Two Solitudes (6 page)

 

FIVE

Marius Tallard was alone in his father's library. It was early evening and early April. He stood at the window looking at the watery sunlight pale on the sugar snow that lay flat on the plain. The poplar trees lining the drive were leafless and bare as brooms, their shadows long and very dark on the snow. Beyond the road, the river was a white expanse of rotted ice, streaked here and there with pallid yellow stains where moisture had seeped upward to the wind-crusted snow on top. An ice-breaker with a clubbed bow was hammering its way upstream to Montreal. The ship looked squat and tiny in the flat distance, but its power crashed far ahead of it. As it piled itself up on the ice and broke it, shuddering cracks ran miles ahead through the ice. The smoke from its funnel lay in a long scarf behind, veiling the opened channel.

Marius looked over the white fields that spread around the house and drew a deep breath. All that he could see was part of himself, and it made him feel important in a way he believed was mystical. Earlier in the day he had examined again the old familiar objects in the house that made it unique: the fine metal work of the chandelier in the dining room, made a hundred years ago by a local craftsman; the carved pine armoires in the upper hall, the row of pewter drinking vessels, all nearly two centuries old, lining the plate-rail above his father's desk. Because his family had been rooted here since the settlement of the river, he fancied that
the spirit of French-Canada breathed with a special purity and understanding through himself. Because ordinary people failed to sense this the moment they saw him, he held a deep, subconscious grievance against them.

He turned from the window back into the library. In the shadows the room looked pleasantly shabby, but dignified and old; in a sense, it was noble. The dry smell of the book bindings was redolent of antiquity, like the books in the library of the seminary he had attended until three years ago in Montreal.

He moved to his father's desk, stood looking at it for a moment or two, then inserted his fingers under the cover and lifted. It yielded a little, but did not rise. He went to the door and opened it into the hall. Here everything was dusk. A moose head with fourteen points on the antlers loomed at him from the wall opposite the door, and above it a solid staircase with an oak banister mounted to the second floor. Marius listened for a moment without moving. There were faint noises from the kitchen at the back of the house, but upstairs no sound.

He went back into the library and closed the door behind him. Oil lamps set on heavy marble pedestals were on the table and the mantelpiece, and one swung in a cradle secured to a stand near his father's desk. The great hearth, its stones blackened by a century of wood smoke, looked in the half-light like a bottomless cave. The room was cold as well as dark, but he lit neither lamps nor fire.

Marius opened a drawer in the lower part of the desk and hunted until he found a small, bent key. He unlocked the desk and lifted the top. Sitting down in his father's swivel chair he began nervously to search through the papers in it. On top of everything there was a copy of the previous Saturday's
Gazette
. He picked it up and glanced at the leading story. The Germans had broken through the British in their drive from
St. Quentin. The British were being beaten again. He threw the paper down. What did it matter to the British? They would never admit they were beaten. They would only blame the French again, or they would find some other excuse. But maybe this time it was not going to be so easy for them to talk their way out of it. He wouldn't be surprised if the Germans rolled the British right back into the Channel. He didn't want Germany to win the war, but it would be a pleasure to see the British forced to admit at last that someone had beaten them.

He went on to search through a confusion of old bills and letters, careful to note exactly where each paper lay so he could leave them as he had found them. Underneath a pile of letters he picked up a large sheet of yellow paper covered with his father's script. He held the paper so the light from the window fell on it. The material on the page must be notes for the book he knew his father meant to write. He had been talking about it for years, but so far as Marius knew, he had never got past the talking stage. In an undertone he read to himself: “Marx is only half right when he calls religion the opium of the people. It may turn a lot of people into sheep, but it turns far too many of them into tigers. Its whole history is violent. Look at the Aztecs, Mahomet and Torquemada!”

