Twenty-Eighth of June, 1919
Philip drove away from the Dug-out about five o’clock. It was a white morning, with the promise of heat, but at this hour the grass was still silky and shining, and the distances clear. Four aeroplanes crossed the blue of the upper sky, one beside the arrow-head of the other.
He chuntered through two villages without noticing the flags thrust from the windows, and was surprised when he reached the main road to find himself in an ever-thickening stream of traffic. Nursing the car, he kept round the northern skirt of London, to reach Renn’s lodging without much driving in streets. When he drew up there he saw the large dirty flag drooping from the window above Renn’s. There were others. The shabby street had broken out into a red white and blue rash. Philip ran up the stairs and opened Renn’s door. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what are you celebrating with this show?’
Renn had been setting the table for their breakfast. He glanced up with a smile. ‘Signing the Peace,’ he said ‘Don’t you read a newspaper?’
‘Only if Frank wins one from a customer. For over a week we’ve had no luck. I might have known it—wait—patches will I get unto these cudgell’d scars And swear I got them in the Gallia wars. Well, that’s something done with.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ Renn said. ‘A bad Treaty doesn’t settle anything—except the causes of the next war.’
He could not make this gloomy prophecy in any but the happiest voice, because of his delight in seeing Philip.
‘All the more reason,’ his friend said, with a smile, ‘why you and I should assert ourselves quickly. He seated himself at the table opposite Renn. ‘How long is it since we shared a meal?’
‘The night of the fifteenth September 1917, in Kemmel Shelters,’ Renn said at once.
‘Well—it’s too long,’ Philip said.
‘You were hit the next day and I the day after.’
Philip was examining the room, as shabby as the house and street of houses. ‘You should live out in a field, as I do. It’s better than this.’
‘I’m warm and well as I am, thank you,’ Renn answered. He did not think Philip would be interested to hear that, of his salary of eight pounds a week, he sent two pounds to his mother, and put three away against the fear of losing his job and having nothing to send her. ‘Besides, I live alone. I’m out almost every evening, trying to find an honest man who will tell me what’s wrong with the world and invite me to join with him. Note that I still believe an honest man could save us.’
‘You won’t have time to look any farther,’ Philip said. ‘From now your evenings belong to the Anti-Clerical Times—unless you can think of a better name. You’re my business manager—unpaid. You know all about costs and printing, I want you to draw up an estimate of the best way to spend eight thousand pounds establishing a weekly paper. This paper is to keep an eye on the scoundrels, politicians, financiers, bishops, writers and the like, who want to betray us. Why respect a society which lets little children be nipped by vermin as they sleep and settles difference by ripping open the bowels or shooting the eyes out of hundreds of thousands of young men? You’ll see now that the one cry of our scoundrels is Back to 1913. So that they can have the War over again later, with a fresh crop of young bodies! Also they’ll cheat everyone to keep their profits. You’ll see what will happen to heroes when they become workless workmen again—but like the bugs and the killing it will be excused as facing the facts. We’re going to prove that their facts are lies, only fit for honest men to—. We’ll print the real facts. We’re for humanity against the devil, and against respectable writers and priests, and for the common man against the people who want to fight to the last drop of his blood—perhaps we shall discover why women are so insensitive about war. Is it because they have no imagination? or only because they lack self-respect?’ He stopped, and added in the same voice: ‘How do you get on with my friend, Hervey?’
‘She sometimes does what I tell her,’ Renn answered. He saw on Philip’s face that his friend was in love with her, and that he was no happier for it. ‘How long have you known the young woman?’
‘Why, we were at school together,’ Philip said. He looked at Renn. ‘There’s nothing to say about it. Let’s settle about the paper.’
‘Your paper’s finished before it sets out,’ Renn said, smiling. ‘People don’t want to be frightened and disturbed.’
‘Are you going to help me?’
‘Of course.’
