Hervey stood up slowly. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘And—thank you for my dinner.’
She walked out of the room, passed the waiters and the cloakroom attendant, feeling her cheeks burn. Her ignorance was such that she half feared to be stopped in the doorway with questions about the bill. Certainly they looked at her. She walked looking fixedly before her, up the stairs, and into the street. She had no coat and no hat. She walked for a time, then decided to take a cab but uncertain of the cost walked on for another ten minutes, conscious of glances at her bare shoulders.
In her room, locking the door, feeling nothing, nothing, she tried to think. She was too tired. She had enough of force left in her to keep quiet, smoothing out her dress, pouring water for the bath she took in her bowl each night, but no impulse to think. She fell suddenly asleep, with her arm stretched to pull the blanket up.
In the morning her first thought was that she had thrown away her single chance of escaping from this dry life. She lay still, feeling too dejected to get up.
Slowly, another feeling came in over the first, a curious lightness, nearly relief. She held her breath, afraid to move. In a moment she said gently: ‘I’m free, I’m alone but I’m free.’ At once, fiercely, she knew that, even if there were no Richard depending on her, and no Penn, her mother’s daughter could not have married the American. She could not trust herself to this man who was violent, neither civilised nor primitive, neither cultured nor simple, and with no very fastidious notions of conduct. It is because he has so much more life than other people that I love him, she said to herself: I don’t respect him, in a few months I might even detest him.
She was too young not to feel downcast, as well as profoundly surprised, by the discovery that her body had its own conception of the good life. If her upbringing had not made it possible decently to snatch that life!—she closed her mind over the thought. The effort was a familiar one. In time it would be easy.
Chapter X
The School For Fiction
In bad weather there was no getting into the east-going buses. She must travel by tube, first walking up a long windy road to the station. She had an everlasting dislike of tubes. Her country-sharp senses frightened her with thoughts of the weight of earth above her, and she hated the destroying noise and the pressure of other bodies on her own in the packed swaying cages. One stormy morning in October the trains were crowded. Hervey stood wedged fast between a girl and a stout man, trying to withdraw into herself so that only her body received the insulting pressure of theirs. The earth was riddled with these moving cages, each full to suffocation of uneasy bodies, meek, staring, breath mingling with breath. At the end of the journey she ran thankfully into the street, though her shoes let in water and the rain soaked through the stuff of her coat.
She was still raging inwardly when Mr Shaw-Thomas sent for her. On her way to his room she decided to ask for another two pounds a week, that is, half as much again of her wages. She was in the state of mind which prefers disaster to enduring poverty another moment. She sat down facing Mr Shaw-Thomas with the air of an injured schoolboy. When he had finished giving her instructions for a certain piece of work she said abruptly : ‘I should like more money.’
Mr Shaw-Thomas lifted his eyebrows. ‘Why, Miss Russell?’
‘I can’t live on four pounds a week,’ Hervey said. ‘I need a great deal more to live properly.’ She spoke with great assurance and politeness. Now I am really growing up, she thought, greatly pleased with herself.
Mr Shaw-Thomas was more amused than annoyed by being spoken to in this way. He felt the liveliest interest in the awkward young girl and looked upon her as his pupil. Actually, if she had said that she needed the money to support an invalid mother, or her child, he would have felt less inclined to give it to her. Commonplace worthy persons bored him no less than commonplace advertising (unfortunately for his happiness his finest notions were too heroic for the dull dogs which captain industry). Moreover he was kind. This, too, was the moment in which advertising firms felt the swell of the wave under them—they were going up, up—glorious emotion. Still, there was no reason why Mr Shaw-Thomas should have given her the two extra pounds a week. He did. Six pounds. She remembered to thank him.
‘Now,’ he said, smiling sharply, ‘now a warning. The Charel people have complained that their last batch of copy, yours, is too subtle. Your danger, Miss Russell. If the great middle-class—your public—enjoyed subtle writing they would buy it. But they buy Mr——. Don’t mistake me. I should have to get rid of a copywriter who wrote as badly as a popular novelist. All I am saying is that your copy must make as few demands on the intelligence of its readers as if it were popular fiction. The difference—these novelists are paid to be, forgive me, a little diarrhcetic. We on the contrary pay heavily for our right to speak. Just now and then—quality copy, in a high-class paper—advertising something too costly for the middle public, subtlety may be possible. I deprecate the risk.’
