Hermione

by Hilda Doolittle

  Yet coming through the moment there were memories, red hyacinths in snow, red cyclamen seen through avid blighting lava. On the slopes of Vesuvius such memories burn, are cyclamen, are hyacinths. “Hermione is a gull name . . . you read beautifully” cut up and across the heavy thing that she now saw was destined to entrap Her.

  I will be caught finally, I will be broken. Not broken, walled in, incarcerated. Her will be incarcerated in Her. One morning I will wake, perhaps tomorrow . . . in my waking I will say this was a dream, and the hot early-morning fumes of amber tea will envelope me, will blot across the surface of my frozen features and make a cloud, amber and soft fumes of early-morning tea will cloud out all this . . . and I will say waking (perhaps tomorrow) the whole thing was some odd dream.

  I will say, going back and back, remembering with the surface, the lava Her-surface that is sure to get me, I will say with the incarcerating part of Her Gart, all that was vague, we only imagine such things. Fayne Rabb will become part of yesterday. I hold Fayne now for one last moment . . . I will say wakening, perhaps tomorrow, where is Eugenia? I have been delirious. I will take Eugenia’s hand, forget, remembering . . . I will recall exact, and specific instance, say “Mama, I was worried really but George has left now. No . . . not any more George . . . but others. I will make new friends.” Exactly and precisely I will drag Her across Her like the eyelids of some saurian. Out of the distance there will be no more faces . . . things creeping to say lava can’t keep down . . . anemones.

  For the moment holding to the moment, I know this. I was a wire, connecting me with such things in my incandescence . . . wire flared out. Hermione will say all that was some dream.

  I want to take up nursing. All the days will go on like all the days going on. Time will cut furrows, here there, people will die sometimes. Valiantly I will keep Her under. I will incarcerate Her. Her won’t anymore be. A white butterfly that hesitates a moment finds frost to break the wavering tenuous antennae. I put, so to speak, antennae out too early. I felt letting Her so delicately protrude prenatal antennae from the husk of the thing called Her, frost nip the delicate fibre of the starfish edges of the thing I clung to. I, Her clung to the most tenuous of antennae. Mama, Eugenia that is, Carl Gart and Lillian were so many leaves wrapped around the unborn butterfly. Outside a force wakened, drew Her out of Her. Call the thing Fayne Rabb. I clung to some sort of branch that wavered in the wind, something between Lillian and Eugenia, a sort of precise character, George Lowndes. Wavering by instinct toward George I found George Lowndes inadequate. He would have pulled back quivering antennae.

  Tomorrow Amy Dennon will bring me invalid-weak tea. She will say “You look much better.” I will look at the tea fumes, sniff that acrid tonic tea scent, sniff that acrid tonic warmth and draw a woollen bedjacket across somewhat thinning collar bones.

  Then in a moment, in an infinitesimal second, the moment that divides day from dawn, that other moment that divides dawn from morning, perhaps that moment that divides early morning from exact morning, will intercede. A moment will stand in a starched apron and the moment will save Her’s being. I will draw back tenuous antennae of delirium . . . Her will be quite sane. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps on its petty pace from day to day and all our yesterdays and all our yesterdays . . .

  “Your eyes are the eyes that made Poppaea furious.” “What do you know then Fayne?” “I know nothing, knowing everything. In your hands I am limpid, modest. In the hands of the universe I am a force not to be gainsaid, not to be struggled with. Mama and I are poor. Sometimes mama and I are hungry. Do you know why I was late Her Gart? I had to do the washing.”

  “But that, dear little Fayne, is needless. Waste. Why can’t your mother.” “Why can’t mama get a cook in? Why can’t mama keep a cook, a laundress, a housemaid? Oh my darling, your ideas are so autocratic.” “I don’t mean twenty butlers.” “Little little little littlest Miss Gart. You are so superhuman. Then sliding from the overlayer, that Überwelt dear Uncle Mark’s books show us, you are you, extraordinary and so common.” “Common?” “Well there is somewhere, something common in you. This way you have of talking about dances.” “I didn’t. It was only because you unearthed that bundle of old dance cards.” “Wasn’t it a little—common so to keep them?” “I suppose so. I don’t know. George taught me to see Whistler’s jokes were funny, I don’t know. I don’t think George did.” “Did, Miss Her Gart?” “Know. He talked blatantly. Knew nothing. Said that Chelsea bridge with mist was a sort of drug, a dope, an anodine. Said that London was soporific and so restful.” “And you?” “Would rather stay on here with you, Fayne Rabb.”

