‘I came in on my way home,’ he said—not giving himself the trouble to remind her of what she had certainly not forgotten, that this was his hour and day for coming—‘yes, to tell you I’ve started writing that novel I told you about. I’m about ready now to do something’ll make people sit up. I was telling Lucy Harben about it this afternoon. She thinks I’ve got a grand scheme for it. I’ve learned a lot in the last four years. You know the book I mean, don’t you? about a London restaurant, full of action and humour and characters, hundreds of characters, a real human book—absolutely original; none of your old stuff. I can do it, and I don’t know any other writer who can.’
Evelyn saw this enormous book rolling towards her, with descriptions of faces and family parties and love scenes, with inventories of pantries and kitchens, with comic events, with speeches in character, corpulent, leg-slapping, something for all tastes and nothing for thought.
‘I’m sure that is true,’ she said in a smooth voice. She looked at him with an insulting air of amusement and irony. Seized with despair, she was thinking, Long before he finishes this frightful book he will have finished with me. For a moment she felt herself slipping into a darkness. But this darkness had been close to her the whole time, from the beginning of her separate life as Evelyn Lamb, the well-known critic. She felt herself slowly being isolated, and however eagerly she ran towards this and that physical contact, hoping to lose herself, to be reassured, the dread sense of isolation increased. For a short time after her marriage she imagined that at last she had ceased to be alone, but this idea too failed her and with the increasing dryness of her life she saw the whole world fading about her, into a darkness in which no voice could reach her and her hand would encounter no seeking hand. She glanced at a picture standing on the floor against the wall. ‘Have you noticed my Van Gogh?’ she said languidly. ‘I paid too much for it, I daren’t tell you how much.’ She went over to look at the picture, laying her hand lightly on Ridley’s arm. I look old this evening. The oil, the herbal packs over my eyelids, rest, sleep; why do I take this trouble? who will see me? She curled her finger in the folds of her dress. Tell me, what shall I do? what shall I ever do?
6. David Renn talks to his friend
Climbing the stairs to David Renn’s room Hervey thought, I couldn’t live in this place. The smell of dirty walls, of bodies, pervaded the house. She had walked through a warren of streets, passed houses in which there were as many people as maggots in a piece of rotten cheese. In parts of London it is possible to forget that other parts are as disgusting as a badly-placed latrine. The street in which Renn lived had a comparative air of decency and reserve, and yet it stank. She had passed a Fun Fair on a piece of waste ground, a shelter of corrugated iron, with wooden horses, slot machines, and a mechanical organ. Drawn by the music, and the lights, and by their penniless state, two little pallid girls stood in the entrance. Otherwise, it was not patronised.
Renn seemed pleased to see her. He had set the table with a clean tablecloth, a teapot, cheese, a loaf, and a few biscuits. Hervey was impressed by the neatness of the room. ‘Do you keep all this clean yourself?’ she asked.
‘Certainly. What did you expect? I don’t like living in a disorder.’
‘Then why do you live in such a street?’ Hervey asked.
‘For two excellent reasons. It is cheap. It puts me on the side of the poor. I couldn’t call myself the comrade of these people if I lived in middle-class comfort in Bloomsbury or Hampstead.’
‘You wouldn’t feel you had to sleep in a cancer ward because you were trying to cure it.’
‘Clever,’ Renn said, with a smile. ‘But false.’ A stain of colour showed itself under his cheekbones. ‘People speak of these streets as a blot on civilisation. False! You don’t say of a man with leprosy on his hands that it’s a blot on a healthy body. You say he is a leper. The slums of the poor are a leprosy. The social body isn’t a healthy body diseased in spots—it is a leper’s body. I’m beginning to believe that Europe is, too. Look at this from Germany.’
He showed her three photographs. First—black troops stopping a young German woman in the streets of a Ruhr town. Second—a poorly-clad man running with a load of paper, his week’s wages, to change it into food. The value of the money fell even as he ran. Third—the body of a university professor of literature found lying in his room, dead of starvation.
