“Are you not a group?” his sister asked, smiling.
“I was a group, a university. But when I wished, or when I felt compelled to cease to be that, I had to isolate myself, of course, and think the matter out by myself.”
“But ...”
“But there was the domestic group, that is what you were about to say, Mary. I know. But I had to think the matter out in isolation from that. For
that
group would merely have pushed me back into the other group. The morals of all groups are the same.
If you wish to act upon a heroic moral plane ...”
“Oh,
là là
!” Mary broke in with an unexpected boisterousness.
The Professor smiled at the sisterly heckle.
“I was not using the word ‘heroic’ with any sentimental accent. Only to define. The same applies to the word moral. You cannot help choosing the moral, rather than its opposite. I am afraid that I derive none of the average satisfactions from heroic moral action. I am a hero
malgré moi
.”
He ho-ho-ho’ed faintly, and mother and sister smiled.
“Anyhow, there it is. It is stupid of us to take this tragically. Probably I shall get along well enough outside the academic fold. For the world I am leaving, I am a finished man. But do not let us take that too seriously. I know at my age I should have grown up: of course I should. But you do not have to worry about this situation so much as you are preparing to do.”
Mary began to cry again. But her mother said to her, “René is right. We do not help matters by taking this so tragically.”
“Or anything so tragically as is usually the case,” he smiled.
“Perhaps you are right,” his mother sighed.
“What a philosophy!” protested Mary, with lifted eyebrows and ironic smile.
“But, but, he has not committed murder or robbed a bank!” The mother answered her almost testily.
Mary laughed up at her mother, and exclaimed, “All right, I have been behaving like an idiot. All René has done is to throw a chair of history out of the window. What is there in that?”
They all laughed, almost merrily.
“Ah,
voila
!” René cried. “You see, we are emerging from the mist that we ourselves have created!”
“Not quite that.” His mother shook her head sombrely. “But still, there are always several ways of looking at anything.”
“Let us not pass so precipitately from the black picture to the very rosy one we are approaching now,” said Mary, standing up. Her brother rose, standing with his hands in his jacket pockets. She gazed at him, and as he raised his head, for he had been staring at the floor, they looked at one another for a moment. She did not answer his smile with another smile, but began speaking instead. “I want to hear more about this, René,” she said. “I am not at all sure I have understood. Will you and Hester come to dinner? I think next Tuesday would be all right, but I will telephone.”
“I am free on Tuesday.”
“I would like you to have a talk with Percy.”
René bowed his head. Mary returned to her mother’s side and thrust her face down and kissed her where the aged cheek was hollow, patting her clenched hands as they rested upon the margin of the hollow lap. As Mary moved away René accompanied her, opening the door as they reached it.
“Are you sure I can’t give you a lift? Where are you dining?”
“That would get me there a little before my time,” he answered.
Mary looked back towards her mother as she left the room, fluttering a farewell towards the stationary figure, more immobile than usual. Closing the door, René went to a tray and poured himself a glass of sherry.
Alone with one another, mother and son drew closer together, like two confederates. Mary, though the nearest to them, far nearer than the other two sisters, belonged to the outside world when it came to these two, who were allied in a very special union.
À
deux
, this extraordinary identity became apparent. To commune with one another, everyone else, even Mary, had to be excluded. René drew up a chair, talking to her softly in the language she still liked best to speak, the tongue she had spoken when she was young but which she had found it quite impossible to induce Mr. Harding senior to learn. She patted and caressed his hand, and he almost danced in his chair with pleasure, like a big dog that is caressed. He arched his legs in a rampant attitude, his toes beating for a moment a quick tattoo. Afterwards, he drank his sherry
d’un trait
, as though it had been a cocktail. Both their faces were broken up into deeply engraved masks of civilized irony.What he loved best about this old woman was her robust refusal to be too serious, her gnome-like raillery, her frail gaiety: the something of Voltaire, the something of Fénélon, which is secreted in all those of her race, the grimace of amusement she would wear upon her deathbed, for the same grimace would serve at need for pain. Really they had nothing to say to one another. All they required to do when they were alone was to gaze into one another’s faces and smile an ancestral smile.
