Two Solitudes (49 page)

The old town looked rich with a picturesque and individual shabbiness as they passed down the harbour. Each of the docks had its own smell; fishmeal from one, the dusty smell of feed from another, the stink of dried cod from a third, the mixed smell of brine and bilges and seaweed from all of them. The strong, raw odours were all new to him, different from any smells on inland water. As he looked up at the Citadel above the town he saw the Jack flutter on the signal mast and come slowly down on its halyard, waving gently in the evening breeze. He could hear the faint and random blasts of motor horns in the lower streets; Halifax going on with its routine independent of the coming and going of ships.

They passed between the terminal docks and the quiet bowl of George's Island, and then the outer harbour came into view, the plane of water spreading far away to the point where the sea and sky met in a soft shade of mauve, mysterious, cool, infinite. Behind the town the sun had set in flames half an hour ago, and now the sky was yellow as a daffodil and shining. A single shredded cloud ribbed with crimson sailed aloofly out of its yellow pool toward the sea.

A strange feeling of mingled excitement and resignation filled Paul as he watched the sunset, the sky, the harbour and the town. He let the sensations fall into his mind like rain.
How long would it be? How many ships would he travel on before he came back again? The strangeness of everything made him feel numb.

A group of deckhands was standing forward in the waist of the ship. They all had the unconscious, reaction-soaked appearance of men who knew the rules so well they never thought about them. He knew they were sizing him up.

Tomorrow it would be all right, he would have no trouble with them, for he knew what they were like. He understood how to get along with men like that, to kill the difference between himself and them. He had been doing it all his life, and it was not so hard as it seemed.

The ship passed the breakwater, then slid past the park on the toe of the town, past the lighthouse on Meagher's Beach where the beam was already circling. The bluff of York Redoubt, shaggy with trees, loomed on the starboard beam, and then the shoreline dropped lower toward tawny rocks where groundswells broke perpetually with hoarse, intermittent surges. This was Yardley's home, Paul thought, Nova Scotia–where one-quarter of Heather had originated. It was as old as Quebec, but it seemed infinitely younger, without the Quebec sadness and the solemnity of the Catholic parishes. Nova Scotia was sea-washed and rain-washed, cooled by fog, thrust so far away from the continent into the ocean that it seemed a separate country.

Well, that was one way of looking at it. Glancing at the crewmen in the waist, Paul knew he could get another line from them. A hell of a place, they'd call it, cold enough to freeze your ass in winter and in summer nothing but rain and fog; no lights, no bars, the whores no good, and no place to take a girl you did pick up but the bushes in the park. And just when you were all set, the rain generally came.

He wanted to go astern and lean over the taffrail, but he wasn't sure if it was permitted while the ship was at sea. The cook passed him on the way to the galley and Paul remembered what Yardley had said about finding a Nova Scotian on board. He'd been right; the cook was from Country Harbour in Guysborough County, a square man with hairy arms like tree branches and a straight, silent mouth; the only Nova Scotian aboard.

Darkness fell as they cleared the harbour, and at the land's edge the sea doubled all the light that lingered in the sky, to hoard it along the surface long after the sun had passed into the interior of the land. Paul breathed deeply. For this one moment he could be himself, the man Heather had found and seen, for there was no one to watch his face and note the difference to use against him later.

He watched Thrum Cap slip by on the port side, a soundless fringe of foam white against its brown base. Some of the following gulls swooped away from the ship and went in to the shore in long glides. The ship lifted hard to the first groundswell, bit the sea, and with a rush of water under the bows gave a faint groan, and then a humming wind started in the shrouds. They passed beyond the farthest tip of McNab's Island, the air got suddenly colder, and looking up the coast of Nova Scotia, Paul saw a crescent of lights flaring out of continental darkness into the sea, steady beacons on every promontory. He leaned over the rail and felt the beat of the propellers under his feet, leaned far over and saw the wake boiling away from the stern, and then he stood upright again to watch the lights recede slowly over the horizon.

