Self Condemned

by Lewis, Wyndham

  XII

  THE HOTEL AND WHAT

  CONTAINS THE HOTEL

  René, as they settled down, willy-nilly, in this shell, began soon to develop a consciousness of solidarity with the environment. The Hotel in which they lived was surrounded by the District, which was surrounded by the rest of the City, which was surrounded by the Province, which was surrounded by the Nation, which was a part of the Continent. The North American continent, like the Chinese toy of box within box within box. And these boxes were all of a piece, all cut out of the same stuff. They were part of the same organism, this new North American organism. Their cells would have the same response to a given stimulus. And of these diminishing compartments the ROOM was the ultimate one, which they inhabited. It was an American ROOM.

  Now since the reactions of all these parts of a great whole were similar, the history and fate of one could be taken to be typical, in one degree or another, of all the rest. The beverage room in the flank of the building, full of sudden violence and maudlin song (the head bar-boy taking his rake-off out of the cash-box): the Indian — drunk as all Indians had been ever since the whites had landed — dwelling amid the sentimental screams of his blond Teutonic squaw: the dazed and crippled mistress of all this, doped in her room, staring at a disorderly mass of business papers. Mr. Ellis across the passage from Mr. Martin, an old especially privileged guest, dozing upon his sofa, the radio murmuring at him, was apt to be incontinent when sober, and even sometimes when drunk, which was his customary condition; the janitor exhibiting his stolen medals to his French-Canadian harem, his eyes popping out of his head in a bird-like ecstasy of nonsense, like a creature out of a Lear’s “Nonsense Rhyme,” or a companion of Alice; all this was a microcosm of what was without — one of the Ward, the City, the Province, the Nation, the Continent. It was of course crazy — or more accurately it was crazed. It was a highly unstable box, within an equally unstable larger box, which in its turn nestled within a still larger box, of great social instability, profoundly illogical. The degeneration of the Maison Plant, the Hotel Blundell, was but a microcosmic degeneration repeated upon a larger and larger scale, until you reached the enormous instability of the dissolving system, controlling the various states. All this one day, at a touch you would think, no more, would come rushing down in universal collapse. — Indeed, that was what the war meant. It was a collapse, a huge cellular degeneration of society. It was crazy as this house was crazy.

  The coarse Nirvana of the ugly bottle, or of the powder or pellet of narcotic, blinded the participants. As the State, the City, the Household waded in a morass of Debt and Mortgage, the Room was charged with despair and decay.

  As the ocean liner is a microcosm, so is the hotel. The hotel contains everything belonging to human society. The hotel in a sense is the city. The hotel is the State. The hotel is the world.

  Now this particular hotel, appropriately seeing the continent upon which it was situated, was a matriarchy. At the helm of state was a woman, Mrs. Plant, a queen bee throned crazily over this hive — a great, broken, lolloping, half-blind queen, and so the hive was a bit cock-eyed, as you might expect. It was in no way more cock-eyed than the city, however. I doubt if it was any more ramshackle than any state. It was madly ill-run. But are not all states ill-run? Are not most cities glaringly mismanaged? Of course. Human society is so fearfully and wickedly mismanaged that there is no wonder that if we pause — as we are doing here — to examine any part of it, that part is seen to be idiotically mismanaged too. On a small scale, however, we can detect the errors more easily. The state is after all “the State.” It makes the laws, it has power of life and death. It is not necessarily more intelligent for that reason. Because a thing is big it is not necessarily more intelligent. Indeed the contrary is usually the case: the giant is usually less smart than the dwarf. And most governments, or “states,” conform to that rule, of the bigger the stupider. For honestly you must grant me this, that no individual could be guilty of the follies that most bodies thousands strong, which we call “governments,” are guilty of. You will object that what the governments have to handle are far more complex matters than what a man would have to cope with. But “complexity” is no excuse really for stupidity. Most of the things statesmen have to deal with are fundamentally as simple as the running of an hotel. — The fact remains, however much one may argue, that only one man in a hundred thousand turns out to be a murderer — and he ends his life on a gallows, or the “hot squat.” Whereas there is no civilized nation that finds itself a proper nation until it has taken human life, to the tune of a million or so. If you murder enough people it’s all right. There is that.

