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.