by May Sarton
“I am delivered up, lock, stock, and barrel.”
“May we go back a bit before returning to the poems? At twenty-three you made a tremendous hit with a first novel, not inappropriately called The Bull’s Eye. Yet, despite your success, you broke the mould, and shortly afterwards published poems and only poems for many years. Would you like to talk about this?”
F. Hilary Stevens sat back in her chair, sitting up very straight. The tension was visible. “It’s harder than you might think to talk about it. Give me a minute.” Again she looked out beyond them to the sea. “It was, I must confess, a painful experience. I got in beyond my depth. Oh, I had written honestly enough, but the last thing I had wanted or imagined was a succès de scandale. It was a shock.” She turned to Jenny with a rather shy smile, as if asking for the first time for help.
“It’s such a spontaneous book,” Jenny plunged in, encouraged by the unspoken plea. “So fresh—it made me think of a brilliant water color. But I suppose people were shocked because you talked about things like women falling in love with each other, took this for granted, set it in its place; and the love affair with the young man is awfully good.”
“You are kind.…” But Mrs. Stevens’ attention was clearly absorbed elsewhere. “I know,” she said, “I’ve got it! Rosenkavalier!” She looked from one to the other of them, and drew a blank. “The ambiguity, don’t you see? That’s what made it sell! I didn’t know quite what I was doing myself. Oh, if I could have written that book twenty five years later, then it might have been something!” The tone changed; she leaned her chin on one hand and went into the familiar dialogue with herself. “Yet one writes to find out. I suppose I dislike the book because it seems to me now superficial, not worthy of its subject. I never looked Medusa in the face.”
“You forget that you had a style!” Peter said.
“Oh well, these self-intoxicated explosions may have some significance—,” she brushed Peter’s praise aside. But perhaps it had been relieving. For the first time since their arrival, she seemed perfectly natural, as she said, “I mean to be honest with you. That is why you have come, to help me to be honest, is it not?”
“I hardly think we imagined ourselves in that role,” Peter said gravely, but there was a twinkle in his eye.
“I should never have let you come if I had not imagined that a benefit would ensue. It is possible,” Mrs. Stevens said, “that I feel so strongly about that book because I have been trying to elude it all these years. You could never guess what it really sprang from, nor shall I tell you.” She swallowed a secret smile. “That is irrelevant.”
“I wonder …,” Peter leaned forward, but she had already escaped him, and was standing at the French windows at the other end of the room, hands in the pockets of her purple jacket, looking out.
Peter made some quick notes on his pad, and Jenny looked around the big formal room, taking it in for the first time, since she had until now been wholly concentrated on the presence of F. Hilary Stevens herself. She noted pale gray walls, a big old-fashioned sofa covered in a chintzy faded rose pattern, the eighteenth century mantelpiece which bore several amusing bibelots, a lustre jug, a Burmese duck covered in gold leaf, a Chelsea shepherdess with a lamb; over the mantle her eyes came to rest on a pencil sketch by Sargent of a person whom Jenny at first took to be a young man in a velvet jacket with a Byronic, open white collar, and then suddenly recognized as Mrs. Stevens herself. She rose to decipher the date, 1920, contemporaneous then with the success of the novel. Sargent had caught well the gleam of mischief, of self-mockery, which had remained characteristic of his subject. It was clear that she had always been a charmer, and knew it.
The other paintings in the room enhanced the atmosphere of light, order, and peace: two French impressionists, one of an apple orchard in flower, and the other of women transplanting lettuce in a vegetable garden dappled with light and shadow. There was a pot of blue hyacinths on the long refectory table, and a few daffodils had been arranged to charming effect in a Venetian glass under a Venetian mirror. Clearly this was not a room where anyone did any writing. A little cool, it might have felt, but for the glow of the wood fire, and the tea tray abandoned there like a still life among them. Yet, despite the coolness and order, the room communicated a sense of life with a keen edge. The house was full of presences; she who lived here alone was surrounded by angels or ghosts, perhaps by both. Yes, it had an atmosphere like its creator, Jenny decided, of contained pressure, of something fiercely controlled. Lifting her eyes to the small figure standing there alone at the end of the room, she wondered what was flowing back with such force into that consciousness? For the withdrawal had been less a withdrawal, Jenny felt, than a strong compulsion toward something else, someone else, perhaps evoked by all the talk about the novel.
