And then I came to the brick-walled passage leading out of the park past the villas. I walked along it, whistling (a thing I never do myself) and there I was in the street I had started from. And there was the frog. The frog said to me: “So you didn’t get the Princess after all! You are a fool, aren’t you?” “But—” I said, and looked round, for I knew I had hold of the doll. Then I saw that the doll had her feet on the ground, that the doll was definitely holding onto me, and that she had grown to life-size. “Aren’t you the Princess?” I asked the doll. The frog, of course, answered. “No, she isn’t—where are your eyes? Proper fool you’ll look, taking that back to the palace!”
“But—” I said again.
Then the doll said, in a most un-princesslike voice: “I’m Joan. That’s all. But don’t worry. That nasty stuck-up little Princess wouldn’t want to get rescued by you—I know her! She said she wasn’t going to let anyone under a prince with ten thousand a year rescue her, and there’s sure to be one soon.”
“But—” I said.
“I didn’t ask you to rescue me, did I?” said Joan, in rather a hurt, proud kind of voice, and stepped back, letting go my arm. When she did that I noticed that her long brocade dress shortened and smoothed out into a printed cotton and her long hair rolled itself up under the beret which the little jewelled cap had turned into. She added: “If you hadn’t rescued me, no one would have. Girls like me don’t get princes to rescue them.”
The frog croaked: “Listen to her, the hussy! And you ought to have rescued the Princess, you know you ought. You were told to.”
“Who told me, anyway?” I asked. I was rather cross.
“Well, I told you, for one!” said the frog; “and now, suppose you take off that tarn-helm and give it me back. Lost most of the rest, haven’t you, proper fool—”
“You shut up!” I said, and I took off the tarn-helm and dropped it on the frog. It clanged on the pavement and disappeared, and so did the frog. I only hope he took it back to wherever it belongs. At the same moment a taxi drew up and I knew I had to be getting along back to Middle Earth. “Can’t I give you a lift, Joan?” I said. “I’m awfully glad it was you, not the Princess!”
Joan said: “I know you now, with that silly old hat off. I’ve got to get off to work—I’m a mill-hand on Middle Earth—but we’ll meet again. I did find out that much in the Tower.”
“When?” I asked, one foot on the step of the taxi.
“First of May, I think,” she said.
“But what year?”
“Well, it ought to be next, by rights,” she said, “but you never know, the way time gets messed about these days. Well, so long and thank you.”
“Till then—” I called after her as the taxi started, and the lines of the notice began ticking over on the clock face:
“In the Debateable Land
That lies between here and Fairy Land ….”
MAIRI MACLEAN AND THE FAIRY MAN
I
Oh maybe ’tis my rock
And maybe ’tis my reel,
And whiles it is the cradle
And whiles it is the creel.
I should be redding my house,
But oh, I’m stepping away
To hear high up in the fern
The tune that the fairies play.
Oh my bonny stone house
With the meal ark full to the brim!
But my fairy man’s in the fern
And I must away to him.
And it’s Mairi, Mairi MacLean,
Ach, Mairi MacLean, come ben!
But I am stepping away
Adown to the hazelly glen.
Oh folks may look upon Jura,
And he may be rich who can,
But all the Isles of the Sea
Are for me and my fairy man!
Oh I’ve made songs at the shearing
Till the tears and the laughter ran,
But a bonnier song than mine
Is sung by my fairy man!
Oh I was milking my ewes,
And it tinkled fine in the can,
But all the flocks in the world
Are for me and my fairy man!
Oh I was weaving a plaid,
And asking myself for whom?
When I spied my fairy man
And I left the clicketting loom.
And maybe ’tis my bairn
Who cries her dinner is slow,
But she sees her mammy’s in love
So she lets her mammy go!
And maybe ’tis my rock
And maybe ’tis my reel,
And times it is the heckling combs
And times it is the wheel …
II
Scarba is purple glass; the ruffling waves grow dim.
Wild deer of Scarba, swim to me over the sound,
Ach, Corryvrechan pulls you, but swim to me strongly, swim!
There is no stag of you all that runs as lightly as him,
Stepping on my quick shadow, pinning it to the ground.
Luing is low on the sea, a dark and a gentle land.
Blackbirds of Luing, rise high in your airy throngs,
From the tall red fuchsias of Luing, fly low, fly across to my hand!
Blackbirds, hark to his singing, for well you should understand
The way that a grown woman gets caught in a net of songs.
All night the Paps of Jura are standing against the stars.
Oh paps of the Jura Woman that dreams of her lover’s breast!
My breasts are remembering Uistean across all fairy bars;
Though I, too, am a mother, freckled with suckling scars,
Yet I would that his head were lying here on my heart’s nest.
III
Though you should bid me keep still, keep still,
And set my body to yours in kindness,
Though I should smile in a magicked blindness
On hands that strangle and eyes that kill,
Though for your sake I turn thoughtless, mindless,
You shall not possess me, nor no man will:
For I am the woman who writes the songs
So I cannot stay in the Fairy Hill.
IV
Oh wha’s this couching at my breist bane?
Is it a sick bairn or a foul black stane,
Or naught but my ain fetch weeping by her lee-lane?
Oh my puir fetch-thing, weep not sae sair!
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 t
here’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.
The Fourth Pig Page 16