Company Parade

by Storm Jameson

  ‘I could manage on that,’ Hervey said, after a pause.

  Renn looked at her. He was still smiling, in a way which accentuated the extraordinary delicacy of his face. ‘You won’t leave Shaw-Thomas. You’re much too anxious for his approval.’

  Hervey did not answer. It was true that she shrank from facing Mr Shaw-Thomas to tell him that she was leaving. And this was less because he had been kind to her than because she disliked the idea of sinking in his eyes.

  But there were other impulses at work in her, of which David Renn knew nothing. Most of these had to do with her husband. Her mind had been busy for a long time on Penn’s failure to find work, and it had produced a plan. The more she dwelt on this plan the finer it seemed. Her mind was at its nimblest and surest when it was a question of handling people to produce an effect.

  She had thought that if she were to resign her job and by the next post Mr Shaw-Thomas received a letter signed Thomas Penn Vane (and no one here except David Renn knew that she was married or would connect her with it) asking for an interview, he would seize the chance to fill her place without the trouble of advertising or examining a number of applicants. All this had been in her mind before David Renn spoke to her. It sprang from her passionate wish to help Penn, to restore to him his waning self-confidence. She could not bear to see him daily losing faith in himself. His attempts—by an air of arrogance towards her, and scorning her for trifles—to disguise it, roused in her more pity than any other emotion. It is true there was some contempt hidden in the pity—in so far as she did not believe that Penn would achieve anything by himself, and she felt certain that she could very quickly find herself in work.

  There was more in it than this. She had enjoyed making Shaw-Thomas take her abilities on trust. That was a triumph. It was something she knew how to do, and could do again, but without being able to understand it. When she listened to people in a certain way, she knew what they were thinking, and could give the wanted answers. And this, to her, was the only, absolutely the only moment when she enjoyed an enterprise. She wanted to be given something, a position, a confidence, she delighted in this exercise of her wits; and as soon as the position was in her hands she no longer wanted it. If, as advertising did, it involved the effort of meeting and talking to other people, she soon loathed it. And she cast about for means of wriggling out of it, without discredit if possible—but even with it, if no sound excuse came along.

  To help Penn was as sound a reason as she was likely to find, for any occasion.

  For a time she told no one what she was thinking.

  Now with David Renn’s offer in her hand she felt that she could manage Penn. It needed care. He may—he will—she thought, feel offended. He may refuse because I have found it for him. How can I begin? (It is easy to manage, to feel one’s way, with others but not with an intimate. The closeness hinders—just as to be passionately in love makes it difficult to behave adroitly.) She would begin by telling him that she was tired of copywriting. That pleased him. He laughed—and told her that she was incapable in anything of persevering. Yes, Hervey said, yes—she sighed ; she feared she was actually very unstable. It seemed a pity that Penn had not taken the job in the first place. He would have done well with it. Yes, of course, Penn said, he would no doubt have been given the job if he had applied. Indeed he had had thoughts of applying, just after the War, but Hervey had nipped in before him. He teased her about stealing his birthright.

  Now was the moment. Hervey felt stiff and cold with the excitment. At the same time she felt sure. She had only to speak, to smile, to put a hand on his knee. ‘Why shouldn’t you do it now?’ she said, smiling. ‘If I were to resign, and at the same moment you applied—and with your qualifications and looks—why then—but perhaps you think the work would bore you?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Penn said. He rose and began to walk about the room. She saw from his face that he was closeted with a director; he was being fluent and convincing; a movement of his shoulders emphasised a point he had just made : these men knew his worth, they listened to him. In time—nay, at this very moment—it was he who listened with an indulgent air, to the enthusiasms of a subordinate. He came closer to her in his stridings up and down, and stopped. Hervey had meant to say that until he felt sure of himself she would help him; he could bring work home in the evenings and she would go over it with him. She decided not to suggest this yet. After all, she thought—his mind is quicker than mine; he may not need help from me.

