certain projects went through he might want to buy one of his fields; there would be a lot of money in it for him if no one else was told about it.

At the end of the week the surveyors went back to town and a few days later McQueen wrote to Athanase asking him to come to Montreal at once to get the organization of the firm under way. Before Father Beaubien or anyone else in Saint-Marc had quite made up their minds to question him, Athanase was gone.

In Montreal, McQueen told him the layout was perfect,
there was plenty of power in the river and no difficulties about the terrain. Plans had already been drawn up by an architect for the building. Athanase studied them with keen interest and gave his approval. All arrangements for incorporation he left entirely to McQueen. He took out a first and second mortgage on his property in Saint-Marc, held in McQueen's name, and converted the loan, together with the proceeds of the sale of his bonds, into stock in the company. All his eggs were in one basket now and the realization of what he was doing sometimes frightened him when he was alone at night. But during the day, when typewriters clacked, telephones rang, drawers were opened and closed, conferences were held, enthusiastic opinions ran high, letters and documents accumulated in files, and architects, engineers, business managers, experts on textiles, and stenographers all beamed confidence, Athanase was quite happy in the swim of so much excitement.

His own important part in the proceedings came to a head when he received word from Ottawa that the government would build the railway spur as soon as the foundation of the factory was laid. Athanase beamed when he read the letter from the minister. He had calculated the political side of this project perfectly, as McQueen had expected him to do. The government had no wish to see him lose his seat, and the railway spur would be put down to his credit in the next election.

Meanwhile the spread of rumours in Saint-Marc found their focus in Polycarpe Drouin's store. Polycarpe himself looked wise and said it meant an election for sure. Anyone using a level and transit was bound to be employed by the government, and the government never did anything except before an election. Frenette said the parish was going to be divided into two parts and a new church was to be built near the falls. Onésime Bergeron said Mr. Tallard was fixing it so the whole
parish would be handed over to the English. Ovide Bissonette made no prediction, but he was sure that whatever happened, it would be something bad. Tremblay and all the farmers whose land had been touched by the surveyors kept their mouths shut. For a fortnight all conversations with the priest were shifted by monosyllables to the subject of the surveyors, but Father Beaubien, looking as stern as the general of an encircled army, merely thought hard and also kept his mouth shut.

 

EIGHTEEN

Marius Tallard sat on a bench in the corner of the station waiting room in Montreal and ate the sandwich Emilie had just given him. He took large bites and swallowed before he had chewed properly. The movement of his jaws showed how thin he had become, with the sharp cheekbones making deep shadows on his white skin. Emilie waited until the sandwich was half consumed and then she said, “You better be sure it's a safe thing, you going back home now.”

Her timidity irritated him. “What's safe anywhere?” he said, his mouth full of bread and ham. “I'm tired. I'm going home.”

Emilie accepted his explanation without question, as she did everything he said.

“But don't get the idea I'm going back to my father,” he went on. “I'm through with him. But that land out there–it's mine as well as his. I hate Montreal anyhow.”

“Sure, sure. Sometimes I think about the country too. Some times.” She smiled at him with a sort of vacant tenderness.

The waiting room smelled of stale cigar smoke, spittoons, disinfectant, orange peels, unwashed clothes and sweating
flesh. All the assorted bits of humanity that sat stiffly or lolled on the benches were ill at ease and unwilling to be there. They were devoid of background, without status in this interim between leaving one place and arriving at another. There were farm women with their best clothes wilted and bundles tied with cord hugged close at their sides. There were sailors and soldiers showing the effects of a weekend leave in the city. There were couples, and single men with cheap suitcases at their feet who might be anything from lunch-counter clerks to steamfitters in the normal course of their day. Now they were nothing, nobodies waiting for trains to take them some place else. For a fraction of time the big room became alive and everyone in it was united by a common interest. A girl in magenta silk, holding the arm of a man in a black suit and a bowler hat, broke away from a splash of shouting and laughter in the concourse, ducked through a shower of rice and confetti, into the waiting room, through it, and on to their train.

Marius finished the sandwich and wiped his mouth with a rumpled handkerchief. He looked up at the clock on the wall at one end of the room. The instrument might have been put there especially to annoy him. “Wait–wait–wait! That's the best thing I do nowadays.”

