The Final Hour

  Mr Hawkins was very surprised. He stared at Peter with astounded disbelief. ‘But, you would first have to change human nature. And thus far, in human history, I haven’t discovered any sign of that change. It seems to me that we must predicate all social advances on the fixed facts of human personality. You can’t go against the grain, you know, even if your ideas are sublime and beautiful. Unless,’ and the frozen light-blue of his eyes was wintry, ‘you can use force.’

  ‘We’ve used force to do evil things. Why can’t we use force to accomplish good things?’ demanded Peter.

  Mr Hawkins paused, and there was a curious expression about his mouth. ‘It seems to me I’ve heard that before, somewhere. Didn’t Hitler say that?’

  Peter flushed darkly. ‘I’m afraid that you don’t understand, Cornell.’

  But Mr Hawkins merely lifted his glass and drank appreciatively. It was the most damnable thing, but there really was little difference between good zealots and evil zealots, he reflected. They were equally dangerous to human welfare. Both were inimical to the slow and tortuous advance of human society through free will and gradual liberty. They left no margin for choice.

  ‘I’ve always hated coercion, of any kind,’ said Mr Hawkins, meditatively. ‘Whether that coercion was for good or for evil. Even “good” coercion is an insult to human dignity. That’s why I’ve never approved of Mr Roosevelt’s methods.’

  Peter’s face had become stiff with irritation. But Mr Hawkins was tactful. He changed the subject. There was no use arguing with a fanatic, even if that fanatic was a virtuous man. Mr Hawkins was becoming even more distrustful of virtuous men than of amoral ones. He regretted this, for it increased his cynicism. He was fast coming to the point where he would affirm nothing and believe nothing. He realized, that if such an attitude brought eventual peace, it would also bring inertia, a spiritual stupefaction. It was necessary to life to believe in something.

  He said: ‘When do you believe there will be a real activity in Europe? So far, the Germans and the French just stare at each other over the Maginot Line.’

  Now a dark tint, as of imminent dissolution, spread over Peter’s features. His hands began to move aimlessly and weakly among the silverware. He was like a man who cannot rid himself of an eternal nightmare. ‘I don’t know,’ he muttered. ‘Who knows?’ Suddenly, he lost control of himself and put his hands momentarily against his eyes, pressing them in deeply. ‘I can’t stand it,’ he said, inaudibly. ‘There is something terrible—’

  He dropped his hands, and said: ‘I have a friend in France. He’s in Paris, now. Baron Israel Opperheim. I was able to help his son out of Germany. I’ve tried to get Israel to leave. In his last letter to me, he hinted he was almost persuaded. But one never knows about Israel. He is a cynic.’

  Mr Hawkins’ interest was aroused. What Peter had said was provocative. But he said no more. Yet Mr Hawkins, with sudden clarity, felt Baron Opperheim’s mysterious ‘cynicism’ all through his own consciousness, though he could not put it into words. He was filled with comprehending sadness, a kind of strange communion with that unknown Opperheim in threatened Paris. And he had another peculiar sensation: he believed, implicitly, that Baron Opperheim must have gazed at Peter with Mr Hawkins’ own and present reflectiveness.

  Outside the tall and shrouded windows a wet and January blizzard was falling, and the air was gloomy and dim. Mr Hawkins watched the large and heavy snowflakes dropping inexorably. There was something of the mystic in him. He felt the death and implacable sorrow of the mournful day all through his flesh and spirit, and the sick hopelessness of the perceptive and intelligent man was like the taste of dry ashes in his mouth.

  CHAPTER XXXV

  Celeste wandered restlessly in the conservatory of the great new house on Placid Heights. She carried a basket with her, and under the truculent eye of the gardener she cut hothouse roses. She did not particularly like hot-house roses; they gave her the vaguely gruesome feeling that always attended on her contemplation of the unnatural. These thorns were weak and flaccid, a simulation of defence, as if the flowers knew instinctively that there was nothing against which they need defend themselves. They were meticulously tended; their natural enemies would never attack them; all danger of hostile environment, which would have strengthened them, given them vigour and lusty life, had been eliminated. No wonder, then, that they were feeble, too delicate and too decadent. That hostile environment of the fields, coupled with the struggle for existence and the competition natural among all forms of vital life, made roses colourful and full of resistance and health, made their thorns weapons of sturdy defence, made their branches sinewy and fibrous with the urgent determination to live and survive, made them exude the heavy and intoxicating scent which these vapid weaklings would never possess.

