The Black Laurel

by Storm Jameson

  Brett stared at him with a hard irony.

  “Of course. You’re an experienced fellow.”

  Arnold listened, amused, a little envying Edward’s assurance, charming, respectful, the subaltern who admires his superior officer without subservience, says the correct things in a pleasantly easy voice, is silent, amusing, alert, serious, when he ought to be, knowing the rules and when safely to ignore them. He was a success with older men; he made them feel both young and authoritative. When he drew no response from Brett, he effaced himself, that is, he allowed Mrs Brett to take him away with her, with the same cool deference.

  Her husband looked after them with an unmoving face.

  “That boy is intelligent,” he said calmly: “he can be amusing, he’s very cultivated, he knows his job. He’s extremely brave. His men hated him. That’s why I say he’s a failure as an officer. What’s more, I believe he knows he is — and it doesn’t make him happy.”

  This criticism startled Arnold. He resented it, and glared at Brett without speaking. With a barely perceptible smile, Brett walked away from him.

  The room was as hot as the street: so many voices, pitched to be heard in the babble, raged through it as hideously as a gramophone needle jerked across a disc. He moved to an open window. A smell of dust, heat, and the curious sickly smell from the ruins, drove him back into the room. He was creeping out when Cowley, slightly drunk now, caught him by the arm.

  “Where are you going? Stay here and talk to Gierymski.”

  A Polish officer as tall as himself, young, smiling, with a calmly handsome face, and completely bald. He looked at Arnold with a frankness and gaiety which knocked aside Arnold’s annoyance; he felt a quick liking, so quick that it was able to dodge his curiosity and mistrust. He stayed willingly.

  His face in singular disorder, Cowley was asking questions on behalf of a book he meant to write. (No doubt it will be called Europe lies in its grave. . .) Is it true that the Russians control Poland?

  Gierymski smiled, amiably. It means nothing, Arnold thought. He recognised the trick. He is like me. . .

  “They control the police and the propaganda. What more do they need? People disappear. Like in the sea or a nightmare.”

  An inquisitive, almost avid look, settled on Cowley’s face and held it strictly to order for a moment.

  “Are you going back?”

  “It’s still true,” laughed Gierymski, “that Poland is a land for heroes or swine. Those who want to fight should go back. No one else.”

  “Fight. Fight what?”

  “What do you think?” He looked into Arnold’s face with an eager complicity: it ignored Cowley. “Russia, of course.”

  Cowley groaned.

  “Don’t expect us to help you,” Arnold said drily. He regretted his words as soon as they were out of his mouth, but they had been jerked from him.

  Gierymski was taken aback. He recovered at once.

  “I knew you would say that, but in the end you’ll be forced to fight — you always are. When the tension between east and west becomes too intolerable, when it splits wide open ...” He laughed again. “The Russians are jealous of us and despise us — exactly the way the Germans feel for the French. It’s very interesting.”

  He hesitated, went on — with a smiling passion:

  “I dislike Russians, but I don’t, yet, hate them as I hate the Germans. You know, they were kinder to vermin than to us. Try burying Pole and German together and see what happens if a Polish bone touches a German one in the ground. I come of a large family; ten children and a battalion of uncles, aunts, cousins, grand-parents: at the end of the occupation only my mother was alive — and I because I was not in Poland.”

  His glance plunged backwards into a darkness:

  “Except twice, secretly. . . And then, this year, my mother refused to live; the fever — she had fever — was only the pretext.”

  Again, he had spoken to Arnold — who had nothing to say: any words he had ready would have sounded clumsy, frivolous. With a sincerity only too obviously reached at the cost of his nerves, Cowley stammered,

  “That’s all very well, but somehow Europe must be saved. Don’t you know what it means — the death of Europe? We’re living in the same house —”

  Gierymski cut him short with a contempt no less bitter for its air of gaiety, even joy.

  “Yes, you English have the most comfortable room in it, while we live in a hideously draughty ante-room. The coming and going in our room is terrible. . . And you can afford to make mistakes, the most appalling mistakes, and survive. We have only to make one, one single mistake, like the Rising, and we pay terribly. We pay every penny.”

