Each twisty turn, each crossing pass
Of threaded vein and artery
From heart to throat, from mouth to eye.
This spun-glass skin, like spider-thread
Is silver water, woven with red.
For their excessive wickedness
In days of old, was this distress
Come on them, of transparency
And openness to every eye.
But still they're proud, their haughty brows
Circled with gold…
Deep in the silence of drowned Is
Beneath the wavering precipice
The church-spire in the thickened green
Points to the trembling surface sheen
From which descends a glossy cone
A mirror-spire that mocks its own.
Between these two the mackerel sails
As did the swallow in the vales
Of summer air, and he too sees
His mirrored self amongst the trees
That hang to meet themselves, for here
All things are doubled, and the clear
Thick element is doubled too
Finite and limited the view
As though the world of roofs and rocks
Were stored inside a glassy box.
And damned and drowned transparent things
Hold silent commerce…
This drowned world lies beneath a skin
Of moving water, as within
The glassy surface of their frown
The ladies' grieving passions drown
And can be seen to ebb and flow
In crimson as the currents go
Amongst the bladderwrack and stones
Amongst the delicate white bones.
And so they worked on, against the clock, cold and excited, until Lady Bailey came to offer them supper.
When Maud drove home that first evening, the weather was already changing for the worse. Clouds were darkly gathering; she could see through the trees a full moon, which, because of some trick of the thickening air, seemed both far away and somehow condensed, an object round and small and dull. She drove through the park, much of which had been planted by that earlier Sir George who had married Christabel's sister Sophie, and had had a passion for trees, trees from all parts of the distant earth, Persian plum, Turkey oak, Himalayan pine, Caucasian walnut and the Judas tree. He had had his generation's expansive sense of time-he had inherited hundred-year-old oaks and beeches and had planted spreads of woodland, rides and coppices he would never see. Huge rugged trunks came silently past the little green car in the encroaching dark, rearing themselves suddenly monstrous in the changing white beam of the headlight. There was a kind of cracking of cold in the woods all round, a tightening of texture, a clamping together that Maud had experienced in her own warm limbs as she went out into the courtyard and cold ran into her constricted throat and pulled tight something she thought of poetically as the heartstrings.
Down these rides Christabel had come, wilful and perhaps spiritually driven, urging her little pony-cart on to the ritualist eucharist of the Reverend Mossman. Maud had not found Christabel an easy companion all day. She responded to threats with increasing organisation. Pin, categorise, learn. Out here it felt different. The mental pony-cart bowled along, with its veiled passenger. The trees went up, solid. A kind of elemental clanging accompanied the disappearance of each into the dark. They were old, they were grey and green and stiff. Women, not trees, were Maud's true pastoral concern. Her idea of these primeval creatures included her generation's sense of their imminent withering and dying, under the drip of acid rain, or in the invisible polluted gusts of the wind. She was visited by a sudden vision of them dancing, golden-green, in a bright spring a hundred years ago, flexible saplings, tossed and resilient. This thickened forest, her own humming metal car, her prying curiosity about whatever had been Christabel's life, seemed suddenly to be the ghostly things, feeding on, living through, the young vitality of the past. Between the trees the ground was black with the shining, sagging wet rounds of dead leaves; in front of her, the same black leaves spread like stains on the humping surface of the tarmac. A creature ran out into her path; its eyes were half-spheres filled with dull red fire, refracted, sparkling and then gone. She swerved, and nearly hit a thick oak stump. Ambiguous wet drops or flakes-which?-materialised briefly on the windscreen. Maud was inside, and the outside was alive and separate.
Her flat, with its unambiguous bright cleanliness, seemed unusually welcoming, apart from the presence of two letters, caught in the lips of the letterbox. She tugged these free, and went round, closing curtains, putting on many lights. The letters too were threatening. One was blue and one was the kind of tradesman's brown with which all universities have replaced their milled white crested missives in the new austerity. The blue one was from Leonora Stern. The other said it was from Prince Albert College; she would have supposed it was from Roland, but he was here. She had been not very polite to him. Even bossy. The whole business had put her on edge. Why could she do nothing with ease and grace except work alone, inside these walls and curtains, her bright safe box? Christabel, defending Christabel, redefined and alarmed Maud.
Here is a Riddle, Sir, an old Riddle, an easy Riddle - hardly worth your thinking about - a fragile Riddle, in white andGold with life in the middle of it. There is a gold, soft cushion, whose gloss you may only paradoxically imagine with your eyes closed tight - see it feelingly, let it slip through your mind's fingers. And this gold cushion is enclosed in its owncrystalline casket,a caskettranslucent and endless in its circularity, for there are no sharp corners to it, noprotrusions, only a milky moonstone clarity that deceives. And these are wrapped in silk, fine as thistledown, tough as steel, and the silk lies inside Alabaster, which you may thin Jiofas a funerary Urn - only with no inscription, for there are as yet no Ashes - and no pediment, and no nodding poppies engraved, nor yet no lid you may lift to peep in, for all is sealed and smooth. There may come a day when you may lift the lidwith impunity - or rather,when it may be lifted from within - for that way, life may come - whereas your way - you will discover - only Congealing and Mortality.
An Egg, Sir, is the answer, as you perspicuously readfrom the beginning, an Egg, aperfect O,a living Stone, doorlessand windowless, whose life mayslumber on till she be Waked - or find she has Wings to spread - which is not so here - oh no -
An Egg is my answer. What is the Riddle?
I am my own riddle. Oh, Sir, you must not kindly seek to ameliorate or steal away my solitude. It is a thing we women are taught to dread - ohthe terrible tower, oh the thickets round it - no companionable Nest - but a donjon.
But they have lied to us you know, in this, as in so much else. The Donjon may frown andthreaten - but it keeps us very safe - within its confines we arefree 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 hopaway - but oh how I sing in my gold cage -