Two Solitudes (13 page)

The train passed more slowly through suburbs of Montreal, skirting the base of the English section of the city. And then without excitement it pulled into Windsor Station. Athanase got out quickly, carrying his own bag and speaking to no one. A few tracks away his train for Saint-Marc was almost ready to leave, and he climbed aboard and sat in a day coach. It was after sunset when he got off at Sainte-Justine.

Beside the station a black horse stood in the shafts of a carriage, munching oats in a feed-bag, and a slumped figure was bending down the springs of the front seat of the carriage where he slept. For twenty years François-Xavier Latulippe had driven the livery in Sainte-Justine, and in all that time he had not been known to speak audibly to a soul. No one could remember now whether it was by choice or necessity.

Athanase laid his bag on the floor of the carriage and climbed in after it. He clapped the driver on the shoulder. “François-Xavier! God, it's good to be back in the fresh air again. Drive me home!”

Latulippe got out and removed the feed-bag from the nose of the horse, got in again and made a clicking sound with
his tongue. The old horse broke into a slow trot and headed for Saint-Marc.

Athanase leaned back in the carriage and drank in the evening air. The sun had set and the shadows were fading from the fields. Out on the river an empty collier was churning downstream with its propeller breaking water. Another ship was visible in the distance and Athanase saw that its decks were outlined by lights. It must be one of the first liners of the year on her way to Montreal from England. Only a few days ago she must have been blacked out, and the people aboard her had been freezing as she picked her way through the straits of Belle Isle.

The odours of spring were multiple in the evening: ploughed earth drying and cooling after sunset, gummy buds swelling to bursting point on bare trees, the flat smell of the river washing its banks high. The horse's hooves clopped steadily, and Latulippe sat motionless, the only indication that he was alive being the horsy smell which seeped off his clothes. In the fresh air it was rather pleasant. As they passed through the village of Saint-Marc, Athanase saw lights in Father Beaubien's presbytery and in Drouin's store. They passed the old stone mill, then the Tallard land came into sight and the row of poplar trees running straight as an avenue in France from the road to his own door. A great crow swooped overhead, coming down in a long loop from the top of a poplar to settle on a fence post, where it crouched black and reverent in the gloaming like a priest in prayer. Westward the last saffron light of the day lay over the Laurentians: sunset in Ontario, late afternoon in the Rockies, mid-afternoon in British Columbia.

Athanase looked toward the maple grove on the ridge behind the parish, stark against the residual light, and again he breathed deeply. Why should anything have to change
here? Why? It was perfect as it was. Tonight it was better than at most times. He was very glad to be home.

He paid Latulippe at the doorstep when the man held out his flat palm for the money, and then he went into his own house as the carriage drove off. Kathleen was not in the living room or the library. Julienne came out of the kitchen when she heard him and said that Madame had not expected him until tomorrow and had gone over to Captain Yardley's.

“Is Paul asleep?” Athanase said.

“Well, I don't know. But he's undressed as he should be and in bed. Maybe he's reading. I looked after him all right. Don't you worry, Mr. Tallard.”

Julienne had been part of the house for a very long time. She was so familiar Athanase scarcely noticed her. “Everything else all right?” he said.

She broke into a torrent of talk about the weather and how Blanchard expected to begin seeding tomorrow and how Paul had spent the last three afternoons at Captain Yardley's. Athanase cut her short. “Is supper ready?”

“There's ham and tongue and cold roast beef. I can hot up potatoes in a few minutes, sir.”

“All right, Julienne. I'll be down shortly.”

He went to his own room and undressed, deciding to change from his city clothes into something more comfortable. His nerves still felt tight and he wondered if sleep would come hard tonight. In the mirror he saw his naked body. The chest was thin and the calves hairless, the flesh looked both loose and thin over his bones. Not much of a prize now. He thought of Kathleen and was lonely; not so much for her, because he would be seeing her in less than an hour, but for the man he had been when the muscles were still on his body and he was proud of them. He pursed his lips. Was that
another of his many mistakes, to have married a girl as young as Kathleen? It had not seemed a bad thing to do at the time. He remembered a phrase he had heard in college, Sophocles saying how thankful he was in his old age no longer to need a woman–“I feel as if I had escaped from a savage master!” Well, he was no Sophocles and he wished he were younger. Kathleen's vitality by its mere existence mocked him now.

