The Third Hour

by Geoffrey Household

  He returned to his table and helped himself largely to crayfish.

  “An odd creature,” he said to Bendrihem. “I wonder what you’ll think of him. An adult outwardly he certainly is. Inwardly, I doubt it.”

  “A chartered accountant, you say?”

  “Yes. Junior partner of Plug, Plug & Ottery. His uncle is Sir Bartlemy Plug. Probably the most intimate friend I have, though our lives don’t touch anywhere.”

  Mark Ottery had been his contemporary at a preparatory school, and again at Oxford, where their mild disapproval of each other was overpowered by the community of early memories. Ottery was a rowing man, while he himself had always disliked purposeless physical effort. He had been awkward, socially undeveloped, while Ottery was a diner-out whose original wit and capacity for alcohol were famous, by the end of his third year, throughout the university. Ottery had been strictly celibate, while Toby was an enthusiastic young lecher who fell in and out of love with the greatest of ease, thereby adding beauty to his concupiscence.

  Ottery’s nickname of the Reverend Mark was due to the fact that he read for honours in theology. He chose that school with deliberate humour, studied the Fathers seriously and delighted in his cups to find original proofs of the existence of God. His mind had the roaring extravagance of an Elizabethan, but, faced by the necessity of earning a living, he had taken the conventional course of entering the family business. Toby knew him for a most efficient accountant who prided himself on proving his favourite theory of education: that a mind once trained to clear thought, even by theology, could swiftly master the rules, however complex, of any form of breadwinning.

  Mark Ottery went over to their table and was introduced to Bendrihem. A waiter followed bearing his cheese and wine.

  “A Chambertin ’15,” said Mark. “I think you’ll find it very drinkable.”

  He was delighted to run into Toby. He appreciated him as an exotic and irregular boon companion in whose society wine became a stimulant both to sincerity and wit; it was the repetition of such evenings that made chartered accountancy endurable. He was content, too, because he had not seen him for four years and had suspected that he was not prospering. The periods when Toby most needed his friends were, he knew, those when he never went near them.

  “We shall indeed,” Toby answered. “Extravagant fellow!”

  “A necessary, old friend! A necessary to polite intercourse! And I remember your tastes. Does he not pamper himself most grossly, Bendrihem?”

  “I wouldn’t say so,” Simon replied. “A good, natural taste of course—but he seems to enjoy anything so long as it’s wine.”

  “Toby, what’s happened to you?”

  “I lost my palate in the United States,” Toby explained, “drinking bathtub gin with a prince of the church.”

  “It sounds worth the price of a palate,” Bendrihem laughed.

  “And here am I, a pillar of the City of London hedged and girded around with respectability! What outlandish job are you on now, Toby?”

  “Selling toys for a firm called Hanson & Crane. Do you know them?”

  “Of course! Purveyors to my nursery! Tell them they can hang my arms over the door—the great bottle rampant of the Otterys! Are they nice people to work for?”

  “They seem to be. I’ve only been with them three weeks. Just starting a trip through Europe.”

  While they ate, Manning and Ottery exchanged a few inevitable reminiscences of common acquaintances and the common past. Twice they checked this flow of talk out of courtesy to Bendrihem, but he threw them back into it with deliberate questions. He was well content to sip his Burgundy and listen, for there was a quality of the two men that aroused his curiosity.

  Both seemed to have an attitude of waiting for—for what? The answer puzzled him. Nothing could be more solid than Ottery’s position and background. No one could be more disciplined than Manning. Neither could be called a frustrated character in any ordinary sense, since they took obvious pleasure in the daily current of their lives and certainly harboured no resentment. Yet both of them seemed to be sure that their present circumstances were only casual circumstances, though neither said a word to indicate their destination, or even that they had any destination. Like two passengers conversing on a liner, Bendrihem thought, except that Ottery could not be called a passenger; he was a ship’s officer, sure of his duties and the planks under his feet. A ship’s officer and an intelligent passenger conversing in the bar—what had given them this unspoken certainty that they were between a port and a port, and that the present was not also the future?

