world who possess the open secret. They know what it is to find the
ultimate virtue in exquisite resignation. They do not only submit to
fate--they joyfully embrace it. I suppose we might maintain that they
even ‘love it’--though I confess that that idea of ‘loving’ fate has
always seemed to me weird and fantastic. But I laugh, and so do you,
I expect, when our friends Sorio and Tassar talk in their absurd way
about women. What do they know of women? They’ve only met, in all their
lives (forgive me, Nance!) a parcel of silly young girls. They’ve no
right to speak of life at all, the depraved children that they are!
They are outside life, they’re ignorant of the essential mystery.
Goethe was the fellow to understand these things, and you know the name
_he_ gives to the unutterable secret? _The Mothers._ That’s a good
name, isn’t it? The Mothers! Listen, Nance! All the people in this
place suffer from astigmatism and asymmetry. Those are the outward
signs of their mental departure from the normal. And the clever ones
among them are proud of it. You know the way they talk! They think
abnormality is the only kind of beauty. Nance, my dear, to tell you
the truth, I’m sick of them all. _My_ idea of beauty is the perfect
masculine type, such as you see it in that figure they call ‘the
Theseus’--in the Elgin marbles--or the perfect feminine type as you
see it in the great Demeter. Do you suppose they can, any of them, get
round that? Do you suppose they can fight against the rhythm of Nature?”
He pulled out his tobacco pouch and gravely lit his pipe, swinging his
head backwards and forwards as he did so. Nance could not help noticing
the shrewd, humorous _animalism_ of his look as he performed this
function.
“But what can be done? Oh, Fingal, what _can_ be done about Linda?” she
asked with a heavy sigh.
He settled his pipe in his mouth and blew violently down its stem,
causing a cloud of smoke to go up into the September air.
“Take her to Mrs. Renshaw,” he said solemnly. “That’s what I’ve been
thinking all this time. That’s my conclusion. Take her to Mrs. Renshaw.”
Nance stared at him. “Really?” she murmured, “you really think _she_
could help?”
“Try it--try it--try it!” cried Dr. Raughty, flinging a bit of moss at
the fish in the water below them.
“It’s extraordinary,” he added, “that these dace should come down so
far as this! The water here must be almost entirely salt.”
That afternoon Nance went to Mr. Traherne’s vesper service. She found
Mrs. Renshaw in the church and invited both her and the priest to come
back with them to their lodgings. She did this under the pretense of
showing them some new designs of a startling and fascinating kind
that she had received from Paris. The circean witcheries of French
costumery were not perhaps precisely the right attraction either for
Mrs. Renshaw or Hamish Traherne, but the thing served well enough as an
excuse and they both took it as such. She was careful to hurry on in
advance with Mr. Traherne so as to make it inevitable that Linda should
walk with Mrs. Renshaw. The mistress of Oakguard seemed unusually
pale and tired that afternoon. She held Linda back in the churchyard
until the others had got quite far and then she led her straight to
Rachel Doorm’s grave. They had buried the unhappy woman quite close to
the outermost border of the priest’s garden. Nothing but a few paces
of level grass separated her from a row of tall crimson hollyhocks.
The grave at present lacked any headstone. Only a bunch of Michaelmas
daisies, placed there by Linda herself, stood at its foot in a glass
jar. Several wasps were buzzing round this jar, probably conscious of
some faint odour clinging still about it from what it had formerly
contained. Mrs. Renshaw stood with her hand leaning heavily on Linda’s
shoulder. She seemed to know, from the depths of her own fathomless
morbidity, precisely what the young girl was feeling.
“Shall we kneel down?” she said. Linda began trembling a little but
with simple and girlish docility, free from any kind of embarrassment,
she knelt at the other’s side.
“We mustn’t pray for the dead,” whispered Mrs. Renshaw. “_He_,” she
meant Mr. Traherne, “tells us to in his sermons, but it hurts me
when he does for we’ve been taught that all that is wrong--wrong and
contrary to our simple faith! We mustn’t forget the Martyrs--must we,
Linda?”
