Authors: Naomi Mitchison Marina Warner
I do not know how long we lay in darkness, only I know that all the time the song in us was growing stronger and sweeter; we felt ourselves better able to fulfil our destiny. And then came light, and hands on me and voices and I was aware of how soon I should know my fate, to what pains I should give healing or to what creation I should inspire. And I was taken up and carefully placed upon a table, among glasses, and there were men all round me, and I was become such that I was aware of their thoughts and feelings towards me.
And I saw first that they were not sad nor discouraged nor in travail of work or love, since they were all rich and secure and well-fed and driven by no necessities. I had no need to heal them. So it seemed to me that perhaps they were creators. But that was not so either; they were not of those who wish to give out, but only to take; there was no spark in them which I could fan to flame of adventurousness or art or love or deep thought. So then, perhaps, they must surely be good friends, laughter-loving, with their minds thrown open each to the other. But neither was that so, for in their hearts was suspicion and jealousy and quarrel-someness; each man was the slave of himself and his own possessions, and being slaves they could not also be friends. But it seemed to me, even with this, that maybe I could break down
these barriers between them and give them happiness, for, although they were not sad, they were yet not happy. And with that the stopper was taken from my bottle and I was poured into glasses, beautiful and tingling and full of hope.
But none of these men saw me as beautiful; they only saw me as a thing which had cost them money, as another piece of possession and pride. And I was swallowed and my essences entered into them, evoking response from nerve and brain cells. But vain my hopes. For the thing which they had been fashioned into by their lifeâthe thing which they had allowed themselves to becomeâwas not to be altered. True enough, bonds were loosened in them, but these were bonds not of uncertainty or a lonely enclosure in the self, but bonds of restraint and a certain outward decency. Such of these men as had small resentments and hatreds hidden in them, let them come out in boasting and anger; loosed too, the impulses towards cruelty. For it was my fate to set free not only the good in mankind but also the evil, not only the dreams of beauty but the nightmares of ugliness, and so, having done what I was meant to do, but having seen it turned to manifest wickedness, I was dissolved and possessed by these men, and lost forever, and out of this overwhelming loss and misery and wan hope, I found myself again facing the witch and again, as I knew, with a nonhuman destiny before me.
I did not hesitate, for the cauldron was still there in its place, and the witch nodded affably enough as she opened her hand with the third choice, which was larger than the others. As I touched it, I saw by a momentary flicker of light, that it was a small piece of iron ore.
Again there was hardness and darkness, but this time no sense of pressure. All, all was stayed. It would have been the same to have waited for a moment or for eternity, nor can I in any way guess at the duration of time that actually passed; I had no measure for it of urgency or growth or consciousness. The blasting of the iron-stone shook me but did not waken me. Inert I was mined and loaded on trucks and sent many miles by train or lorry. Only, the whole time, I was gathering to myself, not any kind of life, for I was and must remain non-living matter, but a sense which was like neither human nor plant sense, of the men who handled me. And the me that I was spread indefinitely beyond that small piece of ore which the witch had handed out, so that there was continuity between one truck-load and another.
Then came the writhing heat of furnaces and the separating of metal from slag, and at the end of that period my strange sense had followed the metal into bars of pig-iron, although, for all I knew, it might also be with the slag; but of that I could have no knowledge. Men handled the pig-iron strongly and angrily, sweating and sometimes in pain. I knew why they were angry, how they, like iron itself, were gripped by an inexorable process which they could not anyhow escape from. I sensed that they had thoughts of another life or of this work of theirs made somehow different and for different ends. They were not glad of the purpose of their life; they would have had it otherwise.
And again there were furnaces and now, instead of a separation, a mixing with another element, a toughening. Again cool, I was piled into ingots of steel in some vast warehouse and again there was in me a knowledge of the men who had thought out
and worked upon their fashioning, and this knowledge was certain and unmoving and metallic, as though the shine on my surface, the different refraction of molecules, was in some way sympathetic with that brightness which comes on the thought of men and women when they consider some making which they mean to do. There were within my packed substance, an interlocking and overlapping multiplicity of images, set upon me by the ingenious imaginations of skilled designers, the latest children of the busy centuries of iron-working, begun when I was strengthless and purposeless ore, deep-hidden and utterly unaware. These interimposed three-dimensional images showed sometimes the simplest human necessities, cooking pots and spades and ploughshares, beds for loving and sleeping, tables for feasting and working; showered and danced through me like electrons the thousand shapes of little things, needles and knives and buttons and razor blades, the pin for the baby's napkin, the scalpel and forceps of the surgeon, the fisherman's hook; rapidly melting into one another those things which take away from the ancient and painful toil of women, bright-metal taps and screws, electric fittings, radiators, sewing machines, cleaners and wringers, refrigerators; successions of ingenious and intricate machinery and apparatus, knife-edges for balances, delicately adjusted means for measuring and testing; close in my substance as these, great objects of calculated strengths and stresses, steel frames for ships or buildings, engines to take and use the forces of steam and oil and petrol, the heavy wheels of winding and pumping gear, propeller shafts to stand the shock of storms; pulsing through these the hair-springs of watches, finest electrical parts, small objects moving or moved with strictest exactitude. Thus
then I knew myself as potentially part of mankind, that extra hand, eye, ear, that ultra-human strength and accuracy which he had made part of his life, of his mastery over and peering into the matter which once mastered him. I knew myself potential giver of the complicated joys and delights which knowledge has given, for all that had been thought into me.
