When he took her in his arms, it was she who said, harshly, “Are you afraid?”
“Not in the least, now,” he said. “My selkie, my white lady, Christabel.”
That was the first of those long strange nights. She met him with passion, fierce as his own, and knowing too, for she exacted her pleasure from him, opened herself to it, clutched for it, with short animal cries. She stroked his hair and kissed his blind eyes, but made no more specific move to pleasure him, the male—nor did she come to that, all those nights. It was like holding Proteus, he thought at one point, as though she was liquid moving through his grasping fingers, as though she was waves of the sea rising all round him. How many, many men have had that thought, he told himself, in how many, many places, how many climates, how many rooms and cabins and caves, all supposing themselves swimmers in salt seas, with the waves rising, all supposing themselves—no, knowing themselves—unique. Here, here, here, his head beat, his life had been leading him, it was all tending to this act, in this place, to this woman, white in the dark, to this moving and slippery silence, to this breathing end. “Don’t fight me,” he said once, and “I must,” said she, intent, and he thought, “No more speech,” and held her down and caressed her till she cried out. Then he did speak again. “You see, I know you,” and she answered breathless, “Yes, I concede. You know.”
Much later, he came out of a half-sleep, imagined he heard the sea, which was just possible from there, and then was aware that she was weeping silently beside him. He put out an arm, and she pushed her face into his neck, a little awkwardly, not clinging, but pushing blindly to lose herself.
“What is it? My dear?”
“Ah, how can we bear it?”
“Bear what?”
“This. For so short a time. How can we sleep this time away?”
“We can be quiet together, and pretend—since it is only the beginning—that we have all the time in the world.”
“And every day we shall have less. And then none.”
“Would you rather, therefore, have had nothing at all?”
“No. This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the midpoint, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere.”
“Poetic, but not comfortable doctrine.”
“You know, as I know, that good poetry is not comfortable, however. Let me hold you, this is our night, and only the first, and therefore the nearest infinite.”
He felt her face, hard and wet on his shoulder, and imagined the living skull, living bone, fed with threads and fine tubes of blue blood and inaccessible thoughts, running in her hidden cavities.
“You are safe with me.”
“I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.”
In the morning, washing, he found traces of blood on his thighs. He had thought, the ultimate things, she did not know, and here was ancient proof. He stood, sponge in hand, and puzzled over her. Such delicate skills, such informed desire, and yet a virgin. There were possibilities, of which the most obvious was to him slightly repugnant, and then, when he thought about it with determination, interesting, too. He could never ask. To show speculation, or even curiosity, would be to lose her. Then and there. He knew that, without thinking. It was like Melusina’s prohibition, and no narrative bound him, unlike the unfortunate Raimondin, to exhibit indiscreet curiosity. He liked to know everything he could—even this—but he knew better than to be curious, he told himself, about things he could not hope to know. She must have bundled away the tell-tale white nightdress, too, in her luggage, for he never saw it again.
They were good days. She helped to prepare his specimens, and scrambled indomitably over rocks to obtain them. She sang like Goethe’s sirens and Homer’s from the rocks on Filey Brigg where Mrs Peabody and her family had been swept away. She marched indomitably over the moors, the crinoline cage and half her petticoats left behind, with the wind ruffling the pale hair. She sat intent beside a turf fire and watched an old woman cook pikelets on a griddle; she spoke little to strangers, it was he who enquired, who invited confidences and information, who learned them. She said, after he had held a countryman half an hour in talk, learning about the swivens, the burnt moorland and peat-cutting, “You are in love with all the human race, Randolph Ash.”
“With you. And by extension, all creatures who remotely resemble you. Which is, all creatures, for we are all part of some divine organism I do believe, that breathes its own breath and lives a little here, and dies a little there, but is eternal. And you are a manifestation of its secret perfection. You are the life of things.”
“Oh no. I am a chilly mortal, as Mrs Cammish said yesterday morning, when I put on my shawl. It is you who are the life of things. You stand there and draw them into you. You turn your gaze on the dull and the insipid to make them shine. And ask them to stay, and they will not, so you find their vanishing of equal interest. I love that in you. Also I fear it. I need quiet and nothingness. I tell myself I should fade and glimmer if long in your hot light.”
He remembered most, when it was over, when time had run out, a day they had spent in a place called the Boggle Hole, where they had gone because they liked the word. She had taken delight in the uncompromising Northern words, which they had collected like stones, or spiny sea-creatures. Ugglebarnby. Jugger Howe. Howl Moor. She had made notes in her little notebooks of the female names of the Meres or standing stones they met on the moors. Fat Betty, the Nan Stone, Slavering Ciss. “There is a terrible tale to be told,” she said, “and a few bright guineas to be earned, of Slavering Ciss.” That too had been a good day, with blue and gold weather, a day that had put him in mind of the youth of the Creation.
