The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell

by Storm Jameson

  But there was a, so to speak, mediating life between these two. That was the life led by a few German refugees who had settled in the village. Here, where baker or chemist always offered his cheapest goods first, their little money would go farther than anywhere in western Europe. Living though they were in the past, it was a past nearer to the time of the foreign hotel, and they were able to understand this and make use of it. One among them would be employed by a visitor as chauffeur, or holiday tutor. Or a German Jew who had established himself, as a dentist perhaps, in Barcelona, would come to the hotel, and for a few evenings his countrymen ate there as guests, worried by the sarcastic politeness of Death in his shape of a Catalan waiter.

  For a few hours during the day, the sun was hot; a blinding light sprang between the sea, which remained icy, and the houses placed like white stones between sea and hills. The instant the sun sank below the hills the air became cold. There was, too, a dry wind like a scythe, which covered everything with fine dust. It started a nervous tension at the back of the eyes and in the muscles, exasperating.

  Even on windless days it was too cold in the late afternoon except to walk. One April day at half-past five, when we set out, the sun was lowering itself behind the hills; its hair streamed triumphantly upward, a long glittering tuft. We climbed across the land side of a headland, the track dry and steep, slopes where the soil had hardened into fantastic organ-pipes, dry noise of cicadas, everywhere flowering heaths, the air scented by them. Nowhere except in these bare hills have I breathed such perfume. The sun, when we reached the top of the hill, had been shaken out, but the light glowed for several minutes. We followed the path — difficult with gaps and stones — round the headland. Suddenly the sea, in flower; the sardine boats were all out and they carry powerful acetylene stern lamps. The path went on without end between the ghostly plants, their brittle life gone off in scent — on, then down, down. Will it drop to the unseen coast road? In a stony gully it began climbing again a further headland. We left it and plunged down in darkness, slipping, clutching at roots; when we fell on to the road and turned to walk back to the village, the sea, on our left, was in full darkness, the many lights resting on it like sea-birds, those farther off gently ruffled, the nearer sending ripples of light to run on the rocks still far below the road; a crescent moon; lights of a passenger-ship going south, the knuckles of a hand gripping the horizon. The road climbed and turned. The descent to the village; the night chorus of frogs, rising through every least vein of the darkness, inexorably; the beam of the lighthouse sending out letter by letter a word made up of sea, cliff, road. The streets were empty, and the light escaping from a half-shuttered window was ironical in its insistence on cold and solitude. My room, with its bare walls and stone floor under the matting, was cold, and the stove only filled it with the bitter smoke of wood, so bitter that I knew I should recall it.

  *

  England is — we spend so much effort to conceal our ignorance of England, that ignorance which earns us the ill-will of foreigners, who put it down to complacence or vanity, although the truth, that England is a boy shot down in the air above his own fields and an old woman ending her days in the trifling joys and squabbles of an almshouse, is too simple to compromise with any of those superb abstractions in free use in other countries, and too heavy, so that it can scarcely squeeze itself into the beehive — so why should I not say that England, among all the other persons she is, is that thin unabatable old lady, my aunt, my mother’s sister? As my mother was, she is a part of the town, with its mud-filled harbour, its cramped streets. But she never left it. All the voyages of her lively mind have the form of one or other of its streets, and if her eyes, blue, clouded, could give back the images pressed into them, the first and last would be that of the Parish Church shepherding its old effaced tombstones on the edge of the cliff: she looks at it from her window, across the roofs and the harbour, in every light, from the youngest to that dying gold which clings to it with such fond love. She looks at it — but does not go inside; as you would guess, she belongs, as did my mother, to the sect which descends from Cromwell’s Independents. No one could be more true in spirit, or slighter in body, or more fearless. You can see her — in all her seventy-odd years she has not learned to tell lies; I fear it is too late — in the letters she has written me this month.

