All these new sights and discoveries, my dear, as you may imagine, have started off shoots of poetry in every direction. (I say shoots in Vaughan’s sense, “Bright shoots of everlastingness,” where the word means simultaneously brightness of scintillation and flights of arrows, and growth of seeds of light—I wish you would despatch to me my Silex scintillans, for I have been thinking much about his poetry and that stony metaphor since I have been working on the rocks here. When your jet brooch comes, I beg you will stroke it and watch how it electrically attracts scraps of hair and paper—it has its own magnetic life in it—and so has always been made use of in charms and white witchcraft and ancient medicines. I divagate without discipline—my mind runs all over—I have a poem I wish to write about modern discoveries of silex-coated twigs in ancient artesian wells, as described by Lyell.)
Now let me know how you are—your health, your household doings, your reading—
Your loving husband
Randolph
Maud and Roland walked round Whitby harbour and up and down the narrow streets that radiated steeply from it. Where Randolph Ash had noticed busyness and prosperity these noticed general signs of unemployment and purposelessness. Few boats were in the harbour and those there were appeared to be battened down and chained up; no motor sounded, and no sail flapped. There was still a smell of coal smoke, but it carried, for them, different connotations.
The shop-fronts were old and full of romance. A fishmonger’s slab was decorated with gaping skeletal shark-jaws and spiny monstrosities; a sweet-shop had all the old jars and pell-mell heaps of brightly-coloured sugary cubes and spheres and pellets. There were several jewellers specialising in jet. They stopped outside one of these: HOBBS AND BELL, PURVEYORS OF JET ORNAMENTS. It was tall and narrow; the window was like an upright box, along the sides of which were festooned rope upon rope of black and glistening beads, some with dangling lockets, some many-faceted, some glossily round. The front of the window was like a sea-chest of wave-tossed treasure, a dusty heap of brooches, bracelets, rings on cracked velvety cards, teaspoons, paperknives, inkwells and a variety of dim dead shells. It was the North, Roland thought, black as coal, solid, not always graceful craftsmanship, bright under dust.
“I wonder,” said Maud, “if it would be a good idea to buy something for Leonora. She likes odd pieces of jewellery.”
“There’s a brooch there—with forget-me-nots round the edge and clasped hands—that says FRIENDSHIP.”
“She’d like that—”
A very small woman appeared in the door of the box-shop. She wore a large apron covered with purple and grey florets, over a skinny black jumper. She had a small hard, brown-skinned face under white hair drawn into a bun. Her eyes were Viking blue and her mouth, when she opened it, contained apparently three teeth. She was puckered but wholesome, like an old apple, and the apron-dress was clean, though her stockings sagged at the ankles over thick black laced shoes.
“Come in, luv, and look around. There’s plenty more inside. All good Whitby jet. I don’t hold with no imitations. You won’t find better.”
Inside the counter was another glass sarcophagus, inside which were tumbled more strings and pins and heavy bracelets.
“Anything you like the look of, I can easy get out for you.”
“That looks interesting.”
“That” was an oval locket with a vaguely classical carved figure, full-length, bending over a flowing urn.
“That’s a Victorian mourning locket. Probably made by Thomas Andrews. He was jet-maker to the Queen. Those were good days for Whitby, after the Prince Consort died. They liked to be reminded of their dead in those days. Now it’s out of sight, out of mind.”
Maud put the locket down. She asked to see the clasped-hand FRIENDSHIP brooch, which the old woman reached in from the window. Roland was studying a card of brooches and rings made apparently from plaited and woven silks, some encircled by jet, some studded with pearls.
“This is pretty. Jet and pearls and silk.”
“Oh, not silk, sir. That’s hair. That’s another form of mourning brooch, with the hair. Look, these ones have IN MEMORIAM round the frame. They cut it off at the deathbed. You could say they kept it alive.”
Roland peered through the glass at the interwoven strands of fine pale hair.
“They made all sorts of it, very ingenious. Look—here’s a plaited watch-chain out of someone’s long locks. And a bracelet with a pretty heart-shaped clasp, ever such delicate work, in dark hair.”
Roland took the thing, light and lifeless, apart from its gold clasp.
