Hermione Read online

  Gambler’s luck was with Her. She had the gambler’s instinct but it was only at that moment that she recognized it. She was not made for any of these groups, even the slightly meretricious sympathy of Jessie couldn’t draw her into another cycle of one-step-removed America which was not just what she wanted. Gambler’s luck pertained to this obvious situation. Keep in with this set, Nellie, Jessie, the others who merged in and through the eternal faculty ladies and their related groups here and abroad, Rome, Oxford, Munich. Keep in or keep out. Accept values as all these people see them or accept value in one gem, one strip or stripe of colour, accept red as you get it, in coral or blue as you get it, perfect star sapphires in eye-sockets.

  The gambler’s instinct, however, was not at the moment so transcribed in consciousness. It was a premonition rather than a recogniton. Her Gart recognised a sort of prickling across cheekbones, which caused no rise of colour, but if anything an intensification of a somewhat congenital pallor. Hermione did not see the girl that Nellie had asked her to see. She did not actually hear the words she uttered. She did not apprehend her, she possibly perceived her. She went on talking, not knowing what she said, she seemed to explain herself not knowing why she did it.

  “I failed,” she flung it out again, “utterly.” Would “I failed utterly” keep people from repeating as they would keep on, Tibetan prayer wheel, “What are you going to do, what are you going to do, what are you going to do now?” What was “now” and what was “doing” and what was “what” precisely? Words went round, had odd ways of tacking off, billowing out, full sail. If she could have gone to Point Pleasant, listened to the sea, everything would come right. Point Pleasant with Minnie wouldn’t be Point Pleasant. Escape through barriers . . . if she could see clear for one week, for one day. NOW was raging down on her like a great lumbering bullock, something dangerously half-formed, depending on its intuition, halfformed, half-baked. Nellie’s sister would keep on insisting “You’d better join our little group in Paris.” Nellie’s sister had a blatant assumption of finality, something crude and forthright, she didn’t presume. Nellie was so obviously a climber.

  “Climber?” “I said ‘Climb,’” (I didn’t know I had said anything) “I will have to climb out of my own predicament.”

  VI

  one

  Something beat about Her but she could not comprehend it. Something conforming to a giant night-moth, something Bertrand had said about “violet rays in line with mathematics.” Something formulated, then uncurled its formal moth-wings, so that the room was a room with set chairs and tables, to be moved about and rearranged like dollhouse furniture.

  The people in the room were assorted, out of different boxes, yet all holding to some pattern, they had the same trademark of nonentity. All people, Her Gart realized (as the thing whirred like a dynamo and yet was delicate and would evade one like the underbelly of a night-moth) have the same sort of trademark. Her Gart realized, while this went on, what Bertrand had meant saying, “violet rays in line with mathematics.” The thing whirrrred like a bird on its way into bird oblivion, it was in line with something . . .

  Nellie went on talking. The sister of Nellie propounded a sort of mild “French” joke which people pretended to get the point of. From the top of the piano, the pewter plate still gave back its pewter highlight and painted pewter shadow. Facing eyes that come “in line with mathematics,” Hermione apprehended, but did not grasp, a thing that whirred like a bird up, up into a forest of metallic leaves and a forest of leaves that waved like seaweed under water. She saw the girl who was “fey with the same sort of wildness,” then she came to, like coming out of ether. Someone was saying, “Oh, yes, Diana of the Crossways” and with the automatic click-click that had gone to so much of the outer mechanism of the thing called Her Gart, a voice answered, “No . . . it was Richard Feverel.”

  It was Her Gart saying “Richard Feverel.” Something as unrelated to a giant moth-wing as a saltcellar is to a petunia took up that strand; she contributed her counters to the play of conversation with as good a grace as any. Yet all the time something nonrelated caused a queer sort of blurring-out of image. She couldn’t think and talk and see and be, all at the same instant. Hardly knowing that she WAS, she let go more than one half of Her. She returned to a room where people sat on chairs (the sort that come with the dollhouse furniture) and she repeated with as good a grace as any, “Richard Feverel.”

