
* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook *

This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please
check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be
under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada,
check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER
COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD
OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

Title: Self Condemned
Author: Lewis, Percy Wyndham (1882-1957)
Date of first publication: 22 April 1954
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Methuen, 1954
Date first posted: 14 November 2012
Date last updated: 14 November 2012
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1010

This ebook was produced by
Barbara Watson, L. Harrison, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






  SELF CONDEMNED




  _By the same Author_


    *

    TARR

    ROTTING HILL

    THE REVENGE FOR LOVE

    THE WRITER AND THE ABSOLUTE

    THE DEMON OF PROGRESS IN THE ARTS




  WYNDHAM LEWIS

  SELF
  CONDEMNED

  METHUEN & CO. LTD. LONDON




  _First published April 22nd 1954
  Reprinted 1954_

  I.2
  CATALOGUE NO. 156/U

  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN




CONTENTS


          _Part One_--THE RESIGNATION

  CHAPTER                                                    PAGE

        I THAT OTHER MAN AGAIN                                  3

       II 'YOU ARE NOT BY ANY CHANCE A FOOL, MY SON?'          15

      III A TAXI-RIDE AND A DINNER AT 'LA TOULOUSAINE'         27

       IV HESTER HEARS THE NEWS                                33

        V IDEALISM RECOGNIZED                                  45

       VI HOW VICTOR SAW THE MATTER                            64

      VII ROTTER                                               76

     VIII AN AGREEABLE DINNER-PARTY                           106

       IX HOW MUCH CAN WE AFFORD TO JETTISON?                 133

        X THE PASSENGER WHO WORE THE RIBBON OF THE
            LEGION OF HONOUR                                  146


          _Part Two_--THE ROOM

       XI TWENTY-FIVE FEET BY TWELVE                          169

      XII THE HOTEL AND WHAT CONTAINS THE HOTEL               189

     XIII AFFIE AND THE 'ROACHES                              197

      XIV THE PATRONESS OF ROTTEN JANITORS                    203

       XV THE MARVELS OF MOMACO                               210

      XVI THE WORD 'BRUTE' IS NOT LIKED IN THE BEVERAGE
            ROOM                                              224

     XVII VOWS OF HARDSHIP                                    236

    XVIII MR. FURBER                                          247

      XIX THE JANITORS                                        263

       XX THE PRIVATE LIFE OF BILL MURDOCH                    271

      XXI THE MICROCOSM BECOMES AN ICEBERG                    277

     XXII HAD I THE WINGS OF THE MORNING                      293


          _Part Three_--AFTER THE FIRE

    XXIII MOMACO OR LONDON?                                   307

     XXIV THE PARTY OF SUPERMAN                               312

      XXV DINNER AT THE MCKENZIES                             328

     XXVI REN BECOMES A COLUMNIST                            339

    XXVII THE BLACK FLY                                       343

   XXVIII A NEW BOOK ON THE STOCKS                            349

     XXIX A CHAIR AT MOMACO                                   359

      XXX POLICE HEADQUARTERS                                 365

     XXXI THE WHITE SILENCE                                   372

    XXXII THE COLLEGE OF THE SACRED HEART                     379

   XXXIII RETURN TO THE NORMAL                                389

    XXXIV THE CEMETERY OF SHELLS                              398




  _Part One_

  THE RESIGNATION




CHAPTER I

That Other Man Again


'If you call five _six_, you embarrass five, seeing that people then are
going to expect of him the refulgence of six.' He looked up, coughed and
continued. 'If you rename six _seven_, far more bustle is expected of
him. I have been speaking, naturally, of the ante-meridian. In the
post-meridian it is the reverse. Put your clock on, call five-thirty
six-thirty, and people will exclaim how much more light six-thirty has.
You push back the night. If you call Clara Stella, people would say how
dull Stella has become, or how bright Clara has become. Five and six,
post-meridian, are like Stella and Clara. See?'

'The little girl sees,' Essie Harding said.

From the other side of the breakfast table Essie had stared at her
husband under a wide clear brow, with blankly bold, large, wide-open
eyes. It was a mature face, the natural wide-openness not disagreeably
exploited: the remains of the child-mind were encouraged to appear in
the clear depths of the grey-blue. But as he spoke of five and six,
she thought, rather, of forty-seven and of thirty-seven (but not of
thirty-four and twenty-four). She renamed ages: as her husband spoke
of renaming the hours of daybreak and the sunset, she shuffled about
the years of life, calling thirty forty and vice versa. As to the
explanation of what occurred when you put the clock forward or
backward, Essie did not follow or would not follow. Allergic to
learning, as are many children, for her the teacher was a life-long
enemy. As she had stared, wide-eyed and with her mind a wilful blank,
at her mistress as a child, her eyes hung open like a gaping mouth;
and the fact that her husband was a professional teacher, a trained
imparter of knowledge, caused Essie all the more readily to drop back
into the mulish trance of childhood; expertly unreceptive she stripped
her large defiant eyes of all intelligence, and left them there
staring at his face, while her moist red lips were parted as she
slowly raised a fresh spoonful of sugared porridge.

'Have I made it clear what it means to put the clock on?' he enquired,
with no expectancy that the reply would be that he had.

'No.' She shook her head.

He laughed.

'You are lazy,' he told her. 'Had you been a boy, and had you lived a
few decades ago, your bottom would have been furrowed up by the cane;
_fesse_ after _fesse_ would have been your lot.'

She slowly sucked the spoon, and there was substituted in her eyes for
the aggressive blank, an amorous and inviting light, as he had expected.

Deliberately he had referred to the caned posterior, as if it were a
bait the other way round in order to provoke the reaction in question.
He looked at her curiously. For a moment he almost embarked upon a
didactic account of the periodic nature of sexual desire in the animal
kingdom. Instead he enquired, 'Why this sudden interest in daylight
saving?'

'Rosemary . . .'

'Ah. I see. Just repeat what I said about calling five six. She is a
bright child, you will not have to interpret.'

Essie laughed. 'Any more questions of that sort and I shall explain
that I am dumb, and that she must wait until Gladys gets well. She has
one of those enquiring minds. I think she is an awful little brat,
between ourselves.'

'Her mama has an enquiring mind, too. It's a beastly thing to have, I
agree.'

He lighted a cigarette and watched her almost furtively for a few
seconds. Then he placed his hand upon an open letter at the side of
his plate.

'What shall we do about Richard?'

'When does he want us to go?'

'About the tenth, I think, of next month. How do you feel about it?'

She sat with her hands behind her head, staring silently at the wall
behind his head. Neither spoke for some minutes.

'I do not feel terribly like the idyllic landscape of England just at
present,' he observed. 'Do you feel like going down yourself for a
week-end? It would do you good.'

'Not by myself; because I look countryfied, they would want me to milk
their cow and draw water from their well. I came back last time from
their place thoroughly worn out.'

'Right. Anything would be better than bucolic England just at present,
for me. I must write him.'

A bell in the little hallway exploded into hysterical life. A door, from
behind which the hum of a vacuum cleaner had for some time been heard,
opened, and one of London's Dickensian charladies stood there without
moving for a moment, a small bird-like figure with a white crest, which
bobbed backwards and forwards, and an irascible eye. This eye was
directed across the breakfast table towards the front door. The charlady
propelled herself around the room, head shooting in and out, and darted
at the front door, ready for battle. Her small raucous challenge was
heard, 'What is it? Ooder ye want?' The landing was extremely dark, and
Mrs. Harradson never could see who her enemy was. In the present case a
telegram appeared out of the shadows impolitely near her little beak.
She seized it, and, with considerable suspicion, holding it between
thumb and forefinger, she re-entered the breakfast room.

'It's for you Professor Harding, sir.'

'Thank you, Mrs. Harradson.'

'Shall I tell 'im there's an answer, sir?'

Harding opened the telegram, and shook his head. 'No, thank you, no
reply.'

Having banged the front door upon the uniformed intruder, Mrs.
Harradson with her violent gait re-entered the bedroom, from whence
she had come, and almost on the instant there came the angry hum of
the indignant vacuum.

It was a large, gaunt and very dark room in which they sat. It was
lighted only by one window in the extreme corner, opening on to the
central air-hole. Between the window and the front door was a shadowy
dresser, and a minute water-closet nestled indelicately in the small
hall, the first thing to confront the visitor. The room in which the
Hardings sat was eccentrically withdrawn from the light of day, as
though London had been Cadiz: had it not been for the electric light
they could not have seen to eat. For more than half the year no more
than a token daylight found its way through the corner window. 'The
house was designed by an imbecile or an Eskimo,' Harding would say.
'Why do we stop here?' To which Essie would reply, 'That I have often
wondered myself.' It was an incomplete cylinder, for its central
air-hole was little more than a semi-circle, the back yard of another
house completing it on one side. Opening off this cavernous chamber
(dining-room, kitchen, 'store-room', all in one) were a bedroom and
sitting-room. Both of these were, in the ordinary way, day-lit: but
because of the tower-like design of the building, they had a somewhat
eccentric shape.

Rainfall was occurring, a thunderstorm threatening London, and the
immured Hardings felt the need of more light. Ren Harding sprang up
to switch on a standing lamp.

'Another beastly day,' he said absentmindedly.

'From whom is the telegram?' Essie enquired.

'From Canada. It is from a colleague of mine with some information I
required.'

Essie was looking at him, as if expecting the answer about the
telegram to complete itself. Professor Ren Harding was tall, about
five foot eleven with broad shoulders and such markedly narrow hips
that the lower part of his jacket was inclined to flap. His beard did
not crudely blot out his face, nesting his eyes in a blue-black bush
or surrounding them with a disturbing red vegetation. It merely
lengthened the face, and stylistically grained and striped it with a
soft material not differing greatly from it in tone, reminiscent of
the elegant stone hair which leaved, curled upon, and grooved the long
French faces upon the west faade at Chartres. His eyes were of a
brown to match the somewhat sallow skin. When he laughed, rather than
bisecting his face laterally, he thrust forward his bristling mouth in
what might be called the ho-ho-ho position, employed by the actor if
he wishes to give the idea of something stiltedly primitive. Should it
be one of an archaically masculine, bearded chorus of uncouth warriors
that he has to represent, that is when he ho-ho-ho's (not
ha-ha-ha's). Ren's eyes were at the cat-like angle, glittering out of
a slit rather than, as with his wife, showing the eye in its full
circular expansion. He was one of those men it is difficult to imagine
without a beard: and who one felt was very handsome bearded, but did
not feel sure about its being so becoming were he to be beardless.

Speaking generally, he was inclined to furrow up his forehead  la
Descartes, and to assume half-recumbent attitudes by choice, rather
than to sit erect.

These physical idiosyncrasies corresponded to an innate preference for
the dressed rather than the undressed, even if the costume or the
disguise was nothing more than hair. His wife was of course a born
nudist; and he had recently, it is true, come to feel, especially at
breakfast time, that he was in a nudist camp.

But this was a very abstracted man. He seldom saw his wife in full
focus, but behind, or through, something else. He did not often
_completely_ withdraw himself from the intellectual problem he had in
hand, when conversing with an intimate or even with a stranger. Inside
him, he left simmering as it were, in the background of his mind, the
dominant problem, in the way that a housewife reduces to a simmer
something she has in hand, to leave her free for a short while for
action elsewhere, in response to a sudden summons.

As he sat down he placed the telegram in his pocket and picked up the
_Daily Express_. Filling himself a fresh cup of coffee he drank this
in a long gulp. Replacing the cup in the saucer with _fracas_ he
continued to stare dully and angrily at the _Daily Express_ headlines.

Monday, 15th May, 1939.

  THE KING WILL BE TWO DAYS LATE
  IT'S THAT OTHER MAN AGAIN
  DUCE SAYS PEACE
  'Nothing to Justify a War.'

Essie was still looking at him, and now she asked, 'What is in your
paper, Ren?'

'It's that "Other Man Again",' he replied, almost mechanically,
echoing the headlines. He looked up at her, his face wrinkled, with a
dismally roguish smile. 'The German Chancellor, you know.'

'So I gathered,' Essie said, and slowly lowered her head to look at
her own paper, the _Daily Telegraph_.

For about ten minutes, husband and wife read their papers without
speaking. Rather abruptly Harding rose, wiped his moustache, and
exclaimed, 'Are you going out to the shops, my dear?'

Hester Harding rose too.

'A little later, yes.'

'See if you can get me _The Times_, will you? Also the _Manchester
Guardian_. I am going in to work now. If anyone should telephone, do
not put them through.'

'No one?'

'No one at all!'

'All right,' said Essie. 'You look preoccupied. Is there anything in
the papers you don't like?'

'A damn lot, but not more so than usual! I shall be through with what
I have to do about one o'clock!'

They had rented the next-door flat, a one-room affair, the front doors
facing one another across the dark landing. He was inserting his key
in the opposite door, that of No. 7, as he was closing his own. This
other flat, which he used as a study, was walled with books. There was
a small desk at which he now seated himself hurriedly and drew the
telegram out of his pocket.

    *    *    *    *    *

For her part, Hester went into the room where Mrs. Harradson was still
at work with the vacuum cleaner, a novelty she greatly appreciated.

'Oo, ma'am, Mrs. Harding, I didn't hear you, m'am,' said Mrs.
Harradson jumping up and down, an excitable marionette, as she heard
Essie's voice. She turned off the vacuum.

'What do you think that old wretch Hitler has done now, Mrs. Harradson?'

'Oo! I'm sure I don't know, m'am. What is it, m'am, the nasty ole man?'

'Yes, he's a horrid old beast. He says woman's place is in the
kitchen. What do you say to that, Mrs. Harradson?'

'Oo, 'e do do 'e, ma'am! What does that dirty ole German want to be
givin' us orders for, where we oughter be, nasty ole man.'

'I don't know what their wives are doing. That is a man's country
where women seem to have no rights at all. The men shave their heads
in the most disgusting way; they don't mind _what_ they look like. If
my husband shaved his head I would sue for divorce on the spot!'

'Nasty ole man!' Mrs. Harradson barked: and it was not clear whether
she was referring to Professor Harding or to 'That Other Man', except
that her employer did not belong to that evil category, which she
classified invariably as 'nasty ole men'.

After a little more desultory conversation about the political scene,
the lot of women, and the arbitrary behaviour of men generally,
especially those that rang the front-door bell, Essie strolled away
into the sitting-room, the _Daily Telegraph_ and an illustrated
tabloid in her hand. She propped herself upon cushions on the settee
and plunged into the tabloid. It was not long before she heard Mrs.
Harradson at work in the large 'cooking' and 'eating' room; there was
also a piano there and she could hear her dusting the keys. Essie read
in the tabloid how a woman had gone into a neighbour's house about ten
in the morning for a nice chat and had not returned till the
afternoon. She discovered her two children both dead: they had
swallowed all her aspirin tablets, which she had left by the side of
her bed. Essie reflected how careless the lower classes were, and
yawned. Mrs. Harradson's voice was heard in the next room, furiously
apostrophizing someone as she scrubbed the sink.

'Nasty ole man--nasty ole _maaan_.' She heard 'maaan' repeated several
times: it could be none other than Hitler, and Essie, smiling, got up
and moved, with a smile still on her face, into the next room.

'Who are you talking about, Mrs. Harradson, Herr Hitler?'

'Not Hitler, not him!' Mrs. Harradson replied, after a violent start
at the sound of her employer's voice. 'It's that Lucifer, nasty ole
man. Walking the earth, nasty ole man!' She scrubbed harder, as if to
scrub him away.

Lucifer was a new one on Essie. _She_ thought in terms of Hitler and
such minor devils. But Mrs. Harradson was a devout catholic and she of
course saw that the Fhrer was nothing but a minion of Lucifer's.

Mrs. Harradson was a perpetual Punch and Judy show for Essie. But also,
in her way, she had become attached to this little being as she would to
a small disgruntled squirrel, had she received so eccentric a gift. One
of Essie's morning amusements, for instance, was to ask Mrs. Harradson
to TIM it for her on the telephone, to check the exact time. Mrs.
Harradson was always very diffident, polite and nervous while speaking
on the telephone. It was a piece of pagan music to which she never grew
used. The deference she exhibited on these occasions was quite unlike
her usual behaviour. She would dial TIM, in obedience to Essie's
request, but when the voice began saying, 'At the third stroke, it will
be e-l-e-v-e-n forty-three and ten seconds,' she began nodding, bowing
and smiling into the telephone, 'Yes, Miss, thank you, Miss. Yes, Miss,
twenty seconds. No, Miss, _thirty_ seconds. Yes, Miss, thank you, Miss,
_forty_ seconds--thank you, Miss,' a little confused and nervous at the
last at the continued affability of this young woman, whose habit it was
to say a different time whenever she spoke. Essie was obliged literally
to drag her away from the telephone. She became positively mesmerised
and without this intervention of her employer, might have stood there
all day bowing and smiling.

The house was run on a principle of extreme parsimony: should the
ball-valve in a lavatory cease to do its work a shrivelled and
diminutive plumber would, sooner or later, appear, a certain Mr.
Shotstone. Since the ball-valve was constantly in need of attention,
the Hardings were very familiar with Mr. Shotstone, and it was seldom
that he failed to diversify his professional visits in the following
manner. Indeed, with this difficulty of Mr. Shotstone's Essie was so
familiar that she took it as a matter of course when the summons
arrived. A hoarse whispered call would reach her from the little
lavatory in the hall. ''Ere, Missis, come 'ere.' When she approached,
finding him standing on the lavatory seat, she would distinguish the
words hissed hoarsely over his shoulder--'Me truss is slipping--ask
'er to come'--Essie would signal Mrs. Harradson and repeat the
message. 'His truss is slipping,' she would say. Mrs. Harradson would
be transfixed with indignation, her head would shoot in and out, her
white crest weirdly flashing. In a high-pitched staccato grunt came
the usual sounds, 'Oo . . . disgusting . . . what, Madam? . . . What?
. . . Did 'ee? . . . Did 'ee say that? . . . nasty ole man. . . .'
Shooting her head in and out, she hurtled across to the water closet.
There her sharp liquid grunts could be heard as she adjusted the
truss. In a few minutes she returned. Mr. Shotstone was a prostatic
elder and at times literally stank the lavatory out. Herself slightly
impregnated with this disagreeable odour, Mrs. Harradson shot angry
glances over her shoulder in the direction of the hall and continued
to snarl, 'Dirty ole man--dirty ole man.'

Harding showed what can only be described as apprehension where the
charlady was concerned. It was as though he had been called upon to
enjoy the antics of a demented person. He would join Essie in
explosions of mirth, sometimes in spite of himself, but on the whole
he was uneasy.

If Mrs. Harradson was a source of cheap amusement for Hester, she had
been born, as it were, with the house in which they lived: the House
that Jack Built, as Ren called it. She was as if she had been one of
its bricks, cemented into it. And if she was absurd, so was the house
and its cast. Essie watched it, mainly through the rapportage of Mrs.
Harradson, through which medium its events were magnified and
distorted. Her husband, too, was entertained by the continuation of
Mrs. Harradson, namely the house. But, as with her, this building, so
replete with absurdity, produced in him a _malaise_, which he
endeavoured to conceal, although he would say to Essie, 'Is it not
_unusually_ absurd? Or is it just the average human mean? What do you
think?' But she would answer, 'As you know, darling, the philosophy of
the absurd is not in my line. But if you really want to know what I
think. . . .'--'Yes? You mean that _we_ are part of the house. That
_is_ the difficulty.'

It might be argued that all the absurdity flowed from the owner of the
house. This large, circular, red-brick building, containing some
twenty flats standing back a little pretentiously from the other
houses in the street, was the property of a strong-minded,
disagreeable moustachioed old lady, named Mrs. Abbott. She was one of
several sisters who had inherited various properties. This house had
been her share, and the least desirable legacy. She heartily disliked
the house and all her tenants. Her refusal to spend a penny on it had
a number of comic consequences. One of the climaxes was when slates
began raining on the heads of those leaving or entering it. It needed
badly 'pointing': the cement was disintegrating between the bricks.
Any day it might begin to collapse. Then half a dozen of the tenants
appealed to the local Town Hall. Eventually one morning a notice was
found posted inside the front doors, 'To whom it may concern'--and a
statement declaring that 'This building is not safe.' Mrs. Abbott
immediately served a week's notice on the six rebellious tenants, but
some repairs were thereupon undertaken.

Mrs. Harradson was the caretaker, at a salary of four and sixpence a
week. For this she was needed to wash all the stairs and all the
windows that lighted them. She was forbidden to accept any other
employment, her charing for the Hardings being a breach of trust. But
she was also provided with a small flat. So, legally, she had a roof
over her head and four and sixpence a week.

The tenants were a typical set of tenants. 'All houses have the same
tenants, however much they may be disguised, just as all worlds have
congenial inhabitants,' Ren Harding commented. On the street floor a
flat had, much against the grain, been sacrificed by Mrs. Abbott, a
three-pound-a-week flat; a family obligation. Her brother, Mr.
Buckland, and his wife occupied their flat rent-free, until Mr.
Buckland lost his reason. The first notice that the neighbours had had
of his approaching derangement were certain violent noises which could
be heard within the flat. The next thing they knew was that Mr.
Buckland would rush out, and thunder on their doors crying, 'Let him
out!' Then one day a coal-man with a sack of coals on his back was
climbing the stairs when Mr. Buckland pursued him, and seized the bag
of coals shouting, 'Let him out! Let him out!' The coal and the
coal-man fell on top of Mr. Buckland, who was madly convulsed in the
midst of a torrent of glistening carbon, and ended by nearly murdering
the amazed coal-man. At this point Mr. Buckland left for Colney Hatch.
For some years Mrs. Buckland had occupied the flat alone. She was a
barmaid-like woman, amiably blonde and somewhat fat.

Now upon the floor immediately above the Hardings dwelt a certain Mr.
Whitaker. He was a bank-manager of a most morose and reticent type and
not very neighbourly. But he was noticed descending the stairs a
little furtively, about nine-thirty in the evening, and on these
occasions he would be admitted to Mrs. Buckland's flat, which he would
leave about midnight; and it was said that he was at times
intoxicated. But in the flat facing that of Mr. Whitaker dwelt a Mr.
Ambrose Dewes. Mr. Dewes was an actor of some thirty-six summers, much
addicted to gallantry. If any good-looking girl happened, for whatever
reason, to ascend the stairs, and if Mr. Dewes chanced to see her, he
would undoubtedly say, 'What a fine day it is, and yet how awfully
dark on the staircase'; and then, all smiling charm, would produce an
electric torch and render her every assistance in his power. And if
she were the kind of girl who seemed to suffer from the heat--or from
the cold--she might follow him into his flat to have a snort and a
little friendly chat, before proceeding on her way. Nor did Mr. Dewes
by any means rely upon such girls as might happen to ascend the stairs
of this particular house. For great numbers of women were seen to
enter his flat by his neighbours. These facts attracted the censorious
comment of his immediate neighbour, Mr. Whitaker. But Mr. Dewes
retorted by pointedly alluding to the bank manager's habit of nightly
visiting the flat of the blonde downstairs. The actor was a very
jovial young Casanova, an old Etonian, not disagreeably impressing
Mrs. Hester Harding.

Upon the same landing as the Hardings was an elderly spinster-lady of
great respectability who would especially enjoin Mrs. Harding to put
a new bulb of somewhat superior power upon the landing when the
Marchioness of Shewburyness came to visit her once a month. There were
many other tenants of great typicality: in a word, the house was
properly stocked, in all its little compartments, in such a way as
emotionally to equip it for its passage through time. The Hardings
were shortly to leave it. A certain percentage of its tenants were to
leave it, too, when London was blitzed. The Blitz, indeed, changed it
a great deal: it shook the decaying cement between its bricks, it
shook the slates from its roof. Indeed, in the depths of the war-years
it became somewhat a wild place. Mrs. Abbott had refused to spend any
money on blacking-out the stair-windows, and consequently there was no
illumination at night. It was not, however, at night that Mrs.
Harradson plunged down the stairs and was killed. A pail of water and
a brush made it plain what she had been doing. Those familiar with her
repertoire of enemies spoke of foul play, and whispered that it was
the postman, who had stopped her tongue with his boot. The actor still
dwelt there, but he was a changed man, greying at the temples, it was
said. By forty-five Mr. Dewes had lost the sight of both eyes. A
woman-friend of the Hardings, who saw him not long after the Blitz,
recalled how he had told her that the cellar was full of dead leaves
and a wild cat had established its home there, a brood of wild kittens
springing about among the leaves. This wild cat so terrorized the
tenants that they dared not go down to their trash bins just outside
the cellar-door. And then this same woman narrated how she had passed
him down the street while a rain of incendiaries was falling in the
district, and the roof of the building where the Hardings had dwelt
was on fire and the tenants of the upper flats were flinging blazing
cushions and other articles into the street. Professor Harding's
comment was that the House that Jack Built was always built in the
same way. And its destiny was in accordance with its architecture.
Some houses built by Jack attracted incendiaries, some did not. But it
did not matter whether they did or whether they did not. All in the
end had wild cats in their cellars, for civilization never continued
long enough to keep the wild cats out--if you call it civilization,
Ren Harding would shout.




CHAPTER II

'You are not by any Chance a Fool, My Son?'


The sun of St. John's Wood reddened the walls of a substantial
sitting-room, and warmed the distracted faces of a family group,
sitting in a rather huddled knot, deep in conversation. The birds in
the trees outside the open windows sang the sparrow-songs which give
the rows of private gardens in this north-west district their rustic
sweetness. The shadow of 'That Other Man' lay across the ugly
lethargic city, but in the beautiful recesses of St. John's Wood you
could believe yourself in the Victorian middleclass paradise, where
Mr. Gladstone, big-nosed and big-collared, chopped down trees for
longevity, or where the towers of the Crystal Palace looked down upon
crinolined throngs moving between the rhododendrons, and stopping to
admire the swans upon the glassy lakes.

Could anyone have entered this apartment unperceived, and have stood
there observing this agitated group, he would have heard from time to
time, phrases in French escaping it, such as _ la bonne heure_, or
_par exemple_, or _mon pauvre petit, mon pauvre petit_. This latter
phrase in a faint voice fell from the lips of the dominant figure, a
very old lady, reminiscent of an ancestral miniature, in her faded
dignity. A period costume, of the severest black with the inevitable
cameo, was too severe to be English. The _pauvre petit_ of the
above-mentioned exclamation was Ren Harding, who, crouching upon a
low boat-like stool at the feet of the aged woman, looked unusually
the reverse of _petit_. But she was his mother: and the intrusion of
french phrases in the talk of these three people, of mother, son, and
daughter, had a simple explanation. Mrs. Harding senior was French,
which accounted also for the gallic Christian name of her son, as it
did for many other things about Professor Ren Harding. Ren's sister
Mary sat close up against Mrs. Harding, on the right-hand side. She
was in her early forties, and more obviously _handsome_, with her
well-cut nose and broad forehead, than her brother with his
hair-sculptured, gothic mask.

Biologically incomplete, the missing male principle of this group was
to be found in effigy upon the wall behind Ren. A large photograph
hanging there, displayed the massive nordic handsomeness, the solid
brow, the clear germanic of Mr. Harding senior, plainly related to the
particular good looks of Mary Harding. On the other hand, the dark
eyes and hair testified to the latin strain, and a certain carriage of
the head, and noble severity in Mary's glance, belonged to the older
civilizations, which her mother represented.

    *    *    *    *    *

At his mother's feet, Ren, like a suppliant, crouched gazing bleakly
up into her face. His fingers entangled themselves in hers, and
sometimes with both hands he would crush her small brown fists. His
sister was pressed so close against their mother, that she seemed to
share the prerogatives of motherhood, and it was usually four eyes
which gazed back at his, and Mary visibly shared the distress of the
greatly shocked parent.

'I have shut the door behind me,' he said. 'There is no going back
upon what I have said. I have been specific. The Council have been
informed with a brutal clarity what my mind has become like. It is no
longer an instrument which can be used in the way that my position
requires that it should be. I am no longer able to teach a story of
the world which they would find acceptable: they would not let me
teach my students the things which I now know, so I have had to tell
them that there is no longer anything that I can teach. To take one
instance only, my position in the matter of economics would alone be
more than sufficient to disqualify me. No, the die, I fear, is cast, I
have to find other employment. That would be very difficult in
England. So . . .'

There was a long silence, during which a few tears ran down the cheeks
of Ren's mother, who was sitting in a motionless rigor, staring into
the distance as though she saw another Ren over the shoulder of her
son; and Mary's head was turned away with a grimace of despair.

Ren broke the silence shrilly, as if it frightened him; as though it
had been a prophetess and not a mother that he had come to consult,
and the processes of whose vaticination he was no longer able to bear.

'Please do not condemn me before you have heard me. I know that with
my professorship and my budding notoriety as an author I am someone to
whom my family looks . . . looks . . . for honour and not dishonour. I
know that I have to give up part of myself to Mother, to sisters, to
wife. I am a responsible man. There has been no levity in the action I
have taken. I took it secretly because there can be no consultation
with others in a matter of conscience. But I did nevertheless consult
everyone of you in my private mind. I heard what you had to say, for I
knew what your feelings must be: I did not consult only my own ego,
and take my orders from that.'

'I know you would not do that, my poor Ren.' His mother's voice
quavered hoarsely.

'I know that, too, Ren,' his sister echoed falteringly.

'My distress has been as great as anyone else's can be. It has been
terrible for me. I do not drop my career down the drain with as light
a heart as it would seem, to see me do it. Of course not. Men are not
made that way. They say Good-bye to common ambition with horror. They
become nobodies as if they were dying.'

'Do not speak like that,' his mother said.

'No, I feel just like you about myself. I consider myself mad, as you
do. I am in two halves, one half of which is you.'

Mary began to sob, wiping her eyes quickly.

'I have had a first-rate job, as good as a man of my mental habits can
have; my position in the world has been excellent; I shall never have as
good a one again. These things have to be built up from early years,
they cannot be re-made once lost. I see with remarkable clarity what
going to a colony must mean. When I get to Canada I may have to teach
Algebra or . . . oh yes, or History in an elementary school. Or of
course I may prefer to earn my living as a waiter in some large hotel.'

He produced the cable he had received that morning.

'Here is a message from a colleague in Winnipeg. He is an Englishman
who went out there recently. He is honest and reliable. The chances of
my obtaining any satisfactory work in Canada are extremely slender.'

'Surely then . . .'

But Ren stopped his sister, saying, 'Let me finish, Mary. Just a few
words more. Let me finish the painting of my black picture. Because of
the success of my book I am fairly widely known. It was reviewed, for
instance, everywhere in Canada and the States. Over there it would be
quite obvious to all its readers why I had resigned my post. As far as
an academic appointment is concerned this is fatal. Colleges are very
conventional places. It is no part of the educator's equipment to have
"ideas". But such ideas as _mine_ are naturally anathema. Nowhere is
unorthodoxy in politics and economics respectable: my kind of
unorthodoxy, however, is especially revolting, to all those in a
"position of trust". You see, I think in a manner in which one is not
allowed to think. So I become an outsider, almost a pariah.'

He strained his arms up into the air above his head, and rotated upon
his hips as if about to perform some eccentric dance. Then he continued,
'You may ask, cannot I think differently? Why can I not purge myself of
this order of thinking? Well, of course there are some things that
everyone thinks which hot irons could not burn out of them. It is the
circumstances of the time in which we live which have made it impossible
for me to mistake my road: there have been signposts or rather lurid
beacons all the way along it, leading to only one end, to one
conclusion. How anyone, as historically informed as I am, can come to
any very different conclusions from my own I find it hard to understand.
They must have blind eyes for all the flaming signs. But really there is
no more to say, I have resigned my professorship. On Monday I am going
to the offices of the steamship company.'

'The picture you have painted certainly is black,' said Mary.

'En effet, il est bien noir,' the mother assented.

'The worst of it is'--and a smile it had had vanished from Mary's
face--'that it does not seem to be blacker than life. That is the
worst of it.'

'Ma foi, oui. On ne pourrait pas le depeindre autrement que noir.'

The two women looked at one another. Then Mary spoke.

'What does Hester think about it?'

Ren felt the four eyes bracketed upon him and squinted a little as he
answered,

'She knows nothing. I have told her nothing, so far.'

There was a sudden relaxation. Mary smiled as she said,

'Your wife is in ignorance. Was it your idea to leave Hester out of
your calculations?'

Ren laughed very softly, his ho-ho laugh. 'Hardly that,' he told her.
'One cannot leave a wife out of one's calculations.'

The mother smiled, and as she did so the furrows and bony accents of
her face arranged themselves almost with a click in what was a
miniature of his own characteristic mask.

'Les femmes, a se trouve quelquepart, n'est-ce pas, avec les valises
et les parapluies.'

Ren ho-ho-ho'ed placidly. 'Mais coute, ma femme  moi n'est pas si
commode.' When Ren and his mother spoke to one another in French
their resemblance was accentuated.

'You think Hester may disagree with what you propose to do?' Mary
asked him.

'Could be,' he rapped, looking away.

The relaxation was affirmed. Mary drew away a little from her mother.

'Naturally'--Ren then proceeded with great firmness--'I shall tell
Essie what I propose to do before I go to the offices of the steamship
company. I have no doubt that she will reproach me. But nothing that
Essie says will cause me to change my plans. In a case of this kind
there is only one thing to do.'

The easier atmosphere was at an end. Mary looked anxiously towards her
mother and drew closer to her again.

'I know I shall be distressing Hester a great deal. I realize all that
side of it fully. She is a very conventional woman. She may even leave
me.'

'Ren, will you not think this over, for our sake,' the old lady said
in a trembling voice.

'I'm going to say something that will annoy you I'm afraid.' Mary
leant towards him. 'You know, Ren, that Mother and I will back you up
if it comes to a showdown. It is because you know that, that I hope
you will allow me to say what has been passing through my mind. As you
were speaking it occurred to me that you might have allowed yourself
to be influenced by the success of your book. Perhaps--and I only make
this suggestion at the risk of seeming tiresome--but were you not
perhaps _bloui_, dazzled, by all the praise of what you have written.
I'm not accusing you of vanity; please do not think that I mean that.
But public applause _might_--excuse me if I am talking nonsense--even
in the case of the strongest mind, and yours is a very firm mind,
Ren, I know that, might play tricks with the firmest judgement. There
is an intoxication . . .'

'No.' Ren shook his head.

'I noticed,' she went on quickly, 'in what you said just now that
there was no mention of the possibility of making money by writing
books. You spoke of being a waiter in a hotel, of doing all kinds of
degrading things, but never of doing the obvious thing: that is,
writing for your living.'

'No, but I should have mentioned that, of course. I was not concealing
that possibility.' And he smiled at her obliquely.

'No, but there _is_ always that. You could, I suppose, to judge by the
success of your book, always make a living of some sort by writing.
There is always that, so do not let us talk about hotel waiters and
teaching Algebra in a secondary school. That obscures the issue.
Surely the two ways of life which confront one another are, first,
your being a professor, and secondly, your writing books. Those are
the two alternatives, are they not? Don't be cross with me, I only
want to make clear in my own mind what is occurring. I have been very
shocked by what you have said. We all admire you very much, and
followed your academic career with great pride, mother and I. And all
of us, of course. We don't want you to make a mistake, a great mistake.'

'Because I have been intoxicated by the reception of my book?' Ren
enquired gravely. 'You mean that? That is what you mean, is it not?'

'Not quite that,' she protested. That would be suggesting that you
were vain indeed. No, I do not mean that you are chucking up your
professorship for that reason, I can see that you are very distressed
about something. All I mean is that if it were not for that other
possibility of making a living in some other way, tempting you in the
background, would you take this step with all that it signifies of . . .
of, well, of ruin?'

There was a sofa at Ren's back and he transferred himself to that,
sitting with his elbows upon his knees with his fingers stuck into his
thick hair.

'You are quite wrong, Mary, about the part the author's vanity plays in
this business. That is not your fault and I know in working it out the
way you have, it was in all kindness. It was because you wanted to help
me that you did your bit of psychoanalysis on me. What you have not been
able to allow for has been something that you could not be expected to
understand. You see, I have been _driven_ into this situation, I have
not pushed myself into it or allowed myself to be led into it, lured
there by ambition. Ambition plays no part in it at all.' He jumped down
into the low boat-like seat before his mother's knees.

'I am sorry to have turned out such a "problem child" after all.'

There was silence. A great discouragement had set in; it was almost as
if the two women had played their last card. They shrank together into
a collective huddle again, and Mary looked away out of the farther
window where the night was setting in, a redness upon the walls having
turned into a livid grey, and Mr. Harding senior seeming to have
become a little forbidding in his faded brown frame.

The old lady evidently experienced great difficulty in finding any
words at all. But at last she said, tremulous and slow, 'There is
nothing I can say. You know all the hopes we had placed in you; but
what is the use of saying that. It is of course a reproach, and the
last thing I wish to do is to reproach you. We will do all we can,
your sisters and I, to make things a little easier, to the extent of
our ability.'

'I know you will,' he muttered.

'What you said about a loan is a very difficult matter, Ren. In fact,
I have hardly any available funds. Outside of my annuity, what have I?
Let me see, I might be able to scrape together, oh, a matter of five
hundred pounds. Of what use would that be to you?'

Mary at this point burst into tears, Ren sprang up and walked quickly
about hither and thither exclaiming,

'This is a nice way of behaving. I propose to rob my mother of her
last savings. I grieve my sister.'

'Don't, please, Ren.' His sister practically shouted through her tears.

'Next it will be Hester. Next it will be Hester!'

The telephone rang; he snatched it up and shouted,

'What is it, what is it?'

'Taxi! Taxi!'

He banged the receiver down and came back to the higher of the two
seats. There he sat with his legs stuck out, looking upwards in a
typical lecturer's position, arranging what he wanted to say. The two
women watched him sorrowfully. Then he looked down at them.

'When one thinks these things out for oneself,' he began, 'that is one
thing. It is quite another thing when one begins to share one's
thoughts with other people. Complexities make their appearance
immediately. I thought this all out for myself without consultation
with anybody.'

'You certainly did,' Mary agreed. 'There is no doubt about that.'

'Just as it would be impossible to write _Paradise Lost_ or _Hamlet_,
collectively, so it is impossible to plan some major change in the
individual life, collectively.'

'Most people,' Mary objected, 'do not lock themselves up at such a
juncture. They talk it over with others, don't they?'

'Most people think collectively, I agree. But they do not usually
think very clearly. They have no pretensions to being individuals.
They are a collective individual, a group of some sort.'

'Are you not a group?' his sister asked, smiling.

'I was a group, a university. But when I wished, or when I felt
compelled to cease to be that, I had to isolate myself, of course, and
think the matter out by myself.'

'But . . .'

'But there was the domestic group, that is what you were about to say,
Mary. I know. But I had to think the matter out in isolation from
that. For _that_ group would merely have pushed me back into the other
group. The morals of all groups are the same. If you wish to act upon
a heroic moral plane . . .'

'Oh, _l l_!' Mary broke in with an unexpected boisterousness.

The Professor smiled at the sisterly heckle.

'I was not using the word "heroic" with any sentimental accent. Only
to define. The same applies to the word moral. You cannot help
choosing the moral, rather than its opposite. I am afraid that I
derive none of the average satisfactions from heroic moral action. I
am a hero _malgr moi_.'

He ho-ho-ho'ed faintly, and mother and sister smiled.

'Anyhow, there it is. It is stupid of us to take this tragically.
Probably I shall get along well enough outside the academic fold. For
the world I am leaving, I am a finished man. But do not let us take
that too seriously. I know at my age I should have grown up: of course
I should. But you do not have to worry about this situation so much as
you are preparing to do.'

Mary began to cry again. But her mother said to her, 'Ren is right.
We do not help matters by taking this so tragically.'

'Or anything so tragically as is usually the case.' he smiled.

'Perhaps you are right,' his mother sighed.

'What a philosophy!' protested Mary, with lifted eyebrows and ironic
smile.

'But, but, he has not committed murder or robbed a bank!' The mother
answered her almost testily.

Mary laughed up at her mother, and exclaimed,

'All right, I have been behaving like an idiot. All Ren has done is
to throw a Chair of History out of the window. What is there in that?'

They all laughed, almost merrily.

'Ah, _voila_!' Ren cried. 'You see, we are emerging from the mist
that we ourselves have created!'

'Not quite that.' His mother shook her head sombrely. 'But still,
there are always several ways of looking at anything.'

'Let us not pass so precipitately from the black picture to the very
rosy one we are approaching now,' said Mary, standing up. Her brother
rose, standing with his hands in his jacket pockets. She gazed at him,
and as he raised his head, for he had been staring at the floor, they
looked at one another for a moment. She did not answer his smile with
another smile, but began speaking instead. 'I want to hear more about
this, Ren,' she said. 'I am not at all sure I have understood. Will
you and Hester come to dinner? I think next Tuesday would be all
right, but I will telephone.'

'I am free on Tuesday.'

'I would like you to have a talk with Percy.'

Ren bowed his head. Mary returned to her mother's side and thrust her
face down and kissed her where the aged cheek was hollow, patting her
clenched hands as they rested upon the margin of the hollow lap. As Mary
moved away Ren accompanied her, opening the door as they reached it.

'Are you sure I can't give you a lift? Where are you dining?'

'That would get me there a little before my time,' he answered.

Mary looked back towards her mother as she left the room, fluttering a
farewell towards the stationary figure, more immobile than usual.
Closing the door, Ren went to a tray and poured himself a glass of
sherry.

Alone with one another, mother and son drew closer together, like two
confederates. Mary, though the nearest to them, far nearer than the
other two sisters, belonged to the outside world when it came to these
two, who were allied in a very special union. _ deux_, this
extraordinary identity became apparent. To commune with one another,
everyone else, even Mary, had to be excluded. Ren drew up a chair,
talking to her softly in the language she still liked best to speak,
the tongue she had spoken when she was young but which she had found
it quite impossible to induce Mr. Harding senior to learn. She patted
and caressed his hand, and he almost danced in his chair with
pleasure, like a big dog that is caressed. He arched his legs in a
rampant attitude, his toes beating for a moment a quick tattoo.
Afterwards, he drank his sherry _d'un trait_, as though it had been a
cocktail. Both their faces were broken up into deeply engraved masks
of civilized irony. What he loved best about this old woman was her
robust refusal to be too serious, her gnome-like raillery, her frail
gaiety: the something of Voltaire, the something of Fnlon, which is
secreted in all those of her race, the grimace of amusement she would
wear upon her deathbed, for the same grimace would serve at need for
pain. Really they had nothing to say to one another. All they required
to do when they were alone was to gaze into one another's faces and
smile an ancestral smile.

However, Ren began idly to gossip, to enquire about the tiresome new
priest, and the even more tiresome physician.

'Et le prtre, il t'embte toujours?' he smiled.

'Mais non, je l'ai chass.'

'Il est grotesque ce prtre. Les prtres anglais sont une race  eux.
a doit tre difficule d'tre catholique chez nous.'

'Bien sur. Et puis leur liturgie!'

'Pauvre chrie.'

The newly arrived priest who had complicated his mother's religious
life was discussed for a little and they then turned to the vexations
attendant upon the housekeeper's menopause. After that Ren enquired
about the asthma of the family physician, which made the ascent of the
stairs for that poor man a cruel ordeal. This imposed upon Mrs.
Harding a less sick doctor. The ailments of the cat were not
forgotten: and as their indolent chat moved along, gently playing with
absurdity after absurdity, at last the subject of the recent interview
was referred to by his mother, but in an almost negligent tone, as if
it were floating about in the background of her mind, but were a
matter of no great importance.

'One must not take such things _au grand srieux_.' She seemed to be
dismissing the subject. She stopped, turned to him and observed, 'We
have always been such great friends, Ren, have we not? I do not know
why. You are so like my brother Jacques, whom you never saw. You look
at life the same way that he did.' Then suddenly her mind appeared to
be traversed by a new thought. She shook her head violently, and
exclaimed, 'Il ne faut pas trop plaisanter, quand mme. La vie est dur
pour ceux qui la traitent avec trop de mpris.'

Ren ceased to smile. But then a terrible look of surprised enquiry
was shot up at him which made him quail.

'You are not by any chance _a fool_, my son?'

Enormously disconcerted Ren sprang up and gazed down at his mother as
though without warning she had slapped his face. She sat peering up at
him out of her grimace, her head bent forwards.

'Of course I am a fool, my little mother. But calm your fears, I am
not too utter a fool to live.'

He bent down and kissed her, then stood in front of her, looking
abstractedly over her head.

'I must be going. Hester will be angry if I keep her waiting. We must
not make Hester angry.'

He bent down again and kissed his mother on the forehead. Neither said
any more: he turned and walked rapidly across the floor to the door,
erect as though stiffened against some parting shot.

'Ren,' the old woman cried, as he was passing through the door. 'Ne
te fche pas, n'est-ce pas?'

'Tu veux dire avec toi? Quel ide, ma petite mre!'

He blew a kiss, all the ornamental curves of his beard seeming to
centre in his lips, the heavy cheek-bones impending upon the jutting
mouth. But the eyes were still distracted.




CHAPTER III

A Taxi-Ride and a Dinner at 'La Toulousaine'


He sprang into the taxi and crouched with his hands cupped around his
face as it shook and rattled preparatory to starting. Then he
straightened himself, and sat bolt upright, in the centre of the seat.
Nature had given its answer. The judgement of his mother uprooted him,
as it were. He had to accept detachment from all that his family had
meant for him. Or at least this must be so in the deepest sense. She
was an ignorant, worldly old woman, it was true. But he remained shaken.

He realized, as he drew very near to himself, in the dark of the
obstreperous old vehicle, how his personality must strike other
people; his sister, or his mother, for instance. He was _un exalt_, a
fanatic, a man apt to become possessed of some irrational idea, which
would blind him to everything, as if it were in a delirium. No: he was
quite the opposite, or so it would seem. He was a man whose bearded
mask was haunted by an ironic smile at all times, as much as was his
mother's, a man inclined to meet with a sceptical eye the enthusiast,
every variety of _emportement_. Yet he was now declaring it as his
intention to behave in so eccentric a manner that an explanation--a
_theory_--seemed to be demanded. It must have been some such mental
process, this, which had brought his mother to ask herself whether
this 'brilliant' and amusing son of hers were not, at bottom,
_stupid_. To be so level-headed, so '_realist_', qualifying so little
for the term 'dreamer', and yet suddenly to act in a way reminiscent
of romantic adolescence, could only be explained by some sudden
alteration, some disturbance of the personality, or else, it must
signify the presence of some streak which had never been suspected
even by those nearest to him. There were only these two explanations
available. He forced his face into a bitter travesty of a smile. To be
so realistic that you came to appear a dreamer, to be so sceptical
that you acted like a man possessed of some violent belief, this was
an irony indeed! So to be sitting as he had been just now in a room
with his nearest and dearest, calmly and matter-of-factly announcing
his line of action, watching dismay and embarrassment deepening upon
their faces, he had had the sensation of being demented. He might just
as well have been explaining to them that he was really Napoleon
Bonaparte, or an isosceles triangle. They could not have been more
amazed and shocked.

The taxi crossed the canal bridge and entered the circular road within
the precincts of Regent's Park. Ren in his cab began to circle around
the slumbering Zoo animals, the lions, the elephants, the anthropoid
apes, all dreaming of Africa, Siberia, and Malaya, Bengal and the Polar
Sea. What was in fact their dream-life was in the cages and pools, on
the imitation rocks, and in the miniature savannahs of the Zoological
Gardens. But _their_ real life of course was where lions live under the
blazing suns, or where the Polar bear prowls upon the ice caps. They
step back, when they close their eyes in sleep, into the reality, out of
the squalid nightmare of Regent's Park. Oh, where was _his_ real life!
For it certainly was not in the restaurant towards which he was
speeding. But he soon left behind the sleeping snakes and snoring
tigers, and the reflections that their proximity provoked. He began to
think that, after all, his lecture-room might be his habitat, as the
river-side was the water-rat's, and the prairie was the buffalo's. As he
creaked and banged along in this deliberately archaic London 'hackney'
vehicle, his mind darted from one absurdity to another. It was human
stupidity he was reacting against. Yet he was now obliged to justify
himself to a number of persons typically stupid. His darling mother, and
dear old Mary as loyal as she was obstinate, were fundamentally as
unenlightened as Mrs. Harradson, at least as that concerned the matter
in hand. He would not dream of describing himself to Mrs. Harradson as a
'hero', would he? No, but he had just committed that absurdity with his
sister, the best woman in the world, but completely deluded. The
delusion under which the majority sleepwalked its way from decade to
decade, from disaster to disaster, had numbed her mind as much as that
of any other Mrs. Everyman. His mother, too, was numbed, was part of the
same somnambulism, and age now was super-added. No means of enlightening
_her_. She was the dearest person in the world, but, to come down to
brass tacks, it was _she_ who was the fool, not he. This he agreed
sounded very conceited, and he had not the least idea how it was that he
came to be awake, while all these others slept. It was an explicable
accident, it signified no superiority. He just had suddenly woken up.

However, faced with this overwhelming difficulty, he had made use of
the term hero, as a stimulus to the imagination. His sister, of
course, would regard what he was doing as heroic--that would be her
way of thinking of it if she could understand; if her intelligence
were not numbed and doped groupishly by mass hypnotism. And her
intelligence was quite a good one, as a matter of fact.

So he picked his way among people who could not see: dealing in this
way with the blind produced in him sometimes the sensation of being an
Invisible Man; at others, of being brutally concrete in an
unsubstantial universe. During this period he began to acquire a
consciousness of his physical presence which was extremely
disagreeable. He thought of himself as an animal among delicate and
vapourish humans. Even his hairiness embarrassed him. At times his
acute self-consciousness would take the form of feeling that he was on
view, an exhibit. He had thought once or twice that Essie had been
looking at him in an odd kind of way. And in fact so she had. But the
reason for that was not what he supposed, but was merely that she had
seen that he was concealing something. Anyone who is inexpertly
engaged in covering something up is bound to attract attention, and
also to appear absurd. There was nothing he dreaded so much as the
absurd, in himself, a part of his French idiosyncratic legacy,
exaggerated if anything in the course of its grafting to a British
stock. But his growing sense of the absurd in everything was painful
and to suspect its presence in himself supremely uncomfortable. Once
or twice he had observed Mrs. Harradson and asked himself if he was a
male Mrs. Harradson. What was the rational, after all? Where was one
to look for the _norm_? The nervous impetuousness of his movements,
of which he was perfectly aware, he had once compared with the
charlady's. However, he had concluded, with a laugh, if it is a
question of the human kind and its essential absurdity, then of course
all right, why should I care? In so absurd a place it was hardly
likely that he himself could be otherwise than absurd.

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 Ren 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 chrie_!

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, pre and mre, as life-long 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 judgement. 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 tte--tte
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 Ren, 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 Rhne 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 jack-knife jump sprang into his own pillowless bed, it was without a
shadow upon his conscience.




CHAPTER IV

Hester Hears the News


Next 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.

Ren 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 bed-ridden girl is terribly sweet,' she answered.

'Ah, that bed-ridden 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 bed-ridden are always bores anyway,
aren't they? But I did think . . .'

'No, there are no extenuating circumstances,' he told her. 'All his
Dickens person, 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?'

Ren 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 Ren 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 Ren 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 Ren 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.'

Ren looked up from his correspondence, momentarily stung almost to
fury by the brazen navely 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, Ren.' 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 high-handed 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.'

Ren 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.

'There are three facts regarding which I am afraid there is no
possible argument. You are now married to an unemployed man. That is
number one. There are no jobs for this out-of-work in this country.
That is number two. Number three is the said man will in about two
months sail for Canada. You may add to these facts if you like, a
fourth: another world war is about to break out--as they say.'

'As to that last _fact_, Ren, I have something to say.'

'Yes.'

'It does not happen to be a fact, I think.'

'No? Evidently I must be mistaken.'

'I think you are. Most people do not think there will be a war.
Stephen, for instance, was telling me the other day that Hitler's
aeroplanes are all made of Ersatz--is that the right word? They often
drop to pieces in mid-air.'

'Indeed? How very interesting.'

'It is, isn't it. Stephen also told me that the uniforms of the German
soldiers are Ersatz, too. They have no raw materials, so practically
everything is Ersatz. Actually, the cloth of their tunics is a sort of
paper. Stephen said a friend of his had seen them marching along the
street and suddenly it came on to rain. They all got under cover in an
archway. Had they not done so their uniforms would have dropped to
pieces once the rain had soaked into them. You laugh, but I really
think you ought to listen to what is said by eye-witnesses, Ren.'

Ren, who had been laughing, rubbed his face, and came out of the rub
purged of mirth.

'Now listen, Hester, you old goose. When the Englishman hears all
these stories, specimens of which you have been retailing, what does
the simple fellow think? Well, the answer is pretty obvious. He says
to himself: "Oh well, if it does come to a war, it's going to be a
walk-over for us. All their planes will drop to pieces, their uniforms
will melt, their rifles will explode and kill them as soon as they
pull the trigger, the Ersatz shells will never leave the Ersatz cannon
and the war will be over in no time. Old Hitler will be hanged, and
Germany cut up and shared among the Allies." That is what the
Englishman will say to himself, is it not: that is what he _is
intended_ to say to himself. You see, these stories are what is called
propaganda. That means, they are reports invented to influence people,
to guide opinion in a specific direction.'

'I know what propaganda means.'

'You know the word,' he corrected her, 'but evidently you do not
understand it very well. You do not know propaganda when you see it.'

'Oh no?'

'No, otherwise you would not repeat to me what Stephen has told you.
Your trustfulness is limitless.'

'But my _dear_ Ren! Why should Stephen of all people be engaged in
such propaganda?'

Ren shrugged his shoulders.

'Stephen is a parlour pink! It is just as simple as that.'

Hester silently demurred with her mouth, conveying in dumb show that
'yes she knew but . . .'

'Hang it all, Stephen makes no secret of his Party-alignment, does he?'

'Stephen of course is not a Tory, Ren! But you describe so many
people as communists, darling!'

'But so they _are_. Whether they are officially members of the Party
is unimportant. We are passing through a period in which, in England,
communist sympathy is fashionable among the young, the educated young.
This is not a novel view of mine. It is generally accepted as being
the case.'

Hester's face was that of a person who had just discovered in her
hand a good card which she had overlooked, and which she meant to make
the most of.

'Very well,' she answered, with what she intended should be an
irritating indolence, 'but it is still quite ridiculous to say that
Stephen Vickers spends his time disseminating propaganda, in favour of
war. Stephen is the last person to fancy himself as a soldier.'

'I agree with you there. But it would not be Stephen who would do the
fighting.'

'But I don't see that, Stephen is young, he knows he would be called
up. He would hardly be likely therefore to stir up wars, would he? No.
I am afraid you have a bee in your bonnet. . . .'

From being coldly watchful and aloof, he had begun to show signs of a
mounting choler. The card she had discovered in her hand was not a new
one, it was one which had often been there before. But she had never
used it at a moment so liable to enrage him. He now sprang to his feet,
glaring down at her. 'It is not in the marriage contract that wives
should hold the same political views as their husbands,' he told her
harshly. 'Nor is it necessary for them to display more intelligence than
a domestic cat. But they _do_ have, on certain occasions, to keep their
big silly mouths closed. It is required to develop sufficient
intelligence to know when to do that. And for Heaven's sake give your
eyes a rest, no one wants to see your eyeballs.'

The bedroom door opened. 'Oo, Miss,' croaked Mrs. Harradson, balancing
backwards and forwards in the gap, as with the limited mobility of a
mechanical toy; her frosty crest, the independent strand of hair which
tented up over her occiput, rising and falling, giving her a startled
expression when it was most erect. So she advanced, only to fall back,
and then advanced again once more to be checked and to retreat holding
a witch's broom. 'Ooo, Miss, was you going to harsk Mrs. Beddin'ton
'oos cat 'ad kittens time I was took sick. . .'

'Mrs. Harradson!' Ren shot his arm out towards her, his finger
pointing at her pale, narrow, now eerily jeering face.

'Please--shut--that--door!'

Mrs. Harradson fell back as if she had received a blow, the closing of
the door coinciding with her eclipse.

Hester, her lips drawn tight over her teeth, rose to her feet, but not
with an unladylike abruptness.

'I am afraid you are misbehaving,' she remarked.

Ren sat down, crossed his legs and looked at her with undiminished
hostility. For him, she had been quite aware what she was doing, in
her references to Stephen: it was _she_ who had misbehaved--in her
persistently ladylike way.

'You provoke misbehaviour,' he said after he resumed his seat.

Hester moved over to the bedroom and pushed the door open; for Mrs.
Harradson had apparently set it ajar in order to miss nothing of the
ensuing dialogue.

'Mrs. Harradson,' she said in a voice of particular politeness. 'Thank
you for reminding me about Mrs. Beddington. It was very kind of you.
We shall not be wanting a kitten, thank you. Yes, a good cat is a nice
thing to have. . . . Thank Mrs. Beddington very much for keeping the
kitten for us. . . . I am so sorry it is now too large to drown. It is
a great pity. But I am sure she will have no difficulty in disposing
of a fine young cat. . . . A good mouser was she? Yes, that of course
will count. Everyone wants a mouser.'

Hester pulled the door to. Ren, who was standing, looked up and said,
'I am in no mood to listen to any more idiotic conversations about
cats. Unless you have anything you want to say to me, I shall now go
to my study.'

Without taking any notice of these remarks, Hester walked with a
dignified composure along the wall to the sitting-room door, turned
the handle (and this is an action which, in such a case, is a trap for
those not dignified by nature, for it is impossible to avoid slightly
protruding the posterior--but which she accomplished with quiet
mastery), entered the room beyond, closing the door behind her neither
too gently nor too loudly. This act was entirely lost upon Ren who
was collecting the one or two opened letters and other mail, which he
thrust inside the newspapers; this done, he turned and passed out
through the front door to his work-room across the landing.

The room was only vacant for a few moments; then the bedroom door
opened and the charlady was exposed to view. Irony holding her
eyebrows high up on her shallow forehead, and her eyes, which first
had seen the light in County Mayo, derisively illuminated, she
surveyed the empty breakfast table. As if exaggerating her own
rachitic mode of locomotion, shooting her head in and out, she rattled
over noisily to the sink.

    *    *    *    *    *

When, crossing the landing, Ren entered his study, he was trembling
slightly. But the tension soon relaxed, out of direct contact with his
wife. This was the first occasion on which disagreements between them
had taken the form of a 'row'. His training had led to his locking up
any irascibility in a frigid silence. On this occasion it had taken a
violent form with great unexpectedness; what had enabled it to do so
called for an immediate investigation. Why had the control, by now
second nature, been found wanting? If his attitude to Hester had
hardened into a critical analysis, he was still very attached to her
upon the sexual level. Being a man of great natural severity, an
eroticism which did not live very easily with it was instinctively
resented: and the mate who automatically classified under the heading
'Erotics' was in danger, from the start, of being regarded as a
frivolous interloper by his dominant intellectuality.

It was thus at the breakfast table that he tended to be harshest with
his Hester. The latter unquestionably had not the talent to leave
'Erotics' in the bedroom, and to create a neutral climate for herself
among the bacon and eggs, the mail, and the morning papers. She had
the knack, during the first hour of day, of reminding her husband of
what he regarded as an undesirable excess. Her 'big baby' eyes, as he
described them in his private thoughts, had at this period of great
strain tended to irritate him more than usual. It had become almost a
parlour-game with him of late to set little traps for her and to watch
her rush into them.

He now sat staring at his 'blotter', on which, as was his habit, he
fiercely 'doodled'. He censured himself in the severest manner, more
especially for the 'eyeballs' part. For at least ten minutes he thus
sat, analysing his behaviour with great care. The conclusion he
reached was that this row must be regarded as a danger-signal of the
first order. Ex-professors had just as much need of discipline as had
professors. Was he by any chance afraid that Essie might leave him and
was he reacting against such a feeling by rudeness, as it were to
scorn the thing he feared? He rejected that at once, for he
experienced no pang at the thought of Hester's departure. The response
he received to further testing was that the great crisis in his
affairs dwarfed into insignificance any merely domestic crisis. He
would keep Hester at his side, if Hester would stop. But that was all.
That settled, with a sigh he turned to the newspaper. But this
interlude of self-examination did not proceed in the mechanical way in
which, deprived of its density, it must seem to have done. Other
matters intruded and were expelled. At one point he gave himself up to
a fascinating doodle, and so forth. But academic life had compelled
him to be methodic; and if it would be untidy to leave some unorthodox
happening unexplained he would force himself to sit down and attempt
to reduce it to logical proportions. It was not at all his nature to
be methodical: as a consequence his life was a little over-full of the
apparatus of method.

But the paper lay there, and the headlines barred the way for a while.

  CITRINE BEATS A.R.P. WALK-OUT
  Unions draw up war-work plans

Everyone was in every way preparing for war. The British Government
was aware that war was inevitable. Their secret service provided them
with information of the progress of Herr Hitler's tremendous
air-armament: their figures were no doubt just as accurate as those
obtained by Mr. Churchill, and published with such a clatter, or those
found in the newspapers, and in no way less alarming. But it was most
improbable that the Government were building an air-fleet even half
the size of the Nazis'. They would see to it, according to plan, that
a war should occur, but they would also see to it that England was in
a condition of glaring inferiority. It was 'the English way': provoke
an enemy, but never be ready to meet him on equal terms. This was
intended as an alibi. 'It was not England who started it, was it?' If
it had been she would be better prepared. A hypocrite's device--which
cost England a great deal of money, and many quite unnecessary dead
and maimed in the war that would ensue.

He stared with stony hatred at the picture which he knew so well. It
was quite impossible to make anyone understand, except a very few like
Rotter, the significance of the events about to occur, the
international pressures which made it impossible to avoid them, the
mountain of debt which would be standing there at the end of the
chapter and what part this mountain played in the transaction. It made
him feel a little sick as he read a few paragraphs of the bland
automatic discussion regarding preparations for war, as if it were an
international football match which was being staged in an unusually
elaborate manner. But he closed the newspapers, and turned to his more
obviously personal affairs.

It was nearly an hour later when he heard Mrs. Harradson make her exit
from their flat, and convulsively descend to her own quarters. He had
been writing, but he now put down his pen, stood up, and made his way
across the landing.

Hester had not left, or he certainly would have heard her. He found
her, as he had expected, in their miniature sitting-room. She was
writing a letter. As he entered the room she rose from her seat. They
faced one another rather starkly, for the space for manuvre being so
limited there was nothing else to do. With the best will in the world,
he could not refrain from noting the ludicrousness of her expression.
She stood lady-likely at bay, exposing reproachfully her 'eyeballs'
and holding her 'big silly mouth' ostentatiously sealed; to laugh was
the only rational action, and he came very near to surrendering to the
dictates of common sense.

If this woman would only forget the ladylike shrouding of her hips, if
this mermaid would be oblivious of her well-tailored tail! Aloud his
words were,

'Hester, are you sure I am not disturbing you?'

Hester answered clearly and even sharply,

'No.'

'I say, you must have thought I had taken leave of my senses. Well,
that is exactly what did happen. I am most frightfully sorry. Please
do forgive me, Hester!'

'I suppose I must,' she said. 'I did not at all like the form your
madness took.'

'I know! They say that under an ansthetic people say the most awful
things.'

'You were not under an ansthetic,' she retorted.

'True. But the fact is I probably need an ansthetic. Then people
sometimes say worse things without them.'

He took one step forward, all that was needed for complete contact,
and placed both his arms around her. She turned, of course, the big
silly mouth away. But very soon the mutual warmth and marital
pressures converted her from an indignant icicle into a mass of
melting flesh. A similar transformation occurred in the masterful
analyst. This was not at all, at the conference in the neighbouring
flat, as it had been planned to proceed. Eros was a factor he always
left out of his calculations and when he first remarked that the above
pressures were resulting in the same warmth on his side as he had
intended them to induce on hers, he was traversed by what almost
amounted to a shudder. The absurd was happening. He was unable to
escape from the absurd; that absurd which was for him an analogous
enormity to _l'infme_. It was with mortification that he arrived a
quarter of an hour late at the restaurant where he was meeting for
lunch an ex-colleague, a man whose friendship he greatly prized.




CHAPTER V

Idealism Recognized


The house and garage of Percy Lamport was hemmed in by high walls and
laurel bushes. In the most 'desirable' part of Hampstead, above which
were once the wastes of the Heath, an unusual degree of privacy had
been contrived by the original 'homemaker'. What was at present to be
found at the core of this seclusion, within the massive Edwardian
walls of the many-roomed palatial site? An individual, but not exactly
the kind of human being around whom high walls must be raised.

Percy Lamport was a heavy doe-like creature. He had dwelt for a long
time in Welwyn, the original 'garden-city': one of a group of families
who had collectively evolved a strongly-marked mannerism, suggestive
of the coy shyness of a retiring herbivore. If one can imagine a
phenomenally smart, forever quietly-amused yak, standing quite still,
slyly self-conscious, its big knowing eye shining with quiet,
self-satisfied humour, standing almost as if it expected to be stroked
or hugged, for being so entirely _understanding_ an animal, if you can
summon to stand there in your fancy such a curious beast, always
_sideways_, always one-eyed, not looking at you, but at some
mesmerically absurd thought which bemused and transfixed it, _then_
you would, by the same token, be in the presence of Percy Lamport Esq.

In a street in Welwyn, to this day, a herd of these animals may be
encountered: a whole tribe of people, neighbours and friends, who
stand quietly like obedient ponies, or like Yaks on a secluded
hillside, or in the cages of a zoo, presenting you with a profile in
which is a big, amused, contemplative eye. One of these Welwynites was
known to Ren, a colleague, a lecturer in physics. This strange
professor would stand there, before his academic audience, as if
thunderstruck with quiet fun, in front of a chart of the astral
universe, making the entire galaxies and starry clusters seem
delightfully ridiculous. Ren had watched him with uneasiness, almost
with alarm, and with his brother-in-law Percy Lamport, most true to
type and capable of remaining in profile with the 'Welwyn eye' as Ren
called it for minutes at a time, he was never quite at his ease.

This great retiring mansion situated near the crest of Hampstead Hill,
far from the built-over bog-lands of the Thames-side, had been
selected in the 'twenties' by Percy Lamport and his wife Mary, to meet
the needs of a growing family, and in view of his mounting prosperity.
As an executive in a big Insurance business, now in his early fifties,
Percy was a minor magnate. Ultra-liberal Welwyn-origins accounted for
his reading-matter: the _News Chronicle_ and _The New Statesman and
Nation_ and other left-wing periodicals. And as a matter-of-fact, the
richer he became, the more to the left these newspapers and weeklies
moved. An enlightened interest in the Fine Arts was also, with him, of
radical origins. He had become the possessor of an original Matisse,
two or three Vlaminks, a half-dozen Marie Laurenins, the painter most
exactly corresponding to his taste. Shaw, G. D. H. Cole, Priestley,
Katherine Mansfield, Wystan Auden, _The Road to Wigan Pier_, _Father
Brown_, was the sort of literature to be found in his study. So his
cultural habits of thought were orthodoxly-liberal and unusually
developed for a City man.

Such was Ren Harding's brother-in-law: it was Tuesday, May the 23rd,
and Ren and his wife accordingly were to go to dinner in Hampstead;
with 'Big Business' as Ren called him.

    *    *    *    *    *

At 7.30 in the evening, as Ren stood beside the taxi, waiting for his
change, his eye rested upon the superbly spacious house, so
beautifully unlike the House that Jack Built. Nothing absurd about
_this house_. How excellently abstract wealth was after all: it got
rid of the idiosyncratic, the absurd! Lobb, the chauffeur, stood
beside the Cadillac: so exactly uniformed, his face so excellently
devoid of expression, _he_ was not absurd. (His _name_ was, but not
the chauffeur.) And as to the Cadillac, no Cadillac can possibly be
absurd. A few moments later Ren and Hester passed the waiting car and
began to ascend the six steps to the pair of ponderous front doors.
One of these opened, and 'Rod' (Rodriques), most hysterical of
spaniels, rushed out, seething with the wildest joy. He was
immediately followed by Pauline--his owner, speaking legally, his
goddess in canine theology. Pauline was twenty, and though lacking the
fanatical abandon of her dog, possessed the impulsive vitality of her
years. On seeing Ren, with an ardour worthy of Rod, she sprang at
him, seized his beard, and flung her arms convulsively around his neck.

'My bear-uncle! My old bear-uncle, where have you been? What have you
been doing with yourself? Oh, make your bear-noise, Ren darling!' And
Ren, lifting his bearded face in the air, gave his ho-ho-ho laugh:
and she echoed delightedly, in a higher register, his famous ho-ho-ho.

Pauline turned to Hester, and another girl was now descending the
steps. They were going to the Ballet at Covent Garden, Hester was
told: and then Pauline stood just below Ren, with her face in
profile, presenting him, for a few moments, a heredity 'Welwyn eye'.
Then she looked up, and enquired, 'When am I coming to hear you
lecture? They say you are a wonderful lecturer. May I come next week?'

Ren shook his head.

'Afraid not,' he told her. 'I shan't be there.'

'You always put me off. You despise my I.Q., I suppose, that's it.'

As she got into the car she was wagging her finger at him. From the
doorway Ren blew her a bearded kiss. With a deafening ovation in
reverse from Rod, the Cadillac moved away.

The quietness and gloom of the dark hall, after the noisy scene
without, almost startled Ren and he stopped. At the far end a door
was open, and through it Percy Lamport appeared. Before the latter had
passed into the hall, Ren had put himself into rapid motion, at the
same time crying 'Ah, Percy!' His advance across the hall was at so
smart a pace that it caused small waves to dart and jump around the
foot of his torso--where the jacket had no support the cloth was
prone to frisk. His bearded head was carried heroically aloft, as the
superb figure-head cut through the gloom towards his smiling host.

Le roi Ren was not a man to be unconscious of style, in himself or
others. He delighted to swim through space with the air of a Louis the
Eleventh, bearing himself as a King of France hurrying to meet the
Emperor Maximilian. He realized that his gait and gesture were too
superb for his status or for the occasion. But this amused him.
Sometimes he would deliberately act the king, or the statesman, about
whom he was just then reading. De Richelieu he was very fond of
impersonating.

These tricks and fancies, however, were incidental, and they never
caused him to forget a mission or an opportunity. The present, he
recognized, belonged to the latter class. He understood quite well
with what object Mary had arranged this visit.

As ever, like an ill-conceived figure on the reverse side of a
splendidly designed coin, was the unfortunate Hester. It would be a
pity to exaggerate this, for it was nothing more than an irritable
consciousness at times presenting itself, as of something amiss, but
never strong enough to spoil the sensation experienced in his more
flamboyant moments. But there was after all Hester to be counted in,
as part of any picture in which le roi Ren was starring.

Just in a flash, as he swept across the shadowy hall, he saw the
figure at his heels: the hips were placed too low and gave her gait a
sexish drag, her neck was too long, which acted as a sort of pole to
carry Big Eyes aloft.

Mary's face, Mary's gait did not advertise . . . oh, the horror of our
lot. But _he_ was goatish, he knew that: and all Hester was--was the
Sandwich woman of his Achilles' heel: with some women a man must feel
like a dog with a chicken tied around his neck. But he switched off
the tell-tale image, as one switches off the radio when it gets too
bad, and thrust his head a fraction higher and quickened his quick
dancing step.

But now, driving the smiling Percy back, he entered the drawing-room
like a conqueror. When he looked in Mary's face the forecast was
favourable, there were no danger signals in her eyes, they just looked
at him serenely. As to Percy, he was standing sideways, an eye in the
side of his face, a darkly mischievous, mesmerized amusement carrying
the gaze outwards to the horizon. Suddenly awakening out of his trance
he proposed a drink, and all of them soon stood holding their sherry
glasses, containing a wine as near to a tasteless abstraction as the
best Rhine wine. Among other things, Percy was a member of the Food
and Wine Society. Sherry is the last thing the Englishman learns how
to buy.

Ren disapproved of his host's orthodoxy in the matter of painting, of
his tame acceptance of fashionable pressure, and the values imposed.
He regarded these values as an offence, when sponsored by a stupid
man. Percy was a prize idiot, he had no right to these views--he
should be collecting Academic monstrosities. So, refusing to take
Percy's _avantgardisme_ seriously, he nevertheless always enquired
with great politeness about any new purchase, which was usually to be
found on the walls.

'A new one I think.'

He had observed something which it seemed to him he had not seen
before: the figure of a hanging man in some enclosed place, with a
number of big-headed, round-faced marionettes, all expressing
blood-lust and derision. One pulled at the rope, one lighted an
immodestly-carved pipe of great size. A dog scratched itself, with a
flea nearly as large as the dog squatting on its rump. He examined it
an inch from the glass, _trs amateur_.

'Ecole de Paris?' he enquired.

'No,' Percy told him. 'This is a Belgian etcher of the nineteenth
century. His name is Ensor. I am not quite sure how much I like him.'

'No, I suppose it is not easy to make up one's mind straight away.'

'You have to live with a picture before you can say whether you really
like it.'

'I can see how that might be.' Ren nodded his head sagely.

Ren stood gazing at the tongue protruding from the mouth of the
victim. Meanwhile, the happy possessor of the picture stood in
profile, the one eye amusedly and with infinite knowingness simmering
away all to itself. As Ren turned to speak to him he had the mental
comment, as his eye fixed itself upon the profile, 'Un Ensor, sapristi!'

'I must say I rather take to this,' he declared aloud.

'You like it? I am glad of that. I find I like it more and more.'

'It does grow on one,' the other agreed. Ren moved down the room to
where he thought he saw a new Marie Laurenin. Laurenin heads all
resemble one another to such a degree that anyone not an expert may
well find it difficult to say which is which.

'I have not seen this one, have I, Percy?'

'"Clothilde"? . . . Yes, you have often seen the "Clothilde". It used
to hang in the dining-room not far from the door. I mean on the same
side as the door. I think it is wonderful.'

'Of course I remember it. How stupid of me.'

'It is not stupid,' Percy protested. 'With her pictures even I
sometimes forget which is which.'

'How extraordinary!' exclaimed Ren. 'I should have thought . . .'

'I am not often at a loss,' Percy smiled.

Ren had noticed that they were now alone in the room. Mary, he had
assumed, had abstracted Hester purposively. Percy looked up and said
almost with violence, 'I want to tell you how greatly I admire your
action in resigning your position at the University. It is one of the
finest things I have ever heard of. I congratulate you.'

This took Ren's breath away. For a moment he said nothing and stared
a little stupidly at his brother-in-law. Suddenly he recovered, and
almost shouted, 'My dear chap, you don't know how those words have
cheered me. I knew you would understand. But the wholehearted nature
of your support, your uncompromising endorsement of what I have done,
well, it's like a breath of fresh air. Thank you, Percy.'

'It is I who have to thank you for setting all of us an example of
fearless courage, of facing up to obscurantism and hypocrisy, the
conservative mind which crushes all the life out of our institutions.
To give up everything rather than be privy . . . to the intellectual
fraud perpetrated in the name of education. My dear chap, it is
inexpressibly fine, it is to have done a great public service. I wish
I had half your guts!'

Ren listened in growing amazement. Did Percy mean that if he had the
guts he would denounce the villanies of the great Insurance Companies?

Did he regard himself as a village Hampden _manqu_? Apparently his
amazing brother-in-law derived pleasure from imagining a day when he
would return as usual from his office, kiss his wife, and announce
that they at once must pack: that he was saying good-bye to Insurance,
that he was selling his houses, cars, and so on, dismissing the
servants and that in future they would dwell in a three-room flat in
Pimlico or Shepherd's Bush. Ren had often speculated as to what
effect a life-long diet of revolutionary journalism might have upon a
highly successful executive. It now was obvious that Marxism was
simply transmuted into romance, into British Dare-to-be-a-Danielism.
As to whether Percy understood, or indeed took the faintest interest
in what precisely were the principles behind his brother-in-law's
unworldly action, Ren could only guess. He supposed that in a woolly
way the good Percy labelled as 'idealism' any defiance of an
established order, or institutions: 'idealism' being the word
traditionally favoured by the revolutionary journalist for the impulse
in the moral man to devote himself to the welfare of men-in-general.
Clearly Percy's reaction would be just to affix the label 'idealism',
without going further into the matter. He never went behind words or
underneath clichs or slogans. Since they had never had any really
serious talk, his brother-in-law could not be otherwise than quite
ignorant of what Ren's beliefs were.

'Percy,' he said, with emotion in his voice, 'what you have been
saying has had a tremendously tonic effect. I daresay you can imagine
the view of the world is simply that I am a fool. I am not made of
wood and such support as yours is a wonderful stimulus.'

Percy looked down at the floor steadily for about a minute, hearing
himself praised; just as he would had he scored a century for his old
school and was being congratulated by the Captain of the Eleven or
the Headmaster: 'Splendid, Lamport. A faultless innings!' Then he
looked up, smiling a little bashfully. 'Will you have another glass of
sherry, Ren? It is some stuff Simon recommended.'

And they moved back to the table where the sherry and glasses had been
placed.

Mary appeared followed by Hester, and she saw at once, by the faces of
the two men, that both were agreeably excited; obviously their
relations had been changed and cemented, by some emotional impact
occurring for the first time. Percy wore an expression with which she
was familiar. He had looked like that when he had appeared for the
first time in coast-guard uniform, in the War to End War: or when, for
instance, he had broken with the firm of family solicitors on learning
that they had behaved with typical professional caddishness and
disregard for the laws of fair-play in a case which he had entrusted
to them. She guessed that her husband must have gone quixotic in
emulation of her brother, and that he had just shown his mettle in
setting about some windmill, to prove that he was just as mad as Ren.
Her eyes rested with a gentle toleration on the pair of them. Perhaps,
after all, they were right and she was wrong. But she found it very
difficult to take either of them seriously.

At dinner a new consignment of champagne was tried out, to the popping
of corks and raising of glasses (_du champagne!_ just as if Ren had
performed a remarkable feat forsooth). After a glass or two Ren began
ho-ho-hoing. The occasion became almost festive, and Mary frowned a
little as she smiled, feeling among other things that it was bad policy
for her to appear in too _carefree_ a rle. Would Percy understand him?
He was very easy to misunderstand! And Percy would expect him to behave
with a proper gravity, his fellow-Quichote in keeping with his recent
heroism. So Mary remained a little severe throughout.

When, however, Percy observed, 'What do you think, Ren, about the
Russian Pact? Are we going to have an Alliance with Russia against
Hitler, or not?', the face of the ex-professor subtly altered: it did
not become graver, but rather a little soberer and immediately wary.

'No,' he said cautiously. 'No, there will of course be no pact between
England and Russia against Germany.'

Percy looked almost startled at the aplomb of this assertion.

