Self Condemned (35 page)

Jim, of course, had his excellent reasons for wishing to remain where he was. All Mrs. Plant’s beverage room managers robbed her, and Jim was no exception. But he was a serious, stocky, thick grey-haired, respectable fellow, liked by René: and Jim was the arch-neutral upon the nightly battlefield where he worked; a militant abstainer from intervention.

Momaco was a city without a theatre. It had the regulation number of cinemas; but these ran the repulsive average Hollywood Film, and were of no use to the Hardings. No French, Russian, German film was ever shown anywhere and so there were no spectacles to attract them out of their Room. From the café angle Momaco was even inferior to London, which has its Café Royal. Perhaps once a fortnight it had been their habit to pass an hour or so in the deplorable beverage room. They dropped down about six in the evening.

Later the beverage room was a place where one spoke with the voice of a giant, and, when contradicted by another giant, drove his tusks down his throat or stamped with hobnailed boots upon his talking-box. Either way, by heel or fist, contradiction, henceforth, was made impossible. With wassail came song. The songs, of nasal passion, cut by hiccups.

Many giants were khakied legionaries. But little young men were also fierce. René had stood and watched one night the bright-lit mouth of their drinking den. Six hot young men, five hatted ones — one was hatless and expostulatory. The bright light was on his flushed face, his young eyes flashing, his bitter red mouth making a bitter meal of hot words. He spat his protests at the five hatted ones — for René five black backs — and blood from between his teeth was spat out too. — One by one the hatted five smacked him in the mouth with a fist. The mouth bleeding, the eyes angry, the handsome face continued to expostulate.

The hot words, from the curled-up blood-filled mouth, kept on streaming out, a tragic fountain of rationality. These were clerks, not giants, but they liked argument no less than giants.

Beverage room was a euphemism for beer parlour. Only beer was to be bought there, but the drinkers had bottles in their pockets, ranging from Niagara wine to methylated spirits. These were poured into the beer. The limbs of the giants were filled with fire, and the fire hardened in their fingers as they curled into a fist as homicidal as a revolver; or relaxed to use the fingertips for an alcoholic caress.

From nine onwards, anyway, the beverage room was an ear-blasting resort of
homo stultus
at his most alcoholic. So, as usual, on the present occasion (the day following the visit of Mr. Starr), René and Hester went down to have a drink about six o’clock. René, like most consumers of “beverage,” had a bottle in his pocket, which was Beverage, too, but not of the kind that might be publicly consumed in English Canada. It was Scotch. As soon as their beers were brought them by Jim, they were spiked by René; Hester permitting a little spiking of her first glass, just to be sociable. She loathed the mixture from the bottom of her heart. They clinked their glasses, and drank to Momaco suffering a similar fate to the Cities of the Plain. The place was unusually full for six o’clock. The hour for the gigantism of the North American was not yet in evidence. Giants there were already, big fleshly chaps, but not yet at the stage when they felt five times as big as they were.

René’s personality suffered the routine inflation of those who spike their beer. Hester almost forgot Momaco, as René imagined for her the demise of Mr. Starr; and how, since he had been a good little fairy, going to a Starrish heaven, he would find himself in the salon of Madame de Villeparisis, the “little old monkey.” At last the real thing! But there would be disenchantment. The performers would seem too violent, the women too carnal (like a lot of Jewesses, with the voices of men), and the wit, like the scent, would be too violent. Mr. Starr, deafened and stunned, would creep away, and without too much difficulty introduce himself into Madame de Villeparisis’ boudoir; lie down upon a chaise longue and, curled up like a little dog,
a tired
little pet doggie, he would dream of Mrs. Moir and of Mrs. Taylor, and the imaginary St. Germain upon the hill at Momaco. In that insipid make-believe, with the soft growl of Canadian voices, he was back in his earthly heaven — much to be preferred to the glare and rattle of the real thing, and the hard scintillation of the Gallic wit.