  Hermione realized that she was still sitting before a table whose tray cloth Aunt Jessie had especially bought in Florence. Hermione focussed to that edge of cloth as her eyes in summer woods had managed to formulate one leaf, out of all gelatinous-green, so here she endeavoured to find a flaw or tom thread in this work. She found one peculiar knotted inch of fringe-end. Her fingers clawed the thing straight. Then she dragged her eyes off the tablecloth, dragged eyes up convex surface of a teacup, dragged eyes up into space that ran on and on across the room behind the back of the creature that had spoken. Hermione forced eyes back till they met eyes . . . “Oh, Meredith! Do you read him?”

  two

  One conversation of all the conversations may retain significance; by one leaf you may judge the contour of a great tree, whether it be oak, or beech or chestnut. One conversation can give clue to the whole insistencies of a forest; analyse it and you will find whether the tract of oak wood may or may not, at some specific later date, be blighted. Analyse pulp substance of green gelatinous wood-leaf and you will find worlds revolving and a continent of armies, massed to slide along ridges of leaf-vein or to swarm in battalions into another exact triangle of wood fibre. Here a patch of brown may show the invidious canker or here some sodden bubble under the living texture may foretell a waterlogged anaemia. One conversation in a sodden jungle (her yet unformulated consciousness and her consciousness of America) gave her a clue to a new race and a new revaluation of the forest. The jungle must be weeded out surely . . . but the soil was ripe for a new sort of forestation.

  The real sort of grace of God that was there was not this febrile garden-growth from England. George Meredith was a somewhat waterlogged and pollared British by-product, an offshoot of an insular and specialized race consciousness. George Meredith set a sort of standard for them and by that standard they must repudiate the forest. For how could they live then in that uncharted wilderness? The mind must have its landmarks. Theirs were false ones.

  Nevertheless they clung to the lifebuoy, the sort of thing that might possibly mean (they didn’t know it didn’t) England. It did not mean that they wanted to be English, it did not even mean that their would-be standardization at all approximated the thing that Nellie stood for, with her Anglo-shabby air of trite repudiation. We are American, therefore we read Wilkie Collins and George Meredith, but rest assured, these in our lighter moments. Down and down and further, there were other kinships. The girl with the wild eyes that were the only sane eyes (possibly except Bertrand’s) that Hermione had yet seen, said, “What about Dostoevski?”

  Dostoevski rang no bell. A conversation that should have slipped on oiled grooves, inevitably to Turgenev did no such suave thing. A voice somewhere (Nellie’s) should have taken up that odd name, that word that sends out a fringe, somewhat untidy aura, the very contour of a forest, but no Nellie chirped up, “Our Dostoevski is Walt Whitman and our Turgenev is Poe.” America had its Dostoevski, its Poe, already its Dionysian and Apollonian were specified but Nellie and Jessie and Hermione didn’t know that. The conversation jibbed at Dostoevski as a little summer sailboat at a log flung across a tide river. They skimmed the edge of their continent, how could they have done other? Dostoevski was a shaggy word, it did not suit them. They came back to Meredith. A high pitched and intense vibration, the married sister this time, insisted that they do so. “What was it you said about the Diana of the Crossways, Miss Gart?”

  Her Gart, now definitely included in that resurrection-of-the-dead conversation, answered, exact automaton, “I said I liked Diana but I said I liked Geo
rge Meredith with reservations.” “In what sense exactly, reservation?” Nellie Thorpe had neatly clicked her counter. “I mean a friend of mine—a man I know—George (he is George too) Lowndes, have you heard of him? he writes; George Lowndes says Meredith shows in every other syllable that his father was a tailor.” “Tailor? Does he? I mean was his father in that sense a tailor?” “Well, you know what I mean. I mean I don’t exactly know what I do mean. But it’s wordy. I mean, it’s words and words—not like Henry James.”

  “Oh James—who reads him?” One I love, two I love, three I love. Do you see me? No. I do not see you. Play hide and seek behind Henry James and Meredith. “I mean, Nellie at Bryn Mawr wrote brilliantly about him.” Nellie had written brilliantly about Henry James, done a thesis, taken a degree.

