Company Parade

by Storm Jameson

  It was like her to try to strike a profit. She hated waste and to fail.

  The ex-service men sat with the soldiers. What do they see? Hervey wondered. She thought that one man’s brain might hold the side of a trench, and another the face of a dead man, and another the room he lived in; it was a poor cold room—he was very shabby and his face gaunt. The sailors filled three rows. They were apart from the others. Their clothes, fitting tight round their bodies, gave them a queerly naked look. One of them, a little head on a solid broad neck, looked with his smooth face like an animal. The rest of the church was filled with men and women to whom the war had made different gifts, giving to this a death, to another new life, to this one money. There were many people in Danesacre whom the war had fed full with money. Perhaps they came here to thank someone for it.

  It has come, Hervey thought suddenly.

  It seemed now as if the silence filled the church like the welling of the sea between rocks. The great chandelier hung motionless in it. The tall pulpit, the gallery, the painted pillars, the figures of men and women, stood upborne in the full tide. All all were still. The great ball of air round the walls contracted and pressed on them. The silence drew into itself every quiver of light reflected on the walls and so strengthened it upheld the thin shell of the roof which would have been crushed : which would have fallen on them. This sound I hear is my own heart, she thought. A splinter of light fell from Jake’s tablet. She saw him at the other side of a London street 5 he was in clumsy khaki, his face was red, he believed he was unwanted. She ran across the road, between the wheels of cabs. She called. She touched him.

  Out there, in danger, living with men, he had grown from boy to young man. Then one morning flying over the lines he had been shot at and had fallen dying on to the spoiled earth. He was nineteen. She had not known him very well—as if he had been too like her, too much the voice of her clumsy dreams. He had had ambitions like hers. He had lived a short time here, and a still shorter time in France, and he was dead. She turned here and there in the silence, thinking of the young men she had known until they were killed. She thought of Philip with a familiar grief. He had only a narrow room in her mind but it was his own. How I wish you had not died, she said to him. And now the silence changed, as though a cloud passing overhead were reflected in water. It darkened, and a wave far out at sea gathered itself to fall, to send a shock of water against the shore. Through all that place there was the sense of waiting for something that would happen. No heads were lifted, no eyes that had been closed opened, the ex-service men still stared rigidly before them, the face of the old man bowed in the upper deck of the pulpit was not uncovered—yet the change had taken place. All now waited—but for what? Nothing came. Nothing happened, except that a gun was fired outside and at the back of the church a man lifted his arms and sounded the Last Post. That dreadful sound, a sigh issuing from all those murdered young men, lacerated their nerves. What is man? he spoils and kills, and then laments with a simple, an unendurable grief. The last note ended, slowly, it passed on, it would go over the earth; it would be heard here and there. The ears that were stopped with earth would not hear it. Hervey held the rail of the gallery. She was ashamed to cry, because these were not the first tears she had shed. But now another sound checked her, checked everyone. After a death there are sheets to wash, dirt to clear away; a shell falls in a group of young men and what is gathered up into a sandbag is as undignified as a dish of tripes. In the musicians’ gallery the organist began the first bar of God Save the King. Lurching a line or so behind the choir, the congregation sang one verse and would have sung the rest if the trumpet had not flown out again in the Reveillé. It flew out and up. It set the branches of the chandelier quivering. It jerked the breath in some throats and hardened others. A woman cried aloud the name she had called at intervals since July 3rd 1916. No one answered.

