“Did you call me, Miss Gart?” “I can’t sleep. Would you mind turning the light up now. Up, up, up. She went upstairs with the telephone book under her arm. I couldn’t find the number.”
“What Miss Gart?” “I thought we said my name’s Hermione.” “Yes, We did, I mean yes Miss Hermione.” “I don’t mean Miss Hermione like Mandy and Tim. Only Mandy and Tim call me Miss. They call me Miss. I am a miss. I have been a Miss. Hit or Miss.” “Yes, Miss—yes, yes, Hermione.” “I mean haven’t I? Now look at me. I mean I had a birthday. The fireweed has a sort of vermillion centre. Some people call it paintbrush. It grows in the swamps with the butterfly weed. Why weed? Lilies of all kinds, the fleur de lys being a sort of lily, a weed. I am Hermione out of Shakespeare.” “Yes, Miss—yes, yes, Hermione.” “You know, I would rather that you pulled your chair up, that you went on sewing. The clock will tick so loudly.” “Yes, yes, Miss—yes, yes, Hermione.” “No. I don’t want anything. I don’t want to take it. No. No. If you Will listen.” “Yes, yes, Miss—Hermione.” “Miss. I am a miss, a miss, a miss. I am as good as a mile. Now don’t you see it’s funny? A miss is as good as a—” “Yes. Yes. I see the thing is very funny.” “I would feel much better if you’d go on sewing.” “I will do, Miss—Hermione.”
“A miss is as good as a mile. Hit or miss. I am as good as a mile. I have missed everything.” “Oh I wouldn’t say that exactly.” “Now there it goes, there it will go, there it will go forever, ting, ting, ting. It crawls its little cricket jerk forward and that is why they put the little old clock upstairs. Up, up, upstairs. And that is why they put the little old clock upstairs. They put the little old clock in the little old potpourri-coloured room upstairs.” “Yes, yes, Hermione.” “It was nobody’s room. It was a study when Bertrand was at school, it was a tiny little storeroom and then mama said the sunlight was all wasted. Mama has the little glass room downstairs.” “Yes, Miss—Hermione.” “I mean the vermillion leaf slashed like starfish purple. Starfish if you leave them on the rocks cook dry. I never left starfish on a rock to cook dry. I scraped them off and made the Stewards angry.” “The—?” “Horrid boys. They were not friends of Bertrand’s. I mean they ran after us, howling and I loathed them. Afterward the people ran and the people ran.” “Yes, Miss Hermione.” “Don’t call me Miss Hermione. I am as good as a mile. George never could love anything quite simply. It ran and ran, made the Xenophon pattern though I don’t know much Greek. The little room upstairs (I said) will be my room. I was going to work and I was going to work and I was going to work. George called them forgotten lyrics of a lost Melic or iambics of a forgotten Melic. I have forgotten. I am the lost iambics of a forgotten Melic. Melos is an island. The Venus de.”
“The—? I admit I don’t quite follow.” “The Venus de Milo is standing in the Louvre now. She is the face of the—that face of—she is the forgotten Melics of a lost iambic. I don’t like the Venus de Milo. But George said taken at a certain angle squinting sideways, she comes up like the moon crescent. She is meant to be seen at the end of corridors, not in these cheap photographs. You know what I mean, nurse. The Venus de Milo . . . it’s not a good thing really. I mean if it were good it would come up better. Like the coloured Tanagra praying boy of . . . but I can’t remember. George said it wasn’t. Lillian said it was. Lillian sent me the purple lilac—that was better.” “Better?” “I mean. Carnations. What do they mean anyway?”
“Germans, I mean, doing things in layers. A top to a thing, a bottom to a thing, things going on and on and on, oneself the Her-part of one holding the whole thing like a pinwheel.” “Fourth of July?” “No. Yes. I mean Uncle Sam, a sort of Carl Gart person is too much for us—too much for us—I mean for us. And who is us? There is a sort of us that holds the Carl Gart Uncle Sam sort of thing together. The whole thing is vibrating, not that, whirring and seething like the heart of a planet before it’s cast out. We’re incandescent and it doesn’t seem fair.” “Fair?” “I mean too much comes to some of us, not enough to all the rest of us. So few of us to do the thinking. I mean so few of us have to be so incandescent. There is me and Fayne for instance—brightness—burning—” “The light on?” “No. Yes. Sit there and go on sewing. I should have had a night nurse. At night I need a nurse. Day time, things stand static. At night I need a night nurse. I need a night at night nurse. You see the thing is inchoate, incontrovertible. There is always, isn’t there, in the heart of a new world that is forming, just that center, that pinpoint of incandescence that holds the thing together? There is a pinpoint of incandescence. George wasn’t.” “George the gentleman who sent you the carnations?” “Understanding but not of it. A sort of three circles beyond; three circles is near when almost everyone else, when almost everything else is some ten or twelve or twenty circles off. You know. Like concentric circles when you throw a stone in. White water lilies are of all kinds, the Her-de-lys being one . . .”
