Possession

by A.S. Byatt

“Do you know,” Roland said, turning to Sir George, “whether there were papers? Is there anything left in that desk? Anything of hers?” “That was cleared, I suppose, at her death,” said Sir George. “May we at least look?” said Roland, imagining perhaps a hidden drawer, and at the same time uncomfortably aware of the laundry lists in Northanger Abbey.

Maud took out the pillow, untucked the counterpane, folded away three fine woollen blankets and a crocheted shawl, and then lifted out one feather mattress and another, and a straw palliasse. She reached in under this, into the wooden box beneath it, prised up a hinged board and brought out a package, wrapped in fine white linen, tied with tape, about and about and about, like a mummy. There was a silence. Maud stood there, holding on. Roland took a step forward. He knew, he knew, what was wrapped away there. “Probably dolls’ clothes,” said Maud. “Have a look,” said Sir George. “You seemed to know where to find it. I bet you’ve got a shrewd guess what’s in it. Open up.” Maud plucked with pale neat lamplit fingers at the old knots, which were, she discovered, faintly covered with sealing wax. “Do you want a penknife?” said Sir George. “We shouldn’t—cut—” said Maud. Roland itched to help.

May I hope that you too enjoyed our talk—and may I have the pleasure of calling on you? I know you live very quietly, but I would be very quiet—I only want to discuss Dante and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Coleridge and Goethe and Schiller and Webster and Ford and Sir Thomas Browne et hoc genus omne, not forgetting, of course, Christabel LaMotte and the ambitious Fairy Project. Do answer this. You know, I think, how much a positive answer would give pleasure to Yours very sincerely Randolph Henry Ash” “And the answer?” said Roland. “The answer? I’m sorry—I’m so curious—I’ve been wondering if she answered, and if so, what she said.” Lady Bailey drew out the top letter of the other sheaf, almost teasingly, like an actress announcing on television the award for the Best Actress of the Year.

Lady Bailey’s reading was slow and halting; words were miscast; she stumbled over hoc genus omne and Arachne. It was like frosted glass between them, Roland and Maud, and the true lineaments of the prose and the feelings of Ash and LaMotte. Sir George appeared to find the reading more than satisfactory. He looked at his watch. “We’ve just time to do what I always do with Dick Francis: spoil the suspense by peeking at the end. Then I think we’ll put these away until I’ve had time to consider my position. Take advice. Yes. Ask around a little. You’d have to be getting back, anyway, wouldn’t you?” He was not asking. He looked indulgently at his wife. “Go on, Joanie. Give us the end of it.”

She was a teacher before the children. She did teach English. She often expressed an interest in Grummer’s tree letters. That’s what we always called them. Grummer’s tree letters. I couldn’t possibly think of letting you have them without so much as asking her. They’re hers, in a sort of way—in trust, if you see what I mean.” “Of course you should consult her. You should say we would naturally give you an advantageous price for these documents. When you speak to her you should mention that. We have very ample funds, Mrs Wapshott.” “Very ample funds,” she repeated after him, vaguely. He was aware that she thought it would be ill-bred to ask him what sort of price he might offer, and that suited him very well, that gave him room to manoeuvre, as he calculated that the richest dreams of her modest avarice would be unlikely to reach the sort of sum he would willingly pay on the open market. He was rarely wrong in these cases. He could most frequently foretell to a dollar what some country curate or school librarian might suppose he could demand, both before and after professional advice.

Had he himself and his team of research assistants had proper access to that work, much of it would be in print by now, annotated, indexed, ready to be cross-referred and to illuminate his own findings. But Beatrice, with what he saw as a truly English costiveness and dilettantism, continued to sit and shuffle and wonder about meanings and facts, getting nowhere at all, and apparently quite comfortable, like the obstructive sheep in Alice Through the Looking-Glass. He had a whole notebook full of queries to check, when he could, when she gave him access. Every time he came across the Atlantic he had such a notebook. It was his firmly held belief—not one he ever questioned intellectually or experienced as other than a sensuous lack, a knowledge of something missing from his essential comfort—that Ellen Ash’s papers should be in the Stant Collection.