He glanced back at the mirror. All that counted in what he saw imaged there was the head. With a sensation of incredulity he realized for the first time that his head was beautiful. But it was an old man's beauty. What use was his head to Kathleen?

When he was dressed again he went into Paul's room, carrying a small lamp in his hand. The boy was asleep, his dark hair tousled on the pillow and his lips parted as he breathed. He had a child's secret look as he lay there, and suddenly Athanase was aware that tears were growing behind his eyelids. This son of his was so withdrawn it was hard to realize that he and Kathleen had anything to do with his existence. As he laid his hand softly on his son's forehead the boy's eyes opened and he was awake.

“P'pa?”

“Yes?”

Paul smiled. “I'm glad you're back.”

The remark touched him. “I didn't mean to wake you. Now you must go back to sleep.”

“I've been asleep.”

“But only for a little while.”

“It feels like a long time.”

Athanase smiled. Paul looked as he did when he woke in the early morning, ready for a new day. Often when Athanase went to wake him he would find the boy on his knees on the
bed peering out his window at the river. Paul would turn around and his eyes would look far away, as though he had been outside the world.

“P'pa? How long is a dream?”

“Oh, about half a second.”

“No!” Laughter bubbled. “It couldn't be, could it? I've been dreaming so many things. It must have taken a long time.”

“What were you dreaming about, Paul?”

“Oh, I don't know exactly. It's sort of hard to remember now. But I was there and then you came.”

“You must go back to sleep now.”

“Yes.”

Athanase bent down and kissed his son's forehead and found it cool. Then he turned away and left the room with the lamp in his hand. The big house seemed empty as he went downstairs for his supper.

When he had finished he put on his hat and coat and called to Julienne, “Go to bed whenever you please. I'm going over to the captain's.”

He took his favourite stick and opened the door. He could hear Julienne moving in the kitchen as he closed it behind him, and he wondered if she were lonely, too.

 

NINE

On Saturday morning, Athanase felt so fine after a good night's sleep, he decided to begin the actual writing of the book on religion which he had been planning for the last six years. He opened his pine desk, sat down in his swivel chair, selected a pen carefully, and took a long look at the clean sheet of paper he had placed squarely in the middle of the desk.

The first sentences had been in his mind so long they wrote themselves: “The basis of all religious belief is the child's fear of the dark. When the child grows into a man, this fear appears to lie dormant, but it is still in him. He invents a system of beliefs to render it less terrible to him. Among primitive tribes we call these beliefs superstitions, but among civilized nations they are masked by the honoured name of religion. God, therefore, is mankind's most original invention, greater even than the wheel. The purpose of this book is to trace and explain…”

He stopped and looked out the window. As a matter of fact, the purpose of the book was not to trace and explain anything. It was mainly to state certain aphorisms like the one he had just written. You saw their truth or you didn't. To write more pages in proof of the obvious was a waste of time.

Athanase surveyed his sentences, smiling as he read. They seemed to him great thoughts clearly expressed. He glanced up at the print of Voltaire hanging above the desk and kissed his fingers gaily in its direction. Yes, these were great thoughts. He wondered if they were also his own.

He leaned back in his swivel chair, stuffed his pipe full of Hudson's Bay, lit it and breathed in the smoke. He looked out the window and saw a fine spring morning. Then he swung his chair inward and surveyed the library, saw again the old chairs and the splendid stone hearth blackened by decades of smoke. He looked at the print of Rousseau hanging beside Voltaire. Rousseau was wearing a fur cap, and it made him look like an early French-Canadian colonist, almost a
coureur de bois
. It was a good room, good and familiar. But was it excellent in his eyes merely because it was old? Perhaps the basis of all conservatism was the tendency to identify the familiar with the excellent? Was this also a great thought? Also his own? He
realized that his mind was wandering and again bent over the white paper on his desk. Then Paul came in with the papers.