He stood up to get fresh coffee. The extraordinary thing was that nothing Philip said mattered. Renn did not believe in this ridiculous paper which was to blow up society, but he was going to work for it until all hours and to give up his evenings, and that with joy. The thing was to have found something to do at last. An exquisite happiness and relief filled him. Just as the room from being shabby and uncomfortable had been transformed at the moment Philip entered it into a good friendly place so his life had once more become an adventure. He held the coffee pot in his hands, admiring its colour. Until now he could not have told you whether it had a colour. As he carried it to the table he noticed for the first time that Philip had eaten nothing, nothing at all.
‘What’s wrong with the toast and honey?’ he demanded.
‘Nothing,’ Philip said. A slight look of fatigue or annoyance came over his face. ‘The fact is, I can’t eat. Something’s gone wrong with me in the last five or six weeks. I daresay it’s indigestion, due to Frank’s cooking.’
‘You ought to see about it,’ Renn said. His feeling of dismay struck him as ridiculous. After a moment he said: ‘You were hit in the stomach, weren’t you? Perhaps they left a splinter or two of shell in you.’
‘It feels a little like that,’ Philip laughed. He drank his coffee, then went over to the window. ‘Look at this.’
A shabby dozen of children were lined up in the sunshine on the opposite pavement. Two of them had wound khaki puttees round their match-stalk legs and one supported a German helmet. It rested on the bridge of his nose. All carried weapons of some description, and the tallest struggled with a flag many sizes too large for him. As the two young men watched they formed smartly into ranks and moved off, singing. Their marching ditty was the most scandalous version of a popular song about the Kaiser. They marched swinging their arms and looking slyly into the faces of the passers-by to be admired. The smallest held out a collecting-box.
‘There’s your future for you,’ Renn said.
A little later Philip went off, leaving his car outside Renn’s house. He doubted whether its constitution would stand a day of celebrations.
He had to meet T. S. Heywood for lunch and had chosen a restaurant which T.S. could reach easily by tube from his laboratory. The room was discreetly shaded from the sunlight, which nevertheless crept in. Pieces of glass and silver flashed suddenly, and a woman’s face, caught in the light, appeared dead, and as if detached from its skull. There was a negro orchestra in blue and silver.
As soon as they were seated Philip began to talk about his paper. He was so absorbed in it that he did not observe his friend’s indifference until T.S. said abruptly:
‘You know I’m going to write for your paper only out of weakness—because you’ll make my life unbearable if I refuse. I don’t believe in it.’
Philip smiled at him without malice. He allowed T.S. more licence than his other friends, who were forced, on pain of being cast out, to share his convictions. But T.S. could say what he liked—provided he obeyed. For all his simplicity Philip had a Yorkshire side to his character, which forbid him to throw away what he could use. Others, if they did not believe, would be quite useless to him, but from T.S. he wanted only a supply of facts. ‘I’m not interested in your private beliefs,’ he said firmly. ‘You’re my scientific correspondent.’ He had asked the waiter to give him the wine list, and while he was looking through it said :
‘There aren’t many people here. Aren’t they celebrating?’
The man looked at him with a civil smile. ‘For to-night we could have booked each table three times over. There is a gala Peace dinner and a dance here.’
At this moment a woman’s voice from the next table exclaimed: ‘He has a hundred thousand pairs of trousers and ninety thousand tunics on his hands. They will be paid for, of course. But no one could have expected the War to end in that shabby way. People have been ruined!’
‘What a pity!’ Philip whispered. ‘I always felt there’d been a mistake. After only four years’ killing any peace would be premature.’
‘All I can tell you about peace is that we’re experimenting in the production of a new gas. It’s economical in use, inflicts really disgusting agony, and has no known reagent. My private hope is to see it used on a meeting of the Imperial League.’ T.S. went on to draw a picture of the death antics of a well-nourished elderly gentleman, so unpleasant that Philip was revolted. Quite unabashed by this, T.S. raised his voice and had the satisfaction of seeing the three middle-aged women at the next table turn scarlet and begin to talk in loud quick voices. His eyes sparkled with pleasure.
‘That’s enough,’ Philip said. ‘Have you seen Hervey lately?’