In my family’s possession was one letter—one very significant letter—addressed by Randolph Henry Ash to my great-grandmother, Priscilla Penn Cropper, née Priscilla Penn. This ancestress was a most forceful, and so to say eccentric personality, a native of Maine, a daughter of devoted Abolitionists, who had housed runaway slaves and had participated in the ferment of new ideas and lifestyles then to be found in the New England States. She was a fervent speaker for the Emancipation of Women, and was also, as was common with those doughty fighters for human rights, involved in other movements.

I do not know why this one of the many treasures in our possession moved me most. God moves in a mysterious way—it may even be that Randolph Henry’s rebuff to my ancestress’s interest gave rise to my wish to show that we were, after all, worthy to understand, and, so to speak, to entertain him. Certainly I felt, when my father first handed me the handwritten pages, preserved in tissue, to see if I could decipher them, something akin to the thrill of Keats’s stout Cortez, silent on his peak in Darien. And when I had touched the letter, I felt, in Tennyson’s words, that the dead man had touched me from the past: I have made my life among “Those fallen leaves which keep their green/The noble letters of the dead.”

fertilising mite. I give in full my great-grandmother’s letter. It now stands in its proper place in Volume IX of my edition of the Collected Letters (No. 1207, p. 883), and an excerpt from it is included in the footnotes to Mummy Possest, RHA’s spiritualist poem, in the edition of the Complete Works, proceeding surely, if regrettably slowly for enthusiasts, under the overall editorial direction of James Blackadder of the University of London. I do not accept Professor Blackadder’s identification of my ancestress with the grossly credulous fictional Mrs Eckleburg in that poem. There are far too many striking points of dissimilarity, which I have detailed in my article on the subject, “A case of mis-identification” (PMLA, LXXI, Winter 1959, pp. 174–80), to which I refer the curious.

But there are ways and ways, as you must well know, and some are tried and tested, and others are fraught with danger and disappointment. What is read and understood and contemplated and intellectually grasped is our own, madam, to live and work with. A lifetime’s study will not make accessible to us more than a fragment of our own ancestral past, let alone the aeons before our race was formed. But that fragment we must thoroughly possess and hand on.

I have written at such length because I do not wish you to think I take your kind thoughts of me frivolously or in a spirit of unthinking bellicose denigration, as some might say. I do have deep-rooted convictions—and a certain amount of apposite experience of my own, which precludes my receiving your communication—your spirit communication—with any great interest or pleasure. I must ask you to send no more such writings. But for yourself, and for your disinterested pursuit of truth, I do of course feel great respect and enthusiasm. Your fight on behalf of your Sex is noble, and must succeed, sooner or later. I hope to hear more of that in the future, and beg to remain Yours most sincerely R. H. Ash

There was also a catalogue from Christie’s, where a sale of Victoriana included a needlecase traditionally believed to have belonged to Ellen Ash, and a ring, once owned by an American widow in Venice, which was said to contain, in its crystal cavity, a few of Ash’s hairs. The Stant Collection contained several consecutive clippings from that great mane, in its faded darkness, its later grizzled mix, and its final post-mortem silver, now the brightest, the most enduring. The Ash Museum in Ash’s Bloomsbury house would perhaps bid, and Cropper himself would certainly bid, and the needlecase and the curl of hair would be enshrined in the hexagonal glass room at the very centre of the Stant Collection, where Ash’s relics and those of his wife, family and acquaintances accumulated in the still, regulated air.

Such letters as have survived of their courtship—pitifully few, no doubt owing to the officious ministrations of Ellen’s sister, Patience, after her death—suggest that she was not flirting with him, and that her affections were not, nevertheless, deeply engaged. But she was, by the time she accepted Randolph’s hand, in the difficult position of seeing her younger sisters, Patience and Faith, making advantageous and happy marriages whilst she remained a spinster.

