The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell

by Storm Jameson

  *

  None of my tricks — as an acrobat — has become second nature: I am still as slow and awkward as when I began. Today at a luncheon chiefly of writers, I found myself between the English novelist I respect more than any other and a young French diplomat. The novelist’s charming gestures, feminine in their lightness, wrote a sentence of which in spite of my fear I was able to spell out a few syllables — a little and feline cruelty, goodness, honesty, care for justice. I had been prepared, by one of his countrymen, for the French diplomat — “He has spent years trying to look like Proust, but I think he has given it up as a bad job.” As he came in I recognised him from this description and greeted him by name. Very slight, elegant, he moved with a languor which certainly had become natural, and he had not had to practise the air of indifference given him by eyelids drawn far down over coldly light eyes. I felt that I was seated beside a boredom so polished and insolent that mine, which I can never bring forward to help me at these moments, is only the anguish of a barbarian before the symbols of a culture he does not understand. It was fortunate for me that he chose to speak.

  “How did you know me? Do I look so like a diplomat? ”

  I seized my courage to answer him. “Monsieur Y. said to me: If you see someone coming in who looks as though Proust might have written about him, that is Monsieur de X.”

  “That is a compliment,” he said, without a smile. He was none the less pleased, and in answer to a confused remark of mine about the fatuity of asking writers to eat in public in honour of whatever person or event we were honouring, he roused himself to speak with a very faint tinge of interest, and at such length that I was able to attend without feeling anxious: he must, I thought, have decided to make a pretence of enjoying himself.

  “My complaint about the English intellectuals ” — in spite of its politeness, his voice gave away his complete disbelief in their existence — “is that they are not serious enough. For example, Mr. Wells, who is conducting a debate in one of your newspapers on the Rights of Man. Why doesn’t he write about what is happening to these Rights in Poland? The information we have is so frightful that little of it can be printed. The Germans, you know, are systematically shooting the educated men and women, doctors, scientists, writers, professors; they intend to make Poland a country of peasants and workers, uneducated men without leaders. Oh, you are going to say that these classes will throw up leaders among themselves. But history, you know, is the proof that they don’t. . . . When I said that they are shooting the educated women I was sparing your feelings. And they have emptied whole towns and villages of their Polish inhabitants — simply turned them out to die in forty degrees of frost. They bring in a Baltic German, show liim round the house, ask him if he likes it, then tell the Polish owner he has two hours to clear out. . . . This is not your house any longer, it belongs to this man. — Where am I to go? — That is not our business. — What can I take? — What you can carry in your hand. . . . There is no other house for him and his family to go to; they join the thousands who are dying on the frozen roads.” He lifted a hand, smaller and a great deal smoother than mine, and looked at it with an interest which destroyed a little the effect of his words. He was sincere, but he would have been more immediately moved if he had suddenly developed a chilblain. In a tone of ironical satisfaction, he went on, “Just seventy years ago, Flaubert wrote to a novelist, a woman: A qui donc sert la science, puisque ce peuple, plein de savants, commet des abominations dignes des Huns et pire que les leurs, car elle sont systématiques, froides, voulues, et n'ont pour excuse ni la passion ni la faim? … I don’t admire Flaubert, he is a master of the devastatingly flat epithet, but he understood the Germans, and his sentence is equally just today.”

  The severe contrast between his voice, cultivated to the point of being almost inaudible, too exhausted to bear any emotion, and the scenes of vile cruelty it called up, made them more shocking than any excited story would have been. It was as though the delicate hand he was resting on the table had opened to display an obscene instrument of torture. I felt myself trembling. But it was partly nerves, and since I must not completely disgrace myself— I was already, I felt, disgraced by my lack of wit — I said hurriedly, “But we still have to decide what to do with the Germans; they have so much energy, it drives them again and again to destroy the world and replace it by a hideously enlarged model of Germany — amoureuse de la mort et des extrémes. We can’t hold them down by force. We can do it for a time, then people become bored.”

  “I know,” he said coldly.

  “The English become bored first.”

  He smiled. “I’m sure you haven’t read the Yellow Book just published? English writers are not interested in foreign affairs. I’m speaking, you know, about the reports of our Ambassador to Berlin.”

  But I had read it. My anxious wish to please drove me to say — it was a polite exaggeration, but not a lie — “The penetration your Ambassador showed in his reports, and their clarity, are a little humiliating, placed beside our own reports from Berlin. Perhaps if we had educated ours at the École des Sciences Politiques . . .”

  “But everyone knows that your Ambassador to Berlin is a fool. They are not all like him.”

  He had spoken without a trace of irony, as though it would be paying a nobody too much honour to despise him. I felt an impulse to destroy this calm. “One hears disquieting things from France. Is it true that some Frenchmen, or a class, are more afraid of socialism than of Hitler? ”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “The real struggle in this war will be across the body of my country, between England and Germany. Both are capable of a terrible force, the Germans from greed, the English because they have been wounded in their pride; some people would call it vanity. They may destroy themselves in their rage. That is, if Germany begins the attack.”

