Two Solitudes Read online

  THE NEW CANADIAN LIBRARY

  General Editor: David Staines

  ADVISORY BOARD

  Alice Munro

  W.H. New

  Guy Vanderhaeghe

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  EPIGRAPH

  FOREWORD

  PART ONE 1917–1918

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  PART TWO 1919–1921

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  PART THREE 1934

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  PART FOUR 1939

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Afterword

  ALSO BY HUGH MACLENNAN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  Love consists in this,

  that two solitudes protect,

  and touch, and greet each other.

  –Rainer Maria Rilke

  FOREWORD

  Because this is a story, I dislike having to burden it with a foreword, but something of the kind is necesssary, for it is a novel of Canada. This means that its scene is laid in a nation with two official languages, English and French. It means that some of the characters in the book are presumed to speak only English, others only French, while many are bilingual.

  No single word exists, within Canada itself, to designate with satisfaction to both races a native of the country. When those of the French language use the word Canadien, they nearly always refer to themselves. They know their English-speaking compatriots as les Anglais. English-speaking citizens act on the same principle. They call themselves Canadians; those of the French language French-Canadians.

  I should like to emphasize as emphatically as I can that this book is a story, and in no sense whatever documentary. All the characters are purely imaginary. If names of actual persons, living or dead, have been used it is a coincidence I have done my best to avoid. The parish known in the story as Saint-Marc-des-Érables is also imaginary. There may be other Saint-Marcs in the Province of Quebec, but they are not mine.

  PART ONE

  1917–1918

  ONE

  Northwest of Montreal, through a valley always in sight of the low mountains of the Laurentian Shield, the Ottawa River flows out of Protestant Ontario into Catholic Quebec. It comes down broad and ale coloured and joins the Saint Lawrence, the two streams embrace the pan of Montreal Island, the Ottawa merges and loses itself, and the mainstream moves northeastward a thousand miles to the sea.

  Nowhere has nature wasted herself as she has here. There is enough water in the Saint Lawrence alone to irrigate half of Europe, but the river pours right out of the continent into the sea. No amount of water can irrigate stones, and most of Quebec is solid rock. It is as though millions of years back in geologic time a sword had been plunged through the rock from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes and savagely wrenched out again, and the pure water of the continental reservoir, unmuddied and almost useless to farmers, drains untouchably away. In summer the cloud packs pass over it in soft, cumulus, pacific towers, endlessly forming and dissolving to make a welter of movement about the sun. In winter when there is no storm the sky is generally empty, blue and glittering over the ice and snow, and the sun stares out of it like a cyclops’ eye.

  All the narrow plain between the Saint Lawrence and the hills is worked hard. From the Ontario border down to the beginning of the estuary, the farmland runs in two delicate bands along the shores, with roads like a pair of village main streets a thousand miles long, each parallel to the river. All the good land was broken long ago, occupied and divided among seigneurs and their sons, and then among tenants and their sons. Bleak wooden fences separate each strip of farm from its neighbour, running straight as rulers set at right angles to the river to form long narrow rectangles pointing inland. The ploughed land looks like the course of a gigantic and empty steeplechase where all motion has been frozen. Every inch of it is measured, and brooded over by notaries, and blessed by priests.

  You can look north across the plain from the river and see the farms between their fences tilting toward the forest, and beyond them the line of trees crawling shaggily up the slope of the hills. The forest crosses the watershed into an evergreen bush that spreads far to the north, lake-dotted and mostly unknown, until it reaches the tundra. The tundra goes to the lower straits of the Arctic Ocean. Nothing lives on it but a few prospectors and hard-rock miners and Mounted Policemen and animals and the flies that brood over the barrens in summer like haze. Winters make it a universe of snow with a terrible wind keening over it, and beyond its horizons the northern lights flare into walls of shifting electric colours that crack and roar like the gods of a dead planet talking to each other out of the dark.

  But down in the angle at Montreal, on the island about which the two rivers join, there is little of this sense of new and endless space. Two old races and religions meet here and live their separate legends, side by side. If this sprawling half-continent has a heart, here it is. Its pulse throbs out along the rivers and railroads; slow, reluctant and rarely simple, a double beat, a self-moved reciprocation.

  TWO

  Father Emile Beaubien stepped onto the porch of his red brick presbytery and looked at the afternoon. It was the autumn of 1917. The October air was sharp enough to shrink his nostrils. The sky was a deep blue, a fathomless blue going up and up into heaven.

  The priest drew in deep breaths of the still air. For his noon dinner he had just eaten roast duck. This good meal, and many other blessings, made him feel content and thankful. He decided he could relax a little from the constant strain under which he had worked since coming to this parish as a rather young priest seven years ago. Last Sunday the new church had been consecrated by the bishop: his church, the largest within many miles. This year also the harvest had been bountiful, and owing to the war farm prices had never been better.

