“Why not admit,” she said, “that none of these countries is fit to govern itself? When we govern them things will be better. We don’t ill-treat our servants.”
“Please tell me what you mean,” I said.
She had a broad charming face, simple and intelligent. “There are servant races. All the trouble in the world comes from not recognising this one truth. Why should you believe that life created only one sort of human being although it created so many sorts of insects and animals? Clearly in some races, the first impulse, the élan vital, weakened or turned back. All these minor European nations — there is nothing to be done except train and use them. They are not experiments, they are unfinished impulses, ideas, contradictions — as if nature had scattered the qualities of a great man and waited to see which impulse would absorb the others and become the man destined to rule the planet. It is after all such a small planet. One pair of hands. . . .”
Hers were short-fingered and white. She moved them as if she were throwing a ball.
“And that is the German? ”
“You English came nearest to us,” she said, smiling, “but your evolution stopped short of producing the greatly privileged man, the leader who is a genius. It is to us he was born.”
If she had been anything but a good gently-spoken creature, I should not have been shocked. And there was a logic in what she said — it is true that one reason why I have failed is that I did not refuse all but one of my selves: they were so many and they all wanted to be given life. But with an anger I could not soften I rejected her logic. Nations are not selves to be nursed or destroyed. They have each their sap rising from the silent voices of their roots, through their memories, to the newest bud — Cette petite espérance qui n’a l’air de rien du tout. Cette petite file espérance. Immortelle. . . . I was going to speak when our hostess came back into the room, and the German who had just condemned her to servitude turned to this young Hungarian woman, a painter, and said tenderly,
“And your pictures, my dear Maria, you are going to show us your wonderful wonderful paintings? ”
*
1939
Royan, July: 2.
A few discreet posters announced that this evening, Sunday, the Musique Municipale de Saumur would play at Royan “sous la direction de Monsieur Bienvenu ”. I went to listen. It was scarcely dark, and in the clear and deceitful light the sky spread into the sea dove-like dunes of cloud. People sauntered between the open bandstand — there were no lights except a few round the edge of its roof— and the trees. I caught sight of the headlines in a copy of L’CEuvre — La situation générale demeure très sérieuse. The man reading it said suddenly, “No,” — looking at the ground and speaking to himself.
Walking towards the bandstand, I had to cross a stretch of sandy gravel. At once, and before I could draw back, I was walking on one of the paths leading, along the side of the cliff, through the rough enclosure called then the Saloon, down towards the band playing on the terrace cut out halfway between the top of the cliff and the shore. Here, looking across the sea, my mother and I listened evening after summer evening to the gently prancing music proper to a small half-forgotten town balancing at the edge of the sea. How charming it was, and how dull and the colour of a young breeze. And alas, vanished, under the unhappy changes which overtook it in its gradual metamorphosis into a Spa, never to be seen again by anyone until the sound of the gravel under my foot joined with the lightly salt air and the absence of any comfort or fuss round this Saumur band to give it back “under the direction of M. Bienvenu ” — yes, yes, you are welcome, my Saloon, in your reserved simplicity, in the discomfort of your benches without shelter, your shabby theatre where no play more daring than an early Pinero was ever seen, your ghosts holding their skirts from the dust, and children with long loose hair. I trembled with happiness, in the certainty that never, never so long as I live, nor perhaps after that, will a foolish town council improve you for the benefit of strangers who ought not to have been pandered to. Moreover, you are mine. The suave light falling round you comes through my eyes. No use for you to hide again behind the changes scrawled over you; you will come now when I choose, awkward, shabby, gay, firmly in that moment, out of all my moments, I give you. The fatigue, the anxiety, I had been feeling, vanished. For a minute I felt, as I used to feel then, that I could do anything, anything.
