The Undefeated
With Penn at work, Hervey began to save money—a pound one week, the next only a few shillings. At the end of September she had almost six pounds hidden under her handkerchiefs at the back of a drawer. They bore up her spirit in time of trouble.
One evening she was tempted to spend them. She was tired. Her work—not made easier by David Renn’s conscience: he checked every figure and date quoted in the paper and felt disgraced by an e printed upside down in one issue—was hard. She felt pulled down by the burden of small duties. Her unfinished novel plagued her. She knew of a farmhouse where she could live for two pounds a week and she was tempted to buy herself three weeks’ freedom. Something less than loyalty to David Renn—perhaps kept fear of his contempt—held her back.
She sat waiting for Penn in her room, restless in mind. When he came in he began instantly to say that one man in the advertising office was treating him shabbily. He was always given the dreariest and most unprofitable tasks, and if a client showed signs of becoming dissatisfied he and no other had to attend to him, and take the blame. Hervey roused herself to pull at the centre of this knot. It turned out that he had offended one client, who straightway complained to Shaw-Thomas, to the end that Penn was in trouble.
After listening, with a little patience, Hervey said: ‘You will always offend people if you try to put them in the wrong, Why not begin by agreeing with everything? Then you can insinuate your knowledge so that it seems theirs. You should never argue. If you begin an argument, your man will be on his guard—the very state of mind you wish to avoid. Choose his least sensible idea and agree to it with the wildest enthusiasm. Say, Yes, it will do this, and this, piling one effect on another. In a short time he will feel uneasy, then will begin to suggest doubts and flaws, and before long you’ll see him turn right about and agree to any compromise.’
‘Dear me,’ Penn said. ‘It appals me to think that this is how I must have been handled, at least before I married you.’
Hervey did not answer. Yes, she thought, when you married me I had learned none of these tricks : it is through you, and through your distrust, that I came to use my mind against people. She bent her head lower. Yet it was in me, she said—the impulse was there: you did not create that. She saw herself as the badly-dressed student, standing on tiptoe—where was it?—in a crowded room to get sight of the back of Penn’s head. She was in love with him then. She recalled the simplicity of her love in those days. There was no one whom she admired as she admired him. Why, she would have gone readily to the stake for any of the opinions he announced with so much assurance.
She felt on her table for a book and held it up to hide her face. There was nothing to be said. But a slow anger—the overt edge of her memory—woke in her against her life. She hated the room, which contained nothing that was not worthless—as if the whole of man’s present ingenuity had been used up in creating more and more elaborate machines 5 these did nothing except deliver daily piles of excrement in the shape of just such chairs and tables. And I, she thought, I, who hate them, live among them. I hate my life. She saw a cliff-side in sunlight, the wind stroking the reedy grass; pavement cafés in a foreign city—what city? a wide river, bronze-green running into flakes of light. This and this is what I want, I shall grow old without having lived. She jumped up, went over to the window, and stood peering out. The street lamps cast yellow circles on the pavement. She watched a woman run swiftly across one circle, vanish, and appear again in the next, her dress blown by the wind. A familiar excitement seized her. Standing quietly, she felt that she was straining with all her force against a wall. She beat her head against it. I can’t get out, can’t get out. Her hand gripped the edge of the sill. No escape, nothing for you here, she thought. But what do I get from this life?
She turned round. ‘I can’t endure this room,’ she said, in a low voice. ‘Can’t we do anything? Won’t your father help us? If we had the smallest place of our own—with decent things—a bed, a table, chairs—I could bear it. Ask him, if he won’t give, ask him to lend us a little money.’
‘You’re only being silly and hysterical,’ Penn said. ‘I’m sorry I’m not a rich man.’ He looked at her with contempt. ‘You seem to forget I should now be in Oxford, at least in comfort, if I hadn’t been willing to help you.’
I vex you into showing your unpleasantest side, Hervey thought. She felt cut off from him, and from herself too, able only to watch the two of them behaving like madmen. With her dreadful honesty she owned to herself that though anxious at the thought of his going away, going to Oxford—afraid of being left, of failing, of having no money—yes, all these things—but she had had mean thoughts too, had resented the contrast between her life and his: why should I live here while Penn amuses himself in Oxford?—yes, I thought that, she admitted—it is true, I am an egoist, I am selfish. She looked at Penn with a sharp smile. She felt an impulse to anger him. It was as though she wanted to drive him out of his senses with her—like a child which is not satisfied until it has angered its mother to punishing it. ‘You and your Oxford,’ she cried. ‘You are thirty this month, and you talk of going back to school. With a son for whom you do nothing. Nothing, nothing.’
‘When you bawl at me in your mother’s voice I only feel that I was a fool not to go,’ Penn said.
Hervey ran out of the room. She ran downstairs, and into the street, without coat or hat, and walked up and down, until the cold sent her back. Penn had gone away into his own room. She undressed and got into bed.
