4
“You’re exaltée. You saw him alone.” “O, no, no, no, no, no. How could I see him alone?” “What’s easier? You tell us he asked you to meet friends of his. You don’t ask us to come along. You disappear at three, saying the friends asked you to early tea and hear music. You come home at—heaven knows what hour—and in Paris. Alone.” “I wasn’t alone.” “Well there you are. I suppose in all decency he would have to see you back at two in the morning.” “It wasn’t two in the morning.” “Wasn’t it?” “Was it?” “Well, you ought to know.”
Was it two in the morning? Odd white mist rising from a silver river, far and far and rather cold stars. Stars in France are oddly rather cold, taking on a sort of artificial glamour like diamond stars on kings’ breasts. “Isn’t it odd even the stars looking different?” “Stars?” “I mean over the river.” “So you stood and star-gazed on the Seine.” “Ever so long. He started telling me about Debussy. It was so odd. The gold fish, you know that thing he plays us and the castle under the sea, he knows all about them. Debussy says Walter is the only person who can play his music.” “So you talked of Debussy. And what else?” “I don’t know. Walter is making drawings, so exquisite of harps and things—” “Harps and things?” “O. I don’t understand. He thought I might. He said he thought I might.” “Understand what (at two in the morning) hanging like any street walker over the Seine parapet?” “Street walker? We did walk rather. He was making drawings of Egyptian harps and things, things like that in the Louvre. He believes he can hear things. Doesn’t really care about Debussy. He thinks it’s all written if one could only get it. He thought I might be able to get it.” “Get what? Cold in your head, I should imagine.” “Get—something—somewhere.” “This is interesting. So instructive, strangely illuminating.” “That is why he was at the Louvre the other morning. He loves Egypt.” “Egypt? The last thing—” “I thought so too. But do we understand? Egypt. He means the music. The harps. Odd pipes. He says voices too. He wants to hear the voices. He cares more about that than his music.”
But I care more about Greek than Egypt. Walter says it’s all wrong but that I personally am all right, limited—and don’t understand—couldn’t be expected to understand—the real things. Real? What is real? Candles reflected in a mirror and our clock doesn’t go here either. Clocks that go and clocks that don’t go. Most of them don’t. This one is like the one in the first room in Rouen before we left. Havre. Rouen. Did they really happen? “O you came to Havre. How funny of you.” Rouen. They didn’t ever seem to have heard of Rouen. “But we must go to Chartres.” Must they go to Chartres? “But were here now in Paris. How can we go to Chartres?” “Well, it was you yourself who suggested it in Rouen.” “That was before we came to Paris.” “Does that make any difference?” “Yes. No. Yes. I don’t know what I mean.” “I should think you didn’t.” “I mean how can anything one has suggested in Havre or Rouen, have anything to do with anything else of moment in Paris?” “Quite a speech for you. If Peter Piper ate the peck of pickled peppers then where is the peck and so on. Say it quickly, it will improve your manners.” “My manners are all right, Josepha. It’s your morals.” “Morals? I thought you thought yourself a nereid, a nymph, a cold and icy star and all shine and luminous quality that nothing could mar or befoul.” “Befoul? What an odd word, Fay.” “Yes. Isn’t it? Not the sort of word you get standing on the bridge at two in the morning asking the price of diamonds.” “Diamonds?” “Stars, was it? Well, stars. Diamonds. Both decorated.” “Who both? Walter and Vérenè?” “Walter and who—is that her name?” “I told you her name long ago. Vérenè Raigneau.”
Vérenè. Vérenè. Vérenè. Was it a name. Was it a person. O, yes it was a person. It was herself and Fayne and Walter who were somehow out of it, out of the picture, out of drawing. Drawing. How odd that he should draw so beautifully. “Look, Fayne. He gave me this.” Fayne took the bit of paper, held it to the light. “I think he must have traced it from a book.” “No. Look, Fay. It’s one of the things in the big case in the Egyptian room we were looking at the other day. A sort of harp arrangement; don’t you remember. They had it propped up against a lovely chair that looked quite new, quite a comfortable new chair with no back and odd arms and the seat sagging just as if it had been sat in.” “Yes, I remember the chair.” “Well, Walter drew the chair and the harp and put the person there in the chair to play the harp.” “But he copied it, I tell you out of a book.” “No. No, he didn’t. You can see it’s the same chair and the person playing the harp—” “It’s you, I suppose.” “He didn’t say so . . . saying I’m too Greek and that he doesn’t care for Greek things and that I don’t understand. I think it’s someone else or no one at all.” “O, it’s you all right.” “But he keeps telling me I’m too Greek—not understanding—” “Does he say you don’t understand?” “Yes. All the time.” “What do you talk about then?” “I don’t know . . . nothing in particular. He’s quite common sometimes. He asked me if we went like all other American tourists to the top of the Eiffel Tower for the express purpose of seeing how far we could spit.”
