No, you were not good. But after the few people who are nerves of my body, in whom runs my blood, I loved you better than the others. That did not make me loyal to you. You had a presentiment when you said smiling,
“That North Sea you are so fond of is treacherous. I don’t think I trust it, even in summer.”
I have found it easier to be loyal to people I care less for. And then, with age, I am becoming less unstable.
A porter returning from the Halles came into the bistrot. He was sweating and filthy, an animal in the strength and smoothness of his muscles. The look on my young German’s face astonished me by its pure response and greed.
“Look at that strong sunburned fellow,” she said, seriously: “I admire him, I should like him to be my lover.”
“Probably he would beat you.”
“I should make him wash and, don’t you see?, teach him to respect me.”
“Not in a hundred years,” I said, with malice. “Prussian though you are.”
She laughed, showing her strong very white teeth. “Yes, you are right. . . . Do you know — I shall never marry. When I am the next year to being forty I shall adopt children, as many as I can get bread for. They will wear my friends’ cast-offs, and I shall be kind to them but just — and strict.”
*
He was sitting on the narrow pavement of the rue Mouffetard. A wall threw its shadow over him, over his rags, and over his face and its wrinkles — they were like dried-up streams with only a little dirt at the bottom. He was so old that he had outlived the last least flicker of thought in his brain. Or so it seemed until, moving with infinite caution, he pushed very lightly forward one of the broken bits of rubbish, indescribably old, dirty, worthless, he imagined he was going to sell. Was anyone poor enough, even here, to think of buying one of these filthy pieces of rag, broken handleless cups, a single greasy slipper? “But does he think he is going to sell them? ” Did he expect anything now? Yes. For an instant, when a passer-by hesitated, his eye flickered, a spark appeared, then vanished leaving only its absence. It was scarcely to be believed — except that both of us noticed it — that he loved this rubbish. Every few minutes his hand, the only part of him still expectant and alive, stole out to rearrange it. He spent an endless patience and tenderness on placing the stump of a knife so that it caught the light, and his fingers when he shook out a rag in which some threads of colour showed faintly, lingered on it, stroking and smoothing. You could think that these objects still held some mystery for him.
“Why does such a man live? What is being born if for this? Why: such lives? ” Year after year to have arranged his handful of rubbish in infinite space, to have moved his hand in it — for what? To please whom? For whom, at what level of this space, to notice, to be moved? Think of the unfolding of life in his body, of his mind opening slowly under the rain of impressions. Every gesture he made added to the depth of his life, until now, if anyone were capable of exploring it, its recesses would be infinitely deep. He was not conscious of them, except perhaps, in a deaf way, when his hand touched one of the more precious of his revolting bits of rubbish. But how often am I aware of depth in myself, and how often — usually — only able to rage in a flurried waste of strength at the surface?
A child, a little boy — his mother was bargaining at a stall for some green apples — halted in front of him and looked. The old man stared back. A faint smile, only a trembling of the wrinkles nearest his mouth, was his answer to the child’s gravity. The miracle was that he had answered. Turning, the child’s mother whisked him away. The old man, slowly, gently, drew the handleless cup a little nearer to him. Look: like any other artist, he spends his time realising himself in these objects. You saw that he had filled the cup full of himself.
A day or two later, when I passed, he was there. He had moved closer to the wall and folded his eyes. A middle-aged woman, his daughter perhaps or a granddaughter, was in charge; she was keeping herself to herself; she had no impulse to spill her energy into these things or any others. Her poverty was a hard ulcer in her, and it took all her strength.
*
“Dine with us this evening — rue de l’Université. A man is coming you should meet. You can perhaps write about him.”
“A friend of yours? ”
“Wait. Wait until you’ve seen him. . . .”
No, since he grew up, this man had never had a friend. He had colleagues, who were tools, rivals, victims. The little I knew about French politics persuaded me that he would return to office — he had for some time been out. No one could over-bid him in rapacity, guile, corruption. As things grew worse, these powers would call out irresistibly to be used. He had, too, a humour which gave him warmth — and warmth is above all the quality lacking in political life. He ate and drank greedily, and talked with a smiling candour about the vices of his late colleagues.
“They all have a secret they are ashamed of,” he said: “or a quite little dream which is a joke or the spit image of a vice.” He laughed like a schoolboy. “You think I’m too sly to dream. How wrong you are! Do you want to see my private joke? … There will be no war in Europe. Why should there? This country is not fit to oppose Germany, and if the English in the next few years change their minds they’ll find they’re too late, and they’ll be knocked out. What a mercy for the world! What pickings! No, no, we shall make a proper and perfectly necessary arrangement with the Germans and behind them advance into the next phase of history — it’s because they have forestalled us in it that they are now the strongest. Do you know what I mean? The epoch of internal ruthlessness. We shall keep our soldiers — there are other continents, and backward compared to Europe — but the power, the real power, will be in the hands of the police. It will be secret and entirely effective. Ears will open everywhere; in every family one member will be employed by it, unknown to his wife or his son. Should any person, man or woman, old or young, professor, civil servant, workman, begin to talk like a rebel, he will disappear. For the others, the disciplined citizens, we shall do enough to keep them happy. After all, what is happiness? To eat, to argue over a glass of wine, to sleep with or thrash your wife. No one who behaves himself will go short of these joys. The Germans, by the way, are typically clumsy — with their Dachaus. When my police execute a criminal it will be as secretly as if they were doing it in their sleep — and the consciences of other people will be quiet. I dislike offending consciences. There is nothing I dislike so much, except, possibly, being insulted by chatter about natural laws and the honour, the honour, mark you, of a nation. A nation has honour precisely as it has fleas — on this or that body. The statesman who talks of honour — unless he means something else, quite different — is a rogue. . . . I believe we shall have a little trouble with rogues. But it will pass.”
