Company Parade

by Storm Jameson

  Evelyn looked down at her desk. ‘I may later,’ she said—or had she only said Good-day?

  In the street Hervey walked blindly, with tears of humiliation and rage. She could not check them. They welled up, and ran over her cheeks. With shame, she fled into the station lavatory at Charing Cross.

  This mortifying hour was the worst she endured. She called, to ask him for an advertisement, on the publisher of her novel, Charles Frome. He asked no fewer questions than Evelyn. His eyes, quick and brightly blue, watched her with curiosity. Rousing herself, she made him laugh at her mistakes. In the end, and still laughing, he said : ‘Well, my dear, I must say I’d rather you wrote us another novel. But if you’re resolved to be the death of printers I suppose we must do something about it.’ He gave her a half-page advertisement for six weeks.

  She was confused and grateful. For a long time her mind kept returning to this interview. She went thoroughly over her words and Frome’s answers, trying to feel sure whether he had been more kind than friendly, and whether she pained him by her want of elegance. She was only aware of her clothes when she saw Frome, with whom were involved her earliest ambitions. At all other times she went shabby with a good heart.

  William Ridley did not wait to be asked to write for The Week. He called at the office when she was on her way to lunch, and came with her. They ate chicken cutlets (‘bags o’ mystery,’ Ridley said) and drank coffee in a restaurant in which even the plates witnessed to the death of society. They had been stamped by sweated Czech workers with patterns which satisfied the American importer’s idea of French peasant art. Hervey spoke of this to Ridley. He offered at once to write an article on it for The Week. ‘That would be very fine,’ Hervey said thoughtfully.

  She looked at Ridley’s large face, in which the little bright eyes were like windows with a watcher stooping behind the candles. The edges of his jacket were shabby. She asked him, Are you willing (she meant, able) to write for us for less than the London Review pays you? We’re poor but worthy, she said. He nodded, blinking—and as though the words, and the thought behind them, had released something in him he began to tell her about his youth. His father was an auctioneer, and there were five other children $ he was the eldest, he had taken scholarships, worked, at thirteen he was already thinking of his career. So was I, Hervey thought. At this moment she liked him warmly.

  ‘I had a suit I kept for best,’ Ridley said : ‘when I went to the university I grew out of it—but I had to wear it for occasions. So you would see me, on ordinary days, shabby but covered—and at a luncheon party, my best suit, it was grand cloth, in for a penny in for a pound, said my father, with the jacket bursting across the front and my wrists sticking out. Not that I attended many parties. I couldn’t ask back, y’see.’

  Hervey listened and nodded. This was nearly her own life. And if the War took four of his years, she thought, so it did of mine, seeing, as though they were poured down in front of her, the interiors of rented rooms, streets, Richard’s bath, the edges (as white as bones) of Salisbury Plain, a dress hanging on a nail. And now Ridley was talking of his success, and she stopped listening to him, only a word or two reached her—talk sense … make your impression … get in somewhere. ‘I’m going to write a novel about London,’ he exclaimed. ‘Crammed with scenes, colour, richness, plenty of fun. It’ll take me years—I’m preparing for it, and it’ll be worth it. There hasn’t been a novel like it.’ But he’s unbearable, Hervey thought. ‘I know I can do it,’ he said. He talked on and on, and about his life, and how he went here, and here, and spoke to this man, and made friends with that well-known writer, and again she liked him and was sorry for him. She saw that his monstrous conceit was a defence.

  They left the restaurant and walked along Fleet Street together. He jerked his head at the Daily Post office and told her how he had impressed Cohen with his ability. It meant something, he said, looking at her. Hervey agreed. She did not mind his bragging, now that she could translate it. They shook hands, and she smiled warmly at him. ‘You’re not so bad,’ Ridley said. He called the words after her as she ran up the dark narrow stairs to The Week.

  Had he really said that? she wondered. Extraordinary. He was an extraordinary creature, and infinitely more complex than she had supposed. She thought humbly that to understand any single person, deeply enough to pass judgement on them, would be work for a lifetime. And then, no doubt, you would be ashamed to judge.

