Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

by May Sarton

  “Yet the Muse is she,” Peter reminded her.

  “Oh yes, even there, even then.…”

  “Don’t think it, say it!” Peter implored, afraid she would disappear again.

  “I’ll try.” Again she leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. “It’s harder this time because it was all so intangible.… I had felt the presence in the house every time I came in again to the dark and the cool after the blazing light. I felt Anne’s presence so strongly that it was as if she were there all the time, locked like the small grand piano in the salon. Luc told me how she used to sing, not a professional, but there was some quality in her voice that made people weep, ‘fresh and passionate,’ he said, like the voice of a young girl. One day I felt I had to open the piano and make it sound.… I played a few notes at random, then closed it again. I had all the time the sense that in that house music was just on the threshold, until I came to see that the silence itself was the music.”

  “And then?” Jenny asked.

  “Then I began to listen to the silence. Almost without my knowing it, my arid soliloquies, those imitation poems, were opening into dialogue.” Suddenly she sat up very straight and clasped her hands tightly almost as if she had made a tangible catch. “It’s that! When the Muse comes back, the dialogue begins …, that is what is meant by fertilization. How extraordinary that I never caught onto this obvious fact until now!”

  “Go on about dialogue,” Peter said.

  “It’s quite simple. One begins to talk to someone, about oneself. Each time one’s whole life seems to be. in play.”

  “Yes, but …,” Jenny hesitated. “Dialogue means an exchange surely. I don’t quite see—.”

  “Oh, the Muse never answers, that’s sure, probably hates Poetry, I’ve decided in the last five minutes. The Muse opens up the dialogue with oneself and goes her way. The poems of supplication are not the good ones. Do you remember?” Mrs. Stevens asked, revolving her empty glass in her hand, “that some English divine once remarked that it was a mistake to suppose that God is chiefly concerned with religion?” She gathered their delighted smiles and pounced, “So why should the Muse be concerned with poetry? She goes her way.…”

  “So that silent voice in the house in France, the Muse who couldn’t be approached in the flesh, was the perfect Muse?” Peter asked. “What was it about her?”

  “Hard to pin down even now. Let me begin with the house itself. It was tangible enough. It had an atmosphere!”

  “What kind of atmosphere?”

  “Cool and passionate,” came the instant response. “Like a note in music, it seemed to me an absolute. In the first place it was rather formal, long French windows downstairs, a few carefully chosen pieces of furniture, which managed to be both elegant and rural. Waxed, octagonal-tiled floors. There was always, as I remember, that sweet smell of wax and burned vine roots. When the evening chill came on, the custom of the house, I was told, was to start the fire with a bundle of dried vine twigs. That made a great blaze; then, when it was really going strong, one put on one or two gnarled old roots or small hard logs. There were several old mirrors in strategic places; they did not reflect oneself so much as the atmosphere, as if seen through water. When the light was fading through the branches of the fir trees outside, there was a moment of rather terrifying poignance. The purity of it all made me feel dreadfully lonely then. There is a difference between solitude and loneliness, as I need not tell you, and people who live alone come to know them both intimately.”

  “Yes,” Peter said, “but do define them each, if you can?”

  “Well,” Mrs. Stevens clasped her hands together. “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self. Will that do?”

  “Thank you,” Peter said, and quickly made a note on his pad.

  “Without Luc’s visits it might all have been impossible: together he and Anne challenged me, and in almost the same way, curiously enough. For him she had become, I sensed, a legend, a modern incarnation of the Lady with the Unicorn in the tapestry. She fitted in with his absolute ideas, was capable like him of living in an absolute world, and had bought the house to be near her own deep sources of feeling.” Hilary paused to light a cigarette, seemed about to go on, then censored herself. “I am not going to tell you her story. Even now, after all these years, I feel that telling it would be a betrayal. Suffice it to say,” she went on with crisp matter-of-factness, “that together Luc and Anne’s presence showed up my own chequered life in a pitiless light. Luc hated the complexity, the multiplicity, the ambivalence in me; so I was surrounded in every way by simplifying and unifying powers.”

