Two Solitudes (46 page)

“But
you're
not French!” she said. “You haven't the slightest trace of a French accent.”

“I haven't the slightest trace of an English accent when I speak French, either,” he said with irony.

This time Heather's flush was lost in the darkness. Paul went on without bitterness, “My father wanted me to get a scientific education. That's why he sent me to Frobisher. Not that Frobisher was much in science, but he thought I'd have a better chance there.”

“And science didn't take?” Heather never let her own confusions interfere with her intense interest in other people. “What kind of science?”

“Any kind. Sometimes I'm sorry it didn't take. I did my best with it at the university. God knows it's the only thing that counts these days. After all, science is the new theology. I'd still like to be a first-class physicist. Then I could stick to my own job and tell everyone to go to hell. Maybe I could even discover some new process that would send them there. The only place where science isn't God now is in Quebec. We're pretty old-fashioned.” He laughed shortly. “But I was no good in maths. I'm a B.Sc., but it doesn't fool me into thinking I'm a scientist.”

Again he opened the car door and this time he got out. “Thanks, Heather. I'd better not keep you any longer.”

“Grampa said you were leaving Montreal soon. When are you going?”

“I don't know. It depends on whether I get a job. He's written to some people he used to know in a shipping company. I hope I can get aboard a freighter.”

“That's wicked!”

“You don't have to feel uncomfortable about it,” he said quietly.

“But it is wicked. And it's stupid. You–an ordinary seaman!”

“It will be a job. I've had a good many doors closed in my face lately, Heather.”

“Is that what you want? To be a sailor?”

He looked both ways up and down the street. “I certainly want to see the world,” he said when he turned back. “And I suppose that's one way of seeing it.”

A woman passed, walking under an umbrella with her head bent. She almost bumped into him, and he stopped talking until she had merged with the misty darkness again. “Anyway, I've got to get out of here. It's choking me.”

A breath of wind rustled the elm tree overhead, and a small shower of rain came down with a whisper.

“Paul–let's see each other again!” When he hesitated, she went on quickly, “I'm trying to learn how to paint. Will you come down to my studio some day and tell me why I'm no good?”

He laughed suddenly in the darkness. “I don't know much about painting. Where's your studio?”

“It's just a little room on Labelle Street. Here.” She opened her bag and took out a pencil and a card and wrote a number on it. “Not tomorrow. I've got to do something with Mummy. But the next afternoon?”

“I've no job to keep me away, God knows!”

“You'll really come then? About three?”

“All right, Heather. Yes, I'd like to.”

She drove away, leaving him on the sidewalk. He stood watching the tail-light of the car recede down the street, then disappear around the corner. In the distance, far beyond the
immediate darkness that surrounded him, thunder growled again, and another puff of wind sent another shower of rain whispering down from the leaves to the pavement.

 

THIRTY-EIGHT

Paul stood in the window of Heather's studio and looked across the street. The brick walls of the buildings opposite were a dull red. They looked very old and European with their painted doors flush with the pavement. The storm which had lasted for nearly thirty-six hours had cleared the air. Now sunlight sparkled on the roofs, made the leaves bright green and dappled the pavement with mauve shadows.

He turned back into the room to take the cup of tea Heather was offering him. She had a single electric plate in one corner, a small table, a few chairs, a couch covered with gay chintz against one wall, and a work table covered with painting paraphernalia. He liked the smell of oil and turpentine, the look of paint stains on the floor, the composition of the canvases stacked against another wall.

Heather curled up on the couch, her feet tucked against her hips, and Paul sat rather stiffly on one of the chairs. She drew his attention to the canvas resting on an easel. “Now tell me the truth about that one,” she said.

Paul looked at it again, as he had been doing off and on ever since he had arrived. He hardly knew what to say, for he knew nothing about the technique of painting. He did know there was a lack in it. He glanced from the picture to the girl on the sofa. There was no lack in her. He saw the curved outlines of her thighs and the mounds of her breasts rising and falling beneath the plain linen frock. Her small nose gave her
face a frank openness, and the frown she wore at the moment made her seem very young. Perhaps she was too much like Yardley to be an artist? He could imagine Yardley building a ship, but never painting a picture.

He got up and set his tea-cup on the table. “I'm not very good at this sort of thing,” he said. “I know why I like it better than why I don't.”

It was a pleasant scene, an oil landscape of a Laurentian road, and it was well drawn. It showed a sweep of country beyond Piedmont, and it indicated that she had enjoyed being there. But she had missed the vastness of such a scene, the sense of the cold wind stretching so many hundreds of miles to the north of it, through ice and tundra and desolation.

“Maybe it would have been better if I'd finished it with a rougher surface,” she said, still frowning. “I used composition board on purpose. I was afraid it would look like an imitation of A.Y. Jackson if I made it too rugged. That's the whole trouble. The Laurentians have been painted too much and too well already. It would take a really great person to say anything new about them, don't you think?”

“I wouldn't know,” he said. “I've not seen many Canadian paintings. Or any other kind, for that matter.”

“But Paul, you ought to! There's some really wonderful Canadian painting. It's the best expression in the arts that we have.”

“I'm full of gaps,” he said.

She uncurled herself from the couch and removed the canvas, replacing it with another. In this one, figures climbed the flight of wooden steps that led up to Pine Avenue from the head of Drummond Street on the face of the mountain. It also had a mat surface, and the design showed a smooth rhythm of hips and shoulders as the figures mounted the steps. Paul stood
away from it, trying to estimate how much originality it contained, but he lacked the frame of reference to judge properly. Because it responded to an idea of his own, he liked the picture, and still he felt there was something wrong with it. It was intended to be grim. The women were poorly dressed, almost in uniform like convicts, and their individual features were removed.