Let’s destroy things. Build them up and destroy them. Wasn’t that their attitude? Walter had reached perfection of a technical order. Therefore he must reach beyond it, destroy in a gesture his exquisite technique, his music flowing like water, a technique that Debussy said he himself couldn’t cope with. Walter must play his music, play it the first time to let him (Debussy) see how it went. Walter playing to her, “but I want to know what you think. Debussy doesn’t like the allegro so much either.” Had she agreed (knowing nothing about music) then with Debussy? What was it all about? Why? Something in the air. Paris. Something there are no words for. Walter was right with his harps and his absolute conviction that there were things, notes, voices in the air about them. X rays, Morse code. Telegraphs and so on. We are only just beginning. People will think us of the year 1912 circa (was it?) somehow crude and old fashioned even doubting, thinking, thinking such things odd. But we didn’t. Not us. Not Walter, Hermione and Josepha.
Are we ahead then of people? O this is horrible. What will people think 1922 or 1932 some great age like that, ten, twenty, thirty years from this year? They will catch us when they know that we are ahead of them. Bash out our brains. Stench of flesh roasting, roasting fumes rising above Rouen. Lilies and the Magdalene looking for the Lover. My Lord, my Lover. How odd. My Lover. You would love us all alike, making no difference, reaching us telepathically, men and women alike, both the same, simply a matter of telepathic rays or X rays or something. Christ seeing colours. Walter would be white, trimmed with blue, a terrible blue. Heat when it gets too hot becomes white, then violet. See Chemistry for Beginners. Does cold, then by the same scientific logic become something other, blue, when it becomes too cold? The cold of Walter that commences by being just cold, the soft cold of snow, soft and of the quality of a moths breast, becomes toward the edges more cold. A cold, people can’t bear. Walter knows people can’t bear him that’s why he hates them, hates them, apologetically closing the window. “We sometimes collect a crowd here and the gendarme doesn’t like it.” Shutting the window not so much against them as against himself. Byronic smile. Collar loosened. Walter shutting the window. “Now what would you like me to play you?” Asking them, waiting actually for an answer. Chopin. Chopin, the de Musset of music. Playing them Chopin.
Swans, a clear surface green lake. Nothing in the lake, no horror, no little mermaid crying for a human lover. Give me your voice and I will give you feet. The old witch under the sea asked the little Mermaid for her voice and in return she would have feet and then she could walk the earth as others and find her human lover. But we don’t fortunately want human lovers. Does Walter really want Vérenè? He thinks he does. It keeps him from rising up, up toward the surface of the sea. It keeps him down, down among the rose coloured bushes to love Vérenè. He is kept down by this love for he would go mad (and he knows it) if he rose to the surface of his consciousness, r
eally heard the voices he is so bent on hearing. Music. Was Vérenè’s cello really music? Not in that sense, not in their sense. It was music of another order. Not of the Morse code Gart formula order. Not of the order of the music of the spheres and Plato actually getting the thing down, making the exact statement, the formula, giving them numbers and figures and design for the thing they knew already. Plato gave them a design. Clear thinking makes a pattern as regular and symmetrical as a plotted engineer’s plan or marine architect’s constructed boat prow. Thinking makes lines in the air. Plato’s formula.
