Two Solitudes (35 page)

There was certainly no danger of standardization at Frobisher, for no two masters had ever been known to agree on anything except their opinion of the Americans. In spite of this, the place ran smoothly. It had some real colour of its own. The boys liked it, and the masters who stayed on grew so fond of the place they admitted they would never like to work in England. The boys believed that the staff had only two things in common. The younger ones were always upset to discover that Canadian boys mistook their exquisite English accents for a proof of softness, and consequently a major part of their work in their first teaching years was directed to prove
this belief wrong. Some of them even froze their ears in winter walking around bareheaded to prove they could take it.

The other point on which the staff agreed was the calamitous proximity of Canada to the United States. The Americans were doubtless all right, but they would be far better if they were a thousand miles away. They did their best to offset this by teaching the boys British history and geography, and they even tried to teach them British manners as well. This never quite succeeded. The boys knew all the latest American slang, and used it. They played better baseball than cricket. In October, when the World Series was played, a surreptitious betting pool generally operated in the basement.

But Paul got a thorough training at Frobisher. None of the masters went by a rule book, their teaching was careful, and if the boys did not do their arithmetic, English, French, Latin, algebra and geography, they were caned for it. All the masters were very cheerful as they bent the boys over and caned them, and Sergeant-Major Croucher liked to make a small ceremony of it, military style. When he gave them one crack, he said he was making them lance-corporals, when he gave them two they became corporals and so on up to the commissioned ranks. It was a matter of pride for all the boys to get a certain amount of caning, and if Croucher noticed that any of the shy ones were failing to qualify, he invented a minor crime and made them lance-corporals for the sake of their morale. When he caned shy boys he was so cheerful he made it impossible for them to be afraid. But once he bent them over he gave them a really good crack. Then they would run away with grins on their faces holding their backsides, knowing they could prove themselves men by taking down their pants and showing the red mark Croucher had given them.

Paul was at the top of his class in work and was good
enough at games to be popular. He was no longer timid about little things as he once had been; he was frightened of nothing at all now. At first he had been homesick for Saint-Marc. In the evenings he had missed his mother talking to him at his bedside, and on Saturday mornings he often had a moment's twang of loneliness when he thought of his walks with his father over the fields. He missed most of all never hearing French spoken around him. But the strangeness soon wore off because there was so much to do, and when he went home to Montreal for the holidays his parents treated him as a special person. His father was pleased with his reports and his mother always took him to shows and gave him ice-cream afterwards. But when the holidays ended he was always glad to be back, looking forward to football in the autumn and hockey in the winter and boxing in the spring. He was a veteran at Frobisher now, and he counted for something.

The other boys never made an issue of his race. They never even thought about it, for he was one of themselves. They might have considered themselves superior to French-Canadians in a vague sort of way, but what few ideas they had on the subject were derived mainly from casual remarks they had heard at home. Frobisher was in the heart of the French-Canadian countryside, but the boys did not think this remarkable. When they went into the village to buy candy and ginger beer they accepted old Baptiste Doucette as a character and a part of the school. He had been running a tuck shop just out of bounds ever since anyone could remember, he knew all the boys by their names and he spoke a picturesque English they presumed had been invented for their own special benefit. The boys never worried themselves about national problems of any sort; indeed, they did not know they existed. Their home was the English section of
Montreal; as a result of what everyone told them, their country was not Canada but the British Empire.

 

Under the yellow ceiling lights the boys sat at their desks and the long-toothed master continued with his corrections. Paul leaned back in his seat and looked across to the window panes. Through them a full moon was visible, rendered blue by the glass. His thighs and lungs felt pleasantly tired from the afternoon's hockey, but he thought it would be wonderful if he could skate when prep was over instead of going straight up to the dormitory. When he became a senior he would be allowed out on the rink after prep on a night like this. He thought of the crisp air and the snow squeaking under his heels, and then his skates biting the ice, running over it and lifting hard under the soles of his feet as he crossed the bumps where the water had bubbled as it froze, the rink like dark blue steel, the snowbanks around it dark with shadows in some places, ghostly white in others, with tiny sparkles flashing mysteriously here and there as the moon caught crystal and made it live.

