Self Condemned (37 page)

“I, no more than you,
would seek hardship
,” he said, and she started, for it was as though he had been listening in to her thoughts. “But honestly, being imprisoned, as we have been, here, has its compensations. This barren life has dried out of me a great deal that should not have been there. And you have become integrated in me. This tête-a-tête of ours over three years has made us as one person. And this has made me understand you — for most people I should hate to be integrated with. It is only when years of misery have caused you to grow into another person in this way that you can really know them.” He waited a moment and then went on, “In the other world, Hester, I treated you as you did not at all deserve. I cut a poor figure as I look back at myself.”

“There is no need to say this. I don’t know why you are saying it.”

“But it is no use talking in this uncomfortable way about ourselves, as if I were I, and you were you. I am talking to myself and we are one. Is it necessary to say that I would sacrifice for you any miserable thing I had — well, as I would for myself?”

So the appeal she had proposed to make must be indefinitely postponed; she left her chair, and putting her arms around his neck kissed him very tenderly. “My darling, we have been hammered together as you say by a very ugly fate, but we would have been together without that. You attribute too much to fate. But there is this, my darling, that I would do anything you asked me to do, and go wherever you wished. I did not know that I would do that once. But I know now.”

“What a grand woman you are. And this tête-a-tête of over three years has made us one person, Ess. I treated you awfully badly.”

René was so moved that tears flooded his eyes, as he held her as well as he could. She had intended to say that she would, as she had said, literally go anywhere, although secretly she would pray that it might be a less hideous spot — she had intended at least to put in this mild reminder; but instead she found that she was crying too, and they remained for a long time clasped together in something like a religious embrace. René was thinking this being and he were vowed to one another, in a sacrament of which good fortune and good times had no knowledge, and she was thinking how she loved René, and how wonderful it was after all to be loved and she would not
pester
him about leaving this awful place if he did not want to, and the war must end some day, some day, and
then
they would return to England, and leave this hideous icebox behind!

He had just said, “Let’s have another cup of tea, my sweet,” and she had picked up the heavy teapot, when a tap came at the door. They heard Affie’s voice through the door. “Come in, Affie!” he shouted, and like a mischievous black-suited spectre she remained fluid for some moments, half-in and half-out of the apartment.

“Come in. Don’t hover,” René commanded.

“I’m not interrupting?” Affie asked.

Both of them thought,“Ah, she’s been listening,” and laughed.

She came in, smiling down at them, pleased at being privy to all that went on in the house. She was not by nature a keyhole-queen. She was more like an aged messenger of Aphrodite, with a supernatural
passe-partout
, bringing for preference aphrodisiacs from Aphrodite, and possessing supernatural access to everything in the hotel. She had no need to squint through keyholes, as Bess always accused her of doing, though she may have done that, it is true, to annoy Bess.

“When I have swallowed this, come and vaticinate in my teacup, Affie darling,” René invited.

“I will see if there is anything I think you ought to know,” answered Affie professionally, deeply inhaling her cigarette smoke. Affie sat huddled up, as though in prophetic concentration with herself. Her childish affectation of solemn preparation for a scrutiny of their fate always pleased them.

This was a recognized method of minor-moneymaking in Momaco. Many tea rooms advertised in their windows that fortune-telling teacup-readers were within.

When Hester and René had finished their tea, they whirled their cups round three times, which was the routine procedure. The tea leaves duly plastered upon the insides of the cups, Affie drew near, crouched over the cups, and gazed first at one and then at the other for several minutes.

Then she said to René, “Someone loves you very much, … very much.” She gave a sidelong glance of fun at Hester, and then straightened her face abruptly. She twisted René’s cup completely round several times. “You are going on a long journey. The man you are going to see is dark … with horn-rimmed spectacles; tall, fattish with a flattened nose, young.”

René and Hester exchanged a glance of high amusement. Several photographs of the gentleman in question had arrived in a registered envelope two weeks earlier. Affie continued to brood over the cups. She approached her face to one of the cups, rather quickly, and raising one eyebrow. “You must be very careful about this dark man,” she said. “You will be crossing water…. It might be as well if you did
not
cross water.”

