Asphodel

by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)

  It seemed so long ago. That they should still be holding on to life with such tenuous threads and Hermione pulled threads to get something of that pre-chasm into her speech and all the pre-chasm was as she recalled it, worse even than their own particular and unique Purgatory. Other things. Other people. Things that had existed in one dimension, that couldn’t any more so exist. You couldn’t any more move on a straight line, you advanced in a spiral and as you grew nearer to the higher things (nearer to the higher? What muddlings) you grew more vague, no, more distinct, but a distinctness in vagueness that was most tantalizing. Get across the chasm, for those things had existed. Get across the chasm for this thing that holds you in its arms is pre-chasm, a little heavier but kisses that she had lost, that had been blinded, blotted out in a dark cloud. Get across the chasm to the other side for there are dreams still the other side, ivory, bronze. Dreams dwell in ivory and bronze, the Narcissus of the Naples gallery. “Do you remember the blue-fire phosphorescence of the huge blue deep sea sort of jelly fish that so fascinated me in the aquarium?” “Aquarium?” “Naples. I seem to be in two sets of perceptions . . . blue green of phosphorescent fire and static bronzes. That Narcissus, you remember. Two sets of clearly defined perceptions. We’ll never any more be able to see anything straight on—clear—” “But we do, darling.” Almost thou persuadest me to be a heathen. She did see things straight for a little moment, but she knew it would soon slip from her. She couldn’t go on seeing things in different dimensions all the time, “steadily and” (was it?) “whole.”

  “Vérène’s I told you, mad. You don’t seem interested.” “I am. Only aren’t we, all? What’s odd, incongruous—” “O, I don’t mean like that—like we say it, she’s mad, you know. I mean insane, insane, locked up.” “Where—how—why—I don’t understand.” They were drawing things out of the depth, pre-chasm to observe them. Things she had for years forgotten now came back— “How did it happen?” “I don’t know. Delia told me and it seemed like the end of a story. A story I had read, put aside, forgotten and then years and years afterwards (five years?) found again, finished, done for. It made me feel something was finished—the old régime I suppose—all the old beautiful intensity, the France we loved—Vérène so smug. She’s not now. O poor little ignorant smug little tight closed, wide open French rose. So smug, so secure and always so sure that everything would come right once one was married—do you remember?” “It links on somehow to that queer girl—” “Shirley yes. Also pre-chasm—a clean bullet, finished.” “And the other queer creature?” His breath was on her face. His ebony stick had slid to the floor. “Be careful—I get—tired—” His breath was on her face and it appeared in one sudden moment of illumination that this was not right. Vérène went mad since she couldn’t (it was evident) march with events. Shirley shot herself since she couldn’t march forward. Wasn’t that it? The wave had lifted them to the crest. One must roll in, on with the tide, with the times, or be crushed under the wave, ground to death in the trough and the great drag back that would be the inevitable aftermath of the war and all it stood for. All those lovely years. Vérène, delicious Delia, all the funny people, someone with a monocle at Delia’s, someone saying someone was like Nero, some girl who spilled hair-pins, hydrangeas and the smoke blue of odd conservatory colours, George with his almost thou persuadest me to be a heathen and the upward drift of candles in Vérène’s elegant Clichy apartment. Walter and the great drone of the sea. But Walter was out of it, always above it, he hadn’t been caught, not actually, he was the inapproachable glacier and he would go on being that. But caught in the flow, Vérène without volition to sweep onward, caught and frozen (Hermione had always known it would come) by Walter’s distant, beautiful aloofness. Vérène and Shirley, victims—victims—wasn’t she the greater victim? She and Darrington? No, no, no, no, no. She felt sensing the wave push back of her that she would land, finally, safely, be thrown, advancing, going on, be thrown by the very impetus of the wave strength up, up on dry land, onto a new post-chasm world. Strike against the wave, the advance of the wave and you are doomed . . . Morganlefay.

