PART SIX

CHAPTER I

The following winter I was too engrossed in myself to think how deeply Catherine had meant that remark to me. Through her and Jerome my whole world had opened up; through them I was meeting people I had previously read about only in books. My weekends in town became series of mental explosions, and at school after the day’s work I used to sit up in bed for hours reading books about politics, history and the ideas which flamed in that peculiar time. Jerome seemed to know everyone in Montreal whose brain was alive, and most of them came from Europe or other parts of Canada. The old dynasty still ruled the city, as oblivious as mandarins to new faces and new ideas, but they were there: after a long, long time they were there at last and they were turning Montreal, in spite of itself, into a real world city. Coming back to Waterloo from those Montreal weekends was like stepping back into the colonial nineteenth century.

Light can blind you more than darkness, and this sudden new light blinded me to signs that now would have been obvious to me.

That winter, increasingly after New Year, the atmosphere in the Martell household changed. Several times I noticed Catherine withdrawing herself. Often she made sharp, cutting remarks that surprised me. At the same time I noticed that Jerome talked with increasing obsession and violence about the political situation. I assumed that this was the sole source of disagreement between him and Catherine, and indeed I think it was the primary one. Catherine would not, and could not, be interested in politics even to the extent that I am interested in them now. She believed that Jerome’s impetuosity caused him to be used by people unworthy of him, nor was she the only one who believed that. But this fixation of Jerome was real and sincere, and its very violence, oddly connected with his own violent history, undoubtedly had made him lonely with a wife who feared for him and for herself and for her daughter and dreaded where his impulsiveness might lead him. This was a time in which you were always meeting people who caught politics just as a person catches religion. It was probably the last time in this century when politics in our country will be evangelical, and if a man was once intensely religious, he was bound to be wide open to a mood like that of the Thirties. By why waste time explaining the pattern? It is obvious now, and dozens of books have been written about it. Less obvious have been some of the attendant passions that went along with this neo-religious faith. Passion has a way of spilling over into all aspects of the human mind and feelings. It is the most dangerous thing in the world whether it focuses itself on love, religion, reform, politics or art. Without it the world would die of dry rot. But though it creates it also destroys. Having seldom been its victim I have only pity for those who are, and I would be a hypocrite if I judged them by the standards you can safely apply to a man at peace with himself and his circumstances.

But I was blind to all the signs, and meanwhile my ordinary routine went on. Week after week I endured the boredom of teaching boys who did not wish to learn, and in my spare time at Waterloo I made myself extremely unpopular by trying to foist on my older colleagues some of the new political theories I now regarded as gospel. Most of them had been out of England so long they had no notion of what the new England was like. Ponson still thought of England as the England he had known as a youth at the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee when she had the ships, she had the guns and she had the money, too. McNish thought only of getting back into the Navy and the Doctor, who read about one newspaper a month, cheerfully assumed that when the time came John Bull would teach the foreigners a badly needed lesson. Meanwhile the younger men, the socialists from the provincial universities, were selfishly pleased to see their social betters humiliated by the present Tory government. Waterloo in those days was a depressing place.

The winter passed, a fateful winter for Catherine, Jerome and myself even though I did not realize it at the time, and finally on a Friday evening in early April I again found myself on the Montreal train accompanied by Shatwell. He was the only colleague with whom I felt easy. He was almost invariably cheerful in his languid way, and though he read the papers diligently, they never angered or depressed him. “I’ve always taken it for granted things were going from bad to worse, you understand,” was Shatwell’s perennial attitude toward everything, including himself.

But on this particular evening Shatwell was so depressed he could hardly talk. I knew he was tired, and I assumed his depression was caused by one of those humiliating incidents which so often happened to junior masters in Waterloo. The Doctor was so busy being the Doctor that without realizing it he undermined the authority of his assistants. That morning Shatwell’s class had rioted, and Dr. Bigbee himself had exploded into the room to quell it. Now I was trying to cheer Shatwell up.

“Old Bigbee deliberately creates all this confusion,” I said. “If it wasn’t for him our lives would be easy. Why worry about it?”

Shatwell turned to me wearily. “George old boy, absolutely the last thing that ever worries me is that old bastard. I had his number the first time I ever met him. He’s simply an older version of my company commander in my A.S.C. days in India. A krait bit that chap and put him out of commission.”

Shatwell then told me the real reason for his malaise. His widow, whose name was Mrs. Moffat, had been operated on by Dr. Rodgers in the Beamis Memorial for a non-malignant growth, and all week Shatwell had been telephoning the hospital for news of her.

“Something quite fearful and drastic has obviously happened,” he said. “They say she’s distended, whatever that is, and isn’t comfortable, which coming from a nurse or a doctor bloody well means she’s bloody well in agony.”

“But there’s bound to be some discomfort after an abdominal operation,” I said, quoting Jerome.

Shatwell shook his head and stared miserably out the window. The train was bowling along through sodden fields under a dappled sky, and the sun, fiaring suddenly out of the west, illuminated standing pools of water and turned them to gold.

“You see,” Shatwell explained, “everything I’ve ever touched has had such a way of turning out badly. It’s not as though poor Martha were strong, you understand. She’s quite petite, actually. She’s never had much luck, and she never asks for anything, and I rather fancy with these doctor chaps, if one doesn’t ask pretty firmly, it’s not likely to be given.”

“They’re not like that at all.”

“Your friend Martell may not be like that, but I’ve seen a thing or two, George. You see, one time when things had gone a little worse with me than usual, I was reduced to working as a hospital orderly. Bed pans, enemas, slops, cleaning up the messes they make – that sort of thing. A perfectly frightful job. But it taught me a thing or two, you understand. In hospitals they cover up for bad work just as we do in the school.”

“But you have no evidence of bad work here.”

“I’ve got rather a nose for that sort of thing, old boy.”

A west-bound express crashed by, the air shock from each car slamming against the window, and when it was past Shatwell continued.

“Martha’s so gentle and kind, you understand. We’ve had the jolliest times together. She doesn’t ask a thing of a chap, I mean to say, she never nags or tries to prod one into marrying her or any of that sort of thing. I mean to say, she just takes a chap like me and we have a jolly time. You can’t guess what that means to me, old boy. I haven’t had too much of that sort of thing in my life. Mum was rather a dear, but Dad was the military type, and the British military can be pretty bloody. He was always trying to keep Mum and me up to scratch, as he put it, and he might just as well have saved his time. Of course the only reason he did it was because he liked it. They’re all like that, those chaps, and most women nag one so. I had a wife once and she nagged.”

“You never told me you were married, Randolph.”

“What was the use? It didn’t work out at all and it was ages ago. She’s married to some engineer chap in India now. But poor little Martha, she just took me as I am, you understand. She never had children, poor thing.”

“When did her husband die?”

“I rather fancy about a dozen years ago. He was much older and I gather he was one of those chaps who gets married and sits. He was in some sort of trade. I don’t think he was much good, but I rather fancy he thought he was, or perhaps he thought he ought to be. He never had any appreciation. Poor Martha’s so appreciative of everything it quite wrings the heart.”

I told Shatwell he was worrying unnecessarily, that people always recovered from operations these days, but he was not comforted.

“If she were fond of somebody else instead of me,” he said, “I can’t help thinking she might have a better chance.”

“Oh come on, Randolph. What’s that got to do with it?” He shook his head miserably. “There was a girl in Smyrna I brought a packet of bad luck to. And there was that consul’s daughter in Kuala Lumpur – but I told you about her. And there was the one in Calcutta who was married to that bloody gunner. And then there was the nicest one of them all in Brisbane – but I don’t expect I told you about her.”

“Not that I remember.”

“The fact is, old boy, I was too ashamed. You see, I went to the very best medico in the place, and he assured me, he positively staked his reputation on it, that I was a complete cure. But I wasn’t, you understand.”

He looked at me with his soft calf’s eyes and I was sluggish in getting the point.

“George old boy, if a chap gives a girl the clap, especially if he’s fond of her, there simply aren’t any words. So you understand my point about the doctors. Just because they tell you there’s nothing to worry about, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a packet.”

When the train reached town, Shatwell jumped into a taxi and rushed to the Beamis Memorial. I checked my bags and took my time walking up the slope of the city to Jerome’s apartment.

It was one of those delicious afternoons which sometimes happen in Montreal between the break-up and the opening of the leaves, robins calling in Dominion square while there was still a grit of leftover winter sand on the pavements. I stopped in a flower shop and bought tulips for Catherine, then walked leisurely upward and through the university campus where boys and girls were sauntering hand in hand, and all about me was the feeling that comes when windows are opened after a long winter. The sky was dappled and some of the clouds reminded me of the underwings of doves.

Catherine’s living room window was open when I entered and Sally was playing on the floor.

“Uncle George!” she cried, and rushed at me to be appreciated. I tousled her ash-blonde hair and rubbed her nose and she gurgled with pleasure, but when I asked her what she had been doing she turned grave and placed a finger on my lips.

“Listen!” she commanded.

I did so and heard the happy noise of a barrel organ, and going to the window we saw the wonderful old Italian who looked like Toscanini and had been playing his barrel organ around the town as long as I could remember. Toselli’s Serenade was making windows pop open all along the curve of that little half-moon street and people leaned out smiling, while over the roofs the cloud-cover was sliding off to the east with the sky around the sun shining like a field of daffodils, and Sally looked so happy I wished I were her father.

The doorbell interrupted us, and while Sally clamored to be let out to play with the barrel-organ man, Catherine called downstairs and asked me to answer the bell.

It was Jack Christopher, the other dinner guest, and he had come over from the hospital where he was a senior intern. He was, and still is, a handsome man in a punctilious way, tall and serious with lines like a pair of parentheses framing a shrewd, disciplined mouth. We were the same age but I thought of him as older than myself and I still do. He was one of Jerome’s various protégés. He came from an old Montreal family with some financial backing, and his people had wished him to go into business. But somewhere along the line, when he was hesitating between business and medicine, he had encountered Jerome and Jerome’s enthusiasm had fired him. Now he was hesitating between entering practice in internal medicine and doing specialized work in endocrinology. It was typical of Jerome that he had advised him to try both for a while.

“Mummy, can I go out and play with the barrel-organ man?”

From upstairs came Catherine’s voice: “So long as you’re sure to put on your coat.”

“I’ll put it on, Mummy.”

I watched Sally go out the door and behind me the phone rang. Jack was nearest and he picked it up, and after half a minute and a few monosyllables he turned to me.

“That was Jerome. He says he’s been held up but will be here in a few minutes. He tells us to get our own drinks. Do you want one?”

I did, and after thinking it over Jack decided he wanted one too.

“Has Jerome been busier than usual?” I asked him. Jack gave a slight shrug but made no comment. We sipped our drinks silently, after a while the barrel organ stopped playing and a little later Sally came in again. I asked her to get a vase for Catherine’s tulips but she preferred to play with Jack, so I got one myself and brought it into the living room with the tulips arranged. Jack was down on the floor with Sally looking as much at ease as an elder statesman playing with a child at election time and Sally was demanding to know why her father was not here.

“I haven’t seen Daddy all week!” she said. “Not all week!”

Then she ran upstairs to talk to her mother and Jack resumed his seat with an expressionless face.

After a while he said in his abrupt way: “Out of the mouths of babes. I don’t like it.”

“What don’t you like?”

“Of course it’s none of my business what he does.”

“What who does?”

“Jerome, naturally. Tell me something – is he, or is he not, a communist?”

“I don’t think he’s one.”

“Are you one?”

“No.”

Jack made an impatient gesture: “But the whole lot of you talk like a pack of Reds all the time. Girls and boys together. That little O.R. nurse, that Blackwell girl – she’s a pal of yours too, isn’t she?”

“I wouldn’t call her that. I’ve known her a while, but – look here, what are you driving at?”

“Jerome sees too much of her. He has no sense of form and I don’t like it. Apart from being bad for the hospital, it’s bad for him. Now that girl’s certainly a communist, and the two of them have been seen at too many meetings not to get themselves talked about. I don’t like it. Mind you, I’m not saying anything more than that.”

“You seem to be hinting at a hell of a lot more than that, Jack.”

“Am I? Perhaps so. Other people are, if I’m not.”

I finished my drink and poured myself another.

“What’s got into everyone these days I don’t know. This damned Spanish War, you’d think it was happening here. All these meetings where the same people tell each other the same old things. What do they know about Spain? How the hell do they know whether what they say is true or not? At best they’re guessing, at worst they’re saying what they like to hear. Those Spanish War meetings are like revivals in a Methodist tent. What’s Spain to a man like Jerome? He’s never been there. That country’s always been an impossible country. What’s Spain to any of these people except an excuse for them to give free play to their neuroticism?”

I became irritated. “Don’t be so stuffy, Jack.”

“You think I really am?” He looked like a scientist faced with new evidence it was his duty to assess. “Perhaps you’re right and I am stuffy. But I was talking about Jerome, not myself. Some of the things he’s doing and saying at the hospital are getting past a joke. We’ve had a new bequest, a considerable one, and with no strings attached. Before there was the slightest mention of how the money was to be used, he was saying around the corridors, so that everyone heard him, ‘Well, now I suppose we’ll be building a new pleasure dome for our rich patients.’ He knew as well as the rest of us that the Beamis is short of beds, but he made it sound like a dirty deal. Of course what he wants is an extension of the out-patient’s facilities, and I’m not saying he’s wrong in that – at least not at the moment. It was his work in that clinic for the unemployed that got him started in all this. I’m not saying it was a wrong thing to do, but all sorts of people have got around him on account of that.”

Jack was seldom so talkative and I looked at him in surprise.

“Of course,” he went on, “every word he said reached Dr. Rodgers. Why does he have to behave that way? Why do all you people talk as though everyone in authority is a crook? Medicine should be above this propaganda.”

“According to Jerome, a good deal of medicine in this town is on the side of the big battalions.”

Jack’s cheeks showed a faint flush. “He’s too suggestible. He used to be a medical man, and that’s what he still is. Politics disgust me.”

“Can you keep politics out of anything these days?”

“You people rot your minds with all this stuff you read and repeat it to each other. I suppose you think I’m a reactionary.”

“Since you ask me, I do. This country happens to have about one million unemployed in it. The States must have about twelve million. Meanwhile Hitler’s on the rampage, and you want to live in an ivory tower.”

Christopher shrugged. “It so happens I have a scientific mind, George. You haven’t, and neither has Jerome. He’s a good biochemist – it amazes me how much science he actually does know. But that’s because he has an incredible memory and was well trained. He’s quicker to learn than anyone I’ve ever met. But he’s not a scientist.”

“Okay. He’s not a member of the priesthood. So what?”

“So this. Outside his profession, he’s as gullible as anyone I’ve ever met.”

“Which no scientist ever is – outside his profession?”

Jack gave me a coldly level glance. “It so happens, George, that I owe a great deal to Jerome and I care what happens to my friends. He’s rotting his mind with this stuff. He’s a wonderful surgeon. You can’t possibly know how good he is. Don’t ask me why. Surgeons like him are born, not made. In time he could become the greatest abdominal man on the continent. Besides that he’s got a mysterious power very few doctors possess. I can’t describe it, exactly, and I don’t want to sound sentimental or give you any of the guff you read about doctors in novels and magazines. But it’s an empirically observed fact that some medical men have more powers of healing than others. In that respect Jerome’s unique. I’ve never seen his equal.”

“Well?”

“This is very rare, George. A man like him is worth ten dozen politicians. But if he keeps on the way he’s going now –” he gave an exasperated shrug. “He’s letting these neurotics and troublemakers use him. There’s not one in that whole crowd of socialists and communists and talkers who’d be acting like that if they were personally successful.”

“Jack,” I said, “tell that to your friends in St. James Street, where you probably heard it the first time.”

“Did I?” He flushed in anger, a rare thing for him to do. “Let me tell you something. They’re using a man better than themselves. They flatter him and he laps it up. If I didn’t love the damned fool I’d be disgusted. I don’t like seeing a first-class man used by a third-class one, and above all I don’t like seeing him used by that bitch of a nurse. Maybe I’m stuffy, but there are a lot of people who look up to Jerome. Whether he likes it or not, he’s expected to set an example of discipline in the hospital.”

Never had I heard so much conversation from Jack Christopher, who could be silent for hours. If I had been more observant I would have realized that such an outburst from a man like him was actually an understatement, but I was not observant, I was blinded by my own feelings, I was determined to permit in myself no jealousy of Jerome and I was hostile to Jack’s entire point of view outside of his work. I became angry, and would have soon become offensive if Jerome had not at that moment entered the house.

We heard his voice loud in the hall: “Well everybody, here I am!”

Sally came tumbling down the stairs to meet him, he picked her up and swung her almost to the ceiling as she squealed with delight, and while still playing with her he called to me to pour him a drink, and to make it a stiff one. He continued to play with Sally who gurgled with joyous laughter while Jack contemplated the scene as though he were trying to figure out its hidden mechanisms. Jerome roughed her up and she loved it, and he was still doing it when Catherine came down. He tossed the child onto a sofa and turned to his wife, kissed her, put his arm about her waist and fondled her, slapped Sally’s backside, swallowed half of his drink and told Jack he wanted to speak to him in his study. Jack rose and went with him, Sally ran upstairs to find something she wanted to show her father, and Catherine and I were left alone.

“Well,” I said, “this seems one of his manic days.”

“Every day would be like this if he didn’t wear so many people out they begin to wear him out in turn. Come, help me set the table.”

We made small talk between dining room and kitchen and a feeling of desire came to me, so sharp it hurt, as I saw the curve of her hips.

“Jack tells me Jerome’s been doing too many things,” I said.

“That’s how the man is made. Sometimes I wonder if he can think of anything else besides Spain. Do you think about Spain all the time?”

“I suppose I do.”

“I’m sure he thinks about Spain in the middle of his operations. What’s the matter with me, George? I can’t think about Spain when I’m cooking a dinner. I could spend a week doing nothing and never think about Spain at all.”

“It’s a pretty important subject these days, Catherine.”

“I suppose it is. But do you really believe that’s why all you people think about nothing else?”

She looked at me with a frown line between her eyes, her heartshaped face not at all serene.

“It’s not so easy being a good wife to Jerome,” she said. I laughed: “It must be tiring sometimes.”

“Tiring!” she turned away. “Jack believes he’s doing too much outside his work.”

“Jack’s right. He’s the only one of our friends who’s not completely blind.” She turned to me again. “He changes so fast, George. Can’t you see the change in him since last fall? What causes it? I wish I knew. He’s so exposed and he doesn’t know it.” She lifted her hands and let them fall. “Oh, let’s not talk about us. How was your own week?”

“My weeks are always the same.”

It was seven-thirty before we sat down at table and Jerome, not noticing Catherine’s mood, talked with manic excitement about a Spanish tank officer he was going to introduce to a public meeting the next night.

“When the war began he was a garage mechanic and now he’s a full colonel. How’s that for proof of what a man can do in a good system? For the first time I’m beginning to think that Norman Bethune was dead right about Spain. Even that Englishman Clifford was right. Now that the Soviets are helping them, the Loyalists are going to win. But they do need doctors. Beth’s over already. They need all the outside help they can get.”

When we went into the living room for our coffee, Jerome’s excitement spread itself as it so often did. He put his arm about Catherine’s waist and gave her a glance that caused Jack to turn aside in embarrassment. He was certainly obvious; when he felt sexual desire it showed as though an electric light had been ignited in his face. With a quiet smile Catherine slipped away to an armchair, and I guessed this was one of her bad days.

The phone stabbed into the middle of Jerome’s monologue, he answered it and said it was for me. Wondering who beside my parents could know I was here, I picked up the instrument and heard Shatwell’s voice hysterical with anxiety.

“George, Martha is dying. They wouldn’t let me see her at first, but I made them and it’s pitiful and they’re doing damn all.”

He poured out details about her symptoms until I stopped him and asked why he did not consult her doctor.

“How can I? The chap who cut her up, the surgeon, you understand, is in Detroit or Buffalo or some such bloody place reading some bloody paper to some bloody other doctors.”

“I meant her own physician.”

“Oh, he’s absolutely not of the slightest use whatever.”

“Come on, Randolph, how do you know that?”

“This physician chap who turned her over to the sawbones who botched her, he’s conked out himself. He’s a patient here too.” He hesitated. “For God’s sake help me, George. Speak to Dr. Martell, will you please, George?”

I had seen this coming. “That’s asking quite a lot, Randolph. It’s not Dr. Martell’s case.”

“But he works in this bloody hospital, doesn’t he?”

“Who is her physician?”

“I think the name of the chap is Crawford. Listen, old boy, this isn’t merely serious, it’s desperate. I’ve spoken to all the housemen or interns or whatever it is they call them over here, and it’s quite obvious not one of them is giving me anything but a cover-up. If Martha has to wait for this chap to come back from Detroit she’ll have to wait till Monday, and by Monday she’ll be dead.”

“Come on, Randolph! They don’t take cases into hospitals and just leave them.”

“Don’t they, though! Don’t they! George, please help us!”

“I’ll ask the doctor, but I can’t promise anything. Where can I reach you if I have to call you back?”

“Here at the hospital. I’m sticking, George. They’d like to get rid of me but they bloody well can’t.”

After hanging up I spoke to Jerome, who frowned and asked Jack and me to join him in his study. Sitting in a swivel chair with a cigarette between thumb and forefinger, his eyes hooded against the smoke, he listened in silence while I repeated Shatwell’s story. Christopher gave me a glance suggesting he wished I’d dropped dead.

“Crawford’s laid out, all right,” Jerome grunted when I had finished. “The poor devil’s passing a kidney stone.”

I had never seen Jerome involved in a case, and the change in him was dramatically impressive. His gaiety disappeared and so did the youthfulness of his manner. He became intense, concentrated and grave, and he looked like my idea of a general pondering a tough decision. Christopher responded to the change and reverted to a correct intern in the presence of a senior.

