Self Condemned (8 page)

As the car inserted its decrepit bulk into the Albany Street traffic and crawled noisily past Great Portland Street Station into Great Portland Street, hot on the scent of the absurd, he recognized that his mother had behaved with absurdity in conspiring with Mr. Harding to beget him, in an embrace that is not objectively edifying and is accompanied by pants and grunts and expressions of ridiculous and unmerited approval of the dull solicitor whose name he bore. Dignified as she was in the antechamber of death, lying exhausted by life in that chair to which she seemed glued, in that, her present form, his mother had little connection with the young Frenchwoman who passed almost half her life in a bed with Mr. Harding, for the sole purpose of bringing into life René and his three sisters. All the values were wrong in that bed. Neither of the excited couple considered what they were doing or they would have quitted the bed immediately. Of course his mother now, with a great big bearded monster like himself in front of her, must dimly realize how frivolous she had been (for she was not such a brute as Essie); and today she had, with disgust, even believed that she had given birth to a fool, into the bargain,
pauvre chérie
!

His mind now shifted to that boldly bland-eyed lady, probably awaiting him not far from Piccadilly — the absurdly
mesquin
and petty centre of this jellyfish of a city. As his taxi propelled itself into the broad street ending in Broadcasting House, his face wrinkled up as though he had been confronted with a peculiarly involved historical problem.

As he drew nearer to Essie her figure began to loom more insistently in his mind: at the same time his mind flashed back to the figures of Mr. and Mrs. Harding,
père
and
mère
, as lifelong inhabitants of a handsome four-poster for the nocturnal half of life Essie and he at night had beds that were twins. Same thing, same idea, but less oppressively barbarous. Why did he and Essie live together? Same idea. Nothing would have induced him to live with a man of Essie’s disposition and mediocre intellect. For though smart enough, she had not a fraction of Mary’s or of his mother’s judgment. Their marriage had been a bus accident. No offspring had resulted. A good thing. The male offspring would have resembled Essie more or less. Sex would have been unpleasantly prominent. Big, staring eyes and all that. This was absurd. Human dignity would have been sacrificed to an exaggerated idea of size of population required. The piling up of huge populations immoral. Cannon fodder.What nations wanted was smaller and smaller populations, not bigger and bigger. Quality not quantity. He gave a ghost of a ho-ho-ho. Here he was legislating for Overman. In the Yahooesque mass the nightly
tête-a-tête
between the sheets was one of the sole compensations for a life sentence of hard labour.“
Je divague
,” he muttered, as the cab stopped at the door of the Toulousaine.

Hester was sitting, demure and wide-eyed, near the
vestiaire.
He led her into the restaurant, mentally prescribing for himself some tonic
consommation
in view of the unpleasant task which lay before him. Also, a quiet corner —
surtout
somewhere really quiet with no eavesdroppers. He did in fact find, in the upstairs rear of the Toulousaine, a table which answered to his requirements.

Next came the meal. He discovered that he felt hungry. He had enough of the Frenchman in him to succumb very quickly to the attractions of a well-arranged menu. Hester, although never losing sight of the problem of the waistline, was nevertheless rather fond of food. They ordered what would have seemed a somewhat elaborate meal to the average Englishman. The
sommelier
, who knew René, took matters a step farther: and before he had left, they had decided, after the cocktails, on a wine decidedly on the heavy side, and, in a word, his plan for a somewhat austere meal, with some brandy to brace him up, had been forgotten. Or it would be more true to say that good reasons had been found, under the pressure of hunger, to
feed
, even to overfeed, rather than merely to
stimulate
as had originally been intended.

Essie watched the proceedings with a certain surprise. What, she asked herself, was the cause of this lavish repast? She enquired if anything serious had taken him up to St. John’s Wood; for he had not explained why he was going and she considered that it might be that something up there had produced this appetite and unusual conviviality. His melancholy response convinced her that it was nothing to do with that visit: so she thought she would wait and watch, and when the wine began to have its effect something doubtless would emerge.

