The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell

by Storm Jameson

  A harshness, a sense of urgency, penetrated mc through the distractions I found here or made for myself. They sharpened my anxiety to do well. The responsibility, after all, was mine. It was I who had said first that a university was the next stage: it had been understood for a year that I was working for a scholarship. But at the last, and when I was getting ready, my mother began to be afraid of the future and sad. Gold mesh purses were very fashionable in those days: with what money I had to spend I bought one for her “to take shopping ”.

  “It won’t comfort me in my lonely round,” she said seriously.

  Without trying to, I shut away the part of my mind which a phrase of this sort could stab. I must go. A year at the Municipal School in Scarborough — I lived during the week in rooms, with a landlady indifferent to my comings and goings, and believed that now I was self-reliant; in many ways I was more ignorant than a child, and intractable when I feared being laughed at — had stirred a thick ferment in me. Rising in my veins and behind my eyes, it blinded me to everything except my intense need to get away.

  When I left she travelled with me as far as Scarborough. Standing on the platform, she looked up at what must have been my carelessly eager face. If I could see her. But there is only a pale shadow. The image which comes if I persist, has the unreal smoothness of a photograph. It is a photograph, of that time. An assassin of memory. I am sorry that photographs were invented. They are infinitely worse than nothing.

  Then she must have walked away alone, to go through what of the ritual of a day in Scarborough she had courage for.

  *

  Dresse-toi nu, vaillant; fais craquer les gaînes; écarte de toi les tuteurs; pour croître droit tu n’as plus besoin que de l’élan de ta sève et que de l’appel du soleil. I came on this and copied it — some years ago, but already too late to be of any use. And I doubt whether the advice, although offered by one of the most distinguished of living writers, would help anyone except a person who did not need it. How well I understand now the changes of corruption in a young soul! At first everything calls it — things, the faces of strangers, even the uncouth streets of an English industrial city. An uncontrolled excitement rises through the body: in the veins, and the spaces round the heart, the pressure very soon becomes more than the soul can bear; scarcely able to breathe, it lets the body rush it out of the library where it ought to be working, absorbing knowledge — anywhere, to the tennis courts, the refectory, the corridors, where it may catch glimpses of magnificent young men on their way to lectures or laboratories, even to the ugly city, to cafés and bookshops. This immature soul has no ballast to keep it from rolling in the lightest swell starting from a malicious object. And where it runs aground it is caught: nothing now can save it from the assault of those strong tropical-seeming plants which push everywhere their fleshy stems. A storm only will free it, and at what cost.

  In my lodging, I am working late — to make up for time wasted during the day. The gas hisses behind a yellow globe, the old wall creaks. Suddenly, in the silent street, footsteps, or someone cries out in the next room, in his sleep — the engineering student who took the room yesterday and tomorrow on the stairs will rush past me, late for a lecture: the footsteps die away, the sleeper turns over (no doubt his bed is no less hard and ridged than mine), but my mind has been wrenched out of the book it with reluctance had drawn round itself, it is already a vapour, or it dreams, dreams foolish or childishly obscene, which cripple it for living.

  Nothing, neither the harshness often of my upbringing, nor my ambitions, had disciplined me. I was helplessly the servant of my senses. The reproofs, mild and half-amused, of senior Students, strengthened in me only distrust and the hatred I felt for authority. A fairly stable rock was my ambition, but a rock the foam hid.

  In the end I passed out at the head of the Honours list in my subject. No more ignorant and undiscriminating mind ever played the examinations cards with more spirit.

  *

  Once it was only books which forced us to think about cruelty, homo homini lupus. The incautious pages let slip tortured limbs of mediaeval peasants, criminals broken on the wheel, bodies of children and women lying under the charred beams. These memories, not or not entirely our own, have a trick of jumping out in the dark to strike. That can be dealt with. But when it starts up in our life, only next door, near enough for us to learn the stench of terror — no use closing our eyes, even no use pinching nostrils; the smell of concentration camps is stronger even than the smell of blood running into the ground during a war. (Because of the air-raids, civilians are not, as they were in the last war, excited by this.)