“I do not agree,” Hester remarked.

“How do you mean?” Affie frowned.

“It is my view that he
should
cross water,” Hester insisted.

“Cross a lot of water.”

Affie looked relieved. “I only meant a small stretch of water.”

“Yes, it is after all only to Victoria Island!” René laughed — Affie showed no sign of recognition, when he said Victoria Island. She transformed her scrutiny to Hester’s cup. “You have many friends,” Affie told her. “You will receive a letter from one … very shortly…. It will contain good news.” She tipped the cup sideways. “You have a boot in your cup.” She looked up with a smile. “It is very lucky. A boot … is exceptionally lucky.”

When, a few months earlier, Bess had been away for a week, a woman who had formerly worked there took her place. She had been an Englishwoman once, many years before. She was quite uninhibited, and the reputations of one or two of the members of the staff, past and present, suffered quite a lot in the course of her incumbency. She was especially dangerous for Affie. Among other things she informed them that Affie steamed open letters, and glued them up afterwards: this occurring in the kitchen, where the postmen left the mail for the entire hotel. This piece of information threw considerable light on Affie’s uncanny skill of divination in teacup reading.There was especially one instance they recalled when Affie had foretold the arrival of “a letter … with a funny sort of stamp … Indian I think.” Four days later a stamped letter arrived from Colombo. After that, it had become a sport, one of the favourite sports of the Room, tracing Affie’s revelations to a letter steamed open in the kitchen. The “crossing water” business at the present seance, and the insistence on the amount of water being inconsiderable, was easily traceable to a dozen or more letters which had recently come from someone in Vancouver, who urged René to come out there. He backed up this request with glittering promises, assuring René that the local university would immediately offer him a chair. Where Victoria Island came in was that the correspondent invited them to stay with him at his “properties,” while arrangements were being made with the university authorities. This man’s father was said to be on the board of the university and a very influential man.

A photograph of his father was enclosed, and he certainly looked a very influential man. This correspondent had poured registered letters in at the rate of two a week: they had impressed Affie more than they had impressed the Hardings.

They both of them felt quite certain that Affie would do nothing really dishonest. She steamed open letters to improve her sorcery and sharpen her prophetic insight. Also she was an inquisitive woman, and she would be amused to learn that No. 34 suffered from a venereal disease or No. 19A was, as she had suspected, homosexual. Knowing
everyone
’s secret gave her a sense of power. Once, when she had said, “Professor Harding, have you ever visited any of our universities? McGill for instance?” he was angry as long as it would take to pick up a pin. Then he said, “Where did you learn that I was Professor Harding?” “That is how your letters are addressed,” Affie answered. But René laughed and asked her, “What were the Christian names of my grandmother?” Affie only answered, “On the English side or on the French, Professor Harding?” At which they all three laughed a great deal.

On the present occasion, after exhaustively analyzing the tea leaves, she rose to her full height, and bowed herself out, like a figure in a ballet. But at the door she turned, and clinging to the slightly swinging door, as if she had been posing for Andromeda, but had suddenly felt rather faint, she addressed Hester.

“Wouldn’t you like a fur coat as a Christmas present, Mrs. Harding?”

“Why?” Hester enquired, with the smile that she reserved, in this place, for this old woman clinging to the door.

“Oh, don’t you like fur? Some people don’t. I have just bought a fur coat.”

“How wonderful, Affie. You’ve made yourself a beautiful Christmas present, have you! Do show it to me!”

Affie clung harder and harder, more and more archly, to the swaying door. “It’s a cherry fox,” she confided. Then with a croak she vanished. René went ho-ho-ho, gently combing his beard.They looked at one another in mutual relishment of Affie’s latest exhibition of prophetic skill, but they were debarred from speaking, for she certainly was listening at the door. All that René said was, “Well, I am going on a long journey.” Hester responded, “But the water you will be crossing will be of insignificant span.” And René concluded with, “Yes, there is of course that.” And then they turned on the radio.