 

PART FOUR

1939

 

FORTY

A
thens was calm in the morning sun, the cone of Lykabettus just visible over the low roofs of the Place de la Constitution, the marble-topped tables at the sidewalk cafés mostly empty, some men in dark suits buying newspapers from the corner kiosk, soft-eyed Greek women passing, moving with liquid ease in the warm morning, Levantine eyes calm with instinctive knowledge, like wells receiving light and retaining it.

Paul left the American Express office with two letters in his pocket, one from Kathleen, the other from Heather. He walked around the corner into the square, sat at a table and ordered coffee. While he waited he brushed someone else's crumbs from the table top and then sat still. He was so accustomed to being alone in crowded places that anonymous people passing were a part of his mind, almost a frame in which he himself became visible. In the five years since leaving Canada he had changed considerably. His black hair, once low on his temples, had receded, making his forehead seem broader. Although he was still a year under thirty, his hair was foxed with grey barely visible against its blackness. He seemed
more solid through the chest and shoulders, less quick in his movements. His hands on the table were as strong as those of a labourer, but their skin was cared for. He was wearing a Harris tweed jacket with a white handkerchief in the breast pocket, grey flannel trousers and brown brogue shoes. To a European he looked English, but an Englishman would probably put him down as an American.

He slit the envelope from Pittsburgh and pulled out his mother's letter. Kathleen was keeping well. A smile touched his mouth as he read her opening words; all her letters began with the same statement. She went on to say that Henry had bought a new car with a good radio because last fall at the time of the Munich crisis they had been driving down to St. Louis in the old car and for several days they had missed hearing Kaltenborn so it was just about as easy to buy a new car with a radio as to buy a radio and have it installed in the old one. Next year Henry expected to make at least eight thousand dollars and then they were going to move again, to a better house. She wished Paul would be sensible and come home. There was no need for him to live in Europe and meet peculiar people. She was worried about him whenever she wondered where he was. She sent him all her love.

Paul raised his eyes and looked over the roofs to the cone of Lykabettus. It glowed in the sun against a deep azure sky. It was early May here in Athens but it was like June in Canada. Homesickness stirred in him like sexual desire, followed by a quick lift of excitement. After nearly five years, he was going home. Within a month or six weeks he'd be there. If he could work his way back he would; if not, there was enough money left to pay his passage on a slow boat.

The waiter came with the coffee and a glass of water. Paul put Kathleen's letter in one pocket as he reached in
another for a few drachmas to pay the man. The waiter slipped away and he was alone again. A woman passed slowly: black hair and white skin, a soft body indolently alive at the hips. Two boys followed her, arguing vehemently.

Paul drank his coffee in three gulps. It was Turkish, brewed thick and syrupy, with heavy sediment in the bottom of the cup. He washed it down with the water that tasted flat with chlorine. Then he picked up Heather's letter and looked at it. There was an American stamp in the corner, a New York postmark, and the address was written in the tidy, imaginative handwriting he would know anywhere as Heather's. He broke it open and held the folded pages in his hand. For nearly five years he had been receiving her letters in strange cities and towns she had never seen, and because she was not afraid to talk to him on paper, he felt he knew her far better now than when he had left Canada. He could still desire her, but how much of the desire was the idea and how much memory he could seldom be sure, for the idea had been created by himself and it was pregnant with the same kind of life and reality he had put into the novel he had been writing for the past year.

The white sheets were unfolded in his hands and he began to read, but after seeing the words
Very dear Paul
he found himself looking over the roofs to Lykabettus again. How much had she changed in five years? It was a very long time at their age. They had both run away from Montreal for their own reasons, but in the simplest of terms it was to escape the strait-jacket of their backgrounds. Had she succeeded? Or did she feel as rootless in New York as he felt in Greece? Had she ever been as homesick as he was now? In spite of all the things he had done and the places he had seen, he was essentially unchanged: a Canadian, half French and half English,
still trying to be himself and stand on his own feet. Through five years, that was what he had always been.

