Self Condemned (59 page)

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.

René 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,” René coldly sneered.

“Oh dear! Is
that
how you feel!”McKenzie looked embarrassed.

“Yes, I feel like that ... very much like that,” René 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 houseboy arrived to sweep away the empty coffee cups, he shouted,
“Et toi! n’est-ce pas que tu es
emmerdé par l’hospitalité du locataire! N’est-ce pas qu’il est emmerdeur!”

Balancing the cups, the houseboy 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 manhole.” 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, René, don’t be silly about your book. It is a very fine book indeed …”

“Stop!” René 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 René
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.

René 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 René 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 René 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 René 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, René: you hurt yourself very badly.”

McKenzie looked grave and dejected. This was the first time anything of this kind had occurred between René and himself.

But René 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 René was not quite himself, but refusing to be explicit. There was one subject which, in future, in conversation with René, 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 René 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 René 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 laughingstock, 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 René, 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 René 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.