. . . “You see the white thing being broken, the whole world falls to pieces. White lightning scarred that across an irate heaven. Hold on, hold on Her Gart. Hold on, hold on Her Gart. And don’t ask why you are holding on so incandescent. Why don’t I go up like a rocket, a sort of decoration that goes off in sizzles? George would have made me a sort of decoration that goes off in sizzles. Fayne understood this. But Fayne’s incandescence was not conscious. I mean she turned it on and off apparently at random. The thing seething and beating like a dynamo beating in thin air . . . to just nothing, vibrating like the propeller of a boat out of water, attached to nothing, making everything seem useless but herself creating nothing. I thought Fayne would understand, get this. She said I was Hecate, a daemon. So I am. I suppose I am that. Sometimes when gull wings beat across the counterpane, I know she loved me. Take a gull. It’s a lonely creature. It is the incandescence of the water. Cast up with eyes made of agate, onyx, those words if you attack them blatantly mean nothing. She said I was deciduous, but that word is cottony. Mrs. Rabb said, ‘You mean cotton-y?’ Cotton is most words; frizzle, sizzle those thoughts that go up like newspapers in a bonfire. Go on and on, thought going up in wet flap of newspapers in an old lot. Boys running down a little avenue chasing a shabby football . . .”
“. . . so that things unhinged from nowhere. Nowhere was right here. Here was nowhere. Being here one was nowhere, in time and space there was no such thing as anywhere. Upstairs in my little room (we finally called it Hermione’s little workroom) snow beat and great Hokusai waves woke from gigantic cyclones. They rose, for art thou a rose my sister white sister there and a ghost rose is growing in your garden. Her mother said ‘A ghost rose is growing in your garden for if you start laughing that way there is nothing to stop you.’ Laughter. You know. Opens doors. They turn on hinges. There is no use striving against nothing . . . for nothing is nowhere. Fayne said ‘Art thou a ghost my sister white sister there?’ Her hair was done high at the back and whisps never would stay right somehow and we bought a beret; we called it a buret but the stones dropped out (they were only rhinestones) and the thing was trampled underfoot. Two springs later we found the broken buret in the vegetable garden for the mauve sweetpeas and the lavender pois-de-senteur told one one never could cope with weeding out the garden. Plantinum spoils Gart lawn. The grass crept up from the smothered molehill. Stamp on the molehill and the trap had iron spikes. The tiny almost unborn moles had soft down like an unhatched gosling’s . . . my sister there. Remember always that Swinburne being decadent, there’s no use arguing . . .”
“Vermillion slashed across wet windows. That was Virginia creeper. Again there was a burnt ember, a common thing, the heart of Minnie Hurloe. Minnie married Gart. My sister has red hair, yellow or red mixed make a sort of zinnia colour . . . art thou a ghost my sister? Looking in a glass I saw that Hermione looked sideways. The glass fell breaking Hermione. One I love, two I love, three I love. George said ‘art thou a ghost my sister? Narcissa, are you a water lily?’ A red hibiscus smouldered through all the grey and silver. George was
a red hibiscus. His carnations are really scentless. Across the red of red hibiscus-red there burnt this common zinnia . . . mama of course being always summer violets. Mama of course being always winter violets. Mama of course being violets under a glass frame and violets in little pottery jugs and violets placed in corners. Follow a corner to its logical conclusion and you will find mama in a broken flower pot spilling indigo . . . mama had indigo in a paint box. Red, read. Read Over Your Greek Book In Vacation. Red you see, Orange you see, Yellow and Green. Read over your Greek book in vacation makes the rainbow colour. Mama said ‘Read over your Greek book in vacation’ . . .”
