Combat Journal for Place d'Armes. Scott Symons

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      I laugh — Greg, like me is a hopeless Tory … and I know that, like me, he voted NDP last time: Tory Radical. Our Toryism is our culture as Canadians … not our politics. I look behind Greg — there is a beaut! Cdn Male: age 46?, navy blue suiting, waistcoat (no handkerchief), unobtrusive glasses, solid … with a face of precast putty.His conversation is alas all too clear — I don’t overhear it; I’m overrun by its calm assertion: “… they don’t put enough force into their speeches, not enough guts — I ghost write for the Minister of Finance — he’s uninspired … ” I can’t believe it — can’t believe this man criticizing dullness; it’s self-contradictory. For a moment my whole personality focuses again, all the legions called home by concentrate of contempt.For an instant I am whole again — alive from toe-tit to occiput. My whole being accuses these sterilettes. And then I feel the danger of exspenditure again. Pull in my horn; I’ll need it later — in emergency.“But this train IS an emergency … it is THE emergency, integral part of it….” Greg looks surprised at this outburst. “Oh I’m just talking aloud — I’ll subside in a minute.” But Greg is looking at me with a large understanding, & I blurt on, “this train is as dangerous, as lethal in its own right as any boxcar translating political deviates to Siberia.Its tactics are more subtle — but they come to the same thing: absolute elimination, corporate destruction.” Here Greg looks mystified & I stop … & am vulnerable again, to dispersal.

      After dinner, back to the bar-car … alone. I don’t know why. I guess I need a drink. A brandy. Ask mischievously for a Marc de Bourgogne.There never is any, of course. I always ask just to reassure me there isn’t any …. Only one place in English Canada where I have had a good Marc. A free seat by the window — my partner in crime discovers himself readily to me … after all, we are fellow inmates, accomplices of the Rapido (there is still something furtive about the bar-car).

      “My name’s Jack Emery — second year Law, Dalhousie …. live in Willowdale … I like hockey and theatre. What do you do?” I flinch … it is the “what do you do?” that hurts. Always “what are you?”Never “who?”. In all my years in Toronto no one ever asked me “who”— except “who’s what.” People are expendable in English Canada; everyone is only a person “ex officio.” & now, of course I’m no longer anything. Except a deserter … no — better than that — because I have my purpose: I’m a demissionary. God, here is this law student, already firmly entrenched in the English Canada Heresy — ex officio humanism! It’s a form of agnosticism. But what chance has he, the betrayal has been made for him, at birth, by his community. We offer each other a drink and discuss the new cabinet changes.

       Student — “Canadians think too much about themselves.”

      Says it with diffident self-satisfaction — like a Christian who has just confessed his Fault, & is now fresh armed with a proud Penance. &that done he unthinking opens up a little … that is, his eyes open into mine more … I nearly fall into the unexpected aperture … but even as I totter bar-car catches me & I withdraw in time. I can’t afford to fall anywhere in these surroundings, because I have no control. Draw back, vetoed again. Stammer something — “we may think too much about ourselves, but we never feel for ourselves.” That ends the exchange. The best that can be achieved now is a slowly distending propriety — a kind of improved impasse.

      He returned to his own car. And waiting to get off wrote his notes with what care he could muster, testing the muted vulgarity of the Rapido. He had to acknowledge to himself that this train did set the taste-pace for its clientele. The clientele being those, like himself, in the coach — the Permanent Commoners … Improved Commoners now, he supposed. And the administrators, the taste-makers, being those in the Club Car. The new élite. The new Canadian Priesthood. Secular Order! The enemy within. The new ultramontanism — with Ottawa as Rome. He’d have to start his own English-Canadian “Quiet Revolution” — against this new Canadian Church … he, the anti-clerical Loyalist.

      The man who shared his seat returned from a later dinner. Young — perhaps 30. Black suit, but with small cuffs. Hair close cropped — but not chopped … sat silently down, careful not to intrude his eyes upon anyone. Started reading: only the chapter head was visible … “how to handle a conference.” Hugh sank in consternation: “God, the army is everywhere.” He went back to his notation … scribbling furious — “the national government has become our Tastemaker — and the Taste it is setting is disastrous indication of the New Man it is concocting by default….”

      By the time he had finished they were in Montreal. Everyone was filing out. Everyone, that is, except a young man three seats forward who stood up, dressed himself with confident placidity, while conscientiously allowing the others to exit. How was it possible, Hugh pondered, to be so correctly condescending as this man was? And then — as he watched the performance, mesmerized — he knew that the youth reminded him of someone. Whom? He stared … the boy must be twenty-five, hair kempt by comb (not brushed, of course), grey coat unobtrusively tweeded, suit implacably pressed. Standing with his body held carefully at arm’s length … from what? Hugh didn’t know. Not yet. The man was obviously a model, for himself — but of what? Bells rang in his ears … the youth put on his white scarf, his gloves. And then it all came to Hugh with a rush — the face from the picture on the wall of the United Church Sunday School near Collingwood, the skiing village … that was it: this youth was a Blondbeast for Jesus … the completed Canadian Methodist! Roundhead with Honours! A variation of the man who had just shared his seat … and who had looked like (Hugh realized it now), those ads for Canadian Army recruitment: those earnest faces — firm (not forceful), clean cut (but not chiselled), accessible (but not frank). Hugh watched amazed at this performance. Surely there was a flaw somewhere. No — there was none. The young man helped a lady with her bag, carefully withdrawing from her extracted thanks. It was painfully embarrassing to Hugh. God — the kid is going through all the right motions … like someone from Whitby Ladies’ College — the complete Methodist Husband for the completed Methodist Lady. Everything was right about it. For a moment he thought that the only solution was prayer — real prayer. And then as the All-Canadian Good Boy carried himself firmly down the aisle (no organ playing — none could: the Kid would see to that!) Hugh felt an insufferable urge that he didn’t define … he couldn’t; he was in situ now — Montreal.

      The station clamoured around him — he gazed into the noise, displaced suddenly … so different from Toronto, from the great thermal Roman Imperial Bath of Toronto Union … wherein no one talked — except the Highclass Hicks of Listen Hear on the billboardings … who yapped at the Permanent Commoners convening to their traintimes. These Hep Hicks — “everyone’s chum,” the pert alert Torontonian…. Well, here in Montreal, it was decisively and disconcertingly different. The station engulfed him now, and he weaved his way through the crowd — “the best-dressed peasants in the world,” he thought, as he warped and woofed his way to his baggage. And the best-behaved. And then he realized that while they were a crowd incoherent around him, engulfing him, yet they were no more than in comparable space in the Toronto station. But the whole experience was utterly different. He gazed around the station — it looked rather like a well-organized sequence of American wayside kiosks. There was a percentage of that, and a percentage of shopping centre, and a percentage of “better buy British” to it all. Around the ceiling, an immensely squalid frieze depicting Canada, apparently, because underneath it the words of “O Canada.” “Better buy Canadian … better belong to СКАЧАТЬ