Self Condemned (26 page)

At this point René would go no further. This sodden satire, this lifeless realism, provoked him into saying, “Why am I reading this dull nonsense? It is just like Rotter to have recommended a book of this sort.” He continued to ruminate. “The historic illusion, the scenes depicted, and the hand depicting them, could be preserved in some suitable archive; but should not be handed down as a living document. It is a part of
history
” — with this he dismissed it.

He went out on to the deck and swinging his arm back hurled the heavy book out to sea. After that he returned to their stateroom, lay down, and instantly fell asleep.

At dinner Dr. Lincoln Abbott remarked slyly, “What book was it, Professor, that I saw you throwing into the sea?”

“That,” René told him, “was a novel called
Middlemarch
.”

“You express your disapproval very forcibly, Professor,” Dr.

Abbott laughed. “You should try one of our American novelists, Professor. Have you ever read any books by Steinbeck? No? Well I wonder if the
Grapes of Wrath
is in the ship’s library. Would you say it was, Mildie?”

He pronounced “wrath” in so strange a manner that René was at a loss to guess what he meant. Misinterpreting the abstracted look upon the other’s face, Dr. Abbott ground out savagely, “
Grapes of Wrarth
!”

René, however, yawned.“No more novels this voyage, Doctor!”

All of which convulsed Dr. Lincoln Abbott with amusement.

René gave him a sidelong look, half-amusement, half-alarm. This side-long look of René’s was interpreted by Dr. Abbott as a facetious rejoinder, the silent equivalent of a side-splitting wisecrack. It convulsed Dr. Abbott, who was always appreciative of mirthful sallies, with much physical exertion. But at this point, unfortunately, René was seized with a fit of coughing. This Dr. Abbott interpreted as bottled-up mirth leading to a coughing fit; and if he had been boisterous before, his contortions now, his gasps and splutters, were positively indecent. The noise they were making as a table was spectacular. This was a matter of great satisfaction to Dr. Lincoln Abbott. But René rose, and, with a muffled remark to his wife, moved out of the room, still coughing slightly. Hester accompanied him; as soon as they were outside René gasped indignantly. “It is preposterous. The fellow is becoming matey. Something must be done about it. I must see the purser immediately and get him to find us room somewhere else.”

“I should not do that,” Hester said. “We must be careful to avoid jokes, I think. I had better say that I have received a cable to say that poor Rosa is dying.”

The next day the radio announced the Declaration of War. At tea time they were having tea in the lounge and the King’s speech was broadcast. René took all this as a matter of course; and, indeed, the passengers in general appeared to be very little affected. This was natural enough, since most of them were on the ship so as not to be in Europe when this event occurred. With a frown Hester stared a little more than usual: whether this was authentic distress, or a desire to attract attention, it is difficult to say.

If this event had been taken as a matter of course there was another happening, not very much later, which was received very differently.The next morning people were seen standing in groups, speaking in whispers. A large liner had been sunk only a hundred miles away. The radio had been shut off upon the Declaration of War.And there had been no official communication. It remained, therefore, a rumour: but it passed from mouth to mouth, and it seemed for some reason to possess authority.

It was not long after this that the captain and two subordinate officers passed through the first class. He was severely uncommunicative: but hardly had this occurred, when the ship’s loud speaker enjoined all passengers to repair to their boat stations immediately, bringing their lifebelts with them.

Within a quarter of an hour passengers were lined up before their respective lifeboat stations. They were dismal little companies. Even the tennis courts were crowded with hammocks to provide sleeping accommodation, and the ship was so full to overflowing that it was quite certain
all
passengers could not get into the boats. Passengers eyed one another nervously, speculating as to whether they could fight their way successfully to safety, or at all events to a place in a boat. René noticed a small, bilious-looking individual glancing at him angrily, if a little furtively. Obviously he was regarding this tall, bearded neighbour as an obstacle, if it came to scrambling into a boat. But most of the waiting passengers just looked depressed and impatient as they shuffled about in the drizzle. Their instructor, René thought, looked scared as he ordered them how to conduct themselves in case of an emergency, and explained the proper way to wear their lifebelts. Some passengers, at this stage, affected a disagreeable jauntiness. There was one, the hysterical note in whose laughter caused the rest to turn a displeased eye on him. As to Hester, she was in the dumps again. She had her lifebelt over her coat and looked grotesquely dismal. René wore his lifebelt like a gentleman, that is to say as if he had been born in it. Looking down at his despondent wife, he reflected that he would have to administer some tonic again.

