Free Self Condemned by Wyndham Lewis Page B

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 for 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.
    He now sat staring at his “blotter,” on which, as was his habit, he fiercely “doodled.” He censured himself in the severest manner, more especially for the “eyeballs” part. For at least ten minutes he thus sat, analyzing his behaviour with great care. The conclusion he reached was that this row must be regarded as a danger signal of the first order. Ex-professors had just as much need of discipline as had professors. Was he by any chance afraid that Essie might leave him and was he reacting against such a feeling by rudeness, as it were to scorn the thing he feared? He rejected that at once, for he experienced no pang at the thought of Hester’s departure. The response he received to further testing was that the great crisis in his affairs dwarfed into insignificance any merely domestic crisis. He would keep Hester at his side, if Hester would stop. But that was all. That settled, with a sigh he turned to the newspaper. But this interlude of self-examination did not proceed in the mechanical way in which, deprived of its density, it must seem to have done. Other matters intruded and were expelled. At one point he gave himself up to a fascinating doodle, and so forth. But academic life had compelled him to be methodic; and if it would be untidy to leave some unorthodox happening unexplained he would force himself to sit down and attempt to reduce it to logical proportions. It was not at all his nature to be methodical: as a consequence his life was a little over-full of the apparatus of method.
    But the paper lay