  Mrs Russell did not cry aloud. Such was not her habit. For a second when the service began she had glanced towards the Garton pew. Whom did she expect to see there? The figure of an old woman? (She had never reflected that her only image of her mother as an old woman was drawn from a picture in a newspaper. It had not replaced the other images.) Her own youth? That least: too much had happened to her—years spent working like a poor woman, like a slave, the births of children, mending clothes, nursing, counting out shillings, going on voyages, heat and discomfort in foreign ports, illness, pain, anger, ambitions transferred to her children, growing old, growing tired—there was nothing left to remind her of the young stubborn girl who had defied her mother, defied everyone, and for what? For nothing. For this moment in which she stood wearing a black coat, made loosely since she was growing heavy, and thought of her dead boy. Yet there persisted—as if it had been any one of those coloured prints, worthless, falling between the pages of magazines we treasured in childhood, living still in us more sharply than the masterpiece we saw yesterday—the bright flickering image of a child asleep in one corner of the great pew. It was warm, there were flies droning on the panels: she said, I fell forward. Someone—her mother?—had laid her down on the seat and she slept.

  She looked away again. Covering his face, the old rector was silent. He had been praising those who had died. He had told her to be proud, to be comforted. She listened and thought, He is excusing what has happened. But there could be no excuse. War, for any cause, is inexcusable. There is nothing which excuses us for the beastly ingenuity of our wars. Only fools, only the diseased, think that we are served by killing the strong young men with machines. Mrs Russell looked at the memorial to her son. He hath outsoared the darkness of our night. They were the right words for an airman. He hath outsoared. The red frowning face of a little boy looked at hers. His mouth was black with bramble juice. She spoke to him. He frowned. He was sullen. Then he smiled at her; a tooth was missing, one of his first. He ran away and she followed him. Doors opened and shut, a cab drew up at the house and she got into it. Jake’s canvas bag on the seat beside her bulged full, the cake that had just finished baking on top of all. His feet in thick army boots crushed hers on the floor of the cab. He mumbled an excuse. He was silent; his eyes had the remote stare of her own and—but she would not think it—of Mary Hervey’s. He was a boy; he was going to make a name : he was going to be killed. The old man’s strong unpriestly voice recalled her. She listened. It is raised in power : it is sown a natural body ; it is raised a spiritual body. She saw a khaki tunic folded in a drawer. The curtain blew out, filled by the wind. Jerking at the drawer she closed it, she stood up, she went from the room. Her feet dragged on the stairs. I am too done, she thought. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. No, no, she cried. She sat stiffly, immoveable. Her hands lay on her knees. She looked at them. Her whole life was in confusion in her, nothing was at peace, nothing was safe. You know that your labour is not in vain, she heard. No, she cried. Take it, take your victory. Take it and give me the living body of my son.

  2. Renn talks to an old friend

  A long way from him, and coming in jerks, as if a door swung open and again to, Renn could hear a bugle giving the Last Post. He heard it without hearing. He was alone in the room. The cessation of sound now gave him, when it was over, a tremor of alarm—as walking by a road at night you come on someone hidden there, pass him, and only then start with fear. For a time his senses had been astray.

  He had thought that if you were to write about London it would have to be in the form of an auctioneer’s catalogue, or a painting in which the intersection in a certain way of three lines, and with the corner of a newspaper, releases the charged mind. The sheet of paper under his hand was all over his compact writing. He wrote on the margins :

  these things cannot be endured.

  rooms without light, with a W.C. for use of eight

  families,

  the totty hinge has gone loose again, spoiling the lock;

  children toss scratch yes as they sleep, because of the

  vermin running in the
pillows, in walls, and the marks

  you see the marks.

  now is the time to buy furs. This exquisitely worked

  mink.

  worth 300 guineas.

  Seen in Hyde Park with his nurse

  the intelligent young marmoset, Mrs Cammell another

  well-known hostess.

  adores, now showing

  now drops the crimson spittle, now the white

  This position will be held and the section will remain

  here until relieved.

  If the section cannot remain here alive, it will remain

  here dead, but in any case it will remain here.

  No Hands Wanted.

  But that’s the after-birth, you must have mutilated—

  mutilated?—misbegotten something one time

  The door opened and his friend Louis Earlham came in. ‘I grew tired of knocking.’

  ‘I didn’t hear you,’ Renn said. He smiled and dropped the paper into a drawer, on the top of several other fragments of London. ‘How is Rachel?’

