Asphodel

by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)

  Is Christianity then that? Is Christ the soft mist, the blue smoke of altar incense hiding the beauty of the thing itself? Is Christianity then that, at its best, a curtain, woven of most delicate stuffs to hide reality, the white flame that is Delphi, that is Athens?

  O God, they don’t even know about it. Not even the Rabbs. Fayne doesn’t really know. Fayne reads Dante and thinks it’s real when it is a circle upon circle to numb the senses, like light reflected from bright mirrors that deflects, that blinds one’s eyes with its dazzle but that really hides the image. The image of truth, of beauty is in this marble bowl forever . . . a Grecian urn. Where is he, Keats of that somewhat washed out ode? Let me get to him. Hands in yours, Phidias’ and mine . . . You held our fingers in yours. We are your fingers. Athene’s hands wove, wove and she was the goddess of the artisan. Sculpture. Let me creep along your corridors. O God. If only I could come here at night when it’s empty and speak with you . . . “Clara, yes, certainly. I was sitting downstairs to keep cool. All these pictures excite one somehow. How funny that just this year the Mona Lisa should be stolen. But there’s that other one, you know, Madonna of the Rocks, Pater wrote about it, didn’t he? No, I don’t mean ‘her eye-lids are a little weary’ but about the background being like light reflected from under sea. A phrase like that reveals things . . . Napoleon’s watches? can’t we do them to-morrow?” Lady of the sea. Lady of the ship’s prow rising from the sea. Rose drips from wings spread rose wise, catching the sun in wings that spread out above a glacial thunder cloud riven with white hail. You stand with spread wings dropping honey-coloured petals down to us, far, far below you and Samothrace itself is here at the top of the steps—“this ladies and gentlemen, is the famous winged Victory”—dropping petals alike on the just and the unjust. The sun shines alike, the rain falls alike, the wings of Samothracian Nike spread alike over the just and the unjust, the seeing and the not-seeing and the almost seeing and the just not seeing. Samothrace is a small island set like a honey-coloured lump of amber in a lapis sea. Honey coloured rock that was riven to mould wings, feathers—“you will see ladies and gentlemen that the later effect of the drapery arrangement—” and the wind blowing, blowing straight from Asia, straight from Europe, you standing between, a sort of breakwater for the East and West. Let me stand between, Greeks of the islands. Mystery made formula. Samothrace a formula of God. God making islands and giving the islands to Greeks before Phidias was Greeks are and they are and will be. You can’t change a static formula. “The crown jewels are in the last room, madame to the right but let me assure you—” Going on and on. Jewels. King’s jewels and Louis the something or other with gems weighing down an empty head and no chin. Bourbon type with no chin, cold like fishes, lecherous. With little boudoirs painted with numberless pink ladies, with love from the air dropping blue streamers with pin-cushion pink rosettes of roses. That’s art. French art. “French art is best represented by this Angelus of Millet.” “French art in its essence this Fragonard, this Watteau—” Air come to light. Light come to garments fluttering in fragrance from Cythera. The breeze from Cythera (see Walter Pater) and Fragonard and Watteau and the other one, Lancret. Small world of mirrors and pinks in glasses with the stems showing. France was pinks in tumblers with the stems showing, hardy fragrance, France. Oeillets trois sous la botte and there were carts of cherries outside along the narrow crooked roofed-over little streets of the left bank. Old brocades and chairs in windows and china that would break if you so much as breathed on the window pane. Rabbits in cages under a counter chewing lupin, grass, thick tufts of green green grass, the greenest of grass under a counter piled high with purple cabbages and with blue-purple artichokes and with asparagus and with eggs in baskets neatly fitted like precious lumps of alabaster. Eggs taking on a new significance. Raspberries different, seen differently as things may seem different seen through clear glass. Things in Paris looked clear and different and a little magical with qualities defined (was that art simply, something in the air?) as if seen through a clear slightly magnifying bit of crystal. Everything a little different, was it something in the air? Climates made people. They did understand. Something in the air in spite of the noise, the raucous screams, the neglect and unsavouriness of certain streets, certain milieux. Yet different. A woman in a poor shop with a cap flung sideways brought back all the Revolution . . . “not that. No, don’t let’s go to the Bastille. Clara do have some more raspberries. What makes them taste like the way pot-pourri ought to smell and doesn’t.” . . . “Where are we going this afternoon?” “There’s that little Cluny Museum everyone talked about.” “Everyone. Who’s everyone?” Yes who was everyone? Hermione propped an elbow on the table edge. Who was everyone? “Can’t we have some of that black, black coffee. I feel—sleepy.” “Bored?” “No. God no. Shut up. Dead beat.” Voices all about. Then voices all going. Then almost gone and all the tables that had been crowded on the pavement empty. “Let’s have the coffee outside. Everyone’s gone now. Café spécial. Yes. We must have it hot, strong.” “You drink too much black coffee. Abuse yourself—” “O God. Really Clara—” “Wh-aaat?” “O, I don’t know what you said. No. It wasn’t funny. I didn’t mean to be rude. But I do. I am. I don’t know what I mean. No. I don’t. Fayne does.” “Does what? What does Paul do?” “Abuses one’s confi—den—ces.” “Does she?” “Terribly. I told her par exemple that I hated statues but that she was to be sure not to tell you.” “O. She didn’t.” “O she did. Don’t stand up for her Clara. She did tell you. I could see by the way you shoved that Victory down my throat. Everybody’s Victory in cheap bronze, in tobacco shops, in people’s libraries, everywhere. A winged Victory on the mantel piece, height of bathos.” “You mustn’t talk that way—” “There you go. All for the proprietors. Like telling me not to be irreligious at Rouen. Religion. Bah—” God. God. God. God. God. Don’t let any demon wipe away Paris. Paris is written in clear colours, as if someone (you?) painted in light from coloured glass. Don’t let it go. Paris is a state of mind like what happens to one’s mind seeing unexpectedly a clear tumbler with flower stems on your dressing table. Lighting the candles and finding the flowers, one magnolia, a flat water lily in a flat dish. Who put it there? Did Eugenia put it there? O good little old Eugenia coming to Paris on her honey-moon. Such a good little Eugenia with a bustle and her hair caught with a diamond arrow (I have the picture somewhere) and seeing all these things, the Bastille even. Good little Eugenia getting presents, little souvenirs for everyone. I’m not good . . .

