He asked, “Was your father a little cold, a little stiff?” I explained again that he was what is known as “typically New England,” though he was one remove from New England, his father having moved to the west. The Professor said he thought my dance-dramas at Corfu were really a sort of display or entertainment for my mother. Did your mother sing to you? I said she had a resonant beautiful voice but that she had some sort of block or repression about singing. Our grandmother loved me to sing to her, old-fashioned hymns for the most part. My older brother and I sang little nursery songs to our mother’s accompaniment. The Professor said this held together. “It will simplify out, even more.” I told him again that my mother died in spring, at this very time, and again I remember that Lawrence died too, in March.
15
March 21, Tuesday
The beautiful engraving that I have of the Professor is propped up on my dressing table. It becomes the “answerer,” like the particular Osiris-image that he showed me.
6:30 P.M.
The Professor was touched with Bryher’s note and her gift to the Society. We talked of the political situation.
There are no frontiers of the spirit.
Yet I am torn by intense emotions of antipathy.
Last night, I had my old train-nightmare. I am going somewhere vaguely undefined with my daughter and Alice, who was at one time her governess. A uniformed official searches our bags. He finds my traveling-flask. Cognac? I attempt no explanation nor apology. The official (“censor,” the Professor?) finds another bottle hidden under the seat. There are more bottles. He collects the lot in an empty suitcase and orders us to follow him.
My daughter and Alice and I are lost somewhere, on some dangerous way, down some steps.
The Professor asked me my association; I said I had no precise association, I was just afraid of being found out. He said, “Maybe, some scruple.” Conscience?
There are so many associations with trains. I recall one in particular when I arrived on the boat train, just after dawn in Paris. My French coffee and rolls at the station buffet were indescribably France. Again, I had got away. Loving England, there was yet, always, that almost hysterical sense of escape, once across the channel. I could even recall the wall-paintings of the Gare — du Nord? Normandy with apple trees, a sea wall and blue sky broken by a foreground of — olives? orange trees? While I was having my coffee in the almost empty buffet, a boy arrived with a huge market basket piled with roses. The manager or waiter selected a handful of roses and laid them by my plate.
Then I remember an incident that preceded the train dream. I am being fitted for a green gown. I stand before a mirror and extend my foot. I wear a beautifully cut classic, yet suitably modern, Greek sandal.
The Professor said, “You tell it so beautifully.”
Before I leave, I fold the silver-grey rug. I have been caterpillar, worm, snug in the chrysalis.
The Professor touches the little bell to warn the maid that this last analysand is about to leave. His elbow concludes its bird-wing dismissing gesture. The Professor says, “We have gone into deep matters.”
They called my father the Professor and my half-brother the young Professor. Our Professor was right, they do not resemble this Viennese Herr Professor Sigmund Freud. He is nearer to the grandfather and that religion, “an atmosphere. . ”
They were North-of-England people. We children were the ninth generation to inherit a quaint English name. Six generations were weathered and shaped by the rock and flint of New England. Our father’s father, the seventh, was lured with that covered wagon generation to the west. His young wife was not happy. They intended to get to California but they settled in Indiana. They began all over again, where the first Puritans of their name had started.
There were still a few Indians in the district. Our grandfather had his law books. Our father helped in the fields but he found plowing difficult. His idea of a straight line was more abstract; he had his father’s Euclid.
They were hunting runaway slaves. Our young father missed the “surge and thunder” of the New England odyssey. He looked to the heavens; mariners steer ships by stars.
He worked with lathe and saw, he was apprenticed to a carpenter. He learned his trade; his thin fingers had a “feel” for pine, tulip-tree, and cedar. His sister Rosa appropriated the Virgil and translated for him. He did not know what he wanted when he picked out, with his far-sighted grey eyes, the ten stars of the Dipper or the eight of Orion’s sword-belt. But he knew this satisfied him. He found Algol.
His brother Alvan was two years older. Alvan called to his brother, loitering as usual, in the darkness. There was a new call from Lincoln. Alvan said, “I’m going.”
Charles went with him.
The younger of the two boys came back. He had no words with which to tell his mother of those last scenes, when she asked him. He had never laughed much. Now he tried to laugh it off, a raw imitation of Alvan’s contagious laughter.
Alvan was dead. He hadn’t been shot through with a bullet. They were rotting. . they were. . it was typhoid. “It was quick,” he told his mother. He tried to remember something from Lincoln’s last speech, he could only remember “a great battlefield of this war,” but it wasn’t a battlefield of war, not of this war. . he knew that his mother felt now that a million free emancipated darkies weren’t worth Alvan. Or didn’t she? It was better not to know what she was thinking. He knew his mother was trying to love him, he had made that effort to come back to tell her. . what he never told her.
He hadn’t got a single reb, he told his father. Celia wished he wouldn’t laugh in that way, so unlike Alvan, she felt he would choke. The elder Charles felt something of it. He asked Celia to fetch the Bible. “Sweeter than honey in the honeycomb,” he read, opening it anywhere. Celia wished the boy wouldn’t stare so. How could he tell his mother of the makeshift camp-hospital. . at the end, there wasn’t anyone left. . He crawled through some trees. He remembered juniper, birch, balm, and hickory. He muttered these clean words under his breath like a prayer. Alvan was dead. He must get back home somehow, to tell them. . “The rebs left just as we got there, the camp —” His father went on reading, “Yea, than much fine gold.”
He was shaken with the after-effects of the malaria and could scarcely stand up. Every time his eyes met Celia’s he saw Alvan. He knew Celia saw Alvan too. Why had he come back? Why did we ever come west, thought Celia. That knocking? It was some friendly neighbor, they were all too friendly. She almost dropped the pan of corncake; it was the thud-thud of a hoe or maybe that colt loose again from the meadow. It might even be the kitchen clock; its tick was so loud she never noticed the clock back home. Slow now, if you stopped to listen. Time was so slow now. She could scream when she saw, through the open window, Charles sprawled out on the porch steps. He couldn’t yet drag his shambling length after the plow.
He had taken his grandfather’s old bubble-watch and laid it on the floorboards. What was he doing, chalking a clock-face round the bubble-watch? A stick was dangling from a string. It was fastened to the hook in the ceiling where Mercy had had her swing. Rosa was off, upstate to learn to be a teacher. Mercy was dead. There was no one here to help her. What was he doing marking along the shadow where the sun fell, with that chalk? Had he gone mad?