When Penn returned he went directly to his room. She waited a moment, then ran after him and looking with an eager face, said : ‘What did your mother answer?’
He hated her to question him. For some reason it made him want to defend himself against her, as if he lost dignity by answering. She knew this but did not understand it, and when she was in a hurry she forgot.
‘Dear me, you’re very anxious to know,’ he said coldly.
‘Yes,’ Hervey said.
To snub her, he made her wait while he polished his pince-nez. ‘You won’t like it,’ he said drawling,‘but my mother has offered me the money to go to Oxford for three years—and whatever you say, I consider it very generous of her. She can’t very well spare the money, but she’s got it into her head that a second degree will help me to get back into the scholastic world. I shouldn’t be surprised if she’s right.’
Hervey did not answer for a time. While he was speaking her mind had become still. It was as if her thoughts sank in it to a great depth, leaving a space in which she was quiet. She held herself in this space. A familiar certainty possessed her, from which, without thinking about it, she would act. She lifted her head and looked thoughtfully at Penn. ‘Would you like to go?’
‘I haven’t actually thought about it,’ Penn said, in surprise and doubt. This was not true.
‘Think,’ Hervey said gently.
Penn had expected opposition and scorn. He was taken aback and did not know what to think. All his resentment vanished and with it the half decision he had made, to go. He looked at Hervey with an air of appeal. ‘Do you want me to go, my dear?’
She was implacable. ‘I want you to do exactly what you like,’ she said in a kind voice.
‘I don’t know,’ Penn cried.
Hervey looked at him with a warm smile. A faint sense of excitement gripped her. Do I want him to go? Doors opened and shut in her mind, she heard footsteps and voices, a hand touched her face. She started. Who came in then?
‘Do you feel it would be a help to you to have another degree?’
‘I suppose so,’ Penn said. He jumped up and began to walk up and down. ‘I don’t want to leave you to live alone again, pup.’
‘Don’t consider me,’ Hervey said swiftly. ‘It only confuses things. Think what you want to do, and then do it.’
‘How would you live?’
‘What would I live on, you mean,’ Hervey said. She felt a momentary panic. But this finishes me, she thought. I shall have to go back; and people will look at me and see that I have come to nothing. She was filled with despair.
In this moment of defeat, when she could see nothing that would save her, and no way out except the humiliating way of going home, having utterly failed, she felt a deep satisfaction. It was as if she preferred that Penn should leave her to face defeat; as if, in the obscure place it had come to, her spirit wanted to be humiliated. Perhaps she wanted also that Penn should do it. She felt almost happy. Perhaps without feeling it more clearly than, when she was deeply asleep, she felt the change from darkness to light, she felt that he was setting her free by his readiness to leave her when she had nothing, no work, and no money, except the fifty pounds she had and he did not know she had. In this darkness where the waiting mind feels its way, where nothing is known and where everything is certain, what voices take up the tale? She was used to listening. Something will come (someone said) of letting Penn go: better let him go. You’re not afraid, are you? (Here a child laughed—Shut your eyes and open your mouth and see what they have brought you.)
She grew aware of Penn’s impatience. ‘I don’t know, but I’ll find something,’ she said vaguely. ‘I always do find something.’
‘I’m not sure whether I ought to go,’ Penn said.
I won’t take the responsibility, Hervey thought swiftly. She looked at her hands. ‘You’ve always accused me of wanting to manage your life for you. This time I’m not going to do anything. I won’t interfere. Make up your mind what you want and I’ll accept it.’
‘Do you think I ought to go?’
‘I think you ought to do what you please. Would you like to go?’
‘I’ve always wished I had been sent to Oxford.’
Hervey did not say anything.
‘Perhaps it’s too late,’ Penn said.
‘You’re only thirty-one.’
‘I wish to God I’d taken it two years ago, when my father offered. Instead of hanging about here and giving you the chance to say you had given me your job.’
‘And your girl a job,’ Hervey said.
‘I expected you to say that.’
