In a too casual voice he said, “I feel like playing in the house this morning.”
His mother drove him out into the garden — as you make a child ride home after a fall from his horse.
How gently he is still treating us. The dead children of Poland and the other countries which know him better than we do would find a smile for this innocent murderer. We watch him closely, and all we notice is one finger, lifted slightly, or the scarcely perceptible movement of a foot. It is a little unnerving. But I am not one of those who cry, “Anything is better than this suspense!” No, no — anything is better than another dead child. Than one. . . .
I am reading the charmingly urbane letters written by Harriet Cavendish between 1796 and 1809. They could equally well have been written before the fall of Nineveh — nearer to it than to us.
*
They come into my room through the closed door, and watch me write letter after letter. There is already a heap of letters at the end of the table, and more to be written. It is nearly midnight: my eyelids have had to be propped up by two thorns. If it were not for their supervision I would stop tearing words from le terrain avare et froid de ma cervelle. The letters are to other people about them, or to the Home Office, or to themselves about themselves and about each other. One has written about her interned husband — I answer her and write about him to the Home Office. Another, not interned yet, wants advice and to be encouraged. A third who is interned will need four letters to his own cheek.
And it is all unnecessary. None of this folly, wickedness, suffering, need have happened, if it were not that men have an invincible habit of tormenting each other. Why? Have they so few ways of proving to themselves that they are alive?
I persuade myself that if I were interned I should keep quiet, and discuss with myself my self. But then I have never been interned, nor am I haunted by the fear that one fine morning the Germans will arrive and I shall be handed over to them — as it happened in France. I remind myself of this when I am on the point of being exasperated by the insistence of these victims on surviving.
Why I am working all night is that I have been in London all the day. I went there to talk to the person on whom they really depend. For one exiled writer who turns to me, twenty throw themselves on the humanity and deep wisdom of the secretary of the P.E.N., without dreaming that he will not be able to give up his whole time to each of them. You could think that Hermon Ould had spent the years when he was knotting the threads of this society — in every knot the capital of a country — preparing them to take this strain. He is holding together the meshes of what has after all become a net for saving lives. Today he looked completely exhausted. At one moment, when a German writer came in with a scheme that would involve us in raising five hundred pounds at once, we were seized by an insane laughter, which we passed off to him as influenza. A strange disease, which attacks without warning and causes tears to pour down the patient’s face. . . . I remembered that I had promised to visit the Rudolf Oldens. They are in the flat they were lent when he came out of internment. On the way there I was surprised when without the least warning it grew dark. An eclipse! I said to myself. . . . My sight cleared. I was holding to the railings of an area — as though what I really expected was an earthquake. . . . When I came into the room, Rudolf’s wife, the composed quiet Ika, nodded at me with a distracted look. She was telephoning to a doctor, and trembling — when she had to wait for the answer she forced her teeth together to prevent their chattering. “Don’t go,” she said, “Rudi is ill, he has collapsed. I think you can help — you comforted us so often.”
She went out of the room, and in a moment came back to say he wanted to talk to me. . . . He was lying in bed on his side, his face grey under its film of sweat. He smiled a little, and held his hand out, stammering an apology for being ill; suddenly a convulsion seized him, he covered his face with his hands and sobbed, between violent jerks of his body. I fled from the room. . . . When I had seen him last, in April, he believed that some use was going to be made of his knowledge and intelligence: at last. But after ignoring him, we suddenly interned them with him — with the effect I had seen. . . . Ika came back — and now, she was again in herself and looked out at me with calm.
“What did they do to him in the camp? ”
“He is delicate. It was one of the bad camps. He suffered.” She added, reflecting, “But that was nothing. It was his disappointment — to be thrown out—”
“What can I do? ”
“Nothing … unless you would go and look at some flats for me. You see, we have to leave here tomorrow — sooner than I thought.”
I wrote down the names. In the streets it was hotter than ever, so hot that the houses seemed swollen. I went from one place to the next. They were all dreadful. I was ashamed, because I had not found a place for Ika, of my exhaustion. I rang her up. She had just heard that they would be allowed the flat for another week — “and by then perhaps, we shall know whether we can stay in England, or if we must accept this offer. You knew that Columbia University has offered to make him a professor? Of German history.” She added in her usual calm voice, “We have been here six years. Until this ye*ar we didn’t know we were not wanted.”
“Don’t judge us by our moments of panic,” I said, and rang off. . . .
But is it panic? Or the sudden widening, into an abyss of meanness, of a crack none of us had noticed? It is true we have an excuse. There may be a fifth columnist or two among the Germans and Austrians, and we have seen what damage a fifth column can do. But in the Dutch, the Belgian, the French fifth columns, how many aliens? Fifty? Ten? One? … It angers me that England should fall into this obscene panic. The war? It is not every day that one has such an excuse for practising the virtues of firmness — towards the helpless. So my country can only save itself by hurrying sons and husbands out of the country, without a word, until they are gone, to the frantic women? And, when a ship-load of them is drowned, by declaring that all those on board were Nazis? It is a lie. . . . Stupidity? Incompetence? … I am ashamed.
