Each Man's Son by Hugh Maclennan Read Free Book Online Page A

that in spite of his family Archie wasn’t too bad a boy. He had certainly been handsome and he had moved with the sure, reckless grace of a wild animal, but he had been restless and moody, and when he began to drink his eyes had flamed out of his face with the desperate look that was only too familiar in those of the youngmen who came to realize they had been trapped by the mines.
    â€œYou’re living in a fool’s paradise,” she heard Dan saying, “if you think a man like Archie MacNeil is going to be any help towards that boy’s bettering of himself.”
    Mollie stiffened as if he had struck her. “Archie is my husband, Doctor, and I am proud of him.”
    â€œHave you ever seen a professional boxing match?”
    â€œIndeed I have not.”
    â€œWell, it’s a brutal spectacle. Some people call it sport. If so, it’s the only sport I know in which the objective is the injury of another man.”
    Mollie was trembling and Margaret said, “Dan, I don’t think this is any of our business.” To the girl she said, “The doctor didn’t mean to be unkind.”
    â€œI know, Mrs. Ainslie. It is terrible, the life Archie is leading. They say he is getting too old to fight now, but he is only twenty-eight. Whenever he has a fight I feel so bad in here–” she pressed her hand against her stomach–“I can hardly eat my supper. I never thought he would fight for money, Mrs. Ainslie, but he was such a beautiful boxer they led him into it. And when he went away I thought, Well at least he will make money for Alan’s education. But he has not even made money for anything.”
    The mare clopped over a bridge spanning a tongue-shaped inlet from the harbor. Fishing boats and potato schooners were moored at jetties farther out and a cluster of dories lay nearer the bridge. Three young men were leaning on the railing of the bridge engaged in a spitting contest with the closest dory as a target. “We should be haffing Big Alec McCoubrie here,” Margaret heard one of them say in a melancholy lilt. She smelled the old familiar odor of drying fish and remembered her childhood when the harbor was more important than it was now, when Broughton was a small town with only a few colleries nosing their way into a back area, when all the land on the left-hand side of the bridge had been a field belongingto her father. In those days the bridge was on the edge of the town. Now the field had disappeared and the core of the business section had swallowed it. The mare entered a narrow main street with lighted store fronts close on either side, lampposts crooked and raw holding up incandescent lights which made the pavement look blue and naked, and narrow sidewalks between the stores and the street swarming with aimless people, as always on Saturday night. Among the many carriages on the street were a few motorcars.
    Ainslie reined up before the motion picture theater where, so Margaret had heard, an audience could watch slapstick comedies, serials about cowboys, gypsies, cops and bathing beauties, and morality plays about nice young Americans who went hellward by way of drink and cards.
    â€œI suppose this is what you came into town for?” he said.
    â€œIt is a change, Doctor, and it only costs ten cents.”
    When Mollie stepped from the carriage she looked at them both, and Margaret’s eyes moved quickly from the girl’s face to her husband’s. She saw the strong, tense lines about his mouth relax and then tighten again, and she knew that he felt infinitely sorry for this girl.
    Mollie looked up at him with the helpless dignity of a gentle person who has lost her way. “Doctor,” she said, “I would like you to understand something because you have always been kind to us. I know many things here are bad for Alan, but I will not be talking to him against his father. It is not good for Archie to be away, but it would be worse