I refuse to read any book in which the cruelty of the theme gives me more pain than the way it is written impresses and gives pleasure. I am certain that such books are only bad.
*
27 October. How I detest flats, and — depth of vexation — a flat in London, in Portland Place, near Oxford Street, near the B.B.C., near all the plagues of a civilisation dominated by noise and things. When I go out I pass a head porter who looks at me with more than the disdain of porters for a new tenant — he will find that my moroseness is proof against his contempt. True, there is Regent’s Park, with its chestnuts and barrage balloon. And from the windows of my room, a curve of modestly small houses which have all the air of houses lived in by human beings, and trees closing the gap at the end — almost a Utrillo. But they are the houses of a mews become — of course — garages, and at midnight and one o’clock a car arrives, with a roar of engines. Doors bang, a self-satisfied voice drawls its orders for the morning, footsteps, the grinding of garage shutters: my heart beats furiously with annoyance; no air comes in the open windows and I gasp for breath. As soon as I fall asleep it is time to get up.
I am determined to be ill, and it does not surprise me in the least that my fainting fits turn out to be due to an over-strained heart. Not that I believe it — most doctors are fools — but it is as good an explanation as any of my dislike of London.
Yesterday my father sent me a shoe-box full of roses and late white pinks. They had been picked with the shortest possible stems and when they were over-grown — he is so much attached to his ill-kept garden that it needs an effort to send away its flowers. Yet he likes to show he has succeeded in growing them. The piece of paper said: All well October 25th ’41, All well — that is what he used to cable from foreign ports, but in a code of which one word stood for: Arrived all well. . . . It seems to me that the roses have a taste of salt on the discoloured petals.
Oh, if I could go home.
I have had a letter from him enclosing a telegram, addressed to me there, from Koubychev — one of those telegrams the Soviet writers send now and then to the English allies they so much mistrust. Who knows what counter-revolutionary adverb I shall insert — innocently — in my reply?
“… I did not know you were communicating with those Roossians — (my father spells as he pleases) — you should watch them, very tricky fellows, Roossians. I have two bowls of roses on the table and more coming out in the garden, I could not get any seeds of Virginia Stock they are pretty little flowers of all colours they make the garden look gay, as soon as one lot dies you drop in more seed and have another show but I could not get any this year, they are using the ground for food. So they say. The days are fine, with bright sun and a light cool wind. We had Germans over last night, the first for a long time. Gooseberries are very scarce and I have not been able to get any. There is no news but I am well and I get plenty of the finest sea and moor air. A pity you cannot. My grandmother’s remedy for her weak heart was one teaspoonful of rum in a cup of milk at night and I remember her at eighty-seven as lively as a chicken. I wish you were here, you would see the garden. . . .”
And my aunt. “They have put some big and very powerful Guns over on the east cliff, below the Church, exactly opposite this house. I don’t know which suffers more, the windows or my nerves. And last night they began firing, it’s unbelievable, just after midnight. The Syren went off at midnight, we heard the German planes going over, and then to everyone’s horror those awful Guns started. Naturally people thought it was a Bombardment or something serious, and today there is general indignation and the whole Town protesting at Guns being allowed to go off between midnight and one in the morning. It is no use protesting, the Military will do as they like, but I feel strongly that Gun-practice should be carried out at a more suitable hour. . . . I saw your Parent yesterday, I think he only lives to contradict. He put me dreadfully out of patience…” Speaking of an old friend — no, an acquaintance of forty years, scarcely long enough to have relaxed into friendship. . . . “She is ill and I am sorry to say won’t get better. I’m truly sorry for her; I can’t but think the War has something to do with it, she has simply let it get the better of her, and is of a most melancholy temperament. You can imagine what she is like now, when she knows she is passing over. I cannot understand Christians behaving like this, after all Death is only going home, and what welcomes and greetings we shall have from those who are expecting us; I’m looking forward to it tremendously. . . . I wonder what you think of the War now. I am hoping against hope that the Russians will hold on and be Victorious; I shall be terribly grieved if they don’t give the Germans a good thrashing, I really think I care more about them than I do about ourselves. We have cut a sorry figure this year, nothing but promises, empty promises. A man said to me yesterday, ‘ I’m very disappointed indeed with England since the War started.’ I replied, ‘I’m more than disappointed.’ And oh how vexing I find this adulation of the Prime Minister. He may be all they say — but you can believe me, no good will come of letting him think he is infallible. And I would say the same if he were a Minister of the Gospel. At this gait, he’ll soon be little better than a Pope. . . . Don’t you detest Tea without sugar? But I smile when I think of you as a child, refusing sugar because someone had said you needed sweetening. And you were exceedingly fond of it. . . .”
*
At home.
Everywhere barbed wire, soldiers, army lorries, more soldiers. The two large hotels, and the houses on the cliff— in summer they are let to visitors and the landlady lives in the basement and looks after them; she goes on living there in the winter, to save money and for warmth — are given up to soldiers. The paint is wearing off, they are terribly shabby, and the little gardens have been trampled to death by army boots. The whole town has grown shabby, as though, with no visitors coming, it would be foolish to keep up appearances.
