Self Condemned (45 page)

On their return to their lodgings René telephoned Mr. Furber, who, to his surprise, was impressed by the fire, and treated him momentarily as a social equal, because he had just been part of the cast in a first-class local thriller, a banner headline affair. This was very American. Mr. Furber thought less of him when he heard that he had lost nothing, had not come down on a fire escape, and had not been robbed by a fireman of his wallet. But he received new stimulation when René told him about the little Detroiter, and how there had been a stink of benzene, how this had caused him to smell a rat, and how
arson
had been whispered.

When Mr. Furber was told that they were now going to live at the Hotel Laurenty, he tittered. He referred to it as the “Lorelei.” René’s visit was fixed for the following afternoon, so that was taken care of.

Before leaving for the Laurenty the next morning they walked around the amazing iceberg into which the Hotel Blundell had been transformed. It was a magnificent sight; a block of ice towering over everything in the immediate neighbourhood. It was of course a hollow iceberg. The interior could be inspected through what had been the street-door of the main hotel building, on Balmoral Street. What René and Hester gazed into was nothing to do with what had been the Hotel Blundell. It was now an enormous cave, full of mighty icicles as much as thirty feet long, and as thick as a tree, suspended from the skeleton of a roof. Below, one looked down into an icy labyrinth: here and there vistas leading the eye on to other caverns: and tunnels ending in mirrors, it seemed. To the right a deep green recess, as if it had been stained with verdigris.

This hollow berg was an unearthly creation, dangerous to enter because so unstable. An icicle weighing twenty tons, rooted in an insufficiently deep, an aerial upside downness, might prove too weighty a vegetation in this inverted world. Probably it would hold in present temperatures, but a relaxation consequent upon thermometrical decline from forty below to twenty below zero, might cause the hugest icicles to crash. It was a cave in which no polar bear could inhabit, in which the Great Auk could not lay its egg, and into which no ex-guest could enter with his ice pick, to search for diamonds which, in his breathless exit, he had had to leave behind. It was a sinister, upside down forest of ice, rooted in the air; a piece of sub-polar absurdity, which would stand there till the first thaws: but René saw it as a funeral vault for Affie, which would be mysterious and inviolable for long enough to suit her volatile taste. Her hooting cry could sound there in the night — the only human sound that could be heard, for only as ghosts could men qualify for admittance, and only Affie be at home in this unearthly scenery.

The “Lorelei,” to give it Mr. Furber’s name, was a far better-run hotel than the Blundell had been, although Bessie, when she came to see the Hardings there two days later, was highly critical, and spoke disrespectfully of the French-Canadian servants. “I have never yet met with a Peasoup who was clean,” she said. To which René replied, “I am half a Peasoup. Perhaps that will help me to put up with it.”

To which Bess tartly retorted, in her Glasgow prim-talk, “It may be all recht for yew, Mr. Harding, but Mrs. Harding is no’ a Pea-sup.”

But what Bessie had come for was to inform the Hardings that Affie was now at a mortician’s, and that a service was to be held there that afternoon. A number of people were coming over from Ottawa, who had known her when her husband was alive and when socially her position had been very different from what it was at her death. The service would be at 3 p.m. René and Hester told her they would be there.

These establishments known as “Mortician’s” consist, of course, in a “lying in state” for everybody. Formerly only famous men and royal personages lay in state, but the American democracy could not but perceive that this was a bad example of privilege. So these morticians multiplied, until today no one economically superior to a rat catcher but is stuck up in a mortician’s upon their demise. So that afternoon the Hardings were introduced to this American mystery: they were led through a large waiting room, and leading out of that was the curiously misnamed Funeral Parlour. They had only taken a half a dozen steps when, turning their heads to the right, they found themselves gazing down at Affie. They were in a small chapel. There were perhaps ten rows of chairs, half of which were already occupied. Facing the latter was the coffin in which Affie lay, rather more than waist high. It was somewhat inclined, and arranged so that the chapel audience could see in part the face. Affie was fully clothed, in a green dress she had recently bought. Her face was heavily made up, powdered, and heavily rouged: and whether any facial injection had been practised or not, Affie looked much healthier and younger than she had ever looked in life. The scar had been in some way filled in, and the discoloration removed.