It appears that there is a world within a world. We all live in some world (or several) but Christ lived in all. This is odd. Going on and on and on. The world of bed-bugs, of the stench of the stagnant water in the tooth-brush tumbler where she had stuffed the already half-wilted stems of the odd orange striped lilies she had some days ago bargained for in the Quai aux Fleurs. Throw the water away. Fresh water. Rinse out the tooth brush cup and find something else. But what else is there? The tea pot they had bought for their own teas at home, no not the pot, we’ll need it. Bother. Orange striped small lilies in a tooth brush tumbler. That’s our life here. But I don’t care. I love it. I love the sordid touch with Clara and Fayne Rabb. It gives character, poignancy and point to all this. And we live on nothing. I will have all that extra money and when they write me to come back, I shall just stay on. Of course, I know I can’t go back. I’d rather be a girl in a shop, rather scrub out hospital wards than go back. O, no, no, no, no. Du bist die Run’, du bist der Friede. O God why didn’t they really let me sing or something and that old Madame Terrone at Mrs. Merrick’s said she would take me for nothing. Funny old thing with huge chest and odd yellow teeth and a huge démodé pompadour and a voice that made you crouch low in your chair and pray to be dead. She sang the Erlkönig and I knew I would go mad for hers wasn’t an opera voice, everybody said so, but people begged her, prayed and implored but she wouldn’t take their daughters. “You have a quality in your voice. I would make you a good singer but only of chamber music, you understand. I will take you for nothing. Who are you?” “My—father—is a—a—professor of—of theorems and things. I don’t think I care for . . . music.”
5
“I can never make out whether Walter’s a second rate Olympian or a first rate demi-god.” “No George.” “I can never make out whether his music has got him or he has got his music.” “Yes, George.” “And on the other hand, I can never see whether that little black beetle of a woman has entangled him or whether he really wants to marry her.” “Marry her, George?” “Yes. What do you think Dryad.”
“I don’t know what I think George. It seemed a matter of—of—” “Why don’t you ever achieve your utterances. You are an oracle manqué.” “Perhaps George, the—the—worshipper—I mean—” “Well, what do you mean? You seem, if I as your nearest male relative may say so, somewhat gauche, your clothes don’t look right. You seem somehow more provincial than ever.” “Provincial?” “Provincial. Or perhaps you prefer Surbiton.” Hermione was beginning to wish she had not after all seen George Lowndes, answered his peremptory summons. “Meet me at the Cottage Tea Rooms at the corner of Piccadilly Circus, upstairs, at half past three so we can get a table.” She had found the post card (forwarded from Paris to their London address and the day scratched in on the other side where George had fenced off a little space in pencil, “Friday. If I don’t hear, will look.”). There wasn’t time to say no. Why shouldn’t she see George?
“But I thought you were engaged to him” stormed Fayne Rabb “and then I thought you broke it off.” “I was engaged to him.” “Well, you don’t after you are engaged to people and then break it off, see them again, do you Madre? What would her mother think?” This was the first time in some weeks that Fayne Rabb had mentioned (ever so distantly) Eugenia. Clara as her way was, went on sewing. Leaves from Bloomsbury sycamores drifted down making a premature autumn. “Madre. Tell her.” “I don’t know. Yes. No. Have you any, Hermione, by any chance sort of tan coloured sewing thread (they call it sewing cotton). This brown doesn’t look right. Yes. No. I mean, what were we saying?” “You heard what we were saying, Madre. Don’t you think it would be the height of foolishness of Hermione to see George Lowndes here away from home, in London where conventions are so strict, where everything is different?” “Yes. No. I mean you say you broke off the engagement, didn’t you?” “Well yes. I broke it off or rather he did.” “He did?” “Well you see there’d been a row but I’ve told you all about that. And I was ill but you know I never like—to—talk about—it—” “Well, why should you see him?” “I don’t know . . . after I was well again . . . after Fayne came back again, he wrote.” “He would do . . . after everything was over.” “He was in Spain then, lying in the sun. He sent me yellow jasmine.” “Jasmine? Pretty mangy jasmine, I should imagine.” “It wasn’t somehow. Something (it was dry but full of colour in the envelope) happened to it.” “Like Saint Elizabeth and the roses—” “Yes. Something. It smelt of—of—” “Of what? Stutter. Stammer. Can’t you ever achieve your meaning?” “That’s like George. Sometimes, Fayne, you are just like George. That’s how George used to go on at me.” “Well, anyhow, should she, Madre?”
Should she. Shouldn’t she. One I love, two I love. “Clara, I have found the very exact shade you’re looking for.” “Hermione, I wish Paulet would be as interested in her things as you are. All so neat.” “No. It was mama—Eugenia who prepared my little work bag. Things I’d never think of. My mother you know. I call her Eugenia except when I’m at home. She’s mama at home.” “Why, pray, Eugenia?” “It’s her name. My grandfather had a sort of adoration for the empress—” “Empress?” “Eugénie.”
