Asphodel

by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)

  “Then Fayne, it’s merely a matter of finances?” “That chiefly. It always has been. We would go without anything to eat (properly) for two days and then grandame would descend on us with out of season hot-house grapes. That’s been our life.” “Well, I can see your point. But as far as Clara is concerned you’re making a mistake. You’re grown up. She is. She is petting you, keeping you back. She is arresting your development. You are a case particularly poignant, of arrested development.” “My dear Dryad (I believe that is what they call you) who’s been talking then?” “No one. No one in particular. It’s in the air. I know what I mean. I knew in Philadelphia. You expected me to stand up to Eugenia. I told you I had done it. You spoke patronizingly of Eugenia, patronized my effort as if it had been nothing. I tell you it broke my heart to break hers.” “Don’t talk that way. Your mother has your father. Your brother.” “That makes no difference. That made it worse in a way. I was the only girl.” “So am I. I am the only one at all, anyway.” “I know that and I wouldn’t go on this way, have gone on at all like this if you hadn’t started it. Don’t you remember that night in Paris—” “Nights in Paris. Nights o’ Paris. O Paris—” “Don’t be cynical, servant girlish. Paris is, has always been Paris. Athens rather. Paris brings one’s mind to a fine point of illumination, of discrimination. One can see and feel and act all at once in Paris. In Paris one is one whole being, mind, body and soul as the Greeks were. In Paris I saw clearly. So did you Fayne Rabb.” “I told you in Paris to harrow you, to whip you up to one of your divine frenzies that I hated Madre.” “You meant it, Fayne. You haven’t the courage to be straight. I hated Eugenia, loving her. But we can’t creep back into our mothers, be born again that way. We must be born again in another way. You must cut, as it were the cord—” “Umbilical cord to be exact.” “Yes, that simply. Here is your chance. You will never get another like it. I have kept, saved almost all they gave me. My father has been generous. There will be nothing wrong, nothing outré even in our staying on here—” “Madre has her school work. She has her job. If she misses the late autumn sailings, she’s done, dismissed, finished, over.” “That’s all right. You’re only making excuses. What anyway can you do? You only really drag her back. She’s not old. People like her. She can go on, work toward coming back here. Come back here in the summer.” “And you Beautiful? What of you Beautiful?” “I? I can’t think, see—anything except you, me and you in two or three little rooms. I see Delia Prescott and George and Walter even coming to tea with us in our little rooms. Perhaps little rooms in Chelsea. The boats, the river. Boats hooting up the river. Down the river. Sea-gulls. Do you remember our wild ecstasy when the sea-gulls wheeled and screamed about the Nereid? And it was land then, they said only a few hours off. Do you remember the very poignant calling, screaming (or is it whistling) of those sea-gulls? But you do Fay. You do remember Fayne Rabb. It was about those gulls that you wrote that poem. You wrote about them.” “I did, Beautiful. I know all that. I’d like to stay. You don’t know how hard it is for me not to.” “I do know.” “Come back with us Beautiful.” “How can I? What good would that do anybody? I’d only have to hurt Eugenia again. I’ve plunged in the dagger.”

  “I’ve broken her heart. She’s got other things, other people. She’s even altering, wants to cross next autumn if I stay on.” “Then how about me? There’d be no place for me. You have your friends.” “Not as I want. Not as I need them. I want a little flat in Chelsea. Delia would help me. Delia would be everything correct, convenable, comme il faut, you know all that—” “You’d use your—Delia as you call her for a screen?” “A screen? For what pray?” “For us.” “Us? We don’t need to be screened. What have we done or could we do to need any apology or explanation? I am burning away that’s all. The clear gem-like flame. I don’t want you to miss it. I’m going to write, work. You could. George took your poems to send to the Lyre, not mine.” “The Lyre (or is it the Lark?) is a rotten little decadent rag—” “No it isn’t. Delia says it isn’t. It’s quite representative and good and George has been offered some job on it. George Lowndes will have some job, help us.” “I don’t understand your wanting George—” “I don’t. I haven’t. But George says he’ll help us if we stay here.” “I thought George hated me.” “He does rather.” “Then why help—us?” “He says we’re like a vision of Theocritus—though he doesn’t approve.” “O Theocritus—”

