Self Condemned (30 page)

The Indian must have been a gentleman, to have a beautiful moderate summer of his own in November — in protest perhaps at the indecent explosion of silly heat seven months earlier. This sort of Yahoo Summer — in contrast to the Indian Summer — has no rationale. For why should it occur in a country so typically northern as is “My Lady of the Snows”?

So in the hotel Room the seasons revolve and have a sad repercussion. They deepen the solitude, like the ticking of a great ominous clock. They are of the nature of a clock, as much as is a sundial.

The face of each new section brought a new despair to the two people in the Room. If the leaves appeared on the trees again it was not a matter for rejoicing — it spelt another section of one’s life wasted in corrosive idleness. If the leaves turned russet and yellow and fell off the trees, that was another disagreeable pang. It meant more months had been consumed, with nothing to show for it; months of so-called life in which nothing had been done except wait for the mail, which always brought discouraging news, or listen to the radio, which droned on in its senseless ritual, or write something which might never see the light.

So the seasons were a curse. They were less anonymous than the days of the week — for Monday did not snow, or Thursday make itself known by its great heats, or Friday announce itself by shedding its leaves. Really, if it were not for Sunday, one could more or less feel one was always living on the same day. The seasons kept reminding you of the stupid plodding feet of Time.

XII
THE HOTEL AND WHAT
CONTAINS THE HOTEL

R
ené, as they settled down, willy-nilly, in this shell, began soon to develop a consciousness of solidarity with the environment. The
Hotel
in which they lived was surrounded by the
District
, which was surrounded by the rest of the
City
, which was surrounded by the
Province
, which was surrounded by the
Nation
, which was a part of the
Continent
. The North American continent, like the Chinese toy of box within box within box. And these boxes were all of a piece, all cut out of the same stuff. They were part of the same organism, this new North American organism. Their cells would have the same response to a given stimulus. And of these diminishing compartments the ROOM was the ultimate one, which they inhabited. It was an American ROOM.

Now since the reactions of all these parts of a great whole were similar, the history and fate of one could be taken to be typical, in one degree or another, of all the rest. The beverage room in the flank of the building, full of sudden violence and maudlin song (the head bar-boy taking his rake-off out of the cash-box): the Indian — drunk as all Indians had been ever since the whites had landed — dwelling amid the sentimental screams of his blond Teutonic squaw: the dazed and crippled mistress of all this, doped in her room, staring at a disorderly mass of business papers. Mr. Ellis across the passage from Mr. Martin, an old especially privileged guest, dozing upon his sofa, the radio murmuring at him, was apt to be incontinent when sober, and even sometimes when drunk, which was his customary condition; the janitor exhibiting his stolen medals to his French-Canadian harem, his eyes popping out of his head in a bird-like ecstasy of nonsense, like a creature out of a Lear’s “Nonsense Rhyme,” or a companion of Alice; all this was a microcosm of what was without — one of the Ward, the City, the Province, the Nation, the Continent. It was of course crazy — or more accurately it was crazed. It was a highly unstable box, within an equally unstable larger box, which in its turn nestled within a still larger box, of great social instability, profoundly illogical. The degeneration of the Maison Plant, the Hotel Blundell, was but a microcosmic degeneration repeated upon a larger and larger scale, until you reached the enormous instability of the dissolving system, controlling the various states. All this one day, at a touch you would think, no more, would come rushing down in universal collapse. — Indeed, that was what the war meant. It was a collapse, a huge cellular degeneration of society. It was crazy as this house was crazy.

The coarse Nirvana of the ugly bottle, or of the powder or pellet of narcotic, blinded the participants. As the State, the City, the Household waded in a morass of Debt and Mortgage, the Room was charged with despair and decay.

As the ocean liner is a microcosm, so is the hotel. The hotel contains everything belonging to human society. The hotel in a sense is the city. The hotel is the State. The hotel is the world.

