Self Condemned (12 page)
Soon after this the two ladies withdrew. The men remained standing. After a pause, as though for
recueillement
on the part of Percy, that gentleman practically re-enacted the scene of just before dinner, with this difference that he had now drunk quite a lot, and his guest also resembled him in this respect. During his emotional expansiveness Percy became quite red in the face, and once or twice moved dramatically close to his brother-in-law.
“How is it, René, that we have never until tonight really got to know one another? Why have we never had any good talks before? It is really astonishing how little we have found to say to one another.”
René knew perfectly well the answer, why they had never had any serious conversation before. But he affected to be at least as astonished as Percy at that fact. He had looked upon Mary’s husband as a man with whom he had so little in common that it was unnecessary to exchange anything more than commonplaces.
But René crashed, almost with violence, with a heartiness even exceeding the other’s, “Yes, is it not amazing that all these years we should have been content to discuss the weather, or some child murder or football match ... Marie Laurençin!”
They both laughed, looking around for one of the ubiquitous stylized inanities.
“It is extraordinary,” he went on,“how something happens … and two people begin talking without any social inhibition and are revealed to one another. It is one of the most extraordinary things in life!”
“Absolutely!” Percy noisily responded.“
The
most extraordinary.”
“The most! It is like the discovery of plastic.” René capped the whole matter. “Just a jolly old milk bottle, the sort the slovenly housewife leaves hardening away there on a shelf — too damned lazy to wash it out and return it to the milkman, and the stuff brought about by her slack habits is
plastic
. World-shaking discovery. A universal substance such as the alchemist dreamed of. Tea trays, false teeth, cups and saucers, eyeglasses, surgical instruments, flying-machines — all out of a bottle of milk. We have been like the indolent housewife, you and I, Percy.We ought to be damned well ashamed of ourselves!”
Percy did not entirely come up to his guest’s comic picture of him, and there were times when he showed a certain uneasiness.
So now, smiling a little dubiously, he remarked, “We neither of us perhaps can claim to possess such staggering properties as are to be found in a neglected milk bottle. But I think you are a very remarkable person: our talk tonight has given me furiously to think. And I like thinking furiously.”
“So do I.” René discharged a furious puff of smoke from his dilated nostrils.They sat down and talked a little more, Percy saying, among other things, what a marvellous insight his new friend had into American history. “But of course it is your job,” to which the historian replied, “It is in fact a pity that Englishmen do not know a little more how America came to be what it is.” Then suddenly Percy drew his chair, with some violence, near to that of René.
“Look here, my dear fellow, I have been thinking about this ever since Mary informed me of your splendid gesture, how you laid down your post ... in a spirit of the purest idealism. Whenever I think of it I marvel — how many people would sacrifice everything for a principle, expose themselves … well, to penury? Now, my dear fellow, I am a relative and you must allow me to say this. In order to meet the difficulties which must immediately confront you, you must allow me to place at your disposal the sum of one thousand pounds.” René began to say, “I could not think of allowing ...” But he was interrupted by Percy, waving such remonstrances away with an imperious hand.
“The sum I have mentioned means nothing to me, I can very easily spare it. Needless to say, it is not my habit to distribute cheques. But in
this
case I look upon it as a paltry sum, and let me say at once that if you should require more in the first year or two to keep you going, do not hesitate to turn to me. I should be ashamed of myself if I did not support you in any way in my power.”
“But really, old chap …”
Getting to his feet with a purposeful air, Percy said, “Will you wait here for a moment, I shall be back immediately. I am going to my study to draw this cheque on the spot. Excuse me. I shall really only be two or three minutes.”
He left the room, and René, who had risen, went to the table and poured himself out another brandy. As soon as he was alone René’s face contracted. Glaring down at his glass, he would appear to be concentrating for purposes of analysis.
