Company Parade

by Storm Jameson

  She turned to Penn with a cry of relief and pleasure. He seemed so cool and definite, untroubled, she forgot her vexed mind and clung to him. It was enough happiness not to be alone for this evening.

  He was looking, she thought, young and engaging, and her heart warmed to him. She ran from her room to his, helped him to put away his things, fetched the manuscript of her unfinished novel to show him, talked and talked away, altogether unlike herself.

  ‘Are you going to read this to me?’ Penn asked.

  ‘No, I must finish it.’

  ‘This evening?’ Penn grinned.

  ‘This evening we’ll go out. We’ll enjoy ourselves.’ She gave him a sudden bright look, as though she had felt shy. Deeply moved, he came over to her and kissed her, holding her body against his. It felt light and thin.

  ‘Your dress is too large for you,’ he said smiling. He drew a fold of it between his fingers. ‘Look.’

  ‘I bought it,’ Hervey said, as if that explained enough the question of its size. ‘Where shall we go?’

  ‘Where do you want to go?’ he said, humouring her.

  Hervey knew that he felt pleased with her. He liked her when she let herself behave as a schoolgirl and not when she talked to him about their future and reminded him that he had responsibilities. It hurt his pride and he retorted by refusing to take any interest in them. Actually he could not endure her when she was managing and ambitious. He wanted to knock all that flat in her; to listen patiently to it was one thing he could not do. The more she strove and was anxious, the less he cared. It was as though he felt that her vitality diminished him in some way.

  This evening she tried willingly to please him. If he would look after her for a short time she would be anything he wanted. Very gladly she let herself be young, as if she were still a student. She recalled what she enjoyed doing then, and off they went, in good spirits, to Richmond.

  They had a late tea in the café which provides succulent cakes called maids-of-honour. In the year before the War, when she came here, Hervey had not been able to afford to eat more than one. Determined now to have a fat feast and a jolly banquet, she ordered twelve. ‘When I am old,’ said she, ‘and the doyenne or aunt of English letters, young cake-eating men with an eye to favours will ask each other what does the old girl like, then bring me here, and stuff me to the ears with maids-of-honour. Then I shall—or shall not—praise their books.’

  Alas, the fifth finished her. It was a proper finish. Penn laughed at her look of dismayed greed.

  Afterwards they walked along the towing-path to Kew, The river was still and cloudy, with a barge moving slowly towards London. Hervey lingered to watch it. ‘If we lived like that we should be free,’ she exclaimed.

  ‘You’d tire of it in a week, and of me, at close quarters,’ Penn said.

  ‘The house we lived in until 1917 was almost as small.’

  ‘Yes,’ Penn said, ‘and were you happy? You grumbled day and night. No, no, my dear, you never forget you’re Mary Hervey’s granddaughter. You’d like to be as wealthy as the old girl. And if you were, you’d be as intolerable a bully. You bully me hard enough as it is.’

  Hervey did not say anything. When you accused her she could not defend herself until she had looked to see whether you were right. These words hurt her.

  Penn glanced at her face. ‘All right, puppy,’ he said gently. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. Look here—what did you want from our marriage? Tell me. Tell me now.’

  An extraordinary sensation passed through her, a shiver which began so far below the surface of her life that she felt it in the pit of her stomach before she felt its cold touch on her skin. It was disconcerting and familiar—her nerves had sent out a warning message—something wrong somewhere, hidden from you, it said—wait—listen. The sensation lasted less than a second, while she was looking at Penn. When it went she forgot it.

  ‘Don’t you know?’ she cried. ‘I wanted us to live together and be kind to each other. I don’t know what else a marriage is for. There is so much unkindness.’ She struggled with herself, to find words for what was better without words. ‘I’m safe, so long as you approve of me,’ she said, with a smile.

  ‘Ah,’ Penn said lightly, ‘but do you approve of me? No, no, no, you don’t any more. You think I’m lazy, irresponsible, slack. One of these days you’ll leave me for a cleverer chap. Run away from me, and what will poor Penn do then?’

