Self Condemned

by Lewis, Wyndham

  René listened in growing amazement. Did Percy mean that if he had the guts he would denounce the villainies of the great Insurance Companies?

  Did he regard himself as a village Hampden manqué? Apparently his amazing brother-in-law derived pleasure from imagining a day when he would return as usual from his office, kiss his wife, and announce that they at once must pack: that he was saying goodbye to insurance, that he was selling his houses, cars, and so on, dismissing the servants and that in future they would dwell in a three-room flat in Pimlico or Shepherd’s Bush. René had often speculated as to what effect a lifelong diet of revolutionary journalism might have upon a highly successful executive. It now was obvious that Marxism was simply transmuted into romance, into British Dare-to-be-a-Danielism.

  As to whether Percy understood, or indeed took the faintest interest in what precisely were the principles behind his brother-in-law’s unworldly action, René could only guess. He supposed that in a woolly way the good Percy labelled as “idealism” any defiance of an established order, or institutions: “idealism” being the word traditionally favoured by the revolutionary journalist for the impulse in the moral man to devote himself to the welfare of men-in-general. Clearly Percy’s reaction would be just to affix the label “idealism,” without going further into the matter. He never went behind words or underneath clichés or slogans. Since they had never had any really serious talk, his brother-in-law could not be otherwise than quite ignorant of what René’s beliefs were.

  “Percy,” he said, with emotion in his voice, “what you have been saying has had a tremendously tonic effect. I daresay you can imagine the view of the world is simply that I am a fool. I am not made of wood and such support as yours is a wonderful stimulus.”

  Percy looked down at the floor steadily for about a minute, hearing himself praised; just as he would had he scored a century for his old school and was being congratulated by the captain of the eleven or the headmaster: “Splendid, Lamport. A faultless innings!” Then he looked up, smiling a little bashfully. “Will you have another glass of sherry, René? It is some stuff Simon recommended.”

  And they moved back to the table where the sherry and glasses had been placed.

  Mary appeared followed by Hester, and she saw at once, by the faces of the two men, that both were agreeably excited; obviously their relations had been changed and cemented, by some emotional impact occurring for the first time. Percy wore an expression with which she was familiar. He had looked like that when he had appeared for the first time in coast guard uniform, in the War to End War: or when, for instance, he had broken with the firm of family solicitors on learning that they had behaved with typical professional caddishness and disregard for the laws of fair play in a case which he had entrusted to them. She guessed that her husband must have gone quixotic in emulation of her brother, and that he had just shown his mettle in setting about some windmill, to prove that he was just as mad as René. Her eyes rested with a gentle toleration on the pair of them. Perhaps, after all, they were right and she was wrong. But she found it very difficult to take either of them seriously.

  At dinner a new consignment of champagne was tried out, to the popping of corks and raising of glasses (du champagne! just as if René had performed a remarkable feat forsooth). After a glass or two René began ho-ho-hoing. The occasion became almost festive, and Mary frowned a little as she smiled, feeling among other things that it was bad policy for her to appear in too carefree a role.Would Percy understand him? He was very easy to misunderstand! And Percy would expect him to behave with a proper gravity, his fellow Quichote in keeping with his recent heroism. So Mary remained a little severe throughout.

  When, however, Percy observed, “What do you think, René, about the Russian Pact? Are we going to have an alliance with Russia against Hitler, or not?” the face of the ex-professor subtly altered: it did not become graver, but rather a little soberer and immediately wary.

  “No,” he said cautiously. “No, there will of course be no pact between England and Russia against Germany.”

  Percy looked almost startled at the aplomb of this assertion.

  “You say of course there will be no pact. The Times seems to think there may be.” Percy looked up through the screen of his eyebrows, crumbling the bread at the side of his plate.

  “That, I believe, is very unduly sanguine. All history points the other way. But it is quite usual for the Times to ignore history.”

  Percy smiled. “Sometimes, certainly.”

