When Hester returned with the insignia — and a self-conscious smile — instead of encountering the reception she had anticipated, René was sitting with his breast at the ready, inflated to receive the accolade, his face wearing a beatific smile.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, as she approached with the ribbon. “We shall make our debut in Momaco society impressively beribboned.”
They were obliged to telephone for a taxi, for René had omitted to enquire by which route Carmichael Road was approached.The French-Canadian driver took them through the Peasoup quarter by the side of the river, from which seething slum they shot up the road at the foot of the little mountain where the McKenzies lived.
Carmichael Road was a rock-flanked, slightly curving road, on almost the lowest slopes of the hill upon which Mr. Furber, and all other illustrious persons, dwelt. It was extremely clean and prosperous-looking. Subsequently Professor McKenzie explained that this had once been a highly respectable district, but the Peasoup tide flowed in underneath it, between the base of the hill and the river, and the householders on the other side of the road (the McKenzies were on the inner side) found themselves gazing down into Peasoup backyards. As a consequence, house rents in Carmichael Road dropped, sharply, until they had reached a level accessible to impecunious professors. This had suited the McKenzies excellently. There were some quite good French-Canadian shops down below within easy reach, and for their part they did not object to French Canadians.
René, as an older Momacoan, instructed this relative newcomer as to one feature of Canadian life which he might not as yet be quite clear on. “Class is Race, in this country,” commented René. “No Nazi could feel more racial superiority than the English Canucks of Upper Canada.”
On the way to Carmichael Road René attempted to converse in French with the taxi driver. The latter repulsed him in pidgin English. But as his face was almost purely Indian, and with traces of the “nobility” of the Redskin, René tipped him well. There were about fifteen steps to climb, winding up between jagged rocks, in order to reach the house, which was well built and substantial. Professor McKenzie opened the door.
There was a fairly large living room, in which they found Mrs. McKenzie playing the piano — an early Beethoven Minuet. She was a woman a few years younger than Hester. Laura McKenzie was an attractive person, who was aware, but not tiresomely so, of what could be done with eyes of light blue-green in the shadow of a mass of dark hair. Regarding her simply as a big sex trap, to lure a male into a situation where offspring may result, she also, thought René, realized the sex value of the piano — of a mazurka of Chopin’s or a pavan for a Dead Infanta according to taste. Hostesses who, on the arrival of guests, are discovered playing the piano, received from René a very bad mark. The figure rising from the keyboard to greet one was not popular with him. To break off in the middle of a Nocturne to shake one’s hand with a dazzling smile was not a device which recommended the woman who made use of it to René.That a room into which guests are destined shortly to arrive should be impregnated with mazurkas or pavans appeared to him in as bad taste as if some perfume had been sprayed into the air a few minutes before the guests’ arrival.
So the minuet that was still in the air prejudiced René against the McKenzie interior. He glanced sideways a little uneasily at Hester, to see whether the music had made the same undesirable impression upon her. But apparently she had no objection to a hostess clothing herself in the raiment of Beethoven in order to welcome her more adequately; and she showed no signs of feeling that Mrs. McKenzie had put on stilts, and was culturally high-hatting her, or something of that kind.
There was something that Laura McKenzie had, not visible to René, which, from Hester’s standpoint, put in the shadow everything else. And, as an efficient observer, that invisible something should have been the number one article for him to check up on. She was a lady, that was the all-important (to René invisible) something. What he had been looking for was the kind of thing which could influence him; and this was a rather usual shortcoming of his.
It was the tones of the hostess’s voice, not the notes of her piano, that mattered. And, staring blandly, Hester swam towards those tones in an entirely satisfactory way, her husband considered.
The four people sat down, René saying to his host, “What luck to have found so nice a house as this,” and it was then that Professor McKenzie explained the reason for so charming a residence being attainable by people in their income bracket.
