Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (12 page)

“I hate skirts!” Hilary lay back in the grass, one arm over her eyes. She had the sensation of being inhabited by powers she could not understand or control, a thick mass of electric energy with no outlet, that is how she had felt. “If I were a boy, I would be great—a great poet,” she said in a muffled voice.

“Hmph,” Miss Munn sniffed. “Nothing to prevent a girl from being a poet, is there?” The disconcerting thing was the complete split between Phillippa’s blue eyes and ravishingly pretty face, and the “Miss Munn” whom she put on like armor in her present role. She was not really quite grownup herself.

“Mawkish, milksop stuff! I hate Alice Meynell and Elizabeth Barrett Browning!”

“Why do you, Hilary? You’re so arrogant!” Phillippa, like most governesses, was in awe of the establishment, in whatever sphere. Rule number one: you do not criticize your betters.

Actually Hilary had lately learned several of the Browning sonnets by heart, but, confused as she was about her own feelings, she would never have admitted this. She felt it a self-indulgence, like drowning in honey, but this was clearly not to be explained to the simple-minded Phillippa.

“Because …, because …,” she fumbled, tearing up a handful of grass in exasperation. “Because it’s no help, I suppose.”

“You’re too young to know about love. Of course it doesn’t interest you.” The most maddening thing about Phillippa was that she refused to rise to obvious bait, and instead, over and over again, relegated Hilary to the manageable world of childhood.

“I’m not a child,” Hilary said, sitting up. “Sometimes I feel very old, a lot older than you. Besides,” she added in a gentler tone, “it does interest me enormously—, I mean, if I were a man.”

“Byron, no doubt?”

“Don’t tease. I am being dead serious.”

For just a second their eyes met, Phillippa’s suddenly flushed with blue as cheeks may be flushed with rose. In the second’s confrontation, the pupil in those blue eyes widened like a shutter, and in that second the massive electric current in Hilary connected, so that she felt all through her the explosion of a blaze of light. Then Phillippa withdrew, and asked in a gentler tone, looking off at the bay,

“If you were a man, what would you write about?” Resuming the conversation now seemed irrelevant. Hilary was far too busy absorbing the shock of that crystallizing second when quite suddenly the universe appears to be focused on a single human face, and nothing else exists. She lay on her stomach with her face propped up on her knuckles, chewing a piece of grass, and wondering if the loud thumping of her heart was audible to the magic person beside her. “Oh things …,” she murmured, then sat up and asked with a new fierce tone in her voice. “You’re such a secret person. What are you really like?”

“I?” Phillippa was startled into confusion. “I’m a rather ordinary person, I guess. Why?”

Something about the coolness, the modesty, the intact quality of the young woman infuriated Hilary. “Because …, because …,” she struggled for the words, “sometimes you seem to be just a machine for being good. It’s horrible!”

Phillippa laughed her gentle elusive laugh. “Dear child, I’m very fond of you.”

“Oh fond!” Hilary groaned. “One is fond of a dog, I suppose. I’m a human
being!
” She was standing now and shouting.

“I can’t understand why you’ve suddenly got into such a passion.…”

“Because I love you!” Hilary shouted. “Can’t you see?”

“I can see that you’re in some kind of state.” Phillippa busied herself with packing up the baskets and folding the rug. “It’s time we started off, Hilary, if we are to get to Harlech for tea, as we had planned.” Was she as bland as she seemed? Did nothing penetrate?

“Whenever you get to be almost human, you have to become a governess again!” Hilary stooped to help with folding the steamer rug, taking care not to brush against Phillippa, for this, she sensed, would have caused an explosion in herself that she was unprepared to handle.

“That is my job, Hilary, after all,” she said gently, and walked down toward the bicycles, without giving Hilary a glance.

“Why God should have chosen to make me love you, of all impossible people!”

“I should leave God out of it if I were you. It’s possible that He has more important things to think about.”

