RODMOOR
BOOKS BY
JOHN COWPER POWYS
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PUBLISHED BY G. ARNOLD SHAW
GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL, NEW YORK
RODMOOR
A ROMANCE
JOHN COWPER POWYS
Author of “Wood and Stone,” etc.
_O they rade on, and farther on,_
_And they waded rivers abune the knee,_
_And they saw neither sun nor moon_
_But they heard the roaring of the sea._
ANONYMOUS.
[Illustration]
1916
G. ARNOLD SHAW
NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1916
BY G. ARNOLD SHAW
COPYRIGHT, IN GREAT BRITAIN
AND THE COLONIES
VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY
BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK
DEDICATED
TO THE SPIRIT OF
EMILY BRONTE
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE BOROUGH 1
II DYKE HOUSE 24
III SEA-DRIFT 40
IV OAKGUARD 49
V A SYMPOSIUM 58
VI BRIDGE-HEAD AND WITHY-BED 73
VII VESPERS 87
VIII SUN AND SEA 102
IX PRIEST AND DOCTOR 118
X LOW TIDE 129
XI THE SISTERS 139
XII HAMISH TRAHERNE 152
XIII DEPARTURE 160
XIV BRAND RENSHAW 175
XV BROKEN VOICES 194
XVI THE FENS 212
XVII THE DAWN 226
XVIII BANK-HOLIDAY 239
XIX LISTENERS 264
XX RAVELSTON GRANGE 282
XXI THE WINDMILL 311
XXII THE NORTHWEST WIND 337
XXIII WARDEN OF THE FISHES 352
XXIV THE TWENTY-EIGHTH OF OCTOBER 375
XXV BALTAZAR STORK 409
XXVI NOVEMBER MIST 430
XXVII THRENOS 447
RODMOOR
I
THE BOROUGH
It was not that he concealed anything from her. He told her quite
frankly, in that first real conversation they had together--on the
little secluded bench in the South London park--about all the morbid
sufferings of his years in America and his final mental collapse.
He even indicated to her--while the sound of grass-mowing came to them
over the rain-wet tulips--some of the most secret causes of this event;
his savage reaction, for instance, against the circle he was thrown
into there; his unhappy habit of deadly introspection; his aching
nostalgia for things less murderously new and raw.
He explained how his mental illness had taken so dangerous, so unlooked
for a shape, that it was only by the merest chance he had escaped long
incarceration.
No; it was not that he concealed anything. It was rather that she
experienced a remote uneasy feeling that, say what he might,--and in
a certain sense he said too much rather than too little--she did not
really understand him.
Her feminine instinct led her to persuade him that she understood; led
her to say what was most reassuring to him, and most consolatory; but
in her heart of hearts she harboured a teasing doubt; a doubt which
only the rare sweetness of these first love-days of her life enabled
her to hide and cover over. Nor was this feeling about her lover’s
confessions the only little cloud on Nance Herrick’s horizon during
these memorable weeks--weeks that, after all, she was destined to look
back upon as so strangely happy.
She found herself, in the few moments when her passionate emotion left
her free to think of such things, much more anxious than she cared to
admit about the ambiguous relations existing between the two persons
dependent upon her. Ever since the death of her father--that prodigal
sailor--three years ago, when she had taken it upon herself to support
both of them by her work in the dressmaker’s shop, she had known that
all was not well between the two. Rachel Doorm had never forgiven
Captain Herrick for marrying again; she felt that instinctively, but it
was only quite recently that she had grown to be really troubled by the
eccentric woman’s attitude to the little half-sister.
Linda’s mother, she knew, had in her long nervous decline rather clung
than otherwise to this grim friend of the former wife; but Linda’s
mother had always been different from other women; and Nance could
remember how, in quite early days, she never interfered when Miss Doorm
took the child away to punish her.
To Nance herself Rachel had always been something of an anxiety. Her
savage devotion had proved over and over again more of a burden than a
pleasure; and now that there was this increased tension between her and
Linda, the thing began to appear invidious, rapacious, sinister.
She was torn, in fact, two ways over the situation. Her own mother had
long ago--and it was one of her few definite recollections of her--made
her swear solemnly never to desert this friend of former days; and the
vows she had registered then to obey this covenant had grown into a
kind of religious rite; the only rite, in fact, after all these years,
she was able to perform for her dead.
And yet if loyalty to her mother kept her patiently tender with
Rachel’s eccentricities, the much warmer feeling she had for her other
parent was stirred indignantly by the thought of any unkindness dealt
out to Linda.
And just at present, it was clear, Linda was not happy.
The young girl seemed to be losing her vivacity and to be growing
silent and reserved.
She was now nearly eighteen; and yet Nance had caught her once or twice
lately looking at Rachel Doorm with the same expression of frightened
entreaty as she used to wear when led away from her mother’s side for
some childish fault. Rachel’s father, a taciturn and loveless old man,
had recently died, leaving his daughter, whom he had practically cast
off, a small but secure annuity and a little house on the east coast.
It was now to this home of her ancestors, in the village of Rodmoor,
that Rachel Doorm was anxious to transport both sisters; partly as a
return for what Nance’s mother, and more recently Nance herself, had
done for her support, and partly out of fanatical devotion to Nance.
