with her dislike, there mingled a considerable element of quite
definite fear. The precise nature of this fear she was unable to
gauge. In a measure it sprang from his unfailing urbanity and the
almost effusive manner in which he talked to her and rallied her
with little witticisms whenever they met. Nance’s own turn of mind
was singularly direct and simple and she could not avoid a perpetual
suspicion in dealing with Mr. Stork that the man was covertly mocking
at her and seeking to make her betray herself in some way. There was
something about his whole personality which baffled and perplexed her.
His languid and effeminate manner seemed to conceal some hard and
inflexible attitude towards life which, like a steel blade in a velvet
scabbard, was continually on the point of revealing its true nature and
yet never actually did. She completely distrusted his influence over
Sorio and indeed carried her suspicion of him to the extreme point of
even doubting his affection for his old-time friend. Nothing about him
seemed to her genuine or natural. When he spoke of art, as he often
did, or uttered vague, cynical commentaries upon life in general,
she felt towards him just as a girl feels towards another girl whose
devices to attract attention seem to be infringing the legitimate limit
of recognized rivalry. It was not only that she suspected him of every
sort of hypocritical diplomacy or that every attitude he adopted seemed
a deliberate pose; it was that in some indescribably subtle way he
seemed to make her feel as if her own gestures and speeches were false.
He troubled and agitated her to such an extent that she was driven
sometimes into a mood of such desperate self-consciousness that she
did actually become insincere or at any rate felt herself saying and
doing things which failed to express what she really had in her mind.
This was especially the case when he was present at her encounters
with Sorio. She found herself on such occasions uttering sometimes the
wildest speeches, speeches quite far from her natural character, and
even when she tried passionately to be herself she was half-conscious
all the while that Baltazar was watching her and, so to speak, clapping
his hands encouragingly and urging her on. It was just as if she heard
him whispering in her ear and saying, “That’s a pretty speech, that’s
an effective turn of the head, that’s a happily timed smile, that’s an
appealing little silence!”
His presence seemed to perplex and bewilder the very basis and
foundation of her confidence in herself. What was natural he made
unnatural and what was spontaneous he made premeditated. He seemed to
dive down into the very depths of her soul and stir up and make muddy
and clouded what was clearest and simplest there. The little childish
impulses and all the impetuous girlish movements of her mind became
silly and forced when he was present, became something that might have
been different had she willed them to be different, something that she
was deliberately using to bewitch Adrian.
The misery of it was that she _couldn’t_ be otherwise, that she
couldn’t look and talk and laugh and be silent, in any other manner.
And yet he made her feel as if this were not only possible but easy.
He was diabolically and mercilessly clever in his malign clairvoyance.
Nance was not so simple as not to recognize that there are a hundred
occasions when a girl quite legitimately and naturally “makes the best”
of her passing moods and feelings. She was not so stupid as not to know
that the very diffusion of a woman’s emotions, through every fibre and
nerve of her being, lends itself to innumerable little exaggerations
and impulsive underscorings, so to speak, of the precise truth. But it
was just these very basic or, if the phrase may be permitted, these
“organic” characteristics of her self-expression, that Baltazar’s
unnatural watchfulness was continually pouncing on. In some curious way
he succeeded, though himself a man, in betraying the very essence of
her sex-dignity. He threw her, in fact, into a position of embarrassed
self-defence over what were really the inevitable accompaniments of her
being a woman at all.
The unfairness of the thing was constantly being accentuated and
made worse by the fact of her having so often to listen to bitter
and sarcastic diatribes from both Adrian and his friend, directed
towards her sex in general. A sort of motiveless jibing against women
seemed indeed one of the favourite pastimes of the two men and Nance’s
presence, when this topic came forward, appeared rather to enhance
than mitigate their hostility.
On one or two occasions of this kind, Dr. Raughty had happened to be
present and Nance felt she would never forget her gratitude to this
excellent man for the genial and ironical way he reduced them to
silence.
“I’m glad you have invented,” he would say to them, “so free and
inexpensive a way of getting born. You’ve only to give us a little more
independence and death will be equally satisfactory.”
On this particular afternoon, however, Baltazar was not encouraging
Sorio in any misogynistic railings. On the contrary he was endeavouring
to soothe his friend who at that moment was in one of his worst moods.
