The Road from the Monument

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by Storm Jameson


  In the moment he gave himself to run an eye over the list of delegates that he had under his hand with the agenda, he realised that among all these well-known names there was not a single name of the very great. With or without offering an excuse, but without exception, the one or two indisputably great men and women in every country had refused his invitation to take part in the Conference. Those who had accepted came from the crowded second line; they were the bright but lesser stars, the — words sprang in his mind before he could check them — the false élite, the perpetual travelling circus of conference addicts, greedy for the attention that fattens them…. His hand jerked as though it had touched something scalding…. Nonsense. The very fact that So-and-so had accepted was proof that he had — and the others had not — a sense of social responsibility. Not only that — the names he was about to read out were precisely the ones that would be known to the men facing him as the most conspicuously successful of their tribe. What better do we want? he thought sharply. What other names would have made these men feel it had been worth their while to find thousands of pounds for us? A la guerre comme à la guerre….

  Everything is all right, he thought.

  He stood up. And again he felt the exquisite pleasure of being able to speak as an equal to men before whom his father in his worn uniform would have been mute.

  ‘Well, gentlemen, I…’

  Chapter Three

  The raw March air caught him when he left the Athenaeum — late, about eleven — and made him shiver. It was raining, too, a thin cold rain. He found a cab, with an old surly driver who took him past his house and drew up five doors farther on. The distance was not worth arguing about; he got out, paid, and walked back rapidly towards his own door. A woman stepping out from the wall made a gesture and said something he did not catch; he did not look at her, though he felt a light touch of pity for any creature driven to try to sell herself in this icy dark and rain. He had his latchkey, and let himself in quickly. Standing at the back of the hall, his hand on the door that led to the cellar stairs, was William, the old manservant (too old to be any use in the house) whom Beatrice had brought with her from Silhampton: rheumaticky, partly deaf, not very amiable, he had a flat on the ground floor where he bullied two elderly unmarried daughters who, with Mrs. Bedford, ran the whole house. He pretended not to hear Gregory say, ‘A horrible night, William.’ Shuffling across the hall he muttered, ‘I’ll lock up now.’

  The door-bell rang as Gregory started up the stairs, a short timid ring followed by a long one, as though the person ringing had felt an impulse of courage or desperation. He turned.

  ‘What on earth…?’

  William opened the door a bare three inches, and poked his old cross grudging face through the gap.

  Gregory waited. Before anything had been said, before the thin slightly common voice began speaking, he knew what had happened, who it was. The strength left his joints, and he stood stiffly, only able to wait.

  ‘I want to see Mr. Mott, please.’

  ‘What? What did you say?’

  ‘Mr. Gregory Mott. I know he’s in. I saw him go in. I want to see him.’

  ‘You’re making a mistake,’ William said, ‘you don’t want anybody here.’

  ‘Yes I do.’ It was like a child persisting, with a child’s impatiently helpless patience. ‘I must see him. I — I have to.’

  What gave him the energy to move? He had been gripping the banister: his fingers slid off the polished wood, he walked slowly down the few stairs, as if puzzled or bored, and stopped half way across the hall. ‘What is it, William?’

  Still holding the door, William turned. ‘A — a young woman. She’s asking for you.’

  ‘Well… open the door.’

  The old man moved slightly, and let the heavy door swing open. Gregory took another short step forward. She was as if flattened against the darkness by the light coming from the hall: it set in a frame of fine yellow threads of rain her too big head and smooth face, the flat-set eyes held open in a fixed stare, lips parted. She said nothing.

  Gregory said easily, ‘I’m afraid you’re at the wrong house. I don’t know you, do I?’

  The look of fear in her face was followed by a strangely sly and humiliated smile, as though she had been caught doing something disgraceful. She still did not speak, but her arm, which had been holding her coat across her, dropped to her side, so that the distortion of her thin body by its pregnancy showed very plainly. She made no move to drag the coat over it again.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ Gregory said, ‘that you had better go home?’

  ‘I…’

  She could not go on. The strange almost disfiguring smile had gone, but the look of shame was still there; her chin trembled and she lifted the back of one hand to her eyes, again like a child in disgrace. Then, without a word, she turned, and disappeared into the darkness.

  ‘Some poor mad creature,’ Gregory said calmly. ‘Lock up now, William. Good night.’

  ‘Good night,’ William said after a moment.

  The same impulse that had moved him across the hall and brought the easy lie off his tongue hurried him up to his room without allowing him time to think. He had acted without thinking, a completely involuntary movement of denial, starting in him at a great depth — denial not so much of her as of himself, of the man who had let himself get involved in an act of casual lust, ridiculous and graceless.

  But he no longer knew what had driven him to his lie. He was horribly disturbed, an obscure bodily disturbance and confusion. What he had just done horrified him — so much that he could not bear to think about it, and began to walk up and down the room, trying to calm himself by coming to a decision, any decision, that would wipe out his memory of her young humiliated face…. During the six months since it happened, his mind, unnoticed by him, had been turning over and recomposing the scene in the shabby boarding-house in Nice. This recomposed scene rose to the surface now, and he saw a subtly altered young woman, bold and experienced, and himself giving way to an impulse not in the least sordid — foolish, perhaps, in poor taste, but not in any way contemptible or brutal or especially disgraceful. Not, of course, an incident he wanted known, but… after all, these things happen. In a sense, too, he had acted out of kindness; certainly the original motive had been kind and generous. Seen from the inside, as he saw it, the generosity of his feelings at the time far outweighed any wrong. He thought: I was a fool, I behaved foolishly and rather badly — but not too badly, not shamefully.

  I must do something for her, he thought. Of course I must do something. Help her. A little money. Enough to see her through…. At the same time, she must be made to understand that coming to his house was inexcusable: if she wanted to be helped she must behave discreetly, like a sensible creature.

  With a shock that travelled from his heart to the ends of his fingers he realised that he had no idea where she lived, or how to get hold of her.

  Chapter Four

  Throughout a nearly sleepless night, he made and unmade plans, all of them useless or foolish. In the morning he decided to see Harriet and talk to her about it. She was wise as well as intelligent; she might know what he ought to do. Anyhow she would soothe him — he did not, even in thought, use the word: the idea that he needed to be soothed was not one he could accept.

  Harriet, when he came into her room, was not alone. Her son, David, was with her. He was in his civilian air-pilot’s uniform, and had come to see her, she said, because he had an hour to put in before driving to the airport to begin a flight to Africa.

  ‘You haven’t seen him,’ she said, ‘since he was a child. Years and years. Twenty.’

  ‘No,’ Gregory said, with the smile whose sweetness could still move her to surprise and affection. ‘How old are you, David?’

  ‘Twenty-seven.’ He looked at his mother. ‘I must go now.’

  ‘Not because I’ve come, I hope?’ Gregory said.

  ‘No.’ He was amiable and self-possessed, shut away
in a life of whose pleasures, fears and hopes his mother knew nothing. ‘I was going.’

  ‘You have ten minutes,’ she said.

  She watched Gregory setting himself to charm her son. He is doing it partly out of kindness to me, she thought, but much more because he craves the good opinion of the young, especially the handsome dangerously active young.

  In a casual voice Gregory said, ‘You gave your mother and her friends some anxious days last year.’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’ The small twin-engined aeroplane he had been piloting across North Africa on a test flight caught fire and he made a crash landing during which the co-pilot was hurt and the wireless wrecked: he left the injured man with the only other man on board and set out to walk across the desert, and was not heard of for five days, when he was picked up, more than half dead.

