Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (16 page)

“He must have loved you.”

“Oh he loved me!” And again Hilary heard the mocking laugh. “He loved me so much that he had to murder me!”

“Even I know that it is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!”

Then there was again a long silence. When Willa spoke again, she was able to sound like herself, for she said in her usual cool, speculative tone, “We live in a curious age, in an age where passion is suspect. We are lepers. We are treated like lepers. So Seamus treated me … like a leper. Worse. Lepers are sent off to their kind to die a natural death.”

“And you?” Hilary breathed.

“Burned to the ground.” Inexorably Willa’s voice went on, to expose what no one but Hilary would ever hear or know. What Seamus had done was to turn up one Sunday at tea time, having chosen an hour when he knew the whole family would be gathered together, bringing with him a young Irish girl whom he introduced as his fiancée.

“What did you do?”

“What did I do?” Hilary measured the strength of the woman beside her. “I welcomed Moira, and I never saw him alone again. Although he had the gall to stay on as lodger for a week.”

“What made him do it?” Hilary cried out. “How could he?”

“People will do a great deal in defence of their immortal souls!”

“Yes, but he didn’t have to stay on!” His genial laughter, his sensitivity, his humor, his charm rose up in Hilary’s mind. How explain such a man? How encompass such cruelty? How do this twisting, torturing thing to the clarity, the light, the balance in the woman beside her? “I don’t understand,” she said.

“Well, you said it yourself. People who cannot feel punish those who do. It’s an instinct like shooting a mad dog. I suppose he would say now that he did it in self defence.… He used to call me a pagan.…”

Then for a long time there was silence between Willa and Hilary. They walked in the dark, separately, side by side. Out of that long silence, Willa for the first time turned toward Hilary, included her. “It was too strange. You walked into the house speaking of Seamus, and you brought the Brandenburg Concertos. You see, that is what we had played during those months, over and over again, as if they held the key to everything we were together. Even the dog knew. It was too strange,” she said again.

“Yes,” Hilary said.

“I was dead, and now I’m alive again.”

Hilary experienced something like jealousy before a kind of passion she sensed that she herself would, perhaps, never know.

“Devastating, useless!” Willa added.

“Feeling is never useless.”

“I wonder.…”

“It has made you what you are. It’s why you can do what you do for everyone who comes to your house. It’s the other side of your detachment, of your power to include everyone and everything—don’t you see?”

“People don’t have to be broken in pieces to be useful, Hilary.”

“But something has to open people, and it’s always terrible.”

“How do you know?” Willa asked in almost her usual tone of voice. “You’re a poet. You can turn it all into something else.”

“Maybe,” Hilary said. “But that’s not easy, either.”

She said it without really knowing. But in the weeks and months that followed she came to know; present when the earth quaked, given to sense the deep tremor, Hilary had been seized by poetry in a new way. Inspiration? It felt more like being harnessed to wild horses whom she must learn to control or be herself flung down and broken. The sonnet form with its implacable demand to clarify, to condense, to bring to fulfillment, became the means to control. Now for the first time she understood about form, what it was
for
, how it could teach one to discover what was really happening, and how to come to terms with the impossible, how it was not a discipline imposed from outside by the intellect, but grappled with from inner necessity as a means of probing and dealing with powerful emotion. From that night on, for weeks, nearly every day Hilary brought Willa a sonnet. Early in the morning, late at night, whenever she could break away from her job for half an hour, she brought one more attempt to contain, to express the long suspended passionate plea—for what? What did those poems ask? To be taken into the flood, to be part of it.

Willa listened. She accepted the poems as the true Muse does with detached, imaginative grace: she brought to bear her critical intelligence, illuminated by something like love, the inwardness, the transparency which had been opened in spite of herself on the night of the Brandenburg Concertos. Above all she succeeded in making Hilary accept that the poem itself was the reality, accept, at least at first, that together, for some mysterious reason, they made possible the act of creation. It was intimacy of a strange kind.

