ISLANDS IN THE AIR

Chapter I

HURRY

As I arose from the twisting staircase to the landing
a door stood open. On the floor in abandon, black as hearses,
lay a pair of shoes. Thrown in the pattern of a tee square
one walked straight toward me, the other set out at right angles.

Something remarkably sinister in their impersuable
vagancy brought me up short. That dead-lock gait come to the
parting of the wayfarer took shape as a sign-board on my
private road. Mine had been a dislocated journey, every step I
had taken resulted in a jam.

The scenic dry-goods surrounding the foot-wear presented
the cubistic hay-stack of a recent school. Countless segments
set at a various subtlety of degree & a wild diversity of
direction piled to overlapping strata in the centre of the room
& started from corners to spear the eye at every point on
the ocular periphery.

So acute was my sensation of having 'irrupted' home
through a papered hoop of outmoded clowns the torn edge of
the picture-plane framing a littered perspective, I felt
myself drop into the deadlock of those halted shoes.....
...awfully in my appointed place.

2

Here and there among the random of tossed objects,
crumpled cleansing tissues with their lip-stick corollas
blossomed indecently. My eyes oscillated between untenable
foci in the confusion & closed.

At five o'clock in the morning I had tidied that flat-
and on coming home -- so had life in its dire disorder crept
up upon a visionary Distance.

Tonight my encounter with those shoes precipitated the
crisis in a long realisation that detail in deterring me had
curtailed time. The panic of postponement which seizes those
who suddenly conclude their temporal resources are irrecoverable
put me in a violent hurry; a resurgence of zeal which by reason
of its repeated arrests in the past now appeared useless.

The Hurry, confounded by the extreme disparity of the
only destinations left for its choice seperated from me on the
spot: antipodal to the exciting display of a dreamy Distance
stood a comfortable gas-stove with its benign assurance of
available liberty. Also I offered this Hurry, with its sense of
entrprise, a poor support: the wierd vacuum of an exhausted
body topped by an aching head.

A kind of short-circuit of being alive occurring in
woman when she simply *cant* go on set my nerves quivering so
intensely they inscribed a diagram of their system on my inner
sensibility. The light that shone in the Distance fizzled out.
Through closed lids I began to see more than met the eye in the
immediate disorder.

Fallen upon the carpet an old ideal showed up as a mere

3

3

anxiety complex, on a sheaf of circulars in shadow lay the
urgent advice I had offered to many companions, out of it,
towering, hewn from stone grew a Dead Ear.

In a freak continuity the Past lay before me, behind me lay the wastes of Time strewn with an astral litter. The accumulation of ideas. Ghosts of manuscripts written at odd whiles they had waned to inconclusion on subversive interruptions. Faded piles of ivory paper, with the passions of the years their rhythms vary. Half one volume had gone to the mice.... they leave a pleasing débris of a flaky somehow oriental substance, fretted to the measure of a nibble.

The book I had felt impelled to write ! Tentatively assuming that what seemed likely to me would seem likely to others. Intermittent ...unfinishing, I saw how this Book in itself constituted my inhibition.

Had early preceptor's insistance on unconditional confession complicated by the shame they had heaped on all forms of self-expression brought me to the conscientious pass of a woman anxious, under the suns of revealing her whole absurdity, to preserve her incognito?

Meanwhile in misanthropic readjustment of the comparative a minute roach turned into an omnibus loaded with humanity in search of food in the sink.

Several years since I had, for no apparent reason in view of nature's vast example found myself unwilling to kill an insect. This had nothong to do with the injunction of a seventh adventist from Assafodasta " Musn't kill pig. Pig was once a Christian".

Autafojasta ?

I shrank from loosening upon the ether the vibrational shock

4

that occurs on concussive ejection of a life from a body; a
shooting pain returning on the air as increase of a general angu
ish tapped by the human race. I had imagined a universal radio
receiving and broadcasting something more than entertainment.
unlike

Now, tossing all such a such irreal valuations on the
present heap, circumscribed by the shoes I had landed in, the
I decided to crush that roach ... While moving toward it I caught
fleeting sight of a faint yellow patch out in the night.

Hanging in an actual distance was a line of windows where,
lit with a human mystery of strange rooms the aspect of solid
beings dissolves to a surplus shadow among the slight gradations
of a palid illumination, In place of the 'washing' taken in at eve
they shone side by side across the floeking dark.

My mood changed.

His passengers restored to their rightful proportions, the roach,
having discharged them in the luminous rooms, crawled over the
edge of immunity.

As a child in the belief I could create flawless people I
attempted to hatch them from a dove's egg concealed in my arm-
pit, but the shell was over-fine. At last I watched them come
to life busied about diaphanous tasks in these few back windows
seen across a roof. The lowlier the interior the lovelier,
shrouded in the phosphorescence of a dusty pane.

A little way off the commonest conditions take on grandure.
From where I stood the behaviour behind those windows appeared
aloof as the planetary drama. Devoid of detail the underprivi-
leged floated like angels in an ideal estate; their uncouth
homes become opal shrines in which the solitary were surely

5

illuminate, the married in their lofty eyrie concording
sublimely with the pulse of Eros' wings.

The scattered currents of my mind diverted from uneasy
channels united in the expectant peace of concentration when
the ray of vision is about to fuse with the waves of sound.
Given a sufficiency of leisure those windows could be set to
words.

This glance out of doors was typical of another form of
distraction leading me off the single track. Assured I had
a precious knowledge to communicate to my fellows, whenever,
having rid my mind of concrete nuisances, I prepared to write
it down, just then, the least thing I caught a glimpse of
however casually or even a vestige astir in memory would
dilate to a dimension of beauty defying rational analysis.

For this it is that in moments of reflection a life which,
lacking this magical quirk would have looked, in retrospect,
so ugly, almost intoxicates me with the glitter it has left
in my brain.

No longer in thus with the world at all I was left to
bear singly the undistributed weight of my communication.
Should its erratic parts be brought toGETHER as if rolled
into a ball to be thrown to a recipient, how light it
would grow describing an arc, in transit.

Two generations have evoved while I stood at the cross-purpose
of the roads, my mouth open to speak or rather my pen dipped
in air.

6

When one is bound to write of things which while observed long ago have as yet barely come into existence, *Accepted Reality* may parry one's move with an inexistent public. The procedure under such circumstances is to create a public to mould a generation but the final output of my observations is tenuous stuff at most to be cut to the contour of an electric spirit. To bring into view this fitful glimmer which is all one sees of man at a distance is a more speculative undertaking than to marshall a bodily generation.

...Bring into view!.. A lot of foolscap in a closed valise
.......The Hurry catching up the tail end of time as a lash to
drive me to a last exertion, was upon me again....To gather up,
to put together, to elucidate!......To what end?
Perhaps the relief of a not uncommon anxiety to produce proof
of having, oneself, existence?
Moreover, discerning in these tenants of a sheet of glass a
public to my contact I must hasten to complete a message
orally impossible.

Apparent only in a primary effulgence of Being as bare
of troubled incidence as the area of perfectability I would
point out to them, this audience at a distance would wear what
ever transparencies I chose to clothe it in.

My tenuous stuff is not all of a piece one gathers the
meshes for its manufacture at intervals -- wherever the dense
material of life wears thin, letting through that little light
which is always so surprising ; to reveal it, yard upon yard
of heavy dark must be unfolded to a life for a life,

My experience to yours for comparison.
But listen to me, Islands in the air, I have made even of your
biology - a lily.

I ran to the closet & dragged out the valise. It was
easy to find the first chapter: " The Bird alights". Here is
no mysticism. I have simply used a well known symbol as an aid
to description of a unique registration of consciousness in
infancy. For a fraction of a second I became aware of what was
then my state of Being. Limitless
Distinct to myself as illimitable and reactive to a flux of light
exceeding the normal. The fraction of a second to allow of this
entire realisation as I have described it covered the strange
expansion of time that occurs on the outskirts of the third
dimension. Concurrently - experience being ratified by remem-
brance, an as yet inoperative power of memorization functioned
for a precocious flash.

In my investigation of first impressions one fact stands
out, that however early they may be experienced reactions are
always ripe. No less rich in import than those of the adult, it
is never too late to resolve their significance to terms of the
intellect.

Whether this preliminary illumination has any bearing on the origin
of the idea that a transient body is animated by a spiritual
continuum I can not say; at least it justifies the high lights
of grandure common to saints & those schizophrenic.

CHAPTER II

The Bird Alights

When I try to recall the dim beginning of my human life,
before the world as I know it took shape in my mind-- that sheer
existence when matter scarcely perceptible and the ether not en-
tirely invisible together formed a cosmic vapour that dispersed so
soon and for later years left a blank introduction to memory-- I
find that beginning keeps a certain distinctness as an infantile
sensation of having come under a spell.

Such an undecided condition can only be figuratively con-
veyed, yet there would seem to be no symbol for that dual dawn of
flesh and aspiration-- a new-born consciousness-- unless its whole
significance lies hidden in the stucco dove which, since an alate
ghost signalled the girded loin to rise from baptism, is splayed
on holy ceilings.

Seen from beneath, the soles of its claws are like naked
stars stamped on its useless underparts-- the immobile unsullied
abdomen of the Third Person who is claimed as her sole property by
the church. But, as a bird, it is entangled in so much half-
forgotten legend that it reminds one more readily of that theoreti-
cal soul said to encumber even the unredeemed, for, if Life after
all should prove to be a divine emanation, we partake of the Ghost
from the time we come into being, and the dove presents an image
of our animation. For, as we look up at its everlasting descent

2

in a puff of gold to serve for the breath of God-- breath which
is at once the conveyance and animus of the conveyed-- we wonder
whether this secret that has hovered over the centuries, if seen
from above, would be revealed as the spirit of man suspended in
intelligential ether.

Call it holy ghost or consciousness, or what we will,
a bird in flight is not unlike the roving passage of the intellect
between the known and the unknown. I have always felt an unaccount-
able pang of recognition on coming upon this dove in whom the whole
hush of the altar is concentrated above our heads as it showers
down from the arches its ethereal influence.

So it is, with the aid of this primitive symbol, that I
have tried to retrieve from oblivion whatever awareness a birdlike
spirit of life enjoys when, through the jugglery of birth, it is
first confined to three dimensions.

But the very faint remembrance we might have of how it
came to incorporate with us is so overlaid with the things we have
learned, which do not necessarily coincide with our experience,
that we should have to get rid of nearly all we take for granted
to regain our first reaction to phenomena-- a fleeting impression
of having recently been drawn out of the world around us-- of being
both liberated and trapped in a sudden ambulant individuality.

When the Infinite performs its impossible stunt of
omniprevalently remaining, while infinitessimally disappearing
through some seedling point within itself to emerge as a human
soul, the feathered metaphor is brought to earth. But a winged
perception, newly come to the concrete, shows little concern for

the body allied to it and no choice of location, for, although
it has been snared in our atomic mesh, it persists as an untethered
sensibility, that-- like the breath from which it emanates and
whose omnipotence it briefly continues to share-- must first,
in order to identify itself, drift through the identity of all
things. During the initiation to its environment it flies the
circles of our consciousness and, conceiving no distinction between
the 'thing known' and the 'knowing of it,' will become, in turn,
everything it encounters, the while remaining at large. And the
last object to be located by it is the center from which it dif-
fuses; the body of its pending individuality. Being so far
unbounded, this sensibility, loose as the air, magically exceeds
its surroundings or shrinks to minute concentrations, as con-
sciousness, unfettered on its introductory flight, establishes that
intimacy between subjective and objective on which the intellect
must later rely.

Therefore, an infant feels no surprise on becoming a
clock, when its attention is touched by a striking hour, or a
crystal reflected in its own iris. But the only proof I can offer
myself that I actually passed through a stage of being 'everywhere
at once,' is a memory of having been thus diffused that survived
my discovery of something I since have known as space intercepting
my relation to all other contents of the nursery.

Even when this dove or this infant consciousness that
encircles and darts and alights on its bird-like survey no longer
actually amalgamates with chance phenomena, the blossoming-into-
view of the objects of sense-- which for us is a process so discreet
that they always seem to be here to meet us or hang waiting round

4

the corner of our eye-- will ram its gaze so suddenly that a
flower will 'go off' like a fire-work.

The give and take of consciousness has something of
the mediumistic in the facility with which the parties to the
contract 'appear.' This predecessor of myself, however, being a
bit of cosmic consciousness in process of isolation within a di-
mensional fence, can only be made out if we pay attention, for
it looks like nothing but a clot of flesh in a plain room; a
state of affairs that is still unconditional to a bird unfamiliar
with capture.

Even if, after months of such spurious liberty, common
to its kind, of looming with the light of day or dwindling to the
flicker of a toe-nail, the bird of consciousness more often, but
still by chance, decides to settle upon this circumscribed creature
that it is going to inhabit-- a baby kicking its legs out of curve
to oppose the girding of the loin-- neither the tangible pressure
of the nurse's hand can make the baby lie still nor the intangible
urge of Nature's design keep the bird within bounds. The entice-
ment to belong to itself only succeeds when the bird, being dumb,
at last discovers the advantage of association. The flesh has a
voice.

So the bird alights. Now we can catch its ecstatic throb
in the cooing throat, recover the flap of its wings in a fountain
of arms conducting the fanfare of self-expression, and behold the
child-- an aerial infinity from which a body of grace depends as
a plumb to hold it to the level of phenomena.

Islands in the Air
8

8

## Chapter II

### The BIRD ALIGHTS

My first impression of being alive retains a certain distinctness as an infantile sensation of having come under a spell.

I found myself in an anteroom to the physical world filled with extraordinary light, matter scarcely perceptible & the ether not entirely invisible together formed a cosmic vapour that was slowly taking shape.

My sensibility loose as the air extended indefinitely or dwindled to minute focus, as consciousness unfettered on an introductory flight, established that intimacy with subjective & objective on which the intellect eventually relies.

I felt no surprise on becoming a clock when my attention was touched by a striking hour, or a crystal reflection in my own toe-nail.

A conviction of having been everywhere-at-once while definitely aware of my self, survived my discovery that something I since have known as space intercepted my relation to other contents of the nursery.

This infant consciousness, that circles, darts and alights on its bird-like survey soon ceased to actually amalgamate with chance phenomena, whereupon the blossoming into-view of the objects of sense (which, for the mature, is a process so discreet they always seem to be here to meet us, or hang waiting round the corner of our eye) rammed my gaze so suddenly a flower would 'go off' like a firework.

The Bird Alights'

9

The give-and-take of consciousness has something of the mediumistic in the facility with which the parties to the contract ' appear'.

When in the jugglery of birth, the Infinite performs its impossible stunt of omniprevalently 'remaining' while infinitesimally disappearing through some seedling point within itself to emerge as a human entity, a jot of life is introduced to three dimensions, while that inquisitiveness sometimes called the soul, receives an impression of having recently been 'drawn out' of the world around it....of being both liberated & trapped in a sudden, ambulent individuality.

A winged perception, snared in our atomic mesh; like the Infinite from which it emanates, & whose omniprevalence it briefly continues to share, it must in order to identify itself, drift through the identity of all things.

During initiation to its environment, conceiving no distinction between the thing to be known & the knowing of it, this 'inquisitiveness' becomes in turn everything it encounters, the while remaining 'at large' and the last thing to be located by it is the centre from which it diffuses, the body of its pending identity.

The roving passage of the intellect between the known & the unknown is not unlike a bird in flight. I have often felt an unaccountable pang of recognition in coming upon that stucco dove which, since an alate ghost signalled the girded loin to rise from baptism, is splayed on holy ceilings.

["'The bird alights'", "10", "Seen from beneath, the soles of its claws are like naked stars stamped on its useless underparts; the immobile unsullied abdomen of the Third Person, in Whom the whole hush of the altar concentrates above our heads to shower down from the arches its ethereal influence.", "If life, after all, should prove to be a divine emanation, this dove presents an image of our animation, & as we look up at its everlasting descent in a puff of gold to serve for the Breath of God, we may wonder whether this secret hovering over the centuries, if seen from above, would be revealed as the spirit of man suspended in intelligent ether...", "Yet this predecessor of my calculable self, a bit of cosmic consciousness in process of isolation, could have looked like nothing but a clot of flesh in a soft cradle. kicking its legs out of curve to oppose the girding of the loin. . . A bird dodging the cage, the enticement to belong to itself only succeeds when the 'Bird' being dumb realises the advantage of association. . . . . . . . . . . .

'Islands in the Air'

11

CHAPTER III

THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD

At the bottom of the valise I find the beginning of the world. Obviously a continuity it describes how the cosmic reserve of an initial consciousness cedes before objective centres of attraction. Far from being fantastic interpretations of half forgotten infantile responses to the commonplace with their queer resemblance to ceremonial magic these analyses are as pains-taking in their accuracy as a blue-print.

As though I were a nomad atom of a measureless giant from whom I inherited a serene cosmic continuity, to my natal preparedness the state of pure apparition in which the ' world' at first revealed itself was not of newness but rather, a reconditioned state of something having part with me in an eternal Presence familiar to itself.

Thus the world retained sufficient continuity to make it appear indestructible, for whether it is significant or no the initial concept of the budding mind is perfection & the first demand it makes of perfection is absolute duration, an illusion which lasts until Fact in founding our suspicion transforms the perfect to the impossible.

This was an almost increate world where hearing & seeing interchange & stationary bodies give chase to words that materialize. On entering it I made advances in a fairy air to communicative furniture which joined me in a veritable dance of

' The Beginning of the World'

consciousness the mature can no more move in than they can hob-nob
with a micro-organism in its universe of concentrated distance.

In this incipient world I possessed the ability to animate
ideas. Actual objects hardly convinced me that most suggesting
their immediate transformation, as horsehair sofas turning into
ships.

My improvements on three - dimensional conveniences being almost
invariably their conversion into engines of escape.

Perhaps in that transcendental factory in which the 'Word' is
made 'flesh' there is no inertia. The child's astonishing mobility
suggests that radio-acti...e onrush which comes to comparative stand-
still in our reality.

When I was twenty-three months old I had my first concrete
impression of phenomena... even then it was not so very concrete.

A row of glass bottles filled with coloured liquids standing
behind a fanlight over a door. The afternoon sun shone through the
bottles, through the fanlight, firing the drastic reds and yellows
in a triple transparency - the blaze exploded in me. I was
riddled with splinters of delight.

Quickened by that fundamental excitement combined of worship
and covetousness which being the primary response to the admirable
very likely composes the whole human ideal, my arms like antennae
waved towards the glitter of those bottles & through a sort of
vibrational extension, came into as good a bodily contact with them,
as if I were capable of a plastic protrusion beyond my anatomical
frontiers. Infants are always attaining to things they cannot touch.

At the same time I distinctly felt something not far away
being held in a clamp. But even though aware that 'it' struggled

' The beginning of the world'

I was not yet enough of a piece with it to find that this
something I a body - was attached to my own elasticity.

A vague unease in the vicinity of the clamp preventing
further extension on my part, the clamp descended, the
fanlight soared.

Consciousness constrained to follow in the wake of its body
had no chance to determine the agent of displacement, for as descent
 divested its course my airy consciousness was out in the glow of
the garden while the clamp must bear my load, or maybe a bed of
those pantomimic flowers called red-hot-pokers was immediately
transported to me on the staircarpet......first impressions being
unconditional.

Probably at that early stage reality consists in very clear
impressions made on a natal mindstuff about to fall into desuetude
while the realities are making very faint impressions on a more
utilitarian mind-stuff that, as it gains in substantiality, shows
them up more and more clearly. All I was alive to at the time
werex the flaming bottles and red-hot pokers.

Thus it may be that much later on the entire XXXXXX
event emerged quite clearly.

I was staying with the famxxy wife of our family doctor to
be'out of the way'while my younger sister was born:

Dr Monks who had one of those bulbous purple faces which
have practically disappeared with the caricaturists who exploited
them ( he had not at the time materialized as far as I was concerned)
was carrying me down a staircase to a carriage waiting in the drive

I even recovered the softness of the staircarpet under the
doctor's tread and I knew he had been at the age of twelve,
taking me home on hearing a reference

# 'The Beginning of the World'

On hearing this, my only visit to the doctor's wife referred to when I was twelve.

It appears that in infancy ' Reality' lies in the magnetic
property of attraction to incorporate the chosen object with the
choosing child while accessory circumstances print pictures, even
maps, which are not as it were taken off the press until years
later.

While I still possessed the mysterious ability to float
around myself, although it is impossible to explain why, whenever
my elders stressed a word in their educative way I somehow took
it for granted they were expressly giving a signal for embodi-
ment.

" Listen " said my nurse as my mother played a march on a
grand piano " that's the soldiers' music".

Instantly, before my eyes a file of soldiers sprang from
the carpet. All shining & alive they jogged across the drawing-
room floor with a full blown military swagger, notwithstanding
that they grew like plants only from the waist up out of a soft
golden yellow pile lying in the light from the french windows
through which they vanished.

After they had gone, the room & all it contained resumed
the monotony of practical conditions I have always found so
unconvincing.

Such an experience seemed casual enough to one who, herself
so lately embodied, took such senseless miracles as a matter of
course.

' The Beginning of the World'

15

On the other hand I was non-plussed as by *the* an abnormity,
when shortly after, I asked for the march to be played again &
on my request being complied with the living soldiery failed to
appear.

These magical embodiments are simpler than they would seem
being the result of the child's receiving such intense first im-
pressions it is able to exteriorize memory.

Groping back in that hazy mist of infancy for an explanation
as to why that vision had no legs, whereas real people were only,
when at all, tangible up to their waists, I dimly recaptured an
impression of being so held, that only the upper part of a
passing regiment was visible to me beyond a garden wall.

The most reliable milestones directing the intellect are
painful realities that lead to decease. It may not have been a
coincidence that my particular consciousness snatching at the air
on its fitful survey should choose a slight pain in the leg from
the tweak of a button-hook as a signal to enter the sphere of
adult reality.

Lifted onto the marble slab of a hall table to keep tidy for
my walk, I can see myself now a speck at the bottom of a well of
light lined with the unfurled fan of the staircase rising towards
a skylight in the roof.

As a patient inhaling an anaesthetic feels agony drawn out of
the body like an elastic that finally snaps, inversely, it became
aware of a discomfort taking place at some distance yet more
defined than had been the doctor's grip. It grew nearer and nearer
until in a last operation of my early detached attachment, I loca-
ted the discomfort in a slim black object lying in front of me like
an overthrown post, in an uncustomary sharpenness of perspective.

' The Beginning of the World'

16

The mind; in an effort to define the nature of anything
it faces for the first time, grasps at comparing.
I thought of the legs of furniture that pillared so much of my
adventure. But this, in spite of seeming rigid, was secluded from
the insensate stuff of its surroundings by an aura of viability
and a certain tenderness in which I was allarmed to find myself
beginning to take part.

I tried to recede, but the space that had so far intervened,
between myself and such things as I did not require failed to
expand. Bound in a new relation of inseparableness, I cannot get
away. The pinch of pain, unhindered, darts from the protruding
solid to my brain; and the world congeals in a clap of inertia.

The tempo of my consciousness, the hilarious riot of vibrant
infancy slows down, the scene dims, as when the weather changes.
Distinctly as if a film of radiance and velocity should transform
before my eyes to arrested motion and monochrome; for after the
violently superlative values I had been used to, I cannot at once
make distinctions among a milder coloration, so at first the actual
world presents its lethargic performance in photographic greys.

A woman, of the color of shadows and strangely slow, is
pressed against and bending over me in an intimate partnership of
my concrete plight.

"Can't you keep still," she asks, lifting with a long exertion
the buttonhole in her grey hand," while I do up your gaiters?"

There must be something ominous about a hue refractory to light
that led our ancestors to choose it for the pall of death; (often
an infant in arms will scream with terror at widow's weeds).

' The Beginning of the World'

17

The sight of the mat black sheath of my gaiter with its row
of boot buttons, stirring an inherited reaction of the eternal
subconscious, is my first alert of mortality; although it is
incredible, unless the condition for entering the adult's
world is the acceptance of finitude; Death is staring me in
the face.

And the heaviness of the flesh incurs its psychic counter-
part, an apprehensive sullenned, when by some sly, slow, three-
dimensional conjury one finds oneself trapped in a brick box,
caught by the leg.

" Now, ,don't sit there sulking, it's time--- ".

The marked propensity , in children, to hop like broken
birds L - - - - .

5

CHAPTER II

The Beginning of the World

As though a universal giant, having fallen asleep to
awaken as a monad, should retain during infancy something of the
serene continuity of the cosmos; to the child, in its natal
preparedness, the world has no beginning, for both take part in
the eternal Presence that is familiar to itself.