  “I, Hermione, tell you I love you Fayne Rabb. Men and women will come and say I love you. I love you Hermione, you Fayne. Men will say I love you Hermione but will anyone ever say I love you Fayne as I say it? Men and women wander from caves into the light and in the caves little bare children tug at the teats of wolves. Romulus. Rome. I think never in the world will such children live, live again as live in my thoughts, my heart. I don’t want to be (as they say crudely) a boy. Nor do I want you to so be. I don’t feel a girl. What is all this trash of Sappho? None of that seems real, to (in any way) matter. I see you. I feel you. My pulse runs swiftly. My brain reaches some height of delirium. Do people say it’s indecent? Maybe it is. I can’t hear now, see any more, people. Some are kind, some aren’t. That’s all the division I can ever have between them . . . Hermione. My grandfather read Shakespeare—that’s why, Hermione. But that’s not me. That’s not me. They can laugh if they want cry if they want, become rhapsodic over Her Gart, Hermione Gart or Hermione. But I’m something different. It’s nothing to do with them. I’m something else. Different. You Fayne know that. Perhaps you are the first one at all to know it. I know that Shakespeare is real. I’d count myself a king of infinite space and that other thing—I can’t remember—things like sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes. Those things are real. The child in Trois Contes dancing in tight drawers for the head of John the Baptist is somehow real, even Aphrodite. Pierre Louÿs. People simper. But Pierre Louÿs (even) is real beside this thing. This thing that you allow to creep over you, to swamp you. This thing that is a convention manqué for you don’t really love your mother, not in that way. If you did you would pierce through the dark nun-veil of falsehood, this nun-veil of hypocrisy. Not that nuns are. But you are. You aren’t going to stay because you’re afraid simply. You urge me on to defy my mother, poor soft dear and sentimental Eugenia. Eugenia is as beautiful as Clara. Even more so. Soft and holding tight to her convention. But not rigid. Clara is rigid. But her love for you is incest. Mothers and daughters don’t sleep in the same bed. It’s horrible.”

  “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers—” “Yes, it appears so. But I’ll go on talking. We are legitimate children. We are children of the Rossettis, of Burne Jones, of Swinburne. We were in the thoughts of Wilde when he spoke late at night of carts rumbling past the window, fresh with farm produce on the way to Covent Garden. He was talking to a young man called Gilbert. They talked of Greeks and flowers. Do people talk that way? None I know. They are witty but always with decoration back of it. (Nor Delia.) London repudiated the rhododendron beauty of those people. Or outgrew it. There will be, I am sure, others. We belong here. Not in Paris. Here. Paris is the sharp sword of perfection. Paris knows her beauty. Paris is no slut, no prostitute. Not even demi-mondaine. People go there for those things and find them. That sort of people could find just as well what they go to Paris to find in New York, Little Rock or Minneapolis. Paris is something different. France is. You say France and something stirs in the air. Flakes and specks of electric power take form and are directed. Paris is back of thought directing it. Paris is, I tell you, Athens. Rome is London. New York is Alexandria. They, Rome, Athens, Alexandria are living in these cities. The saffron clothed Chrysis climbed the wharf at Alexandria. I don’t want to be that. Nor have you that. Is Plato the only one who understood this? O Christ also. Love is enfolding one, all of one. Light that shoots about ones brow like a saint’s halo. Sometimes I could catch you in a mood and freeze you and keep you safe forever. Other times you have destroyed, you are afraid. You are not whole. Not a perfect pers
on. Walter is. George understands things but he bickers. Trifles. But George is kind. I love George when he is kind but I would love him better if he loved you. Clara is stiff with some rigid family complex. Or is it that she really did run away and have you? Is your story right? Did she run away and are you some half-creature, really soulless, of the wood and river? Helen thy beauty is to me as those Nemean barks of yore. You are beautiful with that beauty. I have only seen another face worthy to call itself your sister. And I don’t want to look and look at that face. That face regards me from the bright polished door of the Prescotts’ while I wait that moment for the door to open. My own face is written on the door of my attainment. The door that leads outward for me holds my own face engraved as on a name plate. Hermione looks at me. There is a door leading nowhere. That is the trip to Liverpool, the boat to New York. There is a door of cowardice and unattainment and of nullity. That is, ‘yes Madre I am coming back with you and O Madre how happy we will be together.’ You are indecent and your mother is. It’s sheer incest.”

