The Road from the Monument

by Storm Jameson

  The image that sprang into her mind was that of a clown in a circus, being slapped, not as part of a game, but with the intention of hurting. He was slapped first on one side of his head, then on the other; he swayed, recovered himself, smiled, swayed, smiled, always — after a harder slap than usual — regaining his balance, but each time more slowly: slowly he weakened, slowly began to crumple, and at last could not stand it any longer and dropped to the ground.

  She walked over to the glass, and looked without gentleness at her face. Yes, she thought calmly, a strong look of the clown, my girl: round staring eyes, heavy cheeks, long mouth…. She turned away. You’re still on your feet, though.

  Chapter Five

  Walking away from Harriet’s, he had a saving thought — the girl would write another letter. Of course. She wouldn’t — after being turned away at the door with a servant gaping at her — risk showing herself there again. She would try a letter.

  He looked rapidly through his letters next morning. Nothing. And nothing on the second delivery. Nor the day after. Nor the day after that.

  A week passed — with his expectation sinking into a deeper and deeper level of his mind: during the day he was able to forget the whole thing, except for the twitch of a nerve now and then, as though he were touched on the shoulder: at night, before he dropped asleep, it plagued him with more insistence. His thoughts began to harden against her. She was after all lying, he assured himself coldly. Trying it on…. To his surprise, this thought started in him a feeling of pity for her. Poor little beast, he thought: if I knew where to get hold of her I’d help her…. The touching little scene played itself in his mind, warmly and easily. Looking her in the face, he said kindly: This has nothing to do with me, has it? Nothing to do with what happened in Nice…. He corrected this swiftly, instantly, to make it: Nothing to do with Nice…. So that the idea of anything at all having happened slipped away into the background. The fact is, he went on, you can’t get at the person who is really responsible, so you came to me. That’s the truth, isn’t it? — Almost inaudibly she cried: Yes. — I thought so. But I’m going to help you, my child, stupid as you’ve been…. In her poor little vocabulary of an uneducated young woman, she had no words to tell him what she felt: she looked at him, her lips trembling humbly, speechless….

  Next morning there was an envelope in his post addressed in a writing he thought was hers. He opened it with a feeling of sickness. It was from a stranger, asking for his signature. In the revulsion from his — what had it been? fear? — he felt a sudden fury…. Why the devil doesn’t she write?… as though she were deliberately cheating him out of the pleasure it would give him to help her, the relief of drawing a line under the Nice incident by a generous entirely uncalled-for act. Account closed…. I’m making a fool of myself. No reason on earth why I should give her another thought. Leave it, leave it….

  Three days later, at the Institute, he was absorbed in the papers Lambert had put on his desk: copies of letters from a number of the more important delegates to the Conference, giving him the outline he had demanded of their speeches. As he studied them his own speech began to shape itself in his mind like an alp appearing through mist, with its rocks and green slopes, its scent of water and resin, its dazzling summit. It must, and would be the most impressive hour of the whole Conference. He rarely made a speech, and when he did he took immense pains, rehearsing until he seemed to be in the grip of an emotion which in fact he was controlling as carefully as a great actor, with a comparable effect on his audience. And on that part of himself, as well, which listened to his own voice as it came out, rather deep, modulating from resonant to staccato and sharp.

  His secretary came in. He glanced up, impatient. ‘What is it, Diana?’

  ‘Canon Pulmer is downstairs. He wants to see you.’

  His mind grew cold with fear. Pulmer knew — and had come to accuse him. No, impossible, he thought: impossible, absurd. ‘Bring him up.’

  Shocked to discover that the anxiety he believed he had disposed of was still crazily alive, he sat rigid, his body pressed against the edge of his table. Could Pulmer have heard the story? How?

  The first glimpse of Pulmer’s face, with its friendly smile spreading from the eyes to the fine shapely lips, its smooth folds in which traces of talc powder lay like a scattering of frost, chased his ludicrous panic out of sight. It left behind it a feeling of weakness in all his joints, and an odd nervous uncertainty. He found it difficult to give all his attention to the long and involved sentence through which, stepping delicately, Pulmer reached his point — he wanted Gregory to write a preface to the volume of theological essays he was going to publish in the autumn.