  An animal is not cruel; it lives wholly in the instant leap on its prey, in the present taste of marrow or blood. Cruelty begins with the memory, and the pleasures of the memory are impure; they draw their strength along levels where no sun has reached.

  At last I am beginning to understand it. A trifling incident put me on the track. The other day I bought some toothpaste of a brand which so far as I knew at the moment I had never used. In the evening when I opened the tube a fine aromatic scent was set free, and at once I was in the long shadowy bathroom of the school I went to when I was ten or eleven. It was a private school, kept in a long house, shabby and handsome, near the harbour. From the upper schoolroom, you saw the gleaming nap of the harbour, the abandoned shipyards, the gulls. At the back a flagged yard, where we played a little. Tricked, the rooms and wide staircase and this yard gave themselves up to me, with a deceptive clarity and, clinging to them, as fresh as if it had done nothing all these years but lie in the earth, a memory I was too slow, and weaker than it, to escape. I was in the yard: other children, stretching the skipping-rope between them, were running round me to draw it tightly round my ankles. In a moment I should fall, helplessly bound, on the stone flags. I stood there, and showed none of my humiliation; nor my fear. I remember walking away, a murderer in my will.

  What smiled in their eyes when they tightened the rope and watched me was curiosity — they were exploring the nature of reality — but curiosity bearing a negative sign. Cruelty is that — as, on the whole, science is the mind’s positive curiosity. Without cruelty, no evolution. In what fusion, and final complete satisfaction, will evolution bite its tail, and curiosity, with cruelty, cease? Fortunate moment for man, and his last.

  This cannot have been my earliest practice in hiding marks of fear or chagrin. One day I was in the street outside a shop. How small I still was I can see by the low window-sill of the shop, on a level with my head. The sixpence I was holding slipped from my fingers, rolled, and fell through the grating of a drain. Shock, the fear of my mother’s anger, ran through me, and at the same instant I thought that I should be laughed at, and my face hardened in an unnatural calm. My terror now was that I had been seen. And someone had seen, a benevolently smiling woman.

  “What did you lose? ” She opened her purse.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Oh, surely—? ”

  “Nothing.” I walked away from her quickly, hot with vexation that my loss had been noticed. Surely, under cover of her interest, she was laughing?

  *

  From the time I could read, when I was four years old, I read indiscriminately, and merged with myself all I read. I recall infantile obscenities I drew out of a story of the Indian Mutiny: and during a long time — how long I cannot now judge — another I and the characters of various books were living a romantic life in a country happily situated in my stomach. Later I began to be punished for hiding books, so that I could read as I dressed, under the mattress of my bed. I must still have been very young, because I continued to hide them in the same place, forgetting, between beatings, that they would be discovered.

  There were certain volumes of fairy-tales I read again and again. Even then I guessed that the myth of the Younger Brother is older and more serious than the others. It seems, too, that I may have understood it, in part. Only in part. I knew that one must leave the comfortable sha
dow thrown by the mother, or remain always poor and ridiculous. But nothing warned me that the whole past is stronger than her shadow, harder to escape from. That the energy of a lifetime cannot break the habit formed too early of walking — stumbling, rather — with eyes turned to the young daylight touching purely the nocturnal coasts of a childhood.

  A story, The King of the Yellow Dwarfs, gave me a shock. It ends in the triumph of injustice, infinitely more terrifying than a cruel or sad tale. It is, I think, the only one. I would as soon leave an infant to play with a sharp knife as let him read this story before he is old enough to defend himself against it.

