The Fourth Pig (21 page)

He is far in his ain place, he will come nae mair,

Not in the gowany glen nor along the wave edge bare.

Stand up, thou Self of me, for we maun come to grips!

We will forget the fairy and the light that doonses and dips,

And the eyes and the hands of him, and the brushing of his lips.

V

Oh maybe 'tis my rock

And maybe 'tis my reel,

And whiles it is the cradle

And whiles it is the creel.

Oh maybe 'tis the meal ark

That stands beside the wall,

And maybe 'tis the weaving,

And I'll be seeing to all.

And maybe 'tis the pot,

And maybe 'tis the pan,

But I can write songs as good

As the songs of the fairy man!

THE LITTLE MERMAIDEN

It never does any good, no, never, never. I too remember Dafnia; I too remember the things that happened to her. She! She was always soft and silly, mooning about by the edges. What business has a mermaid to be like that? Any of us like to climb out on to a rock now and then, to get that lovely, dangerous sense of evanescence when the film begins to dry off one in the sun and one's skin tingles to the air; all of us like to lie out on a yellow beach and feel the hot sand wriggle and tickle in under one's scales—when one knows that in a moment one can be plunging back into the clean water. All of us like playing among the weed tangle, rocked in the slippery, purple-brown cradle, parting it with hands and tail. And then there's coming to an estuary, or better, where some quite little stream drops down through rocks and in, where the sweet, flower-tainted water is seized on and ducked and held under by the waves breaking onto its flow, till it gives way and mixes and is taken, it and all its earth-things, its straws and branches and fir-cones, its smell of man and cattle and land-birds. But one can have enough of edges. And then it's out and down, to the deep rhythms, the dark quiet of our own which is so good, so far better than all the crashing and bursting, the flying foam, the angry hollows and retreats of edges. Better above all than shallows and compromise, low-tide pools, places of nets and stakes. For after all, when one has said everything, it yet remains that edges mean man.

But she—it was as though something were wrong deep inside her, something that made her different, even at the beginning, from the rest of us mermaids. It was always edges for her, and warmth and softness; the only game she played was the quicksands game. She would swim with the ships by moonlight; well, we've all done that in our time, but Dafnia never kept her distance, she seemed to forget the chances of their soiling her, she seemed almost to enjoy the smell of cooking and harbours and tarry feet. We warned her, and when we understood that she wouldn't listen to us, we took her to the Queen, our hands bearing on her angry, slippery shoulders, down, down to the still, untainted, deeply salt water and the Green Palace. We left her alone with Queen Thetis and not one of us asked her what was said. But after that she was sulky and not to be spoken to for weeks; she would sit on the bottom with her hair tangled and heavy, and if anything passed her she would hit out at it, snatching the crabs' legs off or grinding stones into the poor soft anemones; even the jelly-fish grew frightened of her and wavered away when they felt her coming. She would only speak to the sea-gulls, and we all know what kinds of shore-tales they have to tell!

And then the storm came, and the rest of us thought we must make it up with Dafnia and get her to come and play the storm-games. We were all tingling and thrilled with it, our strong tails were straightening and threshing among the bursting bubbles, our hair was piled with foam. We went hurrahing through the crests and Dafnia along with us, and we thought now she had become a true mermaid again.

When we came up with the boat, she was already half over, her sail wet and hindering. We went salmon-dancing all round her,
laughing at the gilding on prow and strakes, laughing at the wet men, loosening the little courage they had left. We did not notice Dafnia then nor catch her looking in any special way—as we know now she must have done—at the young man in the drenched pale shirt and velvet coat and hair as dark and glistening as a conger's back. The boat went over and filled with the eager breaking water, and glad waves slapped the drowning mouths, and all was to be clean and mixed again and part of the long story of Thetis. We wanted that.