  And yet I must judge his deeds, she thought. I don’t like his writing: it makes me think of a grocer setting out his window—so many sides of bacon, so much sugar, so many heaps of raisins, boxes of soap, pyramids of tins, cunningly set out to rouse your appetite and make you buy. You must buy, so that he can live. He has no time to wonder whether you are happy, whether his food nourishes you, and what becomes of you when you leave his shop. Perhaps you are torn by doubts of the value of your life, spent between an office and a house which is the image of a million other houses. Or you are a farmer, whose land no longer keeps you. Or a machine hand, lashed across the machine. You had dreams, but you have forgotten them, except for a faint uneasiness when you find yourself alone for a moment. Soon you are afraid to be alone. You turn the gramophone on, or crowd into the cinema at the corner, or get out the car. Something that you thought you had has been stolen from you, or lost. You are a man brought up as the heir to an estate who finds on entering upon it that it has vanished—the fields rotted, the great roof fallen in, and where you expected lights, servants, music, there is nothing, a heap of stones, the lintel stone of the door, but the door and the familiar rooms it led to, gone. And here is tradesman Ridley’s chance. He runs forward with his lusty essays, his great novel (‘crammed with’—sides of bacon and bottles of cooking wine)—a kind of vast beano, all together now boys, hip, hip, hurrah, we won’t go home till morning. What’s this you say about lost lands? The roots decayed? The wells dried up? Ah, that’s only what you think—take another look at our Spring offers. Sign here, join now. Stupendous attraction. Real camels, real sand. For a few shillings you can dream that you are still the heir, you are fortunate, you are safe, your dish is prepared for you, in your Father’s house there are many mansions.

  Hervey walked past the typist, opened the inner door, and closed it quickly. She saw at once that Renn’s wounds were hurting him. His desk was set at an angle with hers and as she came in he turned his back, but not before she had caught a frightening glimpse of his face, damp with the sweat. There was nothing she could do. She worked on until six o’clock. The typist went home. Still Renn went on writing. Sitting with him, in the now empty and silent office, Hervey imagined that she was alone with him in the cabin of a ship. Miles of sea cut them off from their kind. There were dangers, the sky—I don’t much like the look of it, she thought—but still he said nothing. Stooped over the table, he wrote and wrote.

  ‘Why don’t you go home? ‘Renn said.

  Hervey walked across the room and stood in front of him. ‘Is there nothing I can do?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘What does Henry Smith do for you when you’re like this?’ Hervey persisted. She gripped the edge of his desk.

  Renn looked at her with a slight smile, full of irony. ‘He rubs my back.’

  ‘Does that relieve you?’

  ‘Yes, it does. I know no reason why it should. My mother discovered it by accident. One day when the pain ran from my leg to my shoulders she began rubbing them—you can’t rub the scars themselves—and after a time it went altogether. Magic.’ He laughed.

  ‘Why don’t you go home at once and let Smith rub you?’Hervey said.

  ‘Why, because he went off yesterday, with five pounds, to walk across Germany.’

  ‘I’ll rub you,’ Hervey said. She stared at him, her chin poked forward into a stubborn disagreeable line. Her hands were shaking. If he refuses, I shall never forget it, she thought.

  Renn only smiled. ‘That’s very good of you,’ he said. He took off tie
and collar—his jacket was already lying across his desk—and drew his arms out of his shirt. They were very thin, whiter than Hervey’s. She averted her eyes from them, with the feeling that he must be ashamed of his thinness. He turned his chair sideways and leaned forward, laying his arms across his desk, and told Hervey where to place her hands and how to rub deeply. When she had rubbed his shoulders for a time, she kneeled on the floor to rub beneath them. From the quietness in the room and from the quiescent body of Renn she received a strange image. She thought that she was very old, she had been on her knees here for centuries, she was tired, her arms withered and came again, and she went on with her self-chosen task. Once Renn sighed. He sighed with his whole body. She felt the muscles in his sides lift and relax, and it was as though she held him up between her hands.

  ‘What is your mother like?’ she asked, after a time.

  ‘A small woman,’ Renn said slowly. His head was hanging forward, so that his voice sounded deeper than usual. ‘Thin and small. Bluish eyes, a very delicate nose, like a girl’s. My father died when I was at school.’

  Hervey’s shoulders burned as though her arms were being pulled in their sockets. Yet she felt that she could go on. Her strength came from Renn himself, from the fine bones under her hands. At last he moved, straightened himself a little, and said: ‘That’s easily bearable now. You can give up.’

  Half exhausted, she let her arms drop and knelt forward with her hands on the floor. Her head was swimming. Looking up, she saw that Renn had his back to her; he was dressing, and she stood up, swaying, and leaned on her desk. She had recovered when he turned round.