A sweet, swarthy, merry-eyed French-Canadian maid brought in upon a large metal tray four cocktails and a shaker, and everybody’s tongue began to move with more agility. Hester disclosed her obsession, and said how dearly she would like to be in England once more, instead of this horrible place.
“I do not think you would talk like that if you had had our experiences for the first two years of the war,” their hostess told her, and it was obvious from her tone that she also suffered from an obsession, of an opposite kind from that of Hester.
“Oh, I am sure I should not be affected by that, a hundred bombs would be better than Momaco!” the latter forcibly asserted.
“It is not the bombs,” Laura McKenzie cried, “I have never been within five miles of a bomb. You would find there were far more disagreeable things than the occasional bomb — unless of course you were in London.”
“All the same…!” intoned Hester. “Never the less…!”
“The amenities of Momaco, I know, are few,” Laura McKenzie replied, “but I still think that you are extraordinarily lucky to be in Momaco, quite extraordinarily lucky.”
A painful contraction of her raised eyebrows made Hester look suddenly like a hopelessly miserable child, who had lost something she could not replace.
“You have to remember, Laura,” McKenzie warned his wife, “that our guests have had a terrible experience since their arrival here. Apart from anything else, their hotel was set on fire by a ghastly little man, a murderer as well as a firebug …”
“An Englishman, I think,” Laura sharply intervened.
René began to feel that they would never reach the dinner table if this went on. Only a very little more of this dogmatical woman plugging Momaco, and Hester would leave the house. Something must be done at once to save the situation. He shook the party with what he hoped would pass for a sudden, uncontrollable laugh.
“Here we have someone as obstinate as yourself, Hester! I never expected to meet anyone as fanatical as you on the subject of Momaco.”
McKenzie followed suit. He seized his Laura by the arm and recalled her to her duties as a hostess. “Rein in your rage against the billeting officer and the hostile constable, and the air raid warden! We have guests … let us forget our personal grievances.”
“Sorry!” said Laura. “I was on my hobby horse, was I? And I met someone else riding a hobby horse of a different colour.
I apologize.” She smiled at Hester. “This war has made a savage of me.”
McKenzie then brought forward a less controversial topic. It appeared they had mutual friends named Saunders.
“You know the Saunders, don’t you?” McKenzie began. Soon they were all talking about the Saunders, saying how nice Jessica was, and what an intelligent chap was Tom; and the Saunders drew them closer together, especially warming the homesick Hester; and still speaking of the Saunders they moved in to dinner in the room on the other side of the front door.
A Barsac which could almost have passed for a Château Yquem drew serious commendation from René, who appeared in the role of a sniffer and taster. Next he and McKenzie began speaking of the drink problem, for the control was very tight, with the result that bootleg alcohol was exorbitant. McKenzie had been given the name of a “blind pig,” who was reputed to be a little more reasonable than most. The place of this illicit merchant was not far from the Laurenty. “Half the ‘blind pigs’ in Momaco have their business addresses in our street,” declared René, “but not at our end of it. There are several ‘blind pigs’ in our hote
l. One of them, with whom I deal, knows the French vineyards quite well.” He gave the address of this man to McKenzie, and McKenzie gave him the new address he had received. The name of this one was the Sieur Fondot. Were there no “blind pigs” down below in their French-Canadian quarter? René enquired. But it appeared that that traffic mostly was carried on in the district beyond the railway track.
Upon the wall of the dining room hung a photograph of a beautifully built seventeenth-century English house, in what appeared to be what was left of a park. The trees seemed to belong to another time, when “lazy tinklings lulled the distant folds,” which they do no more. Laura’s father was a parson, and this was his rectory in Somerset. René demanded rhetorically if there were anything more beautiful in the world than red Somerset, with its red earth, its red rivers, and its wealth of ancient red brick manor-houses, rectories, farms and inns. And Hester’s staring eyes grew misty as she thought of those sacred counties, in the warm southwest of England — from the indescribable beauties of Shaftesbury and the neighbouring villages, to the landscape of Lamorna Birch, and the splendours of Tintagel. Laura was a little cynical and aloof, when it came to a sentimental tripping around the landscapes of her birthplace, but she allowed that it was first-class hunting country.
