Company Parade

by Storm Jameson

  She went back to her desk. She was not able to do any work. At last she had a coherent thought—it was that she could not go out to dinner with him in a frock that was eight years old if it was a day.

  She had agreed to lunch with Philip, and the idea came to her to ask him for a loan. At another time she would rather have starved than ask for a penny. She had a nervous shame about such things. Now the idea took complete possession of her. She went out, met Philip, sat down with him in a restaurant, smiled, listened. All the time her mind was occupied with the thought of the money. Philip’s face was not the face of her friend, it was an algebraical sign for a face, and if it was pale and the eyes sunken she did not notice these things.

  He asked her about Penn. ‘When is he coming out of the Air Force?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Does he come to see you? Write? How often do you hear from him?’

  ‘I haven’t heard for five weeks,’ Hervey said. Her mind jumped. ‘He doesn’t answer letters, either. I wanted a little money—bills—I can’t pay everything. But he didn’t send it.’

  ‘My dear Hervey,’ Philip cried, ‘I can let you have money—as much as you want. You knew that. I’ve just come from the bank. You can have ten, twenty pounds.’

  Neither relief nor her overbearing excitement showed in Hervey’s face. She thanked him and folded the money into her bag, and at five o’clock spent the whole of it on a dress. With the same blandness and want of scruple she knocked at Mrs Delia Hunt’s door to ask a favour. It would be kind, very kind, if Mrs Hunt would lend her her room for a few minutes. A little before time she went there in her new dress and waited, polite and stolid. There was a knock, and Delia opened.

  Captain Gage looked past her to Hervey. He came directly in, and without speaking walked up to Hervey and kissed her with passion. She had not expected it, and almost fainted. She came to herself in a moment. She succeeded in behaving in a rational way, though her knees trembled so that she could scarcely stand. The familiar tone of his voice, sudden and pleasant, startled her. But she had not forgotten it, any more than she had forgotten that he walked with a dancing movement of his body, very fine and neat. He had grown thinner. There is no one like him, she thought, almost with pain.

  She saw him take Delia in at first glance. They’re two of a kind, she thought quickly. Both had a quality she admired, a hard impudence in the face of life, but the American was at the height of his physical beauty. He made himself agreeable to Delia, and as soon as he was outside, he asked : ‘Known her a long time, darling?’

  ‘No,’ Hervey said.

  ‘She’s not the right company for you,’ Gage said seriously.

  ‘Kind to me—she offered me work,’ Hervey said.

  ‘You won’t need any work,’ Gage observed. ‘I certainly hope to support my wife better than Englishmen seem in the habit of doing.’

  ‘You could perhaps do it by mere moral superiority,’ Hervey said. She felt a pleasure in running him through not less keen than the pleasure of watching him and listening to his voice. A delicious sensation—like the surprise of new life after an illness—possessed her. She could have run and jumped for joy.

  ‘You’ll be lovely to come home to,’ Jess said. He looked at her with a smile.

  The cab turned across the Haymarket, and stopped. Hervey stepped out carefully, holding her dress, and walked into the hotel as though she were used to these places. She was afraid of stepping on her dress, which brushed her slippers.

  Jess smiled at her across the table. He began to talk to her about France. ‘The French are a great nation. If an army of locusts arrived they’d eat them and charge duty. During the influenza I was buying eggs at three francs apiece—each time one of the boys died they put the price up to offset the loss of custom … I lost my servant. The eggs I was buying were for him. Hervey, I tried every way to keep that boy. He lost his nerve. There was one thing he wanted—that was a cabin trunk like the one I’d got me to take home. At last I said, “ Boy, if you’re well by Saturday I’ll buy you a cabin trunk in Paris.” That boy certainly tried hard to live.’

  Hervey was watching his face so closely that she had no comment ready. After a moment he began to tell her other stories, less truthful. She listened vaguely. The room, the discreet orchestra, lights, waiters, diners, unfamiliar tastes and odours, formed in her mind a picture which bore scarcely any resemblance to the reality. It changed and fell to pieces momently—now the tables were radial lines with a vast bare arm filling the foreground, now a bar of music took shape as a street with lit windows, or an eye, and dominated the pattern. Suddenly Gage said: ‘Last year you couldn’t get yourself divorced because you couldn’t leave Richard. Now you’ve left him—I want to know how much longer I’m to wait for my wife.’

