“Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walked,
Larger than human on the frozen hills,”
the funeral barge appearing on the waters, bearing the three queens, the commencement of the voyage into the unknown, to the island valley of Avalon. By the cold moonlight the spectacle fits the frame, for all distances are magnified and the awkward corners of daylight fact are obscured by the mysterious glamour. It is not the setting Tennyson has given to the Idyll, but it mates the story as told by Malory in his re-rendering from the French. It is not far over the hills to Slaughter Bridge, where Arthur is said to have received his mortal wound in combat with Sir Mordred; it is a dozen miles or so to King Arthur’s Castle at Tintagel.
Fascinating as the great allegory is in any setting, it may be assumed, quite safely, that Borrow was even more keenly interested in the other, wilder, fiercer legend of Dozmary—the legend of Tregeagle. For, though he exclaimed his pleasure at detecting a resemblance between the names Jenefer and Guinevere in the parish records of St. Cleer, and afterwards made a journey to the Arthurian country to the north—when he passed by Caerleon on his tour through Wales, he did not turn aside to dream of the Round Table, but contented himself with mentioning Caerleon as “at one time one of the most considerable towns in Britain,” and went on to explain that whisky really was a corruption of the Erse word for water, and that meticulous accuracy would describe the fiery spirit as usquebaugh!
The Penance of Tregeagle was a very different matter. It is a variant of the universal Satanic legend. Tregeagle is a prototype of the immemorial man who makes compact with the Father of Evil, the bargain in this case being a hundred years of earthly pleasure in return for his soul immortal. The parable is an answer to the tragic question, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Tregeagle was a shepherd, who, dissatisfied with his share of the good things of earth, expressed a petulant wish to possess all he could see. The Devil appeared to him in guise of Knight, arrayed in black armour, carrying a black lance, riding a black horse, accompanied by two black hounds of hell. The stranger challenged Tregeagle’s desire; for the forfeit of his soul at the end of a hundred years, he should have during those hundred years a castle and broad lands and endless riches. The shepherd accepted the terms; the Black Knight sounded his terrible horn and rode away, with the black hounds (which dominate the story in all its versions) snarling at his horse’s heels. In some form or other the dog is nearly always associated with the Satanic legend. In the Faust stories the Spirit of Evil is introduced as a dog. In “Tam o’ Shanter,”
“There sat Auld Nick in shape o’ beast,
A towzie tyke, black, grim, and large.”
Upon the Devil’s departure, Tregeagle fell into a trance, and, when he awoke, the moors were changed into waving forests and verdant meadows, and on the hill where Dozmary had been stood a splendid castle. Tregeagle himself was arrayed in knightly costume, and saluted as their lord by a stately retinue.
In the course of his hundred years of prosperity all his fine stock of original sin had black and bloody development. Rapine, murder, and pillage went unchecked; he consummated his crimes by abducting the lovely virgin Goonhylda, daughter of the Earl of Cornwall, and shutting her up in the castle. Her father led an expedition to rescue her, and its arrival at Tregeagle’s gates precisely coincided with the expiration of his hundred years. And as the Earl’s messenger thundered there, the sound of the terrible horn and the sinister baying of hounds was heard; the Black Horseman came riding across the hills, calling upon Tregeagle to surrender himself, for that his bond was due.
Tregeagle, in a palsy of fear, stepped out, and was immediately stricken dead by a bolt from the black clouds that had suddenly o’erspread the scene. A storm raged, a spectre arose from the corpse of Tregeagle and fled into the murk, pursued by the grim huntsman and his hounds. When the storm had passed, the enchantment was over. Castle, forests and meadows had vanished; once more stretched the wide brown moors, glittered the surface of the pool. But Tregeagle was condemned for ever to the service of the Devil, who delights to set him Sisyphean tasks, of which the chief is to drain dry the pool of Dozmary by baling it with a limpet shell which has a hole in the bottom. Let him desist for a moment, and his torture begins; he flies shrieking before the Huntsman and his ghastly hounds. The spectre horseman and his pack are known as “The Devil and his Durdy Dogs.” The punishment of Tregeagle is only a small part of their business. They travel far and wide, not only over the moors but along the sea coasts, and their attentions are most fatal to those who happen to be abroad at night bent on deeds of evil. There is a tale of a herdsman who was on the moor of a winter’s night, and was chased by the Durdy Dogs, which came rushing down from a neighbouring tor. He could not run fast enough to escape, and just as they were close upon him he fell on his knees in prayer. Immediately the dogs stood at bay, howling ferociously. The terrible Huntsman shouted, “Bo Shrove!” (“the boy prays”), and at the word both he and his hounds vanished. [166] Similar legends of the yeth-hounds of Dartmoor are heard in Devonshire. As the black dogs hunt Tregeagle across the Cornish hills, their baying and his cries of agony are heard in lonely cottages at night. One draws closer to the chimney-corner as the wind pelts moaning athwart the waste, when this tradition is related to him by firelight in one of the crofts near by. Crying children are told that they are “roarin’ an’ howlin’ like Tregeagle.”
Borrow was deeply interested, not only in these larger legends of world-celebrity, but in the purely local folklore, the pixy stories of the peasantry. The Cornish pixies—or “piskies,” to use the vernacular—are diminutive fairies, generally dressed in green, very fond of mirth and mischief, some bad, but most good. They mislead men at night, for fun; then the only way to break the spell is for the victim to turn his coat inside out. They play practical jokes; they resemble, now Will o’ the Wisp, now the Scottish brownie, and again Robin Goodfellow; when properly propitiated they sometimes make gifts to their human neighbours of fairy food and fairy goblets. Borrow heard how the pixies mount horses’ heads at nights, and ride them about the fields, making stirrups of their manes; how they work in the mines, and are heard knocking in the levels underground, like the Duegars of northern latitudes; how some of them are under penance, like Tregeagle, to bale dry the pool of Dozmary.
Elizabeth Borrow, his cousin, related this characteristic story to him. A child belonging to poor parents was observed to have developed peculiarities. Among these was the fact that it could never get enough to eat. This is not, one might suppose, a peculiarity of children altogether confined to St. Cleer or even to Cornwall; but this child’s appetite was so abnormal that its relations decided to consult a wise woman about it. The witch told them that she had no doubt it was a pisky. She recommended them to put a large quantity of old shoes on a spit and make the child turn it, even if they had to beat it to compel it to the task. This procedure was adopted, and after a sound thrashing and much complaining the child was heard to say: