“Trevelyan’s response will be immediate, I feel quite sure of that,”McKenzie affirmed.“He is a man of considerable intelligence. This is rather rare, I imagine, in the Church of England.”
Hester was a quietly unconvinced witness of these proceedings, as though one man were proposing to the other a sovereign cure for indigence. She half-turned, with a half-smile in the direction of her hostess. She left the house with rather mixed feelings about Laura McKenzie; admitting to herself, and later to René, that Laura was a curious, a bitter, and arrogant woman, but quite amusing notwithstanding.
When the Hardings took their departure, the McKenzies looked at one another; McKenzie said, “I like Harding;” his wife observed, “She’s a funny one, but she has her points.”
XXVI
RENé BECOMES A COLUMNIST
The next day, McKenzie telephoned. His Reverence would much like to meet the author of The Secret History of World War II which he described as “very naughty.” Could René and his wife come to dinner the next night?
The Trevelyan dinner was a great success. The clergyman appeared to like René in spite of the “naughtiness” of what he wrote. He had read a little history, and he liked discussing, from a churchman’s angle, the years immediately succeeding the setting up of a separate English church in the sixteenth century. This, actually, was a period with which René was particularly familiar.
René, on his side, was not at all displeased with this contact: he felt there was a good deal of shrewdness underneath the cleric’s rather flourishy talk. The following Sunday the Hardings were at the morning service in St. George’s Church, and René’s tall bearded figure was noted with satisfaction by the Reverend WilliamTrevelyan.The church, to the astonishment of the Hardings, accustomed to the empty churches of England, was full,Victorianly full.The greater part of the congregation was English. Hester found herself surrounded by English people: though, unfortunately, just ahead of them was a Canadian couple; and the pleasing illusion which she might otherwise have enjoyed, that she was once more in England, was denied her.The Canadian voices, whose responses were louder than those of anyone else in their neighbourhood, and the lusty rolling of the r’s, spoilt her enjoyment of her favourite hymn,“For those in peril on the sea.” It was, however, consoling to feel that there were other Britons suffering the horrors of Momaco and that she was not a solitary martyr.
During the next few weeks they made the acquaintance of numbers of people, some of these, both Canadian and English, were just people it was thought the Hardings might like to know; others were big shots, of potential use to René. One of these was the proprietor of the Momaco Gazette-Herald. This was a contact of great significance, for René was offered a weekly column in that paper, which was so well paid that it changed their economic position overnight; and so radically, that they moved from the Hotel Laurenty to an apartment hotel in a more desirable quarter of the town.
One would have supposed that this last event would have stirred Hester into a certain elation. But that was not the case. She even warned René against the dangers of this new prosperity.
“Whether Momaco ignores you or fêtes you, it is always Momaco. Do you really want to spend the rest of your life in this awful city? The fact that you have been recognized all of a sudden, and have been given a newspaper job which will enable us to live comfortably, changes nothing.You do not want to be a journalist, do you? This column merely keeps us alive. Is that all you want to do, René? Just keep alive?”
Formerly René would have laughed, in the hope of wearing her down by mirth. Now he looked at her very seriously, for she was a problem which had to be faced with all the resources he possessed.
“A city is good or bad, attractive or horrible, according to the people it contains, and which of its citizens you happen to know. You call it ‘horrible’ because of horrible conditions under which we lived for three years. If we had lived under similar conditions, London would be horrible.”
Hester laughed. “These classroom arguments get one nowhere,” she answered. “It may be a good piece of logic, but it has no connection with the reality. London was where we were born. I might agree with you if I had been born in Momaco — though I should know it was a pretty poor place to be born in (if I had any intelligence).”
René drew in his breath. “If we are speaking of realities, then let me say that I have no intention of stopping in Momaco longer than I can help. So your argument that because I have got a good job I shall therefore live here forever is fallacious.”
“Thank God for that!” said Hester with a bitter fervency, getting up and going into the bedroom, there leaning out of the window, inhaling the milder airs which were blowing from the south.
René came into the bedroom behind her. She started and stiffened as she heard him. Was he proposing to resort to the venustic argument of the bedchamber? She hoped he was not. She had never denied him her body, but she wished he could understand that copulation was nothing to do with logic. But this was not what he proposed. When she turned round, he took her hands. “Hester, I had something else to say. One of the people in Momaco is myself. Another is yourself. The fact that you are in Momaco changes Momaco a great deal for me. Now today you have written to several people in London, to Susan, to your Mother. You love London, and are homesick, because perhaps a certain half-dozen people are there — you love those people collectively more than you love me? You would rather be in London with Susan, perhaps, than live in Momaco with me?”
