Company Parade

by Storm Jameson

  ‘You won’t have time to look any farther,’ Philip said. ‘From now your evenings belong to the Anti-Clerical Times—unless you can think of a better name. You’re my business manager—unpaid. You know all about costs and printing, I want you to draw up an estimate of the best way to spend eight thousand pounds establishing a weekly paper. This paper is to keep an eye on the scoundrels, politicians, financiers, bishops, writers and the like, who want to betray us. Why respect a society which lets little children be nipped by vermin as they sleep and settles difference by ripping open the bowels or shooting the eyes out of hundreds of thousands of young men? You’ll see now that the one cry of our scoundrels is Back to 1913. So that they can have the War over again later, with a fresh crop of young bodies! Also they’ll cheat everyone to keep their profits. You’ll see what will happen to heroes when they become workless workmen again—but like the bugs and the killing it will be excused as facing the facts. We’re going to prove that their facts are lies, only fit for honest men to—. We’ll print the real facts. We’re for humanity against the devil, and against respectable writers and priests, and for the common man against the people who want to fight to the last drop of his blood—perhaps we shall discover why women are so insensitive about war. Is it because they have no imagination? or only because they lack self-respect?’ He stopped, and added in the same voice: ‘How do you get on with my friend, Hervey?’

  ‘She sometimes does what I tell her,’ Renn answered. He saw on Philip’s face that his friend was in love with her, and that he was no happier for it. ‘How long have you known the young woman?’

  ‘Why, we were at school together,’ Philip said. He looked at Renn. ‘There’s nothing to say about it. Let’s settle about the paper.’

  ‘Your paper’s finished before it sets out,’ Renn said, smiling. ‘People don’t want to be frightened and disturbed.’

  ‘Are you going to help me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He stood up to get fresh coffee. The extraordinary thing was that nothing Philip said mattered. Renn did not believe in this ridiculous paper which was to blow up society, but he was going to work for it until all hours and to give up his evenings, and that with joy. The thing was to have found something to do at last. An exquisite happiness and relief filled him. Just as the room from being shabby and uncomfortable had been transformed at the moment Philip entered it into a good friendly place so his life had once more become an adventure. He held the coffee pot in his hands, admiring its colour. Until now he could not have told you whether it had a colour. As he carried it to the table he noticed for the first time that Philip had eaten nothing, nothing at all.

  ‘What’s wrong with the toast and honey?’ he demanded.

  ‘Nothing,’ Philip said. A slight look of fatigue or annoyance came over his face. ‘The fact is, I can’t eat. Something’s gone wrong with me in the last five or six weeks. I daresay it’s indigestion, due to Frank’s cooking.’

  ‘You ought to see about it,’ Renn said. His feeling of dismay struck him as ridiculous. After a moment he said: ‘You were hit in the stomach, weren’t you? Perhaps they left a splinter or two of shell in you.’

  ‘It feels a little like that,’ Philip laughed. He drank his coffee, then went over to the window. ‘Look at this.’

  A shabby dozen of children were lined up in the sunshine on the opposite pavement. Two of them had wound khaki puttees round their match-stalk legs and one supported a German helmet. It rested on the bridge of his nose. All carried weapons of some description, and the tallest struggled with a flag many sizes too large for him. As the two young men watched they formed smartly into ranks and moved off, singing. Their marching ditty was the most scandalous version of a popular song about the Kaiser. They marched swinging their arms and looking slyly into the faces of the passers-by to be admired. The smallest held out a collecting-box.

  ‘There’s your future for you,’ Renn said.

  A little later Philip went off, leaving his car outside Renn’s house. He doubted whether its constitution would stand a day of celebrations.

  He had to meet T. S. Heywood for lunch and had chosen a restaurant which T.S. could reach easily by tube from his laboratory. The room was discreetly shaded from the sunlight, which nevertheless crept in. Pieces of glass and silver flashed suddenly, and a woman’s face, caught in the light, appeared dead, and as if detached from its skull. There was a negro orchestra in blue and silver.

