Two Solitudes (37 page)

Father Arnaud's reply was inaudible, but the two men continued talking.

It was quiet in the library. Snow had fallen in the night and now as the sun rose over it the new crystals flashed and glittered. Paul looked out the window and saw figures passing on the sidewalk, women in black Hudson seal coats with their hands in black muffs, men with fur caps and hands in their pockets, the hands occasionally jumping out to rub cold ears. A milk sleigh passed, the horse straining as it pulled up the hill, steam rising from its back and flanks. Three students from the university fraternity house at the upper corner came by with books clamped under their arms, their breath puffing in quick, disappearing clouds of vapour ahead of them. Then the stairs creaked once more and Kathleen entered the room. The skin was red about her eyes, but the rest of her face was white under the blackness of her hair. She came over to the sofa and sat down, putting her arms about Paul, her movements as indolent as ever.

“Poor boy–don't worry, don't fret! It's you and me now. Just the two of us!”

“Is P'pa…” Paul began, and stopped, biting his lip.

“He's asleep, Paul. He'll just slip away from us in his dreams.”

She turned from him with a swift movement and began to cry, silently letting the tears flow down her cheeks.

From the other side of the room Marius spoke in French.
“You'll come with me now, Paul.” He looked sharply at Kathleen. “Yes…once I finish college you and I…”

Kathleen flashed around, her arm about Paul's shoulder. Her eyes seemed on fire. “He's not yours!”

“He's my brother!”

Paul sat wretchedly with his head hanging. Yardley cleared his throat to say something. Then a loud voice broke the tension in the room.

“Stop this, both of you!”

They looked up and saw Father Arnaud standing in the door, his great nose dominant in his heavy face, his hair very white against his dark skin.

“This is no way to go on!” he said. Then he crossed the room and laid his hand quietly on Paul's head. “Don't be afraid, my son. Your father is in God's hands now.” He looked once more at Marius and left the room. Shortly afterwards they heard the outer door open and close. Paul sat frozen while Yardley in the armchair smoked quietly and Kathleen and Marius avoided each other's eyes. Upstairs the noise of Athanase Tallard's driving breath was loud, the house seemed to thunder with it, all that was left of him now for Paul. After another hour, it stopped. Kathleen's low cry was audible through the whole house, and then everything was silent.

 

THIRTY

Paul drew aside the curtains of the bay window in the living room and looked at his mother walking down the street to the shops. She was wearing a black silk dress and a light black coat trimmed with white. Her black hat with its white trimming was almost gay. She walked with a fresh, expectant movement.
Paul let the curtain drop and stepped back into the room. After the bright sunshine in the street, the apartment was very dark. The folding doors at the back of the living room were open. Dimly beyond them he could see the rumpled sheets of his mother's bed. Beyond that was the kitchen.

Paul sat down on the sofa, looking at the opposite wall. There was not much to see on it: just a stretch of wall on either side of the hearth. On one end of the mantel was a small photo graph of his father, taken ten years ago. On the other end was a companion photo of his mother.

Paul and Kathleen had been living in this apartment for two months now, ever since moving out of the large town house Athanase had rented before his death. As he had died bankrupt, the mortgage on the house and land at Saint-Marc had been foreclosed. Nearly all the furniture of the town house had been sold to pay debts. What was left was crowded into these three rented rooms. Kathleen had saved the red mahogany dining-room table and the eight chairs that matched it. She had kept a sofa on which Paul slept at night in the living room, and a double bed so large it almost filled her bedroom. The rooms were so crowded with furniture that even Paul had to squeeze between some of the pieces. One small shelf of books stood in a corner behind the armchair; these books and the chair itself were all that survived from the old library in Saint-Marc. The books were carefully selected. Yardley had picked out those he thought Paul would want to read during the next few years, and some he hoped he would want to keep all his life.