The girl could not help experiencing a feeling of infinite relief
at the thought of being freed from her uncongenial work in the
dressmaker’s establishment. Her pleasure, nevertheless, had been
considerably marred, in the last few days, by the attitude of her
sister towards the projected change.
And now, with the realisation of this thrilling new passion possessing
her, her own feeling about leaving London was different from what it
had been at first.
None of these questions interrupted, however, on that particular
afternoon, the girl’s dreamy and absorbed happiness.
In the long delicious intervals that fell between her and her lover
with a perfume sweeter than that of the arrested rain, she let her mind
wander in languid retrospect, from that seat in Kensington Park, over
every one of the wonderful events that had led her to this.
She recalled her first sight of Adrian and how it had come over her,
like an intimation from some higher sphere of being, that her fate was
henceforth to lie, for good and for evil, in that man’s hands.
It was quite early in April when she saw him; and she remembered,
sitting now by his side, how, as each day grew milder, and the first
exquisite tokens of Spring penetrated one by one--here a basket of
daffodils, and there a spray of almond-blossom--into the street she
traversed to her work, she felt less and less inclined to struggle
against the deep delicious thrill that suffused itself, like a warm
indrawing wave, through every pulse of her body. That it should
never have come to her before--that she should have lived absolutely
fancy-free until so near her twenty-third birthday--only made her
abandonment to what she felt now the more sweet and entire.
“It is love,--it is love,” she thought; “and I will give myself up to
it!”
And she had given herself up to it. It had penetrated her with an
exultant inner spring of delight. She had immersed herself in it.
She had gone through her tedious drudgery as if she were floating,
languidly and at ease, on a softly rocking tide. She had lived entirely
in the present. She had not made the least movement even to learn the
name of the man whose wordless pursuit of her had stirred her senses to
this exultant response.
She had felt an indescribable desire to prolong these hours of her
first love, these hours so unreturning, so new and so sweet; a
desire--she remembered it well now--that had a tinge of unformulated
fear about it; as though the very naming, even to herself, of what she
enjoyed, would draw down the jealousy of the invisible powers.
So she had been careful never to stop or linger, in her hurried morning
walks to the historic bridge; careful--after she had once passed him,
and their eyes had met--never so much as to turn her head, to see if he
were following.
And yet she knew--as well in those first days as she knew now--that
every morning and night he waited, wet or fine, to see her go by.
And she had known, too--how could she not know?--that this mute
signalling of two human souls must change and end; must become
something nearer or something farther as time went on. But day by day
she put off this event; too thrilled by the sweet dream in which she
moved, to wish to destroy it, either for better or for worse.
If she had doubted him; doubted that he cared for her; all would have
been different.
Then she would have taken some desperate step--some step that would
have forced him to recognise her for what she was, his one of all,
ready as none else _could_ be ready, to cry with a great cry--“Lord,
behold thine hand-maid; do unto her according to Thy will!” But she had
known he did care. She had felt the magnetic current of his longing, as
if it had been a hand laid down upon her breast.
And in answer she had given herself up to him; given herself, she
thought, with no less complete a yielding than that with which, as she
heard his voice by her side, reaching her through a delicate mist of
delicious dreaming, she gave herself up to him now.
She recalled with a proud gladness the fact that she had never--never
for a moment--in all those days, bestowed a thought on the question
of any possible future with him. In the trance-like hours wherein
she had brooded so tenderly over the form and face of her nameless
lover, she always pictured him as standing waiting for her, a tall,
bowed, foreign-looking figure, clothed in the long weather-stained
Inverness--the very texture of which she seemed to know the touch
of--by that corner curb-stone where the flower-shop was.
Just in that manner, with just that air of ardent expectation, he
might be found standing, she had felt, through unnumbered days of
enchantment, and she passing by, in silence, with the same expectant
thrill.
Such a love draught, not drained, not feverishly drunk of, but sweet in
her mouth with the taste of a mystic consecration, seemed still, even
now that she had him there beside her, to hold the secret, amid this
warm breath of London’s first lilacs, of a triumphant Present, wherein
both Past and Future were abolished.
It seemed to the happy girl on this unique April afternoon, while the
sliding hours, full of the city’s monotonous murmur, sank unnoticed
away, and the gardeners planted their pansies and raked lethargically
in the scented mould, as though nothing that could ever happen to
her afterwards, could outweigh what she felt then, or matter so very
greatly in the final reckoning. With every pulse of her young body
she uttered her litany of gratitude. “_Ite; missa est_” her heart
cried--“It is enough.”
As they walked home afterwards, hand in hand through the dusk of the
friendly park, she made him tell her, detail by detail, every least
incident of those first days of their encountering. And Adrian Sorio,
catching the spirit of that exquisite entreaty, grew voluble even
beyond his wont.
He told her how, in the confusion of his mind, when it was first
revealed to him that the devastation he was suffering from did not deny
him the sweet sting of “what men call love,” he found it impossible
to face with any definite resolution the problem of his doubtful
future. He had recognised that in a week or so every penny he possessed
would be gone; yet it was impossible--and his new emotion did not,
he confessed, alter this in the least--to make any move to secure
employment.
A kind of misanthropic timidity, so he explained to her, made the
least thought of finding what is popularly known as “work” eminently
repellant to him; yet it was obvious that work must be found, unless he
wished, simply and quietly, to end the affair by starvation.