  ‘I shall never run from you,’ Hervey said quickly.

  The river was empty, and the towing-path empty. Warm stillness lay everywhere. Penn put his arm round her, with a smile. ‘Why won’t you? Tell me.’

  A deep certainty seized her. ‘I couldn’t leave you after we’ve lived together so long,’ she exclaimed. ‘It would do too much damage. It would destroy one of us.’ She looked at him—thinking, odd as the thought was, that it is the dull, tiresome things you do for one another in marriage that seize and hold. ‘Are you beginning to be tired of me?’

  ‘My dear child!’ Penn said.

  They walked on in complete accord. The thought crossed her mind that again Penn had said nothing about leaving the Air Force. She was too anxious for the success of their outing to risk the question. Perhaps in the morning he would speak of it. She felt closer to him again, as if their conversation had been important—a revelation.

  Chapter VII

  Richard

  Richard Vane, son to Hervey and Penn, was between three and four years old when his mother, on whom he depended, left him to make her fortune. His if she succeeded. He knew nothing about this. One morning his mother bathed and dressed him as usual and in the evening a strange woman called and took him away to her house. When she left him alone for a few minutes he looked in one or two places for his mother. The woman returned, gave him supper, bathed him and put him to bed. He did not ask for his mother.

  In the morning he sat up in bed and looked about the room, waiting for his mother. The woman came in smiling. He had begun to accept her as part of his new life. When he had lived in the house a short time other children came. Excited by their voices and faces he rushed to the door to meet them, surprising them. He had an idea that his mother had sent them. The woman, to whom he had now given a name, sometimes spoke to him about his mother. He listened but said nothing. No one knew what he was thinking. He disliked the question sometimes put to him, ‘Do you remember your mother?’ and did not reply. He was often alarmed by shapes and sounds, and his defence against them was always silence.

  One day he was looking at a white flower. He pulled it closer and looked down into the deep cup. He saw dark violet lines, and spikes covered thickly with a bright yellow powder. I am living down in there, he said to himself; I am hidden, no one sees me. The extraordinary feeling this gave him was scarcely pleasant, and it was in spite of himself that he went on looking into flower after flower. The feeling lasted, and when at tea he tried to eat he was very sick. When this happened he had been with the woman a long time. His other life, with his mother, in some other house, had not vanished from his mind, but it was at times something which had been endlessly long ago, and at times as close as yesterday. One morning he was playing by himself in the garden. He heard steps coming up the path at the other side of the house and put his things down to listen. The bell rang, then an interval without sound, then his mother’s voice. His heart turned round in his side. He got up and began to run. ‘Is that my mother?’ he called.

  Before she saw him Hervey heard him speaking in this high voice. She was struck through by it. When she went away from him he was—both by being obstinate and an only child—backward in speaking. He would say a single word and point. The thought in her mind was: Without me he has been learning to speak. She was never able to reason away the ridiculous pain of this thought.

  To come, she had travelled by the night train and was going back the next night. When she came in the early morning, her mother was watching for her from the window of her house. She had turned her head as
ide and Hervey had a momentary glimpse of her staring, it seemed, at nothing, her blue eyes fixed and empty, with the look in them of one used to distances, mouth drawn down and bitter. Hervey stood still on the path, looking at her mother’s face, the skin still clear and pale, but the look of bitterness fixed on it, and the lines deeper.

  With a kind of anger in her, she ran into the house, deliberately noisy and gay. Anything to rouse her mother from that set staring immobility. She could not bear it.

  After breakfast, before going out to get Richard, she looked round the house to see if anything was new there. She saw a chair in her mother’s room and the newly-framed photograph of her brother. It was one taken only a short time before he was killed.

  ‘I like your new chair,’ she said eagerly.

  Mrs Russell touched it gently, caressing the old wood. ‘I’m going to have this room painted in the autumn. I told your father and he looked as black as thunder. Ha! he’d let us live in a barn if he had his wish. I take no notice of him.’