On the surface Willa was exactly as she had been before, witty, cool, the good listener, but there was something—and Hilary was acutely aware of it—that she could no longer control, that rising flood of feeling which had been buried so long. She confessed to Hilary that both men and women among those who had used to come to the house for the good conversation, for the atmosphere of intellectual comfort, had suddenly begun to make personal demands, were drawn to her as lovers.

“What am I to do about this, Hilary? It is so disturbing …,” and she laughed. “There’s no use telling them I am through with all that. No one believes me!”

Willa had laughed her light cool laugh, but there was considerable stress under it, and Hilary knew that she herself contributed to the stress. The poems themselves denied that Willa was “through with all that.” And the time came when Hilary could no longer accept that the Muse must not be involved except as a spectator. She wanted to break through the detachment, through the admirably lucid understanding of what she was doing as a poet, to break through to the woman herself in Willa, to appease the flood with a human gesture. More than once Hilary had crossed the room as if it were a continent or an ocean, taken one of those small tensile hands in hers, and kissed it. At such moments Willa simply waited for the seizure to pass, waited, impassive as some goddess to whom a devotee makes an oblation. There was no human response. But not even this absolute control on Willa’s part, this implacable façade, could keep the tension from growing between them. They were being carried on a wave of such depth and force that Hilary could not doubt its reality, and somewhere sometime it would have to break, before it could be sucked back into the deep from which it had come. So she believed with her whole being.

Yet the day came when Willa spoke out sharply. “Hilary, you force me to speak plainly. I simply am not one of those ambidextrous people who can love women as well as men. You’ll have to accept me as I am.”

“But why does it go on then?” Hilary asked. “I can’t believe I am making all this up alone. I’m not that crazy!”

“I can only tell you my truth. I can’t tell you yours.”

“I feel as if I had been seized by the hair by some angel who won’t let me go until, until …,” and Hilary had rushed out of the house.

How long had it taken before the wave did finally break? Six months? A year? Such experiences take place outside time, and old Hilary could not remember.

But she remembered that once again chance had played its part, chance or the furies, who are never very far off where human passions are played out. It was after midnight on a spring night. Hilary, on her way home from the theatre, saw the lights on downstairs and walked in to say goodnight: Willa never locked her door. But no one answered Hilary’s call, and she had run upstairs, startled by the silence.… Was Willa ill, in need of help?

Hilary stood at the open door of the bedroom, in darkness, and heard the quiet breathing of the magic person asleep. For a second she hesitated; it would be kind to tiptoe down and go out of the house, for surely that sleeping, frail humanity needed rest. But who could have resisted such temptation after such months of mounting need? She flung herself down on the bed, and Willa, wakened from the subterranean world where all we control in the daylight lives its strong irrational life, opened her arms to the child, to the poet, to the lover, and allowed the wave to break. Within those passionate kisses sexuality hardly existed, or was totally diffused in a fire of tenderness. The relief of it! The beauty of it! God knows, life had not stopped there when Hilary was twenty nine, but even now in her old age she knew their poignance and their power. She had used the word “trauma” to herself a few seconds before.… How could she have forgotten the blessing?

Whatever the psychiatrists may have told us, there are no repetitions. Never again would Hilary experience passion as pure light. The consummation was as absolute as the initial break-through into personal feeling. There was, in fact, nowhere to go from there. And what had seemed to her, as she walked home early the next morning, the beginning of a new life, was in fact, the end of an episode. They did not meet again as lovers.

When Hilary came back two days later, one of Willa’s sons was at the door, rather stiff and formal. He told Hilary that his mother had been taken to a hospital and was allowed no visitors. Willa had fallen down the stairs and been found in the afternoon of “the next day” unconscious, with a severe concussion. It had been a stroke, no doubt. John did not ask her in, and Hilary stood there, silenced, trying to read something more in the boy’s closed face, hoping for some sign, for some message, but there could be none, of course. She was merely one of the innumerable friends and acquaintances who must be told the tragic fact. She had no right to force her way in. She would not have dared.

