‘Do you remember that tree?’ Philip asked her.
‘Yes.’ It was not true. She did not remember anything, any tree. She wanted to get away. ‘Goodbye, Philip. I’ll come to see you on Saturday.’
‘No you won’t come,’ Philip said.
Renn came close to the bed and stood looking down at him.
‘Goodbye, my dear,’ T.S. said.
Renn stooped lower. ‘Goodbye, Philip.’
Philip did not say anything more. He kept his eyes on Hervey for a moment, then closed them and kept them closed until he was alone.
Outside the hospital Renn stood a moment, looking down at his hands, then turned away without a word and walked off. They watched him cross the street and disappear. ‘What’s the matter with him?’ Hervey said.
‘Nothing—he’s hating the sight of you,’ T.S. grinned.
Hervey felt surprise and pain. ‘What did I do wrong?’
‘You wouldn’t understand it,’ T.S. said. He looked at her with a touch of contempt. ‘He and Philip and I went out together in March’15. I was transferred later. They stayed together until Renn was wounded, in September of’17.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes what? That’s all.’
‘Is Philip going to die?’
‘Renn won’t see him no more,’ T.S. chanted. ‘Never see him no moer. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. They shall hunger no more. And God shall wipe away all te-ars, all tears from their eyes, and G-od shall wipe away all tears, all te-ars from their eyes, all tears from their eyes, all tears from their eyes.’
‘Don’t sing in the street,’ Hervey said. She had turned crimson.
‘Do you call that singing? I knew a man, he’d sung at Queen’s Hall, who used to sing German lieder in the trenches to amuse himself. One morning a board was hoisted in the Boche trench with the words, You sing that too slowly, chalked on it. He said it felt much worse than getting a rotten notice in The Times,’
Hervey could not help laughing. She bit her lip to control the spasm but it forced its way out, and she laughed until she felt bruised and aching. The thought of the War, of its insane twisting of natural emotions to unnatural ends, and of Philip, was like the blow given by a clown’s bladder. It was too farcical. It jarred your brain and you laughed. T.S. waited patiently until she recovered, then took her arm and walked on slowly, half leaning on her. She could feel the exhaustion of his body. They spent the evening together, drank coffee and sherry in the Café Royal, and went to a music hall. It was a little like the months just before the War. But for what they carried about with them, in their hearts.
Philip died during that evening. T.S. telephoned to her at the office next morning. Her mind swayed for a moment in utter fear. The edge of the table steadied her limbs, then to think of Renn was too much; she turned in her chair and said : ‘That was T.S. He says Philip is dead. He says it was time it came.’
After a scarcely felt pause Renn said: ‘I’m sure it was time.’ He smiled slightly.
Hervey discovered that the dead are not real. She could not think of Philip, only of herself with Philip. And when she cried it was for herself. The sun warmed her hands, which had been cold for a few moments. She felt thirsty and thought of a glass of iced coffee. Towards one o’clock she went out and went to a Corner House. She asked for iced coffee and sat drinking it and watching the people. A woman with a fat merry face and an ample body pleased her greatly and she kept looking at her until the woman went out.
The vague melancholy that filled her was scarcely unhappy. This scene, familiar and changing, the sun, the ease of her body, soothed her little by little; she began to think earnestly of her son. His birthday was in two days and she had to decide at once what she could send him. Philip retreated to the back of her mind, becoming more shadowy each moment, until at last he came to the place prepared for him.
Chapter XVI
The Romantics
On Saturday she went with T.S. to walk in Richmond. The grass was dry and brittle like straw. A sun as proud as a peacock drew his tail over the sky. They walked to that edge of the Park which overlooks the vale of Twickenham, now veiled in a clear rippling haze, its colours sucked from it by the bright light of the sun. Here they seated themselves and T.S. talked. His short stocky body lay relaxed, fitting into a hollow of the ground. His head, too big for its body, lolled back. The flesh below his cheekbones had fallen in, leaving his beaked nose more prominent than ever. It made Hervey think of a bony mountain ridge between two plains.