  So the hotel in question was naturally ill-run. How could it be otherwise — seeing that it was typically of Momaco — which was typically of the earth: and of the universe. Somebody argued that it was not so badly run as all that: that the proprietress — or the “Leading Lady,” as she was described by one of her female assistants — was a genial old cripple.

  Certainly, when Mrs. Plant disappeared for a few days to have her face lifted, immediately it dissolved into a greater chaos than before. — But badly stuck together as undeniably it was, the erratic clockwork of this hotel never actually came to a full stop.

  In the little world of the Room there was a guiding principle. The Room was not a matriarchy. But passing out of the Room — number 27A — into the hotel, as we are now doing, we go down a passage, all the rooms of which are Something-A. It must be that farther down the passage when they came to 13 and began resorting to A’s, they just went on A-ing and at 17 or 18 were still engaged — hiding the unlucky number. This is not a reasonable explanation, I know. But what reasonable explanation could there be for putting A after every number?

  Inside the front door of the hotel was a large reception desk, but it was generally empty. You looked in vain for executive personalities. You filled in the forms required by the law for the newly arrived guest, and then went on a hunt for someone qualified to receive them, and to allot you an apartment. This large reception desk had been introduced into what the architect had obviously intended to represent the lounge of a vast private mansion. There were comfortable but faded settees, tables with periodicals at least six months old, and three nude statues, about half life size, which had once been white, and which still gleamed dully in the Edwardian gloom. From a stained glass window at the other extremity of this spacious lounge, some dirty blue and green light was admitted, and in the middle of the ceiling there was a milky transparency which distributed discreetly the electricity around this shadowy entrance hall. It must once have seemed impressively solid.

  Not only was the reception desk usually unoccupied, but this lounge, or whatever it was, was likewise almost always silent and empty. It was not patronized by the guests. The hotel executive were customarily either dyeing their hair in the bathroom, or upstairs telling the fortunes of the guests in teacups.

  This was in the daytime. At night the beverage room, situated beneath the stained glass window, was open.This did not necessarily involve a more inhabited look in the lounge; but there was more electric light and considerable noise penetrated the interior of the hotel. On a hot night drunken songs would reach the open windows of the apartments overlooking the beverage room; for the Hotel Blundell was a crowded beer saloon as well as a family hotel in process of transformation into a clandestine brothel upstairs.

  Receptionists — housekeepers — manageresses there were, working in two shifts. Miss Toole had been ousted from first place while away on holiday in Ottawa, her home town, by Vera. Vera was the number one assistant to the proprietress, Mrs. Plant, when the Hardings arrived. A spectacled young woman, she was a sluggish, corrupt little figure. She only would function if you introduced a dime into her clammy fist. A dollar had the effect of an earthquake.

  This young woman got drunk on Aromatic spirits of Ammonia, otherwise called “Sal volatile.” The management advised the local drugstore of her weakness: but in
the end they were obliged to dismiss her. She found employment in another hotel where eventually she died, through her indulgence in this strange intoxicant. It should be added that Miss Toole had been very much addicted to drink also, but in her case it was whisky, and this had appeared to do her no harm.

  The hotel from the outside was a pale stucco affair, straight up and down, of four stories in addition to the mezzanine. The banqueting room and various offices which originally comprised the mezzanine had been converted into apartments, though this floor had not been promoted to first story. It was only up to the top front of the mezzanine that the hotel face was pretentiously ornamented, rather like the front of a French hotel, quite unlike its grim Edwardian interior. The three-story annexe ran at right angles at its rear, stretching along a street at the back for some distance; and led into the hotel down two wide corridors.

