“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.'