The disturbing thing for Hilary, of course, was that she could not approach one element in the past, without raising all its elements, without being assailed by ghostly presences. On the surface she could be quite consciously brisk and analytic, even detached. But under the surface, she was filled with echoes and rumors, with startling images, and the easy talk about the novel had not really been easy at all. Too much flowed back into consciousness. How to separate art and craft from life? How handle all this now before witnesses? She was appalled by the intensity of her feeling, unexpected really, not prepared for, despite her wakeful night. Standing at the window she knew what it was to be in the power of the daemon: there in that summer in Wales, in 1911, the Muse had made her appearance for the first time, and Hilary, the Hilary now over seventy who was also Hilary at fifteen, saw that that episode was perhaps the key to everything. Unconscious of the incongruity of the gesture, she picked up a long silver box, extracted a thin cigar, lit it, and took several puffs, thinking about Phillippa Munn, her governess, who had been the instrument of revelation. They had been sent over with bicycles and knapsacks and told to amuse themselves while Hilary’s parents traveled in Spain: as usual she was being “sent away,” and as usual whatever pleasure there might be in the adventure was tied down to becoming “cultivated”; Phillippa was instructed to give Hilary Latin lessons, and they were reading Virgil.
Images, scenes, flowed up now. A summer afternoon. They were sitting among the ruins of a castle, looking down on the wide curve of a bay below, munching at huge indigestible meat sandwiches, and drinking cider. Miss Munn was happily unaware that English cider is not exactly like New England cider, and hardly a proper drink for governesses and young girls. The day was hot and rather buggy, and their long skirts were wound tightly around their legs, over high laced boots.
Just below them a young boy was scything a small field. The rhythm of his walk, slow and meditative, his pauses to whet the blade, had a hypnotic effect. For the last half hour they had sat in companionable silence, watching him.
“Why wasn’t I born a boy, Miss Munn? It’s so unfair!”
“Well, you weren’t, so I would sit up, if I were you, and straighten your skirt.”
“I hate skirts!” Hilary lay back in the grass, one arm over her eyes. She had the sensation of being inhabited by powers she could not understand or control, a thick mass of electric energy with no outlet, that is how she had felt. “If I were a boy, I would be great—a great poet,” she said in a muffled voice.
“Hmph,” Miss Munn sniffed. “Nothing to prevent a girl from being a poet, is there?” The disconcerting thing was the complete split between Phillippa’s blue eyes and ravishingly pretty face, and the “Miss Munn” whom she put on like armor in her present role. She was not really quite grownup herself.
“Mawkish, milksop stuff! I hate Alice Meynell and Elizabeth Barrett Browning!”
“Why do you, Hilary? You’re so arrogant!” Phillippa, like most governesses, was in awe of the establishment, in whatever sphere. Rule number one: you do not criticize your betters.
Actually Hilary had lately learned several of the Browning sonnets by heart, but, confused as she was about her own fe
elings, she would never have admitted this. She felt it a self-indulgence, like drowning in honey, but this was clearly not to be explained to the simple-minded Phillippa.
“Because …, because …,” she fumbled, tearing up a handful of grass in exasperation. “Because it’s no help, I suppose.”
“You’re too young to know about love. Of course it doesn’t interest you.” The most maddening thing about Phillippa was that she refused to rise to obvious bait, and instead, over and over again, relegated Hilary to the manageable world of childhood.
“I’m not a child,” Hilary said, sitting up. “Sometimes I feel very old, a lot older than you. Besides,” she added in a gentler tone, “it does interest me enormously—, I mean, if I were a man.”
“Byron, no doubt?”
“Don’t tease. I am being dead serious.”