The state of pure apparition in which this world is at
first revealed is not newness, but of being reknown in a novel
relativity of something to which the child has hitherto been in-
herent become separate, and as this change is not altogether in-
terruptive, the world retains sufficient continuity to make it
seem indestructible and in so far perfect. For, whether it is
of any significance or not, the first concept that the mind can
form is of perfection, and the first thing we demand of perfection
is absolute duration; and the second, that it be unconditional.

This concept of Perfection only lasts until fact, in
founding our suspicions, transforms the perfect to the impossible.
But I can still evoke that almost increate world, where hearing
and seeing interchange and stationary bodies give chase to words
that materialize, and remember how a child, on entering it,
parades its glorious insuspicion of our world of fact as it makes
advances in a fairy air to communicative furniture which will join
with it in a veritable dance of consciousness in which we can no

6

more take part than we can hob-nob with a micro-organism, in its
universe of concentrated distance, which is also out of scale to
our dimension.

So we watch the child at play with little understanding
of its art of animating ideas in a universe at once inside and
outside our own. For the things we see do not appear to it, or
at most to suggest immediate transformation, as when, in my
Victorian infancy, the horse-hair sofas turned into ships. But
we cannot help noticing that a child's improvement of our three-
dimensional conveniences is, almost invariably, their conversion
into engines of escape.

Is this because in that transcental factory the child
proceeds from in which the word is made flesh, there is no inertia?
For there still lingers in its superior mobility something of
that radio-active onrush that comes to a standstill in our reality.
But to what indignity of occult shrinkage has its spirit been
submitted to have brought about an incalculable contrast between
its perilous stagger and its air of dominion-- the defiance of
remoteness and the tiny stretch of its arm. A baby is always at-
taining something it cannot touch.

******

Those fitful moments when the bird of consciousness
alighted crystalized on the emptiness of the cosmic haze in clear
vignettes that will never fade.

It was when I was twenty-three months old that I first
retained a concrete impression of phenomena, and even then it was
not so very concrete.

8

not yet enough of a piece with it to find out that this 'wome-
thing' was attached to my own elasticity until after future ex-
periences. Although a vague unease in the vicinity of the clamp
forbidding any further extension on my part, as the doctor de-
scended another step, constrained it to follow in the wake of my
body, once having been drawn off the bottled, my consciousness
had no time to attribute its forced displacement to the haul of
his arms, for when his descent did divert its course, it anti-
cipated his intention-- my airy consciousness was out in the glow
of the garden, while he must carry its load downstairs.

Or perhaps what really occurred was an immediate trans-
portation of a bed of those pantomimic flowers called 'red-hot
pokers' to the middledof the stair carpet-- these first impressions
being of such lightening nature. X

I cannot explain why the actual scene-- a strong man
carrying a small child downstairs towards a door opened on to a
garden, the waiting carringe or the knowledge that I was being
taken home-- did not exist for me at the time. It seems as if
it may have taken shape subsequently, as if stored in an embryonic
state to mature in the practical compartment of memory which only
opened up for me later on when I accepted rational standards.

As a background to my first encounter with color, they
attended me only so far as in a dream a particular person ac-
companies us, although on awakening we should be hard pressed to
understand why we had presumed he was there, as the dream con-
tained nothing to indicate his presence except our conviction
that he was with us.

9

Perhaps at that early stage the realities were cognized
vaguely as having the final unimportance which transcendental
things take on for the adult. It is possible that the infant's
realities consist in very clear impressions made on a natal mind-
stuff that is about to fall into desuetude, while the earthly
realities are making very faint impressions on a more utilitarian
mind-stuff that, as it gains in substantiality, shows them up more
and more clearly. For, as the facts stand, all I was alive to at
the time were the flaming bottles and red-hot pokers, and my only
reference to the visit and its cause is a remark made casually in
my presence twelve years later. At all events, in infancy, the
tremendous, the obsessive 'reality' lies in the magnetic property
of attractiveness to incorporate the chosen object with the choos-
ing child, while accessory circumstances print pictures, even
maps, that are not, as it were, taken off the press until later
on. Also, the intentions of the people taking part in an event
were registered but not received at the time.

******

Therefore we can define everything about the child ex-
cept the quality of its experience, for we can hardly imagine the
mysterious ability of this stranger to our order to float around
itself, any more than we can realize how often, when we stress a
word in our educative way, it takes it for granted that we are ex-
pressly giving the signal for embodiment.

It was not very long after I had first been bashed into
consciousness by the doctor's glittering glass-- and transparency

10

has always been a revelation to me-- that my mother was playing
a march on a piano with a long black tail.

"Listen," said my nurse who, together with the player,
had only the tenuous dream proximity, "that's the soldier's music."

Instantly before my eyes a file of soldiers sprang from
the carpet. All shining and alive they jogged across the drawing-
room floor with a full-blown military swagger, notwithstanding
that they grew like rooted plants only from the waist up out of
a soft golden-yellow pile lying in the light from the 'French'
windows through which they vanished.

After they had gone, the room and all it contained re-
sumed the monotony of practical conditions I have always found so
unconvincing.

It is curious if the real and unreal are interchangeable
in its mind, for which such materializations are a matter of
course, that the child should so very rarely mention them to an
elder. Does it know instinctively that for us words are not in
the habit of materializing to disturb our conviction that nativity
suffices to bring our offspring into the same world with ourselves;
or else, why should it make reservations in view of adult standards,
as if it could not get into touch with them.

But these magical embodiments that do actually take place
within our range are more simple than they would seem were we
aware of them. They are the result of the child having received
such intense first impressions that it is able to externalize
memory.

CHAPTER II

The Beginning of the world

As though a universal giant, having fallen asleep to
awaken as a monad, should retain during infancy something of the
serene continuity of the cosmos; to the child, in its natal
preparedness, the world had no beginning, for both take part in
the eternal Presence that is familiar to itself.

' Islands in the Air'

CHAPTER IV

THE ACCIDENT

Hopping about in my short embroideries I could not make head or tail of the furniture in the day-nursery; a wreckage piled on the site of a Perfection that had fractured to time and space.

There is no knowing why incipient life, when first it turned
towards the light should have headed for this particular form of
civilization, and with an organism responding to only a limited
gamut of vibrations it was hard to find my bearings. It looked
pretty much as though an accident had happened in the dark, crushed
my companions against their heavy household Gods; leaving things in
this commonplace room so entirely out of gear I could not be sure
whether I was a hopping child or an old crippled instinct poking
about among shadows for something to save.

A sense of disaster penetrated to that core of intuition
where the subconscious of our fellows seems more present than their
person, so similar to the physical is the intuitive impact with
the thing concealed.

Repression musters a rebellion that packs the atmosphere. I was
blockaded by the doubles of women sitting their patient sit or
rising like armoured towers with the lateral signals flapping &
cuffing. The effort to reconcile their actuality with the pretences
they projected was so preoccupying it prevented me from communicating
with them.

' The accident '

19

To my brain so sensitive in being new humanity was broken
in half. I was just on a level with the souls of their entrails.
My mother was but a corset - busk giving out ominous creaks as
if nursing resentment for some secret affront under festoons of
silk. Her subordinates were legs hiding behind panels of cloth.
My father, two tubes rattling coins in their summits; magical
sources of the houses and provisions that poured from them.

These people in their concrete extended no further than the
waist because their vibrations going straight through me conveyed
solidity. I could look up into their faces but being so far above
me they seemed almost visionary.

On my father's face was a smile. Out of the mouths of the
women floated words and words, some addressed to me. Not yet
knowing where abouts I was, miscalculating their direction, I
failed to reply, then, from that uncontacted visionary plane
there rumbled a ' too young to understand ' while subliminal
selves made appalling confessions to me. The women of the eighties
were filled with a different stuffing to the upholstery they
resembled,

A psychic pressure hemmed me in: the blind emergence of
inhibited lives.

Feeling depressed I decided to ignore it only when I turned
my back on it all I found myself face-to-face with the elastic
ogre time. An huge duration unfamiliar (to me) drew itself out
to its infinite length & wound itself about me.

" Feel me " drawled Time......" how endless I am, feel how
I am all bare....'count me" jeered time.

To save myself in space I fell back into the room. Clinging
to form I tried to balance mass, to rearrange pattern, but

' The Accident '

20

design on a scene of devastation is so unruly, everything fell
back into the same wrong shape again as soon as I moved my mind.

Sanity may depend on a sense of proportion. In the ' Accident'
even symmetry had been seriously injured & enough of my natal
illumination in its blatant beauty had lasted to serve as criterion
for anything I should ever see.

A room composed in a quarrell of display and thrift could not
hod out the arms of ite walls to gather me in as it should. Yet I
would sit staring at it expectantly for hours as if I were sure the
tawny excrement of colour spread over so many homes ot the time must
be the matrix of a jewel.

The convinced are always confirmed. Fiddling with the high wire
guard round the fireplace I pricked my finger. The lucid embers of the
grate glowed through the liquid drop. I had come into possession
of a living ruby.

The origin of symbols is not fortuitous. Destiny having also
its subconscious whose seeming accidents are omens of its ends
modern story mirrors ancient myth. There may be something redemptive
about a fabulous blood.

I was jammed in the conditional yet it took me some time to
narrow down to myself or pick myself out from among other people.

Muscular reflex to past illumination persisted. My arms
would fly up to embrace a blaze hardly extinguished to a ceiling.
They made a liveliness in the air annoying to an audience by whom,
could they behold it, the revolutions of the planets would be
blamed as figgets.

' The Accident '

21

This happened to me once when I had been playing with some
heavy dominoes & one still lay unheeded in my unclasping hand.

There ensued a train of events.

Words instead of sailing off to unknown destinations descended
stinging me with a vocal shrapnel of ' wicked temper' & 'smashed
window'.

I perceived that when my arms assumed a vertical position
other, horizontal arms shot out, from all sides, pointers like
craning geese converging towards a large placard of light I had not noticed before.

Sound increased. The mystery of all things visible became
audible culminated in a supreme voice rising from the
steel-bound abdomen. A very echo of the ' Accident'.

— Trends of ideas rushing from opposite directions within the
same confines, to crash into one another & splinter to bits.

Although unintelligible it reached that understanding having
no need of language.

Like an ungovernable wind it swept through me, crying.

"You, you who haven't no conception of evil, I will show you
evil. Look! Doesn't it frighten you to death? And where can I
do you
think I found it. Right inside you? You never knew it was there?
You'd rather throw it away? Nonsense! How could God chastise you,
with nothing to chastise?

It was a strange Accident in which the intellect colliding
with the absolute split apart into good and evil. I caught a hint
of its causation as the Voice summed up ' original sin ', puffing
my future equilibrium to the devil.

' The Accident '

22

Told not to move, while everyone else went down to tea,
I just sat pushing my fingers through the holes in the cane seat
of my chair.

At the same time I was tremendously engrossed with that
placard of light set in the air, so surprinsingly involved with
a series of excitements for which I could not find myself res-
ponsible. It was the being there of its not being there that
intrigued me. Only this was plain. The sodded light of these dim n
new days did not come in of itself. An implausible wound in
invisibility whose zone was fine as a spider's line revealed a clearer distance.

"Never mind" said a pair of eyes as, like violets too bash-
ful to fade they stole into the nursery with their maide-lady to
look at the hole in the window " it was an accident ".

' Islands in the Air '

CHAPTER V
ADJUSTMENT

If life at least is not heroic in fighting against infinite
odds in determination to make sense of itself yet I could not have
endured in my almost sub-physical helplessness among other
spectres of the sub-conscious that crowded into my company when
like Lucifer from heaven I was 'cast out' of perfection bom-
barded with 'ideas' peculiar to the human race; those mental sparks
illustrating reaction of which the first being a biological
myth of rise and fall inspired by the unconscious effort of
breathing align the sacred and profane concepts in paranoiac
alternation.

Nature takes care of all that. She stokes the sun to an
intensity compensating for the sublime......

I emerge into clarity once more.

I was as high as the hedge grass. An horizon of immediate sky
descends to my estate of insects & undergrowth on the edge of an
open country road, and the residium of its azure splashes one blue
flower against immensity. Isolated by this grounded perspective
in which the tops of my parents vanish on leaning over a fence
I saw nothing of the hills & plains spread out before them.

I was about to try and reach into the field & gather this 'innocence' its coolness

" Adjustment "

24

so reassuring after the ruby blood. But even a flower held in
the hand is not possessed. There is something more about it
than itself ; the aesthetic suggestion to make beauty one's
own through some dimly conceived and incalculable transfor-
mation.

Flooded with sudden determination for a moment conscious-
ness diffused? The physiological vehicle is wiped out. There
is nothing 'here' but infinity. Where my body had been standing
there was simply a nucleus of power.

Even as my consciousness had come upon my body I found my
will.

When I narrowed down to myself again something of that
Power which had absorbed me remained within me. It is the
Power that hoverover our eyes & through the eyes reciprocates
the light. The light which makes the inside and the Outside one.

Redeemed by self-sufficiency, I said to myself I can know
all things, achieve all things. All is in me, to emerge at
a sign, on some reflection with little cooperation. What cer-
titude of the future. There appeared no barriers to that
solar future washed up before me on an ocean of clarity.

The relief of readjustment, of perfect equipoise, when I
grasped my heritage of dominion over all things elated me.
The regenerative intervention of the will stirred up a great
bravado, as if, having been held in thrall by spectres and
providentially released, I should prefer to pretend I had
overcome them myself.

"Adjustment"

25 (25)

It is the nature of individually to look upon the rest of
the world in the light of an audience. I got the idea that
'an impression is to be made'. Trying to astound every one with
my unexpected potency and as often happens with the ambitious,
bluffing a little. I would climb talltrees or in the dark ascend
that indoor tree the staircase. It is easy enough to be brave
before you know what to be afraid of, and my elders praised me;
but they were being deceived, I knew nothing of valour, I had only
that intuitional trick of keeping the body of jeopardy in custody
of the spirit. It seemed so easy.

Again as in the case of our doctor's bottles, my conscious
dilation on reacting to the blue of the cornflower in the country
was all I experienced at the time. Later on, doubtless owing to
the gradual development of that utilitarian mind-stuff to which
I have alluded, correlative impressions emerged showing me this
as an event taking place on the only visit I ever paid my grand-
parents. At that age, around thirty months I was supposedly too y
young to understand. ( I calculate the age by the bulk of du-
ration the baby sister occupied in my mind which I also came
to remember.)

My grandfather is sitting in the doorway of his long low
carpenter's shed of tarred board, like a tree barber; for a fallen
wooden curl lies pale under a trestle. As I stood at his gnarled
knives beneath the humble apron, it seemed I was not so near to
him as our actual proximity would warrant; his timid benevolence
conveying how useless he felt it would be to grow fond of me.
A stillborn love kept us company in the interior of that quiet

" Adjustment "

26

black hutch built on a plot of waste ground with the same wild grass as in the ditch pressing upon its threshold.

Understanding that all operative objects have magical properties for small creatures like myself, he shows me an enormous magnet. I can see the new vermillion of its lean horseshoe, how with the passing of years, its size has decreased and its symbolic premonition of what in human personnality would most intriguing me.

This ' instantaneous ' of my english maternal grandfather blows out in a puff of condescension given off by my mother, and on that same puff his wife some months later settles in an incommensuous posture on the apple green plush of a flimsy gilt chair in our drawing room.

Her daughter, as in those days was the style, ' toys languidly with an ivory and gilt paper-knife. In her fingers the paper knife would slip and twist as if handled by one blind. But all the same I could see it was a weapon with which in some metaphysical manner she succeeded in skewering this shrinking grandmother, who was almost afraid to look at me, to our pretentious little chair. I never saw this grandmother again.

As in ancient times sorceresses were accompanied by their familiar. The Will may be seconded by an impulsive geni who can, if he cares, direct all the currents of hazard to further its course, and who advertises his presence by showing of signs.

It seemed *XXXXXXXXX* for a while as if I had come under his tutelage, for like the aboriginal who, on issuing from his *encounters*, picked up a diamond and other precious things when I went out for walks.

" Adjustment"

27

" Gracious, Miss, " said the maid, " you've got good luck."
So this is luck, I reflected. Nothingness itself crops up as values
that remain. I revelled in the promise of my luck, convinced that
not only should there be no hindrances, but that all the hidden
forces of fate would actually cooperate with me.

Being an optimistic throwback, I knew perfectly well
what to do about luck, for I had just been taught how to count
up to ten. In spite of the strain entailed in reaching the
handle of the door, driven by some inner necessity to escape from
the victorian era, I shut myself up in an unpeopled room to
enclose myself with what has always been alone with the air
that is 'knowing' what I really am.

Once alone, I would turn round and round until objective
reality dissolved. I stopped when I found myself attracted in
a direction. It was imperative that I should bow low in this
direction while certain numbers I had learned made a great to-do
in my brain. Numbers that are forces for my protection, at once
very present and very remote. Numbers that must not only be
muttered, but also spoken to. The awe they inspired was over-
powering and only offset by the security they bestowed. They
must, moreover, be bowed out to the measure of their own count.
And by some chance they were numbers immemorably holy.

However, my indeterminate impressions of the solids and lights
and shadows that formed my home could hardly incite will-power, they
having in the period of magical play been drained of all conjura-
tive properties except a lingering tendency to disappear allowing
the gradual outreaching of the imagination to supperpose an
inchoate facade of the future, built to the indiminishable

" Adjustment "

28 (28)

perspective of curiosity on my actual surroundings, even as the
natal inspiration had once masked all phenomena.

If the will is a force, it is so much the compliment of
curiosity that the call of the unknown most efficaciously
stirs it to action. The unyielding limits of the home afford
the most urgent pressure in ejecting it into a larger sphere.
While I was yet nothing but a bud of animation, so exactly
like a toy from its miniature face to the lace on its drawers,
in falling after a rubber ball I decided to conquer the world.
It did not matter at all that the words 'world' and 'conquest'
were absolutely unknown to me. Concepts are embedded in the
human mind long before they become communicable. Just as degrees
of impetus are defined by mathematical processes, I intuited
my impulses and their oppositions quantitively if not in kind.

According to the etiquette of my mythology, the will must
encounter a dragon, but at that toy-like stage the parental, or
counter-will is still lurking. Unconsciously it awaits the conven-
nience of seizing its opponent on common territory. So the
formless premonitions of a conquestorial future continued to
hang about me undisturbed, like the lace that ambitious arachnoids
spin out of reach. Desire puts its own construction on empti-
ness. Yet nothing pertaining to my phantasmal conjectures mate-
rialized until one day I happened on a little door. There are
many threshholds that may be crossed for entrance into non-
existant sanctuaries.

It was a door that lay on a low table, prostrate for lack
of any palpable jamb to support it. I oppened it and found

' Adjustment'

29

that this entrance gave onto another door; this one so flimsy
that it fluttered back to disclose what seemed to me an infinite
succession of white, four-cornered flaps. They were covered with
linear conundrums.

This was the first phenomenon that had come within my
range that had nothing about it of the "déja vu" of infantile
continuity. These signs of signs that record the centuries of
intellectual intricacy have no cosmic prototype. They mark a
certain independence of man that did have a beginning.

As the result of many inquiries I gathered at last that
such doors as these open onto the contents of time; that
behind them is stored the composite brain of humanity as if
preserved in microscopic slides; the final answer to the
whole question. All that was needed for access was to decipher
the unfamiliar markings. A challenge to the curious will. I too
became such a pest invading other people's occupation, pointing
to mysterious pages, that I was given a fat book of rhymed
alphabets. Enormously I concluded I was holding the doors of
the universe ajar with my hands. By the time I was four years
old, I knew how to read. My life as a scholar terminated at
that age. I could not guess when I came to 'Z is for Zantippe'
who was a great scold that again the methodical accidents of
destiny's subconscious had, through my first scrap of knowledge
predicted the death of the will.

Now that I had begun to show off, I was only an actor
on the common stage.

" Adjustment "

30

But could we, while it is still something nebulous or
absolute, get in touch with the child microcosm we might find in
this seedling of all evolution not only the reflorescence of the
past, but also a germination of the ultimate blossom of consciousness, and that, in the cyclic manner of secret things whose end is
in the beginning, it starts its unfoldment right under unparticipating eyes in a flashing synopsis of the eventual illumination
of man, as if Will were the urge upon us of Evolution, to arrive,
through a patient voyage of elucidation, at the point of departure.
Only this time by light of our own reason.

Why I acquired this idea of incipient perfection being common
to all infantile nature including my own, is unanswerable. Possibly
the exceptional quantity and quality of the degradations to which
I was submitted, as if in inverted illustration of the brightest
light casting the deepest shadow caused me, the more I was blackened
from without the more to exonerate an essential incorruption within
The contrast of what ignorant christians, while proclaiming the
ineluctable purity of Christ, made of the merely annoying brat I
may actually have been, and His" suffer the little children to
come unto me" with its implication that children alone were fit
for His company may have necessitated my assumption. Yet again...
This glorification of the infant must finally be accounted for
in that first incomparable moment of self glorification in transcending the self I described in the bird alighting. However far-fetched this all may seem this is exactly the intuitive value every true mother sets upon the babe she treasures with that unparallelled solicitude.

Adjustment

From among those authored odds and ends I pick a scrap
which would seem to belong under the heading of adjustment

I was seven years old when I found my particular face, on
visiting *km* a tailor's shop with my father. The tailor being a
friend of his, they were having a chat after business hours and
the lights were low. Before that winter evening my being alive
had consisted entirely of a narrow variety of intensive emotions.
I I had no identity, until, wandering into a deserted fitting-
room, I came upon my appearance in a triple mirror. Drenched *in*
in those depths and distances of interreflected glass which
are endless in having no existence, even as *in* the beginning,
I had attached my leg to my locality, I found my covered image
surmounted by my naked face.

Like a dead pearl in old dim seas adrift in an aquarium
of mirrored fog and incandescent gas that appeared to redrown
all the life that wanted to look at itself in that ocean from
which originally it arose. Or like some marine bloom aslant
from a maroon rock, its contour formed that scribble on the air that
is a profile, as if it had been cut in its shadowy cameo with
a musical instrument; so much do some things plastic look melo-
dious.

Awash on an unaccountable current, stirred by invisible
incentives as I moved, my own face filled me with the instant
sympathy one might feel for an exile, recognized as a compatriot
to whom one is powerless to attain. I was excited by a premonition

' Adjustment '

32

of future meetings under unimaginable circumstances. This mirrored face drooped in its semi-luminous loneliness from the rock - like distortion upholding it and into which it seemed at moments to subside. Surprised into unwarranted recognition, I stood as if being mesmerized by a face already held in trance by myself, to at last describe in the maroon base it attached to the preposterous proportions of my winter sleeves. Sliding my hand down the side of the face I should never see, to 'prove' myself in the mirror, "That's I" I thought --- and its got such a ' different ' expression. The unreal distance between myself and ' it.' disquieted me.

This fitting incident of hazard having picked that proper partition to fit me to my face, I, according to my kind and to be seen of them, walked away wearing that disastrous veil which falls to pieces before we have worn it out.

on visiting a tailor's shop with my father. The tailor being a
friend of his, they were having a chat after business hours and the
lights were low. Before that winter evening my being alive had

The relief of readjustment, of perfect equipoise, when
the child grasps its heritage of dominion over all things, is
so elating, that the regenerative intervention of the will stirs
up a great bravado, as if, having been held in thrall by spectres
and providentially released, it should prefer to pretend that it
has overcome them. myself

So perhaps, because it is the nature of individuality
to look upon the rest of the world in the light of an audience, I
got the idea that 'an impression is to be made'. I tried to as-
tound every one with my unexpected potency and as often happens
with the ambitious, I blurring a little. I would climb a tree and
from my foliate pedestal play monument to the sky, or in the dark
ascend that imoor tree, the staircase. It is easy enough to be
brave before you know what to be afraid of, and my elders praised
me; but they were being deceived, for I knew nothing of valour,
I had only that intuitional trick of keeping the body or jeopardy
in custody of the spirit. It seemed so easy.

"Rthics & Hygiene of Nightmare"

62

When I entered her bedroom to say good morning to mama---
this was when we were at home again--- she lay in the shadow
of a screen that was covered with a woven foliage of several kinds
of nut-bearing branches. As I drew near she told me to bring her
the smelling salts.

It was rather dark and on my difficult expedition I hurt
my hand, exclaiming---.

Instantly that dreaded voice leapt out of the thick air
conserved by heavy curtains, so like a lash it almost whipped
me off my balance where I stood on a puffy sofa, my arm upraised
to turn up the gas.