  When Penn stopped, and stroking the back of her neck, said that it was a splendid idea of hers and she must resign—since, he laughed, she had, as usual, made her mind up without saying a word to him, but he was used to that—and he would apply and take her work over from her, she felt herself ready to fall, she was so tired. This kind of thing was exhausting. She felt as though all the strength had gone out of her and she had scarcely enough left to crawl into bed.

  A week later—it was now July—she went trembling to Mr Shaw-Thomas, to give him a fortnight’s notice. He was surprised and offended, but concealed both these emotions. For the first time he noticed that the lower half of her face was stubborn and heavy. He had never looked at her hands before. The long fingers were untended. There was dust on her shoes and she was wearing cheap stockings. He expressed a merely polite regret at losing her and had the just satisfaction of watching her slink from his room. By a fortunate chance he had just read a letter, written—which had pleased him—on Air Force notepaper, from an excellently promising young man. He beckoned his secretary over and gave her a letter to the young man, with the day and hour for his interview.

  Hervey wanted to advise Penn how to behave at the interview. She did it badly. She was still smarting from her own ordeal. For the time she had nothing to give Penn. She resented having to be on guard with him. He ought—she knew he did not—to trust her. He ought to know that anything she said was to help him, not—why did he force her to say it?—not to offend or humiliate him.

  ‘Mr Shaw-Thomas enjoys the sound of his own voice,’ she had said. ‘You must let him talk. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear what he wants you to say.’

  ‘You’re afraid I shall give myself away,’ Penn said. He frowned.

  ‘Not at all,’ she answered wearily.

  ‘You’d like to take this interview for me exactly as you try to arrange the whole of my life. You’re as abominably managing and domineering as your mother. Perhaps you think I don’t see it. I do, but I’m usually too bored by it to point it out. What a pity you have such a low opinion of me. It makes you make mistakes.’

  Hervey held her tongue. His interview was that afternoon. The thought that she had been too clever gripped her.

  In the very moment when she saw Penn’s face of triumph, the relief in her mind swung over into sharp fear. She could have wept. What could I have been thinking of, she cried, to give up a place where I was safe? If Penn makes a failure of it I have sacrificed Richard to my folly, and all for nothing. She could scarcely believe what she had done. I was mad, she thought. It was like buying the dress. Something had arisen in her, outside her will, and thrust her, blind, absorbed in her own cleverness, along a path of which the end revealed itself only at the end, in a flash of terror.

  She kept these thoughts quietly hidden. During the last days before she left the office and Penn stepped in she was stolid and more silent than usual. Penn was in high spirits. This was some comfort to her, but not so great as it would have been to a nobler character.

  Towards the end of the month she went up to Danesacre, to see Richard. She had now told Penn about The Week. He was inclined to laugh at it, and she herself did not believe that it would last more than a short time.

  She had not seen Richard for over six months. That was at Christmas, and since then he had had meaasles and recovered from them with no after effects. Miss Holland had written every day during the illness, and yet she had been in agony. It was the first time he had been ill without her to nurse him. She
remembered his last illness when he was a baby and the care she had taken of him. She hated Miss Holland. That she, that any woman, should be nursing her child. It was as much as she could bear.

  She thought him paler, and grown. He was now five, tall, and with his high forehead and eyes of a pure deep blue, very beautiful. He was so beautiful that she was afraid. She asked Miss Holland whether he drank his milk, and how long he slept in the afternoon. Miss Holland, who never failed a jot in her duty, resented these useless questions. She answered them but she added, smiling, in that way of hers—it made her kind brown face look as though she were propitiating and despising you : ‘Richard is sometimes bad tempered.’

  ‘A bad temper!’ Hervey repeated. She looked at the woman in astonishment.

  ‘He has fits of senseless anger,’ Miss Holland said firmly. ‘I never know what causes them. He lies on the floor screaming, and bites the legs of chairs. Sometimes it’s the carpet he bites and then his mouth fills with fluff and I have to coax him to let me bathe it.’

