Self Condemned (14 page)

You have my sympathy.”

Janet accompanied her brother to the entrance hall.

“You don’t seem as well as usual,” she said.

“Yes, Janet,” he replied at once. “I am not worse than before.

It is that preposterous little animal you wedded who requires a dose of castor oil.”

Victor beckoned imperiously to the waiter and ordered a double brandy. The waiter did not say, “Yes, my lord Duke,” but Sicilian eyes veiled themselves with respect and Victor felt much the same as the Duke of Marlborough, or the Duke of Somerset, must feel when they order a double brandy. The curious thing was that England still swarmed with dukes of this sort in 1939.

“It’s no use, darling, but your brother is not a gentleman,” Victor told his wife, when she had returned.

“No, darling? He lacks breeding, I suppose it is that. But may I ask what caused you to be offensive to him? What has he done to you?”

“Oh, nothing,” he drawled, sticking his shoulders up and waving his hand. “Turned his back on me, but what of that? I am only a
rat
, after all!”

“You are a very vain rat,” she retorted. “So because he accidentally turned his back on you, you start being
very
offensive.”

“I like ac-ci-dent-ally!” He caressed the word, undulating witheringly over it.

They remained among their respective thoughts for awhile, then Victor sat up observing, “There are one, or I should say three or four, things about Professor Harding; I give him his title, you notice, though that is just kindness.”

“What are these
things
you notice…?”

“Well” — he drew a noseful of smoke into his diminutive lungs and expelled some of it again, watching its reappearance along the sides of his nose, looking as if he were squinting — “to start with he is not a man, who, except for his beard, would impress one as out of the ordinary at all, is he? I mean, I should never take him for a
learned
man. His conversation is upon a very pedestrian level. I have never heard him mention any historical event: except once he said Queen Elizabeth had a beard, like his, but that
she
shaved hers.”

Janet laughed. “How amusing. Did he say that?”

“There you are!” exclaimed Victor, “
amusing
. That is just it. Did you ever hear him talk about anything
serious
? Or do you ever remember him being in dead earnest?”

Janet laughed again. “No, except when he called you a rat!”

“You are his sister, have known him all your life, and
you
say you have never known him to be serious about anything.”

“He worked like blazes at Oxford and got every sort of honour. I was only ten. But I was very impressed by the tall, solemn young man who was my brother, who was always reading in Latin ... oh and German. No, I don’t think you can say he is not
serious
. You don’t understand him, that is all. If
you
were a learned man, we should all know about it, shouldn’t we. René does not wear his learning on his sleeve.”

Victor’s ears
did
tend to stick against his head when displeased, and now he lay back slumped very loftily in his chair, his arm hanging limply down behind it.

“I did not know him when I was ten,” Victor blandly protested. “I can only speak of the present time, and I find him a common place sort of fellow.... He even has rather low tastes.”

“That frightful tobacco, do you mean?”

“No,” drawled Victor with a particular anticipatory stress.

“No. Have you never noticed his eyes straying around, in rather ... unexpected directions?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well” —Victor blew some smoke up at the once resplendent ceiling — “I caught him tonight smiling and blowing smoke rings at an extremely vulgar-looking girl ... with a rather pronounced
bust
. She had a pig face and yellow curls.”

“Dear me!” Janet laughed. “What a little monster! Did she stick out behind too?”

“She
did
!”Victor assured her. “And old René was ogling this little horror.”

“Shameful! And he a married man too!”

“You don’t understand what I mean, apparently. One would hardly expect this great
Idealist
to take any interest in the protruding bosoms of such cheap little minxes.You would expect his mind to be full of other, and very different, matters.”

“The breasts of the nymphs in the brakes!” she mocked. “But stay! I have caught you, my little Victor, before now — covertly eyeing the protruding bottoms of nymphs in the brakes of the Strand. Once I caught you
talking
to one. Take back those words about my brother!”

Victor laughed hollowly and a little sheepishly.

