accustomed to roam long distances by herself, so that it did not strike
him as anything unusual that she should have chosen a place so far off
from Oakguard as the scene of their encounter. One of her most marked
peculiarities was a certain imaginative fastidiousness in regard to
the _milieu_ of her interviews with him. That was, indeed, one of the
ways by which she held him. It amounted to a genius for the elimination
of the commonplace or the “familiar” in the relations between them.
She kept a clear space, as it were, around her personality, only
approaching him when the dramatic accessories were harmonious, and
vanishing again before he had time to sound the bottom of her evasive
mood.
On this occasion Sorio walked with a firm and even gay bearing towards
their rendezvous. He followed at first the same path as that taken by
Nance and her sister on the eve of their eventful bank-holiday but
when he reached Nance’s withy-bed he debouched to his left and plunged
straight across the fens. The track he now followed was one used
rarely, even by the owners of cattle upon the marshes and in front of
him, as far as his eye could reach, nothing except isolated poplars
and a few solitary gates, marking the bridges across the dykes, broke
the grey expanse of the horizon. The deserted windmill towards which
he made his way was larger than any of the others but while, in the
gently-blowing wind the sails of the rest kept their slow and rhythmic
revolution, this particular one stretched out its enormous arms in
motionless repose as if issuing some solemn command to the elements or,
like the biblical leader, threatening the overthrow of a hostile army.
As he walked, Sorio noticed that at last the Michaelmas daisies were
really in bloom, their grey leaves and sad autumnal flowers blending
congruously enough with the dark water and blackened reed-stems of the
stagnant ditches. The sky above him was covered with a thin veil of
leaden-coloured clouds, against which, flying so high as to make it
difficult to distinguish their identity, an attenuated line of large
birds--Sorio wondered if they were wild swans--moved swiftly towards
the west. He arrived at last at the windmill and entered its cavernous
interior. She rose to meet him, shaking the dust from her clothes.
In the semi-darkness of the place, her eyes gleamed with a dangerous
lustre like the eyes of an animal.
“Do you want to stay where we are?” he said when he had relinquished
the hand she gave him, after lifting it in an exaggerated foreign
manner, to his lips. She laughed a low mocking laugh.
“What’s the alternative, Adriano mio? Even _I_ can’t walk indefinitely
and it isn’t nice sitting over a half-empty dyke.”
“Well,” he remarked, “let’s stay here then! Where were you sitting
before I came?”
She pointed to a heap of straw in the furthest corner of the place
beneath the shadow of the half-ruined flight of steps leading to the
floor above. Adrian surveyed this spot without animation.
“It would be much more interesting,” he said, “if we could get up that
ladder. I believe we could. I tried it clumsily the other day when I
broke that step.”
“But how do we know the floor above will bear us if we do get up there?”
“Oh, it’ll bear us all right. Look! You can see. The middle boards
aren’t rotted at all and that hole there is a rat-hole. There aren’t
any dangerous cracks.”
“It would be so horrid to tumble through, Adrian.”
“Oh, we shan’t tumble through. I swear to you it’s all right, Phil.
We’re not going to dance up there, are we?”
The girl put her hand on the dilapidated balustrade and shook it.
The whole ladder trembled from top to bottom and a cloud of ancient
flour-dust, grey and mouldy, descended on their heads.
“You see, Adrian?” she remarked. “It really isn’t safe!”
“I don’t care,” he said stubbornly. “What’s it matter? It’s dull and
stuffy down here. I’m going to try anyway.”
He began cautiously ascending what remained intact of the forlorn
ladder. The thing creaked ominously under his weight. He managed,
however, to get sufficiently high to secure a hold upon the
threshold-beam of the floor above when, with the aid of a projecting
plank from the side-wall of the building, he managed to retain his
position and after a brief struggle, disappeared from his companion’s
view.
His voice came down to her from above, muffled a little by the
intervening wood-work.
“It’s lovely up here, Phil! There are two little windows and you can
see all over the fens. Wait a minute, we’ll soon have you up.”
There was a pause and she heard him moving about over her head.
“You’d much better come down,” she shouted. “I’m not going up there.
There’s no possible way.”
He made no answer to this and there was dead silence for several
minutes. She went to the entrance and emerged into the open air. The
wide horizon around her seemed void and empty. Upon the surface of the
immense plain only a few visible objects broke the brooding monotony.
