The Heart to Artemis

by Bryher;

  Vaud had been full of refugees from the Huguenots to the émigrés at the time of the French Revolution. There had been intrigues and foreign agents. I often felt that I was reliving those old and troubled times with merely a change of names. Once you know that a moment’s carelessness may cost a life, you yourself alter in a dozen subtle ways. I learned watchfulness, never to say a word on a telephone that could not safely be overheard or to leave notes where they might be read. I carried the particulars of my refugees in a tiny notebook that I usually wore suspended round my neck and inside my clothes. I had to suspect every stranger and as the years went on it was difficult to remain humane as well as alert.

  One day I was told that someone was waiting to see me in the library. A white, anxious face peered round a bookcase from the only dark corner in the room. I asked the usual questions, he evaded the answers. Where had he come from? Vienna, he answered in excellent English. Oh, he was Austrian. He shook his head, he had been studying there for a short time. I waited for him to tell me his nationality. He blinked and said nothing. What was he doing in Lausanne? He had his medical course to finish, he hoped to get his diploma in two years. Had the authorities accepted him? Provisionally, yes. On what quota was he registered? He turned that question by saying that he was low on the list. It flashed across my mind that he was a Nazi spy, some wretched fellow that they had tortured and let go provided that he supplied them with the names of other refugees. It was a difficult moment. If I made a mistake, he might have nowhere to eat or sleep and be driven through need to the very act that I was half accusing him of having committed. Yet the fate of half a dozen other students was in my hands. Suppose that I helped him and he passed my name and address to the Nazis, I should be watched and their safety would be compromised. His hands were shaking, I thought how little the conventional citizen ever knew of the realities of life but I decided for once that the group was more important than the individual and answered sternly that I could not think why he had come to me, it must be a mistake, I was only interested in English students who had come to Vaud to learn French. He looked at me helplessly as if he did not know how to leave and as a final concession I asked almost angrily, “Well, where were you born?”

  “That is the trouble,” he said, looking more frightened than ever, “all my family come from Riga but I was born in Moscow while my father was there on a business visit.”

  He was in trouble. The Americans required people to go on the visa lists not according to nationality but according to where they had been born and I did not even know if a Russian quota existed. But Riga! Ever since my childhood I had dreamed about the city with its associations both with Elizabethan venturers and the amber trade. “I have always wanted to go to Riga,” I could not help saying and for the first time he smiled. He then pushed a letter of introduction into my hand. It was signed by one of my friends. “Why didn’t you give me this at once?” I asked in some exasperation. “I thought you were a Nazi agent.”

  “And I thought you might be careless about names.”

  We both had to laugh and agree that it was not safe to be frank at first. The misunderstanding created a friendship between “Riga” and myself. He came to see me regularly during the next two years and brought me more students to help to safety. I christened him “the Marmot” because he hid in the darkest corner even on a warm summer day, on guard and ready to disappear at any hint of strangers.

  1938. The year of Munich, appeasement and shame. I was in England in the spring and warned people so continuously that one friend wrote, “The only suitable ally in any campaign you may wish to undertake would be Winston Churchill. I should be delighted to try to arrange a little dinner or lunch with him any time.”

  Clio deserted me. I refused. I have never understood how I could have been so stupid. It is a sign of how lightly Churchill was taken at that time that such a meeting should even have been proposed. It could have changed my life had we met because I might have been spared six years of complete frustration during the second war but perhaps it was an object lesson. If a historian is stupid he is more obtuse than anybody else. For some reason I was particularly homesick at that moment for Burier but I missed my opportunity and as usually happens, I was never given a second chance.

  I had no feeling that war had been prevented that September. It had merely been postponed. We lost the benefit of the well-trained Czech army, the trust of the stable elements in France and we encouraged the Germans to think that we would accept the most shameful conditions rather than fight. The Luftwaffe used every moment of the extra year to perfect its machines. We did not even trouble to prepare an economic program so that the government wasted a nation’s savings in panic in 1939. It is perhaps the most disgraceful chapter in our history and we should never forget it for our own safety. Yet, today, how much do the English remember of that terrible year?

  We redoubled our efforts to get our people away but lost our first refugee, he was murdered on his way to Palestine. With others, safety was a matter of hours. Visas, birth certificates, journey money, there was not much time left for historical research. People flocked to me whom I had never seen but I was a soldier in Mithra’s army, right was right to me, wrong was wrong and it never occurred to me for a moment that I dared do anything but help.

  The war drew nearer every day and I wanted one thing for myself. I longed to see the Lapps and persuaded Robert Herring to join me at Stockholm for a trip to Finland. The Marmot who had just got both his visa and diploma suggested that we travel together as far as his native city. We went by Holland because it would have been dangerous to cross the German border and when I met him at the airport, after I had visited some Dutch friends, he was carrying a Siamese kitten in a basket.

