Self Condemned

by Lewis, Wyndham

  René sawed his forefinger from side to side, a reinforced form of a shaking of the head. “You must devote a little more time, Professor, to this subject. This question has been finally answered, you probably believe, once and for all, in one of the supreme dramas of the present century. I refer to the struggle in Russia between the Bolshevists and the Menshevists. Both were revolutionists, but when, with unexpected completeness and suddenness, success was theirs, the manner in which Russia was to be ruled had to be decided. The Bolshevists, a small party, were in favour of a government as autocratic as that of the Tsars — in favour of taking power and ruling ruthlessly, just like those they had overthrown (or even more so). And their view prevailed, the Menshevists rejecting with disgust the arguments in favour of the use of power. You would say that the idea in my latest book is to reverse this situation: that, with me, it would be the Menshevists, with their compunction, their idealisms, who would rule.”

  “Yes, that does seem to follow, does it not, Professor?” McKenzie agreed.

  “You would also say that my ‘mild, intelligent, trustworthy men,’ as I think you described them, would, in order to rule, be compelled to acquire the unscrupulous ferocity of the typical ruler.You would say that, when it comes to a showdown, it will always be the Bolshevist type of good man who secures power, and that the sort of ruler I envisage is impossible, because a good man who is scrupulous and gentle could never wield power.”

  “Yes, I should say that,” smiled McKenzie.

  “But, as we know, to associate ferocity, lack of any compunction and so on (as in the case of the Bolshevist) with what is called ‘idealism,’ with an extreme programme of social justice, cancels out. It results in zero. The high aims with which the revolution started cannot coexist with the wholesale coercion necessary to check counter-revolution. A rule of iron eventuates in a society no better than the feudal society overthrown.”

  “So social justice is impossible, and we shall never be able to get away from barbarity?” Professor McKenzie enquired.

  “Not unless some change in the balance in our Western society occurs, as a result of the horrible extremes of destruction which we are now approaching — turns the tide against violence in all its forms. It has seemed to me that in the West, and especially on this continent, there is an awakening which amounts to an Enlightenment. It is easy to be sceptically amused as to the existence of such an awakening. But I believe that this war, or perhaps the next, will make the continuance of the monstrosities in question impossible.”

  Professor McKenzie lay back in his chair, indicating his acquiescence that the argument should cease at this point. René sprang up, and with agitated strides went over to the window. He looked out for some minutes; then, with an equal precipitation, he returned to his chair.

  Mr. Furber turned his head, and with his large, blankly enquiring eyes followed René’s rush to the window, and then followed him back again to his chair. “You are disturbed, Professor Harding? Something in your talk caused you to rush across the room?” Mr. Furber purred.

  Every once in a while René became acutely conscious of Mr. Furber. Things would happen which reawakened his curiosity; and on this occasion, as he re-seated himself, and found the owl-like glance focussed upon him, he was impelled to turn Mr. Furber over in his mind for the fifth, or was it the sixth, time. Certainly Mr. Furber’s mask most successfully suggested a distinct, and possibly a new zoological species. His large and lustreless dark eyes brooded blankly, allowing one to divine a lazy but inquisitive brain, belonging to some aloof, observant, mildly interested creature of owl-like habits. A long, shapeless, black beard hung down lifelessly, concealing his neck and collar. As it stretched downwards from the base of his nose, this practically mouthless expanse threw the onus of expression upon the eyes. These hung reticent, with very little comment, secretive but harmless, above the weedy, pendant growth.The emotionless dull red of the mouth existed irrelevantly in this; the India-rubber lips secreted no saliva and moved very little.

  While he was with this queer creature René always felt that he was engaged in field work as an amateur naturalist. It was like being a bird-watcher, and Mr. Furber a great dreary owl. For all the latter’s lethargy, his indolent remoteness, he concealed behind the blank discs of his eyes the gentle gaminerie of a spirited young lady of eighteen or nineteen; and there were violent streaks of canaillerie as well. Was he a soft, good-natured, “impish,” old shit? No: he was not susceptible of a worldly classification after that manner. One cannot speak of an owl as a shit, for instance.

