BEFORE THE BATTLE

(London 1940)

So things rush over us suddenly. We go along, day by
day, then an inevitable moment arrives, unexpectedly, when
the Battle of Britain becomes something that actually may
happen, and we stand shoulder to shoulder, living bodies, like
the bodies that make up coral-islands, to contribute, to sacri-
fice our very bones to keep back the invader. But until we are
sacrificed or sanctified by a new peace, inevitable waves of
terror sweep over us, cosmic tide-waves of terror drown us.
Many of us are familiar with a sort of rhythm of terror, like
rhythm of birth-pangs, actually we are in the travail, actually
and literally in the sense of the Book of Revelations, we our-
selves are begetting this new age.

Stella In the grasp of blackness, tried to get out of
her mind her chief concern, Russia. The Russian news did not
seem too good last night. If Russia should be against us?
If Russia? It was an illogical fear, but this fear seizes us
from time to time. Russia. Then she began to worry again
about her child's book, about the future of her child, tech-
nically no longer a child, and the many children.

When she had exhausted herself in a sort of black-sweat

2.

of agony, she lay down on her couch. It was soon after ten.
Then the Lord is my shepherd, she repeated over and over to
herself. It answered better than the prayer she started.

The Latin *Sancta Dei Genetrix, ora pro nobis*, acts like a charm
sometimes, it dispels fear and opens doors. But the old call
of the old-English, the rugged, rock-like beauty of the English
version of the Psalm, was more suited to her mood. I shall not
want. He maketh me to lie down. Yea, though I walk through
the valley of the shadow of death, where we now walk.

But the door-bell sounded and Stellin thought it must be
an air-warden or a telegram from the Continent, where her friend
is caught in Switzerland. But it was the child, she was worrying
about. The child's book, she had decided, was the child her-
self, she feared misconstruction and misapprehension and actual
criticism might be let loose by the publication of her child's
autobiography, she feared that she herself would die. Struggling
with this terror, she tried to face the fact that she had feared
to die herself in 1919, when the child was born. Struggling
with the remembrance of personal agony and threat of immediate
death, which at the time nature (for the sake of life) had
forced her to repress, she had sweated, as I say, in a sort of
black agony. Then, she had spoken those words, *Yea though I
walk through the valley.... I shall fear no evil. For thou art
with me*. And the door-bell rang.

3.

It was this same child who rarely came in, unless by pre-
arrangement, at this time of night. She seemed to Stella's half-
blurred eyes, a dream of beauty, in her summer frock. The pretty
dress was printed with red flowers, like poppies and with green
leaves. Around the child's thick soft dark hair, was a ribbon
of a peculiarly tender shade of blue. The blue of the ribbon
caught up blue flowers woven among the poppies and the green
leaves of the summer print-frock she wore; hatless, stocking-
less in soft open Suede slipper-sandals, the creature (modern,
as she thinks, in the extreme) was yet tenderly and exquisitely
(with no self-consciousness) attired like very Primavera. She
was life. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. Here was
this pasture, a summer-field scattered with summer flowers.

"O come in, darling."

There she is, the daughter, standing in the hall. The
child has stepped out of the door of life.

This is the short cut. God answers so subtly. So beautifully. I could not have thought of a lovelier thing in answer to my own prayer, why, she walked in unexpectedly, right on my words, For thou art with me. "Come in."

"But you've gone to bed. It's late."

4.

"No but wait. I didn't draw the curtains, it's past
black-out time." She shut her own door. She goes to the
front room, to the side-room where she has her desk and does
her writing, to the bath-room, to the little kitchen, groping
in the dark, fastening the black-out curtains. Now the child
switches on the overhead light in the big room. "No, put that
out, let's have the other light." It is a wall bracket, glass,
with a rose-coloured bulb shining out to shape the cut pattern
of sun-shapes carved on the glass. The rose light falls on
the child seated on the couch now, with the background of the
fawn-coloured panel tacked up behind the cushions. She is a
portrait, she is painted in bright summer-colours, her face is
round and rose-coloured, her face is a red rose certainly.
O, my love is like a red, red rose. Her grandmother was born
in June and loved roses, this child was born with the spring
sun rising and her other sign is Leo, she was born in the house
of the beginning, the Ram with Leo, the house of pleasure rising.
Our mother
Pleasure? This is what had worried Stella in the book, the last
part of the book. Parties.

