There was a long silence. Evelyn’s fingers opened and shut in a nervous spasm. She waited for him to speak, to go away, do anything rather than sit staring at her in that absent way. His body had sunk forward, as if the life were leaving it. His eyelids twitched in the way she found maddening to watch.
‘Why won’t you go to a doctor about your nerves?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with them,’ T.S. said,
‘You have no energy.’
When he had gone she looked closely at herself in the glass. There were no lines on her face, which at thirty-six was as smooth as an egg. Indeed she had become younger during the War and more avid of living. She married a young man, a soldier, for passion and with the nearly conscious wish to identify herself with all that invisible pervasive excitement, springing from the presence everywhere of young men who were going to die in a few weeks, or even a few hours. A sharp sensation, neither grief nor joy, seized her whenever during this time she touched her husband. For the first time in her life her senses got the better of her intellect and she felt herself carried away by an emotion. He was in France several months without leave, until the end of the War. On this, his second return, she scarcely recognised him in the hagridden young man, hardly able to keep his eyes open from fatigue, who fell asleep in the cab. The War is over, she thought. It seemed to her that already some brightness, some mystery, had departed from the world.
The book she was reading fell forward and she turned it sharply over. ‘Au hasard! A jamais, dans le sommeil sans hommes, Pur des tristes éclairs de leur embrassements… .’ Why read? Why brush your hair? Why do anything? She wanted to hurl her books about the floor, to run as she was into the street. Everything bored her, everything was dry, tasteless, finished. She curved herself backward, gripping the sides of her chair. Choking with nervous anger, she repeated ‘Let something happen, let something happen,’ until her voice stopped of itself. She heard the first of her guests arriving. With fingers over her eyes she grew calm and began to arrange the evening in her mind so that it should seem informal, a quite spontaneous meeting of friends.
2. Hervey at Ephesus
About the middle of May Hervey had a letter from Evelyn Lamb, asking her to dinner.
Hervey’s first impulse with an invitation was to refuse it. She would go to any lengths to avoid meeting new people. This was partly her nervous fear of being a failure, but more a rooted, unconscious arrogance, vexed by having to make any effort to be agreeable to strangers. I don’t want to know them, why should I? she fretted. Very often she was, as she had known she would be, a failure, sitting wooden and silent, made stupid by the pressure of so many alien minds. Everyone except herself seemed to her to possess a public face, which he wore to perfection. Now and then she came out of herself with a rush and was astonished to find that she had something to say. Afterwards she endured torments, feeling certain that she had made a public clown of herself.
She refused Mrs. Heywood’s invitation. In a few days she had another—this time inviting her to coffee at nine o’clock. At the same time she had a note from T.S., ordering her not to behave like a fool. This was like the old days—she accepted, and towards nine o’clock that evening was walking along the Chelsea Embankment to his house. In front of her was a short ungainly figure of a private soldier, sauntering along as if the pavement belonged to him. Hervey was in no hurry to arrive and she kept behind this figure. Nothing warned her that she was present at the birth of yet another new age. Its short thickset legs and broad shoulders held her glance—they were so solemnly self-confident. To her small surprise the soldier turned in at the gate of number 97. Seeing him on the step, she hung back, but the maid held the door open and she had to walk in after him.
The light fell on his cropped head and sergeant’s stripes. She had to edge past him, following the maid. She was already taut and on the defensive. She laid aside her coat and looked at herself carelessly in a glass. Then the maid took her downstairs again and opened the door of a large room, filled with people. She heard her name spoken—‘Miss Hervey Russell’—and went forward.
It was a nightmare parody of all the times she had pictured herself arriving, already known, in the world of writers. Her arms and legs felt like lead. She glared round the room, with an effort to appear self-possessed. A woman with a tall elegant body, thin almost to emaciation, smiled at her and said: ‘I’m so pleased you’ve come. You don’t know me. I’m Evelyn.’ So much kindness was almost too much for Hervey. She turned red, grasped the very long beautiful fingers held out to her, and muttered two words.
