ELIZABETH BOWEN
1117
way is incomprehensible-insanity, depravity, or misplaced cupidity,
something hard and hardening that refuses to melt into its origins
must be the only answer. Only a handful of Englishmen out of mil–
lions actively supported the Nazis, but Miss Bowen hardly seems to
realize the peculiarity of her situation. She looks at he inscrutable
with a cheerful, disparaging glance, confident that it too is a matter
of bad breeding.
Robert Kelway seems both unfamiliar with and embarrassed by
Nazi ideology; he is "English," as thoroughly discomfited by an
ex~reme
position as the author herself. His manner has the dream–
like, humbled and baffled quality of an actor badly miscast in a role
and when he says, " ... look at your 'free' suckers, your democracy
-kidded along from the cradle to the grave," we feel him wince,
wink and shrug; this is clearly not his line. But these few dogmatic
utterances are mere fillers and the real motives for his treason are
found back home, nestling behind the shrubbery and bird baths.
Look for Robert Kelway, the traitor, in the fact that his bumptious
middle-class family thinks of its home only as a poor investment, a
galling swindle to which they are doomed because it would be a
"slight" not to sell for more than they gave. Stella Rodney, the
heroine, meeting her lover's family for the first time and hearing
their conversation about selling the house, thinks, "How
c~n
they
live, anyone live, in a place that has for years been asking to be
brought to an end?" Stella is gentry by extraction and, though up–
rooted by the war and private circumstance, has retained her iden–
tity and pride. "A handsome derelict gateway opening on to grass
and repeated memorials round the walls of a church still gave some
sort of locale, however distant, to what had been her unmarried
name." She is appalled by the Kelways and they are an unappetiz–
ing lot, bulky, clumsy people, though the historical significance of
their watch-dog snappishness is not apparent to me. The author seems
to feel that for all its ovenveening middle-class vanity this family (and
the middle class too?) is socially and humanly menacing; it is a dart–
gerous weight, "suspended in the middle of nothing." Robert Kel–
way, then, has nothing to defend, neither his own kind nor his coun–
try; his indifference to the fate of England is symbolized by his
willingness to sell (sell out?) his family house.
It
is
impossible, I think, to exaggerate the stubborn inadequacy
