He remembered most, when it was over, when time had run out, a day they had spent in a place called the Boggle Hole, where they had gone because they liked the word. She had taken delight in the uncompromising Northern words, which they had collected like stones, or spiny sea-creatures. Ugglebarnby. Jugger Howe. Howl Moor. She had made notes in her little notebooks of the female names of the Meres or standing stones they met on the moors. Fat Betty, the Nan Stone, Slavering Ciss. "There is a terrible tale to be told," she said, "and a few bright guineas to be earned, of Slavering Ciss." That too had been a good day, with blue and gold weather, a day that had put him in mind of the youth of the Creation.
They had come across summer meadows and down narrow lanes between tall hedges thick with dog-roses, intricately entwined with creamy honeysuckle, a tapestry from Paradise Garden, she said, and smelling so airily sweet, it put you in mind of Swedenborg's courts of heaven where the flowers had a language, and colours and scents were correspondent forms of speech. They came down the lane from the Mill, into the closed cove, and the smell changed to the sharpness of salt, a fresh wind off the northern sea full of brine and turning fish-forms and floating weeds, running away to the northern ice. The tide was in, and they had to make their way tightly under the overhang of the cliff. He watched her move swiftly and surely along. Her arms were spread above her head, her strong small fingers gripping cracks and crannies, her tiny booted feet picking a sure way over the slippery shelves below. The stone was a peculiar gunmetal slate, striated and flaking, dull with no sheen, except where water dripped and seeped from above, bringing with it ruddy traces of earth. The layers of grey were full of the regularly rippled rounds of the colonies of ammonites that lay coiled in its substance, stony forms of life, living forms in stone. Her bright pale head, with its circling braids, seemed to repeat those forms. Her grey dress, with the winds loose in the skirts, blended almost into the grey of the stone. All along those multiplied fine ledges, all through those crazed and intricate fissures, ran hundreds of tiny hurrying spiderlike living things, coloured an intense vermilion. The bluish cast of the grey of the stone increased the brightness of the red. They were like thin lines of blood; they were like a web of intermittent flame. He saw her white hands like stars on the grey stone and he saw the red creatures run through and around them.
Most of all, he saw her waist, just where it narrowed, before the skirts spread. He remembered her nakedness as he knew it, and his hands around that narrowing. He thought of her momentarily as an hour-glass, containing time, which was caught in her like a thread of sand, of stone, of specks of life, of things that had lived and would live. She held his time, she contained his past and his future, both now cramped together, wifh such ferocity and such gentleness, into this small circumference. He remembered an odd linguistic fact- the word for waist in Italian is vita, is life-and this must be, he thought, to do with the navel, which is where our separate lives cast off, that umbilicus which poor Philip Gosse believed had had to be made by God for Adam as a kind of mythic sign of the eternal existence of the past and the future in all presents. He thought too of the Fairy Melusina, a womznjusqu 'au nombril, sinoalla vita, usque ad umbilicum, as far as the waist. This is my centre, he thought, here, at this place, at this time, in her, in that narrow place, where my desire has its end.
On that shore can be found round stones of many kinds of rocks, black basalt, various coloured granites, sandstones and quartz. She was delighted by these, she filled the picnic basket with a heavy nest of them, like ordnance balls, a soot-black, a sulphur-gold, a chalky grey, which under water revealed a whole dappling of the purest translucent pink. "I shall take them home," said she, "and use them to prop doors and to weigh down the sheets of my huge poem, huge at least in mass of paper."
"I shall carry them for you until then."
"I can carry my own burdens. I must."
"Not while I am here."
"You will not be here-I shall not be here-much longer."
"Let us not think of time. "
"We have reached Faust's non-plus. We say to every moment 'Verweile dock, du hist so schôn, ' and if we are not immediately damned, the stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike. But it is open to us to regret each minute as it passes."
"We shall be exhausted."
" 'And is not that a good state to end in? A man might die, though nothing else ailed him, only upon an extreme weariness of doing the same thing, over and over "
"I can never tire of you-of this-"
"It is in the nature of the human frame to tire. Fortunately. Let us collude with necessity. Let us play with it."
"And if we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run."
"A poet after my own heart," she said. "Though not more beloved than George Herbert. Or Randolph Henry Ash."
Chapter 16
THE FAIRY MELUSINE
PROEM
And what was she, the Fairy Melusine?
Men say, at night, around the castle-keep
The black air ruffles neath the outstretched vans
Of a long flying worm, whose sinewy tail
And leather pinions beat the parted sky
Scudding with puddered clouds and black as soot,
And ever and again a shuddering cry
Mounts on the wind, a cry of pain and loss,
And whirls in the wind's screaming and is gone.
Men say, that to the Lords of Lusignan
On their death's day appointed comes a Thing,
Half sable serpent, half a mourning Queen
Crowned and thick-veiled. Then they cross themselves
And make their peace with Heaven's blessed King
And with a cry of pain she vanishes,
Unable, so they say, to hear that Name,
Forever banished from the hope of Heaven.
The old nurse says, within the castle-keep
The innocent boys slept in each other's arms
To keep away the chill from hearts and limbs.
And in the dead of night a slender hand
Would part the hangings, and lift sleepy forms
To curl and suck the mother's milky breasts
As they had dreamed they did, and all the while
Warm tears in silence mingled with the milk