“The sum I have mentioned means nothing to me, I can very easily spare it. Needless to say, it is not my habit to distribute cheques. But in this case I look upon it as a paltry sum, and let me say at once that if you should require more in the first year or two to keep you going, do not hesitate to turn to me. I should be ashamed of myself if I did not support you in any way in my power.”
“But really, old chap …”
Getting to his feet with a purposeful air, Percy said, “Will you wait here for a moment, I shall be back immediately. I am going to my study to draw this cheque on the spot. Excuse me. I shall really only be two or three minutes.”
He left the room, and René, who had risen, went to the table and poured himself out another brandy. As soon as he was alone René’s face contracted. Glaring down at his glass, he would appear to be concentrating for purposes of analysis.
The Absurd was once more puzzling him. This man he was with was so obviously not screwed down tight, and half-finished: kept attacking him — yes, actually assaulting him — with nonsensical approbation! Then he would shoot off, as he now had done, into the néant, soon to reappear with a cheque for a thousand pounds. Was this fairy gold? Was he an emissary of Nonsense in person? Yes, would these thousand pounds only be convertible into a thousand absurdities? For such a figure could not possibly deal in a rational currency.
But René poured down more brandy and squared his shoulders. It was his brother-in-law ... after all, who slept with Mary every night. Mary, stable as a rock, she would not be closely associated with so unstable an entity were she not assured that his money came from a normal mint. No.
Although he had drilled himself into tolerance of the absurd by the time Percy hustled in, the first impact of the bird’s nest coloured thatch, the rimless glasses (put on to write the cheque), produced a mild spasm of alarm, of the type always experienced when Mrs. Harradson emitted, “Oo, sir, Professor Harding, sir!”
But he forced an agreeably abstracted expression on to his face (no unseemly expectancy of what was about to happen, yet ... in a musing of a happy kind, so that if anything did drop in his lap it would be received benignly, without too crudely abrupt a change of countenance).
“I say, Percy, I ought not to take this you know! I am quite serious,” he protested, as Percy placed an envelope upon the table beside him. “You’re a terrific brick!” (He supposed that “brick” was the kind of idiot word that belonged to the vocabulary of this sort of homunculus.) “But I know I should refuse!”
“Nonsense, my dear chap!”
René looked up quickly at the word “nonsense.”
“I don’t know what Hester would say if she could see me pocketing this,” as he picked up the envelope and put it in his breast pocket. He almost laughed at the thought of Hester’s disgust at the sight of a thousand quid. “Hester always says I have no proper pride.”
“She will soon get over it, I expect.” For this was rather in excess of what could be absorbed by the homunculus on the serious level.
“I expect so, poor dear girl. For she takes a more serious view than I do of our future.”
“Women are born pessimists,” Percy told him.
René nodded his head. “They are the eternal Greek chorus.” Then quickly placing his hand upon that of his host, which lay, hairy and sprawling, on the table, and administering a slight pressure, he exclaimed fruitily, “I am your debtor for life, old man. I do not mean I shall not repay you this sum. I mean that when I do, I shall still be your debtor.”
“Nonsense!”
At this second “nonsense” René shot up his head even more quickly, and examined closely the bird’s nest hair, the blankly shining eye-glasses. Had he read his suspicions? Has this old bourgeois second sight?
But Percy resumed the dinner-table conversation, which had apparently given him an appetite for political and other discussion; or there had been something René had said which had stirred him into unaccustomed speculation.
“In my lifetime,” he began, “the attitude to violent death has completely changed.”
“In mine too. We have become like the Orientals.”
Signs of animation were seen in the bird’s-nest-topped head, with its glazed eye-sockets (for the glasses were still there).
“Orientalized, are we? You think that?”
“All I meant was,” René clarified, “that in the past it was always said that our attitude to death was different from that of the Oriental races. Today one does not hear that said, and I think that there is no longer any justification for saying it.”
