boys, as the world moves round, must learn to put up with the arms of
European princes. Let me feel your muscle, Tommy. I’ve an idea that
you’re suffering from deficient nourishment.” The child extended his
arm, and then bent it, with an air of extreme and anxious gravity.
“Pretty good,” said Stork, smiling. “Yes, I may say you’re decidedly
powerful for your size. What’s your opinion, Tommy, about things in
general? This gentleman here thinks we’re all in a pretty miserable
way. He thinks life’s a hell of a bad job. What do you think about it?”
The boy looked at him suspiciously. “Ben Porter, what cleans the
knives up at the Admiral’s, tried that game on with me. But I let him
know, soon enough, who he were talking to.” He moved off hastily after
this, but a moment later ran back, pointing excitedly at a couple of
sea-gulls which were circling near them.
“A man shot one of them birds last night,” he said, “and it fell into
the water. Lordy! But it did splash! ’Tweren’t properly killed, I
reckon--just knocked over.”
“What’s that?” said Sorio sharply. “What became of it then? Who picked
it up?”
The boy looked at him with a puzzled stare. “_They_ ain’t no good to
eat,” he rejoined, “they be what you call cannibal-birds. They feeds on
muck. Cats’ll eat ’em, though,” he added.
“What became of it?” shouted Sorio, in a threatening voice.
“Went out with the tide, Mister, most like,” answered the child, moving
apprehensively away from him. “I saw some fellows in a boat knock at
it with their oars, but they couldn’t get it. It sort o’ flapped and
swimmed away.”
Sorio rose from his seat and strode to the edge of the quay. He looked
eastward, past the long line of half-submerged wooden stakes which
marked the approach to the harbour. “When did that devil shoot it, do
you say?” he asked, turning to the boy. But the youngster had taken
to his heels. Angry-looking bronze-faced gentlemen who interested
themselves in wounded sea-gulls were something new in his experience.
“Let’s get a boat and row out to those stakes,” said Adrian suddenly.
“I seem to see something white over there. Look! Don’t you think so?”
Baltazar moved to his side. “Heavens! my dear,” he remarked languidly,
“you don’t suppose the thing would be there now, after all this time?
However,” he added, shrugging his shoulders, “if it’ll put you into a
better mood, by all means let’s do it.”
It was, when it came to the point, Baltazar who untied an available
boat from its moorings, and Baltazar who appropriated a pair of
oars that were leaning against a fish shed. In details of this kind
the passionate Sorio was always seized with a paralysis of nervous
incompetence. Once in the boat, however, the younger man refused to do
anything but steer. “I’m not going to pull against this current, for
all the sea-gulls in the world,” he remarked.
Sorio rowed with desperate impetuosity, but it was a slow and laborious
task. Several fishermen, loitering on the quay after their supper,
surveyed the scene with interest. “The gentleman wants to exercise
’isself afore dinner-time,” observed one. “’Tis a wonder if he moves
’er,” rejoined another, “but ’e’s rowin’ like ’twas a royal regatta.”
With the sweat pouring down his face and the muscles of his whole body
taut and quivering, Sorio tugged and strained at the oars. At first it
seemed as though the boat hardly moved at all. Then, little by little,
it forged ahead, the tide’s pressure diminishing as the mouth of the
harbour widened. After several minutes’ exhausting effort, they reached
the place where the first of the wooden piles rose out of the water.
It was tangled with seaweed and bleached with sun and wind. The tide
gurgled and foamed round it. Baltazar yawned.
“They’re all like this one,” he said. “You see what they’re like.
Nothing could possibly cling to them, unless it had hands to cling
with.”
Sorio, resting on his oars, glared at the darkening waters. “Let’s get
to the last of them anyway,” he muttered. He pulled on, the effort
becoming easier and easier as they escaped from the in-flow of the
river-mouth and reached the open sea. When at last the boat rubbed its
side against the last of the stakes, they were nearly a quarter of a
mile from land. No, there was certainly no sea-gull here, alive or dead!
A buoy, with a bell attached to it, sent at intervals, over the
water, a profoundly melancholy cry--a cry subdued and yet tragic, not
absolutely devoid of hope and yet full of heart-breaking wistfulness.