“Do you know anything about this patient?” Jerome asked him. “I was with Dr. Crawford when he made his rounds this morning.”

“And?”

“I’d rather you asked Dr. Crawford himself.” Jerome shot him a bleak glance and Jack stopped hedging. “There’ve been complications. Dr. Crawford said if her temperature continued to rise it would be necessary to go in once more.”

They exchanged some medical language and Jerome abruptly picked up the telephone extension from his desk and dialed the hospital.

“Who’s on her floor tonight?” he said over his shoulder to Jack. “I think it’s Sawyer.”

When the intern came onto the line I felt sorry for him. Jerome shot a series of questions at him, interrupted most of the replies, and finally exploded.

“Has it occurred to you that you’re being trained to think for yourself? Even to act for yourself? You tell me her temperature was 101 at eleven-thirty, 102½ at three and you tell me it’s now 103. And while this goes on you’ve dutifully observed what you’ve read on her chart. What’s that you say? I know Dr. Crawford’s passing a kidney stone. The whole hospital knows about that damned stone. Aren’t there any other doctors? You say Dr. McGregor’s up north and Dr. Smith can’t be found? Damn it, you knew where I could be found. Why didn’t you call me?”

He slammed down the phone and looked at Christopher as though it were Jack’s fault.

“Dr. North is in town,” Christopher said quietly. “And I know where I can locate Dr. Adamson and Dr. Simpson.”

“Yes,” said Jerome, “I know where I can locate them, too.” We followed him out and heard him tell Catherine he had to go to the hospital. Before leaving he asked her to make his apologies to the guests who had been invited for the rest of the evening.

“Perhaps I’d better go along with you?” suggested Christopher. “No, you stay here.”

“I’d really prefer to go.”

“And I’d really prefer you here.”

Jack went slightly white as the door closed behind Jerome and we heard his feet running down the steps. We heard his car start and drive away.

“Damn him!” Jack said between closed lips.

He came into the room and looked at Catherine, she looked back and they seemed to understand each other. Catherine was tired and anxious, and I hardly knew what to say, for I did not understand something which she and Jack, without having mentioned it to one another, clearly did understand.

Then steps sounded and the first guests arrived, followed by more, and soon the familiar chorus filled the living room: Spain, Chamberlain, Blum, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Roosevelt, the Soviets, capital, unemployment and all the rest of it. I found my way to Catherine, sat on the floor beside her chair and our eyes met.

“I wish I were in bed,” she said. “Why don’t you go to bed?”

“Not till Jerome comes back.”

“Is anything serious the matter?”

“With Jerome? Yes, I’m afraid there is.”

“I meant with you.”

“Oh me! I’m just weary of being half of a person. Help Arthur Lazenby with the drinks and forget about me.”

“Wherever Arthur is, he’s always serving the drinks.”

“Wherever there’s an evening like this, there’s always Arthur.”

“Except that he doesn’t talk.”

“You talk, George. It’s good for you. Talk all you like.” But that night I did not feel like talking at all; or rather, I wanted only to talk to Catherine, and not about politics. Jack Christopher, who was spending his first and only evening in this kind of a crowd, sat in a corner chair with his fingertips pressed together and his eyes on the ceiling. For an hour nobody paid him the slightest attention and he paid none to anyone else. Lazenby crossed and tried to interest him in a beer, then in some broken conversation, but he failed and presently found himself another place. Around eleven-thirty Jack left the room and I guessed his destination was the phone in Jerome’s study. Soon afterwards I was conscious of him tall and aloof in the doorway looking with exasperated contempt at the cluster of intellectuals bent forward to argue and agree, and when he caught my eye, I joined him in the hall.

“Well,” he said coldly, “he’s done it. He’s operated on your friend’s mistress.”

“How do you know she’s Shatwell’s mistress?”

He disregarded the question and said: “I suppose it might have been worse.”

“For Mrs. Moffat?”

“Frankly, I don’t give a damn about Mrs. Moffat.”

“Is it your idea that he should have let her die for the sake of medical ethics?”

Jack gave me a glance of withering contempt, then his anger disappeared almost instantly behind the facade of his professional manner. But he look at me very coldly.

“You’d never have made that remark if you hadn’t heard him make similar ones. And he’d not make them if it wasn’t for these new friends and ideas of his. He shouldn’t do it, George. What’s more, he knows he shouldn’t do it. Maybe it’s true that in one case in a thousand a patient’s neglected because he’s not important, but –”

“It occurred to Shatwell that this might be the one case in the thousand.”

“Which is not an original thought. About one family in ten gets the idea sooner or later that it’s not getting all it deserves from the medical profession.”

“I’m sorry, Jack. I heard Jerome’s conversation with that intern.”

“You heard only his half of it, and you aren’t in a position to understand it. You political people are always on the lookout for something crooked. I don’t know what’s the matter with you.” Jack gave an exasperated shrug. “At least he telephoned Detroit, but of course Dr. Rodgers wasn’t in his hotel room and he didn’t locate him. He did talk to Dr. Crawford, but Crawford’s blind with pain and apparently did nothing more than tell him to use his own judgment. Oh, I suppose in the technical sense Jerome’s been correct enough.”

“Then what are you beefing about?”

“Simply this. For the last two or three years Jerome has been inviting this competition with Dr. Rodgers in the hospital. I don’t think he realizes the extent to which he’s done it. That man’s always trying to prove something – God only knows why. Maybe just to himself.

“Now look at this from Dr. Rodgers’ point of view. He’s old enough to be Jerome’s father. He’s taught Jerome a great deal. He once regarded him as his protégé. And in case you’ve picked up from Jerome the wrong idea about Dr. Rodgers, let me tell you an absolute fact. Ten years ago Rodgers was regarded one of the greatest surgeons in the world. Now how do you think a proud old man is going to like it when he discovers that on one of the few occasions when he’s made a mistake, the one man he especially dislikes sees the details of the mistake and puts it right?”

“Then Rodgers did botch the job?”

Christopher turned away in exasperation, then back again. “I’d appreciate it very much, George, if you’d suggest to this friend of yours with the funny name that he can be grateful for what’s been done for him, and that if he wants to show his gratitude the best way he can do it is to keep his mouth shut. I saw this fellow at the hospital and I didn’t care for the look of him. He looks like a remittance man to me.”

“Do you think he enjoys knowing that everyone thinks that about him?” I said.

Jack went over to Catherine, said he was leaving and thanked her. The conversation went on in the room as though he had never been there and had never departed, and a little later I joined Catherine in the corner. I knew from her face that she was not listening to a word anyone said.

When I sat down her hand closed on mine, pressed it slightly, dropped it. She looked away.

“You should be safely married to somebody nice,” she surprised me by saying. “You shouldn’t be involved with me.” I laughed and said something non-committal. Then I saw the pain in her face, I saw her deep inner seriousness transparent.

“I suppose you know all about it?” she said calmly. “All about what?”

“Our trouble. Has nobody told you?”

“What is it, Catherine? Jack was talking in a vague kind of way, but – what trouble, Catherine? What trouble?”

She lifted her hands and dropped them: “It would be so easy if the question could be easily answered. What trouble? Oh George, it must have been easy fiffty years ago when everyone knew who was to blame for what.”

I looked at her baffled. “How can I blame anyone? Even that girl. I don’t like her, but how can I blame her. She’s not responsible. How can I blame Jerome? He can’t help this thing inside of himself. How can I blame myself? I can’t believe this war in Spain is a crusade. But he does. You see – oh George, you ask me what the trouble is? Do I know anyone who can tell me what the trouble is? Life, perhaps. Life in this time.” Her pale, smooth face remained calm. “Or perhaps it’s the vacuum left by his lost religion. I tried to fill it. I thought I’d filled it, but now I know I didn’t.”

I looked over my shoulder, but none of the others were paying any attention to us. I saw Arthur Lazenby’s profile intent on some argument and turned to Catherine again.

“Everyone takes it for granted he’s having an affair with this Blackwell girl,” she said calmly.

“I’m sure he isn’t.”

She smiled elliptically: “I wouldn’t care if he was so long as he didn’t feel responsible for her. You see, George, he doesn’t understand women. The way some of them scheme and rationalize, the way some of them play on a man’s better nature and make him feel responsible for situations they’ve engineered themselves – Jerome didn’t grow up with girls, and he’s worked so hard he’s never had time to find out what some of us are like. Even if he did understand them, I’m not sure he’d understand Norah Blackwell.”

Catherine sat small and erect, hurt and proud, yet her heart-shaped face was serene. “I’m worried about Norah Blackwell,” she said, “and not for any of the reasons people believe. I’m not going to pretend I like her. I’m not going to pretend he hasn’t hurt me horribly on account of her. No, I’m not noble at all. But George, none of this matters compared to one thing. That girl is mentally unbalanced.”

“I think she’s unhappy and intense, but would you say that –” Again she looked at me calmly: “She’s lethally attractive, George.”

“I don’t think she is at all.”

Catherine smiled; she smiled almost pityingly at me. “To a man like Jerome she’s one of the most fatal women I could possibly imagine. She looks so soft and gentle, and at the same time she’s apparently very good at her work – which is almost his work. She’s unfortunate. She wants to better herself – indeed she does! She hero-worships him, and he’s so terribly insecure.”

“Jerome insecure!”

“More than you’ll ever be. And he doesn’t even know it. He’s too proud. Or – no, it’s not even that. Underneath he’s too desperate.” Catherine took a deep breath and sighed. “If only Norah Blackwell was not so noble-minded!”

I could think of nothing to say and just looked at her. “I don’t under-rate her, George. Not for a minute. Quite possibly she may love him, though I know he’ll never be able to love her for long. I don’t think he ever did, really. I don’t think he does now. But one thing I do know – she’ll cling. She’ll make him feel responsible. He’s not a light man, George. He’s still religious underneath. He’s never done anything like this before, that I know. If he had, he’d have told me. He can’t stand anything undercover. He has a compulsion to confess. Oh George, what a winter this has been, what a winter!”

“Catherine!”

“Don’t feel sorry for me like that! Don’t let me do things to you!”

“All right. I won’t.”

“This girl – if only she schemed consciously. But I don’t think she does. I’m not even sure she arranged a situation for him. Perhaps it just happened. He was tired, I was sick, with flu, they looked at each other, they happened to be alone, and he exploded. But that look in her eyes – she’ll cling, George. With the best motives in the world she could ruin him. And on top of it all she’s a communist who’s all in favor of him going to Spain, and I’m not a communist and that makes him feel alone with me at the very time when he shouldn’t. I could help him with Norah. I could help him and save his pride, too. But this other thing is too much. And one thing more, George – I believe that at bottom Norah Blackwell is a suicidal type, and I believe Jerome knows it and is scared to death.”

Again we were silent and the rest of the room with its political talk might not have existed for us.

“Conscience is such an awful thing, and he has such an awful conscience,” she said. “I’ve failed him so badly. I’ve battened on him too much.”

“How can you say that?”

“Because it’s true. I made him my whole life.”

“There’s also Sally.”

“Yes, bless her and thank God.” She smiled with rueful bravery. “I’ve said such hateful things in my own mind about Norah Blackwell and I loathe myself for it. About Jerome, too, and of course he senses it. So Spain becomes an escape for him.”

“I’m sure it’s more than that.”

“Yes.” Her face suddenly looked older. “Yes, it is more than that. What he told you about killing Germans in the war was all too real. He has that terribly on his conscience. He thinks that in this Spanish war he has a chance to make recompense by saving life. Oh conscience – it really does make cowards of us all! George, George, I’m so frightened for him! If he goes to Spain the communists will capture him for good. His home means more to him that most people will ever guess. This girl can’t begin to understand that. She sees me only as a partial invalid holding him down. Yes, but I also keep his home. This foolish girl! How I wish she’d never been born!”

Suddenly I couldn’t stand it and got to my feet. “I think I’d better go,” I said. “I think I’d better go up to the hospital and see how Shatwell’s doing.”

The April air tasted delicious as I walked up the steep slope of the city, the starlight filtering down through the bare trees, and reached the hospital where Jerome worked. It was late for visitors, but nobody paid any attention when I went up in the automatic elevator to the floor where the sunroom was. The convalescent patients were all in their beds and the hospital was very quiet. Windows were open in the sunroom and the cool air stole in sweet and clean. The lights were turned low and in the far comer I saw the shadows of two men, one lying back in a chair and the other hunched forward talking to him. I recognized them as Shatwell and Jerome, and Jerome was talking.

“She’s going to be all right,” Jerome was saying, “and so are you.” Shatwell had apparently broken down, for I heard him sobbing. “This does you no discredit, old man,” I heard Jerome say, and his voice would have healed almost anyone. “You’ve had a hard life – the hardest any man could have – and of course it’s not been easy to bear.”

“Hard!” I heard Shatwell, his Englishness entirely collapsed, almost sob. “I’ve been worthless. I’m not fit to live. I’ve failed at everything.”

“No,” said Jerome, “you have not.”

“You don’t know about me, Doctor.”

“I know the only thing that matters about you. You’re a kind man, Mr. Shatwell.”

“Does that matter?”

“It matters far more than you can ever guess. Oh, it’s not easy for anyone not to be able to do what his society expects. It’s to your credit you failed in the English colonies. A man like you was bound to, for a simple reason. You were too kind. Now” – Jerome stood up – “come with me and I’ll give you a sedative, and then you’ll sleep and wake up a new man.”

Jerome saw me as they passed on the way out, but Shatwell did not. He walked unsteadily, and smelling whisky I guessed he had been drinking pretty heavily to deaden the pain of his anxiety. I waited, for Jerome had made a gesture indicating that he would return, which he did after ten minutes.

“Well,” he said, and his voice sounded tired, “it was the only thing to do. There were indications of septicemia and if we’d waited there wouldn’t have been much chance.”

“Is everything all right now?”

“Yes, everything is fine so far as she’s concerned. How are things at home?”

I made no answer and was aware of him searching my face in the shadows.

“Has Kate been talking to you?” he asked in that abrupt way he sometimes had of striking through to a main point.

“I don’t suppose it matters if I say that she has.”

He put his hand on my forearm and pressed it: “I’m sorry, George. I’m so sorry I –”

I said nothing because there was nothing to say. “The weakest excuse a man can give is that he can’t help himself. But what else can I say but that? For sometimes I can’t.”

There was a kind of despair in his voice; not self-loathing but despair at his own helplessness against inner forces.

“Are you in love with Norah Blackwell?” I forced myself to say. “In love?” He shrugged. “It all started with my trying to help her. She was confused. She’s never had much of a chance.”

“She’s also an attractive girl.”

“Yes. Especially to a man of imagination.”

“I think Catherine understands that.”

His voice changed. “But she doesn’t understand the meaning of Spain and I can’t make her see my side of it at all. If I didn’t adore Kate – if I didn’t worship her –” He turned away and then back again. “These people” – a sweep of his hand toward Montreal – “these people think I’m a Red because I want to help the Spanish Loyalists. My God, how stupid can they be! I’m not a revolutionary. I see a thing that has to be done – like tonight – and I do it. It gets damned lonely bucking the current all the time.” His eyes stared into mine. “Have you the slightest idea how lucky you are, not being born with my temperament?”

Below us the city shimmered in its lights, around us the hospital was still. The sweet, gentle air of the April evening kept coming in.

Jerome, motionless and massive in the shadows, was silent for nearly a minute.

Then he said: “If I’d been raised like you and Kate maybe I wouldn’t feel the way I do about all this. But do you know, George – it’s always seemed to me an incredible privilege to belong to civilization.”

I said nothing. “You people take it for granted. I don’t. One more big war and it can go so fast. A life can go so fast. And when it’s gone?”

He lifted his hand and shrugged. A moment later he began talking again in a soft, gentle voice.

“In my work I often have to see old men die. They could live if – if they were younger. It’s as simple as that. Old men are running our civilization now. Men like Rodgers. Well-meaning men, but old and tired. They want to be left in peace. They hope if they look the other way the tiger will eat somebody else.” He hesitated. “I understand Kate better than she knows. I understand how hard it’s been for her. With that heart of hers, of course she wants to be left in peace.” Another pause. “But unless fascism is stopped in Spain, she won’t be. There’ll be a war we’ll probably lose. I know that’s what fascism is. It’s not political at all, it’s simply the organization of every murderous impulse in the human being.”

He got up and I rose with him, and for a moment longer he brooded out over the city.

“George, I’m not clever. Maybe I’m wrong in this, but I really believe it. The old countries which gave us our civilization are tired of being civilized. But people like me, people born on the fringes, we really care. When I grew up in Halifax” – he turned and looked at me with a shy small smile – “do you know what I used to dream about? I used to dream of a city on top of a hill – Athens perhaps. It was white and it was beautiful, and it was a great privilege to enter it. I used to dream that if I worked hard all my life, and tried hard all my life, maybe some day I’d be allowed within its gates. And now I see the fascists besieging that city and a handful of Spanish peasants holding out inside. They’re dying for lack of medical care. So what is my duty? Tell me that – what is my duty?”

CHAPTER II

In my years of work as a political commentator I have come to a conclusion which shocks some of my friends who think of politics as a rational occupation. I believe that most international crises are like gigantic mystery plays in which obscure and absolutely irrational passions are handled by politicians, and viewed by the public, in a form of ritual akin to primitive religious rites. Hardly anything anyone says or thinks in a time of political crisis is likely to be rational or a representation of the facts. The crisis is almost never about the outward things with which it professes to concern itself. Also no political crisis ever blows up quickly. It matures underground for years and months, the chemical ingredients are various and many. So it is within a nation, a human group or a city, and it often happens that the fulminate which fires the explosion is something nobody notices. We forget how in those days Spain was the stage on which a multitude of passions met. The big war which followed – very possibly because the powers refused to face what Spain meant – has made most of us forget what the very mention of the Spanish Civil War used to do to people’s minds. It was the fulminate to so many conflicting fears and hopes that it caused explosions thousands of miles away from Madrid and Barcelona.

The night after Jerome operated on Shatwell’s widow it caused an explosion in Montreal, and when it was over the newspapers pretended to be astonished that such an affair could happen in the city. But there was no reason why they should have been astonished, for the ingredients to make that particular explosion had been there for years.

My own part in the affair began quietly enough. Around noon the phone in my parents’ flat rang and I discovered Arthur Lazenby on the other end of the line.

“I suppose you know tonight’s the night when Jerome introduces this Spanish tank officer?” Arthur said. “Are you going?”

“I’d been thinking of it.”

“Then let’s eat some spaghetti first and go together.”

Over our supper Lazenby talked with more excitement than I had ever heard from him. He looked lean, hungry and fanatical, something was on fire in him, but in a singular way he seemed happy and fulfilled. The successful, middle-aged Lazenby I know now has a dead face, but not the young one of that evening.

“There’s going to be trouble tonight,” he said over our coffee. “What kind of trouble?”

“You remember that priest who stopped the Loyalist priest from speaking this winter?”

“I know who he is. Isn’t that the time they had to hire a hotel suite and then the management was unable to get them out legally and turned out the lights to stop the meeting?”

“No, that was another meeting and another Spaniard. This priest orders his students to break up all meetings in favor of the Loyalists. He tells the priest-ridden fools the Loyalists are anti-Christ. You wait – there’ll be trouble tonight.”

The Mayor had evidently come to the same conclusion, for when we reached the hall we found police all over the place. They were stolidly good-natured in the way of most Montreal cops, but as we went in we had to pass between two men in plain clothes whose eyes were very sharp indeed.

“The rcmp,” said Lazenby.

Inside the hall the atmosphere was electric because the communists had packed the house. There was a solid bloc of them in the middle, and they were ominously silent and disciplined. The hall filled up and there was no hint of trouble except for this unaccountable air of tension. Then half a dozen extra-large cops came in and posted themselves at the doors, where they stood impassively surveying the house.

Suddenly there was a loud, organized hissing and the cry: “The Cossacks!”

It sounded so foreign I was startled, and yet I should not have been. Most of the communists that night were Jewish; some had been born in Poland and Russia, and those who had not were the sons of parents who had emigrated to escape the pogroms. A considerable Jewish quarter had slowly emerged between the French and English sections of the city, and the depression had hit the Jews – at least in their minds – harder than it had hit any other racial group in the city.

I want to be clear about this. To me the Jews are the senior people of civilization and it annoys me that I am unable to say that some of my best friends are Jews without being accused of sneering at a people whose tradition I reverence. However, some of my best friends are, and one of them tells me that it is very easy for a Jew who leaves the synagogue, especially for one who left it in the 1930s, to become a communist. In Montreal quite a few had done this and had broken their parents’ hearts, and the guilt they felt for having done so had made them all the more bitter. By no means all the communists in Montreal in those days were Jews, but I think it a fact that it was the Jews who provided the passion. Who could blame them? For they knew, while the French and English blocs did not, exactly what Hitler was preparing for all of us.

“The Cossacks!” the cry rang out again. “The Cossacks!” When the platform party came out the hissing changed to applause, the applause to foot-stamping and the foot-stamping to cheers. The first man out looked like a middle-aged shoe clerk, the second like a tallyman on the docks, the third was the Spanish tank officer and the fourth was Jerome. The Spaniard had a long scar down a swarthy cheek, he was lean and fanatic and as proud as a matador. The central bloc in the hall broke into the Internationale and looking down the aisle I saw the mild faces of a pair of Presbyterian ministers staring in surprise. The platform party stood at attention to the workers’ hymn and all but Jerome raised their clenched fists. Then Jerome, seeing the others doing it, did the same. The hymn ended and silence fell with a crash.

