Lore of Proserpine — THE FAIRY WIFE –Part 1

THE FAIRY WIFE

There is nothing surprising in that story, to my mind, but the reprobation with which Beckwith visits himself.

What could he have done that he did not?

How could he have refrained from doing what he did?

Yet there are curious things about it, and one of those is the partiality of the manifestation.

The fairy was visible to him, his child and his dogs but to no one else.

So, in my own experience, had she been whom I saw in K---- Park, whom Harkness, my companion, did not see.

My explanation of it does not carry me over all the difficulties.

I say, or will repeat if I have said it before, that the fairy kind are really the spirit, essence, substance (what you will) of certain sensible things, such as trees, flowers, wind, water, hills, woods, marshes and the like, that their normal appearance to us is that of these natural phenomena; but that in certain states of mind, perhaps in certain conditions of body, there is a relation established by which we are able to see them on our own terms, as it were, or in our own idiom, and they also to treat with us to some extent, to a large extent, on the same plane or standing-ground.

That there are limitations to this relationship is plain already; for instance, Beckwith was not able to get his fairy prisoner to speak, and I myself have never had speech with more than one in my life.

But as to that I shall have a very curious case to report shortly, where a man taught his fairy-wife to speak.

The mentioning of that undoubted marriage brings me to the question of sex.

There is, of course, not the slightest doubt about it.

Mrs. Ventris was a fairy wife.

Mrs. Ventris was a puzzle to me for a good many years--in fact until Despoina explained to me many things.

For Mrs. Ventris had a permanent human shape, and spoke as freely as you or I. I thought at one time that she might be the offspring of a mixed marriage, like Elsie Marks (whose mother, by the way, was another case of the sort); but in fact Mrs. Ventris and Mrs. Marks were both fairy wives, and the wood-girl, Mabilla King, whose case I am going to deal with was another.

But this particular relationship is one which my explanation of fairy apparitions does not really cover: for marriage implies a permanent accessibility (to put it so) of two normally inaccessible natures; and parentage implies very much more.

That, indeed, implies what the Christians call Miracle; but it is quite beyond dispute.

I have a great number of cases ready to my hand, and shall deal at large with all of them in the course of this essay, in which fairies have had intercourse with mortals.

It is by no means the fact that the wife is always of the fairy-kind.

My own experience at C---- shall prove that.

But I must content myself with mentioning the well-known case of Mary Wellwood who was wife to a carpenter near Ashby de la Zouche, and was twice taken by a fairy and twice recovered.

She had children in each of her states of being, and on one recorded occasion her two families met.

It appears to be a law that the wife takes the nature of the husband, or as much of it as she can, and it is important to remark that _in all cases_ the children are of the husband's nature, fairy or mortal as he may happen to be.

"Nature," Despoina told me, "follows the male."

So far as fairies are concerned it seems certain that union with mortals runs in families or clans, if one may so describe their curious relationships to each other.

There were five sisters of the wood in one of the Western departments of France (Lot-et-Garonne, I think), who all married men: two of them married two brothers.

Apart they led the decorous lives of the French middle class, but when they were together it was a sight to see!

A curious one, and to us, with our strong associations of ideas, that tremendous hand which memory has upon our heart-strings, a poignant one.

For they had lost their powers, but not their impulses.

It was a case of _si vieillesse pouvait_.

I suppose they may have appeared to some chance wayfarer, getting a glimpse of them at their gambols between the poplar stems of the road, or in the vistas of the hazel-brakes, as a company of sprightly matrons on a frolic.

To the Greeks foolishness!

And be sure that such an observer would shrug them out of mind.

My own impression is that these ladies were perfectly happy, that they had nothing of that _maggior' dolore_ which we mortals know, and for which our joys have so often to pay.

Let us hope so at any rate, for about a fairy or a growing boy conscious of the prison-shades could Poe have spun his horrors.

"To the Greeks foolishness," I said in my haste; but in very truth it was far from being so.

To the Greeks there was nothing extraordinary in the parentage of a river or the love of a God for a mortal.

Nor should there be to a Christian who accepts the orthodox account of the foundation of his faith.

So far as we know, the generative process of every created thing is the same; it is, therefore, an allowable inference that the same process obtains with the created things which are not sensible to ourselves.

If flowers mate and beget as we do, why not winds and waters, why not gods and nymphs, fauns and fairies?