  As soon as they were seated Philip began to talk about his paper. He was so absorbed in it that he did not observe his friend’s indifference until T.S. said abruptly:

  ‘You know I’m going to write for your paper only out of weakness—because you’ll make my life unbearable if I refuse. I don’t believe in it.’

  Philip smiled at him without malice. He allowed T.S. more licence than his other friends, who were forced, on pain of being cast out, to share his convictions. But T.S. could say what he liked—provided he obeyed. For all his simplicity Philip had a Yorkshire side to his character, which forbid him to throw away what he could use. Others, if they did not believe, would be quite useless to him, but from T.S. he wanted only a supply of facts. ‘I’m not interested in your private beliefs,’ he said firmly. ‘You’re my scientific correspondent.’ He had asked the waiter to give him the wine list, and while he was looking through it said :

  ‘There aren’t many people here. Aren’t they celebrating?’

  The man looked at him with a civil smile. ‘For to-night we could have booked each table three times over. There is a gala Peace dinner and a dance here.’

  At this moment a woman’s voice from the next table exclaimed: ‘He has a hundred thousand pairs of trousers and ninety thousand tunics on his hands. They will be paid for, of course. But no one could have expected the War to end in that shabby way. People have been ruined!’

  ‘What a pity!’ Philip whispered. ‘I always felt there’d been a mistake. After only four years’ killing any peace would be premature.’

  ‘All I can tell you about peace is that we’re experimenting in the production of a new gas. It’s economical in use, inflicts really disgusting agony, and has no known reagent. My private hope is to see it used on a meeting of the Imperial League.’ T.S. went on to draw a picture of the death antics of a well-nourished elderly gentleman, so unpleasant that Philip was revolted. Quite unabashed by this, T.S. raised his voice and had the satisfaction of seeing the three middleaged women at the next table turn scarlet and begin to talk in loud quick voices. His eyes sparkled with pleasure.

  ‘That’s enough,’ Philip said. ‘Have you seen Hervey lately?’

  ‘No. She came to see my wife, to one of her evenings. I don’t know what happened, I wasn’t there, but I suppose she felt out of it. You know how uncouth Hervey can be. And Evelyn has no kindness to spare for intelligent young women. She did say afterwards that she felt certain there was something in Hervey. But you saw that she had no intention of helping it out.’ He broke off suddenly, looking at Philip’s plate. ‘Why did you order eggs if you don’t like them?’

  ‘I ordered it because it was the cheapest thing on the menu. I can’t eat without feeling or being ill, and I don’t intend to feel ill now—I must fetch our Hervey out this evening.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘I’ll tell you afterwards,’ Philip said. He had a blind faith in his friend’s cleverness, the faith of a layman who mixes up all branches of science and imagines that if a man understands chemistry he must know why you have a pain in your belly.

  Afterwards, in T.S.’s room, he spoke rather shyly about his feeling of unease and the slight pain he had. He frowned, and was ashamed to be discussing his health. Yet it seemed as though the uneasiness he spoke of were in his mind. He made light of it and yet he seemed relieved to have spoken, as though he had passed on a warning he did not understand.

  T.S. asked him several questions and at last said shortly: ‘I know nothing. I’m going t
o send you to a doctor.’ He went away to telephone and when he came back he had arranged for Philip to see the doctor next day. He was unsympathetic and called Philip a fool to live as he did.

  ‘Why, where shall I live?’ Philip said. ‘I’m not married to a famous woman.’

  When he was alone, T.S. sat a long time unmoving. He was staring across the Embankment at the river, which ran smoothly and was filled with light. Where it met a barge it shattered in pieces and the light sprang up from it. He felt certain that Philip was seriously ill. The little he knew, joined to a memory of his own father’s illness, assured him of it. Perhaps Philip was actually dying. As he thought of it he remembered that he had already called Philip ‘a doomed young man’—and at once the phrase seemed less apt, because it was a generation which had been doomed and it was not worse for Philip than for the others.