‘‘I think you’d better take this, Miss Her.” ‘‘Yes nurse?” “I said I think you’d better take this Miss Her.” “Why nurse?” “You don’t seem to be any too well for talking.” “I wasn’t talking. I was only thinking.” “You don’t seem to be doing yourself any too much good by thinking.” “I wasn’t thinking. Laughter . . . you see opens doors. There is the slightest screendoor between today and last year. Everything goes on with everything. Red, orange, yellow, (read over your) green, blue, indigo (Greek book in) violet. Violets. She was only violets. This is the forest of Pennsylvania. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks. ‘Gosh all hemlocks’ is what George said when he would have been an Uncle Sam. Gosh all hemlocks bearded with moss and with garments green. I had a green sort of chiffon, blue-green, waterfall sort of chiffon. George tearing ripped it. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks and a forest’s so damn Gothic. Twist a forest being damn Gothic into some winter formula. Greece is. White column and white column and white bones bleaching. I lie here, you lie here, they lie here, tell them Oh sailor that I lie here warning him, you, them against the perils of the Cthonian Cyclades. Tell them Oh mariner that I lie here. Beware Oh mariner that you lie here. You lie, I lie, one I lie, two I lie, three I lie. Remembering Marathon. A few people against everything always. A few atoms against everywhere . . .
“I think you’d better take this now, Hermione.” “I can’t see anything. A mosquito broke through the ceiling. His red antennae gnawed me. A train rushed past the window. George said, ‘Don’t, don’t be hysterical.’ How could I be hysterical? A badger’s collar, a sort of fur I wore pricked inwards. A mosquito raked toward a dank arena. George danced horribly. The only thing that saved it was a black hat. Hide under chiffon darkness the black of a tent that was a black hat drooping downwards. A rose that was a sort of moonflower answered George never could love anything . . . nor any tree . . . I am the word tree, I am AUM exactly. Fayne being me, I was her. Fayne being Her I was Fayne. Fayne being Her was HER so that Her saw Fayne; there was no use trying to hide under a midnight black hat rim for out of the black hat Her saw everything. Her was Fayne, Fayne was Her so that saying to George did you love, one I love, meant nothing. I knew George saw Her, saw George, saw Fayne. Out of nothing triangles shaped like Buster Brown being hit on the head sidestepping. He saw stars triangles. I saw triangles stars and the beat, beat that was the in-growl, that was the out-growl of Atlantic breakers. The flower called paintbrush weed made deep scars across the lips of George Lowndes. He sat on the couch, his lips were a paintbrush weed colour across New Jersey meadows. Hibiscus flowering in a salt marsh. Take the canoe up and take the canoe up for Minnie never could understand a canoe wasn’t a tugboat. Gulls sweep and hoot . . . Hermione is a gull’s name, Fayne said and you have the eyes that made Poppaea furious. Dealing with terms of antiquity became a sort of ritual. It was all out of reality. I mean reality was out of it precisely. The very centre of spark of the divinity was in a Greek boy praying . . . which art in Heaven . . . which had no side nor edge nor top nor any end whatever. Which went on for some time. Then crowds filled vacancy. People kept on coming . . . everybody said Oh this, Oh that and did you make Poppaea furious? Of course I did do. She was furious. She came out, sidled across the lawn in floppy rubbers, sidled across the tiles before the outer gateway and sidled like some broken image into our house. She sat in the hall under Pius Wood and harangued everybody. We had taken, we had seduced her daughter. Art thou a ghost my sister? I had finally to range myself with everyone, with mama more exactly for the things she said were vibrous. Vicious is what the things she said were. Vibrant vicissitudes but she needn’t do it. We broke everything having the screendoor mended.”
“Take this now, Miss Her—Hermione.”
three
“I suppose this you’ve given me is a replica of something out of antiquity.” “You seem quieter.” “I am much quieter.” “If you slept for only a little while, Hermione, you’d feel much better.” “If I sleep now, Amy, I will sleep forever.” “No. Miss Gart. The crisis passed last night.” “I don’t mean sleep in that sense. I don’t mean to sleep, to die, to dream, ah there’s the rub. I don’t mean any meandering really. I see clearly.” “I said you looked much better.” “If you open the window ever so little, just enough so that I may hear the sun rise.” “Hear?” “That odd infallible sliding-like-crystal air on water that means day’s left dawn for morning.”
