Each Man's Son by Hugh Maclennan

to do but work?”
    â€œDan, do you know how cruel it is for you to say that to me?” But there was no expression of hurt on her face; experience had taught her to transform the frustration she felt to a look of cool serenity. She stepped from the carriage and wasabout to go up the path to the house when she turned and spoke again. “I won’t see you until church tomorrow?”
    â€œProbably not.”
    She went on up the path. She heard music and the stir of many feet on the polished floor of the big front parlor, and suddenly she was happy again. The door of her mother’s house opened and her youngest sister was there to welcome her with a smile. Margaret forced herself not to look back at her husband, though she knew the carriage had not moved.

 
    Four
    W HEN THE DOOR CLOSED , Ainslie felt a smart of tears behind his eyes and the loneliness came down on him. He looked at the rambling house and he let himself feel angry about it because it was a thing he could consider objectively. Margaret’s father, Noah Eldridge, had built the house and while he lived Ainslie had liked him, though he had never greatly respected the man. But Mrs. Eldridge, Margaret’s mother, Ainslie disliked frankly and openly. She lived there like a queen bee, surrounded by a large and adoring family who worshiped her. To him, she had always seemed semialien, a selfish, superficial woman with no standards of education whatever. In his mind he always called her a Yankee, without any thought for the political significance of the word, because she stood for a state of mind opposed to everything his own emotions honored. Things came easily to people like the Eldridges and they were always ready to take the easy way out of a situation. Ainslie clucked at the mare and turned her about in the narrow street, then he leaned back and let the animal find her own way to the hospital.
    The sadness, the sense of irreparable loss, persisted in him. As he sniffed the air he remembered an evening like this when he had been a boy of nineteen, earning money before themast during his summer vacation from college. He had put out from North Sydney on the last of old Eldridge’s barks and the wind had been so right they had been able to set stuns’ls before clearing Cranberry Head. The memory of that night had lasted with him all these years. The westerly wind had flattened the sea so that the keel was as firm as a dock, but the wind had been strong and held the sails as hard as iron. All that night at sea he had smelled forests, for the wind that blew them to Newfoundland had previously traversed the length of Nova Scotia and come to them laden with the pungent scent of balsam. Those had been good days. The past had still been honorable, unblighted by the mines. The whole world had seemed too small to hold his future.
    Now that future was the present, and what had it brought? Only an end to seeing ahead. Not even posterity. Just the moment of hard work. The memory of work endlessly hard. The memory of striving, straining, heaving the huge rock up the hill with the feeling that if he relaxed for a moment it would become the rock of Sisyphus and roar down to the valley bottom again. Was defiance all that remained?
    The mare turned into Wellington Street and Ainslie’s body shifted position. His loneliness became a hungry desire. If only Margaret had smiled at him he would have felt differently, but she smiled at others so much more easily than she did for him. He still thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever met, except for her eyes. There was no smoke in her eyes, no mystery, nor any sense of it; instead there was a fearless clarity that could look steadily at anything short of a Gaelic ghost. Her white body was like a hill of snow under the moon. It was tantalizingly lovely, it was unbelievably beautiful, yet he had never seemed able to reach its inner warmth or to feel that he had come home to her. Her body lived