Self Condemned (53 page)
However, these labours had the effect of drawing the two professors together in what became a genuine friendship. Impressed by what René was attempting, McKenzie spoke enthusiastically to Trevelyan of this distinguished work which was in process of construction in their midst. At Trevelyan’s suggestion the university authorities were stimulated to offer Professor René Harding six extension lectures, the subject of which was to be the emergence, in England, in the sixteenth century, of the new secular civilization. He analysed all the ingredients of the late sixteenth-century melting pot. The story of how the culture of the Italian city states had found its way into England is, of course, a stock subject, but René’s interpretation of it was the reverse of a parochial one; he saw those events as if he had been looking at them from the heart of the continent.
In the course of this work he paid frequent visits to Ottawa, where he found the excellent library in the Parliament Building of the greatest use. On the first of these visits he and his wife lunched in the restaurant in Parliament House, as the guests of a member of the government, whom he had come to know through his new Momaco friends. They had a table beside a window. From this position upon the towering rock on which Canada’s parliament is built, an imposing view might be obtained down over the fast-moving river which separates the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. Even Hester was impressed by the finest capital city of the new world. Unfortunately, as they were returning to their hotel, the Lord Elgin, the recent fall of snow achieving the same result as expensive laundry, they met a Highland regiment returning to their barracks. Alas, the wild music of the cold little island mountains of Scotland, and its bedizened clans, reminded Hester of Harrod’s and De Bry’s, where a piper often advanced along the gutters of the Brompton Road, and Hester would sometimes give him a three-penny bit. The alien snow, the parliament that was not Westminster, and the thought that again Momaco was their destination turned her mind back into the well-worn channel of hatred of the land in which they found themselves. On their way back in a parlour car, she expressed herself as follows, “There is far too much snow in this country, and Ottawa is just as bad as Momaco. I always felt, in reading the Russian novels, uncomfortable at the thought of so much snow.” And René answered, “I always manage to read Tolstoy without feeling cold.”
The appearance of Professor René Harding, in cap and gown, in a lecture room at Momaco University, attracted considerable attention, and even drew a fair-sized audience. Trevelyan, for instance, only missed one lecture; at the end of the series, he congratulated René warmly, and he said, “It is a great piece of luck for this little place that you happen to be here. How wonderful it would be if you could occupy for a short while — for I realize that you will not wish to stay here once the war is over — if you could be induced to accept the history professorship while you are with us! Blackwell is leaving, to take up a post in the United States … if you were offered it, would you accept?” René signified that he would.
W
hen René landed in Canada, he landed as a dead man, or as good as dead.
His first three years and three months at Momaco confirmed him in this assessment of the situation in the most absolute sense. He could never imagine himself emerging from this deadly shadow, this burial alive; what is more, like many men who find themselves in the position of the “White Russians,” or the Huguenot exiles, he prepared to begin to live again, in a very different way.
He was strangely resigned, accepting his change of fortune with matter-of-factness. But what had begun in Mr. Furber’s library, a meeting on which at the time nothing seemed to hang, had assumed quite serious proportions. With his six extension lectures, and his weekly column in the
Gazette-Herald
, he actually had rather more than his professorial fees before his resignation from his job at home in England, and a substantial surplus remained when he had “paid his way” every month. There was enough to buy quite a lot of books, so, in sum, he was just as strikingly well off as, so short a time ago, he had been badly off.
During the spring of ’44, as a weekly columnist, his task was not very onerous, for there was nothing much of a spectacular kind going on. This relative calm endured right up to D-Day in June (and this great event was accompanied by another one, the arrival of the first flying bomb in England).
During these easy months he was able to get on with the writing of his book and the subject of his lectures was such familiar ground with him that the doing of three things at once was not at all a feat.
It was in May, when, one morning, a very portentous looking envelope arrived by mail. He sat down at the breakfast table and perused its contents; then, with apparent indifference, he flung it over for Hester to read.