  He walked briskly back and forth, one hand on his pendant cross, the skirts of his black soutane swishing as he moved. There was great energy in his steps; energy also in the lines of his face. The cheekbones and nose were very large, the mouth wide and straight, the eyes seemingly magnified by the thick lenses of the glasses he wore. Two deep lines, like a pair of dividers, cut the firm fle
sh of his face above the flanges of the nose to the corners of the lips. His hair was black and closely cropped, somewhat like a monk’s cap. His face was brown; his hands too were brown, and big-boned, and his posture gave the suggestion that under the soutane the bones were all big, the shoulders strong as a ploughman’s.

  The motionless air was suddenly cracked by two gunshots, and the priest paused in his walk to look up at the sky above the river. He saw three specks rise in it, and with eager interest he watched them. Two more shots cracked the air. One of the specks stopped, wavered and fell straight down. Frenette, the blacksmith, must be shooting ducks from his blind in the marsh near the river. It was years since the priest had done any duck-shooting himself, and he missed it because it had been the only recreation he had ever known. When he was a boy there had been little time from farm work even to shoot food; nor for that matter enough money to buy cartridges for his uncle’s old gun.

  He resumed his walking. By long habit his mind was vigilant to the parish about him. He carried the whole of Saint-Marc-des-Érables constantly in his thoughts. Quite literally he believed that God held him accountable for every soul in the place.

  On this Saturday afternoon the village which was the core of the parish was deserted even by the dogs. Across the dirt road the brown houses, their steps edging shyly forward into the road, were silent. There was no sign of life in their airless front parlours, concealed behind white lace curtains drawn as close and tight as blinds. The men were out in the fields for the fall ploughing, the women in the kitchens, the smaller children asleep, the older children at work. Farther down the road, the priest could see the sun glinting on the metal advertising posters that plastered the front of Polycarpe Drouin’s general store with a strange mixture of French and English: La Farine Robin Hood, Black Horse Ale, Magic Baking Powder, Fumez le Tabac Old Chum. The store would be empty now except for Ovide Bissonette, who was getting more feeble-minded every year. Ovide would be asleep on a table piled with overalls, his eyes wide open and his legs dangling over the side. Polycarpe himself would be asleep in his rocking chair in the back kitchen.

  Father Beaubien stepped down from the porch and walked slowly across a stretch of grass fronting the presbytery toward the new church. His feet rustled crisply in the newly fallen leaves. At one corner of his house was a large oak tree, its leaves yellow; at the other corner was a giant rock maple. The maple was a tower of silence, a miraculous upward rush of cool flame, every leaf scarlet and dry and so delicately poised that the first wind would tear the whole tower apart and scatter it on the lawn and over the road.

  The priest passed over the rustling leaves onto the brown, packed-gravel area before the church. He stood still with his powerful hands folded under his pendant cross, his eyes lifted to the twin spires. He could not look at his church often enough. Sometimes at night during the past week he had wakened after a few hours’ sleep and dressed himself and gone out of the presbytery, to cross to the new building. He entered it by his own door and stood in the darkness, watching the votive candles burning before the images; or wandered through the nave under the great canopy of the roof, with the stone cold as a grave-marker under his feet and the whole church shadow-haunted, and so still he could hear his own blood pulsing in his ears: the sound of God.

  Now he stood staring at the solid grey stone mass. After everything critics had said against the size of his church, it had been built. He felt both humble and proud that God had permitted a man like himself to build Him such a monument. It was the largest within forty miles. It was larger even than the largest Protestant church in Montreal where millionaires were among the parishioners. And Saint-Marc numbered less than a hundred and thirty families.

  But Father Beaubien was not yet satisfied. The building itself was complete, yet it needed better heating equipment to make it comfortable in winter. The sheet-iron roof and the steeples were covered with bright aluminum paint, making the outside look finished and the whole glitter for miles in the sun. But he also required a new bell. The one he had was adequate when there was no wind, but when the wind blew against the sound the angelus was almost inaudible at the fringes of the parish. He also wanted more images for the chapel, and he wanted particularly an image for the gravelled area in front of the church. He saw clearly in his mind what it should be: a bronze figure of Christ with outstretched arms, about twenty-five feet high, with a halo of coloured lights above the head.

  The priest breathed deeply and touched his cross again. Although the bishop had congratulated him on the church, he had also expressed concern about the size of the debt. At present, war prices were helping considerably, but the war could not last forever, and when it was over prices would fall and the debt would remain. The parishioners in Saint-Marc were nearly all farmers. They never had much ready money. And yet the priest had faith. The parish could rest indefinitely on the knees of God.

