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.”