Eighteenth Of May, 1920. Between Six and Seven in the Evening
His ownership of the Daily Post gratified the two Marcel Cohens who lived, scarcely in amity, in one body. One could tear at this and that decayed beam, while the other did business on a sound basis. He had never stepped outside the law in his life, or evaded the least clause of a contract; but his own lawyer drew the contract. Thus he could enjoy his intelligence, without the need to sacrifice to it. He flourished on the disorders which have infected our civilisation, because he accepted the conditions of disorder—that there are no spiritual standards of reference, no human values—the only universally acknowledged value is success, and the only alternative to success is failure.
In his newspaper, which he called a Radical Independent paper (to allow himself the widest margin of opposition to all parties), he published articles exposing the filth of the slums. His city editor advised investment in companies relying in part on the existence of slums. The financial page, read by a few thousands, was better worth a penny than any other daily newspaper in the country. A vast public gulped down the rest of the paper, enjoying its fat feast of exposures and the assassination of private and public men. It was a fillip for the day. The political leader writer had a turn for neat festering phrase. On the middle page well-known novelists exposed their views and parts. The cartoonist had been born unable to respect anything and was paid well for his misfortune. At times Marcel Cohen was made to feel the distrust his restless mind inspired in the Christians with whom he did business, and a dismayed sub-editor or a reporter, meeting him accidentally after one of these rebuffs, found himself sacked for no reason. Cohen paid his people well, squeezed the last drops of energy from them, and had a clause inserted in the contracts allowing him to discharge without warning.
He was amused and surprised to receive a note from Hervey Russell, asking him in a very formal way for an interview. Now what does she want, he wondered? He had seen her four or five times since their first meeting in Evelyn Lamb’s house, and she had avoided him—he thought, through shyness. He answered her letter himself.
She came in with a look of confidence. It made him smile to himself. I know all about it, I have pretended confidence, he remembered. An impulse to take the wind out of her sails made him say: ‘You’re astonishingly like your grandmother. By the way, are you still on bad terms with her?’
Hervey only smiled. She had prepared for the question. ‘On no terms at all.’
‘Schade! You’re making a mistake. Mrs Hervey is not only the richest, she’s the most surprising figure in England. An eminent Victorian. You’d better think about forgiving her.’
‘So that she would help me?’ Hervey said. ‘I prefer to help myself. Do you know my grandmother?’
His mouth, shapely and too expressive, twitched. ‘I sat opposite her jaw at fifty board meetings before she resigned from her own firm. Yours is the same jaw. The upper half of your face is different—less, forgive me, less sure of itself. I daresay you’re more intelligent, but you won’t get so far.’
‘I didn’t inherit a shipping firm,’ Hervey said dryly.
Cohen looked at her with a sharp smile. ‘Oh, there’s one thing you don’t forgive her. Well—why have you come to see me?’
‘Do you want an art critic?’ Hervey said.
‘What do you know about art?’
‘Nothing. I don’t want it for myself?’ She hesitated, forgetting the speech she had prepared. ‘Do you remember when the Morning Gazette changed hands they dismissed half the old staff? One, the art critic, is my friend. He must know it all. Can’t you give him work?’
Marcel Cohen laughed out. ‘He will be eighty. The art criticism of the old Morning Gazette was early Victorian. The music worse. Policy and methods also—before the reorganisation it was all but bankrupt. It is still as reactionary and unintelligent as before, but it has smartened itself up and it will last until a Liberal government suppresses it. Liberal governments don’t suppress—one reason why there won’t be another in our time. Ours is a time to suppress or be suppressed. In any case, I don’t employ a regular art critic. Who wants it? I get a painter or a critic, not the most modern but the most modern heard of, to write an article on the Academy. Last week we ran a young writer, William Ridley, on public statues, very destructive and funny. That’s what people like. Do you ever read ordinary art criticism?’
‘I’m not interested.’
‘Neither is Mrs Smith. Can your friend write a slashing attack on anything?’
‘Bless me, no,’ Hervey sighed. She stood up to leave. ‘I see it’s no use.’