Flowers could be sent to the hospital. A ring which Willa had admired in a little box. This was returned a month later, unopened, by John, quite casually and without a word. The boys had been away at school so much that Hilary hardly knew them. On that occasion he stood at the door of her flat, and she did not ask him in. So, twice, they had confronted each other on a doorsill without the slightest contact or real exchange. Hilary was in a strait jacket, unable to move. She went to work every day like an automaton and came back to her dreary lodgings in Hampstead, to limbo. Her desk was littered with words, but they did not connect.…, the electric current was turned off. What she wrote, if coherent at all, had no form; as poetry it did not exist. After a time she recognized that there could be no relief in merely writing down cries of anguish, and threw it all into the wastebasket.

Three months later Willa came home again and ostensibly resumed her life. People came and went; records were played, but the world that had existed so tangibly no longer existed, because Willa, as she had been, was no longer there. She looked suddenly old and gaunt; she moved carefully and spoke as if she had to plan how to articulate each word and utter it by the force of will. She had never been warm; now she seemed as cold and distant as the moon. So immense was the change that there could be no question of feeling what Hilary had felt three months before, and never in the years to come did she refer to what had taken place between them. By the time the book of poems appeared, as far as Hilary was concerned, it might have been written by someone else.

Downstairs they talk so lightly about the Muse, the old woman on the bed was thinking. But I can’t tell them anything. It is all too strange, too terrible still. Even now, I understand nothing. As she forced herself to get up again, she felt bruised, as if in the last few minutes she had been battling with invisible forces and had been beaten.

And yet …, standing now on her feet, coming back to the familiar room, to the warm afternoon light, to the glimpse of tranquil blue through the window, she dared herself to take down the book of sonnets and open it for the first time in many years. It was as if she had never really seen them before, at first too involved in the experience itself, and then finding any return too painful. “After all …,” she murmured aloud. After all, the poems existed. That strange marriage of two minds, from which they had flowed, still lived there on the page.

But almost at the instant when she recongized this, she flung the book down, and the everlasting dialogue was resumed. “When did I learn—shall I ever?—that conquest is not the point!”

Peter was writing so fast that he did not hear the light step as F. Hilary Stevens returned to them, but Jenny, lifting her head, was shocked. The old face had gone white; like parchment, it looked; fine wrinkles which she had not noticed before were apparent. Whatever had happened upstairs had taken a toll.

“We are tiring you,” Jenny said, watching the trembling hands pour them each a stiff drink.

“I’m all right,” she said testily. “At my age one ebbs and rises rather quickly, that’s all. Nothing a drink won’t cure!” And she lifted the glass, held the pause a second, and then, sending a gleam of a smile toward Peter, toasted “the Muse!”

“Yes,” Peter said rather gravely, “the Muse! Whoever she or he may be!”

F. Hilary Stevens took a small sip of her drink, as if it were some dangerous kind of magic, and tasted it before she spoke. Then she said gently, “ ‘Whom I desired above all things to know. Sister of the mirage and echo!’ … the Muse, young man, is
she!
”

“So Graves tell us,” he answered.

“Yes,” Mrs. Stevens now took a long swallow and set her glass down rather decisively. “That is the problem, you see. ‘Sister of the mirage and echo,’ ” she repeated, emphasizing the two final nouns. “It is very exact that phrase; it is prescient.”

Jenny looked troubled, and the old hawk caught the look. “You don’t agree, Miss Hare?”

“I don’t know,” Jenny answered, afraid. “I don’t quite understand.

“No doubt the problem is different for you.”

“I want to believe that a woman writer must be a whole woman,” Jenny said passionately out of her painful sparring with Peter, “and from what you said earlier, what you said about the great women writers never trying to be men.…”

“Quite. Hoist with my own petard, eh?” She nodded two or three times half-mockingly. “Well, that’s the problem, you see—that’s
it!
”