Adeline (21 page)

He is quoting again, this time from the mouth of Jinny, her own half self in
The Waves.
But she cannot acknowledge it. How can she now, when this repository of a man has plucked seven words from the middle of her book, as if once again they are written on the palm of his hand, and matched them to five nearly identical words in Tom’s latest poem?

“It is the same thought,” Yeats continues. “Coming from the same vast permeating source. In
The Waves
you have captured this in fictional form. You have given linguistic expression to this oneness, this continuation of universal consciousness and the pulsations of energy that are coursing through it. You have shown that the individual and the collective mind are one and the same. These are indeed the very waves, as you have so aptly called them, for whose existence today’s most innovative physicists are producing the scientific evidence, and which the newest developments in psychic research are beginning to corroborate.”

Bless and damn him. She is on the verge of tears of sheer joy and relief that someone outside her immediate family has understood
The Waves
, and said so. The words, the labor, the pain have not been wasted. God, but he is astounding.

“And did you speak with Tom of Baudelaire’s ‘Correspondances’?” he asks.

“No. Not specifically.”

“You know the poem, of course.”

“Yes, but not by heart. My French is poor.”

“By mind.” He smiles, and she nods gamely.

He begins once more to recite: “
La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers / Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles.
” And then to translate: “Nature is a temple where living pillars / Sometimes let fall confused words.”

She furrows her brow.

“Living pillars,” he says. “The stones are alive! All around us, they are alive. And speaking, what’s more. Speaking!”

She immediately recalls the time, so many years ago, when she and Leonard were courting. She had told him virtually the same thing. You are my rock, she’d said, meaning it in just this way, as a compliment, but he, of course, had taken it as a slight. Then, as she had proceeded to explain that no, no, rocks were as sentient as everything else, he’d looked at her for the first time with that mixture of awe and worry that would cross his face so often over the course of their marriage.

This, for some reason, makes her remember Stephen, and she looks across at him to see how his brain is taking this assault. He is now sitting forward in his chair with his head in his hands, but from between his splayed fingers she can see his goggle eyes swiveling frantically back and forth between Yeats and her, as though he is watching a game of tennis being played between the undead with a ball of fire.

Then, out of nowhere, as if she, too, is energetically in tune, Ottoline appears at Virginia’s shoulder in a flash of trailing purple silks and floral headscarves. She leans in, levers rigid Stephen out of his chair without a word and shuffles him to a chaise across the room, where what appears to be a troop of truant brokers and their daytime tarts are gathered round, sipping champers and talking political rot. Just the thing.

Virginia turns laughing back to Yeats, who is chortling avuncularly at the sight of the overcorrupted ears of a tyro being scuttled on their wobbling pins to safety among the starched shirtfronts.

“I take it you hear voices, Mrs. Woolf?” he resumes, now that they are alone.

The question is as artless as she feels, yet rather lawyerly, too, she thinks, in the way it is phrased. He knows the answer, or he would not have asked. And for her part, she is as liberated as he has been by Ottoline’s rare showing of good sense. Perhaps the two of them are emanating, after all, levitating there on their side of the room, speaking of things that are, like demonic charms, dangerous to say aloud.

“Sometimes,” she says. “Yes.”

“And do you know how?”

This is startling. How? The whats of her illnesses have been far too preoccupying for her to have ever considered the hows. And she gave up hope long ago that any of her doctors would ever know anything of cause, so why should she?

“No,” she says at last, politely but a little disapprovingly, as if she is a teetotaler refusing a stiff drink.

But Yeats is determined.

“It is not mysterious,” he asserts. “Have you listened to a wireless?”

She shrugs. “Of course.”

“And do you know what makes a wireless work?”

Again she makes the flat response. “No.”

And again he urges past it without pause.

“To keep it simple,” he says, “the metals and the carbon in the vacuum tubes inside your wireless are receiving, converting and then amplifying waves that are running through the air. Radio waves, to be exact.”

She shrugs again and says nothing.