Hervey looked at them without speaking. Renn said: ‘What are you writing now, Hervey?’
‘Another novel,’ she answered awkwardly.
‘Don’t you know you haven’t any right to write novels unless you put into it this slum and those black troops being used to bully Germans? We shall pay for both crimes.’
‘Propaganda novels,’ Hervey said. She pushed the photographs gently aside.
‘Who writes any other kind?’ Renn said in a sudden voice. ‘Whether you know it or not, you’re being used. You’re either soothing or rousing people. You’re persuading them that all’s for the best in the best of possible worlds. Or you’re warning them. You’re telling them lies or truths. You’re—’ He stopped, biting his lip. ‘Well, I’m a madman,’ he said calmly. ‘Have some more tea.’
Hervey pressed her knees together. They had begun trembling because she was afraid to say what she was going to say. Until this moment she had supposed that she still cared sharply about what was being done in Europe under the aegis of a dirty Peace, Once she had cared—enough to lie awake at nights, to go hungry so that she could give a little money to murdered Austria. Now incredible. It must be six months since I looked at a foreign newspaper, she thought. Why should I care? All her passion of anger and pity had gone into nothing. It was finished. The photographs shocked her, but they did not make her burn with anger. But for coming here to-night she would never have seen them. Without thinking, she had closed her ears and turned her eyes from the spectacle of Europe being driven as an ox is driven towards the next war. It was too much. It was unendurable. Why watch it? Eat, drink, work, for tomorrow you die again. I have my work to do, she thought sullenly. The thought that her next novel was certain to be a success flitted through her mind.
She looked at Renn. ‘I can’t write the kind of novel you want.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know enough. What’s more, I don’t want to know.’
Renn jumped up. ‘You’ve changed too much. Why, I don’t know you. Are you going to spend the rest of your life to become a popular novelist, as if nothing mattered but your making a fat income? You’d better go back to advertising. There’s money in it.’
‘I must make an income,’ Hervey said. ‘I have a son.’
‘You have a son,’ Renn mocked her. ‘You have given birth to a charming piece of cannon-meat. Don’t you see, you poor young fool, that if you let them, if you don’t watch and listen and protest, they’ll kill your son as they killed Philip and the others? It must look funny from above. The war graves with their unpleasant tenants and the nurseries with theirs. I hope there is a God.’
Hervey’s face had flushed an unlovely red. ‘I have only a certain energy. I can’t earn money for Richard and worry about Europe as well.’
If she could she would have explained to him the sudden drying up of her passion. For a time she had cared. For a time she had looked with deep horror at pictures like these now lying under her arm. They came into the office of The Week, and drove her to write with angry bitterness. They haunted her dreams. Then one sudden day it was all gone. Her mind was voiceless about Renn’s three pictures.
‘I can’t help it,’ she said roughly. She pushed the photographs towards him. ‘I don’t like these. But—I don’t feel anything. It’s no use. I have to live my life as best I can. You can’t live it for me by telling me what to feel. I must find my own way. I’m lost now. Everything I know is turning and flying apart.’ She looked at Renn with a childish smile. ‘You don’t know what awful confusion my mind is in, now, in these days. Imagine a pond after someone has
stirred about in it with a stick.’
‘Talk to me again when it settles,’ Renn said.
Hervey stood up. ‘Goodbye.’
‘You’re angry.’
‘No. I haven’t enough dignity to be angry.’
‘Hurt, then.’
‘No.’
She went away quickly, afraid that he would see how little she liked being snubbed by him. Her cheeks still burned.
After she had gone Renn could not at once get rid of her. He was surprised by the anger she woke in him. After a time he began to think that she would always anger people by her mingling of shyness and mulish obstinacy. He saw her, her listening face, the eyes a clear sky, and behind the clearness a storm of obstinacy gathering, to come down when least expected. Her virtues will offend more than her faults, he thought. Then, his anger cooling, he was sorry he had treated her with so much harshness. She is very kind, he thought, generous, and in the end she is honest. But it is too late to take back what I said 5 and besides—she will forgive me.
