“Yes, but if there is going to be war — when? ”
“In two years — at most three.”
“What do you base that on? ”
“Listen—”
There is no need to listen. In the first place she had known it since a day twelve or more years since, during a child’s diphtheria illness. She sat and watched him, in the weak circle of the night-light, asleep, and easily. A thing happened which was not for the first time — the image of herself became indistinct, merged in that of the clumsy schoolgirl still conscious in her, then in a crowd, indistinct, and as it were suppliant. A woman separated herself from it, and became distinct — less her features than the curve itself of her body and its cold. She stooped, outside the smouldering door-beams of a house, a poor house, over a child’s dead naked body. It had been thrown down on stones his blood made wet. None of this was a thought; it was an experience — of reality or of a reality; and whether in the past or the present did not arise. There was one, not two moments, an absence, it could be, of time, confused with this double anguish; one cruelty — of life; one rigidity of despair, which possessed all her senses. A movement made by the living child in his sleep brought her back — to inhabit the sole narrow island of her mind which she could measure, which her strength equalled. It was then, yes, when there were no present signs of a war, that she began to fear one. Within a few years there were too many and clear signs. The habits of rational speculation, of questioning people, of collecting for its own sake information, did not abolish the signs her self made to itself — as the afternoon two years ago, when a cloudily bright sky thundered without warning, a long clattering fearful peal: the trees started with birds; and she ran terrified to the window, certain — he was away learning to fly — that he must have fallen with his aeroplane. And there were many nights when, the rest of her household asleep, she walked in her room, and thought: I am an old woman walking about an empty house; I am defeated now, I am nothing.
It was not only to make up to him, for everything, that she spent on training him for life the greater part of all she had. It was because of the war.
The voices crossed each other in the room in a growing tension. It became harder to see who was speaking. Some of the lighter voices might come from outside, from the waiting houses, or from any moment of the past or future. So few years separated these speakers from the young men they knew during the last war and who could not possibly, before they were silenced, have said all they had to say. Fewer still from the dead of the next.
“Surely it’s time for the news? ”
She turned on the wireless. A voice flowed like slightly rancid oil through the room. ...S O S. I’m falling. Oo-oo-oh, hold me tight, I’m falling, falling. ... It was absurd, but what do you expect? Even Fate — rather than affront our inconsequence by a sign which would remind us of the age of her family and the respect in which it used to be held — makes herself cheap. The pure profile stammers. By a sort of complicity between her and our way of life she becomes vulgar enough to seem not out of place in the theatre — where our so clever dramatists arrange a few startling, witty, or homely lies in such a way that we pass from our sitting-rooms to the stage — at our wildest, from Hyde Park — without noticing the difference.
*
Only to be a European is to fear. Europe has for long been a continent where the plains are burned dry in summer and frozen in winter by the same fear falling from darkened or clear skies; where the hills have kept their air of expecting the fugitive; where rivers are open and navigable to terror from mouth to source. What foreigner, even if he were in Europe and lived through them, can know the weight and shape in our minds of the years during which we watched catastrophe coming towards us behind the idiot mask of Sir John Neville Hoare?
In the space, cramped enough, of three years, we had five monstrous crises. After March 1938 there was only The Crisis. It was not headlines, or despatches from correspondents. It was fear — it was the taste itself of our bread, it was in the water we drank; in the air, which for weeks together became dry and heavy, so that the lungs fought with it. In Siegfried et le Limousin, in 1922, the most charming of living French writers — and rarely betrayed by his elegance — wrote: Je ne veux pas mourir avant que les mères dont les fils out été tués soient toutes mortes: ce jour-là un grand pas sera fait vers le bonheur du monde. A quite modest wish.
