2. Delia’s voice
In another part of London Hervey Russell was enjoying—you can put it in that way—a good dinner in company with Mrs Delia Hunt. Delia had invited her for half-past seven. Punctually at that time Hervey walked into Verrey’s and stood staring round her with a pretence of ease. She felt that everyone in the place, and especially the waiters, had remarked her with contempt. For a moment she was seized with panic. The expression her face wore was exactly one it had when she arrived late at school and was forced to walk past the others to reach her place in the ranks—an air of exaggerated calm: here I am, I, Hervey Russell, I’m not at all hurrying myself, why should I?
She said stiffly to a waiter: ‘I’ll sit here until my friend comes.’
Beneath her panic she was being amused by the extravagant discreetness of the place, the last faint ripple of a wave which broke in the Victorian heyday—or it might have been in Babylon. Delicious days when Verrey’s was fast (as fast as hansom cabs). All gone—except this carpet, the discreet cloakrooms, this subdued light. She waited ten minutes, between the extremes of shame and doubt. When at last Delia entered, she was half overjoyed, and half embarrassed by the clothes Delia had seen fit to wear. An immense hat, pinned down at one side, allowed you the finest view of Delia’s lively eye and richly recklessly puffed hair. She wore many rings, a dress of lace and satin, and an excessively grand fur coat. As Hervey walked down the room behind this grotesque figure she tried to imagine what the other diners thought of her. Do they think I’m like her, she wondered. It was a disturbing thought.
The room—it had no windows and was lighted from above—accepted Delia without demur. Hervey was the intruder, the speck of grit it could neither digest nor turn into a pearl for a woman’s ear.
‘Lord, how I do love this room,’ Delia said. ‘Blue and gold and red—and all those drops and what d’you call ‘ems. I love it. I suppose they’ll tear it down tomorrow and put up something Broadway could use. Aha, the fools!’
Hervey kept her gaze strictly in the small area of their table, persuading herself that she was invisible. She did not forget to eat as much as she could. This dinner was providential, coming towards the end of a month when, thanks to a bill for Richard, she was poorer than usual. When the waiter cut their filet de bœuf she was vexed to see that he gave more than half of it to Delia. Just because she is bigger he thinks she needs more, she said to herself. However, what she received was more than enough for her—it went down with a delicious ease, between mouthfuls of a coarse white bread and two or three sips of the wine. She was relieved that Delia did not insist on her emptying her glass. Without that, the food was making her feel light-headed, and as the meal advanced Delia’s voice sank into harmony with the other noises of the place. They flowed over her with a confused pleasing warmth, so that inside and out she felt soothed and well.
‘You don’t make the best of yourself,’ Delia said loudly. ‘That coat now—it’s what I call tame. You won’t get so far with a coat like that. What d’they pay you?’
‘Four pounds.’
‘Tch! Did I ever tell you what I started with? Fifteen shillings and find your own clothes. Well I found ‘em. I knew where to look between m’legs.’ She nodded her head with an air of sharp good humour. ‘You’ve got to look out for yourself in this world. In the next, if it’s like this. My God, I’ve heard there are such things as saints and disinterested men, but I never met one. Mind you never do anything for anyone, man or woman, without you get some good of it—if it’s only a good laugh.’
‘What will you get from giving me this splendid dinner?’ Hervey said.
‘The sight of your face waiting for me,’ Delia said swiftly. She gave her great laugh. ‘You thought I wasn’t coming, and I suppose you hadn’t more than a few shillings in your bag. Look here—I could do with an assistant in my business. You can call it that. I’ll pay you six—no, look here, you got a boy to keep, haven’t you?—I’ll pay you eight pounds a week.’
‘But I don’t know what you do,’ Hervey said calmly. A familiar impulse had taken its sharpest hold of her. Though she had not the least intention to become Delia’s assistant in her business—it was probably not reputable—she could not resist playing the cards in her hand. It was an instinct out of her control. Every crafty, hard-dealing ancestor in a long line of them sprang to her elbow in the moment they saw a chance to profit. They quite stifled the other Hervey, the careless one. She rested her chin on her hands, and looked seriously at her companion. ‘Tell me what you do.’
‘Eight pounds a week! I should think you’d take it and then ask,’ Delia grumbled.
Hervey smiled at her. ‘I might be no use to you.’