  If the hotel was a jumble of styles, that was appropriate, for the population was a jumble too; not so much as it is in the United States, but still a mixture. The French stucco front, of this Hotel, the Edwardian Anglo-Saxon hallway, and the apartments on American pattern, plus the velvet furnishings which are English, displayed, in a mild way, the incoherence customary on this new continent where nothing can ever be one thing. The multiple personality of Canada depends mainly, it is true, upon the two dominant racial groups, the English and the French. The major weakness of this small nation lies in the implacable hostility of those of English speech, for those of French speech, which is warmly reciprocated. This is in part a religious cleavage; the protestant English, backward and bigoted, rage against the papist hierarchy ruling the French.Then there is the fact that class here is race: the Anglo-Saxon suffers from a Hitlerian superiority feeling, and the “Peasoups” (as the French are called) have had to put up with a lot of contempt from the master race. But with quintuplets and families of twenty or thirty children the French will soon outnumber the English.

  There exists a strong Scottish coloration in English Canada. But although many Scots are encountered, the North Irish and English are certainly more numerous. “Though still the blood is strong — the heart is Highland: And we in dreams behold the Hebrides,” lines in a famous poem, may once have made the blood feel strong in Canada. But the pipers are dying out, and the marked Scottish colouration no longer means what it did. It should be added that, although the recognized Indians, still living as such, are numerically and otherwise a feeble group, the French Canadians have a great deal of Indian blood, and in many cases are purely Indian, French-speaking and usually bearing Scottish names, like McTavish or McIntyre. The Russian, Scandinavian, Finnish, Negro, and other groups are greatly inferior in numbers. Some enterprising slave-driver went to the Ukraine about forty or fifty years ago, and imported great numbers of Russians for agricultural peonage. All the railway stations of Eastern Canada were full for months of hairy men in sheepskin coats.Then at last they had all settled: and they too — unlike the Anglo-Saxons — are great ones for breeding.

  It would be impossible to understand a ROOM in a Canadian hotel without obtaining a clearer picture of Canada than that possessed by the average European. So here is a brief account of the country surrounding the Hotel in which was the Room inhabited by the Hardings. On the map Canada is vast; but the habitable part is of a tape-like shape, exceedingly long and narrow.This elongated country north of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, from Quebec to Vancouver, has its cities, hundreds of miles apart, strung out between the bush and the United States border; everything is east to west, and hardly ever north to south.

  What “Canada” means is this strip north of the United States, signifying north of the river St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, which continuous waterway divides the two nations in the way the Pyrenees are the inevitable frontier between Spain and France. Although this watery barrier is on a grand scale, it is at no point, except Quebec City itself, very impressive, in the way that the Hudson River is.

  As to the historic consolidation of Canada; the founding of French Canada, and the big, bold landmark of Quebec is all that people know anything about.Where English Canada begins, above Montreal, it is technically known as “Upper Canada.” The first settlers from the States meant by this expression up the St. Lawrence, as they paddled as far away from the freezing coast as they could get. For the Tories, who came north in disgust after the War of Independence, were so dismayed by their first winter in Halifax (and well they might be, in those bad cold days before central heating) that they swore that even Lady Washington was better than that, and with loud cries of distress, fled inland in a body, till they reached Lake Ontario. That is where the River St. Lawrence ends and the Great Lakes begin.

  So much for the southern border of this strip of a country, as far as the Rockies. The other side of the strip, in Upper Canada, is the Bush. This is a fairly solid wilderness up to the Muskeg and after that the Polar Sea. If you start driving north in an automobile from Toronto, Momaco, or Ottawa, you begin passing through farmlands which very soon thin out, and then you come to the impassable Bush. Small lakes are ubiquitous in the nearer Bush and there are summer camps in these fly-infested lakelands, thirty or forty miles north of Momaco and Toronto. They can be reached by car.

