to cross the water where, some hundreds of years before, an earlier
generation walked their cobbled streets. The storm-buoys rock and ring
and the boat lanterns burn their wavering signals over the drowned
foundations that once supported Town-Hall and church tower, Market
place and Village Tavern. It is this slow, century-delayed flight
from the invading tide which so often produces in East Anglian coast
towns the phenomenal existence of two parish churches, both it may be
still in use, but the later and newer one following the heart of the
community in its enforced retreat. Thus it is brought about in these
singular localities that the very law of the gods, the law which utters
to the elements the solemn “thus far and no further” is as a matter of
fact, daily and momently, though with infinite slowness, broken and
defied.
It is perhaps small wonder that among the counties of England these
particular districts should have won for themselves a sinister
reputation for impiety and perversity. Nothing so guards and
establishes the virtue of a community than its sense of the presence
in its midst of the ashes of its generations. Consciously and in
a thousand pious usages it “worships its dead.” But East-Anglian
coast-dwellers are not permitted this privilege. Their “Lares and
Penates” have been invaded and submerged. The fires upon their altars
have been drowned and over the graves of their fathers the godless
tides ebb and flow without reverence. Fishes swim where once children
were led to the font and where lovers were wedded the wild cormorant
mocks the sea-horses with its disconsolate cry. It is easy to be
believed that the remote descendants of human beings who actually
walked and bartered and loved and philosophized on spots of ground now
tangled with seaweed and sea-drift, and with fathoms of moaning and
whispering water above them, should come in their hour to depart in a
measure from the stable and kindly laws of human integrity! With the
ground thus literally _moving_--though in age-long process--_under
their feet_, how should they be as faithful as other tribes of men to
what is permanent in human institution?
There was perhaps a certain congruity in the fact that now, after all
these ages of tidal malice, it was in the interests of so singular
an alien as Sorio--one whose very philosophy was the philosophy of
“destruction”--that this lingering on of offices, whose service had
been sea-drowned, remained as characteristic of the place. But this is
precisely what did occur.
There was in Rodmoor a local official, appointed by the local town
council, whose title, “The Warden of the Fishes,” carried the mind back
to a time when the borough, much larger then, had been a considerable
centre of the fishing industry. This office, tenable for life, carried
with it very few actual duties now but it ensured a secure though small
emolument and, what was more important, the occupancy, free of rent, of
one of the most picturesque houses in the place, an old pre-Elizabethan
dwelling of incommodious size but of romantic appearance, standing at
the edge of the harbour.
The last incumbent of this quaint and historic office, whose duties
were so little onerous that they could be performed by a very old and
very feeble man, was a notable character of the village called John
Peewit Swinebitter, whose chief glory was not attained until the close
of his mortal days, which ended under the table in the Admiral’s Head
after a surfeit of the very fish of which he was “warden” washed down
by too copious libations of Keith-Radipole ale.
Since Mr. Swinebitter’s decease in June, there had gone on all through
July and August, a desperate rivalry between two town factions as to
the choosing of his successor and it was Mr. Traherne’s inspired notion
to take advantage of this division to secure the post for Nance’s
prospective husband.
Sorio, though of foreign blood, was by birth and nationality English
and moreover he had picked up, during his stay in Rodmoor, quite as
much familiarity with the ways and habits of fish as were necessary
for that easy post. If, at any unforeseen crisis, more scientific and
intimate knowledge was required than was at his disposal, there was
always Dr. Raughty, a past master in all such matters, to whom he could
apply. It was Mr. Traherne’s business to wheedle the local rivals into
relinquishing their struggle in favour of one who was outside the
contention and when this was accomplished the remaining obstacles in
the way of the appointment were not hard to surmount. Luckily for the
conspirators, Brand Renshaw, though the largest local landowner and a
Justice of the Peace, was not on the Rodmoor council.
