I was told that there were ten thousand of them in the herd, and that, like me, they were using the ice as a shortcut to get where they were going. I stayed put that day, doing nothing but watch them trot by in their mass migration. The smell of them was
overpowering, a musky acrid smell. They trod their droppings underfoot, churned it with the snow, so for days afterwards their road-like trail stretched out of sight in both directions.
I was not used to sleeping so close to the sea. I preferred nights when, because of a storm, the sounds of the ice were as various and deafening as thunder. Better I be kept fully awake than mesmerized into a dwall by the haunting drone of sea sounds. I thought, not of uncomplaining Clara grown accustomed to my absence or my children by whose progress through infancy I would not allow myself to be diverted more than momentarily, but of Fielding.
I could only imagine for us a union so devoid of context that it was almost featureless. To invest it with detail, to try to imagine where and how we might be together and what it would be like only made me realize how foolish of me it was to brood on something that would not only never happen but that I didn’t really want.
What a nuisance her existence was to me. I was certain that if I could somehow purge her from my mind, I would be much the better for it. How much easier might it be then to cleave to Clara, to not begrudge her that modest allotment of devotion that a proper sort of wife deserved. I was obscure and destitute, but soon not to be, I hoped. Married to Fielding, I was certain, I would have stayed obscure and destitute forever.
And yet it seemed the woman had fated me to a life of furtively and shamefully attending to myself like a schoolboy in the dark. I wondered if enlisting in some rigorously prescriptive religion might constrain me from this habit, which I sometimes slipped out of bed to indulge in even with Clara sleeping there beside me. For days afterwards, I would feel guilt-ridden and depressed.
Sometimes, to keep the length of the interval between our couplings from becoming a source of embarrassment between us, I gave in to her suggestion that we have what she playfully referred to as a “bout,” but I would find myself losing interest midway and,
determined to see the act through to its conclusion, inspired myself by picturing Fielding reclining on the moss in the Spruces. Poor Clara, at such times, thinking something she had done had caught my fancy, would so fervently respond she would have to turn her face in to the pillow to keep from crying out.
Lying in these houses on the southwest and west coasts, I would hear someone in the next room toss and turn on their mattress and it would remind me of my mother the night I stood outside her room. The sound of her breath indrawn through clenched teeth as if my father were sticking her with pins. Could she have been doing it to muffle moans of pleasure? I wondered. It seemed inconceivable to me. “Smallwood, get off me,” she had said dismissively when the squeaking of the bedsprings stopped.
I visited almost every settlement on the south and southwest coasts, no matter how small. Most of the people there had never heard of unions, had not the faintest idea what a union was or what difference it would make to their lives if they belonged to one. Only in Corner Brook and a few other larger towns was I able to find anyone who would listen to me. By this time it was early spring and in some places, where there was not much sealing done, the fishery had started. In the Bay of Islands, my old stomping grounds from the days when I campaigned for Sir Richard, I signed up hundreds of fishermen to my co-operative union.
Unfortunately, and unknown to me until too late, most of them, after six months, had not paid one cent of dues and my co-op had collected less than 6 per cent of the Bay of Islands catch. I had thought we were getting somewhere with the 6 per cent and had been as surprised as the fishermen to find out that all the earnings from it had been eaten up by overhead and we were bankrupt. Explaining to fishermen that they would have been no poorer if they had given their fish away or never caught it in the first place had been difficult, though not so difficult as getting out of the Bay of Islands unharmed after doing so.
I made it unscathed to the mill town of Corner Brook, found a bed in a boarding-house and slept for thirty-six hours, not in a dwall but deeply, obliteratingly. When I awoke, I went without breakfast to the train station.
Feeling humiliated by my failure, my ineptitude, I hardly glanced out the window as the train began its eastward run across the island. Just before nightfall we came to an unscheduled stop in the Topsails, where the snow on either side of the tracks was piled so high it was dark inside the train. We started, stopped, started, stopped, stalled in that eerie tunnel of snow for hours at a time, barely inching forward when we moved, the cowcatcher groaning against the snow that blocked the tracks. I had no food, having spent all the money I had left on my train fare home. What should have been a twenty-four-hour trip took nearly three times that.
