The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell

by Storm Jameson

  Oslo, when you look down on it at night, from the tall hill behind, is a small half-hoop of lights at the edge of the water. In the daytime it is the most charming capital in Europe, simple in its dignity of king’s palace, university, harbour, so small the stranger has the illusion that he lived here at some time when he was happy. . . .

  Chamberlain on the wireless — a very shrewd speech. The impression floating above his words, like a bird trying to insert itself into its shadow, was that we had been very clever to go to Norway in order to be able to withdraw so cleverly. Suddenly— it was nothing he had said, it emerged from the gap between his words and their meaning — my mind felt the approach through this invisible gap of a new threat.

  “Is it possible,” I said timidly, “that there is some other reason for withdrawing? Is it possible that France is not such a powerful ally as we think? ”

  They looked at me with a quick irony, and my friend said, gently enough, that if it were not for the French army there would be nothing for the continent to hope. “And think of our having to depend on the French! ” one of them cried. As if dependence on a Latin race were the last insult to a nation descended from Viking pirates.

  *

  They had come to this room from Europe, most of them after enormous difficulties which had changed and multiplied under their hands, as in those bad dreams when you pull frantically at the bolts of doors to escape a torturer. Others, although they had left in good time, were so poor when they got here that you really can’t imagine how they live at all. Most of them are Germans and Austrians — people with whose country we are at war; many but not all Jews, people with whom half of Europe has been at war for years: there are also a few Czechs; and two, or three, Catalans, men with haggard delicate features, who have an air of being alone in the room. Each brings with him into the lighted room an immensely elongated shadow, a part of the blackness of Europe: caught up in it, fragments of the deaths and agonies they have escaped, faces, of people about whom they no longer know anything, are they dead or living, and how living? died how?, images of streets and rooms once so familiar they hardly saw them and now see with such clearness that one of them will stand in the London street and force open his eyes … because here there should have been a flight of steps and across the street a hand waved in greeting from the tables of a café … they come into this room, having dressed themselves with great care, a few have come only because we invited them, others with a crazy sense of relief—We do still exist, then? Yes, yes, we must; since who, if we were nothing, would invite us? — others are thinking the whole time of their insecurity, so that when you look at their eyes the image given back is of pure desolation. They stand about in this over-lit room in their own dark.

  There are not a great many of them — how many? a hundred? They could be changed into terms of the very many hundreds of letters written in answer to theirs coming to us from Vienna, Prague, Brno. . . . Their letters? So many hands thrust from the earth which is being trodden over the mouth and eyes. Yes, but how many? If at any time I knew, I have forgotten — a few, and only those we were able to save, or some of them saved themselves. I remember what I had better forget. The young Czech who wrote in frantic English from Brno, promising — to put himself in a good light with us — to “work desprite and when in war I fight ”: his letters ceased before we were able to do anything. I remember the German writer from Prague whose wife had not followed him at once; she was still in Prague when the Germans came: worn out by days of running from place to place imploring help he began when he was talking to me in the P.E.N, office to cry; he did not know he was crying and looked with astonishment at the drops falling on his hands.

  So few — but the effort to help is so much too large for us that we are almost broken, and all the help we give each of them is pitiably small, although with fearful trouble we begged about three thousand pounds. Does that seem to you a large amount of money or only a little? For what it has to do, it is a very little. I would rather break stones than write any more begging letters.

  And now the internments. . . .

  The worst this evening is that I shall be forced to make a speech. At any time to have to speak drives me almost out of my mind with panic. But to have to address myself to this anxiety, this fear, even when hidden, of a personal defeat … people whose real lives have been torn from them so cruelly that they are as if flayed. . . .

