illuminated waters with absorbed concentration. At last Adrian broke
the silence.
“What I’m aiming at in my book,” he said, “is a revelation of how
the essence of life is found in the instinct of destruction. I want
to show--what is simply the truth--that the pleasure of destruction,
destruction entered upon out of sheer joy and for its own sake,
lies behind every living impulse that pushes life forward. Out of
destruction alone--out of the rending and tearing of something--of
something in the way--does new life spring to birth. It isn’t
destruction for cruelty’s sake,” he went on, his fingers closing
and unclosing at his side over a handful of sand. “Cruelty is mere
inverted sentiment. Cruelty implies attraction, passion, even--in some
cases--love. Pure destruction--destruction for its own sake--such as
I see it--is no thick, heavy, muddy, perverted impulse such as the
cruel are obsessed by. It’s a burning and devouring flame. It’s a mad,
splendid revel of glaring whiteness like this which hurts our eyes
now. I’m going to show in my book how the ultimate essence of life,
as we find it, purest and most purged in the ecstasies of the saints,
is nothing but an insanity of destruction! That’s really what lies
at the bottom of all the asceticism and all the renunciation in the
world. It’s the instinct to destroy--to destroy what lies nearest to
one’s hand--in this case, of course, one’s own body and the passions
of the body. Ascetics fancy they do this for the sake of their souls.
That’s their illusion. They do it for its own sake--for the sake of the
ecstasy of destruction! Man is the highest of all animals because he
can destroy the most. The saints are the highest among men because they
can destroy humanity.”
He rose to his feet and, picking up a flat stone from the sea’s edge,
sent it skimming across the water.
“Five!” he cried, as the stone sank at last.
The girl rose and stood beside him. “I can play at ‘Ducks and Drakes’
too,” she said, imitating his action with another stone which, however,
sank heavily after only three cuttings of the shiny surface.
“You can’t play ‘Ducks and Drakes’ with the universe,” retorted Sorio.
“No girl can--not even you, with your boy-arms and boy-legs! You can’t
even throw a stone out of pure innocence. You only threw that--just
now--because I did and because you wanted me to see you swing your
arm--and because you wanted to change the conversation.”
He looked her up and down with an air of sullen mockery. “What the
saints and the mystics seek,” he went on, “is the destruction of
everything within reach--of everything that sticks out, that obtrudes,
that is simply _there_. That is why they throw their stones at every
form of natural life. But the life they attack is doing the same thing
itself in a cruder way. The sea is destroying the land; the grass
is destroying the flowers; the flowers one another; the woods, the
marshes, the fens, are all destroying something. The saints are only
the maddest and wisest of all destroyers--”
“Sorio! There’s a starfish out there--being washed in. Oh, let me try
and reach it!”
She snatched his stick from him and catching up her skirt stepped into
the water.
“Let it be!” he muttered, “let it be!”
She gave up her attempt with an impatient shrug but continued to watch
the steady pressure of the incoming tide with absorbed interest.
“What the saints aim at,” Sorio continued, “and the great poets too, is
that absolute _white light_, which means the drowning, the blinding,
the annihilating, of all these paltry-coloured things which assert
themselves and try to make themselves immortal. The only godlike
happiness is the happiness of seeing world after world tumbled into
oblivion. That’s the mad, sweet secret thought at the back of all
the religions. God--as the great terrible minds of antiquity never
forgot--is the supreme name for that ultimate destruction of all
things which is the only goal. That’s why God is always visualised as
a blaze of blinding white light. That’s why the Sun-God, greatest of
destroyers, is pictured with burning arrows.”
While Adrian continued in this wild strain, expounding his desperate
philosophy, it was a pity there was no one to watch the various
expressions which crossed in phantasmal sequence, like evil ghosts over
a lovely mirror, the face of Philippa Renshaw.
The conflict between the man and woman was, indeed, at that moment,
of curious and elaborate interest. While he flung out, in this
passionate way, his metaphysical iconoclasm, her instinct--the shrewd
feminine instinct to reduce everything to the personal touch--remained
fretting, chafing, irritable, and unsatisfied. It was nothing to her
that the formula he used was the formula of her own instincts. She
loved destruction but in her subtle heart she despised, with infinite
contempt, all philosophical theories--despised them as being simply
irrelevant and off the track of actual life--off the track, in fact, of
those primitive personal impulses which alone possess colour, perfume,
salt and sweetness!
