ONE

Joseph Carver, the publisher of the Montreal Sun, lived on the mountain. Nearly all the rich families in Montreal lived on the mountain. It was always there to make them feel secure. At night it rose against the sky like a dark protective barrier behind a shimmering curtain of lights surmounted by a gleaming cross. In the daytime, if you walked east or west along St. Catherine or Dorchester Street, it might be screened momentarily by tall buildings, but when you came to a side street there it was looming up like a great jagged brown hedge. Storms came up over the mountain, and the thunder clapped against it…

But the mountain is on the island in the river; so the river is always there, too, and boat whistles echo all night long against the mountain. From the slope where Mr. Carver lived you could look down over the church steeples and monastery towers of the old French city spreading eastward from the harbour to the gleaming river. Those who wanted things to remain as they were liked the mountain. Those who wanted a change preferred the broad flowing river. But no one could forget either of them.

Joseph Carver lived in the Château apartments near the Ritz, high above the roofs of the houses sloping down to the railroad tracks and the canal. In the grey winter days when the clouds were low on the mountain the Château with its turrets and towers and courtyards looked like a massive stone fortress. It suited Mr. Carver. He and his handsome divorced daughter, Catherine, were as comfortable in the Château as they had been in the big house in Westmount before Mrs. Carver died. All he missed was his rose garden. He still wore a rose in his lapel every day, and roses were always on the long bleached oak table in the drawing room. In the evening, sometimes, key men from the St. James Street publishing office came to the apartment for informal conferences. Mr. Carver had a weakness for conferences.

He thought of himself as an enlightened liberal, and he was much impressed one evening late in December by an article in the latest Atlantic Monthly entitled, “The Independent Man.” The style was lively and authoritative, the reasoning sound. It reminded him that for months he had been considering having someone do a provocative column on current events. It had been difficult to find the person with the right touch, the human personal approach to everything, and this McAlpine seemed to have it. Turning to the notes on the contributors in the front of the magazine he found that McAlpine was an associate professor of history at the University of Toronto. It surprised him, and he smiled to himself. Being a member of the Board of Governors at McGill, Mr. Carver had given up expecting too much from professors. This James McAlpine seemed to be worth a night’s thought.

The next day he wrote a letter asking him if he would come to Montreal to discuss the possibility of doing an uncensored column in The Sun on world affairs, and he enclosed a cheque covering the cost of a return ticket to Montreal.

In the second week of January, when it was mild with no snow, James McAlpine came to the Château to have a drink with Mr. Carver. He was a tall broad-shouldered man in his early thirties. He wore a double-breasted dark blue overcoat and a black Homburg hat. He had brown eyes, black hair, and a good dignified bearing that he might have acquired in the Navy when he had been a lieutenant commander.

Something about McAlpine compelled Mr. Carver’s immediate attention. It was not simply his manner, which was straightforward and poised, nor his quiet self-confidence; as soon as they shook hands McAlpine made him feel they had been waiting a long time to meet each other. Mr. Carver was both amused and impressed.

That first night Catherine, arriving home from a Junior League meeting, heard the voices in the drawing room, and she stopped to listen. She liked the stranger’s low deep voice. She was a tall girl with good legs, candid blue eyes, and a handsome face with a mole on the left cheek. While she took off the beaver coat her father had given her for Christmas she continued to listen because she was twenty-seven and lonely after her divorce. A gossip columnist had written that he counted it a fine day when he happened to see Catherine walking in the sunlight on Sherbrooke Street. Yet her friends had noticed that she had the air of not quite believing in her own loveliness, of not being sure she was really wanted, and they were sometimes touched by her hesitant eagerness.

She liked the stranger’s laugher; but because he sounded attractive she drew back with an instinctive shyness. This shyness came from a secret knowledge of herself she had gained in her brief marriage with Steve Lawson; it made her watch herself with everyone and hide the ardour in her nature from anyone who attracted her, fearing if she revealed it she would suffer again the bewildering ache of her husband’s resentful withdrawal.

When she finally entered the drawing room, her shyness was hidden by her cultivated, cool friendliness. She had a fine walk, a slow stride as if her shoulders were suspended from a clothesline, her legs swinging effortlessly. She met McAlpine and sat down to listen.

From that night on she was there listening. Her father would be striding up and down, his grey head like a silver bullet on his big shoulders, and he wouldn’t be talking directly about what was going on in the world, nor asking McAlpine for direct opinions that might interest the readers of The Sun.