Now this particular hotel, appropriately seeing the continent upon which it was situated, was a matriarchy. At the helm of state was a woman, Mrs. Plant, a queen bee throned crazily over this hive — a great, broken, lolloping, half-blind queen, and so the hive was a bit cock-eyed, as you might expect. It was in no way more cock-eyed than the city, however. I doubt if it was any more ramshackle than any state. It was madly ill-run. But are not all states ill-run? Are not most cities glaringly mismanaged? Of course. Human society is so fearfully and wickedly mismanaged that there is no wonder that if we pause — as we are doing here — to examine any part of it, that part is seen to be idiotically mismanaged too. On a small scale, however, we can detect the errors more easily. The state is after all “the State.” It makes the laws, it has power of life and death. It is not necessarily more intelligent for that reason. Because a thing is big it is not necessarily more intelligent. Indeed the contrary is usually the case: the giant is usually less smart than the dwarf. And most governments, or “states,” conform to that rule, of the bigger the stupider. For honestly you must grant me this, that no individual could be guilty of the follies that most bodies thousands strong, which we call “governments,” are guilty of. You will object that what the governments have to handle are far more complex matters than what a man would have to cope with. But “complexity” is no excuse really for stupidity. Most of the things statesmen have to deal with are fundamentally as simple as the running of an hotel. — The fact remains, however much one may argue, that only one man in a hundred thousand turns out to be a murderer — and he ends his life on a gallows, or the “hot squat.” Whereas there is no civilized nation that finds itself a proper nation until it has taken human life, to the tune of a million or so. If you murder
enough
people it’s all right. There is that.

So the hotel in question was naturally ill-run. How could it be otherwise — seeing that it was typically of Momaco — which was typically of the earth: and of the universe. Somebody argued that it was not so badly run as all that: that the proprietress — or the “Leading Lady,” as she was described by one of her female assistants — was a genial old cripple.

Certainly, when Mrs. Plant disappeared for a few days to have her face lifted, immediately it dissolved into a greater chaos than before. — But badly stuck together as undeniably it was, the erratic clockwork of this hotel never actually came to a full stop.

In the little world of
the Room
there was a guiding principle. The Room was not a matriarchy. But passing out of the Room — number 27A — into the hotel, as we are now doing, we go down a passage, all the rooms of which are Something-A. It must be that farther down the passage when they came to 13 and began resorting to A’s, they just went on A-ing and at 17 or 18 were still engaged — hiding the unlucky number. This is not a reasonable explanation, I know. But what reasonable explanation could there be for putting A after every number?

Inside the front door of the hotel was a large reception desk, but it was generally empty. You looked in vain for executive personalities. You filled in the forms required by the law for the newly arrived guest, and then went on a hunt for someone qualified to receive them, and to allot you an apartment. This large reception desk had been introduced into what the architect had obviously intended to represent the lounge of a vast private mansion. There were comfortable but faded settees, tables with periodicals at least six months old, and three nude statues, about half life size, which had once been white, and which still gleamed dully in the Edwardian gloom. From a stained glass window at the other extremity of this spacious lounge, some dirty blue and green light was admitted, and in the middle of the ceiling there was a milky transparency which distributed discreetly the electricity around this shadowy entrance hall. It must once have seemed impressively solid.

Not only was the reception desk usually unoccupied, but this lounge, or whatever it was, was likewise almost always silent and empty. It was not patronized by the guests. The hotel executive were customarily either dyeing their hair in the bathroom, or upstairs telling the fortunes of the guests in teacups.

This was in the daytime. At night the beverage room, situated beneath the stained glass window, was open.This did not necessarily involve a more inhabited look in the lounge; but there was more electric light and considerable noise penetrated the interior of the hotel. On a hot night drunken songs would reach the open windows of the apartments overlooking the beverage room; for the Hotel Blundell was a crowded beer saloon as well as a family hotel in process of transformation into a clandestine brothel upstairs.

Receptionists — housekeepers — manageresses there were, working in two shifts. Miss Toole had been ousted from first place while away on holiday in Ottawa, her home town, by Vera. Vera was the number one assistant to the proprietress, Mrs. Plant, when the Hardings arrived. A spectacled young woman, she was a sluggish, corrupt little figure. She only would function if you introduced a dime into her clammy fist. A dollar had the effect of an earthquake.

