Self Condemned (33 page)
So these were the backgrounds of Affie, to which we shall shortly return. However, she was mischievous, but not inhuman. What René objected to in the American system — a modified form of which exists in Canada — was its inhumanity. They had got involved in a violent and unintelligent dance, in which all reference to the happiness and interests of the human individual had been abandoned. — In Canada, as in the States, Prohibition had been imposed upon a docile people. An absurd religion, the last of Puritanism, was accepted by them: it drove them out of their homes into hotels to find some natural relief. This could not happen in France. Even in Russia, with its revolutionary restrictions, the sale of spirits was not forbidden.
T
he Monday after Affie’s gas gun fury they were numbed by a letter from home. England had been becoming farther and farther away until it was, at times, hardly real. Percy Lamport was in another dimension: and René’s mother had grown to be little more than a picture of an old lady in a chair.When they received a letter from Mary, or even from Helen, it was as though they were on Mars and they knew that the denizens of earth were attempting to contact them. But they, on their side, were only able to respond very feebly to these messages across interstellar space. A difference existed naturally between Hester’s reactions and René’s: she did attempt to respond, sometimes, with the same eagerness as was shown by those who wrote to her. At other times she felt that it was impossible to find anything whatever to say.
The present letter was from Mary, and it went on describing things that were of importance to people over there, but about which they had scarcely the energy to think. Why did Mary assume that nothing had changed? Everything had changed so completely that the scene she wrote about appeared pallid and meaningless. She and Percy now lived about half-way between London and Oxford. Janet and Victor were still in London — had not the money to be anywhere else. But what had uprooted and changed the life of René had upset the life of the Lamports too. When the exile thought of London, it was of the old London.
Another, and very important, factor in making a receipt of a letter from “home” so unpleasant, was that René simply could not imagine himself ever living in England again: for him England became dimmer and dimmer
forever
. Letters, from people who had once been so dear to him, but who seemed to have no understanding of the fact that they inhabited the past (which was the same thing as a demise), letters of this kind were not pleasant breakfast-time reading. They darkened the day. A letter from René’s mother was worst of all, for there all the past of his filial affection put up a fight against his relentless scepticism re the maternal.
So things began badly that morning, and René found it difficult to write an article, which it was urgent and necessary to finish. Having been plunged from university life in a great European capital, with an awful suddenness, into life in this barren abstraction of the Room (worse, of course, than had it been any tolerable occupation, or even such an occupation as a truck-driver or newspaper reporter) his personality had suffered profoundly. All freedom depended upon consciousness: but now, at times, he felt his brain clouding and blurring. His daily periods of semi-consciousness increased. It was as
dreaminess
that he thought of the semi-conscious spells, and indeed that was often what they were. More and more the “waking hours” were rather patches of semi-consciousness than a continuous wakefulness. Or full awareness. Then one day he would not wake up at all, he told himself. He would just get out of bed at the usual time, and his life, on a far more primitive level, that of the functional coma of the animal world, would go on as the polar bear does, or the ant. So a great experiment would have come to an end.
The problems of consciousness had often preoccupied René: he thought of it as enlightenment, as a light unaccountably breaking in upon a darkness, and the mind born with this light modifying the creatures affected by it. In other words, men. He estimated that we were perhaps rather more than half-way across that, in geological terms, infinitely brief era of “enlightenment.” Men, he felt, were
less
enlightened than they had been. — Slowly men awakened from the sleep of nature, or recovered from the madness of nature, as René preferred to say. Man had begun to look around him, once the dazzling light had been thrown upon his surroundings; and he saw where he was, though
why
he was there he could not imagine. Finally he discovered he was riding an immense ball — dashing around in a cold, black emptiness — which was warmed by a much larger, extremely hot ball. All this was a great deal more than the polar bear or the monkey knew.