  My mother had despaired of me for years. “I know you are going to get into serious trouble one day and who will get you out of it?” Still, I was a reasonably law-abiding citizen and the last thought that entered my head as we landed was that we were about to be arrested.

  It really was most unpleasant. It had nothing to do with my refugee activities nor with smuggling. It was the kitten. The Marmot had inquired if there were any regulations about animals in transit and had been assured that the restrictions applied only to cattle and dogs. He should have been told that there was a strict law that no living animal could be landed on Swedish soil. We were flung into a whitewashed room and left there for hours. Finally they took me out for questioning, it was quite severe, they went through my luggage item by item and sent me into Stockholm by the last bus to leave that night. Dinner was over by the time that I got to the hotel and Herring had gone out, leaving an angry note. He assumed that I had played a trick on him and had given up the expedition. I went hungrily and gloomily to bed.

  The telephone rang the following morning. It was the Marmot. “Are you all right?” he asked in a very sad voice, “They kept me at the airport till midnight and took the kitten into quarantine.”

  “I got no dinner.”

  “I want you to have breakfast with me, I hate being alone in the morning and I have heard of a wonderful café...”

  “No,” I said hastily, “I want breakfast here and now.”

  “Come with me and I will give you sixpence.”

  I knew that he had a phobia about being alone at meals. I hesitated, grumbled some more and then joined him in the hall where I insisted upon having my sixpence at once. He possessed a student’s guide that really did give the names of restaurants where the food was inexpensive and good but we did not know Stockholm and naturally lost our way. We went back to the hotel, they had finished serving breakfast. I was sunk in gloom, it was almost twenty-four hours since I had had anything to eat. Finally about eleven o’clock we found a place where we could get one small cup of coffee and while we were drinking it the Marmot told me dreamily about his first love affair as a boy; it was, I felt, in the best Russian tradition.

  Late that evening two policemen marched down to the Riga boat. The Marmot followed wi
th the kitten in a basket and his luggage. Two tall, stiff policemen brought up the rear. To our intense regret, Herring and I were out on an excursion and missed the spectacle that naturally collected a crowd.

  We joined the steamer early the following morning and just as we arrived, the captain stamped angrily into the Marmot’s cabin, picked up the basket and took it up on deck. The kitten, it appeared, had howled miserably all night. I next heard my cabin companion, a stern, elderly German, complaining to the steward that she could not share her quarters with a degenerate Englishwoman and I must be moved elsewhere. The ship was full and there were no other berths. She slept that night fully clothed, even to her hat, presumably to escape contamination. Her only concession was to take off a pair of black boots and put on bedroom slippers.

  Riga was sleepy and delightful, it was exactly like the pictures that I had seen in my book as a child when we wandered along the cobbled streets under the pointed gables. Our only trouble was hospitality. I do not think I have eaten so much otherwise during a day. “To make up for Stockholm,” the Marmot teased as he pressed upon me yet another delicious native dish. In the afternoon he took us to the amber beaches. They smelt of pine and salt and I sat on a log and thought of Apollo and the Nine Muses while I let the sand that was full of crushed scraps of bark sift through my hands. There was still some amber to be found there after the autumn gales.

  People kept asking if the Marmot and I were twins. We looked alike when we both wore berets. I am short and built like a Balt although I know now that it is rather my Hitzacker inheritance. We took the plane to Tallinn the following day and spoke at parting of a probable meeting in America. Suddenly, in one of those flashes that come to us all at times, I knew as I waved good-by that I should not see the Marmot for a very long time. He escaped almost at the last hour but we lost trace of each other during the war and I have never seen him again. Yet to have seen Riga was a great advantage to my classical studies, particularly when I wrote Roman Wall. We do not know whether a trader made the full journey, it would have taken several years, or whether the news of the coast was passed from tribe to tribe but the amber road and its stories were an integral part of the folk material of Greece.

  We flew from Tallinn to Finland. This is no place for a travel diary but what was important on this journey was “the thawing of the ice.” We crossed the Arctic Circle on a bus and as I watched the reindeer moving between the birches, I knew that, apart from my refugees, I had been following the wrong path, I did not belong to the literary movements nor even to a particularly intellectual group. I was an Elizabethan who needed action and the sea. I should only become a writer when I returned to my proper material and I wondered why I had wasted so much time. As a beginning, I decided that I would learn to fly.

  The first news that we read in the papers at Stockholm was the death of Havelock Ellis. He had been desperately ill for some months, he had fretted against his inactivity and it would have been cruel to wish for his life to be prolonged. Freud made the discoveries but it was Ellis who was a friend. He had replied to my letters within twenty-four hours of receiving them, told me about books and advised me about writing for twenty years. A myth has grown up that he was a fussy old man who compiled lists but had no original ideas. It is a false picture of a very great Englishman. All pioneers face a desperate task. They have to fight ignorance and often persecution of themselves and their followers. They stand in the “shield wall” and therefore have to leave theory to the men who will succeed them. Yet the audacity of their propositions seems so obvious to a second generation that the dangers of the early battles are forgotten. Ellis opened new ways and relieved the anxieties of hundreds of uneasy minds. At least we can offer him respect.

