several eulogies.
She thought she had found a reference in the poetry of William Cullen Bryant, than whom no one could be more appropriate: his beard was the size of Birnam Wood, a monstrosity on a scale epic enough to inspire terror in Dunsinane, panic-stricken flights, mass pallings in resolution.
Macbeth
— it may have been why the image came to mind — was a play populated almost entirely by beards; even most of the women had them. The witches flourished theirs at Banquo and thoroughly confused him (“You should be women”: these were pre-Marian Halcombe days), and Lady Macbeth clearly hankered after one of her very own. “Unsex me here,” she’d boomed in her deepest voice, keen to get the sprouting started. She wasn’t too fussed about being top-full of direst cruelty, about having the access and passage to remorse stopped up, or about having the spirits that tend on mortal thought come to her woman’s breasts and take her milk for gall (a passage mysteriously missing from the edition of Shakespeare used at Miss Pearsall’s School for Girls). All that she really wanted was the beard. The only beard-free inhabitants of the play — struck down by the beardie murderers — appeared to be Lady Macduff and her son, though this child certainly displayed a precocious beardsomeness in his manner. When she looked at the words more closely —
In these peaceful shades — peaceful, unpruned, immeasurably old —
they turned out to be describing not a beard but an untracked forest, one of those trackless silences in which Chingachgook and Hawkeye still wandered, looking for signs, listening for danger, the books that Ben had loved as a child.
There was only one thing for it: she clearly needed to develop her moustache — it was a promising beginning — in order to increase her chances of achieving success as a writer, compensate for the paucity of syllables in her name by sprouting a colossal growth of facial hair. At least she chose to write in prose and not in verse. Perhaps this afforded some small possibility of publication, despite her lack of the necessary qualifications. Some women novelists were widely acknowledged to be — er — quite good, really, all things considered.
To dream of a beard on a woman, foretells unpleasant associations and lingering illness.
6
Charlotte had once tried to think of the name of the composer of a particular piece of music. She bent over, banging her forehead against one of the brass candlesticks projecting from the upper frame of the piano, lost in the agonies of thought. She was in a permanent state of near-impalement, and had scars on her forehead the way boys had them on their knees and elbows.
“Brahms …?” she muttered doubtfully. “Bizet …? B …?”
She wavered for a moment, seemingly on the point of considering Byron or Botticelli as possibilities, before adding, “Tchaikowsky?” Her knowledge of different composers and their styles was not very extensive, though her knowledge of Gilbert and Sullivan was second to no one’s. At last, inspiration had dawned upon her.
“You know whom I mean,” she’d said, challengingly. (
Whom.
Charlotte was a stickler for grammatical correctness.) “
One of those Bearded Ones
!”
They had developed their own gesture whenever they wished to make a discreet reference to The Bearded Ones, the gesture a man made when he was trying to decide whether or not he was in need of a shave, the insides of the fingers and thumb of their right hands grasping the chin and pulling downward, feeling for bristles. As the beards grew, so did the gestures, and they began to use both hands, making a descending down-down-down gesture from the sides of their faces as far as they could reach to encompass the immensity of the outgrowths. At the bottom, they moved their hands outward and then together, and it looked as if they were making some kind of scooping, gathering movement, drawing something — a large puppy, a tentative tottering