However, René began idly to gossip, to enquire about the tiresome new priest, and the even more tiresome physician.
“
Et le prêtre, il t’embête toujours?
” he smiled.
“
Mais non, je l’ai chassé.
”
“
Il est grotesque ce prêtre. Les prêtres anglais sont une race à eux. Ça
doit être difficule d’être catholique chez nous.
”
“
Bien sur. Et puis leur liturgie!
”
“
Pauvre chérie.
”
The newly arrived priest who had complicated his mother’s religious life was discussed for a little and they then turned to the vexations attendant upon the housekeeper’s menopause. After that René enquired about the asthma of the family physician, which made the ascent of the stairs for that poor man a cruel ordeal. This imposed upon Mrs. Harding a less sick doctor.The ailments of the cat were not forgotten: and as their indolent chat moved along, gently playing with absurdity after absurdity, at last the subject of the recent interview was referred to by his mother, but in an almost negligent tone, as if it were floating about in the background of her mind, but were a matter of no great importance.
“One must not take such things
au grand sérieux
.” She seemed to be dismissing the subject. She stopped, turned to him and observed, “We have always been such great friends, René, have we not? I do not know why.You are so like my brother Jacques, whom you never saw.You look at life the same way that he did.” Then suddenly her mind appeared to be traversed by a new thought. She shook her head violently, and exclaimed, “
Il ne faut
pas trop plaisanter, quand même. La vie est dur pour ceux qui la traitent
avec trop de mépris.
”
René ceased to smile. But then a terrible look of surprised enquiry was shot up at him which made him quail.
“You are not by any chance
a fool
, my son?”
Enormously disconcerted René sprang up and gazed down at his mother as though without warning she had slapped his face. She sat peering up at him out of her grimace, her head bent forward.
“Of course I am a fool, my little mother. But calm your fears, I am not too utter a fool to live.”
He bent down and kissed her, then stood in front of her, looking abstractedly over her head.
“I must be going. Hester will be angry if I keep her waiting.
We must not make Hester angry.”
He bent down again and kissed his mother on the forehead.
Neither said any more: he turned and walked rapidly across the floor to the door, erect as though stiffened against some parting shot.
“René,” the old woman cried, as he was passing through the door.“
Ne te fâche pas, n’est-ce pas?
”
“
Tu veux dire avec toi? Quel idée, ma petite mère!
”
He blew a kiss, all the ornamental curves of his beard seeming to centre in his lips, the heavy cheek-bones impending upon the jutting mouth. But the eyes were still distracted.
III
A TAXI RIDE AND A DINNER
AT “LA TOULOUSAINE”
H
e sprang into the taxi and crouched with his hands cupped around his face as it shook and rattled preparatory to starting.
Then he straightened himself, and sat bolt upright, in the centre of the seat. Nature had given its answer. The judgment of his mother uprooted him, as it were. He had to accept detachment from all that his family had meant for him. Or at least this must be so in the deepest sense. She was an ignorant, worldly old woman, it was true. But he remained shaken.
He realized, as he drew very near to himself, in the dark of the obstreperous old vehicle, how his personality must strike other people; his sister, or his mother, for instance. He was
un exalté
, a fanatic, a man apt to become possessed of some irrational idea, which would blind him to everything, as if it were in a delirium. No: he was quite the opposite, or so it would seem. He was a man whose bearded mask was haunted by an ironic smile at all times, as much as was his mother’s, a man inclined to meet with a sceptical eye the enthusiast, every variety of
emportement
. Yet he was now declaring it as his intention to behave in so eccentric a manner that an explanation — a
theory
— seemed to be demanded. It must have been some such mental process, this, which had brought his mother to ask herself whether this “brilliant” and amusing son of hers were not, at bottom, stupid.To be so level-headed, so “realist,” qualifying so little for the term “dreamer,” and yet suddenly to act in a way reminiscent of romantic adolescence, could only be explained by some sudden alteration, some disturbance of the personality, or else, it must signify the presence of some streak which had never been suspected even by those nearest to him. There were only these two explanations available. He forced his face into a bitter travesty of a smile. To be so realistic that you came to appear a dreamer, to be so sceptical that you acted like a man possessed of some violent belief, this was an irony indeed! So to be sitting as he had been just now in a room with his nearest and dearest, calmly and matter-of-factly announcing his line of action, watching dismay and embarrassment deepening upon their faces, he had had the sensation of being demented. He might just as well have been explaining to them that he was really Napoleon Bonaparte, or an isosceles triangle. They could not have been more amazed and shocked.