‘Sit down a minute,’ Cohen said. ‘Don’t you want to write something?’
An unexpected question usually started cracks in Hervey’s mind, through which everything fell. She blinked and said : ‘I’ll think about it.’
‘What do you do? Are you in business? No, you’re a writer.’
‘A copy writer.’ She put her head down, so that he saw her face foreshortened; boulder of forehead; eyes, one perceptibly lower in her head than the other; short upturned nose. ‘I could write you an article—“ Advertisers are doing the Devil’s work “—would you print it?’
‘Certainly not,’ Cohen said. ‘Like any other newspaper the Daily Post lives by advertisements. Besides I don’t agree with you.’
‘I didn’t suppose ycu would,’ Hervey said. She looked at him with a warm smile. ‘Well then. How would you like one on shipping firms which blow out their capital until they can’t afford to pay dividends, and finally blow up, ruining their ordinary shareholders. I mean the Northern Counties Company.’ She felt a thrill, the familiar sensation of jumping from a great height. Though she had looked up the figures and details of the affair she had not discovered whether Cohen was on the board of either company.
‘You don’t want to write for me at all,’ Cohen said. He kept his eyes on her face, frowning. ‘What do you know about shipping?’ He gave a sudden laugh. ‘Your grandmother ought to have put you in the firm. She had a grandson in it—’
‘Nicholas Roxby, my first cousin,’ Hervey said.
‘First fool,’ Cohen shouted. ‘He walked out during the War. Left her with her ships in her arms. It was then she sold out—at the top of the wave. Just like her. Heaven only knows what she’s worth now.’
‘My cousin must be a fool,’ Hervey said bitterly.
Cohen looked at her. ‘You wouldn’t have done it, eh?’
‘No,’ Hervey said.
‘Not you. Now, that Northern Counties story would have made your grandmother stare, and sneer. To buy at £22 a ton and sell back at £4.! The government refused an enquiry. Quite rightly. Why all this about the loss of a few millions! How many millions did the War cost? A day! Someone has to lose money in the slump. First in and first out is the rule—known to your grandmother. You’re not a socialist, are you? Comrade Smith proposed that slumps be made illegal. Carried unanimously. Bah!’
Weakly Hervey nodded. She could not force herself to say that she was a socialist. The figure of Mary Hervey, mouth clenched, eyes cold and starting with anger, possessed her mind. She admired that ruthless possessive spirit. One of the masters of an age. Which age? The great houses of merchant princes set within sight of the slave quarters. Her grandmother’s house. Succeeded against her will by Marcel Cohen. The rats are underneath the floors. Am I a socialist? Th-en, comrades, now rally And the last fight let us . . . The delicate steel-engraved outline of her grandmother, blood staining her dress, retreated slowly. There was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour. With pain she tore away the cords fastening her to her grandmother. Brother, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. Cold—how cold it is, said the little lamb. My mother reading from the book. She could not help smiling.
‘Now, you and I are going to get on together,’ Cohen said. His eyes twinkled a little. ‘You’re a clever girl and if you’re sensible I see a future for you.’
‘Thank you,’ Hervey said, smiling at him.
‘We’ll drink a cup of tea, eh?’ He pressed his bell. With a feeling of friendliness he talked to her about his children, about the boy who had died without his mother finding the courage to see him, and about his daughter. The liking Hervey had felt for him when he was talking about the boy died as soon as he began to recite a list of his daughter’s friends; her house in Bruton Street; the room she slept in, like a drawing-room, décor by Charles; the bed, Florentine and painted, in the alcove; two nurseries painted out in pale green; the bathrooms—‘but only quite a simple house.’ She wondered why he did not notice that she had ceased to be sympathetic. There were extraordinary gaps in his understanding of other people—extraordinary because of the assurance in his glance. He ought to know better, she thought. Such childishness, side by side with such experience, repelled her.
Cohen wished to interest her. He thought that perhaps he could use her. The thought crossed his mind, If she’s at all like her grandmother she’ll try to use me. That displeased him. He looked again at her face and saw in it more of the withdrawn contemptuous old woman. He decided that she had stayed long enough.