He cleared the table and sat down to write to his mother. But first he looked in his notebook at a column of figures, added the total, and compared it with another figure he had in his mind. The difference between the two figures was what was left of his savings. It was like the skin that shrank each time its owner uttered a wish; by now it was horribly small, scarcely large enough to make a glove.
‘It is disappointing I cannot come down,’ he wrote, ‘but you know what it is with a new job. I enjoy the work, but I have to keep at it very close until I have earned a holiday. I am not sure when that will be, but one of these days you will be sitting reading by the fire, with your tongue between your teeth, and I shall walk in. You really must cure yourself of that habit. One evening when I startle you by coming in without warning you will nip the end of it off, and that will be a serious misfortune. Do you remember when I was living at school I used to rush home during the afternoon break, running all the way through five streets and arriving out of breath and unable to utter a word. One day you jumped round when I came in, and the soup you were stirring boiled over; you did not hear it at once and I could only point and point and you thought I had gone mad, and in your alarm you let it go on pouring over until I got my breath. My word, how I hated that school. Thank you for the cake. The ones I buy at—’ (he had to stop a moment to remember where one can buy cakes) ‘—the place we had tea when you were up here, Buzzard’s, are not the same thing. By the way, you can give up wondering—my leg doesn’t hurt at all these days. I have just had a friend, a young woman, to supper. You would like her—but don’t encourage any romantic notions, she’s married, and in any case I shouldn’t want to marry her. She’s too erratic. I want someone quite soothing and gentle and as round as an apple.’
He ended the letter as he had been ending these letters once a week for fourteen years, exactly half his life, and folding the two £I notes inside the sheet he closed the envelope, addressed it to Mrs. Renn, 5, The Street, Hitchin, and propped it against the tea cannister for the night.
He had given up his second room, and he slept now on the couch. Usually when he was undressing he talked to himself, or to anyone who was prepared to listen. ‘You know, my dear Renn, you ought to have explained to that young woman that what is wrong with her is that she lacks a sense of values. She doesn’t know whether she is looking for truth or success. You can’t have both, not in this age. The truth is unpleasant. Who wants to be told that the next act is a squalid tragedy? If you want success you must join the saxaphonists. A little nearer the end you can still play Nearer my God to Thee and gather up the pennies thrown you by your deeply moved and tearful audience. Now if our Hervey would make up her mind what she wants——’
‘Our Hervey is very slow.’
Renn glanced up. ‘Oh, is it you?’ he said, pleased.
Philip leaned against the wall and looked at his friend with a smile in which there was some irony. ‘You have so little patience,’ he remarked.
‘But there is so little time,’ Renn said.
‘What do you mean, so little time?’ Philip retorted. ‘Time for what? I hadn’t much time, it’s true, but the human race didn’t die with me, and there will always be someone to enjoy living as well as I did.’
‘That’s no use to me,’ Renn said sadly. ‘I mean it’s awfully pleasant to talk to you, and it’s decent of you to come in like this—by the way, why are you wearing khaki? it’s out of date, people will think you can’t afford anything new—but I’d rather you were alive, one can’t say you showed much politeness in dying in just the way you did; and then, these visits are a little uncertain, and to speak coarsely they have too little body for my liking. As for all this talk of yours about time, it doesn’t reconcile me in the least to living in a lunatic asylum.’ He went on talking for several minutes, amusing himself by proving exactly how out of date and wrong-headed his friend’s philosophy was; stooping to take off his shoes when he looked up again Philip had gone.
7. As the night darkened
As the night darkened Frank came out of The Dug-out and stood looking along the road. There was a faint glow on that part of the horizon to which he was turned, and tomorrow morning they would move that way and by night the glow would have closed round them. London. Two rooms in a street in the north-east of London, and a job which he did not expect to like. Lucky to touch it, he said, without conviction.