"You wicked girl," it cried, inflating the 'wicked' until
it entirely encompassed me. "What sort of a mind have you got?
Using the language of a lot of low scavengers?"

"I'm sick and tired of trying to teach you to behave like
a little lady."

"How can I make a silk purse out of a sow's ear?" it
enquired.

"You're a downright disgrace to me."

While I was recovering from the stabbing surprise that
distracted attention, the voice leapt on, gaining like a moun-
tain goat, successive footholds on various rocky themes.

I heard it say, "The eye of God seeth thee". Also,
"Day and night it watcheth over thee --". It's no use trying to
hide from it, you shiftless, good-for-nothing lazy lout! He'll
punish you!"

"Ethics & Hygiene of Nightmare"

63

Again, it was saying, " Nice children are born in cabbages.
You were found under a stinging nettle! "

U
And again. " A good ducking in the horse-pond is what you
require. "

There followed a long analysis which brought up my ' filthy
hypocrisy' --.

" You're sweet enough when you want to wheedle something out
of me. Cupboard love! That's what I call it."

And the voice that edits private history set out on anew trail

" You're just like your father," it taunted. " He'd let his
wretched relations eat me out of house and home. They'd claw the
rags off my back if I'd let them," and I could see how my mother
drew close her comfortable wrap.

" Not me ! If I hadn't any self-respect they'd all be living
here, and I and my children out in the streets begging our bread,
I _dare_ say ! No, thank you.

" But you're allx alike-- the whole bunch of you. Here I
slave myself to the bone morning, noon and night till I might
as well drop dead at your feet for all the thanks I get-- it
would serve you well right, too! "

Although I could understand enough of what the voice was
saying to gather its inconsequence, I was shattered, for its
sound vibrations beset me with the rough-sheathed impacc of a class
whose loud self-assertion lifts them above the manual clatter of
their lives, whose heritage it is to lack the mental leisure
which alone, of all conditions, allows for the culture of such
superficial graces as amenity, the expression of affection or the
tempor d rebuke, -- a class for generations so hard-driven they

64

had no time for loving their offspring.

In the years to come, I was to read in a newspaper which may have been unreliable, that sound vibrations would be studied by some War Office as the most deadly instrument of collective destruction.

"Then you'll be contented, " the voice went on, still overcome with apprehension of being worn to death. " But never fear. I'll let the neighbors know the sort of life you lead me. The world will point its finger at you. You'll be an outcast! "

Then it continued, after a short pause for breath, " So sly, so underhand, always whining around for something. Nothing ever satisfies you--- you needn't stand there gaping. Why aren't you having your breakfast, if you please?"

"But I shan't let your father have his way and buy you a mantle either --- all decked out in your frills and furbelows like a duchess. And who are you, I'd like to know? A child who has no fear of God! It's not surprising you wont obey your mother. I wonder you're not ashamed to be so ungrateful".

On hearing these unexpected denunciations, my mind, which normally should work forwards, reverted; set out on that endless introvert journey in search of the motive attributed to it --- imperceptible cause of a harrassing effect.

However, this preoccupation had not as yet entirely wiped out my interest in the ceaseless appearance and vanishing of green pixies and gnomes taking shape among the cretonne foliage on the screen beside the bed.

"Haven't you any conscience at all? --" asked the Voice,

65

prob ing the ganglions of my nerves and setting them all a-
jangle, " --- with such a lovely home and kind parents to do
' everything of the best' for you--- What more in the world
could you possibly want to make you happy? "

Although ere this the problem of happiness, whatever it
was, had never presented itself to me, I felt that this very
moment it was being irrevocably solved.

"But no, nothing is ever good enough for you, my fine lady
Look at those lovely boots I bought you only last winter---
pretending they hurt you --- you grow like a weed that is no
good to anybody".

"What do you mean by leaving the room while your mother is
speaking--- have you no respect?" the voice demanded, as I
shrank toward the door---

"I'd dress you in a potato-sack, if I had my way. That'd
knock some of the conceit out of you, you stiff-necked genera-
tion! And you needn't think any one will ever marry you, either,
for all your idiotic father's wonderful plans-- You, with your
foul mouth! I'll tell the young man what you are all right---
though it would be good riddance of good rubbish--- I do declare

Disintegrated by the vibratory flux, I was quivering as
a heat haze might after the flame that engendered had gone out;
only for having listened to the fluency of British lane and
lowly hearthstone, a little sound theology and the philosophy
of thrift.

Change is not gradual; it is instantly that transformation
takes place. Destiny is a lightning calculator who will show

66

how the sum works out, subsequently, at great pains, in the
numerals of events.

Selfless, defenseless, abject with shame, I watched my
inborn equipoise recede among the shadows wondering over the
future of its sallow double, six-year-old me, left behind in life

"Don't you know that Satan takes people who use bad language and throws them in the fire? You'll burn for ever and ever".

"Couldn't I die" I enquired, anxiously.

"No, you won't be able to die--- and the fire hurts fearfully
so you can't bear it--- yet, you'll have to bear it, for it
will never, never end."

"But," I pointed out beseechingly, "I only said 'bother'
because I hurt my hand on the gas bracket."

My poor mother's myopic eyes peer at me with a somehow
thwarted suspicion." Don't try to tell me you didn't say---"

I could not catch the name of the crime I had been accused
of.

"Mark my words," the voice slowed down solemnly, "No good
will ever come of you. Nothing will ever prosper with you."
There followed the supreme imprecation of heavy melodrama, "The
curse of your mother is upon you."

Then, in a more familiar manner, "Get out of my sight!"
shrieked the voice.

its

If only I could. But just all this sight one has to live
in, that, baring the spirit to the quick, leaves me defenseless
Another pair of predatory eyes is waiting for me in the dining
room. Governess' eyes that have never been kissed.

"Now let me see," says Miss Ware, consulting a list she

" Ethics & Hygiene of Nightmare"

67

has prepared, " One mistake in spelling, four in arithmetic, three in history, two in grammar--- that makes ten pieces of punishment bread."

She sets my little body up against the table and watched as I stuff it perforce with the ten tremendous slabs of Hovs. Hovis. Aridity absorbs saliver. My throat contracts. My stomach becomes delirious as the tawny pulp expands its way down, tedious as an inverted parturition.

When it is ended, my breakfast that has been waiting for me, begins. Lumpy porridge, wholesome burnt milk, a cold egg, the regulation amount of bread and butter.

With this ceaseless invasion of tepid volume, I swallow Miss Ware's desolation of a bondwoman whose primeval recollections are lying in a dingle with a naked body. BOY

" That child is getting terribly anaemic," my father exclaims on catching sight of me, " Where' s her tonic" They manage to pry my mouth open and pour down some cod-liver oil.

He insists that my mother take me to the doctor. So we go in a cab to visit Sir Edward Seivkin, , the Queen's physician his consulting room being as near to court as we can approach. My mother is rigid with his reverence as this awe-inspiring personage orders my left lung , or what remnant he has found of it, to be planted immediately in a country farm. But having had our guinea's worth of society, all that the lung gets out of it is a stout push and " See what comes of disobeying your mother", as I bear it disconsolately down the front steps.

I must attend to myself.

Every child of that era was aware of what it meant' to go

68

into a decline ' for they could not learn too early of the
consequence of wet feet or sitting in a draught-- and should
you be caught in the rain , will not the very drops as they
fall upon you arise as feathers? In a literature ofb smug
fatalism, the' nicest ' children cross flickering finger
on a hollow torso draped in calico; and even longer girls lie
out at full length on the first disappointment in love.

These recumbent beings waning in the window among the
hyacinth bulbs, breathing ever faintly their genteel breath
and about to fly to heaven aroused my envy, I having caught
onto the fact that--- once in this world you have one way out.

Standing outside the housemaid's closet was a row of tall
cans she kept filled with cold water --- so much more water than
could ever seep in a shoe--- jugs just brimming with consumption

It was easy to enveigle my sister out of bed. Warmth
itself is excelled by the tingle of being naughty. So we spent
the evenings on the landing and with the aid of tumblers she
pours the cold water all over my body under my cotton night-
gown. How enjoyable it is to shiver in defiance. As I paddle in
a puddle, death is become a practical joke on my elders.

I only renounced death when I happened upon eternity. One
night when we were out on this quest of tuberculosis, we found
a ladder in this same closet, left heaping against the cistern
I climbed it, and peered over the edge of a reservoir so near
the ceiling it hardly belonged to earth.

In this grey shadowy vat is a metal ball soldered to an
invisible support---an eroded orb on a bottomless water, like a
caviar speck, egg of some fish that is increase, afloat

69

ON the face of doom.

Scardely a cosmic spectacle. Yet in this waking survey of
my inanimate, silver somnambulists' world, I see it as a timeless
universe. It may well be a microcosm awaiting the generation
of life, or a clinker of a burnt-out comet.

The cistern represents absolute depth as I cannot see to
the bottom of it. For me, the little leaden planet has the
blind patience of 'before life'. I am looking at a universe
that is not yet 'alive'. --- or has it some kind of liveness
in being immeasurably aloof? For me anything may come alive'--
a doll, a picture-- I once laid a colored print off a meadow
under my feet on the carpet & went for a walk in the country.

As so often in those early years I could remember things
that must have been unknown to me, this, in spite of the stark
impossibility of its ever having been cognized by any circumscribed
consciousness, seems nevertheless familiar to me. Yet my possible
knowledge of the elementary fact of the world being round would
seem insufficient for evoking so great a concept from so trivial
an object.

Moreover this disproportionate disunited creation--- a planet
and its primordial aqueous surface--- which was what I surprisingly
recognised in the metal ball--- separated and incommesurate did
not make sense--- unless it comes clear, when we consider the
disregard for dimension and location shown in my infant drawings
in which a bird may be bigger than the tree it perches upon or
rain more defined than a crowd of people watching a locomotive
travelling in the sky.

30) (70)

The wet calico stiffening on my body clothes me in a
dignity as cold as the dim vacuous peace of my secret planet
in the upstairs cistern; and perhaps because simplicity allows
for vastness, in looking at my symbolic universe, I feel I am
external so that which contains me and that somehow thereby I
become everlasting.

These clouds of cosmic fancy soon roll away, and this
plumber's orb reduces to a virgin playground---void,--- and
volcanoes and kingdoms spring up upon it ( can not a child bring
the whole of nature into the house with one sod of grass?) Now,
it is overrun by a superlative breed of people--- I am just about
to leap upon that planet myself to make merry among them, when it
strikes eleven.

Miss Ware, all this while sits with her book after her
lonely dinner in the school-room--- How inexact! Is she not this
very moment in Denmark--- " Here's rue for you", she reads,
" our shepherds call them by a grosser name". Her cheeks are flushed
because mankind was once so young as to collaborate with spring.

She has had her door ajar to keep an ear on her sleeping
charges. But the queer rise and fall, the rumble and pitch of
points of view as opposite as the poles of the earth, pressing their
dynamic impact upon a closed diing room door, have prevented her
hearing our assassinative antics on the upper landing.

Peeping over the bannister, we see her coming up to bed. And
the blood-red splash of her evening bodice mounts the staire in
the wake of the wet, white flash of myself making for the dark-
ness of the night- nursery at the top of the house.

Poor Miss Ware's My younger sister, who not being in the

71

habit of creating universes, sees so much more than I do of
what is going on, pretending to be asleep, watches the nurse-
y governess undress. She sees her looking at her own nakedness
in the mirror, finding it pleasant. Was it her veneration of God,
or Victoria, that withheld this irreleasable prisoner from murde-
ring us, another woman's children.

My maternal grandfather & grandmother were devoted. When
they died they did so within a week of each other.

I was told how" Grandfather" - & I could see him as the
snowy white beard I remembered, bowing over his wife's coffin in
refusal to let it leave the cottage until he should accompany her
as he sat in his armchair beside her, immovable, unfed---" he
managed to expire in the nick of time.

It was a double funeral.

Apparently red with fury my poor mother, whose emotive
life was so rudimentary her sorrows & apprehensions unified in a
manifestation of perpetual rage, preparing smoke to attend was
trying to sew a strip of black cloth on the machine.

It was not yet I should recall my vow when plucking the
shepherds purse which had she known of it might have justified
that look of denunciation lodged in my mother's eyes beyond the
hump of a mechanised animal swiftly nibbling the outstreched
cloth.

Their observation twisted as usual my Sensibility to a

5 72

drill boring the depths of my consciousness to locate

'what I had done'. The original evil these eyes accused

me of - was indefinable but for its suffocating pressure--

Standing submissively beside her as she innoculated me
with ' self accusation' I at the same time gathered that
Auntie Mary would spend the whole day in our house to look
after us while my mother buried her dead.

This Miss Gunne we were trained to call Auntie Mary was
a gentlewoman in reduced circumstances who had discreetly
advertised herself in the 'Ladies' Pictorial" as a 'Companion'

The mention of her name correlated a scatter of incidents
latent in my mind.

It evoked a brief respite in subliminal warfare, on first
being engaged to propound the ways of the world to my mother
she infused our constricted atmosphere with a little of the
fairy-tale inconsequence traditional to english infancy. Among
other things she had instituted 'surprises'. My mother at
first responded, hence her throwing of the blue valentines.

73

This peaceful interlude dispersed. Like 'real' relations she was 'forbidden the house'. Never would my mother, her self-respect outraged, speak to her again. Auntie Mary, th'silly thing, had theories on family life. Within a period of several years, Mary Maud Gunne provided my sole familiarity with culture.

Round the corner from the sweet-shop where I had met my great-grandmother Mary Maud's bell was set in a gate post so low I could pull it when outraged.

Once I visited her. I was again running away. Set out to seek my future in a peculiar land I could see distinctly. Void as the desert for my lack of imagination two trees like planed poles, each bearing its single enormous fruit, the one a pear, the other an apple were planted vis-vis without further incident. Trees of an unattainable knowledge in my empty promised land. I had transpOXKised them from the rosey branches of fruit dividing vigneted groups of figures on the same wall-paper in the night nursery - wherein before daylight I had scooped out prime-eval caves.

But this is not true. I did not see any trees. There were no poles, and the fruit was not large enough to support the weight of the trees. Also, there were no apples, only pears. This is not true at all.

-Theain-

74

The ancient things in the home of the Gunnes seasoned my fingers. Poking the patterns of the past I could feel they were on the verge (in the future) being recomposed.²

In the window draped with Virginia creeper there was a ball propped against the back of an invalid's chair, of a surface resembling a rose petal, it was kept under a lace cap. Invisibly rooted in it threads clinging together for fineness, silvered to metallic whiteness slipped into groups of corkscrew curls on either cheek of Mary Maude's mamma. I would have required a fractional definition to compare the whiteness of these two women's hair. Aunty Mary's was pure white, Mrs Gunn's was whiter still.

Either a temporary reconciliation had taken place or that truce warranted by tragedy. I found myself in soothing presence of the leery shades of those roads of old walls.

Ordinarily we were taken for walks in glum streets between semi-detached facades in paralysed regimentation.

As nobody took action when we grew out of our clothes or boots, progress was agonising. At one time I must have contracted from some old bruise an oste ? (thickening of the bone). Every step I had to take gave me the sensation of my shin bone having been sawn in half & the contiguous ends bumping together. Nowhere an ear for chilish complaints- like soldiers on the march we went on walking. Conversation was desultory; once on setting

75

out from Blenheim Terrace I remarked to my governess "tomorrow
will be Good Friday - "Yes" she answered two hours later on our
return " Tomorrow will be Good Friday. After nights insouffarent
for toothache, the days insisted on their duration.

This day with Miss Gunn was a transformation. It was
spring. She allowed me to wear my slippers. She told us stories.
In her comforting society my body lightened; the solar plexus
unknotted as should an understanding saint visiting a prisoner w
who has no comprehension of the criminal automaton functioning
within him, through some sublime response bring momentarily to
the fore that image of God submerged in him, Mary Maude without
a wand 'turned' me into a happy child.

An unimaginable aroma drifted through the air.

With the perversity of chance, I found in this very heavenly
afternoon the occasion for my unique experience of what is now dis-
cussed as precocious sexuality in children.

I believe

We came under a lime tree in bloom, under a flowering dome
of pale green tassels raining a thousands scents.

In asweet assault of insect orchestra a cloud of bees
impinged their zuming chords on spurts of light. There was a sound
of shuttles of mobile air weaving a fabric of leaf-bud & pollen to
hold in suspension the travel of sun-light.

This tree alive with melodic fragrance shaken in interlaced
shimmer of ivory into jade, tuned to the pitch of deific nerves
dropped in its manifold animation soft translucent caterpillars
mourn?
filled with verdant juice. Vertiguous, in falling they spun round
& round at the end of invisible lines in centrifugal counterpoint
to a collective undulation of sweet rhythm.

An aesthetic excitement stirred in my body a faint electric

76

nuclear response, a projection of the vibrant lime transplanted
within me, branches of nectar dripped through my torso & my limbs
--- a replica of the arboreal structure of the nervous system.

"Oh dear" I thought anxiously, "a caterpillar has
crawled up my inside."

Even the prudery of the inhabitants of a brick box cannot
prevent a little sex-enlightenment from creeping in.

I was a little over eight, sitting outside the night -
nursery at dusk with a little girl who had come to play with me in
our seaside lodgings. Entranced in the fantastic intercourse of
young creatures, we dangled our legs from a great big laundry basket we had preferred to the banal accommodation of the sedate.

"You're so silly," said my visitor whose interests had
revealed themselves as more realistic than my own," I bet you
don't even know where babies come from."

The jeering reflection of her remark, together with its
import, relating itself to an accusation often sprung upon me by
grown up people, I answered, "They found me under a stinging
nettle."

"Oh, you booby---", then she crowed, "I know how you
get them."

"Well, how do you get them," I asked her listlessly, not
particularly requiring one.

"Same as Christians," this child, to whom you implied
'jew' assured me assertively.

"What!" just by saying 'Where 's Christians'?' I exclaimed
mistaking her words and confusing them with an occult invocation

77

akin to ' open Sesame' gleaned from some fairy-tale I cannot
recall, staring the while at a patch of light on the carpet to
watch the baby appear.

"No, stupid, I said Jews get babies the same way as Christians". Again this word that had gradually formed in me an impression of its being something that _did_ and at the same time _did not_ exist ---.

"What are Jews" ?

"Well, we just _are_," she explained, and started out on
my initiation.

The copulative prelude was most summarily dealt with.

"--- then the woman " continued my instructress " gets most terribly ill and writhes in agony for nine months and then the doctor comes to cut her open and takes ' it' out " ( Instantly everything inside me had congealed to an icy lump). But it hurts so badly that she almost always dies before he has time to sew her up again. " You see", she hooted in triumph, " I know more than you do",

The effect this information had upon me seems, now, dis-
proportionate in a child whose mentality was already stuffed with
hell and annihilating duty: the proof of whose existence was a
constant pain in my head.

But I get to look so very unwell that even others beside
the master took notice, and at last, when terror became irresis-
table, I ceded to my elders curiosities, but the matter being
too miserable for speech, I wrote out a statement with the stub
of a pencil. A child in horror of its origin begging for reassu-
rance. Alas, I had given my mother the opportunity to draw her-
self up to the very pinnacle of her superb morality.

78

"Now you are like a leper," she told me, degrading me with her righteous eyes, "Never, will you be able to look any one in the face again."

Secure in her immunity to the anathema heaped on a child who by chance surprises an unclean knowledge of which the monopoly being reserved for the adult, mysteriously endows them with superiority, she flaunted the anomalous comparison of her unassailable status that made me despicable. "Mind you guard your disgusting secret carefully--- Never breathe a word", and I felt I must hug it hopelessly to myself, live with it uncomforted and alone --- always, while through the panic of my thoughts I heard the pitiless voice grind out, "You are no longer fit to be left with other children!!"

At last the secret meaning that lay behind the ominous creating of those busks was revealed to me as the working of a relentless machinery, involving *myself*.

They're only dead men's heads in a dream - I assured myself for it would soon be time to go to bed.

"Through all their misfortunes they never lost sight of their origin," *The Master* was saying to the governess. "We know who we are --- for four thousand years--- ". I was not free to pay attention to their palaver. "Massacres, renascences, emmigration --- bales of British cloth --- the priestly glory of his ancestors" were meaningless to me. My concern was to brace

79

- time for me
myself to encounter the jibbering decapitations of the prophetic
dark.

I could not listen if I would to the ritual he described,
or reverence patriarchs, nor much wonder why, when speaking of
juice, they should pronounce it jews ----. The hour when I must
relinquish an upright realism for the horizontal surrender to an
existence one cannot ' touch' was drawing too near.

ooofiiiiiiiiiiiiiooo

IN my dreams I an crossing a bridge with the master and his
head is bowed before me -- an endless bridge spanning
a shoreless sea that is turbid with red clay -- and now da is look
ing upward in the air.

Out of this terra-cotta-colored sea that it seems I must
cross forever. there rises an interminable stake, out of the depths
of the waters up through the foundations of the sky -- a breezeless
brazen sky. And on this infinitely unabbreviated totem pole are
growing oracular shoots -- Heads of ancients, like mummified seers
of a type I have never seen -- their bearded irony drips
from their salient cheek- "ones under embedded fevered eyes surve-
ying their issuant edicts as words to be weighed as gold-- Heads
of patriarchs craning alive out of their world that is increate
save for its axis. All prophesying at once, they conjuring the master to
me to some enterprise obscure to me.

I was afraid of falling asleep, for the patriarchs were
recurrent; I knew when I should dream them, for as soon as the
gas light was turned out, darkness showered red and yellow discs.

80

like gory and golden money before my open eyes.

There was a 'different' dead man's head ' in another
dream that terrified me --- being unexpected in so usual an
environment ---

I would be opening aAXM the rickety door to the
chicken-run when a drift of snowy beard on the hard earth floor
stopped me. Buried up to its chin, which moved with difficulty
in mumbling, an old man's puzzled face stared up at me. Not so
much coming out of the earth as sinking in, my material grand-
father tries to convey some duty--- as though he were drawing me
into the ground with him --- I awaken in apprehension--.

If my dreams were stange, I also met with the monsters of
daylight, for as if the perfect craftsmanship of Nature is liable
to be taken too much for granted, her even process eliciting no
gratitude for her meticulous conformity to her own standard, she
will sometimes go on strike to give us a glimpse of the awful
phenomena that ensue when she allows her attention to wander for
a fraction of an embryonic second from her everlasting job.

Perhaps to remind us of this, Mr Barnum collects the mis-
shapen output of her abberations in the side shows of his circus,
or to alleviate the discontent of humanity for their average
shortcomings by showing us 'something worse', or to mystify chil-
dren allowed to take part in their parents amusements.

Roped in by a crimson cord--- an unfamiliar organization
of living forms I am not prepared for presents an ill-assorted
pattern that, to my eyes, looks like a bodily lunacy, and it re-
quires some effort on the part of my unpracticed mind to see it
as actual substance.

81

FREAKS! Parading on a platform. -- Human accidents de-
pendant on the indelicacy of a crowd for bitter sustenance of the
partial assassination
enforced suicide of their incongruous life.

The skeleton dude, sporting the derisive emptiness of his
conventional evening dress, puffs wirely at a cigar the thick-
ness of his arm; while beside him, the bearded lady's silky
appendage slided down dejectedly over the amber satin of her
upholstered bosom. On a sign from the show-man, these two defec-
tions of the creative clockwork ogle each other flirtatiously,
suggesting to the leering onlookers that, in defiance of fleshly
standardization, grotesque inflammatory desires call from his
attrophy to her excess.

Slowly we pass on.

A youth in ruby plush lowers his shame-worn eyes to his ab-
domen, and handles the rubbery legs of his unborn twin which tend
to cling together because the cramped heels of foeti are crossed.
Over and over again he pulls the creasy limbs of a babe apart to
inform the ticket holders. To me, in my sickening pity, it appea-
red that this half body had taken a premeditated plunge to stick
half way in the process of becoming, rather than ripen for the
butchery of conscious life. I ached with the fateful hatred of the
Freak for those legs of annihilation taking their static leap into
the lasting exposure of his modesty; the cleaving of his stricken
abdominal muscles.

Still we pass on ---

The air is astir with monotonous writhing. Four arms about
two young and sorrowful heads, lifting enlacing, parting as they

82

strain for ease from their convulsive nearness; enlacing, par-
ting -- lifting as it were, a pearly imploration for release
to the tradition of heaven. Plush and gold encases the inse-
perable torsoes of the siamese twins.

Now, at last, this pacing of torture is over, and I
return to the child-reality as we come to a great glass case
whose support is secretively draped with vevet reaching to the
ground. It contains a live lady with crispy hair and bedecked
with diamonds. She is rocking cheerily on her hip, for from her
her waist down grow the metal scales of a fish-tail cocked up
behind her, a cold, hard, reassuring release from a surfeit of
eratic flesh.