“You are more observant, darling, than I thought you were. But I am only young Victor Painter, junior partner in a second-rate publicity racket! Nobody calls
me
an
Idealist
! I am just a little nobody. It’s natural that I should take an interest in typists’ bosoms. I have nothing better to think about. No one expects a little publicity man to have any intellect. But the great Professor René Harding, who is so high-minded an idealist …”

“All right, all right, you poor little rat!” she broke in with a laugh.

Victor subsided, sulkily. Then he began again in his indolent drawl, “I do not believe a single word about his scruples, and his horror of war! He nearly landed me one in the eye just now. It was all he could manage to pass it off with a vulgar laugh like some drunken pork butcher. His fanaticism! How can a man like that be a fanatic? He takes nothing seriously, he makes a joke about everything! He does not believe in anything! He just likes guzzling down all the good food and good wine he can get, and running after girls half his age! A fanatic!”

Exhausted by his diatribe,Victor closed his eyes.

One of the women at the next table leant across towards Victor, who opened his eyes when he heard her voice. It was none other than Fred’s luckless wife. “I hope you will excuse me for this intrusion, but I could not help hearing what you were saying, and I thought you would like to know that when the bearded gentleman passed me on his way out he winked at me. I thought this fact had some bearing upon what you were saying.”

Victor was as gallant as it is possible to be in a world so unresponsive to “the graces.” Then “The Ladies, God bless them, God bless them, the Ladies,” was a toast which would have been echoed with fervour by the susceptible Victor. He was stirred to gracious volubility, by the perfume which reached him from the neighbouring table. But Janet was less fervent, though a little ornate. She said, “Thanks. When next I see my brother I shall tell him that his optical salute was duly appreciated.”

VII
ROTTER

R
obert Parkinson had a square head. It was like a fortress, and his body was a larger edition of that. He had a pipe, too, of a bulky type. He stuffed it, as he lay back in a strong soft chair, with plaits of bright yellow and black tobacco: a mixture whose stimulating pungency belongs to the family of smells including peat, tar, joss stick, and burnt bacon. The sweet stench of his tobacco fumigated the heavily loaded bookshelves and such apparatus of learning as the half-foot-thick American dictionary upon a lectern, with an aggressive outdoor to-hell-with-culture tang.

But his was a misleading personality. The thick-set body of a certificated master seadog, and the almost startling aromatic violence of the smoke which blew from his mouth, twelve hours out of the twenty-four, were the camouflage of, as well as the fumigation, for a born bookworm. The fact was he played up to the accident of his physique, applauding nature’s paradoxicality. Parkinson’s accents were those of an educated don, and his dark eyes were as ruminative as those of a twelfth-century monk, a mellow schoolman, Latinizing in his cell.

This was 1939, the last year, or as good as, in which such a life as this one was to be lived. Parkinson was the last of a species. Here he was in a large room, which was a private, a functional library. Such a literary workshop belonged to the ages of individualism. Its three or four thousand volumes were all book-plated Parkinson. It was really a fragment of paradise where one of our species lived embedded in his books, decently fed, moderately taxed, snug, and unmolested. The London weather permitting, the sun warmed it for half of his working day. When the sun became too hot during high summer or thereabouts, which is a month or so at most, he departed, settling on the French Atlantic coast or repairing to Switzerland with a block of books in his luggage. Again, this was 1939. A good club was possible, the restaurants were good and not beyond his means, the London library supplied him for the absurdly modest sum of three pounds a year, with ten books at a time: in the butcher’s shops was plenty of meat, the greengrocer’s supplies of fruit and vegetables were cheap, fresh, and plentiful, and all shops were well stocked with errand boys, and deliveries followed closely upon a telephone order. Elegant alcohol was available for the poorest professional man, an excellent bottle of Burgundy or of Bordeaux costing perhaps two shillings and nine pence. Such as Parkinson could ask a friend to dinner for an additional expense of around five or six shillings. And that powerfully sweet tobacco which he enjoyed smelling so much cost him little more than a fraction of what it would today.

