I could visualize the very worst terrors, I could see myself caught in the fall of bricks, and I would be pinned down under a great beam, helpless. Many had been. I would be burned to death.
I could think in terms of one girl in a crinoline, I could not visualize civilization other than a Christmas tree that had caught fire.
There had been a little Christmas tree here on the table, where the lamp now was. That was the first tree we had had since the “real” war and the fragile glass balls, I had boasted, had withstood the shock and reverberation of steel and bursting shell; “These little balls,” I had said, when I unpacked them from the tangle of tinsel and odds and ends of tissue-paper packing, “are symbolic”; unpicking shredded green tissue paper from a tinsel star, I said, “Look at this, it’s as bright as ever and this glass apple isn’t broken.”
But … I was sick to death of tension and tiredness and distress and distorted values and the high-pitched level and the fortitude, which we had proved beyond doubt that we possessed. I had passed the flame, I had had my initiation, I was tired of all that. It had all happened before. Words beating in my brain could get out, not beat there like birds under wire-cage roofs or caught in nets. What was that? The soul? Something being caught or not-caught in the net of the fowler. We were caught. We were trapped. I was sick to death of being on the qui vive all the time.
I was tired of trying to understand things, I was tired of trying to explain things. I had done my part. Bryher and my child could go on. I was tired of being the older, the stronger, the more perceptive. I was sick of fanatic courage, my own and that of those about me. We had had too much. The mind, the body is not built to endure so much. We had endured too much. I was tired of it. I could not be brave, I would not be philosophical, it was all a trap, a trick, there could be nothing worse.
I was tired of being grateful just for a quiet night—I was sick of being grateful for things that we had always taken for granted. I was sick of my own high exalted level, this climbing up onto a cloud, a dimension out of time. I hated the thought of Abide with me. Though indeed, indeed—the trite old words of the familiar, long-forgotten hymn tunes had come true. What had I known of the darkness deepens when I sang to my grandmother? I had sung those words as an inquisitive, sensitive, overstrung, possibly undernourished child, and now that I was overstrung, undernourished, it all came back.
I had gone round and round, and now I had made the full circle, now I had come back to the beginning. But the words of the hymns were trite, were trivial, and the net of the fowler was no longer a neat Asiatic metaphor but an actuality. But it shall not come nigh thee at this moment was almost a displeasing thought, for sometimes when the mind reaches its high peak of endurance, there is almost the hope—God forgive us—that the bomb that must fall on someone, would fall on me—but it could not—it must not. Because if the bomb fell on me, it would fall on Bryher, and Bryher must go on. That is the way we are trapped, that is the way I was trapped.
Bryher was my special heritage as I had been hers, but she would go on. She did not need me as she had at the end of the last war, and the child was grown up. …
Bryher said again, “It’s the second wave.”
Yes, we were drowning again. We had had almost a hundred air raids in succession in the worst days; that was after the Battle of Britain and we had recovered and now the tide-wave of terror swept over us again. We were drowning again.
The second wave! We would go down, we had gone down, the wave was breaking over us and if we came up to the surface again, there was only one certainty; there would be the third wave. Would the third wave be the last wave? It is true that the psyche, the soul can endure anything. But one did not want the body broken—we must not think about that. I am sitting in the hall in one of the little chairs. Actually, we can breathe, we can talk.
“It’s not just this raid,” I said, “it’s remembering all the others.”
The terrific shattering reverberations of the great guns slackened for a moment. There seemed to be less shaking and rumbling and an echo as of thunderstorm, further off, was probably distant guns following the flight of the bombers that had already passed over our heads. The surprising thing was that we hadn’t all gone raving mad; I do not believe actually one of our friends had left town, driven out by fear. We had had a few weekends and the short summer breaks but actually had scarcely missed less than a half-dozen of the near-hundred continuous days and nights of bombing, not to mention the later, still terrific, but less sustained attacks.
Bells clanged, an air raid warden shouted “Are you all right in there,” someone in a pause called in the hush, “Puss-puss-puss-puss.” Somebody’s cat would or would not respond from behind a familiar ash can or an unfamiliar heap of smouldering bricks and mortar. It had been worthwhile. It had been worthwhile to prove to oneself that one’s mind and body could endure the very worst that life had to offer—to endure—to be able to face this worst of all trials, to be driven down and down to the uttermost depth of subconscious terror and to be able to rise again.
“Well, then, it’s nearly over,” I said.
My hands were cold with that freezing uncanny coldness that one associates with ghosts and ghost stories and sitting in a circle in the dark when they told the story of the man who died of fright because he had nailed his coat to a coffin and thought a skeleton hand had got him. That was a delicious tremor of expectancy, at a party sitting in a circle in the dark. Well, hadn’t this been a sort of party on a grand scale, on, you might say, almost a cosmic scale?
Being shut up in a cupboard in the dark was really associated with games of hide-and-seek and the skeleton hand of death was something to be scared of at a party and to watch other people being scared of, afterwards at the next party. Going down and down in the dark was a sensation to be watched, to be enjoyed even if I had touched rock bottom. I had gone down under the wave and I was still alive, I was breathing. I was not drowning though in a sense, I had drowned; I had gone down, been submerged by the wave of memories and terrors repressed since the age of ten and long before, but with the terrors, I had found the joys, too.
