Self Condemned (31 page)
So much for the southern border of this strip of a country, as far as the Rockies. The other side of the strip, in Upper Canada, is the Bush. This is a fairly solid wilderness up to the Muskeg and after that the Polar Sea. If you start driving north in an automobile from Toronto, Momaco, or Ottawa, you begin passing through farmlands which very soon thin out, and then you come to the impassable Bush. Small lakes are ubiquitous in the nearer Bush and there are summer camps in these fly-infested lakelands, thirty or forty miles north of Momaco and Toronto. They can be reached by car.
The Bush-cities, built in the Bush to provide a small urban environment for those working in the mines, can only be reached by rail, or by plane. So these communities in the northlands are extremely isolated and surrounded by Bush. This huge wilderness, pressing down upon the cultivated strip, in Canada, is so undesirable a residence that it is difficult to see the Bush being pushed back very far, unless the world becomes so overpopulated that men will live in the Polar cold rather than nowhere at all. It is quite uncomfortable enough for half the year at Momaco and Ottawa, though central heating helps to banish what otherwise would be hideous conditions. Nature in British Columbia is somewhat more benevolent; the western prairies, with their hundred days from frost to frost, are certainly no warmer, but it is a different topography to Upper Canada; and the Laurentian Mountains provide the Montrealer with beautiful summer camps. But the people of Momaco feel themselves shut in between the St. Lawrence and the Bush.
Any criticism of Canadians, meaning English Canadians, is in general irrelevant. An Anglo-Saxon community living under such isolated conditions, in so uninviting a climate, could hardly be otherwise than they are. They are just average inhabitants of Belfast, of Leeds and Bradford, of Glasgow, poured into a smaller community, American in speech, and, apart from the fact that they acquire an American accent, they continue to exist exactly as they did in the British cities from which they came. One must not be deceived by the American accent. Canada is not identical with the United States: it is quite distinct, because most of the people in it, except the French, come from these islands. If you criticize them you criticize the average population of Belfast, of Bradford and Leeds, and of Glasgow. If you deplore the materialism and the humble cultural level, you are merely criticizing Anglo-Saxon civilization.
Canadians have all the good qualities as well as the bad, of the Ulsterman, the Scot, the Englishman: and among them, of course, are about the same percentage of gifted people as you would find in these islands.
Momaco is rather nearer to the Bush than is Ottawa. Like Ottawa itself, it has a large French Canadian population — about one third of the Momaconians are French. A river traverses Momaco and its main square is built beside the river. There is a very handsome Catholic Church dominating this square: and it is a market square also, which at times gives it a somewhat French aspect. The river is, of course, apt to be full of logs, travelling down towards the St. Lawrence. The City is built in a plain and is extraordinarily flat except for a hill at its north-east corner. The Hotel Blundell was situated where the English quarter adjoins the French. Baimoral Street, on which the Hotel Blundell stood, was a long street which began quite well but ended very badly: it was largely French Canadian at the bad end. The Blundell was on its earlier and better part.
T
he hotel was a ship whose engines stopped every night about ten. The ice-boxes in the annexe vibrated no more, as the cool air, smelling of ammonia, was forced up the zinc pipes into them. It was like a ship becalmed, this dusty old passenger ship, the engineers knocking off for the night. About eight o’clock a.m. — the time varied, according to how drunk the janitor had been the night before — the Hotel shook and throbbed: the beat and hum of its engines was heard from down below: the iceboxes in the annex shook. The ship was on her way again, the good ship “Blundell.”
A half-hour later René and Hester quitted the bed, like two flies dragging themselves out of a treacly plate. One went to the bathroom, the other to the kitchenette. By nine o’clock they were seated at breakfast, watched from every bough of the nearest maple by the patient eyes of their bird-chorus.