To the south and east she could discern just one or two familiar
landmarks but to the west there was nothing--nothing but an eternal
level of desolation losing itself in the sky. She gave an involuntary
shudder and moved away from the windmill to the edge of a reed-bordered
ditch. There was a pool of gloomy water in the middle of the reeds
and across this pool and round and round it whirled, at an incredible
speed, a score or so of tiny water-beetles, never leaving the surface
and never pausing for a moment in their mad dance. A wretched little
moth, its wings rendered useless by contact with the water, struggled
feebly in the centre of this pool, but the shiny-coated beetles whirled
on round it in their dizzy circles as if it had no more significance
than the shadow of a leaf. Philippa smiled and walked back to the
building.
“Adrian,” she called out, entering its dusty gloom and looking up at
the square hole in the ceiling, from which still hung a remnant of
broken wood-work.
“Well? What is it?” her friend’s voice answered. “It’s all right; we’ll
soon have you up here!”
“I don’t want to go up there,” she shouted back. “I want you to come
down. Please come down, Adrian! You’re spoiling all our afternoon.”
Once more there was dead silence. Then she called out again.
“Adrian,” she said, “there’s a moth being drowned in the ditch out
here.”
“What? Where? What do you say?” came the man’s reply, accompanied by
several violent movements. Presently a rope descended from the hole and
swung suspended in the air.
“Look out, my dear,” Sorio’s voice ejaculated and a moment later he
came swinging down, hand over hand, and landed at her side. “What’s
that?” he gasped breathlessly, “what did you say? A moth in the water?
Show me, show me!”
“Oh, it’s nothing, Adrian,” she answered petulantly. “I only wanted you
to come down.”
But he had rushed out of the door and down to the stream’s edge.
“I see it! I see it!” he called back at her. “Here, give me my stick!”
He came rushing back, pushed roughly past her, seized his stick from
the ground and returned to the ditch. It was easy enough to effect the
moth’s rescue. The same fluffy stickiness in the thing’s wet wings that
made it helpless in the water, made it adhere to the stick’s point. He
wiped it off upon the grass and pulled Philippa back into the building.
“I’m glad I came down,” he remarked. “I know it’ll hold now. You won’t
mind my tying it round you, will you? I’ll have both the ends down here
presently. It’s round a strong hook. It’s all right. And then I’ll pull
you up.”
Philippa looked at him with angry dismay. All this agitating fuss over
so childish an adventure irritated her beyond endurance. His proposal
had, as a matter of fact, a most subtle and curious effect upon her.
It changed the relations between them. It reduced her to the position
of a girl playing with an elder brother. It outraged, with an element
of the comic, her sense of dramatic fastidiousness. It humiliated her
pride and broke the twisted threads of all kinds of delicate spiritual
nets she had in her mind to cast over him. It placed her by his side as
a weak and timid woman by the side of a willful and strong-limbed man.
Her ascendency over him, as she well knew, depended upon the retaining,
on her part, of a certain psychic evasiveness--a certain mysterious
and tantalizing reserve. It depended--at any rate that is what she
imagined--upon the inscrutable look she could throw into her eyes and
upon the tragic glamour of her ambiguous red lips and white cheeks. How
could she possibly retain all these characteristics when swinging to
and fro at the end of a rope?
Sorio’s suggestion outraged something in her that went down to the very
root of her personality. Walking with him, swimming with him, rowing
in a boat with him--all those things were harmonious to her mind and
congruous with her personal charm. None of these things interfered
with the play of her intelligence, with the poise, the reserve, the
aloofness of her spiritual challenge. She was exceptionally devoid of
fear in these boyish sports and could feel herself when she engaged in
them with him, free of the limitations of her sex. She could retain
completely, as she indulged herself in them, all the equilibrium of
her being--the rhythm of her identity. But this proposal of Sorio’s
not only introduced a discordant element that had a shrewd vein of the
ludicrous in it, it threw her into a physical panic. It pulled and
tugged at the inmost fibres of her self-restraint. It made her long
to sit down on the ground and cry like a child. She wondered vaguely
whether it was that Adrian was revenging himself upon her at that
moment for some accumulated series of half-physical outrages that he
had himself in his neurotic state been subjected to lately. As to his
actual sanity, it never occurred to her to question _that_. She herself
was too wayward and whimsical in the reactions of her nerves and the
processes of her mind to find anything startling, in _that_ sense,
in what he was now suggesting. It was simply that it changed their
relations--it destroyed her ascendency, it brought things down to brute
force, it turned her into a woman.