‘No. She came to see my wife, to one of her evenings. I don’t know what happened, I wasn’t there, but I suppose she felt out of it. You know how uncouth Hervey can be. And Evelyn has no kindness to spare for intelligent young women. She did say afterwards that she felt certain there was something in Hervey. But you saw that she had no intention of helping it out.’ He broke off suddenly, looking at Philip’s plate. ‘Why did you order eggs if you don’t like them?’
‘I ordered it because it was the cheapest thing on the menu. I can’t eat without feeling or being ill, and I don’t intend to feel ill now—I must fetch our Hervey out this evening.’
‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘I’ll tell you afterwards,’ Philip said. He had a blind faith in his friend’s cleverness, the faith of a layman who mixes up all branches of science and imagines that if a man understands chemistry he must know why you have a pain in your belly.
Afterwards, in T.S.’s room, he spoke rather shyly about his feeling of unease and the slight pain he had. He frowned, and was ashamed to be discussing his health. Yet it seemed as though the uneasiness he spoke of were in his mind. He made light of it and yet he seemed relieved to have spoken, as though he had passed on a warning he did not understand.
T.S. asked him several questions and at last said shortly: ‘I know nothing. I’m going to send you to a doctor.’ He went away to telephone and when he came back he had arranged for Philip to see the doctor next day. He was unsympathetic and called Philip a fool to live as he did.
‘Why, where shall I live?’ Philip said. ‘I’m not married to a famous woman.’
When he was alone, T.S. sat a long time unmoving. He was staring across the Embankment at the river, which ran smoothly and was filled with light. Where it met a barge it shattered in pieces and the light sprang up from it. He felt certain that Philip was seriously ill. The little he knew, joined to a memory of his own father’s illness, assured him of it. Perhaps Philip was actually dying. As he thought of it he remembered that he had already called Philip ‘a doomed young man’—and at once the phrase seemed less apt, because it was a generation which had been doomed and it was not worse for Philip than for the others.
Carelessly, his mind offered him a scene plucked from the files—Philip and himself in St Amand, the room half dark half lighted, a dish of eggs and two bottles of red wine, thin and tart, Philip, his thick fair hair all ways, laughing and laughing, so that the good French housewife thought he was drunk. T.S. smiled. How bright the water is, he thought. I can admire it, I’m not suffering. Don’t I mind about Philip? He searched rudely among his thoughts, but found that he was searching for a place to lay Philip dead—pushing first this and then that young man out of the way to make room. Above all let’s be peaceful and tidy, he said to himself.
Evelyn came in, and not speaking she walked past him to the window. She is beautiful, he thought. A feeling he much disliked possessed him. He felt ashamed, because always, at these moments, he was liable to the same weakness, a schoolboy’s snivelling physical longing for some emotional act. He pictured scenes in which Evelyn became the protective wife-mother. A vulgar slobbering miracle took place and he was saved. Speak, his mind jeered; say ‘Evelyn, my darling,’ and fasten your body upon hers.
Evelyn put her hand up to the blind and jerked it half down. The shadow came to her waist. ‘Don’t forget dinner is half an hour early,’ she said absently. ‘We’re going on, you know, to Mrs Harben’s, to hear a concert of Purcell. Franz-Joachim—how unfortunate his name has been to him. No one believed he was a Swiss. And then dancing.’ Her fingers twisted the blind cord. ‘I haven’t danced since last year.’
‘Do you think this a suitable occasion?’ T.S. grinned.
Evelyn considered him for a moment. ‘Are you going to be tiresome?’ she asked, not ungently.
‘I hope not,’ her husband answered. ‘But I don’t want to hear Purcell, and I shan’t dance. You had better take someone else with you.’
‘Very well,’ Evelyn said. She left the window and stood beside him, resting a hand on his neck. His hair was very short but she found a piece at the nape which she could make a show of twisting. ‘You take very little interest in me. Am I looking old?’
Nothing responded in him, except that a horrid jangling sprang up in the nerves of his chest. He felt humiliated. He looked up and pulled a clown’s face at her. ‘You look splendid,’ he said, grinning. As she moved away he put his hand out and smacked her across the behind, with a vacant laugh.
He felt a sense of relief as soon as she had gone. Trying to think of Philip he could only see the room in St Amand and Philip’s face crimsoned with laughter. His arms in stained khaki sprawled across the table and his shoulders quivered.