He brought his mind back to his work, but after reading a little more he turned the book upside down and lifted his eyes to the ceiling. His lips moved and his teeth showed as he repeated to himself the Fifth Declension. The master looked up from his corrections. “Not so much noise, Tallard!”

“But I'm working, sir!”

Paul made his voice sound bright on a reflex. The boys always looked their brightest whenever a master told them to stop doing something. The long-toothed master went back to his corrections, and Paul continued as though nothing had happened:
res, res, rem, rei, rei, re
. He knew this well enough to drop it; it was the easiest of all the declensions anyway, and
the best, for once you finished it there were no more of them to learn. He thumbed through his Latin book until he came to the pictures of famous Greek and Roman buildings at the back. He looked at the Parthenon. One of the younger masters had been in Athens with the Navy during the war, and had told him about it so well he could imagine exactly what it was like, the white pillars with the strange copper stains near the top, the sun going down behind Salamis and Aegelos, throwing the purple shadow of the mountain ridges over the Athenian plain, the corona of violet light ringing the crests of Parnes, Pentelikon and Hymettus, and the Parthenon floating there like a miracle, resting apparently on the actual light that shot uninterrupted above the shadow that buried the plain.

Some day he would see it. He remembered stories from the
Odyssey
: the wine-dark sea, the rollers coming in over the beaches in the fog, the men rowing the small, narrow ships with beaks on their prows. He looked back at the Parthenon, and in the book it seemed plain and ugly, almost like a bank in Montreal. Why was a building beautiful in Europe when an exact copy of it was ugly here? But in Athens the Parthenon was framed by what lay around it, it was free in the air and sunshine, it was open. That was what the master had told him. Paul frowned, trying to figure out the differences.

The door of the prep room opened and the headmaster stuck his face in. The boys all stopped working to look around. The head smiled and nodded at the prep master and scanned the boys until his eyes fell on Paul. “Come along, Tallard,” he said. “I want to speak to you.”

Paul got up and left his desk, the boys watching curiously, wondering if it meant a caning. Paul tried to remember what he had done lately. The Sergeant-Major had made him a corporal that morning for being late for a line-up, but this was
all he could recollect. He followed the head out into the hall.

“Come along to my study,” the head said.

Paul knew from the tone of his voice that he was not going to be caned. They reached the study and the head opened the door.

“Go in, Tallard,” he said. “I'll be back presently.”

Paul saw a figure sitting in a chair by the head's desk and recognized Captain Yardley. Then the door closed quietly behind him.

“Hullo, there, Paul!”

“Hullo, sir!” Paul grinned with pleasure, showing his buck teeth.

Yardley got up and balanced himself, the old intimate kindness showing in his brown face. His hair was a little whiter now, but he kept it cropped short and his ears stuck out the same as ever. As Paul was trying to get over his surprise at seeing Yardley here, he noticed that the captain was not smiling.

“Is anything wrong, sir?”

Yardley put his hand on Paul's shoulder. “I just came down to have a talk with you, Paul. The train was late. Man–you're growing so I can see it!”

Paul flexed his right arm. “Feel my muscle, sir!”

Yardley felt the biceps, and then the muscles back of the shoulder. “Biceps don't count for anything,” he said, “only for show. Back there in the shoulder, now–when you hit a fella, thet's where it comes from–there and the calves. And what's the idea of calling me ‘sir' all the time? Haven't heard thet word since I left the sea. The Limeys teach you thet?”

Paul grinned and sat on the edge of the headmaster's desk, feeling bold as he did so. “I don't know,” he said. Then, noticing that Yardley's face still showed no smile, his grin faded out.

The captain looked at the floor and traced out the pattern of the rug with the point of his stick. “Paul,” he said, “you and me've got to go into town.”

“What's the matter?”

“I better tell you, Paul. Your father's pretty sick.”