  “Then you didn’t know that Polish uncle that you bragged of?” “Not Polish. Lithuanian or Bavarian, one of those people.” “You can’t be Lithuanian or Bavarian. There is a world of difference.” “We are, aren’t we?” “Lithuanian?” “I mean Russian. We aren’t are we European? I mean we aren’t, we Uncle Sam forest primeval people, European? We think more like Russians. We are nearer Russia. What Russia is to Europe on one side, we are on the other.” “Dostoevski?” “No. I don’t mean that. I mean our genius has claustrophobia, then has agoraphobia. We flee the waste on one side. The Middle West is our Siberia.” “Witty?” “Not meaning to be. We are held here to the thin slope of the Atlantic seaboard like the warriors of Leonidas. We hold, holding to our intellectual standards a sort of mountain. We are so few really.” “Who exactly Her Gart?” “I mean you and me and other people like you and me here in the Etats Unis, growing up, not growing up, part of the nebula, maybe in Alabama, maybe in Georgia, maybe in Oklahoma. There must be others like us for the climate makes us . . . we are deracinated Europeans holding valiant intellectual standards . . . caught here on the narrow strip of the Atlantic seaboard, caught in subtilized European standards, holding them like the warriors of Leonidas . . . against . . . Lithuania. I mean holding something against something. Someone will name the something. Germans name it. A sort of weltgeist that has a vibrant phosphorescent heart, the so few of us, the so very few of us Americans. The Siberia of our valiant little stronghold . . . I mean the Siberia to our sort of holding on to something . . . I’ll never make it clear . . . make it clear . . . you are the sort of wire, the sort of dynamo that makes it clear. Cerebralism burning at its incandescent white heat beats into the air. Images form, we can’t talk in mere words. There are bright mountains. A sort of tiny porthole and I look out on mountains. Onyx, amethyst like the apocryphal mountains. Holding on to something. . .

  “Yes. I love him. Understand this, Hermione. I love him. If I say I love George, it isn’t this flimsy thing you call love. You loved him, if you loved him, superficially. You never saw the bright sort of aura that he wore. About George there was that bright cuirass of beauty. You didn’t know, couldn’t know what love is . . . perhaps you thought you loved him. I suffered, watching. My suffering was a sort of burning banner. I carried it, waved it. Did you think I was happy that day, any day, ever when you were with me? Your beauty lacerated me and I said there is no use Fayne Rabb. I stood beside you, I dared to stand beside yon and say I loved him.”

  “Well then speaking man to man, Fayne, why don’t you take liim?” “You would be cruel, but I am beyond your cruelty.” “I wasn’t.” “Re-eeely?” “A little. Yes. I was a little cruel. I—” “You draw away. You are in love with George Lowndes.” “One I love, two I love. I am in love with . . . nothing.” “You are as George says heartless.”

  Heartless means without a heart. Less a heart. Hermione. Less-a-heart. I am heartless Hermione, Hermione Less-a-heart. What is Hermione Less-a-heart? Hermione heartless is this thing. Tossed like a winter branch on a snow bed. I am Hermione stripped of blossoms. Flowers drifted here, there, incandescent flower. Snowdrop under a cedar. You are a parasite, drifted here and there to perch a moment parasitically on George Lowndes. Branch flowers dipped parasitic feelers down and down into the live bark of somewhat common tree branch. George could love no parasite, c
ould love no flower as I am. Burst up, up said George Lowndes, dance under a pink lampshade. You are essentially feminine, said George Lowndes, dance and dance for yon make me feel a devil.