To enjoy eating, not for the sake of the food, you must have starved at an impressionable age. Marcel Cohen had been hungry for the first fifteen years of his life. Now, though he was fifty, he found an acute pleasure in thinking of the good his food did him. He felt that he deserved it—the sherry in the strong consommé, the delicate flesh of grilled trout, the firmer flesh of young chicken (in preparing it, port, white wine, and cream had been used), he had almost a sense of triumph as he absorbed them. They fed his intellect as much as his body. From the red gravy of the tournedos, a cut of which he was especially fond, a thin savour ascended to his nostrils and thence to his mind.
That morning, it being his fiftieth birthday, he had looked at himself curiously after his bath. He saw that he had gone thick in every part without losing the outline of his body. It had coarsened like a tree. The skin was yellow and smooth, full of oil. He thought of it now with an impersonal and sardonic friendliness, as though he were merely a spectator of its satisfactions. Just as at times he had a cruel notion of his mind running from cellar to cellar like a rat. This rat had teeth strong enough to gnaw through iron. It could not help gnawing—the very joists on which this room had been built were not safe from it.
This was more curious since Marcel Cohen took pride in his house. The room in which he sat had bulbous pillars, mouldings crusted with figures, and hangings of Italian stamped velvet of the seventeenth century. His taste and vanity were both fully satisfied by it. He had chosen each piece of its furniture—chests of oak veneered with walnut and inlaid with ivory, a drawing table with six elaborately carved legs and fine ivory inlay, Farthingale chairs. He admired them and they were worth a great deal in money. The claret he was drinking pleased him—he thought of the price paid, a fair one, considering the nature of the wine, and of its incomparable flavour.
He set his glass down, and took a look at his wife. Sophie was his own age, and she was fat, fashionable, and unhappy. He knew that she was unhappy, and while he felt no respect for her and no love, he was occasionally a little sorry.
Sophie Cohen’s dress was cleverly designed to make her seem thinner, but, as always, a wrinkle had formed in it under each arm, and she wore too many jewels, which winked and glittered above every fold of her neck and arms. Poor mamma, he said to himself, she has no taste. It was to please her that they invited eighteen people to dinner. He liked to dine with one other man, and to spend an hour afterwards dissecting the world—nerves could be severed by this knife—before hearing music. He listened to music as some read poetry, with his bowels and mind, and it did not occur to him to value a concerto by the amount of applause it received.
Sophie was inviting her guests to drink to the Peace. He smiled at her and at them and raised his glass. ‘We could have made peace in 1916,’ he observed. ‘It would have been a sounder and less spectacular affair and we should not have spent a great deal of money we have spent.’ I forget how many young men, so many that the number doesn’t matter, he thought, who were living are now dead: it’s funny, I don’t like to think of so many hands and mouths rotting away in the ground.
He reflected that if peace had come in 1916 he would have been poorer by half a million pounds. The rat underneath the joists saw a balloon of swollen profits go up from the battlefields. Garton’s Shipbuilding and Engineering Works, chairman Thomas Harben, were about to issue bonus shares to the value of two million pounds, out of undisclosed reserves. That’s splendid, splendid—better sell now, sell, now sell, never touch the price again. He stood up. Sophie’s body, like a badly-shaped vase, steel-ribbed, teetered behind her guests into the upper room. He followed, and walked over to the window. At once the thought of his dead son—he was wounded and died in hospital in 1916—squeezed him so that he gripped the curtain between his hands. Yes, he was sorry for Sophie, but there was one thing he would not forgive her. When the boy was near death he asked for her—‘When will mamma come?’—and the father had to say: ‘She’s on her way, son,’ but the truth was that she was afraid to come. She was afraid to look at disfigurement and death. So David died without her. Yes, yes, he understood it, poor mamma, poor Sophie, but he did not forgive her. At this time, too, he had realised fully how useless she was to him. Why, she could not give him another son.