Outside in the street Hervey went over the interview with a growing feeling of shame. She tried to recall all she had said and to construe the impression it must have made. The conviction of her utter inadequacy returned to beat inside her brain. Her face burned crimson. To forget what had happened she walked quickly in the May sunlight. The evening was as clear as glass, mirroring rose and delicate amber clouds in the sky above Trafalgar Square. Her self-possession began to return.
The evening traffic past the Dug-out had scarcely begun. One lorry had drawn up under the hedge and the driver, a thin man with blue patient eyes, was gulping down hot coffee. He looked at the road. ‘Going north?’ Frank said.
‘Middlesbrough.’
‘Ah, I was in Garton’s Yard the year before the War.’
‘You made a good exchange,’ the driver said. He wiped his hand across his mouth and felt for the buttons of his under-jacket, an old khaki tunic. After he had started the engine he came back. ‘Want to keep the paper, mate?’ He handed it across the counter.
‘Thanks,’ Frank said. He laid it down and went into the back room. His wife looked at him from the bed with a smile. ‘How d’you feel, Sally?’ he asked. The presence of the other woman tied his tongue—he felt in the way. He went back to the shed facing the road and leaned against the counter reading the Daily Post. An article on the workers and ‘direct action’ caught his eye. He read it through twice. The writer showed that strikes and any such violent action injured the workers more than the other classes. They must put their trust in . . . English sense of justice . . . the ballot box . . . constitutional methods . . . the slow march of democracy . . . prosperity for all. But what if our votes don’t get us anywhere? he thought. He read the article again. No, nothing in it about that. Woman Found Dead in Tub. Shooting in Ireland.
He read the news, and the sporting pages. A lorry drew up beyond the Dug-out. The driver came running back. ‘Three sandwiches quick, mate. I got to be in Carlisle by four ac emma.’ Frank cut and folded rapidly. He served eight persons in quick succession. After this a lull. No one, no lorry or cart in sight. He went back into the house. Standing, irresolute, he listened for sounds from the other room. A footstep, the creak of a board, then his wife groaned. It was an animal sound—he could not believe she had made it. Scarcely knowing what he was about he opened the door and went straight to the side of the bed. ‘Oh, Sally is it bad?’ he said.
‘I didn’t mean to call out,’ his wife said. ‘Shan’t do it again. I don’t want to frighten away customers.’ She smiled. Her face changed quickly—as though a hand passed over it, wiping away her youth. He felt his heart stop.
‘I’ll call you if I want help,’ the other woman said kindly.
He was elbowed out of their room and the door shut on him. For a moment he was resentful without knowing why. He could not be angry with his young wife, so he hated the older woman. Spreading herself in the place, he thought. Too many women—we could have managed.
He went outside. As if to even things his mind took him to where there had been no women, only men. He rarely thought about the War. When he did no whole vision of it stayed in his mind. His life before the War, and after it, was a plain story. He could say. That year I was in Garton’s; that summer the strike started. The four years of war were different: he remembered incidents, single moments, with a vividness which struck him dumb about them. But there was no order in his memories, and if, as he was falling asleep, the corner of a trench in blazing sunlight leaped from nowhere into his mind he could not be sure into which month, or year, of the War it fitted. Yet he could see the texture of the earth and sandbags, feel the heat of that sun in his body, and hear words spoken as carelessly as if no mind were laying them up for the future. Once, when he was walking across the field to the caravan with the captain’s breakfast, he remembered an hour lying out on night patrol, his body taut flattened against the ground. His hand felt the crack in the ground into which he had driven the ends of his fingers. The smell, like nothing else, of ground that has been fought over rose in his nostrils, and his heart pounded in his throat. Another time he stood again at the back of a dug-out watching the officer write on a pad held on his knee—the candle bent over and he watched it carefully, and the hand moving across the paper.
The road outside the dug-out was straight for about five hundred yards. He marched, swaying with fatigue. His body was no longer separate, but dragged and was dragged at by the rest of the marchers. That would be the Tunnels, he thought.
