On this occasion she felt neither guilt nor weakness. He was so confident, boisterous even; she felt as never before how few impulses they had in common. (What they had once in common was first youth, its egoism, fevers, and unmanageable energy. But that is the most usual of accidents.) He insisted with great good-humour on making the forty minutes’ journey back with her. When she had got home she was worn out, and aware of a dreadful disturbance taking place in some part of her mind. No one noticed it. How could they? — it was buried as deeply as any moment of childhood.
Like all such moments, it chose the darkness, when she was lying in bed, to come to the surface. It was still faceless, a vast stifling cocoon of unmotived sadness — no, no, a cocoon is not alive, and this was living and active in the lowest depths of her life at the same time when it was holding open her eyelids and squeezing her throat. She tried repeating: In returning and rest ye shall be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength. It was useless? Return where? To childhood? To her first years of marriage? The thought that if she cried she would only be crying for herself kept her from just that folly. She felt her heart being torn out, examined, and thrust back anyhow, by a brutal hand. Let me sleep, she begged, only let me sleep. And at last she was set down, and slept.
It often seemed to her that she had spent her life creating what she could not, when it chose to make itself felt, control. Terrifying to think of this growing in her, one day, perhaps, to break out and devour all it saw. But that was unlikely — she was not one of those headstrong people who become desperate. She had too much alloy in her metal.
*
Four Germans, refugees, spent the evening with us. I knew one of them well, the least dependent, the only one who is free and ruthless; it was she who brought the others. Of them, one, a Jewish musician, had gaiety and courage, another was still so afraid that when I dropped a spoon he turned pale and shuddered violently: the third, his wife, was very young, vague, with dark eyes that were a little mad, and charmingly rosy cheeks. She was timidly silent. I devoted myself to her, leaving the others to a discussion which became more and more passionate — they were happy at least — and in the end she was talking simply and gaily. After a time her countrywoman noticed it and drew me aside. “Why do you bother with her? ” she said fiercely: “it is quite unnecessary, she is not used to being taken notice of.” The other young woman had not heard. Fortunately.
I set myself the task of giving each of them in turn his proper importance. It is so simple that you can scarcely make a mistake. You have only to listen and become nothing or a mirror, in which they see themselves before they were refugees. When they had gone I felt myself as hollow as a reed, and at the same time exhausted, and scattered about a continent. As very slowly I washed cups and glasses, swept up tobacco ash, and straightened chairs, the scattered pieces returned to their places. But it had been, I might even say, a near thing.
*
When I feel responsible for other people’s happiness, when I use every effort to help them, making myself nothing, giving away will and time, it is not kindness, it is part of my fear. Where can I have laid in such a stock of fear? And how is it that it remains at the same level, though it is used from every day?
*
When I think of my ancestors, the men and women whose portraits I have seen — and about many of them stories were told to us which made them figures of legend and no less alive for that — I know that if I were to meet them I should dislike extremely their smiling, almost brutal irony, their contempt for what could not be handled in the form of heavy silver spoons and tea-pots, or launched in the small shipyard, or banked. The air of shrewd malice in the back of their eyes kills anything which is not as robust as they are and as direct. These eccentric men, whose rages and headstrong actions were really the amusements they had thought of to save themselves from boredom — they were terribly easily bored — these domineering women, whose daughters somehow were not crushed but grew up to rule families in their turn: how I should have hated them and with respect and envy. They were certainly masters, even of their own violent natures; they allowed these to behave with a savage oddity only because it relieved them of themselves for a few hours. And because there was more space in the world in those days, and on the whole they were admired as eccentrics — by everyone, perhaps, except by the sons and daughters they would have destroyed if most of these young ones had not been as hard as themselves and inured to whippings and sarcasm.
But why did I write: If I were to meet them? I meet them every time jeering laughter springs in me when I am asked to share emotions involving an image of myself as sensitive, high-minded, suffering from my passions and the tragedy of our times. The moment this image is noticed by all those pairs of malicious eyes, I am seized by a laughter which is nothing better than a devil, a ridiculous jeering mean northern devil. This morning I had a letter from a man I knew when we were both young and have not seen for years. He wrote it because he knew that with the outbreak of another war I should be feeling despair. Despair, anguish, fear — yes, all those feelings. They are under my pillow. . . . I had a moment of genuine kindness; it was, I think, chiefly for myself, the young woman who has learned as clumsy and stupid people do, by running into things. But then I caught sight of the image, and an uncontrolled laughter broke out of me, almost broke me. It did not stop until everything was destroyed.
*
There are times when the whole world is only the appearance taken by my sorrow for her death. The sunlight, the green trees, are a horrible vacancy.
I sit here writing. Outside, the garden has a cool glittering freshness, there is a smell of lilac — if I get up I shall sec the tree, as if dazed by the sunlight and its weight of flowers. And I see, I feel, that we are seated in the early train going to Scarborough. The train is standing in a little station, the last before we reach Scarborough; the sun shines like this sun on its trees and flower-beds. My mother is sitting opposite me: for a second, and without effort except this pang, I can create her out of the surface of a particular dress, a gesture, hand shut on the clasp of a bag, air of absorbed expectation. So far wc have been lucky — until this moment a carriage to ourselves for the hour’s journey along the coast; between gorse, windy fields, the sea, always the sea, suave promise of sun for the whole of this day out.