  “Why did you go to the land of liberty, Toby?” Ottery asked.

  “After a girl.”

  “You would!”

  “Well, I’m grateful to her. It taught me what I don’t want from life, and that’s halfway to learning what I do.”

  “The good lord has delivered him from fornication,” remarked Ottery.

  “He has done nothing of the sort,” replied Toby indignantly. “He has delivered me from content.”

  “He did that to me when I was fourteen,” said Mark.

  “I mean a special kind of content that is particularly North American—an illusion of content. The idea that one is active because one has a fast car, that one’s efficient because the office is full of machines, that one thinks because one has potted history or philosophy delivered at the door, that one is an individual because one lives in an imitation English cottage when the rest of the street is of imitation Spanish bungalows! A man may be driven into himself by ugliness or lifted out of himself by beauty; but the American influence on Europe tends to make us content to be lifted out of ourselves by continuous vulgarity. It’s a damnably difficult influence to combat. After all it’s very natural for the mass of Europeans to consider the United States highly civilised simply because every family has a radio and a plug that pulls.”

  “Woe!” cried Ottery. “Woe unto thee, Kalamazoo! Woe unto you Omaha and Chicago and points east! A monstrous great exaggeration, Toby! America didn’t invent either the wireless or the cinema or the suburban villa or the motor car.”

  “They set them up as idols anyway, and added two other civilising influences—popular journalism and modern advertising. For all I know they may be far superior in the eyes of heaven, but until that point is settled let us be Europeans!”

  “Serve the Lord even with thy vices,” murmured Bendrihem.

  “I try to,” Toby replied. “But who says I should?”

  “The Talmud.”

  “Study it, Toby! Study it!” said Mark Ottery. “Justify your idle and bestial life with holy writ!”

  “I will study it. It expresses exactly what I’ve been trying to say. We all serve the Lord with other people’s vices in these days. That’s what I’m up against. Community thinking is like community singing. Nobody enjoys it, but everybody is afraid to say so.”

  “I can see that the United States are responsible for your personal revolt,” said Bendrihem. “But I don’t think it’s just to hold them responsible for the cheapness of our civilisation. Your make them a scapegoat for what you don’t like, very much as an anti-Semite would stick the blame on the Jews. But grant them their virtues. Where else but the United States do you find such day to day appreciation of the brotherhood between man and man—the ideal of Islam which you so admire?”

  “Spain,” replied Toby promptly, “and her ex-colonies. And a politer kind of brotherhood too. I admit the average American is very eager to be kindly. But it doesn’t affect my argument. Look here—if I were choosing an agent for Hanson & Crane, I’d rather appoint a German than any other nationality but I should still think that the foreign policy of the German government was criminal. If I were lonely, I’d rather find myself in an American town than anywhere else, but that doesn’t change my opinion that their civilisation is a menace to everything I love.”


  “A babbles of dons and the bilboes, and will have it there are no honest men in the Virginias. Wine, ho! Bring me wine!”

  Ottery’s voice echoed around the deserted dining room, and they were reminded that they were the last in it.

  “Shall we try a cabaret?” Toby suggested.

  “No wenches, old friend! The Ottery is drunken but he will have no wenches!”

  “It would be a pity to spoil the mood of that Chambertin,” Bendrihem agreed, sensing a real distaste under Ottery’s uproariousness. “How would it be if we hired a boat and went over the sound? The night’s hot enough.”

  “Fine!” said Toby. “What supplies shall I lay in? That wine mustn’t be carried under one’s arm, I suppose?”

  “O jolly Caliban! O excellent Caliban! Bendrihem, is it not like a man?” asked Ottery, patting Toby approvingly on the shoulder. “Whisky, sot!”