The air was hot and windless; the sky heavy with clouds; the horizon
concealed by the rapidly falling night. Sorio seized the stake with
his hand to keep the boat steady. There were already lights in the
town, and some of these twinkled out towards them, in long, radiating,
quivering lines.
“Tassar!” whispered Sorio suddenly, in a tone strangely and tenderly
modulated.
“Well, my child, what is it?” returned the other.
“I only want to tell you,” Adrian went on, “that whatever I may say or
do in the future, I recognize that you’re the best friend I’ve got,
except one.” As he said the words “except one,” his voice had a vibrant
softness in it.
“Thank you, my dear,” replied his friend calmly. “I should certainly be
extremely distressed if you made a fool of yourself in any way. But who
is my rival, tell me that! Who is this one who’s a better friend than
I? Not Philippa, I hope--or Nance Herrick?”
Sorio sighed heavily. “I vowed to myself,” he muttered, “I would never
talk to any one again about him: but the sound of that bell--isn’t it
weird, Tassar? Isn’t it ghostly?--makes me long to talk about him.”
“Ah! I understand,” and Baltazar Stork drew in his breath with a low
whistle, “I understand! You’re talking about your boy over there.
Well, my dear, I don’t blame you if you’re homesick for him. I have a
feeling that he’s an extraordinarily beautiful youth. I always picture
him to myself like my Venetian. Is he like Flambard, Adrian?”
Sorio sighed again, the sigh of one who sins against his secret soul
and misses the reward of his sacrilege. “No--no,” he muttered, “it
isn’t that! It isn’t anything to do with his being beautiful. God
knows if Baptiste _is_ beautiful! It’s that I want him. It’s that he
understands what I’m trying to do in the darkness. It’s simply that I
want him, Tassar.”
“What do you mean by that ‘trying in the darkness,’ Adriano? What
‘darkness’ are you talking about?”
Sorio made no immediate answer. His hand, as he clung to the stake amid
the rocking of the boat, encountered a piece of seaweed of that kind
which possesses slippery, bubble-like excrescences, and he dug his
nails into one of these leathery globes, with a vague dreamy idea that
if he could burst it he would burst some swollen trouble in his brain.
“Do you remember,” he said at last, “what I showed you the other night,
or have you forgotten?”
Baltazar looked at his mistily outlined features and experienced,
what was extremely unusual with him, a faint sense of apprehensive
remorse. “Of course I remember,” he replied. “You mean those notes of
yours--that book you’re writing?”
But Sorio did not hear him. All his attention was concentrated just
then upon the attempt to burst another seaweed bubble. The bell from
the unseen buoy rang out brokenly over the water; and between the side
of their boat and the stake to which the man was clinging there came
gurglings and lappings and whispers, as if below them, far down under
the humming tide, some sad sea-creature, without hope or memory or
rest, were tossing and moaning, turning a drowned inhuman face towards
the darkened sky.
XVI
THE FENS
Nance was able, in a sort of lethargic obstinacy, to endure the
strain of her feelings for Sorio, now that she had the influence of
her familiar work to dull her nerves. She tried hard to make things
cheerful for her not less heart-weary sister, devising one little
scheme after another to divert and distract the child, and never
permitting her own trouble to interfere with her sympathy.
But behind all this her soul ached miserably, and her whole nature
thirsted and throbbed for the satisfaction of her love. Her work played
its part as a kind of numbing opiate and the evenings spent among
Letitia Pontifex’ flower-beds were not devoid of moments of restorative
hope, but day and night the pain of her passion hurt her and the tooth
of jealousy bit into her flesh.
It was worst of all in the nights. The sisters slept in two small
couches in the same room and Nance found herself dreading more and
more, as July drew to its close, that hour when they came in from their
neighbour’s garden and undressing in silence, lay down so near to one
another. They both tried hard, Linda no less than her sister, to put
the thoughts that vexed them out of their minds and behave as if they
were fancy-free and at peace, but the struggle was a difficult one.
If they only hadn’t known, so cruelly well, just what the other was
feeling, as they turned alternately from side to side, and like little
feverish animals gasped and fretted, it would have been easier to bear.
“Aren’t you asleep yet?” one of them would whisper plaintively, and
the submissive, “I’m so sorry, dear; but oh! I wish the morning would
come,” that she received in answer, met with only too deep a response.