Athanase took them and laid them on the corner of his desk. “How would you like to go away to school, Paul?” he said as the boy was about to leave the room.

Paul stopped and looked at his shoes. “I don't know,” he said. “Next year you'll have to go somewhere to school. You can't stay here forever.”

Paul's face showed such alarm that Athanase noticed it. Every now and then he observed that his son seemed frightened of things. “My dear boy, you'll like it at school. We'll choose an English school. You'll learn science. You'll find out what makes the world go around.”

“But doesn't it go by itself?”

Athanase laughed, not realizing that his laughter blighted the boy's instinctive response. “Yes,” he said. “But you'll learn why.”

“Isn't it because God wants it to?”

“Yes, yes, I know.” He picked up one of the papers from the desk and spread it out. “Next year you will go to a fine English school. You'll still be a Canadian, mind you. Don't forget that.”

For a few moments Paul watched his father reading, then left the room silently and went outside. Athanase turned back to his work, but the words no longer marched. A book on religion was a tremendous job. Any book was. He frowned over the page of manuscript, and then Kathleen appeared in the door and paused on the threshold.

“Come in,” he said. He was glad of an excuse to stop working. He watched her cross the room, watched her pass one hand absent-mindedly over the window ledge and then
lift her fingers to inspect them for dust. She rubbed them clean against her skirt. The untidiness of her dress and her hair this morning made her look older than her thirty-one years. He waited for her to speak, but she said nothing as she gave her attention to the scene beyond the window. A breeze from the river ruffled the sticky young buds on the double row of poplars, and it billowed the starched white curtains at her side. Athanase felt her boredom like a visible presence in the room.

“I must go out in a few minutes to talk to Blanchard,” he said. “Want to come with me?”

She turned from the window and moved back into the room quietly, like a lazy cat. “No,” she said.

“It would do you a lot of good. The air's soft today. You ought to get outdoors more often.”

“I don't like it outside.” The tone of her voice was neither bitter nor sarcastic. Rather, it carried a trace of an Irish lilt that made it sweet and carelessly gentle. She wandered about the room, looking at the books on the shelves without allowing her attention to rest on any of them. Then she opened a drawer in the end of a book-littered table and took out a package of cigarettes.

“Those are stale,” he said. “Here. Have one of these.”

She did not bother answering, but pulled a cigarette from the package in her hand and set it between her lips. Then she moved to the mantelpiece to look for matches. A litter of cards and papers and old envelopes lay there among the bric-à-brac. Kathleen was always looking for things, but never in a hurry; sooner or later she found them. Now she picked a loose match from a small bowl and struck it with a crack on the stone front of the hearth. When the cigarette was burning she turned slowly around with the smoke inhaled, then she let it pour from
her nostrils slowly, easily, as though there were no end to it.

“Where's Mike?” she asked.

“He has fleas. I put him out. I wish you wouldn't bring him into the house. He's a farm dog.”

“I've never seen any fleas on him.”

He began to tap the edge of his desk with a pencil. There it was between them. It had grown steadily during the past few years, and now there seemed to be nothing he could do about it. He was too old for her. His ideas of developing her mind had been an absurd failure. Her instinct held it against him as a grievance, even though her nature was easy going and accepting, for he had not married her because of her mind and they both knew it. Now whenever they were too long alone together they bored each other. Yet she was still beautiful. Watching her shrug her shoulders, pick up a magazine and lay it down again, smile at her own thoughts, he felt again within himself the stir produced by the astonishing contrasts in this woman, her white magnolia skin against the blackness of her hair, her full breasts with the slender, independently moving hips beneath them.

“What about the factory?” she said. “You saw McQueen on the train.”