In the Rip van Winkle existence of René and Hester — of suspended existence so that they might as well have been asleep — a thousand years is the same as one tick of the clock. It was a dense, interminable, painful vibration, this great whirring, age-long, thunderous Tick. Bloat therefore the minutes into years, express its months as geological periods, in order to arrive at the correct chronology of this too-long-lived-in unit of space, this one dully aching throb of time.
A prison has a smell, as distinct as that of a hospital with its reek of ether. Incarceration has its gases, those of a place where people are battened down and locked up, year after year. There is a wrong sort of hotel; one dedicated to the care of guests who have been deprived of their freedom, and have been kidnapped into solitude and forced inertia. — The Hotel Blundell was the wrong sort of hotel. It was just a hotel, it was not a prison, but for the Hardings, husband and wife, it stank of exile and penury and confinement.
Their never-ending disappointments, in the battle to get work — wild efforts to liberate themselves, ghastly repulses — had made of this hotel Room no more personal than a railway carriage, something as personal as a suit of clothes.As time passed, it had become a museum of misery. There were drawers packed with letters, each of which once had represented a towering hope of escape. Each effort had resulted in their being thrown back with a bang into this futility.
Number 27A, the number of the apartment (for apartment was the correct term for it), was consequently a miniature shadow, anchored upon another plane, of the great reality, which they had willy-nilly built up about them in their loneliness. They must vegetate, violent and morose — sometimes blissfully drunken, sometimes with no money for drink — within these four walls, in this identical daily scene — from breakfast until the time came to tear down the Murphy bed, to pant and sweat in the night temperatures kicked up by the radiators — until the war’s end or the world’s end was it? Until they had died or had become different people and the world that they had left whad changed its identity too, or died as they had died. This was the great curse of exile — reinforced by the rigours of the times — as experienced upon such harsh terms as had fallen to their lot. Then they hid things from each other; as when one morning she saw a report of the suicide of Stefan Zweig, refugee novelist. He and his wife had killed themselves in their apartment at Rio. — To begin life again, was Zweig’s reported explanation, once the war was ended, would demand a greater effort than he felt he would be capable of making: he preferred to die and the wife who had shared with him the bitter pangs of exile accompanied him, with that austere and robust fidelity of the Jewish woman to her mate.
But as she stared and brooded over this ugly news item, during a laconic breakfast — the sun with a great display of geniality glittering over the frosty backyards — Hester recalled how earlier in the week she had praised electricity as against gas, for fixing food and as a heating agent. René had given his gothic headpiece a rebutting shake.The substitution of electricity for gas, he had objected, removed from those who were tired of life one of the only not-too-brutal modes of making one’s exit from it: one available to anybody, costing nothing, requiring no specialist technique. A foolproof key to the néant. Just turn on the tap and lie down. — So she stopped herself from exclaiming about this tragedy, remarking instead that the egg ration in England was at present one a month.
But this roused him to controversy. “I’d rather have that one egg and be in England …”
“Oh yes — you’d probably find it was a bad one when you got it!” she told him. There was no chance of their getting back to England: she discouraged regrets.
“All right, all right! I’d rather have that one rotten egg …!”
She gave in with a big sigh, no longer denying her nostalgia.
“I too, René! — I’d give all the eggs in Momaco for half an hour in London!”
However, ten minutes later her husband came across the Zweig report. He exclaimed “ha!” as he glanced through it and then he passed it over to her.
For the class of things they hid from each other was not identical. René did not picture Hester with her head in a gas oven. His Hester was strongly prejudiced against death. What he concealed from her was rather newspaper announcements of appointments to academic posts, even of a quite minor order. He hurriedly shuffled out of sight anything with a hint in it of horridness towards himself: such as when a local columnist referred to the presence among us “of a certain historian for whom history ended at the Repeal of the Corn Laws.”
“Zweig,” said René, tapping the paper with his finger, “put down his act to his own incompetence, and to the future not the present.”
“So I noticed.” Her anger broke up into her face, giving her suddenly the mask of a tricoteuse, “I would like to rub their damned noses in that sort of thing,” she exclaimed.
“Where’s the use? It’s human nature.”
“It’s like animals! ... Human nature!”
They took up their respective roles at once. He became austerely watchful that no missile should get past which he regarded as irrational, and therefore unlikely to find its mark and kill its man. Thus it was no use calling people “animals.”
Just as well say they had hair in their crutches and armpits, and discharged the waste products of their nutritive system. “We are animals,” René shrugged. “Besides, he was just bored probably. I expect it was that.”
Hester shook her head. “Don’t you believe it! How about Toller. How about …”
“That’s right enough … It’s pretty bloody for a German-speaking and German-writing man.”
“Pretty awful,” Hester retorted, “for any temporarily displaced person. Among people who pay lip service to ‘culture’ as they call it — to the objects of this war, but …”
“Oh well,” he interrupted her, “the devil takes the hindmost everywhere. Hitler had kicked him down to the bottom of the class. So the devil got him. You can’t expect a lot of Portuguese mulattos …”
“Nor Canadians for that matter!”