“Do you sell many of these?”
“Oh, now and then. Folk collect them, you know. Folk’ll collect anything, given time. Butterflies. Collar-studs. Even my old flatirons, as I used right up to 1960, when our Edith insisted on getting me an electric one, I had a man round, asking. And there’s a lot of work in that bracelet, young man, a lot of care went into that. And solid gold, 18-carats, which was expensive for them times, when you got pinchbeck and such.”
Maud had a row of brooches laid out on the top of the counter.
“I can tell you know a good piece. Now, I’ve got a real good carved piece you won’t see any more of—language of flowers, young man—clematis and gorse and heartsease—which is to say Mental Beauty and Enduring Affection and ‘I am always thinking of you.’ You should buy that for the young lady. Better than old hair.”
Roland made a demurring noise. The old woman leaned forward on her high stool and put out a hand to Maud’s green scarf.
“Now that’s a good piece such as you won’t come across easily—that looks to me like the best of the work out of Isaac Greenberg’s Baxtergate undertaking—such as was sent all over Europe to Queens and Princesses. I’d dearly like a close look at that piece, mam, if you could—”
Maud put up her hands to her head, and hesitated between unpinning the brooch and pulling off the whole head-binding. Finally, awkwardly for her, she did both, putting the scarf on the counter, and then unpinning its carefully constructed folds and handing the large black knobby thing to the old woman, who trotted away to hold it up in the dusty light from the window.
Roland looked at Maud. The pale, pale hair in fine braids was wound round and round her head, startling white in this light that took the colour out of things and only caught gleams and glancings. She looked almost shockingly naked, like a denuded window-doll, he at first thought, and then, as she turned her supercilious face to him and he saw it changed, simply fragile and even vulnerable. He wanted to loosen the tightness and let the hair go. He felt a kind of sympathetic pain on his own skull-skin, so dragged and ruthlessly hair-pinned was hers. Both put their hands to their temple, as though he was her mirror.
The old woman came back and put Maud’s brooch on the counter, switching on a dusty little Anglepoise to illuminate its darkness.
“I’ve never seen aught quite like this—though it’s clear enough one of Isaac Greenberg’s pieces, I reckon—there were a piece of his at t’Great Exhibition with corals and rocks on, though I’ve never seen a mermaid and the coral—with her little mirror and all. Where did you come by that, mam?”
“I suppose you might call it a family heirloom. I found it in the family button box when I was really quite young—we had a huge dressing-up box full of old buckles and buttons and bits and bobs—and it was just in there. I’m afraid nobody liked it much. My mother thought it was just hideous Victorian junk, she said. I suppose it is Victorian? I took it because it reminded me of the Little Mermaid.” She turned to Roland. “And then lately of the Fairy Melusina, of course.”
“Oh, it’s Victorian. I sh’d say it’s earlier than the death of the Prince Consort in 1861—there was more playful pieces before that—though always the sad ones predominated. Look at th’ workmanship in that waving hair and the lifelikeness of the little tail-fins. What they could accomplish in them days. You wouldn’t get work like that nowadays, not nowhere. It’s forgotten and go
ne by.”
Roland had never closely approached Maud’s brooch, which depicted indeed a little mermaid seated on a rock, her glossy black shoulders twisted towards the surface, modestly obviating any need to carve her little breasts. Her hair snaked down her back, and her tail snaked down the rock. The whole was enclosed in what he had taken to be twigs and now saw, through the old woman’s eyes, to be branching coral.
He said to Maud, “You inherited some of Christabel’s books.…”
“I know. I never thought. I mean, this brooch has always been there. I never thought to ask where it came from. It—it looks quite different in this shop. Among these other things. It was—it was a joke of mine.”
“Perhaps it was a joke of his.”
“Even if it was,” said Maud, thinking furiously, “even if it was, it doesn’t prove she was here. All it proves is, he bought brooches for two women at once.…”
“It doesn’t even prove that. She could have bought it for herself.”
“If she was here.”
“Or anywhere they were sold.”
“You should look after that piece,” the old woman put in. “That’s unique, I should say, that is.” She turned to Roland. “Won’t you have the flower-language piece, sir? It would be a real companion-piece to the little mermaid.”