“Nothing under LaMotte. No, wait a minute. Here. A cross-reference. We need the reading box. It’s very theological, the reading box. It appears”—she drew out a dog-eared yellowing card, the ink blurring into its fuzzy surface—“it appears she read The Fairy Melusina, in 1872.” She replaced the card in its box, and settled back in her chair, looking across at Roland with the same obfuscating comfortable smile. Roland felt that the notebooks might be bristling with unrecorded observations about Christabel LaMotte that had slipped between Beatrice’s web of categories. He said doggedly, “Do you think I could see what she said? It might be”—he rejected “important”—“it might be of interest to me. I’ve never read Melusina. There seems to be a revival of interest in it.” “I tried once or twice in the old days. It’s terribly long-winded and impenetrable. Gothic, you know, Victorian Gothic, a bit gruesome, in places for a lady’s poem …” “Beatrice—could I just cast my eyes over what Mrs Ash said?” “I’ll just see.” Beatrice rose from her table.

She began to read aloud: “Today I embarked on The Fairy Melusina, which I bought for myself in Hatchard’s on Monday. What shall I find there? So far I have read the rather long preamble which I found a little pedantic. I then came on to the knight Raimondin and his encounter with the shining lady at the Fontaine de Soif which I liked better. Miss LaMotte has an unquestionable gift for making the flesh creep.” “Beatrice—” “Is this the sort of thing you were—?” “Beatrice, could I possibly read that for myself, to make notes on it?” “You can’t take it out of the office.” “Perhaps I could perch at the corner of your table. Would I be terribly in your way?” “I suppose not, no,” said Beatrice.

Perhaps if I had made his life more difficult, he would have written less, or less freely. I cannot claim to be the midwife to genius, but if I have not facilitated, I have at least not, as many women might have done, prevented. This is a very small virtue to claim, a very negative achievement to hang my whole life on. Randolph, if he were to read this, would laugh me out of such morbid questioning, would tell me it is never too late, would cram his huge imagination into the snail-shell space of my tiny new accession of energy and tell me what is to be done. But he shan’t see this, and I will find a way—to be a very little more—there now I’m crying, as that girl might have cried. Enough.

Joan Bailey, wheeling round the table, had laid the packages on it. “I hope you’ll be comfortable. Do let me know if you need anything else. I would light the fire for you, but the chimneys haven’t been swept for generations—I’m afraid you’d suffocate with smoke, or else we’d set the whole house on fire. Are you warm enough?” Maud, animated, assured her that they were. There was a faint flash of colour in her ivory cheeks. As though the cold brought out her proper life, as though she were at home in it.

She had decided that they should each read the letters of the poet who interested them, and that they should agree conventions of recording their observations on index cards according to a system she was already using in the Women’s Resource Centre. Roland objected to this, partly because he felt he was being hustled, partly because he had a vision, which he now saw was ridiculous and romantic, of their two heads bent together over the manuscripts, following the story, sharing, he had supposed, the emotion. He pointed out that by Maud’s system they would lose any sense of the development of the narrative and Maud retorted robustly that they lived in a time which valued narrative uncertainty, that they could cross-refer later, and that anyway they had so little time, and what concerned her was primarily Christabel LaMotte. Roland agreed, since the time constraint was indeed crucial. So they worked for some time in silence, interrupted only by Lady Bailey bearing a thermos of coffee, and the odd request for information. “Tell me,” said Roland, “did Blanche wear glasses?” “I don’t know.”

The green silk of her scarf glittered with turreted purple ridges. Dust danced in a shadowy halo round her shifting head, black motes in straw gold, invisible solid matter appearing like pinholes in a sheet of solid colour. He spoke and she turned through a rainbow, her pale skin threading the various lights. “I’m sorry to interrupt—I just wondered—do you know about the City of Is? I.S. I.S?” She shook off her concentration as a dog shakes off water. “It’s a Breton legend. It was drowned in the sea for its wickedness. It was ruled by Queen Dahud, the sorceress, daughter of King Gradlond. The women there were transparent, according to some versions. Christabel wrote a poem.” “May I look?” “A quick glance. I’m using this book.” She pushed it across the table. Tallahassee Women Poets. Christabel LaMotte: a Selection of Narrative and Lyric Poems, ed. Leonora Stern.