The thought of David was leaving him. He had learned to endure it in a very simple way—by recalling his gifts to David, the pony, the bathing pool, Eton. David’s youth had been soft. Mine, he thought, and his mind paused—before the sight of an eight-year-old boy in the room he shared with his mother and five sisters. The boy was frowningly busy with the bugs in his bed, squashing them on his hand. After a time he got up and went out. The water-closet was shared by five families, and while he waited his turn the door began to open slowly, and a man came out, but before the boy could slip in a woman pushed past him and past the man and slammed the door. The man grinned. Well, he could not wait any longer so he withdrew a few paces. The man watched until he squatted down, then said quietly, ‘You little jew bastard,’ and lifted his foot.
But it was so humiliating that the adult Cohen suffered nearly as much as the boy. He had been back to look, and the court was still there, housing five families, unchanged, a place into which no man would put a dog he liked, but there were children in it. Strong, he thought—I was as strong as a rat. David had two nurseries.
A servant had crossed the room and whispered to him that Mrs Groelles was in the library. He smiled with pleasure and went off quickly to speak to his daughter.
She was dressed for some party and greeted him with a smile of impatience. ‘My dear Fanny,’ he exclaimed, ‘you look very well—and you’re wearing my emeralds.’ Because of her tall shapely body, fine skin, and head of dark red curls, at twenty Fanny Groelles was a ripe beauty. She had married out of her race, the second son of a poor landowning family, which had once had an illustrious member—so long since that the pride they might have felt in him had been transferred to the length of time since his death, during which no one of the family had said or done anything memorable. Her husband was as foolishly extravagant as herself. They were perpetually in debt, Fanny’s large allowance from her father scarcely paid for her clothes and her husband’s racing stable. Whenever she came to see her father she asked him for money, and this even seemed natural to him. His love for her ate up his conceit and even his common sense—he gave her anything she asked. Now he said fondly: ‘Have you come to stay the evening?’
‘Good gracious no,’ Fanny said. She was so completely taken by surpise that her father could suppose she had an evening to spend with him that she told the simple truth. ‘I don’t like Jews, daddy, and you never have anyone else here.’
‘You are a Jew,’ her father said.
‘But I needn’t live with them any longer,’ Fanny said simply.
Marcel Cohen looked at her with a reserved smile. He found it difficult actually to believe that his daughter was ashamed of him. His mind had formed the habit of avoiding this thought. So now all he said, and with a sigh, was: ‘Before you came, my darling, I was thinking of David.’
Fanny heard and instinctively misunderstood him. Her social sense—she had had to defend herself during the first months of her marriage against the biting speeches of her mother-in-law—was so finely organised that she had been able to earn a reputation for ‘delicacy’ and ‘true kindness’ simply by detecting in advance and avoiding the occasions on which she would have to display these qualities. She saw that if she were forced to discuss her brother’s death now, it would be awkward to ask for money. It was almost without thinking that she said in a gay voice: ‘Why, David spoke of you this evening. I went in his room to say good night: he was in his cot, and he looked at me with his funny smile and said : “ Are you going to see my grandfather? Give him my love.” Don’t you think that was remarkable from a child of three?’ Her father smiled again. Laying her arm round his neck she said earnestly: ‘Daddy, I’m in such a hole. I can only stay two minutes, we’re going to Sarah’s and I ought not to be late.’ Her father stroked her arm and listened. He liked her to talk to him in this familiar way about people to whom she would never show either her father or mother, and now that she was kneeling beside his chair he felt that she loved him.
‘Tell me what you want, my darling,’ he said gently.
Philip called for Hervey at six o’clock and took her to dine at Gatti’s. The rooms were decorated but not indecently so. About eight o’clock they walked to Piccadilly Circus, where the crowd was thickest. Soldiers, women in short frocks, whistles, rattles, flags, men and women in each other’s arms, a girl with one breast bare, drunken soldiers and civilians dancing waving their arms, a frenzy of unreal excitement. There was no spontaneity in any of their antics. Feeling had gone cold since the Armistice, and the resurrection was attended with a great inconvenience of worms. Philip felt Hervey pulling his sleeve. He had to put his ear to her mouth to know what she was saying. ‘They’re not enjoying themselves,’ she cried : ‘it’s terrifying, it’s hideous, let’s go away, Philip.’