The door opening sent a shock through her. She looked up and saw Penn coming towards her. He did not seem unkind, but he seemed young and vulnerable. He came into the bed and put his arms round her in silence. Tears sprang to her eyes. Without meaning anything she cried: ‘Life is so disappointing.’ Penn laid his face against hers—‘Poor Hervey,’ he said. The words flew back across her mind, flashing the signal first to this hill and then to that until the farthest bore its fire, and the message was read—but by whom? Now she grew warmer and began to fall towards sleep. It was very pleasant, to glide, to fail, to sink into sleep. Her mind seemed to hover, like a breath of wind playing alone, above her body. Penn was speaking, but she was too sleepy to listen to him. It is something weak and foolish that Penn comforts, she said to herself. (‘My dear, I wish you could have your house,’ Penn said.) Is it that weak thing which goes on clinging to him? Yes—her head sank forward—yes, I am weak, I am a coward—it is marriage (‘I’ll never call you that again, Hervey, it’s silly’) : marriage ties people to each other in an underneath dragging way, she thought, in growing confusion. Her mind stooped to enter a long dark corridor, like the passage in her mother’s first house. Her senses were now astray. She felt warmth and the smoothness of the clothes. And now, as if it had come to the end of the passage, her mind was confident and happy. She felt that nothing was too hard for her. I can do anything, anything, she thought. She sank deeper. Light welled round her; where the darkness had been it was now full light. She ran after her mother and they stepped out together into the clear early-morning air; there was sunlight, the yellow flowers of the broom sent a spray of bright drops into the air when she reached for it. She laughed, looking at her mother; who was smiling. She is pleased with me, the child thought, and her heart felt light.
In the room below Hervey’s Delia was in bed, ill. Her nose had sharpened as if she were dying. But she was not, not this time. There was a nurse in the room, and to avoid watching directly she watched this woman’s shadow move by the wall. She saw the white end wall of a house and the shadow of herself as soft there as soot. No sun made that shadow. It began then, she thought—no, that was not true, it began months and years earlier, in Brixton. The door opened and an aproned child ran along the street. She dragged her hand by the wall, her fingers touching the stone—yes, night, the walls cold, rough, sending the cold through her hands, and the street, it was behind the market, empty. At last she came to the turning, the dark archway, and the market. The lights of open stalls, roaring tongues, drew her here and there. She ran about between the stalls like a lean cat, brushing against women’s clothes. Underfoot the stones of the road were wet, slippery with mud, leavings, spittle. The staring faces of men and women were larger than life, pressed against the stalls; there were so many of them that they moved all together, surging to this side, forward, then back, laughed, grumbled, lifted their hands with spread fingers—she held her own red tiny hand before a gas jet, to see its bones. A sharp excitement pricked her. She felt the prick in her stomach first, it spread, and she swelled with it until she was light as a feather. She rolled on the ground. Two legs overstepped her and a hand gripped her jerking her up. She began to dance. She showed her skinny legs in the dance. A woman’s voice saying, ‘If she were mine, I’m bound I’d give her a hiding,’ filled her fuller than before of wickedness, and the excitement, and dancing, kicking her legs, she made an idiot’s face at the woman. It was rich.
‘Do you want anything, Mrs Hunt?’
‘No,’ Delia said.
‘I’ll take a nap for a few minutes.’
‘Nap your head off.’ Only leave me alone. She wanted to get back again. For one moment she had had the strong biting taste of those days in her mouth—but the fool must speak and spoil all. She could scarcely breathe. Her body felt swollen. It felt monstrous. She made an effort to part her legs but they had grown together and she could do nothing except lie and endure these changes. No change taking place in her body could be so extraordinary as the one which had overtaken the child Delia. For some reason this thought gave her intense pleasure. She considered it for another moment, then closed her eyes. At once, she felt that she was falling headlong through a black torrent. She had a fancy that her husband had come in: half opening her eyes she looked everywhere in the room. Nothing. The nurse dozing made as much noise as her own laboured breaths. I was a fool to take him back, she thought, without heat. She felt only contempt for herself, no pity. She did not feel injured when he thrashed her more than when he looked at her. It was all in the day’s work, she would say. Her mind, more resilient than her body, took all such mishaps as they came. She treated her body as if it were not important, and rolled it in the dirt; but every pleasure she had had came to her through it. What alarmed her now was that it refused to obey her. It’s the end of everything, she thought.
The nurse had set two candles on the floor. Delia turned her face from them and thought of other rooms which the candles had changed and diminished. Ah, but I was young, she repeated. In those days London was smaller and grander. You knew where you were. Women like her, with no weak modesty and no fears, were apart. There were places she went where no what you called respectable woman could have gone. A sense of warm satisfaction filled her, as if her body had its own thoughts.
