Possession (55 page)

I see I have written a page now, and all that is of value in it is the
precepts of my cousin Christabel. That is only right—she is the most important person in my life at present, and moreover a shining example because she is both an acknowledged writer of some importance and a woman, thus a sign of hope, a leader, for all of us. I am not sure how much she relishes this role—indeed I think I know very little of what she inwardly thinks and feels. She treats me, in the gentlest way possible, as though she were a governess and I were a tiresome charge, full of enthusiasms, never still, hopelessly ignorant of life.

If she resembles a governess I am sure that she resembles the romantic Jane Eyre, so powerful, so passionate, so observant beneath her sober exterior.

The last two sentences cause me to think of a problem. Am I writing this for Christabel to see, as a kind of
devoir
—a writer’s exercises—or even as a kind of intimate letter, for her to read alone, in moments of contemplation and withdrawal? Or am I writing it privately to myself, in an attempt to be wholly truthful with myself, for the sake of truth alone?

I know
she
would prefer the latter. So I shall lock away this volume—anyway during its earliest life—and write in it only what is meant for my eyes alone, and those of the Supreme Being (my father’s deity, when he does not seem to believe in much older ones, Lug, Dagda, Taranis. Christabel has a strong but peculiarly English devotion to Jesus, which I do not wholly understand, nor is it clear to me what her allegiances are, Catholic or Protestant).

A lesson. Work written only for one pair of eyes, the writer’s, loses some of its vitality, but
en revanche
gains a certain freedom, and rather to my surprise, adult quality. It loses its desire, female as well as infantile, to
charm
.

I shall begin this work by describing Kernemet as it is today, at this hour, four on a dark, autumnal, misty afternoon.

I have spent all my short life—which has at times felt very long and dragging to me—in this house. Christabel was surprised, she said, both by its beauty and by its simplicity. No, I will not say what Christabel said, I will record what I myself notice of what is so familiar that in moods of
ennui
I hardly see it.

Our house is built of granite, like most of the houses on this coast, long and low, with high pointed slate roofs and
pignons
. It stands in a courtyard surrounded by a high wall, to create a space of quiet inside
the wind, as much as to keep out anything. Everything here is built to stand in the streaming winds and beating rain off the Atlantic. The slate is more often glistening with wet than not. I love it also in the summer, when it can shine in the heat. Our windows are deep, and high-arched, like church-windows. Our house has only four major rooms, two upstairs, two down, each with two deep windows, on two walls, to provide light in all weathers. Outside also is a turret, with a dovecot above, and a place for dogs below. Dog Tray, however, and my father’s brach, Mirza, live indoors. Behind the house, sheltered from the Ocean, is the orchard, where I played as a child, which then seemed infinitely spacious and now is cramped. It too is walled with a wall of dry stones and huge sea cobbles which, the peasants say, “spend” the wind, breaking its force among innumerable holes and crannies. In storms, when the wind is in that quarter, the whole wall sings, a stony song like a pebble beach. The whole of this country is full of the song of the wind. When it blows, the people plant their feet more firmly, and so to speak, sing into it, the men deepening their bass, the women raising their tones.

(That is not badly put. And having written it, I am now full of a kind of aesthetic love of my countrymen and of our wind. I would go on, if I were a poet, to write the poem of its keening. Or if I were a novelist I could go on to say that in sober truth its monotonous singing can drive you half mad for silence, in the long winter days, like a man thirsting in a desert. The psalms sing with praise of the cool shelter of rocks in the hot sun. We here are athirst for a drop or two of dry, bright silence.)

In the house, at this time, three people are sitting quietly in three rooms, writing. My cousin and I have the two upper rooms—she has the one that was my mother’s room, where my father has never wanted me to be (nor indeed, have I myself). From these upper rooms it is possible to see across the fields, to the edge of the cliff, and the moving surfaces of the sea. That is, on a bad day, it moves, it heaves. On a good day, it is only the light that appears to move. Is this so? I must check. Another point of interest.