The shoe-clerk in a toneless voice introduced Jerome as a great doctor, a great scientist, a great friend of the working class. He spoke as though Jerome was already a member of the Communist party, and as I listened I thought of what Jack Christopher had said about Jerome allowing himself to be used, and I felt cold and guilty. For that Jerome was being used now was obvious. The excitement of the crowd had worked on him. His own impetuosity, his own generous, reckless way of throwing himself into a moment and responding to the emotions of others – all this sucked him out of any restraint he might otherwise have had. He said things that night he would not have uttered had he kept his head. He sounded to an untrained ear more like a communist than the shoe-clerk had done, and at every point he made the crowd barked like dogs.

The Spaniard rose and for three-quarters of an hour he spoke in halting French all the more moving because of a certain grim naïveté in his manner and choice of words. He told us about horrors he had seen in Spain. He spoke of the murder of his parents by the fascists, of the hope of the Spanish people had had before the Moors came in under Franco, and the passion of the Spanish war reached us even through the communist jargon he employed. He was arrogant, but in a way he was noble. I could not like him; I had the impression that if he ever achieved power he would be merciless. But he was obviously brave, he was fanatical, and he was literal. It was my impression that he had not been a communist for a long time and had become one only because the communists seemed to offer him hope. He ended his speech, raised his clenched fist and received a standing ovation. Then the central bloc, as though on a word of command, broke into the marching song of the German detachment of the International Brigade. It was called Freiheit and when they sang it in German it sounded like a Teutonic paean. They were still singing when the riot began.

The riot started with a ripe fruit which sailed over the heads of the crowd and squelched on the wall just behind Jerome’s head. Jerome came to his feet with his bulldog jaw outthrust. Excited and stirred by the Spaniard, he had reverted to the primitive and if I ever saw a man thirsting for a fight it was Jerome at that moment. The Spaniard stood immobile and stately with folded arms, the shoe-clerk smirked and looked well pleased, but Jerome stepped forward to the edge of the platform and his very aspect was a challenge announcing that if there was anyone who wanted trouble, he was ready to oblige him. I turned and saw the black berets of French-Canadian students crowding in and the surge of the people in the back. Then I saw berets running down the central aisle toward the platform.

“The Cossacks have let the fascists in!” one of the communists screamed.

Fists began swinging and I heard French voices crying “Sales Juifs” while others responded with “sauvage”, “fascist” and “pea-soup.” The flash bulbs of newspaper reporters began popping and a body of cops following the students down the aisle began to take control of the spectators. Three black berets climbed the platform and made for the speakers and Jerome, his eyes glittering, his body moving craftily despite his limp, slipped a punch and landed a solid right on a student’s jaw. The student was knocked clean off the platform and disappeared and Jerome’s eyes gleamed with joy. More students milled up and Jerome was in the center of a tangle of them, doing all right for himself, and then the police went up to the platform and began pulling the fighters apart.

“Let’s get out of here!”

It was Lazenby talking and pointing to the cops with one hand and to a side door with another. He disappeared while I stood where I was, wondering what to do. By now the police had the riot under control and solid blue uniforms were marshalling the crowd from the center aisle to the side doors. I was pushed out in the mêlée and found myself next to Professor John David, who said excitedly that it was quite a night. In the street there were several paddy wagons, a crowd of loafers and about twenty cops, and everyone looked quiet and orderly except for one character who was being pushed by a pair of enormous cops into the back of a paddy wagon. His mouth was opening and closing very fast and I heard him scream that if they didn’t let him go he would sue them for false arrest. The cops threw him in, closed the door on him and left him there.

I waited around thinking about Catherine and feeling shocked and rotten and wondering what to do. Now that the communists had made their demonstration, they were quiet and orderly. A few of them stood around, but most of them moved off singly or in small groups in an easterly direction. I saw no sign of Lazenby and forgot about him, and after a while I went to a cop and asked him what had happened to the platform party. He gave me a stolid look and did not answer. Then I walked around to the back of the building and saw a police automobile drawn up before the back door with one cop behind the wheel, and two more standing outside talking to a trio of students in black berets. I asked one of them in French what had happened to the platform party, but he did not answer. I waited about four minutes and then the door opened and they all came out: the shoe clerk, the tallyman, the Spaniard and Jerome, and directly behind them was a woman I recognized as Norah Blackwell. Jerome had a mouse under his left eye and was laughing as though he had enjoyed himself. Norah came up to him and took his arm, Jerome gave her a quick kiss, then all of them piled into the police car and were driven off. This happened in less than thirty seconds.

“What are you doing?” I asked the sergeant in French. “Arresting the speakers?”

He evidently thought I was a reporter, for he replied with courtesy. “No, monsieur, we are protecting the speakers.” There was nothing more to see or do at this hall, so I walked away, and as I came around the corner I saw a familiar figure ahead of me, quickened my step and overtook Adam Blore.

“Were you at that goddamned meeting?” he asked me. “I certainly was.”

“Did you ever hear such crap in your life?” He let out a sneering laugh. “Well, was I right or wasn’t I about Martell and that little Blackwell bitch? He’s fallen for her like a tree in a swamp. Where are you going?”

“Home, I guess.” “I’m looking for a woman. There’s nothing like a show like tonight’s to serve as an aphrodisiac for some of these little puritan girls. Down on Dorchester Street it would cost me two bucks, but with them all I have to do is say I hate Franco.”

We parted company and I turned in the direction of the university and walked until I ended in the little street where Jerome and Catherine lived. There was no light in the living room, but knowing Catherine was home I went up the steps and rang the bell. When nothing happened I walked through the tradesmen’s lane to the back and looked up at the bedroom windows. They were all dark. Catherine might be asleep or she might be lying awake, but with all of those windows dark it was certain Jerome had not come home.

Leaving the quiet area of the university under a rising last-quarter moon, I walked down to St. Catherine and saw by a clock that it was only ten minutes after ten. I walked slowly along in the streaming crowds of St. Catherine Street on a Saturday night: the unemployed shuffling with the noise of a river, the young couples with petty jobs emerging arm in arm from the movie houses, the trams clanging, the lights glaring, the popcorn smell on the corner of Peel, the vendors selling the bulldog edition of the Gazette, the grit and the torn scraps of newspaper and the throb of downtown Montreal after dark. I boarded a westbound tram and when I reached my parents’ flat in N.D.G. they were both up and surprised to see me home so soon. My mother inquired about dear Catherine and my father, happy in his shirtsleeves after several hours at his work bench, produced a telegram he had received that morning.

“They’re going to take my can opener,” he said, and his sheep dog’s face beamed.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” said my mother. “Who’s going to take what can opener?” I asked, and both their faces fell.

“But George, you know all about it. Father showed you his can opener months ago.”

“Here, George, read this.” And Father handed me the telegram. I read it and learned that the Acme Home Industrial Development Corporation of Buffalo, N.Y., was at least interested in Father’s can opener.

“This time I decided to make something simple and indispensable – something everyone wants,” said Father, smiling. “I got the idea from reading about King C. Gillette in a magazine. You know, the razor man. He had a theory. Invent something which becomes indispensable to a man the moment he has it, but something which wears out quickly and has to be replaced. Now take this can opener. Think of the number of times you’ve been on a picnic and used the old fashioned thing that jigs and jags, and you end up by cutting yourself and leaving the top of the can like the edge of a saw. Wait – I’ll show you the thing itself.”

Father darted into his bedroom and returned with a gadget that looked like an old-fashioned, medium-sized jack-knife. He opened it up and it turned into the kind of can opener you now see screwed into kitchen walls, but with a difference: this one was anchored to a tripod which could be held onto the ground.

“If you don’t mind me saying so, Father, this thing seems a little flimsy.”

“But that’s the point. It’s meant to be flimsy. It will break somewhere, or bend somewhere, after a month or two. But during that time it will work, and it will carve the tops off cans as neatly as King C. Gillette’s blue blade shaves off beards, and once a family has owned one, it will never be without one again.”

Suddenly I felt exhausted. I looked up from the sofa, handed the gadget back and said: “That’s wonderful, Father.”

“You really think so, George? I value your opinion, old man. You’re not pretending?”

“Of course I think it’s wonderful.” “I’ve always known your father was wonderful,” Mother said. “And I’ve always known he’d be recognized.”

“What happened to that crossbow?” I asked him. Father laughed. “Oh, that! When I became a man I put away childish things.”

He embraced his wife and kissed her as though he had just married her; I said good-night and made ready for bed.

The next day was Sunday and I went to the Martell’s apartment just before noon and found Catherine in a housecoat. She sent Sally upstairs on some pretext so that we could be alone.

“I suppose you were there last night?”

I nodded. “I wasn’t, of course. I haven’t gone to one of his meetings in months. Perhaps I should have gone to them all. Perhaps that’s been the trouble.” “How is Jerome today?”

“I wouldn’t know. I haven’t seen him.”

“You mean, he didn’t come home?”

“He called up around midnight to say he was all right and that he had to look after this Spaniard. He told me to sleep and get my rest. I hardly slept all night.”

“I came here after the meeting,” I said. “I thought it might have been you who rang the doorbell.” She got up and rearranged some glass objects on her mantel-piece and spoke to me with her back turned.

“My father was a great reader, and when I was a girl I remember one of his favorite poems was by an ancient Greek. Something about the turn of a dragonfly’s wing.”

“Like the turn of a dragonfly’s wing, so rapid the change,” I said.

“So you know it, too.”

“Is there anything I can do, Catherine?” Still with her back to me, she said: “Only give me a normal heart. Only give me enough strength to be a normal woman.”

I said nothing and stared at the floor. “I’ve been reading the Bible lately,” she said. “Do you know the Ninetieth Psalm?”

“No.”

“Nobody ever reads it any more, I suppose. They should. ‘Thou turnest man to destruction and sayest: return, ye children of men.’ Yes indeed all our days now are consumed in somebody’s anger. Well, George –” she turned and faced me and her whole face was pain, and at the same time beautiful. “I think you’d better go now.”

“Catherine!” But I got to my feet. “Yes, I think you’d better go, for he may be home any time now.” Her large eyes looked into mine. “Was the Blackwell girl there last night?”

I would have liked to lie, but it was useless to lie to Catherine, so I nodded.

“Was she there in her capacity as a communist, or as a woman?”

“As both, I’d say.”

I told her briefly about the scene on the stage and about seeing Jerome and the platform party drive away.

“She could be very attractive and appealing,” Catherine said, “especially to a man like Jerome who always wants to help people. He’s spoken to me about her quite frankly. He’d like me to like her. Of course he would, poor dear.” An elliptical smile. “Men seem so strange to me sometimes. Probably we seem equally strange to them. However – from the way she’s behaving and from what he’s told me – I’m afraid he’ll rue the day he looked at her, for she can’t be judged normally. I tell you, she’s an unbalanced personality, and I think Jerome must have been tired of her a few minutes after he first made love to her. If only he wouldn’t feel responsible for her! But she’ll see to it that he does.”

I lit a cigarette and looked out the window and for a while neither of us spoke.

“Well,” she said finally, “if he must go to Spain, then he must go to Spain. I know he’s sincere in that, and I wish this girl were out of the picture for the sake of our dignity. People will say he’s going on account of her. He tells me a personal life doesn’t matter in a time when millions are going to be killed. I suppose he’s right, but I’m a woman and a personal life is all I can understand.”

Then she said very simply: “Jerome and I loved each other too much. I haven’t been able to rest him. He needs rest and this winter I failed. One gets so tired of hurting and being hurt. One gets so tired of thinking.”

I looked out the window at a street empty save for a cat washing its face on the curb.

“I loathe that girl for what she’s done to our dignity,” Catherine said. Then she shrugged: “But Jerome is unconscious of this, so why should I be? He’s put me into an impossible position, and he doesn’t seem to realize it. He’s put me into a position where I can’t help him. If I tell him the truth about that girl – at least what I think is the truth – what else will I seem to be but a jealous woman? How can I tell him to stop feeling guilty to her when he also feels guilty to me?”

“Is he as mixed up as that?”

“I’ve been badly mixed up myself, so how can I blame anyone for being the same? I feel useless. I seem to be one of the few people you know who distrusts everything about the communists. Lots of people join them because they’re idealists, but the real communists hate too much. I can’t accept Jerome’s view of them. Now – on account of this girl, who is also a communist – I can’t even talk to him about that. Women can be frightful deliberately, but men can be frightful out of sheer chivalry.”

She got up and with her head held so high that for all her small stature she seemed tall, she said: “In spite of all this I’m going to make one more attempt to talk to the silly man. But I’m not going to pretend I see anything good in the communists.”

She went to the door and turned: “Now George, you’d better go, for he’ll be back soon.”

Bumblingly I said: “I’m sure he didn’t spend the night with Norah. I’m sure he just went off with the speakers and got talking and didn’t come home.”

Her smile made me feel like a child: “I know the difference between love and sex, George. And I know that what he feels for Norah Blackwell – apart from a normal desire – is pity and not love.”

The following Monday morning, eating breakfast beside McNish in the Waterloo dining hall with my back to the admirals of the Red and my face to the admirals of the Blue, I learned from the morning paper that Saturday night’s riot had outraged opinion in Montreal, and that the real cause of the outrage had not been the Spaniard, the students or the communists in the audience, but the presence of Jerome and the role he had played.

It is a curious city, Montreal, and in this story I keep returning to the fact that it is. Strangers never understand its inner nature, and immigrant families, even from other parts of Canada, can live here two generations without coming to know it in their bones. I am absolutely certain that Montreal is the subtlest and most intricate city in North America. With her history she could not have been otherwise and survived, for here the French, the Scotch and the English, over two centuries, have been divided on issues which ruin nations and civilizations, yet have contrived to live in outward harmony. This is no accident. They understand certain rules in their bones.

As a born Montrealer, I had been startled and shocked the night of Jerome’s meeting even though I had gone to it in sympathy with its apparent aims. Now when I read the account of it in the Monday morning paper I trembled for Jerome and Catherine. This newspaper account could not possibly make a difference to the shoe clerk, the tallyman or the mob which had shouted “Here come the Cossacks!” They were outsiders. But Jerome, no matter how much an outsider he might have felt himself to be, could not be dismissed as one because he was involved in the most respected institution the city has, the medical profession which has been great here since the days of Osler. By virtue of his position at the Beamis Memorial, Jerome had been at least half-way inside the Montreal Thing whether he wanted to be or not. Had he been a born Montrealer he would have realized what he had done, but he was not a born Montrealer and I was sure that even now he did not.

The press that morning had done something it seldom does here: it had featured a local riot. This I knew to be the result of a deliberate editorial decision to declare war on Jerome personally. Not only did they make a front page story of the riot; most of page three was covered with pictures of it, and the pictures made me feel cold all over. The caption under one of them was: “Dr. Martell Gives the Clenched Fist Salute.” A lot of people at the meeting had given the clenched fist salute, and Jerome himself had given it too, but I remembered the instant when this particular picture was taken and the reason why Jerome’s fist was up and clenched was that a rioter was making for him and he was making to hit the rioter on the jaw. In another picture the stage was a confusion of policemen, students and speakers, and in the middle of that mêlée was Jerome again. This picture was even more damning than the first, for there was something absolutely sordid and undignified about it. Jerome’s eyes shone with the joy of battle, beside him the morose face of the Spanish tank officer looked sinister, and the last straw was Norah Blackwell. This picture, taken after I had left the hall, showed Norah clinging to Jerome’s arm with a face rapt and staring at his. How she had got there I could not know, but I guessed she must have listened to the speeches from the wings and come out to stand by her hero when the fighting began.

Worse still was the story on the front page. It was under the byline of a man called Irving Dublin, whom I knew to be a crypto-communist, and Dublin had worded his piece to make it appear to everyone that Jerome was not merely a humanitarian doctor with an interest in the Spanish Loyalists, but an actual member of the communist party. I realized that Dublin had done this deliberately in order still further to isolate Jerome and drive him all the way over into the arms of the communists.

I turned to the editorial page and found what I expected: a scandalized sermon asking how it was possible for a man with the educational advantages and public position of Dr. Martell to associate himself with such a disgraceful affair. And when I read all this I felt guilty and lacking, for I had known Montreal and I should have warned him of the danger he was entering. I should have listened to Jack Christopher, who also understood Montreal, and I should have recognized my own responsibility in even tacitly encouraging Jerome to behave as he did.

I had to wait a fortnight before I learned the details of the aftermath, for I was held at Waterloo on weekend duty. Every day I searched the papers, but they told me nothing. Their silence was also typical of the Montreal technique in an affair of this sort: having fired their broadside the editors let the matter sleep. They printed a few letters expressing horror at Jerome’s behavior, but none in support of him, and then they let the whole thing drop.

When I finally reached town, the first person I called was Jack Christopher, who was at home and asked me to drop around. Somehow the details of his story don’t seem to matter, but here they are.

Dr. Rodgers, returning to the city from Detroit on the Monday morning after the riot, read about it while eating his breakfast on the train. It would be presumptuous of me to guess what the old man felt, but I can’t believe that his feelings were simple. He may have felt a bitter pleasure because Jerome had finally delivered himself into his hands, but he came from an old Montreal family, he was the son of a judge, in his youth he had worked under Sir William Osler and he was a patrician by nature and training. It is impossible for me to believe that a man like Dr. Rodgers could ever have felt it necessary to prove his worth to Jerome or to anyone else in Canada. He was certainly outraged, and he may even have reproached himself for not having taken steps about Jerome long before.

But this is guess work; I never knew Dr. Rodgers and what I have is hearsay.

According to Jack Christopher, the old man did not reach the hospital until mid-morning, and by then Sir Rupert Irons, the chairman of the board, had twice called to speak to him. Rodgers knew what Irons wanted, and it was typical of him that even at this moment he ignored Irons’ request that he get in touch with him the moment he arrived. In Rodgers’ book a man like Irons, for all his wealth, was a parvenu. The old surgeon went to his office, read his correspondence, dictated a few letters and then made his customary rounds.

It was in the course of these that he discovered that on the night before the riot Jerome had operated on Mrs. Moffat. He at once consulted with Dr. Crawford, who had passed his kidney stone but was still resting in one of the hospital beds. After learning the details from Crawford, he returned to his office, read a report of the case and passed out the word that he would be pleased to see Dr. Martell at the Doctor’s earliest convenience. As Jerome was then in the operating room, the two men did not meet until nearly noon.

With his capacity for sensing the hurt in another person, Jerome immediately understood that the old surgeon had been deeply humiliated by the Moffat case. What he had done or failed to do in the first operation I don’t know, but it was obvious that he had slipped up somewhere.

Jerome, with the quick kindness which was the other side of his quick pugnacity, made the first move.

“Please don’t concern yourself about this case,” he said. “It’s a thing that could have happened to anybody. I’ve had a thing like that happen to me once.”

This remark, Jack told me, was the most unfortunate he could have made under the circumstances to an older and more experienced man.

The old doctor looked at the younger one, hated him, and said: “Since this case has been taken out of my hands, we will please not discuss it any further.”

“But it’s not been taken out of your hands.” Jerome gave his gentlest and most sincere smile. “I just filled in because there was an emergency.”

“We will not discuss it.”

Then Dr. Rodgers picked up the morning paper, jogged it across the desk to Jerome and examined the younger man’s face.

“Yes,” Jerome said, “I’ve read it, too.”

Rodgers continued to regard him, and Jerome, sensing implacable hostility, flared out.

“What I do outside the hospital is my own business, Dr. Rodgers. I don’t happen to believe that the medical profession is a priesthood. That meeting was concerned with the most important subject in the world today. Look what happened in Germany. The men of science, the professors, the medical men – they were all so correctly professional they did nothing at all. They left what resistance there was to a handful of workers and unemployed. And now look what’s happened to them.”

The old man raised his eyebrows. “This is not Germany, this is Montreal. We have no Nazis here.”

“No?”

“The name of this hospital, according to my count, appears five times in this morning’s paper. I’m afraid that what you do in your spare time has a great deal of connection with this hospital.”

“It wasn’t us who started the riot.” Suddenly Jerome began talking like a schoolboy. “It was a crowd of students duped by that fascist priest. It was a perfectly orderly meeting till they came in and started fighting.”

After a moment’s appraising silence, the old man put his finger down on the account of Jerome’s speech.

“Did you actually say the things reported here?”

“I can’t remember every word I said, but what’s the matter with what’s reported here? If you’d take your blinders off, you’d see it’s true.”

“You say it was an orderly meeting when you admit you made these statements? These are generalizations of the wildest kind. These are seditious accusations. These are statements no man of science should ever make anywhere. I shouldn’t be surprised if they bring you within range of the courts.”

Jerome looked at him and said: “Do you think you can stop fascism by closing your eyes and pretending it’s not there?”

The old man looked back at him: “We will not argue, please. There have been quite enough generalizations. We will confine ourselves to some facts.” His finger came down on one of the pictures. “Is it a fact that this young woman has been a nurse in this hospital?”

“Yes, she’s Mrs. Blackwell.”

“May I ask what she was doing in the middle of all this?”

“Isn’t that her business?”

The old man leaned back in his chair and surveyed Jerome. “What’s come over you? You have often been rude and aggressive, but I put that down to your temperament and possibly to your background. You were a promising surgeon, and that was enough for me.” A pause. “I have great respect for your wife and I have known her family for years.” Another pause. “I am an old fashioned man, as you have been heard to point out more than once in the corridors of this establishment, even to some of the housemen. I don’t believe in washing dirty linen in public. I am even prepared to close my eyes to behavior I deplore so long as it does not expose the parties concerned to vulgar gossip. But” – again his finger came down on the photograph – “you have not only displayed your dirty linen in public, you have actually flaunted it in front of a newspaper camera.” He stared at Jerome with his ascetic face, and Jerome flushed. “This particular sample of dirty linen, Dr. Martell, will no longer be associated with this hospital.”