Hervey was sunk, hiding her triumph. She had missed the whole of this speech. Renn saved her by coming in fo orders. She stood up to go, but Shaw-Thomas kept her and talked another five minutes, plunging his fine sharp smile into defenceless words. ‘Think of a street of little houses,’ he said to her, ‘a plant in the window, ivory lace curtains, in each house a woman dusting, making beds, mending, looking in the oven, looking at the scrubbed toes of children’s boots. She pushes her hair back with one hand, thinking in the same moment of the price of shoes, the torn place in the rug, and a coat worn by the young woman her neighbour. With all that in her mind, and with the endless work, how can you get her to listen to you? And having listened, open the rubbed purse in her bag and take a shilling from the handful of silver and coppers for something she had no notion she needed until you spoke to her?’
‘Yes. I see,’ Hervey exclaimed.
‘The greatest artist ever born couldn’t do more with words,’ Mr Shaw-Thomas said.
She went back to her room, in one hand grasping the promise of wealth, in the other a half-fledged excitement. Her head throbbed. After all there is something in this copywriting, she thought. To write with the extreme of precision and economy—that takes some doing. She looked up as Renn came in. He saw that she was excited, and smiled, looking at her from the side.
‘Don’t you know that part of Shaw-Thomas’s job, for which they pay him three thousand a year, is to blow enthusiasm into his copywriters?’
Hervey looked at him. She felt foolish and very young. Her ardour died at once, which is not surprising. She blushed and bent her head over her desk; unfortunately there was nothing beneath her eyes except a rag of blotting-paper.
‘You’re beginning to use your mind on your work—which will be the death of your mind if you stay here long enough. It seems a small pity to waste you.’
‘Am I wasted?’ Hervey asked, pleased.
Renn came over to her and said in a sarcastic voice : ‘I read your novel. It’s a preposterous novel, but you could learn. If you want to stay here you’ll have to learn all the dishonest uses of words. You despise popular fiction, don’t you? Well then—why do you stay here writing advertisements for soap? What is there to choose between playing on a woman’s silliest emotion to sell her a new soap, and gratifying them with a ridiculous story of life as she would like it to be? Both times you’re selling women the lie they want—the lie they want. That’s fine isn’t it? They buy the soap, they’ll buy your stories—they’ll give you more than money for them—praise, gratitude. How she understands us, they’ll say; how lovely our’lives are when she describes them to us—More, give us more, Miss Russell, another of your rich exciting human books; persuade us we’re happy, fortunate, noble, pathetic, brave.’
Out of breath with his sudden vehemence Renn paused. Hervey said sullenly: ‘I tell lies about soap to get my living—caveat emptor. I don’t want to tell lies about life.’
‘Why not?’ Renn mocked. ‘Caveat emptor … it’s true that lies about life are
more insidious. There’s a patent stomach medicine on the market that rots the membranes of the stomach. Someone should examine for creeping rot the inside of a brain addicted to popular fiction.’
His face changed and he said kindly: ‘You’d better get out before it’s too late, Hervey. These brutes—they’re spoiling all the best words by using them to sell soap. Very soon honest writers will have to use only the simplest, crudest words—those which the advertisers rejected, He laughed. ‘Shall I tell you my nightmare? In the name of efficiency the world has been taken over by big business: our new overlords address us in the most natural way, by advertisement. Thus: Eat More Fruit. Use More Steel. Since no one has thought to advertise loving-kindness, they fall out among themselves. Then as you walk along a road, from one side a mechanical voice blares: Use More Wood, and from the other: Use More Steel. You rush home and shut the windows : the voices come down the chimney, by telephone, by wireless, by post. The More Steel party decides on war. Every newspaper runs terrific headlines: Fight and Grow Strong. You and I sweat at our desks writing five hundred strong words on The Romance of War. We remember the rule: clinch your advertisement by giving the reader something to do—ask his grocer or fill in a coupon. So we write : Demand War NOW. At this moment a bomb comes through the roof and a fragment of my belly flying in one direction encounters your head going in another. At last the last word.’
