Self Condemned

by Lewis, Wyndham

  As soon as it was evident that all were present, from a side door emerged a handsome young clergyman, notably contrasting in age with his audience. He walked over to the coffin, and gazed intently into it for nearly five minutes. Talking had stopped, there was a profound hush. The long and mournful inspection of the dead, as though he had been impressing upon his mind this image, that there should be no anonymity when he came to intercede with God, was a well-conceived part of this ceremony, René appreciatively reflected. Then the young man, with his excellently serious face turned sideways to the coffin, began to intone a psalm in a strong and hypnotic voice. René heard the familiar words, “For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain,” and this he recognized. “Take thy plague away from me: I am even consumed by means of thy heavy hand. When thou with rebukes dost chasten man for sin, thou makest his beauty to consume away, like as it were a moth fretting a garment; every man therefore is but vanity.” René pondered at this point, I am consumed by the heavy hand, but he added at once to himself that the hand, although heavy, was not so heavy as might be expected. And so he gave expression to what distressed Hester most. He was the kind of man, as she had come to learn, who having lost both his legs would say how merciful God had been to leave his arms intact: and if he lost one arm as well, would resign himself on account of one limb remaining to him.

  The splendid rhetoric was lifted in the air, by the aspiring voice of the minister, winged with an emotion, which everyone felt would carry the words to God’s ear, where somewhere His head is bent to listen to the noble words of such professional advocates as this, to intercede for those blackened with sin, which He is asked, in His infinite mercy, to forgive, and, to allow to enter into the realms of salvation, and when in finishing, the pastor sadly sang, “Oh, spare me a little, that I may recover my strength: before I go hence, and be no more seen,” the last few words dying out, to fade away into the shadow, the intoxication of the small audience had begun: and at the end of a short and intense hush, came the most penetrating Amen that that chapel had ever heard — or so everybody felt.

  All the red necks and white heads in the audience were bowed. The young cleric was performing before a small assemblage of elders, and chanting to them of death. They had travelled hundreds of miles to be chanted to of death, smiled at by the painted corpse of a member of their social circle.

  “Let us pray!” said the young minister, and the little herd of white polls bent still farther and the lines of shoulders rose accordingly. And after that a collect, and then another prayer for the slightly smiling funereal doll in the wooden box. Then came the culmination. The head, with its beautiful waved hair, thrown back, the minister began in an exalted voice — and this was his final and most tragic, his most solemn piece of declamation, and a most fitting culmination to the brief ceremony: “Had I the wings of the morning, and could I fly to the uttermost parts of the earth” was his idealistic opening.

  All these white-haired, these hoary sinners, mourned that they had not the wings of the morning — those powerful and golden, beautiful star-tipped wings, stretching across the horizons like aspiring clouds. And oh, if they could have a part of the advantages of the Morning (Who does not die or become Afternoon, but flies on and on towards the remotest west) then they would fly into the unearthly distances, not to the uttermost ends of the earth, but of the world and of Time. They had a momentary glimpse of a remoteness, of a solitude, somewhere behind the stars, where they would be unimaginably far from where they had been, and what they had always been. This soaring rhetoric armed them with a contempt for the life they would so soon be obliged to leave, and this verbal intoxication melted all the old husks, and noses were blown in all parts of the audience. At the rear, Hester and Bessie were both wiping their tears away, and René bit his lip to discourage an unmanly display. But he thought wistfully of the odious days in the hotel, and his heart was soft and inexpressibly sad, as he thought of the wild woman who had inhabited that puppet there, from which she had mysteriously departed.

  It was with shame at the debauch of sadness in which they had indulged that most of them shuffled out of the mortician’s, some casting resentful glances at the small painted figure which had been responsible for this. But the fixed smile or half-smile of what in life was sexual câlinerie answered appropriately the covert scowls. — Those who were going on to the graveside remained in prayer within.

