The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell

by Storm Jameson

  In the evening I have uninvited visitors: I approve eagerly of opinions I despise, and betray by a cowardly silence others I respect; I join in praising an imbecile and allow a friend to be severely judged; to give pleasure to eight people, of whom I like one, I make myself their lowest common factor and wear anything they throw me, whether it is clean or not.

  At last they go. My spirit — or what I take to be my spirit — runs behind them for several moments, a dog which has forgotten which of these strangers is his master. I open the window, to feel the night on my face, but feel nothing — grown part of my skin, the mask is still there, I take my hands to it, but there is still another, and another, skin after flayed skin, and I scarcely remember whether I have a face of my own or not. Humiliated and vexed, I begin to prepare for bed. Now I know that I shall never do anything which can justify me for the lives I have sacrificed to come here. ... A child is perhaps crying. ... If I could be sure who was crying, it might be well to listen.

  It is too late. Sleep.

  *

  Where I am living is very handsome, very fine, but it is not my country. Every day I take a steep road up a hill, on either side there are other hills, a valley, the sea — things, forms, that encompassed my childhood, and for hundreds of years — and not one of them has a voice I can hear. Endlessly I look at absent hills; their roads follow the threads of my nerves, and day and night my nerves think of them. Yet it was here, in my own country, from the country of my own nerves, began my habit of running away. It began when I was a young girl. Perhaps it is not wholly a bad thing for a writer to tear his roots out of a ground where they cannot grow an inch without touching some memory which is either five or five hundred years old — five or five hundred, the words it uses are the same. It teaches him in time to send roots down in himself — if he has the energy: let us say, of a Rilke or a Valéry (French writers are peculiarly fortunate in that, born in a village, a province, they find it again intact in Paris: all France is the province of Frenchmen). But each time that I have run away — and from a habit it quickly became an illness — I have betrayed someone. Myself, but not always only myself.

  *

  Kneeling, looking into the fire, I am listening to my mother and another equally arrogant old woman. They are discussing the books — of household knowledge — and certain of them are very old, that they use. It is clear, though neither would admit it, that the books, which have been turned over by so many hands — what a family of hands! mine scarcely seem to belong to me any more — use them, and impose habits, a gesture, which repeat themselves in the women of my family as often as my mother’s coldly staring blue eyes and the boredom which seizes them in their thirties more brutally than the strokes from which, much later, they get their second and final death. With her customary firmness, my mother says, “It is always best to use the best” — (I recall a long dish on which, at the end of every week and again on Wednesday, pounds of yellow butter were set side by side on the stone shelf). Now and then they ask me, the young woman, with condescension, for an opinion, and I give it humbly.

  A woman is working in a room which is indistinct because I cannot separate it from myself: outside, the air is fresh, with the freshness and clarity of a world emptier than ours. The light shock when the woman slips into my own body brings the two moments … not together, because there are no longer two, there is only one moment, endlessly present. It has gone, the woman has gone. I listen to the voices, springing directly from an unimaginable past, as though the old chairs, too, were using their latest owners. Older than that, the voices come from the ground, from the streets of this old port, from the wharf and sail-loft; from the nothing, the absence of voices which is marked by the sea-pitted stones … master mariner, beloved husband of … wife of the above … daughter, died in infancy.

  I begin to suspect that a woman has nothing more important than this slow labour of creation, carried out through children and houses. The gesture with which one generation guards the next is the movement, and the only time we see it clearly, of life itself. There are perhaps a few women, a very few, who should put first knowledge, or creation in one of the arts or in another form of construction; and these ought possibly to deny themselves marriage, or at least child-bearing. I am sure that, except in these rare instances, rarer than we like to believe, nothing a woman adds to or puts in the place of her endless labour as roof-tree, as the light voice which comforts a child who has wakened to find the room full of night, is of great value. And to do this work well, she should as far as possible live a long time in one place. What sort of tree can you plant afresh every few years?

  *

  Then why, if you always, even when you were denying it with the most bitter rage, knew this, did you so often run away? Why, having one day gone back to your place, having settled yourself in a room where each time you looked up from your table you saw the pattern of your nerves traced out on the side of a hill and momently had the inconceivable joy of fitting outer to inner, why did you, after only a few years, three, or four, leave it again? You knew, surely, that in leaving a quiet life and to live (for the fourth time) in London, where inevitably your acrobat self would be called on for its tricks, you were betraying the only one of your selves who should have been listened to. Then why?