The Absurd
was once more puzzling him. This man he was with was so obviously not screwed down tight, and half-finished: kept attacking him — yes, actually
assaulting
him — with nonsensical approbation! Then he would shoot off, as he now had done, into the
néant
, soon to reappear with a cheque for a thousand pounds. Was this fairy gold? Was he an emissary of Nonsense in person? Yes, would these thousand pounds only be convertible into a thousand absurdities? For such a figure could not possibly deal in a rational currency.
But René poured down more brandy and squared his shoulders. It was his brother-in-law ... after all, who slept with Mary every night. Mary, stable as a rock, she would not be closely associated with so unstable an entity were she not assured that his money came from a normal mint. No.
Although he had drilled himself into tolerance of the absurd by the time Percy hustled in, the first impact of the bird’s nest coloured thatch, the rimless glasses (put on to write the cheque), produced a mild spasm of alarm, of the type always experienced when Mrs. Harradson emitted, “Oo, sir, Professor Harding, sir!”
But he forced an agreeably abstracted expression on to his face (no unseemly expectancy of what was about to happen, yet ... in a musing of a happy kind, so that if anything did drop in his lap it would be received benignly, without too crudely abrupt a change of countenance).
“I say, Percy, I ought not to take this you know! I am quite serious,” he protested, as Percy placed an envelope upon the table beside him. “You’re a terrific brick!” (He supposed that “brick” was the kind of idiot word that belonged to the vocabulary of this sort of homunculus.) “But I know I should refuse!”
“Nonsense, my dear chap!”
René looked up quickly at the word “nonsense.”
“I don’t know what Hester would say if she could see me pocketing this,” as he picked up the envelope and put it in his breast pocket. He almost laughed at the thought of Hester’s disgust at the sight of a thousand quid. “Hester always says I have no proper pride.”
“She will soon get over it, I expect.” For this was rather in excess of what could be absorbed by the homunculus on the serious level.
“I expect so, poor dear girl. For she takes a more serious view than I do of our future.”
“Women are born pessimists,” Percy told him.
René nodded his head. “They are the eternal Greek chorus.” Then quickly placing his hand upon that of his host, which lay, hairy and sprawling, on the table, and administering a slight pressure, he exclaimed fruitily, “I am your debtor for life, old man. I do not mean I shall not repay you this sum. I mean that when I
do
, I shall still be your debtor.”
“Nonsense!”
At this second “nonsense” René shot up his head even more quickly, and examined closely the bird’s nest hair, the blankly shining eye-glasses. Had he read his suspicions? Has this old bourgeois second sight?
But Percy resumed the dinner-table conversation, which had apparently given him an appetite for political and other discussion; or there had been something René had said which had stirred him into unaccustomed speculation.
“In my lifetime,” he began, “the attitude to violent death has completely changed.”
“In mine too. We have become like the Orientals.”
Signs of animation were seen in the bird’s-nest-topped head, with its glazed eye-sockets (for the glasses were still there).
“Orientalized, are we? You think that?”
“All I meant was,” René clarified, “that in the past it was always said that our attitude to death was different from that of the Oriental races. Today one does not hear that said, and I think that there is no longer any justification for saying it.”
“No, there is not. I do not mind being blasted out of my house by a ‘super-bomb’ at any moment. This is a quite new attitude. — I mean my callousness about myself.”
A frown grew upon René’s face, like a hieratic tree, during Percy’s self-analysis. The last thing that he desired was a serious discussion with this auriferous nobody. But such self-complacent revelation of callousness normally would have provoked him to didactic reproof.
“Ah ha, yes, very painful,” he muttered.
“Rather the reverse,” the callous one smilingly corrected. “But I often have wondered,” he went on, “whether the sort of orientalizing we have undergone was not due to the extraordinary growth of Jewish influence.”
(Ha! An anti-Semite, thought to himself the surprised listener. One of the City Man’s substitutes for thought — the fox hunting still in the blood of the stockjobber. But he waited.)
“It is my opinion that the Jews have too much influence,” Percy continued truculently, glancing at his frowning companion; the frown still there which had grown under the stimulus of passing reference to high explosives and high finance.
“I should be interested to know your opinion, René, of the Jewish question.”