  Degree, degree, degree . . . Hermione went up like the mercury in the thermometer. Degrees, degrees . . . she would burst out of the top of herself like the mercury in the thermometer. Mercury in the thermometer rises, rises . . . What does it feel like when it can’t rise any higher and is there, pulsing, beating to express degrees beyond the degrees marked carefully in fine spiderweb of silver on the glass tube? Mercury that felt expression . . . beating, pulsing; I am feeling degrees of things for which there is no measure. “It is hot. Terribly.”

  “But you with that lovely place in the country—” “Yes, you with that lovely place in the country—” “—can’t feel the heat—” “—as we do.” Everything people say rhymes in rhythms, you do, do—you, do re mi fa so la si do. “Did you never take up music?” Someone else was talking to someone else about taking something as they said “up.” They were always taking things up or why didn’t you take things up, this up or this up or this up. Life was going on in circles, people placed like teacups in clusters, changing molecule clusters because it was so hot and someone said, “Is the dust worse or is the heat worse” and someone said, “But there is no dust in your street, Miss Thorpe.” This street is so secluded and someone said “They have tarred the whole front of Chestnut Street; Philadelphia is shocking in the summer. Now I have a friend in India”—impressive pause—“in India. That is she is English, what they call Anglo-Indian—” impressive pause—“she says it is far, far more repellently hot in Philadelphia than in India.” “Oh but in India,” a voice said, “there are snakes, there are vipers and scorpions” and then someone went on dramatically about someone whom they knew who had wintered (impressive) at Luxor, up the Nile and the snakes—something about someone calling snakes from little walls and sand caves and porches out of temples with a reed pipe.

  three

  Precinematographic conscience didn’t help Her. Later conscience would have. She would later have seen form superimposed on thought and thought making its spirals in a manner not wholly related to matter but pertaining to it and the peony petals magnified out of proportion and the people in the room shrunk to tiny insects while the teacups again would have magnified into hemispheres. This teacup would have fitted that teacup, each of the two nonentities talking to its nonentity, had mind fitted like a teacup. Nellie and the James subject, Jessie and the second of the Thwaight twins were equally nonimportant yet matched in a nonimportant manner. The married sister was removing a spot of sticky mille-feuille from her starched jabot, and at the moment talked to no one. Jessie and Nellie and the married sister had kept some six or eight nonrelated sets of people talking, each self-considered intrinsically significant, when all the time, they were minute and flyspeck size and the peony petal had lifted, spread surface over all.

  She saw the room as a room, the people as people, the teacups as small cups placed upon small matched saucers, the mille-feuille plate as a plate with pattern round the edge, the piano as a piano, no more, no less, the girl facing Her as a girl facing Her with rather staring slightly rude eyes and an irreverent manner. Her Gart saw the girl as that, all the time realizing with an instinct that was at the time submerged, that she had seized on her pearl-of-price thought this time; as it happened, it was a pair of exactly matched star sapphires.

  four

  “Who is George?” “George—I don’t know.” “You said he wrote or knew people who wrote or something.” “Oh, he knows people who write. He writes.” “What does he write?” “He writes about—about Castile, I don’t know. He wrote a sort of treatise on something between Castile and Cadiz. I mean he knows languages.” “Does he travel?” “George? He is—I mean he hardly ever doesn’t.” “Where does he go?” “Oh—he went to Algiers, I have a photograph of George in a fez.” “It doesn’t sound like George.” “No—it isn’t. George isn’t the least bit like that. It doesn’t suit him.” “What then is George like?” “Oh, I don’t know—rather like Aucassin and Nicolette. I mean he once said I was.” “Like—” “One or the other. Aucassin, you know, and Nicolette, you know.” “I don’t know.” “Well—that sort of thing. He got me the copy from the Portland Maine shop, you know that shop.” “Yes, I know. What else do you read?” “Read? Oh I read Ibsen, Maeterlinck, all of Bernard Shaw.” “Do you like Maeterlinck?” “The Bee—yes, George said it was nature faking.” “Did you think it was nature faking?” “A little—it didn’t quite ring true. But then the French is easy.” “Do you read much French?” “No, George bought me—a set of—I mean Dante’s Fiori or I mean Saint Francis and the Beata Beatrice. I don’t care for the Paradiso.” “Queer, now I like the Paradiso.”