‘What do you think, our Hervey? Last week I had the offer of two jobs. The first was to write what Marcel Cohen, and my dear wife, call a science column—for the Daily Post. You know what. How to split the atom in your own home without practice or drudgery. Will the artists of 2000 A.D. paint by wireless? A column a week at ten guineas.’
‘That’s a great sum,’ Hervey said. ‘I wish I had it.’
‘I wrote: Dear Cohen, When I want a job tearing up science into pieces small enough for your readers to wipe their—s, I’ll ask you for it, yours faithfully, T. S. Heywood. The other offer was charge of the research department of Stokes Chemical Works. It wasn’t offered; I had word that if I asked I should be given. Evelyn’s friend Harben is a director of the company—it’s a subsidiary of a vast combine with associate firms in a dozen countries. It makes something useful—paying an interest guaranteed by the government—and researches into poison gas to be beforehand with the next war. The wages are eight hundred a year. I accepted. Such a chance. Once and once only.’
‘I can’t see that it’s a better offer than Cohen’s,’ Hervey said, startled. ‘I call it vile work. I thought you had a conscience. Don’t you care what happens?’
‘Conscience!’ T.S. sat up sharply, the skin round his eyes twitching. ‘What should I care? he said softly. ‘If there’s another war, if after the last another is permitted, I hope it finishes us. I hope every country that goes to war is broken by it, the soil poisoned, the towns festering. I shall do my best to live—if only for the pleasure of seeing how Lucy Harben and my clever wife like living in savagery. They’re both disabled from childbearing. A pity. They’ll be spared something.’ He smiled at Hervey. ‘Don’t glower at me, young Hervey. I’ll look after you. We’ve been friends for a long time. When you hear the first gas-raid warning don’t run into a shelter—they’re not really proof, you know, and they’ll be very unpleasant when the gas seeps in—come to me and I’ll kill you quickly and gently. I’ll label you, too. Stand close around ye Stygian set, With Hervey in one boat conveyed. Or Charon, seeing, may forget That he is old and she a shade. … So you think I’ve chosen wickedness?’
Hervey felt confused and did not know what to reply. She was afraid of his sharp tongue. To be laughed at was more than she could endure; it filled her with a ridiculous obsessive shame. At last she said : ‘Isn’t there anything you believe in?’
‘Certainly. Science is a satisfactory life. Clean enough. Decent. No room in it for your little chittering entrail-pickers of writers.’
‘You’re only a romantic, after all,’ Hervey said, with sudden spirit. ‘You have to take cover somewhere and you’ve chosen science. I hope it keeps you warm!’
T.S. only smiled at her. He said nothing, and Hervey’s anger died away. It was not in the least necessary to say so. The warm earth, the sun, held both of them in one hand. They lay side by side very contentedly in silence.
Hervey sat up with a strong feeling of reluctance. ‘I ought to go home,’ she sighed, looking round her. ‘Penn will be waiting. He went over to spend the day with his father and mother but he won’t stay.’
‘Why doesn’t he get work?’
‘He has tried,’ Hervey said.
T.S. looked at her severely—he likes, she thought, to look savage and disillusioned. ‘How old is your precious Penn, Hervey?’
‘Twenty-nine—three years older than you and me.’
&
nbsp; ‘He’s too old to be looking for work.’ He hesitated, and said with a quick warm smile: ‘You don’t like living with Penn, do you? Don’t tell me any lies—I’ve known you longer than he has.’
It was a relief to speak the truth. ‘I bring out the worst in Penn. He distrusts me—and no wonder. I hide things from him—to save trouble—then he finds me out and is able to prove that I’m deceitful. I want to please him, but I try less and less—I don’t respect him now and I feel it’s a waste of my strength—as if I were so important!—to take trouble for him. And so nothing goes right. I make resolutions and don’t keep them. I’m not generous enough to give freely. And Penn makes no concessions. He enjoys humiliating me. I would give anything to have him out of my life, but it’s impossible, too much is involved in it; it would be like unravelling a whole carpet to get at the first knot. Yes, impossible. If I had the courage—I have no courage, I could never bring myself to leave him. And you know yourself, I’m not easy to live with. I like to be in the right and I’m impossibly moody and careless. Penn ought to have married someone much less ambitious, someone who depended on him. Every time we quarrel, and such quarrels, T.S., I blame myself. And yet I can’t help thinking I could behave better—with another person.’ She forgot what she had been going to say. ‘Don’t laugh at me,’ she said, turning very red.