The carrier’s cart with their furniture on board stood close to the hedge, the shafts resting across two boxes. He seated himself between them on one of the boxes. During the day he had been burning pieces of tarred wood and that salt odour lingered in the air. It flowed into the February smells of wet grass and frost, at night rising thinly from the unquickened earth. As a child can only believe in what it sees he could not believe that something was over. Well, it’s finished, he thought; here we are and here, in a manner of speaking, we aren’t. But while he still breathed this air, thin, faintly acrid, cold, and felt under his hand the shaft of smooth worn wood, he could not feel a change.
Looking at The Dug-out he saw one window darken; a moment later a yellow glow came in the other. Sally had carried the lamp into their room and was undressing for bed. She had set the lamp by the window, but in his mind he saw it standing on the chest of drawers now wedged into the cart. A moment, and he remembered that the room was empty of all save their bed and the lamp. A feeling of uncertainty invaded him. Where had she stood it? Now he could not see the room in his mind. Empty, it did not exist. In a shadowy fashion other rooms filled its place and he saw a room in which he had been a child, and through that, like a reflection in water, the room into which a dozen dog-tired men had crowded at the end of a day’s march. Which room? He could not have been sure. But there was a lamp, and outlined in that fine glow the face of a boy called—he remembered the name with excitement—Angus. Beyond that evening no memory of him remained, and he did not know whether he had died or lived; but only to have recalled a name from that time filled him with a deep excitement and satisfaction, as if something which had been left unfinished had now, with ease, been completed and could be put by.
He came back to himself and felt the cold, and the shaft under his hand. He stood up. By some road—it should have started from that room full of soldiers—he came to the morning when stepping whistling out of The Dug-out he saw the captain lying out there with his head on his arms. No one seen him that time but me, he thought. He moved stiffly towards the hut. In the first room his father-in-law was asleep or lying still in the darkness. He opened the other door softly and went into their room. Sally had been crying but she was asleep.
The darkness deepened after midnight. It pressed down the sleepers as if they lay in deep water. Their life died in them to a semblance, vague and distorted. Yet, imperceptibly at first, a current began to flow through the darkness, altering its nature. The blind surface of the water changed, but so weakly that you would not know whether what slipped over it was a ripple or the
first actual breath of reflected light. The night turned. To the few watchers it was as if a signal, unseen by themselves, had brought the world about at the moment when it was voyaging out of sight.
The new lightness made itself felt in the senses even of the heaviest sleepers. Children and old people, between whose sleeping and waking life there is a briefer passage than for others, felt it quickest. Richard Vane opened his eyes and called out. This happened before he remembered that he was in his bedroom again in Miss Holland’s house. He put his hand out and felt the quilt, and remembered. The handle of the door creaked slightly. Now she will speak, he thought. ‘Richard?’ He did not answer her. He could hear her slow breathing but he did not see her. Now she is listening, he thought. After a time he heard her move, and the door closed. He lay without moving, his eyes open.
At the same moment Mrs Russell woke smiling, with the words, ‘For always and always,’ on her lips. She remembered her dream at once, and her happiness vanished. She had been walking along a road, and her son had come to her and said, ‘Mother, I’ve got the house I wanted.’ She walked with him as far as a gate, and along a drive bordered with trees. The house was neither large nor small but it had fine windows and the rooms were all lofty and well made. He took her from room to room and she admired here a cornice and there a fine cupboard and from every window there were views over the country. It was the kind of country she liked, with tall trees, meadows, and in the distance a range of hills. ‘I’m sure I love trees,’ she said. ‘Well, mother,’ Jake answered, ‘they’re your trees, and this is our own house. We’re going to live here together. You see I’m quite well and safe and I shan’t want to go away again.’ Mrs Russell was filled with joy. Her son, whom she had thought dead, was alive. And this house was what she had always wanted. She turned to look again at the rooms. It was growing dark and suddenly she thought that Jake was in another room. She hurried to go to him, but the passage was longer and darker than she had thought it. A little anxiety now laid its finger on her happiness but before she had found him she awoke.
Company Parade Page 32