The News was beginning. Richly and persuasively the preliminary sales talk rolled out. “Be the smart host,” it exhorted, “When you’re serving tall drinks!” After a final appeal, “So be the smart host,” came a cataract of bad news, though thousands of dead bodies of enemies made you feel the day had not been quite in vain. Before the news was over it was learned that President Roosevelt had accepted the rib of a Japanese Marine, mounted in gold, as a paperknife.

“A nice Christmas present for the Great White Chief,” René observed.“They ought really to scalp their enemies. Sawing a rib out of the cadaver is decadent, I feel.”

Hester seldom paid any attention to the roaring voices of “commentators.” They all had a vested interest in a long, long war. They would never be heard of again when it
did
end: they hoped that the ten million pounds a day (or was it a minute?) military budgeting would go on forever. Hester came to hate these brash voices, but after a time it was nothing but a troublesome noise. They might have been talking Chinese for all she knew about it. René followed the nightly outpourings with close attention, if for no other reason, because the
Momaco Gazette-Herald
bought political articles from him, and that was one of the ways he had found to make a living.

The murder of all these millions of simple inoffensive people all over the world, whether civilians or uniformed herds, the enormous, irretrievable ruin being prepared for each and all of these countries, the certain slavery consequent upon unpayable mountains of debt, plunging all the combatants indiscriminately, whether “victors or vanquished,” into worse and worse inflations; all this burden of knowledge, and what was therefore for him a spectacle of ruin, for the first year or so had tormented him. Now, however, the torments had ceased, and his reactions at present amounted to an anarchic pessimism, destined to undermine his fierce puritanism, his “perfectionism?”, as it had been called.

He would hardly know, if they should meet, and have lunch together, how to converse with Rotter now. His letters to Rotter for a year past had been few and far between. Then at last, about a month ago, he informed his disciple that he had modified his theory. He had explained that his opinion of the past and of the traditional writing of History was quite unchanged. He even retained his belief in a sort of “Enlightenment.” But he now felt that the powers of evil disposed of such stupendous forces that they must always, with the greatest ease, annihilate any opposition: and it is inherent in earthly life that this should be so forever. Any “Enlightenment” that might make its appearance would be like a taper in a tornado.

His disciple had written to him in a tone of such utter despair, that he had considered it best to provide some immediate balm. So he wrote that, after all, the taper would not be extinguished by the tornado if it were secreted in the mind, where, as a matter of fact, it was generally to be found. All that he had done was to deprecate the idea that it would come out of the mind, and
physically
do battle with the Darkness and the Whirlwind. Then it would be a case of a combat between a minnow and a cuttlefish. This latter seemed to have afforded consolation to the sensitive Rotter.

But René could find nothing with which to console himself, though he now grieved less over the universal catastrophe as he realized more thoroughly its dark necessity, its innateness.

That there was no intention of ending this war, until it had become a total catastrophe
for everybody
was now obvious to him. He did not communicate to Hester his views as to the probable length of the war. He just sat before the radio, and listened to the unfolding of new moves promising, as he interpreted it, the most stupendous evils — sat there, night after night, too shocked to speak at times: at others simply stifling the human instinct to communicate.

It had been over three
very long
years, and he was almost reconciled to the hardship of which he had spoken. Even, he had developed an appetite for this negation of life, and a sort of love for this frightful Room. It was this that Hester most feared in him: she watched with apprehension how he was making himself at home in their present surroundings — and even beginning to ho-ho-ho. He had no wish to be in a greater scene, where men falsified everything, and built up their small façades: where “success” meant failure and betrayal. He felt he could well live at some distance from the scholars who used their learning to conceal, and the literary men who, after a few years’ spectacular navigation, crept into some port where they could moulder placidly for the rest of their lives. He experienced no desire to be once more in those places where the intellect was rewarded for its surrenders, and where the mind became illustrious in proportion to its moral flaccidity.