Self Condemned (58 page)
But next day he made up for this lapse. He took his cue from the happenings of the last evening, spent, in imagination, with Hester, culminating in the ardour of conjugal embraces. Here was a major factor in the things of value to the “little rabbit,” in her creation of a male tenderness of ludicrous sentimental intensity: the ecstasies of the marriage bed. “Well!” snorted René, he owed nothing to Hester in that connection. The lubricious little beast had got as much out of him as he had got out of her! (In using such expressions about her he was not so lost to all sense of justice as not to realize it was a striking case of pot calling the kettle black. And for that matter, his own abnormal addiction to the sports of Venus was something he never ceased to regret.) Did he owe her any more tenderness than she owed him on that score? Of course not! They were quits. A dog and a bitch were not sentimental about such things as that. Why should men and women be? Legitimate subjects for sentimental attachments, if there were any, were of a different kind; perhaps to do with offspring or matters relating to fellowship in man’s destiny of a being condemned to death. Having unmasked the “little rabbit,” he proceeded, in detail, to debunk the claim of the woman that she is conferring some favour upon the male by going to bed with him. That of course is nonsense, for is it not her
duty
to do so, as it is man’s duty also to play his part in nature’s comedy? He is usually, it is true, quite ready to comply with nature’s commands, since nature rewarded fulfilment of these functions with delights embodied in the nervous system. Where the snag exists is in the great disparity between the social and intellectual needs, and fundamental tastes, of the man and the woman: and the fact that they are supposed to cohabit. It is the cohabitation that is the trouble. This is so well understood by every mature man and woman as to be a commonplace, though of course it does not follow that they admit to this understanding. Finally, he looked at the suicide again. Was any pity due from him to this mutilated corpse? How pitiable almost any corpse is! But
this
was an aggressive corpse — it was death militant.
This
dead body was there with a purpose. It was designed to upset his applecart, violently to interfere with his life. It was a Japanese-like suicide, a form of vengeance. Suppose you are a Japanese, and, on arriving home one evening, you find a corpse on your doorstep. You recognize it as that of a man with a grievance.You know that this man has taken his life in order to injure you. If you were this Japanese, what would your attitude be towards the aggressive corpse? You could not be otherwise than extremely indignant. You would kick the body off your doorstep, spitting on it contemptuously. This imaginary drama from far Japan gave René great satisfaction. He decided that Hester dead was even less worthy of respect than Hester alive. Nor did he fail to review the sheer volume of sentimentality attracted by death. On all sides he found himself beset by false sentiment. He congratulated himself upon the good work he had done in reducing in his personal life these mounds of slush to reasonable proportions. Towards the end of this period he felt he had cleansed things to such an extent that he could end this particular activity. He had driven Hester out of his mind, in which she had dangerously intruded. So all that was overcome, and he could now once more proceed on his way.
But to start with he must say farewell to these wonderfully considerate young priests, who had done their best to help him, and allowed him to live among them almost as a fellow priest. First, he visited Father O’Shea, with whom he had formed a friendly relationship. “I regret that I am going to leave you,” he said.
“When?” asked the priest, looking at him calmly and appraisingly. “You have been called away or something?” he asked lazily.
“Something,” René replied. Father O’Shea had no very strong missionary impulses. He had been a seminarian; but he had preferred not to enter the priesthood, he had gone into business instead.That is how he began.“Life in an office, however,” he had explained to René, “obliged me to become a lickspittle, to abase myself to such continuous servility that I gave it up and returned to my original idea of becoming a priest. In a primitive democracy such as we enjoy in our community life here at the college, it may not be an ideal type of existence for every kind of man, but at least one does not have to lick the shoes of half-a-dozen lousy power-addicts every morning, and offer one’s bottom to be kicked.”