'You say _of course_ there will be no pact. _The Times_ seems to think
there may be.' Percy looked up through the screen of his eyebrows,
crumbling the bread at the side of his plate.

'That, I believe, is very unduly sanguine. All history points the
other way. But it is quite usual for _The Times_ to ignore history.'

Percy smiled. '_Sometimes_, certainly.'

'There is much affinity between the Russians and Germans. The Russians
naturally will think that it would give us great pleasure to see the
Russian and German dictatorships destroying one another.'

'But may they not,' Percy protested, 'desire to see Hitler destroyed?'

Ren shook his head. 'That is too simple,' he said. 'Russia would not
_help_ Hitler, with arms. But might agree to a limited pact with her.
Why not? Moscow, after all, would relish the sight of Germany
exhausting itself in defeating England or vice versa. One of the great
mistakes the English make is to believe themselves lovable.'

Percy laughed. 'There is some truth in that.'

'Russia will never go to war if it can possibly avoid it, though it is
said to be much stronger than is generally supposed. It will always
prefer not to commit itself deeply. . . . For the rest, there are two
things always to bear in mind. _First_, the Russian people are
traditionally very averse to war. Unlike the Germans. Unlike us.
_Secondly_, the Russian ruling class have always got on well with the
Germans, and have made use of them whenever possible. The Armies have
still been friendly when the politicians were bickering.'

There was a pause, Percy continued to eat in silence. Mary and Hester
smiled at one another, as if to say, 'Men are very clever! It is a
debate where our merely feminine views would be _de trop_.'

The host wiped his mouth and pushed his chair back. 'Your two cardinal
points,' he began, 'may or may not be of the decisive character that
you attribute to them. I am not competent to judge. What I do know is
that I should be indeed sorry should the pact not materialize.'

'I too.' Ren vigorously nodded his head.

'What is more,' Percy continued, 'the situation would then be of the
utmost gravity.'

'I agree, it could hardly be graver. For ten years now we have
carefully progressed, as if that were our aim, into this terrible
situation. It seems to me, in all seriousness, that there has been a
great deal of deliberation in getting ourselves tied up in a worse and
worse position from which nothing can disengage us.'

Percy stared at him. 'Do I understand you to say that it was on
_purpose_ that we find ourselves in this highly dangerous situation?'

'After years of the closest observation and exhaustive research,' Ren
told his brother-in-law, 'I find it impossible to come to any other
conclusion.'

At this unexpected dnouement, of what had succeeded his initial
enquiry regarding the proposed Russian pact, Percy's first reaction
was one of bewilderment. This was expressed in his face with a most
graphic explicitness. Next, it could with a comic distinctness be
observed transforming itself into something else. The bewilderment
hardened into suspicion: Percy could be seen to cast a covert glance
at the bearded oracle! Mary noted the arrival of second-thoughts with
anxiety. For absurd as the phase of Percy and Ren's relationship
appeared to her, in which the quixotic was in the ascendant, yet Mary
would have far preferred that to one in which her husband came to look
upon Ren as a lunatic. Nor was Ren unaware that he had gone too far.
Formerly he had never moved on to an enlightened plane in conversing
with Mary's husband, nor with Mary either, except for one lapse, which
had not developed. He asked himself how he had come to be led into
this, and why he had not contented himself with some conventional
explanation. 'It was the prophet coming out,' he told himself, with an
internal grimace.

Ren made no further move, as though to allow his oracular statement
to take effect (though he sincerely hoped that it might not);
meanwhile he gave himself up to the delights of a Coupe Marocaine,
wondering what elixir it was which Percy's Greek cook had introduced
into this exotic _entremet_. Mary and Hester, who both had memories of
Pangbourne, were outside this political debate, discussing mutual
friends. 'Old Mrs. Proctor,' Mary said, 'had been born in India, and
told me she was a Buddhist, and was convinced that in her next
incarnation she would be a Siamese cat.'--'I like old Mrs. Proctor,'
Hester mused.--'I did too. Her choice of a Siamese cat accurately
reflected her nature. She _was_ a cat, but a Siamese cat!' And laughed.

But Percy was suffering another transformation. His face had cleared
up. He was obviously once more in the clutches of some heroic emotion,
it seemed to Mary. And at this moment he broke the silence between the
two men, which must have lasted several minutes.

'What you said was a hard saying,' Percy told his brother-in-law.
'Just for a moment it was too much even for me.'

Greatly relieved at his tone, Ren replied ambiguously, 'The world is
a hard place.' He was resolved not to permit himself any further
departures from the beaten track.

'Indeed it is!' Percy answered heartily. 'But do you really believe that
the Tories would be such ruthless monsters as to _arrange_ a second
world-war . . . yes, even connive at the successful emergence, or in
effect _create_ such a bloodthirsty little gangster as Herr Hitler, such
a scourge of God, to advance their class interests by a shambles.'

Ren almost laughed outright. His brother-in-law was incapable of
imagining any turpitude other than a Tory-capital one. It was a
masterpiece of doctrinaire delusion.

'The macchiavellian Tory is capable of anything,' Ren asserted with
suitable solemnity, having decided to convert it into a Party matter.

'You think he would go that far?' Percy leant forward. 'Do you think
he would pull down the world about his head, if necessary, in order to
have his stupid way?'

'Don't you? Consider the deeds of his secret service! He deals in
political murder just as much as the Hitlerites or Italian fascists.'

'I still recoil,' Percy protested, 'at the picture of civilized men,
however corrupt, plotting the destruction of whole populations, and
even sacrificing perhaps half of their own. I consider Mr. Churchill a
very bad man, but scarcely a Borgia.'

Ren stroked his beard; he was thinking of the Borgias.

'All Tories are potential Borgias,' Ren laid it down (for if he was
so stupid as he had revealed himself, even so childish a statement as
this would go down all right!). 'I say it quite seriously,' he
added--for he believed he saw a shade of suspicion darkening his
brother-in-law's face, and must plug it in pretty stiff. 'The ruling
class of a country, the traditional ruling class, is completely
ruthless. Human emotions are luxuries which those desiring power must
discard entirely.'

'You speak like Machiavelli,' Percy smiled.

'But the modern politician behaves like Machiavelli. This is brought
home to the historian, though he is very careful never to betray the
guilty secrets he has learned. It is more than his place is worth. As
the servant of the ruling class, he cannot but become privy in the
course of his researches to the dark secrets of his masters.'

'But, Ren,' Mary interposed. 'Was Lord Macaulay, for instance, in
possession of these criminal secrets?'

'Of course he was,' her brother told her, smiling. 'But he wanted to
be a . . .'

'A LORD!' Percy almost roared delightedly.

'Exactly!' Ren smiled.

'I think you are a pair of dreadful cynics!' Mary laughed, all the
jolliness of the dinner having returned.

'Well, I do not propose to reveal any of the dark secrets I have
myself come across. Let me take an incident which is described in
every history of the United States. I refer to the sinking in Havana
Harbour of the battleship _Maine_. At the time the Americans were
accused of doing this. The motive would be obvious: namely, so to
inflame American opinion that war with Spain would be inevitable. Well
now, when it was said that the _Americans_ were responsible for the
sinking of this ship, with enormous loss of life, the American
Government was clearly _vis_. But the President was determined to
have no war if he could possibly help it. So would it be the War-party
of which Theodore Roosevelt was a prominent member? Would they murder
hundreds of their countrymen, gallant seamen, in order to precipitate
a war? The answer is, to my mind, that they would. Indeed, they would
blow up half the world to have their way. And this goes for all
politicians in all places. Guests are no longer poisoned by their
hosts, as was the case in the Italy of the Borgias. That is too crude.
Hypocrisy has, in our society, put a thick patina over everything:
there are a number of forms of violence which must not be indulged in.
But whereas in the Italy of the Borgias massacre was confined to quite
modest numbers, today a man (a politician) may destroy ten million
people without it ever being remarked that he has behaved rather badly.'

They all had listened to this more or less attentively.

'It may have been accident,' Mary observed. 'It may just have blown up
of its own accord.'

'No one ever thought it did that,' Ren replied. 'The more sinister
explanation is practically uncontradicted.'

'The Americans are a nation of gangsters,' was Percy's comment, 'and you
can hardly argue, because Americans were capable of such an action, that
Englishmen would be liable to commit an equally foul crime.'

Ren laughed.

'Upon such a generalization as that "all Americans are gangsters" you
cannot safely base an argument. Bryan, for instance, Vice-President in
Woodrow Wilson's administration, was not a gangster. There are, let us
admit, a few exceptions to the rule that all politicians are
blackguards. Americans as a _whole_ are no more gangsters than we are.
Sorry.'

'No. I am sorry too. The good Americans--if there are any--are
untypical.' Percy, like many of his countrymen, took up a very rigid
position regarding the Yahoo on the other side of the Atlantic. The
ex-professor pushed his chair back and laughed negligently.

'My illustration was unfortunate. I forgot how opaque the atmosphere
of prejudice is. I should not have gone for my illustration to the
United States. But there is no particular point in re-starting and
taking my illustration from nearer home. By all means retain your
illusions regarding playing-the-game and a race of "Very Perfect
Gentlemen".' He looked at his host and smiled. 'Remember, though,
that it is usually Tories who speak about playing the game. Do not be
_too_ credulous.'

Soon after this the two ladies withdrew. The men remained standing.
After a pause, as though for _recueillement_ on the part of Percy,
that gentleman practically re-enacted the scene of just before dinner,
with this difference that he had now drunk quite a lot, and his guest
also resembled him in this respect. During his emotional expansiveness
Percy became quite red in the face, and once or twice moved
dramatically close to his brother-in-law.

'How is it, Ren, that we have never until tonight really got to know
one another? Why have we never had any good talks before? It is really
astonishing how little we have found to say to one another.'

Ren knew perfectly well the answer, why they had never had any
serious conversation before. But he affected to be at least as
astonished as Percy at that fact. He had looked upon Mary's husband as
a man with whom he had so little in common that it was unnecessary to
exchange anything more than commonplaces. But Ren crashed, almost
with violence, with a heartiness even exceeding the other's, 'Yes, is
it not amazing that all these years we should have been content to
discuss the weather, or some child-murder or football-match . . .
Marie Laurenin!'

They both laughed, looking around for one of the ubiquitous stylized
inanities.

'It is extraordinary,' he went on, 'how something happens . . . and two
people begin talking without any social inhibition and are revealed to
one another. It is one of the most extraordinary things in life!'

'Absolutely!' Percy noisily responded. '_The_ most extraordinary.'

'The most! It is like the discovery of Plastic.' Ren capped the whole
matter. 'Just a jolly old milk-bottle, the sort the slovenly housewife
leaves hardening away there on a shelf--too damned lazy to wash it out
and return it to the milkman, and the stuff brought about by her slack
habits is _plastic_. World-shaking discovery. A universal substance
such as the alchemist dreamed of. Tea-trays, false-teeth, cups and
saucers, eye-glasses, surgical instruments, flying-machines--all out
of a bottle of milk. We have been like the indolent housewife, you and
I, Percy. We ought to be damned-well ashamed of ourselves!'

Percy did not entirely come up to his guest's comic picture of him, and
there were times when he showed a certain uneasiness. So now, smiling a
little dubiously, he remarked, 'We neither of us perhaps can claim to
possess such staggering properties as are to be found in a neglected
milk-bottle. But I think you are a very remarkable person: our talk
tonight has given me furiously to think. And I like thinking furiously.'

'So do I.' Ren discharged a furious puff of smoke from his dilated
nostrils. They sat down and talked a little more, Percy saying, among
other things, what a marvellous insight his new friend had into
American history. 'But of course it is your job,' to which the
historian replied, 'It is in fact a pity that Englishmen do not know a
little more how America came to be what it is.' Then suddenly Percy
drew his chair, with some violence, near to that of Ren.

'Look here, my dear fellow, I have been thinking about this ever since
Mary informed me of your splendid gesture, how you laid down your post
. . . in a spirit of the purest idealism. Whenever I think of it I
marvel--how many people would sacrifice everything for a principle,
expose themselves . . . well, to penury? Now, my dear fellow, I am a
relative and you must allow me to say this. In order to meet the
difficulties which must immediately confront you, you must allow me to
place at your disposal the sum of one thousand pounds.'

Ren began to say, 'I could not think of allowing . . .' But he was
interrupted by Percy, waving such remonstrances away with an imperious
hand.

'The sum I have mentioned means nothing to me, I can very easily spare
it. Needless to say, it is not my habit to distribute cheques. But in
_this_ case I look upon it as a paltry sum, and let me say at once
that if you should require more in the first year or two to keep you
going, do not hesitate to turn to me. I should be ashamed of myself if
I did not support you in any way in my power.'

'But really, old chap . . .'

Getting to his feet with a purposeful air, Percy said, 'Will you wait
here for a moment, I shall be back immediately. I am going to my study
to draw this cheque on the spot. Excuse me. I shall really only be two
or three minutes.'

He left the room, and Ren, who had risen, went to the table and
poured himself out another brandy. As soon as he was alone Ren's face
contracted. Glaring down at his glass, he would appear to be
concentrating for purposes of analysis.

_The Absurd_ was once more puzzling him. This man he was with was so
obviously not screwed down tight, and half-finished: kept attacking
him--yes, actually _assaulting_ him--with nonsensical approbation!
Then he would shoot off, as he now had done, into the _nant_, soon to
reappear with a cheque for a thousand pounds. Was this faery gold? Was
he an emissary of Nonsense in person? Yes, would these thousand pounds
only be convertible into a thousand absurdities? For such a figure
could not possibly deal in a rational currency.

But Ren poured down more brandy and squared his shoulders. It was his
brother-in-law . . . after all, who slept with Mary every night. Mary,
stable as a rock, she would not be closely associated with so unstable
an entity were she not assured that his money came from a normal mint.
No.

Although he had drilled himself into tolerance of the Absurd by the
time Percy hustled in, the first impact of the bird's-nest coloured
thatch, the rimless glasses (put on to write the cheque), produced a
mild spasm of alarm, of the type always experienced when Mrs.
Harradson emitted, 'Oo, sir, Professor Harding, sir!'

But he forced an agreeably abstracted expression on to his face (no
unseemly expectancy of what was about to happen, yet . . . in a musing
of a happy kind, so that if anything _did_ drop in his lap it would be
received benignly, without too crudely abrupt a change of countenance).

'I say, Percy, I ought not to take this you know! I am quite serious,'
he protested, as Percy placed an envelope upon the table beside him.
'You're a terrific brick!' (He supposed that 'brick' was the kind of
idiot word that belonged to the vocabulary of this sort of
homunculus.) 'But I know I should refuse!'

'Nonsense, my dear chap!'

Ren looked up quickly at the word 'nonsense'.

'I don't know what Hester would say if she could see me pocketing
this,' as he picked up the envelope and put it in his breast pocket.
He almost laughed at the thought of Hester's disgust at the sight of a
thousand quid. 'Hester always says I have no proper pride.'

'She will soon get over it, I expect.' For this was rather in excess
of what could be absorbed by the homunculus on the serious level.

'I expect so, poor dear girl. For she takes a more serious view than I
do of our future.'

'Women are born pessimists,' Percy told him.

Ren nodded his head. 'They are the eternal Greek Chorus.' Then
quickly placing his hand upon that of his host, which lay, hairy and
sprawling, on the table, and administering a slight pressure, he
exclaimed fruitily, 'I am your debtor for life, old man. I do not mean
I shall not repay you this sum. I mean that when I _do_, I shall still
be your debtor.'

'Nonsense!'

At this second 'nonsense' Ren shot up his head even more quickly, and
examined closely the bird's-nest hair, the blankly shining
eye-glasses. Had he read his suspicions? Has this old bourgeois
second-sight?

But Percy resumed the dinner-table conversation, which had apparently
given him an appetite for political and other discussion; or there had
been something Ren had said which had stirred him into unaccustomed
speculation.

'In my lifetime,' he began, 'the attitude to violent death has
completely changed.'

'In mine too. We have become like the Orientals.'

Signs of animation were seen in the bird's-nest-topped head, with its
glazed eye-sockets (for the glasses were still there). 'Orientalized,
are we? You think that?'

'All I meant was,' Ren clarified, 'that in the past it was always
said that our attitude to death was different from that of the
Oriental races. Today one does not hear that said, and I think that
there is no longer any justification for saying it.'

'No, there is not. I do not mind being blasted out of my house by a
"super-bomb" at any moment. This is a quite new attitude.--I mean my
callousness about myself.'

A frown grew upon Ren's face, like a hieratic tree, during Percy's
self-analysis. The last thing that he desired was a serious discussion
with this auriferous Nobody. But such self-complacent revelation of
callousness normally would have provoked him to didactic reproof.

'Ah ha, yes, very painful,' he muttered.

'Rather the reverse,' the callous one smilingly corrected. 'But I
often have wondered,' he went on, 'whether the sort of orientalizing
we have undergone was not due to the extraordinary growth of Jewish
influence.'

(Ha! An anti-semite, thought to himself the surprised listener. One of
the City Man's substitutes for thought--the fox-hunting still in the
blood of the stockjobber. But he waited.)

'It is my opinion that the Jews have too much influence,' Percy
continued truculently, glancing at his frowning companion; the frown
still there which had grown under the stimulus of passing reference to
high explosives and high finance.

'I should be interested to know your opinion, Ren, of the Jewish
question.'

Stirring himself reluctantly, this frowning guest, whose profession it
was to have opinions, drank his brandy slowly, ponderously put down
the glass, and a shade grumpily gave his opinion.

'The Jews. The Jews are an alibi for all the double-dealers, plotters
and intriguers, fomenters of wars, _und so weiter_. A useful tribe,
they take the rap for everything.'

It was with a much colder voice that the bird's-nest-crowned mask
drawled, 'So you regard the Jews as much maligned?'

'They certainly are maligned. They have their own advocates in plenty;
I am only interested in justice, and I notice numbers of malefactors
escaping on the backs of the Jews.'

Percy's disappointment was patent, he was even ruffled. 'In the
Insurance business . . .'

'Ah yes, in the Insurance business you do meet a lot of bad hats with
semitic cognomens.'

'You do indeed,' Percy asserted with asperity and then followed several
accounts of fabulous Insurance frauds, and the part his company had
played in same. The last of these stories was laughter-provoking, the
delinquent possessing an eye for the farcical, and both narrator and
listener became uproarious and mingled their laughs as they poured
themselves fresh glasses of brandy. The bad patch in the conversation
was over. Subjects in which the City man's passions were not aroused
succeeded, one or two of which revealing an identity of view and so
confirming Percy's new-found belief in his brother-in-law's wisdom. It
seemed a long time to Ren since their wives had left them when his host
got up and led the way to the drawing-room.

As all were moving about near the open front door preparatory to the
departure of the two guests, Ren went up to his sister and kissed
her, murmuring almost in her ear, 'Marie, tu est si belle, tu est si
bonne!' The serene roman-face of the slightly-smiling Mary accepted
the mariolatry blandly, squeezing her brother's arm. And over her
shoulder could be seen in the light of the hall lamp the figure of
Percy, his head once more in profile, his shining eye rapt in a dream
of unutterable knowingness. Ren saw him as a large bird, a hen-bird,
a bird's-nest upon its head, transfixed in a dream of exultant
intensity; a bird who had just laid a splendid golden egg.




CHAPTER VI

How Victor Saw the Matter


'Are you a subscriber to a Press-Clipping Agency?' Janet Painter
looked across the marble table at her brother. He shook his head. 'You
did not read my story about you then, I expect.'

'What was that?' Ren was watching a girl at a neighbouring table who
had been sketching him he thought. He had seen no sketching in the
Caf Royal for a long time. Habits were changing among the native
artists. Spectacled girls were always the hottest: her specs were the
big rimless ones that went with myopic, fat, red-lipped, provincial
Sunday School sexiness. As greedy for it, as red-cheeked lads for jam.
She turned towards him and smiled. He pointed his bearded lips and
puffed a pencil of blue smoke.

'The little beast carts that sketch-book around with her as a means of
getting off,' he ruminated. 'She sketches men into her fat little net.
Probably been trodden by several hundred Yorkshire Tykes or Shropshire
Lads. Now up in the capital, is swimming around with that protruding
fish-mouth of hers below the short fat nose.' He removed his eyes from
the coarse bit of sex-bait and caught Victor's eye, which had been
covertly feasting upon the same abject morsel. Not for the first time
did he find himself cruising in the same dirty waters as Victor. They
had so few tastes in common that _this_ one he found particularly
startling.

'Idealism,' his sister was saying, 'was the caption for my story.'

'Idealism?' Ren repeated. 'The World as idea and as imagination. I
see.'

'Yes, I say the most brilliant of our "young" professors, whose book,
_The Secret History of World War II_, created such a sensation last
year. After enumerating a few of his more glittering academic honours,
I went on to describe how at last unable to bear the feeling of
guilt, he had resigned his professorship. The sense of guilt had grown
with his increasing sense of the evilness of the system his teaching
was designed to support. Now, he, accompanied by his beautiful young
wife, who with great bravery is following him into the wilderness, are
booking a passage for Canada, where they are to start a new life.
"Such idealism," my story concluded, "is not often met with outside
the pages of a novel."'

'Oh, why didn't you tell me about this, Janet?' drawled Victor
fruitily in his throat. 'How clever of you, darling!'

Mr. Victor Painter was Janet's husband, but his classily-barking
patronage she took no more notice of than if he had been a familiar dog.

'Where has this story found a home,' Ren enquired, also ignoring the
drawling noise.

'In the _Ladies' Realm_,' she told him. 'But I am slithering another
one into the gossip of the _Daily Telegram_.'

Meanwhile Hester glowed appreciatively, actually blushing a little.

The four had just been dining within, in the smallish room where the
orchestra performs.

The party consisted exclusively of Ren and his brother-in-law, Victor
Painter, and their wives. This party had been proposed by Ren, with
the purpose of passing an evening with Janet, his second sister:
thirty-seven, eight years junior to Mary, and ten years younger than
himself. She was dark and in some ways a slenderer version of Mary,
and in character much less substantial too: Victor and Janet were a
pointedly youthful thirty-seven. The ten years which separated Ren
inflated by them to twenty. Across these twenty-odd, Victor addressed
his brother-in-law as from a long way off. His learning and renown
served to confer upon these inflated distances a proverbial
likelihood. In Victor's manner, too, there was always something which
implied that, as decade after decade passed, he automatically was
destined to become the possessor of a similar learning and renown. If,
at present, he was ignorant and quite unknown, this was merely owing
to his youth (for the ten years he added to Ren's age, he took off
his own); consequently it was in fact across no less than three
decades, rather than two, that he addressed his wife's brother.

To such a harmless rearrangement of nature and adoption of a false
position Ren would not have objected (his beard alone was a testimony
to his indifference to the Zeitgeist), had it not been for his
brother-in-law's general vulgarity and distinct proclivity to 'bound'.

Victor was a product of Liverpool, and the accent with which he had
originally spoken was that peculiar to Lancashire: in no way inferior to
B.B.C. English certainly, but that had not been Victor's view. He had
come to London young, after a brief period as a wool clerk. It had been
borne in upon him immediately that to speak as if an Old School Tie hung
around his somewhat scraggy neck instead of a work-a-day necktie was
essential for success. Giving proof of a certain histrionic endowment,
he completely suppressed the locutions and tang of the Merseyside. He
substituted the languid drawl of a Vaudeville toff.

As he strolled from one room to another of their little house, it was
with so manifest an indifference to the lapse of time, that anyone
could see he had been born in the top drawer, and that _Time is Made
for Slaves_ was his family motto.

His brother-in-law always listened to his throaty baying tones with
boredom, and found it difficult to hide his contempt for this Ersatz
gentleman. There had even been a moment in Victor Painter's life when
his surname appeared to him a little compromising: and he had once
considered changing it by deed poll. Did it not draw attention, quite
unnecessarily, to how his ancestors had made their living? For
_painter_ signified, of course, a fellow on a ladder painting a front
of a house. But it was not long before he learned that those
privileged beings, the painters of easel-pictures, invariably referred
to themselves as _painters_. So he was on good terms again with his
name, and even a little proud of it. He thought of Lord Leighton and
of Sir Alfred Munnings, and when asked what his name was by, say, a
hotel clerk, he barked proudly, '_Painter_.'

Victor by profession was the third on the notepaper of a
not-very-prosperous Publicity business. In this Janet assisted, in a
spasmodic way. Lastly, since the nature of his job brought him into
contact with a number of actors and literary people, Victor regarded
himself as an inhabitant of 'The Art World', a typical attendant at
the annual Three Arts Club Ball, and the kind of person the casual
visitor would expect to see at the Caf Royal, which he persisted in
regarding as a 'rendezvous of artists and models', though it had long
ceased to be that. How on earth Janet had come to marry this squalid
coxcomb Ren could not understand: except he was obliged ruefully to
agree that ten years earlier this melancholy, baying countenance may
have provided the female eye with material for mild romance.

This being Victor, it may be imagined that it was in no way to be in
_his_ society, Ren had arranged this party. On the other hand it
would never have occurred to Victor that Ren's suggestion that they
all four should meet at the Caf Royal, could be for any other reason
than to pass an evening with him: to secure _his_, Victor's, opinion
upon the course he had taken, in resigning his professorship, and to
give him the inner low-down regarding that resignation. It was, in
consequence, a little puzzling to Victor that so far his opinion had
not been sought, nor had any account been forthcoming of why (the
_real_ why) Ren had thrown up his job. 'Ren is a deep dog,' he
reflected. 'He has got something up his sleeve!'

Ren's objection to discussing anything about his resignation with the
shoddy, flashy Victor was absolute: and when he saw that personage
leaning over confidentially towards him, he met the intruder with a
dark scowl. However, Victor proceeded, quite undeterred, to address
him in a hoarse, throaty, confidential, brother-in-lawish manner (as
though to say 'in the family things can be told which it is perhaps
undesirable to broadcast outside').

'What, Ren, was the real story,' Victor asked, 'behind your
resignation--I mean the real motive? Did you have some bust-up or
something?'

Ren stared at him for perhaps a minute, and then turned his back.
Janet laughed. 'All Victor wants to know is was there any dirty
business?'

At this Ren turned around with not very good grace. 'Oh, I beg your
pardon,' he said to Victor. 'I thought, for some reason, that you were
talking to yourself.'

'No, nooo,' Victor drawled, and as he drawled astonishment could be
seen changing into anger. 'I am not accustomed to speak to myself.'

'No? You wish to know . . . ah yes. Nothing at all is concealed. The
occurrence to which you referred has no esoteric inner story. My
original statement is all there is to say.'

'I see,' Victor observed drily. He was extremely offended. He looked
down his nose, hooding his eyes and hollowing his cheeks, as he was
accustomed to do with anybody whom he regarded as nearer to the
bottom-dog level than himself. He had been becoming acutely conscious,
as they sat in this sacred hall of fame, that this man, of whom he had
always been rather afraid and cringed to, at times, was no longer the
person that he had been. His status had suffered, to his mind, a
catastrophic decline. It had required a sizeable interval, and almost
two hours had elapsed since they met in the restaurant, for him to
realize the new situation. (Upon the level, of course, which was valid
for him.) With questions of _status_ Victor was very familiar. As a
Publicity Agent, _status_ was a cardinal factor in the very existence
of such a trade as his. And when one of his two partners passed down
to him some 'name' of a client on the down-grade, no longer worthy of
their attention, he enjoyed saying, 'Now, Mr. X., let us face it
squarely, you are no longer front-page stuff!'

So with these backgrounds, when it came to the great Professor Harding
turning his back on him and even giving him a bit of lip--oh then, it
was time that the true state of affairs should be emphasized. After
all, Ren was now a man out of a job, and like any other man out of a
job, he had to find a new one; and in all probability it would be
considerably less good than the last. Hang it all, he, poor little
Victor, had a job. It might not be a very good one, but there it was;
any job is better than no job. So this fine brother-in-law of his had
better get off his perch. He must be made to understand that (for
whatever reason--and he, Victor, was not likely to swallow the
_Idealism_ stuff) he is no longer a professor of history, but just
some vague free-lance person. He is not, even, a professor any
longer. _Mister_ Harding, if you please!

In his grandest manner, magnanimity in every line of his face, Victor
addressed his brother-in-law, drawling drearily, 'I can quite
understand how you feel, old man, I should be a little testy myself if
I had just got the sack! . . . _You_ haven't been fired, I know. You
committed suicide, so to speak, fired yourself!' (and he ha-ha-ha'ed
like the crowing of a rooster on a cracked gramophone record). 'You
may even be in Queer Street for all I know. One does these things . . .
in a passion. Then one regrets it ever afterwards. When it's a
relative it comes home to one. . . . I am really awfully sorry; I
sympathize with you most genuinely.' He sighed. 'What Canada is like I
do not know. They say it is a tough place.' Then he said facetiously,
with a broad smile, 'You may end up as a lumberjack! That would be
rather fun.'

Ren had been looking at him with an expression of such concentrated
contempt that it was a proof of how far he had sunk in Victor's
estimation that that professional valuer of reputations did not quail.
Janet had been listening only half believing her ears, when suddenly,
at this point, she shouted, 'Victor! I wonder what you think you're
talking about?'

'Me?' Victor enquired innocently.

'Victor, you are angry! I always know . . . your ears are sticking
against your head. Apologize immediately for what you have just said.'

'Apologize! What on earth for?' drawled her husband in affected
astonishment.

'Such a rat does not even know when he is being offensive!' Ren spoke
to his sister. 'He is right. He has nothing to apologize for. If you
marry a gutter-rat you should study a little the mentality of your . . .
bed-fellow.'

'Ren!' Hester's consternation flung her forward upon the table and
she clutched his arm in a foolish automatism. But now Victor's drawl
came with a sharper note, as if it were difficult for him not to go a
little quicker. He still used the back of his chair to hook his arm
over, and addressed himself to his wife.

'Cads who insult their sisters . . .'

'Are you drunk? . . .' Janet screamed at him.

'No, no more than anybody else here. What I was saying was that cads
who insult their sisters are certainly unfit to wear the academic
regalia' (he drawled out 'regalia' with extraordinary unction). 'That
they should _resign_ is the best thing they could do.'

The two wives were white and motionless, both staring at Ren's face. As
to signs that it registered the insulting epithet, the face in question
showed nothing. All that the two women could see was a deeper red
spreading where the beard did not cover it; and the eyes appeared to be
growing more bloodshot every moment. Yet Ren was looking into the
distance, and his head had an angle suggestive of the act of listening.

What Ren had actually been hearing was (_a_) the word 'Cad' and, at
the same time, (_b_) the voices of two women behind him. They were
carrying on the following conversation, not in a stage whisper, but in
a loud undertone. _First woman_: 'I never had an orgasm with Fred not
once, and we were married ten years. Ten years! Imagine!' _Second
woman_: 'I don't believe I have had more than a half-dozen with Philip
and we were married in '25 . . . or was it '26?' _First woman_:
'Heavens, what is the matter with these men. Philip looks as if he
ought to do better than that. He is so athletic.' (She stopped.) 'Oh
listen!' she hissed. 'A fight! A fight! I haven't seen a fight for
ages!' _Second woman_: 'My money's on the Beard!'

The dialogue of the two women had already begun before the word 'Cad'
reached Ren's ears, and that word had not sufficient authority to
abolish the women's chatter. Cad held its place in the foreground of
Ren's consciousness on equal terms with the inability of Fred to
produce an orgasm.

As the two wives watched the inscrutable, angry and inquisitive
listening face--that of the brother of one and the husband of the
other--they each in their different ways considered what course to take
should there be a sudden explosion: Janet had decided, when the storm
broke, to fling herself in front of Victor. Hester decided to call upon
the waiters to rescue Victor. If Ren were to injure his brother-in-law
on top of the story of his resignation . . .! She dug her nails into
her hand and tears came to her eyes. She heard the woman behind Ren
cry, 'A fight! A fight!' and only just managed to hold down a scream. A
waiter who, in passing, had heard the word 'Cad', and saw the furious
bearded mask of the 'Cad', lingered to watch the explosion. As to
Victor, his was the composure of a gentleman who has been called a 'rat'
by a 'Cad'. He looked down his nose and delicately flicked the ash of
his cigarette upon the caf floor.

To this circle of watchers Ren's congested immobility looked as
though it were turning to a state of chronic suspense. Meanwhile,
inside the bearded head a battle raged. Many years of disciplining his
choleric nature squashed the choler until it nearly split his head.
The memory of his recent domestic explosion battled against his rising
madness. And then Fred's ten-years-long orgasmless efforts grew and
grew at the expense of the 'Cad', which shrank and shrank. After two
or three seconds of this ever more violent expansion of the power of
Fred, the 'Cad' collapsed. To the alarm and terror of everybody,
Victor giving an involuntary jump, Hester clapping her hand over her
mouth to repress her panic, Ren was convulsed with a deafening roar
of laughter. He stamped and roared, amid the bewildered relaxation of
the spectators.

'Can it be that he is yellow?' hissed one of the disappointed women in
his rear.

Hester's face wore an almost maniacal distorted smile. Victor was far
more angry than when he had been called a 'rat'. In his fit, Ren
actually kicked Victor sharply on the shins, as he threw a foot out in
a spasm of mad mirth. Victor withdrew his leg with dignity.

When his seizure was over, Ren looked at his watch, smiled at Janet
and stood up. Hester, more gracefully, not to say languishingly,
followed suit.

'We must go, Janet,' he said and moved away. 'Good-night, Victor,'
Hester sang, as she passed the 'rat' of the party, contriving to look
limp, and livid with rage, at the same time. 'Good-night, Essie my
dear,' he sang back. 'You must be having an awful time. You have my
sympathy.'

Janet accompanied her brother to the entrance hall.

'You don't seem as well as usual,' she said.

'Yes, Janet,' he replied at once. 'I am not worse than before. It is
that preposterous little animal you wedded who requires a dose of
castor-oil.'

    *    *    *    *    *

Victor beckoned imperiously to the waiter and ordered a double brandy.
The waiter did not say, 'Yes, my lord Duke,' but Sicilian eyes veiled
themselves with respect and Victor felt much the same as the Duke of
Marlborough, or the Duke of Somerset, must feel when they order a
double brandy. The curious thing was that England still swarmed with
Dukes of this sort in 1939.

'It's no use, darling, but your brother is not a gentleman,' Victor
told his wife, when she had returned.

'No, darling? He lacks breeding, I suppose it is that. But may I ask
what caused you to be offensive to him? What has he done to you?'

'Oh, nothing,' he drawled, sticking his shoulders up and waving his
hand. 'Turned his back on me, but what of that? I am only a _rat_,
after all!'

'You are a very vain rat,' she retorted. 'So because he accidentally
turned his back on you, you start being _very_ offensive.'

'I like ac-ci-dent-ally!' He caressed the word, undulating witheringly
over it.

They remained among their respective thoughts for awhile, then Victor
sat up observing, 'There are one, or I should say three or four,
things about Professor Harding; I give him his title, you notice,
though that is just kindness.'

'What are these _things_ you notice . . .?'

'Well'--he drew a noseful of smoke into his diminutive lungs and
expelled some of it again, watching its reappearance along the sides of
his nose, looking as if he were squinting--'to start with he is not a
man, who, except for his beard, would impress one as out-of-the-ordinary
at all, is he? I mean, I should never take him for a _learned_ man. His
conversation is upon a very pedestrian level. I have never heard him
mention any historical event: except once he said Queen Elizabeth had a
beard, like his, but that _she_ shaved hers.'

Janet laughed. 'How amusing. Did he say that?'

'There you are!' exclaimed Victor, '_amusing_. That is just it. Did
you ever hear him talk about anything _serious_? Or do you ever
remember him being in dead earnest?'

Janet laughed again. 'No, except when he called you a rat!'

'You are his sister, have known him all your life, and _you_ say you
have never known him to be serious about anything.'

'He worked like blazes at Oxford and got every sort of honour. I was
only ten. But I was very impressed by the tall, solemn young man who was
my brother, who was always reading in Latin . . . oh and German. No, I
don't think you can say he is not _serious_. You don't understand him,
that is all. If _you_ were a learned man, we should all know about it,
shouldn't we. Ren does not wear his learning on his sleeve.'

Victor's ears _did_ tend to stick against his head when displeased,
and now he lay back slumped very loftily in his chair, his arm hanging
limply down behind it.

'I did not know him when I was ten,' Victor blandly protested. 'I can
only speak of the present time, and I find him a common-place sort of
fellow. . . . He even has rather low tastes.'

'That frightful tobacco, do you mean?'

'No,' drawled Victor with a particular anticipatory stress. 'No. Have
you never noticed his eyes straying around, in rather . . . unexpected
directions?'

'How do you mean?'

'Well'---Victor blew some smoke up at the once resplendent ceiling--'I
caught him tonight smiling and blowing smoke-rings at an extremely
vulgar-looking girl . . . with a rather pronounced _bust_. She had a
pig face and yellow curls.'

'Dear me!' Janet laughed. 'What a little monster! Did she stick out
behind too?'

'She _did_!' Victor assured her. 'And old Ren was ogling this little
horror.'

'Shameful! And he a married man too!'

'You don't understand what I mean, apparently. One would hardly expect
this great _Idealist_ to take any interest in the protruding bosoms
of such cheap little minxes. You would expect his mind to be full of
other, and very different, matters.'

'The breasts of the nymphs in the brakes!' she mocked. 'But stay! I
have caught you, my little Victor, before now--covertly eyeing the
protruding bottoms of nymphs in the brakes of the Strand. Once I
caught you _talking_ to one. Take back those words about my brother!'

Victor laughed hollowly and a little sheepishly.

'You are more observant, darling, than I thought you were. But I am
only young Victor Painter, junior partner in a second-rate Publicity
racket! Nobody calls _me_ an _Idealist_! I am just a little _nobody_.
It's natural that I should take an interest in typists' bosoms. I have
nothing better to think about. No one expects a little Publicity man
to have any intellect. But the great Professor Ren Harding, who is so
high-minded an idealist . . .'

'All right, all right, you poor little rat!' she broke in with a laugh.

Victor subsided, sulkily. Then he began again in his indolent drawl,

'I do not believe a single word about his scruples, and his horror of
war! He nearly landed me one in the eye just now. It was all he could
manage to pass it off with a vulgar laugh . . . like some drunken
pork-butcher. His fanaticism! How can a man like that be a fanatic? He
takes nothing seriously, he makes a joke about everything! He does not
believe in anything! He just likes guzzling down all the good food and
good wine he can get, and running after girls half his age! A fanatic!'

Exhausted by his diatribe, Victor closed his eyes.

One of the women at the next table leant across towards Victor, who
opened his eyes when he heard her voice. It was none other than Fred's
luckless wife. 'I hope you will excuse me for this intrusion, but I
could not help hearing what you were saying, and I thought you would
like to know that when the bearded gentleman passed me on his way out
he winked at me. I thought this fact had some bearing upon what you
were saying.'

Victor was as gallant as it is possible to be in a world so
unresponsive to 'the Graces'. Then 'The Ladies, God bless them, God
bless them, the Ladies,' was a toast which would have been echoed with
fervour by the susceptible Victor. He was stirred to gracious
volubility, by the perfume which reached him from the neighbouring
table. But Janet was less fervent, though a little ornate. She said,
'Thanks. When next I see my brother I shall tell him that his optical
salute was duly appreciated.'




CHAPTER VII

Rotter


Robert Parkinson had a square head. It was like a fortress, and his
body was a larger edition of that. He had a pipe, too, of a bulky
type. He stuffed it, as he lay back in a strong soft chair, with
plaits of bright yellow and black tobacco: a mixture whose stimulating
pungency belongs to the family of smells including peat, tar, joss
stick and burnt bacon. The sweet stench of his tobacco fumigated the
heavily loaded bookshelves and such apparatus of learning as the
half-foot-thick American dictionary upon a lectern, with an aggressive
out-door to-hell-with-culture tang.

But his was a misleading personality. The thick-set body of a
certificated master-sea-dog, and the almost startling aromatic violence
of the smoke which blew from his mouth, twelve hours out of the
twenty-four, were the camouflage of, as well as the fumigation, for a
born book-worm. The fact was he played up to the accident of his
physique, applauding nature's paradoxicality. Parkinson's accents were
those of an educated don, and his dark eyes were as ruminative as those
of a twelfth-century monk, a mellow schoolman, latinizing in his cell.

This was 1939, the last year, or as good as, in which such a life as
this one was to be lived. Parkinson was the last of a species. Here he
was in a large room, which was a private, a functional library. Such a
literary workshop belonged to the ages of individualism. Its three or
four thousand volumes were all book-plated Parkinson. It was really a
fragment of paradise where one of our species lived embedded in his
books, decently fed, moderately taxed, snug and unmolested. The London
weather permitting, the sun warmed it for half of his working day.
When the sun became too hot during high summer or thereabouts, which
is a month or so at most, he departed, settling on the French Atlantic
coast or repairing to Switzerland with a block of books in his
luggage. Again, this was 1939. A good club was possible, the
restaurants were good and not beyond his means, the London library
supplied him for the absurdly modest sum of three pounds a year, with
ten books at a time: in the butcher's shops was plenty of meat, the
greengrocer's supplies of fruit and vegetables were cheap, fresh and
plentiful, and all shops were well stocked with errand boys, and
deliveries followed closely upon a telephone order. Elegant alcohol
was available for the poorest professional man, an excellent bottle of
Burgundy or of Bordeaux costing perhaps two shillings and ninepence.
Such as Parkinson could ask a friend to dinner for an additional
expense of around five or six shillings. And that powerfully sweet
tobacco which he enjoyed smelling so much cost him little more than a
fraction of what it would today.

According to any computation except that of the underprivileged,
Parkinson was a poor man. There were many good things he had not the
money to buy, his income was much smaller than that of Ren Harding.
But what was it produced this blissful modest abundance that has been
described above? Nothing more than writing a few reviews a month, one
probably for an American publication, by whose editors his
well-seasoned mind, whose judgements were delivered in an Oxford
accent, was greatly appreciated. Why it is quite accurate to say that
such a man nowhere today exists though he might receive the same
remuneration for the same work, is because the pound sterling has lost
two-thirds of its stature. It only masquerades as a pound. It is but
six and sixpence. The work he did would be paid as though the pound
were still the pound, for the periodicals and newspapers sell not very
far above the nineteen thirty-nine figure. And accordingly their
contributor must live in some other way than the way Parkinson lived.
The Individualist Age, composed of a multiplicity of small paradises,
is no more.

Whenever Ren came into his friend's study he regarded it with
admiration. He ran his eye over the well-arranged shelves of
philosophy, of history, of biography, of general literature, of
politics: the French, the German, the Italian and other foreign books,
confined to their allotted sections. For Parkinson was a man of
method, and Ren was not. As to the spacious room, the heavy screens,
the loaded lectern, and so on, Ren paid less attention to that. For
he knew quite well why he preferred to stop where he was, in the House
that Jack Built.

He occupied a separate flat, a flat for work only; it was inviolable.
No one had ever ventured to disturb him. Had he been at the other end
of London--or in Paris or in Rome--he could not have been more
unmolested. Whereas, had they had a larger flat, in a finer house (not
one of the Houses that Jack Built) he would have heard Mrs.
Harradson's voice croaking 'nasty old man' in the passage outside his
door, or it would have been the catarrhish voice of some other
house-serf somewhere within earshot, or the gas inspector inspecting,
or a new postman asking if a Mrs. Hungerford-Smith lived there, not to
mention Hester's genteel flutings. So he did not envy Parkinson his
work-room: dimly perhaps he realized that men like himself always were
to be found in Houses that Jack Built, working in a book-lined area
the size of a bathroom, which no charlady's finger ever touched: while
for the Parkinsons there was always more amenity, more comfort, more
space--which is not to scorn the Parkinsons but to define how these
things are allotted, for one purgatory, for the other paradise.

When Ren entered the room it was quickly and quietly, without the
empty fracas which is the rule with visitors; just as if he lived
there and had been in the room five or ten minutes before. He went
over to the fireplace and sat down. Parkinson did not rise. He made a
little sign, which was a private salute, and with the other hand
pushed over a box of cigarettes. Both of them knew that this was the
last year of an epoch, and that such men as themselves would never
exist on earth again, unless there were, after thousands of millennia,
a return to the same point in a cosmic cycle. They knew that as far as
that quiet, intelligent, unmolested elect life was concerned, they
were both condemned to death: that the chronological future was, in
fact, _a future life_, about which they both felt very dubious. They
might survive as phantoms in a future England: or they might learn to
live in some other way. It was with gravity that these friends sat
talking, upon the brink of a chasm, in comfortable armchairs, but not
with pathos. Once the fatality is recognized pathos is a disagreeable
vulgarity. Even the atmosphere appeared to be thinning out. Parkinson
and his visitor did not resort to words, merely for words' sake.

Their interests were closest together, perhaps, in the field of
political thought, or the political-historical. Ren's political
insight was startling; predictions of his in the field of foreign
affairs, and the domestic scene as well, events almost invariably
proved to be correct. His insight into the past was equally
remarkable. The first predictions of solar eclipses appeared to the
men of that time miraculous; and Parkinson almost to the same degree
felt a dumb amazement at some of his friend's foreknowledgement of
events, and hardly less at the light he threw on past happenings. By
now his 'belief in' this gifted man was unshakeable. The species
'friend' has no exact definitions and Ren Harding had no other
complete friend such as was this one: he only had men who were friends
in part. In a life, there is hardly ever more than one complete
friend, and rarely that. At Oxford this friendship had begun. At
Oxford or at Cambridge positions are taken up for life, ascendancies
forever confirmed, and the failure to secure first place is a decision
which is practically irreversible. There is no democracy in youth.

From the first their interests were similar. At the university Robert
Parkinson had soon ceased to aspire to the first place in the magnetic
company of Ren Harding: and in the end had come to look upon himself
as a sort of disciple, and other people tended to take some such
relationship for granted. During the last two decades Ren had written
books which were much discussed, whereas the other showed no signs of
ambition, and so time had endorsed the view that one was the master,
the other the follower.

    *    *    *    *    *

Abstracting in this way the essentials of the relationship of two
people may be misleading, especially if one gets no farther than the
essentials. For instance, provided with such an abstract as the
foregoing, a person would undoubtedly be considerably confused in the
actual presence of these two men. The first thing this person would
notice would be that Ren's manner was anything but that of a master,
of 'the boss' in this relationship. He was, on the contrary, the
reverse of arbitrary, often deferring to his square-headed,
squarely-camped and frowning follower. The first impression might even
be that Parkinson was the taciturn but attentive leader, Ren a
dashing follower. Actually, the last thing Ren Harding wanted to be
was 'the boss'. There were three reasons for this. Firstly, he did not
at all relish the rle of 'boss'. Secondly, he had always had a great
liking, and respect as well, for this unassuming but intelligent man.
He prized his friendship and respected his judgement. Thirdly, had he
had an appetite for bossing, he would have realized that in a
friendship with an intelligent and unaggressive man, an indulgence of
this appetite would be most undesirable, and would strain and probably
ruin the friendship: for friendship of an exceptional order is
allergic to the exercise of domination. Domination may in reality be
present, but it must not be exercised openly.

Ren for a few moments sat passing his fingers through his hair, where
the hat had pressed it down. Then he looked towards his friend.

'What did you want to see me about, Rotter?' he asked, using his pet
name.

'I hoped you would give me a little help,' Parkinson answered. 'The
_Bostonian_ asked me to do an article about you and your work. I have
now finished it, and there are some passages . . . Well, let's read
them.'

He picked up some typed pages from a chair and began softly reading
them. His dog-name, 'Rotter,' no doubt commemorated a period in his
Johnsonian undergraduate days when he was addicted to monosyllabic
disapproval. But all that a man so heroically built, with so commanding
a head-piece would have to do, would be to bark 'Rot!' once or twice,
and men would decide they had to do with a big dog-man and, with
respectful affection, call him 'Rotter'. Misnamed, then, gently and
evenly, with a minimum of opinionated forcefulness in the text, as
unself-conscious as Ren, as if running over something for a typist or
secretary, he announced the title. 'A Historian who is anti-History.'
All this was routine. Ren lay back in his chair, his pointed fingers
forming the apex of an arch, based in the elbows upon the arms of the
chair. Neither he nor Parkinson looked at one another. All the latter
did was to pause politely now and then, for a moment, and if Ren made
no remark, to continue. However, Ren's comments were almost nil.

'This still young man has written a first-rate orthodox history,
especially his noble study of the Tudors and Stuarts, of particular
interest because of its tragic pattern of the frustrations of the
Renaissance swimming against the full black tide of the Reformation.
It was by this brilliant volume that, until very recently, he was
known. He was regarded as a highly promising traditional young
historian. Then, with great suddenness, the picture changed, the image
of him in the public eye suffered a transformation overnight. His
extraordinary work, _The Secret History of World War II_, that
dramatic jump into the middle of the unfinished history of our time,
appeared; and grouped with this in our present view of him must be
several important essays and articles in learned reviews and in more
popular publications. These also are of very recent date. Altogether,
the book, conjoined with the smaller pieces, has made him one of the
most discussed writers of the present time.

'Professor Ren Harding has not been on the stage long enough for the
public to have made up its mind exactly what kind of figure this is
who, more and more, is attracting attention by his unorthodox
utterances. Is this one of those persons, who, by a skilful use of the
technique of _surprise_ and paradox, attracts more interest than he
deserves? or is he, on the other hand, somebody enunciating a doctrine
which is destined to do more than momentarily astonish us? Is he a
really first-line figure, who has something to say of unique
importance? It is my view that he is, indeed, just that. But before
this comes to be universally recognized, there must be clarifications.
It is necessary to dissipate the confused and misleading notions about
what he represents, and to replace them by others, corresponding more
to the facts. In this article I would like to make a start in that
direction. More especially I shall attempt to discourage the
misconception, so often met with in connection with a thinker of this
kind; namely, that his is a purely destructive intelligence. He is, on
the contrary, in a remarkable degree, creative.

'I think I should begin by saying that Ren Harding is a violent
perfectionist. Accordingly he would be regarded with disapproval by
all those interested in humanity retaining its vices, its most
ill-favoured passions, intact. To illustrate this: the exponent of a
strict institutional Christianity would be scornful. This is because
the dogma of original sin, and indeed the machinery of salvation in
its entirety, requires men to remain much as they are. It does not
legislate for a terrestrial community of saints. This is evidenced by
the often-discussed leniency of the catholic confessional, in the
eager acceptance of human fallibility. In that communion, a society of
miserable sinners is postulated, which of course accounts for the
catholic attitude to war. What greater sin is there than war, than
mass-murder? It is man at his wickedest, in his extremest need of
pardon and of salvation. So war is, for institutional Christianity, a
precious enormity.'

At this point Ren interposed. He murmured, 'Do not involve me in your
prejudices, Rotter. I am a friend of Farm Street and of All Saints'
too.'

'Sorry.'

The reading proceeded.

'But for the Marxist equally perfectionism is displeasing. The
class-war is as dear to the Marxist as is nationalist war to the
Christian. No improvement, no spectacular evolutionary development, in
the species for which it legislates, enters into the programme of
Marxism. Indeed, such an idea is entirely alien to it. The type of
improvement with which it is concerned is in the bread-and-butter
situation of men-in-general and great amelioration in the conditions
of work. Man is envisaged as a _Workman_, not, more inclusively, as a
human being.

'Not only is the perfectionist, or the idealist, disapproved of by
both these classes of men: it is quite extraordinary how many
different kinds of people there are interested in the perpetuation of
unintelligent and brutish human standards. Then, of course, more
inclusively and in a less specialist way, and without the dogmatist's
intensity, men as a whole--the uncreative majority--oppose the designs
of the perfectionist. Any kind of real perfectability, any tampering
with their cosy averagism, their beer and football, their Scotch and
golf, their "pools" and crime fiction, any tightening up of their
slack mindlessness, any challenge to part with a fraction of their
animality, is resisted by men.

'The reader should perhaps be warned that in the compass of this
article I can hardly hope to give more than a caricatural idea of the
views of Professor Harding. Reading through what I have just written I
see how impossible the work is to telescope and to "pot". Our author
does not suggest, for instance, that all history should be abolished,
only that it should be approached in a different way with radically
changed accents. The story of ideas, theory of the state, evolution of
law, scientific discoveries, literature, art, philosophy, the theatre
and so on, these are the proper subjects of history. Contemporary with
these creative happenings are the proceedings of the uncreative mass,
climaxed by the outrageous blackguardism of hereditary or elective
government. The wars, civil massacres which should be treated as
police court news, provide the basis for the story of mankind we
encounter in history books. The explanation of this terrible paradox,
that the state should always be in the hands of ruffians or of
feeble-minded persons, is that the enormous majority of men are
barbarians, philistines, and mentally inhabit an "heroic" age, if not
a peculiarly violent Stone Age. And upon that popular plane the
political world has its being. A number of creative "sports" are born
into every successive generation of uncreative gang-rule. Though
frowned on or even hated by the majority, these individuals
nevertheless introduce into the dull and sodden stream of the average
a series of startling innovations. They compel that strange couple,
the "man in white" with his knife, and beneath him the prostrate
patient whose lung he is about to remove, to behave differently. After
much angry argument, they persuade the man in white to permit the
etherization of his patient. This spares the surgeon the agonized
convulsions and piercing screams of his victim, and spares the latter
the agony and shock probably resulting in death. But the man who
confers this benefit is violently abused by everybody. It would be
superfluous to enumerate other instances. All such revolutionary
innovations, as is universally recognized, have to overcome similar
resistance upon the uncreative plane. Such inventive intrusion upon
the still barbarous level is for ever complicating and violently
transforming the uncreative lifestream below. Up to our age the
official rle of the _changers_ has been that of ethereal visitors,
having no part in the life they stimulate and refashion. The big boys,
the great persons, have been, up to the present, the gilded thugs, and
plumed and be-ribboned directors of homicide. But, with what may seem
a baseless optimism, I believe that a novel situation is developing.

'The inventive and creative few are growing restless at the continued
depravity of the traditional rulers on the popular plane, and the
childish melodrama which they persist in perpetuating. The contrast
between the debased level upon which governments function, and the
glittering gifts which are forced on them by the creative intruders
who are their contemporaries upon a higher but much less populous
plane becomes, for the latter, more and more intolerable. More and
more god-like powers in the hands of unintelligent and venal
individuals (possessed thereby of a terrifying potential) is so
obviously shocking that discussion of it has become a review and
magazine item. The student masses have begun to regard the world into
which they have been born with a cold eye, in a way that has never
happened before. They are not all very intelligent, but they come to
this situation with a new mind. They are beginning to look upon the
proceedings of their masters as if they were looking down upon a plane
of things beneath them. This is one very promising feature of the
present scene. It is necessary to transcend the brutal plane of
automatic life; and it must, of course, be the young, and first and
foremost the instructed young, who effect the translation of average
human life to a higher level. Among publicists, scholars, academic
leaders, a similar disgust with the pitch of nonsense to which we have
attained, and the persistent criminality of the politicians, is
another helpful sign. Clearly, there is as yet an insufficient weight
on the side of enlightenment to challenge the generations of Caliban.
But more and more people range themselves against the traditional
world of ruffianism and deceit which still lumbers on upon the
"official" plane, where all the values are those of a back-alley
brawl, or of an insurance fraud. The conspiracy to perpetuate the
ten-millennia-long system popularly known to us as "history" is well
organized, however, it is necessary to remember; and there is nothing
to justify the hope of the immediate end of the glorification of the
unselective past as "history". This is the point at which it should be
observed that the supermanism of Professor Harding is dogmatically
restrained. All he desires is to see the upper plane substituted for
the under plane: the only kind of superman he would like to see
installed is the superior man already there, the creative minority.
His ambitions do not lead to the setting up of a Philosopher King. In
a republic, a committee of Sages would perhaps be the rulers. But into
such detail he does not go. It is resented as we should find the
kangaroo resenting a suggestion that it would be an improvement if he
were less of a kangaroo, or should you propose to a hawk to reduce his
hawkishness. Having identified for the reader the idiosyncratic slant
of the mind of our author I will go on to his teaching of History, or
of no-History.'

Ren sat with his arm trailing over the side of the chair, fingering
Rotter's cat. He did not seem to be giving his closest attention to
what was being read (and indeed, such articles had often been read to
him before. Since Parkinson was a most diligent puffer). When,
however, his friend reached the expounding of ideas it was evident
that Ren was actively listening.

'For Ren Harding, Jansenist, the past can only be visualized and
written about as a crime-story. The criminals, of course (and some are
exceptionally unpleasant ones), are the endless series of persons who
figure as the heads of States. Earlier, they were men and women
disguised in some regal fancy dress, the gilt bestowing a mystical
sanction upon their childishness, dishonesty or ferocity. Nowadays,
seeing that there has been so much unpleasantness about kings and
queens, especially since the events terminating the eighteenth century
in France--the heads of States disguise themselves as quiet little
harmless people, just like you and me: but their outrageous behaviour,
involving the deaths of millions of people, exceeds in horror anything
in the historic past.

'If these persons are the star criminals of the story we call
"history", the sympathetic characters, whether murderers or otherwise,
are those inventive and creative persons who do their best to
transcend the historical, and to jack-up the social level out of reach
of the brutishness of these troupes of power-drunken individuals, who
play the old game in new ways, but always to the same disastrous end.

'It is suggested by Ren Harding that the principal figures in the
history-book should be those heroic creators who attempt to build
something, usually to be knocked down by the gang of criminals above
mentioned, with the assistance, of course, of the unenlightened herd.
The actual rulers are not necessarily concerned in any way with these
creative individuals; it is usually left to members of the
ill-disposed majority forcibly to prevent the success of the designs
of the creative few, or the contemporary wielders of power, may, for
some reason, do no particular mischief; may omit to stage a bloodbath,
debase the currency, pillage and tax to death the community, cheat
them out of their rights, push them down into new slaveries. They may
be absorbed in their pleasures, or once in a way they may even possess
a streak of goodness. Anyway, in such periods, the creative minds are
relatively free to carry out their civilizing work. Such work is
usually destroyed within a few decades by a remarkable outbreak of
bestial barbarity.

'Or, of course, these circumstances may invite the historian to look
at them in another way. He may prefer to project a picture more
reminiscent of Alice's adventures through the looking-glass. The mad
kings, queens, duchesses, hatters and the rest are the more or less
dangerous lunatics who surround the baffled hero. If this be the
approach of the historian's choice, a great deal of gaiety will
accompany the tale. This might be regarded by some as unethical, or
even frivolous. There is nothing really very gay about Stalin, or
Hitler, or Napoleon. Menacing dummies as they might still be, in a
world akin to that of Alice they would acquire a certain innocence,
transformed by the alchemy of humour into a less sinister dimension.
Professor Ren Harding admits as a possibility that history should be
written as an Alicean chaos, or even as a violent burlesque. Many of
the criminals in question, such as Henry VIII, might be treated as
ghastly clowns, with the author of _Utopia_ (in this case the
murderee) attempting to advance the new humanism, but pounced on and
beheaded in the end. Although he allows that this would be a quite
legitimate manner of dealing with the historic material, Professor
Harding prefers the tragic approach, reserving the full moral
responsibility for the ogres involved.

'It is with the utmost concreteness that Professor Harding demonstrates
how this new type of history would be written. Taking the twentieth
century, the period best known to all of us, as his first illustration,
he observes that, to begin with, the criminal in this crime-story is
less and less the head or heads of the State. In the modern
parliamentary democracy the ostensible leader is not the real one; and
so the picture is more complicated than in the case of an Emperor or
absolute Monarch. Let us take contemporary France. The little packets of
drab personalities succeeding each other with bewildering rapidity
possess too little power to be accepted as the real criminals. You have
to look for your criminal among the sinister background figures, and in
the pressure-groups pushing the little front-line puppets hither and
thither, to left or right. A big rogue, like Clemenceau ("le tigre")
does emerge, for a short while, in the world war (1914-18). But there
has been, in general, a monotonous mediocrity in cabinet after cabinet.
This has signified, of course, that all power was behind the scenes. It
has been quite otherwise in Germany, Italy and Russia, where the
front-line ostensible rulers were in fact the responsible parties. In
Great Britain, during the present century, few of our first ministers
have qualified as criminals in our crime-stories or histories. Certainly
Mr. Baldwin, pipe in mouth, and quoting scripture, was a pernicious
figure, but among his misdeeds there was no blood bath. Mr. Churchill,
arch-militarist as he is, is merely taking advantage of a situation
contrived by a great number of people of divergent interests. Even we
have had Lloyd George, with his Health Insurance Act, a splendid feat
which places that minister in the creative category. On the other hand,
there was a fat jewish-looking gentleman, with a lisp, a large cigar,
and a homburg hat, facetiously named "The Peacemaker", who was on the
sinister side. But in general the big criminal figure is absent from the
lime-lit scene.

'Now this new history-making is productive of strange effects.
According to the old method, we are shown a succession of potentates
whose attainments are set forth in a favourable light even though it
has sometimes to be admitted by the traditional historian that their
intellectual stature was exceeded by some of their subjects. Beneath
these loftiest characters in the historical plot, are shown lesser
giants, for instance statesmen, cutting a great figure nevertheless,
usually because of their aptitude for crime. Then, in the average
history book, in what is little more than a foot-hole, we have a
perfunctory account of learning, the arts, and mechanical inventions.

'Instead of this, what Professor Harding suggests is more like a
description of the activities of two races of men, one destructive and
the other creative. The destructive always wins in the end: just as we
see, in this century, miraculous technical inventions, which could
have set men free from senseless and wasteful toil, being seized on by
the destructive race, so that, at last, things are a hundred times as
bad as they were to start with, instead of a hundred times as good.

'The outline provided us by Professor Harding of how the
twentieth-century would look in an intelligent history, differs
absolutely from the kind of history we all know (that written by
Trevelyan or Green, for instance). What we have called the "criminals"
still play an important part, simply because the story is about
something radiantly creative in humanity being invariably destroyed by
something as malign as it is common and coarse; and this latter is,
needless to say, the Criminal in question, only no longer given first
place, and properly execrated by the reader. History  la Ren Harding
is an essentially pessimistic narrative. Man is shown as an
uncivilizable animal; the inferiority and destructive character of his
appetite forbids attempts by the civilized minority to establish a
civilized order. In a numerically feeble group there is great
inventiveness: this, however is not forbidden, because _homo stultus_
takes possession of all inventions, either using them as toys or
applying them to destructive ends.

'History cannot be merely an account of all that is interesting, in
age after age: the Divine Comedies, the great religious and
philosophical systems, the feats of Galileo, Newton or Pythagoras, or
the arts, and the ideologies. As an account of what has happened that
would be incorrect: for certainly all those things came into being,
but that is only half the story, it is not "history". For all these
things are products of man, and all have a more or less functional
aspect. Once the aeroplane is invented, it is what happens to it
afterwards, to what uses it is put, which is as much its history as
its original construction. It is the same with the radio, the
internal-combustion engine, and the rest: and as to books, their
publication is almost meaningless by itself; "history" is there to
tell us who read the book and what the book did to him. Now, why
Professor Harding's history is, as we have said, pessimistic, is
because man in general ignores, misuses or misreads these various
products of the creative mind, a mind not possessed by man in general.
So this explains why so many uninteresting figures, and even, in the
seats of power, such _criminals_ must be still described, why it is
impossible for the historian to escape from them. Just as the smell
from the sewers must be described in a novel in which it causes the
hero's death, so the new historian is obliged to describe what is
brutish and only fit for the garbage pail. To conclude, history can
only be written as a tragedy, because all that is worth writing about
that has come down to us has been denied its full development, has
been nipped in the bud, or has been done to death. The world war
(1914-18), is like a mountain range in the historic landscape. It is,
at once, composed of mountains of criminal destructiveness, and a
piling-up of tremendous creative inventiveness. Those four years
marked in fact the mass-arrival of the cinema, the aeroplane, the
motor-car, the telephone, the radio, etc. This is, as it were, a
perpendicular wall of great height, a mountainous barrier, behind
which the past world lies.

'The history of our century would not be one mainly of personalities
(though, alas, they are there as ever). What we should see would be
big, ideologic currents, gaudily coloured, converging, dissolving,
combining or contending. It would look like a chart of the ocean
rather than a Madame Tussaud's Waxworks; though there would be faces
(one with a toothbrush moustache), like labels of one or other of the
big currents of ideas. Then there would be the mountainous blocks of
all kinds, as though raised up by an earthquake: there would be the
piling up of tremendous inventions, their instant conversion to highly
unsuitable uses: the criminality of man rioting in the midst of these
unnumbered gadgets. Then there would be the growth, in every society,
of the huge canker of Debt. In more and more insane proportions, the
Credit System would be apparent, developing its destructive bulk. One
would sense nebulous spiders, at the heart of wider and wider webs of
abstract simulacras of wealth, suspended over everything: hordes of
men engaged for years in meaningless homicide: and vast social
revolutions as the culmination of a century of plots, and propaganda
of brotherly love at the point of a pistol, and _la haine cratrice_.
So there would be arabesques of creation and of destruction, the
personal factor unimportant, the incarnations of ideas, the gigantic
coloured effigies of a Hitler or a Stalin, no more than the remains of
monster advertisement.

'According to Professor Harding the Soviet leaders are mixed types.
They _should_ have been a new species in the history chart, but they
are a species that has somehow failed, their creative impulse
distorted. To parody the idea in Goethe's _Faust_, they are the
spirits who willed the good and did the evil. But in them are seen a
coarsely drawn sketch, of the new ruler who will no longer be the
criminal of the crime-story, but the first of the creative
earth-governors.

'Even Hitler, though a man of blood, has a streak of the new ethos
mixed into him: a horrible paradox, but the militarist in his
composition made short work of any contradictory impulse.

'Here we must note a rather curious streak of optimism in Professor
Harding himself. Dreadful century as this one is showing itself to be,
Professor Harding believes that it was _intended to be_ really a new
model: had it not been for an element which dragged it back into the
past, that great mountain range, conveniently confined within the
conventional limits of the year 1914, and the year 1918, has all the
signs of being the giant backcloth for a new Year One. The Professor's
belief may be regarded by some as of a navet worthy of Cobden and
the Manchester School: but it is his view that the liberal idealism of
the nineteenth century would, left to itself, have eventuated in a
twentieth-century rebirth, wonderfully assisted by the burst of
inventive genius coinciding with the liberal climax in the second
decade of this century--that so supported, this idealism could have
produced a new age of social justice, had it not been for the
intervention of the Marxist ideology.

'His argument is that the incitement to hatred and civil war, the
doctrine of the necessity of catastrophe, and indeed everything else
about Marx's teaching stigmatizes him as belonging to the barbaric
world of the wars of religion and the other things which it is our
desperate wish to be finished with for ever. In 1920 the sudden
expansion of Marxist influence, developing into a violent fashion, was
a unique misfortune, because the world foreshadowed by Lloyd George's
Health Insurance Act, and the increasing liberality on all sides, plus
the revolution in Industrial technique, would anyway have led, under
the leader-ship of such men as Beveridge, to a New Deal, unattainable
by means of the blood-bath of a revolution.

'But this belief of Professor Harding's is, in reality, a revival of
an earlier, generally held, belief. In the nineteenth century in
England and America, and even elsewhere, it was universally thought
that a new age of tolerance and intelligence, of "decency" and
humaneness, had begun; and just as a great number of practices
belonging to the bad old times of the unenlightened past, such as
slavery, duelling, hanging and quartering, public executions,
imprisonment for debt, child-labour, cruel sports, ill-treatment of
animals and so forth, had been discountenanced and abolished (for
ever, it was supposed), so gradually all such odious survivals would
disappear, and "The world's great age begin anew, the golden years
return". The time when nations would recognize the wickedness and
wastefulness of war was near at hand. This belief was unchallenged in
the english-speaking countries at the beginning of the century, and
such feeling lingered even as late as Woodrow Wilson's Paris
peace-making, or the Kellogg Pact. But actually the world-war gave the
death-blow to this belief, and the happenings of the last two decades
have done nothing to reinstate it. The optimistic idealism of the
Nineteenth Century, although it is not identical with, inherited
something from the Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century. The
outlook of Professor Ren Harding may perhaps more usefully be
compared with the anti-past views of the Eighteenth Century, than with
the more sentimental aspirations of the Nineteenth Century.

'Professor Collingwood considers this Eighteenth Century contempt for
the past--or at least for all the ages prior to the Tudors, when the
modern world began--as anti-historical, or "not genuinely historical".
He would look upon Professor Ren Harding's anti-historical views in
the same way.

'In order to facilitate an understanding of the work of this new,
anti-historical historian, a longish passage will now be quoted from a
recent lecture of Professor Collingwood's which I have been privileged
to use.

'"A truly historical view of human history," says Professor
Collingwood, "sees everything in that history as having its own
_raison d'tre_ and coming into existence in order to serve the needs
of the men whose minds have corporately created it. To think of any
phase of history as altogether irrational is to look at it not as an
historian but as a publicist, a polemical writer of tracts for the
times. Thus the historical outlook of the Enlightenment was not
genuinely historical; in its main motive it was polemical and
anti-historical."

'From this it will be seen, that Professor Collingwood regards
"genuine history" as accepting without demur the fact that man's
actions are in general irrational. He considers a man who separates
the story of the past into examples of rational and of irrational
behaviour, as no true historian. For he has not the true historian's
appetite for the good and the evil, the rational and irrational,
indeed whatever it may be that can be proved to have _happened_. For
him the true historian must go to these happenings, of whatever kind,
without any prejudices, relating to ethics, taste, intellectual
fastidiousness, etc. He is, therefore, diametrically opposed to
Professor Ren Harding, whose view is that we should reject entirely
anything (notwithstanding the fact that it undoubtedly happened) which
is unworthy of any man's attention, or some action which is so
revolting that it _should not_ have happened, and must not be
encouraged to happen again. In other words, that it is time that men
ceased proudly unrolling the blood-stained and idiotic record of their
past: it is time that they should as a minimum become adult.

'The following is more from Professor Collingwood, analysing the
eighteenth-century attitude of historians, which in some ways is very
reminiscent of this new objector to the past.

'". . . writers like Voltaire and Hume . . . were not sufficiently
interested in history for its own sake to persevere in the task of
reconstructing the history of obscure and remote periods. Voltaire
openly proclaimed that no securely based historical knowledge was
attainable for events earlier than the close of fifteenth century:
Hume's _History of England_ is a very slight and sketchy piece of work
until he comes to the same period, the age of the Tudors. The real
cause of this restriction to the modern period was that with their
narrow conception of reason they had no sympathy for, and therefore no
insight into, what from their point of view were non-rational periods
of human history; they only began to be interested in history at the
point where it began to be the history of a modern spirit akin to
their own, a scientific spirit."

'Returning to what we were saying before we introduced this very
appropriate matter from an unpublished MS. of Professor Collingwood,
Professor Harding believes that the Golden age of "peace and plenty",
a typical Victorian dream, was actually upon us on the eve of the
World-War, and we should be enjoying it at the present moment had it
not been for an evil principle of unexpected virulence.

'This seems to me to be turning the blind eye to that non-Marxian
barbarity, the great nationalist war of 1914-18, which made the
russian revolution possible. But I suppose that Professor Harding
would reply that that last great christian war would probably have
been as Lloyd George asserted "a war to end war", had it not been for
the social-revolutionary complications which it engendered. Finally,
however, Professor Harding dismisses all this as a dead issue: for as
he eyes the approaching war, and the vast mountain of Debt which will
be of dreadful dimensions by the time this is over, not to mention all
the other things involved and easily predictable, he sees no hope of
anything but a plunge backward into the barbarism from which, not so
long ago, we imagined we had emerged for good. The present century
provides Professor Harding, as we have seen, with his first
illustration. Some of his other illustrations are even more
illuminating small working models of his plan for a new sort of
history. The "century of genius", for instance, is particularly
interesting, for we see political events of the first importance,
according to the old idea, such as the execution of Charles I, and the
Cromwellian epic: and then side by side with this, we are offered the
spectacle of events of great magnitude of a different order
altogether, such as, at the beginning of the century, the Tudor Stage
brought to an abrupt close by the black-coated enemies of the
Renaissance spirit--the Newtonian system, Milton's epic and Bunyan's
allegory, the political philosophies of Hobbes and of Locke, the
innovating scientific mind of Bacon, to mention no more, upon the
plane Genius, rather than upon the plane of the gibbet and the
headsman's block, the Old Testament battlefields of one of history's
biggest ruffians, Cromwell, and all the other "great events"
characteristic of _that_ plane.

'In the historical blue-print offered us by Ren Harding, we see
something like a tapestry of transparencies. We see what are the true
great events, which gave the name "century of genius" to this period,
as a white foreground frieze, and through this one can see, like a
swarming of shadows, struggling Kings, helmeted and booted
gang-leaders, Nellie Gwyn and Guy Fawkes and a thousand other things
upon the mental level of the Dime novel, or of Fanny Hill,
"infallible artillery", and of course pints of blood squirting
everywhere. We have, in short, the two planes in starker contrast than
perhaps in any other century; especially since the adherents of the
old view of what deserves commemoration have a lot of Big shots, like
Cromwell, to set up against the Newtons and the Shakespeares.

'I prefaced this study of Professor Ren Harding's work by stating that
we have, in him, a perfectionist or, if you prefer it, an idealist. The
term _perfectionist_ is more expressive and perhaps, in this case, more
useful. Now Professor Harding is not at all a nave perfectionist.

'This is another fact to remember, of first importance. He is
completely aware of all that ensues from such a position as his. To
propose so profound a revolution on the writing of history can be
little more than a gesture: obviously the historians could make no
such change in their routine, unless, at the same time, men in general
were in the act of revolutionizing their ways of thinking.

'So this is not merely a reform in the writing of history that is in
question, but an implicit proposal for revaluation, moral and
intellectual, throughout society. Which is absurd. Men do not turn
their lives upside down in response to the summons of a professor of
history. Professor Harding perfectly understands all this; he is not a
deluded dreamer. But he simply asks, "What else could I do?" and
proceeds quite undisturbed by the reflection that he is building a
road which will be trodden by no one but himself, for perhaps a
hundred years.

'Professor Harding's way of seeing the world is, then, analogous to
the Vision of the Saints. But it is not necessarily in any way
connected with saintliness. What this system amounts to, in reality,
is a taking to its logical conclusion the humane, the tolerant, the
fastidious. It is really no more than that with great rigidity and
implacability, you pursue these things logically to a point where all
that doesn't belong to them or that contradicts them is absolutely
repudiated. But Ren Harding would say, "Why not take these things to
their logical conclusion? what is the use of them indeed, if you do
not take them to their logical conclusion? They do not exist, they are
no more than mere words, until they are logically developed in this
way: there is no half-measure in such matters."

'This is, of course, all very well: but in life nothing is taken to
its ultimate conclusion, life is a half-way house, a place of
obligatory compromise; and, in dealing in logical conclusions, a man
steps out of life--or so it would be quite legitimate to argue.

'The questions above attributed to Professor Harding actually occur in
his text. But he knows that they are purely rhetorical questions. He
knows that they are sensible questions to ask--questions that _are_
asked, from time to time, by men like himself: questions which would
be quite otiose were it not for the fact they have a tonic effect, and
that the conventional life of men (and of historians) would be even
less satisfactory than it is without these uncompromising interveners.
He feels that his is a function of authentic value, as a counsellor of
perfection, in spite of the fact that it would be quite impossible to
convert most historians to his standpoint, as it would mean the end of
their careers. Conversions of such scope can only be attained under
the threat of torture and death: and Ren Harding has somewhere
admitted that he has put the cart before the horse, and that if he had
not been tainted with scepticism he would long ago have given up
history, and have attacked those more fundamental obstacles upon which
history and everything else depends.

'In other words, this idealist carries a sceptic on his
back.--Figuratively, the concentration camp (and it is not always
figurative merely, at that) which awaits the anti-vivisectionist, the
pacifist, he who proposes artificial insemination, the vegetarian, the
egalitarian, and in fact all those anti-animal eccentrics, is a
familiar landmark to this trained historian. I should perhaps say,
however, that this implacable perfectionist is, in his personal life,
gaily capable of unregenerate behaviour. He must not be visualized as
a bloodless and solemn ascetic.'

Ren Harding's head swung slowly round, showing his comically-painful
grimace of bouffonic reproach to his follower, who was actually
slowing down before this occurred, in anticipation of such a reaction
upon his master's part.

'Yes?' Rotter shot his question at the dumb show staged by Ren,
which he looked at sideways, his head still bent over the typescript.
'Anything wrong?'

'The _argumentum ad hominem_ is justly disapproved of, and I see no
reason why the American public should be invited to invade my private
life. It does not affect the validity of an argument denouncing the
evils of drink if the speaker is himself an alcoholic, though I
suppose it would be tactful to do what he could to keep his red nose
out of sight.'

The two friends gazed with their usual cold fondness at one another.
In any article he wrote about Ren's work, Parkinson invariably,
sooner or later, dragged in the historian's personality: in the first
draft, that is, but removed it under indignant pressure when the
typescript came to be read, as in the present case.

Rotter smiled sedately. 'I am most apologetic, but in indicating how,
in your private life, you fail to discipline . . . to _prune_ in the
way one would expect you to, as a reader of your books, no disrespect
was intended. My purpose was to dissipate the idea that you might be
some pale little purist. You know how people speculate about the kind
of man the author of a book may be, and how, from the standpoint of
publicity, they should be prevented from imagining something
disenchanting, which in fact is not there.'

Ren gave his head a violent shake. 'I think the recently introduced
habit of thrusting under the public's nose a publicity photograph of a
pretty girl to make them buy Miss So-and-So's book, if the book is by
a male, a portrait as much like a screen-star as possible--this is
especially done in America--I think this shows that the publishing
business is attempting to rival Hollywood in cheapness.' Some such
remark was usually made by Ren, during the discussion which followed
the reading of an article, and Parkinson smiled appreciatively as it
made its appearance. He sat quite silent. They were smiling at one
another as if they had been watching, with paternal satisfaction, the
parts played by those two accomplished mimes, Ren Harding and Henry
Parkinson.

'I think those personalities are quite unworthy of you, Rotter.'

Rotter laughed. 'They are deleted. We eschew the personal.'

'Thank you, Rotter.'

After this the reading continued. Although Parkinson always read such
things to Ren, the text did not differ enough to escape monotony:
Rotter had his formality for teaching Ren in transatlantic publics.
The present article was, however, one of his best efforts. When
Rotter's voice stopped and he put his manuscript down on the table,
Ren stood up and stretched vigorously, and then complimented and
thanked his friend with great sincerity, and his friend looked
straight at him as if he did not hear what he was saying. Parkinson
was one of those Englishmen who is calculated to baffle the men of
other nations. His faade was at times forbidding, but his intimates
paid no attention to it: they knew that it was merely a screen stuck
up by this 'sensitive', behind which he could give his feelings play,
even if necessary drop a tear.

