How closely packed the working day was may be judged by the following circumstance — belonging to a period some months further on. On Christmas Day René worked in his study up to tea time.They had arranged to go to Momaco’s giant hotel for dinner, to celebrate with the McKenzies, who were bringing their son, Duncan, now ten years old. After a brief tea René returned to his study: and he hardly gave himself time to dress. Hester, on her side, had gone to see Alice Price, and to have a good talk with Alice’s father about a certain country, which both of them loathed, and another, which both of them loved — romantically, uncritically. Mr. Price was quite a well-to-do man: but his well-known lack of Canadian orthodoxy, and his habit of continually criticizing the country which was responsible for his small fortune, had probably been the cause of his daughter’s not marrying. She was good-looking, a typical Canadian, but already thirty-five.
When Hester got home to dress for the evening, René was drinking a cup of tea; and when at half-past seven the McKenzies called, in a hired car, to take them to the hotel, his toilet was still incomplete. It was with a flushed face of wry apology that he at last entered the car, saying,“I worked too late; I have two jobs on my hands: you are a sensible fellow” (to McKenzie), “and content yourself with one.”
The King George Hotel was an example of the colossal in hotel building.... Certain of its massive and sinister vistas were suggestive of Gnossos rather than of Momaco, of hieratic rather than of capitalistic architecture. Their French-Canadian waiter had a countenance that went with the architecture. Lines of ponderous square pillars marked off the dancing floor from the lines of tables, and behind the pillar-line there was more depth than in the Château Laurier — which the architect clearly had had in mind, and had hoped to outdo. When they arrived, a rumba was in progress. Leaving McKenzie Junior at the table, the two professors disappeared into the barbaric melee, Laura waving her posteriors expertly in the embrace of René. Hester, less disposed to borrow from the expressive buttocks of the Black, wobbled her own a little mournfully.
They decided that they would drink champagne. Before long they were pulling crackers, and transformed by paper hats into pantomime figures, McKenzie with an eyebrow pencil having given himself a very dark moustache. Chicken Maryland, with fried pineapple and sweet corn and potato mixed, was the centre of the meal. (They had rejected unanimously turkey Momaco, reine pedauque.) Young Duncan McKenzie looked rather green for a moment, after consuming a bombe glacée messaline. The Moët frothed as it should, and flames from the large Christmas pudding very nearly started a conflagration; Hester’s Alsatian peasant cap burst into flames, but was extinguished with great skill and promptitude by McKenzie, who clapped his hands upon the flames. A smell of singeing bore witness to the part that Hester’s hair had played in the excitements of the evening. Theirs was a conventional Christmas celebration, and there was a great deal of dancing: the taste of the French Canadians, who were prominent in staffing and stage directing this monstrous hotel, was of a “Rasta” type, the orchestra preferring rumbas and tangos to anything else. René carried on an intermittent conversation with a French party at the next table — Parisian French, not Momaco French. The noise soon became terrific. There were one or two academical figures here and there, and two of these joined them at one point. It was undeniably a wonderful idea to have had their Christmas dinner in this saturnalian fashion.
With their last bottle came the final toasts. All of these toasts, naturally, looked towards the future happiness or success of each member of the party. When René’s new academic adventure was being toasted, it was noticed that Hester watched, with an exclusive concentration, the scene on the dance floor. “And now, René, your book!” exclaimed McKenzie. But even to that she did not respond. This glass that never rose to celebrate, but which got emptied all the same, in toasts that were undivulged, at the last chilled this Christmas party, and left an uncomfortable sense of something wrong: although, on the whole, the evening might be described as a great success.
When the Hardings got home, as Hester was drawing off her gloves, she summed up: “A pretty penny that has cost us. What was it for?”
René looked at the cross and staring face with compassion. “Mais quel entêtement, nom de dieu!” he said under his breath.
As a consequence of his appointment at the university, if for no other reason, René was obliged to go to a certain number of parties and functions, as well as to dinner engagements or casual visits to the houses of the friends he had made. Hester almost always accompanied him. Such a demonstration as she made on the occasion of the Christmas dinner was not a typical occurrence, she usually conducted herself quite normally.
So when, one night, she failed to turn up at the house of the chancellor of the university, at the time arranged, 7:30, René was very surprised and correspondingly uneasy. He had dressed at the university, from which he went directly to the chancellor’s house. It was an important dinner: the president of McGill and other academic notables were to be there. Of course, no great harm would be done should she not appear; if it turned out to be a coup de tête on Hester’s part, some plausible excuse could be found. What he said, on the spur of the moment, was simply that he could not guess what had happened to delay her.
It was half-way through the meal that he was called to the telephone outside in the hall. When he picked up the receiver, someone said, “This is the police.” He was asked if his wife’s name was “Hester Lilian Harding.” His heart took a painful jump and stopped dead. He said quietly “Yes,” when the voice asked him to come immediately to Police Headquarters at Rochester Avenue. He asked no questions. Upon the back of a visiting card he scribbled a brief message, and told the man who had accompanied him to the telephone to hand it to the Chancellor.