  “There is much affinity between the Russians and Germans.

  The Russians naturally will think that it would give us great pleasure to see the Russian and German dictatorships destroying one another.”

  “But may they not,” Percy protested, “desire to see Hitler destroyed?”

  René shook his head. “That is too simple,” he said. “Russia would not help Hitler, with arms. But might agree to a limited pact with her. Why not? Moscow, after all, would relish the sight of Germany exhausting itself in defeating England or vice versa. One of the great mistakes the English make is to believe themselves lovable.”

  Percy laughed. “There is some truth in that.”

  “Russia will never go to war if it can possibly avoid it, though it is said to be much stronger than is generally supposed. It will always prefer not to commit itself deeply…. For the rest, there are two things always to bear in mind. First, the Russian people are traditionally very averse to war. Unlike the Germans. Unlike us. Secondly, the Russian ruling class have always got on well with the Germans, and have made use of them whenever possible. The armies have still been friendly when the politicians were bickering.”

  There was a pause, Percy continued to eat in silence. Mary and Hester smiled at one another, as if to say, “Men are very clever! It is a debate where our merely feminine views would be de trop.”

  The host wiped his mouth and pushed his chair back. “Your two cardinal points,” he began, “may or may not be of the decisive character that you attribute to them. I am not competent to judge. What I do know is that I should be indeed sorry should the pact not materialize.”

  “I too.” René vigorously nodded his head.

  “What is more,” Percy continued, “the situation would then be of the utmost gravity.”

  “I agree, it could hardly be graver. For ten years now we have carefully progressed, as if that were our aim, into this terrible situation. It seems to me, in all seriousness, that there has been a great deal of deliberation in getting ourselves tied up in a worse and worse position from which nothing can disengage us.”

  Percy stared at him.“Do I understand you to say that it was on purpose that we find ourselves in this highly dangerous situation?”

  “After years of the closest observation and exhaustive research,” René told his brother-in-law, “I find it impossible to come to any other conclusion.”

  At this unexpected dénouement, of what had succeeded his initial enquiry regarding the proposed Russian pact, Percy’s first reaction was one of bewilderment. This was expressed in his face with a most graphic explicitness. Next, it could with a comic distinctness be observed transforming itself into something else. The bewilderment hardened into suspicion: Percy could be seen to cast a covert glance at the bearded oracle! Mary noted the arrival of second thoughts with anxiety. For absurd as the phase of Percy and René’s relationship appeared to her, in which the quixotic was in the ascendant, yet Mary would have far preferred that to one in which her husband came to look upon René as a lunatic. Nor was René unaware that he had gone too far. Formerly he had never moved on to an enlightened plane in conversing with Mary’s husband, nor with Mary either, except for one lapse, which had not developed. He asked himself how he had come to be led into this, and why he had not contented himself with some conventional explanation.“It was the prophet coming out,” he told himself, with an internal grimace.

  René made no further move, as though to allow his oracular statement to
take effect (though he sincerely hoped that it might not); meanwhile he gave himself up to the delights of a Coupe Marocaine, wondering what elixir it was which Percy’s Greek cook had introduced into this exotic entremet. Mary and Hester, who both had memories of Pangbourne, were outside this political debate, discussing mutual friends. “Old Mrs. Proctor,” Mary said, “had been born in India, and told me she was a Buddhist, and was convinced that in her next incarnation she would be a Siamese cat.” — “I like old Mrs. Proctor,” Hester mused. — “I did too. Her choice of a Siamese cat accurately reflected her nature. She was a cat, but a Siamese cat!” And laughed.

  But Percy was suffering another transformation. His face had cleared up. He was obviously once more in the clutches of some heroic emotion, it seemed to Mary. And at this moment he broke the silence between the two men, which must have lasted several minutes.

  “What you said was a hard saying,” Percy told his brother-in-law. “Just for a moment it was too much even for me.”