A lorry drove clean through the lines of swaying men and stopped. Frank shook himself, heated coffee, and listened for sounds from the room. Nothing.
‘Got a paper?’ the driver asked. Frank handed over his Daily Post. ‘I can’t read that rag,’ the other said.
‘What’s the matter with it?’
‘Can’t you read? Or don’t you care what happens?’
‘I thought it was a sort of socialist paper,’ Frank said.
‘Socialist be blowed,’ the driver said. He swallowed his coffee. ‘You got a nice place here,’ he said, looking about. ‘Bad luck for you when they begin the bye-pass.’
Frank looked at him for a moment. ‘Bye-pass? What’s that? Where is it?’ he said.
‘’Tisn’t anywhere yet. It’s going to cut out all this’—he swept his arm round—‘and save twenty miles on the road north.’
‘Far from here?’ Frank asked. It was an effort to ask. He kept his voice low.
‘About three miles.’
‘Have to move,’ Frank said.
He stood still, when the other man had gone, trying to think it out. They couldn’t go on living here—if it was true. He felt convinced it was true. For a moment his dismay was so acute that he had to hold on to the shelf for support; nothing seemed safe. A door opened in the house behind him ; he heard it but did not move.
He felt hungry of a sudden. Breaking off a piece of bread he stood eating it, and thinking. That they could do this, ruining him, and he helpless. A feeling of bewilderment seized him: all round him there were millions like himself, working, eating, looking at the faces of those nearest them, touching things, working, working: who thought about them? who knew them? I’m no one, he thought. He touched his skin and ran his hands over his body, trying to reassure himself. Here I am, he thought; they can’t just wash me out, I’m living, I’m here. He felt small and uncertain. His throat was dry, a mouthful of bread stuck there and he had a time swallowing it out of the way.
He had his elbow on the copy of the Daily Post. Moving aside, he noticed it, and thought, Newspapers are a lot of words, I can’t vote myself a living, can I? He seized the paper and began to tear and fold it into pieces the right size to cover shelves. Make some use of it, he said to himself.
Bustling about, he felt more cheerful and with that and with the idea of making some enquiries—ask people, go across there and have a look round—he began to be confident. He ate another slice of bread, feeling slightly hollow inside.
His name spoken behind him. He swung round, and saw the woman smiling and beckoning. He followed awkwardly, scowling at her because she was all smiles. Sally looked different, his girl again.
‘I didn’t call out again,’ she said.
‘It isn’t over, is it?’ he said, dumbfounded. He knew it was, but his tongue was much slower than his mind.
‘Look at him then,’ Sally said kindly.
Instead, he looked at her. My lovely girl. He tried to say something.
‘Don’t you like him?’ Sally asked.
‘If only they’ll let us live,’ he burst out.
Sally looked at him, drowsy and serene, her pains not remembered now. ‘Why shouldn’t we live? We’re decent people. Aren’t we? Who’s going to stop us living?’
Many people knew Thomas Harben—his wife, his fellow-directors, managers of departments, secretaries, scientists employed by him, journalists, foreign industrialists and their envoys, bankers, his mistress. None of these people, not even the last, knew that he could not sit at a square table without running his fingers over the corners. In a strange room he was uneasy until he had touched and passed a finger over every square corner about the furniture. He would stand, carelessly, beside the mantel-shelf, walk past a sideboard, feel with his hand for the edges of his chair. Walking in the streets he counted, and touched, the right-angled corners of walls; he paused at the end of the pavement and his foot felt idly round the edge. He had been doing this for so many years that it had ceased to be a habit and become a pressing need. When he was younger he tried sometimes to break himself of it, but his discomfort was so great, and increased the longer he abstained, that he yielded. Nowadays he performed these small acts methodically as part of his life, and had ceased to reason about them. Occasionally it came into his mind that there was something comical in the spectacle of a man of his importance edging across a room to touch the angles of a cupboard, and then he laughed. He could laugh at himself.