‘You’re not disinterested, by any chance, are you?’ Delia Hunt exclaimed. ‘It’s all the same to me if you are. I run a business—Women in Council Ltd. It has three doors, as you might say, two in and one out. Two pages of questions and answers—Delia writes th’ answers, hundreds of them a day, Lord, you never read such a book of revelations—in two mealy women’s papers, and gets well paid for it, bless her, and refers the finest cream dela cream to Women in Council, which charges them five shillings for consultation by letter. It’s all your mouth to my ear, in strict confidence, and I sell the names and addresses, a guinea a thousand, to who can use them. You being a troubled and so wife write an’ ask Mrs. Delia Hunt’s advice about your husband, I send you th’ advice—mark me, good advice—wasn’t I born a hundred years old?—in a month or so you get a letter from a skin-food specialist and husband hears what is to his advantage. By this everyone’s pleased to death, and it all works to the benefit of th’ Empire in which a sucker is born every minute, an’ why not? Why shouldn’t they be born? They have as excellent leave to live as I have. So God bless us and make Delia a good girl. What is it? Where was I? Ho me, I sell a hundred thousand names to Ira Fisher, who guarantees to cure your constipation thank God I can’t complain with extract of bark and water—a hundred thousand men and women made glad and happy. You take my meaning? Ah yes. The motto of this world is Deliver the goods and mind to get a receipt. Eight pounds a week. It’s a good offer, isn’t it? The first time I saw you I thought—there’s a girl has got some character. That’s what I want—character. I could teach you?’
‘Thank you very much,’ Hervey said. She gave Delia one of her soft intimate smiles. ‘I’d like to think about it.’
She was half enchanted by Delia. The very grossness and boldness of Delia’s face, the air she had of being sunk in life like an old boat in mud, so pleased her that if the ‘business’ had been less revolting she might have agreed in it. Delia had so much life—and Hervey Russell loved the coarse old-smelling roots of life perhaps more than its delicate flowers. The innocence she kept to the end of her days came in here. So did a cynicism she could not have learned so young—it must have been given her.
She set herself to flatter Delia, and succeeded so well that the woman swallowed all down.
Afterwards, how tired she was. When she had escaped she forgot her at once and her eight pounds. She dreamed. I am twenty-five, my novel is a failure, yes, I must face it. The work I do is useless, I did wrong to come to London, leaving my baby. For what? For this. I have no money, no one has heard of me yet, I have not even a husband. This last thought jumped into her mind because she had just seen at the far side of the road one who might have been Penn, so alike were they in this light. A deep longing for him seized her. Her body felt light and relaxed.
All the streets were lit up. A river of light from the street-lamps ran down the centre of the road and joined the pools widening outside the big shops. Hervey did not know what she wanted to do. She had walked—bristling with interest, like Habbakuk among his chimney-pots—along Regent Street and down on the other side. At the Circus she hesitated and turned towards Soho, where in a narrow half-lit street the shops were still open, and men and women were at their business—staring, chaffering, touching—in a warm odour of decaying f
ood, sweat, dust, tripes, cheap clothes, and their breath. Between the houses, the air, breathed by so many, was never pure. She turned aside to this street. This or the next, what did it matter, since no one knew her or was waiting for her.
She was in that state between anger and exaltation when fatigue works on the nerves like excitement. Look at that sorrowful woman, her mind said; look at the old Jew; look, is it a dog or a child running in between their legs? She pushed a way through the crowd, impatient, her mind alive with thoughts, with impulses she could not wait to examine before, turning head over heels, they dragged her the other way, like a young animal prowling for what to kill and eat. She thought now of the time when she would be famous. She was eager to write a book, a masterpiece, which at one bound would place her above criticism. Another notion, not displeasing, was to take Shaw-Thomas’s place at the head of the firm and be signalled in two continents as a ruthless woman of affairs. She was even prepared—this proves her not quite unreasonable—to become famous through a superb gesture. She rehearsed scenes in which she saved the life of a royal person and was rewarded at once with a sinecure at Court. Or perhaps more suitably, the life of the director of the Ritz Hotel, who would allow her a modest room looking over the Green Park, with the privilege of dining in his restaurant for life.
Suddenly—as she lifted her eyes to see where she was—she saw an elderly man standing in front of her with a tray of dead toys. His face was that of a monk or a scholar, patient, delicate, with sunken bones. He was not trying to sell his toys. He merely stood there as though giving himself every chance to be the object of a miracle. Without looking at him again she laid a penny on his tray. As she walked on, it seemed to her that her mind had taken a plunge downwards into darkness. It flowed silently in the darkness, bearing away with it her dreams and the years of her life.