“Canadian and British governments announce that they have given instructions that German prisoners are to be unshackled on Dec. 12th.” René read listlessly the headline in the
Momaco
Gazette-Herald
. Hester’s eyes stared as ever, but more painfully now. She stared at a point between the kitchenette and the bathroom, where she appeared to discern a ghost lurking in the wall, of which she was not apprehensive, because it had been there so long.The classic conundrum as to whether the cow is still there in the field when you have walked away from it, or whether it vanishes the moment you cease to observe it, is apposite. For the analysis of Hester’s new look, she felt like the cow in the field which is no longer observed by any human eye (because, from this angle, René did not count). She had been a violently self-conscious woman — she was a cow in a field excessively conscious of being observed; and for whom to be observed was
to be
. But it was so long now since she had been under human observation — for she did not regard her present environment as human — that self-consciousness had left her: and the ghost she stared at in the wall half-way between the kitchenette and the bathroom was the remote phantom of those people in England for whom, long ago, she had been the self-conscious object. So she was still a staring woman, but she now stared at something so remote as to be abstract, and with far less vitality than formerly.
Emptying his third cup of tea, René rose. “Well!” He spoke with fists raised to the dirty heaven of the hotel apartment, as if this bitter
well
were an imprecation. His stretch took him forward several thudding paces, like a man with locomotor. “I guess I’ll make this Room fit for a hero to live in…. Why don’t they say that this time? They don’t say anything nice this time like ‘a war to end war’! Effrontery!”
“Hush!” remarked his wife.
“Yes, I know.” He heaved a sigh that was loaded with stale revolt, that was like a freshwater tear, that had lost even its salt.
A pair of large tarnished scissors were at his feet: he picked them up and dropped them into a work-basket that was a miniature oyster basket from Boulogne-sur-mer: picked up a breakfast cup with an empty packet of cigarettes stuck in it, a square-toothed breadknife and a last night’s beer-pocked tumbler, and carried them to the kitchen. Watched by his wife, as animals watch each other with sullen reserve in cages, when one comes to life, René returned and collected his overshoes, the ice from which had wetted the floor, and his damp Bond Street overcoat, and went with them towards the closet. His wife got up and drifted with the listlessness of captivity towards the bathroom, against the window-pane of which the birds were knocking with their beaks.
“Some birds …”
“Yes!” he answered emphatically.
“Some birds get to think …”
“Undoubtedly,” he said. “Tell Philips we can’t afford to feed so huge a bird.”
“Poor Philips.”
“Never mind! Shoo the pigeons away. Why allow Philips …”
“It isn’t Philips,” she said, watching the birds from the bathroom door. “It’s two sparrows.” The knocking had stopped.
“They have been looking at me from that bough for the last ten minutes.”
“Tell them we don’t like Canadian sparrows.”
“It’s no use.They don’t know they’re Canadian. Besides, they can’t help it.”
René, who was sitting at the table filling his pipe, showed exasperation. He felt she never properly understood.“Bread!” he exclaimed. “Ask them how the hell they think we can get all that bread! Where from? Ask them. Say we’re on relief.”
She looked at him. She had fetched some stale bread from the kitchen. “We soon shall be, if …”
“All right. But don’t be blackmailed by a gang of sparrows.
They’re too lazy to dig for worms. They prefer to sponge on us.”
“Oh well …”
“They think they’re romantic because they’ve got feathers.
Say you’ve got feathers too!” She put her bread down and began to cry a little, softly and stupidly.
The knocking on the window began again. With this she had a burst of crying, and sat down heavily. René rushed to the window shouting, “
It’s Philips! I can see him.”
He struggled with the window which would not move. He ran back into the Room and fetched the screwdriver they used for that purpose and prised it open. The birds had flown away and were watching him from the neighbouring trees and roof gutters. There were not many, it was too cold. He gave vent to an unfriendly roar in the icy air: then forced the window down, with as much noise as possible.
His wife was weeping beside the pieces of stale bread. René felt sorry, but he could not forgive his wife for not seeing through these parasites, just because they had violet wings.
“I don’t know where I can get the bread for Philips, upon my word I don’t,” he grumbled. “I was a nickel out yesterday. Three cents of that went for Brown and Philips and a gang of common little gutter finches. — Don’t cry. — They know you’re an English sucker. These bloody peasants wouldn’t give them a crumb. Let them go to …”
He stopped.