Dressing for his wife’s dinner party, he came to a standstill before the dressing-table. By using both hands he could touch all four corners in a flash. That over he gave his mind to adjusting his tie. His long sardonic nose seemed to be taking an interest in the business; it looked down at his fingers fiddling with the ends. He watched both in the glass, feeling almost friendly toward them.
For a man of fifty-six his face was very little lined. You could not say it was a young-looking face, but neither was it old—its long heavy cheeks, long nose, mouth closely gripped, deep eye-pits, seemed made of a substance more enduring than flesh. Such lines as he had were deep. He was a big man, heavy but without much flesh on him. In repose his face was still sardonic and alert. Speech altered it very little. Only his mistress could say whether it changed under a sensual emotion, whether the eyes veiled themselves—perhaps the mouth loosened for a short time. His wife had certainly forgotten.
He was thinking of his wife as he dressed. Of her extraordinary habit of mixing people at her dinner parties, regardless of effect. The truth, he knew it, was that she could not endure his acquaintances, but a vestigial sense of duty made her ask them, not too often, to the house, and then she found herself driven to invite two or three friends of her own, by way of bodyguard. It was simple—not vexing, almost funny.
He admired in his wife her unshakeable self-assurance. She knew her place in the social pyramid, its privileges, its duties. She looked after the tenants on her father’s land, now hers. In London she gave the right number of dinner-parties, some large, none noisy, always followed by most excellent music. She understood that, patronised musicians, travelled to Bayreuth, to Salzburg. She knew something, enough, about modern art, and bought judiciously. She read many books—but when? he had no idea : perhaps in bed. In all these—culture activities (it was thus that his mistress spoke of them to him, but with respect, and with her slow smile)—he took no part. He was entirely uninterested. His life touched hers only in the certainties both felt. Lucy had hers through her family; his were a matter of power and character, he had started with the competence left him by his father and made himself one of the eight richest men in Europe. Curiously, he could think of himself as a man, a male animal, and compare himself strength for strength with a docker or a furnace-man, but he never thought of Lucy as a woman with the bodily shape and habits of other women. He had once expected children from her.
The thought that he had no son scarcely troubled him. It visited him at odd moments—as now, when he was looking at his face in the glass he saw queerly a young face beneath the bones of his own, and it occurred to him that it might have been his son’s. That was a strange thing. Now for a moment he wondered whether Lucy—does she ever think of it? Lucy when young. He frowned in the effort of memory.
The door leading to his wife’s rooms was at the other side of the landing. It was slightly open when he came to it, and obeying an impulse he went in to speak to her. ‘Who’s coming here to-night, Lucy?’
He stared at her long straight back, as if it might split and reveal a much younger woman hidden away there. Nothing short of this miracle would be any use. He could not of himself recall the least smile or word of the lost young woman.
‘George Ling again? But I can’t stand the fellow,’ he said, with abrupt vigour.
‘You said he must come once a year,’ his wife answered. ‘The last time was eighteen months ago.’
‘Well who else? Marcel Cohen?’ He exploded with laughter. He never failed to find amusing the encounters of Lucy with her Jews. Needing music, she could not do without them, and her very bones protested against their presence in her house. As well as a go-between for Lucy when she needed some celebrated musician to play in her music room, Cohen was his associate on half a dozen Boards. He detested George Ling, who was afraid of everything and yet stank of piety, but not so forcibly as he distrusted Cohen. And they were his allies (but thank God not his only ones) in the struggle he foresaw. He had felt, then thought it, placing his thoughts like sentries. The outlines of the struggle were acid-sharp in his mind—one or other of the nations would make beak and bones out of the post-war remnants; one, with or without satellites, would secure itself, for a generation at least, against the competition of the rest. As he saw it, it was only a matter of prevision and brute energy. America? In all simplicity Thomas Harben believed that the Americans would fumble the catch, because they were American—that is, foolhardy and inexperienced—not English. Japan? sharply more dangerous, he thought, seeing a runner stripped to the skin.