One unusually hot night--it happened to be the first Sunday in August
and the eve of the Bank Holiday--Nance felt as though she would scream
out aloud if her sister moved in her bed again.
There was something that humiliated and degraded in this mutual misery.
It was hard to be patient, hard not to feel that her own aching heart
was in some subtle way mocked and insulted by the presence of the same
hurt in the heart of another. It reduced the private sorrow of each
to a sort of universal sex pain, to suffer from which was a kind of
outrage to what was sacred and secret in their individual souls.
There were two windows in their room, one opening on the street and
one upon an enclosed yard at the back of the house. Nance, as she now
lay, with the bed-clothes tossed aside from her, and her hands clasped
behind her head, was horribly conscious not only of the fact that
her sister was just as wide awake as she herself, but that they were
listening _together_ to the same sounds. These sounds were two-fold,
and they came sometimes separately and sometimes simultaneously. They
consisted of the wailing of an infant in a room on the other side of
the street, and the whining of a dog in a yard adjoining their own.
The girl felt as though every species of desolation known in the world
were concentrated in these two sounds. She kept her eyes tightly shut
so as not to see the darkness, but this proceeding only intensified the
acute receptivity of her other senses. She visualized the infant and
she visualized the dog. The one she imagined with a puckered, wrinkled
face--a face such as Mr. Traherne might have had in his babyhood--and
plague-spots of a loathsome colour; she saw the colour against her
burning eyeballs as if she were touching it with her fingers and it
was of a reddish brown. The dog had a long smooth body, without hair,
and as it whined she saw it feebly scratching itself, but while it
scratched, she knew, with evil certainty, that it was unable to reach
the place where the itching maddened it.
There was hardly any air in the room, in spite of the open windows,
and Nance fancied that she discerned an odour proceeding from the
wainscoting that resembled the dust that had once greeted her from a
cupboard in one of the unused bedrooms in Dyke House, dust that seemed
to be composed of the moth-eaten garments of generations of dead
humanity.
She felt that she could have borne these things--the whining dog, and
the wailing infant--if only Linda, lying with her face to the wall,
were not listening to them also, listening with feverish intentness.
Yes, she could have borne it if the whole night were not listening--if
the whole night were not listening to the turnings and tossings of
humanity, trying to ease the itch of its desire and never able to
reach, toss and turn as it might, the place where the plague-spot
troubled it.
With a cry she leapt from her bed and, fumbling on the dressing-table,
struck a match and lit a candle. The flickering flame showed Linda
sitting bolt-upright with lamentable wide-open eyes.
Nance went to the window which looked out on the yard. Here she turned
and threw back from her forehead her masses of heavy hair. “God help
us, Linda!” she whispered. “It’s no use. Nothing is any use.”
The young girl slowly and wearily left her bed and, advancing across
the room, nestled up against her sister and caressed her in silence.
“What shall we do?” Nance repeated, hardly knowing what she said. “What
shall we do? I can’t bear this. I can’t bear it, little one, I can’t
bear it!”
As if in response to her appeal, the dog and the infant together sent
forth a pitiful wail upon the night.
“What misery there is in the world--what horrible misery!” Nance
murmured. “I’m sure we’re all better off dead, than like this. Better
off dead, my darling.”
Linda answered by slipping her arms round her waist and hugging her
tightly. Then suddenly, “Why don’t we dress ourselves and go out?” she
cried. “It’s too hot to sleep. Yes, do let’s do that, Nance! Let’s
dress and go out.”
Nance looked at her with a faint smile. There was a childish ardour
about her tone that reminded her of the Linda of many years ago. “Very
well,” she said, “I don’t mind.”
They dressed hurriedly. The very boldness of the idea helped them to
recover their spirits. Bare-headed and in their house-shoes they let
themselves out into the street. It was between two and three o’clock.
The little town was absolutely silent. The infant in the house
opposite made no sound. “Perhaps it’s dead now,” Nance thought.
They walked across the green, and Nance gave a long wistful look at the
windows of Baltazar’s cottage. The heavy clouds had lifted a little,
and from various points in the sky the stars threw down a faint,
uncertain glimmer. It remained, however, still so dark that when they
reached the centre of the bridge, neither bank was visible, and the
waters of the Loon flowing beneath were hidden in profound obscurity.