“Why doesn’t she come?” he kept jerking out. “She knows perfectly how I
hate waiting in the street.”
“Come and sit down under the trees,” suggested Baltazar. “She’s sure to
come out on the green to look for you and we can see her from there.”
They moved off accordingly and sat down, side by side, with a group of
village people under the ancient sycamores. Above them the nameless
Admiral looked steadily sea-wards and in the shadow thrown by the trees
several ragged little girls were playing sleepily on the burnt-up grass.
“It’s extraordinary,” Sorio remarked, “what a lot of human beings
there are in the world who would be best out of it! They get on my
nerves, these people. I think I hear them more clearly and feel them
nearer me here than ever before in my life. Every person in a place
like this becomes more important and asserts himself more, and the same
is true of every sound. If you want really to escape from humanity
there are only two things to do, either go right away into the desert
where there’s not a living soul or go into some large city where you’re
absolutely lost in the crowd. This half-and-half existence is terrible.”
“My dear, my dear,” protested his companion, “you keep complaining
and grumbling but for the life of me I can’t make out what it is that
actually annoys you. By the way, don’t utter your sentiments too
loudly! These honest people will not understand.”
“What annoys me--you don’t understand what annoys me?” muttered the
other peevishly. “It annoys me to be stared at. It annoys me to be
called out after. It annoys me to be recognized. I can’t move from your
door without seeing some face I know and what’s still worse, seeing
that face put on a sort of silly, inquisitive, jeering look, as much
as to say, ‘Ho! Ho! here is that idiot again. Here is that fool who
sponges upon Mr. Stork! Here is that spying foreign devil!’”
“Adrian--Adrian,” protested his companion, “you really are becoming
impossible. I assure you these people don’t say or think anything of
the kind! They just see you and greet you and wish you well and pass on
upon their own concerns.”
“Oh, don’t they, don’t they,” cried the other, forgetting in his
agitation to modulate his voice and causing a sudden pause in the
conversation that was going on at their side. “Don’t they think these
things! I know humanity better. Every single person who meets another
person and knows anything at all about him wants to show that he’s a
match for his little tricks, that he’s not deceived by his little ways,
that he knows where he gets his money or doesn’t get it and what woman
he wants or doesn’t want and which of his parents he wishes dead and
buried! I tell you you’ve no idea what human beings are really like!
You haven’t any such idea, for the simple reason that you’re absolutely
hard and self-centred yourself. You go your own way. You think your own
thoughts. You create your own fancy-world. And the rest of humanity
are nothing--mere pawns and puppets and dream-figures--nothing--simply
nothing! I’m a completely different nature from you, Tassar. I’ve
got my idea--my secret--but I’d rather not talk about that and you’d
rather not hear. But apart from that, I’m simply helpless. I mean I’m
helplessly conscious of everything round me! I’m porous to things.
It’s really quite funny. It’s just as if I hadn’t any skin, as if my
soul hadn’t any skin. Everything that I see, or hear, Tassar--and the
hearing is worse, oh, ever so much worse--passes straight through me,
straight through the very nerves of my inmost being. I feel sometimes
as though my mind were like a piece of parchment, stretched out taut
and tight and every single thing that comes near me taps against it,
tip-tap, tip-tap, tip-tap, as if it were a drum! That wouldn’t be
so bad if it wasn’t that I know so horribly clearly what people are
thinking. For instance, when I go down that alley to the station, as
I shall soon with Nance, and pass the workmen at their doors, I know
perfectly well that they’ll look at me and say to themselves, ‘There
goes that fool again,’ or, ‘There goes that slouching idiot from the
cottage,’ but that’s not all, Tassar. They soon have the sense to see
that I’m the kind of person who shrinks from being noticed and that
pleases them. They nudge one another then and look more closely at me.
They do their best to make me understand that they know their power
over me and intend to use it, intend to nudge one another and look at
me every time I pass. I can read exactly what their thoughts are. They
say to themselves, ‘He may slink off now but he’ll have to come this
way again and then we’ll see! Then we’ll look at him more closely. Then
we’ll find out what he’s after in these parts and why that pretty girl
puts up with him so long!’”
