Self Condemned (20 page)

“Jealousy! Are you in your right senses, Helen …” Robert began, but René left the room, as he stopped.

“Kerridge! Come out here, will you?” René called. The parson left the room with a disagreeable smile: but a few minutes later they both re-entered, and took up their drinks without further exchange just then.

After dinner, the clergyman excused himself, he had a letter to write. Brother and sister were alone for a short while.

“I am sorry, René, how difficult things are here. Robert has always been terribly jealous of you.”

“Of
me
?”

“Yes. And now, to make things worse, he is writing a novel.”

René laughed. “A novel!”

“Yes. I do hope he does not become a celebrity! There will be no holding him!”

René made what is called in French a
moue
. “
Ça pourrait être
bien curieux, quand même
.”

Helen smiled and nodded. She treated her husband as a precocious boy, from whom one must expect tactless outbursts.

The next morning a local woman came in to char. René at first regarded her with suspicion, but there were no signs of insanity. Outside of the London area such creatures as Mrs. Harradson are scarcely ever found.

Mr. Kerridge had a date somewhere. Shortly after breakfast signs of impending departure were visible. René was furtively attentive to these signs: and at length he was able to observe, through one of the front windows, the bicycle being wheeled to the gate, and through its iron work followed with joy the mounting of the bicycle. Finally, he watched with elation the disembodied clerical hat gaining speed as it skimmed along the top of the hedge. He waited a moment, then rushed back into the kitchen, to announce to Helen that the coast was clear. “The wicked giant, in whose power you have been for so long, has pedalled away on some mysterious errand. Hoorah!” With his dancing step he led the way out-of-doors. Behind him Helen, as eager as himself, danced at his heels in imitative stance.

The Kerridges would have been very difficult to please if they had not been grateful for the vicarage which had fallen to their lot. It had the dignity, the elegance of the eighteenth century in every line, its well-cut red brick, its windows and doors picked out by the white stripes in their sockets, and the white triangle balanced upon its white legs or convenient columns, as clean and correct as white linen at the neck and wrists in a gentleman’s attire. A house which had escaped by forty years the Romantic Revival. Also, the place was a sizable one to allow for the considerable broods of sedentary clergymen. And then the Kerridges had been presented with a large garden too, and kept it in excellent shape — except that it would have been better with fewer herbaceous borders.As he danced past the Canterbury bells and delphiniums, René said to himself that his sister at least could get away from the obsessing India-rubber neck, white jaw ornaments forever on show, and the two glittering panes of glass where eyes ought to be: these herbaceous vulgarities would serve to sweeten her imagination after a long tête-à-tête with the wicked giant within, alecking away at his smartest, and perhaps attempting to devour her with those hideous tusks.

As he thought of the two sets of piano keys in Kerridge’s mouth, something possessive caused him to seize Helen around the shoulders and draw her away more rapidly from the House That Jack Built, as she decided that it was, inhabited by a bank-clerkish Giant, with big glass eyes and crunching tusks. She clung to him, as if understanding that a Preux had come to rescue her from a giant oddly disguised as a clergyman.

At the foot of the garden they reached a summer house, dating from Victorian days, a caricature of a miniature pagoda. Once you got inside it, it was quite comfortable, with a rug on the floor, a table and chairs, and at the back there was a window looking out on to a very minor ravine in part gorse-covered. They entered, went over to the window, which was open, and leaned upon its gritty sill, gazing vacantly out at the uncultivated strip of country, too far from the horizontal to be of much use to anybody.

“Now that we are alone at last, René, please tell me why you threw up your job? I did
not write
to you, because I knew that you would say nothing in a letter. Did you have the most fearful row?”

His sister’s sudden question took René a little aback. After a short pause he laughed, and passed his hand violently over his face. His reply was a question.

“How long have you been married, Helen?” he enquired.

“Eleven years,” she said at once, as though she had had the answer ready.

“Well, I was appointed professor of modern history eleven years ago. Let us suppose that you suddenly left your husband....”

“Me? ... Why?”

