Self Condemned (27 page)
But such actions, no matter how greatly the circumstances might differ, lead to an estrangement from the norm of life. An individual who has repudiated publicly the compromise of normal living must thereafter be careful never to use compromise, or half-compromise, under whatever circumstances.
Sometimes rolling upon the floor of the stateroom, as he lost his balance, at the severest of the sub-polar storm, he analysed all of this down to the bedrock. His humiliation had been so great, he had at one point with difficulty restrained himself from confessing to the stricken Hester.
He emerged from those spasms of self-reproach outwardly unchanged. His behaviour to the Doctors was in no way modified when he met them on the decks or elsewhere.
The decks were crowded as they approached Quebec. Quebec, the gateway not so much to Canada as to the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. Among the chain of cities upon this riverine highway, the American outnumber the Canadian, and of course outclass them, commercially. This magnificent rock, more impressive than Gibraltar, is a catholic citadel, the importance of which was appreciated by René. As he stared at it, he did not see a colonial battle in the eighteenth century between a handful of French and English troops, he saw instead a magnificent cardinal, assisted by a herd of clerics, celebrating mass, in the cathedral. He saw the French population multiplying, the English dwindling, and this rock symbolizing Catholic power, rather than anything pettily national.
The President of Rome University (and how clownish a Rome that was) came up and remarked, “Well, Professor, you are looking at Quebec, and I imagine you are thinking of an Englishman called Wolfe …!”
“You are wrong, Doctor,” René answered, “the military exploits of my countrymen, past or present, do not preoccupy me to that extent.”
This was too much for Dr. Abbott, his sides began to quiver, René perceived he was about to relish this hugely in his characteristic fashion, as the latest drollery, of that “caution,” his old buddy, the Chevalier René Harding. He fixed the Doctor with an eye so forbidding that his comradely orgy was nipped in the bud. — It would be a mistake to say that René’s manners had suffered no change whatever, towards his academic fellow passengers.There had to be a certain severity which was not there before. Dr. Lincoln Abbott he regarded as, in part, a phantom. Dr. Lincoln Abbott was for him, above all, an historic figure: for was it not the Doctor who had been the opposite member (or whatever the actors call it) to that pitiable fool the bearded professor with the Legion of Honour stuck in his dinner jacket? The comic playlet staged in the dining saloon of the
Empress of Labrador
was something of such importance to him that the “Doctor” in that farce had for him a special immortality. Once or twice, on the last day of the voyage, Dr. Lincoln Abbott had found himself being stared at with such intensity that it made him feel hot under the collar. Had he put his tie on inside out, had he forgotten to shave his upper lip, or was it BO? The first time he encountered this scrutiny, Dr. Abbott hastened to his cabin, and examined himself carefully, from head to foot, removed his jacket and sniffed at his armpits, but was unable to discover anything amiss.
The passport business, and then the problems with the vast amount of luggage they had with them — passing the customs on the ship and arranging for the safe disembarkation of the hand luggage — all this fully preoccupied everybody as they approached Quebec.All that René did by way of farewell to the Doctors was a curt nod in the Customs Shed. But Dr. Lincoln Abbott was not going to let him off so easily as that. He rushed at him, seized his hand, which he subjected to an hysterical pressure, reminded him that he had promised to come to Arkansas and lecture, and a half-dozen other things, while Mrs. President Abbott came round and overwhelmed the half-dead Hester with her solicitations and effusiveness. At last they shook off these good people and succeeded in getting on the track of their porters.
On landing two or three porters seized their hand luggage. René tried a little French on them, but as they were mostly Indians they were not interested. All they could speak was very limited French Canadian, which is anything but identical with French.The Hardings kept losing these people, and finding them again with intense relief; but at last they were in a cab and being driven through the old city at the foot of the rock, which was not in any way noticeable. There is the French hand in a good deal of the buildings but on the whole Quebec is a cold city, which is natural enough seeing that it is under ice and snow for half the year. They spent the night there, but René was disappointed at finding so little that was truly French. The next morning, René rather stern, Hester still rather seasick, they left in the train for Montreal — but not to stop in that unusually fine city, but to press on to Momaco.