Paul looked away, tight all over, not knowing what to do or say. Because of his embarrassment, tears were in his eyes. Then he felt Yardley's hand on his shoulder and turned back. “Is P'pa dead?”

Yardley shook his head. “He just wants to see you. I spoke to your headmaster about it, and he says the matron upstairs is fixing your things so we can ship right out. We got to change trains, but we can get to town by early morning. Got to sit up a good while in Sainte-Hyacinthe waiting for the train, I guess.” He limped to the door and opened it. “Something new, Paul–you going places on a train at night.”

 

TWENTY-NINE

Athanase breathed, he existed, he lay in the sheets and heard as though from a great distance the mechanism which held the life in him running down. It was morning; the sunlight streamed in the window and sparkled on the snow-covered roof next door. It was afternoon, and the snow was purple with shadows. A shaded lamp showed it was night. But for him no real time had passed because he could not measure it. His mind was like water coloured by changing weather. His ears, like a doctor's instrument detached from his body, heard the rattle of his breathing. Some part of his brain, still living, recorded the fact that the rattle had grown louder. It would
grow steadily, it would become a snore, it would become a thunder filling the house. He was alone with the rattle of his own breaking mechanism announcing his extinction.

“Try to take this, Mr. Tallard. Try to open your mouth.”

Something warm on his lips, a little moisture in his dry mouth, and again exhaustion. A cloth brushed his mouth and chin. He lay as before, motionless.

He felt a hand on his forehead and opened his eyes. Kathleen's face was bent over him, turned slightly away as if to avoid his breath. She did not think he could see her. His jaw struggled to speak against the paralysis. “Paul!” he whispered.

“He's coming!” Kathleen's voice was clear and normal. He could hear it perfectly. “He'll be here by morning. John Yardley is bringing him.”

For many minutes Kathleen knelt by the bed stroking his forehead. Marius was at the foot of the bed, the nurse on a chair on the other side of it.

A faint tremor ran through the thin, motionless body. Something in him seemed trying to speak, a flicker passed over the face as though the mind were indignant because the mechanism would not serve it any more. “It's dark. I've always hated the dark. I'm…” From somewhere out of the past floated a memory. “Except when the candles are bright.”

Kathleen's voice was still and clear. “The light's on, Athanase. It's not dark any more.”

His eyelids closed. Scattered recollections from his boyhood flickered through his mind, faded a second and then grew strong, not much motion or force in them but a smooth, silent process like shifting lights. He saw very clearly the prospect from the old house in Saint-Marc: the flat fields, the river like ink running through the snow-covered plain, then the river miraculously warm in the sun with the cloud-towers above it,
Blanchard walking across a row of brown furrows smoking his pipe. His lips quivered, but Kathleen bending over them detected no clear sound. My father's house…our house…myself! Familiar faces he had almost forgotten swam into the light above the motionless lake of his mind, blurred and disappeared. A virgin's face, a nun's face with a blue snood over black hair. Marie-Adèle! A shiver of panic tried to communicate itself from his mind to his paralysed body. The jaw moved.

Kathleen bent to listen for his whisper. Nearly a minute passed before it came.

“Don't go!”

“I'm here, Athanase. I won't leave you.”

Nearly five minutes passed. The nurse in her chair on the other side of the bed had never taken her eyes from the face on the pillow. She rose with a rustle of starched linen and wiped his forehead gently with a moist cloth. Marius remained at the foot of the bed, gripping the rail with both hands. Kathleen dropped quietly to her knees, her firm arms resting on the edge of the bed.

He whispered again. “Marie! Marie-Adèle!”

Kathleen felt the colour draining out of her cheeks, and turning away she saw Marius' eyes burning into her. A wild look of triumph was on his face. She turned to the bed again and stared into her husband's eyes. They were opened half way, then they opened wide and looked into hers. His hair was as white as the pillow, the flesh on the cheekbones looked grey and worn out, but the lines about the mouth and nose were still dominant and dignified. His eyes still looked at her.