On the other hand, it was a little Affie that they now saw, so small a face, like a sleeping child. This immovable expression of a false content, the slight smile of the last sleep, and of the mortician’s art, succeeded in making it look as though Affie, from the unearthly calm of this final phase of her self-presentation, were smiling at the people who had come to look at her, just as she would have done had she been conscious — had she been asked to climb into the box and arrange herself there, heavily made up. So Affie still seemed active in this last display.The only thing which destroyed the impression that this indeed was life, was the
smallness
of the face. It had not been a
child
who used to stand there, just inside their apartment, with a slight ironical smile, always
faisant des façons
with an unspoken “Shall I come in? Am I intruding?” — (She, who had been listening at the keyhole for anything up to ten minutes.) She had not been of childish stature, but tall and straight, with a sense for style — not like a doll, with its feet together, arranged in a cardboard box for the Toy Fair.

Hester and René only paused for a few seconds to gaze down at the dead. They then proceeded to the rear of the rows of seats. “A gathering of well-heeled bourgeois,” whispered René. But substantial citizens were arriving all the time, and continued to do so, until the last of the seats were occupied. Nearly all those present dated back a good time, to those days when Affie and her lawyer husband were living in Ottawa, before his unexpected death. The heads of most of those in the audience, the males, that is, had the wintry thatch which would also have been that of Affie, were it not that she and Miss Toole dyed their hair in the bathroom every other Saturday. And finally it must be said that Mr. and Mrs. McAffie must have been both prosperous and popular, for all these people to make so considerable a journey to be present at the last rites of Mrs. McAffie. The gathering was almost complete when not the least prosperous-looking of this
élite
attendance made her appearance. It was Bessie, in a handsome fur coat (borrowed, as Hester recognized at once, from Miss Toole). She came up to them a little shyly; and all three sat on chairs placed in the corner for such as had not reserved seats.

As soon as it was evident that all were present, from a side door emerged a handsome young clergyman, notably contrasting in age with his audience. He walked over to the coffin, and gazed intently into it for nearly five minutes. Talking had stopped, there was a profound hush. The long and mournful inspection of the dead, as though he had been impressing upon his mind this image, that there should be no anonymity when he came to intercede with God, was a well-conceived part of this ceremony, René appreciatively reflected. Then the young man, with his excellently serious face turned sideways to the coffin, began to intone a psalm in a strong and hypnotic voice. René heard the familiar words, “For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain,” and this he recognized. “Take thy plague away from me: I am even consumed by means of thy heavy hand. When thou with rebukes dost chasten man for sin, thou makest his beauty to consume away, like as it were a moth fretting a garment; every man therefore is but vanity.” René pondered at this point, I am consumed by the heavy hand, but he added at once to himself that the hand, although heavy, was not so heavy as might be expected. And so he gave expression to what distressed Hester most. He was the kind of man, as she had come to learn, who having lost both his legs would say how merciful God had been to leave his arms intact: and if he lost one arm as well, would resign himself on account of one limb remaining to him.

The splendid rhetoric was lifted in the air, by the aspiring voice of the minister, winged with an emotion, which everyone felt would carry the words to God’s ear, where somewhere His head is bent to listen to the noble words of such professional advocates as this, to intercede for those blackened with sin, which He is asked, in His infinite mercy, to forgive, and, to allow to enter into the realms of salvation, and when in finishing, the pastor sadly sang, “Oh, spare me a little, that I may recover my strength: before I go hence, and be no more seen,” the last few words dying out, to fade away into the shadow, the intoxication of the small audience had begun: and at the end of a short and intense hush, came the most penetrating Amen that that chapel had ever heard — or so everybody felt.

All the red necks and white heads in the audience were bowed. The young cleric was performing before a small assemblage of elders, and chanting to them of death. They had travelled hundreds of miles to be chanted to of death, smiled at by the painted corpse of a member of their social circle.