  I was not what George wanted. He wanted fire to answer his fire and it was the tall sapling, the cold Laconian birch tree, the runner and the fearless explorer (my mind was) that drew spark from him. It was to disguise himself that George would so disguise me . . . under a winter bonfire. Flowers creeping out from winter leaves and anemones mistaken for the fallen snowflake . . . run on and on, run on and on Hermione. You are doomed Hermione for the message you carry is in forgotten metres . . . run, stripped across snowbanks, fly downward with pulse beating and pummelling veins at either side of a burning forehead; beating, beating, run, run Hermione. Pheidippides run, run. You have a message but you are doomed Hermione. Run, run across the stones and let your sandal strap break and stoop to fasten nothing . . . run, run Hermione. You have in your hands a message and a token. At the end of a valley seething with snow-tipped fir trees, there is a smallish temple. Run and run and run and run Hermione. Runners wait at each station to carry on the message. No god asks too much . . . humanity is in a god’s touch. You know running and running and running that the messenger will take (lampadephoros) your message in its fervour and you will sink down exhausted . . . run, run Hermione. For the message-bearer next in line has turned against you . . . dead, dead or forgotten. Hecate at crossroads, a destruction . . . you have a double burden . . . run, run Hermione, run for yourself and Fayne Rabb.

  Fayne will not reach out, will not accept her greatness. You must bear a double sword, a double burden. We are an octopus (North and South Dakota) we are a creature even now seething with life cells, phosphorescent cells; will Fayne Rabb desert me. Run, run little blood corpuscle, tell the whole inchoate mass (Dakota, Oklahoma) that we are all together. Feelers, Siberia, run, run your way, blood corpuscle, there are others.

  There are others in Georgia, in Alabama, run, run, keep life living in this formless monster . . . run, run Hermione. Tell the Lacadaemonians . . . that . . . we . . . lie . . . here . . . tell the Lacadaemonians that we lie here . . . tell the Lacadaemonians that we lie here . . .

  . . . Obeying their orders. Whose orders? I have been almost faithful. In order to be faithful I will forego faith, I will creep back into the shell in order to emerge full fledged, a bird, a phoenix. I will creep back now in order to creep out later . . . tell the Lacadaemonians that we lie here obeying their orders.

  I have been faithful, said Her Gart, feeling that the moment was about to pass into all moments, the great majority of moments that are dead moments.

  four

  Now standing on her feet, she realized that she liked her feet. I have been wandering, she thought, too long in some intermediate world and Miss Dennon was nice about the nursing. Certainly, I must be doing something. She thought of feet wandering in long corridors, of grateful patients, of some stalwart youth (saved by Her miraculously from some romantic death) who would have a cottage on an island, somewhere off Florida, and, thinking Florida, red hibiscus in her memory made no deep scar, made no flame and burnt no scar across her consciousness.

  All about her peace said snow falls and petals fall, and the fury in Her had been appeased and things had happened as she had foreseen, as she had hoped standing that black night upstairs looking out on Gart terrace. Lawn had been black and heat lightning had scarred an irate heaven, but now earth lay flat and was spread with white on white. Everything had been erased, would be written on presently. White spread across an earth, purified for its fulfillment . . . “Three months is a long time. I have almost missed winter.”

  Snow wafted and fell. It was the white against white she had wanted . . . art thou a ghost my sister . . . it was the froth against breakers, it was the annihilation and the fulfillment. Snow caught against eyelashes, made a delicate runnel against out-thrust chin and hollowed cheekbone. Snow scratched softly, made, the most distant of delicate sound falling. Snow stupefied Her, cleansed Her, breathing an anesthetic. Thought was wiped out, annihilated. Thought did no good, had done none. “I think I won’t think, ever.”

  “I think I won’t think, ever” dropped a sort of casque, a sort of double armour. Her was wound in Her, in some sort of acceptance . . . Things about the house were interesting. Mandy was getting married. Tim had bought crocus bulbs this year from the other flower farm. The violets, the Farrand’s gardener had under glass, were frozen. Mrs. Banes’ daughter had a baby. Minnie had gone to stay with Mrs. Banes while her daughter had the baby. Mrs. de Raub came out often. She had gone out in her moleskin wrap with Her to watch Tim open up the trench for celery. She watched Tim pile on loam and dried leaves and they had gone indoors. Mrs. de Raub liked Mandy’s way of drying their own apples, liked the smell of dried mint in the attic and liked being shown Carl Gart’s bottles and zinc tanks in the cellar.