  A pause:

  “And for your mistakes, too.”

  He looked smilingly round the room.

  “These people,” he said quietly, “have not suffered enough. We have a grudge against you, we Poles. Oh, not for that. We’re afraid you’ll ruin us again. We can’t help feeling — like other peoples, let me tell you! — that good done to a German is evil against us. What use, what ground is there even, for our architecture, if every twenty years it is wiped out? Not a chair, not a sheet of music, not a book that any soul of my family used, is left. Multiply us by millions — and add the centuries of our dead. Now really dead, since no one, no thing, survives to remember them from oblivion.”

  He hesitated and said again,

  “Oblivion.”

  Cowley was on the verge of one of his infantile rages: he had been known to weep publicly when he was put down.

  “So you ask us to destroy everything else! Lunacy! In the tenth century, a monk who knew his throat might be cut tomorrow believed he was working for eternity. At least he was working for us! One more war, and we shall leave nothing. Nothing!”

  Gierymski smiled into his face.

  “Why do you worry? We’re living in the collapse of civilisations. You must acquire the habit of loss. Take it into your nerves, live with it. It’s less difficult than living with a woman. Eternity. . . you can’t count on it, you know. I —” he pointed a delicate finger at himself — “I count on history. Which is crushing me and my country, and tomorrow may, I say may, let us live. What else can I do with my soul? If there is only history? I don’t dream about the past, and I don’t try to think myself into serenity: my actions think for me. I bet my whole life every moment.”

  His eyes sparkled with gaiety.

  “I shall be killed. But now, now, I’m happy. Happier than you, my poor fellow.”

  Arnold’s body remembered the calm enclosing tension of its moments of danger. As against Cowley, who had deciphered it from the outside, he and the Pole had lived the scandal of their courage and their failures. . . He drew back. No, the fellow’s mad, they all are. . . To cover the awkwardness of Cowley’s offended silence, he said coolly,

  “You were in Poland during the war? Why? What were you doing?”

  Silence.

  “We are all obsessed,” Gierymski said, “imprisoned in the house of our memories. When you have blown out a man’s brains, even an S. S., when you have learned to lie, rob, to kill as a terrorist kills — how do you stop? Where is the frontier? Many of my friends have remained bandits even though they are living normally.”

  He had been touching one shoulder against the wall behind him: suddenly he leaned against it like a man on the point of fainting; the gaiety and energy of his face were wiped out, he closed his eyes; for a second his face was as poignantly calm, as empty, as if he were dead. He came to life at once and looked at Arnold with the same brightness. Cowley had recovered from the mortification of being pitied. An uneasy buffoon.

  “Pity you don’t write. You occupied peoples have a chance. But would anything give English writers the wit of a fifth-rate Frenchman? I doubt it.”

  “You’re talking nonsense,” Gierymski said swiftly, “you don’t know what your country is.”

  He smiled ironically and politely, and left them.

  Arnold
moved away, too, to escape from Cowley. He wanted to escape from the room, from all these innocently chattering people. We shall never live decent lives, he thought, with an absurd anger. . . He had reached the door and was slipping out when Edward caught him and pulled him back into the room. He had an air, of disquiet and hauteur, Arnold recognised. Someone has snubbed him, or he believes he has put a foot wrong; he wants to talk himself out of his exasperation. He waited, ready (whatever Edward told him) to say: I think you were right.

  “I’ve been listening to one of Brett’s unfortunate subordinates,” Edward drawled.

  “Why unfortunate?”

  “Since Brett can’t or won’t realise that his first job here is to increase his establishment, none of them will get his move. Very noble of him. Very honest. But death to a wretched major hoping to become lieutenant-colonel. I don’t know that he has the right to make his officers pay for the upkeep of his conscience.”

  “All the same, you admire it.”

  Edward frowned.

  “Perhaps.”