This, as things went then, he told her, giving her hand a final
pressure as they emerged into the lighted streets, he did not at all
urgently want--though in the first days of his return from America he
had pondered more than once on the question of an easy and agreeable
exit. It was as they settled down side by side,--her hat no longer
held languidly in her gloveless hand,--to their long and discreet walk
home through the crowded thoroughfares, that she was first startled by
hearing the name “Rodmoor” from his lips. How amazing a coincidence!
What a miraculous gift of the gods!
Fate was indeed sweeping her away on a full tide.
It seemed like a thing in some old fantastic romance. Could it be
possible even before she had time to contemplate her separation from
him that she should learn that they were not to separate at all!
Rachel Doorm was indeed a witch--was indeed working things out for her
favourite with the power of a sorceress. She kept back her natural
cry of delight, “But that is where we are going,” and let him, all
unconscious, as it seemed, of the effect of his words, unravel in his
own way the thread of his story.
It was about a certain Baltazar Stork she found he was telling her when
her startled thoughts, like a flock of disturbed pigeons, alighted
once more on the field of his discourse. Baltazar, it appeared, was
an old friend of Sorio’s and had written to offer him a sort of
indefinite hospitality in his village on the North Sea. The name of
this place--had she ever heard of Rodmoor?--had repeated itself very
strangely in his mind ever since he first made it out in his friend’s
abominable hand.
At that point in their walk, under the glare of a great provision
shop, she suddenly became conscious that he was watching her with
laughing excitement. “You know!” she cried, “you know!” And it was with
difficulty that he persuaded her to let him tell her how he knew, in
his own elaborate manner.
This refuge--offered to him thus out of a clear sky, he told her--did
in a considerable sense lend him an excuse for taking no steps to find
work. And the name of the place--he confessed this with an excited
emphasis--had from the beginning strangely affected his imagination.
He saw it sometimes, so he said, that particular word, in a queer
visualised manner, dark brown against a colourless and livid sky; and
in an odd sort of way it had related itself, dimly, obscurely, and with
the incoherence of a half-learnt language, to the wildest and most
pregnant symbols of his life.
Rodmoor! The word at the same time allured and troubled him. What it
suggested to him--and he made her admit that his ideas of it were
far more definite than her own--was no doubt what it really implied:
leagues and leagues of sea-bleached forlornness, of sand-dunes and
glaucous marshes, of solitary willows and pallid-leaved poplars, of
dark pools and night-long-murmuring reeds.
“We’ll have long walks together there!” he exclaimed, interrupting
himself suddenly with an almost savage gesture of ardent possession.
If it had been any one but Baltazar Stork, he went on, who had sent
him this timely invitation, he would have rejected it at once, but
from Baltazar he had no hesitation in accepting anything. They had
been friends too long to make any other attitude possible. No, it was
no scruple of pride that led him to hesitate--as he admitted to her
he had done. It was rather the strange and indefinable reaction set up
in his brain by those half-sinister half-romantic syllables--syllables
that kept repeating themselves in his inner consciousness.
Nance remembered more than once in a later time the fierce sudden way
he turned upon her as they stood on the edge of the crowded square
waiting the opportunity to cross and asked, with a solemn intensity in
his voice, whether she had any presentiment as to how things would turn
out for them in this place.
“It hangs over me,” he said, “it hangs over us both. I see it like a
heavy sunset weighted with purple bars.” And then, when the girl did
nothing but shake her head and smile tenderly, “I warn you,” he went
on, “you are risking much--I feel it--I know it. I have had this sort
of instinct before about things.” He shivered a little and laid his
hand on her arm as if he clung to her for reassurance.
Nance remembered long afterwards the feelings in her that made her turn
her face full upon him and whisper proudly, as if in defiance of his
premonitions, “What can happen to us that can hurt us, my dear, as long
as we are together, and as long as we love one another?”
He was silent after this and apparently satisfied, for he did not
scruple to return to the subject of Rodmoor. The word gave him in those
first days, he said, that curious sensation we receive when we suddenly
say to ourselves in some new locality, “I have been here; I have seen
all this before.”
Had he at that time, he told her, been less distracted by the emotions
she aroused in him, he would have analysed to the bottom the dim mental
augury--or was it reminiscence?--called up by this name. As it was
he just kept the thing at the back of his mind as something which,
whatever its occult significance, at least spared him the necessity of
agitating himself about his future.
Nance’s thoughts were brought back from their half-attention with a
shock of vivid interest when he came to the point, amid his vague
recollections, of his first entrance into her house. It was exactly
a week ago, he reminded her, that he found himself one sunny morning
securely established as a new lodger under her roof. In his impatient
longing to secure the desirable room--across the narrow floor of
which, he confessed to her, he paced to and fro that day like a hungry
tiger--he had even forgotten to make the obvious inquiry as to the
quarter of the London sky from which his particular portion of light
and air was to come.
It was only, he told her, with a remote segment of his consciousness
that he became aware of the fine, full flood of sunshine which poured
in from the southern-opening window and lay, mellow and warm, upon his
littered books and travel-stained trunk.