Her mind, as she stood hesitating, reviewed the moth incident. That
sort of situation--Adrian’s fantastic mania for rescuing things--had
just the opposite effect on her. He might poke his stick into half the
ditches of Rodmoor and save innumerable drowning moths; the only effect
_that_ had on her was to make her feel superior to him, better adapted
than he to face the essential facts of life, its inherent and integral
cruelty for instance. But now--to see that horrible rope-end dangling
from that gaping hole and to see the eager, violent, masculine look
in her friend’s eyes--it was unendurable; it drove her, so to speak,
against the jagged edge of the world’s brute wall.
“To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes,
Is delicate and rare--”
she found herself quoting, with a horrible sense that the humour of the
parody only sharpened the sting of her dilemma.
“I won’t do it,” she said resolutely at last, trying to brave it out
with a smile. “It’s a ridiculous idea. Besides, I’m much too heavy. You
couldn’t pull me up if you tried till nightfall! No, no, Adriano, don’t
be so absurd. Don’t spoil our time together with these mad ideas. Let’s
sit down here and talk. Or why not light a fire? That would be exciting
enough, wouldn’t it?”
His face as he listened to her darkened to a kind of savage fury. Its
despotic and imperious lines emphasized themselves to a degree that was
really terrifying.
“You won’t?” he cried, “you won’t, you won’t?” And seizing her roughly
by the shoulder he actually began twisting the rope round her body.
She resisted desperately, pushing him away with all the strength of
her arms. In the struggle between them, which soon became a dangerous
one, her hand thrusting back his head unintentionally drew blood with
its delicate finger-nails from his upper lip. The blood trickled into
his mouth and, maddened by the taste of it, he let her go and seizing
the end of the rope, struck her with it across the breast. This blow
seemed to bewilder her. She ceased all resistance. She became docile
and passive in his hands.
Mechanically he went on with the task he had set himself, of fastening
the rope round her beneath her arm-pits and tying it into a knot. But
her absolute submissiveness seemed presently to paralyze him as much
as his previous violence had disarmed and paralyzed her. He unloosed
the knot he was making and with a sudden jerk pulled the rope away from
her. The rope swung back to its former position and dangled in the air,
swaying gently from side to side. They stood looking at each other in
startled silence and then, quite suddenly, the girl moved forward and
flung her arms round his neck.
“I love you!” she murmured in a voice unlike any he had heard her use
before. “I love you! I love you!” and her lips clung to his with a long
and passionate kiss.
Sorio’s emotions at that moment would have caused her, had she been
conscious of them, a reaction even less endurable than that which she
had just been through. To confess the truth he had no emotion at all.
He mechanically returned her kisses; he mechanically embraced her.
But all the while he was thinking of those water-beetles with shiny
metallic coats that were gyrating even now so swiftly round that reedy
pool.
“Water-beetles!” he thought, as the girl’s convulsive kisses, salt with
her passionate tears, hurt his wounded lip. “Water-beetles! We are all
like that. The world is like that! Water-beetles upon a dark stream.”
She let him go at last and they moved out together hand in hand into
the open air. Above them the enormous windmill still upheld its
motionless arms while from somewhere in the fens behind it came a
strange whistling cry, the cry of one of those winged intruders from
foreign shores, which even now was perhaps bidding farewell to regions
of exile and calling out for some companion for its flight over the
North Sea.
With his hand still held tightly in hers, Philippa walked silently by
his side all that long way across the meadows and dykes. Sorio took
advantage of her unusually gentle mood and began plaintively telling
her about the nervous sufferings he endured in Rodmoor and about his
hatred for the people there and his conviction that they took delight
in annoying him. Then little by little, as the girl’s sympathetic
silence led him on, he fell to flinging out--in short, jerky, broken
sentences--as if each word were torn up by the roots from the very soil
of his soul, stammered references to Baptiste. He spoke as if he were
talking to himself rather than to her. He kept repeating over and over
again some muttered phrase about the bond of abnormal affection which
existed between them. And then he suddenly burst out into a description
of Baptiste. He rambled on for a long while upon this topic, leaving
in the end only a very blurred impression upon his hearer’s mind. All,
in fact, the girl was able to definitely arrive at from what he said
was that Baptiste resembled his mother--a Frenchwoman of the coast of
Brittany--and that he was tall and had dark blue eyes.