  Kisses held Morgan le Fay and she was Circe, Calypso to those kisses. She hadn’t strength against them. She was smothered and kisses recalled her to worlds away, pre-chasm. Would she go on with Darrington? She felt the kisses and she felt herself numbed, pollen dusted over with the kisses. Kisses brought back people, pictures, a honey-coloured Correggio nymph, the wide wings of the marble Nike. Wings of marble, islands of yellow stone, amber lights against rocks where the sea weed caught sunlight in its translucent surface. Ivory of small winged Erotes. Some Dionysus with a head band. The Nereids— “Do you remember those violets that you used to get me?”

  He remembered the violets. He remembered everything. They remembered far and far back as if the years of terror (five was it?) never had been, had been some fulsome nightmare. Clear out of the years of terror the past rose, rose and cleft the years of terror like white lightning, a black storm cloud. The past, images of the past that had all the time been there, that had been buried under the stench of lava and molten metal, of guns and broken trenches, of earth mounds that were graves, the very substance of volcanic furious, the past, all the past had been there, all the time, white, in clear images, people, things, all the people, all the things and in some moment of rapport, holding her close, forgetting (both of them) all incidents of mere Louise, Merry or Cyril Vane, they conjured back the past, at one in a rapt intensity. The past rose and broke across the present, broke across the five years of dark disaster like some dancer that steps half-naked before a black drop-curtain. The past seemed safe and secure and the war was but a curtain that had fallen, “you will come, you will come back—Astraea?” He had conjured the past with a wave of his ebony stick, she had renewed the past with the white swansdown on her blue bed-jacket. Watchet blue, he called it. It was the colour of the blue eyes of Fayne Rabb.

  Almost as if her thoughts had been his thoughts, though she had never spoken of her and the days of odd upheaval stood between them and this was the first time that he had been allowed to come to see her since—almost as if her thought that had risen like the half-naked dancer, gracious, sinuous, before the black drop-curtain, almost as if his thoughts had been her thoughts and as if the past was a very visible embodied image, Jerrold Darrington said, “yes, Phoebe is a pretty name for it. But one’s name’s a little awkward sometimes.” Darrington was looking at the very beautiful small doll with black hair that lay asleep in a wide basket. He said, “why don’t you name its other name, Fayne Rabb?”

  14

  “I don’t understand.” Hermione was facing Darrington. The room in the little Soho hotel that he had asked her to, was narrow with the window (top floor) overlooking a narrow side-street, overlooking the narrow debouching door of the Temple Theatre opposite. The room had grown narrow, it appeared, while she regarded it for at first the room containing Darrington had contained Italy, the slopes of Monte Solaro, anemones blooming pre-war Easter red and the blood red of the foot steps of Adonis that had been the atrocious wooden image that they had carried to the songs of pre-Hellenic old volcanic southern gypsy chanting. Christ had died and Christ was to be born again. Red anemones had flowered against the dim shabby paper of the narrow room and red anemones had fallen beneath her feet and had burned the very soles of her feet as she had stepped tentatively out of her bed cold mornings, mist cold early spring mornings, mornings over Soho like a brides veil for she was that in her renewed love of Jerrold. The narrow room with the stained sulphur coloured paper had been wide tunnel toward enchantment. At the end of the now narrow room, like vision projected by an enchanter’s magic, there had been the white cone of Vesuvius, the shale that had been the other side of Vesuvius, the side that sloped toward Pompeii, that was shale and scattered vineyard when seen from Herculaneum. The room with its narrow sordid proportion and its one narrow meagrely curtained window looking over the Soho back street had been wide and marvellous
, a small concentrated space, like the tube of the Indian mystic, self-made from which, or at the end of which, he projects images of marvellous reality. The wall paper, Hermione now observed, was the mustiest of faded mustard yellow. The wall paper, Hermione saw it for the first time, was faded with a smudgy uneven spottiness that let show through the mustard like spots, the egg-stain like spots of singularly mal-formed tuberous yellow rose buds. The room became a room in Soho and the paper sordid as she saw it. The room shrank. “I don’t understand you at all. You go off on a vulgar escapade with Vane. You have this child—” “I thought we had talked all that out before. I thought it was arranged that it should—be—yours—” “How could it ever be mine? How could you ever be mine?” “Then why did you ask me to come back here? I might have—stayed—with—” She might have stayed with Vane. But she didn’t say it. She didn’t even think it really for she could never have stayed with Vane. The room shrank to its mean proportion. “What are we going to do anyway about it?”