  “Well, why don’t you want to go to Versailles?” “I don’t. I mean I do want to sometime. Why must we go so soon? Why must we go at all . . . O all right.” Versailles. O well if we have to but can’t we stay in the garden. Some days, certain days a week, once a month or something the fountains play. You have to come when the fountains are playing. It’s no good ordinary times. But then its full of people. Fountains. Long corridors. Horrible to think that Marie Antoinette ran actually down this long hallway, screaming perhaps. Why did we come? Marie Antoinette in powdered wig with slippers too high and her stays too tight and odd little embroidered underclothes. O, it was horrible. But those poor children starving and great Signors cutting off their serf’s nose. O horrible. How can things be so disjointed for why shouldn’t Marie Antoinette have roses embroidered and love knots on her petticoats and stays made in Italy and tiny, tiny high heeled little slippers, rows of them. Did she pick them up and love them and play with them as if they were dolls? I think I should have done that if I had had all the shoes of Marie Antoinette to play with. Sydney Carton. Paris. London. They are always in my heart wedded, two names, how funny I had forgotten all about Dickens. Cherry trees dropping leaves and a last scene and the girl (what was her rather washed out name?) taking the coach back to London. Not that I loved Caesar less—but that was the reverse of it—not that I loved London (or Paris) less but that I loved (what was her somewhat insipid name?) Dora (no not Dora it was some one else) more. Sydney Ca
rton so elegant and standing on the platform, all the elegance that a school girl will dream of forever. Sydney Carton. “The view is lovely from this window.” Long corridors outside as well as in. The garden outside was corridors and steps and squares of water set in like squares of polished wood. The water outside and the hedges made walls and floors. It was not a garden really. They were caught here (poor people) in their own labyrinth. Going on and on from day to day, caught, not knowing they were caught. We’re all, all caught, but only here and there one of us (me) knows that we are caught. Light above their heads, death below their feet, still dancing, going on dancing with flutes and a Venetian cello or a new Milanese flute to give rapture to the occasion. The Grand Soleil. “No. Don’t let’s go any further. Well if we must see the little Trianon.” All the same only tiny. All the same, a doll-house replica of the big palace and huts covered à l’anglaise to play at milk maids. “Why did we come here? I think it’s the saddest place I’ve ever been to.” O sad, sad, sad. O pinks in tumblers faded and thrown on the dust heap of Republicanism. American Revolution hastening the downfall of French autocracy. Those very minute men who fired the first gun in Boston helping to nose out little rabbit white Marie Antoinette in her rose-heeled slippers. Sad thing democracy. Benjamin Franklin and America from the European angle is not unimportant. England sneering. France and America. The Marquis de Lafayette staying at the old house the Farrands’ grandmother used to have. He stayed there I mean. All the garden of the old house (it was called the Grange) laid out in boxes, squares and rows. We had heliotrope roots and cuttings from their garden, from the Grange that was named the Grange after the estate of the Marquis de Lafayette. So I was always near, near France. Heliotrope (though they didn’t thrive, they’re delicate) made me one with this. With this. O with this. Marie Antoinette running down a corridor and the heel of her slipper bent under her and she fell forward and caught her underlip. She couldn’t find the handkerchief to dab at the dash of blood on her lip. Blood and foam and all the heart of a Great Sun gone down like an ocean liner in a minute. Sydney Carton. “Do you like heliotrope?” “What for?” “The flower. I mean do you like it. It smells of eternity, the sudden foam of something breaking across—across—elegance from another world. The face powder of Du Barry.” “Who?” “Someone or other’s rather vulgar mistress. I mean don’t you think of things, people like that. Words darting in and out and every word related so that everything you saw and every word you say relates, weaves on to another.” “What are you stumbling at?” “I mean when I said—(thought) heiotrope I thought Du Barry. Though I don’t know why. I was really thinking of Marie Antoinette. But Marie Antoinette is a faded stalk of carnation flung in the dust bin of Republicanism. Liberty enlightening the world. That’s us. America.”

