Each Man's Son (26 page)

 

Thirty-One

T
HE ORDERLY
who drove the ambulance had once driven a sulky at the Cape Breton County Exhibition and was proud of being the best driver in Broughton. He drove his team fast and kept the pace smooth, and he knew every break and pothole in the road between the colliery and the hospital. He also had a new bell, softer than the bell on the fire wagons but loud and musical, and he clanged it at every opportunity on the way in. The dirt road was empty all the way to the bridge, but he had his opportunity in the main street and from the Nickel Theater to MacDonald's Corner the bell rang constantly. The post office clock struck the half-hour between eleven and midnight as the team of bays turned through the corner. The driver rang his bell again, and was delighted to see Mr. Magistrate MacKeegan, crossing the street, jump clear of the horses and turn to shake his stick, then lower it when he recognized the ambulance. All the way up the steep hill to the hospital, as the hard-working bays passed knots of men on their way home from the saloons, the orderly had to suppress a longing to call out to them that he had Archie MacNeil and his wife aboard and that he was driving from the scene of a murder.

He reached the hospital, saw Dr. Weir waiting on the steps, and reined in. By the time he and the orderly beside him had
jumped from the box and run around to the back, Dr. Weir had opened the doors. Inside Dr. Ainslie was still crouching between the two stretchers. When they peered in and then stood waiting for orders, the doctor seemed not to know he had reached his destination. The driver was crestfallen, for he had hoped the doctor would praise him for his performance. He had beaten his record from that particular colliery by forty-five seconds.

Dr. Weir waited a moment, then said, “Everything is ready, Doctor.”

Ainslie looked up as though he had no idea where he was. He shook his head, breathed deeply once or twice and shook his head again.

“Never mind,” he said as he got out. “She died on the way in. The other has a clot in his brain. If he's lucky, he'll not recover consciousness.”

Then Ainslie began walking down the drive.

Weir ran after him. “Doctor!”

Ainslie kept on going and Weir fell into step beside him.

“Doctor, aren't you coming into the hospital?”

“No.”

“But–”

“There's nothing to be done for him. Put him in bed. Keep him quiet. You know what to do as well as I.”

“Yes, Doctor, I suppose so.”

They had reached the street and Ainslie turned to walk down the hill.

“Dr. Ainslie–you have no carriage!”

“I have two legs. And the trains are still running.”

Ainslie continued to walk and Weir watched him go.

When he reached MacDonald's Corner he turned into the main street and walked to the harbor bridge. Here he stopped and looked at the riding lights of the moored schooners and smelled the drying fish and the salt air. When he closed his eyes
he saw the beast again, the tight-skinned, tawny, green-eyed dog with the small ears. It was standing over the blood and its eyes were on his face.

He left the bridge and continued walking under a sky quiet with stars. His feet plodded along the dusty road over which his carriage had drawn him on so many thousands of cases and the land around him was very dark. He met nobody, or if he did he was unaware. After a while he reached the enclosure of his own colliery, saw the black mass of the bankhead loom against the lighter mass of the sky, plodded past and turned down in front of the miners' row. There he stopped and scanned the road. A few lights were still burning in the cottages, and in front of the MacNeil house he saw Alec McCoubrie the policeman sitting on the steps talking to a pair of miners. He took the far side of the road and went by without speaking. He knew their eyes were on him as he passed, but none of them spoke until he was out of earshot. He crossed the bridge and mounted the slope on the far side, turned into his own driveway and disappeared among the shadows of the trees.

The lights were burning in the surgery and in one room upstairs, and a carriage he recognized as MacKenzie's stood at the door, the horse with a feed bag over his nose.

Ainslie had no sense of the distance he had walked or what time of night it was. He stood in the darkness outside his own house for a long while, hearing the sound of the broken water in the brook. Then he took the path by Margaret's rose bed around the house to the front door and went in that way. He avoided the surgery and climbed the stairs. He opened the door of their bedroom, but the room was dark. Then he remembered where he had seen the light from the outside. He crossed the hall and opened the door of the spare bedroom and saw Margaret in a large rocker with the sleeping boy in her arms. She smiled at him over Alan's head and her brown
hair was lustrous in the light that shone behind her chair.