  “… things are dreadfully scarce here, and now there are no Matches to be got, I don’t know what we are coming to, if you want anything at all you have to spend the whole day in the streets, we had 2 hectic nights last week, with these disgraceful bombs, I had to take shelter in the coal-house passage which the Warden, poor fellow, assures me is the safest place. What we do at these times! …”

  “… it is just possible you may know we have been bombed this afternoon, and I am writing to tell you that we are all serene. We supposed it was one of our own Planes, it was going so quickly and just over the house-tops; we were watching it out of the sitting-room window when, without a word, there was a blinding flash and a loud terrible noise, and we fled downstairs for our lives. And afterwards, O the destruction! I never thought the Germans would sink so low or that I should live to see the town in this state. I have just remembered that it is your Parent’s birthday tomorrow. The last time I saw him I was not able to conceal my disgust with the pleasure he takes in pretending that nothing I mention is important — whether it is the War or a fine day. We shall see whether it is nothing that four of his own windows have been blown in. Mine, I am thankful, are not touched. . . .”

  *

  The stunted little mechanic, returning this evening from the East End to his R.A.F. station somewhere in the country. He talked only to explain to himself the anguish he felt. It puzzled him. It was too large for him, he struggled to fit it into himself and it broke open on all sides like an ill-made parcel. He had a slight squint, which gave him the air of seeking in himself the reason of his anguish. “Seems a silly way of making war. You hit me and I’ll hit you. I reckon they ought to stop it … you know, it’s the women and kids. . . . My wife, now, she has the baby in the shelter every night, all night, and then three or four raids a day, she can’t bath him even, as soon as she’s had breakfast and begun washing him, the siren goes. . . . When you say goodbye their heart’s in their boots, you can see it. . . . Of course you couldn’t do any good if you were with them, but they’d feel better. . . .” To be travelling away from danger, leaving his family under the threat of German bombs — what an extreme triumph of the social instinct. It fought in him with the instinct to stay with his own, to place his thin body, spoiled by a slum, between them and the weight of their death. What orders we obey for the sake of obeying. I could do nothing for him except listen. I did that, hiding my dislike of an unhappiness which must talk. Or I had given all my futile pity to one of the two soldiers in the carriage — a boy. On the platform, to see him off, he had two women; his mother, shabby, her hands worn and cracked, made towards him timid signs he ignored: all his eyes were for his girl who was with her, made up to resemble, grossly, a film star. He looked at her and repeated, “I’ll be back.” His effort brought drops of sweat to his forehead. As soon as the train started, he glanced with a vague smile at the other soldier and said softly, “That’s over.” While his friend slept, he sorted his photographs of her from the letters in a new pocket-book.

  *

  This morning in London I walked through one of those zones, or rays, of pure happiness through which this planet passes at irregular and always unpredictable moments. Or no one has learned yet how to predict them. I was opposite Westminster Abbey when the line of longitude I was walking on passed through the ray. There was a light wind. The sky, a pale blue, broke into white foam over the roof. A tune slipped from the past and played itself on a hurdy-gurdy waiting at a sunny corner for just such a piece of luck. What use is it to be poor, modest, if you cannot in these moments squander your last, absolutely the last, reserve of youth and irresponsible freedom? Moments of escape — but wh
ere? — from this nightmare, this iron sky closing on us. . . . What use to feel cold if not to smile at these London trees warm in a light the colour of honey and silence?

  I bought an evening paper and read that the City of Benares has been torpedoed. She was carrying children and all but a few of them are lost. The air now was glacial. And already my eye had seen another name, and I leaned, to read it, against the nearest wall. The Oldens were on board and are both lost. An English officer tried to force Ika into one of the boats, but she refused to go without her husband: who was too ill. . . . But I can hear the voice, even, quiet, deep, and the very few words with which she refused. . . . I cant leave Rudi. I’m sorry. . . . I am sure that is what she said; she would be unyielding and softly polite, regretful that she had to be disobliging — and immovable. In her young face the dark eyes would not waver.

