The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [72]
“Don’t chew your coloured pencils, dear,” said Miss Violence to Laura. “You aren’t a rodent. Look, your mouth is all green. It’s bad for your teeth.”
I read Evangeline, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; I read Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. “Beautiful,” sighed Miss Violence. She was gushy, or as gushy as her dejected nature would allow, on the subject of Elizabeth Barrett Browning; also E. Pauline Johnson, the Mohawk Princess.
And oh, the river runs swifter now;
The eddies circle about my bow.
Swirl, swirl!
How the ripples curl
In many a dangerous pool awhirl!
“Stirring, dear,” said Miss Violence.
Or I read Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a man whose majesty was second only to God’s, in the opinion of Miss Violence.
With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all:
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable-wall....
She only said, “My life is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”
“Why did she wish that?” said Laura, who did not usually show much interest in my recitations.
“It was love, dear,” said Miss Violence. “It was boundless love. But it was unrequited.”
“Why?”
Miss Violence sighed. “It’s a poem, dear,” she said. “Lord Tennyson wrote it and I suppose he knew best. A poem does not reason why. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’”
Laura looked at her with scorn, and went back to her colouring. I turned the page: I’d already skimmed the whole poem, and found that nothing else happened in it.
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
“Lovely, dear,” said Miss Violence. She was fond of boundless love, but she was equally fond of hopeless melancholy.
There was a thin book bound in snuff-coloured leather, which had belonged to Grandmother Adelia: The Rubåiyåt of Omar Khayyåm , by Edward Fitzgerald. (Edward Fitzgerald hadn’t really written it, and yet he was said to be the author. How to account for it? I didn’t try to.) Miss Violence would sometimes read from this book, to show me how poetry ought to be pronounced:
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
She gasped out the Oh as if someone had kicked her in the chest; similarly the Thou. I thought it was a lot of fuss to make about a picnic, and wondered what they’d had on the bread. “Of course it wasn’t real wine, dear,” said Miss Violence. “It refers to the Communion Service.”
Would but some wingèd Angel ere too late
Arrest the yet unfolded Roll of Fate,
And make the stern Recorder otherwise
Enregister, or quite obliterate!
Ah, Love! Could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits – and then
Remould it nearer to the heart’s Desire!
“So true,” said Miss Violence, with a sigh. But she sighed about everything. She fit into Avilion very well – into its obsolete Victorian splendours, its air of aesthetic decay, of departed grace, of wan regret. Her attitudes and even her faded cashmeres went with the wallpaper.
Laura didn’t read much. Instead she would copy pictures, or else she’d colour in the black-and-white illustrations in thick, erudite books of travel and history with her coloured pencils. (Miss Violence let her do this, on the assumption that no one else would notice.) Laura had strange but very definite ideas about which colours were required: she’d make a tree blue or red, she’d make the sky pink or green. If there was a picture of someone she disapproved she’d do the face purple or dark grey to obliterate the features.
She liked to draw the pyramids, from a book on Egypt; she liked to colour in the Egyptian idols. Also Assyrian statues with the bodies of winged lions and the heads of eagles or men. That was from a book by Sir Henry Layard,