  “Your mind seems to have a definite octopus quality. Do you assimilate anything?” “Assimilate?” Her Gart came to as from an anesthetic. Just what had she been saying? She seemed to have answered this odd girl, word for word, click, snap and click, the exact requisite counter, the same game but involving something very different from the casual afterdinner sort of auction-whist her words meant with these others. Her words now were a gambler’s heritage, heady things, they would win for her, they would lose for her. Now as she realized that these very words must stand forever, her counters win or lose, she realized there was a general flutter as of some new people coming and of some of the rest going and Nellie had pounced down on them.

  Her cheekbones felt as if they were tinted with the most hectic point of the Indian paintbrush; colour seemed to have drawn a cycle across a world, to have marked out a zone, a continent. There was a zone she had not explored. She could use the same counter, the same sort of password that she used with all these people, but she had passed out in a twinkling of an eye into another forest. This forest was reality. There, the very speaking of the words, conjured up proper answering sigil, house and barn and terrace and castle and river and little plum tree. A whole world was open. She looked in through a wide doorway.

  Nellie said, “Now you two, you mustn’t monopolise each other any longer. Come, Her Gart, there’s Adelaide Noyes who terribly wants to meet you.”

  VII

  one

  She wanted George as a child wants a doll, whose other dolls are broken. She wanted George as a little girl wants to put her hair up or to wear long skirts. She wanted George with some uncorrelated sector of Her Gart, she wanted George to correlate for her, life here, there. She wanted George to define and to make definable a mirage, a reflection of some lost incarnation, a wood maniac, a tree demon, a neuropathic dendrophil.

  She wanted George to say, “God, you must give up this sort of putrid megalomania, get out of this place.” She knew sooner or later George would begin his prodding and sooner or later, she must make up her mind. She wanted George to make the thing an integral, herself integrity. She wanted George to make one of his drastic statements that would dynamite her world away for her. She wanted this, but even as she wanted it she let herself sink further, further, she saw that her two hands reached toward George like the hands of a drowned girl.

  She knew she was not drowned. Where others would drown—lost, suffocated in this element—she knew that she lived. She had no complete right yet to this element, hands struggled to be pulled out. White hands waved above the water like sea sp
ume or inland-growing pond flowers . . . she wanted George to pull her out, she wanted George to push her in, let Her be drowned utterly.

  George was the only young man who had ever kissed Her. George was the only person who had called her a “Greek goddess.” George, to be exact, had said ruminatively on more than one occasion, “You never manage to look decently like other people. You look like a Greek goddess or a coal scuttle.” George said she looked like a coal scuttle. He also said she looked like a Greek goddess. There was that about George, he wanted to incarnate Her, knew enough to know that this was not Her. There was just a chance that George might manage to draw her out half-drowned, a coal scuttle, or push Her back, drowned, a goddess. Regarding him, very hot on the woodpath, Hermione became almost collegiate of the period, almost a person with hair up and with long skirts. Her became almost Hermione as she looked at George with his collar torn open at the throat, turned-back Byronic collar, clean shirt, hot underarms in great symmetrical patches. There were clean wet patches under the arms of George, his coat was left somewhere. “Where did you leave your coat, George?” “I’ve forgotten, Bellissima. Now is this the forest of Arden?”

  George said, “Now is this the forest of Arden?” She looked at George; pedantically, she replied, “My little body is a-weary of this great world.” She swerved, she would yet dramatize herself, she turned as with stage gesture toward stage trees. But Orlando couldn’t save Her, Rosalind couldn’t save Her. The trees were not forest of Arden, they were not so far incarnate, were of another element. Trees swung and fell and rose. Trees barricaded her into herself, Her into Her. I am the word Aum, I am the word Her. Her was received into trees that swung and billowed and swung. Trees formed upright shafts and rose upright into shafts that held crossbeams of trees—George was saying “Crossbeams of trees. A forest’s so damn Gothic.”