Self Condemned

by Lewis, Wyndham

  They were ordered to wear their lifebelts, or to carry them, everywhere. They must sleep in them, and come to meals in them. René grimaced expressively with his mouth at the announcement about meals. It was not difficult to foresee how excruciatingly funny it would appear to Dr. Lincoln Abbott to see the Professor eating a grapefruit in a lifebelt. He felt that that table must be changed, since fancy dress was the order of the day.

  The ship’s behaviour had attracted attention immediately after the Declaration of War. It had begun to tack, or to zigzag. This was the time, also, when large pieces of canvas were lashed along all the promenade decks, screening the interior from the sea, to make it more sure that enemy submarines could see no lights within. Now, as night drew on, there was something else that the passengers noticed. It had grown distinctly colder. By the next morning, it was very cold indeed. And blowing a gale. They still zigzagged, but were heading due north. Were they bound for Greenland, René wondered; and, unless they encountered an iceberg, would they remain in some gap in the icepack until a naval escort arrived? They had been entirely blacked out.

  As they got farther north the ship started to plunge badly in the stormy seas. Waves were frequently dashed against the canvas screen and some of the water burst through upon the decks.

  Hester was not only the prey to “baby thoughts,” but became atrociously seasick. René, who was a good sailor, replaced the steward, and nursed her through this violent but harmless reaction to the wallowing of ships in briny abysses: to the motions of the rut of a rolling whale, as it were. All the movements of monsters sicken the parasite. The big ship is the only monster of which we have any experience.

  For three or four days, their radio cut off very rigidly, both for reception and dispatch of messages, the Empress could scarcely have rolled more and it seemed as though they were practically stationary, except for the furious rolling, off Greenland was the general guess. Thus unreachable, and as silent as the grave, tossed up and down, continually in some high latitude, but not told where, at least they might suppose that they were in safety. But it was obvious, also, that sooner or later they must go back into waters frequented by the submarine; and there were some of them who wished that the captain would decide to do so at once.

  During his vigil with Hester, René did not fail to criticize the policy of the captain. This polar adventure of his was ridiculous. Why had he not taken them a hundred miles or so to north or to south of the ship lane, and trusted to their speed to have left behind any submarine. There would be some, most likely in ambush near the mouth of the St. Lawrence; those risks had to be taken.

  However, a few days later the captain appeared to have come to the same opinion as most of his passengers. He took them back towards Quebec; quite unexpectedly they found themselves in the Belle Isle Straits, and unmolested ascended the estuary of the St. Lawrence.

  During their stay in northern waters it had been difficult to eat and almost impossible to drink. René had, of course, gone into the restaurant, where Dr. Lincoln Abbott was generally to be found, happily somewhat subdued. René was undergoing a severe mental strain during that period, and it would have been a bad thing for Dr. Abbott had his customary boisterous self indulged in playfulness. Naturally there were lapses. When the Doctor was flung out of his chair, he thought this terrifically funny; he picked himself up and came gulping back to the table with schoolboyish mirth. “I wish I had my football equipment with me,” he chuckled. (“Equipment” was not the word he used but some term descriptive of the armour worn in American football.) Any other physical contretemps of this sort affected him in the same way; but on the whole the Doctor was a much more tolerable companion under these conditions. One afternoon René had made his way into the Tourist Class, and had a little talk with Oscar. He seemed somewhat self-conscious, and he suspected him of concealing the presence of sea-sickness, under a more than ever colourless abstraction of the self.

  Hester did not recover speedily, nor for some time did she seem to forget her nightmare of riding a plunging leviathan. She was very weak, when she first came out on deck in the estuary of the St. Lawrence; and although the movement of the ship was by this time normally steady, she tended to cling on to things, and soon returned to her stateroom, where the stewardess brought her such food as she could eat.The long journey up this huge waterway was, for some, an avenue, made agreeable by the proximity, somewhere, of places and people, so new as to offer a temporary toehold to Hope. For others it was, of course, home. For quite a few it was “the land of possibilities.” But to René the closer this land closed in as they advanced, the tighter the knot seemed to be drawn about his neck.

  All the incidents of this crossing remained, in his memory, of no more significance than what is left in the mind after a cross-channel journey, only multiplied nine-fold. The Declaration of War was a fainter impression than the first volume of Middlemarch flying through the air: but neither stood out in any way. For René, the period since the Empress of Labrador had left Cherbourg reduced itself to one terrifying self-revelation. His delight at being recognized by the preposterous little President of Rome was so awful a self-degradation, and only less his gratification at the respectful eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses of Dr. Bleistift. That this should have had the effect of an earthquake in his emotional centres was — the moment the emotion had evaporated — an occurrence which staggered him. He stared at it twenty-four hours later as if he had seen a ghost. Who was this man, with the Legion of Honour in his dinner jacket, sitting at a table with a common little American, reverently gazing at the ribbon? Who was this man warming himself at such a fire as this? Could it be the René Harding he had known all his life? Was this foolish creature indeed himself, converted, by some witchcraft, into the gentleman he was gazing at across an interval of only twenty-four hours? The state of nervous dereliction into which he had passed with such rapidity, after they had taken their place among the herds making the crossing on this great liner, was to him incomprehensible. Especially during the days while he was attending to Hester, he had this picture incessantly before him — of a degraded self, not known to him before, by some subconscious convulsion thrown up into time, and sitting there for all eternity at that restaurant table, with its ridiculous red boutonniére. He brooded for hours together over this obscene image of his past self. It had a terrifying fascination for him: at one time he lay back in his chair and howled with derisive laughter at it. Hester, startled at this, called out, “What on earth are you laughing at, René?” He answered, “Oh, just at a funny picture which suddenly came into my mind. You know how funny pictures have a way of popping up.This was a beastly funny one.”

