by Bryher;
My father had work to do at one of the Ministries and had been allotted a small amount of petrol for that purpose. The rules were strict that nobody must accompany him. He had once been unable to take my mother on an urgent visit to the doctor, and I, myself, had not seen the inside of our car for two years. On Armistice Day, every regulation could be broken and as he had to deliver some official papers, he said that we might join him that afternoon. We got as far as the access to Trafalgar Square and there with great difficulty turned back. It was one of the most frightening spectacles that I have ever seen. Thousands of people in drab and worn-out clothes stamped, snarled and swayed in a single mass like some unholy beast, their arms locked round each other, ready to kill. Nobody would have had a chance of escape had they turned on him. A few were afraid and had probably been caught into the mass by accident but most of the faces were masks of rage. There is always violence in the air after a catastrophe and during the next forty-eight hours thousands fought, got drunk and yelled away some of their frustration and anger in what our rulers called a disgraceful manner. Yet through it, I believe, we remained a nation. In 1945 when I looked at the white-faced crowds being exhorted by the radio and officials to remain dignified and calm, I turned to a friend and said, “We have lost the peace.” It is possible to build after people have expressed a normal anger; it is much more dangerous if it bursts through later in some indirect way that nobody has foreseen.
My father tried to bring us back to the realities of the situation. “The man who holds a similar position to myself in Germany has just committed suicide,” he said later that day. “I want you always to remember, Miggy, the war has been a very close thing.” I could not listen to him at such a moment, the gate was opening, perhaps to my freedom. Doris and I hurried instead to Piccadilly. It was about four in the afternoon and perhaps fortunately for ourselves we were swept back into a side street at once by the surging crowds. Wounded soldiers in blue convalescent uniforms had clambered over some buses, otherwise all traffic had stopped. The pavements were empty away from the main roads but we could hear a low continuous roar, there was nothing joyful about it, coming from the masses in the park.
We went back somewhat chastened to an extremely quiet evening and a lecture from my father on the economic problems of the peace. “People have lost the habit of thrift, we cannot blame them, but it will be very difficult building up the reserves.” I was not a good listener that night, I simply felt bewildered and tired.
No peace is a return to pre-war conditions. It simply brings the full realization of all that has been destroyed. A copy is not the same as the original and it is an illusion to suppose that we can repeat the past. There was a general sense of disaster in 1919. The English casualties had been three times greater than they were in the second war and as people realized their losses, the influenza epidemic struck the world and gave numbers the death that they consciously or unconsciously desired.
In some ways it was an exciting winter for me. I had a friend at last who talked to me about poetry and did not laugh at my meager attempts at writing. (Not that I thought them meager at the time!) It was ray first real contact with an artist, and H. D. was the most beautiful figure that I have ever seen in my life, with a face that came directly from a Greek statue and, almost to the end, the body of an athlete. I remember that when she was seventy, the elevator boy in a big New York hotel whispered to me, “What a beautiful lady!”—and until her final illness, there was little change in her expression or the carriage of her head. She read poetry magnificently. She gave me books to read, laughed at my solemn pronouncements, taught me most of what I know about the Greeks. “I’m a Levantine water rat,” I used to tell her cheerfully, “hanging about the quaysides for the ships.” She would laugh at me again and shake her head: “Further East, a little Assyrian perhaps, always bringing me flowers”—because I had discovered that she liked anemones with their scarlet petals and black hearts.
We could not meet often. She had returned from Cornwall to Buckinghamshire because she was expecting a baby in the spring. I went there to see her a few times and waited for letters. At the beginning of March she moved to London to be near the nursing home where she had booked a room. I did not hear for some days and then she wrote asking me to come and see her, “I have been ill but it is just a cold.”
It was a long bus ride on a bitterly cold day through gray streets to Ealing, a part of London that I did not know. I found H. D. in bed and looking feverish, even to my inexperienced eyes. “Tell me about Greece,” she said, “it’s hard to speak with my cold.”
I was so alarmed by her appearance that I could only stumble through an itinerary of places. I have just found you, suppose I lose you, was the thought running through my head. What had green lizards and sunlight to do with this freezing room? “If I could walk to Delphi,” H. D. whispered with an intensity that I knew I was seeing for the first time, “I should be healed.”
“I will take you to Greece as soon as you are well.” I did not stop to think about the practical difficulties, the consent of my family, the lack of trains and steamers at that post-war moment; it was not even consolation, the words seemed to come from somewhere beyond my brain. Yet to the end of her life Hilda never forgot them. Then there was a knock at the door and she roused herself to say, “That is the doctor, would you mind waiting outside a few minutes?”
It seemed much longer and I cannot remember anything but a feeling of helplessness till I went back into the room. “What did he say?” I asked.
“It’s rather a nuisance. He says there is a patch of congestion over one lung. But don’t let’s talk about it. Have you been writing lately?”