Why, in this instance, he looked so strong, was of course for English
reasons. He was being praised; what he had written was the object of
the most lavish compliments. Now, his writing he took very seriously,
and consequently his sensitive nature was most exposed at that point.
What is more, the man he almost worshipped was speaking of what he
most prized--and, to add to this, Ren was better qualified than
anyone else to judge the value of his writing. So naturally his
stoniest and most unresponsive faade was kept stiffly in position.

But Ren's cynical eye, when it rested, upon Rotter, rested gently.
All master-and-follower relationships, especially so matured a one as
this, have in them something of religion and something of love. The
pair are a love pair, and they are god and his dedicated. But when
they are an english pair, the lovers are evasive, the devout is _sans
faon_. There was even, at times, a mockery in the Rotter's eye. He
knew he could only love from a position of complete independence:
could only be devout with familiarity, and his incense was the reeking
smoke of his pipe.

When the master-follower pair are a literary pair the sacred text is
one thing for the master and another thing for the disciple. For the
master the whole process of publicity is imbecile, and he is degraded
in his own estimation when he thinks of himself squatting down to
listen to a solemn exegesis of his literary labour; to be seriously
assisting at the building up of a name, at the contriving of a
superstition. To arrive, in process of time, at a point when he will
be described as 'great' necessarily appears to him paltry and absurd,
for he has no illusions about the quality of those who are destined to
employ this silly epithet.

Under these circumstances, Ren would have far preferred not to
participate at this particular kind of sance. It was a failure of
understanding on good old Rotter's part to ask him to do so. 'He even
imagines that I like it,' he once reflected. But he saw quite well
that to enjoy the advantages of a kind of a minor god, he must not
decline to provide the devout with this satisfaction.--But what did he
write books for? partly the pleasure of writing them, but partly in
order to attract the absurdities which inevitably ensued. No, he was
by no means a perfectionist.

They moved over together to where the whisky and the glasses were, and
made ready a highball, fetching some ice from Rotter's baby
refrigerator. Standing, they talked for a little about Ren's
transatlantic plans. It was with exquisite hard-boiledness that Rotter
spoke of the departure of his friend. The whole business depressed him
so much that it even affected his enthusiasm for his friend's
magnificent rigidity. Then they referred to the article again, and
Ren asked him why he made use of that horrid word 'perfectionist'.
This suggested a less than perfect taste on Rotter's part, and the
latter for a moment looked disturbed. Then he said, 'Why do I employ
the word "perfectionist"? Well, I realize that it is not a nice word.
But I am only a publicity man, and this article of mine is for an
american magazine. One must not hold oneself at too great a distance
from one's audience. And I would say _Okay_ or _Sez-you_ if it would
help your books.'

'I know you would, Rotter. I know you would make an absolute hog of
yourself. I must forcibly hold you back: you write so much for the
american public that in the end you would ruin your style and bristle
with the foulest expressions.'

Did Ren really mean it, Rotter mused, when he referred to his style
in so flattering a way? He could not stop himself--quite
idiotically--wondering this. Then, with a slight smile, he told Ren
that he would be on his guard against the insidious requirements of
the Yankee public. They filled up their glasses and strolled back to
their chairs.

'Taking the beastly expression seriously for a moment,' Ren said, 'I
cannot see how you could have mistaken me for a perfectionist.'

'No?'

'No. I do not desire _perfection_ in the least. All I suggest is that
it is high time that people gave up over-valuing figures neither more
nor less noteworthy than a pugilist or a thug. When writing _history_,
hang it all, they should not accept the world's estimation of what is
valuable and important.'

'But most historians have the minds of a small-town bank manager.'

'Of course, I know that. But there is no occasion to call me a
perfectionist because I think it is possible for the historian to
approach his material from a somewhat higher level; to transcend the
values of the market-place, and to attain to a level which is all-over
as intelligent as what is, at present, the most intelligent. That
would not be perfect, Rotter. It need be no higher, for the present,
than what would satisfy you and me. Are _we_ perfect?'

They both laughed. Rotter took up his article and threw it into a
waste-paper basket.

'If you do _that_, Rotter, I will refrain from comment in future. You
grow temperamental!'

Rotter reached down and removed his article from the waste-paper
basket. 'I have just been asked by a Chicago paper,' he then observed,
'to say something about Toynbee's _Study_. Oh dear! I am afraid I have
to do it.'

'Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Bless the bed that I lie on.'

'Yes, I know.' Rotter laughed. 'But I should be obliged for a little
stimulation.'

'There is, of course, plenty to say,' the other answered. 'His great
merit is that he is one of the few people who abhor war. But I think
it is curious that a man with these unusual scruples should be so
little disturbed as he is by all the monstrosities of the past. For
him, what is outrageous today is anything but that five hundred or
five thousand years ago.

'One would expect, for instance, this Victorian throwback to bristle
the moment he found himself, in his Universal History, confronted by
the slave-household of the Padishah. But this does not occur. On the
contrary, he dwells lovingly upon the Osmanli's nomadic masterpiece of
despotism. He is lyrical about "this marvellous system of human
cultivation": and marvels as much at the Mamluks as at the
Janissaries. Were he studying a colony of insects this objectivity
would be natural: but these were men. One would not offer this
criticism if he were a twentieth-century man.'

'No, he is not _that_.' Rotter took up a pen and made a note upon a
scribbling pad. 'Thank you,' he added.

'Then it occurs to me that the word civilization requires careful
definition.'

'You are speaking of the _Study_?' Rotter asked.

'I should have to refer to him again, but it is my impression that he
is careless about that. I suggest that you check up on it.'

'I certainly will.' Rotter made another note.

'If, for instance, you say that culturally (or as "civilization") Rome
is no more than a reflection of Hellas, and that the Empire set up by
the Church at Rome was merely a prolongation of the _Roman_ Empire, and
that, of course, the civilization of Western Europe remains essentially
Graeco-Roman (and that the Roman is Graeco-Roman is superfluous since
Rome was a reflection of the Greek civilization)--seen in this way it is
a continuous civilization from Pericles to Mr. Attlee. In cataloguing
your civilization--and making use only of this very abstract
term--alongside the Egyptiac, the Sumeric, the Syriac, the Minoan, and
so on you would lump Hellas, Rome, and Western Europe as "hellenic". Now
this, culturally, leads to extraordinary complications. If what you are
studying is the growth, development, and breakdown of civilizations,
then there are so many breakdowns between Pericles and Mr. Attlee (or,
if you like, Stalin) that it is difficult to think of what you label
hellenic as one thing. To pack Christendom and Hellas into one box would
be much easier if you could say that Christianity was just Stoicism: but
for bible-religion Christianity was mostly hebraic in temper.

'The labellers' difficulties are daunting. Since the monkish
civilization was latin, and since the italian humanists so
dramatically put on the market again the literature of Greece and of
Rome; since latin nations are the most intelligent in Europe, and
France has dictated culturally to the rest of Europe for a long time
now; since Italy was so incredibly creative, you cannot shake off
Rome, which was the child of Greece--there is no other label for us
except Graeco-Roman or hellenic, is there?' Rotter scratched his head.

Ren nodded. 'Yes. It is rather a pity that the Italians flooded
northern Europe with their humanism, with Greece and with Rome. Had
northern Europe remained Gothic it would have been more logical,
wouldn't it?'

'I agree with you,' Rotter said. 'It would have been more clear-cut.
The old Testament is quite Gothic and would have fitted in very well
with the Norse mythology. We then would have had a norse civilization
up here, with Gothic sculpture confronting, across the centuries, the
figures of the Parthenon.'

Ren laughed. 'Anyway, there we are. It is difficult to prevent Mr.
Attlee being labelled _hellenic_, from the practical standpoint. But
the "_breakdown_" question is another matter. I have often thought how
difficult it is. Toynbee, if I remember rightly, made our civilization
break down at the Wars of Religion. He considers, therefore, that the
Reformation did the trick.'

'He is not the only one who takes the Reformation for the start of the
Great Decline.'

'But for different reasons,' Ren observed. 'But, outside of dogma,
the question of _breakdown_ remains very difficult; and for my part I
believe it is today rather meaningless, seeing that we have passed
into what is potentially a world-culture just as we are moving rapidly
to what will be a world-society.'

Rotter gazed approvingly at his master. He reached over and made
another note upon his pad.

'Let us consider the breakdown business, and let us confine ourselves
to Great Britain. Let us survey the cultural situation in this country
from, say, the sixteenth century, when humanism hit England, down to
the present day.'

'I think I know,' said Rotter pleasurably, 'what you are going to do!'

'Well, it is just worthwhile to run through it,' Ren said politely.
'What we are going to consider is exactly at what point we detect the
_breakdown_ signs in our civilization. The Age of Faith and the Gothic
art-form which accompanied it was not a _breakdown_, or rather not a
_step-down_ from what came before it. In the sixteenth century the
Renaissance and humanism came to England and jostled about in battle
with the Gothic: but, outside of dogma or of race, no one would assert
that the Italian Renaissance was inferior to the Gothic. So there was
no _breakdown_ in the sixteenth century in England. Was there a
_breakdown_ in the seventeenth century? But that was the 'Century of
Genius': it contained Shakespeare and Milton, and Newton, to go no
further, and it hardly seems that there was any cultural breakdown
there. The eighteenth century, if not so blazing with genius, is the
most _civilized_ of any yet. The nineteenth century in England was
extraordinarily _different_ from the eighteenth, its materialism
leaving no room for the elegant scepticism it superseded. But it was
no less civilized. It produced a terrific crop of cultural
"high-lights": there was the Darwinian revolution, very great writers
like Dickens, great political thinkers and a crop of first-rate
scientists. There was no sign of _breakdown_ there. We fought it on
its borders, but we now realize how wonderful a century it was. How
about the twentieth century? Are we civilized? The Man of Science
would answer that we are even _more_ civilized. Einsteinean physics
and the discovery of atomic fission are not suggestive, exactly, of
intellectual decay. The revolution in the Fine Arts, the academics
describe as decadent, but the artistic pioneers appeal to me,
personally, more than do the detractors. As to the social
revolutionaries, they do not regard themselves as symptoms of
_breakdown_. Quite the contrary. As the present-day "West European"
intellectual sees it, there is just as much vitality in _his_
civilization, however you classify it, as there was in Periclean
civilization. And one should indicate here a further complication; our
most admired artists regard artistic works of the Peak period in
civilization as inferior to the primitive or so called "archaic" art.
The painters Gauguin and Picasso prefer the primitive art of Tahiti or
of the Sandwich Islands to that of the High Renaissance, or of
Fourth-century Athens. Is this still civilization? Or does it at this
point break down? Is Civilization, when it becomes most civilized, no
longer itself, or classifiable as Civilization? In other words, we
have reached a civilized refinement where civilization is transcended.
Now, the point of this review of the centuries, is that I feel that
the great generalizers of birth and of breakdown run their abstract
lines, arbitrarily, through all kinds of things. If it suited them,
the _breakdown_ line would go through the centre of the Century of
Genius, or the century before, or indeed anywhere, regardless of the
cultural vigour to be met with at that spot.'

'Yes.'

'Then I think that would be a profitable investigation.'

'I think so too.'

Ren sighed, and lit a cigarette. 'And I do not have to tell you, do
I, that in my view civilization belongs to a period which is past. We
no longer have to think about civilization.'

'There I shall be on familiar ground.'

Rotter made a note, and began to light his pipe. Ren pondered in
silence for a moment then, leaning on the gunwale of his armchair, in
an attitude suggestive of a surrender to happy sloth, he yawned and
said, 'You are aware, no doubt, that there are many technical
criticisms of _The Study_?'

'Yes.'

'Toynbee has been much criticized for doing violence to facts in order
to crush them into the rigid frames of his theory. But I do not know how
you intend to write about him. I should not be too tough if I were you.'

Rotter laughed. 'Toughness is not what I have to be on guard against.'

Ren stood up and stretched. 'I must go,' he said. 'Thank you, Rotter,
for reading me that.'

Rotter got to his feet, smoking furiously. 'How is Hester?' he enquired.

At this Ren started, and then--there was no doubt about it--blushed.
Very annoyed with himself, he countered, without answering, 'How is
Kathleen?'

No blush came to Rotter's face. He answered placidly that Kathleen had
returned to Ireland. 'I am now interested in a young lady called
Josephine. She is a belgian discovery.'

Ren sighed. 'You seem very fond of foreigners,' he grumbled.

'Perhaps that is why I am so fond of you.' Rotter gave a soft growling
laugh. The gallic half of Ren was not the part of him that Rotter
liked least. The educated englishman's inferiority complex about the
French Ren had often had occasion to be grateful for. He liked men
with big pipes and square heads, who spoke with phlegm of this and
that, their heads rising from clouds of smoke like a small mountain:
he found that they looked favourably upon his french-gothic beard, and
his dark celtic eyes. He began to drift towards the door, Rotter
slowly moving with him. They did not speak until they were out in the
hall and Ren had picked his hat off the rack, when Rotter asked him,
'Shall we be meeting soon?'

'Let me see.' Ren rubbed his eyes. 'I am spending a day or two with
my beastly brother-in-law. The parson. When I get back, let us have
dinner.'

They carefully abstained from all mention of the approaching end of
the world. Both were tired of talking about it, and also tended to
boycott it as a subject of conversation. They shook hands at the door.
As Ren was hurrying up the street his critical frenzy had one of its
regular spasms. He tore his best friend to pieces and himself as well;
so much devotion was embarrassing; how could one really feel at ease
with a parasite, and with what ridiculous assiduity he had encouraged
this man to feed upon his brain. He went round there perhaps once a
month to be milked, as it were. As the ideas imbibed in this way were
observed to issue from Rotter's mouth, Ren would sometimes hang his
head. If only Rotter were a shade less dependent!--but he shook off
the critical fiend as he turned round into Marylebone Road.




CHAPTER VIII

An Agreeable Dinner-Party


When Ren stepped out of the train on to the platform of Rugby station,
he wished he had not come. This feeling was so strong that he nearly
crossed to the opposite platform, to take the next train back to London.
For the big rough word, Rugby, stank of Kerridge; that is the Reverend
Robert Kerridge, husband of his youngest sister Helen. However, he
checked this impulse to fly, and made his way to the telephone.

Kerridge! the very name was unseemly; the name of the Kerridges was
probably 'carriage', but as the more archaic carriages doubtless
spelled things as they pronounced them, Robert had inherited the
surname Kerridge, or at least this was the philology sponsored by
Ren, for the name of his brother-in-law. Apart from one's reactions
to the particular clergyman involved, how much jollier it would have
been had this been a visit to the Reverend Amos Barton of Shepperton,
who one might have accompanied to the local workhouse, known as the
'College', sniffed the roasting goose, or exchanged a word with the
one-eyed rebel, Poll Fodge.

How colourless was the existence of the Kerridges: how tiresome a
'pink' bank-clerk was Kerridge himself! Helen had indeed got herself
embedded in a squalid _matire_.

Such reflections moving through his mind, he at last reached the
telephone, and almost immediately was hearing the voice of his dear
sister, who in many ways he valued more than anybody. He breathed the
atmosphere of her voice, standing erect in the glass-box, and it was
the voice of the Helen of yesterday, and this was the last time he
would be in touch with her down here; for once he reached the Vicarage
there would be Kerridge all round them, and it would be difficult to
see her as distinctly as he now could hear her. Helen told him that
Robert K. was down in Rugby shopping. They lived a half-hour's ride
outside it, but almost daily Kerridge bicycled in to shop, or to chat
with some friends he had there. The news, however, that he was in
Rugby, and not in Starbrook, had not even a practical interest, for
Ren could not pillion-ride with him back to the Vicarage for there
was of course no pillion, and had there been he would have declined so
close a contact with his relative.

Outside the station he found a taxi and came to terms with the driver.
He was humming

      '_It won't be a stylish merridge_,
      _For we can't afford a Kerridge_,'

as they started off. This almost springless vehicle punishing him
badly, he speculated as to the likelihood of hackney vehicles no
longer able to pass the Metropolitan police-test being shipped down to
the provinces.

Rugby is a dull town, with none of the distinction that might be
expected as a background for the ancient school. In the days of Tom
Brown, yes: the approaches to the gaping gate, leading into the School
House quadrangle, would still have possessed some style. But long ago
the industrialism of the Midlands had converted everything into a drab
uniformity.

As the taxi was turning at right angles in front of the great gate, he
remembered how he had witnessed, on a January morning some years
before, a snow-fight. There had been a heavy snow-fall during the
night, and half the School House were in the dark interior of the
gate-way preventing the rest of the School from entering. From all the
outside Houses the boys had duly arrived to go to their form-rooms,
and had been met by a hail of snow-balls. They laid siege to the gate,
answering the fire of the School House from such cover as they could
secure along the sides of the shopping street which led to the gate.
Windows were broken and snow-balls also caused casualties among those
attacking and those defending the gate. In the rear of the School
buildings, a similar battle was in progress. It was a scene to Ren's
mind, typical of this rough school.

They bumped along in this new street but very soon they once more
turned to right angles, and moved along the side of the School
precincts. Next came the Close, and as they began to move forward
beside the Close railings, Ren leant out of the cab-window and looked
at the line of School buildings facing the Close, the Library Tower,
and the windows of the School House and Headmaster's quarters, from
which Dr. Arnold once would gaze down upon the Close, a biologist
scrutinizing work in progress. From this position, seated at his study
window, he was able to watch his burly young Christian Gentlemen
playing their own especial version of the game of football. The
spectacle would probably cause him to reflect how lawless this school
had always been, and how raw still was the material with which he had
to work. After all, Tom Brown's School Days was going on under the
same roof, within a few yards of him.

It had been found impossible, in an earlier time, to persuade its
scholars to confine themselves to _foot_ ball. Some passionate young
blackguard would snatch up the ball, and rush wildly towards the goal
with it, pursued by a howling pack of agnostic Gentlemen. (And the
Christianizing of such creatures could be no easy matter.)--Since
there was no means of keeping this a ball-kicking game new rules had
to be drawn-up to regulate the rushing about with the ball under the
arm: and to limit, to some extent, the ferocity of attacks upon the
man who had run off with it.

Dr. Arnold was not a lover of tradition, and his headmasterly blood
did not boil, in retrospect, at the thought of this defiance of the
laws governing pastimes. The sight of a mud-caked Christian Gentleman
tearing down a field hugging a dirty ball, and a dozen dirty
Christians, as gentle as himself, at his heels, seemed to him entirely
as it should be. Did it not harden muscle: and did it not add
hardiness to a Christian Gentleman's moral uprightness? In the School
chapel the C.G. in question would learn to smite people hip and thigh,
and to exact an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. The canes of
the prefects, as well as those of the masters, would harden this
Christian Gentleman-in-the-making in other ways: and fagging toughen
the little rat who was to become a Christian Gentleman, and teach him
the beauties of Authority. His learning to fear his redoubtable
headmaster would be good practice for fearing God.

Then as to the spectacle of the ugly battles which would occur in
front of the home-goal, it would not be forgotten by Dr. Arnold that
many Christian Gentlemen had, a little later in life, to be trained as
professional 'killers'. There were foot-slogging killers, and mounted
(or cavalry) killers. As six furious figures fought for a slippery
ball, rolling over and over near a goal-post, punching and strangling
and kicking one another, the fresh-coloured rather jewish-looking face
at the window (Jahveh Minor) had a gratified glint in his eye. Just
then a boy passed immediately beneath where he was sitting, with a
half-dozen books under his arm. He wore the School House Colours, and
the doctor with some annoyance found he could not identify this pale
and earnest face. He made a mental note of the features. The boy did
not turn his head to watch the game. A little 'swot'. Arnold's pleased
expression was replaced by one of heavy petulance. 'Tis a goodly
sight, that knot of violent gentlemen in the great field beyond: but
this bookish boy was in danger of never developing into a Christian or
into a Gentleman.

At this point Ren, in imagination, left Jahveh Minor in his
observatory, and moved on to a time when Dr. Arnold had abandoned his
human laboratory at Rugby, and flung himself into the Civil War of
Tractarians and Anti-Tractarians, raging around Oxford. He had no love
for Tradition, it has been observed above; and this extended into the
sphere of Supernatural Grace and the nasty stirrings of the Old
Religion. He laid about him lustily. The arguments in favour of a
priesthood stimulated his fighting glands to an extraordinary
degree--for the delegation of Authority, when that Authority was God
Himself, moved him to as violent an opposition as that he had incurred
when at Rugby School he had delegated his authority to members of the
Sixth Form, and even to Sixth Powers. This was very inconsistent of
Dr. Arnold. For why should he object to God delegating His power to a
priesthood, whereas, in his capacity of Jahveh Minor, he empowered the
boys of the Sixth to act in place of him?

While such thoughts were unfolding in Ren's mind, the cab had been
proceeding on the road to Starbrook, and there, all of a sudden,
pedalling along before him, he perceived a familiar figure upon a
familiar bicycle. He would have known the neck anywhere. It was the
Reverend Robert Kerridge: and it was with considerable satisfaction
that he passed his brother-in-law, kicking up, he trusted, a fair
amount of dust in the reverend gentleman's face. But the cab was not
equal to the task of reaching Starbrook Vicarage so much ahead of the
pedalling parson as to enable him to have more than a few words with
his sister before the eruption of Kerridge. She was removing the tea
things and he followed her into the kitchen, where she put down the
tray and gave him a delighted hug. 'My darling Ren, how glad I am to
see you. I have been worrying a great deal about you. We must have a
talk . . . as soon as I can manage it.'

'Do let us.'

They moved back into the drawing-room, and they had just passed through
the door when sounds announcing Kerridge's arrival came from without.

'I think that's Robert,' Helen said, and they both turned towards the
door. There was a quick strong step in the hall and the Reverend
Robert Kerridge entered the room with his customary _fracas_. 'Ah
hallo. Was that you in the cab? I thought it might be!'

He moved forward a few steps, swinging his arms and legs, and
displaying his glaringly white teeth, attempting to suggest the
exhilaration of good-fellowship.

Described in this way, Robert Kerridge probably has a rather alarming
sound. But to the average eye the hearty straggling of his legs and
welcoming movements of his arms would indeed have spelled good
fellowship, even if the white clerical collar did not in itself carry
conviction. He was in his thirties, and according to average standards
a tallish young man of regular features and agreeable expression.
Looked at more analytically, he possessed rather too long a neck,
while his eyes shone with too artificial a geniality through largish
glasses. His fine, large, white teeth _were_ too much in evidence.
When he spoke, he chewed round and round with these teeth the words in
his mouth, as if they were too big, and required him to open his
mouth wide and reduce them by mastication. The words were all a dark
blue. I mean that they had the Oxford colours. The Oxford accent
trailed after it the accents of Croydon; but still, with the shining
eyes and gleaming teeth, waved about on the top of his long
pink-and-white neck, the accent did its work well enough.

There was a derisive something in the gleam as he straddled about and
rubbed his hands in front of Ren. Kerridge made a hearty meal of the
eleven words, 'It is a long time since I last saw you, Ren,' his jaws
rolling round in the act of mastication.

'It is quite a time,' Ren drily agreed. 'Quite a time.' They looked
at one another with very little affectation of pleasure on either
side. The clergyman's aggressive politeness, with the baring of his
big battalions of teeth, was answered by a brief amused smile, wiped
off abruptly, succeeded by an air of patient watchfulness, as one
might keep one's eye upon a ram of notoriously aggressive habits.

'I have missed you very much,' Helen said. 'But I hear all about you
from the family, of course. At least, all the family knows.'

'Yes!' Kerridge crashed in. 'I was very sorry to hear about your
resignation. I always have trotted out at parties "My brother-in-law
Professor Ren Harding." It sounded very well. I shall not be able to
do that any longer now!'

'You can say instead, 'My brother-in-law, the author of _The Secret
History of World War II_!' Helen reminded him.

'That,' Robert drawled, 'is not I am afraid quite so impressive. You
know what I mean; a Chair of History is much rarer than mere
authorship.'

The young bank-clerk face of the marxist vicar retained a pointed
gravity for some time after the mention of Ren's book. Ren's
remained grave too.

'You both look a little glum,' Helen exclaimed. 'I will fetch
something to drink.'

'Won't you sit down,' Robert said, and threw himself into a chair. Ren
walked over to the window, and stood gazing out of it. There was nothing
to look at except a tree; but he fixed a bored eye upon a baby twig. The
voracious Oxford accent of his brother-in-law, with drawling cadences,
got busy behind him. 'What was the real cause of your resignation, Ren?
Of course I have read what the _newspapers_ say.'

Ren turned round. 'That is all,' he answered indifferently. 'Nothing
is concealed. I simply did not any longer wish to teach what is called
History.'

'So long as you can afford to indulge a very natural taste for
leisure,' drawled his clerical relative, with a very casual laugh.

'Had I desired leisure I should have become a clergyman,' Ren
retorted. He felt there was nothing else to do.

'I am afraid you do not understand what is expected of a clergyman, if
you regard his life as one of leisure!' protested Robert languidly,
stretched out like a holiday snap-shot in his chair.

'Has your morning been a very heavy one?' enquired Ren, advancing
towards him, goaded into counterattack.

'Terrifically heavy,' Helen answered, as she entered with the drinks.
'Robert has been buying groceries, and having a heavy gossip with
Jimmy Braybridge, the Vicar of St. Osaph's.'

'That is most unjust!' Robert drawled, more lazily than ever. 'I was
discussing with Braybrook a question of great weight and moment.'

'Yes, the transport of a lawn-mower!' Helen laughed. 'Get up, Robert,
and pull this cork!'

But Ren had the bottle between his knees, and there was the sound of
a cork being drawn.

'A clean pull!' sang Robert and no one could say he was averse to
others scrutinizing the inside of his mouth. 'Other things failing,
Ren, you can always get a job as a waiter, can't you?'

Helen, frowning, breathed in her husband's ear, 'None of that, now!'

Ren shrugged his shoulders and moved towards the window again. He
recalled the offensive words of another brother-in-law, namely Victor.
These two very average sensual men could be said, couldn't they, to
represent Everyman: so this might be taken as the world's reaction to
what he had done. These mocking brothers-in-law could be set beside
his mother. They all had much the same view of a man who threw up a
professorship for nothing. He looked fixedly at the diminutive twig.
He heard Helen's voice, speaking in an angry undertone, 'Robert, I
hope that this time you will remember Ren is our guest! You do your
best to stop him from coming down here by your rudeness. It is
jealousy! You ought to be ashamed of yourself.'

'Jealousy! Are you in your right senses, Helen . . .' Robert began,
but Ren left the room, as he stopped.

'Kerridge! Come out here, will you?' Ren called. The parson left the
room with a disagreeable smile: but a few minutes later they both
re-entered, and took up their drinks without further exchange just then.

    *    *    *    *    *

After dinner, the clergyman excused himself, he had a letter to write.
Brother and sister were alone for a short while.

'I am sorry, Ren, how difficult things are here. Robert has always
been terribly jealous of you.'

'Of _me_?'

'Yes. And now, to make things worse, he is writing a novel.'

Ren laughed. 'A novel!'

'Yes. I do hope he does not become a celebrity! There will be no
holding him!'

Ren made what is called in French a _moue_. 'a pourrait tre bien
curieux, quand mme.'

Helen smiled and nodded. She treated her husband as a precocious boy,
from whom one must expect tactless outbursts.

The next morning a local woman came in to char. Ren at first regarded
her with suspicion, but there were no signs of insanity. Outside of the
London area such creatures as Mrs. Harradson are scarcely ever found.

Mr. Kerridge had a date somewhere. Shortly after breakfast signs of
impending departure were visible. Ren was furtively attentive to
these signs: and at length he was able to observe, through one of the
front windows, the bicycle being wheeled to the gate, and through its
iron work followed with joy the mounting of the bicycle. Finally, he
watched with elation the disembodied clerical hat gaining speed as it
skimmed along the top of the hedge. He waited a moment, then rushed
back into the kitchen, to announce to Helen that the coast was clear.
'The wicked giant, in whose power you have been for so long, has
pedalled away on some mysterious errand. Hoorah!' With his dancing
step he led the way out-of-doors. Behind him Helen, as eager as
himself, danced at his heels in imitative stance.

The Kerridges would have been very difficult to please if they had not
been grateful for the Vicarage which had fallen to their lot. It had
the dignity, the elegance of the eighteenth century in every line, its
well-cut red-brick, its windows and doors picked out by the white
stripes in their sockets, and the white triangle balanced upon its
white legs or convenient columns, as clean and correct as white linen
at the neck and wrists in a gentleman's attire. A house which had
escaped by forty years the Romantic Revival. Also, the place was a
sizable one to allow for the considerable broods of sedentary
clergymen. And then the Kerridges had been presented with a large
garden too, and kept it in excellent shape--except that it would have
been better with fewer herbaceous borders. As he danced past the
Canterbury bells and delphiniums, Ren said to himself that his sister
at least could get away from the obsessing india-rubber neck, white
jaw-ornaments for ever on show, and the two glittering panes of glass
where eyes ought to be: these herbaceous vulgarities would serve to
sweeten her imagination after a long tte--tte with the wicked giant
within, alecking away at his smartest, and perhaps attempting to
devour her with those hideous tusks.

As he thought of the two sets of piano-keys in Kerridge's mouth,
something possessive caused him to seize Helen around the shoulders
and draw her away more rapidly from the House that Jack Built, as she
decided that it was, inhabited by a bankclerkish Giant, with big glass
eyes and crunching tusks. She clung to him, as if understanding that a
Preux had come to rescue her from a Giant oddly disguised as a
Clergyman.

At the foot of the garden they reached a summer-house, dating from
Victorian days, a caricature of a miniature pagoda. Once you got
inside it, it was quite comfortable, with a rug on the floor, a table
and chairs, and at the back there was a window looking out on to a
very minor ravine in part gorse-covered. They entered, went over to
the window, which was open, and leaned upon its gritty sill, gazing
vacantly out at the uncultivated strip of country, too far from the
horizontal to be of much use to anybody.

'Now that we are alone at last, Ren, please tell me why you threw up
your job? I did _not write_ to you, because I knew that you would say
nothing in a letter. Did you have the most fearful row?'

His sister's sudden question took Ren a little aback. After a short
pause he laughed, and passed his hand violently over his face. His
reply was a question.

'How long have you been married, Helen?' he enquired.

'Eleven years,' she said at once, as though she had had the answer
ready.

'Well, I was appointed Professor of Modern History eleven years ago.
Let us suppose that you suddenly left your husband. . . .'

'Me? . . . Why?'

'_Just suppose._ People would ask you in great surprise, what had
caused you to take this step. You would answer, presumably, that you
had done so because of his complete absence of moral understanding and
because of the harm he was doing as a consequence of his lack of moral
sense. At least this is what you would say if your case were a
parallel one to mine, and your motives resembling my motives.'

'Ah, I see,' she exclaimed, in a tone of considerable relief. 'I was
going to say . . .'

'But the answer I have imagined you giving to your inquisitive
neighbours would appear to them of the most fantastic kind. What a
reason to give! they would say. They would suppose that you had
invented this to conceal the actual cause of the estrangement and
separation. Later on, they would take you aside and ask you what was
the _real_ reason. You would find yourself in an embarrassing
position, and in the end would almost wish that you had answered, "Oh,
we just had a row, just a bad row!" Do you follow me?'

'I am afraid I do not,' Helen replied.

'No? Well, my case is rather similar to this suppositious one, in
which you left Robert, explaining your action by charging him with
moral obliquity.'

'Ah, I see what you were getting at!'

'Well,' Ren sighed, 'you will begin to understand from this
illustration, how difficult it is for me to know quite what to say. No
one will believe that I am such an utter _prig_--that is how it must
look to them--as I claim to be.'

Helen turned, and had a good look at the bearded face beside her,
which in imagination, she always saw with a gay curling up of the ends
of the moustache, nothing but high-spirited raillery and delighted
exploitation of the absurd seeming to be happily mobilized behind
those eyes. Even now his glance held nothing solemn in it. It swam and
darted as it always did.

'I see how it must be, Ren. But it is so difficult to think of you
convulsed with some ethical problem: yours is not exactly an ethical
personality! I find it difficult myself to see you resigning your
professorship, for _moral_ reasons.'

Ren laughed, as he turned away from the windowsill. He lighted a
cigarette, and dropped into a chair.

'Please give me a cigarette,' said Helen, as she sat down in front of
him.

They both sat smoking for a moment, and Helen feared at first that she
might have offended: but her brother then looked up with his
accustomed smile. 'You put your finger at once upon one of the
difficulties,' he told her. 'My personality is _not_ that of a great
moralist, is it? That is probably the reason for people's scepticism.
You showed great insight, sister. But that is not _all_. If the issue
were a simple one, or rather, if it were reducible to a simple
explanation, I would have no objection whatever to making a public
statement. But as it is, my personality is so out of keeping with the
ethically heroical image that the bare facts elicit. You spotted that
at once. _I_ cannot be made to fit in with my story. To extricate
myself from that misunderstanding, I should have to agree, _Yes, my
personality is not that of a martyred moralist. But then I am not,
first and foremost, a moralist._ From that point onwards everything is
far too difficult to explain to the majority of people. To satisfy
Tom, Dick, and Harry, some formula would have to be found--something
as short as it was convincing.'

'But Robert is neither Tom, Dick, nor Harry, is he? Why do you not
explain to him?'

'Because he is biased against me. And there is no particular reason
why I should say more to him than to anybody else. But to _you_, I
would like to explain a little, if you want to be bored.'

'I wish you would, Ren . . . I am not very learned!'

'It is not a question of "book-learning". There is nothing abstruse;
my position could be made quite clear to anybody. If you were employed
by some large concern, for instance, and in the course of some years
you discovered that _everyone_ in this considerable business was
dishonest, and that the whole set-up was fundamentally a racket; when
at last there was no longer any doubt that you were devoting your time
and talent (such as it was) to something at once trivial and harmful,
what would you do? It would be rather an awful predicament. Your
salary is a good one; you are too old to re-direct yourself very
easily. All your friends and relations attempt to dissuade you from
resigning. Why be so fussy, so fastidious? they would argue. But now I
come to the real point. Would you be a _great moralist_ because you
decided to resign? Not necessarily so at all. Any decent ordinary girl
would find it distasteful and repugnant to spend her life engaged in
activities which, without being criminal, were not honest and
potentially very harmful. It would be, in part, no doubt, a _moral_
issue: but equally, and perhaps in a more compelling way, it would
turn upon questions of taste and of _self-respect_. We all have a
considerable fund of inherited morality which we describe as
"decency". And then there is a fastidiousness which is partly
aesthetic, partly social conceit. We are presupposing a
well-brought-up, rather particular, self-reliant girl. But why not?
There are, happily, a number of girls like that. To sum this up: the
term _great moralist_, if it were used of her in mockery, would quite
falsify the true nature of the girl's action, in throwing up her job.'

Helen's face looked grave and a little embarrassed. She asked, with an
apologetic air, 'You reason very clearly, Ren, but I fail to see,
quite, what the imaginary girl employed by some people not quite on
the straight, has to do with Ren Harding, Professor of History, who
resigns his post.'

'Exactly!' Ren exclaimed, with much approval. 'My racket is
_History_, you say. As harmless a thing as could well be imagined.
What is _History_ except dates--William the Conqueror 1066 and a list
of the wives of Henry VIII? The past, the long-ago, is about as
harmless as anything could be. That, more or less, is the general view
of history, is it not?'

Helen laughed and nodded. 'I'm afraid so,' she said. 'I, of course,
know a bit more than that. I have just been reading about the Court of
Queen Anne. But I cannot see how there is much room for such a moral
flare-up as we are discussing.'

'Well there _is_, even about Queen Anne's reign. All history is
written with a bias. But if it is written with a state-organized bias,
as in Soviet Russia, great harm ensues. For if you falsify past events
methodically, you very soon authorize or indeed command that present
events be systematically falsified also. And for there to be no
standard of objective reality in a society is a very bad thing for the
society in question.'

'I see that all right,' Helen told him.

'And do you also see, Helen, how I could not, in delivering myself of
this explanation to Robert, have cited Soviet Russia, although it is
the best illustration of state-falsification of History?'

Helen laughed heartily, as she always did at any reference to Robert's
political views, in colour approaching that of the letter-box or of
the setting-sun.

'We are getting along well,' Ren assured her. 'But History includes
the present as well as the _past_. The World War was _history_ as much
as the Wars of the Roses. Mr. Winston Churchill is as much a
historical figure as was the first Duke of Marlborough, about whom you
have been reading in your Queen Anne book.'

Helen's face was still without the social smile: she recognized that
her brother attached great importance to this interview, for some
reason; that he set store by her understanding exactly what he was
saying: and she was determined to concentrate, and to make her mind
properly receptive. It was very rarely indeed that great exactitude
was required of her understanding, and she sat very still, as though
she were absorbed in some calligraphic feat.

'Now what it is essential to remember,' Ren continued, after a
pause, 'is that any work includes the field of contemporary
politics--twentieth-century politics. Whereas, up to a certain point,
what you think, and what you say, about the Peasants' Revolt--about
Wat Tyler and John Bull--has no immediate influence upon people's
conduct, it is quite a different matter when you are writing about
nineteenth-century Liberalism in England, or the deluded optimists
known as the "Manchester School"; and when it comes to the twentieth
century to Edward the Peacemaker, to the Duke of Windsor and to Mr.
Baldwin--when it comes to writing about all this, it ceases to be
history as popularly understood at all. It is more like analysing the
character and behaviour of the members of one's family circle,
neighbours or friends: or the notables of your borough or county, the
local police or sanitary authorities, or local member of parliament.
You see what I mean?'

He paused, and Helen said, 'I see.'

'The word history is synonymous in the popular mind with something
_distant_. When _history_ gets so near to us that it hurts, naturally
we no longer regard it as _history_--and then, the so-called
historian, when his history is _near_-history, is far less free than
when his material is a century away. Any unorthodoxy is deeply
resented, especially if he occupies an official position. Pressures
are felt from all directions. All kinds of things are expected of him.
He is supposed to conform to accepted views of every sort: more
especially _economic_ unorthodoxy is impossible. You are supposed to
forget that the banks and great Insurance Companies exist: your view
in all such things must be that of a child of ten years old. And as to
_wars_ (as to so senseless a crime as the World War), there you must
speak of "anger of a great people demanding action". You must speak of
governments giving way to popular clamour ("popular clamour" being the
inflammatory banner headlines of the _Daily Mail_ or the _Daily
Mirror_): your history must sound not unlike an Armistice Day speech.
You must turn no stones on the beach to see what is underneath them:
you must adhere to the reality of the world of slogans, and you must
never turn a slogan on its back.'

His sister looked up, smiling.

'Helen, I have only begun to say what it is necessary to run through
to answer the curious as to the _real_ reason for my resignation. I
should have to proceed next to another point: namely, how events in
the present century _reflect back_, and cause the historian to tell
the story of the nineteenth century rather differently. I should say,
_very_ differently! And as to the nineteenth-century economics! But
all this _n'en finit plus_. Apart from anything else, no one would
patiently listen to the lecture which it would be necessary to
deliver, for full enlightenment. To find a half-dozen words in which
to explain why I resorted to so drastic a step as resignation, is
quite impossible. From such explanatory words as I think up for public
consumption people conclude that I am laying claim to an inordinate
ethical sensitivity. My motives of course involve nothing of the sort.
But it is impossible to compress into a sentence or two my reason for
resigning without creating this impression.'

'I can see, I think,' Helen told him, 'how difficult all this is, Ren.'

'You have been very attentive, very kind. But you must, at the end of
it, regard me as an abominable egoist keeping you screwed down in this
summerhouse, while I harangue you.'

'Oh, Ren darling! . . .'

'The fact is, I very much wanted to have one member of my family who
saw clearly what my resignation was about.'

'_One_ does!' she interrupted. 'I have listened very carefully, Ren,
and I believe I see already exactly what your problem is. It surprises
me very much that this has not also been clear to other people, better
informed than I am. My husband, for instance. . . .'

Ren gave a short laugh like a cough. 'It is because he understands so
well that he appears so dense. _He_ stands for the latest form of
obscurantism.'

Ren sprang up and stretched, as he always did in such cases, as
though to shake the concentration out of his body. That he should
want to shake it out was evidence of the fact that he lived in two
compartments. He shook off what was mental as soon as he was done with
it and passed over into the animal playground of the mind--the sphere
in which most people of course pass all their time. He was
half-brother to Everyman.

He went over to the window, where he propped himself as before,
observing the blasted heath. 'What a glamorous outlook!' he said. 'Is
this hut supposed to represent life on earth, and is that the great
open spaces of the _nant_?'

'Something like that,' Helen laughed, who had come over and was now
standing beside him.

'I should have gone on with my disquisition,' Ren said, 'but I do not
know how long we have. It is rather breathless but let me shove in a
further bit of elucidation if you can bear it. I should have explained
to you that in a full statement I should be obliged to cite details
likely to embarrass me. Events in the twentieth century regarded by me
as unworthy of the historian's notice (since they belong to that
barbary which it is our duty to surmount), are thought of by many
people as of supreme importance. A _complete_ statement would merely
start a row. Events of the last twenty years which Robert Kerridge
looks upon as world shaking, would not look like that to me. And, of
course, the pros and cons of my resignation would depend upon values
which some allow, and some do not allow. It is really very
complicated. In the _abstract_, my resignation looks thus and thus;
_concretely_, it would look quite differently. So as not to get
embroiled in all those hot issues which tear our world to pieces
today, it is perhaps as well that my resignation should be accounted
for abstractedly. There is something in favour of people talking
nonsense about "a great moralist". Though, to add a last touch of
confusion, I am a sort of moralist notwithstanding.'

Helen frowned and cried, 'Ren! What a problem to set your poor little
sister. But I will work it out in solitude. I will write to you when I
have straightened things out. But I know, instinctively . . .'

'You intuit.'

'I suppose that's it. I was saying that I am certain you are right. I
know you better than anybody, and I know that what you have done is
sensible and just.'

He gave her a quick hug, and said, 'I have you on my side, Helen. I
knew I should. I am so thankful that we were allowed the time to have
our talk. But what do I see! Merciful heavens (as Lady Brown would
say). There he is! There he comes!'

Along the opposite crest of the little ravine, there indeed he
was--teeth, glass eyes, rubber neck and all. For he was waving an arm
at them as he pedalled. Helen waved back, in wifely salutation.

'You nearly hit me!' Ren gasped. 'Do not get too hysterical at the
sight of old rubber-neck.'

'Ren! You must not call Robert old rubber-neck!' Helen exhorted him,
wagging a finger.

'How you can degrade yourself by biting that rubbery substance!' her
brother hissed as he made for the door. 'Hurry up! Be at the gate of
the castle to greet your lord as he dismounts.'

'You go too far,' she complained, but did in fact hustle along, as
though to reach the gate of the castle in time.

As Ren hastened forward to be present at the arrival of the Wicked
Giant, he was startled by a soprano in the top register attaining to
the shrillness of a steam-whistle in the next-door house. Deafened by
the shriek, he passed the kitchen window and there was the charlady's
face tilted back, observing him with the remote ethereal derision
peculiar (he had supposed) to Mrs. Harradson, observing him in flight
from the blast of the soprano. He realized that he had his fingers in
his ears. He put his tongue out at her, and she vanished as if by
magic. He stepped lightly and briskly into the house and Mrs.
Huxtable, the Warwickshire charlady, emerged from the kitchen. . . .
He promptly stuck his tongue out as if it were a reflex action. Mrs.
Huxtable, as if knocked back into the kitchen with a sledgehammer
blow, vanished: and a door, pivoting madly on its hinges, replaced
her. It must be the country mind, he thought. She considered it quite
in order to jeer at me in her gaze because I have my fingers in my
ears, in order to bar ingress to the steam-whistle of a neighbouring
soprano: but if I reciprocate by protruding my tongue, this affects
her galvanically. Like Mrs. Harradson, she fails to conceal her
disrespect. Disrespect shown _by me_, knocks her out entirely.'

'What are you doing, Ren?' came a pant from just behind. 'You are up
to something I believe.'

'Incorrect!' he rapped back. 'I was merely turning over in my mind how
Mrs. Harradson would have reacted. She would have gone into violent
action--scrubbing, washing, or merely scuttling. She would respond as
a town-bred charlady. She would play up with all that was comic in
her; and throw a fit.'

'I am sure I don't know what you are talking about,' Helen told him
crossly.

They were in the hall now, and they heard the tramp on the gravel
outside of rubber-neck. While they had been talking he had pushed his
machine in at the gate, and leaning it against a tree, entered the
house with routine _fracas_.

'Ah, Helen, I have news for you!' he gave forth in a snarling
gentlemanly drawl. 'Mrs. Pearson's bitch has been delivered of one
fine black and tan puppy and a lot of less interestingly marked little
animals.'

'Has she indeed?' Helen showed interest.

'I bespoke the fine one, as being what you wanted.'

Kerridge knew he was observed, and that it had been divined that he was
in fact a Wicked Giant, but was determined to stand his ground, on his
credentials as a young clergyman addicted to a working-class bicycle. He
swung slowly over, from side to side, drifting his feet a little,
elephant fashion. Though the dental display was almost non-stop, he
never laughed. He was a machine whose Creator had forgotten to fix in a
bark: or perhaps he had thought that the grin laid on most of the time
made the ha-ha unnecessary. If the workmanship had this limitation, that
there was a sluggishness and monotony in its reactions which made it
smell of the _machine_; if the eyes behind the fixed spectacles were
glassy, and if the feet seemed unnaturally heavy, his talk was as
successful as a calculating machine. But of course this is how one would
argue if one did not know that Kerridge was in truth a Wicked Giant,
attempting to disguise his _wickedness_ by invariably smiling to
suggest bonhomie, and that the creatures of Fairyland were big, always
lumbered, and mouthed their words.

Ren at all times treated him correctly, as a young clergyman who had
married his sister. But his uneasiness sometimes amounted to horror.
In Ren's composition, the Preux caused him to feel that it was his
sacred task to rescue Helen from the clutches of a supernatural
monster. If his sister were not careful, she would find herself flying
away some day, among the stars, to unearthly mountains. She would find
herself in the blue mists of a world of rubber-necks. Top-booted and
white-bearded giants moved about with an intoxicated gait, lifted
their feet waveringly as though they did not know where to put them
down. She would be taken to see them in their mildewed castles, bayed
at by mournful dogs.

The longer Ren stopped at the Kerridges, the more powerful the illusion
grew that Robert Kerridge was a supernatural impostor, that he was, not
in fancy, but in cold reality, a 'Wicked Giant': happily he had never
stopped more than a few days. Had his stay extended into as many weeks,
the sensation would have become intolerable. It is quite likely as the
time to go grew near, he would have killed Kerridge. As it was, on this
second day, he was still in a playful region, the atmosphere of
Fairyland not yet so thick as to madden him. There was still an even
chance that this was merely a clergyman after all.

During lunch Kerridge announced that a housemaster at Rugby,
Grattan-Brock by name, was coming to dinner. 'I suppose I should have
asked you first, Ren!' he heavily and archly minced. 'But he is a great
fan of yours. He knows _The Secret History of World War II_ by heart!'

'I don't think that we should mislead our guest, Robert,' Helen
protested, looking very angry. 'Dr. Grattan-Brock, far from being an
admirer of Ren's, has violently attacked him, and in my presence.'

There was a moment of silence, in which her husband looked with such
sullen displeasure at Helen, that instinctively Ren gripped his
knife, and looked, himself, perfectly ferocious.

'I think, Helen, you should not make such statements. You do not
understand these things. . . .'

'Oh, don't I!' she said, laughing. 'I know far more than you think!
But what I am quite certain of, I am not _deaf_, is that Dr.
Grattan-Brock, at this table, called Ren a fascist, an impostor, a
poor scholar, and--yes--_a cad_!'

A most delighted 'ho-ho-ho' came from Ren, who was gazing with
malicious enquiry at Kerridge.

'Dr. Grattan-Brock, however much he admires a book, does not dispense
with criticism and analysis,' Robert Kerridge solemnly pointed out,
frowning at an imaginary person hovering between his wife and her
brother.

'Obviously he does not,' Ren said, frowning with an equal pomp.
'Spare the rod and spoil the child is his motto. He lays into those he
loves, hot and strong: and considers there is no better way of
expressing his appreciation of an author than by jotting down in his
diary, "The author of this ill-written book is, _par dessus le
march_, an utter cad." In view of the great esteem in which he holds
me, I must anticipate tonight, I suppose, some pretty plain speaking.'

While this persiflage was in progress, Kerridge crumbled up his
section of bread, while he eyed his wife with glances far more
eloquent than any words. Helen sat with bowed head, but she told
herself with a crusading fervour that she was not going to stand by
while her dear brother was made a fool of, however bitterly Robert
might reproach her! Ren had opened his heart to her that very day,
and she saw how the land lay. There were more loyalties than one; and
loyalty to a husband did not wipe out all others.

Tea they had by the fireside as it had grown unexpectedly cold. After
tea Robert Kerridge drew his guest aside, and, with affected
embarrassment, informed him that Mrs. Huxtable had threatened to give
notice: that he would be terribly obliged if Ren would not put his
tongue out at the charlady. She was a very strict Presbyterian.

'I like that!' Ren protested. 'She was jeering at me because I had my
fingers in my ears.'

'I have never known Mrs. Huxtable to jeer at anybody, Ren,' Kerridge
said coldly.

'No? Put your fingers in your ears and see what happens!'

Ren's tongue suddenly shot forth from between his bearded lips. 'One
way of resisting rudeness! If you put your fingers in your ears you
will find this handy.' And again he stuck out his tongue, afterwards
sauntering away from his round-eyed, pained-looking host, trying to
decide whether the tongue was meant for him or not.

The housemaster's arrival that evening was accompanied by much
stamping about in the hall, the drawling bay of the Oxford Accent and
the big-dog barking of the visitor. Dr. Grattan-Brock was only a
moderately big man physically, however, though rather obesely stocky.
He was one of that numerous class of more or less learned English men
(and in this class may be included a few literate Americans too) who
believe that they are Dr. Johnson. Their voices roll towards their
interlocutor heavy carefully-picked words, reminiscent of those which
thundered in the small-talk of the formidable Lexicographer. A bending
of the brows will, at times, accompany these verbal discharges.

But something had happened to this shadow of the great
eighteenth-century doctor. Dr. Grattan-Brock had not come under the
spell of Marx, no housemaster could do that. He might be a Morley-like
liberal, but nothing stronger. But what _had_ happened was that Dr.
Grattan-Brock had been very active during the Spanish Civil War, and
events leading up to it. He had shown himself _outstandingly_ liberal.
He had met numbers of fellow-travelling intellectuals (like Kerridge)
and even C.P. Party-men. From these frequentations he had acquired a
harshness wholly twentieth-century. This he had incorporated, or
worked into, the Johnsonian ponderosity. But some subjects inflamed
him and brought back those grand days he had spent in Barcelona, and
then the ponderosity began to pound and snarl. As it was, he would go
along nicely, no-sirring and yes-sirring you for a long time, until
suddenly he would become the soap-boxer.

It was in Johnsonian vein that he began with Professor Ren Harding.
'I am a reader of yours, sir. I am very grateful to Robert Kerridge
for affording me the opportunity of meeting you.' Ren, on his side,
was greatly amused. He was his most urbane. He planned, by the
extravagance of his language, to shame this local impersonator of Dr.
Johnson out of his pose. He screwed up his mouth and its surroundings
into a budding rosette of concentrated sweetness. His eyes directed
upon the other a crackling glance (emitting something like a cloud of
midges playing all over the person in front of it, in the last
refinement of deferential gallantry).

'My brother-in-law and my sister, too, have told me so much about you.
The privilege of meeting you is something, sir, I had never dared to
hope for.'

The housemaster blinked a little at this but he accepted it as normal,
and even managed an abbreviated eighteenth-century bow.

'The privilege, sir, is altogether on my side.' Then came the bow.

It was in this spirit that they all went in to dinner, with many
courtesies on Ren's part suggestive of the great social and academic
importance of Dr. Grattan-Brock. And had it not been for the
incitements of Kerridge it is probable that the dinner would have
passed off with Dr. Grattan-Brock basking his way through an excellent
meal (for her early home life had provided Helen with a feeling for
good cooking), and have gone home thinking what a charming fellow
Professor Ren Harding was. It was Kerridge who first moved the
conversation into dangerous channels. In a pause after a number of
scholarly exchanges he was heard to say, 'By the way, Grattan-Brock, I
was telling my brother-in-law that you had read his _Secret History of
World War II_, and how much you had admired it.'

There was a disagreeable silence, all four suspending the meal and
waiting. At last the housemaster shook himself and growled, 'Oh
(arhumm) yes, of course. Indeed, I did, read your book, (arhumm). Are
you writing another, sir?'

Ren laughed. 'No, sir. Not for the moment.'

'My brother-in-law is going to Canada. He is sailing in a few months.'
Kerridge beamed at Ren.

'Canada! Extraordinary place to go to. Well, sir, I hope you will have
a good trip.'

That the Professor was not returning, that he had resigned his
professorship, etc., etc. was, Kerridge saw to it, elicited. The
housemaster began to be less ready to bask in the flatteries of this
ex-Professor; and although Ren attempted a diversion with the
architectural beauties of Strasbourg, which he had recently visited,
Kerridge soon drove him out of Strasbourg, though Dr. Grattan-Brock
seemed inclined to linger there a little. The St. Estephe, which was
now circulating, was all the more conducive to pottering about in a
French city, and perhaps becoming acquainted with _La Maison Rouge_.

A little later Helen, returned from a somewhat lengthy visit to the
kitchen, found, to her astonishment, that the atmosphere had so
worsened as to be alarming. Her husband and the housemaster were both
turned, with accusing eyes and irritably knitted brows, towards Ren,
who was looking first at one, and then at the other, without speaking.
It was Kerridge, evidently, who was the leading spirit.

'Very well; but _The Times_, Ren, described you as fascist-minded,
didn't it?'

'Did it?' Ren smiled. 'I do not remember that. But quite likely it
did, since many people have been called that recently, simply because
they had made a remark of an unenthusiastic kind about communism. So
many youngish reviewers are romantic about Russia. It is quite absurd.
I do not have to love Russia because Hitler, Russia's enemy, is so
vile a man.'

'I do not think, Ren, that the critic of _The Times_ would base a
judgement on so stupid a reasoning as that.'

'No?' Ren looked around awaiting the next move.

'I must say, sir, that I myself have felt, at times, that you showed
fascist tendencies,' Dr. Grattan-Brock began a little gruffly. 'It was
just an impression, to be sure, but you have used arguments, sir,
which have (arhmmp) surprised me.'

Kerridge showed signs of annoyance at the feebleness of the
housemaster's co-operation. He leaned over and refilled his glass with
wine, hoping that this might improve matters.

'I remember you pointing out to me, Grattan-Brock, a good illustration
of what you mean. It was where Professor Harding made a comparison
between Herr Hitler and St. Ignatius Loyola.'

'Yes, I _do_ remember that. How, sir, you could compare that
miserable gangster at present terrorizing Europe with the founder of
the Society of Jesus I completely fail, sir, to understand.'

Ren shook his head. 'You have got that wrong, sir. I was not
suggesting that those two men personally resemble one another; what I
said was that they had functioned much in the same way. Both were
"military-minded", both organized para-military organizations, both
were reactionaries, both stood, or stand, for the old order in Europe,
one had the Reformation (potentially), the other the Communist
Revolution, to cope with.'

From the housemaster came a muffled snarl, from Kerridge a deep-toned
bay of gentlemanly protest.

'But, sir, do you consider it seemly to speak in the same breath of
this foul blackguard, this guttersnipe who has seized power in Germany
with . . . with _anybody_?'

'Upon what plane, sir, are we discussing this? Upon the plane of
contemporary political passion, or as History sees these things: not
_subjectively_, sir, but subspecie aeternitatis.'

'Subspecie aeternitatis fiddlesticks! How can you bring eternity in to
supply a monster like that with admission to a place where he can meet
saints and heroes upon equal terms? I am ashamed, sir, to be sitting
at a table . . .'

'No, Grattan-Brock, do not allow yourself . . .'

'It is quite clear now,' said Ren coldly, 'upon what plane this
discussion is to proceed: upon the plane, that is, of passion, not of
reason.'

Helen's voice rose full of an unexpected sharpness and firmness. 'But
what is all this about? Will you allow a mere woman to ask a few
questions? I cannot quite see what my brother's offence is. He is a
historian, not a political writer. You, Robert, and you too, sir, I
gather, are exclusively politically minded. You are talking at
cross-purposes.'

'Classification is one of the historians' tasks,' Ren said. 'My only
offence was, in the course of classification, to put the Iron
Chancellor No. II (whose military obsessions I detest as much as you
do), to put Herr Hitler in his right pigeon-hole. He has often been
compared with Martin Luther. Quite apart from whether one admires or
detests these two figures, as a historian, the comparison appears to
me erroneous. The soldier-saint seemed to me a far better choice. Oh,
gentlemen, please.' Ren half rose in his chair, holding up a hand.
'This is not to say that the German Chancellor is a _saint_.'

Helen laughed. 'You two seem to be taking up a most unreasonable
attitude. This Fhrer (little beast though he is) has a certain place
in history, which may be defined and measured. He has to be
pigeon-holed, however much we would wish he could be abolished. Just
as he has to be shaved, and measured for suits.'

'I am afraid, my dear lady . . .'

'Most unfortunate illustrations. I do wish, Helen, you would not talk
nonsense.' Kerridge bayed disgustedly his complaint.

'You can't just slap down anything you don't like,' Ren told him.

'I hope Robert will digest that,' Helen laughed.

'We are devoting too much attention to one point,' Kerridge began.
'There are plenty of _other_ things in _The Secret History of World
War II_.' Kerridge looked at Grattan-Brock. 'Are there not, Doctor?'

'I was thinking just now, sir,' Dr. Grattan-Brock was
addressing himself to Ren, 'where classification is in question, that
your _Secret History_, sir, can only be classified as a political
work. You are as much a politician, sir, as we are politicians.'

Ren's urbanity unimpaired, he turned towards the sour and quarrelsome
pseudo-eighteenth-century personality at his side, and observed, 'In
finding myself classified, sir, as one of you, I suppose I should feel
flattered. I am afraid I am unable to return the compliment and invite
you over into my class. You belong irrevocably, sir, to the subjective
order: I might add to those who, with shouts and brandished fists,
throw any argument down on to a lower plane, out of reach of Reason's
arbitrament.

'Order, order!' called Kerridge roughly. 'Are you describing my guest
as a brawler and a bully? If so, I must really ask you . . .'

Ren rose. 'I will immediately comply. I will withdraw to my room. You
have asked me to sit at this table in order to attack me: because I
do not tamely submit, you ask me to leave it.' He looked the 'Wicked
Giant' in the eye. 'It is extraordinary behaviour for a clergyman.' He
moved round the table towards the door.

Kerridge sprang up, crying, 'Now look here, Ren. _This_ is
extraordinary behaviour if you like! Do please be sensible and come
back and sit down.'

Ren, standing with his hand upon the handle of the door, answered
quietly, 'If you will allow me to make a few remarks, without
interruption, I will return to my seat.'

A sound similar to the rumbling of the stomach came from the
housemaster: at the same time Kerridge, who had resumed his seat,
declared, 'As many remarks as you like, my dear fellow. Why should
anyone interrupt you? It is not every day that we have a famous author
among us.'

Ren walked back to his place to the right of his sister, who gave his
arm a quick squeeze as he sat down. Everyone looked at him with
various expressions. 'As I have been accorded permission to deliver a
short lecture . . .'

'No lectures at dinner-table, not that,' sang rubber-neck.

'Yes, I was going to say . . .!' came a Johnsonian rumble.

'All right then. It shall be table-talk, it doesn't make any
difference, provided I have my two hundred words in silence.'

'Shoot!' His mouth bitterly twisted, all teeth showing, the clergyman
sat back derisively.

'Herr Hitler's air-fleet will doubtless smash up large areas of our
capital. Our air-force is so inferior in strength (for some reason)
that that seems inevitable. Why a few brigades of British and French
troops did not march into Germany, at the time of the Rhineland coup,
why Hitler was not made prisoner, and the whole Nazi movement forcibly
liquidated no one knows, at least I do not. Let me say about this by
now very powerful and menacing politician, the Fhrer, that _my_
indictment of him is mainly on the ground of his insane militarism,
and belief in force. This boils down to terrorism. Many people express
a more or less insincere horror of the fact that he is a dictator.
There is however one man who is at least ten times as complete a
dictator as he: and there is much dictatorial power elsewhere. Myself,
I object absolutely to political terrorism and philosophies of force.
And War as well as other forms of organized violence belongs, for me,
to the Dark Ages. I am not violent myself, because I am a civilized
man. So far, so good. Now what I find is that those who are most
juicily ferocious in their denunciation of the German Leaders are
themselves adherents, or part adherents, of a terroristic philosophy.
This appears to me hypocritical. Hypocrisy is a thing for which I feel
a great distaste.'

Ren stood up. 'Now, I will retire to my room.' He stepped back and,
without hurrying, left the room.

As he was leaving, Kerridge laughed bitterly, saying, 'I am afraid
that my brother-in-law has always been a man of violent gestures. The
French blood, I suppose. Oh, I apologize, darling.'

'The man is a thug,' exploded the housemaster, whose glass had never
stood empty, Kerridge had seen to that.

Helen now rose, exclaiming rather hotly, 'Now I shall go to my room,
too,' and moved off quickly in the wake of her brother, her husband
shouting, 'But, Helen darling; you simply cannot leave us like that,
we have a guest. It is impossible for you to do this!'

He, in turn, moved towards the door, and so, in a few moments, there
was no one in the room but the housemaster who, with a wheeze, grasped
his wine-glass fiercely, and emptied it at a gulp.




CHAPTER IX

How Much Can we Afford to Jettison?


The next morning just after eleven o'clock The Reverend Robert
Kerridge was exhibiting proudly his fine dental christianity to a
fair-sized congregation in Starbrook Church--about twenty-five or
thirty women christians, appreciative of his well-toothed and Oxford
accent. About the same time Ren and his sister sat in a taxi-cab,
chatting about Kerridge, on their way to Rugby station.

Almost as soon as the cab had started, Helen had asked her brother's
forgiveness for the disgusting scene of the night before. 'It was
perfectly awful, I have never seen or imagined anything so vile. And I
just cannot understand it. I do hope, Ren, that you will try and
think of us without thinking of _that_. It was utterly unlike Robert;
I believe that he was temporarily out of his senses. He was abjectly
apologetic this morning.'

Ren stopped her with a most hearty laugh. 'No apology whatever is
required of you--for you to apologize is absurd. I owe you my deepest
gratitude for rescuing me from a dragon.'

'A dragon? I believe you are capable of dealing with any dragon.' And
she glanced sideways in a complimentary way at the Preux.

Ren shook his head. 'I am afraid not. There was a moment when I first
caught sight of it, that I had that St. George-like feeling. But
no--now I know better.'

'What is all this, brother, about mythological monsters?'

'Well, a dragon has made its appearance in this century. It is not a
reptilian animal about fifty yards long which spits fire. It is a far
bigger animal than that, and a far more subtle one. It is, if you like,
a mental animal: one may identify it, almost see its fiery being in the
minds of men. I have seen it, I have felt it. For a long time now I have
known of its existence. I know why it is here, I am afraid of it. I
recommend you very earnestly not to interfere with it, pretend you do
not see it, and if you do so, you have nothing to fear from it. Sidestep
if you can its tumults, its earthquakes, its thunderbolts.'

'Oh dear me. This is terrifying. Do explain!'

'There would be no point whatever in my doing that. We are little,
powerless, shortlived creatures. What I am speaking about is
supernatural, of vast powers, and ageless. We cannot possibly know
why, at certain periods, these monstrous things appear among us and
then disappear again. Only, it is the best and only advice. Mind your
own business.' He looked sharply round at her. 'But stop. For you
there is an alternative: you can _ride_ this monster. You have one of
its scales quite handy. Why not become _it_?'

'I become more and more afraid.'

'That,' he said, 'is an excellent thing to be. I used often to marvel
at the expression godfearing. What a barbarous thing, I thought, to
suppose that God should wish to be feared. I have altered my mind. In
order to live, we must do a great deal of salutary fearing.'

Helen laughed and put her arm through Ren's. 'All the same, you
seemed to be standing up for yourself last night a little bit.'

'I do not often find myself in bad company, because I am careful to
avoid it. But if attacked, I answer; quite mildly of course.'

'I forgive you for that insult,' Helen laughed. 'We deserve it.'

'I still get a little cross sometimes: to have everyone thinking in
exactly the same way about everything, is, humanly speaking, a
nightmare. People attempting to make everybody do this I find
nightmarish, too. Yet an orthodoxy is certainly hardening all around
us. There is a good illustration of this in the fine arts, the
anti-academy rebels are automatically raising up a new academy. Upon
your dining-room walls there is that colour-reproduction of a painting
by Nash. It is a chilly and rigid affair, is it not? Those things do
entertain me, the best of them: but I realize that they are a new
academicism in the making. Everyone is a zealot today, they cannot
paint a water-colour without doing so as if it were a religious rite.
I read some of their writings. _You must_ abstract. It is categorical,
it is as if it were a branch of revolutionary politics. Oh, I do not
like that _must_ of theirs, I hate these twentieth-century _Absolutes_!'

'So do I, Ren. But it seems as if we have to live among Absolutes.
Why do you not invent an Absolute yourself?'

'My Absolute is Moderation.'

'That,' she said, 'is an inherited Absolute. The French always
pretend, at least, that moderation is their mellow goddess.'

'Yes, that Absolute of mine may be a legacy, as you say. With a dual
national inheritance it is difficult sometimes to keep track.'

'Ah, these mixed marriages,' Helen sighed rhetorically. 'I sometimes
think mother was a goose to go abroad for a husband.'

'I could not agree more,' he smiled. And they made merry for a moment
over the possibilities of an all-gallic parentage. 'Perhaps,' Ren
roared, 'we should have been on the Cte d'Azur at this moment. . . .'

'Eating _bouillabaisse_,' she laughed.

'Even so. _Endimanchs_, and in a restaurant, _une belle terrasse_,
the masts of the port beneath our eyes.' He rolled about joyously upon
the seat of the cab.

After this they talked a little about the family:

'What a united family we are,' he began. 'In France, and in Germany
too, families cultivate that unity. It is not only a hangover from the
Catholic World, it has to do with other things also. In a nation
firmly organized, at least half-way down, into family-groups that
really stick, there can be no _tatisme_. The family is the great
enemy of the State conceived as one huge family. All that passionate
affection developed within the limit of the family circle, is a thing
which violently resists dissolution. And it cannot be expanded very
greatly. Thin out that love until it fills the entire State and it has
evaporated. Consequently, the whole character of the Society has to be
changed (quite apart from the destruction of the Family) in order to
establish _tatisme_. Since no one loves the State, when there is
_only_ the State, there is very little of that warmth and sympathy
which the human animal needs.'

Helen agreed, but observed that the Germans loved the State: a
horrible kind of love, but still the State _was_ loved by somebody.

'When members of a family are very united,' Ren went on, 'they are
apt to have no sympathy to spare for anybody else. I, for instance,
have been so devoted to Mother, and you know how I have loved you,
Helen--not to mention dear Mary and Janet as well--that I have not had
any real friendships, and have felt far too little sympathy for people
to whom some fraction of love at least was due.'

'I can carry you out in that,' she told him. 'When I first knew Robert,
for instance, I could not stir up any liking for him, try as I would,
and even when we were first married, my sensations were so tepid . . .'

A perfect roar of amusement burst from Ren. 'Oh, Helen, how right
your instincts were. I cannot understand how you can ever have
mustered a farthing's worth of sympathy for him. How can one _love_ a
piece of india-rubber.'

So they had talked as they drove through the Sunday shut-down of a
provincial English town. They had made the journey in a shorter time
than expected, and when they reached the train, which was standing in
the station, there was twenty minutes to wait.

The moment they entered the train and made their way along the
corridor to a first-class compartment, Ren was overcome by an
extraordinary depression, which his sister could not fail to detect.
For a moment they sat in silence, and then Helen began to talk about
his book. 'I must read your _Secret History_ again. I shall understand
it so much better now, after our talks. I shall plug you, to the
disgust of my immediate circle.'

To speak in this way of his book would be the best way to cheer him
up: such had been Helen's idea. But it had no such effect.

'It will sound absurd to you, it cannot do otherwise, all these
warnings. But you really do not have to go on with your championship.
Please put away my book, in an honoured position on your shelf, with
a number of other books you have read and enjoyed. That is quite
honour enough for me. But treat it as we do all those in such a class:
leave it where it is. Do not laugh at me, take my advice.'

'I shall do nothing of the kind.'

He shrugged his shoulders, and remained silent. Like one of those
masterpieces of impressionistic modelling, chiaroscuro suggested in
sculptured heads, Ren's face appeared to her disintegrated, as if
translated into a clay-coloured object of gouged and slapped-on bits.
In the poorly lighted compartment, he sat, his head sagging sideways.
His grief had made him into a 'Burgher of Calais' rather than a
bearded apostle embedded in the gothic stone at Chartres.

However, in spite of so much discouragement, she persisted. 'I have
always been so fond of you--I mean _personally_ of course--that it has
been an obstacle, isn't it odd, to my reading you. As if strangers
alone were interesting! But I was very impressed by what you told me.'

He put his arm around her waist, and tears came into his eyes. 'We
must part, Sister. I am afraid we shall not meet again. Everything is
over with me, you know, I feel.' He put his head down to her shoulder,
and she could feel him shake.

Helen was deeply astonished at what was occurring, for she would have
said that it would be quite impossible for this masterful brother of
hers so to shrivel up and cry like a child.

'Ren,'--she spoke to him softly--'why are you like this?'

Ren looked up, intelligence appearing to return. 'Sadness, you know,
at parting,' he said drily. 'At leaving everything, at going away into
a wilderness among so very solid a mass of strangers. And never to
come back. Never to come back.'

'Ren!'

'The numbers, the mass of strangers, does not matter, they might as
well be stones. Indeed, the thicker the mass of stony strangers the
deeper the wilderness. Then the fact that Canada is four-fifths an
authentic wilderness does not matter. It would be the same emptiness
anywhere. The same ghastly void, next door to nothingness.' He lifted
up his head, but did not look at her. 'You must understand what has
happened to me! It is destiny. Through looking too hard at the
material I was working on, I saw the maggots in it, I saw the
rottenness, the fatal flaws; had to stop earning my living in that
way. There is a very small chance that I can make a living there
rather than here. I have no particular reason to go to Canada. I must
go somewhere out of sight of what is going to happen because I know so
well the reasons which make it impossible for it not to occur. How
disgusting, how maddening, and how foully comic all the reality of
death and destruction will be; I just cannot stick around here and
watch that going on. Canada is as good, or as bad a place as any
other. The problem is, to get out of the world I have always known,
which is as good as to say out of the world. So Canada is to be my
grave. I wish I had chosen for myself a warmer place--or that fate
had. My former colleague, who has been in Winnipeg for some years,
implores me not to go to the Dominion unless they offer me a
professorship. He says the chances of anything of that kind are
slight. He tells me that Canadians feel very strongly about vacancies
in Colleges being filled by Englishmen, against whom there is a great
deal of feeling. On the other hand, it would not amuse me, like some
Russian emigr, to eke out an existence as a shoeblack. When my small
capital is exhausted I shall make a painless exit from an existence
only bearable under certain well-recognized conditions. There is no
alternative existence _ici-bas_ when you have got where I did; if you
leave hold you shoot down like a lump of lead. You have just
witnessed, I mean last night, how far down I have already got. Twelve
months ago I could not have been treated like that. The kicking around
has begun. It began with our rat-like relative, Victor: it continues
with the Vicar of Starbrook, who gets in a local housemaster to have a
bit of fun.'

Helen had been listening with lowered head, in wretched silence. At
the concluding words, she recoiled a little, the reference to the
doings of the Vicar of Starbrook stinging her unendurably for a
moment. Then she leant towards Ren and said how all that he had told
her had amazed her. 'I had not the remotest idea that you felt like
that about your position.'

Ren looked up half-smiling. 'How did you think I felt then? Of
course you could not know. Now listen. I do not talk about this. I
have spoken to _nobody_ about it. No one has any idea what my
reactions are, nor is there any reason why they should. I have just
told you, I cannot tell why, except that I have always been so near to
you. I do not want you to let anyone else know.'

'They shall not.' Her voice was low and trembling.

'Meanwhile, of course, I go about exactly the same as before. I
believe I am right in saying that I show no signs of any emotional
disturbance. What is more, to be quite accurate, I _feel_ no emotion,
except when I deliberately turn my mind that way.'

'I am so glad,' Helen told him, looking up. 'You certainly show
nothing, and I am glad you have that ability to insulate.'

'No, I have not been sad. Saying good-bye to you is the saddest thing
that has happened to me yet, or that ever will. You have always been
what I love best in the world. I hate this parting . . . I hate this
parting!' He clung to her with tears in his eyes.

Two or three minutes earlier the guard had called 'All passengers'
friends out of the train.' And now, a moment before, the whistle had
sounded and he felt the train beginning to move.

'You can't get out now,' he told her. 'You can catch the next train
back to Rugby.' But the last words she did not hear, she had sprung up
and was now rushing down the corridor. Ren was horrified, for the
train seemed to be moving quicker. As he ran after her, people came
out of a carriage and blocked the corridor. She was out of sight, and
he entered a carriage and sprang to an open window, where he was just
in time to see her jump from the moving train and fall on the platform.

The human body is not a square object like a trunk, and when it falls
it tends to roll. In her case it rolled towards the train. But a
porter seized her shoulders and stopped the roll. In doing this, he
apparently lost his balance and went down backwards with his legs in
the air. In the same instant Helen, now no longer a rolling body, but
in command of her limbs once more, sprang to her feet, and Ren
momentarily had the impression that it was she who was knocking over
the railway porter. She moved out away from the train and placed her
hands trumpet-wise in front of her mouth. He heard in his ear as if it
had been the thin whisper in a shell, the two syllables of his name,
'Ren--Ren--Ren!' He frantically waved his hand.

    *    *    *    *    *

Only when the station platform was out of sight, he drew his head in,
and returned to his own compartment. Quietly he took his place in the
window seat facing the engine. This parting had been so unexpectedly
painful. He had had no anticipation of anything unusual, owing to his
careful insulation from the centre of emotional awareness. As he had
explained to his sister, he was able to fasten himself down to the
unemotional daily routine: but suddenly, without any warning, floodgates
of realization would fly open. The insulation would break down. In order
not to be at the mercy of his emotions, he had been obliged to effect a
division of his personality into two parts: he had created a kind of
artificial 'unconscious' of his own, and thus locked away all acuity of
realization. If a doctor had told him he had only three months to live,
all the significance for him of this announcement would be hurried away
and put under lock and key. He of course could not guarantee that
something would not release it at any moment, but he had for so long
mastered his reactions that it would be unlikely to burst out until
permitted to do so. His callous self was so well insulated from the
compartment of the imagination that he was able to pass as a somewhat
unemotional man. On the other hand, he _did_, as in the present case,
experience a certain number of violent surprises.

So he sat almost rigid in his corner; for the 'floodgates' in question
had not yet shut-to. On the other hand, in the past forty-eight hours
his nervous system had undergone quite sufficient strain, and he
wished to return to the callous norm as quickly as possible. But this
could not be instantaneous--his mental machinery was not so
stream-lined as all that: so for a short while the glare of awareness
was still present.

A number of things came under review, and not of the most agreeable.
But he sometimes succeeded in exercising the right of selection. He
now threw back the beam of his acutely awakened awareness upon the
statement he had recently made to his sister. For he knew from
experience that this heightened perceptivity was capable of
distorting, and even of transforming, facts. Was he, in his parting
with Helen, speaking in a moment of natural depression consequent upon
the dinner-scene of the night before? Making every allowance for
temporary depression, he could not see how any _real_ account of his
present circumstances could be more optimistic.

He might pull down over the reality a fire curtain, which was what his
insulation system amounted to; he might gamble upon the _one chance in a
million_, the chance that his fortunes would radically mend, and he find
himself, in, from the worldly standpoint, as favourable a position as
before. It was as open to the rag-picker to nurse a golden dream as it
was for him to soothe himself with reflections upon the miracles of
Chance. Certainly by eating his words he might teach in some comic
little college in a neck of the woods. That appeared to be the summit of
future possibilities. So the searchlight showed quite as empty a scene
as, to his surprise, he had depicted in his farewell to Helen.

Now he had visited all the members of his family in turn; he had got a
flea in his ear in every case except one, the exception being Percy.
It is true that these visits had taken a different form in each case:
he had done scarcely more than _show_ himself to Janet and the
egregious Victor--what more could he do, and, of course, why should he
do that? To his mother and Mary he had made a very superficial
statement: but again, what more could he do? With Helen, alone, had he
attempted a real explanation (an explanation which would have been
entirely wasted upon his mother and Mary). To Percy, there had been no
need to say anything; it would, indeed, have been quite impossible to
make him understand a single syllable. Percy _knew_ Ren was a rebel
and a martyr, that was what Percy knew and no one could have altered
that. And so these visits had been futile, as far as elucidations
went; no one was any wiser as a result of his visit than they had been
beforehand, excepting only Helen.

He had, in the course of his summing up, a moment of gaiety in
considering what reaction the Dragon of his recent cab-talk would have
had upon Percy. But, of course, Mary and her husband would have decided
that as a result of overwork, his reason had been affected. What these
duty-calls had done was to destroy a school-boy picture of a circle of
loving-hearts. That junk, at least, had been got rid of, for ever.

But he thought that Mothers must receive a brief analytical scrutiny;
something more had to be hacked away from the old domestic monument.
Now, one's old bitch of a mother was a figure one approached with
reverence, because she had given birth to one. A fact of such importance
that one _must_ reverence her for that; though indeed she had only
loaned her belly for the pre-natal drama. She is always supposed to be
awfully fond of Me because of her having permitted all this to go on in
the spare-room she's got down there, for Little Strangers. Often one
hears of 'her bowels yearning' for the one-time occupant of the
spare-room. The fact of course is that, except for the extent to which
she may be influenced by the stream of waffle she had to consume on the
subject of her 'love', she must feel what most landladies do about their
lodgers. There is no evidence at all that a woman has any of these
beautiful sensations, invented for her by man. Once the nursing-job
imposed upon her by nature is over, and the 'little toddler' has grown
to be a noisy and bumptious schoolboy as big as herself, and still
worse, a little later, the obviously extremely limited but absurdly
self-important young man, she must realize (if she has not realized it
before) that she has simply been made a convenience of by Nature; and,
in any case, that it has been a great deal of fuss and trouble about
nothing. (If instead of a schoolboy it is a big fat schoolgirl, peering
at herself in the mirror all the time, it is hardly necessary, in that
case, to stress what her _real_ sensations must be.) Women of the
working class go on turning out 'Little Strangers', because of the
importance it gives them among the neighbours, and as an insurance in
old age. If by nature bossy, it gives the woman a little community to
bully, scold, make favourites of: and eventually this little community
will work for you--or that is the idea.

