Hilda Doolittle - Asphodel

Stark colour broke across an old room, gone dim with light fallen to gold-grey, fallen to grey with the hint of gold that under clouds at sun-set throw over grey water, gone to grey water. . the room was filled with grey water from which odd knobs and handles and the flank of a candle-stick emerged, streaked in the water-grey like metallic gilt sun-fish, flicking here and there fin or under-belly, flicking colour, metallic from and-irons, the claw foot of a table, the reflected fire-light in a polished bowl and the stark upright shafts of hot-house carnations (she had not noticed them before) white wax spikes that glowed now, gave uncommon frost and winter and artificiality to the interior that up till now had been just the web and comfort of a big country room with the firelight and the inexpressible comfort of the great arm-chair after the camp-chairs, deck-chairs and the low crude (but so dear) foot stools of the little cabin shelter. Carnations. “How did they get there?” “What — where?” “I hadn’t noticed the carnations till the sun faded and they glowered out wax-white, taper-white, I hadn’t noticed the scent, now it comes over me, so spiced, so cold, so hieratic in this room that smells of logs, of tea, of comfort, of pot-pourri, I noticed that when I first came in.” “We always have carnations — dada loves them.” “O dada.” Then there was a dada. Who was this dada? My dada paid a billion pounds for the car (but she hadn’t said it). Which car? An emperior. He was Tiberius obviously. “Is your (if you will forgive me) ‘dada,’ Tiberius?” Was it possible that the child could laugh? It seemed so. High, clear, the voice of a boy laughing over a fish that has fallen from his line that he with some arrogant and unexpected gesture has caught back, flung into the net as it was just escaping. The laugh lit the room with the same metallic glamour, the slight note of discord, like clear tropic fish beating up out of grey water. “You don’t seem altogether — English.” This was the sort of thing one never said nowadays. She oughtn’t to have said it. “You see, being myself really American—” would excuse everything, every lapse and the faux pas of intimating anybody wasn’t English in this time. “O but we are — we aren’t—” “I thought so. I mean I thought you were — you weren’t. What (if I’m not being curious) are you?” “Dad has boats. Now not so many. A hundred have been lost. We were always in Egypt in the winter—” “You were born then in Egypt?” “No — nearly though in Naples—” “Ah — Naples—” Under trees flowering with the locust blossom, that sweet honey and salt of the sea and the salt and the weeds lying against the break-water and the odd wrong songs, the bella Lucia and the atrocious Verdi. “Naples—” The word prolonged into the odd interior, the grey water from which the fin of a brass candle-stick, the flick of the back of a cigarette box or the bright ivory worked on the polished idol she just now noticed, made eccentric Chinese, tropical odd comment on the very greyness. Pot pourri-like incense and the heady sharp stinging sweetness of the staunch white taper of the hot-house winter carnation. . room full of subtlety yet strength, odd comment on the world, on the war. How had she ever come here? In the room against the sheer north grey and the more obvious erratic Chinese, tropical glint of fish-fin that was the candle-stick and knob of something that was the crystal glass knob of something that was the crystal substance of some delicate jelly-fish, more obvious European, classic colour obtruded. Naples? Names, people, names. Naples. Atrocious sound of Verdi, Bella Lucia. Blue, blue, blue. “Why is it that one immediately thinks of stark blue, thick blue that you can cut with a knife when one says Naples?” Someone from somewhere had switched on a light but it didn’t matter and the light was modified from where she sat by the heavy idol on the table, by the sprays of tall upstanding stark wax-taper of the white carnation. Someone was moving forward, gathering up the tray but it didn’t matter. It was the sort of someone that would do things like that so they wouldn’t be noticed, could go on talking, even about Naples. “Stark, stark blue. Why is it?”