For just a second their eyes met, Phillippa’s suddenly flushed with blue as cheeks may be flushed with rose. In the second’s confrontation, the pupil in those blue eyes widened like a shutter, and in that second the massive electric current in Hilary connected, so that she felt all through her the explosion of a blaze of light. Then Phillippa withdrew, and asked in a gentler tone, looking off at the bay,
“If you were a man, what would you write about?” Resuming the conversation now seemed irrelevant. Hilary was far too busy absorbing the shock of that crystallizing second when quite suddenly the universe appears to be focused on a single human face, and nothing else exists. She lay on her stomach with her face propped up on her knuckles, chewing a piece of grass, and wondering if the loud thumping of her heart was audible to the magic person beside her. “Oh things …,” she murmured, then sat up and asked with a new fierce tone in her voice. “You’re such a secret person. What are you really like?”
“I?” Phillippa was startled into confusion. “I’m a rather ordinary person, I guess. Why?”
Something about the coolness, the modesty, the intact quality of the young woman infuriated Hilary. “Because …, because …,” she struggled for the words, “sometimes you seem to be just a machine for being good. It’s horrible!”
Phillippa laughed her gentle elusive laugh. “Dear child, I’m very fond of you.”
“Oh fond!” Hilary groaned. “One is fond of a dog, I suppose. I’m a human being!” She was standing now and shouting.
“I can’t understand why you’ve suddenly got into such a passion.…”
“Because I love you!” Hilary shouted. “Can’t you see?”
“I can see that you’re in some kind of state.” Phillippa busied herself with packing up the baskets and folding the rug. “It’s time we started off, Hilary, if we are to get to Harlech for tea, as we had planned.” Was she as bland as she seemed? Did nothing penetrate?
“Whenever you get to be almost human, you have to become a governess again!” Hilary stooped to help with folding the steamer rug, taking care not to brush against Phillippa, for this, she sensed, would have caused an explosion in herself that she was unprepared to handle.
“That is my job, Hilary, after all,” she said gently, and walked down toward the bicycles, without giving Hilary a glance.
“Why God should have chosen to make me love you, of all impossible people!”
“I should leave God out of it if I were you. It’s possible that He has more important things to think about.”
They walked their bicycles onto the road and mounted. Hilary raced off ahead as fast as she could go. She needed to get away from the source of so much feeling to be able to think about it, and to try to control the whirling inside her. Phillippa was quite right, of course: it was absurd to bring God into this, yet she could not believe that the moment of revelation was not a Sign; something far greater and more mysterious than Hilary seemed involved. She felt enlarged by goodness, not an emotion she was used to feeling at all; she would have liked to perform some heroic act immediately, rescue a drowning child, single-handedly put out a blazing fire; she felt like a giant, as if she had grown several feet in the last hour, had grown taller than Phillippa, and so was in some way responsible for her, felt protective and concerned as she had never felt before for another human being. And after a few moments she slowed her furious pace, thinking that the magic person behind her might get tired trying to keep up.
In the two weeks that followed, Hilary emerged from her cocoon, as if she were some awkward luna moth, painfully extricating itself for a first flight into the soft darkness of a spring dusk. She was already then two distinct beings, a floundering physical person who dropped things and blushed and sweated, and a powerful, conquering, violent, inner being who had suddenly the capacity to understand things that Phillippa, the innocent Phillippa, considered extraordinarily mature for age fifteen. Phillippa found herself being quizzed, examined, attacked from every side by an insistent, probing love which was at times disturbing in its force. She felt, no doubt, as if a whole battery of stage lights had been turned on her; it was not a comfortable situation to be in. And she reacted by becoming as impersonal as possible.
“You are so beautiful,” Hilary said across the table of an Inn where they were staying near Harlech. “You shouldn’t be so humble! You hide, and it’s not worthy.”
“Worthy of what, Hilary?”
“Of yourself, of what you were meant to be!”
“Good gracious, child, what on earth was I meant to be?” And Phillippa avoided the searching gray eyes.
