The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell

by Storm Jameson

  My fear of inner defeat — as of a door which would open silently on the dark stairs — always in me, even when I was confident and greedy — has turned to indifference. What lies beyond defeat? Wait, wait, you can be sure it is not so bitter.

  *

  Yesterday morning a German plane unseen above the clouds, grey, heavy, of a day of warm rain, dropped three bombs near the Roman wall. One of them killed a woman in the field with the Saxon name. Another fell between the forgotten church with its memorial tablets and the old charming plain vicarage. In the bomb crater in the field, a boy later picked up a Saxon flint.

  *

  The house settled on itself again, with a smile of relief, as soon as my young sister returned. It is no use pretending I did more, during these fifteen weeks, than just keep it going; I did nothing to please it.

  She is safe, and I can think over the extreme fear of these days, almost living — it was at my heels on the staircase; the stair creaked after my foot left it, and when I drew my curtains at night it took the shape of a fold and I lay trying in the dark to out-stare it. . . . Six days ago The Times said that a German pocket battleship had attacked a convoy half-way between Ireland and Newfoundland. We had guessed — when my sister cabled from Chicago to us: On my way to see Montreal — that she would sail that week-end. And the day after The Times report, when we were reading that “losses in the convoy are likely to be very heavy”, another cable, signed by an unknown name — Left Sunday.

  In my family we are not given to premonitions, any more than to colds in the head. We expect to survive. I did not recognise it as fear, the restlessness that drove me to walk about the house, to run errands, anything sooner than the effort of giving life to the,ghost — it has been waiting about in my mind for months and I was eager to talk to it — of The Fort. If my brother-in-law had said he was anxious I should have deafened him with my reasons for being certain she was safe. To get itself noticed, my fear had to make the crudest signs. . . . The third morning I was dressing — almost in the dark; I refuse to turn on a light, not only because it jars after the darkness and sleep, but it would mean drawing blinds and curtains, all that annoyance of black-out — when I heard the hoarse cries of wild geese. I ran to the window and flung it up. There they were, flying very fast, dark against a grey sky ruffled by dove-grey clouds. In the east a narrow strait of clear pale yellow. The same, the very same sky I have seen so often at home, but — time is in reverse with me now — at the other end of the day, after sunset. A hand pinched me. I remembered that at home we call the crying of wild geese in flight the gabble-rachet — it is their tally-ho and away as they hunt the newly-dead. . . . I had an anguished thought that her thin body was sinking through icy Atlantic water. . . . At the Canadian Pacific they said they had no news, and so far as they knew their ships did not sail in convoy. . . . But the image persisted, and placed itself wherever I looked. For the next three days it stayed with me, in front of or behind my shoulder; either its breath or its distorting reflection clouded every mirror. Armistice Day came. The newspapers had a circumstantial report that a Canadian Pacific boat, the Empress of Japan, had been bombed and disabled four hundred miles west of Ireland. Why did I believe at once that this must be her boat? In my plain senses I should easily have convinced myself that it was the last ship she was likely to be in. . . . I rang up N. to ask again at the shipping office in London. While I was waiting for the answer, I remembered the Two Minutes and followed them into that underworld where I have more friends than in this, and — I have none here — a brother. But, for the first time, it was only the past — as if it belonged to my childhood, as if he had died then. He, my mother, that life, that undisciplined girl, are all dead. I am not that girl, and only a few of her acts are able, still, to make me cry out. . . . The telephone rang downstairs, and I rushed to it. For a few seconds my head throbbed so that I could not hear. Then … the Empress of Japan is not now in the firm’s service, and your sister will be on a smaller boat — which is in the Mersey at this moment. . . .

  I insulted my fear, and chased it out of my sight with my mother’s cruelly sarcastic laugh. Fool! I shouted — in her very voice. And it has gone. Of course it has gone. And just now I caught myself thinking of it at the end of a passage. This is idiotic. Since it is in the past, why do I think of it in the future? If my family were not the sanest eccentrics in their part of the country, I should say I was a little touched. . . .