A cold enthusiasm kept his thoughts grinding at the mill. He thought in abstractions as concrete as steel rails and the keels of ships. When he used the words ‘man power’ he saw a half-naked steel puddler, but far from starting in him the ideas of a common humanity this image only angered him. A sullen will in the half-naked man opposed itself to his. This sweating brute at his furnace had feelings, desires, energies, not used up in work. Strikes, quarrels about hours—crowning impudence, the talk of nationalising this industry and that. To nationalise my industry, thought Harben. It was stupefying. It was enough to drive a man mad.
‘There’s another strike starting in the Garton yards,’ he broke out.
His wife looked at him calmly. ‘You don’t seem able to manage as the old lady did. She had no strikes during the War.’
‘And the fault’s hers,’ Harben exclaimed. ‘Her War bonuses to the men! I warned them, at the time I warned them. The Board used to agree to anything she said. Now she’s sold out and left me to carry the burden.’ In spite of his anger he could not help laughing. ‘The old devil. A nice pudding she mixed us. They’ve finished with bonuses, of course, and they’re going to take wage cuts as well. Do you know—if one could run an industry without men—that would be something.’
‘Machines without men,’ he said promptly. ‘And I don’t doubt it’ll come to that—but not in my time.’
‘Trade is much worse, isn’t it?’ Lucy said politely.
‘Worse all the time. This is the moment they strike, and chitter-chatter in their unions about nationalising! Time and energy wasted to argue with them. I’d give something to argue them with machine-guns. Poor brutes of private soldiers who were shot for desertion deserved it far less.’
‘You might not have thought so if you had been a general,’ his wife said.
‘Eh, would I?’ he laughed.
He felt an impulse to clap her on the shoulder. That was enough—the mere notion was unseemly. He went away, fingering the edge of the door as he went.
The minutes before dinner—well now, he reflected, looking about the room, Lucy has surpassed herself. He spoke to Evelyn Lamb; who answered by asking him, in a languid voice, something to do with the music. ‘Upon my word, I don’t know anything about it,’ he said. He saw Marcel Cohen standing at the other side of the room, and thought, There’s a man knows infinitely more about music than this clever silly woman and he has more sense than to talk to me about it. Making his way across he spoke in Cohen’s ear.
‘You remember my idea of a bureau of information and propaganda. Discourage all this subversive nonsense. I’ve thought about it a great deal now. I shall want to discuss it with you, my dear fellow.’
When he needs something I’m his dear dear fellow, Cohen said to himself. He made a gesture with elbows and outward-turning hands. ‘When you like,’ he said smiling. ‘Any time, any time. I am at your service.’
Ridley’s self-possession deserted him as he climbed the steps to the house. He was not sure—was it wise to call without an invitation? It was true she had said: ‘I shall really be interested, if you can hear who wrote that absurd article.’ But if it had been better to write? A brief amusing letter?
He rang the bell. The door opening, he felt as if he had stepped over the edge of a cliff. He fell and then waited for a year. When the man returned he looked into Ridley’s face and said civilly : ‘Mrs Harben is not disengaged, sir.’
‘Oh,’Ridley said. ‘Thanks.’
In the street he experienced the greatest difficulty in walking at a proper speed. He wanted to run, to fling his arms about. Not disengaged. What a way to put it! Was it or was it not an insult? Have I been snubbed? He stood still and felt his forehead. It was dry and burning, and yet the inside of his hand was wet. A man passing looked at him inquisitively. He hurried on.
In the state he was he thought of Evelyn with dislike and impatience—as if it were her fault he had overshot his mark. Not for the first time, he regretted involving himself with her. Thank God, he cried, I have better friends. Grand chaps. Working writers and reviewers, no nonsense about them. He forgot that Evelyn had first given him these friends. Thinking, In future I’ll stick closer to my own sort, he began to be comforted. The miserable wrigglings of his lower self dropped out of sight. He walked on slowly. The air was mild and pleasant. On a May evening London enchanted, more surely and subtly than any other city. He began to notice things. A pale child passed him crying silently and bitterly, and he turned himself about. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. No answer. Wanting to comfort her, he felt in his pocket. ‘Here you are, poor little thing,’ he said with a smile.