‘Very well,’ Philip said. They were several minutes struggling out of the crowd, Hervey was afraid of being knocked down and gripped his arm: at last they were able to walk with some ease.
They took a cab to Renn’s street. The car looked sulky—perhaps vexed that it had not been shown the celebrations. With a great struggle they started, and then Hervey noticed that Philip had grown white. She touched his hand lightly and found it cold and damp. ‘You’re ill,’ she said. She spoke carelessly because he disliked fuss.
‘No,’ Philip said,‘it was the effort. If you leave me alone I shall be all right.’ His lips were colourless. But it was true—before long he had recovered, it seemed easily, and Hervey was very glad of it. Never ill herself, illness in another person bored her. Unless the other person were her son. Then she changed at once, her whole being drawn to a point, that point her son’s life. She still felt that the tide of his life depended on hers and that only she, if he were ill, could save him.
They drove directly to the Dug-out. It was dark when they reached it and a little light came through the curtains. It made Hervey think of night at Danesacre, and of coming home. She said nothing, and followed Philip shyly into the room behind the counter. This room, which was very small, was the living-room of the family; Frank’s father-in-law slept in it, and Frank and his young wife slept in the other room, which was smaller still. Both rooms were stuffed with furniture, and clean, smelling of soap, grass, and of some kind of string with which the old man was making a hammock for a child. The child was not born yet, but he liked to think that everything he had to do was well forehand.
Hervey smiled, shyly and warmly, at the young woman, and wished to be gone. Her mother’s anger when a stranger was brought into her house had persuaded her that no one ever welcomed chance-brought company. She was sure that she was unwanted. But Frank’s wife was pleased to show off her rooms to another young woman. ‘We came here because of Frank’s chest,’ she said, with a smile, touching her own. ‘He was gassed, and doctor said towns were bad for’en. I reckon we’re well off here.’
‘This is a nice room,’ Hervey said.
Since this only confirmed the general belief no one answered her, and in a few moments she and Philip were walking across the field to his caravan with bread and a jug of strong dark coffee. The night sky was immensely blown out and thin, like a bubble at bursting-point, and except for the sound they made themselves, whipping the long grass, there was nothing.
Philip left the door open and lit his candles ; the flames lay over on a current flowing from the darkness into the tiny cell of light. At first nothing was said and he watched the line of Hervey’s cheek resting on her hand. He felt happy and curiously at peace, as if he had done a great deal of work that day. It was a comfort to be with Hervey and without other people. He began to talk about his paper to her. She listened and nodded her head. She was thinking how well she got on with him and how if he were only not in love with her they could set up house together and be unusually happy. The absurdity of this thought made her smile.
Philip stopped talking. ‘Please go on,’ she said anxiously.
‘No. I’ve talked about myself too long,’ Philip said. ‘Come and sit outside on the step and wait for the bump. It’s a minute to one o’clock and at one exactly the earth goes over the top.’
Sitting with the door of the caravan at their backs they talked and were silent and talked, each speaking into the darkness and receiving an answer from it. A deep happiness possessed Hervey, sprung from the likeness of this long night of talking to others just before the War, when with Philip and T.S. she had often stayed awake all night to talk and discuss life and their future—about which, as it turned out, they were much at fault.
Suddenly Philip said: ‘What do you want most in the whole world, Hervey love?’
Shall I tell the truth? Hervey thought quickly. It was not easy for her to give herself away, but for this once she would. ‘To be famous and Richard to have a fortunate life,’ she said. She looked at him to see whether he were going to laugh at her.
‘Is that all you want? I should like to be the conscience of unthinking people.’ He reflected that Hervey’s ambitions were more human than his. But there must be no more poor, he said to himself.
‘You can be that in your paper,’ Hervey exclaimed. She did not believe that he would achieve anything with it, but she wanted to help him. She looked at his wrists, lying crossed on one knee, and was struck by their thinness—it gave all his plans an air of uncertainty in her eyes.
‘Don’t you want to be in love? ‘Philip said.