  This morning in London, one of my friends asked: “How did your sister get back? They told me at the passport office that Englishwomen who went to the States will have to stay there, it is impossible to get a boat.”

  “Ha, it would take more than the Government to keep one of us in America when she wanted to come home,” I said.

  It was only when my friend looked at me oddly that I saw how foolish my remark was. Do I often, I wonder, make remarks like this?

  It never entered my young sister’s head that she would stay in the safety of America. As soon as she had settled her children with their generous foster-parents she set about corning back. She found it would be difficult to come from New York, and so went quickly to Canada and came from there.

  She began — the day she arrived — to plan against the children’s coming home. She is furnishing a dolls’-house, more modern — it will have electric lighting — but not more likely to be the meeting-place of witty cultivated beings, almost always awake, lolling on their sofas, and talking, interminably, than the one a ship’s carpenter made, and my mother furnished … even to window-boxes she bought in Antwerp, and mirrors hanging awry, which a child’s eagerly clumsy finger could never put straight.

  *

  Today the sky is a greenish grey, as though it reflected the North Sea. Even though at its height it ought to be able to see two hundred miles, I don’t believe it. There is a wind and grey clouds. These, and the leafless branches, each doubled by a line of rain-drops, carry me to the fields behind my mother’s house: it is an afternoon in winter, a mist from the sea doubles the sky: always at the same place, where she can look one way to the moors and another to the Church and the Abbey ruins on the edge of the cliff, she pauses. The bare trees, the chill thin air … her life and mine go on there, unseen, unending, and these walks, part of the ritual of her life, will never end, even when I do. There will endlessly, in this street, at that turn of the moor road, for those who can feel it, be a footstep doubling theirs, a breath … the light pressure on them of a memory not theirs. . . . My aunt writes that they have been bombed again — the bomb fell in the field, always, because we looked at it from the other side of the harbour, smooth, below the Abbey, and in a road nearer the cemetery, and beyond it among the Golden Grove trees. Did they disturb you in your cold sleep, my poor love? And no daughter to tell you that it was a storm or the armistice guns.

  *

  1941

  13 January. There is nothing clear in the colour of winter moonlight. These last few mornings I have dressed in bright moonlight, at about half-past six. This morning a curiously elongated moon — I should know it again from all the others — woke me at five o’clock by stroking my face. I lay looking at the garden. There was a bird in the long grass. At the other side of the orchard the trees were remote and rather bestial, like some passages in Aeschylus. Although I could see everything, the light was menacing and ambiguous.

  I have finished The Fort.

  *

  The abyss of sadness in the last words of Jules Renard’s Journal. I think one needs to read the whole Journal, and have lived with it, to feel this last entry not simply pathetic, but sad, solitary, terrible.

  *

  Today when I was in the village someone walking behind me began to whistle the air of a hymn, one little known. I recognised it. Turning, I saw a middle-aged farm labourer. If he had been young I should have been astonished. Mine is the last generation brought up to know a great many hymns. And the last which remembers, as a thing felt, the Victorian certainties, hollo
w as these were, wormed inside, in 1900. Isolated, sarcastically indifferent to the rest of England, our Victorianism was almost of 1840. I rebelled against it, but it had formed and deformed me; even my revolt was filial. My deepest self, when I am conscious—you won’t expect me to answer for any sleeping or disinterested self — is patient, stubborn, a little cracked in its dislike of being told what to do. Anything which is repeated a great many times, a chair, a sentiment, words, repels it. It has no respect at all for its neighbour’s opinion. The only thing I have added of my own to this outwardly sober eccentric is the horror of cruelty which disorders my thinking. Not that I am kind — an illusion identifies kindness and dislike of cruelty.

  *

  12 May. Today, in the train to London, four young soldiers talked to each other in Welsh, and sang — Welsh songs first; then (I thought it had disappeared with the last war) Apres la guerre finid. And then, singing softly in parts, so that they sounded like laments, foolish songs in English — even of the last war. . . .