Vaguely, at the bottom of his soul, even while he was speaking, Sorio
knew that the girl was irritated and piqued; but the consciousness of
this, so far from being unpleasant, gave an added zest to his words.
He revenged himself on her for the attraction he felt towards her by
showing her that in the metaphysical world at any rate, he could reduce
her to non-existence! Her annoyance at last gave her, in desperation,
a flash of diabolic cunning. She tossed out to him as a bait for his
ravening analysis, her own equivocal nature.
“I know well what you mean,” she said, as they moved slowly back
towards Rodmoor. “Poor dear, you must have been torn and rent,
yourself, to have come to such a point of insight! I, too, in my way,
have experienced something of the sort. My brain--you know _that_, by
this time, don’t you, Adriano?--is the brain of a man while my body
is the body of a woman. Oh, I hate this woman’s body of mine, Adrian!
You can’t know how I hate it! All that annoys you in me, and all that
annoys myself too, comes from this,” and she pressed her little hands
savagely to her breast as she spoke, as though, there before him, she
would tear out the very soul of her femininity.
“From earliest childhood,” she went on, “I’ve loathed being a girl.
Long nights, sometimes, I’ve lain awake, crying and crying and crying,
because I wasn’t born different. I’ve hated my mother for it. I hate
her still, I hate her because she has a morbid, sentimental mania for
what she calls the sensitiveness of young girls. The sensitiveness!
As if they weren’t the toughest, stupidest, sleepiest things in the
world! They’re not sensitive at all. They’ve neither sensitiveness nor
fastidiousness nor modesty nor decency! It’s all put on--every bit of
it. I _know_, for I’m like that myself--or half of me is. I betray
myself to myself and lacerate myself for being myself. It’s a curious
state of things--isn’t it, Adriano?”
She had worked herself up into such a passion of emotional self-pity
that great swimming tears blurred the tragic supplication of her eyes.
The weary swing of her body as she walked by his side and the droop
of her neck as she let her head fall when his glance did not respond
were obviously not assumed. The revelation of herself, entered upon for
an exterior purpose, had gone further than she intended and this very
stripping of herself bare which was to have been her triumph became her
humiliation when witnessed so calmly, so indifferently.
After this they walked for a long while in silence, he so possessed by
the thrilling sense of having a new vista of thought under his command
that he was hardly conscious of her presence, and she in obstinate
bitter resolution wrestling with the remorse of her mistake and
searching for some other means--any means--of sapping the strength of
his independence.
As they moved on and the afternoon advanced, a large and striking
change took place in the appearance of the scene. A narrow, clear-cut
line of shadow made itself visible below the sand-dunes. The sky lost
its metallic glitter and became a deep hyacinthine blue, a blue which
after a while communicated itself, with hardly any change in its tint,
to the wide-spread volume of water beneath it. In those spots where
masses of seaweed floated beneath the surface, the omnipresent blue
deepened to a rich indescribable purple, that amazing purple more
frequent in southern than in northern seas, which we may suppose is
indicated in the Homeric epithet “wine dark.”
As the friends approached the familiar environs of Rodmoor they
suddenly came upon a fisherman’s boat pulled up upon the sand, with
some heavy nets left lying beside it.
“Sorio!” cried the girl, stooping down and lifting the meshes of one of
these, “Sorio! there’s something alive left here. Look!”
He bent over the net beside her and began hastily disentangling several
little silvery fish which were struggling and flapping feebly and
opening their tiny gills in labouring gasps.
“All right--all right!” cried the man, addressing in his excitement the
tiny prisoners, “I’ll soon set you free.”
“What are you doing, Adrian?” expostulated the girl. “No--no! You
mustn’t throw them back--you mustn’t! The children always come round
when school’s over and search the nets. It’s a Rodmoor custom.”
“It’s a custom I’m going to break, then!” he shouted, rushing towards
the sea with a handful of gasping little lives. His fingers when he
returned, were covered with glittering scales but they did not outshine
the gleam in his face.