It is the creative urgency that imports more than the creative matter.

To my mind, _magna componere parvis_, it is my fixed belief that all created nature known to us is the issue of the mighty love of God for his first-made creature the Earth.

I accept the Greek mythology as the nearest account of the truth we are likely to get.

I have never had the least difficulty in accepting it; and all I have since found out of the relations of men with their fellow-creatures of other genera confirms me in the belief that the urgency is the paramount necessity.

If I am to deal with a case of a mixed marriage, where the wife was a fairy, the spirit of a tree, I shall ask leave to set down first a plain proposition, which is that all Natural Facts (as wind, hills, lakes, trees, animals, rain, rivers, flowers) have an underlying Idea or Soul whereby they really are what they appear, to which they owe the beauty, majesty, pity, terror, love, which they excite in us; and that this Idea, or Soul, having a real existence of its own in community with its companions of the same nature, can be discerned by mortal men in forms which best explain to human intelligence the passions which they excite in human breasts.

This is how I explain the fact, for instance, that the austerity of a lonely rock at sea will take the form and semblance, and much more than that, assume the prerogatives of a brooding man, or that the swift freedom of a river will pass by, as in a flash, in the coursing limbs of a youth, or that at dusk, out of a reed-encircled mountain-tarn, silvery under the hush of the grey hour, there will rise, and gleam, and sink again, the pale face, the shoulders and breast of the Spirit of the Pool; that, finally, the grace of a tree, and its panic of fury when lashed by storm, very capable in either case of inspiring love or horror, will be revealed rarely in the form of a nymph.

There may be a more rational explanation of these curious things, but I don't know of one: _Fortunatus et ille, Deos qui novit agrestes!

_ Happy may one be in the fairies of our own country.

Happy, even yet, are they who can find the Oreads of the hill, Dryads of the wood, nymphs of river, marsh, plough-land, pasture, and heath.

Now, leaving to Greece the things that are Greek, here for an apologue follows a plain recital of facts within the knowledge of every man of the Cheviots.

I

There is in that country, not far from Otterburn--between Otterburn and the Scottish border--a remote hamlet consisting of a few white cottages, farm buildings and a shingle-spired church.

It is called Dryhope, and lies in a close valley, which is watered by a beck or burn, known as the Dryhope Burn.

It is deeply buried in the hills.

Spurs of the Cheviots as these are, they rise to a considerable elevation, but are pasturable nearly to the top.

There, however, where the heather begins, peat-hags and morasses make dangerous provision, from which the flocks are carefully guarded.

It is the practice of the country for the shepherds to be within touch of them all night, lest some, feeding upward (as sheep always do) should reach the summits and be lost or mired inextricably.

These upland stretches, consequently, are among the most desolate spots to be found in our islands.

I have walked over them myself within recent years and met not a human soul, nor beast of man's taming.

Ravens, curlews, peewits, a lagging fox or limping hare; such, with the unsensed Spirits of the Earth, will be your company.

In particular I traversed (in 1902) the great upland called Limmer Fell, and saw the tarn--Silent Water--and the trees called The Seven Sisters.

They are silver birches of remarkable size and beauty.

One of them is fallen.

Standing there, looking north-west, the Knapp may be seen easily, some five miles away; and the extent of the forest with which it is covered can be estimated.

A great and solemn wood that is, which no borderer will ever enter if he can help it.

There was--and may be still--a family of shepherds living in Dryhope of the name of King.

When these things occurred there were alive George King, a patriarch of seventy-five years, Miranda King, his daughter-in-law, widow of his son, who was supposed to be a middle-aged woman, and a young man, Andrew King, her only son.

That was the family; and there was a girl, Bessie Prawle, daughter of a neighbour, very much in and out of the house, and held by common report to be betrothed to Andrew.

She used to help the widow in domestic matters, see to the poultry, milk the cow, churn the butter, press the cheeses.

The Kings were independent people, like the dalesmen of Cumberland, and stood, as the saying is, upon their own foot-soles.

Old King had a tenant-right upon the fell, and owed no man anything.

There was said to be a mystery connected with Miranda the widow, who was a broad-browed, deep-breasted, handsome woman, very dark and silent.

She was not a native of Redesdale, not known to be of Northumberland.

Her husband, who had been a sailor, had brought her back with him one day, saying that she was his wife and her name Miranda.

