Self Condemned (23 page)

“Oh dear me. This is terrifying. Do explain!”

“There would be no point whatever in my doing that.We are little, powerless, short-lived 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 god-fearing. 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 René’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 watercolour 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, René. 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,” René roared, “we should have been on the Côte d’Azur at this moment….”

“Eating
bouillabaisse
,” she laughed.

“Even so.
Endimanchés
, 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
étatisme
.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
étatisme
. 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,” René 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 René. “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 shutdown 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, René 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, René’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.

“René,” — she spoke to him softly — “why are you like this?”

René 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.”

“René!”

“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 émigré, to eke out an existence as a shoe-black. 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 René 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.”

René 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 goodbye 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. René 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 backward 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 René 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, “René — René — René!” 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 streamlined as all that: so for a short while the glare of awareness was still present.