“With the longest lashes,” Sorio kept repeating, as if he were
describing to her some one it was important she should remember, “that
you, or any one else, has ever seen! They lie on his cheek when he’s
asleep like--like--”
He fumbled with the feathery head of a reed he had picked as they were
walking but seemed unable to find any suitable comparison. It was
curious to see the shamefaced, embarrassed way he threw forth, one by
one, and as if each word caused him definite pain in the uttering,
these allusions to his boy.
Philippa let him ramble on as he pleased, hardly interrupting him by
a gesture, listening to him, in fact, as if she were listening to a
person talking in his sleep. She learnt that it was only with the
greatest difficulty that he had persuaded Baptiste to keep his position
in New York and not fling everything up and follow him to London.
She learnt that Baptiste had copied out with his own hand the larger
portion of Sorio’s book and that now, as he completed each new chapter,
he sent it by registered mail straight to the boy in “Eleventh Street.”
“It will explain my life, my whole life, that book,” Adrian muttered.
“You’ve only heard a few of its ideas, Phil, only a few. The secret of
things being found, not in the instinct of creation but in the instinct
of destruction, is only the beginning of it. I go further--much further
than that. Don’t laugh at me, Phil, if I just say this--only just
this: I show in my book how what every living thing really aims at is
to escape from itself, to escape from itself by the destruction of
itself. Do you get the idea in that, Phil? Everything in the world
is--how shall I put it?--these ideas are not easy, they tear at a
person’s brain before they become clear!--everything in the world is
on the edge, on the verge, of dissolving away into what people call
nothingness. That is what Shakespeare had in his mind when he said,
‘the great globe itself, yea! all which it inherits, shall dissolve
and--and--’ I forget exactly how it runs but it ends with ‘leave
not a rack behind.’ But the point I make in my book is this. This
‘nothingness,’ this ‘death,’ if you like, to which everything struggles
is only a name for _what lies beyond life_--for what lies, I mean,
beyond the extreme limit of the life of every individual thing. We
shrink back from it, everything shrinks back from it, because it is
the annihilation of all one’s familiar associations, the destruction
of the impulse to go on being oneself! But though we shrink back from
it, something in us, something that is deeper than ourselves pushes us
on to this destruction. This is why, when people have been outraged
in the very roots of their being, when they have been lacerated and
flayed more than they can bear, when they have been, so to speak, raked
through and combed out, they often fall back upon a soft delicious tide
of deep large happiness, indescribable, beyond words.”
He was too absorbed in what he was saying to notice that as he made
this remark his companion murmured a passionate assent.
“They do! They do! They do!” the girl repeated, with unrestrained
emotion.
“That is why,” he continued without heeding her, “there is always a
fierce pleasure in what fools call ‘cynicism.’ Cynicism is really the
only philosophy worth calling a philosophy because it alone recognizes
‘that everything which exists ought to be destroyed.’ Those are the
very words used by the devil in Faust, do you remember? And Goethe
himself knew in his heart the truth of cynicism, only he loved life
so well,--the great child that he was!--that he _couldn’t_ endure the
thought of destruction. He understood it though, and confessed it,
too. Spinoza helped him to see it. Ah, Phil, my girl, _there_ was
a philosopher! The only one--the only one! And see how the rabble
are afraid of Spinoza! See how they turn to the contemptible Hegel,
the grocer of philosophy, with his precious ‘self-assertion’ and
‘self-realization’! And there are some idiots who fail to see that
Spinoza was a cynic, that he hated life and wished to destroy life.
They pretend that he worshipped Nature. Nature! He denied the existence
of it. He wished to annihilate it, and he did annihilate it, in his
terrible logic. He worshipped only one thing, that which is beyond
the limit, beyond the extremest verge, beyond the point where every
living thing ceases to exist and _becomes nothing_! That’s what Spinoza
worshipped and that’s what I worship, Phil. I worship the blinding
white light which puts out all the candles and all the shadows in the
world. It blinds you and ends you and so you call it darkness. But it
only begins where darkness is destroyed with everything else! Darkness
is like cruelty. It’s the opposite of love. But what I worship is as
far beyond love as it is beyond the sun and all the shadows thrown by
the sun!”