Marius frowned. This was not what he was looking for, but it interested him enormously. He tilted back in the swivel chair and again paused to listen. The house was still silent. He read on, passing his left hand through his long black hair. His face carried a strained, tense expression, and his hair kept falling over his narrow forehead every time he bent his head forward. His face was thin and pale, with high cheekbones underlined by shadows. His body was slender and still pliable with adolescence. His eyes were large, like his father's, but without any humour, and as he strained to read in the bad light a sharp line
formed between his brows and shot up to his forehead where a single vein was visible under the skin.

He went on to read the next note. “Certainly with the masses religion must rest on fear if it is to exist at all. The masses can be neither mystical nor intelligent. Therefore the Protestant Church is destroying itself by trying to explain everything. No magic, no religion. No hell, no church.”

Marius wondered if this was heresy. Probably not quite, though it certainly suggested that the Church might have worldly motives. He dropped his eyes to the paper again. “The masses are ruled by their own sense of guilt. Therefore nationalism and sex are the two time-tested mediums through which they can be controlled by small groups. Hammer in absolute patriotism and absolute purity as ideals, and you have the masses where you want them. You can always keep them feeling guilty by proving that they are not patriotic and not pure enough.”

Marius frowned again, not sure that he understood the full meaning behind the words. He read on. “If some of our priests don't mind their step, they will turn the whole Church here into a nationalist political party. The hierarchy is too intelligent and cultured to want anything as crude as this, but unless our traditional fear of the English is eradicated, that is just what we are likely to get. Some of the lower clergy want it without a doubt. From most of them you can't expect anything better.”

The paper fell from Marius' hand to the desk. This was certainly heresy, suggesting that the motives of a priest of God were no better than those of a politician. He had for some time suspected that his father was a free-thinker. His fondness for the English was a part of it. So were the convolutions of his private life. Now Marius felt he had absolute proof that his father was
also a liar. He lacked the courage to say openly what he believed, escaping the consequences of his heresy by rendering lip-service and going to church occasionally and keeping a pew. His political actions proved him a traitor to his race. Now this book proved him a traitor to his religion as well.

In sudden impatience Marius put both hands to the pigeon-holes at the back of the desk and began to turn them out. He was absorbed in his search until he thought he heard a noise. He looked up with a start, heard nothing, and then began pushing the papers and letters back in a frantic hurry. With a swift movement he closed the desk and locked it, slipped the key back into the drawer where he had found it, and stood up, tense and with moist palms. He went to the library door, opened it and listened carefully. There was no sound. He swore under his breath and closed the door again, moving softly back into the room. Then he let out a deep breath and stood there with his hands in his pockets, not moving.

He felt decidedly annoyed because he had found no money. It was as though his father had deliberately fooled him. Nearly always there was money somewhere in that desk. He had seen it since he was a child whenever he had asked for spending-money; sometimes there was as much as a hundred dollars in various sized bills. His father held five hundred dollars in trust for him, a legacy from his own mother. Until his twenty-first birthday he could not legally claim it, but he needed money now, badly, and he saw no reason not to borrow against the five hundred.

Part of Marius' anger was caused by the knowledge that his father was naturally generous with money. By French standards, he was even reckless with it. Athanase would have given him any amount had he asked for it, but to ask his father for anything was something Marius could not bring himself to do.

His breathing quieted and he went again to the window. A feeling of excitement, mixed strangely with sadness and pleasure, passed through him like a knife as he thought of his discovery. His father was a heretic. It gave him a tremendous sense of vindication. His father had never given regard to anyone's feelings but his own. Now he would ultimately be found out, and then the world would know which of them was right, which one had suffered unjustly.

He turned his head to listen but there was still no sound in the house. With a quickening in his blood he dropped on his knees before the bookcase beside his father's desk. He let his hand move over a row of slim volumes on the bottom shelf. They were art books his father had brought from Paris years ago; he had first discovered their presence in the house when he was thirteen. His hand found the volume he wanted without searching, and he went back to the window with it. His fingers trembled as he opened the pages.