  “And France? ” I asked.

  For the first time I saw, stretched lightly under the air of disdain and boredom with which he had contrived his, as it were, Proustian face, another which may not have been any more natural to him but was at least unfinished — it was still capable of change; it had a touch even of real bitterness, like the suspicion of garlic in an honest salad.

  “If we must become a dependency of the British Empire, let us do it with a good grace,” he said. . . .

  I don’t understand the France I heard, or I thought I heard, speaking in his voice — deliberately fatigued. Are they tired already? I won’t think about it. Think instead of any village in the Dordogne, at midday in summer — empty, because of the heat, and silent, with a silence which vibrates when you lay your hand on an old house. No country is less likely to disappear than this one where the silence has the taste of a young wine.

  *

  26 April. He is so intelligent that I never understood why he thinks it worth while talking to me. I am nervous with him, but I have begun, in spite of myself, to form an idea of him which is not simply a polite reflection. The youngest of four brothers, if he had allowed a family habit to choose for him he would have been a soldier, a scholar, or a civil servant; he is not able, speaking five languages, and with friends or at worst colleagues in a dozen countries, to speak with conviction more than one, his own. He is very fond of .his brothers, but he thinks the professor of mediaeval German half an alien, and the Treasury official a bit of a grocer in his attitude to money; he is completely at his ease only with his eldest brother, Aden, the general. Aden shares his liking — the nearest thing in his life to a passion — for Horace Walpole. Walpole has sat with him through international monetary conferences, and it is Walpole’s philosophy, without illusions about human beings, cool, self-centred, with a warm spring of feminine kindness, which gives my friend his reputation for imperturbable honesty and vanity. His colleagues, in every country, respect him; but because he never loses his temper, and drinks claret, the director in Berlin considered him francophile and a gourmand; and in Paris, since the day when a private letter was handed about in which he rem
arked on the trouble taken by the greatest French writers to turn charming platitudes, he is said to be a socialist. In fact he is purely and arrogantly English. He distrusts in the French their habit of logical thought, whereby words weigh the same on every occasion, without any allowance for their evaporation in anger or solidifying in a moment of danger, and in the Germans he dislikes their trick of loading a word with myths — so that to say mountain is to say exultance, the superman, vengeance, or any other madness proper to a legend — and above all that primitive mysticism always waiting its chance to throw them into an ecstasy where each German identifies himself with all the others and yearns to consummate the marriage of the German tribe with the planet. Even in looks he is the Englishman of foreign cartoons, excessively tall, thin, and long-nosed. All this masks neatly a mind which never allows a feeling to disguise itself as a reason, or an idea to show him only one of its faces. He has a right to his unconscious vanity.

  What moved him today to explain to me, after he had read out sentences from his brother’s letter, the frightful seriousness of our position? He explained it very fully, in his quiet voice, even smiling a little. It seems that never, never at any time during the last war, were we in such mortal danger as we are now. We have not been threatened in this way since the Napoleonic wars. We may lose this war. Compared with the Germans, we are very poorly equipped, and the French, etc. etc. I am tired of being told that the French are suffering a crisis of prudence and logic. (His brother distrusts them for a quite different reason. What can you expect of a nation in which sentinel is a feminine noun?) He talked for almost an hour, as though it were important to destroy the illusions of an obscure writer. Why? I think, from curiosity, and a sprig of malice, to see how I would take it. Little he knows me. I knew that my face was dull, even vacant. It was perhaps that provoked him into going on, as once years ago it provoked a surgeon to tell me the truth about an operation. In fact, behind my air of stupidity, I was listening as I would to angrily loud voices heard at night in a foreign town, trying on them one meaning after another to find the one which does not imply a murder. What meaning has the word defeat for us? We have never seen an execution.

  “My dear child,” he said, “what really frightens me is the appalling indecision of these old men! They have committed us to a war they’re not fit in any way to run. I think — I hope — they’ll be sacked. We’re very generous and sentimental, we’re always ready if a man confesses his fatal mistake to praise him for committing it. But these aged sinners are not going to repent. . . . You know I never liked Churchill” — he had a rooted distaste for Mr. Churchill’s prose, so unlike Horace Walpole’s — “but I tell you we need his pugnacity and his impulse to rule — these lawyers and business men don’t rule: they manage, and meanly enough. He would give the country a personal faith … which might last the war. After that . . .”

  I asked him about Norway, and again, stooping over the map in The Times, he showed me that things are going wrong there — in spite of the reports. He told me which names to listen for on the wireless and what it will imply if we are said to be retiring, whatever reason is given, from certain places.

  Finally, and as if he really were disappointed by my dullness, he said gently, “Do you understand what I’ve been saying? ”

  “Oh, I think so,” I said. “You are telling me that we may be conquered. And the German meaning of the word, I know, is cruelty, hunger, fear. Or our old gentlemen may capitulate, which is the same thing. Or then perhaps there would be an interval when people young enough to stand it could reach America.”

