Possession. A Romance

Chapter 19

High howled the wind, the Ocean hurled

His mass of crested jet uncurled

Against the sea-wall and the tower

Where Dahud and her paramour

In shuttered silence, silky white

Lay side by side the live-long night.

The people ran about the street

Their fearful voice, their wet hands beat

Against the opposing steely door

All smoothly silent, as before.

Confusedly in Dahud's arm

He felt presentiment of harm

Raising his ears from her white skin

And heart's noise, to the people's din

And beyond them, the growling roar

Of angry Ocean at the door.

"Go to the window," then said she,

"Tell me the movement of the sea

His colour and his strategy."

"Lady, his waves are green as glass

The sky is jet, the small skiffs pass

From gulf to gulf like flying things

Soaked through, sucked down, with sodden wings."

"Then come to me and my embrace-

I will press kisses on your face

Whose heat and sharpness shall occlude

The murmuring of the multitude

The rumble of the waters rude."

Bewitched, he does her bidding, till

He hears a splashing at the sill

Of the tower's portal, and he cries,

"Lady, he comes, and we must rise."

" 'Tis he must rise," she answers fast,

"We are safe until the iron gate's past.

Go to the window, tell to me,

The pace and movement of the sea

His colour and his strategy."

"Lady, his waves are livid pale

The sky is covered with a veil

Of flying foam, and drowning men

Cry from the crests and sink again."

"Come and lie still within my arms,

What care we for these weak things' harms?

I can subdue him with my charms."

Again he stirs, again he cries,

"The Ocean comes, and we must rise."

"Go to the window, tell to me

The height and movement of the sea

His colour and his strategy."

"Lady, his waves are black and boil

Like stinking pitch, like raging oil,

He mounts and mounts, his million jaws

Snatch at the tower with open maws

Fringed with foam-teeth, curv'd and white

Shape-shifting monsters of the night

Now one, now myriad, open, high.

Lady, I cannot see the sky.

The stars are out, the waters race

Where the town was, over the place

Where steeple pointed, clock-tower smiled.

Now all is turbulent and wild.

There is a sound of grinding chains

The very tower sways and strains

He laughs with rage, flings his fist down.

Now rise up, lady, or we drown."

-CHRISTABEL LAMOTTE, The City of Is

They were closed in a cabin on the Prince of Brittany. It was night: they could hear the steady throb of the engines, and beyond and around them, the huge heavy rush of the sea. They were both faint with over-excitement. They had stood on deck and watched the lights of Portsmouth glare and dwindle. They had stood apart, not touching, though earlier, in London, full of obscure emotion, they had rushed into each other's arms. Now they sat side by side on the lower bunk and drank duty-free whisky and water from toothmugs.

"We must be mad," said Roland.

"Of course we are mad. And bad. I lied shamelessly to Leonora. I've done worse-I nicked Ariane Le Minier's address when she wasn't looking. I'm as bad as Cropper and Blackadder. All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous. This one's got a bit out of hand. But the bliss of breathing sea air and not having to share my flat with Leonora for the next few weeks-"

It was odd to hear Maud Bailey talking wildly of madness and bliss.

"I think I've just lost everything I've ever had or cared about. My bit of job in the Ash Factory. Val. Which means my home because it's her home, she pays the rent. I should feel frightful. I probably shall. But at the moment I feel all-clear in the head-and single, if you know what I mean. I suppose it feels so good because of the sea. I'd just feel silly if I'd gone to earth in London."

They were not touching. They were sitting amicably close and not touching. "Oddly," said Maud, "if we were obsessed with each other, no one would think we were mad.”

“Val thinks we are obsessed with each other. She even said it was healthier than being obsessed with Randolph Ash."

"Leonora thinks I've rushed away in response to a telephone call from a lover." Roland thought, All this giddy clear-headedness is dependent on our not being obsessed with each other.

He said, "These are clean narrow white beds."

"So they are. Do you prefer top or bottom?"

"I'm indifferent. And you?"

"I'll take the top." She laughed. "Leonora would say it's because of Lilith.”

“Why Lilith?”

“Lilith refused to take the inferior position. So Adam sent her away and she roamed the Arabian deserts and the dark beyond the pale. She's an avatar of Melusina."

"I don't see that it matters, top or bottom," Roland said stolidly, perfectly aware of the absurd range of this comment between my thography, sexual preference and distribution of bolted bunks. He felt happy. Everything was absurd and at one. He turned on the shower.

"Do you want a shower? It's salt.”

“So it is. A sea-water shower under the sea. We are under the sea, in this cabin? After you."

The water hissed and pricked and calmed. Outside, the same water ran darkly, carved by the bulk of the huge craft, and beyond that supporting the rush and balance of unseen life, schools of porpoises and threatened singing dolphins, moving and darting masses of mackerel and whiting, the propulsive canopies of the medusa, the phosphorescent semen of herrings which Michelet, mixing his genders and functions as he had a habit of doing, called the sea of milk, la mer de lait. Roland lay peacefully on his inferior bunk, and thought of a magical sentence of Melville's about schools of-what was it exactly?-rushing beneath the pillow. He heard the shower-streams break and rattle on Maud's invisible body, which he imagined to himself gently and vaguely, without urgency or precision, white as milk, turning this way and that in the jets and the rising steam. He saw her ankles as she climbed the ladder, white and fine, in white cotton and an air of fern-scented powder and damp hair. He felt a great contentment, that she should be shelved there, invisible and inaccessible, but there. "Sleep well," she said, "good night," and he answered, the same. But for a long time he did not sleep, only lay wide-eyed in the dark, listening voluptuously for small creaks and rustles, sighings and shiftings, as she moved above him.

Maud had telephoned Ariane Le Minier, who was about to set out for a holiday in the South but had agreed to see them briefly. They drove peacefully to Nantes in good weather and met over lunch in a surprising restaurant, mysteriously and brilliantly decorated in fin de siècle Turkish tiles with pillars and jewelled stained glass. Ariane Le Minier was young, warm, and decisive, with ink-black hair carved into a precise geometric form, angled at the nape, across the brow. The two women liked each other; they shared a passionate precision in their approach to scholarship, and discussed liminality and the nature of Melusina's monstrous form as a "transitional area," in Winnicott's terms-an imaginary construction that frees the woman from gender-identification. Roland said very little. It was his first French meal in France and he was overcome with precise sensuality, with sea food, with fresh bread, with sauces whose subtlety required and defied analysis.

Maud's task was delicate. She needed to be given access to Sabine de Kercoz's papers without exactly saying why and without explaining the relationship between her request and Leonora's absence. This seemed initially to be made more difficult by Ariane's imminent departure. The papers were locked away and access was not really possible in her absence. "If I had known you were coming…"

"We didn't know ourselves. We turned out to have this small holiday. We thought of travelling through Brittany and seeing LaMotte's family home-"

"There is nothing to see, alas. It was burned down at the time of the First World War. But simply to see Finistère and the Bay of Audierne -under which Is traditionally lies-and the Baie des Trépassés-the Bay of the Dead-"

"Have you found out anything else about the visit LaMotte made in the autumn of 1859?"

"Ah. I have a surprise for you. Since I wrote to Professor Stern I have made a discovery-I have found a journal intime kept by Sabine de Kercoz which covers almost all LaMotte's visit. I think Sabine was imitating George Sand in keeping such ajournai-and, for that reason, wrote in French rather than in the Breton which might have seemed natural."

"I cannot say how much I should like to see that-"

"I have a further surprise for you. I have made you a photocopy. To show to Professor Stern, and because I have such great admiration for your work on Melusina. And to make up for my absence and the closure of the archive. The photocopier is a great democratic invention. And we should share our information, should we not-it is a feminist principle, co-operation. I think you will be very surprised by the contents of this journal. I hope we may discuss their implications when you have read it. I shall say no more now. One should not spoil surprises."

Maud expressed surprise and gratitude in some confusion. What Leonora would say was sharp in her mind. But curiosity and narrative greed were sharper.

The next day they drove through Brittany to the end of the earth, to Finistère. They drove through the forests of Paimpol and Brocéliande, and came to the quiet enclosed bay of Fouesnant, where they found a hotel at le Cap Coz, a hotel which combined the wind-battered ruggedness of the North with something dreamier and softer and more southern, which had a terrace and a palm tree, looking down through a copse of almost Mediterranean pines to a circling sandy bay and a blue-green sea. There, over the next three days, they read Sabine's journal. What they thought will be told later. This is what they read.

SABINE LUCRÈCE CHARLOTTE DE KERCOZ.

JOURNAL INTIME.

BEGUN, AT THE MANOIR DE KERNEMET,

OCTOBER I3TH 1859.

The blank space of these white pages fills me with fear and desire. I could write anything I wished here, so how shall I decide where to begin? This is the book in which I shall make myself into a true writer; here I shall learn my craft, and here I shall record whatever of interest I may experience or discover. I have begged the notebook from my dear father, Raoul de Kercoz, who uses these bound volumes for his notes on folklore and his scientific observations. I began this writing task at the suggestion of my cousin, the poet, Christabel LaMotte, who said something that struck me most forcibly. "A writer only becomes a true writer by practising his craft, by experimenting constantly with language, as a great artist may experience with clay or oils until the medium becomes second nature, to be moulded however the artist may desire." She said too, when I told her of my great desire to write, and the great absence in my daily existence of things of interest, events or passions, which might form the subject matter of poetry or fiction, that it was an essential discipline to write down whatever there was in my life to be noticed, however usual or dull it might seem to me. This daily recording, she said, would have two virtues. It would make my style flexible and my observation exact for when the time came-as it must in all lives-when something momentous should cry out-she said "cry out"-to be told. And it would make me see that nothing was in fact dull in itself, nothing was without its own proper interest. Look, she said, at your own rainy orchard, your own terrible coastline, with the eyes of a stranger, with my eyes, and you will see that they are full of magic and sad but of beautifully various colour. Consider the old pots and the simple strong platters in your kitchen with the eyes of a new Ver Meer come to make harmony of them with a little sunlight and shade. A writer cannot do this, but consider what a writer can do-always supposing the craft is sufficient.

I see I have written a page now, and all that is of value in it is the precepts of my cousin Christabel. That is only right-she is the most important person in my life at present, and moreover a shining example because she is both an acknowledged writer of some importance and a woman, thus a sign of hope, a leader, for all of us. I am not sure how much she relishes this role-indeed I think I know very little of what she inwardly thinks and feels. She treats me, in the gentlest way possible, as though she were a governess and I were a tiresome charge, full of enthusiasms, never still, hopelessly ignorant of life.

If she resembles a governess I am sure that she resembles the romantic Jane Eyre, so powerful, so passionate, so observant beneath her sober exterior.

The last two sentences cause me to think of a problem. Am I writing this for Christabel to see, as a kind of devoir- a writer's exercises-or even as a kind of intimate letter, for her to read alone, in moments of contemplation and withdrawal? Or am I writing it privately to myself, in an attempt to be wholly truthful with myself, for the sake of truth alone?

I know she would prefer the latter. So I shall lock away this volume-anyway during its earliest life-and write in it only what is meant for my eyes alone, and those of the Supreme Being (my father's deity, when he does not seem to believe in much older ones, Lug, Dagda, Taranis. Christabel has a strong but peculiarly English devotion to Jesus, which I do not wholly understand, nor is it clear to me what her allegiances are, Catholic or Protestant).

A lesson. Work written only for one pair of eyes, the writer's, loses some of its vitality, but en revanche gains a certain freedom, and rather to my surprise, adult quality. It loses its desire, female as well as infantile, to charm.

I shall begin this work by describing Kernemet as it is today, at this hour, four on a dark, autumnal, misty afternoon.

I have spent all my short life-which has at times felt very long and dragging to me-in this house. Christabel was surprised, she said, both by its beauty and by its simplicity. No, I will not say what Christabel said, I will record what I myself notice of what is so familiar that in moods of ennui I hardly see it.

