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."