He was interrupted at that moment by a roar of laughter from the group
beside them and Baltazar rose and pulled him away. “Upon my soul,
Adrian,” he whispered, as he led him back across the green, “you must
behave better! You’ve given those honest fellows something to gossip
about for a week. They’ll think you really are up to something, you
can’t shout like that without being listened to and you can’t quarrel
with the whole of humanity.”
Adrian turned fiercely round on him. “Can’t I?” he exclaimed. “Can’t
I quarrel with humanity? You wait, my friend, till I’ve got my book
published. Then you’ll see! I tell you I’ll strike this cursed human
race of yours such a blow that they’ll wish they’d treated a poor
wanderer on the face of the earth a little better and spared him
something of their prying and peering!”
“Your book!” laughed Baltazar. “A lot they’ll care for your book!
That’s always the way with you touchy philosophers. You stir up the
devil of a row with your bad temper and make the most harmless people
into enemies and then you think you can settle it all and prove
yourselves right and everybody else wrong by writing a book. Upon my
soul, Adrian, if I didn’t love you very much indeed I’d be inclined to
let you loose on life just to see whether you or it could strike the
hardest blows!”
Sorio looked at him with a curiously bewildered look. He seemed
puzzled. His swarthy Roman face wore a clouded, weary, crushed
expression. His brow contracted into an anxious frown and his mouth
quivered. His air at that moment was the air of a very young child that
suddenly finds the world much harder to deal with than it expected.
Baltazar watched him with secret pleasure. These were the occasions
when he always felt strangely drawn towards him. That look of
irresolute and bewildered weakness upon a countenance so powerfully
moulded filled him with a most delicate sense of protective pity. He
could have embraced the man as he watched him, blinking there in the
afternoon sunshine, and fumbling with the handle of his stick.
But at that moment Nance appeared, walking rapidly with bent head, up
the narrow street. Baltazar looked at her with a gleam of hatred in his
sea-coloured eyes. She came to rob him of one of the most exquisite
pleasures of his life, the pleasure of reducing this strong creature
to humiliated submissiveness and then petting and cajoling him back
into self-respect. The knowledge that he left Sorio in her hands in
this particular mood of deprecatory helplessness, remorseful and gentle
and like a wild beast beaten into docility, caused him the most acute
pain. With poisonous antagonism under his urbane greeting he watched
furtively the quick glance she threw at Adrian and the way her eyes
lingered upon his, feeling her way into his mood. He cast about for
some element of discord that he could evoke and leave behind with them
to spoil the girl’s triumph for he knew well that Adrian was now, after
what had just occurred, in the frame of mind most adapted of all to the
influence of feminine sympathy. Nance, however, did not give him an
opportunity for this.
“Come on,” she said, “we’ve only just time to catch the three o’clock
train. Come on! Good-bye for a while, Mr. Stork. I’ll bring him back
safe to you, sooner or later. Come on, Adrian, we really must be quick!”
They went off together and Baltazar wandered slowly back across
the green. He felt for the moment so lonely that even his hatred
drifted away and sank to nothingness under the inflowing wave of
bitter universal isolation. As he approached his cottage he stopped
stone-still with his eyes on the ground and his hands behind his back.
Elegantly dressed in pleasant summer clothes, his slight graceful
figure, easy bearing, and delicate features, gave without doubt to
the casual bystanders who observed him, an impression of unmitigated
well-being. As a matter of fact, had that discerning historic personage
who is reported to have exclaimed after an interview with Jonathan
Swift, “there goes the unhappiest man who ever lived,” exercised
his insight now, he might have modified his conclusion in favour of
Baltazar Stork.