  ‘She sent her love and wants you to come to see us.’ Earlham paused, looking at his friend with a slight smile. ‘We’re going to have a baby in five months. Rachel said I was to tell you now because you’d never notice it until the child was born. She wants you to be the godfather.’

  ‘But where will you keep it?’ Renn said anxiously. ‘You have hardly room for Habbakuk in your flat—let alone a child.’

  Earlham did not answer at once. There was going on in his mind a strange process whereby, without anything being lost, or any belief sacrificed, an entirely new form emerges. It is like the shifting of the sea floor—a depression fills the place of a range of hills, new peaks are flung up, a whole submerged island is stripped of life, but the watcher on the surface sees nothing, except a wave that rises suddenly in mid-ocean, rushes over a small ship or two, and sinks back. Already Earlham had accustomed himself to what he was going to do, but not to speaking about it. He felt for words.

  ‘You know that Cohen is starting an evening paper. The Evening Post. He is moving over part of the staff of the Daily as a nucleus, and he has offered me a job as leader writer. I shall take it, Davy. It’s not only for the money. I know precisely how far Cohen’s Radical ideas go—not far enough to damage his investments—and I know that I can force some Socialism into those limits. Probably I can do it better this way than if I were using an openly Socialist newspaper. The people will be educated without knowing it. Small homoeopathic doses for the million.’ He laughed, looking at Renn’s face.

  ‘Is Cohen financing the paper himself?’ Renn asked.

  ‘Not entirely. I believe Harben holds a share of it.’

  Renn lifted a file from his shelf and opened it. ‘Harben, Thomas,’ he read aloud. ‘Yorkshireman. Born 1864. Chartered accountant by profession. Holds nineteen directorates and eight chairmanships of companies. Chairman since 1918 of the Garton Shipbuilding and Engineering Company. Director of two other shipping firms. Lately bought a controlling share in the Ling Steel and Iron Works on the Tees. Director of Stokes Chemical Works, a subsidiary of the largest armaments firm in the world. A director of the Midland Railway. Of the English Steel Corporation. On the board of Lloyds Bank. Director of a petrol combine. Chairman of a Canadian timber company. Married. No children. Has one mistress, partly German, whom he visits twice a week in the evening. Is at present engaged in reorganizing his shipping interests to avoid the worst consequences, to himself, of war inflation.’ He closed the file and looked up at Earlham with a smile. ‘What percentage of Socialism do you believe you can squeeze through this gentleman’s fingers?’

  Earlham shrugged his shoulders. ‘I knew most of that,’ he said. ‘But you’re forgetting that The Evening Post is avowedly a Radical paper. Harben won’t be able to change the policy.’

  ‘He won’t need to,’ Renn said swiftly. ‘When you were inoculated against typhoid you absorbed a certain amount of the poison. After that you were immune to it. That will be your job on the Post. Under cover of the smoke screen of Liberal promises and ideas you put up, Thomas Harben and his allies will be able to carry on in ease. Should a time come when they no longer need screening, they will invite you to turn about and admire their fine system of forts and salients and entrenchments. At present you are dupe and decoy duck. Do forgive me. Your illusions are not my business—nor your hopes either.’ He turned over the papers on his desk. ‘When Harben instructs the financial editor of the Post to recommend an issue of shipping shares, will you be allowed to point out facts I’m about to print week by week in The Week? In 1919 one of Harben’s companies actually doubled its share capital by an issue of bonus shares, another increased its ordinary share capital by 200 per cent, in 1917. Of these one is about to issue four million pounds worth of debentures at 7 per cent, to pay the part cost of its reckless buying up of other firms. These interest-bearing facts, with those I shall set out in The Week, affect every man woman and child who depends on. the shipping business. There will be men looking for work for years of their lives; boys’ lives will be twisted; a woman will die of hunger, another woman will give birth to a dead child, because Harben indulged himself in an orgy of inflation during the War. Did he think it was going to last his lifetime? Are you going to open this to your readers? Homoeopathic doses? Why, you even won’t be allowed to warn the anxious middle-class investor that the statement Harben supplies with his new issue is completely misleading. It is nothing more than the balance sheet of a holding corporation and doesn’t tell him whether it is safe to invest his money in the shares of this or that firm involved, and what share of the declared profits has been drawn from secret reserves.’ The fine delicate lines of Renn’s mouth sharpened this outburst. He could seem to smile as he said bitter insulting things in a pleasant voice. ‘You mercenary!’ he said gently.