He swung around and looked at her. “Did you believe it, when you did it?” he said.

She waited a moment before she answered, then she said, “I think so. It's meant to be stylized. I wanted it to be a particular study.” She indicated certain parts of the composition. “I wanted those lines to compensate for these…. It was the uniformity of their movement I was after.”

“You certainly got that.”

She was disappointed. “But I've missed something else?”

He pointed to a splash of colour in one corner. “That's the only part of yourself I see in it. That's joyful. It's good.”

She removed the canvas and went back to the couch. Suddenly her laughter bubbled. “Huntly McQueen said something to me the other night that sounded just the same. He said I thought it was my duty to be miserable on account of the unemployed.”

Paul sat down on the chair again and looked at her intently. “From what I've heard of McQueen, I'd hate to agree with him, but he's got something all the same. You haven't lived a rotten life. People haven't been rotten to you. Why feel guilty about it?”

“I don't. You don't understand at all. People have been altogether too nice to me.”

He laughed shortly and she tossed her head. “Don't despise me, Paul. It's not my fault if I've never had to worry where my next meal was coming from.”

He picked up the two tea-cups and refilled them, handed her one and sat down again. “You know as well as I do there's no meaning in that kind of niceness,” she went on. “It doesn't cost anything.”

Paul gave his attention to the tea in his cup, though he didn't drink it, and Heather pushed the hair back from her temples. Silence grew between them and a sense of disappointment weighed on her. After a while she said, “Do you suppose anything ever comes off the way you really want it?”

“I'm stubborn. I think sometimes it can.”

“If you really believe that, it's wonderful.”

He felt the tension rising inside. “But it takes time. That's the trouble. God, it takes time!” He was sitting quite still, and his stillness was giving more force to his words than he realized. “An artist's brain is like a distillery. A distillery takes years to produce anything but hooch.”

“And I don't take the time?”

“Nobody does any more.”

Her eyes twinkled at his seriousness. “In other words, I should go through hell and suffer first, and then try to paint?”

Paul paid no attention to her amusement. “Forget the suffering,” he said. “There's nothing romantic about it.” He leaned forward. “You're a happy person. You've got joy inside you. For God's sake don't be ashamed of it. The world is dying for the lack of it.”

Heather was surprised by the turn of his mind. All the students she had liked in college had been socialists, and she had accepted their point of view easily. She had never known anyone who was poor or worked with his hands, but she had taken it for granted that Paul would be bitter and even resent her because she had money. She wondered if he had never read Marx because he had been brought up a Catholic. She
watched him as he pulled more of her pictures from the stack against the wall and studied them one by one. Some he dismissed with a glance, others he set on the easel and looked at from a distance. When he had gone through the lot he put them back and began to talk again. Heather listened quietly without interrupting him. If she wanted to paint, he said, she must look inside herself. If the mess of the world had crawled inside, paint it, because then it was hers. But never pretend it was there when she knew damn well it wasn't. Did Mozart look out his window at the slums of Vienna when he wrote the E-Flat Symphony? She had one source to draw from, herself. An artist had nothing worth offering the world, absolutely nothing, except distilled parts of himself. If what she had was joyful, offer it, and to hell with the class struggle. No politician could be moved by art; all they were interested in was power.

He looked down at her. “But it takes time,” he added. “It's got to grow inside first.”

Heather felt abashed. She also felt somewhat annoyed because he dismissed so easily the ideas she had worked hard to acquire. But her annoyance disappeared in the face of her natural good humour, and she turned her thoughts to the personal problems he represented, problems she had never considered before. “Thank you, Paul,” she said, and her face broke into a smile again. “I could believe you've thought that out long before this afternoon. What have you tried to do–and found it took time?”

This was touching his privacy. Instead of answering he looked at her curled up on the sofa and he thought how much he'd like to stop talking and sit beside her and relax. He looked at his shoes instead. “I want to write,” he said. “I hate admitting it. Everyone wants to get into print these days.”

Heather knew he had exposed his vulnerability, and suddenly she knew how he felt about many things. The simple statement had removed a subtle barrier between them. He no longer baffled her and she no longer felt that he was making her an outsider. A wave of gratitude warmed her. When she spoke again her voice had an intimate naturalness like the child he remembered in Saint-Marc. “How long do you think it will take you, Paul?”

“They don't let a surgeon loose on the public until he's been trained seven years and certified. A writer's job is just as difficult, technically.”

He felt he could sit still no longer, but he forced himself to do so. He knew hardly anyone with whom he could discuss written books, much less writing. Sometimes it seemed just as well. There was so much self-flattery in the idea of writing books; it made him superstitiously afraid of telling anyone that this was what he wanted to do. His own voice had surprised him as he made the admission to a girl who was almost a stranger.

“It's not just that I want to be a writer,” he said. “I told you the other night I wanted to be a physicist. I'd like to be an architect, too. Every time I really look at a building in Montreal it makes me cringe. The only buildings in this whole country that suit it are the barns. On the whole, I'd rather be an architect than anything else.”

“Why don't you, then?”

“I told you–I'm no good in maths. My mind doesn't work that way.”

The tension rose to his throat and he got up and began pacing the room. It was impossible to sit still any longer and watch her. She made him want to talk about himself, for a few minutes to break the solitude. To change the subject, he told
her that he'd been given a berth on a ship that was sailing in a week from Halifax. He stood looking down at her, and then it overwhelmed him like a bursting wave, the quality he had always found in Yardley, the quality that had permitted his nature to unfold without being struck back, without spilling. She met his glance and held it, and after an appreciable moment she said, “It seems such a waste. With your degree you could teach.”

He shook his head. “I've got to get out of here. I've got to see something else. Besides, there aren't even teaching jobs now.”