  Celeste found the thought very interesting. She paused in her cutting to gaze unseeingly through the cloudy glass to which the wet and heavy snowflakes clung. Suppose the idealists and the theorists had their way, and human life were bereft of the necessity to struggle for existence, and all vigorous competition were eliminated. Suppose humanity were protected from the natural forces that threatened it, and a hostile environment. Suppose, since that hostile environment was removed, that the weak could then survive. Would not humanity, like these hot-house roses, become flaccid, possessed of a decadent and feeble spirit, lacking colour and vitality and health and vigour? Would it not become uniform, without interest and variety, in such a society? Would not the surviving weaklings, coddled, pampered and inherently inferior, yet possessed of their strange ability to procreate lavishly, finally outnumber and inundate their superiors?

  As such a dangerous soft environment was artificial, it would not survive under stress. And stress eventually came. When it arrived, would not these enfeebled men die at once, having been robbed of their natural weapons of defence, their health and toughness and sinewy resistance?

  Yes, it was an interesting thought. Celeste’s smooth black brows drew together in her concentration. She would argue this out with Peter. Once, he had believed this, as she, herself, now believed it. But lately he had become excited and querulous, and had vehemently pleaded the cause of the hot-house rose. Man had a right to be protected from his natural enemies; he had a right to demand from his rulers that his environment be made easy and sweet and comfortable. He had a right to insist that ‘unfair’ competition be removed. In other words, thought Celeste, with cool disgust, it was man’s right that he should be spoon-fed with pap, that he should recline in unearned comfort, and cling, like a fat vulnerable slug, to the stem of the social order. Why? Simply because he was man! And, because he was man, he was inherently superior to the lesser beasts that struggled naturally and healthily with a hostile environment, and derived vigour from the struggle!

  Did Peter now, once possessed of some measure of realism, plead this insane and foolish premise because he felt the deathly increase of weakness in himself, felt the stronger pangs of dissolution? Perhaps it was always the weak and dying rose that pleaded that his stronger fellows were wronging him in crowding him out and stretching towards the light with all the passion of their unblighted stems. And demanded, also, that those unblighted stems be cut back, that the bright and colourful bud be lopped off in order that the worm-eaten bloom be given an opportunity to unfold its diseased petals without competition, and fill the garden with their sick and decaying scent.

  Celeste, despite her love and pity for her husband, felt the strong stirring of dissent and impatience in herself. Then, she decided not to argue with Peter. He would be so exhausted when he returned from New York. She sighed, turned away from the roses, and laid the cut blossoms on the gritty wooden table. She did not want them. If they stood on her tables, she would be reminded of the argument, and would feel again that stirring of passion and anger and impatience.

  She felt changed and much older. She remembered herself as a young girl, and her mouth twisted with irritability. Was it always the ignorant that es
poused the cause of the weaklings? The untried, the innocent and the deluded? She did not know. Some thought nagged her, with its vagueness. Was Henri influencing her? She felt a warm tremor over her tired body, and a quickening of her heart.

  She went into one of the hushed dim drawing-rooms and drew aside a curtain. The grounds had not yet been landscaped; that was a project for the spring. The winter had fallen all about and over the new greystone house, had forgotten and ignored it, covering the long slope to the valley, as it had done for centuries before, with a heavy and glimmering wave of snow. The driveway was still only gravel; its sunken path was faintly visible in wet dark streaks and smooth scalloped edges of whiteness. The ancient trees had not yet been moved or cut down, and as they bent under the snow they were like old gaunt men bending under the weight of time. The early winter twilight stood over the house, the white dropping hills and the twisted iron trees, like a fathomless depth of grey still water, in which dimension, distance and substance were lost and all objects had acquired the wavering and indistinct forms of dreams. The valley at the end of the long slope was lost in a kind of grey opaque mist. Nothing moved or stirred in that smothering silence except the dropping flakes of snow. There was no wind. Isolated though the house was, stranded like a desolate hulk on petrified and rounded white waves which extended endlessly into space and time, Celeste yet had the dismaying sensation that it was really enclosed in a vast glassy ball filled with drifting fog which rolled in upon it from every surface.