The bad taste of a city with pavements as wide as Regent Street and no café tables. I’ll write in the Review about it, he promised. But with the thought of drinking he began to die of thirst. He hurried on as far as Charing Cross Road and went into a bar there. A leaning man made room for him and as he did so looked up. This man had a face as grotesque as a dream. It was long, thin, bent, one grey eye and one green, mouth as wide as a street, rick of black hair. Ridley knew him at once—how could you forget such a face?—a farm boy who in 1915 had been with him in France. They shook hands with the proper joy. ‘Well? How’s life?’
‘I’m writing—articles in the papers and so forth,’ Ridley answered.
‘Are you now? You’ll be getting famous,’ the other said. His bright eyes searched Ridley’s face with the little sharp malice of a peasant. ‘Trust you to make the best of yourself! Now look at me—I’ve travelled in Germany in style, I married a French wife, I’ve a grand farm near Dunkirk with a house and furniture all present and correct, and here I am, with a few shillings in my pocket. In December my officer took me to Cologne and Berlin with him and when he stayed at the best hotels I did, too—not in the same part, but it was all right. Investigating. Yes there was children starved so that they had stomachs blown out to a point and the insides of their cheeks meeting! ‘He went off into a fit of laughter. ‘And yes when I was snug in Berlin I gets a letter from France, from a friend of mine, tells me she has a fine baby—and wouldn’t I come back tsweet and marry her, and look after the farm. Why and mind you, she was no girl, but I said to myself, The best stock comes out of the oldest pot. Here’s where I went wrong. Back I went, yes, marries—with considerable trouble—and starts farming. Lord, lord, I soon found I’m married to her mother, father, fifteen great-aunts, a whole tribe of blossoming frogs. Mouldering mumping maggots. Up before dawn working, no money, all scraped up by the old woman and hidden away somewhere. One day what do they do but trust me with five hundred francs. Did I run? I ran, I ran, I ran.’
‘You’re a nice scoundrel,’ Ridley said, grinning. He took an envelope out of his pocket and scribbled on it: Best stock comes out of oldest pot. The beer and the fellow’s crazy chatter exhilarated him. He left the place smiling, and as he walked he took pains to etch the man’s face on his mind. It was a fine item snatched into the Rogues’ Gallery he kept there. All these with the sounds and sights he added daily and with some were not rogues, like that pale child to whom he had given sixpence for her crying, he meant to use, when the time came. Yes, yes, he could and would use them—but he loved them dearly too.
Renn could visit his friend only between six and seven o’clock. This was after hours, but with T.S.’s help he got himself in, and because Philip was alone now in a private ward, and because he was considered to be dying. (This had not been in Philip’s plans.) He went every day.
For a long time he thought that Philip had not changed. There are some changes the body conceals within itself until the last possible minute and they are even less alarming to the onlooker for coming in this way, without warning, as when the light dies rapidly from a scene, turning to the grey colour of water all that has been fields and woods. To-day, looking towards the bed as he crossed the room, Renn had the impression that Philip was half asleep. Philip smiled at him, began to talk, but remained drowsy, his head drooping over his chest. He spoke, too, as if Renn had been with him all along.
‘What became of your ex-soldier in the end?’
‘Oh, he’s learning to think,’ Renn said. ‘I give him books and take him to meetings. Now and then he earns a guinea. He learns as fast as he thinks. He is as strong as a bear, lazy, and likes being alive. All his family is dead. Father a sea captain, the mother had some ambition in her thoughts and tried to train the boy. He has a head for languages, and speaks French, and he’s learning German fast. Out of all this I’ll find work for him in time.’
‘I’ll talk to him when I get out of here,’ Philip said. ‘Perhaps I can help him.’
He had been following one train of thought in his mind for many days. It was not new, but it had forced itself on him with threats, and he could have no peace until he dealt with it. How can one bear the evil in man, knowing that there is no justice or pity in life, and knowing that when Jesus said: ‘Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God?’ He was saying only what He willed to believe? Children are born into poverty and young men eat their hearts out in it; infinite care, infinite ingenuity, is daily given to the filthy and bloody traffic in armaments. For all these things there is no compensation. The hungry are not fed, the defrauded young are not comforted in another life. They were born to be defrauded. In the last War the flower of England died uselessly.