‘Indeed yes,’ Hervey said—she paused—‘but then it’s so much trouble,’ she went on, saying what was in her mind. Speaking the truth, once you have started it, is too exhilarating to draw back.
‘Do you really mean that, Hervey? There must be a difference between men and women in these things, because I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I don’t know anything about women—I know more about myself,’ Hervey said. ‘I know what I should like —to share a violent passion with some man. But it must be a physical passion, I don’t want to feel sorry for him or to have to change myself to please him. I want to be able to say what I choose. And I want it to burn up and be over. I don’t want to have to live with him afterwards and order his breakfasts and try to remember what he likes. I don’t want to know what he likes. Respect—companionship—all that—that’s nothing. I can respect many things, and be my own companion—I shouldn’t want them to come into my love affair. You have to make allowances for a person you respect, modify your thoughts, be tolerant. That isn’t anything to do with love. But it’s what all the men I have known—except one—think of as love, and that’s what I say is too much trouble.’
She is talking about her American, he said to himself. A feeling of bitterness crossed his mind. ‘Then you don’t want a husband?’ he said, trying to smile.
‘I have one,’ Hervey said calmly. ‘And perhaps I shouldn’t like to live alone. No doubt that’s why marriage goes on. But why confuse it with passion? Or think that you are having both when you marry.’
She spoke sleepily. Her mind was full of unsorted speculations—she had not spoken a tenth of them. It was no use. What I think and feel has scarcely any relation with what I do, she thought—if I lived as I feel, I should be a monster.
They were both silent—a little depressed, as the young are when they are forced to realise how little of themselves is of use to life, but comforted by each other’s nearness. Philip could see the tuft of soft hair on Hervey’s nape. He felt a desire to touch it but refrained. Instead he thought over what she had been saying—she had described a kind of love as narrow and brutal as a knife, yet she had been speaking her thoughts. All at once he saw that her thoughts did not determine her life. Her mind, a strong clumsy instrument, was blunted and turned aside by her profound carelessness of herself: it dictated only the least significant of her actions, a resentful prisoner shut in the same cell with her sense of humour—which was that of a savage. For a moment he was as sorry for Hervey as if he had known that she was going to be defeated.
The sky, as they talked and waited, was turning from night to day. The earth still slept, but it was visible in a strange light of no colour. To the east the grey husk of sky split apart and showed a naked whiteness. Seen in that way, the whiteness was startling. It was as if they had watched a new continent break from the sea.
Philip looked at his watch—half-past four. Hervey was leaning a little against him and he thought she had fallen asleep. He watched for another half hour, during which short time the edges of the new continent caught fire, and delicate tongues of flame ran here and there across the vast spaces; the waters dividing them became a clear green, with overhead a sky, new, smooth, and flawless. A busy chattering began in the trees behind the caravan.
Hervey was not asleep, she stretched herself, smiled, and said: ‘If it was my country we should hear a peewit cry.’ She stood up. ‘Now if you drive me home I can get into the house before it’s too late.’
Philip was seized with anguish. He put his arms round her, looking closely in her face. ‘Oh Hervey, stay, stay,’ he repeated.
Hervey stood perfectly still. ‘Must I? ‘she said, after a moment. ‘You know I don’t want it.’ Her liking for him made her speak carefully, not to hurt him, but he felt the ease and finality with which she was leaving him. And he felt not as though she were going but he dying. He released her. His arms strained back to feel the wood of the caravan.
‘Yes, yes, stay with me. I only want not to be alone yet.’
‘Why, Philip,’ Hervey said, troubled and ashamed.
She sat down again on the step of the caravan. ‘I can stay,’ she said. He saw that she was reluctant and had no warmth for him, and it was no use keeping her.
Evelyn pressed her hand down on her eyelids. The nerves behind her eyes throbbed and sent flashes of crimson across the darkened lids. To look is better, she thought, and opening her eyes gazed round Mrs Harben’s music room. The concert was long finished. They were dancing in the next room, and couples passed and repassed the doorway. Many of them were middle-aged or elderly. She saw one motion issuing from all their bodies like a snake unfolding and folding itself along the wall. Some of the revellers were drunk, and since the floor was crowded these kept bearing off into side rooms; one fat elderly woman had let down the shoulder straps of her dress, to the satisfaction of her partner. Why do I stay? Evelyn thought: why go? why did I come? She turned her head and saw William Ridley coming towards her, walking carefully on the waxed boards. Here he comes with his boasting face, she said. His face was one large smile.
