There was more pleasure for Roland and Maud in their walk, the next day, along the becks to the fosses. They walked out from Goathland and saw the threads and glassy interrupted fans of the Mallyan Spout; they scrambled along river paths above the running peaty water, and crossed moorland, scrambling down again to riversides. They found magical patches of greensward between rocks, mown by the incessant attention of nibbling sheep, surrounded by standing stones and mysterious clumps of spotted purple foxgloves. Strange transparent insects whirred past; dippers ran in the shallows; in one marshy place they disturbed whole groups of newly-shining young frogs, which leaped up in little showers of water under their feet. Over lunch, which they ate in one of the grassy clearings near the Nelly Ayre Foss, they discussed progress. Roland had been reading Melusina in bed and was now convinced that Christabel had been in Yorkshire.
"It has to be here. Where do people think it is? It's full of local words from here, gills and riggs and ling. The air is from here. Like in his letter. She talks about the air like summer colts playing on the moors. That's a Yorkshire saying."
"I suppose if it is, no one has noticed it before because they weren't looking. That is-her landscapes were always supposed to be really Brittany, claiming to be Poitou, and heavily influenced by Romantic local colour-the Brontes, Scott, Wordsworth. Or symbolic."
"Do you think she was here?"
"Oh yes. I feel certain. But I've no proof that will stand up. The Hob. The Yorkshire words. Perhaps my brooch. What I can't understand, still, is how he could write all those letters to his wife-it makes me wonder-"
"Perhaps he did love his wife, too. He does say 'when I come back.' He always meant to go back. And he did-we know that. If Christabel was here, it wasn't a question of running away-"
"I wish we knew what it was a question of-"
"It was their business. It was private. I will say though, I feel Melusina is very like some of Ash's poems- The rest of her work isn't at all. But Melusina sounds often as though he wrote it. To me. Not the subject matter. The style."
"I don't want to think that. But I do see what you mean."
The Thomason Foss is reached along a steep track from Beck Hole, a small hamlet in a fold of the moorland hills. They walked to it that way, rather than descending from the moors, so as to approach the pool below the fall. The weather was very lively and full of movement; huge white clouds sailed in a blue sky, above dry stone walls and woodland. Roland discovered on the surface of one of the walls a series of shining silver mates, which proved to be the openings of the lairs of tunnel spiders, who rushed out, waving fierce grasping arms and jaws, when even a thread of their structure was troubled by a straw. Towards the Foss the path descended steeply and they had to clamber among boulders. The water fell amongst a naturally cavernous circle of rocks and lowering brows, in which various saplings struggled for a precarious living; it was dark and smelled cold, and mossy, and weedy. Roland looked at the greenish-goldish-white rush of the fall for a time and then transferred his gaze to the outer edges of the troubled and turning pool. As he looked, the sun came out, and hit the pool, showing both the mirror-glitter from the surface, and various live and dead leaves and plants moving under it, caught as it were in a net of fat links of dappled light. He observed a curious natural phenomenon. Inside the cavern, and on the sides of the boulders in its mouth, what appeared to be flames of white light appeared to be striving and moving upwards. Wherever the refracted light off the water struck the uneven stone, wherever a fissure ran, upright or transverse, this same brightness poured and quivered along it, paleness instead of shadow, building a kind of visionary structure of non-existent fires and non-solid networks of thread inside it. He sat and watched for a time, squatting on a stone, until he lost his sense of time and space and his own precise location and saw the phantom flames as though they were the conscious centre. His contemplation was interrupted by Maud, who came and sat beside him.
"What's absorbing you?”
“The light. The fire. Look at that effect of light. Look how the whole cave roof is alight." Maud said, "She saw this. I'm sure she saw this. Look at the beginning of Melusina. "
Three elements combined to make the fourth.
The sunlight made a pattern, through the air
(Athwart ash-saplings rooted in the sparse
Handfuls of peat in overhanging clefts)
Of tessellation in the water's glaze:
And where the water moved and shook itself
Like rippling serpent-scales, the light ran on
Under the liquid in a molten glow
Of seeming links of chain-mail; but above
The water and the light together made
On the grey walls and roof of the dank cave
A show of leaping flames, of creeping spires
Of tongues of light that licked the granite ledge
Cunningly flickered up along each cleft
Each refractory roughness, creeping up
Making, where shadows should have been, long threads
And tapering cones and flame-like forms of white
A fire which heated not, nor singed, nor fed
On things material, but self-renewed
Burnt on the cold stones not to be consumed
And not consuming, made of light and stone
A fountain of cold fire stirred by the force
Of waterfall and rising spring at once
With borrowed liveliness…
"She came here with him," said Maud. "Even this isn't proof. And if the sun hadn't struck out when it did I wouldn't have seen it. But it is proof, to me."
"I've been reading his poems. Ask to Embla. They're good. He wasn't talking to himself. He was talking to her-Embla-Christabel or- Most love poetry is only talking to itself. I like those poems."
"I'm glad you like something about him."
"I've been trying to imagine him. Them. They must have been- in an extreme state. I was thinking last night-about what you said about our generation and sex. We see it everywhere. As you say. We are very knowing. We know all sorts of other things, too- about how there isn't a unitary ego-how we're made up of conflicting, interacting systems of things-and I suppose we believe that? We know we are driven by desire, but we can't see it as they did, can we? We never say the word Love, do we-we know it's a suspect ideological construct-especially Romantic Love-so we have to make a real effort of imagination to know what it felt like to be them, here, believing in these things-Love-themselves- that what they did mattered-"