‘You’re wasted on this firm,’ Hervey said. ‘You should be a revivalist.’
Renn blinked at her. ‘You’re right,’ he said.
Hervey glanced furtively at him when he stooped over his desk. An incongruous thought—the plane of shadowed flesh falling away below his cheekbone reminded her of an edge of Salisbury Plain, smooth violet-shadowed hollows scooped in the chalk. Both gave pleasure.
Towards six o’clock Philip walked into their room and asked them to waste two hours with him. He was leaving London for Germany—to see a doctor who was healing ulcers in your body without the knife. He was excited, his eyes in their darkened hollows wide and pale, as if their colour were leaving them. He had grown irritable in the last few weeks, taxing the love of his friends.
Outside snow had fallen and was melting into slush. Hervey felt it oozing between the thin places in her shoes. Philip did not want to eat, or rest, he wanted to walk. The three of them walked along the Embankment, stopped to argue, walked on again. Hervey shivered. Near Blackfriars Bridge they turned into a small dingy café and ordered coffee. A young man was seated at the next table. After a moment Renn said to him : ‘I remember you. You saved me from having my head cracked after a socialist meeting.’
The young man looked at him with a charming smile. ‘Lucky I happened to be there. I didn’t know what it was about, though.’
‘What are you doing now?’
‘Starving,’ the other said in a firm voice. He had a jester’s face: when he laughed the ends of his mouth shot up to form a quarter circle, and his eyes were bright hazel colour. ‘Don’t look at me like that, it’s not catching,’ he exclaimed. ‘I was demobilised, I’ve spent all my money, my mother died at the end of the War, and I haven’t a job. I wasn’t trained for anything.’
‘What were you before you enlisted?’ Philip asked.
‘A schoolboy. I was eighteen in January 1918. In my time you didn’t enlist—you were conscripted.’ He began to laugh, throwing his head back. ‘That last year at school was very curious. We knew, I and the other fellows, that we should be called up unless the War ended before then. We didn’t think it would end. We wrote Latin verses and played games, we read our ancient history, and none of it was of the least importance. Some of the fellows loafed and tried to break loose. They said it was wasting their last months. But what could we have done? Trained our minds? That would have been a pretty good waste of time, too! “
‘Where are you living?’
‘Last night I slept out—for the first time. My goodness, it was cold.’
‘You’d better come home with me,’ Renn said. ‘You can sleep on the couch and we’ll discuss your state in comfort. Comfort compared with sleeping out.’
The boy laughed again, gently. ‘Why should you do such a thing for me?’
‘Upon my word, I don’t know,’ said Renn. ‘Except that you did save my life.’
In the meantime Hervey was shaking so violently with cold that she had to keep her knees from knocking against the table. She spilled the coffee from her cup as she drank. Her teeth chattered on its edge. Only the newcomer noticed. ‘You’re freezing,’ he exclaimed.
‘Nothing of the kind,’ Hervey said quickly.
Philip picked up a morning newspaper from a chair and became engrossed in it. His face crimsoned with anger ‘Do you see?’ he said. He held up the page and pointed a trembling finger at the headlines. Stolen Hun Cows. Well-fed German Babies. Justice to French Babies. Hun Food Snivel. ‘That’s how these brutes report a conference of experts set up to deal with famine in Germany and Central Europe. My God, it’s unbearable. I should like to shoot the hooligan who owns this paper.’
‘Well,’ Renn said, smiling. ‘You might remember that lice will go on breeding on a dirty body even if you kill the largest you find.’
‘It’s a cruel article to have printed,’ Hervey stammered.
Renn turned on her his wide smile. A muscle twitched in the tightly-drawn skin over his temple. ‘You won’t face things,’ he said lightly. ‘Human beings are cruel by instinct. Homo homini lupus. The more civilised a country is, the less scope there is in it for open cruelty. The War was a godsend to our instincts. In the name of justice you can starve Hun women and children freely. Think of the relief!’