Our house is built of granite, like most of the houses on this coast, long and low, with high pointed slate roofs and pignons. It stands in a courtyard surrounded by a high wall, to create a space of quiet inside the wind, as much as to keep out anything. Everything here is built to stand in the streaming winds and beating rain off the Atlantic. The slate is more often glistening with wet than not. I love it also in the summer, when it can shine in the heat. Our windows are deep, and high-arched, like church-windows. Our house has only four major rooms, two upstairs, two down, each with two deep windows, on two walls, to provide light in all weathers. Outside also is a turret, with a dovecot above, and a place for dogs below. Dog Tray, however, and my father's brach, Mirza, live indoors. Behind the house, sheltered from the Ocean, is the orchard, where I played as a child, which then seemed infinitely spacious and now is cramped. It too is walled with a wall of dry stones and huge sea cobbles which, the peasants say, "spend" the wind, breaking its force among innumerable holes and crannies. In storms, when the wind is in that quarter, the whole wall sings, a stony song like a pebble beach. The whole of this country is full of the song of the wind. When it blows, the people plant their feet more firmly, and so to speak, sing into it, the men deepening their bass, the women raising their tones.

(That is not badly put. And having written it, I am now full of a kind of aesthetic love of my countrymen and of our wind. I would go on, if I were a poet, to write the poem of its keening. Or if I were a novelist I could go on to say that in sober truth its monotonous singing can drive you half mad for silence, in the long winter days, like a man thirsting in a desert. The psalms sing with praise of the cool shelter of rocks in the hot sun. We here are athirst for a drop or two of dry, bright silence.)

In the house, at this time, three people are sitting quietly in three rooms, writing. My cousin and I have the two upper rooms-she has the one that was my mother's room, where my father has never wanted me to be (nor indeed, have I myself). From these upper rooms it is possible to see across the fields, to the edge of the cliff, and the moving surfaces of the sea. That is, on a bad day, it moves, it heaves. On a good day, it is only the light that appears to move. Is this so? I must check. Another point of interest.

My father has one of the rooms downstairs, which is at once his library and his bedroom. Three walls of his room are lined with books, and he constantly grieves over the terrible effect of the damp sea air on their pages and bindings. When I was a girl it was one of my tasks to polish the leather covers with a preservative mixture of beeswax and I know not what else-gum arabic? terebinth?-which he had devised himself to protect them. This I did instead of embroidery. I can mend a shirt, I have had, of necessity, to learn that, I can do good plain white sewing-but of the more delicate feminine skills I have none. I remember the sweet smell of the beeswax as pampered young ladies may remember rosewater and essence of violets. My hands were supple and shining with it. In those days we lived largely, the two of us, in that one room, with a good fire, and a kind of pottery stove as well.

My father has the old style of Breton box-bed, like a great cupboard, with its own stairs and ventilated door. My mother's bed had heavy velvet hangings with braid and embroidery. My father asked me to clean these two months ago; he did not say why; I formed the mad idea that he had some project of marrying me, and was preparing my mother's room as a bridal chamber. When we took down the hangings they were heavy with dust, and Gode made herself very ill with beating them out in the courtyard, her lungs were stuffed with a lifetime's [my lifetime's) spiderwebs and filth. And then, when they were beaten, they were nothing, all their substance was gone with their encrustation, so that huge rents and ragged tatters appeared everywhere. Then my father said, "Your cousin from England is coming, and new bed furniture must be had somewhere." I rode all day to Quimperlé, and asked Mme de Kerléon, who gave me a set in serviceable red linen, for which she had, she said, no foreseeable need. They are embroidered with a border of lilies and briar roses, which my cousin likes very well.

These box-beds, the wooden chambers within chambers, of Brittany, are said to have been devised as protection against wolves. There are still some wolves roaming the high ground and the moorland in this part of the world, or wandering through the forests of Paimpol and Brocéliande. In the past, in the villages and farmhouses, it is said, these beasts used to come into the houses and snatch and carry off the sleeping infants in their cots by the hearth. So the peasants and farmers, to make quite sure of their young ones, would close them inside the box-beds and make the door fast before going out to the fields. Gode says this protects them also against wandering pigs with indiscriminate snouts and greedy hens who go in and out of the cottages and are not particular about what they tear or stab, an eye or an ear, a tiny foot or hand.

Gode used to terrify me when I was small with these terrible stories. I was afraid of wolves, day and night, and of werewolves too, though I cannot say I have ever seen a wolf, nor certainly heard one, though Gode has held up a finger on snowy nights when something has howled, and has said, "The wolves are coming closer; they are hungry." In this misty land the borderline between myth, legend and fact is not decisive, my father says, as a stone arch might be between this world and another, but more like a series of moving veils or woven webs between one room and another. Wolves come; and there are men as bad as wolves; and there are sorcerers who believe they control such powers, and there is the peasant's faith in wolves and in the need to put solid doors between the child and all these dangers. In my childhood the fear of the wolves was hardly greater than the fear of being closed in, out of the light, into that box which resembled, at times, a chest or shelf in a family vault as much as a safe retreat (a hermit's cave when I played at being Sir Lancelot, before I learned I was only a woman and must content myself with being Elaine aux Mains Blanches, who did nothing but suffer and complain and die). It was so dark in that bed, I cried for the light, unless I was very ill or unhappy, when I would curl up in a small ball, like a hedgehog or sleeping caterpillar, and lie still as death, or the time before birth, or between autumn and spring (the hedgehog) or the crawling state and the flying (the grub).

I am now making metaphors. Christabel says that Aristotle says that a good metaphor is the sign of true genius. This piece of writing has come a long way, from its formal beginning, back in time, inward in space, to my own beginnings in a box-bed, inside the chamber inside the manor inside the protecting wall.

I have much to learn about the organisation of my discourse. I wanted, when I was writing about my father's bed, both to describe my mother's bed, which followed on, and to construct a disquisition or digression on box-beds and the borderland between fact and fancy which also followed on. I have not been wholly successful-there are awkward gaps and hops in the sequence, like too-great holes in the drystone wall. But something is done, and how interesting it all is, seen as craftwork which can be bettered, or remade, or scrapped as an apprentice piece.

What comes next? My history. The family history. Lovers? I have none, I see no one, I have not only formed no attachment and rejected no offer, I have never been together with anyone who could be thought of in that light. My father seems to think it will all settle itself by some gentle and inevitable process "when the right time comes," which he believes is still far off-I believe, already almost past and lost. I am twenty years old. I will not write of that. I cannot control my thoughts, and Christabel says that this journal must be free from "the repetitious vapours and ecstatic sighing of commonplace girls with commonplace feelings."

What is clear is that I have described the house, in part, but not the people. Tomorrow, I shall describe the people. "Action, not character, is the essence of tragic drama," Aristotle said. My father and cousin were disputing about Aristotle over dinner last night; I have rarely seen my father so lively. I think inaction is the essence of tragic drama, in the case of many modern women, but I did not venture upon this near-epigram, as they were disputing in Greek, which Christabel learned from her father, but I do not know. When I think of mediaeval princesses running their households during the Crusades, or prioresses running the life of great abbeys, or St Theresa as a little girl going out to fight evil, as George Sand's Jacques says, I think a kind of softness has overcome modern life. De Balzac says that the new occupations of men in cities, their work in businesses, have turned women into pretty and peripheral toys, all silk, perfume and full of thefantaisies and intrigues of the boudoir. I would like to see silk floss and experience the atmosphere of a boudoir-but I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write. Is this too much? Is this declaration vapouring?

THURSDAY OCTOBER I4.TH

Today I said I should describe the characters. I find I am afraid, that is the motjuste, of describing my father. He has always been there and it has always been only he who was there. My mother is not my mother but one of his tales, which in childhood I could not tell from truth, although he always scrupulously insisted that I be truthful. My mother came from the South, she was born in Albi. "She missed the sun," he would say. I have a clear image of her deathbed. She called to see me, he told me, she was wild with agitation over what would become of me, in this rough land, with no mother to care for me. She cried and cried, her force was spent even for living, to see the child, and when I was brought, she was calm, she turned her white face to me and was calm, he says. He says that he promised to be father and mother to me, both, and she said he would do better to marry again, and he said no, that could never be, he was one of those who only love once. He has tried to be father and mother to me both, but poor good man, he has not much skill at the practical side of things-he is gentle enough and kind, it is not that. It is more that he cannot make practical decisions as a woman would. And that he has no knowledge of what I fear. Or desire. But he took me in his arms with infinite gentleness when I was an infant, I remember that, he kissed and comforted me, and read me tales.

I see one of my faults as a writer will be a tendency to rush off in all directions at once.

I am afraid to describe my father because what is between us is accepted and unspoken. I hear his breathing in the house at night, I should know immediately if it faltered or stopped. I should know, I think, if anything happened to him, even if I were a great distance away. And he would know if I were in danger, or sick, I know. He appears to be very abstracted, very bound up in his work, but he has a sixth sense, an inner ear, which hears me. When I was a tiny child he would attach me to his desk with a great band of linen, like a long rope, and I would run in and out of his room and the great room quite contentedly. He has a book with an old emblem of Christ and the Soul where the Soul runs free in the household on just such a linen tie; he says it gave him the idea. I have since read Silas Marner, the story of an old bachelor who attaches a foundling to his loom in the same way. I feel his anger and his love as gentle tugs on that limiting linen band, whenever I think too rebelliously, or ride too fast. I do not wish to try to write of him too objectively. I love him like the air and the hearthstones, the wind-twisted apple tree in the orchard and the sound of the sea.

De Balzac always describes his people's faces as though they were painted by the Dutch masters. A snail-curly nose, indicating sensuality, an eye which has red fibrils in the white, a bumped brow. I can't so describe my father's eyes, nor his hair, nor his stoop. He is too close. If you hold a book too close to your face in poor candlelight, the characters blur. So with my father. His father, the philosophe, the Republican, I remember in the days of my early infancy. He wore his iron-grey hair long, as the Breton nobility used to do, and put it up with a comb. He had a good shapely beard, whiter than the hair. And leather gauntlets, in which he went out to visit, or attend weddings or funerals. The people called him Benoit, even though he was the Baron de Kercoz, as they call my father Raoul. They ask their advice, on matters about which they have no particular knowledge, and matters of which they know nothing. We are a little like bees in the beehive; all will not go well unless they are informed or consulted.

When Christabel came, my emotions were confused, like the waves at high tide, some still advancing, some falling back. I have never really had a female friend or confidante-even my nurse and the house-servants are too old and respectful to fulfil the second function, though I love them dearly, especially Gode. So I was ablaze with hope. But also I have never shared my father or my home with another woman, and was afraid I should not like this, afraid of nameless interferences or criticism or at the least embarrassment.

Perhaps I still feel all these things.

How to describe Christabel? I see her now-she has been here exactly one month-so very differently from when she arrived. I shall try first to recapture that first impression. I am not writing for her eyes.

She came on the wings of a storm. (Is that too romantic? It does not give a sufficient idea of all the volume of wind and water that were thrown at our house during that terrible week. If you tried to open a shutter, or step outside the door, the weather met you like an implacable Creature, intent on breaking and overwhelming.)

She arrived in the courtyard when it was already dark. The wheels on the paving stones made a grinding and unsteady noise. The carriage advanced-even inside the yard wall-in little swaying bursts. The horses had their heads down, and their coats were streaming mud and salt-white. My father ran out with his roquelaure and a tarpaulin: the wind nearly wrenched the carriage door out of his hand. He held it open, and Yann put down the steps, and a grey ghost slipped out in the gloom, a huge beast, silent and hairy, making a kind of pale space on the dark. And then behind this very large beast, a very small woman, with a hood and mantle and a useless umbrella, all black. When she was down the steps, she stumbled and fell, into my father's arms. She said, in Breton, "Sanctuary." My father held her in his arms, and kissed her wet face-her eyes were closed-and said, "You have a home here for as long as you desire." I stood in the door, fighting to hold it steady against the blast, with huge stains of rainwater spreading on my skirts. And the great beast pressed himself against me, trembling and muddying me even further with his wet coat. My father carried her in, past me, and put her down in his own great chair, where she lay, half-fainting. I came forward and said I was her cousin Sabine, and she was welcome: she seemed hardly to see me. Later, my father and Yann between them supported her up the stairs, and we saw no more of her until dinner the next evening.