“You should have seen them dash away,” he cried. “I’m glad those
children won’t find them!”
“They’ll find others,” remarked Philippa Renshaw. “There’ll always be
some nets that have fish left in them.”
IX
PRIEST AND DOCTOR
There are hours in every man’s day when the main current of his
destiny, rising up from some hidden channel, becomes a recognizable
and palpable element in his consciousness. Such hours, if a man’s
profoundest life is--so to speak--in harmony with the greater gods, are
hours of indescribable and tremulous happiness.
It was nothing less than an experience of this kind which flowed
deliciously, like a wave of divine ether, over the consciousness of
Hamish Traherne on the day following the one when Sorio and Philippa
walked so far.
As he crossed his garden in the early morning and entered the church,
the warm sun and clear-cut shadows filled him with that sense of
indestructible joy to which one of the ancient thinkers has given the
beautiful name of μονοχρονος ἡδονὴ--the Pleasure of the Ideal Now.
From the eastern window, flooding the floor of the little chancel,
there poured into the cool, sweet-smelling place a stream of quivering
light. He had opened wide the doors under the tower and left them open
and he heard, as he sank on his knees, the sharp clear twittering of
swallows outside and the chatter of a flock of starlings. Through every
pulse and fibre of his being, as he knelt, vibrated an unutterable
current of happiness, of happiness so great that the words of his
prayer melted and dissolved and all definite thought melted with them
into that rare mood where prayer becomes ecstasy and ecstasy becomes
eternal.
Returning to his house without spilling one golden drop of what
was being allowed him of the wine of the Immortals, he brought his
breakfast out into the garden and ate it, lingeringly and dreamily,
by the side of his first roses. These were of the kind known as “the
seven sisters”--small and white-petaled with a faint rose-flush--and
the penetrating odour of them as he bent a spray down towards his face
was itself suggestive of old rich wine, “cooled a long age in the
deep-delved earth.”
From the marshes below the parapet came exquisite scents of water-mint
and flowering-rush and, along with these, the subtle fragrance, pungent
and aromatic, of miles and miles of sun-heated fens.
The grass of his own lawn and the leaves of the trees that overshadowed
it breathed the peculiar sweetness--a sweetness unlike anything else
in the world--of the first hot days of the year in certain old East
Anglian gardens. Whether it is the presence of the sea which endows
these places with so rare a quality or the mere existence of reserve
and austere withholding in the ways of the seasons there, it were hard
to say, but the fact remains that there are gardens in Norfolk and
Suffolk--and to Hamish Traherne’s flower-beds in spite of the modesty
of their appeal, may well be conceded something of this charm--which
surpass all others in the British Isles in the evocation of wistful and
penetrating beauty.
The priest had just lit his cigarette and was sipping his tea when
he was startled by the sudden appearance of Nance Herrick, white and
desperate and panting for breath.
“I had to come to you,” she gasped, refusing his proffered chair and
sinking down on the grass. “I had to! I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t
sleep. I couldn’t stop in that house. I saw him last night. He was
walking with _her_ near the harbour. I spoke to them. I was quiet--not
angry or bitter at all and he let her insult me. He let her whip
me with her tongue, wickedly, cruelly and yet so under cover, so
sideways--you know the kind of thing, Hamish?--that I couldn’t answer.
If I’d been alone with her I could have, but his being there made me
stupid, miserable, foolish! And she took advantage of it. She said--oh,
such mean, biting things! I can’t say them to you. I hate to think of
them. They went right through me like a steel lash. And he stood there
and did nothing. He was like a man in a trance. He stood there and let
her do it. Hamish--Hamish--I wish I were at the bottom of the sea!”
She bowed her white, grief-distorted face until it was buried in
the grass. The sun, playing on her bright hair, made it look like
newly-minted gold. Mr. Traherne sank on his knees beside her. His
ugliness, intensified by the agitation of his pity, reached a pitch
that was almost sublime. He was like a gargoyle consoling a goddess.
“Child, child, listen to me!” he cried, his husky grating voice
flinging itself upon the silence of her misery like a load of rubble
upon a marble pavement.