  So René was tremendously conscious of Mr. Furber suddenly, because this big weedy object was sluggishly interfering with him, at a moment when his mind was inflamed, and was attempting to pounce on something, as yet undetected; and the acuity of his attention was diminished by the intrusion into the field of vision of a bearded idiot-child, of huge proportions. The idle man-watching (and if birds are watched why should not men be watched?) of this irresponsible aesthete, to whose den they had come, resulted in his intellect being drawn away from an important object, and riveted upon an unimportant object. In other words, the mental energy mobilized to cope with the great dilemma was diverted into an angry analysis of the blandly gaping Mr. Furber. Professor McKenzie was momentarily forgotten.

  “There is a problem,” he told Mr. Furber, “a major problem, and I once regarded myself as the man destined to solve it. Three years have passed during which my mind has been asleep. Professor McKenzie here woke it up with a start. I believed I saw something which I had not seen before. I was somewhat excited. I went to the window….”

  “Why do you go to the window?”

  “Why do you go to the window?” René retorted, in what seemed a silly tu quoque.

  “I do not go to the window,” Mr. Furber answered.

  “Well, I do. I always go to the window if perplexed,” René remarked.

  “You went to the window? Why did you go to the window, Professor?” Mr. Furber spoke gently, as if talking to a patient.

  “Has the window a mystical attraction for you, Professor?”

  McKenzie asked.

  René turned to him, grimacing que-voulez-vous-ishly.

  “Whenever I am pursuing some idea, if it escapes me it always vanishes through the window.”

  “Don’t you ever feel inclined to pursue it?” Mr. Furber enquired owlishly.

  “I have so far resisted the impulse to plunge after them out of the window.” René looked darkly at the window, at Mr. Furber’s large and lowering window; and Mr. Furber, who now appeared to feel that these Professor fellows had finished their performance, and had better be sent packing, rose majestically, remarking, “I must get to work, I suppose,” and, specifically, to his pseudo-secretary, “Another parcel of books from New York has just arrived. It looks as though it might be a very interesting parcel.” He gently moved towards the library, and the Professors, who had risen, moved gently in his wake.

  “I wonder if you and your wife will come and have a meal with us, Professor?” murmured McKenzie, and they proceeded at once to fix a day.This was a turning-point in the epic of Momaco; the social void was to be filled with friendly faces, and the first face was that of this agreeable Scot. None of the rancour felt by his wife embittered for René this transition, only contempt for Mr. Furber was experienced by him, for that bush-toff, because of his brutal omission; for of course Mr. Furber should long ago have made their life more bearable by putting them in touch with a few chosen people. And then of course René’s attitude towards the academics (unknown to him) who so passionately held down their jobs, and closed their ranks against the stranger of renown — for them his attitude hardened if anything. René’s mind was absorbed by these considerations, as they passed through the library, and Furber’s new consignment of books faded away into thin air.

  Professor McKenzie lived on the Hill, so he and René parted at the foot of the steps outside, where a little fresh snow was beginning to fall; René very
warmly shaking his hand.

  Heading rather precipitately down the hill, the author of The Secret History of World War II was in a mental turmoil; and the more chaotic the brainstorm grew, the more his speed increased, until he was in imminent danger of slipping upon the ice, and rolling down the hill instead of walking down it.

  Since his last talks in England, over four years ago, he had had no contact of any kind with anyone more scholarly than the mushy Mr. Furber. Needless to say it was impossible to communicate with that stylistic owl-man. When at last, after these years of dumbness, the silence was broken, and communication began again (as he and Professor McKenzie disputed), the ideas hurt as they sprang up, arguments were painfully forced out of a rusty dialectical machine. A rough parallel to this would be the case of a man who had been wrecked upon a desert island and never spoken for many years, until at last a ship anchored off the coast of the island, and the castaway found himself speaking once more: lips, larynx, vocal chords, sinuses, tongue, all going into action again together after this portentous lapse, would do their work in astonished familiarity.