The Donjon may frown and threaten—but it keeps us very safe—within its confines we are free in a way you, who have freedom to range the world, do not need to imagine. I do not advise imagining it—but do me the justice of believing—not imputing mendacious protestation—my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop away—but oh how I sing in my gold cage— Shattering an Egg is unworthy of you, no Pass time for men. Think what you would have in your hand if you put forth your Giant strength and crushed the solid stone. Something slippery and cold and unthinkably disagreeable

My chief spy—a young woman who is not best pleased by the turn of events—tells me you are spending the New Year together, investigating connections. I am naturally consumed by curiosity. Perhaps I will come and consult your archive. I do wonder what you make of young Michell. Don’t eat him, dear Maud. He isn’t in your class. Academically, that is, he isn’t, as you may have discovered by now. Whereas you and I could have had the most delectable talk about towers above and under water, serpent tails and flying fish. Did you read Lacan on flying fish and vesicle persecution? I miss you from time to time, you know. You weren’t wholly nice or fair to me. Nor I to you, you will say—but when are we ever? You are so severe with male shortcomings.

Would you be prepared to give a paper at the Australian meeting of the Sapphic society in 1988? I had in mind that we would devote that session entirely to the study of the female erotic in nineteenth-century poetry and the strategies and subterfuges through which it had to present or dis-cover itself. You might have extended your thinking about liminality and the dissolution of boundaries. Or you might wish to be more rigorous in your exploration of LaMotte’s lesbian sexuality as the empowering force behind her work. (I accept that her inhibitions made her characteristically devious and secretive—but you do not give her sufficient credit for the strength with which she does nevertheless obliquely speak out.)

As for Fergus. As for Fergus. He had a habit which Maud was not experienced enough to recognise as a common one in ex-lovers of giving little tugs at the carefully severed spider-threads or puppet-strings which had once tied her to him. She was annoyed at his proposal for a siege-paper, without knowing how much it was manufactured ad hoc to annoy her. She was also annoyed by his arcane reference to Lacan and flying fish and vesicle persecution. She decided to track this down—method was her defence against anxiety—and duly found it.

She trod crunchingly around the kitchen-garden wall and up a yew alley, festooned with snow, to where the overlapping, thick evergreens—holly, rhododendron, bay—enclosed a kind of trefoil-shaped space at the heart of which was the pool where Christabel had seen the frozen gold and silver fish, put there to provide flashes of colour in the gloom—the darting genii of the place, Christabel had said. There was a stone seat, with its rounded snow-cushion which she did not disturb. The quiet was absolute. It was beginning to snow again.

“Well, good night, then,” she said. Her fine mouth was set. Roland had vaguely supposed that they might, or should, discuss progress now they were together, compare notes and discoveries. It was almost an academic duty, though he was, in fact, tired, by emotion and the cold. Maud’s arms were full of files, clasped against her like a breastplate. There was an automatic wariness in her look that he found offensive. He said, “Good night, then,” and turned away towards his own end of the corridor. He heard her behind him tap away into the dark.

He thought he recognised the twisted thorn trees, and might indeed have done so; there they stood in their triangle, as they had done at dawn; but of the old crone’s little hut there was no sign. The sun was going down fast, over the edge of the plain; he pricked forward a little, hoping he might be mistaken, and saw before him, a little on his way, an avenue of standing stones, which he had no memory of seeing before, though they were, to say the least of it, hard to miss, even in the greying light.

And she sang: “Mine the long night The secret place Where lovers meet In long embrace In purple dark In silvered kiss Forget the world And grasp your bliss” And he thought she knew his secret soul, and would have stretched out his arms to her in longing, for she made him see in his mind’s eye a closed casement in a high turret, and a private curtained bed where he would be most himself. For it was himself, surely, she offered him, as the other offered the sunlit earth.

And her face was cast down in shadows, for she looked not at him, but at the dull lead casket, as pale as might be, and seemingly without hinge or keyhole, that lay cradled before her. And around her brow was a coronet of white poppies and on her feet were silent silken slippers like spider webs, and her music was single, a piping not of this earth, not merry, not sad, but calling, calling. And she sang: “Not in the flesh Not in the fire Not in action Is heart’s desire But come away For last is best I alone tender The Herb of Rest” And then the heart of the Childe was wrung indeed, for it was the Herb of Rest which his father so desired him to bring home, to end, as only that might, his long agony.