But Hester was in no mood to be put off by the cynic. She was fond of wine, and especially of sweet wine. The Barsac was finding its way round her veins. She had a sleepy, happy look as her eyes rested upon the old rectory in the photograph hanging directly in front of her, and, then, finding herself once more in civilized surroundings.
It was at this idyllic moment for Hester that Laura McKenzie felt impelled (perhaps because she divined her guest’s gooey state of mind) to speak of the English countryside as she had last seen it.
“It may be that in another couple of years I shall be feeling the way you do,” said Laura, with a jangling about of the brilliant cold blue and green spangles of her eyes, in the shadow of the impending dark avalanche of her hair. The last thing that Hester realized was that the eyes and hair were the human equivalent of the sumptuous and delicate scene in the West Country which had acted on her with such nostalgic force.
It was a south-English combination, a feminine romanticness of so special a kind that it could not come from the northern counties, would seem very strange in France or Italy, would be far too theatrical in Germany and probably could not be found in Scandinavia. This is only to speak of the kind, not of the quality.
“We were not living, for the first two years of the war, in anything as pleasant as that.” (Laura waved her hand towards the photograph.) “Do you happen to know that bleakest of counties, Essex? Well, we had to find some sort of a place to live in quickly. We rented a small and ill-furnished house about thirty miles outside London. To get there you pass a dirty forest, an East End forest, and roll through the dirtiest, sootiest, flattest slums ever seen. After an hour or so of chugging through sooty, dank, dispirited fields you reach Crackbrook. No one pretends that it is a show place, or beauty spot, but I cannot make you understand the degree to which to mention it in a guidebook would be disloyal.We lived for two years in Crackbrook.”
“If it was so unattractive, why did you go there to live?” enquired Hester, in a tone of bored protest. Why must she be told about this repulsive place?
“All the less brutally ugly spots had already been occupied. We were latecomers.”
“I see,” said Hester miserably. She looked towards Professor McKenzie. But the two professors were absorbed in harrying some little problem which had made its appearance, and been spotted by René.
Laura McKenzie smiled, and remarked, “No use looking at him. You must hear what an awful time we had. As soon as war became certain it was decided that no speck of light must be visible to a night raider, and wardens were appointed to see that this did not happen. No other nation ‘blacked out’ in this way. But as if the war were not enough, ‘war conditions’ were so luxuriated in by that blood-sweat-and-tears merchant …” Her husband turned quickly towards her.
“Laura, I believe you are about to speak of a man to whom we all should be grateful.”
“Rubbish, darling,” said Laura, “but I will say no more lest it might offend. Anyhow” — resuming her conversation with Hester — “I was telling you about the blackout. It is still in force.
The most disagreeable type of men volunteered for the job of air raid warden. We had a real beauty at Crackbrook. He prowled round our house every night. If a chink of light was visible he thundered upon our door. We were fined, most unjustly, several times, and then I took no more trouble to conceal my low opinion of him.”
“How unpleasant! Weren’t you able to blackout your windows?”
“Of course I was!” Laura McKenzie told her. “But there is always a chink somewhere.”
“I suppose there is,” sighed Hester.
“But if the warden was an enthusiastic snooper, the billeting officer was an alcoholic old sadist, for whom the war was a heaven-sent opportunity. She hated me, probably because I was the only woman in her part of the hamlet who did not fawn upon her. The house we had rented was small, and there were three of us, with our seven-year-old son. But there was a tiny room upstairs that was not occupied. One afternoon, after a bad night of bombing in the East End, several busloads of children and cripples arrived.This frightful woman planted a crippled boy of twelve on us. To my protests she answered that I had a spare room, and that no one else had any accommodation for him. People who took in a cripple received thirty shillings a week, and some of the local people were glad enough to take one in. There must have been someone who would have been glad to have him. But there was nothing for it. The billeting officer and the constable were buddies, there was no one to appeal to, so we had this Jewish child of twelve (she had picked a Jew for me!) until one day he disappeared. He complained one week that I was under-nourishing him, and the billeting officer got my week’s sustenance money docked.The cripple was excessively aggressive, and on one occasion he struck Ian with his crutch.”
