Yet do not on that account cease to write to me - if I skimp a little on the Fairy-cakes - and write you a truncated and scanty answer -and procrastinate - notunfruitfully - one more day for the Melusina - all may be botched together somehow.
You say you cannot imagineJane. Well -I will tell you, this much - she has a Sweet Tooth - a very sweet tooth. It is beyond her powers to let be a set of little milk-jellies - or delicious macaroons - orbrandy-snaps - in the Larder - without abstracting one insignificant exemplar here - or indenting a Spoon there and leaving traces of her gourmandise. So it is with my sad Self and the inditing of letters. I will not do it I say, until this is quite done - or that embarked on - but in my mind runs an answer to thisthat or the other - and I say to myself - if this argument were disposed of (if just that sweetmeat were tasted and slid down) my mind would be my own again, without agitation -
No, but how ungracious to quibble. I was just asserting -I am no Creature of your thought, nor in danger of becoming so - we are both safe in thatregard. Asfor the Chairs and wall-coverings - imagineaway - think what you will - and I shallfrom time to time write a small Clue - sothat you may be the more thoroughlyconfounded. I will say nothing as to clematis and roses - but we have a veryfine Hawthorn - -just now tressed and heavy with pink and creamyblooms and alive with thatalmondsmell - so sweet - too sweet - that the sense aches at it. I will not say where this Tree is - nor how young or old, large or small - so you will be imagining it not as it is indeed- Paradisal and Dangerous - you know the May must never be brought into the house.
Now I must discipline myself- - and address my wandering wits to your momentous questions - or we are swallowed up, both of us, in frippery imaginations, and vain speculations.
I too have seen S.T.C. I was but an infant - his pudgy Hand rested on my golden curls - his Voice remarked on their flaxen paleness - he said - or I have since by thinking created his voicesaying - for I too, like you, must be imagining, I cannot let things alone -I believe he said "It is a beautiful name and will I trust not be a name of ill omen. " Now this is all the Clue I have to the end of the poem of Christabel- that its heroine was destined for tribulation - which is not hard to see - though how she might obtain Happiness thereafter is harder, if not Impossible.
Now I must change my habitual Tone wholly. Now I must write stringently and not fly about distracting you with flappings of tinsel or demoiselle-flickering. What nonsense in you to pretend to fear, or to fear truly perhaps, that I could be anything but wholly gratified by what you say of the Melusina and of my own powers of writing - of what I might do. You have readmy thoughts - or madeclear to me what were my predispositions - not in an intrusive way - but with true insight. She is indeed - myMelusine - -just such a combination of the orderly and humane with the unnatural and the Wild - as you suggest - the hearth-foundress and the destroying Demon. (And female, which you do not remark on.)
I had not known you were a reader of such childish things as Tales Told in November. Those were my Father'stales, aboveall - and told -only- in those dark months to which they belong. He used to say that those collectors or researchers who went to Britanny in the summer months - when the sea smiles sometimes, and the mist lifts from the granite so that it almost shines - might never come by what they looked for. The true tales were only told on dark nights - after Toussaint, All Saints, had passed. And the November Tales were the worst - of revenants,of demons,ofportents, ofthe Prince of the Powers of the Air. And of the Ankou - who drove a terrible chariot, - a creaking groaning grinding sort of a conveyance anyone might hear behind him on a lonely heath on a dark night - -full of dead bones, it might be, heaped and dangling. And the Driver was a Man of Bones - under his huge hat you saw only his hollow Orbits - he was not, you must know, Death, but Death's Servitor - come with his Scythe - whose blade faced not inward for harvesting but outward- -for what? (I can hear myfather's voice on a dark evening, asking - -for what? And if I tell it to you somewhat flatly - why - it is because the days lengthen, and outside a thrush sings and sings in my foamy May - and all this is Out of Time.) If we are still writing letters to each other in November - as why should we? and why should we not? -I can a tale unfold - and shall - quite in my father's manner. After November came the gentler tales of the Birth of Our Lord - you will remember it is a Breton belief that on that holy day the Beasts talk in the Stalls and Byres - but no man may hear what they say, those sage and innocent creatures - on pain of Death -