They were ordered to wear their lifebelts, or to carry them, everywhere. They must sleep in them, and come to meals in them. René grimaced expressively with his mouth at the announcement about meals. It was not difficult to foresee how excruciatingly funny it would appear to Dr. Lincoln Abbott to see the Professor eating a grapefruit in a lifebelt. He felt that that table
must
be changed, since fancy dress was the order of the day.

The ship’s behaviour had attracted attention immediately after the Declaration of War. It had begun to tack, or to zigzag. This was the time, also, when large pieces of canvas were lashed along all the promenade decks, screening the interior from the sea, to make it more sure that enemy submarines could see no lights within. Now, as night drew on, there was something else that the passengers noticed. It had grown distinctly colder. By the next morning, it was very cold indeed. And blowing a gale. They still zigzagged, but were heading due north. Were they bound for Greenland, René wondered; and, unless they encountered an iceberg, would they remain in some gap in the icepack until a naval escort arrived? They had been entirely blacked out.

As they got farther north the ship started to plunge badly in the stormy seas. Waves were frequently dashed against the canvas screen and some of the water burst through upon the decks.

Hester was not only the prey to “baby thoughts,” but became atrociously seasick. René, who was a good sailor, replaced the steward, and nursed her through this violent but harmless reaction to the wallowing of ships in briny abysses: to the motions of the rut of a rolling whale, as it were. All the movements of monsters sicken the parasite. The big ship is the only monster of which we have any experience.

For three or four days, their radio cut off very rigidly, both for reception and dispatch of messages, the
Empress
could scarcely have rolled more and it seemed as though they were practically stationary, except for the furious rolling, off Greenland was the general guess. Thus unreachable, and as silent as the grave, tossed up and down, continually in some high latitude, but not told where, at least they might suppose that they were in safety. But it was obvious, also, that sooner or later they must go back into waters frequented by the submarine; and there were some of them who wished that the captain would decide to do so at once.

During his vigil with Hester, René did not fail to criticize the policy of the captain. This polar adventure of his was ridiculous. Why had he not taken them a hundred miles or so to north or to south of the ship lane, and trusted to their speed to have left behind any submarine. There would be some, most likely in ambush near the mouth of the St. Lawrence; those risks had to be taken.

However, a few days later the captain appeared to have come to the same opinion as most of his passengers. He took them back towards Quebec; quite unexpectedly they found themselves in the Belle Isle Straits, and unmolested ascended the estuary of the St. Lawrence.

During their stay in northern waters it had been difficult to eat and almost impossible to drink. René had, of course, gone into the restaurant, where Dr. Lincoln Abbott was generally to be found, happily somewhat subdued. René was undergoing a severe mental strain during that period, and it would have been a bad thing for Dr. Abbott had his customary boisterous self indulged in playfulness. Naturally there were lapses. When the Doctor was flung out of his chair, he thought this terrifically funny; he picked himself up and came gulping back to the table with schoolboyish mirth. “I wish I had my football equipment with me,” he chuckled. (“Equipment” was not the word he used but some term descriptive of the armour worn in American football.) Any other physical contretemps of this sort affected him in the same way; but on the whole the Doctor was a much more tolerable companion under these conditions. One afternoon René had made his way into the Tourist Class, and had a little talk with Oscar. He seemed somewhat self-conscious, and he suspected him of concealing the presence of sea-sickness, under a more than ever colourless abstraction of the self.

Hester did not recover speedily, nor for some time did she seem to forget her nightmare of riding a plunging leviathan. She was very weak, when she first came out on deck in the estuary of the St. Lawrence; and although the movement of the ship was by this time normally steady, she tended to cling on to things, and soon returned to her stateroom, where the stewardess brought her such food as she could eat.The long journey up this huge waterway was, for some, an avenue, made agreeable by the proximity, somewhere, of places and people, so new as to offer a temporary toehold to Hope. For others it was, of course, home. For quite a few it was “the land of possibilities.” But to René the closer this land closed in as they advanced, the tighter the knot seemed to be drawn about his neck.

