It was two o’clock when I went to bed. I was exhausted, but for a long time could not sleep. I thought of my unfinished work, of my young sister and the children, of my son.
*
22 May. For three hours this afternoon I tried to advise and comfort the wife of an Austrian writer, swept into internment last week. Some of her English friends have refused to see her. She is living alone in their cottage, and may herself be interned. I wrote down everything about both of them, to do what I could. She said she was afraid that when the Germans invade, the refugees will be handed over to them. This shocked me. Then I reflected that in the disorder they might be forgotten — and found by their Nazi countrymen. . . . At the Ministry I was told that Churchill has flown to Paris again to stiffen the French. . . . I was hoping, although a second evening would be a supreme piece of luck, to see my son again. In the evening I rang the number he had given me. The man who answered said, “They were late leaving.” For a second I didn’t understand, then realised he was telling me that the orders had come and they were gone. No use to stay a second night with X. I caught a late train. . . . The sky had kept a clear light— an illusion •— in the unlighted carriage it was too dark to read. In this curiously still sky the balloons were black and shrunken, like squeezed grape-skins. An immense moon, so bright that it reflected a gleam or two of the sunset, rose on the left. The Thames was a glass, a real glass, the reflections in it of the trees clear and very sharp.
My sister had gone to bed. Usually she sleeps when her head touches the pillow — she must have been anxious; when she heard us she came down. Her hair tumbled on her shoulders, she was a girl, younger than her years. My brother-in-law was still at the factory, which is on a twenty-four-hour shift, all our supplies in France have been lost. “Perhaps you and the children had better go to North Wales,” I said. She shook her head, looking past me with our mother’s stubbornness. “I can’t leave all our fruit in the garden, it must be picked and bottled. We shall need it.” It seemed a good reason, as good as mine for going on with Cousin Honore.
24 May. The Germans have been in possession of Boulogne since last night. . . . I spent the morning writing — to send to all those centres of the P.E.N, we can still reach, so that they can put it about — a letter addressed to that conscience of the world which, when the Czechs wrote to it, was so comfortably absent. I understand now why they wrote at all. Addressing it to the world, they wrote to themselves, to their mind at the moment when it was to be crushed by the Gestapo thumb, to all the places in their body which were still sensible to a pleasure, a grief, an injustice, coming to them from other peoples. And another thing — I had imagined them doing nothing else but choosing the words for this letter they knew would not be answered, except by themselves. But of course, they had to leave it off in the middle to peel potatoes for lunch or bandage a child’s knee or run out to pick chives or, suddenly recalling it, alter a sentence in the manuscript pushed aside the morning when it became clear that there was no time to finish anything — except just this useless letter
To the Conscience of the World
*
30 May. My German translator — the woman who used to translate into German a few of my books, and has been a refugee since long before the war — came here today and implored me volubly to go to America. Why did she make this journey only to warn me, me, that when the country is invaded and, she implied, taken, I shall be put in a concentration camp or murdered? She is equally in danger. It was because she is tired of running away. . . . “I ran to Italy in 1933 and here in 1937, I can’t run any farther. But you must go —” she began weakly to cry — “you English don’t understand, you don’t believe you’re in danger. You don’t know.”
The more she wept and argued, the harder I grew — and the more sure that we shall fight. It must look — to these poor devils, and perhaps to neutrals — as though we are going to be punished at last for our crimes, our immoral hatred of war, and our reluctance to begin fighting. Some of them, perhaps, are not sorry, they think it will take us down a peg. Even our allies. The French especially, who believe that to reason clearly is to be wise, must expect our defeat to follow theirs — and what a consolation! But wait, wait, my friends — we may even go up a peg.
I tried to comfort my German friend. I told her that there are moments where logic and intelligence are less reliable weapons than plain stupidity. We are too stupid to see what must be clear to the rest of the continent.
“You are living — and crying into your tea,” I said, “on a corner of Europe which knows more about human freedom than about logic. . . .”
May I be forgiven the boast. But I am tired of reciting our sins. Which nation will praise us if we do not, once a decade, praise ourselves? It is time now.
*
1 June. Nothing, no moment, in any of our lives can equal this one. For days we have thought of our men, trapped, driven to their last hold, almost in sight of us. The thought has eaten at our tables, stood by our beds, and waited for us when we fell asleep so that its were the first eyes we saw, fixed on ours. And they have escaped. All the world knows how. What it doesn’t know, what no one, except ourselves, ever will know, is this storm in us of relief, pride, joy. They are home. We have them.
Nothing will make us afraid again. No more doubts, no fears. It is not a victory. It is deliverance. O infinitely greater, and small enough to be held secretly in the hand — until daylight.