Stirring himself reluctantly, this frowning guest, whose profession it was to have opinions, drank his brandy slowly, ponderously put down the glass, and a shade grumpily gave his opinion.
“The Jews. The Jews are an alibi for all the double dealers, plotters, and intriguers, fomenters of wars,
und so weiter
. A useful tribe, they take the rap for everything.”
It was with a much colder voice that the bird’s nest crowned mask drawled, “So you regard the Jews as much maligned?”
“They certainly are maligned. They have their own advocates in plenty; I am only interested in justice, and I notice numbers of malefactors escaping on the backs of the Jews.”
Percy’s disappointment was patent, he was even ruffled. “In the insurance business …”
“Ah yes, in the insurance business you do meet a lot of bad hats with Semitic cognomens.”
“You do indeed,” Percy asserted with asperity and then followed several accounts of fabulous insurance frauds, and the part his company had played in same. The last of these stories was laughter provoking, the delinquent possessing an eye for the farcical, and both narrator and listener became uproarious and mingled their laughs as they poured themselves fresh glasses of brandy. The bad patch in the conversation was over. Subjects in which the City Man’s passions were not aroused succeeded, one or two of which revealing an identity of view and so confirming Percy’s new-found belief in his brother-in-law’s wisdom. It seemed a long time to René since their wives had left them when his host got up and led the way to the drawing room.
As all were moving about near the open front door preparatory to the departure of the two guests, René went up to his sister and kissed her, murmuring almost in her ear, “
Marie, tu
est si belle, tu est si bonne!
” The serene roman-face of the slightly smiling Mary accepted the mariolatry blandly, squeezing her brother’s arm. And over her shoulder could be seen in the light of the hall lamp the figure of Percy, his head once more in profile, his shining eye rapt in a dream of unutterable knowingness. René saw him as a large bird, a hen bird, a bird’s nest upon its head, transfixed in a dream of exultant intensity; a bird who had just laid a splendid golden egg.
“A
re you a subscriber to a press clipping agency?” Janet Painter looked across the marble table at her brother. He shook his head. “You did not read my story about you then, I expect.”
“What was that?” René was watching a girl at a neighbouring table who had been sketching him he thought. He had seen no sketching in the Café Royal for a long time. Habits were changing among the native artists. Spectacled girls were always the hottest: her specs were the big rimless ones that went with myopic, fat, red-lipped, provincial Sunday School sexiness. As greedy for it, as red-cheeked lads for jam. She turned towards him and smiled. He pointed his bearded lips and puffed a pencil of blue smoke.
“The little beast carts that sketchbook around with her as a means of getting off,” he ruminated. “She sketches men into her fat little net. Probably been trodden by several hundred Yorkshire tykes or Shropshire lads. Now up in the capital, is swimming around with that protruding fish mouth of hers below the short fat nose.” He removed his eyes from the coarse bit of sex bait and caught Victor’s eye, which had been covertly feasting upon the same abject morsel. Not for the first time did he find himself cruising in the same dirty waters as Victor. They had so few tastes in common that
this
one he found particularly startling.
“Idealism,” his sister was saying, “was the caption for my story.”
“Idealism?” René repeated. “The world as idea and as imagination. I see.”
“Yes, I say the most brilliant of our ‘young’ professors, whose book,
The Secret History of World War II
, created such a sensation last year. After enumerating a few of his more glittering academic honours, I went on to describe how at last unable to bear the feeling of guilt, he had resigned his professorship.The sense of guilt had grown with his increasing sense of the evilness of the system his teaching was designed to support. Now, he, accompanied by his beautiful young wife, who with great bravery is following him into the wilderness, are booking a passage for Canada, where they are to start a new life. ‘Such idealism,’ my story concluded, ‘is not often met with outside the pages of a novel.’”
“Oh, why didn’t you tell me about this, Janet?” drawled Victor fruitily in his throat. “How clever of you, darling!”
Mr.Victor Painter was Janet’s husband, but his classily barking patronage she took no more notice of than if he had been a familiar dog.