  The Hardings returned to the Laurenty profoundly affected, but resentful. How dignified and how real (for it amounted to that) Affie had been as she lay in the snow, with a piece of coarse cloth over her face, placed there, perhaps by Monsieur Lafitte, as a sign of respect. René could have wished that that had been his last glimpse of Affie. The vulgar peep show with the dolled-up face, at the mortician’s, was so violently unreal, that it blotted out the real. They would have to wait until time had washed out that garish spot-lit image, before they could see her again in their minds.

  This hotel, like the Blundell, had telephones in every apartment. Shortly after they had finished their tea the telephone began ringing. René lifted the receiver, and he heard the familiar voice of Mr. Furber. “Ah,” said Mr. Furber, “have you heard the news about your late hotel?” René told him that he had heard nothing about his late hotel.

  “Well,” said Mr. Furber, “a guest, a certain Mr. Martin, has been arrested.” — “What for?” enquired René, with genuine interest.“Did he set the hotel on fire?” — ’No,” Furber answered. “He has been arrested for the murder of the manageress, Mrs. McAffie.” There was such relish in Mr. Furber’s voice that René knew that he would be giving less than satisfaction if he did not display emotion. “Now that is curious!” he practically shouted. “When did that news break?”

  Furber told him that it came through on the radio, the Momaco station just gave that piece of information and no more, except that Mr. Martin is “a countryman of yours.”

  René gave his employer all the information he possessed about Mr. Martin. He also told him that he had felt, of late, that there was something enigmatic about that familiar figure. He had thought that Mrs. Plant, the ostensible proprietress, might be a blind, and that the hotel might be owned by Mr. Martin. Since then, a member of the staff had gossiped: had told him that Mrs. Plant would assert that she had not paid a penny piece for the hotel, that it had been a mortgage transaction.

  Then Mr. Furber evinced curiosity about Mrs. McAffie: was the manageress perhaps the mistress of Mr. Martin? René laughingly discouraged speculation along those lines, explaining that Mrs. McAffie was at least sixty and Mr. Martin too, and that no love was lost between the two. — When, asked Mr. Furber, had René last seen Mrs. McAffie. “Why?” René laughed. “You do not suspect me of playing a part in her murder? I last saw her a few hours ago in a wooden overcoat in a mortician’s.”

  Mr. Furber, it was obvious, was greedily devouring a big juicy slice of “crime-mystery” in the making. He was reluctant to hang up the telephone, but unfortunately René was a man out of whom could be extracted the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So at last he sang his goodbye.

  Hester was then told what had happened, and her reactions were quite different from those of Mr. Furber. The killing of Affie horrified, and did not amuse Hester. Apart from the corollary of weeks of impaired sleep and in the end insomnia, she had been less tolerant of a nest of criminals opposite 27A. She felt that their toleration had been counted on, that no Canadian man and wife would have put up with it. Her general attitude to all the uncouth features of their life had been very different from that of René. But this little lower-class Englishman killing their darling Affie (and it was still in that way that she thought of her, in spite of the ghastly debunking of the Funeral Parlour), that was too beastly. She felt sick: She asked René to stop discussing it. And then she began to react violently to her memory of the scene at the mortician’s. The painted face in the coffin, the rather sly hint of a smile (no doubt the mortician’s ha
ndiwork) had been repulsive at the time, but was doubly repulsive now. Affie now began to seem to be part of the whole beastly business. She and all the rest of them were a vile crew. She and René should long ago have extracted themselves from this ugly milieu. The evening was, not unnaturally, anything but pleasant. Mr. Furber rang up two hours later, which did not improve matters. More news from the Momaco station! A fireman had seen Mr. Martin strike Mrs. McAffie with what looked like a newfangled, slender cosh. He had come up behind her as she was looking through the keyhole of the apartment. Mrs. McAffie had turned her head quickly, still crouching, and he struck her down, swinging his arm with great force, so the fireman reported. Also Mr. Martin was the actual proprietor of the hotel, and it was believed it was he who had caused the fire, and was thereby responsible for the deaths of over fifteen people. How many could not be finally decided until the ice had melted in the spring thaw.