"O - what happened at the party?"

"O, that was this afternoon, I met Jack there. He took
me out to dinner last time, so I asked him out this. But you
were asleep?"

6.

"I don't know. I got up to go, then he came with me, and
said, I'll get you a taxi, but there was no taxi and by the time
a taxi came in sight, a bus came so I got on the bus. Then the
bus stopped at the corner and I got off." ("At the exact moment
when I started saying to myself <u>the Lord is my Shepherd,</u> I thought
Stella.)

"Then I came along, then I thought I'd come in, though
it's late."

"What made you exactly come in - I mean you know it's
lovely, once before, you came late after a party, I love you to
come in, but why did you think of coming in?"

"O, the bus stopped at the corner and I thought I'd get
out. I just thought I'd come in. Maybe you didn't want me?"

"O - yes - let me get you some fruit-juice." (Stella
keeps a special pink-raspberry sort of thing, as the child re-
members it from little circus treats and fairs and cuttings in
Switzerland, but she doesn't realise why her mother keeps just
that special raspberry or loganberry fruit-extract for her.)
"I have some new grape-fruit juice, it's good with soda - have
a cigarette?"

"No, I was smoking. No, I just had my dinner. Why did
he say that about my book?"

"I don't know, darling, It's probably something purely

7.

pathological. You must remember that a book implies all sorts
of things. We know how clever Jack is, how really successful,
but he never had the big novel published that he was so keen
about. He probably, in spite of all his clever articles, really
wants to have a proper-sized book published. He mixed up the
idea of a book with the idea of a baby, probably. He is a
darling, you know, but rather twisted."

"He said, he had had more happenings to him when he was
twenty. Why didn't I do anything, have anything really happen
in the book? He said it was all about myself."

"Well, books are in one way and another, all about the
people who write them."

"He was quite nice at Dick's party."

"Who was at the party?"

"O Miss Janel, the novelist and Dick's cousin - "

"Yes, such a nice girl. I met her you know, at your
birthday-party, sitting on the gramophone table, wasn't she,
in the corner?"

"He and Pat got on. Then he said, why does Pat dislike
me so much?"

"He was tight, I expect - you know he drops a stitch
when he's tight sometimes."

"He went on about Pat."

8.

"Or it's more like a landslide, one can listen for five
hours, very tired and he never notices and he never gets any-
where."

"But he's nice the next day, he'll be nice when I see
him at the Centre, in the morning."

"Well, then forget all about it. I say, it's this way.
Men, the nice sensitive men, the unobvious ones, the sort we
know for the most part, are creative and really they would
like a child, not a child as a man has a child, but a child
actually. So they get jealous when something like a child, a
book, comes to a woman who can have a child anyway. They don't
know they're like that, but that's why so many of them hate
things women do. Because a woman is biologically so much more
highly evolved than a man, then they think, why should a girl
have everything? He is jealous of your book probably."

"But you're sleepy."

"No, darling. Now have a cigarette. You don't seem
tight yourself." (This is how one talks to them).

"No. I just had sherry. Dick mixed some strong things
the way he does but I don't have them usually."

"Who else was there?"

"O - you know, the sort of airmen that come in."

"O - yes. The sort of airmen who come in."

-----

10.

now run along. But you might like to stay here to-night?" No,
she wouldn't spend the night. She would go back to her own little
flat. "Hadn't you better ring me up to say you are all right,
you have no torch, take mine." No, she would never take the
torch after black-out time, she would be all right. "Thank you,"
she said as if to a kind stranger as the lift-door slid shut."