We arrived in St. John’s on a Friday afternoon. I walked home to Gower Street, up the hill from the train station with my suitcase only to find there was no one in the house. I guessed that Clara and the children, whom I hadn’t told that I was coming home, had gone to spend the weekend in Harbour Grace with Clara’s parents. Clara had left the door unlocked, as she always did when she went out while I was away.
There was mail for me on the kitchen table, among it an invitation to a press reception at Government House. I threw it aside, sat there as the house grew dark. I was a would-be politician in a country in which politics was obsolete. A would-be unionist in a country where even the minority that understood what a union was were too poor to pay their dues. A reporter in a country in which reporters were told by a commission from abroad what they could and could not write. And if all this would ever end nobody knew.
I picked up the invitation from the floor. It had always been the case that you were no one in St. John’s society if your name did not appear on the Government House invitation list, but this was especially so under the Commission of Government, when Government House was viewed as some far-flung wing of Whitehall.
The commissioners wished to meet the press. There was a dinner party to which the publishers and editors of the long-established papers were invited, after which there was a reception for the rest of us.
With my engraved invitation was included a reminder, bearing the commission’s letterhead, of what constituted “proper attire.”
“While we realize,” it read, “that it would be unrealistic of us to expect some of those to whom invitations have been sent to attend dressed in the manner normally required at such functions, we do ask that you do everything within your means to make yourself presentable.” It read almost as though they wanted me to have the good grace to decline and settle for the honour of merely having been sent the invitation. I considered declining, telling myself that to attend such a lavish event would be hypocritical even for the somewhat compromised socialist-at-heart-if-not-in-practice I had become. On the other hand, I would, by staying away, be doing only what they wanted. I would go, I decided, dressed just as I was. How else
could
I go, having no better clothes than my Harris tweed slacks and Norfolk jacket anyway?
By the time I set out for Government House, there was a northeast wind blowing in from the ice that for weeks had jammed the entrance to the Narrows. A freezing rain that I was certain would soon change to snow was falling, but as I had no money for a cab, I had no choice but to walk to Military Road from my house.
When I knocked on it, the door of Government House no sooner opened than it began to close, and all that saved me from having to march straight back home was my sodden invitation, which I fished from my pocket just in time. A liveried fellow who reminded me of Cantwell, the Squireses’ butler, took it from me and, holding it by thumb and forefinger, looked doubtfully at it as if he thought I must have stolen it from someone or found it discarded on the ground.
“You are Mr. Smallwood?” he said, as if he had heard of me, which flattered me, though his tone of incredulity did not. He
spoke with a heavy St. John’s accent, which, given the way he was dressed, struck me as ridiculous.
“Come in, sir,” he said, kindly, deferentially. “You’ll catch your death of cold in what you’re wearing. I might be able to find you something dry.”
I didn’t realize until it was too late that his concern was genuine. I assumed this was his way of hinting that Governor Anderson had made provision for fellows like me who showed up attired “unpresentably.” I pictured myself walking about in some obviously borrowed, ill-fitting suit.
“I’ll wear what I’m wearing,” I snapped. “And I won’t stand here waiting to be inspected. Either show me in or show me out.”
“Of course, Mr. Smallwood, of course,” the poor fellow said and took my hat from me. “You can go straight in, sir.”
I smoothed back my hair with my hands, wiped my glasses dry on my lapel, put them on and strode quickly into the reception lobby, hoping to so abbreviate my entrance that I would not be noticed. It worked, except that the managing editor of the
Daily News
, who I was sure had been at the pre-reception dinner, spotted me and waved, not so much by way of greeting as to draw attention to me. Or so I thought. I felt so conspicuous I suspected everyone of trying to make me more so.
I waved back but walked with feigned purpose in the opposite direction, vaguely entertaining the notion that I would keep moving until I was sufficiently dry that when I stopped a puddle of water would not form at my feet. I was wet through to the skin; my clothes, for once, were clinging to me, my pants matted to my thighs.
