Self Condemned (39 page)

In order to mark the occasion, Furber offered him a cigar, which he refused. Dragging his long legs, languidly and with elegance, like a sun-doped stalk, Furber then led him back again into the library.

When friends came to see him — “friends” in contrast to someone in his pay — they were led laughing into the study. René would probably be sitting on a ladder doing what he was paid to do; pushing the books about, attempting to get them into homogeneous groups. Usually no notice was taken of him, although no doubt when they reached the study, it would be explained who he was. Once or twice one of these people apparently wanted to say they had met him, and he was introduced. This was what was disagreeable, not the times when, gaily laughing, they passed into the study. These persons were almost invariably young; Mr. Furber seemed to know no one of his own age. René judged that they were young intellectuals of the better sort, i.e. the less impoverished, or possibly young men at the university. It was unlikely that they were rich, for Momaco, though wealthy, was so primitive a place that Furber probably was the only man of wealth upon the hill who knew the difference between Pericles and Petronius. So the study was the place where he was called Cedric, where he instinctively went with a “friend,” and where René was not allowed to penetrate. To be treated like a man who had come to mend the clock would not have mattered to René, had it not been for the ordeal on the wooden chair, with so much harsh American daylight. For he felt that it was not intentional.

His patron’s father had been “one of the richest men in Canada.” There are thousands of such, but he, undeniably, was a biggish nickel man. For this sensitive bearded flower of his loins, this was to be born in the purple. He had inherited, along with his comfortable fortune, the feeling of the gulf between really big dough, and such money as René could ever hope to make: scarcely enough to keep one’s underclothes clean. Also there was the “hired man” superstition of the American. You never drank, smoked, exchanged stories, unbent with your “hired man” — whether you hired him at twenty thousand bucks a year, or thirty cents an hour.

As to drinking, Furber never did that. He smoked: but even when he inserted a medicated camphorized cork-tipped “Kool” between his bearded lips, and ejected the smoke through his heavy goatish nostrils, it seemed paradoxically
masculine
: René registered surprise. For Furber, a rich lonely bachelor of forty, was very old-maidish and strict. He was dreadfully fussy about untidiness. It was unlikely that his epicene instincts found expression in any practical way, though it was hardly possible that he was unaware of their presence. The big lips under his beard were dreamy and large and a little childlike, his big brown eyes were bovine but intelligent. He knew to what “tribe” he belonged, but probably did not practise the rites of the tribe. He liked watching.

In some ways he was considerate. Once or twice he had enquired how René was getting on, and when René answered by a grimace, he took five twenty-dollar bills out of his pocket, and pushed them across the office table.

“Here, put this in your pocket. Don’t mind taking it. I know the jam you are in here in Canada. When all this is over, pay me back if you prefer to have it that way. The war won’t last forever, will it!”

“I don’t know. — Thank you. That will do a lot and I will take it.”

“Tell me if you ever need anything. I will do anything I can.”

There are few rich men who, unasked, help a man poorer than themselves.As he sat there upon the numbing wood, the cold hard light from the large curtainless window glaring in his eyes, and gazed at the bearded sphinx lying back in the leather office chair, René appreciated that actually this strange creature was
kind
. He was almost startled with all the inhuman ritual of the American rich automatically adopted by this barbarous snob, yet Cedric Furber had the generosity of the poor. How was this possible?

Probably a good heart. René thought better of him (one’s opinion cannot but develop a favourable upward movement when a man gives you a hundred bucks if you have nothing). He even began to believe that he had found somebody in Canada who liked him. He kind of liked this inhuman old maid, too.

“How hard it is to experience gratitude!” René sighed one day, after Cedric Furber had paid them one of his rare and patronizing little visits, at the Hotel Blundell. They had just enough tea to last them until the day after the next: but just enough by means of their painfully elaborated system of one muslin bag between them. The bags, prepared by Hester, were the size of a large thimble.

Furber had surprised them as the first cups were being poured out. Naturally they were compelled to press him to have some.

Graciously — with his usual bashful graciousness, in Hester’s presence — and probably considering it the proper thing to do, so as to
ménager
the touchiness of the poor — he consented.