“You know I would not,” she replied. “You know that the question is absurd. But your question implies something that is not true. It implies that my motives are purely selfish in desiring to leave this place and to return to London. That is absolutely untrue. Listen, I would throw myself out of that window if I knew that my death would result in your returning to England, and that nothing else would do so.”
This was typical of the way their half-disputes would end. In a half-threat, or in something he felt it wiser to ignore or to turn his back on. After all, the open window was there. But on this occasion he turned on her reproachfully.
“If you threw yourself out of that window, it would achieve nothing except to break my heart. It would shatter London as much as Momaco into a million pieces. — Momaco — London! — How I have come to hate those names!”
An almost sinister expression of loathing was on his face as he said this. The effort to conduct these conversations upon the normal social plane had really grown to be beyond his powers of nervous endurance; to present a face undistorted by passion, to employ the innocuous forms of civil speech, instead of springing at her and shaking her till her teeth rattled, howling in her face, “Bosh, bosh, bosh, bosh! Quack, quack, quack, quack! Listen, intolerable sparrow! London is as useless to me as Momaco is to you. There are no conceivable circumstances which would ever make it possible for me to work, to teach, to exist intellectually in London, after my resignation. Here it is possible for me to work and here I stop — here I stop. I do not need you to tell me ten times a day that it is not worth while to work here, to work in Momaco. Of course it is not. I know that — I know that … better than you can ever know it. I am, let me assure you, madly aware of that. But I also know that I will never again become a nameless piece of human wreckage. I may not be much. I may not amount to much. But my shoes shall be shone: my pocketbook shall be packed with newly printed notes: my quarters shall be in the smart clean part of town — shall be — and there is an end of the matter. If you say London once more I will paint you all over with the word London in big red letters, and tie you up, and mail you to Susan. — That is a mild ending for such a pest.”
So, at this period, suppressions were always involved, often resulting in muscular anomalies in his mobile face; he did not say anything more than politely he was supposed to say. But his face had the most extraordinary expressions sometimes, ranging from snarling smiles to a fakir-like ferocity.
XXVII
THE BLACK FLY
In the first week in August, the Hardings went to a summer camp, about forty miles to the north of Momaco. There were a number of small lakes in the Bush, and at several places the Momacoans had built huts and arranged centres for the hire of canoes.What the seaside is for the English these lake-lands are for the Momacoans. The English Canadians and the Peasoups were rigidly separated, the English having the best sites.
René, in the interests of economy, selected a place where the English and French camping grounds almost met. The English, while paddling too far eastward, might occasionally catch sight of a brown-skinned Peasoup disporting himself in the water; or a canoe-full of little inky-haired Peasoups might paddle past a Nordic Blond sunning himself in front of his hut (reading some Nordic literature, like Forever Amber, or a Western story). They would gaze at one another across the glassy water with racial disapproval.
This position, so near the Peasoups, was naturally inexpensive. But it had other disadvantages besides the inconvenience of catching sight of a few Peasoups. As luck would have it, the campsite René had chosen was occasionally visited by what the border people of the U.S. know as “the Canadian Fly.” However, they had a few days of blissful silence, of fir-scented lakes, of plunges into icy waters by moonlight. Hester was almost happy.
“How lovely this is!” she exclaimed. “Before the Canadians came I think I might have quite liked Canada.” To which René answered,“You mean before the English came.” For the first time for months she could be seen throwing her head back and laughing. She bathed continually, she did some bird watching; one night, at their starry evening meal, she got a little tipsy. And then she was bitten — or is it stung? Whatever the black fly does she was bitten or stung. Within twenty-four hours Hester was a mass of bites, unable to sleep or eat. René, whose bites were less severe, took her back with the utmost despatch to Momaco, where she lay for a week or more in a high fever. René was not well himself, and he listened morosely to Hester’s ravings. Canada was the subject throughout — “Godforsaken icebox, heavenly summers presided over by the black fly…. Please, René, never let us leave this beautiful country … you won’t, will you? I could never forgive you if you did so!”
The McKenzies had had their holiday in July, a trip into Vermont in preference to the fly-blown joys of little Bush lakes. Laura came over at once, when she heard what had occurred. She enrolled a young Canadian friend of hers, Alice Price, and the two of them fulfilled all the functions of nurse, bellhop, entertainer. They shopped, they rubbed in ointments, they prattled, they cooked, they administered ice packs, gave cold spongings; and last but not least enabled René to concentrate upon his own bites. In Hester’s case there was a poisoned mind enormously complicating the problem of a poisoned body. The amount of bitter vilification of Canada that Alice Price was obliged to listen to would have caused a more chauvinistic young woman to depart, her eyes flashing angrily, quite early in the proceedings. But Alice was a second-generation Canadian, with an English father, and had listened to diatribes hardly less vitriolic from her own parents.
