And the first came in a golden glow, putting out gold-slippered feet from under a dress rich and stiff with cloth of gold and all manner of silk embroidery. And the cushion she bore was tissue of gold and the chased box shone like the vanishing sun herself with rich gold chasing and fretwork.
The second was bright with silver like the light of the moon, and her slippered feet were like slivers of moonlight, and all over the silvery gown shone crescents and luminous rounds of argent light, and she was bathed in a cool but intense brilliance, which most beautifully embellished the polished surface of the silver casket she bore on cloth of silver, with its threads like needles of pure white light.
And the third was dull behind these two, and had a subdued lustre, like that of armour burnished and used, like that of the undersides of high clouds hiding the true light that suffuses their steely grey with a borrowed brilliance. Her dress was alive with slow lights like still water under the stars but in the shadow of great trees, and her slippered feet were softly velvet, and her hair, unlike that of the others, was caught back under a masking veil. And the first two smiled at the Childe as they came out of the stone shadows in their brilliant pools of glimmering light. Only the third cast down her eyes, modestly, and he could see that her lips were pale, and that her eyelids were heavy and smoky dark and threaded with violet veinings and her lashes were like the feathery plumes of moths on her colourless cheeks.
And they spoke to him, it seemed, with one voice, which had in it three tones, a clear clarion, a reedy oboe, a whispering low flute.
“You may go no further this way,” said they, “for this is the edge of things, here, and beyond is another country. But you may choose, if you will, one of us to be your guide, and venture further. Or you may turn back if you will, without dishonour, and trust yourself again to the plain.”
And he answered them courteously that they should speak on, for he had not come so far and so wearily simply in order to turn back. Moreover he was charged by his father with a mission, which he might not reveal in that place. “It is known to us already,” said the three damsels. “We have waited long for you.”
“How am I to know, then,” asked the Childe, greatly daring, and in tones of the most humble respect, “that you are not those whiteladies of whom they speak with such fear and honour in the villages I have come through?”
Then they laughed, high, low, clear and whispering, and said they doubted much whether honour was so very apparent when those were spoken of; however there was much superstition and misbelief, as to the whiteladies, among the common people, to which he should perhaps not give too much credence.
“As for ourselves,” said they, “you must take us as you find us, and judge of us as you see us, what we are, or what we may be to you, as all men must, who have a high courage and a clear vision.”
Then said he, not knowing before he spoke that he had made up his mind to venture, but as if some voice spoke through him, “I will assay.”
“Choose now,” they said then, “and choose wisely, for extremes of bliss and misery stand in your choice.”
Then passed they before him, each in her turn, each in her own little cage of light, as though, it might be, she were a candle and cast the beams of her glory a little distance, through the walls of a lanthorn. And as they passed, each sang, and to her song unseen instruments twangled and made delicious moan. And the last rays of the bloody sun showed the standing stones grey on a grey heaven.
First came the gold lady, stepping proudly, and on her head a queenly crown of gold, a filigree turret of lambent sunny gleams and glistering wires above crisping gold curls as heavy with riches as the golden fleece itself. She held out her gold box bravely before her and it struck out such rays that his eyes were briefly dazzled with it and he was forced to look down at the grey heather.
And she sang:
“Mine the bright earth
Mine the corn
Mine the gold throne
To which you’re born
Lie in my lap
Tumbled with flowers
And reign over
Earth’s tall towers”
And he could have stretched out his hands and warmed them, in that cold gloaming, at all the fire and brilliance that shook from her as she passed. And he thought she offered happiness, but said, natheless, “I shall see all, before I speak.”
Then came the silver lady, with a white crescent burning palely on her pale brow, and she was all hung about with spangled silver veiling that kept up a perpetual shimmering motion around her, so that she seemed a walking fountain, or an orchard of blossom in moonlight, which might in the day have been ruddy and hot for bee kisses, but at night lies open, all white to the cool, secret light that blesses it without withering or ripening.
And she sang:
“Mine the long night
The secret place
Where lovers meet
In long embrace
In purple dark
In silvered kiss
Forget the world
And grasp your bliss”
And he thought she knew his secret soul, and would have stretched out his arms to her in longing, for she made him see in his mind’s eye a closed casement in a high turret, and a private curtained bed where he would be most himself. For it was himself, surely, she offered him, as the other offered the sunlit earth. And he turned from the gold lady and would have taken the silver, but caution, or curiosity, restrained him, for he thought he would still see what the dim last might offer, compared to her two sweet sisters.