When he had gone my host said,
“He enjoys pretending to be the new Fouche. . . . You’re trembling — you mustn’t be so simple.”
I had grown cold. A joke is a joke or the image of a truth. . . . There have been dictators and ruthless powerful men who have got rid of their enemies: this man, if he has the power, will murder as well the simplest things, the child’s trust in his father, the man’s in the trivial circumstances, sensuous or gentle, of his life, the woman’s in the chairs she polishes and the bread she bakes. His was the pure instinct to be separate, the lack in one thing of all the others, that I had felt here, and he carried it to its ultimate. When he had done his work, there would only be dissolution and distrust. The poison always threatening us, asleep in the veins, in the oldest rocks of our inner world, would move and suddenly get rid of us — this time all. I had come here, to Paris, to learn this.
*
The same friend who believes that part of a writer’s experience is to catch his own hidden cruelty reflected in the world took me with him to a house in the avenue Emile-Acollas. In the long anteroom, a double line of footmen like freshly-painted lampposts; at the door of the drawing-room, the last pair, speaking together
, repeated the names. The drawing-room was full of people, the women unbelievably elegant, as if each had been drawn for the occasion. The four lustres in the corners of the ceiling drew up brittle rays of light from jewels and finger-nails, crossing and returning them, so that the heads of the guests hung from glittering wires. I was unwilling to move about. Certainly I was out of place here, but it was not likely that any of these people would notice me, except to avoid me as if I were the angle of a chair. I knew that I was alive, but I was not certain any of the others were. This allowed me to feel indifferent.
Our hostess interested herself vaguely in writers. There, against a wall, was the wealthiest of French publishers. And here was that young writer, essayist and poet, who has a singular talent for splitting off layers of personality until these lie round him like finger-nails, on which he draws eyes and a mouth. It is his way of avoiding the remarkable grace and wit so many French writers of this century show in the profound statement of platitudes. There is no doubt that they are, on an average, more intelligent than their English contemporaries, but so much of their brain-work is nothing else. I think, too, that they have begun to live on their capital, on Montaigne and Racine and La Bruyère — Valéry, their last great poet, who spent twenty years in accumulating capital of his own, must be — how old? — sixty? And Claudel?
There was a stir in the anteroom. Looking round I saw the lines of tall footmen bending like poplars, but towards each other. A single guest was announced as His Excellency. . . . I did not hear the rest of it. He was, as soon as he came in, delicately mobbed. The young writer was presented to him and rubbed his mind across and across the new-comer’s ankles, with feline warmth. Women offered him, spitted on a glance or a tongue, their devotion, as much of it as the wires drawn through their heads allowed them to show.
“Who is it? ” I asked my friend.
“Surely you know the German Ambassador? What are you thinking? ”
“That it is a rehearsal.”
Toute pensée émet un Coup de dés. If, after exposing your mind blankly, like an idiot, to another person or to a scene, you reply instantly to the question: What do you think of …?, the image springing from the mirror surface of your mind will resemble a truth. There was the humiliating evening in London when — I was very young and no one in the room knew me, not even my hostess who had smiled gently and absentmindedly when her friend presented me to her. For an hour I sat and watched without thinking. I was leaving, and my hostess spoke to me. “What did you think of S-? If you would like him to read anything you have written, let me see it. He can do a great deal for a young writer.”
Alarmed, jerked, by being suddenly spoken to, out of my looking, “He is not interested,” I said, “in young women.”
She looked at me with such severe rebuke that I thought I should burst into tears. “Don’t repeat foolish gossip,” she said coldly.
It was only years later I learned that S—of whom my ignorance had never heard — was homosexual.
*
There is perhaps a Montmartre which could still be lived in by a foreigner — who was prepared to wrap himself, as refugees do, in his poverty, only taking it off to sleep, or to walk in one of those streets, completely unlit, where the rumour is confirmed that there is a sky and stars, even a moon. One night towards one o’clock I felt my way along a street, after a visit to German artists living — it would be fairer to say that from day to day they existed a little less — in a narrow stone basement near the Place du Tertre. (At this hour the square was empty, except of a few trees which turned out, surprisingly, to be real.) There was a moon, very feeble. I was looking up, and I stumbled over the foot of a heap of rags lying in a doorway. The heap shifted, and an arm, bare to the shoulder, moved like a tentacle under the half-frozen light.
‘Even in your bed you’re not left in peace.”