René laughed. “Ah, he had never had the misfortune to encounter them …!”
But René was wrong. The real backgrounds of this act of despair were made apparent — with, as René put it, “a lousy naïveté” — by the literary editor of the Momaco Gazette-Herald. Zweig had, it seemed, encountered these dwellers of the Far North, for he had spent some time in Momaco, obviously in search of a refuge, of not too inhospitable a spot to weather the storm in.
But individuals of world renown, the starry few, are only welcome in such parts as unreal and glittering apparitions, upon a lecture platform. To “stick around” is not well received. — In his obituary notice the literary authority of the Momaco Gazette-Herald recalled, upon a lachrymose note, how this most distinguished novelist, during his sojourn in Momaco, offered me his friendship. He was sorry now he had not responded.
René burst out laughing as he reached this climax of the obituary.
“Means poor old Zweig tried to get some reviewing to do in their beastly paper. But that would be too big a name … overshadow the other contributors. So …”
“So!”
“But a pretty fellow. He might have left out that bit about how he’d snubbed him and how kind of regretful and contrite he was … kind of half feeling he’d done the poor chap in.What a rat!”
In such moments as this they changed roles. Hester became sweetly reasonable.
“My dear René,” she mildly protested, “you take this little bush tick too much to task. He was only advertising himself, to his little circle of bush bookworms. If a newspaperman can’t advertise himself …!” So they conversed, these two inmates of this lethal chamber. Its depths were dark. Looked into from without — by a contemplative bird established upon the maple bough about a foot from the middle window — the Hardings would have seemed (as they moved about their circumscribed tasks, or rested sluggishly upon the bottom as it were) provided with an aquatic me
dium, lit where it grew dark by milky bulbs. So they must have appeared to the visiting squirrel, applying his large expressive eye to the pane, to discover if his presence had been noted by the two odd fish in the dark interior, who fed him peanuts, when they had the jack. Of the six windows, three, half the year, resembled very closely the plate glass sides of a tank in an aquarium. The green twilight that pervaded the lair of the Hardings was composed of the coloration from the wall of leaves of the summer maple, abetted by the acrid green veil of the mosquito netting. Green blinds latticed with use further contributed to this effect of water, thickening the bloomy cavity.
In the winter a dark pallor, or the blue glare of the snow, replaced the green. For weeks the windows would be a calloused sheet of ice, in places a half-inch thick. That was the only way the window ever got a cleaning. The Hardings had to go over them with a sponge, plunged in hot water, in order to see at all, and some of the calluses, of the density of icicles, required more than one kettle of boiling water. Immediately a new coat of ice would form, but the dirt of a twelvemonth poured down with the dissolving ice. The smoke of thirty thousand cigarettes, and a hundred fish, roasts, or “offal,” rolled down upon the windowsills. Of course the film of factory smoke from the chimney of Momaco upon the outside surface of the window never departed.
“This is not real,” René insisted one day, as he sat looking towards the daylight from air seat, sniffing the rancid smoke from the grill. “It isn’t poverty. That is the worst of it.”
“No?”
“I am rich — in a city where people die every day from under-nourishment. Idle — and rich.”
Hester, her face flushed from the sub-tropical kitchenette, shook her head. She felt sick from the smoke.
“The pukka-poor would laugh at us,” he told her.
“The rich would laugh at us too … they do.”
“Those top-booted black-coated Jews out of the ghetto in Cracow, who have a look in their eyes, you or I shall never have.”
“Not?”
“Their lips are pale with blood that has never been thickened with anything that would keep in decent gloss the coat of a well-cared-for dog. — And their lips are etched with the extraordinary bitterness of their sense of that fact. They have tasted every injustice. They live ten in a room. We cannot fill this Room properly. There are only two of us.”
“I consider it full,” she answered.
He stared round, as if looking for somebody.
“No. This is a joke,” he said. He got up. “The fat from our food collects in the bottom of the oven. If we scraped it out and ate it on our bread, that would be hard times — though in hard times there would be no fat in the bottom of the oven.”
“These are hard times,” she told him. “Different from the poverty of a rag-picker, but in some ways worse.”
The Hardings were exiles, not from Poland, or France or Germany, but from Great Britain. They were not romantic political exiles but economic exiles — exiles by accident, frozen in their tracks, as it were, by the magic of total war, and the unavoidable restrictions upon travel that entailed, and the iron laws dividing dollar currency from sterling currency, and so cutting English nationals in Canada off economically from their own country.
As an “involuntary squatter” in the Dominion of Canada René described himself, if he wrote to a friend in England. Locked up in this dollar country as solidly as if he were in Sing Sing — no farthing reaching him from England — he and his wife had been marooned. In Tahiti, a Swedish best-seller, the papers had reported, was an even worse case. He had no money at all and lived by what he could beg or catch in the sea. In Massachusetts, an American friend had written them,“an English millionaire” was marooned. He scarcely had enough money for a pack of cigarettes. So this ex-professor was one of quite a lot.
