Each Man's Son (24 page)

 

Twenty-Six

D
AN AINSLIE
walked out to the road, down the slope and over the bridge, then up the slope in front of the miners' row. It was a cool evening with a smell of kitchen fires in the air, but there were several miners and their wives sitting on front steps. Ainslie felt that the eyes of all of them were watching him as he approached the MacNeil house, so he lifted his chin defiantly and quickened his gait to that of the visiting doctor they all knew so well.

Mollie answered his knock on the door.

“Where's Alan?” he said without preliminaries.

“He is upstairs doing his lessons, Doctor.”

“I'd like to see him.”

But Mollie stood there in the door without speaking and with no apparent inclination to ask him in. Immediately he felt a fool, for everyone must see that the doctor was not going inside on a professional call.

“I want a word with Alan,” he repeated. “I've been too busy lately to see how he was getting along.”

“Alan is fine.”

“May I come in?”

“You are the doctor and I could not say no.”

Her face was naked. He saw its delicacy, its tenderness, its love. She was the mother Alan had known all his life. And
there was something else he recognized, a last reserve of strength which she was calling upon. To oppose him–to oppose his father? He passed his hand over his eyes.

“I've come as a friend,” he said. “Not as the doctor.”

“Yes, I know.”

He straightened his shoulders. “I trust Alan is feeling stronger all the time?”

“You have been good to us, Doctor. We will always be grateful.”

This girl had only to look at him and say she was grateful for what he had done; she had only to look at him and express her thanks while deliberately ignoring what she knew he had been trying to do, and he was helpless against her. There was a rock in her as there was a rock in them all, buried deep in the past of his whole race. But he knew in that moment she was stronger than he was because he was ashamed of something and she was not. Her features were dim as she stood with her back to the lighted hall, and she seemed to him incredibly poignant and beautiful.

“Then it's true,” he said. “You're going away.”

“Yes, Doctor. We are.”

He looked beyond her to the stairs, but there was no sign of anyone else in the house. “Tell Alan I send him my love.”

“Yes, Doctor. That I will do.”

He turned away and heard the door close behind him. With his chin down he began to retrace his steps quickly down the board sidewalk in the direction of the bridge.

“Good evening to you, Doctor,” a voice said in the night.

Ainslie kept on walking. A few steps on he stopped and turned.

“Did I hear you say somebody is sick?”

“No, Doctor. No indeed. I wass just saying good evening to you.”

“Good evening to you, Angus.”

He crossed the bridge and climbed the slope on the other side and started up his own driveway. A half-moon rode overhead and its light filtered through the trees. He turned off the driveway among the birches, reached the grass of the interval and saw the brook. There were dancing pin points of light where the moonbeams struck the broken water near the bridge. The sky was a radiant dome, the firmament glowed and there was not a breath of wind. On such a night, he knew, the sea would rest in shining silence all around the island and sailing ships would be as still on its surface as protruding black rocks.

Ainslie dropped onto a patch of grass by the brook, stared up at the sky, then lay on his back and closed his eyes. A terrible fatigue, an exhaustion of the whole spirit, engulfed him. His vision of Alan growing up twisted itself into a mockery of what it once had been. He saw the lad in a scholar's gown crossing an Oxford quadrangle under the moon, saw the gown flutter and disappear, and there was Alan again with coal dust black on his face, a metal lunch box under his arm, a cap with the broken peak on his head. Then Louis Camire's face came into his mind, but the Frenchman's part in Alan's future crushed his imagination and he could not think about it. It was he alone who had driven this girl to Camire. How then could he blame her or hate her? God forgive me, he thought.

A shaking rage began to mount within him. There is no God, he kept repeating to himself. God is nothing but an invention of mad theologians who have told generations of men that He is the all-seeing Ancient of Days who at the same time damns men and loves them. The theologians, not Jesus, have tried to convince us that God, out of His infinite loving-kindness and tender mercy, out of His all-wise justice, has decided that nearly all human beings are worthless and must be scourged in the hope that a few of them, through a lifetime of punishment, might become worth saving.