It was an invitation addressed to him by the registrar of the University of Momaco to occupy the post of professor of modern history in succession to Dr. Blackwell.
She read this document calmly, without speaking, and René studied attentively another letter he had just opened, but both knew that a showdown was imminent. René’s hand shook a little, the one that was holding the letter. He noticed this and, tumbling forward upon the table, read it flattened out upon the tablecloth.
At last, with great deliberation, Hester pushed back to her husband the letter from the registrar. “What are you going to do about this?” she enquired sharply, fixing upon him a weary but remorseless eye.
“Accept it, of course.” He said this so categorically, that she recoiled as though something heavy had fallen upon the table between them.
“Oh.” She drew in her breath; it was a short, quiet gasp. “You propose to accept?”
He nodded. “Of course,” he said. “Would you like me to turn it down? Should I turn it down and in a year or so return to England, and see if I can secure a post as history master in Mill Hill School, or take on the marking of examination papers? Such jobs are frightfully well-paid. I think we might manage to rent a top floor in Pimlico. You would have to do the washing. We could not afford a laundry. But we should get by somehow. — Would it be better if I did that?”
Hester, whose face had been convulsing itself in a tragic mask, released, with a sort of howl, a torrent of tears. René sneezed violently, and noisily blowing his nose, went into the bathroom. He was neither dressed nor washed: vigorous sounds of another kind were immediately set up, the dashing about of water, puffing and grunting, in obvious competition with the obstreperous cataract of grief.
Hester stuck to it for a minute or two, then fell angrily silent.
As a rule René was a whirlwind dresser, but today he took longer than usual. When at length he appeared he was unusually spic and span. His present clinical respectability, his dazzling Bengal-striped shirt, his aggressive tie were in the starkest contrast with the old days in the Room. It almost seemed as though he had wished to demonstrate what well-laundered, well-heeled advertisements of well-washed prosperity they were, in contrast with the grubby pair who would gaze out of the Pimlico window, never visited by the window cleaners, at the sluggish Thames, the colour of dirty bathwater.
The scent of the conifer-packed soap emitted by his well-scrubbed person seemed like a theme scent in his corporeal and sartorial attack upon the tearful propaganda for the most smoke-sullied spot on earth — for the unheated houses, the rain of greasy soot-flakes of London; the smells of cabbage, of beefsteak, of washtub, and of sink, overflowing into the small living room, where sat the man snarling over a welter of examination papers.
The demonstration was unheeded — by nostrils closed against pine, and eyes blind to a Bengal stripe. He sat down opposite to her at the table, and picked up and arranged his letters.
“I think this is a most terrible thing,” she announced militantly.
“Do you? What?”
“The fact that this tin pot little university offer you this … professorship” — she made a contemptuous noise, like a delicate bark. “If you had known ten years ago that you were going to end your days as a professor in a small colonial city, what would you have felt like? It is awful, René.” Her voice broke, she wiped her eyes. “Worst of all is your attitude. You are as pleased as if you had received a … what is it called? … a Regius Professorship at Oxford. You were trying to hide your pleasure just now. You went into the bathroom and washed, to try and wash the childish satisfaction off your face.”
René laughed. “Do not be so idiotic, Essie, you know quite well I was escaping from that flood of tears. As the weaker animal, women used to emit them as the devil fish emits ink. — But is not all this water archaic?”
“I am afraid that my position is as inferior a one as that of a Victorian wife. He who pays the money calls the tune.”
“Nonsense,” came his reprimand.
“I cry because I have no money of my own,” she told him.
It was only just over four and a half years, the scene reminded him, since they left England, and ceased to be that couple living in the House that Jack Built — he looked across the table objectively.