The dogmas of Western European religions and much romance have been
built up around the figure of the Mother. Any number of tough old girls
are quite ready to regard this as their 'big part'--just as formerly
they would play the 'little angel' to some masculine moron, who had been
taught to expect 'love' from that quarter--meaning a sort of combination
of worship and 'bowel-yearning.' Many women, quite naturally, develop a
superiority-complex listening to so much man-waffle.

Having arrived at this point, he was able to focus his eye upon the
old french lady, very comfortably installed, in a St. John's Wood
mansion-flat, with whom he played a tiresome little farce every time
he visited her. No wonder _elle rigolait_, and was full of
well-matured mirth. To see him arrive, walk quickly across the room,
his face screwed into a certain expression, reserved for old ladies
who at one time have changed one's diapers (and earlier of course have
given one house room in their intestines) all that must fill so
intelligent an old woman with amused contempt.--When she had called
him a _fool_--which had so astonished him at the time--it was
something she had often thought, no doubt, but had not, until that
moment of exasperation, given utterance to.

To his Testament of Mothers he added a Codicil.--There were, of
course, women in the Mother-part who are _Great Lovers_. But he could
see nothing agreeable in such forms of incest, where one of the
parties is anything up to fifty years older than the other.

Ren promised himself to analyse properly, when in his callous norm
once more, the nature of family love; to analyse carefully the cement
which caused the average christian family to adhere. He had done, in
the past, a good deal of serious field-work on the Family. In England,
he had concluded, there was little more than animal attraction left:
and when we get down to the animal level we only have to think of the
pigeons on our window-sill. There would be no maternal recognition
for a young pigeon who flew down upon our window-sill and reminded the
old hen-bird, sunning herself there, that he was a one-time egg of
hers. He would be roughly repulsed; and in any case, recognition on
the part of the ex-chick would be just as impossible, and unless men
would somehow communicate the idea to the younger pigeon, even if he
recognized the hen-bird as his parent, it could never occur to him
that she owed him any interest or assistance.

With the very slightest christian hangover, the mid-twentieth-century
English family still retained a traditional cement, which guaranteed
it a thin cohesion. For a middleclass family desirous of some show of
blood-attachments, the best solution would be to become a Mutual
Admiration Society. In his own case, his mother had provided the basic
ingredients of solidarity owing to her French Catholic origin. For the
rest, the Mutual Admiration Society was the best way of describing
what had existed there. When tested, as had recently been done by him,
it had proved sadly inadequate. So his family was a junk he had no
further use for. His sister Helen was another matter. For her he had
an attachment produced by something far stronger than the usual old
family cement. But (he remembered something) he must salvage Percy
from this universal demolition of old ties.

His own personality came up for consideration, as it always did on
such occasions. This time he selected for special notice the fact that
his natural gaiety was an exasperating thing to have been endowed with
in view of the extreme severity imposed on him by his destiny. He had
been born into a time supremely unfavourable for the enjoyment of _la
gaya scienza_. He then smiled his first smile for half an hour; for
Rotter's article came back to him with its dogmatic 'Ren Harding is a
Jansenist': and he reflected that one adherent at least of Port Royal
was not devoid of wit. But as soon as he had riveted his eyes upon the
obvious incompatibility of the age and of his personality, he realized
it was not quite so important as he had supposed. Its main
disadvantage was that people found it difficult to associate in their
minds tragedy and gaiety. The motives for his resignation were,
however, of the grimmest semi-ethical order. Looked at from that
angle, he was almost a dour enough man to be typical of his time.
Something in him was as severe and mirthless as those uncivilized
forces with which he had contended. But something apprised him that
his spell of unlicensed awareness was nearly ended. He was exceedingly
tired and, after looking at his watch, he arranged himself in the
corner and almost at once fell asleep.




CHAPTER X

The Passenger who Wore the Ribbon of the Legion of Honour


'This is the last boat out of Europe,' the young Swiss told him, 'the
last boat.'

It was possible that no more unescorted passenger ships would leave
this French port. Like people making a frenzied exit from a building
which was on fire, the continental crowds pouring from train after
train all had the automatism of a great emergency. Europe on fire
again for the second time in a generation. On principle, Ren approved
of any exodus, at such a moment. But he would have liked to see the
entire coast of France humming with people in flight, thousands
putting out to sea in rowing-boats, and this port packed with vessels
flying panic flags, and all their sirens shrieking. This was too
detached a young Swiss fugitive.

There were no women doing what the occasion demanded, no tearing of
the hair, as the Muse of History ordains. In disgust he pushed his way
through this inexpressive crowd, but one woman of the old historic
kind scratched him and brought blood.

Hester was lying down in their stateroom. The plea was a headache, but
he knew that she was frightened at going away from family and friends,
upon a journey which Ren had never pretended could have a happy
ending, nor that her absence could be anything but long. As he entered
she was crying hysterically.

'Come, my darling. What is baby girl crying about?' He put his hand
upon her heaving back. His voice had been so unusually kind that
Hester clutched his hand gratefully. 'I am sorry,' she choked, 'just
baby feelings as you say.'

'Baby feelings, I know them, I had an awful baby feeling myself just
now.'

Hester gave a big hoarse sob. 'Mummie!' she gurgled. 'It isn't all
mummie, it's everything and everybody. I am going away in this boat
from everything I have ever known and from all those I have ever cared
for. No wonder that one gets baby feelings,' she sobbed. 'I am sorry,
darling, I know what you're thinking, but I just can't help it. All
this is too much for me.'

Ren was much affected. The realization of what this would be for poor
Hester struck him now for the first time. He always forgot that Hester
was a human being, because she was so terribly much the Woman. And
then her world must appear to him such a petty world, that losing it
could hardly mean very much. Indeed, it is rather what the grown-up
traditionally thinks about the child; it cries its eyes out and it is
impossible for the mature to understand that its heart is breaking, if
for no other reason because it breaks so many thousands of times.

But Ren looked grave and was really sorry, as much as it was possible
for him to be. It was the beginning of a new way of thinking about
Hester, although, at that time, it did not continue for very long.

As he got down on the bed beside her, he muttered, 'Poor old Ess!'
tenderly for him, and Hester pushed aside her grief and turned towards
him her big--her too big--eyes, clouded with tears. But then, alas,
the usual thing occurred: alas, because grief is a more serious thing
than pleasure, and it had been too unceremoniously pushed aside. The
effect of that, too, upon Ren was devastating, mocking, as it did,
his momentary glimpse of a human reality.

However, not long afterwards, thoroughly purged of her mother, and all
the endearing scenes of the life she was leaving, Hester's mind turned
to the function that awaited them in an hour or so. She passed nimbly
over Ren and began opening up their cabin luggage, and picking out
what she would require. She was watched morosely by Ren, who lay, a
little somnolent upon the bed. She darted hither and thither, as if
pretending, as it seemed to him, to find something: and assuming a
series of display poses, as though she had been modelling for
_Esquire's_ most risqu draughtsman. He wondered if she worked out
these poses when he was not there. What a way of spending one's life.
She was the most frightful reflection of himself, the image of his
lubricity. Worse than pinning up _Esquire_ in his room, he maintained
a live _Esquire_ colour-block--he had always been teasing himself
after this fashion. Oh well, what more, what better, had he to do now,
except that! Hester's obscene person must henceforth be his Muse, in
succession to History. He was going to Canada in order to fornicate
with Hester. What else!

When these reflections grew unendurable, and an outburst against
Hester threatened, he got slowly up and dressed. He went out, saying
that he must fix with the purser about their table for dinner. Going
up in the lift to the main promenade, he found that they were out at
sea. A powerful wind slapped him in the face, the ocean's reaction at
the appearance of the flushed amorist. The ocean had nothing to offer
him like the scented femininity in his stateroom down below. But what
had the ocean got if it set itself up against Venusberg? He thought of
all its wonders which had captivated men. Its trump card, perhaps, was
that delicious solitude, of which the poet speaks. And, what in marine
terms, he wondered, would be the equivalent of 'a green thought in a
green shade'? That would resolve itself, it seemed, into a battle
between blue and green. Ah, the ocean could produce something far more
secret than a garden.

He walked quickly sternwards until he came to a spot where he was quite
alone. He looked down at the romantic water. A beautiful mercurial
substance seemed to be moving in one direction, they towards the other
horizon. Moon and ocean were overwhelming and commonplace. Is it worth
while to go on looking at this changing but monotonous element?

With business-like grimness the railway porter had said, 'They may be
here at any moment.' This had been at Waterloo. But there had been no
announcement that war had been declared; and this was the _Empress of
Labrador_, and no one allowed the doings of landsmen to intrude upon
the immemorial trinity of man, moon, and ocean.

Above the coast of France search-lights made the clouds look
sinisterly bright, and a storm was advancing from perhaps Boulogne,
announced by the appearance and disappearance of its flashes. The
dully glowing clouds and moving beams made the scene look
enigmatically dramatic, but there could be no battles in progress just
yet. Hitler would dash into France, it was to be presumed. The frantic
fool, the Brummagen Bismarck. But there was not time for the fastest
vehicle to have rushed into France, had there been nothing to stop
them. What Ren was witnessing, he imagined, was the preliminary
lighting up of the clouds over France. Yet it already, from afar,
looked like a battle.

They were five miles, perhaps, out of the French port. All these
people, packed tightly into the _Empress_, were rapidly receding from
the terror. In London, at the last moment, there had been a shuffling
of berths, and Ren and Hester had been offered a stateroom on the
_Athenia_, or on the _Duchess of York_. Since the _Duchess_ was
sailing on a Friday, Ren declined that suggestion of the shipping
office, and declined the _Athenia_ because it was not a Canadian ship.
Had it not been for that, they would have crossed in the _Athenia_.
Afterwards Hester regarded this as a typical action of her Providence.
'Kismet,' she was heard to remark. For otherwise of course, a torpedo
might have burst into the Dining Saloon as they were discussing the
Menu with a Steward--or is it Waiter? At present, later events made
evident, the _Athenia_ was somewhere on its way not far from them.

In the sequel the _Empress_ may have passed over the same
_Unterseeboot_, but the _Empress of Labrador_ was not the name written
upon the torpedo.

Meanwhile, all its lights showing, the grand hotel was on the swim again
across the dark rolling abyss. Apprehension must be unknown. The
multi-ribboned Master up in his little clangorous house aloft, ringing
his bells and tilting his braided cap, never thought of the liquid
element through which the _Empress_ was passing. The Master had long ago
stopped thinking of his ship as seen by the fishes. To ring a thousand
bells, seaworthy and jauntily naval at the Captain's table, was all his
life. Until the broadcast informing him of war had ordered him out of
the spot-light, his imagination did not reach below the plimsoll line.
Ren was as callous as the Captain; he believed as profoundly as did
that officer in the magic character of the word _war_: though when he
looked down at the dark and heaving mass, he agreed that the word ought
not to be uttered until they were in the New World.

    *    *    *    *    *

They entered the restaurant, _en grand tenu_. Hester's eyes were
surely the cynosure of all other eyes. Ren saw a young woman nudging
her mother. 'Listen, _ma poule_,' he hissed, 'if you don't damp down
those "bedroom Eyes" they will turn us out.' As Hester supposed this
was merely a comic and roundabout way of referring to her ravishing
attractiveness, she squeezed his arm, and turned her exhibitionist
eyes upon him, in a flood of such intimacy that he actually blushed.

They approached the table at which two Americans were sitting, a man
and wife apparently, who smiled and bowed slightly as they sat down.
Ren had in his buttonhole the ribbon of the Legion of Honour--about
which it is always said that not to have it is more honourable than to
have it. But the Americans did not feel that way about it. The man
glanced at the name card at the place next to his, and at once
muttered something to his wife. Hester believed that what he said
referred to the beautiful young woman approaching (herself, in other
words) in that exquisite black crepe and brooch of rubies.

The American spoke first. 'It is a great honour to be sitting at the
same table with you, sir. Professor Ren Harding, I believe.'

Ren bowed a little stiffly. Hester slewed her head around and
socially lit up her eyes for a moment. The American spoke again. 'I
may as well say, sir, that my name is Dr. Lincoln Abbott. I am the
President of the University of Rome, Arkansas. Ours is not a great
College like Chicago or Cornell. But it has beaten both at football!'
He laughed, but Ren knew what this meant.

'What does that cost you?' he asked him with a smile.

'Far more than I should like to say,' Dr. Abbott replied. 'We are
committed to that.'

'A majority of young men are probably better employed at football than
at having knowledge squeezed into their skulls,' Ren politely
observed, though he exhibited no signs of a desire for much talk. The
President however was of a different mind, and after a decent interval
of a few silent spoonfuls of a 'Bisque d'Homard' he started again.
'We, all over America, read your terrifying book _The Secret History
of World War II_ with the greatest interest. It is not often, if I may
say so, that such a book comes out of England.'

Ren smiled with polite appreciation, looking at his plate. But he
said nothing.

'I do not have to ask you, Professor, what you think of World War Two,
which may be with us in a few days!'

'No,'--Ren shook his head--'you do not have to ask me that, Doctor.'

He knew that these academic titles were very dear to Americans, and
that he would be addressed as 'Professor' for the rest of the voyage,
though he had described himself as Mr. Ren Harding for the
Passengers' Register. By this time Hester and the President's wife
were discussing standard female topics. What the Professor thought of
the Doctor may be summarized as follows. First, the Englishman's
outlook was conditioned by an extraordinary Social artifice. All
Englishmen of Ren's age, educated at a public school and at Oxford or
Cambridge, became automatically that mysterious thing a 'gentleman'.
This is an aristocratic invention (though not of course invented by
aristocrats). In its way it is a patent of nobility conferred upon all
men with a professional status. It is a quite illogical honorary rank,
but life in England until the end of the thirties was profoundly
affected by the spell cast by the two words Lady and Gentleman. It
created a mystical and impenetrable frontier (to be on the wrong side
of this was an irretrievable disaster).

The above may appear superfluous: but the social structure it seemed
necessary to describe is already an archaism.

To turn, now, to Dr. Lincoln Abbott. The essential thing about him was
(as registered by Ren's automatic self) that he not only belonged to
another nation, but to another class. Since the Doctor's intellectual
limitations were unmistakable, this table companion was not greatly to
Ren's taste. The latter was anything but an intellectual snob, so one
can pin squarely on him a class-bar. Hester was guilty of such
sensations, too: for 'ladies' had (and have) at least as strong a
_class-bar_ as had 'gentlemen'--though neither may have had (to keep
it in the past tense) any more blue blood than a fountain-pen--less,
for the latter might at least protest that its _ink_ was blue. There
were Americans and Americans; Ren had met quite a few who had
surprised him by not sending into action the class-bar, though he did
not of course put it in this way.

Well there it was, they must consume their food in the company of this
man whose mediocrity was not mystically gilded as would, at that date,
have been the case in England. On the other hand, a compensatory
emotion gradually made itself felt; one which, twelve months before,
Ren could not have experienced. He felt a kind of horrible attraction
for this man, a strange toleration: the shameful cause of this was Dr.
Abbott's immediate recognition of him as a famous author--yes, and
because the middle-west College President visibly enjoyed sitting at
table with a Legion of Honour. This was terrifying evidence of the
extent to which Ren's morale had declined. With inevitable publicity
he had turned his back upon the world and so, _ipso facto_, forgone
its esteem and its honours--and of these he certainly would receive no
more. Yet here he was, at the outset of his retreat into the
wilderness, wearing one of the most desirable Orders the world has to
give, in the restaurant of a transatlantic liner (why?), and
experiencing almost cordiality for somebody visibly susceptible to
that emblem of success. Thus it was that when Hester remarked after
they had left the restaurant, 'Ought we not to get them to change our
table?' Ren shrugged his shoulders and answered that they might go
farther and fare worse.

Dr. Abbott was not slow in communicating to another academic notable (a
luminary appreciably superior to himself) the name and quality of the
bearded gentleman with whom he had been paired off in the restaurant.
Dr. Milton Bleistift, the academic notable in question, was a one
generation American: but his immigrant-parents had named their sons
Milton and Homer, and both were as American as Coca-Cola. Dr. Milton
said he hoped they would be able to persuade Ren to lecture at his
university--for he was a president too. This was said with a flattersome
German deference, which gave a little added depth to the pleasurable
sensations resulting from Dr. Abbott's reactions at finding himself
sharing his table with a Star. Even Hester noticed what a good humour
her husband was in--she failed completely to identify the cause of his
cheerfulness. Nor did she do so when he remarked, in an offhand way,
that it was, after all, a happy thought of Mary's to pay the difference
between the First and the Tourist Class. The next afternoon he came into
their stateroom exclaiming, 'This bloody ship is full of "Doctors". I
have just met another. That makes five.'

Hester made a grimace significant of her feelings about any more
Doctors. 'Yes I know,' he agreed. 'But I have no wish to talk to the
English. You understand, of course, why.'

'Well, while you have been collecting American "Doctors", I have
collected an Irish countess, Lady Malone. She is of course an
alcoholic, and I am not at all sure that she is not a lesbian. I am
going to tea with her this afternoon--she has a most spectacular suite.'

'Goodbye.' Ren scratched her head, which he only did when in an
uncommonly good temper. 'Does Sappho know about me?'

'I am afraid so. She is an intellectual. She claims to have read
_both_ your books.'

'She must be a phoney countess. Watch out she does not pick your
pocket, while making a lesbian assault.' Ren looked at his watch. 'I
must go, Ess. My fifth doctor is awaiting me in the tourist class.'

This youngest of the Doctors was an instructor at Yale. His name was
Oscar Gilman. They sat in the Tourist caf (as it really was) and
their preliminary talk lasted about one hour. The Englishman's
class-bar had no application in the case of Oscar, who, in the first
place, had no American accent. He simply _had not_ an English accent,
which was a de-parochialization, both ways. His subject was English
literature; known to Ren only as an adjunct to History. He felt
provisional respect for this colourless de-parochialized instrument
for studying the tongue they both spoke. The fact that one was
maturely bearded and in his late forties, the other scarcely more than
thirty, was no obstacle to communion, or to such communion as they
might have. As they talked, their thinking proceeded much as
follows.--Oscar liked this bloke with the tawny beard (when thinking
of an Englishman he substituted 'bloke' for 'guy'--showing his
learning in foreign slangs). Elizabethan Englishmen (Chapman) must
have looked like that.--Ren liked Oscar as one likes a pine bath
salt. How many vaguely Scandinavian-looking young men there are in the
United States, with the clean and puritanic appearance the Norse blood
takes with it, and rather colourless, or coldly coloured clothes. This
neutral breed is classless, though they give a sense of being of a
well-brushed _milieu_.--Why, Oscar asked himself, was this bloke
talking to him? Could it be love? Oh dear, that prickly
_moose_-tache--Oscar of course knew everything, like all young
Americans. No doubt he possessed a thousand devices for the
concealment of ignorance. Those cold, level, well-guarded young eyes;
he would bluff his way out of any difficulty. An empty clean look like
a well-washed lavatory, socially very useful, probably recommended him
to his superiors.--Oscar approved the jutting and ironic mouth. His
eyes, he saw, were idly investigatory. Okay, if he likes to pick
around in this trash-bin.--Whether this bright, clean mind was not too
neutral.--I am being high-hatted, but that always happens with a
limey.--What did this tight-lipped young man think about war? Probably
he was one of those fatalistic, uninterested-but-dutiful, young
Norse-looking Yankees, rather fond of doing nothing-in-particular
until a bullet bangs them down, that sort of 'excellent military
material', too brightly uninterested to stop a war coming its way. No
use talking to him about that.--'He don't seem,' thought Oscar, 'to
know why he's sitting here, I think he's making up his mind.'

What _Ren_ showed an interest in discussing was Yale, what Oscar
preferred to talk about was Renaissance in England, the influence of
Machiavelli and Hobbes, and such things. When they got up, the
clinically-clean young neutral moved back with him into the First
Class, where he had business, and they parted with polite warmth.

Ren's temperature had fallen considerably. This first conversation in
limbo, where the same language had been spoken, where (at one point)
the same interests had been invoked, but no contact had been made, was
ominous. America had reached a very different level of consciousness,
but it was completely cut off from life, and a kind of cold smartness
presided at the new elevation. He felt that Oscar was a phantom: and
that he himself was becoming one too. He was approaching a land of
sterilized thinking, and reflections of another life. The reality must
all be on the cigar-store and pool-room level, or the world the
negroes live in. He thought he would read something relaxing. In his
hand-luggage he had brought nothing classifiable as work. Among the
few books he had packed was George Eliot's _Middlemarch_, which he had
been told by Rotter was a good book. He had read few of the English
classics, and thought he would turn to them now, for a little. With
the first volume under his arm, he selected a corner of the ship where
he felt he would probably be undisturbed. Disagreeable sensations
ensued almost from the first page. He began reading about the two
young ladies, of about twenty years old. Now one was an 'ordinary'
girl; one so alarmingly unordinary as to cause her sister to be
frightened of her. Both the young ladies are beautiful, but the
high-minded one slightly more so. A grey-headed, hollow-eyed clergyman
makes his appearance (he comes to dinner with the uncle of the two
girls). A good-looking young squire arrives at the same time. The
painfully priggish young lady is quite rude to the young squire, for
being so normal, but finds the unattractive cadaverous clergyman of
fifty very much to her taste, and he is engaged upon a work of great
learning: how appropriate; she will assist him in this lofty labour.
In a few months they are married. Lest the reader should be depressed
at the thought of what was in store for this poor young lady in the
arms of this elderly clergyman, something is provided by the
considerate author. When the reader is first taken to the Rectory, a
young man is discovered seated in the garden, sketching it in
water-colours. He is a very different kettle of fish from his
cadaverous uncle or cousin, the Rector. The reader knows, something
tells him, that _in the end_ the leading lady will enjoy the embraces
of this personable young man. He heaves a sigh of relief. Just to show
that the young fellow is a sport, when he sits down again to resume
his sketching, he throws his head back (his curls tumbling about as he
does so) and emits a short laugh. It is obvious that this young man
has the same feelings about the Rector's marriage as the reader has.
But after that the reader is taken down to a lower social level. He is
introduced to a stock figure, described as a 'gentleman-farmer', who
is inferior, but full of a disagreeable senile vitality. Prospective
heirs are there, and one of them he gleefully unmasks.

At this point Ren would go no further. This sodden satire, this
lifeless realism, provoked him into saying, 'Why am I reading this
dull nonsense? It is just like Rotter to have recommended a book of
this sort.' He continued to ruminate. 'The historic illusion, the
scenes depicted, and the hand depicting them, could be preserved in
some suitable archive; but should not be handed down as a living
document. It is a part of _history_'--with this he dismissed it.

He went out on to the deck and swinging his arm back hurled the heavy
book out to sea. After that he returned to their stateroom, lay down
and instantly fell asleep.

At dinner Dr. Lincoln Abbott remarked slyly, 'What book was it,
Professor, that I saw you throwing into the sea?'

'That,' Ren told him, 'was a novel called _Middlemarch_.'

'You express your disapproval very forcibly, Professor,' Dr. Abbott
laughed. 'You should try one of our American novelists, Professor. Have
you ever read any books by Steinbeck? No? Well I wonder if the _Grapes
of Wrath_ is in the ship's library. Would you say it was, Mildie?'

He pronounced 'wrath' in so strange a manner that Ren was at a loss
to guess what he meant. Misinterpreting the abstracted look upon the
other's face, Dr. Abbott ground out savagely, _Grapes of Wrarth_!'

Ren, however, yawned. 'No more novels this voyage, Doctor!'

All of which convulsed Dr. Lincoln Abbott with amusement.

Ren gave him a sidelong look, half amusement, half alarm. This
side-long look of Ren's was interpreted by Dr. Abbott as a facetious
rejoinder, the silent equivalent of a side-splitting wisecrack. It
convulsed Dr. Abbott, who was always appreciative of mirthful sallies,
with much physical exertion. But at this point, unfortunately, Ren
was seized with a fit of coughing. This Dr. Abbott interpreted as
bottled-up mirth leading to a coughing fit; and if he had been
boisterous before, his contortions now, his gasps and splutters, were
positively indecent. The noise they were making as a table was
spectacular. This was a matter of great satisfaction to Dr. Lincoln
Abbott. But Ren rose, and, with a muffled remark to his wife, moved
out of the room, still coughing slightly. Hester accompanied him; as
soon as they were outside Ren gasped indignantly. 'It is
preposterous. The fellow is becoming matey. Something must be done
about it. I must see the purser immediately and get him to find us
room somewhere else.'

'I should not do that,' Hester said. 'We must be careful to avoid
jokes, I think. I had better say that I have received a cable to say
that poor Rosa is dying.'

    *    *    *    *    *

The next day the radio announced the Declaration of War. At tea-time
they were having tea in the lounge and the King's speech was
broadcast. Ren took all this as a matter of course; and, indeed, the
passengers in general appeared to be very little affected. This was
natural enough, since most of them were on the ship so as not to be in
Europe when this event occurred. With a frown Hester stared a little
more than usual: whether this was authentic distress, or a desire to
attract attention, it is difficult to say.

If this event had been taken as a matter of course there was another
happening, not very much later, which was received very differently.
The next morning people were seen standing in groups, speaking in
whispers. A large liner had been sunk only a hundred miles away. The
radio had been shut off upon the Declaration of War. And there had
been no official communication. It remained, therefore, a rumour: but
it passed from mouth to mouth, and it seemed for some reason to
possess authority.

It was not long after this that the Captain and two subordinate
officers passed through the first class. He was severely
uncommunicative: but hardly had this occurred, when the ship's
loud-speaker enjoined all passengers to repair to their boat stations
immediately, bringing their lifebelts with them.

Within a quarter of an hour passengers were lined up before their
respective lifeboat stations. They were dismal little companies. Even
the tennis-courts were crowded with hammocks to provide sleeping
accommodation, and the ship was so full to overflowing that it was
quite certain _all_ passengers could not get into the boats.
Passengers eyed one another nervously, speculating as to whether they
could fight their way successfully to safety, or at all events to a
place in a boat. Ren noticed a small, bilious-looking individual
glancing at him angrily, if a little furtively. Obviously he was
regarding this tall, bearded neighbour as an obstacle, if it came to
scrambling into a boat. But most of the waiting passengers just looked
depressed and impatient as they shuffled about in the drizzle. Their
instructor, Ren thought, looked scared as he ordered them how to
conduct themselves in case of an emergency, and explained the proper
way to wear their life-belts. Some passengers, at this stage, affected
a disagreeable jauntiness. There was one, the hysterical note in whose
laughter caused the rest to turn a displeased eye on him. As to
Hester, she was in the dumps again. She had her lifebelt over her coat
and looked grotesquely dismal. Ren wore his lifebelt like a
gentleman, that is to say as if he had been born in it. Looking down
at his despondent wife, he reflected that he would have to administer
some tonic again.

They were ordered to wear their lifebelts, or to carry them,
everywhere. They must sleep in them, and come to meals in them. Ren
grimaced expressively with his mouth at the announcement about meals.
It was not difficult to foresee how excruciatingly funny it would
appear to Dr. Lincoln Abbott to see the Professor eating a grapefruit
in a lifebelt. He felt that that table _must_ be changed, since fancy
dress was the order of the day.

The ship's behaviour had attracted attention immediately after the
Declaration of War. It had begun to tack, or to zig-zag. This was the
time, also, when large pieces of canvas were lashed along all the
promenade decks, screening the interior from the sea, to make it more
sure that enemy submarines could see no lights within. Now, as night
drew on, there was something else that the passengers noticed. It had
grown distinctly colder. By the next morning, it was very cold indeed.
And blowing a gale. They still zig-zagged, but were heading due north.
Were they bound for Greenland, Ren wondered; and, unless they
encountered an iceberg, would they remain in some gap in the icepack
until a naval escort arrived? They had been entirely blacked out.

As they got farther north the ship started to plunge badly in the
stormy seas. Waves were frequently dashed against the canvas screen
and some of the water burst through upon the decks.

Hester was not only the prey to 'baby-thoughts', but became
atrociously sea-sick. Ren, who was a good sailor, replaced the
steward, and nursed her through this violent but harmless reaction to
the wallowing of ships in briny abysses: to the motions of the rut of
a rolling whale, as it were. All the movements of monsters sicken the
parasite. The big ship is the only monster of which we have any
experience.

For three or four days, their radio cut off very rigidly, both for
reception and dispatch of messages, the _Empress_ could scarcely have
rolled more and it seemed as though they were practically stationary,
except for the furious rolling, off Greenland was the general guess.
Thus unreachable, and as silent as the grave, tossed up and down,
continually in some high latitude, but not told where, at least they
might suppose that they were in safety. But it was obvious, also, that
sooner or later they must go back into waters frequented by the
submarine; and there were some of them who wished that the Captain
would decide to do so at once.

During his vigil with Hester, Ren did not fail to criticize the
policy of the Captain. This polar adventure of his was ridiculous. Why
had he not taken them a hundred miles or so to north or to south of
the ship-lane, and trusted to their speed to have left behind any
submarine. There would be some, most likely in ambush near the mouth
of the St. Lawrence; those risks had to be taken.

However, a few days later the Captain appeared to have come to the
same opinion as most of his passengers. He took them back toward
Quebec; quite unexpectedly they found themselves in the Belle Isle
Straits, and unmolested ascended the estuary of the St. Lawrence.

During their stay in northern waters it had been difficult to eat and
almost impossible to drink. Ren had, of course, gone into the
restaurant, where Dr. Lincoln Abbott was generally to be found,
happily somewhat subdued. Ren was undergoing a severe mental strain
during that period, and it would have been a bad thing for Dr. Abbott
had his customary boisterous self indulged in playfulness. Naturally
there were lapses. When the Doctor was flung out of his chair, he
thought this terrifically funny; he picked himself up and came gulping
back to the table with schoolboyish mirth. 'I wish I had my football
equipment with me,' he chuckled. ('Equipment' was not the word he used
but some term descriptive of the armour worn in American football.)
Any other physical contretemps of this sort affected him in the same
way; but on the whole the Doctor was a much more tolerable companion
under these conditions. One afternoon Ren had made his way into the
Tourist Class, and had a little talk with Oscar. He seemed somewhat
self-conscious, and he suspected him of concealing the presence of
sea-sickness, under a more than ever colourless abstraction of the self.

Hester did not recover speedily, nor for some time did she seem to
forget her nightmare of riding a plunging leviathan. She was very
weak, when she first came out on deck in the estuary of the St.
Lawrence; and although the movement of the ship was by this time
normally steady, she tended to cling on to things, and soon returned
to her stateroom, where the stewardess brought her such food as she
could eat. The long journey up this huge waterway was, for some, an
avenue, made agreeable by the proximity, somewhere, of places and
people, so new as to offer a temporary toe-hold to Hope. For others it
was, of course, home. For quite a few it was 'the land of
possibilities'. But to Ren the closer this land closed in as they
advanced, the tighter the knot seemed to be drawn about his neck.

All the incidents of this crossing remained, in his memory, of no more
significance than what is left in the mind after a cross-channel
journey, only multiplied ninefold. The Declaration of War was a
fainter impression than the first volume of _Middlemarch_ flying
through the air: but neither stood out in any way. For Ren, the
period since the _Empress of Labrador_ had left Cherbourg reduced
itself to one terrifying self-revelation. His delight at being
recognized by the preposterous little President of Rome was so awful a
self-degradation, and only less his gratification at the respectful
eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses of Dr. Bleistift. That this should
have had the effect of an earthquake in his emotional centres was--the
moment the emotion had evaporated--an occurrence which staggered him.
He stared at it twenty-four hours later as if he had seen a ghost. Who
was this man, with the Legion of Honour in his dinner-jacket, sitting
at a table with a common little American, reverently gazing at the
ribbon? Who was this man warming himself at such a fire as this? Could
it be the Ren Harding he had known all his life? Was this foolish
creature indeed _himself_, converted, by some witchcraft, into the
gentleman he was gazing at across an interval of only twenty-four
hours? The state of nervous dereliction into which he had passed with
such rapidity, after they had taken their place among the herds making
the crossing on this great liner, was to him incomprehensible.
Especially during the days while he was attending to Hester, he had
this picture incessantly before him--of a degraded self, not known to
him before, by some subconscious convulsion thrown up into time, and
sitting there for all eternity at that restaurant table, with its
ridiculous red boutonnire. He brooded for hours together over this
obscene image of his past self. It had a terrifying fascination for
him: at one time he lay back in his chair and howled with derisive
laughter at it. Hester, startled at this, called out, 'What on earth
are you laughing at, Ren?' He answered, 'Oh, just at a funny picture
which suddenly came into my mind. You know how funny pictures have a
way of popping up. This was a beastly funny one.'

These days of dark brooding in the rocking stateroom affected him so
deeply that he felt at times almost half-witted. He found himself
offering Hester smelling-salts when she had asked for a hot-water
bottle: and was surprised to hear himself addressing the Stewardess as
Helen.

This indelible impression was of so fiercely salutary a kind, here at
the outset, that it even modified his attitude, and for good,
regarding his way of thinking about himself (or 'what was left of
himself', as he put it).

At Quebec he stepped ashore a quite different man from that beribboned
Professor who had encountered Doctors Abbott and Bleistift a week
before--that figure which he regarded as a terrifying apparition,
which might at any moment once more usurp his place.

He had learned his lesson, the lesson of final and absolute exile,
quickly. He began immediately to forge for himself a more disciplined
personality. If he had to die, and that was no doubt what it meant, at
least he must do so in a manner that was not base and childish. He
must not die with the Legion of Honour in his button-hole.

Mary's insistence upon elevating them from the Tourist Class to the
First, which had evoked gratitude at the time of his degradation, now
was very differently viewed. That was altogether the wrong way of
meeting his fate.--It should not be in evening-dress with one of the
world's honours reserved for the second-rate flaunted in his
button-hole. Quite another costume was the only appropriate one. No,
he should not have been a First-Class passenger--the distinguished
Professor Harding incognito--that was a quite false idea. There was no
honest way in which you could make sufficient money to travel First
Class. His First-Class passenger act had been Mary's big mistake,
whose mind was a First-Class mind. Either the life he was now to enter
was an empty interlude, an apprenticeship to death: or it was a
breathing-space, a period of readjustment, preceding the acceptance of
a much simpler type of existence for Hester and himself. These
alternatives would have to be broken to Hester. All details it would
be time enough to settle when they had reached their destination, some
very moderately priced hotel, which it would now be his task to find.
She would have to be given the clearest explanation. Quite likely she
would leave him, which might be the best solution. But all of that was
detail. The general shape of the future was starkly outlined, for him,
as if by some supernatural hand. It was the way things must fall out,
when anyone refuses to live in the land of compromise. What
immediately ensues must depend upon the circumstances of the man in
question at the time of his decision. If he were a soldier on active
service and if he laid down his rifle and declared his intention to
use it no more, the consequences would be death, banishment or
disgrace. If he were a salaried servant of a great insurance company
and became a conscientious objector (to the financial system
involved), and resigned his post, then the blow would be an economic
one. But there were many other cases, which it is not necessary to
specify, where ostracism accompanies the act of repudiation.

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 Ren. 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,' Ren 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, Ren
perceived he was about to relish this hugely in his characteristic
fashion, as the latest drollery, of that 'caution', his old buddy, the
Chevalier Ren 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 Ren'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 B.O.? 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 Ren
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. Ren 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 Ren was disappointed at finding
so little that was truly French. The next morning, Ren rather stern,
Hester still rather sea-sick, they left in the train for Montreal--but
not to stop in that unusually fine city, but to press on to Momaco.




  _Part Two_

  THE ROOM




CHAPTER XI

Twenty-five Feet by Twelve


The 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--Ren 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 bed-bugs, 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 on to the human body, Ren 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 Ren'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 booklined 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 Ren 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 Ren 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, agelong,
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 had 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. Ren 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 _nant_. 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,
Ren!--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.
Ren 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 Ren, 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 rles 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,' Ren 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!'

Ren laughed. 'Ah, he had never had the misfortune to encounter
them . . .!'

But Ren was wrong. The real backgrounds of this act of despair were
made apparent--with, as Ren put it, 'a lousy navet'--by the
literary editor of the _Momaco Gazette-Herald_. Zweig _had_, it
seemed, encountered these dwellers of the far-north, for he had spent
some time in Momaco, obviously in search of a refuge, of not too
inhospitable a spot to weather the storm in.

But individuals of world renown, the starry few, are only welcome in
such parts as unreal and glittering apparitions, upon a lecture
platform. To 'stick around' is not well received.--In his obituary
notice the literary authority of the _Momaco Gazette-Herald_ recalled,
upon a lachrymose note, how this most distinguished novelist, during
his sojourn in Momaco, _offered me his friendship_. He was sorry now
he had not responded.

Ren burst out laughing as he reached this climax of the obituary.

'Means poor old Zweig tried to get some reviewing to do in their
beastly paper. But that would be too big a name . . . overshadow the
other contributors. So . . .'

'So!'

'But a pretty fellow. He might have left out that bit about how he'd
snubbed him and how kind of regretful and contrite he was . . . kind
of half feeling he'd done the poor chap in. What a rat!'

In such moments as this they changed rles. Hester became sweetly
reasonable.

'My dear Ren,' she mildly protested, 'you take this little bush-tick
too much to task. He was only _advertising_ himself, to his little
circle of bush-bookworms. If a newspaperman can't advertise
himself . . .!'

    *    *    *    *    *

So they conversed, these two inmates of this lethal chamber. Its
depths were dark. Looked into from without--by a contemplative bird
established upon the maple bough about a foot from the middle
window--the Hardings would have seemed (as they moved about their
circumscribed tasks, or rested sluggishly upon the bottom as it were)
provided with an aquatic medium, lit where it grew dark by milky
bulbs. So they must have appeared to the visiting squirrel, applying
his large expressive eye to the pane, to discover if his presence had
been noted by the two odd fish in the dark interior, who fed him
peanuts, when they had the jack. Of the six windows, three, half the
year, resembled very closely the plateglass sides of a tank in an
aquarium. The green twilight that pervaded the lair of the Hardings
was composed of the coloration from the wall of leaves of the summer
maple, abetted by the acrid green veil of the mosquito netting. Green
blinds latticed with use further contributed to this effect of water,
thickening the bloomy cavity.

In the winter a dark pallor, or the blue glare of the snow, replaced the
green. For weeks the windows would be a calloused sheet of ice, in
places a half-inch thick. That was the only way the window ever got a
cleaning. The Hardings had to go over them with a sponge, plunged in hot
water, in order to see at all, and some of the callouses, of the density
of icicles, required more than one kettle of boiling water. Immediately
a new coat of ice would form, but the dirt of a twelvemonth poured down
with the dissolving ice. The smoke of thirty thousand cigarettes, and a
hundred fish, roasts, or 'offal', rolled down upon the window-sills. Of
course the film of factory smoke from the chimneys of Momaco upon the
outside surface of the window never departed.

'This is not real,' Ren insisted one day, as he sat looking towards
the daylight from an inner seat, sniffing the rancid smoke from the
grill. 'It isn't poverty. That is the worst of it.'

'No?'

'I am rich--in a city where people die every day from
under-nourishment. Idle--and rich.'

Hester, her face flushed from the sub-tropical kitchenette, shook her
head. She felt sick from the smoke.

'The pukka-poor would laugh at us,' he told her.

'The rich would laugh at us too . . . they do.'

'Those top-booted blackcoated Jews out of the Ghetto in Cracow, who
have a look in their eyes, you or I shall never have.'

'Not?'

'Their lips are pale with blood that has never been thickened with
anything that would keep in decent gloss the coat of a well-cared-for
dog.--And their lips are etched with the extraordinary bitterness of
their sense of that fact. They have tasted every injustice. They live
ten in a room. _We_ cannot fill this room properly. There are only two
of us.'

'I consider it full,' she answered.

He stared round, as if looking for somebody.

'No. This is a joke,' he said. He got up. 'The fat from our food
collects in the bottom of the oven. If we scraped it out and ate it on
our bread, that would be hard times--though in hard times there would
be no fat in the bottom of the oven.'

'These are hard times,' she told him. 'Different from the poverty of a
rag-picker, but in some ways worse.'

The Hardings were exiles, not from Poland, or France or Germany, but
from Great Britain. They were not romantic political exiles but
economic exiles--exiles by accident, frozen in their tracks, as it
were, by the magic of total war, and the unavoidable restrictions upon
travel that entailed, and the iron laws dividing dollar currency from
sterling currency, and so cutting English nationals in Canada off
economically from their own country.

As an 'involuntary squatter' in the Dominion of Canada Ren described
himself, if he wrote to a friend in England. Locked up in this dollar
country as solidly as if he were in Sing Sing--no farthing reaching
him from England--he and his wife had been marooned. In Tahiti, a
Swedish best-seller, the papers had reported, was an even worse case.
He had no money at all and lived by what he could beg or catch in the
sea. In Massachusetts, an American friend had written them, 'an
English millionaire' was marooned. He scarcely had enough money for a
pack of cigarettes. So this ex-professor was one of quite a lot.

But as an 'involuntary squatter' Ren had chosen to squat far too near
to the University of Momaco. There are hard and fast rules about
squatting in new countries, of which he had not been aware. It is not
a good thing if you are a potential professor to squat too near to the
institution where actual professors function. That is regarded as a
little threatening. That is not well received.

So for the Hardings exile was complicated by other matters, which was
what made it so peculiarly bad. Their isolation was now complete.
People in Momaco were even tired of gossiping about them. They had at
last really forgotten Professor Harding was there. But Ren had not
forgotten _them_. As he sat crouched in his corner of the bay window,
behind his palisade, he would sometimes take up a notebook, marked
Momaco, and make a little note for future use.

'I remembered something just now, Hester,' he might remark to his
invisible wife.

'What was it, darling?' For she knew by the tone of his voice that it
was something she would be glad to hear.

'I thought, "Oh, God. Oh, Montreal."'

'Yes?'

'What exclamation could Butler have found to apostrophize Momaco!'

Hester gave vent to a cat-like rumble of feline anger. She had long
ago given up trying to find words for what she felt about Momaco.

    *    *    *    *    *

This prison had been theirs for more than three full years. When Ren
read reports in the newspapers about Daladier, Blum and the other
French politicians in their place of confinement in France (Daladier
described as tirelessly reading all the papers he could get and never
speaking, Blum writing, Guy La Chambre complaining all day about the
food, or so their Vichy captors had it) he decided that the
all-important difference that he, Ren, _could_, if he possessed the
necessary money, take a ticket to Chicago or for that matter to Mexico
City, did certainly count for a lot. It was a big advantage. But he
had not even got the money to buy a ticket for a spot thirty miles up
the line and spend the day at a lake. He could get the money to just
buy enough good food and a car-fare to go downtown once a week. The
city limits were his limits and Hester's.

For a period of four months Hester had not gone out at all because she
had no shoes to wear. All the shopping had to be done by him; and when
the meat famine had come in Momaco, he had to go as far as the
downtown market. This took up half the day, while she sat at home, at
the mercy of her miserable fancies, counting the hours of this
senseless captivity.

At last Hester could buy a pair of shoes. A New York friend had
unexpectedly sent a present of thirty dollars. She cried a little. It
was like a cripple recovering the use of her legs!

Through always conversing only with each other, their voices sounded
strange to them when they were visited once in a way. Their 'company'
voices were like the voices of two strangers. So if they had a couple
of visitors--as once had occurred--it was like having four people _as
well as_ themselves in the Room. It was quite a party.

And the Room: that became something else. For anyone from the outside
to come into that, was like someone walking into one's mind--if one's
mind had been a room and could be entered through a door and sat down
in. Ren found he disliked their Room being entered by other people.
The less people had come into it, until practically nobody came--the
more they suffered in it boxed up there in interminable lonely
idleness--the more he felt that if he must see people he preferred to
see them upon neutral ground. That they should see where he and his
wife had been so unspeakably miserable he looked upon as an affront.
If he had lost his reason he would probably have burnt down the hotel,
so that no one should ever come in and boast, 'This is where we shut
up that dumbbell Ren Harding.'

If this was a prison, and it was, the three bay windows twelve feet
above the soil-level had a better outlook than most jails. It could
not be an authentic prison, anyway, because of a coil of heavy rope
hung at the side of one window--a precaution decreed by the city fire
headquarters. No prison has a coil of rope invitingly attached by one
of its ends to the wall at the side of a window. That would be an odd
kind of prison--as this one was.

Momaco, the city in which the Hotel Blundell was situated, was one of
the greatest Canadian cities. It was a big, predominant anglo-saxon
city, though the french-canadian population, if anything, exceeded the
english-canadian, the two together around half a million souls. It
swelled and shrank like a river: it swelled in boom years, when the
mines of nickel and gold were booming. It shrank if the mine interests
weakened. But it was always a big place: it had got so big it couldn't
shrink as much as the economic fluctuations decreed. Now the war was
swelling it to bursting: it was swollen like a great tick with the
young blood of farming areas, as the war factories mushroomed up. The
experts predicted a catastrophic deflation, when Canada passed back
out of total war into total peace. But Momaco could never become a
ghost city, like Cobalt or Kirkland Lake, unless the Province became a
ghost. This bush metropolis had the appearance of an English midland
city, which had gone in for a few skyscrapers. Its business quarter,
in spite of a dozen of these monsters, was mean. It even succeeded
very successfully in concealing them; as if having committed itself to
a skyscraper, it resented its size.

Momaco was so ugly, and so devoid of all character as of any trace of
charm, that it was disagreeable to walk about in. It was as if the
elegance and charm of Montreal had been attributed to the seductions
of the Fiend by the puritan founders of Momaco: as if they had said to
themselves that at least in Momaco the god-fearing citizen, going
about his lawful occasions, should do so without the danger of being
seduced by way of his senses.

Had this city not been, with so rare a consistency, ugly and dull, the
Hardings might have been less cooped up. Being friendless, there was
no temptation to leave their neighbourhood, and be depressed by the
squalid monotony. Accordingly the rows of backyards, twelve feet
beneath their windows, constituted their unchanging horizon. The walls
of the penitentiary were the houses enclosing the backyards. Their
room was cell 27A. But they were blessed with an amusing and
loquacious warder, in the person of the maid.

How much land does a man require? The landowner Count Tolstoi asked
that. It is one of the massive fundamental questions. His answer was
six feet by two, the space demanded by a man's body when he is
dead.--Alive twenty-five feet by twelve is all right, with the dusty
trough of half a dozen backyards thrown in, and a dusty company of
maples--in which pursuing their beautiful lives robins and jays,
starlings and doves abound: not to mention the eternal passerine
chorus, or the small black Canadian squirrel who vaults on to the
windowsill.

The Hardings even had two favourite pigeons, who always came together.
They named them Brown and Philips, after the two well-known picture
dealers of Leicester Square.--But Brown and Philips vanished, in spite
of the great reliance these two birds had come to place on the
Hardings' bounty. And their promenade--or sports-ground where they
played bread-polo--on the flat roof of the kitchen quarters, tacked
on to the next house, lost much of its glamour.

There was one occasion when an escaped budgerigar turned up to the
amazement of all the birds present at the time upon Brown and Philips'
sports-ground. 'Poor beast,' muttered Ren. 'Look at it. . . . It has
no pride--it's a lovebird, it wants love.' A group of sparrows was
repulsing its frantic advances. So gaudy a novelty in the way of a
bird was not, it was plain, to their taste. 'That's not love,' Hester
advised him. 'It's his big heart, only. . . . How matey he is!' she
exclaimed, as he knocked one of the sparrows off a ledge, and engaged
the next in what Ren decided was in fact only energetic conversation.
'He is a darling!' Hester insisted. 'He does look so funny among all
those sparrows, the wonderful little lost ball of fire!' But a captor
came up a ladder, tiptoed across the roof and caught him in his hand.
'Back to the cage, buddy!' said Ren. 'To die in captivity.' At that
moment Philips alighted heavily upon the neighbouring roof, decorously
arranging his lavender wings, and Brown dropped beside him, with an
eye cocked towards the intruder carrying off the escaped prisoner.

    *    *    *    *    *

The Hardings' Room was not by itself. It was one of a family of over
one hundred apartments, as they were one of a family of people called
'guests', comprising one of the six apartment-hotels of Momaco. The
bathroom, lavatory, and kitchenette made of it a complete
living-quarters. You need never move out of it, if you did not want
to, or did not have to go to work. By telephone---the instrument was
on your writing table--you could order all your food from the
groceteria, the dirty backyard of which you could see from the bay
window. During the meat famine it was even possible to observe the
carcasses of beef or lamb being carried in at the side of the door,
rush to the telephone and secure a small hunk before they sold out.

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 per cent 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, Ren 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 week-end 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 sing-song voices assure
us that war is a holy thing. It is a day of verbal bloodletting, of
exhortations to homicide and quivering organpipes. It is at
once--cooped up in an 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. war-time, 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 Ren, 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_.

Ren sighed. He looked over at the handle of his door. There was the
handle--that delicious handle, signifying _freedom_. He sighed again.
For _ 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 phantasy 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 soufflish 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's 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. Ren 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 heatwave, 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.

The Indian must have been a gentleman, to have a beautiful moderate
summer of his own in November--in protest perhaps at the indecent
explosion of silly heat seven months earlier. This sort of Yahoo
Summer--in contrast to the Indian Summer--has no rationale. For why
should it occur in a country so typically northern as is 'My Lady of
the Snows'?

So in the hotel Room the seasons revolve and have a sad repercussion.
They deepen the solitude, like the ticking of a great ominous clock.
They are of the nature of a clock, as much as is a sundial.

The face of each new section brought a new despair to the two people
in the Room. If the leaves appeared on the trees again it was not a
matter for rejoicing--it spelt another section of one's life wasted in
corrosive idleness. If the leaves turned russet and yellow and fell
off the trees, that was another disagreeable pang. It meant more
months had been consumed, with nothing to show for it; months of
so-called life in which nothing had been done except wait for the
mail, which always brought discouraging news, or listen to the radio,
which droned on in its senseless ritual, or write something which
might never see the light.

So the seasons were a curse. They were less anonymous than the days of
the week--for Monday did not snow, or Thursday make itself known by
its great heats, or Friday announce itself by shedding its leaves.
Really, if it were not for Sunday, one could more or less feel one was
always living on the same day. The seasons kept reminding you of the
stupid plodding feet of Time.




CHAPTER XII

The Hotel and what Contains the Hotel


Ren, as they settled down, willy-nilly, in this shell, began soon to
develop a consciousness of solidarity with the environment. The
_Hotel_ in which they lived was surrounded by the _District_, which
was surrounded by the rest of the _City_, which was surrounded by the
_Province_, which was surrounded by the _Nation_, which was a part of
the _Continent_. The North American continent, like the Chinese toy of
box within box within box. And these boxes were all of a piece, all
cut out of the same stuff. They were part of the same organism, this
new North American organism. Their cells would have the same response
to a given stimulus. And of these diminishing compartments the ROOM
was the ultimate one, which they inhabited. It was an American ROOM.

Now since the reactions of all these parts of a great whole were
similar, the history and fate of one could be taken to be typical, in
one degree or another, of all the rest. The Beverage Room in the flank
of the building, full of sudden violence and maudlin song (the head
bar-boy taking his rake-off out of the cash-box): the Indian--drunk as
all Indians had been ever since the Whites had landed--dwelling amid the
sentimental screams of his blonde Teutonic squaw: the dazed and crippled
mistress of all this, doped in her room, staring at a disorderly mass of
business papers. Mr. Ellis across the passage from Mr. Martin, an old
especially privileged guest, dozing upon his sofa, the radio murmuring
at him, was apt to be incontinent when sober, and even sometimes when
drunk, which was his customary condition; the janitor exhibiting his
stolen medals to his french-canadian harem, his eyes popping out of his
head in a bird-like ecstasy of nonsense, like a creature out of a Lear's
Nonsense Rhyme, or a companion of Alice; all this was a microcosm of
what was without--one of the Ward, the City, the Province, the Nation,
the Continent. It was of course crazy--or more accurately it was
crazed. It was a highly unstable box, within an equally unstable larger
box, which in its turn nestled within a still larger box, of great
social instability, profoundly illogical. The degeneration of the Maison
Plant, the Hotel Blundell, was but a microcosmic degeneration repeated
upon a larger and larger scale, until you reached the enormous
instability of the dissolving System, controlling the various States.
All this one day, at a touch you would think, no more, would come
rushing down in universal collapse.--Indeed, that was what the War
meant. It was a collapse, a huge cellular degeneration of society. It
was crazy as this house was crazy.

The coarse Nirvana of the ugly bottle, or of the powder or pellet of
narcotic, blinded the participants. As the State, the City, the
Household waded in a morass of Debt and Mortgage, the Room was charged
with despair and decay.

As the ocean liner is a microcosm, so is the hotel. The hotel contains
everything belonging to human society. The hotel in a sense is the
city. The hotel is the State. The hotel is the world.

Now this particular hotel, appropriately seeing the continent upon
which it was situated, was a matriarchy. At the helm of state was a
woman, Mrs. Plant, a queen-bee throned crazily over this hive--a
great, broken, lolloping, half-blind queen, and so the hive was a bit
cock-eyed, as you might expect. It was in no way more cock-eyed than
the city, however. I doubt if it was any more ramshackle than any
State. It was madly ill-run. But are not all States ill-run? Are not
most cities glaringly mismanaged? Of course. Human society is so
fearfully and wickedly mismanaged that there is no wonder that if we
pause--as we are doing here--to examine any part of it, that part is
seen to be idiotically mismanaged too. On a small scale, however, we
can detect the errors more easily. The State is after all 'the State'.
It makes the laws, it has power of life and death. It is not
necessarily more intelligent for that reason. Because a thing is big
it is not necessarily more intelligent. Indeed the contrary is usually
the case: the giant is usually less smart than the dwarf. And most
governments, or 'states' conform to that rule, of the bigger the
stupider. For honestly you must grant me this, that no individual
could be guilty of the follies that most bodies thousands strong,
which we call 'governments', are guilty of. You will object that what
the governments have to handle are far more complex matters than what
a man would have to cope with. But 'complexity' is no excuse really
for stupidity. Most of the things statesmen have to deal with are
fundamentally as simple as the running of an hotel.--The fact remains,
however much one may argue, that only one man in a hundred thousand
turns out to be a murderer--and he ends his life on a gallows, or the
'hot squat'. Whereas there is no civilized nation that finds itself a
proper nation until it has taken human life, to the tune of a million
or so. If you murder _enough_ people it's all right. There is that.

So the hotel in question was naturally ill-run. How could it be
otherwise--seeing that it was typically of Momaco--which was typically
of the earth: and of the universe. Somebody argued that it was not so
badly run as all that: that the proprietress--or the 'Leading Lady',
as she was described by one of her female assistants--was a genial old
cripple.

Certainly, when Mrs. Plant disappeared for a few days to have her face
lifted, immediately it dissolved into a greater chaos than
before.--But badly stuck together as undeniably it was, the erratic
clockwork of this Hotel never actually came to a full stop.

In the little world of _the Room_ there was a guiding principle. The
Room was not a matriarchy. But passing out of the Room--number
27A--into the Hotel, as we are now doing, we go down a passage, all
the rooms of which are Something-A. It must be that farther down the
passage when they came to 13 and began resorting to A's, they just
went on A-ing and at 17 or 18 were still engaged--hiding the unlucky
number. This is not a reasonable explanation, I know. But what
reasonable explanation could there be for putting A after every number?

Inside the front door of the Hotel was a large reception desk, but it
was generally empty. You looked in vain for executive personalities.
You filled in the forms required by the law for the newly arrived
guest, and then went on a hunt for someone qualified to receive them,
and to allot you an apartment. This large reception desk had been
introduced into what the architect had obviously intended to represent
the lounge of a vast private mansion. There were comfortable but faded
settees, tables with periodicals at least six months old and three
nude statues, about half life size, which had once been white, and
which still gleamed dully in the Edwardian gloom. From a stained-glass
window at the other extremity of this spacious lounge, some dirty blue
and green light was admitted, and in the middle of the ceiling there
was a milky transparency which distributed discreetly the electricity
around this shadowy entrance hall. It must once have seemed
impressively solid.

Not only was the reception desk usually unoccupied, but this lounge,
or whatever it was, was likewise almost always silent and empty. It
was not patronized by the guests. The Hotel executive were customarily
either dyeing their hair in the bathroom, or upstairs telling the
fortunes of the guests in teacups.

This was in the daytime. At night the 'Beverage Room', situated
beneath the stained-glass window, was open. This did not necessarily
involve a more inhabited look in the lounge; but there was more
electric light and considerable noise penetrated the interior of the
Hotel. On a hot night drunken songs would reach the open windows of
the apartments overlooking the Beverage Room; for the Hotel Blundell
was a crowded beer-saloon as well as a family hotel in process of
transformation into a clandestine brothel upstairs.

Receptionists--house-keepers--manageresses there were, working in two
shifts. Miss Toole had been ousted from first place while away on
holiday in Ottawa, her home town, by Vera. Vera was the number one
assistant to the proprietress, Mrs. Plant, when the Hardings arrived.
A spectacled young woman, she was a sluggish, corrupt little figure.
She only would function if you introduced a dime into her clammy fist.
A dollar had the effect of an earthquake.

This young woman got drunk on Aromatic spirits of Ammonia, otherwise
called 'Sal volatile'. The management advised the local drug-store of
her weakness: but in the end they were obliged to dismiss her. She
found employment in another hotel where eventually she died, through
her indulgence in this strange intoxicant. It should be added that
Miss Toole had been very much addicted to drink also, but in her case
it was whisky, and this had appeared to do her no harm.

The Hotel from the outside was a pale stucco affair, straight up and
down, of four stories in addition to the mezzanine. The banqueting
room and various offices which originally comprised the mezzanine had
been converted into apartments, though this floor had not been
promoted to first story. It was only up to the top front of the
mezzanine that the Hotel face was pretentiously ornamented, rather
like the front of a French hotel, quite unlike its grim Edwardian
interior. The three-story annexe ran at right angles at its rear,
stretching along a street at the back for some distance; and led into
the Hotel down two wide corridors.

If the Hotel was a jumble of styles, that was appropriate, for the
population was a jumble too; not so much as it is in the United
States, but still a mixture. The French stucco front, of this Hotel,
the Edwardian anglo-saxon hallway, and the apartments on American
pattern, plus the velvet furnishings which are English, displayed, in
a mild way, the incoherence customary on this new continent where
nothing can ever be one thing. The multiple personality of Canada
depends mainly, it is true, upon the two dominant racial groups, the
English and the French. The major weakness of this small nation lies
in the implacable hostility of those of English speech, for those of
French speech, which is warmly reciprocated. This is in part a
religious cleavage; the protestant English, backward and bigoted, rage
against the papist hierarchy ruling the French. Then there is the fact
that _class_ here is _race_: the Anglo-Saxon suffers from a Hitlerian
superiority feeling, and the 'Peasoups' (as the French are called)
have had to put up with a lot of contempt from the master-race. But
with quintuplets and families of twenty or thirty children the French
will soon outnumber the English.

There exists a strong Scottish coloration in English Canada. But
although many Scots are encountered, the North Irish and English are
certainly more numerous. 'Though still the blood is strong--the heart
is Highland: And we in dreams behold the Hebrides,' lines in a famous
poem, may once have made the blood feel strong in Canada. But the pipers
are dying out, and the marked Scottish coloration no longer means what
it did. It should be added that, although the recognized Indians, still
living as such, are numerically and otherwise a feeble group, the
French-Canadians have a great deal of Indian blood, and in many cases
are purely Indian, french-speaking and usually bearing Scottish names,
like McTavish or Mclntyre. The Russian, Scandinavian, Finnish, Negro,
and other groups are greatly inferior in numbers. Some enterprising
slave-driver went to the Ukraine about forty or fifty years ago, and
imported great numbers of Russians for agricultural peonage. All the
railway stations of Eastern Canada were full for months of hairy men in
sheepskin coats. Then at last they had all settled: and they too--unlike
the Anglo-Saxons--are great ones for breeding.

It would be impossible to understand a ROOM in a Canadian hotel
without obtaining a clearer picture of Canada than that possessed by
the average European. So here is a brief account of the country
surrounding the Hotel in which was the Room inhabited by the Hardings.
On the map Canada is vast; but the habitable part is of a tape-like
shape, exceedingly long and narrow. This elongated country north of
the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, from Quebec to Vancouver, has
its cities, hundreds of miles apart, strung out between the bush and
the United States border; everything is east to west, and hardly ever
north to south.

What 'Canada' means is this strip north of the United States,
signifying north of the river St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, which
continuous waterway divides the two nations in the way the Pyrenees
are the inevitable frontier between Spain and France. Although this
watery barrier is on a grand scale, it is at no point, except Quebec
city itself, very impressive, in the way that the Hudson River is.

As to the historic consolidation of Canada; the founding of French
Canada, and the big, bold landmark of Quebec is all that people know
anything about. Where English Canada begins, above Montreal, it is
technically known as 'Upper Canada'. The first settlers from the
States meant by this expression _up_ the St. Lawrence, as they paddled
as far away from the freezing coast as they could get. For the Tories,
who came north in disgust after the War of Independence, were so
dismayed by their first winter in Halifax (and well they might be, in
those bad cold days before central heating) that they swore that even
Lady Washington was better than _that_, and with loud cries of
distress, fled inland in a body, till they reached Lake Ontario. That
is where the River St. Lawrence ends and the Great Lakes begin.

So much for the southern border of this strip of a country, as far as
the Rockies. The other side of the strip, in Upper Canada, is the
Bush. This is a fairly solid wilderness up to the Muskeg and after
that the Polar Sea. If you start driving north in an automobile from
Toronto, Momaco, or Ottawa, you begin passing through farmlands which
very soon thin out, and then you come to the impassable Bush. Small
lakes are ubiquitous in the nearer Bush and there are summer camps in
these fly-infested lakelands, thirty or forty miles north of Momaco
and Toronto. They can be reached by car.

The Bush-cities, built in the Bush to provide a small urban
environment for those working in the mines, can only be reached by
rail, or by plane. So these communities in the northlands are
extremely isolated and surrounded by Bush. This huge wilderness,
pressing down upon the cultivated strip, in Canada, is so undesirable
a residence that it is difficult to see the Bush being pushed back
very far, unless the world becomes so overpopulated that men will live
in the Polar cold rather than nowhere at all. It is quite
uncomfortable enough for half the year at Momaco and Ottawa, though
central heating helps to banish what otherwise would be hideous
conditions. Nature in British Columbia is somewhat more benevolent;
the western prairies, with their hundred days from frost to frost, are
certainly no warmer, but it is a different topography to Upper Canada;
and the Laurencian mountains provide the Montrealor with beautiful
summer camps. But the people of Momaco feel themselves shut in between
the St. Lawrence and the Bush.

Any criticism of Canadians, meaning English-Canadians, is in general
irrelevant. An anglo-saxon community living under such isolated
conditions, in so uninviting a climate, could hardly be otherwise than
they are. They are just average inhabitants of Belfast, of Leeds and
Bradford, of Glasgow, poured into a smaller community, American in
speech, and, apart from the fact that they acquire an American accent,
they continue to exist exactly as they did in the British cities from
which they came. One must not be deceived by the American accent.
Canada is not identical with the United States: it is quite distinct,
because most of the people in it, except the French, come from these
islands. If you criticize them you criticize the average population of
Belfast, of Bradford and Leeds, and of Glasgow. If you deplore the
materialism and the humble cultural level, you are merely criticizing
anglo-saxon civilization.

Canadians have all the good qualities as well as the bad of the
Ulsterman, the Scot, the Englishman: and among them, of course, are
about the same percentage of gifted people as you would find in these
islands.

Momaco is rather nearer to the Bush than is Ottawa. Like Ottawa
itself, it has a large french-canadian population--about one third of
the Momaconians are French. A river traverses Momaco and its main
square is built beside the river. There is a very handsome Catholic
Church dominating this square: and it is a market square also, which
at times gives it a somewhat French aspect. The river is, of course,
apt to be full of logs, travelling down towards the St. Lawrence. The
City is built in a plain and is extraordinarily flat except for a hill
at its north-east corner. The Hotel Blundell was situated where the
English quarter adjoins the French. Balmoral Street, on which the
Hotel Blundell stood, was a long street which began quite well but
ended very badly: it was largely French-canadian at the bad end. The
Blundell was on its earlier and better part.




CHAPTER XIII

Affie and the 'Roaches


The Hotel was a ship whose engines stopped every night about ten. The
ice-boxes in the annexe vibrated no more, as the cool air, smelling of
ammonia, was forced up the zinc pipes into them. It was like a ship
becalmed, this dusty old passenger ship, the engineers knocking off
for the night. About eight o'clock a.m.--the time varied, according to
how drunk the janitor had been the night before--the Hotel shook and
throbbed: the beat and hum of its engines was heard from down below:
the ice-boxes in the annexe shook. The ship was on her way again, the
good ship 'Blundell'.

A half-hour later Ren and Hester quitted the bed, like two flies
dragging themselves out of a treacly plate. One went to the bathroom,
the other to the kitchenette. By nine o'clock they were seated at
breakfast, watched from every bough of the nearest maple by the
patient eyes of their bird-chorus.

'Canadian and British governments announce that they have given
instructions that German prisoners are to be unshackled on Dec. 12th.'
Ren read listlessly the headline in the _Momaco Gazette-Herald_.
Hester's eyes stared as ever, but more painfully now. She stared at a
point between the kitchenette and the bathroom, where she appeared to
discern a ghost lurking in the wall, of which she was not
apprehensive, because it had been there so long. The classic conundrum
as to whether the cow is still there in the field when you have walked
away from it, or whether it vanishes the moment you cease to observe
it, is apposite. For the analysis of Hester's new look, she felt like
the cow in the field which is no longer observed by any human eye
(because, from this angle, Ren did not count). She had been a
violently self-conscious woman--she was a cow in a field excessively
conscious of being observed; and for whom to be observed was
_to be_. But it was so long now since she had been under human
observation--for she did not regard her present environment as
human--that self-consciousness had left her: and the ghost she stared
at in the wall half-way between the kitchenette and the bathroom was
the remote phantom of those people in England for whom, long ago, she
had been the self-conscious object. So she was still a staring woman,
but she now stared at something so remote as to be abstract, and with
far less vitality than formerly.

Emptying his third cup of tea, Ren rose. 'Well!' He spoke with fists
raised to the dirty heaven of the Hotel apartment, as if this bitter
_well_ were an imprecation. His stretch took him forward several
thudding paces, like a man with locomotor. 'I guess I'll make this Room
fit for a hero to live in. . . . Why don't they say that this time? They
don't say anything nice this time like "a war to end war"! Effrontery!'

'Hush!' remarked his wife.

'Yes, I know.' He heaved a sigh that was loaded with stale revolt,
that was like a freshwater tear, that had lost even its salt.

A pair of large tarnished scissors were at his feet: he picked them up
and dropped them into a work-basket that was a miniature oyster-basket
from Boulogne-sur-mer: picked up a breakfast cup with an empty packet of
cigarettes stuck in it, a square-toothed bread-knife and a last night's
beer-pocked tumbler, and carried them to the kitchen. Watched by his
wife, as animals watch each other with sullen reserve in cages, when one
comes to life, Ren returned and collected his overshoes, the ice from
which had wetted the floor, and his damp Bond Street overcoat, and went
with them towards the closet. His wife got up and drifted with the
listlessness of captivity towards the bathroom, against the window-pane
of which the birds were knocking with their beaks.

'Some birds . . .'

'Yes!' he answered emphatically.

'Some birds get to think . . .'

'Undoubtedly,' he said. 'Tell Philips we can't afford to feed so huge
a bird.'

'Poor Philips.'

'Never mind! Shoo the pigeons away. Why allow Philips . . .'

'It isn't Philips,' she said, watching the birds from the bathroom
door. 'It's two sparrows.' The knocking had stopped. 'They have been
looking at me from that bough for the last ten minutes.'

'Tell them we don't like Canadian sparrows.'

'It's no use. They don't know they're Canadian. Besides, they can't
help it.'

Ren, who was sitting at the table filling his pipe, showed
exasperation. He felt she never properly understood. 'Bread!' he
exclaimed. 'Ask them how the hell they think we can get all that
bread! Where from? Ask them. Say we're on relief.'

She looked at him. She had fetched some stale bread from the kitchen.
'We soon shall be, if . . .'

'All right. But don't be blackmailed by a gang of sparrows. They're
too lazy to dig for worms. They prefer to sponge on us.'

'Oh well . . .'

'They think they're romantic because they've got feathers. Say you've
got feathers too!' She put her bread down and began to cry a little,
softly and stupidly.

The knocking on the window began again. With this she had a burst of
crying, and sat down heavily. Ren rushed to the window shouting,

'It's Philips! I can see him.'

He struggled with the window which would not move. He ran back into
the room and fetched the screwdriver they used for that purpose and
prised it open. The birds had flown away and were watching him from
the neighbouring trees and roof gutters. There were not many, it was
too cold. He gave vent to an unfriendly roar in the icy air: then
forced the window down, with as much noise as possible.

His wife was weeping beside the pieces of stale bread. Ren felt
sorry, but he could not forgive his wife for not seeing through these
parasites, just because they had violet wings.

'I don't know where I can get the bread for Philips, upon my word I
don't,' he grumbled. 'I was a nickel out yesterday. Three cents of
that went for Brown and Philips and a gang of common little gutter
finches.--Don't cry.--They know you're an English sucker. These bloody
peasants wouldn't give them a crumb. Let them go to . . .'

He stopped.

'I hear the gas-gun. . . . Not at this time in the morning!'

His wife got up, wiping her eyes.

A big fact in the Hotel Blundell was the Cockroach.--What Hester had
at first taken to be garden insects at last became more numerous. Then
one day Bess came in as usual and asked, in an indifferent voice,
whether the Hardings had seen any cockroaches. No, they answered (for
they were always both there when Bess arrived to do the room). They
had _read_ of ''roaches' in American stories, but they had never
_seen_ a 'roach.

After that, however, they began looking out for the cockroach. And
soon they became convinced that the 'garden insects' were in fact
cockroaches.

These animals began moving in on the Hardings in droves. For, in other
apartments, war was being made on them, and they began crawling in to
the only apartment where they were not interfered with. So the
Hardings complained to Bess, and an insect spray was lent them. This
was no use at all. Apparently all over the Hotel--all over every hotel
and everywhere else, from the Market down town to the Drugstore at the
corner--they were swarming.

The cockroach (with diabetes, one of the national handicaps of the
North American Continent) is about the size of a bed-bug, but
elongated, lighter in colour, and speckled, with a detachable pouch
full of embryos which it throws away when pursued. It exists equally
in the bush and in cities.--There is another kind, which is black,
called the German variety. But the reddish one is what one mainly sees.

About the time the Cockroach began to obsess the Hardings, and all the
Hotel, it also became a burning question throughout Momaco, and even
in Ottawa, the capital city of Canada, it closed government offices.
Fifty girl clerks struck, because these animals were running all over
their typewriters and over their clothes. So the department had to be
shut down and fumigated.

In the Beverage Room downstairs, they were crawling up people's legs
and getting in the beer. Customers were leaving to go to other
Beverage Rooms. Mrs. Plant was extremely sensitive about anything that
happened to her Beverage Room trade. She took steps accordingly.

A man arrived to demonstrate the use of the gas-gun. The Hardings were
the people with the greatest collection of Cockroaches, so it was to
the Hardings' apartment that he was brought, but he merely came to
talk, not to deliver an attack upon the 'roaches. He told them how he
had been all over the city, rescuing people from this pest. The City
Hall was full of them. Only yesterday he had been asked to go to a
Jewish workers' establishment, where the floor was so thick with them
that you could not walk without treading on them; and when a girl was
going to put a needle into a piece of cloth, she would put it through
a cockroach first. The girls were screaming and weeping.

Then he produced the gas-gun. Since that time this instrument had been
in use in the Hotel day and night. But Mrs. McAffie had especially
interested herself in the destruction of these pests: and it was she
who almost exclusively handled the gas-gun.

It was about ten minutes before Affie made her appearance. Now, as a
personality, or visually at least, Affie was in two parts. There was
the normal Affie that went about the house discharging her duties as
manageress; and there was the hooded, rather sinister and witch-like
figure who appeared, gas-gun in hand, and, after knocking at the door,
this was the figure which entered the room, enquiring if they wished
her to go into action, or whether she should come later on.

They had always up till now postponed a showdown with the 'roaches.
They looked at one another, and they did not have to speak to reach
agreement: both thought that a showdown with the 'roaches was overdue.
Ren beckoned Affie in. They both of them proceeded to remove, or to
place under cover, things like cooking utensils, crockery, toilet
articles and the rest. Some were brought into the room, and others
locked in cupboards. Then Affie entered the kitchen, and turned the
gas-gun on the ceiling. It filled the whole apartment with its acrid
fumes, and within a few minutes hundreds of cockroaches were pouring
from the ceiling upon Affie's head and shoulders. This continued for
twenty minutes or half an hour, as long in fact as cockroaches
continued to appear from crevices and hideouts all over the kitchen
and bathroom, and succumb to the fumes. The floor was carpeted with
the bodies of these insects. Many of them fell on the face of the
gunner, and her cheeks were also streaming with the poisonous liquid.
She appeared to be devoured by an insane itch for destruction; it was
personal, not at all a matter of duty. She did not spare herself, but
seemed rather to enjoy the tumbling bodies of the vermin sticking to
her face and hands, or garments--her hair being protected by the hood.

Some of the insects escaped from the kitchen or bathroom; and from
time to time she would put down the gas-gun, and hurry out in pursuit,
crushing them with the heel of her shoe. Stooping down, she would
sometimes pick one up, and address it in the following way: 'Ah ha,
you threw off your bag did you. You hoped to save your brood, did you!
Your auntie was too smart for you!' with which she would throw it down
and stamp on it.

Ren soon left the Room, and Hester followed him in a few minutes.
'That woman is possessed,' he remarked, when Hester joined him in the
Beverage Room. 'It cannot be good for her to breathe in all that
stuff. She is the only person in the Hotel who takes on the job, and
if anyone else touches the gun she gets very angry. What do you
suppose is the matter with her?'

When they returned to the Room a half-hour later, the dead 'roaches
were being swept away, and Ren hurried over to a window which he
propped open. The icy air entered the rooms, but even so it took a
long time to expel this stink. Affie vanished, and already she could
be heard in a neighbouring apartment, blasting away at the 'roaches.




CHAPTER XIV

The Patroness of Rotten Janitors


Mrs. McAffie was their favourite figure. They developed an affection
for this flying wraith, with the faintly rouged cheeks, who dashed,
flew and darted everywhere, as though she desired to get rid of every
remaining piece of flesh on her bones. She was tall and still enjoyed,
in the manner of an afterglow, a vanished grace. She was known as
Affie in the Room, where she was a welcome apparition. The hooded
figure with the gas-gun was Affie in a sinister rle which troubled
them a little bit.

Mrs. McAffie arrived in succession to Vera. In addition to being an
addict of Aromatic Spirits of Ammonia, Vera was insolent, lazy,
thievish, sly and bad tempered. She shot off her mouth at Mrs. Plant
one day, and that was when she left. Then Mrs. McAffie was hired and a
spirit came into the place which was of a different texture--more
volatile and sprightly than had been there before. Her age was unknown
and unguessable. She endeared herself to Ren in one of their early
conversations by the sincerity of her horror at the new war. 'They are
taking our boys,' she said in an undertone, as if speaking to herself
and the fact that her eyes were dry was only because anger dried them
up. 'They are taking our boys _again_.'

Affie took no tips. She was the only decent person who ever found her
way, or his way, into the Hotel Blundell. And she paid for it.

When Affie read the tea-cups once, Ren, who liked her, succeeded in
thrusting a dollar bill down between her shrivelled breasts, and she
ran hooting from the room. But when she saw that neither Ren nor his
wife believed in her hypnotic assurances that they should beware of a
dark man, or that they would tread strange ground shortly, she refused
to take another penny. She shot away, pawing the air, when he
approached her with a dollar bill.

Affie had been married to an attorney in the long ago, dead some
twenty years. She had acted as nurse-housekeeper. She had owned a shop
up in the gold-mining country, where it is very cold. She came from a
bush-city herself: but she had exceedingly bad man-trouble: heavy,
incurable, starry-eyed man-trouble. Her old eyes sparkled, her old
bones kindled at the touch of a male, and the male touched them as he
was looking for money. Some personable deceiver had cheated her out of
her nest-egg up in the gold-country. Her shop in Timmins was hers no
longer. She often sat crouched at the telephone, in the zero weather,
brooding. Her dream-man had spat on her old heart. When the glass went
down to zero, the old wound hurt: she rocked herself in the lonely
lounge. Naturally she did go on losing any weight she had, as she
rushed like a witch all over the Hotel--carrying towels or sheets, or
just running for the sake of running after her shadow.

When she slapped the face of the young punch-drunk janitor, she flew up
the stairs, screeching and croaking with glee. The janitor was ten
seconds behind her on the annexe landing. She had vanished with a hoarse
cackle.--The Hardings heard the indignant roar of the alcoholic
pugilist, a few feet from their door: 'Come down here, you bloody old
cow, Missis McAffie, and I'll wring your f---- neck!'--Silence. She had
adroitly evaporated. When Affie and her colleague Miss Toole retired to
the bathroom, and she dyed Miss Toole's hair a most unreal brassy gold,
and Miss Toole did the same for her in a dark brown, Affie, with her
cheeks rouged and lips painted, looked for a while a not uncomely
scarecrow, with the shawl held tight round her shoulders to keep warm,
standing and smiling at the Hardings' door, on which she had tapped,
presenting herself like a child who had dressed herself up in her
grandmother's clothes--she having of course borrowed the bloom from the
cheeks of a granddaughter, and stolen the brown tresses. She stood,
tall, genteel, and at bottom severe, with the smile of a naughty girl
who had been at the dye-bottle with her little pal Molly Toole.

Affie is the nearest approach in Canada to the decayed gentlewoman.
Affie certainly had decayed. And subsequently it was proved that she
had in fact dwelt among the genteel, as a respected attorney's lady,
in Ottawa. She had enjoyed the amenities. As 'well-bred', she beyond
doubt still regarded herself.

Affie was a bad influence in the Hotel. She was so cheerfully and
openly on the side of copulation--in spite of her respectable and even
outwardly solemn appearance--no matter who were to be the performers:
she cried in her heart with King Lear 'let copulation thrive!'--that
she would rent the rooms preferably to women who could be depended on
to use them for that purpose, and turn away people whom she felt had
leanings to virtue, though otherwise more desirable tenants. The Hotel
as a consequence, in the 'transients' section, was in a state of
chronic disorder.