  But it was the subject of this first act of communication which was so moving. All his life-work (so long neglected), and the very heart of what he had always been thinking about as well, had been burst open, as it were, and scrutinized, by a stranger of intelligence. A shaft of hard light had been cast upon an intellectual structure, and it had shocked him into seeing what he had never seen quite so objectively before. Now that he was alone, he attempted to arrange what he had seen, and to arrive at some immediate judgment.

  It was rather similar to Dunne’s problem of recording dreams. Upon waking, the most vivid dream fades with extraordinary rapidity. Usually ten or twelve seconds is all one has to turn an objective eye on and to describe the main features of the dream one has just had. Often its disappearance is far more speedy than that, and a few seconds are sufficient for it to vanish entirely.

  At the end of his conversation with McKenzie, René was in the situation of the awakened dreamer. There had been a revelation of some kind. The mind was in a peculiarly sensitive condition, as if about to attain for him a new insight. But the “interference” of the mischievous owl had stopped him before he could see what was as it were hovering indistinctly in the atmosphere. So now, rushing along over the snow and ice, the snowfall also increasing somewhat in density, he hoped that he might recapture what had escaped him under the ironical scrutiny of Mr. Furber’s disintegrating futility. But anyone who has vainly attempted to call back from oblivion a dream, startlingly life-like for the few seconds it survived in waking life, will understand that nothing, neither standing on one’s head, nor any other physical ordeal, will restore what has so abruptly clicked out. The memory is in league, it seems, with dreams, for nothing will persuade it to function regarding what has occurred during sleep. As he hurried forward, in place of what he hoped might be vouchsafed him again, was the face of Mr. Furber.

  He reached the Laurenty fatigued and discouraged. As he entered the sitting room of their apartment, snow on his hat and shoulders, Hester’s quizzical stare, that new phenomenon, irritated him more than usual. She was celebrating a victory for which his dismal expression was responsible — an eloquent comment, she felt, upon how well his new social enterprises were going!

  René sat silent until she brought in the tea. After he had swallowed three cups (chain-drinking) he was restored, and enabled to meet her stare on equal terms.

  “You look rather tired, my pet,” he observed.

  “You feel better now?” she answered.“When you came in, tired is not the word I should have used to describe what you looked like.

  I should have said that you seemed on the brink of collapse.”

  “Indeed?” said René, still smiling comfortably. “Mr. Furber’s house is a good way away, and I rushed along to tell you the good news. Our first invitation to dinner in Momaco!”

  “After three years and a half. — How delightful! I do hope you accepted.”

  “It was not by people like McKenzie that we have been ostracized. He is a surprisingly nice chap, who arrived long after us.”

  “Is that why you looked so radiantly happy when you came in at that door a quarter of an hour ago?”

  “Purely physical, my dear Hester, I had just been walking hard,” he answered, “forgetful of the fifteen below.”

  “So you said just now, darling,” she said in a wan tone winch announced defeat, but not resignation.

  A little later he went into the bedroom and lay down. It was very unusual for him to do this: he only lay down on the bed in the daytime when unwell. His purpose at present was to isolate himself, and to make another attempt to secure contact with a mind lit up by controversy and on the verge of discovery. But this withdrawal disturbed his wife, as he should have seen that it would: and before he had time to get his intellect in focus there was Hester standing beside him, scrutinizing his face with anxious eyes.“What is wrong, René?” she asked him.“Aren’t you well?”

  He rolled off the bed with an exasperated laugh. “Absolutely nothing is wrong, excepting that when I am attempting to contact my muse, someone intrudes, and asks me what is the matter with me! That is what is wrong.”