They had come across summer meadows and down narrow lanes between tall hedges thick with dog-roses, intricately entwined with creamy honeysuckle, a tapestry from Paradise Garden, she said, and smelling so airily sweet, it put you in mind of Swedenborg’s courts of heaven where the flowers had a language, and colours and scents were correspondent forms of speech. They came down the lane from the Mill, into the closed cove, and the smell changed to the sharpness of salt, a fresh wind off the northern sea full of brine and turning fish-forms and floating weeds, running away to the northern ice. The tide was in, and they had to make their way tightly under the overhang of the cliff. He watched her move swiftly and surely along. Her arms were spread above her head, her strong small fingers gripping cracks and crannies, her tiny booted feet picking a sure way over the slippery shelves below. The stone was a peculiar gunmetal slate, striated and flaking, dull with no sheen, except where water dripped and seeped from above, bringing with it ruddy traces of earth. The layers of grey were full of the regularly rippled rounds of the colonies of ammonites that lay coiled in its substance, stony forms of life, living forms in stone. Her bright pale head, with its circling braids, seemed to repeat those forms. Her grey dress, with the winds loose in the skirts, blended almost into the grey of the stone. All along those multiplied fine ledges, all through those crazed and intricate fissures, ran hundreds of tiny hurrying spiderlike living things, coloured an intense vermilion. The bluish cast of the grey of the stone increased the brightness of the red. They were like thin lines of blood; they were like a web of intermittent flame. He saw her white hands like stars on the grey stone and he saw the red creatures run through and around them.
Most of all, he saw her waist, just where it narrowed, before the skirts spread. He remembered her nakedness as he knew it, and his hands around that narrowing. He thought of her momentarily as an hour-glass, containing time, which was caught in her like a thread of sand, of stone, of specks of life, of things that had lived and would live. She held his time, she contained his past and his future, both now cramped together, with such ferocity and such gentleness, into this small circumference. He remembered an odd linguistic fact—the w
ord for waist in Italian is vita, is life—and this must be, he thought, to do with the navel, which is where our separate lives cast off, that umbilicus which poor Philip Gosse believed had had to be made by God for Adam as a kind of mythic sign of the eternal existence of the past and the future in all presents. He thought too of the Fairy Melusina, a woman jusqu’au nombril, sino alla vita, usque ad umbilicum, as far as the waist. This is my centre, he thought, here, at this place, at this time, in her, in that narrow place, where my desire has its end.
On that shore can be found round stones of many kinds of rocks, black basalt, various coloured granites, sandstones and quartz. She was delighted by these, she filled the picnic basket with a heavy nest of them, like ordnance balls, a soot-black, a sulphur-gold, a chalky grey, which under water revealed a whole dappling of the purest translucent pink. “I shall take them home,” said she, “and use them to prop doors and to weigh down the sheets of my huge poem, huge at least in mass of paper.”
“I shall carry them for you until then.”
“I can carry my own burdens. I must.”
“Not while I am here.”
“You will not be here—I shall not be here—much longer.”
“Let us not think of time.”
“We have reached Faust’s non-plus. We say to every moment ‘Verweile doch, du bist so schön,’ and if we are not immediately damned, the stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike. But it is open to us to regret each minute as it passes.”
“We shall be exhausted.”
“ ‘And is not that a good state to end in? A man might die, though nothing else ailed him, only upon an extreme weariness of doing the same thing, over and over.’ ”
“I can never tire of you—of this—”
“It is in the nature of the human frame to tire. Fortunately. Let us collude with necessity. Let us play with it.
“And if we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.”
“A poet after my own heart,” she said. “Though not more beloved than George Herbert. Or Randolph Henry Ash.”
16
THE FAIRY MELUSINE
PROEM
And what was she, the Fairy Melusine?
Men say, at night, around the castle-keep
The black air ruffles neath the outstretched vans
Of a long flying worm, whose sinewy tail
And leather pinions beat the parted sky
Scudding with puddered clouds and black as soot,
And ever and again a shuddering cry
Mounts on the wind, a cry of pain and loss,
And whirls in the wind’s screaming and is gone.
Men say, that to the Lords of Lusignan
On their death’s day appointed comes a Thing,
Half sable serpent, half a mourning Queen
Crowned and thick-veiled. Then they cross themselves
And make their peace with Heaven’s blessed King
And with a cry of pain she vanishes,
Unable, so they say, to hear that Name,
Forever banished from the hope of Heaven.
The old nurse says, within the castle-keep
The innocent boys slept in each other’s arms
To keep away the chill from hearts and limbs.
