‘You never asked me what I was doing,’ he reproached Hervey. ‘The King dismissed me last week, with a generous tip, and leave to wear his uniform for a fortnight. Thoughtful. I took this place by letter. It’s damned nice, isn’t it? The Dug-out is the best of it—no worry about your rations coming up—it’s kept by a friend of mine. He was my sergeant in 1916.’
Hervey smiled at him. The old Philip, untouched by war. No, that was not true. The touch was there, but for the moment it could be ignored. T.S. had gone over to the Dug-out to fetch coffee. He arranged cups and glasses on the packing-case between two candles, of which the flames blew out level, like yellow leaves, in the draught. A plait of wax hung from the edges. Hervey poured the coffee. Philip stooped behind the case and brought up a bottle of red wine.
‘But, Philip, your mother,’ Hervey said. ‘Doesn’t she mind your living here?’
‘Not a bit, she died last month,’ Philip answered.
He had spoken about her in a light voice, but with that convulsive narrowing of the space between his eyebrows which his friends knew well. Hervey said nothing. Neither did T.S. and after a moment Philip said impatiently :
‘Don’t sit like owls. I want to know what you have been doing, Hervey. I’m told you’ve written a book? You would seize the chance, when the rest of us were off killing Germans, to get in first.’
‘I write mostly about soap now,’ Hervey said gloomily. ‘My novel is coming out in a fortnight, in May.’
‘You s’d have made friends with my wife,’ T.S. said. ‘I know I wrote to you from France to go and see her. Why didn’t you?’ Hervey looked at him blankly. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Evelyn Lamb,’ he said, in a jeering voice.
‘Is Evelyn Lamb your wife?’
‘Evelyn Lamb has been Evelyn Hey wood since June 1918. She married me in a most unusual outbreak of emotion about the War. That’s not fair, but why should I be fair? I’m among friends, ain’t I? The fact is I didn’t know I was marrying half the sparrow-hawk writers, editors, and what not in London. It’s awful, awful.’
Hervey had seen quite a number of portraits of Evelyn Lamb. There was always a new one in one of the independent galleries, by a young artist whom everyone would soon know. Young artists began by painting Evelyn Lamb, exaggerating the flattened line of her face and the length and narrowness of her hands. After that they went on to paint the well-advertised young women who move social diarists to their daily or weekly droppings in the newspapers. So that Evelyn Lamb’s name carried always a faint flavour of something not merely literary.
Her father was an assiduous surgeon—among his colleagues known as Butcher Lamb—who left her a very respectable fortune. She wrote sparingly essays of a biting, railing kind, and besides this was the literary editor of the London Review. She had a gravely-earned reputation as a critic and director of taste. Hervey had known about her since a long time—but when T.S. wrote that he was married, and when he spoke of his wife, it did not occur to her that his Evelyn was Evelyn Lamb. Only the notion would have seemed absurd. Why, thought Hervey, she must be ten or twelve years older.
As if he knew what she was thinking, T.S. put on his sharpest and most malicious smile.
‘How’s Penn. And where is he?’
‘He’s in Canterbury,’ Hervey said, waiting.
‘Didn’t he get to France, then? Pity.’
‘You know he didn’t,’ she said fiercely. She was more vexed with herself for her want of dignity than with T.S. Also she was ashamed of Penn before these old-young warriors, and ashamed of her feeling of shame. Why am I so disloyal, she thought.
‘Give over teasing our Hervey,’ Philip said. He smiled, looking at her with his clear, very clear, blue eyes, as if he were alone with her in the little space. She was afraid T.S. would notice and jeer at him. ‘You’ve neither of you asked me what I’m doing. Nice pair of friends I’ve got. Well—my mother had over eight thousand pounds put away. I always thought she had only her pension. She scraped and skimped all our lives as if we hadn’t a farthing to spare.’ Again that contraction of his brows, like a slight pain. ‘Now I’m going to spend every penny of it. I’m going to read economics, and then I’m going to start a weekly paper.’
‘Oh my God,’ T.S. said.
