Hilda Doolittle - The Gift

Mr. Evans put down the watch by the wallet that Gilbert had put down again on the piano. Gilbert took up the watch, “It’s stopped,” he said, “the glass is broken and it’s stopped.”

Eric took Papa’s watch and shook it, Mr. Evans said, “It stopped at quarter past nine, it must have been when—”

There was the crunch of wheels on the drive and Gilbert went to the door.

Mr. Evans said, “But I thought you children were in bed.”

The table stopped going round.

“What is concussion, Mr. Evans?” I said.

“What is concussion, Mr. Evans?” I said. But I could not hear what he said because there was a roar, and then the floor sank.

It was sinking and I was sinking with it, and this was ironical and strange after all we had been through. Now it was ironical and bitter-strange because this was January 17, 1943, and we had done all that. The papers would be burnt, that is what Mamalie had said, she had said the papers would be burnt or she would be burnt, and now it all came back again, now I would be burnt and it did not matter what happened any more, only I did not want to be burnt.

I would sink down and down and all the terrors that I had so carefully held in leash during the great fires and the terrible bombing of London would now break loose, because we hadn’t had any big raids for some time and we had forgotten how to act.

We had not quite forgotten, because Bryher had come out of her room and switched off her light and we carefully shut all the doors. I counted the doors. “There are seven doors,” I said, although of course we knew this. The hall is narrow, opening from the front door. “I think I’ll open the front door,” I said, but Bryher said, “No.” She sat down on one of the hall chairs and we switched on the small table-lamp and I said, “I think I’ll open the front door.”

Now I thought, would it be better to dash out through the kitchen to the back door to the fire escape or would it be better to go out of the front door and rush down the five flights of stairs? There is the black-and-fawn-striped carpet in the outer hall and blacked-out windows along the stairs and a muffled blue-shaded light burning on each floor. The lift is useless in a raid, as the electricity may be cut off at any moment. “And there you will be, madame,” said the hall porter after one of the big fires, “stuck in the lift and maybe burnt to death and no one could get at you.”

The noise was so terrible now that I could not hear what Bryher was saying, but she was saying something. She got up from her chair and took a few steps across the red and grey patterned rug and she stood by my chair. I did not move. The chair would go down too, as if we were both in a lift, an elevator, and we would keep on going down and down. But now the floor was level and I was not going down.

She was not shouting at me but she was speaking carefully. I could see from her face that she was afraid that I was afraid. I was afraid. She said it again, and now I heard her words though the noise of little bricks went on; the bricks went on rolling along and knocking against one another and there was now a terrible quiet that was worse than the roar of the guns. “It’s nothing,” she said, “it’s just practice.” I knew it was not practice.

I knew the wall outside (not our wall) had fallen. “At first, I thought it was our own wall,” I said, “it’s because it’s so very near. I thought it was our own wall.” She said, “No, it’s not a wall.” She did not shout but her face, like a mask, repeated words. I saw the shape of the words and the way she was keeping her face quiet. Then I heard the words. “It’s our new gun,” she said.

The bricks were rolling along and now it was quiet but suddenly there was the same terrific roar, and the terrific explosion and the walls shook but the doors did not fly open, pushed outward by the repercussion of the blast as they had done sometimes. So it was not so near or it was nearer; anyhow what she said went with it and I had lost my trick of getting out, of being out of it.

I had learned a trick, lying on my bed, through the closed door, not ten feet away from my right elbow. It had been, I had felt, like a ship; I was snug and comfortable in my bunk, my bed was like a bunk pushed against the wall, in the corner with the outer wall at my head. Then the roar of the wings and the slight trembling of the walls were like the vibration set up in a great ocean liner, and I was on a great ocean liner and the ship might or might not go down. And then there would come that moment when I had left myself lying secure and it did not matter what happened to the frozen image of myself lying on the bed, because there was a stronger image of myself; at least I did not see myself, but I was myself, whether with attributes of pure abstraction or of days and in places that had been the surroundings of my childhood, or whether as sometimes, it seemed, in one of the vast cathedrals of Italy or in a small beehive that was a tiny Byzantine church outside Athens or was actually the beehive tomb of the prehistoric King Agamemnon outside Mycenae, or whether it was a dome of a Mohammedan tomb on the sands of Egypt that rose familiar beyond the gigantic columns of the temples, or whether it was … whatever it was, now all the accumulated wealth of being and impression would go down with the ship that was rising and falling.

But it was only my own chair and I never had screamed, I never had fainted, why was Bryher still standing there? She looks at me. Her face is as carved and cold as a Chinese mask, but white, not yellow, not brown or gold. There should be bronze faces and brown and gold faces, there should be the meeting — what was it that Mamalie had tried to tell me?

Now Mamalie was speaking and there was a rattle of the curtain rings as the curtains blew a little inward. It wasn’t a thunderstorm, no, it was a star that was going to fall on the house. It was a shooting star that was going to fall on the house and burn us all up and burn us all to death. Bryher is looking at me; she does not know why I am able to sit here. I am sitting here because there is a star, Mamalie told me about it. There was a promise and there was a gift, but the promise it seems was broken and the gift it seems was lost. That is why, now at this minute, there is the roar outside that will, perhaps this time, shatter my head, shatter my brain, and all the little boxes that have been all the rooms I have lived in, have gone in and out of, will fall … fall … she need not tell me again. Why does she tell me over and over, if it’s true, that the sound of the bricks falling is the sound of our own guns?

“It’s the sound of our own guns,” she says again.

“All right,” I say, “it’s all right.”

I saw, I understood … a memory of my grandmother’s or her grandmother’s — a lost parchment, terror that led back finally to the savages, burning and poisonous arrows.

This, I could remember, letting pictures steadily and stealthily flow past and through me. When the terror was at its height, in the other room, I could let images and pictures flow through me, and I could understand Anna von Pahlen who had been the inspirer of the meetings at Wunden Eiland when the unbaptized King of the Shawanese gave his beloved and only wife to the Brotherhood; I saw it all clearly.

I remembered how my mind, after a certain pause of tension and terror, had switched, as it were, into another dimension where everything was clear, where people moved in the costumes of their period, thought back to their old oppressions in Europe and planned a secret powerful community that would bring the ancient secrets of Europe and the ancient secrets of America into a single union of power and spirit, a united brotherhood, a Unitas Fratrum of the whole world.