IV
HESTER HEARS THE NEWS
Next morning it was a different matter. Hester and Mrs. Harradson put in their appearance, but more than anything else it was Essie’s exultant freshness, her speaking orbs hung over the breakfast table, her very bare arms although it was a very chilly day, and the significant glances she cast at Mrs. Harradson, which caused a deep reaction. It was all very well giving spectacular proof that he was a fool, but his conversation with Essie was now going to be considerably more difficult. However, after breakfast, he decided he would at once ask her to come into his study and come to the point immediately. Meantime, he must steer her mind into severer channels. He had noticed Princess Casamassima upon her table: he asked her if she had been reading it. As he had expected, a studious look was the result. Her brow was slightly knitted, she looked a very serious girl. Yes, she told him, she had always wanted to read this particular book of James and had at last started doing so a week or so before. Did she like it? he asked. She thought she did, she said, but James’ London slums appeared to her a little theatrical, as if copied from some sentimental Victorian bookplate.
René knew that she must have heard or read this somewhere, but he looked suitably impressed.
“Don’t you think that Lady Aurora is very good?” he enquired.
“Oh yes, and the bedridden girl is terribly sweet,”she answered.
“Ah, that bedridden girl! James intended, with her, to serve up one of Dickens’ most tear-compelling creatures. But she nauseated him so much half-way, that he changed her into the disagreeable character she all along, in spite of him, had been.”
This gave Essie a shock: for she saw that she had got somehow into deep waters. This was not an easy book to talk about, as she had supposed.
“I see what you mean, I think. The bedridden are always bores anyway, aren’t they? But I did think …”
“No, there are no extenuating circumstances,” he told her.“All his Dickens personae, in any case, are terrible failures. Hyacinth — what a little hero to have! Could anyone be interested in such an unreal, comic little figure? His suicide is the duddest climax to a long, long yarn that it is possible to imagine.”
“Ah, I have not come to that. So that is the end of Hyacinth, is it?”
René could see that she was carefully storing away these criticisms of the book, to be used, along with the Victorian bookplate, to impress some intellectual friend. Meanwhile, he had got her toned down in the problems of a James’ novel. Having finished his eggs and bacon, he turned to his mail.
Had Hester received convincing evidence that René had deliberately led her into a high-brow discussion from strategical purposes she would have been as astonished as mortified. She regarded herself as well-endowed with “low-cunning”; but she was accustomed to think of him as ingenuous as a child, and as easy to see through as plate glass. If he was ever opaque, that was his learning blurring the glass a little in her view. It was this acceptance by Hester of the Victorian convention of the strong but stupid masculine in contrast to the weak but wily feminine, which made it the simplest thing in the world for René to deceive her if he wanted to, though it is true that so far he had never availed himself of this, except for bagatelles, for pulling her leg.
As soon as she saw that he was occupied with his correspondence (and she was not detained by her own, which had been nothing but a few bills), she shook off the contretemps of the Princess Casamassima discussion — such a highbrow feature for their breakfast table talk was almost without precedent — and returned to the setting of her own little traps. The terrific success of the night before, and René had been in perfect honeymoon form, must really be put to some good use. The moment had come, it seemed to her, to seize time by the forelock while his eyes were still gooey and his brain still drugged with the fumes of the Venusberg. Her eyes shining, her waist arched in and hips thrust out, she held up a page of her newspaper, on which were displayed a bunch of late-spring coats, a bait for those who were so silly as to imagine that in the warm weather fur coats grew cheaper.
“Now that,” she exclaimed, arching her eyebrows, “is what, if you ever had a really lavish fit — that is the sort of thing I should get you to buy.”
René looked up from his correspondence, momentarily stung almost to fury by the brazen naïvely mercenary calculations of the good Hester, with her garishly stock notion of what was a propitious moment.
“Oh, that would be it? I’m glad to know that. I shall bear that in mind.” He pushed his correspondence away.“Hester. Apropos.”
“Yes, René.” She had sunk back in her chair and stared at him apprehensively.
“Yes, very much, I am afraid, apropos. There is something I have to talk to you about, and this seems a good moment. I have just sent in my resignation to the University. I had not obtained special leave of absence. I fear that I deceived you; I said that in order to delay giving you the news of my resignation. There is going to be another of these crazy and extremely wicked wars. As I no longer have my job, I propose to go to Canada. That, in the crudest outline, is what had to be imparted.”
He fastened a hard stare upon her, as though he had dropped something into Essie and were waiting to see it emerge. But at the moment she appeared incapable of any reaction at all. Her face had gone a little grey, her eyes still stared, but very blankly, even a shade piteously. Among other things she had the sensation of having been unmasked, or (the same thing) seen through. As Essie did not possess a very tough core, she was unprepared and a little abashed. And he went on staring at her so coldly that her uppermost impulse was to cry. But she did not do so. Instead she said, “I knew that something was the matter. I saw you were ... I saw you were trying very hard to hide something.” To see her pathetically clinging, even at this juncture, to what she regarded as her superior insight, in her capacity of female of the species, faintly amused her husband. He smiled, almost contemptuously.