  “I begin to see what the word ‘Spells’ in your title means,” Jenny said.

  “Yes, I forgot to say that when the dialogue with the Muse is set up, its tangible effect is that lines begin to run through one’s head, without the slightest volition on one’s own part. Poetry was there when I began to go out for long walks among the vineyards, closed the iron gates behind me, and left the intense, silent enclosure to walk out into the open world, the mysterious, gnarled, ordered world of the vines, row on row, high up on the windy plain, in the distance a few cypresses making their sharp exclamation points against a church tower.”

  “All this you capture in the poems,” Peter said, “yet under them, under the austerity and order, as you put it, I feel a kind of anguish, or tension. One is very much aware that for you the landscape is symbolic. The way the Loire comes back, for instance, the presence of the river.…”

  Jenny was moved by how closely, how sensitively the young man at her side could participate, so that now when he asked a question, it was almost as if Hilary were asking it of herself, and she answered on the same current.

  “I couldn’t see the river from the house, but it was always there as a presence like Anne herself. Symbolic?” She raised an eyebrow. “Perfectly real. Itself. Herself. But,” she granted, “you’re right. There was a tension like anguish. Every visitation of the Muse is disturbing. And here it seemed as if I were being cross-examined, pinned down in a pitiless light.”

  “Pitiless? All the images you use are gentle ones—a woman seen at dusk in a lighted farmhouse, cutting a loaf of bread across her breast,—that is one I remember.”

  “Exactly! All these images of rooted human life attacked mine! Anne with her long, faithful, hopeless love, her one love; Luc and his absolute values; a woman cutting a loaf of bread—. Oh,” she said with vehemence, “don’t you see how they affected me? By their light I had to examine and come to terms once more with my own life. I have not concealed from you—how could I?—that it has been chequered, a life of many encounters, riches, poverty, already fertilized by many people, many landscapes. In the presence of so much wholeness and purity I felt deeply challenged. I had to set something against it. I had to come through to my own source, to my own reality. It was a struggle.”

  “What did you set against ‘wholeness and purity’?” Peter asked. “What do you mean when you say ‘my own source’?”

  “Oh dear,” Mrs. Stevens passed a hand over her forehead, and sighed. “May I let that question pass? I did not sleep in Anne’s room, but at that time I used sometimes, before I went to bed, to push open the door and stand for a long time at her window. Swallows made lightning arcs through the air; there was a smell of roses. The evening light over the spacious land. And when I turned away in almost total darkness the great carved bed with its air of desolation affected me like the presence of a huge, haunting dead animal or spirit …, never evil and never frightening, only powerful. Oh, I was under a spell, you are right there!” And before they could speak, she went on, “Without Luc, the whole experience might have been too strange, too unreal.”

  “Did you feel this presence as a question?” Jenny asked.

  “Of course. The Muse is always a question—that’s what sets up the dialogue.” Now once more for a few seconds F. Hilary Stevens closed her eyes, “And one always imagines that the question mi
ght be answered some other way, but it can only be answered through writing poems. The dialogue is not with the Muse, but with oneself.” She opened her eyes. “Once I remember saying to Luc, ‘Anne wouldn’t have liked me. I would have shocked her.’ ”

  “And what did Luc say?” Peter asked.

  The answer was that light, self-revealing laugh, “Oh he was kind. He knew a little of the self-disgust I had been suffering. After all, he needled me pretty relentlessly himself. He said it would have been interesting to see us together, the eagle and the dove!” She gathered up the answering smiles. “‘Conflict,’ he said, ‘is your element—what would you do with peace of mind?’ He. was very well aware, that wise creature, that the Muse destroys as well as gives life, does not nourish, pierces, forces one to discard, renew, be born again. Joy and agony are pivoted in her presence.” Then for the first time in nearly an hour Mrs. Stevens got up and began her prowling to the French windows and back, stopped a moment to pick up a Japanese carved ivory mouse and turn it in her hand absent-mindedly.