I do not think I can say I liked her, at first. If that is so, it is at least in part because she seemed not to like me. I think I am an affectionate being-I believe I would attach myself lovingly to whoever offered me a little warmth, a human welcome. But whilst my cousin Christabel showed herself full of a near-devotion to my father, she seemed to look on me-how shall I say?-a little coolly. She came down to dinner that first time in a dark-checked woollen dress, black and grey, with a voluminous fringed shawl, very handsome, in dark green with a black trim. She is not elegant, but studiously neat and carefully dressed, with a jet cross on a silk rope around her neck, and elegant little green boots. She wears a lace cap. I do not know her age. Maybe thirty-five. Her hair is a strange colour, silvery-fair, almost metallic in its sheen, a little like winter butter made from milk from cows fed on sunless hay, the gold bleached out. She wears it-not becomingly-in little bunches of curls over her ears.

Her little face is white and pointed. I have never seen anyone so white as she was, that first evening (she is not much better now). Even the inner curl of the nostril, even the pinched little lips, were white, or faintly touched with ivory. Her eyes are a strange pale green; she keeps them half-hidden. She keeps her mouth compressed too-she is thin-lipped-so that when she opens it one is surprised by the size and apparent strength of her large, very regular, teeth, which are distinctly ivory in colour.

We ate boiled fowl-my father has ordered the stock to be put aside to restore her strength. We ate round the table in the Great Hall- usually my father and I have our cheese, and bowl of milk, and bread, by the fire in his room. My father talked to us about Isidore LaMotte and his great collection of tales and legends. He then said to my cousin that he believed she too was a writer. "Fame," he said, "travels very slowly from Great Britain to Finistère. You must forgive us if we see few modern books."

"I write poetry," she said, putting her handkerchief to her mouth, and frowning a little. She said, "I am diligent and I hope a craftsman. I have no fame, I think, of a kind that would have brought me to your attention."

"Cousin Christabel, I have a great desire to be a writer. I have always had this ambition-"

She said, in English, "Many desire, but few or none succeed," and then, in French, "I would not recommend it as a way to a contented life."

"I never thought of it in that way," I said, stung.

My father said, "Sabine, like yourself, has grown up in a strange world where leather and paper are as commonplace and essential as bread and cheese."

"If I were a Good Fairy," said Christabel, "I would wish her a pretty face-which she has-and a capacity to take pleasure in the quotidlan.

"You wish me to be Martha, not Mary," I cried, with some little fire.

"I did not say that," she said. "The opposition is false. Body and soul are not separable." She put her little handkerchief to her lips again and frowned as though I had said something to hurt. "As I know," she said. "As I know."

Shortly after that, she asked to be excused, and went to her bedroom, where Gode had set a fire.

SUNDAY

The pleasures of writing are various. The language of reflection has its own pleasure and the language of narration quite a different one. This is an account of how I came to have, in some measure, the confidence of my cousin after all.

The storm continued unabated for three or four days. After that first dinner she came down no more, but kept her room, sitting in the deep alcove of her arched window, which is cut into the granite, and looking out at not much, the sodden orchard, the wall of pebbles, merging into a thick wall of mist, with rounded forms on it, like mist-pebbles. Gode said she ate too little, like a sick bird.

I went in and out of her room as much as I dared without seeming to intrude, to see if there was anything we could do to add to her comfort. I tried to tempt her with a fillet of sole, or a little beef jelly, made with wine, but she would eat only a bare spoonful or two. Sometimes when I came in after an hour or two she would not have moved from her earlier position, and I would feel I had returned indecently quickly, or that for her time did not exist as it did for me.

Once she said, "I know I am a great trouble to you, ma cousine. I am unrewarding and sick and small-minded. You should let me sit here, and think of other things."

"I want you to be comfortable and happy here," I said. She said, "God did not endow me with very much capacity for being comfortable."

I was hurt that, although I have been running this house almost since I was ten years old, my cousin deferred to my father in all practical matters and thanked him for acts of foresight or hospitality of which he would have been quite incapable, though full of good will.

The big dog, too, refused to eat. He lay inside her room, with his nose to the door, flat on the ground, rising stiffly twice a day to be let out. I brought titbits for him too, which he refused. She watched me try to speak to him, passively at first, without encouraging me. I persisted. One day she said, "He will not respond. He is very angry with me, for taking him away from his home, where he was happy, and reducing him to terror and sickness on that boat. He has a right to be angry, but I did not know a dog could bear a grudge for so long. They are believed to be foolishly forgiving and even Christian towards those creatures who pretend to 'own' them. Now I think he means to die, to spite me for having uprooted him."

"Oh no. It is very cruel of you to say that. The dog is unhappy, not spiteful.”

“It is I who am spiteful. I plague myself and others. And good Dog Tray who never harmed any creature." I said, "When he comes downstairs, I will take him out in the orchard."

"He will not come, I fear."

"And if he does?"

"Then your patience and kindness will have wrought something with my gentle dog, if not with me. But I believe him to be a one-man dog, or I should not have brought him. I left him for a little, recently, and he refused to eat until I returned."

I persisted, and little by little he came more willingly, did the tour of the yard, the stables, the orchard, made himself at home in the hall, left his post at her door and greeted me with a push of his great muzzle. One day he ate two bowls of chicken soup his mistress had rejected, and waved his great tail in pleasure thereafter. When she saw this, she said, sharply enough, "I see I was mistaken about his exclusive loyalty too. I should have done better to leave him where he was. All the magic glades of Brocéliande are not worth a good run in Richmond Park to poor Dog Tray. And he might have given comfort-"

Here she broke off. I affected not to notice, for she was obviously in distress and not given to confidence. I said, "When the good weather comes you and I may take him walking in Brocéliande. We may make an excursion to see the wilderness of the Pointe du Raz and the Baie des Trépassés."

"When the good weather comes, who knows where we may be?"

"Will you leave us then?"

"Where would I go?"

That was no answer, as both of us well knew.

FRIDAY

Gode said, "In ten days, she will feel strong." I said, "Have you been giving her herb-stew, Gode?" for Gode is a witch, as we all know. And Gode said, "I offered. But she would not." I said, "I will tell her your potions do nothing but good." And Gode said, "Too late. She will be better by Wednesday week." I told Christabel this, laughing, and she said nothing, and then asked what Gode could magic? I told her, warts and colic and childlessness and women's pains, coughs and accidental poisoning. She can set a limb and deliver a child, Gode can, and lay out a corpse and resuscitate the drowned. We all learn that here.

Christabel said, "And she never kills what she cures?"

I said, "No, not to my knowledge, she is very scrupulous and very clever, or very lucky. I would trust my life to Gode." Christabel said, "Your life would be a great trust.”

“Or any man's," I said. She frightens me. I see her meaning, and she makes me afraid.

As Gode predicted, she grew stronger, and when in the beginning of November we had three or four clear days, as can happen on this chancy changing coast, I drove her and Dog Tray to see the sea, in the bay at Fouesnant. I thought she might run with me along the beach, or climb rocks, despite a chill wind. But she simply stood at the edge of the water, with her boots sinking into the wet sand, and her hands tucked into her sleeves for warmth, and listened to the breakers and the gulls crying, quite still, quite still. Her eyes were closed when I came up to her, and with every breaker her brows creased in a little frown. I had the fanciful idea that they were beating on her skull like blows, and that she was enduring the sound, for reasons of her own. I went away again-I have never met anyone who so gave the impression that normal acts of friendliness are a deadly intrusion.

TUESDAY

I was still determined that we should talk about writing together. I waited until one day she seemed relaxed and friendly; she had offered to help me to darn sheets, which she does much better than I do-she is a fine needlewoman. Then I said, "Cousin Christabel, it is true that I have a great desire to be a writer."

"If that is true, and if you have the gift, nothing I can say will change the outcome."

"You know that cannot be true. That is a sentimental thing to say, cousin, forgive me. Much could prevent me. Solitude. The lack of sympathy. The lack of faith in myself. Your contempt."

"My contempt?”

“You judge me in advance, as a silly girl, who wants she knows not what. You see your idea, not me."

"And you are determined I shan't persist in that error. You have one of the gifts of the novelist at least, Sabine, you persist in undermining facile illusions. With courtesy and good humour. I stand corrected. Tell me, then, what do you write? For I suppose you do write? It is a métier where the desire without the act is a destructive phantom."

"I write what I can. Not what I should like to write but what I know. I would like to write the history of the feelings of a woman. A modern woman. But what do I know of that, in these granite walls somewhere between Merlin's thorny prison and the Age of Reason? So I write what I know best, the strange and the fantastic, my father's tales. I have written down the legend of Is, for instance."

She said she would be happy to read my story of Is. She said she had written an English poem upon the same subject. I said I knew a little English, not much, and should be glad if she would teach me some. She said, "I will try, of course. I am not a good teacher, I am not patient. But I will try."

She said, "Since I came here, I have not attempted to write anything, because I do not know what language to think in. I am like the Fairy Mélusine, the Sirens and the Mermaids, half-French, half-English and behind these languages the Breton and the Celt. Everything shifts shape, my thoughts included. My desire to write came from my father, who was not unlike your father. But the language in which I write- my mother-tongue exactly-is not his language, but my mother's. And my mother is not a spiritual woman, and her language is that of household minutiae and female fashion. And English is a language full of little blocks, and solid objects and quiddities and unrelated matters of fact, and observation. It is my first language. My father said that every human being needs a native tongue. He withdrew himself and spoke to me only in English, in my earliest years, he told me English tales and sang me English songs. Later I learned French, from him, and Breton."

This was the first confidence she made to me, and it was a writer's confidence. At the time, I did not think so much about what she had said about language, as about the fact that her mother was alive, for she said she "is not a spiritual woman." She was in great trouble, so much was clear, and had turned not to her mother, but to us-to my father, that is, for I do not think I counted for anything in her decision.

SATURDAY

She read my story of King Gradlon, the Princess Dahud, the horse Morvak, and the Ocean. She took it away on the evening of October 14th and returned it two days later, coming into my room and putting it into my hands brusquely, with a funny little smile. She said, "Here is your tale. I have not marked it, but I have taken the liberty of writing one or two notes on a separate sheet."

How shall I describe the happiness of being taken seriously? I could see in her face when she took the tale that she expected to find sentimental vapourings and rosy sighs. I knew she would not, but her certainty overwhelmed mine. I knew I must be found wanting, one way or another. And yet I knew that what I had written was written, that it had its raisond'être. So I awaited her inevitable disdain with half my soul, and with the other knew that it ought not to be so.

I seized the paper from her hands. I ran through the notes. They were practical, they were intelligent, they acknowledged what I had tried to do.

What I had meant was to make of the wild Dahud an embodiment as it were of our desire for freedom, for autonomy, for our own proper passion, which women have, and which, it seems, men fear. Dahud is the sorceress whom the Ocean loves and whose excesses cause the City of Is to be engulfed (by that same Ocean) and drowned. In one of my father's mythological recensions the editor says, "In the legend of the City of Is may be felt, like the passing of a whirlwind, the terror of ancient pagan cults and the terror of the passion of the senses, let loose in women. And to these two terrors is added the third, that of the Ocean, which, in this drama, has the role of Nemesis and fate. Paganism, woman and the Ocean, these three desires and these three great fears of man, are mingled in this strange legend and come to a tempestuous and terrible end."

On the other hand, my father says, the name Dahud, or Dahut, in ancient times, signified "The good sorceress." He says she must have been a pagan priestess, as in an Icelandic saga, or one of the virgin priestesses of the Druids in the Ile de Sein. He says even that Yes, maybe, is the vestigial memory of an other world where women were powerful, before the coming of warriors and priests, a world like the Paradise of Avallon, the Floating Isles, or the Gaelic Sid, the Land of the Dead.