It is the modest wishes of humanity that a war denies. Every glorious (or vain-glorious) wish — for excitement, danger, any severe tension of senses and nerves — are provided for to excess. But the common pleasures, from unbroken hours of reading or conversation with friends, to the coming to our tables of strawberries in their season, are swept away, and with them the common joys — who now rejoices freely in his child’s growth to manhood, plans an inheritance, or says: Next year I shall plant a tree here? Posterity will grieve for its lost treasures, but the real loss is simpler, more tragic, and cannot be put right.
*
IMAGES
They have made an image of you, my dear,
Moulding in your mouth’s refusal to smile
A sly wisdom sadder than a tear.
This knowing dead woman is not you. I’ll
Help you to undress now, my helpless one,
Night’s begun, the long night, nothing can be done
But let you go to sleep. So night may take
From deep of eye-pit some young waking look,
Yes, a girl. What light springs in the opaque
Dark, giving back the living face night took?
Impatient, you couldn’t endure to walk
At your child’s pace; silent. Is it you can’t talk?
O useless. They are all buried, those young
Impatient women, and the bright hair ruined
By neglect, where memory should have clung:
The images hide each other, eyes find
Strange colours in my mind, voice mutes voice, your breath
Clouds only the glass emptied by your death. . . .
Today the rose burns in your face. What cold
Turns thus to grace, teaching you foolish lies?
Corruption’s pupil. Yet what if this new mould
Held; if freed by their folded lids your eyes
Now smiling secretly beguile your face
To take itself lightly back from your vague race.
You are not in this last image, this mouth
Drowning all past words with its frigid cry,
Coldness unlit by a remembered south.
Have you forgotten how you’d sit and try
New hats, turning from the mirror to ask
Your remote gaze, But does it suit me? O quick,
Slipping from me, mute eyes noting my trick,
What young woman looks from me to the glass?
ELEGY
1
Snow will not fall on her from the hedge
Nor the wind touch her
Nor by stone walls moss-covered her feet carry her
Nor in the streets she knew, loved;
Resting, now, in a narrower street.
Lane, moors, town, O town,
Give back what you took,
Her pressure, reflection in you.
2
A life squeezed into three words
Into an old woman by the fire chanting
Yes my dear. Yes my dear.
And afterwards, after her death,
Her daughter hears the same voice
Issue from her own body;
The whole of her childhood, acts, gestures, hands,
Is in that voice freshly flowing through the generations.
Water flows outlasting in a stone runnel
The decayed cloister, under the living frieze of the birds.
3
So if I look into the glass,
Look long and carefully,
Shall I not force her to come forward
Separate herself from its depths
F
rom the reflections waiting, pressed close, in there,
Lean towards me, as when she leaned
And looked into herself minute after
Minute, seeking what knowledge?
The glass must be keeping her unflawed,
Unused: a king’s tomb shelters the seed
Closed in it, life enclosed in that husk,
As all her days, roads she walked on,
Clouds, trees, houses, gathered into her eyes
When she was within touch here
Are laid up, living, uncalled-on, in her image
Withdrawn into the glass: but irreturnable.
4
This is your last night with us. Forgive me
For anything I when you lived thought against you
In moods viler than the sharp enmity
Of a child. Forgive me. And forgive me too
All I selfish did not do for you. Mind
Me in your smiling death only as the child
I was, stubborn but timid, eager, kind,
When, if I but vexed you lightly, I cried.
*
Paris, rue de l’Abbé de l’Épée.
This room on the top floor of a shabby hotel, this attic, rather, identified itself instantly with the room I lived in in London before the last war. In the moment of waking, and for a moment, my hand on the coarse sheet gave me back my light awkward body of those days. Then, with the grief of re-entering a stupider body, I had another moment of pleasure to find how easily it adapted itself to the ways of life of a poor student. There are certain individual experiences we do not (as, obsessed with time, Proust thinks) summon to us again and again, so truly as we live in them perpetually. They form a space round us — easily distinguishable among all the other as precisely formed spaces we are in the habit of walking into. Whatever the life we lead here, the shock of recognition itself is pure happiness. Why? I think, because the mind feels an affection for what it once, with the greatest care and energy, constructed. It may when it comes to die feel for the body only affection, longing, regret.
