At the end of the years he filled the pages headed Memoranda with soliloquies his daughter suspected had been meant for his wife’s eyes. In that clear pale glass these naive untruths would have reflected only images of derision. The last day of the year was the anniversary of his wedding — (under that date, 31 December 1883, the entry was: “Light breeze and dull throughout. Married this morning at the Parish Church at 8/am and proceeded from there to Liverpool”). He never failed to find words so insincere that they were pitiful — written in the trustful conviction that he was telling the truth, and for a woman who never existed. Even the very young girl he married, with her eager temper, her vitality, was not gentle enough to forgive him for his habit of lying. She was too scornfully direct to ask herself why a man brave and accurate in his dealings with the sea lost and betrayed himself so clumsily with human beings — she among them. “He vexes me beyond bearing with his lies,” she used to say, the anger in her voice terrifying her children.
He must sometimes have vexed himself. The last pages of 1907 were bare except for two sentences.
“Nothing to remember but faults.
“Distance run from Sandy Hook to Monte Video 5747 miles, time steaming 32 days 22 hours, average speed 7.28 Knots: anyone wishing to see the record of this remarkable quick passage can do so at the Office; yet some people are so envious they will not acknowledge that my ship can move.”
*
The hand tracing the lines, line after line, every day, the days becoming years, the tall captain becoming a weather-worn eccentric old man, stopped. Surely, my God, of all this lifetime of effort, one word could have been saved? Why not this, written in Bahia: “So ends the year 1896 under a clear sky and in Tropical Waters miles from home ”?
His eldest daughter recalled that in turning out a drawer she had found his two war medals, which no one when he was alive remembered he had. She fetched them and pinned them on his jacket between the folds of white, ridiculous and decent, covering him. She asked him to forgive her for destroying his life’s work. Tears sprang to her eyes, really of pity for him. A pure pity, since his absence meant nothing. But who, when his life, mutely going off after enduring hard things so long, turned and laid down its great store of unshared memories, would not have wept for it?
And in fact, she had always felt a queer sympathy for him. The aversion she learned young, from her mother, did not succeed in killing it, only drove it shamefully to hide itself. My mind, she thought, is as tortuous as his. We are alike. No one else will cry over him. . . . Then she felt sure that her mother, if she had lived, would have cried. But for whom?
*
It surprised her — as when she was praised herself— to find that many persons in the town, small and guarded as it was, respected him. He was a character, they said, and so few are left.
And it is true that in any part of the modern world there are now only a few characters. Most of us have long ceased to have opinions and feelings of our own or to take that unhurried interest in living which is necessary if we are to be anything more than a set of gestures, useful in letting other people know in which pigeon-hole of society we belong. But, she wanted to ask them, what character? Are you thinking of the faithful experienced captain, with his habit of courage? Yet this was the very one who found spiteful ways of punishing an officer he disliked. And when his young son sailed with him, he bullied the boy, who was anxious to do well and very brave, so mercilessly that he ended the voyage desperate and nervous. If she had shown any weakness, he would have bullied his wife. When, during the war, the boy, and soon after his seventeenth birthday, earned a Médaille Militaire and a little later the M.C., he felt only a sour envy and told him, “Others have done more and had nothing.” To see the boy’s five medals — he was killed — set out in the case in his wife’s room angered him. Where are my two? he thought bitterly. Not once, not by one word, did he praise the boy to his wife or speak a sorrowful word when he was killed.
But what is the use of placing side by side, like algebraic signs, the queerness nourished in long slow voyages, in the loneliness forced on the master of a ship, his wish to be shabby, the instinctive lies, his fear of disapproval, the endless patience, his deep bitter resentment, flowing down through all the veins of his life, of his wife’s contempt for him, his unwilling submission to the will in her delicate body, his shame, never acknowledged, of the harm he did her in marrying her? Everything is missing from the equation — even if one had the rest of the terms. Even if room were found for the child of thirteen stooping, in the room in Newcastle — there was a stove and engravings of ships — to write his name at the foot of the parchment headed Ordinary Apprentice’s Indenture.