“He's all right,” she said. “Dr. Dougald looked him over and he thinks the effect of the shock will wear out in a little while. He must have seen or heard nearly everything.”

Ainslie leaned against the door. “How could you tell? Did he talk about it?”

“No. Not at all. But he didn't relax or stop shaking until after we got the bromide down, and then he began to cry. I'm glad you weren't here. It would have broken your heart.”

Ainslie looked down at the boy, but Margaret could detect no emotion she could recognize in the expression of his face.

“You must be tired,” he said.

“Well–” She smiled. “I couldn't leave him alone until he fell asleep.” Her eyes fell to the drooping figure in her arms and her face softened. “Poor child, he'll have to be loved very much to make up for this.”

It was then that Ainslie began to cry. He made no sound, but the tears welled up and overflowed and he made no move to brush them away. It was the first time Margaret had ever known him to be unashamed of showing such emotion. Under other circumstances she would have tried to help him by pretending she hadn't seen the tears, but now she could do nothing but sit with the sleeping boy in her arms.

After a few moments the tears stopped and Ainslie came over and stood beside her.

“Here, let me take him now.” He cleared his throat and blew his nose. “He's quite heavy. Your arms must be paralyzed, holding him so long.”

She smiled again. “They're not numb at all.” Their eyes met and held. “I like holding him.”

“Mollie is dead,” he said.

“Yes, I know. Dr. Dougald called the hospital and they said you had gone.” She looked down at Alan again. “Do you want us to keep him and raise him as our son?”

She was afraid Daniel might cry again, so she indicated that he could relieve her of the boy's weight. He reached down, and as she shifted the burden, Alan whimpered. Ainslie took her place in the chair and tried to hold the boy in a comfortable position. Alan opened his eyes. Through the drug, his vision focused on the man who was so close to him. For several seconds he stared. Then he became rigid and began to scream in terror.

“It's all right, Alan. It's all right. You're with us now. There's nothing to be afraid of now. It's the doctor. Don't be frightened. You're going to stay with us.”

The screaming stopped but Alan's body remained stiff and unyielding. Ainslie tried to talk to him. Every time he spoke the sobs began anew and the boy tried to hide his face from the doctor's eyes.

“Do you want me to hold you again, Alan?”

The boy looked up at Margaret, then at Ainslie, and when she held out her arms he slipped off the doctor's knees and moved into them, nestling down against her shoulder when she returned to the chair. Over the boy's head Margaret looked at her husband, but all she saw was his back going out the doorway.

Downstairs in the surgery, MacKenzie opened his eyes when he heard Ainslie's steps approaching and he was sitting upright when the doorknob turned and Ainslie entered.

“I've brought over some of my smuggled brandy,” he said. “Over there–I've already poured it out for us.”

He rose from the leather couch where he had been lying, crossed to Ainslie's desk and picked up two small glasses charged with brandy and water.

“Here!” he said, and thrust one out.

Ainslie dropped into the Morris chair and leaned back. If he saw the glass extended in MacKenzie's hand, he gave no sign of it.

“Margaret tells me you know she's dead,” he said tonelessly.

MacKenzie nodded and replaced the rejected glass on the desk.

“I killed her as surely as my father killed my mother,” Ainslie went on. “You told me the truth once and I wouldn't listen. Through arrogance, the both of us. Through total incapacity to understand that in comparison with a loving human being, everything else is worthless.”

MacKenzie lifted his glass of brandy to the light, put back his head and poured it down. Then he wiped his long white mustache and sat down facing Ainslie on the edge of the desk.

“Keep a grip on yourself, Dan,” he said sharply.

“What else have I done all my life but keep a grip on myself?” Ainslie shuddered. “Alan is terrified of me now. He isn't afraid of Margaret at all.”

“That's only shock.” MacKenzie's shrewd eyes probed his friend's exhausted face. “It was you who found him hiding and he's still terrified by what he saw tonight. It's only shock and it will pass.”

Ainslie closed his eyes. “But I love the boy.”

MacKenzie rose, set his empty glass beside the untouched one and put his hand on Ainslie's shoulder.