In Momaco (unlike Toronto) taxis are allowed to ply for hire, and he found one almost at once. Rochester Avenue was not far, and as soon as he entered the door of the main commissariat of police, someone said, “You Professor Harding?” — He was then conducted into a room in which a police officer sat at a table, who sprang up, saying “You Professor Harding?” before any sound had been made by his escort. But after that, as they stood facing one another, the police officer appeared embarrassed.
“It’s a warm evening for April, Professor,” he said. “I’m glad you came right over here without delay. I was sorry to disturb you, Professor, I’m more sorry than I know how to say, Professor....
Hell, this isn’t easy!”
“What is it?” René asked sharply.
To hunt other human beings seems to reduce the face to a coarse muzzle and baleful eye. When this simplified face attempts to portray pity, the effect is alarming.
“Will you kindly tell me at once what my wife has done,” demanded René.
“What did she do?” echoed the policeman. And René noticed the change of tense.
“She did nothing?” he asked; his lips trembled. “If she has done nothing, why did you demand my presence here?” The aggressive tone provoked the reappearance of the unmodified jowl of the dogs of the Law.
“She did do something, Professor. She threw herself under a truck.”
René was trembling, and swaying a little. He glared silently at the police officer, as if the latter had said that his wife was a liar or a thief. Then he staggered forward, and supported himself upon the table with the flat of his hands. The policeman said, “Lean on me,” and led him to a chair. He retched once and vomited a little, turning sideways to do so. The man rang a bell on his desk, and soon a glass of water was produced. René attempted to rise. “Sit there for a while, Professor,” the policeman told him: he knew all about shock. He could see that this one had almost knocked this limey cold. He sat in his chair smoking, and noting something in a large book.
At length René got to his feet and said, “Where is she? Shall we go?”
“Okay, Professor.”
The man walked beside him, his eye in the corner of his head, ready to catch him as he
fell. They stopped, the policeman drew from his pocket a large key, opened a door.
René was not conscious of passing through the door, but almost immediately he found himself leaning bodily upon the policeman, his head almost on the shoulder of his escort, and looking down on a much-soiled collection of objects. They were arranged in the most paradoxical way. Like a graffito the essentials were picked out. He recognized the low-bottomed silhouette of a female figure, the clothes shapeless and black with blood. Slightly to one side there was a pair of legs in horrible detachment, like a pair of legs for a doll upon a factory table, before they have been stuck on to the body. At the top, was the long forward-straining, as it were yearning neck. Topmost was the bloodstained head of Hester, lying on its side. The poor hair was full of mud, which flattened it upon the skull. Her eye protruded: it was strange it should still have the strength to go peering on in the darkness.
René took a step forward towards the exhibit, but he fell headlong, striking his forehead upon the edge of the marble slab — the remains being arranged upon something like a fishmonger’s display slab. As he fell it had been his object to seize the head and carry it away with him. To examine his legal right had been his last clear act of consciousness.
XXXI
THE WHITE SILENCE
Two hours later, his head bandaged, René lay in a bed in the Momaco General Hospital. He was staring, with a dull and confused expression, at a young man who sat beside him.
“Nothing,” he said thickly.
“Had she no inherited pre-disposition?
“Please leave me,” René muttered.
“You have nothing you can tell me, Professor?”
“Leave me.”
The Gazette-Herald reporter coughed. An intern came up behind him, and bent down, mouth to ear. The reporter rose, coughed, looked at the patient, and moved away on tiptoe. This was the Silent Ward, as they called it, for a thrombosis secured admission for a patient to the White Silence, a place so quiet that, to be any more silent, it would have to be death.
René’s brain was silent too. All that entered it resembling a thought was a painful feeling that he was alone, that he had been removed from life and shut into a white solitude.The white intern was a mechanism. He could not understand the nurses. They had not learned how to speak. Wherever he looked he saw a round spot of light, but soft, as if it belonged wherever it happened to appear. The intern was watching him. He came over, and fixed white spectacles upon his nose.The eyeholes were circles of white muslin. — There can be no proper silence while the eyes are allowed to bang about. Now that the visual turbulence had been cut off, and sight reduced to a white circle, an all-over muting of the consciousness ensued. Even such stimulus as white-coated intern removed, the mind began to dream of white rivers which led nowhere, which developed laterally, until they ended in a limitless white expanse. The constant sense of loneliness ended, in the white silence, as a necessary ingredient of the white silence, which was all that was desired — the negation of the visual; and an aural blank which had more quality than white, was not such a negation, and was as soothing as a caress. But at last consciousness ebbed quietly away, and René lay in a dreamless sleep, alone in this place dedicated to silence, totally removed from life.
It was only very gradually that this remoteness and peace began to be invaded by fragments of the glaring and clanging world outside this muted and spectral seclusion. It was the specialist’s purpose to forbid ingress and access to anything belonging to the passionate universe without, from which René had accidentally been cut off. Everything was done to preserve the salutary aloofness.