A very strange thing — in those days his writing sloped as far forward as that in the forty-odd folios leans back. When did he begin retreating from life?
Leaning forward eagerly, the child enters his life, “voluntarily binds himself”; and promises that for the term of five years he “will faithfully serve his said Master, his Executors and Assigns, and obey his and their lawful commands, and keep his and their secrets … and will not do any damage to his said Master, nor will he consent to any damage being done by others, but will, if possible, prevent the same; and will not embezzle or waste the Goods of his Master … nor frequent Taverns or Alehouses, unless upon his or their business; nor play at Unlawful Games: IN CONSIDERATION WHEREOF, the said Master ” will teach him the business of a Seaman, and pay him £40 during the five years, beginning the first year with six, “the said Apprentice providing for himself all sea-bedding, wearing apparel, and necessaries. . . .” He lays the pen down, with that already doubtful smile. The Marine Superintendent shakes hands with him, with that condescension of the knowing adult for the open and defenceless. He opens the door for his secure decent Master, follows him out, and is never seen again.
A character. Its bitter must, clouding the whole, was surely formed then. From the cold of that first winter, the bleeding rawness of his hands while they were losing what childishness they brought with them, hardness, cruelty, the coarse thumbs pressing him into shape, the brief cheap gaieties, the clouded eyes staring at the foreign streets and the hand seeking in the pocket a few pence. He told no one. Who would have seen anything in so common a tale? Even he only remembered clearly, and sometimes spoke of it, the snow lying everywhere that day.
*
What a pleasant place Nicholas Russell chose! At this height, and on this side, nothing came between it and the finest of views. You looked towards the east cliff, balancing its Church and the broken Abbey, to the sea, and down on the tranquil harbour with its plumed houses — there is always smoke tarnishing, softly, the air over the roofs. Except for the family, the mourners were very old men, on duty: an old sea-captain, and a retired pilot, so old that their life was all on the surface, the lightest breeze would have dissipated it.
The eldest daughter kept her gaze on the sea. A clear cold day, without wind, she said to herself, and thought: I’m getting the habit, but I’m not good at it yet: I should know which quarter this no-wind is coming from. . . . She saw the old captain walking, his tall body leaning forward a little in its dreadful clothes, towards the town. Oh, poor soul.
For what, this long life, oh for what? To the eldest daughter at this moment, it seemed that she had been left an undecipherable scroll of memories of ports, voyages, skies, seas, dangers — all that the old captain had carried with him so long, and for what, for what? Walking through the ancient streets, with their secretive alleys and flights of worn steps, their restless glimpses of water, a mooring-post, a sunk wharf, a gull, she looked in them for the answer. In all these narrow streets, but never both of them at one time, she saw — if you can call seeing what is no clearer than the reflection of water in sunlight — the captain and the captain’s wife. Guard them carefully, she cried to the flagstones, to the walls eaten by the salt: guard them for me when I can no longer.
It did not seem to her impossible that, hurryi
ng towards the bridge, or the cliff, the captain’s wife would one day come face to face with a girl. But it would need, surely, his longest voyage for the old captain to come up with his still trusting look. He learned distrust young. And yet — so patient a curiosity, and lasting his life, could it belong to anyone but a child?
A young man of this war has complained that the survivors of the last, now in their forties or fifties, cannot understand his anger at being driven into the boredom and danger of a war. Why does he think that they have lost their memory? Because they survive?
He complains, too, that the young men of that war were so ignorant they enjoyed it. I am tempted to be foolishly angry or laugh. Too many young men live in my memory, and only there — phantoms who at moments remember their fresh looks: one of them, the youngest, remembers his stammer, another his wish to finish writing a poem, another his little joke about leave trains: I have forgotten it but I recall that Victoria station which was a part of our bodies where a nerve had been rubbed bare: another remembers his fear of losing an arm, and another that he had never eaten as many strawberries as he wanted. The young writer of this war says they were careless, and not bored. . . . He is lying.