It would certainly have required more than ordinary discernment to
touch the tip of the iron wedge that was being driven just then into
this graceful person’s brain. Looking casually into the man’s face one
would have seen nothing perhaps but a dreamy, pensive smile--a smile
a little bitter maybe, and self-mocking but with no particularly
sinister import. A deeper glance, however, would have disclosed
a curious compression of the lines about the mouth and a sort of
indrawing of the lips as if Mr. Stork were about to emit the sound of
whistling. Below the smiling surface of the eyes, too, there might
have been seen a sort of under-flicker of shuddering pain as if,
without any kind of anæsthetic, Mr. Stork were undergoing some serious
operation. The colour had deserted his cheeks as if whatever it was he
was enduring the endurance of it had already exhausted his physical
energies. Passing him by, as we have remarked, casually and hastily,
one might have said to oneself--“Ah! a handsome fellow chuckling there
over some pleasant matter!” but coming close up to him one would have
instinctively stretched out a hand, so definitely would it then have
appeared that, whatever his expression meant, he was on the point of
fainting. It was perhaps a fortunate accident that, at this particular
moment as he stood motionless, a small boy of his acquaintance, the son
of one of the Rodmoor fishermen, came up to him and asked whether he
had heard of the great catch there had been that day.
“There’s a sight o’ fish still there, Mister,” the boy remarked, “some
of them monstrous great flounders and a heap of Satans such as squirts
ink out of their bellies!”
Baltazar’s twisted lips gave a genuine smile now. A look of
extraordinary tenderness came into his face.
“Ah, Tony, my boy,” he said, “so there are fish down there, are there?
Well, let’s go and see! You take me, will you? And I’ll make those
fellows give you some for supper.”
They walked together across the green and down the street. Baltazar’s
hand remained upon the child’s shoulder and he listened as he walked,
to his chatter; but all the while his mind visualized an immense,
empty plain--a plain of steely-blue ice under a grey sky--and in the
center of this plain a bottomless crevasse, also of steely-blue ice,
and on the edge of this crevasse, gradually relinquishing their hold
from exhaustion, two human hands. This image kept blending itself as
they walked with all the little things which his eyes fell upon. It
blent with the cakes in the confectioner’s window. It blent with the
satiny blouses, far too expensive for any local purchaser, in Miss
Pontifex’s shop. It blent with the criss-cross lines of the brick-work
varied with flint of the house where Dr. Raughty lived. It blent
with their first glimpse of the waters of the harbour, seen between
two ramshackle houses with gable roofs. Nor when they finally found
themselves standing with a little crowd of men and boys round a circle
of fish-baskets upon the shore did it fail to associate itself both
with the blue expanse of waveless sea stretched before them and with
the tangled mass of sea shells, seaweed and sea creatures which lay
exposed to the sunlight, many-coloured and glistening as the deeper
folds of the nets which had drawn them from the deep were explored and
dragged forward.
Meanwhile Adrian and Nance, having safely caught their train, were
being carried with the leisurely steadiness of a local line, from
Rodmoor to Mundham. Jammed tightly into a crowded compartment full
of Saturday marketers, they had little opportunity during the short
journey to do more than look helplessly across their perspiring
neighbours at the rising and falling of the telegraph wires against
a background of blue sky. The peculiar manner in which, as a train
carries one forward, these wires sink slowly downwards as if they
were going to touch the earth and then leap up with an unexpected
jerk as the next pole comes by, was a phenomenon that always had a
singular fascination for Sorio. He associated it with his most childish
recollections of railway travelling. Would the wires ever succeed in
sinking out of sight before the next pole jerked them high up across
the window again? That was the speculation that fascinated him even
at this moment as he watched them across the brim of his companion’s
brightly trimmed hat. There was something human in the attempts the
things made to sink down, down, down and escape their allotted burden
and there was certainly something very like the ways of Providence in
the manner in which they were pulled up with a remorseless jolt to
perform their duties once more.
Emerging with their fellow-passengers upon the Mundham platform both
Sorio and Nance experienced a sense of happiness and relief. They had
both been so long confined to the immediate surroundings of Rodmoor
that this little excursion to the larger town assumed the proportions
of a release from imprisonment. It is true that it was a release that
Adrian might easily have procured for himself on any day; but more
and more recently, in the abnormal tension of his nerves, he had lost
initiative in these things. They wandered leisurely together into the
town and Sorio amused himself by watching the demure and practical way
in which his companion managed her various economic transactions in the
shops which she entered. He could not help feeling a sense of envy as
he observed the manner in which, without effort or strain, she achieved
the precise objects she had in mind and arranged for the transportation
of her purchases by the carrier’s cart that same evening.