“There are moments in our life when no words, however tender, however
wise, can do any good. The only way--child, it is so--it is so!--the
only way is to find in love itself the thing that can heal. For love
_can_ do this, I know it, I have proved it.”
He raised one of his arms with a queer, spasmodic gesture and let it
drop as suddenly as he had raised it.
“Love rejoices to bear everything,” he went on. “It forgives and
forgives again. It serves its beloved night and day, unseen and unfelt,
it draws strength from suffering. When the blows of fate strike it,
it sinks into its own heart and rises stronger than fate. When the
passing hour’s cruel to it, it sinks away within, below the passing of
every possible hour, beyond the hurt of every conceivable stroke. Love
does not ask anything. It does not ask to be recognized. It is its own
return, its own recognition. Listen to me, child! If what I’m saying to
you is not true, if love is not like this, then the whole world is dust
and ashes and ‘earth’s base built on stubble’!”
His harsh voice died away on the air and for a little while there
was no sound in that garden except the twitter of birds, the hum of
insects, and the murmur of the sea. Then she moved, raised herself from
the ground and rubbed her face with her hands.
“Thank you, Hamish,” she said.
He got up from his knees and she rose too and they walked slowly
together up and down the little grass plot. His harsh voice, harsher
than ever when its pitch was modulated, rose and fell monotonously in
the sunny air.
“I don’t say to you, Nance, that you shouldn’t expect the worst. I
think we always should expect that and prepare to meet it. What I say
is that in the very power of the love you feel there is a strength
capable of sustaining you through your whole life, whatever happens.
And it is out of this very strength--a strength stronger than all
the world, my dear--than all the world!--that you’ll be able to give
your Adrian what he needs. He needs your love, little one, not your
jealousy, nor your self-pity, nor your anger. God knows how much he
needs it! And if you sink down into your heart and draw upon that and
wait for him and pray for him and endure for him you will see how, in
the end, he’ll come back to you! No--I won’t even say that. For in this
world he may never realize whose devotion is sustaining him. I’ll say,
whether he comes back or not, you’ll have been his only true love and
he’ll know it, child, in this world or another, he’ll know you for what
you are!”
The sweet, impossible doctrine, older than the centuries, older than
Plato, of the supremacy of spiritual passion had never--certainly
not in that monastic garden--found a more eloquent apologist. As she
listened to his words and her glance lingered upon a certain deeply
blue border of larkspurs, which, as they paced up and down mingled
with the impression he made upon her, Nance felt that a crisis had
indeed arrived in her life--had arrived and gone--the effect of which
could never, whatever happened, altogether disappear. She was still
unutterably sad. Her new mood brought no superficial comfort. But
her sadness had nothing in it now of bitterness or desperation. She
entered, at any rate for that hour, into the company of those who
resolutely put life’s sweetness away from them and find in the accepted
pressure of its sharp sword-point a pride which is its own reward.
This mood of hers still lasted on, when, some hours later, she
found herself in the main street of the little town, staring with a
half-humorous smile at the reflection of herself in the bow-window of
the pastry-cook’s. She had just emerged from the shop adjoining this
one, a place where she had definitely committed herself to accept the
post of “forewoman” in the superintendence of half a dozen young girls
who worked in the leisurely establishment of Miss Pontifex, “the only
official dressmaker,” as the advertisement announced, “on that side of
Mundham.”
She felt unspeakably relieved at having made this plunge. She had begun
to weary of idleness--idleness rendered more bitter by the misery
of her relations with Sorio--and the independence guaranteed by the
eighteen shillings a week which Miss Pontifex was to pay her seemed
like an oasis of solid assurance in a desert of ambiguities. She cared
nothing for social prestige. In that sense she was a true daughter of
her father, the most “democratic” officer in the British Navy. What
gave her a profound satisfaction in the midst of her unhappiness was
the thought that now, without leaving Rodmoor, she could, if Rachel’s
jealousy or whatever it was, became intolerable, secure some small,
separate lodging for herself and her sister.
Linda even, now her organ-playing had advanced so far, might possibly
be able to earn something. There were perhaps churches in Mundham
willing to pay for such assistance if the difficulty of getting over
there on Sundays when the trains were few, could in some way be
surmounted. At any rate, she felt, she had made a move in the right
direction. For the present, living at Dyke House, she would be able to
save every penny Miss Pontifex gave her, and the sense of even this
relative independence would strengthen her hand and afford her a sort
of vantage-ground whatever happened in the future.