I never stinted myself, she said. Loud familiar music sounded in her brain. The feeling of satisfaction deepened, it became an exquisite joy; shock after shock of this joy passed through her; she felt it spreading upwards and filling her breasts with warmth: even her breathing felt easier. Now I am winning, she thought. When she felt happy she had always a sense that she was getting the better of life. She had had this sense when she rolled on the ground, when she was drunk, when she was merry, when her lusts were filled. She thought of life as a woman of her own present age, and miraculously stronger. No friend of hers, but someone of her own family—a familiar and an old enemy. Times when she was poor, or unlucky, were one up to life. Her illness was another score for that side. I’ll pay you out, she thought—you, I’ll fetch you a slap in the eye—yes, that’s it, she thought, that’s the way to live, up and at’em. The pressure in her side started again, it was like a hand opening and shutting. Damn you, damn you, she said to the other woman. She felt angry that she could do nothing but lie here with life crowing over her. You wait, she muttered. Yes, wait, I’ll show you. I’m a fool, but that’s neither here nor there, she thought, confused by the pain.
‘Nurse.’
She called twice before the inert body in the chair stirred and sat up. With a hurried gesture the nurse straightened her cap. She disapproved deeply of her patient.
‘I feel much worse.’
Stooping, the woman felt her forehead and wrist. ‘We’re going on very well,’ she said in a moment.
‘We, you fool. Are you ill in bed too?’ Groaning with with rage, Delia struck at the woman’s hand. The nurse withdrew in an offended silence. Now Delia felt past all. Her body seemed to be dissolving away from her. She tried to save it by fixing her glance on one and then on another of the objects in the room. She liked her furniture. It was ornate and comfortable. The floor was thickly carpeted so that she could step out of bed without feeling the cold, and with the chairs, the gilt bed and the dressing-table, it was another slap in the eye for life. Who could have expected her to reach this? Not that woman in Brixton who wanted to give her a hiding. Whatever happened to her, these would remain, the marks of a victory.
She let herself drift again into a half sleep. Her body flowed over the room, touching the walls, the ceiling. In a sudden panic she contracted it until it lay huddled and panting in the bed. Doors opened in her everywhere. As fast as she shut one, another sprang apart to let out a rat or a dwarf. The dwarfs were as small as children, dark, with bent legs. They ran everywhere and everything they touched shrivelled. She tried to keep out of their way. A sudden spasm gripped her. Seizing one of the dwarfs she tried to cram him into her body, but in the same moment she woke and saw the room. She was so hot that she thought she was burning. And life was standing by her bed, grinning down at her. ‘You’ve come, have you,’ she said to life. Now I am burning, she thought. A slow anger possessed her. As life stooped down and began to choke her she made a sudden effort and sprang forward. She fell on to the floor and still fighting rolled under the bed. She tore her nightgown and tore at her throat in her struggle to breathe. In the struggle she rolled back and forward, sending the chamber-pot flying against the wall; it broke into a dozen pieces and she cut herself on one of them.
The nurse could do nothing to help her. Out of her wits, she opened the door and called for help. It was four in the morning. Hervey heard her and came downstairs pulling a coat over her nightgown. ‘She’s fighting under the bed with something,’ the woman said.
They went in, Hervey reluctant, afraid of seeing an unpleasant sight. Delia was exhausted. She lay with her hand bleeding—a little blood where she had put it to her lip. Dragging and lifting, they got her into the bed. ‘She’s killed herself,’ the nurse said. ‘Congestion of the lungs, and that strength. Who would have expected her to do it?’
Hervey was looking closely at Delia. Her big gross face, the mouth gone slack, was as if empty. As Hervey watched, a little colour suffused it. The eyes were open. They were alive, staring, bold, used.
Some impulse deep in Hervey recognised its like in Delia. She stooped closer, trying with an unconscious passion to see the brain moving behind the eyes. A strong excitement filled her, the sense of sharing in a mystery. Behind her the nurse fumbled with the candles. Only one remained alight; the rest of the room was so dark that it might have been underground. Delia’s face changed. She moved her eyes and looked straight at Hervey, with her bold cynical gaze, the flame of the candle wavering in her eyes. She’s alive, Hervey thought. ‘Do you want something?’ she asked, smiling. Delia winked at her. ‘Whoops, dearie,’ she said in a breathless whisper. She closed her eyes again and kept them closed. She had no further need of help.
‘What’s that? Has she spoken?’
‘She’s no more dead than you are,’ Hervey laughed. Far less dead, she corrected herself. She stumbled back to her room and slept at once.
In the morning, going out to her work, she looked in Delia’s bedroom. A big man, in a travelling coat down to his ankles, stood at the end of the bed.
It was the first time Hervey had seen Delia’s husband. She knew that he lived mostly in Ireland—he was an officer in the Black and Tans—and her faint feeling of distaste for his profession strengthened to active enmity. She looked at him without speaking. He had a smooth face, the planes curiously flattened, nose fleshly and strong, narrow guarded eyes—a hard face, hard-mouthed and arrogant. He returned her gaze with an encouraging smile, which increased her dislike. Turning her back on him she spoke to the nurse, took one look at Delia, who was sleeping, her face grey in the daylight, and went out. Her heart quickened uncomfortably. As she stepped into the street she was trying to account for her dislike. It was unaccountable, a breath across a mirror: it came, she thought, from the past—he had reminded her a little of Captain Gage. No—from the future, she said. But that was nonsense. She hurried on, half running to get away from the image of herself standing like a stock before that inexplicably alarming figure.