Yet there were other thoughts; there were thoughts of those men who knew that none of this was for them, and my material was heavy with their dumb wonder and resentment, asking a why which I could answer no more than they could. Yet they were trying to answer it, to answer it with hate. Contending thoughts pierced through me, shivering and defacing my images of power. And it began to be plain that none of these potentialities of mine were wholly good; all could be turned into instruments and objects of possession and envy and the power of one sort of man over another. It was borne in upon me that men were forever crossing one another's purposes, so that even the dumb ingots were to them only objects for the working of their malicious and destructive wills. Nor was it known to me in what way I was to be used.
So, after a time of waiting, it came about that my ingots were lifted and piled and taken again to furnaces and forced between rollers, and I knew that at last the wills of men were having effect on me and soon I should get my shape. Then for a time I was a heavy and enormous cylinder, but that was pierced, and spirals were welded into me, and a part of me became careful and intricate machinery and a part of me became supports and great wheels, and all of me shone and glittered with newness and I was a finished thing. During all this process I had become so concerned
for my shaping that I was unaware of my purpose, but, as my material essence cooled and slowed and settled, the thoughts of men lighted upon me again. And I became aware that I was a great gun; I became aware that the destructive will had taken me completely; I became aware that my potentials had been taken not for life and delight and use, but only for death. My muzzle pointed inexorably towards death; all parts of me were designed and perfected towards death-giving. And with that, with the heaping of death-thoughts upon me, my awareness began to fade out and grow cold and earth-fixed, metal-fixed, for one purpose only. The shapes of power and ingenuity and beauty and ease-giving had left me now. It was again as though I were the ore deep-hidden and untouched under the earth. Dead and dark.
And out of death and darkness I came to myself slowly in the witch's cave of Soria Moria castle; slowly, slowly my senses unstiffened, my eyes to sight of the cauldron, my ears to the low crackling of the fire, the low clicking of the knitting needles, my judgement to the knowledge that there was no fourth choice. The witch looked up from her knitting and nodded to me. “You've been a long time,” she said. It seemed to me that there was no answer I could give; I only knew that everything should have been different and I knew also that the kind of castle that we build is from its foundations conditioned by the kind of person whom we have allowed ourselves to become. Nor did it seem to me likely that I should ever again bring back reports to that committee upon the nature and substance of any reality.
There was now in that cavernous place an ever more immediate triangle of lines of force, increasingly positive, between myself and the witch and the still dreadfully fuming cauldron. Out
against them I set every strength I had of repulsion and courage; yet the basis had been undermined and I was become weak with the despair of the wasted bread and wine and iron. So, step by step, I was drawn nearer to the base of the dreadful triangle, scarcely now against my will but against what I could only know that my will should have been. And the witch took another knife out of her cupboard.
But, as I was almost within reach of her, there came a great noise and a vibration round us, not only in the close air but in the very walls of the castle, and here and there a flake dropt off and fell softly to the floor. And the witch said: “Now, if that isn't provoking! That nasty sea is coming in and we shall have to take to the back-stairs.” And with that she opened a peculiar door which had, until then, not been apparent, and, taking her murrey-coloured stockings, which were now of a length beyond any stockings I had seen elsewhere, over the crook of her elbow, she bustled through it, and I, after a moment's hesitation, followed her, for again there had come the shock and the noise of roaring and beating against the castle walls.
Behind the peculiar door was only a great darkness and a stillness beyond any exterior vibration and such that our own footfalls and our own hushed breathing became of an almost unbearable nature, stirring an air that should have been eternally quiescent. Through this, then, we went down and down, and the darkness pressed upon my open eyes and clung round my pushing face and shoulders, and after a time even the shuffling footsteps of the witch were not to be heard, but only my own. It was then that my hands, groping as ever for the wall of the back-staircase, encountered nothing, and it began to come to me, at
first slowly and then with an intensely rapid realisation, that this before my eyes, which I had still taken for darkness, was, in its upper part all pierced with stars, which, because of their stillness, I had not been apprehending, and, in its lower part, it was banded with moving and swirling whiteness upon a grey or dark background. And, looking more fully upon this, it became at once apparent that here were the incoming waves.
So, rapidly adjusting myself to these conditions, I perceived that the sea was sufficiently near and was, indeed, about to destroy my carefully made castle. Yet this was of no consequence to me, for to-morrow I should build another and better castle which would in its turn come to destruction and a levelling out of walls below the salt quick water. And in about half an hour, it was high tide.
KATE CRACKERNUTS
LIST OF CHARACTERS
Kate
Ann,
her elder stepsister
Kate's Mother
The Hen-Wife
Maidens
Sick Prince
Well Prince
Porter
Fairies
A Fairy Baby
ACT I
SCENE I
A corner of a hall in Those Days. Plain walls, a chest or two, a spinning wheel, two stools. On the stools ANN and her younger stepsister KATE, sitting and sewing in bright colours
.
Ann:
Stepsister Kate, you sew so fine,
Dear little stitches, all in a line!
Kate:
I can't sew as somebody can,
Stepsister Ann, stepsister Ann!
Ann:
Stepsister Kate, I love you dear,
All the morning your voice I hear,
Merry about the household ways,
Making a pleasure of all the days.
Kate:
I love you and I love you well,
This is the prettiest thing to tell:
Love you more than I'll e'er love man,
Stepsister Ann, stepsister Ann!
(They go on sewing. But after a moment Ann sighs and passes a hand across her face, letting the sewing lie.)
What is the thing that clouds your brow?
Stepsister Ann, what grieves you now?
Ann:
Oh I am troubled, yes I am troubled,
Kate, oh Kate, I will tell you how!
If but your mother were mine own mother,
I were as happy as bird on bough,
But oh your mother is my stepmother,
And there is the trouble that's on me now!
Kate (frowning)
:
Well I know that her jealous eye
Watches ever to peep and spy,
Well I know that her jealous heart
Will not give you a daughter's part.
Yet, my Ann, be merry and see
The sunshine dancingâand why not we!