She was still standing in front of the confectioner’s window when she
heard a well-known voice behind her and, turning quickly round, found
herself face to face with Fingal Raughty. The Doctor looked at her with
tender solicitude.
“Feeling the heat?” he said, retaining her fingers in his own and
stroking them as one might stroke the petals of a rare orchid.
She smiled affectionately into his eyes and thought how strange an
irony it was that every one, except the person she cared most for,
should treat her thus considerately.
“Come,” the Doctor said, “now I’ve got you I’m not going to let you go.
You must see my rooms! You promised you would, you know.”
She hadn’t the heart to refuse him and together they walked up the
street till they came to the tiny red-brick house which the Doctor
shared with the family of a Mundham bank-clerk. He opened the door and
led her upstairs.
“All this floor is mine,” he explained. “There’s where I see my
patients, and here,” he led her into the room looking out on the
street, “here’s my study.”
Nance was for the moment inclined to smile at the use of the word
“study” as applied to any room in Rodmoor High Street, but when she
looked round at walls literally lined with books and at tables and
chairs covered with books, some of them obviously rare and valuable,
she felt she had not quite done justice to the Doctor’s taste. He
fluttered round her now with a hundred delicate attentions, made her
remove her hat and gloves and finally placed her in a large comfortable
armchair close to the open window. He pulled one of the green blinds
down a little way to soften the stream of sunshine and, rushing to his
book-case, snatched at a large thin volume which stood with others of
the same kind on the lowest shelf. This he dusted carefully with his
sleeve and laid gently upon her lap.
“I think you’ll like it,” he murmured. “It’s of no value as an edition,
but it’s in his best style. I suppose Miss Doorm has all the old
masters up at Dyke House bound in morocco and vellum? Or has she only
county histories and maps?”
While his visitor turned over the pages of the work in question, her
golden head bent low and her lips smiling, the doctor began piling up
more books, one on the top of another, at her side.
“Apuleius!--he’s a strange old fellow, not without interest, but you
know him, of course? Petronius Arbiter! you had better not read the
text but the illustrations may amuse you. William Blake! There are some
drawings here which have a certain resemblance to--to one or two people
we know! Bewick! Oh, you’ll enjoy this, if you don’t know it. I’ve got
the other volume, too. You mustn’t look at _all_ the vignettes but some
of them will please you.”
“But--Fingal--” the girl protested, lifting her head from Pope’s Rape
of the Lock illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley--“what are _you_ going to
do? I feel as if you were preparing me for a voyage. I’d sooner talk to
you than look at any books.”
“I’ll be back in a moment,” he said, throwing at her a nervous and
rather harassed look, “I must wash my hands.”
He hurried precipitously from the room and Nance, lifting her eyebrows
and shrugging her shoulders, returned to the “Rape of the Lock.”
The doctor’s bathroom was situated, it appeared, in the immediate
vicinity of the study. Nance was conscious of the turning of what
sounded like innumerable taps and of a rush of mighty waters.
“Is the dear man going to have a bath?” she said to herself, glancing
at the clock on the chimney-piece. If her conjecture was right, Dr.
Raughty took a long while getting ready for his singularly timed
ablution for she heard him running backwards and forwards in the
bathroom like a mouse in a cage. She uttered a little sigh and, laying
the “Rape of the Lock” on the top of “Bewick,” looked wearily out
of the window, her thoughts returning to Sorio and the event of the
preceding evening.
Quite ten minutes elapsed before her host returned. He returned in
radiant spirits but all that was visible to the eye as the result of
his prolonged toilet was a certain smoothness in the lock of hair which
fell across his forehead and a certain heightening of the colour of his
cheeks. This latter change was obviously produced by vigorous rubbing,
not by the application of any cosmetic.
He drew a chair close to her side and ignored with infinite kindness
the fact that his pile of books lay untouched where he had placed them.
“Your neck is just like a column of white marble,” he said. “Are your
arms the same--I mean are they as white--under this?”