“Yes, Dan. Now I think you do.”

 

Afterword

BY ALEC LUCAS

As a body Hugh MacLennan's fiction might well be entitled the anatomy of contemporary Canada. No other series of Canadian novels has been written with a greater sense of a national identity, and no other author has tried harder to de fine and demonstrate the forces that have determined it.
Barometer Rising
(1941), the first of MacLennan's novels, dramatizes Canada's fight against corrupt colonialism. His next book,
Two Solitudes
(1945), focuses on problems of race and religion in the province of Quebec. Even his most intimate novel,
The Watch That Ends the Night
(1959), describes the depression of the 'thirties and comments on the Canadian left-wing movement.
The Precipice
(1948) and
Each Man's Son
(1951), however, differ from his other novels, emphasizing ethical rather than sociological issues. Both are studies of Puritanism, the
bête noir
for MacLennan of Canadians and Americans alike. In
The Precipice
he makes it the basis for an examination of the moral and social attitudes of Canada and the United States, and in
Each Man's Son
he takes a close look at the inner world of the Puritan conscience.

Whether correct or not, MacLennan undoubtedly sees Calvinism as the albatross of the Canadian character. His speeches, essays, and novels repeatedly confirm his aversion to the “iron in our hearts” that thwarts the joy of living.
“America's crisis,” he observes in
Cross Country
(1949), “and therefore the crisis of the rest of us, consists in this: puritanism has conditioned its members to act rather than to think, to deal with means rather than with ends, to press forward with ever-increasing speed and efficiency toward a material goal.” Canadian Puritanism, MacLennan holds, manifests itself as a “futile, haunting sense of guilt” that has “enormously inhibited the Canadian character.”

Although MacLennan bases Canadian identity on Calvinism, he also stresses the importance of racial groups in Canada's development. He selects the English, the French, and the Highland Scots as the most significant, and in
Barometer Rising
and
Two Solitudes
makes the first two central to his themes. In
Each Man's Son
the Scots come directly into the foreground, where MacLennan can examine both their Calvinism and their predicament as a betrayed race, berating and praising them simultaneously. If they brought the dry rot of a negative morality with them, they had been “poets once before the damned Lowlanders got to [them] with their religion,” says the fatherly Dr. MacKenzie, Ainslie's confidant and the novel's choric character. If brutalized by circumstance, they were still a people of hardy courage and almost desperate resolution.

After books on Quebec and Ontario, MacLennan went home again in
Each Man's Son
, since he had already written
Barometer Rising
out of his knowledge of the Maritimes. Yet he seems even more at home in
Each Man's Son
. He was born in Cape Breton, the setting of the book, and even when his family left Sydney (probably the Broughton of the novel), it moved no farther than Halifax. The subject, too, is one that MacLennan feels on his pulses, since he is of Highland Scottish descent. Furthermore, Dr. Ainslie suggests the author's father, Dr. MacLennan, a man of similar high seriousness and respect for learning.

Although both
Barometer Rising
and
Each Man's Son
are regional fiction, they differ in that the first stresses place and the second people. Despite the specific setting in a mining community,
Each Man's Son
depends largely on the tippling, squabbling, yarn-telling Scots for its local colour. They form a living and (to mention an element lacking in MacLennan's earlier novels) a frequently humorous backdrop for the story, and emphasize its theme, not specifically as Mrs. MacCuish does, but more generally. While MacNeil, like a shadow, waits in the wings, they keep his world before the reader, most significantly through their attitudes. Like MacNeil they have their ideals and express them in terms of the passionate and the physical. Moreover, they suggest the forces that control MacNeil and torment Ainslie. Natural men, the miners are damned according to the Puritans since they do not live by the light of faith and doomed according to Ainslie since they do not live by the light of reason. MacLennan himself implies that as they work in darkness, so they live in darkness, their ungodliness deriving from the unsatisfying nature of the Puritan God. For MacLennan they are lost, not because they neglect this austere God, but because, like Archie, they have set up instead the ideal man of brawn. Their gods are the muscular men, the Archie MacNeils and the giant MacAskills. The miners never know that the physical has no meaning beyond itself, nor that fighting it on its own terms must be a losing battle.

