It has no separate existence in space. It exists in time-waves — the wave flung across Europe by the revolution in Russia, later waves starting one behind the other in Germany, in Spain, in Austria. It meets you in any poor or half-demolished street, or on the stairs of hotels shabbier than the one we lived in.
One German I knew was a painter. He need not, since he was not a Jew and his work was unobtrusive and gentle, in no sense advanced, have left Munich. He left, in 1933, in order to breathe. What he left was not terror, not disgrace, but an easy secluded life — his paintings were much admired by all except the eccentrics whose disgrace he chose to share — for the extreme harshness of his years in Paris. He was an old man. You had only to look at him to see that he was good and innocent. Smiles setting out from the corners of his eyes contradicted the web of grief covering his face. In his room — it was really a cupboard, half below the stairs of a house sinking under the weight of its own filth and age — he had a couch, a backless chair, and a stove where he boiled potatoes. He lived on them; they were clean and cheap. He had a friend, much younger, a Berlin Jew, sickly and gross-lipped. They lived at opposite ends of Paris and took it in turn to visit each other, of course on foot.
The younger man had a room, a large room, on the ground floor of a house which had been condemned and was evading sentence by falling quietly to pieces: you reached it across the pitfalls of a small courtyard; a barren vine covered one wall with its stems and overgrown hairy leaves. He was a writer: now and then, with a good deal of waiting about and cringing, he sold an article and had money to spend.
Today he invited me to supper. It was a party, for the German family, father, mother, and two children, he had taken under his wing. His wing! I arrived a little early, and found him with his friend busy wrapping up a large watercolour that the old painter — it was a miracle — had sold. To a former patron who had discovered him in Paris. It was to be packed and left the next morning at an hotel. Mistrusting his skill, the painter had carried it across Paris, and now, as gently as though it were alive, his friend was swaddling it in a piece of checked cotton, the rags of a shirt, and sheets of paper he had begged from a shop. His fingers shook lightly with anxiety and love. He drew me aside to tell me how much the painter had been paid. It was not much.
We were overheard. “Emil,” the painter said reproachfully, “you are still grumbling. And on a day when I am divinely happy.”
“He could have given you the proper sum.”
“But he came to see me in my room,” the painter said, smiling, “and he saw how little I spend.”
The guests came. Emil made the coffee and put on the table a pound of biscuits and a small bottle of rum. He was pleased and very proud of this feast. Suddenly he saw the painter look in a small bowl on the table and move it stealthily aside. Reaching for it — yes, he had forgotten to buy sugar. At once all his pride was wiped out by shame. He almost wept.
“But, Emil,” his friend cried, “the rum! We’ll pour the rum into our coffee. Who wants sugar when he can have strong sweet rum? ”
The children, too, had a few drops of the precious stuff measured into their cups. Their hands, the paws of small animals, stretched out quickly again and again to the plate of biscuits. They ate in silence, accepting the bliss of this moment as gently as they had accepted terror, flight, hunger. Their world — I felt it beginning to open round me — was not, as their parents’ was, shut in by hills, with clearly-marked roads leading just so far: to the Prefecture, the bakery, the room where a coat or a little money would, at the price of answering a great many questions, be handed out — not grudgingly and yet as if grudged. The cracked plate with its biscuits rested just within reach, at the edge of all they did not try to understand. Anxiety was reflected on to them, but for hours, for an endless time, they ignored it.
At this moment the others were talking about papers. To possess as many francs as would buy a certain paper made the difference between living, however wretchedly, as human beings or as vermin, and hunted. Each time the old painter began to speak Emil interrupted. He was terribly afraid that his friend meant to offer up the sum paid for the picture. In the end, in his sharp Berlin voice, he began singing. He sang Ich grolle nicht, and the others, not the children, sang with him.
I could not follow the words. But I caught, rising in the darkness of the room lit by a candle, and from a depth I have not yet touched nor can touch, the strong note of existence itself. To hear it without the long failure of living, would not that be what these children still had, and what I remember I had, a freedom in which the body is so immaterial that it would be no shock if suddenly it became the body of a bird or a tree?
*
My friend left weeks ago. It is easier to stay in this hotel than to look for another. Besides, I have not much money. And this room suits me. I sit writing, I eat in slightly better cafés, where I am not so likely to be poisoned, and I can come and go on these stairs without meeting a soul. This morning I went into the Luxembourg Gardens and sat there, under the smooth light flowing, a bland oil, round trees, children, stone vase. Pressed into myself by the separateness of everything here, I felt at first only the absence of feeling. It is like that with me so often. Things try — the light striking the dome of the Panthéon, a hand, almost an offering, laid on a café table — to break through the silence to me, but more and more I see only myself, moving among isolated objects which little by little are losing their weight and hardness, their substance, and moving farther off. If I could stay here alone until I began to hear. I know that as soon as I leave I shall lose this … attentiveness. I am weakly restless — patience has to be forced on me, by living alone in a place I don’t know. The darkness closing round me, the weight on my eyelids, absence or disregard of all other sounds, lead where? I can imagine at the other edge of this forest light springing, and warmth, smooth and heavy, on my eyes, but I have not the courage to go on, to find my way back, or forward — at this point they would be the same — to a life, a milk pressed for me by a work-worn serene finger, to the sharply-pointed northern air on the fields, to lights sunk — are they of windows or ideas? — in the so gentle and tranquil night, to the Church, landmark for sailors and pilgrims, on the edge of the cliff, to the voices, stronger than the defaced lettering on its stones, of the long grass, rank and wind-beaten, to a future of riddles, to disinterest. It is easier to turn aside.