  Greatly relieved at his tone, René replied ambiguously, “The world is a hard place.” He was resolved not to permit himself any further departures from the beaten track.

  “Indeed it is!” Percy answered heartily. “But do you really believe that the Tories would be such ruthless monsters as to arrange a second world war ... yes, even connive at the successful emergence, or in effect create such a bloodthirsty little gangster as Herr Hitler, such a scourge of God, to advance their class interests by a shambles.”

  René almost laughed outright. His brother-in-law was incapable of imagining any turpitude other than a Tory capital one. It was a masterpiece of doctrinaire delusion.

  “The Machiavellian Tory is capable of anything,” René asserted with suitable solemnity, having decided to convert it into a Party matter.

  “You think he would go that far?” Percy leant forward. “Do you think he would pull down the world about his head, if necessary, in order to have his stupid way?”

  “Don’t you? Consider the deeds of his secret service! He deals in political murder just as much as the Hitlerites or Italian fascists.”

  “I still recoil,” Percy protested,“at the picture of civilized men, however corrupt, plotting the destruction of whole populations, and even sacrificing perhaps half of their own. I consider Mr. Churchill a very bad man, but scarcely a Borgia.”

  René stroked his beard; he was thinking of the Borgias.

  “All Tories are potential Borgias,” René laid it down (for if he was so stupid as he had revealed himself, even so childish a statement as this would go down all right!). “I say it quite seriously,” he added — for he believed he saw a shade of suspicion darkening his brother-in-law’s face, and must plug it in pretty stiff. “The ruling class of a country, the traditional ruling class, is completely ruthless. Human emotions are luxuries which those desiring power must discard entirely.”

  “You speak like Machiavelli,” Percy smiled.

  “But the modern politician behaves like Machiavelli. This is brought home to the historian, though he is very careful never to betray the guilty secrets he has learned. It is more than his place is worth. As the servant of the ruling class, he cannot but become privy in the course of his researches to the dark secrets of his masters.”

  “But, René,” Mary interposed. “Was Lord Macaulay, for instance, in possession of these criminal secrets?”

  “Of course he was,” her brother told her, smiling. “But he wanted to be a …”

  “A LORD!” Percy almost roared delightedly.

  “Exactly!” René smiled.

  “I think you are a pair of dreadful cynics!” Mary laughed, all the jolliness of the dinner having returned.

  “Well, I do not propose to reveal any of the dark secrets I have myself come across. Let me take an incident which is described in every history of the United States. I refer to the sinking in Havana Harbour of the battleship Maine. At the time the Americans were accused of doing this. The motive would be obvious: namely, so to inflame American opinion that war with Spain would be inevitable. Well now, when it was said that the Americans were responsible for the sinking of this ship, with enormous loss of life, the American Government was clearly visé. But the president was determined to have no war if he could possibly help it. So would it be the war party of which Theodore Roosevelt was a prominent member? Would they murder hundreds of their countrymen, gallant seamen, in order to precipitate a war? The answer is, to my mind, that they would. Indeed, they would blow up half the world to have their way. And this goes for all politicians in all places. Guests are no longer poisoned by their hosts, as was the case in the Italy of the Borgias. That is too crude. Hypocrisy has, in our society, put a thick patina over everything: there are a number of forms of violence which must not be indulged in. But whereas in the Italy of the Borgias massacre was confined to quite modest numbers, today a man (a politician) may destroy ten million people without it ever being remarked that he has behaved rather badly.”

  They all had listened to this more or less attentively.

  “It may have been accident,” Mary observed. “It may just have blown up of its own accord.”

  “No one ever thought it did that,” René replied. “The more sinister explanation is practically uncontradicted.”

  “The Americans are a nation of gangsters,” was Percy’s comment, “and you can hardly argue, because Americans were capable of such an action, that Englishmen would be liable to commit an equally foul crime.”

  René laughed.