Even though less geographically and historically precise than in
Barometer Rising
, setting in
Each Man's Son
is no less important. Aside from its usual functions, it isolates a pure culture of the Scot in Canada. Moreover, it reflects the major issues of the story–even in the very first pages. The promontory like a giant casts its shadow over Alan and Mollie; the moon and the tide destroy Alan's sand castle; the conch shell evokes an imaginary world; and the black bankhead looms
over all. Although not symbolic, these details suggest MacNeil's looming presence, which broods over the whole story and Ainslie's attempts to dominate the mother and her son. They suggest also the immediacy to the mining community of the natural world, the sense of the past, and the Puritan fear of sin and damnation. All of these contribute to the major conflict of the novel, man's struggle against the forces that inhibit him in his search for freedom of spirit.

Other details of setting amplify this conflict. The hospital becomes the beacon light of science for a troubled world; although it ministers only to physical need, it stands out boldly against the Calvinist church, which ministers to man's spiritual need by preaching his weakness and God's strength. The mine, too, is not simply a mine–MacLennan sets no action
in
it–but a means of developing theme and examining the characters of MacNeil, Camire, and Ainslie. As a mine it is for MacNeil a hateful place to work, for Camire (a socialist who dreams of inheriting private property) a social evil exploiting the labourer, and for Ainslie a corrupting force, maiming men's bodies and stultifying their minds. The mine also represents the natural world dreaded by Ainslie and Puritan alike, since they believe it dooms man to a purposeless life, the lot of the unenlightened as Ainslie, and, of the nonelect, as the Calvinist see it. Finally, as the heart of darkness, the mine challenges each man to find the hidden meaning of life itself. MacNeil tries to discover it in the physical; Ainslie, in the rational; and Camire, in the sentimental. None finds it, nor, MacLennan implies, can he find it in Calvinism.

The world of Margaret Ainslie, a gentler Puritan, and of Mollie and Alan MacNeil acts as a foil for the mine and the three men, the narrowness of whose outlooks, set against love and kindness, becomes patent. MacNeil's concept of love is limited to passion and the flesh; Camire's, to an a ?air of the heart and romantic escape; and Ainslie's, although seemingly
less self-centred, to the head and the “good” of the individual. Dreading both the physical and the emotional (a Puritan legacy) and trusting to the rational, Ainslie destroys his and his wife's happiness and undermines Alan's and Mollie's. Each man attempts to fit human relationships into the world of hand or heart or head that he has tried to establish in his personal life as a way “to lick” the mine.

The narrative that sets up these struggles depends on the efforts of each man to come to terms with Mollie and Alan and to escape the menace of the mine. MacNeil seeks success as a boxer in the United States but, betrayed by the “business world” there and his own “weaknesses,” and defeated in the ring, he returns home. Camire, dreaming of his boyhood in France, manages, through his love-making (and as a result of Ainslie's meddling), to persuade Mollie (with Alan) to leave Broughton with him, only to have his plans thwarted when Archie returns. Studies in the failure of self-gratification as a
modus vivendi
, both men reveal values that Ainslie has rejected in his search for happiness; at the same time they define more clearly the nature of his problems. Simply put, his is the story of a childless man seeking to “adopt” another man's son. Yet it is no less the story of a man hounded by a sense, inculcated by his Calvinist father, of man's sinfulness. Taught that the successful must be godly since the godly are successful and that the senses are in league with the devil, Ainslie makes his own life into a fight against failure and against human frailty in himself and others, a battle that he can win only by hard work and the sternest denial of the sensuous and emotional. Fearing failure, he wants to subjugate all to his will. Fearing the flesh, he tries to live above it in the depersonalized world of the rationalist and the scientist. In the hospital, a refuge paradoxically for his maimed spirit, he can feel at home, for there his objectivity forms part of his professional code of ethics. Outside the hospital, however, he
is cut off from the world by this same objectivity, his love for his wife twisted, his relationship with Mollie and Alan misguided, and his attitude toward man, except as a creature to be improved or a patient to be cured, almost contemptuous. The episodes in Ainslie's life have a double focus, for through them MacLennan examines both the Puritan conscience and the stages by which Ainslie moves from his fear of life to a recognition of its beauty through the great liberating effect of unselfish love.