The taxi crossed the canal bridge and entered the circular road within the precincts of Regent’s Park. René in his cab began to circle around the slumbering Zoo animals, the lions, the elephants, the anthropoid apes, all dreaming of Africa, Siberia, and Malaya, Bengal and the Polar Sea. What was in fact their dream life was in the cages and pools, on the imitation rocks, and in the miniature savannahs of the Zoological Gardens. But
their
real life of course was where lions live under the blazing suns, or where the polar bear prowls upon the ice caps. They step back, when they close their eyes in sleep, into the reality, out of the squalid nightmare of Regent’s Park. Oh, where was
his
real life! For it certainly was not in the restaurant towards which he was speeding. But he soon left behind the sleeping snakes and snoring tigers, and the reflections that their proximity provoked. He began to think that, after all, his lecture room might be his habitat, as the riverside was the water rat’s, and the Prairie was the buffalo’s. As he creaked and banged along in this deliberately archaic London “hackney” vehicle, his mind darted from one absurdity to another. It was human stupidity he was reacting against. Yet he was now obliged to justify himself to a number of persons typically stupid. His darling mother, and dear old Mary as loyal as she was obstinate, were fundamentally as unenlightened as Mrs. Harradson, at least as that concerned the matter in hand. He would not dream of describing himself to Mrs. Harradson as a “hero,” would he? No, but he had just committed that absurdity with his sister, the best woman in the world, but completely deluded.The delusion under which the majority sleepwalked its way from decade to decade, from disaster to disaster, had numbed her mind as much as that of any other Mrs. Everyman. His mother, too, was numbed, was part of the same somnambulism, and age now was super added. No means of enlightening
her
. She was the dearest person in the world, but, to come down to brass tacks, it was
she
who was the fool, not he.This he agreed sounded very conceited, and he had not the least idea how it was that he came to be awake, while all these others slept. It was an explicable accident, it signified no superiority. He just had suddenly woken up.
However, faced with this overwhelming difficulty, he had made use of the term hero, as a stimulus to the imagination. His sister, of course, would regard what he was doing as heroic — that would be her way of thinking of it if she could understand; if her intelligence were not numbed and doped groupishly by mass hypnotism. And her intelligence was quite a good one, as a matter of fact.
So he picked his way among people who could not see: dealing in this way with the blind produced in him sometimes the sensation of being an Invisible Man; at others, of being brutally concrete in an unsubstantial universe. During this period he began to acquire a consciousness of his physical presence which was extremely disagreeable. He thought of himself as an animal among delicate and vapourish humans. Even his hairiness embarrassed him. At times his acute self-consciousness would take the form of feeling that he was on view, an exhibit. He had thought once or twice that Essie had been looking at him in an odd kind of way. And in fact so she had. But the reason for that was not what he supposed, but was merely that she had seen that he was concealing something. Anyone who is inexpertly engaged in covering something up is bound to attract attention, and also to appear absurd. There was nothing he dreaded so much as the absurd, in himself, a part of his French idiosyncratic legacy, exaggerated if anything in the course of its grafting to a British stock. But his growing sense of the absurd in everything was painful and to suspect its presence in himself supremely uncomfortable. Once or twice he had observed Mrs. Harradson and asked himself if he was a male Mrs. Harradson. What was the rational, after all? Where was one to look for the
norm
? The nervous impetuousness of his movements, of which he was perfectly aware, he had once compared with the charlady’s. However, he had concluded, with a laugh, if it is a question of the human kind and its essential absurdity, then of course all right, why should I care? In so absurd a place it was hardly likely that he himself could be otherwise than absurd.