  This was why you came to England, my dear Rudi, with your hatred of cruelty and tyranny and your passion for truth, the two fires which burned your flesh so that even your smile was twisted, as though from within. I watched you at an international committee, with Jules Romains, and a Polish writer of whom nothing has been heard since, waiting with this half-eager, half-ironical smile, to remind the Frenchman that the Nazis have murdered or exiled all the good German writers and this simple fact is the only one a writer need remember about them. But you remembered much more. As scholar, as liberal humanist, you could not forget what was going on in the night of barracks and concentration camps. And how eagerly you believed in our English freedom.

  You had time, even before the war, to remember our English dislike of intelligence. . . . What would you have done, my friend, without your wife’s smiling calm, without that limitless devotion she placed so quietly, unnoticed, in your hands? You had that. And the little lively child, born here — “the English subject,” Ika said, smiling. . . .

  I have one of the letters Rudolf wrote to me when the internments began here. It had occurred to him that, if we asked them, the American writers might press their Government to invite German writers living in France and England — he had the strangest idea of the value of writers. When he was strongly moved, his English became very bad; you could judge his feelings by the state of his tenses — “…no one, I feel certain, would wish to give the appearance as if he ran away from dangers. I should say almost all of these writers living in France or here would have had the possibility to go to the United States in past years and they remained deliberately in Europe although they with certainty foresaw the war. Some of them only wanted to remain nearer the decision, some of them did it for love to Europe, some felt sure he would be used in information or broadcasting work and wanted to fight the Nazi. This was perhaps foolish but it was so. You see: this is a ridiculous situation. They remained here to work and they are thoroughly been stifled. (To work or fight they thought by their voice.) The trouble of being interned is not so much this to live for some time without the usual comfort and liberty — but it is: to be entirely idle whilst one hoped for utter activity. Further on it means that especially those writers who are of the Allies’ cause and could be use for it will be useless. I should like to suggest to look on their case from the political angle and not from a humanitarian one. I do not think it would be the moment for considerations of this latter kind. . . . What great, rare, reassuring, comforting occurrence that I can write this to you. . . .”

  To humiliate a man like Olden it is not necessary to shut him up in a disused cotton mill, bare and verminous. That was extravagant.

  He hoped until the last minute that the English would keep him. Until the very last, when they were going on board … there would be a telegram; the Travelling Paper, where the clause allowing him to return was crossed through again and again thickly, in red ink, was a mistake — You are wanted in England. . . . “I regret,” he wrote the night before he sailed, “to leave this country in this moment. But no choice was left to me. Please, do not forget our unhappy comrades in the camps — when there will be more calm than it is now. And do not forget us.”

  It seems to me that many people will remember a distinguished writer we humiliated. I ought to remember his young smiling wife. She was always, except that one time, stubborn and gentle, composed and gay, calm and smiling. Even when, because of the internments, she decided to send Kutzi, who was two years old, to a friend in Canada. . . .

  “At the English passport office they gave me a passport for her at once, and they were very kind. Then I thought: Perhaps she has to go through the States. Very well, this morning I went to the American consulate, to show them her English passport and ask: Suppose she needs it, will you give her a visa? But they have a man there in the hall who is simply brutal. He asked: What’s the passport? — She is a British subject, I said. — Parents’ nationality? — As soon as I told him: Stateless, he said: Nothing for you here, and I’ll tell you right away we don’t grant visas on compassionate grounds. — But I’m not asking you for compassion, I came to make enquiries. — Nothing doing. You can try again at 9.30 tomorrow if you want to. . . . Then he pushed me out quickly.”

  “I’ll ask for you,” I said: “unkindness of that sort rolls off me.”

  She refused. “Off me, too. You forget my mother was English,” she said, smiling. . . .

  A telegram: “Rudi interned. Kutzi left for Toronto ”. . . . The police who came for him comforted her, and she forced herself to be grateful for a politeness which alarmed her more than the thought of her empty house. Then, as the door shut, the emptiness sprang at her. This cottage they had lived in for four years was an enemy; it had hidden one of Kutzi’s shoes and chose this moment to drop it in front of her; and when she had to make a list of the papers the police had taken away with them — these included Kutzi’s birth certificate — her hands shook and everything she touched slipped from them.