So skillfully did Mr. Traherne handle the matter and so cautious and
reserved was Nance that it was not till after the final reading of
their bans in the church on the marshes and the completion of the
arrangements for their marriage at the end of the following week, that
even Baltazar Stork became aware of what was in the wind.
Sorio himself had been extremely surprised at this unexpected favour
shown him by the local tradesmen. He had brooded so long upon his
morbid delusion of universal persecution that it seemed incredible
to him, in the few interviews which he had with these people, that
they should treat him in so courteous and kind a manner. As a matter
of fact, so fierce and obstinate were their private dissensions, it
was a genuine relief to them to deal with a person from outside; nor
must it be forgotten that in the appointment of Nance’s husband to
the coveted post they were doing honour to the memory of the bride’s
father, Captain Herrick having been by far the most popular of all
the visitors to Rodmoor in former times. Most of the older members of
the council could well remember the affable sailor. Many of them had
frequently gone out fishing with him in the days when there were more
fish and rarer fish to be caught than there were at present--those
“old days” in fact which, in most remote villages, are associated with
stuffed wonders in tavern parlours and with the quips and quirks of
half-legendary heroes of Sport and Drink.
It was a reversion to such “old days” to have a gentleman “Warden of
the Fishes.” Besides it was a blow at the Renshaws between whom and
the town-council there was an old established feud. For it was not
hidden from the gossips of Rodmoor that the relations between Nance and
the family at Oakguard were more than a little strained, nor did the
shrewder ones among them hesitate to whisper dark and ominous hints as
to the nature of this estrangement.
Baltazar Stork received the news of his friend’s approaching marriage
with something like mute fury. The morning when Sorio announced it to
him was one of concentrated gloom. The sea was high and rough. The
wind wailed through the now almost leafless sycamores and made the
sign which bore the Admiral’s head creak and groan in its iron frame.
It had rained steadily all through the night and though the rain had
now ceased there was no sun to dry the little pools of water which
lay in all the trodden places in the green or the puddles, choked up
with dead leaves, which stared desolately from the edges of the road
upon the sombre heaven. Sorio, having made his momentous announcement
in a negligent, off-hand way, as though it were a matter of small
importance, rushed off to meet Nance at the station and go with her to
Mundham.
As it was Saturday the girl had no scruple about leaving her work. In
any case she would have been free, with the rest of Miss Pontifex’s
employees, in the early afternoon. She was anxious to spend as long a
time as was possible making her final purchases preparatory to their
taking possession of Ferry Lodge. The mere name of this relic of
Rodmoor’s faded glory was indicative of how times had changed. What was
once an inland crossing--several miles from the shore--had now become
the river’s mouth and where farmers formerly watered their cattle the
fishing boats spread their sails to meet the sea.
Nance had made a clean sweep of the furniture of their predecessor,
something about the reputation of Mr. Peewit Swinebitter prejudicing
her, in perhaps an exaggerated manner, against the buying of any of
his things. This fastidiousness on her part did not, however, lessen
the material difficulties of the situation, Sorio being of singularly
little assistance in the rôle of a house-furnisher.
Meanwhile, with hat pulled low down over his forehead and his cane
switching the rain-drenched grass, Baltazar Stork walked up and down
in front of his cottage. He walked thus until he was tired and then he
came and stood at the edge of the green and looked at his empty house
and at the puddles in the road. Into the largest of these puddles he
idly poked his stick, stirring the edge of a half-submerged leaf and
making it float across the muddy water. Children passed him unheeded,
carrying cans and bottles to be filled at the tavern. Little boys came
up to him, acquaintances of his, full of gaiety and mischief, but
something in his face made them draw back and leave him. Never, in
all his relations with his friend, had Baltazar derived more pleasure
from being with him than he had done during the recent weeks. That
condition of helpless and wistful incompetence which Nance found so
trying in Sorio was to Baltazar Stork the cause of the most delicate
and exquisite sensations. Never had he loved the man so well--never had
he found him so fascinating. And now, just at the moment when he, the
initiated adept in the art of friendship, was reaping the reward of his
long patience with his friend’s waywardness and really succeeding in
making him depend on him exactly in the way he loved best, there came
this accursed girl and carried him off!