Evelyn Lamb was a master in the art of placing strangers. She knew at once whether a new acquaintance was likely to be useful or do her credit. Her first notion on seeing Hervey come in, with an air of morose indifference, was that she had made a mistake in listening to T.S. Then as she was salvaging her hand from Hervey’s she was struck by a curiously massive quality in the young woman. It was as though she had run up against something she thought soft to find it as heavy and immovable as stone. She felt a spring of interest and curiosity. At the same time she noticed Hervey’s old-fashioned dress, and slippers which had evidently been worn a great many times.
‘I must have a talk with you later,’ she said, in her slow, hushed voice. She always spoke slowly, with a smile, as if she were the gentlest and kindest of creatures. ‘Now you must talk to Mr. Ridley. He’s come up to take London by storm, too. You must compare notes.’ She moved away, leaving Hervey face to face with the young sergeant. He was an extraordinary figure in this company, standing in his thick khaki and thick clumping boots planted widely apart, as if he would refuse to budge. Hervey looked from them to his face, large, sallow, and complacent, and tried to think of something to say.
‘Are you a writer?’ she said at last.
‘When I get free o’ this uniform I’ll be one quick enough,’ was the answer, given with terrific gusto, in a rough voice.
‘I suppose you’re writing something or other.’
‘My first novel came out yesterday,’ Hervey said.
‘And I suppose it’s damn bad,’ Ridley said, with a broad smile.
‘I don’t know why you should suppose it,’ Hervey said mildly. ‘You haven’t read it.’
‘Because you’re like all the rest. Out with a novel, before you know how to write, and then write another, and another, and by the time you’ve learned something you’ve written that many rotten books no one takes y’ seriously.’ He jerked his head. ‘Come on, let’s sit down over here and I’ll tell y’ something worth knowing.’
Hervey was glad to be in a corner, away from the centre of the room. Ridley was too blatant a companion. Now that they were apart she did not mind him. He talked to her in a patronising voice, as if she would be incapable of understanding him. She had never known anyone so filled to bursting-point with conceit. At the same time she almost took to him—only because he was pleased with himself. There was something engaging in so much vanity. He was young, her own age, very broad and heavy, with reddish hair.
‘I don’t mind telling you,’ he said, smiling. ‘Some would keep a good thing to themselves, I’m not like that. Here’s what you ought to do. Don’t write novels. Write criticism and essays. Get a reputation for saying something a bit different from other people. Make friends with th’other writers. Get about among’em, get known. Then when you’re well in then bang down your novel. Creeping about the way you’re doing is just damn silliness.’ He looked at her out of little twinkling conceited eyes. ‘Now I suppose you’re offended.’
‘Why should I be?’ Hervey said simply. It was true. If you were only unusual enough she did not mind how uncivil you were, so far as it concerned her. She never felt that other people’s behaviour touched her at all. Even when she was trying to please them she did not take many people seriously. Once out of her sight they ceased to exist for her.
Evelyn Lamb came towards them, and Ridley planted his great feet and stood up. ‘No, sit down,’
Evelyn said gently, putting her hand on him. ‘I’ll sit between you’ She smiled at Hervey, then turned half round, ignoring her, and talked to Ridley. She seemed to have known him already for some time. She asked him when he expected to be demobilised. He was stationed at Dover, where, if you believed him, there were few men of his metal.
His manner had changed. Without becoming any less self-confident—as when he thanked her for sending him books to review his voice suggested that in doing him a good turn she had done an even better one for herself—he managed to convey a not too subtle flattery by the way he hung on her words, nodding his big head when she paused, as if he were learning from her.
In her delicate fashion Evelyn seemed delighted with him. She made herself smooth and very friendly, as if his bullying voice and thick overbearing body attracted her. Hervey sat stiffly through it all. She supposed she had been dismissed, but did not know how to leave. So she sat on, inwardly mortified, with a fixed air of interest. She hoped that other people would think she was taking part in their conversation.