 

Between the summer of 1934 and the summer of 1937 Paul had been at sea almost continuously. For a year the
Liverpool Battalion
plied regularly along the American coastal route between Newfoundland and Trinidad. She carried salt cod, hardware, flour, salted beef and pork, along with various detailed supplies and consignments, from St. John's and Halifax down to the West Indies. She returned with sugar, molasses, rum for the government liquor stores, bananas, limes, lemons and pineapples. For a while Paul worked as an ordinary seaman. He swabbed, chipped, painted, mended gear and occasionally worked with gangs under the bosun or the second mate making minor shifts in the stowing of cargoes in the hold. He passed through his first Bermuda hurricane just before Christmas in 1934. In February of the next year they ran into a gale in below-zero weather that followed all the way from Cape Race to Cape Sambro, and when they finally came into Halifax the
Liverpool Battalion
looked like a floating blanc-mange.

Toward the end of 1935 the ship was recalled to England. Paul went with her, and so missed Yardley when the old man returned to Halifax to live, in mid-autumn of that year.

In Liverpool the ship was laid up for nearly two months for a refit, and Paul rented a room in a cheap hotel and spent the time writing short stories. By the time the ship was ready to sail again he had half a dozen finished. They were all based on sea-life with accurate detail and great care in the descriptions, but the plots were largely formula. The day before they sailed he sent them off to an agent he had heard about in New York and several months later when they called at Liverpool
again he discovered that four of them had been sold to American magazines.

Paul was a quartermaster now, and the holds of the
Liverpool Battalion
were always full. From the movements of the ship and the cargoes she carried it was not difficult to see that the postwar slump had developed into a prewar boom. From Stockholm she carried Bofors guns to Luebeck. From Bremen she took small arms to Spain. Once in Liverpool Paul saw a deckhand spit over the side when drums of high-octane gasoline were hoisted aboard on a consignment to Genoa. Later in Barcelona they were held up a week; the Spanish civil war had just broken out and there were no stevedores immediately available to discharge the cargo.

Paul remained with the ship into 1937, writing whenever he found time and saving his money. At first his work had seemed just a job and a job was something he had to have. Then he realized that he had attained a certain kind of freedom. And with the freedom he had found a way to understand the wounding soreness that his earlier life had left with him. As the artificial pulling of the two races within him ceased, the sediment settled in his mind.

By the summer of 1937 he had saved two thousand dollars, and then he left the ship for good. During the previous winter he had applied for a teaching job in a school in Canada, but he was informed that he must have a more advanced degree to qualify with the other available teachers on the market. It was then that he remembered his father's intention to send him one day to the Sorbonne, or even to Oxford or Cambridge.

Recalling the old house in Saint-Marc and his father's library, in a life separated from the present by what seemed a desert of years, Paul suddenly revolted against the sweaty kind of ugliness that had surrounded him for so long. He wanted
to relax, he longed to live again in decent surroundings. He told himself that he had a right to go to the Sorbonne or Oxford if he wished, and then he realized that he had enough money of his own for a year's fees if he wanted to use it that way. His degree from the University of Montreal would admit him to either university. After careful consideration he decided on Oxford because he felt that some formal study in English literature would help his writing. So in October, 1937, he was admitted to the university.

After sixteen years of being homeless, of working with harvest stiffs, hockey players and sailors, being in Oxford was like opening a door and finding himself in a room containing all the things he had tried to create out of his imagination from books. It was the first leisure he had known since his childhood; leisure to study and think without having to earn a living at the same time. Once a week he went to a tutor in Oriel, and because this was the only college in which he had any work, he came to think of it as his own.

He liked to look out his tutor's window across the front quad of Oriel to the tower of Merton which showed above the long dark roof. All through that winter he found himself waiting for the moment when the lights went on in the college hall and the coats-of-arms in the stained-glass windows began to glow like jewels in the dusk. On foggy nights he liked to stand by the porter's lodge to watch dons and undergraduates drift in their gowns across the quad and up the steps under the portico into the hall. And always he listened for the cadence of St. Mary's chime which preceded every hour with a full garland of sound. Nowhere else had he ever heard a bell note so pure, not even in Italy; it sang in over the tiles and chimney pots and through the windows, and the moment it ceased all the bells in Oxford began striking the hour in different keys.