O this is terrible. At last after all these months. I have found perfection, have fallen into a beautiful chair, have sat throned yet at peace, doesn’t the girl know what is the matter with me? O this is too much, too much. The run over in the great car, the warm rug about my feet, the feeling of the world coming back, yes the “world,” houses with carpets on stairs, windows with curtains drawn, wine in different shaped glasses, stems of glasses in a circle on white damask and flowers in the centre of the table, made artificial by the stiff upright symmetry of them. Flowers on tables and curtains drawn and the right side of the right person at the right dinner at Delia Prescott’s, all those things came back when I sank in this chair, smelt the translucent fumes of tea that was real tea, tea a ceremony, Chinese. . what was it? All that had come to Hermione in her corner of the room, in her great chair and now all that was going. Didn’t the girl understand? No, it would be like Marion, wrong kind of delicacy, never to have told her about the baby and after all, here is this child, perhaps she knows nothing at all. O impossible! Yet staring back into eyes that stared and stared (now that she was just leaving) Hermione asked herself if perhaps she wasn’t in some net of wrong enchantment, must pay, it seems for everything, but this was too much to pay for beauty and seclusion and the trees going past the open car window all in proportion. Paintable. Things seen in perspective become things to be grappled with. Art. Isn’t art just re-adjusting nature to some intellectual focus? The things are there all the time, but art, a Chinese bowl, a Chinese idol, a brass candle-stick make a focus, a sense of proportion like turning the little wheel of an opera glass, getting a great mass of inchoate colour and form into focus, focussing on one small aspect of life though really it is only a tiny circle, a tiny circle. You get life into a tiny circle by art and that was where Morgan le Fay was wrong with her craft for she would say all art is man’s mere imagining and see, the shell by the shore, the one petal of a water-lily is a sort of crystal glass, a bright surface and you yourself staring at it, may make things in the air, pictures, images, things beyond beauty beautiful. But there is where Morgan le Fay was wrong. We are strung together, we all have lungs, must breathe, breathe, breathe, we men and gods, rather we men and demi-gods for Morgan le Fay and Circe and Cassandra and the Oreads and Hermione were only half-people, half gods, demi-divinities like this child whom now half-god Hermione saw was also one of the half-people. O what good did motor cars do anyway and having Tiberius for a father if you had to stare this way? Now sinking back in her chair having almost said good-bye, Hermione must ask her.

“What is it in your eyes. I’m awfully sorry (will the man mind waiting another ten minutes?). I can’t go home all alone without knowing. You will I am sure forgive me. I want to know what it is in your eyes for they have looked at me and looked at me, seeming to want to tear something out of me like evil-minded urchin opening up a chrysalis to see the unborn butterfly. I am sorry if I have been uncomprehending. It’s true you wrote me you were lonely. I have forgotten for a long time the meaning of that word for I am — I am—” but she couldn’t tell her that. It occurred to Hermione suddenly that the child might hate her, turn against her, consider her beyond the pale, a woman with a fine leashed intellect (for the child adored the intellect) having so far forsaken the snow-white arcana of Pallas, so far as to fall. . fall. . fall. . there were other islands. She wanted to tell the child about those other islands. “There are other haunts, not of the intellect.” The child said simply staring with the eyes that weren’t now blue at all, gone grey as if a film of ice lay with devastating blight across a space of blue and heaven-blue gentians. That was the trouble, that was what unnerved. The eyes were glazed over like the eyes of the blind. There was something odd, unseemly, difficult. Hermione wanted to get out, get away, hold on to her web of gauze, continue the melting loveliness into her own room, take it back with her to spread it like thin honey over the plain wheat-bread of her plain days. She wanted to eat the gauze with her spirit, make it her own, take it back, treasure it and let flecks of it brighten days and days. . for days after all were days and sometimes drawing the water from the little well, wandering up to the distant farm for her supplies, waiting at the post office for her notes from Darrington (Darrington was writing, writing to her) she felt days as days. . heavy lead-winged days that had to be endured for at the end of days and days there were worse days. . worse days. . days of fire and slaughter. . madness, no, she daren’t think, had morganlefayed it, made herself a dream in a dream to sustain herself, to sustain the small le Fay. What was this staring at her? Was it another child, child of her mind, her spirit? Did God increase his burden. . to him that hath. . shall be given. . but she didn’t want this mad child vamping her. She couldn’t stand perils of the intellect. She wanted to escape the mind and all it stood for. She wanted to take from this girl not give to her. “I know. I suppose you wanted to paint. It was like that with me — only music—” What was she going to say, where was it going to take her? “I shouldn’t think too much, wait a little — wait a little—” The girl said surprisingly yet not to Hermione at all surprisingly, “I can’t wait much longer. I’ve thought it all out. I can’t have what I want, paint, the smell of it, boxes of paints, freedom — I’m going to kill myself — it isn’t exactly anybody’s fault — but I can’t stand it.” “Can’t stand — what?” “Everything. Nothing. All things. Nothing at all. Myself chiefly.”