Casual and preoccupied were the glances he cast, each time his
mechanical perambulation brought him to that pleasant window, at the
sun-bathed traffic and the hurrying crowd. London Bridge Road melted
into his thought; or rather his thought took possession of London
Bridge Road and reduced it to a mere sounding-board for the emotion
that obsessed him.
That emotion--and Nance got exquisite pleasure from hearing him say the
words, though she turned her face away from him as he said them--took,
as he paced his room, passionate and ardent shape. He did not
re-vivify the whole of her,--of the fair young being whose sweetness
had got into his blood. He confined himself to thinking of the
delicate tilt of her head and of the spaciousness between her breasts,
spaciousness that somehow reminded him of Pheidian sculpture.
He hadn’t anticipated this particular kind of escape--though it was
certainly the escape he had been seeking--amid the roar of London’s
streets; but after all, if it did give him his cup of nepenthe, his
desired anodyne, how much the more did he gain when it gave him so
thrilling an experience in addition? Why, indeed, should he not dream
that the gods were for once helping him out and that the generous grace
of his girl’s form was symbolic of the restorative virtue of the great
Mother herself?
Restoration was undoubtedly the thing he wanted--and in recalling his
thoughts of that earlier hour, to her now walking with him, he found
himself enlarging upon it all quite unscrupulously in terms of what he
now felt--restoration on any terms, at any cost, to the kindly normal
paths out of which he had been so roughly thrown. He thrust indignantly
back, he told her, that eventful morning the intrusive thought that
it was only the Spring that worked so prosperously upon him. He did
not want it to be the Spring; he wanted it to be the girl. The Spring
would pass; the girl, if his feeling for her--and he glanced at the
broad-rimmed hat and shadowy profile at his side--were not altogether
illusive, would remain. And it was the faculty for remaining that he
especially required in his raft of refuge.
Up and down his room, at any rate, he walked that day with a heightened
consciousness such as he had not known for many clouded months. “The
Spring”--and in his imaginative reaction to his own memories he grew,
so Nance felt with what was perhaps her first serious pang, almost
feverishly eloquent--“the Spring, whether I cared to recognise it or
not, waved thrilling arms towards me. I felt it”--and he raised his
voice so loud that the girl looked uneasily round them--“in the warmth
of the sun, in the faces of the wistful shop girls, in the leaves
budding against the smoke of the Borough. It had come to me again, and
you--you had brought it! It had come to me again, the Eternal Return,
the antiphonal world-deep Renewal. It had come, Nance, and all the
slums of Rotherhithe and Wapping, and all the chimneys, workshops,
wharves and tenements of the banks of this river of yours could not
stop the rising of the sap. The air came to me that morning, my
girl!”--and he unconsciously quickened his steps as he spoke till, for
all her long youthful limbs she could hardly keep pace with him--“as
if it had passed over leagues of green meadows. And it had! It had,
Nance! And it throbbed for me, child, with the sweetness of your very
soul.” He paused for a moment and, as they debouched more directly
eastward through a poor and badly lit street, she caught him muttering
to himself what she knew was Latin.
He answered her quick look--her look that had a dim uneasiness in
it--with a slow repetition of the famous line, and Nance was still
quite enough of a young girl to feel a thrill of pride that she had a
lover who, within a stone’s throw of the “Elephant and Castle,” could
quote for her on an April evening that “_cras amet qui nunquam amavit_”
of the youth of the centuries!
The rich, antique flavour of the words blent well enough as far as she
was concerned with the homely houses and taverns of that dilapidated
quarter. The night was full of an indescribable balm, felt through
the most familiar sounds and sights, and, after all, there was always
something mellow and pagan and free about the streets of London. It was
the security, the friendly solidity, of the immense city which more
than anything just then seemed to harmonise with this classical mood
in her wonderful foreigner and she wished he would quote more Latin as
they went along, side by side, past the lighted fruit stalls.
The overhanging shadow of Adrian’s premonitions, or whatever they were,
about Rodmoor, and her own anxieties about Rachel Doorm and Linda
withdrew themselves into the remotest background of the girl’s mind as
she gave herself to her happiness in this favoured hour. It was in a
quiet voice, after that, that he resumed his story. The sound, he said,
of one of the Borough clocks striking the hour of ten brought a pause
to his agitated pacing.
He stretched himself, he told her, when he heard the clock, stretched
his arms out at full length, with that delicious shivering sensation
which accompanies the near fulfilment of deferred hope. Then he
chuckled to himself, from sheer childish ecstasy, and made goblinish
faces.
Nance could not help noticing as he told her all this, how quaintly he
reproduced in his exaggerated way the precise gestures he had indulged
in. “Per Bacco! I had only three pounds left,” he said, and as he
shrugged his shoulders and glowered at her under a flickering lamp from
eyes sunken deep in his heavy face, she realised of what it was he had
been all this while vaguely reminding her--of nothing less, in fact,
than one of those saturnine portrait-busts of the Roman decadence, at
which as a child she used to stare, half-frightened and half-attracted,
in the great Museum.
The first thing he did, he told her, when the sound of the clock
brought him to his senses, was to empty his pockets on the top of the
chest-of-drawers which was, except for the bed and a couple of rickety
chairs, the only article of furniture in the room. An errant penny,
rolling aside from the rest, tinkled against the edge of his washing
basin. “Not three pounds!” he muttered and leered at himself in his
wretched looking glass.