“Oh
good
!” she exclaimed, so loud and forcibly that Furber started. And she sprang up to fetch the next day’s tea bags.

“I don’t usually take it …” he said.

As a great condescension and particular treat for them he would partake of a cup.

“Well —
just to please us
!” she hissed.

He blinked, and stared owlishly at her. Hester had ways of expressing her gratitude and pleasure that were at times as startling as at times they were well meant.

So the next day, as they had no money until (probably!) the following morning, they had no tea. And tea was the one thing they found it was extremely difficult to do without.

“How
difficult
it is to be properly grateful sometimes!” René mused again, shortly after Furber had sidled and wriggled his great height out of the door, coquettishly responding to their duet of crashing
Goodbyes
.

“Why be grateful?” Hester enquired.

“Just a debt,” René said. “One owes gratitude, as one owes money.”

“What is gratitude?”

“A certain
quantity
,” he answered, “chalked up in the mind, as belonging to somebody else.”

“Quantity of what?” she insisted.

“Of whatever one happens to have to give. — One’s life, for certain things. A spoonful of goodwill for others.”

Hester frowned crossly.

“Well,” she said, “understand this. However many dimes a spook of that kind hands me, he doesn’t become real. — He only gives it to pass himself off as a real person. He kind of half-likes you because you play ball.”

René laughed.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll keep up my intercourse all the same with the spirit world. He is gentle and a little spookish isn’t he? I don’t mind him. He can’t help believing he’s the Duke of Kent.”

“I would prefer the real thing,” she answered, yawning.

“You are such a stickler for the real. I prefer these fantastic shadows on the walls of the cave.”

She laughed and got up, as their squirrel was looking at her with one large pop-eye through the window, his head, like a neolithic axe-head, pressed against the glass, standing on his hind legs.

“To hell with Furber. Stupid great hairy pansy snob!”

“Well, I cannot agree. You can experience gratitude for that stupid great hairy pansy snob. I can only feel gratitude to people very different from that.”

The squirrel hissed impatiently.

“My darling, no nuts! No tea! We are like you but we have not your sex appeal.”

The squirrel retired into the tree, hanging upside down like a bat, one eye fixed upon her, as she placed a half a Dad’s cookie on the window-sill.

Like Lord Herbert, only with far less reason, Furber took his surroundings very seriously. He was as solemn a Momaconian as anyone: going to all the hundreds of committee meetings which gave to every microscopic local intellectual a sensation of importance every day of the week. To articles in Momaco, or Ottawa or Toronto papers, or in reviews such as
Midweek
(of Momaco) or
Saturday Night
(of Toronto) he attached as great importance as if they had appeared in the
New York Times
, in
The
New Statesman
or
La Nouvelle Revue Française
. He had no sense of proportion at all, and spoke of the new poems of some lady friend of local note as though she were Paul Valèry or Mr. Eliot.

The economics of the two people exiled in a Room are of the importance that economics always possess where human life is suspended above the gutter by something as gossamer-like as the beard of Mr. Furber, or as fabulous as an exceptionally good second-hand bookseller in Momaco. René also wrote fairy stories in French for a Montreal Magazine, and political articles for the
Momaco Gazette-Herald
. But Mr. Furber — odd as this would sound to anyone acquainted with him — was the most solid thing upon the Hardings’ economic horizon. And that was why René was obliged prematurely to remove his sling and bandages.

If he had
not
done this, and had presented himself to Furber with one of his arms out of action, Furber would have insisted upon his not resuming his duties (such as they were) at the Library (such as it was). His “job” would have been endangered, or this was what he felt, he would have received no money. He now, after a considerable walk in the snow, reached the entrance to the Library: he rang, and with unexpected promptitude Furber came to the door in response to the bell. His large round brown eyes opened themselves in what was plainly a feigned surprise. “Well! This is an unexpected pleasure!” he said.

“Indeed?” René replied with a foreboding of something unpleasant. They passed from the small hallway into the Library, and there, at the foot of a ladder, stood a young man surrounded by books, scattered in all directions upon the floor.

