I wonder where the Beast’s rose garden is, she thought, For there is no sign of it here.
She stood up and made her way slowly back to the drive and more slowly yet towards the gaping front door. There were no candles lit today, and in the bright daylight the open door looked like the mouth of a cave. Or of a Beast.
She came to within a few steps of the portico, and halted, and could make herself go no farther. Her heart was beating so quickly she had to keep swallowing, because it seemed to be leaping up her throat; her head felt light, and there was something wrong with her vision, as if everything she looked at were no more than an elaborate mirage. ... She touched Jeweitongue’s embroidered heart again. The decision was made; she was here; she would not turn back; she would not even look back over her shoulder... .
She had been standing, staring at the portico and the door beyond in a kind of half trance. A shadow caught the comer of her eyes, and she spun round, backing away so quickly that she blundered against the nearest box hedge; it pricked her sharply even through her skirts. She stumbled, regained her balance, and stood staring at the Beast.
She was less lucky than her father, who had never looked the Beast clearly in the face. The old merchant had had some little warning of the Beast’s approach by hearing him roar before he appeared and was therefore already frightened enough to have difficulty looking at the threat directly; and the Beast had remained, throughout that interview, with his back to the daylight. Beauty had had the warning of her father’s experience, but it was the wrong sort of warning, or she had taken the wrong warning from it. She had thought only that this Beast was a very iarge, strong, and therefore dangerous Beast, who was the more terrifying because he walked and dressed and spoke like a man.
Had she had the opportunity to choose, she would still have chosen to look immediately into the Beast’s face upon meeting, to have the worst borne and past at once. But the worst borne is not necessarily past and over with thereby. The worst of fighting a dragon is being caught in its fire, but you do not survive dragon encounters by commanding your muscles to withstand dragon fire, because you and they cannot. You survive by avoiding being burnt. Beauty knew no better than to wish to marshal her forces before she met the Beast, though that marshalling would not have saved her. As it was, she was surprised into looking into the Beast’s face.
The contrasts she found there were too great: wisdom and despair, power and weakness, man and animal. These made him far more terrible than any hungry lion, any half-tamed hydra, any angry sorcerer, terrible as something that should not exist is terrible, because to recognise that it does exist shakes that faith in the foundations of the natural world which human beings must have to bear the burden of their rationality.
Later Beauty thought of a metaphor to explain the shock of that first sight of the Beast: She felt as if she were melting, like ice in sun. Water is perhaps a kind of ice, but it is not ice, it is water. Whatever—whoever—she was, it was being transformed implacably into something else; she was being undone, unmade, annihilated. .,. But that unravelling thought—which she would later put the words to of ice burning in the heat of the sun—made her drowning mind throw up a memory of those last days in the city. And she remembered staring into the eyes of the salamander, into those two pits of fire whose dangerous heat she had felt, and she heard the salamander’s dry, scratchy voice saying, I give you a small serenity.
With her last conscious strength, she cupped her hands and immediately felt the warmth between the palms, as if she held a small sun; and then the heat surged up her arms and into her body, reaching into every niche and cranny, till it had reshaped her flesh into her own precise, familiar, individual contours, and she was neither water nor ice nor unmaking but again herself. And she opened her mouth and gasped for air, for since she had raised her eyes to the Beast’s eyes, she had not breathed.
All of this took no more than a minute, as clocks understand lime.
She lowered her eyes then, and wishing to regain her composure and not wishing to appear rude, she dropped a curtsy, as she would have done to a great lord of the city, keeping her eyes upon the ground; but the graceful dip of her curtsy was hampered by the box hedge. She could not quite bring herself to step away from it, for any step forward would take her nearer the Beast.
“You need not curtsy to me,” said the Beast. “I am the Beast, and you will call me that, please. Can you not bear to look at me?”
She looked up at once, pierced to the heart by the sorrow in his voice and knowing, from the question and the sorrow together, that he had no notion of what had just happened to her, nor why. From that she pitied him so greatly that she cupped her hands again to hold a little of the salamander’s heat, not for serenity but for the warmth of friendship. But as she felt the heat again running through her, she knew at once it bore a different quality. It had been a welcome invader the first time, only moments before; but already it had become a constituent of her blood, intrinsic to the marrow of her bones, and she heard again the salamander’s last words to her: Trust me. At that moment she knew that this Beast would not have sent such misery as her father’s illness to harry or to punish, knew too that the Beast would keep his promise to her, and to herself she made another promise to him, but of that promise she did not yet herself know. Trust me sang in her blood, and she could look in the Beast’s face and see only that he looked at her hopefully.
This time it was he who looked away first. “If you will follow me, I will show you to your rooms,” he said.
“I—I would rather see your garden. I—I mean, your flower-garden,” she said almost shyly, and hesitating to mention roses. She look one, two, three tiny steps away from the box hedge. The Beast was so large! And it would be easier to be near him outdoors, in these first few minutes of—of—in her first attempts to adjust to—to—She did not think she could bear to look at the rooms she was now to live in, that did not have her sisters in them. Roses might comfort her, a little. Or if they could not, nothing could. ., .
She shook herself free of that thought quickly and allowed instead her gardener’s passion to be drawn by die prospect of roses which bloomed so far out of their season as the one diat had decorated their father’s breakfast table, the one which still stood in the window of—No! She would not let herself think of it. Roses; she was thinking of roses, of what a great sorcerer indeed the Beast must be, to have roses blooming in winter.