  Behind her, as she stood at the windows with their diamond-shaped panes, the house extended, as shapeless, as dreamlike, as empty as the other world. It was a house of shadows. She heard the crackling of a fire on a distant hearth in the great still room, but it had no verity for her. Through all her senses she felt the unreal curving of the tremendous staircase in the hall beyond the room, the upper corridors, the rooms opening off them, the dining-room and the library, the morning-room and the terraces. Yet, she could not believe in their existence. It was all a dream. Nothing really existed except her trapped consciousness in a dull universe without form or substance. Somewhere, in the depths of the house, servants moved noiselessly. But still Celeste could not believe in their existence.

  A curious and frozen fear pervaded her, a sort of alert lifelessness and awareness. She felt herself longing desperately for a human face, a human voice. Peter was still in New York. She had only to order a car, she thought, to be in the city within a short time. But the thought brought her no relief. A heavy lethargy was upon her. She could not make herself believe there was any city beyond that shadowy mist below.

  Finally, she could not even believe in her own existence. The diffusion outside diffused her. She felt her personality silently and softly disintegrating, so that all its cells moved and prepared to drift away. Yet deep in herself was a hot core of drugged pain.

  She was only dully surprised to discover that she was weeping. The pain in her heart strengthened, but she did not know what caused the pain. She dared not analyse and examine it. She only knew that she could not endure this house, that she had never been able to endure it, that she had dreaded it from the moment the first stone had been laid. She had hoped, vaguely, and from the very first, that she would never have to live in it, and when the day of entering had arrived, she had been ill with a kind of inexplicable horror. Its beauty was, to her, the fantastic beauty of a nightmare, grotesque and unreal. Yet, it was a simple and majestic building, and she had chosen all of its furnishings herself, had made all the arrangements. But she had done all this in the depths of fantasy, and without joy.

  Without joy. Yes, all her life had been without joy, until she had known Henri. And that joy had been one with pain and suffering. Her tears came faster now. But she was not weeping for herself. She could not have told why she wept. The snow fell swifter and more inexorably beyond the win dow. It did not glitter. It was only a pall of death. She felt its death all through herself.

  She thought of the war, the ‘phony’ war, where terrible antagonists gazed at each other in speechless silence, and waited. Even the war was unreal to her. She could not feel its imminence, its reality. She thought of Peter; he, too, was a shadow. However, the pain leapt in her heart like a startled thing.

  She was not aware, for some moments, that she had been staring at a pinpoint of light twinkling far below the house, a pinpoint that wavered from side to side, and was increasing in brightness. When she was fully conscious of it, she could hardly believe it. Who would be coming up here on this desolate winter day? She was expecting no one. Her relatives and friends always called up first before visiting her.

  She watched the light coming closer. Now, far down on the slope, she could see the struggling black shape of a car, leaping on the ruts, falling, swaying, its lights piercing the foggy gloom, and surrounded by a dim aura through the snow. She pressed her face against the cold panes of glass. Could it be Henri? But Henri was in Washington. He had called her only that morning.

  The wheels of the car had found the gritty driveway, and it was ploughing heavily upward. Celeste could hear the labouring of the motor, its muffled roaring. It was having a hard time negotiating the frozen ruts and the slipping gravel. Then, with a triumphant hoarse heave, it had swung about before the house, and had stopped.