  Oh my God, he thought, what a bore. He felt that he was being exploited by Pulmer, but he could find no polite excuse for refusing. A little wearily, he said,

  ‘Yes, of course. Send me the manuscript.’

  ‘A thousand thanks. I hardly dared ask you.’

  ‘That was foolish. Quite unnecessary.’

  Settling himself in his chair, Pulmer said warmly, ‘Am I disturbing you?’

  A little late in the day to ask that, he thought. ‘Not at all.’

  ‘You have so much on your mind.’

  His feeling of weakness and uncertainty was still there, and he had a sudden confused impulse to confess himself to this man, this priest as notorious for his tact as for the wisdom and delicacy of his understanding of sinners. Without giving himself time to reflect on what he was risking he said,

  ‘I wonder if you can help me. I have, in fact, something, a problem, on my mind. A scruple of conscience.’

  The smilingly urbane face at the other side of the table changed so nearly imperceptibly that he could believe he was imagining the shadow of authority that crossed it — and vanished at once. ‘My dear Gregory—’

  But he had been checked. Cautiously, listening to himself, he said,

  ‘I made — some time ago — a very foolish promise. I could — with the utmost difficulty — have kept it. With enormous difficulty. It was all but impossible to keep it. I didn’t. I wasn’t able to get at my friend, to warn him not to count on me, and very naturally he felt that I’d treated him badly.’ He began to speak with more ease, to feel himself very much the sensitively scrupulous man of the world. Over scrupulous. He felt that he was impressing Pulmer with both his punctiliousness and his sincerity. ‘It so happens that I could, now, at considerable cost, redeem my very rash promise. Partly, at any rate. But it would create a very difficult, very disturbing situation — not only for me, but for other people — and I’m not sure that I have any right to do that. Especially since I shouldn’t be doing anyone a great deal of good.’ He smiled lightly and ironically. ‘It could, you know, my dear Pulmer, be nothing more than vanity on my part. The wish to cancel a failure.’

  He stopped. For the moment he all but overlooked the fact that what he had told Pulmer was not — not in any but the airiest sense — the truth. He waited for Pulmer to read him a friendly lecture on the sin of being too scrupulous, the sin of inverted pride.

  In the glance Pulmer turned on him there was only a polite friendly curiosity. He said gently,

  ‘I wouldn’t dare advise you, without knowing more about it.’

  ‘I can’t tell you any more. It would involve too many other people.’

  ‘My dear Gregory, you have all my sympathy. It’s extremely hard to steer a course between satisfying one’s sense of duty, one’s rectitude, and the fear of giving pain. I’m sure, I’m quite sure that your innate good feeling and tact will guide you, if you trust them. You have so much… sensibility.’

  Gregory did not answer at once. He felt that he had been let down, deflated. But who had deflated him? Recovering himself, he said,

  ‘Kind of you to listen.’ He smiled. ‘If you were my spiritual adviser I should hate to disappoint you…. You’ll send me your manuscript quickly, won’t you. I should like to write the preface at once, before beginning anoth
er job — less important.’

  Pulmer stood up — a second before Gregory himself could move. ‘I’ve stayed too long. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh, no.’ Holding the door open, he said gaily, ‘No one enjoys being interrupted more than I do. I’m really a lazy man. I ought to have been born a rich amateur of some kind.’

  Pulmer frowned. He might have been going to say something more serious than in the end he said. ‘Goodbye. If I can be of any use, send for me.’

  ‘Thank you. I will,’ Gregory said smoothly.

  ‘I’m deeply obliged to you for the preface. My publisher will be quite as grateful — for baser reasons.’

  ‘I’m delighted to do it.’

  He watched Pulmer’s tall agile body until it had crossed the outer office. Closing the door, he went back slowly to his table, walking as carefully as a man who had checked himself at the very edge of a precipice. He felt tired to death. It was some time before he could get back his interest in the letter — beginning: Cher collègue et ami — which had been engrossing him before Pulmer came.