  ‘Do you punish him?’ Hervey asked, trembling.

  ‘Dear me, no,’ Miss Holland said. ‘I wait until it’s over and then I ask him about it, quietly. They don’t come often. He’s really a good little boy. Kind, and intelligent.’

  Hervey said nothing. She felt that she was to blame. It was because she had left him. He was never in a rage when he lived with me, she thought. But she had forgotten much of what had happened to them in those days.

  In the afternoon she took Richard to the sands. It was only half a success. She knew how to care for a child, so that he would grow up strong and handsome, because these things can be learned, but not how to play with a child. She forgot, building the castle, that Richard’s hands were less quick than hers. In the end, she built while Richard looked on.

  The feel of the warm sand on her legs, and the light shiver as the wind breathed on them, woke in her the memory of long summer days spent here with Jake her brother. Solitary children, they played together alone, between the cliffs and the sea. The days were endless. At one moment the tide was far out, leaving pools and ripples in the dark sand; they turned their backs on it, and in a moment it was licking at their heels and the heel of the cliff. Between the two moments they had built a city with bridges. The city was destroyed daily, and Jake had been killed, shot down in the air and fallen dying into No Man’s Land (she felt the shock of it in her body, the terror and the falling). Only I am left, she thought, looking at her hands, stronger and yet tireder than the hands of the builder of cities. As she thought it, she knew that it was not true. The moment itself, that long moment between two tides, was left—it hung like a bubble in the clear air of time itself, within it two young Russells were safe for as long as either of the two lived, and here they had their eternity. The sea rose in her and retreated, tide after tide flowed through her veins. She was the moment through which the whole of this passed and in which it was reflected, as in the sides of the bubble. She moved. She felt the warm sand under her hands. Now she saw that Richard had turned away from their castle and was making a clumsy tower for himself. He piled one bucketful of sand on the top of another until the whole collapsed. Then, knitting his brows, he began it over again. ‘Why don’t you finish our castle?’ Hervey said.

  ‘I’m busy here,’ he said briefly. He added at once: ‘God helped me to build the first and it fell down. You can’t blame him for that, his fingers are not very strong.’

  What can he be thinking? Hervey wondered. She watched him until he wearied of the task. They shook the sand from themselves and went away to the pools between the rocks. Richard walked a little apart from her, not looking at the sea, which he disliked.

  In the evening, when she had put the child to bed in her room, her mother talked to her about him. She said that when he came here to tea he always played the same game he had invented. Mr Vane has called to see Mrs Russell. Dear me, what a pleasant surprise; how do you do, Mr Vane? Very well, and how are you, Mrs Russell? ‘I take him back to Miss Holland before bed-time,’ Mrs Russell said: ‘if it is raining I keep him here for the night. When it is almost time he keeps saying, Is it raining? Do you think it will rain? He likes to think this is his home. She’s very kind to him. She said to me that he is an exceptional child, exceptionally intelligent.’

  All the time her mother was speaking Hervey kept half turned from her. She kept her face indifferent and stolid, as though all this chatter about Richard bored her. She did not know why she was behaving like this. She knew only that she was deeply inexplicably offended by being asked to listen to her mother’s praise of him. It was quite another thing that she was afraid of being laughed at if she showed her own pride in Richard. Her mother had laughed at her as a child too often and unkindly—the fear of it was always with her : there was no one with whom she felt safe.

  Now Mrs Russell was talking about his illness. For a long time, days, he was listless—as though, the doctor said, he had no interest in getting better, which was absurd in so young a child. Then one night (it was about three in the morning) Miss Holland had gone in to him, and he was awake, and she said, Is there anything you would like? and he said in a thread of a voice, I should like a good cup of tea. Then you shall have it, the kind good woman said, and there and then she went downstairs and made it for him and he drank it and after that night, Mrs Russell said, looking up and smiling, he began all at once to get better.