  Hester was relieved, denying herself the regulation pique of the officious wife. His arm around her shoulder, René propelled her into the sitting room. There he explained to her the cause of his withdrawal. It was a little difficult to be explicit, but he made her see what was happening, what an unsatisfactory role the memory was playing, and how a little seclusion was to be desired.

  Hester cheered up with surprising suddenness. The word work was, for her, a magic vocable — work, that is, with its old significance; the sort of work which he had always done before he came to Momaco. Indeed, a big factor in the formation of her implacable hatred for Momaco was precisely that no work could be done there. Momaco — the place which was the grave of a great career: the barren spot where you ceased to think, to teach, or to write, and just rotted away. So the news that thinking was at last going on again filled her with indescribable joy. This rebirth of his normal intellectual life would surely, sooner or later, lead him back to England. For there was no Public here; no publishers, no anything that is necessary for such enterprises — bold and dazzling enterprises — which were as natural to her husband as they were necessary. Hester felt happier than she had at any time since the fire. She even began to make plans for finding a new home, when they got back to England; one nearer to King’s Road, Chelsea, a better shopping neighbourhood for her, and where she would be within easier reach of her friend Susan.

  The fact that Professor McKenzie’s wife was an Englishwoman, and one who had come out to this deadly spot since the outbreak of war, caused her almost to look forward to their dinner engagement.

  XXV

  DINNER AT THE MCKENZIES

  Two days later, in the evening at six o’clock, Hester was examining herself in the glass, in a way she had not done since, in her stateroom on the Empress of Labrador, she was getting ready to accompany a Knight of the Legion of Honour into the first-class restaurant of the ship. It was now a different face from what it had been then. The stare remained, but it was no longer one of ladylike vacuity. It now was purposeful. The purpose was to escape from Momaco merely, but it might have been that of a woman confined in an iron chest, bracing herself to push up the portentously heavy lid.

  René, on his side, was taking his evening suit out of the clothes closet, wondering how much weight he had lost, and looking to see whether the moth had eaten a hole in the middle of the back. When at length he had tied his black tie and put on his jacket, and moved over to the long glass, he saw what the world would consider a very distinguished-looking figure — tall, well-shaped, with elegant, well-brushed beard. This life-size Royal Academy portrait of Professor René Harding impressed him disagreeably — it stepped, for him, straight out of the past of foolish ambitions, and of metropolitan self-importance. B
ut Hester, who was watching him, from where she was sitting attempting to put a discreet gleam on to her nails, did not share his disgusts. With her hands immobilized, she sat following him with her eyes: then one tear, and after that another, began to roll down her cheek. She put down the shammy leather pad, dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief and then jumped up. Going over to her husband she exclaimed, “Darling, you look wonderful!”

  “I’m afraid I do.”

  “Don’t be silly, René.” She kissed the splendid object, upon the beard not far from the mouth — a mouth worthy of an air marshal. “René darling,” she said coaxingly, “do wear your decoration! I will go and get it for you.” He was speechless with indignation — literally he desired ardently to protest with enormous violence, but something stuck. The scene in the restaurant of the liner rose up in his memory, in all its shameful absurdity. He must put that disgraceful emblem in the waste paper basket; or still better make a present of it to the hotel proprietor. A woman is always on the side of the lousy world. And then of course they want to demonstrate that their man is a bigger shot than the other woman’s husband. So he stood, preparing to stamp on the decoration when it arrived. But Hester, who was in the bedroom, could not at once put her hand on the ribbon, and René had begun to think of something else. All of this was giving Hester a great deal of pleasure. More pleasure than she had experienced for many a long day. This was all helping to reconcile her, to make her accept life in this detestable dump. And so, after all, if the Legion of Honour can be utilized to gild the road upward, from the winter of their discontent in Momaco No. I to Momaco No. II, which might become, if not “glorious summer,” at least not quite so oppressive a spot — well, if the wretched decoration would help to that end, why not bedeck himself with it — at the risk of appearing someone he was not to McKenzie?