by Rebecca West
(There is some doubt as to what the following excerpt can be. Madame Sara declares she saw it in newspaper print, but says that ‘the letters looked a bit funny’, and I imagine it is a leading article which would be published somewhere on 31 December 1944, if various people should tell the truth, an eventuality which, however, will not happen.)
In reviewing the events of 1944 … in reviewing the events of 1944 … in reviewing the events of 1944 … what fun it would be if one could say what one really thought. Then we could admit that there was one event of 1944 on which we of the Right Wing could look back with satisfaction, and that was the recognition of Marshal Pierrot. Quite apart from the reasons which made us take that step, the way it was taken made us feel fine. We are always a little afraid of the Left-Wing intellectuals. But that’s all over now. We feel quite safe in the saddle, thank you.
For the recognition of Marshal Pierrot was a Right-Wing stunt from first to last. We might have told the truth about him. We might have owned up that there was civil war in France, and that the revolutionaries were led by a man called Marshal Pierrot, and that the others who wanted to live in the same sort of society as ours were fighting against him, and that there were good people on both sides, and that probably the best man would win, and anyway it was France’s business. Instead we played him up as if all conceivable kinds of right were on his side and all conceivable kinds of wrong on the other side. It was some of our Right-Wing boys who got that idea and worked it out to the last detail. But not only did the Left-Wing intellectuals not offer any opposition to the policy, though it was dead against half their principles, they swallowed it hook, line, and sinker, and even took on the job of selling it to the public. There wasn’t any question of leading them up the garden path. They ran up it of their own accord, and fetched up just at that dark spot in the shrubbery we wanted them to be. Honest, it was a shame to take their money. There wasn’t a silly story they wouldn’t believe, on evidence that wouldn’t justify hanging a cat; and I don’t think it ever struck them that most of those stories were told them by Government officials. No, we don’t worry about Left-Wing intellectuals any more.
Why did we recognize Marshal Pierrot? For several reasons. There are some of us who carry the people in their minds as a good man carries his wife and children. A man works for his wife and children. If he is out of luck he may have to work for them in torturing conditions. Many a man has woken up in the night and said to himself, ‘I cannot go on working in that sweat-shop for one more day, it would be better to starve.’ Then he has heard his wife and children breathing quietly, and he has known that he was lying, and he has gone on working the next day, and the next, and the next. There are some of us who when they wake up in the night hear the people breathing quietly and know that they would pay any price to keep safe those poor dear afflicted millions. So they go back to their sort of sweat-shops, and do what is demanded of them. And if it is demanded of them in that sweat-shop that they should sacrifice a scruple, they make that sacrifice.
There are others who are not of this kind, who do not read their files and have no notion that the matter is not simple, or who have a fancy that when the mob bursts open the library door they will flash a wide grin, lay a hand on the decanter of second-best port (the best being buried in the gladiolus bed) and roar genially, ‘Come right in, boys, and drink a toast with me to Marshal Pierrot.’ But most can claim to care for the people, and if the special form of our care is to be called appeasement, in this hour we will not be ashamed of that name. Surely it is not a disgrace to seek the salvation of the people, and often, as many of us have found in our lives, appeasement answers. But if it fails, it is not easy to see what we can do. For then we will have to defend ourselves in the real situation; and then, since the people are now utterly confused by lies, it is not possible to know how we can acquaint the people with the truth in the amount of time which will be left to us. And that is where those others were to blame, for we are men of action whose profession is the deed, but they were intellectuals, clerks, whose profession was the truth. So may the Lord have mercy on all our souls.
As I said at the beginning, I do not really believe that anything in this monstrous sequence of revelations from Madame Sara’s magic crystal will take place in the future. Yet all the same, it disquiets me. For, somehow, it reminds me of something, but I can’t think what …
30 January 1944
The Second Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Make Any Graven Image
This appeared in an anthology, The Ten Commandments, Ten Short Novels of Hitler’s War Against the Moral Code, Cassell and Company Ltd, London, 1945. Avowedly propaganda – of a very high order – it was edited by Armin L. Robinson, who commissioned internationally renowned writers. As well as Rebecca West’s story, there are contributions from Thomas Mann (a magnificent tale of the life of the prophet Moses and the formulation of all ten commandments; the commandment in question here is the first, ‘Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods But Me’), Franz Werfel, John Erskine, Bruno Frank, Jules Romains, André Maurois, Sigrid Undset, Hendrik Willem Van Loon and Louis Bromfield. Even allowing for unusual despatch in commissioning and publishing, it is unlikely that this project dated much later than 1944, when the tide of war was starting to turn in favour of the Allies and, significantly, considering the theme of Rebecca West’s story – and others in the collection – the full monstrosity of what Hitler was doing to the Jewish population in his territories was just beginning to emerge.
