Hawker and the Pixy? May 6, 2014

Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern

We have visited Robert Hawker before on this blog, not least in his gadding about as a mermaid. However, there follows a peculiar episode in which he claims to have seen a supernatural creature in a letter written in 1856 (or was the experience 1856, the source Byles Life and Letters is not clear?). R.A.J.Walling assumed, in his biography of George Borrows, that Hawker was describing a pixy in this passage. Maybe…

It was a bright, fierce, stern dog-day. I was returning from Wellcombe on my old gray mare. I had to cross a deep and narrow Gorge between hills, like Stowe valley without its cottages or woods, and to pass, down near the sea, a silent mill. On Sundays it is always shut up, and the people go elsewhere to sleep. Often as I have passed the all-but-ruined hut, I have thought of the psalm wherein mention is made of the ‘thing which walketh in darkness and the demon of the noon.’ That day the sky was silent with heat, and the whole scene was like a place where all was so lonely that hardly God was there; when all at once a swift, brown, rough shape started up among the gorse bushes, and rushed or glided towards the stream. I felt myself flush and then grow pale; but, remembering St. Thomas’s word that every spirit must crouch to the Sign, I made it in the air, and rode as fast as I could urge the mare towards it [the creature?]. I saw its head disappear down the bank, and, although I looked along the river and followed its course, I caught sight of it no more. It was a kind of nameless and indefinable sensation, rather than the sight, that assured me it was preternatural: at least, so I thought, and think.

Two questions matter here. First, was the sighting genuine and, second, how does this fit into local tradition?

As to its genuiness there are a couple of problems here. Hawker was a fine practical joker: note the link to the mermaid above. On another occasion he told an acquaintance on the road: ‘Did you meet a waggonette full of people? I stuffed them up with all kinds of nonsense, and they believed every word!’ But this is in his own writing, yet is not one of his short stories. I would assume that it should be taken at face value: though note also that Hawker had a serious opium habit. Would opium be good for a ‘brown, rough shape…’ drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com As to fairy tradition, the creature appears in great heat: something associated by the theosophists with fairy sightings; perhaps also good for optical illusions? The fairy also disappears into the ground apparently: for which there are many parallels. What though is to be made of ‘rough’: hairy presumably? Had Hawker stumbled on some largish mammal? A deer and escaped something…