As if escaping from something, he gave himself up almost childishly to the delights of the table. The wine of the Rhône rolled down his throat, the brandies of Normandy attacked his membranes and caused his animal fires to blaze. By the time he was through with this meal he gave up all idea of explaining to Hester that he had planned a change of life. His well-being was such that the charms of Essie assumed great prominence: he ho-ho-ho’d as he lifted his glass and nothing in the world could have been more different from what he had foreseen. He tripped brilliantly out of the restaurant and Essie was actually a little tipsy. In the taxi he behaved like an amorous student. And once or twice, when the sterner side of his nature had attempted to intervene, he pushed it away with a ho-ho-ho. When, some time later, his glands emptied and his head as clear as a bell, this hairy faun in a jackknife jump sprang into his own pillowless bed, it was without a shadow upon his conscience.

IV
HESTER HEARS THE NEWS

N
ext morning it was a different matter. Hester and Mrs. Harradson put in their appearance, but more than anything else it was Essie’s exultant freshness, her speaking orbs hung over the breakfast table, her very bare arms although it was a very chilly day, and the significant glances she cast at Mrs. Harradson, which caused a deep reaction. It was all very well giving spectacular proof that he was a fool, but his conversation with Essie was now going to be considerably more difficult. However, after breakfast, he decided he would at once ask her to come into his study and come to the point immediately. Meantime, he must steer her mind into severer channels. He had noticed
Princess Casamassima
upon her table: he asked her if she had been reading it. As he had expected, a studious look was the result. Her brow was slightly knitted, she looked a very serious girl. Yes, she told him, she had always wanted to read this particular book of James and had at last started doing so a week or so before. Did she like it? he asked. She
thought
she did, she said, but James’ London slums appeared to her a little theatrical, as if copied from some sentimental Victorian bookplate.

René knew that she must have heard or read this somewhere, but he looked suitably impressed.

“Don’t you think that Lady Aurora is very good?” he enquired.

“Oh yes, and the bedridden girl is terribly sweet,”she answered.

“Ah, that bedridden girl! James intended, with her, to serve up one of Dickens’ most tear-compelling creatures. But she nauseated him so much half-way, that he changed her into the disagreeable character she all along, in spite of him, had been.”

This gave Essie a shock: for she saw that she had got somehow into deep waters. This was not an easy book to talk about, as she had supposed.

“I see what you mean, I think. The bedridden are always bores anyway, aren’t they? But I did think …”

“No, there are no extenuating circumstances,” he told her.“All his Dickens personae, in any case, are terrible failures. Hyacinth — what a little hero to have! Could anyone be interested in such an unreal, comic little figure? His suicide is the duddest climax to a long, long yarn that it is possible to imagine.”

“Ah, I have not come to that. So that is the end of Hyacinth, is it?”

René could see that she was carefully storing away these criticisms of the book, to be used, along with the Victorian bookplate, to impress some intellectual friend. Meanwhile, he had got her toned down in the problems of a James’ novel. Having finished his eggs and bacon, he turned to his mail.

Had Hester received convincing evidence that René had deliberately led her into a high-brow discussion from strategical purposes she would have been as astonished as mortified. She regarded herself as well-endowed with “low-cunning”; but she was accustomed to think of him as ingenuous as a child, and as easy to see through as plate glass. If he was ever opaque, that was his learning blurring the glass a little in her view. It was this acceptance by Hester of the Victorian convention of the strong but stupid masculine in contrast to the weak but wily feminine, which made it the simplest thing in the world for René to deceive her if he wanted to, though it is true that so far he had never availed himself of this, except for bagatelles, for pulling her leg.