“I’ll take the FRIENDSHIP brooch,” said Maud quickly. “For Leonora.”
Roland wanted badly to own something, anything, in this strange sooty stuff which Ash had touched and written about. He did not in fact want the ornate flower-piece and could think of no one to whom he might give it—these things were definitely not in Val’s style, not in either of her styles, old or new. He found, in a green glass bowl on the counter, a pile of loose unrelated beads and chips which the old woman was selling at 75p each and sorted out for himself a little heap of these, some round, some flattened and elliptical, a hexagon, a highly polished satin cushion.
“Personal worry beads,” he told Maud. “I do worry.”
“I noticed.”
14
They say that women change: ’tis so: but you
Are ever-constant in your changefulness,
Like that still thread of falling river, one
From source to last embrace in the still pool
Ever-renewed and ever-moving on
From first to last a myriad water-drops
And you—I love you for it—are the force
That moves and holds the form.
—R. H. ASH, Ask to Embla, XIII
My dearest Ellen,
Today I varied my regimen of dissection and magnification by a long stride from foss to foss, or force to force, around the Dale of Goathland or Godeland—do you not admire the way we here see language in the making, in the alternative names, both accepted, for these things. These names were given by the ancient Vikings—the Danes settled these parts and embraced Christianity, whilst the wilder Norwegian pagans tried to invade from Ireland and the North—to meet defeat at Brunanburh. They left few traces of their 250 years of farming and fighting here—only words and names, which vanish and decay as W. Wordsworth has observed.
Mark! how all things swerve
From their known course, or vanish like a dream;
Another language spreads from coast to coast;
Only perchance some melancholy Stream
And some indignant Hills old names preserve,
When laws, and creeds, and people all are lost!
There are two constituent brooklets of the Mirk Esk, the Eller Beck and the Wheeldale Beck, which have their juncture at a place called Beck Holes—and along these Becks are many fine fosses—the Thomasine Foss, Water Ark and Walk Mill Fosses—and then the Nelly Ayre Foss and Malyan’s Spout—a particularly impressive hundred-foot fall into the sylvan ravine. The effect of light and shade, both in the changing green of the pensile foliage and the depths of the pools, and in the racing clouds which bring dark, light and dark again, was particularly fine. I climbed up onto Glaisdale and Wheeldale moors—where these becks have their sources in small rills which bubble up amongst the heather and grit. The contrast between the cool dappled world of the little dales—and the shady caverns and pools into which the forces rush and hurry to be swallowed in quiet—and the open spaces where for dark mile upon mile nothing seems to stir and nothing sounds save a surprising harsh wailing cry of a bird—or a chipping sound of another—this contrast is so absolute and yet so natural—and the water running from one world to another—a man might think that here, in this rough north was, if not Paradise, the original earth—rocks, stones, trees, air, water—all so solid and immutable, apparently—and yet shifting and flowing and fleeting in the race of light and the driving cloaks of shadow, that alternately reveal and conceal, illuminate and smudge its contours. Here, dear Ellen, and not in the fat valleys of the south, one has a sense of the nearness of those remotest men whose blood and bones made our blood and bones and live still in them—Briton and Dane, Norseman and Roman—And of things infinitely more remote—creatures who once walked here when the earth was hot—Dr Buckland investigating the cave of Kirkdale in 1821 discovered a den of hyenas with bones of tiger, bear, wolf, probably lion and other carnivora, elephant, rhinoceros, horse, ox, and 3 species of deer as well as many of the rodentia and birds, consumed by the hyenas.