  Thinking about the war, Father Beaubien’s dark face set into a heavy frown. So far Saint-Marc had kept fairly clear of it. Only one member of the parish had volunteered, and he was on a spree in Trois Rivières when the recruiting sergeants got him. He was no good anyway, always missing masses. But this year the English provinces had imposed conscription on the whole country, trying to force their conquest on Quebec a second time. Conscription officers had been in the neighbouring parish of Sainte-Justine and had taken young French-Canadians out of their homes like thieves to put them into the army.

  The priest’s solid jaw set hard. His superiors had ordered him not to preach against the war and he had obeyed them. He did not question their wisdom; they knew more than he did. But at least his parish knew how he stood. He thought of the war and the English with the same bitterness. How could French-Canadians–the only real Canadians–feel loyalty to a people who had conquered and humiliated them, and were Protestant anyway? France herself was no better; she had deserted her Canadians a century and a half ago, had left them in the snow and ice along the Saint Lawrence surrounded by their enemies, had later murdered her anointed king and then turned atheist. Father Beaubien had no fondness for the Germans and no wish for them to win the war; he knew nothing whatever about them. But he certainly knew that if a people deserted God they were punished for it, and France was being punished now.

  He turned back toward his presbytery and paused on the lawn to pick up an acorn dropped from his great oak. As he did so the silence was cracked again by a pair of gunshots down in the marsh. The priest held the acorn in his palm, looking at it, then he polished it firmly between his thumb and forefinger. This nut was like his own parish of Saint-Marc-des-Érables. It was perfect. You could not change or improve it, you could not graft it to anything else. But you put it into the earth, and you left it to God, and through God’s miracle it became another oak. His mind moving slowly, cautiously as always, the priest visioned the whole of French Canada as a seed-bed for God, a seminary of French parishes speaking the plain old French of their Norman forefathers, continuing the battle of the Counter-Reformation. Everyone in the parish knew the name of every father and grandfather and uncle and cousin and sister and brother and aunt, remembered the few who had married into neighbouring parishes, and the many young men and women who had married the Church itself. Let the rest of the world murder itself through war, cheat itself in business, destroy its peace with new inventions and the frantic American rush after money. Quebec remembered God and her own soul, and these were all she needed.

  Suddenly, as he went back to his porch, the priest heard the trotting hooves of a horse coming down the road into the village from the direction of Sainte-Justine. Shortly before dinner he had seen Athanase Tallard and Blanchard, Tallard’s farm manager, drive past on their way out of the village. Now they were coming back, having met the afternoon train from the city at Sainte-Justine. Father Beaubien felt a twinge of uncertainty as the horse’s hooves beat nearer.

  Athanase Tallard was the only limit, under God and the law, to the priest’s authority in Saint-Marc. Since
the days of the early French colonization, the Tallards had been seigneurs. For more than two hundred years social opinion in Saint-Marc had depended not only on the parish priest, but also on whoever happened to be head of the Tallard family. Most of their seigniory had been broken up during the latter half of the nineteenth century and they collected no more rents. But the family still seemed enormously rich to the rest of the parishioners. Athanase owned by inheritance three times more land than anyone else in Saint-Marc, and he hired men to work it. He also owned a toll-bridge over a small tributary river at the lower end of the parish, and this brought him far more money than came from his crops. In many respects his surface authority was as great as that of the priest himself, and his manner of a great gentleman increased it.

  The people of Saint-Marc had always been proud of the Tallards. They were of their own stock and neighbourhood, yet they had always amounted to something in the outside world. In the historic days of the eighteenth century they had been noblemen. A Tallard had been a seigneur and officer in the colonial army of France at the same time a kinsman of the same name, back in Europe, lost the battle of Blenheim to the Duke of Marlborough. Another Tallard had won a skirmish against the English redcoats in the Rising of 1837. But along with other institutions, they had gradually become more prosaic. Since the confederation of the provinces into the Dominion of Canada just after the American Civil War, a Tallard had always sat in parliament in Ottawa.

  Unlike most French-Canadians, they had never been a prolific family. Athanase himself was an only child, and after two marriages had only two sons. Although Catholics, they were traditionally anti-clerical, and apt to make trouble for their priests. Saint-Marc still talked about the grandfather of Athanase, who had once chased a priest through the village with a whip.

  The horse came into Father Beaubien’s view, trotting fast and pulling Tallard’s best carriage. Four men were in the vehicle, two in front and two behind. It stopped before Drouin’s store and Blanchard dropped off, touching his cap to Athanase before he turned to enter the store. Then the carriage drove on past the presbytery as Tallard looked and nodded to the priest, dipping his whip with a graceful flourish. The priest returned the nod and the carriage went on beyond the village along the river road.