Both René and Hester were shouting with laughter, the image of the shabby little pansy, with his hairless skull and dirty white silk scarf, curled up in the boudoir of Madame de Villeparisis, dreaming of an imaginary Madame de Villeparisis with a Canadian accent, turned Mr. Starr into a little curled-up dog-man of Salvator Dali’s. René became more and more exuberant, as he drank his fifth beer, and Hester’s eyes, like starry lamps, hung over the table, as they both were sealed up in their private world of joy. She lifted her arm to drink, when her right breast and hip were inundated with beer — which however was not
her
beer. Her neighbour’s glass bounced off her body, and fell to the floor.

“I’ve wetted you, lady. My hand slipped.”

Hester sprang up with a startled cry.All that either of them had noticed was that a dark man, thinking his own thoughts, which must be ill-favoured, was sitting against the wall. René shouted at him angrily, “You clumsy brute! Are you unable to carry your glass to your mouth without upsetting it over other people?”

“‘Brutes’ are we, you big-mouthed old limey! An’mals, huh!”

This came from the table behind him. René turned abruptly to identify the voice, and, more in astonishment than anger, found himself, at a distance of five or six feet, looking into a face of a most unprepossessing kind. The mouth was twisted into an ugly sneer right across the face.

“Yes,
sir
!” the man drawled. “That was me. Another brute.

Why is you and that Jane with you doin’ us the honour, down in this saloon….”

“René! Let us leave here.”

Hester pulled him by the sleeve. He sprang up, as a dark face, full of platonic hatred, picked itself out, and Hester’s neighbour of the unsteady hand struck him below the eye. He swung at this hateful countenance with an unexpected precision, and the man went down, with a great deal of noise, between the two tables, Hester jumping away with a gasp. He was gazing at the man between the tables, and, with the other part of his eye, aware of Jim Greevy wiping the beer off Hester’s dress, when he was struck very heavily on the left cheek, and bounded back to meet this new attack. It was with no surprise that he saw his assailant blotted out by a large person who seemed to move up from the floor, and heard a deep voice observe, in an as-it-were official voice, “Do you want to say anything to
me
, Tom Thorne?” But there was so much noise by this time that he did not find out whether Tom Thorne wanted to say anything to the tall stranger.

The next thing he really knew was a panic-stricken entreaty, “Do come away at once, darling”; and while he was hearing this, he focused something of an entirely different character to anything else in this phantasmagoria. It was much more integrated and purposeful. A crouched, medium-sized figure was dancing in front of him. There was no angry face — there was hardly any face at all. It was an engine rather than a man, or a man who was so highly trained that his personality was submerged. There was something very dangerous about this taut and dancing body.

The presence of this figure in front of him admitted of only one interpretation, and he struck it with all his force, as if it were an adder, or any other dangerous thing in nature. The next thing he knew was that he could no longer strike it because it was so near to him. The next thing he knew after
that
was how the lightning snaps and is gone, and it hits you, and he had been slammed in the stomach, and he was shut up over the pain like a book that had tried to slap itself shut. The pain filled the Room, and he was crouched in the middle of it, hugging his pain. He felt a warm cheek against his, and there was a soft voice near his ear; it said, “So you like that, budd” (much too dulcet for a Canadian but still in the accents of North America). A stallion kicked a tattoo — four more like the first, until he became no more than a solar plexus, and the Room was a solar plexus too.

He stood gasping, with his neck stuck out, like a bearded rooster. It was then that he saw the
face
— the face of the engine, which had attacked him. It was a smooth, young, and rather thoughtful face; just now it was looking at him with a calm concentration, one eyebrow a little lifted. Before he could be aware of anything more, he found himself hitting the floor, his hands still pressed in the pit of his stomach.

The uproar was intense, and someone must have been playing about with the electric light, for the light kept going out and coming back again. Then there was a deafening scream, and simultaneously a boot hit him in the face, and then more boots began hitting him, elsewhere. Three or four boots perhaps. Then that stopped, and there was a trampling all around him, and sometimes on him.