This spectre followed him day and night. At last he came to it that the only good in life lies in one kernel with the evil. Just as death always triumphs over life, so cruelty is stronger than gentleness and hate than pity, and greed than kindness. A man can live until he dies; so also can he raise his voice against cruelty until his tongue is torn from its roots. I too feel hate, Philip thought. I hate age, cruelty, greed, ignorance, dying. I should be ashamed to submit to what is forced on me.
He was not surprised to look up and find Renn standing beside him. In the last week he had felt pain less. A curious dualism—of body, not of mind—possessed him. He had two bodies, one which sweated and rebelled, and another which remained apart and could think clearly concerning everything except concerning time. Time eluded this self, and he was often surprised to find night falling on a day no longer than the single thought that had occupied him since waking. At one moment his friends were with him, the next gone. After another moment, or a year, there they stood again. His thoughts played with him—one came alone, then a flight passed, a cloud of birds winging strongly across a clear sky. He was not unhappy.
‘I made a will before coming in here,’ he next told Renn. ‘You know I have almost eight thousand pounds. I’ve left the whole of it to you, to spend on the paper.’
‘You’re going to spend it yourself,’ Renn said.
‘I know that,’ Philip said, smiling. ‘But just suppose I don’t—suppose I were to die. The odds are poor—I’ve had eight doctors at me in a fortnight—eight to one against! In that case, I want you—will you take it on?’
‘Certainly,’ Renn said.
Philip laughed. ‘Do you remember our first week in the line—Hannescamps—and the sudden descent, terrifying us two poor children, of a full-blown Corps Commander? He asked me—rather like Jove, I thought—how I should act if I were in command of the company and a battalion of the enemy attacked at once without warning. I couldn’t get out a word. I daren’t tell him—if he didn’t know—that a battalion couldn’t attack in full daylight without warning. I nearly burst into tears. When he tried you, you said in a kind voice: “ I should engage them at once.” He can’t have been such an ass after all—he laughed.’
‘I’ve forgotten,’ Renn said.
‘Well, I thought I had,’ Philip said. ‘I remembered it when you said Certainly.’
‘I’ve been trying to write an account of the retreat,’ Renn said, after a moment. ‘I can’t find any words hard enough. They ought to be as sharp and hard as flints. I’ve given it up.’
‘Did you write any more poetry?’
‘No,’ Renn said.
‘Don’t give that up.’
Renn did not answer. He was watching the shadow on his friend’s face—no trick of the light, but the deepening, otherwise imperceptible, of an inward tide. Where had been clear stream, leaf, sand, and pebble, shining in sunlight, was now a gathering swirl of darkness, nothing to be seen, all, all lost. He roused himself to question Philip about the policy of the paper.
Afterwards he forgot the answers but remembered that Philip said he hated the new standardising of life, which has touched a pitch that whereas even chairs and candlesticks used to be signed by their makers you now, wading chin-deep in the flood of books, can find scarcely one that bears the signature of its maker in any line. The spring that runs living out of our English past is being choked with these piles of rubbish. Rubbish Shot Here.
Philip proposed a patient sifting of the writings and speeches of all kinds of men, from leaders of industry, politicians, divines, bankers, trades union officials, to novelists. We shall wash a great deal of muck for a thimbleful of metal, he said. He thought that a wide public would welcome his efforts on behalf of their inheritance. Really, one cannot be sorry he died without having to admit he had been deceived.
When Renn left the hospital he rang up T. S. Heywood and asked him this question. ‘What are they doing to Philip in——’s?’
‘Trying a new lead treatment on him.’
‘Will it cure him?’
There was a short silence, during which he had the sensation of supporting an immense weight, the burden of the space between himself and T.S.
‘No. I don’t think so. It will kill him off,’ T.S. said.
‘Quickly?’
‘Oh yes. Fairly quickly.’