These peccadillos of Nature's moments of absentmindedness
are closely resembled by the deformations of the spirit--

All I remember of a visit to 'Venice' at the 'Olympic'--
beside gondolas, the deathly blackness of pleasure-hearses
toppling across the oily waters of an artificial canal-- as a
vista of planked flboring, cleared for the passage of challen-
ging feet-- the swinging swish of tartan kilts.

Raising my head I saw they belonged to what now appears
simply as a troup of scotch pipers playing a lively KILL reel--
but this is how they looked and sounded KILL to me then.

These kilted pipers are blowing into the parched legs
of dead men, and have stuck hurtful wooden tubes into them; they
have tied up withered skin round the one end of the tubes and
hold the other end with the new clear skin of their cruel mouths
The souls of the dead men are imprisoned in their mummied legs

83

which writhe and swell as the living blow their devastatingly
live breath into them and their souls shriek out in torture
and terror -- while the big bodies of my elders straggling
around them impel me to this deathly orgy by my throbbing
wrists held in their ineludable claws of dominion.

It has taken me some time to discover of what material
I could have formed this ghastly illusion; but at last I remem-
bered a fancied resemblance of bagpipes to -- smoked hams, to-
gether with the somewhat human misery of their squeals.

The last of the entertainments to obsess me was an early
electric power plant open to the public View at Earls Court
Exhibition. That always only half acquiescent participant, a
child, I trail along behind my mother and the nurse. Stirred to
an uneasy premonition of the coming mechanized world by weird
sparks and flashes flying from the slip and slag of enigmatic
engines, I decide it is imprudent to expose the working of such
magic to unprepared eyes.

In the dream I shall dream that night, I meet again
with that steel swish and arc-lit iterance of a nerveless
automatism engendering exiled moons.

I drag at my mother's towering skirts to entreat her to
come away -- she takes no heed -- Suddenly this dream mother
comports herself in the wildest way -- She is flinging her arms
up, and at once they become steely arms -- She is changing --

8# (84)

turning--- changes into a dressmaker's dummy of ringing metal
--- ххххххх--- with expandible bust--- the abdomen full
as the curving breast of Lohengrin's oncoming swan. There,
where the skirts should have been, all that upholstery dissem-
bling the site of sin--- is a forbidding cage of iron wire. It
rasps my fingers that have clutched at it for protection, ---
a protection I now require against itself, the very author of
my being--- being author of my fear--- twirls from my fingers---
twirls, spins, spins to a transparent bobbin of intense rotae
tion.

This fetish of maternity gloats in preposterous peals
of derision while her face dissolves---

And this was the last of my nightmares --- asleep.

here follows 84 A

Nightmare

come with apprehension of being worn to death. "But never fear.
I'll let the neighbors know the sort of life you lead me. The
world will point its finger at you. You'll be an outcast!"

Then it continued, after a short pause for breath, "So
sly, so underhand, always whining around me for something. Nothing
ever satisfies you-- you needn't stand there gaping. Why aren't
you having your breakfast, if you please?

"But I shan't let your father have his way and buy you
a mantle either-- all decked out in your frills and furbelows
like a duchess. And who are you, I'd like to know? A child who
has no fear of God! It's not surprising you son't obey your
mother. I wonder you're not ashamed to be so ungrateful."

On hearing these unexpected denunciations, my mind,
which normally should work forwards, reverted; set out on that
endless introvert journey in search of the motive attributed to
it-- imperceptible cause of a perceptible effect.

"Haven't you any conscience at all?--" asked the voice,

Nightmare A-8

She sets my little body up against the table and watches as I stuff it perforce with the ten tremendous slabs of Hovis. Aridity absorbs saliver. My throat contracts. My stomach becomes delirious as the tawny pulp expands its way down, tedious as an inverted parturition.

With this ceaseless invasion of tepid volume, I swallow Miss Ware's desolation of a bondwoman whose primeval 'recollections' are lying in a dingle with a naked boy.

"That child is getting terribly anaemic," my father exclaims on catching sight of me, "Where's her tonic?" They manage to pry my mouth open and pour in some cod-liver oil.

He insists that my mother take me to the doctor. So we go in a cab to visit Sir Edward Seivkin, the Queen's physician, his consulting room being as near to Court as we can approach. My mother is rigid with reverence as this awe-inspiring personage orders my left lung, or what remnant he has found of it, to be planted immedi-

Nightmare A-9

ately in a country farm. But having had our guinea's worth of society, all that the lung gets out of it is a stout push and "See what comes of disobeying your mother," as I bear it disconsolately down the front steps.

I must attend to it myself.

Every child of that era was aware of what it meant to 'go into a decline' for they could not learn too early of the consequences of wet feet or sitting in a draught-- and should you be caught in the rain, will not the very drops as they fall upon you arise as feathers? In a literature of smug fatalism, the 'nicest' children cross flickering fingers on a hollow torso draped in calico; and even longer girls lie out at full length on the first disappointment in love.

These recumbent beings waning in the window among the hyacinth bulbs, breathing ever more faintly their genteel breath and about to fly to heaven aroused my envy, I having caught on to the fact that-- once in this world you have one way out.

Standing in the nursemaid's closet was a row of tall cans she kept filled with cold water-- so much more water than could

For me anything may 'come alive'-- a doll, a picture-- I once laid
a colored print of a meadow under my feet on the carpet, to go for

a walk in it.

a
scrap
for

scrap book

Nightmare A-12

The wet calico stiffening on my body clothes me in a
dignity as cold as the dim vacuous peace of my secret planet in
the upstairs cistern; and perhaps because simplicity allows for
vastness, in looking at my symbolic universe, I feel I am external
to that which contains me and that somehow thereby I become ever-
lasting.

These clouds of cosmic intuition roll away, and my
fancy reduces this plumber's orb to a virgin playground-- void,--
and volcanoes and kingdoms spring up upon it (can not a child
bring the whole of nature into the house with one sod of grass?).
Now, it is overrun by a superlative breed of people-- I am just
about to leap upon that planet myself to make merry among them,
when it strikes eleven.

Miss Ware, all this while sits with her book after her
lonely dinner in the school-room-- How inexact! Is she not this
very moment in Denmark-- . "Here's rue for you," she reads,
"our shepherds call them by a grosser name." Her cheeks are
flushed, because mankind was once so young as to collaborate with
Soring.

Nightmare 17-13

She has had her door ajar to keep an ear on her sleeping charges. But the queer rise and fall, the rumble and pitch of points of view as opposite as the poles of the earth, pressing their dynamic impact upon a closed dining room door, have prevented her hearing our assassinating antics on the upper landing.

Peeping over the bannister, we see her coming up to bed. And the blood-red splosh of her evening bodice mounts the stairs in the wake of the wet, white flash of myself making for the darkness of the night nursery at the top of the house.

Poor Miss Ware! My younger sister, who not being in the habit of creating universes, sees so much more than I do of what is going on, pretending to be asleep, watches the nursery-governess undress. She sees her looking at her own nakedness in the mirror, finding it pleasant. Was it her belief in God, or Victoria, that withheld this irreleasable prisoner from murdering the other woman's children?

Nightmare

"Not me! If I hadn't any self-respect they'd all be living here, and I and my children out in the street begging our bread, I _dare_ say! No, thank you.

"But you're all alike-- the whole bunch of you. Here I slave myself to the bone morning, noon and night till I might as well drop dead at your feet for all the thanks I get-- it would serve you jolly well right, too!"

Although I could understand enough of what the voice was saying to gather its inconsequence, I was shattered for its sound - vibrations beset me with the rough-sheathed impact of a class whose loud self-assertion lifts them above the manual clatter of their lives. whose heritage it is to lack the mental leisure which alone, of all conditions, allows for the culture of such superficial graces as amenity, the expression of affection or the tempered rebuke,-- a class for generations so hard-driven they had no time for loving their offspring.

In the years to come, sound-vibrations would be studied by the British War Office as the most deadly instrument of collective destruction.

"Then you'll be contented," the voice went on, still over-

Nightmare

Disintegrated by the vibratory flux, I was quivering as
a heat haze might after the flame that engendered it had gone out;
only for having listened to the fluency of British lane and lowly
hearthstone, a little sound theology and the philosophy of thrift.

Change is not gradual; it is instantly that transformation takes place. Destiny is a lightning calculator who will show how the sum works out, subsequently, at great pains, in the numerals of events.

Selfless, defenseless, abject with shame, I watched my
unborn equipoise recede among the shades wondering over the future
of its sallow double, six-year-old me, left behind in life.

"Don't you know that Satan takes people who use bad language and throws them in the fires? You'll burn for ever and ever."

"Couldn't I die?" I enquired, anxiously.

"No, you couldn't die-- and the fire hurts fearfully so
you can't bear it-- yet, you'll have to bear it, for it will never,
never end."

Nightmare

My poor mother's myopic eyes peer at me with a somehow
thwarted suspicion. "Don't try to tell me you didn't say-- "

"Mark my words," the voice slowed down solemnly, "no
good will ever come of you. Nothing will ever prosper with you."
There followed the supreme imprecation of heavy melodrama, "The
curse of your mother is upon you."

If only I could. But it's just all this sight one has to
live in, that, baring the spirit to the quick, leaves me defenseless.
Another pair of predatory eyes is waiting for me in the dining
room. Governess' eyes that have never been kissed.

"Now let me see," says Miss Ware, consulting a list she
has prepared, "One mistake in spelling, four in arithmetic, three
in history, two in grammar-- that makes ten pieces of punishment
bread."

Nightmare A-8

He insists that my mother take me to the doctor. So we go in a cab to visit Sir Edward Seivkin, the Queen's physician, his consulting-room being as near to Court as we can approach. My mother is rigid with reverence as this awe-inspiring personage orders my left lung, or what remnant he has found of it, to be planted immedi-

Nightmare A-9

I must attend to it myself.

Every child of that era was aware of what it meant to
'go into a decline' for they could not learn too early of the con-
sequences of wet feet or sitting in a draught-- and should you be
caught in the rain, will not the very drops as they fall upon you
arise as feathers? In a literature of smug fatalism, the 'nicest'
children cross flickering fingers on a hollow torso draped in
calico; and even longer girls lie out at full length on the first
disappointment in love.

behind the door op the housemaid's
Standing by the nursemaid's closet was a row of tall censers
she kept filled with cold water-- so much more water than could

Nightmare - 2

bridge spanning a shoreless sea that is turbid with red clay-- and
nurse is pointing upward in the air.

Out of this terra-cotta colored sea that it seems I must
cross forever there rises an interminable stake, out of the depths
of the waters up through the foundations of the sky-- a breezeless,
brazen sky. And on this infinitely unabbreviated totem pole are
*Patriarchs* growing oracular shoots-- Heads of aneients, like mummified rabbis
of a type I have never seen-- their bearded irony drips from their
*That* salient cheek-bones under embedded fevered eyes surveying their
*^A* issuant edicts as words to be weighed like gold-- Heads of patriarchs
*L* craning aive out of their world that is increate save for its axis.
*^A* All prophesying at once, they conjure me to some enterprise obscure
to me.

I was afraid of falling asleep, for the patriarchs were
recurrent; I knew when I should dream them, for as soon as the gas
light was turned out, darkness showered red and yellow discs, like
gory and golden money before my open eyes.

There was a different 'dead man's head' in another dream
which terrified me-- being unexpected in so usual an environment--

I would be opening the ricketty door of the chicken-run

Nightmare - 3

when a drift of snowy beard on the hard earth floor stopped me.
Buried up to its chin, which moved with difficulty in mumbling, an
old man's puzzled face stared up at me. Not so much coming out of
the earth as sinking in, my English grandfather tries to convey some
duty-- as though he were drawing me into the floor with him-- I
in filled with apprehension--.

If my dreams were strange, I also met with the monsters
of daylight, for as if the perfect craftsmanship of Nature is liable
to be taken too much for granted, and her even process eliciting
no gratitude for her meticulous conformity to her own standard, she
will sometimes go on strike to give us a glimpse of the awful
phenomena that ensue when she allows her attention to wander for
a fraction of an embryonic second from her everlasting job.

Perhaps to remind us of this, Mr. Barnum collects the
missshapen
monstroses
output of her aberrations in the side shows of his circus,
or to alleviate the discontent of humanity for their average short-
comings by showing us 'something worse', or as examples to children
allowed to take part in their parents appalling amusements.

Roped in by a crimson cord-- the unfamiliar rhythm of
living forms I am not prepared for presents an ill-assorted pattern

Nightmare - 7

sat there in the dusk to be concerted in an intention to spring upon
me. They were flashing messages to each other in a code of connivance.

"Goy," my father asked me, and his eye reflected a hot
gleam from a burning coal, "Did you peep into Auntie Mary's basket?"

Seeing how Auntie Mary, with her finely plaited basket
on her knees, clutched it with almost convulsive protection in her
bony hands, and remembering my pact with my father to spare her
feelings, I answered, "No."

As if this word were a signal confidently awaited, the
upper halves of their bodies bolted out of their huge arm-chairs. The
rosy gleam on Miss Gunne's white hair, the copper edge of my father's
crinkly beard, and the embers in my mother's eyeglasses hung over me
as supernatural embodiments of destiny might lean menacing out of an
incongruously low sky.

"That's a lie," my father exclaimed in a voice of chuckling
severity, appreciative of a scene he had evidently prepared with his
companions. "You know very well I saw you do it myself."

The word 'lie' seemed to release their sonority, and the
voice I had heard for the first time when the dominoe miraculously
flew through the window gathered in volume above the staccato of

Nightmare - 9

of thickly planted lilac trees hedged the curved drive that swept in
and out of the gates.

Breathing the dripping of lately fallen rain loaded
with the aroma of the lilacs, its freshening of the pebbles in the
gravel, the balm of earth had already begun to heal the concussion
of my nerve centers eased in this atmosphere so different in
nature to the one that filled the brown birch box I had left--
when a heavy arresting hand clamped itself on my frail shoulder--
they did want a liar.

The ultimate difficulty of ascribing guilt to the proper
quarter necessitated the conception of the devil-- for however we
may search for the inspiration of that evil which gets mysteriously
mixed up with so many of our deeds, we can seldom locate it. It is
seemingly the result of impersonal causes over which we have little
control.

Thus the riddle as to how at any time and unwittingly,
innocent may change into guiltiness came up again when one Autumn
Sunday afternoon my good-looking father, faultlessly dressed, indulged
in a much earned pleasure of taking his dear little girl for a walk.

Nightmare - 12

unknowing that human society had prepared sufficient for me. There
were so many objects I must never touch without first bowing seven
times to them and I could not eat peas because the mark where the
tiny stalk had broken off looked like a mouth. They must be boiled
fairies who, having been previously bewitched, might with luck at
any moment burst out of their green shrouds in their veritable form.
At first I selected only a few that had robbled among the gravy and
potatoes 'mouth up', so that the fairies positively pleaded with me
to save them on the side of my plate-- but I soon discovered that
have
all peas had mouths.

Bearing directly on the episode of the staircase was the
affection I had developed for lost causes. It seemed shamefully
unfair to me, for instance, that such general preference should be
shown for the right-hand side. I would pick up the left-hand side
with my sensibility and nurse it in my astral arms like a doll,
croon to it and make ugly faces on its behalf at the aristocratic
right that gave itself such airs. For this, ix it was my right
leg that swung in the air, I allowing myself in as far as possible

Nightmare - 14

I had a long and tearful argument with a nurse over a defective poultice she had laid on my throat, when, on discovering in my bed what looked like a remarkably tidy turd, I claimed the authorship of the most heinous of infant misdemeanors not at all of my habit, while she insisted on depriving me of a distinct satisfaction—that self-conscious Christian hysteria, whose 'mea culpa' at once pleasant and painful, is a compensation for so much inhibited normal self-expression— with the assurance that she had not folded the poultice properly and so some linseed had rolled out.

But the early summer evening was so shiny, and, exceptionally, this nurse so tender and consolatory, I could not be sure if I felt impelled to enfever this serenity with that moral turpitude so often attributed to me, if I was making a noisy bid for further demonstrations of a rare affection, or whether, in consequence of my cerebral routine, my mind had already begun to conform automatically to a rhythm of recurrent culpability.

The anxiety of such precocious introspection, winding itself as a clock ticking uninterruptedly through time—would function continually— even through the occasional hours of relaxation and entertainment.

Nightmare - 15

All I remember of a visit to 'Venice' at the 'Olympia'--
beside gondolas of the deathly blackness of pleasure-hearses toppling
across the oily waters of an artificial Canal-- is a vista of planked
flooring, cleared for the passage of challenging feet-- the swinging
swish of the fringe on sashes.

Raising my head, I found they belonged to a troup of
Scotch pipers playing a lively reel-- and this is how they looked
and sound to me:

These kilted pipers are blowing into the parched legs of dead
men, and have stuck hurtful wooden tubes into them; they have tied
up withered skin round the one end of the tubes and hold the other
end with the new clear skin of their cruel mouths. The souls of the
dead men are imprisoned in their mummied legs which writhe and swell
as the living blow their devastatingly live breath into them. And
the souls shriek out in torture and terror-- while the big bodies
of my elders straggling around them impel me to this deathly orgy
by my throbbing wrists held in their ineludable claws of dominion.

It has taken me some time to discover of what material I
could have formed my ghastly illusion; but at last I remembered

Nightmare - 18

'Alas, this transparence is but the echo of light.

Receiving all things into itself for strange interpretations.

In this the sun is even become a contortionist and beauty,
brokenness-- ephemeral travesties

Of itself only an invitation to a shadow. It's finale-- is
to filter-- a blank wall'

To what can be likened this volume that is only to be
located through its reflections?

Nightmare - 3

when a drift of snowy beard on the hard earth floor stopped me.
Buried up to its chin, which moved with difficulty in mumbling, an
old man's puzzled face stared up at me. Not so much coming out of
the earth as sinking in, my English grandfather tries to convey some
duty-- as though he were drawing me into the floor with him-- I
awaken with apprehension--.

Perhaps to remind us of this, Mr. Barnum collects the
misshapen,
monstrous output of her aberrations in the side shows of his circus,
or to alleviate the discontent of humanity for their average short-
comings by showing us 'something worse', or as examples to children
allowed to take part in their parents appalling amusements.

Roped in by a crimson cord-- the unfamiliar rhythm of
living forms I am not prepared for present an ill-assorted pattern

Nightmare - 7

As if this word were a signal confidently awaited, the
upper halves of their bodies bolted out of their huge arm-chairs. The
rosy gleam on Miss Gunne's white hair, the copper edge of my father's
crinkly beard, and the embers in my mother's eye8glasses hung over me
as supernatural embodiments of destiny might lean menacing out of an
incongruously low sky.

The word 'lie' seemed to release their sonority, and the
vice I had heard for the first time when the dominoe miraculously
through the window gathered in volume above the staccato of

Nightmare - 12

unknowing that human society had prepared sufficient for me. There
were so many objects I must never touch without first bowing seven
times to them and I could not eat peas because the mark where the
tiny stalk had broken off looked like a mouth. They must be boiled
fairies who, having been previously bewitched, might with luck at
any moment burst out of their green shrouds in their veritable form.
At first I selected only a few that had robled among the gravy and
potatoes 'mouth up', so that the fairies positively pleaded with me
to save them on the side of my plate-- but I soon discovered that
all peas had mouths.

Bearing directly on the episode of the staircase was the
affection I had developed for lost causes. It seemed shamefully
unfair to me, for instance, that such general preference should be
shown for the right-hand side. I would pick up the left-hand side
with my sensibility and nurse it in my astral arms like a doll,
croon to it and make ugly faces on its behalf at the aristocratic
right that gave itself such airs. For this, xx it was my right
leg that swung in the air, I allowing myself inasfar as possible

209

Nightmare - 16

a fancied resemblance of bagpipes to-- smoked hams, together with
the somewhat human misery of their squeals.

Nightmare - 18

Disappearances

Nightmare B-1

It is improbable that my intention when I stuck my fingers into the night light was to gather its flame as one would the bud of a flower.

Price's night lights sent to earth in a heavenly carton covered with mystic stars of blue, were packed in rows and looked like comic mountain-crests of mythic ice.

The remorse that overcame me was measureless when, the tiny stiff wick capsizing in immaculate grease, the light went out.

I had not only extinguished the illuminant of my toy-but as world, a night-light has also its import in the adult world this accident would give rise to questions I felt myself incapable of answering--.

Timeless night could draw out no more indefinitely for a contrite murderer trying to bring a corpse back to life than this midnight I had blackened-- this hour at which I had never before

lit by the sparse filter of moon through the cotton blind, been awake-- as, I attempted over and over to set that wick up again. All my efforts remaining fruitless, I set out to seek a burial place for the lump of white wax I had

Nightmare Bv
Disappearances

utterly misshapen with my fumbling. Strips of dimness from windows
led my wandering perplexity along passages that, in the depth of
shadow, stretched into endless corridors. Desperate at last,
although horrified at so unfitting a grave, I threw the cadaver of
beauty down the lavatory. U5

tessalated floor, lay their cold planes under my naked feet.

Beyond an open door the deathly damask of a table_cloth is surrounded
by ghostly chairs.

In my silent somnambulist petrified world, angles play
acrobat on a precursory silver screen until the automaton halted
by the heavy bolts on the street door, staring up at an open fan
light, awakens, for I cannot fly.

Whenever we took temporary quarters for holiday time the
asphyxiating atmosphere of conjugal crime would lift and, like a
rift in a cloud, arrival at furnished apartments would always reveal
some object of unguessed beauty, or strike a note of the cosmic
that never penetrated our home
harmony. So I lie in my bed at Sundown listening to the boats being
drawn up out of the surf onto the beach. An effortless sound of the
end of day, a crunching too compliant to be rasping, for the ocean
had left something of itself among the pebbles that made their
subsidizing among one another so slippery, it eased the ride of the craft.

I am aroused from the spell of this unaccustomed lullaby
when my sight settles on the curtain-pole above the window that, facing
me, lets in the dusk. The end of the pole is ornamented with a
glass lily-- or trumpet. It is one of the very few beautiful things
I have found in the world.

It was a white-- yes, is of a whiteness so tenuous as
to have evaporated through itself, leaving transparency. As, since
long ages crystal is pregnant with eyes evoking visions, this lofty

Nightmare B-3

Beyond an open door the deathly damask of a table cloth is surrounded by ghostly chair-fulls.

In my silent somnambulist petrified work, angles play
acrobat on a precursory silver screen until the automaton, halted
by the heavy bolts on the street door, staring up at an open fan
light, awakens, for I cannot fly.

Nightmare

Even the <u>mis</u>prudery of the inhabitants OF a brick
box cannot prevent a little sex-enlightenment from creeping in.

When I was a little over eight, I was sitting outside the
night nursery at dusk with a little girl entranced in the
fantastic intercourse of young creatures, as we dangled our legs
from a great big laundry basket we had preferred to the banal
accommodation of the sedate.

"You're so silly," said my visitor whose interests had
revealed themselves as more realistic than my own, "I bet you
don't even know where babies come from."

"Oh, you booby--," then she crowed, "I know how you
get them."

"Well, how <u>do</u> you get them," I asked her listlessly,
not particularly requiring one.

"Same as Christians," this child, to whom 'you' implied

Nightmare

Even the maniac prudery of the inhabitants OF a brick
box cannot prevent a little sex-enlightenment from creeping in.

"You're so silly," said my visitor whose interests had
revealed themselves as more realistic than my own, "I beg you
don't even know where babies come from."

"Well, how *do* you get them," I asked her listlessly,
not particularly requiring one.

Nightmare

'Jew,' assured me assertively.

"What!" Just by saying 'Where's Christians?'" I exclaimed, mistaking her words and confusing them with an occult invocation akin to 'Open Sesame' gleaned from some fairy-tale I cannot recall, staring the while at a patch of light on the carpet to watch the baby appear.

"No, stupid, I said Jews get babies the same as Christians." Again this word that had gradually formed in me an impression of its being something that _did_ and at the same time _did not_ exist--.

"What are Jews?"

"-- And then," continued my instructress, "the woman gets most terribly ill and writhes in agony for nine months. Then the doctor comes and cuts her open and takes 'it' out." Instantly everything inside me had congealed to an icy lump. "But it hurts so badly that she almost always dies before he has time to sew her up again. "You see," she hooted in triumph, "I know more than you do."

Nightmare

child who by chance surprises an unclean knowledge of which the
constitutes the superiority of
monopoly is reserved for the adult, she flaunted the anomolous
comparison of her unassailable status that made me despicable.