And she came, almost creeping, not dancing nor striding, but moving imperceptibly like a shadow across his vision, in a still pool of soft light. And her garments did not sparkle or glitter but hung all in long pale folds, fluted like carved marble, with deep violet shadows, at the heart of which, too, was soft light. And her face was cast down in shadows, for she looked not at him, but at the dull lead casket, as pale as might be, and seemingly without hinge or keyhole, that lay cradled before her. And around her brow was a coronet of white poppies and on her feet were silent silken slippers like spider webs, and her music was single, a piping not of this earth, not merry, not sad, but calling, calling. And she sang:
“Not in the flesh
Not in the fire
Not in action
Is heart’s desire
But come away
For last is best
I alone tender
The Herb of Rest”
And then the heart of the Childe was wrung indeed, for it was the Herb of Rest which his father so desired him to bring home, to end, as only that might, his long agony. And the Childe’s heart rebelled a little, for he was loth to abandon the rich brightness of the golden dame, or the lovely clarity of the silver one, for the softness and quiet and downcast eyes of this half-invisible third. And you know, and I know, do we not, dear children, that he must always choose this last, and the leaden casket, for wisdom in all tales tells us this, and the last sister is always the true choice, is she not? But let us have a moment’s true sorrow for the silver blisses the Childe would have preferred, and the sunlit flowery earth which is my own secret preference, and then let us decorously follow as we must, as he takes up the soft hand of the third, as his fate and the will of his father decree, and says, half-musing, “I will come with you.”
And one day we will write it otherwise, that he would not come, that he stayed, or chose the sparkling ones, or went out again onto the moors to live free of fate, if such can be. But you must know now, that it turned out as it must turn out, must you not? Such is the power of necessity in tales.
Well, she took his hand softly, and the touch of her cool fingers was the kiss of moths, or cool linen after a hard day’s work, and she turned her face towards him and lifted up those eyelids and looked at him and then he saw her eyes. What can I say of her eyes, save that he looked into them and was lost and no more saw the heath, nor the other two bright creatures turning and turning in their
cages of light, nor yet his own trusty steed who had come with him prancing and saddle-sore to the known world’s end? If I were to attempt this description—but no, I cannot—yet I must, for I am your chronicler, bound to recount to you, what? Imagine then twin pools at midnight, lit by no external shining, but from deep within, some glimmer, some promise, lucid through sloe-black deep after deep after deep. Imagine then, when she turned her head slightly, a black not after all bluish, like those black plums, but very faintly brown, the slightly hot black of panther-skin, still, waiting, out of the gleam of the moon.
“I will come with you,” said the Childe, a second time, and she said softly enough, inclining her head in what might have been a dutiful way, “Come then.”
And she drew him on, over and under the threshold of the standing stones, and his horse called out in alarm, but he stepped on unhearing. And although the stones seemed simple enough in the midst of the moor, which seemed vaguely to stretch on behind as it had before, he found it was no such thing, for beyond the lintel was a descending track, winding and winding, between banks of sweetly scented flowers he had never seen or dreamed of, blowing soft dust at him from their huge throats, and lit by a light neither of day nor of night, neither of sun nor of moon, neither bright nor shadowy, but the even perpetual unchanging light of that kingdom.…
CHRISTABEL LAMOTTE
10
THE CORRESPONDENCE
Dear Miss LaMotte,
I do not know whether to be more encouraged or cast down by your letter. The essential point in it is “if you care to write again,” for by that permission you encourage me more than by your wish not to be seen—which I must respect—you cast me down. And you send a poem, and observe wisely that poems are worth all the cucumber-sandwiches in the world. So they are indeed—and yours most particularly—but you may imagine the perversity of the poetic imagination and its desire to feed on imagined cucumber-sandwiches, which, since they are positively not to be had, it pictures to itself as a form of English manna—oh the perfect green circles—oh the delicate hint of salt—oh the fresh pale butter—oh, above all, the soft white crumbs and golden crust of the new bread—and thus, as in all aspects of life, the indefatigable fancy idealises what could be snapped up and swallowed in a moment’s restrained greed, in sober fact.
But you must know that I am happy to forgo the sandwiches, dreamed or soberly chewed, for your delightful poem—which, as you say, has a note of savagery proper to the habits of true spiders as they have lately been observed. Do you wish to extend your metaphor of entrapment or enticement to Art? I have read other of your poems of Insect Life, and marvelled at the way they combined the brilliance and fragility of those winged things—or creeping—with something too of the biting and snapping and devouring that may be seen under a microscope. It would be a brave poet indeed who would undertake a true description of the Queen Bee—or Wasp—or Ant—as we now know them to be—having for centuries supposed these centres of communal worship and activity to be Male Rulers—I somehow imagine you do not share your Sex’s revulsion at such life-forms—or what I imagine to be a common revulsion—
I have in my head a kind of project of a long poem on insect life of my own. Not lyric, like yours, but a dramatised monologue such as those I have already written on Mesmer or Alexander Selkirk or Neighbour Pliable—I do not know if you know these poems and shall be glad to send them to you if you do not. I find I am at ease with other imagined minds—bringing to life, restoring in some sense to vitality, the whole vanished men of other times, hair, teeth, fingernails, porringer, bench, wineskin, church, temple, synagogue and the incessant weaving labour of the marvellous brain inside the skull—making its patterns, its most particular sense of what it sees and learns and believes. It seems important that these other lives of mine should span many centuries and as many places as my limited imagination can touch. For all I am is a nineteenth-century gentleman plumb in the midst of smoky London—and what is peculiar to him is to know just how much stretches away from his vanishing pin-point of observation—before and around and after—whilst all the time he is what he is, with his whiskered visage and his shelves full of Plato and Feuerbach, St Augustine and John Stuart Mill.
