Self Condemned (25 page)

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 searchlights 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 Brummagem Bismarck. But there was not time for the fastest vehicle to have rushed into France, had there been nothing to stop them. What René 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 René and Hester had been offered a stateroom on the
Athenia
, or on the
Duchess of York
. Since the
Duchess
was sailing on a Friday, René 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 spotlight, his imagination did not reach below the plimsoll line. René 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. René 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. René 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 René Harding, I believe.”

René 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 René 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,” René 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 “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.”

René 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,” — René 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. René 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 René’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 René’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 René’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; René 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, René 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 René’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?” René 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 René 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.” René 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.” René 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 café (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 René 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. — René 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
René
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.

René’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 watercolours. 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.