I feel at home in this French crowd. Nowhere in Europe do people dress worse or less pretentiously than the provincial French, and there is no people I respect more. Respect, not like. They present to liking a smooth impermeable surface, on which not even a fly could cling. But how many qualities one sees playing behind this, to the foreigner, impassable barrier — a simplicity, which does not exclude shrewdness and malice, a refusal to be bled in spirit or money for the sake of show, a stubborn self-will living easily under cover of their terrible respect humain: each Frenchman cultivates his soul as jealously as we used to grow aspidistras, with a sharp eye for its difference from his neighbours’. I bear them, since they are at home, no grudge for their involuntary contempt for foreigners. It will never lead them to interfere — and it reminds me of those violent greedy eccentrics, my ancestors. But these French people play. With their ideas, emotions, bodies. You only have to watch elderly men talking or young men and girls amusing themselves on the sands with a child’s ball. It is a habit we have almost lost.
Looking, in the growing darkness, at this crowd of men and women, casually listening to music which made no solemn demand on the emotions, so like other each they could be sent to any other planet and form at once a French province, so unlike that no one in his senses would mistake them for a tribe, I was seized with rage to think that it was menaced by a nation which has re-invented torture, and squeezes a child’s skull to make it like all the other skulls. They will crush this imperfect exquisite growth, plant of which the seeds have blown across Europe. Why? Because they themselves grow nothing, they only, and with the ingenuity of insects, make? I recalled a charming young German of good Bavarian family. He had been reading at Oxford about the English troops during the Peninsular War: Wellington trained them so strictly that when they entered France they astonished the peasants by paying for the cattle they took. He was scornful, and above all puzzled. “Why, when you have fought and conquered, pay? It doesn’t make sense.” Impossible to make him believe that there are other senses than those which flower impartially in music, coupling, and bombs.
And the Germany our grandfathers loved? And the evenings of music, the sighs and linden-trees and candid welcoming voices? Hard to believe they were the first victims of the German destined to rule. But what did we love, with — even while we ran to throw our arms round it — a touch of condescension and contempt? A country we did not think of as a rival. And we gave it back, as a present, the innocence it offered us in the voices of children singing old carols. Flaubert could have told my grandfather — who never heard of him and would have detested him if he had — a little about ces officiers qui cassent des glaces, en gants blancs, qui savent le Sanscrit et qui se ruent sur le champagne, qui vous volent votre montre et vous envoient ensuite leur carte de visite, cette guerre pour de l’argent, ces civilisés sauvages, … No. It has gone, that country we half loved and half invented, buried deeper than my Saloon. That, at least, had a true innocence, one I can feel in it when, fresh in its light air and the strong rough grass of its cliff, it rises from the past. There was a Saloon; there was never a Germany, but only — until fifty years ago — a fair-ground of contradictory passions, for friendship, for innocent pleasure, for symphonies, for discipline, pillage, cruelty, learning, chasing each other to the music of an organ driven by one engine. And suddenly the music stops, and the children on the wooden horses become murderers.
Ah, Monsieur Bienvenu is bowing from the bandstand, and the Musique Municipale de Saumur is packing to go home — to another of these small towns where the past has not the slightest difficulty in making itself heard in any moment
of the present, since they are cut out of the same cloth, endlessly unfolding, like the Loire at Saumur its pattern of vines, poplars, old strong roofs, like the habits handed down so carefully in a family that even before he can stand the youngest knows what is being said to him by everything he touches.
There is nothing to hope for unless this simplicity of the French spreads. Suppose each Englishman gave up his nagging belief that he ought to live better and better and chose instead to live well? And the Germans gave up their form of ostentation — their macht-politik? Need the French give up anything? Yes. A few of them might perhaps learn English.
*
20 August. Why, when war is going to break out, don’t women hide their sons? Or cry, all of them with the same anger and pity: No! It must be that each thinks she is alone, that the others will not hear. Their sons, too, are alone.
And the little people in all countries, who left themselves in the hands of men they trusted to look after them? … We cannot suddenly take back our freedom. Which of us even knows what it looks like? In a Lyons this morning a young woman carrying her baby, a very handsome baby, said to my sister,
“Look at him. I’ve never had a safe moment with him. He was born in the May crisis of last year, and it’s been the same thing ever since.” She added in a confident voice, “If we’d had Anthony Eden this would never have happened.”
