Vérenè. Vérenè. Vérenè. Was it a name. Was it a person. O, yes it was a person. It was herself and Fayne and Walter who were somehow out of it, out of the picture, out of drawing. Drawing. How odd that he should draw so beautifully. “Look, Fayne. He gave me this.” Fayne took the bit of paper, held it to the light. “I think he must have traced it from a book.” “No. Look, Fay. It’s one of the things in the big case in the Egyptian room we were looking at the other day. A sort of harp arrangement; don’t you remember. They had it propped up against a lovely chair that looked quite new, quite a comfortable new chair with no back and odd arms and the seat sagging just as if it had been sat in.” “Yes, I remember the chair.” “Well, Walter drew the chair and the harp and put the person there in the chair to play the harp.” “But he copied it, I tell you out of a book.” “No. No, he didn’t. You can see it’s the same chair and the person playing the harp—” “It’s you, I suppose.” “He didn’t say so. . saying I’m too Greek and that he doesn’t care for Greek things and that I don’t understand. I think it’s someone else or no one at all.” “O, it’s you all right.” “But he keeps telling me I’m too Greek — not understanding—” “Does he say you don’t understand?” “Yes. All the time.” “What do you talk about then?” “I don’t know. . nothing in particular. He’s quite common sometimes. He asked me if we went like all other American tourists to the top of the Eiffel Tower for the express purpose of seeing how far we could spit.”
Let’s destroy things. Build them up and destroy them. Wasn’t that their attitude? Walter had reached perfection of a technical order. Therefore he must reach beyond it, destroy in a gesture his exquisite technique, his music flowing like water, a technique that Debussy said he himself couldn’t cope with. Walter must play his music, play it the first time to let him (Debussy) see how it went. Walter playing to her, “but I want to know what you think. Debussy doesn’t like the allegro so much either.” Had she agreed (knowing nothing about music) then with Debussy? What was it all about? Why? Something in the air. Paris. Something there are no words for. Walter was right with his harps and his absolute conviction that there were things, notes, voices in the air about them. X rays, Morse code. Telegraphs and so on. We are only just beginning. People will think us of the year 1912 circa (was it?) somehow crude and old fashioned even doubting, thinking, thinking such things odd. But we didn’t. Not us. Not Walter, Hermione and Josepha.
Are we ahead then of people? O this is horrible. What will people think 1922 or 1932 some great age like that, ten, twenty, thirty years from this year? They will catch us when they know that we are ahead of them. Bash out our brains. Stench of flesh roasting, roasting fumes rising above Rouen. Lilies and the Magdalene looking for the Lover. My Lord, my Lover. How odd. My Lover. You would love us all alike, making no difference, reaching us telepathically, men and women alike, both the same, simply a matter of telepathic rays or X rays or something. Christ seeing colours. Walter would be white, trimmed with blue, a terrible blue. Heat when it gets too hot becomes white, then violet. See Chemistry for Beginners. Does cold, then by the same scientific logic become something other, blue, when it becomes too cold? The cold of Walter that commences by being just cold, the soft cold of snow, soft and of the quality of a moths breast, becomes toward the edges more cold. A cold, people can’t bear. Walter knows people can’t bear him that’s why he hates them, hates them, apologetically closing the window. “We sometimes collect a crowd here and the gendarme doesn’t like it.” Shutting the window not so much against them as against himself. Byronic smile. Collar loosened. Walter shutting the window. “Now what would you like me to play you?” Asking them, waiting actually for an answer. Chopin. Chopin, the de Musset of music. Playing them Chopin.
Swans, a clear surface green lake. Nothing in the lake, no horror, no little mermaid crying for a human lover. Give me your voice and I will give you feet. The old witch under the sea asked the little Mermaid for her voice and in return she would have feet and then she could walk the earth as others and find her human lover. But we don’t fortunately want human lovers. Does Walter really want Vérenè? He thinks he does. It keeps him from rising up, up toward the surface of the sea. It keeps him down, down among the rose coloured bushes to love Vérenè. He is kept down by this love for he would go mad (and he knows it) if he rose to the surface of his consciousness, really heard the voices he is so bent on hearing. Music. Was Vérenè’s cello really music? Not in that sense, not in their sense. It was music of another order. Not of the Morse code Gart formula order. Not of the order of the music of the spheres and Plato actually getting the thing down, making the exact statement, the formula, giving them numbers and figures and design for the thing they knew already. Plato gave them a design. Clear thinking makes a pattern as regular and symmetrical as a plotted engineer’s plan or marine architect’s constructed boat prow. Thinking makes lines in the air. Plato’s formula.
It appears that there is a world within a world. We all live in some world (or several) but Christ lived in all. This is odd. Going on and on and on. The world of bed-bugs, of the stench of the stagnant water in the tooth-brush tumbler where she had stuffed the already half-wilted stems of the odd orange striped lilies she had some days ago bargained for in the Quai aux Fleurs. Throw the water away. Fresh water. Rinse out the tooth brush cup and find something else. But what else is there? The tea pot they had bought for their own teas at home, no not the pot, we’ll need it. Bother. Orange striped small lilies in a tooth brush tumbler. That’s our life here. But I don’t care. I love it. I love the sordid touch with Clara and Fayne Rabb. It gives character, poignancy and point to all this. And we live on nothing. I will have all that extra money and when they write me to come back, I shall just stay on. Of course, I know I can’t go back. I’d rather be a girl in a shop, rather scrub out hospital wards than go back. O, no, no, no, no. Du bist die Run’, du bist der Friede. O God why didn’t they really let me sing or something and that old Madame Terrone at Mrs. Merrick’s said she would take me for nothing. Funny old thing with huge chest and odd yellow teeth and a huge démodé pompadour and a voice that made you crouch low in your chair and pray to be dead. She sang the Erlkönig and I knew I would go mad for hers wasn’t an opera voice, everybody said so, but people begged her, prayed and implored but she wouldn’t take their daughters. “You have a quality in your voice. I would make you a good singer but only of chamber music, you understand. I will take you for nothing. Who are you?” “My — father — is a — a—professor of — of theorems and things. I don’t think I care for. . music.”