‘You do now.’
‘It’ud be different if you were a little more pliant and let me kiss you,’ Philip said. He looked at her with a young serious air.
‘I could be false and let you kiss me,’ Hervey said swiftly. A biting impulse to tell the truth seized her. ‘Don’t you know what I’m like, Philip? I always want people to be pleased with me, I pretend to agree with them when they talk as I think wickedly or nonsense. I can’t write lies but I speak them and if I had to write about a friend’s books I’d tell the strictest truth about them, but if he asked me I’d answer him they were very good. When I’m with people I try all the time to be pleasant, I think my own thoughts but I say theirs, and I’d let you touch me, smiling, dear Philip, and as if I liked it and I should not like it, I don’t like being touched, not even by you—it isn’t anything to do with Penn, it’s something altogether different; if you make me kiss you I’ll seem to like it, but it will be meanness and cowardice, and wanting you to approve of me.’
‘After this I wouldn’t kiss you if you asked me to,’ Philip said fiercely.
‘All right,’ Hervey said. She felt herself shaking.
‘How d’you talk to your American?’ Philip said. ‘Do you tell him all that?’
Hervey did not speak.
‘T.S. said you were going to run away with him; I don’t believe that, but you’ve changed, my dear. You’re not so simple and fine as you were—maybe it’s the War. It’s always the War. Did you like him very much?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he ask you to leave Penn?’
‘Yes. Do we have to go on with this?’
‘Did you stay somewhere with him?’
‘No.’
‘Meanness and cowardice,’ Philip said. ‘Why didn’t you run away with him, our Hervey? You’re not religious, are you?’
‘I couldn’t run far with Richard,’ Hervey said quickly. She looked at him, ‘Don’t quarrel with me. I have to live my own way.’ Way of a blind mole. Blindly working its way in the heavy earth. She felt the energy in her veins. One of these days I shall surprise them.
Philip jumped up. ‘Come, Hervey,’ he said, laughing. ‘You’re too much for me. You have finer reasons for doing only what you want to do than anyone I know. Richard indeed! I suppose you’ll tell me you came to London for Richard’s sake.’
‘I came to make my fortune,’ Hervey said.
‘Dear Hervey. I’d send you one by post if I could. You’d take it up, with that look on your face no one recognises but me, which means you’re pretending to be indifferent—all the time you’re so excited you can scarcely unfasten the knots—you never cut a good piece of string, do you?—well, at last you get it open thinking What’s this? why, it’s my fortune, hurrah, hurrah. At the bottom of the box there’s a card—From Philip. With Love.’
‘Why thank you, Philip, I’m much obliged to you,’ Hervey said.
They walked past big houses like dowagers, flounced with gardens. Night coming slowly made their trees a sound and a shadow. The sky was very far off, filled with a warm May darkness. There were lighted windows in the houses, and one stood open, framing between curtains a group of three men, two holding violas and the third seated, his cello between his knees. A fourth was partly hidden. Philip and Hervey stood against the railings to listen. Proud, loud, triumphant, the sixth Brandenburg concerto came among the leaves. Tears were in Hervey’s eyes. This music was mixed in her with evenings of 1913, with a careless student life of any age, with no bitterness of war’s or time’s anguish. She touched Philip’s hand. He was thinking only of the music : which stopped, and they walked on. They were too happy to care to talk.
4. The realist
Ridley’s forefathers had been peasants, and farmers in a small way, until his grandfather, another William Ridley, moved into London and became an auctioneer’s clerk. The son did a little better and became an auctioneer in his own right, married a good woman, the daughter of a schoolmaster, and sent his son to the university in the hope that the boy (who was prudent, intelligent, and energetic) would become at least a schoolmaster if not a master among auctioneers. He was short, inclined to be fat, with a large head and small bright eyes, like the country-bred Ridleys. At eighteen he no longer looked young. When the War broke out he had just taken his degree and was about to begin work on a newspaper (he had his own plans). Much as he disliked the idea of being killed he was impelled to join up, in order not to feel inferior to other young men and because he had decided that a war, in which he would acquire the reputation of being a hero, might be no bad beginning to his career. The War disappointed him by lasting four years.