It was precisely at that moment that the sound of voices struck his
ears, proceeding from the adjoining room.
“I had spent half the night,” he whispered, drawing his companion
closer to his side as a couple of tipsy youths pushed roughly by them,
“lying awake listening. I felt a queer kind of shame, yes, shame,
as I realised how near I was to you. You know I knew nothing of you
then, absolutely nothing except that you went to work every day and
lived with some sort of elderly person and a younger sister. It was
this ignorance about you, child, that made my situation so exciting. I
waited breathlessly, literally petrified, in the middle of the room.”
Nance at this point felt herself compelled to utter a little cry of
protest.
“You ought to have made some kind of noise,” she said, “to let us know
you were listening.”
But he waved aside her objection, and continued: “I remained petrified
in the centre of the room, feeling as though the persons I listened to
might at any moment stop their conversation and listen, in their turn,
to the frantic beating of my heart. I heard your voice. I knew it in
a moment to be yours--it had the round, full sweetness”--his arm was
about her now--“of your darling figure. ‘Good-bye!’ you called out and
there came the sound of a door opening upon the passage, ‘Good-bye! I’m
off. Meet me to-night if you like. Yes, soon after six. Good-bye! Look
after each other.’
“The door shut and I heard you running down the stairs. I felt as
though that ‘Meet me to-night’ had been addressed to myself. I crossed
over to the window and watched you thread your way through the crowd in
the direction of the Bridge. I knew you were late. I hoped you would
not be scolded for it by some shrewish or brutal employer. I wished I
had had the courage to go out on the landing and see you off. Why is
one always so paralysed when these chances offer themselves? I might
easily have taken a fellow-lodger’s privilege and bidden you good
morning. Then I found myself wondering whether you had any inkling that
I had been sleeping so near you that night. Had you, you darling, had
you any such instinct?”
Nance shook her head, nor could he see the expression of her eyes in
the quiet darkened square, across which they were then moving. They
came upon a wooden bench, under some iron railings, and he made her sit
down while he completed his tale. The spot was unfrequented at that
hour, and above their heads--as they leaned back, sighing tranquilly,
and he took possession of her hand--the branch of a stunted beech-tree
stretched itself out, hushed and still, enjoying some secret dream of
its own amid the balmy perfumes of the amorous night.
“May I go on?” he enquired, looking tenderly at her.
In her heart Nance longed to cry, “No! No! No more of these tiresome
memories! Make love to me! Make love to me!” but she only pressed his
fingers gently and remained silent.
“I took up a book,” he went on, “from the heap on the floor and drawing
one of those miserable chairs to the window, I opened it at random.
It happened to be that mad lovely thing of Remy de Gourmont. I forgot
whether you said you had got as far as French poetry in that collection
of yours that Miss Doorm is so suspicious of. It was, in fact, ‘Le
livre des Litanies,’ and shall I tell you the passage I read? I was
too excited to gather its meaning all at once, and then such a curious
thing happened to me! But I will say the lines to you, child, and you
will understand better.”
Nance could only press his hand again, but her heart sank with an
unaccountable foreboding.
“It was the Litany of the Rose,” he said, and his voice floated out
into the embalmed stillness with the same ominous treachery in its
tone, so the poor girl fancied, as the ambiguous words he chanted.
“_Rose au regard saphique, plus pâle que les lys, rose au regard
saphique, offre-nous le parfum de ton illusoire virginité, fleur
hypocrite, fleur de silence._”
The strange invocation died away on the air, and a singular oppression,
heavy as if with some undesired spiritual presence, weighed upon them
both. Sorio did not speak for some minutes, and when he did so there
was an uneasy vibration in his voice.
“As soon as I had read those lines, there came over me one of the
most curious experiences I have ever had. I seemed to see, yes, you
may smile,”--Nance was far from smiling--“but it is actually true--I
seemed to see a living human figure outline itself against the wall of
my room. To the end of my days I shall never forget it! It was a human
form, Nance, but it was unlike all human forms I’ve ever beheld--unless
it be one of those weird drawings, you know? of Aubrey Beardsley.
It was neither the form of a boy nor of a girl, and yet it had the
nature of both. It gazed at me with a fixed sorrowful stare, and I
felt--was not that a strange experience--that I had known it before,
somewhere, far off, and long ago. It was the very embodiment of tragic
supplication, and yet, in the look it fixed on me, there was a cold,
merciless mockery.
“It was the kind of form, Nance, that one can imagine wandering in
vain helplessness down all the years of human history, seeking amid
the dreams of all the great, perverse artists of the world for the
incarnation it has been denied by the will of God.” He paused again,
and an imperceptible breath of hot balmy air stirred the young leaves
of the beech branch above them.
“Ah!” he whispered, “I know what I thought of then. I thought of that
‘Secret Rose Garden’ where the timid boy-girl thing--you know the
picture I mean, Nance?--is led forth by some wanton lamp bearer between
rose branches that are less soft than her defenceless sides.”
Once more he was silent and the hot wind, rising a little, uttered a
perceptible murmur in the leaves above their heads.