Philip’s face was alive with delight. He stood up and put two fresh candles in the place of the old. A globe of light sprang round them, fine and wavering, as though it were a motion of the air. Outside the caravan there was black, still night. ‘You’re going to write for it, my lad. You’ll write the scientist’s notes once a month. And our Hervey can write, too, if she behaves herself and does what I tell her.’
‘What kind of a paper, Philip?’ Hervey asked.
He looked from one to the other with a serious air. ‘Pacifist, socialist, and classicist,’ he answered, in a slow voice. Listening to it, Hervey remembered that it was always Philip who, in their life together, had taken charge of it. It was he who made them empty their pockets for the dock strikers. He who had the idea of giving away socialist leaflets at the Principal’s garden-party. He ordered and they obeyed. It never occurred to either of the others not to obey him.
‘Socialist—because even to tolerate the idea of there being rich and poor is vulgar—disgusting and ill-bred. Well-to-do persons who want to remain better-off than others are very under-bred. Pacifist—because it is always the young who die of wars, and this creates for the time an elderly experienced world, which smells used. And classicist—because it is your romantics who cover up wars, dictatorships, and the other nastinesses with their bad sentiments. I detest romantics. Nearly as much as I used to detest our heroic civilians and the indecent women who gave away white feathers. I know a number of very highminded old gentlemen, but they are not much use.’ The draught was now so hard on the candles that their flames nearly left the wick. Philip put his hands round one, so that it flew erect again, like a strong stem. ‘Because we have survived the War, we have to keep a channel open between us in 1914—do you remember us?—and the future. Before long something new will begin. We three are going to watch for it, and watch the others—the practical ones, who support crucifixions on behalf of the nail and timber interests—watch them that they don’t pop the old greasy clapper of their facts on it at sight.’
T.S. put one hand over his eyes. His eyelids had begun to twitch, as they did now when he was tired. ‘Nothing keeps fresh for longer than a moment,’ he said.
‘I’ll help you, Philip,’ Hervey said.
‘It’s no use,’ T.S. screamed. He jumped up and banged on the wall of the caravan. ‘No use. We’re all beasts. Here’s a story for your first number. In December I was in Berlin for a fortnight. Coming back I fell in with two journalists on the train. I thought I couldn’t do any harm showing them photographs of the starving children, like abortions. They swore they’d write about it in their paper. When I read their article it was headed: Germans Whining For Help. Stop the Hun Coddlers. How’s that for your something new?’
He shut up suddenly and sat down, collapsed. He was grey with fatigue, drawn and old. You could not believe that his youth would ever come again. Yet he was only twenty-four. Younger than Hervey.
‘I’m sorry. I’ll help, of course,’ he said. He looked at Hervey. ‘Poor Hervey,’ he said, with a grin. Hervey nodded to him, trembling a little. Since the shock when he screamed, she had not looked up. Now she thought that for all they had known each other so long and were more intimate than a many brothers and sisters, never, never would she be anything better with them than a stranger in all that touched the War. There, the distance between them was absolute.
During it all, Philip had sat quiet, shielding the candle. You would think he had been through it before. He now opened a book and put it behind the flame. ‘I’ve got a fourth man,’ he said quietly. ‘He was in my company until he was shot up. There were five of us in the battalion, but the others had themselves killed. We used to plan the paper together. Name of David R
enn.’
‘He’s in my firm,’ Hervey said, glad to have something in the pot with them. ‘He is said to be teaching me to sell soap.’
‘Well, what do you think of him?’
‘Only this morning he took the blame for a disastrous mistake I made, and afterwards gave me such a gruelling I nearly broke down and cried.’
Philip divided the last of the wine carefully among them. ‘We’ll drink this to Hervey’s book,’ he said.