Why should desire and the senses be so terrifying in women? Who is this author, to say that these are the fears of man, by which he means the whole human race? He makes us witches, outcasts, sorcières, monsters…

I will copy out some of Christabel's phrases which particularly pleased me. I should in all honesty copy out also those criticisms she made of what was banal or overdone or clumsy-but these are engraved on my mind.

Some comments of Christabel LaMotte on Dahud La Bonne Sorcière by Sabine de Kercoz.

"You have found, by instinct or intelligence, a way which is not allegory nor yetfaux-naïf to give significance and your own form of universality to this terrible tale. Your Dahud is both individual human being and symbolic truth. Other writers may see other truths in this tale. (I do.) But you do not pedantically exclude.

All old stories, my cousin, will bear telling and telling again in different ways. What is required is to keep alive, to polish, the simple clean forms of the tale which must be there-in this case the angry Ocean, the terrible leap of the horse, the fall of Dahud from the crupper, the engulfment etc etc. And yet to add something of yours, of the writer, which makes all these things seem new and first seen, without having been appropriated for private or personal ends. This you have done."

FRIDAY

After the reading, things went better. I cannot recount all, and yet we are now nearly at the present time. I told my cousin what a great relief it had been to me to have my work read as my work, and by someone who knew how to value it. She said this experience was rare in any writer's life, and one would do better neither to expect nor to rely on it. I asked her if she had a good reader and she frowned a little and then said briskly, "Two. Which is more than we may hope for. One too indulgent, but with intelligence of the heart. One, a poet-a better poet-" She was silent.

She was not angry, but she would say no more.

I think it must happen to men as well as to women, to know that strangers have made a false evaluation of what they may achieve, and to watch a change of tone, a change of language, a pervasive change of respect after their work has been judged to be worthwhile. But how much more for women, who are, as Christabel says, largely thought to be unable to write well, unlikely to try, and something like changelings or monsters when indeed they do succeed, and achieve something.

OCTOBER 28TH

She is like Breton weather. When she smiles and makes sharp, clever little jokes, one cannot imagine her otherwise-as the coast here may smile and smile in the sun, and in the sheltered coves at Beg-Meil may grow round pines and even a date-palm, which suggest the sunnier south, where I have never been. And the air may be soft and gentle, so that, like the peasant in Aesop's tale, one takes off one's heavy coat, one's armour, so to speak. She is much better, as Gode said she would be. She and Dog Tray go for long walks together, and also with me, when I am invited or when she accepts my invitation. She insists also on taking part in the daily life of the household, and it is in the kitchen, or mending by the fire, that we have our closest talk. We talk much of the meanings of myths and legends. She is very desirous of seeing our Standing Stones, which are some way away, along the cliff-I have promised to go there with her. I told her that the village girls still dance round the menhir, dressed in white, to celebrate May Day-they move in two circles, one clockwise, one widdershins, and whoever slackens and tires so that she falls, or touches the stone in any way, is mercilessly cuffed and kicked by the others, who all set on her as a flock of gulls will attack an intruder, or one of their own weaklings. My father says this rite is a relic of ancient sacrifice, perhaps Druidic, that the fallen one is a kind of sacrificial scapegoat. He says the Stone is a male symbol, a phallos; and the women of the village go to it in the dark night and clasp it, or rub it with certain preparations (Gode knows but Father and I do not) to have strong sons, or to have their husbands return safely. My grandfather said the church spire was only this ancient stone in a metamorphic form-a slate column, he said, instead of granite, that was all-and the women huddled beneath it like white hens, as in earlier times they danced before the other. I did not quite like to hear that said and hesitated to repeat it to Christabel, for she has Christian belief of some kind certainly. But I did say it, for her mind is fearless, and she laughed, and said it was so, the Church had successfully taken in and absorbed, and partly overcome, the old pagan deities. It was now known that many little local saints are genii loci, Powers who inhabited a particular fount or tree.

She said also, "So the girl who stumbles in the dance is also the Fallen Woman and the others stone her."

"Not stone, " I said, "not now, only blows with the hands or feet."

"Those are not the most cruel," she said.

FRIDAY

What is strange is that she seems to have no life anywhere but here. It is as though she had walked in out of that storm like some selkie or undine, streaming wet and seeking shelter. She writes no letters and never asks if any have come for her. I know-I am not foolish-that something must have happened to her, something terrible, I imagine, from which she fled. I ask her nothing about that, for it is so very clear that she does not wish to be asked. But occasionally I arouse her anger, without meaning to.

For instance, I asked her about the curious name of Dog Tray and she began to tell me that he had been named as a joke, for a line in Wm Shakespeare's King Lear-"The little dogs and all-Tray, Blanche and Sweetheart, see they bark at me." She said, "He used to live in a house where there was a Blanche and where I was jokingly called Sweetheart-" and then she turned her face away and would say no more, as though she choked. Then she said, "In the nursery rhyme, of Mother Hubbard, in some versions, the Dog who finds the cupboard bare is called Dog Tray. Maybe he was truly named for that old woman's dog, who found nothing but disappointment."

NOVEMBER I TOUSSAINT

Today the storytelling begins. Everywhere in Brittany the storytelling begins at Toussaint, in the Black Month. It goes on through December, the Very Black Month, as far as the Christmas story. There are storytellers everywhere. In our village, the people gather round the workbench of Bertrand, the shoemaker, or Yannick, the smith. They bring their work and warm each other with their comfortable presences-or with the heat of the forge-and hear the messengers in the dark that is thick outside their thick walls, the unexplained crack of wood, or flap of wings, or creaking at worst, of the axles of the bumpy cart of the Ankou.

My father made a habit of telling me tales, every night during the two Black Months. This year will be the same, except that Christabel is here. My father's audience is not as numerous as Bertrand's or Yannick's and to tell the truth his tale-telling is not as dramatic as theirs, it has that scholarly courtesy which is part of him, a pernickety insistence on accuracy-no Pam! or Pouf! of demon or wolf-man. And yet he made me believe absolutely in the creatures of his myths and legends, over the years. He would open his tale of the Fontaine Baratoun, the Fontaine des Fées, in the magical forest of Brocéliande, with a scholarly register of all its possible names. I can recite the litany: Breselianda, Bercillant, Brucellier, Berthelieu, Berceliande, Brecheliant, Brecelieu, Brecilieu, Brocéliande. I can hear him say, pedantic and mysterious, "The place shifts its name as it shifts its borders and the directions of its dark rides and wooded alleys-it cannot be pinned down or fixed, any more than can its invisible inhabitants and magical properties, but it is always there, and all these names indicate only one time or aspect of it…" Every winter, he tells the tale of Merlin and Vivien, always the same tale, never twice the same telling.

Christabel says her father too, told her tales in winter. She seems ready to be part of our fireside circle. What will she tell? Once we had a visitor who told a dead tale, a neat little political allegory with Louis Napoleon as ogre arid France as his victim, and it was as though a net had drawn up a shoal of dull dead fish with loose scales, no one knew where to look, or how to smile.

But she is wise and partly Breton.

"I could a tale unfold," she said to me in English, when I asked if she would tell (I know that is Hamlet, it is the speech of the revenant and much à propos).

Gode always joins us and tells of the year's trafficking between this world and that, the other side of the threshold, which at Toussaint may be crossed in both directions, by live men walking into that world, and by spies, or outposts, or messengers sent from There to our brief daylight.

TOUSSAINT, LATE AT NIGHT

My father told the tale of Merlin and Vivien. The two characters are never the same in successive years. Merlin is always old and wise, and clearsighted about his doom. Vivien is always beautiful, and various and dangerous. The end is always the same. So is the essence of the tale-the coming of the magician to the old Fairy Fountain, the invocation of the fay, their love beneath the hawthorns, the charming of the old man into telling her the spell which can erect round him a solid tower visible and tangible only to himself. But my father, within this framework, has many stories. Sometimes the fairy and the magician are true lovers, whose reality is only this dreamed chamber, which she, with his complicity, makes eternal stone of air. Sometimes he is old and tired and ready to lay down his burden and she is a tormenting daemon. Sometimes it is a battle of wits, in which she is all passionate emulation, a daemonic will to overcome him, and he wise beyond belief, and impotent with it. Tonight he was not so decrepit, nor yet so clever-he was ruefully courteous, knowing that her time had come, and ready to take pleasure in his eternal swoon, or dream or contemplation. The description of the Fairy Fountain, with its cold dark boiling rings, was masterly. So were the flowers which strewed the lovers' bed-my father was lavish with imagined primroses and bluebells; he made birds sing in dark hollies and yews, so that I remembered my childhood life which was lived in tales, so that I saw flowers and fountains and hidden paths and figures of power and despised-no, diminished in my mind-the life of real things, the house, the orchard, Gode.

When he had finished she said in a very small sharp voice, "You are an enchanter yourself, Cousin Raoul, you make lights and perfumes in the dark, and spent passions."

He said, "I spread my skills, as the old magician did for the young fairy." She said, "You are not old." She said, "I remember my father told that tale.”

“It is everyone's tale.”

“And its meaning?" Then I was angry with her, for we do not talk of meanings in this pedantic nineteenth-century way, on the Black Nights, we simply tell and hear and believe. I thought he would not answer her, but he said, thoughtfully and courteously enough, "It is one of many tales that speak of fear of Woman, I believe. Of a male terror of the subjection of passion, maybe-of the sleep of reason under the rule of-what shall I call it-desire, intuition, imagination. But it is older than that-in its reconciling aspect, it is homage to the old female deities of the earth, who were displaced by the coming of Christianity. Just as Dahut was the Good Sorceress before she became a destroyer, so Vivien was one of the local divinities of streams and fountains-whom we still acknowledge, with our little shrines to who knows what Lady-"

"I have always read it differently."How, Cousin Christabel?"As a tale of female emulation of male power-she wanted not him but his magic-until she found that magic served only to enslave him-and then, where was she, with all her skills?”

“That is a perverse reading.”

“I have a painting-" she said, "which portrays the moment of triumph-so-perhaps it is perverse." I said, "Too much meaning is bad at Toussaint.”

“Reason must sleep," said Christabel. "The stories come before the meanings," I said. "As I said, reason must sleep," she said again. I do not believe all these explanations. They diminish. The idea of

Woman is less than brilliant Vivien, and the idea of Merlin will not allegorise into male wisdom. He is Merlin.

NOVEMBER 2ND

Today Gode told tales of the Baie des Trépassés. I have promised Christabel that in the good weather we may make a day's excursion there. The name, she says, moves her. It is not so much the Bay of the Dead as the bay of those who have crossed the barrier which divides this world from that. My father says that the name may not derive from any such otherworldly connection, but simply be the name given to this apparently wide and smiling beach where the shattered pieces of ships and men are tossed up after breaking against the terrible reefs of the Pointe du Raz and the Pointe du Van. But he says also that the Bay was always thought of as one of those places on the earth-as with Virgil's grove of the Golden Bough, or Tam Lin's journey under the Hill-where two worlds cross. From here the dead, in ancient Celtic times, would be sent out on their last journey to the Ile de Sein, where the Druid priestesses would receive them (no man was allowed to set foot on their island). And there, according to some legends, they found a way to the Earthly Paradise, the land of golden apples in the midst of winds and storms and dark blades of water.

I can't write down Gode's way of telling things. My father has from time to time encouraged her to tell him tales which he has tried to take down verbatim, keeping the rhythms of her speech, adding nothing and taking nothing away. But the life goes out of her words on the page, no matter how faithful he is. He said once to me, after such an experiment, that he saw now why the ancient Druids believed that the spoken word was the breath of life and that writing was a form of death. I thought of this journal, at first, to see how I might best follow Christabel's advice and record accurately what I heard, but my very intention in some strange way took life from my listening and from Gode's telling, so I desisted, from courtesy and something more. (Yet the interest has its life, there must be a way of writing.) So now. I have something to tell which is not to do with Gode's tale, though it was then that. Start again. Write it like a story, write it to write it-how wise I was to keep this journal for my eyes only. For now I can write to find out what I saw.