Looking for something to do, Paul took out his old Homeric picture book from the shelf and carried it over to the sofa by the window. As he read the book, he was able for the moment to forget where he was. He wondered what
Achilles' face had really looked like when he had quarrelled with Agamemnon, whether his lip had lifted and he had talked out of the corner of his mouth, or whether his whole face had exploded with frank rage. It had always puzzled Paul why a second-rate man like Agamemnon had been in charge of the heroes anyway, why Homer took him so seriously. He must have had a dry kind of voice, and a smile that showed his teeth instead of his feelings. But apart from him, there seemed a sea-green freshness about all of Homer's people, a beauty you never found any more, the men like athletes in their white tunics and the women tall and queenly with blue-bordered robes trailing the ground. The air they breathed was so pure it sparkled, the days were sunny, and wherever you looked you saw the sea. He stopped at a picture of Troy by night, with Helen on the wall and the two Trojan elders sitting in the shadows out of her view. It must have been wonderful to live in a city like that where you could come up to the wall and see the whole of it at a single glance and know everyone inside it. You could look out over the plain and see the camp-fires of the enemy; but beyond them was the gleam of moonlight on the Aegean, and the danger made the moment even more beautiful than it was anyway.

He laid the book down, suddenly listless. He looked out the window to the houses across the street. It was no fun having nothing to do. There was nothing he could even think of doing.

Paul sometimes thought that being poor would not matter if only his father were alive. Then they would still count for something. Instinctively, he knew that they now counted for nothing, and that if they disappeared tomorrow nobody would care; at least, no one except Yardley and Marius. His mother had been sad when his father died, and sometimes she cried
when she thought about how poor and helpless they were. But much of the time she seemed to Paul simply to be allowing time to pass over her while she did nothing. She seemed almost not to be able to care; and by not caring, she removed herself from him without even knowing it. Some nights while Paul did his homework she sat at the large table playing solitaire, concentrating on the game as though it were a great problem. Sometimes she talked to him, and tried to find games in the newspapers that would amuse them both. Sometimes after Paul was asleep she went out alone. She had made several new friends, but she preferred to go to their homes rather than have them come to her, so Paul seldom saw any of them. They all seemed to like dancing and bridge-playing, and he wondered if she went to dances so soon after his father's death. He did not think she did, but he knew she wanted to go. Lately she had begun to talk about their luck changing. Something would turn up and they would again live in a fine house with plenty of clothes and enough of everything. When Paul got older he would have a motor car of his own and be able to do whatever he pleased. But Paul was old enough already to know that luck had nothing to do with their being alone in three rooms in this side street of Montreal.

It had been a good street once. The grey, stuccoed Victorian houses had dignified lines, but the old families had long ago sold out to rooming-house proprietors. Beautiful old trees still grew out of holes in the concrete near the curbs and shaded the grey façades of the houses. When the light was soft, the street was like an exiled aristocrat trying to cover up his poor clothes and worthlessness with the fine manners he had never been able to forget. But during the day boys ran around on the asphalt and dodged traffic as they played catch, and trucks roared through constantly. At night the street was quiet
enough. But three women, always the same three, wearing black fur-lined overshoes in winter and high heels in summer, patrolled the block regularly from eight to twelve. Occasionally a car with dimmed lights cruised past them and stopped. Then one of the women went over to the curb and talked in low tones to the driver. Sometimes the driver got out and went into a house with her, sometimes she got into his car and drove off, the car roaring fast in second and often grinding its gears loud in the silence as the driver hurried to get out of the neighbourhood. Most of the trade came to the women in cars, but occasionally a transient from the hotels wandered through the street on foot. Last night when Paul had been trying to sleep he had heard one of the women talking to a strange man just outside his window.

Restlessly, Paul replaced the book on its shelf. He decided to go out. It was Saturday, and a boy ought to make a special day out of a Saturday. He left the apartment and went out into the common hall of the house, being careful to snap the door behind him and test it to make sure it was properly locked. Then he felt in his pocket to see if he had his key, and walked out into the street.

