Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (13 page)

“It’s disturbing,” Phillippa said.

“But all the time I’m myself, I’m somebody else looking on and learning. Why is that bad?”

“I don’t know. But it is disturbing.”

And so it would be said of her, even into the seventies: you feel too much and you are at the same time too detached to be quite human.

“Why should I fall in love with you, of all impossible people?” As Hilary stood, looking out at the appeasing blue sea, and took a puff of her cigar, that was the phrase that came back to haunt. The sign of the Muse, she thought: impossible, haunting, she who makes the whole world reverberate. Odd that I recognized her at fifteen! And she felt some remote tenderness for that quaking, passionate being whose only outlet had been poetry—, bad poetry, at that!—But who had learned then to poise the tensions, to solve the equation through art.

So intense was the evocation that Hilary felt confused—she had forgotten all about the interviewers. What is this all about? she asked herself. Why am I living it through again? Pull yourself together, old thing, young Hilary admonished. Concentrate! And then quite suddenly it all fell into place, as many little pieces of glass tinkle and fall into a pattern in a kaleidoscope. The pattern was clear …, she was still “mining” Phillippa and her own feeling as an adolescent when she came to write the novel; transposed into the very young man and his love affair …, a mistake, she saw clearly. But how odd that in the five years that elapsed between the writing of it and the episode with her governess, it was
that
somehow that remained the crucial thing, the unsolved thing, the haunting thing. There the imagination had crystallized, perhaps just because nothing there had been “lived out” at all. God knows she had been in love in the intervening years, the years when sex came to muddy the waters, to bring its inevitable complexities and absurdities. Hilary turned brusquely back into the room. She did not want to be drawn into
that
whirlpool. It was essential that she keep her head.

“Well,” she uttered, coming back into the present, coming back to the wing chair and sitting down, “I just had to think something out.” Curiously, the five minutes or so had not seemed an interruption to any of the three, and in fact, the continuity was unbroken. “I stopped writing novels because I had the wit to see that for me at that time, it was a false start.
There
, I simply transposed myself. It gave the whole thing an ambiguity. It wouldn’t do.”

“Why not?” Peter asked. “It did all right for Tolstoy to become Natasha, or for Flaubert to become Madame Bovary.” Out of sheer interest, he spoke sharply, but gentled his tone to ask, “I guess I’m being obtuse?”

“Not at all. I have not made myself clear …, but can I?” she asked with a little mocking laugh. “For instance,
Rosenkavalier
.”

“Lovely opera!”

“Yes, yes,” she said testily. “Of course. But opera is an artificial form, and there this sort of fantasy
works
. It doesn’t work in the novel, unless what one wishes is to be Ronald Firbank.”

“And you did not?” Peter smiled.

“Oh, I was twenty three and at twenty three one is corruptible. I became the fashion in London. I was nearly spoiled by all the attention I got.” She glanced up at the Sargent sketch, her eyes half closed, as if she were daring that self. “I can’t deny that I enjoyed it. I made conquests, wore a flower in my buttonhole, and had no idea how silly I was being!” She stubbed out the half-smoked cigar. “Ugh, I really hate them,” she explained, “but the doctor has warned against cigarettes.”

“And this is your devious way of being obedient?” Jenny asked.

“Devious.…” The word hung in the air, then she pulled it down. “Everything that was false in me and in my work at that time was swept away by my marriage. That did bring me to my senses. I was very much in love with Adrian.” She turned to Jenny, “Perhaps you noticed his photograph on that wall?”

“A British officer in uniform?” Hilary nodded. “He looks very un-Rosenkavalier-ish, very real.”

“Yes. He tamed all the wildness in me, because he was so wild—killed jumping in the hunting field.” But this, whatever it brought into focus as Hilary’s eyes narrowed, was to be buried. “He was a great dear.”

Jenny, sensitized to these important hesitations, waited for what would come next.

“I never wrote a single poem for him. Odd, isn’t it?” She turned to Peter, as if he might have an answer.

“The work of art, you imply, comes from what is
not
lived out?”

“No.” Mrs. Stevens lifted her chin and looked over Peter’s head into the air. “No … I could not say that. No, I could not …, lived out on what level, don’t you know?” She gave Peter a piercing look. “That’s the point, isn’t it? Lived out in what way? When does reality grip at the subconscious level? When does reality need to be transposed?”

“I’m frankly at sea.…” Peter, for the first time, fumbled for a cigarette. He had been too absorbed to feel the need of one until now.