“This is clairaudience at work. Do you see?” he insists. “The mechanism of it man-made, already in many houses in the land, as accepted and commonplace as pudding.”

“Man-made?” she repeats, a bit dazed, and not quite caring to contest.

“Yes. The wireless is”—he puts up his hands to bracket the words—“an ‘invention.’ But in fact it is only mimicry, a reinvention of what already exists all around us in the earth and in ourselves. All the elements and conductive metals in a radio are not only in the hills, the mines and mineral deposits in rocks, in air, in soil and in seawater, they are also in your body. Did you know that zinc, copper and iron are in your blood? And you yourself are made primarily of salt water and carbon? Water is a marvelous conductor, which, as the latest techniques in neurological research are showing, acts as a kind of bioelectrical charge on our skin when we sweat. They are calling it the galvanic skin response and have used it to measure states of psychoemotional arousal in the human brain. Notice the word ‘galvanic.’ In common usage, as you know, it means to cover something with a metal coating, specifically zinc, and also to electrify or spur something into a heightened state of activity. And that, my dear, is the metal in our sweat acting on us like a conductor, and turning a human being into a wireless.”

Now she is nodding politely and thinking that he is as mad as she sometimes is. Yet he is talking of things she knows, or has sensed at least and felt. She cannot deny it. And he does talk so like an Irishman. The blarney is rolling over her like a cascade of hands. She cannot help but lose herself in the feel of his voice.

“We will not live to see it,” he continues, “but one day people will be communicating across seas and continents, their messages traveling through nothing but air, and they will be doing so through yet another of these so-called marvelous inventions, which will in fact turn out to be nothing more than what we ourselves are—modifications of the same earth, air and water that are all around us and babbling all the time.”

Now he can see that she is addled, and slightly afraid, somewhere back behind her glazing eyes.

“I did not mean to frighten you, Mrs. Woolf.”

She surprises him and herself by coming suddenly and rather fiercely out of her daze to assert her side of this description. She does not wish to have the tortures of her mind swept so nonchalantly into the speculations of this wild-eyed Fenian shaman. In any case not without a fight.

“Why is it, then, Mr. Yeats,” she says testily, “if all of this activity you speak of is so real, if it is going on always and everywhere, why do I, and, alas, some of the unfortunates who are caged and so cannot be among us, seem to be the only ones who hear or see or feel it? Tell me that.”

“Wonderful,” he says in a strange tone of voice. “And brava, my dear. You have hit the pith of it in one.”

She frowns, regretting that she spoke at all.

“Think of Melville’s whales,” he says.

She looks at him quizzically, and still annoyed. But then, she thinks, at least they are back in the neighborhood. And besides, what can she do? He is off again like a crier before she can protest.

“Melville spends a great deal of time, you may remember, on his cetology, the science and classification of whales. He tells us of their singing. The humpback, one of the baleen whales, which is also called the Mysticeti whale, is perhaps the greatest composer among the whales, propagating his song through the waters in waves of sound. Many of these vocalizations are too low for us to hear, just as our very own Sir Francis Galton’s dog whistle is too high for us to hear. But humpback whales can hear these sounds, and they have been making these sounds to each other for thousands of years, unheard by us, because they are specially equipped to function in a wider range of frequencies.”

He fixes his eyes on her like pins.

“I ask you, then, if we are able to hear what is indubitably only a fraction of the whale’s deep-throated symphony, and we cannot hear Galton’s dog’s whistle at all, does this mean that these sounds do not exist?”

She shakes her head.

“Of course not,” he cries, his voice rising sharply. “That was what I meant to show you with the example of the wireless. There are many, many more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies. That is given. But some of our wildest dreaming is coming true and being made real through discoveries in science. What’s more, these
dis-coveries
are just that, uncoverings of what has always been there, in the songs of the whales of the seas, and the
babbling gossip of the air
that is being heard and answered by the mountains.”