And turn a kind of pain to a kind of interest, a kind of curiosity, which is to be my salvation.

Gode's stories, even more than my father's, depend on the outer dark and the closeness, indoors, of tellers and listeners. Our great hall is bleak and bare enough in the daylight, it does not make for intimacy. But at night in the Black Month it is different. We have the logs burning in the great chimney-flaring and fitful in the beginning of the evening, with black spaces where the fire has not caught-but in the later part, glowing with scarlet and golden cinders in a thick warm blanket of grey ash under the burning wood. And the great leather backs of the chairs make a kind of wall against the cold other end of the room, and the light of the fire gilds all our faces and reddens white cuffs and collars. We have no oil-lamps during these evenings-we work by the light of the fire, such work as can be done in such moving shadows, knitting, snipping, plaiting. Gode will even bring a cake she is stirring, or a bowl of roasted chestnuts to be peeled. But when she tells, she will raise her hands, or throw back her head, or shake her shawl, and long tattered shadows race across the ceiling into the dark of the unseen half of the room, or huge faces with gaping mouths and monstrous noses and chins-our own, transfigured by the flames into witches and spectres. And Gode's telling is a play with all these things, with the firelight and the gesturing shadows and the streamers of light and dark-she brings all their movements together as I imagine the leader of an orchestra may. (I have never heard an orchestra. I have heard one or two ladylike harps and the fifes and drums at the Kermesse, but all these sublime sounds I read of, I have to imagine at best through the church organ.)

My father sat in his high chair at the side of the fire, with ruddy lights in his beard, which is not all grey, and Christabel sat close beside him, lower, into the dark, her hands busy with knitting. And Gode and I were on the other side of the circle.

Gode said: "There was once a young sailor who had nothing but his courage and his bright eyes-but those were very bright-and the strength the gods gave him, which was sufficient.

"He was not a good match for any girl in the village, for he was thought to be rash as well as poor, but the young girls liked to see him go by, you can believe, and they liked most particularly to see him dance, with his long, long legs and his clever feet and his laughing mouth.

"And most of all one girl liked to see him, who was the miller's daughter, beautiful and stately and proud, with three deep velvet ribbons to her skirt, who would by no means let him see that she liked to see him, but looked sideways with glimpy eyes, when he was not watching. And so did many another. It is always so. Some are looked at, and some may whistle for an admiring glance till the devil pounces on them, for so the Holy Spirit makes, crooked or straight, and naught to be done about it.

"He came and went, the young man, for it was the long voyages he was drawn to, he went with the whales over the edge of the world and down to where the sea boils and the great fish move under it like drowned islands and the mermaids sing with their mirrors and their green scales and their winding hair, if tales are to be believed. He was first up the mast and sharpest with the harpoon but he made no money, for the profit was all the master's, and so he came and went.

"And when he came he sat in the square and told of what he had seen, and they all listened. And the miller's daughter came, all clean and proud and proper, and he saw her listening at the edge and said he would bring her a silk ribbon from the East, if she liked. And she would not say if she liked, yes or no, but he saw that she would.

"And he went again, and had the ribbon from a silk-merchant's daughter in one of those countries where the women are golden with hair like black silk, but they like to see a man dance with long, long legs, and clever feet and a laughing mouth. And he told the silk-merchant's daughter he would come again and brought back the ribbon, all laid up in a perfumed paper, and at the next village dance he gave it to the miller's daughter and said, 'Here is your ribbon.'

"And her heart banged in her side, you may believe, but she mastered it, and asked coolly how much she was to pay him for it. It was a lovely ribbon, a rainbow-coloured silk ribbon, such as had never been seen in these parts.

"And he was very angry at this insult to his gift, and said she must pay what it had cost her from whom he had it. And she said,

" 'What was that?'

"And he said, 'Sleepless nights till I come again.'

"And she said, 'The price is too high.'

"And he said, 'The price is set, you must pay.'

"And she paid, you may believe, for he saw how it was with her, and a man hurt in his pride will take what he may, and he took, for she had seen him dance, and she was all twisted and turned in her mind and herself by his pride and his dancing.

"And he said, if he went away again, and found some future in any part of the world, would she wait till he came again and asked her father for her.

"And she said, 'Long must I wait, and you with a woman waiting in every port, and a ribbon fluttering in every breeze on every quay, if I wait for you.'

"And he said, 'You will wait.'

"And she would not say yes or no, she would wait or not wait.

"And he said, 'You are a woman with a cursed temper, but I will come again and you will see.'

"And after a time, the people saw that her beauty dimmed, and her step grew creeping, and she did not lift her head, and she grew heavy all over. And she took to waiting in the harbour, to see the ships come in, and though she asked after none, everyone knew well enough why she was there, and who it was she waited for. But she said nothing to anyone. Only she was seen up on the point, where the Lady Chapel is, praying, it must be thought, though none heard her prayers.

"And after more time, when many ships had come and gone, and others had been wrecked, and their men swallowed, but his had not been seen or heard of, the miller thought he heard an owl cry, or a cat miawl in his barn, but when he came there was no one and nothing, only blood on the straw. So he called his daughter and she came, deathly-white, rubbing her eyes as if in sleep, and he said, 'Here is blood on the straw,' and she said, 'I would thank you not to wake me from my good sleep to tell me the dog has killed a rat, or the cat eaten a mouse here in the barn.'

"And they all saw she was white, but she stood upright, holding her candle, and they all went in again.

"And then the ship came home, over the line of sea and into the harbour, and the young man leaped to the shore to see if she was waiting, and she was not. Now he had seen her in his mind's eye, all round the globe, as clear as clear, waiting there, with her proud pretty face, and the coloured ribbon in the breeze, and his heart hardened, you will understand, that she had not come. But he did not ask after her, only kissed the girls and smiled and ran up the hill to his house.

"And by and by he saw a pale thin thing creeping along in the shadow of a wall, all slow and halting. And he did not know her at first. And she thought to creep past him like that, because she was so altered.

"He said, 'You did not come.'

"And she said, 'I could not.'

"And he said, 'You are here in the street all the same.'

"And she said, 'I am not what I was.'

"And he said, 'What is that to me? But you did not come.'

"And she said, 'If it is nothing to you, it is much to me. Time has passed. What is past is past. I must go.' "And she did go. "And that night he danced with Jeanne, the smith's daughter, who had fine white teeth and little plump hands like fat rosebuds.

"And the next day he went to seek the miller's daughter and found her in the chapel on the hill. "He said, 'Come down with me.' "And she said, 'Do you hear little feet, little bare feet, dancing?' "And he said, 'No, I hear the sea on the shore, and the air running over the dry grass, and the weathercock grinding round the wind.'

"And she said, 'All night they danced in my head, round this way and back that, so that I did not sleep.' "And he, 'Come down with me.' "And she, 'But can you not hear the dancer?' "And so it went on for a week or a month, or two months, he dancing with Jeanne, and going up to the chapel and getting only the one answer from the miller's daughter, and in the end he wearied, as rash and handsome men will, and said, 'I have waited as you would not, come now, or I shall wait no more.'

"And she, 'How can I come if you cannot hear the little thing dancing?'

"And he said, 'Stay with your little thing then, if you love it better than me.'

"And she said not a word, but listened to the sea and the air and the weathercock, and he left her.

"And he married Jeanne the smith's daughter, and there was much dancing at the wedding, and the piper played, you may believe, and the drums hopped and rolled, and he skipped high with his long long legs and his clever feet and his laughing mouth and Jeanne was quite red with whirling and twirling, and outside the wind got up and the clouds swallowed the stars. But they went to bed in good spirits enough, full of good cider, and closed their bed-doors against the weather and were snug and tumbled in feathers.

"And the miller's daughter came out in the street in her shift and bare feet, running this way and that, holding out her hands like a woman running after a strayed hen, calling 'Wait a little, wait a little.' And some claimed to have seen a tiny naked child dancing and prancing in front of her, round this way, back widdershins, signing with little pointy fingers and with its hair like a little mop of yellow fire. And some said there was nothing but a bit of blown dust whirling in the road, with a hair or two and a twig caught in it. And the miller's apprentice said he had heard little naked feet patting and slip-slapping in the loft for weeks before. And the old wives and the bright young men who know no better, said he had heard mice. But he said he had heard enough mice in his lifetime to know what was and was not mice, and he was generally credited with good sense.

"So the miller's daughter ran after the dancing thing, on through the streets and the square and up the hill to the chapel, tearing her shins on the brambles and always holding out her hands and calling out 'Wait, oh wait.' But the thing danced on and on, it was full of life, you may believe, it glittered and twisted and turned and stamped its tiny feet on the pebbles and the turf, and she struggled with the wind in her skirts and the dark in her face. And over the cliff went she, calling 'Wait, wait,' and so fell to her death on the needle-rocks below and they got her back at low tide, all bruised and broken, no beautiful sight at all, as you may understand.

"But when he came out into the street and saw it, he took her hand and said, 'This is because I had no faith and would not believe in your little dancing thing. But now I hear it, plain as plain.'

"And poor Jeanne had no joy of him from that day.

"And when Toussaint came he woke in his bed with a start and heard little hands that tapped, and little feet that stamped, all round the four sides of his bed, and shrill little voices calling in tongues he knew not, though he had travelled the globe.

"So he threw off the covers, and looked out, and there was the little thing, naked, and blue with cold yet rosy with heat so it seemed to him, like a sea fish and a summer flower, and it tossed its fiery head and danced away and he came after. And he came after and he came after, as far as the Baie des Trépassés and the night was clear but there was a veil of mist over the bay.

"And the long lines of the waves came in from the Ocean, one after another after another, and always another, and he could see the Dead, riding the crests of them, coming in from another world, thin and grey and holding out helpless arms, and tossing and calling in their high voices. And the dancing thing stamped and tossed on and on, and he came to a boat with its prow to the sea, and when he came into the boat he felt it was full of moving forms pressed closely together, brimming over but unseen.

"He said there were so many Dead, in the boat, on the crests of the waves, that he felt a panic of terror for being so crowded. For though they were all insubstantial so he could put his hand this way or that, yet they packed around him, and shrilled their wild cries on the waves, so many, so many, as though the wake of a ship would have not a flock of gulls calling after it, but the sky and the sea solid with feathers, and every feather a soul, so it was he said, after.

"And he said to the dancing child, 'Shall we put to sea in this boat?

"And the thing was still and would not answer.

"And he said, 'So far I have come, and I am very greatly afraid, but if I may come to her, I will go on.' "And the little thing said, 'Wait.' "And he thought of her among all the others out on the water, with her thin white face and her flat breast and her starved mouth, and he called after her 'Wait,' and her voice howled back like an echo, Wait.

"And he stirred the air, that was full of things, with his arms, and shuffled his clever feet among the dust of the dead on the boards of that boat, but all was heavy, and would not move, and the waves went rolling past, one after another, after another, after another. Then he tried to jump in, he says, but could not. So he stood till dawn and felt them come and go and well in and draw back and heard their cries and the little thing that said,

" 'Wait.'

"And in the dawn of the next day he came back to the village a broken man. And he sat in the square with the old men, he in the best of his manhood, and his mouth slackened and his face fell away and mostly he said nothing, except 'I can hear well enough' or otherwise 'I wait,' these two things only.

"And two or three or ten years ago he put up his head and said, 'Do you not hear the little thing, dancing?' And they said no, but he went in, and made his bed businesslike, and called his neighbours and gave Jeanne the key to his seachest and stretched himself out, all thin as he was and wasted, and said, 'In the end I waited longest, but now I hear it stamping, the little thing is impatient, though I have been patient enough.' And at midnight he said, 'Why, there you are, then,' and so he died.

"And the room smelled of apple blossom and ripe apples together, Jeanne said. And Jeanne married the butcher and bore him four sons and two daughters, all of them lusty, but ill-disposed for dancing."

