The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell

by Storm Jameson

  Have we a right to suppose that this pure passion benefits the race? None. It exhausts. In the circuit of a few years it discharges the virtue of a lifetime.

  The worshippers of the machine do not deny that it lets the Ape in us twist the still living nerve of our humanity with more skill than an executioner of the past winding his entrails from a living man. (A letter from an English airman in Spain: You needn’t be sad if— it should be when; these are truly awful machines — I don t get back this time. We bombed: (name deleted) yesterday, I came home tired out and fell asleep almost at once — and had a confused dream about the children I must have killed or only mutilated. All I could say to myself was: Thank God Im dreaming. But I woke up and it was true.):

  And after wars of the modern sort, we are too bitter and bewildered to make peace. As in 1919, what we shall make is another war.

  I meet people who say they are in despair: man is so cruel and stupid that the sooner he, like other unwanted species, dies out, the better. If only I could repeat this, war, and Dachau, would be moments on the way to extinction, and mean nothing. They would be endurable — not simply as anything is that fails to kill — but as a test, an examination, which need not be passed. I can’t. Men suffer. When it comes to dying, there are no cruel or stupid men, or enemies. The kernel that death pulls out with his fingers is always the same. He must find it odd to split open so many different-looking fruits and find an identical pulp. . . .

  I have not chosen between my pacifism and my dislike or a tyrant — which is older in me than many a fear. Pacifism is easy when you keep your gaze steadily on war, on the Ape’s work. Too easy: pacifists are ashamed of this ease, and make the most of their other difficulties. Shift your gaze a little to one side, to Dachau and the schools where children’s tender skulls are hardened to deny gentleness and freedom, place them in the England you know — and it is no longer easy, or even possible, to remain a pacifist. This is really the moment of decision. It is no use saying that what one obscure person chooses is not important. That is only another and feeble escape.

  Is there a way to hold these evils in the mind, and accepting the guilt of both live quietly in the mortal silence below them — and free of an agony pressing always on the same nerve? A place in which the twin streams of cruelty and gentleness are joined in a salt freshness the old can look at and the young learn by heart? There must be. But I know already that my lack of patience will not take me so deep — and when the moment to choose comes, between submission to the evil of war and the evil of Dachau, I shall chose, blindly, the first.

  *

  In its middle years, my body remembers that girl with her baby, in the room with the high chair set in the window. Who is listening more closely, she or I? There seems no difference between us, and between the child and the young man scarcely a likeness.

  During the last weeks, he said, he had thrown overboard as many as he could lay hands on of all the theories, ideas, and even the emotions, he had learned. Now he wanted to study every branch of knowledge and at the age of fifty write a small pamphlet. Wasn’t it, I asked, exhilarating to have thrown everything overboard and have nothing? Yes, at first, but now he felt dejected and almost sullen. (His happiness broke from him in smiles and slight movements of his long narrow hands. I had thought they would grow up the hands of a surgeon or a writer: as it has turned out they are, and by his early choice, an airman’s.)

  I spoke of the imperative of our age: to fend off the too many unreal wants thrusting themselves at us. Trying to attend to them cheats us of our seven feet of time; only by leading very simple lives can we save ourselves. And from the greedy habits of our family. “I’m not greedy,” he said: “you gave me a great deal: the Alps, Cambridge, flying. Now all I want is books, companionship, children, and to go on flying.” With a smile, he added, “My mind is really so like yours that often I know your thoughts.”

  At the moment I had a single thought — certainly unseen — shadow, stone dropping in the bitter silence of water: Pray God take away the war from us. . . . What nonsense that the world is smaller than it was in the time of oil-lamps and sailing ships! Can I hear what is being said by women in Spain and China? Not a word.