  ‘My father,’ said Gregory, ‘started life as an apprentice in a sailing-ship when he was thirteen. The ship was wrecked on its way home from Archangel and he, with eleven others, spent nine days in a small boat in that icy sea, before a Swedish ship picked them up. Five had died. I asked him once, when I was a boy, to tell me about it, and all he had to say was: We had food, but I was so thirsty I couldn’t eat.’

  David smiled at him, lowering thick eyelashes. ‘He was dead right.’ He hesitated. ‘The curious thing was I never thought about drinking, only about water. I had a sort of —’ he moved his fingers — ‘an idea of water. It wasn’t only my throat and lips — my whole body had this image of water. Not any actual water, not a cup of it or a lake. The thing in itself.’ He laughed briefly. ‘I can’t explain it to you, I’m no good at explaining things.’

  ‘You’ve done pretty well,’ Gregory said.

  Harriet thought: If he had asked to be told, he would have got nothing: he knew better than to ask; all he did was drop his bait gently in front of David. Who never told me that story — or anything else about it…. She saw that Gregory was memorising the words, and thought: He’ll use them in a book — and why not?

  ‘Would it,’ Gregory said, ‘bore you to have dinner with me at the Athenaeum when you come back from this trip?’

  ‘Not at all, sir. I’d like to very much.’

  ‘How long will you be away?’

  ‘Two weeks.’

  ‘Would the fourth of April suit you?’

  ‘It would be fine. Thank you.’

  When the young man had gone, moving his long legs and long lean body across the room with the forward-slouching movement of so many airmen, Gregory said, ‘That’s a nice boy, Harriet. Is he married?’

  ‘No. He has a girl — I should say: a young woman. His age. He spends all his time off with her. I don’t know why they don’t marry — some trouble or other. He doesn’t talk to me about it, or about himself.’ She added in a light voice, ‘I see him very seldom.’ Almost as seldom, she thought, as in the days when — in order to see you — I spent less time with him than I ought.

  ‘Are you —’ he hesitated — ‘happy? I don’t mean only about the boy.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Are you working?’

  Surprised that he had troubled to ask, she said, ‘Yes. I never stop. I write too much. If I had written fewer books they would have been better. But I’ve always been driven — money for David’s needs first. Now money simply to pay my taxes and keep alive.’

  Gregory frowned. ‘You know, I don’t believe that. A good writer isn’t driven by anything except his need to write. He sacrifices — he can’t help doing it — everything else, and everybody, to that.’

  He had spoken with the coolest indifference, as if they were discussing not her, but the man in the moon. Harriet said humbly, ‘I’m sure you’re right.’ In the same breath, with a shrewdness as deeply-rooted as her humility, she asked silently: What have you had to sacrifice, my dear Gregory?

  ‘I want your advice,’ he began — and stopped.

  ‘Yes?’

  With what seemed complete irrelevance, he said,

  ‘Your son is very like you. I didn’t notice it when he was a child…. You have the same forehead and mouth, the same eyes that seem clear and are in fact not clear at all — impenetrable. It’s odd. He’s very masculine. You’re not, not in the least. Yet you do, I see it now, look much more like a young man——’

  ‘Not young.’

  ‘How old are you, Harriet? My age? You don’t look it, you know.’

  ‘What were you going to ask me?’

  He thought: No, I can’t tell her. Or not the whole…. It was her likeness to her son that paralysed his tongue. Embarrassing and impossible to expose his problem, his rather ridiculous problem, to the appraising eyes of a young man set in Harriet’s face, still smooth, for all its ineffaceable lines of thought and overwork. He said slowly,

  ‘It’s a foolish story, and I don’t come out of it at all well.’ He smiled wryly. ‘I won’t over-tell it…. I had an affair, very casual, with a young woman who is taking it badly.’ He stopped short. This is no good, he thought.

  ‘What do you mean? That she’s making demands?’

  His face was briefly distorted. ‘Yes. In effect.’