  “I thought I should have to convince you.” His smile covers so much vanity and kindness. Why did he not guess that I might be hiding from him — out of shame — my lack of logic? I find it impossible to believe in our defeat. I’ll keep my eyes open, I’ll watch. But I do not believe it. Let them go on quarrelling with me in my nerves — the one who says: That is only because defeat is not English — and the other: Suppose we are defeated? What will happen to your son? … My disbelief is stupidity or stubbornness or belief.

  *

  2 May. It was foolish to accept, for this afternoon, an invitation from my Norwegian friends. But if I had made an excuse, next time I went they would have said — with that northern malice I recognise — “So you had to retreat last week, too? ”

  To be honest, I was not sure when the news would be let out. I thought I should be lucky. But while I was there the telephone rang, from the Legation, and my friend answered it; I watched the changes on her face. She looked at the others in the room — all Norwegians — and at me, and choosing with superb politeness among her pronouns,

  “We are leaving Norway,” she said.

  I had to sit there and listen to the Norwegians talking among themselves. They dropped at once their half-sarcastic, half-candid friendliness, but — out of courtesy or to punish me — they spoke English, leaving in their own language the bitterness they felt and the memories pressing their terrible weight on each word. After a time I did not listen. I had my own sorrow, different but sharp.

  It is as if Europe were evaporating, leaving a discoloured mark in the flask. . . . When I went to Norway I landed at Horten, at four o’clock in the morning. This small port moved me like a memory. A name common in our family was written on a door in the street nearest the harbour. It had made a quicker crossing — no, it had always been here, refusing exile and to lose the perennial cool vigour of this north. The streets sleeping in the clear light were familiar although I had not seen them before. They had the narrow simplicity of streets I knew as a child and from a memory older than my own. The air was deliriously light and cool; there was a faint smell of tar and new rope. I was sleepy, but it was exhilarating to be awake in this sunlight which sprang back from the modest houses and the small boats, in the instant it touched them. . . .

  All that was five years ago. It is less than a month since the Germans bombed Horten, and destroyed — what have they destroyed? — no, what have they left of this little town? They are nearly unbearable, the extremes we have to hold together in our minds, with the insanity of a continent springing up to force them apart: the cool sunlight on the harbour and narrow streets with the bombs, the green icy stream in the high dale with the concentration camp. All that vileness and cruelty spreading its stain in the clear air. . . .

  One of the Norwegians spoke directly to me — either his politeness or his anger had got the better of him.

  “We knew quite well that if we resisted it meant that Norway would be a battlefield. All right, we said, we put it at your disposal as a battlefield; if you can fight the Germans here you will never be invaded yourselves. . . . All ours, we said, will fight. . . . If you had landed sufficient forces in time, and gone straight for Trondheim, risking your ships, you would have pushed the Germans out.”

  “You will not now be a battlefield,” I said foolishly.

  “No — a concentration camp. . . . If every town in Norway had been destroyed and the Germans thrown out, we could still have been happy. . . . Scandinavia is gone, Sweden will be forced to make terms, the Balkan countries will see that they must capitulate quickly-”

  He obeyed a glance from one of the others and stopped short. . . .

  We lived during that summer on the island of Tjømø in the Oslo fjord. There was a small wharf, the wooden hotel, shabby and friendly, a few houses, a white dusty road running between pines and the fields in which sprang fantastic rocks, grey tablelands split open by ling and young trees. It was a rocky shore, and the water, clearer than any I have seen, was too deep except for swimmers. The wide fjord had all the sea light, the candour, missing from the dourly handsome fjords of the other coast. In the hot sun, the scent, like wild raspberries, of the pines, went to your head. It might alone have accounted for the vigour with which Norwegians, young men, and girls with the pallor of the north under their tan, danced, sang, and argued through the long evenings and the short scarcely dark nights until daylight. Their vi
gour is as inexhaustible and unexhausted as the cold rivers, alive with salmon, in the hills. In the late afternoon, a small steamer called at the island and it was not only the children who ran to the wharf to watch her make in. . . . I was writing, more quickly than I have ever written anything in my life, a novel about the second year of a dictatorship — I tried to explain in it why a dictator must murder the friends who were useful to him when he was only a brutal adventurer. It was laid in England, but during those weeks, writing as I did, all day, in the window of my wooden cell, my memory was drawing through suspense and treachery the clear Norwegian threads, scent of pines and salt, brushing of the long grass in the field, the pure sky without clouds, creak of dry sun-bleached wood. . . . Let it undo its work, then. Let it draw them out, as a nerve is drawn out until it snaps, and leave in place of the island a pure grief and cruelty … without benefit of that air. . . .

  “I wasn’t anxious about my father and mother — they were openly anti-Nazis — because although they lived in Oslo they had a hut in Hallendal — do you know it? — and got away there. But this means that the country will be taken over by the Gestapo and they’ll be caught.” He laughed nervously. . . .