Self Condemned (29 page)

In the flank of the hotel, on its south side, was a drinking saloon. To placate the Methodists a saloon or a beer parlour was called a “beverage room” all over Canada. It did not pacify the Methodists, who would never be satisfied until Momaco was a hundred percent bootleg city: and in the war they saw their opportunity. — A dirty and generally drunken waiter would bring you beer, or, if he knew you weren’t a dick, bootleg rye or Scotch. If you were a “wine hound” you could have what in Canada is laughingly called wine.

Should you find it undesirable to move far from the front door and expose yourself to the saddening and depressing sensations produced by the streets and alleys of Momaco, you were obviously well placed to stand a siege. For the Hardings it was a siege.Their resistance was an epic of human endurance, and some day, René felt sure, would make Momaco famous.

The sense of the passage of time depended largely upon the recurrence of Sunday. You got lost in the week itself. — Monday was very distinct. You knew when the week
began
.

Mondaymorningishness was an unmistakable something that entered the Room as Bess came in at 10:30 with her sheaf of towels and sheets. She was swollen with a sense of accumulated wrongs — during the weekend all the insults of the week had had time to mobilize and organize inside her, in her lonely Room, and on Monday morning she discharged these humours as she passed from room to room.

Tuesday and Wednesday were sometimes a little difficult to identify. Thursday and Friday had a way of getting mixed up: and Thursday and Wednesday were a no man’s land in the centre of the week: it didn’t really matter which it was, and they were usually indistinguishable.

Friday has this advantage over Thursday, that it is unlucky.You can’t cut your nails. You can’t start on a journey: if you are one of those people who are lucky enough to be leaving Momaco, you have to restrain your impatience until Saturday. Something unpleasant is pretty sure to happen on Friday anyway (especially in Momaco) that reminds you what day it is you are passing through.

Saturday has a very definite function of its own among the days of the week. It is easy to identify — it is the last day as Monday is the first. Shopping is a more urgent matter, because of Sunday. It is your last chance until Monday to buy what you want. And as to Sunday, no one can mistake
that
. From the Gulf of Mexico to Hudson’s Bay everyone is in bed until noon, so it is only half a day. But it is the day of days, because you know you have lived a week more, and with luck, or ill-luck, will soon be treading another week — towards another Sunday.

The radio roars all day on Sunday. It vibrates with the tremulous thunder of the organ. From a million pulpits singsong voices assure us that war is a holy thing. It is a day of verbal bloodletting, of exhortations to homicide and quivering organ pipes. It is at once — cooped up in a hotel Room with a radio — an uncommonly noisy day, and a very blank one. It is a vacuum, full of a fierce and sanctimonious voice, hollow with bogus emotion, calling for blood, and another one, sweet and tender, promising love to the brave.
Why
you should be stridently homicidal on Sunday is so obviously because Christ would desire it, for when He talked about the “other cheek” He was only fooling, and He likes a good old Christian War just as much as any other Christian.

There is
no
voice telling people that this is a very great revolution rather than the stupid war every booby thinks it is — because it will afford all the nations an authentic
chance
(whether they take it or not, which is up to them) of escape from the unmentionable chaos which brought it about, that a more intelligent society
may
be in the making. One in which the men of creative capacity, instead of wasting ninety per cent of their lives wrestling with the obstructive inertia of the majority, will be freed for their creative tasks. — Instead of such voices as that, which would be far too real a thing to be tolerated on the highly respectable ether, there is just the old fustian. A loud voice saying nothing: the nihilistic screech of the pep-doctor — the platitudinous drone of the reverend gentleman in the god-business, assuring us that Jesus was a kind of Elite Guard, and God a sort of Super-Thor, and that we are headed for a Valhalla of mediocrity.

So Sunday is a good day to anchor your timetable to. It is a day that is a vacuum in more senses than one, because it is quite impossible to get any news on Sunday, or to find out what is going on.
Nothing
apparently is going on, in a world where nothing is more important than something, and nobody than somebody. A war is going on somewhere no doubt — our lovely boys are dying somewhere up in the ether waves, piloting their ships, hounded by Zeros in unequal fight, because some fool or knave prevented them having anything but “too little and too late.” But the children are not supposed to be disturbed on Sunday.We are the children — so all the news becomes emptily rosy.