  Arnold noticed that Lise was standing close enough to hear; he looked warningly at Edward, who turned to her with a friendly smile. The slightly mocking look that had crossed her face when Arnold glanced at her made her for the first time seem Brett’s daughter. He said nothing, with an air of boredom and indifference. Edward, of course, had words at the end of his quick tongue. What did she think of Berlin, did she like dancing? Would she care to see a night club of sorts? He was charmingly attentive and kind: Lise fluttered at the end of his fingers. Arnold was vexed by his own clumsiness: he had no wish to talk to her, he only wanted to be able to without laying himself open to mockery.

  “Lise.”

  Her mother’s voice made the girl start. She hurried to her across the room.

  “I’m going,” Arnold muttered.

  His friend looked at him with a slight smile. In a casual undertone:

  “I never told you. Mary and I have been living together for the last three years. I’m very fond of her.”

  Arnold was taken aback. At once, anxiously, he hoped that he had not shown it. Raising his eyebrows, he began a sentence, hesitated, and decided on,

  “Well, well, very interesting.”

  Edward laughed gently, looking at him with affection, and turned away. He left at once, not troubling to look for his hostess.

  The last thing he heard as he closed the door was Cowley’s high-pitched giggle. Outside the hotel, he noticed the tracks, goat-paths, leading across glacis of rubble into cellars or to the one habitable room, marked by a pot of geraniums on the window-sill, of a building in ruins.

  Chapter Thirteen

  As always, Renn had waited for several minutes until Mr Scorel was ready to attend to him. When he arrived, Scorel was hull down in a heavy monologue, delivered between bites: he was at breakfast. The listener this time was a gaunt shabby priest wearing an overcoat; he sat at the table, head drawn into his shoulders, eyes half covered by wrinkled eyelids, patient. He had brought a letter; it lay on the table, spread open, and when he had a finger to spare Scorel jabbed, shook, and worried it.

  “Not even a date. Ridiculous. No one wants to take responsibility, no one has any sense of what’s possible, you all expect miracles. You Czechs are as incompetent as the others. Imagine a civil servant sending me such a document. They’re inefficient, I know it, the efficient Czechs were all Germans or Jews. Precisely. Well now, what am I to do? I shall do all I can, I’ve come here to help and I will help. You can count on me, yes, yes, but I must have the figures.”

  In an exhausted voice:

  “Yes, yes, I understand, but I shall speak my mind to your people in Prague just the same. All these old hatreds. You must forget them.”

  Finger raised:

  “And don’t think I’m blaming you, I’m not, but I want figures, dates, names, and I want them at once. Precisely.”

  Scraping the marmalade from its saucer and licking the spoon delicately, like a blunt-faced tabby:

  “Go away now and come back tomorrow at this time with the information. Don’t be late. I shall count on you. Thank you for coming this morning. Oh, and just one more point...”

  How can so much goodness be part of such unmisgiving ignorance of the effect his scoldings must have on the victims he has come to Europe to save? thought Renn. He knew and respected Scorel, not without a shudder when he reflected that this brisk voice was a saviour’s.

  The Czech priest had risen and was going away. He seemed unmoved. At the moment of leaving, a gleam of something between amusement and malice escaped below his eyelids. He shook Scorel’s hand, warmly, and slouched off.

  Scorel turned towards Renn a face agitated by a rage of pitiless benevolence.

  “What people! If I hadn’t the patience of Job I should go mad. Precisely. Well, my friend, what can I do for you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? But you wanted to see me?”

  “Not at all. You asked me to come here at nine. It’s now half-past.”

  Mr Scorel recovered instantly from his embarrassment.

  “Yes, yes, you’re right, it’s these annoyances. . . Well, yes, you’ll be interested. That girl you were talking to me about, what’s her name, Marie? I may have heard of the very girl. Now, you come with me this evening, say about six. . .”