No, I have not told it like Gode. I have missed out patterns of her voice and have put in a note of my own, a literary note I was trying to avoid, a kind of prettiness or portentousness which makes the difference between the tales of the Brothers Grimm and La Motte Fouqué's

Undine.

I must write what I saw, and worse, if I can, what I thought. As Gode's story went on, I saw Christabel knit faster and faster, with her shining head bent over her work. And then after a time she laid her work by, and put her hand to her breast and to her head, as though she was hot, or had not enough air. Then I saw my father take that wandering little hand and hold it in his. (It is not so little, neither; that is a poeticism; it is a strong enough hand, nervous but capable.) And she let him hold it. And when the tale was over, he bent his head and kissed her hair. And she put up her other hand and clung to his.

We looked so like a family, round that fire. I have been used to thinking of my father as old, old. And of "my cousin" Christabel as a young woman something of my own age, a friend, a confidante, an example.

But she is in truth much older than I am, if still nearer in age to me than to him. And he is not old. She told him his hair was not grey, that he was not old like Merlin.

I do not want it that way. I wanted her to stay, to be a friend, to be a companion.

Not to replace me. Not to replace my mother.

Those are distinct things. I have not aspired to my mother's place, but my place is what it is because she is not there. And I do not want another to have the care of my father, or the first right to hear his thoughts or his discoveries.

Or steal his kiss, write it, that is what I felt, or steal his kiss.

I did not offer to embrace him when we went to bed. And when he put out his arms, I went in and out of them quickly, stiff and dutiful. I did not look to see how he received this. I ran up to my room, and closed the door.

I must guard myself from behaving improperly. I have no right to resent a natural kindness, to fear an event he might think I should welcome, for I have complained often enough of the dull life we lead here.

A thief in the night, I want to cry, a thief in the night.

Better write no more.

NOVEMBER

My father takes much pleasure in her company these days. I remember when I was glad when she began to talk to him, for I thought then she would not go away and our household would be livelier. She asks him good questions, better than I do, or did, for her interest is newer and she brings him new information, different reading, her father's and her own. Whereas all my ideas-save those which are mine, and do not interest him, for he would see them as trivial and female and ungrateful-all my ideas that would interest him are his own. And of late, before she came, I had not shown much interest in all this, the eternal mist and rain and the angry Ocean and Druids and dolmens and all those old magics. I wanted to know about Paris, and walk its streets in trousers and boots and an elegant jacket, like Mme Sand, free and not in the vapourising solitude. So maybe I failed him, thinking of myself and thinking-in part-that he had failed me, not seeing I might have other needs. He treats her with such respect, his voice comes to life when he tells her things. He said today it did him so much good to feel her interest in his ideas. Those were his very words. "It does me so much good to feel you take an interest in these recondite matters."

They talked over our midday meal about the intersection of this world and that other. He said, as he has often said, that in our part of Brittany-la Cornouaille, l'Armorique-there is a persistence of the ancient Celtic belief that death is simply a step-a passage-between two stages of a man's existence. That there are many stages, and this life is one, and that many worlds exist simultaneously, round and about each other, interpenetrating perhaps here and there. So that in uncertain areas-the dark of night, or sleep, or the curtain of spray where the solid earth meets the running Ocean, which is itself always a threshold of death for men who cross and recross it-messengers might hover between states. Such as Gode's little dancing thing. Or owls or those butterflies who have been known to be blown in off the salt wastes of the Atlantic.

He said that the Druid religion as he understood it had a mysticism of the centre-there was no linear time, no before and after-but a still centre-and the Happy Land of Sid-which their stone corridors imitated, pointed to.

Whereas for Christianity this life was all, as the life was our testing-ground, and then there were Heaven and Hell, absolute.

But in Brittany a man could fall down a well and find himself in a summer land of apples. Or catch a fish-hook on the bell tower of a drowned church in another country.

"Or walk through the gate of a barrow into Avallon," she said.

She said, "I have been asking myself whether the current interest in the spirit-world is an indication that the Celts have the right view of these matters. For Swedenborg went into the world of spirits and saw, he says, successive states of being, all being purified, all with their own homes and temples and libraries in their own kinds. And of late there have been many moved to seek apparent messages from the debatable lands beyond the veil that separates this world from the next. I have seen a few small unexplainable acts, myself. Spirit-wreaths brought by unseen hands, shining white, of unearthly beauty. Messages tapped painfully out by little hands that found this mode of communication infinitely clumsy for their now-refined nature, and yet persisted, out of love for those left behind. Music played by invisible hands on an accordion placed under a velvet pall out of reach of all. Moving lights."

I said, "I do not believe that these drawing-room tricks have anything to do with religion. Or with whatever it is that we hear in our streams and fountains here."

She seemed surprised at my vehemence.

"That is because you make the mistake of supposing that spirits dislike vulgarity as much as you do. A spirit may speak to a peasant like Gode, because that is picturesque, she is surrounded by Romantic crags on the one hand and primitive enough huts and hearths on the other, and her house is lapped by real thick mortal dark. But if there are spirits, I do not see why they are not everywhere, or may not be presumed to be so. You could argue that their voices may well be muffled by solid brick walls and thick plush furnishings and house-proud antimacassars. But the mahogany-polishers and the drapers' clerks are as much in need of salvation-as much desirous of assurance of an afterlife-as poets or peasants, in the last resort. When they were sure in their unthinking faiths-when the Church was a solid presence in their midst, the Spirit sat docile enough behind the altar rails and the Souls kept-on the whole-to the churchyard and the vicinity of their stones. But now they fear they may not be raised, that their lids may not be lifted, that heaven and hell were no more than faded drawings on a few old church walls, with wax angels and gruesome bogies-they ask, what is there? And if the man in shiny boots and gold watch-chain or the woman in bombazine and whalebone stays, with her crinoline hoop-lifter for crossing puddles-if these fat and tedious people want to hear spirits as Gode does, why may they not? The Gospel was preached to all men, and if we exist in successive states, the materialists among us must waken in this world and the next. Swedenborg saw them sweat unbelief and rage like heaps of glistening maggots."

"You move too quickly for me to argue," I said sullenly enough, "But I have read about table-turning and spirit rappings in Papa's magazines and I say it sounds like conjuring tricks for the credulous."

"You have read accounts by sceptics," she said, all fire. "Nothing is easier to mock."

"I have read accounts by believers," I said staunchly. "I have recognised credulity."

"Why are you so angry, Cousin Sabine?" said she.

"Because I have never heard you say what was silly before now," I said, and that was true, though doubtless it was not why I was angry. "One may conjure real daemons with drawing-room conjuring tricks," said my father, meditatively.

NOVEMBER

I have always thought of myself as an affectionate being. I have complained of not having enough people to love, or make much of. I do think it is true to say I have had no experience of hatred until this time. I dislike the hatred, which seems to come from outside myself and take possession of me, like some great bird fixing its hooked beak in me, like some hungry thing with a hot pelt and angry eyes that look out of mine that leaves my better self, with her pleasant smile and her serviceableness, helpless. I fight and fight and no one seems to notice. They sit at table and exchange metaphysical theories and I sit there like a shape-changing witch, swelling with rage and shrinking with shame, and they see nothing. And she changes in my sight. I hate her smooth pale head and her greeny eyes and her shiny green feet beneath her skirts, as though she was some sort of serpent, hissing quietly like the pot in the hearth, but ready to strike when warmed by generosity. She has huge teeth like Baba Yaga or the wolf in the English tale who pretended to be a grandmother. He gives her my tasks when she asks him for employment, and salts the wound by saying "Sabine was finding all this copying burdensome, it is good to have other so-skilled hands and eyes." He strokes her hair as he passes her, the coil on her neck. She will bite him. She will.

At the time I write this I know I am absurd.

And when I write that, I know I am not.

NOVEMBER

Today I set out for a long walk along the cliff. It wasn't a good day for a walk, there were great solid patches of mist and spindrift-and quite a powerful wind. I took Dog Tray. I did not ask her if I might. I took pleasure in the idea that he will follow me anywhere now, although she said he was a dog who loved exclusively and once only.

He loves me, I am sure, and his mood suits mine, for he is a sorrowful and reserved sort of beast, he makes his way purposefully in the weather, but he does not play, or smile, as some dogs do. His love is a sad offer of trustfulness.

She came after me. That has never happened. All those times when I hoped she might come or follow, she never came, unless I begged, or cajoled for her own good. But when I walk to escape her, she comes running after, hurrying a little without wishing to be seen to hurry, in her great cape and hood, with the silly umbrella flapping and creaking in and out in the wind and of no particular use at all. That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

There is the walk which passes all the monuments-the Dolmen, the fallen menhir, the little Lady Chapel with its granite image on its granite table, not so different from the rough stone of the first two, and probably made from part of one or the other.

She caught me up and said, "Cousin Sabine, may I go with you?”

“As you will," I said, with my hand on the dog's shoulder. "As you please, of course." We walked a little, and she said, "I fear I have offended you in some way?

"Not in the least, not at all."

"You have all been so kind to me, I have truly felt I have found a sanctuary, a kind of home, here in my father's country.”

“My father and I are glad of that.”

“I do not feel you are glad. I have a sharp tongue and a thorny exterior. If I have said anything-"

"You have not."

"But I have intruded into your peace? Yet you did not seem wholly satisfied with your peace-in the beginning." I could not speak. I quickened my step and the dog loped after. "All that I touch," she said, "is damaged.”

“As to that, I know nothing, for you have told me nothing." It was she who was silent, then, for a time. I walked quicker and quicker; it is my country, I am young and strong; she had some difficulty in keeping up.

"I cannot tell," she said, after a time. Not plaintively, that is not her way, but sharply, almost impatiently. "I cannot make confidences.

It is not in me. I keep to myself, I survive in that way, only in that way. And that is not true, I wanted to say, but did not. You do not treat my father as you treat me.

"Perhaps you do not trust women," I said. "That is your right."

"I have trusted women-" she began, and did not finish. Then "That did harm. Great harm."

She sounded portentous, like a sibyl. I went quicker. She sighed after a little and said her side hurt her, she would go back. I asked if she needed to be accompanied. I asked in such a way that pride must make her refuse, as it did. I put a hand out to the hound, and willed him to stay, which he did. I watched her turn back with her hand to her side and her head down into the wind, toiling a little. I am young, I thought, and should have added "and bad," but did not. I watched her go and smiled. Part of me would have given almost anything for things to have been as they were before, for her not to be melodramatic and pitiful, but all I did was smile and then stride on, because I am at least young and strong.

[Note by Ariane Le Minier] Here there are some pages missing, and what is written becomes perfunctory and repetitive. I have not made photocopies of the rest of this month until the evening of Christmas. You may see this material if you wish.

CHRISTMAS NIGHT 1859

We all went to hear Mass at the church at midnight. My father and I always go. My grandfather would not enter the church; his principles were republican and atheist. I am not sure that my father's religious beliefs would please the Curé, if he were to discuss them with him, which he does not. But he believes strongly in the continuance of the life of the community, the Breton people, which includes Christmas and all its meanings, old and new. She says she is a member of the Church of England in England, but that here the faith of her fathers is the Catholic faith, in its Breton form. I think that the curé would be surprised to know what she thinks also, but he seems to welcome her into his church, and respects her isolation. She has been going up to the church more and more during Advent. She stands in the cold, looking at the work of the sculptor of the Calvary, the crude figures carved with such effort out of intractable granite. Ours has a good St Joseph, holding the ass, on the way to Bethlehem (our church is dedicated to St Joseph). My father spoke of how in our country the animals in the barns have speech on the night of the Nativity, when all the world is reconciled to its maker in primeval innocence, as it was in the days of the first Adam. She said, the Puritan Milton, on the contrary, makes the moment of the Nativity the moment of the death of Nature-at least, he calls on the old tradition that Greek travellers heard the shrines cry out on that night Weep, Weep, the great god Pan is dead. I said nothing. I watched him put his cloak round her shoulders and lead her up to our place in the front of the Church, and saw it, God help me, as a préfiguration of our life to come.