T
he Room, in the Hotel Blundell, was twenty-five feet by twelve about. It was no cell. It was lit by six windows: three composed a bay, in which well-lit area they spent most of their time — René sat at one side of the bay, writing upon his knee on a large scribbling pad. Hester sat at the other side, reading or knitting or sleeping.
For the first year she had sat upon a piece of monumental hotel junk, a bluish sofa. But it secreted bedbugs, the summer heat disclosed, as it caused one occasionally to walk upon one of its dirty velvet arms.
Once the identity of the bug had been established, and before it moved from the velvet structure onto the human body, René acted. Overcoming loud protests from the management, who insisted that the bugs were innocent tree insects, the sofa was expelled. Next Hester sat in a large blue velvet armchair. It was closely related to the sofa, but no bugs had shown up. Lastly, they were furnished with a fairly new and bugless settee.
It was René’s habit to place an upended suitcase upon a high chair and drape it with a blanket. He stood this between his wife and himself, so blotting her out while he wrote or read. He could still see, over the crest of this stockade, a movement of soft ash-gold English hair, among which moved sometimes a scratching crimson fingernail.This minimum of privacy, this substitute for a book-lined study, was all he had for three years and three months — to date it from the sailing of the
Empress of Labrador
from Southampton.
In summer René lowered the centre blind to shut out the glare. At present it was December, and another glare, that of the Canadian snow, filled the Room with its chilly radiation. There was a small stack of books upon a chair to the left of him; he wrote in silence, hour after hour, dropping each page, as it was completed, into a deep, wooden tray on the floor at his side.
They never left this Room, these two people, except to shop at the corner of the block. They were as isolated as are the men of the police posts on Coronation Gulf or Baffin Bay. They were surrounded by a coldness as great as that of the ice pack; but this was a human pack upon the edge of which they lived. They had practically no social contacts whatever. They were hermits in this horrid place. They were pioneers in this kind of cold, in this new sort of human refrigeration; and no equivalent of a central heat system had, of course, as yet been developed for the human nature in question. They just took it, year after year, and like backwoodsmen (however unwilling) they had become hardened to the icy atmosphere. They had grown used to communicating only with themselves; to being friendless, in an inhuman void.
The Room, as mentioned above, was twenty-five feet by twelve about, but six of these, out of the length, you have to deduct for bathroom and kitchenette. Those figures still in no way express the size, because it was immense. Two human beings had been almost forcibly bottled up in it for a thousand years.
In the Rip van Winkle existence of René and Hester — of suspended existence so that they might as well have been asleep — a thousand years is the same as one tick of the clock. It was a dense, interminable, painful vibration, this great whirring, age-long, thunderous
Tick
. Bloat therefore the minutes into years, express its months as geological periods, in order to arrive at the correct chronology of this too-long-lived-in unit of space, this one dully aching throb of time.
A prison has a smell, as distinct as that of a hospital with its reek of ether. Incarceration has its gases, those of a place where people are battened down and locked up, year after year. There is a wrong sort of hotel; one dedicated to the care of guests who have been deprived of their freedom, and have been kidnapped into solitude and forced inertia. — The Hotel Blundell was the wrong sort of hotel. It was just a hotel, it was not a prison, but for the Hardings, husband and wife, it stank of exile and penury and confinement.
Their never-ending disappointments, in the battle to get work — wild efforts to liberate themselves, ghastly repulses — had made of this hotel Room no more personal than a railway carriage, something as personal as a suit of clothes.As time passed, it had become a museum of misery. There were drawers packed with letters, each of which once had represented a towering hope of escape. Each effort had resulted in their being thrown back with a bang into this futility.