There was peace in the caravan again. T.S. roused himself, and drank with a flicker of mischief and pleasure on his face. It really did amuse him to think of Hervey’s book. He felt sure it was queer, stiff, and unreadable. So it almost was. Hervey knew what he thought and did not care. She was by much too happy. These moments when she could feel herself accepted, without having to make any effort, were the happiest in her life. With everyone except these two she felt impelled to take trouble to please or to impress. She was then never free, never herself. Too nervous and mistrustful to give herself away, she was forced to appear the person others wanted. Only with the two who knew her she could be as slow, careless, and violent as she liked.
‘Wouldn’t it be a fine thing if we had three caravans here, one each,’ she said suddenly.
Philip broke into his ridiculous wild laugh. He never learned to laugh with decency. ‘You and T.S. are both lost, and I’m the only free man among you.’
T.S. looked at him scornfully. ‘You make me very tired, Philip. Do you know what you are?—you’re a doomed young man. Zero hour of you and your new spirit!’
Towards midnight, Philip led his cohort back to London. In the extraordinary stillness of that night the noise was shattering. Every sound rang again, in the arch of sky and dark earth. It was certainly not the fault of the car if any creature on their route slept through the arrival of the new age.
T.S. chose to get out at the first Tube station. As soon as he had gone Hervey fell asleep. She woke suddenly when the car stopped, and stumbled out. Still only half awake, she forgot to speak, and after waiting a moment Philip called to her softly out of the darkness. ‘Good night, Hervey love.’
Words so familiar that they were scarcely spoken before they became a memory.
3. Philip
Two miles from the Dug-out the car coughed gently and stood still. Philip smiled to himself. He recognised the foolishness of trying to argue with the creature, at this time of night. Resigning himself to walk the rest of the way, he stepped out, and pushed the car gently into the ditch. At least no one would abduct such a wretch. In the morning he and his friend Frank, of the Dug-out, would turn out as a crash party and bring her in.
He walked comfortably in the darkness, between hedges where as yet no green showed. The lovely freshness and thinness of the air between dark and day flowed over him like cool water. He loved this country, so plain, forgotten between two roads. It was a comfortable country for a man who was rarely alone, since there was always a ghost or two to step up and keep him company. Not that his dead friends worried him. He liked to feel them about when they came, but he never encouraged them. Sometimes he thought it a pity that they gave themselves the trouble to come back at all. Thin young men in shabby khaki, their eyes embarrassed the old and were themselves baffled by the flippant stare of the very young. He himself took care not to speak of the War except with soldiers. He was not resentful. The War had given him something, a new poise, without taking away even one of his early dreams. He still believed that he could help the world—but now he had a sharpened sense of time’s urgency.
It was not only that he had lost four years. The rude shock of the War had done invisible damage to his dear England. He was now like a man escaping from a battle who looks round him for his friends, to save what he can. Part, indeed, of the little company of the days before the War was missing, but the others would not fail to answer. We must close the ranks, he thought. In the darkness his face wore that smile, half childlike half mocking, with which in those early days he had rallied his followers to support him—it might be in an attack, delivered with stink bombs and cushions, on a meeting of the Tory Club, or to form a bodyguard for the fluent and intractable French anarchist he had invited to the university, or only to empty their pockets for the benefit of a strike failing for lack of funds.
He was not, even yet, willing, as were the other survivors from that time, to take up a smiling air of patronage towards these incidents. He would have said that they were necessary—the discipline a platoon needs so that later on it will obey, and which its officer himself needs. But for the habit formed in 1913 T.S. would now be refusing his share of work. Our Philip had too much simplicity to see that his friends loved him without, always, sharing his faith, and that it was for him they slaved.
As he walked he came to a pond, and stooped to dip his hands in it, for the sake of the cool water. He thought of Hervey, whose hands were always cool, with a kind of living cold, like the feel of a leaf. He loved her so much, and without subtleties—only wanting to live with her, and be able to touch her, and hear her voice, which was so thin and clear that he had never heard any other woman with such a voice.