Now he had something specific to be angry about, and Ainslie let his rage build upon itself. Underneath all his troubles, he told himself, lay this ancient curse. He thought desperately of Margaret and desperately of himself, and he knew that it was his fear of the curse which had hobbled his spirit. The fear of the curse had led directly to a fear of love itself. They were criminals, the men who had invented the curse and inflicted it upon him, but they were all dead. There was no one to strike down in payment for generations of cramped and ruined lives. The criminals slept well, and their names were sanctified.

For nearly an hour more Daniel Ainslie lay on the grass and tried to come to terms with himself. If there was no God, then there was nothing. If there was no love, then existence was an emptiness enclosed within nothing. He felt as though his spirit had hurled itself against the window of his life like a wounded bat and broken the glass. It had been caught in a prison and now it was free. But its freedom was the freedom of not caring, and the things it witnessed now were different from those it had seen before. Now his spirit flickered like a bat over a dark and sinister landscape as lifeless as the mountains of the moon, its bat's eyes contemplating a world older than the human race; a world where there were no gods, no devils, no laws, no certainties, no beginnings and no end. A world without purpose, without meaning, without intelligence; dependent upon nothing, out of nothing, within nothing; moving into an eternity which itself was nothing.

With a slow movement, as if coming out of a deep sleep, Ainslie sat up and looked at the sky. With longing for continuance brimming in his blood, he had looked ahead on his days and seen total emptiness. He had reached his core. And there he had stopped. 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.

For many minutes he stood there looking down at the brook in the moonlight. Now Alan and Mollie MacNeil were two people he had known and loved a long time ago. “God bless them!” he said, and turned towards the house.

When he opened the surgery door Margaret was sitting behind his desk with the telephone in her hand. He smiled at her tentatively. Her answering smile reached him and he knew that if he had not come home, he had at least returned to the surest haven he had ever known.

“Miss MacKay has just called,” she said. “The tonsils case you operated on this morning. She says bleeding has started again. Weir would be more comfortable if you could see it.”

He nodded and began to check the contents of his bag.

“I spoke to Mollie,” he said and cleared his throat. “What you told me was quite true.”

Now he could once more think about the people around him. He knew Margaret would never understand what had wrought this change in him, as he knew it was not in his power to explain, but he was grateful for her calm silence which no longer seemed to be accusing him. Once more it was a strength against which he could lean.

“You might call the hospital and tell them I'm on my way,” he said as he reached the door with the bag in his hand. He turned around and his eyes went to three photographs on the wall behind her head. They had hung there in the same place for years. Tonight he was seeing them as though they were new. Lister, Osler and Dougald MacKenzie. What qualities did they share which he lacked? It seemed important to take time to find the answer right now. Perhaps it lay in the fact that they were all three supremely fortunate human beings. They were all men who had lived out their careers before the world had become conscious of its own nerves. They had lived with a sense of continuance and permanency which he had never known. Within that permanency their wagons had been
hitched with reason to stars. During their life spans the great and obvious evils had been attacked and conquered–fevers, plagues, the kind of death that came from dirty hands. They were men the Romans would have called
beati
, secure in their age and in themselves. As Ainslie looked at their photographs he realized why he could learn nothing from MacKenzie any more. He was now alone with his own skill, surer of his fingers than of his soul. Even here in Cape Breton he could guess at vistas of skill and knowledge which old Dougald lacked the imagination to contemplate. So he would go to Europe, as MacKenzie had said he must do, and there he would reach the top of his profession. Perhaps MacKenzie and Margaret had known he would come to this decision all the time, but it was his own path, not their pressures, which had led him to it.

“One thing more,” he said to Margaret. “I may be at the hospital all night, so I'd better tell you while I think of it. You might write to Halifax tomorrow and see what kind of shipping space you can get. It doesn't matter whether we land in Southampton or Liverpool, so long as we leave soon.”