  The interval of sanity, the brief lightning-flash of will, had come to an end. Another will was in control — scarcely to be called a will. My vice of restlessness, blind greed, demon of change, ambition. Leave this house, which demands as much attention as an exacting wife, and apart from a window and a view is not even agreeable. Go, go — take your doubts, your dryness, despair, confusion, hidden violence, and clear out.

  During these years of tranquillity I had been learning a new fear — no doubt it was an old one, another of the abolished and ever-audible voices. The fear that, any moment now, I should come to an end, and — still living — die of a dry throat, dry veins, powerless, choked by lies, defeated. L’acédia, maladie des moines, is not invariably a sign of spiritual delicacy. (In Baudelaire it was; he had neither the energy nor the coarseness of fibre to save himself from being destroyed by the hostility of a middle-class civilisation: with as much probity and severe delicacy of spirit, and with far greater vitality, Péguy was nearing exhaustion when the war came to turn him into a symbol.) In an ignorant and clumsy writer, it can be the effect of an even brief insight. What! that meanness! Those foolish noisy lies!

  There were other things. I did not know how to live — as the world itself does not. A lout, and part of my world by my egoism and self-deception, I wanted peace and reached out my hand for violence. Was it my hand? Or one of those that grope through the roots and touch me when I am passing? But I should be in control. ... I controlled nothing, none of my lives. At times when I was peaceably talking to one, the other would throttle it. Solitude — violence; forethought — lies, day-dreams; gentleness — blind egoism and greed: all the contraries in one cracked earthenware bowl. None of your fine glass, no transparent Chinese tea-cup, no pure gold or excellent goblet — a common bowl, but filled with a scalding bitter drink.

  Very, now I come to think of it, like the tea brewed in those pots which in many kitchens in Yorkshire stand all day at the side of the stove.

  There was a thick frost over the ground the January morning when I left, for good, that house, to go back to a society I could only live with by changing from self to self a dozen times a day — until they became so worn and soiled that they were unfit to wear. The frost covered the soil with a brittle web — but strong enough to resist the sun — in which leaves, small stones, water, a feather, were trapped. A shadow, of a low cloud, cut in half my hill, and the road broke off there, a severed nerve. Nothing, I thought, has ended. You have only run away again. Your past is unfinished where you left it off. Without going back, you have no future. In my body every nerve protested against the agony of parting with those other nerves — which I could look at for a moment before they became a vague confusion a
nd corruption in my mind. Why add to the continuous corruption of my life another which was avoidable? What, poor fool, can you learn if you never sit still, if renouncing nothing you give away all?

  The sun and darkness of my hill, the freezing air — what courage it would need to begin there again. And indeed there would not be early enough. It would be imperative to go farther back. Back and back — to the first cowardice, the first seed of treachery, the first infinitely-celled fear. Too far — you must try to live without your future.

  *

  She went full of resentment to an appointment with her first husband, not their first meeting since the divorce, but the first for several years. How could she not dislike him? — he had been part, with his lies and folly, of her unhappiness for ten years, and she had injured him. But when she saw him she felt pity, and some other emotion which was, perhaps, only remorse, and pity for herself. Listening, as she had often listened, to his ready tongue, she prayed that just one of his plans might come off.

  Of their life together the essence had escaped; there was nothing. There was nothing even of the mud in which they sank. Only was left, a bitter salt, the memory — not even that, but purely a dry useless loss — of youth and young energy. She could recall that there had been days when to dream was as satisfying and fruitful as an act, but not a single moment of one of those dreams. That such unhappiness and joy had ended in nothing, unless in this absence, was unendurable. It defeated her and she felt already old. To say, in hope of consolation, that every person carries in him a great many deaths, and that what she felt was one death, evaded the insistent question, the only one. What had their life together made, that existed? A child, yes — but that child himself was another cause of coldness and division.

  What have I that I can smile at? she thought. Her unhappiness, the quarrels, had destroyed her self-confidence — if it had ever existed and was not wholly a young arrogance, built on first puerile success at a university. And had fed in her a grudging instinct not to waste kindness on an object considered unworthy. This surely was absolute failure. If one cannot love what is or seems worthless, it is because warmth and the power to love are not there.

