The Gift: Novel

by Hilda Doolittle

  It was waiting and waiting and every day saying, “Have they sent us a letter?” And the lady who was the mother of Fritzie said, “Maybe your father and mother sent you here to get rid of you, but I don’t want you, you needn’t think I want you”; I saw her count green dollar bills with Ida. And I thought, that is the money that Papa gave for us to go to the farm and Ida was counting two heaps of the money and they each had a heap and maybe it was true, maybe they had gone to the World’s Fair and would never come back, but I was afraid to ask Cousin Clarence because the lady smiled so much and talked with him, and seemed kind and said she was so glad to have us and it was a pity but the farm he had chosen for us was too far away and anyhow old Mrs. Apfelholzer was not anxious to have the children; she said, “She couldn’t have them,” and that was a lie.

  This grown lady told a lie, because the old lady said she wanted us to help her with the hens.

  Ida didn’t seem like she was and when we were going home at last, she said, “Tell your mother you had a good time, will you,” and she gave me a quarter.

  I did not know what to do, but when Gilbert started saying he had caught frogs with Fritzie, I didn’t say anything. It is a dreadful thing if your mother and father go to the World’s Fair and you cannot write a letter and you cannot even read a letter if it comes and even if it comes and you might be able to steal it and take it to Cousin Clarence to read. The lady who was the mother of Fritzie got the letters first and we could only just read our names on the envelope but she kept the letters.

  No, I did not really think of all this, when I saw the picture of the apple orchard and the cow, but that funny thing happened that sometimes happens, when there is a hole in the floor or a stone on a walk will open and I will step in and fall down and then I stop running and walk around the stone.

  It is something that happens. I never tell anyone about it, for I really do not know what it is about, but it seemed to be there all the time that summer when we were at that hot little brick house, with a horrid flower called a fuchsia that she said “Don’t step on” all the time, and none of our toys and books because we were going to a farm where there was a barn and pigs and cows and hens and where we could live like farmer’s children and where they said we could get eggs.

  Cousin Clarence had written Mama about it and then this lady said old Mrs. Apfelholzer didn’t want us and that was a story; it was a grown person who was Ida’s cousin, telling a lie.

  Cousin Clarence did not know she was telling a lie and he took Harold and me to a nice place to sit on their porch and they gave us lemonade in blue glasses and they gave us apples and they said, “I wish you were staying here with us,” but we had to go back to the hot little house and the lady said, “Well don’t eat it then,” when I did not like the sausage and pickles and she just took my plate away and she said to Ida, “That will learn her.”

  So I didn’t have any lunch and I didn’t tell Cousin Clarence.

  Eric turned the pages and he said, “You’ve almost painted all this book, haven’t you?”

  He turned the pages back again quickly and bits of the different edges of the pictures were there, and I saw a red slice of paint or a blue, or green of the grass before the big house that looked like the Ashurst’s house, where there were bees in the round bed of heliotrope.

  The pieces of color did not fit together and seemed to go very fast, like turning that kaleidoscope, it was called, that we took apart and it was little pieces of colored glass and we could not put it together again. It was like that old round box that was at Aunt Millie’s house, that Mama had played with when she was a little girl. You put in a strip of long colored pictures, the pictures were like the different pictures of a long funny picture in Puck or Judge, but they were all in one long piece and were not funny; they were a girl rolling a hoop or a boy jumping a pony over a fence or a lady, like our circus-page in this book, jumping through a hoop in the same kind of clothes, or a man walking with a bear until it stood up on its hind legs.

  The colors were separate and bright like the colors in this book, so now when Eric turned over the pages so quickly, it was like lying on the floor with the round box of the gyroscope going round and round. It made you dizzy after a while; you looked through little slats that were just one large slat when the box went fast. Now that was like this.

  I held on to the table edge because the box was going so fast and I remembered only a bit of color, the pink and ugly red of the fuchsia flowers that were so ugly and the blue glasses that they gave us and the lemonade, a different color in the glass, and then the old lady, like a good old witch with a broom, who said, “But I always wanted children to hunt my eggs, I need children on this farm,” and a picture of an old witch with Hansel and Gretel, because really old Mrs. Apfelholzer (her name was) could not have been a bad old woman in a dirty house like they said, but it was Ida’s cousin who was bad and divided the money up with Ida.

  I saw the green of the dollar bills as they counted them out like counting cards, for there were three of us and we were to be at that farm while they were at the World’s Fair in Chicago, and this was the money for it.