  The Bush-cities, built in the Bush to provide a small urban environment for those working in the mines, can only be reached by rail, or by plane. So these communities in the northlands are extremely isolated and surrounded by Bush. This huge wilderness, pressing down upon the cultivated strip, in Canada, is so undesirable a residence that it is difficult to see the Bush being pushed back very far, unless the world becomes so overpopulated that men will live in the Polar cold rather than nowhere at all. It is quite uncomfortable enough for half the year at Momaco and Ottawa, though central heating helps to banish what otherwise would be hideous conditions. Nature in British Columbia is somewhat more benevolent; the western prairies, with their hundred days from frost to frost, are certainly no warmer, but it is a different topography to Upper Canada; and the Laurentian Mountains provide the Montrealer with beautiful summer camps. But the people of Momaco feel themselves shut in between the St. Lawrence and the Bush.

  Any criticism of Canadians, meaning English Canadians, is in general irrelevant. An Anglo-Saxon community living under such isolated conditions, in so uninviting a climate, could hardly be otherwise than they are. They are just average inhabitants of Belfast, of Leeds and Bradford, of Glasgow, poured into a smaller community, American in speech, and, apart from the fact that they acquire an American accent, they continue to exist exactly as they did in the British cities from which they came. One must not be deceived by the American accent. Canada is not identical with the United States: it is quite distinct, because most of the people in it, except the French, come from these islands. If you criticize them you criticize the average population of Belfast, of Bradford and Leeds, and of Glasgow. If you deplore the materialism and the humble cultural level, you are merely criticizing Anglo-Saxon civilization.

  Canadians have all the good qualities as well as the bad, of the Ulsterman, the Scot, the Englishman: and among them, of course, are about the same percentage of gifted people as you would find in these islands.

  Momaco is rather nearer to the Bush than is Ottawa. Like Ottawa itself, it has a large French Canadian population — about one third of the Momaconians are French. A river traverses Momaco and its main square is built beside the river. There is a very handsome Catholic Church dominating this square: and it is a market square also, which at times gives it a somewhat French aspect. The river is, of course, apt to be full of logs, travelling down towards the St. Lawrence. The City is built in a plain and is extraordinarily flat except for a hill at its north-east corner. The Hotel Blundell was situated where the English quarter adjoins the French. Baimoral Street, on which the Hotel Blundell stood, was a long street which began quite well but ended very badly: it was largely French Canadian at the bad end. The Blundell was on its earlier and better part.

 
XIII

  AFFIE AND THE ’ROACHES

  The hotel was a ship whose engines stopped every night about ten. The ice-boxes in the annexe vibrated no more, as the cool air, smelling of ammonia, was forced up the zinc pipes into them. It was like a ship becalmed, this dusty old passenger ship, the engineers knocking off for the night. About eight o’clock a.m. — the time varied, according to how drunk the janitor had been the night before — the Hotel shook and throbbed: the beat and hum of its engines was heard from down below: the iceboxes in the annex shook. The ship was on her way again, the good ship “Blundell.”

  A half-hour later René and Hester quitted the bed, like two flies dragging themselves out of a treacly plate. One went to the bathroom, the other to the kitchenette. By nine o’clock they were seated at breakfast, watched from every bough of the nearest maple by the patient eyes of their bird-chorus.

  “Canadian and British governments announce that they have given instructions that German prisoners are to be unshackled on Dec. 12th.” René read listlessly the headline in the Momaco Gazette-Herald. Hester’s eyes stared as ever, but more painfully now. She stared at a point between the kitchenette and the bathroom, where she appeared to discern a ghost lurking in the wall, of which she was not apprehensive, because it had been there so long.The classic conundrum as to whether the cow is still there in the field when you have walked away from it, or whether it vanishes the moment you cease to observe it, is apposite. For the analysis of Hester’s new look, she felt like the cow in the field which is no longer observed by any human eye (because, from this angle, René did not count). She had been a violently self-conscious woman — she was a cow in a field excessively conscious of being observed; and for whom to be observed was to be. But it was so long now since she had been under human observation — for she did not regard her present environment as human — that self-consciousness had left her: and the ghost she stared at in the wall half-way between the kitchenette and the bathroom was the remote phantom of those people in England for whom, long ago, she had been the self-conscious object. So she was still a staring woman, but she now stared at something so remote as to be abstract, and with far less vitality than formerly.