  Her head cleared quickly. ‘I haven’t left Richard—except to earn money. Nothing’s changed.’

  ‘I haven’t asked you about Penn. You’re not living with him any longer’—Hervey did not speak—‘and I don’t want to hear about him. I don’t dislike him and I don’t want to talk about him. This is my last leave in England, darling child. We’ve got to settle something. You’re not tired of me, are you?’

  ‘No,’ Hervey said.

  ‘I couldn’t stop myself thinking about you in France. I can’t say I wanted to marry anyone, maybe I don’t love you—I don’t know what you’d call not being able to do without a woman as irritating as you are. You’ve got to live with me. If you don’t we’ll both die of it—I won’t always know that, but I know it now. I’m not saying what I mean. Do you want to be half alive and half dead for the rest of your life?’ Hervey smiled at him. ‘Isn’t your life worth something?’ Gage said.

  She did not answer. She made some answer, but it was an evasion. It satisfied him. He talked to her about Texas and the sort of houses she would live in, and his father (who wrote him letters beginning, My darling June), and as if she were remembering she listened. Small things engrossed her, the unfamiliar sound of familiar words in his speech, the movements of his hands. She tasted the coffee with surprise that it did not taste different from other coffee.

  ‘Am I boring you?’ Jess said.

  ‘No.’ But smile, smile, my love, she said silently. Her heart failed with joy.

  She was going softly past Mrs Hunt’s room to her own when the door opened and Delia beckoned her. She let herself be led inside.

  ‘You be careful, my girl,’ Delia Hunt said. ‘That American is a bad type—I know his sort. Greedy and no conscience. You’ll get yourself murdered.’

  Hervey smiled kindly and went away. In her room she gave herself up to the thought of living with Gage. Their life would be difficult, violent, and uncertain. It was what she wanted. The violence of change and uncertainty, not to live in a house with books, servants, the orange juice before breakfast, at nine the Manchester Guardian arrives, books and more books, writing, a few friends, not added to hastily, the peace of death which passes all resurrection.

  She sat for hours in her window. She had taken her new dress off at once and hung it carefully protected from the dust by a nightgown. When she thought of Gage it was to feel that he was in the room. She experienced thus the finest pleasure of the senses.

  All this time she was careful not to think of Richard. She was able to overlook him because of a certainty, not yet admitted but present in her mind, that she could never leave him. This settled at the roots of her mind, she was able to dream of a future in which he did not exist. In an hour she lived with Gage a year and visited China, South America, and the mountains of the moon.

  She spent Saturday afternoon and evening with him. He had been in London a week. In France, after the Armistice, he had had the idea of addressing himself to Thomas Harben (that is, to a forest of ships, steel, cotton, oil, coal) with whom his father did business in oil, to suggest ways of selling small arms in China. He refused to stay quietly in Texas, working for his father. ‘But won’t he be cruelly disappointed?’ Her
vey asked.

  Gage looked at her. ‘He’ll try to get round you. He’ll say, Hervey, can’t you do anything with June?’

  ‘Well,’ Hervey began. She paused. ‘What did Harben say to you?’