“But what was more startling to me, Nance,” he went on, “even than the
figure I saw (and it only stayed a moment before disappearing) was
the fact that at the very second it vanished, I heard, spoken quite
distinctly, in the room next to mine, the word ‘Rodmoor.’
“I threw down the ‘Book of Litanies’ and once more stood breathlessly
listening. I caught the word again, uttered in a tone that struck
me as having something curiously threatening about it. It was your
Miss Doorm, Nance. No wonder she and I instinctively hated each other
when we met. She must have known that I had heard this interesting
conversation. Your sister’s voice--and you must think about that,
Nance, you must think about that--sounded like the voice of a
little girl that has been punished--yes, punished into frightened
submissiveness.
“Miss Doorm was evidently talking to her about this Rodmoor scheme.
‘It’s what I’ve waited for, for years and years,’ I heard her say.
‘Every Spring that came round I hoped he would die, and he didn’t. It
seemed that he wouldn’t--just to spite me, just to keep me out of my
own. But now he’s gone--the old man--gone with all his wickedness upon
him, and my place returns to me--my own place. It’s mine, I tell you,
mine! mine! mine!’ It was extraordinary, Nance, the tone in which she
said these things. Then she went on to speak of you. ‘I can free her
now,’ she said, ‘I can free her at last. Aren’t you glad I can free
her? Aren’t you glad?’
“I confess it made me at that moment almost indignant with your sister
that she should need such pressing on such a subject. Her voice,
however, when she murmured some kind of an answer, appeared, as I have
said, quite obsequious in its humility.
“‘O my precious, my precious!’ the woman cried again, evidently
apostrophising you, ‘you’ve worked for me, and saved for me, and now I
can return it--I can return it!’ There was a few minutes’ silence then,
and I moved,” Sorio continued, “quite close to the wall so as to catch
if I could your sister’s whispers.
“Miss Doorm soon began once more and I liked her tone still less. ‘Why
don’t you speak? Why do you sit silent and sulky like that? Aren’t you
glad she’ll be free of all this burden--of all this miserable drudgery?
Aren’t you glad for her? She kept you here like a Duchess, you with
your music lessons! A lot of money you’ll ever earn with your music!
And now it’s my turn. She shall be a lady in my house, a lady!’”
Nance’s head hung low down over her knees as she listened to all this
and the hand that her lover still retained grew colder and colder.
“I remember her next words,” Sorio went on, “particularly well because
a lovely fragrance of lilacs came suddenly into the window from a cart
in the street and I thought how to my dying day I should associate that
scent with this first morning under your roof.
“‘You say you don’t like the sea?’ Miss Doorm went on, ‘and you
actually suppose that your not liking the sea will stop my freeing her!
No! No! You’ll have the sea, my beauty, at Rodmoor--the sea and the
wind. No more dilly-dallying among the pretty shop windows and the nice
young music students. The Wind and the Sea! Those are the things that
are waiting for you at Rodmoor--at Rodmoor, in my house, where she will
be a lady at last!’
“You see, Nance,” Adrian observed, letting her hand go and preparing
to light a cigarette, “Miss Doorm’s idea seems to be that you will
receive quite a social lift from your move to her precious Rodmoor. She
evidently holds the view that no lady has ever earned her living with
her own hands. Does she propose to keep a horde of servants in this
small house, I wonder, and stalk about among them, grim and majestic,
in a black silk gown?
“I must confess I feel at this moment a certain understanding of your
sister’s reluctance to plunge into this ‘milieu.’ I can see that
house--oh, so clearly!--surrounded by a dark back-water and swept
by horribly cold winds. I’m sure I don’t know, Nance, what kind of
neighbours you’re going to have on the Doorm estate. Probably half the
old hags of East Anglia will troop in upon you, like descendants of the
Valkyries. And the North Sea! You realise, my dear, I suppose, what the
North Sea is? I don’t blame little Linda for shivering at the thought
of it.”
For the first time since she had known him Nance’s voice betrayed
irritation. “Don’t tease me, Adrian. I can’t stand it to-night. You
don’t know what all this means to Rachel.”
Adrian smiled. “Your dear Rachel,” he said, “seems to have got you both
fairly well under her thumb.”
“She was my mother’s best friend!” the girl burst out. “I should never
forgive myself if I made her unhappy!”
“There seems more chance, as I see it now,” observed Sorio, “that Miss
Doorm will make Linda unhappy. I think I may take it that Linda’s
mother wasn’t much of a favourite of hers? Isn’t that so, my dear?”
“We must be getting home now,” the girl remarked, rising from the
bench. But Sorio remained seated, coolly puffing wreaths of cigarette
smoke into the aromatic night.
“There’s not the slightest need to get cross with me,” he said gently,
giving the sleeve of her coat a little deprecatory caress.
“As a matter of fact, when I heard that woman scold Linda for not
wanting to set you free I felt, in a most odd and subtle manner,
curiously anxious to scold her, too; I quite longed to overcome and
override her absurd reluctance. I even felt a strange excitement in
the thought of walking with her along the edge of this water, and in
the face of this wind. O! I became Miss Doorm’s accomplice, Nance!