“
Just suppose
. People would ask you in great surprise, what had caused you to take this step. You would answer, presumably, that you had done so because of his complete absence of moral understanding and because of the harm he was doing as a consequence of his lack of moral sense. At least this is what you would say if your case were a parallel one to mine, and your motives resembling my motives.”

“Ah, I see,” she exclaimed, in a tone of considerable relief. “I was going to say …”

“But the answer I have imagined you giving to your inquisitive neighbours would appear to them of the most fantastic kind.What a reason to give! they would say. They would suppose that you had invented this to conceal the actual cause of the estrangement and separation. Later on, they would take you aside and ask you what was the
real
reason.You would find yourself in an embarrassing position, and in the end would almost wish that you had answered,‘Oh, we just had a row, just a bad row!’ Do you follow me?”

“I am afraid I do not,” Helen replied.

“No? Well, my case is rather similar to this suppositious one, in which you left Robert, explaining your action by charging him with moral obliquity.”

“Ah, I see what you were getting at!”

“Well,” René sighed,“you will begin to understand from this illustration, how difficult it is for me to know quite what to say. No one will believe that I am such an utter
prig
— that is how it must look to them — as I claim to be.”

Helen turned, and had a good look at the bearded face beside her, which in imagination, she always saw with a gay curling up of the ends of the moustache, nothing but high-spirited raillery and delighted exploitation of the absurd seeming to be happily mobilized behind those eyes. Even now his glance held nothing solemn in it. It swam and darted as it always did.

“I see how it must be, René. But it is so difficult to think of you convulsed with some ethical problem: yours is not exactly an ethical personality! I find it difficult myself to see you resigning your professorship, for
moral
reasons.”

René laughed, as he turned away from the windowsill. He lighted a cigarette, and dropped into a chair.

“Please give me a cigarette,” said Helen, as she sat down in front of him.

They both sat smoking for a moment, and Helen feared at first that she might have offended: but her brother then looked up with his accustomed smile. “You put your finger at once upon one of the difficulties,” he told her. “My personality is
not
that of a great moralist, is it? That is probably the reason for people’s scepticism. You showed great insight, sister. But that is not
all
. If the issue were a simple one, or rather, if it were reducible to a simple explanation, I would have no objection whatever to making a public statement. But as it is, my personality is so out of keeping with the ethically heroical image that the bare facts elicit.You spotted that at once.
I
cannot be made to fit in with my story. To extricate myself from that misunderstanding, I should have to agree,
Yes, my personality is not that of a martyred moralist
.
But
then I am not, first and foremost, a moralist
. From that point onwards everything is far too difficult to explain to the majority of people. To satisfy Tom, Dick, and Harry, some formula would have to be found — something as short as it was convincing.”

“But Robert is neither Tom, Dick, nor Harry, is he? Why do you not explain to him?”

“Because he is biased against me. And there is no particular reason why I should say more to him than to anybody else. But to you, I would like to explain a little, if you want to be bored.”

“I wish you would, René ... I am not very learned!”

“It is not a question of ‘book learning’. There is nothing abstruse; my position could be made quite clear to anybody. If you were employed by some large concern, for instance, and in the course of some years you discovered that
everyone
in this considerable business was dishonest, and that the whole set-up was fundamentally a racket; when at last there was no longer any doubt that you were devoting your time and talent (such as it was) to something at once trivial and harmful, what would you do? It would be rather an awful predicament. Your salary is a good one; you are too old to redirect yourself very easily. All your friends and relations attempt to dissuade you from resigning. Why be so fussy, so fastidious? they would argue. But now I come to the real point.Would you be a
great moralist
because you decided to resign? Not necessarily so at all. Any decent ordinary girl would find it distasteful and repugnant to spend her life engaged in activities which, without being criminal, were not honest and potentially very harmful. It would be, in part, no doubt, a
moral
issue: but equally, and perhaps in a more compelling way, it would turn upon questions of taste and of
self-respect
. We all have a considerable fund of inherited morality which we describe as ‘decency.’ And then there is a fastidiousness which is partly aesthetic, partly social conceit.We are presupposing a well-brought-up, rather particular, self-reliant girl. But why not? There are, happily, a number of girls like that. To sum this up: the term
great moralist
, if it were used of her in mockery, would quite falsify the true nature of the girl’s action, in throwing up her job.”