  After leaving the telephone (with great difficulty) René came back to where Hester was sitting. He was of course unable to suppress entirely what Mr. Furber had said, and these further details increased her nausea relating to everything to do with the place they had lived in for so long.

  René attempted to dispel the gloom by tuning in to the U.S. networks — carefully avoiding all Canadian stations. It was late in the evening, when the following piece of silliness issued from their instrument.

  “For a cowboy has to sing.

  And a cowboy has to yell,

  Or his heart would break

  Inside of him,

  At the gates of the home corral.”

  Hester had been knitting, and now looked up with a rather sickly smile. “My heart will break inside of me, if I don’t get out of this place. I know you don’t agree with me, but I do greatly prefer the Brompton Road to any street in this awful country.”

  René did not reply at once; he sat with his elbows on his knees staring at the radio. Then he said slowly and distinctly, “What I am wondering is ... if we left here where should we go. One would not find, I expect, in every city … a Mr. Furber.”

  Hester stared, or it would be truer to say glared at him as though he had just displayed an unmistakable streak of insanity. And in some way she was right. Even more than herself René was shocked; and something did find its way into his manner of thinking which was insane.

  PART THREE

  AFTER THE FIRE

  XXIII

  MOMACO OR LONDON?

  The destruction of the hotel by fire divided their life at Momaco into two dissimilar halves. The second half had a quite different coloration from the first. The years in the Hotel Blundell were more romantic, because to begin with, Canada was a great novelty, and novelty is synonymous with romance; and the microcosm which had gone up in smoke and fire was more blatantly microcosmic than what succeeded it.

  The management of the Blundell lived and let live, hence a great deal of raw life was present, then the fact that it possessed a beverage room (which the Laurenty did not) brought it nearer to the great heart of the universe, and entitled it to microcosmic status. The Laurenty was not, of course, quiet at night — no Canadian hotel could be that. From the number of dark and shining eyes and waving hips to be met in its corridors it was obvious that it was in one important respect in no way behind the Blundell. But excessive uproar was not encouraged. This was decently occulted. The janitors did not come and go with rapidity, did not leave, shouting, between policemen: or if they did, there was no Bess to keep the guests posted in such scandalous events. A French-Canadian maid, averse from speech, attended to the Hardings’ apartment.

  But it was not only on account of the very different character of the hotel that this second half of the war years in Momaco was so different. There was a growing dissimilarity, owing to a psychological factor; a tension, becoming more acute month by month, between René and Hester, and, independently, within both René and Hester.

  With increasing distress Hester observed the development of a new outlook on the part of her husband. At the Hotel Blundell the sense of transience of the first days always remained: it was an abominable hotel, in an abominable city, which they were going to quit at the first opportunity. So everything was anything but static. But now the horrors of Momaco were never mentioned. In the first place, the violent impression which the fire, the murder of poor Affie, and indeed all the brutal unmasking of what they had been living in the midst of for so long had made upon Hester, was apparent to René. He realized that he had a new situation on his hands. Consequently, he was careful to avoid expressing his feelings about the daily annoyances peculiar to life in Momaco for a couple of uprooted English people. He tended to discourage the chronic bitterness of the Blundell days; above all, he resisted any pressure to evacuate Momaco immediately. Against the “really it was about time to think of returning to England, since it was plain enough that this war would never end” recurring almost daily, he set up a defence-in-depth.

  “I agree,” he would say, “that the war is of an exaggerated and quite unnecessary length. But it will end suddenly one day.”

  “Oh no it won’t,” she would retort grimly. “And what is more, you know that it won’t.”

  René knew, of course, that it wouldn’t: and then he had so often, in the past, shown her that it could not, that he had to be very careful not to press too hard the opposite view.

  “All right,” he would answer. “Unquestionably it will still be with us next week, and next month. But if it has not ended next year, in less than a year, its end will be so near we shall be able to stretch our arms out and touch its ending.”