  “If Peter Piper picked the peck of pickled peppers then where is the peck of pickled peppers that Peter Piper picked?” “I don’t know Fayne Rabb but your silliness is unworthy of you. You are a Diadumenos, with a clown’s face. You are Hyacinth mired with horror. Hyacinth was a strong boy not a pimp. You make beauty a fool’s bladder. Bladder. Yes that thing like a balloon blown up for fools to play indecent jibes with. You are the youth of the god Hermes, but you have neither wand nor wings nor sandals. You are Hermes turning from the high ladder of Heaven solely to the underworld. Hermes led dead men across Styx. You are that river.”

  7

  “Almost thou persuadest me to be a heathen.” Who said that? Who was talking? Fayne had said something like that. It was Fayne who had first said it. Was it a joke she had picked up from George or was George saying something he had heard from Fay? “Almost thou persuadest me—” George was bending down between two incredibly tall candle sticks to turn a page. What page? All France is a book. Brrr sous la livre. A livre. A book. No it was a pound of plums in a paper bag and the bed bug (Fayne had said) climbed swifter than a horse. No, Fayne said the bed-bug walked swifter than a horse, “no, no more tea cakes, thank you,” and everywhere the bells were ringing, beating, ringing (“O no. Not yet. I hope to get to Italy later—”). Christ in Heaven, Christ in Heaven— “Almost thou persuadest me to be a—” George was saying it again. The candles sent up immaculate light toward a square ceiling whose corners were elegant Georgian circlets of fruit, beautiful like squares of Delia Robbia quince, orange and tufts of orange blossom. “Luca della Robbia.” Who was saying that? “Delia Robbia. The old fellow got the essence of the Renaissance in that thing. I myself prefer it to the hackneyed Leonardo and our eternal over-patterned Botticelli.” “O but I don’t agree with you, Sir Know-all.” “The acme of art is—” Going on and on and on and the music was coming now. Not Walter’s music. There was music and Walter’s music and this was not Walter’s. Something not to be listened to that differed from Walter’s music as the flat plaster fruits (for all their fitted-in elegance) in the lofty Georgian ceiling differed from the incarnate South, the tendrils of grape and the one tuft of blossom and the odd pine-cone. “Luca della Robbia—” It was going on. The voice that said, “Delia Robbia” was going on. One could listen to the voice. It was like these other odd voices, cultivated yet containing something else, something slightly different. The voice came from the end of the divan but Hermione, seated square before the fire on a low pouffe did not turn to face its suave producer. The voice made her think of real things suddenly though she had an odd un-nerving suspicion that it was not a real person who so spoke, “Delia Robbia and by God, the Baptistry—”

  Voices. Notes. The voices were stopping out of some sort of politeness for George had turned. The two candles flared in exact symmetry and George (as Hermione twisted on the pouffe to watch him) stood in amazing radiance like some pre quattro-cento saint before an altar. Or was it Signorelli? Taddeo Gaddi. George brought to mind these perfect compositions though he himself was rough a little, a little too rough, something powerful and strong in old George though people had a way of sniggering, “decadent.” What was decadent? Not George. Facing them with his head flung back, with his excellent throat emerging from his loose collar, George tossed back a petulant lock. Began: “Sith when I met thee in thy bark of painted sandal wood.” He went on for some time in that strain and as he reached the pause at the end of what appeared to be the fiftieth line (though in all conscience it must have been about the fifth) the other protagonist began deep harp-like notes, strumming on the piano deep well ordered, well ordained notes yet futile. The producer of the notes was no amateur nor was George yet the effect was amateurish. George had hair the colour of autumn grapes, red grapes in the sun. The lights across the petulant locks of George made a picture. It was too strong, too forthright to be Italian. Late perhaps. Venetian. Tall candles and a mop of fleece. Veronese. The notes began what was presumably a prelude to the next stanza. And George discontinued.