When Elisaveta woke she rang the bell for her coffee, but Marta did not come. When she had rung again and nothing happened, she thought, ‘This is the third time Marta has not come this month. She is getting old, probably she will not stay with me much longer. But I will not know what to do without her, she has been with me ever since I was a little girl.’ Her eyes brimmed. ‘I am still young, but I am being left alone as if I were very old. Everybody is going away from me.’
She reached out for the bottle of rose water and the pad of cotton wool she kept by her bedside to repair the damage done by the tears she shed so much more frequently than was wise in an actress. Then she picked up the script of her new part, which had fallen to the floor when she had at last dropped off to sleep, and began reading the lines to try to drive out of her mind the thought of her husband, David, who might be alive, who might not. With the Nazis there was no knowing, and no hoping.
Dropping it, she pouted the smiling defiances of an imaginary happy woman while she pulled on her dressing-gown, which had to go unmended now that she lived alone, then went along the corridor, drawing back the curtains and wincing as the strong morning light fell on her tired eyes. She went to the kitchen to make the strong coffee her nerves needed before she could face the day.
‘No,’ she murmured, ‘I don’t want to go on a trip to Paris – not unless you can move Paris out of France, to some new, exciting country. I’ve been to France so often. And I don’t want any diamonds. I don’t want any jewels – unless you can get me some stone that’s a cross between a diamond and a pearl. That I might like – though I can’t be sure.’
The problem was to say the lines, not as if the woman were a complete fool and meant it, or meant to be funny, but as if she were a sensible woman who was talking nonsense because the cause of her dissatisfaction was so wounding to her pride that she could not name it, yet at the same time to keep on the plane of comedy, even light comedy.
Soon, however, she ceased to say the lines. She was seduced into gentle contentment by the clean white and green paint of the kitchen and the glittering stove and pots and pans, all very bright in the spring sunshine, by the bowl of hyacinths on the dresser, by the good coffee and rye bread and butter, and, above all, by the view she saw between the checked curtains of her window.
People thought it strange of her to live so far away from the centre of the town, in the most distant apartment house, right up on the heights beyond the navy dockyard. Indeed, it cost her a fortune in taxis after the theatre. But it was
halfway to being in paradise, looking down on the town from these windows. It might be one of the smallest capitals in Europe, beautiful Copenhagen, but it was like the seat of a king in a fairy-tale. Even when she had dreamed of it as a girl in her father’s parsonage at the other end of the country, pouring into the dream all she could imagine of beauty, and knowing nothing of ugliness, she had not seen it as lovely as it was.
Beneath her windows the little white houses stood on the sloping hillside among the budding lilacs with the touching, hopeful quality of a new suburb; there young people were beginning life, or old people ending lives that had been successful enough, since they were still together and had the means for comfort. All turned their faces toward the wide, high floor of the dark-blue sea, crisped now to white horses by spring winds, strewn with the hundred islands, dark with pine trees, bright with the wakening maples and birches, stretching to the white bar of the southern horizon.
At the foot of the hillside the red-roofed cottages of the old fishing village and the long, low, butter-coloured buildings of the naval establishment hid all of the docks save the funnels and masts. From that the raised causeway, blue water and gentle surf on the one side, emerald salt marshes on the other, ran to the tortoise-shaped rock on which the city lay. With its gables and towers it made a shape as clear, as easy for the eye to grasp, as an intaglio on a ring. Its colour was red, a soft drowsy red with nothing harsh in it, the colour that some rose petals turn in potpourri. Behind it rose the pointed hills, dark with firewoods, and above them the pyramids of the snow peaks, all angular, all shapely and austerely cut yet not ungentle, like the houses and churches in the city below.
‘Spring is here,’ thought Elisaveta. ‘Someday soon I will get old Sven to take me to the fisherman’s pavilion on the other side of the city, where they give one those lovely prawns, just out of the water and cooked.’ Sven was the oldest actor in the State Theatre and he had been very kind to her since David had gone, taking her about to pretty places that were not too noisy and yet were a distraction, and being patient with her when the distraction failed and she wept. She poured out another cup of coffee.
‘No,’ she murmured, ‘I don’t want to go on a trip to Paris – not unless you can move Paris out of France …’
Then it was that she saw what was happening. She set down her cup and saucer on the table so that the coffee spilt. She ran to the window and grasped the ledge and stared, her mouth falling open as if she were dead, as she might well soon be. The causeway was no longer dust-coloured, empty save for an occasional lorry or tradesman’s cart, as it always was at this hour. It was dark with a moving column of men and vehicles more brutal than lorries, monstrous even when seen from a great distance. Crying out, she ran from the kitchen into the living-room and turned on the radio. A voice, smug with successful treachery, was shouting that the city need feel no further fear, for Hitler had taken it under his protection.