  They strolled down to the quay through the stolid streets of Helsingfors, armed with two bottles of whisky, two syphons and three tumblers. The sky glowed darkly like a twilight mirror, unshining but reflecting the sun that circled through the night just below the green bands of light on the northern horizon. Across the sound the islands squatted low on the water, their pine forests a pure black against the luminous sea. The night had the warmth of the Mediterranean and the silence of the north. The domes of the Russian church, their upper surfaces painted white that all the year they might seem to be under snow, were unreal as an exhibition pavilion in the tropics.

  Toby was glad that his proposal to go on to a cabaret had been overruled; it was no night to spend in an atmosphere of cigarette smoke and cheap scent. Nevertheless he wished that Mark had not rejected it so flatly. Evidently he had not yet lived down his fear of sex and its workings. The best type of Englishman, Bendrihem had said—well, it was true enough. Mark had the sense of honour, the independence, the conservatism of an old-fashioned lord of the manor; it was certain that no one was ever less impressed by his neighbour’s exterior. But a man with so much vitality could never be truly mature without some other outlet for his tenderness than listening to the troubles of his boon companions.

  Years earlier he had heard from a miserable and sober Mark the history of his only affair. He had lost his heart and his virginity soon after coming down from Oxford. The girl had given him six months of rapture and then deserted him for a man less gentle but more understanding of women. Ottery cured himself by the sound remedy of a voyage round the world; but it was only a partial cure. Thereafter he had lived, and apparently still lived, without enjoyment of sex, fearing, like some predestined old maid, to lose the beauty of a first experience in an attempt to repeat it.

  Mark Ottery bargained for a boat and compelled each hirer to open up his engine so that he might choose the most silent. They purred across to the dark maze of islands while Helsingfors slid away from them, massive as a line of cliffs twinkling with lights.

  Ottery let forth a hearty belch.

  “Oh, lovely belly!” he declared. “Oh, faithful servant!”

  Bendrihem shook with laughter.

  “That means he is sober,” said Toby. “He will now complain that he is a Pillar of the City of London. I wish I were!”

  “You don’t,” Mark replied. “You’re a rebel from your class, Toby. And thank God for it!”

  “I may do eventually, but I don’t yet. It makes life too difficult. I’d be on the Embankment now if it weren’t for Bendrihem. He got me this job.”

  “Are you with Hanson & Crane too?” asked Ottery.

  “No. I’m up here to look into a paper agency I thought of taking.”

  “We have several clients who paddle in the Baltic, and I come here once a year,” said Ottery diffidently. “Don’t hesitate to ask for my advice if you think it would be any help to you.”

  Bendrihem mentioned the name of the mill that had offered its agency. He was astonished to receive a masterly report on its financial standing, which at the same time placed it clearly against a background of the Finnish paper industry in general. He had not pictured Toby’s friend as more than a picturesque decoration on the solid front of Plug, Plug & Ottery, but apparently his riotous nights were justified by meticulous days. The man had a ruthless power to analyse facts and a melancholy acceptance of the human motives behind them. Yet it was evidently friendship that he counted of most value; though a member of the most discreet of professions, he offered to Toby’s benefactor, with a frank simplicity that was wholly charming, the costly fruits of his expert training.

  “Remember that the Finnish market used to be Germany,” Ottery went on. “And now two-thirds of the German newspapers are closed down and the remainder have half their former circulation. But that won’t last. When the people get used to National Socialism, they’ll begin to read again. Then your mill will have no more incentive to develop the English market. They’ll return to their old and tried German customers and lose interest in their London agent.”

  “Damn it all!” Toby protested. “They couldn’t do that after encouraging Bendrihem to go ahead.”