He wondered vaguely whether all women were like this and whether, with
their dearest and best-loved dead at home, or their own peace of mind
permanently shattered by some passage of fatal emotion only some few
hours before, they could always throw everything aside and bargain so
keenly and shrewdly with the alert tradesmen. He supposed it was the
working of some blind atavistic power in them, the mechanical result
of ages of mental concentration. He was amused, too, to observe how,
when in a time incredibly short she had done all she wanted, instead of
rushing off blindly for the walk they had promised themselves past the
old Abbey church and along the river’s bank, she shrewdly interpreted
their physical necessities and carried him off to a little dairy shop
to have tea and half-penny buns. Had _he_ been the cicerone of their
day’s outing he would have plunged off straight for the Abbey church
and the river fields, leaving their shopping to the end and dooming
them to bad temper and irritable nerves from sheer bodily exhaustion.
Never had Nance looked more desirable or attractive as, with heightened
colour and little girlish jests, she poured out his tea for him in the
small shop-parlour and swallowed half-penny buns with the avidity of a
child.
Baltazar Stork was not wrong in his conjecture. Not since their early
encounters in the streets and parks of South London had Sorio been in a
gentler mood or one more amenable to the girl’s charm. As he looked at
her now and listened to her happy laughter, he felt that he had been a
fool as well as a scoundrel in his treatment of her. Why hadn’t he cut
loose long since from his philandering with Philippa which led nowhere
and _could_ lead nowhere? Why hadn’t he cast about for some definite
employment and risked, without further delay, persuading her to marry
him? With her to look after him and smooth his path for him, he might
have been quite free from this throbbing pain behind his eyeballs and
this nervous tension of his brain. He hurriedly made up his mind that
he _would_ ask her to marry him--not to-day, perhaps, or to-morrow--for
it would be absurd to commit himself till he could support her, but
very soon, as soon as he had found any mortal kind of an occupation!
What that occupation would be he did not know. It was difficult to
think of such things all in a moment. It required time. Besides,
whatever it was it must be something that left him free scope for his
book. After all, his book came first--his book and Baptiste. What
would Baptiste think if he were to marry again? Would he be indignant
and hurt? No! No! It was inconceivable that Baptiste should be hurt.
Besides, he would love Nance when he knew her! Of that he was quite
sure. Yes, Baptiste and Nance were made to understand one another.
It would be different were it Philippa he was thinking of marrying.
Somehow it distressed and troubled him to imagine Baptiste and Philippa
together. That, at all costs, must never come about. His boy must never
meet Philippa. All of this whirled at immense speed through Sorio’s
head as he smiled back at Nance across the little marble table and
stared at the large blue-china cow which, with udders coloured a yet
deeper ultramarine than its striped back, placidly, like an animal
sacred to Jupiter, contemplated the universe. There must have been a
wave of telepathic sympathy between them at that moment, for Nance
suddenly swallowing the last of her bun, hazarded a question she had
never dared to ask before.
“Adrian, dear, tell me this. Why did you leave your boy behind you in
America when you came to England?”
Sorio was himself surprised at the unruffled manner in which he
received this question. At any other moment it would have fatally
disturbed him. He smiled back at her, quite easily and naturally.
“How could I bring him?” he said. “He’s got a good place in New York
and I have nothing. I _had_ to get away, somewhere. In fact, they sent
me away, ‘deported’ me, as they call it. But I couldn’t drag the boy
with me. How could I? Though he was ready enough to come. Oh, no! It’s
much better as it is--much, much better!”
He became grave and silent and began fumbling in one of his inner
pockets. Nance watched him breathlessly. Was he really softening
towards her? Was Philippa losing her hold on him? He suddenly produced
a letter--a letter written on thin paper and bearing an American
stamp--and taking it with careful hands from its envelope, stretched
it across the table towards her. The action was suggestive of such
intimacy, suggestive of such a new and happy change in their relations,
that the girl looked at the thing with moist and dazed eyes. She
obtained a general sense of the firm clear handwriting. She caught the
opening sentence, written in caressing Italian and, for some reason or
other, the address--perhaps because of its strangeness to a European
eye--fifteen West Eleventh Street--remained engraved in her memory.
More than this she was unable to take in for the moment out of the
sheer rush of bewildering happiness which swept over her and made her
long to cry.