Self Condemned (9 page)

“There are three facts regarding which I am afraid there is no possible argument.You are now married to an unemployed man. That is number one. There are no jobs for this out-of-work in this country. That is number two. Number three is the said man will in about two months sail for Canada.You may add to these facts if you like, a fourth: another world war is about to break out — as they say.”

“As to that last fact, René, I have something to say.”

“Yes.”

“It does not happen to be a
fact
, I think.”

“No? Evidently I must be mistaken.”

“I think you are. Most people do not think there will be a war. Stephen, for instance, was telling me the other day that Hitler’s aeroplanes are all made of ersatz — is that the right word?

They often drop to pieces in mid-air.”

“Indeed? How very interesting.”

“It is, isn’t it. Stephen also told me that the uniforms of the German soldiers are ersatz, too. They have no raw materials, so practically everything is ersatz. Actually, the cloth of their tunics is a sort of paper. Stephen said a friend of his had seen them marching along the street and suddenly it came on to rain. They all got under cover in an archway. Had they not done so their uniforms would have dropped to pieces once the rain had soaked into them. You laugh, but I really think you ought to listen to what is said by eyewitnesses, René.”

René, who had been laughing, rubbed his face, and came out of the rub purged of mirth.

“Now listen, Hester, you old goose. When the Englishman hears all these stories, specimens of which you have been retailing, what does the simple fellow think? Well, the answer is pretty obvious. He says to himself: ‘Oh well, if it does come to a war, it’s going to be a walk-over for us. All their planes will drop to pieces, their uniforms will melt, their rifles will explode and kill them as soon as they pull the trigger, the ersatz shells will never leave the ersatz cannon, and the war will be over in no time. Old Hitler will be hanged, and Germany cut up and shared among the Allies.’ That is what the Englishman will say to himself, is it not: that is what he
is intended
to say to himself.You see, these stories are what is called propaganda. That means, they are reports invented to influence people, to guide opinion in a specific direction.”

“I know what propaganda means.”

“You know the word,” he corrected her, “but evidently you do not understand it very well. You do not know propaganda when you see it.”

“Oh no?”

“No, otherwise you would not repeat to me what Stephen has told you.Your trustfulness is limitless.”

“But my
dear
René! Why should Stephen of all people be engaged in such propaganda?”

René shrugged his shoulders.

“Stephen is a parlour pink! It is just as simple as that.”

Hester silently demurred with her mouth, conveying in dumb show that “yes she knew but …”

“Hang it all, Stephen makes no secret of his Party-alignment, does he?”

“Stephen of course is not a Tory, René! But you describe so many people as communists, darling!”

“But so they
are
. Whether they are officially members of the Party is unimportant. We are passing through a period in which, in England, communist sympathy is fashionable among the young, the educated young. This is not a novel view of mine.

It is generally accepted as being the case.”

Hester’s face was that of a person who had just discovered in her hand a good card which she had overlooked, and which she meant to make the most of.

“Very well,” she answered, with what she intended should be an irritating indolence, “but it is still quite ridiculous to say that Stephen Vickers spends his time disseminating propaganda, in favour of war. Stephen is the last person to fancy himself as a soldier.”

“I agree with you there. But it would not be Stephen who would do the fighting.”

“But I don’t see that, Stephen is young, he knows he would be called up. He would hardly be likely therefore to stir up wars, would he? No. I am afraid you have a bee in your bonnet....”

From being coldly watchful and aloof, he had begun to show signs of a mounting choler. The card she had discovered in her hand was not a new one, it was one which had often been there before. But she had never used it at a moment so liable to enrage him. He now sprang to his feet, glaring down at her. “It is not in the marriage contract that wives should hold the same political views as their husbands,” he told her harshly. “Nor is it necessary for them to display more intelligence than a domestic cat. But they do have, on certain occasions, to keep their big silly mouths closed. It is required to develop sufficient intelligence to know when to do that. And for Heaven’s sake give your eyes a rest, no one wants to see your eyeballs.”