He had no place to go, for he knew nobody. No games were provided at the public school he now attended. Five days in the week the boys sat fifty to a room that smelled of disinfectant when they arrived and of massed humanity an hour later. They were taught by a grim-faced spinster long in the tooth who knew that if she relaxed her face an instant the whole class would get out of hand. The school's functions ceased abruptly on Friday afternoon at half-past three. It taught its schedule, and that was all it tried to do or could do.

Walking with his hands in his pockets, Paul went up the slope toward the mountain. In the upper levels of town he felt
some of the grey loneliness fade away from him. Here the streets were quiet as churches and canopied by stately trees: maples, and limes, and elms with fresh leaves, and horse-chestnuts spired with blossoms. Here he could smell the fresh earth of newly-turned flower-beds, look over hedges and see immaculate lawns and gardeners clipping them, the lawn-mowers singing high in the warm air. Some of the boys he had known at Frobisher lived on this street. Not many, for there were few houses on it; the houses were enormous brick-and-stone structures, some shaped like castles with gargoyles at the corners of the roofs, all with huge glass conservatories on their sides. But the boys he knew would not be here this morning. They would be playing cricket on the elm-lined field in front of the school, or breaking bounds by hiking across the river and trying to catch fish in the pool below the abandoned grist-mill near the road. He remembered that a small rod of his was concealed behind a rafter in that grist-mill. He remembered another rod he had forgotten in the scullery in the old house in Saint-Marc.

Loneliness returned to him with a fresh surge. He climbed a long flight of wooden steps that rose up the first ridge of the mountain, he crossed Pine Avenue and went up the winding dirt road toward the summit. Here it was almost like the country, for the city was behind and below him. In Saint-Marc, in the real country, the maples would be at their greenest this weekend and the first shoots would be visible in the ploughed fields. It was almost three years since he had lived in Saint-Marc. At school in the country he had almost forgotten it, but after his father's death the old life had come back to him vividly and he seemed to have left it only yesterday.

Thinking of Saint-Marc, he left the road and plunged into the dry bracken of the hillside until he reached a huge
rock. It was dark grey, the colour of the house he lived in now, and a dust of lichen covered it. He sat behind the rock and picked up a stick he found there. Then, taking out his scout knife, he whittled it.

Marius said that as soon as he finished his law course–if he had enough money to finish it–he was going to sue some people to recover the old property in Saint-Marc, as well as the money his father had lost. Paul knew Marius was only talking to make himself feel important. You fell into debt and you paid your debts and then you were poor, and that was all there was to it. He wished Marius would not come around to the house so often, for whenever he did he quarrelled with his mother. Sometimes Marius would sit for minutes looking at her, his eyes shifting whenever she looked back. Then, for no reason at all, he would begin to quarrel, and Paul himself was generally the cause of it. Marius insisted that Paul ought to go to a French-language school, and this made Kathleen furious.

Lying behind the rock whittling away the stick, Paul felt the sun pour down on him through a gap in the trees. This would be a beautiful day on the river, the clouds white and interlaced with brilliant patches of blue. The last time he had been in Saint-Marc was the day his father was buried. The sky had been grey and cold.

Paul could not get that day out of his mind. The whole parish had attended the funeral, and important-looking men whom Paul had never seen had come from Ottawa and Montreal. But it was the old faces Paul's eyes had caught: Frenette, Polycarpe Drouin, Blanchard, even Ovide Bissonette. Father Beaubien in his robes had stood at the head of the grave and the piled-up earth was like a brown wound against the snow. Then the coffin was lowered into the ground, the priest threw some frozen earth on top of it, and they went away, their
ankles numb with cold and their ears nearly frozen. That evening Yardley drove Paul and Kathleen into Sainte-Justine in his sleigh. They took the train for the city and had not seen Saint-Marc since.

Restless again, Paul moved from behind the rock and continued up the road toward the top of the mountain. Occasion ally horsemen came by, rising and falling on cavalry saddles. Near the top he came on a group of girls who were learning to ride. Their horses were knotted about an instructor who was explaining something to them. Paul drew near to listen to what the man said. Then one of the girls turned her head from the instructor and waved her riding crop.