  *

  Six years old, or at most seven, I may have been when my mother went a long voyage without me — I think to the Argentine. She put me to live in the small dame’s school next door, kept by two sisters. I recall that she promised me, before she went, if she died, to come and see me. But it was not fear of a ghost overcame me as soon as I was put to bed, and every night during the four months she was away: it was a dreadful anxiety and desire to see her. I implored her to come, if only for a moment. I cried and cried, and one of the sisters came upstairs to reason with me. But it was stronger than my terror of being scolded or pitied. Nothing, until sudden sleep came, was any good.

  The next long voyage she went, a year or two later, I was indifferent. But on the last morning I made a pretence of being sad. I knew she expected it.

  Already I felt my responsibility for her happiness. Why? It was not that, were she disappointed or bored, her children would vex her — which meant a thrashing: with good reason we feared our thrashings. No — it came, I am certain, from a knot tied in one of my nerves when I was born, to remind me that I must do something about her disappointment. How far I was from understanding its depth, and lifelong and inappeasable bitterness … yet my anxiety to please her had the compulsion of pity: it was a little too large for me. If she were unhappy I felt instinctively guilt, not fear. A picnic where something happened which amused her gave me a delicate feeling of triumph. Did she find a common wild flower and ask me what it was called? — it was, I told her, very rare here. The sky clouded over for rain? As we walked, I pushed the clouds back with my will.

  You could think I had an ear growing inside hers, a pulse of mine in her wrist.

  One day she was dressing to go out. I asked when she was coming back. “Never,” she said, with a bitter slowness. She was vexed with my father. In their quarrels she could not make a reconciling gesture; it must come from him and be made more than once before her strong pride, really disappointment, was appeased. (I was always hers — and yet, since I cannot easily hurt anyone’s feelings, I talked to him when she could not hear me.) Did I believe she meant this? Enough to follow her when she left the house. We walked a mile or so into the country, I a hundred yards behind, just out of sight, I thought. There was sunlight between the strong shadows of trees. She stopped and looked round: when I reached her she ordered me — I suppose gently, since I was not afraid — to go home. Did I obey her? — I was hot and tired. And was it then she turned back? I can’t remember. I sec her only in the moment when she turned her head and looked at me coming behind her.

  *

  A port is a ship which has grown into the land. The waves, striking its cliffs, its wharves, send a light trembling, unseen but not unfelt, through the old streets. In the air, salt — and that brightness reflected in a shower of rays from the sea, as though a fish leaped and flashed past your eyes everywhere you glanced. Gardens, houses, thoughts, turn away from the land, towards flight. Among those living in any street, some have just returned from Callao, Shanghai, Odessa, or that strange land known to my infancy by the two names of Bonnus-Airs and The Plate; others are leaving again tomorrow. Of this one you are told: last heard of in the perpetual night of Archangel in winter, his ship frozen in the ice: a ship still free spoke him on her way home and heard that the captain had had his hand amputated after frost-bite: all winter his wife lives with this absence of a hand, but when light frees the other ships his has vanished; nothing heard, nothing seen, of the moment when the ice broke in on her; the darkness of the north has taken all. Of this young woman: her husband died of fever in Pernambuco. Of that old silent couple: when she was on a voyage with him, the ship barely lived through a hurricane: ask her — she has forgotten it. . . . The captain’s wife, for whom foreign countries are only a coast-line and harbours, who has learned to live at ease in a cabin and endure the boredom of long voyages in a small steamer, is here and absent: she has her children and her house or she has her husband — rarely all three. There runs, through the quietest, least unconventional of homes, a current always of change, uncertainty, the thought and desire of voyages.

  Every Victorian bracket and old cupboard of our house was filled with exotic fragments, fetched up here from the other side of the world — the side towards which, whether she had willed it or not, my mother’s deepest nature was set — egg-shell china from Shanghai, the model, in scented wood, of a Chinese house, silks and etchings on copper from Sasebo, books printed in Tokio, hand-painted and fastened by a tiny ivory slipper, the huge seeds of tropical plants, fans, Spanish trays from Montevideo, lace and a shell from Tenerife. When she was very young my mother was bored by living at home. And I think her children bored her then.

