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How old was Charles now? He was seventeen when he went with Alvan and lied about it, so they took him. Mercy and he had paired off together. Alvan and Rosa. She remembered how she had had to reprove Mercy for sing-songing, when it came her turn for reading.

The Bible was for decorum.

16

March 22, Wednesday, 6:30 P.M.

I gave the Professor Bryher’s books. He seemed rather professional and aloof after using half my session yesterday in gossip. I tell him last night’s dream: hotel, stranger, dark (or in-the-dark) young man in the hall, he passes the open door and sees me. I wear a rose-colored picture-gown or ball-gown. I am pleased that he sees me and pose or sway as if forward to a dance. In a moment, he has caught me, I am lost (found?), we sway together like butterflies. He says, “You do know how to dance.”

Now we go out together but I am in evening-dress, that is, I wear clothes like his. (I had been looking at some new pictures of Marlene Dietrich, in one of the café picture-papers.) I am not quite comfortable, not quite myself, my trouser-band does not fit very well; I realize that I have on, underneath the trousers, my ordinary underclothes, or rather I was wearing the long party-slip that apparently belonged to the ballgown. The dream ends on a note of frustration and bewilderment.

This dream seems to have some association with Ezra; though he danced so badly, I did go to school-girl dances with him. The Professor knew the name, Ezra Pound. He said he had seen an article, but could not pretend to follow it. I told the Professor how Ezra had been more or less “forbidden the house,” and the conflict at that time with my parents.

8:20 P.M.

I feel old. When I told the Professor of a much younger admirer of mine who had flattered and mildly “courted” me, the Professor said, “Was that only two years ago,” as if at my age (forty-six) I should be well over that sort of trifling. But I remembered the novel Wagadoo that Dr. Sachs brought us to read. As I remember, the woman in the book began her analysis at forty-seven. . and she was at that age deeply involved in various love experiences or experiments. But that was French. Vienna, too, develops differently. The Professor seemed to be surprised when I told him that my first serious love-conflict or encounter was with Ezra when I was nineteen; he said then, “As late as nineteen?” Perhaps, this is some technical mannerism or façon de parler.

Ezra and I took long walks; I remember the hepaticas, the spring is late in America, at least compared with England. I was triumphant if I found my first cluster of blue flowers or a frail stalk of wood anemone or bloodroot, the last day or one of the last days of March. To find flowers in March was a great triumph for us there.

I had not time to speak of my dream of the two Japanese-like dwarfs. Their surname is Anemone. (Japanese anemones. . Bryher brought them to me several times a week at St. Faith’s Nursing Home before my child was born; they are associated particularly with that time.) I discuss the dwarfs with my mother and we are both annoyed that they should have that flower-name.

17

March 23, 8:45 P.M.

I started to hold forth on Frazer and The Golden Bough. The Professor waved me to the couch, “More confession?” I said, no, I wanted to go over some of the old ground again. “I will go back to Van Eck, do you remember Van Eck?” He said, “Of course.” I told him that I felt reticent and shy coming back to all this. I told him of the crystal arriving in the State Express Cigarette box and a letter that I received, sent by Van Eck from Alexandria. I was then at Mullion Cove, Cornwall, with Bryher. The box had come to the new furnished flat we had found at Buckingham Mansions, Kensington, the preceding summer. It was the summer before this, July 1919, that we had gone first to the Scilly Isles together. The crystal seemed to carry out my vision or state of transcendental imagination when I had felt myself surrounded, as it were, with the two halves of the bell-jar.

I told the Professor how after some years I had met the cousin of Van Eck, or rather her sister, to whom he had written a letter, enclosed in this Mullion Cove note to me. I presented the letter, or sent it rather with a small book of my poems, but Miss Van Eck never answered. Then, I met her sister in the Hotel Washington, Curzon Street, where I stayed when I went over to London.

I was now under the impression that Van Eck had been a total illusion or figment of my imagination, but when I mentioned him, and his helping Bryher on the boat with her Greek, to the younger Miss Van Eck, she said, “Yes, he always was very good at languages.” So, there actually was a Van Eck and this lady and the elder, whom I had not met, were in fact his cousins.

Now there is a Van Eck. In my Hotel Washington bedroom, I pick up the telephone book. It did not occur to me before this that he might be back in England. But there was the odd distinguished and unusual name. I asked for the number and in no time at all a voice answered. It was a Belsize Park telephone number. The strange voice said, rather curtly I felt, “Do you want Mr. or Mrs. Van Eck?”

This was a great shock to me. I was due to leave for Paris the next day. I managed somehow to get away. I met Bryher there. She said the shock was really a secondary one; that is, she felt I had superimposed it on the first shock of the parting from Aldington before we went to Greece.

But the Van Eck mystery still continues to obsess me. Again in London, from my Sloane Street flat, I consult a telephone book; there is Van Eck again, with another number.

It appears to be a City number, I judge an office. I will be ready now for any shock, but a pleasant young voice answers; he will give my number to Mr. Van Eck when he gets back to the office. Van Eck rings me. He comes to see me. I have other people in, Kenneth and Bryher, a strange girl who was sent to me from New York, a writer of sorts, pretty, in summer frock. This must be Van Eck, but I doubt if I would have known him had we met on the street.

18

March 25

Then I go on with the Van Eck saga. I receive a card, spring 1931, when I am staying near Miss Chadwick in a big room in Tavistock Square. We get the connection with the maternal uncle, the gifted younger musician brother of my mother’s Frederick. . Van Eck.

This card is a notification or invitation to attend the church service at which Mr. Van Eck is to be ordained — I believe that is the word. It seemed an odd volte-face.

However, there was the name, the card, the statement of his new choice of career, the words, Tray for me.”

When I go back to my flat again in Sloane Street, I write again. Mr. Van Eck comes to call, a friend is with me, the Dorothy of the earlier Joan and Dorothy dream.

Now Mr. Van Eck disappears but I am at least informed of his intention. He is going for a time into “retreat” in a High Church or Anglo-Catholic St. Francis of Assisi foundation in Dorset.

The Professor said these details only confirmed him in his first impression, or opinion, that the Van Eck episode or fixation was to be referred back to my mother. The maternal uncle, church, art.

The Professor asked me if I had ever wanted to go on the stage. He said he felt I narrated these incidents so dramatically, as if I had “acted them out” or “prepared” before coming to him. I told the Professor how I loved “dressing up,” but most children do. There were some old stage properties in our first home, left to my mother by a retired prima donna who had taught singing at the old school where my grandfather was. The Professor said he felt some sort of “resistance.”