But as an “involuntary squatter” René had chosen to squat far too near to the University of Momaco. There are hard and fast rules about squatting in new countries, of which he had not been aware. It is not a good thing if you are a potential professor to squat too near to the institution where actual professors function. That is regarded as a little threatening. That is not well received.
So for the Hardings exile was complicated by other matters, which was what made it so peculiarly bad. Their isolation was now complete. People in Momaco were even tired of gossiping about them. They had at last really forgotten Professor Harding was there. But René had not forgotten them. As he sat crouched in his corner of the bay window, behind his palisade, he would sometimes take up a notebook, marked Momaco, and make a little note for future use.
“I remembered something just now, Hester,” he might remark to his invisible wife.
“What was it, darling?” For she knew by the tone of his voice that it was something she would be glad to hear.
“I thought, ‘Oh God. Oh Montreal.’”
“Yes?”
“What exclamation could Butler have found to apostrophize Momaco!”
Hester gave vent to a cat-like rumble of feline anger. She had long ago given up trying to find words for what she felt about Momaco.
This prison had been theirs for more than three full years. When René read reports in the newspapers about Daladier, Blum, and the other French politicians in their place of confinement in France (Daladier described as tirelessly reading all the papers he could get and never speaking, Blum writing, Guy La Chambre complaining all day about the food, or so their Vichy captors had it) he decided that the all-important difference that he, René, could, if he possessed the necessary money, take a ticket to Chicago or for that matter to Mexico City, did certainly count for a lot. It was a big advantage. But he had not even got the money to buy a ticket for a spot thirty miles up the line and spend the day at a lake. He could get the money to just buy enough good food and a car-fare to go downtown once a week. The city limits were his limits and Hester’s.
For a period of four months Hester had not gone out at all because she had no shoes to wear. All the shopping had to be done by him; and when the meat famine had come in Momaco, he had to go as far as the downtown market. This took up half the day, while she sat at home, at the mercy of her miserable fancies, counting the hours of this senseless captivity.
At last Hester could buy a pair of shoes. A New York friend had unexpectedly sent a present of thirty dollars. She cried a little. It was like a cripple recovering the use of her legs!
Through always conversing only with each other, their voices sounded strange to them when they were visited once in a way. Their “company” voices were like the voices of two strangers. So if they had a couple of visitors — as once had occurred — it was like having four people as well as themselves in the Room. It was quite a party.
And the Room: that became something else. For anyone from the outside to come into that, was like someone walking into one’s mind — if one’s mind had been a room and could be entered through a door and sat down in. René found he disliked their Room being entered by other people. The less people had come into it, until practically nobody came — the more they suffered in it boxed up there in interminable lonely idleness — the more he felt that if he must see people he preferred to see them upon neutral ground. That they should see where he and his wife had been so unspeakably miserable he looked upon as an affront. If he had lost his reason he would probably have burnt down the hotel, so that no one should ever come in and boast, “This is where we shut up that dumbbell René Harding.”
If this was a prison, and it was, the three bay windows twelve feet above the soil level had a better outlook than most jails. It could not be an authentic prison, anyway, because of a coil of heavy rope hung at the side of one window — a precaution decreed by the city fire headquarters. No prison has a coil of rope invitingly attached by one of its ends to the wall at the side of a window.That would be an odd kind of prison — as this one was.
Momaco, the city in which the Hotel Blundell was situated, was one of the greatest Canadian citi
es. It was a big, predominantly Anglo-Saxon city, though the French-Canadian population, if anything, exceeded the English-Canadian, the two together around half a million souls. It swelled and shrank like a river: it swelled in boom years, when the mines of nickel and gold were booming. It shrank if the mine interests weakened. But it was always a big place: it had got so big it couldn’t shrink as much as the economic fluctuations decreed. Now the war was swelling it to bursting: it was swollen like a great tick with the young blood of farming areas, as the war factories mushroomed up.The experts predicted a catastrophic deflation, when Canada passed back out of total war into total peace. But Momaco could never become a ghost city, like Cobalt or Kirkland Lake, unless the province became a ghost. This bush metropolis had the appearance of an English midland city, which had gone in for a few skyscrapers. Its business quarter, in spite of a dozen of these monsters, was mean. It even succeeded very successfully in concealing them; as if having committed itself to a skyscraper, it resented its size.
Momaco was so ugly, and so devoid of all character as of any trace of charm, that it was disagreeable to walk about in. It was as if the elegance and charm of Montreal had been attributed to the seductions of the Fiend by the puritan founders of Momaco: as if they had said to themselves that at least in Momaco the god-fearing citizen, going about his lawful occasions, should do so without the danger of being seduced by way of his senses.
Had this city not been, with so rare a consistency, ugly and dull, the Hardings might have been less cooped up. Being friendless, there was no temptation to leave their neighbourhood, and be depressed by the squalid monotony. Accordingly the rows of backyards, twelve feet beneath their windows, constituted their unchanging horizon. The walls of the penitentiary were the houses enclosing the backyards. Their Room was cell 27A. But they were blessed with an amusing and loquacious warder, in the person of the maid.
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