Self Condemned (21 page)

His sister looked up, smiling.

“Helen, I have only begun to say what it is necessary to run through to answer the curious as to the
real
reason for my resignation. I should have to proceed next to another point: namely, how events in the present century
reflect back
, and cause the historian to tell the story of the nineteenth century rather differently. I should say,
very
differently! And as to the nineteenth-century economics! But all this
n’en finit plus
. Apart from anything else, no one would patiently listen to the lecture which it would be necessary to deliver, for full enlightenment. To find a half-dozen words in which to explain why I resorted to so drastic a step as resignation, is quite impossible. From such explanatory words as I think up for public consumption people conclude that I am laying claim to an inordinate ethical sensitivity. My motives of course involve nothing of the sort. But it is impossible to compress into a sentence or two my reason for resigning without creating this impression.”

“I can see, I think,” Helen told him, “how difficult all this is, René.”

“You have been very attentive, very kind. But you must, at the end of it, regard me as an abominable egoist keeping you screwed down in this summerhouse, while I harangue you.”

“Oh, René darling! ...”

“The fact is, I very much wanted to have one member of my family who saw clearly what my resignation was about.”

“
One
does!” she interrupted. “I have listened very carefully, René, and I believe I see already exactly what your problem is. It surprises me very much that this has not also been clear to other people, better informed than I am. My husband, for instance….”

René gave a short laugh like a cough. “It is because he understands so well that he appears so dense.
He
stands for the latest form of obscurantism.”

René sprang up and stretched, as he always did in such cases, as though to shake the concentration out of his body. That he should want to shake it out was evidence of the fact that he lived in two compartments. He shook off what was mental as soon as he was done with it and passed over into the animal playground of the mind — the sphere in which most people of course pass all their time. He was half-brother to Everyman.

He went over to the window, where he propped himself as before, observing the blasted heath. “What a glamorous outlook!” he said. “Is this hut supposed to represent life on earth, and is that the great open spaces of the
néant
?”

“Something like that,” Helen laughed, who had come over and was now standing beside him.

“I should have gone on with my disquisition,” René said, “but I do not know how long we have. It is rather breathless but let me shove in a further bit of elucidation if you can bear it. I should have explained to you that in a full statement I should be obliged to cite details likely to embarrass me. Events in the twentieth century regarded by me as unworthy of the historian’s notice (since they belong to that barbary which it is our duty to surmount), are thought of by many people as of supreme importance.A
complete
statement would merely start a row. Events of the last twenty years which Robert Kerridge looks upon as world shaking, would not look like that to me.And, of course, the pros and cons of my resignation would depend upon values which some allow, and some do not allow. It is really very complicated. In the
abstract
, my resignation looks thus and thus;
concretely
, it would look quite differently. So as not to get embroiled in all those hot issues which tear our world to pieces today, it is perhaps as well that my resignation should be accounted for abstractedly. There is something in favour of people talking nonsense about ‘a great moralist.’ Though, to add a last touch of confusion, I am a sort of moralist notwithstanding.”

Helen frowned and cried, “René! What a problem to set your poor little sister. But I will work it out in solitude. I will write to you when I have straightened things out. But I know, instinctively …”

“You intuit.”

“I suppose that’s it. I was saying that I am certain you are right. I know you better than anybody, and I know that what you have done is sensible and just.”

He gave her a quick hug, and said, “I have you on my side, Helen. I knew I should. I am so thankful that we were allowed the time to have our talk. But what do I see! Merciful heavens (as Lady Brown would say). There he is! There he comes!”

Along the opposite crest of the little ravine, there indeed he was — teeth, glass eyes, rubber neck, and all. For he was waving an arm at them as he pedalled. Helen waved back, in wifely salutation.

“You nearly hit me!” René gasped. “Do not get too hysterical at the sight of old rubberneck.”

“René! You must not call Robert old rubberneck!” Helen exhorted him, wagging a finger.

“How you can degrade yourself by biting that rubbery substance!” her brother hissed as he made for the door. “Hurry up! Be at the gate of the castle to greet your lord as he dismounts.”