I see myself stand up and go away, a stranger and clumsy, along these paths between the reluctant trees of October. I see — but I am deaf.
*
It had rained, and I walked through a great many narrow ill-lit streets, crossed the Seine, and at last, shivering, because the air was cold and still damp, I sat outside a small restaurant and asked for coffee. The dark bulk of the Louvre was near, and there was a street-lamp, a weak cloudy vapour round a stem. Leaning against it a girl and a young man. The light fell on her thin arms straining at his shoulders, and her face, plain, with closed eyes. Desire separated them from everything. They were a single ungentle pain. A cold sleet began falling. She spread her hands above his head pressed at her throat.
*
Last night dreaming my mother alive, and living, by herself, in the end house of that street of houses with narrow sedate gardens which faces the inner harbour, I felt that she was in danger. Heavy with anxiety I went to see her. Three of us drove to the house; I saw with fear that all the blinds were down. I ran in. The door was open, the floor broken in places, and the walls cracked. I called. To my joy, she answered. She was there, safe; she must, I said, come and live with me, and we put her in the car and drove off. There was scarcely room for me; I had to sit on an edge of the seat as — but I did not think of it until I woke — in the car leaving her funeral.
For a long time, in the greyness of this Parisian room, I wondered whether she would forgive me for leaving her.
Second Book
1938
22 May. I have been with my youngest sister, talking of whe
re we could take her children if war comes in the next weeks: the boy two years old and the child who will be born in a few days or hours.
It seems the last moment of decision. As though the circles are narrowing now quickly and the centre is very close. There is only news of tension — the stretched nerves of a hand waiting to be severed — and of German and Czech troops moving to the frontier between their countries. While I was with her I rang up a friend in London who will always know what is happening in Europe, and repeated what he said — The feeling is that it is not war. My sister, who for a moment had come back nearer to the surface of her life from its inner engrossing task, smiled and went back there, leaving the smile to lie vaguely on the surface, forgotten: she was, as always, too busy.
Before I sleep I must think about her. Think. . . . That old tyrant, my grandmother Mary Hervey, had the same clear coldly blue eyes as my mother — in a vague fear at seeing them go away I laid my hand over them when she died. In my family one man or woman in every generation has these eyes, without a shadow on their blueness: the eyes of all the others are ambiguous, clouded by secrecy and a twisted diffidence; we are perhaps intimidated and driven into ourselves by the directness, the quick radiance and anger, of this one’s look.
Its clearness has been given, in my generation, to my youngest sister. And with it the intense loyalties and hatreds, and the swift frankness, of those of us whom no one, no master for the time of the family, has been able to subdue. She defeated my mother easily. In the early struggle of their wills, hers conquered by its mute rage — of a child of four. True, my mother was tired from her life, but I doubt how much that accounts for her new gentleness and timidity before her last-born. I doubt it because I, too, am careful with her and, yes, timid. I, too — when I know that she wants something very much — am anxious to give it to her. This has little to do with my will; it is an instinct; it springs from a source deep enough to have no name — or I have never taken the trouble to name it. Love? Responsibility? Her being young? … It has always been there. . . . I suspect that my mother, too, felt this secret compulsion, blind, but too clear to be disregarded. Half with guilt, she gave all she had. Once or twice she made excuses to me for giving the youngest so much. I encouraged her to do it — but that was because I saw it pleased her and gave her her only deep happiness of this time.
My sister grew up less and less like me — quick-witted, practical, loyal where she loved and pitiless in her dislikes. My energy is patient, hers a quiver starting in the nerves and plunging through her like light through trees. Fair-haired, the natural scarlet, clear, fine, of her lips a sign of her blood’s quickness, slender. Deceptively hard — with a kernel of purest unchanging devotion to a few persons — her husband first, her children, me if I am attacked.
She is generous and unforgiving. When she was very young she befriended a stray cat and saved for it every day part of her cup of milk. One day it stole from the pantry. Turning on it with hate, she drove it away and never again allowed it into the house, because it had disgraced itself and failed her.
23 May. I have a niece. In the single glimpse I caught of them I thought her eyes were a light clear blue.
A great many bombing planes in formation passed over the house in the morning. My sister said to herself that war must be coming at once and the Government was trying to reassure us. She waited, to ask about it, until I came, knowing that the nurses would lie, and resenting gentleness as a humiliation, Why did she think I should tell her, at this moment, a disturbing truth? And she is deeply uninterested, still busy bringing order into this new workroom of her life.
