Company Parade Read online

  STORM JAMESON

  COMPANY

  PARADE

  Contents

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  CHAPTER XXVI

  CHAPTER XXVII

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  CHAPTER XXIX

  CHAPTER XXX

  Foreword

  This book is the first of perhaps five, or six, novels in which an attempt, necessarily incomplete, is made to depict the contemporary scene. The family name of all these books is The Mirror in Darkness, and the mirror may be taken to be the mind of the author, or of the reader, or at times only of the young woman called Hervey Russell whose relation to the whole work is unchanging in time, although the space allotted to her in the several volumes necessarily varies. It is clear that a great many characters must be required to play their parts in any illusion of the contemporary scene, and even when the number of these has been reduced to the subsistence minimum (so that one character is forced to do the work of a crowd) it is large enough to make the author’s life a busy one, and this first volume, in which the greater number of them must appear, even if only once, in the nature of a Company Parade. The author has worked hard to make the reader’s share of the work as light as possible, and she begs forgiveness, first for putting herself forward to make what seems a necessary explanation, and secondly, for not being able in one volume to tell all she knows about the men and women in it.

  STORM JAMESON.

  Chapter I

  December 1918

  A Young woman comes to London in the month after the Armistice. She is inexperienced, poor, ambitious, burdened. This is what happens to her.

  The town was crowded, not a room to be had in any of the cheap hotels; for all she knows, none in any of the dear ones. President Wilson had arrived that day, drawing people from all parts of the country to look at him, the bright star of their hopes. She slept the first night in a Hostel for Young Women near Victoria. The manageress, a bony creature, refined, with no bowels, was surprised to see her come with a large black leather trunk, her mother’s: it was of the kind known as a dress-basket, with a domed top and straps. ‘You won’t need that taken up to your room,’ she said in a gritty voice. ‘You can only keep the room for two nights. As I informed you in my lettah. Leave it in the passage.’ The girl agreed anxiously. She was tired but at first could not sleep for thinking of her baby. This child, who was three years old, and very beautiful, she had left in Yorkshire with a lady trained in the care of young children. The more she considered in her mind the perfections of this lady, the less comforted she was and scarcely able to bear being parted from him. What would he think and feel when, falling asleep in a strange room, he awoke to find it stranger by daylight, and the door opening, and looking round for his mother, Miss Holland came in?

  The next day, Sunday, she tried a score of apartment houses without finding room. Towards dusk, very tired, she came on the blue Y.W.C.A. hut in Trafalgar Square and went timidly in, prepared for charity gone cold. There was no such thing—but there was a chair, a good cup of tea, and they told her where to go to find a room. The day after she and her dress-basket shared a bedroom in a Temperance Hotel, in Bloomsbury, the room very narrow, cold, dingy, and the bed a penance. She took possession of it in the evening of Monday, after her first day spent trying to write advertising ‘copy.’ This day had convinced her that she was a failure, and now the room drove other thoughts home. Too cold and uneasy to sleep, she lay and thought about her baby. When it was wet, the coarse stuff of the pillow-case scraped and burned her cheeks.

  She was young, and each morning ran out gladly. She could not stay quietly of an evening in that dreary place, but sauntered about London, pleased with trifles. London to her was a brightly-coloured web, from which now she drew the sound of violins in a café, now a voice crying Victory, now a boy and his sweetheart laughing as they passed, now furtive encounters of which her mind retained a gesture or a glance. In a time and a city of easy meetings no one spoke to her. She was always alone, all her friends dead, or in France or Mesopotamia. In the first months after the War London was gone to pieces and noisy—not gay. She was too young to feel this and wherever there was music and bright warmth and they were cheap there she was, living in her eyes.

  Her bedroom in the hotel was so uncomfortable that she never unpacked the dress-basket, and after three weeks of it she moved to a room in St. John’s Wood. It was at the top of a house, really a large attic, and when she had stowed her things it looked as though no one was living in it. On the third evening she was going upstairs behind a middleaged woman. This woman turned and smiled at her and said in a fine jovial voice: ‘You doing anything? Come in and eat a bite of supper.’

  The girl followed reluctantly into the first-floor room. It was all white whiskery rugs and low chairs, the very pattern of Edwardian demi-monde ease. She sat stiffly in one of these chairs and watched the woman put beer and sandwiches on a tray in front of the gas fire. She knew she would not be able to drink the beer and said: ‘Could I just have sandwiches?’

  ‘As you please,’ the woman said. She was a big well-built woman, surprisingly quick. The girl could not help looking at her face, which was coarse and pleasant, with deep merry lines. There was a superb impudence in the way she threw her voice about, slapping it down on things. With the tray between them she began to question the girl. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Hervey Russell.’ She could not overcome a dislike of giving her name to strangers.

  ‘What’s that? Is it your own?’

  ‘My very own, as it happens,’ Hervey said quickly and shyly. ‘I’m married, but I don’t use my married name very much.’

  ‘What’s it, then?’

  ‘Vane.’

  ‘Ha. Well, Miss Russell-Mrs. Vane, did you see my name on the door?’