And in the dead of night a slender hand
Would part the hangings, and lift sleepy forms
To curl and suck the mother’s milky breasts
As they had dreamed they did, and all the while
Warm tears in silence mingled with the milk
In dreaming mouths combining sweet and salt,
So that they smile for warmth, and weep for loss,
And waking, hope and fear to dream again.
So says the old nurse, and the boys grow strong.
Outside our small safe place flies Mystery.
We hear it howl adown the winds; we see
Its forces set great whirlpools on the spin
In the dark deeps, as a child sets a top
Idly in motion, whips it for a while
Then tires and lets it stagger. On grey walls
We see the indents of its viewless teeth.
We hear it snake beneath the forest floor
Weaving the lives and deaths of roots, the weft
And warp of pillar-boles and tracery
Of twigs and sighing sunkist canopies
Which sway and change, glow and decay and fall.
Inhuman Powers cross our little lives.
The whale’s warm milk runs beneath icy seas.
Electric currents run from eye to eye
And pole to pole, magnetic messages
From out our Beings, through them, and beyond.
The whelk’s foot grips; the waves pile fragments up
Smooth sands compacted, skull on shell on scrap
Of horny carapace on silex sparks
Sandstone and chalk and grit, and out of these
Sculpts dunes like dinosaurs and mammoth banks
And breaks them back to flying specks of stuff.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I read, writ in the ancient chronicle
By John of Arras (who wrote for his Lord
To please and to instruct), “King David said
The judgments of the Lord are like vast deeps
With neither wall nor bottom, where the soul
Spins in a place without foundation
Which comprehensively engulfs the mind
That cannot comprehend it.” The monk, John,
Humbly concludes the human soul should not
Use reason where it cannot stretch to work.
A reasonable man, says the good monk,
Must see that Aristotle told the truth
Who stated firmly that the world contained
Creatures invisible and visible
Both in their kind. He cited next St Paul
Who claimed the first Invisibles of the world
As witnesses to their Creator’s Power,
Beyond the scope of men’s inquiring mind
Save as revealed from time to time in Books
Writ by wise men, as guides to wandering wits.
And in the air, says the brave Monk, there fly
Things, Beings, Creatures, never seen by us
But very potent in their wandering world,
Crossing our heavy paths from time to time,
And such, he says, are faeries or Fates
Who Paracelsus said were Angels once
Now neither damn’d nor blessèd, simply tossed
Eternally between the solid earth
And Heav’n’s closed golden gate.…
Not good enough to save, spirits of air
Not evil neither, with no steadfast harm
In their intents, but simply volatile.
The Laws of Heaven run through the earth as poles
That twist and turn this Globe at His command
Or net (to change the metaphor) the skies
And seas and all the swaying, moving mass
In fine constraining meshes, beyond which
Matter slips not, and mind may never step
Save into vacant Horror and Despair
Forms of illusion only
What are they
Who haunt our dreams and weaken our desires
And turn us from the solid face of things?
Sisters of Horror, or Heav’n’s exiled queens
Reduced from spirit-power to fantasy?
The Angels of the Lord, from Heaven’s Gate
March helmeted in gold and silver ranks
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,
As quick as thought between desire and deed.
They are the instruments of Law and Grace.
Then who are those who wander indirect
Those whose desires mount precipice of Air
As easy as say wink, or plunge again
For pleasure of the terror in the cleft
Between the dark brow of a mounting cloud
And plain sky’s opal ocean? Who are they
Whose soft hands cannot shift the fixèd chains
Of cause and law that bind the earth and sea
And ice and fire and flesh and blood and time?
When heavenly Eros lay at Psyche’s side,
Her envious sisters said, the light of day
Would show a monstrous serpent was her Lord.
When she transgressed and held the trembling flame
Over the bed, the drops of wax fell fast
On love in perfect human form, who rose
In burning anger from his place and fled.
But let the Power take a female form
And ’tis the Power is punished. All men shrink
From dire Medusa and her writhing locks.
Who weeps for Scylla in her cave of bones,
Thrashing her tail and howling for her fate
With yelping hound-mouths, though she once was fair,
Loved by the sea-god for her mystery
Daughter of Hecate, beautiful as Night?
Who weeps the fall of Hydra’s many heads?
The siren sings and sings, and virtuous men
Bind ears and eyes and sail resolved away
From all her pain that what she loves must die,
That her desire, though lovely in her song
Is mortal in her kiss to mortal men.
The feline Sphinx roamed free as air and smiled
In the dry desert at those foolish men
Who saw not that her crafted Riddle’s clue
Was merely Man, bare man, no Mystery,
But when they found it out they spilt her blood
For her presumption and her Monstrous shape.
Man named Himself and thus assumed the Power
Over his Questioner, till then his Fate—
After, his Slave and victim.
And what was she, the Fairy Melusine?
Were these her kin, Echidna’s gruesome brood,