My father has one of the rooms downstairs, which is at once his library and his bedroom. Three walls of his room are lined with books, and he constantly grieves over the terrible effect of the damp sea air
on their pages and bindings. When I was a girl it was one of my tasks to polish the leather covers with a preservative mixture of beeswax and I know not what else—gum arabic? terebinth?—which he had devised himself to protect them. This I did instead of embroidery. I can mend a shirt, I have had, of necessity, to learn that, I can do good plain white sewing—but of the more delicate feminine skills I have none. I remember the sweet smell of the beeswax as pampered young ladies may remember rosewater and essence of violets. My hands were supple and shining with it. In those days we lived largely, the two of us, in that one room, with a good fire, and a kind of pottery stove as well.

My father has the old style of Breton box-bed, like a great cupboard, with its own stairs and ventilated door. My mother’s bed had heavy velvet hangings with braid and embroidery. My father asked me to clean these two months ago; he did not say why; I formed the mad idea that he had some project of marrying me, and was preparing my mother’s room as a bridal chamber. When we took down the hangings they were heavy with dust, and Gode made herself very ill with beating them out in the courtyard, her lungs were stuffed with a lifetime’s (
my
lifetime’s) spiderwebs and filth. And then, when they were beaten, they were nothing, all their substance was gone with their encrustation, so that huge rents and ragged tatters appeared everywhere. Then my father said, “Your cousin from England is coming, and new bed furniture must be had somewhere.” I rode all day to Quimperlé, and asked Mme de Kerléon, who gave me a set in serviceable red linen, for which she had, she said, no foreseeable need. They are embroidered with a border of lilies and briar roses, which my cousin likes very well.

These box-beds, the wooden chambers within chambers, of Brittany, are said to have been devised as protection against wolves. There are still some wolves roaming the high ground and the moorland in this part of the world, or wandering through the forests of Paimpont and Brocéliande. In the past, in the villages and farmhouses, it is said, these beasts used to come into the houses and snatch and carry off the sleeping infants in their cots by the hearth. So the peasants and farmers, to make quite sure of their young ones, would close them inside the box-beds and make the door fast before going out to the fields. Gode says this protects them also against wandering pigs with indiscriminate
snouts and greedy hens who go in and out of the cottages and are not particular about what they tear or stab, an eye or an ear, a tiny foot or hand.

Gode used to terrify me when I was small with these terrible stories. I was afraid of wolves, day and night, and of werewolves too, though I cannot say I have ever seen a wolf, nor certainly heard one, though Gode has held up a finger on snowy nights when
something
has howled, and has said, “The wolves are coming closer; they are hungry.” In this misty land the borderline between myth, legend and fact is not decisive, my father says, as a stone arch might be between this world and another, but more like a series of moving veils or woven webs between one room and another. Wolves come; and there are men as bad as wolves; and there are sorcerers who believe they control such powers, and there is the peasant’s faith in wolves and in the need to put solid doors between the child and all these dangers. In my childhood the fear of the wolves was hardly greater than the fear of being closed in, out of the light, into that box which resembled, at times, a chest or shelf in a family vault as much as a safe retreat (a hermit’s cave when I played at being Sir Lancelot, before I learned I was only a woman and must content myself with being Elaine aux Mains Blanches, who did nothing but suffer and complain and die). It was so dark in that bed, I cried for the light, unless I was very ill or unhappy, when I would curl up in a small ball, like a hedgehog or sleeping caterpillar, and lie still as death, or the time before birth, or between autumn and spring (the hedgehog) or the crawling state and the flying (the grub).

I am now making metaphors. Christabel says that Aristotle says that a good metaphor is the sign of true genius. This piece of writing has come a long way, from its formal beginning, back in time, inward in space, to my own beginnings in a box-bed, inside the chamber inside the manor inside the protecting wall.

