Hilda Doolittle - The Gift

I ran into the kitchen with Harold and we filled the washbasin with water and brought back a towel and Harold stood there and now the water in the basin was almost as red as the blood on his face and his beard was thick with blood and I went on washing his face with the towel and wringing out the towel in water, like Ida showed me how to do when I was a little girl and helped her and Annie wash clothes, but that was in the old house.

This was the new house and we thought, “What fun it will be to move and go to a new house,” and now we were here and we had little peach trees in the back garden by the kitchen porch and we had new plants and roots for the shrubbery that the Ashursts sent us. Where was Mama? Was Mama outside, was she dead?

Where was everybody? I went on wringing out the towel and the basin got more red and it did not really seem to matter. Nothing mattered because everything was somewhere else. Gilbert was cutting out paper soldiers and I was watching Harold paint the dog ruffle yellow and we were sitting at the round table in the sitting room and we were waiting for the car that came, if it was on time, ten minutes past the hour, but it was late as usual, Gilbert said.

Where is Gilbert? I must go and empty this basin and get some more fresh water. I must get another towel. But I cannot leave him alone and we are alone in his room. This is his study. There is the desk, there are his ink bottles and his pens and the shears that Gilbert took and that Gilbert put back, and I said, “But he hasn’t come in yet.”

He hadn’t come in but he had been somewhere near and something had happened, while the car went on past the house. Was it robbers? Something had happened that only happens in stories. The Arabian Nights had a picture of a lady whose head might be cut off but it wasn’t, because she went on telling a man in a turban, who was a Turk (or did they say he was Arabian?), a new story. This was a picture in that book or it was the Bible picture when we spread the illustrated Bible open on the floor, before we could read the writing. He was on the stairs, too. On the stairs, He was looking and looking and never shutting his eyes and the thorns made great drops of blood run down his face and Mama thought it was a beautiful Guido Reni.

Harold was there, he held the basin. I could not get the thick blood out of my father’s beard. It tore like my doll’s hair, when it gets tangled. If the water was hot, maybe we could get the thick blood out of his beard. I wanted hot water and I wanted a new towel, but if we went out for some more water, then he would be alone. You cannot leave him alone, staring.

He looks at the bookcase where he has his War and Peace and Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and some German books in German. Those are his reading books (his other books are all along the wall, the other side of the table) and his Gibbon’s Rome . I have tried to read in these books because they have covers striped like marbles, with dark blue on the back and triangles of dark blue on the corners; he said I could read them, but I did not read very far in Gibbon’s Rome .

He is looking at the glass doors of the bookshelf, it is part of an old desk, there is a drawer in the desk that opens; in it, he keeps his pistol. “Did you ever shoot a man?” He said he never did that he knew of, but now someone or something had shot him or hit him, like an Indian with a tomahawk. You could see that something had hit him. If he goes on looking at the glass door of the shelves, above the old desk, where he keeps his pistol in the drawer, I will have to push his head round, I can’t have him go on looking at one thing like that. If he would close his eyes, it would be better, it would even be better if he fell down but we would not be able to get him up; do dead men sit in chairs?

He walked across the bright light from the open door and I said, “Papa,” and he didn’t say anything. What he says, when I say “Papa,” is “little one” or he says “Töchterlein,” and when I take his hand, his hand shuts round my hand like it does, and he holds my hand almost too tight sometimes and he even calls me daughter.

Then Ida was there, she said, “What?” I saw her stand in the door, she said “How? Where?” She went away. She had her hair up, she pins it round her head, she takes it down in front of the little mirror in her room and makes two long plaits of it, but she hadn’t taken it down; I might have thought she was in bed, but I had not really thought about her; now she was there. She went away. The door to the wing opened and Eric and Mr. Evans were there; now I saw why Gilbert had gone away, he had gone to get Eric and Mr. Evans. Ida came back, she had more towels, she pushed me away, she said, “Run away, run away,” what did she mean? She had a bowl, it was one of the big china bowls, there are a lot of them and they all fit in together; she had water in the bowl but we had done all that; Harold still held the basin. She said, “Put it down. I’ll see to your father,” as if he were coming in for his evening coffee, or something; she pushed in front, I could not see Papa. Eric and Mr. Evans stood there in the way.

Now I stood there trying to get round to Papa, but they said, “It’s all right.”

Mr. Evans said, “You children run along”; where were we to run to? Now Mama was standing in the doorway. There was Papa in the chair, Ida, Eric and Mr. Evans and Gilbert and Harold and me, and Mama in the doorway. She said, “Charles.” That is all she said.

She had on a lace scarf or a lace shawl over her head, like she wears when she doesn’t wear a hat, when she goes out at night. It was black lace over her head like the lady on the inside lid of the cigar box that Papa gave me. He saved two boxes and gave them together; mine had the lady with the shawl like Mama had and Gilbert had a man in a big hat with a bullfight on the little pictures round the edge, on the inside of his tobacco box.

They were cigar boxes, there was writing in Spanish, he said it was from Cuba.

Now he saved the two boxes and gave Gilbert the one with the man and me the one with the lady. Maybe Harold was too small for a box. I never, till now, wondered what Harold had, but maybe he was too small. This was in the old house, we cut out pictures for valentines and kept them in the boxes, then we kept firecrackers in the boxes. He always gave us his boxes. Now I must have remembered the box because of the lady with the lace over her head, and the little pictures were of red and white flowers and there was a gold edge around the whole picture on the inside lid, like a valentine. It was like that.

He smoked a cigar after dinner sometimes, or when professors came to talk, but he liked his pipe. The bowl with the tobacco was on the top of the chest of drawers that ran along the wall next to his table. He had them made for his study, before we came here. He let us look over the blueprints with the architect, who came from Philadelphia with the blueprints for the new house, and he would take his pen and make a little mark here, a door here or a cupboard under the stairs. This was that house.

We had watched him draw a square for the extra door in the hall that led out to the field that was now the orchard, since the peach trees were planted. We had seen the blueprint for this room, the double window that looked out on the orchard, the bookshelves built in for his books and nautical almanacs that were on the other side of the table; there was the sofa where he lay down in the afternoons, sometimes when he had been working at night. There was the door where Mama was standing with the lace over her head, there was the wing door that had opened a crack when Gilbert slid in first, that had opened wide when Mr. Evans and Eric walked in.