“But Miss Hare is not at sea, are you Miss Hare?”

Jenny was startled, too startled to think, and she parried, “Because I am sensible?”

“Because you are a woman and a writer,” Mrs. Stevens said firmly. “It is a contradiction in terms: men tame women’s genius, yet we cannot apparently live without them.” She gave Peter a mischievous smile, then turned back to Jenny with complete seriousness, taking her in, taking it for granted that
she
knew all about this. It was one of Mrs. Stevens’ charms, Jenny thought, that she never presumed on her age or on her celebrity, never made observations as if she alone had the answer, and even when she was most definite, a question lurked in the background as it did now. “The women who have tried to be men have always lacked something: we have to rest on Sappho, Jane Austen, Colette …, we have to be our
selves
. Mr. Selversen cannot imagine what problems that statement might pose, can he?”

“I can try,” Peter said, jotting down something on his pad.

“Ah!” Mrs. Stevens smiled a catlike smile. “He does not rely wholly on his memory!”

“It’s hard to capture lightning on the page,” he said. “But Sappho, Jane Austen, Colette make a constellation. I thought I would just look at those names.”

“What do you make of them?” Hilary Stevens asked, not without malice.

“You do it!” For the first time he felt and looked awkward, and Jenny was touched to watch him flounder, he who had seemed always so much in control of the situation.

“Very well,” Mrs. Stevens gleamed. “What occurs to me on the spur of the moment—God knows, you are stimulating, you two!—is that the fundamental point is diffusion of sensuality. Colette could write better than anyone about physical things; they include the feel of a peach in one’s hand. A man could only write in this way about a woman’s breast.”

“So?”

“The three writers we have named are predominantly
feminine
—that is their strength. Granted that in Sappho’s case, the context was rather odd, but still. Where is all this leading?” she asked Peter with mock solemnity.

“You have brought three fascinating females into the room, but we are here to interview
you
, Mrs. Stevens. Would it be relevant at this point to ask how you explain the change of style in your books of poems?”

“The question is crucial—your questions are apt to be!” Mrs. Stevens answered, rubbing her forehead with one hand, as if to rub out indecision and doubt.

“It is only that I was thinking that your capacity for growth and change is rather out of the ordinary. Probably it explains your triumph this year. Nothing has been taken for granted, apparently. The total opus is a constant recreation in terms of
style
.” Peter laid this statement on the table between them with an air of finality.

“Yes, yes …,” F. Hilary Stevens murmured. Then she lifted her head and looked him straight in the eye. “Epiphanies.”

“Epiphanies?”

“It is a word, isn’t it? Since Joyce. A word with the particular meaning of a moment, or a time of personal revelation, something of that sort!” And she laughed her light, shy laugh, tasting the word with evident pleasure, “Yes, epiphanies. Each book of poems I have published represents the experience of one.”

Peter exchanged a look of triumph with Jenny. “Ah! Very well, then let us begin with your first book of poems,
From a Hospital Bed
. It was published in 1925, six years after the novel.
As
the first book of poems of a young woman, it was singular, full of concentrated images, taut, specific, but not a single love poem!”

“They were all love poems, you idiot! All poems are,” and Jenny noted that one of those elegant feet was tapping the floor.

“Go to the bottom of the class, Peter,” Jenny laughed.

“Well, none was addressed directly to a you.” He was nettled and on the defensive, dear Peter.

Suddenly Mrs. Stevens who had looked on the point of getting angry—her cheeks were flushed—relaxed. “By a supreme effort on my part, the ‘you’ was camouflaged but he was there. The critics called it cold. I have never forgiven that. It was devastating,” she said. “It’s not your fault—you were not even born,” she amended in a gentler tone, “but I felt it at the time. You see, that book was wrung out of something hard to bear. You missed the context: From a Hospital Bed.”

“You were ill?” Jenny asked.

“After Adrian was killed in that stupid accident, I waned.”

“Waned?” Jenny asked, for the word was startling.

“I can’t seem to find a more accurate word. My illness, whatever it really was, was treated as a nervous breakdown—sheer poppycock!—I think now it was some deficiency, thyroid, God knows what. Anyway the prescribed cure was to make me lie absolutely still for a year, not allowed anything at all emotive, don’t you know? Personal letters were censored. No newspapers. I just floated there in a cocoon.”

“How awful!” Jenny cried out. It was hard to imagine the bundle of nervous energy before them pinned down for a whole year. “How did you manage? What did you do?”