And then we saw that Dafnia had hold of the man, touching him not yet dead. We have all touched them when they are dead, the dreadful leaping heat washed out of them. When they are beautiful we use them for a time to deck out the halls of the Green Palace. We have stripped the sodden canvas from the bodies of sailors, the silk and linen from the bodies of those who paid money to be taken in ships, we have draped their white fluent limbs over knots of coral and hung them by their heels from the under-sea cliffs to wave arms no longer hot and hostile and mix their land hair with the long ripple of the weeds. That is one thing, but to touch them alive and uncooled, as Dafnia was doing—ah, we cried to her to drop it, at first angry and shocked, then desperate for her own safety. Some of us tried to snatch it away, but we could not bring ourselves to touch it. But she kept hold of it, kept its face above water, her hands under its shoulder, the flukes of her tail holding up its trailing legs. And her face was set and quiet and stupid looking, as though a net were dragging her, although it was she herself who was her own net.

We could not bear it; we dropped away and watched her take it to an island, pushing it up onto rock after rock, higher out of
reach, and so to grass and sea-pinks. We saw it begin to move, sit up and become irrevocably a man. And at that we dived down, clamouring, the steep waters pressing clean on our eyeballs, to tell our Queen of what had befallen our sister.

The next day Dafnia came back to us, but none of us could touch her hand now or ask her to join in our games. Nor did it seem as though she wanted that. But in a day or two we had begun to forget; the thing we had seen was rocking away from us with every hour of the long swells that had followed the storm. We were planning a moonlight porpoise hunt, and she was with us again. Then suddenly she said: “On the land there is hunting of four-legged deer with horns like fine coral, only brown and stronger. They ride on horses, with their legs branching on each side of the horse's back.” That was very horrible; for a moment none of us could speak to answer her. She went on and she was not looking at us: “On the land they dance on grass and in palaces; their legs bend and lift and toss in the air. The women wear shoes of all colours on their feet; when a man is a prince men bend down and kiss his feet, and when a woman is loved by a prince, it may be that her feet are kissed by him.”

We heard her out. And we shivered as one does in a cold current with one's upper part, and we felt as one does when the shark catches some smaller fish, and one is not near enough to save it. The things she said grated like sharp gravel on our scales. And then she spoke again: “He has gone home to the land and his palace and I must follow him.”

So then with a great effort and wavering of flukes I forced myself towards her, to take her hand. I said: “You cannot, Dafnia.
Edges may be one thing; but this is beyond edges, beyond the tops of beaches. Think what that means, Dafnia—it will be dry!”

And she said: “It was dry on the island in the hollow the spray did not reach; the sea-pinks were dry and thin.”

I saw then that in her other hand she held some crushed wet heads of sea-pinks. I said: “Forget the sea-pinks and all this. You must. If you do not you cannot be one of us mermaids ever any more.” And we all trembled when I said that terrible thing to Dafnia, and I remembered how she had struggled awkwardly and uglily up over the rocks of the island, pushing and lifting that—man.

But, if she heard at all, she did not heed. Her hand was slack as low-tide weed in my hand. She said: “Sisters, I am going to the witch.”

I dropped her hand then; I could only say: “Why?” very low, but I knew or half knew the answer she was bound to make.

“I am going on land,” she said. “I am going to walk on feet.”

We drew away from her then; there was nothing more to say; we saw her float from among us until she hung, little and shining-pale, suspent over the great hole above the waving of tentacles. She knotted up her hair and straightened herself; she lifted her hands and clasped them over her head, and dropped through the little space between the tentacles and was lost.

There were none of us by her in her wanderings below; she had chosen to be alone; she could not be recalled to wishing otherwise. But those with tentacles had overheard and whispered by moonlight to the mackerel, and the mackerel told the thing to us. Dafnia had sat for a long time in silence by the cave, on the stone,
until the witch knew what was in her heart. And then the witch had sheared Dafnia's hair with a sharp pearl shell, and with the same shell had slit and carved and divided her, making her human-shaped. And with the human feet and legs, Dafnia had also taken on human mortality. She would become the thing that men become after drowning and before the fish have cleaned and whitened their bones into cool permanence. Yet, even so, she could not become wholly human, she could not have whatever this thing is which they claim is better for them than our calm sea-living for all time, this violence more than storms, this brightness more than sunshine, this clinging-together more than touched limpet to rock, this troubled thing which humans call the soul. I cannot tell why they, who are shaped like us in their upper parts, yet never perfect, should yet be different, nor whether this soul of theirs makes up to them for their lack of bodily perfection. It is better not to think of them, to stay in our own world, mixed and flowing with it for ever.