‘I’ll become a naturalised German,’ Philip shouted.
‘They’ll soon begin torturing each other,’ Renn smiled : ‘they have no other outlet.’
Philip jumped up and hurried from the café. Renn paid quickly and they followed him. They caught him up at the other end of the street. He was still angry, but he apologised, squeezing Hervey’s arm. His train went in lesss than half an hour. They climbed into a Liverpool Street bus, the young ex-soldier keeping shyly apart. At the station he stood aside while the other two went with Philip to his train. They stood below the window looking up at him in silence. It reminded Hervey of the leave trains with their load of doomed young men. She raised herself on her toes to put her arm round his neck and kiss him.
‘That’s the first time you’ve done it without being asked,’ Philip laughed. ‘I must be very ill.’
‘No, no,’ Hervey said. The train moved. ‘Come home again,’ she cried.
They watched him disappear into the darkness.
Hervey went home. She who usually slept like a child slept badly, and woke with a pain in her side. She stayed at work, trying to ignore it.
The next day the pain was worse. It caught her under her waist when she laughed or moved quickly, the twist of a knife. On the third day she could not keep herself upright. She walked with difficulty, stooping forward keeping her hand on the pain. Renn said something that made her laugh ‘Oh!’ and bite her lip. Sweat ran over her.
‘What’s hurting you?’ Renn asked.
‘My right side,’ Hervey said. She felt ashamed as she said it.
Renn got up and went out, in silence. He came back in a few minutes tearing the wrapping from a clinical thermometer. ‘Would you prefer to put it into your mouth yourself?’ he said politely. It registered four degrees of fever.
‘Now will you go home,’ he said in an exasperated voice.
Hervey crept away. It was two o’clock. She went home and went to bed. Her head ached and when she moved her eyes they seemed to be the only movable parts of a solid block of pain. She slept for an hour and woke to find herself in a grey world. It was a moment before she remembered that she had been sent home. Lying still, she had no pain and she supposed that she was cured. She sat up, and it seemed that she was drowning. Grey water swirled to her throat, she fought it feebly, then sl
ipped down and lay still.
From unconsciousness she passed into a state neither waking nor sleeping. The room was there, strangely distorted, and filled with a faintly menacing darkness. This darkness was actively at work stifling the little light that came under the door. She lay and watched it. It kept changing its shape. After the light, my turn, she thought. Now Mr Shaw-Thomas was in the room. Smiling, he handed her sheet after sheet of paper until the pile reached from the floor to the level of her eyes. He went away and she began feverishly to work, writing on each sheet and thrusting it into a mouth that opened, with a sucking jellylike motion, between the bed and the wall. She wrote: Ex when your child is dying, Ex when you fear birth and death in a grain of sand, Ex when you have been mutilated by the spades of the archaeologists, Ex for Lucifer, Ex when pity causes foul smells in yards, graves, war memorials, streets, and sick rooms, Ex when Celia all her glory shows, such gaudy tulips raised from dung, Ex against Communism, nose-bleed, Zeno’s arrow, and the streptococcus of life, Ex against famine and the wolf. Lines of poetry, single words, the names of villages near her home, fragments of recollected speech, ran through her mind like sand on to the paper. At last she wrote nothing but: I am now going home. She wrote the whole night and fell asleep towards morning. When she woke again she felt heavily tired but cool. Her body when she moved gave her less pain. She lay quietly, looking at the ceiling. Nothing seemed worth the effort of thinking about it.
Towards nine o’clock in the morning, when she should have been out, her landlady came into the room. She seemed annoyed to find Hervey in bed and asked her if she wanted a doctor.
‘Not at any time,’ Hervey said in a placid voice. The woman went downstairs. A short time later Delia Hunt toiled up the stairs from her room and took charge. She nursed Hervey for six days, with great good humour. On the fourth day, when the pain in her side and fever were quite gone, she made her eat a nearly raw beefsteak. It made Hervey drunk.
Company Parade Page 13