Self Condemned

by Lewis, Wyndham

  René had plunged his face into his hollow hands. “That is too silly; that is all past,” came a hollow, precipitate whisper. “Don’t you understand?”

  “I understand,” responded McKenzie, a little awestruck, satisfying the categorical intervention of that by which René was possessed — that which had picked him up, and that which had thrown him down; at the same time replying tenderly to his friend’s appeal.

  After some minutes René removed his hands and turned his face towards the other. McKenzie was very shocked by the extraordinary alteration. The face now presented to him was haggard and despairing: it made him feel, somehow, that the face had just been vomiting, although of course it had not. Actually, that was what it was about to do; with a series of rapid spasmodic movements René simultaneously, and with surprising deftness, leant abruptly sideways to be sick, and yanked a handkerchief out of his pocket, and his hand flew with it to his mouth. A small quantity of vomit was in his handkerchief, which he folded and refolded, and poked away into the side pocket of his jacket.

  “My brain is burning.” He began to speak stolidly and matter-of-factly, as if transmitting a piece of information about one of the organs of his body. “I have had that sense of a hot devouring something inside my skull, and of a light as well, of a fire-coloured light, since that day I banged my head in the police morgue.You know, I told you how I fell.”

  “Yes, I remember, René: you hurt yourself very badly.”

  McKenzie looked grave and dejected. This was the first time anything of this kind had occurred between René and himself.

  But René grew calmer; at the same time, however, he became taciturn. In about ten minutes he took his leave.

  This scene had revealed to McKenzie an inner situation of a severity which he had not, prior to this, so much as suspected. He maintained the strictest silence regarding what he had learnt, only informing his wife that René was not quite himself, but refusing to be explicit. There was one subject which, in future, in conversation with René, he was very careful to avoid, namely his friend’s book.

  The real depth of the chasm into which he had involuntarily been gazing, was not realized even yet by him. But he did understand that to mention his poor friend’s latest work was the showdown. To speak of that meant that one had to think of René as he had been, and as he now was — had to speak of his decadence: of his death.

  Not that McKenzie would have gone so far as to have envisaged the extinction of his personality. He regarded this condition as a neurotic phase, something that would pass. He could not, naturally, appreciate the full — the massive, the terrible — truth of the position. The fact was that René Harding had stood up to the gods, when he resigned his professorship in England. The gods had struck him down. They had humiliated him, made him a laughingstock, cut him off from all recovery; they had driven him into the wilderness. The hotel fire gave him a chance of a second lease of life. He seized it with a mad alacrity; he was not, he had not been, killed — he had survived the first retaliatory blow — the expulsion, the ostracism. He was still almost, and up to a point, his original self, when he and McKenzie were scrutinizing the philosophic foundations of his contemporary literary enterprise; though already he was being shaken by the unceasing psychological pressure of the obsessed Hester. In fact, it had been then that the suppression, the battening down, began: he was obliged to push under and hold down the gathering instability and hysteria. When the gods struck the second time there was, from the moment of the blow, and the days spent in the white silence of the hospital, no chance that he could survive, at all intact. You cannot kill a man twice, the gods cannot strike twice and the man survive.

  The outburst at McKenzie’s had not been a confession, but was something like it; it was an unmasking of a most thorough description. The act of doing this had been a shock to René, as it had been a shock to McKenzie. When he came out of his fit he made a resolution never to permit this to happen again. In fact, he locked himself up twice as tight as he had been locked up before.

  The presence of all this molten material within did not affect the impenetrability of the shell, nor did it interfere with the insect-like activity with which he proceeded with the concreting of his position of academic success and widely acclaimed authorship. He even managed to write some quite authentic-looking magazine articles, “from the pen of the celebrated British historian, Professor René Harding.”

  It was with unusual rapidity that the existence of so distinguished a man upon the North American continent was recognized. It was not more than a year or two after the scene just described in the McKenzie home that a great university in one of the eastern states of the U.S.A. offered him a professorship. With a kind of mechanical thrill of frigid delight he accepted it, after expressing his great regret at leaving them to the governors and chancellor of Momaco University. As to McKenzie, that was another matter. He was actually extremely distressed at this parting. Almost he was frightened at finding himself withdrawing from the warm personal contact of these friends. At one moment, this fear was so present to him that he felt he must not accept yet such an offer from the United States, but stick to Momaco. He was within an ace of sending a letter to the American university to say he had changed his mind. But he did not do so, and in a few months he was installed in a small, warm, wooden dwelling not far from the campus of this much more pretentious seat of learning, five hundred miles farther south; and the faculty had no idea that it was a glacial shell of a man who had come to live among them, mainly because they were themselves unfilled with anything more than a little academic stuffing.