I cannot describe the air to you. It is like no other air. Our language was not designed to distinguish differences in air; it runs the risk of a meaningless lyricism or inexact metaphors—so I will not write of it in terms of wine or crystal, though both those things came into my mind. I have breathed the air of Mont Blanc—a chill light clean air that comes off the remote glaciers and has the purity of those snows, touched with the resin of pine and the hay of the high meadows. Thin air, as Shakespeare said, the air of vanishing things and refinements beyond apprehension by our senses. This Yorkshire air, the moorland air, that is, has no such glassy chill—it is all alive, on the move, like the waters that thread their way through the heath, as it does with them. It is visible air—you see it run in rivers and lines over the shoulders of bald stones—you see it rise in aery fountains and tremble over the heath when it is hot. And the scent of it—sharp, unforgettable—clean rain tossed and the ghost of ancient woodsmoke—and the cold clearness of brook water—and something fine and subtle all of its own—oh, I cannot describe this air, it expands a man’s mind in his head, I do believe, and gives him extra senses he knows nothing of, before coming on these heights and ranges.…
There was more pleasure for Roland and Maud in their walk, the next day, along the becks to the fosses. They walked out from Goathland and saw the threads and glassy interrupted fans of the Mallyan Spout; they scrambled along river paths above the running peaty water, and crossed moorland, scrambling down again to riversides. They found magical patches of greensward between rocks, mown by the incessant attention of nibbling sheep, surrounded by standing stones and mysterious clumps of spotted purple foxgloves. Strange transparent insects whirred past; dippers ran in the shallows; in one marshy place they disturbed whole groups of newly-shining young frogs, which leaped up in little showers of water under their feet. Over lunch, which they ate in one of the grassy clearings near the Nelly Ayre Foss, they discussed progress. Roland had been reading Melusina in bed and was now convinced that Christabel had been in Yorkshire.
“It has to be here. Where do people think it is? It’s full of local words from here, gills and riggs and ling. The air is from here. Like in his letter. She talks about the air like summer colts playing on the moors. That’s a Yorkshire saying.”
“I suppose if it is, no one has noticed it before because they weren’t looking. That is—her landscapes were always supposed to be really Brittany, claiming to be Poitou, and heavily influenced by Romantic local colour—the Brontës, Scott, Wordsworth. Or symbolic.”
“Do you think she was here?”
“Oh yes. I feel certain. But I’ve no proof that will stand up. The Hob. The Yorkshir
e words. Perhaps my brooch. What I can’t understand, still, is how he could write all those letters to his wife—it makes me wonder—”
“Perhaps he did love his wife, too. He does say ‘when I come back.’ He always meant to go back. And he did—we know that. If Christabel was here, it wasn’t a question of running away—”
“I wish we knew what it was a question of—”
“It was their business. It was private. I will say though, I feel Melusina is very like some of Ash’s poems— The rest of her work isn’t at all. But Melusina sounds often as though he wrote it. To me. Not the subject matter. The style.”
“I don’t want to think that. But I do see what you mean.”
The Thomason Foss is reached along a steep track from Beck Hole, a small hamlet in a fold of the moorland hills. They walked to it that way, rather than descending from the moors, so as to approach the pool below the fall. The weather was very lively and full of movement; huge white clouds sailed in a blue sky, above dry stone walls and woodland. Roland discovered on the surface of one of the walls a series of shining silver mates, which proved to be the openings of the lairs of tunnel spiders, who rushed out, waving fierce grasping arms and jaws, when even a thread of their structure was troubled by a straw. Towards the Foss the path descended steeply and they had to clamber among boulders. The water fell amongst a naturally cavernous circle of rocks and lowering brows, in which various saplings struggled for a precarious living; it was dark and smelled cold, and mossy, and weedy. Roland looked at the greenish-goldish-white rush of the fall for a time and then transferred his gaze to the outer edges of the troubled and turning pool. As he looked, the sun came out, and hit the pool, showing both the mirror-glitter from the surface, and various live and dead leaves and plants moving under it, caught as it were in a net of fat links of dappled light. He observed a curious natural phenomenon. Inside the cavern, and on the sides of the boulders in its mouth, what appeared to be flames of white light appeared to be striving and moving upwards. Wherever the refracted light off the water struck the uneven stone, wherever a fissure ran, upright or transverse, this same brightness poured and quivered along it, paleness instead of shadow, building a kind of visionary structure of non-existent fires and non-solid networks of thread inside it. He sat and watched for a time, squatting on a stone, until he lost his sense of time and space and his own precise location and saw the phantom flames as though they were the conscious centre. His contemplation was interrupted by Maud, who came and sat beside him.