But the mackerel told us that the witch had made it plain to Dafnia that she might not have this human thing called soul unless she herself were to become mixed with the human, the prince, as before she had been mixed with us and the sea, and this would only come to be if the prince were to love her. “She has made a bad bargain,” said the silvery flipping mackerel, “for she will not get her soul without the prince's love—think of it, mermaids, mixing with a human! She has lost her hair and she is blemished as a body, and now when she walks on her new feet, it hurts her as though she were walking on sharp shells.” And they told us how the witch had sent her, now that she was no longer a
mermaid, through the twisting, dry way, under the rocks of the very bottom, and so up onto land.

So she was lost to us; it was no use remembering her. In storm or calm we did not think of her. We would sweep south with the whales into the sticky, tingling water which fills our warm hair with sparkles, where soft flashes gleam along our slowly plunging bodies. Or we would turn and head north pouring along the tepid currents until we came to the iceberg seas, deep diving down their under cliffs and into their tinkling inner caves and clefts. And one day we came back to the beaches of the land where Dafnia had gone, and it was just before dawn.

As we were playing there among the light surf, we saw a woman coming down the cliff path, wearing the thick woollen skirt and kirtle of land folk, stuff that smells half of sheep and half human. She had no basket or burden on head or hips, as most women have, nor had she nets piled on her arms. And she walked waveringly, as though each step were pain. Hiding in troughs and hollows, sea and sand coloured, we watched her come down to the beach and strip off her heavy clothes; her hair was between short and long, and partly grey. Her body seemed soft and blemished as land women's bodies are, because they must wear woollen clothes and carry burdens, and because their souls tear through the flesh and skin. Yet it was not altogether a land woman's body; and a thought came to me, and I cried out “Dafnia!” and she held her arms out and ran unevenly forward into the first of the little waves.

We all came round her then, but not touching her, for she was tainted. And I said: “Have you found your human soul, Dafnia?”

And she cried out in a soft bleating voice: “No, for he never loved me, he would not let me mix with him!”

“What, then?” I asked.

And she said: “It is all over. The land does not want me.”

Then I: “You cannot come back, Dafnia. You cannot be a mermaid any more, nor can the things that the witch has done ever be undone.”

She looked at me with her eyes that had become half human and said: “Oh, are you sorry for me?” And her mouth went soft and shapeless and tears began to go down her cheeks.

It seemed to us strange and horrible that Dafnia, who had been a mermaid, should say and do that; it seemed so strange that we all laughed. And then an even stranger thing happened. For Dafnia went on into the sea, deeper and deeper, stepping with her woman's feet, and we thought she was going to drown as humans do. But instead, the waves washing against her were wearing her away as though she had been made of sand, a sand pillar. The sun was rising now and the edges of the waves were crinkled gold and flesh colour with the light beating through them, and all this colour was dashing and breaking on Dafnia, and all the time she was becoming shapeless, blotting out, no more than the first pattern of something that could have become either woman or mermaid. And in another minute, as the sun rose fully, even that shapelessness became worn away. Where Dafnia had been there was nothing now but dancing waves and foam, and perhaps a mixing again with us mermaids and the sea world which is ours.

PAUSE IN THE CORRIDA

Black bulls of hate, charging across the mind,

You are met, are stopped here.

Not by red cloaks, colour I most love and hate,

But by green, colour of fields and certainty,

Blue, colour of sky and time,

White, colour of sleep, no colour.

At mid-age, sick and suddenly,

I found myself in the thick of a dark wood.