“A person, not a governess.” In those days of incessant dialogue in which there was no rest for either of them, Hilary had learned a great deal about Phillippa. She was the oldest of a family, all girls, of an impoverished Unitarian minister in Springfield, the only one to be sent to college so far, and she was earning the money now to help her younger sister get an education. Everything in her background had built in the need to serve, but Hilary had dug under that hard crust to the person inside, to the hidden seed of revolt, to the hunger for personal happiness.
“It is very important,” she announced, “who you marry.”
“No doubt,” and Phillippa laughed her haunting laugh, so gentle, so elusive.
“If you marry the wrong person,” Hilary said, with the absolute conviction of innocence, “you’ll be a slave. I think you should marry a lawyer,” she announced, “not a doctor, not a minister.…”
“Oh Hilary,” and Phillippa smiled a little wan smile, “I’ll be lucky if I marry at all.”
“Don’t talk like that! Or if you do,” she added, “talk about being a professor in a college. You are a very good teacher, you know. Think what you have accomplished with me who have no talent for Latin at all!” It was the first time that Hilary had experienced the intoxication, the enlargement of taking into herself another human being, of becoming, as it were, someone else. “You are so beautiful, Phillippa, you can do anything you want to do,” but now the statement came from power, the power to mould.
“How do you know, dear child?”
“I know because I am often more inside you than I am inside myself. I think about you all the time.”
“Where is the waiter? We had better order our dessert,” said Phillippa, making the inevitable retreat. And if Hilary was the person in command on these semi-public occasions by the sheer intensity of her commitment, she became a child again after they went to bed. Then it was she who waited for a sign, lying taut while Phillippa brushed her teeth, hoping like a convict for the word of pardon and release. Would Phillippa kiss her good night? Would she show some feeling, even a very little?
Poor Phillippa, seventy-year-old Hilary thought! What pressure she had had to endure! More often than not, she turned her back on Hilary and went to sleep, while Hilary tossed and turned and dreamed of the unimaginable kiss which was never given. And in the morning, Phillippa, refreshed, would see the wan fifteen year old, wide awake, waiting still for the word, the gesture which, within her ethos, she could not, in honor, give.
“What you hope for, Hilary, is not in my power to
give,” she said once. “And if I did, it would only make things worse. You know that, really, don’t you?” And Hilary, knowing it, was silent, only reaching out to clasp Phillippa’s hand in an iron grasp.
“Darling, let me go!” And for the “darling” Hilary let her go.
Of course as the two weeks—that eternity—slipped away like a day, the tension rose. Phillippa became aware that Hilary now hardly slept at all.
“You will make yourself ill,” she had said once, with real concern. By now, Hilary was hardly eating; food stuck in her throat. She was close to tears all the time, tears of frustration, tears of rage.
“Well, what if I do?” Hilary answered, furious. “Do you think for a moment, it isn’t worth it? I know so much I never knew before!”
“Like what?” Phillippa asked gently.
“Oh, everything!” Hilary shouted. “You don’t understand!” In the grip of the thing, she could not express the multiplicity of sensation it represented, and was well aware that if she had been able to express it, Phillippa herself would have been bewildered and frightened. In the first place Hilary now felt she was two people all the time, instead of one. Her eye had been cracked open by a “you,” and she pondered Phillippa as if Phillippa were some extraordinary equation which, once solved, would yield the secret of the universe. But at the same time because of this huge inner reverberation, which stretched all her powers, it was as if the whole outer world also resounded in her … landscape, literature, everything had become alive in a wholly new way. Single lines in Shakespeare’s sonnets and in Keats spoke to her with such force that she felt they had been written for her alone. Landscapes she had raced through for the sheer joy of riding her bicycle as fast as she could, now touched her like pieces of music and haunted her as phrases from Mozart concertos sometimes haunted: there it was still, that beech tree under which she had lain one day, the silvery bark, crisscrossed with black lines here and there, and the leaves trailing in a watery, flowery way along the horizontal branches; there it was still, that wide shallow brook in a pasture where sheep grazed, and where an old curved stone bridge brought the whole natural, casual scene into focus.…