“You go too far,” she complained, but did in fact hustle along, as though to reach the gate of the castle in time.

As René hastened forward to be present at the arrival of the Wicked Giant, he was startled by a soprano in the top register attaining to the shrillness of a steam whistle in the next-door house. Deafened by the shriek, he passed the kitchen window and there was the charlady’s face tilted back, observing him with the remote ethereal derision peculiar (he had supposed) to Mrs. Harradson, observing him in flight from the blast of the soprano. He realized that he had his fingers in his ears. He put his tongue out at her, and she vanished as if by magic. He stepped lightly and briskly into the house and Mrs. Huxtable, the Warwickshire charlady, emerged from the kitchen.... He promptly stuck his tongue out as if it were a reflex action. Mrs. Huxtable, as if knocked back into the kitchen with a sledgehammer blow, vanished: and a door, pivoting madly on its hinges, replaced her. It must be the country mind, he thought. She considered it quite in order to jeer at me in her gaze because I have my fingers in my ears, in order to bar ingress to the steam whistle of a neighbouring soprano: but if I reciprocate by protruding my tongue, this affects her galvanically. Like Mrs. Harradson, she fails to conceal her disrespect. Disrespect shown
by me
, knocks her out entirely.”

“What are you doing, René?” came a pant from just behind. “You are up to something I believe.”

“Incorrect!” he rapped back. “I was merely turning over in my mind how Mrs. Harradson would have reacted. She would have gone into violent action — scrubbing, washing, or merely scuttling. She would respond as a town-bred charlady. She would play up with all that was comic in her; and throw a fit.”

“I am sure I don’t know what you are talking about,” Helen told him crossly.

They were in the hall now, and they heard the tramp on the gravel outside of rubberneck. While they had been talking he had pushed his machine in at the gate, and leaning it against a tree, entered the house with routine
fracas
.

“Ah, Helen, I have news for you!” he gave forth in a snarling gentlemanly drawl. “Mrs. Pearson’s bitch has been delivered of one fine black and tan puppy and a lot of less interestingly marked little animals.”

“Has she indeed?” Helen showed interest.

“I bespoke the fine one, as being what you wanted.”

Kerridge knew he was observed, and that it had been divined that he was in fact a Wicked Giant, but was determined to stand his ground, on his credentials as a young clergyman addicted to a working-class bicycle. He swung slowly over, from side to side, drifting his feet a little, elephant fashion. Though the dental display was almost non-stop, he never laughed. He was a machine whose creator had forgotten to fix in a bark: or perhaps he had thought that the grin laid on most of the time made the ha-ha unnecessary. If the workmanship had this limitation, that there was a sluggishness and monotony in its reactions which made it smell of the
machine
; if the eyes behind the fixed spectacles were glassy, and if the feet seemed unnaturally heavy, his talk was as successful as a calculating machine. But of course this is how one would argue if one did not know that Kerridge was in truth a Wicked Giant, attempting to disguise his wickedness by invariably smiling to suggest bonhomie, and that the creatures of Fairyland were big, always lumbered, and mouthed their words.

René at all times treated him correctly, as a young clergyman who had married his sister. But his uneasiness sometimes amounted to horror. In René’s composition, the Preux caused him to feel that it was his sacred task to rescue Helen from the clutches of a supernatural monster. If his sister were not careful, she would find herself flying away some day, among the stars, to unearthly mountains. She would find herself in the blue mists of a world of rubbernecks.Top-booted and white-bearded giants moved about with an intoxicated gait, lifted their feet waveringly as though they did not know where to put them down. She would be taken to see them in their mildewed castles, bayed at by mournful dogs.

The longer René stopped at the Kerridges, the more powerful the illusion grew that Robert Kerridge was a supernatural impostor, that he was, not in fancy, but in cold reality, a Wicked Giant: happily he had never stopped more than a few days. Had his stay extended into as many weeks, the sensation would have become intolerable. It is quite likely as the time to go grew near, he would have killed Kerridge. As it was, on this second day, he was still in a playful region, the atmosphere of Fairyland not yet so thick as to madden him. There was still an even chance that this was merely a clergyman after all.

