Two Solitudes (45 page)

Heather said, “Some time I'm going to do a cartoon of Huntly McQueen sitting on top of a boiling kettle on the summit of Mount Royal telling the water it hasn't been boiling long enough to be sure the heat's going to last. It's too bad there aren't any really good cartoonists of human nature in Canada.”

Paul thought: is that knowledge of hers real? Does she know it comes down to people every time? Does she realize that the whole trouble now is that everyone is trying to make the facts fit their feelings instead of making their knowledge fit the facts? The sheep call themselves idealists, and the wolves call themselves realists. Does she know anyone like Marius? Would she understand that Marius finished himself the moment he began blaming everyone else for what he lacked himself? In Marius' mind, those who don't agree with him are traitors. What his theories add up to is as crude as voodoo. But if they shut you out everywhere, what do they expect to get but voodoo? For four years the depression has been screaming at people to surrender and go into the woods together and beat the tom-tom. What has happened in Germany is only what happens to any single man when he lets what matters spill out. So now there's a gigantic involuntary conspiracy to make everyone surrender in the name of everyone else, in the name of some abstract idea. You're young and they tell you it's dangerous to be in a hurry to live. You work for an education and they tell you it's superfluous. Gradually you begin to think of the whole world as “they,” and then you feel madness rise, and you want to say to hell with them, and let what matters spill out, and go into the woods and beat the tom-tom with the rest.

He watched Heather from under his long, dark lashes. He was as suspicious of words as Marius was suspicious of people. She was too natural and easy in her nature to know in her bones what her words really meant. Besides, she was a rich girl with background. How could she know?

Yardley concealed a yawn with the back of his hand and Heather got to her feet once more. “I've stayed too long, Grampa. Forgive me.”

Yardley shook his head, his eyes twinkled for a moment, and then became serious as he studied her. “Come a little oftener, Heather. And a little sooner. I've got so used to getting up at dawn thet ten o'clock to me is like past midnight to you.”

“I've wanted to come oftener, Grampa. Honestly I have. Daffy and I tried twice last week, but you weren't in either time. And since you insist on not having a telephone…”

Both Yardley and Paul stood watching her, then Paul went into the bedroom and returned with his coat and necktie. “Funny thing,” Yardley was saying, “up in Cape Breton I once talked over what must have been the first telephone there ever was. Up in Bell's place there. Thet was years ago. We used to sit on the wharf and talk about all sorts of things. He was a wonderful man. But I got a prejudice against telephones all the same. Maybe my ears are too big for them. Besides, look what they do to a business man in an office. Specially if he's got a lot of them.”

Paul adjusted his tie and waited for Heather to make the first move to the door.

“Why don't you ever come to see us?” she said to her grandfather. “I'll call for you with the car, any day you say.”

“Well, I've been thinking thet maybe after this year I'll ship out of here for good and go back home.”

Paul moved to the door and paused with his hand on the knob.

“But I thought you'd sold the farm,” Heather said.

“I mean Nova Scotia,” Yardley said. “I bet you've forgotten thet's where a good quarter of you comes from. When a man's been born down there it stays his home no matter where he goes to live afterwards.”

“But I thought you didn't know anyone down there any more?”

Yardley smiled reflectively. “Nobody knows me anywhere now, I guess. Not even in Saint-Marc. It's been changing out there ever since your mother's friend McQueen put thet factory into it. It's pretty near a good-sized town now, all filled up with unemployed and every other damn thing a town needs to feel itself important. I was telling Paul just before you came in that Polycarpe Drouin died last week. Remember him–the man thet kept the store?”

Heather shook her head.

“So you see, it don't matter where I live now and I guess I might as well go home. Paul's shipping out of here too.” Seeing her troubled expression, he added, “Don't get the notion I got anything to complain of. Man, if anyone's had a life like mine and don't know he's lucky, he's one of God's fools.”

Remembering how her grandfather always felt uncomfortable in the Methuen house and how seldom she had come to see him when there had been time, Heather felt a blur of tears in her eyes. “Are you going soon?” she said.

“Not right off. But I guess pretty soon.”

“Where will you live? In Halifax?” She had a moment's poignant sensation that she was no longer necessary to him, and that it was her own fault. And yet, of all people in the world, he understood her best.

“I haven't decided yet,” he said. “There's five thousand miles of coastline around thet province, taking in all the bays and inlets. There's plenty to choose from.”

“You've never really liked living here, have you, Grampa?”

“Well, it's nothing for you to worry about if I didn't. Trouble with me is I never could take fellas like McQueen seriously, and if you want to get along in this town you've got to take everything seriously.” He grinned at her. “I never even tried.”

Heather reached up and kissed his cheek. “I'll see you soon,” she said. Paul held the door open and when she had gone out he made an appointment for the broken Greek lesson on the next night, and followed her.

 

Yardley stood still in the middle of the room, listening to the doors close behind them. After a time he went to the shelf and picked out a book, adjusted his glasses and moved the light over the shoulder of the chair where Heather had been sitting. It was the Loeb translation of Xenophon's
Anabasis
which Paul had brought from the college library. For nearly half an hour he tried to puzzle out the Greek with the help of the English on the right-hand page, then put the book away. He decided he was too old to learn another language, and that perhaps after all there was something ostentatious in a man like himself studying Greek if he could not learn it properly. It was partly a sense of humour that had made him start it anyway.