I must sleep. . . . In a clear sky, the searchlights fold and open a fan, closing and dilating the intervals between the transparent rods. At last the closed fan is held motionless, upright, the halting sound of aeroplanes ceases below the horizon, and this sound I hear is only the too noisy beating of my heart — calling attention to itself. What unsatisfied hope is keeping, close to me, these patient shadows? I must sleep. Look — look at all the letters I have written about you. . . . I have, Sir, the honour to be Your obedient servant. . . . True, they will do none of you any good.
*
Yesterday, we invited the exiled writers again — including a few Germans who have not been interned. Old Dr. Federn, the historian, so old, so brave, so gay, and like a grasshopper in his shabby frock-coat, talked to me about another German he wants to save from internment. Until I spoke of him myself, he did not mention his delicate son who is interned, and then he said quickly, with his smile, “You are not to mind. England is the best people in the world — and kind.” Another German listened, an old gentle creature, a philologist and translator of Shakespeare, now modestly starving in the country he, because of this same Shakespeare, thinks of as his home.
There was a Czech poet, young, severe — out of reserve or pride he stood the whole evening alone, mutely refusing himself to every current; there were also Poles — among them a young man who related in a polite voice, with gestures almost smiles, the stages by which a country is forced in a few short months to relive the Dark Ages, by pillage, the destruction of libraries, the murder of scholars; and there was a distinguished Polish novelist, Marja Kuncewiczowa, whose laboured English did not succeed in hiding a subtle and elegant mind. What can one say to these writers who have lost not only their country but their language? How can Madame Kuncewiczowa live when her hand, her delicate writing — hand, has been cut at the wrist? Exiled from two countries at once, Poland and literature, she can keep herself alive only b
y the passion of her belief that she exists. I looked at her. Yes, she exists. She is charming, her face has the clearness and lightness of an ivory, each of its fine bones is a vow—not to die, and to speak Polish, always Polish… Leaning against the buffet, an elderly Frenchman, a journalist, talked for a long time to one of the Czechs. I was avoiding them, but the Czech caught my arm. “What are we to do with the pure-bred Nazis, the real young thugs? ” he said. He looked at me with a little malice.
“I don’t know.”
“Kill them,” the Frenchman said.
“Exactly my idea! And listen. Little as I want to give up any of our land — I have been a farmer longer than I am a soldier or a writer — I would cut off three narrow strips of Czechoslovakia and get rid that way of two out of our three million Boches. Of the million left, half will be killed before I get there. A pity. . . . The rest can be given their choice of going to Germany with their goods and their metaphors — we are not thieves and we have real poets — or becoming Czechs. No more German schools, no double faces, no politicians who are traitors, and teachers of gymnastic who mean to murder some of their pupils. This time — finish!”
The Frenchman half closed his eyes, to see better inside them. “I believe,” he said drily, “there will not be a German problem. There will be, when the Germans are retreating, another Night of the Long Knives. They think, these ordures, that they have taken France without paying. Every minute adds to the debt.”
Certainly I understand it. I understand these dreams the colour of hate, and the wish to strangle — the hands of the Czech who used to be a farmer had arranged themselves with just room for a neck — and to blot out eyes which saw the dead children and the hostages with their bandaged glance. And yet this darkness, this second night of Europe, stifles me. It is not the dead, not these hands already like roots, who insist that debts must be paid. No bailiffs among them. Only silence and indifference. Who will blame the living if they assume the anger, hate, justice, of these who feel nothing, not even the cold of the earth? And will dare promise them that they need not spend the rest of their lives with the taste of their justice?
“You disapprove of us! ” the Czech said to me.
“Not at all. You know what you want — where we, with a different experience, are increasingly uncertain. That’s always something. You have only to find out whether you enjoy what you want.”
It seemed to me that our German guests needed attention more than the others. They have a habit of standing about in groups — close to them, the country they can’t touch. I can only listen — and listen — and become nothing.
2 August. The house, without the children, is deathly quiet. The sense has gone out of the orchard and kitchen-garden where they ran and shouted and cried.
After the French surrender, and when the defences against invasion were being improvised in the roads and lanes, in that motionless heat — and other children had gone — we thought of sending ours to the States or Canada. I doubted whether there were time. But we took the first steps in a maze of formalities — and I wrote to America. A terrible struggle began in my sister’s mind during these weeks. In her body, since her children are nerves of her life, and dear possessions of a young woman as firmly possessive as any of ours. Can there be any more frightful riddle than the one English mothers are being asked? They are being given time to ask themselves: If I keep my child with me, am I handing it to its butchers? And if after all we are not invaded, what have I done? … Like the others, my young sister had to decide, quickly, whether to save her two she ought to give them up.
She is entirely her husband and children — as you can say that a spring is its cool freshness. She has no joys or ambitions which are not their image. The courage to give them up has been taken from her veins. Rightly, her husband left the decision to her. I say rightly, because in my family it is the mother who decides such things. And, too, it is her days which will change, and become unbalanced by the loss of her children.