*
15 June. This evening when I came into the kitchen, my sister was setting the trays for breakfast in the morning. She looked at me and smiled. You forget, about the people you live with, that they are beautiful. I felt a slight shock of surprise and pleasure. How hard it is to describe, using only words, the red and white of cheeks (she reminds me of the tale of Snow-white and Rose-red), the colour of eyes which become deeper and brighter at certain moments of a life, the quickness of a young body. Children escaped from hers without marring or making it slower. She is all neat swift energy and impatience. It is hard to believe she will age — ever.
Today I finished writing Cousin Honoré. For the first time for many years — since we took this large house together in the year before the war — I have been writing almost easily. And often, in spite of the war, happy — especially on fine days when I look up from my manuscript and see the trees in the orchard quivering with light, or the tassels of lilac move slowly in answer to some pull, invisible, of the roots sunk in the grass. My sister runs this household — the one thing I always hated — of two families, and I have only to do certain tasks. Which is no burden at all. I am free, as I have never been free. It is worth the drawbacks of this house and way of living.
*
Never has Europe been so near as now, when it is leaving us. You could think it leaned back and brushed lightly now our hands, now a throat from which the voice will spring. And wherever it touches, a shock passes through our nerves to give life to a memory. To the Europe we have lived. Yesterday the Germans bombed Mantes — Mantes-la-Jolie … In the summer evening the Seine, running lightly, is grey-green, the colour of sage, except just the moment where a single curve reflects the last yellow of the sunset. Now look from the bridge to the small island, in mid-stream, the fle-aux-Dames, dragging at its double cable of tall poplars behind a line of willows, spectral, their colour buried. A path circles the island behind the poplars. Walk, it is dark now, towards the old house. Look across the wide courtyard to the flight of steps leading to the doorway, and the light from within profiles two figures, mediaeval or a scene from a ballet. You may even know that it is a youth hostel and that in daylight the bare shapely legs, the delicacy, the air of plumes, will become the blouse, shorts, and muscular calves of two girls: the enchantment, at this hour, remains. Leave the island and walk back — do you know what day this is? — to the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville. France is this small square, paved with cobblestones, the shabby Hôtel de Ville, the trestle-tables outside two small cafés, the Renaissance fou
ntain, dry, shabby, neglected, against which two boys have made with branches an arbour to play a concertina and drum for the young citizens of Mantes-la-Jolie to dance on the worn stones: at the wooden tables the others look on, and drink — what are they drinking? this is the fourteenth of July 1939.
*
17 June. I went this afternoon to buy wood. Some village women were waiting outside the man’s cottage where we buy it. They talked a little, and calmly, about the French surrender. None of them doubted we should go on fighting alone — they did not even speak of it — but one said “They should send the children away now.” On the wireless Churchill’s short grim speech. Thank God, he made no appeal to America. How well he knows us at this moment, and that we should have felt humiliated and less certain. Before going to sleep I read the terrible sixth chapter of 2 Kings. I always believed that the strength coming from it was clearer than the horror. Now I know.
*
18 June. It was only half-past five when I woke — and thought instantly, Ils nous lâchent. An amazing exultance seized me, like that other early morning when, not expecting them, I saw the Alps affronting the window. That great Doh piercing the air (and my body) is unrepeatable, but the sense now of being alone — not yet isolation — prolongs it in this curious echo.
The earth is dry and cracked, the grass burned out. Today, as every day for weeks, the sun flames in the sky like a comet. There are going to be nectarines, dozens of them, on the tree against the wall, and the plum-trees have already more green fruit than leaves. Turning her back on us, France is bequeathing us a summer. Very kind. It would be kinder still if she sent us her Fleet.
30 June. Still the drought, heat, gross dazzling clouds, made fast above blue gulfs. Coming in gusts, a dry wind. We are still waiting, and surely it cannot be put off many more days, or a month, for Hitler to attack England. The soldiers here are making a deep wide moat across the fields, and places at the side of the lane for machine-guns. One of the village women, looking at the barricades, cross-pieces of wood and barbed wire, at the side of our road, said to me, “They look sadly home-made.” They do, too. . . . It occurred to me that I should destroy the letters people have written to me and I have kept — I keep very few, those which gave me something. If we are defeated, or only if we are invaded, and the Gestapo came here, the writers of the letters would be compromised. Is this absurd? I don’t think it is. So many of the refugees I have tried to help were more obscure than I am, yet they suffered and caused others to suffer: the Gestapo uses a fine net.
With a little grief, I tore up and burned, on the garden bonfire, the small packet of letters from the tallboy. But, just as if it were a trick of my mania for destroying — I destroy everything finished with, letters, papers, manuscripts; if I could not get rid any better way of clothes and chipped cups I would destroy them: I destroy all half-broken things, to put them out of their misery — a trick to get possession of me, I went on to drag out of my bookshelves all my books on foreign affairs, world politics, economics, sociology, all the neat piles of pamphlets. Rage seized me at the thought that I had wasted so much of my life and reason on them. I threw them on the bonfire. Which went out. I had to light it again several times with branches as dry as the books. I have tortured my mind to understand these things, when it might have been humbly reading Racine or learning to read Greek. What a fool. What a misguided mistaken fool.