‘How are you getting on?’ he asked, as if he had brought her: ‘I’m having a grand time. I’ve made an impression, too. It’s a good thing you asked me to come with you, I’ve met some good chaps.’ He sat down close to her. ‘You look as if you weren’t enjoying yourself. You should let yourself go, eat something, get among people, drink—there’s plenty ‘—he tapped her knee—‘I don’t like to see you looking glum. I don’t like anyone to be glum when they could be happy.’
Evelyn looked at him. He was above himself with happiness at being here. That’s almost pathetic, she thought. Nothing else in him could rouse a feeling of pity, unless it were the cheapness of his clothes, which squeezed his ungainly body here and hung on it there. But if he had ever known they were wretched, he had forgotten it in his satisfaction at having made his impression. But on whom?
‘What time is it? I shall go home. Can I take you anywhere in the car?’
Ridley hesitated, weighing in his mind her importance against the richness of a whole new world—which he could use. She was wrong if she thought this house, these people, impressed him. ‘You drop me off at your house,’ he answered. ‘I’ll walk on after that. These people here aren’t important—I want to see what th’others, the tarts, the shop girls, young clerks, policemen, old wives, are doing to celebrate.’
When they were at her house she asked him to come in and talk to her. ‘My nerves are bad,’ she explained. ‘I shan’t sleep yet. If we talk for a time that will make the hours less until daylight.’
In her room, Ridley seated himself with his legs widely apart. He was very warm and excited. Her restlessness had infected him and he felt a desire to walk about the room, fingering things, to assert his position here. ‘You should be like me,’ he said. ‘I get moods—when that happens I don’t sit brooding, I go out, have a drink, talk to people.’
‘What are you writing?’ Evelyn asked. She kept her eyes on his face, waiting for him to begin talking. Her Spanish shawl, blue and crimson, had fallen from her over the day-bed. Talk, talk to me, her mind repeated. She leaned forward, twisting a corner of the shawl between her fingers.
He was ready enough. As he talked his inner excitement swelled, but he was determined not to show it. He felt that things were turning out well for him. The mirror between the widows reflected his face and well-filled shirt front, enough and no more. ‘I am probably the most important writer you know,’ he exclaimed: ‘that’s because I’m not ashamed to write as I feel. Like the rest of your sex you suffer from too much cleverness.’ Here she roused herself to protest, and he said seriously : ‘Well—I’m not making conversation, I’m telling you something of importance about writing.’
‘One day you will know a little better how to write,’ Evelyn answered, in a dry voice. But she felt that already he knew as much as he needed. Nothing she knew was of use to him, though she had more sensibility in her finger than was in his whole hulking body.
‘Then we won’t talk about it,’ Ridley said, with good humour. He rose and came towards her clumsily, his arms knocking against the objects in his path. For the first time she became aware of his excitement. He stood looking down at her, his body leaned forward, arms hanging. His lower lip was thrust out with a drop of moisture on it. He stooped, and fell forward with her across the couch.
For a moment she struggled weakly with him. She yielded longing trying to feel to feel to lose oneself ecstasy to feel everything yes to feel. But there was nothing, only discomfort and the disorder of her mind. When he rose, she averted her face from him. She wished to regain a semblance of dignity. She lay silent. When he spoke to her, a little blustering, she answered only by a mortified smile. She was conscious of nothing but the effort of waiting for him to go.
As the door closed she felt the room settle into silence. A burden passed from her mind. Think, I lay still—it was thus and thus—I said nothing. People walking outside in the road disturbed her, she listened to their footsteps passing and then to a burst of laughter that began abruptly and went on, it sounded like an old man, weak and malicious. Now think. But trivial things distracted her and she could fix her mind only on a scratch on the table and the swinging blind cord.