After a few moments Evelyn rose. A man had come in whom it was important for this Ridley to know, and off they went, leaving Hervey quite by herself. She sat for a long time, ignored, knowing no one, and ashamed to move. An older woman glanced at her curiously, as if she would speak, but Hervey returned the glance with so forbidding a look that the woman went past. The feeling of being isolated shamed her. She could neither endure it nor go. She felt herself turning cold with shame, and yet she burned, she was on fire, conscious in every nerve of the clatter of voices and of figures moving before her eyes. At last she thought she would stand up and walk slowly down the side of the room to the door. Once there she could whisk out, unnoticed. And never, never, would she enter this house again.
She was just about to move, her head thrust blindly forward, when a man halted in front of the couch. He was a big middleaged Jew, handsome, seeming very pleased with himself. Directed at the air, his smile took in Hervey on its way. Immediately he stepped closer. ‘Why, I know you,’ he said, in a high resonant voice. His eyes, dark, brilliant, and womanish, examined her with surprise and an impersonal pleasure. He stood in front of her with his powerful head on one side and his fingers pressed together, gazing at her as if she were a painting which he could well value, knowing deeply how fine it was and also what it would fetch.
Hervey was past civility. ‘No, I don’t know you,’ she said coldly. A short time before she would have been glad of him, of anyone who took away from her the disgrace of sitting there ignored. But she had made up her mind to go and he was a hindrance.
‘You’re related to old Mrs Mary Hervey, the shipbuilder. I’m sure I’m right. Of course I am—I don’t make mistakes. Let me tell you you have her very expression.’
‘Mrs Hervey is my grandmother. I belong to a part of her family she chooses to have nothing to do with.’ She spoke sharply, because she was ashamed of not having any part or lot in her powerful grandmother, and yet scornful. Without knowing it, she lived through the phases of her mother’s life each time when, as now, she had to confess her grandmother.
‘So much the worse for her,’ Marcel Cohen said. ‘Now what are you doing here? You don’t know anyone, you have no money, you want work. Our dear Evelyn only helps young men. Try somewhere else. Try me.’
‘I am just leaving.’ She could not for her life keep her voice altogether steady. She thought in the same moment of the time it would take her to get home, of her slippers, her book, of which no one here had spoken, and of Richard—they stuck in her throat and she could not speak. How shameful if she should cry.
‘Na! What a pity! Just as we meet. Well, I shall walk to the door with you, then you will be grateful to me—and I shall say to your grandmother——’
‘You’ll oblige me by saying nothing to her,’ Hervey said in a tense voice. The whole of her rage and humiliation went off in the words. She looked at him, at his big genial face, lined and pouched with intelligence and good-living, and detested it. She thought he ought to have known better than to be sorry for her. Head held down, she walked towards the door. Evelyn Lamb spoke to her as she went by and she answered, not realising until afterwards that she had actually accepted another invitation. She took her coat, scarcely waiting to drag it over her arms, and went out.
The cold night air shocked her, and sent a ball of blood to press against the root of her head. She walked without thinking about the past hour. The look of the river, dark, like dark glass with infinite gradations of light under the surface, soothed her : she thought of her home, of the sea, with the cliffs and the town clinging to them and the river going back between the hills, softly, turning this way and that, into the silence between two moors. Truly, to her it was as if it turned in her heart. She followed it with her mind, rapt, until she came to herself again in London. And then she hated so thoroughly the street, smelling of dust, sweat, and oil, and the flattened voices and faces of townsmen, that it revolted her to touch them. She took a bus at last, but when it filled so that the people standing pressed against her knees she stood up and pushed her way out. She would walk.
She thought about Richard. Suddenly there were tears running over her face in the darkness. It was for this she had left Richard, and was living in this man-heap, for such an evening, for such days, spent in racking worthless labour. This was what she had got, and given up her only son for it.
With a great effort she became quiet. She would not think any more, since it was useless. She went home, went to bed, and slept.