He did his duty in it. He could have stayed at home—he had defective eyesight—and shown his father how to profit by it. Moreover, that side of war which could be summed up in thinking of the latrine, with its torn piece of sacking, filled him with loathing—so much so that he never got the better of it. But he went to France and was an efficient soldier. There were many hours when he went nearly mad with rage at having wasted so much time. In February 1918, finding himself in England for a spell of home service, he began to send essays and short sketches to the London Review. Some of them were printed, and as soon as he could get leave he called on the editor and by him was handed on rather gingerly to Evelyn Lamb.
His first interview with her, at her house, abruptly altered his life. Up to now he had imagined himself earning a competence as a literary journalist, marrying comfortably and settling down to life in the near country. His one secret ambition was to make a name as a writer. At the first sight of Evelyn’s house this changed. A dozen impulses lying loosely about his mind rushed together with a deafening explosion. When the smoke cleared away a whole man, purged of romantic weakness, stood up—the eternal William Ridley had been born.
His small shrewd eyes noted the value of every piece of furniture in the room. The paintings baffled him, as did the tea service. He turned a plate over surreptitiously, made a mental note of the mark, and looked it up afterwards in the British Museum. Later he bought a book on china and old silver and another on the French Impressionists. Here his inborn shrewdness came to his help. If he knew nothing about painting from the artist’s side he quickly learned to distinguish a good Manet from an indifferent one. Just as, without having any music in him, he was able to seize at once on the essential form of a piece of music, and by listening intently to musicians to make use of them for his own ends. This was something more than shrewdness. He would have laughed his loud jeering laugh if you had told him that he had a hunger for beauty. This hunger was more vehement in him than in other men. But he was ashamed of it.
He was deliberately brusque with Evelyn Lamb. He saw at once that to seem impressed would only force her to underrate him, and he lolled on her day-bed, his clumsy army boots sticking out across the rug, as if the house was his. He criticised her part of the Review, told her that So-and-so was no good, a wind-bag, and offered plump out to write a weekly page for her.
‘You don’t want all this impersonal stuff. It only bores people. You want something personal. Let them hear the voice. Not “ This is a bad novel,” but “ I think this is a damn bad novel,” That’s what people are going to want now. The War’s knocked all your gentlemanly reviewers off their perches. Down to brass tacks—Is this what I like or isn’t it? That’s what we want. Now when I write an essay, I don’t ask m’self, Is this as good as Charles Lamb? I say, It’s not Lamb, Lamb’s been done, I know all about Lamb, now you listen to Ridley for a bit.’
Evelyn was impressed by his uncouth ways. Since she did not need to pretend anything, she let him see that he had impressed her. This pleased him, fed the growing vanity which was part of his spirit—and gave him a little contempt for her. In spite of it, he could not shake off the effect her rooms, and her own elegance, had on him. He drove his heel against his chair at the same time that, without anyone seeing him, he had crawled under it on his stomach to guess its value. He was quivering wi
th longing to possess a house in which every object was of more value than anything in hers.
Again, this was not only greed. Somewhere he was as vulnerable as a new-born crab. If he had great possessions he could in his soft moments scuttle into them and be safe. Not that he thought about it in this way. He did not admit that he was vulnerable. The squirmings of the blind, naked, terrified part of him went on in such darkness that he could pretend they were not going on at all.
He was shaking with excitement when he left Evelyn this first time. His heart thumped, and his neck was squeezed inside the collar of his jacket so that he thought something would burst there. He went into the Popular Restaurant in Piccadilly and ordered a meal and a glass of beer, eating and drinking slowly, to quiet himself. At the next table there were two young women, recklesssly made up, very gay and plump. They stood up to go out, and the girl facing him smiled: without thinking about it he beckoned the waiter, paid, and followed them. The streets were already dark, with a thin wash of light from the blackened lamps. At another time he would have shown himself polite and generous but now he made no bones about what he wanted. The young woman who had smiled must come with him at once or not at all.
