They Shall Inherit the Earth

by Callaghan, Morley

• ISBN13: 9780771093630
• ISBN10: 0771093632
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-01-06
• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart Ltd

Summary

First published in 1935, this novel is a penetrating study of a father and son caught in the moral and economic undertow of the Great Depression. The action hinges upon a sudden mischance in which accident and intention tragically coincide. Swept along by the inexorable logic of events, Callaghan's protagonists are forced to re-examine the nature of individual conscience and responsibility. In their personal struggle is expressed the mood of the age, its cynicism and anger, its desperate idealism, and its agonized longing for redemption. From the Paperback edition.

Author Biography

Morley Callaghan’s literary circle included Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Joyce. In a career spanning more than six decades, he published sixteen novels and more than one hundred works of short fiction.

Excerpts

One

In the early summer evening Andrew Aikenhead, of the firm of Hillquist and Aikenhead, had gone out seeking his son. He had crossed slowly through the traffic with an eager expression on his upturned florid face. He was there on the sidewalk in the crowd, in the way of the passing people, looking up at the rooming house where his son lived, and he was full of delight, as though he had at last taken a necessary step that would bring joy again into his life.

He went into the house, and when he stood in the hall and saw by the names on the wall that his son was on the third floor, he began to climb the red-carpeted stairs, puffing and sighing at every fifth step. On the second floor, where the light was brighter, he saw a small, neat man with such delicate features and such fair wavy hair parted in the middle that he looked like a pretty boy, except that his blue eyes were redrimmed and shrewd, and this man was tiptoeing along the hall carrying a basket of fruit in both hands. The light overhead shone on the blue grapes, the yellow pears and the glossy peaches as he stooped and placed the basket of fruit on the carpet by the door of a room.

“Could you tell me where Michael Aikenhead lives?” Andrew Aikenhead asked.

“Mike Aikenhead,” the man said, straightening up and looking embarrassed. “Sure, I can tell you. Go on upstairs. The last room on the right at the back. He’s in there.” Andrew Aikenhead went on climbing the stairs again, while the fairhaired young man looked doubtfully at the basket of fruit he had placed like an offering outside that door.

In the little hall at the top, where there were only two doors, Andrew Aikenhead coughed, and then he began to clear his throat like a man who is about to make an important speech and offers a few preliminary sounds as a friendly gesture. Then he stood still, looking at the brown-painted door while his heart fluttered strangely and there was a yearning in him that his son might remember and know his voice that had sounded so loud. And when he rapped and his son’s voice called carelessly, “Come in,” he was full of gladness; and as he opened the door he thought, “That’s a good omen. Things will go well.”

His son, Michael, was sitting at a desk with his feet curled around the legs of the chair, and because the light on the desk was one of those lamps that students use which throw the rays of light in a pyramid shape full upon the desk, the father could not quite see the face in the shadow. The long fingers of one of his son’s big hands crossed quickly through the light and spread through his hair, and then he got up awkwardly. He was a big dark fellow, and he came across the room slowly, his hand stretched out to his smiling father. “Hello, I hardly knew you. I mean I was surprised to see you,” he said.

“Didn’t you hear me cough in the hall, Michael?”

“No, I was reading.”

“I knew you’d be surprised. I guess you didn’t expect me at all,” the father said, and then he sat down on the bed, for he was out of breath from climbing the stairs, and he looked around the room while he rested. It was one of those attic rooms with sloping ceilings. There was only a bed, an old golden-oak dresser, a heavy desk with one end of it piled high with books, the long window, with a radiator under it, and a worn green carpet on the floor. At one end of the room was a little alcove that could be used as a kitchenette, for there was a gas stove there and a kettle and a coffee pot. And when Andrew Aikenhead saw how poor his son was and that he lived in this plain room, he sighed, and he was deeply embarrassed and he could not look up, even though he knew his son preferred this poverty to the comfort of his father’s house.

Michael was a graduate civil engineer who was waiting for

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Excerpted from They Shall Inherit the Earth by Morley Callaghan
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