What a charming illusion, smiling, elegant, on the eve of a war!
*
“And you writers? What have you to be proud of? ”
“Nothing,” I said.
It is true. Survivors of the generation mutilated by the other war, how have we used our twenty grace years? Over and above arguments, useless enough to be impudent, about the relative vileness of air-raids and concentration camps, about our duty to society and our right to be quietly ourselves, we forced on a younger generation our despair and growing bitterness, which were not of their size. We ought to have been affirming, praising, a few simple things, those which underlie disillusion. . . . We even proved that the brotherhood of the trenches had been a snare — yes, at a moment when we should have been repeating over and over again that a creed, any creed, which sets loyalty to a party above the loyalty to each other of human beings, condemns itself by that one simple unforgivable treachery. Imbeciles, who did not see that now, now, when half the world is spanned by a bombing plane, it needs, to avert this new terror, a new outbreak of human loyalty, indivisible. . . . In the moment when this war, foreseen by so many of us and not even delayed by our cries, is here, and precipitates in our confused minds the certainty that fighting is better than submission, it is too late to look for a faith. We fall back on positions which have not been prepared. We see, when it is too late, our guilt. I am as guilty of this war, I admit it, as the lazy or stiff and blind old men.
There will always be barbarians. Defeated by a supreme effort, they will always return. I know this habit of barbarians because I am one. . . .
When a friend who has always been right tells you not to hope, you hope because this may be his only chance of being wrong. I must hope. We are not at war yet. There is time. There are a few hours, a few days, weeks. No mother is being forced to deliver up her son tonight. It may not happen. Cowardly and obstinate, I give myself another night not to believe it, to believe in a miracle. If it is a clear fine night, there will be no war. . . . Not a cloud. . . . I am not frankly an egoist, I give this peaceful consoling night to all mothers and wives, and to the young whose first war this will be.
*
Someone in another house is playing tunes from the musical comedies of the last war. What an idea! Why choose this evening to fill the stalls of an absent theatre with all those young men in uniform, younger than anything except their eyes, laughing, their hands and bodies restless with life? It is only now that they are really disappearing, when a street will not suddenly remind us of them, and no book, carelessly opened, let fall one of their letters, no strangely bright day, no night over-full of stars, persuade us that they will come in and find us unchanged.
Nothing is left of that war — it is foolish to recall it — nothing of that long-drawn-out suspense and fever. And none of the excitement which, at least for the young, never quite failed until it was over. It was less excitement than the absence of real joy. And, too, the absence of real fear, the sort which creeps into the memory and inserts itself in every moment of the present. That waited to be born until after the war. . . . Of my brother, nothing is left but those few childish letters he wrote from France, between his seventeenth and nineteenth birthdays. Ought I to tear them up? Tell me — what is. the use of keeping things they touched, who have no hands now to touch anything?
Only today I realise — it was as soon as her son was killed that my mother gave herself up entirely to her boredom, of which in the end she died. If she had taken the trouble, she would have lived to be old, like others of her family. But some even of those I remember died of boredom.
*
One lives during these days in a double, which moves its hands, walks about, argues. One’s self is ashamed, and going about like a woman who has no right to be pregnant. (Perhaps that is why no one in my family, not a soul, has spoken to me about my son.) But it is really absurd to discuss whether we ought or ought not to attend a congress of writers in Stockholm next week. Everybody here knows that by next week we shall be at war. I suggest sending a wire to Paris to ask their opinion, and another to the Swedish writers. Everyone agrees — everyone, that is, except the only important person in the room. H. G. Wells insists — he is good-tempered and smiling, and obstinate — that we ought to go to Stockholm, to show that we are not afraid, to put heart into the French writers, who are all of them bureaucrats, and to speak, in a voice which will be heard by the whole world, for freedom. My belief is that the world is listening for some other sound, and I have no intention, whatever I may have promised a week ago, of being in Sweden when the war starts. These are the feelings of my real self, which is mute. The other says, and even snaps its fingers — how few times I was able as a child to make this defiant sound; I practised it to a high degree of skill, secretly: the chances to use it now are so few that I daren’t miss one — it is no use going to Sweden for the sake of a metaphor. Very well, he says amiably, he will go alone, and while the rest of us are cowering in England. . . . Is the war being fought in Sweden? my double says sharply: I could not have stopped her in time . . . he will be in Stockholm, warning the Swedish writers that we are cowards. Then he made one of the quips which are worth his arbitrary temper — at least in the moments when one is not suffering from it. The most mischievous of great men, and the least rigid, he has too quick a sense of humour to play at being great. This would be disconcerting, and humiliate his inferiors, if he had not also so many prejudices that they can pride themselves on being saner. It is an illusion.