Jerome jumped to his feet: “Take that back, Dr. Rodgers.” The old man regarded him calmly and said: “No, I will not take it back. It was a considered statement. I will be even more explicit. I will inform you that Mrs. Blackwell has been discharged from the nursing staff of this hospital. She will probably find it very difficult to attach herself to the staff of any other.”

“It’s not her fault. You’re unjust to her. She needs the job to live. She got mixed up in this riot the same way I did. What has she done wrong?”

The old man looked at Jerome and said: “I have received word that Sir Rupert Irons wishes me to get in touch with him immediately. I can guess what he wishes to talk about and what he will demand. So far I have not got in touch with him.” A pause. “I am an old-fashioned man, Dr. Martell, as I have already mentioned. It is contrary to my principles that any hospital, school or university should have its policies and actions dictated by business men in any matter which lies outside a business man’s competence.” Another pause. “I dislike you, Doctor Martell, and for a reason which has not occurred to you. People like you place men of responsibility in an intolerable position. I have protected you for two years – not for your sake but for the sake of the principle. But you continue to make it intolerable for me. Moreover, you do this wilfully. You do it because you enjoy making trouble.” “That’s absurd!” said Jerome. “Is it? Please examine the situation more closely. If I discharge you from the staff, I will be vilifled by you and by all your communist friends. You will say I am part of the capitalist conspiracy. You will say – and you will be right – that your work here has been satisfactory, and you will add that your private life is your own. But this propaganda” – again the finger tapped the newspaper – “aims at the destruction of the entire social order. Do you deny it?”

“Of course I deny it. Do you think –”

The old man waved his hand: “Medicine and science are sacred to me. They should be to you. No medical man or man of science ought to touch this – this vulgar filth.”

Jerome sat in silence and after a while he said: “I will not vilify you if you demand my resignation. Instead I offer you my resignation. I’m sorry, for I was happy here. I think I did good work. I’m grateful for many things you’ve done for me. I never wanted to be your enemy, but you live in another world from mine, and I think mine is the real one.”

The old man sat still, then shrugged: “We might have been friends. But as we are not friends, I will not shake hands with you now. I deplore your character and your behavior and your principles – or lack of them. As a surgeon you might have had a great career, but you will never have one now. I accept your resignation and I will inform the board it was given by you freely without my asking for it. You have ruined yourself.”

That was the story told me by Jack Christopher, and when he ended I asked: “Has he really ruined himself?”

“He certainly has in Montreal. He’ll never get another hospital appointment here after this. He’s a surgeon, and a surgeon without a hospital – he’s ruined himself all over the country.”

“What will he do?”

“I can only guess, and I don’t like what I’m guessing.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Do I have to spell it out? Where else can be go but to the people who’ve captured him? That damned girl! I could poison her, for she’s poisoned him.”

“Jack,” I said, “I don’t think that girl has anything important to do with it. He’d have been mixed up in this anyway.”

He said wearily: “I suppose you’re right. But that’s not what people will say. And he did let himself get mixed up with her. I don’t think anything like that happened before, but it might have. There’s a lot of animal in him.”

“There’s a lot of animal in any normal man, isn’t there?”

Jack said bitterly: “All right, to hell with Norah Blackwell. But this thing that people like you are feeling is like a disease. Jerome’s sick with it. What’s the matter with you all?” He stopped. “Have you seen Catherine?”

“Not for over a fortnight.”

“Neither have I. I hadn’t the courage. Do you know where Jerome is?”

“I was going to ask you that.”

“I don’t know where he is. Catherine went up north to the lake with Sally. She’s there now.”

“I’ll go up tomorrow and see her.”

“You’d better borrow my car, then. I have to run down to New York for the weekend and I won’t be needing it.”

CHAPTER III

April had turned into May and the world was bright and clear: cool air and warm sun, a powder of buds on the hardwoods, fields skunk-cabbage green against the heavy viridian of spruce and fir, the muscles and bones of the land visible as an athlete’s under the light dust of its first verdure. All the waters were cold, and crossing the bridge at Sainte-Rose I saw the wash of the river coming around the northern curve of Montreal Island with eddies as smooth as the backs of enormous jellyfish. It was almost hot under the mid-morning sun and yet the air was cool, only the striking of the sun hot, and further north when I crossed a freshet the white water from the hills had a breath like snow. I drove up into the Laurentians and after a while turned off into a valley, then up over a hairpin bend into a trail embraced by firs and maples until I descended in a pair of brown ruts to the cottage. When I got out of the car there was a sough in the firs and I wished I had been here at dawn when the birds sang. Little waves danced on the lake, ferns had sprung in fiddleheads, trilliums were white stars under the trees and the daffodils Catherine had planted five years ago swayed in the breeze like golden dancers. Looking down the bluff to the shore I saw the red flank of Jerome’s beached canoe.

Catherine was alone on the porch in a deck chair staring into the distance.

“George!” she said, and without rising she took my hand and indicated the empty chair beside her.

I sat down and for a long while neither of us tried to talk. Then she said: “I’ve been losing myself in this. Look and look. I’m going to start painting in a week or two. I’m going to learn how.”

“How do you feel?”

“If I could paint, I feel as if it would never matter how I felt about anything. Jerome is so fond of saying that you must belong to something larger than yourself. So look at all this in front of us. Look at it, George.”

Silence, and after a while I murmured the line about one generation passing away, another coming and the earth remaining.

“I don’t know about all these big things. Only about the little human specks passing through what I’m looking at now. I never knew before that the earth has bones.”

“How are you?” I asked again. “I’m fine, I think. I lifted too many things yesterday and got too tired, but the Stephensons from down the lake drove Sally and me up and helped us unpack. They were so kind. Jerome used to like them, but they’re conservatives, so now of course he doesn’t like them. He’s still in town. I think he’s coming out this afternoon. You know he’s resigned from the hospital, I suppose?”

“Jack told me about it last night.”

“Poor Jack, he’s so upset by all this. He’s so perfectly organized, and he’s going to be such a good doctor, but he’ll never be a Jerome. He just can’t spend himself the way Jerome does. He doesn’t know how.”

There was another long silence and again it was I who broke it. “Will you be leaving Montreal now?”

I won’t be leaving. No, Sally and I will stay in the same old place.”

“But Jerome?”

“Well you see, after that meeting he won’t be able to practice here any more. The girl played such a charming part in that meeting, didn’t she? It was so dignifled, that picture of her in the paper. I suppose he’d have gone to Spain anyway, but after that meeting there was no more question about it. He’s going all right.”

She said it just like that, but the emotion underneath her words was the more ominous because superficially her voice was brittle and bright.

She smiled in a way I cannot describe: “I’m not sure when he leaves, but it will be just as soon as he can complete his arrangements. That includes turning over his old patients to other men.”

“Catherine dear – I hate all this.”

“So do I. I just loathe all this. But it’s what’s happening, and if I married a man as impulsive as Jerome, don’t you think I should have known all along that something of the kind would happen?”

“He’ll come back.”

“He says so, of course. This week he’s been excited and quite manic. The last time I saw him he reminded me of somebody I knew who joined the Oxford Group. The light on the road to Damascus. For a few days after his scene with Dr. Rodgers he was very depressed, but you know Jerome. The moment he made up his mind what to do next, he bounced up again.”

I stared at the bright wilderness and tried to force myself to accept that what I was hearing was real.

“Anyway,” I said, “it’s just Spain, and the girl has nothing to do with that. She’s not going with him, is she?”

“Apparently not,” she said. “But she does have a talent for the undignified, don’t you think?” Calmly she went on: “I wish the coming week or fortnight or however long it’s going to be were over and done with. Jerome and I have had such wonderful years, and we love each other so much that the time between now and when he goes will be horrid. After that?” A smile. “Sally and I will manage somehow after that. I only hope he’ll manage half as well.”

Forcing myself to be factual, I asked how she was fixed for money. “There’ll be enough for a while. Jerome says this mess at the hospital means nothing in the long run. He thinks it’s cleared the air, as a matter of fact. He calls it a godsend because it’s fixed things for him so there is no choice. So off he goes to the Spanish crusade. He’s sure the big war will start next year or the year after, and then this mess at the hospital will be forgotten by everyone.” I sat in silence staring at the landscape which stared back: form and color and light and shade, useless to farmers, some of the oldest rock in the world cropping out of it, dark green and light green, ancient, mindless, from everlasting to everlasting without any purpose anyone could possibly understand, but there.

“I don’t know what to believe about anything any more,” I said. “Neither do I. It’s strange, not knowing what to believe about anything any more. A lot of us will have to get used to it, though.”

“He loves you. Of that I’m sure.”

“But of course he does. And I love him more than you can understand, for you’ve never been married. In these years we’ve signed ourselves on each other, and we both know that. Of course I don’t understand him. I suppose I know him better than he knows me, but the more we’ve lived together, the greater mysteries we’ve become to each other. He knows me perfectly as a woman, and I know him perfectly as a man, but what is that? Perhaps that’s why he’s panicked, for panicked he has. At the moment he’s not really thinking. He’s just moving ahead like a sleepwalker.”

“Jack Christopher says it’s a disease, this thing he’s caught. I know what he means. I nearly caught it myself.”

“What fools we’ve all been, all us clever people. We were so sure we understood. We were so positive we knew all the answers. We’re not like the man who built his house on the sand. We’re like the man who tore down all the walls of his house in November and then had to face the winter naked. It’s so hard to be married. It’s so hard to keep on going. It’s so hard just to live. Now I suppose we’ve got to make up the rules as we go along, and one gets so tired doing that. It would have been so much simpler and safer to have kept the old rules.”

Sally’s voice broke out from under the porch saying she was hungry and Catherine was glad to stop talking and go inside to prepare a lunch. I left the porch and let Sally show me some daffodils swaying in a tiny bed around the corner of the house.

“They’re mine,” she said. “I planted them last year and Daddy says they’re better than Mummy’s.”

“Well dear, they’re certainly lovely daffodils.”

“Daddy knows everything. He’s coming out this afternoon to be with us. It’s such fun being with Daddy.”

Jerome did come, arriving in his Pontiac at five-thirty with bright eyes and a strained expression on his tough face. He was surprised to see me and also relieved, for this weekend could hardly have been one he looked forward to. What words had passed between him and Catherine I did not know, but I did know that this tough-looking man was very sensitive and that his antennae were acute.

Catherine was resting upstairs when Jerome arrived and Sally, fresh from her afternoon nap, was playing alone in the woods. Jerome stretched out in the long chair and I sat in the one beside it.

“Did Kate tell you I’ve decided to go to Spain?”

“Yes.”

“All the arrangements are made. My ship sails next Friday. Southampton first, a fortnight in London getting things organized, then a freighter from the London docks to Barcelona.”

“Are you joining Bethune’s unit?”

He shook his head. “It’s probably just as well I’m not, for Beth and me in the same outfit – no, this team will be all British except me. Surgical entirely. For front line service wherever they send us.”

In profile he looked very tired, but this bright, tense excitement made his face more arresting than I had ever seen it.

“How long do you plan to be in Spain?”

“For the duration, I suppose. Now, how about a drink?” He went inside and came out with two glasses.

“The water up here in May is so delicious it’s a shame to put whisky into it. But the whisky’s good too, and by God, it’s become a necessity.”

Sipping our drinks we looked out over the lake which now was heavily shadowed along the length of its western shore with the promontories thrusting their outlines far out and deep down, the sun still bright but westerly over the hills. The wind had dropped and in the total silence of the empty north land we heard the musical sigh of a tiny stream coursing through the trees into the lake. Apart from the sound of the stream this stillness in which we sat went all the way north to the Arctic and all the way west to Hudson Bay. A robin swooped down to settle on a patch of manured ground and stood listening for worms.

“I’d like to plant tomorrow,” Jerome said. “It always used to make me feel good getting my hands into the dirt in the spring. But what’s the use now? Kate loves gardening, she’s far better at it than I am, and if I plant she’ll try to keep the damned thing up. What a woman. Did you know she’s studied botany? But she’s too much of a perfectionist, and if I plant that garden – that was part of the trouble, her perfectionism. My God, George, it’s not so easy being me.”

We were silent for a while and I said: “You’re going to miss this place.”

He looked sharply around and his eyes misted: “You think I’m a bastard, don’t you?”

I shook my head.

“You’re in love with Kate and you think I’m deserting her and Sally, don’t you?”

“I didn’t use that word.”

“But you thought it. Like the rest of them, you’re enslaved by words. Desert. It sounds very bad. But nobody owns anyone else, and who the hell do you think you are to keep your nose so clean? It’s not easy being me. Kate and I have had some good years. Who are you to judge?”

“I’m not judging, Jerome.”

“Oh yes, you are. All of you are. Did you ever read a book called Foxe’s Book of Martyrs?”

I could not follow this jump of his mind and shook my head. “My father, I mean my foster-father, was the gentlest man I ever knew. He was probably the only genuine Christian I’ll ever meet in my life. He used to drink a lot of rum. Some old smuggler down in Halifax, some old man he’d done something for, this old man used to deliver the rum to the rectory in a cask at dead of night. There was always a cask in our basement, and Father used to sneak down at all hours for a nip.

“Now my mother, who was a lovely, gentle, kind woman, deplored this. Father was never exactly drunk, but he was never precisely sober, either. Mother deplored his drinking, but she understood why he had to have his rum. Quite literally that man drank rum for the love of God, for it was only when the rum was in him that he felt close to his God and was sure his God loved him. It wasn’t easy being Father, for his own father had given him a hell of a time when he was a boy. Now Mother wasn’t a perfectionist. She understood that, and she loved him, and she didn’t expect the man she loved to be perfect. She accepted his rum because it was a part of his necessity, and she never nagged or tried to change him, even though the doctor told her he’d probably die of cirrhosis of the liver, which he did, and even though she knew perfectly well that people snickered at him and criticized him because they were narrow-minded bastards who thought it a terrible thing for a clergyman to drink, and even though we were dirt poor in a poor parish, and she knew he’d never get out of it or be preferred on account of his habit, she never tried to change him. She took it, George, she took it.”

“And Catherine isn’t taking what’s in you now – is that what you mean?”

A spasm of pain crossed his face and he looked down at his feet. Then he went on:

“I began by talking about Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. My father – this gentle Christian – gave it to me to read when I was thirteen. It’s practically a handbook on torture. But it was right that it was written, and it was right that he should have given it to me, because it happens to be true, and to contain a lot of truth about human nature. Those savage priests of the Reformation time pretended that if Christ had died a horrible death on the cross, it was necessary to invent even worse tortures for sinners. As a doctor I know how fiendishly ingenious they were. Well, I used to wake up nights with my hair on end on account of that book. I saw it all. I wondered how any man, knowing what it would cost, could stand up for what he believed. Then came the war, and I saw this absolutely depersonalized butchery for absolutely nothing.”

Jerome stopped and stared at me with incandescent eyes. “Try and understand this – the fascists have brought back torture, and torture calls for martyrs. And what else is fascism but the logical product of the capitalist system?”

“What do you mean – torture calls for martyrs?”

“Simply this. Unless a man is able to stand up and look the torturer in the eye and say, ‘I’m not afraid,’ torture becomes the way of the world. It’s as simple as that.”

“Is it really as simple as that?”

“No.” He shook his head impatiently. “No, because underneath it all is the plain economic exploitation of a rotten world. The communists are the only people who understand that. How can you pretend they’re not one hundred percent right when they say that at a time like this the life of a single individual isn’t worth a snap of the fingers? Wasn’t Debs right when he said that so long as there was a soul in prison he wasn’t free? What does a single marriage count in a balance like that? It isn’t easy being me. I know what all this means. This evil inside the human animal – the fascists are charming it out like a cobra out of its hole and the capitalists let them do it because they think its good for business. You think I’m abandoning Sally by leaving for Spain. I tell you, if I don’t leave for Spain then I really do abandon her to a future of fascism and concentration camps.”

These words poured out of Jerome like a torrent of lava, and I thought of Catherine with her fragile heart having to live with a force like that, and of a force like that having to live with her fragile heart.

“Jerome,” I stammered, “you’re only a single man, and what can a single man do unless the governments act? Is this reasonable?”

He stared at me and for an instant I felt I was being annihilated. I had felt his force before, but never anything like this. Then he smiled with a surprising new sweetness and touched my knee.

“George, you’re a very nice fellow, and I’m going to say something you may think is an insult. Just because you’re nice, you don’t know what you’re up against. People like you – left to your own devices – you’ll be crushed like nuts in the jaws. You don’t want to fight. Neither do I. But you don’t know how to fight. And I do. I wish I were like you. I really do wish it. I don’t want to fight, George – I tell you, I don’t want to fight. I hate this thing in myself that makes me. But at the same time” – he stared out over the lake – “at the same time let me tell you this. No civilization has a chance unless it has civilized men in it who can and will fight when they have to.”

“All I’ve been thinking about – ” I began. “You think all you’re thinking about is Kate. But I wonder?” His eyes burned against mine, and then they misted. “That wonderful woman, she loves me. She’s a fighter, too. But against her fate, George. And she’s a woman all the way through, and that means she’s a private person. Do I betray her?” A shrug. “I’m honest, George, and honestly I don’t know.”

A long silence fell and his profile brooded over the lake. Jerome loved the stark grandeur of the Laurentian Shield which evoked a response in him it has never called out of me, for I prefer a gentler land where flowers and fruits grow. But now with the sun sloping westward and the shadows of the hills thrusting easterly over the lake, with the clean, innocent smell of the sun-warmed spruce and the utter stillness of this empty land, now I thought it must be unbearable for him to leave this place where he had been happy.

He said slowly and heavily: “A man must belong to something larger than himself. He must surrender to it. God was so convenient for that purpose when people could believe in Him. He was so safe and so remote.” A wistful smile. “Now there is nothing but people. In Russia our generation is deliberately sacrificing itself for the future of their children. That’s why the Russians are alive. That’s why they’re happy. They’re not trying to live on dead myths.”

I said nothing and my thoughts wandered back to Norah Blackwell, and Jerome – one of the most animal-like things about him was his on-and-off capacity to be a medium – suddenly startled me.

“You think I’m a hypocrite, don’t you?”

“I said nothing of the kind, Jerome.”

“But you’re thinking Norah is back of this?”

“Since you ask me, I don’t think she’s helped.”

He passed a hand over his eyes and breathed heavily: “I wish to God I’d never laid eyes on her.”

I said nothing.

“As the world understands the word, I’m not a lecher. I make no excuses. But perhaps you can tell me what there is to protect a man like me against his own impulses?”

For a while I said nothing, but after a time I said: “Do you feel responsible for her?”

“In a way, yes, I do. I suppose you think this thing with her – it’s over now and it never amounted to much – you think it sullies my motives?”

I said nothing. “Norah is very gentle and kind and troubled. Oh well! I’d have gone to Spain in any case. But has she affected my motives? Does this thing with her have anything to do with them?”

I said nothing, he scrutinized my expression and shrugged. “I suppose it does. Can I help my own vitality? But the motives were there anyway, and they have nothing to do with Norah.”

“I was thinking of Catherine.”

He stared at me with deep pain in his face: “Do you think I don’t, too? She tried to use her will against me this winter, and she’s got a strong one.”

“I was thinking of her health.”

“Are you a doctor? Are you her husband? She and I – we’ve set our seals on each other.”

I had a vision of Jerome in his tiny canoe going down the New Brunswick river and of Catherine on the shore trying to beckon him in.

“We’re both casualties,” he said. “She and I.”

“But you’re leaving her.”

“The only way I could do that is to write my own life off. I married her knowing what her heart is. You didn’t marry her. You didn’t take – what’s life and death anyway? When I operate on a serious case I don’t think of saving a life. I think of saving a few years. If the patient’s young, perhaps quite a few years. But in a lot of cases I bargain for five, or three, or even for one.”

I sat without answering and he said: “The only immortality is mankind.”

“Can anyone love a thing as big as that?”

“What’s love to do with what I’m saying?”

“Is Norah going to Spain with you?”

“Not if I know it. My God, but you’ve got a middle-class mind! Do you think this thing is as vulgar as that?”

Had I been older or more experienced I might have been able to stand up against him, but in those days I had no inner authority against a man I had installed as a substitute father in my own mind. In any case I was up against the whole climate of the period, some of which was within myself. To people who had exiled themselves from the establishment, as most of us had at least partially done, the volunteer for Spain had a special aura about him. I rose from my chair and stood by the railing with my back to Jerome looking down the shadowed slope to the lake and again I asked myself how he could bear to leave all this. I remembered Adam Blore’s remark that I was a middle-class man. Jerome had just said the same thing. I knew then better than ever before how greatly I had longed for a home and a family, and how much I would surrender to have them if the chance ever came.

I heard Catherine’s step descending the stair inside the cottage and expected her to appear, but the step receded toward the kitchen at the back.

“I think I’d better leave and go back to town,” I said.

“Don’t go, George. Stay the night.”

“I don’t belong here tonight, Jerome.”

“Yes you do. You’ll always belong here.” A moment later he said quietly: “Look after Kate when I’m gone, will you?”

I faced him: “She’s not my wife. She’s your wife. She doesn’t want me to look after her. She wants her husband to look after her. She wants her home.”

For the first time that day his face became confused; he breathed noisily and I thought that at last I might have reached him. I was totally unprepared for what he said next.

“I said ‘yes’ to Kate when it was her marrying time. If I hadn’t, she’d have disintegrated. Norah had this moronic husband and she thought she was going crazy. I said ‘yes’ to her and perhaps I gave her some respect as a woman. Perhaps I didn’t. It’s so easy to be correct. Perhaps I did wrong. Yes, I was disturbed. Yes, I feel guilty. Yes, yes, yes to all of that. But let me tell you something – everyone takes from somebody else and gives what he’s taken to another. What Kate took from you years ago she gave to me. What she took from me all these years – if I’m killed or if she’s through with me – she’ll give to some other man. And what I took from her” – he stopped and stared out over the lake.