  “I told you I had Beryl arrange for the baby at that officers’ wives’ farm home for a few weeks—” “A few weeks—there’s always afterwards.”

  Afterwards—afterwards— But why hadn’t he thought of that before? Was the strain too great—was Darrington some monster simply who was sent to persecute her? “I tell you I love Louise.” “Why didn’t you tell me that before I came back?” “I didn’t want to hurt you.” “Rot. You’d hurt me enough. You hurt me long ago. Why didn’t you say simply you were going to carry on with Louise—” Hermione heard the words, listened to herself speaking the words. “You go at once and register that child as Vane’s.”

  Register the child. She had not thought of registering the child. There had already been preliminary taken for granted registration of the child—Mrs. Jerrold Darrington—baby, female—Phoebe Fayne. There had already been that. Why begin again? Why begin again? What was Darrington after? What was it all about? “Why hadn’t you seen this before—made it clear sooner?” Her words like white lead came from her with the force of something beyond Hermione. Hermione, worn past endurance, found words that she had never dreamed she had the strength to utter, forming somewhere white bullets, white searing lead, in the inside of her now cold head, and white bullets, white searing lead, projected outwards, out and out and out into a void where Darrington was, where Jerrold was. Someone was standing before her, someone who had nothing to do with Jerrold, some odd, uncanny and evil metamorphosis, evil and evil and bloated and dull as that very Cretan Minotaur. Minotaur sent to destroy the Athenian youth, to destroy beauty, Minotaur of wickedness . . . Hermione no longer recognised this creature, herself one white frozen heat of flame repudiated some obscene creature who suggested obscene and evil things. “Register it? But that’s the merest legal formality. You said it was to be yours. I have your letters. You urged me on to have it. You let me go through with it though I was crippled with the last one and you let my friends (my bloated millionaire friends as you call them) see me through the added expense of the pneumonia and that dreadful set-back that meant that double nursing and impossible delicacies. You let me do that and you asked me, comfortably out of it, out of this world, to come back to Soho.”

  Trampled flowers smell sweet. But there is a murderous ox foot, a cloven devil foot. Was it the war simply, that walked forward that would crush with devil horns and great brute devil forehead the tenderest of growths—Phoebe. Phoebe. Don’t say her name out loud, Hermione. Keep Phoebe Fayne out of it. It was you who were wrong drifting into this, tired and having no proper place to go to and it was better (far better) for Phoebe to have that officers’ wives’ home (what a cheat) in the country to go to for a few months until you could arrange, Beryl arranging it, Lady de Rothfeldt so kindly arranging it, officer’s wife . . . pneumonia, very ill, husband only just returned but a cheat. A cheat. Husbands didn’t return like this with a bit of a uniform, his old tunic with a dash somewhere of a bit of ribbon as a smoking jacket. Jerrold was all in bits, trousers and jacket didn’t go together, Jerrold was all in bits. “I will look after you,” and “now register it as Vane’s,” didn’t go together. Jerrold was a Minotaur and there was only one thing now to do about it. Dodge him.

  “I’m just waiting. Was just waiting. They said I must be careful. I’m going out to-morrow. I have to go to Richmond. You have to register them in the district where they were born—Richmond.” “See that you do then. See that you do then. It’ll be evidence to divorce you . . .” Divorce? Was she hearing, seeing? She was mad simply. This word that they had none of them used (Vane had so suavely brushed it) was brought out in a fervour of brutality against her. “Divorce me?” “Of course. It’s the only way to do it. I as a returned officer can prove your infidelity—” “My infidelity?” “Well, Louise and I—that will be overlooked. You are, aren’t you, the offender?” “Offender?” “I mean—well you know what the law is in England? You can’t divorce me as you have been unfaithful—” “Unfaithful?” Words out of the Daily Mail meaning nothing. Where had he picked these words up? What did these words mean? Words out of the Daily Mail mean nothing. Unfaithful wife, returned officer husband, lover, baby . . . words out of the Daily Mail meaning nothing.