“No, there is not. I do not mind being blasted out of my house by a ‘super-bomb’ at any moment. This is a quite new attitude. — I mean my callousness about myself.”
A frown grew upon René’s face, like a hieratic tree, during Percy’s self-analysis. The last thing that he desired was a serious discussion with this auriferous nobody. But such self-complacent revelation of callousness normally would have provoked him to didactic reproof.
“Ah ha, yes, very painful,” he muttered.
“Rather the reverse,” the callous one smilingly corrected. “But I often have wondered,” he went on, “whether the sort of orientalizing we have undergone was not due to the extraordinary growth of Jewish influence.”
(Ha! An anti-Semite, thought to himself the surprised listener. One of the City Man’s substitutes for thought — the fox hunting still in the blood of the stockjobber. But he waited.)
“It is my opinion that the Jews have too much influence,” Percy continued truculently, glancing at his frowning companion; the frown still there which had grown under the stimulus of passing reference to high explosives and high finance.
“I should be interested to know your opinion, René, of the Jewish question.”
Stirring himself reluctantly, this frowning guest, whose profession it was to have opinions, drank his brandy slowly, ponderously put down the glass, and a shade grumpily gave his opinion.
“The Jews. The Jews are an alibi for all the double dealers, plotters, and intriguers, fomenters of wars, und so weiter. A useful tribe, they take the rap for everything.”
It was with a much colder voice that the bird’s nest crowned mask drawled, “So you regard the Jews as much maligned?”
“They certainly are maligned. They have their own advocates in plenty; I am only interested in justice, and I notice numbers of malefactors escaping on the backs of the Jews.”
Percy’s disappointment was patent, he was even ruffled. “In the insurance business …”
“Ah yes, in the insurance business you do meet a lot of bad hats with Semitic cognomens.”
“You do indeed,” Percy asserted with asperity and then followed several accounts of fabulous insurance frauds, and the part his company had played in same. The last of these stories was laughter provoking, the delinquent possessing an eye for the farcical, and both narrator and listener became uproarious and mingled their laughs as they poured themselves fresh glasses of brandy. The bad patch in the conversation was over. Subjects in which the City Man’s passions were not aroused succeeded, one or two of which revealing an identity of view and so confirming Percy’s new-found belief in his brother-in-law’s wisdom. It seemed a long time to René since their wives had left them when his host got up and led the way to the drawing room.
As all were moving about near the open front door preparatory to the departure of the two guests, René went up to his sister and kissed her, murmuring almost in her ear, “Marie, tu est si belle, tu est si bonne!” The serene roman-face of the slightly smiling Mary accepted the mariolatry blandly, squeezing her brother’s arm. And over her shoulder could be seen in the light of the hall lamp the figure of Percy, his head once more in profile, his shining eye rapt in a dream of unutterable knowingness. René saw him as a large bird, a hen bird, a bird’s nest upon its head, transfixed in a dream of exultant intensity; a bird who had just laid a splendid golden egg.
VI
; HOW VICTOR SAW
THE MATTER
“Are you a subscriber to a press clipping agency?” Janet Painter looked across the marble table at her brother. He shook his head. “You did not read my story about you then, I expect.”
“What was that?” René was watching a girl at a neighbouring table who had been sketching him he thought. He had seen no sketching in the Café Royal for a long time. Habits were changing among the native artists. Spectacled girls were always the hottest: her specs were the big rimless ones that went with myopic, fat, red-lipped, provincial Sunday School sexiness. As greedy for it, as red-cheeked lads for jam. She turned towards him and smiled. He pointed his bearded lips and puffed a pencil of blue smoke.
“The little beast carts that sketchbook around with her as a means of getting off,” he ruminated. “She sketches men into her fat little net. Probably been trodden by several hundred Yorkshire tykes or Shropshire lads. Now up in the capital, is swimming around with that protruding fish mouth of hers below the short fat nose.” He removed his eyes from the coarse bit of sex bait and caught Victor’s eye, which had been covertly feasting upon the same abject morsel. Not for the first time did he find himself cruising in the same dirty waters as Victor. They had so few tastes in common that this one he found particularly startling.