The hatred which he felt at that moment towards Nance was so extreme
that it overpowered and swamped every other emotion. Baltazar Stork was
of that peculiarly constituted disposition which is able to hate the
more savagely and vindictively because of the very fact that its normal
mood is one of urbane and tolerant indifference. The patient courtesy
of a lifetime, the propitiatory arts of a long suppression, had their
revenge just then for all they had made him endure. In a certain
sense it was well for him that he _could_ hate. It was, indeed in a
measure, an instinct of self-preservation that led him to indulge such
a feeling. For below his hatred, down in the deeper levels of his soul,
there yawned a gulf, the desolating emptiness of which was worse than
death. He did not visualize this gulf in the same concrete manner as he
had done on a previous occasion, but he was conscious of it none the
less. It was as a matter of fact a thing that had been for long years
hidden obscurely under the hard, gay surface of his days. He covered it
over by one distraction or the other. Its remote presence had given an
added intensity to his zest for the various little pleasures, æsthetic
or otherwise, which it was his habit to enjoy. It had done more. It
had reduced to comparative insignificance the morbid vexations and
imaginative reactions from which his friend suffered. He could afford
to appear hard and crystal-cold, capable of facing with equanimity
every kind of ultimate horror. And he _was_ capable of facing such.
Under the shadow of a thing like that--a thing beyond the worst of
insane obsessions, for his mind was cruelly clear as he turned his eyes
inward--he was able to look contemptuously into the Gorgon face of any
kind of terror. When he chose he could always see the thing as it was,
see it as the desolation of emptiness, as a deep, frozen space, void of
sound or movement or life or hope or end. There was not the least tinge
of insanity in the vision.
What he was permitted to see, by reason of some malign clarity of
intellect denied to the majority of his fellows, was simply the
real truth of life, its frozen chemistry and deadly purposelessness.
Most men visualize existence through a blurring cloud of personal
passion, either erotic or imaginative. They suffer, but they suffer
from illusion. What separated Baltazar from the majority was his power
of seeing things in absolute colourlessness--unconfused by any sort
of distorting mirage. Thus what he saw with his soul was the ghastly
loneliness of his soul. He saw this frozen, empty, hollow space and he
saw it as the natural country in which his soul dwelt, its unutterable
reality, its appalling truth. That was why no thought of suicide
ever came to him. The thing was too deep. He might kill himself, but
in so doing he would only destroy the few superficial distractions
that afforded him a temporary freedom. For suicide would only fling
him--that at least is what, with horrible clarity, he had come to
feel about it--into the depths of his soul, into the very abyss, that
is to say, which he escaped by living on the surface. It was a kind
of death-in-life that he was conscious of, below his crystalline
amenities, but one does not fly to death to escape from death.
It will be seen from this how laughable to him were all Sorio’s
neurotic reactions from people and things. People and things were
precisely what Baltazar clung to, to avoid that “frozen sea” lying
there at the back of everything. It will be easily imagined too, how
absurd to him--how fantastic and unreal--were the various hints and
glimpses which Sorio had permitted him into what his friend called his
“philosophy of destruction.” To make a “philosophy” out of a struggle
to reach the ultimate horror of that “frozen sea,” how lamentably
pathetic it was, and how childish! No sane person would contemplate
such a thing and the attempt proved that Sorio was not sane. As for
the Italian’s vague and prophetic suggestions with regard to the
possibility of something--philosophers always spoke of “something” when
they approached nothing!--beyond “what we call life” that seemed to
Baltazar’s mind mere poetic balderdash and moon-struck mysticism. But
he had always listened patiently to Sorio’s incoherences. The man would
not have been himself without his mad philosophy! It was part of that
charming weakness in him that appealed to Baltazar so. It was absurd,
of course--this whole business of writing philosophic books--but he was
ready to pardon it, ready to listen all night and day to his friend’s
dithyrambic diatribes, as long as they brought that particular look of
exultation which he found so touching into his classic face!