  ‘Did I manage as well as Smith?’ she asked.

  ‘Much better,’ Renn said, smiling. ‘I ought to thank you,’ he said, ‘and I don’t know what to say.’

  As they walked down the stairs together he laid his hand on her arm. She felt a pure pleasure, as though she had been rewarded for something, or admitted into something—she was not sure which. Whatever it was, she was happy—and from some deep cause grateful. She had nothing to say.

  Chapter XXI

  The Undefeated

  1. Hervey Russell

  With Penn at work, Hervey began to save money—a pound one week, the next only a few shillings. At the end of September she had almost six pounds hidden under her handkerchiefs at the back of a drawer. They bore up her spirit in time of trouble.

  One evening she was tempted to spend them. She was tired. Her work—not made easier by David Renn’s conscience: he checked every figure and date quoted in the paper and felt disgraced by an e printed upside down in one issue—was hard. She felt pulled down by the burden of small duties. Her unfinished novel plagued her. She knew of a farmhouse where she could live for two pounds a week and she was tempted to buy herself three weeks’ freedom. Something less than loyalty to David Renn—perhaps kept fear of his contempt—held her back.

  She sat waiting for Penn in her room, restless in mind. When he came in he began instantly to say that one man in the advertising office was treating him shabbily. He was always given the dreariest and most unprofitable tasks, and if a client showed signs of becoming dissatisfied he and no other had to attend to him, and take the blame. Hervey roused herself to pull at the centre of this knot. It turned out that he had offended one client, who straightway complained to Shaw-Thomas, to the end that Penn was in trouble.

  After listening, with a little patience, Hervey said: ‘You will always offend people if you try to put them in the wrong, Why not begin by agreeing with everything? Then you can insinuate your knowledge so that it seems theirs. You should never argue. If you begin an argument, your man will be on his guard—the very state of mind you wish to avoid. Choose his least sensible idea and agree to it with the wildest enthusiasm. Say, Yes, it will do this, and this, piling one effect on another. In a short time he will feel uneasy, then will begin to suggest doubts and flaws, and before long you’ll see him turn right about and agree to any compromise.’

  ‘Dear me,’ Penn said. ‘It appals me to think that this is how I must have been handled, at least before I married you.’

  Hervey did not answer. Yes, she thought, when you married me I had learned none of these tricks : it is through you, and through your distrust, that I came to use my mind against people. She bent her head lower. Yet it was in me, she said—the impulse was there: you did not create that. She saw herself as the badly-dressed student, standing on tiptoe—where was it?—in a crowded room to get sight of the back of Penn’s head. She was in love with him then. She recalled the simplicity of her love in those days. There was no one whom she admired as she admired him. Why, she would have gone readily to the stake for any of the opinions he announced with so much assurance.

  She felt on her table for a book and held it up to hide her face. There was nothing to be said. But a slow anger—the overt edge of her memory—woke in her against her life. She hated the room, which contained nothing that was not worthless—as if the whole of man’s present ingenuity had been used up in creating more and more elaborate machines 5 these did nothing except deliver daily piles of excrement in the shape of just such chairs and tables. And I, she thought, I, who hate them, live among them. I hate my life. She saw a cliff-side in sunlight, the wind stroking the reedy grass; pavement cafés in a foreign city—what city? a wide river, bronze-green running into flakes of light. This and this is what I want, I shall grow old without having lived. She jumped up, went over to the window, and stood peering out. The street lamps cast yellow circles on the pavement. She watched a woman run swiftly across one circle, vanish, and appear again in the next, her dress blown by the wind. A familiar excitement seized her. Standing quietly, she felt that she was straining with all her force against a wall. She beat her head against it. I can’t get out, can’t get out. Her hand gripped the edge of the sill. No escape, nothing for you here, she thought. But what do I get from this life?

  She turned round. ‘I can’t endure this room,’ she said, in a low voice. ‘Can’t we do anything? Won’t your father help us? If we had the smallest place of our own—with decent things—a bed, a table, chairs—I could bear it. Ask him, if he won’t give, ask him to lend us a little money.’

  ‘You’re only being silly and hysterical,’ Penn said. ‘I’m sorry I’m not a rich man.’ He looked at her with contempt. ‘You seem to forget I should now be in Oxford, at least in comfort, if I hadn’t been willing to help you.’