But about seven o’clock Eastern war-time Jack Benny brings far more than comic relief. He brings a great gust of reality and heaven-sent respite from Godliness — and from verbal thunder of bulletins telling of battles that probably were never fought (or not that way). A salvo of wisecracks dispels the fog. We are back upon the earth again with Jack and Rochester, among things that matter to men, and things that are good for human consumption. Once more we are among things just as real as this war is — if we were ever allowed to know about it, or treat it as a real thing, rather than a dummy.

So the week wings by: really it is from Sunday to Sunday. From, and towards, that great blank empty End of every week. As the poet so justly sang in his melancholy youth:

From the Intense Inane to the Inane
Intense My soul took flight upon the wings of sense.
But very soon my soul flew back again
From the Inane Intense to the Intense Inane.

Sunday in Momaco, from x a.m. war-time to x p.m. wartime, was the Intense Inane, to which the soul flew back as to rest, after its flight across the other six days of the week, so replete with a meaningless intensity.

But the Hardings, placed as they were, were painfully reminded of another unit beside the week, namely the year. It was borne in upon them that there are fifty-two weeks in the year. Just as the week has a shape of sorts, so had for them the year. Christmas is to the year what Sunday is to the week.

But a year is a higher organism than a week. Its shape is more distinct. By looking out of the window you can see more or less where you have got in your weary road across the year, from Christmas to Christmas. Whereas it is no use looking out of the window to see what day of the week it is (always excepting Sunday).

As year succeeds year, marooned in Momaco, you become very conscious of the seasons, as if you were engaged in husbandry instead of being engaged in wasting your life — day by day, week by week, and year by year. Actually you can
see
the seasons, as these two people did, and watch them revolve with a painful slowness, if you have a window, and if that window is not of milled glass, as they are in the rooms where Japanese confine their political prisoners.

Not to be able to see out, thought René, must be truly fearful, when he read the interview with the American correspondent who had been exchanged for one of their nationals, after four months of solitary confinement: this man had told his interviewer that the first thing he noticed after his release — noticed with a thrill of delight — was that
doors had handles
.

René sighed. He looked over at the handle of his door.There was the handle — that delicious handle, signifying
freedom
. He sighed again. For
à quoi bon
? What was the use of having a handle to a door, if in fact there was nowhere to go outside the Room? If anywhere you could go outside was worse than stopping where you were? What was the use of living in a free country, as a free man, where doors had handles and windows had no bars, if that freedom was of no use to you — was freedom with a bar sinister, freedom with a great big catch in it somewhere? From the big bay window where the Hardings sat all day long and in the summer all the evening, the seasons made themselves visible in the backyards of Momaco. They waited for the so-called Squaws’ Winter which in Canada precedes the Indian Summer — for the feeble snowfall which has to take place before the false lovely gentle summertime of the Indian can come in and make believe for a week perhaps. After that in Momaco there was no fooling. The first blizzard hit them soon afterwards.

The backyards became a strange submerged version of themselves; with a deep soft icing of the angel cake variety all seemed fantasy of a sudden, its relation to what was underneath beautifully pathologic. Every branch or twig had on a furry coat of snow that swelled it out as a kitten’s hair puffs out its miniature limbs. Festoons and lianas of this souffléish substance of weightless young snow made a super Christmas card of what had a short while before been a piece of drab and brutal impressionism.

Icicles six feet long, and as thick as a man’s arm, hung from the eaves and gutters.The heat of the hot water pipes could some days scarcely be felt. Yet they knew that in fact they were giving forth a heat comparable to that of a Central American jungle. Below zero temperatures started when the cold came down from Hudson Bay and higher, and the Polar Sea walked right through the walls of the hotel as if it had been a radio wave and went clean through your bones. At 50 below zero, in a place by no means perfectly dry, like Momaco, with a sizable river running through the middle of it, it was as impossible to keep it out as radium, in the imperfectly heated apartment of the Blundell. It walked through your heart, it dissolved your kidney, it flashed down your marrow and made an icicle of your coccyx.