  The moment came when I had to stand on a chair and say what I had prepared. I only remember parts of it. . . . We English, I said, must bear our share of responsibility for the course of events in Europe. We have made many mistakes. We don’t wish to make light of them. With all we did we did not manage to save Europe from war. And we are now at war. But we remember that the difficulties each of us is facing in his own life are lighter than yours. It is not easy to live as the stranger within the gates. We know that. We are sorry. If we could make it easier for you we would. We do anything we can and it is very little. We cannot give you back your homes, your familiar streets, your lost certainties. In the end, nothing is any good to you but your own courage, which we know to be great. It is on that you rely. . . . We are sharply conscious that our friendship is a plank thrown hurriedly across the uncertainty and coldness of your lives in this country. You must forgive us for that. You must also forgive us if our own new anxieties, and the confusion of the war, preoccupy us. You will not make the mistake of thinking that we are no longer concerned for you because we are concerned about ourselves. . . . In England, as in every country, there are people always ready to look with suspicion on the stranger. When these people accuse you, remember that they are our enemies as much as yours … enemies of all the P.E.N, believes — that justice is possible and that men must come one day to understanding their need of each other. As against them we are your allies. Do not forget this. Do not be betrayed into a dangerous anger and impatience. . . . For a few hours this evening we are all safe and all at our ease, I know you cannot forget the past, its pressure on you drove you here. But expect a future which will ask you for the whole of your energy and wits and give you in return a country. . . .

  As soon as I had said this and jumped off my chair, I thought: But which of them is not so sunk in the past, so fastened to it by all the roots he was made to drag from their earth, that he has become it? That he goes on writing and re-writing between every line of his past, and in all the margins, until not an inch of space is left for the future to squeeze in one word? And this fire of twigs we light for them — what use is it except to make their cold darker?

  *

  11 May. We were often in Antwerp when I was a child. As everything we remember of our childhood is more than itself, is the glance back and forward over a vast country, so Antwerp is the reflection, gently precise, in my mind, of its two least precise habits, eternity and what is foreign. They are perhaps the same image, reflected from two angles. I can trace the second as it fits itself into the outline of yellow shuttered houses, of a long room with many lace curtains and a parrot, of the dark cathedral and the flower-women in sunlight, of the shops we looked in so often and thoroughly that I noticed at once the slight, the very slight, changes made from week to week in their usual display … what a word for so firm a modesty! … But its essence is in the dry husks we found spilled over the wharf when the ship docked there one June. What were they? They were like the husks of some large seed which had dropped out to make room for this mysterious emptiness. Uncertain, and afraid of being laughed at if I asked, I stood beside my father and the agent and touched them lightly with my foot: foreign-ness came from them, a perfume I shall never smell, it was all strange scents and none of them, and which has enticed me ever since.

  And the voyage to Antwerp — not the sea-crossing, which bored me on a steamer the size of a modern Channel ferry. I was the only passenger in the half-dozen berths leading off the saloon — my mother slept in my father’s cabin on the bridge, next the chart-room — nothing to do, it never occurred to my m
other, who was bored by the sea, that idleness bored her child, no books except the scrap book in which my father had copied jokes and poetry and sketched ladies in petticoats, bloomers, or corsets. No, not the sea-voyage, but the endless hours it took to move up the river to Antwerp, the thin line not horizon, widening slowly, how slowly, into flat green fields, a house, a Noah’s-ark tree. Space, which at sea had shrunk to a few yards of deck, the tarred canvas of hatches, the saloon filled by its dining-table and fixed chairs, widened timelessly as the land came gently back into it; there seemed no reason why it should cease, and the light shock with which finally we ran against the continent would have been a disappointment if it had not opened at once into the foreign town.

  My dear Scheldt — image of eternity; my dear Place Verte, my dear wharf and streets and music played at night in the Zoo, and eclairs at the counter of a small shop, and windows filled with padded brassieres and lace — image of a pure joy: today the Germans bombed you, I don’t know how badly. Little by little, destroying an eternity here, a child’s toy there, they are emptying the world of seeds and words, leaving, this time, a husk filled only with loss.

  *

  It is only now, when our army is back in Belgium, that I feel the acute ceaseless anxiety, the anguish, I did not feel during 1914-18, when it was my own friends, the young men of my age, who were there. Twenty-five years after they were killed, I begin to be afraid for them in the living bodies of boys I don’t know. In those days, the death of a young man shocked and grieved when it happened, and for a short time. But I was ambitious; I hoped; I believed in a future. Now I know that the world is poorer for every young man killed in battle and every child murdered by a bomb, and that the debt will have to be paid. It seems to me that my friends, those young men, with their illusions, gaiety, desires, faults, hopes, are now really dying in the deaths of another generation. And I have even heard these new ones say of ours that they were romantic about war and went blindly … to Loos and Passchendaele. . . .