Canadian business life, like American business life, is of a somewhat Oriental type. The big shot haughtily isolates himself, and all the department heads under him follow his example, exacting as much servility as it is possible to extract from a human being. It may be that Big Money is somewhat more democratic in the States at present; but in Canada these conditions still fearfully flourish. Father O’Shea’s experience was in no way an unusual one. Just what Father O’Shea did
not
say was that his clothes were of the most expensive cloth — and although the deep black was obligatory, it was very becoming to Father O’Shea. Then he smuggled over from Buffalo numbers of excellent cigars. Economic worries were unknown to him — no income tax, no rent, no keeping up with the Joneses. He was one of the priests who did a great deal of work over in Buffalo, where he would make his way in the college car with his small grip — which was never examined by the customs officers, who were all Catholic to a man — Poles or Wops or Germans. So it seemed to René that this priest did not have so bad a life — especially in view of the fact that St. Thomas Aquinas was a study he greatly enjoyed. Lastly, he was an ambitious man, and would no doubt go to headquarters before very long, and might end as the head of the Order of St. Maurice.
The young priest, whose horizons were far wider than the walls of a seminary, admired the worldly success of René, approved in his private mind of René’s departure: for to stop much longer in this neck of the woods would have reduced René in his estimation. “I didn’t think you could stick it so long here,” he said, smiling.
“The peace here is terrific. You are so used to it that you fail to appreciate it,” René told him.
Father O’Shea stretched his arms out to their full length, as he said with a sleepy yawn, “Gosh, I could do with a little less peace sometimes.”
As René was leaving the cell, Father O’Shea enquired, “You said you were becoming a Catholic. You have not given up the idea, I hope?”
“Ah, no,” said René. “Quite soon, when my mind is entirely at peace, I shall be reading those books you gave me.” He looked up at the priest suddenly, with an expression which startled Father O’Shea. “But there is no peace for me, I should tell you. I see a fiery mist wherever I direct my eyes. But the fire is not outside me, the fire is in my brain.”
Father O’Shea blinked. “You had a bad break, René. You ought to see a physician.”
Father Moody, the enthusiast, the bright-eyed missionary, was disappointed, but he made no reference to this at all. He had cherished the hope that this well-known professor and author would move into the Roman communion within those four walls. But Professor Harding might return to the Sacred Heart, might he not? And he lavished his innocent flatteries upon the departing visitor. O’Neill, who shared the disappointment of the registrar, shared it genteelly. The colourless but amiable Superior concealed his satisfaction that this prolonged visit was drawing to a close. An orthodox period for visitors (who did not usually dress in a cassock) was at most three days,
not
almost three long months.
It should perhaps be added that a couple of weeks after René’s departure a cheque was received by the Registrar for a small sum representing the fees for lectures which René had delivered during his stay at the college. So that possible indiscretion, retrospectively, was eliminated.
B
ack in Momaco, René found himself, as he put it, among bowed heads and muted voices. He was received as a man struck down, and, rumour had it, actually crazed with grief. He was looked at rather timidly, as though he might, unless handled very carefully, bite. He was obliged to improvise a technique, in order to cope with all this misunderstanding: for he regarded it as preferable not to say, “My dear sir, you are mistaken: My wife was a selfish, scheming old bag, whose death placed me in a very awkward position.” Self-defensively he accepted the rule of a grief-stricken husband. They were capable of dismissing him from the university (at the instance of the wives of the members of the board) if he showed himself otherwise than paralysed with uxorious sorrow. When someone came up to him and began offering him, in a choked voice, his heartfelt sympathy, René just answered with a muffled gasp and an hysterical squeeze of the hand. Sometimes his squeeze was so painfully compressive, though, and the noise he made in his throat was so fierce, that the would-be mourner would say afterwards, “I think that man’s mind has been turned by what he has gone through. He seizes one’s hand like some wild animal.”
