"Well, if I didn’t, I’d only be accused of pushing in where I’m not wanted".
The barge slid into place against the beach and with her eyes on the old French Canadian who was adjusting the two planks which served as runways, she asked after a pause, "Are you going to feel like this about everyone?"
"No, of course not. You just happened to pick the wrong people".
They drove past the monastery, then into a village by a steepled church, around one side of the green square where a few old men were playing bowls, and out the other side among the fields and scattered farm-houses painted white and with the softly curving bell-cast roofs of Quebec, and the great barns of faded yellow and blue and red. There was a shrine by the side of the road and a few people grouped around it, old men and women and children and the village curé, and later on they came to a herd of cows and had to follow along behind with the car in low gear until the cows turned in at a gate.
This is Quebec, where you were born and brought up, and these are some of the things you would remember if you had to go away and live somewhere else-wayside shrines and fields of cornflowers, the view from the top of Mount Oka where you can look down on the roofs of the great Trappist Monastery and out over the valleys of the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence, green islands and green shores, blue water with a white sail here and there and the blue mountains in the distance. You would remember a village with a white church steeple at the end of a Laurentian valley, a farmer driving a high-wheeled buggy down a dark country road at night, singing on his way home; sea-gulls flying over the rocky coast of Gaspé, sailing-boats and villages and the long narrow farms running down to the St. Lawrence, and everywhere over cities, towns, villages and the green countryside, over mountains and valleys, rivers and lakes, the sound of bells tolling for mass and the dark anonymous figures of priests, nuns and monks. You would remember the jangle of sleighbells in winter, the sharp, pointed outlines of pine trees black against the snow, the flat white expanse of frozen lakes crossed and re-crossed with ski-tracks, and the skiers themselves pouring down the cold mountainside at dusk, toward the train waiting down below in the valley.
And you would remember Montreal, the incredible tropical green of this northern city in summer, the old gray squares, the Serpentine at Lafontaine Park with little overhanging casinos and packed with little boats; the harbor, the river; the formalized black-and-white figures of the nuns taking the air just at dusk among the trees around the Mother House of the Congregation de Notre Dame, the narrow gray streets of downtown Montreal like the streets of an old French provincial town, the figure of the Blessed Virgin keeping watch over the harbor from her place high up on Bonsecours, the sailors’ church; the steep terraced gardens of Westmount, and the endless narrow balconies of endless walled convents and monasteries, where nobody ever walks.
Erica said reflectively as they passed an old stone farm-house on one side of the road with a grove of pines on the other, "When they go on about preserving the French Canadian way of life, sometimes I think I know what they’re talking about".
"Yes", said Marc, adding after a pause, "Only their way of life is rather a luxury at the moment and somebody has to pay for it. I don’t feel the way you do about Quebec. I feel that way about Ontario".
He slowed down, looking warily at a dog which was standing undecidedly in the middle of the narrow winding dirt road just ahead of them, and then finally came to a dead stop. "Well, make up your mind", he said patiently. "We’re not in a hurry, just take your time about it". The dog regarded him without interest, and eventually started toward a near-by gate, waving his tail in the air.
"It doesn’t matter so much where it is, though, provided it’s Canada. I’m hopelessly provincial, Eric. I’ve been in Europe and the States of course, but though I had a marvelous time, it was always a relief to come home again. I just belong here, that’s all. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. How long can you see the shore after you leave Halifax?"
"Only for a short while".
"That’s good. The shorter the better. I don’t want to stand around for hours watching Canada fade into the distance".
He drove on in silence for a while, looking straight ahead of him, and then said suddenly, "Gosh, it will be great to come back again, though, won’t it, Eric?"
"Yes, darling".
"How about something on the radio?" He turned past several dance orchestras and an announcer saying, "Ainsi se termine, chers auditeurs, un autre concert symphonique…" and another one beginning, "Nous vous presentons maintenant quelques bulletins de guerre…" and finally he left it at a symphony orchestra playing a Strauss waltz.
A hay wagon was lumbering toward them and as he slowed down again in order to go off the road and give it room to pass, he said, "They told me at Headquarters today that it probably wouldn’t be much more than a month now".
"And then what?"
"Petawawa or Borden for a while, and then overseas".
"I hope it’s Petawawa", said Erica under her breath. Camp Borden was four hundred miles away.
He stopped the car in an open space underneath some evergreens at the edge of a small wood and turned off the radio which had changed from Strauss to advertising, so that they were caught up in the silence all around them. The moon was rising over an orchard, and the lamps were already lit in the small farm-house up the road. Nearer at hand there was a wayside cross partly outlined against the dying light in the west.
Marc took the cigarette from her hand and threw it out on the road and then his arm was around her, drawing them together. He kissed her throat and then her mouth and she had no will at all until at last memory came back. She slipped one arm up behind his head and clung to him, trying to forget the time when she would have to let him go, probably not much more than a month from now.
Chapter V
In the first week of August Charles Drake suddenly changed tactics. His conduct from the Wednesday morning in mid-July when they had had that scene at the breakfast table, through to the end, sometime in September, represented three different and distinctive methods of attack, from the negative in which he had withdrawn in apparent indifference and simply waited, through the positive but indirect, in which he attempted to break down Erica’s resistance by abandoning all efforts to conceal what he felt while never actually referring to his feelings, and at the same time by letting loose a continuous stream of broad statements, anecdotes and even rather pointless jokes on the subject of Jews in general, to the third and last stage in which he swung round and made use of every weapon he could lay his hands on.
For reasons of her own, Margaret Drake went along with him. Although so far as her surface behavior was concerned, she seemed to take her cue from her husband, her attitude was fundamentally different. She believed that all mésalliances are the result of infatuation, and therefore from start to finish, she consistently underestimated Erica’s love for Marc. In fact, she did not regard it as love, in the proper sense of the word. She lacked her husband’s ability to understand emotion as such, particularly an emotion which lay outside the field of her own experience. The sexual element did not exist for her except in a derogatory sense; in her conception of a valid and lasting relationship between a man and a woman, that element was removed. She did not discount it; she simply left it out altogether. The ingredients of a successful marriage, she had often said, were community of tastes, interests, and a similarity of viewpoint and background. All these were blended together by an emotion called "love" of course, but a love which was to her a composite of other kinds of love, rather than a separate entity with a basic character of its own. She was devoted to her husband; he was her best friend, her father and counselor, her child, her brother-in fact he was the sum total of all her other relationships and because that was so much, it had never occurred to her, consciously at any rate, that he could have been anything more.