In their new and rather smart apartment, she in a new house-frock and brightly American, looking not a minute older than in those last days in England, he began to perceive the resemblance between the new and the old. How in those near-far days she would plot to receive payment for
bayadère
-like transports, in the form of a fur coat, and she still was plotting now. But today her plots led to other ends; and their nocturnal entanglements were no longer thought of as utilizable. Why? (he stopped to ask himself).Why had they ceased to be that?
Why would she of course
not think of that expedient today?
She no longer thought of fornication from the commercial angle, nor so lightly, because she had bid adieu to youth. The years in the Hotel Blundell had been a profound ordeal, and counted as ten years at least psychologically. — Did she love him still?; this wandered, as it were, across his mind. The answer seemed to be
no
; that had taken its final leave, no doubt, around the time youth had officially departed. No, he decided, love had nothing to do with all this. One would have to look behind the fire, and the hideous events accompanying it for anything like love. But she was a great planner, was his Ess, had always been. She was very deeply worried because she felt she had nothing to bargain with.
“You are a great plotter and planner, Hester,” he said gently. “You are always deep in thought as to how you can get me back to England. You will have a breakdown — why not take life easier?”
“I can’t … I can’t see you throwing away everything you have wanted … and lived for. This place seems to have cast a spell over you. Left to yourself, you would be quite content to sink into the petty existence of a little teacher in a colonial city … like Professor McKenzie. You were not a little routine teaching hack like him.”
At an impatient gesture of René’s she pulled herself up. “Professor McKenzie is quite a nice man, I am saying nothing about that. As you know, Laura and I are good friends. But
you
, René.You are something different, aren’t you? You mustn’t mind my saying this, but in the past you would not have taken any notice of such a man. Now you consult him. You take him into your confidence.You trust him as an equal….You have changed a great deal.You have let Canada get you down, René.”
René threw himself back in his chair.
“All that is an out-dated way of thinking, Hester — I know it is difficult for you to understand.You cannot be expected to see how this war will change everything. As ‘Peter Pan’ Nehru says, nothing after it will be the same as it was before it. You urge me, you implore me, to return to England. But England will be a very different place ... poor, instead of rich — a second-class country, a drab shabby society, not at all what we have always known.”
She stiffened, with a touch of melodrama.“I do not care what England is like. I am much too old to change my way of thinking and feeling. I would far rather have England penniless, England in rags, England with no more power than … oh Ireland or Iceland, than any other country in the world.” She stared bleakly into the future. — Susan and Mummy and Gladys and Stella — she felt their warm British shoulders on either side of her. As she looked at René she made the mental comment, “René darling is half-a-frog, of course.” That excused him for not seeing these things exactly the way she did.
“We have talked about this so much that we repeat ourselves. Still, I must as usual make the attempt to correct your way of looking at all this, Ess. I may have to stop here a couple of years more, but that will be all.After that there is an excellent chance that I should be asked to go down to some large American university; Yale, Chicago, something like that. The United States is surely a big and important enough place to satisfy your ambitions on my behalf.Apart from that, I am sure you would like it. You would go on being more Kensingtonish than ever, whereas I could hardly make myself into a Yankee. We could go to England, we should not be locked up in the States. But I should not like to go to England with my hat in my hand, as now would be the case.” He leant across the table and took her hand in his. She gently withdrew her hand, and looked up at him steadily.
“You see the picture the wrong way up, Ess, in a most funny, pathetic light. Yes, you see everything through spectacles which both of us acquired in Hotel Blundell days. I wish I could convince you of that.”
There was a silence during which she gazed at the tablecloth. She had moved very little while they had been talking. She appeared riveted to her chair, in a despairing concentration. She did not seem to wish to move, or to rise from it, as though she felt that, if she did, it would be her last chance of deflecting him, that there was something final about this interview Then she lifted her head and looked at him coldly. “All right,” she said, “you deceive yourself.You have an uncommon capacity for self-deception, my dear René. I am sick of talking to you about this business. Accept, full of joy and self-congratulation, your dirty little job, and you will see, some day, that I was not so wrong as you think.”