“How frightful!” Hester’s face screwed up into a painful grimace. “Surely you could appeal to the police?”
“Of course, but the police was the fat, red-nosed ‘boyfriend’ of the billeting officer. The cripple said that my husband had hit him first!”
“How disgusting!” Hester looked as if she were about to cry.
“Well, I need not retail how horrible the shopkeepers became. If you gave them large tips that was all right. If you did not, you were treated atrociously. Some of them must be getting quite rich; especially of course owners of food shops.”
“How horrible!” Hester was now actually weeping.
Professor McKenzie looked around at this moment, and saw the tears emerging from the miserably staring eyes, he then looked angrily at his wife.
“You have made Mrs. Harding cry,” he said.
“Sorry.” (This was apparently what Laura always said, when she offended.) “I did not notice …”
“I am not crying,” protested Hester, very confused. “It is the Canadian light — it often makes my eyes water.”
They then began talking about the difference between soft English light, and the hard relentless Canadian variety. Professor McKenzie had had to go to an optician, and René, too, said he thought of having smoked glasses for the winter time, against the glare of the snow.
“Things are all right in the north and west of England, I believe,” Laura told her shrinking guest — a great concession showing that she was really a kind-hearted woman.And with that Hester’s ordeal was over. There was no further mention of the unattractive sides of the English character, or those parts of England which were hard on the eye. The excellent cognac which accompanied her coffee re-mellowed her, and put a melancholy sparkle in her eye, for she was extremely susceptible to good brandy.
When they moved back into the living room, René enquired if any Canadians were to be expected as after-dinner guests.
“Hester asked me to wear this, in case we should be called upon to meet some of the natives. I hope you didn’t think I stuck that in my coat for you!”
“I think your ribbon is a well-deserved and colourful emblem. I wish I had one, and I should always wear it if I had!”
McKenzie added.
“I am quite sure you would not,” retorted René, “except in the company of the ignoble.”
It was not long before René asked Laura McKenzie if she would please play them something. Without fuss she went over to the piano and played several pieces very well. Asked to play some more, she played several more pieces, until René said to himself, “She is going to play for the rest of the evening.” However, although entreated by René to continue, she did stop after the second batch.The Hardings learned that Laura had just begun her career as a pianist when she married. “I had not the money,” she informed them, “to hire halls, so I should certainly have failed.”
As a couple, René said to himself, the McKenzies were good-lookers. A dark, slightly built man, McKenzie wore the no-longer-popular “side-boards” — without being “dressy” he was careful about his clothes; and Laura, with a complete absence of self-consciousness, wore rather expensive ones. It had not escaped René that he was the object of a very friendly feeling on the part of his host.
The McKenzies appeared to be on especially good terms with the rector of the Anglican Church dominating the Hill; a very large church, almost acting as cathedral to English-Canadian Momaco. The Reverend William Trevelyan was an Englishman, and René supposed that Laura McKenzie’s connection with the Church was at least a contributing factor to the more than usually cordial relations subsisting between the McKenzies and the rector. In any case, they seemed to wish René to meet this clergyman without delay.
The English colony in Momaco was especially, almost uniquely, strong; and the Reverend William Trevelyan was a person highly influential in Momaco. Quite half the board of governors of the University belonged to his flock. This fact alone demonstrates the unusual position of the English in that city, for, in most of the great cities of Canada, the English occupy a very minor position. McKenzie explained the meaning of the Reverend W. Trevelyan to René; it was arranged that Trevelyan should be informed of the presence in Momaco of this very original and well-known historian.
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