  The world’s good word, the institute—that’s the Institut de France. The Institute. Carl and Bertrand Gart getting books, pamphlets from the Institute, French Binomial Theorems. Mathematics is a language common to all people—dots and dashes—why don’t we all speak a common language of dots and dashes and colours? Why must we be divided, hating each other, never understanding? There ought to be a sort of Spiritual Esperanto, all understanding each other but then how tiresome because French things are French. French things are more French obviously than anything American could ever be American. What is American? That’s just it. Asking us to be something that has never yet been defined. I am a Frenchman. O yes then go die for it, for that visible, embodied thing you call la patrie. La patrie is visible. It has made those peonies on that cart shine with that luminous rose in alabaster light. France. France has made those peonies different from any other and our flowers at home were always Dutch tulips, English roses, O la France rose had to have a name, a tag to get really across to us, to make us really love it. The Seine. This is the Seine. Fancy calling the little built up island the He de France. Of France. Of all of France. The island of France. Islands. The island in the river where we had picnics, called Calypso’s island and I asked my dear old Bert who Calypso was and he said a goddess out of a Greek poem. That was the first time I had ever heard of a goddess. “Who was she? What is one?” “What is what, Bird?” (They call me Bird.) “Why that, what you said, something about less God.” “O ho, ho.” Bert didn’t laugh like that but how do you think of people when they laugh? It’s a sort of cringing, a sort of crinkling, a sort of twisting. It’s letting go. Bert let go, leaned against the rail of the bridge. (We were on our way up what we called, the mountains, for what we called, pansy violets.) O ho, ho. That is no sound for laughter. But how write laughter? Bertrand laughed. He was always immensely thin, immensely tall. Laughing. “How kind of your big brother to take you, such a little girl up the mountains.” “Yes to get pansy violets.” Bert laughing. “A goddess as a—god—less, a God—less. Less what, Birdlet?” “It was you who said it, not me. I didn’t say anything about any less.” “You did, oracle. You said a goddess—” And he was at it again. Twisting a long leg round another long leg. What was he about then. But here we are, not there. Here we are standing on a bridge over the Seine, the galleries of the Louvre to the left ladies and gentlemen and the famous Notre Dame across a little in the distance. Here we are in France. How ever did we get here? What is France? What is French? A sort of (obviously) Esperanto of the Spirit.