But Linda’s mind was far from the martyrs. It was occupied entirely
with the thing that lay buried before them, under that newly disturbed
earth.
“But we can pray to God that His will be done, on earth, even as it is
in Heaven,” murmured Mrs. Renshaw.
She was silent after that and the younger and the elder woman knelt
side by side with bowed heads. Then in a low whisper Mrs. Renshaw spoke
again.
“There are some lines I should like to say to you, dear, if you’ll let
me. I copied them out last week. They were at the end of a book of
poetry that I found in Philippa’s room. She must have just bought it or
had it given to her. I didn’t think she cared any more for poetry. The
pages weren’t cut and I didn’t like to cut them without her leave but I
copied this out from the end. It was the last in the book.”
She hesitated a moment while Linda remained motionless at her side,
trembling still a little and watching the movements of a Peacock
butterfly which was then sharing with the wasps their interest in the
ancient honey-jar.
Mrs. Renshaw then repeated the following lines in a clear exquisitely
modulated voice which went drifting away over the surrounding marshes.
“For even the purest delight may pall,
And power must fail and the pride must fall.
And the love of the dearest friends grow small,
But the glory of the Lord is all in all.”
Her voice sank. A slight gust of wind made the trees above them sigh
softly as though the words of the kneeling woman were in harmony with
the inarticulate heart of the earth.
Linda stopped trembling. A sweet indescribable calm began slowly to
pervade her. Gently, like a child, she slipped her hand into her
companion’s.
“Do you remember the Forty-third Psalm, Linda?” Mrs. Renshaw continued
and her clear dramatic voice, with a power of feeling equal to that of
any great actress, once more rose upon the air.
“Our heart is not turned back, neither have our steps declined from
thy way.
Though thou hast sore broken us, in the place of dragons, and covered
us with the shadow of death.”
Once more she was silent but with a slight veering of the wind,
the sound of the waves beyond the sand-dunes came to them with
pitiless distinctness. It seemed to mock--this voice of the earth’s
antagonist--mock, in triumphant derision, the forlorn hope which that
solemn invocation had roused in the girl’s heart. But in contending
against Mrs. Renshaw’s knowledge of the Psalms even the North Sea had
met its match. With her pale face uplifted and a wild light in her
eyes, she continued to utter the old melodious incantations with their
constant references to a Power more formidable than “all thy waves and
storms.” She might have been one of the early converts to the faith
that came from the sacred Desert, wrestling in spiritual ecstasy with
the gods and powers of those heathen waters.
Either by one of the fortunate coincidences which sometimes interrupt
even the irony of nature or, as Mrs. Renshaw would herself have
maintained, by a direct answer to her prayer, the weathercock on
the church tower swung round again. North-east it swung, then
north-north-east, then due north. And finally, even while she was
uttering her last antiphony, it pointed to north-west, the quarter most
alien and antagonistic to the Rodmoor sea, the portion of the horizon
from which blew the wind of the great fens.
In a country like East Anglia so peculiarly at the mercy of the
elements, every one of the winds has its own peculiar burden and brings
with it something healing and restorative or baleful and malefic. The
east wind here is, in a paramount sense, the evil wind, the accomplice
and confederate of the salt deep, the blighter of hopes, the herald
of disaster. The north-west wind, on the contrary, is the wind that
brings the sense of inland spaces, the smell of warm, wet earth and the
fragrance of leaf mould in sweet breathing woods. It is the wind that
fills the rivers and the wells and brings the fresh purifying rain.
It is a wind full of memories and its heart is strong with the power
of ancient love, revived even out of graves and sepulchres. To those
sensitive to finer and rarer earth influences among the dwellers by
the east coast there may be caught sometimes upon the north-west wind
the feeling of pine woods and moorland heather. For it comes from the
opposite side of the great plain, from Brandon Heath and even beyond
and it finds nothing in the wide fen country to intercept it or break
the rush of its sea-ward passage.
Thus, when the two women rose finally to their feet it was to be met by
a cool, healing breath which, as it bowed the ranks of the hollyhocks
and rustled through the trees, had in it a delicious odour of inland
brooks and the coming of pure rain.