  Earlham looked at him. ‘Listen to me, David. The Week is a luxury. Nothing else. You couldn’t afford it without Philip Nicholson’s money. When that’s spent you’re done. You’re showing a weekly loss, aren’t you? The pure milk of the word. Who reads it? The converted. Only the converted. The little I squeeze through the Post will be heard by millions. Long after you’re silenced. That’s all. You want to work a revolution. I tell you it can’t be done that way. Inch by inch, one step an inch in front of the last——’

  Renn laughed.

  A detachment of infantry marched down Fleet Street with fifes and drums. The music swept round them, isolating them in another world. Now destroyed. Earlham went over to the window. ‘My God, I was happier in the War than I’ve been since,’ he exclaimed.

  ‘It was certainly simpler,’ Renn said.

  3. Harben has an important suggestion to make

  The soldiers had left their barracks at nine o’clock. Shortly after ten they were passing the building which housed Garton’s Shipbuilding Company and the shipping firms it controlled. The drums—the fifes were silent—thudded in the Board room. George Ling straightened his back in response. He loved martial music. Obscurely he felt that he and England were safe so long as the drums stammered and fifes shrilled of a morning somewhere.

  Thomas Harben lifted his long nose and turned it towards the windows. In this posture his face was all strong fleshy beak. In a moment the beak drove down into the papers in front of him. He had observed Ling’s rapture with annoyance. It aggravated the rage he felt at having to explain to this nincompoop that Garton’s was already feeling the effects of war inflation. The huge prices paid for tonnage during the War, financed by new issues, the increase of capital, now dragged at it. In his fury he said too much. He had the pleasure of seeing Ling’s fresh-coloured cheeks fall with terror. Then he went on to say that the ground position was still good. The reserves hidden away during the War had not been dissipated. From one source and another, the sum of these undisclosed monies went into eight millions. Over-depreciation and over-insurance (ships sunk during the War, spurlos versunkt). This year, for two compa
nies, debenture holders and other mortagees would swallow up the last farthing of the net profits, unless (he squinted suddenly round his nose at Marcel Cohen) it was felt advisable to pay a small dividend.

  ‘From what? Pay from what?’ Ling quavered.

  ‘From special reserves,’ Harben said.

  ‘Naturally you would consider not disclosing the source of this dividend?’ Cohen said.

  ‘I should certainly consider that.’ Harben let himself sink forward in his chair. He was feeling the onset of a violent attack of dyspepsia. This always happened to him after one of Lucy’s more elaborate dinners. He had taken all the precautions—a dose of salts before going to bed; in the morning he lay relaxed on the floor of his bedroom for ten minutes and massaged his stomach with both hands. It was no use. Presently he resigned himself to his pains. In the moment of speaking to George Ling he had decided to go directly to Chelsea and get Lise to give him the cascara and a cup of lime tea. She was lazy. At this hour she would just be up and freshly bathed. He would lie down on the sofa and let her talk soothingly to him until relief came. He had a certain respect for Lise. He had never given her a gift worth more than a few pounds. A long time ago he had offered her an allowance. She refused it with her wide smile. But she asked him to advise her in investing her little money, and in this way he had in a few years made her very easy. He did not know that she had begun now to gamble in shares; and she was too afraid of rousing his contempt to tell him.