The jet, you know, was once alive too. "Certain scientific thinkers have supposed it to be indurated petroleum or mineral pitch - but it is now generally accepted that its origins are ligneous - it is found in compressed masses, long and narrow - the outersurface always marked with longitudinal striae, like the grain of wood, and the transversefracture which is conchoidal and has a resinous lustre, displays the annual growths in compressedelliptical ones." I cite this description from Dr Young, though I have seen such raw lumps of jet in the working-sheds, yes, and held them in my hands, and been moved unspeakably by the tracesof time - growing time long, long, unutterably long past - in their ellipses. They may be contaminated by an excess of siliceous matter in some cases - a craftsman carving a rose, or a serpent, or a pair of hands may suddenly come across a line or flaw of silex or flint in the material and be driven to desist. I have watched such craftsmen work - they are highly specialisedworkers - a carver may pass a brooch on to another who specialises in incising patterns - or gold or ivory or bone-carving may be joined to the jet.
All these new sights and discoveries, my dear, as you may imagine, have started off shoots of poetry in every direction. (I say shoots in Vaughan 's sense, "Bright shoots of everlastingness, " where the word means simultaneously brightness of scintillation and flights of arrows, and growth ofseeds of light -I wish you would despatch to me my Silex scintillans^r I have been thinking much about his poetry and that stony metaphor since I have been working on the rocks here. When your jet brooch comes, I beg you will stroke it and watch how it electrically attracts scraps of hair and paper - it has its own magnetic life in it - and so has always been made use of in charms and white witchcraft and ancient medicines. I divagate without discipline - my mind runs all over -I have a poem I wish to write about modern discoveries of silex-coated twigs in ancient artesian wells, as described by Lyell.)
Now let me know how you are - your health, your householddoings, your reading -
Your loving husband
Randolph
Maud and Roland walked round Whitby harbour and up and down the narrow streets that radiated steeply from it. Where Randolph Ash had noticed busyness and prosperity these noticed general signs of unemployment and purposelessness. Few boats were in the harbour and those there were appeared to be battened down and chained up; no motor sounded, and no sail flapped. There was still a smell of coal smoke, but it carried, for them, different connotations.
The shop-fronts were old and full of romance. A fishmonger's slab was decorated with gaping skeletal shark-jaws and spiny monstrosities; a sweet-shop had all the old jars and pell-mell heaps of brightly-coloured sugary cubes and spheres and pellets. There were several jewellers specialising in jet. They stopped outside one of these: HOBBS AND BELL, PURVEYORS OF JET ORNAMENTS. It was tall and narrow; the window was like an upright box, along the sides of which were festooned rope upon rope of black and glistening beads, some with dangling lockets, some many-faceted, some glossily round. The front of the window was like a sea-chest of wave-tossed treasure, a dusty heap of brooches, bracelets, rings on cracked velvety cards, teaspoons, paperknives, inkwells and a variety of dim dead shells. It was the North, Roland thought, black as coal, solid, not always graceful craftsmanship, bright under dust.
"I wonder," said Maud, "if it would be a good idea to buy something for Leonora. She likes odd pieces of jewellery.”
“There's a brooch there-with forget-me-nots round the edge and clasped hands-that says FRIENDSHIP."
"She'd like that-"
A very small woman appeared in the door of the box-shop. She wore a large apron covered with purple and grey florets, over a skinny black jumper. She had a small hard, brown-skinned face under white hair drawn into a bun. Her eyes were Viking blue and her mouth, when she opened it, contained apparently three teeth. She was puckered but wholesome, like an old apple, and the apron-dress was clean, though her stockings sagged at the ankles over thick black laced shoes.
"Come in, luv, and look around. There's plenty more inside. All good Whitby jet. I don't hold with no imitations. You won't find better." Inside the counter was another glass sarcophagus, inside which were tumbled more strings and pins and heavy bracelets.
"Anything you like the look of, I can easy get out for you."
"That looks interesting."
"That" was an oval locket with a vaguely classical carved figure, full-length, bending over a flowing urn.
"That's a Victorian mourning locket. Probably made by Thomas Andrews. He was jet-maker to the Queen. Those were good days for Whitby, after the Prince Consort died. They liked to be reminded of their dead in those days. Now it's out of sight, out of mind."
Maud put the locket down. She asked to see the clasped-hand FRIENDSHIP brooch, which the old woman reached in from the window. Roland was studying a card of brooches and rings made apparently from plaited and woven silks, some encircled by jet, some studded with pearls.
"This is pretty. Jet and pearls and silk."
"Oh, not silk, sir. That's hair. That's another form of mourning brooch, with the hair. Look, these ones have IN MEMORIAM round the frame. They cut it off at the deathbed. You could say they kept it alive."
Roland peered through the glass at the interwoven strands of fine pale hair.
"They made all sorts of it, very ingenious. Look-here's a plaited watch-chain out of someone's long locks. And a bracelet with a pretty heart-shaped clasp, ever such delicate work, in dark hair."
Roland took the thing, light and lifeless, apart from its gold clasp.
"Do you sell many of these?"
"Oh, now and then. Folk collect them, you know. Folk'll collect anything, given time. Butterflies. Collar-studs. Even my old flatirons, as I used right up to i960, when our Edith insisted on getting me an electric one, I had a man round, asking. And there's a lot of work in that bracelet, young man, a lot of care went into that. And solid gold, 18-carats, which was expensive for them times, when you got pinchbeck and such."
Maud had a row of brooches laid out on the top of the counter.
"I can tell you know a good piece. Now, I've got a real good carved piece you won't see any more of-language of flowers, young man-clematis and gorse and heartsease-which is to say Mental Beauty and Enduring Affection and 'I am always thinking of you.' You should buy that for the young lady. Better than old hair."
Roland made a demurring noise. The old woman leaned forward on her high stool and put out a hand to Maud's green scarf.
"Now that's a good piece such as you won't come across easily- that looks to me like the best of the work out of Isaac Greenberg's Baxtergate undertaking-such as was sent all over Europe to Queens and Princesses. I'd dearly like a close look at that piece, mam, if you could-"
Maud put up her hands to her head, and hesitated between unpinning the brooch and pulling off the whole head-binding. Finally, awkwardly for her, she did both, putting the scarf on the counter, and then unpinning its carefully constructed folds and handing the large black knobby thing to the old woman, who trotted away to hold it up in the dusty light from the window.
Roland looked at Maud. The pale, pale hair in fine braids was wound round and round her head, startling white in this light that took the colour out of things and only caught gleams and glancings. She looked almost shockingly naked, like a denuded window-doll, he at first thought, and then, as she turned her supercilious face to him and he saw it changed, simply fragile and even vulnerable. He wanted to loosen the tightness and let the hair go. He felt a kind of sympathetic pain on his own skull-skin, so dragged and ruthlessly hair-pinned was hers. Both put their hands to their temple, as though he was her mirror.