  I returned home by way of London to see my mother. People were beginning to be anxious and to talk of air-raid shelters. Doris had bought a bulb farm in a beautiful valley near the Lizard and was developing new daffodils. I arranged for my mother to join her if war broke out until I could get back to England. It was late July when I reached Burier and the peace of the Swiss mountains.

  TWENTY-ONE

  In Switzerland it was a wonderful summer. The air was so full of light that the sunflowers in the cottage gardens turned the color of corn and the Grammont was darker than its own wild cyclamens above a silver lake. A moment had come when our minds could react to warnings no longer and we sank into an enchanted sleep where nothing mattered except the movement of the grasses and the heat of the earth.

  I forgot Clio in these last moments of a disappearing epoch in an adventure of my own. The North had unlocked a door and I took flying lessons at Lausanne. Switzerland is a difficult country for a novice on account of its mountains and few civilians wanted to learn. The instructor landed me a dozen times in quick succession. I thought in my innocence that it was a demonstration of the machine, a little Moth. Afterwards he explained that it was to test my nerves as if I had shown the slightest uneasiness it would have been wasteful to continue the course. It had not occurred to me to be nervous; as I have already written, I belong to the sea and the air. To our mutual astonishment, although my age was against me, I was forty-five, I seemed to get the feel of the plane at once. It was not only having the stick in my hands, I seemed to be using all my senses a new way. It was an affirmation that what I had believed was true and that is always deeply satisfying to the mind. There was a dual control on the Moth but as we went in for my first landing, the instructor remarked cheerfully, “You know, if you make a mistake, there is very little that I can do.” Of course there were howls of laughter as I bumped her along the ground but I had the feel of it, “It will be slow but you will learn.” Even the engine did not trouble me too much. The instruction book was in French and every section was explained so logically and clearly that for the first time I understood some elementary mechanical rules. It is always easier to learn scientific facts in French. The explanations are clear. It is the reverse with German. Complications are added in that language until the essential facts are hidden under pyramids of words.

  The course was thirty lessons. I had barely had four when the aerodrome was closed to civilians. Walter and Melitta Schmideberg, whom I had known in psychoanalytical circles, had arrived for a few days but we seemed to have made a pact not to listen to the news. A cable came from the Marmot, he and his wife were on the high seas, bound for New York. Drums sounded, the Swiss mobilized. Women replaced their husbands in the fields. A guard marched up and down the platform of our little local station. We sat round the radio and heard that England was at war but our own minds were numb. “It was the sight of the first dead,” Walter exclaimed, remembering 1914. I seemed to be struggling up the lane in the Isle of Wight towards the post office as if the intervening years had been wiped out with some dark sponge. We had all known so well the inevitable end of appeasement that I am sure that there was a break in the continuity of time and we felt again, quite literally, the utter exhaustion of the earlier conflict.

  The march to the consulates began. Traveling was impossible until the French mobilization had ended but it was important for names to be entered early on various lists. I was torn between wishing to remain at Burier and my duty to my mother. She cabled me that she had joined Doris at St. Keverne. Nobody had listened to my warnings in England, I had no particular place there and there might still be ways in Switzerland where I could help.

  I had barely time to think about the problem. Another wire came to say that my mother was dangerously ill in the hospital at Truro. Curiously enough, all her life she had dreaded going to Cornwall. I had refused several opportunities to travel in the Far East because I did not want to be far away in case I were needed, “I can always get to you in a day from Switzerland,” I had often reassured her. More cables came, she rallied, grew worse, and on September 16th she died. It was merciful that it happened so swiftly because she had always said that she could not bear another war.

  I used to think that I was more like my father but now I k
now better; the fire, the adventure in me, came from my mother’s side. I have never had my father’s detachment though I may have a little of his prescience and initiative, even a rudiment of his prudence. It is now more than twenty years since my mother died but I still get letters from those of her friends who survive, praising her goodness and speaking of the ways in which she had helped them. Both my parents had great courage. I was a disappointment to them once my childhood was over because I could not accept a number of stupid rules that had, after all, almost deprived them of happiness. It was the inevitable conflict of the generations. Their mark is on me although I am also myself: I try to carry on the essential part of their tradition whilst modifying it to meet the changing times and much of any aid that I have been able to give is directly derived from their influence.

  We got our ration cards, we waited for permits. One late September morning the Schmidebergs departed for France in their car and shortly afterwards H. D. left by train. She wanted to return to Perdita and her London apartment. I was now free to choose and decided to remain at Burier but our farewells were easy because I already had a visa to go to England to wind up my mother’s affairs, as soon as certain necessary documents were signed.