This “look of exultation” in Sorio’s features had indeed been
accompanied during the last month by an expression of wistful and
bewildered helplessness and it was just the union of these two things
that Baltazar found so irresistibly appealing. He was drawn closer to
Adrian, in fact, during these Autumn days, than he had ever been drawn
to any one. And it was just at this moment, just when he was happiest
in their life together, that Nance Herrick must needs obtrude her
accursed feminine influence and with this result! So he gave himself up
without let or hindrance to his hatred of this girl. His hatred was a
cold, calculated, deliberate thing, clear of all volcanic disturbances
but, such as it was, it possessed him at that moment to the exclusion
of everything else. He imagined to himself now, as with the end of his
stick he guided that sycamore leaf across the puddle, how Nance would
buy those things in the Mundham shops and what pleasure there would be
in her grey eyes, that peculiar pleasure unlike anything else in the
world which a woman has when she is indulging, at the same moment, her
passion for domestic detail and her passion for her lover!
He saw the serene _possessive_ look in her face, the look of one who at
last, after long waiting, arrives within sight of the desired end. He
saw the little outbursts of girlish humour--oh, he knew them so well,
those outbursts!--and he saw the fits of half-assumed, half-natural
shyness that would come over her and the soft, dreamy tenderness
in her eyes, as together with Adrian, she bought this thing or the
other, full of delicate association, for their new dwelling-place. His
imagination went even further. He seemed to hear her voice as she spoke
sympathetically, pityingly, of himself. She would be sure to do that!
It would come so prettily from her just then and would appeal so much
to Adrian! She would whisper to him over their lunch in some little
shop--he saw all that too--of how sad she felt to be taking him away
from his old friend and leaving that friend alone. And he could see
the odd bewildered smile, half-remorseful and half-joyful with which
Sorio would note that disinterested sympathy and think to himself what
a noble affectionate creature she was and how lucky he was to win her.
He saw how careful she would be not to tire him or tease him with her
purchases, how she would probably vary the tedium of the day with some
pleasant little strolls together round the Abbey grounds or perhaps
down by the wharves and the barges.
Yes, she had won her victory. She was gathering up her spoils. She was
storing up her possessions! Could any human feeling, he asked himself
with a deadly smile upon his lips, be more sickeningly, more achingly,
intense than the hatred he felt for this normal, natural, loving woman?
He swept his stick through the muddy water, splashing it vindictively
on all sides and then, moving into the middle of the road, looked at
his empty cottage. Here, then, he would have to live again alone! Alone
with himself, alone with his soul, alone with the truth of life!
No, it was too much. He never would submit to it. Better swallow at
once and without more nonsense the little carefully concocted draught
which he had long kept under lock and key! After all he would have to
come to that, sooner or later. He had long since made up his mind that
if things and persons--the “things and persons” he used as his daily
drug, failed him or lost their savour he would take the irrevocable
step and close the whole farce. Everything was the same. Everything was
equal. He would only move one degree nearer the central horror--the
great ice field of eternity--the plain without end or beginning, frozen
and empty, empty and frozen! He stared at his cottage windows. No, it
was unthinkable, beginning life over again without Adrian. A hundred
little things plucked at random from the sweet monotony of their days
together came drifting through his mind. The peculiar look Adrian had
when he first woke in the morning--the savage greediness with which
he would devour honey and brown bread--the pleading, broken, childlike
tones in his voice when, after some quarrel between them he begged his
friend to forgive him--all these things and many others, came pouring
in upon him in a great wave of miserable self-pity. No--she should not
win. She should not triumph. She should not enjoy the fruits of her
victory--the strong feminine animal! He would sooner kill her and then
kill himself to avoid the gallows. But killing was a silly futile kind
of revenge. Infants in the art of hatred _killed_ their enemies! But
at any rate, if he killed her she would never settle down in her nice
new house with her dear husband! But then, on the other hand, she would
be the winner to the end. She would never feel as he was feeling now;
she would never look into his eyes and know that he knew he had beaten
her; he would never _see_ her disappointment. No--killing was a stupid,
melodramatic, blundering way out of it. Artists ought to have a subtler
imagination! Well, something must be done, and done soon. He felt he
did not care what suffering he caused Sorio, the more _he_ suffered the
better, if only he could see the look in those grey eyes of Nance that
confessed she was defeated!