“What about yourself?”

“I’ve written myself off.”

“Why? Kate hasn’t written you off.”

Staring over the lake, he said: “I’m tired.”

I swallowed the last drops in my glass and rose, intending to say good-bye to Catherine, but he called me back.

“Before you go, listen to this – I forgot to tell you earlier. In town I talked to Tom Storey about you. He’s with the cbc. He’s interested and I think he’ll make a job for you. Call him up tomorrow. It’s stupid for you to go on working in that school.”

He reached for his wallet, took out a piece of paper with Storey’s telephone number and I slipped it into my pocket without even thinking about it, much less that this simple action was going to change my life.

In the kitchen I found Catherine standing in front of some dish she was preparing, but her eyes were staring at the wall.

“Is there a thing I can do?”

She shook her head.

“Let me take Sally back to town so you and Jerome can be alone?”

Again she shook her head.

“Jerome tells me he sails next Friday. I’ll be in town early next Friday. I’ll come out by bus and see you.”

She did not turn around. She lifted her head in pride, but she looked fragile as I had never seen her look; she looked beaten.

CHAPTER IV

Driving down that evening from the Laurentian highlands with the sun behind me orange and red, the shadows deep on the road and presently the lights coming on, driving down through Saint-Jerome, Sainte-Rose, onto the island of Montreal and thence into the city itself, I saw virtually nothing around me. I had never before witnessed the break-up of a marriage, and something told me that this was what was happening here. It might be mended, it might grow again, but both of them felt inwardly that they had failed the other. I cursed Norah Blackwell for her part in it even though I knew in my heart it was not basic. Yet she sullied Jerome, she added that nasty touch of sordidness and equivocation to a situation I frankly could not understand. What he said about civilization and defending it was probably true, but I could not believe it was the whole truth. What he said about the fascists charming out evil like a cobra out of its hole sounded truer. But I was not like him and I could not know what his pressures were. I had not seen my mother murdered, I had not escaped in childhood down a forest river to the sea, I had not fought in the war and killed men hand to hand with a bayonet. Nor was I married to Catherine even though I wished that I were. Nor was I a brilliant professional man with revolutionary ideas which the established men in my profession dismissed. But that night as I drove back to Montreal I at least discovered this: that there is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and that the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them. Morality? Duty? It was easy to talk of these things once, but surely it is no accident that in our time the best of men hesitate inwardly before they utter these words? As Jerome said, “What is my duty?” Did not the generals who sent millions to their death in the war feel certain they understood their duty? The time was the 1930s. Everyone I knew remembered what had been done in the name of duty only a decade and a half ago.

In the massed traffic I slowed to a crawl, and it was a long time before I reached Jack Christopher’s place and put his car into the garage. It was nine-thirty and one of those spring nights in Montreal which pull the heart out of you. After the long winter the air was alive with tiny life and billions of insects swarmed about the street lamps. Girls and boys sauntered arm in arm and the air was soft enough to corrupt a saint. I walked past a tavern, smelled its malty breath and went in for a beer, and when I came out it was dark. I walked some more and at ten-fifteen I was mounting the stairway of the musty lodging house I had known so well in my time with Caroline Hall. I rang the bell by the Blackwells’ door and Norah opened.

“Come in, George,” she said.

I had come there hating her. I had come remembering Catherine and prepared to say anything to make her leave Jerome alone. And now as I looked at her in that mean little apartment, her eyes enormous, her face with the inward expression of a woman who at last has known love, her voice gentle as it had always been, her body at once frail and strong, her whole being like a flower which had opened after a long frost – when I saw all this I knew how much wiser than I Catherine was, and how right she was to be terrified for Jerome. For Norah Blackwell really was lethally attractive, and I was attracted to her myself, and under the circumstances I hated myself for being so.

I sat down and said: “I’ve been up north. I’ve just spent an afternoon with Catherine and Sally and an hour with Jerome.”

“How is he?”

That look on her face! Not even guarded but open, offering herself – to what?

“Norah,” I said, “I came here to –” I hesitated and looked down at the floor. “I know why you came, George. You love Kate.”

I felt a spasm of anger when I heard her use Jerome’s name for his wife, but it passed.

“She’s a very wonderful woman, George. I know Jerome loves her. I’ve always known that. I’ve never wanted to hurt his love for her. All I want is his good. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

I looked at her and knew she was sincere, and I remembered what else Catherine had said about her, and my world rocked, for this was the first time – I had always been slow on the uptake – when I realized that under certain circumstances sincerity is the most dangerous thing in the world.

“What are you going to do?” I asked her. “Jerome’s going to Spain, he says. What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. The capitalists have turned us both out of the hospital. When Jerome learned what Dr. Rodgers did to me he resigned at once.”

I searched her face for a sign of pride, but found none. Oh, but Catherine had been right about this girl! Norah – God help her – really didn’t know any better.

You’re not thinking of going to Spain, are you?” I asked. She looked at me mournfully; she looked so sad and lost that despite my feelings about this situation I had to force myself to sit still and not to take her into my arms and comfort her. She was everyman’s daughter who might, given the circumstances, become everyman’s loved one. Catherine had known it; possibly she had known it immediately she had seen her.

“No,” she said, “not now. But I’m a surgical nurse and they need nurses in Spain. I don’t think I can stand it here. But it’s for the Party to decide.”

“For the Party, and not for Jerome?”

“Oh George, how do I know?”

“I wish I could hate you.”

“I know you do, but you can’t, any more than Harry can.” Harry! I had forgotten about him. “What’s he going to do?”

“He’ll be all right, I think.”

“Norah, how can you continue in this mess? You have Harry and he needs you. Catherine used to have Jerome and she needs him. Cut your losses, Norah. This situation is hopeless.”

“Everything seems to be but one thing. The Revolution will come and then everything will be different. That’s why I can’t blame myself for Kate, George. You see, she doesn’t understand it any more than you do.”

“Oh, to hell with that! She understands better than any of us.”

“Don’t you believe in symbolism? I do. Oh, I don’t blame her, George. It’s not her fault. But she’s not well, and Jerome is so strong and can do anything. She’s a – a symbol of our sick civilization.”

I was glad she said that, for it enabled me to become angry at last, and in that condition I left her.

CHAPTER V

The next Friday I asked Dr. Bigbee if I might leave Waterloo after morning classes and was somewhat chagrined by his response.

“By all means, my dear Stewart. I’ll take your classes myself. I’ve been wondering lately whether you’ve been keeping them up to the mark.”

I reached town by bus about three o’clock in the afternoon and took a taxi from the terminal to Jerome’s apartment, but just as I was about to mount the steps I hesitated. Suddenly it occurred to me that this was their last afternoon and what business had I to intrude? So I walked away and at the nearest phone booth I called the shipping company and learned that Jerome’s vessel was not due to sail until eight o’clock that evening. Then I walked the central city which rested me as it always does on a fine day neither too warm nor too cold.

After fifteen minutes I remembered Tom Storey and the cbc, went into a phone booth and found him in his office; he told me to come around right away and as soon as I met him I liked him. He was a man only two years older than myself, but he had taken a Ph.D. in philosophy in Yale, and unable to find a teaching job he had ended with the cbc. In talking about the organization he insisted that its men had more leeway under the government than the broadcasters had in the States under the control of commercial advertisers. He also explained that they earned much less money. Then he took me into an empty studio, introduced me to the engineer on duty, put a script before me and asked me to study it, and ten minutes later I was in the middle of my first audition.

When it was over, Storey smiled: “Now listen while I play it back and try not to be too startled at the sound of your own voice.”

The disk revolved and when I heard my voice I was more than startled; I was incredulous.

“Jerome told me I had a voice a little like Roosevelt’s,” I said. “I thought he was kidding.”

Storey smiled. “He’s an amazing man. I’ve never known anyone like him for discovering a flair in a person the person doesn’t know he has. I met him as a patient when I didn’t have a job, and he told me I’d make a lousy philosopher but would be good in radio work. I don’t know whether the latter part of the statement is true, but anyway I’m in radio earning a living.”

After thanking the engineer, Storey took me back to his office. Then, while the noise of St. Catherine Street traffic drummed through the open window, he talked.

“Jerome tells me you have a history degree and a remarkable feeling for politics?” he began.

I was about to disclaim the compliment, but all I said was: “At least I have a history degree.”

Storey said: “As you know, the Americans have made a very big thing out of news commentaries over the air. For my taste most of their men exaggerate and are too hyperthyroid, but that needn’t concern us. We have a quieter public here and we don’t have to worry about the commercial sponsor.” He paused and looked out the window. “I’m not in a position to promise you anything definite now, but I have an idea I’d like you to consider. That audition was excellent and your voice is perfect for what I have in mind.”

He outlined an idea that amazed me. There was a travel agency in town which wanted a courier to lead a summer tour to the Soviet Union and Storey asked me to take the job. There would be no salary, but there would be full expenses. I would be out of the country from June until Labor Day and only a handful of people would be on the tour. My duties would consist in taking care of tickets and baggage, and making arrangements from city to city.

“Jerome tells me your French is perfect and that you have a smattering of German,” Storey said.

“My French is passable, but smattering is a compliment to my German. I suppose I could order a beer, but that’s about all.”

“It won’t matter. With French and English you’ll manage without trouble. Now this is why I want you to take this job.”

It was Storey’s notion that I use the tour as a means of getting into radio as a commentator. He wanted me to go to Russia with an open mind, to observe what I saw and record what I thought, and he was sure a series of scripts would come out of it. If they were successful, the organization might then hire me on a permanent basis.

“It’s a gamble like anything else,” he said, “but your way will be paid to Russia and you’ve got nothing to lose. How about it?”

I protested that the whole thing sounded much too ambitious for an unknown person like me, but he cut me short.

“This damned depression has made everyone our age think too small. I was just as bad before Jerome picked me up by the scruff of the neck and shook some sense into me.”

I proposed as another objection my job at Waterloo, telling him that I would be unable to broadcast these trial scripts because I would not be in Montreal.

“That won’t matter. When you come in over the weekends we can put them on wax. And anyhow, why not look at the bright side? If this idea works out, you’ll be able to leave Waterloo forever.”

I left Tom Storey full of elation, but the moment I reached the street all I could think about was that this was Catherine’s last afternoon with Jerome and that I might never again see Jerome himself. I walked for a while and around six I stopped in a cafeteria for something to eat. Coming out at six-thirty I jumped into a cab and drove to their street just in time. Another cab was parked by the curb and the driver, his door open, was picking his teeth in the attitude of a waiting man. I paid off my own driver and got out and then the house door opened and the whole little family emerged. Sally was holding her father’s hand and Catherine was ahead of them, and the instant I saw her face I knew that an important change had happened. She was serene, pale and beautiful.

“George!” Jerome called. “George, I’m so glad you’ve come. Everything is fine now, everything is fine. Get in and come down to the ship with us.”

We drove down the long slope of the city toward the river, bumped over some railway tracks and got out in front of a huge shed surmounted by the twin funnels of a C.P.R. liner. We walked through the dock, and afterwards Catherine said she would never forget the sight of a pair of gulls perched high on one of the metal rafters. After talking with some officials, Jerome went up the gangplank with Sally on his shoulder and disappeared into the ship. Catherine and I were alone and she looked at me with this new, intense, pale calm.

“I’m grateful for last week, George.”

“I’m glad.”

“We came close to each other again. Now it will be easier. Now no matter what happens …” A proud little smile: “I might have got sick, you know. I might have held him back by getting sick, but I didn’t. It was hard not to, but I didn’t.”

“Are you tired now?”

Another smile: “Frankly, I’m so exhausted I wouldn’t be surprised if I fainted, but I feel better than I’ve felt in a long time in spite of that.”

“You’d better sit down on something, though.”

There was an empty baggage truck, and as I had a folded newspaper in my pocket, I spread it out on the truck and helped Catherine up. She sat like a little girl with dangling legs and wide gray eyes staring in surprise out the huge open gate of the shed toward the high white flank of the ship. The falls squealed on the fo’c’slehead, the last baggage went up the slide and was lowered into the hold, some late passengers made their adieus and went up the plank and disappeared. A chorus of happy voices rang bibulously through the shed and a twenty year old girl and a boy no older, covered with confetti and pursued by a gang of youths in morning coats and girls in bridesmaids’ dresses, rushed up the plank and disappeared.

“Yes,” Catherine said quietly, “this week has at least saved something. It’s saved my soul. Please God it saves his, too.”

“I’m so glad.”

“Since he must go to Spain, then he must go. I’m not the first wife who’s seen her husband off to the wars and I won’t be the last.”

Then we saw Jerome’s head and shoulders coming down the plank with Sally walking cautiously in front of him. They stepped out onto the dock and came up to us.

“Well Kate, it’s time.”

“Daddy says that if we go up to the bow he’ll come out and wave to us.”

I rose to move away in order to preserve what remained of their privacy, but neither had eyes for me at that moment. She sat as she was with her whole soul in her pale, calm, eloquent face while he stood before her and looked into her. I never saw a pair of human beings look at each other as they did then. In their eyes was a hurt amazement that they were parting, an incredulity that, loving each other so much, they had made each other suffer. There was shock and pain, there was a terrible, almost despairing tenderness.

“Kate,” he said hoarsely, “I don’t want to go.”

With calm, pale pride she said: “I know, dear. But you must.” Suddenly the dock shook as the steamer’s horn roared, and the thunder of it broke the tension. Jerome stepped forward, Catherine melted into his arms as he lifted her off the baggage truck, then he set her down, turned to Sally and swept her off her feet, kissed her, set her down, and then in spite of his limp he ran fast up the plank and disappeared into the ship.

I turned to Catherine: “Now let me take you home.”

“No,” Sally cried, “Daddy promised to wave to us.”

Looking down at Sally I knew that she had sensed with a child’s intuition the pain and the tragedy and was trying to deny it.

“Daddy is going to wave to us. He promised.”

Catherine was weak, but she rallied and smiled down at Sally and together we walked along the dock under the huge white flank of the liner until we came to the hawsers. Looking up we saw the heads of a few passengers along the rail but on the concrete apron of the dock Catherine, Sally and I were the only people. We waited. Twilight had dimmed the river, had covered St. Helen’s Island with a transparent purple shroud, the air was cool and the gulls had not begun to scream. We looked, there was the flash of a white handkerchief and we saw Jerome’s head and shoulders at the railing.

“Daddy! Daddy!” screamed the child, and began to cry.

Jerome cupped his hands to his mouth and called down to us, but at that instant the steamer’s horn roared again and shook the air and his words were lost. Looking down the length of the dock I saw that the gangplank had been lowered. There was a swirling hiss of dirty water between the dock and the ship, the stern lines were cast off and she began to swing out rapidly, and still that tiny white handkerchief fluttered, and Sally waved back and Catherine stood like a statue.

“Catherine, please let me take you home!”

But I was too late. For at that instant something happened which I had dreaded all along yet could not really believe would happen. Beside Jerome’s shoulder, high and small above the railing of the fo’c’slehead, very close to him but not close enough to touch, appeared a woman’s head. That woman’s head had come by stealth, had come under the terrible compulsion of that destructive power within her of which she was utterly unaware, and all three of us saw her before Jerome did, who clearly did not know she was on board the ship. Catherine went white as chalk, she lurched and I took her arm and stared up.

“Please let’s go! Please!” I cried. “Please come with me now!”

Walking as though she were unconscious, her whole body trembling, Catherine went beside me along the enormous white flank of the ship. A swirl of gulls screamed at the stern, tugs pushed and pulled, but Catherine saw nothing. At the entrance to the dock we paused and I looked back and saw Sally, tiny in that colossal setting, waving frantically to her father on the ship. Then even Sally seemed to understand, for she dropped her handkerchief and turned and ran to her mother as fast as she could. The three of us walked silently through the shed to the space of cobbles on the other side, where we got into a cab. We drove across the tracks, up past the sailors’ boarding houses, up through the ancient part of the city, through an empty Place d’Armes, up Beaver Hall Hill into the traffic, the noise, the shining lights, the river-like crowds of central Montreal on a warm spring night.

Two hours later Sally was in bed and Catherine and I were alone downstairs. She looked so exhausted that I asked if I might call Jack Christopher, but she would not let me.

“Jerome knew nothing about her,” I said. “I know that. I absolutely know he didn’t know she’d be on that ship.”

Calmly she said: “It doesn’t matter any more.”

“That girl – she doesn’t know what she’s doing!”

“Yes she does,” Catherine said. “In one part of her mind she knows perfectly well. But not even she matters now.” She turned her face away. “I don’t know where I am. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know anything.”

Through the open window I heard the faint hum of the night city and the sound of footsteps passing below, and I think it was then that I became consciously afraid of life itself. This is what happens, I thought, when the leaders close their doors and the walls of custom collapse. This is what happens when people try to play a game making the rules as they go along. I saw Catherine, Jerome, myself and everyone I knew like lost shadows moving perilously over a crust covering a void.

“I tried so hard, George. I tried so hard. And now I’m exhausted, and I feel so ugly.”

“You’re not ugly. You’re beautiful.”

“I’d like to fall asleep forever.”

“Catherine dear – just fall asleep now. Take a sedative and sleep.”

“I begged him to stay with me. I went down on my knees. I threw all my pride away.”

“He loves you. Didn’t you hear him say he didn’t want to go?”

“I know.” Her calmness returned. “He will always love me, and that makes me grieve for him, for I failed him. He was born in – what? Naked he came into the world, and now naked he goes out into – what? He’s naked now. He’s in agony now and I grieve for him, alone on that ship with that girl.”

“He probably hates her now.”

“Yes, he probably wants to murder her now, and that will make him hate himself the more.”

“She doesn’t matter, Catherine.”

“That’s what’s so terrible. She doesn’t matter – in herself she never did – and yet she’s done this.”

“He’d have gone to Spain whether he met her or not.”

“Yes. Yes, he’d have gone. But cleanly, and not like this. Not hating himself. He’d have gone and perhaps he’d have found himself. Perhaps he’d have found what he lost in the trenches in the war.”

“You mean his religion?”

“I mean something that would protect him at three o’clock in the morning. He thought he’d found it in me. He did find it in me for a while. Then everything went bad. Not our life together – no, not that. But his war experience regurgitated when everything went to pieces and the fascists started this new war. And of course he tried to do too many things. He has this awful vitality, and everyone sucked it out of him, and he got himself involved. Oh, why talk? Everything’s gone out of control and I want to sleep forever.”

“He’ll come back.”

“Now I don’t think I can stand it if he does. Love can be such a terrible torment, George. It’s so powerful it exhausted me. What is it? God knows what it is, but it’s cruel. People break loose into sex because it’s so direct and simple. Oh, I feel so ugly and tired.”

A long silence and the city’s hum coming in through the window. “I was too frightened. We were all too frightened. He seemed so brave and strong and everyone sucked from him. Me too. And he got tired – tired inside, tired in his soul, and this communistic thing seemed an escape. And yet he wants to do good. I don’t know. I don’t understand. All I know is that I failed him.”

“Catherine dear, please take a sedative and rest.”

She made a movement to rise, but stayed where she was. “What’s going to become of him, George?” I shrugged my shoulders; I was wondering what was going to become of her.

“All right, I’ll take that sedative and I’ll try to sleep.” She rose, small and I thought beautiful, and haunted. “It’s so awful for a woman to learn that human love isn’t sufficient. We need God, and He doesn’t care. Perhaps because we don’t let Him care. But where is He? Where has He gone?”

She went upstairs and when I guessed she was in bed I followed and she called me into the double room she had shared with Jerome. She looked tiny lying there in that huge double bed all alone, but her eyes were enormous. Her body lay still under the sheets and I sat by her bedside and we looked at each other.

I took her hand and found myself saying: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want …”

But the familiar words had lost their potency for both of us because the Lord who had shepherded Israel and our fathers had gone away and we had lost the habit of searching for Him.

CHAPTER VI

Was it only a month and a fortnight ago?

Standing on the balcony of the Europa Hotel in Leningrad I had forgotten, for the time being, the intense little tragedy in which I had been involved the previous spring in Montreal. Now I was out in this huge, news-making, future-making – what? Who could understand Europe in 1937, or Russia then or ever? The provincial walls in which I had lived had crumbled and I was out in this alone. With me was a young American I had met on the train out of Helsinki the night before, and he had come all the way from Nebraska to see with his own eyes the shape of things to come. By noon of his first day in Russia he had seen enough to daze him, to terrify him with its unknown quantities, to smash to pieces the neat little walls of theory with which he had armored himself. Now we were together, close and intimate in Russia though we barely knew each other’s names.

The nuit blanche of Leningrad in late June made eerie the perpetual rustling of thousands of shoeless feet on the pavements below, the pavements laid out by the Czars which the communists had captured along with this hotel and the marble palaces nearby. We could just distinguish the human swarm in the nuit blanche, not the faces of individuals but the smock-wearing, shuffling swarm which flowed hour after hour without ceasing because, apparently, they had nothing else to do and no place to go.

Byprizorni,” the American kept muttering. “Byprizorni.”

In the weird white night they swarmed like creatures mysteriously risen out of a Sargasso Sea, ourselves on the ship’s bridge looking down, and after a day in the Leningrad streets we knew that every face, to us, was a variant of the same face we had stared at since leaving the Finland Station that morning: a face wrinkled, prematurely old, unsmiling, unblinking, the face of Tolstoy’s peasant in a world he could not understand, scarred by years of cold and hunger, knowing a totality of unwantedness, the face of the millions too old, slow, ignorant and stupid for this new Soviet world.

“See Russia,” said the American, “and let your theories die.”

The thousands of feet shuffled with the sound of a restless sea that would never be still and never know a storm, and they shuffled like that because each one of them was wrapped in bandages and hemp, and they were wrapped in bandages and hemp because there were not enough shoes in Russia, and because the price of a pair of cheap shoes cost more than double the monthly pay of the average Soviet worker that year.