  These days of dark brooding in the rocking stateroom affected him so deeply that he felt at times almost half-witted. He found himself offering Hester smelling salts when she had asked for a hot water bottle: and was surprised to hear himself addressing the stewardess as Helen.

  This indelible impression was of so fiercely salutary a kind, here at the outset, that it even modified his attitude, and for good, regarding his way of thinking about himself (or “what was left of himself,” as he put it).

  At Quebec he stepped ashore a quite different man from that beribboned professor who had encountered Doctors Abbott and Bleistift a week before — that figure which he regarded as a terrifying apparition, which might at any moment once more usurp his place.

  He had learned his lesson, the lesson of final and absolute exile, quickly. He began immediately to forge for himself a more disciplined personality. If he had to die, and that was no doubt what it meant, at least he must do so in a manner that was not base and childish. He must not die with the Legion of Honour in his buttonhole.

  Mary’s insistence upon elevating them from the Tourist Class to the First, which had evoked gratitude at the time of his degradation, now was very differently viewed. That was altogether the wrong way of meeting his fate. — It should not be in evening-dress with one of the world’s honours reserved for the
second-rate flaunted in his buttonhole. Quite another costume was the only appropriate one. No, he should not have been a First-Class passenger — the distinguished Professor Harding incognito — that was a quite false idea. There was no honest way in which you could make sufficient money to travel First Class. His First-Class passenger act had been Mary’s big mistake, whose mind was a First-Class mind. Either the life he was now to enter was an empty interlude, an apprenticeship to death: or it was a breathing space, a period of readjustment, preceding the acceptance of a much simpler type of existence for Hester and himself. These alternatives would have to be broken to Hester. All details it would be time enough to settle when they had reached their destination, some very moderately priced hotel, which it would now be his task to find. She would have to be given the clearest explanation. Quite likely she would leave him, which might be the best solution. But all of that was detail. The general shape of the future was starkly outlined, for him, as if by some supernatural hand. It was the way things must fall out, when anyone refuses to live in the land of compromise. What immediately ensues must depend upon the circumstances of the man in question at the time of his decision. If he were a soldier on active service and if he laid down his rifle and declared his intention to use it no more, the consequences would be death, banishment, or disgrace. If he were a salaried servant of a great insurance company and became a conscientious objector (to the financial system involved), and resigned his post, then the blow would be an economic one. But there were many other cases, which it is not necessary to specify, where ostracism accompanies the act of repudiation.

  But such actions, no matter how greatly the circumstances might differ, lead to an estrangement from the norm of life. An individual who has repudiated publicly the compromise of normal living must thereafter be careful never to use compromise, or half-compromise, under whatever circumstances.

  Sometimes rolling upon the floor of the stateroom, as he lost his balance, at the severest of the sub-polar storm, he analysed all of this down to the bedrock. His humiliation had been so great, he had at one point with difficulty restrained himself from confessing to the stricken Hester.

  He emerged from those spasms of self-reproach outwardly unchanged. His behaviour to the Doctors was in no way modified when he met them on the decks or elsewhere.

  The decks were crowded as they approached Quebec. Quebec, the gateway not so much to Canada as to the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. Among the chain of cities upon this riverine highway, the American outnumber the Canadian, and of course outclass them, commercially. This magnificent rock, more impressive than Gibraltar, is a catholic citadel, the importance of which was appreciated by René. As he stared at it, he did not see a colonial battle in the eighteenth century between a handful of French and English troops, he saw instead a magnificent cardinal, assisted by a herd of clerics, celebrating mass, in the cathedral. He saw the French population multiplying, the English dwindling, and this rock symbolizing Catholic power, rather than anything pettily national.

  The President of Rome University (and how clownish a Rome that was) came up and remarked, “Well, Professor, you are looking at Quebec, and I imagine you are thinking of an Englishman called Wolfe …!”

  “You are wrong, Doctor,” René answered, “the military exploits of my countrymen, past or present, do not preoccupy me to that extent.”