Quite quietly, quite calmly, he gathered together all the forces of
his nature to accomplish this one end. His hatred rose to the level of
a passion. He vowed that nothing should make him pause, no scruple,
no obstacle, until he saw that beaten look in Nance’s face. Like all
dominant obsessions, like all great lusts, his purpose associated
itself with a clear concrete image, the image of the girl’s expression
when at last, face to face with him, she knew herself broken, helpless
and at his mercy.
He walked swiftly down the High Street, crossed the open space by
the harbour and made his way to the edge of the waves. Surely that
malignant tide would put some triumphant idea into his brain. The
sea--the sterile, unharvested sea--had from the beginning of the world,
been the enemy of woman! Warden of the Fishes! He laughed as he thought
of Sorio’s assuming such a title.
“Not yet, my friend--not quite yet!” he murmured, gazing across the
stormy expanse of water. Warden of the Fishes! With a strong, sweet,
affectionate wife to look after him? “No, no, Adriano!” he cried
hoarsely, “we haven’t come to that yet--we haven’t come to that quite
yet!”
By some complicated, psychological process he seemed to be aware, as
he stared at the foaming sea-horses, of the head of his mute friend
Flambard floating, amid the mist of his own woman-like hair, in the
green hollows of the surf. He found himself vaguely wondering what
he--the super-subtle Venetian--would have done had he been “fooled
to the top of his bent” by a girl like Nance--had he been betrayed
in his soul’s deepest passion. And all at once it came over him, not
distinctly and vividly but obscurely and remotely as if through a
cloudy vapour from a long way off, from far down the vistas of time
itself, what Flambard would have done.
He stooped and picked up a long leather-like thong of wet, slippery
seaweed and caressed it with his hands. At that moment there passed
through him a most curious sensation--the sensation that he had
himself--he and not Flambard--stood just in this way but by a
different sea, ages, centuries ago--and had arrived at the same
conclusion. The sensation vanished quickly enough and with it the image
of Flambard, but the idea of what remained for him to do still hovered
like a cloud at the back of his mind. He did not drag it forth from its
hiding place. He never definitely accepted it. The thing was so dark
and hideous, belonging so entirely to an age when “passional crimes”
were more common and more remorseless than at the present, that even
Baltazar with all the frozen malice of his hate scrupled to visualize
it in the daylight. But he did not drive it away. He permitted it to
work upon him and dominate him. It was as though some “other Baltazar”
from a past as remote as Flambard’s own and perhaps far remoter--had
risen up within him in answer to that cry to the inhuman waters. The
actual working of his mind was very complicated and involved at that
moment. There were moments of wavering--moments of drawing back into
the margin of uncertainty. But these moments grew constantly less and
less effective. Beyond everything else that definite image of Nance’s
grey eyes, full of infinite misery, confessing her defeat, and even
pleading with him for mercy, drove these wavering moments away. It
was worth it, any horror was worth it, to satiate his revenge by the
sight of what her expression would be as he looked into her face then.
And, after all, the thing he projected would in any case, come about
sooner or later. It was on its way. The destinies called for it. The
nature of life demanded it. The elements conspired to bring it about.
The man’s own fatality was already with a kind of vehemence, rushing
headlong--under the fall of these Autumn rains and the drifting of
these Autumn leaves--to meet it and embrace it! All he would have to do
himself would be just to give the wheel of fate the least little push,
the least vibration of an impulse forward, with his lightest finger!