“I hear the gas gun…. Not at this time in the morning!”
His wife got up, wiping her eyes.
A big fact in the Hotel Blundell was the Cockroach. — What Hester had at first taken to be garden insects at last became more numerous. Then one day Bess came in as usual and asked, in an indifferent voice, whether the Hardings had seen any cockroaches. No, they answered (for they were always both there when Bess arrived to do the Room). They had
read
of “’roaches” in American stories, but they had never
seen
a ’roach.
After that, however, they began looking out for the cockroach. And soon they became convinced that the “garden insects” were in fact cockroaches.
These animals began moving in on the Hardings in droves. For, in other apartments, war was being made on them, and they began crawling in to the only apartment where they were not interfered with. So the Hardings complained to Bess, and an insect spray was lent them. This was no use at all. Apparently all over the hotel — all over every hotel and everywhere else, from the market downtown to the drugstore at the corner — they were swarming.
The cockroach (with diabetes, one of the national handicaps of the North American Continent) is about the size of a bedbug, but elongated, lighter in colour, and speckled, with a detachable pouch full of embryos which it throws away when pursued. It exists equally in the bush and in cities. — There is another kind, which is black, called the German variety. But the reddish one is what one mainly sees.
About the time the cockroach began to obsess the Hardings, and all the hotel, it also became a burning question throughout Momaco, and even in Ottawa, the capital city of Canada, it closed government offices. Fifty girl clerks struck, because these animals were running all over their typewriters and over their clothes. So the department had to be shut down and fumigated.
In the beverage room downstairs, they were crawling up people’s legs and getting in the beer. Customers were leaving to go to other beverage rooms. Mrs. Plant was extremely sensitive about anything that happened to her beverage room trade. She took steps accordingly.
A man arrived to demonstrate the use of the gas gun. The Hardings were the people with the greatest collection of cockroaches, so it was to the Hardings’ apartment that he was brought, but he merely came to talk, not to deliver an attack upon the ’roaches. He told them how he had been all over the city, rescuing people from this pest. The City Hall was full of them. Only yesterday he had been asked to go to a Jewish workers’ establishment, where the floor was so thick with them that you could not walk without treading on them; and when a girl was going to put a needle into a piece of cloth, she would put it through a cockroach first. The girls were screaming and weeping.
Then he produced the gas gun. Since that time this instrument had been in use in the hotel day and night. But Mrs. McAffie had especially interested herself in the destruction of these pests: and it was she who almost exclusively handled the gas gun.
It was about ten minutes before Affie made her appearance. Now, as a personality, or visually at least, Affie was in two parts. There was the normal Affie that went about the house discharging her duties as manageress; and there was the hooded, rather sinister and witch-like figure who appeared, gas gun in hand, and, after knocking at the door, this was the figure which entered the Room, enquiring if they wished her to go into action, or whether she should come later on.
They had always up till now postponed a showdown with the ’roaches. They looked at one another, and they did not have to speak to reach agreement: both thought that a showdown with the ’roaches was overdue. René beckoned Affie in. They both of them proceeded to remove, or to place under cover, things like cooking utensils, crockery, toilet articles, and the rest. Some were brought into the Room, and others locked in cupboards. Then Affie entered the kitchen, and turned the gas gun on the ceiling. It filled the whole apartment with its acrid fumes, and within a few minutes hundreds of cockroaches were pouring from the ceiling upon Affie’s head and shoulders. This continued for twenty minutes or half an hour, as long in fact as cockroaches continued to appear from crevices and hideouts all over the kitchen and bathroom, and succumb to the fumes. The floor was carpeted with the bodies of these insects. Many of them fell on the face of the gunner, and her cheeks were also streaming with the poisonous liquid. She appeared to be devoured by an insane itch for destruction; it was personal, not at all a matter of duty. She did not spare herself, but seemed rather to enjoy the tumbling bodies of the vermin sticking to her face and hands, or garments — her hair being protected by the hood.