  Her trailed people from the barn to the vegetable garden and back, saying “But we love having people. We are so cut off here.” People liked coming (Eugenia was endearing); they liked the trip out, made excuses, kept on coming. George had called Eugenia’s Thursdays so suburban. Eugenia repeated her October Thursdays. Her accepted the people, the Thursdays, had forgotten red hibiscus. But now thinking in the snowy forest of some stalwart young male patient and of Florida, inevitable word reaction brought hibiscus and hibiscus made no scar, brought no resentment, no crippling impotence. In a moment, I am free of George, there is something so thrilling about thinking of something that might happen about someone that you never have seen. A form followed her, dogged Her through winter birches. It followed her feet, it stopped when she stopped. He would have wide shoulders, his eyes would be blue. Her thought went on and on stupidly like a nursemaid.

  Her head had been alert, her head had been stupid. Her head that had split open one day didn’t now much matter. People were kind. People are, if you just don’t go against them. People had been kind all winter. Her feet went on making the path. Her feet were pencils tracing a path through a forest. The world had been razed, had been made clear for this thing. The whole world had been made clear like that blackboard last summer. Last summer Gart lawn had been a blackboard but not quite clear. Now Gart lawn and Gart forest and the Werby meadow and the Farrand forest were swept clear.

  They were virginal for one purpose, for one Creator. Last summer the Creator had been white lightning brandished against blackness. Now the creator was Her’s feet, narrow black crayon across the winter whiteness. Art thou a ghost my sister white sister there, art thou a ghost who knows . . . . . . the stones by the Werby meadow were getting too loose. Someone will fall one day and get a stone on his leg. She stepped carefully through an opening in the stone wall. The meadow lay flat and whiter than the forest. Across the meadow the rails ran on their little up-built terrace. The terrace and the rails cut the Werby meadow from the forest. “Hepaticas always come out first in the Farrand forest.” She trailed feet across a space of immaculate clarity, leaving her wavering hieroglyph as upon white parchment. When Her got to the little declivity that supported the railroad, she looked back. Her track was uneven and one footprint seemed always to trail unsteadily. She climbed the embankment and again looked down. The meadow lay like a piece of outspread parchment partially curled under. The embankment made the roll from which more parchment might be shaken. The other side of the embankment dipped more sharply. She fell rather than ran into the Farrand Forest.

  Now her feet seemed to be filled with memories and the soles of her swift feet. Here I found once an escaped narcissus and escaped narcissus brought back “Narcissa” and “Are you a water lily?” Inevitable word-reaction followed her least thought but reaction was under everything, had really been erased like last year’s violets from the winter meadow. Snow had fallen, anesthetic obliterating landmarks. You might as well be happy as not be. George was wrong always. George was a red hibiscus in a globe of water lilies. We would have been wrong always. Her
thought went on and began formulating its set purpose. I could have really written but it’s better really to give in to people, be quite ordinary and quite happy like all people.

  Now she stopped at a runnel that was frozen. Her toe hammered at the space of frozen surface. Then she stamped heavily with her heel. The heel made a sharp dent in the frosted ice. She stood with both feet on it. The opposite bank was shadowed with a tangle of old creeper. No snow covered the tiny beach under the cave space opposite. There might conceivably be just the beginnings of things, common chickweed or arbutus bud under that protective mat of creepers. She stamped further and found foothold. As Her swayed forward, the ice dipped. She heard faint reverberation, the frail thing breaking. It never does freeze properly. There’s always water running. She stood wondering whether it would be better to step back or to leap and risk the breakage. The ice stood solid, did not dip further.

  The ice cracked as she made tentative slipping movement. The sound it gave out suggested something beneath hammering the undersurface. The slight jar brought Her to tension. She stood tense and silent, if she moved forward it would break now certainly. The bank opposite rose sheer up above the tangle. She wanted to touch the narrow black strip under the bank, was sure of finding something growing. Every year all my life, I have discovered something really in the winter. She remembered all the years, the first year she had actually found violets in December. Violets in December, part of last year? Part of next year? She stood part of next year, part of last year, not totally of either. The crack widened, actually snapped suddenly. The ice she stood on still held, did not dip further toward the tiny upward jet of running water. Reverberation cut like a white string, cut like a silver string. Winter branches etched above her head caught reverberation of ice breaking. Reverberation of the break seemed to be prolonged, would be till it touched stars. The stars are shining all of them, but I can’t see any. She felt like a star invisible in daylight. Then her thought widened and the tension snapped as swiftly. It’s like a violin string. It’s like Fayne exactly.