And one day we will write it otherwise, that he would not come, that he stayed, or chose the sparkling ones, or went out again onto the moors to live free of fate, if such can be. But you must know now, that it turned out as it must turn out, must you not? Such is the power of necessity in tales.

I find I am at ease with other imagined minds—bringing to life, restoring in some sense to vitality, the whole vanished men of other times, hair, teeth, fingernails, porringer, bench, wineskin, church, temple, synagogue and the incessant weaving labour of the marvellous brain inside the skull—making its patterns, its most particular sense of what it sees and learns and believes. It seems important that these other lives of mine should span many centuries and as many places as my limited imagination can touch.

I have not answered yr question about my Fairy Poem. I am deeply flattered—and no less deeply alarmed—that you remember it so—for I spoke—or affected to speak—idly on the matter, as about something which might be pleasant to Toy with—or pretty to investigate—one of these unoccupied days— Whereas in verity—I have it in my head to write an epic—or if not an epic, still a Saga or Lay or great mythical Poem—and how can a poor breathless woman with no staying-power and only a Lunar Learning confess such an ambition to the author of the Ragnarök? But I have the most curious certainty that you are to be trusted in this matter—that you will not mock—nor deluge the fairy of the fountain with Cold Water.

When Odin, disguised as the Wanderer, Gangrader, in my Poem, asks the Giant Wafthrudnir what was the word whispered by the Father of the gods in the ear of his dead son, Baldur, on his funeral pyre—the young man I was—most devoutly—meant the word to be—Resurrection. And he, that young poet, who is and is not myself, saw no difficulty in supposing that the dead Norse God of Light might prefigure—or figure—the dead Son of the God Who is the Father of Christendom. But, as you perceived, this is a two-handed engine, a slicing weapon that cuts both ways, this of figuration—to say that the Truth of the Tale is in the meaning, that the Tale but symbolises an eternal verity, is one step on the road to the parity of all tales.… And the existence of the same Truths in all Religions is a great argument both for and against the paramount Truthfulness of One.

You know how it is, being yourself a poet—one writes such and such a narrative, and thinks as one goes along—here’s a good touch—this concept modifies that—will it not be too obvious to the generality?—too thick an impasto of the Obvious—one has almost a disgust at the too-apparent meaning—and then the general public gets hold of it, and pronounces it at the same time too heartily simple and too loftily incomprehensible—and it is clear only that whatever one had hoped to convey is lost in mists of impenetrability—and slowly it loses its life—in one’s own mind, as much as in its readers’.

Am I a Sorcerer—like Macbeth’s witches—mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book—telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban—I nowhere claim my poor bullet-headed brute of a Roman censor as other than mine, a clay mouth to whistle through. No answer, you will say, your head on one side, considering me, like a wise bird, sharply, and judging me as a prevaricator. Do you know—the only life I am sure of is the life of the Imagination. Whatever the absolute Truth—or Untruth—of that old life-in-death—Poetry can make that man live for the length of the faith you or any other choose to give to him. I do not claim to bestow Life as He did—on Lazarus—but maybe as Elisha did—who lay on the dead body—and breathed life into it—

Do you touch at my meaning? When I write I know. Remember that miraculous saying of the boy Keats—I am certain of nothing, but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination— Now I am not saying—Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, or any such quibble. I am saying that without the Maker’s imagination nothing can live for us—whether alive or dead, or once alive and now dead, or waiting to be brought to life—

We are grossly materialist—and nothing will satisfy us but material proofs—as we call them—of spiritual facts—and so the spirits have deigned to speak to us in these crude ways—of rapping—and rustling—and musical hummings—such as once were not needed—when our Faith was alight and alive in us— He said too the English are particularly indurate by reason of our denser atmosphere, less electrical and magnetic in its character than that of the Americans—who are conspicuously more nervous and excitable than we are—with more genius for social schemes—more belief in the betterment of Human Nature—whose Minds, like their Institutions—have shot up with a rapidity of growth resembling that of tropical jungles—and have in consequence greater openness and receptivity.