“Listen to me, child,” said Mrs. Renshaw as they passed out of the
churchyard, “I want to say this to you. You mustn’t think that God
allows any intercourse between the living and the dead. That is
a wicked invention of our own sinful hearts. It is a temptation,
darling--a temptation of the devil--and we must struggle against
it. Whenever we feel it we must struggle against it and pray. It is
perfectly right for you to think gently and forgivingly of poor Miss
Doorm. It were wrong to think otherwise. But you mustn’t think of her
as anywhere near us or about us now. She’s in the hands of God and in
the mercy of God and we must leave her there. Do you hear what I’m
saying, Linda? Do you understand me? Anything else is wrong and evil.
We are all sinners together and we are all in the same merciful hands.”
Never was the exorcising of powers hurtful to humanity more effective.
Linda bowed her head at her words and then raising it freely, walked
with a lighter step than for seven long days. She wished in her heart
that she had the courage to talk to Mrs. Renshaw about an anxiety
much more earthly, much less easy to be healed, than the influence of
Rachel Doorm, alive or dead, but so immense was her relief at that
moment to be free from the haunting phantom that had been pulling her
towards that mound in the churchyard that she found it in her heart to
be hopeful and reckless even though she knew that, whatever happened,
there was bound to be pain and trouble in store for her in the not far
distant future.
XXIII
WARDEN OF THE FISHES
It will be found not altogether devoid of a strange substratum of
truth, though fantastic enough in the superficial utterance, the
statement that there are certain climacteric seasons in the history of
places when, if events of importance are looming upon the horizon, they
are especially liable to fall. Such a season with regard to Rodmoor, or
at least with regard to the persons we are most concerned with there,
may be said to have arrived with the beginning of Autumn and with the
month of October.
The first weeks of this month were at any rate full of exciting and
fatal interest to Nance. Something in the change of the weather, for
the rains had come in earnest now, affected Sorio in a marked degree.
His whole being seemed to undergo some curious disintegrating process
as difficult to analyze as the actual force in Nature which was at that
very time causing the fall of the leaves. We may be allowed to draw at
least this much from Sorio’s own theory of the universal impulse to
self-destruction--the possible presence, that is to say, of something
positive and active, if not personal and conscious, in the processes
of natural decadence. Life, when it corrupts and disintegrates; life
when it finally falls away and becomes what we call death, does so
sometimes, or seems to do so, with a vehemence and impetuosity which
makes it difficult not to feel the pressure of some half-conscious
“will to perish” in the thing thus plunging towards dissolution.
The brilliant colour which many flowers assume when they approach
decease bears out this theory. It is what the poet calls a “lightning
before death” and the rich tints of the autumn foliage as well as the
phosphorescent glories--only repulsive to our human senses in fatal
association--of physical mortality itself, are symbols, if not more
than symbols, of the same splendid rushing upon nothingness.
This change in Sorio was not at all to Nance’s disadvantage in the
external aspect of the relations between them; indeed, she was carried
forward by it to the point of coming to anticipate with trembling
excitement what had begun to seem an almost impossible happiness. For
Sorio definitely and in an outburst of impatient pleading, implored her
to marry him. In the deeper, more spiritual association between them,
however, the change which took place in him now was less satisfactory.
Nance could not help feeling that there was something blind, childish,
selfish, unchivalrous,--something even reckless and sinister--about
this proposal and the passionate eagerness with which he pressed it
upon her, considering that he made no more attempt than before to
secure any employment and seemed to take it for granted that either she
or Baltazar Stork or his own son in America, or some vague providential
windfall would provide the money for this startling adventure. Side
by side with her surprise at his careless disregard for all practical
considerations, Nance could not help feeling a profound apprehension
which she herself was unwilling to bring to the surface of her mind
with regard to his mood and manner during these days. He seemed to
throw himself passively and helplessly upon her hands. He clung to her
as a sick child might cling to its parent. His old savage outbursts
of cynical humour seemed to have vanished and in their place was a
constant querulousness and peevishness which rendered their hours
together much less peaceful and happy than they ought to have been.