He had said no more about her, would say no more, and had been drowned at sea before his son was born.

She, for her part, had been as uncommunicative as he.

Such reticence breeds wonderment in the minds of such a people as they of Dryhope, and out of wonderment arise wonders.

It was told that until Miranda King was brought in sea-birds had never been seen in Dryhopedale.

It was said that they came on that very night when George King the younger came home, and she with him, carrying his bundle and her own.

It was said that they had never since left the hamlet, and that when Miranda went out of doors, which was seldom, she was followed by clouds of them whichever way she turned.

I

have no means of testing the truth of these rumours, but, however it may be, no scandal was ever brought against her.

She was respectable and respected.

Old King, the grandfather, relied strongly upon her judgment.

She brought up her son in decent living and the fear of God.

In the year when Andrew was nineteen he was a tall, handsome lad, and a shepherd, following the profession, as he was to inherit the estate, of his forebears.

One April night in that year he and his grandfather, the pair of them with a collie, lay out on the fell-side together.

Lambing is late in Redesdale, the spring comes late; April is often a month of snow.

They had a fire and their cloaks; the ground was dry, and they lay upon it under a clear sky strewn with stars.

At midnight George King, the grandfather, was asleep, but Andrew was broad awake.

He heard the flock (which he could not see) sweep by him like a storm, the bell-wether leading, and as they went up the hill the wind began to blow, a long, steady, following blast.

The collie on his feet, ears set flat on his head, shuddering with excitement, whined for orders.

Andrew, after waking with difficulty his grandfather, was told to go up and head them off.

He sent the dog one way--off in a flash, he never returned that night--and himself went another.

He was not seen again for two days.

To be exact, he set out at midnight on Thursday the 12th April, and did not return to Dryhope until eleven o'clock of the morning of Saturday the 14th.

The sheep, I may say here, came back by themselves on the 13th, the intervening day.

That night of the 12th April is still commemorated in Dryhope as one of unexampled spring storm, just as a certain October night of the next year stands yet as the standard of comparison for all equinoctial gales.

The April storm, we hear, was very short and had several peculiar features.

It arose out of a clear sky, blew up a snow-cloud which did no more than powder the hills, and then continued to blow furiously out of a clear sky.

It was steady but inconceivably strong while it lasted; the force and pressure of the wind did not vary until just the end.

It came from the south-east, which is the rainy quarter in Northumberland, but without rain.

It blew hard from midnight, until three o'clock in the morning, and then, for half an hour, a hurricane.

The valley and hamlet escaped as by a miracle.

Mr. Robson, the vicar, awakened by it, heard the wind like thunder overhead and went out of doors to observe it.

He went out into a still, mild air coming from the north-west, and still heard it roaring like a mad thing high above him.

Its direction, as he judged by sound, was the precise contrary of the ground current.

In the morning, wreckage of all kinds, branches of trees, roots, and whole clumps of heather strewn about the village and meadows, while showing that a furious battle had been fought out on the fells, confirmed this suspicion.

A limb of a tree, draped in ivy, was recognised as part of an old favourite of his walks.

The ash from which it had been torn stood to the south-east of the village.

In the course of the day (the 13th) news was brought in that one of the Seven Sisters was fallen, and that a clean drive could be seen through the forest on the top of Knapp.

Coupled with these dreadful testimonies you have the disappearance of Andrew King to help you form your vision of a village in consternation.

Hear now what befell young Andrew King when he swiftly climbed the fell, driven forward by the storm.

The facts are that he was agog for adventure, since, all unknown to any but himself, he had ventured to the summits before, had stood by Silent Water, touched the Seven Sisters one by one, and had even entered the dreadful, haunted, forest of Knapp.

He had had a fright, had been smitten by that sudden gripe of fear which palsies limbs and freezes blood, which the ancients called the Stroke of Pan, and we still call Panic after them.

He had never forgotten what he had seen, though he had lost the edge of the fear he had.

He was older now by some two years, and only waiting the opportunity for renewed experience.

He hoped to have it--and he had it.

The streaming gale drove him forward as a ship at sea.

He ran lightly, without fatigue or troubled breath.

Dimly above him he presently saw the seven trees, dipping and louting to the weather; but as he neared them they had no meaning for him, did not, indeed, exist.

For now he saw more than they, and otherwise than men see trees.