  “Upon such a generalization as that ‘all Americans are gangsters’ you cannot safely base an argument. Bryan, for instance, vice-president in Woodrow Wilson’s administration, was not a gangster. There are, let us admit, a few exceptions to the rule that all politicians are blackguards. Americans as a whole are no more gangsters than we are. Sorry.”

  “No. I am sorry too. The good Americans — if there are any — are untypical.” Percy, like many of his countrymen, took up a very rigid position regarding the Yahoo on the other side of the Atlantic. The ex-professor pushed his chair back and laughed negligently.

  “My illustration was unfortunate. I forgot how opaque the atmosphere of prejudice is. I should not have gone for my illustration to the United States. But there is no particular point in restarting and taking my illustration from nearer home. By all means retain your illusions regarding playing-the-game and a race of ‘Very Perfect Gentlemen.’” He looked at his host and smiled. “Remember, though, that it is usually Tories who speak about playing the game. Do not be too credulous.”

  Soon after this the two ladies withdrew. The men remained standing. After a pause, as though for recueillement on the part of Percy, that gentleman practically re-enacted the scene of just before dinner, with this difference that he had now drunk quite a lot, and his guest also resembled him in this respect. During his emotional expansiveness Percy became quite red in the face, and once or twice moved dramatically close to his brother-in-law.

  “How is it, René, that we have never until tonight really got to know one another? Why have we never had any good talks before? It is really astonishing how little we have found to say to one another.”

  René knew perfectly well the answer, why they had never had any serious conversation before. But he affected to be at least as astonished as Percy at that fact. He had looked upon Mary’s husband as a man with whom he had so little in common that it was unnecessary to exchange anything more than commonplaces.

  But René crashed, almost with violence, with a heartiness even exceeding the other’s, “Yes, is it not amazing that all these years we should have been content to discuss the weather, or some child murder or football match ... Marie Laurençin!”

  They both laughed, looking around for one of the ubiquitous stylized inanities.

  “It is extraordinary,” he went on,“how something happens … and two people begin talking without any social inhibition and are revealed to one another. It is one of the most extraord
inary things in life!”

  “Absolutely!” Percy noisily responded.“The most extraordinary.”

  “The most! It is like the discovery of plastic.” René capped the whole matter. “Just a jolly old milk bottle, the sort the slovenly housewife leaves hardening away there on a shelf — too damned lazy to wash it out and return it to the milkman, and the stuff brought about by her slack habits is plastic. World-shaking discovery. A universal substance such as the alchemist dreamed of. Tea trays, false teeth, cups and saucers, eyeglasses, surgical instruments, flying-machines — all out of a bottle of milk. We have been like the indolent housewife, you and I, Percy.We ought to be damned well ashamed of ourselves!”

  Percy did not entirely come up to his guest’s comic picture of him, and there were times when he showed a certain uneasiness.

  So now, smiling a little dubiously, he remarked, “We neither of us perhaps can claim to possess such staggering properties as are to be found in a neglected milk bottle. But I think you are a very remarkable person: our talk tonight has given me furiously to think. And I like thinking furiously.”

  “So do I.” René discharged a furious puff of smoke from his dilated nostrils.They sat down and talked a little more, Percy saying, among other things, what a marvellous insight his new friend had into American history. “But of course it is your job,” to which the historian replied, “It is in fact a pity that Englishmen do not know a little more how America came to be what it is.” Then suddenly Percy drew his chair, with some violence, near to that of René.

  “Look here, my dear fellow, I have been thinking about this ever since Mary informed me of your splendid gesture, how you laid down your post ... in a spirit of the purest idealism. Whenever I think of it I marvel — how many people would sacrifice everything for a principle, expose themselves … well, to penury? Now, my dear fellow, I am a relative and you must allow me to say this. In order to meet the difficulties which must immediately confront you, you must allow me to place at your disposal the sum of one thousand pounds.” René began to say, “I could not think of allowing ...” But he was interrupted by Percy, waving such remonstrances away with an imperious hand.