I run on, and have not communicated to you the subject of my insect-poem, which is to be the short and miraculous—and on the whole tragic—life of Swammerdam, who discovered in Holland the optic glass which revealed to us the endless reaches and ceaseless turmoil of the infinitely small just as the great Galileo turned his optic tube on the majestic motions of the planets and beyond them the silent spheres of the infinitely great. Are you acquainted with his story? May I send you my version when I have worked it out? If it comes to good? (As I know it will, for it is so full of tiny particular facts and objects in the observation of which the animation of the human mind inheres—and you will ask—my mind or his?—and I do not know, to tell the truth. He invented marvellous tiny instruments for peering and prying into the essence of insect life, and all made of fine ivory, as less destructive and harmful than harsh metal—Lilliputian needles he made, before Lilliput was thought of—faery needles. And I have merely words—and the dead husks of other men’s words—but I shall bring it off—you need not believe me yet, but you shall see.)
Now—you say I may have an essay on the Everlasting Nay—or on Schleiermacher’s Veil of Illusion or the Milk of Paradise—or what I will. What prodigality—how am I to chuse? I think I will not have the Everlasting Nay, but remain still in hope of eventual cool green circles—to go with the Milk of Paradise and a modicum of Bohea—and I want from you not illusion but truth. So perhaps you will tell me more about your Fairy Project—if it may be spoken of without hurting your thinking—There are times when to speak—or to write—is helpful, and times when it is most nugatory—if you would rather not pursue our conversation I shall understand. But I hope for a letter in answer to all my rambling nonsense—which I hope has given no offence to one I hope to know better.
Yours very truly
R. H. Ash
Dear Mr Ash,
I am ashamed to think that what you may reasonably have taken for coyness—or even churlishness—in myself should have produced such a generous and sparkling mixture of wit and information from you. Thank you. If all persons to whom I refused mere vegetable aliment were so to regale me with intellectual nourishment I should remain obdurate in the matter of sandwiches till all eternity—but most petitioners are content with one denial—And that is truly for the best, for we live so very quietly, we two solitary ladies, and run our little household—we have our sweet daily rhythms which are not disturbed, and our circumscribed little independence—on account of being wholly unremarkable—your delicacy will see how it is—I speak soberly for once—we neither call nor receive callers—we met, you and I, because Crabb Robinson was a friend of my dear father—as whose friend was he not? I did not feel it in my power to refuse a request in that name—and yet I was sorry—for I do not go out into society—the lady protests too much, you will say—but she was moved by your green circular visions of contentment, and did wish, briefly, that it was in her power to give a more satisfactory answer. But it would have been regretted, it would—not only by me, but also by yourself.
I was greatly flattered by your good opinion of my little poem. I am uncertain as to how to answer your question on entrapment or enticement as qualities of Art—of Ariachne’s art they may be—and by extension of merely fragile or glistening female productions—but not surely of your own great works. I was quite shocked that you might suppose I did not know the Poem on Mesmer—or that on Selkirk on his terrible island, face to face with an unrelenting Sun and an apparently unresponsive Creator—or that too on Neighboour Pliable, and his religious versatility or tergiversations. I should have told a small Fib—and said I knew them not—for the grace of receiving them at their Author’s hands—but one must keep truth—in small things as in great—and this was no small thing. You are to know that we have all you
r volumes, ranged forbiddingly side by side—and that they are often opened and often discussed in this little house as in the great world.
You are to know too—or maybe you are not—how should I say this, to you with whom my acquaintance is so recent—and yet if not to you, to whom—and I have just written, one must keep truth, and this is so central a truth—you are to know then, after all, for I must take my courage in my hands—that your great poem Ragnarök was the occasion of quite the worst crisis in the life of my simple religious faith, that I have ever experienced, or hope to experience. It was not that anywhere in that poem you attacked the Christian religion—which indeed was not made mention of with complete Poetic Propriety—and moreover you speak never, in your poetry, with your own voice, or from your own heart directly. (That you question is clear—the creator of Pliable, of Lazarus, of the heretic Pelagius is as wise as the serpent about all the most subtle and searching questionings and probings of the Grounds of our Belief that in our time have been most persistently and unremittingly explored. You know the “ambages and sinuosities” of the Critical Philosophy, as your Augustine says of your Pelage—for whom I have a weakness, for was he not a Breton, as I in part am, and did he not wish sinful men and women to be nobler and freer than they were?…) I digress wildly from Ragnarök and its pagan Day of Judgment and its pagan interpretation of the mystery of the Resurrection, and the New Heaven and the New Earth. It seemed to me you were saying “Such Tales men tell and have told—they do not differ, save in emphasis, here and there.” Or even “Men tell what they Desire shall be or might be, not what it is divinely, transcendently decreed Must Be and Is.” It seemed to me you made Holy Scripture no more than another Wonder Tale—by dint of such writing, such force of imagining. I confuse myself, I shall not go on, I ask your pardon if what I have said appears incomprehensible to you. I doubted and I admitted Doubts I have had to live with since. Enough of that.