  It is their illusion. Every generation puts out its own, and when they begin seeding they resemble each other so closely that the earth, for all its experience, can’t tell the difference.

  *

  When the Germans entered Prague, they chose a certain house as the place where the Gestapo would examine political prisoners. Innocent until then of all but human vices and crimes, an adultery or two, a child whipped unfairly, a few frauds or lies, it was forced to hide now — as well as these things can be hidden — an inhuman cruelty. There will be nothing for it, when Czechoslovakia is free, but to pull it down. Who would dare live with those walls?

  Among the thousands put to death in one of its rooms, after he had been tortured, was the man who in June 1938 was Minister of Education. That month he had the idea of giving, for the benefit of a writers’ congress, a performance in Czech of Romeo and Juliet, in the garden room of the seventeenth-century palace which housed the Ministry. Open to the garden, its absent fourth wall was a triple arch, with white strong columns, a balustrade, and a shallow flight of steps. The play began at dusk, and the audience watched from the garden the dancers move up the steps into the panelled room, and through into the darkness, and the young men argue, quarrel, make love, with a boldly new vigour, as if translation into Czech had given Shakespeare the age of the Republic — twenty years. The sky was the colour of plums, young, hard, a little green on the side which caught only the last of the sun. . . . Suddenly, during a brief pause, Henry Nevinson glanced at it, and at the swallows, and the lucid summer dusk, the colour of silence, and said, “To think that all this will go on and in a few years I shan’t be alive to see it! ” He should have said, “To think that in a few months the man who thought it well to play Romeo and Juliet in seventeenth-century Prague will be dying in the hands of his torturers.” He should have said, “To think that in a few weeks his country will be crying to its allies — ” Mercutio at this moment cried it — also in Czech — “I was hurt under your arm” He should have said … but the young Shakespeare, stepping from behind a pillar, silenced him with a finger on his smiling mouth, and the young Republic, disdainful of treachery, not even hesitating to imagine a hundred possible futures, none of them of defeat, sprang in front of the steps and threw words against the unseen audience without dreaming a night, close enough, of fear, equally of words and silence.

  *

  20 May. The speed of the German advance is stupefying. A triumphal march of tanks on day after day of unbroken sunlight, driving before it hordes of refugees. They are a pestilence, not an army. In a few days they will reach the coast. And then? … We are anxious about the children, so near London and the south coast. I have written to A. in North Wales and N. in Scotland, to ask whether, if it became necessary, I could send my young sister and her children. . . . Meantime, I am trying to finish Cousin Honore: if we are defeated I shall wish I had spent these last days looking at things, but it is no use setting one’s watch by a time which may not be exact. The thought of the fighting in northern France is a deafness shutting off any fear except for the children.

  Was there ever so young and fresh a May, the sky cloudless and the air purely clear and warm? The acacias are fountains of ivory blossom, with a light scent which comes and goes, as the trees breathe. Or a fine smile?

  *

  21 May. London. The choir of flowers in St. James’s Park — singing? no, shouting — heaven knows what, but it was certainly English. The paper I had bought said that the Germans have taken Amiens, Arras, Abbeville. All the names of the last war are rising to the surface, with all that was buried with them, the hands of young men, the fever, the joys, the shame. Standing looking into the lake, I saw the tanks lurch through the shabby square at Abbeville in the early sunlight, and an officer walk quickly into the narrow yard of the Tete de Bœuf, sit down resting his arm on the checked tablecloth and ask for coffee, rolls, honey. An absurd hallucination, as clear as the pain it started. Or am I beginning to mix dream and memory, like the skeins of two silks?