  But who, very young, knows that without having been taught? Only the good or very simple. Certainly not a young woman by nature greedy, possessive, ignorantly ambitious. His mother had once said to her, “He is very young.” But this she did not understand. To her, even younger, the words meant nothing.

  She could not overlook his infidelity. Her vanicy was in agony. She was destroyed in her own eyes. So much of our unhappiness is lived in by our memory, turning the knife on itself, that it was her childhood, listening to her mother’s strong voice (“You are the laughing-stock of the neighbourhood ”), which grimaced and said, ashamed: Everything is spoiled; I should have been admired more than all, I should have been all; if I am not all I am nothing. So, and for a long time, she was nothing, she was a resentment, breaking down in tears so corrosive that in the end they burned away even her feeling of disgrace. Everything: except her self-pity. Then she wanted to go away, but a nerve still joined her to him, and he was able, by drawing his too articulate emotions across it, to make her feel that she was guilty of cruelty. She wept again. Would she have gone if, as anyone coming back to life from an illness strengthens his weak thread of new-born life by fastening it to the tree under his window, she had not turned to another her blind will?

  Her feeling of guilt was far heavier than the sin of abandoning him. It seemed the whole of her being. At this moment she took all, all the blame. But this, too, was a lie — a mask put on to avoid seeing her own face. It is true, she thought, that partly our failure had to do with my passion to be in the right. Which involves wanting other people to be wrong. Worse — to be pointed at as wrong. How often had she betrayed him by speaking of his cruelties, lies, ugliness, and disguising her own? But — strip off all these masks, you will not even then find innocence. No, no, her guilt sprang far deeper than any harm she did him.

  They had nothing to say to each other now. With relief, she hurried away from him, to go home. She was oppressed by the nothing of their marriage. Suddenly, with excitement, almost joy, she reflected that what had been made, and endlessly, was the single impact of two youthfully irreconcilable energies, already, when they met, turning away from each other. But the instant of meeting, which existed only in the past, was real — as though a word were the equal of all the silence that precedes and follows it — and indestructible: two streams rushing down hill touch, and for a moment before dashing separately aside, widely separate, on their way to the lower valleys, form a deep pool. It existed in them now as a denial. A stone had dropped out of sight in the pool, leaving only the spreading circles. They too had ceased. But accept, without bitterness, that they existed, exist, will always exist, in the being of the pool itself. It is the without bitterness that is important. Guilt ... if she could accept, truly accept, even that, without distortion or exaggeration, she might hope one day to see the light which was so far behind her, and far, far behind the sun lying on the hill-sides of infancy. And, perhaps, so far ahead.

  *

  My mother stubbornly wanted perfection in the things round her. With only a little money to spend, she bought handsome old pieces of furniture, fine china, rugs. One afternoon she was standing close to a window examining a glazed bowl she held in both hands. Her latest find, it was beautiful; in the glaze a great many flowers and small animals were gently reflected, as though they caught the sun. The artist must have watched in a mirror a long time before copying them. My mother looked at one, then at the next, and the next, with the intent gravity of a child. When I opened the door, she started and dropped the bowl. It broke on the polished floor into hundreds of pieces. The blood sprang to her face. Looking at me with a hotly fierce anger, she cried out,

  “You fool. See, you’ve made me break it. Get away out of my sight. Go, go.”

  I fled: and carried my half-accepted guilt with me all day under the weight of her refusal to speak to me. Only in the evening when I was going up to bed, she said — it was as though the words jetted in her from a deep bitterness and grief — “No, if you hadn’t come in I should never have dropped it. I couldn’t. I never drop anything. Never, never, never.”

  *

  The years when, living in London tor the third time, I learned my acrobat’s tricks, were not the lowest. That can be said of the two years immediately after the last war. Who recalls those years clearly? The young dead were still so close that had we taken the trouble to listen their voices would certainly have carried back to us. Or we should have seen them, pointing out to one another something we overlooked, the early light, the pattern of foam between breaking waves, a hill carrying a house, things as common as these. A few of their contemporaries, among them poets, did listen. I did not. My energy in those days was inexhaustible, and I wasted it. Get, get, was all I heard. Things I despised — no, not despised, but denied — were waiting anywhere but in London for mc to notice them. To my restless greed, they were as it lying at the other side of the grave. I wanted what I saw here. 1 bought — clothes, more than I needed, and too expensive; pieces ot furniture, old and again costly, for a house I had no intention at present of living in: to get a lacquered tallboy I coveted, I borrowed money and began a series of debts. In the hours when I was not working for a firm of advertisers, I did not read, nor try even to think. I was a greedy gaping mouth for the cheapest and easiest sensations.