  When she came back to her chair, she leaned over the back of it a moment before sitting down again. “I suppose what I really understood that summer was that it was time I stopped borrowing other people’s houses, other people’s lives, and made my peace with myself in a house of my own creation: this house is the daughter of that house in the Touraine, you see.” She came back to the interviewers, sat down, clasping her hands in the now familiar gesture, and looked into the fire.

  “All that was long, long ago …, and Luc died in a camp before the liberation, just before. No one of us could ask for peace for years and years to come. No one of us could rest, or make a root. The ghosts would not be gentle like Anne perhaps ever again, not in my lifetime anyway. And as for purity …,” she shrugged her shoulders. “We were stained to the marrow with something far more degrading and more terrible than love affairs!”

  The fire was dying down and the sun, which had momentarily lit up the daffodils, had slipped down behind the rocks. Jenny noticed that the shadow had flowed into Mrs. Stevens’ face too, hollowing out the delicate bone structure and giving her for a second the look of a death’s head.

  “Peter,” she murmured. “It’s getting awfully late.”

  He looked at his watch. “Heavens, Mrs. Stevens, it’s after six. We are tiring you.”

  “Yes,” Hilary rubbed a hand across her forehead, “I am tired.” But instead of breaking off, she sat down quite deliberately. “But the night will come soon enough. Stay half an hour, if you can …, if you are not caught here by the ancient mariner!”

  “You’re incredibly generous. You know it,” Jenny answered.

  “Not generous. Interested. I said to myself when I got Mr. Selversen’s letter that this interview might be a chance to clear a path, to find out where I stand. It’s you who have been generous. I’ve told you things I did not even know I knew!” She lifted the bottle of Scotch. “Well, there’s just about one drink apiece left. Shall we finish the bottle in style?” When she had carefully poured out what was left with mathematical precision (that sense of order, Peter thought to himself!) she leaned back in her chair and smiled rather thoughtfully at Jenny. “Miss Hare, would you say offhand that anything had happened here? To you, I mean, as well as to me? Of course,” she added with a laugh, “nearly everything seems to have happened to me!”

  “Why do you ask me?” Jenny countered.

  “Because I should like to imagine that I have been of some use to you, that this exchange has not been entirely one-sided in its possible value. Oh, I am not thinking of what will be published eventually!” And she shrugged her shoulders, as if that hardly concerned her now. “But after all, Miss Hare, wild-eyed or not, you are a woman and a writer, yourself—so—.”

  “Of course it’s been helpful,” Jenny answered, “but I’ll have to think it all over,” and she gave Peter a slightly nervous look. “I mean, there is so much to think about,” she floundered. “May I ask one thing, just for me? Not for the interview.”

  “To Hell with the interview! We are important!”

  “Do you really think it is impossible for a woman and a writer to lead a normal life as a woman?” But before Hilary could answer, Jenny clasped her hands tightly, for they were shaking she discovered to her dismay, and asked another question, “and must the Muse be feminine? It seems so strange to me because.…”

  “Because?” The tone was gentle but the old eyes flashed.

  “Well,” and Jenny felt with dismay the blush rising her throat to her eyes, “You see, I’m in love with a man. I hope to marry him.”

  “So I gathered sometime ago. My dear child, please remember that I have spoken only for myself. Marry your young man!” she commanded, flushing herself. “After all, I married!”

  “I’m not afraid, but I think he is,” Jenny said, looking down at her clasped hands, afraid of meeting Peter’s glance. “Isn’t he, Peter?” she asked.

  Was there a faint amusement visible in the way Mrs. Stevens turned to Peter and repeated the question, using his first name herself, “Is he—Peter?”

  “Listen,” Peter parried, obviously embarrassed, “This is none of my business. You two carry on.”

  “Well, I’ll answer,” Mrs. Stevens said with a smile. “No doubt he is afraid.”

  “Oh dear,” Jenny said. “I suppose he is. But I don’t want to be a monster, Mrs. Stevens!—I suppose you think I’m an idiot, but how do I know that I have enough talent, for instance, to take on the full ‘motherhood, the full monsterhood’ as you put it sometime ago?”