  I said goodbye to the flowers,

  I said goodbye to the trees,

  And the little church so quiet,

  I said goodbye on my knees….

  Tears came into my eyes without my knowing how they came there; I stared out of the window to keep them from falling.

  The truth is, my despair is so unmanageable that I can let myself cry only over the last war. This one is an agony, always present, and tears are not decent. The cruelty, the young deaths, the abyss of pain, weigh too much; it insults them to place in the other balance a single grief. And yet I cannot make myself say, with the pacifists: Submit — to the justice of the Nazis. Too many people in Europe have learned to translate the German word for justice into their own words for torture, the closing of schools, hunger, death. My mind hides a rock — it may only be a rock of ignorance or want of vision, but all my thoughts run against it. What — once Hitler had been allowed to grow to great strength and was using it to create an empire which in the moment he chose would compel all other countries to submit — could we have done if we had not fought? If one could believe that after a long time — how long? — the elements of good sense in his New Order would neutralise the cruelty and racial nonsense on which it is built, there would be a case for choosing the risks of such a peace to the risks of such a war. My rock is that I cannot believe it, nor find any evidence, material, moral, psychological, for believing. There are things I can believe without evidence — if these match a colour in my mind. But of what colour spread by the Germans in Poland, in Norway, in France, can one believe that it resembles the colour of youth and the colour of joy? I see us caught — by our own blindness and failures in 1919–39 — in this trap which closes on children as well as on young men, and forced to go on suffering and inflicting suffering until we or the Nazi State are exhausted. And — the real horror — although I write boldly and as carefully as I can about what ought to be done after the war to restore a trembling and ravaged world, I am almost without hope. If I must believe without evidence, I’ll believe that our exhaustion will be less than our anxiety to rebuild. Even that is easier than to believe that Messieurs les Grands Intérêts will be defeated in their wish to rebuild a world fit for great interests. How we shall need a force of disinterested intelligence and humanity! — and where, under the ruins, or in the war graves, shall we look for it?

  But I have no right, in talking or writing, to share my ruinous despair with others. Especially not with young people. . . .

  Today in the city there was still the acrid smell of burning, and the clatter of broken glass. Ambulances and police waited outside crashed houses where men have been digging hard for thirty-six hours. A thick fine grit covered the pavements. The air was full of the filthy dust of old houses and fragments of burned paper. There were streets which had given up everything; they had not kept even a semblance of life. Yet it was here precisely that life clung with the most agonised strength — as though things used by human beings absorb some of their memories and cannot simply be pulverised and scattered. A dark oblong on a fragment of wall kept the shape of a bed or a mirror, and where you would least expect it a cup rested unharmed, between two heaps of rubble. As for the human beings themselves, those whose poor bodies, deformed by their death, had been carried away or were still waiting, under vast piles of stone, the very suddenness with which they had been shocked out of life kept them here. You saw a shadow caress the corner of a wall where there should have been a child’s bed, and another pause as though seeking a reflection in a glass, then, turning in the door not there, hesitate and look up, not yet accustomed to seeing the daylight where there should be a ceiling.

  These weeks have made our moments fit exactly into moments lived first in China, in Spain. The shrunken spaces between peoples, crossed by a fine web of voices and the steel shuttles, are negligible, almost nothing. Time is the absolute division. Nothing changed in our lives when we were told about the air-raids in Spain; even Poles, even the thousands killed in Rotterdam in an afternoon, died, for all we felt to the contrary, in the year of the Great Plague. All these events, our own future, became for us, in the very moment they happened, the weak reflection in us of history. It is only now, when the smoke of our ruins joins the cloud above theirs, and our dead are confounded with a vague crowd coming from many countries and all now speaking a common language, that we keep the same time as Chinese, Poles, and the others. In their cities and villages the Americans are not yet our contemporaries.