"Mind you guard your disgusting secret carefully-- Never breathe a word," and I felt I must hug it hopelessly to myself, live with it uncomforted and alone-- always. While through the panic of my thoughts I heard the pitiless voice grind out, "You are no longer fit to be left with other children!!"

At last the secret meaning that lay behind the ominous
creaking of those busks was revealed to me as the working of a
relentless machinery, involving myself.

Nightmare

The last of the entertainments to haunt me was an early electric power plant open to the public view at Earls Court Exhibition. That always only half acquiescent participant, a child, I trail along behind my mother and the nurse. Stirred to an uneasy premonition of the coming mechanized world by weird sparks and flashes flying from the slip andALKO of enigmatic engines, I decide it is imprudent to expose the working of such magic to unprepared eyes.

I drag at my mother's towering skirts to entreat her to
come away-- she takes no heed--for quite suddenly this dream
mother comports herself in the wildest way-- She is flinging her
arms up, and at once they become mechanical arms-- She is
changing-- turning, she changes into a dressmaker's dummy of
ringing metal-- with expansible bust-- the abdomen full as the

Nightmare

The last of the entertainments to haunt me was an early electric power plant open to the public view at Earls Court Exhibition. That always only half acquiescent participant, a child, I trail along behind my mother and the nurse. Stirred to an uneasy premonition of the coming mechanized world by weird sparks and flashes flying from the slip and lang of enigmatic engines, I decide it is imprudent to maximize expose the working of such magic to unprepared eyes.

I drag at my mother's towering skirts to entreat her to
come away-- she takes no heed-- for quite suddenly this dream
mother comports herself in the wildest way-- She is flinging her
arms up, and at once they become mechanical arms-- She is
changing-- turning, she changes into a dressmaker's dummy of
ringing metal-- with expansible bust-- the abdomen full as the

Nightmare

curving breast of Lohengrin's oncoming swan. There, where the skirts should have been, all that upholstery dissembling the sight of sin-- is a forbidding cage of iron wire. It rasps my ^ -- a protection fingers that have clutched at it for protection, I now require against itself, the very author of my being-- being author of my fear-- twirls from my fingers-- twirls, spins, spins to a transparent bobbin of intense rotation.

And this was the last of my nightmares-- asleep.

Islands in the Air

## Chapter VIII

I realised the arrangement of angles around me had
undergone change on touching a pane of imitation stained
glass, filtering a morning light a monochrome branch of
apple-blossom that looked sticky & felt dry was baked onto
its surface.

My contact with a meaningless decoration brought within
range the whole of a semi-detached residence that was brand
new. A serial impression of static furniture forced me to enter
a devaluated time-interval coincident with a stretch-on-the-
wreck - of years, to be spent in the sanctity of the home.

On touching that pane of glass I turned into a commonplace
person with average aspirations. Agog with expectancy of normal
life. Of the Cosmos of infancy the Voice alone survived.

In this papered & enamelled container prepared for my
adolescence, the checkered routine of my farcical training
as a social unit would at first seem to consist in my being
flapped in and out of mobile & stagnant air out into Clinton
Gardens & indoors again.

The father handsome & erect trimmed with auburn mustaches
stalked us on stilts of ambition exhorting us to glory. An
uppish bosom intervened with " over my dead body " for Father's
consolation my sister was a musical prodigy, while I, in a
spirit of obedience, had bursts of self-expression. Balanced

Chapter VIII

86

on the end of a brown wooden bedstead while the governess brushed Ida's hair I wrote a 'poem'.

## NAT and Daisy

On a warm afternoon
In June
A (G)Nat in the air død fly
Ever so high ... ever so high

I want a sweetheart was all his cry
Ah! all his cry,

I've asked the white Rose
But she's far too proud
To care for a (G)Nat like me

And what do you think
The other day
I asked Miss Lily to tea
But she like the rose did not care for me

When low near the ground I flew
Disconsolately... Disconsolately
Ah! What did Isee ? Ah! What did I see?

A demure little maiden most pink & white
The loveliest maiden you ever did see

Chapter VIII

87

And unlike the rest she said she loved me
And then came the wedding, What awful fun!
Our friend the cat
Stole from the kitchen a lovely iced bun
To serve for the wedding cake
And the bees brought much honey
The best they could make

I remember no more, save that the (g) Nat having found his
daisy with all her petals shed, I ended up serenely:

So he lay down & died
At his daisy-stalk's side.

It was shocking to learn on being knocked off my
perch that instead of a laudable poet I was somehow "a sly
minx, trying to get round him".

Day by day, drifting from room to room seeking for
'something to do' shooed by a blast of 'idle slut' past the
towering gilded mirrors from 'North Hall' I felt put out by
their flitting amorettis' dimples of inascribable delight.
My father was assured these mirrors, now cut down to the height of our present
ceilings, were lost from the palace of Versailles. At the base
of one, in a spacious jardiniere, a few poor artificial plants
fell upon one another. I found it useless to try digging the

Chapter VIII

88

pointed shanks on which they were mounted into the metal
bottom.

The houses in Clinton Gardens were all alike but on
the threshold of ours stood a menace as ominous as Chaaron.
The gap of doom was at my back as I entered the gate.

Retrospectively the sides of that brick box which
seemed so vacuous actually creaked. Forced to bursting point
by opposite pressures from within. At the time a steady
inoperation dulled the interior, bodies moved without aim.
Tentacles of waste energy wavered toward inexistant objectives.
Like machinery working full blast on the production of nothing,
I wore down my own dynamism. The brain for lack of intellectual
material exercised its ceaseless automatism upon the biological
function to abnormal extent - one always had some kind
of pain, heightened by the spasms of the solar plexus on
impact with the Voice.

Gentle Jesus meek & mild, in my babyhood I conceived
of as a mouse, would he'come out I had wondered if he knew
I wouldn't hurt him.

Now, with a private vow of Atheism, I countered my
mother's vicious pinches on our way to church.

Monday morning I fought my first moral battle.
While rattling my hoopstick along an iron fence I denied God;
at the age of nine.

In a mobile pattern of alternating streaks of bright-
ness & blackness, the fleeting palings rippled past my eyes
coinciding terrifically with stripes of fiery hell & dark
oblivion as I ran. I could not be sure the everlasting flame

89

Chapter VIII

was bluff. Yet to the Voice I had such antipathy I could not
cede to its precepts. Asserting a tremulant heroism, I decided
to risk eternal torture rather than resemble the people He
approved.

Hardly had I become an atheist when my religious educa-
tion was reinforced with the cooperation of the only governess
my mother never quarrelled with.

Out of a flat - fronted woolen bodice of amber plaid with
velvet collar & reveres, rose the flesh & lashes of a swine.
Beneath the cuff of a sleeve too short appeared a rosy wrist
sown with glinting hairs.

The nearness of this pious governess added to my ills a
perpetual nausea.

"Mamma", Miss Nickson had a habit of saying, her some-
how accusing eye upon me " Never cared if her babies were
pretty. All she asked when we arrived was" Has it got the
correct number of fingers and toes?"

A golden tassle on her watch chain dangling against my
ear, her breath on the nape of my neck, merged in my subcon-
cious with the horror instilled by my first information on
procreation. In the pathological vortex she arroused in me spun
a black Bible cloth boards 2/6.

Hour upon hour we looked up texts, compared references
under the awning of her white eyelashes.

Aversion to her obstructing my senses deafened me to
her lessons. To relieve my tedium I would investigate the old
Testament when Miss Nickson wasn't looking.

My mother's assertion that intercourse "isn't true"
somehow rendering anomolous her condemnation of my hideous

Chapter VIII

knowledge further confused me when I read in the Geneology
- went in unto & begat. For a while I was drawn into the
obscene undertow of religious mania. To vent the up rush of
sadism associated with it I turned( imaginatively ) upon the
physical repulse to which it reduced in the person of the gover-
ness.

Nicky should be mated with a lion and _beget_ cubs, whose
manes inherited her sandiness, to lacerate her with _claws_.

Frequently I have sampled the emotive embroglios under-
lying lunacy; that I never got ' stuck' in any one of them @
I owe to my latent preoccupation with beauty. To the fulminating
'wish on' Miss Nickson the level of my consciousness sunk lower
than it ever would again.

Two years our overseer remained with us. From morning
prayers until, having put us to bed at six she sat outside our
open bedroom door still pouring her freckled over the Bible.
She was there to insure a silence in which no original sin could
rise to the surface. What Evil - originated, Ifelt, in my
father, were those women bent on driving forth from the young
in those days of drastic watching & waiting?

This governess, poor thing, had one attraction, enticing
me sometimes to approach her voluntarily. She could sharpen a pen-
cil to a finer point than seemed credible. Then shade the
Narcissi she knew how to draw till they shone like a bead.

Her sense of righteousness braced by Miss Nickson's acquil-
esence in purging me of some shameful component, my mother
exhibited a modicum of calm during her residence. When the
governess left the house this calm broke down completely. My
father blasphemously believing in educational subjects, sup-

Chapter VIIIplement

91

plementary to religion. He had us 'sent' to school.

The pitch of the maternal sound-track during the ensuing
years could only be given in terms usually signifying wild
exaggeration & the bias of a liar read into them. Not infre-
quently in the sheltered homes of the nineties, daughters were
bullied to maturity subject to prohibitions unmodified since
babyhood. Their only self-expression : to watch and pray.

I watched the startled groups of new servants listening
in the hall.

Under the metronome running scales, my sister sits on the
piano stool in that kernel from which all sound is centrifugal
herself unrung.

I watched my father 's vitality congeal to a heaviness of
the brow only to be supported in two quivering hands.

All the keys had been taken out of the doors by my mother
except, in regard for decency, those of three lavatories on
the different floors.

One above the other they stood, our ivory. Here I had knelt
to pray for my transformation while an opal vase left on the
washstand peered at me, a blind eye, through its lovely
cataract of lacteal blue & rose.

One above the other in sanctuary we could hear our baffled
foe shriek for us to come forth. As an atheist I sat on the
heavy mahogany lid, my own eyes held by a mosaic head of
Medusa, as the last limp trails of Virginia creeper waved
their shadows through the narrow window across a polished
paper tile turning me to stone.

Chapter VIII

92

Going to school I anticipated as joining an opposition
club of youth combatting the mother-myth. I had stood up to God
alone. Mother love was beyond me. I had urgent need for that
exchange of confidences in which the helpless asses of misfortune
appraise each other's loads to lighten them at least of bearing
in silence.

"Do you love your mother"? I asked with significant inflec-
tion upon absurdity of the first little girl who wanted ' to
make friends'. We were putting our books away on a lower shelf.
Had I had any opportunity to observe the portents of normal
human relationships I should have been instantly informed in
this bobbing together of top-knots, should have recognised in
the hair ribbon vane indicating which way the maternal wind
blows. That other child in its cheerful cerise lay carressing
with a pair of ordely loops her formal curls while mine like a
flag vanquished in some unfortunate engagement started ragged
in assymetry from crippled knot in which some random hairs of
my culpable head were caught to an agonising tension among the
overloose mass.

The effigy of vengeance is not sufficiently envisaged
in the ramp of frog-like furies clawing the air. The poignant
effigies on whom vengeance is brought home to us, are stuck
all over with its trophies, in their general appearance of ha-
ving been covered with the final detritus of any social cataclysm.
The shreds & rifts in the clothes of the poor, the tired mud
that cakes upon the patriots who have marched too compliantly,
the indefinable collapse of child bodies whose covering is not
civilized with the detail of affection.

Chapter VIII

- 93 -

Horror leapt to that other child's eyes. Involuntarily
she looked upwards expectant of something to fall upon me.

"But of course" she answered, her voice almost drowned
in the din of her disapproval.

A face expressing emotion from within is a bountiful face even if pouring out dislike. Which is also receivable & of common traffic but the horror face that like a faulty mirror distorts its vis-à-vis ... the horror on that small girl's face is a reflected horror. So even outside the home, I am not a nice child. And now I percieve her hair ribbon, it is all tied up with love.

Original sin, where does it lie, in the logical process of
thought? The problem wearied my mind to the exclusion of all
further operation. I spent three years of education washing the
soot from the ivy on the garden wall beyond the class room win-
dows with my wandering eyes.

As it was a moral impossibility to arrive in class without
bringing one's home work, and a physical impossibility to concen-
trate at home, I copied my exercises out of the text book. In
order not to cheat the other girls I wrote in sufficient mistakes
to place me permanently above the defective child with an oyster
eye who sat in unassailable simplicity at the bottom of the clas.
Beside her I pondered that eerie hitch in a psychic mechanism
rendering the defective so' differently' incapable of concentra-
tion to myself. Had she had for daughter that imbecile child
would even my mother have spoken in vain?

Chapter VIII

- 94 -

Until we fizzled out like squibs in the damp, we glowed whenever we had company. Visitors aroused in us that over animated gaiety of people who must ram their need for pleasure into brief occasions.

One of my father's step-relations who enameled his outdoor cistern vermillion had a paying guest or perhaps lodger he often brought to our house to dinner. A Welsh musician he played us all he composed & Ida would join him in duets. My father relaxed in an arm chair of lurid satin, melting in relief, let a few pure tears trickle to his beard " I love music in a minor key " he avowed wiping his eyes with a bandanna " It makes me feel sentimental."

If I recall his face accurately, Edward German dominated the show of gas on our drawing room with a distinct Celtic beauty.

I stood apart from the initiates gathered round him. Even the ' step' was a music addict. Multiplied by the mirrors they made a crowd among reflected ebony, gilt & alabaster. Moving their laughter round an early gramaphone as they recorded Ida's precocity on cylinders of coffee coloured wax. My mother wearing all her diamonds assumed the smile of a diplomat who assured of attaining his end is not for the moment giving his politic away.

With Ida, my father's unaccountable presentiment of future glory seemed secure. Almost as a baby she moved her fingers on ivory & harmony was the result. AS a girl she opined her mouth & emitted a ' voice'.

Her itinerary I could see so clearly marked. It led her

Chapter VIII

-95-

along a straight route of practising up to a certain musical
soirée at which Hambourg & Blanche Marchesi exchanged confi-
dences on a sofa. Each had a star pupil. " There she is " they
cried simultaneously as Ida entered.

Meanwhile on leaving school one morning, among a group
of pupils, I noticed standing somewhat apart two tiny sisters
waiting to be ' fetched' . One , a trifle taller than the other,
so stringy their drab striped coats were outstanding as raiment
on puppets , each had a perfect head of Osiris. Intrigued by
the almost invisible moulding of their oval faces , the
idol-flatness of their noses . I lingered to admire them. Their
name was Hesse. "Myra, the smaller one played the piano. " an
elder girl remarked. She had none of Ida's 'advantages', I was
given to understand.

While for my sister the divine penetrated to her envi-
ronment in mine the walls were hung with pictures from the
royal academy.

Music, intangible, speaks for the dumb soul; other arts have
too articulate audiences. Ida has if her curls had condensed
to minims & crotchets still moved serenely to constant applause.
I was confused when anyone enquired of me " I hear you draw.
Can you draw a cork?"

Being the elder was also a strain. Paternal benevolen-
ces incident to different stages in a daughter's life natu-
rally fell first to me . Experiments ending in catastrophy.

" You're getting a big girl now" father said, when I
was fourteen, producing at the dinner table a gatelinked
bracelet of plain gold. " I thought you might wear a little
quiet jewelry".

Chapter VIII

- 96 -

His wife turned red, flung away her knife & fork,
crying on Heaven to witness the sacrilege, wasting money on
an undeserving .... She made a dash for me, my father
averted her hand.

Squatting slowly, cautiously to the floor she lay down
flat with her head against the fender & screamed ... for the se
servants to be her witnesses ... "Fine bracelets you'll both get,
handcuffs is what you require" ... her husband anxiously
explaining he did not knock her down.

"Father, I implored him" How can you go on arguing with her all these years, listen to me, she's putting it on. Pour some cold water over her."

My father who is quaking with nervous shock stiffens

"Now what sort of girl are you turning out to be, have
you forgotten she is your mother?"

"If only I could"

"Ah, I'm afraid your mother is right about you...you're
heartless"

"Give me my cloak & bonnet" my mother declaimed probably
taking her cue from some old melodrama as every now wore hats.

"I leave this house for ever to put myself out of my
misery... Murderers both of you."

The servants huddled together in the hall argue with the
kitchen maid who is crying.

"It's not for us I'm crying, we're leaving; it's for
that wretched kid of a Miss Linda as does no 'arm & can never
get away."

"Go" said the father I have antagonised, gulping a stiff
dose of Brandy. "Go and take care she does herself no harm. I

Chapter VIII

- 97 -

should never forgive myself".

Too young for stimulants, having had no dinner after
similar inroads on lunch, I crept upstairs to hang limply
about the keyhole of my mother's bedroom.

I see her arrange herself serenely on the sofa; her body
entirely relaxed, directing the pitch & toss of her body.
Hearing no sound of having been followed, she stops dead &
listens, narrowing her crafty eyes. Has she no audience?

Somewhere a door closes, she starts afresh, baying ( on
principle ) as a dog at the Moon.

["Chapter VIII", "- 98 -", "In the face of such monstrous opposition, my father had\nperformed heroic acts. When first he noticed our danger of go-\ning naked, he drove us to Marshall & Snellgroves & had us'fit-\nted out' in the delightful fashion of the period. To the same\nimprecations, he sent us to school, committed Ida to her proffes-\nsion of music and, later, enrolled me, with the best intentions,\nin an art school.", "As things got worse, he could take no fresh initiative ;\nhis 'health' which was behaving queerly became his major concern\nHaunting Harley Street where specialists repeatedly decided there\nthe matter\nwas nothing 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Chapter VIII

- 99 -

smile:

"Coax her" he advised me. Such inadequacies were native to that older generation which clung on long after the bough of its fixed idea had broken. But this was not the only reason that, loyally my father's ally throughout my purgatorial apprenticeship I had really no ally of my own. His solicitous confidente, I yet perceived, beneath his need for uncommiseration, down-right suspicion of me. He shared, with an almost total majority of men at the time, a somehow subtly obscene aversion to any female, whether she could handle her ears & invoque the quiet I guaranteed would heal him; should he cut his marriage in half, the more plainly he heard the opinion which the middle class lived to propitiate, of a 'society' for whom that class must exist incognito. "Never" said my father, static as a fakir, "It would harm you children".

His visions were his own however. My harrowed entreaties for even minor respites he parried, grandly shaking his head, "It wouldn't do, no daughter should ever leave her mother's side" how far his voice receded, measuring the duration of this vision's tenacity with a sob "Its so beautiful ... the bud beside the rose; men like it." he consoled me.

The bud. Patched to distortion, the tight half of my sleeve under the elbow length bell often wearing thin, had been recovered as if by an insane upholsterer with so many layers of miscellaneous stuff it had grown to a shapeless bundle. Discouraged, I let my forearm, like the incomodious appendage of a crustacean, drop to my side.

All the while I had been growing up, becoming a woman

Chapter VIII

" Some day you'll be a mother yourself then you'll understand."
says mine, pushing me violently in the chest. This nevrose
body is developping and for thrift she is making me a dress
from a pattern with a child's flat yoke. " How can I fit you?
You nasty girl. Do you think at your age it is decent to have
a figure. Your vile flesh, you'll get no good out of it.
Curse you. Curse your father.... I'm going to crush"it"she
screams.

Having seen little except for machine made furniture, the
subjects I found appropriate for art were cupids, peacocks,
cypresses and swans. Ah swans down, swans

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Having seen little except for machine made furniture,
the subjects I found appropriate to art were cupids, peacocks,
cypresses and swans. AH swansdown, swans neck condescension
in curves, against sunsets of jam.

To what most sweetly could I make flesh compare? Fondants,
How idealise foliage? AS emeralds, eyes to be frilly-orbed,
would not sockets or lids detract from their astral entirety?

I imagined creation to be an intensification.

Uncultured pilgrims to the shrine of an aesthetic leap at t
the superlative only to slow down to analysis on reaching a seni-
lity of ardour.

The might before I entered the Art school, I could not sleep
Visual excitement hung on the dark pictures I longed to paint as
soon as the 'masters' showed me how; a pair.

The one'in the treble' portrayed a cupid having no joints
whatever, his fondant face flat as his brassy curls, Added to
his grace was a swan with nothing under its feathers. Of a white-
ness on which the slightest shadow would be a polution.

The one ' in the bass ' portrayed a 'bronzed' cupid. His
curls and eyes of ebony. He leaned against the outspread fan of
a peacock glowing with unsullied colour straight from the tube.

As I lay there planning the response of the multitude to my
lovely boys, my brain suddenly aware of being lead along by an
intuition dropped taht intention as it was trained to do. The
effect upon me was of an abstract blow. In a flash of darkness,
the mental scene shifted, filled with a sense of shame, I automa-
tically reproached myself for my ambition.

Chapter VIII

102

Expecting the study of Art to be a participation in some-
thing familiarly resembling transformation scene in the Pantomime
I was ushered into the Antique room through a leather padded door
whose swing back sounded at once a groan and Hush ! A place was
assigned to me among a line of students along the wall. Rows of
miners in the galleries of ignorance. Scatch go their charcoal
sticks and the black blastings of their emery blocks strew their
voluminous grey pinafores, leave chimney-sweep smudges on their
anaemic features as they push the english wisp of hair out of
their plodding eyes.

In Italy, three centuries ago & yesterday, top displace a
block of enormous marble doubly blanched with alabaster dusts, the
haltered oxen with their hooves of slaves, labour the white road
from Carara, insert Michaelangelo Housing Daedalus nose

David's nose hung from aring inserted in it, en its a plas-
ter clink as I set it straight. I am ordered to reproduce it exac-
tly. The rounding out of the wing of his nostril was effected by
rubbing a hard Conté crayon on the sandpaper until it was pointed
as a pin. You came to a pore on the Whalman paper, you jabbed your
Conté into it through leaving there like a fly your minute speck. The
speck is too black, you pounce upon it with a sharpened erasor...
it plas.

After several weeks of persistance, the area thus covered
may be smoothed to perfection with spikes of coiled blotting paper
& twiddled bread. You are' stippling it up' among the dry & dirty
crumbs fallen into the rack of the easel lay the hallucinogens
white feather of my vanished swan.

Next to me a zealous young woman has detected in David's
mouth a non-Buonnarottian addition. A startling line dividing the

Chapter VIII

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lips, because for some accident of labial obliquity the dust does n
not settle there. Her determination to reproduce this intrigues the
masters. Approving, they linger to bring a male ingenuity to bear
on a still finer tipping of indiarubber.

As father looked so important , the expression of his top hat
so harmonised with the rest of him, and I being only fifteen was the
baby of the school , to palliate the nostalgia of a first day , I was
invited totea in the private studio of the elderly monitor. I found
myself among her friends in an atmosphere unaccustomedly kindly

' You must feel rather unhappy ' she enquired of me' away from
home'?

'How should I ' I answered warmly ' among such charming people'
Evidently this put them in a new light , they peeled with laughter.

To relieve my bewilderment as to how I should paint beautiful
pictures from soiled casts , they assured me I should find all I
need in the evening life-class.

That was where I came upon the poor bare man with the eyes
of a lizard who had known no sun . Because the studio dust was some-
how similar to the jaded hairb on his body, that body seemed fear-
fully deprived of a divine right , while the professor cocked his
eye at a plumb-line appraising the proportion of a lamentable being
who hardly seemed able to hold together. I heard him discourse on
sensing the bony structure beneath the masses, noting how the lea-
ning torso sagged into the pelvis. All that was clear to me was how
the excressences of the model's unproud knees confounded his symetry

Not being sufficiently developped intellectually to guess that
knowledge can be applied , requiring Adonis , I repudiated the model

Why draw the head like a square block , why dash a line where
the eyes should be , I would argue with the students. Construction ?

Chapter VIII

104

Where was the beauty in that?

Soon I could depict to a nicety, detail almost scattered about
as leaves without a tree.

Invited to little teas by the more high-brow pupils, at one
such tea, intimate behind a gigantic statue of Hermes, I found
myself listening to the head master - who gnawed his mustache -

"Everything here" he said pointing to me, to Hermes, to
the tea-tray set on a wooden stool" all matter is composed of
atoms. Nothing is solid, each atom is surrounded by space?..

It flashed through my mind that this was an explanation of how the man in the Bible got out of a dungeon. I could feel there was some control in the brain with which he, knowing how to use it, could pass his atoms through the spaces between the atoms in a wall of stone.

I had never been the least intrigued by this Biblical episode
I barely recalled, yet I welcomed this sudden solution as if it were
one of importance I had long sought.