She does not like the manner of this much better than she did before, but she does love that they are back to poetry, and that he has quoted Viola, the androgyne, whose speech of love is among her favorites in all of Shakespeare.
If I did love you in my master’s flame / With such a suffering, such a deadly life
. . .
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills / And make the babbling gossip of the air / cry out
. . .

She is smiling without knowing it.

“So, at last, Mrs. Woolf,” he is saying, “I submit to you the notion that you and I, and Tom and others, who are able to hear and see and smell things that others cannot, are not perhaps mad, after all, but only distinctively equipped to receive the
complete
experience. And that, again, is Baudelaire:
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.
Perfumes, sounds and colors correspond.”

He is finally done, yet he does not have the look of a man who has just delivered a psychotic’s sermon, or, by chance, encapsulated the mysterious workings of the world within an hour. He does not seem enervated in the least. He is glowing, as he was when she came in, and now she is beginning to see just how he may have sucked the spleen out of Stephen. Yet in her chagrin, she is nearly his disciple, too. She is truly mesmerized, and now, it appears, unwisely encouraging him as well, for what she says next seems to come from someone other than herself and without her consent.

“You said the Mysticeti whales.”

“Ah, yes,” he gushes, “well, of course, the root of the word ‘mystic’ is the Latin
mysticus.
The root of the word ‘Mysticeti’ is unclear, though it appears to be
mysticetus
, meaning ‘mouse,’ a corruption of a translation from the Greek in Aristotle’s
Historia Animalium.
But much more interesting is this: Melville named his ship the
Pequod
after the Pequot, one of the indigenous peoples of what would later become the Massachusetts Bay Colony. New Bedford is the primary seaport of whaling in North America from which Melville’s ship departs in its search for Moby-Dick. As you may know, there is a river in that area called the Mystic, as well as a town of the same name. The name comes from the languages of those same indigenous peoples, either Muhs-Uhtug or Missi-Tuk, both of which mean ‘big river,’ though the latter term is more literally translated as ‘great river whose waters are driven by
waves.
’”

“Like the Ouse,” she says.

Yeats looks at her curiously.

“The Ouse River in Sussex, near where we live in the country. It is tidal.”

She looks at him for help, as if she has said something terrible that cannot be taken back, but he is only hearing again what he has already heard.

“And so,” he says, “here is yet another coincidence, as the skeptics would say. But you and I know from Baudelaire to call it a correspondence.”

She nods, but she is utterly spent and, mesmerized or not, she can say nothing more. She does not quite know how she disengages herself from his clutches, or if he lets her go, but when she is aware of herself again, she is standing in Ottoline’s foyer, going through the motions of departure with the grande dame herself. Yeats is there, too, but only to see her off. He is staying—to enthrall some other unsuspecting mark, no doubt, and invigorate himself still more.

As they are saying their goodbyes, Yeats leans in and whispers to her, “The poem that I wrote for you is called ‘Spilt Milk.’”

She nods stiffly and a little guiltily, but he seems unperturbed by her failure to have read his latest work. As always, he simply knows.

The moment she reaches home, she bounds up the stairs to her room and rifles through her books. She has it here somewhere. She is pulling out all the newer ones that she has either shoved in sideways on the bookshelves atop the rest or crammed in nooks by the bed and elsewhere in the room, but it is not there. She stumbles, twirling anxiously around the room, more determined than ever to find it. She goes flat on her belly beside the bed, and retrieves it at last from the depths of a pile of toppled quartos, newspapers and journals that she has let accumulate there.

The Winding Stair
, a pale turquoise and black-checkered volume on which is depicted the winding staircase of the title, a coiled serpent, confrontationally open-mouthed, and a woman riding a dolphin. She flips to the table of contents and runs her finger down the page until she sees it. “Spilt milk.” She opens to the place and sees that the poem is only four lines long. She reads it over many times. She reads and reads, and her eyes begin to water and swell. She closes and reopens the book. She sits staring blearily at the text, the cover, the walls. Then, finally, she allows herself to cry.