The polar bear was mad, he was obsessed with being a polar bear: and many men were pretty mad also, incapable of looking at themselves from the outside. No one could imagine why man had abstracted himself and acquired the sanity of consciousness; why he had gone sane in the midst of a madhouse of functional character. — And History: with that, René’s central tragedy was reached. History, such as is worth recording, is about the passion of men to stop sane. Most History so-called is the bloody catalogue of their backslidings. Such was René’s unalterable position.
So, locked up in this Room, or as good as, for years on end, he felt the light not losing its intensity, but getting patchy. He knew he could not go on indefinitely living in this way without returning to the functional darkness, it was only a matter of time. As now he sat with his writing pad on his knee, assiduously scribbling, and dropping the product into the wooden tray at his side, his awareness was at a low ebb; for what he was writing did not interest him (it was bread-and-butter work of a pretty awful kind). This ant-like work was interrupted by the entrance of the Scottish maid Bessie, or Bess, as they called her. He laid aside his work, stretched back in his chair, and said, “Well, Bess, what’s cookin’?”
“Another nitwit,” she announced, as was her custom: and they knew that another weak-minded person, in one of the neighbouring apartments, had outraged her Scottish good sense. The small, malformed, spectacled, Glaswegian hotel slavey squinted up with humorous toleration at her bearded fellow-countryman — and the fellow countryman side of it was important. For Bess never for a moment forgot that she was a stranger in this country, and her tongue was turned against all its inhabitants, and especially those in the Hotel Blundell. When her father and mother first came to Canada they rented a house in Momaco. For twenty years no one in the street addressed a word to them: they were all Canadians. Then the people in the house across the way left, and new people moved into it. To her mother’s amazement the new tenants spoke to her one morning. They were Scotch. When Bess crossed the Atlantic to join her parents, experiences analogous to this were her lot likewise, and, outside the hotel, she spent all her spare time with Scottish immigrants.
The nitwits who came to lodge in this hotel were innumerable: for every morning Bess had a new nitwit to announce to the Hardings. But this was Monday morning; she entered the Room with clean sheets and pillowcases, and swollen with a sense of accumulated wrongs — as though on Sunday all the slights of the week had time to mobilize and solidly invest her in her lonely room, following her into church and acting as a pressure group in the rear of her prayers. On Monday morning she worked off these humours, as she passed from apartment to apartment. She felt almost lighthearted as she reached the end of the third-floor apartments of the annex. The Hardings inhabited the first apartment to be visited on the second floor.
The nitwittery would consist of anything, from an enquiry as to whether Scotland was an island, to the nearest way to the Momaco hospital for diseases of the throat. A guest only had to open his or her mouth in Bessie’s presence to betray half-wittedness. Then she also was a disseminator of scandal. Far more diligently than any bee transports its pollen, Bess collected and distributed information of a scandalous nature. René squeezed her dry of the morning’s quota, and she always left the Hardings’ apartment with a sense of being appreciated, and of having blackened someone’s reputation. Both René and Hester understood quite well that they were not immune, and that “those English nitwits in no. 27A” formed part of her repertoire; but they always welcomed her appearance at about 10:30 in the morning. Between Affie and Bess no love was lost: the latter took every opportunity of informing Mrs. Plant of any misdemeanour of Affie’s that came to her notice, and always endeavoured to be the first to draw Mrs. Plant’s attention to scandalous happenings, before Affie got a chance of doing so.
After the Bess interlude René laboured until lunchtime, Hester washing-up, attending to a rudimentary toilet, feeding the sparrows, and reading a library book. After lunch René fixed the alarm on the clock, and they lay down on the settee for some more oblivion. They were awakened by the clock in time to prepare themselves for an unusual event. Someone was coming to tea.