 

Twenty-Seven

I
N THE SECOND WEEK
of September the weather broke at last. A storm that had begun off Cape Hatteras roared out of the sea and tore across the whole province from Yarmouth to Cape North. It made the spruce forests whistle like banshees and it turned the dirt roads to splashing brown mud. It shook the wooden houses and rattled the windows. It lifted the ocean against the shores and in the bare places along the coast it drove the flying spume half a mile inland. Under Dr. MacKenzie's house the sandstone cliff trembled for three days as the ocean entered the caverns it had made and rumbled volcanically. Fishing schooners homeward bound from the Banks to Lunenburg and Gloucester ran battened down under bare poles while the seas crashed over their bulwarks. Cape Breton changed from an island of shining waters and sunlit green to a granite-gray outpost smoking with cold rain as it threw back the sea.

On the third day of the storm a freighter with a flooded engine room fired distress signals in the night, and just after dawn a small group of watchers on the cliff near MacKenzie's house saw her hit. A huge sea rolled her over, lifted and beam-ended her on a reef, and there she hung impaled. From the way she wallowed it was clear to people who knew ships that
her after-bulkhead was gone. She jerked up on the incoming sea and lay level with the ocean fuming across her, then crashed down with the ebb, so that her stern was under and her bows pointed skywards like a gun aimed for the highest trajectory.

The men on the cliff fired a line across her and watched a seaman go overboard as he came out of the shrouds to make it fast. The line was hauled in and fired again. This time it caught on the foremast shrouds and the crew belayed it. A breeches buoy was run out and one after the other the seamen were pulled in to the top of the cliff until nineteen men were accounted for, five unconscious and lashed to the buoy and four others with nothing worse than broken bones.

Ainslie and McCuen were called to work on the survivors, who had been carried to MacKenzie's house. When they arrived they found the old doctor at work in his shirt sleeves, so all three of them administered first aid as they could, set bones and sent the serious cases on to the hospital. MacKenzie's housekeeper gave the doctors their breakfast and shortly afterward Ainslie and McCuen drove off in the blowing rain to begin their regular rounds of the day.

During the next night the gale blew itself out and left a coldly shining sky over the province and a sea roaring angry green around it. The summer was over. Men began to think of the autumn run of salmon and of crystalline days when they would stalk deer and bring home partridge to be hung. Their wives counted jars of preserves and vegetables on cellar shelves and hoped for one more week of warmer sunshine before a killing frost left gardens black in the dawn.

For Dan Ainslie there was no respite from work. Although he and Margaret were making their plans to leave Cape Breton within a month, there was little time for either of them to savor the coming change in their lives. Margaret thought she had never seen Dan work so hard before. For years he had
driven himself and wasted energy through nervous frustration. Now he wasted nothing.

When he returned each evening from the hospital he ate his dinner quietly and usually spent the length of a burning pipeful of tobacco talking to her about getting the house ready for the Doucettes from Louisburg, who would be coming up to take over the practice while they were away. Or they talked about Ruth's engagement to the bank's Mr. Toast. But neither of them spoke the name of Mollie or Alan MacNeil.

Then he went into the surgery and buried himself until midnight, and sometimes long after, in journals and medical textbooks. He was determined to recapitulate what he knew of neurology and neuropathology before he reached London, and each day confirmed his belief that there was no field of medicine in which more was mysterious and less was actually known. On three nights out of four his work was likely to be interrupted by a call. He made the call and returned to his work. Those were the times when a clear evening under the new moon or some remembered smell in the air reminded him of his childhood, and he thought of Alan with renewed pain. Those were the nights when neither Margaret nor anyone else could help him, because no one knew how much he needed help, and he was powerless to tell.

Over his books in the surgery a conviction gradually developed from an old hunch that the sciatica which plagued so many miners in the Broughton area was not caused by the dampness of the mines, as most of the textbooks said it was. His imagination grew on the problem until there were moments when he felt the answer was only just beyond his reach. He studied carefully the incipient pains in his own sciatic nerve which he knew were caused neither by dampness nor by cold. Nor was such a condition caused by too much muscular strain, or by a nerve lesion, though this last
theory seemed to draw him closer to the answer than anything else he could find.

Then there were hours when he realized that he was nowhere near a solution of the problem, but he felt himself drawn forward into the mystery, and the longer he studied the more eagerly he looked forward to the advanced clinical work he would be doing in London the following year.