In those days before modern antibiotics, pneumonia was the great killer. I heard a step on the stairs and with hardly an excuse I dashed outside and caught the doctor. “It’s the lung,” he said, “she ought to have a nurse.”
“Can you get her one?”
“With this epidemic?” He must have seen the consternation on my face because he added after a moment, “My other patient here is a little better, perhaps her nurse could help.” He turned wearily back to inquire.
Two old ladies emerged from the basement and looked at me. “The woman in the next room had pneumonia, that’s how she caught it.”
“No doubt.” Dr. Boyce had told me a lot about germs.
“It will be the end of her, poor thing, and expecting a baby too.”
“She looked so ill when she arrived.”
“She should have had a fire when the doctor ordered one.”
“Why didn’t she?” I asked suspiciously.
“The landlady has only got one maid.”
“And she’s afraid of infection. You know what they are like now. I carried a tray up to your friend myself.”
The landlady appeared at that moment. She looked at me with one of the most malevolent expressions that I have ever seen in my life and said, “Do you know the woman? She is going to die. Can you pay the funeral expenses?”
I was so terrified that I could not speak for a moment; then because the battle seemed lost, my inhibitions broke. I swung into action and treated the woman with arrogance, the only thing that she understood. I saw that the nurse could help until another one could be obtained, I telephoned to someone Hilda knew who promised to arrange for her to be transferred at once to the nursing home, and to send some proper food. I promised to return the next day.
I looked at my watch, I had been trained that I had always to be back by a certain time and it was getting late. The rule so dominated me that I caught the bus back home, it is an action of which I have been ashamed all my life.
Hilda was dangerously ill for several days. The doctor said that the baby could not be born alive but Perdita arrived on the last day of March with the
daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty
just in time to earn her Shakespearean name.
Educational reform was the topic of the moment, Development started a controversy in the Daily Mail, no other book of mine has been as successful and a second printing was needed within a few weeks. “Old girls” from Queenwood protested bitterly, Miss Chudleigh was furious, Shorter stood by me. My parents were shocked and upset. “How could you write such a dreadful book?” they asked.
“I am sorry if it worries you but it was my duty to protest.”
“But you cannot go against everyone else.”
“Why not?”
“Because it will set you apart from others to lead a lonely existence.”
“It is better to be lonely than to have a stock-size mind.”
“We thought if you went to Queenwood you would make friends with girls of your own age.”
“I wanted to go to an art school.”
“You were so young.”
My instinct about writing had been correct. I knew that Development was not a book of which Mallarmé would have approved but I really objected to the human wastage of school. My family bowed to the inevitable. I had committed the unpardonable Victorian sin and made myself “conspicuous.” (I enjoyed this very much.) I was allowed to join H. D. in a small apartment that she had rented in Kensington, not far from where the Pounds and Mrs. Shakespeare were living and where I tried, without success, to write my second book.
Hilda was extremely patient with me. Once I interrupted her work and she tore up the page that she had just begun. I collected the fragments humbly, pasted them together and never intruded again. When she was not writing, however, she talked to me about the two forms of art: “the wild, Dionysiac, it might be called, and the cold, stately Helios meters.”
“I want to be as wild as possible. Not Athenian. I should never have had the citizenship anyhow. I belong to the islands and the East.”
“Why be so serious about it?” I learned as much from Hilda’s laughter as from anything else.
“Athens is so cold and balanced.”
“And you want Scilly and your puffins. Get on with your work.”
“That wretched book. I thought you would hate the stuff.”
“I admit when I asked you to let me read it, I dreaded the afternoon. It is incomplete, whole pages need to be cut out or changed, but there is a certain sincerity, you love beauty. Remember the mind of an artist ought to be a vase holding epic thoughts.”
I knew that Development was bad but I seemed unable at that moment to write anything that was better.
“The essential,” H. D. continued, “is to know what you want.”
“I am interested in educational reform and sometimes I think that I would like to be a book myself so that I am not always punished for having a brain.”
“Little frozen being.”
“People do not mind if you read but they hate you if you think.”
“I shall try to teach you all I know.”
Teach, yes, Hilda was as great a teacher as she was a poet. So many letters reached me after she died both from friends and strangers whom she had met perhaps once, all saying “She showed me my way in life.” She was an Athenian of the great period, seeing a problem with complete clarity, giving an answer that we might understand only a score of years afterwards and always stressing “You must love. A person, an island, an idea, but it must be completely and with utter dedication.”
Hilda’s circle did not like me at all. They said that I was an unmannerly cub who stared and never spoke and they advised her to get rid of me as soon as possible. Ezra Pound boasted, however, that if he could see me alone, he could manage me with ease.