In the morning, as soon as she awoke, she felt a change in the air. The room was full of sunshine, like bright running water, everywhere, from the floor to the ceiling. She stepped out into it from her bed and went over to the window. There, in the yard behind the house, a miracle. Only the day before the bush of lilac had been black and dead, with a few hard spikes of buds among the tightly-furled leaves. Now it was quick and alive. The young green of the leaves and the lavender-hued flowers sprang up together in the strong light. Beyond the wall a row of poplars had broken into leaf. Yesterday, nothing—and to-day, flower and leaf together in a swift radiant flight.
3. Philip and Hervey
So it was everywhere. That year there was no coming of spring. One day it was winter, no sap moving, the air cold and lifeless, and the next full spring, with the flowers quickening among the young leaves so that both were new, young, and perfect in the same moment, as those mediaeval painters and weavers of tapestries imagined them.
Hervey went to her work like a creature in an enchantment. She was so happy she did not know she had ground under her feet. It was hard to go home at night. Much she wished for company. Her mind teemed with thoughts as her body, a violin with nerves for strings, vibrated with pent-up energy. She sauntered in crowded streets, an odd careless figure, part Yorkshire bumpkin, part spy in enemy country, heartening herself with words.
T.S. had sunk himself in his work. He was vexed that Hervey was not at home in his house and vexation worked in him to keep him away from her. Philip Nicholson had gone off into Cornwall. One evening Hervey came home to find him waiting at the end of the street. Cornwall had tired him, as she could see. He greeted her with his familiar quick smile, loving and nervous. If he liked me without loving me, Hervey thought, I could be happy anywhere with him.
‘I’ve dined,’ Philip said. ‘Have you?’
‘Why yes,’ Hervey said, to save trouble, and not caring—as young still—whether she ate or not. But she would eat fast enough if any offered a meal.
They went into Regent’s Park and walked between the water and the flowers. ‘I don’t like your novel,’ Philip said.
‘Isn’t it any good at all?’
‘You ought to read some French,’ Philip said seriously. ‘Your book hasn’t any form.’
‘What’s worse,’ Hervey sighed, ‘I haven’t the least idea what you mean. I’m always reading about this here form and I could write about it myself, but I——’
‘Oh Hervey, you’re such an idiot, and you’ve got a broken lace in your shoe, and I do love you more than anything else in the world,’ Philip said. He laughed, and made her sit down where she could see a lilac, a chestnut tree, and a triangle of water in which silly ducks stood on their heads for sport. He took his hat off and the breeze lifted his hair, very fair and thick it was, but Hervey noticed that what she had taken for the shadow thrown by his hat was still there. It was cast from within outwards, as though something hidden in his young body were beginning to show through the flesh—like the almost imperceptible mark of a bruise.
‘You’re tired, aren’t you, Philip?’
‘Cornwall was very fine,’ Philip said. ‘You could lie in a field and watch it come alive. Like the Creation. I swear I saw an orchis unwrap itself and all the buds spring open in the time it took a green caterpillar to clear off. He thought it was the beginning of a barrage. It’s a pity young Hervey isn’t here to see you, I said. So then I came home.’
Hervey smiled at him. She hoped he would talk about her book. She had a review of it in her pocket, torn from a newspaper, but the moment in which she would bring it out, carelessly, had not come.
‘Do you smile at everyone like that?’ Philip said.
She took her hand out of her pocket, without the review. This was not the moment. ‘It’s my only social aid. I can’t talk—I’m so afraid of not understanding that I listen with both ears, and my tongue goes to sleep.’
‘It took me a quite a time to realise you didn’t mean anything by it—I know it doesn’t mean anything, but my heart turns round in me just the same.’
There was silence for some moments. ‘Can’t we just go about together?’ Hervey said at last.
‘When I don’t see you, I think we can just be happy not talking or thinking about it. Then I see you, and it’s no good. I know it’s no good. I’d always be making you feel awkward.’
Company Parade Page 5