“Let us pray!” said the young minister, and the little herd of white polls bent still farther and the lines of shoulders rose accordingly. And after that a collect, and then another prayer for the slightly smiling funereal doll in the wooden box. Then came the culmination. The head, with its beautiful waved hair, thrown back, the minister began in an exalted voice — and this was his final and most tragic, his most solemn piece of declamation, and a most fitting culmination to the brief ceremony: “Had I the wings of the morning, and could I fly to the uttermost parts of the earth” was his idealistic opening.

All these white-haired, these hoary sinners, mourned that they had not the wings of the morning — those powerful and golden, beautiful star-tipped wings, stretching across the horizons like aspiring clouds. And oh, if they could have a part of the advantages of the Morning (Who does not die or become Afternoon, but flies on and on towards the remotest west) then
they
would fly into the unearthly distances, not to the uttermost ends of the earth, but of the world and of Time. They had a momentary glimpse of a remoteness, of a solitude, somewhere behind the stars, where they would be unimaginably far from where they had been, and what they had always been. This soaring rhetoric armed them with a contempt for the life they would so soon be obliged to leave, and this verbal intoxication melted all the old husks, and noses were blown in all parts of the audience. At the rear, Hester and Bessie were both wiping their tears away, and René bit his lip to discourage an unmanly display. But he thought wistfully of the odious days in the hotel, and his heart was soft and inexpressibly sad, as he thought of the wild woman who had inhabited that puppet there, from which she had mysteriously departed.

It was with shame at the debauch of sadness in which they had indulged that most of them shuffled out of the mortician’s, some casting resentful glances at the small painted figure which had been responsible for this. But the fixed smile or half-smile of what in life was sexual
câlinerie
answered appropriately the covert scowls. — Those who were going on to the graveside remained in prayer within.

The Hardings returned to the Laurenty profoundly affected, but resentful. How dignified and how
real
(for it amounted to that) Affie had been as she lay in the snow, with a piece of coarse cloth over her face, placed there, perhaps by Monsieur Lafitte, as a sign of respect. René could have wished that that had been his last glimpse of Affie. The vulgar peep show with the dolled-up face, at the mortician’s, was so violently unreal, that it blotted out the real. They would have to wait until time had washed out that garish spot-lit image, before they could see her again in their minds.

This hotel, like the Blundell, had telephones in every apartment. Shortly after they had finished their tea the telephone began ringing. René lifted the receiver, and he heard the familiar voice of Mr. Furber. “Ah,” said Mr. Furber, “have you heard the news about your late hotel?” René told him that he had heard nothing about his late hotel.

“Well,” said Mr. Furber, “a guest, a certain Mr. Martin, has been arrested.” — “What for?” enquired René, with genuine interest.“Did he set the hotel on fire?” — ’No,” Furber answered. “He has been arrested for the murder of the manageress, Mrs. McAffie.” There was such relish in Mr. Furber’s voice that René knew that he would be giving less than satisfaction if he did not display emotion. “Now
that
is curious!” he practically shouted. “When did that news break?”

Furber told him that it came through on the radio, the Momaco station just gave that piece of information and no more, except that Mr. Martin is “a countryman of yours.”

René gave his employer all the information he possessed about Mr. Martin. He also told him that he had felt, of late, that there was something enigmatic about that familiar figure. He had thought that Mrs. Plant, the ostensible proprietress, might be a blind, and that the hotel might be owned by Mr. Martin. Since then, a member of the staff had gossiped: had told him that Mrs. Plant would assert that she had not paid a penny piece for the hotel, that it had been a mortgage transaction.

Then Mr. Furber evinced curiosity about Mrs. McAffie: was the manageress perhaps the mistress of Mr. Martin? René laughingly discouraged speculation along those lines, explaining that Mrs. McAffie was at least sixty and Mr. Martin too, and that no love was lost between the two. — When, asked Mr. Furber, had René last seen Mrs. McAffie. “Why?” René laughed. “You do not suspect me of playing a part in her murder? I last saw her a few hours ago in a wooden overcoat in a mortician’s.”