I knew nothing about this conversation but one day when H. D. was out, the bell rang and I found him at the door. He strolled in, his velvet jacket a shade darker than his beard, and sat down on the couch. I had already privately christened him the Leopard and did not share the circle’s enthusiasm for his poetry. It seemed to me then as it does today to lack originality and to consist rather of often-superb translations. In those London days he reminded me of a jester, strolling round a Crusaders’ camp with an old song and the newest gossip on his lips.
Ezra settled himself comfortably against the cushions and remarked, as if he had been a lecturer, “I have just been reading an account, written in the eleventh century, about a fight between Harald the Saxon and a Danish chief on the east coast of England. I cannot trace the exact spot but the place is immaterial.”
“Yes,” I agreed politely. I needed no instruction from him, however, if he were speaking about King Harald.
“The interest of the story lies in the fact that the Danish chief, whose name I forget, seduced and raped Harald’s wife. He carried her off to a log hut in the Lincoln marshes and while they were having intercourse together, Harald and his bowmen began shooting arrows through the door.”
“It was the custom of the time.”
“Yes. They fought until all the Danes and most of the Saxons were killed, then they set fire to the hut. The only survivor on the Danish side was a boy, half Saxon and half Dane.”
“You seem to be interested in early history.”
“I had the Middle Ages badly at seventeen and I may say that I was steeped in them for the next ten years. I do not regret this. Modern European thought is not directly founded upon classicism but upon the Middle Ages and the classical Renaissance.”
There was a long pause. I wondered if I were being impressed enough but I could not think of anything to say.
“And what can I do to help you?” Ezra finally inquired.
“I want to go to America.”
“America! Why America? Why not Arles?”
“Because America is the hope of the world.”
“But the women’s clubs!”
“Need I come in contact with them?”
“I fear, being European, you do not know the institution. Once a week, the ladies of America meet to obtain culture and discuss their neighbors and their children. They have lectures on eugenics, on Racine and what to do if bitten by a dog presumed insane.”
“Should I have to meet them?”
“Why go to America otherwise?”
“Because the poets I admire are American, H. D., Marianne Moore,” and remembering hastily to be polite, “yourself.”
“Say rather that we are refugees from the West.” He got up swiftly and put his arm round my shoulders. It was a most uncomfortable position, an Elizabethan would have screamed or snatched up a dagger but I decided to be wary and calm.
“Nice hair...nice hair...” he pecked chastely at a cheek. I wondered what in the world I was supposed to do and decided to gaze at him abstractedly and in silence.
We stared at each other for what seemed a very long time. Then he asked, I felt with some solemnity, “Have you no chocolates?”
“I don’t think so,” I said but it gave me an excuse to break away and look in various cupboards.
“What a child you are,” the Leopard remarked, putting on his over-coat. “When the awakening comes you will have a different tale to tell me.”
There was another awkward pause. Then he patted my head and walked down the steps with his stick over his shoulder like a sword. I thought “How very odd” and I heard afterwards that his verdict on me was, “Bryher is impossible.”
I did make friends. I met
Havelock Ellis and nobody could have been kinder to me. He broke the ice the first time that I saw him in his little apartment at Brixton by telling me that he was a sea captain’s son who had made two voyages in a sailing ship round the world. I cannot think now why I did not ask him about his experiences in more detail. I suppose that I was jealous of them.
We shared two interests in common, Elizabethan poetry and modern French literature. I still read his book, From Rousseau to Proust, with pleasure. I also read his Studies in the Psychology of Sex but with one exception we never discussed it. I talked endlessly instead about women’s rights. I do not know if it was due to my Eastern experiences or because I had been spared any furtive allusions in childhood but sex to me then was entirely a matter for science and I grasped immediately that birth control was far more important to women than votes. Nobody had the right to force a woman to have a child, I argued, it must be her choice as a matter of moral principle. “You are trying to crowd into a few years what will have to take generations,” Ellis scolded gently, a smile on his sun-tanned face. I was furious with him; reform, I said, had to be accomplished at once.
I was completely a child of my age. I was one of the first people to be inoculated against influenza and I argued that if we could find some substance to prevent anxiety, we could really do something about changing the globe.
“But fear perhaps is one of the great motive forces of the world,” he chided gently, trying to make me see that life was a balance of composite forces, I never agreed, I am amused to think that in 1920 some vague notion of tranquillizers was already turning round in my brain. Now that I am old, it appears to me more and more that we cannot escape the trends of our particular generation, and the twenties, I believe, was an era of discovery.
It was a difficult time for me because I did not want to hurt my parents, I had always loved them, but I knew that I could not remain at home and live. Ellis always tried to help me to keep a balance, to visit them without saying things that would shock them and yet to keep a hardly won independence. H. D. had nicknamed him Chiron after the instructor of Achilles and we ranged in talk over all the subjects of the day. It was a moment when race memory was being much discussed and books on anthropology were popular. “It is possible that some experiences are common to the race,” he said one day, “and that the more sensitive inherit a knowledge of emotional states that they have not felt themselves.”