The trampling went on, but it seemed to have moved a little way away. He heard Jim Greevy’s voice saying, “Get up now, quick!” He was pulled, and crawled towards a chair. “Can you stand?” said Jim. He lifted himself with Jim’s aid upon the chair. There he stopped a moment, and then rose to his feet. Hester, in a hollow voice, was imploring him to try and come away, then Jim Greevy pushed him through a door, and Hester and he found themselves in the staff quarters. The uproar of a fight still reached them, but, he still doubled up, they were able to reach the street at the back. From there it was only a few steps to the annexe entrance. “I will tell Mrs. Plant, you have been beated up,” Jim said as he left them.

“For heaven’s sake don’t do that,” René answered. “Jim, say nothing to her.”

Back in the Room, René sank upon the sofa. He felt himself all over with his fingertips. “No fatal damage,” he told the pale and shaking Hester.

“You must see a doctor,” she answered.

René shook his head; he felt so sick and dazed that he was not able to cope any more just then. Hester flung herself in a chair with a terrible fit of weeping. Her experience in the beverage room had been such a monstrosity, there had been so much hatred, suddenly released, and it had then filled her with such a dreadful fear, not to mention the hateful humiliation of having beer poured over her head — all this she had to meet without breakdown, and so now she broke into a hundred pieces.

This was not an indulgence, but a necessity on Hester’s part: she was unable to control herself. But having acquired the requisite relief, she rose and went over to the telephone. The doctor arrived in a quarter of an hour. One of the most obvious effects of the melee had been a stiffening of the arm, the loss of use in the left hand, and a considerable swelling around the elbow, with, of course, a great deal of pain. There were other areas which demanded investigation as well. Of this invitation to probe Dr. Mackinnon took the fullest advantage.

René made no pretence to like the doctor. He was persuaded that Dr. Mackinnon would, in the ordinary course of business, make his scrutiny as painful as possible.The more the examination hurt, the more justified would the physician’s visit seem.Were the patient to wince, or if possible groan, the more serious would the case appear to the family: and so the more likely they would be to ask the physician to return. That, at least, was René’s account, when the doctor had left, and the patient recovered a little from his maltreatment. Further, the fact that he did not recommend an X-ray signified there was absolutely nothing there but bruises and the dislocation of the left arm and a sprained wrist, and it had been unwarrantably alarmist to call him in. As the doctor refused to push the disjointed arm back into its proper position because of its swollen state, that was merely an excuse for returning several times. René said for two pins he would push the arm back into place himself. Nevertheless he allowed Hester to take the prescription to the druggist. Since his arm and head were both painful he would have been unable to sleep without Dr. Mackinnon’s sleeping draught.

Hester, however, lay awake and listened to the screams of the woman in the apartment beneath theirs, it being the husband’s nightly habit to half-murder her. (Three or four weeks later the police were called in, and they removed the wife out of danger.) What a fearful place they had come to! She must try and prevail upon René to return to England. — As soon as he was better — it would be no use to begin talking of that now. She watched for some time to see that he did not toss about and do some further harm to his left arm. When at last she went to sleep, her dreams were so appalling that she kept waking up, and in the end preferred to be awake than to be asleep.

So the next morning, dressings on his head, a sling for his left arm with only a slight bend in it, and several band-aids plastered about on face and hands, René was propped up on the settee. The arm was a good deal swollen, and the pain had not abated: he kept this at bay, to some extent, with Veganin.

After breakfast at about the usual time, the screams of the young German woman continued for more than an hour. She was married to an Indian — a North American Indian, not a Hindu. Bess was of the opinion she nagged the Indian until he gave her a punch or two to make her stop: and that she often would scream before he had done anything: this made him so angry he would perhaps hold her upside down and shout “Will you stop that — noise!” This, apparently, was the only way to stop her. But soon she would start again. When the screaming began, René said, “I feel sorry for that poor Indian.”

Hester looked at him in surprise.

“Oh,” she said, “Why?”

“If I were that Indian, I would take a pillow and put it on her face and sit on it for half an hour.”

Hester stretched over and squeezed his hand.

“Darling, you have grown very ferocious in the last twenty-four hours. Has that kick on the head turned you into a new man?”

He gave his ho-ho-ho laugh, the first for perhaps two years.

“The fellow may have kicked some sense into me, there is always that. I made an uncommonly sensible remark.”