  ‘I didn’t see him at once. A fine young draft-dodger interviewed me. I got right up from my seat, polite and ceremonious, downright English—“ You can tell Mr Harben I didn’t come here to talk to his telephone. I’ll be at the Carlton for one week if he wants to make an appointment with me. Good day ”—and off I went. Well, thought I, that’s finished, and I had a mind to go home without seeing you. Thursday morning—“ Mr Harben would like to see Captain Gage at eleven.” “ Tell Mr Harben I’m obliged to him,” I said. Maybe he was pleased to see me. He looked round his nose, spiteful vulture, and held out one finger. “I hear your father is building tank steamers,” he said: “ very rash of him. Too much competition.” “ Very rash,” said I: “ lo, the poor savage. But if you’ll forgive me—he’s certainly a step nearer his oil supply than you are. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the cause of humanity drove us to clean up Mexico this year. Maybe President Clemenceau wasn’t writing poetry when he wrote : Oil is as necessary as blood to the battles of tomorrow.” Round came his nose—“ Very interesting. But we have oil nearer than Mexico, young man. And the future is a matter for friendly competition.” “ Until the next war,” I said. I was growing fonder of his nose every minute. “ The next war may be fought for oil,” said he : “ but you haven’t come here to-day to arrange terms, have you? ” Why, Hervey, I laughed out—thinking of all the highminded buzzards and their League of Nations, not knowing John D. Rockefeller and Thomas Harben had it squeezed into a ball between them. Your old nose, I said to myself. But then we did our business. Next year I’ll be in China and elsewhere, travelling in ammunition.’

  ‘Who will buy arms from you?’ Hervey asked.

  ‘Why, both sides,’ Gage said, chuckling.

  Hervey said nothing. A world torn between Gages and Harbens is in a bad way, she thought. A fine world for Richard. Words like ‘the next war’ filled her with rage. With rage and a growing horror, she thought that there are men who make a business of death. They must have wars in order to live. A swollen louse, world size, sucked the blood of all the men and women on earth. They worked, married, had children, and all the time this horror had fastened on their bodies. If I say what I think we shall quarrel too seriously, she thought, with contempt for herself. She sat quietly, seeing Gage, not for the first time, as he was—sentimental and brutal, the world his forced market: his religion—a successful deal justifies everything from theft to murder.

  My love for him is strictly a matter for my senses, she thought. They began it in the first place. My foolish mind is nearly, but not quite, helpless. She looked at Gage. He has only to lay his arm over me and I have no more strength. She remembered her thoughts when she was alone. I have no strength when I think of him, she said. I shall never feel like this again. Take me, take me, take me, my love. But this won’t last, she thought, it will burn out, I know that—I am not so foolish. The only honest thing, since I am not going to give in to him and make a clean fire of all I feel, is to run away. The only dishonest thing is to lie with him in my mind.

  Gage asked her what she was thinking about. ‘You and your Thomas Harben,’ she said lightly. ‘You’re making a frightful mess of the world.’

  ‘You can’t run a world without doing business,’ Gage said seriously.

  The next day, Sunday, Gage hired a car and called for her. He would not tell her where they were going, but by the time she reached Basingstoke she knew. They drove through Andover and by lanes to the familiar valley. The road followed the valley, with a clear stream on their right. As they crossed the bridge into Broughton Gage nodded and said: ‘Last time I crossed this bridge going back to the aerodrome from your billet, I hated you and your countrymen. You had just jilted me.’

  ‘You weren’t mine to jilt,’ Hervey said.

  ‘I was and I am. You’re probably the cleverest woman I have ever owned—the slowest, too. I’ll have to trick you into marrying me.’

  ‘I shouldn’t try it if I were you,’ Hervey said dryly. ‘I don’t mind injustice, but I should resent being tricked.’

  ‘Just like you,’ he exclaimed. ‘But you’d trick me.’

  ‘Only in self-defence,’ Hervey said with a smile.

  ‘Don’t I have to defend myself against you? The hell I don’t.’

  Hervey smiled again. She felt better able to deal with him. The certainty of disaster—this must end in a disaster—perhaps one she would laugh at later—had a familiar effect on her, bringing out the other Hervey, the Hervey she distrusted. This Hervey was a passionate creature, careless, greedy of experience, ribald, unreliable, hating authority, cynical, cruelly clear-sighted. Possibly she was the essential Hervey—but there was another, a young woman shrewd and conservative, who watched her and kept her in order and did what she could to make money and get together a solid steady life. At the moment this other was only a spectator and listened ironically, now and again putting in her word.