Elisaveta threw herself down on the divan, sobbing and cursing and drumming with her fists on the Chinese silk coverlet. A part of her which remained calm thought wistfully ‘I am not a great beauty, I am not a great actress, I am only so-so. It is not fair that I should be asked to take part in great events of history. I could have borne with misfortunes that are like myself, within a moderate compass. I could have nursed David through a long illness. I could have kept my dignity if the Director had taken a dislike to me as he did to Inga and pretended that I was old long before I really was, and made me play character parts.
‘I could have gone on all my life long being patient if David and I had had a child and it had been delicate or stupid or wayward, but all this abduction and killing and tyranny, I cannot stand up to it.
‘When Truda married and left the theatre and it was a question who should play the leading parts, the Director said to me, “Now, Elisaveta, this you can play and that, but not Hebbel’s Judith and not Ann Whitefield. You have not the big bones, you have not the broad veins.” I wish somebody would come and say to me: “You cannot be expected to live under Hitler. You have not the big bones, you have not the broad veins.’”
She sobbed for a little while, and then thought: ‘And it is all wrong. It is like having suddenly to start acting without any make-up on in the middle of the lounge at the Excelsior Hotel, or in the silk department in Lacherman’s store, to have to face these tremendous events in the familiar places where one has lived all one’s everyday life. It would have been better if these horrible things were happening to one in some fantastic country which one had reached only after many days’ travel.’
It had been at the holiday resort which everybody in the city went to in summer, which she had visited two or three times a year ever since she had become an actress, that they had taken David away. It was on the road going through the pinewoods to the lake with the overhung cliff called the Trolls’ Castle, to which every family in the kingdom had at some time or other made an excursion, that the grey automobile had stopped and the four men had got out and thrown the raincoat over David’s head. It was there that David had fallen to the ground and been kicked by the heaviest man in the crutch of the loins. As she heard again his scream, she prayed at one and the same time that he would come back to her again; that he had long been dead.
Then the automobile had driven off in the direction of the frontier, and she was left alone, looking about her in horror at the pinewoods she had known so long, as if they had lied to her.
There had been nobody on the road, for it was lunchtime. She had run into the woods and had found a picnic party and had stood in front of them with her hands stretched out, as if it were of them she was asking mercy, and had said: ‘My husband is a Jewish refugee, he is David Adler, the writer. The Nazis have come in an automobile and kidnapped him. What shall I do?’
The men and women and children had sat quite still on the grass, holding bitten slices of bread and sausage in their hands, staring at her in hostility because, though they were kind, she looked so strange, what she said was so strange. When they understood, they had gathered round her in a circle, helpless as if the sun had turned black. They looked about them at the forest as she had done, as if they were victims of a betrayal, as if they had been asked to a bridal and had found themselves at a funeral, their dress improper and an unexpected grief taking advantage of them. Their country which had always promised small delights, small comforts, small, swiftly terminated sorrows, and had kept its promise, would henceforth, now that the Nazis had come, practise such bizarre deceptions against which the mind could not forearm itself, being committed to health.
‘Whom shall I turn to now?’ she wondered. ‘Who will be strong enough, who will be a refuge in whom I can find shelter, and remember the time when everything was healthy, so that I do not go mad? I will be poor, of course. Even if I could bear to act now, they would not let David’s widow play in the State Theatre. Probably they will steal my savings. But that does not matter. It is seeing horrible things I will mind. My head will go. Even if it had not been David whom they took away in the automobile, even if it had been a total stranger I had never set my eyes on before, the mere sight of what happened would have shattered me. I am afraid of going mad, all alone. Who will come to save me now?’
Old Sven was too old. He had wept sometimes at the thought of the Nazis coming; now he would be utterly overcome, no shelter for her but a charge on her kindness. Besides, it was not an actor to whom one would wish to turn at this time. If there had been a great actor in the State Theatre, then that would have been all right; he would have been co-creator with the greatest men whose works they had performed. He would have been wise, as they were. But there was nobody at the State Theatre now who was more than an interpreter; one might as well look to a violin apart from its player for comfort in a crisis.
If one knew a great author, though he might be helpless as a child in material matters and in human relationships, and perhaps even naughty as a very naughty child, he would have wisdom. He would know what to put
in the other pan to counterbalance the evil that was dragging down the scales. Because writers, if they were good, really knew something. She did not care for books and rarely read one from year’s end to year’s end, but she knew from the plays in which she had acted that writers were not just trying to amuse people or to make money. They were making clear a pattern in life that was there but had not been noticed by ordinary people. Often in her own life, something would happen to her that would strike her as important and strange, and yet not altogether unfamiliar; as if she had been told long ago that that was how it would be in such circumstances. Then she would remember, ‘But, of course, that is what the play A Pack of Cards was about! That was what Feierabend was trying to say …’