  For a week or two longer she kept up a pretence that this was an interruption, not the end, of their life here. But the house itself, in all the ways a house can be malignant, forced the truth on her. She gave in, without panic, and came to live in London, where it would be easier to work for Rudi. And for the others her loyalty did not forget when she was only thinking of him. . . . She never pitied herself, or him — poor vice of exiles. She had only just admitted her exile and she would not flatter it. Each time we met during those weeks when the authorities, moving like men who are frost-bitten, were preparing to release him on condition that he went to America, she spoke as though I had an imaginary grudge against England which she must cure me of. She had a deep voice, with an abruptly silenced vibration, a voice which delighted me. How many times, smiling, she said as if she felt no anxiety, “And when Rudi comes home . . .” It was by chance I learned she was not able to sleep. . . .

  Sleep, sleep, brave Ika. You shan’t, I promise it, be forgotten.

  *

  The atmosphere of these days, of waiting, is that of autumn — no rain, but suddenly a feeling of chill, as if the sun had turned its shoulder on us. Over-night, the leaves of the elms have become yellow, the colour of suspense. We listen.

  Yesterday evening, I was writing in my room, warm, with the fire, and heard the stuttering noise of a German plane. For a moment, until the bombs fell, a long way off, I felt a sense of comfort and pleasure. Why? Behind what I was writing, my mind groped in the darkness, then suddenly gave me back the sputtering gas-jet in my bedroom when I was a child. How often, waiting for my mother to come upstairs to say good-night and turn it off, I listened to it with ears already drowned under sleep. And then she came in and stooped over the bed, touching my cheek with a lightly roughened finger. . . . Go to sleep now, my good little love. . . . The two sounds, gas-jet and German bomber, are the same. No wonder that our generation is slightly cracked, sullen, or giddy, seeing that it has to hold together two extremities a torrent is trying to force apart. What energy could we possibly have left over for all the other things we should have done, the poems we ought to have written, the children we should have brough
t up in safe placid houses, the problems — Sonnant dans Vôme un creux toujours futur — we should have meditated? We have all we can do to appear sane. Very often I doubt whether a generation will be born able to stand the terribly accelerated speeds, and the pressure of things spawning from us like numbers in a geometrical nightmare. We may have to renounce them — as the only way of saving ourselves. Open our hands and let drop possessions, haste, even change. What luck, in that time, to be born in a country of vines and olives. . . .

  When I was in bed other planes came over, and dropped their bombs about the neighbourhood. There is a new searchlight facing the window nearest my bed; it lights up the room as it comes round, touching the tallboy, the mirror, my cheek … a finger. . . . Nothing is stranger than to lie in bed in the quiet dark of the country, to be roused by bombs, then to listen to the plane drone out of hearing like an insect on a warm day, to sleep, to hear another machine, the guns picking it up, and bombs again, dropped, it seems, into nothing, muffled by the blackness. There is none of the excitement I feel in London, nor the sense of danger. It is, I think, the silence, and the one plane isolated in it. One listens as in a dream. If I don’t hear the plane coming, the first bomb startles me, sending an electric shock to the ends of my fingers. Then, the calm sense of a dream comes back. I sleep lightly afterwards, and the next plane wakens me at once. One night this week our cockerel startled me awake, I thought he was a new sort of bomb coming down.

  This morning, very early, the sirens woke me. I was surprised and listened drowsily to a succession of sounds in the almost-darkness; first, that shuddering of the air one hears at night before hearing the plane, then a cock crew, then the planes, other cocks answering the first from all the scattered farms, then bombs, then silence and an owl in the paddock, then far-off gun-fire, the sound of the planes fading … a jay called out … another. . . . A broad finger of moonlight caressed the bookshelves under the window.