With McKenzie, whom he trusted like a brother, he was quite explicit. “I am not heartbroken. I have no sensation of grief whatever. I have thought all that out, since I came out of the hospital. The fire at the Hotel Blundell, and still more the other things associated with the fire, left my wife a little mental. I did my best; she just set herself to obstruct everything, as if she were possessed. Her death was her last act of obstruction. Also it showed how deeply her reason had been affected. — We had got to such a pitch just before she threw herself under the truck that it seemed to be a matter of her life or mine, almost. For I understand a great many things that she could not, and she wanted to drag me down into her backwater, and into modes of life from which I had rescued myself, into a decaying society, into the rotten old dreamlands of her youth. She clung to me like a drowning woman, and her suicide was her last effort to drag me under. So you see … but I must put on a mask of grief for these good Momacoans. It is a bore, but they would think me an awful brute if I did not do so.”This was quite a temperate, quite normal-sounding statement, and McKenzie accepted it as all there was to know about this sad affair. He never asked himself whether René had not been associated with his wife in a neuropathic duet.
Meanwhile, with a feverish energy, René proceeded with the work of digging himself in with concrete and steel, so that no change of fortune could overtake him again. The successful “young” historian of the old days in London was one man — buoyant, elastic, inventive, and fearless: the present man, professor of history at the University of Momaco, Dominion of Canada, was quite another. He no longer even believed in his theories of a new approach to history; that had almost become a racket; for him it had all frozen into a freak anti-historical museum, of which he was the keeper, containing many libelous waxworks of famous kings and queens. He carried on mechanically with what the bright, rushing, idealistic mind of another man had begun.The man of former days had been replaced by a machine, which was a good imitation of the reality, which had superficially much of the charm, even the vivacity of the living model, but, when it came to one of the acid tests of authenticity, it would be recognized as an imposture.
If the personality is emptied of mother-love, emptied of wife-love, emptied of the illusions upon which sex-in-society depends, and finally emptied of the illusions upon which the will to create depends, then the personality becomes a shell. In René’s case that daring and defiant act, the resignation of his professorship in 1939, had made imperative the acquisition of something massive to counterbalance the loss, else disequilibrium could not but ensue. But, reacting with bitterness to criticism, he began hurling overboard the conventional ballast, mother-love going first.
The process of radical revaluation, the process which was responsible for the revolutionary character of his work, that analysis, turned inwards (upon, for instance, such things as the intimate structure of domestic life), this furious analysis began disintegrating many relationships and attitudes which only an exceptionally creative spirit, under very favourable conditions, can afford to dispense with. Into this situation came world war, came also Canada, with all that means; came the three years in the Hotel Blundell — three, mortal, barren, desolating years. A major hotel fire put a violent close to that period and so far nothing irretrievable had happened. The man who left England in the summer of 1939 was still there. If only latent, what was necessary for full vitality was intact. It was from that point onwards that either the personality had to reflower, as it were, or there must be degeneration. There was nothing that compelled degeneration — it was the bitter struggle that then began which led to it. The incipient dementia of his wife, and the pressure of its unreason upon him; another pressure from within, namely the pressure of his own will-to-success, of the most vulgar type, these pressures, both irrational and both touched with dementia, brought into being, as has been seen, something insanely militant, from which the finer inspirations of his intellect shrank, and with which his original self found it impossible to coexist.
There was this too; whatever he might say, he had been deprived of his natural audience; it is not until he loses it that a man of letters, or of ideas, knows how much he depends upon the deep cultural soil in which he has grown, or upon that atmosphere and that climate of thought. His withdrawal from that into an outlandish culture-less world (as he, even more than Hester, felt it to be), the long obliterating years of the war; in the end, the necessity of accepting this tenth-rate alternative to what had been his backgrounds before his resignation — all of this deeply disillusioning situation had, first of all, impaired, and, a little later, injured irreparably his creative will. He was half-way through that process while he and McKenzie were working upon the foundations of his new enterprise. Such a process does not proceed illuminated by consciousness, where it may be watched, and where steps may be taken, perhaps, to arrest it. So it was that one day consciousness asserted itself, and René discovered that he was only a half-crazed replica of his former self. He did actually perceive this for a moment, and then it was swallowed up by other emotions; but the revelation, which had horrified him, was not obliterated.