Now mark - you must write no more of your interest in my work as a possible Intrusion. You do not seem aware, Mr Ash, for all your knowledge of the great world I do not frequent, of the usual response which the productions of the Female Pen - let alone as in our case, the hypothetick productions - are greeted with. The best we may hope is - oh, it is excellently done -for a woman. And then there are Subjects we may not treat - things we may not know. I do not say but that there must be - and is- some essential difference between the Scope and Power of men and our own limited consciousness and possibly weaker apprehension. But I do maintain, as stoutly, that the delimitations are at present, all wrongly-drawn- We are not mere candleholders to virtuous thoughts - mere chalices of Purity - we think and feel, aye and read- which seems not to shock you in us, in me, though I have concealed from many the extent of my - vicarious - knowledge of human vagaries. Now - if there is a reason for my persistence in this correspondence - it is this very unawareness in you - real or assumed - of what a woman must be supposed to be capable of. This is to me - like a strong Bush, well-rooted is to the grasp of one falling down a precipice - here I hold - here I am stayed -
I will tell you a Tale - no I will not neither, it does not bear thinking on - and yet I will, as an instance of trust- towards You.
I sent some of my smaller poems - a little sheaf- - selectedwith trembling - to a great Poet - who shall be nameless, I cannot write his name - asking - Are These Poems? Have I - a Voice? He replied withcourteous promptness - that they were pretty things - not quite regular- and not always well-regulated by a proper sense of decorum - but he would encourage me, moderately - they would do well enough to give me an interest in life until I had -I quote him exactly - "sweeter and weightier responsibilities. " Now how should I be brought by this judgment to desire those- Mr Ash - how? You understood my veryphrase - the Life of Language. You understand - -in my life Three - and Three alone have glimpsed - that the need to set down words - what I see, so - but words too, words mostly - words have been all my life, all my life - this need is like the Spider's need who carriesbefore her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out- the silk is her life, her home, her safety - her food and drink too - and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew - you will say she is patient - so she is - she may also be Savage - it is her Nature - she Must- or die of Surfeit - do you under stand me?
I can write no more at this time. My heart is too full -I have said too much - if I overlook these sheets, my courage will fail me - so they shall go all uncorrected as they are, with their imperfections on their heads - God bless you and keep you.
Christabel LaMotte
M y dear Friend,
I may call myself your friend, may I not? For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth, - even if like the May, only a threshold-presence, by decree. I write to you now in haste - not to answer your last most generous letter - but to impart a vision, before the strangeness of it fades. An answer you shall and must have - but this I must tell you of, before I lose my courage. Are you curious? I hope so. First I must confess my vision occurred in a ride in Richmond Park. And why must I confess this? May a poet and a gentleman not ride out with friends wherever he pleases? I was invited to take exercise with friends in the Park, andfelt a vague unease as though its woody plantations and green spaces were girdled with an unspoken spell of prohibition - as your Cottage is - as Shalott was to the knights - as the woodsof sleep are in the tale, with their sharp briarhedges. Now on the level of tales, you know, allprohibitions are made only to be broken, must be broken - as is indeed instanced in your own Melusina with striking ill-luck to the disobedient knight. It may be even that I might not have come to ride in the park if it had not had the definite glitter and glamour of the enclosedand barred. Though I must add, as a true nineteenth-century gentleman, I did notfeel it was within my right to saunter past the clematis and roses, or the foamy May-tree, as I might so easily and casually have done - pavements arefree places. I will not exchange my imagined rose-bower for reality until I am invited to step inside it - which may be never. So -I rode within thepale of the Park - and thought of those who dwelt so close to its iron gateways - andfancied that at every turn I might see a half-familiar shawl or bonnet whisk out of sight like one of yr own whiteladies - AndI felt a little irritation with the good Quakergentleman whose stolid telluric conditions have so much more confidence-inspiring virtue than the poetic morality of R. H. Ash -