  Hervey did not say anything. She was thinking: he wanted to be indulged, it was me he wanted. She would not show that the story had moved her at all. She listened with a polite smile, as though she must decently be grateful for the effort to interest her. But so that no one could suppose she was interested, she asked no questions. And she would ask none. Mrs Russell was disappointed. She searched Hervey’s face for the look of softening she expected. Hervey turned to her with a bright air. Behind it, her mind ran up and down passages, groaned, scrabbled at the boards, beat itself on walls and doors, and all for nothing. There was nothing to be done.

  Chapter XX

  The Week Begins

  No one could say that as a reformer Hervey lacked zeal. She was short, lamentably, of experience. During their first month David Renn was laid off with his wounds, which were giving trouble in a new way. He said they had suddenly developed an imagination of their own. Whatever it was, it meant that he lay in bed, looked after with loving incompetence by Henry Smith, and after the doctor had been—he came every morning and forbade Renn to sit up or read—he cut extracts from the score of newspapers, English and foreign, lying in the next room, and wrote an editorial and other columns, and sent Smith off with a sheaf of instructions to Hervey. She had to make up the paper and see it through the press.

  She also reviewed books and plays. She had engaged the late art critic of the Morning Gazette to make the translations from French, German and Italian. He worked at them at home, writing in penny exercise books, and was never late with what he called his devoir, but the translations were word for word and utterly unreadable. Hervey spent an hour or more every night turning them into tolerable English.

  Their office was the top floor of a thin house in a square behind Fleet Street. The square was old and shabby, and not a house in it but had fallen on evil days and lost its character. A narrow road, always busy with lorries, led from one corner of the square to the printers’ and beyond to the river. On fine days and when she had time to leave the office for it, Hervey took her dinner down to the Embankment and sat eating it and watching the boats and the gulls. There is a moment when the gull, turning, to sweep sideways and downward to the surface of the water, makes a movement of such perfection that it can scarcely be watched without tears.

  The floors in their two rooms had sunk in the centre, so that chairs slid inwards and desks had to be wedged. In the outer room a typist and a cynical office boy shared unhelpfully in Hervey’s days. She pored over David Renn’s instructions and did what she could, with a copy of The Spectator open beside her, t
o make The Week look a little like a paper. The compositors in their kindness taught her best. One of them showed her how to use space to advantage. She was always behind time. On press nights she waited at the printers’ until one o’clock reading the pages as they came off the machines. The room was fiercely lighted and the light took the colour from the men’s faces. The noise of the machines destroyed her. Its strong mechanical beat, without any of the intervals which belong to a living rhythm, tore at the fibres of her brain. She wished she could stop her ears. The men drank cups of deathly strong tea, and fetched her a cup. It was the thickest china she ever felt and the tea the strongest.

  When Renn was able to sit up, he worked in the office and sent her out on errands. She called on Evelyn, whom she had not seen since their quarrel. She was to ask her for an article (at the lowest level of pay) and for an advertisement. She dawdled in the street, outside the office of the London Review, for half an hour before finding the courage to go in. She hoped that Evelyn would be in a kind mood. This hope was vain.

  ‘Dear me,’ Evelyn said,‘how long have you been touting for advertisements?’

  ‘Not long,’ Hervey said, with a smile. ‘I used to be a novelist, and I’ve gone down in the world. I now shark for myself and live as opportunity serves.’

  Evelyn asked a great many questions about The Week and about David Renn. At last she was called into another room and went away, asking Hervey to wait. Hervey waited almost an hour. She could hear the two girls in the room whispering about her with smiles.

  The door opened and Evelyn came in. She looked at Hervey in astonishment. ‘Are you still here?’

  ‘You asked me to wait,’ Hervey said. She stood up, trembling. Evelyn kept her waiting for another age, to listen to an account of the mistakes made by amateur editors. ‘Aren’t you going to write for us, then?’ Hervey said, in a jaunty voice.