Chapter 19

    The course of true love never did run smooth.
 
     It's a great line, and a true one, as applied to ordinary courtships, especially insofar as they have the good fortune to turn into at least a moderate form of the spiritual exercises. When Toby was just a lad, and living in his own paradise on a coastal island while his father was logging and his mother, most definitely a city girl, trying to keep her peace of mind in the midst of a social situation that contradicted anything she had ever known, most brutally, he read, and read again, a novel by the Western writer, Zane Grey, and therefore ran into a quite acceptable image of the Exercises in that book. "Code of the West" was a modern duster, dealing in part with Grey's own personal anguish, set in post War One Arizona, illustrating the clash of flapper philosophy with what Grey liked to think of as the superior instincts of the pioneers who built the West. As with all Westerns, put together on the assumption that men are better off using their muscles than their brains, the book limped with the sentimentality that must go with such priorities, but it had kept Toby excellent company as a boy, and his divine influences had used it well on his own mind. He was, after all, only ten years old when his first read it. There was an inescapable element of quiet in the weeks the heroine spent nursing her brutally beaten husband. At the time Toby had little training for seeing Cal Thurman as an image of the crucified Christ, but such omissions were not likely to stop a Holy Spirit who had already laid certain extraordinary claims to his protege, who had always been not only content with solitude and quiet, but often found it the most exciting option among the rest of the choices. Such is life for those who read as well as they can; such is death, by contrast, for those who will not read as well as they should.
 
     I am not talking about the course of love with Jelena, or at least not from Toby's point of view. He course may have been rougher than his, as his mind over her had been made up with alarming alacrity, while hers possibly wavered back and forth, particularly while he was making so much racket against the Faith, with all the alarming energy of a mystic in fact not actually realizing at the moment where his peculiar brand of insight and energy theoretically - in a sense - came from, but I am talking about Toby and his wife's mother.
 
     For he did truly love her. He loved her, he loved her husband, as he was Jelena's father, and he loved the younger brother and sister. He would have loved the dog and the cat, if they had owned such, simply because they came with the environment that had produced and encompassed the young woman of his destiny. So Toby was entirely open to the lady he was convinced would be his mother-in-law. But she was not entirely open to him.
 
     They had first met, as I have said earlier, at the front stairs of the house, early of a Sunday morning when Mrs. Omagh was heading off to Mass with her two youngest, and Toby had been thus been given a golden, very early, insight into how easily his intended could take control of a difficult situation.
  
    Their next meeting was not for a couple of weeks, when Jelena said that her mother had invited him for tea. "Two weeks is not a lifetime, but I think she feels there's a certain stability already in the fact of you and me, so she wants to meet you under more ordinary circumstances than the first time. After all, she never even got to hear you speak that morning, with me sending you off so quickly. She's never actually told me whether she admired your docility or thought you a pushover."
 
     Toby had grinned. "It was neither. Just the automatic fruit of my years with the military. Doesn't she know anyone in the army? Maybe I should have given a salute, but I would be hard put to decide which one of you should get it."
 
     "There weren't many soldiers around Hastings during the war. No reason for it, as there were no training campus nearby. But we did put up a lot airmen from around the Commonwealth. They came from the training camps on the Prairies. They were nice, and they had funny expressions. One of them asked my mother to "Knock me up in the morning," meaning that she should wake him up with a rap on the door. I think he was from New Zealand."
 
     "I hope she laughed."
 
     "Of course. My mother has a great sense of humour."
  
    "Good. As my mother-in-law, she'll need it."
 
     "You seem awfully confident about your future. Our future."
  
    "My confidence is a problem for some people, I admit. But I think I have to put it down to knowing when to obey orders. You can go a long away just doing what you're told. Like right now. I'm told to come to tea, so I'm going."
 
     "That wasn't an order, that was an invitation!"
 
     "Your mother's wish is my command."
 
     "Are you being sarcastic?"
 
     "No, not at all. Any woman who raised you deserves to be very profoundly respected until she creates very good reasons not to be. Reasons plural. One reason wouldn't be enough."
 
     "Ah, so you're being politically astute. I get it."
 
     "Well, I have read Machiavelli, in the same time frame as Freud and Havelock Ellis, but no, I don't think of you as, say, Mexico, and myself as the United States lobbying for annexation."
Jelena laughed. "But I am Catholic, and you're mostly not. It is sort of like Mexico and the States. That's very good."
 
     "Thank you. I like to think that I can give you something to think about as well as all those books you read. By the way, how are doing with Caitlin Thomas? Is she still depressing you? Damn good thing I read some Dylan himself last summer, just so you can't be too far ahead of me. Do you know that you're the first girl I ever met, as far as I know, who's actually read Tolstoi?"
 
     "Dylan's death was a great blow to her. It's not like reading "Pogo"."
 
     "I didn't say it was. I'm only saying that every time you mention it I get a headache and feel depressed myself and I wonder why that is. And, by the way, I can get depressed reading Pogo, every time Walt Kelly reminds me of Joe McCarthy."
 
     "Do you know that we have someone in Hastings who used to work in Hollywood? A really important position, too, but he had to leave because he would not testify against old film-making friends he knew were inclined to the Left. The industry wouldn't allow him to work. So he came to Canada and bought a business in Hastings. We had our after Grad on his farm property out the lake. It was an old orchard, really. We sat up all night an watched the sun rise over the Purcells in the morning. Those are the mountains on the east side of the lake."
 
     "I didn't go to my Grad. Our cadet corps was invited to a cruise on the honorary colonel's yacht, and I decided I had to go along, as I was head cheese."
 
     "You really were part of the military-industrial complex, weren't you? So what do you think about the man who wouldn't testify?"
 
     "I don't know him, but I hate witch-hunts, McCarthy was a pig, and I don't think that was Hollywood's finest hour. I certainly don't like Communism, but conscience is conscience or else the world goes mad. You'd think they would have learned from the Spanish Inquisition. Nationalism is a curse. You'd think they would have learned from the Nazis. By the way, the military-industrial complex did me a great deal of good, but when it was time to leave it, I left."
  
    "My mother will find you interesting."
 
     "And this time, not particularly silent."