  The place was the cellars of a small convent, now a jagged stone cliff: leaning from it at an angle, a crucifix profiled on a sky without clouds. With an air as though he had lived here all his life, Scorel led him down steps littered with rubble, to the first cellar. They stepped into darkness and damp fcetid air. At one side, the darkness was less black; a candle on a bare long table spread, only a little way, not so much light as a yellowish shadow. When Renn’s eyes became used he made out eight or nine worm-like forms, lying or propped against a wall; a few of them were swaddled from chin to ankle, the rest sat motionless, beggars in a mediæval cloister. He had noticed in the London Tube, in air-raids, that the hands of the human larvae piled up there had gathered the life drained from featureless heads: in them resided terror, apathy, strength, the instinct to live. So it was here. He found it hard to turn his gaze from two pairs of hands lying side by side, one of extreme delicacy, the thumb curled over the fingers like a narrow leaf; on each of these hands two fingers were missing: the other squat, broad, dirty, the paws of an animal, abandoned as if in sleep.

  The nun who came forward to greet Scorel must be the Mother Superior of the convent: he recognised her from the description Scorel had given him as they drove here. She was perhaps sixty: smooth unlined face, broad and flat across the cheekbones, and narrowing to a small pointed chin and small mouth, firm, colourless; nose finely arched, pale eyes. She, with three nuns, had alone survived the raid that destroyed the convent.

  She was a Bavarian; he thought he could detect in her voice that she had kept the accent of her province.

  “Ah, my friend, I was expecting you. The food you sent has arrived, and the bandages. We are deeply in your debt.”

  “Not at all, ma’am. Precisely. I’m sorry not to send more. I’ll send next week. . . Now, have you done as I asked you?”

  Her smile had a warm friendly malice.

  “No.”

  Mr Scorel clicked his tongue. He was, Renn saw, disconcerted, and more than this, baffled. His brisk flow of words came out in jerks; he was voluble and authoritative, but he had lost a little confidence.

  “If you’ll allow me to say so, ma’am, it’s ridiculous. Yes, ridiculous and imprudent. One of these days — and in any case in winter — this place will be uninhabitable. Yes. Where if you let me move you to Stuttgart. . . precisely. . . the arrangements are simple, in fact, I’ve made them, you have only to let me know which day —”

  “My dear friend, we stay here, until we are ordered to move. Come, you and I understand each other. Let us go on doing so.”

  She looked at Renn, and Scorel, still downcast, said,

  “Th
is, ma’am, is my friend David Renn. I told you — he has been raking the country for a young woman called Marie, what was it?”

  “Duclos.”

  “I guess that’s not the same name, but —”

  She interrupted him in her low voice, with its flat undernote of authority.

  “The young woman,” she said, speaking to Renn, “was called Marie Pieck — but I doubt if it was her name. She was certainly not German. She was ill when she came here. She was always shivering and cold. In many ways she was a child, but she had lived as a very weak woman might live, resigning herself without trust. She was an adult child, I think; she had been abandoned, and she had no —” she hesitated — “not any feeling of God.”

  “Where is she now?” Renn asked.

  “It’s several months since she left. She didn’t tell us she was going, she went out. And simply didn’t return.”

  Renn had been aware all the time of her calm penetrating glance, fixed on him. He was being judged. He felt anxious and, below his anxiety, indifferent.

  “You’ve described almost exactly the young woman I knew as Marie Duclos. But the description could fit other people.”

  There is not only one young ruined creature in the world. He saw that the Mother Superior was going to ask him a question. Perhaps: Why do you want her? With a change from severity to simple kindness she said,

  “We’re going to have our meal. Will you both share it?”

  Moved into the centre of the table, the candle lit up from below two faces, of a man and a woman; the depths of shadow in eyepits and temples gave them the look of a gothic relief cut in wood. The young woman’s serenity seemed reflected in her face from a distance: the other, a mask of simplicity and slyness, the closed yet innocent face of a peasant, scored lightly with irony at the corners of the eyelids, was the Czech priest who had been Scorel’s visitor that morning. On either side of these two, indistinctly human beings leaned, whispered, made the sounds of eating and breathing. A young nun of an astonishing and radiant beauty went round placing a bowl of soup in front of each of them. It tasted strongly of fennel, and of little else.