‘Well, forgive me,’ Hervey said. ‘Tell me—do you truly think it will benefit you to have an Oxford degree?’
‘I suppose it will.’
After a moment Hervey said : ‘I can go to Danesacre.’
‘What to do?’
‘I could write another novel.’
‘That’s a good idea.’
‘It’s a fine idea,’ Hervey said.
‘I could let you have fifty pounds for a start. Mother is taking out nine hundred and fifty for me. I rang up Parke before I came in—he was at Oxford and he says I can manage on three hundred a year. If you’re in Danesacre I can spend half my vacations there.’
‘Where do you spend the rest?’
Penn cleared his throat. ‘With my mother. Naturally, she’s expecting to get something for her money—poor dear, she’s lonely.’
‘Oh quite,’ Hervey said.
‘If I do well it’s worth it.’
‘Why shouldn’t you do well?’
‘It gives me something to take hold of. I’ve been feeling so wretched, Hervey.’
If you could make Hervey think of you as a child or as poor or oppressed, she would move mountains for you. My poor Penn, you shall have everything you want, she cried silently. She was full of love for him. ‘Darling Penn, you’ll be a great success.’
‘I’ll remember that,’ Penn laughed.
‘Remember this, too, then. I may get the wind up some time or other about being left. Don’t pay any attention to it.’
‘We’ll have fine holidays. When the three years are up you shall have your house and all that and you’ll be happy and I shall have done something, after three years. I’m not going to think of the three years, I’m going to think of our future.’
Hervey listened to him in silence. In her head the words made a noise like voices coming and going away in a street, the street empty, and the voices coming towards the street lamp and passing it and dying away again.
Chapter XXVIII
Interval
1. I am you reading
She gave up the rooms and went back to Danesacre at the beginning of August. She had close on a hundred pounds, her hoard and the fifty Penn had given her, or Penn’s mother. She wrote to thank Mrs Vane, falsely grateful.
Her plans, such as they were, the cover for defeat, did not please her mother. She did not want Hervey to take Richard from Miss Holland. Perhaps she felt it to be unjust that Hervey could so easily take back her son, after how long? after three and a half years—Jake was killed in 1917. Mrs Russell did not think these things. But she thought with a sudden bitterness that the boy was well enough with Miss Holland; why take him away? ‘You may very easily want to go away again,’ she said, frowning. ‘Then you would have unsettled him for nothing. You might even find that Miss Holland was not willing to take him back.’
Hervey felt herself flinch. That sound in her mother’s voice cowed her. She became a child tense with fear before the thrashing no tears would avert. She poked her chin forward in unconscious mimicry of her mother. ‘I’d rather have him with me,’ she repeated. ‘I can take rooms in a house near hers, in the fields. He can go to her for lessons.’
‘You must do as you please,’ Mrs Russell said coldly.
‘I can write in the mornings and when he is asleep.’
‘Miss Holland has been getting him into good ways. You’l
l find he behaves much worse with you. I shouldn’t be surprised if he begins his bad tempers again.’
‘He behaved well enough with me when he was a baby,’ Hervey said.
She went out of the room and upstairs to her bedroom. She was trembling with anger and dismay. She was a grown woman, she was a child, she had offended, she would be thrashed shortly. Shutting the door of her room, she put her hands over her eyes and tried to stiffen herself. She was uneasy and ashamed. When she was out of favour with her mother she remembered that she was living here because she had nowhere else to live. She had no husband, no room that was her own. If I had been a success no one would have said, You are the wrong person to bring up your own child, she thought, with shame and growing anger.
The smell of wood smoke came into the room. She looked out. Pale wisps and spirals rose from a heap of green in the field. The strong sunlight pressed down the flames. In the house someone struck a note on a piano, then a run of notes. Her mother’s voice tried over a line of a song. It came out loud and strong for a moment, weakened suddenly, missed a note, then ceased.