Although at the studio I was removed from immediate terror, I
found it a haven of disappointment. IN a clap of astonishment rol-
ling its echoes of anxiety along the empty channels of an excite-
ment which for want of XXXXX concepts takes the place of a mental
process Art had faded; leaving me to the house-paint.

The sequestered wound of Beauty revealed itself in the colour
of dried blood. On door & wainscot the bases of casts mounting
the stairs along the gallery, even the oil-cloth.

A wandering mind is one so feverishly preoccupied it will seek
a sedative in anything.

Off the marroon obsession spread to the ladies dressing room
floor I picked the fallen printed page, by which that very wound

Chapter VIII

105

was to be healed.

From that moment I began to have a life. I read in a scrap of book review that a Max Nordau considered the refrain in poetry to be a symptom of dementia giving as an example one - & it was at this name I passed into a condition of elation - Dante Gabriel Rossetti --- The name! Smelling to the ear as to the nose an orange stuck with cloves to temper dried rose petals in the more sophisticated 'pot-pourris'.

Not seldom an aesthetic springs from the spirit of contradiction that instigates secession, and anger which dare not aspire to a physical outlet the substratum for an intellectual pugnacity.

How could a man named more ornately than all other men as far as I could know, be mad?

Being myself to the eternal assailant, the assailed, I was braised as to the relative merits of the critic & the criticised; even so In the manner in which I had espoused the cause of the inferiorised left hand, I condemned Nordau & all his works.

Why this particular combination of syllables should be more conducive to spontaneous veneration far an empty mind than, for instance, William B. Calwalader, is mysterious as the fixations of allergies.

Father, on my entreaties somewhat against the grain for, observing in his portrait on the frontispiece that Rossetti's trousers bagged, he concluded this must be a poor artist, brought me home the volume of his complete poems, reproductions of his paintings and, for full measure, Christmas Poems bound in red morrocco containing his illustrations for Goblin Market.

Chapter VIII

Poor Rossetti cooling your italian nostalgia in an alien
langaage, your passionate brush to tentative british technique.
Of the latin spasm disciplined to retention, a pommegranate mil-
dewed in the mist of the Thames, you concocted in your poesy so
powerful an emetic of the spirit as to relieve a middle-class vi-
sionary of her adolescence and clog the gorgeous rubber crops of
your wide-eyed women stricken with fried hair.

The account of our unlovely sitting room attenuate to the
echo of you. The dye stuff of your luscious gloom has come off on
the air ---

I was tented in visual arras like a medium emitting the pneumatic lips of your Sidonaa & Proserpine to float through my mother's irate pince nez listening only to a silent ventriloquy of your refrain :

"Oh mother, Mary Mother,
Three days & nights twixt hell & heaven".

The enormous cavern the mind can scoop out of the smallest sod
where man may infinitely haunt himself with any ghostliness he
chooses, this psychic retreat, this area of perfectability hitherto
stored with emptiness, Rossetti filled for me.

Under his influence, I began to 'furnish' England with a small
pattern, an incipient rhythm, a wisp of Folk-lore. A poppy head,
a knight errant, and, later, something from Liberty's in Cymric
silver, with a covetous eye on a ' greenwood tree' or rather a sim-
ple wooden bedstead stained to a violent emerald by Ambrose Heal in
the Tottenham Court Road.

My fancy pottering around this' soul shoppe' with a candle on
a pricket, I beheld that art being ' spiritual', the highest func-

Chapter VIII

tion of a maiden is to yearn, to be brought to it.

of a young man also if he can

My outlook having brightened, I wished that others might share
in my relief. I pondered on the maternal face the cause of its sul-
lenness. Then coming to a lightening conclusion, probably stimula-
ted by the gas illuminant burning up the air that always excited
me, I stretched out my hands to my mother:

"Oh, I won't you realise that there's nothing the matter with
any of us I begged her I imagine how charming you would be if
only you were not forever so angry. Everything is really all right
only somehow or other you've just got into the habit of
thinking all wrong.

"There's no reason why you should not start afresh this very
minute. We can all be h ammy MMM Now.

"Why shouldn't you smile? Just one little smile, Please,
quick before you have time to reflect. One — Two — Three —!"

"Have you" she asked, drawing herself up "No respect for you
your mother. You shall go to bed without your supper & I hope you
will awaken in the morning a sadder & a wiser girl."

It was I who was thinking wrongly. My mother was thinking
'straight' — directing her policy of wearing down
the imagined opponent —

Tipped off as it were by the poet I preffered, I at last be-
gan to function. Having found something to love - love being the
mechanism of talent - in the English almost nursery medievalism
of the day, I discovered that if my powers of concentration flag-
ged with a model before me, I could draw anything I longed to see

Chapter VIII

provided I had nothing to look at. While much that is learned from
the study of models seemed to have registered on some unsuspected
plane of memory.

My first entirely independent work executed in the shade of that
same Hermes stirred the wrath of Brand

"Waisting time" he grumbled on espying me.

"I am joining the 'sketch club'" I clarified.

Brand was about to expostulate when catching sight of what I was
doing he goggled ---

Amid unprecedented astonishment that first drawing won the prize
and established me as one of the outstanding students of the school.

Composition I determined by the fitness of the' expression' indu-
ced by the relation of parts. My standard for faces consisted in an ego-
less purity brought about by the harmonic contingence of their Celtic
features. Once one of my women was so lovely that the visiting R.A. p-
practically licked his chops.

This instantaneous liberation of my self confidence diminished
my subconscious anxieties for a while - until my mother in one of
her accesses of outraged morality tore up my drawing of a bare
Andromeda lashed to a rock.

As" Vile, debased" she rated my mind of a " vicious slut -
marking the division" Trying to make out on following her thick
accusative finger what she whose senses were so rudimentary, might
mean, I at length concluded in a blush of violation, that she had
falsified to locate a shadow line as lying on my innocent-eyed Andromeda's
virginal - thigh.

Thereafter the lack of keys, making it impossible to protect
things from her, allowed for incessant raids on the work which had,
for a time, so comforted me. Drawings & poems became the prey of her

Chapter VIII

disoccupation.

Infantile apprehensions revived in me.

'Shocks' having hollowed out pockets along the mental route the mind trained to drop into them did so independently of impetus from without. These periodical plunges into a depth of shame lining the constructive impulses had in the long run the inexplicable effect of forcing me to deliberate ruin a beautiful drawing in some single spot - very much as warriors surrender. At present, the interference in my work took the form of violent depression, and soon of terror, on receiving praise, of never being able to produce anything again that could merit praise.

I do not remember the exact relation in time of my impact with the Preraphaelite & my second sex enlightenment, when my friend Evangeline came from Edimborough to stay with me. My moral leprosy became stagnant was stirred up by my mother.

"Mind you" she whispered as we said 'good night' rolling her eyes in her usual savage warning when I came into contact with other girls." If you breathe a word ---"

The rise in psychic temperature was immeasurably when, as it seemed, immediately, from her pillow on a bed beside mine, Evangeline gurgled in derision

"Confess".

"You can't be so 'grean'. We went into hysterics over you when you came to Scotland.

"You *dont* know what people do on their honeymoon? You're jolly well going to find out".

The buzz of inocuous pornographic darkness generates in the young rose in crescendo to --

--" -- then the man --

Chapter VIII

--- " Suddenly " Evangeline assured me " You are overcome by the most marvellous sensation. It is just like being in heaven."

The orb of consciousness reversed in my brain. The illuminated side fallen into contact with my senses on this only intimation that there is such a thing as " pleasure" in this world, I had ever received.

" But " Evangeline amended " It can't last more than one second because the pleasure is so intense that if it lasted any longer it would kill you "

This unprecedented shock of antithesis knocked me into a coma of delight - probably what is known as day dream. At once I understood why literature stops short at marriage, there being no words sufficing for description.

I shut my eyes but I slide off the rack in my day dream. What I had got hold of is the ascetic trance of illumination. No crisis of the flesh or is it a mingling of both. Is there perhaps little difference? Or has my imaginative sensibility, so crucified, in a psychic haste passed its destination?

Evangeline prattles on of ways and means.

My mind confor ing to an almost universal fallacy scraps all that. I have learned all I need to know . A momentary, a magic contact. Such is marriage . Un effleurement suffit. Having as a child devoutly accredited fairies , I retrieve the wand for the immediate, the immaculate transformation.

Of the millions accepting , in that era, existence as a vacuum surrounding the Three Events the majority were by nature so well adjusted to inhibition they appeared to have exteriorized it to wear as an armour of agreeable inertia. The rest ill at ease in such intellectual depravity exhibited every gradation of a domestic fever

Chapter VIII

whose crisis was reached in homes such as mine.

Most of the people I chanced to associate with functioned
contentedly within the boundaries of their domestic interests.
These, being, unlike my mother's, in their case long standardised
by a tradition of social pursuits, composed an adequate programme
for their meagre dynamism. Leaving them however, uniformly flat.
What imagination, emotion, apprehension they could generate, they
summoned solely for Birth and Marriage and Death.

The torture of girls to make them fit for marriage became a
chimeric affair in homes so nicely guarded that parents must have
supposed marriage to be something fateful striking unannounced like
death.

The girls were torn with anxiety between the appeal of a sole
liberation and the paralysing certainty that the very torture of
their isolation rendered marriage unattainable.

A family entirely English might never have mentioned this re-
strictive fetish. But in my father a racial fixation, despite
the din of his wife's remonstrance, must go about marrying off a
daughter even as a domesticated cat goes hunting after dark' a
streak of fur across furnished apartments flooded with electric
light. He cant make out why this terrorised child in his desolate
home isn't on the way to making a good match.

"Sixteen and as thin as a rail. An old maid all ready"

From the accustomed dual opposition, I gathered that were

Chapter VIII

I not'dressed I should resemble ' bad women'. Unless I turned
out to be a geniues I would never ' appear. That were I to ex-
press an opinion, I should fail to find a husband.If I as much
as spoke to a man I would become ineligible.

"Can't you fatten yourself up a little" Pappa asked anxiously

The young are seldom aware of their privileges. My unique op-
portunity to experience the eroding discipline to which the off-
spring of the lower classes together with middle class morality
amid the larger advantages of civilization. I could hardly appre-
ciate at the time.

My parents' eternal exhortations, from their opposite stand-
points :

"What do you think people will think of you?" inspired me to project an uneasy mental enquiry into the minds of others an endeavoured to read their thoughts that in the end I was able to. However the psychological material thus gathered, under the pressure of my induced complex of culpability, sunk into the subconscious, to accumulate for years before I was free to bring it to the surface.

Meanwhile as the majority do I shoved my observations of actuality aside lest they encroach on the type concepts impressed on theimind from birth.

The insidious element in rebellion against parents consists in
your inability to detach yourself completely from the basic
substratum of their ascendency.

Seeing my mother fall by the fender purposely, hearing her sob
at will, served merely to render more complex the initial imposi-
tion of filial duty. Behind her tantrums loomed the collective

Chapter VIII

maternal heart given into the keeping of the doctor of that era
he pronounced it so weak the slightest emotional stress must cause
a devoted mother's instantaneous death. I lived like my father in
breathless apprehension of committing an astral murder. There ap-
peared to be no way of averting it. This feeling, lasted the rest of
my life.

She had a knack of emitting invertible accusations in light-
ning sequences of transposed logic which revealed an unparallelled
self protective agility in the female running to waste in conse-
quence of her anomolous relationship to Nature.

I never heard anything like it again - except in modified
form from Mr Guffy on Eddie Cantor's program in March 1939.

I suspect that collective heart ailment, coddled by countless
distracted families, of having taken the doctor for granted as an
accomplice.

According to my parents, all spectators of that suspect show-
piece, myself, must inevitably receive impressions to my disadvan-
tage. Sometimes this had the effect of my injecting into those ran-
sacked minds the very conclusions I was warned against yet only
after some long a siege by my unnatural anxiety that their primary
genial acceptance of me wavered.

The extremes which marked my to & fro between world and home
were those of a pendulum endowed with consciousness swinging beyond
a calculable range.

The reactions I evoked outside the home staggered me more than
those within, where the very sight of me stirred up fury. At first
I accepted as practical joking the rush occasional acquantances
made for me as they twittered

"You're the loveliest thing I have seen in all my life".

## Chapter VIII

Neither of these valuations of my physique assumed significance in my scheme of things where the maiden who lost her eyebrows in 'Love among the Ruins' fixed the standard of beauty which alone I should, at the time, have been proud to attain.

My trouble was the friends I made so easily urged me ' to do something about' myself. Unable to explain my situation which didn't make sense, I formed the habit to avoid vain regret of paying no attention to what they were saying . With the strange result that whenever I asked the ~~time~~ or the ~~way~~ I neglected to wait for an answer.

Sculptured by my parents' thought, England agglomerated to an omnipotent adult of dual embodiment - female, endeavoured with a divine right to insult me - male, endowed with a similar right to ruin me.

Nothing has more amazed me than the idiotic apprehensions of t
he moralists that the world during recent decades had lapsed from
the purity of the pre War era.

Preoccupation with that somewhat unformulated concept, sex, pe-
mitted expression, has become intermittent. Putting it into words
supplies sufficient egress to allow of average individuals entirely
concentrating on other interests for considerable stretches of time.

At the close of Victoria's reign it formed an incessant obsession
of the respectable. They never ceased to be aware of ' not doing
something' and the necessity for preventing others. The striking
characteristic of the post-war era is a pronounced purification
revealed in its concomitant a marked abatement of sadism.

* Burne Jones

Islands in the Air

Chapter VIII

I realised the arrangement of angles around me had
undergone change on touching a pane of imitation stained
glass; filtering a morning light a monochrome branch of
apple-blossom that looked sticky & felt dry was baked onto
its surface.

My contact with a meaningless decoration brought within
range the whole of a semi-detached residence that was brand
new. Aerial impression of static furniture forced me to enter
a devaluated time-interval coincident with a stretch-on-the-
wreck - of years, to be spent in the sanctity of the home.

My father handsome & erect trimmed with auburn mustaches
stalked me on stilts of ambition exhorting me to glory. AN (small)
uppish bosom intervened with " over my dead body ". For Father's
consolation my sister was a musical prodigy, while I, in a
spirit of obedience, had bursts of self-expression. Balanced

Chapter VIII

NAT and Daisy

On a warm afternoon
In June
A (G)Nat in the air dæd fly
Ever so high ... ever so high

When low near the ground I flew
Disconsolately... Disconsolately
Ah! What did I see? Ah! What did I see?

Chapter VIII

I remember no more, save that the(g)Nat having found his
daisy with all her petals shed, I ended up serenely:

It was shocking to learn, on being knocked off my
perch, that instead of a laudable poet I was somehow "a sly
minx, trying to get round your father".

Day by day, drifting from room to room seeking for
'something to do' shooed by a blast of 'idle slut' past the
towering gilded mirrors from 'North Hall' I felt put out by
their flitting amorettis' dimples of inascribable delight.
My father was assured these mirrors, these gilded mirrors,
now cut down to the height of our present
ceilings, were looted from the palace of Versailles. At the base
of one, in a spacious jardiniere, a few poor artificial plants
fell upon one another. I found it useless to try digging the

Chapter VIII

88

pointed sticks on which they were mounted into the metal
bottom.

The houses in Clinton Gardens were all alike but on
the threshold of ours stood a menace as ominous as Chaaron.
The cusp of doom was at my back as I entered the gate.

Retrospectively the sides of that brick box which
seemed so vacuous actually creak. Forced to bursting point
by opposite pressures from within. At the time a steady
inoperation dulled the interior. Bodies moved without aim.
Tentacles of waste energy wavered toward inexistant objectives.
Like machinery working full blast on the production of nothing,
I wore down my own dynamism. The brain for lack of intellectual
material exercised its ceaseless automatism upon the biological
functions to abnormal extent - one always had some kind
of pain, heightened by the spasms of the solar plexus on
impact with the Voice.

Gentle Jesus meek & mild, in my babyhood I conceived
of as a mouse, would he'come out ' I had wondered if he knew
I wouldn't hurt him.

Monday morning I fought my first makkka moral battle.
While rattling my hoopstick along an iron fence I denied God;
at the age of nine.

Chapter VIII

was bluff. Yet to the Voice I had such antipathy I could not
conform to its precepts. Asserting a tremulant heroism, I decided
to risk eternal torture rather than resemble the people He
approved.

A golden tassle on her watch chain dangling against my
ear, her breath on the nape of my neck, merged in my subcon-
cious with the horror instilled by my first information on
procreation. In the pathological vortex she aroused in me spun
a black Bible cloth boards 2/6.

Aversion to her obstructing my senses, deafened me to
her lessons. To relieve my tedium I would investigate the old
Testament when Miss Nickson wasn't looking.

Chapter VIII

92

Going to school I anticipated as joining an opposition
club of youth combatting the mother-myth. I had stood up to God
alone. Mother-love was beyond me. I had urgent need for that
exchange of confidences in which the helpless asses of misfortune
appraise each other's loads to lighten them at least of bearing
in silence.

"Do you love your mother"? I asked with significant inflec-
tion upon absurdity of the first little girl who wanted ' to
make friends'. We were putting our books away on a lower shelf.
Had I had any opportunity to observe the portents of normal
human relationships I should have been instantly informed in
this bobbing together of top-knots, should have recognised in
the hair ribbon A vane indicating which way the maternal wind
blows. That other child in its cheerful cerise lay carressing
with a pair of orderly loops her formal curls while mine like a
flag vanquished in some unfortunate engagement started ragged
in assymetry from crippled knot in which some random hairs of
my culpable head were caught to an agonising tension among the
overloose mass.

Chapter VIII

A face expressing emotion from within is a bountiful face
even if pouring out dislike which is also receptible & of
common traffic but the horror face that like a faulty mirror
distorts its vis-à-vis ... the horror on that small girl's face
is a reflected horror. So even outside the home, I am not a nice
child. And now I percieve her hair ribbon, it is all tied up
with love.

As it was a moral impossibility to arrive in class without
bringing one's home work, and a physical impossibility to concen-
trate at home, I copied my exercises out of the text book. In
order not to cheat the other girls I wrote in sufficient mistakes
to place me permanently above the defective child with an oyster
eye who sat in unassailable simplicity at the bottom of the class.
Beside her I pondered that eerie hitch in a psychic mechanism
rendering the defective so differently incapable of concentra-
tion to myself. Had she had for daughter that imbecile child
would even my mother have spoken in vain?

Chapter VIII

- 94 -

One of my father's step-relations who enameled his outdoor cistern vermillion had a paying guest or perhaps lodger he often brought to our house to dinner. A Welsh musician, he played us all he composed & Ida would join him in duets. My father relaxed in an armchair of lurid satin, melting in relief, let a few pure tears trickle to his beard. I love music in a minor key. he avowed wiping his eyes with a bandanna. It makes me feel sentimental."

If I recall his face accurately, Edward German dominated the show of gas on our drawing-room with a distinct Celtic beauty.

I stood apart from the initiates gathered round him. Even the ' step' was a music addict. Multiplied by the mirrors they made a crowd among reflected ebony, gilt & alabaster, Moving their laughter round an early gramaphone, as they recorded Ida's precocity on cylinders of coffee-coloured wax. My mother wearing all her diamonds assumed the smile of a diplomat who assured of attaining his end is not for the moment giving his policy away.

With Ida, my father's unaccountable presentiment of future glory seemed secure. Almost as a baby she moved her fingers on ivory & harmony was the result. AS a girl she op-

*lyric soprano*

*already it had*

*ened her mouth & emitted a ' voice'.*

Chapter VIII

-95-

While for my sister the divine penetrated to her envi-
ronment in mine the walls were hung with pictures from the
royal academy. insert

Music intangible speaks for the dumb soul other arts have
too articulate audiences. Ida has if her curls had condensed
to minims & crotchets still moved serenely to constant applause.
I was confused when anyone enquired of me " I hear you draw.
Can you draw a cork?"

" You're getting a big girl now," father said, when I
was fourteen, producing at the dinner table ~~gatelinked~~
bracelets of plain gold. " I thought you might wear a little
quiet jewelry".

Chapter VIII

- 96 -

"If only I could"

"Give me my cloak & bonnet" my mother declared probably
taking her cue from some old melodrama as everyone now wore hats.

Chapter VIII

- 97 -

should never forgive myself".

Too young for stimulants, having had no dinner after
similar inroads on lunch, I crept upstairs to hang limply
about the keyhole of my mother's bedroom. door until after midnight

Chapter X

" She came about her husband. He got involved with a very pret-
ty nursery governess" the Baroness later announced, not explained.
"Her parents who wished her to finish her studies sent her to us
"au pair" the wife supposed you were her" she mentioned casually.

I did not make out why the complainant was kept in the dark
as to my identity. It must have been convenient to camouflage the
actual location of that mislaid girl.

That same evening a young diplomat dined with us. The following
day I received by express from this stranger an offhand ' command'
to meet him at some notorious night restaurant. Utterly bewildered,
I showed it to my hostess who, stonily placative endorsed my resent-
ment with the enigmatic remark " Bad move . Too fast a worker"

Soon there appeared another young man, a student of law from
the Netherlands; somewhat in the same capacity as myself- a paying
guest-- for dinner. A God-send I thought for Mammalie who could
almost squeeze tears from those blue rocks when seeking my sympathy
in the stars after
for her precarious finances.

It was noticeable how little this ' Alexandre' had to do in
the evenings when the meal was over; how suddenly the Baronial couple
contracted appointments away from home. Left to entertain him, I
was frightened by his crescent gallantry. I felt I had escaped
Bedlam to fall into a trap. My ever-watchful mother desiring her
legitimate share in the grandure Father had procured for me had
written the Baronness at great length setting out in detail my
disobedience, my strongheadedness. Exhorting her to exercise the
utmost severity should I show the slightest tendency to behaviour
contrary to her wishes. A letter which cast almost a radiance over t
the inflated pink flesh and mouse coloured plaited crown of a pe-
trified Gretchen, it placed me unconditionally at her disposal.

" What a woman " commented the Baroness " - only to complaints

Chapter X

4

140

from her own child would she turn a deaf ear".

Horror of a calamity my parents obsessed by morality had tried
to avert by frightening me into utter subervience to the dictates
of others, was steadily developing into a terror that if anyone
I disliked insisted upon my doing anything I was averse to I would
automatically comply; so systematically they had obfuscated my ins-
tinct of self-protection.

However it was not yet I should reach the maturation of an
engrafted anxiety. At first over-stimulated apprehensions disperse
before the comparative insignificance of actual crises. When
Alexandre acutely moulded in evening dress, stood before me with a
a pistol, about to blow his brains out should I find no use for his
passion, I said "Shoot".

Anxieties flourished in my louche situation. Complexes were not
yet public property. Neurosis in those days so very much resembled
an unhappied screw to the pitch of pain.

Having been given a white liqueur which almost blew my head
off, I sneaked the bottle to my room, supposing that should I
swallow the whole contents it would kill me. But after a long
battle of the breath with an explosive suffocation although the
liquid dynamite had blown my body to a numb rigidity, my eyes sur-
vived.

They did not look out of my head. In a visual advance to some
distance before me they applied in strange aliveness with my reflec-
tion in a mirror the other side of the room.

Over there my comatose face endowed with an ectoplasmic facil-
ity for transfiguration escaped the conventions of a normal retina.
in streamers of distorted flesh. Its structure accentuated to
stalagmites of bone thrust beyond the glazy surface - it drew back
its lips in the bray of moronic fiends - Poked & spread - dripped in

Chapter X

self-dissolution from a thorn - recomposed as inocuous sleeping-beauty to burst and fllng its india-rubber stuffing in a crescendo of grimaces to the corners of the frame.

Throughout the night the chameleon mime put on the illimitable rictus of human sensibility revealed by the fluoroscope of an eye in fixation.

In the morning there I was, safe & sound, my anxiety intact.

Utterly confused by the persistant evidence that all my parents feared for me, in their ignorance they forced upon me, a desperate sense of having no one to turn to had been a major factor in my uneasiness. Now, all at once, I did find someone to turn to: Alexander.

To my timely advantage the current distinction among womankind was clear cut. Apart from the ugly & such as were carnally achievable there existed - angels.

"You are an angel" said Alexander when I saw him again; gradually affectionate as men were wont to be when they had just found me out'. "An angel" he repeated warningly, "Who has flown into a wasps' nest. Linda look at this". It was the Baron's advertisement for male diners, in an evening paper, offering the bait of an ' english Miss'.

"Thank God you've got me to come to dinner" It was quite worth his while to watch over me he explained" I'd rather talk to you than any man - you're so damned intelligent."