  Chapter Six

  He was dining out that evening. When he came home, a little after ten o’clock, he found his wife still in the drawing-room. She was alone.

  ‘My dear, I thought you had Emily coming this evening,’ he said.

  ‘I put her off,’ Beatrice answered, yawning.

  ‘Why? Do you feel ill?’

  ‘No. Bored. The thought of an evening spent discussing you and your virtues was too much for me.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ he said, smiling. ‘But she has other interests.’

  ‘Yes. Politics, the Prime Minister, her uncle’s will, politics again. I really believe that her fondness for you is her only human feeling. The rest of her is heartless. What heart there is is the size of a pea.’

  A ridiculous image of his wife’s heart in the shape of a black wrinkled walnut crossed his mind. He said gently, ‘You don’t like living in London, do you?’

  ‘I never liked it.’

  ‘Would you… I’ve been thinking about it —’ this was not true: the thought had sprung in him only this moment — ‘would you like to live in the country?’

  Beatrice shrugged her shoulders. ‘Don’t be absurd, my pear. The whole point of our living here is that you can walk to the Institute.’

  ‘If I were to resign from the Institute…?’

  She gave him a mocking and faintly surprised glance. ‘Resign? Why are you talking in this stupid way? You know very well that if I told you I couldn’t live in London another day you would be delighted to make the Institute an excuse to pack me off and live here alone. Alone except for your devoted Emily and Harriet and the rest.’

  ‘To be honest, I was thinking of myself,’ he said. ‘I should be perfectly happy to resign, live in the country — the real country, as far from London as you like — see no one, and write. Why not?’

  Is that really what I want? he asked himself. Or am I bolting?… The confusion in his mind increased. He thought wearily: You’re in no state to decide anything — but, oh my God, to get away…

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ Beatrice said. ‘You write here.’

  ‘When I can. When I’m not at the Institute. That’s not good enough; one can’t, or I can’t, write with an eye on the calendar, today here, tomorrow at Rutley House — and so on.’

  Staring at him in her fixed nonchalant way, his wife tried to guess what lay below this sudden — she felt sure it was sudden — impulse to throw everything away merely to become that, to her, somewhat dubious and preposterous figure, the writer who lives by his writing. She did not believe that he was giving her the true reason for his mood. There was something else — what? Trouble with an Egeria who is beginning to ask for something less ethereal than words? she thought drily. Or boredom with the work he does at the Institute? That, she reflected, would be exactly like him. He had a craving for power, for the kind of flattering personal power his position as Director gave him; he manœuvred — talking in the right way to the right man (or woman) — to get it. And then resented the cost of it in time and energy.

  ‘But you’ve always said that you need to live in the world, that you need to know important men in important places — for the sake of your books. When did you decide that what your genius really needs is solitude? The solitude, I suppose, of a comfortable country house, with a good cook and gardeners, and a sound-proof writing-room?’

  There was enough truth in her gibe, as in all her bitter or merely comic gibes at him, to chill him. He contrived to smile. ‘The sound-proof room, certainly.’

  ‘My dear boy, do you really believe you’d be happy shut up in the country with your muse? And me. Had you forgotten me? How long would it last? A year? Six months? Not longer, I’m certain.’

  Glancing at her from the corner of an eye, he wondered just when it was he realised that their marriage had been a mistake. A mistake only, not a disaster. That he had no love and almost no liking for her. Respect, yes: he respected certain qualities in her: her uprightness, her lack of illusions about herself, her somewhat eccentric piety — a mingling, as he saw it, of childish habits with the reverence she would pay any ruling authority. Others of her qualities he disliked infinitely. He made an effort to trace in her finely-cut features the remains of the aristocratic delicacy he had admired so much, and could see only their sharpness, the long pointed nose, the too thin lips which seemed to squeeze the sounds that came through them. But even that — that harsh and slightly screeching note — had impressed him as aristocratic once. Nothing that has changed is her fault, he thought.

  ‘You’re very likely right,’ he said gently.

  ‘That’s civil of you.’

  ‘I’ve tired you with my nonsense. Forgive me.’

  ‘You —’ she stopped, defeated by her sense of his distance from her, a distance which his gentleness and polite endurance of her tongue only aggravated. ‘Help me to my room.’