You may be perfectly happy. I made up my mind that very moment that I
would write at once to Baltazar and accept his invitation. Indeed I
did write to him, the minute I could hear no more talking. I was too
excited to write much. I just wrote: ‘Amico mio:--I will come to you
very soon,’ and when I’d finished the letter I went straight out and
posted it. I believe I heard Linda crying as I went downstairs, but, as
I tell you, Nance, I had become quite an accomplice of Miss Doorm! It
seemed to me outrageous that the selfish silliness of a child like that
should interfere with your emancipation. Besides I liked the thought of
walking with her by the shore of this sea and calming her curious fear.”
He threw away his cigarette and, rising to his feet, drew the girl’s
arm within his own and led her homewards.
The beech-tree, as if relieved by their departure, gave itself up with
more delicious abandonment than ever to the embraces of the warm Spring
night. They had not far to go now, and Nance only spoke once before
they arrived at their door in the London Bridge Road.
“Had that figure you saw,” she asked in a low constrained voice, “the
same look Linda has--now that you know what she is like?”
“Linda?” he answered, “Oh, no, my dear, no, no! That one had nothing
to do with Linda. But I think,” he added, after a pause, “it had
something to do with Rodmoor.”
II
DYKE HOUSE
Nance Herrick stood at her window in the Doorm dwelling the morning
after their arrival thinking desperately of what she had done. The
window, open at the top, let in a breath of chilly, salt-tasting wind
which stirred the fair loose hair upon her forehead and cooled her
throat and shoulders. At the sound of her sister’s voice she closed
the window, cast one swift, troubled look at the river flowing so
formidably near, and moved across to Linda’s side. Drowsy and warm
after her deep sleep, the younger girl stretched out her long, youthful
arms from the bed and clasped them round Nance’s neck.
“Are you glad,” she whispered, “are you glad, after all, that I made
you come? I couldn’t have borne to be selfish, dear. I should have had
no peace. No!--,” she interrupted an ejaculation from Nance, “--it
wasn’t anything to do with Rachel. It wasn’t, Nancy darling, it really
and truly wasn’t! I’m going to be perfectly good now. I’m going to be
so good that you’ll hardly know me. Shall I tell you what I’m going
to do? I’m going to learn the organ. Rachel says there’s a beautiful
one in the church here, and Mr. Traherne--he’s the clergyman, you
know--plays upon it himself. I’m going to persuade him to teach me. O!
I shall be perfectly happy!”
Nance extricated herself from the young girl’s arms and, stepping
back into the middle of the room, stood contemplating her in silence.
The two sisters, thus contrasted, in the hard white light of that
fen-land morning, would have charmed the super-subtle sense of some
late Venetian painter. Nance herself, without being able precisely to
define her feeling, felt that the mere physical difference between
them was symbolic of something dangerously fatal in their conjunction.
Her sister was not an opposite type. She too was fair--she too was
tall and flexible--she too was emphatically feminine in her build--she
even had eyes of the same vague grey colour. And yet, as Nance looked
at her now, at her flushed excited cheeks, her light brown curls, her
passionate neurotic attitude, and became at the same time conscious of
her own cold pure limbs, white marble-like skin and heavily-hanging
shining hair, she felt that they were so essentially different, even in
their likeness, that the souls in their two bodies could never easily
comprehend one another nor arrive at any point of real instinctive
understanding.
Something of the same thought must have troubled Linda too at that
moment, for as they fixed their eyes on each other’s faces there fell
between them that sort of devastating silence which indicates the
struggle of two human spirits, seeking in vain to break the eternal
barrier in whose isolating power lies all the tragedy and all the
interest of life.
Suddenly Nance moved to the window and threw it wide open.
“Listen!” she said.
The younger sister made a quick apprehensive movement and clasped her
hands tightly together. Her eyes grew wide and her breast rose and
fell.
“Listen!” Nance repeated.
A low, deep-drawn murmur, reiterated, and again reiterated, in menacing
monotony, filled the room.
“The sea!” cried both sisters together.
Nance shivered, closed the window and sank down on a chair. With
lowered eyes she remained for some seconds absorbed and abstracted.
When she lifted her head she saw that her sister was watching her and
that there was a look on her face such as she had never seen there
before. It was a look she was destined to be unable to thrust from
her memory, but no effort of hers could have described it then or
afterwards. Making an effort of will which required all the strength of
her soul, Nance rose to her feet and spoke solemnly and deliberately.
“Swear to me, Linda, that nothing I could have said or done would have
made you agree to stay in London. I told you I was ready to stay,
didn’t I, that night I came back with Adrian and found you awake?
I begged and begged you to tell me the truth, to tell me whether
Rachel was forcing you into going. I offered to leave her for good
and all--didn’t I?--if she was unkind to you. It’s only the truth I
want--only the truth! We’ll go back--now--to-morrow--the moment you say
you wish it. But if you don’t wish it, make me know you don’t! Make me
know it--here--in my heart!”
In her emotion, pressing her hand to her side, she swayed with a
pathetic, unconscious movement. Linda continued to watch her, the same
indescribable look upon her face.
“Will you swear that nothing I could have done would have made you
stay? Will you swear that, Linda?”
The younger girl in answer to this appeal, leapt from her bed and
rushing up to her sister hugged her tightly in her arms.
“You darling thing!” she cried, “of course I’ll swear it.
Nothing--nothing--_nothing_! would have made me stay. Oh, you’ll soon
see how happy I can be in Rodmoor--in dear lovely Rodmoor!”