He turned off the light and went into the bedroom and got undressed. Thinking of Heather and Paul, he reflected with wonder and some indignation that each was the victim of the two racial legends within the country. It was as though the two sides of organized society had ganged up on them both to prevent them from becoming themselves. Neither had much respect for their elders, but they were quiet about it. Shrewd, in a way. He wondered what Heather would have been like if she had been born without money. Or if her mother had let her alone? On both sides, French and English, the older generation was trying to freeze the country and make it static. He supposed all older generations tried to do that, but it seemed worse here than any place else. Yet the country was changing. In spite of them all it was drawing together; but in a personal, individual way, and slowly, French and English getting to
know each other as individuals in spite of the rival legends. And these young people no longer seemed naive; older than he was himself, Yardley thought sometimes. Paul would never be as simple as his father had been. He would see to it that his battle to become himself remained a private one. And Paul was the new Canada. All he needed was a job to prove it.

As he got into bed, Yardley wondered if he would live long enough to see the country merged into a whole. He smiled ruefully. Paul might, but not he. Yet, there were so many things he still wanted to see and do, there was so much left to be learned. He might have three years more, perhaps five or six. His health was still astonishing, and no matter how much he tried to tell himself that he would be eighty in four years, it didn't make sense. He didn't feel much different from the way he had at sixty. After all, his own father had lived to be ninety-two. With the same expectancy, that would give him sixteen years more, and a man could do quite a bit in that amount of time.

 

THIRTY-SEVEN

When Paul and Heather reached the street they found that the rain had stopped, but the atmosphere was as dense with mist as though a cloud had moved into the town. Miles away thunder growled like a distant bombardment. On University Street the nearest arc-lamp cut a long cone of blue light on the pavement.

“Could I drive you anywhere?” Heather said.

“No thanks. I only live on Durocher.”

“But you haven't a raincoat.”

He looked down at her with the darkness between them. “All right, Heather.” It felt strange to be using her name. “Maybe I'd better go with you.”

He opened the car door, she got in and slid under the wheel, and he followed. When she turned over the motor it failed to spark. She pulled the choke all the way out and ground the starter for nearly half a minute and the result was the same. Then she snapped off the ignition lock. “Now I've flooded it,” she said.

They sat for a time in silence and she tried again. The motor still did not spark.

“I'll take a look at it,” he said. He got out and lifted the hood, struck a match and looked inside, then put both hands in, touching something and said, “Now try it.”

She pressed the starter and the motor roared alive. She caught and held it while he lowered the hood, then quieted it down. He got inside and closed the door.

“So you know all about cars, too,” she said.

“It wasn't flooded. Your choke wire was disconnected. That was all.”

“I wouldn't know a choke-wire from–from a magneto.”

“Why should you? You'd only put garage hands out of work if you did.”

She sat for a moment in the dark, touching the accelerator rhythmically with her toe. Then she turned to look at him. “There's something the matter with that remark, Paul.”

He made no reply as he wiped his hands on his handkerchief. Unreasonably, she had touched off the anger inside him. Unemployment could be nothing but an academic problem to her, if she ever thought about it at all.

“It shouldn't be economically necessary for people to be helpless,” she said. “I'm ashamed not to know anything about the car I drive.”

His flash of anger died out; it made no sense. When he spoke again his voice was quiet. “I don't know much about
engines myself but rule of thumb. I worked in a garage for two summers.”

She set the car in motion and drove up the hill, turned off into Prince Arthur and along to Durocher. They reached the house where he indicated he lived within a few minutes. She kept the motor running, but he made no move to get out of the car. Neither of them spoke. They merely sat in the dark car and stared through the rain-splashed windshield.

Then she broke the silence. “You know Greek, and you understand cars, and you're a hockey player. It's a fascinating combination. What else have you been doing since we all went fishing together in Saint-Marc?”

“Trying to get along, mainly. Why not tell me what you've been doing yourself?”

She tested the play in the wheel. “What people like me always do, I suppose. Nothing of any importance whatever.”

He opened the door of the car and she checked him with another question. “Paul–am I very different from what I used to be?”

He closed the door, fished in his pocket for a package of cigarettes, and found them. “I don't know, Heather.” He offered her one, from habit calculating how many he had left. “It's a long time since we used to be.”

“You see Grampa often, don't you?”

“Since he's been in Montreal. Once or twice I went out to Saint-Marc to see him, but I didn't manage it very often.” He added that Yardley had written to him regularly once a month for years. He still had two shoe-boxes full of his letters.

“Do you think he's as wonderful as I do?” Heather said.

“I don't even know if he's wonderful at all. He's just a natural man, so far as I can tell.” He added, as if to himself, “Men like him aren't being made any more. I wish I knew why.”

She tried to see his profile, but could discern nothing more than a blur of dark hair and eyes. “After you left Saint-Marc, you went to Frobisher, didn't you?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I seem to remember someone telling me.”

“Frobisher, and a few other kinds of education, made a pretty good job of bastardizing me.” When she made no reply he added, “At least, according to my brother.”

Swimming vaguely out of her memory, a lean, haunted-looking man came back to Heather. He was in a maple grove, slinking away from Daphne, Paul and herself. Then Daphne mentioning him to her mother, telling her mother what he had said to Paul. And after that she somehow knew that the man had been arrested because of something her mother had told someone, and they had left Saint-Marc with her grandfather looking sad, and never returned. It still made her uncomfortable and rather ashamed to remember.

Paul gave a sudden, short laugh. “No wonder you don't know what I'm talking about. After all, you're English. It's a tribal custom in Canada to be either English or French. But I'm neither one nor the other.”

“I can't see what difference it makes.”

It was his turn to hunt for her face in the dark.

“Why did you learn Greek, Paul? Nobody I know takes it any more.”

He opened the door to throw out the stub of his cigarette, took hers when she handed it to him and threw it out too, then shut the door and turned back to look at her. He took his time to answer, and then he said without emotion, “I thought for a while I was going to study for the Church. Marius tried to make me believe I had a vocation. If you're
French and reasonably good in your school work, there's nearly always someone who thinks you ought to be a priest.”