“I shall be at Tilbury on Thursday,” he said, “to sail on the Suecia”:
We corrected him. “Wednesday.”
Smiling, he began to turn the leaves of his diary. “It would be strange if I were saved by a subterfuge while the rest of you sailed to a concentration camp in Sweden. . . .”
Henry Nevinson was there. He had been silent. Suddenly he said, in his extinguished voice — the lava, under the weak tension of the surface, is still warm — that he had written to Rome protesting against one of the poems in a journal the Italian writers send us every month. A poem? About what? Oh — thanking the Duce for the joy of machine-gunning Abyssinians from the air, like black ants.
“What was the phrase? ” Wells asked sharply.
“Like black ants,” Nevinson repeated.
“Black …? oh, yes, ants.” He seemed to ponder the justice of the comparison. For a moment he looked exhausted, as though he had stared so long, and with no moral indignation to inflate him, into the endless mean corridors of tyranny, that he had nothing left to say. . . .
*
How strange it is that when war is
really here — after the days on days of almost unbearable waiting, of listening to wireless orders about the children being sent out of danger areas, food hoarding, mobilisation, Poland invaded, Warsaw, Cracow, Lodz bombed, the eloquence of politicians raising memorials to young men who are still alive and able to hear, an excited Frenchman on Radio Paris invoking the judgement of history, as if he knew in advance what history with her blind fingers feeling the marble will guess, of waiting for a letter which never comes, of waiting — it is not in the least strange. Exactly what happens? You turn on the wireless and hear a voice say smoothly, “Stand by for an important announcement.” The announcement is short. We, he says, have given Germany until 11 A.M. to withdraw from Poland. At 11.15 the Prime Minister will speak — no, make a statement. That left an hour and a quarter. I finished the dusting and wrote a few sentences of Europe to Let: they were about Prague last year, but between my memories and the present moment the only channel was my mind which chose words, felt the weight of a sentence and lightened it by altering the form, turned to look at the river under the Karlov bridge, it ran quickly and silently, and back to the page under my hand: no spark joined their hour to this: an agony starting in the past turned off before it could reach ours, and I felt nothing. During this time my body must have been attending to something else, because it stood up and went downstairs exactly in time to hear an old man’s bitter voice say “Consequently we are at war with Germany.”
It was a day of clear sun, the sky very bright, the wind high and soft.
The war had come quietly into the room. As he came in, we recognised him. He was a neighbour. There was nothing in his face to suggest death or the horror of the brains clinging to the bombed wall. He was no taller than any of us, and he gave his orders in a polite voice — fill sacks with earth from the garden to protect the windows of the cellars, carry there a table, chairs, and pack a suitcase with toys and rugs which could be snatched up when the raids started, make a list of the few stores we could buy. To other peoples he had come openly as a murderer: with us he observed certain forms. No one could have been more unassuming and willing to adapt himself to our simple life. I understood why we endure wars. It was only when he opened the door of the bathroom and stood there watching me as I tried to grasp the warm slippery bodies of the children, and when, looking in one of my mother’s books, I noticed for the first time — what malice time shows — a few words she had written on the fly-leaf, in 1917, about my brother, that I felt fear. Oh, break all mirrors: in the world. Let us have no more reflected images; let us rather be dumb to each other, and absent. Barren.
The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell Page 14