“Your penetration is admittedly extraordinary. But there was no Gunpowder Plot. I just thought it better to wait a little until things were settled.”
“It did not occur to you to consult me?”
“No. Nothing would have been gained. What was involved could only be settled by myself, not in discussion with others. Talking would only have blurred the issue.”
“I suppose you mean,” she drawled coldly, “that I should have protested. Have you told the others, have you told your mother? Oh yes, of course, that was what you were doing yesterday evening. Well, really! You behave in a very highhanded way, don’t you, Professor Harding?”
“Mr. Harding, please.”
She blinked at him slowly, as if interrupting herself to absorb this bleak item.
“A debating society is all right for some things, not for such as this. I’m sorry.”
She stood up. “There are things which I am not prepared to debate about also.”
“Of course,” he answered, so visibly uninterested that Essie flushed.
“All this is settled, then?” she demanded.
“Absolutely.” He lay back and scratched his head.
She resumed her seat, nervously lighting a cigarette, rapidly inhaling the smoke. They were silent for a few moments, as she gazed speculatively at him, as though at some not very attractive problem child.
“Am I allowed to know why you have left the University? Were you dismissed?”
He shook his head. “No. I have dismissed myself.”
“Are you displeased with ... annoyed at anything?”
He laughed. “Displeased? Yes, highly displeased. But not specifically with the University. It is what I am obliged to teach that displeases me.”
“What they have asked you to teach! What is it?”
“No, you have misunderstood me. It is history itself I am displeased with. I have no authority to teach the truth. We now arrive at something which involves a great deal of explanation of a technical order …”
“Something entirely over my head. Bir
d brain could not hope to grapple.... I see.”
René had sunk back in his chair, till his shoulders were level with his ears, watchfully checking the course being taken by Hester. Her reactions, however, had been very much what he had expected. From his lazy huddle in the Windsor chair, he straightened himself almost violently, banging his elbows upon the table with force, and clasping his hands at right angles with one another as though he had caught a fly.
“There are three facts regarding which I am afraid there is no possible argument.You are now married to an unemployed man. That is number one. There are no jobs for this out-of-work in this country. That is number two. Number three is the said man will in about two months sail for Canada.You may add to these facts if you like, a fourth: another world war is about to break out — as they say.”
“As to that last fact, René, I have something to say.”
“Yes.”
“It does not happen to be a fact, I think.”
“No? Evidently I must be mistaken.”
“I think you are. Most people do not think there will be a war. Stephen, for instance, was telling me the other day that Hitler’s aeroplanes are all made of ersatz — is that the right word?
They often drop to pieces in mid-air.”
“Indeed? How very interesting.”
“It is, isn’t it. Stephen also told me that the uniforms of the German soldiers are ersatz, too. They have no raw materials, so practically everything is ersatz. Actually, the cloth of their tunics is a sort of paper. Stephen said a friend of his had seen them marching along the street and suddenly it came on to rain. They all got under cover in an archway. Had they not done so their uniforms would have dropped to pieces once the rain had soaked into them. You laugh, but I really think you ought to listen to what is said by eyewitnesses, René.”
René, who had been laughing, rubbed his face, and came out of the rub purged of mirth.
“Now listen, Hester, you old goose. When the Englishman hears all these stories, specimens of which you have been retailing, what does the simple fellow think? Well, the answer is pretty obvious. He says to himself: ‘Oh well, if it does come to a war, it’s going to be a walk-over for us. All their planes will drop to pieces, their uniforms will melt, their rifles will explode and kill them as soon as they pull the trigger, the ersatz shells will never leave the ersatz cannon, and the war will be over in no time. Old Hitler will be hanged, and Germany cut up and shared among the Allies.’ That is what the Englishman will say to himself, is it not: that is what he is intended to say to himself.You see, these stories are what is called propaganda. That means, they are reports invented to influence people, to guide opinion in a specific direction.”
“I know what propaganda means.”
“You know the word,” he corrected her, “but evidently you do not understand it very well. You do not know propaganda when you see it.”
“Oh no?”
“No, otherwise you would not repeat to me what Stephen has told you.Your trustfulness is limitless.”
“But my dear René! Why should Stephen of all people be engaged in such propaganda?”
René shrugged his shoulders.
“Stephen is a parlour pink! It is just as simple as that.”
Hester silently demurred with her mouth, conveying in dumb show that “yes she knew but …”
“Hang it all, Stephen makes no secret of his Party-alignment, does he?”
“Stephen of course is not a Tory, René! But you describe so many people as communists, darling!”
“But so they are. Whether they are officially members of the Party is unimportant. We are passing through a period in which, in England, communist sympathy is fashionable among the young, the educated young. This is not a novel view of mine.
It is generally accepted as being the case.”
Hester’s face was that of a person who had just discovered in her hand a good card which she had overlooked, and which she meant to make the most of.