According to any computation except that of the underprivileged, Parkinson was a poor man. There were many good things he had not the money to buy, his income was much smaller than that of René Harding. But what was it produced this blissful modest abundance that has been described above? Nothing more than writing a few reviews a month, one probably for an American publication, by whose editors his well-seasoned mind, whose judgments were delivered in an Oxford accent, was greatly appreciated. Why it is quite accurate to say that such a man nowhere today exists though he might receive the same remuneration for the same work, is because the pound sterling has lost two-thirds of its stature. It only masquerades as a pound. It is but six and sixpence. The work he did would be paid as though the pound were still the pound, for the periodicals and newspapers sell not very far above the 1939 figure. And accordingly their contributor must live in some other way than the way Parkinson lived. The Individualist Age, composed of a multiplicity of small paradises, is no more.

Whenever René came into his friend’s study he regarded it with admiration. He ran his eye over the well-arranged shelves of philosophy, of history, of biography, of general literature, of politics: the French, the German, the Italian, and other foreign books, confined to their allotted sections. For Parkinson was a man of method, and René was not. As to the spacious room, the heavy screens, the loaded lectern, and so on, René paid less attention to that. For he knew quite well why he preferred to stop where he was, in the House that Jack Built.

He occupied a separate flat, a flat for work only; it was inviolable. No one had ever ventured to disturb him. Had he been at the other end of London — or in Paris or in Rome — he could not have been more unmolested. Whereas, had they had a larger flat, in a finer house (not one of the Houses that Jack Built) he would have heard Mrs. Harradson’s voice croaking “nasty old man” in the passage outside his door, or it would have been the catarrhish voice of some other house serf somewhere within earshot, or the gas inspector inspecting, or a new postman asking if a Mrs. Hungerford-Smith lived there, not to mention Hester’s genteel flutings. So he did not envy Parkinson his work room: dimly perhaps he realized that men like himself always were to be found in Houses that Jack Built, working in a book-lined area the size of a bathroom, which no charlady’s finger ever touched: while for the Parkinsons there was always more amenity, more comfort, more space — which is not to scorn the Parkinsons but to define how these things are allotted, for one purgatory, for the other paradise.

When René entered the room it was quickly and quietly, without the empty fracas which is the rule with visitors; just as if he lived there and had been in the room five or ten minutes before. He went over to the fireplace and sat down. Parkinson did not rise. He made a little sign, which was a private salute, and with the other hand pushed over a box of cigarettes. Both of them knew that this was the last year of an epoch, and that such men as themselves would never exist on earth again, unless there were, after thousands of millennia, a return to the same point in a cosmic cycle. They knew that as far as that quiet, intelligent, unmolested elect life was concerned, they were both condemned to death: that the chronological future was, in fact,
a
future life
, about which they both felt very dubious. They might survive as phantoms in a future England: or they might learn to live in some other way. It was with gravity that these friends sat talking, upon the brink of a chasm, in comfortable armchairs, but not with pathos. Once the fatality is recognized pathos is a disagreeable vulgarity. Even the atmosphere appeared to be thinning out. Parkinson and his visitor did not resort to words, merely for words’ sake.

Their interests were closest together, perhaps, in the field of political thought, or the political-historical. René’s political insight was startling; predictions of his in the field of foreign affairs, and the domestic scene as well, events almost invariably proved to be correct. His insight into the past was equally remarkable. The first predictions of solar eclipses appeared to the men of that time miraculous; and Parkinson almost to the same degree felt a dumb amazement at some of his friend’s foreknowledgement of events, and hardly less at the light he threw on past happenings. By now his “belief in” this gifted man was unshakeable. The species “friend” has no exact definitions and René Harding had no other complete friend such as was this one: he only had men who were friends in part. In a life, there is hardly ever more than one complete friend, and rarely that. At Oxford this friendship had begun. At Oxford or at Cambridge positions are taken up for life, ascendancies forever confirmed, and the failure to secure first place is a decision which is practically irreversible. There is no democracy in youth.