  I left the Park and walked and walked. The heat rising from the pavement crossed a column of sunlight at the height of my eyes. I was blind for a moment. Then, thankfully, I found I had reached the Chinese Embassy; I had thought it farther away. Rooms, a staircase, receiving with indifference, polite, the chattering anxiety of English people mainly of the Left — since it is the Left, the side sensitive to a danger to life, which has been anxious about China during these years. Here and there in the voracious current a reed, a Chinese woman, her face clear, unaltered by its smile. There were small sandwiches, ambrosial enough, and strawberries and cream. . . . I listened with all my ears. . . . The French Ninth Army has been captured, and with it a General Giraud, who seems important, if any general in France is important now. . . . An editor who has been attacked many times in the Nazi press told me he had begun to carry poison to save himself and his wife from the Gestapo. . . . The platitudes oozing from a writer who will certainly, for the excellent reasons he will find, make friends with the Germans — if they conquer us. . . . A woman whose simplicity and elegance have always intimidated me talked to me about her children — she is a Jew. Tears came into her eyes without falling — “I would give them to friends now if I thought they could lose their identity and have a chance, only a chance, of living.” Not knowing what to say, I was moved, as though she were dying and I was alone with her, to kiss her: it had been the right thing; for a second she clung to my hands. . . . All these people assumed that the French are going to capitulate; in a few days the Germans will take Paris and the coast facing England; ill-equipped, led by generals of the last war, the French are demoralised, retreating from the tanks on to villages already burned by parachute troops. For once, her rivers have not saved France. They must have relied too nearly on the Marne, it has failed them and they are lost — as if all the rest, towns, cities, Paris, chateaux, vineyards, the Beauce, the Dordogne, the harbours, were held together by this one clasp: which has given way. . . . Even the Chin
ese Ambassador seems to expect that the French will give in. This impressed me more than anything I heard. More than the talk, reasonable enough, about England being devastated from the air and German armies landed here by troop-carrying planes. — “When? ” I asked the editor. —“Very quickly, I imagine. Within the next two months.” — “And then? ” — “The Government will be forced to capitulate. . . .” — “And then? ” — “It depends on … provided that . . .” The mood of all these people was rigidly subjunctive.

  I was dejected by the certainty, it seems of them all, that this is the end. In my heart, I did not entirely believe it. Neither, I suppose, did they — entirely. . . . The calm of the Chinese, and their smiles, friendly, indifferent, were self-effacing — as if they left the space free for their English guests to talk themselves tnit. . . .

  The most terrible thing, the thing for which is no comfort, is the situation of our army, caught — if the Germans have reached the coast — in a triangle of country with no choice between massacre or surrender. Couldn’t they, I asked X., try to fight their way out? “My dear girl,” he said drily, “three hundred thousand of them at the most, and the Germans have eight million men under arms. . . .”

  I had to leave this desert of logic for one far worse — the dinner at which I had promised to speak. Imagine spending one of your few last evenings on this hideous custom of public dinners! I made a vow. Deliver us from the invasion, and I will never, never, let myself be bullied into another. The hotel was full of Dutch refugees: we walked through rooms I thought were being spring-cleaned to a vast room covered with mirrors which repeated everything, like a chorus of idiots. I was doubly unhappy because I had been trying all day to telephone to my child at the aerodrome. X.’s wife had promised me to go on ringing up until she got him. She would tell him to come to their flat where I am staying, and I imagined him already there. The dinner, bad and ill-served, went on slowly. I grew desperate. My politeness failed and I asked if I might speak first, before the great man. As soon as I had spoken I left and took a cab to the X.s’ flat. Before I could ask, they told me he was on his way in. He arrived at once. He looked so young, almost a child, that I felt an impulse to lie to him — the French are re-forming on the Seine, America has sent us a hundred thousand aeroplanes, fifty battleships, a battalion, plague has broken out in the German armies — I told him bluntly as much as I knew and we debated the possibility of defeat and what chance there was of our own aeroplanes being sent to Canada with their crews. “Thank goodness,” I said, “you and I have different names now.” He smiled quickly. “The Germans are not so stupid as that. . . .” X. came in with one of the Chinese from the Embassy, and again the talk was of France and defeat. “Can’t you get your mother away in an aeroplane? ” X. said: “she’s too well known as an anti-Nazi.” “He has just married a wife,” I said quickly. “When the Germans come,” X. said, “you must get them both away.” He smiled. X. and the Chinese diplomat questioned him. Could the Fleet defend itself against bombing? Was it possible for the Americans to fly their air fleet here? etc. etc. At his age I was either too afraid or too anxious to be approved of to speak. He answered very well. He has matured in the last half-year. He was always, even as a child, composed and able to speak sensibly, without affectation or naïveté, but he has a young authority now, speaks when he knows and only what he knows, quietly, with great clearness.