“Since you did not ring up again — how long ago was it, ten days? — I supposed that the arm was giving trouble. Things were getting a little chaotic here, and I thought I would try out a young man who is waiting to take up a post in Ottawa. It really
was
rather urgent.” He gazed around the Library.

René kept his eyes on the ground and did not speak. He had become very pale. Furber noticed the change.

“Come,” he said, “let us go into the office, and see what can be done.”

The new “librarian” had almost at once retired into the study, or private sitting room, it would be better to call it, reserved for intimates or social equals. René followed Mr. Furber into the office, and sat down upon one of the two hard chairs. Then he spoke.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I appear to have been responsible for a muddle — I was unable to tell you a week ago — it was a week ago I telephoned — the exact day on which I could remove the bandages, and so on. But I was pretty sure I should be all right within a week, and that was what I said. That was stupid of me. I should …”

“Not at all, I should have communicated with you. But I thought you would have shown some sign of life if there was any chance of your being able to turn up so soon.”

“Yes, I ought to have telephoned,” René persisted. “As it is”

— he looked up with a half-smile, and an ironic glitter in his Mongol tilted eyes — “I have lost my job.”

“No. I hope not. Just for the present I must stick to my arrangements with this youngster” (and “don’t you have to stick to your arrangements with me?” René inwardly countered) “but a little later on, I hope, we shall go on with our work.”

René gazed up into the hard, flat, American sky, and his eyes began to water.

“On the other hand, Harding, if you are hipped … if you are in any money difficulty …”

“That
of course
I am. So long as the exchanges are shut down, and I have no appointment, I must be that,” René said. Furber always appeared to have several hundred dollars in his notecase, and he now put down on the table three twenty-dollar bills. “As I have said before, pay me back some day, in the piping times of peace. Meanwhile please tell me, at any time, if you are in a jam.”

René duly thanked him, but he left a few minutes later. As he went out into the snow, down the steps which led to the library, and down the magic hill which so oddly stuck up above Momaco, he saw in front of him something like a large black hole in the landscape whichever way he turned his head. It was as though his vision were in some way affected. He marched back to the hotel, or, as the snow in places had not been cleared away, it was rather a martial trudge, and his head kept up a feverish hammering. When he reached the Room, and laconically announced the news, Hester burst into angry tears. But soon she wiped her eyes and expressed her feelings on the subject of “the double-faced, elongated pansy man, the dollar seigneur who stinks of culture as some people do of camphor.” She borrowed her expletives from René, recombining them, and altering them with half-humorous feminine venom.

“He is a worm,” agreed René, “but he is a worm with a great big pansy heart. Sixty berries are not to be sniffed at.”

“What is the use of that?” Hester protested. “Such doles, uncertain doles, are not going to keep us alive. Are they?”

“No.”

“How are we going to live now?”

“That we must see,” he said, frowning.

They neither of them felt that the tea they then had, a little early for them, was a strong enough drug to shift their immense depression. They both were brooding, when Affie made her appearance, and got to work on their tea cups. Obviously she had been listening to Hester’s outburst, for she made some rather disparaging remarks about fairies. She also foretold a sudden change of fortune for the Hardings. There was a number of small black specks in Hester’s cup; this was
money
. — After having revived them, as she thought, with promises of gold, she gossiped about their immediate neighbours. The woman in 21A, for instance, who had gone away to have a baby three months before, was her first subject. Some weeks before the time had come for her to be confined her husband had vanished.This, it appeared, was a by no means uncommon occurrence. The woman, however, could not do otherwise than enter the nursing home, when advised by her doctor to do so. She had the child: so far so good. But that was three months ago, and the nursing home had refused to allow her to leave until their fees were paid. She was a prisoner. Meanwhile the child was growing into a fine big boy. Attempts to trace the husband were in vain. But only that afternoon the mother-in-law had put in an appearance, settled the bill, and the young woman and her child were back in No 21A. In a month or so’s time, all the expense over, the husband would no doubt return. Such was the general rule in Momaco. She was a good-looking young woman: Affie felt sure he would come back.