During lunch Kerridge announced that a housemaster at Rugby, Grattan-Brock by name, was coming to dinner. “I suppose I should have asked you first, René!” he heavily and archly minced. “But he is a great fan of yours. He knows
The
Secret History of World War II
by heart!”

“I don’t think that we should mislead our guest, Robert,”

Helen protested, looking very angry. “Dr. Grattan-Brock, far from being an admirer of René’s, has violently attacked him, and in my presence.”

There was a moment of silence, in which her husband looked with such sullen displeasure at Helen, that instinctively René gripped his knife, and looked, himself, perfectly ferocious.

“I think, Helen, you should not make such statements. You do not understand these things....”

“Oh, don’t I!” she said, laughing. “I know far more than you think! But what I am quite certain of, I am not deaf, is that Dr.

Grattan-Brock, at this table, called René a fascist, an impostor, a poor scholar, and — yes —
a cad
!”

A most delighted “ho-ho-ho” came from René, who was gazing with malicious enquiry at Kerridge.

“Dr. Grattan-Brock, however much he admires a book, does not dispense with criticism and analysis,” Robert Kerridge solemnly pointed out, frowning at an imaginary person hovering between his wife and her brother.

“Obviously he does not,” René said, frowning with an equal pomp. “Spare the rod and spoil the child is his motto. He lays into those he loves, hot and strong: and considers there is no better way of expressing his appreciation of an author than by jotting down in his diary, ‘The author of this ill-written book is,
par dessus le marché
, an utter cad.’ In view of the great esteem in which he holds me, I must anticipate tonight, I suppose, some pretty plain speaking.”

While this persiflage was in progress, Kerridge crumbled up his section of bread, while he eyed his wife with glances far more eloquent than any words. Helen sat with bowed head, but she told herself with a crusading fervour that she was not going to stand by while her dear brother was made a fool of, however bitterly Robert might reproach her! René had opened his heart to her that very day, and she saw how the land lay. There were more loyalties than one; and loyalty to a husband did not wipe out all others.

Tea they had by the fireside as it had grown unexpectedly cold. After tea Robert Kerridge drew his guest aside, and, with affected embarrassment, informed him that Mrs. Huxtable had threatened to give notice: that he would be terribly obliged if René would not put his tongue out at the charlady. She was a very strict Presbyterian.

“I like that!” René protested.“She was jeering at me because I had my fingers in my ears.”

“I have never known Mrs. Huxtable to jeer at anybody, René,” Kerridge said coldly.

“No? Put your fingers in your ears and see what happens!”

René’s tongue suddenly shot forth from between his bearded lips. “One way of resisting rudeness! If you put your fingers in your ears you will find this handy.” And again he stuck out his tongue, afterwards sauntering away from his round-eyed, pained-looking host, trying to decide whether the tongue was meant for him or not.

The housemaster’s arrival that evening was accompanied by much stamping about in the hall, the drawling bay of the Oxford Accent and the big-dog barking of the visitor. Dr. Grattan-Brock was only a moderately big man physically, however, though rather obesely stocky. He was one of that numerous class of more or less learned English men (and in this class may be included a few literate Americans too) who believe that they are Dr. Johnson. Their voices roll towards their interlocutor heavy carefully picked words, reminiscent of those which thundered in the small talk of the formidable Lexicographer. A bending of the brows will, at times, accompany these verbal discharges.

But something had happened to this shadow of the great eighteenth-century doctor. Dr. Grattan-Brock had not come under the spell of Marx, no housemaster could do that. He might be a Morley-like liberal, but nothing stronger. But what
had
happened was that Dr. Grattan-Brock had been very active during the Spanish Civil War, and events leading up to it. He had shown himself
outstandingly
liberal. He had met numbers of fellow travelling intellectuals (like Kerridge) and even CP Party men. From these frequentations he had acquired a harshness wholly twentieth-century. This he had incorporated, or worked into, the Johnsonian ponderosity. But some subjects inflamed him and brought back those grand days he had spent in Barcelona, and then the ponderosity began to pound and snarl. As it was, he would go along nicely, no-sirring and yes-sirring you for a long time, until suddenly he would become the soap-boxer.