"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.