Later, she could not take herself away quickly enough to satisfy him: he hated her. To get rid of her in the most humiliating manner, he put her out of the door himself. He felt exactly as he had felt one evening during his schooldays when, to please him, his mother let him attend some ceremony in his best suit and beside the other boys’ suits it appeared cheap and ill-cut. That had made him ashamed of having been born poor; now as well he loathed himself for having been born at all.
In the morning he took a happier and more sensible view of things. Lacing his boots, he saw them again planted on Evelyn Lamb’s rug. ‘Why, I’m getting on,’ he said aloud.
He smiled slyly. There was nothing like being proud of yourself, to impress others. His face in the glass seemed to him that of a fine self-reliant man, a sound man of business. The idea for an essay on war-time cafés came to him as he ran down the stairs. His mind bubbled with happy phrases. One day I’ll write a novel about a café, he thought. A deep, almost painful excitement seized him. He drove it out sternly: this was not yet the time.
5. On being young
One day David Renn praised Hervey, saying that she wrote special copy better than any other person on the staff. She was so pleased that she sat at work late. It shortened the evening, and she would have less time to saunter about London, dreaming, and less to drink coffee to Puccini beating through the clatter of plates and voices and less time to think. Her body was restless with vitality and if she went home to her room it would drive her out again.
Sometimes as she walked about, she saw something that made her laugh out loud in the street. Sometimes she felt menaced by the people and the buildings, and she had to reason with herself not to run. She was happy without knowing it—anything made her laugh just as anything made her cry. Her mind was never still, balanced like a leaf in the wind. Now there is music, it said ; now the street lamps are lit; now the sun shines and the flower-women have sprinkled water on their flowers. Once she saw a man reading her book in the street and thought, Now I am becoming famous.
Chapter V
Evening of May Twenty-Second
1. The voice of the people
Renn left the office early, to have time to change his clothes before the meeting. In the office he wore his only good suit and he was afraid to risk it in what might turn out badly—ever since the first notice of the meeting one daily paper had been calling on all true-born Englishmen to signify in the usual way their dislike of unEnglish gestures. In the view of this newspaper the truly English gesture would be to starve all Germans to death, or, if that was a trifling severe, at least to lay them under tribute for an astronomical period. Renn shook the creases out of his second suit. It had been folded up ever since the day his mother packed it for him. Three moth-balls having a poisonous smell fell out and rolled away under the bed : he bent his head to sniff the sleeve of the jacket. ‘It smells like mustard gas,’ he said to himself. ‘That ought to keep patriots away.’
He had promised to call for Rachel Earlham. She was waiting for him with an air of ridiculous courage but her hands felt cold. ‘What’s the matter?’ Renn asked.
‘Louis rang up from the office to say he heard there was trouble. They’re going to break up the meeting, David!’
‘But, Rachel,’ Renn said gently, ‘you knew it before. Why not stay at home?’
‘No, I shall come. But don’t let anyone take hold of me, will you? I always think they’ll do something dreadful to me.’ She smiled at him like the good obedient child she was.
As they approached the hall they saw the beginnings of the crowd, women of the neighbourhood, young men, roughs, and a few soldiers. A dozen bored policemen were holding them off the steps of the hall. Rachel drew her arm from Renn’s and walked boldly beside him, head held firmly. A gross comment from the crowd made her blush. Inside the hall she drew a long gasping breath and smiled with relief. ‘I am very angry,’ she said.
They were early. Half an hour later, when the meeting should have begun, the crowd outside had swollen to fill the street, and stones thudded on the shuttered windows—the shutters were inside and every pane of glass vanished. The most terrible noise in the world, more terrible and destroying than any merely mechanical terror, the noise made by human beings who want to hurt each other, made speech impossible.