He paused and contemplated a nervous water-rat that was running along
close to the water of the ditch they walked by, desperately searching
for its hole.
“I call it white light,” he continued, “but really it’s not light
at all, any more than it’s darkness. It’s something you can’t name,
something unutterable, but it’s large and cool and deep and empty.
Yes, it’s empty of everything that lives or makes a sound! It stops
all aching in one’s head, Phil. It stops all the persecution of people
who stare at you! It stops all the sickening tiredness of having to
hate things. It’ll stop all my longing for Baptiste, for Baptiste is
_there_. Baptiste is the angel of that large, cool, quiet place. Let me
once destroy everything in the way and I get to Baptiste--and nothing
can ever separate us again!”
He looked round at the grey monotony about them, streaked here
and there by patches of autumnal yellow where the stubble fields
intersected the fens.
“I prove that I’m right about this principle of destruction, Phil,”
he went on, “by bringing up instances of the way all human beings
instinctively delight to overthrow one another’s illusions and to fling
doubt upon one another’s sincerity. We all do that. You do, Phil, more
than any one. You do it to me. And you’re right in doing it. We’re
all right in doing it! That accounts for the secret satisfaction we
all feel when something or other breaks up the complacency of another
person’s life. It accounts for the mad desire we have to destroy
the complacency of our own life. What we’re seeking is _the line of
escape_--that’s the phrase I use in my book. The line of escape from
ourselves. That’s why we turn and turn and turn, like fish gasping on
the land or like those beetles we saw just now, or like that water-rat!”
They had now reached the outskirts of Nance’s withy-bed. The path Sorio
had come by deviated here sharply to the east, heading sea-wards, while
another path, wider and more frequented, led on across the meadows to
the bank of the Loon where the roof and chimneys of Dyke House were
vaguely visible. The September twilight had already begun to fall and
objects at any considerable distance showed dim and wraith-like. Damp
mists, smelling of stagnant water, rose in long clammy waves out of
the fens and moved in white ghostly procession along the bank of the
river. Sorio stood at this parting of the ways and surveyed the shadowy
outline of the distant tow-path and the yet more obscure form of Dyke
House. He looked at the stubble field and then at the little wood
where the alder trees differentiated themselves from the willows by
their darker and more melancholy foliage.
“How frightening Dyke House looks from here,” remarked Philippa, “it
looks like a haunted house.”
A sudden idea struck Sorio’s mind.
“Phil,” he said, letting go his companion’s hand and pointing with
his stick to the house by the river, “you often tell me you’re afraid
of nothing weird or supernatural. You often tell me you’re more like
a boy in those things than a girl. Look here, now! You just run over
to Dyke House and see how Rachel Doorm is getting on. I often think
of her--alone in that place, now Nance and Linda have gone. I’ve been
thinking of her especially to-day as we’ve come so near here. It’s
impossible for me to go. It’s impossible for me to see any one. My
nerves won’t stand it. But I must say I should be rather glad to know
she hadn’t quite gone off her head. It isn’t very nice to think of her
in that large house by herself, the house where her father died. Nance
told me she feared she’d take to drink just as the old man did. Nance
says it’s in the Doorm family, that sort of thing, drink or insanity, I
mean--or both together, perhaps!” and he broke into a bitter laugh.
Philippa drew in her breath and looked at the white mist covering the
river and at the ghostly outlines of the Doorm inheritance.
“You always say you’re like a boy,” repeated Sorio, throwing himself
down where four months ago he had sat with Nance, “well, prove it
then! Run over to Dyke House and give Rachel Doorm my love. I’ll wait
for you here. I promise faithfully. You needn’t do more than just
greet the old thing and wish her well. She loves all you Renshaws. She
idealizes you.” And he laughed again.
Philippa regarded him silently. For one moment the old wicked flicker
of subtle mockery seemed on the point of crossing her face. But it died
instantly away and her eyes grew childish and wistful.
“I’m not a boy, I’m a woman,” she murmured in a low voice.
Sorio frowned. “Well, go, whatever you are,” he cried roughly. “You’re
not tired, are you?” he added a little more gently.
She smiled at this. “All right, Adrian,” she said, “I’ll go. Give me
one kiss first.”