They walked their bicycles onto the road and mounted. Hilary raced off ahead as fast as she could go. She needed to get away from the source of so much feeling to be able to think about it, and to try to control the whirling inside her. Phillippa was quite right, of course: it was absurd to bring God into this, yet she could not believe that the moment of revelation was not a Sign; something far greater and more mysterious than Hilary seemed involved. She felt enlarged by goodness, not an emotion she was used to feeling at all; she would have liked to perform some heroic act immediately, rescue a drowning child, single-handedly put out a blazing fire; she felt like a giant, as if she had grown several feet in the last hour, had grown taller than Phillippa, and so was in some way responsible for her, felt protective and concerned as she had never felt before for another human being. And after a few moments she slowed her furious pace, thinking that the magic person behind her might get tired trying to keep up.

In the two weeks that followed, Hilary emerged from her cocoon, as if she were some awkward luna moth, painfully extricating itself for a first flight into the soft darkness of a spring dusk. She was already then two distinct beings, a floundering physical person who dropped things and blushed and sweated, and a powerful, conquering, violent, inner being who had suddenly the capacity to understand things that Phillippa, the innocent Phillippa, considered extraordinarily mature for age fifteen. Phillippa found herself being quizzed, examined, attacked from every side by an insistent, probing love which was at times disturbing in its force. She felt, no doubt, as if a whole battery of stage lights had been turned on her; it was not a comfortable situation to be in. And she reacted by becoming as impersonal as possible.

“You are so beautiful,” Hilary said across the table of an Inn where they were staying near Harlech. “You shouldn’t be so humble! You hide, and it’s not worthy.”

“Worthy of what, Hilary?”

“Of yourself, of what you were meant to be!”

“Good gracious, child, what on earth was I meant to be?” And Phillippa avoided the searching gray eyes.

“A person, not a governess.” In those days of incessant dialogue in which there was no rest for either of them, Hilary had learned a great deal about Phillippa. She was the oldest of a family, all girls, of an impoverished Unitarian minister in Springfield, the only one to be sent to college so far, and she was earning the money now to help her younger sister get an education. Everything in her background had built in the need to serve, but Hilary had dug under that hard crust to the person inside, to the hidden seed of revolt, to the hunger for personal happiness.

“It is very important,” she announced, “who you marry.”

“No doubt,” and Phillippa laughed her haunting laugh, so gentle, so elusive.

“If you marry the wrong person,” Hilary said, with the absolute conviction of innocence, “you’ll be a slave. I think you should marry a lawyer,” she announced, “not a doctor, not a minister.…”

“Oh Hilary,” and Phillippa smiled a little wan smile, “I’ll be lucky if I marry at all.”

“Don’t talk like that! Or if you do,” she added, “talk about being a professor in a college. You are a very good teacher, you know. Think what you have accomplished with me who have no talent for Latin at all!” It was the first time that Hilary had experienced the intoxication, the enlargement of taking into herself another human being, of becoming, as it were, someone
else
. “You are so beautiful, Phillippa, you can do anything you want to do,” but now the statement came from power, the power to mould.

“How do you know, dear child?”

“I know because I am often more inside you than I am inside myself. I think about you all the time.”

“Where is the waiter? We had better order our dessert,” said Phillippa, making the inevitable retreat. And if Hilary was the person in command on these semi-public occasions by the sheer intensity of her commitment, she became a child again after they went to bed. Then it was she who waited for a sign, lying taut while Phillippa brushed her teeth, hoping like a convict for the word of pardon and release. Would Phillippa kiss her good night? Would she show some feeling, even a very little?

Poor Phillippa, seventy-year-old Hilary thought! What pressure she had had to endure! More often than not, she turned her back on Hilary and went to sleep, while Hilary tossed and turned and dreamed of the unimaginable kiss which was never given. And in the morning, Phillippa, refreshed, would see the wan fifteen year old, wide awake, waiting still for the word, the gesture which, within her ethos, she could not, in honor, give.

“What you hope for, Hilary, is not in my power to give,” she said once. “And if I did, it would only make things worse. You know that, really, don’t you?” And Hilary, knowing it, was silent, only reaching out to clasp Phillippa’s hand in an iron grasp.

“Darling, let me go!” And for the “darling” Hilary let her go.

Of course as the two weeks—that eternity—slipped away like a day, the tension rose. Phillippa became aware that Hilary now hardly slept at all.