They would argue instead about Oxford and the Sorbonne, or whether there had been any real order in the world since the fall of the Roman Empire, then switch suddenly to the Latin poets. “What about Petrarch, McAlpine? You like Petrarch?”

“I prefer Horace.”

“Really? You prefer Horace?”

“It always seemed to me there was something too deliberate about Petrarch.”

“Well, look here, McAlpine. What about Catullus? Couldn’t we settle for Catullus?”

“Fine. I’ll take Catullus,” McAlpine would say, and they both would smile.

And Catherine, watching McAlpine, said, “You know, Mr. McAlpine, you don’t look much like a professor to me.”

“No?” he asked.

“No, but I imagine that’s why you were probably a very good one.”

“No,” he said quietly. “I was a failure as a professor.”

“Oh, but not with your students, surely.”

“No,” he agreed, smiling. “That part of it was fine, but I did not get along with my superiors. They didn’t like my methods.”

“These academic men,” Mr. Carver snorted, making an emphatic gesture with his horn-rimmed glasses. “I know them, McAlpine. I have to deal with them at my own university. It’s all to your credit if they didn’t approve of you.”

Sitting back with his long legs folded, Mr. Carver, listening closely, noticed that when McAlpine talked to Catherine his tone would change. Whether he was talking about Winston Churchill, the United Nations, or guerrilla warfare in Greece, his tone would become easy and intimate. Catherine would break in with an eager question. For months Mr. Carver hadn’t seen such a quickening in Catherine, and now the pleasure in her eyes moved him.

“Yes, he’s got a good mind,” he admitted to Catherine when McAlpine had left. “He says some good things, too. H’m-m, what was that he said about Churchill? ‘Eighteenth century syntax and nineteenth century hats.’ I liked it. Provoking and amusing.” Then he reflected a moment. “And if I should decide I want him he seems to be free to start at any time.”

“I think you’ll want him all right,” Catherine said quietly. “No matter how long you take, you’ll end up wanting him.”

They agreed that he had a quiet faith in himself that he must have nursed for years while he waited for the kind of job he wanted. But Catherine did not say how much she liked him, or how she had begun to put her own meaning on his words, or how she had come to believe he possessed an exciting strength of character.

It was her town, at least the small part of it that was not French, and, wanting to be helpful, she had a drink with McAlpine in the Ritz bar; after that in the afternoons they had many drinks together in little bars and places where she hadn’t been for months. It was a fine week for walking, very mild with still no sign of snow, and no skiing in the Laurentians, and the old calèches were still lined up at the curb by the Windsor Station. They always talked about the job; but in the way they walked, her arm under his, he made her feel not only that she belonged to his happiest expectations of Montreal, but that he wanted to tell of his plans and have her approval. At first she was restrained and diffident. Then he seemed to ask for her support. He could make her feel he really wanted her opinion and her sympathy. His need of her appeared to be so genuine it gradually broke down her diffidence; it became like a caress, opening her up to him and setting her free to indulge her ardent, generous concern. Walking along in step with him, her whole being was suffused with a new light happiness. Her shyness vanished. She talked quickly and brightly; she reached out to make his plans her plans, and she held him silent and wondering at the glow of her generosity.

She told him he ought to go to the clubs and be with managing editors and publishers and people who really influenced opinion. She intimated it would be unwise to hang around with his friend Chuck Foley in the Chalet Restaurant, where only the wrong sort of newspapermen went. Her father had suggested that if he and McAlpine came to an arrangement it would be necessary, later, for McAlpine to go to France, Italy, and England to see with his own eyes what was happening in these countries; and she talked about Rome and Paris as if she would be walking with him through the streets of those cities, showing him around. She talked, too, about her father’s temperament and advised McAlpine on how to get along with him; if there were difficulties, she could be helpful in smoothing them out. And he would need an apartment with a good address. She might be able to find one for him if he wanted her to.

The warmth of her generous interest stirred McAlpine, and he wondered how he had evoked it, and how he had had the good luck to come on such a handsome woman when she was waiting shyly to attach herself to someone who knew how to appreciate the fullness of her ardour. They walked in the twilight, and she felt compelled to talk about herself. All she said, though, was that her own marriage had been a mistake; she felt that she hadn’t been married at all. It had only lasted three months because Steve had been such an alcoholic.