“Idealism,” his sister was saying, “was the caption for my story.”
“Idealism?” René repeated. “The world as idea and as imagination. I see.”
“Yes, I say the most brilliant of our ‘young’ professors, whose book, The Secret History of World War II, created such a sensation last year. After enumerating a few of his more glittering academic honours, I went on to describe how at last unable to bear the feeling of guilt, he had resigned his professorship.The sense of guilt had grown with his increasing sense of the evilness of the system his teaching was designed to support. Now, he, accompanied by his beautiful young wife, who with great bravery is following him into the wilderness, are booking a passage for Canada, where they are to start a new life. ‘Such idealism,’ my story concluded, ‘is not often met with outside the pages of a novel.’”
“Oh, why didn’t you tell me about this, Janet?” drawled Victor fruitily in his throat. “How clever of you, darling!”
Mr.Victor Painter was Janet’s husband, but his classily barking patronage she took no more notice of than if he had been a familiar dog.
“Where has this story found a home,” René enquired, also ignoring the drawling noise.
“In the Ladies’ Realm,” she told him. “But I am slithering another one into the gossip of the Daily Telegram.”
Meanwhile Hester glowed appreciatively, actually blushing a little.
The four had just been dining within, in the smallish room where the orchestra performs.
The party consisted exclusively of René and his brother-in-law, Victor Painter, and their wives. This party had been proposed by René, with the purpose of passing an evening with Janet, his second sister: thirty-seven, eight years junior to Mary, and ten years younger than himself. She was dark and in some ways a slenderer version of Mary, and in character much less substantial too:Victor and Janet were a pointedly youthful thirty-seven. The ten years which separated René inflated by them to twenty. Across these twenty-odd, Victor addressed his brother-in-law as from a long way off. His learning and renown served to confer upon these inflated distances a proverbial likelihood. In Victor’s manner, too, there was always something which implied that, as decade after decade passed, he automatically was destined to become the possessor of a similar learning and renown. If, at present, he was ignorant and quite unknown, this was merely owing to his youth (for the ten years he added to René’s age, he took off his own); consequently it was in fact across no less than three decades, rather than two, that he addressed his wife’s brother.
To such a harmless rearrangement of nature and adoption of a false position René would not have objected (his beard alone was a testimony to his indifference to the Zeitgeist), had it not been for his brother-in-law’s general vulgarity and distinct proclivity to “bound.”
Victor was a product of Liverpool, and the accent with which he had originally spoken was that peculiar to Lancashire: in no way inferior to BBC English certainly, but that had not been Victor’s view. He had come to London young, after a brief period as a wool clerk. It had been borne in upon him immediately that to speak as if an Old School Tie hung around his somewhat scraggy neck instead of a work-a-day necktie was essential for success. Giving proof of a certain histrionic endowment, he completely suppressed the locutions and tang of the Merseyside. He substituted the languid drawl of a Vaudeville toff.
As he strolled from one room to another of their little house, it was with so manifest an indifference to the lapse of time, that anyone could see he had been born in the top drawer, and that Time Is Made for Slaves was his family motto.
His brother-in-law always listened to his throaty baying tones with boredom, and found it difficult to hide his contempt for this Ersatz gentleman. There had even been a moment in Victor Painter’s life when his surname appeared to him a little compromising: and he had once considered changing it by deed poll. Did it not draw attention, quite unnecessarily, to how his ancestors had made their living? For painter signified, of course, a fellow on a ladder painting a front of a house. But it was not long before he learned that those privileged beings, the painters of easel pictures, invariably referred to themselves as painters. So he was on good terms again with his name, and even a little proud of it. He thought of Lord Leighton and of Sir Alfred Munnings, and when asked what his name was by, say, a hotel clerk, he barked proudly, “Painter.”