Helen’s face looked grave and a little embarrassed. She asked, with an apologetic air, “You reason very clearly, René, but I fail to see, quite, what the imaginary girl employed by some people not quite on the straight, has to do with René Harding, professor of history, who resigns his post.”

“Exactly!” René exclaimed, with much approval. “My racket is
History
, you say. As harmless a thing as could well be imagined. What is
History
except dates — William the Conqueror 1066 and a list of the wives of Henry VIII? The past, the long ago, is about as harmless as anything could be. That, more or less, is the general view of history, is it not?”

Helen laughed and nodded. “I’m afraid so,” she said. “I, of course, know a bit more than that. I have just been reading about the Court of Queen Anne. But I cannot see how there is much room for such a moral flare-up as we are discussing.”

“Well there
is
, even about Queen Anne’s reign. All history is written with a bias. But if it is written with a state-organized bias, as in Soviet Russia, great harm ensues. For if you falsify past events methodically, you very soon authorize or indeed command that present events be systematically falsified also. And for there to be no standard of objective reality in a society is a very bad thing for the society in question.”

“I see that all right,” Helen told him.

“And do you also see, Helen, how I could not, in delivering myself of this explanation to Robert, have cited Soviet Russia, although it is the best illustration of state falsification of history?”

Helen laughed heartily, as she always did at any reference to Robert’s political views, in colour approaching that of the letter box or of the setting sun.

“We are getting along well,” René assured her. “But history includes the present as well as the
past
.The World War was
history
as much as the Wars of the Roses. Mr. Winston Churchill is as much a historical figure as was the first Duke of Marlborough, about whom you have been reading in your Queen Anne book.”

Helen’s face was still without the social smile: she recognized that her brother attached great importance to this interview, for some reason; that he set store by her understanding exactly what he was saying: and she was determined to concentrate, and to make her mind properly receptive. It was very rarely indeed that great exactitude was required of her understanding, and she sat very still, as though she were absorbed in some calligraphic feat.

“Now what it is essential to remember,” René continued, after a pause, “is that any work includes the field of contemporary politics — twentieth-century politics. Whereas, up to a certain point, what you think, and what you say, about the Peasants’ Revolt — about Wat Tyler and John Bull — has no immediate influence upon people’s conduct, it is quite a different matter when you are writing about nineteenth-century Liberalism in England, or the deluded optimists known as the ‘Manchester School’; and when it comes to the twentieth century to Edward the Peacemaker, to the Duke of Windsor and to Mr. Baldwin — when it comes to writing about all this, it ceases to be history as popularly understood at all. It is more like analyzing the character and behaviour of the members of one’s family circle, neighbours, or friends; or the notables of your borough or county, the local police or sanitary authorities, or local member of parliament.You see what I mean?”

He paused, and Helen said, “I see.”

“The word history is synonymous in the popular mind with something
distant
. When
history
gets so near to us that it hurts, naturally we no longer regard it as
history
— and then, the so-called historian, when his history is
near
history, is far less free than when his material is a century away. Any unorthodoxy is deeply resented, especially if he occupies an official position. Pressures are felt from all directions. All kinds of things are expected of him. He is supposed to conform to accepted views of every sort: more especially economic unorthodoxy is impossible. You are supposed to forget that the banks and great insurance companies exist: your view in all such things must be that of a child of ten years old. And as to
wars
(as to so senseless a crime as the World War), there you must speak of ‘anger of a great people demanding action.’ You must speak of governments giving way to popular clamour (‘popular clamour’ being the inflammatory banner headlines of the
Daily Mail
or the
Daily Mirror
): your history must sound not unlike an Armistice Day speech. You must turn no stones on the beach to see what is underneath them: you must adhere to the reality of the world of slogans, and you must never turn a slogan on its back.”