All sorts of little things irritated him--irritated him even in her.
He clung to her, she could not help fancying, more out of a strange
instinct of self-preservation than out of natural love. She couldn’t
help wondering sometimes how it would be when they were actually
married. He seemed to find it at once difficult to endure her society
and impossible to do without it. The bitter saying of the old Latin
poet might have been his motto at that time. “_Nec sine te nec tecum
vivere possum._”
And yet, in spite of all this, these early October days were days of
exquisite happiness for Nance. The long probation through which her
love had passed had purged and winnowed it. The maternal instinct in
her, always the dominant note in her emotions, was satisfied now as it
had never been satisfied before, as perhaps unless she had children of
her own it would never be satisfied again.
In these days of new hope and new life her youth seemed to revive and
put forth exquisite blossoms of gaiety and tenderness. In a physical
sense she actually did revive, though this may have been partly due
to the cool crisp air that now blew constantly across the fens, and
Linda, watching the change with affectionate sympathy, declared she was
growing twice as beautiful.
She offered no objection when Sorio insisted upon having their “bans”
read out in church, a duty that was most willingly performed without
further delay by Hamish Traherne. She did not even protest when he
announced that they would be married before October was over, announced
it without any indication of how or where they would live, upon whose
money or under whose roof!
She felt a natural reluctance to press these practical details upon his
notice. The bond that united them was too delicate, too tenuous and
precarious, for her to dare to lean heavily upon it, nor did the few
hesitating and tentative hints she threw out meet with any response
from him. He waved them aside. He threw them from him with a jest or
a childish groan of disgust or a vague “Oh, _that_ will work itself
out. _That_ will be all right. Don’t worry about _that_! I’m writing to
Baptiste.”
But, as we have said, in spite of all these difficulties and in spite
of the deep-hidden dismay which his nervous, querulous mood excited in
her, Nance was full of a thrilling and inexpressible happiness during
these Autumn days. She loved the roar of the great wind--the north-west
wind--in chimneys and house-tops at night. She loved the drifting of
the dead leaves along the muddy roads. She loved the long swishing
murmur of the rushes growing by the dyke paths as they bent their
feathery heads over the wet banks or bowed in melancholy rhythm across
the rain-filled ditches.
Autumn was assuredly and without doubt the climacteric season of the
Rodmoor fens. They reluctantly yielded to the Spring; they endured the
Summer, and the Winter froze them into dead and stoical inertness. But
something in the Autumn called out the essential and native qualities
of the place’s soul. The fens rose to meet the Autumn in happy and
stormy nuptials. The brown, full-brimmed streams mounted up joyously
to the highest level of their muddy banks. The faded mallow-plants by
the river’s side and the tarnished St. John’s wort in the drenched
hedges assumed a pathetic and noble beauty--a beauty full of vague,
far-drawn associations for sensitive humanity. The sea-gulls and
marsh-birds, the fish, the eels, the water-rats of the replenished
streams seemed to share in the general expansion of life with the black
and white hornless cattle, the cattle of the fens, who now began to
yield their richest milk. Long, chilly, rainy days ended in magnificent
and sumptuous sunsets--sunsets in which the whole sky from zenith to
nadir became one immense rose of celestial fire. Out of a hundred
Rodmoor chimneys rose the smell of burning peat, that smell of all
others characteristic of the country whose very soil was formed of the
vegetation of forgotten centuries.
In the large dark barns the yellow grain lay piled roof-high, while
in every little shed and outhouse in the country, damsons, pears and
potatoes lay spread out as if for the enjoyment of some Dionysian
gathering of the propitiated earth-gods.
The fishermen, above all, shared in the season’s fortune, going out
early and late to their buoy-marked spots on the horizon, where the
presence of certain year-old wrecks lying on the sand at the bottom
drew the migratory fish and held them for weeks as if by a marine spell.