It is always so beautiful when the candles are lit to signify the new world, the new year, the new life. Our heavy little church is not unlike the cave where the birth of Jesus is so often pictured. The people knelt and prayed, shepherds and fishermen. I knelt too, and tried to turn my confused thoughts into some kind of charity and goodwill, to pray in my way. I prayed, as I always pray, that the people would understand the spirit in which my father keeps those festivals only that he considers universal-for him, the nativity is the winter solstice, the turning of the earth to the light. The Curé is afraid of him. He knows he should remonstrate, and dare not.

I saw that she was not kneeling, and then that she was lowering herself, after all, rather carefully, as though she felt faint. When we were seated again, after the candles were lit, I looked to see if she was well, and understood. She was leaning back, in the corner of the bench, with her head against a pillar and her eyes and lips tightly closed, wearily closed, but not patiently. She was shadowed, the church-shadows swallowed her, but I saw she was pale. She had her hands clasped under her bosom, and some trick of the twist of her body, some ancient protectiveness in those hands made me see clearly what she had concealed and what I, a good countrywoman and mistress of a household, should have understood long ago. I have seen too many women hold their hands so to be mistaken. Leaning like that, I could see how she is stout. She came to us for sanctuary indeed. Much, if not all, is explained.

Gode knows. She is quick-eyed and wise about these things.

My father knows, I think, he must have known for some time, if not before she came. What he feels is pity and protectiveness, I see it now; I have read sentiments that did not exist except in my own fevered imagination.

What shall I say or do?

DEC. 3

I see I shall dare to say nothing to her. I went up to her room in the afternoon, with a gift of barley sugar and a book I had borrowed in earlier times before I grew angry. I said to her,

"I am sorry to have been so disagreeable, Cousin. I have been misunderstanding things.”

“Indeed," she said, not so agreeably. "I am glad you find it to be a misunderstanding.”

“Oh, I know how things are, now," I said. "I wish to be good to you. To help you."

"You know how things are now, do you?" she said slowly. "You know how things are. Do we ever know that about a fellow-creature? Tell me then, Cousin Sabine, how do you think thingsare with me?"

And she stared at me with her white face and her pale eyes, defying me to speak. If I had, if I had uttered it, what could she have done or said? It is so, I know it. But I stammered, I did not know what I meant, I believed I had made her unhappy, and then, as she stared on, I burst into tears.

"Things are well enough with me," she said. "I am a grown woman, and you are a young girl, full of the fancies and instability of youth. I can look after myself. I do not desire help from you, Sabine. But I am glad you are no longer so full of rage. Rage hurts the spirit, as I know to my cost."

I felt she knew all, all I had suspected and feared and resented. And that she did not choose to forgive me. And then I was angry again, in my turn, and went out still weeping. For she says she does not need help, but she does, she has already requested it, that is why she is here. What will become of her? Of us? Of the child? Shall I speak to my father? I still feel she is like Aesop's frozen serpent. A figure of speech may get hold of your imagination even when its appositeness is worn away. In which case which of us is the serpent? But she looked at me so coldly. I wonder if she is a little mad.

[LATEJAN] Today I made up my mind to speak to my father about Cousin Christabel's state. I have thought of it once or twice, but something has always prevented me. Possibly a fear that he too may reprove me. But the silence lies between me and him. So I waited until she had gone away to the church-any practised eye could tell her condition by now, for sure. She is too little in stature to disguise it. I went in to my father and said very quickly, before I could be deflected from my purpose, "I wish to talk to you about Christabel.”

“I have noticed, with regret, that you seem to show her less affection than you did.”

“As to that, I do not think she wants my affection. I misunderstood. I thought she was growing so close to you that I-that there was no space left for me.”

“That was most unjust. Both to her and to me.”

“I know now, for I have seen, father, I have seen her condition, which is unmistakable. I was blind, but now I see." He turned his face away to the window and said, "I do not think we should speak of that.”

“You mean, you do not think I should.”

“I do not think we should.”

“But what is to become of her? Of the child? Are they to stay here always? I am the mistress of this house, I wish to know, I need to know. And I wish to help, Father, I wish to help Christabel.”

“The best way to help her seems to be by maintaining silence." He sounded puzzled. I said, "Well, if you know what she intends, I am content, I will be quiet and say no more. I only wish to help.”

“Ah, my dear," he said, "I know no more than you do, of what she intends. I am as much in the dark as you are. I offered a home, as she requested-'for some time' was all she said in her letter. But she has not allowed me to speak of-the reason for her need. Indeed, it was Gode who enlightened me, very early. It may be that she will turn to Gode, when the time comes. She is our kin-we offered sanctuary.”

“She must speak of her trouble," I said.

"I have tried," he said. "She turns it all aside. As though she wished to deny her state, even to herself."

FEBRUARY

I have noticed that I have lost pleasure in this journal. For some time now it has been neither writer's exercise nor record of my world, only a narrative of jealousy and bafflement and resentment. I have noticed that writing such things down does not exorcise them, only gives them solid life, as the witch's wax dolls take on vitality when she warms them into shape before pricking them. I did not start this journal to be a confidante for my spying on another's private pain. Also I am afraid that it might be read, by accident, and misconstrued. So, for all these reasons, and as a kind of spiritual discipline, I shall give it up for the time being.

APRIL

I am witnessing something so strange, so strange I must write about it, though I said I would not, in order to help myself to understand. My cousin is now so big, so ripe, so heavy, it must be soon, and yet she has allowed no word of discussion of her condition or her expectations. And she has us all under some spell, for no one of us dare take her to task, or bring into the open, to be spoken of, what is already in full view and yet hidden. My father says he has several times tried to make her speak of it, and has always been unable. He wants to tell her that the child is welcome; it is, as she is, our kin, whatever its origins, and we will care for it and see it is well brought up and wants for nothing. But he says he cannot speak, and this for two reasons. One, that she daunts him, she prohibits him absolutely with her eye and manner from opening the subject, and though he knows he is morally required to do so he cannot. The second is that he is truly afraid that she is mad. That she is somehow fatally split in two, and that she has not let her conscience and public self know what is about to happen to her. And although he feels she must be prepared he fears also to set about it wrongly and shock her into complete alienation and frenzy and despair, and perhaps kill both. He heaps little loving-kindnesses upon her, and she accepts all, gracefully, like some princess, as a kind of due, and talks to him of Morgan le Fay, Plotinus, Abelard and Pelagius as one rendering courteous payment for favours. Her mind is clearer than ever. She is quick and razor-sharp and witty. My poor father feels, as I do, a growing sense of madness in himself, to be driven by courtesy and what was once a pleasure into these elaborate disputations and recensions and recitations, when what should be talked of is solid flesh and practical provisions.

I said to him, she is not so unknowing, for her clothes have been let out, around the waist, under the arms, with firm enough lines of stitching, with intelligent care. He said he doubted but that was Gode's work, and we resolved that if we had neither courage nor hardness enough to confront Christabel we would at least find out what Gode knew, whether she had been privileged, as was possible, even probable, with any confidence. But Gode said no, the needlework was not hers, and Mademoiselle had always turned the conversation, as though she had misunderstood, when Gode had offered help. 'She drinks my tisanes, but as though she did it indulgently to please me,' Gode said. Gode said she had known cases like it, of women who had resolutely refused to know their state and yet had been brought to bed as sweetly and easily as any heifer in the barn. And others, she said, more gloomily, who had broken themselves up fighting, and so killed either or both, mother and child. Gode thinks we may leave it to her-she will know by certain sure signs when the time is come, and will give my cousin drinks to calm her, and then bring her to her senses all practically at the last. I think Gode has the measure of most men or women, at least where they are most animal and instinctive, but not at all certainly of my cousin Christabel.

I have considered writing her a letter, setting out our fears and knowledge, on the grounds that she reads easier than she speaks, and could reflect alone upon these careful words. But I cannot conceive how to cast such a letter, or how she would respond.

TUESDAY

During all this late time she has been very good to me, in her way, discussing this and that, asking to see my work, embroidering me, in secret, a little case for my scissors, a pretty thing with a peacock on it in blue and green silks, all eyes. But I cannot love her as I did, because she is not open, because she withholds what matters, because she makes me, with her pride or her madness, live a lie.

Today we were able to be in the orchard, under the cherry blossom, talking of poetry, and she brushed falling petals off her full skirt with apparent unconcern. She talked of Melusina and the nature of epic. She wants to write a Fairy Epic, she says, not grounded in historical truth, but in poetic and imaginative truth-like Spenser's Faerie Queene, or Ariosto, where the soul is free of the restraints of history and fact. She says Romance is a proper form for women. She says Romance is a land where women can be free to express their true natures, as in the lie de Sein or Sid, though not in this world.

She said, in Romance, women's two natures can be reconciled. I asked, which two natures, and she said, men saw women as double beings, enchantresses and demons or innocent angels.

"Are all women double?" I asked her. "I did not say that," she said. "I said all men see women as double. Who knows what Melusina was in her freedom with no eyes on her?"

She spoke of the fishtail and asked me if I knew Hans Andersen's story of the Little Mermaid who had her fishtail cleft to please her Prince, and became dumb, and was not moreover wanted by him. "The fishtail was her freedom," she said. "She felt, with her legs, that she was walking on knives."

I said I had terrible dreams of walking on knives since reading that tale, and that pleased her. And so she talked on, of the pains of Melusina and the Little Mermaid; and of her own pain to come, nothing.

Now I am clever enough to recognise a figure of speech or a parable, I hope, and I see that it could well be thought that she was telling me, in her own riddling way, of the pains of womanhood. All I can say, is that at the time it did not feel so. No, her voice flashed, with all the assurance of her needle when she sews, fabricating a pretty pattern. And under the dress I swear I saw that move, which was not her, and was not acknowledged by all her brightness.

APRIL 30

I can't sleep. I shall take the gift she gave me and write, then, write what she has done. We have been looking for her for two days. She went out yesterday morning to walk up to the church, as she has increasingly done over these last weeks. It turns out that the villagers have seen her, standing they say for long periods, and tracing the history of the life and death of the Virgin round the base of the Calvary, leaning against it to catch breath, tracing the little figures with her fingers "like a blind woman" one said, "like a carver" another said. And she has spent hours in the church praying too, or sitting quietly, that we knew, that all of us knew, we and the people, with her head covered with a black shawl and her hands clenched in her lap. They saw her yesterday, as usual, go in. No one saw her come out, but she must have come out.

We didn't begin to look until dinner-time. Gode came and stood in my father's room and said, "I should take out the horse and trap, Monsieur, for the young woman is not back, and her time was near."

And our minds filled with terrible pictures of my cousin fallen and in pain, perhaps in a ditch or a field, or maybe a barn. So we took out the horse and trap, and drove all along the roads, between the stone walls, looking into hollows and isolated huts, calling sometimes, but not often, for we felt a sort of shame, for ourselves that we had lost her, for her that she had strayed, in the state she was in. This was a horrid time, for all of us I know, for me most certainly. Every inch was painful-I think uncertainty is maybe more painful than any other emotion, it both drives one on and disappoints and paralyses, so that we went on in a mounting kind of suffocation and bursting. Every large dark patch-a gorse bush with a rag caught on it, an abandoned worm-eaten barrel-were objects of terrible hope and fear. We climbed up to the Lady Chapel and peered in through the mouth of the Dolmen, and saw nothing. And so we went on until it grew dark, and then my father said, "Heaven forbid she has fallen over the cliff."

"Perhaps she is with one of the village people," I said. "They would have told me," said my Father. "They would have sent for me."

Then we decided to search the shore-we constructed great torches, as we do for times when boats are driven on the coast and there are survivors, or wreckage, to be picked up. Yannick built a small fire and my father and I ran from cove to cove, calling and waving our torches. Once I heard a crying sound, but it was only a disturbed gull's nest. We went on like that, without food, without respite, under the moon, until after midnight, and then my father said we must go home, news might have come in our absence. I said, surely not, they would have sent to find us, and my father said, they are too few to tend a sick woman and fetch us from here. So we went home with a sort of half-hope, but there was nothing and no one, except Gode, who had been conjuring the smoke, and said nothing would be known before the morrow.