No, he is only dull. He does not see what shadow crosses his. Of the young men he is talking about, I saw a few during their last leave — and I know what they were thinking. They thought, with regret, with love, that there were things they would have done if they had had time, that books are made to be read, bodies to be touched, countries to be visited, and they regretted the little they had read, touched, seen. And they thought the war terribly boring and uncomfortable.
Does it matter? Not to the young men who have settled themselves so easily in the grass of France. To the young scolding soldier of this war, then? A little. Since if you are insensible it is no use, even supposing you are not killed, hoping to write what, when they read it, will change people’s lives.
*
The parlour of a small French house is too full of things” arranged for the absence of human beings. They would gladly, the two Englishmen, move half of them to the attic, but it is impossible, they are not allowed to change anything. They can open the window. They do, and the clear warmth of June in France, clear, even in northern France, of any under-current of cold, filters into the room the sky, bees, and a sensation of arms stretched like the horizon. Young, very young, their khaki blurs muscle and quickness without spoiling them. Smith, slightly the elder, is also the one who more easily balances his senses with his will. He speaks as the young often do, half to himself.
Smith.—How many of them are there, carts, lorries, bicycles, cars with mattresses, without mattresses, children, a sewing-machine, a parrot, the hunchback? When I saw them first coming along the road I thought: Always the same paraphernalia, refugees never learn a new trick. Then they began practising their new trick, rolling into ditches, their bodies split open on the road, throwing themselves across the children — why? It wasn’t until I caught the look on a woman’s face and remembered my own eyelids stretching like that, my skin stiffening across my cheeks to form a mask, that I saw what she was seeing, yes, I saw the planes — and the plane shooting us up on a road near Givenchy. So they use them on refugees now. . . .
Johnson.—Always the same friendly Boche.
Turning, Smith jerks his head at the sofa where a third person, an English soldier a little older than either of them, but young, is sleeping, a hand under his round cheek.
Smith.—Do you think he’s really dead?
Johnson.—Oh, I think so. He’s very quiet.
Smith.—So was that other. That one I watched for an hour, hours, until suddenly he began to talk to himself about a field of long grass, and to stroke it. I almost began to feel it under my own hands, the lightness, the dew chilling my fingers, the rough sharpness of a blade. Then I was at home, over my knees in a meadow blazing with marguerites and delicious with quaking-grass; and then I was sitting with my father, I saw the braid on his sleeve, he was, you know, the captain of a tramp steamer, beside the disused ramparts in Antwerp: my finger was bleeding, I had cut it on a reed in the ditch. You know how it is with us now: seized by a memory, we’re changed into it, it takes possession, nothing prevents it from flowing through all the veins of our bodies. . . . When I came back to myself— a few minutes, days, was it, later? — he had gone. The thing I really regret was the book I caught sight of in his pocket. He could have told me what people like us are writing now. Like that Frenchman the other day who brought us Valéry and Charles Péguy.
Johnson.—Ever since I’ve been hoping to find his Peguy. No luck — he must have contented himself with a part of France I don’t know.
Smith.—Dans le recourbement de notre blonde Loire, no doubt… The other is still alive. He enjoys as much as he ought to the miracles of living, the light, the salt wind, yet he knows more about us than we know of ourselves. I should be glad to hear from him where he learned it. . . .
It is only after he has been talking for a minute that he realises he is alone; Johnson has gone. But the other young man stretches himself on the uncomfortable sofa, yawns, and sits up. At once he looks at Smith with the air, defensive and friendly, of a child waking in a strange room. He speaks first, with a timidly friendly smile.
Green.—Good-morning, my name’s Green. Did you bring me in? Decent of you.
Smith.—Where were you?
Green.—Lying out in a field near the road. I heard the shell. . . .
Smith.—Have you seen this house before? Green.—Oh, yes. I slept in it a week, or two weeks was it? since.
Smith.—Are you sure?
Green laughs.—This or one very like it.
Smith.—One like it. . . . Now you’re here, tell me — what have you brought? A book? Poems? Good — I used to read poetry. I even wrote — badly … but talk, tell me everything you know.
Green.—Do I know anything? Why, yes — yes — what a hive. . . . Stop! No, I can’t stop them, they drone in and out, a swarm of bees. I see them.