I re-enter an experience with joy even if in the very moment I recognise it for one where I am only unhappy: behind my anguish, part of it, is the relief with which I stroke a known wall, note the arches I myself built to take the weight of a grief, the windows directing just so much light and, carefully-spaced, the columns leading to the other door.
This attic is narrow, its bed, table, chair, wardrobe, of the cheapest, and defaced by years of rough ill-use. On either side of me, similar attics are lived in by students — last night I heard one of them repeating to himself again and again a series of formulae, and sighing heavily as he knocked each into the walls of his skull. The window looks across the tiles of lower and still shabbier houses to — oh, happiness and glory — the dome of the Panthéon. How many years, far too many, I have waited for Paris, and now I bring it, to live in a student’s poor room, the mind and body of a middle-aged writer. Yet I am at home in this room. My mind recognises it, stretches itself in it — lighter than it was yesterday, free. The light of a September morning in Paris is not too crushing for it, exacts without cruelty, almost invites.
Yet it was a strict light. It spared nothing. Yard, window-sill, geranium, naked body, its spine a grey cord knotted under the grey skin, standing to wash itself in the window, were outlined by a silence which was really appalling. The noise, of lorries, horns the thumb pressed remorselessly, and voices, rolled over and round them without breaking into the loneliness imposed on each by the light. They were separated, untouchable. Nothing here could comfort itself by gliding into another thing. Each explained itself by the absence of all the rest. It was exhilarating and alarming. I began to understand what a friend had said to me: The first days in Paris you will feel like committing suicide; after that there’s no place like it. I began to see that until the mind has grown a second skin as impenetrable as the light, the assault on it of all these isolated things could be as painful as sand driven into a naked body. It could become intolerable.
Going downstairs, I passed the servant who spends her whole day, from early morning until dark, scrubbing and sweeping. In the cheap hotels of this quarter — I paid one and threepence a day for my room — the dust is ceaselessly polished into floors, furniture, walls. By now, most of them have a second self, indestructible, of dirt.
My landlady, a woman about forty, was in her room on the ground floor, the door open, while her hair was waved. Looking in the glass she could watch it as well as note who came in and out. In a monotonous voice she was telling the hairdresser that her husband had spent the night “with those women ”, and was asleep in his room. “First thing when he wakes he’ll ask me to give him a clean shirt, and then what money I have in the drawer. What disillusion! ”
The lines of her mouth formed a single word, of surprise and bitterness.
The streets here, behind their mask, unsmiling, of sunlight, are grey and hard with age. The life going on continuously, every inch occupied by it, in every room someone coughing, working, bartering, baking, or pressing offal into a cheap pâté, ironing, giving birth, dying, was self-supported and self-devouring, completely cut off, by a hard membrane, from the soil. There must be living roots, but how far down, and what catastrophe would be strong enough to throw them into the light? Never, not in any other city, have I felt this division, this separateness, this sense of a brittle ferment, sharply enclosed — in a wide space, true: wide enough to hold, under a delicately-modelled sky, the Sainte-Chapelle, the Seine and its bridges, the Luxembourg, to shelter a great people of monuments, of the past, and a greater weight of treasures of all ages, to hold Notre-Dame, the Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Elysées: but enclosed. The life not only of one city: the Paris of the Middle-Ages, of the seventeenth century, of the Second Empire, of a dozen other distinct epochs, persisted in side-streets, in sunken dilapidated rooms, as well as in the museums where fragments of the past still keep their power to reach out to stroke or twist a nerve. I have been alone in a great many places, but nowhere except here do I feel this irresistible need to be on guard, almost all the time.