“Where do they come from? Where are they going?”

A voice with an English accent answered behind us: “They come from the land and they are going no place. These, my friends, are counter-revolutionaries. They are, or were, kulkas. They are the sons of serfs, and the Bolsheviks liberated them in 1917.”

This elderly, ironical Englishman had eaten a seven-course dinner with us a couple of hours earlier, and it was he who had told us that hemp was the basic footwear of this crowd. He was in the hemp business himself and every year his firm shipped thousands of tons of the stuff into the ports of Leningrad and Odessa. He claimed to know Russia well, both before and after the revolution, and we had seen what diabolical pleasure he had taken in baiting visiting Americans in the hotel, and a few English trade unionists as well, who were fellow-travellers and spoke the jargon, and already were noting down the wonderful things they would report to their little cliques in Brooklyn, Chicago and Manchester when they got home. The moment this Englishman heard an English voice in the lobby utter one of those key words of the period (cadre, stakhanovite, the masses – any one of the key words would suffice) he would pick a conversation with the man. Pretending to seek instruction, he would lead the man into one absurdity after another, and then with a perfect innocence of expression he would agree that Russia was absolutely wonderful because she was the only country in the world which had solved her unemployment problem, providing work camps for some eighteen million, forbidding socialists to tamper with the productive powers of labor, accustoming labor to work for a quarter the pay they got in England and America, maintaining by conscription an army of twenty-one million men and tolerating no soft-headed nonsense about giving consumer goods priority over guns. With a gleam in his eye the Englishman would watch the angry flush mount to the fellow-traveller’s face until the moment came, as it inevitably did, when he would be called a fascist or a reactionary.

To us he had been more gentle, deciding after a while that though we knew nothing we were at least not true believers. But he delighted in shocking us.

“Those people down there,” he said calmly, “will not be entirely useless to the state. When the war comes, their hour will strike. They will be sent ahead of the tanks to blow up the enemy mine-fields.”

“It can’t be as bad as that?”

“Perhaps not. Time will tell. But if you had any sense, you’d say it can’t be as good as that, for whether they like it or not, the Russians are going to be our allies.” He chuckled and said to the American: “At this moment in our hotel seventeen of your countrymen are living better than they ever did in their lives. Caviar three times a day. I find them charming. Here they are, coming all the way from America to teach Russia how to outproduce America. Oh, don’t think she won’t, given the time. There aren’t any trade unions here, you see. And now let me tell you the most wonderful thing of all about Russia. These people don’t understand themselves. They haven’t reached that fatal watershed in a nation’s history when they think they should.”

The American raised some objection to this, and the Englishman laughed.

Hadn’t we read Russian literature? It was a wonderful literature, the truest there was, and if truth was what you wanted out of a literature, Tolstoy and Dostoievsky were worth a dozen Shakespeares. But it was not a literature of understanding. You couldn’t pin it down. That was why it broke all the limits and was true, because the truth couldn’t be pinned down. Oh yes, this was a great country and the fact that it was dreadful had nothing to do with its greatness. It was big enough to do what it liked with anything. Look what it had done to communism in twenty years. It had taken the Romans three centuries to take care of the Church, but the Russians had taken care of Marx in two decades. This was all right because the Russian never cared about understanding himself. That was why the future was Russia’s. We doubted that? Look at France, the only country in the world which even tried to understand herself. Yes, look how she had castrated herself with understanding. We doubted it? Wait a few years and see how that French army of critics would fight when the war came. England? Well, England had certainly had a fine run for her money, but she was finished now. For centuries the English had contrived to avoid thinking about themselves, but they were doing it now and that meant only one thing. Chamberlain knew they were finished. He was stupid, of course, he had seen better days. But he wasn’t as stupid as everyone said he was.

“Listen, my dear boys, Mr. Chamberlain understands one thing most of you refuse to accept. He knows that Hitler is the last ace Europe has to play. If Hitler can’t knock Russia out, Europe is doomed. But he won’t knock her out because he’s a lunatic, and I don’t think he could do it even if he was sane.”

Then he went on to say that the war was going to be so terrible that only the Russians could win it because only the Russians could suffer enough. Generalship? Forget it. Suffering was what was going to win the war, and Stalin would make it as terrible as he could, just as Hitler would, but the Russians could suffer more than the Huns. We doubted it? Wait and see, wait and see.

At dawn the Englishman yawned and left us, and the American and I stayed a little longer watching the old Czarist palaces emerging out of the brief nuit blanche into full daylight. A bird perched on the parapet near us and called, then flew away, and we smelled the indefinable smell of a Russian city which travellers say is the smell of the doorway of Asia.

“Well,” said the American, “I guess I’m about ready for the sack.”

When we went downstairs a band was playing corny American jazz for the Russian officers and bureaucrats who had come into the restaurant after the fellow-travelling tourists had listened to the program of folksongs and gone to bed. I entered the huge room the Intourist had given me, undressed and lay down and tried to sleep, but I was still wide awake when the sun stared in and found me reflecting that this was the first time in my life when I had felt like nothing. I had often felt small, I had often felt weak and afraid and inadequate, but now I felt like nothing at all.

“This,” I had heard a fellow-traveller say at dinner, “is the future.”

The fool had believed that reason was in control of it. Before falling asleep I remembered Jerome. The canoe in which he had issued from the forest had now taken him out into the ocean. A canoe in an ocean, at night, with a hurricane rising. Jerome, Myself, Everyone.

CHAPTER VII

As the liner moved into the estuary of the St. Lawrence and I looked across miles of cold water to the barren mountains of northeastern Quebec, I felt old. But at least I was coming home. It was strange, but before this sight of that barren land I had never thought of Canada as home. It had been where I was born and lived. I had never thought of Canada as having a future with a future role to play. Now I knew better. “I will work here,” I thought. “I will try to understand this country. It’s all there’s left for me now, for the rest is beyond me.”

By arranging that summer trip for me, Tom Storey had changed the whole pattern of my life and thought. Never again would I be able to believe that there is a simple explanation for anything. Never again would I trust a politician with a theory. Now I knew that the two subjects about which we talk the most are the two about which we actually know the least: politics and the weather. There are so many factors conspiring to make politics and the weather that no human mind, not even a calculating machine, can assess them.

Why was there going to be a war? Why, unless the very people who professed to want peace wanted war?

Staring across the water at the mountains I recalled a conversation with a Polish travel agent on the Warsaw platform just before I boarded the train for Berlin.

“Well, you have seen Warsaw. Inside a few years there will be no Warsaw. You’ve met me. In a year or two I will be dead.” And then he grinned and said: “But one very good thing comes out of all this. In a year or two there will not be a single Jew alive in the whole of Europe.”

Yes, there was going to be a war.

The ship steamed up the enormous cleft in the Laurentian rock where people lived knowing nothing of the emotions I had felt all that past summer. Was this what had haunted Jerome – their ignorance, their innocence? Had it haunted him to the extent that he found life here intolerable? I did not know the answer to that, either.

Steadily the river narrowed, and in the late afternoon we rounded the Ile d’Orleans and stopped to let off passengers at Quebec. As we cast off an hour later the evening Angelus tolled over the stream and we sailed into the sunset toward Montreal. After dinner I walked the decks till midnight, the parish lights very close on either side most of the time, moving off occasionally as the river widened, closing in again, and the sudden thought came to me that about this country, this Canada where I had been born and lived all my life, I knew almost nothing. My forebears had been here six or seven generations, and still I knew nothing important about it. I thought of Waterloo and despised myself for having squandered so many years there. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars if we allow the Bigbees to bluff us. Walking the deck, smelling the balsam in the moist night air, I swore I would trudge St. Catherine Street rather than spend another year in Waterloo. And I thought of the half dozen scripts I had already written for Tom Storey and wondered if they would open the door at last.

The next morning in town I took the scripts to Storey and he promised to read them at once and to talk with me in his office about them early in the afternoon.

After leaving him, I phoned Catherine’s apartment and waited while the instrument buzzed ten times. Then I phoned the Beamis Memorial and learned that Dr. Christopher was now in private practice and that I should be able to reach him in his office. At noon I did reach him, and he told me that Catherine had sublet her apartment and taken Sally out to the Lakeshore to live with her parents.

“I’m sick about the whole thing,” Jack told me. “After you went away her nerves went all to pot. She was in a state of shock and didn’t know it until the middle of July, when she collapsed with a fair-sized nervous breakdown.” He hesitated – he was her physician now – but decided to tell me the rest: “Unfortunately that’s not the most serious of her symptoms. Her heart has begun to fibrillate.”

“What does that mean?”

“Omitting the details, it means that it can’t carry a normal load. In turn that means that she has aged – so far as her lifespan is concerned – approximately twenty years in the last six months. Of course she’s taking digitalis and her organism will make certain accommodations, but there can be only one long-range prognosis, and that’s progressive heart failure.”

I felt as if the bottom had fallen out of me and asked if I might see her.

“I’m sorry, but I must say no, George. She’s – no, I can’t advise that just now.”

Feeling cold and queer, I tried to steady my voice: “Tell me one thing – did Jerome anticipate this when he went away?”

Jack answered quietly: “He’s an experienced medical man.”

“You mean, he went away knowing this would happen?”

“I didn’t say that. But he knew it was bound to happen ultimately. He married her knowing that.”

“But to go away knowing it was possible!”

Jack, whom I had always assumed to be rigid and correct, surprised me.

“Don’t judge him by yourself, George. You – if you’ll pardon my saying this – may be in love with Catherine, but you were never married to her, and you’re not a man who can do about a dozen different things and wants to do them all. Jerome saw the sick all day and had to go home each night to a wife who was becoming an invalid.”

“But she was his wife! And I know he loved her.”

“Oh for God’s sake, George, what do I know? I’m getting to the place where all I know is my own plumber’s work.”

“Has Jerome written to Catherine?”

“I believe quite often. He’s even written to me asking about her health. But Catherine’s been shaken. There’s just so much a person can stand; she stood very much and she was frailer than I thought. I only knew how much she drew out of Jerome after he left and she collapsed. But don’t ask me about all this. I’m a doctor. I’m not a psychologist.”

After saying good-bye to Jack, I went out to my parents’ flat and found them delighted to see me. My trip to Russia, however, was not real to Father who had no interest in politics and had omitted Russia from his reading list. He soon began talking about the new can opener he had invented and said it was going to make money. There was a stream of correspondence about it between him and Buffalo, he said. He also spoke of another invention, but I forget what it was.

That afternoon I went to see Tom Storey, and this extraordinarily kind, modest man was as pleased with my scripts as though he had written them himself.

“But there’s nothing here that isn’t obvious,” I said. “It’s just ordinary reportage. I don’t really know anything about Russia.”

“That’s just why I like them. Everyone else is sure he knows everything about Russia. Everything I see about Russia is slanted. This stuff rings true and fresh.” He smiled. “I’m afraid it’s going to lose you any left-wing friends you may have. Now let’s go to the studio and record the first of them.”

In the studio he rehearsed me several times for emphasis and timing, then he gave the word to the engineer and we put the script onto wax.

“Now,” Storey said, “I have a proposition to make you. There’s a vacancy in our organization in Vancouver, and these scripts might just as well emanate from there as from here. I don’t want to hold out false hopes, but I’m going to Toronto tonight and I’m taking along both the scripts and this disk we’ve made. I’m going to make some of the big boys consider them, and inside a day or two I’ll have a decision one way or the other. That will give you time to resign from the school before term begins, and if you don’t come in with us – well, you can go back to the school.”

Late the following afternoon he telephoned me from Toronto to say the job was mine if I wished it. I said I did.

The next morning I took the train to Waterloo to pick up some clothes and books I had left there and to inform Dr. Bigbee I would not be returning. I was stiff with anxiety on the train, for I expected the old man to throw a tantrum or even to threaten to take measures against me if I walked out a week before the beginning of term. He never drew up a contract with any of his masters, but I had the idea he must have some hold over us and was afraid, because he made everyone feel like a child.

I need not have worried. When I gave the Doctor my news he blew his nose, looked out the window and after a while spoke.

“Well, I fancy we’ll not have any trouble filling your place. I’ve just had a cablegram from a man at home who wants to come out here. I don’t know much about him, but I fancy he’ll stop the gap.”

That was the extent of my final conversation with the Doctor after five years in his service. He did not even ask me what I intended doing, where I had been in the summer or why I had decided to leave.

Twelve days later I got off the train in Vancouver.

CHAPTER VIII

That year I began to grow up. The depression was over at last so far as I was concerned, and I came out of its deep freeze retarded by some ten years suddenly eager to live and amount to something.

By New Year’s I had established myself in the cbc organization. The series of Russian scripts were so successful that for a short while I enjoyed the mild notoriety of a new radio personality in a small country. When the original series ended, I was given a regular spot for news interpretations and began a systematic study of newspapers, journals of opinion and European and Asiatic diplomatic history. For the first time in my life I had a real job. For the first time in my life I became more than a cipher. I began to get used to knowing that all over the country people said occasionally: “Did you hear George Stewart last night?” Or, “Do you think George Stewart is right or do you think he is crazy?”

It was one of the various ironies in my life that I owed my reputation to no less a personage than Adolf Hitler. On my return from Russia I had spent a week in Berlin, and nobody with eyes or ears could have spent even a day in Berlin at that time without knowing Hitler’s intentions. Most people I knew were emotionally unable to believe – really to believe – that Hitler intended war. I found it impossible to believe anything else, and in an odd way my own involvement with Jerome and Catherine, my witness to their break-up, had prepared me emotionally for this colossal break-up which now was under way.

That year of Munich – it has always seemed marvelous to me that people did not throw away their radios, considering what that instrument did to their nervous systems in the Munich year – I used to receive frantic letters from people abusing me for being pessimistic when I called Munich a surrender. A week after Munich, when Hitler made a truculent speech at Saarbrücken which even Chamberlain must have trembled to hear, I predicted that within six months he would gobble up the rest of Czechoslovakia. I had noticed that Hitler in those days, like a python who eats an enormous meal periodically, got starving hungry every six months. Late in the winter of 1939 Sir Samuel Hoare made the statement that a golden age for Europe was about to begin. I used this as the basis for a broadcast in which I said, without hedging, that Sir Samuel’s golden age would be ushered in before summer by still another German outrage. A fortnight later Hitler entered Prague.

I had been so consistently right – I take no credit for this, because surely all I said was obvious – that the organization decided to move me east where I would be closer to the capitals. I returned to Montreal in the late spring of 1939 and rented my first apartment, a two-room affair with a kitchenette three blocks from the little half-moon street where Jerome and Catherine had lived.

It was a strange spring, a haunted spring, and outwardly a lovely one. In late May the university campus was shadowed by elms in full leaf and empty of the students who soon would fight and die. In this fine weather the news I had to study seemed all the more atrocious. I began to become personally afraid. Raised on the novels of the old war, I could not imagine myself enduring the life of a soldier in this coming one. I often thought of Jerome, and missed his courage.

Meanwhile there was Catherine. During the winter we had corresponded, and in her letters she had told me she was picking up. I got in touch with Jack Christopher as soon as I returned to town. “Well,” I began with Jack, “what price Jerome’s opinions now?”

“It looks pretty bad,” Jack admitted. “But when the war starts, perhaps that will bring him out of Spain.”

Then I asked him about Catherine.

“Thank God she’s picked up. Her mental attitude has definitely returned to normal. She and Sally are at the lake now. She’s accommodated herself to the digitalis and she’s determined to live a new and interesting life.”

“You mean, she’s sure she and Jerome will never come together again?”

“I don’t know, George. I don’t think she does, either. Did you know he was back in town last winter?”

This startled me, for Catherine had not mentioned it in any of her letters.

“Yes, he was back for about a fortnight. He’d been slightly wounded – his left arm was in a cast, I remember. I didn’t meet him. He came home to raise funds for this surgical unit of his, but I don’t think he was successful. Spain’s become a dead issue now that so many people think we’ll be at war ourselves. The communists used him for propaganda purposes, but the papers didn’t even mention the speech he made.”

“But he did see Catherine?”

“Yes, briefly.”

“And then he went back to Spain?”

“He did. Don’t ask me why, but he did.”

“What passed between them?”

“You must ask Catherine that. I didn’t ask her, and she didn’t tell me.”

There was no phone in Catherine’s Laurentian cottage and the second-hand car I had bought two days ago had not yet been overhauled. I was very busy in the office anyway, so I put off visiting Catherine until the weekend. But I wanted to talk to somebody who had seen Jerome, and the first person who came to my mind was Arthur Lazenby. I called him up and around eight-thirty that night he came to my apartment.

The change in Lazenby’s appearance startled me. He looked like a man who had seen his own ghost and had not got over it yet, he smoked constantly, he was nervous and figeted, there was a temporary tick in his left cheek. But what startled me most was the change in his mental attitude.

“I listened to every one of your Russian talks over the air,” he said, “and by God, they were good.”

“I’m surprised to hear that from you.”

Lazenby winced: “This last year I’ve been on the verge of going out of my mind. It started with Jerome Martell.”

“What do you mean?”

“I met him when he was back from Spain and he let down the boom on me. Do you know why I went to see him? I wanted him to help me get into the International Brigade. In case you’re interested, I’ve been a communist. All the time the rest of you talked, you may remember I said very little. But I was a communist and you weren’t. I won’t go into the details of why the Party didn’t want me to go to fight in Spain. Let’s say they didn’t. But Jerome had influence – or at least so I thought – and I went to him. And do you know what he told me?”

“Go on, tell me.”

“He just looked at me in that way he has and shook his head: ‘I wouldn’t help my worst enemy get into Spain now,’ he said. I was so taken aback by this I could only stutter.

“‘This whole miserable tragic business,’ Jerome said, ‘inside a couple of months it will be over. Stalin’s murdered the Revolution in his own country and to him Spain is nothing but an embarrassment. He’ll never risk a war with Hitler for the sake of Spain. With him it’s been political from the start. Look what he’s done. He’s sent a few advisers. He’s let thousands of non-Russian communists commit suicide in the Brigade. He’s spread the myth that the communists are the only people on the Loyalist side who are fighting, and all the time he’s been using Spain as a slaughterhouse to get rid of every element in the workers’ movement that doesn’t follow him the way the Germans follow Hitler.”

I listened to this and much more and said: “Then why in God’s name did he go back to Spain himself?”

Lazenby stared at me as though he had been asking himself that same question for months.

“Don’t ask me. He beats me, that man. He’s a divine fool, I guess. Or maybe he’s just one of those who sticks when the rats run out – the rats like me. He had this surgical unit and maybe he went back to that because he felt it was his duty. But what he told me about Spain” – Lazenby winced and his cheek ticked – “it was terrible for me, it was terrible, George. But it was the truth.”

“You’re a communist and you say that?”

Was a communist. Was a communist. Of course I refused to believe him. Of course I used all the commie words of insult.” Lazenby winced again. “All right, maybe I’d better give you the whole of it.”

Apparently Jerome, as he often did when somebody attacked him, had struck back. He told Lazenby that the real underlying reason why he, Lazenby, wanted to go to Spain was to get in on the ground floor of the Revolution. He told him he’d been mesmerized by the very propaganda he disseminated.

Lazenby looked at me with an expression I shall never forget. He looked humiliated, still hostile to Jerome, yet stubborn and defiant. He was the first person I knew who had been a communist and had left the party, and I was unfamiliar with the utter desiccation of soul that this experience caused in people who had accepted communism as a religion.

“Three days after I talked to Jerome,” Lazenby said, “I remembered something he’d said to me – something I’d forgotten because I was so scared and sore. He’d told me that the place for a man like me was External Affairs, and that he’d write Dr. Scrimgeour in my behalf. He said Dr. Scrimgeour was an old patient of his.”

Lazenby lit another cigarette, and with his whole personality seeming to twitch, he said: “Two months ago I sat my exams for External.”

“Did you get in?”

“I don’t know yet. But I admitted to Dr. Scrimgeour in my interview that I’d been a communist and had got out. I told him I thought a man like me would be useful just because I’d been a communist. And it’s a good thing I did, for they knew anyway. Scrimgeour talked about Jerome to me privately. He thinks he’s a great man, but he thinks he’s a tragic one. And there’s one more thing, George.” Lazenby gave me a bitter, sardonic look. “Do you think the big war will start this year?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know how it will start?”

“I suppose by Hitler invading Poland.”

“But before that?” Lazenby shook his head. “Before that – you watch – Stalin and Hitler are going to get together. It’ll be us against the fascists with Russia sitting pretty on the side.”

The same idea had occurred to me, but I could not believe it; I could not see how it could be worked.

“You wait,” Lazenby said. “I told that to the people in External and they smiled. But you wait.” And then he added: “It was Jerome who told me, and three days later I knew he was right. You wait and see.”

Another day passed. I worked in the office, I bought a few more necessities for my flat, I wrote the first draft of a new script and I picked up my second-hand Ford from the dealer. It was my first car and I spent several hours driving around town in it, climbing and descending the Westmount hills looking at the tulips in the gardens and occasionally staring off over the downward sweep of the city to the distant, blue bend of the St. Lawrence. Around seven I came home and made myself supper, and I was just sitting down before my typewriter when the phone rang and a familiar voice spoke.

“Hullo George, this is Caroline. Caroline Hall, and if you say you’ve forgotten me, I’ll hate you.”

“For God’s sake, where are you now?”

“I got off a ship yesterday and I’ve just found a room for a few days.” She gave me the name of a tourist home near where I lived. “I’ve simply got to see you, George. Can you come over now?”

I had a script to re-write, it was a long time since I had even thought of Caroline, and I hesitated.

“I’m just back from Paris,” she said, “and I’ve got to have help. I was the last person to see poor Norah and I’ve got –”

“What do you mean, the last person to see Norah? You mean Norah Blackwell? Is she –”

“Hasn’t anybody told you?”