  Our contemporaries are Bede, spending himself to write down the sum of European knowledge in the almost total darkness of the seventh century, Alcuin — who persuaded the Frankish barbarian to admire learning — Dante, Montaigne, Vigny. . . . I know that despair is a sin. Moreover, a sin one must be ashamed of. I suppose that the true intellectual can — to escape this sin of despair, or the odious folly of despising men as hopelessly stupid because they let themselves be trained like cocks to kill each other — offer himself the thought of a great genius, who need only live and his life justifies the nullity and the disappointments of all the others. I prefer to offer myself, offering of which none of us is worthy, the eyes of a young airman, or the eyes, full of kindness and patience, unasking, of an old workman.

  *

  16 September. Last week was our Congress — of the English P.E.N. By holding it in war-time we avoided the embarrassment and disgrace of having to explain to our foreign writers why it was not opened by the Prime Minister, why no garden-party given by the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, no special performance at Covent Garden of an English opera, no Guildhall banquet, etc. etc. — events which added themselves naturally to Congresses in Warsaw, Prague, and other capitals. It may have — we hope it has — escaped them that in this country the disrespect paid to literature goes so far that writers are perfectly free. We did our best for them. We invited to a luncheon every Ambassador except one, technically neutral, whom none of us could regard as neutral or bearable. . . . I shook hands with Ambassadors, I made speeches prepared and delivered in anguish of mind. Amiable foreigners addressed me as Mme la Presidente. . . . Good. When I came home at the end of the week I found that our servants had left, to go into a war factory. Useless to think of finding others in this village — which in any case we must leave, I to live in London, my sister for a smaller house near her husband’s factory. Our lives are coming to pieces in our hands. This house — we took it so that the children could live in the country — is Victorian in its demands, and today Mme la Présidente’s back aches and her knees tremble from a day’s hard washing and ironing. I iron very badly, I always did. It seems that with an iron energy and good intentions are not enough. A pity. I have enough of both.

  During the Congress I had a supreme piece of luck. How, since June of last year, I have combed the London bookshops for Giraudoux I gave away or lent in the illusion that I had only to cross the Channel to buy others — the Channel, which is now a good century wide. Last week I found in Foyle’s a soile
d shabby copy of La France Sentimentale, uncut. Imagine that its imbecile of an owner let it out of his hands without reading it! If he has died since, how he must be cursing himself for the folly which has deprived him of so many phrases joining a thing to its opposite, a magpie and Phedre, despair and a good omelette, life and the night, the cold. I walked off with it in the blazing heat, exalted. If I could have a new Giraudoux, of a good vintage, every month, what a long otherwise dull life I could live happily.

  To be able to shut the door of one’s room and cut the pages of a Giraudoux consoles for all but the great tragedies (and on how many of these can a journeyman writer count?) — consoles for disappointments, disillusions, snubs, for a casual infidelity, for failure. Could he sustain one through a real loss? I doubt it. But why ask of a writer to take the place of courage or a faith? That is not what they are here for.

  Notice that when Giraudoux writes about what is tragic; war, the disappointments of children, death — you will be surprised when you add up the number of times he concerns himself with nothing smaller — he does it by setting gently in the place of the terrifying image one which is only smiling or innocent. The bitterness, the terror, are penetrated by a light which dissolves them into a rain of bright drops. He is not invariably successful. In moments when his touch fails, the rain is seen to be stage rain, thrown down by a maladroit arm appearing through the canvas. But when he is inspired, when the hive of French poetry, nourished in Greece and (in defiance of French critics of all centuries) in the Italy of Virgil, Cicero, Terence, comes round him and he has only to dip his fingers in the honey, there is nothing, no subject, he fails to turn to a pure joy. He shrinks from none — the cruellest, the most terrible. And to be confronted by them in his words is only a delight. It is not that he lacks the necessary cruelty of writers. It is that he has, very often, the Midas-touch of the poet, and the words given to him turn what is terrible into what is graceful and enchanting, or equivocal. At his worst, into what is arid and glittering, but not, but never, painful.