  “Odd fellow. Lowndes. Quaint fellow Lowndes.” The voice was slightly patronizing. “Always think of the first time I met him. It was at Prescott’s. They were handing around the fruit and old Hawky said ‘George, a pear or a peach’ and George said ‘neither thank you, nor a pomegranate’—” It was going on. Odd notes. The hands that swung back and forth, right and left were trained, actual musician hands. What was wrong with the whole thing? O but don’t criticize. Don’t think, Hermione. Let it go on, on, on. Voices like music. Music like voices. No art defined here, not stark outstanding terror of Beauty. Candles that make incomparable shadows not the dandelion puffs of Vérènes rooms on the Avenue de Clichy. The river. The Seine. The Thames. London. Going on and on and on. Other people drifting. Other people leaving. It was late, not late enough, too late. “Dryad.” “Yes—George?” “Dreaming, Dryad? Did you like the opus?” “Whose George?” “Mine, dearest Dryad. I thought myself quite fetching.” “Fetching yes. You seem to have fetched everybody.” “Why this petulance, Dryad?” “Jealous, I suppose.” “Why Dryad?” “I should like to be—somebody.” “What are you now Dryad?” But how tell him? What are you now Dryad? I am something like a magic lantern sheet and on it the most horrible of dreary pictures. There is a town called Liverpool and miles of black docks. Rain. And rain. And rain. That is Liverpool. Trains hoot and trains rumble and somebody says “miss hurry off here the first bell’s sounded.” Climb up and up and up long stairs, nice walls, I suppose but how horrible. This is not a boat. This is not a boat. This is to boats what other music is to Walter’s music. “Yes, Clara I think it so much more sensible to have come third on a huge boat than to risk the winter storms on one like we had. You are lucky.” Fling down your bundle of flowers, your little bundle so guarded and treasured all that disheartening journey from Victoria. Boat train. Yes boat train, not the continent. Liverpool, the Ouratania. Ouratania. Urania. Boat. Are you a boat? Hermione climbed up from the cellar of a huge white hotel that floated on the water. Below, far below a bundle of flowers spilled fragrance on the clean bunk. Sheets like cast iron but clean. Not like Rouen. Not like Havre. Clean already as if already the sterilized breath of the sterilized States had touched them. Flowers are spilling on the floor. “Don’t cry, Fayne Rabb. All the things I said to you were nothing, nothing. I never really meant them. I whipped myself up to one of my fits because you said you liked them. You’re right to stay with Clara.” “But you, darling?” “I told you long ago, I couldn’t go back. Not go back. I have to stay. I have to stay in England.”

  Boats hooting. The very gulls drab and with soot-coloured feathers. Buoys bobbing like dead men in the stagnant water. Rain dripping. It’s going thank God. Thank God. “Did you say something?” A voice she recognised, a voice she knew, had always somehow, somewhere known, a voice that seemed to mean nothing but that gave her the sense of things inexpressible behind it. “O nothing much. I was thinking of some�
��people.” “Friends, enemies, idiots, saints or devils?” “Some of those things. Most of those things. I don’t know. Yes, all of those things.” “At once or at different times and how often?” “O, at once and at different times and sometimes all together and I think always.” “Like when is a monkey a barber and how many times would a wood-chuck chuck?” “Something like that.” “Is there an answer then?” “I don’t think so.” “But there must be. Now think hard. Anyhow tea-cakes help the brain. More tea?” “I hadn’t wanted it.” “Hadn’t. We all felt that way. But after hearing dear old Lowndes and that fragrant cedar wood, we all (I speak for the committee) feel somewhat blind-O.” “Blind-O—what?” “Famished. Starved. Hungry. I myself eat nothing for ten days and then eat.” “Is the ten days up then?” “No. It begins to-morrow.” “Why do you eat and not eat?” “Family. I can’t stand too much of ‘em. If I don’t eat it annoys ’em.” “What a brilliant idea. And if they don’t?” “O, but they do.” “Do what?” “George.”