  ‘No,’ Hervey said.

  ‘You never heard of Delia Hunt? All the worse for little Delia. I saw when you came in you were married. Where d’you come from? You have a country face.’

  Hervey was not offended by the woman’s curiosity. When you have answered such questions you have not told anything of importance about yourself. Soon Mrs. Delia Hunt knew that she was twenty-four, had a baby called Richard, and was earning her living (or not earning it—since as yet she had done nothing well) as a writer of advertisements.

  ‘That’s fine,’ Delia Hunt said. ‘I like spirit. I began earning m’keep when I was six, and if I told you all I’d done you wouldn’t believe me. Don’t talk to me about the horrors of war. I was in Johannesburg in 1890 and if the front line was as raw I feel sorry for the troops. I do so. I had my husband, but my dear life, he was no sort of protection against drum fire. When I came home I left him there. I been a stewardess, a cab-driver, second cook to a troupe of monkeys, and dear knows what else. You don’t learn much more after you’ve learned the first things.’

  Hervey felt ashamed of knowing so little. She had no idea that she was staring until the woman told her so with a rich laugh. Afterwards, in her own much colder room, she felt excited and able to do anything. It was too late to go out and she sat still trying t
o read. She felt her heart beating as though she were caged. It was the same excitement she had felt as a child when the wind rose to a gale round the house. She wanted to run shouting in the windy darkness. She did not know yet that her thoughts and flesh were the cage. Suddenly she jumped up and began to beat her hands on the window-sill.

  Chapter II

  January 8, 1919

  1. Hervey

  There were two moments on waking in the morning when she was unhappy. The first was her waking thought of Richard, turning his head the moment the door of his room opened, but not asking for her. He would look for her but he would say nothing and no one would know from his face that he was looking. The second was when she opened the door to her breakfast tray and there were no letters on it. After that there was nothing she had to do except run to the window to know which of her two coats to wear. If there was a letter from Penn, her husband, she read it over breakfast, disappointed because it was short and told her nothing and then forgetting it suddenly as she stepped into the street. He was stationed in Kent, a ground officer in the Air Force: his War had been a pleasant tour of stores depots, parks, and aerodromes in England. When she thought of him it was with impatience and kindness, as we think of a person we can neither like nor leave off liking.

  At the office she shared his room with an experienced copywriter, and was his assistant. In practice, she was useless to him. She had no notion how to write the advertisements for a new soap and he could not show her. His name was David Renn, he had been lucky enough nearly to die of wounds in 1917 and then not to die and to be discharged—so that he got out and got work before returned heroes were being sold two for a farthing. He was quick and reliable—to look at, you would say a willing soldier. He was thin and had been good-looking, with very fine bones. Indeed his head was still beautiful, if you looked only at the bones and then at the quick steady eyes.

  This morning when she came in he gave her eight typewritten pages about an arc welding process and told her to get the facts into two hundred words. As he turned away he said : ‘I don’t suppose you can do it, but you can try.’

  But this was something she could do. When she brought it to him he was holding his leg where the pain started. He read it through, nodded, and said : ‘Now try to find just six words about Charel’s new soap, to go with the pictures. Take my copy and read through it.’ He spoke carefully, with an effort to seem calm. A drop of sweat trickled over his temple to the cheekbone.

  ‘What kind of words?’ Hervey said.

  ‘My dear God, don’t you know anything? Think. Have you ever walked down Oxford Street of an afternoon and seen that mess of women, as thick as glue on the pavement? They haven’t had a fresh thought since they were born, they read the Daily Post and believe it, and get their first and last notions of life from the women’s magazines and the cinema. Write six words to make every one of those women think that Charel’s Almond Cream Soap will save her. Don’t shout. Whisper in her ear. How to be more beautiful than other women. How to look young. How, how, who told you, who, listen I’ll tell you. Almond Cream Soap.’

  ‘Is your leg very bad?’ Hervey said.

  ‘What are you trying to do? Sell me an ointment?’ Renn jeered.

  She went back to her desk and read eight different descriptions of the soap. The six words did not show themselves. She tried writing down short phrases and tore them up in despair. Her head felt like leather and the more she dragged at it the heavier and more stupid it felt. I’m wasting my time here and I’m no good, she thought. She was too angry and ashamed to answer Renn when he spoke to her.

  In the afternoon the managing director, Mr. Shaw-Thomas, sent for her and Renn. He wanted to talk with them about the Charel sales scheme, but first he asked Hervey how she was getting on. ‘Not very fast,’ Hervey said curtly: ‘I can’t write slogans.’ She had no natural respect for authority, and Mr. Shaw-Thomas never took any trouble to snub her.

  He looked at her as though she amused him. She was sitting on the edge of her chair, like a nervous boy, her face angry and frowning, as if she were setting her teeth over the notion of being laughed at. Its stubbornness had a soft look.