I think I would have left had I not seen Prowse standing with a group of men who I knew worked for the commission, Prowse dressed just like them in a smart-fitting tuxedo with a black bow tie. I wondered what he was doing there, this being a reception for the press. They were all standing at one end of the buffet table; beside Prowse, champagne glass in hand, was a woman who I
guessed was his wife. She was dressed as impeccably as the governor’s wife, in a blue evening gown, a black hat with a large white feather, elbow-length white gloves. Prowse saw me looking in his direction and nodded at me, half raised his glass in a token of salute. I sloshed across the room and joined his group.
“I’ve often wondered what you weighed soaking wet, Smallwood,” Prowse said. “I don’t suppose you’d let me lift you.” The others laughed.
“What are you doing here, Prowse?” I said.
“Working. I’m an assistant of Sir John Hope Simpson’s. What are you doing here? I thought you’d retired from the press —”
“I can’t believe you would have anything to do with this lot,” I said. “Only a year ago, you were working for the Liberals, for Squires.”
“Are you implying that the commission is not politically neutral,” Prowse said, “and that for me to work for it makes me some sort of turncoat? What does that make a socialist who works for Richard Squires?” Again the group broke out in laughter.
“So what have you been up to lately, Smallwood?” Prowse said. “I hear your latest attempt to unionize the fishermen met with the usual success. You really are a hack of all trades.”
“And what are you?” I said.
“A master of one.”
“You’re so full of it, Prowse,” I said. “I’m surprised there’s any room left for the booze.”
“If a man looked at a woman the way you’re looking at that food, Smallwood,” Prowse said, “he’d be arrested. Why don’t you just go over there and eat something, for God’s sake?”
I
had
been looking at the food. I suspected this reception did not rank high on the Government House scale of lavishness, but there was more to eat and drink than I had ever seen gathered in one place before, all of it arrayed on tables pushed against the back wall. I could not take my eyes from it at first. There were heaping platters of smoked turkey, slices of cloved ham, salmon
and trout and arctic char carved into chunks and adorned with wedges of lemon and pineapple, piles of cucumber sandwiches, bowls of pâté, cakes with thick pink icing, frosted jugs of lemonade and bowls of punch. At the end of the tables opposite ours, a white-hatted chef stood beside piles of plates and trays of glasses and cutlery. When he was not carving or pouring, which was most of the time, he stood with his hands behind his back and his feet spread wide apart as though he was guarding the food.
The Newfoundlanders acted as if they knew, and wanted the British to know they knew, that such a spread was not meant to be eaten but to be admired. Some were simply too proud, in front of others, to admit to being hungry, though I doubted that more than one in ten of them had eaten properly that day. I was in this last group, though the “others” I was primarily loath to admit my hunger to were those who with money from our treasury had supplied the food, namely, the British. I knew that if I were to touch a morsel, I would put aside all thought of keeping up appearances and gorge myself. I knew because others, a few so famished or so weak-willed they could not afford the luxury of self-consciousness, were doing just that.
On the other hand, opinion seemed to be unanimous that to take a glass of champagne when offered one from a well-loaded tray was quite acceptable. A waiter bearing aloft a tray of champagne-filled glasses did not even slow down as he neared me, so I helped myself. I moved away from Prowse’s group.
It was possible to look amused, aloof while sipping champagne or even while tossing it off a glass at a time, as I began to do.
I drank several glasses, and though I found it sickly sweet, I preferred it, near teetotaller that I was, to rum or whisky. Soon I began to feel better, less concerned than I would have been without the champagne to see in the oval mirror on the wall what might have been a sculpted likeness of myself, my clothes hanging in rigid folds on my body. I dispelled the illusion by toasting my
image in the mirror, and felt pleased when it reciprocated. The Guards Band seemed to be playing all my favourite songs. I felt like dancing. I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up into the eyes of a man I vaguely knew, a reporter who seemed to be swaying back and forth.