Should she. Shouldn’t she. Leaves prematurely drifting down from tall peeling sycamores. Strange scent of sun-burnt sycamores (that was a rare hot early autumn) and the odd curious cut-off feeling like being in a birds cage, high up above the old square with the corner going on and the other corner going on. The corners seemed to be separated, odd square boat hulks stranded there, all so quiet, rumble in the distance, rumble, rumble, the eternal rumble of London. Cut apart in their little back-water. Bloomsbury.
“Well but if you have broken it finally—off—” “Well. I mean, we did. I mean he did. Then he came back and we got engaged again.” “Well that alters everything.” “I mean we got engaged then we—I mean he—no it was I this time—I mean I broke—it—off—I mean it was broken off—” “Well are or are you not engaged to George Lowndes?” But how answer that thing? “I don’t know, Josepha. I had better ask him.”
“We’re not engaged, George?” “Gawd forbid.” “I thought you felt that way about it George. Mrs. Merrick and Stephen Merrick sent their love. He expects to be back in Rome in a year or so and wants to see you. Do you like Rome? Or have you ever been there? Everything’s so odd, exciting. I don’t know where I have been. I don’t know where I haven’t. Those pictures in the Louvre transported one and I felt the same way about the Nike. The winged Victory. I told the Rabbs I didn’t. I don’t mean that. What do I mean? I mean seeing the Elgin marbles this morning gave me the same feeling and I didn’t know, don’t know whether I’m in Rome or Paris. I mean the Louvre and the British Museum hold one together, keep one from going to bits. For one is all in bits. I even like awful things, awful (I believe they are awful) like Delacroix and the Lancrets. I saw Napoleon’s snuff box and the Corots. There was a little bad picture of a ship in a storm, simply awful but like one in our attic like Eugenia did once . . . but you never liked Eugenia’s funny pictures. I—love—Europe.”
“Its so quaint, she loves London.” “Yes, isn’t it odd—she loves London.” “This is Miss Gart—they call her Her short for Hermione—she loves London.” “O I am—so—glad. Why do you love London?” “O let me really tell you Bertie, that Miss Her Gart loves London. Such a quaint person—” “Yes, I love London.”
“This is Miss—O did you know what h
er name is?—but you love London—” O Walter.
Coming across the room, bowing to someone. Someone different, out of something that never was that never could be. It was too bad about Walter, acted as if he were, as if he were something like the first aeroplane ever invented or a dug-up Dinosaur. All hushing down, fluttering down, sinking down into arm-chairs pushed aside and jumbled in little knots, islands of arm-chairs. Walter comes across the room, people fall, all turned toward him, sun-flowers to the sun. Sunflowers to the sun, whispering, whispering “Dowel you know. Only Delia in all London can procure him.” Procure? How did Delia procure Walter? And where was Delia? Hermione had been jostled through crowds of people and hadn’t got near Delia. Delia standing somewhere, somewhere far away, crowds and she was always interrupted, George at her elbow, “no you come here Dryad, here’s another prize specimen.” George produced prize specimens. They cropped up on the stairs, upstairs and when she got upstairs to find Delia George pronounced that Delia had gone downstairs and “you needn’t worry about your book of etiquette, dear Dryad. Don’t be so provincial.” Was it provincial to find Delia, Lillian Merrick’s sister Delia, all mixed up, one with another, the Merricks, school at Rome, people in the legations, poets. Everything at Delia’s was like that. “Where is Delia?” It was George who had told her how to say it. “Don’t be so provincial Dryad. Don’t let me hear you saying Lady Prescott that way again. It’s back-stairs. Everybody calls her Delia.”
Where then was Delia? Delia had invited her. She had had lunch alone with Delia. Delia had said she would be bored with the crush but Walter had asked her to be sure to come. Walter had asked her to come so that he could hate them all in peace and yet play nicely. There was Walter. But she must first find Delia. What an odd Walter, like some one in an elegant Pinero revival, coming forward, one hadn’t even imagined Walter (even) could be so elegant. “Huh,” from George. “Old Forgeron is in fine professional form.” Forgeron came forward, bowing a little. Who was he bowing to, eyes so colourless, amber and flecked grey amber. Walter’s eyes were a brook’s eyes, not a deep wood brook but one that has escaped from a glacier. Warmth came and went in Walter’s eyes, warmth not his own, one felt, but the warmth that came to a glacial stream that runs over clear amber. Walter.
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