He knew her so well that he could see just how her honesty, that biting tooth, was being turned in on itself by her life—married to that unedifying fellow Vane. He even realised that something in Vane woke a kind of pity under his loathing—Vane was der Mann ohne Schatten. But to think of Hervey in his hands—that was too much—Philip groaned aloud. ‘My darling, my little child, how could you?’ Involuntarily he had quickened his steps and now stood still. When he lifted his eyes he saw that the light was coming, more a strange lifting and thinning of the darkness than light itself. Beneath his hand a gorse bush showed some few early flowers and he took one and began to rub it between his fingers. The bitter scent—it was a thick scent like oil—disturbed him profoundly. He stood with bent head, trying to recognise the emotion which had seized him and which belonged, he felt certain, to an incident so far back in his life that it had nothing to do with Hervey.
At once the moment he was seeking gave itself up. He saw the long school slope and the lines of boys and girls drawn up outside the building, answering Here to their names. He stood at the end of one line, full in the morning sun, and he could see the trees in the valley garden, and one of them, an ash, was just coming—its leaves, widely spaced, and of a very young bright green, gave him an extraordinary feeling of happiness, as if he were listening to music. He stood and looked at it, and at the same time he was crushing between his fingers a piece of gorse pulled from the growing bush at the top of the slope. In time his own name was called and he answered.
Now, standing in the half darkness, he thought that he could say Here with precisely the same feeling of ecstasy and enchantment, since in fact the two moments were identical—there was no flaw of time, no dovetailing of Now and Then, since time had no authority over this experience shared with his younger self. The Philip of both moments was the same person and would live on in him unaltered until he died—and perhaps after.
But that was not all. He smelled the gorse again, and now as if it were one of those quite ordinary objects which an animal or an old woman gives the youngest son and tells him that he has only to hold it in his mouth to have his wish—there again was the school slope, and the marching lines. He marched with them, and just at the door turned his head to look back up the slope. Hervey, late as always, ran down it to take her place. She wore her school cap, and her plaits swung back as she ran, head up in a pretence of confidence. The boy next him smiled widely. ‘Look at young Hervey. You’d think she owned the place.’ Philip looked.
I looked too long, he thought, smiling. Suddenly he was very tired. The Dug-out was only a few yards away now, but he could not manage them. He lay down on the short grass and felt the cold entering first his hands and cheek and then his whole body.
About six o’clock Frank came out of the Dug-out, whistling. He saw Philip lying asleep at the side of the roa
d. He looked so like other figures Frank had seen lying in just that attitude that before he could stop himself he thought, Oh my God, they’ve got the captain. He ran forward.
Chapter IV
In the Month of May
1. Evelyn
Evelyn Lamb’s writing room, where she received friends, was a fine, severe room, the walls finished to resemble plaster, and lined for half their height with oaken shelves for books. A sixteenth-century oak table, taken from a church, stood in the window, flanked by a day-bed. There was nothing else in the room, except the chairs, and a rug on the painted floor. Next door to this room her bedroom had been decorated by a Mount Street firm. The floor, of polished steel, reflected as in a dark, smooth lake the dressing-table with its thin ebony pillars, the bed, made of ebony with an ivory inlay, the great candlesticks, deliberately out of keeping to add that touch of the incongruous demanded by the modern scheme, and the open doors of the cupboard in which she kept creams and lotions for the ritual of her face. Those for her body were stored in the bathroom. Two hours in the morning and an hour at night were not enough for these deities, and she attended to them with her own hands. A book was propped against the mirror to distract her mind.
That evening she was brushing her hair before dinner when her husband came into the room, leaving the door ajar, so that the curtains blew out slowly in the tepid air. He watched her for a moment, and said :
‘I do want you to ask Hervey Russell to come here. You could do something for her.’
‘Are you very devoted to her?’ his wife asked.
‘Not at all, I like her, and she shared our rooms, mine and Philip Nicholson’s, before she married. Before the War, Your hair is as smooth as water.’
Evelyn laid her brush down, frowning. ‘Did you truly live together in all innocence, a young girl and two young men? I know you say so now.’
T.S. smiled sharply. ‘If you had known Hervey in those days. She was very young, shabby, and careless. She didn’t know anything. Besides, we were interested in a great many other things.’
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