‘I could live with you, Hervey,’ T.S. said quickly. ‘You’re the only woman I’m at ease with. I like you better than anyone. We two could saunter about Europe very happily, and nothing to pay.’ He jumped up and gave her a hand. ‘Come along, then.’
Hervey laughed. A wind had sprung up, scattering coolness everywhere. They walked at a good pace. It was something, if only for an hour, to be with a friend and to feel free.
Penn was not in their rooms when she arrived there. They must have persuaded him to stay the night, she thought: and in this hope unlocked a cupboard and took from it the manuscript of her novel. More than half of it was written, but lately, with Penn always at her elbow in the evenings, she had had to leave it alone. Her first novel had been such a failure. No one, except the critics, had read it, and she was ashamed to be seen writing the second. Not that Penn had been unkind; indeed he had encouraged her, but it was no use—the book was a failure and only her stubbornness and a simple dislike of admitting failure forced her to go on. She told no one what she was thinking.
Turning the pages, she thought that only an idiot would go on writing with so little taste for it. I know nothing, nothing, she cried. (One reviewer had said of the first book : ‘Miss Russell has every talent but knowing how to write.’) It must be true—but what am I to do, how can I learn? Better to give up at once, before she was utterly disgraced: but not yet—not until she was certain, as certain as repeated awful failures could make her, that she would never learn, never make any money, never reach safety—Heaven knows I don’t want safety for myself, she cried: but Richard, Richard—it was for Richard.
She began to write slowly, holding her pen round the nib so that it covered her fingers with ink. The story—it was conceived on a sublime scale and none of the characters was low or ordinary—had to do with a young woman whose husband was unfaithful to her. But now, now that she had reached the climax—the young woman has the fatal letter in her hand and is about to cry out, or swoon, or clasp her head—she discovered that she had no more notion (she said) than a cat what feelings went with such a scene. What should I feel, she thought, if Penn——? At once it came to her that she would be enormously relieved—she would conceal it, of course, behave with ease, dignity, kindness; but all the time she would feel like dancing for joy. (Nothing warned her that in imagining a painful scene which has not yet taken place, we assign to ourselves in it only manageable emotions—emotions chosen not in tranquillity but in ignorance. When the time comes, another self takes possession of us, and the emotions suffered by this self are not manageable and not newly-coined. They spring from the deepest sources and drag in feelings and memories from all sides until the mind sinks under its weight of experience; a younger, less assured self takes possession of us: the grown woman gives birth to a girl, weeping the uncontrolled tears and suffering the sincere exaggerated anguish of youth.)
She frowned. She laid her pen down. Relief. Joy. This would never do; it was the last thing she wanted: the young woman in the story was destined to suffer every kind of tumultuous emotion until she died or became reconciled to her husband—but it would take a long time, another hundred and twenty pages at least, before either end came in sight. And to keep the young woman alternately crying out and swooning for that prodigious number of pages was more than she could face. I must think, she sighed, again.
The door opened and Penn put his head in, withdrew it, and went along the landing to his own room.
She put her manuscript away at once. Either he was irritated—vexed by having had to endure all day his father’s disapproval (as if it was the poor boy’s fault that no one would employ him). Or he was very tired. She felt a prick of remorse. Had she not given him away to T.S.? To that friend—true, he was her oldest, and her dearest, since Philip was dead—she had presented a picture of her marriage that falsified everything in it. Penn was lazy, selfish, a bully; he told lies; he was not to be depended on in any of the ways a young woman may hope for in her husband: but for all this he held her; like a child he depended on her; he was quick as a woman in little things; he could be wonderfully gentle and simple. More than all this—and something she could not speak of—he was her first youth, fastened to her by all the emotions of that time, when to be in love is to discover a new continent every few hours.