  “I don’t suppose one ever knows about one’s talent.…” She paused and closed her eyes, and when she opened them, they were still narrowed like someone looking at a painting, bringing it into focus. “No, the crucial question seems to me to be this: what is the source of creativity in the woman who wants to be an artist? After all, admit it, a woman is meant to create children not works of art—that’s what she has been engined to do, so to speak. A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It’s the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant.”

  Jenny swallowed this autocratic statement in silence, but she was frowning.

  “Well, Miss Hare?”

  “I just don’t see,” Jenny blurted out. “It seems to me you make art a neurotic symptom, at least for a woman.…”

  “Oh no,” the answer shot back. “Just the opposite. For the aberrant woman art is health, the only health! It is,” she waved aside Peter’s attempt to interrupt, “as I see it, the constant attempt to rejoin something broken off or lost, to make whole again. It is always integrating, don’t you know? That’s the whole point. Do you think I am crazy?” she asked Peter suddenly.

  “Of course not—but may I suggest that the troubling word is ‘aberrant.’ What do you mean exactly by ‘aberrant’? Who wants Marianne Moore to be a grandmother?” he added with a mischievous smile.

  “Well, I don’t, of course,” she sniffed. “I am too delighted when I browse among her creations. Nevertheless,” she turned to Peter quite sternly, “we do all feel, I think, that we have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.…” She paused, frowned, waited a moment, rubbing her forehead with one hand in a rather nervous way. “No,” she murmured half to herself, “that’s too easy. I’ve got to think!” she said. “Give me a moment.… Maybe it’s this: the woman who needs to create works of art is born with a kind of psychic tension in her which drives her unmercifully to find a way to balance, to make herself whole. Every human being has this need: in the artist it is mandatory. Unable to fulfill it, he goes mad. But when the artist is a woman she fulfills it at the expense of herself as a woman.” Suddenly she relaxed, sat up and laughed, “So round and round the mulberry bush we go! I don’t make myself clear. I’ve been too busy doing what
I had to do to think a great deal about this. The interview—you two éminences grises about to invade my privacy—stirred it all up, and I must confess that in the last few days I have suffered from rather acute anxiety.”

  “What made you so anxious?” Peter asked gently.

  “Well, I had the curious feeling that I was about to be found out, or rather that I was going to be forced to find out something I didn’t want to know.” She smiled a shadowy smile. “That was the attraction, of course. That was what magnetized, that sleeping anxiety which your coming brought to the surface, not to mention Miss Hare’s preoccupations, which come back like the angel to trouble the waters. Why do you want to write, for instance?” She shot at Jenny. “Do you know?”

  “I get filled up. I feel I’m going to burst.”

  Hilary Stevens laughed. “Exactly! She knows,” she said to Peter.

  “It’s something I am, not something I do,” Jenny went on.

  “Well marry your young man with all that you are, and see what happens!” Mrs. Stevens uttered, not so much as a challenge as with a gesture of a person opening a door.

  “I’m going to have a try—if I can unscare him!”

  The darkness had really invaded the room now. They could hardly see each other’s faces. For a moment they rested, as if they had arrived at a temporary resolution.

  “We have reached The Silences,” Peter said then.

  “Oh that book!” Mrs. Stevens pulled herself up. “Let’s have some light on the subject!” She rose and crossed the room to light the lamp on the big table, then one beside her chair. She herself remained standing, leaning one arm on the wing. “The book of this house, the intoxication of solitude. I wish it were better,” she said. “It should have been better, and perhaps if I live another ten years, I’ll be ready to have another try. But you see, just before I came here, my mother died.…” Her eyes were bright. If she’ had looked tired a half hour before, she was alive again. Feeling flowed through her in a visible stream. And in this curious creature, Jenny saw, feeling acted like light, as if every finest blood vessel which had been opaque, was now lit from within. “Yes,” she said, “let us end this dialogue with the beginning. I have sometimes imagined that my last book might be about my mother; it is time to die when one has come to terms with everything. My mother still remains the great devouring enigma, ah!” She came round the chair and sat down, looking at them with triumph, “the Muse, you see.…”