This suited Mrs. Plant, however, since people would pay several
dollars more to use the apartments for acts of discreet prostitution
than for less Babylonish purposes. Thus it was that when two
French-Canadian civilians came in with girls with over-bright eyes,
asking for a room for the four for a week, they were given the room
above the Hardings. This had never happened before; always they had
had peaceable overhead neighbours.

For a week the Hardings slept little. Loud intoxicated talk of four
unbridled mouths, bottles falling, feet scraping, followed by the
heavy rhythmic crunch and thump of beds, a truly French-canadian
crisis producing a furious pounding up and down, succeeded by an
alligator quiet: the night-long periodic flushing of the toilet, and
procession of bare-feet--sleep was impossible. They knew they had to
thank Affie for this, and a coolness ensued.

But this unusual woman was not only the protector of harlots: she was
the patroness likewise of rotten janitors. There was one, young,
baldish, genteel-spoken--a bank clerk, a white-collar out-of-work.
Affie called him 'Sonny-boy': said he looked like a boy she once
knew.--_Was_ she faithful to her memories? That antique casket of her
heart exuded a strong nostalgic perfume. The more well-deserved hatred
he aroused in the Hotel, the more passionately she protected him.

Sonny-boy omitted to stoke the furnace. The guests were stark with
cold in their rooms, while he lay in a stupor induced by mixing
brandy, port wine and beer. When sober he could not fix a fused light
or put a washer on a faucet, let alone restart an element that had
ceased to give off heat. But he stopped a long while in the Hotel. 'I
have a privileged position,' he announced to one of the maids, who
tried to move him off the bed in a guest's room where he had gone for
a nap. Affie shielded Sonny-boy truly and faithfully, until Mrs. Plant
sent for the police and had him ejected, screaming imprecations over
the shoulders of the policeman.

These are two examples of the way in which Affie was bad. She did no
good to the Hotel, but then Mrs. Plant didn't either. The latter lady
liked young and inefficient janitors too, up to a point; showed
remarkable distaste for industrious or sober ones. She only liked old
janitors if they drank. Then she would just as soon have them as young
ones.

The Hotel was a matriarchate, as is America, run by what Affie called
the 'First Lady'--or sometimes the 'Leading Lady'--Mrs. Plant, its
owner, and her attendant ladies, including a couple of Scottish maids,
with impressive Glasgow accents.

There was a guest, as has already been mentioned, named Mr. Martin,
who had been there some time, and had, apparently, a pipe-line to the
proprietress. Whether this little Englishman had, in the past, stood
(however unbelievable) in a tender relationship with the big jamaican
proprietress, it is impossible to say, but there he was, in an
apartment not far from hers, as one who could be appealed to in her
absence. He did not much enjoy all of these privileges for, on one
occasion, he observed, in confidence to Ren, 'I _can_ fix a washer or
a fuse _of course_, but if I did they'd never let me alone.'

This group of women, all except Katie, the old Scottish maid, were not
repelled by the criminal classes. They accepted them on equal terms
with other guests, and if the police descended on them at night, that
was the business of the police and the criminals, nobody else's. So
there were criminals. Apart from the fearful noise the police made at
night, yelling 'Open up--the police!' as they hammered on the
malefactors' door, the Hardings found the large family of criminals,
one enceinte, the quietest people in the house. They never fought,
they never drank too much.

Affie thought that, as it takes all sorts to make a world, and as a
hotel was a microcosm, one should have one's criminal element. But
since her main interests lay in the direction of the sexual impulses,
there were always far more followers of Aphrodite, than there ever
were picklocks and motor-car thieves in the Blundell.

The Hotel Blundell was just an ordinary Canadian Hotel. It was not a
brothel like the Plaza or Marlborough in the next street, and was less
spectacularly unvirtuous than the first-class hotel on the waterfront:
the King George.

_All_ Canadian hotels had been for a long time drinking-dens. This
could not be otherwise, for the only place a Canadian business man
could drink the whisky all his ancestors drank was in a hotel room.
'Hard liquor' was not sold for consumption in public: but it was sold
at the government shops, called Liquor Control Stores, in bottle. As
the bottles cannot be taken home and drunk there--to this most women
object--it is drunk in hotel-bedrooms. Harry Martin had an old friend
called Mulligan, who was the president of a big concern. He was a very
big man, clothed like a big shot, with the big bullying voice and
glassy eye of a tycoon. He came sailing in every six weeks or so (the
times varied) with a nurse in attendance. He went to bed at once, and
there he drank for a week.

During these periods Mr. Martin and the nurse moved cautiously in and
out of the room, as if they were waiting upon a sick man. He never
left the bed--except to knock the nurse down if she absented herself
for too long. He urinated and defecated in the bed, and the sheets
were removed, rolled up and burnt in the furnace. He also relieved
himself in this way in the bath.

One day the nurse would be seen no more, the bout was at an end, and
the president was back in his office, sober till the next spasm arrived.

This was the only example in this small second-class hotel of how the
big shot lives, but it was typical of what went on in thousands of rooms
and suites all over Canada. It was (and perhaps is) a product of
Methodism, with its edicts against pleasures that are taken for granted
everywhere else, except parts of the United States. The more expensive,
or as it is called 'exclusive', hotel is where the business man keeps
his mistress. At the King George Hotel a Mr. Cox, the vice-president of
a very large corporation--known in the first phase of their stay at
Momaco to the Hardings--lived with a floozy of old standing. They had
been there together for so long that this had become his real home. He
only was at his official home, with the 'Mrs. Cox' of the telephone
book, on Thursday. At first you might be surprised that Mrs. Cox only
invited you to dinner on Thursdays, until you were put wise to the true
situation.--If you got to know Mr. Cox really well, you were asked to
partake of a very much more agreeable dinner at the King George. And it
was a far greater honour to be asked to the King George on Tuesday or
Friday, than to the Cox home on Thursday.

When first in Momaco the Hardings stopped at the King George. The
first hint they had of what lay beneath the methodist surface of
Canadian life, in the dominion--the formidable sabbaths, the wholesale
restrictions on everything that is agreeable or convenient, even
taxicabs--was as they left their room the first morning, and walked
along to the elevator. A door was open leading into a large room: upon
a bulky sideboard were ranged scores of large and small bottles and
decanters, comprising every form of spirit and liqueur known to man.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Harding stopped, licked their lips, and passed on,
laughing.

'Some cellar!' said Ren, using Winston Churchill's favourite and
typically out-of-date Americanism. At that time Ren did not know, any
more than his illustrious leader, that Americans no longer said 'some'
this and 'some' that.

'A cellar in a very exposed position,' Hester remarked.

'Exhibitionism, I presume.' Ren shrugged his shoulders. A couple of
moronic business sub-men passed them, and they saw that they entered
the open door. They eyed Ren and his wife, in their English clothes,
with dull, bold dislike.

What struck the Hardings most about these amazing _moeurs_ was the way
such things were reacted to by all these women, as much as by
everybody else.

That, both Ren and his wife felt, was the proper
manner--irresponsible detachment. Life was for Affie and Madame Plant
a cinema performance. A violent performance. If it had no _kick_ it
would after all be dull. They disapproved of any kind of sobriety or
restraint. That Ren did not beat up his wife, or was not seen drunk
every night, was not in his favour. His irreproachable behaviour as a
guest would be registered against him.

So these were the backgrounds of Affie, to which we shall shortly
return. However, she was mischievous, but not inhuman. What Ren
objected to in the American system--a modified form of which exists in
Canada--was its inhumanity. They had got involved in a violent and
unintelligent dance, in which all reference to the happiness and
interests of the human individual had been abandoned.--In Canada, as
in the States, Prohibition had been imposed upon a docile people. An
absurd religion, the last of Puritanism, was accepted by them: it
drove them out of their homes into hotels to find some natural relief.
This could not happen in France. Even in Russia, with its
revolutionary restrictions, the sale of spirits was not forbidden.




CHAPTER XV

The Marvels of Momaco


The Monday after Affie's gas-gun fury they were numbed by a letter
from home. England had been becoming farther and farther away until it
was, at times, hardly real. Percy Lamport was in another dimension:
and Ren's mother had grown to be little more than a picture of an old
lady in a chair. When they received a letter from Mary, or even from
Helen, it was as though they were on Mars and they knew that the
denizens of earth were attempting to contact them. But they, on their
side, were only able to respond very feebly to these messages across
interstellar space. A difference existed naturally between Hester's
reactions and Ren's: she did attempt to respond, sometimes, with the
same eagerness as was shown by those who wrote to her. At other times
she felt that it was impossible to find anything whatever to say.

The present letter was from Mary, and it went on describing things
that were of importance to people over there, but about which they had
scarcely the energy to think. Why did Mary assume that nothing had
changed? Everything had changed so completely that the scene she wrote
about appeared pallid and meaningless. She and Percy now lived about
half-way between London and Oxford. Janet and Victor were still in
London--had not the money to be anywhere else. But what had uprooted
and changed the life of Ren had upset the life of the Lamports too.
When the exile thought of London, it was of the old London.

Another, and very important, factor in making a receipt of a letter
from 'home' so unpleasant, was that Ren simply could not imagine
himself ever living in England again: for him England became dimmer
and dimmer _for ever_. Letters, from people who had once been so dear
to him, but who seemed to have no understanding of the fact that they
inhabited the past (which was the same thing as a demise), letters of
this kind were not pleasant breakfast-time reading. They darkened the
day. A letter from Ren's mother was worst of all, for there all the
past of his filial affection put up a fight against his relentless
scepticism re the maternal.

So things began badly that morning, and Ren found it difficult to
write an article, which it was urgent and necessary to finish. Having
been plunged from university life in a great European capital, with an
awful suddenness, into life in this barren abstraction of the Room
(worse, of course, than had it been any tolerable occupation, or even
such an occupation as a truck-driver or newspaper reporter) his
personality had suffered profoundly. All freedom depended upon
consciousness: but now, at times, he felt his brain clouding and
blurring. His daily periods of semi-consciousness increased. It was as
_dreaminess_ that he thought of the semi-conscious spells, and indeed
that was often what they were. More and more the 'waking hours' were
rather patches of semi-consciousness than a continuous wakefulness. Or
full awareness. Then one day he would not wake up at all, he told
himself. He would just get out of bed at the usual time, and his life,
on a far more primitive level, that of the functional coma of the
animal world, would go on as the polar bear does, or the ant. So a
great experiment would have come to an end.

The problems of consciousness had often preoccupied Ren: he thought
of it as enlightenment, as a light unaccountably breaking in upon a
darkness, and the mind born with this light modifying the creatures
affected by it. In other words, men. He estimated that we were perhaps
rather more than half-way across that, in geological terms, infinitely
brief era of 'enlightenment'. Men, he felt, were _less_ enlightened
than they had been.--Slowly men awakened from the sleep of nature, or
recovered from the madness of nature, as Ren preferred to say. Man
had begun to look around him, once the dazzling light had been thrown
upon his surroundings; and he saw where he was, though _why_ he was
there he could not imagine. Finally he discovered he was riding an
immense ball--dashing around in a cold, black emptiness--which was
warmed by a much larger, extremely hot ball. All this was a great deal
more than the polar bear or the monkey knew.

The polar bear was mad, he was obsessed with being a polar bear: and
many men were pretty mad also, incapable of looking at themselves from
the outside. No one could imagine why man had abstracted himself and
acquired the sanity of consciousness; why he had gone sane in the
midst of a madhouse of functional character.--And History: with that,
Ren's central tragedy was reached. History, such as is worth
recording, is about the passion of men to stop sane. Most History
so-called is the bloody catalogue of their backslidings. Such was
Ren's unalterable position.

So, locked up in this Room, or as good as, for years on end, he felt
the light not losing its intensity, but getting patchy. He knew he
could not go on indefinitely living in this way without returning to
the functional darkness, it was only a matter of time. As now he sat
with his writing-pad on his knee, assiduously scribbling, and dropping
the product into the wooden tray at his side, his awareness was at a
low ebb; for what he was writing did not interest him (it was
bread-and-butter work of a pretty awful kind). This ant-like work was
interrupted by the entrance of the scottish maid Bessie, or Bess, as
they called her. He laid aside his work, stretched back in his chair,
and said, 'Well, Bess, what's cookin'?'

'Another nit-wit,' she announced, as was her custom: and they knew
that another weak-minded person, in one of the neighbouring
apartments, had outraged her scottish good sense. The small,
malformed, spectacled, glaswegian hotel-slavey squinted up with
humorous toleration at her bearded fellow-countryman--and the
fellow-countryman side of it was important. For Bess never for a
moment forgot that she was a stranger in this country, and her tongue
was turned against all its inhabitants, and especially those in the
Hotel Blundell. When her father and mother first came to Canada they
rented a house in Momaco. For twenty years no one in the street
addressed a word to them: they were all Canadians. Then the people in
the house across the way left, and new people moved into it. To her
mother's amazement the new tenants spoke to her one morning. They were
Scotch. When Bess crossed the Atlantic to join her parents,
experiences analogous to this were her lot likewise, and, outside the
Hotel, she spent all her spare-time with scottish immigrants.

The nit-wits who came to lodge in this Hotel were innumerable: for
every morning Bess had a new nit-wit to announce to the Hardings. But
this was Monday morning; she entered the room with clean sheets and
pillow-cases, and swollen with a sense of accumulated wrongs--as
though on Sunday all the slights of the week had time to mobilize and
solidly invest her in her lonely room, following her into church and
acting as a pressure-group in the rear of her prayers. On Monday
morning she worked off these humours, as she passed from apartment to
apartment. She felt almost light-hearted as she reached the end of the
third-floor apartments of the annexe. The Hardings inhabited the first
apartment to be visited on the second floor.

The nit-wittery would consist of anything, from an enquiry as to
whether Scotland was an island, to the nearest way to the Momaco
hospital for diseases of the throat. A guest only had to open his or
her mouth in Bessie's presence to betray half-wittedness. Then she
also was a disseminator of scandal. Far more diligently than any bee
transports its pollen, Bess collected and distributed information of a
scandalous nature. Ren squeezed her dry of the morning's quota, and
she always left the Hardings' apartment with a sense of being
appreciated, and of having blackened someone's reputation. Both Ren
and Hester understood quite well that they were not immune, and that
'those English nit-wits in no. 27A' formed part of her repertoire; but
they always welcomed her appearance at about ten-thirty in the
morning. Between Affie and Bess no love was lost: the latter took
every opportunity of informing Mrs. Plant of any misdemeanour of
Affie's that came to her notice, and always endeavoured to be the
first to draw Mrs. Plant's attention to scandalous happenings, before
Affie got a chance of doing so.

After the Bess interlude Ren laboured until lunch-time, Hester
washing-up, attending to a rudimentary toilet, feeding the sparrows,
and reading a library-book. After lunch Ren fixed the alarm on the
clock, and they lay down on the settee for some more oblivion. They
were awakened by the clock in time to prepare themselves for an
unusual event. Someone was coming to tea.

The visitor they were expecting was Mr. Herbert Starr; and it was in
the following way that a fraternity which they would never have
expected Momaco to conceal became known to them. It was just after
Easter of the year 1941, and Hester and Ren had taken off their
overshoes for the first time that year, and went out to the market.
They had for long known that Momaco was the never-never land, was the
living-death, the genuine blank-of-blanks out of which no speck of
pleasantness or civilized life could come. They moved disconsolately
down the street side by side without speaking. Ren's lustreless eye,
for the thousandth time, spelled out the words 'BINGO! Eight o'clock
tonight' upon the notice-board in front of the Boer War Veterans'
Club. A Boer War veteran hobbled down the path beside the budding
shrubbery towards the gothic door of the club. This old man had been a
springy young khaki warrior once, with a brand-new bayonet, gone to
fight for gold and diamonds. An 'absent-minded beggar'. Oh, God, oh,
Momaco (and Magersfontein)! The Canadian sun shone with its deceptive
brilliance, for it was not over-warm, as the veteran faded into the
gingerbread gothic.

But everything was not dispirited and listless in Momaco. For suddenly
overtaking him a figure swung past with swaying hips, and a violent
arm sawing the air at his side, with little finger stiffly erect,
having separated itself from the other fingers. A _man_: a fairy-man.

Ren felt a glow, as if a leprechaun had declared its presence when
least expected. Civilization after all existed here: how eccentric to
be so flaunting a fairy in such a region as this--he might have come
swaying and mincing out of the pages of Proust. . . . Proust! Proust
in Upper Canada: what a violent conjunction of images, he thought.
Never the twain shall meet, one would say, of this chilliest, dullest
West and that most civilized and urban East. How would Monsieur
Charlus's lungs be able to breathe the air of Ontario?

Ren was quite cheered up by this. The sting had been taken out of
'Bingo'. As a prisoner whose cell is suddenly invaded by a mouse or
rat will regard this animal with tenderness, as a link with the past,
so he followed, amused and encouraged, the swinging hips, the single
arm that sawed majestically up and down, employed for dainty but
headlong propulsion.

He found that this fairy haunted the Beverage Room of the Hotel
Lafitte. His hunting-ground was not among the cockroaches of Mrs.
Plant's saloon. The other hotel, although french-canadian, had a much
cleaner drinking place, with a better type of soldier.

A little later, perhaps three weeks later than this, he had gone down
to a jewish newstand and shop that sold English and American papers,
the only place in Momaco where such exotics were to be met with. There
he was accosted by Starr.

Starr introduced himself as a mutual friend of a Glasgow intellectual,
who had been given an official job in Ottawa. Starr said he had
intended to write to Ren Harding, and suggest a meeting. Since then
he had learned of his presence in Momaco, but _now_ this most
auspicious encounter meant, he trusted, that Ren would do him the
honour to have lunch with him. He, Starr, would appoint himself the
guide of Professor Harding in Momaco.--Was Momaco not _dull_? Why no.
It was the most wildly exciting place probably in America or anywhere.
But he would reveal to Ren the secrets of Momaco: and make known to
him a number of people, of very extraordinary interest and charm.--Oh
no, dull was _not_ a word that could be applied to Momaco.

Ren's curiosity was mildly aroused, but not enough to prolong this
conversation any longer than necessary. During a period of eighteen
months Mr. Starr had been encountered mainly in bookshops, perhaps a
half-dozen times. Ren had never admitted this anything but attractive
little man behind his social defences. There was a certain event,
coming at long last, which very slightly endeared Mr. Starr to him;
but it was not until this December of the following year that he so
far weakened that he had invited this queer little object to tea.

It was with no delightful anticipation that Hester and Ren dragged
themselves from their siesta a half-hour before the established time,
to act as hosts. As it was, it was a rather hurried marshalling of the
cups and saucers, and arranging of the company-biscuits upon a plate
was only just in place, and Hester's face powdered, when there was a
gentle tap upon the door. Herbert Starr made his entrance, smiling and
sidling, and all but kissed Hester's hand as he bent over it, saying
to Ren as he stood up, 'Mrs. Harding and I have already met--unknown
to her' (with an arch flutter of eyelashes in Hester's direction). 'It
was a few weeks ago in a bookshop--I wonder if you remember, Mrs.
Harding? We both wanted to look at _Salammbo_ at the same time, but I
relinquished it, observing, 'I will wait until you have finished with
Carthage.' Do you remember?'

'Oh yes, I remember that very well,' Hester laughed. 'I thought it was
extremely civil of you. I did not keep you out of Carthage for very
long.'

'You did not--and I thought that very, very civil of _you_.'

Mr. Starr slipped smoothly into the chair indicated by Ren.

'Well, now you are going to lift the veil, aren't you, on Momaco?'

'Yes.' Starr was completely bald, except above the ears, and his ears
seemed to cling back against his head, as the ears of dogs do when
abashed or guilty. He smiled and smiled and nodded.

'It is a strangely interesting place, is it not, Mr. Starr?'

'Wildly--fantastically--interesting!'

'Has it always been interesting?' enquired Hester.

'Always? It is one of those places where you have to have a guide. I
shall be your guide, and I shall make you acquainted with the most
entrancing people. It will be a revelation to you both. I wish I had
met you before, for it must have been very dull for you. I am so
sorry.--But we will start tomorrow.'

'As soon as that?' Ren enquired, smiling. 'I am busy tomorrow.'

'Well, the next day.'

Ren and his wife laughed.

'Count me out,' said Hester. 'I am room-ridden. One says bed-ridden;
why shouldn't one say room-ridden? I am room-ridden.'

'But how terrible!' protested Mr. Starr, with smiling politeness.
'Would not your physician allow you to go abroad, to have dinner with
a woman who is probably the most intelligent person in Momaco?'

'I'm afraid not. His name is Dr. Fell. He has prescribed _this room_
and I have got so used to it, I am afraid I should feel strange
outside it now.'

'But how perfectly terrible.'

'I thought so at first. But it is amazing what one can get used to.'

'Oh dear!' Mr. Starr still smiled, but his smile was full of polite
pain.

'I have my family of squirrels. They are the only people in Momaco who
do not mind my being English.'

'English! But that is absurd. To go no farther, there are the
Daughters of Empire . . .'

Ren laughed.

'Yes, there are the Daughters of Empire!' He turned to Hester. 'I will
take a peek at one of these human marvels of Mr. Starr's.'

'You are laughing at me,' said Mr. Starr. 'But marvels they are.'

At length it was arranged that Ren should meet Mr. Starr at a
restaurant for lunch, to make the acquaintance of one of Mr. Starr's
marvels. She was a Mrs. Glanz. Her husband was a Buffalo German, and
of course she was rich.

All Mr. Starr's friends were women, and all rich. He had once, twenty
years before, been in New York. But a rich man left him there very
suddenly with only a season ticket for a box at the Opera and no
money. Since he had grown bald he had nestled in the lap of wealthy
old women, whom he apparently drenched in a scented torrent of
flattery, poured equally over their faces and their minds. But _he_
was of humble origin: his brother was a workman, he revealed. It was
wonderful he said, how he went about in the most exclusive circles.

'If Mrs. Moir only knew,' he told them. 'But they think I am like
themselves.'

At eleven-thirty, an hour before the luncheon engagement, Starr
telephoned. He said Mrs. Glanz had started.

'How do you mean?' asked Ren.

'She has just left.'

'Left where?'

'Oh, she lives rather a long way off. Four miles.'

'It won't take her an hour to move four miles,' Ren objected.

But Mr. Starr was evasive or at least confused.

'But I believe, I certainly believe, she will be there.'

Ren remained silent.

Mr. Starr burst into a suppressed cough. 'You must really excuse me,
Professor Harding, I get this occasionally. I have been lying down.'

'Not well?'

'I am quite well, thanks,' Mr. Starr said hurriedly, 'but I have these
attacks. I hope you won't mind, but I have asked Charles Brooks to go
to the restaurant and meet the woman, and introduce you.'

'So you will not be there yourself?'

Mr. Starr had a fit of shrill coughing.

Charles Brooks, according to Mr. Starr, was an Englishman, who worked
in a publisher's office and wrote plays himself. Ren had not met him:
so at one o'clock he telephoned the restaurant, asked for Mr. Brooks,
and told him he was prevented from coming to lunch. To make his
excuses to the lady.

'I don't know if I shall recognize her,' Brooks said.

'Why, don't you know her?'

'Never seen her in my life.'

Ren banged down the instrument and told Hester what had happened.
Instead of Mr. Starr, there was a certain Charles Brooks (presumably
gone there at Mr. Starr's request) waiting in the restaurant for a
woman he had never seen, and therefore would be unable to recognize.
In any case, from Mr. Starr's evasive and disjointed remarks, it did
not seem likely that this unknown lady would be at the restaurant. 'I
was right, you see,' he said.

They discussed this further piece of Momacoishness with some disgust.
Ren knew it was his fault. Both he and Hester had scrutinized Mr.
Starr, sceptically and derisively. From such a figure nothing could be
expected but nonsense. He had not the money, anyway, to take people
out to restaurants. Still, it was just more and more of Momaco.

'I have asked Brooks around this evening to have a drink,' Ren told
her. 'He seems a fairly rational person. He _is_ English.'

He found Brooks in the Beverage Room at the appointed time. He was a
stocky, dark and fattish fellow about thirty-six. Ren's _Secret
History of World War II_ he had read, and appeared to know a good deal
about him. He was a not unattractive man, frank and well behaved: with
Ren's permission, he would put him in touch with a wealthy friend of
his--it might serve to relieve the social monotony of Momaco. He then
went on to describe the friend.

Mrs. Stevenson was a married woman (her husband stationed in England).
She was his mistress. She had a daughter of eighteen, who was very
beautiful. This bewitching young lady cried herself to sleep every
night.

'Nothing between you and the daughter?' Ren said, frowning. He felt
sure that there was something between him and the daughter, and
possibly half a dozen other women. 'Certainly!' Brooks answered firmly
and incisively. 'I have slept with her too.' But was it necessary to
inform him about all this copulation, so soon after they had met, and
in connection with an invitation to Hester and himself to be made
acquainted with these persons?

'I see,' Ren observed drily. They appear to be most desirable
acquaintances.' He gazed at this Cricklewood Casanova with a somewhat
cold curiosity.

'Women like that, who have all the money in the world, are as easy as
anything. I confine myself to them.'

'A capital plan.'

'None of those girls in Mansfield's [the large department store] would
get on her back, you'd be fooling around for months.'

'I suppose so.'

Brooks had of course noticed that a certain displeasure had replaced
Ren's original affability. At this point he said, 'I hope you
understand, Professor Harding, that I should not suggest a _serious
introduction_ to such a woman as Mrs. Stevenson. I even feel that I
ought not to suggest that your wife . . .'

'No, it is all right, my wife has become hardened to anything in this
place.'

'Oh, I am glad. I thought you might be rather bored. And these people
are quite indecently rich.'

'That is as it should be.' There was a short silence.

'Well, when shall I arrange for the party?' Brooks asked briskly.
'Practically any evening you like. I am with her every night, I can
arrange it how you like. Would you prefer a big party; four hundred
people? She often throws big parties. It's an enormous penthouse. She
loves it. Or shall we make it a smaller party? Some interesting
people, that sort of thing.'

'It's as you like,' said Ren.

Some evenings later, Mr. Starr put in an appearance, his ears pressed
back on the side of his head. Brooks apparently was not well. Nothing
much: well, it was kidney trouble. Ren burst into a 'belly-laugh'.

'I am not surprised,' he said.

But Mr. Starr had an aversion to direct references to anything sexual.

'Brooks says, "You must rescue the Hardings socially." Well, I have
arranged that you should meet _Mrs. Moir_.'

Mrs. Moir was his Dulcinea. Mr. Starr had never spoken to her, except
once. A few words. But when he was at a party Mrs. Moir was conscious
of him all the time. He saw it. He knew it. She wished to speak to
him. They did, in effect, telepathically converse.--_She_ was one of
the Marvels of Momaco.

At Mrs. Taylor's--that was where they would meet Mrs. Moir.--However,
some weeks later he dropped in and said he had not been able to get
Mrs. Taylor going. Though she was very rich she had complained that to
entertain the Hardings would cost fifteen dollars, Mr. Starr told them
(they began looking at him more and more disagreeably). She had totted
up the main items. There would be a little wine; then she would have
to hire a maid; there were many other things, such as tomato soup,
which stood between the Hardings and a visit to Mrs. Taylor.

Hester got up, and saying that she must go down and try to find Affie,
she left the room.

Ren scrutinized his visitor carefully, and he considered getting up,
opening the door, and shooing him out. But instead he threw his head
back disgustedly and yawned. What a ham! What an insulting old fairy,
pack full of fairy malice. Ugh!

But Mr. Starr was very apologetic. Some severe things passed his lips
with reference to Mrs. Taylor's parsimony. Mrs. Taylor was not a
_Marvel_ herself, though one of the charmed circle.

All these Marvels crumbled into dust, however, in spite of the intense
genteelness of the conjurer. The fact that he had rather brutally
recounted his squalid interview with old Mrs. Taylor--for he now
mentioned that she was seventy years old, suggesting this as a sort of
excuse--showed that he recognized that that comedy was finished.
_This_ sweet-scented manuscript was closed--though to life in general
still clung the same cloying perfume, inseparable from the act of
living with this Proust-drunken parlour-treader. Thenceforth the
Marvels were not mentioned.

But Mr. Starr felt unmasked. A slightly nasty glint came into his eye.
Hester returned, looked down at Mr. Starr, hesitated, and then sat
down as before. Mr. Starr almost immediately took his leave. He did so
with great dignity, as if he had been in some way offended, but was
determined to take no notice of it. Hester was not looking in his
direction during this ceremonious leave-taking. 'Must we continue to
see that dreadful little man?' Hester asked rather angrily. 'He is
making fools of us, in the way all these beastly people do if they get
a chance. I do really think that we might dispense with his visits.'

'Yes, let's do that. The only reason I have gone on seeing him is that
he is so comic.'

'Yes, I know he is _comic_. . . .'

In spite of this, when a discreet tap came at the door a few weeks
later, they let him in, laughing at him as they said 'Sit down.' They
were rewarded by further information about this remarkable little bald
fairy. In the course of quite a long talk they learned that as 'Lord
Herbert' he carried on a correspondence with a lady (a socialite in
Montreal who was quite unknown to him). He addressed her in his
letters as 'Lady Louise'.

Ren wondered how many of these transplanted domestics bestowed upon
themselves titles of nobility, for certainly Herbert was not the only
noble lord in Momaco: he was shown one of these missives which Lord
Herbert had just composed. It ran as follows. 'Dear Lady Louise,' it
began. 'How your last letter intrigued me--I could see your eyes
moving as I read it, your very beautiful veiled eyes full of secrets.
Your lips had a queer dear smile, as if you knew that I was watching
you. I always watch you as I read what you write. There is a perfume
in the words you choose. Did you know words secreted perfumes? They
do. No one else arranges words that way. They are as personal to you
as your arms or your hair.'

Ren tossed it back to Mr. Starr.

'Lord Herbert, you are a fair deceiver!'

'Not at all.--I make such money as my simple tastes demand by writing
slogan pieces for Mansfield's. It's second nature with me to write
like that. I think like that.'

'I often wondered, Mr. Starr, how you made your living,' Hester
remarked, looking at his exposed scalp, though he was still a very
dapper man--gnawing at forty perhaps, or else fighting stubbornly with
the early forties themselves, the first and toughest, as only a fairy
can fight.

He gave her a darting smile of recognition, and breathed softly at her

'Mee-owww!'

At his first visit it was soon apparent to Ren that Proust was the
bible of Mr. Herbert Starr. He had peopled Momaco with Proustian
figures. Mrs. Moir, or Mrs. Taylor, or Mrs. Baker, or Mrs. Glanz would
be cast for the rle of the Duchesse de Guermantes, or Madame de
Marsantes. He had transformed Momaco so thoroughly that it was
unquestionably, for him, a marvellous place, inhabited by diaphanous,
secretly enamoured _grandes dames_. But it was, perhaps, merely a
sideline of an advertisement-man which no one was intended to take
seriously, any more than his literature on behalf of Mansfield's
Department Store. But his proustian intoxication was a real thing at
least. He lived himself in a proustian world, but he did not expect
other people to follow him into it, however much he might mouth about
it.

However much he may have got in Ren's hair, there was one person to
whom Mr. Starr had introduced him who proved to be of some use. This
was a figure which did not crumble into dust the moment you went in
quest of it. This one feather in Mr. Starr's cap will be produced in
the sequel.




CHAPTER XVI

The Word 'Brute' is not liked in the Beverage Room


Ren had a chat with Jim Greevy soon after he became a manager of the
Beverage Room; he was standing in the reception desk for some reason,
and displayed a beautiful black eye. But his expression was very
disagreeable; it was obvious that he did not at all relish this manly
discoloration.

'See this?' he growled. 'I got that doing my duty, Mr. Harding. For
the _last time_. Would Mrs. Plant buy me a new pair of spectacles if
these were stamped on? No. Mrs. Plant is not that sort of woman. I
confine myself in future to taking the money. They can break up the
whole blooming place as far as I'm concerned.' (He pointed to his
eye.) 'A dirty little trouble-maker I had no option but to push out.
As gentlemanlike as possible. As I turned to go back, what did the
little bastard do but come up behind and land me this shiner. By great
good luck, my glasses wasn't on my nose. Yes, Mr. Harding, if Mrs.
Plant wants a bouncer she will have to hire one. _I_ am not applying.
I shall say to the boys tonight, "I am here to take your money. If you
want to break up the dratted place, it's okay with me. Pay no
attention to me. _I'm neutral_".'

Jim, of course, had his excellent reasons for wishing to remain where he
was. All Mrs. Plant's Beverage Room managers robbed her, and Jim was no
exception. But he was a serious, stocky, thick grey-haired, respectable
fellow, liked by Ren: and Jim was the arch-neutral upon the nightly
battlefield where he worked; a militant abstainer from intervention.

Momaco was a city without a theatre. It had the regulation number of
cinemas; but these ran the repulsive average Hollywood Film, and were
of no use to the Hardings. No French, Russian, German film was ever
shown anywhere and so there were no spectacles to attract them out of
their Room. From the caf angle Momaco was even inferior to London,
which has its Caf Royal. Perhaps once a fortnight it had been their
habit to pass an hour or so in the deplorable Beverage Room. They
dropped down about six in the evening.

Later the Beverage Room was a place where one spoke with the voice of
a giant, and, when contradicted by another giant, drove his tusks down
his throat or stamped with hob-nailed boots upon his talking-box.
Either way, by heel or fist, contradiction, henceforth, was made
impossible. With wassail came song. The songs, of nasal passion, cut
by hiccups.

Many giants were khakied legionaries. But little young men were also
fierce. Ren had stood and watched one night the bright-lit mouth of
their drinking den. Six hot young men, five hatted ones--one was
hatless and expostulatory. The bright light was on his flushed face,
his young eyes flashing, his bitter red mouth making a bitter meal of
hot words. He spat his protests at the five hatted ones--for Ren five
black backs--and blood from between his teeth was spat out too.--One
by one the hatted five smacked him in the mouth with a fist. The mouth
bleeding, the eyes angry, the handsome face continued to expostulate.
The hot words, from the curled-up blood-filled mouth, kept on
streaming out, a tragic fountain of rationality. These were clerks,
not giants, but they liked argument no less than giants.

Beverage Room was a euphemism for Beer Parlour. Only beer was to be
bought there, but the drinkers had bottles in their pockets, ranging
from Niagara wine to methylated spirits. These were poured into the
beer. The limbs of the giants were filled with fire, and the fire
hardened in their fingers as they curled into a fist as homicidal as a
revolver; or relaxed to use the finger-tips for an alcoholic caress.

From nine onwards, anyway, the Beverage Room was an ear-blasting
resort of homo stultus at his most alcoholic. So, as usual, on the
present occasion (the day following the visit of Mr. Starr), Ren and
Hester went down to have a drink about six o'clock. Ren, like most
consumers of 'Beverage', had a bottle in his pocket, which was
Beverage, too, but not of the kind that might be publicly consumed in
English Canada. It was Scotch. As soon as their beers were brought
them by Jim, they were spiked by Ren; Hester permitting a little
spiking of her first glass, just to be sociable. She loathed the
mixture from the bottom of her heart. They clinked their glasses, and
drank to Momaco suffering a similar fate to the Cities of the Plain.
The place was unusually full for six o'clock. The hour for the
gigantism of the North American was not yet in evidence. Giants there
were already, big fleshly chaps, but not yet at the stage when they
felt five times as big as they were.

Ren's personality suffered the routine inflation of those who spike
their beer. Hester almost forgot Momaco, as Ren imagined for her the
demise of Mr. Starr; and how, since he had been a good little fairy,
going to a Starrish heaven, he would find himself in the salon of
Madame de Villeparisis, the 'little old monkey'. At last the real
thing! But there would be disenchantment. The performers would seem
too violent, the women too carnal (like a lot of Jewesses, with the
voices of men), and the wit, like the scent, would be too violent. Mr.
Starr, deafened and stunned, would creep away, and without too much
difficulty introduce himself into Madame de Villeparisis' boudoir; lie
down upon a chaise-longue and, curled up like a little dog, _a tired_
little pet doggie, he would dream of Mrs. Moir and of Mrs. Taylor, and
the imaginary St. Germain upon the hill at Momaco. In that insipid
make-believe, with the soft growl of Canadian voices, he was back in
his earthly heaven--much to be preferred to the glare and rattle of
the real thing, and the hard scintillation of the gallic wit.

Both Ren and Hester were shouting with laughter, the image of the
shabby little pansy, with his hairless skull and dirty white silk
scarf, curled up in the boudoir of Madame de Villeparisis, dreaming of
an imaginary Madame de Villeparisis with a Canadian accent, turned Mr.
Starr into a little curled-up dog-man of Salvator Dali's. Ren became
more and more exuberant, as he drank his fifth beer, and Hester's
eyes, like starry lamps, hung over the table, as they both were sealed
up in their private world of joy. She lifted her arm to drink, when
her right breast and hip were inundated with beer--which however was
not _her_ beer. Her neighbour's glass bounced off her body, and fell
to the floor.

'I've wetted you, lady. My hand slipped.'

Hester sprang up with a startled cry. All that either of them had
noticed was that a dark man, thinking his own thoughts, which must be
ill-favoured, was sitting against the wall. Ren shouted at him
angrily, 'You clumsy brute! Are you unable to carry your glass to your
mouth without upsetting it over other people?'

'_Brutes_ are we, you big-mouthed old limey! An'mals, huh!'

This came from the table behind him. Ren turned abruptly to identify
the voice, and, more in astonishment than anger, found himself, at a
distance of five or six feet, looking into a face of a most
unprepossessing kind. The mouth was twisted into an ugly sneer right
across the face.

'Yes, _sir_!' the man drawled. 'That was me. Another brute. Why is you
and that jane with you doin' us the honour, down in this saloon. . . .'

'Ren! Let us leave here.'

Hester pulled him by the sleeve. He sprang up, as a dark face, full of
platonic hatred, picked itself out, and Hester's neighbour of the
unsteady hand struck him below the eye. He swung at this hateful
countenance with an unexpected precision, and the man went down, with
a great deal of noise, between the two tables, Hester jumping away
with a gasp. He was gazing at the man between the tables, and, with
the other part of his eye, aware of Jim Greevy wiping the beer off
Hester's dress, when he was struck very heavily on the left cheek, and
bounded back to meet this new attack. It was with no surprise that he
saw his assailant blotted out by a large person who seemed to move up
from the floor, and heard a deep voice observe, in an as-it-were
official voice, 'Do you want to say anything to _me_, Tom Thorne?' But
there was so much noise by this time that he did not find out whether
Tom Thorne wanted to say anything to the tall stranger. The next thing
he really knew was a panic-stricken entreaty, 'Do come away at once,
darling'; and while he was hearing this, he focused something of an
entirely different character to anything else in this phantasmagoria.
It was much more integrated and purposeful. A crouched, medium-sized
figure was dancing in front of him. There was no angry face--there was
hardly any face at all. It was an engine rather than a man, or a man
who was so highly trained that his personality was submerged. There
was something very dangerous about this taut and dancing body. The
presence of this figure in front of him admitted of only one
interpretation, and he struck it with all his force, as if it were an
adder, or any other dangerous thing in nature. The next thing he knew
was that he could no longer strike it because it was so near to him.
The next thing he knew after _that_ was how the lightning snaps and is
gone, and it hits you, and he had been slammed in the stomach, and he
was shut up over the pain like a book that had tried to slap itself
shut. The pain filled the room, and he was crouched in the middle of
it, hugging his pain. He felt a warm cheek against his, and there was
a soft voice near his ear; it said, 'So you like that, budd' (much too
dulcet for a Canadian but still in the accents of North America). A
stallion kicked a tattoo--four more like the first, until he became no
more than a solar plexus, and the room was a solar plexus too.

He stood gasping, with his neck stuck out, like a bearded rooster. It
was then that he saw the _face_--the face of the engine, which had
attacked him. It was a smooth, young, and rather thoughtful face; just
now it was looking at him with a calm concentration, one eyebrow a
little lifted. Before he could be aware of anything more, he found
himself hitting the floor, his hands still pressed in the pit of his
stomach.

The uproar was intense, and someone must have been playing about with
the electric light, for the light kept going out and coming back
again. Then there was a deafening scream, and simultaneously a boot
hit him in the face, and then more boots began hitting him, elsewhere.
Three or four boots perhaps. Then that stopped, and there was a
trampling all around him, and sometimes on him.

The trampling went on, but it seemed to have moved a little way away.
He heard Jim Greevy's voice saying, 'Get up now, quick!' He was
pulled, and crawled towards a chair. 'Can you stand?' said Jim. He
lifted himself with Jim's aid upon the chair. There he stopped a
moment, and then rose to his feet. Hester, in a hollow voice, was
imploring him to try and come away, then Jim Greevy pushed him through
a door, and Hester and he found themselves in the staff quarters. The
uproar of a fight still reached them, but, he still doubled up, they
were able to reach the street at the back. From there it was only a
few steps to the annexe entrance. 'I will tell Mrs. Plant, you have
been beated up,' Jim said as he left them.

'For heaven's sake don't do that,' Ren answered. 'Jim, say nothing to
her.'

Back in the Room, Ren sank upon the sofa. He felt himself all over with
his finger-tips. 'No fatal damage,' he told the pale and shaking Hester.

'You must see a doctor,' she answered.

Ren shook his head; he felt so sick and dazed that he was not able to
cope any more just then. Hester flung herself in a chair with a
terrible fit of weeping. Her experience in the Beverage Room had been
such a monstrosity, there had been so much hatred, suddenly released,
and it had then filled her with such a dreadful fear, not to mention
the hateful humiliation of having beer poured over her head--all this
she had to meet without breakdown, and so now she broke into a hundred
pieces.

This was not an indulgence, but a necessity on Hester's part: she was
unable to control herself. But having acquired the requisite relief,
she rose and went over to the telephone. The doctor arrived in a
quarter of an hour. One of the most obvious effects of the mle had
been a stiffening of the arm, the loss of use in the left hand, and a
considerable swelling around the elbow, with, of course, a great deal
of pain. There were other areas which demanded investigation as well.
Of this invitation to probe Dr. Mackinnon took the fullest advantage.

Ren made no pretence to like the doctor. He was persuaded that Dr.
Mackinnon would, in the ordinary course of business, make his scrutiny
as painful as possible. The more the examination hurt, the more
justified would the physician's visit seem. Were the patient to wince,
or if possible groan, the more serious would the case appear to the
family: and so the more likely they would be to ask the physician to
return. That, at least, was Ren's account, when the doctor had left,
and the patient recovered a little from his mal-treatment. Further,
the fact that he did not recommend an X-ray signified there was
absolutely nothing there but bruises and the dislocation of the left
arm and a sprained wrist, and it had been unwarrantably alarmist to
call him in. As the doctor refused to push the disjointed arm back
into its proper position because of its swollen state, that was merely
an excuse for returning several times. Ren said for two pins he would
push the arm back into place himself. Nevertheless he allowed Hester
to take the prescription to the druggist. Since his arm and head were
both painful he would have been unable to sleep without Dr.
Mackinnon's sleeping draught.

Hester, however, lay awake and listened to the screams of the woman in
the apartment beneath theirs, it being the husband's nightly habit to
half murder her. (Three or four weeks later the police were called in,
and they removed the wife out of danger.) What a fearful place they
had come to! She must try and prevail upon Ren to return to
England.--As soon as he was better--it would be no use to begin
talking of that now. She watched for some time to see that he did not
toss about and do some further harm to his left arm. When at last she
went to sleep, her dreams were so appalling that she kept waking up,
and in the end preferred to be awake than to be asleep.

So the next morning, dressings on his head, a sling for his left arm
with only a slight bend in it, and several band-aids plastered about
on face and hands, Ren was propped up on the settee. The arm was a
good deal swollen, and the pain had not abated: he kept this at bay,
to some extent, with Veganin.

After breakfast at about the usual time, the screams of the young
German woman continued for more than an hour. She was married to an
Indian--a north American Indian, not a Hindu. Bess was of the opinion
she nagged the Indian until he gave her a punch or two to make her
stop: and that she often would scream before he had done anything:
this made him so angry he would perhaps hold her upside down and shout
'Will you stop that ---- noise!' This, apparently, was the only way
to stop her. But soon she would start again. When the screaming began,
Ren said, 'I feel sorry for that poor Indian.'

Hester looked at him in surprise.

'Oh,' she said, 'Why?'

'If I were that Indian, I would take a pillow and put it on her face
and sit on it for half an hour.'

Hester stretched over and squeezed his hand.

'Darling, you have grown very ferocious in the last twenty-four hours.
Has that kick on the head turned you into a new man?'

He gave his ho-ho-ho laugh, the first for perhaps two years. 'The
fellow may have kicked some sense into me, there is always that. I
made an uncommonly sensible remark.'

'You think so?' Hester became aware of a contradiction in her husband.
He was not really gentle: she did not mean that he was un-gentle, but
he could not claim to be gentle. Yet he had always exhibited an
authentic distaste for physical violence. At school he had been an
athlete. But he tended to avoid the more brutal sports. It was as a
gymnast that he had excelled. He had once told her how it had always
thrilled him to fly through the air in a large gymnasium. The sight of
him bandaged there on the settee, delivering himself of an
exceptionally brutal remark (it was the sort of remark that most men
make, but he had been a refrainer) naturally provoked her attention.

It was almost as though he had been privy to her thoughts: for he
remarked, 'We have had our baptism of fire, have we not, in the
violent life of this hotel. It is an astonishingly violent place, but
no more violent than the world of which it is so perfect a microcosm.'

'Oh,' Hester murmured.

'How extraordinarily, when one shuts oneself up in a little segment of
the world like this hotel, it is brought home to one what a violent
place the world is.'

'This hotel is not typical,' she demurred.

'It is. The kind of bourgeois family we were brought up in is highly
deceptive. War is cheerfully maintained by everybody; our military
aristocrats glory in "blood and sweat and tears". But if a bank clerk
were given power he would kill even more millions. So far no one has
been _killed_ in this hotel. But thousands are killed on the roads,
and millions over in the battlefields. You are right, this hotel is
not typical. It is a nice quiet hotel--a rather mild microcosm.'

The Indian's wife gave a bloodcurdling shriek.

'That woman,' he observed, 'is asking _to be killed_, as loudly as she
knows how to.'

'I am afraid that you are right,' Hester agreed.

'And now we are in harmony with the hotel,' he told her. 'If I lived
here much longer I should be a full-scale blood-sacrifice.'

He was now himself again, Hester thought, and she looked over at him
fondly.

'Oughtn't you to get a little sleep?' she reminded him. But there was
a knock on the door: it was Jim Greevy, and instead of sleep, Ren
visibly braced himself, and stuck bravely out his beard.

'How do you feel, Mr. Harding? You struck a very bad patch. I did all
I could. But it wasn't much.'

'We do not underestimate what you did, Jim. You were splendid.'

'Oh rats,' said Jim, with violent modesty; turning to Hester, 'I wiped
the beer off you as it was thrown over you! That's all I did.'

'You did more than that. You sided with the limey--you, an Irishman!'

'There is that,' Jim laughed. 'Tom Thorne is a dangerous man. A year
back he served a term of imprisonment for manslaughter. I would not
have him in the place if it were mine. He fights every time he comes
here. And tonight he had that Yank with him.'

'Ah yes, that Yank.' Ren patted the sling. 'I had this arm over my
face. That was when I was on the ground. That Yank kicked it pretty
hard.'

'Yes, I'll bet he did,' said Jim. 'He's a nasty piece of work. Of
course he's a draft-dodger; that seems to contradict what they say.
They say he's very well known in the States, at his weight a champion.
But if he is a champ, what the heck is he doing draft-dodging? Uncle
Sam looks after his champions. He would not be wasted in Guadalcanal,
I mean.'

'Perhaps he's no champ,' Ren laughed. 'But he felt like a champion to
me when he was doing that tattoo on my belly.'

'No, he may be a champ all right, but there must be something else.
Anyway, he goes everywhere now with Tom Thorne. That shows the sort of
man he is. He ought to be pushed back into the States. Last night I
noticed he didn't take on that big chap, you know, who went after Tom
Thorne.'

'Oh, didn't he? The little coward.'

Jim shook his head. 'No. It would not be that. Everyone knows that
Fitz was a Mountie.'

'Ah, I see what you mean. As a draft-dodger he would prefer not to
draw attention to himself.'

'Yes,' Jim nodded; 'yes, that, and probably something else.'

'So that big fellow used to be in the Mounties?' Ren enquired.

'Yes. He's a good scout is Fitz. I knew he would not see a stranger
like yourself beaten up. All the same' (he rubbed his hand over his
eyes in a quick bashful gesture), 'I had just stuck my spectacles in
my pocket when I saw old Fitz get up; and he knocked Tom down with a
proper haymaker. Tom Thorne is a man who doesn't usually find himself
on his back.'

'Mr. Greevy, I do think that was splendid of you . . .'

'Yes, Jim, it was jolly decent of you to get ready to do battle in
that way. The ex-Mountie's intervention was a wonderful stroke of luck
for all of us.'

'It was that. He is a very popular man, is old Fitz, with all except
thugs like Tom Thorne.'

There was a pause, and then Hester spoke.

'But what had my husband done to these people? It all seems very
extraordinary looking back on it.'

'Yes, that puzzles me too,' Ren said. 'What on earth had poor Hester
done? Why pour beer over her head? Apart from its being
blackguardedly, it doesn't seem to make sense, does it, Jim?'

Jim smiled wryly, and gave his face another violent rub. 'Yes, Mr.
Harding, unfortunately it _does_ make sense to me all right.'

'Sense of what kind!' almost shouted Ren. 'You mean we are the kind
of people over whom it is natural to empty beer and to kick 'em in the
teeth?'

Jim laughed nervously. 'Well, you put it that way, Mr. Harding, but it
is a fact that in such a place as I am the manager of it is natural
for almost anything to happen.--Especially to strangers.--You don't
make a noise like a Canadian!'

'That's too bad.'

'It isn't even that. I might as well say it, it is the English accent
I'm afraid.'

'Mr. Greevy, you really mean that? . . .' Hester looked very distressed.

'I don't like saying it, Mr. Harding, but you must have noticed yourself
that the English are not very much liked. Let me be frank . . .'

'Please do,' Ren told him.

'There is always the high-hatting charge. You see, in such a place as
ours, Mr. Harding--who has a voice that can be heard . . .'

'And why not?' clamoured Ren. 'Are we to speak in whispers then?'

'No, Mr. Harding, of course not, I did not say that. But you are a man
who knows the world, and there is a time to speak soft and low. People
think you are swanking, the sort we have down there, if you talk very
loud about things they don't understand.'

Ren gave an angry and dramatic sigh. Turning to Hester he said, 'You
see how it is, being English is an unpopular thing to be. To be Scotch
is all right, to be Irish is just fine' (he winked at Jim), 'but being
what we are, we had better stop here in this Room, rather than go out
and expose ourselves to the displeasure of the natives--everymanjack
of whom comes from the British Islands.'

Ren pushed over a packet of cigarettes to Jim, after taking one
himself. Jim looked uncomfortable. The direction the conversation had
taken made him regret his frankness. But Ren continued, and Jim
looked up a little apprehensively.

'What I would like to know is the degree in which these are
war-conditions. In peace time is there this perpetual drunkenness and
fighting?'

'Yes and no,' Jim answered. 'Everything is worse today. But the
Canadian is at all times an ugly man when he is full of liquor.'

Jim Greevy now enquired whether the kick on the left arm had broken
anything: and whether the bandage round the head signified anything
serious.

Ren reassured him. He told him his arm was dislocated merely: it was
painful, but would be all right soon. Shortly after that Greevy left.

'Well, that was from the horse's mouth. We were imprudent, even at six
o'clock, not to quieten down our voices.'

There was a bloodcurdling shriek from the end of the passage. It
continued solidly for three or four minutes.

'I wish someone would empty some beer over that woman,' Hester smiled
mirthlessly. 'But she "makes a noise like a Canadian", so that is all
right I suppose.'




CHAPTER XVII

Vows of Hardship


Blizzards blew from the Pole downwards, though they were abominably
vacillating, and this was a severe one. Hester had gone to the
groceteria about noon: it was no farther than the other end of the
block, but you faced north to go to it from the hotel. Hester had to
move doubled up, and to stop a half-dozen times, and stand with her
back to the ice-blast, which whirled around her as soon as she turned,
so that she stood in a whirlpool of snow. Each time she stopped she
was very quickly forced around again in order to escape the whirlpool:
and at intervals this mannerism was repeated again and again. Her hair
was full of frozen snow and her lips froze against her teeth when she
reached the groceteria: she went up to the glass case, and stared
through at the items for sale, odds and ends of butchery. These
show-cases were such as are used in Museums for the display of
antiquities, and to begin with this method of exhibiting meat is
displeasing to English people. She selected four kidneys as a treat
for Ren, for the evening meal, and two Idaho potatoes--or if not
Idahoes they were almost as large.

This was christmas-type eating, a foretaste of what it would be
incumbent on them to do in the way of extravagance in four days' time.
But they would not have the money to have much of a Christmas dinner:
so why not spread the Christmas dinner out? Christmas had made
everything worse, and Hester had privately reached a state of mind
where she would whisper to herself, 'To hell with economics!' as she
pointed to a packet of frozen peaches in the ice-chest. Why did they
not go to the British High Commissioner, say they had no money, and
ask to be shipped home? They had known another Englishman who had done
that: there was no difficulty about it. They could not travel
together, but what of that if they got back to England. It was also in
this spirit that, before she left the groceteria, she added half a
pound of mushrooms to her other purchases. Fortified by the heat in
the shop, she then went back into the storm, ploughing through the
snow in her overshoes. Her stockings were wet above the knee, and the
whirling snow drove down inside her overshoes.

When Hester reached the hotel, she was breathless and uncomfortably
hot. She collapsed upon a seat near the front door, tearing her ulster
open to ventilate the burning interior. At last she was able to move
through the hotel, and then, her heart still thumping, stumble up the
annexe stairs. She burst into the Room with a protesting 'Oh', and
sank on the settee, struggling to recover her breath. She did not
indulge in speech for a while: then she said, to the amused Ren,
'Never, but never, have I encountered such a beast of a blizzard! It
is like a million dervishes whirling around one.'--But when the
contents of the shopping bag was revealed to Ren he was less amused.

'Mushrooms! Idahoes! What does all this signify? Is this Christmas?'

'I am sorry.' She exhibited contrition. 'I was demoralized. Very
demoralized. Please put it all down to the blizzard: I lost all sense
of time and space.'

These luxurious purchases, this succulent raw material spread out upon
the table, obviously produced acute dejection in Ren, and filled him
with the darkest forebodings. The fact that his left arm was out of
action had made it much more difficult for him to work. To be
behind-hand with his work raised up the spectre of insolvency, and
Furber, that was worst of all--and then _par dessus le march_,
Christmas!

He gave up his afternoon rest, for he felt that the mushrooms and the
Idahoes pointed to the necessity of making up for the time lost
resulting from the brawl of six days before. When tea-time came he
showed great appreciation of the Salada and of some stale cookies,
which had been rejected as compromisingly old when they were
entertaining Mr. Starr. He appeared to be in an exceptionally good
mood, so Hester thought she would speak to him of her growing
unwillingness to prolong the occupation of the Room, and of her
longing to shake the dust of this country off her thrice-patched shoes.

'Just look at that blizzard,' she exclaimed, waving her hand towards
the window. 'While I was sweating and freezing, gasping for breath,
and trying to prevent my heart from beating a hole in my side, when I
got back to the hotel this morning, I said to myself, "Hester, you
have been in this country long enough."'

Ren ho-ho-ho'ed. He did not suspect the existence of any purpose
behind this _boutade_.

'We are great friends, aren't we, Ren, as well as lovers?' she said
softly.

Ren was thinking of the work he had to do after tea: he did not take
this in for a few moments: they were not accustomed to say things of
that kind to one another. But then he turned squarely towards her,
reached over and planted his hand on hers.

'The greatest pals in the world, Ess. I don't believe there ever have
been such pals.'

'I don't believe there have been either, Ren.' He had taken his hand
away and passed it through his hair, and frowned, as if confronted
with some difficult problem. He stared at her intently. She became
self-conscious at this scrutiny; she felt like some wild animal not
accustomed to be looked at. We take our being for granted, our
physical presence comes to enjoy the anonymity of furniture. What was
he searching for, what information that he did not possess already?

'I see, I see,' he almost hissed, 'a stranger who has become a
sister.' And it flashed through his mind how his belief in blood, in
the Family, had taken him, in the crisis of his life, to a lot of
strangers beginning with his mother.

There was only Helen, and that was not because she was a sister. But
here, all the time, was the person he should have gone to. 'Hardship!
I am beginning to love hardship. It sharpens the sight. When I look, I
see. I see what a grand woman you are. I used to think that you were
scheming and frivolous--I am afraid that you must have seen that I
thought that.'

'I sometimes feared you thought that,' she agreed. She saw her chances
of an opening slipping away. She had trembled when he spoke so
favourably of hardship.

'I, no more than you, _would seek hardship_,' he said, and she
started, for it was as though he had been listening in to her
thoughts. 'But honestly, being imprisoned, as we have been, here, has
its compensations. This barren life has dried out of me a great deal
that should not have been there. And you have become integrated in me.
This tte--tte of ours over three years has made us as one person.
And this has made me understand you--for most people I should hate to
be integrated with. It is only when years of misery have caused you to
grow into another person in this way that you can really know them.'
He waited a moment and then went on, 'In the other world, Hester, I
treated you as you did not at all deserve. I cut a poor figure as I
look back at myself.'

'There is no need to say this. I don't know why you are saying it.'

'But it is no use talking in this uncomfortable way about ourselves,
as if I were I, and you were you. I am talking to myself and we are
one. Is it necessary to say that I would sacrifice for you any
miserable thing I had--well, as I would for myself?'

So the appeal she had proposed to make must be indefinitely postponed;
she left her chair, and putting her arms around his neck kissed him
very tenderly. 'My darling, we have been hammered together as you say
by a very ugly fate, but we would have been together without that. You
attribute too much to fate. But there is this, my darling, that I
would do anything you asked me to do, and go wherever you wished. I
did not know that I would do that once. But I know now.'

'What a grand woman you are. And this tte--tte of over three years
has made us one person, Ess. I treated you awfully badly.'

Ren was so moved that tears flooded his eyes, as he held her as well
as he could. She had intended to say that she would, as she had said,
literally go anywhere, although secretly she would pray that it might
be a less hideous spot--she had intended at least to put in this mild
reminder; but instead she found that she was crying too, and they
remained for a long time clasped together in something like a
religious embrace. Ren was thinking this being and he were vowed to
one another, in a sacrament of which good fortune and good times had
no knowledge, and she was thinking how she loved Ren, and how
wonderful it was after all to be loved and she would not _pester_ him
about leaving this awful place if he did not want to, and the war must
end some day, some day, and _then_ they would return to England, and
leave this hideous ice-box behind!

He had just said, 'Let's have another cup of tea, my sweet,' and she
had picked up the heavy teapot, when a tap came at the door. They
heard Affie's voice through the door. 'Come in, Affie!' he shouted,
and like a mischievous black-suited spectre she remained fluid for
some moments, half in and half out of the apartment.

'Come in. Don't hover,' Ren commanded.

'I'm not interrupting?' Affie asked.

Both of them thought, 'Ah, she's been listening,' and laughed. She
came in, smiling down at them, pleased at being privy to all that went
on in the house. She was not by nature a Key-hole-Queen. She was more
like an aged messenger of Aphrodite, with a supernatural
passe-partout, bringing for preference aphrodisiacs from Aphrodite,
and possessing supernatural access to everything in the hotel. She had
no need to squint through keyholes, as Bess always accused her of
doing, though she may have done that, it is true, to annoy Bess.

'When I have swallowed this, come and vaticinate in my teacup, Affie
darling,' Ren invited.

'I will see if there is anything I think you ought to know,' answered
Affie professionally, deeply inhaling her cigarette smoke. Affie sat
huddled up, as though in prophetic concentration with herself. Her
childish affectation of solemn preparation for a scrutiny of their
fate always pleased them.

This was a recognized method of minor-moneymaking in Momaco. Many
tea-rooms advertised in their windows that fortune-telling
teacup-readers were within.

When Hester and Ren had finished their tea, they whirled their cups
round three times, which was the routine procedure. The tea-leaves
duly plastered upon the insides of the cups, Affie drew near, crouched
over the cups, and gazed first at one and then at the other for
several minutes.

Then she said to Ren, 'Someone loves you very much, very . . . much.'
She gave a side-long glance of fun at Hester, and then straightened
her face abruptly. She twisted Ren's cup completely round several
times. 'You are going on a long journey. The man you are going to see
is dark . . . with horn-rimmed spectacles; tall, fattish with a
flattened nose, young.'

Ren and Hester exchanged a glance of high amusement. Several
photographs of the gentleman in question had arrived in a registered
envelope two weeks earlier. Affie continued to brood over the cups.
She approached her face to one of the cups, rather quickly, and
raising one eyebrow. 'You must be very careful about this dark man,'
she said. 'You will be crossing water. . . . It might be as well if
you did _not_ cross water.'

'I do not agree,' Hester remarked.

'How do you mean?' Affie frowned.

'It is my view that he _should_ cross water,' Hester insisted. 'Cross
a lot of water.'

Affie looked relieved. 'I only meant a small stretch of water.'

'Yes, it is after all only to Victoria Island!' Ren laughed--Affie
showed no sign of recognition, when he said Victoria Island. She
transformed her scrutiny to Hester's cup. 'You have many friends,'
Affie told her. 'You will receive a letter from one . . . very
shortly. . . . It will contain good news.' She tipped the cup
sideways. 'You have a boot in your cup.' She looked up with a smile.
'It is very lucky. A boot . . . is exceptionally lucky.'

When, a few months earlier, Bess had been away for a week, a woman who
had formerly worked there took her place. She had been an Englishwoman
once, many years before. She was quite uninhibited, and the
reputations of one or two of the members of the staff, past and
present, suffered quite a lot in the course of her incumbency. She was
especially dangerous for Affie. Among other things she informed them
that Affie steamed open letters, and glued them up afterwards: this
occurring in the kitchen, where the postmen left the mail for the
entire hotel. This piece of information threw considerable light on
Affie's uncanny skill of divination in tea-cup reading. There was
especially one instance they recalled when Affie had foretold the
arrival of 'a letter . . . with a funny sort of stamp . . . Indian I
think'. Four days later a stamped letter arrived from Colombo. After
that, it had become a sport, one of the favourite sports of the Room,
tracing Affie's revelations to a letter steamed open in the kitchen.
The 'crossing water' business at the present sance, and the
insistence on the amount of water being inconsiderable, was easily
traceable to a dozen or more letters which had recently come from
someone in Vancouver, who urged Ren to come out there. He backed up
this request with glittering promises, assuring Ren that the local
University would immediately offer him a Chair. Where Victoria Island
came in was that the correspondent invited them to stay with him at
his 'properties', while arrangements were being made with the
University authorities. This man's father was said to be on the Board
of the University and a very influential man. A photograph of his
father was enclosed, and he certainly looked a very influential man.
This correspondent had poured registered letters in at the rate of two
a week: they had impressed Affie more than they had impressed the
Hardings.

They both of them felt quite certain that Affie would do nothing really
dishonest. She steamed open letters to improve her sorcery and sharpen
her prophetic insight. Also she was an inquisitive woman, and she would
be amused to learn that No. 34 suffered from a venereal disease or No.
19A was, as she had suspected, homosexual. Knowing _everyone's_ secret
gave her a sense of power. Once, when she had said, 'Professor Harding,
have you ever visited any of our universities? McGill for instance?' he
was angry as long as it would take to pick up a pin. Then he said,
'Where did you learn that I was Professor Harding?' 'That is how your
letters are addressed,' Affie answered. But Ren laughed and asked her,
'What were the christian names of my grandmother?' Affie only answered,
'On the English side or on the French, Professor Harding?' At which they
all three laughed a great deal.

On the present occasion, after exhaustively analysing the tea-leaves,
she rose to her full height, and bowed herself out, like a figure in
a ballet. But at the door she turned, and clinging to the slightly
swinging door, as if she had been posing for Andromeda, but had
suddenly felt rather faint, she addressed Hester.

'Wouldn't you like a fur coat as a Christmas present, Mrs. Harding?'

'Why?' Hester enquired, with the smile that she reserved, in this
place, for this old woman clinging to the door.

'Oh, don't you like fur? Some people don't. I have just bought a fur
coat.'

'How wonderful, Affie. You've made yourself a beautiful Christmas
present, have you! Do show it to me!'

Affie clung harder and harder, more and more archly, to the swaying
door. 'It's a cherry fox,' she confided. Then with a croak she
vanished. Ren went ho-ho-ho, gently combing his beard. They looked at
one another in mutual relishment of Affie's latest exhibition of
prophetic skill, but they were debarred from speaking, for she
certainly was listening at the door. All that Ren said was, 'Well, I
am going on a long journey.' Hester responded, 'But the water you will
be crossing will be of insignificant span.' And Ren concluded with,
'Yes, there is of course that.' And then they turned on the radio.

The News was beginning. Richly and persuasively the preliminary
sales-talk rolled out. 'Be the smart Host,' it exhorted, 'When you're
serving Tall Drinks!' After a final appeal, 'So be the Smart Host',
came a cataract of bad news, though thousands of dead bodies of
enemies made you feel the day had not been quite in vain. Before the
news was over it was learned that President Roosevelt had accepted the
rib of a Japanese Marine, mounted in gold, as a paper-knife.

'A nice Christmas present for the Great White Chief,' Ren observed.
'They ought really to scalp their enemies. Sawing a rib out of the
cadaver is decadent, I feel.'

Hester seldom paid any attention to the roaring voices of
'commentators'. They all had a vested interest in a long, long war.
They would never be heard of again when it _did_ end: they hoped that
the ten million pounds a day (or was it a minute?) military budgeting
would go on forever. Hester came to hate these brash voices, but
after a time it was nothing but a troublesome noise. They might have
been talking Chinese for all she knew about it. Ren followed the
nightly outpourings with close attention, if for no other reason,
because the _Momaco Gazette-Herald_ bought political articles from
him, and that was one of the ways he had found to make a living.

The murder of all these millions of simple inoffensive people all over
the world, whether civilians or uniformed herds, the enormous,
irretrievable ruin being prepared for each and all of these countries,
the certain slavery consequent upon unpayable mountains of debt,
plunging all the combatants indiscriminately, whether 'victors or
vanquished', into worse and worse inflations; all this burden of
knowledge, and what was therefore for him a spectacle of ruin, for the
first year or so had tormented him. Now, however, the torments had
ceased, and his reactions at present amounted to an anarchic
pessimism, destined to undermine his fierce puritanism, his
'perfectionism?', as it had been called.

He would hardly know, if they should meet, and have lunch together,
how to converse with Rotter now. His letters to Rotter for a year past
had been few and far between. Then at last, about a month ago, he
informed his disciple that he had modified his theory. He had
explained that his opinion of the past and of the traditional writing
of History was quite unchanged. He even retained his belief in a sort
of 'Enlightenment'. But he now felt that the powers of evil disposed
of such stupendous forces that they must always, with the greatest
ease, annihilate any opposition: and it is inherent in earthly life
that this should be so for ever. Any 'Enlightenment' that might make
its appearance would be like a taper in a tornado.

His disciple had written to him in a tone of such utter despair, that
he had considered it best to provide some immediate balm. So he wrote
that, after all, the taper would not be extinguished by the tornado if
it were secreted in the mind, where, as a matter of fact, it was
generally to be found. All that he had done was to deprecate the idea
that it would come out of the mind, and _physically_ do battle with
the Darkness and the Whirlwind. Then it would be a case of a combat
between a minnow and a cuttlefish. This latter seemed to have afforded
consolation to the sensitive Rotter.

But Ren could find nothing with which to console himself, though he
now grieved less over the universal catastrophe as he realized more
thoroughly its dark necessity, its innateness.

That there was no intention of ending this war, until it had become a
total catastrophe _for everybody_ was now obvious to him. He did not
communicate to Hester his views as to the probable length of the war.
He just sat before the radio, and listened to the unfolding of new
moves promising, as he interpreted it, the most stupendous evils--sat
there, night after night, too shocked to speak at times: at others
simply stifling the human instinct to communicate.

It had been over three _very long_ years, and he was almost reconciled
to the hardship of which he had spoken. Even, he had developed an
appetite for this negation of life, and a sort of love for this
frightful Room. It was this that Hester most feared in him: she
watched with apprehension how he was making himself at home in their
present surroundings--and even beginning to ho-ho-ho. He had no wish
to be in a greater scene, where men falsified everything, and built up
their small facades: where 'success' meant failure and betrayal. He
felt he could well live at some distance from the scholars who used
their learning to conceal, and the literary men who, after a few
years' spectacular navigation, crept into some port where they could
moulder placidly for the rest of their lives. He experienced no desire
to be once more in those places where the intellect was rewarded for
its surrenders, and where the mind became illustrious in proportion to
its moral flaccidity.

When, however, the storm of nonsense, the menacing voices had ended,
they walked with Fred Allen down his East-side 'Alley', and shook as
they listened to Mrs. Nutzbaum, or to the Bard who always prefaced his
remarks with the words, 'That is precisely why I am here!'

They followed the exchanges between Fred Allen and Jack Benny, which
began with cracks about Jack's _toupe_. Or it was a lucky break, and
Jimmy Durante ('such are the circumstances that prevail') served up
Ombriago and filled them with vigorous joy. They did not turn up
their noses, either, at Fibber Magee and his outfit: and they both
felt the keenest displeasure if anything caused them to miss Gracie
Allen, and even more so Henry Aldridge, that classical satire on the
American Boy. In the evenings they were surrounded by these wonderful
comedians, brought them by half a dozen U.S. Networks: and in the end
the war-bulletins began to fade, and like all good Americans they came
to realize that it was only the comic that mattered.

Before they went to bed Fred Waring wished them 'A Happy White
Christmas'. They both spontaneously groaned, as Christmas was
mentioned, and Ren rattled a couple of bits in his trouser-pocket.




CHAPTER XVIII

Mr. Furber


When Ren laid aside his sling, his arm felt like a toy limb: it could
not take on much more than the stroking of a beard, or picking of a
tooth. He kept his hand in his jacket pocket. People respect a sling,
but an arm with its hand thrust into a jacket pocket was liable to be
bumped into or even playfully seized. But these risks must be ignored:
Ren could delay no longer his going to Cedric Furber's.

Living as they did, from hand to mouth, to lay aside for more than a
week or so his work at Mr. Furber's forced them to draw upon their
emergency reserve. Formerly their only reserve had been the key books
Ren had brought with him. The _Encyclopdia Britannica_ was the
bulkiest and most valuable of these.

But, one by one, they had all been disposed of. At present their
reserve consisted of a slim bundle of dollar bills sufficient to
enable them to pinch and scrape their way through one month. Thanks to
Furber, they now had reached a point at which they did not have to
fear hunger. Provided the arrangements they had been able to make did
not fall through they could make both ends meet, and have sufficient
slack to enable them, most weeks, to put by a dollar or two.

Before this period of relative stabilization they were only saved from
complete insolvency by the sale of books. There had been one occasion
when they had been unable to buy any cigarettes for nearly a month,
and they had never eaten so little in their lives. There was a book
shop run by an Englishman, a Mr. Salter, and it was one of the best in
Canada--which is not a country of second-hand bookshops. Momaco was as
unpromising as could well be found for such a shop. But Mr. Salter
mailed his lists all over North America. In the book trade, from Santa
F to St. Johns, Newfoundland, he was well known. Although things were
appallingly difficult, they had sold him so many books that Ren had
decided to break new ground, if that were possible, rather than to
apply to Mr. Salter again. But the moment came at length they
literally had no money left, or just a quarter and a nickel. So a
_History of National Biography_ and another book were packed and Ren
started off for the bookshop. He found it closed; Mr. Salter was
probably at a sale. The heat was formidable, perhaps a hundred
degrees. Ren had not the money to go to a Beverage Room, to kill
time, so he decided to walk to the city's main department store,
Mansfield's. It was at the centre of the shopping quarter, about a
mile away. The great square shadows of the down-town buildings were
delightful to walk in, but between one block and the next the sun eyed
him without intervening masonries, and it scorched his back through
his shirt. On the return journey he had a piece of luck. He found
himself walking behind a diminutive Jew, with a large cigar. Normally
he would have corrected such a situation, have got out of range. He
did not do so now, but inhaled the horrid smoke with delirious
pleasure. Afterwards it was without exaggeration that he would insist
that never, but _never_, had he had a smoke to compare with it. There
was no wind, and the stream of smoke was carried into his face, up his
nostrils, without interruption; suddenly the Cigar turned into a
side-street, in the most unexpected way: for it had never occurred to
Ren that the Cigar might do that. He stopped. Should he follow the
Cigar? No, he thought, he must not do that: the man attached to the
Cigar might notice that he was being followed. Besides, the heavenly
Cigar was already a short way away, and he would have to run to catch
it up.

When he got back to the bookshop Mr. Salter was there. The bookseller
not only bought the two books Ren had with him, but put down twenty
dollars on account for a third book. This Ren duly handed over (with
infinite regret) the next morning. That evening the two castaways on
Momaco _faisaient la bombe_ with a bottle of Niagara wine, a packet of
twenty Player's and a fried Chicken Maryland.

    *    *    *    *    *

Ren's present problem was to resume his employment at Mr. Cedric
Furber's house. He tended to take Mr. Furber too much for granted, and
that was an error, psychologically. This error derived from the fact
that there was something paradoxically solid about this gentleman, and
it had impressed Ren out of proportion to its value.

This is how he had come to meet his strange patron. It was a little
over a year earlier that Ren had gone one morning to the only serious
bookstore in town, that is dealing in new books. He saw (and avoided)
Mr. Starr, who was looking at a display of the very latest English
books upon a table near the door. If he avoided Mr. Starr, that
gentleman did not avoid him; and it was not long before he heard his
soft 'Hallo', as he was trying to locate a book in one of the less
accessible shelves. This was at a later meeting with Mr. Starr. Their
original encounter has been described elsewhere. Mr. Starr had spotted
the nature of the beard, had seen at once that it was not an ordinary
outburst of hair, and the way its bearer bore himself meant something
unusual. This had involved a fairly long chat, but Ren had no desire
to repeat it.

But there was no resisting Mr. Starr, and a further chat took place. He
left the shop in order to escape from Mr. Starr (but Mr. Starr came with
him), and as they came out into the street, they passed a tall and
bearded man going in. The two beards took note of one another
discreetly. Ren remarked that the other was tall and elegant. His
elegance was the only thing about him that did not remind the spectator
of Lytton Strachey. But Mr. Starr mincingly intercepted the bearded one,
who looked down the melancholy expanse of hair with marked disapproval.
The dapper figure in the grubby white silk muffler and seedy tight
little overcoat got no advertisement from his acquaintance.

'How are you, Mr. Furber! It is a long time since we met.'--An austere
silence.--'I would like you to meet Professor Ren Harding, the
historian. I am sure you have read _The Secret History of World War
II_.'

At the name there were flattering signs of recognition: the large dull
brown eyes above the long mournful beard softened. From the hirsute
lips came polite words. Ren had stopped not far from the entrance of
the shop. In response to Mr. Starr's light touch, he turned about and
faced the bearded stranger. Both bowed and smiled.

'Mr. Furber,' said Mr. Starr, 'has one of the finest collections of
books in Canada.' Mr. Furber had a rather effeminate gesture of
deprecation. 'I think, Mr. Furber, that Professor Ren Harding would
be very interested to see your collection.' Mr. Furber bowed
agreeably--he was not a man of many words. Mr. Starr had turned to
Ren. 'A first edition of _Decline and Fall_ is among his books.'

There was a pause; then Ren said, 'Oh, are you fond of Evelyn Waugh?'

'No! Gibbon,' Mr. Furber corrected, a faint smile playing hide and
seek in his beard; 'a not unnatural confusion,' with a sidelong glance
at Mr. Starr.

'And your Proust manuscript,' Mr. Starr reminded, telling Mr. Furber
in a bored voice, for he was angry. 'And haven't you a book of Cocteau
drawings too, Mr. Furber? Someone seems to have told me.'

Cedric Furber regarded Mr. Starr with the eye with which money in
America looks at no-money. He looked appealingly towards Ren, as if
to say 'must we suffer the impertinences of this unedifying citizen?'

'I should be very happy to show Professor Harding my books, if it
would interest him.' And Furber gazed in owlish, unsmiling invitation
at Ren, who expressed his desire to see the books, and a day and hour
was agreed upon.

With a very insulting look at Mr. Starr, this new figure in Ren's
life passed on. Lord Herbert was ruffled. But he gave Cedric Furber a
'build-up'.

'His father was one of the richest men in Canada. A small nickel king.
Cedric's brother became the head of the business, on the old man's
death. Cedric went to Paris, and came back some years later with one
of the finest collections of French books in Canada.'

Everything was the biggest or best 'in Canada', not in Momaco, in
America, or in the world.

'Where did he pick up that beard?'

'Disgusting, isn't it?' Mr. Starr made a dainty _moue_. 'I think he
was born that way.'

'What an accouchement!'

'Oh no! You will make me ill in a minute.' Mr. Starr put his hand on
his stomach, and protruded his tongue above the dirty white silk
neckerchief. Then he looked thoughtful. 'But he might be useful to you.'

Such was the manner in which Ren became acquainted with Mr. Furber.

    *    *    *    *    *

In due course Ren had presented himself at the residence of Mr.
Furber. It was a not immoderate-sized building, but of some
pretensions, with a rather lavish use of pillars and pilasters, also a
marble terrace thrust out from the main window of the Library. It was
situated upon the sacred hill which dominated Momaco to the North.
Cedric Furber's collection of books turned out to be quite
considerable, but very rich-undergraduate like, the aesthete and
dilettante presiding at the purchases, evidently, the scholar
conspicuous by his absence. Having learned of Ren's predicament,
resulting from the rigid Exchange restrictions, Cedric Furber
suggested that he should assist him with his books, giving up say two
afternoons a week to this, for which he was to receive fifty dollars a
month. The assistance required of him was mainly consultations. It was
a gesture of goodwill. Cedric Furber's horizons were beyond the
confines of Momaco, and although his friends at the university of
Momaco battered him with their tongues, Furber did not listen. The
Englishman was known to everybody for his historical treatises: Furber
himself was almost a foreigner, and knew that all his Momaco friends
were fiercely exclusive. The tariff wall which protected Canadian
industries from foreign competition was not the only wall protecting
things Canadian from outside competition. The learned professions, and
the teaching profession especially, had a 100 per cent tariff wall
against all learning that was not strictly Canuck, whereas the
products of Canadian factories only had a 25 per cent wall.
Consequently Furber did not listen to the chatter. This was a private
affair between Ren and himself.--He liked Englishmen, because they
were more genteel than his own compatriots. His own family came from
Vancouver, with interests and relations in Seattle and San Francisco,
which was the next thing to being an American, and he looked upon the
ferocious exclusiveness of these longer-settled parts of the dominion
with the eye of an outside observer.