Our house, although no one is living in it except my father, has become like the others. In all the rooms, dust, cobwebs, discoloured walls. Even in hers. In the early morning the scent of chrysanthemums came into the house, from the few in the garden. I can’t stay here, I thought. But I stayed, and in the afternoon I walked through the old town, looking at the restless sparkling water of the harbour. It was a clear day, sunshine, a strong wind, the sky very blue and filled with white clouds the wind could not reach. When I climbed the hill to the cemetery and looked back, the sea was leaning against the sky, the cliffs on either side of the harbour its flying buttresses.
On her grave the southernwood is overgrown; it needs to be cut back: she would be very vexed. Don’t think of your spoiled house, I said to her; don’t think of your bad children. I was ashamed to cry — shouldn’t I be crying for myself? — and I went away and sat on a bench where I could see cliffs, harbour, sea, the Parish Church of St. Mary, all she liked looking at. Why do our memories outlive us and cloud for the living even the bluest sea?
During the night a few bombs — there had been no warning — fell close to the house. Shocked awake, I lay listening for the next act; after a minute the door of my father’s room opened quietly and he went upstairs to the top of the house, then down to the ground floor, walking as he does always, so softly that he was nearly inaudible. Should I get up and speak to him? There were no more bombs, and the guns — no doubt thinking of my aunt — had not fired. The old man — he is eighty-seven — padding about in the darkness and silence of his house was part of a solitude in which I have no part. Had he been a stranger I might have felt that I ought to call out to him. Nothing moved me to make a sign. I listened. After a time, I heard the stairs creak, then a board on the landing. His door closed again softly.
The bombs destroyed a house on the cliff near us and some army lorries; and killed a young sentry. When I saw my aunt she said that with her old servant she had hurried as usual to the basement coal-house. As soon as they were there, seated side by side on chairs placed in the dark entry, the old servant said indignantly, “To thi
nk they could go on like this, with Miss Hervey here! ” That I call the finest feudal spirit.
*
1942
When his wife died, a new life, one you can call happy, began for the old sea-captain. At his age happiness is content to fill trivial objects … which no one else wants. . . . For the first time, when he was eighty-two, he began to be master — as he used to be master in his ship — in his own house. He had been on bad, that is, on no terms with his wife for many years. Her death — breaking through the walls between them — shocked him. He remembered that they had been young: he saw her, slight, elegant, turn as she stepped down the gangway from the ship to the quay to look with her young defensive hauteur towards the foreign city; he saw — only for a moment, since the waking eye has no power over the past — her look of a rebellious boy. It was less these scarcely seen images than the long wave of the past breaking on him, stinging his eyes and forcing the salt between his lips. All the voyages they had made together, the days, the nights, all the harbours, were there, suddenly, together, grieving him. A sharp salt. He stood at the foot of the stairs and wept. His eldest daughter spoke to him with false awkward pity. He repulsed her. She knows nothing, he thought, nothing. Who, now, knew that girl?
He passed easily, from this confused deep regret, to the little excitements of a death in the house. As if it were the days before Christmas, he went out and bought special fruit to give his daughters. His tears had been shaken from his past, and after the funeral he had no more. Not that the past left him. But it became again his own life, the cloud, full of foreign countries and deceits, he lived in. After a day or two he realised that he was going to be left alone in the house, with an elderly woman coming in daily to clean and cook. He felt a pang, brief, of desolation. But scarcely admitted it, since it would be to admit that he was not loved. Little love as he had given anyone in his life — but where in that hard country could he have found it? — he was terribly ashamed of slights.
When he was turning over his treasures these days — he had drawers and cupboards filled with what his wife said was rubbish — he found a painting on silk made by a Japanese artist from a photograph of three of his children, the boy and two girls, when they were very young: the boy was still in petticoats. He gave it to his eldest daughter.
“You’re all going, it’s no use my keeping this,” he said hurriedly.
Like him a moral coward, she chose not to look at the abyss under the words. In that, too, like him. And what, when he spoke, had happened? Nothing. . . .
Eighty-two. . . . He had left the sea twelve years since, to live at home, always at home. For the first time. What did he expect of it? What — when he said to himself, Time I stayed at home — had he seen? Surely not the curious beleaguered life he began almost at once? … Not quite at once. For a few weeks — or months, was it? — he moved uneasily about the house. During the day he went out, met and talked with other old sea-captains who had laid themselves up in this small port. There were many points of the globe where their memories lay alongside his; he thought them dull fellows, and most of them mistook the flights of his mind for lies. But he could talk to them and to others; the morose silence he kept at home vanished, and he was amiable and very friendly, or he contradicted. In the evening he sat fidgeting in his wife’s sitting-room, vexing her as roughly by his few words as his yawns; then it was time to shut himself in the kitchen to smoke the strong American tobacco she hated; then, going up to bed, he paused outside her door to say, “Good-night,” and waited until her voice, indifferent, repeated, “Good-night.”