But in the graveyard of the senses, one by one, the most brutal memories were resurrected. Before he left the hospital René was in possession of the full burden of consciousness once more. As a first step, about ten days after he had been brought in, the nerve-centres restored to proper functioning, he was removed from the Ward of Silence to a bright and pleasant room. And it was in that room that the struggle began, the struggle as gradually as possible to re-admit to the mind what had been excluded from it: and the re-admission was apt to be anything but gradual, and threatened to disrupt the vessel into which it rushed. For approximately a week he was left alone there, until he was regarded as strong enough to receive visitors: which protective measure left totally out of count the mental visitors who crowded in. The first to enter the room without knocking was, it was natural, Hester. And when the nurse found him sobbing upon the pillow, every effort was made to get rid of this terrible and disturbing visitant. For it was well understood by the doctors who she must be. But there was no expulsion of Hester. She was always there very soon, and obsessed the patient. Sometimes she would be as she was in the days of the Room, of the “vows of hardship.” At others she was the graffito woman of the police mortuary. She would enter as he was half-asleep, with her eyes protruding, her head thrust forward, and the deep line of her frown prolonged by a swollen vein bisecting the forehead. The nurse would perhaps appear, to do one of the innumerable, irrelevant things nurses find to do, and he would lie glaring at the wall; and she would go up to the bed and give the pillow an idle poke; and say, “Te voilà qui ne dors pas, René.”
But at last they decided to let in the world of flesh and blood, if only to counteract the more dangerous imaginary visitors. McKenzie was the first to arrive, and the only one for a long time. “You have been very ill, René,” he said, “you have had a terrible time. I have made a number of efforts to see you. Is there anything at all I can do? Laura would like to come and see you. Would that be all right?”
René continued to stare at him, even to glare at him, holding his hand tight.
“Do not trouble to talk, René. I know how hard it must be for you. Do not make any effort.”
René tried to smile, and it changed his face into somebody else’s. “I struck my head ... they told you, of course. I suppose there was concussion ... yes, concussion. I have got over it, at least I have got over the concussion. Of course I’m rather shaken you know.”
“I can well imagine.”
“It will be impossible for me to see any people.” His eyes filled with tears. “I must leave here — Momaco, I mean.”
“Why? René, that would be a great pity. Wait a bit. Do not decide anything yet.You are in no state …”
“I have decided,” René said.
“You must go and rest somewhere. It is clear enough that you will not be able to work for some time. They are quite decent people at the university; they will give you sick leave, with pay you know. I will see about that. Allow me to see about that for you.”
René empowered him to do anything, and said he would be most grateful if he would act for him. He gave him a bunch of keys, lifting up one, and saying “the front door”; lifting up another, he said, “the desk.” There was a small address book, that was all he wanted. And then he became very tired. Muttering some apology, he turned his back upon his friend and was almost at once asleep. McKenzie left quietly, and informed the nurse that her patient was asleep. He asked if he might see the doctor who had been dealing with this case.
The next day McKenzie called again, bringing the small address book, mail, and some fruit. He was at once admitted. René had told them that he wished to see no one else. The mail was left with the doctor, to be delivered as and when he saw fit: with the warning that one of the letters was probably from the patient’s dead wife. That day René said even less than the day before. He confided that he thought he would go to a certain place, if there was a vacancy. He would stop there for some time. Perhaps he would stay there a long time. It appeared to fatigue him profoundly to talk, even with anyone he knew. Having imparted the above piece of information, as before he presented McKenzie with his back, and rapidly fell asleep.
In a few days he got up, for the making of the bed, and a week later than that he gave signs of a rather more normal condition of mind. What was occurring beneath this frozen surface was a series of painful
readjustments, followed, as was the case with McKenzie’s visit, by sleep. He slept a great deal of the time, the doctors saw to that. Meanwhile he had written one letter: upon the envelope was the following name and address:
Father Moody, S.M.,
Registrar,
College of the Sacred Heart,
Niagara, Ont.
and to this letter a reply had been received at the hospital, but was in the keeping of the doctor, as was the mail from the apartment.
Neither to doctor nor to nurse, any more than to McKenzie, did René utter a word upon the subject of his wife’s death. He continued to refuse to see anyone. Mr. Furber, for instance, greatly excited by the banner headlines SUICIDE OF COLLEGE PROFESSOR’S WIFE, and the tittle-tattle scraped together by the reporters, made frenzied attempts to be admitted “for a few brief moments” to see René. But René became hysterical at the idea of seeing Mr. Furber, so that would-be visitor was permanently banned.
The Hester he saw at present was a living and moving one, one that he had loved, a witty, at times malicious one; but one who had become as much part of his physical being as if they had been born twins, physically fused — or better, one might say, for physical amalgamation would be unpleasant, identical twins. It had been a fearful estrangement between them when she made a return to England a supreme issue, a life or death issue. She still, in death, spoke of England. But all he spoke to her about was forgiveness. Could he ever be forgiven? No, forgiveness was of course impossible. Once or twice he thought he must get back to England, and if he should ask her forgiveness there, then the sweet face would smile as if to say, “You have returned! We could not both return! But you found your way back. That proves that there really was love in you for me.” And he several times started to plan a return to England — to England and to penury. The phantom was tenderer when England was in his mind: when he was thinking of all the profound advantages England had over any other English-speaking country.
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