The bedroom door opened. “Oo, Miss,” croaked Mrs. Harradson, balancing backward and forward in the gap, as with the limited mobility of a mechanical toy; her frosty crest, the independent strand of hair which tented up over her occiput, rising and falling, giving her a startled expression when it was most erect. So she advanced, only to fall back, and then advanced again once more to be checked and to retreat holding a witch’s broom. “Ooo, Miss, was you going to harsk Mrs. Beddin’ton ’oos cat ’ad kittens time I was took sick ...”

“Mrs. Harradson!” René shot his arm out towards her, his finger pointing at her pale, narrow, now eerily jeering face.

“Please — shut — that — door!”

Mrs. Harradson fell back as if she had received a blow, the closing of the door coinciding with her eclipse.

Hester, her lips drawn tight over her teeth, rose to her feet, but not with an unladylike abruptness.

“I am afraid you are misbehaving,” she remarked.

René sat down, crossed his legs and looked at her with undiminished hostility. For him, she had been quite aware what she was doing, in her references to Stephen: it was she who had misbehaved — in her persistently ladylike way.

“You provoke misbehaviour,” he said after he resumed his seat.

Hester moved over to the bedroom and pushed the door open; for Mrs. Harradson had apparently set it ajar in order to miss nothing of the ensuing dialogue.

“Mrs. Harradson,” she said in a voice of particular politeness. “Thank you for reminding me about Mrs. Beddington. It was very kind of you. We shall not be wanting a kitten, thank you. Yes, a good cat is a nice thing to have.... Thank Mrs. Beddington very much for keeping the kitten for us.... I am so sorry it is now too large to drown. It is a great pity. But I am sure she will have no difficulty in disposing of a fine young cat.... A good mouser was she? Yes, that of course will count. Everyone wants a mouser.”

Hester pulled the door to. René, who was standing, looked up and said, “I am in no mood to listen to any more idiotic conversations about cats. Unless you have anything you want to say to me, I shall now go to my study.”

Without taking any notice of these remarks, Hester walked with a dignified composure along the wall to the sitting room door, turned the handle (and this is an action which, in such a case, is a trap for those not dignified by nature, for it is impossible to avoid slightly protruding the posterior — but which she accomplished with quiet mastery), entered the room beyond, closing the door behind her neither too gently nor too loudly. This act was entirely lost upon René who was collecting the one or two opened letters and other mail, which he thrust inside the newspapers; this done, he turned and passed out through the front door to his work room across the landing.

The room was only vacant for a few moments; then the bedroom door opened and the charlady was exposed to view. Irony holding her eyebrows high up on her shallow forehead, and her eyes, which first had seen the light in County Mayo, derisively illuminated, she surveyed the empty breakfast table. As if exaggerating her own rachitic mode of locomotion, shooting her head in and out, she rattled over noisily to the sink.

When, crossing the landing, René entered his study, he was trembling slightly. But the tension soon relaxed, out of direct contact with his wife. This was the first occasion on which disagreements between them had taken the form of a “row.”

His training had led to his locking up any irascibility in a frigid silence. On this occasion it had taken a violent form with great unexpectedness; what had enabled it to do so called for an immediate investigation. Why had the control, by now second nature, been found wanting? If his attitude to Hester had hardened into a critical analysis, he was still very attached to her upon the sexual level. Being a man of great natural severity, an eroticism which did not live very easily with it was instinctively resented: and the mate who automatically classified under the heading “Erotics” was in danger, from the start, of being regarded as a frivolous interloper by his dominant intellectuality.

It was thus at the breakfast table that he tended to be harshest with his Hester. The latter unquestionably had not the talent to leave “Erotics” in the bedroom, and to create a neutral climate for herself among the bacon and eggs, the mail, and the morning papers. She had the knack, during the first hour of day, of reminding her husband of what he regarded as an undesirable excess. Her “big baby” eyes, as he described them in his private thoughts, had at this period of great strain tended to irritate him more than usual. It had become almost a parlour game with him of late to set little traps for her and to watch her rush into them.