It was through this most unexpected comradship I gained the experience of a continental man of the world.

My association with a wealthy sensualist with that face which only takes form atop of good tailoring would have been the rather usual expedient of chance for lack of a social scope including the anyone

Chapter X

to me

congenial had it not been for the unbiased christianity of his attitude towards prostitutes. For this I found myself indebted to him for an ethical relief substantiating our intimacy.

Ever since finding myself alone somewhere around Piccadilly , I had stritten in an incomprehensible grip of conscience . It had been while looking for a bus after visiting a gallery with students who lived in an opposite direction that, halted by a tug at my coat , I made out, a little above my knee, an infant face,

Floated up from the shadows entangled with feet its unutterable
beauty was strangely divided between the awful purity of undernou-
rished babyhood & willful, daubs of soot. It was the fifth of Novem-
ber . The little flower of poverty held forth the cup of his hand
and wheedled " I'se de Guy"

Immediately after, I approached the only woman passing in the
crowd to ask the time.

Her eyes were unmentionable.

"I beg your pardon---" eyes of defense expressionless as a
barricade. Whatever lay siege to them from without was a nothing
compared to her own brain battering on the back of them. Dead eyes
promenading. Why, they are in hell, I thought, surprised at my
sudden acceptance of that drastic locality. Not the time, but myself
they measured as momentarily I came between her and the rest of the
world.

"Could you tell me ---" I smiled into those unflinching eyes
of a lady ashamed. Her face soared. In a gust of glad excitement
she panted the hour, handing me half past five as a precious keep-
sake out of the past---

"Injustice" kept knocking at my head on the rattle of the
horse buss " What's the matter with women -- the matter with women

Chapter X

that they <u>allow</u> one of themselves to look like that. Truel a streetwalker should be so pleased when I ask her the time.
And these complementary spectres of a London street fused in my indignation.

"I'se de Guy" said the prostitute. I beg your pardon, and !,
Oh I beg your pardon. Oh I beg your pardon. neutrality

So in Alexander though I never surmounted my antipathy to the
sophisticate commonplace of his <u>mundaine</u> features, I found a moral
spaciousness soothing to my obsession of an enigmatic sex-class
culpability toward that woman on Picaadilly.

Even now I would not care to have to look into those eyes of
an english' professional' reflecting the sky-line of Victorian seem-
liness.

Setting out for the holidays with the
genius of certain Tentons for putting one off
ones ease my host to find satisfaction
in pointing out to fellow-passengers that I
was English. At that time the Buch händler
windows were decorated predominantly with
Queen Victoria's naked posterior. Through
out our journey personal insults referring

Chapter X

were of historical lineage whose <u>lineage</u> whose glory had lasted
until some recently it must only have been cut short by that fall
on its head. They reached the apex of their alpine enjoyment
behind the terrace restaurant overlooking the Starnberger See,
creeping up on the line of ' aborts ' in the garden to guffaw at
the ladies of the party as they stepped out. The canonade that
followed to my english aversion, echoed along the serried enclo-
sures of those shrines of Nature' could only have emanated from t
the most martial of races the chemical compounds of their very
nutriment manufactured explosives from Pilsener & Sauerkraut.

The Starnberger See held the bluest water I have ever seen,
an ultra- saphire slab, after hours of our libations on its shores
under a vast sunset of incendiary warfare in Heaven it changed in
all its magnitude to opal.

' You're so sure of yourself ' the Baroness was taunting me
' You think no man can resist you'.

My only mention of men having been the sad exile from an
idealistic adoration of HÖlyoak to whom, I confided to her , my
everlasting fidelity was dedicated, she must have intended this
remark to be propelled in the direction of a feminine offensive
in which she hoped I should be robbed of my defenses.

Following this invocation of an irrational vanity, my dese
cent from the mountains was arranged.

A fair journey from our speck of domestication in an almost
unpopulated valley, on a high road, bare to the sun, we called
on the heiress of a stone quarry. She was deformed. Had been mar-
ried for her heritage . Somehow the Baroness conveyed me in her
arid parlour, like a stick through bars to enrage a moping ape.

Prominent in the room , great and square stood an empty

Chapter X

white porcelain stove reflecting the hot glass of the windows,
equally unnecessary was our conversation it seemed sufficient for
the Baroness to have shown me to her...

Below in the quarry where iron bins ran through white grit
on a little railway we found the Baron planning to climb the
Grottenkopf with the poor woman's husband & his brother, two
short men with tepid blue eyes thrown up at the foot of a boulders
and covered with a froth of stone they were baked grey in their
scrubby colourless hair.

"Morgen" gesticulated the Baron elatedly, "Es ist erreicht"
"Hush" urged his wife glancing at me.

Preparatory to the ascent we all slept in another hunting lodge
much higher up. At four A.M. we were ready to start. First the
Baron dropped out, I had not wanted to join in an expedition too
onerous for one whose brain worried so rapidly! that it sapped my
physical energy; but the Baroness fortified with my mother's
authorisation had forced me to do as I was told. Pushing me
out onto the mountain side in the pitch-dark after the quarry
owners, and :

"I'm not coming" she told them, her eyes slamming
with the door.

These strangers awkward in their mystification were yet very
considerate. They showed me how to climb. Trudging, clinging as
the air lit up, we rose & rose to, incredibly, arrive at the
top of Grottenkopf.

Here as if the whole world had covered itself with ageless excrements, sight was outdistanced by range beyond range of shatterd multiple cones. Sharp as armament, carressed by mist aretes and crevasses glittering in the icy whiteness of forennon heat. Recognisably populous with an unconvincing absence of my-

Chapter X

thical beings--- one could have sworn these inverted avalanches
of eternal adamance were not inanimate, so irresistably they moved
in upon recesses of memory stored with mountain folk lore....

The little husband mysteriously, I could not know what the
Baron may have implied on the eve of our setting forth, seemed
somehow to have been alloted a leading role, probably wondering
what his wife would say, he appeared both desirous and sulky.
Whenever we relaxed our strenuous progress, the brother would
stand aside watching his indiscipline as to what was expected of him,
in, particularly for their class, this bawdy situation. They
knew at least I had had no wish to climb a mountain.

Such glorious outburst of the Alps in a diamond morning, the
comparative ease of descent, our relief at regaining normal levels
after such unexpected isolation of the ill-assorted made us almost
companionable, we returned with the triumphant yodels of accmmplished
mountaineers. Wistfully as though in reparation of misjudgement
they bowed abashed over the formality of kissing my hand.

One other early morning expedition, not at all ambiguous was our
drive in the forrester's two-horse brake to Oberammergau, after the
hush of forest roads awaiting dawn. The modern sheltered pen for an
international crowd was inconducive. The chorus of four cornered
women stood in a row like Unlans in curtains. The wood of the "po-
liceman's" rattle" used for breaking the bones of the crucified
thieves in their rosy cotton tights was over new as on a bazaar
counter " That rattle " the Baroness remarked " Is the most effec-
tive instrument of anti-semitism " . The show, to me, seemed prepos-
terous. I was later to know what it should have been like watching
a De Max miracle play on a laic stage.

Chapter X

That day in Oberammergau, Judas, owning to the intervention of
Nature turned out to be the hero, in saving the aesthetic situation
As he came on for his lonely act, the skies darkened, a wind blew
up whipping his remorse to elemental drama. Tossing his full long
hair & his roman garment across his staggering self-accusation in
magnificent accident.

Had it not been for this sudden change in the weather, I
should have seen nothing to prepare me for my halucinatory meeting
with the holy family.

The Baron being the_ personnage in our district was notified
by the ' Wirth' that the actors in the passon play were stopping at
his Gasthaus on one of their days off & he wished to present them
to us.

To adjust my Victorian eyes to those passing guests restrained
by hereditary tradition to an atavism of handsome sanctity, I
cast off centuries.

IN the incomparable glow of oil lamps diffusing mellow clues
to eroded wall & blackened rafter the jewelled flesh of their goodly
medieval german faces leapt in defined portions from the bronze
matrix of the profound chiarascuro of an old master.

Leaning this way and that, spontaneously biblical in composition, they ate at a long narrow table. The parting above Mary's brow lay, quiet as if smoothed by hands in prayer. Christ Jesus shred an onion with the gesture of sacrament. Above a virgin beard rested the saintly eyes of St John the Baptist in humble tranquility. Nobly handling their peasant knives, they might have been hewing out of themselves cathedrals monuments of those they represented. One even detected a grave angelic chord in their" Guten Abend meine Herrschaften."

Chapter X

Christmas came, the Baroness in lymphatic calm, as if in
mating she had contracted an opposite effect of that cephalic
crash came as near to her spouse as her belly allowed her; drinking
together from a loving cup under the candles winking on the tree.
With no emotion they observed their annual sentimental rites. Alexander
and I were their audience.

Now mysteriously lightened of debt, daily they touted me to
lunch at a fashionable restaurant. In we trooped. First the gesti-
qulator - the belly - myself, blushing in the exhibition.

Poor Mamalie; her inflation was trompe-l'oeil. On my arrival
I had shuddered at the thought of her delivery until she explained
her permanent appearance to be due to the ignorance of a doctor who
had 'not' done something' when the Baby Baroness was born.

In view of my childhood of horror-& the fact thaty expectant
mothers modestly disappeared from circulation, the corsets then in
vogue boosting their generate load to an unshapiness too awful to
contemplate - going about with her' did something' to my virgin
aplomb.

Led to a table, the Baron, as was the custom, presented himself
before taking his seat " Freiherr von "..

Sword-slashed men who had acquired in duels of honour the faces
of seamed potatoes, clicked their heels before him. Then, after
introducing his wife; with a flourish, " Die Miss "

" Gnadiger Fraulein " click" Surely this is Cleo de Mirode ?
Liane de Pougy ? " they enquired.

Whatever my sponsors' expectations, the only person I decided to speak to there was a well-known waitress whose intimate tragedies I had learned from Alexander. Inwardly I was evolving a

## Chapter X

weirdly strict personal form of feminism of which the militant aspect consisted in being peculiarly benign to any woman who had been ' pushed' . Mitzi, pretty and pale under her pompadour respon- ded intuitively with sweet welcome.

Came Carnival. My faithful guardian, Alexander initiated me to the celebration of Fasching. As we galloped along, the folded red of his Neapoitan woman's head-dress, the startling black of my velvet hickers had almost the same tone-value as Masqueraders the other side of the Platz, so clear was the cold atmosphere. The coloured shower of confettis on newly fallen snow made game of the impressionist Pissaro; providing a subject matter to express his technique.

For that long-a-go Carnaval, Munich seemed, in seismic festivi- ty, to have thrown all its citizens onto the streets in travesty. The crowd was flamboyant.

We dined in the charming retreat of the Vier Jahreszeiten and ended the night watching the ' live for the moment' turbulence in the Café Luitpold. In counter-action Alexander became seriously anxious as to his future. He asked me to marry him.

When I got home, Mammalie had retired. I sat in the dark on the end of her bed relating our adventures when, bursting through the door, loud as a braying ass, the tall Baron, beside himself with excitement reiterated Ha ha ha --- ha ha -- " He said they had been in the Café. I was there - they never stepped foot inside the door - ha ha ha !

" Hush " said the Baroness pointing me out.

" But Mammalie " I exclaimed, as he beat a retreat " Whatever is he so happy about"

Chapter X

" Ma-nu " she answered patting my shoulder pacifically" one
pays no attention to him".

Drawing whatever cerebral harmony Nature had intended for me
, the record of the Voice playing on my mind periodically accu-
mulated such confusion it exceeded my capacity. At this point
in endurance, I would receive a blow on the brain & sink into
a slumbrous coma.

On awakening - I felt relieved - as one beginning life
afresh - Gradually the painful dissonance returned.

At last, receiving a peevish letter from my Father, I
discovered the cause of the danger I ran. He complained of my
writing him nothing but nonsense, description of Oberammergau
' angels' tumbling in the hay. He had sent the Baroness, at her
request three hundred pounds to buy the luxurious outfit
I required for the round of social gayeties I was now enjoying
under her aegis - and I had never even mentioned it! My parents
in their distrust of their offspring seemed to take for granted
the blanket innocence of the adult.

I had only the vaguest conjectures how their getting me
into " trouble " would have prevented my father discovering
the deflection of his money. In those days a girl who mislaid
her maidenhood was promptly let out on the streets, without a
farthing, by her family - perhaps it would be presumed the vi-
sionary finery had gone with me. But how to explain the ' show-
ing ' of me to the quarry heiress - obviously an angry wife had
played a role in the episode of the student governess. The 'good
idea' stiffens with the backing of a precedent of course!

Chapter X

She could be depended on to ' publish' a downfall of which the Baroness must a ppear unaware.

Had Alexander not brought me the dinner ad and even at that delicately indicated its implication , my uneasy intuition would have sunk into the bed-rock of my anxiety complex , and becoming part of it , persuade me with that recorded ' voice' my suspicion of Mammalie arose from my own shortcoming.

Sharing with my parents the prevalent assumption that any couple of opposite sex , if alone together, must automatically come to a clinch, notwithstanding the large percentage of people in that era so fundamentally inhibited, any primitive gesture was almost impossible for them; she might have spared herself her mystification as she watched Alexander come to dinner month in month out with no dubious breaks in my unruffled catch & return of his friendly teasing,, spared herself her inward exasperation when a light-hearted yodel concluded her desperate expedient: two potential violaters on a dark mountain ; if only she had reflected that no financial compli-cations whatever could have induced me to cut short my year's res-pite from the Voice. Mammalie may have been a bad woman. Never did "I" heard her utter an unkind word.

" We did not tell you " said the Baroness " We thought it better so " . She referred almost shyly to what she had accomplished for me in winning that cheque from my Father.

" Indeed " I assented amiably " You are now in a position to give me a latch-key".

My life henceforth could run its average course as a student of the art Verein which should have sufficed to rid me of a dejected sense of inhabiting a psychic house of ill-fame of, wherever I went being offered to the first comer. But a long ffermenting urge to

Chapter X

to proclaim myself voluntarily unseductive came to a head in so
clownish a gesture, that, had it not'worked' one must fail to
attribute to it the sublimated rationality of most nonsensical
impulses :

I bought a play pipe

The scandal involved for me, unprecedentedly reformed turned on t
the Baron and Mammalie. The consul who had furnished their address
was hilarious to behold me , flaunting the outrageous purity of that
penny pipe under Bayerische colours, the blue and white striped
awning of an open train.

I preferred to appear as an amateur lunatic rather than an
amateur baggage.

Trying to work I found myself incapable of sustained effort
under the most efficient system, Angeles Jaua had us draw life size
one's point of view taken from the other end of the studio, one had
to carry each stroke of form in one's head while crossing to an
easel placed up close to the model. At first go, intensely enth-
siastic over what I was doing he declared himself interested to
watch what would be the outcome of such extraordinary talent. A
new problem, a new environment could always stimulate me to incipi-
ent achievement. As I became ' accustomed' the same offuscation
beset me. " Its like soap " Jank at last complained, bewildered.

The Baroness, I had demoted to landlady, the Baron, a cringy old man they had presented to me as 'Marconi' & his huge beetle-browed wife who saved the lump sugar in cafés, stuffing it into her beaded reticule as she rose from the table joined hands & encircled me singing:

" Du bist Verrückt mein kind
Du must nach Berlin "

h
They trew back their palms before the impossible ." An empty
pipe , between the lips of a raving beauty".

Chapter X

German Art being beyond the pale of my shadowy Preraphaelites,
I was entirely without aesthetic allegiances to any trends among a
Bavarian intelligentsia; handsome, warm-hearted bringing a compre-
hensive view point to horizons vast in comparison to those of English
students. Their international contacts adjusted to a nicety nicety
Having no choice to make, I was left to the choice of others. Much
as a flower might find itself picked I was drawn into an eclectic set
principally of german men and russian women. The men were grave and
courteous, the women chastely advanced. Some were well known.
Common to all were their untarnished titles, these they subordinated
to their intellects. In long forgotten converse we toured the night
dining beneath ceilings of foliage the light on our table hung with
a screen of chestnut leaves.

Safely unchaperoned my year in Munich drew to a close. Father
entirely discouraged allowed me to make the return journey alone.
The only memory it leaves me is the bronzed symmetry of the tall
youth trying to present himself to the averted brim of my hat as we
left Ostend, the name of the place had a racy tang at the time.

Chapter X

" She came about her husband. He got involved with a very pretty nursery governess" the Baroness later announced, not explained.
"Her parents who wished her to finish her studies sent her to us until "au pair" the wife supposed you were her" she mentioned casually.

That same evening a young diplomat dined with us. The following day I received by express from this stranger an offhand ' command' to meet him at some notorious night restaurant. Utterly bewildered, I showed it to my hostess who, stonily placative endorsed my resent - ment with the enigmatic remark " Bad move . Too fast a worker".

Soon there appeared another young man, a student of law from the Netherlands; somewhat in the same capacity as myself- a paying guest-- for dinner. A God-send, I thought, for Mannalie who could almost squeeze tears from those blue rocks when seeking my sympathy for her precarious finances.

It was noticeable how little this ' Alexandre' had to do in the evenings when the meal was over; how suddenly the Baronnial couple contracted appointments away from home. Left to entertain him, I was frightened by his crescent gallantry. I felt I had escaped Bedlam to fall into a trap. My ever-watchful mother desiring her legitimate share in the grandure Father had procured for me, had written the Baronness at great length setting out in detail my disobedience, my strongheadedness. Exhorting her to exercise the utmost severity should I show the slightest tendency to behaviour contrary to her wishes. A letter which cast almost a radiance over the inflated pink flesh and mouse coloured plaited crown of a petrified Gretchen, it placed me unconditionally at her disposal.

" What a woman" commented the Baroness " - only to complaints

Chapter X

140

Horror of a calamity my parents obsessed by morality had tried
to avert by frightening me into utter subservience to the dictate
of others, was steadily developing into a terror that if anyone
I disliked insisted upon my doing anything I was averse to I would
automatically comply; so systematically they had obfuscated my ins-
tinct of self-protection.

However it was not yet I should reach the maturation of an
engrafted anxiety. At first over-stimulated apprehensions disperse
before the comparative insignificance of actual crises. When
Alexandre, acutely moulded in evening dress, stood before me with a
pistol, about to blow his brains out should I find no use for his
passion, I said "shoot".

Anxieties flourished in my louche situation. Complexes were not
get public property. Neurosis, in those days, so very much resembled
an unhappiness screwed to the pitch of pain.

Having been given a white liqueur which almost blew my head
off, I sneaked the bottle to my room, supposing that should I
swallow the whole contents it would kill me. But after a long
battle of the breath with an explosive suffocation although the
liquid dynamite had blown my body to a numb rigidity, my eyes sur-
fived.

They did not look out of my head. In a visual advance to some
distance before me they mplyed in strange aliveness with my reflec-
tion in a mirror the other side of the room.

Over there my comatose face endowed with an ectoplasmic facil-
ity for transfiguration escaped the conventions of a normal retina.
in streamers of distorted flesh. Its structure accentuated to
stalagmites of bone thrust beyond the glazy surface - it drew back
its ligds in the bray of moronic fiends - Poked & spread - dripped in

Chapter X

141

self-dissolution from a thorn - recomposed as inocuous sleeping-beauty to burst and fling its india-rubber stuffing in a crescendo of grimaces to the corners of the frame.

Throughout the night the chameleon mine put on the illimitable rictus of human sensibility revealed by the fluoroscope of an eye in fixation.

"You are an angel" said Alexander when I saw him again; gravely affectionate as men were wont to be when they had just found me out'. "An angel" he repeated warningly, "Who has flown into a wasps' nest. Linda look at this". It was the Baron 's advertisement for male diners, in an evening paper, offering the bait of an ' english Miss'.

My association with a wealthy sensualist with that face which only takes form atop of good tailoring would have been the rather usual expedient of chance for lack of social scope including the

Chapter X

congenial had it not been for the unbiased Christianity of his attitude towards prostitutes. For this I found myself indebted to him for an ethical relief substantiating our intimacy.

Ever since finding myself alone somewhere around Piccadilly, I had stritten in an incomprehensible grip of conscience. It had been while looking for a bus after visiting a gallery with students who lived in an opposite direction that, halted by a tug at my coat, I made out, a little above my knee, an infant face.

Floated up from the shadows entangled with feet its unutterable beauty was strangely divided between the awful purity of undernourished babyhood & willful daubs of soot. It was the fifth of November. The little flower of poverty held forth the cup of his hand and wheedled "I'se de Guy"

Her eyes were unmentionable.

"I beg your pardon--- eyes of defense expressionless as a barricade. Whatever lay siege to them from without was a nothing compared to her own brain battering on the back of them. Dead eyes promenading. Why, they are in hell, I thought, surprised at my sudden acceptance of that drastic locality. Not the time but myself they measured as momentarily I came between her and the rest of the world.

"Could you tell me ---" I smiled into those unflinching eyes of a lady ashamed. Her face soared. In a gust of glad excitement she panted the hour, handing me half past five as a precious keepsake out of the past---

"Injustice" kept knocking at my head on the rattle of the horse buss "What's the matter with women -- the matter with women?"

CHAPTER X

to the Boer war mingled with something for which my father was
paying heavily as it dripped down my skirt from the baby Baroness
I had to carry.

In the Bavarian Alps where gathering thunders bowled the
paneramic peeks - infinitesimal in isolation a stroke of whitewash
marked the primitive hunting lodge in which we lived.

Crossing the river I spent my lonely time on miles of flowering
weeds, discriminating among the various contours of their green
leaves I drew only those which like beautiful bodies diverged from
their structural similars in some esoteric ritual of line. The
heraldic curves of giant dandelions, the crowded constellations of
the umbel.....

Spasmodically a rural social life, we had three scattered
neighbours, dragged me in every direction through fervid sun and
crushed pine by beaten tracks half breaking off the hill-sides to
distant objectives of identical beer.

Seated at high wooden tables grey with dried rain on their
atrophied legs, the Baroness, her stare become hypnotic, ceaseles-
sly complimented me on being a lovely ' vampire' fatal to men.

The Baron occasionally started shouting about crowned heads
but nobody bothered to take him up.

His uncle, a bald eagle specimen of the 'vieu marcheur' came
to visit us. Also hard up, unlike his nephew he was very much all
there punctuating with his flashing monocle, stories which escaped
all risk through their openness.

Entirely at home among the peacefully neglected children in t
the bare wooden hut, these Barons more ' pot-luck ' than England's

Chapter X

were of historical lineage whose lineage whose glory had lasted
until some recently it must only have been cut short by that fall
on its head. They reached the apex of their alpine enjoyment
behind the terrace restaurant overlooking the Starnberger See;
creeping up on the line of ' aborts ' in the garden to guffaw at
the ladies of the party as they stepped out. The canonade that
followed to my english aversion echoed along the serried enclo-
sures of those shrines of Nature' could only have emanated from t
the most martial of races the chemical compounds of their very
nutriment manufactured explosives from Pilsener & Sauerkraut.

The Starnberger See held the bluest water I have ever seen,
an ultra- sapphire slab, after hours of our libations on its shores
under a vast sunset of incendiary warfare in Heaven it changed in
all its magnitude to opal.

My only mention of men having been the sad exile from an
idealistic adoration of HÖlyoak to whom, I confided to her , my
everlasting fidelity was dedicated, she must have intended this
remark to be propelled in the direction of a feminine offensive
in which she hoped I should be robbed of my defences.

Following this invocation of an irrational vanity, my dese
cent from the mountain§ was arranged.

A fair j urney from our speck of domestication in an almost
unpopulated valley, on a high road, bare to the sun, we called
on the heiress of a stone quarry. She was diformed. Had been mar-
ried for her he itage . Somehow the Baroness conveyed me in her
arid parlour, like a stick through bars to enrage a moping ape.

Chapter X

Below in the quarry where iron bins ran through white grit
on a little railway we found the Baron planning to climb the
Grottenkopf with the poor woman's husband & his brother, two
short me with tepid blue eyes thrown up at the foot of a boulders
and covered with a froth of stone they were baked grey in their
scrubby colourless hair.

Here as if the whole world had covered itself with ageless excrements, sight was outdistanced by range beyond range of shatterred multiple cones sharp as armament carressed by mist aretes and crevasses glittering in the icy whiteness of forennon heat. Recognisably populous with an unconvincing absence of my-

Chapter X

Such glorious outburst of the Alps in a diamond morning, the
comparative ease of descent, our relief at regaining normal levels
after such unexpected isolation of the ill assorted made us almost
companionable, we returned with the triumphant yodels of accomplished
mountaineers. Wistfully as though in reparation of misjudgement
they bowed abashed over the formality of kissing my hand.