Who will describe for us as they are these days of waiting? We carry with us everywhere, the whole time, sleeping and awake, the thought and expectation of war. It has already gone on too long. For too long we have been reading about events — and from here some of them look unimportant: a brawl in the streets of a frontier town and a man, a single faceless man, shot; a meeting of students and flags; the speech, senseless and noisy, of some local dictator — and wondering whether this nothing meant that it had begun? Begun? Has it, for years, even hesitated — that slow movement of a finger towards the lever? Whole peoples are waiting, men in front of machines or in fields, women quiet after childbirth, and others to whom suddenly the bones of a child’s head, or a man’s, seem too frail.
Is there any way in which my sister and her family could go away in time? Perhaps to Canada? Of course not. With the others, they are caught.
28 August. Part of my mind refuses to attend to this new crisis. It goes on, with intense care, as though everything else were asleep, writing The Children Must Fear, for a book in which it will be the last section: written, because it presses in my mind like an anxiety, first. Selfish or insensible?
You slept, do you remember?, during her last night.
I can count on the fingers of a hand the persons who would always, in any crisis of their lives, engage my whole attention, with or against my will and without the smallest grain of reserve. My son, my husband, my sister, her two children. . . . It seems that England is not one of these persons, since I can sit here and write instead of listening. The obsession is not far off, and the almost stupid despair. They seize me as soon as I have written all at one time I can, and force me to attend. Until then — I write. I should be ashamed of this unwillingness. Yet what, now, can I do? What was for years at the other side of the door is in the room. I see it when I look up. If it is going to live here, one might as well get used to it and keep quiet.
Who said that? Not I. A great many men and women all speaking at once in my blood, in that old blood which I feel sometimes has become too impatient and bored to hold out any longer. There are so few of us now; at home my father is alone in his house, with the loot of his voyages and the photographs he pastes in books: none of us is willing to live there. He is shabby and grows shabbier. What does he think about in the silence: what comes from a past endured and nowhere shared?
*
The door opened then. It was my son who, not having said he would come, came in, from his aerodrome. The terror I have been avoiding sprang on me. I can drive it into its cage. I can talk, smile, tell stories, I am quiet. This old trick of women is not wisdom. Cowardice, more like. We agree to too much for our children. The question is not put to us in words we can understand. Do you, they say, want your child to feel that so far as he is concerned freedom, justice, and those other enduring forms into which humanity still keeps trying to pour itself, are less important than he is? Do you want him to be afraid of pain? They never say: Are you willing that he should be torn living in pieces? Can you bear the cold of the earth on his eyes and hands? Put to us like that, what should we say? Even those who believe, yes, believe, in life everlasting? That is, in life. We still want for them this life, down to its smallest bud, this sun, and the least of these stars.
*
I must — before the war comes — clear my mind of the quarrel which has been going on in it for years. Since the time when to my loathing of war was joined loathing of the newest tyranny, an old one adapted and brought up to date by cruelly simple-minded men — first in Russia, where, in spite of the deaths, it seemed possible there were seeds the future was going to spring from (even if, as it grew, it took on more and more the strong Tartar look in its stem and leaves); then in Germany. And in Germany, it was too clear, the future was being shut up and tortured in places where all the sickening cruelties of the past had revived suddenly, like seeds left in a tomb. So long as there was a chance, the least, that the war we knew was coming would not come, would content itself with carrying off lambs and children from outlying farms, the brawl could go on. I could carry in my mind two refusals, cancelling each other.
I am confused by an agony of fear. That there are millions of us who have reached the same place is no good. Think, you must think.
Is it true that, except by the unhearing, unseeing, the falsely romantic, the morally or sensually perverted, or the interest
ed, wars are recognised to be cruel, wasteful, deeply useless?
Is it true that the commonly sensible and intelligent man does not want to become part of a machine for slaughtering men? But obeys, and for months he prepares himself, with the sacrifice of his time and will, to perform the act which he knows to be inexcusable, and does not excuse — or excuses with hysteria (Montherlant): or he avoids it in thought. Or — there is the clever young historian who has decided, on the ground that if such crimes must be committed he cannot leave them to others, to train as a bombing pilot — he chooses deliberately to take the worst on himself.
Is it true that the soldier by profession is often less indulgent to war than the non-combatant civilian? And yet, without remorse, he makes himself responsible for as many deaths as a plague. Sometimes, against the advice of men who know better, he insists on a Passchendaele of young men. What insulating dullness allows him to accept honours, or show himself to the people as if he were an actor and harmless?
Is it true that we read placidly the phrase: Our losses were only: …? That we shall check the feeling of pity which will rise in us when, from our own experience, we see and hear what is going on in an enemy town during an air-raid? As if, at the other side of a frontier, anguish weighed less: as if over there children are not children.
Is it true that war is the opportunity of bullies? of jacks-in-office? of men whose greeds are so swollen that in all sincerity they identify them with the nation?
It is all true.
And true that in certain sensitive people — perhaps in many? — war calls out their purest good. They dig down in themselves to a gentleness, a selfless serenity, a refusal of ambition, that in the rest of their life nothing reaches. In spite even of boredom, they are content, and it can happen that they feel the loss of this unseen contentment more than they welcome peace.
The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell Page 10