  I saw the soap bubble in the tree out of the bathroom window, but that was a whole soap bubble like a balloon made of glass, like the glass mountain the princess climbed, but it was with nails that she climbed up.

  I saw the face of the man on the stairs and the way his beard was curly like my doll’s hair, and Mama said if Papa cut off his beard she would leave him and everybody laughed; I would not leave Papa if he cut off his beard.

  Eric has no beard.

  Even the table goes round like the gyroscope on the floor of Aunt Millie’s conservatory that isn’t a conservatory anymore, but she keeps her old things there and boxes on the shelves where there used to be flowerpots.

  Aunt Jennie gave me a Chinese lily that you plant in a bowl with pebbles.

  The bowl Aunt Jennie gave me was blue and shiny, the same kind of shine that the green saucer has that Eric puts his ash in.

  Eric puts his ash in the saucer, he throws the end of the cigarette down and it smokes beside the matchstick.

  The ash curls up and I go on looking at the smoke of the cigarette.

  Eric shuts the book.

  Gilbert is standing by the piano, looking at Papa’s wallet.

  The table is round like a big wheel.

  There was that man in the milk cart who asked me if I wanted a ride, coming up the Black Horse Hill, home from school, and I said “Yes,” and I climbed in.

  The horse was pulling at the milk cart, going up the hill, and I was thinking it was fun to have a ride in the milk cart. They drove the carts in, early, to the market on Market Street in Philadelphia, and they came home and slept while the horse climbed Black Horse Hill. The milk cans rattled in the back of a cart, and the horse’s back came straight when we came to the top of the hill. There was Fetters’ Farm at the top of the hill and the switch where the cars met each other; and the cart jerked and the horse began to run.

  I looked at the man and I saw he was … he had … and he said … but I said, “I get out here, I live here,” but I did not live at the Fetters’ Farm.

  I thought he might not stop the horse, so I slid out and I jumped over the wheel that was going fast and I stood by the switch and I saw Mr. Fetters was driving some cows out of their front field and Mrs. Fetters was shelling peas on the porch.

  I could pretend to go in at the Fetters’ gate, if the man looked to see where I was going, but he did not stop. I saw the back of the cart and the milk tins that rattled and I crept under the fence, so as to get out of the road, and went home through the field, by the side of the road.

  The wheel was as big as this table and this table was going round but maybe that was the gyroscope or the soap bubble that I blew out of the window. Once I thought if I had three wishes, like they have in fairy tales, I would wish for a soap bubble to stay as it was with the different rainbows in it and floating over the pear tree,
like a balloon, but in my wish it would never break. That was one of my wishes.

  Now I do not know what I would wish, except that the table would not go round like that wheel when I jumped and that Eric would take us to a hut in the woods and that we would have Saint Nicholas every week instead of only once a month.

  Gilbert had asked me where was Saint Nicholas, but I did not answer and maybe he was looking for it on the piles of music and magazines on the piano.

  Mr. Evans came in; he had Papa’s watch in his hand, he said, “I found the Professor’s watch and there’s someone turning in the drive, I think it’s the doctor.”

  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.

  MORNING STAR

  “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 u
nited brotherhood, a Unitas Fratrum of the whole world.

  This had not worked out, but it might have worked out and it would work out, I had thought, if I could follow the clue through the labyrinth of associated memories. But I only remembered that I had had this power, the power had gone now; I was a middle-aged woman, shattered by fears of tension and terror, and now I sat in a chair and only remembered that I had been caught up in a vision of power and of peace and I had remembered my grandmother’s words exactly.

  She had called me Agnes, and she had called me Lucy.

  I was Lucy, I was that Lux or Light, but now the light had gone out. There was not even a small candle, although the lamp on the table by my elbow was burning with a soft glow. In the old days, I had kept a bag ready, packed with a few precious possessions, but now I had no shoes on, only a worn pair of bedroom slippers and I had left my handkerchief pushed down between the arm and the padded seat of the chair in the other room, and I couldn’t go on this way. I must, if possible, get through this, but I could not go on with it, and I could not achieve the super-human task of bringing back what had been lost, so the Promise might be redeemed and the Gift restored. The Gift was a Gift of Vision, it was the Gift of Wisdom, the Gift of the Holy Spirit, the Sanctus Spiritus; actually, it was the same Spirit that Paxnous’ people worshipped, with somewhat the same ritual as that of the initiates of Wunden Eiland.