  *

  There is in me a landscape of desert and rocky hills: sometimes it sprouts the infant streets of my own memory; oftener it is placed in a memory so old and savage that it can talk only in signs. This time I was alone in a dazed sandy country, and saw the huge curved uprush through the sky of two birds, darkly crested and strong: others coming behind were crestless. They doubled the flight of the sky. I felt an astonished delight in so much beauty, then anxiety if they should attack us. Us? There was a formless people on the ground, confused with the stones and the skeleton-like roots of trees. . . . After I woke from this dream, my pleasure in these great birds kept me awake — and the fear they had roused.

  *

  22 September. This reached me from Prague today:

  To the Conscience of the World

  In this fateful moment, when a decision between war and peace is being reached, we, the undersigned Czechoslovak writers, address this solemn appeal to all those who form the conscience of the world. . . and so on. It is not a long document, nor is it an appeal. It is more the voice, quietly serious, of a people in the greatest danger, which without violence says: Judge us whether we have deserved to be killed by a stronger and greedier, we who, though in different words, speak your own language of freedom and conscience. . . . We appeal to all writers and to all others who create culture. . . .

  Who told you, Czechs, that anyone if you called would hear you? Except those who are already sick with shame. We might have warned you that our advice and admonitions were only delaying the moment when we should leave you with your murderer. That would have been honest. But it would not have been according to the forms. It is always to the forms that a policy of hesitations and confusion attaches itself. I am sure our old men are confused. It must have occurred to them at last that they are dealing with bandits, and the only thing they can think of doing is to ask for a receipt made out in legal form for the goods handed over. These include the children I saw, three months since, march with their springing step through Prague for the great meeting of the Sokols. Small groups had trained over the whole country, keeping time to the same music: when they came together for the first time, in the stadium, they moved as a single supple body, with the lightness of a dancer.

  How young Prague was this June! Children went in and out of its sunlight like bees; the stones themselves of its seventeenth-century churches and palaces kept the taste of honey. At night, under a sky the lamps, not too strict, left in possession of the old squares, the darkness was open at both ends, on past and future. The children at least, looking at this future’s clear profile, did not expect that it would turn to them the face of an enemy. How could they? Their elders had brought them up to believe they had only to stretch their minds in the new schools, and exercise, in freedom, their easily strong bodies, to become a people the others would respect. They believed it. Nothing so youthfully candid could pretend to the happiness they gave off in the clear, the too clear and splendid light. It was almost palpable, this light, like the rind of a fruit. No thought of its bitter pulp crossed their minds. Their parents … these by now knew the truth, and remained calm. A people never behaved with a simpler dignity than these Czechs who knew they were living in the full shadow of a German conquest. True, as honest people they believed in the honesty of their friends: even their President, warned during these days by an Englishman in private talk not to trust too much in the English or his French ally, smilingly dismissed the warning. He, too, believed — if only in the self-interest of rich countries whose interests must surely, like his, push them against robbery with violence.

  But the calm, and the strong confidence, went deeper, too deep for even treachery to reach. They are part of the inheritance of this people, in its wide valley of rivers, forests, mountains with lakes, lying
between western and eastern Europe, seeded into by both, but harvesting only itself. And with what gross delicate vigour — as though the Renaissance had waited three centuries, buried in the earth here, a suave and smilingly perfect image, to be uncovered by the spades of the generation first free to excavate its own life.

  How few gestures this young country, born to an old and obstinately strong family, has had time to make. Each of them in its assurance a curve towards a free and quietly human life. Land was given to the peasants, schools, very many schools, were built, and its children set to learn the use to the future of their hands and minds. Had the nation guessed how many of its new schools would serve as barracks for an invader, would it, during these twenty years, have tried as hard? I think so. Despair is not Czech.