  This was too much for Dr. Abbott, his sides began to quiver, René perceived he was about to relish this hugely in his characteristic fashion, as the latest drollery, of that “caution,” his old buddy, the Chevalier René Harding. He fixed the Doctor with an eye so forbidding that his comradely orgy was nipped in the bud. — It would be a mistake to say that René’s manners had suffered no change whatever, towards his academic fellow passengers.There had to be a certain severity which was not there before. Dr. Lincoln Abbott he regarded as, in part, a phantom. Dr. Lincoln Abbott was for him, above all, an historic figure: for was it not the Doctor who had been the opposite member (or whatever the actors call it) to that pitiable fool the bearded professor with the Legion of Honour stuck in his dinner jacket? The comic playlet staged in the dining saloon of the Empress of Labrador was something of such importance to him that the “Doctor” in that farce had for him a special immortality. Once or twice, on the last day of the voyage, Dr. Lincoln Abbott had found himself being stared at with such intensity that it made him feel hot under the collar. Had he put his tie on inside out, had he forgotten to shave his upper lip, or was it BO? The first time he encountered this scrutiny, Dr. Abbott hastened to his cabin, and examined himself carefully, from head to foot, removed his jacket and sniffed at his armpits, but was unable to discover anything amiss.

  The passport business, and then the problems with the vast amount of luggage they had with them — passing the customs on the ship and arranging for the safe disembarkation of the hand luggage — all this fully preoccupied everybody as they approached Quebec.All that René did by way of farewell to the Doctors was a curt nod in the Customs Shed. But Dr. Lincoln Abbott was not going to let him off so easily as that. He rushed at him, seized his hand, which he subjected to an hysterical pressure, reminded him that he had promised to come to Arkansas and lecture, and a half-dozen other things, while Mrs. President Abbott came round and overwhelmed the half-dead Hester with her solicitations and effusiveness. At last they shook off these good people and succeeded in getting on the track of their porters.

  On landing two or three porters seized their hand luggage. René tried a little French on them, but as they were mostly Indians they were not interested. All they could speak was very limited French Canadian, which is anything but identical with French.The Hardings kept losing these people, and finding them again with intense relief; but at last they were in a cab and being driven through the old city at the foot of the rock, which was not in any way noticeable. There is the French hand in a good deal of the buildings but on the whole Quebec is a cold city, which is natural enough seeing that it is under ice and snow for half the year. They spent the night there, but René was disappointed at finding so little that was truly French. The next morning, René rather stern, Hester still rather seasick, they left in the train for Montreal — but not to stop in that unusually fine city, but to press on to Momaco.

  PART TWO

  THE ROOM

  XI

  TWENTY-FIVE FEET BY

  TWELVE

  The Room, in the Hotel Blundell, was twenty-five feet by twelve about. It was no cell. It was lit by six windows: three composed a bay, in which well-lit area they spent most of their time — René sat at one side of the bay, writing upon his knee on a large scribbling pad. Hester sat at the other side, reading or knitting or sleeping.

  For the first year she had sat upon a piece of monumental hotel junk, a bluish sofa. But it secreted bedbugs, the summer heat disclosed, as it caused one occasionally to walk upon one of its dirty velvet arms.

  Once the identity of the bug had been established, and before it moved from the velvet structure onto the human body, René acted. Overcoming loud protests from the management, who insisted that the bugs were innocent tree insects, the sofa was expelled. Next Hester sat in a large blue velvet armchair. It was closely related to the sofa, but no bugs had shown up. Lastly, they were furnished with a fairly new and bugless settee.

  It was René’s habit to place an upended suitcase upon a high chair and drape it with a blanket. He stood this between his wife and himself, so blotting her out while he wrote or read. He could still see, over the crest of this stockade, a movement of soft ash-gold English hair, among which moved sometimes a scratching crimson fingernail.This minimum of privacy, this substitute for a book-lined study, was all he had for three years and three months — to date it from the sailing of the Empress of Labrador from Southampton.

  In summer René lowered the centre blind to shut out the glare. At present it was December, and another glare, that of the Canadian snow, filled the Room with its chilly radiation. There was
a small stack of books upon a chair to the left of him; he wrote in silence, hour after hour, dropping each page, as it was completed, into a deep, wooden tray on the floor at his side.

  They never left this Room, these two people, except to shop at the corner of the block. They were as isolated as are the men of the police posts on Coronation Gulf or Baffin Bay. They were surrounded by a coldness as great as that of the ice pack; but this was a human pack upon the edge of which they lived. They had practically no social contacts whatever. They were hermits in this horrid place. They were pioneers in this kind of cold, in this new sort of human refrigeration; and no equivalent of a central heat system had, of course, as yet been developed for the human nature in question. They just took it, year after year, and like backwoodsmen (however unwilling) they had become hardened to the icy atmosphere. They had grown used to communicating only with themselves; to being friendless, in an inhuman void.

  The Room, as mentioned above, was twenty-five feet by twelve about, but six of these, out of the length, you have to deduct for bathroom and kitchenette. Those figures still in no way express the size, because it was immense. Two human beings had been almost forcibly bottled up in it for a thousand years.