3. The voice of Lt. Penn Vane talking to himself
There was a group of young men in the centre of the room when he came in. One or two greeted him with offhand friendliness, without ceasing to listen to what had been going on for a long time—the story of young Newcomb’s adventures on leave. The point of the story was that nothing had happened to him. With peals of laughter, they followed him from anti-climax to anti-climax… . ‘Go on, Dan, what did you do then? … What did she say to you? … I don’t believe it.’ Newcomb’s cropped fair head almost touched the ceiling—he was a young giant—and the ease with which he laughed at himself infected his hearers. A current of smiles ran from face to face. They became crazy with joy. Penn turned his back on them, as ostentatiously as possible, drew his wife’s letter from his pocket, and sat down. He pretended to be engrossed.
He did not dislike the boy because he was young, insolent, and very brave—but because, coming fresh to the aerodrome, he seemed to imagine that the Equipment Officer was a willing kind of dog, useful for fetching things. Penn had set himself to teach the boy his lesson.
‘I say, Vane, listen to this.’
Penn glanced up. ‘Sorry. Not interested,’ he said in a contemptuous voice. If there’s one type I can’t stand at any price, he thought virtuously, it’s the man who runs after women when his wife is safely out of the way. Newcomb hasn’t been married more than six months—yah!
He read the last page of the letter four times. Fortunately it was closely written—Hervey had been anxious to economise paper while writing a great deal he had heard before, about their future. He heard the end of the story and the last dying explosions of mirth. Without lifting his head he was aware that Newcomb had strolled across the room, and was eyeing him. ‘Going to get me those new struts soon, Vane? I’ve been waiting a fortnight.’
Penn glanced at him and returned to the letter. ‘All in good time,’ he said curtly. ‘You’re not the only pilot in the Air Force.’
‘What a rotten brute you are,’ the boy said calmly. ‘If you can’t fly, you could at least see to getting the rest of us what we need.’
Someone laughed, a young sound without malice. Penn folded Hervey’s letter, stood up, adjusted his tie carefully, and without glancing again at Newcomb strode out of the room. He was too sick with anger to eat. He can wait now—I’m going to teach him to behave himself if they put me on the carpet for it: it’s no pleasure to me to dine in mess, I can’t stand this new crowd. Ah, the best have all been killed. Poor Perry—Salmson—Griffith—all gone. Only this child left.
For a moment he left a throb of deep pride in his survival. He might easily have been killed—there was the day young Rose crashed within a yard of his Stores tent. The thought of his wife, and what she would have suffered if he had died then, pricked his eyes. Poor Hervey. A sentence in her letter returned to him in good faith. ‘I wished for you so much, dear Penn.’ Ah, she misses me all right when I’m not with her, nothing like a spot of absence. He thought tenderly about her for some time. I’ll write and cheer her up. Why not this evening? I might send her something, a surprise. With Penn’s love.
He had paused to look carefully in the windows of a shop for the surprise. A loud merry voice calling his name brought him round. There stood Miss Len Hammond, smiling, overjoyed to see him. All the tenderness which had suffused his mind found an outlet in looking at her. They walked along together, very happy, he looking down into her face with a brotherly indulgent smile. She liked him and admired him so much that it would be cruel not to be fond of her. In his room he took her on his knee and began to unfasten the hooks of her white blouse. He could feel her heart quickening under his hand—perhaps not fair to rouse her, but after all, he thought easily, she likes it or why come here? He was startled and a little annoyed when Len pushed away his hand.
‘What would your wife think of us if she could see you?’ she said, in a rough unnatural voice. Her round face, not pretty, but fresh and a little foolish, was crimson with emotion.
‘But she can’t see us,’ Penn said reassuringly. He did not want to think about his wife now.
She drew herself suddenly from his arms. ‘Really, I’m not a bit happy about us,’ she whispered. ‘I feel we’re behaving wrongly, and if your wife knew she would be terribly unhappy.’
Her distress was clearly so genuine that Penn felt sorry for her. ‘My poor child,’ he said fondly. ‘Why do you worry your head about what can’t happen? We haven’t done anything to make you ashamed. So long as we don’t—you know. I told you long ago—you can’t say I didn’t—I’m in love with my wife, and I wouldn’t hurt her for anything in the world. I feel certain she loves me too, even though she looks down on me—oh yes, she does—for not being a success and all that, and not flying.’