  A minor diplomat when I was in Prague complained to me that the Czechs are ill-bred. He was stupid enough to think that breeding is less an affair of endurance in the same place for centuries than of the tricks a man like himself, ot poor intelligence, can learn easily in a few years. The Czechs, God be thanked, are not a charming people. (This same year I saw in Hungary what, when you reverse the coin, is profiled on charm.) In truth they are not unlike us English, before we were broken in: uncomfortably stubborn, fond of good food and drink, with a shrewd malice rolled under their tongues, gross, subtle, patient. Even now, when without (it seems) any aid other than the conscience of the world may give by groaning in its sleep, they are being left to the Germans, I find it impossible to believe that no adult future is to be given them. Especially when, after listening to that demented voice screaming from Berlin, I hear the quiet reasonable voice of Benes. A Europe deaf to this voice is dying, and no help for it: those of us to whom she used to be a warm nurse will need to have ready the clean pennies for her eyes.

  *

  Prague, my newspaper says, is calm. Of course. . . .

  The garden of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, in the Černín Palace, was noisy that evening with writers of a score of countries, chattering like — writers; the English, like children, about each other, the French what always sounds like political arithmetic, and the other nations, with degrees of excitement rising to the simple fury of a Central European delegate describing his wife’s recipe for hare soup, about literature, cooking, and affairs. My neighbour, a Czech, listened for a time with a serious smile.

  “They are happy? ” she asked anxiously.

  “Obviously. Writers when they are unhappy glare at each other and note down without wasting them in talk the clever phrases that come into their heads.”

  “Yes— ” she laid on my arm a thin hand. Young, delicate, she had worn herself out preparing this writers’ conference — “but will they go home liking us? They’ve seen — they must — how hard we are working, so that no one shall be poor or ignorant, or ashamed. They’ll be able, won’t they?, to contradict anyone who tells foolish lies about us. . . .”

  “What are you hoping for? ” I asked.

  After a minute she said softly,

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? ”

  The garden had not been lighted. With their total absence of vulgarity, the Czechs leave what is perfect alone. They knew that the seventeenth century and the lucent darkness of a June night should be left to form their own cool sun. Jiřina’s face, pale from overwork, was hardly visible. I had to catch it reflected in her light voice. She was smiling.

  “Don’t mistake me, my darling— ” in her innocence, after listening to the English, she had taken this word to mean “my friend ” — “I know that none of you will tell lies. You will repeat that Prague is beautiful … it is … that everyone here is happy to be able to work madly for Czechoslovakia, that you learned one word of Czech, that we are kind, lively, and we eat a great deal of goose, and drink slivovitz. And nothing you say will have the slightest effect, because your Government has made its mind up already.” Her voice ran out to a fine edge. “If only I knew what! ”

  “It’s impossible,” I protested, “for us to let Germany defeat you. For our own sake. We are selfish, but not idiotic.”

  Jiřina patted my hand. “You are always good and clever,” she said lightly. “I hope very much that all the governments have only good clever Ministers. I’m sure yours has. It is a pity”—her eyes sparkled — “that we have no concentration camps and don’t make threatening speeches. Not one, not a single one of your statesmen has said we are a proud sensitive people and mustn’t be provoked.” Her voice trembled a little.

  “And how true. We are only stubborn and modest — and we are not afraid.”

  I remembered the way in which some of our politicians spoke of Benš. I was silent. Jiřina looked at me to see what I was thinking, and I hurried to say, “You have a superb country.”

  “We shall keep it,” she said quietly. . . .

  It was Jiřina who sent out this appeal to the conscience of the world. I saw her hand, thin, small, fold it into the envelope, and the concentrated purpose of her body, as slight as a child’s, without a single cowardly nerve. What will the Nazis do to her when they take her country?

  *

  The French writer Jules Romains, an orator and not simply a speaker, was addressing the conference. His rhetoric had been prepared with all that sense of responsibility a Frenchman feels towards syntax and verbal logic. It was gracefully ironical and witty. Towards Czechoslovakia its feelings were irreproachable. Here, you would say, is a writer, a Frenchman, who will defend with his last spasm of eloquence the country for which he feels this concern and respect, both deep. Behind a table the shortness of the speaker’s body was not apparent; his head, large, with the delicately heavy features of a sculpture in wood, had the space he occupied almost to itself.