They leant upon the parapet and inhaled the darkness. What wind there
was blew from the west so that the air was heavy with the scent of peat
and marsh mud, and the sound of the sea seemed to come from far away,
as if it belonged to a different world.
They crossed the bridge and began following the footpath that led
to the church. Coming suddenly on an open gate, however, they were
tempted, by a curious instinct of unconscious self-cruelty, to deviate
from the path they knew and to pursue a strange and unfamiliar track
heading straight for the darkened fens. It was on the side of the
path removed from the sea that this track began, and it led them,
along the edge of a reedy ditch, into a great shadowy maze of silent
water-meadows.
Fortunately for the two girls, the particular ditch they followed had
a high and clearly marked embankment, an embankment used by the owners
of cattle in that district as a convenient way of getting their herds
from one feeding-ground to another. No one who has never experienced
the sensation of following one of these raised banks, or dyke-tracks,
across the fens, can conceive the curious feelings it has the power
of evoking. Even by day these impressions are unique and strange.
By night they assume a quality which may easily pass into something
bordering upon panic-terror. The palpable and immediate cause of this
emotion is the sense of being isolated, separated, and cut-off, from
all communication with the ordinary world.
On the sea-shore one is indeed in contact with the unknown mass of
waters, but there is always, close at hand, the familiar inland
landscape, friendly and reassuring. On the slope of a mountain one
may look with apprehension at the austere heights above, but there is
always behind one the rocks and woods, the terraces and ledges, past
which one has ascended, and to which at any moment one can return.
In the midst of the fens there is no such reassurance. The path one has
followed becomes merged in the illimitable space around; merged, lost
and annihilated. No mark, no token, no sign indicates its difference
from other similar tracks. No mark nor token separates north from south
or east from west. On all sides the same reeds, the same meadows, the
same gates, the same stunted willow-trees, the same desolate marsh
pools, the same vast and receding horizons. The mind has nothing to
rest itself upon except the general expanse, and the general expanse
seems as boundless as infinity.
Nance and her sister were not, of course, far enough away from their
familiar haunts to get the complete “fen-terror,” but, aided by the
darkness, the power of the thing was by no means unfelt. The instinct
to escape from the burden of their thoughts which drove the girls on,
became indeed more and more definitely mingled, as they advanced,
with a growing sense of alarm. But into this very alarm they plunged
forward with a species of exultant desperation. They both experienced,
as they went hand in hand, a morbid kind of delight in being cruel to
themselves, in forcing themselves to do the very thing--and to do it in
the dead of night--which, of all, they had most avoided, even in the
full light of day.
Before they had gone much more than a mile from their starting-point
they were permitted to witness a curious trick of the elemental
powers. Without any warning, there suddenly arose from the west a much
more powerful current of wind. Every cloud was driven sea-ward and
with the clouds every trace of sea-mist. The vast dome of sky above
them showed itself clear and unstained; and across the innumerable
constellations--manifest to their eyes in its full length--stretched
the Milky Way. Not only did the stars thus make themselves visible. In
their visibility they threw a weird and phantom-like light over the
whole landscape. Objects that had been mere misty blurs became distinct
identities and things that had been absolutely out of sight were now
unmistakably recognizable.
The girls stood still and looked around them. They could see the
church tower rising squat and square against the line of the distant
sand-dunes. They could see the roofs of the village, huddled greyly and
obscurely together, beyond the dark curve of the bridge. They could
make out the sombre shape of Dyke House itself, just distinguishable
against the high tow-path of the river. And Nance, turning westward,
could even discern her favourite withy-copse, surrounded by shadowy
cornfields.
There was a pitiable pathos in the way each of the girls, now that the
scene of their present trouble was thus bared to their view, turned
instinctively to the object most associated with the thoughts they were
seeking to escape. Nance looked long and wistfully at the little wood
of willows and alders, now a mere misty exhalation of thicker shadow
above the long reaches of the fens. She thought of how mercilessly
her feelings had been outraged there; of how violent and strange and
untender Sorio had been. Yet even at that moment, her heart aching with
the recollection of what she had suffered, the old fierce passionate
cry went up from her soul--“better be beaten by Adrian than loved by
all the rest of the world!”