*
Not quite. Over breakfast — at the corner of the rue St.-Jacques — I could relax. The sun on the old houses was suave and friendly; a freshness, almost a salt freshness, sharpened the air: a young lively boy passed, pressing yard-long rolls of bread under an arm, and went with them into the pissoir; an old woman sauntered, holding a bunch of marigolds between black-gloved hands and smiling. There were a few workmen at the counter, taking their first drink of the day; they had an air of amiable leisure.
You walked past here, I thought — greatest of mediaeval teachers — exultant, arrogant, until the day when you became he who no longer had the politeness of heart to love anyone, any human being, even the one in whose hands your mind, humiliated with your body, would have been safe. I watched him pass with long strides down the centre of the narrow street; he avoided the slippery gutter where I fell yesterday, and walked through and obliterated the living bodies of men and women like midges.
My companion stretched her arms. “How well I feel! ”
I watched her with affection and envy. In Paris, as anywhere, she was alive with a strong vigorous ease. Her life was as spontaneous as the unfolding of a strong bud. Nothing hindered in her the fulfilment of a desire except a material circumstance she was too poor, or too unknown, to remove. She was endlessly inquisitive, and with an equal courage. A German, she belonged to that generation, children during the War, whose adolescence was shaken by the collapse of all standards — the mark, the State as Power, the authority of parents, morals. Nothing need be respected. With impotent violence — so much had been destroyed already, so much had failed them, why should it too not be ruined? — they mocked and tore down the past. The past gone, the future went with it; they had only a moment in which to enjoy everything they could seize.
At sixteen, she was earning her living in the frenzied Berlin of the early
twenties and, with her ruthless self-possession, enjoying it. Her body was her own, to do with as she pleased, strong — a Prussian can feed on hunger — curiously untouched. At twenty-nine she had the face of a girl, and youthfully candid. Prussian as she was, her mind had been bent into rejecting any authority. It is true that the negation of Prussia is anarchy — what else can it be? — but she kept firmly all the habits of her childhood, a rigorous neatness, respect for intelligence, and an instinct to possess the world — her first attempt took her to France; she was almost without money and she managed to live there for several weeks and reach Marseilles. When the Nazis took over Germany she came to England, determined above all not to think or feel as a refugee: the Prussian arrogance under her gaiety and youth refused every weakness as well as every remorse of the exile. She made friends, she worked, she spoke and wrote in English. Poor, she was able to enjoy the life of a young man about town and without sacrificing either her independence or her smiling simplicity, as firm as her will.
We lived in Paris at the rate of her purse: she was not willing to borrow mine. There were so many cheap cafés in this quarter that in some danger of being poisoned we spent, each of us, twelve or fifteen francs on the day’s meals. What in my Prussian was the recklessness of youth was in me courage — before the White Russian and Chinese menace.
There is — there was one other person with whom I could have lived easily in such discomfort: for all others I should only feel responsible. She and the young German had the same sensuous quickness and wit, a natural lyricism in act, so unlike my slow ways, and the same purely instinctive charm. Only, since she was a young Englishwoman, she was the subtler, the more intuitive, with a touch of sly malice.
You were my only friend at that time, and perhaps ths one always closest to me. Together, we had the stupidity to be young. We shared the squalor of rooms in old houses, of desires, the squalor itself of youth. Ah, Georgina, why need you have died then? There was still so much you had to do. The curiosity, endless, of your senses, had touched only a few of the things they were offering you. You had changed so little life into yourself. How you would have sat here, indolently smiling, amused by letting the street come to you with its stalls, narrow windows full of figs, cheap hats, pâtés, the church, women haggling, the golden September light. And afterwards you would have walked, drawing glances and aware of them, past windows where without vanity you saw yourself — to find other places where you could give yourself up to seeing. In you, as it is in me, seeing was a passion. It made you selfish and happy. No one, not even this young German, has more than your gift of happiness. You spent it on everything in your life, and on me. I was not thankful enough for it.
The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell Page 7