As the fever abated, and Hester emerged from the torment, able once more to converse with restraint, the two young women undertook a sort of occupational therapy, trying to persuade her to knit or do crosswords. Then they entertained her with gossip of the Hill, of the university, of the city at large; and Laura would read her bits of letters from England. They did everything that was possible to ease her back, expeditiously, into normal life once more, and their ministrations were responsible, René believed, for preserving Hester’s sanity intact, and sparing them all from an open breakdown. For a breakdown of health existed all the time, needless to say, and Hester, as much as her husband, was not more than fifty percent normal. At the time of the execution of Mr. Martin she had gone about muttering to herself. They had hastened the process of hanging Mr. Martin by the neck and dropping him into the earth, as if it were hardly decent for him to continue to breathe. The proceedings shocked Hester profoundly. She dreamed frequently of the doll-like face of Affie, as they had seen it in the mortician’s. Several times, in conversation with René, she insisted that Mr. Martin was not an Englishman. On the actual day of the execution, she was very nervous, and on one occasion when the maid (who supposed that they were out) entered unexpectedly, Hester stifled a scream, and, springing up, rushed into the bedroom — there, a few minutes later, René found her convulsively weeping, and it was a long time before she quieted down.
René’s reactions to the trial, of course, were of a very different character from hers. Actually he went to the courthouse on two occasions, and had a good view of Mr. Martin in the dock. He looked a very wizened bit of spotless respectability, in his striped flannel suit. He treated the whole proceedings exactly as he had the use of the word “bitch” in addressing himself to a lady. His eyes remained hooded, and the skin of his face was of the same faded pink as before. He answered the counsel for the prosecution as if that gentleman had been a janitor, accusing him of some misdemeanour on the principle that attack is the best defence. Obviously the janitor, or janitor-like person, had realized that he was about to be denounced by Mr. Martin, and was forestalling Mr. Martin’s attack by shooting at him a series of questions designed to cover him with obloquy. Mr. Martin, with the faintest of sneers, in a voice as thin as paper, answered him as though it were really beneath his dignity to have any truck with such a fellow. Once or twice he burst into derisive laughter — but laughter that was so noiseless and polite that it could hardly offend very deeply. If the judge asked him a question, Mr. Martin turned towards him as one gentleman to another, both of them above the melee of the Court, rather amused at the extravagances of those taking part.
Once René saw the prisoner catch sight of an old acquaintance in the public benches, and raise his hand with a gentlemanly restraint, his slight smile, with a faint amusement in it, suggesting as clearly as possible that here were two friends who found themselves both as spectators of a very curious, and somewhat degrading, spectacle. — Asked why he had struck down the manageress, Mrs. McAffie, he became, for him, rather violently indignant. “If I had been doing what he accuses me of, the fireman could not have seen me, because the passage was full of smoke. I had my handkerchief over my nose and mouth on the only occasion when, with great difficulty, I returned to my apartment. It was impossible that any fireman could have been farther along the passage than my apartment, as this fireman pretends that he was. The fellow must be suffering from some delusion, or else he is one of those people who enjoy seeing their names in the newspaper.” When confronted with the elongated cosh, which he agreed was his, and asked how it came about that there was human blood and human hair upon it, and that the hair was that of Mrs. McAffie, he simply replied that the police had stuck the hair there, in order to build up a case of homicide, so that their charge of arson would appear more probable — if anything could make that probable.
René got the impression that this little Englishman, whose god was Respectability, was playing the whole time for the benefit of his old friends and drinking companions, and was not seriously concerned with defending himself. He probably knew that there was no escape, but he wished to leave the scene the upright, cool and collected gentleman they all knew so well, visibly incapable of the crimes of which he was so absurd
ly accused.
From any standpoint, René’s existence at this time had become anything but identical with that of Hester. So many of the plans of action which suggested themselves to him met with bitter opposition, or were treated with disagreeable levity when communicated to his wife, that he ceased to communicate them. Whatever he might plan assumed a continued residence on that side of the Atlantic — this was quite sufficient to cause her to feel no interest, and to react hostilely. Up to the period of the fire he had informed her, from day to day, of everything he was doing, or intending to do. As castaways upon Momaco they had lived together, in an idyllic communion in which it was unthinkable that they should hide anything from one another. Now he would consult her upon nothing of serious moment. So they went back to a regime which had obtained for some years before his resignation of his professorship. At that time, aware that she would violently disapprove of the “quixotic” course that he was adopting (for from the first he knew that his revolutionary principles regarding the writing of history must lead to a dangerous showdown with those responsible for him), he had maintained a stern, and it had at times appeared a brutal, silence. Hester was no “intellectual,” in any case, and he had never attempted to initiate her into the mysteries of his new theory of history. During the years of their semi-animal existence in the Hotel Blundell all that had been changed.
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