Renn put his ear against Rachel’s lips to catch part of what she was saying. She asked anxiously: ‘Will they make us pay for the windows?’ On the platform the speaker of the evening opened and shut his mouth without a sound audible to the woman nearest him. At last he came down into the room and spoke a sentence to a man here and another there, who passed his words on. Those left on the platform were writing the resolution in large letters on a sheet of paper, which they held up: ‘That this meeting contemns the vindictive clauses of the proposed Peace Treaty and demands a humaner and more sensible attitude to the defeated.’ In less than a minute they turned the paper over and wrote: ‘Resolution carried. It is suggested that we are less likely to be attacked if we leave the hall in twos or threes.’
‘Come along,’ Renn said.
Rachel had meant to walk bravely, but her first sight of the crowd frightened her so that she turned and caught hold of Renn’s arm. It was a much thinner arm than her husband’s. Ah, if only Louis were here, she thought. Her knees shook so that she could scarcely move them. Suddenly she saw something which made her press her hand on her mouth. In front of them an elderly man had lost his hat, and now someone in the crowd brought a stick down on his bald head, which cracked across like an egg. He fell, and was dragged into the crowd. Rachel looked up at Renn’s face—he was pale, his mouth lifted in a smile she was not able to recognise. Something struck him on the shoulder, making him stagger. Now they were in the crowd between the lines of police. She stared, fascinated by it, into the curiously distorted face of a woman who was shrieking: ‘Cowards—beasts—murderers.’ This woman was well dressed. As Rachel passed, she leaned forward and struck her on the breast. A policeman shifted his bulk in front of her. ‘Why you people hold these meetings beats me,’ he said in a disgusted voice. ‘I believe you like trouble.’
Rachel’s little body refused to obey her. She clung to Renn’s arm because it was the only support left, but she felt no confidence in it. There was nothing left but prayer. Rachel was a Christian—and she began a pitiably incoherent one: ‘Please deliver me from this crowd, please help me. Dear Louis, come and help me.’
Just in front of them a soldier ducked under the arms of the police and spoke quickly to Renn.
‘Can I help? What’s the best thing to do?’
Renn shrugged his uninjured shoulder. ‘I think if you’d just walk along with us to the bus,’ he said. ‘They’ll leave you alone.’
‘Right.’
Rachel felt her streng
th returning to her. Still trembling, she walked along between Renn and their rescuer. He was a young man, tall, strong, very sunburned, with a country face. His eyes twinkled, and his mouth, short and firmly closed, turned upward at its corners. When he had seen them on to the bus he smiled and saluted in a friendly eager way, like a boy. Rachel looked after him until she was almost ashamed, and turning to Renn she caught an expression on his face that made her feel sad. ‘I could not have walked through that crowd without you, David. I’m a wretched coward.’
‘You’re a wretchedly poor liar,’ Renn said, smiling at her. He had meant to answer roughly, but Rachel looked at him with so young and innocent a desire to please him that he changed his mind. But when they reached the flat he refused to come in to wait for Louis. If I stay, he thought, Rachel will have to wait until I leave to tell him how frightened she was with no one to protect her except poor crippled David. He walked away quickly, ignoring the beginnings of pain in his leg. His spirits were strangely high. I should like, he thought, to drink a little too much, in good company.
The thought barely crossed his mind that good company was hard to come by since so many had gone. Happiness sprang in him from a full source, and in spite of his leg he felt the pavement as light under his feet as grass. What’s to do with you? he said to himself, smiling. Almost at once he knew that he had begun to feel happy in the moment when he came down the steps of the hall into the crowd. The feeling of danger had excited him, stirring other, less simple feelings that he had thought dead. So that the moment when the young soldier joined him followed naturally on other moments, in which he had been sharply and radiantly alive. Those were the days, he thought happily.
Hands plucked at his sleeve as he walked up the stairs. Eyes looked into his with the confidence of a shared knowledge. When he unlocked the door of his room someone who had not waited outside laughed, and said: ‘Bless me if it isn’t our Davy.’
Company Parade Page 6