On the opposite wall, the mirror was still set at its correct angle. It was a smallish square of glass set in a wide frame of Neapolitan or Pompeian inlaid wood of different colors. It was set square and solid against the wall and we had not thought it necessary to take it down when we put away the china and had the glass over the doors blocked in. The mirror frame did not budge, although there was a slightly different pitch or tone to the new reverberations.
“I don’t know whether they’re flying higher or lower or whether it’s them or whether it’s us,” I said.
“It’s not us,” Bryher said, though my remark had not required an answer. But even if she had not answered it, it would have been immediately answered by the short, staccato perfectly measured beat of a new utterance.
“I don’t know where that comes from.” I said. “I thought we knew all the gun positions.”
“It must be a mobile gun,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Anyway, it’s the third wave,” she said.
But I was not afraid. The noise was outside. Death was outside. The terror had a name. It was not inchoate, unformed. Wunden Eiland? Was that this island, England, pock-marked with formidable craters, with Death stalking one at every corner?
It is very quiet. My knees are trembling and I am so cold. I am terribly cold, but though my knees are trembling, I seem to be sitting here motionless, not frozen into another dimension but here in time, in clock-time. “I wonder what time it is,” I say to Bryher. “It wasn’t a very long raid,” I say to Bryher, “I wish we could talk to someone.”
They told us that gravity or something of that sort would keep the stars from falling. But their wisdom and their detachment hadn’t kept the stars from falling. The bombers had gone now, but the reaction after the prolonged battle is sometimes more shattering than the raids themselves. But the terror
and the tension and the disassociation must come to an end sometimes.
Bryher is standing in the door. We will open all the doors now, and I will, with an effort, get out of this chair and stagger into the kitchen and fill a kettle and strike a match and arrange a tea tray.
“I’ll get tea now,” I say. …
I push open the kitchen door and turn round. I stand by the kitchen door opposite the mirror, in a glass darkly. But now face to face. We have been face to face with the final realities. We have been shaken out of our ordinary dimension in time and we have crossed the chasm that divides time from time-out-of-time or from what they call eternity.
I heard Christian Renatus saying:
Wound of Christ,
Wound of God,
Wound of Beauty,
Wound of Blessing,
Wound of Poverty,
Wound of Peace
and it went on and on, while underneath it there was the deep bee-like humming of the choir of Single Brothers and then the deeper sustained bass note that must have been Christian David who had a voice like my great-grandfather who made clocks and kept bees and was called princeps facile of musicians. Princeps facile they called him in Latin and then there was another language about passing the tomb. L’amitié passe même le tombeau, that was; that was French and it was the motto on the seal that the old great-great uncle had, and it was the writing at the head of the parchment that my other grandfather, Christian Henry Seidel, found.
L’amitié passe même le tombeau.
Now Golden Eagle with his arrows, has driven off the enemy; it is a cry and it is a liturgy, the litany of the wounds; pity us, sings Christian David deep deep down so that the even flow of the subdued bee-like humming of the choir of Single Brothers seems like a swarm of bees around the deep bell ringing, ringing in Christian David’s throat; pity us, he says every time that the young Count Christian Renatus pronounces another one of his single strophes of his liturgy of the wounds. Our earth is a wounded island as we swing round the sun.
Harken to us, sings the great choir of the strange voices that speak in a strange bird-like staccato rhythm, but I know what they are saying though they are speaking Indian dialects. The two voices answer one another and the sound of Anna von Pahlen’s voice as she reads the writing on the strip of paper from the woven basket that Cammerhof has just handed her, is pure and silver and clear like a silver trumpet.
I will give him the Morning Star reads Anna, and the head of the Indian priests, who is Shooting Star, later to be baptized Philippus, answers in his own language, Kehelle and then Hail, and they call together to the Great Spirit and the Good Spirit who is the God of the Brotherhood and the God of the Initiates...
… it comes nearer, it is the shouting of many horsemen, it is Philippus, Lover-of-horses, it is Anna, Hannah or Grace, who is answering. Now they call together in one voice … the sound accumulates, gathers sound … “It’s the all-clear,” says Bryher. “Yes,” I say.
London
1941
1943
ALSO BY H.D.
Collected Poems 1912-1944
End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound
The Hedgehog
Helen in Egypt
Hermetic Definition
HERmione
Kora and Ka
Nights
Pilate’s Wife
Selected Poems
Trilogy
Tribute to Freud
Copyright © 1969, 1982 by the Estate of Hilda Doolittle
Copyright © 1982 by Perdita Schaffner
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the cooperation of the Collection of American Literature of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library of Yale University for making the manuscript, with notes, as well as the photographs of H.D. and of her mother available. The Gift as published here is a shortened version of those materials.
The chapter “The Dream” was first published in Contemporary Literature.
First published clothbound and as New Directions Paperbook 546 in 1982.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 1886-1961.
The gift.
(A New Directions Book)
I. Title.
PS3507.0726G5 1982 813’.52 82-8207
ISBN 978-0-8112-0854-3
ISBN 978-0-8112-2358-4 (e-book)
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corp.
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011.
The Gift: Novel Page 14