  She spoke with a quiet steely anger. ‘When Jake’s things were sent home,’ the mother said, ‘he wanted to take them. “ I’ll take those,” he said. “ Oh no you’ll not,” I told him : “ they’re mine, my son’s—and you don’t lay a finger on them.” And I put them away. He never thought anything of the boy; when Jake got his first medal he wrote to him that other men had done as much and not been given medals for it. And then saying,“ I’ll take those.” ‘Her mouth worked.

  Hervey watched her with the old feeling of rage and pity. She could not bear it when her mother showed so plainly her disappointment with her life. She was in truth disappointed. With all her young rage Hervey could not make it right for her.

  After a pause Mrs Russell said: ‘Your grandmother is building herself a new house.’

  Your grandmother; your father—but my son. She puts as far away from herself as possible, won’t have, the things she dislikes, and grasps the others. ‘Where?’

  ‘Almost on the moors. The place is about five miles from here. They’ve cut a road from the main road and great cartloads of stone were being taken along it. I saw it. Carlin and I were up there one day and we saw the road. Like a cut made in the moor. You’d think she had houses enough without building another.’

  Hervey did not look at her. At last she said : ‘Five miles. Suppose she came here to see us! She might be thinking of it!’

  ‘Not she!’ Sylvia Russell flashed. She laughed, in the loud contemptuous way that had hurt Hervey as a child. ‘She’ll not come here!’ Pulling at her mouth, she said quickly: ‘I’ll tell you a thing I’ve never told anyone. One day, it was before you were born, your grandmother came to see me—not in this house, in the house I lived when I was first married. I hadn’t seen her since—since just after I married. I asked her to take your father into the firm and let him make a career for himself. Mind you, I was very young. And she refused. Your father was out of a ship after that for over five months. When she came that day I thought she’d come to offer him a post. I opened the door to her and I said, “ Have you come to offer William a place in the firm? “ When she said No, she hadn’t, I shut the door again. I wouldn’t have her in the house. From that day to this she hasn’t been near hand. She didn’t come when you were born. She never offered to do anything for any of you. All that Jake did he did for himself. The time when she could have helped him is gone.’

  ‘I suppose you never wrote to her,’ Hervey mumbled. She was afraid of saying the wrong thing. There was something dreadful, the ugliness of a wound, in her mother’s bitterness. After all these years she was no less bitter than if it had happened yesterday. Why, she thought, even I have forgiven my grandmother. Wincing inwardly, she saw herself, a stiff, badly-dressed schoolgirl, asking Mary Hervey to give her work. To herself she laughed guiltily, wondering what her mother would say if she knew. She had not the faintest wish to tell her.

  ‘Why should I write?’ Mrs Russell said loudly. ‘I was poor, not she. It was her place to write, not mine. Nay—I was done with her after that.’

  ‘Of course,’ Hervey said quickly. ‘You couldn’t do anything, she was mean and cruel to you.’

  She wanted to assure her mother that she was on her side. Mrs Russell’s face had a sunken defeated air. At this moment Hervey hated her grandmother. In the same moment she could not help thinking how different, easier, and happier, their life would have been if her mother had relented.

  As if she felt this Mrs Russell began a violent justification of herself. It was not she, it was Mary Hervey who had been relentless, grudging, hard. Hervey listened and nodded. With one of its strong leaps her mind saw how everything in Sylvia Russell’s life had been coloured by her quarrel with her mother. Everything she did had to justify her. Everything she did was right. If she broke a cup, it was not her fault, nothing was her fault. Am I like her? Hervey wondered. With her usual savagery towards herself, she answered: Yes, I am like her, I can’t bear being in the wrong.

  There was one person in the house who could best Mrs Russell. That was the nine-year-old Carlin. In the afternoon, while Richard was sleeping upstairs, the little girl played quietly in a room with Hervey. All at once she dropped her doll. Its face cracked into bits. Carlin did not cry. After one glance at the wreck she flew across the room and began to beat Hervey. ‘You broke my doll,’ she cried, her fine delicate face scarlet. Hervey was taken by surprise and laughed out. At that the child lifted up her voice and wept loudly. Mrs Russell hurried in and Carlin rushed to her.