It would be difficult to sleep now.

Terribly, terribly cold. Actually the window was open,
of course, the covers had slipped off, but in that other dimension
there is such a bleak cold. Cold. There they lie, how cold they
must be, the flat-stones of the church-yard lie with no distinc-
tion like the grave-stones of the Quakers, the Friends. Cold. A
wall of the house is down. The wall of our psychic house is down,
to let in unknown, uncharted sensation. Everywhere, all the time,
in ordinary day-thought is the paralysing fear, but as well there
is the vicarious suffering, for those homeless thousands on the
Continent.

Even in her dream, she thinks, "it's not only the dead who
are cold, it's the living, thousands and thousands in France,
Belgium, Holland."

In her dream, standing on the familiar gravel-path of the
old church-yard, she thinks "we don't ever realise it, they are
so cold." And the stones lie flat, in that homely park-like

11.

enclosure where along the sandy paths, she had loitered on her
way to school (at 6, at 7) and where she had gathered butter-
cups among the mounds, and stars-of-Bethlehem in the tufts of
longer grass by the wooden fence where there were no stones,
just humps of grassy earth, where blue soldiers and grey lay
alike un-named. Some of them were mursed back to life at the
old seminary on Church Street. They had turned the dormitories
into hospital wards for the ill and wounded, on the trail back
from Gettysburg on the way to Philadelphia. Those that could
not go on, were left behind there, most of them were already
nearly gone, but they had cared for blue and grey alike and
there they lay with no distinction, with no names. Lost.

Lost? Individually, how lost we are. But I am not lost.
Why mama! How cold it is. But is it so cold? She is there,
she is in black and I realize that in some vague half-house,
open to the air, I am slipping on a black frock. Then over it
a dark coat. Around my head, mun-like, I wrap violet and white
bands, lest there be no mistake that I am mourning for someone!
It must be papa, of course, or papalie, her father, who died
when I was 7.

She is there and I kneel before an open fire-place and
break twigs and small sticks to place under a dark log. How
high now the flame reaches, "this is extravagant," I say, as

12.

if we were poor people, peasants, or refugees, mama and I in our
rather elegant and not unbecoming mourning. Someone must be pro-
pitiated, a housekeeper or our old nurse. Frieda, her name was,
she was German. The Germans will be cross? There is this danger?
Frieda must not know how much firewood we are using. But we
are elegant refugees, I with my bands of white and purple round
my forehead. Do we belong in dream, out of time, mama and I,
to some religious order? Mother Superior? Mother.

But we are out in the grave-yard again and now it does
not seem so cold. Over a wall, climbing over a low roof on the
other side, is a branch of honey flower. There is a heady, foam-
like branch of another white blossom, fruit-blossom, probably.
A group of children pass us, look at the wall as if about to
break off the flowering branch, "no, no" we say, "you must not
touch that branch." No one must touch it, there is summer
in mother and daughter, Demeter and Persephone meet here at
last.

Married to the dead, she was, wasn't she? Persephone the
spring, now married to Death. Here in this graveyard, the dead
lie, everywhere the dead are lying and the living fall almost
before our very eyes, minute by minute into the channel. Germans?
Yes, the terror is never far absent, waking or sleeping, but
here in this cold graveyard (in the town of her own and of mother's
birth) lie the rows of flat stones, no titles are indicated on

13.

the flat small stones of the early followers of Count Zinzendorf,
many of whom left lands and estates in Bavaria, in Saxony, in
Bohemia. Small strange names like Job or Zeb are baptised
Indians; Indians lie here, at peace too, among the middle-European
refugees, the cobbler and the Count.

I am safe now. We built a great fire, brought back a
dead log to life, we got warm, she and I together brought back
the spring. This war is over, I tell you.