Victor by profession was the third on the notepaper of a not-very-prosperous publicity business. In this Janet assisted, in a spasmodic way. Lastly, since the nature of his job brought him into contact with a number of actors and literary people, Victor regarded himself as an inhabitant of “The Art World,” a typical attendant at the annual Three Arts Club Ball, and the kind of person the casual visitor would expect to see at the Café Royal, which he persisted in regarding as a “rendezvous of artists and models,” though it had long ceased to be that. How on earth Janet had come to marry this squalid coxcomb René could not understand: except he was obliged ruefully to agree that ten years earlier this melancholy, baying countenance may have provided the female eye with material for mild romance.
This being Victor, it may be imagined that it was in no way to be in his society, René had arranged this party. On the other hand it would never have occurred to Victor that René’s suggestion that they all four should meet at the Café Royal, could be for any other reason than to pass an evening with him: to secure his, Victor’s, opinion upon the course he had taken, in resigning his professorship, and to give him the inner low down regarding that resignation. It was, in consequence, a little puzzling to Victor that so far his opinion had not been sought, nor had any account been forthcoming of why (the real why) René had thrown up his job. “René is a deep dog,” he reflected. “He has got something up his sleeve!”
René’s objection to discussing anything about his resignation with the shoddy, flashy Victor was absolute: and when he saw that personage leaning over confidentially towards him, he met the intruder with a dark scowl. However,Victor proceeded, quite undeterred, to address him in a hoarse, throaty, confidential, brother-in-lawish manner (as though to say “in the family things can be told which it is perhaps undesirable to broadcast outside”).
“What, René, was the real story,” Victor asked, “behind your resignation — I mean the real motive? Did you have some bust-up or something?”
René stared at him for perhaps a minute, and then turned his back. Janet laughed. “All Victor wants to know is was there any dirty business?”
At this René turned around with not very good grace. “Oh, I beg your pardon,” he said to Victor. “I thought, for some reason, that you were talking to yourself.”
�
�No, nooo,”Victor drawled, and as he drawled astonishment could be seen changing into anger. “I am not accustomed to speak to myself.”
“No? You wish to know ... ah yes. Nothing at all is concealed.
The occurrence to which you referred has no esoteric inner story. My original statement is all there is to say.”
“I see,” Victor observed dryly. He was extremely offended. He looked down his nose, hooding his eyes and hollowing his cheeks, as he was accustomed to do with anybody whom he regarded as nearer to the bottom-dog level than himself. He had been becoming acutely conscious, as they sat in this sacred hall of fame, that this man, of whom he had always been rather afraid and cringed to, at times, was no longer the person that he had been. His status had suffered, to his mind, a catastrophic decline. It had required a sizeable interval, and almost two hours had elapsed since they met in the restaurant, for him to realize the new situation. (Upon the level, of course, which was valid for him.) With questions of status Victor was very familiar. As a publicity agent, status was a cardinal factor in the very existence of such a trade as his. And when one of his two partners passed down to him some “name” of a client on the down-grade, no longer worthy of their attention, he enjoyed saying, “Now, Mr. X., let us face it squarely, you are no longer front-page stuff!”
So with these backgrounds, when it came to the great Professor Harding turning his back on him and even giving him a bit of lip — oh then, it was time that the true state of affairs should be emphasized. After all, René was now a man out of a job, and like any other man out of a job, he had to find a new one; and in all probability it would be considerably less good than the last. Hang it all, he, poor little Victor, had a job. It might not be a very good one, but there it was; any job is better than no job. So this fine brother-in-law of his had better get off his perch. He must be made to understand that (for whatever reason — and he, Victor, was not likely to swallow the Idealism stuff) he is no longer a professor of history, but just some vague freelance person. He is not, even, a professor any longer. Mister Harding, if you please!
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