  “Toby, you have the innocence of a lamb—a dissolute and evil-living lamb. A limited company exists to make money for its shareholders in the surest way. If a market doesn’t suit it any longer, to hell with the agent who built the market up! And if an agent does brilliant business, the company puts down a branch factory in his territory and leaves him out of a job. But forget this when you are appointing agents, or you’ll never appoint any. Shall we broach the cargo?” Toby poured the drinks and curled himself up in the bows while Bendrihem and Ottery stretched out on the cushioned benches. The boatman in the stern listened impassively to the soft and vehement flow of the foreign language. The aroma of his passengers’ cigars delighted him. It was new and romantic, as to them was the wind of their passage scented with the rich dampness of moss and bilberry. Desirous of making some contact with the fourth figure who shared the night with them, Toby passed the bottle down the boat to him. The boatman smiled a sad northern smile and tilted a quarter of its contents down his throat.

  “You speak of limited companies,” said Bendrihem, “but there is still loyalty in business when an individual really controls a firm. Old Seafair—that’s Hanson & Crane’s managing director—is the sort of man who backs his agents at the expense of his pocket. So Manning needn’t worry.”

  “Let him who keepeth his books correctly be exalted, and him who maketh less profit than he could be damned,” said Ottery ironically. “That is the law that society expects me to enforce. I am a chartered accountant. I am only concerned with humanity when humanity errs.”

  “The good old rules of the game!” Toby murmured. “You play it with extraordinary integrity like the soldiers and bankers and solicitors. You evolve the discipline and checks and counter-checks that force England to be the most law-abiding country in the world. But you never question the game.”

  “And we shouldn’t! The chartered accountant is an avenging angel, Toby. It’s the auditor that puts the fear of God into these fat company promoters. Their mouths can lie, but their books cannot.”

  “Good rules, but a poor game,” Toby answered. “You save the money of the public—you and all the other professions—but you don’t give a damn about their souls.”

  “A pox on all parsons, say I!”

  “Amen! An inefficient lot! But suppose one turned the uprightness and efficiency of you professional men to something more than the protection of property. Imagine a company of accountants chartered to limit a man’s profits, or an institute to prevent a firm manufacturing worthless goods that contain a penny’s worth of value to every three-pence of advertising costs. Or imagine a bar to protect the public against newspaper proprietors.”

  Toby emptied his glass and let his ideas develop themselves.

  “Deliberate sensationalism to be a misdemeanour; gross breaches of good taste, a felony. As
the law stands, if an editor prints some silly obscenity he goes to prison, but if he publishes an exclusive interview with a wife whose husband has just been run over by a steamroller, nothing can be done to him. And the reader who licks his lips over the wife’s agony will sit down and write a letter to the same paper on the debasing cruelty of the Spanish bullfight. What’s the difference between the sensations provoked by the penny newspaper and those of the Roman arena? We’re handed a magnificent show of rape, murder, war and sudden death, if possible with photographs, and taught to like it. There’s something for you to clean up! You won’t allow a company director to make money by financial corruption, but you’ll allow a newspaper proprietor to make as much as he can by spiritual corruption. You are all organised for the protection of money, and not a damned thing is organised for the protection of the individual.”

  “Religion?” suggested Bendrihem.

  “It was once. Now it trails apologetically behind the man in the street, trying to catch up with his thought. And as he only knows what he doesn’t think, it’s tough on the parsons.”

  “He’ll legislate us all into good taste,” said Ottery. “Heil, Toby! On with your gents’ shirtings, lads!”

  “No, I’m not a chemisier de sport, your reverence. The world needs standards, not laws. Europe is in the same stage as China three thousand years ago. It knows that politics and commerce are two great farces, but it has to put up with both. It’s tired of devil worship and it’s ripe for a Confucius. It wants a formal religion of manners, good taste, respect for the other fellow and good government. It doesn’t care how it’s governed so long as the democracy or the dictator or the boss or the trades-union has some glimmerings of nobility.”

  “Join the Boy Scouts, Toby.”

  “You’re a sensitive devil, Mark. You know exactly what I mean and are afraid of it. As that remark proves.”

  “I’m not a reformer, old friend,” said Ottery. “I withdraw from what offends me. I’m a monk—a useless monk. My monastery is the club and my god a bottle.”