Marius Tallard sat on a bench in the corner of the station waiting room in Montreal and ate the sandwich Emilie had just given him. He took large bites and swallowed before he had chewed properly. The movement of his jaws showed how thin he had become, with the sharp cheekbones making deep shadows on his white skin. Emilie waited until the sandwich was half consumed and then she said, “You better be sure it’s a safe thing, you going back home now.”
Her timidity irritated him. “What’s safe anywhere?” he said, his mouth full of bread and ham. “I’m tired. I’m going home.”
Emilie accepted his explanation without question, as she did everything he said.
“But don’t get the idea I’m going back to my father,” he went on. “I’m through with him. But that land out there–it’s mine as well as his. I hate Montreal anyhow.”
“Sure, sure. Sometimes I think about the country too. Some times.” She smiled at him with a sort of vacant tenderness.
The waiting room smelled of stale cigar smoke, spittoons, disinfectant, orange peels, unwashed clothes and sweating flesh. All the assorted bits of humanity that sat stiffly or lolled on the benches were ill at ease and unwilling to be there. They were devoid of background, without status in this interim between leaving one place and arriving at another. There were farm women with their best clothes wilted and bundles tied with cord hugged close at their sides. There were sailors and soldiers showing the effects of a weekend leave in the city. There were couples, and single men with cheap suitcases at their feet who might be anything from lunch-counter clerks to steamfitters in the normal course of their day. Now they were nothing, nobodies waiting for trains to take them some place else. For a fraction of time the big room became alive and everyone in it was united by a common interest. A girl in magenta silk, holding the arm of a man in a black suit and a bowler hat, broke away from a splash of shouting and laughter in the concourse, ducked through a shower of rice and confetti, into the waiting room, through it, and on to their train.
Marius finished the sandwich and wiped his mouth with a rumpled handkerchief. He looked up at the clock on the wall at one end of the room. The instrument might have been put there especially to annoy him. “Wait–wait–wait! That’s the best thing I do nowadays.”
Emilie touched his forearm with her fingers. She wanted to take the strain from him, to make him quiet, but he refused to let her. Now he jerked his arm away. She wanted to ask him where he had been and what he had been doing during all the weeks she had not seen him, but she said nothing. It was something to be thankful for that he had called her at the restaurant just before she was ready to leave.
“I guess you got no money, maybe?” she said after a while. “Maybe that’s why you go home?”
“Well, what if it is?”
“You should have come to me. I’d see you weren’t hungry.”
He laughed harshly. “I’ve been getting my education.”
“You been back at the college?”
“Don’t be so simple. Do you think you get an education in college?”
“Mon Dieu, you got no need to bite me.”
“I’ve been learning things that count. How the poor feel, for instance.”
“I could have told you.”
He appraised her with a sarcastic smile. “I found out the poor have no brains. They believe whatever they’re told so long as it’s easy to remember. But the main thing is, they’re all lazy.”
He got up from the bench and thrust his hands in his pockets. All the luggage he possessed was on his back. A passing soldier glanced at him and Marius made a point of staring until the man looked the other way.
“In this town,” he said, looking over Emilie’s head, “all the poor I met were French. We’re the ones that get splashed with the motor cars of the English.” He looked down at the girl beside him. “Did you ever stop to think how comparatively few English live in Montreal?”
Emilie shook her head. She had no interest in what he was saying, but the way he said it gave her a sick feeling inside. He stooped down and picked up a grain of rice that had been thrown at the honeymoon couple. Eyeing it as he turned it over in his fingers, he went on. “In Montreal the French outnumber the English three to one. In the province we outnumber them more than seven to one. And yet, the English own everything!” He held the grain of rice under the nail of his thumb and stared at the floor. “The English in Montreal, they own nearly the whole of Canada. And yet once upon a time the whole of Canada belonged to the French.”
Emilie tried to smile. She tugged at his coat in an effort to get him to sit down again, but Marius knew he talked better on his feet. “In the factories all the bosses are English. One English boss, five hundred French workers. Funny, no?” He cracked the grain of rice solemnly between two nails as though it were a flea. “But on the whole,” he went on, “it is the laziness of the poor one should first observe. The rich are equally stupid, but I think maybe the rich are frightened, and frightened men are not generally lazy.”
Emilie got up from the bench and stood close beside him. In contrast to his drawn and bitter leanness, she looked plump and healthy. Her commonsense wanted to make him stop all this talk. It was probably clever, but clever people only got into trouble. Only priests should use clever talk like Marius.
Again she tugged at his sleeve. “What are you going to do now?”
“How do I know?”
“Will they get you? You think maybe they know where you’re going?”
Marius looked at her sharply and then he walked rapidly out of the waiting room toward the tracks. Emilie had to move her short legs unnaturally fast to keep up with him and her heavy hips wobbled in time with her trot. She knew Marius was frightened. When a man talked like that he was always scared of something. Whoever was after him had found out where he’d been hiding, and now he had to get out of town.
When they reached the gate Marius showed his ticket to the conductor. The man glanced at it and let them pass through to the platform. They walked down a line of standing coaches and Marius finally selected one that was nearly full. He stopped at the steps and looked down at Emilie. The set expression on his face melted and he looked irresolute, almost pitiful. “If I only had some money…”
He bent and kissed her fiercely, then released her and went up the steps without looking around. She stood where he had left her and her hand rose and then fell again. He had kissed her so hard his teeth had bruised her lips. Nothing had passed from him to her but the pain. Even in kissing her he had locked her out. She turned after a few moments and walked slowly back to the station concourse. What ought she to do? She had saved seven dollars. Maybe if she went to church and put the money in the box and prayed to the Virgin, the Holy Mother of God would intercede and make Marius kinder and happy, so everything between them could be good. If she wanted to be blessed she must first deserve the blessing.