But if the days had their especial quality, the nights during that
October were more significant still. The sky seemed to draw back,
back and away, to some purer, clearer, more ethereal level while with
a radiance tender and solemn the greater and lesser stars shed down
their magical influence. The planets, especially Venus and Jupiter,
grew so luminous and large that they seemed to rival the moon; while
the Moon, herself, the mystic red moon of the finished harvest, the
moon of the equinox, drew the tides after her, higher and fuller and
with a deeper note in their ebb and flow than at any other season of
the year.
Everywhere swallows were gathering for their long flight, everywhere
the wild geese and the herons were rising to incredible heights in the
sky and moving northward and westward; and all this while Nance was
able, at last really able, to give herself up to her passion for the
man she loved.
It was a passion winnowed by waiting and suffering, purged to a
pure flame by all she had gone through, but it was a passion none
the less--a long exclusive passion--the love of a lifetime. It made
her sometimes, this great love of hers, dizzy and faint with fear
lest something even now should at the last moment come between them.
Sometimes it made her strangely shy of him too, shy and withdrawn as if
it were not easy, though so triumphantly sweet, to give herself up body
and soul into hands that after all were the hands of a stranger!
Sorio did not understand all this. Sometimes when she thrust him away
as if the emotion produced by his caresses were more than she could
bear or as if some incalculable pride in her, some inalienable chastity
beyond the power of her senses, relucted to yield further, he grew
angry and morose and accused her of jealousy or of coldness. This would
have been harder to endure from him if there had not existed all the
while at the bottom of her heart a strange, maternal pity, a pity not
untouched with a sort of humorous irony--the eternal irony of the woman
as she submits to the eternal misunderstanding of the man, embracing
her without knowing what he does. He seemed to her sometimes in the
mere physical stress of his love-making almost like an amorous and
vicious boy. She could not resist the consciousness that her knowledge
of the mystery of sex--its depth and subtlety not less than its flame
and intensity--was something that went much further and was much
more complicated and involved with her whole being than anything he
experienced. Especially did she smile in her heart at the queer way he
had of taking it for granted that he was “seducing” her, of deriving,
it seemed, sometimes a satyrish pleasure from that idea, and sometimes
a fit of violent remorse. When he was in either of these moods she felt
towards him precisely as a mother might feel towards a son whose egoism
and ignorance gave him a disproportioned view of the whole world. And
yet, in actual age, Sorio was some twenty years her senior.
In her own mind, as the weeks slipped by and their names had already
been coupled twice in the Sunday services, Nance was taking thought
as to what, in solid reality, she intended to do with this child-man
of hers when the great moment came. She must move from their present
lodging. _That_ seemed certain. It also seemed certain that Linda would
have still to go on living with her. Any other arrangement than that
was obviously unthinkable. But where should they live? And could she,
with the money at present at her disposal, support three people?
A solution was found to both these problems by Mr. Traherne. There
happened to exist in Rodmoor, as in many other old decaying boroughs
on the east coast, certain official positions the practical service
of which was almost extinct but whose local prestige and financial
emoluments, such as they were, lingered on unaffected by the change of
conditions. The relentless encroachments of the sea upon the land were
mainly responsible for this. In certain almost uninhabited villages
there existed official persons whose real raison d’être lay with the
submerged foundations of former human habitations, deep at the bottom
of the waters.
It was, indeed, one of the essential peculiarities of life upon those
strange sea-banks this sense of living on the edge, as it were,
of the wave-drowned graves of one’s fathers. It may have been the
half-conscious knowledge of this, bred in their flesh and blood from
infancy, that gave to the natives of those places so many unusual and
unattractive qualities. Other abodes of men rest securely upon the
immemorial roots of the past, roots that lie, layer beneath layer, in
rich historic continuity endowing present usages and customs with the
consecration of unbroken tradition. But in the villages of that coast
all this is different. Tradition remains, handed down from generation
to generation, but the physical continuity is broken. The east-coast
dwellers resemble certain of the stellar bodies in the celestial
spaces, they retain their identity and their names but they are driven,
in slow perpetual movement, to change their physical position. In
scriptural phrase, they have no “abiding-place” nor can they continue
“in one stay.”