Dear Mr Ash, I write to you from an unhappy House—and must be brief—for I have an Invalid dependent upon me—my poor Blanche—quite racked with hideous headaches—and nausea—quite prostrated—and unable to pursue the work which is her life. She is engaged on a large painting of Merlin and Vivien—at the moment of the latter’s triumph when she sings the Charm which puts him in her power, to sleep through time. We are very hopeful of this work—’tis all veiled suggestion and local intensity—but she is too ill and cannot go on. I am not in much better case myself—but I make tisanes, which I find efficacious—and wet handkerchiefs—and do what I may.

He told me the tale of Mélusine—often and often—for the reason, he said, that the very existence of a truly French mythology was dubious—but that if such a thing might be found—the Fairy Mélusine was indisputably one of its eminences and bright stars—My dear father had hoped to do for the French what the Brothers Grimm did for the German people—recount the true pre-history of the race through the witness of folktale and legend—discover our oldest thoughts as Baron Cuvier spliced together the Megatherium from a few indicative bones and hypothetic ligatures—and his own Wit and powers of Inference.

What is so peculiarly marvellous about the Melusina myth, you seem to be saying, is that it is both wild and strange and ghastly and full of the daemonic—and it is at the same time solid as earthly tales—the best of them—are solid—depicting the life of households and the planning of societies, the introduction of husbandry and the love of any mother for her children. Now—I am greatly daring, and I trust you not to fly out at me scornfully if I am wrong—I see in the gifts you show already in your writings such mastery of both these contradictory elements—that the Story may appear to be made for you, to await indeed—You—to tell it.

So I speak to you—or not speak, write to you, write written speech—a strange mixture of kinds—I speak to you as I might speak to all those who most possess my thoughts—to Shakespeare, to Thomas Browne, to John Donne, to John Keats—and find myself unpardonably lending you, who are alive, my voice, as I habitually lend it to those dead men—Which is much as to say—here is an author of Monologues—trying clumsily to construct a Dialogue—and encroaching on both halves of it. Forgive me.

Now I must change my habitual Tone wholly. Now I must write stringently and not fly about distracting you with flappings of tinsel or demoiselle-flickering. What nonsense in you to pretend to fear, or to fear truly perhaps, that I could be anything but wholly gratified by what you say of the Melusina and of my own powers of writing—of what I might do. You have read my thoughts—or made clear to me what were my predispositions—not in an intrusive way—but with true insight. She is indeed—my Melusine—just such a combination of the orderly and humane with the unnatural and the Wild—as you suggest—the hearth-foundress and the destroying Demon. (And female, which you do not remark on.)

Now mark—you must write no more of your interest in my work as a possible Intrusion. You do not seem aware, Mr Ash, for all your knowledge of the great world I do not frequent, of the usual response which the productions of the Female Pen—let alone as in our case, the hypothetick productions—are greeted with. The best we may hope is—oh, it is excellently done—for a woman. And then there are Subjects we may not treat—things we may not know. I do not say but that there must be—and is—some essential difference between the Scope and Power of men and our own limited consciousness and possibly weaker apprehension. But I do maintain, as stoutly, that the delimitations are at present, all wrongly drawn—We are not mere candleholders to virtuous thoughts—mere chalices of Purity—we think and feel, aye and read—which seems not to shock you in us, in me, though I have concealed from many the extent of my—vicarious—knowledge of human vagaries. Now—if there is a reason for my persistence in this correspondence—it is this very unawareness in you—real or assumed—of what a woman must be supposed to be capable of.

Now to you and in your marvellous Poem—Bethany is the Place where the master called his dead friend to resurrection beforetimes and particularly. But to us Females, it was a place wherein we neither served nor were served—poor Martha was cumbered with much serving—and was sharp with her sister Mary who sat at His Feet and heard His Word and chose the one thing needful. Now I believe rather, with George Herbert, that “Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws—Makes that and the action fine.” We formed a Project—my dear Companion and myself—to make ourselves a Bethany where the work of all kinds was carried on in the Spirit of Love and His Laws. We met, you are to know, at one of Mr Ruskin’s marvellous lectures on the dignity of handicraft and individual work. We were Two—who wished to live the Life of the Mind—to make good things. We saw after thought that if we put together the pittances we possessed—and could come by by giving drawing lessons—or by selling Wonder Tales or even Poems—we might make ourselves a life in which drudgery was Artful—was sacred as Mr Ruskin believes is possible—and it was shared, for no Master (save Him Who is Lord of All and visited the true Bethany). We were to Renounce.