Emilie touched his forearm with her fingers. She wanted to take the strain from him, to make him quiet, but he refused to let her. Now he jerked his arm away. She wanted to ask him where he had been and what he had been doing during all the weeks she had not seen him, but she said nothing. It was something to be thankful for that he had called her at the restaurant just before she was ready to leave.

“I guess you got no money, maybe?” she said after a while. “Maybe that's why you go home?”

“Well, what if it is?”

“You should have come to me. I'd see you weren't hungry.”

He laughed harshly. “I've been getting my education.”

“You been back at the college?”

“Don't be so simple. Do you think you get an education in college?”

“Mon Dieu, you got no need to bite me.”

“I've been learning things that count. How the poor feel, for instance.”

“I could have told you.”

He appraised her with a sarcastic smile. “I found out the poor have no brains. They believe whatever they're told so long as it's easy to remember. But the main thing is, they're all lazy.”

He got up from the bench and thrust his hands in his pockets. All the luggage he possessed was on his back. A passing soldier glanced at him and Marius made a point of staring until the man looked the other way.

“In this town,” he said, looking over Emilie's head, “all the poor I met were French. We're the ones that get splashed with the motor cars of the English.” He looked down at the girl beside him. “Did you ever stop to think how comparatively few English live in Montreal?”

Emilie shook her head. She had no interest in what he was saying, but the way he said it gave her a sick feeling inside. He stooped down and picked up a grain of rice that had been thrown at the honeymoon couple. Eyeing it as he turned it over in his fingers, he went on. “In Montreal the French outnumber the English three to one. In the province we outnumber them more than seven to one. And yet, the English own everything!” He held the grain of rice under the nail of his thumb and stared at the floor. “The English in Montreal, they own nearly the whole of Canada. And yet once upon a time the whole of Canada belonged to the French.”

Emilie tried to smile. She tugged at his coat in an effort to get him to sit down again, but Marius knew he talked better on his feet. “In the factories all the bosses are English. One English boss, five hundred French workers. Funny, no?” He cracked the grain of rice solemnly between two nails as though it were a flea. “But on the whole,” he went on, “it is the laziness of the poor one should first observe. The rich are equally stupid, but I think maybe the rich are frightened, and frightened men are not generally lazy.”

Emilie got up from the bench and stood close beside him. In contrast to his drawn and bitter leanness, she looked plump and healthy. Her commonsense wanted to make him stop all this talk. It was probably clever, but clever people only got into trouble. Only priests should use clever talk like Marius.

Again she tugged at his sleeve. “What are you going to do now?”

“How do I know?”

“Will they get you? You think maybe they know where you're going?”

Marius looked at her sharply and then he walked rapidly out of the waiting room toward the tracks. Emilie had to move her short legs unnaturally fast to keep up with him and her heavy hips wobbled in time with her trot. She knew Marius was frightened. When a man talked like that he was always scared of something. Whoever was after him had found out where he'd been hiding, and now he had to get out of town.

When they reached the gate Marius showed his ticket to the conductor. The man glanced at it and let them pass through to the platform. They walked down a line of standing coaches and Marius finally selected one that was nearly full. He stopped at the steps and looked down at Emilie. The
set expression on his face melted and he looked irresolute, almost pitiful. “If I only had some money…”

He bent and kissed her fiercely, then released her and went up the steps without looking around. She stood where he had left her and her hand rose and then fell again. He had kissed her so hard his teeth had bruised her lips. Nothing had passed from him to her but the pain. Even in kissing her he had locked her out. She turned after a few moments and walked slowly back to the station concourse. What ought she to do? She had saved seven dollars. Maybe if she went to church and put the money in the box and prayed to the Virgin, the Holy Mother of God would intercede and make Marius kinder and happy, so everything between them could be good. If she wanted to be blessed she must first deserve the blessing.

 

NINETEEN

For Paul, it was a momentous day. He got up just before dawn and dressed quietly, then went downstairs in the dark in his stocking feet so as not to wake the others in the house. He put on his shoes in the kitchen and went out to the scullery. He took his fishing rod from the corner where he had left it the night before, walked down the drive in the dark and turned into the river road toward Captain Yardley's with the rod over his shoulder. He felt very important being up before anyone else in the parish.