  Carelessly, his mind offered him a scene plucked from the files—Philip and himself in St Amand, the room half dark half lighted, a dish of eggs and two bottles of red wine, thin and tart, Philip, his thick fair hair all ways, laughing and laughing, so that the good French housewife thought he was drunk. T.S. smiled. How bright the water is, he thought. I can admire it, I’m not suffering. Don’t I mind about Philip? He searched rudely among his thoughts, but found that he was searching for a place to lay Philip dead—pushing first this and then that young man out of the way to make room. Above all let’s be peaceful and tidy, he said to himself.

  Evelyn came in, and not speaking she walked past him to the window. She is beautiful, he thought. A feeling he much disliked possessed him. He felt ashamed, because always, at these moments, he was liable to the same weakness, a schoolboy’s snivelling physical longing for some emotional act. He pictured scenes in which Evelyn became the protective wife-mother. A vulgar slobbering miracle took place and he was saved. Speak, his mind jeered; say ‘Evelyn, my darling,’ and fasten your body upon hers.

  Evelyn put her hand up to the blind and jerked it half down. The shadow came to her waist. ‘Don’t forget dinner is half an hour early,’ she said absently. ‘We’re going on, you know, to Mrs Harben’s, to hear a concert of Purcell. Franz-Joachim—how unfortunate his name has been to him. No one believed he was a Swiss. And then dancing.’ Her fingers twisted the blind cord. ‘I haven’t danced since last year.’

  ‘Do you think this a suitable occasion?’ T.S. grinned.

  Evelyn considered him for a moment. ‘Are you going to be tiresome?’ she asked, not ungently.

  ‘I hope not,’ her husband answered. ‘But I don’t want to hear Purcell, and I shan’t dance. You had better take someone else with you.’

  ‘Very well,’ Evelyn said. She left the window and stood beside him, resting a hand on his neck. His hair was very short but she found a piece at the nape which she could make a show of twisting. ‘You take very little interest in me. Am I looking old?’

  Nothing responded in him, except that a horrid jangling sprang up in the nerves of his chest. He felt humiliated. He looked up and pulled a clown’s face at her. ‘You look splendid,’ he said, grinning. As she moved away he put his hand out and smacked her across the behind, with a vacant laugh.

  He felt a sense of relief as soon as she had gone. Trying to think of Philip he could only see the room in St Amand and Philip’s face crimsoned with laughter. His arms in stained khaki sprawled across the table and his shoulders quivered.

  2. The celebrations begin

  To enjoy eating, not for the sake of the food, you must have starved at an impressionable age. Marcel Cohen had been hungry for the first fifteen years of his life. Now, though he was fifty, he found an acute pleasure in thinking of the good his food did him. He felt that he deserved it—the sherry in the strong consommé, the delicate flesh of grilled trout, the firmer flesh of young chicken (in preparing it, port, white wine, and cream had been used), he had almost a sense of triumph as he absorbed them. They fed his intellect as much as his body. From the red gravy of the tournedos, a cut of which he was especially fond, a thin savour ascended to his nostrils and thence to his mind.

  That morning, it being his fiftieth birthday, he had looked at himself curiously after his bath. He saw that he had gone thick in every part without losing the outline of his body. It had coarsened like a tree. The skin was yellow and smooth, full of oil. He thought of it now with an impersonal and sardonic friendliness, as though he were merely a spectator of its satisfactions. Just as at times he had a cruel notion of his mind running from cellar to cellar like a rat. This rat had teeth strong enough to gnaw through iron. It could not help gnawing—the very joists on which this room had been built were not safe from it.

  This was more curious since Marcel Cohen took pride in his house. The room in which he sat had bulbous pillars, mouldings crusted with figures, and hangings of Italian stamped velvet of the seventeenth century. His taste and vanity were both fully satisfied by it. He had chosen each piece of its furniture—chests of oak veneered with walnut and inlaid with ivory, a drawing table with six elaborately carved legs and fine ivory inlay, Farthingale chairs. He admired them and they were worth a great deal in money. The claret he was drinking pleased him—he thought of the price paid, a fair one, considering the nature of the wine, and of its incomparable flavour.