  3

  “But who is he?” “I tell you he is Walter Dowel. I can’t tell you any more. He’s very famous—” “I should judge so by his trousers.” “I can’t see that there was anything wrong with Walter’s trousers.” “Nothing wrong only they made us, the post-cards, the woman behind the bench selling post cards, the Cook’s guide, the elegant late plaster cast Roman lady with the fat arms, even you, even you, purse proud, look wrong.” “How wrong, Fayne Rabb?” “I don’t know how wrong. I could tell you in a million years. I didn’t know your friends, your formulas for life. But even you, I should have thought could have stood upright looking like some Cyrenian hysteria beside anybody. But you didn’t. You looked dowdy and odd and fancy your thinking you could carry your mangy wilted peonies along with you through the Louvre galleries and fancy you not having French enough to get the woman’s meaning—” “I knew her meaning. She only wanted a tip.” “Then fancy you Miss Suavity, not having savoir faire (I think you call it) enough to get out your pennies and having to be interpreted—” “I didn’t have to have it interpreted—” “Well, mama and I saw you at it and we thought it was a stranger—” “Well he is a stranger.” “You don’t talk to strangers—” “I mean I only heard him play a few times—” “Play? Play what? Ye gods I thought he was head floor walker in some smart shop.” “No. He’s I told you famous. He’s the famous Walter Dowel—” “The famous Walter Dowel.” “His grandfather invented the morse code. Telepathatic. I mean telegraphic or something. It’s taken Walter in music—” “Music? That’s what he does?” “Didn’t I tell you? I’ve been saying it all along. The famous Walter Dowel. Debussy’s favourite pupil.”

  O Walter, Walter how kind of you to have asked us here. Walter suavity, fragrance (can a man be fragrant?). O Walter you are like great dog-wood trees, men are trees sometimes. But what makes me so happy is that you don’t seem to care, don’t seem to mind our being hot and draggled and after all not asking any odd questions, not thinking anything odd, just greeting one as if it were at Mrs. de Raub’s without surprise, bursting into French (exquisite French) and then going on and on, talking as if time never existed and “would you like, Hermione, to hear some more music?” Asking her if she would like some more music, not making any intermediate enquiries for what was there else to ask? “Hermione do you think there is more of the sea in this—ruuuuuuuuuuu—or this uuuurrrr—” “How can I tell, Walter? I think the other one, no not that one, has more of the idea but you see I don’t know much about music.” “No. Sit still. don’t move. I can play things, make things come right when you are listening.” Walter. Walter. No intermediate jangling of looking as if her face needed washing not c
aring that her arms were full of dusty wilted peonies. “But what a lovely flat.” Everything Walter had must become by the magic of his having it, lovely. Small rooms, leading one into another, hardly anything in them, some trees outside the window. Seine. Clichy. “I live out here, rather in the country. Can’t stand too much noise.” “We loved the trip up in the little steam boat. It was so kind of you to ask us. It was so kind of you to ask us. Fayne likes coming.” “I like having them.” He liked them. Walter liked Clara and Fayne Rabb. Now in the light of Walter’s liking them, who (she asked in her arid little starved way) ever had? Walter liked them. Walter found them sympathe-tic. What did he do with the word? “You sound foreign sometimes. What is the foreign way you talk?” “I was put to school in Munich when I was three.” German. Was he German? Du bist die Run’, du bist der Friede. She must say it to get near to Walter. “My mother’s people, some of them, about a third came from south Germany.” German. The wind was making a noise and Fayne sat crouched against the further wall. There was something stronger than Fayne Rabb. Hermione had made her great discovery. It was Walter’s music.