Self Condemned (38 page)
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 Jacks
toupée
. 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 René rattled a couple of bits in his trouser pocket.
W
hen René 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: René 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 René had brought with him.The
Encyclopædia
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 Fe to St. Johns, Newfoundland, he was well known. Although things were appallingly difficult, they had sold him so many books that René 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 René started off for the bookshop. He found it closed; Mr. Salter was probably at a sale. The heat was formidable, perhaps a hundred degrees. René 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 downtown 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 René 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 René had with him, but put down twenty dollars on account for a third book. This René 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.
René’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 René 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 René 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 René 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. René 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 René 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. René 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 René 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 René. “A first edition of
Decline and Fall
is among his books.”
There was a pause; then René 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 René, 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 René, 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 René’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 René became acquainted with Mr. Furber.
In due course René 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 René’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 percent tariff wall against all learning that was not strictly Canuck, whereas the products of Canadian factories only had a 25 percent wall. Consequently Furber did not listen to the chatter. This was a private affair between René 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” René 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 René 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); René 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 René 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, René 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.