  He set his glass down, and took a look at his wife. Sophie was his own age, and she was fat, fashionable, and unhappy. He knew that she was unhappy, and while he felt no respect for her and no love, he was occasionally a little sorry.

  Sophie Cohen’s dress was cleverly designed to make her seem thinner, but, as always, a wrinkle had formed in it under each arm, and she wore too many jewels, which winked and glittered above every fold of her neck and arms. Poor mamma, he said to himself, she has no taste. It was to please her that they invited eighteen people to dinner. He liked to dine with one other man, and to spend an hour afterwards dissecting the world—nerves could be severed by this knife—before hearing music. He listened to music as some read poetry, with his bowels and mind, and it did not occur to him to value a concerto by the amount of applause it received.

  Sophie was inviting her guests to drink to the Peace. He smiled at her and at them and raised his glass. ‘We could have made peace in 1916,’ he observed. ‘It would have been a sounder and less spectacular affair and we should not have spent a great deal of money we have spent.’ I forget how many young men, so many that the number doesn’t matter, he thought, who were living are now dead: it’s funny, I don’t like to think of so many hands and mouths rotting away in the ground.

  He reflected that if peace had come in 1916 he would have been poorer by half a million pounds. The rat underneath the joists saw a balloon of swollen profits go up from the battlefields. Garton’s Shipbuilding and Engineering Works, chairman Thomas Harben, were about to issue bonus shares to the value of two million pounds, out of undisclosed reserves. That’s splendid, splendid—better sell now, sell, now sell, never touch the price again. He stood up. Sophie’s body, like a badly-shaped vase, steel-ribbed, teetered behind her guests into the upper room. He followed, and walked over to the window. At once the thought of his dead son—he was wounded and died in hospital in 1916—squeezed him so that he gripped the curtain between his hands. Yes, he was sorry for Sophie, but there was one thing he would not forgive her. When the boy was near death he asked for her—‘When will mamma come?’—and the father had to say: ‘She’s on her way, son,’ but the truth was that she was afraid to come. She was afraid to look at disfigurement and death. So David died without her. Yes, yes, he understood it, poor mamma, poor Sophie, but he did not forgive her. At this time, too, he had realised fully how useless she was to him. Why, she could not give him another son.

  The thought of David was leaving him. He had learned to endure it in a very simple way—by recalling his gifts to David, the pony, the bathing pool, Eton. David’s youth had been soft. Mine, he thought, and his mind paused—before the sight of an eight-year-old boy in the room he shared with his mother and
five sisters. The boy was frowningly busy with the bugs in his bed, squashing them on his hand. After a time he got up and went out. The water-closet was shared by five families, and while he waited his turn the door began to open slowly, and a man came out, but before the boy could slip in a woman pushed past him and past the man and slammed the door. The man grinned. Well, he could not wait any longer so he withdrew a few paces. The man watched until he squatted down, then said quietly, ‘You little jew bastard,’ and lifted his foot.

  But it was so humiliating that the adult Cohen suffered nearly as much as the boy. He had been back to look, and the court was still there, housing five families, unchanged, a place into which no man would put a dog he liked, but there were children in it. Strong, he thought—I was as strong as a rat. David had two nurseries.

  A servant had crossed the room and whispered to him that Mrs Groelles was in the library. He smiled with pleasure and went off quickly to speak to his daughter.

  She was dressed for some party and greeted him with a smile of impatience. ‘My dear Fanny,’ he exclaimed, ‘you look very well—and you’re wearing my emeralds.’ Because of her tall shapely body, fine skin, and head of dark red curls, at twenty Fanny Groelles was a ripe beauty. She had married out of her race, the second son of a poor landowning family, which had once had an illustrious member—so long since that the pride they might have felt in him had been transferred to the length of time since his death, during which no one of the family had said or done anything memorable. Her husband was as foolishly extravagant as herself. They were perpetually in debt, Fanny’s large allowance from her father scarcely paid for her clothes and her husband’s racing stable. Whenever she came to see her father she asked him for money, and this even seemed natural to him. His love for her ate up his conceit and even his common sense—he gave her anything she asked. Now he said fondly: ‘Have you come to stay the evening?’