Number 27A, the number of the apartment (for apartment was the correct term for it), was consequently a miniature shadow, anchored upon another plane, of the great reality, which they had willy-nilly built up about them in their loneliness. They must vegetate, violent and morose — sometimes blissfully drunken, sometimes with no money for drink — within these four walls, in this identical daily scene — from breakfast until the time came to tear down the Murphy bed, to pant and sweat in the night temperatures kicked up by the radiators — until the war’s end or the world’s end was it? Until they had died or had become different people and the world that they had left whad changed its identity too, or died as they had died. This was the great curse of exile — reinforced by the rigours of the times — as experienced upon such harsh terms as had fallen to their lot. Then they hid things from each other; as when one morning she saw a report of the suicide of Stefan Zweig, refugee novelist. He and his wife had killed themselves in their apartment at Rio. — To begin life again, was Zweig’s reported explanation, once the war was ended, would demand a greater effort than he felt he would be capable of making: he preferred to die and the wife who had shared with him the bitter pangs of exile accompanied him, with that austere and robust fidelity of the Jewish woman to her mate.
But as she stared and brooded over this ugly news item, during a laconic breakfast — the sun with a great display of geniality glittering over the frosty backyards — Hester recalled how earlier in the week she had praised electricity as against gas, for fixing food and as a heating agent. René had given his gothic headpiece a rebutting shake.The substitution of electricity for gas, he had objected, removed from those who were tired of life one of the only not-too-brutal modes of making one’s exit from it: one available to anybody, costing nothing, requiring no specialist technique. A foolproof key to the
néant
. Just turn on the tap and lie down. — So she stopped herself from exclaiming about this tragedy, remarking instead that the egg ration in England was at present one a month.
But this roused him to controversy. “I’d rather have that one egg and be in England …”
“Oh yes — you’d probably find it was a bad one when you got it!” she told him. There was no chance of their getting back to England: she discouraged regrets.
“All right, all right! I’d rather have that one rotten egg …!”
She gave in with a big sigh, no longer denying her nostalgia.
“I too, René! — I’d give all the eggs in Momaco for half an hour in London!”
However, ten minutes later her husband came across the Zweig report. He exclaimed “ha!” as he glanced through it and then he passed it over to her.
For the class of things they hid from each other was not identical. René did not picture Hester with her head in a gas oven. His Hester was strongly prejudiced against death. What
he
concealed from her was rather newspaper announcements of appointments to academic posts, even of a quite minor order. He hurriedly shuffled out of sight anything with a hint in it of horridness towards himself: such as when a local columnist referred to the presence among us “of a certain historian for whom history ended at the Repeal of the Corn Laws.”
“Zweig,” said René, tapping the paper with his finger, “put down his act to his own incompetence, and to the future not the present.”
“So I noticed.” Her anger broke up into her face, giving her suddenly the mask of a tricoteuse, “I would like to rub their damned noses in that sort of thing,” she exclaimed.
“Where’s the use? It’s human nature.”
“It’s like
animals
! ... Human nature!”
They took up their respective roles at once. He became austerely watchful that no missile should get past which he regarded as irrational, and therefore unlikely to find its mark and kill its man. Thus it was no use calling people “animals.”
Just as well say they had hair in their crutches and armpits, and discharged the waste products of their nutritive system. “We are animals,” René shrugged. “Besides, he was just bored probably. I expect it was that.”
Hester shook her head. “Don’t you believe it! How about Toller. How about …”
“That’s right enough … It’s pretty bloody for a German-speaking and German-writing man.”
“Pretty awful,” Hester retorted, “for any temporarily displaced person. Among people who pay lip service to ‘culture’ as they call it — to the objects of this war, but …”
“Oh well,” he interrupted her, “the devil takes the hindmost everywhere. Hitler had kicked him down to the bottom of the class. So the devil got him. You can’t expect a lot of Portuguese mulattos …”
“Nor Canadians for that matter!”
René laughed. “Ah, he had never had the misfortune to encounter them …!”