  ‘You’re not going at it the best way,’ he said, with his sharp smile. When Mr. Shaw-Thomas wanted to thrust a word into your ear he pressed his hand down flat on his desk and smiled, showing small very sharp teeth. There the word was, pinned through the living body, like a strange moth. ‘I know you can write, but writing advertisements is a subtle art. Perhaps we must say could be. To be honest—advertising still lacks its Shakespeare. There’s a peak for you to conquer, Miss Russell. And the field is—if I may put it so bluntly—pregnant. How many novelists or poets manage to get themselves read by rich, poor, superior, ignorant, successful, cultured, happy, miserable, unimaginative, snobbish, resigned? Remember that people choose to read novels, but you must trick them into reading an advertisement. You can only do it if you believe in what you’re saying. You must know with your heart that Charel’s Almond Shaving Oil is the purest of all oils before you are fit to write about it. If by some error you know at the same time that the oil used is somewhat impure cottonseed, you must practise what philosophers call a suspension of belief. In that way you will achieve the sincerity needed in order to write well. Great advertising is the expression of deep emotional sincerity. The risk a clever young woman runs is of being merely clever or cynical. Do avoid cynicism.’ He considered her for a moment and added: ‘It is incompatible with real emotion.’ He nodded at her. ‘And now I hope I have removed some of your doubts about yourself, Miss Russell. I am sure you will do me credit before very long.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ Hervey answered.

  ‘When is your novel coming out?’ Mr Shaw-Thomas asked, smiling into her face.

  After a moment Hervey said : ‘Not until May.’

  ‘I don’t think you told me you had written a novel.’

  She did not say anything.

  ‘A great novelist is not necessarily a great advertiser,’ Mr. Shaw-Thomas said genially. ‘Remember, to rise in our profession requires more than ordinary talent. You must be willing to give your whole mind. Novelists! I wouldn’t pay H. G. Wells two pounds a week until I had trained him. He’s probably too old to learn anything. Do you think Miss Russell is learning?’

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ Renn said.

  Hervey had listened anxiously. She wanted to be praised for writing brilliantly about soaps and packets of breakfast food. In the same moment, she felt herself turning away, with a dreadful flat misery. She was impressed, and at the same time she was sceptical and half-consciously revolted.

  When they went back to their room Renn said quietly: ‘You’ve got to accept all that to get on, but all the same don’t accept it.’

  Hervey looked at him ‘How can I do both?’

  ‘You can’t. Either you tell yourself lies or you don’t. Perhaps you’re the Shakespeare of advertising? One day you will be so moved by a new purgative that you will write your Lear to induce people to buy it. I shall now read you a genuine advertisement from a genuine trade paper. Listen. “ For Christmas, our luminous Crucifix shines in the dark and makes a wonderful Christmas present. Our agents always clean up with this Crucifix at this time.” If you can play on women’s sexual needs to sell them a cold cream why not on another emotion to sell crucifixes? Behold I stand at the door and knock offering an illuminated crucifix.’ His face twitched. ‘The answer is that good business it not always good business unless you suit yourself to your company. You can’t sell decent women illuminated crucifixes, but you can sell them something else as easily and get their money.’

  Hervey had forgotten to listen in her interest in Renn himself. It was not at all the interest of a young woman, but belonged to a part of her mind which drew the same pure nearly unrealised delight from the flattened planes and creases of a man’s face; the running of a wave; London when a clear sky gives its buildings that air of delicacy and remoteness; a big careless wom
an in full sail; a hill; the curve of a lighted road at night. If you deprived her of her other senses and left her her eyes she would be happy. Why not? She only half listened to what was said to her and did not enjoy speaking, but her eyes could never look enough and she lived in them.

  When Renn stopped talking she had nothing to say and pretended to be engrossed in her work. I ought to listen more and stare less, she thought. The rest of the afternoon went in the exasperation of trying to write six words and failing. When she left, she was too fretted and restless to go home.

  She had a shilling to spend on the evening meal and knew where she would spend it. She walked with an awkward movement of her young body, as if she did not know or care what her arms and legs were doing. She half longed for someone to speak to her, but the moment she saw, or thought she saw, the beginning of a smile on the face nearest her, her own turned quiet and sullen. Her awkwardness and her country face were both a defence.

  In her haste, and deep absorption in herself, she missed the wheels of a cab by seconds. The man shouted at her. She did not look round. Head down, to hide her embarrassed face from him, she hurried along the pavement, pushing between people as though they were trees, submerged with her in the light flowing between the street lamps. Above the light, darkness began abruptly.

  After the cold and the hurrying the Corner House closed round her with a familiar smoothness. Here no one knew her. She could open her book, and keep her eyes in it, only moving when the girl put coffee and scones before her. She was not reading. Her thoughts went back over the day with a nervous fury. I can’t do it, she thought, I can’t write their six words. I’ve failed, I’m useless, a failure; this is what I left Richard for, to get this. To sit days in that room thinking how to sell soap, and at night coming here every night getting nothing, knowing nothing, at times happy, unhappy, no doubt a fool but could have been used. Her wish to see and touch her son overcame her. She felt that she would cry, and pretended to drink her coffee, holding the cup at her mouth; her throat was rigid.