“That’s the sort of thing I mean, a poem exactly. George said you are a poem though your poem’s naught. Browning. I skipped the lawyers in The Ring and the Book. But somewhere not here, somewhere else, exactly sensed, exactly seen, Fayne was. I mean this thing you’ve given me, is like white lilac across my head and everything is exactly right. The radiator in the corner and its drip drip winter nights and sometimes the little hard shriek of a whistle it gives as the steam comes up toward morning. The light cuts a triangle on your stiff apron and you are encased in your apron, perfectly right, encased in a sort of hollow pillar, exactly seen there. You are white in a pillar and I should like, now that this white lilac has etherealized my senses, to do something.”
“You might yet take up nursing.” “Something. Something. My grandmother, it appears, left money for my trousseau. I could use it for nursing. People say my hands help. Vibrant, something comes out through my fingers. Fayne said hypnos, she murmured hypnos. That sleep and that forgetting may be, is part and parcel of reality.”
“Really you’d better lie now flat, Hermione.”
“I don’t want to, nurse, this time. I want to sit here sensing this moment that is dawn and morning. A moment and an infinitesimal fraction of a moment and dawn slides into morning like starlight into water. There is a quivering, a. slightest infinitesimal shivering. The thing that was is not.”
She heard (sensing moments) realities, intentions, the footstep that trod silent and fateful toward the open window. She heard by that fraction of a second that separates sleep from waking, the window closing and she knew in that fraction of a second that divides thought from dreaming that the window was now shut fast. She sensed her head, felt it fall heavy, no valiant effort could hold her to her vast desire. A project had formed in her head, a project and a determination. I will tell someone. When I have told someone it will fall from my forehead, heavily and visibly like the very scriptural millstone.
The thing she realized in that moment, that fraction of waiting, was lost. Nothing could bring the thing back, no words could make the thing solid and visible and therefore to be coped with. Solid and visible form was what she had been seeking. I will put this into visible language, Amy Dennon will say this or this. Amy Dennon will say you were harassed, disintegrated and disassociated by preliminary erotic longings, wakened as it were in sleep, sleeping in a dream as in a dream we sleep and in a dream we are awakened, perceiving the dream (in the dream) to be only a dream and in the dream saying, the dream (in a dream) was the wildest of stark foreboding. In a dream, there had been a dream and it was the very valiant avid mind of Her that had started valiantly like some young Lacadaemonian alone across trackless pathways to entrap it.
The dream in the dream should be put into stark language. Birds in traps, enemies in pitfalls, the Athenians in the pit at Syracuse. So valiant, she had stalked across an untracked Laconian desert, hill rose, hill fell, valley and hill. At times she star
ted into some trance, the dream was broken and a heavier state retook it. The trance caught Her and she said correctly and with perfect sophistication “You are not Olympian, Fayne, but Delphic.”
Delphi, Olympus were states as different, as exact and as exactly to be predicted as the words, the reactions of a Frenchman, of an Italian, of a South American. Olympus and Delphi and Dodona were states of mind, exactly to be predicted . . . but there was no one, as if a wire were beating with some message, tick, tick, dot, dot, tick dot and dot tick and she, avid and eager, beat her dot and tick into an empty area.
The dot, tick had found in Fayne Rabb another station, another receiver for messages, transferred to Her from Dodona, from Herculaea. Dot tick, we are here, always and always, we fall, we wallow in mire and filth of war time, we are stressed in unhappy circumstance, human and dark browed, our very sweat remains witness to our fidelity . . . I have been faithful said Her Gart, feeling the moment was about to pass into all moments, the great majority of moments that are dead moments. Her felt her head sink into the cushion, felt; Amy Dennon has given me some sort of dope. She has cheated me of my discovery . . . lilac had made exact pattern, the thing inhaled into her nostrils clarified, simplified so that the triangle of heavy starched surfaces and the corresponding triangle of darkly underlined shadow in the stiff front of Amy Ham-shem’s apron, meant triangle and perfect surface of some Delphic portico . . . It was important to remember the steam and hiss of the radiator that had kept on wakening Her. It was also important to recall the exact swirl of a leaf that made Ionian columns ornate . . . Corinthian. The name, the word would cut its way like a snow plough, ploughing extraneous matter to this side, sweeping it to that side. Through great drifts of impassable obstruction such things cut like ploughshares . . . that was why it was necessary to remember . . . to remember . . . Amy had cheated Her. This was the moment that should have been prolonged to eternity . . . forgotten.
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