This young woman got drunk on Aromatic spirits of Ammonia, otherwise called “Sal volatile.” The management advised the local drugstore of her weakness: but in the end they were obliged to dismiss her. She found employment in another hotel where eventually she died, through her indulgence in this strange intoxicant. It should be added that Miss Toole had been very much addicted to drink also, but in her case it was whisky, and this had appeared to do her no harm.

The hotel from the outside was a pale stucco affair, straight up and down, of four stories in addition to the mezzanine. The banqueting room and various offices which originally comprised the mezzanine had been converted into apartments, though this floor had not been promoted to first story. It was only up to the top front of the mezzanine that the hotel face was pretentiously ornamented, rather like the front of a French hotel, quite unlike its grim Edwardian interior. The three-story annexe ran at right angles at its rear, stretching along a street at the back for some distance; and led into the hotel down two wide corridors.

If the hotel was a jumble of styles, that was appropriate, for the population was a jumble too; not so much as it is in the United States, but still a mixture. The French stucco front, of this Hotel, the Edwardian Anglo-Saxon hallway, and the apartments on American pattern, plus the velvet furnishings which are English, displayed, in a mild way, the incoherence customary on this new continent where nothing can ever be one thing. The multiple personality of Canada depends mainly, it is true, upon the two dominant racial groups, the English and the French. The major weakness of this small nation lies in the implacable hostility of those of English speech, for those of French speech, which is warmly reciprocated. This is in part a religious cleavage; the protestant English, backward and bigoted, rage against the papist hierarchy ruling the French.Then there is the fact that
class
here is
race
: the Anglo-Saxon suffers from a Hitlerian superiority feeling, and the “Peasoups” (as the French are called) have had to put up with a lot of contempt from the master race. But with quintuplets and families of twenty or thirty children the French will soon outnumber the English.

There exists a strong Scottish coloration in English Canada. But although many Scots are encountered, the North Irish and English are certainly more numerous. “Though still the blood is strong — the heart is Highland: And we in dreams behold the Hebrides,” lines in a famous poem, may once have made the blood feel strong in Canada. But the pipers are dying out, and the marked Scottish colouration no longer means what it did. It should be added that, although the recognized Indians, still living as such, are numerically and otherwise a feeble group, the French Canadians have a great deal of Indian blood, and in many cases are purely Indian, French-speaking and usually bearing Scottish names, like McTavish or McIntyre. The Russian, Scandinavian, Finnish, Negro, and other groups are greatly inferior in numbers. Some enterprising slave-driver went to the Ukraine about forty or fifty years ago, and imported great numbers of Russians for agricultural peonage. All the railway stations of Eastern Canada were full for months of hairy men in sheepskin coats.Then at last they had all settled: and they too — unlike the Anglo-Saxons — are great ones for breeding.

It would be impossible to understand a ROOM in a Canadian hotel without obtaining a clearer picture of Canada than that possessed by the average European. So here is a brief account of the country surrounding the Hotel in which was the Room inhabited by the Hardings. On the map Canada is vast; but the habitable part is of a tape-like shape, exceedingly long and narrow.This elongated country north of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, from Quebec to Vancouver, has its cities, hundreds of miles apart, strung out between the bush and the United States border; everything is east to west, and hardly ever north to south.

What “Canada” means is this strip north of the United States, signifying north of the river St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, which continuous waterway divides the two nations in the way the Pyrenees are the inevitable frontier between Spain and France. Although this watery barrier is on a grand scale, it is at no point, except Quebec City itself, very impressive, in the way that the Hudson River is.

As to the historic consolidation of Canada; the founding of French Canada, and the big, bold landmark of Quebec is all that people know anything about.Where English Canada begins, above Montreal, it is technically known as “Upper Canada.” The first settlers from the States meant by this expression
up
the St. Lawrence, as they paddled as far away from the freezing coast as they could get. For the Tories, who came north in disgust after the War of Independence, were so dismayed by their first winter in Halifax (and well they might be, in those bad cold days before central heating) that they swore that even Lady Washington was better than
that
, and with loud cries of distress, fled inland in a body, till they reached Lake Ontario. That is where the River St. Lawrence ends and the Great Lakes begin.