  It was a large black limousine, like a hearse. And now Celeste recognised it. It belonged to her brother, Emile. But why should Emile, who was perfectly indifferent to her, and for whom she felt nothing at all except a dull dislike, be visiting her? The chauffeur was climbing out of the car. He was opening the door. The tall black figure of a woman was alighting with difficulty, for the car was tilted to one side in the drifts. It was Agnes, Emile’s wife.

  Agnes Bouchard! Agnes, whom she had always dreaded and avoided, the cynical hard Agnes with the cruel amused eyes. Why should she be visiting her young sister-in-law, whom she openly disdained and found excessively boring?

  Celeste turned on the lights, and the great quiet living-room sprang into warmth and pleasant stillness. Even the fire took on courage and leapt upward. The snow and the death were lost behind windows suddenly dark and protecting. Now the whole house became real and tangible, solid and strong, no longer a diffused and misty outline of walls. Little as she liked Agnes, Celeste yet felt a pleasure in this approach of another human being. She heard Agnes’ voice in the quiet hall, a brisk clipped voice with its undertone of wryness and humour. That voice no longer made her shrink. She advanced towards the archway with a welcoming smile.

  Agnes appeared. Though she was no Bouchard by birth, but only by marriage, she had all the attributes of the ‘Latin’ Bouchards. She was somewhat tall, and possessed a compact and excellent figure, very chic and slender. She was now about forty-nine years old, but there was a briskness and avidity about her which made her appear much younger. She moved with swiftness and lightness. Her narrow white face, with its long ‘harpy’ nose and patrician thinness, had a cruel and alert look, cynical and shrewd, and there was no gentleness in the thin thread of her twisted lips, so violently painted. Her hard and bold black eyes had a predatory gleam in them, disingenuous and malicious. Agnes Bouchard had no faith in human nature, nor in any of its ‘virtues.’ She did not believe that it possessed any altruism or kindness or justice or mercy, or even decent honesty, nor that it had more intelligence than a monkey. She found it rather regrettable, but amusing, too, that the only good men she had ever encountered had been fools, and impotent. ‘The children of darkness are wiser in their generation that the children of light,’ she would quote, with conviction, and no sadness at all. She found no difficulty in adjusting herself to such a dark and menacing world, and was constantly mirthful about it, because she was a clever woman of considerable intellect and much knowledge. In many ways she was much like her younger relative-by-marriage, Rosemarie Bouchard, except that she was a wiser woman and possessed of much innate integrity and forthrightness and open disdainful courage, and that there was no sadism in her such
as there was in Rosemarie. She had for her husband a kind of affectionate scorn and indifference, and a cold and vicious contempt for her dull but dangerous son, Robert, the familiar and slave of Antoine Bouchard.

  She brought brickness, coolness and movement into the room with her. She had not removed her smooth black fur coat; it fell back to reveal her smart black dress and scarlet scarf. There was a Russian hat of the same fur on the perfect white coiffure with its silvery waves. She was removing her black kid gloves; it was evident, however, that she was not remaining very long.

  ‘Agnes,’ said Celeste, extending her hand, real pleasure shining over the ivory planes of her face. ‘I’m so glad you came. But what an awful day.’

  Agnes’ piercing eyes flashed over her young sister-in-law, and there was a minatory brightness in them. The scarlet thread of her lips curled. ‘You won’t be so glad I came in about five minutes,’ she said, with hard and disdainful curtness. She moved to the fire, rubbed her hands, stared about the room. ‘A nice place,’ she commented. ‘I probably won’t be seeing it again.’

  Celeste was startled. All her life, she had felt dread at the sound of cruel and relentless voices, and the old shrinking, the old tension, made all her nerves tighten defensively. ‘Why, Agnes? What is wrong?’

  Agnes continued to rub her hands. The act made a dry and rustling sound in the room. She had begun to smile, her predatory profile outlined against the fire. Then she turned her head again and stared at Celeste with brutal curiosity, as if the younger woman had been an object which aroused her amusement, contempt and wonder. The inexplicable dread in Celeste increased. She retreated involuntarily. Agnes moved away from the fire and sat down in a chair, her excellent back straight and alert. Celeste seated herself also, and waited, her hands pressing one upon the other.