  Hester would lose her patience. “Nonsense, René, you cannot make statements of that sort to me. Even supposing we take all that seriously for a moment, what then? Do you mean to say that you have so little consideration for me that you ask me to live in this filthy hotel for another year? I might perhaps have stood it had it not been for that ghastly fire. No, René, I just cannot face it.”

  Sometimes René would resort to amorous treatment,vigorously administered. She humoured him — but after their transports, he could see that she was not convinced. The logic of sex would have proved dazzlingly irrefutable in any other connection, but not in this.To leave this place, and to return to England, was now nothing short of an obsession with her. And this had become the major feature of their daily life. It was, for him, a huge obstacle which had, in some way, to be reduced to manageable proportions or to be circled round and left behind, or perhaps to be incorporated in the landscape as a permanent eyesore.

  René attempted to divert her socially. It happened that soon after they had taken up their quarters in the Laurenty, through the agency of Mr. Furber René formed several relationships which tended to produce a more normal appearance in their life in Momaco. They went out to dinner several times, to a few parties, and René was made rather a fuss of at one of these. But as to these events producing a better atmosphere they had, if possible, the opposite effect.They literally terrified Hester. In one horrible prophetic glimpse she saw them settled down for good in this monstrous spot.

  The middle-class Canadian woman, as Hester supposed it to be, repelled her just as much as everything else about England’s ex-colony. The Kensingtonian lady, wonderfully tolerant of the artistically bohemian, for instance, stiffened in the presence of these Americanly self-assured, pink-faced English parlour maids (as she thought of them). Her eyes hardened, and contempt visited her voice, as she observed them doing a little crude detective work: had she or had she not been presented at court? was what they desired to know. She admitted never to have bent the knee at court; well, she must be of a pretty inferior class. It gave her some satisfaction to tell them that she had never seen the Royal Family at closer range than one hundred yards, and then by accident; and as to curtsying, she was sure she would end on the floor if she attempted to do so. They nearly all seemed to have had the opportunity of curtsying at one time or another, if only as spectators of a royal progress down the main ave
nue of Momaco.

  She realized that her husband believed that this new social life must be a great treat for her; that he looked upon this as a trump card in his campaign to reconcile her to Momaco. It was therefore with great relish that she gave him her opinion of the ladies of Momaco — of the dream-world of Mr. Starr.

  René attempted to counter this by putting in a good word for the “rather jolly” Madge Weldon, or Jack Christie’s wife, “who seems to have a talent for malice.” Hester made short work of them: and warned him that he must not count on her to go to many more of these boring entertainments.

  So the passionate solidarity of the two lonely exiles practically confined to “the oom” in the Hotel Blundell had begun to crumble. The destruction of their prison had resulted in their coming out of their seclusion into a more normal existence. Momaco began to relent. But Hester retained the spirit of the disregarded intruder in a most jealously exclusive society: and, as she saw it, René had in fact broken away, and, in however qualified a manner, gone over to the side of the enemy — had made his peace with Momaco.

  It was of course true that René was prepared to benefit by such amelioration in their treatment by the Momacoan as might occur: but that did not mean that he had changed his opinion. He still thought the Momacoans stank. The essence of the whole matter was Hester’s desire to return to England at once. So it came to assume the shape of a fantastic question: Momaco or London? Naturally such a question was abysmally absurd: but René would have said that that was not the real question. The nonsense question, “Is the miserable half-civilized bush-city, Momaco, or is the great metropolis, London, the better place to live in?” was not what was posed. The real question was quite different. “Was London or Momaco the better place for René Harding, in the year I944?” would be the real question. Since the burning of the Hotel Blundell, and the manner in which Hester had reacted to that event had obliged René to answer that question, the act of answering had brought enlightenment. He knew that he could never return to London, now or when the war ended. That point settled, Momaco was his best bet, not only in Canada, but in the world. This thought would have been terrifying to a less truly stoical man: as it was he knew that it was Momaco or nothing, and he began to know this hysterically, fanatically, almost insanely. For he knew quite well that it was a fearful thing to know.