A simultaneous outburst of weeping relieved at that moment the feelings
of both of them, and they kissed one another passionately through their
falling tears.
In the hush that followed--whether by reason of a change in the wind or
simply because their senses had grown more receptive--they both clearly
heard through the window that remained closed, the husky, long-drawn
beat, reiterative, incessant, menacing, of the waves of the North Sea.
During breakfast and the hours which succeeded that meal, Nance was
at once surprised and delighted by the excellent spirits of both Miss
Doorm and Linda. They even left her to herself before half the morning
was over and went off together, apparently in complete harmony along
the banks of the tidal stream.
She herself, loitering in the deserted garden, felt a curious sensation
of loneliness and a wonder, not amounting to a sense of discomfort but
still remotely disturbing, as to why it was that Adrian had not, as
he had promised, appeared to take her out. Acting at last on a sudden
impulse, she ran into the house, put on her hat and cloak, and started
rapidly down the road leading to the village.
The Spring was certainly not so far advanced in Rodmoor as it was
in London. Nance felt as though some alien influence were at work
here, reducing to enforced sterility the natural movements of living
and growing things. The trees were stunted, the marigolds in the wet
ditches pallid and tarnished. The leaves of the poplars, as they shook
in the gusty wind, seemed to her like hundreds and hundreds of tiny
dead hands--the hands of ghostly babies beseeching whatever power
called them forth to give them more life or to return them to the
shadows.
Yes, some alien influence was at work, and the Spring was ravished and
tarnished even while yet in bud. It was as if by an eternal mandate,
registered when this portion of the coast first assumed its form, the
seasons had been somehow thwarted and perverted in the processes of
their natural order, and the land left, a neutral, sterile, derelict
thing, neither quite living nor quite dead, doomed to changeless
monotony.
Nance was still some little distance from the village, but she
slackened her pace and lingered now, in the hope that at any moment
she might see Adrian approaching. She knew from Rachel’s description
only very vaguely where Mr. Stork’s cottage was and she was afraid of
missing her lover if she went too far.
The road she was following was divided from the river by some level
water meadows and she did not feel certain whether the village itself
lay on the right or the left of the river mouth. Miss Doorm had spoken
of a bridge, but among the roofs and trees which she made out in front
of her, she was unable at present to see anything of this.
What she did see was a vast expanse of interminable fen-land
stretching away for miles and miles on every side of her, broken
against the sky line, towards which she was advancing, by grey houses
and grey poplars but otherwise losing itself in misty horizons which
seemed infinite in their remoteness. On both sides of the little massed
group of roofs and trees and what the girl made out as the masts of
boats in the harbour, a long low bank of irregular sand-dunes kept the
sea from her view, though the sound of the waves--and Nance fancied it
came to her in a more friendly manner now she was closer to it--was
insistent and clear.
Across the fens to her left she discerned what was evidently the
village church but the building looked so desolate and isolated--alone
there in the midst of the marshes--that she found it difficult to
conceive the easily-daunted Linda as practising organ music in such
a place. She wondered if the grey building she could just obscurely
distinguish, leaning against the wall of the church, were the abode of
Mr. Traherne. If so, she thought, he must indeed be a man of God to
endure that solitude.
She had wandered into the wet grass by the road’s edge and was amusing
herself by picking a bunch of dandelions, the only flower at that
moment in sight, when she saw a man’s figure approaching her from the
Rodmoor direction. At first she assumed it was Adrian, and made several
quick steps to meet him, but when she recognised her mistake the
disappointment made her so irritable that she threw her flowers away.
Her irritation vanished, however, after a long survey of him, when the
stranger actually drew near.
He was a middle-sized man wearing at the back of his head a dark soft
hat and buttoned up, from throat to ankles, in a light-coloured heavy
overcoat. His face, plump, smooth, and delicately oval, possessed a
winning freshness of tint and outline which was further enhanced by
the challenging friendliness of his whimsical smile and the softness
of his hazel eyes. What could be seen of his mouth--for he wore a
heavy moustache--was sensitive and sensuous, but something about the
way he walked--a kind of humorous roll, Nance mentally defined it, of
his sturdy figure--gave an impression that this body, so carefully
over-coated against the cold, was one whose heart was large, mellow
and warm. It was not till after a minute or two, not in fact till
he had wavered and hovered at her side like an entomologist over a
newly discovered butterfly, that the girl got upon the track of other
interesting peculiarities.
His nose, she found, for instance, was the most striking feature of his
face, being extremely long and pointed like the nose of a rodent, and
with large quivering nostrils slightly reddened, it happened just then,
by the impact of the wind, and tilted forward as the man veered about
as though to snuff up the very perfume and essence of the fortunate
occasion.
From the extreme tip of this interesting feature hung a pearly drop of
rheum.
What--next to the man’s nose--struck the girl’s fancy and indeed
so disarmed her dignity that even his entomological hoverings were
forgiven, was the straight lock of black-brown hair which falling
across his forehead gave him a deliciously ruffled and tumbled look, as
if he had recently been engaged in a rural game of “blind man’s buff.”
The forehead itself, or what could be seen of it, was weighty and
thoughtful; the forehead of a scholar or a philosopher.