The events of the narrative derive from Ainslie's decision to take Alan MacNeil under his care, for when the novel opens Ainslie is a successful doctor but an unhappy man who longs for a son to give meaning to his empty life. On the professional level, the only one he understands, he succeeds. A series of cases that emphasize the categories of hand, heart, and head into which Ainslie (and the thematic organization of the novel) divides life culminate in Alan's appendectomy, by which Ainslie does “beget” a son. Totally involved for once, the surgeon becomes a man. On the personal level, however, Ainslie's rational ethic fails him. Unaware of Alan as an individual, he dreams of moulding the boy into a projection of his own ideal self. He wants both to play God, a just but dispassionate Jehovah, and to create God in his own image to fill the spiritual vacuum of his agnosticism.

The incidents that reveal Ainslie's failure recapitulate his life and disclose the limits of his emancipation from his Puritan upbringing. In an external-internal drama in which the past is reflected in the present, Ainslie plays the role of both son and father. As the one he sees himself a boy again, growing up like Alan under the threats of the mine and the Calvinist Church; as the other, a man whose duty it is to remove these threats from his son's life. Ainslie only imperfectly understands the part taken by the villain Puritanism, but, in his soul-searching over Alan, he recognizes its crippling effect on his own life. Ashamed of sex and afraid of
failure, he realizes, as the first step toward redemption, the harm that these attitudes have done to his marriage. Again the fact that Mollie and his wife occasionally become mother images suggests a second stage in his development, his growing awareness that because of his early religious training he is afraid to give love completely, since he has never felt free to accept it.

All this, however, is largely retrospection for Ainslie. In the present, except for his agnosticism, his father's Calvinistic precepts motivate his behaviour. Assuming that the same resolution and values that made the successful surgeon will make the successful “father,” Ainslie disregards his wife's and Mollie's rights and feelings and Alan's hero-worship of his father and determines to make the boy his protégé. Thus he sets the stage for the spiritual crisis of his life. Mollie refuses to give up her son, and Ainslie perceives at last the strength of the weak.

Shocked by this defeat, he comprehends in his hour of agony the sterility of his attitude toward God and man. God either is or is not, but whether He exists as the God of Calvinism, or does not exist, as the free-thinker Ainslie holds, love has no place in human relationships. The loss of Alan has revealed but not resolved Ainslie's dilemma. It has disclosed the causes and results of his inability to love, but nothing of a way to overcome it. His spirit, released from the prison of agnosticism and Puritanism, is free, but in a purposeless world. Then in a flash of insight he moves out of his dark centre toward his salvation. He recognizes the meaning of the vitality of the natural world and the need to accept the simple fact of being as neither moral nor immoral. “He got to his feet and looked down at the brook. In that moment he made the discovery that he was ready to go on with life.”

The denouement of the novel quickly follows Ainslie's crisis. Now a derelict, MacNeil, his semi-blindness a symbol of his spiritual plight, returns home to find Mollie with
Camire. Enraged, he brutally attacks his wife's lover. This fight, MacNeil's last, awakens Alan to the true nature of his father's world. MacNeil accidentally kills Mollie, murders Camire, and suffers a clot of blood in the brain, removing all obstacles from Ainslie's path. Fortuitous as this violent conclusion may seem, it is the plausible climax of MacNeil's career as a boxer and Ainslie's interference in Mollie's life. Yet the brawl functions as more than the escape hatch of plot. As the consequence of Ainslie's Puritanism, the basis of his meddling, it is integrated with the main theme of the book. Furthermore, it reveals that MacNeil's passion and Camire's old-world romanticism are not less selfish than Ainslie's possessive love for Alan. Neither cares for Mollie for her sake but for his own. Again the fight concludes the stories of Camire and MacNeil as allegories of love. In the struggle between the romantic (which ultimately cannot escape the actual) and the physical in love, the physical overthrows love altogether and comes to a dead end, its victory, like Archie's, meaningless.