  Hervey looked out at the village. It was exactly what it had been in 1917 when a colony of Flying Corps officers and their wives were billeted on it. For eighteen months this colony lived a life as separate from the life round them as if a Roman legion had returned to the valley. With the end of the War it vanished, and its traces, in the sensitive earth, were only the latest and weakest scrawl on a memory in which the Romans figured as newcomers. Indeed, in this memory Romans and Flying Corps officers were now coeval.

  The car balked at the road to the downs. It was a track pressed into the chalk, its whiteness blazing in the sunlight. They climbed up on foot. The grass at the edge of the downs was thin like hair, exactly as she remembered it. They could see a long way, to the other side of the valley. The chalk glittered everywhere, under the grass, between the roots of trees—it was the hard bones of this country showing through the delicate skin, the skin fine and unwrinkled, as smooth as water.

  Jess was talking to her about Thomas Harben, and about a woman he had met in the hotel, who knew Harben, and was very free with her stories about him. In the end she offered to sound him on Gage’s own business—‘He begins with agents and drops them when it suits him,’ she had said; ‘I could find out his real opinion of you.’

  ‘She wasn’t going to do that for nothing,’ Hervey said. ‘What were you to pay her?’

  Jess laughed sharply : ‘We didn’t get so far. I put her off. What’s your advice, darling child?’

  ‘I should have nothing to do with her. A dog that will fetch will carry,’ Hervey said. She pulled at the dry grass.

  Gage’s mouth twitched between amusement and pleasure. ‘You’re right,’ he said. He stretched his arm out and laid a hand on her ankle. ‘I’d decided it for myself.’

  ‘You were trying me?’ Hervey said with a grin. She was offended, and unwilling to show it. She disliked giving herself away and would pretend to be pleased rather than admit she had been hurt.

  ‘No,’ Gage said. He was quick enough to know what he had done. But he did not know how to put it right, unless he treated her as he would treat any other woman in the circumstances. That he did not do so is to be accounted for by the vanity which dictated a great many of his actions. He was physically brave and morally incapable of self-control at the point where his vanity came into play. Thus his bravery had unjustly the air of bravado. His generosity, on the other hand, was almost all vanity, without seeming to be. At the moment he was vexed with himself—a point had been missed—and ready to be vexed with Hervey because she was stiff and unmanageable by the most natural methods. During the drive home he told her stories about himself, some of them true.

  Hervey had ceased to look forward—she lived impatiently in the moment, aware that sooner or later a moment would turn up when she would be forced to act as if there were a future. Gage’s manner, when they met in the evening
, steadied her at once. He had drunk enough to exorcise his vanity. Without realising what it was, she felt that some impulse on which she relied in order to govern him had disappeared. She felt scornful and anxious. His vitality, which drew her so sharply, began to seem only violence.

  During dinner, for which they went down to the grill room, he talked about his country. ‘Europe’s done, England’s done. Finished. But for the War you might have held out against America for another quarter of a century. You’re done. You’ve nothing left but your diplomatic experience. Your goddam diplomats will always overtalk ours, and it won’t save you. Only a young country can afford mistakes.’

  ‘That may be so,’ Hervey said. ‘Let us hope you will make as many as will hang you. Even if another barbarian invasion is due I don’t expect to enjoy it. When you have wasted our inheritance what will you put in its place? The largest building? The loudest noise? Or only the most motor cars?’

  ‘You may use your tongue on me if it amuses you,’ Gage said. ‘But I am going back to France tomorrow, then home, to be demobilised. I should like everything settled before I go.’ He was speaking quietly but with a passion that alarmed Hervey. She was afraid he would disgrace her by making a scene.

  ‘What is to be settled?’ she asked smoothly. She felt uncertain but not yet angry. If he becomes unmanageable I can leave him, she thought. The idea of walking across the room alone was more alarming than anything else.

  Gage looked at her with narrowed eyes. He was full of suspicion. Then he noticed her hand trembling and made an effort to control his mind. But he was too nearly at the point at which his muscles twitched of their own accord, and twitched his mind.

  ‘Do you want to marry me, Hervey?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ Hervey said quietly, her eyes on him.

  ‘Then go away,’ Gage said. ‘Go. Go at once.’