Self Condemned (46 page)
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 René 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 goodbye.
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 René. 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 René 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 René 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 newfangled, 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) René 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.
René 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.”
René 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 René was shocked; and something did find its way into his manner of thinking which was insane.
T
he 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 René and Hester, and, independently, within both René 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 René. 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.”
René 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, René, 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, René, I just cannot face it.”
Sometimes René 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 eyesore.
René 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 René 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 René 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 middle-class 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.
René 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 oom” 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, René 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 René 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 René 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 René Harding
, in the year I944?” 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 René 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.
T
he first of the new friends made by René were Professor McKenzie and his family. It was through Mr. Furber that the introduction was effected. He asked René to drop up one afternoon to meet a man who knew and admired his work. Since the fire Mr. Furber’s attitude towards René had mellowed. The Hardings had been, as it were, baptized in fire as Momacoans of sorts.Also René 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 René 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 role 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 René’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 René 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 horsefly 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.