She’s not vexed, Hervey thought. At once she wished her mother had finished the song. Why did she stop? I know why, her voice felt weak to her, she couldn’t reach the notes. Hervey clenched her hands. She could not bear the thought that her mother no longer felt certain of her voice. How she used to sing then, she thought. Loud and clear, drowning the uncertain voices of her children, Mrs Russell sang The River of Tears and White Wings they never grow weary. They stood round the piano to listen. Her foot pressed on the pedals and her hands, the fingers a thought swollen, struck boldly the notes. Bright with pleasure, her eyes followed the words as she sang. A fury of love and pity overcame Hervey when she remembered it. Why aren’t you young now? she cried. Her throat felt hard with grief.
Her mother was at the centre of her life. She rebelled against her, at times with dislike, but she was bound to her by a love in which bitter and hurting things were drowned. There was no one whom she admired as she admired her mother.
She watched the wind rushing down the field of long grass. The grass lay over like waves rushing in green and silver under a ship. Again her heart was near breaking with grief. She loves these country things so much; she ought to live for ever, not to die and lose them. I too—all the pain and discontent and the striving will be as if it had never been. She gripped the edge of the window. Why can’t you live for ever? she said furiously, seeing her mother’s hands. You must, I tell you.
She went downstairs. Her mother was still in the front room. A woman in a thin grey coat had come in and was sitting there. She had a lean tired face: she sat with her hands folded, smiling in an unlistening way when Mrs Russell spoke to her. The contrast between the two women startled Hervey. Her mother was older and frailer than her friend, yet she had more life in one hand than the other woman in her whole body.
‘You shouldn’t do it for them,’ Mrs Russell was saying, in an energetic voice. ‘I wouldn’t, Mary. I wouldn’t work like that for anyone living. Tell them you can’t do it.’
The other woman listened with an uneasy smile. ‘It’s the first week this season I’ve had all my rooms let. You can’t do what you like when you take visitors. They leave you and go elsewhere if they’re not satisfied. And it’s a short enough season.’
‘Nonsense,’ Mrs Russell said. ‘Visitors or no visitors, season or no short season, I wouldn’t do it.’
Hervey sat quietly and listened. For a moment she had an extraordinary feeling of love and understanding of all such tired, anxious, unattractive women, coming, with propitiatory glances, into rooms, going away, shutting doors, opening and closing windows, drawing blinds up, drawing them down again at night or against the sun, turning down the tops of beds, preparing trays, climbing with them up flights of stairs, answering bells. ‘We see you have rooms to let.’ ‘What do you charge?’ ‘Is the water hot?’ ‘Is this facing the sea?’ ‘Is it quiet?’ Is life nothing but bells and stairs and trays of food? Is the grave quiet? The woman’s thoughts and feelings rose in pale wisps and spirals in Hervey’s mind. You are living in me, she thought. I could speak for you, I could lie in your bed and wear your clothes; I am you.
2. Night image
Hervey lived with Richard in the country, where the valley of Danesbeck begins to narrow entering the hills. They had here two rooms in a house within walking distance of Miss Holland’s. In the morning Hervey wrote at her third book and again in the evening until past midnight when her eyes were falling into her head with sleep. She wrote quickly and easily about fancied events, having no respect for words. Certain thoughts and feelings started an excitement in her brain, and she was under the delusion that this had some connection with literature.
In the afternoon Richard was with her. She played with him and took him out. Her pride in him was excessive. He was tall for his seven years, brown as a berry, his eyes wide, a deep bright blue, with black heavy lashes. He was quick, graceful, and lazy. He hated to exert himself. Hervey took such care of him as never was, and yet she had no pleasure in talking to him. She was herself too young to talk to a child. She wanted company of her own age.
She did not know what Richard was thinking when they walked. He was apt for silence as a Trappist or she was. He gave no more than half an eye to the real world. Once he told her a story about a young bird, but it was no bird, it was himself. They went here and there, the careless-walking, shabby young woman and her handsome child, in woods and meadows, each fast in his own mind. When Richard talked she listened, anxious to please. He only listened when something she said amused him.