If the genteel meant a great deal to Lord Herbert, it also meant a lot
to Lord Cedric. His aestheticism was a by-product of social snobbery.
Books, old jade, clavichords and Baroque art were functions of the
leisured existence of princes, counts, and dukes. He too, like Mr.
Starr, was of the circle of the Duchesse de Guermantes and of Madame
la Comtesse de Villeparisis. And, like Mr. Starr, he was what the
latter designated as a 'tribesman' (this refers, of course, to the
Pansy-clan).

Mr. Furber lived with his sister. She sculpted, in a big studio at the
rear of their residence, though she spent more time in New York and
Washington than in Momaco. She was so 'grande dame' that she could
scarcely be seen. When she was 'in residence' Ren was ejected, when his
work was over, by a side porch leading off the library, lest Mayenne
should have to say how-do-you-do too many times to this mere historian:
mere college professor, even if possessed of a respectable celebrity.

The procedure, when Ren arrived--in the end he always presented
himself at the side-porch, for he was no more desirous of encountering
the preposterous Mayenne than was that embodiment of gentility to see
him--was as follows. Furber and he would pass into an 'office',
adjoining the library. Furber would sit at his desk, in shadow (and in
a comfortable upholstered chair); Ren would sit upon one of the two
surprisingly puritanic chairs, facing the light--the glaring North
American daylight--until his eyes as well as his bottom ached.
When--after several hours sometimes--he rose, his bottom was numb, his
eyes watering. Of the two chairs there were times when he thought one
was the less hard. He would stick to it for a period. Then suddenly he
would switch to the other one, and for a couple of weeks adhere to it.

Furber would push over a pack of cigarettes, or a box, or a case: for
smoking was conceded. There would be several books on the office
table, newly arrived from the New York dealers or elsewhere. They
would pore over these, discuss the author, the period, the binding,
the dedication if any (a phoney, did Ren think?), hurry off and
search in reference books for dates and other data.

At last the conference would break-up. They would pass out of the
office, and enter the library, Ren winking at a bust of Bolingbroke
as he passed it. The library was where he was supposed to earn his
fee, reshuffling and organizing and bringing the catalogue up to date.
But it was in the office that he passed the majority of the time, in
conference with Furber.

Once or twice he _had_ been in the house itself, as a very great
favour. Once he had even been in the drawing-room--for a few minutes,
to be shown an engraving. In the study, which was a room adjacent to
the library, he had actually been asked to sit down, and the chairs
there were more accommodating to the posterior than were those of the
little office. Upon the study wall were photographs of nude young men:
of _one_ nude young man he thought. As he was looking at them he found
Furber watching him with owlish impassivity, with the most tenuous
hint of enquiry: as if to say 'Well?' There was an obscene ink-drawing
by Jean Cocteau, a photograph of a Dali, photos of Roman aqueducts, a
scene in the mountains above Split, a view of Paris from the window of
an apartment in the Ile Saint Louis where he often passed a few months.

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. Ren 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.
Ren 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 Ren was not allowed to
penetrate. To be treated like a man who had come to mend the clock
would not have mattered to Ren, 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 Ren
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_: Ren 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 child-like, 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
Ren was getting on, and when Ren 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, Ren
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. Ren 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!' Ren 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
_mnager_ 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!' Ren mused
again, shortly after Furber had sidled and wriggled his great height
out of the door, coquettishly responding to their duet of crashing
_Good-byes_.

'Why be grateful?' Hester enquired.

'Just a debt,' Ren 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.'

Ren 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 Franaise_. 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 Valry 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.
Ren 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
Ren 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?' Ren 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.

Ren 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. Ren 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,' Ren 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?' Ren inwardly countered) 'but a little later
on, I hope, we shall go on with our work.'

Ren 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,' Ren said. Furber always
appeared to have several hundred dollars in his note-case, 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.'

Ren 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 Ren, recombining them, and altering them with half-humorous
feminine venom.

'He is a worm,' agreed Ren, '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.

In the Nursing Home, incarcerated though she was, she had had a
splendid time. Now she was idyllically happy, with her baby. Affie
looked a little happy with the happy mother.

Ren sat for a moment thinking of this. Then he made a pronouncement.
'It sounds primitive at first. But I do not believe it is so, really.
The expense of bringing a new citizen into the world is borne by the
older, economically better-placed member of a family. Then the male
bird (temporarily absent) returns to the nest, and the care of the
new-born is assured. If the male bird does _not_ return, it means the
female is unattractive. But she had no right to reproduce her
graceless self: so the male, in this case, acts in the best interests
of nature to keep away, and to refuse to help her to perpetuate her
unlovely self.'

'_That_,' smiled Affie, 'sounds to me a little primitive.'

'And to me, too,' Hester softly clamoured. 'How about ugly _men_? Many
of the greatest men have been hideously ugly.'

There were sounds of polite exultation from the female side. But Ren
put this down at once.

'You think you have reasoned well. But the fact is that the children
of the great are their deeds. Their biological offspring is generally
the dullest or vilest.'

After a little argument they left that subject, to discuss a neighbour,
called by the Hardings 'The Duchess'. Affie had the latest information
as to the new type of drug she was taking. This drug addict was a
lesbian, and she had been crossed in love. Hence the new drug.

Finally, Ren attempted to discuss the Russians who occupied the
apartment immediately opposite their own. A young man and a young
woman, and the mother of the young man, lived there.

But Affie became remote at once: this was one of the only apartments
about which she observed a strict discretion. The young Russian was
unusually good looking.

'Do you not know who that is?' someone had asked Ren with surprise.
'It is the "Toronto Kid".' He was well-known as a boxer. But somehow
he had got to Momaco, and he did no boxing there. Instead of that he
held people up and robbed them, with violence. Or so the detectives
said, with whom Ren had spoken in the Hotel kitchen. There were two
detectives who haunted the Hotel for some weeks, but they appeared to
be quite impotent: for why did they not arrest the young Russian, if
they really had the evidence, which they claimed to have, that he was
the next thing to a murderer?

Another puzzling question was why the Hotel disregarded the warnings
of the Police. If the Police informed the owner of a Hotel that a
certain guest was a dangerous criminal it might be supposed that he
would be asked to leave immediately. Not so at the Hotel Blundell.
Ren speculated as to the probable reason for this. The only
explanation was money. Numbers of men used to visit the Russians'
apartment, and they were always of an ostentatiously criminal type.
This alone would be sufficient corroboration of what the two
detectives said.

But now the underworld came there no more. The 'Toronto Kid' was the
owner of a superb car, the wonder of the Hotel. It still stood near
the Annexe door, but its tyres had been so badly slashed (who was
responsible no one knew) that it was completely disabled. The
discontinuance of the visits of gorillas may have had something to do
with the tyre-slashing.

A more likely explanation of this fact, however, was the presence in
the Hotel, by night as much as by day, of the Police. It had recently
been an almost nightly occurrence for the Police to visit the
Russians. At two or three in the morning Hester and Ren were wakened
by the tramp of heavy boots. This was immediately followed by 'Open
up, the Police!' shouted over and over again, and an imperious banging
upon the Russians' door, which continued until the door was opened.
This lasted sometimes for ten minutes. The women would have to get up
every time, no doubt. This was an extraordinary persecution; it was
obvious that the Police were convinced that something was hidden
there, and it was equally obvious that they did not find it. But there
was now what seemed to be a complication. The Police, it was said,
were also on this young man's track as a draft dodger. Some weeks
before, duly manacled, the young Russian was marched off; but late the
next morning he was back again. What this meant no one seemed to know.
Not even Bess. If this was to do with draft dodging, then clearly his
claim for exemption had not been disproved. If it was to do with a
criminal charge it had not the effect of stopping their nocturnal
visits. The police may not have succeeded in wearing down the
resistance of the Russian family, but they were successful in almost
reducing the Hardings to nervous wrecks. But, dominating everything
else, the mystery remained as to why the proprietor of the Hotel
Blundell did not turn these people out, and _that_ veil Affie not only
refused to lift, but would not admit that it existed. She, who was the
incarnation of indiscretion! This must indeed be hush-hush to affect
Affie in that way.




CHAPTER XIX

The Janitors


Of the janitors most remained unseen, in the regions where the furnace
was situated, beneath the street level. One cannot refer to those
regions as cellars, they were not deep enough for that, and also there
were many other things there besides cellar-like areas. There were,
for instance, a number of rather squalid apartments, there was a small
office, a store-room, and the remains of what was once a saloon. All
janitors, theoretically, must ascend to the upper part of the hotel:
for it was one of their duties to attend to the windows or fix the
elements in the electric cooker, or keep the elevator in shape. But
the majority of janitors omitted, for one reason or another, to do
this. What was mainly responsible for their failing to carry out these
rather ill-defined functions, was drunkenness. The furnace they just
must attend to, or everyone in the hotel would freeze to death: but
everything else they were supposed to do could, at a pinch, be done by
somebody else. More than half the time, for instance, there was an
occupant of a fourth-story apartment, a Mr. Jacobs, who fixed the
elements, and attended generally to break-downs in the lighting,
heating and elevator systems.

Why all the janitors were so defective in honesty, industry, in
restraint with respect to the bottle, or what goes with that, _das
Weib_, has already been explained. It was because Mrs. Plant, Affie,
and everybody else, on the whole, preferred them that way. The hotel
had no use for an honest, hardworking, and sober janitor. He would be
out of tune with the hotel, and the janitor is a very important
functionary in such a place. Charlie, the present janitor, was an
exception to all rules. And _he_ did not stay all the time out of
sight. Quite the contrary. Charlie was flying all over the hotel all
day long and for half the night. He awakened in Ren a rather similar
alarm to that he had felt for Mrs. Harradson. Charlie was a very
large Norwegian, like a gigantic squirrel, with a small head, in which
a wild pale-blue eye at all times lit up and was madly expressive. He
enjoyed the unusual advantage of being _persona grata_ with both Mrs.
Plant and Affie. Affie displayed the breadth of her sympathies by the
variety of characters she sponsored and protected among the long
succession of janitors: and without that protection no janitor would
be there very long.

She had been passionately devoted to 'Sonny-boy'. It was _she_ who
named him 'Sonny-boy'--the bank-clerk-like young man, who was the most
useless of all the janitors. In a way she was equally fond of Charlie,
the old jailbird, with his wild eyes and torrents of broken English,
indeed so broken that not a particle was intact, unless it was the
Norse intermixture.

She actually preferred a man to be a thief and drunkard. Having been a
nurse might account in part for her tastes. She once described to the
Hardings an experience of hers at a hospital, where she had acted as
an auxiliary unqualified nurse, or such was her story. One day a
violently protesting hag was brought in. They immediately thrust her
screaming and kicking into a hot bath. She was a confirmed vagrant:
her hair was full of hundreds of hairpins and also the greasy hide-out
of a horde of lice. She, for some time, defended her head with a
fanatical ferocity; it required all the muscular endurance and
hygienic militancy of Affie and two other nurses to force her to
surrender her head. They cleared out all the hairpins and effected a
thorough delousing of her entire person, and in the end she turned out
to be a delightful old woman, according to Affie; a professional
wandervogel, an indigent tourist, sleeping in the barns when the dogs
would let her, a mettlesome philosophic wit. Affie struck up a great
friendship with this old wreck who had once been a tobacconist. So all
her life Affie had had to deal with sick or eccentric people (her most
permanent type of employment being that of nurse-companion) until
perhaps she had developed an appetite for helplessness.--However that
may be, the only kind of janitor she heartily disliked was a competent
one, like a man called Jan--whom everybody hated because he was so
clean, sober, and good at his job.

Again, her sex reactions were original. A big strong man said nothing
to her. Jan was that, and this side of him was greatly appreciated by
the Belgian woman who ran the house next door. Even the hairdresser
widow on the other side appreciated this too, and Jan was greatly in
demand on either side of the hotel--until the Belgian lady beat up the
lady hairdresser one day just outside the front door, after which Jan
deserted the hairdresser and went to live with the Belgian
rooming-house lady. But to Affie he was nothing, she said he smelled.
This, Ren thought, was because he was definitely of the workman or
seaman class. Affie disliked all workmen. Charlie was an ordinary
seaman too; but he was mad, and more often in a jail--everybody
supposed--than in a ship.

But then there was something more than either of those things. Affie had
an eye for life. In Charlie she saw the ruined Peer Gynt, but still a
wild piratic lunatic. She loved his screaming laugh, his staring
hyper-eager eyes. She knew he had lived with the Troll-king and played
every scurvy trick upon his fellows, out of giddiness--and that he would
at last be melted down by the button-moulder. He lied so much he chased
himself, whirling in and out of his wildly blurted stories. If you
caught him in a lie, he burst into a peal of shrieks and dashed off,
leaping along the passages and up and down the stairs like a demented
kangaroo. Solveig had been sitting and singing, ah for so long. But what
does Solveig's song turn into if you stop and listen to it? Into a brood
of bawling children. So he vaulted away, and until he died would be
skipping and screaming with laughter, thieving and lying.

When Ren had occasion to descend into the basement during the Charlie
epoch he would find it full of the rolling pyjama'ed bottoms of
French-Canadian prostitutes. Their black Indian eyes blazed with
merriment when they saw Charlie come leaping down, with a duck in one
hand and a coil of rope in the other, which he was swinging round his
head, as if he would lasso the amused harlots.

Upstairs, he and Mrs. Plant would engage in shouting matches in some
room where he was working. He liked her deafness, it gave him the
opportunity to scream. As she always talked at the top of her voice
too, they made a deafening uproar. Anybody would suppose they were
having an appalling show-down: but if they listened they would find
that the First Lady and her janitor were only violently agreeing with
one another.

It was Ren's good fortune to observe Charlie, in the midst of one of
these transports, slap Mrs. Plant on the shoulder, nearly knocking her
down, so great was his approval of what she had said. Though visibly
shaken, she did not mind a bit. Nothing that Charlie did was wrong.
When he robbed a store she might have been expected to mind a little.
But she understood, or Affie did, that he was irresponsible, and that
it was, like everything else, a prank merely.

One evening after tea, Ren and Hester were in conference, and both
were speaking in low tones, for they preferred that what they were
talking about should not be heard by Affie. Hester was frowning as she
listened, then suddenly without warning the door flew open. There may
have been a knock, but neither of them heard it. Charlie stood there
panting, his hat on the back of his head, and the right eye, which did
all the expressive work, was darting about, full of the maddest light
they had ever seen in it. His hands too were in ceaseless movement,
and one flipped out of one of his pockets with a baby packet of tea.
As he held it out he was convulsed with crazy mirth, and he continued
to pour out a jerky stream of largely incomprehensible speech. But
'want buy' was said a great number of times with great eagerness.

Charlie dropped a small packet of tea upon the table by the side of
which the Hardings were sitting. A lightning dive into the dark hole
of his pocket, and out shot a second packet, then a third, and a
fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, and a seventh, and an eight, and a
ninth, and a tenth, and an eleventh, and a twelfth. So there were a
dozen miniature packets of tea. As each packet was produced, he
riveted a moist eye upon Hester, and when Hester and Ren began to
laugh, as the pile of tea-packets went on increasing, he laughed with
extraordinary glee. They were entering into the joke of the
thing--that was as it should be.

They asked him how much he wanted for these packets of tea, and he
screamed with laughter at the idea of knowing how much he wanted for
them. Tea was in short supply and the Hardings wanted the tea. All he
knew was they wanted the tea, and that he had the tea. He tried to
twist his body in a hysterical knot, coughing with laughter. Then he
darted his head down towards Ren and poured out a lot of urgent
confidences, mostly in Norwegian. Ren's nervousness increased, and
taking a couple of dollars out of his pocket he held them up, he made
an offer. Charlie almost tore the notes out of his hand, and pushed
the tea-packets over towards Hester. Then he reached down into the
other pocket, and with the abruptness of legerdemain a huge cheese,
actually processed cheese supplied in cubes, flew out of his pocket
and then, with a bang, there it sat, immense and greasy, upon the
table. This big square of cheese seemed to strike him as the funniest
thing he had ever seen. He kept pointing to it, gulping with laughter,
as he jumped about. 'Cheese!' he shrieked. Hester and Ren shook their
heads. Charlie had one more try at getting them to see the joke. Then
he snatched the cheese up and thrust it back in his noticeably unclean
pocket, and darted out of the Room. The Hardings had not the least
idea of the nature of this joke. But very soon they were to be
enlightened.

The next morning at about nine o'clock there was an uproar at the foot
of the stairs near which their apartment was situated. Both of them
jumped up and ran to the stair-head. Charlie, screaming with laughter,
was being beaten up by a large jewish woman. She had torn his shirt to
shreds, and Charlie whirled his arms about in an attempt to beat off
this frantic woman, who kept spitting in a hoarse staccato, 'Dirty
teef. You shop-lift--you break my shop in, you tak my sheese, I phone
de pleece.' Charlie took a six-stair leap towards the Hardings, his
face strained up towards them in the usual eager delight, but she
caught him by the heel crying hoarsely, 'You beast! You crim-in-al!'
Clutching the banister, he kicked her off, and in a blue cloud of
strips and tatters, he leapt past the Hardings. Mrs. Plant, it turned
out, had come up behind Hester. That lady gazed after her
tatterdemalion janitor, and when he had disappeared at the other end
of the corridor, she turned to Hester, smiled and nodded her head, as
if to say, 'Well, what an odd fellow it is!'

Very soon the police arrived, and took him away, which he seemed to
regard as the best joke of all. They were as morose as the great
jitterbug was elated, and they marched off dourly with this tattered
giant dancing between them.

This irrepressible jitterbug turned the hotel into the kind of place
it would have been had the Mad Hatter been let loose in it for a week
or two. He would have been found attempting to thrust Mrs. Plant into
a teapot or purloin the medals of the Three Musketeers--'each for all
and all for each'. As a matter of fact those were precisely the kind
of things Charlie was doing all day long. His infatuation for medals
led to a stirring scene.

Charlie was in the Beverage Room with his favourite concubine. They
were sitting with a man who had a magnificent Boer War gold medal. The
prostitute was so impressed with this medal that she left Charlie's
side and sat beside the bemedalled veteran.

'You have no medals, Charlie. You have no beautiful gold medal like
this. I don't love you any more.'

'I have I have!' he cried as he sprang to his feet. With a banging of
doors he violently vanished. Ten minutes later he returned, his breast
jangling with medals of the most convincing kind. A number of suitcases
were in store not far from the furnace room, and this depository was in
Charlie's care and keeping. Needless to say he had conducted a thorough
examination of the contents of this luggage (for no locksmith was more
expert than he), and in one large portmanteau he had come upon these
beautiful medals. There, provisionally, he had left them.

    *    *    *    *    *

When they were back in their apartment, Ren said, 'If we were people
who were inclined to forget, this hotel would always be reminding us
what a chaos we live in.'

'I suppose it would,' Hester agreed without enthusiasm.

'We have got into rather a brisk little microcosm. But'--he looked at
her placidly--'it is not brisker than the nations of Europe.'

At the usual time Bess arrived with her vacuum cleaner. She seemed
glad to have seen the last of Charlie, for she did not at all share
the irresponsible temper of the First Lady, or of the Second Lady. A
small shop, which in England would be called a 'general shop', was the
place Charlie had broken into the night before. It was situated in a
neighbouring street, and both Hester and Ren were its patrons, from
time to time. Bess growled on about the enormities of Charlie, and the
disgraceful scenes that occurred down below, in the lowest row of
apartments. She said that on one occasion she had seen Charlie
completely naked, darting in and out, in a sort of obscene hide and
seek with a couple of naked french-canadian prostitutes. It seemed
that he was at the top of his form before he put his clothes on.

At the time when usually the Indian was compelled to hold his teutonic
wife upside down, there was a terrific shriek of an abnormal kind,
though Ren felt sure that it was the same woman. The earlier
disturbance had probably whetted his appetite for such things: for he
rose immediately, opened the door, and moved quickly down the corridor
in the direction of the shrieks. The sound grew louder, and then
suddenly stopped. Mr. Martin's was the first apartment you reached as
you moved out of the annexe into the main building. Ren found him,
standing just outside his door, and looking in his direction. In
light-coloured flannel trousers and a pale jumper, the faded pink of
his cheeks pulled down a little by the set jowl, the eyes gently
hooded, he was in some way a spectral figure. From the stairs leading
down to the street level emerged the Indian; not at all a daunting
figure, but a pleasant, dark-skinned young man. He was shouting, 'Cut
that out. Come back here, you bitch, d'you hear me.' But a moment
later he was confronted by Mr. Martin, and he stopped. In a low voice
of great impressiveness, he heard himself admonished, as though a text
from scripture had been selected for the occasion, 'A gentleman does
not refer to a lady as a bitch!' The Indian stood rooted to the spot,
as though he had seen a ghost, who had given utterance to some
frightful curse. Mr. Martin stood, awful in his respectability, his
mouth having scarcely moved to utter the tremendous sentence.
Obviously he was perfectly aware that this was big medicine. The
Indian, having glanced rebelliously once or twice at the Eternal
Englishman, went back downstairs again in eloquent silence.

With a smile, Ren went up to Mr. Martin. He had decided that it was
best to affect to have some errand in the hotel. 'Good morning,' he
said, 'so Charlie has left us?'--'As far as I am concerned,' Mr. Martin
replied, '. . . well, there are people I should miss more than Charlie.'

Over Mr. Martin's shoulder Ren saw the inflamed face, the small
girl-hiker figure of the German-Canadian, whom he knew principally as
a Scream. The Scream looked at him as any Scream would, as if to say,
'Yes, I am the Scream.'

Mr. Martin was sparing of his words, and, in any case, somewhat
mentally congealed. But as Ren was moving on, he observed politely,
'I suppose your arm is all right again now, Mr. Harding? It was very
rough luck.'




CHAPTER XX

The Private Life of Bill Murdoch


Ren wandered through the hotel, and dropped in at the kitchen. Affie
and Miss Toole were sitting at the table. They had been having their
mid-morning tea, and Affie smokily scrutinizing Miss Toole's cup. The
normal everyday expression of Miss Toole's face was one of
astonishment. Her eyebrows were forever raised, and if she were
chatting with a guest you would have said that the latter had been
telling her some pretty tall stories--which, incidentally, she was
scarcely prepared to credit. But now she looked not only startled but
dismayed. Ren saw at once that Affie had been scaring the wits out of
her. He had seen her at it before, and felt rather sorry for her
victim. Once or twice he had met Miss Toole in the corridor lately,
and quite obviously she was terrified. She was moving about like an
automaton, literally 'scared stiff'.

Ren sat down at the table. Affie lifted her head slowly and looked at
the intruder: for obviously he was that. 'And how is Professor Harding
this morning?' She knew that he did not like being called Professor
Harding, and the fact that she addressed him in that manner signified
that she would rather have his room than his company. Plainly she had
arrived at a point in her sorcery act at which the spell was working,
but for complete success more time was needed. Another ten minutes and
Miss Toole would be speechless with terror.

Ren pointed to the ice-box. 'Did you discover who took the chicken?'
The last time he had been down there, there was perturbation; no one
had been in the kitchen for ten minutes or so and it must have been
during that time that the chicken in the ice-box had vanished.

Miss Toole's look of astonishment increased, and she shook her head.
'Mr. Harding,' she said slowly, in a tone of chronic astonishment
deepening into dismay, 'to think that one can't leave a door open for
ten minutes!'

But Affie, bored, observed, 'Things are often stolen from the
ice-box,' as if to close the subject. 'Who steals them?' Ren
enquired.--'Your guess is as good as mine.' And Affie turned back to
the tea-cups. Ren smiled at Miss Toole and sauntered out.

Back in the Room, Ren told Hester that the embodied Scream had sought
sanctuary with Mr. Martin, and that she appeared perfectly safe there.

'How does that insignificant little man manage to . . .?'

'I wonder. Mr. Martin has succeeded in exploiting English
respectability. This is rather a feat, especially in a country where
the English are so unpopular. In the first instance he must have
impressed Mrs. Plant terrifically with his genteelness. His voice is
discreet, he exudes _it isn't done_, he always seems a little tired.'

'He is the kind of man one sees everywhere in England,' Hester said.

'Of course,' Ren agreed. 'He belongs to the sports-jacketed
lower-middleclass. He is a small provincial haberdasher, or (if he
were younger) a Trust House manager, or a seaside tobacconist.'

'Yes,' she nodded.

'Well, that is where _respectability_ is to be found. The "decent
fellows" of the Public Schools become, on that level, "One of the
best", "a white man". He would be as white a man as you could find if
you tipped him well.'

'You are hard on Mr. Martin,' she demurred. 'He is a harmless little
man, is he not?'

'I believe you are wrong. He is not a very trustworthy man. But in a
small way he has "made good" in Canada. He knows the Northlands: he is
one of the innumerable "prospectors" one encounters, who have never
prospected. I am sure he knows no more geology than the patter anyone
picks up in the North. A few men come in here and have a drink with
him every evening. They sit there in his apartment drinking Scotch,
and talking of gold and nickel. I suppose the whisky is bootleg. They
are the substantial men of the immediate neighbourhood. They do not
get noisy, though they drink a lot. They sit there drinking easily and
quietly, as sea-captains do in a port, narrating their adventures in
strange seas. I do not know what his adventures have been. When we
first arrived Mr. Martin spoke to me of his life in the Northlands;
how he played the doctor with the Indians, and so on. I think that is
genuine enough.'

Hester regarded her husband with ironical expectancy. He returned her
gaze, and smiled. 'I say a mouthful about a very little man: a mild,
soft-spoken, weak-kneed Briton. But such mild-mannered little
Englishmen have often been at the bottom of very funny things.'

Hester opened her eyes a fraction more than usual, and stared, again
expectant. For such hints of melodrama were not his line of country.

'If he has exploited his genteel personality, others might do so too,'
Ren added, as though as an afterthought.

'Really, Ren!' Hester laughed. 'If anything occurs in this hotel . . .
of a startling nature, I shall suspect Mr. Martin--or _you_, darling.'

    *    *    *    *    *

The janitor who succeeded Charlie was greatly disliked by Affie. He
was the ex-boxer whose face she smacked. Everyone described him as
'punch-drunk'. But to Ren it seemed that the punches that made him
permanently muzzy and half-stupefied were in reality kicks that came
out of a bottle. The kick induced by mixing two or more bottles of
dissimilar alcohol.

This janitor's name was Bill Murdoch. His behaviour was infinitely bad
from the first day of his arrival, when he nearly killed a man in the
Beverage Room. He was lazy, drunken, and surly. If, in the abstract,
as a worthless ruffian, he qualified, he was dull and an unattractive
man, and no one, man or woman, could take any interest in him.

Inured as they were to dramatic noises, both diurnal and nocturnal,
some weeks after Charlie's departure there was one which made them and
the whole of the rest of the hotel sit up. It was in the middle of
the night, and it seemed as though the house were being demolished by
a giant. Both Ren and Hester were wakened by tremendous thumping in
the basement. It was a blow which shook the annexe to its foundations,
followed, at intervals of about thirty seconds, by blows of equal
force. Almost at once the most bloodcurdling screams were heard,
appearing to come from somewhere below. Someone--or something--was
battering with sinister power upon a wall; or so it seemed at first.

'This is too awful! What is happening!' Hester's voice was a little
breathless. For once this noise sounded as though the whole hotel was
involved: as if at length this giant footstep would be heard outside
their own door, as if the attack were upon all of them. For the
imagination is apt to inhibit the rational faculties: and the
imagination is basically anthropomorphic. And thus, although the
faculties responsible for mathematics would assure the anxious heart
that these sounds were a product of some sort of hammering, and it was
_not_ Thor's hammer that was being used, nevertheless the imagination
would have its way, would insist that the god Thor was in the
basement, or else it would appear that these enormous thuds were the
footsteps of a supernatural being.

It was the splintering and the crash of wood, which could be
distinctly heard, which removed these sounds at last from the
supernatural, and confined them firmly to the natural order. There was
a final ghastly thud, echoing from the nether regions, the tearing and
cracking of heavy wood, and a crescendo of screams, differing in
quality from the German woman's morning aubade in sharps, to which the
annexe was treated every morning, as the genuine M'Coy does from its
opposite. These screams had terror in them.

All this frightful, menacing disturbance, in the heart of the night,
was merely the lid lifted off the private life of Bill Murdoch. Ren
went out and stood at the top of the stairs. There was no sound now
except the distant stoking of the furnace. Mr. Martin had passed
him--without recognition. His face had the same look of awful
respectability, the cheeks of faded pink hanging a little dourly, the
eyes hooded, as on the occasion of his reprimand to the Indian.
Obviously he was prepared to say, 'A gentleman does _not_ employ a
mallet to batter a lady's brains out,' if that were necessary.--There
were certain hoarse mutterings, and soon afterwards Mr. Martin
reascended, going in the direction of his apartment. Again as he
passed there was no recognition. Guests were not supposed to snoop, to
poke their noses in things of that kind.

'Very official!' Ren thought to himself, and he speculated as to
whether Mr. Martin were the real owner of the hotel, and Mrs. Plant
merely a rather subtle blind.

He watched the small grey figure, with its genteel flexing of the
knees, as it went down the corridor. And he thought he saw something
white in the dark angle where Mr. Martin's apartment was situated.
Yes, Ren pondered, there is more in Mr. Martin than meets the eye. He
reproached himself with having been so unobservant. So quiet a little
man, so harmless, so genteel.

In the morning, Affie visited them after breakfast. This, according to
her, was what had occurred during the night. A Peasoup, living in a
basement-apartment, cohabited with a woman not a French-Canadian. This
man worked at night. The woman was quite nice, Affie reported; she
came from 'a good family' in Ottawa. This made it all the more
surprising that, not content with living in sin with a repulsive
Peasoup (who looked like a defrocked priest, and Affie felt quite sure
he was--and it was a great pity they did not defrock more of
them)--not content with this flagrant exhibition of bad taste, she
had--at night, of course, when the Peasoup was out at work--palled up
with the unspeakable janitor, who was always too drunk to be of much
use to any woman, and sent his shirt to the wash once a year.

Well, for some reason, the Peasoup had unexpectedly returned last
night and failed to find this woman in their apartment. After a little
investigation, he discovered her in the janitor's room very drunk, in
bed beside the even drunker Bill Murdoch. He had gone away, secured
something at once heavy and handy, and returned to the room of the
janitor who was now alone, since the offending woman had succeeded in
staggering back to her apartment. With a rain of gallic curses he
rushed at the prostrate janitor who had not moved from where he was,
or indeed had any consciousness of what was happening, and gave him a
terrific beating with the weapon he had found in the furnace-room.

This had occurred at about twelve-thirty, as Affie timed it. She had
been woken up by the commotion. Then about four o'clock the stunned
and drunken janitor came to his senses, or enough so to experience
resentment, and to be in possession of sufficient strength to
undertake retaliatory action.

He banged with his fist on the door of the Peasoup's apartment,
uttering the most unspeakable threats; he flung himself against it,
and kicked it with great violence. But these were all very solid doors
of good Canadian wood, and he made no impression on it. He seemed,
though, quite resolved to get in somehow, and his fury increased as he
found himself thwarted.

The Peasoup's sensations were not of the pleasantest, for he was a small
man, and the janitor would certainly eat him alive if he broke down the
door. So he escaped through the window, and he had been watched by
Affie, hopping through the backyards, which were knee-deep in snow.

Unable to bring down the door by hurling himself against it, Bill
Murdoch had fetched from the store-room a heavy baulk of wood about
six feet in length. Supplied with this battering-ram he opened the
assault proper upon the Peasoup's apartment. His imprecations filled
the whole of the lower part of the house, and the woman inside, who
had not fled with her mate, was terrified, it was plain to hear. Why
she too had not escaped across the snow Affie could not understand.
When at length Bill Murdoch battered the door down, she was beaten
within an inch of her life. (Perhaps Affie exaggerated, but it was no
doubt probably unpleasant enough). It was most likely that Bill was
still too drunk to see that this was not the Peasoup, or else not very
particular who it was received his retributive blows.

Somewhere about noon the police arrived, and the battered, bloodshot,
cursing janitor was marched off. The uncouth quarters reserved for
janitors were cleaned out, clean linen replaced the soiled, and within
a few hours a new janitor was installed.




CHAPTER XXI

The Microcosm becomes an Iceberg


Not much more than two weeks had passed when Ren received a telephone
call from Mr. Furber, asking him if he would care to resume his duties
as 'librarian'. The following afternoon Ren was sitting once more
upon one of the two unsoftened chairs at the side of Mr. Furber's
office table, offering his opinion as to the value of several books,
and as to whether they would be an acquisition to Mr. Furber's
collection. Regarding the first of these two questions, he had not the
remotest idea what the answer was. He knew as little about the market
value of a book, as he did of the value of diamonds or fur coats. As
regards the second question, since most of Furber's books did not
interest him, it was a waste of time consulting him as to the
desirability of adding a little-known Marquis de Sade to the
collection. But he had to affect enthusiasm, in order to retain his
position upon one of the unsoftened and malformed chairs, reserved for
those of very low income-brackets. But he and Hester were overjoyed:
black Christmas was forgotten, and they prayed with fervour that he
maintain his precarious perch upon Mr. Furber's awful chairs for many
months to come.

The actual date of this reinstatement was January the eighteenth. The
evening of January the twenty-second was spent as usual. First of all
they listened to the bulletins, reporting acts of war all over the
world; the slow unfolding of World Ruin, Act II. After that they
listened to a talk by an American Expert on Asia. He was a very
aggressive anglophobe, who once a week told the American public that
'White Empire in Asia' was at an end--and he made it very clear what he
meant by that. He meant that England must immediately quit India, Burma,
Malaya, the East Indian and Pacific Islands, Hongkong, etc., etc., etc.
He also made it perfectly plain that the English must do this because
they were unpleasant people; not because the wickedness of white people
occupying and bossing Oriental countries worried him particularly. He
was not a moralist, like an English Liberal or Socialist--he was not
possessed of an uneasy White conscience. He was just a violent
imperialist who objected to other imperialists occupying all the
territories that would be better run by Uncle Sam. And England was after
all a small island, not much bigger than Long Island.

'Europe will be crushed between American and Russian Imperialism,'
Ren remarked absentmindedly. 'And England's Empire will vanish like
smoke--literally overnight, this war being the night in question. I
wonder if there is a single Englishman, bar Mr. Churchill and a few
dozen more in politics and in banks, who knows that?'

'Is it really as bad as all that?' Hester protested.

'It is what we call History. The only thing that is _bad_ about it is
that the civilization which is now enjoyed by France (and if it were
not for Nazis, by Germany) will be destroyed, and there will be
nothing anywhere to take its place. That is bad.'

But, as has already been explained, the ruin of these two people's world
was by now so much an accepted thing that it had lost its power to
depress. No cloud went with them from the war bulletins over into the
other programmes consistently light-hearted, which immediately followed.

The night was exceptionally cold, even for Momaco. And although the
heating system was good enough, on such nights, when it went to forty
or fifty below zero, they switched on an electric fire which was also
provided. Even so, they felt uncomfortably cold, and when they went to
bed they placed their overcoats on top of the blankets, and slept in a
laocoon-like embrace.

About three-thirty in the morning there was a sound that woke both of
them; it was a new sound that they had never heard before. They did
not know what it meant, they lay and listened. Actually it was the
clanging of the large bell, which was installed in a corner of the
entrance lounge. It was a very powerful bell, which could be heard
plainly in the Annexe: its sound was harsh and unpleasant. The
Hardings had never taken any notice of it, but it was an alarm bell,
provided to alert the guests in case of fire. Ren sat up in bed and
exclaimed, 'What is that? It is in the house somewhere.'

'It sounds to me like an alarm,' Hester said. There was a stir and
murmur throughout the Hotel, upstairs someone was pounding frantically
about. Then there was a tenuous screaming, from a long way off, and
almost immediately afterwards the Indian's wife went into action. Ren
jumped out of bed, turned on the electric light, and went over to the
window. As he held the curtain aside, he said, 'There are flames. The
Hotel is on fire. We must be quick. We must try and get our belongings
out.'

Hester jumped out of bed, and moved quickly over to the window. Flames
were coming out of the top of the Hotel, against the moon-illumined
sky. It was a bright orange kicking against an electric blue. Both had
the same experience, both felt incredulous. The idea of the Hotel, the
shell in which they had lived for so long, going up in smoke and
flames, they had to become accustomed to; the destruction of a
microcosm gives one a foretaste of the destruction of the world, and
Ren thought afterwards how much they had taken their especial
universe for granted, and how far they had been from a realization of
the destruction they were always talking about.

'What do _we_ do?' asked Hester, her teeth chattering.

'The first thing is to dress. And _dress warm_. We shall probably have
to get out. It is at least forty below zero.'

He tore their overcoats off the Murphy bed, and afterwards pushed it
up into the air, until it fitted neatly into its cupboard, the doors
of which he banged shut. Next he went to the clothes closet, lifting
from its hanger his warmest suit, and picked up his overshoes. In a
few minutes he was dressed, all but his overcoat. Hester, on her side,
had disappeared into the bathroom.

There was not much noise in the Annexe. Everyone was engaged in the
same way, no doubt, as were the Hardings. There was a sound of people
hurrying along the corridor, which was probably guests streaming out
of the main part of the Hotel, from which direction came confused
noises, among them the screaming of women. All these sounds filled
both of them with horrified apprehension, and in Ren, more than in
Hester, there was the sense of pressure, from a time that was now
constantly narrowing. Ren had lifted on to the table a large
portmanteau: into this he rapidly packed clothes, underclothes as well
as suits and dresses, snatching them out of drawers, and pulling them
out of the clothes closet. 'Won't that be too heavy, Ren?' was
Hester's anxious enquiry. He seemed not to hear.

For some little time, smoke had been seeping in beneath the door. When
he had piled everything in the portmanteau, he strapped it up, and
then went quickly into the corridor. It was full of smoke. The young
Russian was standing at his door, and smiled.

'What is the Fire Chief doing?' he asked. 'Where are the hoses? It is
a quarter of an hour now since that bell went. The Fire Chief is a
Peasoup. He don't like being woken up.'

'Ah, that's it!' Ren responded. As he was going back into his
apartment, he saw Mr. Martin coming along the corridor, with the
expression that would be there if he were on his way to point out to
somebody that 'a meat-saw is not the implement a gentleman uses to saw
off a lady's head'! The bottom of his flat cheeks of faded pink
flapped very slightly, and he called out, 'The Hotel is on fire. Open
all windows.'

'Needless to say do not open the windows,' Ren warned Hester. 'Come
with me,' he continued. 'I must carry this out. We will come back if
the smoke is not too bad.'

Ren dragged the portmanteau outside the door. Firemen now were rushing
down the corridors, banging upon the doors, shouting 'Get out.' The
fireman on their floor sprang over the portmanteau on his way out.

'Let me give you a hand with that,' said the Russian. Ren was glad of
this help, and the portmanteau was quickly carried out into the
street. There were a number of people gathered there, guests and
sightseers. Ren caught sight of a woman with whom he had often
talked, who occupied a house almost facing the street-door of the
Annexe. She offered to take in their luggage, if they wanted somewhere
to put it. Hester had carried out a suitcase, and this and the big
valise were placed just inside the front door. Mrs. Waechter was the
woman's name; she explained to them how it was that the fire had got
such a hold. The hydrants had been frozen and it had taken them some
time to get rid of the ice. It was only a few minutes ago that the
water had been directed on the flames.

They left Mrs. Waechter, and returned to their apartment. The smoke
was thickening all the time, and they had not been in the apartment
above four or five minutes before the water began coming in at the
door, and they were soon standing with water over their shoes. 'So
they _have_ got their hoses playing at last,' said Ren. 'They must be
shooting some back into the Annexe, to discourage the fire from
spreading, I suppose.' But Hester was too tired and miserable to
reply. They were both hastily collecting what had not found a place in
the portmanteau, into another suitcase. Ren pulled the curtains
aside, and the fire had now spread to the entire front of the Hotel.
Massive smoke was apt to obscure the flames. At one moment a leaping
tongue of fire could be seen in front of a full-bellied black cloud,
spreading out as it ascended into the sky: at another moment small and
nimble flames would tumble and whirl as though escaping from something
hotter than themselves. They both stood dreamily at the window: their
eyes seemed to be saying to the flames, 'Yes, all right. Leave nothing.'

As they left the room Ren stopped and looked back. He was not looking
at a room but at a life. 'Farewell, three awful years!' he said. 'You
will soon be ashes.' But he did not wish that to happen. The Room was
him, it was them, they might never be so happy again. And that was a
dreadful thought: but it is what we always think when we say Good-bye
to something forever.

The Russian was still there at his door; his eyes were apparently
immune to smoke, but two huddled figures beyond him seemed to have
their faces buried in handkerchiefs.

''Bye,' said Ren. 'You are waiting for flames, eh?'

'I guess so,' the Russian replied, looking up the corridor. Leaving the
Annexe, they crossed the road to Mrs. Waechter's, and put the
typewriter, rugs, attach case, and another small suitcase down beside
the other things in the Hall. They went back to the sidewalk and walked
slowly over towards the Annexe door. On the way, Ren looked at her and
said, 'I have a lot of manuscript in that suitcase we stored. I am
going down into the cellar. No risk. I will go no farther than is safe.'

But Hester's face, which was quite stiff with cold, took on a peculiar
expression. The muscles which were automatically directed to produce an
expression of anguish, only succeeded in realizing a dismal snigger,
tears rolling down her cheeks, caused by the intense cold. She poked her
arm through his, however, and dragged him away from the Annexe, which
they had reached. 'There is nothing in that suitcase that matters, is
there? Do not go back into the Hotel,' she begged him. 'No, I won't
allow you to go down into the cellar, Ren. Do come away.'

He tolerated this forcible removal for a few yards only, then he
stopped.

'I shall only be down there for a few minutes,' he told her, as he
moved back towards the Annexe door. 'I am only going to have a look:
if it is impossible to do anything about the suitcase, I will come
back immediately.' He disengaged himself, crossed the sidewalk to the
door, passed inside, and ran down the steps to the basement.

Hester followed him up to the door, and there she took up her
position, although there was a good deal of pushing to and fro.

Ren found that there was not more than an inch of water in the
corridor below street level, but it was extremely hot. Striking a
match, he moved rapidly along the left wall as far as the furnace
room. As he looked in he saw that the furnace was still functioning,
and the light from one of its doors disclosed the fact that someone
was standing near it. He went in and found that it was the Indian, who
seemingly was warming himself and smoking a cigarette.

'A good place when it's forty below,' said the Indian.

'Indeed it is,' Ren answered, warming his hands at the furnace. The
Indian came forward, and with an expert deftness, opened another of
the furnace doors.

'All clinkers!' he said contemptuously, waving his hand towards the
glare. Ren recalled that his job was said to be that of 'an
engineer', which might mean anything from janitor to the designer of
marine engines. But he certainly had a janitor's or fireman's
indignation with the quality of the coal.

'I am down here to see if I could get into the storage-room. I have a
large suitcase there.'

The Indian shook his head. 'I shouldn't go much beyond this.'

'You think it is unsafe?'

'I damn well know it is,' the Indian answered irritably. 'There is a
very heavy door a few yards along there. It is fire-proofed. The
store-room is beyond that. But the fire has almost reached it I guess.
And the store-room would be locked anyway.'

'I will have a peek,' said Ren. As he left the furnace-room, Ren
heard the Indian mutter something.

He wondered, of course, why the Indian had strong feelings about what
lay beyond the door. And also, of course, it flitted through his mind
that this was rather an odd place for him to be. But he thought it
most likely that this man had come down there on the same errand as
himself--which would account for his irritability: then had remained
in the furnace-room as the warmest place he could find.

Out in the corridor he struck a match, and through the smoke (which
was not so thick down here) he saw, he thought, the door. He walked in
that direction. Suddenly, with the unexpectedness which always
accompanies such experiences, he ran into the door, from which he
recoiled with an exclamation of surprise. This surprise, too, was
paradoxical, for naturally the door would be hot since the atmosphere
was absolutely stifling. He fumbled for the door-handle and snatched
his hand away with outraged astonishment--in spite of the fact that if
the door was hot its metal handle would certainly be hotter. He thrust
his hand beneath his overcoat, where it was flexible below the pocket.
His hand muffled in this way, he seized the door-handle and violently
turned it, pushing the door an inch or so open. Hot smoke poured out
in his face, and there was the stench of burning which was intensely
pungent. He was again taken entirely by surprise and was almost
overcome as the inrush of smoke all but choked him. Almost in the same
moment that he opened the door he pulled it towards him again, and it
shut fast, it seeming to Ren that it was a new lock, it closed so
easily. He staggered, coughing and spitting, away from the door, and
as he could hardly see he felt his way along the wall until he reached
the furnace-room.

As he stood just inside the door he heard the Indian's laughter, who
remarked genially, 'Had a look-see for yourself. You don't think you'll
go in and fetch your case?' Ren laughed grittily and shook his head.

After a moment he said, 'I had a look. The fire is nearer than you
suppose.'

'Oh no it isn't.'

'Have you looked in there recently?'

'No,' the Indian said. 'No need to do that.' He coughed and spat. 'I'm
sticking around down here. Waiting for those guys to put the fire out.
And this is the warmest place I can find.' He continued to ponder
darkly over the clinkers.

With a Good-night Ren left the furnace-room and made haste to return
to Hester. As he was moving along the corridor he recalled that during
the instant while the door was ajar, and before his eyes had become
full of smarting tears, he had seen a glow through the smoke. He
computed that the fire was twenty yards or more beyond the door.

When he reached the street door he found Hester standing just outside
it, up to her ankles in water. The water was cataracting down the
Annexe stairs, and across the sidewalk into the gutter, freezing as it
went. And everywhere else, of course, there was quite thick ice, on
which they certainly would have slipped, had they not been wearing
their overshoes, whose india-rubber soles at least enabled them to
stand. Without that they could not even have stood up, for they had
not the life-long habit of walking on ice of the Momacoans.

Hester's face, as he first caught sight of it, alarmed him, for she
was beside herself, it was clear, with fear, cold and discouragement.
He must get her, he thought, into some warm room as soon as possible.
As soon as she saw him a congealed grin of rapture disfigured her
face. 'Ah, darling, that is good.' She was shivering, as he took her
arm, and he led her as rapidly as possible across to Mrs. Waechter's.

This good woman hastened out to meet them, and led them into her
parlour. Unsolicited, she proceeded to make a pot of tea for them, and
when Ren spoke of the necessity of finding a lodging for the
remainder of the night, she offered them a large room which happened
to be empty. All this satisfactorily settled, Ren took his leave.
'You sit here for a bit, the tea will help you to _dgeler_.' Hester
was so profoundly chilled that she did not resist very much, telling
him only not to be too long away.

Mrs. Waechter came to the front door with him.

'The hydrants being frozen gave the flames a big start. I hardly think
they will stop them now.'--'Nor do I.' And Ren told her what he had
seen when he opened the fire-door near the furnace-room. 'It would
take a stream of water as thick as the River St. Lawrence to drown all
that. It has got too deep a hold. It started deep-down.'--'I guess it
did.' And Mrs. Waechter shook her head.

Ren made his way round to the front of the Hotel. It was of course
impossible to cut through by the side of the Beverage Room, so he made
a wide dtour. He slipped several times in his haste, the last time
rolling over in the snow. After that he went slower, a little lame
from his heavy fall. He came into the main road, which was now a
brilliant and sinister scene, wildly lighted by the fire, and in a
haze of smoke. Rather more than half-way up the block he reached a
small hotel. Two firemen came up to its entrance from the opposite
direction, and he stood aside to allow them to pass in. The first was
dabbing his nose which was bleeding. They practically all of them
suffered from nose bleeding, as the result of the great efforts they
were obliged to make, in the appalling cold. Small icicles were
hanging from the nostrils of the second fireman; and his moustache,
where his breathing moistened it, was full of minute icicles too. Some
of them depended in front of his mouth, where, however, his breath
tended to melt them. Wherever there was moisture there was ice. These
two men had come to the hotel for a cup of hot coffee. Ren also
noticed later on various householders, giving the firemen warm drinks;
women also brought cups of hot coffee to the firemen working the hoses.

The proprietor was a French-Canadian. He was a man who had spent some
years in France and spoke French correctly. Ren and he had often
talked together, and, when le sieur Jean Lafitte saw Ren enter his
hotel, he called out genially, 'Ah, vous voil sans domicile. O ce
que vous allez gter a prsent?' Monsieur Lafitte was in the best of
good temper. He was making money, and his principal rival was in
process of elimination. Inside was a small Beverage Room where coffee
and sandwiches were being served. It was full of refugees from the
Hotel Blundell. There was a great clamour, as everyone wished to
describe their sensations, to disclose their losses, to denounce the
fire, to show their wounds. There were women with nothing but their
fur coats covering their pyjamas, everything else left behind. There
were men with singed hair and children with chattering teeth,
chattering with fear and cold. As Ren entered a man near the door was
complaining that firemen had seized him and refused to allow him the
time even to cross the room, and fetch his money from the pocket of
his suit, in the closet. But the topic that dominated all the others
was the problem of Insurance. The loudest howls, the most distended
eyes, had an economic origin.

Ren sat down and talked to an old American whom he knew slightly, and
who was alone--but not alone from preference. It was quite clear that
he could hardly bear to sit there, maintaining an involuntary silence.
He was a little bag of fermenting words which, if Ren had not
happened to sit down, would have burst: and there would have been a
little figure conversing heatedly with itself, in the accents of
Michigan and Illinois. For Ren, he was a little mine of information,
waiting feverishly for its prospector, in the form of a
parchment-pale, kid face, all its wrinkles tautly stretched, the neat
silver-grey American suit enclosed in the neat dark padded overcoat,
and the neat grey hat hung on the back of the head, its brim rising
above the bright ironically-darting grey eyes.

All Ren had to say was 'Well!' and he began at once; he was well-nigh
incontinent. The fire, he blurted out, came up from the basement. It
was already a well-nourished flame when it sprang through the
mezzanine. And at this point the American assured him that with it
seemed to come a very strong smell of benzine.

'You first smelt benzine when you saw the Flame?' said Ren.

'Yes, but I smelt it everywhere.'

Obviously the old drummer had a firebug story to tell. 'I had an
apartment on the mezzanine. From the beginning of the ringing of the
bell, I had at most six minutes to dress and throw my things together.
When I first put my head out of my room, when the bell rang, I saw a
smallish flame: when I left the room less than ten minutes later there
were big flames. The staircase, I don't have to tell you, forks up
from the lounge, joining the mezzanine balcony on either side. These
flames were thirty or forty feet from the entrance to my apartment,
and I, of course, had to go down the opposite side to them. In the
apartment where the fire first hit the mezzanine the man was badly
burned, and is in hospital.'

'I see,' said Ren.

The old American looked at him with his bright inquisitive eyes. 'It
was Mr. Martin who was ringing the bell,' he said impressively. 'He
had got there mighty quick. Your fellow-countryman was pulling away
there as if he had been ringing a church bell for morning prayers. Of
course most people got out of my part of the Hotel when I did. Many
must have lost all their belongings. I had a grip and nothing else,
and most of my stuff was still in the grip. I got back here last
night. So packing wasn't any problem for me. Oh boy was I glad!
There's plenty of people's lost everything, and the firemen were
rushing about shooing everybody out of their apartments, throwing them
out in some cases.'

'People in the upper floors?' Ren suggested.

'No, just everywhere. It was all so sudden. I heard the elevator
working non-stop, but that could not have lasted long because of the
electricity. No time at all. Of course in the upper part of the Hotel
many of them had to come down on the fire-escapes. As they put their
hands on the old fire-escapes they nearly froze to the metal.'

'Was not the metal covered on the fire-escapes?' Ren objected.

'I guess not. But maybe it was the metal fire-ladders of the Hotel
they were talking about. That lot--it was two women and two men--lost
everything. And are they mad--why, one of them went round with a gun
looking for Mrs. Plant, and your compatriot, Mr. Martin, they would
like to find him too! But the Management has done "the vanishing
trick", as I heard a man say.'

'Any casualties, any dead?'

'They say there are seven Peasoups up in a top apartment, who didn't
hear the bell. They must be dead by now. A fireman tried to reach
them, but he could not pass through the flames. I saw a woman jump out
of a window.' He pointed out of the window. 'There are three corpses
right out there, along the edges of the sidewalk, waiting to go to the
mortuary.'

Ren left him, still talking. Outside in the hall there were numbers
of people: there was one man in a blue dressing-gown, thanking a woman
for having bathed his feet (which were bare) in warm water. 'Where are
you going to get some shoes?' asked Ren. 'I'm damned if I know,' said
the man with a laugh, 'nor where I am going to get anything else.
Everything I possess is burned by this time. The firemen pulled me out
of bed, practically carried me on to the fire-escape.'

Ren pushed his way out into the street again, and moved towards the
fire.

In front of the last house in the block, which was that of the
_Friseur_, were three bodies with their faces covered, their feet on
the edge of the gutter. Two reporters were bending over them, removing
one by one the cloths which had been laid over the face. As Ren drew
level with them they uncovered the nearest face. It was Affie.

Ren stepped quickly forward. 'Hold on a minute!' he said.

The two reporters looked up. They were French-Canadians, he noticed.
Affie's head had a deep scar, reaching down to the left eye. One of
the reporters pointed to the scar. 'Looks as if someone had hit her on
the head,' he said.

'It does,' Ren said. Almost automatically he said to himself, 'She
must have got that while snooping. She must have had her eye at a
keyhole . . . and someone came up behind her.'--Aloud, he said, 'This
was the Manageress.'

The two reporters opened their notebooks. 'The Manageress?'

'Yes,' Ren answered. 'Mrs. McAffie.'

Ren crossed the road to observe the progress of the fire. He had to
pick his way among the fire-engines, which entirely blocked the
roadway: but he found a path, stepping on and over hoses, shouted at
by firemen, who would have him choose some other route. The irritation
of these men increased as they noticed him shaking with laughter.

He was thinking, 'To be lying in the snow. Dead.' Perhaps he was
dreaming. Here was something that was not in conformity with a waking
reality. It was what was absurd in himself, that suddenly he had been
confronted with. Sudden death presents its card with a leer. He
thought now that he had seen a smile on Affie's face. He could not be
sure of this but he thought he had. She had understood the Absurd. So
it was that he found himself doing what the firemen thought he was
doing; it was a convulsion of meaningless mirth.

He had now reached the other side of the road, and stood gazing up at
the flaming edifice.

There were groups of people standing all along the sidewalk, and
gazing up, as he was. The two who were beside him were talking, and
one of them was telling the other how he had telephoned to a friend
the other side of the river. This friend had informed him that a huge
cloud of smoke was spreading all over the city. Ren moved along until
he was actually in front of the Hotel. The noise was formidable, there
was the throbbing of the engines, the firemen shouting to one another,
the excited talk of the spectators, in addition to the roaring and
crackling of flames, and occasional crashes inside the burning
building, and less frequently, though more disagreeably, outside. A
section, for instance, of burning wood and masonry fell almost on top
of the men manipulating a fire-escape: for several fire-escapes were
still feeling their way on the sides of the Hotel, watching for guests
who might still be there and seeking to escape. The fireman kept
people at a distance, and Ren was already as near as he could get
without protest. The fireman passed him, and asked a woman who was
standing in her porch if she had some old socks she could give him. He
held up his hands, both of which were becoming useless with frostbite.
He followed her into the house, and came out a little later with his
hands bandaged.

The noise, the glare, the clouds of smoke, the roaring and crackling
of the flames, this great traditional spectacle only appealed to him
for a moment. But he could not help being amazed at the spectral
monster which had been there for so long, and what it was turning
into. It was a flaming spectre, a fiery iceberg. Its sides, where
there were no flames, were now a solid mass of ice. The water of the
hoses had turned to ice as it ran down the walls, and had created an
icy armour many feet in thickness. This enormous cocoon of ice did not
descend vertically, but swept outwards for perhaps fifty yards,
stopped by the wall of the house of the _Friseur_, half submerging the
Beverage Room in its outward progress. The flames rising into the sky
seemed somehow cold and conventional as if it had been their duty to
go on aspiring, but they were doing it because they must, not because
they had any lust for destruction. These were the flames that still
reached up above the skyline of the faade. But a new generation of
fiery monsters, a half-hour younger, appeared behind them, a darker
red and full of muscular leaps, charged with the authentic will to
devour and to consume. And there were dense volumes of black smoke
too, where fresh areas were being brought into the holocaust.

But Ren believed he could see a still fresher group of flames, which
must be sprouting out of the Annexe. He moved farther on, where he
could see the Annexe. It was still quite intact, but there was a very
active flame which he felt sure was feeding on the first timbers of
the Annexe. Two streams of water began playing on it, and it grew
shorter and paler, but it did not disappear. He heard someone saying
that the Fire Marshal was in the backyards upon which their windows
looked, and that he believed the Annexe could be saved. They were
fighting the flames in the corner, attempting to stop them at that
point. He could see a dark group near the centre of the white strip
where the backyards were.

'Well there it is,' Ren summed up for himself, 'a bonfire, a very
large bonfire. Every Murphy bed, and every settee had a latent flame
in it, as the stuff of a bonfire. As we lived in our apartment, in our
wonderful crapulous Room, we were kept away from chaos and dissolution
by its strong walls and orderly shapes. But it can all be set a match
to, and daemonic nature appear from nowhere and eat it up. Then he
thought of war.' War is so respectable. The rulers, the firebugs, dare
not do more than kill a few million people. Theirs is a hypocritical
destruction, it takes them years to go round bumping off small packets
at a time. How much better it would be if they summoned a few million
people to the Sahara and destroyed them all within twenty-four hours
by poison-gas or some quicker exterminator. But no; they must pretend.
They must say that it is a very holy cause that they are serving, and
fool around for four or five or six years. Fire is not frivolous and
hypocritical, it is not human. The Hotel will not be there tomorrow
morning. Instead of it there will be a beautiful iceberg. What a pity
that dear Affie could not have got herself embalmed in the ice.

Ren did not return to Mrs. Waechter's the same way. He circled round
past the groceteria. As he walked warily along, he reflected what a
handicap it was, from the standpoint of the Fire, that there was no
wind. The whole place would have been burned down long before this if
there had been a good wind. It was completely windless, and a really
beautiful moonlit night, if one had any time for beauty.

When at last he reached the door of the Annexe, he saw that the fire
had not been stopped, as anticipated, but had its teeth in the
beginning of the Annexe. It was already filling the street with smoke,
and smoke as well as water was now coming out of the Annexe door. As
he was looking at the door, the young Russian came out of the smoke,
coughing and patting his eyes with a handkerchief. He had only taken a
step or two when another man who had also come out of the smoke loomed
up behind him, and seizing the hand which held the handkerchief, fixed
on the wrist a manacle, with almost as little trouble as if this had
been a prearranged scene. The two men were now fastened to one
another, but as if coming to life the young Russian hit the other in
the face with his free hand, and they both seemed to slip and fall to
the ground, kicking, struggling and shouting. But another man appeared
from nowhere, and bent down over Ren's ex-neighbour, whom he hit with
something. It was difficult to see what. The next thing Ren saw was
the two men dragging and carrying the young man to a waiting car,
which was parked beyond the disabled car of the 'Kid'.

So the 'Toronto Kid' had at last had to leave his apartment, as the
police had foreseen. Had he been obliged to leave his treasure trove,
or whatever it was, up there in the smoke, or had he got it in his
pocket, or tied round his waist, or in the lining of his hat? Or had
the women . . .? But Ren had been so busy watching the capture of the
'Kid' that he had turned from the Annexe door, from which, as he now
saw, the two women had also emerged. They stood at present, wailing
and weeping, in the custody of two detectives, who kept their eyes
very closely upon them, especially, of course, upon their hands. But
this was a rapidly moving scene; and it was hardly a minute before a
car drove up and the two women were pushed into it. The men jumped in
behind them, and as the car door was banged to, the car was already
under way and disappearing in the wake of the other one. The people in
the street all seemed to be shouting, and it was not certain if they
were shouting for anything more than pleasure at seeing three people
pinched, or anger at the thought that one day the same men might find
some excuse for pinching them.




CHAPTER XXII

Had I the Wings of the Morning


For the remainder of the night Ren and Hester attempted to rest, but
the noise of the fire itself, and the noisiness of those putting it
out, and those looking on, made this very difficult. The fitful rest
they did, however, manage to obtain, made them, by nine in the
morning, fresh compared with most people in the immediate
neighbourhood. To gloat over the destruction, Mrs. Waechter related
the highspots; how a fireman on the ice-cap over the Beverage Room had
been killed by the collapse of a wall, and how the bodies recovered
were said to number twenty. 'How lovely!' Ren exclaimed, and Mrs.
Waechter thought what a brute he was. Only Apartment 27A and its
immediate neighbours remained to be burned into unrecognizability. The
Fire Brigade felt in honour bound to prolong the agony of these four
or five remaining apartments. As a slight wind had sprung up, this was
demonstrably impossible.

After an excellent breakfast they went outside, and almost the first
person they met was Bessie ('another nit-wit'): she appeared to be
mouching round in the hope of meeting Mrs. Plant. The wind made it
ferociously cold and they invited her inside.

What Bess obviously hoped was that with the Insurance money Mrs. Plant
would acquire another hotel, and that she would be the Manageress, now
that Affie was gone. They both felt Bess had grown in stature because
of this opportune demise. She was at present in the running (she felt)
for managerial status, and, meanwhile, she had become the sole
transmitter of gossip, and bearer of news.

The latter function she exercised immediately. The following are a few
specimens of this. Would the Insurance Company pay up? This was her
first line. The hotel had been secured by Mrs. Plant by means of
mortgages: she had been in the habit of boasting that she had never
paid a penny for anything. She would refer to this as 'The modern
way'. But the Insurance Companies had become notorious for their
scepticism, wriggling out of payment wherever they could. They were
not such 'suckers' as their English opposite numbers.--When asked by
Ren on what these sceptical companies would base their refusal to
pay, she stared with the crafty innocence of a slum-child through her
hideous steel spectacles, 'Oh, I don't know.' She appeared to be as
sceptical as were, according to her, insurance companies. Bess said
the account of Affie's death in currency (though from what mint this
story came she had been unable to discover) was that she had gone back
into a part of the hotel where the fire was quickly gaining ground, to
fetch her Cherry fur. But that story did not agree with the position
in which her body had been found. 'Where was that?' Ren had enquired.
She, with a mock-innocent craft, answered, 'It was not far from you.
It was just beyond the door of Mr. Martin's apartment. And that was
early on--there was no fire there then.' Ren confirmed that he had
seen her body in Balmoral Street, at a relatively early stage of the
fire. 'Where did you see her?' Bess enquired. 'Not far from Lafitte's
hotel!' he told her. And Bess exclaimed, 'Ah. Right over there!' She
was full of information about the goods and valuables lost by the
majority of the guests, and the people who now were penniless and with
nothing left but the clothes they stood up in. These destitute
fire-victims were resolved to get the money out of Mrs. Plant: 'But
what hopes!' chanted Bess.

'Will they get nothing, then?' said Ren. But Bess knew the law
regarding Innkeepers' liability in the case of fire. It seemed as if
the law had been drawn up by Innkeepers themselves or their personal
friends. For, Bess assured them, in Canada, Innkeepers were exempt
from any claim for loss of damage to goods caused by fire.

When asked as to whether she had managed to save all her belongings,
Bess tended to be obscure: but Ren concluded that all this meant was
that she had lost nothing, but did not care to be so utterly without a
grievance. Katie and Bess had been lodged in a small apartment
adjacent to the kitchen, in the extreme rear of the hotel proper. The
two maids only had to carry their belongings the length of the ground
floor of the Annexe, and there was the street.

Asked if Mr. Martin was as elusive as Mrs. Plant, Bess did not seem to
like that question. She appeared to become quite unusually cagey.

'Well,' said Hester, 'I last saw Mr. Martin when _you_ (nodding at
Ren) were down below, looking for the case that was in store. As I
stood outside the Annexe door, Mr. Martin appeared, moving
effortlessly down the cataract on the stairs. His expression was at
once mild and stern. Turning at the bottom, he descended into the
cellar, the way you had gone!'

'When I was down there in the furnace-room!' Ren said, astonished.
'Well, he never got as far as the furnace-room.'

'There are apartments down there,' Hester reminded him. 'I suppose he
went into one of them.'

Bess offered no suggestion, but appeared to catch sight of something
out of the window. And the subject of Mr. Martin dropped.

Bess said she must get on with her search for Mrs. Plant. They told
her to come in and see them again: when they left they would leave
their new address with Mrs. Waechter. Bess looked so prosperous and so
Canadian in her outdoor clothes, but her personality, no clothes could
transmute. She remained indelibly the small Scottish skivvy, with her
morning greeting of 'Another Nitwit!'

That day they went on foot to a neighbouring boulevard, where there
were two or three apartment hotels. It was a long street, nearly half
of which was in the French-Canadian quarter, and its hotels were
spoken of as swarming with Peasoup prostitutes, or at the best very
liable to be that. But after the Hotel Blundell such personalities as
they encountered did not suggest a knocking shop. At the Laurenty the
executive and service staff were French-Canadian, and seemed quite
decent people. It was settled that they should move in on the
following day.

On their return to their lodgings Ren telephoned Mr. Furber, who, to
his surprise, was impressed by the fire, and treated him momentarily
as a social equal, because he had just been part of the cast in a
first-class local thriller, a banner-headline affair. This was very
American. Mr. Furber thought less of him when he heard that he had
lost nothing, had not come down on a fire-escape, and had not been
robbed by a fireman of his wallet. But he received new stimulation
when Ren told him about the little Detroiter, and how there had been
a stink of benzine, how this had caused him to smell a rat, and how
_arson_ had been whispered.

When Mr. Furber was told that they were now going to live at the Hotel
Laurenty, he tittered. He referred to it as the 'Lorelei'. Ren's
visit was fixed for the following afternoon, so that was taken care of.

Before leaving for the Laurenty the next morning they walked around
the amazing iceberg into which the Hotel Blundell had been
transformed. It was a magnificent sight; a block of ice towering over
everything in the immediate neighbourhood. It was of course a hollow
iceberg. The interior could be inspected through what had been the
street-door of the main hotel-building, on Balmoral Street. What Ren
and Hester gazed into was nothing to do with what had been the Hotel
Blundell. It was now an enormous cave, full of mighty icicles as much
as thirty feet long, and as thick as a tree, suspended from the
skeleton of a roof. Below, one looked down into an icy labyrinth: here
and there vistas leading the eye on to other caverns: and tunnels
ending in mirrors, it seemed. To the right a deep green recess, as if
it had been stained with verdigris.

This hollow berg was an unearthly creation, dangerous to enter because
so unstable. An icicle weighing twenty tons, rooted in an
insufficiently deep, an aerial upside downness, might prove too
weighty a vegetation in this inverted world. Probably it would hold in
present temperatures, but a relaxation consequent upon thermometrical
decline from forty below to twenty below zero, might cause the hugest
icicles to crash. It was a cave in which no polar bear could inhabit,
in which the Great Auk could not lay its egg, and into which no
ex-guest could enter with his ice-pick, to search for diamonds which,
in his breathless exit, he had had to leave behind. It was a sinister,
upside down forest of ice, rooted in the air; a piece of sub-polar
absurdity, which would stand there till the first thaws: but Ren saw
it as a funeral vault for Affie, which would be mysterious and
inviolable for long enough to suit her volatile taste. Her hooting cry
could sound there in the night--the only human sound that could be
heard, for only as ghosts could men qualify for admittance, and only
Affie be at home in this unearthly scenery.

The 'Lorelei', to give it Mr. Furber's name, was a far better-run
hotel than the Blundell had been, although Bessie, when she came to
see the Hardings there two days later, was highly critical, and spoke
disrespectfully of the French-Canadian servants. 'I have never yet met
with a Peasoup who was clean,' she said. To which Ren replied, 'I am
half a Peasoup. Perhaps that will help me to put up with it.'

To which Bess tartly retorted, in her Glasgow prim-talk, 'It may be
all recht for yew, Mr. Harding, but Mrs. Harding is no' a Pea-sup.'

But what Bessie had come for was to inform the Hardings that Affie was
now at a mortician's, and that a service was to be held there that
afternoon. A number of people were coming over from Ottawa, who had
known her when her husband was alive and when socially her position
had been very different from what it was at her death. The service
would be at 3 p.m. Ren and Hester told her they would be there.

These establishments known as 'Mortician's' consist, of course, in a
'lying in state' for everybody. Formerly only famous men and royal
personages lay in state, but the American democracy could not but
perceive that this was a bad example of privilege. So these morticians
multiplied, until today no one economically superior to a rat-catcher
but is stuck up in a mortician's upon their demise. So that afternoon
the Hardings were introduced to this American mystery: they were led
through a large waiting-room, and leading out of that was the
curiously mis-named Funeral Parlour. They had only taken a half a
dozen steps when, turning their heads to the right, they found
themselves gazing down at Affie. They were in a small chapel. There
were perhaps ten rows of chairs, half of which were already occupied.
Facing the latter was the coffin in which Affie lay, rather more than
waist high. It was somewhat inclined, and arranged so that the chapel
audience could see in part the face. Affie was fully clothed, in a
green dress she had recently bought. Her face was heavily made up,
powdered, and heavily rouged: and whether any facial injection had
been practised or not, Affie looked much healthier and younger than
she had ever looked in life. The scar had been in some way filled in,
and the discoloration removed.

On the other hand, it was a little Affie that they now saw, so small a
face, like a sleeping child. This immovable expression of a false
content, the slight smile of the last sleep, and of the mortician's
art, succeeded in making it look as though Affie, from the unearthly
calm of this final phase of her self-presentation, were smiling at the
people who had come to look at her, just as she would have done had
she been conscious--had she been asked to climb into the box and
arrange herself there, heavily made up. So Affie still seemed active
in this last display. The only thing which destroyed the impression
that this indeed was life, was the _smallness_ of the face. It had not
been a _child_ who used to stand there, just inside their apartment,
with a slight ironical smile, always _faisant des faons_ with an
unspoken 'Shall I come in? Am I intruding?'--(She, who had been
listening at the keyhole for anything up to ten minutes.) She had not
been of childish stature, but tall and straight, with a sense for
style--not like a doll, with its feet together, arranged in a
cardboard box for the Toy Fair.

Hester and Ren only paused for a few seconds to gaze down at the
dead. They then proceeded to the rear of the rows of seats. 'A
gathering of well-heeled bourgeois,' whispered Ren. But substantial
citizens were arriving all the time, and continued to do so, until the
last of the seats were occupied. Nearly all those present dated back a
good time, to those days when Affie and her lawyer husband were living
in Ottawa, before his unexpected death. The heads of most of those in
the audience, the males, that is, had the wintry thatch which would
also have been that of Affie, were it not that she and Miss Toole dyed
their hair in the bathroom every other Saturday. And finally it must
be said that Mr. and Mrs. McAffie must have been both prosperous and
popular, for all these people to make so considerable a journey to be
present at the last rites of Mrs. McAffie. The gathering was almost
complete when not the least prosperous-looking of this _lite_
attendance made her appearance. It was Bessie, in a handsome fur coat
(borrowed, as Hester recognized at once, from Miss Toole). She came up
to them a little shyly; and all three sat on chairs placed in the
corner for such as had not reserved seats.

As soon as it was evident that all were present, from a side-door
emerged a handsome young clergyman, notably contrasting in age with
his audience. He walked over to the coffin, and gazed intently into it
for nearly five minutes. Talking had stopped, there was a profound
hush. The long and mournful inspection of the dead, as though he had
been impressing upon his mind this image, that there should be no
anonymity when he came to intercede with God, was a well-conceived
part of this ceremony, Ren appreciatively reflected. Then the young
man, with his excellently serious face turned sideways to the coffin,
began to intone a psalm in a strong and hypnotic voice. Ren heard the
familiar words, 'For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth
himself in vain,' and this he recognized. 'Take thy plague away from
me: I am even consumed by means of thy heavy hand. When thou with
rebukes dost chasten man for sin, thou makest his beauty to consume
away, like as it were a moth fretting a garment; every man therefore
is but vanity.' Ren pondered at this point, I am consumed by the
heavy hand, but he added at once to himself that the hand, although
heavy, was not so heavy as might be expected. And so he gave
expression to what distressed Hester most. He was the kind of man, as
she had come to learn, who having lost both his legs would say how
merciful God had been to leave his arms intact: and if he lost one arm
as well, would resign himself on account of one limb remaining to him.

The splendid rhetoric was lifted in the air, by the aspiring voice of
the minister, winged with an emotion, which everyone felt would carry
the words to God's ear, where somewhere His head is bent to listen to
the noble words of such professional advocates as this, to intercede
for those blackened with sin, which He is asked, in His infinite
mercy, to forgive, and to allow to enter into the realms of salvation,
and when in finishing, the pastor sadly sang, 'Oh, spare me a little,
that I may recover my strength: before I go hence, and be no more
seen,' the last few words dying out, to fade away into the shadow, the
intoxication of the small audience had begun: and at the end of a
short and intense hush, came the most penetrating Amen that that
chapel had ever heard--or so everybody felt.

All the red necks and white heads in the audience were bowed. The
young cleric was performing before a small assemblage of elders, and
chanting to them of death. They had travelled hundreds of miles to be
chanted to of death, smiled at by the painted corpse of a member of
their social circle.

'Let us pray!' said the young minister, and the little herd of white
polls bent still farther and the lines of shoulders rose accordingly.
And after that a collect, and then another prayer for the slightly
smiling funereal doll in the wooden box. Then came the culmination.
The head, with its beautiful waved hair, thrown back, the minister
began in an exalted voice--and this was his final and most tragic, his
most solemn piece of declamation, and a most fitting culmination to
the brief ceremony: 'Had I the wings of the morning, and could I fly
to the uttermost parts of the earth' was his idealistic opening.

All these white-haired, these hoary sinners, mourned that they had not
the wings of the morning--those powerful and golden, beautiful
star-tipped wings, stretching across the horizons like aspiring
clouds. And oh, if they could have a part of the advantages of the
Morning (Who does not die or become Afternoon, but flies on and on
towards the remotest west) then _they_ would fly into the unearthly
distances, not to the uttermost ends of the earth, but of the world
and of Time. They had a momentary glimpse of a remoteness, of a
solitude, somewhere behind the stars, where they would be unimaginably
far from where they had been, and what they had always been. This
soaring rhetoric armed them with a contempt for the life they would so
soon be obliged to leave, and this verbal intoxication melted all the
old husks, and noses were blown in all parts of the audience. At the
rear, Hester and Bessie were both wiping their tears away, and Ren
bit his lip to discourage an unmanly display. But he thought wistfully
of the odious days in the hotel, and his heart was soft and
inexpressibly sad, as he thought of the wild woman who had inhabited
that puppet there, from which she had mysteriously departed.

It was with shame at the debauch of sadness in which they had indulged
that most of them shuffled out of the mortician's, some casting
resentful glances at the small painted figure which had been responsible
for this. But the fixed smile or half-smile of what in life was sexual
_clinerie_ answered appropriately the covert scowls.--Those who were
going on to the grave-side remained in prayer within.

    *    *    *    *    *

The Hardings returned to the Laurenty profoundly affected, but
resentful. How dignified and how _real_ (for it amounted to that)
Affie had been as she lay in the snow, with a piece of coarse cloth
over her face, placed there, perhaps by Monsieur Lafitte, as a sign of
respect. Ren could have wished that that had been his last glimpse of
Affie. The vulgar peep-show with the dolled-up face, at the
mortician's, was so violently unreal, that it blotted out the real.
They would have to wait until time had washed out that garish spot-lit
image, before they could see her again in their minds.

This hotel, like the Blundell, had telephones in every apartment.
Shortly after they had finished their tea the telephone began ringing.
Ren lifted the receiver, and he heard the familiar voice of Mr. Furber.
'Ah,' said Mr. Furber, 'have you heard the news about your late hotel?'
Ren told him that he had heard nothing about his late hotel.

'Well,' said Mr. Furber, 'a guest, a certain Mr. Martin, has been
arrested.'--'What for?' enquired Ren, with genuine interest. 'Did he
set the hotel on fire?'--'No,' Furber answered. 'He has been arrested
for the murder of the manageress, Mrs. McAffie.' There was such relish
in Mr. Furber's voice that Ren knew that he would be giving less than
satisfaction if he did not display emotion. 'Now _that_ is curious!'
he practically shouted. 'When did that news break?'

Furber told him that it came through on the radio, the Momaco station
just gave that piece of information and no more, except that Mr.
Martin is 'a countryman of yours'.

Ren gave his employer all the information he possessed about Mr.
Martin. He also told him that he had felt, of late, that there was
something enigmatic about that familiar figure. He had thought that
Mrs. Plant, the ostensible proprietress, might be a blind, and that
the hotel might be owned by Mr. Martin. Since then, a member of the
staff had gossiped: had told him that Mrs. Plant would assert that she
had not paid a penny piece for the hotel, that it had been a mortgage
transaction.

Then Mr. Furber evinced curiosity about Mrs. McAffie: was the
manageress perhaps the mistress of Mr. Martin? Ren laughingly
discouraged speculation along those lines, explaining that Mrs.
McAffie was at least sixty and Mr. Martin too, and that no love was
lost between the two.--When, asked Mr. Furber, had Ren last seen Mrs.
McAffie. 'Why?' Ren laughed. 'You do not suspect me of playing a part
in her murder? I last saw her a few hours ago in a wooden overcoat in
a mortician's.'

Mr. Furber, it was obvious, was greedily devouring a big juicy slice
of 'crime-mystery' in the making. He was reluctant to hang up the
telephone, but unfortunately Ren was a man out of whom could be
extracted the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So at
last he sang his good-bye.