She hesitated over going to his room to fetch him out. He might snub her, and that, she knew, would start in her the hideous discontent she wished to forget (having spoken too freely about it to T.S.). She brushed her hair, looked in her purse to see what money there was, and sat down with her hands folded, to wait.
Penn had flung himself on the bed in his room. The sight of Hervey, writing—as he supposed—had put the finishing touch to his despondence. It was enough that he had quarrelled with his father, run out of the house, walked—to save the fare—from Holland Park to St John’s Wood, but he must come home to a wife indifferent to him, absorbed, and covered with ink. There was a thick streak of it across her forehead where she had pushed the hair out of her eyes.
He pitied himself with more fierceness than ever when, raising his arm, he noticed that the cuffs of his jacket were frayed and shiny. The sight was too much. He felt tears in his eyes. Shabby and a failure. That’s what I am, he groaned—a failure. A shabby failure. The memory of weeks, months, spent applying for posts in London schools—five months since he left the Air Force—rushed over him. He wiped his eyes with the back of his wrists. At every interview, and he had been interviewed dozens of times, it was the same thing. Too old. They meant too costly. Under the new scale, the salary they would have to pay him rose with the number of years he had been teaching, and counting his years in the Air Force. We should like to have you on the staff, Mr Vane—your degrees, your testimonials—your appearance—admirable, in every way—but—. In vain he began offering, after several such interviews, to take less salary than he was allotted—it was no use; that was forbidden. One headmaster said : ‘Just after the War you would have had no difficulty—’ He refused to believe this. It was what Hervey had always said.
Between emotion and hunger he felt tired and very weak. He rose from the bed, washed, straightened his jacket, with a glance mournfully averted from the sleeve, and went in to Hervey. She looked up and smiled at him.
He felt that he was going to cry. The interviews. The coat. His father’s face quivering with his anger, his contempt. Blindly feeling for her, he knelt down and laid his head against her knees.
‘Oh Hervey, I’m miserable.’
Hervey’s heart ached for him. She stroked his cheek, and said : ‘Why are you so late? I thought perhaps—I have the money for it now—we could din
e once a week in Soho. You enjoy it. I thought perhaps to-night—unless you’re too tired.’
‘I can’t dine out. I’m too shabby.’ He held out his arm, displaying a slender wrist in its band of threadbare cloth.
‘You must have a new suit,’ Hervey said. ‘Come, we’re not so badly off as that. You haven’t come to the end yet of your gratuity money’—(he had, but he said nothing)—‘a pre-war suit—it’s good cloth, of course, better than the new. But you can afford a new one. And if you can’t’—she glanced towards the cupboard—‘my book, when it’s finished—there’s always that: if it makes any money. Surely it will make a little which will be a fine help. We can spend it on luxuries—a new suit, for instance.’ She saw a brown bear on wheels in the window of a shop in Regent Street.
Penn’s arm closed round her. He was comforted, she could feel that, and her body grew strong and light. It was so easy to restore him. She had only to listen, to smile, to distract him with some brightly-coloured toy, like a child. At once, though she did not listen to it, a voice said in her ear that it was too easy, not worth doing. Not worth her doing. She trembled a little, losing all patience with herself, and ashamed.
‘My father offered to-day to send me up to Oxford, to read modern languages,’ Penn said.
‘Another degree!’ Hervey exclaimed. She grew rigid. Coming from the Vanes, this offer insulted her. ‘What use would that be?’
‘He seems to think it would be useful,’ Penn smiled.
Hervey was silent. She was trying to think calmly about it, but she could feel only surprise and pain. To send him away, leaving her alone. It terrified her. It would mean another three, four, irresponsible years for him, now, now when more than anything he needed responsibility. Her mind swung between astonishment and anger. Her voice quivered. ‘Your father forgets that you have a wife, and a son,’ she cried, with bitterness.
Penn sat up. He looked at her with a malicious smile. ‘On the contrary, my dear. He and my mother think you’re bad for me. The offer depends on my leaving you entirely out of it. Even if you were willing you mayn’t come to Oxford with me. And I was to live with them during the vacations, to make sure I worked. If necessary, he said, he would pay you ten shillings a week.’
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