One hot day they sat down under a tree beside a stream. ‘Once I was disappointed,’ said Richard suddenly. ‘I was in the Christmas bazaar by myself and I met an old lady who knows me. She said, “ Would you like to go and refresh yourself at that stall? Have you some money? ” I said No, but she thought I said Yes, and she said, “Then why don’t you go and refresh yourself? ”’
‘That was a bad day,’ Hervey said. She looked at him with a smile. At the same moment she thought, I wish I had enough money to travel, I have never seen Spain. The shutter of a foreign house was flung open and a hand set a pot of herbs on the sill. I should be happier if I were not greedy. Can I possess myself in patience? I shall work harder and harder, I shall learn Spanish. She watched her son trying to make a raft from the tough dry reeds. He had a little skill and no patience. Now she was seized by an irrational fear that something terrible would happen to him. The more radiant living creatures are the less use life has for them, she thought. Rousing herself from this old nightmare she tried to help him to plait reeds, but her fingers were as awkward as his and the reeds broke. ‘We might try the Lord’s prayer,’ Richard said, frowning.
‘Do you think it would help?’ she asked.
Without answering, he repeated it. He looked at her face when he was saying it, and at the end he said : ‘What do you think of it?’
‘Well, I like it,’ Hervey said.
‘Yes, I think it’s a good one myself. My throat hurts.’
Her mind jumped, then steadied into silence. She looked into his throat, but nothing showed. But they went home and in the night he woke and woke Hervey and said : ‘But my throat does hurt.’ There and then Hervey got up and dressed herself, to be in good time. There was diphtheria in the town, many cases. Before the doctor she sent for came she made her mind up that if Richard had diphtheria he should stay with her. No isolation hospital for him, she thought.
And so it was. He had that diphtheria and Hervey was so certain the woman of the house would let him stay that the woman did.
He had it lightly, yet Hervey would watch the first nights. She took a chipped saucer and floated a night-light in it, and put it near her chair. Her chair stood between the light and his bed, in the narrow cave hollowed out of the surrounding darkness. She could think that outside the country lay as wild and harsh as when the Danes landed and burned the first town,
leaving charred ash of timber and at the edge of the cliffs the blackened stones. That sound might be branch grinding on branch or it could be—they ran their cruel ships on to the beach and afterwards there was the smoke curling about the walls the dead sons the mess the stones the mess of blood on the stone. Richard slept without moving. She folded her hands and thought of her book. She had begun to suspect that she was a foolish writer, taking excitement for feeling and ideas for thoughts. I ought to write simply, she thought. I exaggerate events in my mind. When I think, She is dying, it is I who am dying, and I pity myself. A thought of Penn jumped into her mind. The truth is I have never forgiven him for bringing that girl to London. It is a year since I knew and I am a fool. Where did they go the first time? Did they go together? Did she go first? Did he open the door and see her waiting for him? Was she ready? It has broken me: I’m old. I don’t want to think of it. I don’t want to think. Stand close around, ye Stygian set, with Dirce in one boat convey’ d. Oh no, oh no no no no I won’t think about it I won’t look Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright. Please not. What are they doing? What are they saying? The truth is, there is no one in the whole world no person nothing you can trust. Make a note of it for the future. Bist du mit mir. She felt her body contract with hot pain. Scalding tears ran over her cheeks. I loathe them, I am sick with my loathing. Why are we like that? It is foul like worms like dying like earth. She thought Richard had moved. She was still at once and looked. She had not made a sound, but it came to her, Could what I am thinking disturb him? That quieted her. Richard slept on and she sat without moving, thinking of her book, until he woke.
He asked her in what he believed to be an invalid’s voice what time it was. ‘About six,’ Hervey said. The windows were open but the blinds hung without moving. Hervey pulled them up and at that the sun came in, it was like a stamping horse.
‘Now give me my little friend,’ Richard said. She felt under the pillow and in his bed and found that old bear; it was very flat and looked to be dying, or else it was only shamming. Richard embraced it indifferently. ‘I didn’t sleep a wink all night,’ he said, looking at Hervey.
Company Parade Page 29