My love of destroying is odd, since I keep, and wilfully or with remorse, more useless memories than most people. Of many rooms in which the drowning glance hesitates, of lace curtains chosen by my mother to admit light but no glances even of friends, roads which became habits or a dream, departures when nothing of the long voyage need or could be foreseen by the child, grief of a young man no longer alive, long coarse grass bleached by the salt wind, the tray, lacquered, square with deep sides, used on birthdays to hold the presents, the few moments when happiness, or it may as easily be shame, fixed its image in the mind with a clear colourless acid. I keep all these, but tear up as if I hated it every document which should remind me of the past or has something in it of my life.
As soon as I had finished destroying, the balance dipped on the other side and I began to make a list of things I should like — supposing I too became a refugee, like these Poles and Czechs who are coming here now, from France, and had time to take anything at all — to save. . . . It is not true that I never save anything. Turning out an old despatch-case I found in it the very little bags, size of a small purse, I made from a piece of white calico, and marked them in indelible ink: Rent and Rates; Coal, Light and Gas; Food; Savings; Clothes, etc. etc. This was in the second year of the last war, in my first, and detested house. The sum divided monthly between them was about ten pounds. You can imagine the virgin flatness of the bag marked Savings. It is in this time, in those days when five hours of profound sleep divided into lengths a torrent of energy, that I place the moment where time turned on itself, and from flowing endlessly, in a young light, began that sudden withdrawal which at an altered speed, but irresistible, it has never relaxed. How foolish they look, these small calico money-bags, with the draw-tapes meant to keep safe their few shillings, and never able to prevent Food being in debt at the end of the month to Payments on Furniture. They may have thought, since they were survivors, the only ones, of a time before time, that they would outlive me. But see, I’m going to burn them, with all the rest.
*
My deep failure is that I finished nothing. I did not bring any of the stages of my life to an end, so that it died richly and naturally into another. I ran away. Always. Leaving them broken off, like green branches thrown down to wither. No, nothing was ever finished. Is there anything I can do now with this rest of my life? If I could turn it into one book worth writing, or even a few lines. . . . For that one needs a discipline, a force of concentration and the giving up of self, which is very rare; if I could have contained it I should have behaved in that way from the beginning. I was too ordinary and coarse-meshed. I had been given the strength to form and send out a child after giving him all, all, a mother can give a child. But for this too I lacked discipline and attentiveness, and gave too much because I had withheld, and wasted, part.
*
3 July. These single German planes, loosing their bombs blindly in the country, are the first pattering drops of the rain which has drenched Europe. Everything behaves as if a downpour were expected. Even the cloud of starlings which this morning rose, in the single thunder of wings followed by a shower of cries, from all the trees at the edge of the heath — it was because above them a hawk hung motionless. And even the magpies — one, two, then a second pair — springing in a sudden curve from the tallest elm, as if released by a lever. These hazards, at any other time signs, peaceable and modest, of a spring under the wrinkled surface of life, are today the fears, the pleasure, of war. There are a few minutes left. The cloud, with these first heavy drops, is lower. . . . Last night’s bombs were our first. I woke and was out of the bed and running to the night nursery in the same moment as the distant firing, coming suddenly nearer — as though salutes were being fired at points along the route of a procession — reached our guns, behind the village. . . . Why did I snatch up Judy rather than Nicholas? … He was sitting up in bed and asked in a calm voice, “What is that noise? ” — “Nothing,” I said: “only the bangs. You know. . . .” I carried her, still asleep, downstairs and gave her to N. to take to the cellar. Going back I met my brother-in-law carrying Nicholas; behind them, with the attache-case where she keeps the housekeeping money, neatly in separate little boxes, my sister. I had meant to go down again to the cellar, but seen from my window the searchlights were so fine I could not leave them. The others stayed for a few minutes in the cellar, then went back to bed and to sleep. It was absurdly silly, because the bombs had been dropped, harmlessly in the fields, when I was on the stairs with the sleeping child — not that we knew then where they had dropped — but we have had no experience. . . . It o
nly seemed natural — almost a habit.
What happened this morning was not so easy to accept. The clouds were very low, and a single German machine flew out of them, as suddenly as one of yesterday’s magpies, thundered over the house and dropped his bombs more than a mile away. Nicholas ran in from the garden, very pale. He did not want to go out again, and suddenly two of his four years of changing and growing dropped from him; he went upstairs and came down with a small flannel blanket he used to adore when he was a child, and prepared to roll himself up in it on the floor, with the fingers of his left hand in his mouth, another habit of that time.
The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell Page 18