  My fault of listening with, instead of my mind, an ear nonexistent somewhere in my body, spoiled this speech for me. The generous phrases and avowals echoed in it doubtfully, as though, having to prepare so much, he had not given himself the trouble of attending to the echo. What is it, after all? Only the mirror side of the voice. Looking at it, I saw reserves hidden like secret drawers in these charmingly turned sentences. A little nervously, I turned to glance at the Czech writers. Had they noticed? No. They were delighted with him, sedate in their satisfaction.

  Perhaps I was mistaken.

  *

  The other bank here of the Danube had been Austrian and was now, only since March, in Germany. After a time we came to a place, the meeting of two rivers, where a German and a Slovak village faced each other across the stream. They were a village and its reflection in a mirror: here, on this side, the low houses, whitewashed, and deep roofs, the trees and shabby wooden palings, the fresh greenness of water-meadows, leaned quietly and saw itself in its image there. Even the black horse near us threw its thinner reflection into the other field. The river’s surface was doubled and self-reflective, wind flowing one way and water another, itself the mirror between the two villages, and ignorant — which was which? If war breaks out, one of them will be forced to obliterate the other. Afterwards, when it steps up to the glass to look at itself, it will see what? Sterility, absence. . . . What kind of people are we, who hold a child up to a mirror to watch it smile at itself—and then, its half-closed skull the tool, smash life and likeness?

  And now I remember the German woman who came out of her house to the edge of the stream and stood there, arms hanging as if she had forgotten them, stood, and looked into the Slovak village. When I was a child I looked in the same way into the mirror between the windows, not to see myself, but trying to see the other, to follow her when she turned her back and began to live among the same things another life, free, no adults with raised voices or a stick, quietly alone with her sole plays, a life turned widely endlessly out, always out.

  *

  I have begun a second book. The difficulty of writing two at once is less than the boredom of writing always the same one. No doubt it will break down; one or the other will insist on undivided attention, but for
a few weeks at least I can carry both. It is exhausting, and that alone would be worth the labour.

  War now seems certain. Yesterday, when I was listening to the broadcast of Hitler’s speech in that absurd Sport-Palast, I made a discovery. In spite of the hatred in his voice, piercing what slight defence our entrails can make against a sound so pitched, there is less in it of pure evil than in Goebbels’s. These disembodied voices give away the secrets of their bodies. I could not listen to Goebbels, who spoke first, without growing horror. The skin of my head felt as though it were being peeled off, exposing the flayed brain and nerves. Who, looking back — if our descendants are able to look at anything but their road — will understand why we gave these men power over us? Or will forgive us our treachery? (It will need an anatomist to lay it bare.)

  In this, as I suppose in other towns, we have been fitting gas-masks. I saw a child’s face, in the instant before it was seized by the mask, suddenly invaded by fear, the blood driven out and all the veins choked by his anguish: he sat stiffly, hand gripping his thin knee. His mother, young and shabby, watched him, ashamed to speak, ashamed even to touch him, with so many people looking. I saw them going away afterwards, hand in hand, carrying their masks. . . .

  A man who knows him said to me about Neville Chamberlain that he “is not inhuman but he lacks imagination”. What if his imagination were bounded — on one side — by the so quickly broken bodies of children? Nowadays when we fight for what we believe in, we hold out to the bomb which will split it open just such a child, helpless in our hands. What is to be done? Step by step, older men who are not inhuman have led us to this room with the desks, the maps and children’s drawings pinned on the walls, where instead of learning a child sits and is tortured. Which of them dare I blame? All these years, the horror of war has been stretched across my eyes, a bandage, not a lens. Who will forgive us our blind gestures as war came? My little child, it is I, your mother, who is drawing the wire through your brain and filling your mouth with dust.