Hester was then told what had happened, and her reactions were quite
different from those of Mr. Furber. The killing of Affie horrified,
and did not amuse Hester. Apart from the corollary of weeks of
impaired sleep and in the end insomnia, she had been less tolerant of
a nest of criminals opposite 27A. She felt that their toleration had
been counted on, that no Canadian man and wife would have put up with
it. Her general attitude to all the uncouth features of their life had
been very different from that of Ren. But this little lower-class
Englishman killing their darling Affie (and it was still in that way
that she thought of her, in spite of the ghastly debunking of the
Funeral Parlour), that was _too_ beastly. She felt sick: She asked
Ren to stop discussing it. And then she began to react violently to
her memory of the scene at the mortician's. The painted face in the
coffin, the rather sly hint of a smile (no doubt the mortician's
handiwork) had been repulsive at the time, but was doubly repulsive
now. Affie now began to seem to be part of the whole beastly business.
She and all the rest of them were a vile crew. She and Ren should
long ago have extracted themselves from this ugly milieu. The evening
was, not unnaturally, anything but pleasant. Mr. Furber rang up two
hours later, which did not improve matters. More news from the Momaco
station! A fireman had seen Mr. Martin strike Mrs. McAffie with what
looked like a new-fangled, slender cosh. He had come up behind her as
she was looking through the keyhole of the apartment. Mrs. McAffie had
turned her head quickly, still crouching, and he struck her down,
swinging his arm with great force, so the fireman reported. Also Mr.
Martin was the actual proprietor of the hotel, and it was believed it
was he who had caused the fire, and was thereby responsible for the
deaths of over fifteen people. How many could not be finally decided
until the ice had melted in the Spring thaw.

After leaving the telephone (with great difficulty) Ren came back to
where Hester was sitting. He was of course unable to suppress entirely
what Mr. Furber had said, and these further details increased her
nausea relating to everything to do with the place they had lived in
for so long.

Ren attempted to dispel the gloom by tuning in to the U.S.
Networks--carefully avoiding all Canadian stations. It was late in the
evening, when the following piece of silliness issued from their
instrument.

      '_For a cowboy has to sing,_
      _And a cowboy has to yell,_
      _Or his heart would break_
      _Inside of him,_
      _At the gates of the home corral._'

Hester had been knitting, and now looked up with a rather sickly
smile. 'My heart will break inside of me, if I don't get out of this
place. I know you don't agree with me, but I do greatly prefer the
Brompton Road to any street in this awful country.'

Ren did not reply at once; he sat with his elbows on his knees
staring at the radio. Then he said slowly and distinctly, 'What I am
wondering is . . . if we left here where should we go. One would not
find, I expect, in every city . . . a Mr. Furber.'

Hester stared, or it would be truer to say glared at him as though he
had just displayed an unmistakable streak of insanity. And in some way
she was right. Even more than herself Ren was shocked; and something
did find its way into his manner of thinking which was insane.




  _Part Three_

  AFTER THE FIRE




CHAPTER XXIII

Momaco or London?


The destruction of the hotel by fire divided their life at Momaco into
two dissimilar halves. The second half had a quite different
coloration from the first. The years in the Hotel Blundell were more
romantic, because to begin with, Canada was a great novelty, and
novelty is synonymous with romance; and the microcosm which had gone
up in smoke and fire was more blatantly microcosmic than what
succeeded it.

The management of the Blundell lived and let live, hence a great deal
of raw life was present, then the fact that it possessed a Beverage
Room (which the Laurenty did not) brought it nearer to the great heart
of the universe, and entitled it to microcosmic status. The Laurenty
was not, of course, quiet at night--no Canadian hotel could be that.
From the number of dark and shining eyes and waving hips to be met in
its corridors it was obvious that it was in one important respect in
no way behind the Blundell. But excessive uproar was not encouraged.
This was decently occulted. The janitors did not come and go with
rapidity, did not leave, shouting, between policemen: or if they did,
there was no Bess to keep the guests posted in such scandalous events.
A French-Canadian maid, averse from speech, attended to the Hardings'
apartment.

But it was not only on account of the very different character of the
hotel that this second half of the war-years in Momaco was so
different. There was a growing dissimilarity, owing to a psychological
factor; a tension, becoming more acute month by month, between Ren
and Hester, and, independently, within both Ren and Hester.

With increasing distress Hester observed the development of a new
outlook on the part of her husband. At the Hotel Blundell the sense of
transience of the first days always remained: it was an abominable
hotel, in an abominable city, which they were going to quit at the
first opportunity. So everything was anything but static. But now the
horrors of Momaco were never mentioned. In the first place, the
violent impression which the fire, the murder of poor Affie, and
indeed all the brutal unmasking of what they had been living in the
midst of for so long had made upon Hester, was apparent to Ren. He
realized that he had a new situation on his hands. Consequently, he
was careful to avoid expressing his feelings about the daily
annoyances peculiar to life in Momaco for a couple of uprooted English
people. He tended to discourage the chronic bitterness of the Blundell
days; above all, he resisted any pressure to evacuate Momaco
immediately. Against the 'really it was about time to think of
returning to England, since it was plain enough that this war would
_never_ end' recurring almost daily, he set up a defence-in-depth.

'I agree,' he would say, 'that the war is of an exaggerated and quite
unnecessary length. But it will end suddenly one day.'

'Oh no it won't,' she would retort grimly. 'And what is more, you know
that it won't.'

Ren knew, of course, that it wouldn't: and then he had so often, in
the past, shown her that it could not, that he had to be very careful
not to press too hard the opposite view.

'All right,' he would answer. 'Unquestionably it will still be with us
next week, and next month. But if it has not ended next year, in less
than a year, its end will be so near we shall be able to stretch our
arms out and touch its ending.'

Hester would lose her patience. 'Nonsense, Ren, you cannot make
statements of that sort to me. Even supposing we take all that
seriously for a moment, what then? Do you mean to say that you have so
little consideration for me that you ask me to live in this filthy
hotel for another year? I might perhaps have stood it had it not been
for that ghastly fire. No, Ren, I just cannot face it.'

Sometimes Ren would resort to amorous treatment, vigorously
administered. She humoured him--but after their transports, he could
see that she was not convinced. The logic of sex would have proved
dazzlingly irrefutable in any other connection, but not in this. To
leave this place, and to return to England, was now nothing short of
an obsession with her. And this had become the major feature of their
daily life. It was, for him, a huge obstacle which had, in some way,
to be reduced to manageable proportions or to be circled round and
left behind, or perhaps to be incorporated in the landscape as a
permanent eye-sore.

Ren attempted to divert her socially. It happened that soon after
they had taken up their quarters in the Laurenty, through the agency
of Mr. Furber Ren formed several relationships which tended to
produce a more normal appearance in their life in Momaco. They went
out to dinner several times, to a few parties, and Ren was made
rather a fuss of at one of these. But as to these events producing a
better atmosphere they had, if possible, the opposite effect. They
literally terrified Hester. In one horrible prophetic glimpse she saw
them settled down for good in this monstrous spot.

The middleclass Canadian woman, as Hester supposed it to be, repelled
her just as much as everything else about England's ex-colony. The
Kensingtonian lady, wonderfully tolerant of the artistically bohemian,
for instance, stiffened in the presence of these Americanly
self-assured, pink-faced English parlour maids (as she thought of
them). Her eyes hardened, and contempt visited her voice, as she
observed them doing a little crude detective work: had she or had she
not been presented at court? was what they desired to know. She
admitted never to have bent the knee at court; well, she must be of a
pretty inferior class. It gave her some satisfaction to tell them that
she had never seen the Royal Family at closer range than one hundred
yards, and then by accident; and as to curtsying, she was sure she
would end on the floor if she attempted to do so. _They_ nearly all
seemed to have had the opportunity of curtsying at one time or
another, if only as spectators of a royal progress down the main
avenue of Momaco.

She realized that her husband believed that this new social life must
be a great treat for her; that he looked upon this as a trump card in
his campaign to reconcile her to Momaco. It was therefore with great
relish that she gave him her opinion of the ladies of Momaco--of the
dream-world of Mr. Starr.

Ren attempted to counter this by putting in a good word for the
'rather jolly' Madge Weldon, or Jack Christie's wife, 'who seems to
have a talent for malice'. Hester made short work of them: and warned
him that he must not count on her to go to many more of these boring
entertainments.

So the passionate solidarity of the two lonely exiles practically
confined to 'the Room' in the Hotel Blundell had begun to crumble. The
destruction of their prison had resulted in their coming out of their
seclusion into a more normal existence. Momaco began to relent. But
Hester retained the spirit of the disregarded intruder in a most
jealously exclusive society: and, as she saw it, Ren had in fact
broken away, and, in however qualified a manner, gone over to the side
of the enemy--had made his peace with Momaco.

It was of course true that Ren was prepared to benefit by such
amelioration in their treatment by the Momacoan as might occur: but
that did not mean that he had changed his opinion. He still thought
the Momacoans stank. The essence of the whole matter was Hester's
desire to return to England at once. So it came to assume the shape of
a fantastic question: _Momaco or London?_ Naturally such a question
was abysmally absurd: but Ren would have said that that was not the
real question. The nonsense-question, 'Is the miserable half-civilized
bush-city, Momaco, or is the great metropolis, London, the better
place to live in?' was not what was posed. The real question was quite
different. 'Was London or Momaco the better place _for Ren Harding_,
in the year 1944? would be the real question. Since the burning of the
Hotel Blundell, and the manner in which Hester had reacted to that
event had obliged Ren to answer that question, the act of answering
had brought enlightenment. He knew that he could never return to
London, now or when the war ended. That point settled, Momaco was his
best bet, not only in Canada, but in the world. This thought would
have been terrifying to a less truly stoical man: as it was he knew
that it was Momaco or nothing, and he began to know this hysterically,
fanatically, almost insanely. For he knew quite well that it was a
fearful thing to know.

The only factor which remained actively dissident was Hester. If she
would not agree to come into his scheme of life, makeshift and
admittedly unsatisfactory as it was, what would the outcome be? It was
unthinkable that they should part. But if she was obsessed, he too was
obsessed. In his case the obsession was never again to find himself in
the pit into which he had allowed himself to step; from which the fire
had mysteriously rescued him.




CHAPTER XXIV

The Party of Superman


The first of the new friends made by Ren were Professor McKenzie and
his family. It was through Mr. Furber that the introduction was
effected. He asked Ren to drop up one afternoon to meet a man who
knew and admired his work. Since the fire Mr. Furber's attitude
towards Ren had mellowed. The Hardings had been, as it were, baptized
in fire as Momacoans of sorts. Also Ren was now in the secrets of
Momaco, for was he not an acquaintance of one of Momaco's most eminent
murderers? one whose 'homicide among the flames' took pride of place
over all murders of recent years throughout the Dominion, and had
secured banner-headlines in the metropolitan press of the United
States.--It was Mr. Furber's habit now to introduce Ren in the
following manner: 'Do you know Professor Harding, the historian? He
nearly lost his life in the Hotel Blundell fire: and he had got to
know his countryman, Martin, quite well during the three years of his
stay there. You know, the _murderer in the flames_!'

In these introductions, needless to say, the rle of the Historian was
a very minor one. It was as the buddy of a murderer that he made the
grade. The large, dark, mild eyes of Mr. Furber studied Ren's face
with sardonic interest on these occasions. For Mr. Furber acted the
part imposed by time and place, and acted it with relish, but he was
under no illusions, and understood how vulgar the part was that fate
had cast him for. He realized (with contempt, for Professor Ren
Harding had to 'take it') what the other must be feeling.

With Professor Ian McKenzie, however, he acted differently. The
Professor was an 'old countryman', and had come out only two years
earlier, to teach philosophy at the University of Momaco. There were
at that seat of learning two or three spectacular teachers, to enable
it to hold up its head among the larger city-universities. It even had
a logical positivist from Cambridge (England) by way of a spot of
_chic_--also perhaps of scandal; although, had they understood what
logical positivism stands for, it would have scandalized the
methodists as much as it did the catholics. As for Professor McKenzie,
he regarded the lectures of the nimble little anti-metaphysical with
bored indifference. However, a collision was carefully avoided: the
little Cambridge horse-fly was the possessor of a small destructive
outfit, if he had nothing else, and McKenzie was a shameless
metaphysician. He had no wish to be reduced to atomic dust by this
patent pulverizer of everything. This was especially the case, since
no retaliation was possible, the logical positivist having whittled
himself away to a colourless abstraction which hardly constituted even
a token target.

Professor McKenzie was a smiling Scottish sophist of about forty-five
with a faint and pleasing accent, as far as possible from the
aggressive scotchiness of Glasgow. Pleasantly surprised, Ren found
himself again, at last, in the presence of a man of his own kind.

They passed from the Library, where the meeting had taken place, into
Mr. Furber's non-business quarters (panelled with the nude
photographic torsos of the juvenile male), reserved for those to be
treated on terms of equality. (Ren felt quite uncomfortable at this
honour, for he felt he ought to show, in some way, to Mr. Furber, how
delighted he was to be there.) The two professors were watched by
their host with a bland anticipation of something mildly amusing. It
was as though they had been two mettlesome dogs, who might be expected
to scrap, brought in there by the brooding aesthete. Both more or less
realized what was expected of them, for McKenzie had been in Momaco
long enough to understand the only terms upon which a man of mind may
be treated otherwise than as an inanimate object, in such an
environment. In his own case it would be the well-known pugnacity of
the philosopher which would gain him momentary recognition as a living
thing. He was now, he knew, expected to fight. Ren had a pugnacious
record too; the confrontation of two such mental matadors should be
productive of a kind of slanging-match.

It was naturally quite impossible for these two professors to clinch at
once: they had first of all to exchange a few amiable commonplaces.
Where had McKenzie taught? How long had he been in Momaco, etc. . . .?
On his side, McKenzie enquired when Ren had arrived (assumed surprise
succeeding to the information that the Hardings were old Momacoans),
expressed the hope that he would have the pleasure of seeing Ren again,
if that gentleman was remaining in the city, etc. Mr. Furber observed
these _boniments_ with the bored impatience that a person would show if
two charladies, presenting themselves for employment, recognized one
another, and indulged in social exchanges, so holding up the interviews.

Professor McKenzie, more conscious perhaps of his obligations, was the
first to act as a Professor should. There must still be a short
interval, however, during which McKenzie was referring politely to
Ren's latest book, _The Secret History of World War II_. After a few
more amiabilities, McKenzie went into action (much to Mr. Furber's
relief, who had begun to feel that he had got a couple of very tame
controversialists before him, and that he might have to stir them up
or to turn them out).

With the most disarming smile the Scottish professor began, 'I do not
know whether you would agree with me, Professor, but what I feel is
that you cut yourself off from mankind.'

'Do I do that?' Ren smilingly rejoined.

'So it seems to me, Professor. If you assert that the aims and actions
of human society up to date--everything except the dreams of the poets
and mathematicians--are not only unworthy of record, but should be
consigned to oblivion, that means that you set yourself against human
beings _as they are_. Now, as you are aware, Professor, the position
you have taken up makes you a Member of the Party of Superman.'

'What do you call the Party of Superman, Professor?' (They addressed
one another as 'Professor'. Anything in the shape of a title was made
great use of, as the Germans are wont to do.)

'What we may call the Superman party', Professor McKenzie continued,
'is those classes of men in the twentieth century, who reach out
violently towards a higher step up the evolutionary ladder. A
remarkably clear-cut example of this is to be found in the arts.
There the so-called Abstractists are probably the best specimens of
what we are talking about. These artists are those who would banish
from the visual arts the external world as it usually appears to men,
and relegate such masterpieces of the past as those of Van Eyck or
Memling to the status of the photograph. In architecture there is the
skyscraper, and the geometric creations of Lloyd Wright. Or if we turn
to Music, there is the twelve-tone system. In politics, of course, the
Superman party is the Bolshevist, which is a super-puritanism,
demanding that we should eradicate such basic human instincts as the
profit-motive for instance. And in literature we have the invention of
super-languages, such as that of James Joyce. Everywhere we have seen,
from the teachings of Nietschze (_Menschlich ber Menschlich_, etc.)
onwards, a dissatisfaction with life as it has so far been lived, and
is still lived by everyone except a very few: a demand that man should
remake himself and cease to live upon the paltry, mainly animal plane
we know.--And now you, Professor Harding, wish to supermanize the
writing of history. So far you have not had much success. If you will
allow me to speak rather frankly, it has landed you in Momaco!'

Mr. Furber laughed with the expectant glee of the spectator (in the
stage-box). Ren smiled appreciatively. He liked this bright Scot. 'I
do not belong to the Party of Superman,' he then said with quiet
indifference. 'But it is a mistake which may easily be made.'

'I was mistaken?' answered McKenzie, gently ironical.

It was obvious that Mr. Furber considered that the argument had made a
promising dbut, and hoped that it would not be abandoned. Ren
decided to oblige.

Smiling accommodatingly, Ren lighted a cigarette, and began to
provide the Professor with an answer. 'Always, Professor, I have made
it my business to keep clear of what you call the Superman party.'

'Nevertheless, it is fundamentally your party,' repeated McKenzie.

'No. I have always discouraged spectacular aims. We do not have to go
outside, or _beyond_, what we have got. The problem is a simple one.
Government is often in the hands of criminals or morons, never in the
hands of first-rate men. This is a statement which most educated men
would endorse. We do not have to create Supermen, but to manage,
somehow, that men of a reasonably high order of intelligence and
integrity govern us. No Philosopher King; just first-rate, honourable,
intelligent men, such as are easy to find everywhere.'

'Are you not forgetting, Professor, that "all power corrupts"; and
that the ten just men who were elected to rule--or the two hundred, or
ten thousand--would soon become as bad as any of their predecessors?
It appears to me a more idealistic or unrealizable proposal to make
the good and the bad change places, than to evolve a Superman, who is
wiser than Man-up-to-date.'

'We quote Lord Acton too often, I think, Professor.' Ren looked at
Professor McKenzie with polite enquiry. 'Don't you agree? Power does
not always corrupt, but corruptible people too often secure it. Then,
again, Superman would not be immune from corruption, unless altogether
inhuman.'

'Superman would be above corruption, would he not?' said McKenzie.

'It would be interesting to know how people visualize their
Superman--except, of course, the titan of the Comics, who is merely
larger and more muscular. For myself, I do not much care to
contemplate a _wiser_ man than Socrates or than Pascal. There seems to
me something strained about the idea of Superman. What kind of man
would this "Superman" be? Would he still be a man? Would he be
physically exactly like ourselves? Or would he depart from the human
norm visibly? What do you think, Professor?'

'I suppose he would,' said McKenzie.

'In that case his life on earth, Professor, would be a very
uncomfortable one, if he were allowed to live. The first specimen of
this Supermanhood would never be able to breed up a family of
Supermen. He would almost certainly be destroyed, or closely confined
for life, before he had time to look for a suitable mate. So even if
such a development were desirable, it may be ruled out as impossible.
This is one reason, though not the only one, why I do not fly any
higher than Socrates or Pascal, or Voltaire.'

'So,' Professor McKenzie smilingly reminded him, 'we get back to the
philosopher-king.'

'And so we should, if we specifically demanded one of those three
great philosophers, or their modern equivalent,' Ren agreed. 'You
would never get men to accept such sages as rulers, anyway. I agree
with you, Professor, men prefer to be ruled by a vulgar blackguard.
This I have, in fact, frequently pointed out. A criminal ruffian is
often very popular, especially if he knows how to advertise his
frailty humorously.'

There were convulsive movements and a chuckling sound from the bearded
referee.

'Do you, by any chance, mean,' said Mr. Furber, 'the Mayor of a great
neighbouring city?'

'Yes, Monsieur What's-his-name is a good illustration,' Ren agreed.
'Almost a standard specimen of what we have somehow to root out. It is
precisely this popular appetite for the criminal and vulgar that we
must not be defeatist about. Must not acquiesce in. Look at this war
for instance. Are we to be defeatist about that? Must we say such
things are natural and inevitable as history amply proves?'

'Yes, I am afraid so.' McKenzie nodded, in dismal assent. 'The majority
of men still are barbarous. But we have drifted away, Professor, from
the main point, which is the quality of your new ruler.'

'Very well, let us return to that. First of all, we have to remain
within the modest bounds of possibility. For our non-moronic,
non-criminal, enlightened man would fall far short of those very
unusual men, those philosophers whose names I mentioned (but only to
indicate a _type_).'

'However much you reduce your claims, Professor,' the Scot persisted,
'an enlightened man, well endowed with qualities of mind and heart,
free of all criminal leanings, is very hard to find, and would impress
other men as exceptional. The impression of strangeness would not fall
far short of that which Ubermensch might be expected to produce.'

'Well, Professor,' Ren smiled, 'I am afraid we shall have to leave
out the possibility of you or me causing such horrified alarm that we
should be put under lock and key before we got a chance of starting
our blameless rule. Let us turn, rather, to the question of the
waning, and eventual disappearance of Homo Barbaricus. I am sanguine;
but I am afraid I am not very successful in explaining why. However,
let me try a little more. In the first years of this century the
feudal, land-owning aristocracies, naturally in favour of the barbary
which produced them, were still intact, except in the New World. Well,
are they _still_ intact? Will not this war yet further stamp out, or
blast away, what is left of the old order, based upon barbary? So at
length the ruling classes who were traditionally interested in
endorsing the barbarity of the barbarous majority, at least these
classes have been almost eliminated. This is a great asset, for those
who wish to liquidate the barbarous habits of mind of the majority.'

For some minutes Mr. Furber had been attempting to look like a feudal
aristocrat, or at least a Medici. 'You approve of the Bolshevists,
then, Professor Harding?' he asked.

'No, I do not,' Ren told him. 'But there is no such thing, in
history, as an event, or as a policy, or as a party, that is all-bad,
or all-good. It was a good, or that is to say a useful, action to
sweep away the feudal conditions in Russia.'

But McKenzie did not seem prepared to let that stand. He leant
forward, as he spoke. 'The truth is, Professor, that a new feudal
class takes the place of the old. And with it comes a new barbary, and
even a new Dark Age.'

'There is always the chance of that: indeed it is almost the rule,
that if you remove anything from the social body, in its place
something of the same sort appears at once. But, to me, the Soviet
Empire has not a very stable look. Its survival up-to-date has been
due entirely to the benevolence of the West.'

'Oh!' protested Mr. Furber.

'It sounds to you a paradox? If you think a little,' Ren said, 'you
will see what I mean. Their strength is artificial, dependent upon the
paradoxical neutrality or, as I have said, benevolence of
Capitalism.--However, this is really irrelevant. All that is in question
is whether a new barbary, of a permanent type, is taking the place of
the boyars and Junkers, and this, naturally, no one can be certain
about. All one can say is that the evidence points in the other
direction--towards some kind of Enlightenment, a mass rebellion against
the brutal and archaic character of political leadership everywhere.'

'I am glad of that,' Mr. Furber observed in a tone of worldly irony.

Ren lighted a cigarette, as a sign that he had nothing more to say on
those lines. As usual Mr. Furber was saturnine, taciturn and superior.
Then Professor McKenzie stirred himself, and it was seen that he did
not feel, on his side, that he had exhausted the subject.

'Well, Professor, I take back what I said. I see that I was mistaken
in placing you in the Party of Superman. Your position is a far more
novel--and far more complicated--one than I had supposed. It seems to
me to be based upon a profound psychological error. For how you expect
your mild, intelligent, and blamelessly honest man to dominate the
ferocious, intelligent, and unscrupulous man I fail to understand.'

'You are thinking too much of the past,' Ren told him. 'It is an
essential feature of my programme that the egotistic, the anti-social
type should cease to fascinate the multitude, and rapidly diminish in
numbers; and in the natural order of things the more or less
enlightened will greatly increase in number and influence. Then
ultra-barbarous wars should have the opposite effect from leading to a
more barbarous state-of-mind, which is what happens at present. A
crescendo of violence should, rather, lead away from it.'

'And so you argue, the sheep should become so numerous that at last
they overwhelm the wolves!' McKenzie broke in.

'It is a mistake to regard men like myself and Mr. Furber as sheep.'

All three laughed; and Mr. Furber protested, 'You must leave me out of
it, either as sheep or as wolf. Nothing would induce me to take power.'

'But I depend, for my theory, entirely,' Ren proceeded, 'upon a
rapidly growing scepticism and enlightenment, and on a shrinkage in
the lone-wolf type.'

'You cannot substantiate that,' Professor McKenzie told him; 'there
is no evidence of the existence of that historical process.'

Ren sawed his forefinger from side to side, a reinforced form of a
shaking of the head. 'You must devote a little more time, Professor,
to this subject. This question has been finally answered, you probably
believe, once and for all, in one of the supreme dramas of the present
century. I refer to the struggle in Russia between the Bolshevists and
the Menshevists. Both were revolutionists, but when, with unexpected
completeness and suddenness, success was theirs, the manner in which
Russia was to be ruled had to be decided. The Bolshevists, a small
party, were in favour of a government as autocratic as that of the
Tsars--in favour of taking power and ruling ruthlessly, just like
those they had overthrown (or even more so). And their view prevailed,
the Menshevists rejecting with disgust the arguments in favour of the
use of power. You would say that the idea in my latest book is to
reverse this situation: that, with me, it would be the Menshevists,
with their compunction, their idealisms, who would rule.'

'Yes, that does seem to follow, does it not, Professor?' McKenzie
agreed.

'You would also say that my "mild, intelligent, trustworthy men", as I
think you described them, would, in order to rule, be compelled to
acquire the unscrupulous ferocity of the typical ruler. You would say
that, when it comes to a showdown, it will always be the Bolshevist
type of good man who secures power, and that the sort of ruler I
envisage is impossible, because a good man who is scrupulous and
gentle could never wield power.'

'Yes, I should say that,' smiled McKenzie.

'But, as we know, to associate ferocity, lack of any compunction and
so on (as in the case of the Bolshevist) with what is called
"idealism", with an extreme programme of social justice, cancels out.
It results in zero. The high aims with which the revolution started
cannot co-exist with the wholesale coercion necessary to check
counter-revolution. A rule of iron eventuates in a society no better
than the feudal society overthrown.'

'So social justice is impossible, and we shall never be able to get
away from barbarity?' Professor McKenzie enquired.

'Not unless some change in the balance in our Western Society occurs,
as a result of the horrible extremes of destruction which we are now
approaching--turns the tide against violence in all its forms. It has
seemed to me that in the West, and especially on this Continent, there
is an awakening which amounts to an Enlightenment. It is easy to be
sceptically amused as to the existence of such an awakening. But I
believe that this war, or perhaps the next, will make the continuance
of the monstrosities in question impossible.'

Professor McKenzie lay back in his chair, indicating his acquiescence
that the argument should cease at this point. Ren sprang up, and with
agitated strides went over to the window. He looked out for some
minutes; then, with an equal precipitation, he returned to his chair.

Mr. Furber turned his head, and with his large, blankly enquiring eyes
followed Ren's rush to the window, and then followed him back again
to his chair. 'You are disturbed, Professor Harding? Something in your
talk caused you to rush across the room?' Mr. Furber purred.

Every once in a while Ren became acutely conscious of Mr. Furber.
Things would happen which reawakened his curiosity; and on this
occasion, as he re-seated himself, and found the owl-like glance
focussed upon him, he was impelled to turn Mr. Furber over in his mind
for the fifth, or was it the sixth, time. Certainly Mr. Furber's mask
most successfully suggested a distinct, and possibly a new zoological
species. His large and lustreless dark eyes brooded blankly, allowing
one to divine a lazy but inquisitive brain, belonging to some aloof,
observant, mildly interested _creature_ of owl-like habits. A long
shapeless black beard hung down lifelessly, concealing his neck and
collar. As it stretched downwards from the base of his nose, this
practically mouthless expanse threw the onus of expression upon the
eyes. These hung reticent, with very little comment, secretive but
harmless, above the weedy, pendant growth. The emotionless dull red of
the mouth existed irrelevantly _in_ this; the india-rubber lips
secreted no saliva and moved very little.

While he was with this queer creature Ren always felt that he was
engaged in field work as an amateur naturalist. It was like being a
bird-watcher, and Mr. Furber a great dreary owl. For all the latter's
lethargy, his indolent remoteness, he concealed behind the blank discs
of his eyes the gentle _gaminerie_ of a spirited young lady of
eighteen or nineteen; and there were violent streaks of _canaillerie_
as well. Was he a soft, good-natured, 'impish', old shit? No: he was
not susceptible of a worldly classification after that manner. One
cannot speak of an owl as a shit, for instance.

So Ren was tremendously conscious of Mr. Furber suddenly, because
this big weedy object was sluggishly interfering with him, at a moment
when his mind was inflamed, and was attempting to pounce on something,
as yet undetected; and the acuity of his attention was diminished by
the intrusion into the field of vision of a bearded idiot-child, of
huge proportions. The idle man-watching (and if birds are watched why
should not men be watched?) of this irresponsible aesthete, to whose
den they had come, resulted in his intellect being drawn away from an
important object, and riveted upon an unimportant object. In other
words, the mental energy mobilized to cope with the great dilemma was
diverted into an angry analysis of the blandly-gaping Mr. Furber.
Professor McKenzie was momentarily forgotten.

'There is a problem,' he told Mr. Furber, 'a major problem, and I once
regarded myself as the man destined to solve it. Three years have
passed during which my mind has been asleep. Professor McKenzie here
woke it up with a start. I believed I saw something which I had not
seen before. I was somewhat excited. I went to the window. . . .'

'Why do you go to the window?'

'Why do _you_ go to the window?' Ren retorted, in what seemed a silly
_tu quoque_.

'I do not go to the window,' Mr. Furber answered.

'Well, I _do_. I always go to the window if perplexed,' Ren remarked.

'You went to the window? Why did you go to the window, Professor?' Mr.
Furber spoke gently, as if talking to a patient.

'Has the window a mystical attraction for you, Professor?' McKenzie
asked.

Ren turned to him, grimacing que-voulez-vous-ishly. 'Whenever I am
pursuing some idea, if it escapes me it always vanishes through the
window.'

'Don't you ever feel inclined to pursue it?' Mr. Furber enquired
owlishly.

'I have so far resisted the impulse to plunge after them out of the
window.' Ren looked darkly at the window, at Mr. Furber's large and
lowering window; and Mr. Furber, who now appeared to feel that these
Professor fellows had finished their performance, and had better be
sent packing, rose majestically, remarking, 'I must get to work, I
suppose,' and, specifically, to his pseudo-secretary, 'Another parcel
of books from New York has just arrived. It looks as though it might
be a very interesting parcel.' He gently moved toward the library, and
the Professors, who had risen, moved gently in his wake.

'I wonder if you and your wife will come and have a meal with us,
Professor?' murmured McKenzie, and they proceeded at once to fix a
day. This was a turning-point in the epic of Momaco; the social void
was to be filled with friendly faces, and the first face was that of
this agreeable Scot. None of the rancour felt by his wife embittered
for Ren this transition, only contempt for Mr. Furber was experienced
by him, for that bush-toff, because of his brutal omission; for of
course Mr. Furber should long ago have made their life more bearable
by putting them in touch with a few chosen people. And then of course
Ren's attitude towards the academics (unknown to him) who so
passionately held down their jobs, and closed their ranks against the
stranger of renown--for _them_ his attitude hardened if anything.
Ren's mind was absorbed by these considerations, as they passed
through the library, and Furber's new consignment of books faded away
into thin air.

Professor McKenzie lived on the Hill, so he and Ren parted at the
foot of the steps outside, where a little fresh snow was beginning to
fall; Ren very warmly shaking his hand.

Heading rather precipitately down the hill, the author of _The Secret
History of World War II_ was in a mental turmoil; and the more
chaotic the brainstorm grew, the more his speed increased, until he
was in imminent danger of slipping upon the ice, and rolling down the
hill instead of walking down it.

Since his last talks in England, over four years ago, he had had no
contact of any kind with anyone more scholarly than the mushy Mr.
Furber. Needless to say it was impossible to communicate with that
stylistic owl-man. When at last, after these years of dumbness, the
silence was broken, and communication began again (as he and Professor
McKenzie disputed), the ideas hurt as they sprang up, arguments were
painfully forced out of a rusty dialectical machine. A rough parallel
to this would be the case of a man who had been wrecked upon a desert
island and never spoken for many years, until at last a ship anchored
off the coast of the island, and the castaway found himself speaking
once more: lips, larynx, vocal chords, sinuses, tongue, all going into
action again together after this portentous lapse, would do their work
in astonished familiarity.

But it was the _subject_ of this first act of communication which was
so moving. All his life-work (so long neglected), and the very heart
of what he had always been thinking about as well, had been burst
open, as it were, and scrutinized, by a stranger of intelligence. A
shaft of hard light had been cast upon an intellectual structure, and
it had shocked him into seeing what he had never seen quite so
objectively before. Now that he was alone, he attempted to arrange
what he had seen, and to arrive at some immediate judgment.

It was rather similar to Dunne's problem of recording dreams. Upon
waking, the most vivid dream fades with extraordinary rapidity.
Usually ten or twelve seconds is all one has to turn an objective eye
on and to describe the main features of the dream one has just had.
Often its disappearance is far more speedy than that, and a few
seconds are sufficient for it to vanish entirely.

At the end of his conversation with McKenzie, Ren was in the
situation of the awakened dreamer. There had been a revelation of some
kind. The mind was in a peculiarly sensitive condition, as if about to
attain for him a new insight. But the 'interference' of the
mischievous owl had stopped him before he could see what was as it
were hovering indistinctly in the atmosphere. So now, rushing along
over the snow and ice, the snowfall also increasing somewhat in
density, he hoped that he might recapture what had escaped him under
the ironical scrutiny of Mr. Furber's disintegrating futility. But
anyone who has vainly attempted to call back from oblivion a dream,
startlingly life-like for the few seconds it survived in waking life,
will understand that _nothing_, neither standing on one's head, nor
any other physical ordeal, will restore what has so abruptly clicked
out. The memory is in league, it seems, with dreams, for nothing will
persuade it to function regarding what has occurred during sleep. As
he hurried forward, in place of what he hoped might be vouchsafed him
again, was the face of Mr. Furber.

He reached the Laurenty fatigued and discouraged. As he entered the
sitting-room of their apartment, snow on his hat and shoulders,
Hester's quizzical stare, that new phenomenon, irritated him more than
usual. She was celebrating a victory for which his dismal expression
was responsible--an eloquent comment, she felt, upon how _well_ his
new social enterprises were going!

Ren sat silent until she brought in the tea. After he had swallowed
three cups (chain-drinking) he was restored, and enabled to meet her
stare on equal terms.

'You look rather tired, my pet,' he observed.

'You feel better now?' she answered. 'When you came in, _tired_ is not
the word I should have used to describe what you looked like. I should
have said that you seemed on the brink of collapse.'

'Indeed?' said Ren, still smiling comfortably. 'Mr. Furber's house is
a good way away, and I rushed along to tell you the good news. Our
first invitation to dinner in Momaco!'

'After three years and a half.--How delightful! I do hope you
_accepted_.'

'It was not by people like McKenzie that we have been ostracized. He
is a surprisingly nice chap, who arrived long after us.'

'Is that why you looked so radiantly happy when you came in at that
door a quarter of an hour ago?'

'Purely physical, my dear Hester, I had just been walking hard,' he
answered, 'forgetful of the fifteen below.'

'So you said just now, darling,' she said in a wan tone which
announced defeat, but not resignation.

    *    *    *    *    *

A little later he went into the bedroom and lay down. It was very
unusual for him to do this: he only lay down on the bed in the daytime
when unwell. His purpose at present was to isolate himself, and to
make another attempt to secure contact with a mind lit up by
controversy and on the verge of discovery. But this withdrawal
disturbed his wife, as he should have seen that it would: and before
he had time to get his intellect in focus there was Hester standing
beside him, scrutinizing his face with anxious eyes. 'What is wrong,
Ren?' she asked him. 'Aren't you well?'

He rolled off the bed with an exasperated laugh. 'Absolutely nothing
is wrong, excepting that when I am attempting to contact my Muse,
someone intrudes, and asks me what is the matter with me! That is what
is wrong.'

Hester was relieved, denying herself the regulation pique of the
officious wife. His arm around her shoulder, Ren propelled her into
the sitting-room. There he explained to her the cause of his
withdrawal. It was a little difficult to be explicit, but he made her
see what was happening, what an unsatisfactory rle the memory was
playing, and how a little seclusion was to be desired.

Hester cheered up with surprising suddenness. The word _work_ was, for
her, a magic vocable--work, that is, with its old significance; the
sort of work which he had always done before he came to Momaco.
Indeed, a big factor in the formation of her implacable hatred for
Momaco was precisely that no work could be done there. Momaco--the
place which was the grave of a great career: the barren spot where you
ceased to think, to teach, or to write, and just rotted away. So the
news that thinking was at last going on again filled her with
indescribable joy. This re-birth of his normal intellectual life would
surely, sooner or later, lead him back to England. For there was no
Public here; no publishers, no anything that is necessary for such
enterprises--bold and dazzling enterprises--which were as natural to
her husband as they were necessary. Hester felt happier than she had
at any time since the fire. She even began to make plans for finding a
new home, when they got back to England; one nearer to King's Road,
Chelsea, a better shopping neighbourhood for her, and where she would
be within easier reach of her friend Susan.

The fact that Professor McKenzie's wife was an Englishwoman, and one
who had come out to this deadly spot since the outbreak of war, caused
her almost to look forward to their dinner engagement.




CHAPTER XXV

Dinner at the McKenzies


Two days later, in the evening at six o'clock, Hester was examining
herself in the glass, in a way she had not done since, in her
stateroom on the _Empress of Labrador_, she was getting ready to
accompany a Knight of the Legion of Honour into the first-class
restaurant of the ship. It was now a different face from what it had
been then. The stare remained, but it was no longer one of ladylike
vacuity. It now was purposeful. The purpose was to escape from Momaco
merely, but it might have been that of a woman confined in an iron
chest, bracing herself to push up the portentously heavy lid.

Ren, on his side, was taking his evening suit out of the
clothes-closet, wondering how much weight he had lost, and looking to
see whether the moth had eaten a hole in the middle of the back. When
at length he had tied his black tie and put on his jacket, and moved
over to the long glass, he saw what the world would consider a very
distinguished-looking figure--tall, well-shaped, with elegant,
well-brushed beard. This life-size Royal Academy portrait of Professor
Ren Harding impressed him disagreeably--it stepped, for him, straight
out of the past of foolish ambitions, and of metropolitan
self-importance. But Hester, who was watching him, from where she was
sitting attempting to put a discreet gleam on to her nails, did not
share his disgusts. With her hands immobilized, she sat following him
with her eyes: then one tear, and after that another, began to roll
down her cheek. She put down the shammy-leather pad, dabbed her eyes
with her handkerchief and then jumped up. Going over to her husband
she exclaimed, 'Darling, you look wonderful!'

'I'm afraid I do.'

'Don't be silly, Ren.' She kissed the splendid object, upon the beard
not far from the mouth--a mouth worthy of an Air Marshal. 'Ren
darling,' she said coaxingly, 'do wear your decoration! I will go and
get it for you.' He was speechless with indignation--literally he
desired ardently to protest with enormous violence, but something stuck.
The scene in the restaurant of the liner rose up in his memory, in all
its shameful absurdity. He must put that disgraceful emblem in the
waste-paper basket; or still better make a present of it to the hotel
proprietor. A woman is always on the side of the lousy world. And then
of course they want to demonstrate that _their_ man is a bigger shot
than the other woman's husband. So he stood, preparing to stamp on the
decoration when it arrived. But Hester, who was in the bedroom, could
not at once put her hand on the ribbon, and Ren had begun to think of
something else. All of this was giving Hester a great deal of pleasure.
More pleasure than she had experienced for many a long day. This was all
helping to reconcile her, to make her accept life in this detestable
dump. And so, after all, if the Legion of Honour can be utilized to gild
the road upwards, from the winter of their discontent in Momaco No. I to
Momaco No. II, which might become, if not 'glorious summer', at least
not quite so oppressive a spot--well, if the wretched decoration would
help to that end, why not bedeck himself with it--at the risk of
appearing someone he was not to McKenzie?

When Hester returned with the insignia--and a self-conscious
smile--instead of encountering the reception she had anticipated, Ren
was sitting with his breast at the ready, inflated to receive the
accolade, his face wearing a beatific smile.

'Ah!' he exclaimed, as she approached with the ribbon. 'We shall make
our dbut in Momaco society impressively beribboned.'

They were obliged to telephone for a taxi, for Ren had omitted to
enquire by which route Carmichael Road was approached. The
French-Canadian driver took them through the Peasoup quarter by the
side of the river, from which seething slum they shot up the road at
the foot of the little mountain where the McKenzies lived.

Carmichael Road was a rock-flanked, slightly curving road, on almost
the lowest slopes of the hill upon which Mr. Furber, and all
other illustrious persons, dwelt. It was extremely clean and
prosperous-looking. Subsequently Professor McKenzie explained that
this had once been a highly respectable district, but the Peasoup tide
flowed in underneath it, between the base of the hill and the river,
and the householders on the other side of the road (the McKenzies were
on the inner side) found themselves gazing down into Peasoup
backyards. As a consequence, house-rents in Carmichael Road dropped,
sharply, until they had reached a level accessible to impecunious
professors. This had suited the McKenzies excellently. There were some
quite good French-Canadian shops down below within easy reach, and for
their part they did not object to French-Canadians.

Ren, as an older Momacoan, instructed this relative newcomer as to
one feature of Canadian life which he might not as yet be quite clear
on. 'Class is Race, in this country,' commented Ren. 'No Nazi could
feel more racial superiority than the English Canucks of Upper Canada.'

On the way to Carmichael Road Ren attempted to converse in French
with the taxi-driver. The latter repulsed him in pidgin-English. But
as his face was almost purely Indian, and with traces of the
'nobility' of the Redskin, Ren tipped him well. There were about
fifteen steps to climb, winding up between jagged rocks, in order to
reach the house, which was well built and substantial. Professor
McKenzie opened the door.

There was a fairly large living-room, in which they found Mrs.
McKenzie playing the piano--an early Beethoven Minuet. She was a woman
a few years younger than Hester. Laura McKenzie was an attractive
person, who was aware, but not tiresomely so, of what could be done
with eyes of light blue-green in the shadow of a mass of dark hair.
Regarding her simply as a big sex-trap, to lure a male into a
situation where offspring may result, she also, thought Ren, realized
the sex value of the piano--of a mazurka of Chopin's or a Pavan for a
Dead Infanta according to taste. Hostesses who, on the arrival of
guests, are discovered playing the piano, received from Ren a very
bad mark. The figure rising from the keyboard to greet one was not
popular with him. To break off in the middle of a Nocturne to shake
one's hand with a dazzling smile was not a device which recommended
the woman who made use of it to Ren. That a room into which guests
are destined shortly to arrive should be impregnated with mazurkas or
pavans appeared to him in as bad taste as if some perfume had been
sprayed into the air a few minutes before the guests' arrival.

So the minuet that was still in the air prejudiced Ren against the
McKenzie interior. He glanced sideways a little uneasily at Hester, to
see whether the music had made the same undesirable impression upon
her. But apparently she had no objection to a hostess clothing herself
in the raiment of Beethoven in order to welcome her more adequately;
and she showed no signs of feeling that Mrs. McKenzie had put on
stilts, and was culturally high-hatting her, or something of that kind.

There was something that Laura McKenzie had, not visible to Ren,
which, from Hester's standpoint, put in the shadow everything else.
And, as an efficient observer, that invisible something should have
been the number one article for him to check up on. She was a lady,
that was the all-important (to Ren invisible) something. What he had
been looking for was the kind of thing which could influence _him_;
and this was a rather usual shortcoming of his.

It was the tones of the hostess's voice, not the notes of her piano,
that mattered. And, staring blandly, Hester swam towards those tones
in an entirely satisfactory way, her husband considered.

The four people sat down, Ren saying to his host, 'What luck to have
found so nice a house as this,' and it was then that Professor
McKenzie explained the reason for so charming a residence being
attainable by people in their income-bracket.

A sweet, swarthy, merry-eyed French-Canadian maid brought in upon a
large metal tray four cocktails and a shaker, and everybody's tongue
began to move with more agility. Hester disclosed her obsession, and
said how dearly she would like to be in England once more, instead of
this horrible place.

'I do not think you would talk like that if you had had our
experiences for the first two years of the war,' their hostess told
her, and it was obvious from her tone that _she_ also suffered from an
obsession, of an opposite kind from that of Hester.

'Oh, I am sure I should not be affected by that, a hundred bombs would
be better than Momaco!' the latter forcibly asserted.

'It is not the _bombs_,' Laura McKenzie cried, 'I have never been
within five miles of a bomb. You would find there were far more
disagreeable things than the occasional bomb--unless of course you
were in London.'

'All the same . . .!' intoned Hester. 'Never the less . . .!'

'The amenities of Momaco, I know, are few,' Laura McKenzie replied,
'but I still think that you are extraordinarily lucky to be in Momaco,
quite extraordinarily lucky.'

A painful contraction of her raised eyebrows made Hester look suddenly
like a hopelessly miserable child, who had lost something she could
not replace.

'You have to remember, Laura,' McKenzie warned his wife, 'that our
guests have had a terrible experience since their arrival here. Apart
from anything else, their hotel was set on fire by a ghastly little
man, a murderer as well as a firebug . . .'

'An Englishman, I think,' Laura sharply intervened.

Ren began to feel that they would never reach the dinner table if
this went on. Only a very little more of this dogmatical woman
plugging Momaco, and Hester would leave the house. Something must be
done at once to save the situation. He shook the party with what he
hoped would pass for a sudden, uncontrollable laugh.

'Here we have someone as obstinate as yourself, Hester! I never
expected to meet anyone as fanatical as you on the subject of Momaco.'

McKenzie followed suit. He seized his Laura by the arm and recalled
her to her duties as a hostess. 'Rein in your rage against the
billeting-officer and the hostile constable, and the air-raid warden!
We have guests . . . let us forget our personal grievances.'

'Sorry!' said Laura. 'I was on my hobby-horse, was I? And I met
someone else riding a hobby-horse of a different colour. I
apologize.' She smiled at Hester. 'This war has made a savage of me.'

McKenzie then brought forward a less controversial topic. It appeared
they had mutual friends named Saunders.

'You know the Saunders, don't you?' McKenzie began. Soon they were all
talking about the Saunders, saying how nice Jessica was, and what an
intelligent chap was Tom; and the Saunders drew them closer together,
especially warming the homesick Hester; and still speaking of the
Saunders they moved in to dinner in the room on the other side of the
front door.

A Barsac which could almost have passed for a Chteau Yquem drew
serious commendation from Ren, who appeared in the rle of a sniffer
and taster. Next he and McKenzie began speaking of the drink problem,
for the control was very tight, with the result that bootleg alcohol
was exorbitant. McKenzie had been given the name of a 'blind pig', who
was reputed to be a little more reasonable than most. The place of
this illicit merchant was not far from the Laurenty. 'Half the "blind
pigs" in Momaco have their business addresses in our street,' declared
Ren, 'but not at our end of it. There are several "blind pigs" in our
hotel. One of them, with whom I deal, knows the French vineyards quite
well.' He gave the address of this man to McKenzie, and McKenzie gave
him the new address he had received. The name of this one was the
Sieur Fondot. Were there no 'blind pigs' down below in their
French-Canadian quarter? Ren enquired. But it appeared that that
traffic mostly was carried on in the district beyond the railway track.

Upon the wall of the dining-room hung a photograph of a
beautifully-built seventeenth-century English house, in what appeared
to be what was left of a park. The trees seemed to belong to another
time, when 'lazy tinklings lulled the distant folds', which they do no
more. Laura's father was a parson, and this was his rectory in
Somerset. Ren demanded rhetorically if there were anything more
beautiful in the world than red Somerset, with its red earth, its red
rivers, and its wealth of ancient red-brick manor-houses, rectories,
farms and inns. And Hester's staring eyes grew misty as she thought
of those sacred counties, in the warm south-west of England--from the
indescribable beauties of Shaftesbury and the neighbouring villages,
to the landscape of Lamorna Birch, and the splendours of Tintagel.
Laura was a little cynical and aloof, when it came to a sentimental
tripping around the landscapes of her birthplace, but she allowed that
it was first-class hunting country.

But Hester was in no mood to be put off by the cynic. She was fond of
wine, and especially of sweet wine. The Barsac was finding its way
round her veins. She had a sleepy, happy look as her eyes rested upon
the old rectory in the photograph hanging directly in front of her,
and, then, finding herself once more in civilized surroundings.

It was at this idyllic moment for Hester that Laura McKenzie felt
impelled (perhaps because she divined her guest's gooey state of mind)
to speak of the English countryside as she had last seen it.

'It may be that in another couple of years I shall be feeling the way
you do,' said Laura, with a jangling about of the brilliant cold blue
and green spangles of her eyes, in the shadow of the impending dark
avalanche of her hair. The last thing that Hester realized was that
the eyes and hair were the human equivalent of the sumptuous and
delicate scene in the West Country which had acted on her with such
nostalgic force. It was a south-English combination, a feminine
romanticness of so special a kind that it could not come from the
northern counties, would seem very strange in France or Italy, would
be far too theatrical in Germany and probably could not be found in
Scandinavia. This is only to speak of the _kind_, not of the quality.

'_We_ were not living, for the first two years of the war, in anything
as pleasant as that.' (Laura waved her hand towards the photograph.)
'Do you happen to know that bleakest of counties, Essex? Well, we had
to find some sort of a place to live in quickly. We rented a small and
ill-furnished house about thirty miles outside London. To get there
you pass a dirty forest, an East End forest, and roll through the
dirtiest, sootiest, flattest slums ever seen. After an hour or so of
chugging through sooty, dank, dispirited fields you reach Crackbrook.
No one pretends that it is a show-place, or beauty-spot, but I cannot
make you understand the degree to which to mention it in a guide-book
would be disloyal. We lived for two years in Crackbrook.'

'If it was so unattractive, why did you go there to live?' enquired
Hester, in a tone of bored protest. Why must she be told about this
repulsive place?

'All the less brutally ugly spots had already been occupied. We were
late-comers.'

'I see,' said Hester miserably. She looked towards Professor McKenzie.
But the two professors were absorbed in harrying some little problem
which had made its appearance, and been spotted by Ren.

Laura McKenzie smiled, and remarked, 'No use looking at _him_. You
must hear what an awful time we had. As soon as war became certain it
was decided that no speck of light must be visible to a night-raider,
and wardens were appointed to see that this did not happen. No other
nation "blacked-out" in this way. But as if the war were not enough,
"war conditions" were so luxuriated in by that blood-sweat-and-tears
merchant . . .' Her husband turned quickly towards her.

'Laura, I believe you are about to speak of a man to whom we all
should be grateful . . .'

'Rubbish, darling,' said Laura, 'but I will say no more lest it might
offend. Anyhow'--resuming her conversation with Hester--'I was telling
you about the black-out. It is still in force. The most disagreeable
type of men volunteered for the job of air-raid warden. We had a real
beauty at Crackbrook. He prowled round our house every night. If a
chink of light was visible he thundered upon our door. We were fined,
most unjustly, several times, and then I took no more trouble to
conceal my low opinion of him.'

'How unpleasant! Weren't you able to black-out your windows?'

'Of course I was!' Laura McKenzie told her. 'But there is always a
chink somewhere.'

'I suppose there is,' sighed Hester.

'But if the Warden was an enthusiastic snooper, the Billeting Officer
was an alcoholic old sadist, for whom the war was a heaven-sent
opportunity. She hated me, probably because I was the only woman in
her part of the hamlet who did not fawn upon her. The house we had
rented was small, and there were three of us, with our seven-year-old
son. But there was a tiny room upstairs that was not occupied. One
afternoon, after a bad night of bombing in the East End, several
busloads of children and cripples arrived. This frightful woman
planted a crippled boy of twelve on us. To my protests she answered
that I had a spare room, and that no one else had any accommodation
for him. People who took in a cripple received thirty shillings a
week, and some of the local people were glad enough to take one in.
There must have been _someone_ who would have been glad to have him.
But there was nothing for it. The Billeting Officer and the constable
were buddies, there was no one to appeal to, so we had this Jewish
child of twelve (she had picked a Jew for me!) until one day he
disappeared. He complained one week that I was under-nourishing him,
and the Billeting Officer got my week's sustenance money docked. The
cripple was excessively aggressive, and on one occasion he struck Ian
with his crutch.'

'How frightful!' Hester's face screwed up into a painful grimace.
'Surely you could appeal to the police?'

'Of course, but the police was the fat, red-nosed "boyfriend" of the
Billeting Officer. The cripple said that my husband had hit him first!'

'How disgusting!' Hester looked as if she were about to cry.

'Well, I need not retail how horrible the shopkeepers became. If you
gave them large tips that was all right. If you did not, you were
treated atrociously. Some of them must be getting quite rich;
especially of course owners of food shops.'

'How horrible!' Hester was now actually weeping.

Professor McKenzie looked around at this moment, and saw the tears
emerging from the miserably staring eyes, he then looked angrily at
his wife.

'You have made Mrs. Harding cry,' he said.

'Sorry.' (This was apparently what Laura always said, when she
offended.) 'I did not notice . . .'

'I am not crying,' protested Hester, very confused. 'It is the
Canadian light--it often makes my eyes water.'

They then began talking about the difference between soft English
light, and the hard relentless Canadian variety. Professor McKenzie
had had to go to an optician, and Ren, too, said he thought of having
smoked glasses for the winter time, against the glare of the snow.

'Things are all right in the north and west of England, I believe,'
Laura told her shrinking guest--a great concession showing that she
was really a kind-hearted woman. And with that Hester's ordeal was
over. There was no further mention of the unattractive sides of the
English character, or those parts of England which were hard on the
eye. The excellent cognac which accompanied her coffee re-mellowed
her, and put a melancholy sparkle in her eye, for she was extremely
susceptible to good brandy.

When they moved back into the living-room, Ren enquired if any
Canadians were to be expected as after-dinner guests. Upon learning
that no one had been asked to meet them, Ren removed his ribbon from
his jacket, and put it in his pocket.

'Hester asked me to wear this, in case we should be called upon to
meet some of the natives. I hope you didn't think I stuck that in my
coat for you!'

'I think your ribbon is a well-deserved and colourful emblem. I wish I
had one, and I should always wear it if I had!' McKenzie added.

'I am quite sure you would not,' retorted Ren, 'except in the company
of the ignoble.'

It was not long before Ren asked Laura McKenzie if she would please
play them something. Without fuss she went over to the piano and
played several pieces very well. Asked to play some more, she played
several more pieces, until Ren said to himself, 'She is going to play
for the rest of the evening.' However, although entreated by Ren to
continue, she _did_ stop after the second batch. The Hardings learned
that Laura had just begun her career as a pianist when she married. 'I
had not the money,' she informed them, 'to hire halls, so I should
certainly have failed.'

As a couple, Ren said to himself, the McKenzies were good-lookers. A
dark, slightly-built man, McKenzie wore the no-longer popular
'side-boards'--without being 'dressy' he was careful about his
clothes; and Laura, with a complete absence of self-consciousness,
wore rather expensive ones. It had not escaped Ren that he was the
object of a very friendly feeling on the part of his host.

The McKenzies appeared to be on especially good terms with the rector
of the Anglican Church dominating the Hill; a very large church,
almost acting as cathedral to English-Canadian Momaco. The Reverend
William Trevelyan was an Englishman, and Ren supposed that Laura
McKenzie's connection with the Church was at least a contributing
factor to the more than usually cordial relations subsisting between
the McKenzies and the rector. In any case, they seemed to wish Ren to
meet this clergyman without delay.

The English colony in Momaco was especially, almost uniquely, strong;
and the Reverend William Trevelyan was a person highly influential in
Momaco. Quite half the board of governors of the University belonged
to his flock. This fact alone demonstrates the unusual position of the
English in that city, for, in most of the great cities of Canada, the
English occupy a very minor position. McKenzie explained the meaning
of the Reverend W. Trevelyan to Ren; it was arranged that Trevelyan
should be informed of the presence in Momaco of this very original and
well-known historian.

'Trevelyan's response will be immediate, I feel quite sure of that,'
McKenzie affirmed. 'He is a man of considerable intelligence. This is
rather rare, I imagine, in the Church of England.'

Hester was a quietly unconvinced witness of these proceedings, as
though one man were proposing to the other a sovereign cure for
indigence. She half turned, with a half-smile in the direction of her
hostess. She left the house with rather mixed feelings about Laura
McKenzie; admitting to herself, and later to Ren, that Laura was a
curious, a bitter and arrogant woman, but quite amusing
notwithstanding.

When the Hardings took their departure, the McKenzies looked at one
another; McKenzie said, 'I like Harding;' his wife observed, 'She's a
funny one, but she has her points.'




CHAPTER XXVI

Ren becomes a Columnist


The next day, McKenzie telephoned. His Reverence would much like to
meet the author of _The Secret History of World War II_ which he
described as 'very naughty'. Could Ren and his wife come to dinner
the next night?

The Trevelyan dinner was a great success. The clergyman appeared to
like Ren in spite of the 'naughtiness' of what he wrote. He had read
a little history, and he liked discussing, from a churchman's angle,
the years immediately succeeding the setting up of a separate English
church in the sixteenth century. This, actually, was a period with
which Ren was particularly familiar.

Ren, on his side, was not at all displeased with this contact: he
felt there was a good deal of shrewdness underneath the cleric's
rather flourishy talk. The following Sunday the Hardings were at the
morning service in St. George's Church, and Ren's tall bearded figure
was noted with satisfaction by the Reverend William Trevelyan. The
church, to the astonishment of the Hardings, accustomed to the empty
churches of England, was full, Victorianly full. The greater part of
the congregation was English. Hester found herself surrounded by
English people: though, unfortunately, just ahead of them was a
Canadian couple; and the pleasing illusion which she might otherwise
have enjoyed, that she was once more in England, was denied her. The
Canadian voices, whose responses were louder than those of anyone else
in their neighbourhood, and the lusty rolling of the R's, spoilt her
enjoyment of her favourite hymn, 'For those in peril on the sea'. It
was, however, consoling to feel that there were other Britons
suffering the horrors of Momaco and that she was not a solitary martyr.

During the next few weeks they made the acquaintance of numbers of
people, some of these, both Canadian and English, were just people it
was thought the Hardings might like to know; others were big shots, of
potential use to Ren. One of these was the proprietor of the _Momaco
Gazette-Herald_. This was a contact of great significance, for Ren
was offered a weekly column in that paper, which was so well paid that
it changed their economic position overnight; and so radically, that
they moved from the Hotel Laurenty to an apartment-hotel in a more
desirable quarter of the town.

One would have supposed that this last event would have stirred Hester
into a certain elation. But that was not the case. She even warned
Ren against the dangers of this new prosperity.

'Whether Momaco ignores you or ftes you, it is always Momaco. Do you
really want to spend the rest of your life in this awful city? The
fact that you have been recognized all of a sudden, and have been
given a newspaper job which will enable us to live comfortably,
changes nothing. You do not want to be a journalist, do you? This
column merely keeps us alive. Is that all you want to do, Ren? Just
_keep alive_?'

Formerly Ren would have laughed, in the hope of wearing her down by
mirth. Now he looked at her very seriously, for she was a problem
which had to be faced with all the resources he possessed.

'A city is good or bad, attractive or horrible, according to the
people it contains, and which of its citizens you happen to know. You
call it "horrible" because of horrible conditions under which we lived
for three years. If we had lived under similar conditions, London
would be horrible.'

Hester laughed. 'These class-room arguments get one nowhere,' she
answered. 'It may be a good piece of logic, but it has no connection
with the reality. London was where we were born. I might agree with
you if I had been born in _Momaco_--though I should know it was a
pretty poor place to be born in (if I had any intelligence).'

Ren drew in his breath. 'If we are speaking of _realities_, then let
me say that I have no intention of stopping in Momaco longer than I
can help. So your argument that because I have got a good job I shall
therefore live here forever is fallacious.'

'Thank God for that!' said Hester with a bitter fervency, getting up
and going into the bedroom, there leaning out of the window, inhaling
the milder airs which were blowing from the south.

Ren came into the bedroom behind her. She started and stiffened as
she heard him. Was he proposing to resort to the venustic argument of
the bedchamber? She hoped he was not. She had never denied him her
body, but she wished he could understand that copulation was nothing
to do with logic. But this was not what he proposed. When she turned
round, he took her hands. 'Hester, I had something else to say. One of
the people in Momaco is myself. Another is yourself. The fact that you
are in Momaco changes Momaco a great deal for me. Now today you have
written to several people in London, to Susan, to your Mother. You
love London, and are homesick, because perhaps a certain half-dozen
people are there--you love those people collectively more than you
love me? You would rather be in London with Susan, perhaps, than live
in Momaco with me?'

'You know I would not,' she replied. 'You know that the question is
absurd. But your question implies something that is not true. It
implies that my motives are purely selfish in desiring to leave this
place and to return to London. That is absolutely untrue. Listen, I
would throw myself out of that window if I knew that my death would
result in your returning to England, and that nothing else would do so.'

This was typical of the way their half-disputes would end. In a
half-threat, or in something he felt it wiser to ignore or to turn his
back on. After all, the open window was there. But on this occasion he
turned on her reproachfully.

'If you threw yourself out of that window, it would achieve nothing
except to break my heart. It would shatter London as much as Momaco
into a million pieces.--Momaco--London!--How I have come to hate those
names!'

An almost sinister expression of loathing was on his face as he said
this. The effort to conduct these conversations upon the normal social
plane had really grown to be beyond his powers of nervous endurance;
to present a face undistorted by passion, to employ the innocuous
forms of civil speech, instead of springing at her and shaking her
till her teeth rattled, howling in her face, 'Bosh, bosh, bosh, bosh!
Quack, quack, quack, quack! Listen, intolerable sparrow! London is as
useless to me as Momaco is to you. There are no conceivable
circumstances which would ever make it possible for me to _work_, to
teach, to exist intellectually in London, after my resignation. _Here_
it is possible for me to work and here I stop--here I stop. I do not
need you to tell me ten times a day that it is not worth while to work
here, to work in Momaco. _Of course_ it is not. I know that--I know
that . . . better than you can ever know it. I am, let me assure you,
_madly_ aware of that. But I also know that I will never again become
a nameless piece of human wreckage. I may not be much. I may not
amount to much. _But_ my shoes shall be shone: my pocket-book shall be
packed with newly-printed notes: my quarters shall be in the smart
clean part of town--_shall_ be--and there is an end of the matter. If
you say _London_ once more I will paint you all over with the word
London in big red letters, and tie you up, and mail you to
Susan.--That is a _mild_ ending for such a pest.'

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.




CHAPTER XXVII

The Black Fly


Weekly, until the summer, Ren wrote a war-commentary for the _Momaco
Gazette-Herald_. He introduced into the column no controversial matter
whatever. Objective judgements, 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 judgement 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 lakelands are for the Momacoans. The English-Canadians and
the Peasoups were rigidly separated, the English having the best sites.

Ren, 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 camp-site Ren 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 Ren 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.
Ren, 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.
Ren was not well himself, and he listened morosely to Hester's
ravings. Canada was the subject throughout--'God-forsaken ice-box,
heavenly summers presided over by the Black Fly. . . . _Please_, Ren,
_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, bell-hop, entertainer. They shopped, they
rubbed in ointments, they prattled, they cooked, they administered
ice-packs, gave cold spongings; and last but not least enabled Ren 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, Ren 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 per cent 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 Ren,
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, Ren found her convulsively weeping, and it was a
long time before she quieted down.

Ren'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 mle of the Court, rather amused at the extravagances of
those taking part.

Once Ren 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.

Ren 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, Ren'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 rgime 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 Ren 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 backwards 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 rebought 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.




CHAPTER XXVIII

A New Book on the Stocks


The 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 down-town 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,' Ren
disciplined himself into an attitude of unconcern.

If Hester was fairly often in the company of the Professor's wife,
Ren with even more regularity, and with much more serious purpose,
was in the company of McKenzie. As he built up his new book, hammering
it into a solid logical shape, he discussed with the professional
philosopher a number of points about which he was doubtful. McKenzie's
was a very good mind of a routine kind, and it had not the insidious
partisanship of Rotter's to make it a dangerous tool to use. If
academically critical, McKenzie was generous; and even more than that
he felt considerable sympathy with Ren's ideas. The philosopher was,
of course, the proper specialist to consult; a historian would have
been of no use whatever. This was a philosophic, and particularly an
ethical work that Ren was projecting, and this new friend was just
the man he needed for consultation.

His book was to be of a soaring and heroic dimension, and under the
circumstances he was not able to provide the argument with the massed
references, quotations and illustration the wholesale character of the
book seemed to demand. The second-hand bookseller _rented_ him, so to
speak, an _Encyclopdia Britannica_, and one of the best American
Encylopdias. Of the hundreds of other books he required for reference
he found perhaps a dozen in the Momaco libraries. He could only hope
that an opportunity might be afforded him, before the completion of
the book, to pass some weeks near a great library.

Of the abstract questions which had to be tackled, there was one which
has been mentioned already at an earlier stage (for it was a question
dogging his former essays on those lines), uniquely threatening.
McKenzie and he spent the best part of three weeks debating it. It was
at the root of all this type of thinking. It was a dragon necessary
to meet and to overcome, before going any farther. This problem of
problems can be compressed as follows: if one condemns all history as
trivial and unedifying, must not all human life be condemned on the
same charge? Is not human life too short to have any real values, is
it not too hopelessly compromised with the silliness involved in the
reproduction of the species, of all the degradations accompanying the
association of those of opposite sex to realize offspring? Then the
interminable twenty years of growing up (of nurseries, and later years
of flogging, of cribbing, of the onset of sex); twenty years of
learning to be something which turns out to be nothing. In maturity,
the destruction of anything which has value by the enormous mass of
what has no value. In other words, the problem of problems is to find
anything of value intact and undiluted in the vortex of slush and
nonsense: to discover any foothold (however small) in the phenomenal
chaos, for the ambitious mind: enough that is uncontaminated to make
it worth-while to worry about life at all. And as to condemning the
slush and nonsense, the pillage and carnage which we have glorified as
'history'; why, that throws us back upon the futility of our daily
lives, which also have to be condemned.

Then we come to this: human existence, however well it was lived,
would necessarily be upon a petty plane. For weeks Ren dragged
McKenzie down into the morass where everything slips through your
fingers as you try to grasp it, into the permanent instability of
antinomy. They both felt like two all-in wrestlers, slipping about in
an arena of warm mud, from which they would emerge covered from head
to foot. In the end a precarious metaphysical foothold of sorts was
found for Ren, though toe-hold would be a better description for it
than foot-hold. Ren felt that a philosopher of greater range than
McKenzie might have helped him to secure himself more satisfactorily.
In the course of their relentless debates he had at once bumped up
against the limitations of his new friend. McKenzie was a follower of
Collingwood. The neurotic and competitive stamp of the author of
_Speculum Mentis_ would be something he could not approve of. He was
an easy-going, modest individual. But his position as philosopher
recalled Collingwood. He possessed a strong ethical bias, which
caused him to criticize Oxford Realism, the Moorites of Cambridge, and
all sad, bleak materialists, as Collingwood was wont to do. Like
Collingwood, he would describe the Realist of the Cook Wilson type as
progressively throwing overboard all positive doctrines whatever; with
a shout of joy jettisoning the last embarrassing doctrine, so that he
now would be devoid of anything theoretic at all--except the theory
that he must adhere to nothing positive. There is, in Collingwood's
account of his own career, a passage where he describes the bad effect
upon the youth of the second decade of the century of the radical
nihilism of the Cambridge Realists--the proposal to extrude ethics
from the body of philosophy of Bertrand Russell being especially
cited. This reaction against the destructive character of these
contemporary groups, in both the Universities, which made Collingwood
so remarkable a figure, was a reaction taken over intact by McKenzie:
and this was the kind of reactionary direction which marked his
teaching at Momaco. He therefore was just the man to make it _too
easy_ for Ren to find a metaphysical foot-hold at any price, if the
latter had not been very much on his guard. Nevertheless these debates
with the learned and steady Scot were of very great use, and McKenzie
was unsparing of his time, and placed his well-stored mind at Ren's
disposal, and his skill as a trained debater.

'If everyone who was going to write a book,' he said slyly to Ren,
'took as much trouble as you do to establish their right to do so,
there would be fewer bad books!'

Having arrived at the point where he knew, with certainty, exactly
just what he stood on and why, and, again, for what reason he was
giving himself this trouble (namely, 'because outraged by the events
of the past thirty years beyond endurance'), he began hacking his way
into the jungle of the past. His slogan was as follows: 'The past
thirty years is typical, not exceptional.'

A number of specimen events (events in which no undeniably great
personality, like Jefferson, were involved) were selected from British
and American history. Nothing but the lowest type of criminal
mentality or else the dullest average mentality was revealed under
analysis; and yet the actors in these events are treated by historians
as of the first calibre. This, as he pointed out, might be used to
indicate the way in which history ought to be written--so much of it
as need be written.

Then he engaged in an important and original piece of field-work. With
the aid of a number of quotations from speeches and articles he
demonstrated how ludicrously inflated was the language in which
politicians referred to one another, and how _la grande presse_
followed suit, or sometimes led the way. They are all 'great' for one
another: how often does one not read in the newspapers one statesman
using this word about another; or one will read in some account by a
columnist of a member of the present Cabinet, 'Whether Mr. X is as
great a brain as Mr. Y', or 'Even the masterly intellect of the
Chancellor' or 'Such giants as Mr. Jones and Mr. Smith'. It could not
be disputed that many occupations require a higher intellectual
endowment than the parliamentary life; yet to hear proudly prominent
parliamentarians talking about one another (and _you scratch my back
and I will scratch yours_ is a principle in constant use in
parliaments) one would suppose that they were referring to some
intellectual giant like Isaac Newton, or William Shakespeare, not a
twentieth-century First Minister, or Chancellor of the Exchequer. Only
the other day we could read one politician describing another as 'the
greatest man of his age'. In this particular instance it might have
been true to say 'the greatest politician of his age', but that is a
very different matter.

At a dinner attended by billiards fans, or cricketing enthusiasts, an
unusually fine player of one of these two games of skill might be
eulogized as 'The greatest man of the age', though certainly a
billiards player might more deservedly be so called than a politician.
Great proficiency in some craft in which a man is passionately
interested would certainly seem to him the most desirable excellence,
the _greatest_ excellence, that a human being could have. What is
unfortunate is that politics is a game that is played with _us_, not
with billiard balls.

If we ask why such veneration of their political leaders is accepted
as reasonable by the public, the answer is obvious. Anyone who _leads_
them must be a very important and remarkable person. Democratic
politics possess a magic property, they are able to turn a nobody into
a somebody. The secret of this magic is the substitution of quantity
for quality. That is, of course, precisely what democracy, as a creed,
sets out to achieve. But how, in democratic politics, the value
'great' = quantity may be seen in the following instance. If an atom
bomb were invented which would wipe out a nation of fifty million
people, the little politician who decreed that it should be dropped
would achieve historical greatness, because, by his action, fifty
million people had been killed. (It is typical of the values of
History that the inventor of the bomb would have no historic
significance.) But this is perhaps too artificial an illustration. It
is, in fact, only necessary to cite cases with which we are all
familiar. Any man, however insignificant his personality, who pushes
round fifty million other people, as do the heads of the great
departments of State, automatically attains thereby a quite unreal--a
_quantitative_--importance; for instance, the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, who, by his Budgets, so deeply affects the lives of fifty
million people, or, as another instance, the Secretary for Foreign
Affairs, who may, by his action, plunge fifty million people into a
bloodbath. Even more, the First Minister, who is able to influence,
for good or ill, fifty million people, by reason of the extraordinary
number of individual destinies responding to his will, assumes, as a
consequence, what one might describe as a quantitative distinction,
which is what alone appeals to History.

History is the record of the quantitative; it is quite indifferent as to
whether the happening is fortunate or unfortunate, provided it happens
to the maximum number of people. As a consequence, space is devoted to a
great number of events which are completely irrelevant, except for the
fact that they affected great numbers of people. In the course of this
impartial recording great advertisement is given to criminal, or to
unintelligent, persons and their mass-responsibility. Unless the notion
of significance can be detached from this misleading 'quantity'
association, no proper History can be written. But, _pari passu_, this
misleading valuation would have to be rooted out of daily life.

If, however, any very radical and wholesale action were to be taken
regarding this quantitative blight applicable to all History; or if a
new attitude were to be introduced, banishing the record of the silly,
the criminal, or the commonplace (which, as it is, relegates History
to the plane of a crime-yarn, a Western Story, or a body of
statistics), then it would be necessary to attempt to expunge from our
daily life, as far as possible, the things we condemn in History.

Needless to say, Ren was obliged to take into account how any
interference or reform of History would be objected to by many
interested parties, whose wishes could not be ignored. To take one
illustration; the Catholics would not give up the reign of Henry VIII
in any axing of the past, for that reign is rich in evidence of the
kind they want. But what was being proposed by Ren was not a
destruction of books, but a new approach to History, so that a new
type of History should be written. Or, since he was not conspicuous
for his optimism, he hoped that constant criticism of this kind would
discredit, or discredit a little, the present approach. Beyond that,
he hoped that the discredit of a certain kind of event in the past
would reflect forward (to some extent) to how we all acted today.

He founded these slender hopes upon the frightful close-up of typical
History which we have all had during the past twenty or thirty years.
We have all seen great generals, great statesmen, great presidents,
engaged in the conduct of great wars, accompanied by great victories.
Everything has been _great_. At the end of it all we feel a little
depressed by so much greatness. Is it too much to hope, Ren demanded,
that these experiences, giving us a front row of the stalls view of
all the great actors, will cure us a little bit of our taste for what
we know as 'History'?

So far the projected volume covered ground almost identical with
Ren's earlier work. But at this point he parted company with the
somewhat frail optimism of his pre-war thinking. The idea of an
increasing number of enlightened people was still there, to some
extent, but he did not any longer feel confident of any but modest
results. Having more fiercely than ever derided the monotonous,
unvarying mediocrity and criminality which History regales us with;
having with more violence than before related this to our own
mediocrity, he then proceeded to go over, lock, stock and barrel, into
what Professor McKenzie had called the Party of Superman. We obviously
would perish ignominiously if we continued as we were at present. We
must train and compress ourselves in every way, and breed an animal
superior to our present disorderly and untidy selves.--He added that
there was very little chance of our doing this, but that it was just
worth stating that that is the only possible solution.

Here it must be observed that the violence of thought which was
characteristic of Ren received everywhere an additional edge because
of the mental instability developing in him just then. There were, at
times, excesses of virulent expression, which amounted to blemishes,
and even sometimes diminished the effectiveness of the argument. One
might even go a step farther, and find in his adoption of the Superman
position a weakening; the acceptance of a solution which formerly he
would have refused. His life altogether was being mechanized upon a
lower level--in everything expediency counted more with him. And
although in the sequel his work might _look_ the same, there was an
insidious softening of the core which only the expert could detect. He
was writing a book ever so slightly too much as part of his new plan
of life, from which the old integrity and belief were missing.

However, these labours had the effect of drawing the two professors
together in what became a genuine friendship. Impressed by what Ren
was attempting, McKenzie spoke enthusiastically to Trevelyan of this
distinguished work which was in process of construction in their
midst. At Trevelyan's suggestion the University authorities were
stimulated to offer Professor Ren Harding six Extension Lectures, the
subject of which was to be the emergence, in England, in the sixteenth
century, of the new secular civilization. He analysed all the
ingredients of the late sixteenth-century melting pot. The story of
how the culture of the Italian city states had found its way into
England is, of course, a stock subject, but Ren's interpretation of
it was the reverse of a parochial one; he saw those events as if he
had been looking at them from the heart of the Continent.

In the course of this work he paid frequent visits to Ottawa, where he
found the excellent Library in the Parliament Building of the greatest
use. On the first of these visits he and his wife lunched in the
restaurant in Parliament House, as the guests of a member of the
Government, whom he had come to know through his new Momaco friends.
They had a table beside a window. From this position upon the towering
rock on which Canada's Parliament is built, an imposing view might be
obtained down over the fast-moving river which separates the provinces
of Ontario and Quebec. Even Hester was impressed by the finest capital
city of the new world. Unfortunately, as they were returning to their
hotel, the Lord Elgin, the recent fall of snow achieving the same
result as expensive laundry, they met a Highland regiment returning to
their barracks. Alas, the wild music of the cold little island
mountains of Scotland, and its bedizened clans, reminded Hester of
Harrod's and De Bry's, where a piper often advanced along the gutters
of the Brompton Road, and Hester would sometimes give him a threepenny
bit. The alien snow, the parliament that was not Westminster, and the
thought that again Momaco was their destination turned her mind back
into the well-worn channel of hatred of the land in which they found
themselves. On their way back in a parlour car, she expressed herself
as follows, 'There is far too much snow in this country, and Ottawa is
just as bad as Momaco. I always felt, in reading the Russian novels,
uncomfortable at the thought of so much snow.' And Ren answered, 'I
always manage to read Tolstoi without feeling cold.'

The appearance of Professor Ren Harding, in cap and gown, in a
lecture room at Momaco University, attracted considerable attention,
and even drew a fair-sized audience. Trevelyan, for instance, only
missed one lecture; at the end of the series, he congratulated Ren
warmly, and he said, 'It is a great piece of luck for this little
place that you happen to be here. How wonderful it would be if you
could occupy for a short while--for I realize that you will not wish
to stay here once the war is over--if you could be induced to accept
the History professorship while you are with us! Blackwell is leaving,
to take up a post in the United States . . . if you were offered it,
would you accept?' Ren signified that he would.




CHAPTER XXIX

A Chair at Momaco


When Ren landed in Canada, he landed as a dead man, or as good as dead.

His first three years and three months at Momaco confirmed him in this
assessment of the situation in the most absolute sense. He could never
imagine himself emerging from this deadly shadow, this burial alive;
what is more, like many men who find themselves in the position of the
'White Russians', or the Huguenot exiles, he prepared to begin to live
again, in a very different way.

He was strangely resigned, accepting his change of fortune with matter
of factness. But what had begun in Mr. Furber's library, a meeting on
which at the time nothing seemed to hang, had assumed quite serious
proportions. With his six Extension Lectures, and his weekly column in
the _Gazette-Herald_, he actually had rather more than his
professorial fees before his resignation from his job at home in
England, and a substantial surplus remained when he had 'paid his way'
every month. There was enough to buy quite a lot of books, so, in sum,
he was just as strikingly well-off as, so short a time ago, he had
been badly-off.

During the Spring of 'forty-four, as a weekly columnist, his task was
not very onerous, for there was nothing much of a spectacular kind
going on. This relative calm endured right up to D-Day in June (and
this great event was accompanied by another one, the arrival of the
first flying-bomb in England).

During these easy months he was able to get on with the writing of his
book and the subject of his lectures was such familiar ground with him
that the doing of three things at once was not at all a feat.

It was in May, when, one morning, a very portentous-looking envelope
arrived by mail. He sat down at the breakfast table and perused its
contents; then, with apparent indifference, he flung it over for
Hester to read.

It was an invitation addressed to him by the Registrar of the
University of Momaco to occupy the post of Professor of Modern History
in succession to Dr. Blackwell.