  ‘She threw my doll down.’

  A flash of anger passed over the mother’s face. She glanced at Hervey.

  ‘That I did not,’ Hervey said. ‘I was sitting here where I am now. I was nowhere near her.’

  Mrs Russell said nothing, and took Carlin away. Hervey heard her comforting the child in a soft voice. It seemed that Carlin, too, was above the law.

  In the evening, she took Richard back to Miss Holland’s house and put him to bed there. He did not ask her how long she was staying. She waited a short time downstairs and then went up to see if he were sleeping. He must have fallen asleep without moving, his small body curled up, one arm flung out. How heavily the dark lashes lay over his cheeks. She bit her lips in her hard grief.

  Mrs Russell looked closely at her when she was saying good-bye. ‘Do you ever feel sorry you went away?’ she asked.

  ‘Something had to be done,’ Hervey said.

  When the train started she stared across the harbour to the old town. In the light without sun every stone, tile, chimney, was as sharp as glass. The green edge of the cliff struck the sky. A few gulls turned and rose above the houses and the boats with reefed sails. To keep herself from thinking of Richard, she thought of her mother. There was the strange pattern of Sylvia Russell’s life, with threads woven into foreign ports—the young spoiled girl becoming the stubborn woman, refusing defeat. Who could say that her mother’s life had been wasted? Touch it anywhere and it fell apart, revealing fresh skies, a street in Vera Cruz, wharves, storms at sea, a toque made of tiny silk flowers, gifts, anger, and joy coming in the morning.

  That so much should end in so little, Hervey cried. The loveliness of Danesacre hurt her, because she thought of all the women who had walked in its streets, of whom through their eyes it had become part, until they died and saw it no more. She felt angry, and shivered.

  Chapter VIII

  Twenty-Eighth of June, 1919

  1. Philip makes plans

  Philip drove away from the Dug-out about five o’clock. It was a white morning, with the promise of heat, but at this hour the grass was still silky and shining, and the distances clear. Four aeroplanes crossed the blue of the upper sky, one beside the arrow-head of the other.

  He chuntered through two villages without noticing the flags thrust from the windows, and was surprised when he reached the main road to find himself in an ever-thickening stream of traffic. Nursing the car, he kept round the northern skirt of London, to reac
h Renn’s lodging without much driving in streets. When he drew up there he saw the large dirty flag drooping from the window above Renn’s. There were others. The shabby street had broken out into a red white and blue rash. Philip ran up the stairs and opened Renn’s door. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what are you celebrating with this show?’

  Renn had been setting the table for their breakfast. He glanced up with a smile. ‘Signing the Peace,’ he said ‘Don’t you read a newspaper?’

  ‘Only if Frank wins one from a customer. For over a week we’ve had no luck. I might have known it—wait—patches will I get unto these cudgell’d scars And swear I got them in the Gallia wars. Well, that’s something done with.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ Renn said. ‘A bad Treaty doesn’t settle anything—except the causes of the next war.’

  He could not make this gloomy prophecy in any but the happiest voice, because of his delight in seeing Philip.

  ‘All the more reason,’ his friend said, with a smile, ‘why you and I should assert ourselves quickly. He seated himself at the table opposite Renn. ‘How long is it since we shared a meal?’

  ‘The night of the fifteenth September 1917, in Kemmel Shelters,’ Renn said at once.

  ‘Well—it’s too long,’ Philip said.

  ‘You were hit the next day and I the day after.’

  Philip was examining the room, as shabby as the house and street of houses. ‘You should live out in a field, as I do. It’s better than this.’

  ‘I’m warm and well as I am, thank you,’ Renn answered. He did not think Philip would be interested to hear that, of his salary of eight pounds a week, he sent two pounds to his mother, and put three away against the fear of losing his job and having nothing to send her. ‘Besides, I live alone. I’m out almost every evening, trying to find an honest man who will tell me what’s wrong with the world and invite me to join with him. Note that I still believe an honest man could save us.’