All the incidents of this crossing remained, in his memory, of no more significance than what is left in the mind after a cross-channel journey, only multiplied nine-fold. The Declaration of War was a fainter impression than the first volume of
Middlemarch
flying through the air: but neither stood out in any way. For René, the period since the
Empress of Labrador
had left Cherbourg reduced itself to one terrifying self-revelation. His delight at being recognized by the preposterous little President of Rome was so awful a self-degradation, and only less his gratification at the respectful eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses of Dr. Bleistift. That this should have had the effect of an earthquake in his emotional centres was — the moment the emotion had evaporated — an occurrence which staggered him. He stared at it twenty-four hours later as if he had seen a ghost. Who was this man, with the Legion of Honour in his dinner jacket, sitting at a table with a common little American, reverently gazing at the ribbon? Who was this man warming himself at such a fire as this? Could it be the René Harding he had known all his life? Was this foolish creature indeed
himself
, converted, by some witchcraft, into the gentleman he was gazing at across an interval of only twenty-four hours? The state of nervous dereliction into which he had passed with such rapidity, after they had taken their place among the herds making the crossing on this great liner, was to him incomprehensible. Especially during the days while he was attending to Hester, he had this picture incessantly before him — of a degraded self, not known to him before, by some subconscious convulsion thrown up into time, and sitting there for all eternity at that restaurant table, with its ridiculous red boutonniére. He brooded for hours together over this obscene image of his past self. It had a terrifying fascination for him: at one time he lay back in his chair and howled with derisive laughter at it. Hester, startled at this, called out, “What on earth are you laughing at, René?” He answered, “Oh, just at a funny picture which suddenly came into my mind. You know how funny pictures have a way of popping up.This was a beastly funny one.”

These days of dark brooding in the rocking stateroom affected him so deeply that he felt at times almost half-witted. He found himself offering Hester smelling salts when she had asked for a hot water bottle: and was surprised to hear himself addressing the stewardess as Helen.

This indelible impression was of so fiercely salutary a kind, here at the outset, that it even modified his attitude, and for good, regarding his way of thinking about himself (or “what was left of himself,” as he put it).

At Quebec he stepped ashore a quite different man from that beribboned professor who had encountered Doctors Abbott and Bleistift a week before — that figure which he regarded as a terrifying apparition, which might at any moment once more usurp his place.

He had learned his lesson, the lesson of final and absolute exile, quickly. He began immediately to forge for himself a more disciplined personality. If he had to die, and that was no doubt what it meant, at least he must do so in a manner that was not base and childish. He must not die with the Legion of Honour in his buttonhole.

Mary’s insistence upon elevating them from the Tourist Class to the First, which had evoked gratitude at the time of his degradation, now was very differently viewed. That was altogether the wrong way of meeting his fate. — It should not be in evening-dress with one of the world’s honours reserved for the second-rate flaunted in his buttonhole. Quite another costume was the only appropriate one. No, he should not have been a First-Class passenger — the distinguished Professor Harding incognito — that was a quite false idea. There was no honest way in which you could make sufficient money to travel First Class. His First-Class passenger act had been Mary’s big mistake, whose mind was a First-Class mind. Either the life he was now to enter was an empty interlude, an apprenticeship to death: or it was a breathing space, a period of readjustment, preceding the acceptance of a much simpler type of existence for Hester and himself. These alternatives would have to be broken to Hester. All details it would be time enough to settle when they had reached their destination, some very moderately priced hotel, which it would now be his task to find. She would have to be given the clearest explanation. Quite likely she would leave him, which might be the best solution. But all of that was detail. The general shape of the future was starkly outlined, for him, as if by some supernatural hand. It was the way things must fall out, when anyone refuses to live in the land of compromise. What immediately ensues must depend upon the circumstances of the man in question at the time of his decision. If he were a soldier on active service and if he laid down his rifle and declared his intention to use it no more, the consequences would be death, banishment, or disgrace. If he were a salaried servant of a great insurance company and became a conscientious objector (to the financial system involved), and resigned his post, then the blow would be an economic one. But there were many other cases, which it is not necessary to specify, where ostracism accompanies the act of repudiation.