‘But,’ cried Len, running to him,‘you’re shortsighted, you can’t fly. When you wanted to, they wouldn’t let you. Doesn’t your wife know that?’
‘Of course,’ Penn said quietly. ‘That doesn’t prevent her despising me in a mild way.’
‘I don’t understand how anyone can despise you,’ Len said. She was looking at him again with a lively devotion.
‘Don’t you? I do,’ Penn laughed. ‘She’s ambitious—I’m not. Success at any price and all that—it’s not in me. She wouldn’t like me if it were, but it gives her an excuse to criticise me. Ah well!’
He found himself thinking of Hervey and young Newcomb in the same moment. A trace of bitterness came into his voice. And he had been about to spend money on her, on a surprise, poor fool that he was.
Len was so eager to comfort him for his wife’s hard nature that he felt a fresh access of fondness. He began to caress her again, cupping first one round pretty breast in his hand, then the other. His hand slipped farther, moving gently over her skin. Half pleased, Len gave a convulsive shudder. Her knees were pressed tightly together; but the upper part of her body had surrendered and lay slackly on his arm. Her eyes were closed. Only when his fingers began to feel at the fastening of her skirt did she make a light movement of resistance. ‘What’s the matter?’ Penn said softly. ‘Don’t you like me any more?’
‘You
’re taking my things off,’ Len murmured. Her head, drooping, turned away from him towards a darkened corner of the room. She was seized with another of those shudders which gave him a delicious feeling of strength and tenderness. ‘Don’t, Penn—not now, please.’
‘I’m not going to touch you,’ Penn said. He meant it, with his whole heart. An ecstasy of emotion filled him. It seemed to have nothing to do with his body, which pressed itself against her without his being much aware of it. ‘I’d like to see the whole of you. Why shouldn’t I? I’ve seen quite a lot of it, you know.’ He looked at her with a mischievous coaxing smile.
Len made it difficult for him at first by clinging to him closely, but at last she began to help him. He had to put her off his knee and she stood in front of him with her hands on her face. Her teeth chattered a little.
‘Cold?’ Penn asked. His head had begun to throb. He pressed her down into her chair and crouched in front of her, trying to warm her with his arms. He held her firmly, and at last she began, with an air of distraction, to return his kisses. The resolution he had taken seemed ridiculous. He felt more than slightly ridiculous, crouching in a uniform and field boots in front of a naked girl. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said abruptly. He stood up and walked to the back of the room. He could not struggle with his boots under her eyes. The chair groaned as he dragged at them, and he wondered with some uneasiness what she was thinking about it. The whole affair was a little awkward. He made as few sounds as he could. His belt dropped on the floor: pricking with nervousness he took it up—and dropped it again.
When he approached Len she made no attempt to refuse him. He had a few minutes of happiness such as he had never experienced in these circumstances. Afterwards she began to cry limply in his arms, and he was filled with pity for her. Poor child. He soothed her, feeling her grow quieter until she opened her eyes and even smiled at him. Fervently he hoped she would have the good sense not to speak of his wife—after all, he had not meant this to happen. All this time as he stroked Len’s shoulders he was determining to spare Hervey all unhappiness. At all costs, this must be kept from her, and from now on he would give his life to it. Not for his own sake—I’m ready at any time to face the music, he thought firmly—but for hers. What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve, he said to himself. He stroked Len’s breast. A gentle sense of well-being spread through him. He rested from his labours in quietness and felt at peace with the world—in which, almost without effort, he embraced his wife, yes, and young Newcomb. In an obscure part of his mind he felt that he was behaving with delicacy and sensibility. No one had been harmed. He did not love his wife less for loving Len in a somewhat different way. The excellent lucidity of his mind delighted him. There was nothing Hervey could say to him for which he had not one good answer at the least. For a space he saw and heard himself disposing of the whole episode in bold, simple words. My dear Hervey—perhaps, Hervey my dear—all your phrases about sin and—he cleared his throat—purity, are a little revolting. There is no justification for the worship of monogamy, neither in heaven nor on earth. I ask you to observe that it is a convention, not held by a third of the world’s inhabitants, and denied—he cast down his eyes—by enlightened men in every civilised country. Men not of the herd. Yes. Many men have loved two women. Yes. After all, my dear girl, a man is an animal. A man has his hungers. The time must come when any man will be prompted by appetite to take someone who will respond to him differently—here he gave her a frank pleading smile—you couldn’t understand that, of course.
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