It was not one, but several Americans — friends, the friends of friends, and women who only knew me by name — who offered to take our two. Who will say enough about America at this time? There are no words for so reckless a generosity, and the pure goodness of Americans who write: Your children need not risk the fate of Polish children — send them to us. It is not possible to reckon our debt, still less pay it. They are strange people, these Americans. You and your wars, they say; don’t ask us to help you! And in the same breath: Let us help you. They have none of that tact which makes such a handsome mask for a mean egoism, they boast of what is least admirable — its gadgets — in their civilisation, and keep a modest silence about its spirit, which is young enough to afford mistakes. When we English say of them, as we do, “They don’t know they’ve been born,” we are speaking about their greatest good fortune. . . .
Nothing, my sister said, would keep her out of England: she will take them over, then come back. When I told her that might not be easy, she was vexed: “They can’t forbid me to come home,” she said: “what nonsense! ” I hope so.
They left last night to take the night train to Liverpool. We put the children to bed early, at five, and at half-past eight woke them; they had to leave the house at nine. Nicholas’s energy and good-temper woke with him, but Judy was furiously sleepy and fought against being dressed. When the luggage was being piled into the car I took her up — she was crying with rage — and carried her about the garden, while Nicholas went through all his tricks to amuse her. . . . “Look, Judy, look at me. . . .”
An evening like any other evening in summer, full of light and penetrated by a breath of darkness. A long way off, the sound of an aeroplane — at its height, its pilot probably saw at least a splinter of the continent where cruelty can do as it likes, where it is no longer a crime to open up a child’s body and leave it to die at the side of the road, where men exert themselves to give death and pain, as if life had become worthless. The sky was very clear. The moment when I lifted the child into the car stretched back endlessly, fastening itself to the mistakes and griefs of the past. Surely this is right, I thought; surely it is wrong. My young sister — who never cries — was making as she cried the same face she made when she was a child.
“Don’t try to keep me over there,” she said to me, “they don’t need me so much as he does.”
You cannot think what this house is like today, without them. Imagine in your life a day when you learned that the one person you were reckless enough to depend on has betrayed you, when to every real act of ill-faith or ridicule you add a cloud of imagined ones, so that your mind is flayed and every touch on it is an anguish, and when you realise at last that yourself, by your childish need, as exigent as a child’s, to be loved, has betrayed yourself — you will form some idea of the emptiness in these rooms and this orchard.
If I stretch myself, I can hold the house together. I can’t give it its living soul. That at this moment is lodged in some part of a ship in the Mersey. They have still to cross safely.
*
This morning, the cool air, promising warmth, and the acrid smell of wood-smoke, opened round me suddenly the air, mediaeval, of a Spanish village — of the coast village north of Barcelona where we lived one March and April, it was five years ago. So small — a harbour, behind it the few narrow streets, thick in dust, the dry hills — but three worlds, each with its climate, customs, even its own time. There was the hotel, simply a large Catalan house, renovated, but that could not change its air of detesting the sun — owned and run by a foreigner — Swiss? German? The guests, speaking every language except Spanish, set their watches by the wireless, so that their time was strictly that of March 1935. Its waves had swept here — together with a few touring cars, newspapers sent by post and arriving, since they had become involved in the indefinitely stretched-out Spanish time, like the light of extinct stars, with their excitement about events already out of sight — a school of young female artists. Their trousers were not indecent — what
made them seem to be was the air of charade given them by bangles, rouge, purple toe-nails. And the loud English laughter, a gramophone needle jerked brutally across the record. They chattered and lounged at the tables in the narrow courtyard with its wind-bitten orange-tree and single gaunt waiter, a Catalan. One of the other guests, the French business man on holiday with his mistress, asked him if he admired them. The Catalan distorted one side of his face, the eyelid sinking as the comer of his mouth rose — and it was the face of Dürer’s Death which so distorted itself; he had the same severe elegance and as little flesh. The guests did not try to plague him as they plagued with their exactions and absurd troubles the patient little Jewish secretary and dog-of-all-work, less a human being than the voice, soothing, gentle, of an immense fatigue — and an immense lie: no one is really a block of abnegation and friendly smiles.
All this whirring polyglot life, always glancing at a watch to see whether it were time to leave the beach for the hotel or the hotel for the only and poor café, was isolated from the bare mediaeval life of the village: ironical silence, poverty, of Catalan fishermen, of peasants turning over by hand a few feet of cracked earth full of stones, impenetrable houses, children with skeletal hands playing in the dust between the buttresses of the large church, the clumsy body of the parish priest. In their black heavy clothes, and unsmiling, the Catalan women watched young women in trousers or bare-backed sauntering along the streets on their way to bathe. Could they even see each other? — moving, as they did, in moments so completely separate, not even of the same kind. Nothing was reflected, from the silence, the poverty and inflexible dignity and ignorance of the one on to the glittering indignity of the other. You could not say that the hotel and its guests were a foreign growth in the village. They were not attached to it in any way, even as a tumour; the slightest movement would shake them off.
The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell Page 19