  She took me with her on voyages before I was old enough to bring back anything but a confused shifting brightness, colours, sounds; they vibrate in my life as the sea through the air and earth of that port where I, fortunate, was born. There is always a sea breeze in my memory, but from what sea it comes who can be sure? Not I. The salt touched my bones very early with its savour of other countries. A savour or a poison? It scarcely matters. Who ever came home without he had first sailed?

  *

  There were days, weeks, during the years before this war when its journey brought it to the top of a hill and we could watch it crossing the stretches of high ground. Then the road dipped again into a defile. Had it, perhaps, decided to turn off along a side road or, changing its mind entirely, to turn back? But irregularly, at increasingly short intervals, it reappeared. It was possible after a time to see its face and speculate on the time — months or years — it would take to reach us. A good many people, not all of them foolish or insincere — quite sincerely they deceived themselves and others — were not interested, and nothing irritated these more than to be seized, their arms shaken, and made to look at the road and that figure drawing week by week nearer. Either they smiled and said, “You are hysterical, my poor friend ” — or, with impatience, “Nonsense. Don’t you see that he is not looking this way? Quite obviously he’s turning east.” Even when at his next and closer appearance the traveller was openly facing in our direction, they persisted in thinking that the road did not reach so far as us: it stopped some distance away, at a country and a people of whom we knew nothing. ... In all countries a few men and women had persuaded themselves that the approaching figure was a friend. . . .

  The mother of a son almost war age cannot persuade herself not to fear. . . . None of the three or four people with her in the room were able, except at moments, to deceive themselves. The length of their sight gave them no least pleasure: what they saw alarmed them; and they were ashamed of their impotence. The League Council was in session at St. James’s Palace, debating the German march into the Rhineland. To the onlookers, the Council offered the spectacle, odd if it had not been senseless and horrible, of a play acted by ventriloquist dolls, almost life-size, not the tenants of their words, able to fold their hands while turning their heads round in the full circle: in this posture, they mimed a Concert of Europe which left nothing to be imagined except the harmonies: their masks, still more their voices, were familiar: less informed people had been listening for years to these same voices exhorting, soothing, explaining, about the traveller, so many contradictory things that they had lost faith. Either the masks were lying or they were lamentably mistaken. Or because of some defect in t
heir mechanism they had lost the power to make decisions. Some perhaps were already hopeless, others were self-assured and not without sympathy for the traveller; others, again, were becoming desperate. They quarrelled. One, it is said, wept.

  The real spectacle was not, perhaps, the one presented to the public: it was being rehearsed in the myopic heads behind the masks — or elsewhere.

  “Is it possible,” she asked, “that we are going to ally ourselves with Germany? ”

  A soldier of the last war — he was thinking, no doubt, of that country of cemeteries which is northern France; of the botched villages, of the thistledown touching the ear with a word spoken by any one of a thousand or so ghosts left to share the place with its few overworked inhabitants; of the sunken scar in the wheat marking a trench — stammered, “If that happens, I shall enlist in the French army.”

  “And you expect the French to say thank-you for your offer! ”

  “All that is charming,” she said to him, “but I can’t help feeling that a little common sense now would be more use.” She was thinking: If our son were a child I could take him away, out of their reach. Herod may kill all the others, but mine would be safe. Unfair? If it were possible to save one child out of twenty millions, would anyone for a moment hesitate? Certainly not his mother.

  “They always behave in exactly the same way, the dear Boches. They have learned nothing and they know nothing.”

  “Except about war.”

  “And music.”

  “Music to them is what their cathedrals are to the French — superb buildings, marvellous conquests of space, which seem to express the soul of the nation, and are only that soul’s excuse for an inhumanity growing up outside. A German goes in and out of his music without giving it time to change his life.”