The woman’s sleeping voice, old, hoarse, had kept a tremor of invitation, as though, living in these obscene rags, it now were the prostitute and could only repeat its acts. The arm flung out was held together by strong tendons. Nearly asleep again, she rolled into the light and lay with her rags falling apart on her thigh and a breast. The flesh had perished, and you saw as if laid open the hidden organisation of the body — marvellous even in ruin, a labour of construction which must have demanded infinite skill. You could understand why the voice clung to it.
There is somewhere in the Landes a church which has been worn down by neglect and the salt air; its walls seem to be ribs and indestructible. A stone figure, all that remains of the tomb of some family, is laid in the porch. The mouth smiles, with a young candour. Immortality even in decay, and a rough patience. The woman, the old worn-out prostitute or beggar … was she a woman, is the church a church? Or are they both a single gesture of the work-worn hand, grasping, still young, of their country?
*
These tapestries, it says, were woven about 1500. Les Vendanges. A much nearer past gathers itself there, among the neat roots of flowers scattered thickly over the ground, and it breaks over me before I can turn aside. Here are all the exquisite glowing colours of the beds of tulips and forget-me-nots in the Valley Gardens in Scarborough. The air is fresh with spring and salt with the sea at the end of the road. The steely North Sea. My mother looked at the beds of tulips as though she were leaning on them, as though they could give her everything she had missed if only, if only, she could look long enough for the colours, the shapes, to plant themselves, leaves, thick green stems, wet earth, all, in her. And with them the noisy rooks and the light. Oh, and the many streets of large and small villas, so ordinary, so nothing, you would think, beside houses she had seen in New Orleans or Cadiz, but she admired them with such eagerness that when with a sigh she gave up trying to own the tulips we turned away at once to walk through street after street, slowly, that she might absorb the details of their commonplace architecture, and the windows, the many curtains — it was the era of short curtains stretched on rods across the lower half of windows, the side curtains not keeping out enough of the light — all in some way significant for her. Deeply. So that it never occurred to me even to feel bored by this pilgrimage.
There is a root of daisies in one tapestry. From it, as in one of those long Chinese paintings, unrolls endlessly a childhood so far away that I can stand and look at it. However long I stay looking I shall not see more than a fraction of that infinity — bounded by the rooms and garden railings of the first house I remember living in with her. Everything I can see is clear, but silent, an unbreakable silence. The curtain of coloured beads on the stairs parts without a sound; knocked by a finger-nail, the ostrich-egg rings back silence; feet press without a creak up and down, up and down, the wooden stairs; the taps drip soundlessly, the laburnum ripples as though in water; pressing the earth against the root of crimson daisies she bought in the market this morning, my mother’s fingers, quick, work-swollen, are more silent in their patience than her eyelids when she looks up, and frowns, at the child stepping on the freshly-raked border. How clumsy, how far-off, today how changelessly falsely near.
*
A statue in wood, not more than six or seven inches, of a pregnant woman: warm-coloured and smooth, the wax rubbed and worn to a glowing skin: upcast eyes, forehead wrinkled in distress and gently smiling mouth, young thighs flowing down from the creased waist. Georgina, if what you bore had not been death, it could be you — you in your smiling self-absorption, your almost slatternly playing with life, and careless loss of the future. It was this loss that pressed lightly against the spine and it curved inwards, and between the narrow shoulders. The future tore you out of itself and let you fall and lie where you fell. There is more of you in this fourteenth-century wooden carving than in the grave I have not seen. Nor shall take the trouble to see.
*
Is there any people in the world which has more curiosity, a more purely destructive power of curiosity, than the French? Or is it only the intellectuals, and among them only one generation,
which destroys in knowing? Their virtuosity is admirable, and they live, I think, to show it off, to exercise it.
A few tables of the café faced the lively shabby rue Soufflot, With two young to middle-aged writers, Frenchmen born in a province, yet, and easily, natives of Paris, I was waiting to be joined by an English writer, their, not my friend. They began talking about the war which they said must come now — in a year or a few months. One of them took from his pocket the notebook in which he was drafting the scenes of a play about Ulysses. The last but one scene was between Ulysses and Antinous. . . .
Ulysses.—My dear boy, you bore me. And if that were all — at my age one expects young men to be boring. But I know that the violence — natural at your age — of your ideas, still more your admirable speeches, are going to provoke the very disaster you fear. Why not leave well alone?
Antinous.—I don’t understand you. You hear the reports travellers are bringing in now every day. You know the strength of the barbarian army. And you shut your ears. If you have a subtle policy, explain it to me.
Ulysses.—It’s simple. I prefer peace.
Antinous.—Absence of war isn’t peace.
Ulysses.—You have no idea how closely — to a soldier — it resembles it. This morning I woke early. Everything was clear, with the clearness of a pure windless sky. Everything was young. And you can believe me that at my age I know what it is to look at the young world. I saw my wife leaning into her mirror, I saw the light flowing over my fields and along the hill-sides covered with olive-trees — and behind them a bright thread, the sea. My sea. I knew then what you don’t — yet. A day on which there is no war is pure gain, worth any cost. You have no wife to look at you in her mirror. No olives ripening.
The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell Page 8