  In my firm, we dealt in lies. Advertising is that — even those forms of it worked out by otherwise decently intelligent men — the skilful use of the truth to mislead, to spoil, to debase. It is true we were servants, not masters. But through us, as much as through newspapers and books, the greater part of its truth was sucked from life; sham needs were forced into it. We are still chewing the sour kernel, without the courage to spit it out. I was bored by my work in this place, and without much conscience revolted by its futility: my boredom spille
d over into the evenings I emptied out in the least intelligent ways, like an animal, without the animal’s pure pleasure in living.

  To think of the time I wasted — and if it had been only time! What did I not waste of a swiftly-passing present, of a child’s first gestures to the world, of tranquillity, of a truth which then slipped out of my reach, never to be seen again in my life. Sometimes now I remember to be thankful to have been spared a severer punishment than the one I gave myself, I who could not wait for anything, imprisoned in my impatient greed. Who did not even imagine what to ask for.

  Why did no one, not one person, turn me round at that time and order me to look at myself? But no one has the right to be saved from outside, by another hand.

  Years later, reading Alain-Fournier’s ironically romantic book, I came on a passage which conveys wholly one aspect, the innocent, of those years: c’est la ville déserte, ton amour perdu, la nuit interminable, l’été, la fièvre….

  Yes, certainly a fever — but in life there are no victims, except among very young children. We others catch our illnesses, we run after them and insist upon succumbing — and afterwards excuse ourselves and complain of our sufferings. The strangest thing about life is not its frightful cruelty, but that it can be gentle.

  *

  Yet I had a chance to see myself. A mirror was held up to me two or three times by a life precisely the opposite of mine, truthful where mine was a sham, as clear as mine was stained and confused.

  By some kindness I was taken to Walter de la Mare’s house at Anerley, for a Sunday afternoon and evening, the day when his friends visited him. Afterwards I went again — twice? three times? — always afraid to be unwanted if I went too often. You took the train through several stations, then a tram, to reach an almost country street of quiet houses, each with its garden at the back. It was indubitably not country, yet was not urban; it held itself in a gently grave space between them, and contented. I recall little of the inside of the house, except a polished table and the bowl in which raspberries, currants, and cherries drowned in their thick juice. It was, perhaps, an ordinary enough house, such as a French poet might have lived and worked in for years, as in the too great lucidity of his mind. There was more here, in this house and its small garden — secluded as only in an English street the gardens can be — than light; there were children and their quietly-smiling mother; there was an order and friendliness of material things. Enclosing all, yet in its place as an unexacting part of all, the preoccupations, disinterested, of Walter de la Mare himself. Even I grasped the relation between the friendly and allusive ease of these conversations, and a poetry which has the brightness, the purity, the ambiguous depth of pools in which a river is lost. Even I could not avoid noticing that part, perhaps the greater part, of the intimacy and light seriousness of the talk was due to the one of his qualities only to be pinned down as absence. He did not live in the same world with us. He was present, blowing a simple idea into fantastic shapes, deflecting any lack of charity (not once did I hear him even think a malicious comment), listening to all the others, ready when no one else chose to speak to lift into daylight a web of analogies, like an anatomist laying open a network of nerves — but his analogies were taking part in a ballet — and not present, politely absent in a solitude which assumed him, not he it. Even I could see that as all this was outside — a singular probity, the fine essence of friendliness, detached attentive curiosity towards the nature of events (all: in nature and in the mind), an irony not weighted by malice, the impossibility of a false or awkward use of words or the spirit — so it was inside. The atmosphere of the house was only these turned inside out, and simple. No faintest hint of the cenacle about these Sunday evenings, nor of the salon. A garden behind a rather small suburban house, and a room, easily approachable, one of the only two perfect examples of hospitality I have known — because centred on itself although open to all the possibilities of thought.