Self Condemned (51 page)
So, at this period, suppressions were always involved, often resulting in muscular anomalies in his mobile face; he did not say anything more than politely he was supposed to say. But his face had the most extraordinary expressions sometimes, ranging from snarling smiles to a fakir-like ferocity.
W
eekly, until the summer, René wrote a war commentary for the
Momaco Gazette-Herald
. He introduced into the column no controversial matter whatever. Objective judgments, with regard to the progress of the war; opinions as to the probable outcome of moves made by either side; explanations of what each move signified from the standpoint of military strategy — there was nothing more provocative than that. If the political issues were dealt with, only acceptable material was employed. At the end of the half-year his column had come to be greatly valued, and not only in Momaco. Those who had been responsible for his securing this job had nothing to reproach themselves with, their judgment had been sound, and their cordiality began to take deeper root.
In the first week in August, the Hardings went to a summer camp, about forty miles to the north of Momaco. There were a number of small lakes in the Bush, and at several places the Momacoans had built huts and arranged centres for the hire of canoes.What the seaside is for the English these lake-lands are for the Momacoans. The English Canadians and the Peasoups were rigidly separated, the English having the best sites.
René, in the interests of economy, selected a place where the English and French camping grounds almost met. The English, while paddling too far eastward, might occasionally catch sight of a brown-skinned Peasoup disporting himself in the water; or a canoe-full of little inky-haired Peasoups might paddle past a Nordic Blond sunning himself in front of his hut (reading some Nordic literature, like
Forever Amber
, or a Western story). They would gaze at one another across the glassy water with racial disapproval.
This position, so near the Peasoups, was naturally inexpensive. But it had other disadvantages besides the inconvenience of catching sight of a few Peasoups. As luck would have it, the campsite René had chosen was occasionally visited by what the border people of the U.S. know as “the Canadian Fly.” However, they had a few days of blissful silence, of fir-scented lakes, of plunges into icy waters by moonlight. Hester was almost happy.
“How lovely this is!” she exclaimed. “Before the Canadians came I think I might have quite liked Canada.” To which René answered,“You mean
before the English came
.” For the first time for months she could be seen throwing her head back and laughing. She bathed continually, she did some bird watching; one night, at their starry evening meal, she got a little tipsy. And then she was bitten — or is it stung? Whatever the black fly does she was bitten or stung. Within twenty-four hours Hester was a mass of bites, unable to sleep or eat. René, whose bites were less severe, took her back with the utmost despatch to Momaco, where she lay for a week or more in a high fever. René was not well himself, and he listened morosely to Hester’s ravings. Canada was the subject throughout — “Godforsaken icebox, heavenly summers presided over by the black fly….
Please
, René,
never
let us leave this beautiful country … you won’t, will you? I could never forgive you if you did so!”
The McKenzies had had their holiday in July, a trip into Vermont in preference to the fly-blown joys of little Bush lakes. Laura came over at once, when she heard what had occurred. She enrolled a young Canadian friend of hers, Alice Price, and the two of them fulfilled all the functions of nurse, bellhop, entertainer. They shopped, they rubbed in ointments, they prattled, they cooked, they administered ice packs, gave cold spongings; and last but not least enabled René to concentrate upon his own bites. In Hester’s case there was a poisoned mind enormously complicating the problem of a poisoned body. The amount of bitter vilification of Canada that Alice Price was obliged to listen to would have caused a more chauvinistic young woman to depart, her eyes flashing angrily, quite early in the proceedings. But Alice was a second-generation Canadian, with an English father, and had listened to diatribes hardly less vitriolic from her own parents.