The train will go on, into Scarborough. We shall get out and hurry down Westborough to Rowntree’s. First, the ritual cup of coffee, then the slow, relentlessly slow, progress through all the floors of the large shop. Especially we examine the dozens of chairs, tables, settees. She has always, folded in her like the kernel of a grain, the idea of a house where every object is perfect. And while during visit after visit she seeks, some fragment of the ideal takes shape before her — then she must consider, go away, come back and look again, and again, and at last, when she, I, and the assistant who has known her for so many years, are all on the point of exhaustion, she decides. It is the same with the hat she will buy downstairs, or at Marshall’s. In both shops, the patient heads of departments take trouble with her. We sit surrounded by hats. She leans to look deeply into the mirror, and not as though she were seeing herself. In search rather of the other; and fixedly, of the life she in some moment, on her way here, had overlooked — and perhaps expecting to catch a last glimpse of it. . . . I am desperately anxious for her to enjoy one of those triumphs on which she will congratulate herself, with her distant smile, on the journey home. I get up and look about myself for the perfect hat, I exclaim, and support her when she hesitates over the price of a “model”, know she will regret endlessly not choosing it. Once, when the hat she coveted, on which many strands of ospreys had been stitched singly, was dear beyond anything, I whispered to her confidently that I could copy it. I am so awkward at sewing that I could never learn, but the agonising need to please her inspired me: it was a success, marvellous, and for a whole summer she wore it with her joy in a new elegance.
And then, the other streets an
d shops, and lunch. If her favourite table is still vacant, I rush to snatch it from the couple making in a leisurely way towards it. In the afternoon the antique shops, where also we are known, and the rest, before the train, in the rose-garden. O streets I shall never walk in without you, with you and not able to see you, not hear, not ever carry that burden again, nor ever lay it down. Never again, never, never.
Nothing in the way of success coming to me has any taste when I cannot show it to you. You never knew how little certain successes meant, how far I am from achievement. To you they were really triumphs, and you took them into your hands with the same sharp happiness, the same comforting sense of security, that filled you when at last I was just able to give you the fur coat promised for “when my ship comes in ”. Now if it comes in, you are not on the quay, not in the bouse waiting, you are nowhere.
If, during the last year, even the last week, I had not felt that you were an importunate child, and O grief, neglected you. . . .
*
In February of the year before Hitler seized power, when I went to Berlin, I walked into a surrealist landscape. Here were the same scattered objects, at first glance meaningless, coldly separate, or joined in equivocal ways; and the deliberate outrage of custom in manners and arts, with submission, helpless, to conventions — of speed, perversion, and a primitive religion. Unrelated activities ran temperatures and nursed them in rooms of a reassuring vulgarity — less reassuring when one of them split in half to display a suicide or an adultery: as little as possible was concealed: frankness, the evacuation of all ideas and instincts, was part of the nightmare.
There was the Sport-palast, where relays of young men had cycled day and night without a break, for six days. During the hours the place was crammed with spectators the teams raced each other; they put on spurts announced by the loud-speaker; when one of them finished his turn he stopped his machine at a cubicle between the track and the tiers of seats, and fell on to his bunk, his joints gone, the yellow unresistant flesh of his legs and stomach dull even when slapped and kneaded with oil. I watched a young man leave his cubicle when his name was shouted by the crowd: his girl tried to pat his arm, he brushed her away peevishly, he had become a machine whose legs unrolled a strip of track, under the fierce lights, between cliffs honeycombed with mouths yelling and swallowing down beer and sausages: after breakfast — some of the spectators stayed through the night and went directly to their offices — there would be hours when the vast building was empty except for the attendants and grudging his energy he traced circles broken only by moments when the track stopped: his meaning gone, he waited for it to move again. The unspeakable boredom, and of the onlookers, poisoned the air more thoroughly than their breath and sweat. No one could have helped guessing that this boredom was the edge of a Gobi desert, that if nothing were done, if springs were not found quickly, the sand would cover everything, streets, homes, the lives of children. No simply human impulse would escape.
It was not for nothing that the painters in favour, on show in the many small galleries and the shops, all belonged to the avant-garde. Very much so. Like their open hatred of the present, their terror of a future they felt to be cruel and unmanageable drove them on farther and farther in their effort to out-distance it, to get beyond — feeling, sensation, life. Stripped naked to the intellect, blind as it is, and often ulcered, they erected their scaffoldings of lines and spirals, round nothing. They had only to walk along the street to find, among the respectably ugly houses of which Berlin is full, one where their intellect was completed by forms of sensation as dry and as, emptily, perverted. . . . In a room more decently null than an A.B.C., young men in low-cut evening dress, rouged, eyebrows plucked, dance together with the decorum of schoolgirls: a girl comes on the tiny stage, her dress shows the length to the waist of a white back and childishly rounded knees; as she dances she lifts thin arms. No, she is a young man — kept, they say, by the elderly gentleman at the next table. He looks like a distinguished civil servant or a banker: he has been reading until this moment — what? — Rilke’s Sonette an Orpheus. Really? Does he hope that the poet will tell him how to tame beasts, or, perhaps, how to change what is only sterile to a young healthy child?