If I have offended you by calling your last long-ago letter contradictory (which it was) or timid (which it was) then you must forgive me. You may well ask why I am so tenacious in continuing writing to one who has declared herself unable to maintain a friendship (which she also declared to be valuable to herself) and remains resolute in silence, in rejection. A lover might indeed in all honour accept such a congé—but a peaceable, a valued friend? It is not as though I ever breathed—or scribbled or scratched—the faintest hint of any improper attention—no “if things were otherwise, ah well then …” no “Your eyes, which I know to be bright, may peruse …”—no—all was straightforward from my honest thoughts which are closer to my essential self than any such nonsensical gallantry—and this you cannot support? And why am I so tenacious? I hardly know myself. For the sake of future Swammerdams, it may be—for I see that I had insensibly come to perceive you—mock not—as some sort of Muse.

Oh, dear friend—I am so very angry—I see strange fiery flashes before my drowned eyes— I dare not write more. I cannot be sure that any further communication of yours will reach me—intact—or at all— Your Poem is lost. And shall I give up—so? I who have fought for my Autonomy against Family and Society? No, I will not. In the known risk of appearing—Inconsequential, Tergiversatory, infirm of purpose and feminine—I ask you—is it possible for you to walk in Richmond Park—when shall I say—you will be occupied—any day the next three days at about eleven in the morning.

It was very much your world we walked in, your watery empire, with the meadows all drowned as the city of Is, and the trees all growing down from their roots as well as up—and the clouds swirling indifferently in both aerial and aquatic foliage—

I have dreamed nightly of your face and walked the streets of my daily life with the rhythms of your writing singing in my silent brain. I have called you my Muse, and so you are, or might be, a messenger from some urgent place of the spirit where essential poetry sings and sings. I could call you, with even greater truth—my Love—there, it is said—for I most certainly love you and in all ways possible to man and most fiercely. It is a love for which there is no place in this world—a love my diminished reason tells me can and will do neither of us any good, a love I tried to hide cunningly from, to protect you from, with all the ingenuity at my command. (Except complete silence, you will rightly say, which was out of my power.) We are rational nineteenth-century beings, we might leave the coup de foudre to the weavers of Romances—but I have certain evidence that you know what I speak of, that you acknowledged, however momently (that infinite moment) that at least what I claim is true.

Do you remember—no, of course you must remember—how we saw the Rainbow, from the brow of our hill, under our clump of trees—where light suffused the watery drops in the indrowned air—and the Flood was stayed—and we—we stood under the arch of it, as though the whole Earth were ours, by new Covenant—And from foot to distant foot of the rainbow is one bright, joined curve, though it shifts with our changing vision. What a convoluted Missive, to lie and gather dust, maybe forever, in the Poste Restante. I shall walk, from time to time, in the Park, and wait even, under those same Trees—and trust you will forgive—and a little more Your R.H.A

I see whole bevies of shooting stars—like gold arrows before my darkening eyes—they presage Headache—but before the black—and burning—I have a small light space to say—oh what? I cannot let you burn me up. I cannot. I should go up—not with the orderly peace of my beloved hearth here—with its miniature caverns of delight, its hot temporary jewel-gardens with their palisadoes and promontories—no—I shall go up—like Straw on a Dry Day—a rushing wind—a tremor on the air—a smell of burning—a blown smoke—and a deal of white fine powder that holds its spillikin shape only an infinitesimal moment and then is random specks—oh no I cannot—

Dear Sir I am too proud—to say I knew, I should not have come—and yet came. I acknowledge my Acts—of which all that trepidant walk was one—from Mount Ararat Road to the Tempting Knoll—with Dog Tray circling and growling—He loves you not, Sir—and the end of that sentence could be—“and nor do I” as well as the more expected ending “whatever I may feel.” Were you happy I came? Were we godlike as you promised? Two earnest pacers, pointing diligent toes in the dust. Did you remark—setting Electrical Powers and Galvanic Impulses aside for the moment—how shy we are one with another? Mere acquaintances, if not on paper.