He now sat staring at his “blotter,” on which, as was his habit, he fiercely “doodled.” He censured himself in the severest manner, more especially for the “eyeballs” part. For at least ten minutes he thus sat, analyzing his behaviour with great care. The conclusion he reached was that this row must be regarded as a danger signal of the first order. Ex-professors had just as much need of discipline as had professors. Was he by any chance afraid that Essie might leave him and was he reacting against such a feeling by rudeness, as it were to scorn the thing he feared? He rejected that at once, for he experienced no pang at the thought of Hester’s departure. The response he received to further testing was that the great crisis in his affairs dwarfed into insignificance any merely domestic crisis. He would keep Hester at his side, if Hester would stop. But that was all. That settled, with a sigh he turned to the newspaper. But this interlude of self-examination did not proceed in the mechanical way in which, deprived of its density, it must seem to have done. Other matters intruded and were expelled. At one point he gave himself up to a fascinating doodle, and so forth. But academic life had compelled him to be methodic; and if it would be untidy to leave some unorthodox happening unexplained he would force himself to sit down and attempt to reduce it to logical proportions. It was not at all his nature to be methodical: as a consequence his life was a little over-full of the apparatus of method.

But the paper lay there, and the headlines barred the way for a while.

CITRINE BEATS A.R.P. WALK-OUT

UNIONS DRAW UP WAR WORK PLANS

Everyone was in every way preparing for war. The British Government was aware that war was inevitable. Their secret service provided them with information of the progress of Herr Hitler’s tremendous air armament: their figures were no doubt just as accurate as those obtained by Mr. Churchill, and published with such a clatter, or those found in the newspapers, and in no way less alarming. But it was most improbable that the Government were building an air fleet even half the size of the Nazis’. They would see to it, according to plan, that a war should occur, but they would also see to it that England was in a condition of glaring inferiority. It was “the English way”: provoke an enemy, but never be ready to meet him on equal terms. This was intended as an alibi. “It was not England who started it, was it?” If it had been she would be better prepared. A hypocrite’s device — which cost England a great deal of money, and many quite unnecessary dead and maimed in the war that would ensue.

He stared with stony hatred at the picture which he knew so well. It was quite impossible to make anyone understand, except a very few like Rotter, the significance of the events about to occur, the international pressures which made it impossible to avoid them, the mountain of debt which would be standing there at the end of the chapter, and what part this mountain played in the transaction. It made him feel a little sick as he read a few paragraphs of the bland automatic discussion regarding preparations for war, as if it were an international football match which was being staged in an unusually elaborate manner. But he closed the newspapers, and turned to his more obviously personal affairs.

It was nearly an hour later when he heard Mrs. Harradson make her exit from their flat, and convulsively descend to her own quarters. He had been writing, but he now put down his pen, stood up, and made his way across the landing.

Hester had not left, or he certainly would have heard her. He found her, as he had expected, in their miniature sitting room. She was writing a letter. As he entered the room she rose from her seat. They faced one another rather starkly, for the space for manoeuvre being so limited there was nothing else to do.With the best will in the world, he could not refrain from noting the ludicrousness of her expression. She stood ladylikely at bay, exposing reproachfully her “eyeballs” and holding her “big silly mouth” ostentatiously sealed; to laugh was the only rational action, and he came very near to surrendering to the dictates of common sense.

If this woman would only forget the ladylike shrouding of her hips, if this mermaid would be oblivious of her well-tailored tail! Aloud his words were, “Hester, are you sure I am not disturbing you?”

Hester answered clearly and even sharply, “No.”

“I say, you must have thought I had taken leave of my senses.

Well, that is exactly what did happen. I am most frightfully sorry.

Please do forgive me, Hester!”

“I suppose I must,” she said. “I did not at all like the form your madness took.”

“I know! They say that under an anaesthetic people say the most awful things.”