For the simpler animal joys, there is the Bock-Bier-Fest in Neue Welt, and the tall building in which every floor is a different country; for a few shillings the clerk and his girl travel from Spain to Turkey, and back through Vienna to dine on a terrace looking across the Danube. Synthetic travels, pains, joys — the place is crowded, but it is obvious as soon as you leave that some young men are not content. Outside, nailed on the bare trees of the street and on kiosks, posters accuse the Nazis of murdering so many Communists: Erich Kassner, baker, Johann Sieber, schoolboy — and the rest — quite thirty of them. At the other side of the same tree, the same kiosk, Nazi posters, with the list, not so long, of their dead. And in his usual place, hiding one of the posters, the man — not a beggar, no one in Berlin is allowed to beg — holding a copy of a magazine, always the same, with the photograph, mildewed, of a film star. He is silent: difficult not to think that his voice was long since frozen in him. The wind in these first months of the year in Berlin is bitter, made of particles of ice gathered on its way across the plains to the east; they torment nerves and skin. He endures it, and the blackened snow under his feet, without moving, his back to the tree, upright in his working-man’s jacket and thin trousers pulled in by the leather belt. It astonishes that he is neat, the long and deep hollows of his face shaved and clean. Misery, a misery formed from the lack of everything a living creature needs to hope, never kept itself cleaner. His skin has the grey surface of wax, his eyelids have become raw ulcers, his limbs bone, or gristle. He still, it seems, respects himself a little, enough to spend on keeping tidy what, if he put it in his mouth, would make a small difference in his hunger. The day when his self-respect fails, he will not begin to be filthy, he will kill himself— adding another to the daily self-murders of workless men. Why has he not joined one of the parties which at least clothe and feed their followers? Perhaps the lists behind him are the answer. In that case he must also be scrupulous — or very simple. Perhaps he has really passed beyond, and if it exists at all in his cold thoughts, the future does not alarm him. He is simply waiting.
When I could, I avoided him. It needed more courage than I have, to look at him and realise that there are women who give birth only to hunger, to a lifelong defeat. He was a denial of all happiness, mine and others’. Denial without issue — unless, unless the future were not what, already, we expected and feared.
*
Do you remember the Germany — of our grandfathers, was it? — of sentimental journeys to the Rhine, evenings of music, vows, and tobacco-smoke? Did not your grandmother sing At Ehren on the Rhine? It was still alive, that perhaps harmless Germany, in the over-furnished and shabby room where the elderly professor of music and his bouncing wife, both Prussians, were entertaining their friends: the old actress — her voice strong enough yet to declaim Schiller; the young smiling Jew from the Spielhaus orchestra; and the not very young woman who was still being given only maidservants to play, but she was studying, learning the whole of long parts, ready for anything, any ordeal, rather than give it up and return home. And how they enjoyed themselves, reciting, playing duets, running to the table to swallow another thin slice of leberwurst, slapping each other on the bottom, talking music, Schiller, Reinhardt, and laughing, laughing.
No one had told them they were a good seventy-five years out of their time, memories, not people. The future was in the universities, called Wartehalle für Unbeschäftigte, waiting-rooms for the workless: or — I had been listening to it that afternoon — it was a schoolboy of ten or eleven, eyes sparkling with anger, hands clenched.
“Listen to me,” he cried, “Englishwoman — listen! We did not sign that treaty. No, no, no, no, no! We young ones say no.”
*
Those years when my work — not then to write books
— involved me in knowing a great many people, in being liked by them. Horrible years! Horrible life! My worst self had it entirely her own way. An acrobat, condemned to go through the same tricks, month after month, before the same indifferent faces, is not more uselessly agile. And it was my spirit I allowed to walk on its hands, to somersault, and develop smiles like knots of muscle.
I woke in the morning, for a single moment myself, Hervey Russell, and unhappy, because of all I was wasting, and not only of my own life. But the imposture had to go on — I thought, not having the courage or sanity to give it up — there were letters to write, making use of that mirror trick of the brain. You know it? The words he is writing are reflected back on to the writer’s mind from the future mind of the reader, and he has only to take them down. A trick it is only allowable to play for a good reason. All my reasons were poor: it was to satisfy an employer that I put myself in the posture of admiring what I detested; soothing the vanity of a man who ought to have been told simply that he was a common fraud; approaching humbly important persons who did not want to see me, and before whom, if my respect were real, I felt only an angry fatigue.
What more did I do that day? Called on a publisher who kept me waiting an hour after the time of the appointment, and said genially, “I wonder why I asked you to come, I only deal with the heads of firms, it saves so much misunderstanding“; listened for three hours, wearing the most amiable of masks, to a novelist who must on no account be displeased, or in her insolently virtuous way she will cheat us: after this interview, when I was in the street, I discovered that in the labour of attention fragments of my mind had worked loose and fallen on her floor; impossible to go back; besides, by this time they had been swept up.
The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell Page 3