  “But what about you? What about—?” “O well—that—you can’t prove anything.” “Prove anything? But I have your letters. Details. Your writing me all the details . . .” “Look here, Astraea”—even now, even now, Astraea.

  Nothing in him that doth fade but doth suffer—but doth suffer—suffer—suffer—sea-change. You suffer toward sea-change but there was an end to legitimate suffering, this suffering of Hermione’s was illegitimate. You don’t take more than your share of suffering any more than you take more than your share of happiness—wheels within wheels—the labyrinth but Theseus (was it?) had the clue, walked straight on, straight on, labyrinth of London upon London and the war, black abysses of pockets of blackness into which you wander feeling the crash of a plane, sensing, feeling the blue body crumpled—an American fighting for France or the brave fawn-coloured young body ground—ground—don’t think. Labyrinth. How marvellous to be of it, in it, one of them, one of the Athenian youths and maidens sent—sent—Athenians. Hermione stared at the wall, waiting for an answer for the wall was mustard coloured and the map that she had pinned there now some days ago, a map fallen from one of the Weeklies now became something other, somewhere else, another pocket, another world. “That map’s rotten—cut up into Balkan states and all wrong.” Map pinned to the wall, sketched in map from London Weekly that she hadn’t thrown away, had pinned on the wall, map of the Balkans, difficulties, marked off in dark lines, cut into dark thick lines, political, meaning nothing, but a map from a modern weekly (last week’s?) and the problem of the Balkans and the map was nothing but it covered a space of the mustard paper and the map was a map of Greece, all distorted by political black lines and dotted lines, the sort of map, you remember we had with our weeklies in that odd spring, never to come again, mist like a bride’s veil over Soho, and she would talk of the map, thus dodging the Minotaur, thus dodging Darrington. She would pretend not to have heard Darrington, would go on talking as if the registering, deliberately of Phoebe as illegitimate was nothing, could be nothing, though she was Mrs. Jerrold Darrington and how difficult to explain, “you see I am married but this is someone else’s child.” But Darrington was mad. The whole thing was impossible, all the letters, he was mad, shell-shock, dissociation (she must make excuses for him) but it was wrong, Hermione knew it was wrong. Hermione had had her share of suffering and if she took more than her share of suffering the world would topple over for you can’t arrogate virtue to yourself, you can’t suffer more than Christ—and she had suffered. Dead, resurrected but she had come to the wrong place. She belonged in heaven after Phoebe—and she wasn’t in heaven. Heaven had been open to her and she had walked straight into Purgatory or Hell even, this hell of Darrington cowering over her, a little now cringing to her. This was worse than his bullyings. H
e was cringing to her. What had happened? What had Louise done? Drugs, sleep—evil—drinks—the wrong kind—abuses—turned his head—come back—he was so nice a week ago. It had all happened in a few days. Turned into a monster, a Minotaur when Hermione had thought he was one of the youths of Athens, he, as she, lost alike in a labyrinth, alike in the end to be saved, but he wasn’t to be saved—Astraea—how dared he call her that. He was mad obviously. Astraea was a name that went with al fresco suppers and the odd pear tree that had plumed itself so extravagantly like a white swan against the upflung hills of Ana-Capri. Astraea was shining over Amalfi and Astraea was the very heart of the orange flowers, golden with that tight whirl of still smooth petals, texture of the orange flowers so much more ivory smooth than any camellia even, even than the wax smooth and ivory stiff gardenia. Elegant. Things of the senses beyond the drift of people and the stuffiness of trains and the Italians with too many children—that remained apart and untouched (then) in grubby cheap little bed-rooms, in bed-rooms on the rue gauche that were youth—youth—simply.