She read this document calmly, without speaking, and Ren studied
attentively another letter he had just opened, but both knew that a
showdown was imminent. Ren's hand shook a little, the one that was
holding the letter. He noticed this and, tumbling forward upon the
table, read it flattened out upon the tablecloth.

At last, with great deliberation, Hester pushed back to her husband
the letter from the Registrar. 'What are you going to do about this?'
she enquired sharply, fixing upon him a weary but remorseless eye.

'Accept it, of course.' He said this so categorically, that she recoiled
as though something heavy had fallen upon the table between them.

'Oh.' She drew in her breath, it was a short, quiet gasp. 'You propose
to accept?'

He nodded. 'Of course,' he said. 'Would you like me to turn it down?
Should I turn it down and in a year or so return to England, and see
if I can secure a post as History Master in Mill Hill School, or take
on the marking of examination papers? Such jobs are frightfully
well-paid. I think we might manage to rent a top floor in Pimlico. You
would have to do the washing. We could not afford a laundry. But we
should get by somehow.--Would it be better if I did that?'

Hester, whose face had been convulsing itself in a tragic mask,
released, with a sort of howl, a torrent of tears. Ren sneezed
violently, and noisily blowing his nose, went into the bathroom. He
was neither dressed nor washed: vigorous sounds of another kind were
immediately set-up, the dashing about of water, puffing and grunting,
in obvious competition with the obstreperous cataract of grief.

Hester stuck to it for a minute or two, then fell angrily silent.

As a rule Ren was a whirlwind dresser, but today he took longer than
usual. When at length he appeared he was unusually spick and span. His
present clinical respectability, his dazzling Bengal-striped shirt, his
aggressive tie were in the starkest contrast with the old days in the
Room. It almost seemed as though he had wished to demonstrate what
well-laundered, well-heeled advertisements of well-washed prosperity
they were, in contrast with the grubby pair who would gaze out of the
Pimlico window, never visited by the window-cleaners, at the sluggish
Thames, the colour of dirty bath-water.

The scent of the conifer-packed soap emitted by his well-scrubbed
person seemed like a theme-scent in his corporeal and sartorial attack
upon the tearful propaganda for the most smoke-sullied spot on
earth--for the unheated houses, the rain of greasy soot-flakes of
London; the smells of cabbage, of beefsteak, of washtub, and of sink,
overflowing into the small living-room, where sat the man snarling
over a welter of examination papers.

The demonstration was unheeded--by nostrils closed against pine, and
eyes blind to a Bengal-stripe. He sat down opposite to her at the
table, and picked up and arranged his letters.

'I think this is a most terrible thing,' she announced militantly.

'Do you? What?'

'The fact that this tin-pot little University offer you this . . .
professorship'--she made a contemptuous noise, like a delicate bark.
'If you had known ten years ago that you were going to end your days
as a Professor in a small colonial city, what would you have felt
like? It is awful, Ren.' Her voice broke, she wiped her eyes. 'Worst
of all is your attitude. You are as pleased as if you had received a
. . . what is it called? . . . a Regius Professorship at Oxford. You
were trying to hide your pleasure just now. You went into the bathroom
and washed, to try and wash the childish satisfaction off your face.'

Ren laughed. 'Do not be so idiotic, Essie, you know quite well I was
escaping from that flood of tears. As the weaker animal, women used to
emit them as the devil fish emits ink.--But is not all this water
archaic?'

'I am afraid that my position is as inferior a one as that of a
Victorian wife. He who pays the money calls the tune.'

'Nonsense,' came his reprimand.

'I cry because I have no money of my own,' she told him.

It was only just over four and a half years, the scene reminded him,
since they left England, and ceased to be that couple living in the
House that Jack Built--he looked across the table objectively.

In their new and rather smart apartment, she in a new house-frock and
brightly American, looking not a minute older than in those last days
in England, he began to perceive the resemblance between the new and
the old. How in those near-far days she would plot to receive payment
for bayadre-like transports, in the form of a fur coat, and she still
was plotting now. But today her plots led to other ends; and their
nocturnal entanglements were no longer thought of as utilizable. Why?
(he stopped to ask himself). Why had they ceased to be that? _Why
would she of course not think of that expedient today?_

She no longer thought of fornication from the commercial angle, nor so
lightly, because she had bid adieu to youth. The years in the Hotel
Blundell had been a profound ordeal, and counted as ten years at least
psychologically.--Did she love him still?; this wandered, as it were,
across his mind. The answer seemed to be _no_; that had taken its
final leave, no doubt, around the time youth had officially departed.
No, he decided, love had nothing to do with all this. One would have
to look behind the fire, and the hideous events accompanying it for
anything like love. But she was a great planner, was his Ess, had
always been. She was very deeply worried because she felt she had
nothing to bargain with.

'You are a great plotter and planner, Hester,' he said gently. 'You
are always deep in thought as to how you can get me back to England.
You will have a break-down--why not take life easier?'

'I can't . . . I can't see you throwing away everything you have wanted
. . . and lived for. This place seems to have cast a spell over you.
Left to yourself, you would be quite content to sink into the petty
existence of a little teacher in a colonial city . . . like Professor
McKenzie. You were not a little routine teaching hack like him.'

At an impatient gesture of Ren's she pulled herself up. 'Professor
McKenzie is quite a nice man, I am saying nothing about that. As you
know, Laura and I are good friends. But _you_, Ren. You are something
different, aren't you? You mustn't mind my saying this, but in the
past you would not have taken any notice of such a man. Now you
consult him. You take him into your confidence. You trust him as an
equal. . . . You have changed a great deal. You have let Canada get
you down, Ren.'

Ren threw himself back in his chair.

'All that is an out-dated way of thinking, Hester--I know it is
difficult for you to understand. You cannot be expected to see how
this war will change everything. As "Peter Pan" Nehru says, nothing
after it will be the same as it was before it. You urge me, you
implore me, to return to England. But England will be a very different
place . . . poor, instead of rich--a second-class country, a drab
shabby society, not at all what we have always known.'

She stiffened, with a touch of melodrama. 'I do not care what England
is like. I am much too old to change my way of thinking and feeling. I
would far rather have England penniless, England in rags, England with
no more power than . . . oh Ireland or Iceland, than any other country
in the world.' She stared bleakly into the future.--Susan, and Mummy,
and Gladys, and Stella--she felt their warm British shoulders on
either side of her. As she looked at Ren she made the mental comment,
'Ren darling is half-a-frog, of course.' That excused him for not
seeing these things exactly the way she did.

'We have talked about this so much that we repeat ourselves. Still, I
must as usual make the attempt to correct your way of looking at all
this, Ess. I may have to stop here a couple of years more, but that
will be all. After that there is an excellent chance that I should be
asked to go down to some large American University; Yale, Chicago,
something like that. The United States is surely a big and important
enough place to satisfy your ambitions on my behalf. Apart from that,
I am sure you would like it. You would go on being more Kensingtonish
than ever, whereas I could hardly make myself into a Yankee. We could
go to England, we should not be locked up in the States. But I should
not like to go to England with my hat in my hand, as now would be the
case.' He leant across the table and took her hand in his. She gently
withdrew her hand, and looked up at him steadily.

'You see the picture the wrong way up, Ess, in a most funny, pathetic
light. Yes, you see everything through spectacles which both of us
acquired in Hotel Blundell days. I wish I could convince you of that.'

There was a silence during which she gazed at the tablecloth. She had
moved very little while they had been talking. She appeared riveted to
her chair, in a despairing concentration. She did not seem to wish to
move, or to rise from it, as though she felt that, if she did, it
would be her last chance of deflecting him, that there was something
final about this interview.

Then she lifted her head and looked at him coldly. 'All right,' she
said, 'you deceive yourself. You have an uncommon capacity for
self-deception, my dear Ren. I am sick of talking to you about this
business. Accept, full of joy and self-congratulation, your dirty little
job, and you will see, some day, that I was not so wrong as you think.'

That was the last time that they had any extensive conversation of
this kind. She seemed to have given up as a bad job the effort to
convince him of his mistake.

In the summer they went to the Gasp Peninsula, in the purely
french-canadian Maritimes. With Hester the place called to mind
Normandy and Brittany, those adjuncts of Kensington like the Oberland
and the Rhine. She felt quite at home there sometimes, except for the
Canadian-English which the _habitant_ used on occasion.

The change of scene, however, and the sea air, benefited her, as it
benefited him. At one moment he became _almost_ his old self. It was
not until the time came to return to Momaco once more that the tension
made itself felt again. In the train on the way back they spoke very
little; and it was a rather gloomy pair of returned holiday makers who
left the train at the Momaco terminus.




CHAPTER XXX

Police Headquarters


It had been necessary for them to curtail their holiday, so that Ren
might have at least a month in which to prepare for his work at the
University. It was unfortunate--for one of the big Churchill-Roosevelt
Conferences (and one in which the former gave a great deal away) was
occurring at Quebec--but the weekly column on the _Gazette-Herald_ had
to be abandoned, for Ren wished, during the Fall, to work intensively
on his book in such time as could be spared from the preparation of
his lectures.

At the apartment a certain number of letters awaited them. There was a
letter with the London postmark for Ren. It was from Mary, informing
him of the death of their mother; this had occurred in the third week
of July. Her interest in the War had not been very great, but the
national excitement at the invasion of France communicated itself to
her; and then the sensational arrival of Flying Bombs (for her, as for
everybody else, a recommencement, an all-over-again-ness, probably of
a worse kind) almost coincided with D-Day. These dynamic accelerations
in the world about her, these new tensions, seemed to have been
responsible for her death.

It was at their dinner-table that this, and other mail, was read; and
the letter from Mary was pushed across the table for his wife to read.
As she perused it, she began to cry. Dry-eyed, Ren found himself
watching her, speculating on the exact nature of this grief. Of course
it was quite natural and proper for her to receive this news in this
manner. They should _both_ have been in tears. And then he began to
think of these two women together, the mother and the wife: how
similar was the attitude of both in one respect. In the eyes of wife,
as much as mother, he was a _fool_, though the obstructiveness of the
younger woman, at the present juncture, was far more intense,
corresponding with the egotism involved. As a matter of fact he was
mentally focussing Hester for the first time, was frowning and staring
hard at her, as though he had detected some unsuspected _physical_
attribute, not remarked before, of a displeasing kind. She looked up
at him suddenly. She had been crying less than he supposed, and was
quite able to see the harsh scrutiny. She continued to look, and the
vertical lines of a frown prolonged upwards by a swollen vein bisected
her forehead. This, with her protruding eyes, produced an almost
demented expression. 'Ren,' she said, 'what was it that caused you to
hate your mother? You never told me.'

Ren had at once removed his eyes; and now, at her question, he
answered without emotion, 'I did not hate my mother. You are quite
mistaken if you think that. I do not cry like you, that is all.'

'That is not true,' she said, as she stood up, and, swaying a little
as if she had been drinking, she went into the bedroom, and he could
hear her throw herself upon her bed.

'A demonstration,' he thought, 'to leave me here on exhibition as a
heartless brute. The idea being that the women are a sensitive, rather
noble lot, invariably suffering from the lack of finer feelings of the
male side of the creation.' Ren resented his mother being brought
into a dispute between Hester and himself. What had occurred between
his mother and himself was very much the affair of the mother and the
son. It was a private matter.

    *    *    *    *    *

From the time of their return from the Gasp, Ren began a furious
labour--there was little opportunity for domestic tensions. Hester made
no enquiries about his lectures; subsequently she was not present at any
of them; nor did he make any reference to them either. He withdrew to
his room 'to work', without specifying the nature of the work; and later
he went to the University to give his lectures, but all he said was that
he was 'going to the University'. It was his hope that, quite suddenly
perhaps, seeing that he was succeeding, she would relent, and everything
would slip into place as if it had never been awry.

How closely packed the working-day was may be judged by the following
circumstance--belonging to a period some months further on. On Christmas
Day Ren worked in his study up to tea-time. They had arranged to go to
Momaco's giant hotel for dinner, to celebrate with the McKenzies, who
were bringing their son, Duncan, now ten years old. After a brief tea
Ren returned to his study: and he hardly gave himself time to dress.
Hester, on her side, had gone to see Alice Price, and to have a good
talk with Alice's father about a certain country, which both of them
loathed, and another, which both of them loved--romantically,
uncritically. Mr. Price was quite a well-to-do man: but his well-known
lack of Canadian orthodoxy, and his habit of continually criticizing the
country which was responsible for his small fortune, had probably been
the cause of his daughter's not marrying. She was good-looking, a
typical Canadian, but already thirty-five.

When Hester got home to dress for the evening, Ren was drinking a cup
of tea; and when at half-past seven the McKenzies called, in a hired
car, to take them to the hotel, his toilet was still incomplete. It
was with a flushed face of wry apology that he at last entered the
car, saying, 'I worked too late; I have two jobs on my hands: you are
a sensible fellow' (to McKenzie), 'and content yourself with one.'

The King George Hotel was an example of the colossal in
hotel-building. . . . Certain of its massive and sinister vistas were
suggestive of Gnossos rather than of Momaco, of hieratic rather than
of capitalistic architecture. Their French-Canadian waiter had a
countenance that went with the architecture. Lines of ponderous square
pillars marked off the dancing floor from the lines of tables, and
behind the pillar-line there was more depth than in the Chteau
Laurier--which the architect clearly had had in mind, and had hoped to
outdo. When they arrived, a rumba was in progress. Leaving McKenzie
Junior at the table, the two Professors disappeared into the barbaric
mle, Laura waving her posteriors expertly in the embrace of Ren.
Hester, less disposed to borrow from the expressive buttocks of the
Black, wobbled her own a little mournfully.

They decided that they would drink champagne. Before long they were
pulling crackers, and transformed by paper hats into pantomime figures,
McKenzie with an eyebrow pencil having given himself a very dark
moustache. Chicken Maryland, with fried pineapple and sweet corn and
potato mixed, was the centre of the meal. (They had rejected unanimously
Turkey Momaco, Reine Pedauque.) Young Duncan McKenzie looked rather
green for a moment, after consuming a Bombe Glace Messaline. The Mot
frothed as it should, and flames from the large Christmas Pudding very
nearly started a conflagration; Hester's Alsatian peasant-cap burst into
flames, but was extinguished with great skill and promptitude by
McKenzie, who clapped his hands upon the flames. A smell of singeing
bore witness to the part that Hester's hair had played in the
excitements of the evening. Theirs was a conventional Christmas
celebration, and there was a great deal of dancing: the taste of the
French-Canadians, who were prominent in staffing and stage-directing
this monstrous Hotel, was of a 'Rasta' type, the orchestra preferring
rumbas and tangos to anything else. Ren carried on an intermittent
conversation with a French party at the next table--Parisian French, not
Momaco French. The noise soon became terrific. There were one or two
academical figures here and there, and two of these joined them at one
point. It was undeniably a wonderful idea to have had their Christmas
dinner in this saturnalian fashion.

With their last bottle came the final toasts. All of these toasts,
naturally, looked towards the future happiness or success of each member
of the party. When Ren's new academic adventure was being toasted, it
was noticed that Hester watched, with an exclusive concentration, the
scene on the dance-floor. 'And now, Ren, your book!' exclaimed
McKenzie. But even to that she did not respond. This glass that never
rose to celebrate, but which got emptied all the same, in toasts that
were undivulged, at the last chilled this Christmas Party, and left an
uncomfortable sense of something wrong: although, on the whole, the
evening might be described as a great success.

When the Hardings got home, as Hester was drawing off her gloves, she
summed up: 'A pretty penny that has cost us. What was it for?'

Ren looked at the cross and staring face with compassion. 'Mais quel
enttement, nom de dieu!' he said under his breath.

As a consequence of his appointment at the University, if for no other
reason, Ren was obliged to go to a certain number of parties and
functions, as well as to dinner engagements or casual visits to the
houses of the friends he had made. Hester almost always accompanied
him. Such a demonstration as she made on the occasion of the Christmas
dinner was not a typical occurrence, she usually conducted herself
quite normally.

So when, one night, she failed to turn up at the house of the
Chancellor of the University, at the time arranged, 7.30, Ren was
very surprised and correspondingly uneasy. He had dressed at the
University, from which he went directly to the Chancellor's house. It
was an important dinner: the President of McGill and other academic
notables were to be there. Of course, no great harm would be done
should she not appear; if it turned out to be a _coup de tte_ on
Hester's part, some plausible excuse could be found. What he said, on
the spur of the moment, was simply that he could not guess what had
happened to delay her.

It was half-way through the meal that he was called to the telephone
outside in the hall. When he picked up the receiver, someone said, 'This
is the Police.' He was asked if his wife's name was 'Hester Lilian
Harding'. His heart took a painful jump and stopped dead. He said
quietly 'Yes', when the voice asked him to come immediately to Police
Headquarters at Rochester Avenue. He asked no questions. Upon the back
of a visiting card he scribbled a brief message, and told the man who
had accompanied him to the telephone to hand it to the Chancellor.

In Momaco (unlike Toronto) taxis are allowed to ply for hire, and he
found one almost at once. Rochester Avenue was not far, and as soon as
he entered the door of the main commissariat of police, someone said,
'You Professor Harding?'--He was then conducted into a room in which a
police officer sat at a table, who sprang up, saying 'You Professor
Harding?' before any sound had been made by his escort. But after
that, as they stood facing one another, the police officer appeared
embarrassed. 'It's a warm evening for April, Professor,' he said. 'I'm
glad you came right over here without delay. I was sorry to disturb
you, Professor, I'm more sorry than I know how to say, Professor. . . .
Hell, this isn't easy!'

'What is it?' Ren asked sharply.

To hunt other human beings seems to reduce the face to a coarse muzzle
and baleful eye. When this simplified face attempts to portray pity,
the effect is alarming.

'Will you kindly tell me at once what my wife has done,' demanded Ren.

'What did she do?' echoed the policeman. And Ren noticed the change
of tense.

'She did nothing?' he asked; his lips trembled. 'If she has done
nothing, why did you demand my presence here?' The aggressive tone
provoked the reappearance of the unmodified jowl of the dogs of the Law.

'She did do _something_, Professor. She threw herself under a truck.'

Ren was trembling, and swaying a little. He glared silently at the
police officer, as if the latter had said that his wife was a liar or
a thief. Then he staggered forward, and supported himself upon the
table with the flat of his hands. The policeman said, 'Lean on me,'
and led him to a chair. He retched once and vomited a little, turning
sideways to do so. The man rang a bell on his desk, and soon a glass
of water was produced. Ren attempted to rise. 'Sit there for a while,
Professor,' the policeman told him: he knew all about shock. He could
see that this one had almost knocked this limey cold. He sat in his
chair smoking, and noting something in a large book.

At length Ren got to his feet and said, 'Where is she? Shall we go?'

'Okay, Professor.'

The man walked beside him, his eye in the corner of his head, ready to
catch him as he fell. They stopped, the policeman drew from his pocket
a large key, opened a door.

Ren was not conscious of passing through the door, but almost
immediately he found himself leaning bodily upon the policeman, his
head almost on the shoulder of his escort, and looking down on a
much-soiled collection of objects. They were arranged in the most
paradoxical way. Like a _graffito_ the essentials were picked out. He
recognized the low-bottomed silhouette of a female figure, the clothes
shapeless and black with blood. Slightly to one side there was a pair
of legs in horrible detachment, like a pair of legs for a doll upon a
factory table, before they have been stuck on to the body. At the top,
was the long forward-straining, as it were yearning neck. Topmost was
the bloodstained head of Hester, lying on its side. The poor hair was
full of mud, which flattened it upon the skull. Her eye protruded: it
was strange it should still have the strength to go peering on in the
darkness.

Ren took a step forward towards the exhibit, but he fell headlong,
striking his forehead upon the edge of the marble slab--the remains
being arranged upon something like a fishmonger's display slab. As he
fell it had been his object to seize the head and carry it away with
him. To examine his legal right had been his last clear act of
consciousness.




CHAPTER XXXI

The White Silence


Two hours later, his head bandaged, Ren lay in a bed in the Momaco
General Hospital. He was staring, with a dull and confused expression,
at a young man who sat beside him.

'Nothing,' he said thickly.

'Had she no inherited pre-disposition? . . .'

'Please leave me,' Ren muttered.

'You have nothing you can tell me, Professor?'

'Leave me.'

The _Gazette-Herald_ reporter coughed. An interne came up behind him,
and bent down, mouth to ear. The reporter rose, coughed, looked at the
patient, and moved away on tiptoe. This was The Silent Ward, as they
called it, for a thrombosis secured admission for a patient to the
White Silence, a place so quiet that, to be any more silent, it would
have to be death.

Ren's brain was silent too. All that entered it resembling a thought
was a painful feeling that he was alone, that he had been removed from
life and shut into a white solitude. The white interne was a
mechanism. He could not understand the nurses. They had not learned
how to speak. Wherever he looked he saw a round spot of light, but
soft, as if it belonged wherever it happened to appear. The interne
was watching him. He came over, and fixed white spectacles upon his
nose. The eyeholes were circles of white muslin.--There can be no
proper silence while the eyes are allowed to bang about. Now that the
visual turbulence had been cut off, and sight reduced to a white
circle, an all-over muting of the consciousness ensued. Even such
stimulus as white-coated interne removed, the mind began to dream of
white rivers which led nowhere, which developed laterally, until they
ended in a limitless white expanse. The constant sense of loneliness
ended, in the white silence, as a necessary ingredient of the white
silence, which was all that was desired--the negation of the visual;
and an aural blank which had more quality than white, was not such a
negation, and was as soothing as a caress. But at last consciousness
ebbed quietly away, and Ren lay in a dreamless sleep, alone in this
place dedicated to silence, totally removed from life.

It was only very gradually that this remoteness and peace began to be
invaded by fragments of the glaring and clanging world outside this
muted and spectral seclusion. It was the specialist's purpose to
forbid ingress and access to anything belonging to the passionate
universe without, from which Ren had accidentally been cut off.
Everything was done to preserve the salutary aloofness.

But in the graveyard of the senses, one by one, the most brutal
memories were resurrected. Before he left the hospital Ren was in
possession of the full burden of consciousness once more. As a first
step, about ten days after he had been brought in, the nerve-centres
restored to proper functioning, he was removed from the Ward of
Silence to a bright and pleasant room. And it was in that room that
the struggle began, the struggle as gradually as possible to re-admit
to the mind what had been excluded from it: and the re-admission was
apt to be anything but gradual, and threatened to disrupt the vessel
into which it rushed. For approximately a week he was left alone
there, until he was regarded as strong enough to receive visitors:
which protective measure left totally out of count the mental visitors
who crowded in. The first to enter the room without knocking was, it
was natural, Hester. And when the nurse found him sobbing upon the
pillow, every effort was made to get rid of this terrible and
disturbing visitant. For it was well understood by the doctors who she
must be. But there was no expulsion of Hester. She was always there
very soon, and obsessed the patient. Sometimes she would be as she was
in the days of the Room, of the 'vows of hardship'. At others she was
the _graffito_ woman of the police mortuary. She would enter as he was
half-asleep, with her eyes protruding, her head thrust forward, and
the deep line of her frown prolonged by a swollen vein bisecting the
forehead. The nurse would perhaps appear, to do one of the
innumerable, irrelevant things nurses find to do, and he would lie
glaring at the wall; and she would go up to the bed and give the
pillow an idle poke; and say, 'Te voil qui ne dors pas, Ren.'

But at last they decided to let in the world of flesh and blood, if
only to counteract the more dangerous imaginary visitors. McKenzie was
the first to arrive, and the only one for a long time. 'You have been
very ill, Ren,' he said, 'you have had a terrible time. I have made a
number of efforts to see you. Is there anything at all I can do? Laura
would like to come and see you. Would that be all right?'

Ren continued to stare at him, even to glare at him, holding his hand
tight.

'Do not trouble to talk, Ren. I know how hard it must be for you. Do
not make any effort.'

Ren tried to smile, and it changed his face into somebody else's. 'I
struck my head . . . they told you, of course. I suppose there was
concussion . . . yes, concussion. I have got over it, at least I have
got over the concussion. Of course I'm rather shaken you know.'

'I can well imagine.'

'It will be impossible for me to see any people.' His eyes filled with
tears. 'I must leave here--Momaco, I mean.'

'Why? Ren, that would be a great pity. Wait a bit. Do not decide
anything yet. You are in no state . . .'

'I have decided,' Ren said.

'You must go and rest somewhere. It is clear enough that you will not
be able to work for some time. They are quite decent people at the
University; they will give you sick leave, with pay you know. I will
see about that. Allow me to see about that for you.'

Ren empowered him to do anything, and said he would be most grateful
if he would act for him. He gave him a bunch of keys, lifting up one,
and saying 'the front door'; lifting up another, he said, 'the desk'.
There was a small address book, that was all he wanted. And then he
became very tired. Muttering some apology, he turned his back upon his
friend and was almost at once asleep. McKenzie left quietly, and
informed the nurse that her patient was asleep. He asked if he might
see the doctor who had been dealing with this case.

The next day McKenzie called again, bringing the small address book,
mail, and some fruit. He was at once admitted. Ren had told them that
he wished to see no one else. The mail was left with the doctor, to be
delivered as and when he saw fit: with the warning that one of the
letters was probably from the patient's dead wife. That day Ren said
even less than the day before. He confided that he thought he would go
to a certain place, if there was a vacancy. He would stop there for
some time. Perhaps he would stay there a _long_ time. It appeared to
fatigue him profoundly to talk, even with anyone he knew. Having
imparted the above piece of information, as before he presented
McKenzie with his back, and rapidly fell asleep.

In a few days he got up, for the making of the bed, and a week later
than that he gave signs of a rather more normal condition of mind.
What was occurring beneath this frozen surface was a series of painful
readjustments, followed, as was the case with McKenzie's visit, by
sleep. He slept a great deal of the time, the doctors saw to that.
Meanwhile he had written one letter: upon the envelope was the
following name and address:

  Father Moody, S.M.,
  Registrar,
  College of the Sacred Heart,
  Niagara, Ont.

and to this letter a reply had been received at the hospital, but was
in the keeping of the doctor, as was the mail from the apartment.

Neither to doctor nor to nurse, any more than to McKenzie, did Ren
utter a word upon the subject of his wife's death. He continued to
refuse to see anyone. Mr. Furber, for instance, greatly excited by the
banner-headlines 'SUICIDE OF COLLEGE PROFESSOR'S WIFE', and the
tittle-tattle scraped together by the reporters, made frenzied
attempts to be admitted 'for a few brief moments' to see Ren. But
Ren became hysterical at the idea of seeing Mr. Furber, so that
would-be visitor was permanently banned.

The Hester he saw at present was a living and moving one, one that he
had loved, a witty, at times malicious one; but one who had become as
much part of his physical being as if they had been born twins,
physically fused--or better, one might say, for physical amalgamation
would be unpleasant, identical twins. It had been a fearful
estrangement between them when she made a return to England a supreme
issue, a life or death issue. She still, in death, spoke of England.
But all he spoke to her about was forgiveness. Could he ever be
forgiven? No, forgiveness was of course impossible. Once or twice he
thought he must get back to England, and if he should ask her
forgiveness _there_, then the sweet face would smile as if to say,
'You have returned! We could not _both_ return! But you found your way
back. That proves that there really was love in you for me.' And he
several times started to plan a return to England--to England and to
penury. The phantom was tenderer when England was in his mind: when he
was thinking of all the profound advantages England had over any other
English-speaking country.

At the time this communion of the dead and the living started, it was
only the decapitated Hester who was present to him. His impulse in the
police mortuary to seize and to carry off her head was realized in the
imagination. In trembling horror he grasped the decapitated head, and
pressed her dear face against his. And then the lifeless lips moved
and grew warm. With amazement, and soon with delight, he felt the
warming lips glueing themselves against his. His entire body
responded, for she was no longer merely a head. Love had brought her
to life again. He imagined, in a sort of delirium, this miracle. Never
again did she return as Hester decapitated and legless. But that
fearful reality was always present, somewhere, out of sight, never out
of mind. He always knew that fundamentally and irreparably she was the
_graffito_ woman of the police mortuary, and only in memory something
else. Attempting always to conjure this horror, he implored Hester to
keep together--to be her old self. And so he went on from day to day,
in the mental reality of his daydream, secured by his hospital
seclusion. He did his best to preserve this delusion; he felt that if
it stopped he would then be compelled to face the overpowering
reality. So it was an escape device.

The reason played no part at any time in his subterranean adjustments
in the hospital. To _think_ was impossible. The implacable severed
head, and the blood-stained severed legs on the one hand, and then the
neurotic collapse in which his head injury had left him, made the
continued exclusion of the reason imperative.

Then one day, when he was physically much stronger, the doctor came in
and handed him his mail. The psychiatrist sat by the side of the bed
while he opened the letters. First was a personal letter from the
Chancellor, expressing his sorrow at the terrible misfortune which had
overtaken Ren; next one from the Registrar, informing him that it was
the hope of the University Board that Ren would absent himself from
duty for as long as was necessary for the complete restoration of his
health, his fees to be paid during that period uncurtailed. There was
a most charming letter from Trevelyan, expressive of a genuine
appreciation of the stricken Professor. Next several letters from
Canadian well-wishers, Alice Price and the pre Price for example.
Then came the last two letters.

There was the not very beautifully engraved envelope announcing the
_College of the Sacred Heart_. The letter within, in the crabbed
peasant fist of Father Moody, was cordial in the extreme. The
personality of the rubicund priest, who had visited him a year or so
earlier, and offered him a course of lectures, if he had the time to
give them at Sacred Heart College, was visible in every awkward
scratch of the pen and crudely friendly word. The Father Superior, to
whom Father Moody had spoken, had expressed himself as delighted if
Professor Harding could come right away.

Last was the letter from Hester. He looked at the envelope, looked up
at the doctor, who smiled encouragingly, and opened it quickly. He
read--whitening as he did so.

Almost at once he put the letter down, still holding it with his hands.
'This,' he told the doctor, 'is a communication from my dead wife.'

'Indeed,' said the doctor.

'Yes,' he answered. 'She has written me. I think I will read it when I
am alone.'

The doctor stood up. 'Well, I will leave you.' He passed through the
door, and took up a position behind it, from which he was able to
observe the patient. He did not have to wait. Ren lifted the letter
again, and as he began to read, he was softly laughing.




CHAPTER XXXII

The College of the Sacred Heart


The College of the Sacred Heart, shortened for familiar use to 'Sacred
Heart College', was a Catholic Seminary. The College buildings were,
in part, originally a Fort. A cloistered square had been contrived in
the heart of the Fort building; and all round this square were the
long corridors, off which, upstairs and downstairs, were the cells of
the priests, the College offices, the Chapel, and the refectory. The
lecture rooms were in a large building in the rear, and also the
dormitories of the Seminarians; behind that was the playing field; and
behind that was the home-farm. On this the priests and Seminarians
worked. Since most of them were the sons of Irish dirt-farmers, the
farm work was carried out expertly. It was not irksome to anybody, and
the priests took it in turns to work there, regarding it as a useful
and pleasurable form of outdoor exercise.

About three months after he had left the Hospital, Ren sat, one
afternoon, at the window of his cell. He was dressed in a cassock: he
still wore his beard. It was a warm afternoon, and his cassock was
open. The College was situated in the wine country of Canada,
bordering the United States. The roar of Niagara sounded sleepily,
like the sound of the ocean not far away. The window of his cell faced
towards the river, which was the water of Lake Erie concentrating
itself to plunge down at Niagara, as one of the most famous waterfalls
in the world, though the slowly moving water of the River Niagara had
nothing ominous about it, and, except for the roar as you approached
the precipice, a man might slide over the top without at all realizing
what was about to occur.

This training-centre for the priesthood was a well-disciplined
community, whose life moved hither and thither in response to quiet
orders, or to a settled routine. It was an idyllically peaceful place
for the victim of dynamic excess to go to, or for those wishing to
shun the tumult of unplanned life. Every sound in it had been
dutifully muted. There, beneath the great wing of the Roman Church,
sat the hospital inmate, but now gathering strength and wilfulness
every day. He was in another kind of Ward of Silence, but passion had
taken possession of him once more, and he was no longer a suitable
inmate of this place of ancient rules, where to consult the
unconditioned will qualified you for expulsion. For you cannot have
_peace_ upon any terms but obedience to law.

The peace of the scene, the restful monotony of the lives of these
people, whose minds reflected the massively built Summa of all
philosophies (providing a static finality in which the restless
intellect might find repose), had proved in the end nothing but an
irritant to Ren. His intelligence was too dynamic, his reason was too
bitterly bruised, for a static bliss.

When he had arrived in a taxicab, three months before, he was still only
fit for silence, and he believed that for the rest of time he would want
nothing but peace. He had regarded Sacred Heart College as a magical
hospital, an ancient place of healing; what was taught there, a mystical
psychiatry. Without any reservation, as he entered the Registrar's
office, Ren was profoundly thankful that so extraordinary an
institution as the Catholic Church was still there intact, exultantly
human. What other institution--which _was_ an institution--lived as the
guardian of the great human values of antiquity?

Father Moody was a very kind and pleasant priest, who stood behind a
long thick counter which was higher than his navel. He stood there
with both his hands flat upon the counter before him. Ren could
scarcely credit his good fortune as the figure of the rosy-faced young
priest, his eyes, blazing with childish benevolence, was electrified
at the sight of him, his temples flushing a rich joyous pink, his hand
outstretched across the solid counter, behind which he functioned.

'Professor Harding, well! Why did you not let me know that you were to
arrive today, and I would have met you at the station at Niagara! Did
you come over in a taxi? Have you got your things there too? That is
fine and dandy!'

Even his secretary, a young layman with the shy manners of a young
Englishman of good education, co-operated discreetly in making the
unfortunate stranger at home. Later on Ren learnt that this young man
had had much practice in Eastern Canada, in helping to make the despised
and rejected welcome, for he had given his services to the House of
Friendship night shelters. There he supervised nightly the housing of a
dozen or so bums. His parents were wealthy Montrealers. He had been a
Trappist: but in a year he had had to give it up, because his health was
unequal to the great rigours of those vows. Now Father Moody used him as
secretary. He was active in their labour organization and lectured on
social problems. The Sacred Heart College Fathers co-operated with
American priests in Buffalo in various social activities.

O'Neill was the secretary's name. He was handsome, sheepishly devout
as well as competent, harmlessly sly. Rising now from where he was
working at an overloaded table, he followed Father Moody, who had
burst out of his enclosure, rubbing his hands heartily, and exclaiming
in vigorous Canadian-Irish, 'So long as you're _here_, that's the
principal thing. The journey did not tire you too much I hope. I'm
glad you feel none the worse for it, you look fairly fit. Let us come
along to your apartment; I think you will be comfortable there. I will
get a cell ready for you. It won't take very long.' As they entered
the grand corridor (figures at the farther end of it appeared quite
diminutive), springing about a little Father Moody shouted,
'Professor, where did you park your luggage? . . . round there to the
left, is it?' Father Moody and his secretary swept up the luggage, and
carried it, it seemed to Ren, about half a mile, to the apartment,
plushy and gilded, set aside for visitors.

Ren's impression of these first days was that he was sinking down
into the equivalent of a wonderful feather bed. It was human wills
which provided this overall sense of ineffable comfort. Everywhere he
was being bolstered and spared any shock.

There was first an ordeal, however, from which he _might_ have issued
not so cushily supported as all that if there had been any hitch. The
potential hitch was a dark, tall young scrutinizing priest, named
Father O'Shea. He and two other priests, in the course of the first
evening, filed into the apartment, without explanation, headed by
Father Moody, saying, 'I've brought you some visitors. I hope we are
not disturbing you?'

Father O'Shea was in charge of the department of philosophy, which began
and ended with St. Thomas Aquinas. He was the uncrowned King of the
College, and made his views felt to such good effect that no one dared
to do anything without his consent, this applying as much to the Father
Superior as to the Registrar. The ultimate position of Ren in this
institution would depend upon whether Father O'Shea liked him or not. So
when this tall, slightly sinister-looking figure, with a long black
cloak sailing out behind him, held at the neck by a spectacular silver
clasp, entered the room, and fixed his dark eyes upon the visitor, the
latter felt (although he had not been apprised of the true situation)
that something of moment was about to occur. Of the other two priests,
only one mattered; that was Father McAuliffe. He was the Librarian, and
a great personal friend of the Registrar. The third priest was Father
Lemoine, a French-Canadian priest who, for some reason, was a Maurician
father. He was small, unlike the other two: and unlike their aggressive
Irish faces his was gentle and self-effacing.

Well, the upshot of this examination was that Father O'Shea seemed
rather to take to Ren, so there was no obstacle there to the
benevolent designs of the Registrar.

Ren's mind was still so warped that no practical considerations could
matter very much. He had informed no one at Momaco, for instance,
where he was going, not even McKenzie. He just took his departure one
fine morning, with the first instalment of his convalescent fees. Now,
of course, it was entirely irresponsible to book himself up for
another job. But he did not regard this place as a _job_: in any
event, the fee would be so small that it could not be thought of in
the same order of things as the University of Momaco, where the
honorarium was larger than might be expected.

When a cell had been found for him, and he had been officially
registered as an inmate, Father Moody discussed with him the question
of doing something (a merely token activity) to regularize his
residence at the College. Was he well enough yet to undertake any
work, of however light a kind, the good Father wanted to know?
Supposing he did nothing just yet, for a short while? That would be
quite agreeable to them. But Ren declared that he was well enough to
play some part in the life of the College. It actually never occurred
to him that by accepting any fee, however small, he would be behaving
in an extraordinary way, seeing that Momaco was handsomely supporting
him as a convalescent professor. What Father Moody proposed was that,
to begin with, he should give two lectures a week of a quite
elementary kind. This would leave him free to do whatever he liked for
the greater part of the week. Ren gladly consented to this
arrangement, and with this went a fee so modest as not to prick his
conscience into activity.

Ren's mental condition left much to be desired. Prior to the suicide
of his wife, his personality had progressively acquired a toughness, a
deadness which enabled him to proceed with his life along normal
lines, though at a lower level, and only on condition of this kind of
numbness. He was deadening and de-sensitizing himself, and considered
that he was proof against any domestic assaults. At that time it would
have required a very outstanding shock to de-anaesthetize him; but
that shock would probably be fatal. The blow which was suddenly
administered in the central police station, when he was confronted
with his wife's mutilated body, was of such severity as to induce a
completely new situation; but the sudden exposure of the profounder
nervous tracts was a test of endurance beyond his powers. In the
hospital the reason lay collapsed and on the verge of a conversion
into an irrational entity. For some days it was uncertain what was
going to happen, and whether he was going to issue from this internal
conflict a man no longer sane, or a man still able to maintain himself
in the company of the sane in a mentally precarious condition. It was
the second of these alternatives which eventuated, and Ren went out
of the hospital like a sleepwalker, able to go here and to go there,
to converse rationally and to carry on with life, but still in a kind
of frozen way, the _ultimate_ issue not decided.

However, here he was, in an atmosphere very propitious to a
satisfactory outcome, surrounded by kindness, and removed from all
likelihood of shock. He entered into pleasant social relations with
those among whom he had come. He conducted himself normally, or almost
normally. He would (infrequently) perhaps weep, but would smile and
apologize. Soon he was on the best of terms with the ruling group.

His first evening at the Sacred Heart, then, he was visited by the
three priests. On the second evening he was invited to join the select
group of priests, described above, in the cell of Father McAuliffe.
There the big Librarian dispensed a kind of supper of savouries and
coffee. He stood before a gas-jet on which he cooked Welsh Rarebits,
sausage items, eggs, sardines on toast, and such things. As he stood
there with the smoke rising around his face, he conversed without
looking up. Most nights Father Moody and Father O'Shea were present,
and several other priests looked in as well sometimes.

It was a noisy, jovial scene, reminiscent of what one associates with,
let us say, eighteenth-century undergraduate life--it was a kind of
cross between that and the life of men in the North Lands of Canada.
All taking part at this nightly gathering-place were bold and
intimate, very comradely, Fathers. And the next day, when Ren was
asked to go up and visit Father McAuliffe by himself, after a little
talk the Librarian went across to where a short curtain hung in front
of a recess, and pulling it back produced a bottle of gin and two
glasses. 'Let us have a snort, what do you say?' And when Ren left,
about an hour later, Father McAuliffe, as he was putting the gin back
into the recess, remarked, 'Whenever you feel you would like a drink,
just come along. I always have something here.'

So the atmosphere was of the most genial kind. These new companions
were a little too vigorous for him as yet. He spent a good deal of
time resting, but otherwise his habits differed in no way from those
of the Fathers. He had his meals in the large refectory: he sat with
the priests at a long table dominating the hall. There was a rapid
grace, and then the twenty priests dropped quickly into their places,
and set about devouring the food automatically and sometimes
violently. About two hundred Seminarians sat at four or five tables
in front of the long table, and during the meal a young cassocked
priest-to-be read in a loud, harsh, expressionless voice some section
of the Old Testament. This was a rather alarmingly noisy place for
someone who was still a sick man, but the food was good.

So there he was, in the next thing to a Monastery, nursing his sick
mind; the rest and peace of a negation of life (or of the dynamic
order which was what life meant for him). This was as much a negation
as the Hotel Blundell. It was his second withdrawal and suspension of
the intellectual processes, the giving-up of being himself. Some weeks
before Hester killed herself he had mailed the MSS. of his new book to
the New York publisher by whom his last book had been taken. But he
had forgotten that he had done this: it was just as though no book had
been written at all. As he had not told anyone in Momaco where he was
going, he would hear nothing about what was happening to his book. He
had turned his back upon all that, upon the new start he had made at
Momaco, and the book he had been so breathlessly writing; he was
repeating the gesture by which he had given up his academic career in
England. Only, the earlier of these two exits had for its rationale a
great moral issue, and his second exit was not a martyrdom but a
sacrifice, an emotional act of propitiation and to assuage a phantom.

In the first weeks here, Hester was constantly in his mind. But he was
not so fundamentally changed that he was not ready to be amused. There
were, almost weekly, cultural and social visitors to the College.
Every month some well-known personality came to lecture, the lecture
taking place in some cinema or hall in Niagara. There was always a
good attendance, a number of people coming over from the United
States. These lecturers spent the night in the visitors' suite. Ren
insisted that his presence in the College was a circumstance as
regards which a silence should be observed. But, although he did not
attend the lectures, he was at times entertained by what he saw of
these eminent personalities. Once, for instance, he was passing the
visitors' suite, and the Irish poet, Padraic O'Flaherty, emerged from
one of the doors ahead of him. The Father Superior and another priest
were deep in conversation a short distance away. As Padraic observed
the dignitary, he crossed himself, and greeted him. Ren had never
seen crossing oneself employed as a salute. An oblate, who had just
arrived from Ireland, was informing the Superior of the object of his
visit. By affecting to look at a notice-board Ren was able
surreptitiously to observe what transpired. The poet now drew level
with the Father Superior, and crossed himself again. Next the poet and
the oblate greeted one another, Padraic again crossing himself. This
may have been because of the enormous cross blotting out the stomach
of the oblate, suspended by a gold chain around his neck. Killarney
was where the young oblate came from, and his childish blue eyes burst
into a shy smile as his fellow-countryman addressed him. Padraic
involved the Father Superior in his boisterous but dignified Irish
mirth, and all three were laughing now. After two minutes perhaps the
poet moved away, crossing himself as he left. Some further remark of
the Superior's arrested him; and, after delivering his jovial reply,
he crossed himself again as he turned away, the Superior adding his
breast-cross to the sum of lavish salutes. So these two Irishmen
between them, the poet, and the oblate with his terrific metal cross
shining upon his stomach, filled the corridor with an unusual
atmosphere of holiness. A German priest who had been staying at the
College for some weeks disapproved of the oblate, describing the
enormous cross hanging from his neck as 'exaggerated'. He would
certainly have disapproved of Padraic too, thought Ren, but he
realized that he himself was on the side of Padraic, and smiled at
this discovery.

It was during this void, this period of suspended life, that he began
to think of a conversion. The fact that his mother had been a Catholic
was a deterrent rather than otherwise, but the void exposed him to
irrelevant impulses, and he drifted towards 'the old religion'. This
was irrational, but he had buried his reason in the tomb of his wife
as an expression of remorse, or so he once put it to himself. There
was, of course, a magnetism in the uniformity of the habits of these
people. When he would sit with Father O'Donnell, one of his new
friends, that good priest would stand up and shake himself,
exclaiming, 'Well now, I must go and settle my accounts with Rome.'
The time had come, in other words, to say his office.

Ren felt attracted to this routine, of office, of pedagogy, of office
again, of farm-labour; for what he needed just then was a discipline,
and prayer was a technique which at last he understood. Hester, with
whom he communed continually at present, was of the same order of
things with God. God was for all the priests and seminarians, all the
other people in this place, the same kind of being that Hester was for
him, having a similar obsessional reality. He had been introduced,
through what had happened to him, into the world of the devout. It was
therefore quite easy, when he fell upon his knees--for the first time
since he had been a child--to approach God as though to the manner
born; to feel him as a reality, of the same flesh and blood with
Hester. There were times when he went from one to the other, as a man
visiting a friend in a certain quarter of the town would say to
himself, 'As old So and So lives hereabouts too, I think I will look
him up before I return.'

It was after he had been there a month that he asked if he might go to
Mass on Sunday. Father Moody's face was irradiated with a smiling joy,
and his forehead was almost a tomato colour. 'Sure! Whoi not! I am so
glad, Professor! Come and fetch me on Sunday morning, we will go along
to Mass together.' The priest's eyes shone with so benign a light that
Ren flushed. This was certainly one of God's most authentic officers.
Without any enquiries at all as to why he wished to do this, he began
to go to Mass on Sundays.

He imagined God inhabiting a void, a nothingness, which might be
thought of as a cavern: his costume was that of a Roman citizen of two
thousand years ago. God was historic. How he became aware of Him
physically was after the manner of his contacting Hester. He could see
only a shadowy face, which was vaguely ecstatic.

When he had said to himself that everyone in this College was engaged
in a communion (namely, with God) as he was with Hester, that would
only be true ideally. It was only the Saints who communed with God as
he did with Hester. Naturally, it would be most improbable that any of
these teaching priests or seminarians enjoyed any intense and
obsessional communion with God similar to his own with his dead wife:
the idea of God certainly ruled their lives, but He would hardly be
more than an abstraction. And Ren did realize this, to some extent,
and, without formulating it very much, he knew that he was nearer to
God, at this period, than most of those around him.

About this time he paid frequent visits to the cell of Father O'Shea.
Their conversation bore upon questions of Catholic teaching and a
number of other kindred subjects, such as the technique of prayer. It
was after a week or two, during which these visits had been
continuous, that the priest unexpectedly asked him, 'Are you becoming
a Catholic?' To this, after a moment's hesitation, Ren answered,
'Yes'.--'In that case,' Father O'Shea observed, 'you will require
these.' And he handed him a half-dozen booklets.

Ren accepted the books. But he was never more explicit than that. All
the priests ever knew about his intentions was his 'Yes' in reply to
Father O'Shea's question. And it was not long after this that he began
to experience a change of heart or a change of mind.




CHAPTER XXXIII

Return to the Normal


Ren's change of mind, and the deep emotional shift, was a process not
abrupt, but of so profoundly radical a kind that, from the first
moment this movement set in, there was something in the nature of a
revolution. It possibly began as a result of his lectures. These were
elementary, but they did take him back to his normal way of thought:
to things belonging to the sphere of reason, rather than to the
spiritist degeneration which had ensued upon the suicide of Hester
(which is not, of course, to say that his contacts with God were a
'degeneration', but what led to them was a degeneration for him, the
springs of whose life lay far away from the extremes of mysticism).
The reason began to assert itself once more--it was a rather queer
sensation for him at first. He would, from time to time, find himself
thinking about something pertaining to the world of the intellect,
which had been so completely displaced by what he soon was to call
'Hesteria'. So gradually he recovered his mental health--with a strict
limitation which did not, however, make any practical difference, only
a profound modification. The 'frozenness', as it has been described,
remained. All that occurred was that he came out of the highly
artificial atmosphere he had adopted as a temporary sheath of
cotton-wool, and attempted to force his invalid personality back into
life again. These developments progressively weakened the clutch of
the dead woman, and, as part of the same movement away from spiritual
realities, the reality of God receded. He did not repudiate the
latter, but merely ceased to experience it. This was a painful
movement, away from 'Hesteria' back to the rational; for of course
there must be pain in any movement away from something powerfully
experienced over to something else violently contradicting it. By the
beginning of his third month at the College he was for the first time
thinking objectively of the suicide of his wife--and this caused him
the acutest discomfort. At first, this return to objectivity had the
shock of a revelation. His old love for Hester and their comradely
solidarity in the days of hardship, which had been the Hester of the
hospital, and which had survived until now, struggled against the
unmasking and debunking that had begun. But once the destructive
analysis was under way nothing could arrest it.--Why had Hester killed
herself? It had been, of course, the culmination of a long period
during which, day in and day out, she had been attempting to move him
from the position he had taken up. But it was for purely selfish
reasons that she desired this return to England. It was not, as
frequently she would assert, because of her concern for his career.
That was the bunk. It was her private life, not his public life, that
was the issue. It was simply because she wished to be near her mother,
near Susan, and all her other friends--that was why she was trying to
force him to return to England. Then a genuine hatred was there,
almost as compelling as love for mother and friends. She did entertain
the most vicious feelings where Canada was concerned; she was
ferociously obsessed with the memory of the ostracism they had
suffered for more than three years. Mr. Furber (who actually in his
ghastly way had befriended them) she loathed, and refused to concede
him any merit. No Canadian was capable of a good action. No doubt all
this bitterness, and rancour, enduring for so long, had built up the
state of mind which had made her capable, ultimately, of her furious
act. All the circumstances, too, of the fire; incendiarism and murder,
and the subsequent execution of the criminal, had done nothing to
steady her mind.

But these considerations did not absolve her from the original charge
of a destructive selfishness. For had she not placed her private
wishes in competition with everything he desired? With insolence she
demanded that he should act upon her counsels and not his own.

Her will did not prevail, in spite of long and violent struggling. But
does someone kill himself, or herself, because their advice is not
taken? Yes: at least Hester did. He now understood precisely why
Hester had taken her life. It was with hatred that he brought his
analysis to the point at which he declared, 'Hester's suicide was an
act of insane coercion. My cold refusal to do what she wanted crazed
her egoistic will. She was willing to die in order to force me off the
path I had chosen. She probably thought, among other things, that her
suicide would oblige me to give up my job at the University. She was
acting vindictively.' Having arrived at this explicit condemnation of
his dead wife--having denied her any of the usual motives for suicide:
namely inability to support the pain of living, life having become an
unbearable torture; having decided that her suicide was committed as
an act of supreme coercion, and malign retribution, there was a
question which had to be answered. He had not asked this directly up
till then. Was Hester insane? He was obliged to answer that she must
have been demented to do what she did: and had, therefore, not been
responsible. In spite of this, Hester had revealed a character
disfigured by an unlovely vanity, Ren told himself. Now he cast his
horrified gaze back upon the _graffito_ occupying the slab in the
police mortuary. There was the severed head; but, in spite of the
severance, self-sufficient; as though it could exist all by itself;
and, as he stared in memory, with a hardly sane intensity, upon what
had been so dear to him, severity melted, his recriminations
dissolved, and he almost plunged back again into the 'Hesteria' he was
abandoning. It was with a mad wrench that he dragged himself away from
a new surrender. He all but sank back into the old love and
comradeship. And now, as never before, his heart seemed about to
break, as he fixed his eyes upon the two slender blood-darkened legs,
so pathetically isolated, one behind the other, exhibits displayed in
a police court case.--'The severed legs of the deceased.'

He was striding up and down his cell as he was in travail with his new
picture of his dead wife. At this point he banged himself down
aggressively upon a chair. 'This sentiment that misleads,' he
reproached himself. It was just the same with his Mother! We (men)
have all these tender reactions about any women, but they (women) on
their side do not entertain feelings of that sort about us. It is a
one-way sentiment. All their life is spent in fooling us, in creating
such feelings as these. To make themselves desirable, 'little',
pathetic. They very well understand what a wealth of tenderness is
associated with the sensation of pity. In most cases they are the
_smaller_ animal, sometimes only half the size of the male. This they
put to wonderful advantage. They congratulate themselves when they
hear themselves called 'little rabbit' or 'little squirrel' or some
such diminutive; it signifies that they have succeeded. Then an
unfailing _passivity_ is a prettiness that goes with smallness. They
ideally, in this ancient technique, are the passive little things to
whom things are done. (The only women who have discarded this
technique are the Americans, with a corresponding loss of something of
vital use to the female. Had Hemingway (in _For Whom the Bell Tolls_)
been putting his hero into a fleabag with an American woman, 'little
rabbit' would not have been the endearment employed.) So Ren's mind
whirled on. And when he looked at the _graffito_ again (in his
brightly-lit memory) he saw nothing but a masterpiece of illusionism.
How uniquely useful it was that the head (the face) was intact. She
had, even in death, whisked it out of the way, when something was
about to smash or disfigure it, as she lay under the truck. That
_must_ survive intact, to pull the heartstrings. In the Momaco
newspapers, in their account of the suicide, they had said that her
head rolled away into the gutter, miraculously escaping destruction.
Ah! thought Ren, she had steered it to safety, using the neck to give
whatever impulse desired. He now regarded his _graffito_ with the
scorn which would be meted out to some unmasked impostor, more
especially when the technique employed in the imposture had been
designed to awaken pity and tenderness.

At this point he went to his suitcase and took from it Hester's
letter, which had been delivered to him in the hospital. He examined
it sentence by sentence. The text of it was as follows. _What can I
say, Ren darling, except to ask your forgiveness. I loathe this
country so much, where I can see you burying yourself. I cannot leave
you physically--go away from you back to England. I can only go out of
the world. Good-bye, my darling. Ess._

When he had read this in the hospital, he had smiled tenderly as he
saw the handwriting, but later on had burst into a hurricane of
tears, beating his head up and down on the pillow. Now he violently
crushed the letter in his hand, tore it into several pieces, flung it
upon the floor, sprang up and stamped upon it. 'Quelle comdie! Quelle
sale comdie!' And he spat down at the ruined sheets--'Fumier!'

Immediately after this scene, nine weeks after his arrival in the
College, he sent a note to McKenzie, upon College of the Sacred Heart
paper; but asking him not to reveal his whereabouts. 'Soon I shall be
back in Momaco,' he added. He enclosed a larger envelope, stamped and
addressed, asking McKenzie to forward any letters which might have
arrived for him. Five days later this large envelope returned, well
swelled out with mail. There was a long letter from McKenzie, a couple
of cheques from the University, several letters from the New York
publisher, one accepting the work, and offering him generous terms,
and the rest urging him to reply. There were other letters, of less
urgency. He despatched telegrams at once to McKenzie, to Momaco
University (Registrar), and to the U.S. publisher, accepting terms.

But this first striking triumph over 'Hesteria' was not as yet
conclusive. A piteous and reproachful Hester dogged him for a time,
approaching him in moments when he was off his guard, or genially
relaxed, having laid aside his new militancy; or even during Mass. There
was one occasion when Hester won a distinct victory. He had gone to bed,
after listening to the radio for two hours or more. Buffalo N.Y. was
only a few miles away, and that was the station in to which he always
tuned. 'Henry Aldridge', that splendid satire on the American schoolboy,
was part of the programme. One of the things which had lightened the
burden of their life at the Hotel Blundell had been precisely this
radio-serial. As he lay on his bed, listening to the whining voice, full
of a dry cunning, of Homer Brown; to the tremulous and querulous appeals
of the hero; and to the ironic expostulation of Aldridge Senior,
massively resigned at having given birth to such a son--absorbed in this
wonderful entertainment, without realizing it, he had slipped back into
the years of evenings passed in the Room, where Hester and he were
enabled to forget the ghastly isolation and boredom of their lives.
Nothing so much as the American radio, with all its wonderful gusto, the
many-sidedness of its interests, provided the necessary anaesthesia.
There was one moment at which he forgot where he was, and it was his
impulse to turn to Hester, to share with her the joy of some quip of
Schnozzle Durante. It was at that point that he realized what had been
happening, and that he had allowed himself to be led into a past where
the living Hester was unavoidably to be encountered. But _after_ that,
and quite consciously, he gave himself up to the retrospective enjoyment
of the warm comfort of this shabby room in the Blundell Annexe, the zero
weather outside, and the wonderful companionship of this woman he had
shared so much with, and with whom he would soon coagulate in the
pneumatic expanses of the Murphy bed. This was one of the pleasantest
evenings he had spent at the College.

But next day he made up for this lapse. He took his cue from the
happenings of the last evening, spent, in imagination, with Hester,
culminating in the ardour of conjugal embraces. Here was a major
factor in the things of value to the 'little rabbit', in her creation
of a male tenderness of ludicrous sentimental intensity: the ecstasies
of the marriage-bed. 'Well!' snorted Ren, he owed nothing to Hester
in that connection. The lubricious little beast had got as much out of
him as he had got out of her! (In using such expressions about her he
was not so lost to all sense of justice as not to realize it was a
striking case of pot calling the kettle black. And for that matter,
his own abnormal addiction to the sports of Venus was something he
never ceased to regret.) Did he owe her any more tenderness than she
owed him on that score? Of course not! They were quits. A dog and a
bitch were not sentimental about such things as that. Why should men
and women be? Legitimate subjects for sentimental attachments, if
there were any, were of a different kind; perhaps to do with offspring
or matters relating to fellowship in man's destiny of a being
condemned to death. Having unmasked the 'little rabbit', he proceeded,
in detail, to debunk the claim of the woman that she is conferring
some favour upon the male by going to bed with him. That of course is
nonsense, for is it not her _duty_ to do so, as it is man's duty also
to play his part in nature's comedy? He is usually, it is true, quite
ready to comply with nature's commands, since nature rewarded
fulfilment of these functions with delights embodied in the nervous
system. Where the snag exists is in the great disparity between the
social and intellectual needs, and fundamental tastes, of the man and
the woman: and the fact that they are supposed to cohabit. It is the
cohabitation that is the trouble. This is so well understood by every
mature man and woman as to be a commonplace, though of course it does
not follow that they admit to this understanding. Finally, he looked
at the suicide again. Was any pity due from him to this mutilated
corpse? How pitiable almost any corpse is! But _this_ was an
aggressive corpse--it was death militant. _This_ dead body was there
with a purpose. It was designed to upset his applecart, violently to
interfere with his life. It was a Japanese-like suicide, a form of
vengeance. Suppose you are a Japanese, and, on arriving home one
evening, you find a corpse on your doorstep. You recognize it as that
of a man with a grievance. You know that this man has taken his life
in order to injure you. If you were this Japanese, what would your
attitude be towards the aggressive corpse? You could not be otherwise
than extremely indignant. You would kick the body off your doorstep,
spitting on it contemptuously. This imaginary drama from far Japan
gave Ren great satisfaction. He decided that Hester dead was even
less worthy of respect than Hester alive. Nor did he fail to review
the sheer volume of sentimentality attracted by death. On all sides he
found himself beset by false sentiment. He congratulated himself upon
the good work he had done in reducing in his personal life these
mounds of slush to reasonable proportions. Towards the end of this
period he felt he had cleansed things to such an extent that he could
end this particular activity. He had driven Hester out of his mind, in
which she had dangerously intruded. So all that was overcome, and he
could now once more proceed on his way.

But to start with he must say farewell to these wonderfully
considerate young priests, who had done their best to help him, and
allowed him to live among them almost as a fellow-priest. First, he
visited Father O'Shea, with whom he had formed a friendly
relationship. 'I regret that I am going to leave you,' he said.

'When?' asked the priest, looking at him calmly and appraisingly. 'You
have been called away or something?' he asked lazily.

'Something,' Ren replied. Father O'Shea had no very strong missionary
impulses. He had been a seminarian; but he had preferred not to enter
the priesthood, he had gone into business instead. That is how he
began. 'Life in an office, however,' he had explained to Ren,
'obliged me to become a lickspittle, to abase myself to such
continuous servility that I gave it up and returned to my original
idea of becoming a priest. In a primitive democracy such as we enjoy
in our community life here at the College, it may not be an ideal type
of existence for every kind of man, but at least one does not have to
lick the shoes of half-a-dozen lousy power-addicts every morning, and
offer one's bottom to be kicked.'

Canadian business life, like American business life, is of a somewhat
Oriental type. The big shot haughtily isolates himself, and all the
department-heads under him follow his example, exacting as much
servility as it is possible to extract from a human being. It may be
that Big Money is somewhat more democratic in the States at present;
but in Canada these conditions still fearfully flourish. Father
O'Shea's experience was in no way an unusual one. Just what Father
O'Shea did _not_ say was that his clothes were of the most expensive
cloth--and although the deep black was obligatory, it was very
becoming to Father O'Shea. Then he smuggled over from Buffalo numbers
of excellent cigars. Economic worries were unknown to him--no
income-tax, no rent, no keeping up with the Joneses. He was one of the
priests who did a great deal of work over in Buffalo, where he would
make his way in the College car with his small grip--which was never
examined by the Customs officers, who were all Catholic to a
man--Poles, or Wops, or Germans. So it seemed to Ren that this priest
did not have so bad a life--especially in view of the fact that St.
Thomas Aquinas was a study he greatly enjoyed. Lastly, he was an
ambitious man, and would no doubt go to headquarters before very long,
and might end as the head of the Order of St. Maurice.

The young priest, whose horizons were far wider than the walls of a
Seminary, admired the worldly success of Ren, approved in his private
mind of Ren's departure: for to stop much longer in this neck of the
woods would have reduced Ren in his estimation. 'I didn't think you
could stick it so long here,' he said, smiling.

'The peace here is terrific. You are so used to it that you fail to
appreciate it,' Ren told him.

Father O'Shea stretched his arms out to their full length, as he said
with a sleepy yawn, 'Gosh, I could do with a little less peace
sometimes.'

As Ren was leaving the cell, Father O'Shea enquired, 'You said you
were becoming a Catholic. You have not given up the idea, I hope?'

'Ah no,' said Ren. 'Quite soon, when my mind is entirely at peace, I
shall be reading those books you gave me.' He looked up at the priest
suddenly, with an expression which startled Father O'Shea. 'But there is
no peace for me, I should tell you. I see a fiery mist wherever I direct
my eyes. But the fire is not outside me, the fire is in my brain.'

Father O'Shea blinked. 'You had a bad break, Ren. You ought to see a
physician.'

Father Moody, the enthusiast, the bright-eyed missionary, was
disappointed, but he made no reference to this at all. He had
cherished the hope that this well-known professor and author would
move into the Roman communion within those four walls. But Professor
Harding might return to the Sacred Heart, might he not? And he
lavished his innocent flatteries upon the departing visitor. O'Neill,
who shared the disappointment of the Registrar, shared it genteelly.
The colourless but amiable Superior concealed his satisfaction that
this prolonged visit was drawing to a close. An orthodox period for
visitors (who did not usually dress in a cassock) was at most three
days, _not_ almost three long months.

It should perhaps be added that a couple of weeks after Ren's
departure a cheque was received by the Registrar for a small sum
representing the fees for lectures which Ren had delivered during his
stay at the College. So that possible indiscretion, retrospectively,
was eliminated.




CHAPTER XXXIV

The Cemetery of Shells


Back in Momaco, Ren found himself, as he put it, among bowed heads
and muted voices. He was received as a man struck down, and, rumour
had it, actually crazed with grief. He was looked at rather timidly,
as though he might, unless handled very carefully, bite. He was
obliged to improvise a technique, in order to cope with all this
misunderstanding: for he regarded it as preferable not to say, 'My
dear sir, you are mistaken: My wife was a selfish, scheming old bag,
whose death placed me in a very awkward position.' Self-defensively he
accepted the rule of a grief-stricken husband. They were capable of
dismissing him from the University (at the instance of the wives of
the members of the Board) if he showed himself otherwise than
paralysed with uxorious sorrow. When someone came up to him and began
offering him, in a choked voice, his heartfelt sympathy, Ren just
answered with a muffled gasp and an hysterical squeeze of the hand.
Sometimes his squeeze was so painfully compressive, though, and the
noise he made in his throat was so fierce, that the would-be mourner
would say afterwards, 'I think that man's mind has been turned by what
he has gone through. He seizes one's hand like some wild animal.'

With McKenzie, whom he trusted like a brother, he was quite explicit.
'I am not heart-broken. I have no sensation of grief whatever. I have
thought all that out, since I came out of the hospital. The fire at
the Hotel Blundell, and still more the other things associated with
the fire, left my wife a little mental. I did my best; she just set
herself to obstruct everything, as if she were possessed. Her death
was her last act of obstruction. Also it showed how deeply her reason
had been affected.--We had got to such a pitch just before she threw
herself under the truck that it seemed to be a matter of her life or
mine, almost. For I understand a great many things that she could
not, and she wanted to drag me down into her backwater, and into modes
of life from which I had rescued myself, into a decaying society, into
the rotten old dreamlands of her youth. She clung to me like a
drowning woman, and her suicide was her last effort to drag me under.
So you see . . . but I must put on a mask of grief for these good
Momacoans. It is a bore, but they would think me an awful brute if I
did not do so.' This was quite a temperate, quite normal-sounding
statement, and McKenzie accepted it as all there was to know about
this sad affair. He never asked himself whether Ren had not been
associated with his wife in a neuropathic duet.

Meanwhile, with a feverish energy, Ren proceeded with the work of
digging himself in with concrete and steel, so that no change of
fortune could overtake him again. The successful 'young' historian of
the old days in London was one man--buoyant, elastic, inventive, and
fearless: the present man, professor of history at the University of
Momaco, Dominion of Canada, was quite another. He no longer even
believed in his theories of a new approach to History; that had almost
become a racket; for him it had all frozen into a freak
anti-historical museum, of which he was the Keeper, containing many
libellous wax-works of famous kings and queens. He carried on
mechanically with what the bright, rushing, idealistic mind of another
man had begun. The man of former days had been replaced by a machine,
which was a good imitation of the reality, which had superficially
much of the charm, even the vivacity of the living model, but, when it
came to one of the acid tests of authenticity, it would be recognized
as an imposture.

If the personality is emptied of mother-love, emptied of wife-love,
emptied of the illusions upon which sex-in-society depends, and
finally emptied of the illusions upon which the will to create
depends, then the personality becomes a shell. In Ren's case that
daring and defiant act, the resignation of his professorship in 1939,
had made imperative the acquisition of something massive to
counterbalance the loss, else disequilibrium could not but ensue. But,
reacting with bitterness to criticism, he began hurling overboard the
conventional ballast, mother-love going first.

The process of radical revaluation, the process which was responsible
for the revolutionary character of his work, that analysis, turned
inwards (upon, for instance, such things as the intimate structure of
domestic life), this furious analysis began disintegrating many
relationships and attitudes which only an exceptionally creative
spirit, under very favourable conditions, can afford to dispense with.
Into this situation came world war, came also Canada, with all that
means; came the three years in the Hotel Blundell--three, mortal,
barren, desolating years. A major hotel fire put a violent close to
that period and so far nothing irretrievable had happened. The man who
left England in the summer of 1939 was still there. If only latent,
what was necessary for full vitality was intact. It was from that
point onwards that either the personality had to reflower, as it were,
or there must be degeneration. There was nothing that compelled
degeneration--it was the bitter struggle that then began which led to
it. The incipient dementia of his wife, and the pressure of its
unreason upon him; another pressure from within, namely the pressure
of his own will-to-success, of the most vulgar type, these pressures,
both irrational and both touched with dementia, brought into being, as
has been seen, something insanely militant, from which the finer
inspirations of his intellect shrank, and with which his original self
found it impossible to co-exist.

There was this too; whatever he might say, he had been deprived of his
natural audience; it is not until he loses it that a man of letters, or
of ideas, knows how much he depends upon the deep cultural soil in which
he has grown, or upon that atmosphere and that climate of thought. His
withdrawal from that into an outlandish culture-less world (as he, even
more than Hester, felt it to be), the long obliterating years of the
war; in the end, the necessity of accepting this tenth-rate alternative
to what had been his backgrounds before his resignation--all of this
deeply disillusioning situation had, first of all, impaired, and, a
little later, injured irreparably his creative will. He was half-way
through that process while he and McKenzie were working upon the
foundations of his new enterprise. Such a process does not proceed
illuminated by consciousness, where it may be watched, and where steps
may be taken, perhaps, to arrest it. So it was that one day
consciousness asserted itself, and Ren discovered that he was only a
half-crazed replica of his former self. He did actually perceive this
for a moment, and then it was swallowed up by other emotions; but the
revelation, which had horrified him, was not obliterated.

It was not, of course, at all as a wreck, or as a gutted shell or as an
empty hangover of himself, that he appeared to himself or to anybody
else. Naturally he continued to live as if there had been no such tragic
fracture of the personality. There was still enough animal vitality in
the shell, and enough residue of ambitious intellectual potency to carry
on 'brilliantly' with his professional duties, carefully to pilot
himself through the social shallows of Momaco (with enough, but just
enough, control not to explode, amorously or vituperatively, and to
wreck everything); to pass pleasant hours with the McKenzies, to conduct
his business efficiently with New York. McKenzie was very attached to
him, and though he could not fail to notice an alteration he disregarded
it: there were plenty of things in the immediate past amply to account
for quite a lot of change if it made its appearance. McKenzie felt that
the new haunted look was only temporary.

Ren was tenacious of rules; there was no slackening in his observance
of the rules for the conduct of his life which he occasionally
formulated. He had laid it down that there must, under no
circumstances, be another marriage. Introducing into his life a new
factor, charged with all the potency of sex and all its
unpredictability, would not be in the interests of security: and to
the ideal of material security he was dedicated. He was surrounded by
attractive, unmarried women, and his temperament was at boiling point.
So he found this rule very irksome.

The loneliness he experienced at this period was almost indescribable.
To start with, it was now for the first time that he comprehended what
it meant to be an exile. On the one hand, like his dead wife before
him, he suffered from an unceasing ache for the old condition of
things, and for the English scene; which, of course, he promptly
pulverized with the same arguments he had employed with Hester. This
was very unpleasant and very unexpected. On the other hand, his
loneliness produced, temporarily, a quite violent antipathy to the
Canadian. He had to make a rule about this: it was to the effect that
he must never regard a Canadian as anything but a Briton disguised
with an American accent, and an anti-British bias as big as a house.
In any case, the vacuum left by the departed Hester was large,
darksome and chilling. The temptation to provide himself with a human
buffer against the environing cold (within and without) was at times
painful. But, in the event, all he did for himself in that direction
was to spend such time as he had to spare with a chocolate-eyed
Peasoup, of course in another quarter of the city.

The fire in his brain, of which he had spoken to Father O'Shea, would
sometimes kindle in the most startling fashion. He would be very near
to bursting out of this cage he had constructed for himself, with a
shriek of rage which would have frozen the blood of Momaco. He was
probably prevented from doing this by a minor explosion when he was
alone with McKenzie one evening, the latter's wife being on a motoring
trip with the Rushforths. This came about quite suddenly.

'The success of your book has been tremendous,' McKenzie had remarked.
'I believe I am even more pleased about this than you are yourself.'

'I am perfectly sure you are,' Ren coldly sneered.

'Oh dear! Is _that_ how you feel!' McKenzie looked embarrassed.

'Yes, I feel like that . . . very much like that,' Ren answered
evenly, as if he were repeating something. 'The _success_ . . . _the
tremendous success_, of which you speak, does not make my heart beat
faster. As a matter of fact, when I think of it, I feel a little
sick.' He leapt to his feet. McKenzie could only see his face in
profile, but it was pulled in all directions, he could see, as a
result of some mental convulsion.

'No! I feel a tremendous nausea at my tremendous success. I am sick--I
am terribly sick; and I am _bored_'--his voice became suddenly
guttural. 'I am not bored, no, I am not bored, I am butchered.'

But when the French house-boy arrived to sweep away the empty
coffee-cups, he shouted, 'Et toi! n'est-ce pas que tu es emmerd par
l'hospitalit du locataire! N'est-ce pas qu'il est emmerdeur!'
Balancing the cups, the house-boy jazzed out of the room.

'B-o-r-e-d--never speak to me of boredom again. I'm split down the
middle with dreary horror--I am squashed flat with the horrible weight
of boredom! My body is in a torturer's press, the bones are being
squeezed through the skin; my mind as well, it is in a malignant vice.
It is not my body, it is my mind that is in the press.' He stared
round at his friend. 'Yes, Ian, I am in a torture chamber, not in a
yawning gallery. My book, my wonderful book! I hope my book bores
everybody as much as I am . . . as much as I soon shall be . . . soon
be . . . croaked with the stink of this man-hole.' He looked down with
a bleak grin at McKenzie. 'Ian, cheer up! I killed a student yesterday
who said "Aw, Professor, don't you ever want to yell, Professor?"'

McKenzie, very uneasy, produced a polite laugh. 'You were quite right
to kill that student. I have been wanting to do so for some time. But,
Ren, don't be silly about your book. It is a very fine book
indeed . . .'

'Stop!' Ren panted in the bass-de profundis--an involuntary command.
He dropped back upon the sofa, where he had been sitting, as if
dropped by somebody who just now had violently snatched him up, as if
a supernatural being had whipped him up into the standing position,
forced his terror-struck 'Stop!' out of him: and now had dropped him
back on to the sofa with a gravitational thud.

McKenzie was a sober man, not prone to feyness, but he experienced the
presence of the supernatural. He seemed to intuit that poor Ren _had
been dropped back_--that some power (and he felt an evil power) was
responsible for the behaviour of the body of his friend, which had
become an automaton. And he responded to the word 'Stop!' as he would
to the command of a god. His tongue froze to his palate, he sat
stock-still.

Ren had plunged his face into his hollow hands. 'That is too silly;
that is all past,' came a hollow, precipitate whisper. 'Don't you
understand?'

'I understand,' responded McKenzie, a little awestruck, satisfying
the categorical intervention of that by which Ren was possessed--that
which had picked him up, and that which had thrown him down; at the
same time replying tenderly to his friend's appeal.

After some minutes Ren removed his hands and turned his face towards
the other. McKenzie was very shocked by the extraordinary alteration.
The face now presented to him was haggard and despairing: it made him
feel, somehow, that the face had just been vomiting, although of course
it had not. Actually, that was what it was _about_ to do; with a series
of rapid spasmodic movements Ren simultaneously, and with surprising
deftness, leant abruptly sideways to be sick, and yanked a handkerchief
out of his pocket, and his hand flew with it to his mouth. A small
quantity of vomit was in his handkerchief, which he folded and refolded,
and poked away into the side pocket of his jacket.

'My brain is burning.' He began to speak stolidly and
matter-of-factly, as if transmitting a piece of information about one
of the organs of his body. 'I have had that sense of a hot devouring
something inside my skull, and of a light as well, of a fire-coloured
light, since that day I banged my head in the police morgue. You know,
I told you how I fell.'

'Yes, I remember, Ren: you hurt yourself very badly.'

McKenzie looked grave and dejected. This was the first time anything
of this kind had occurred between Ren and himself. But Ren grew
calmer; at the same time, however, he became taciturn. In about ten
minutes he took his leave.

This scene had revealed to McKenzie an inner situation of a severity
which he had not, prior to this, so much as suspected. He maintained
the strictest silence regarding what he had learnt, only informing his
wife that Ren was not quite himself, but refusing to be explicit.
There was one subject which, in future, in conversation with Ren, he
was very careful to avoid, namely his friend's book.

The real depth of the chasm into which he had involuntarily been
gazing, was not realized even yet by him. But he did understand that
to mention his poor friend's latest work was the showdown. To speak of
_that_ meant that one had to think of Ren as he had been, and as he
now was--had to speak of his decadence: of his _death_.

Not that McKenzie would have gone so far as to have envisaged the
extinction of his personality. He regarded this condition as a
neurotic phase, something that would pass. He could not, naturally,
appreciate the full--the massive, the terrible--truth of the position.
The fact was that Ren Harding had stood up to the Gods, when he
resigned his professorship in England. The Gods had struck him down.
They had humiliated him, made him a laughing-stock, cut him off from
all recovery; they had driven him into the wilderness. The hotel fire
gave him a chance of a second lease of life. He seized it with a mad
alacrity; he was not, he had not been, killed--he had survived the
first retaliatory blow--the expulsion, the ostracism. He was still
_almost_, and up-to-a-point, his original self, when he and McKenzie
were scrutinizing the philosophic foundations of his contemporary
literary enterprise; though already he was being shaken by the
unceasing psychological pressure of the obsessed Hester. In fact, it
had been _then_ that the suppression, the battening down, began: he
was obliged to push under and hold down the gathering instability and
hysteria. When the Gods struck the second time there was, from the
moment of the blow, and the days spent in the white silence of the
hospital, no chance that he could survive, at all intact. You cannot
kill a man twice, the Gods cannot strike _twice_ and the man survive.

    *    *    *    *    *

The outburst at McKenzie's had not been a confession, but was
something like it; it was an unmasking of a most thorough description.
The act of doing this had been a shock to Ren, as it had been a shock
to McKenzie. When he came out of his fit he made a resolution never to
permit this to happen again. In fact, he locked himself up twice as
tight as he had been locked up before.

The presence of all this molten material within did not affect the
impenetrability of the shell, nor did it interfere with the insect-like
activity with which he proceeded with the concreting of his position of
academic success and widely acclaimed authorship. He even managed to
write some quite authentic-looking magazine articles, 'from the pen of
the celebrated British historian, Professor Ren Harding'.

It was with unusual rapidity that the existence of so distinguished a
man upon the North-American Continent was recognized. It was not more
than a year or two after the scene just described in the McKenzie home
that a great university in one of the eastern States of the U.S.A.
offered him a professorship. With a kind of mechanical thrill of
frigid delight he accepted it, after expressing his great regret at
leaving them to the Governors and Chancellor of Momaco University. As
to McKenzie, that was another matter. He was actually extremely
distressed at this parting. Almost he was frightened at finding
himself withdrawing from the warm personal contact of these friends.
At one moment, this fear was so present to him that he felt he must
not accept _yet_ such an offer from the United States, but stick to
Momaco. He was within an ace of sending a letter to the American
University to say he had changed his mind. But he did not do so, and
in a few months he was installed in a small, warm, wooden dwelling not
far from the campus of this much more pretentious seat of learning,
five hundred miles farther south; and the Faculty had no idea that it
was a glacial shell of a man who had come to live among them, mainly
because they were themselves unfilled with anything more than a little
academic stuffing.


  Printed in Great Britain by
  Butler & Tanner Ltd.,
  Frome and London




Transcriber's Note


  * Obvious punctuation and spelling errors repaired.

  * Hyphenation inconsistencies left as in the original.






[End of Self Condemned, by Wyndham Lewis]