As the fever abated, and Hester emerged from the torment, able once more to converse with restraint, the two young women undertook a sort of occupational therapy, trying to persuade her to knit or do crosswords. Then they entertained her with gossip of the Hill, of the university, of the city at large; and Laura would read her bits of letters from England. They did everything that was possible to ease her back, expeditiously, into normal life once more, and their ministrations were responsible, René believed, for preserving Hester’s sanity intact, and sparing them all from an
open
breakdown. For a breakdown of health existed all the time, needless to say, and Hester, as much as her husband, was not more than fifty percent normal. At the time of the execution of Mr. Martin she had gone about muttering to herself. They had hastened the process of hanging Mr. Martin by the neck and dropping him into the earth, as if it were hardly decent for him to continue to breathe. The proceedings shocked Hester profoundly. She dreamed frequently of the doll-like face of Affie, as they had seen it in the mortician’s. Several times, in conversation with René, she insisted that Mr. Martin was not an Englishman. On the actual day of the execution, she was very nervous, and on one occasion when the maid (who supposed that they were out) entered unexpectedly, Hester stifled a scream, and, springing up, rushed into the bedroom — there, a few minutes later, René found her convulsively weeping, and it was a long time before she quieted down.
René’s reactions to the trial, of course, were of a very different character from hers. Actually he went to the courthouse on two occasions, and had a good view of Mr. Martin in the dock. He looked a very wizened bit of spotless respectability, in his striped flannel suit. He treated the whole proceedings exactly as he had the use of the word “bitch” in addressing himself to a lady. His eyes remained hooded, and the skin of his face was of the same faded pink as before. He answered the counsel for the prosecution as if that gentleman had been a janitor, accusing him of some misdemeanour on the principle that
attack is the
best defence
. Obviously the janitor, or janitor-like person, had realized that he was about to be denounced by Mr. Martin, and was forestalling Mr. Martin’s attack by shooting at him a series of questions designed to cover him with obloquy. Mr. Martin, with the faintest of sneers, in a voice as thin as paper, answered him as though it were really beneath his dignity to have any truck with such a fellow. Once or twice he burst into derisive laughter — but laughter that was so noiseless and polite that it could hardly offend very deeply. If the judge asked him a question, Mr. Martin turned towards him as one gentleman to another, both of them above the melee of the Court, rather amused at the extravagances of those taking part.
Once René saw the prisoner catch sight of an old acquaintance in the public benches, and raise his hand with a gentlemanly restraint, his slight smile, with a faint amusement in it, suggesting as clearly as possible that here were two friends who found themselves both as spectators of a very curious, and somewhat degrading, spectacle. — Asked why he had struck down the manageress, Mrs. McAffie, he became, for him, rather violently indignant. “If I had been doing what he accuses me of, the fireman could not have seen me, because the passage was full of smoke. I had my handkerchief over my nose and mouth on the only occasion when, with great difficulty, I returned to my apartment. It was impossible that any fireman could have been farther along the passage than my apartment, as this fireman pretends that he was. The fellow must be suffering from some delusion, or else he is one of those people who enjoy seeing their names in the newspaper.” When confronted with the elongated cosh, which he agreed was his, and asked how it came about that there was human blood and human hair upon it, and that the hair was that of Mrs. McAffie, he simply replied that the police had stuck the hair there, in order to build up a case of homicide, so that their charge of arson would appear more probable — if anything could make that probable.
René got the impression that this little Englishman, whose god was Respectability, was playing the whole time for the benefit of his old friends and drinking companions, and was not seriously concerned with defending himself. He probably knew that there was no escape, but he wished to leave the scene the upright, cool and collected gentleman they all knew so well,
visibly
incapable of the crimes of which he was so absurdly accused.