One other early morning expedition, not at all ambiguous was our
drive in the forrester's two horse Brake to Oberammergau, after the
hush of forest roads awaiting dawn. The modern sheltered pen for an
international crowd was inconducive. The chorus of four cornered
women stood in a row like Uhlans in curtains. The wood of the " po-
liceman's" rattle" used for breaking the bones of the crucified
thieves in their rosy cotton tights was over new as on a bazaar
counter " That rattle " the Baroness remarked " Is the most effec-
tive instrument of anti-semitism " . The show, to me, seemed prepos-
terous . I was later to know what it should have been like watching
a De Max miracle play on a laic stage.

Chapter X

The Baron be ng the_ personnage in our district was notified
by the ' Wirth' that the actors in the passion play were stopping at
his Gasthaus on one of their days off & he wished to present them
to us.

To adjust my Victorian eyes to those passing guests restrained
by herededitary tradition to an atavism of handsome sanctity, I
cast off centuries.

Leaning this way and that, spontaneously biblical in composition, they ate at a long narrow table. The parting above Mary's brow lay quiet as if smoothed by hands in prayer. Christ Jesus shred an onion with the gesture of sacrament. Above a virgin beard rested the saintly eyes of St John the Baptist in humble tranquility. Nobly handling their peasant knives, they might have been hewing out of themselves cathedrals monuments of those they represented. One even detected a grave angelic chord in their" Guten Abend meine Herrschaften."

Chapter X

Christmas came, the Baroness in lymphatic calm, as if in
mating she had contracted an opposite effect of that cephalic
crash came as near to her spouse as her belly allowed her; drinking
together from a loving cup under the caddles winking on the tree.
With no emotion they observed their annual sentimental rites. Alexander
and I were their audience.

Poor Mamalie; her inflation was trompe-l'oeil. On my arrival
I had shuddered at the thought of her delivery until she explained
her permanent appearance to be due to the ignorance of a doctor who
had 'not' done 'something' when the Baby Baroness was born.

In view of my childhood of horror-& the fact that my expectant
mothers modestly disappeared from circulation, the corsets then in
vogue boosting their generate load to an unshapiness too awful to
contemplate - going about with her' did something' to my virgin
aplomb.

Sword slashed men who had acquired in duels of honour the faces
of seamed potatoes, clicked their heels before him. Then, after
introducing his wife; with a flourish " Die Miss "

Whatever my sponsors' expectations, the only person I decided to speak to there was a well-known waitress whose intimate treatments I had learned from Alexander. Inwardly I was evolving a

Chapter X

weird strictly personal form of feminism of which the militant
aspect consisted in being peculiarly benign to any woman who had
been ' pushed' . Mitzi, pretty and pale under her pompadour respon-
ded intuitively with sweet welcome.

Came Carnival. My faithful guardian, Alexander initiated me
to the celebration of Fasching. As we galloped along, the folded
red of his Neapoitan woman's head-dress, the startling black of
my velvet knickers had almost the same tone value as Masqueraders
the other side of the Platz, so clear was the cold atmosphere.
The coloured shower of confettis on newly fallen snow made game of
the impressionist Pissaro; providing a subject matter to express
his technique.

For that long a go Carnaval, Munich seemed, in seismic festivi-
ty, to have thrown all its citizens onto the streets in travesty.
The crowd was flamboyant.

Chapter X

151

"Na-nu" she answered patting my shoulder pacifically" one
pays no attention to him".

Drawing whatever cerebral harmony Nature had intended for me
the record of the Voice playing on my mind periodically accu-
mulated such confusion it exceeded my capacity. At this point
in endurance, I would receive a blow on the brain & sink into
a slumbrous coma.

At last, receiving a pe vish letter from my Father, I
discovered the cause of the danger I ran. He complained of my
writing him nothing but nonsense, descriptions of Oberammergau
'angels' tussling in the hay. He had sent the baroness, at his
her request three hundred pounds to buy the luxurious outfit
I required for the round of social gayeties I was now enjoying
under her aegis - and I had never even mentioned it! My parents
in their distrust of their offspring seemed to take for granted
the blanket innocence of the adult.

I had only the vaguest conjectures how their getting me
into " trouble " would have prevented my father discovering
the deflection of his money. In those days a girl who mislaid
her maidenhood was promptly let out on the streets without a
farthing, by her family - perhaps it would be presumed the vi-
sionary finery had gone with me. But now to explain the ' show-
ing ' of me to the quarry heiress - obviously an angry wife had
played a role in the episode of the student governess. The 'good
idea' stiffens with the backing of a precedent, Of course!

Chapter X

Student days

153

CLAY

I bought a clay pipe

The scandal involved for me, unprecedentedly reformed turned on the Baron and Mammalie. The consul who had furnished their address was hilarious to behold me, flaunting the outrageous purity of that penny pipe under Bayerische colours, the blue and white striped awning of an open train.

Insert

Trying to work I found myself incapable of sustained effort
under the most efficient system, angels Jank had us draw life size
one's point of view taken from the other end of the studio, one had
to carry each stroke of form in one's head while crossing to an
easel placed up close to the model. At first go, intensely enth-
siastic over what I was doing he declared himself interested to
watch what would be the outcome of such extraordinary talent. A
new problem, a new environment could always stimulate me to incipi-
ent achievement. As I became accustomed the same offuscation
beset me. " Its like soap " Jank at last complained, bewildered.

here follows omission to be
inserted at No. 153A

Chapter X

155

The rehearsal of Lebendige Bilde at the Frauen -Verein,
myself, picked as the ideal madonna by the respectable against the
Baron's Café acclaimed me as a reigning Parisian Courtesan, perched
on a tall wooden structure a dummy in my lap. The lamp lashed to
my waist to shed the light of the Holy Babe from under my veils,
bursts into flame, the committee of ladies vanishing, the janitress
in the nick of time cutting me free with her kitchen knife lifts me
down dashing the lamp as it exploded into the court.

Reflecting on my extraordinary calm in this and similar tight
corners, I concluded that as the breaking up of the normal condition
which for the average person is security, occasions shock, so for
the habitually scared real danger in shocking them out of their usual
condition acts as a calmative.

My pipe with the albino fly moulded beneath the bowl led me into
extremes of society - excentric starvlings among the 'genuises' of
the Verein ->

My first anarchist anarchist, Stephanie, with her voice of inhe-
rited patience told me how she had worked out emancipated love sit-
ting in the Eglischen Gärten with her sweetheart labourer on whose
arm, his sleeves rolled up, she had planted a thickset row of
kisses from wrist to elbow. The wide modelling of her pure pasty
face was suffused with an insufficient inner light as she sat in the
deserted anatomy hall drawing life-sized replicas of the skeleton
in lieu of lunch.

An elderly countess who having seen me in the street and
decided ' there goes somebody' insisted on meeting me - or the pipe?

Chapter X

German Art being beyond the pale of my shadowy Preraphaelites,
I was entirely without aesthetic allegiances to any trends among a
Bavarian intelligentsia; handsome, warm-hearted bringing a compre-
hensive view point to horizons vast in comparison to those of English
students. Their international contacts adjusted to a nicety nicety
Having no choice to make, I was left to the choice of others. Much
as a flower might find itself picked I was drawn into an eclectic set
principally of german men and russian women. The men were grave and
coutteous, the women chastely advanced. Some were ' well known' .
Common to all were their untarnished titles, these they subordinated
to their intellects. In long forgotten converse we toured the night
dining beneath ceilings of foliage the light on our table hung with
a screen of chestnut leaves.

Chapter X

Along the broad white streets of Munich, the Baron's
Vandyke beard opened and shut as he waved his arms about in
vocal frenzy, he rattled off the multiple titles attached to royal
persons for my chaperone Mrs Rayburn. Preceding them, his con-
sort waddled along with me pausing every time he stopped to point
out a palast, her alpaca skirt streched to the limit, she was
presumably on the brink of giving birth.

" My husband has asked Mrs Rayburn what your father is, but --

"Oh do tell me" I implored, curious yet going hot and cold
at the thought of my mother's secretive disgust for the occupations
of her whole family " What is he?" The Baroness supressing her
surprise " she could only say he directs numerous subordinates &
is obviously a man of importance, dont you know?"

"I'm sure he's a tailor, branching out into wholesale
cloth but I can't prove, my mother does not permit the subject to be mentioned".

The Baroness definitely confronted with a problem paused
awhile " Your Herr Pappa " she decided " must be 'Hoffschneider'
that comes nearest to an acceptable solution . " Donnerwetter"
she added " and one would take you for a princess."

After the imposing Mrs Rayburn returned to England, the
processional grandure of our reception changed to family encirclement in which three or four anaemic children struggled with life
in the unpredictable shifty atmosphere of debt.

In his youth the Baron, it appeared, had fallen on his head.

Chapter X

138

The Baroness had had a Mamma whom she evoked in brilliant vignettes, perched on four-in-hands being doused with champagne by swanky officers - reizend - she nodded reminiscently.

With this woman who equated her husband's unnatural excitability with an exophthalmic calm of China blue eyes, I exchanged confidences. Her poker stare believed all my miseries, while her own communications as to the nullity of conjugal bliss coincided with the outstanding opposition to the cheerful resources of life, I listlessly attributed to adults in general. The story going round at the time of a lady who sampled illicit love only to exclaim: "Why its just as dull as marriage & did not incite me to any heretical speculation; universally, human sentiment clings to implied mysteries in the face of factual report.

Going through the gestures of taking me to her imperturable heart with the gentle sloth of a ruminant - caring for nothing never did she show sign of rebellion - her voiceless putting up with circumstances stilled me as if I had entered the silence after a storm. Adopting me as a daughter she was bent on spoiling to make up for my filial misadvantages " You shall call me Mammalie" she said. There was a certain pancake she would toss for me whenever I demanded. Otherwise, delighted at choosing my own delicacies, I practically lived on bread and leberwurst. Meanwhile my sentimental monotones on the piano changed from "In the Gloaming" to the "Blue Danube".

Before long I found her recieving the first of her very rare visitors. On entering the room I was eyed by a female with so exact a replica of Mrs Peck's expression when she espied the bead, I retracted in haste not without noticing how the patient gaze of my consolitory foster-mother only slightly modified became hard-boiled

Chapter X

Soon there appeared another young man, a student of law from the Netherlands; somewhat in the same capacity as myself- a paying guest-- for dinner. A God send I thought for Mammalie who could almost squeeze tears from those blue rocks when seeking my sympathy for her precarious finances.

It was noticeable how little this ' Alexandre' had to do in the evenings when the meal was over; how suddenly the Baronial couple contracted appointments away from home. Left to entertain him, I was frightened by his crescent gallantry. I felt I had escaped Bedlam to fall into a trap. My ever-watchful mother desiring her legitimate share in the grandure Father had procured for me had written the Baroness at great length setting out in detail my disobedience, my strongheadedness. Exhorting her to exercise the utmost severity should I show the slightest tendency to behaviour contrary to her wishes. A letter which cast almost a radiance over the inflated pink flesh and mouse coloured plaited crown of a petrified Gretchen, it placed me unconditionally at her disposal.

Chapter X

140

Horror of a calamity my parents obsessed by morality had tried to avert by frightening me into utter subservience to the dictate of others, was steadily developing into a terror that if anyone I disliked insisted upon my doing anything I was averse to I would automatically comply so systematically they had obfuscated my instinct of self-protection.

However it was not yet I should reach the maturation of an engrafted anxiety. At first over-stimulated apprehensions disperse before the comparative insignificance of actual crises. When Alexandre acutely moulded in evening dress stood before me with a pistol, about to blow his brains out should I find no use for his passion, I said"shoot".

Anxieties flourished in my louche situation. Complexes were not get public property. Neurosis in those days so very much resembled an unhappiness screwed to the pitch of pain.

Having been given a white liqueur which almost blew my head off, I sneaked the bottle to my room, supposing that should I swallow the whole contents it would kill me. But after a long battle of the breath with an explosive suffocation although the liquid dynamite had blown my body to a numb rigidity, my eyes survived.

They did not look out of my head. In a visual advance to some distance before me they applied in strange aliveness with my reflection in a mirror the other side of the room.

Over there my comatose face endowed with an ectoplasmic facility for transfiguration escaped the conventions of a normal retina. In streamers of distorted flesh. Its structure accentuated to stalagmites of bone thrust beyond the glazy surface - it drew back its lips in the bray of moronic fiends - Poked & spread - dripped in

Chapter X

"You are an angel" said Alexander when I saw him again; gradually affectionate as men were wont to be when they had just found me out. "An angel" he repeated warningly, "Who has flown into a wasps' nest. Linda look at this". It was the Baron's advertisement for male diners, in an evening paper, offering the bait of an ' english Miss'.

Chapter X

Floated up from the shadows entangled with feet its unutterable beauty was strangely divided between the awful purity of undernourished babyhood & willful daubs of scot. It was the fifth of November. The little flower of poverty held forth the cup of his hand and wheeled "I'se de Guy"

Her eyes were unmentionable.

"I beg your pardon--- eyes of defense expressionless as a barricade. Whatever lay a sege to them from without was a s nothing compared to her own brain battering on the back of them. Dead eyes promenading. Why, they are in hell, I thought, surprised at my sudden acceptance of that drastic locality. Not the time but myself they measured as momentarily I came between her and the rest of the world."

"Injustice" kept knocking at my head on the rattle of the horse bus "What's the matter with women -- the matter with women?"

CHAPTER X

144

Spasmadically a rural social life, we had three scattered
neighbours, dragged me in every direction through fervid sun and
crushed pine by beaten tracks half breaking off the hill-sides to
distant objectives of identical beer.

His uncle, a bald eagle specimen of the 'view marcheur' came
to visit us. Also hard up, unlike his nephew he was very much all
there punctuating with his flashing monocle, stories which escaped
all risk through their openness.

Chapter X

were of historical lineage whose lineage whose glory had lasted
until sore recently it must only have been cut short by that fall
on its head. They reached the apex of their alpine enjoyment
behind the terrace restaurant overlooking the Starnberger See;
creeping up on the line of ' aborts ' in the garden to guffaw at
the ladies of the party as they stepped out. The canonade that
followed to my english aversion echoed along the serried enclo-
sures of those shrines of Nature'could only have emanated from t
the most martial of races the chemical compounds of their very
nutriment manufactured explosives from Pilsener & Sauerkraut.

A fair j urney from our speck of domestication in an almost
unpopulated valley, on a high road, bare to the sun, we called
on the heiress of a stone quarry. She was diformed. Had been mar-
ried for her heritage . Somehow the Baroness conveyed me in her
arid parlour, like a stick through bars to enrage a moping ape.

Chapter X

46

Here as if the whole world had covered itself with ageless e
excessences, sight was outdistanced by range beyond range of sh
shattered multiple cones sharp as armament carressed by mist
aretes and crevasses glittering in the icy whiteness of forenoon
heat. Recognisably populous with an unconvincing absence of my-

Chapter X

The little husband mysteriously, I could not know what the
Baron may have implied on the eve of our setting forth, seemed
somehow to have been alloted a leading role, probably wondering
what his wife would say, he appeared both desirous and sulky.
Whenever we relaxed our strenuous progress, the brother would
stand aside watching his indication as to what was expected of him,
in, particularly for their class, this bawdy situation. They
knew at least I had had no wish to climb a mountain.

One other early morning expedition, not at all ambiguous was our
drive in the forrester's two horse Brake to Oberammergau, after the
hush of forest roads awaiting dawn. The modern sheltered pen for an
international crowd was inconducive. The chorus of four cornered
women stood in a row like Uhlans in curtains. The wood of the " po-
liceman's" rattle" used for breaking the bones of the crucified
thieves in their rosy cotton tights was over new as on a bazaar
counter " That rattle " the Baroness remarked " Is the most effec-
tive instrument of anti-semitism " . The show, to me, seemed prepos-
terous. I was later to know what it should have been like watching
a De Max miracle play on a laic stage.

Chapter X

That day in Oberammergau, Judas, owing to the intervention of Nature turned out to be the hero, in saving the aesthetic situation As he came on for his lonely act, the skies darkened, a wind blew up whipping his remorse to elemental drama. Tossing his full long hair & his roman garment across his staggering self-accusation in magnificent accident.

The Baron be ng the_ personnage in our district was notified by the ' Wirth' that the actors in the passon play were stopping at his Gasthaus on one of their days off & he wished to present them to us.

IN the incomparable glow of oil lamps diffusing mellow clues to eroded wall & blackened rafter the jewelldd flesh of their goodly medieval german faces leapt in defined portions from the bronze matrix of the profound chiarascuro of an old master.

Leaning this way and that, spontaneously biblical in composition, they ate at a long narrow table. The parting above Mary's brow lay quiet as if smoothed by hands in prayer. Christ Jesus shred an onion with the gesture of sacrament. Above a virgin beard rested the saintly eyes of St John the Baptist in humble tranquility. Nobly handling their peasant knives, they might have been hewing out of themselves cathedral monuments of those they represented. One even detected a grave angelic chord in their" Guten Abend meine Herrschaften."

Chapter X

Christmas came, the Baroness in lymphatic calm, as if in
mating she had contracted an opposite effect of that cephalic
crash came as near to her spouse as her belly allowed her; drinking
together from a loving cup under the cNDles winking on the tree.
With no emotion they observed their annual sentimental rites. Alexander
and I were their audience.

Now mysteriously lightened of debt, daily they touted me to
lunch at a fashionable restaurant. In we trooped. First the gesti-
culator - the belly - myself, blushing in the exhibition.

Poor Mamalie; her inflation was trompe-l'oeil. On my arrival
I had shuddered at the thought of her delivery until shev explained
her permanent appearance to be due to the ignorance of a doctor who
had 'not' done something' when the Baby Baroness was born.

In view of my childhood of horror-& the fact thatv expectant
mothers modestly disappeared from circulation, the corsets then in
vogue boosting their generate load to an unshapiness too awful to
contemplate - going about with her' did something' to anes virginal
aplomb.

Led to a table, the Baron, as was the custom, presented himself
before taking his seat " freiherr von "..

Sword slashed men who had acquired in duels of honour the faces
of seamed potatoes, clicked their heels before him. Then, after
introducing his wife; withe a flourish " Die Miss "

Whatever my sponsors' expectations, the only person I deci-
ded to speak to there was a well-known waitress whose intimate tre-
gedies I had learned from Alexander. Inwardly I was evolving a

## Chapter X

Came Carnival. My faithful guardian, Alexander initiated me to the celebration of Fasching. As we galloped along, the folded red of his Neapoitan woman's head-dress, the startling black of my velvet nickers had almost the same tone value as Masqueraders the other side of the Platz, so clear was the cold atmosphere. The coloured shower of confettis on newly fallen snow made game of the impressionist Pissaro; providing a <u>subject</u> matter to <u>express</u> his technique.

Chapter X

" Na-nu " she answered patting my shoulder pacifically" one
pays no attention to him".

At last, receiving a peevish letter from my Father, I
discovered the cause of the danger I ran. He complained of my
writing him nothing but nonsense, descriptions of Oberammergau
' angels' tumbling in the hay. He had sent the Baroness, at h
her request three hundred pounds to buy the luxurious outfit
I required for the round of social gayeties I was now enjoying
under her aegis - and I had never even mentioned it! My parents
in their distrust of their offspring seemed to take for granted
the blanket innocence of the adult.

I had only the vaguest conjectures how their getting me
into " trouble " would have prevented my father discovering
the deflection of his money. In those days a girl who mislaid
her maidenhood was promptly let out on the streets, without a
farthing, by her family - perhaps it would be presumed the vi-
sionary finery had gone with me. But now to explain the ' show-
ing ' of me to the quarry heiress - obviously an angry wife had
played a role in the episode of the student governess. The 'good
idea' stiffens with the backing of a precedent of course!

Chapter X

152

Sharing with my parents the prevalent assumption that any couple of opposite sex , if alone together, must automatically come to a clinch, notwithstanding the large percentage of people in that era so fundamentally inhibited, any primitive gesture was almost impossible for them; she might have spared herself her mystification as she watched Alexander come to dinner month in month out with no du-bious breaks in my unruffled catch & return of his friendly teasing, spared herself her inward exasperation when a light hearted yodel concluded her desperate expedient: two potential violaters on a dark mountain ; if only she had reflected that no financial compli-cations whatever could have induced me to cut short my year's res-pite from the Voice. Mammalie may have been a bad woman. Never did "I Whedder her utter an unkind word."

My life henceforth could run its average course as a student of the art Verein which should have sufficed to rid me of a dejected sense of inhabiting a psychic house of ill-fame of, wherever I went being offered to the first comer. But a long fermenting urge to

Chapter X

I bought a play pipe

The scandal involved for me, unprecedentedly formed turned on the Baron and Mammalie. The consul who had furnished their address was hilarious to behold me, flaunting the outrageous purity of that penny pipe under Bayerische colours, the blue and white striped awning of an open train. tram insert 153 A - *

Trying to work I found myself incapable of sustained effort
under the most efficient system, angele Jaub had us draw life size
one's point of view taken from the other end of the studie, one had
to carry each stroke of form in one's head while crossing to an
easel placed up close to the model. At first go, intensely enth-
siastic over what I was doing he declared himself interested to
watch what would be the outcome of such extraordinary talent. A
new problem, a new environment could always stimulate me to incipi-
ent achievement. As I became ' accustomed' the same offuscation
beset me. " Its like soap " Jank at last complained, bewildered.

here follows inserted omission

p. 153 A

They trew back their palms before the impossible. " An empty pipe, between the lips of a raving beauty".

Chapter X

Recreation -

Studios - roof tops - garden restaurants - Tingel-Tangels --
at one of these art cabarets producing the compositions of the
ultra modern I heard a song :

" Ich war ein Kind von fünfzehn Jahren
Das reinste unschuld yolles kind
Als ich zum ersten mal erfahren
Wie züss die Liebes freude zind

Er nahm mich um dem leib und lachte
Und flussteje ach welch ein gluck
Und dabei heüght er zachte zachte
Mein Kopfchen auf dem pfuhl zurüch

Zeit jene zeit lieb ich sie alle
Das leben's schönste glantz ist mein
Und wen ich keinem mehr gefalle
Da mächt ich gern begraben zein ".

Samovas - an island fête - drifting to music across a twilit
lake under chinese lanterns strung from bamboos across a barge
draped with rich brocades - the nocturnal picnic under the ilex
and my glimpse of a notorious nymph - heroine of the shocking novel
of the moment in which the complacent author watched his mistress
sell his wife a hat. A lyrical family name recurring in the news-
papers recalls that ostracised scion, the fair gräfin, superbly
wan, bearing back to the barge at dawn her love-child asleep
against the shift of red ' art muslin' appended to her etiolate
skin. Its trailing hem was sodden in the mud of the shore.

Chapter X

The rehearsal of Lebendige Bilde at the Frauen -Verein,
myself, picked as the ideal madonna by the respectable against the
Baron's Café acclaiming me as a reigning Parisian Courtesan, perched
on a tall wooden structure a dummy in my lap. tTHe lamp lashed to
my waist to shed the light of the Holy Babe from under my veils,
bursts into flame, the committee of ladies vanishing, the janitress
in the nick of time cutting me free with her kitchen knife lifts me
down dashing the lamp as it exploded into the court.

My pipe with the albino fly moulded beneath the bowl led me into
extremes of society - excentric starvlings among the 'genuises' of
the Verein.

My first anarchist anarchist, Stephanie with her voice of inhe-
rited patience told me how she had worked out emancipated love sit-
ting in the Eglischen Gärten with her sweetheart labourer on whose
arm, his sleeves rolled up, she had planted a thickset row of
kisses from wrist to elbow. The wide modelling of her pure pasty
face was suffused with an insufficient inner light as she sat in the
deserted anatomy hall drawing life-sized replicas of the skeleton
in lieu of lunch.

To an elderly countess who having seen me in the street and
decided ' there goes somebody' insisted on meeting me - or the pipe?

Chapter X

156

German Art being beyond the pale of my shadowy Preraphaelites,
I was entirely without aesthetic allegiances to any trends among a
Bavarian intelligentsia; handsome, warm-hearted bringing a compre-
hensive view point to horizons vast in comparison to those of English
students. Their international contacts adjusted to a nicety
Having no choice to make, I was left to the choice of others. Much
as a flower might find itself picked I was drawn into an eclectic set
principally of german men and russian women. The men were grave and
courteous, the women chastely advanced. Some were ' well known'.
Common to all were their untarnished titles, these they subordinated
to their intellects. IN long forgotten converse we toured the night
dining beneath ceilings of foliage the light on our table hung with
a screen of chestnut leaves.