When Paul and Heather reached the street they found that the rain had stopped, but the atmosphere was as dense with mist as though a cloud had moved into the town. Miles away thunder growled like a distant bombardment. On University Street the nearest arc-lamp cut a long cone of blue light on the pavement.
“Could I drive you anywhere?” Heather said.
“No thanks. I only live on Durocher.”
“But you haven’t a raincoat.”
He looked down at her with the darkness between them. “All right, Heather.” It felt strange to be using her name. “Maybe I’d better go with you.”
He opened the car door, she got in and slid under the wheel, and he followed. When she turned over the motor it failed to spark. She pulled the choke all the way out and ground the starter for nearly half a minute and the result was the same. Then she snapped off the ignition lock. “Now I’ve flooded it,” she said.
They sat for a time in silence and she tried again. The motor still did not spark.
“I’ll take a look at it,” he said. He got out and lifted the hood, struck a match and looked inside, then put both hands in, touching something and said, “Now try it.”
She pressed the starter and the motor roared alive. She caught and held it while he lowered the hood, then quieted it down. He got inside and closed the door.
“So you know all about cars, too,” she said.
“It wasn’t flooded. Your choke wire was disconnected. That was all.”
“I wouldn’t know a choke-wire from–from a magneto.”
“Why should you? You’d only put garage hands out of work if you did.”
She sat for a moment in the dark, touching the accelerator rhythmically with her toe. Then she turned to look at him. “There’s something the matter with that remark, Paul.”
He made no reply as he wiped his hands on his handkerchief. Unreasonably, she had touched off the anger inside him. Unemployment could be nothing but an academic problem to her, if she ever thought about it at all.
“It shouldn’t be economically necessary for people to be helpless,” she said. “I’m ashamed not to know anything about the car I drive.”
His flash of anger died out; it made no sense. When he spoke again his voice was quiet. “I don’t know much about engines myself but rule of thumb. I worked in a garage for two summers.”
She set the car in motion and drove up the hill, turned off into Prince Arthur and along to Durocher. They reached the house where he indicated he lived within a few minutes. She kept the motor running, but he made no move to get out of the car. Neither of them spoke. They merely sat in the dark car and stared through the rain-splashed windshield.
Then she broke the silence. “You know Greek, and you understand cars, and you’re a hockey player. It’s a fascinating combination. What else have you been doing since we all went fishing together in Saint-Marc?”
“Trying to get along, mainly. Why not tell me what you’ve been doing yourself?”
She tested the play in the wheel. “What people like me always do, I suppose. Nothing of any importance whatever.”
He opened the door of the car and she checked him with another question. “Paul–am I very different from what I used to be?”
He closed the door, fished in his pocket for a package of cigarettes, and found them. “I don’t know, Heather.” He offered her one, from habit calculating how many he had left. “It’s a long time since we used to be.”
“You see Grampa often, don’t you?”
“Since he’s been in Montreal. Once or twice I went out to Saint-Marc to see him, but I didn’t manage it very often.” He added that Yardley had written to him regularly once a month for years. He still had two shoe-boxes full of his letters.
“Do you think he’s as wonderful as I do?” Heather said.
“I don’t even know if he’s wonderful at all. He’s just a natural man, so far as I can tell.” He added, as if to himself, “Men like him aren’t being made any more. I wish I knew why.”
She tried to see his profile, but could discern nothing more than a blur of dark hair and eyes. “After you left Saint-Marc, you went to Frobisher, didn’t you?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“I seem to remember someone telling me.”
“Frobisher, and a few other kinds of education, made a pretty good job of bastardizing me.” When she made no reply he added, “At least, according to my brother.”
Swimming vaguely out of her memory, a lean, haunted-looking man came back to Heather. He was in a maple grove, slinking away from Daphne, Paul and herself. Then Daphne mentioning him to her mother, telling her mother what he had said to Paul. And after that she somehow knew that the man had been arrested because of something her mother had told someone, and they had left Saint-Marc with her grandfather looking sad, and never returned. It still made her uncomfortable and rather ashamed to remember.
Paul gave a sudden, short laugh. “No wonder you don’t know what I’m talking about. After all, you’re English. It’s a tribal custom in Canada to be either English or French. But I’m neither one nor the other.”
“I can’t see what difference it makes.”
It was his turn to hunt for her face in the dark.
“Why did you learn Greek, Paul? Nobody I know takes it any more.”
He opened the door to throw out the stub of his cigarette, took hers when she handed it to him and threw it out too, then shut the door and turned back to look at her. He took his time to answer, and then he said without emotion, “I thought for a while I was going to study for the Church. Marius tried to make me believe I had a vocation. If you’re French and reasonably good in your school work, there’s nearly always someone who thinks you ought to be a priest.”
“But you’re not French!” she said. “You haven’t the slightest trace of a French accent.”
“I haven’t the slightest trace of an English accent when I speak French, either,” he said with irony.
This time Heather’s flush was lost in the darkness. Paul went on without bitterness, “My father wanted me to get a scientific education. That’s why he sent me to Frobisher. Not that Frobisher was much in science, but he thought I’d have a better chance there.”
“And science didn’t take?” Heather never let her own confusions interfere with her intense interest in other people. “What kind of science?”
“Any kind. Sometimes I’m sorry it didn’t take. I did my best with it at the university. God knows it’s the only thing that counts these days. After all, science is the new theology. I’d still like to be a first-class physicist. Then I could stick to my own job and tell everyone to go to hell. Maybe I could even discover some new process that would send them there. The only place where science isn’t God now is in Quebec. We’re pretty old-fashioned.” He laughed shortly. “But I was no good in maths. I’m a B.Sc., but it doesn’t fool me into thinking I’m a scientist.”
Again he opened the car door and this time he got out. “Thanks, Heather. I’d better not keep you any longer.”
“Grampa said you were leaving Montreal soon. When are you going?”
“I don’t know. It depends on whether I get a job. He’s written to some people he used to know in a shipping company. I hope I can get aboard a freighter.”
“That’s wicked!”
“You don’t have to feel uncomfortable about it,” he said quietly.
“But it is wicked. And it’s stupid. You–an ordinary seaman!”
“It will be a job. I’ve had a good many doors closed in my face lately, Heather.”
“Is that what you want? To be a sailor?”
He looked both ways up and down the street. “I certainly want to see the world,” he said when he turned back. “And I suppose that’s one way of seeing it.”
A woman passed, walking under an umbrella with her head bent. She almost bumped into him, and he stopped talking until she had merged with the misty darkness again. “Anyway, I’ve got to get out of here. It’s choking me.”
A breath of wind rustled the elm tree overhead, and a small shower of rain came down with a whisper.
“Paul–let’s see each other again!” When he hesitated, she went on quickly, “I’m trying to learn how to paint. Will you come down to my studio some day and tell me why I’m no good?”
He laughed suddenly in the darkness. “I don’t know much about painting. Where’s your studio?”
“It’s just a little room on Labelle Street. Here.” She opened her bag and took out a pencil and a card and wrote a number on it. “Not tomorrow. I’ve got to do something with Mummy. But the next afternoon?”
“I’ve no job to keep me away, God knows!”
“You’ll really come then? About three?”
“All right, Heather. Yes, I’d like to.”
She drove away, leaving him on the sidewalk. He stood watching the tail-light of the car recede down the street, then disappear around the corner. In the distance, far beyond the immediate darkness that surrounded him, thunder growled again, and another puff of wind sent another shower of rain whispering down from the leaves to the pavement.