He took on himself a few duties, he went to the old market for vegetables, he gardened. In a short time, between ignorance and his stubborn claim to know, he had destroyed part of the garden. He went on working and planting. Some things grew. It became his garden, and each bud a victory of his will over injustice and neglect. After a longer time, they became kind and friendly and he trusted them.
He gave up entering the sitting-rooms. He lived between his bedroom, at the top of the house, and a room on the ground floor, leading to the garden, which began to be thought of as his, and no one else sat in it. It was in his bedroom he felt safe. Here, at a shabby desk in the window, he cut pictures out of newspapers and magazines. In drawers which he kept carefully locked — even, when he suspected that one of them had been opened, fastened by screws driven through the wood — were all the things he valued. No one knew what he had in them. Now and then he took something from one of the other rooms — a Japanese book he had brought home thirty years earlier, a carved stick — and locked it away. He had a habit, too, of taking things to his room to examine them. If his wife or daughters complained too loudly that they had lost, perhaps a glove, he never returned it. Nothing said, it reappeared one day in full view. Or his grandchild’s toys vanished and came back broken. He was very clumsy. Things broke in his hands when he only touched them.
“He is as mischievous as a monkey,” his wife said, with bitterness.
But it was not mischief. It was solitude, enmity, fear. As he passed between the outer world, hostile for all it was familiar and common, the streets and harbour of his childhood, and his room, he put his hand out and seized an object. It might — why not? — turn out to be the answer to a question he never asked: Why am I not loved? And, too, he was madly inquisitive. His curiosity kept alive in him a child — a being quite other, even in its curiosity, than a monkey. This poor child — what must it have thought of the lies, malice, disappointment, in which he made it live? So little contents a child that it was often happy.
After all, how little difference there was between an old captain’s beleaguered life in his house and his life during a voyage. No one in the ship advises or interferes with her captain; he is left alone. Yes, there was a difference, a great one. In his ship he had authority, and the respect, at least of caste. In his house no one respected him.
He made himself, and for twelve years he lived, this stealthy life inside the house, inside the life of the house, which centred wholly on his wife. During these years she turned away from him more and more. At last she could not endure even to eat with him. There were days when she passed him on the stairs without speaking, without a look. He felt, but again without admitting it, cold coming to him from her. The cold of her long disappointment. He rushed away from it. So used now to his stealthy life that he scarcely felt anxious, his mind took refuge in the maze of twisting corridors — dark — even he could not tell lies from truth here. Long since, in this burrow, he had lost himself.
He had no part in the life of his house. Their children belonged only to his wife. And the truth is that he had never been interested in them; had it been left to him they would have fared badly in all ways. He forgot their names and called any of them by the name of the eldest, the only one for whom he had a little warmth — and she could recall a younger captain, indistinct, who sang The Two Obadiahs. But he prepared carefully his Christmas presents, as though all the twenty-fifths of December he had spent at sea were unappeased; or the rest of tenderness in his life ran into this shallow cup at the foot of the year and he offered it, hopefully — and without hope.
In long walks on the moors he turned over the heap of memories like the tangle of wools he used in darning — he darned with exquisite neatness — and a word, a look, a gesture, from near at hand. His mind clouded with self-pity and anger, and fantasies of triumph. One day he would say such words … one day all would see what he was … one day … His eyes, long-sighted, were caught by a flash of wings, and a clear joy filled him in the sky brim-full of clouds, and the field. He could pick tirelessly for hours, primroses, violets, brambles — like a boy. Out here he was free, and slowly, until he turned home, the day itself took the place of his suspicions and dreams.
If he brought home a good haul of ripe brambles, his wife might say, with a little air of praise,
“That’s a good basketful.”
Then, secretly, he was pleased. And comforted.
Every evening, before he did anything else, he made a note of the day’s weather in a large folio diary, the same size and type as the diary he had kept every year at sea. Now he had no incidents of a voyage to record. Only that it had been fine or rained, and the quarter of the wind. He wrote slowly, a clear backward-leaning hand, very clear. His hand, brown and as if polished, had an air of patience. How many million such words it had drawn after it. . . .
When he resigned, the Line had given him, of grace, a pension of three hundred a year. He was seventy, their senior captain, he had been with them for forty of the fifty-seven years he was at sea. Fifty-seven years. “I was apprenticed when I was thirteen,” he would say — if anyone were interested — “I went to Newcastle. It was January. There was snow.”
Seven years after he retired — in 1932 — he received a letter:
“DEAR CAPTAIN RUSSELL,
“As you know Shipping is in a very very bad condition, and we have had to effect Economies all round. Not only have we all here in the Office had to submit to drastic reductions but reductions in the wages of Masters, Officers, etc. have also had to be made. I feel that in future we cannot continue paying you a Pension as high as £300 a year: — this amount was agreed upon when the cost of living and everything else was at a very high level. We therefore, propose that your Pension should be £250 per annum. Your cheque for this month will be sent at the rate of £300 per annum but next month’s payment will be on the reduced basis.
“Naturally I am very sorry to have to suggest this but I think you will realise that I would not have done so had I not felt compelled.
The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell Page 22