Today we aroused the neighborhood. My father, his pride and his hat in his hand, knocked at all the doors and asked if anyone had knowledge of her-and all denied it, though it was established that she had been in the church in the morning. The peasants came out and searched the fields and lanes again. My father went to see the Curé. He does not like to see the Curé, who is not an educated man, and embarrasses both himself and my father by knowing that he should try to argue with my father's religious views, which he must see as most irreligious. For he dare not argue-he would lose and he would lose respect in the neighbourhood, if it were known that he had interfered with M. de Kercoz, however much in the interest of his immortal soul.

The Curé said, "I am sure Le Bon Dieu has good care of her."

My father said, "But have you seen her, mon père?"

The Curé said, "I saw her in church this morning."

My father thinks the Curé may know where she is. For he did not offer to come out and join the searchers, as he should surely have done, if his mind had been unquiet? But then again, the Curé is fat and closed up in his fat, and unimaginative and stupid and might well have simply supposed that the searching was being adequately done by the young and agile. I said, "How should the Curé know?" And my father said, "She might have asked him for help."

I could not imagine how anyone could ask the Curé for help, let alone in such a circumstance. He has staring eyes and a blubber mouth and lives for his stomach. But my father said, "He visits the Convent of St Anne, on the road into Quimperlé, where the Bishop has made provision for the care of cast-out and fallen women."

"He could not send her there," I said. "It is an unhappy place."

Yannick's sister's friend, Malle, was brought to bed there, when her parents cast her off and no one claimed her child, for no one, it was said, could be certain whose it was. Malle claimed that the nuns pinched her and made her do penance of foul scrubbing and carrying all sorts of dirt, when she was barely delivered. The child died, Malle said. She went into service as a housemaid in Quimper, with a chandler's wife, who beat her unmercifully, and did not live long.

"Perhaps Christabel asked to go there," my father said.

"Why should she do that?"

"Why should she do anything she has done? And where is she, for we have searched and searched? And no one has been cast up from the sea.

I said we could at least ask the nuns. My father will drive down to the Convent tomorrow.

I feel sick at heart. I am afraid for her, and angry too, and sorry for my father, a good man burdened with grief and anxiety and shame. For now we all know, that unless she has had an accident, she has run away from our offer of shelter. Or else they suppose we cast her out, which is also a disgrace, as we never should.

But perhaps she is lying dead in some cave, or on the shore of some cove we cannot climb to. Tomorrow I will go out again. I cannot sleep.

MAY 1ST

Today my father drove to the convent and back. The Mother Superior gave him wine, he says, and said no one answering Christabel's name or description had been brought to the convent that week. She said she would pray for the young woman. My father asked to be told if she found her way there. "As to that," said the nun, "that depends on what the woman herself says, seeking sanctuary."

"I wish her to know that we offer her, her and her child, a home with us, and care for as long as she requires it," my father said.

And the nun: "I am sure she must already know that, wherever she is. Perhaps she cannot come to you, in her trouble. Perhaps she will not, for shame, or for other reasons."

My father tried to tell the nun about Christabel's mad obstinacy in silence, but she became, apparently, brusque and impatient, and turned him away. He did not like the nun, who, he says, enjoyed her power over him. He is much set back and depressed.

MAY 8TH

She is back. We were at table, my father and I, sadly enough, going over yet again our talk of where we might have looked, or whether she went away in the two carts or the innkeeper's trap that went through the village on that fateful day, when we heard wheels in the courtyard. And before we were up, there she was in the doorway. This second sight of her-a revenant in broad day-was more terribly strange than her first coming in the night and the storm. She is thin and frail, and she has pulled in her clothes with a great heavy leather belt. She is as white as bone, and all her bones seem to have dispossessed her flesh, she is all sharp edges and knobs, as though the skeleton were trying to get out. And she has cut off her hair. That is, all the little curls and coils are gone-she has a kind of cap of dull pale spikes, like dead straw. And her eyes look pale and dead out of deep hollows.

My father ran to her, and would have put his arms tenderly round her, but she put up a bony hand and pushed him back. She said,

"I am quite well, thank you. I can stand on my own feet."

And so, with great care, and with what I can only call a proud creeping, she made her way, infinitely slowly, but always upright, to the side of the fire and sat down. My father asked if we should not carry her upstairs, and she said no, and repeated "I am quite well, thank you." But she accepted a glass of wine and some bread and some milk, and drank and ate almost greedily. And we sat round, open-mouthed, and ready to ask a thousand questions, and she said: "Do not ask, I beg you. I have no right to ask favours. I have abused your kindness, as you must see it, though I had no choice. I shall not abuse it much longer. Please ask nothing."

How can I write what we feel? She forbids all normal feeling, all ordinary human warmth and communication. Does she mean, that is, does she fear or expect, to die here, when she talks of not abusing our kindness much longer? Is she mad, or is she very clever and secret, is she working out a plan she has always had, since her coming here? Will she stay, will she go?

Where is the child? We are all in an agony of curiosity, which she has cleverly, or desperately turned against us, making it seem a kind of sin, prohibiting all normal solicitude and questioning. Is it live or dead? Boy or girl? What does she mean to do?

I will write here, for I am ashamed, and yet it is an interesting part of human nature, that it is impossible to love where there is such lack of openness. I feel a kind of terrible pity when I see her thus, with her bony face and cropped head, and imagine her pain. But I cannot imagine it well, because she forbids it, and in a strange way her prohibition turns my concern into a kind of anger.

MAY 9TH

Gode said, if you take the shirt of a little child and float it on the surface of the feuteun ar hazellou, the fairy fountain, you may see if the child will grow to be lusty, or if it will be weak or die. For if the wind fills the arms of the shirt, and if the body of it swells and moves across the water, the child will live and flourish. But if the shirt is limp, and takes water, and sinks, the child will die.

My father said, "Since we have neither child nor shirt, this divination is not much use." She made no little shirts, during those months, only pretty pen-cases and my scissor-case, and the mending of sheets. She stays in her room mostly. Gode says she is not fevered, nor in decline, but very weak.

Last night I had a nightmare. We were by the side of a great pool, very black, with a surface like jet, lumpy, with a sheen on it. We were surrounded by hollies, a thick hedge of them-when I was a girl, we used to pick the leaves, and prick our fingers ever so slightly from thorn to thorn, moving around the circumference, "II m'aime, il ne m'aime pas." I taught this to Christabel, who said holly was better for this game of chance, which in England is played with the petals of daisies, which they tear off, one by one. In my dream I was afraid of the holly. I feared it as one automatically fears snakebite, if something rustles in the undergrowth.

In my dream we were several women by the edge of the water-as in many dreams it was not possible to see how many-I was aware of some behind my shoulders crowding me. Gode was launching a small parcel-at one point this was all swaddled and wrapped, like pictures of the hiding of Moses among the bulrushes. At another point it was a stiff little nightshirt, all pleated, which sailed out into the centre of the pool-there were no ripples-and then raised its empty arms and struggled with the air, and tried to heave itself out of the thick water, which swallowed it very slowly, more like mud or jelly than water, more like liquid stone, and all the time the thing twisted and waved its-so to speak-hands, for it clearly had no hands.

It is clear enough what all this is about. But the vision changes my sense of the shape of events. When I ask myself, now, what became of the child, I see the black obsidian pool, and the lively white shirt going down.

MAY IOTH

A letter came today for my father from M. Michelet, and enclosed in it one for Christabel. She took it composedly enough, as though she had been expecting it, and then when she saw it properly, caught her breath and put it aside, unopened. My Father says M. Michelet writes that it is sent by a friend, upon a hope rather than a certainty that Miss LaMotte might be with us. He asks us to return it to him, if she is not here, and it goes undelivered. All day she did not open it. I do not know when or if she did.

Note to Maud Bailey from Ariane Le Minier.

Dear Professor Bailey,

Here the journal ends, and the notebook almost ends. It is possible that Sabine de K. took it up in another book; if so, it has not yet been found.

I made up my mind not to tell you much of its content, as I wished you, perhaps a little childishly, to have the narrative shock and pleasure that I had from discovering it. When I return from the Cévennes we must compare notes, youand I and Professor Stern.

I was certainly under the impression that students of LaMotte believe her to have lived a secluded life, in a happy lesbian relationship with Blanche Glover. Do youknow of any lover or possible lover who might have been the father of this child? The question imposes itself - was thesuicideof Blanche connected to the history related in this text? Perhaps you can enlighten me?

I should also tell you that I have made efforts of my own todiscover whether the child survived. The convent of St Anne was the obvious place to look, and I have been there and have convinced myself that there is no trace ofLaMotte in their somewhat scanty records. (Much was cleared out under a zealous Mother Superior in the 1920s who believed dusty papers were an unnecessary waste ofspace and nothing to dowith the timeless mission of the sisterhood.)

I still suspect the Curé, if only because there is no one else, and Icannot quite believe the child was born and murdered in a barn. I imagine it may well not have survived, however.

I enclose a few English poems and parts of poems I found among Sabine's t hings. I have no access to any specimen of LaMotte's handwriting, but I t hink they may be hers, and confirm the view that all was not well?

Sabine 's story after these events is part happy, part sad. She published the t hree novels I wrote of, of which La Deuxième Dahud is much the most i nteresting, and depicts a heroine of powerful will andpassions, an imperious m esmeric presence, and a scorn of the conventional female virtues. She is d rowned in a boating accident, after having destroyed the peace of two h ouseholds, and whilst pregnant with a child whose father may be her meek h usband or herByronic lover, who drowns with her. The strength of the novel i s its use of Breton mythology to deepen its themes and construct its imaginary o rder.

She married in 1863, after a prolonged battle with herfather to be allowed t o meet possible partis. The M. de Kergarouet she married was a dull and m elancholic person, considerably older than she was, who became obsessively d evoted to her, and died of grief, it was said, a year after she died in her third c hild-bed. She bore two daughters, neither of whom survived into adolescence.

I hope all this has been of interest to you, and that we may compare our findings at leisure at some later date.

May I say finally, as I hoped to be able to say during our brief meeting, h ow much I admire your work on liminality. I think from that point of view t oo, you will find poor Sabine's journal interesting. La Bretagne is full of t he mythology of crossing-places and thresholds, as she says.

Mes amitiés

Ariane Le Minier

A page of scraps of poems. Sent by Ariane Le Minier to Maud Bailey.

Our Lady-bearing-Pain

She bore what the Cross bears

She bears and bears again-

As the Stone-bears-its scars

The Hammer broke her out

Of rough Rock's ancient-Sleep-

And chiselled her about

With stars that weep-that weep-

The Pain inscribed in Rock-

The Pain he bears-she Bore

She hears the Poor Frame Crack-

And knows-He'll-come-no More-

It came all so still

The little Thing-

And would not stay-

Our Questioning-

A heavy Breath

One two and three-

And then the lapsed

Eternity-

A Lapis Flesh

The Crimson-Gone

It came as still

As any Stone-

My subject is Spilt Milk.

A white Disfigurement

A quiet creeping Sleek

Of squandered Nourishment

Others in heavy Vase

Raise darkly scented Wine-

This warm and squirted White

In solid Pot-was mine-

And now a paradox

A bleaching blot, a stain

Of pure and innocent white

It goes to Earth again-

Which smelled of summer Hay

Of crunching Cow-Divine-

Of warm flanks and of love

More quiet, more still-than mine

It runs on table top

It drips onto the Ground

We hear its liquid Lapse

Wet on soft dust its sound.

We run with milk and blood

What we would give we spill

The hungry mouths are raised

We spill we fail to fill

This cannot be restored

This flow cannot redeem

This white's not wiped away

Though blanched we seem

Howe'er I wipe and wipe

Howe'er I frantic-scour

The ghost of my spilled milk

Makes my Air sour.