Smith.—Close your eyes.
Green.—I still see them. . . .
Smith, quietly, almost with love.—You wouldn’t see them if you weren’t dead. Nor this room — which is so like the one you slept in. You would see a field, they must have made a field where the house I know stands. It was here in 1914. You won’t stay here long, it’s not one of your real memories. But you have time, you have the whole of time now — for everything but the things you had no time to enjoy before you were killed. Don’t go without showing me … whatever you are carrying with you, to show us. . . .
Green.—Us?
Smith.—You talked about us, not very often, when you were alive. We were your elders, exactly of your age: we had carelessly got ourselves killed in the last war. How clearly I can see — any moment I shall begin to think I remember you. . . . You’re not unhappy … you smile. . . . See how easy it is to be dead — and how empty. If one had no hope of going further …
Green.—What can I show you? What had we? Our pre-knowledge of this new war? The despair we passed off as scepticism? We learned it from your friends who were not killed. But was it despair? — or just a fashion? What do you want to know? What the sun feels like across the top of a bare shoulder? Its shocking brightness on the sea? The taste of dark honey? I’m nearer to them than you.
Smith.—No … don’t cling to what you must sooner or later let go. Tell me — since you know — since you remember so much — more than you knew you knew — who are your poets? What did they write between our wars? Since? I remember a few names — but tell me as well about all those I don’t, since they weren’t born then, or they were children. What is the name of our Valéry?
Green.—Good God, he doesn’t exist.
Smith.—Are you going to disappoint me? At least let me look, let me see. Let me hear.
Green.—A great many of us wrote poetry: when you believe you have very little time it seems easier to begin with a few verses. With l
uck they will be finished. And our elders — Spender, Day Lewis, Auden——
Smith.—Foolish of me, but I expected to hear other names. . . . But go on, go on. I had no time to use up my curiosity, my impatience. I still have them, I still live out of myself to the future. Talk — I want new words. Words, phrases, I can go down into, always deeper—
Presque tombeau vivant dans mes appartements,
Qui respire et sur qui l’éternité s’écoute. . . .
Green.—You expect too much. The writers you know nothing about are all minor poets — those of them whom without being foolish one can call poets. They began to write when they were very young, and they echoed two very admirable poets, Hopkins and Eliot. It’s right, I think, that we should do our exercises in that way, and let them be printed and criticised. But they went on writing and writing and publishing: so anxious they gave themselves no time for that concentrated and hard mental effort which alone could have helped them to see themselves, their emotions, their sensations before life, the relations of all these with whatever in nature is unchanging, really to see these, not only to have feelings about them and to turn these into verse with the help of a technique borrowed here and there and hastily applied. They are fond of quoting a passage from a German poet, dead now, whose rhythms, when these had been transposed into English and altered, they imitated: Verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings (these we have soon enough): they are experiences. But they never understood what this meant. It would never occur to one of them, as it did to the French poet you admire so much, to give up a long time, years, to placing himself in the real world. Perhaps they felt there was not enough time for that. . . .
Smith.—How I sympathise with them!
Green.—I needn’t — being one of them. . . . They never even examined their thoughts, to see whether these bore any relation to things-as-they-are. I don’t mean they should have tried harder to write a poetry of ideas. Heaven forbid. They have, some of them, only too many lame and decrepit ideas. There was a period when, in lieu of thought, they accepted the ideas of Marx as interpreted for them by a political party. We — I mean my friends — ought to be grateful to them for having this chicken-pox: immunised, we didn’t take it. They, too, got over it, but have they thought since? Scarcely at all. Indignation, confused, or a vague pity for victims, quickly becoming self-pity, in Spender. In Dylan Thomas a self-conscious and simple sexual imagery, at the level of the crudest Catholic symbolism, almost an inversion of those symbols: and to become conscious, unbearably, of their cardboard roughness, you need only place them beside one verse or another of Baudelaire, he haunted by his Catholic heredity and, deeper, by the most primitive of religious terrors——
The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell Page 24