  Harriet felt a familiar disturbance — physical in so far as it started, disagreeably, in the nerves of her stomach, but reaching other more obscure nerves. To hide from him that they were shaking, she folded her hands tightly. Not my hands, she thought, deriding herself: they belong to a young woman who died. She asked coolly,

  ‘Were you fond of her?’

  ‘No. Not in any lasting way. I told you — it was altogether a foolish business.’

  ‘I’m sure you weren’t unkind.’

  The same brief convulsion disfigured his face. ‘Nothing is easier, when you’re asked to pity someone you don’t like, than to be unkind.’

  ‘That’s true.’ She was feeling her way — anxious to say what would comfort him without implying that what he had wanted was to be absolved in his own eyes and comforted. ‘But, you know, Gregory, kindness, if you have to force yourself to be kind, is not worth giving. Or taking.’ Her voice hardened because now she was saying what she believed. ‘No one has any right to kindness, no one should ask for it. If your young woman doesn’t know that yet…’

  ‘But surely one is responsible? I am responsible?’

  ‘For what? What did you promise her?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing? Then — my dear Gregory!’

  Gregory was silent. Since he had not told her the truth, since he had told only half of it and half lied, it was not her fault that the consolation she offered was clean off the mark. Useless. As useless as her advice, if he asked her for it, would be. He looked at her with a polite friendly smile. ‘Talking to you always clears my mind. You’re a good friend to have, my dear Harriet. Why can’t I, for a change, do something for you?’

  Harriet’s mind swung round violently, away from him. ‘Just now you asked me if I am happy. I’m not, I’m terribly unhappy.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Gregory, I can’t go on. Can’t go on writing my strength out, my mind, my energy, book after book, written as well as I’ve taught myself to write — and I do write well now——’

  ‘Yes. You do.’

  She said wildly, ‘But who ever says so? What critic even notices it? Yet all my — my inadequacies, my faults, are noticed, and treated with acid. It’s too much, I’m too old. I can’t go on performing, like an old acrobat, to a thinner and thinner circle of watchers. I can’t…. I must give it up, and try to find a job. Surely I ought to be able to? I’m intelligent, I’ve worked in an office — when I was young, you remember. I have the habit of hard work.’

  She stopped. She was shaking visibly now, knees and hands. Wretched, she thought: I’m talking much too loudly, with too little dignity…. And she had not said: Help me to get a job. It stuck in her throat.

  ‘Do you need money?’ he asked.

  ‘No. That is — I haven’t any debts. But I have
no savings either. I’ve never made enough to save — unless I’d gone without everything but food to put in David’s mouth and mine. And now — when the income tax takes nearly half, and…’

  ‘My dear — I’ll do what I can,’ he said. ‘It’s possible that there will be a job coming up at Rutley House. Easterby, the chap we call our editor — he’s hardly that — is talking of leaving in June. What he does is get out the monthly bulletin that we send to points abroad. It’s work you might enjoy doing, and not very strenuous. Nor, I’m afraid, well paid. Six hundred — a pittance. But it will become more important as we go on, and then the salary will go up, or we could give you an assistant — whichever you liked.’

  Now the emotions she had to control were relief and joy, both absurdly violent. It’s not a certainty, she reminded herself roughly: don’t appear to be certain, don’t put pressure on him…. Speaking quietly, she said,

  ‘I should be very glad if that came off. And I would do my best, my very best.’

  He smiled with great kindness. ‘You always do that.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Everything I know about you, my dear——’

  ‘You —’ she hesitated and said, ‘You’re very kind.’

  When he left she stood for a moment in the middle of the room, hands locked together, rigid. Trying to reduce fears and hopes to a few words, so that they would become manageable. He calls six hundred a pittance, she thought…. The gleam of derision in her eyes sprang from a less warm-hearted Harriet than the one Gregory knew…. What does he think I live on now?… It would save me. I should be safe, I could sleep at night — no more two a.m. sessions of panic and cowardice…. Don’t feel sure of it, don’t. But he spoke as though he were sure….

 

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