I remembered the night when Norah had used almost the same words about Caroline’s marriage.

“Are you telling me she’s dead?”

Caroline’s voice was warm with pity when she said: “She was run over in a Paris street a month ago and I’ve brought her baby home. She’s an adorable baby girl and I have her here now.”

These telephone conversations in my life! “Is the child Jerome’s?”

“What difference does it make whose it is? I’m taking her to Harry and I’m afraid to go all by myself. I just can’t face that little lost soul all by myself, and you’ve just got to come and help me.”

After this I knew I would do no more work the rest of the night, so I said “All right,” hung up and went out. A spring sunset had sent a flush of clouds over the roofs and on a corner I saw an old Jewish man, poorly dressed but serene, staring up at the clouds sailing over the mountain. Five minutes later I rang the doorbell in Caroline’s lodging house.

She looked older, and with brown eyes gentler even than I remembered them, she kissed me like a sister. The passion we once had shared might have been felt by two different people: we had become friends who knew each other’s loneliness and still were fond.

“Let’s go for a walk,” she said. “The baby’s asleep and I want to talk to you.”

We strolled westward through the gray streets to the university campus, where we ended like a pair of students on the stone steps looking down the avenue of elms to the first lights shining in the city.

“Is Jim with you?”

She shook her head and smiled.

“Are you still married to him?”

“Technically. Norah said she’d told you I was pregnant when I went away. But there wasn’t a child. I had a miscarriage in Paris.”

“I thought you’d gone to New York?”

“We went there first, but since then we’ve been almost everywhere.”

“Where is Jim now?”

“I don’t know,” she said simply.

“Did you know he was in the Party when you married him?”

“Yes, but I didn’t know what being in the Party means.” Another smile. “It’s all over between us, of course. With them, the Party’s everything. I’m going west to someplace where nobody knows me and find a job. I’m still fairly young, and I miss that baby almost as much as if the poor thing had never been born. I want to meet some nice man and have another.”

We smoked in the twilight while the city lights grew sharper.

“Well George, I suppose you know Jerome’s in Spain. Norah tried to follow after him, but she couldn’t. We kept running into them separately in various places.”

“In other words, they’ve not been living together?”

“Does it matter? Jerome’s in the Spanish War and that’s everything with him. Jim met him in Madrid, but when he talked about him – which was precious little – there was a tone in his voice that gave me the creeps. Those people aren’t human, George. I don’t know whether Jerome knows or cares, but he’s in danger, and I don’t mean just from the fascists.”

“Is this child you’ve got Jerome’s?” I asked her again.

Again Caroline smiled. “I don’t know. Does it matter? She’s an adorable baby.”

“Did Jerome abandon Norah, too?”

“Well, he never expected she’d follow him to Europe. She was a member of the Party. He wasn’t, incidentally. I think for a time he intended to join, but he never did. But Norah was in deep and they got her a job in a crèche for Spanish refugee children in Paris.”

“Did she commit suicide?”

Caroline sighed: “The French police called it an accident. But earlier that year she’d had to take shock treatments. It must be terrible to have been Norah. Don’t judge her, George.”

“It doesn’t make much sense to judge a lunatic.”

“Don’t use that word, either. She was just – oh, why talk? Things were too much for her. If she’d had any luck, maybe this trouble wouldn’t have come out. If Jerome had married her –”

“He’d never have done that,” I said.

“I think she knew it all along.” Her brown eyes looked into mine. “Does any of this matter? The poor girl isn’t here any more, and she tried so hard and she was so nice.”

I stared down the avenue to the city and after a while I asked her if she knew why Jerome had gone back to Spain.

“I never did understand that man, but what else could he do? Maybe he went back for the same reason that Norah walked out into the traffic of the Rue de Rivoli. I’m so lucky not being brainy like you people. I just go on from day to day. I kept telling Norah to throw it up and go home to Harry, and she did come home for a while. Last year I think. But she couldn’t stand it.”

“Did she see Harry when she was back?”

“Certainly she did. Poor little Harry wanted her to go back to him as though nothing had happened, but when she saw him he was repulsive to her and she wouldn’t even stay in his flat. I think the Party told her to go back to Paris.”

“I see.”

Caroline rose and smoothed down her flannel skirt. “Now,” she said briskly, “you and I have a job and the sooner we do it the better. We’re taking that baby to Harry.”

I looked at her incredulously. “Are you suggesting that the child is his?”

“I think the baby will be very good for Harry now. I love the little thing and I’d gladly look after her if he refuses, but I think she’ll be wonderful for Harry.”

“I thought babies were supposed to need mothers?”

“But that’s just the point. Harry’s a motherly type.”

“Why do you want me to go along with you in this?”

She gave me one of those mysterious female smiles which women interpret better than men.

“Well, Harry always liked you, and if you come along I just think everything will work out better.”

“Just what gives you that idea?”

“But George, isn’t it obvious? If he thinks you take it for granted the baby’s his, then he’ll think others take it for granted too, and everything will seem much easier and more natural for Harry.”

We walked back to her lodgings and found the child asleep in the middle of a huge brass bed. While Caroline picked the baby up and made cooing sounds at it, I listened to the soft rumble of distant traffic and smelled the smell of downtown Montreal in a warm night.

“She’s such a darling,” Caroline said. “Hold her, George. Isn’t she a love?” She rubbed the baby’s cheeks with the backs of her fingers and the baby made some smilingly gurgling noises for which Caroline praised her. “She’s going to be a raving beauty when she grows up.”

“In that case, how can you believe that Harry will think he’s the father?”

Caroline smiled at me mischievously.

“Harry may be dumb, but he can’t be that dumb,” I said.

“George, you’re being much too clever for all of us. Just you wait and see.” Another mischievous smile. “Now let’s go.”

So we walked out into the night, the baby in Caroline’s arms and I beside her as though I were the father. I hailed a cab and on the short run to those familiar lodgings, Caroline kept up a stream of endearments to the baby while I looked out the window at passersby. The cab stopped, I paid the fare and we went up the steps.

“How do you know he’s in?” I said.

“I called to make sure and the minute I heard his voice I hung up. He’d think I was French and that I knew from the English voice I’d got the wrong number.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s in now.”

“We’ll soon find out. I didn’t tell him it was me because I didn’t think he ought to have time to think before he sees the baby. Harry’s so sweet.”

“So are you.”

“I’m not sure I liked the tone you said that in.”

“I suppose Harry knows Norah’s dead?”

“Oh yes, he knows that. All her old friends here know that.”

Soon we were in the apartment I remembered so well and it was unchanged. The cheap prints were still on the walls, the floors were as spotless as ever and the old photograph of Norah in her nurse’s cap stood on the table.

At first Harry seemed amiably glad to see us, confused but no more so than usual, and oblivious of the presence of the baby.

“It’s been a long time,” he said.

“Hasn’t it?” said Caroline.

Harry’s pear-shaped body and oversized head, his short little legs and shopworn hair were familiar enough, but his eyes had changed.

“I’ve kept the place pretty nice, don’t you think?” he said. “Norah would like it, I think.”

“Of course she would,” said Caroline. “Norah’d be proud of you.” She sat down with the baby on her knees, and it occurred to me that Harry assumed it was hers, even that I might be its father. I lit a cigarette, the idea coming to me that this was one of the most bizarre situations I had ever found myself in.

“Harry,” said Caroline, “I don’t know how to begin.” But as I looked at her I thought she knew exactly how to begin and was doing it. “Did Norah write that she and I saw a lot of one another in Paris?”

“Oh yes, she wrote all the time. She never missed a week writing me.”

“She loved your letters so much, Harry. And when the baby came she wanted you there so much.”

Harry’s underlip trembled, his adam’s apple went up and down, but he managed to swallow and speak: “But of course she had to stay because she had all that nursing to do in Paris.”

“She was wonderful in Paris. You’d have been proud of her.”

“Yes, she was certainly wonderful. We used to have such good times. You know, the way we always understood each other without talking, kind of, we had some good times.”

He and Caroline exchanged glances and slowly a new expression emerged on Harry’s cheese-shaped face. He looked at me and I managed to nod and smile, and he muttered, “Gee I’m glad to see you again, George.” Then his face turned pink and I wondered if he was going to cry, but before he could make up his mind what to do, Caroline rose and laid the baby on the couch and put her little finger between its lips while the baby smiled and wriggled its toes.

“Harry, isn’t she a darling, and aren’t you lucky!”

Then she looked straight into his eyes, he looked straight back, and they stood still. There followed a quick sob and an expression on his face quite indescribable and again I wondered if he was going to cry. But instead he grinned like an idiot and went down on his knees to play with the baby.

“She’s Norah’s image,” he said, “isn’t she?”

“Yes,” said Caroline critically, “but there’s some of you in her, too. Look at her nose. Your nose isn’t too terrific in a man, if you don’t mind my saying so, but for a girl your nose would be just about perfect. It won’t be this ski-jump I’ve got to carry around with me. Isn’t it a pretty nose for a girl?”

“Gosh, yes!”

I stared down at the baby, and to me she was not Norah’s image and she did not have Harry’s nose. To me she was just an infant with pink cheeks and plump limbs fully aware that she was being appreciated. I puffed on my cigarette and stepped back.

“Norah and I –” Harry began. Then he stopped, uttered a little choking cry, picked up the baby and carried her to the open window. I saw the muscles of his back straining, his suit wrinkling, as he clasped the baby to his chest and rocked it making strange sounds.

“Norah and I had so many wonderful times together,” he whispered in that choked voice. “You’ll never know, you’ll never know. She was so happy the night she told me she was –”

“Yes, that’s what she said to me in Paris. She was so happy when she knew the baby was coming and that you knew.”

“I’m going to call her Joan,” Harry said, still staring blindly out the window with the infant in his arms. “Joan! Don’t you think Norah would like that?”

“I know she would.”

He turned and laid the baby on the couch and began playing with her, and the child liked him.

“She’s laughing!” Harry looked up with an astonishment of happiness on his face. “Don’t you hear her laughing?”

“She knows her father,” said Caroline.

“Gosh, how can a baby know that?”

“I brought her to you the moment I could, Harry. You see, after Norah – well, after she had that accident, it was lucky I was in Paris then. It was luckier still I was just going to leave, for I was able to bring her to you.”

I sat frozen at what I was witness to.

“You’ll have to learn a lot about caring for babies, Harry,” Caroline said sharply. “But there are books and nurseries and things, and I’ll be around for a week or two to show you.”

“I’ll learn,” Harry said. “Just watch me learn.”

“Of course you will, but don’t go around boasting about being able to take care of babies better than women can.”

“I’ll learn. You watch and see. I’ll bring her up just the way Norah would have liked it.”

He was full of pride. Or was it pride? No. For in that instant I saw his eyes and knew he was not fooling himself or even trying to fool us. Suddenly he had found a reason for living, something to cling to in a life which had become meaningless and horrible, and it was as simple as that. He had recovered a continuance with the only thing that had ever mattered to him, and glancing at Caroline’s wise smile I wondered how I could possibly have under-rated her intelligence.

“I’ve got my job back,” Harry said. “I didn’t tell you, but I got it.”

“In the radio shop? But that’s wonderful!”

“From now on things are going to be fine,” he said. “I’ve just got to succeed from now on.”

“And you will. You’ll make Norah and everyone else very proud of you. She’s watching you, you know.”

Again I stared at Caroline in astonishment.

“Yes,” she went on, “before she died Norah became religious again and she knew there’s an after-life.”

I knew that Caroline did not believe a word of this, but Harry believed it. His eyes shone. His pathetically shaped body straightened and he nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

Soon after we left him, as we walked back to her lodgings, I said: “Does Jerome know about this baby?”

“Of course.”

“Is it his?”

“Honestly I don’t know, but I don’t think there’s much likelihood. He’d be much happier if it were.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well George, I suppose I might as well tell you. When Norah went to England on the ship with him, of course she thought that would settle things and they’d be together. Jerome was kind to her, but no – he wouldn’t do that. She must have made life hell for him. She had breakdowns and everything like that. She threw scenes. But when he went to Spain she became sort of awfully calm and she just slept with everyone who wanted her. This baby could have had any one of several dozen fathers. Norah’d been faithful to Harry until this thing with Jerome, you see. It had been building up inside of her all the time and once she started she just went hog wild. They often do that, you know.”

“Who often does that?”

“People who are sick like that. One part of their mind is pure and the other – you see, they don’t know who they are any more. Poor Jerome, it was awful for him. He blames himself for destroying her.”

“She’d have destroyed herself anyway.”

“I suppose so. Actually if anyone’s to blame in this it’s Harry, for he never satisfied her. Could you imagine Harry satisfying a woman like Norah? He’s such a nice little man, but – well, I hope for everyone’s sake that his next wife’s not over-sexed. I’m sure he’ll marry again.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“Oh, men always seem able to find wives if they want them badly enough.”

We said good-night and I walked homeward in the warm air, but when I reached my door I was too restless to go in and walked up the slope of the mountain until I found myself among the trees. A couple passed hand in hand talking quietly in French, starlight filtered down through the trees and the city shimmered far below. I sat on a granite boulder for half an hour feeling myself involved, and, thinking about Jerome, I knew why I was no longer shocked by his behavior. He, too, had become involved. As Caroline had, as all of us did if we lived long enough. I wondered if I would ever see Caroline again, and something told me I never would. Nor did I.

Nor, for that matter, did I see Harry Blackwell again for many years. He and his newly-found baby disappeared into the ocean of Montreal and soon I forgot all about them. But one day in the first year after the war I happened to be walking down a sidestreet between Sherbrooke and St. Catherine – my orbit in Montreal had narrowed to the city’s heart – and suddenly I saw his name on the front of a store fluorescently lit, remodelled and extremely modern. I looked in through the window and saw Harry himself, quite bald and as absurdly pear-shaped as ever, but well-dressed and with a new manner. He was talking to a tall woman in a black Persian lamb coat, and she looked the kind of woman who would only talk to the owner or the manager. That afternoon I called up a man I knew in a St. James Street insurance office and asked him if he knew anything about Harry’s business. He told me that Blackwell’s Radios and Record Players was not only doing exceedingly well, but that it had captured a sizable piece of the carriage trade business in his field, and that Harry himself had become a prosperous man.

CHAPTER IX

A few days after meeting Caroline, I drove up to the Laurentians in my second-hand car to see Catherine and Sally. I felt tense and unnatural, and half-way up I even began to feel hostile. This fixation I had on Catherine had endured so long it had become a part of my life. There was no sense in pretending it had not frustrated me. There was no sense in pretending that there had not been moments when I had felt angry with Catherine for not having dismissed me outright. On that journey to the Laurentians I came as close as I ever did to criticizing her. Why this acceptance and non-acceptance of me? Had she, perhaps without knowing it, thought of me as a kind of insurance policy? It was no use my remembering that she had introduced me to other girls in her time with Jerome, or that she had urged me to regard her as a friend and live my own life. With her in my mind I had been unable to love any other girl I met, even though I had desired several.

These feelings melted away the moment I saw her, for what I saw was a small woman with an older face, a withdrawn face, a small, plumpish body still beautifully formed, a woman who had once lived a full rich life now living a circumscribed one, a woman who once had loved a lusty husband now living only for her child. I thought: once again she has gone over a frontier ahead of me.

Sitting on the porch we talked quietly of various things, and her initial coolness, her initial factualness, made me feel rejected. She told me Jerome had left her with a small annuity, that she intended to put this cottage on the market, and that she hoped to get a job in the fall.

“I probably won’t be strong enough to work whole-time at anything,” she said. “But I must make some extra money. Daddy and Mummy took us in when I broke down, but Daddy’s health is failing and he can’t live much longer, and it’s impossible to try living with Mummy. She bosses Sally and she still resents me even though she doesn’t know it. When Daddy goes she’ll want to be free. In her heart that’s what she’s always wanted.”

Looking down the lake where Jerome had paddled and talked of his childhood, knowing that this would be the last summer either of us would see this panorama, I had to resist the impulse to ask Catherine to marry me. I was not earning a big salary, but it was more than twice what I had ever expected at Waterloo, and it would be just enough to support us at present prices. But of course there was still Jerome.

“I suppose you saw him when he came home?” I said casually.

“Yes.”

“How was he?”

Her face was a mask. “That’s an impossible question for me to answer.”

“Jack Christopher told me he’d been wounded.”

“That’s true, but he didn’t take it seriously. You know Jerome in things like that.”

“I was talking to Arthur Lazenby,” I said, “and Arthur told me Jerome was disgusted with the communists.”

Catherine breathed heavily and I thought I saw a little flutter in her chest.

“I always knew he’d be disgusted with them when he got to know them,” she said. Then a moment later: “But – I don’t know what to say, George. He’s involved. That’s the only way I can put it – he’s involved so deeply nobody can touch him. It wasn’t like two strangers meeting. It was” – she lifted her hands and dropped them – “it was frightening, and yet it wasn’t frightening. Both of us seemed to be hypnotized.”

“Lenin used to talk about dead men on furlough.”

“Did he?” she said. “Did he?” She gave a soft laugh. “I don’t suppose he spoke of dead women on furlough, too?”

I felt blasted, isolated, cut off and almost annihilated by this sentence, and for a time neither of us spoke.

Then, forcing myself to sound factual, I said: “This Spanish war will soon be over. Will Jerome come home then?”

“How do I know? Somehow I doubt if he will.”

“Do you want him to?”

“How can I answer that, George?”

I looked at that small figure reclining in the chair, the face older not because it was lined but because it reflected now an inner discipline that made it almost formidable.

“Some things seem clearer now,” she said. “I think I told you once that the trouble with Jerome and me was that we loved each other too much. It was something I said when my emotions were so confused I could hardly think. But now I’ve found out it’s true – we loved each other so much we exhausted each other. Everyone wants to be happy, and so much of happiness depends on not being tired. We both demanded from each other more than was possible. Do you know that line of Rilke? ‘Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other’? A marriage based on that kind of love could last. But one like Jerome’s and mine –” We talked of other things for a while, and finally I asked her if she knew that Norah Blackwell was dead.

“The poor, crazed girl,” Catherine said. “I can pity her now, but not because she’s dead. No, I don’t pity her for being dead.”

I remembered what Jack Christopher had said about Catherine’s heart beginning to fibrillate, but she looked so well it was unreal to me that her life should be in danger. I had noticed her movements, and certainly they were slower and more deliberate than I recalled them. I had noticed that she kept off her feet more than she used to, but her figure was as beautifully curved as ever, her skin was still soft and creamy, her hair still sable with that suggestion of lightness. To me she had never been more attractive as a woman than she was then. There seemed a greater depth in her, a greater – long ago I spoke of that singular force which I called, for lack of a better word, spiritual. I felt more of it in her now than ever before, I felt it emerge from her and reach me.

“George,” she said simply, “since Jerome went away and since I broke down, I’ve had to ask myself some hard questions. While Jerome was here and we were happy I pretended the future didn’t exist. I lived in the moment – from day to day. I drew on his strength. Now” – she smiled as though to protect me – “you mustn’t mind this, George, but I must say it. Now my problem is a very simple one. Somehow I must contrive to live long enough to enable Sally to grow up.”

This shocked me so much that I felt my color change, and Catherine laid her fingers over the back of my hand.

“You mustn’t mind me putting it like that. I don’t expect to die for a long time yet, but I do know that my reserves have been reduced. Sally is what I must live for now. Poor little girl, she’s the bigger thing that gives her mother a reason for existing.” Then her face changed, she smiled and was beautiful: “Now don’t think I go around in the glooms because I don’t. I’m getting a lot of fun out of hundreds of things. I’ve begun painting and I love it. Soon – who knows? Perhaps I’ll stop worrying about Jerome.”

That night after Sally went to bed, Catherine came to me with a letter.

“I’d like you to read this, George. I got it over a year ago, and it’s from Jerome’s foster-mother, Mrs. Martell. I met her only twice, for he was afraid or ashamed to visit them, but I wish she’d been my mother and not his.”

I picked up the letter, which was bulky but written in a very fine script with an old-fashioned pen, and this is what I read:

Dear Catherine, I know that what he has done to you is cruel, and I do not understand how God will easily forgive a man who deliberately leaves his wife and child, but that Jerome himself is cruel, that I do not believe. He was a good boy always, and when he grew up in our house we thanked God for him every day of our lives. If you had seen the poor little thing the morning we found him and the look in his eyes you could never be bitter against him for anything he did. Grieved you could be, but bitter, no.

It was the war, Catherine dear, coming on top of that awful thing that happened to him as a little boy. The day he came home from the war was the most awful day Mr. Martell and I ever spent, and it was the day we were sure would be our gladdest. We went down to meet the troopship and I, big fool, had my arms full of daffodils because his first poem had been about daffodils and it wasn’t a bad poem either, much nicer than the poems which are so famous today and nobody reads for beauty or gladness, but Jerome was hardly back in our little house before he turned on us and told us we had raised him on myths and old wives’ tales and by that he meant our religion, and he told my poor husband that the reason he drank was that it was only when he was drunk that he could believe that everything he lived for was not a fake. My husband was never drunk, Catherine! Jerome’s language that day was so awful I shudder to remember it, but what right had I to complain, and what could I say, for what did I know of war? He was only nineteen years old and he had been through those awful things, and poor Mr. Martell and I could not even imagine how fearful they were. That night we wept bitterly.

Mr. Martell was wiser than I, and he said to me the next day, “Goodness and mercy we thought would follow us all the days of our lives, but it cannot follow anyone if he tries to live his life through somebody else. Jerome must find his own path now.” This was too deep for me, Catherine, for wise though Mr. Martell was, I know we never tried to live our lives through Jerome, we were just proud of him, and later on when he was a doctor we were so proud and happy to think that the little boy we had found in a railway station, our little boy, was a wonderful doctor helping all kinds of people in a great city. No, I do not think we tried to live our lives in Jerome, I think we just loved him and wanted him to be happy, and dear Catherine, when he married you we were so happy we thanked God once more for his goodness, for you were the perfect wife.