If in Momaco there was never any temptation to make use of your privilege of a free man, and stroll out upon the streets beyond the door of the Hotel, there was the need for exercise, and with eyes shut the Hardings would occasionally walk round the block. But when it got really cold there was something that competed even with Momaco itself to keep you indoors; if summer or autumn you were never tempted to remember “that you had a doorhandle,” even less in the winter did you desire to insist upon your quota of prisoners’ exercise.

From the hotel up to the main road was a matter of three blocks.To walk it when the wind was from the north or east, and when there was a wind, in this sub-zero weather, was a feat for anyone who was a stranger to such things. Your face would be wet with tears which would freeze upon the face, or the wind would catch the tears as they came over the rim of the eyelid and dash them on to your shoulder. Your ears would become cauliflower ears, and the drums would set up an ache, which would not leave you for some time.Your lips would crack. It was very severe indeed. But this was only when there was a wind. If the wind falls the glass does not fall, but you do not feel it much any longer, even at 30 below. In sunny weather, with no wind, 5 or 10 below is just pleasantly fresh. It is the wind that does it.

Bad as is the wind, in the periods of great cold, there is something even more disagreeable. That is the ice. It is very difficult not to slip: and people in Momaco often, walking too confidently along the street, break a leg or an arm. In general the Momaconians of the more prosperous — and as they believe more civilized — kind like to think that Momaco’s winter is a marked but not excessive falling away from civilized standards of warmth. So they often dress improperly in the winter.

All shop messengers or errand boys have ear flaps of fur after October, and could not go their rounds without them. They are as sure-footed as goats, but they are beaten by the ice. Then splinters of ice have a function, and one pierced a boy’s eye and blinded him outside the Blundell Hotel. So the ice is abnormally bad, whereas the snow forms an engagingly soft material to tread on. The snow is beautiful to look at and to walk on: but at Momaco, and of course farther north, it gets worse, there is a little too much of it. It goes on for too long, and it is the eyes that are probably the worst sufferers.

Blindness is very prevalent. You meet blind people everywhere, tapping along the edges of the sidewalks with their sticks. The number of people in Momaco who wear smoked glasses is surprisingly great.They get so used to wearing them in the winter, against the dazzle of the snow, that they are also very apt to wear them in the summer, against the dazzle of the sun. They become conscious of violent light in general. And the light is for some reason very violent. In the morning it seems to bang you in the face, as it glares in at the window. Canada is no land for those with delicate eyes.

There is perhaps something more than the ice, the glaring snow, and the pulverizing zero wind. That is the mud. René and his wife found, during the foul period of mud, such small sorties as in the summer they permitted themselves, impracticable. The telephone had to be resorted to. There is no spring in Momaco. There is a period of winds — milder than the winter ones, but very fierce and quite cold, which is said to come in March but which really comes in April. Everything arrives a month later than it is supposed to do. May is very violent, too. Off and on there is a great deal of wind in Momaco; not so much as in Chicago or Buffalo, where ropes along the sidewalks have to be provided for pedestrians at times, but still it is far windier than anywhere in Europe, except as you approach the Sahara. Unlike an ocean wind, it is charged with no pep. It is a violent annoyance: you are being pushed around by an element you do not respect.When it finds its highest expression is in the tornadoes of the central United States. But Canada east of the Rockies is part of that unstable system.

Suddenly in Momaco you get summer. The leaves all come out overnight. Agriculturally, between frost and frost, it is a summer of a hundred days. After that the cattle go back to the barns, and often the cereal farmer locks up his farm and goes south to California.

The summer is in two parts. There is the summer and then a super-summer. The latter is a heat wave, which is hotter than the Red Sea — only in Momaco you cannot console yourself with the thought that, being “east of Suez” there “ain’t no Ten Commandments.” There are Ten Commandments in Momaco, as in no other city in the world. It is the city of the Ten Commandments, all of which are so violently broken that they can never be forgotten, as they can be in a place where no one pays any particular attention to them.