“I understand,” he said, knowing they had been really talking all week about the failure of her marriage, touching on it again and again when they talked about other things.

“It wasn’t my fault,” she insisted. “I know you’d expect me to say so. The Havelocks, though, were on my side from the beginning.”

“The Havelocks?”

“My husband’s uncle.”

“Not Ernest Havelock?”

“No, that’s another family. They’re around here too. There are as many Havelocks as there are Carvers. Why? Do you know Ernest Havelock?”

“It was the children, Peter and Irma – when I was a boy.”

“I heard someone say they were in Europe now. I like to think of you knowing people I might know.”

“Do you?”

She nodded, and he smiled down at her.

“Well, don’t get a wrong impression,” he said. “I was no family friend. The name reminded me of the time when I knew them. That’s all.”

“You mean you lived near them?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “My people had a little summer cottage at the end of the beach where the Havelocks had their big country home. A cottage stuck down among a swarm of other cottages. But you know how kids get around and meet each other. There was a pavilion, a dance hall, up on the highway, and all the kids used to go there. No,” he added half to himself, as he smiled, “I don’t think the Havelocks ever knew how important they were to me.”

“Important in what way, Jim?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said with an easy laugh. “You know the way a name or a house looms up in a kid’s mind.”

“Their house impressed you?”

“I was never in it, and yet I nearly made the grade one night.” He was making it an amusing story. “It was almost a start in life for me. When I was fourteen! I must have been impressed, too, or I wouldn’t remember it so clearly, would I? The night I nearly made the grade I had been walking with my father and mother down the oiled road running behind the cottages, and I remember we had to step off the road because the Havelock car was passing. Peter and Irma and their cousin, Tommy Porter, from Boston, called out to me they would see me up at the pavilion. My mother – she died of cancer two years later – was impressed, I think, and so was my father. He’s still quite a guy, jolly and eloquent. He used to like writing poetry. He stood there making a speech about Havelock’s fine liberal interests and how he had practically known him for years since he saw him coming out of his Trust Company every day at noon time when he, himself, was coming out of the post office where he worked. I didn’t like listening to him because I liked him, and I had noticed that Havelock in his big car hadn’t even nodded to him.”

He was silent, remembering, and Catherine waited to hear about his youth and his family. His good humour as he looked back didn’t fool her, for when he spoke of his father and mother his tone changed; it was full of affection, and she was sure a wound was hidden under his calmness.

“I left my father and mother and went over to the pavilion and played the pinball machines; and a little later Irma and Peter and their cousin Tommy came, in their school blazers, and we fooled around, and I noticed a lot of big cars passing down the road to the Havelock house, and in a little while Irma said they had better be getting back to the house. They were having a party. City friends of theirs. And Tommy, their cousin, asked me if I wasn’t coming and I said I wasn’t invited, and he said neither was he, we were all on the beach, weren’t we, and I should be a sport and stick with them, so I followed along with Tommy.”

He laughed apologetically. “Isn’t it ridiculous how you remember these little details?”

“No, go on,” she said.

“A kid remembers, I think, because he sort of likes everything to happen right, and when it doesn’t it sticks in his memory.” Again he laughed softly. When he got to the Havelock gate, he said, he trailed in with the cousin. It was the first time he had been inside the big hedge, and there were the wide green lawns and the fountains and the big sprawling house. Strange kids in English flannels came toward them from the terrace, and he was shy and hung back. “I forgot to say I had a little spaniel,” he said, “and I was glad he was there, dancing around. Then Mrs. Havelock came out. She was stout and had streaks of grey in her hair, and she just looked at me, and I felt awful because I had shorts on and an old sweater and my hair was rumpled. ‘Who’s that boy?’ she asked, and her son, Peter, said idly, ‘Oh, that’s Jim McAlpine – he lives down at the end of the beach.’ All she said was, ‘Oh.’ She didn’t tell me I wasn’t invited. It was her wooden expression that hurt me and made me move closer to Tommy Porter. When she left us I wanted to behave with dignity and let her see, if she were watching from the house, that Tommy counted on me being with him.”

They picked up two croquet clubs, he said, and began to knock the ball back and forth. It was getting dark and he missed the ball and it shot past him and through the hedge, and he ran out the gate to get it. He tossed the ball over the hedge, then stood there, feeling lonely, yet glad he had got out, for now they would notice that he was not with them. Now Tommy or Peter would call out, “Oh, Jim! Where’s Jim gone? Hey, Jim,” and come down to the gate and look along the road for him.