Some day he will return to you, Catherine dear. That I know. To you he will come back, but not of course to me, for now that Mr. Martell is gone, I hope and pray that I will soon follow him. I am Scotch as you know, and we Scotch are lonely, sentimental folk, and I love that old Scotch song Mr. Martell enjoyed so much, The Land O’ the Leal and sometimes I sing to myself those lines about wearin’ awa like snaw when it’s thaw, because that is what I am doing now, just wearin’ awa as though all were a dream. Since my husband’s death nothing seems real, only the times I remember and the great hope I have that soon we will meet in perfection, and sometimes I think Mr. Martell may even be lonely in heaven, though of course I know that is silly, for he won’t need his socks darned there, and he won’t need somebody to clean the spots off his Sunday clothes, and all the little things I so liked doing for him, he won’t need them at all.

Pray for him, Catherine dear, and do not be too proud to pray for yourself. Pray that your belief in him will endure, for I know you must believe in your heart that in his heart he is a good man still. Pray that he may discover the peace he seeks, and that he will find God before it is too late because that is what he really seeks, for if he finds God he will find himself, and then he will find you. One of these days this dream will end and we will all meet in the bosom of God. You must not mind if I talk like this, for it is an old woman’s weakness and some day you yourself will be an old woman and will know what it is like. It is like talking to yourself so much of the time.

I hope I am not just talking to myself now, Catherine dear, when I repeat to you a sentence from one of my husband’s sermons which has helped me many a time. My husband was not a very good preacher because he had a weak voice and never believed people would be interested in what he had to say, but I always loved his sermons because usually he would say something in them I had been thinking myself, and then it would be said and I would know it was true.

This thing he said was one of the most familiar sentences in the Bible, simply this – “It comes to pass.” That was his text. But the way my husband spoke it the old words sounded quite new and different, for he spoke them like this – “It comes – to pass!” That is, it comes, in order to pass.

I put the letter down and was unconscious of my own body as I stared over the lake to the empty hills. I heard Catherine’s voice beside me.

“That was the last word I had from her. Six weeks later she died.”

Catherine went inside with the letter and left me staring across the lake to a wilderness half-obscured by a purple twilight. I thought of those two gentle, loving little people I had never known. Had the ocean rolled over them as though they had never been?

Catherine returned, and sensing my thoughts, she said: “I envy those two people. They were born knowing that nobody can be equal to his destiny if he’s alone. But they believed in God, so they weren’t alone. I envy them, George, I envy them. I wish I could believe in God.”

“I’ve often wondered if you did.”

“I do and I don’t. I think it’s this wretched heart of mine that makes it so hard for me to believe in Him. I used to pray and pray when I was a child, pray to God to make me better and like everyone else. And yet there are times when I’m aware of Him.”

For a long while neither of us spoke and it grew dark. Stars looked very bright in the silence, the total silence, of that northern night. I sat and thought; I sat and desired Catherine so intensely I could hardly endure it. Never had I loved her as I did then, and I did not understand until much later – though she did – that this feeling of being able to love her properly was to some extent connected with the change in her condition. Circumstances of many kinds had reduced her. Now at last – for I, too, was growing up – I could believe within myself that I was her equal.

Suddenly I heard myself say: “Catherine, please marry me.”

She was so calm that I’m sure she had anticipated my question. I felt her hand close over mine, her small, soft hand with the long, lovely fingers.

“Oh George!” And then: “Dear George, it would be better if you hated me.”

“Don’t say such things.”

“Even if I were in a fit mental state to marry anyone, I wouldn’t dream of letting you marry me. You’re still young.”

“We’re the same age, practically.”

She smiled: “Yes, in the actual number of years we’ve lived. No dear, you must find yourself a real wife who’ll be able to give you children and take care of you properly.”

Overwhelmed by emotion I took her into my arms, the first time I had done so since we were children, and for an instant she melted against me and I cried out with emotion. Then she stiffened, she turned away her head, she pressed her cheek against my breast, she withdrew and sat down in silence.

“Catherine, I love you! I can’t love anyone else but you. I’ve tried. I’ve tried and I can’t.”

I saw her breast lift and fall, her hands came up and covered her face, then she dropped her hands and sat still.

She said very quietly: “I’m sorry, I’m so terribly sorry. I’ve done to you what Norah Blackwell did to Jerome. Almost what he’s done to me. I knew better and yet – oh George, how can people hurt each other like this?”

“Is it Jerome? Is it still him?”

“Perhaps. How do I know? Oh George, I – this has been like a bereavement. More than that, it’s – I can’t make decisions. I’ve made so many and I can’t make any more. Living with Jerome I let him make them and then I was left – just Sally and me and my bad health and – I can’t make another decision, I can’t.” Then she said more quietly: “I’m going to say something I hope you’ll never find the necessity of saying.”

I had been kneeling by her chair and now I got up and sat in my own.

“I’m tired of love,” I heard her say. “I’m exhausted by it. All of me, body and soul. Now I’m beginning to be free of it, and how can I face it again?”

I looked dumbly at the shadow of her form in the chair in the dark and she knew what was in my mind.

“George dear, I know what you want and I want it too. Don’t think I don’t. But I wasn’t talking of sex a while ago, I was talking of love. Sex is so easy. It’s so very, very easy. But you love me and I love you. And I’m not equal to love.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I hope you never do, dear. Now I’m going to say something which will probably shock you. A year ago I went to bed with a lonely man I didn’t love. I thought it might help but it didn’t. I came home and thought of the verse in the psalm: ‘Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog.’ I knew then there is no easy escape from loneliness. I’ve been wounded, George. Perhaps I’ll heal. If my health were normal – yes, I’m sure I’d heal. But I’m not equal to love now, and you are, so you must find somebody else.”

And a little later she said: “It’s funny, not really believing in a God who cares and yet believing in the soul. Yet it’s all each of us is left with, finally. If I were stronger I could forget that, but I must live for that, too. For that besides Sally. For that until I get so tired I can’t. Does this make any sense? Can’t you see, George? I’m still a fairly young woman. I know from the way men look at me I’m still a desirable one. I know from the way I feel I’m still full of desire myself. But” – she stopped, and then she said with complete calm – “I also know that I haven’t long to live.”

I think I wept but I’m not sure, nor does it matter. A little later I drove back to town with the image of her face haunting me, with the feeling of her body melted into mine so warm and close that the night throbbed. I remembered Jerome in his canoe going down the river to the sea, and my thought that at last he had reached the sea and was out of sight of land in his canoe. Now I, too, was at sea and I thought of that vast reservoir of emotions and memories on which every fragile human life floats until the depth becomes a Mindinao Deep so profound he cannot plumb it. And I realized something else: that Catherine had been trying to tell me that love, sought as an escape from the burden of the self, turns rapidly into a captivity. “Very well,” I said aloud, “very well.” And I knew then – or thought I knew, since nobody can know in advance how he will actually feel – that perhaps I had at last grown up. If loving Catherine meant captivity, then I wanted it.

CHAPTER X

That summer and the years immediately following, my private life almost drowned in what seemed to be the disintegration of the world itself. As pigeon after pigeon came home to roost, as all the fearful prophecies we had made with angry defiance in the Thirties became living realities, my own life and that of everyone I knew shrank to insignificance.

The summer after I revisited Catherine was a sweltering one. Montreal steamed in a humid heat worse than Singapore’s, the garbage smelled high in back alleys, tenement dwellers gasped for breath on their steps and porches after sunsets; even the calls from the belfries rang like dull bronze in the dead air. Thunder-weather.

Working day after day, often night after night in that humid heat I felt like a herald of death. Strangers used to call me in the radio building and say: “Mr. Stewart, can’t you really see a ray of hope?” Or: “Mr. Stewart, please stop telling us there’s going to be a war.” Or: “Mr. Stewart, my husband was killed at Ypres and my boy is eighteen and why do you insist there’s going to be a war?”

We entered it in September, 1939, in a trance. Catastrophe after catastrophe, the queer lull during the first winter, then Norway, Holland, Belgium and France: Narvik, Rotterdam, Eben Emael, Forges-les-Eaux and Hitler in the Forest of Compiègne. The bands played There’ll Always Be an England, the airmen signed the Kentish skies with their honor and the unemployed vanished from St. Catherine Street into the army.

The week France fell I was in Washington on business for the organization, and while listening to a scared debate in the Senate Chamber of that neutral country I remembered Jerome. Where was he now? When last heard of, he had been seen crossing the Pyrenees into France with a beaten remnant of the Loyalist army. I believed he had been interned by the French, which indicated that his passport had been lost or stolen. The previous winter I had made enquiries in Ottawa about him, but External was far too busy with the war to spend time tracing a single citizen who had left his country to join a Spanish tragedy. Where was he now? Dead, I thought, as dead as my own past, as dead as I myself will be a year or two hence. When I returned to Montreal I went to a recruiting station to volunteer. The doctors looked me over, thanked me for coming, and rejected me on two counts. So I went back to my work in cbc and stayed with the organization throughout the war.

Strange years which now have become a blur. While the war thundered on, Canada unnoticed grew into a nation at last. This cautious country which had always done more than she had promised, had always endured in silence while others reaped the glory – now she became alive and to us within her excitingly so. My work brought me close to the heart of this changing land. And sometimes, thinking with shame of the Thirties when nothing in Canada had seemed interesting unless it resembled something in England or the States, I even persuaded myself that here I had found the thing larger than myself to which I could belong.

The war thundered on and the Thirties became a memory. I spent a winter in Halifax directing a series of scripts describing some aspects of the navy which then, without anyone seeming to be aware of it, was carrying on sixty percent of the convoy duty on the Atlantic. I crossed to England on a convoy and visited some of our army camps. I returned to Canada for more routine work. The war thundered on with the tide turned. I went out to the Alaska Highway, came back again and was sent to England just after the Normandy landings. I was back in Canada when the war ended, having spent all of it chairborne and out of uniform.

It was during the war, of course, that Catherine and I finally came together.

Late in the summer of 1939 she found a buyer for her Laurentian cottage, and a few weeks after war began she got a job with an interior decorator in the city. Yes, even then there was some business in interior decorating. She sent Sally to her own old school in the city and rapidly her confidence returned to her. In 1940 she left the interior decorator’s for war work which she was able to do in the mornings and she stayed with this for the duration. In such spare time as she had, she began learning how to paint.

Then, early in 1941, came the news that Jerome had been tortured to death by the Nazis.

I heard this news before Catherine did, for it reached me in my office in the cbc building. I at once got in touch with the French aviator, Captain Lajoie, and he seemed an entirely responsible man. He was in Canada organizing a fighter wing of Free Frenchmen who were training under the Empire Air Training Plan, and before the war he had been a professional officer in the French Army. There seemed no reason to doubt his word. He told me that Jerome, after being released by the French from the concentration camp for the defeated Spanish, had tried to escape to England. But the Nazis had over-run the country and he had joined the French underground. Captain Lajoie had not seen his body impaled on the meathook in that French market town, but he himself had been in the operation in which Jerome had been captured. He said an attempt had been made to rescue him from the Gestapo and that afterwards he had been told about the torture and execution by one of his own men, who swore he had seen the body.

It seemed final and conclusive, and I left Lajoie feeling sick. But I remembered Catherine almost at once, and immediately I telephoned friends on the newspapers and asked them to repress the details of the story. Once again I was grateful to that Montreal clannishness which can be so exasperating to outsiders. The men I talked to on the papers had already heard Lajoie’s story and had decided themselves to repress the details for Catherine’s sake. And the Gazette, as I was to tell Jerome years later, wrote him an obituary notice becoming a former Montreal surgeon who had died bravely in the war.

But the details got out just the same; they always do. One day a woman Catherine barely knew telephoned her to ask if the story about the torture was true. Catherine was shocked enough anyway, but now this woman gave her the details and nearly killed her. She had to rest in bed for nearly a week, and when I visited her she looked as though she were under the torture herself.

She recovered. Once again she crossed a frontier and grew strong on the other side. I visited her more and more often, we became more and more essential to one another and at last she ceased holding me off. By the end of that summer she had persuaded herself that I would never marry anyone else. Also by the end of that summer she received from the Canadian government a formal confirmation of Jerome’s death.

It was on the weekend of our Thanksgiving in 1941 that I drove Catherine down to a friend’s cottage beside a lake south of the city and there we spent three days in the cathedral silence of a land which in that season is surely the loveliest on earth. For this was hardwood country with deep, clear lakes. Maples of three species, birches, oaks, beech and butternut trees flamed all the way from southern Quebec to the New England sea, mirrored in lakes while flocking birds flew south.

“Yes, George,” she said, “yes!”

Three weeks later we were married.

CHAPTER XI

Happiness is one of the hardest things to write about, and the difficulty of doing so makes me long to be a musician or a painter, for painters and musicians are at ease with the supreme emotion, which is not grief but joy abounding. To be able to make a joyful noise to the Lord or a praise of colors and forms would seem to me to equate any man with gods or little children. Happiness annihilates time. We measure history by its catastrophes, we recall the weather by its storms, but the periods of peace and joy – who can describe them?

“Many a green isle needs must be …” But is it not also true that years later it is the green isles of happiness that we remember best, even if we cannot tell about them? Is it not also true that though we can describe pain, we cannot remember what it was like? Jerome once said to me that nature’s greatest mercy could be found in the singular fact that nobody can remember pain. You can remember that you felt pain and you can dread its return, but pain itself, the surgeon’s saw across the unanaesthetized bone – that you cannot remember. But moments of joy you can, even the feelings of it. The feelings of making love in peace and excitement can return years later and live.

Happiness did not come to Catherine and me in a rush; rather it grew like summer weather after a cool spring in a northern land. I heard her laughing again, I watched her face shed some of its lines and grow younger again, I saw a new ease with the growing Sally. Happiness revealed its presence in the faces of new friends, and to me its fairest aspect was my own witness of the world’s beauty once again establishing itself upon Catherine. She had been lost and now she was found. As I, lost for years, had also been found. As the world, apparently lost for more than a decade, now seemed to be finding itself, too.

Now Catherine understood what beauty was; now in her painting she was learning to capture some of it; now in the acceptance of her own infirmity she had no need to resist the knowledge that beauty’s most exquisite property is its evanescence.

The war ended and still the country grew, and now I had a small but established reputation. Now we lived a quiet life and the Thirties seemed to have sunk back into the past. Good years, rich years, wonderful years. Many a green isle needs must be … We lived, and we lived well, in those years before the first of the harsh inevitable commands came from her damaged heart. We lived and it was real and I remember nearly all of it. Even now on a spring morning in the country I can see again the joy in Catherine’s face when she used to come out to greet a morning similar. Or on an evening of mists in the country I can still see living the serene happiness in her eyes. Or across a dinner table in candlelight, sometimes I see a handsome woman in early middle-age smile at the man beside her and remember how Catherine too had smiled at some man, hitherto a stranger, who had become her dinner companion and in whom she had discovered something she liked. Good years and full ones. I could not count all the lives that crossed and touched our own during them, each contributing to the other some atom of experience. Now when the first snow falls in the city and the apartment is suddenly brighter owing to the sun’s reflection on the snow, I see again the look in her eyes which says: “How good to see this again!” Her painting became joyful: such riots of color I had seldom seen in the work of a painter in this land which so many painters see as somber except in the fall. In our country place we planted a garden and there was a spring of water beside it where warblers fanned themselves on hot days. Together we grew intimate with the seasons, and we planted our lives in one another without trying to annul the past. She, who had said ‘yes’ with all her might to Jerome, now said ‘yes’ to me.

The odd thing about this period was that we both were young in years yet felt all ages within our imaginations. In terms of a normal life-span we should have been standing at high noon. Yet, though we never used such terms to one another, we knew that our actual time was early evening. We knew, and never mentioned, that it was sure to be limited. Fortunately the evening was the part of the day we both loved the best, for the early evening of a good day holds within itself the dawn and the morning no less than the promise of the night.

Sally grew and entered college and the first touch of gray appeared in Catherine’s sable hair. The country grew and became rich, and a generation to whom Hitler and the depression were mere names now stood six feet tall. Good and wonderful years when the voice of the turtle was truly heard in the spring. For Catherine’s soul seemed healed. Her love for Jerome had gone down like a wounded living thing to the floor of the sea and time had covered it, the deep time which enfolds and exposes to chemical change all living things, time full of new friends and interests and life and love, and of the quiet joy of watching her child grow into a woman.

CHAPTER XII

The last line uttered by the Devil in the first part of Goethe’s Faust is the abrupt command, Her zu mir! Faust’s adventure is over, his dream of eternal happiness gone. The Devil, who had been waiting ironically, says “Come to me!” and it is over. I think of that line whenever I hear the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth where, time and again with a compulsive beauty, the key changes to that ominous note of pity and terror against which all but courage and art quails. From the statement of the opening theme this key-change has been inevitable. One senses, even if one does not know, that it is sure to come, and it does. So came the change in our lives with Catherine’s first embolism.

It struck like a sword, it threatened her life, it paralyzed her entire left side for days. And for days I was terrified not only for her but also for myself. I learned to hate sickness as Jews learned to hate Hitler.

But Catherine recovered from this. That enormous life-force in her, after being nearly extinguished, gathered a mysterious strength not even the doctors professed to understand. After a long convalescence she got better, and a season in the country restored her. The lid of her left eye drooped from the damage done to her nervous system, but this droop gave her features a singular charm. By the fall of that year she was almost normal again.

Almost, I said. For in our minds neither of us could ever be quite like other people again. The inevitable had now happened. It did lie ahead of us, a beyond-this-nothing, as the war had lain ahead of us in the Thirties. Now it was here, as the war was here in the Forties. Previously she had known that she lived with the sword dangling over her head by a horsehair. Now she had felt its point; now she looked up and saw it there.

A year passed and the sword fell again. Once more that astonishing life-force in Catherine rallied and after paralysis she again got better.

I make these statements factually and coldly because it is the only thing I can do. Each of these attacks was an assault on her life by an enemy who had aimed at her. Suddenly it seemed to me that we were almost isolated by her fate. I became aware that some of our friends regarded Catherine’s plight with awe. They spoke of her courage and outward cheerfulness, they were kind and thoughtful, but it must have been painful at times for them to think about us. They, too, were nearing early middle age. They were reaching the place where the final enemy ceases to be a mere word. They had seen his tracks in the forest, they had heard his horns in the night, they had come upon the traces of his fires. They knew he was planting his little fifth columns in their arteries and valves and organs and the cigarettes they smoked and the tensions under which they lived. A few of them looked at Catherine, I sometimes thought, as I myself had looked at some small, defenseless country near to Hitler’s Germany in the years when Hitler seemed as omnipotent as fate. She would get it first. She, still so young in years, was a preview of what lay in wait for all.

The change of key, the turn of the dragonfly’s wing – was it only to us that the whole mood and tenor of life seemed so suddenly different in the last two years of the 1940s? I don’t think so. For surely the whole world went over a frontier in that time and since has been compelled to live very strangely.

In the Thirties all of us who were young had been united by anger and the obviousness of our plight; in the war we had been united by fear and the obviousness of the danger. But now, prosperous under the bomb, we all seemed to have become atomized. Wherever I looked I saw people trying to live private lives for themselves and their families. Nobody asked the big questions any more. Why think, when the thing to be thought about is so huge it is impossible to think about it? Why ask where you are going, when you know you can’t stop even if you wish? Why ask why, when it does no good to know why?

In the Thirties old John Donne had spoken for all of us when he declared that no man is an island entire of itself, that every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. In the bleak years we at least were not alone. In these prosperous years we were. The gods, false or true, had vanished. The bell which only a few years ago had tolled for all, now tolled for each family in its prosperous solitude. So with us; so with so many. How private my life with Catherine had become! How outmoded so many of my friends felt! How different was this new key!

But of course for Catherine there was the knowledge that most of her life was lived, that the best was inevitably over. Now in her final phase what I used to think of as her character ceased to matter in Catherine; her character almost disappeared into her spirit. The Catherine I knew and loved was still present and visible, was even fun to be with. But the essential Catherine – what now was the essential Catherine – sometimes seemed to me like the container of a life-force resisting extinction.

Yet she was often gay. In public she never let out a word of how she felt except by way of excuse when there was some place people wanted her to go to and she was not well enough. Sally seemed almost unconscious of her mother’s struggle, so well did Catherine conceal it from her. And does it make any sense to say that she was inwardly sad when she painted such pictures? Every fortnight or so she changed the picture which hung on the wall facing the foot of my bed, and when I woke in the dawn there this thing was, this expression – not of Catherine but of a love of life itself which in her had become so intense as to be almost impersonal.

Finally we reached this winter which I described at the beginning of the story, when I, too, almost persuaded myself that I was equal to my destiny of living under the sword with her until at last the sword fell. When I, too, almost believed I was at peace. When I, too, flattered myself that my courage was equal to hers.

Few fighters are knocked out by a single blow. One after the other in combination is the way a trained man strikes down his enemy. And after each blow the situation changes, and so do the reflexes and capacities of the person hit.

Little did I know – though I believed I knew all about it – how little I actually knew of the enormous and terrible implications of absolute finality.

The shark in the ocean may be invisible, but he is there. So also is fear in the ocean of the subconscious.

A man standing on a rock may believe himself strong enough to stand there forever. But if an earthquake comes, where is he? What is he?

I can say now in retrospect that I did not know what my true position was when Jerome returned from the dead. But I was soon to find it out. I was also to discover what I, and I believe every man, requires to know and feel if he is to live with a sense of how utterly tremendous is the mystery our ancestors confidently called God.