It was perhaps because of her preoccupation with her own thoughts
and her long dreamy gaze at the spot which recalled them, that she
did not remark a certain sight which set her companion trembling
with intolerable excitement. This was nothing less than the sudden
appearance, between the trees that almost hid the house from view,
of a red light in a window of Oakguard. It was an unsteady light and
it seemed to waver and flicker. Sometimes it grew deeply red, like a
threatening star, and at other times it paled in colour and diminished
in size. All at once, after flickering and quivering for several
seconds, it died out altogether.
Only when it had finally disappeared did Linda hastily glance round to
see if Nance had discerned it. But her sister had seen nothing.
It was, as a matter of fact, small wonder that this particular light
observed in a window of Oakguard, thrilled the young girl with
uncontrollable agitation. It had been this very signal, arranged
between them during their few weeks of passionate love-making, which
had several times flickered across the river to Dyke House and had been
answered, unknown to Nance, from the sisters’ room. Linda shivered
through every nerve and fibre of her being, and in the darkness her
cheeks grew hot as fire. She suddenly felt convinced that by some
strange link between her heart and his, Brand knew that she was out in
the fens, and was telling her that he knew it, in the old exciting way.
“He is calling me,” she said to herself, “he is calling me!” And as she
formed the words, there came over her, with a sick beating of her heart
and a dizzy pain in her breast, the certainty that Brand had left the
house and was waiting for her, somewhere in the long avenue of limes
and cedars, where they had met once before in the early evening.
“He is waiting for me!” she repeated, and the dizziness grew so strong
upon her that she staggered and caught at her sister’s arm. “Nance,”
she whispered, “I feel sick. My head hurts me. Shall we go back now?”
Nance, full of concern and anxiety, passed her fingers across her
sister’s forehead. “Oh, my dear, my dear,” she cried, “you’re in a
fever! How silly of me to let you come out on this mad prank!”
Supporting her on her arm she led her slowly back, along the
embankment. As they walked, Nance felt more strongly than she had
done since she crossed the Loon, that deep maternal pity, infinite in
its emotion of protection, which was the basic quality in her nature.
For the very reason, perhaps, that Linda now clung to her like a
child, she felt happier than she had done for many days. A mysterious
detachment from her own fate, a sort of resigned indifference to what
happened, seemed to liberate her at that moment from the worst pang
of her loss. The immense shadowy spaces about her, the silence of the
fens, broken only by the rustling of the reeds and an occasional splash
in the stream by their side as a fish rose, the vast arch of starlit
sky above her, full of a strange and infinite reassurance--all these
things thrilled the girl’s heart, as they moved, with an emotion beyond
expression.
At that hour there came to her, with a vividness unfelt until then, the
real meaning of Mr. Traherne’s high platonic mystery. She told herself
that whatever henceforth happened to her or did not happen, it was
not an illusion, it was not a dream--this strange spiritual secret.
It was something palpable and real. She had felt it--at least she had
touched the fringe of it--and even if the thing never quite returned
or the power of it revived as it thrilled her now, it remained that it
_had been_, that she had known it, that it was there, somewhere in the
depths, however darkly hidden.
Very different were the thoughts that during that walk back agitated
the mind of the younger girl. Her whole nature was obsessed by one
fierce resolve, the resolve to escape at once to the arms of her lover.
He was waiting for her; he was expecting her; she felt absolutely
convinced of that. An indefinable pain in her breast and a throbbing
in her heart assured her that he was watching, waiting, drawing her
towards him. The same large influences of the night, the same silent
spaces, the same starlit dome, which brought to Nance her spiritual
reassurance, brought to the frailer figure she supported only a
desperate craving.
She could feel through every nerve of her feverish body the touch of
her love’s fingers. She ached and shivered with pent-up longing, with
longing to yield herself to him, to surrender herself absolutely into
his power. She was no longer a thing of body, soul, and senses. The
normal complexity of our mortal frame was annihilated in her. She was
one trembling, quivering, vibrant chord, a chord of feverish desire,
only waiting to break into one wild burst of ecstatic music, when
struck by the hand she loved.
Her desire at that moment was of the kind which tears at the root of
every sort of scruple. It did not only endow her with the courage of
madness, it inspired her with the cunning of the insane. All the way
along the embankment she was devising desperate plans of escape, and by
the time they reached the church path these plans had shaped themselves
into a definite resolution.