“You will make yourself ill,” she had said once, with real concern. By now, Hilary was hardly eating; food stuck in her throat. She was close to tears all the time, tears of frustration, tears of rage.

“Well, what if I do?” Hilary answered, furious. “Do you think for a moment, it isn’t worth it? I know so much I never knew before!”

“Like what?” Phillippa asked gently.

“Oh,
everything!
” Hilary shouted. “You don’t understand!” In the grip of the thing, she could not express the multiplicity of sensation it represented, and was well aware that if she had been able to express it, Phillippa herself would have been bewildered and frightened. In the first place Hilary now felt she was two people all the time, instead of one. Her eye had been cracked open by a “you,” and she pondered Phillippa as if Phillippa were some extraordinary equation which, once solved, would yield the secret of the universe. But at the same time because of this huge inner reverberation, which stretched all her powers, it was as if the whole outer world also resounded in her … landscape, literature, everything had become alive in a wholly new way. Single lines in Shakespeare’s sonnets and in Keats spoke to her with such force that she felt they had been written for her alone. Landscapes she had raced through for the sheer joy of riding her bicycle as fast as she could, now touched her like pieces of music and haunted her as phrases from Mozart concertos sometimes haunted: there it was still, that beech tree under which she had lain one day, the silvery bark, crisscrossed with black lines here and there, and the leaves trailing in a watery, flowery way along the horizontal branches; there it was still, that wide shallow brook in a pasture where sheep grazed, and where an old curved stone bridge brought the whole natural, casual scene into focus.…

“Everything!” she had cried out, and it meant that if the whole world had become sensation, the whole world had become by the same token, spirit. The totality addressed her, and somehow had to be answered.

“I’m so full of praises and pain, I think I shall burst,” she said to Phillippa across the dark.

Phillippa murmured, “Can’t you sleep, dear?”, gave a little sigh, and turned over; Hilary, wide awake, heard the deep breathing and did not have the heart to wake her. Instead, she tiptoed out into the hall with a notebook and pencil and locked herself into the bathroom: no one surely would want to take a bath at three
A.M
. Safe, freezing cold, she began to write a poem of her own. And when it was finished, she crept back into bed and slept soundly, for the first time in a week. When she woke, her first thought was not of the magic person, but of the notebook under her pillow and of the work of genius she had produced in the night …, oh how relieving to have at last discovered a possible way to use all that had been happening to her! She was not even dashed when, later on, she read it aloud to Phillippa, who managed to regard it in the light of an English lesson and made several suggestions as to how it might be improved.

“But that’s the word I like
best
,” Hilary had cried out, furious. “You can’t ask me to change that!”

They had found a ground to stand on together at last, and the poems poured out. Hilary was allowed to have a room of her own so that she could keep the light on. With a room of her own, where she could pace up and down, say a line over aloud until it sounded right, stay up as long as she liked, and above all feel that the powerful electric current inside her was not being short-circuited any more, the last of the two weeks they would have together, became possible. Everything could now be
said
—this was the intoxicating discovery Hilary made. She could go the limit with her feeling; she could come to terms with it by analyzing it through the written word. She could praise, rage, despair, love, in peace. No one could say her nay: even the self-imposed censor could be quelled. And the result was a series of crude, passionate love poems. Phillippa was shocked.

“How do you know all this, Hilary?” she asked. “You’re only a child.”

“I suppose I’ve learned it from you.”

“From me?” And Phillippa blushed to the roots of her hair, much to Hilary’s delight. “But—but—.”

“I’ve been mining you,” Hilary said gravely. “You’re a rich mine.”

Phillippa laughed her shy laugh. “You are really a strange little girl.”

“Why strange?” Hilary asked, feeling dreadfully exposed suddenly.

“You are so self-conscious, so aware of what is going on inside you. It doesn’t seem quite natural.” And Hilary caught the note of irritation, which she would meet all through her life before the experiential fact that a writer not only feels but watches himself feeling.

“But if I could not stand outside myself and look at myself, I would go mad, don’t you understand? Don’t you understand?”