Читать книгу There are Victories - Charles Yale Harrison - Страница 19

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Edgar soon learned not to be too squeamish about life. Miss Quinn’s profession, he soon came to realize, was but one aspect of a many-sided existence. Life and the philosophy of his social circle soon hardened him against emotional fastidiousness; one kept a stiff upper lip under all circumstances, one hid one’s emotional responses under an impassive mask, one held one’s liquor—in short, one behaved generally like a man. And later when he went terrified to the family physician, he was told that a fellow was not really a man until he had been bitten at least once. “It is nothing. A cold—but not in the head,” the doctor said, smiling. And so Edgar became a man.

After Edgar left McGill, he was taken into his father’s shipping business. He started at the bottom of the ladder, a phrase dear to Kennedy père, and was assured that his rise to the top would be commensurate with his ability. For a year he worked side by side with the clerks in the outer office—those harried workers whose meager salaries maintain them in that pathetic starched dignity which lifts them above the ranks of mere toilers. He was given a small salary and commanded to observe the petty regulations which governed his less fortunate co-workers. He arrived at the office at eighty-thirty, took half an hour for lunch, and knocked off at six o’clock. His father considered this the essence of democracy.

——No damned coddling and hereditary nonsense the way we had in the old country. What the lad needs is hard knocks, that’s the way to learn the ropes. The same as I did, by gad.

Nevertheless, Edgar was promoted and advanced with rapid and most undemocratic regularity while his fellow clerks (pronounced with the broad English “a,” to compensate them for the inadequate salaries they received) continued at the old and time-honored rates. The young man soon learned all there was to know about maritime insurance, Lloyd’s, customs rates and a smattering of Admiralty law. Mr. Kennedy, a portly gentleman who wore a distinguished Edward VII beard and was a member of the Board of Trade, a respected member of the community, hoped to see his son in his place when the day for retirement arrived.

The cold necessity of business and the mores of his social group soon blunted whatever native fineness Edgar had the night when he turned with repugnance from the prostitute in Miss Quinn’s house. He was now a frequent visitor of the bar at the Windsor Hotel where the bartenders knew him by sight and by name. He smoked a very masculine pipe belligerently and prided himself on his knowledge of women and horse-flesh. He was acutely aware of the difference between women of his own class and those of a “lower” order; to the one he gave a shaded meticulous attention colored somewhat by a tired deference, while to the others, the less wealthy and baser born, he offered a boisterous good fellowship tinted with a touch of vulgarity. His affairs, carried on with women not of his class and station, usually ended up in a Drummond Street house of assignation—sneaking in and out and with much furtive looking up and down the street. On the way to his favorite house run by a yellowish, pallid Belgian who kept a huge, vicious police dog, he walked past a dilapidated Methodist mission in the window of which appeared the legend: “God is Love—Jesus Saves.” But this gave Edgar no qualms; it was Protestant proselytizing and he proceeded down the street intent on his illicit love affair.

Edgar was now tall, dark, and handsome. His face was rather weak, marred by a soft receding chin and blue watery eyes, but when it was in repose it expressed a bewildered wistfulness, a pathetic indecision. But this was rare enough, as a rule his guards were up and he was militantly masculine. His black hair was slicked back pompadour style and his air was excessively man-of-the-world. His clothes, and this was most important, were fashioned by an obsequious little Englishman who owned a dingy little shop on St. James Street. It was here that all the solid citizens of the city and their sons had their clothes made: quite conservative suits with low rolled lapels and shortish jackets which curved above the groin with quiet exhibitionism, tweeds from Scotland and England, indistinct in coloring, which blended with the grayish buildings of the business thoroughfare. The styles were subdued and unaffected, nothing loud and shrieking like the Yankee styles. Oh, no, this was Montreal, not New York, a difference with a distinction—as the Montrealers were proud to remark.

In all matters Edgar Kennedy has come a long way since the day when, as a sensitive youth, he became nauseated and greenish pale at the sight of a Cadieux Street whore squatting prophylactically after her commission of the act of love. It is some six years since that night and now Edgar is ashamed and laughs at his squeamishness. He is a hard-drinking, level-headed, young man about town. And it is upon him that Mrs. Throop has her eye as a prospective husband for Ruth.