“My mother came over …, did she really love me? I do not know, but her duty was plain. Perhaps, actually, she enjoyed herself. For that year she was in total command, and, then, all the doctors fell in love with her, a plain woman with an inexplicable glamour about her, and the voice of an angel.…” Hilary Stevens pressed her hands to forehead and let them drop. “My mother read Jane Austen aloud remarkably well. But that isn’t the point.”

“Epiphany?” Peter asked.

“Oh yes, thank you … yes, of course …, epiphany …,” and once more the tantalizing silence descended. Hilary Stevens bent her head, closed her eyes, and after a minute, the interviewers began to wonder whether she had suddenly fallen asleep. Or had she merely once more left them to chase a hare on her own?

Everything appeared to be quite normal, yet was slightly distorted as in a dream. Had the window of her hospital room really been so huge? She lay on her side looking out at a straggly city tree and a sky where marvelous clouds rose like the breasts of mythical swans. She was numb. She didn’t even see the clouds, except that the camera of consciousness never stopped registering on one level. She had just heard her sentence. The endless excruciating tête-â-tête with her mother, nothing real or warm ever being said ‘because she was not to be upset’; she was to vegetate; she was not to be
moved
, for a year. She lay there, trying to imagine the vacuum, when suddenly she felt her hand taken between two strong, life-giving male hands. It was first, sensation, the sensation of a transfusion of faith, quite impersonal, as if a god had descended.

“I am Doctor Hallowell. I have wangled permission to look in on you at about this time every evening.”

“You’re an American!” His very intonation swamped her in a tide of homesickness, and of relief.

“Yes. They’re short of doctors around here. I thought I might come in handy. It has proved to be a sound intuition.” While he spoke, the transfusion of health—of, could it be?—love, poured into her through those warm, vital hands that did not let her go. So schooled already in fearing emotion, she did not dare look at the face. One hand professionally encircled her wrist.

“Pulse steady enough.” Then, in exactly the same impersonal tone, he asked, “How do you intend to use this time?”

Cautiously, she opened her eyes, and found herself staring at a queer, almost ugly face, so asymmetrical it was, a bald head with a few white hairs standing up straight on top, and a look so piercing, that she could not have said then what color the eyes were. Later she knew they were blue, very pale blue. They added to the sense one had of a transparent person. She looked, and the tears she had withheld spilled down her cheeks, as she turned her head to the wall.

Dr. Hallowell pulled up a chair and sat quite close to the bed where he could speak very gently and still be heard. “If you will listen, I might talk a little. I can imagine how hard it must be to be stopped, as it were, just now, but most people of your age, you know, are in an awful hurry. And almost never are they given a time like this without pressure. Has it occurred to you that what looks like calamity may be a gift, given to you—just possibly—because you are the rare being who can use a hard gift like this?” Hilary had no answer; she was undone by the tears that rained down her cheeks. “If you could feel,” the vital voice went on, “that you are the center of a mystery, and keep your self very still, all may be well. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.…’ ”

“I don’t believe it,” she murmured.

“You don’t have to. I do believe it. One is enough.”

In the middle of the institutionalized hospital world where so much was inhuman, so much done by rote, so much mechanical, Dr. Hallowell moved to his own original spirit. Hilary supposed he must be a good doctor from the medical point of view or he would not have been here at all, but that was not the side of him she saw; she was not his patient, but she learned from him what the power of healing is, and how some people have it in their hands; it flows out of them. What would have become of her there without him? Of course he very soon found out that the one thing she wanted to do was to write poems, and he was able to convince her that it was no punishment but a necessary discipline to lie quite still for weeks. Because he never doubted for a moment that she would do what she wanted to do in the end, she almost believed it herself. And all during that time he was inventing things to make limbo bearable. Sometimes, when he paid his evening visit, he brought her flowers, three roses or a bunch of anemones from the South of France … ; that day they talked about the myths of death and resurrection, she remembered. He brought her a book on astronomy, “so you can call the stars and planets, you will see through the window, by name,” he said. He brought crumbs in an envelope in his pocket to feed the sparrows on the window sill, and little by little he taught her how to make a cosmos out of the bare hospital room. As if all this were not enough, he managed finally to get up a trio. He himself played the violin with near professional skill; one of the internes played the viola, and one of the surgeons, the cello. On Sunday afternoons, they joined forces to play together. No doubt he had to fight the bureaucracy to get permission for this unorthodox therapy. People were supposed to be upset by music, but if he was asked, no doubt he answered firmly, “Not upset by Bach or Mozart!”