“Very well,” she answered, with what she intended should be an irritating indolence, “but it is still quite ridiculous to say that Stephen Vickers spends his time disseminating propaganda, in favour of war. Stephen is the last person to fancy himself as a soldier.”
“I agree with you there. But it would not be Stephen who would do the fighting.”
“But I don’t see that, Stephen is young, he knows he would be called up. He would hardly be likely therefore to stir up wars, would he? No. I am afraid you have a bee in your bonnet....”
From being coldly watchful and aloof, he had begun to show signs of a mounting choler. The card she had discovered in her hand was not a new one, it was one which had often been there before. But she had never used it at a moment so liable to enrage him. He now sprang to his feet, glaring down at her. “It is not in the marriage contract that wives should hold the same political views as their husbands,” he told her harshly. “Nor is it necessary for them to display more intelligence than a domestic cat. But they do have, on certain occasions, to keep their big silly mouths closed. It is required to develop sufficient intelligence to know when to do that. And for Heaven’s sake give your eyes a rest, no one wants to see your eyeballs.”
The bedroom door opened. “Oo, Miss,” croaked Mrs. Harradson, balancing backward and forward in the gap, as with the limited mobility of a mechanical toy; her frosty crest, the independent strand of hair which tented up over her occiput, rising and falling, giving her a startled expression when it was most erect. So she advanced, only to fall back, and then advanced again once more to be checked and to retreat holding a witch’s broom. “Ooo, Miss, was you going to harsk Mrs. Beddin’ton ’oos cat ’ad kittens time I was took sick ...”
“Mrs. Harradson!” René shot his arm out towards her, his finger pointing at her pale, narrow, now eerily jeering face.
“Please — shut — that — door!”
Mrs. Harradson fell back as if she had received a blow, the closing of the door coinciding with her eclipse.
Hester, her lips drawn tight over her teeth, rose to her feet, but not with an unladylike abruptness.
“I am afraid you are misbehaving,” she remarked.
René sat down, crossed his legs and looked at her with undiminished hostility. For him, she had been quite aware what she was doing, in her references to Stephen: it was she who had misbehaved — in her persistently ladylike way.
“You provoke misbehaviour,” he said after he resumed his seat.
Hester moved over to the bedroom and pushed the door open; for Mrs. Harradson had apparently set it ajar in order to miss nothing of the ensuing dialogue.
“Mrs. Harradson,” she said in a voice of particular politeness. “Thank you for reminding me about Mrs. Beddington. It was very kind of you. We shall not be wanting a kitten, thank you. Yes, a good cat is a nice thing to have.... Thank Mrs. Beddington very much for keeping the kitten for us.... I am so sorry it is now too large to drown. It is a great pity. But I am sure she will have no difficulty in disposing of a fine young cat.... A good mouser was she? Yes, that of course will count. Everyone wants a mouser.”
Hester pulled the door to. René, who was standing, looked up and said, “I am in no mood to listen to any more idiotic conversations about cats. Unless you have anything you want to say to me, I shall now go to my study.”
Without taking any notice of these remarks, Hester walked with a dignified composure along the wall to the sitting room door, turned the handle (and this is an action which, in such a case, is a trap for those not dignified by nature, for it is impossible to avoid slightly protruding the posterior — but which she accomplished with quiet mastery), entered the room beyond, closing the door behind her neither too gently nor too loudly. This act was entirely lost upon René who was collecting the one or two opened letters and other mail, which he thrust inside the newspapers; this done, he turned and passed out through the front door to his work room across the landing.
The room was only vacant fo
r a few moments; then the bedroom door opened and the charlady was exposed to view. Irony holding her eyebrows high up on her shallow forehead, and her eyes, which first had seen the light in County Mayo, derisively illuminated, she surveyed the empty breakfast table. As if exaggerating her own rachitic mode of locomotion, shooting her head in and out, she rattled over noisily to the sink.
When, crossing the landing, René entered his study, he was trembling slightly. But the tension soon relaxed, out of direct contact with his wife. This was the first occasion on which disagreements between them had taken the form of a “row.”
His training had led to his locking up any irascibility in a frigid silence. On this occasion it had taken a violent form with great unexpectedness; what had enabled it to do so called for an immediate investigation. Why had the control, by now second nature, been found wanting? If his attitude to Hester had hardened into a critical analysis, he was still very attached to her upon the sexual level. Being a man of great natural severity, an eroticism which did not live very easily with it was instinctively resented: and the mate who automatically classified under the heading “Erotics” was in danger, from the start, of being regarded as a frivolous interloper by his dominant intellectuality.
It was thus at the breakfast table that he tended to be harshest with his Hester. The latter unquestionably had not the talent to leave “Erotics” in the bedroom, and to create a neutral climate for herself among the bacon and eggs, the mail, and the morning papers. She had the knack, during the first hour of day, of reminding her husband of what he regarded as an undesirable excess. Her “big baby” eyes, as he described them in his private thoughts, had at this period of great strain tended to irritate him more than usual. It had become almost a parlour game with him of late to set little traps for her and to watch her rush into them.
Self Condemned Page 6
