Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well..."

75 The Hidden Nest
in 1927 to rekindle his young love for Olga and bringing gifts, including
the red kimono that she treasured (and requested to be buried in). The
couple held hands in the old Palais Garnier during a performance of
Tristan and Isolde, and Egerton again proposed marriage. Olga could not
summon the courage to tell him about her relationship with Ezra. She was
on the brink of confessing the birth of her child but the right moment
never came, and Egerton left to continue his research at Cambridge.
Ezra treated the news of his rival in his usual patronizing and jocular
manner: ‘‘He rejoices that she should possess a suitable and befitting and
imperial kimono, according with her instincts. Is she going to walk in the
via Sacra in black lacquer, playing the shamisan??’’
Olga returned to St. John’s Wood in October for another reunion with
Egerton. She was considering asking him to act as sponsor in the baptism
of her child in the Catholic faith. After corresponding with a Jesuit cousin,
she felt guilty about Mary’s lack of religious education and asked Ezra’s
advice, to which he answered: ‘‘As to her P[rimo] A[more], he cannot be
expected to be an authority. . . . He [Egerton] might want a duplicate [of
Mary], and it really wouldn’t produce anything similar.’’
In November, while Olga was with Kathleen Richards and her parents
at Hook Heath, tension was mounting in the relationship. Ezra appeared
insensitive to her feelings: ‘‘Yes, he sh’d pay some attenshun to her. She
had a-niversary, and he forgets it regularly.’’ When he entered the Ospedale
Civile in Genoa with a fistula (possibly brought on by stressful
complications in his personal life), he cautioned her not to come.
Instead, she returned to the Hotel de la Poste. She wrote Ezra about her
day with Mary and the Marchers: ‘‘I went in the sled and brought them
back here—Leoncina, F. Marcher, and Margherita [the Marcher’s foster
daughter]. Frau Marcher told a charming story about the child, who
disappeared one day and couldn’t be found in house or garden. She was
discovered sitting on a nest in the hen house. When scolded for not
answering her call, Mary said, ‘How can I? I am a hen—when I have laid
my egg, I will cluck!’ ’’ Olga complained that ‘‘the Leoncina makes
F. Marcher do just what she wants—won’t do anything if someone suggests
it—which is like Him.’’
‘‘I grew up like one of them,’’ Mary wrote in her autobiography,