  In his own room, he stood for a time at one of the windows, in the darkness. A young woman, a negress, was walking up and down on the opposite side of the road, keeping close to the wire fence of the Park, a few paces each way. She wore a light yellow coat and carried, open, a parasol of the same colour, twirling it as she walked. The frightful sodium light thrown down by the lamps hung high above the centre of the road turned the faces of all white people to the livid pallor of a corpse, but had no effect on the pure oily blackness of her skin. In the unusually clear darkness, the lights, in Park Lane, in the wide space round the Arch, in the buildings — domes, chimneys, a tower outlined in blue and red — on the far side of the Park, sent out the finest of fine rays, crossing and re-crossing like the shrill crying of fifes or horns. Inside the Park three patches of daffodils started a ripple nearer in colour to the peeling trunks of the trees than to the yellow of the negress’s coat. A man, a white man, stopped to speak to her; they talked for a minute, then he made an abrupt gesture of refusal and walked on and she went back to her slow walk, something between a dance step and a prowl, twirling her parasol, lifting her black face to the harsh light.

  An extraordinary feeling of isolation and ignorance seized Gregory. He felt cut off from life, as though he were an exile. A ridiculous thought jumped into his mind. If I could go home with that young black whore — not to sleep with her; to live with her in her room, watch how she behaves with the men she brings in, how she eats, yawns, what she looks like asleep, how she breathes, how her skin smells: sink myself in that life of animalism and obscenity. I might learn more about human nature in a week than I’ve managed to learn so far in fifty years.

  Fool, he thought harshly, you fool.

  He turned away from the window, and began to undress.

  Chapter Seven

  He fell asleep at once.

  He was a child walking with his father through the cobbled and very narrow streets of a town he did not know, at night: it was not completely dark, on both sides of him he could
see the houses, none like its neighbour, story-book houses with gables and low windows. Holding his son’s hand, the old sea-captain walked quickly, silent, in his worn suit of navy serge and black laced boots, leaning forward and taking long shambling steps. There was nothing uneasy in the silence, and he trotted beside his father in trusting contentment. The change began slowly; a sense that all was not well spread to him from the silent shabby old man, from the darkening street itself: some danger threatened them both, as though the thickened air were pressing down on them. He began to be afraid. Without any warning, his father left him, going away through the only door in a high flat wall of dark brick. After a moment he knew — without knowing how he knew — that in a cellar of the house men were putting his father to death. He flung himself against the door, beating on it with his hands in an agony of grief, which became guilt, a terrified guilt, as though it were in some way his fault that his father was being cruelly killed. In his fear he half woke; the street wavered round him like dark smoke, and he thought obscurely: But he left me, I didn’t leave him…. He fell back into the dream, into the same narrow street, and now he was alone, running down it, trying to escape. Escape what? There was something in his mind that was not only the fear of being killed — an anguish, a knowledge, that at any cost he mustn’t look at. As he ran someone tapped on a window in the house he was passing. His father? One of the murderers? This tapping was worse than anything, unbearable: his fear turned and twisted in him, backing savagely, refusing to see, to know…. Don’t let me know.… He made a second violent effort to wake, and succeeded in escaping from the street into an ambiguous awareness of his body lying in bed in the darkened room: it was only a partial escape, his bedroom and the dark street of the dream moved in and out of each other, he had a horrible feeling of oppression, his body too heavy to move, his mind sickeningly torn between the two scenes struggling together in him. Again he heard the tapping, behind him. With a confused effort he began consciously to imagine himself running away along a street which was light and friendly. It vanished. His eyes opened on his room. Lying still, he forced himself to think. … He did his best for me. And he had only that miserably small pension paid him by a rich shipping firm, rich and mean enough to cut it down in his last year to an even more miserable sum, on the excuse that if he could afford to send his son to a university he must have saved money and didn’t need as much as two hundred a year…. For the first time — the first time he had allowed the thought into his mind — he asked himself: Did he — to send me my inadequate allowance every month — did he go as short of food as of everything else?… This was more than he could face: he pushed the thought away.