She had realized as soon as it was over, that the break with her father would react on Marc to almost the same degree as it had reacted on Charles and herself, unless she could somehow manage to keep Marc from finding out about it. She had tried, she had not for a moment stopped trying except when she was safely in her room at the hotel, and although it had been rather like attempting to hide an object twice as big as herself by standing in front of it, still she had thought that she was getting away with it.
And all she had actually succeeded in doing was to look like someone trying awfully hard not to look like that.
She said, "I had a row with Charles".
"About me", he said.
"Yes".
He was watching a bird circling in and out of the sun toward the west and he said, "All your rows are about me, aren’t they? You never had any till I came along".
"It was just by accident that we didn’t. I never happened to want to do anything that Charles and Mother disapproved of until now, that’s all. They knew I didn’t agree with them about a lot of things, of course, but they didn’t seem to mind, and it’s taken me all this time to discover that the only reason they didn’t mind was because they thought it was just so much talk and so naturally it didn’t matter. The moment they realized that it wasn’t just so much talk, then all hell broke loose. They were bound to realize it sooner or later".
He said after a long pause, "I wish it hadn’t been me".
Erica sat up, as though the ground on which she had been lying had, in fact, begun to slip out from under her, and moving back so that she was sitting cross-legged facing him, she said desperately, "Darling, it isn’t just you. Can’t you get that into your head? It was you who started it, but if it hadn’t been you, it would have been something else, and if I never saw you again after today, it wouldn’t make any difference to Charles and me". With her voice rigidly controlled she said almost matter-of-factly, "We both know where we stand now, and we’ll never get back to where we both thought we stood before".
"All your father wants is to get rid of me".
"What my father wants is unconditional surrender to a set of prejudices and a bunch of filthy conventions which are hopelessly out of date!"
The bird flew down, out of the path of the sun and disappeared among the trees edging the trail, and as his eyes came back to her face he said quietly, "They’re not out of date, Eric. The moment you’d married me, you’d find that out. The prejudices are still there, working overtime as a result of war conditions", he added a little ironically.
"Not with us…".
"Us?" he repeated. "You mean people of our generation? Don’t be silly. I live and eat and sleep with people of our generation; I happen to be the only Jewish officer in our particular outfit at the moment, and although most of my brother officers are thoroughly decent and do their damnedest to make me feel as though I belong, they have to make an effort, and I know they have to make it, and I think it’s probably just as difficult for them to get used to the idea of always having a Jew in the room as it was for their fathers in the last war. Even when people don’t dislike you, even when they really like you, you still make them feel slightly self-conscious, I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just because they’ve been brought up to regard Jews as ’different’. Do you want a biscuit?"
"Yes, please", said Erica. "One of the chocolate ones".
He handed her two chocolate biscuits and said, "Except for a very few people, so few they hardly count, that self-consciousness so far as I’m concerned would be about the best you could hope for. What you could actually expect, as opposed to just hoping, is usually something a lot worse".
He said, "You’ve got to see it, Eric".
"Yes", said Erica. "Well, go on. We might just as well get it over with".
"It’s not your father and your friends, it’s not even just us and what we can take-if we were married, it would be our children-your children-who’d have to take it. First you’d suffer through me and then you’d start getting it through them, only what came to you through them would hit you far harder because I’m grown up and more or less used to it, and anyhow you didn’t bring me into the world, you’re not responsible for me. But to have to watch your children go through school tagged as ’Jews,’ as outsiders-that’s not so easy".
He broke off, and then remarked, looking out over the mountains again, "I’ll never forget the way my mother looked the first time I came running home from school bawling my eyes out with a bunch of kids after me, pelting me with snowballs and yelling, ’Marc’s a dirty kike’. It wasn’t the snowballs that scared me", he added hastily. "It was the word ’kike’. I’d never heard it before and I didn’t know what it meant-I don’t suppose the kids who were yelling it did either", he added. "It just sounded awful. It sounded even worse to my mother and she’s Jewish herself".
"But that was twenty-five years ago", protested Erica.
"Yes", said Marc. "That was twenty-five years ago and Hitler was just a corporal in the German Army. It will probably take us another twenty-five years to get back to where we were in 1915". He said incredulously, "You think after ten years of Nazism that things are easier for us now than they were then?"
"I don’t know", said Erica miserably.
"Well, I do", said Marc. "The outlook, my darling, is not very bright, and just why you should be dragged into it when you don’t have to be, I can’t quite see".
"Can’t you? I should think it would be fairly obvious". Before he could say anything she asked, "Isn’t it easier for children who are half-Jewish?"
"No. Most Gentiles regard half-Jews as Jews-look at the refugees! — particularly if the father’s Jewish, regardless of whether they’ve been brought up as Christians or not, and if they have, then the Jews won’t accept them, so they end up by not really belonging anywhere".
"Would you want our children to be brought up as Jews?"
"Yes, of course".
"Why?" asked Erica in amazement.
"Why?" he repeated, looking surprised. "Well, apart from the fact that I’m Jewish, simply because it’s easier for them in the long run. It’s much easier to grow up knowing you’re Jewish from the time you’re old enough to know anything, than to have it suddenly thrown in your face when you’re twenty or twenty-five. That was what happened to God knows how many people in Austria and Germany who’d gone through life under the impression that they were Catholics or Protestants who’d been ’assimilated’. Assimilated", he said derisively, "I wonder who invented that word".
"I don’t see what Germany and Austria have to do with it. Naturally, the Nazis…"
"Do you mean to say you’ve never heard a good Canadian Gentile say about some refugee or other, ’Yes, I know he’s supposed to be a Catholic but he’s really Jewish…’."
She could not deny it; she had heard plenty of good Canadian Gentiles say that, sometimes even about refugees who were racially, or whatever you could call it, even less than half Jewish.
Erica opened her mouth to say something else, and then thought better of it. She knew now that unless there were a miracle, she would never marry Marc, but sometimes miracles happened and there was still one day left.
"Aren’t you going to argue about it?" asked Marc, looking still more surprised.
"No", said Erica. The idea that if they were married, their children would be brought up as Jews had come as a shock, the worst shock Marc had given her so far, she realized. At the moment it did not seem to her to make much sense, and it was certainly going to take some getting used to, but to argue about it now struck her as just about as futile as stopping a film in the middle and proceeding to quarrel over what took place in the part neither of them had yet seen.