I have much to learn about the organisation of my discourse. I wanted, when I was writing about my father’s bed, both to describe my mother’s bed, which followed on, and to construct a disquisition or digression on box-beds and the borderland between fact and fancy which also followed on. I have not been wholly successful—there are awkward gaps and hops in the sequence, like too-great holes in the drystone wall. But something is done, and how
interesting
it all is, seen
as craftwork which can be bettered, or remade, or scrapped as an apprentice piece.

What comes next? My history. The family history. Lovers? I have none, I see no one, I have not only formed no attachment and rejected no offer, I have never been together with anyone who could be thought of in that light. My father seems to think it will all settle itself by some gentle and inevitable process “when the right time comes,” which he believes is still far off—I believe, already almost past and lost. I am twenty years old. I will not write of that. I cannot control my thoughts, and Christabel says that this journal must be free from “the repetitious vapours and ecstatic sighing of commonplace girls with commonplace feelings.”

What is clear is that I have described the house, in part, but not the people. Tomorrow, I shall describe the people. “Action, not character, is the essence of tragic drama,” Aristotle said. My father and cousin were disputing about Aristotle over dinner last night; I have rarely seen my father so lively. I think
inaction
is the essence of tragic drama, in the case of many modern women, but I did not venture upon this near-epigram, as they were disputing in Greek, which Christabel learned from her father, but I do not know. When I think of mediaeval princesses running their households during the Crusades, or prioresses running the life of great abbeys, or St Theresa as a little girl going out to fight evil, as George Sand’s Jacques says, I think a kind of softness has overcome modern life. De Balzac says that the new occupations of men in cities, their work in businesses, have turned women into pretty and peripheral
toys
, all silk, perfume and full of the
fantaisies
and intrigues of the boudoir. I would like to
see
silk floss and experience the atmosphere of a boudoir—but I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write. Is this too much? Is this declaration vapouring?

THURSDAY OCTOBER
14
TH

Today I said I should describe the characters. I find I am afraid, that is the
mot juste
, of describing my father. He has always been there and it has always been only he who was there. My mother is not my mother but one of his tales, which in childhood I could not tell from truth,
although he always scrupulously insisted that I be truthful. My mother came from the South, she was born in Albi. “She missed the sun,” he would say. I have a clear image of her deathbed. She called to see me, he told me, she was wild with agitation over what would become of me, in this rough land, with no mother to care for me. She cried and cried, her force was spent even for living, to see the child, and when I was brought, she was calm, she turned her white face to me and was calm, he says. He says that he promised to be father and mother to me, both, and she said he would do better to marry again, and he said no, that could never be, he was one of those who only love once. He has tried to be father and mother to me both, but poor good man, he has not much skill at the practical side of things—he is gentle enough and kind, it is not that. It is more that he cannot make practical decisions as a woman would. And that he has no knowledge of what I fear. Or desire. But he took me in his arms with infinite gentleness when I was an infant, I remember that, he kissed and comforted me, and read me tales.

I see one of my faults as a writer will be a tendency to rush off in all directions at once.

I am afraid to describe my father because what is between us is accepted and unspoken. I hear his breathing in the house at night, I should know immediately if it faltered or stopped. I should know, I think, if anything happened to him, even if I were a great distance away. And he would know if I were in danger, or sick, I know. He appears to be very abstracted, very bound up in his work, but he has a sixth sense, an inner ear, which hears me. When I was a tiny child he would attach me to his desk with a great band of linen, like a long rope, and I would run in and out of his room and the great room quite contentedly. He has a book with an old emblem of Christ and the Soul where the Soul runs free in the household on just such a linen tie; he says it gave him the idea. I have since read
Silas Marner
, the story of an old bachelor who attaches a foundling to his loom in the same way. I feel his anger and his love as gentle tugs on that limiting linen band, whenever I think too rebelliously, or ride too fast. I do not wish to try to write of him too objectively. I love him like the air and the hearthstones, the wind-twisted apple tree in the orchard and the sound of the sea.