He knew it might take some time before they noticed that he was missing, so he waited, with the spaniel wagging its tail and looking up at him. It began to get dark. Where there had been only the one evening star there were now many stars.

The voices on the lawn faded away toward the house, and no one called him; but they might not miss him, he thought, till they got inside. The moon rising over the lake shed its light on the roof of the Havelock house and gleamed through the thick hedge.

Lying down beside the hedge he watched the gleam of the Havelock lights. The moon rose a little higher. Then the road was all moonlight, and the little spaniel which had been lying beside him got to its feet and began to bark and circle around, then rush at the Havelock gate. The dog came frisking back at him to rub its nose in his neck and then darted at the gate again and scratched and whined. The bright moonlight was driving the dog crazy. From the house came the sound of a piano, and singing and laughing, and in chorus all the songs he knew so well.

The lights gleamed through the high hedge, and he watched them and waited, forgetting about his spaniel until he heard it scratching at the hedge beside him, thrusting its nose at the break in the hedge he had been making with his own hands. Suddenly the dog squeezed through the hedge and barked and bounded at the Havelock house.

“Come back, Tip, come back,” he called. Then he stopped calling. One of the Havelock children might recognize the dog’s bark and come out. “It’s Jim’s dog out on the road. Jim must be out there. I thought he was here,” they would say. “Let’s go and get him.”

A door opened, a shaft of light slanted across the lawn, and his heart thumped in his throat. A servant’s voice cried, “Go on, scat, do you hear, scat!” and the dog yelped and came running back to the hedge and wriggled through and into his arms. He held it hard against him, staring at the house. Then he jumped up, still holding the dog in his arms, and backed away from the tall dark hedge. He started to run down the road, and as he ran his pounding feet beat out the words, “Who’s that boy? Who’s that boy?” He stopped, breathing hard, his fists clenched, and stared back at the gleaming hedge, darker than the night, and whispered fiercely, “Just wait. Just wait.”

He walked along with Catherine, remembering, and then he laughed again. But she was shocked that he could reveal himself so calmly and finish the story with an easy laugh. I could never tell that story about myself, she thought. No one she knew would put himself in that light – a boy outside a hedge. No touch of snobbery troubled him, for he had faith in himself; he had reached his goal; the job on The Sun was to be his; he could afford to smile at his beginning. He had revealed himself to her in order to draw her closer to him, just as his arm tightening on hers drew her closer; she felt she was wanted in the secret part of his life and wanted right at the beginning. She was happy and proud and quietly content. “You’ll come to dinner tonight, won’t you, Jim?” she asked suddenly.

“Tonight?”

“I know Daddy would like it, too.”

“Of course I’ll come,” he said.

It was an intimate dinner made bright with easy conversation. They sat around, taking their time.

“Have lunch with me tomorrow, Jim,” Mr. Carver said when McAlpine was leaving. “I’m speaking to my managing editor, Horton.” And after McAlpine had gone, he said to Catherine, “You like him, don’t you?”

“Yes, I like him a lot. He’s interesting.”

“Mind you, he hasn’t got a nickel.”

“But he hasn’t been a businessman.”

“And he’s staying at the Ritz. Just a gesture. Burning his professorial bridges behind him.”

“I like that, too. Don’t you?”

“Oh, I don’t hold it against him.”

“Is there something you do hold against him?”

“Yes, there is something, Catherine.”

“Oh. But I thought you were enthusiastic?”

“I am. I am. But after all, my dear, I run a newspaper. And that quality of his which you’ve noticed too – I mean his absolute faith in his own judgement—”

“Yes, I’ve noticed it.”

“It isn’t just faith in himself. It’s an unshakable belief in what he thinks he sees.”

“But that’s rare and good,” she insisted.

“I know it’s rare. And I know it’s good,” he agreed. “I like it, too. But I do run a newspaper. I have to wonder if a man like that doing a column on the paper might some day embarrass me. It’s simply something I have to take into consideration.”

“Oh, you’re trying to be so cautious,” she said, laughing. “But you don’t fool me. I know you’re sold on him.”

“I am,” he admitted. “Only I want to make sure I won’t be left holding a tiger by the tail.”