The visitor they were expecting was Mr. Herbert Starr; and it was in the following way that a fraternity which they would never have expected Momaco to conceal became known to them. It was just after Easter of the year 1941, and Hester and René had taken off their overshoes for the first time that year, and went out to the market. They had for long known that Momaco was the never-never land, was the living death, the genuine blank-of-blanks out of which no speck of pleasantness or civilized life could come. They moved disconsolately down the street side by side without speaking. René’s lustreless eye, for the thousandth time, spelled out the words “BINGO! Eight o’clock tonight” upon the notice board in front of the Boer War Veterans’ Club. A Boer War veteran hobbled down the path beside the budding shrubbery towards the gothic door of the club. This old man had been a springy young khaki warrior once, with a brand-new bayonet, gone to fight for gold and diamonds. An “absentminded beggar.” Oh God, oh Momaco (and Magersfontein)! The Canadian sun shone with its deceptive brilliance, for it was not over-warm, as the veteran faded into the gingerbread gothic.
But everything was not dispirited and listless in Momaco. For suddenly overtaking him a figure swung past with swaying hips, and a violent arm sawing the air at his side, with little finger stiffly erect, having separated itself from the other fingers. A
man
: a fairy-man.
René felt a glow, as if a leprechaun had declared its presence when least expected. Civilization after all existed here: how eccentric to be so flaunting a fairy in such a region as this — he might have come swaying and mincing out of the pages of Proust…. Proust! Proust in Upper Canada: what a violent conjunction of images, he thought. Never the twain shall meet, one would say, of this chilliest, dullest West and that most civilized and urban East. How would Monsieur Charlus’s lungs be able to breathe the air of Ontario?
René was quite cheered up by this. The sting had been taken out of “Bingo.” As a prisoner whose cell is suddenly invaded by a mouse or rat will regard this animal with tenderness, as a link with the past, so he followed, amused and encouraged, the swinging hips, the single arm that sawed majestically up and down, employed for dainty but headlong propulsion.
He found that this fairy haunted the beverage room of the Hotel Lafitte. His hunting ground was not among the cockroaches of Mrs. Plant’s saloon.The other hotel, although French Canadian, had a much cleaner drinking place, with a better type of soldier.
A little later, perhaps three weeks later than this, he had gone down to a Jewish newsstand and shop that sold English and American papers, the only place in Momaco where such exotics were to be met with. There he was accosted by Starr.
Starr introduced himself as a mutual friend of a Glasgow intellectual, who had been given an official job in Ottawa. Starr said he had intended to write to René Harding, and suggest a meeting. Since then he had learned of his presence in Momaco, but
now
this most auspicious encounter meant, he trusted, that René would do him the honour to have lunch with him. He, Starr, would appoint himself the guide of Professor Harding in Momaco. — Was Momaco not
dull
? Why no. It was the most wildly exciting place probably in America or anywhere. But he would reveal to René the secrets of Momaco: and make known to him a number of people, of very extraordinary interest and charm. — Oh no, dull was
not
a word that could be applied to Momaco.
René’s curiosity was mildly aroused, but not enough to prolong this conversation any longer than necessary. During a period of eighteen months Mr. Starr had been encountered mainly in bookshops, perhaps a half-dozen times. René had never admitted this anything but attractive little man behind his social defences. There was a certain event, coming at long last, which very slightly endeared Mr. Starr to him; but it was not until this December of the following year that he so far weakened that he had invited this queer little object to tea.
It was with no delightful anticipation that Hester and René dragged themselves from their siesta a half-hour before the established time, to act as hosts. As it was, it was a rather hurried marshalling of the cups and saucers, and arranging of the company-biscuits upon a plate was only just in place, and Hester’s face powdered, when there was a gentle tap upon the door. Herbert Starr made his entrance, smiling and sidling, and all but kissed Hester’s hand as he bent over it, saying to René as he stood up, “Mrs. Harding and I have already met — unknown to her” (with an arch flutter of eyelashes in Hester’s direction).“It was a few weeks ago in a bookshop — I wonder if you remember, Mrs. Harding? We both wanted to look at
Salammbo
at the same time, but I relinquished it, observing, ‘I will wait until you have finished with Carthage.’ Do you remember?”
“Oh yes, I remember that very well,” Hester laughed. “I thought it was extremely civil of you. I did not keep you out of Carthage for very long.”