Nude women gleamed from the smooth paper. He turned the pages and there were more nude women in reproductions of paintings by Titian, Correggio, Botticelli, Rubens and Ingres. As he looked at the lovely bodies he was both troubled and fascinated by his thoughts. These were the nearest he had ever come to the sight of a woman naked. So the forms lost individuality as conceived by the painters and became what he made them. They signified only the female being he did not know, the being which was beautiful and dangerous and at the core of sin. His fingers shook as he turned the pages.

Then, as always happened when he opened the book, he became afraid the pages would be marked by his fingers. He dreaded that his father would some day know how often he looked at these pictures. Not that his father would have cared. It was a matter of guarding his thoughts and essential
self from others; this had become an obsession with Marius.

He replaced the book and dropped into an armchair before the cold hearth, resting his head on cold leather. His father was very proud of this library; in a way he was proud of it himself, for it belonged to the family.

Steps were audible on the stairs. Marius sat upright, listening, tense. He was facing the door, and as it opened he saw his stepmother before she caught sight of him. Kathleen Tallard stopped still, staring. “Great heavens!” she said, speaking in English. “What are you doing here?”

Marius leaned back in the chair with an elaborate show of indifference.

“What's the matter?” she said. “Are you in trouble?” Her voice had a husky, pulsing quality, but it was friendly, warm and frank.

“Can't I come home when I feel like it without you thinking something's wrong? It's my home, isn't it? I was born here, wasn't I?”

“Why sure it's your home. But you ought to be in Montreal. You don't have a vacation for another month. What will your father say?”

“What business is that of yours?”

She was silent a moment. Then she said, “I only wanted to be pleasant. I don't see why you always talk that way to me.”

“Don't you?”

She turned from him and picked up a long-sticked match from a bowl on the table, struck it, lifted the mantle of the lamp that stood there and touched the match to the wick. Then she struck another match and lit the lamps above the hearth. After that she turned back to him with a smile. “There. That's better. A little light makes even this place cozy. You need a fire, too.”

She bent and sprinkled kerosene from a brass can over the logs which were already set on the andirons, then struck another match and dropped it on them. Flames leaped over the kindlings and the birch logs, and a pleasant smell of burning wood seeped into the room as the smoke made wreaths around the stones at the edge of the fireplace before the draft sucked them up the chimney. Marius lay back in the long chair with his hands in his pockets and his feet straight out, watching this woman he always thought of as “my father's wife.”

Kathleen stood up from the fire and moved with an easy, indolent grace to the centre of the room. The boy followed her with his eyes. “You're in trouble, Marius,” she said. “Wouldn't you like to tell me what it is?”

“Why should I? Nobody ever pays any attention to me around here. What's the idea of you starting now?”

She picked up a book from the table and laid it down again, her mild eyes watching him. She was thirty-one and he was twenty. The fact that she was much closer to his age than to her husband's was always an unspoken knowledge between them. “You haven't come out here for fun,” she said. “I know men well enough to know how they feel when they look the way you do.”

“I'll bet you know how men feel!”

Her voice flared up in lazy anger. “If you say things like that I'll have to tell your father.”

He continued to stare at her, his eyes mocking. “You wouldn't dare.”

She made a slow movement with one foot, as if to stamp in anger, but the gesture died. “How do you know I wouldn't?”

His teeth showed white. “Because you're afraid of trouble.”

Kathleen shrugged her shoulders and picked up some magazines, putting them down again and making their edges straight. One dropped to the floor and she bent to retrieve it while Marius watched her, his lips opening slightly. God, she was beautiful!

Ever since she had come to Saint-Marc nine years before, the house had seemed mysteriously evil, warm with sin. It was more than her beauty, more than the outrage he felt because his father had married a woman young enough to be his own daughter. It was her particular kind of beauty. The contrast between Kathleen's white Irish skin and the intense ebony blackness of her hair was startling. Her lips were generous and her breasts were full, but her hips below this opulence were slender. As she straightened his eyes dropped. It was the way she moved and sometimes the way she looked at him that gave her so much power over his senses.