As soon as she saw that he was occupied with his correspondence (and she was not detained by her own, which had been nothing but a few bills), she shook off the contretemps of the
Princess Casamassima
discussion — such a highbrow feature for their breakfast table talk was almost without precedent — and returned to the setting of her own little traps. The terrific success of the night before, and René had been in perfect honeymoon form, must really be put to some good use. The moment had come, it seemed to her, to seize time by the forelock while his eyes were still gooey and his brain still drugged with the fumes of the Venusberg. Her eyes shining, her waist arched in and hips thrust out, she held up a page of her newspaper, on which were displayed a bunch of late-spring coats, a bait for those who were so silly as to imagine that in the warm weather fur coats grew cheaper.

“Now
that
,” she exclaimed, arching her eyebrows, “is what, if you ever had a really
lavish
fit —
that
is the sort of thing I should get you to buy.”

René looked up from his correspondence, momentarily stung almost to fury by the brazen naïvely mercenary calculations of the good Hester, with her garishly stock notion of what was a propitious moment.

“Oh, that would be it? I’m glad to know that. I shall bear that in mind.” He pushed his correspondence away.“Hester. Apropos.”

“Yes, René.” She had sunk back in her chair and stared at him apprehensively.

“Yes, very much, I am afraid, apropos. There is something I have to talk to you about, and this seems a good moment. I have just sent in my resignation to the University. I had not obtained special leave of absence. I fear that I deceived you; I said that in order to delay giving you the news of my resignation. There is going to be another of these crazy and extremely wicked wars. As I no longer have my job, I propose to go to Canada. That, in the crudest outline, is what had to be imparted.”

He fastened a hard stare upon her, as though he had dropped something into Essie and were waiting to see it emerge. But at the moment she appeared incapable of any reaction at all. Her face had gone a little grey, her eyes still stared, but very blankly, even a shade piteously. Among other things she had the sensation of having been unmasked, or (the same thing) seen through. As Essie did not possess a very tough core, she was unprepared and a little abashed. And he went on staring at her so coldly that her uppermost impulse was to cry. But she did not do so. Instead she said, “I knew that something was the matter. I saw you were ... I saw you were trying very hard to hide something.” To see her pathetically clinging, even at this juncture, to what she regarded as her superior insight, in her capacity of female of the species, faintly amused her husband. He smiled, almost contemptuously.

“Your penetration is admittedly extraordinary. But there was no Gunpowder Plot. I just thought it better to wait a little until things were settled.”

“It did not occur to you to consult me?”

“No. Nothing would have been gained. What was involved could only be settled by myself, not in discussion with others. Talking would only have blurred the issue.”

“I suppose you mean,” she drawled coldly, “that I should have protested. Have you told the others, have you told your mother? Oh yes, of course, that was what you were doing yesterday evening. Well, really! You behave in a very highhanded way, don’t you, Professor Harding?”

“Mr. Harding, please.”

She blinked at him slowly, as if interrupting herself to absorb this bleak item.

“A debating society is all right for some things, not for such as this. I’m sorry.”

She stood up. “There are things which I am not prepared to debate about also.”

“Of course,” he answered, so visibly uninterested that Essie flushed.

“All this is settled, then?” she demanded.

“Absolutely.” He lay back and scratched his head.

She resumed her seat, nervously lighting a cigarette, rapidly inhaling the smoke. They were silent for a few moments, as she gazed speculatively at him, as though at some not very attractive problem child.

“Am I allowed to know why you have left the University? Were you dismissed?”

He shook his head. “No. I have dismissed myself.”

“Are you displeased with ... annoyed at anything?”

He laughed. “Displeased? Yes, highly displeased. But not specifically with the University. It is what I am obliged to teach that displeases me.”

“What they have asked you to teach! What is it?”

“No, you have misunderstood me. It is history itself I am displeased with. I have no authority to teach the truth. We now arrive at something which involves a great deal of explanation of a technical order …”

“Something entirely over my head. Bird brain could not hope to grapple.... I see.”

René had sunk back in his chair, till his shoulders were level with his ears, watchfully checking the course being taken by Hester. Her reactions, however, had been very much what he had expected. From his lazy huddle in the Windsor chair, he straightened himself almost violently, banging his elbows upon the table with force, and clasping his hands at right angles with one another as though he had caught a fly.