  I vex you into showing your unpleasantest side, Hervey thought. She felt cut off from him, and from herself too, able only to watch the two of them behaving like madmen. With her dreadful honesty she owned to herself that though anxious at the thought of his going away, going to Oxford—afraid of being left, of failing, of having no money—yes, all these things—but she had had mean thoughts too, had resented the contrast between her life and his: why should I live here while Penn amuses himself in Oxford?—yes, I thought that, she admitted—it is true, I am an egoist, I am selfish. She looked at Penn with a sharp smile. She felt an impulse to anger him. It was as though she wanted to drive him out of his senses with her—like a child which is not satisfied until it has angered its mother to punishing it. ‘You and your Oxford,’ she cried. ‘You are thirty this month, and you talk of going back to school. With a son for whom you do nothing. Nothing, nothing.’

  ‘When you bawl at me in your mother’s voice I only feel that I was a fool not to go,’ Penn said.

  Hervey ran out of the room. She ran downstairs, and into the street, without coat or hat, and walked up and down, until the cold sent her back. Penn had gone away into his own room. She undressed and got into bed.

  The door opening sent a shock through her. She looked up and saw Penn coming towards her. He did not seem unkind, but he seemed young and vulnerable. He came into the bed and put his arms round her in silence. Tears sprang to her eyes. Without meaning anything she cried: ‘Life is so disappointing.’ Penn laid his face against hers—‘Poor Hervey,’ he said. The wor
ds flew back across her mind, flashing the signal first to this hill and then to that until the farthest bore its fire, and the message was read—but by whom? Now she grew warmer and began to fall towards sleep. It was very pleasant, to glide, to fail, to sink into sleep. Her mind seemed to hover, like a breath of wind playing alone, above her body. Penn was speaking, but she was too sleepy to listen to him. It is something weak and foolish that Penn comforts, she said to herself. (‘My dear, I wish you could have your house,’ Penn said.) Is it that weak thing which goes on clinging to him? Yes—her head sank forward—yes, I am weak, I am a coward—it is marriage (‘I’ll never call you that again, Hervey, it’s silly’) : marriage ties people to each other in an underneath dragging way, she thought, in growing confusion. Her mind stooped to enter a long dark corridor, like the passage in her mother’s first house. Her senses were now astray. She felt warmth and the smoothness of the clothes. And now, as if it had come to the end of the passage, her mind was confident and happy. She felt that nothing was too hard for her. I can do anything, anything, she thought. She sank deeper. Light welled round her; where the darkness had been it was now full light. She ran after her mother and they stepped out together into the clear early-morning air; there was sunlight, the yellow flowers of the broom sent a spray of bright drops into the air when she reached for it. She laughed, looking at her mother; who was smiling. She is pleased with me, the child thought, and her heart felt light.

  2. Delia Hunt

  In the room below Hervey’s Delia was in bed, ill. Her nose had sharpened as if she were dying. But she was not, not this time. There was a nurse in the room, and to avoid watching directly she watched this woman’s shadow move by the wall. She saw the white end wall of a house and the shadow of herself as soft there as soot. No sun made that shadow. It began then, she thought—no, that was not true, it began months and years earlier, in Brixton. The door opened and an aproned child ran along the street. She dragged her hand by the wall, her fingers touching the stone—yes, night, the walls cold, rough, sending the cold through her hands, and the street, it was behind the market, empty. At last she came to the turning, the dark archway, and the market. The lights of open stalls, roaring tongues, drew her here and there. She ran about between the stalls like a lean cat, brushing against women’s clothes. Underfoot the stones of the road were wet, slippery with mud, leavings, spittle. The staring faces of men and women were larger than life, pressed against the stalls; there were so many of them that they moved all together, surging to this side, forward, then back, laughed, grumbled, lifted their hands with spread fingers—she held her own red tiny hand before a gas jet, to see its bones. A sharp excitement pricked her. She felt the prick in her stomach first, it spread, and she swelled with it until she was light as a feather. She rolled on the ground. Two legs overstepped her and a hand gripped her jerking her up. She began to dance. She showed her skinny legs in the dance. A woman’s voice saying, ‘If she were mine, I’m bound I’d give her a hiding,’ filled her fuller than before of wickedness, and the excitement, and dancing, kicking her legs, she made an idiot’s face at the woman. It was rich.