From any standpoint, René’s existence at this time had become anything but identical with that of Hester. So many of the plans of action which suggested themselves to him met with bitter opposition, or were treated with disagreeable levity when communicated to his wife, that he ceased to communicate them. Whatever he might plan assumed a continued residence on that side of the Atlantic — this was quite sufficient to cause her to feel no interest, and to react hostilely. Up to the period of the fire he had informed her, from day to day, of everything he was doing, or intending to do. As castaways upon Momaco they had lived together, in an idyllic communion in which it was unthinkable that they should hide anything from one another. Now he would consult her upon nothing of serious moment. So they went back to a regime which had obtained for some years before his resignation of his professorship. At that time, aware that she would violently disapprove of the “quixotic” course that he was adopting (for from the first he knew that his revolutionary principles regarding the writing of history must lead to a dangerous showdown with those responsible for him), he had maintained a stern, and it had at times appeared a brutal, silence. Hester was no “intellectual,” in any case, and he had never attempted to initiate her into the mysteries of his new theory of history. During the years of their semi-animal existence in the Hotel Blundell all that had been changed.
But, apart from anything else, now he was mobilizing himself for new efforts — he was projecting a new volume, dealing this time not with contemporary history, “secret” or otherwise, but with an even more radical analysis of what we call “history.” This project he did not even mention to her. He just spoke of his “work,” when necessary. There was a third room in their present apartment, and this he used as a study. He would say, “Well, I must get to work,” as he made his way towards it, and the assumption was that he was going to work in connection with his weekly column in the
Gazette-Herald
. Before long it must have been apparent that he was engaged upon other work than just that. As he did not mention what is was, Hester knew that it was something she would regard with aversion; and she never asked him anything about it. Finally, he kept the door of the small room locked, “to keep out the maid,” but this also kept out Hester.
If René had now returned to a compartmenting of their married life, to some extent, such as he had practised in the crisis period in England, she too took a step backward in one little matter. He noticed that the change he received when he gave her a few dollars for housekeeping was not very accurate. Since he needed as much as possible of any money not employed in mere living, to buy books (in some cases his own books, a few of which he had re-bought from the second-hand bookseller) he was obliged to stop this leakage. Nor could he guess what Hester needed money for, beyond pin money. The dress situation was not acute. She had brought a good number of garments with her to Canada. These had been rehabilitated, since he had come in possession of money again, and two new dresses had been purchased. Nevertheless, there was increasing evidence that Hester was bent on amassing a little money. He began watching her, as in the old days. But now she knew she was being watched.
T
he black fly episode was responsible for cementing the friendship of Laura McKenzie and of Hester. The extraordinary kindness shown by Laura was so much appreciated that Hester’s weekly letter to Susan compared her to the Lady of the Lamp. When entirely recovered and able once more to pay visits, and accept invitations to tea, she approached Laura like an affectionate dog. It was Laura herself who made the comparison with a dog.
“She reminds me of a sickly dog with big sentimental eyes, dumbly thanking one for a good turn one has done him,” she told her husband; and, “she is awfully like a big sad-eyed bitch, who has had a rotten time, and reacts hysterically to kindness. She
is
like an animal. There is something
shut off
about her, as if attempting to communicate in spite of some handicap. I think she is frightfully nice, but she embarrasses me rather. I feel I ought to know dog talk! I also have to conquer an instinctive desire to stroke her.”
But Laura did manage to adjust herself to the big, mooney, thankful animal. They would go downtown to the department stores together, attended a lecture or two at a little club and jointly accepted invitations to several cocktail parties, notably a large, more socially pretentious one at the house of the Rushforths, Nancy Rushforth being one of the half-dozen Canadian women with whom Laura preserved a continued relationship. Alice Price, also, at this time was someone whom Hester mildly cultivated. She had some nice talks with Alice’s old father, but, as she found listening to these two Britons engaged in vitriolic analysis of everything Canadian undermined her morale, Alice did her best to keep them apart.
As it can be seen, Hester now allowed herself a limited participation in the social life made available to her by the new conditions. Her husband, as he observed this change of front, this compromise, experienced an intense satisfaction, akin to triumph. A little more of this “normalcy” and the trick would be done, he told himself. The beaming smile with which he greeted her on her return from some mainly female social event, amused, but also annoyed her. Become conscious that she had surprised his too visible delight, especially after she had said, “Don’t grin like a Cheshire cat, for goodness sake,” René disciplined himself into an attitude of unconcern.
