this way, be saving him in the larger issue. Were Adrian’s mind, for
instance, to break down now at once, rendering it necessary that he
should be put, as they say in that appalling phrase, “under restraint,”
it might as a matter of fact, save his brain from ultimate and final
disaster. It is true that this aspect of what he projected was too
fantastic, too ironically distorted, to be dwelt upon clearly or
logically but it came and went like a shadowy bird hovering about a
floating carcass, round the outskirts of his unspeakable intention.
What he reverted to more articulately, as he made his way back across
the littered sand-heaps to the entrance of the harbour, was the idea
that, after all, he would only be precipitating an inevitable crisis.
His friend was already on the verge of an attack of monomania, if not
of actual insanity. Sooner or later the thing must come to a definite
climax. Why not anticipate events, then, and let the climax occur when
it would save him from this intolerable folly--worse than madness--of
giving himself up to his feminine pursuer? As he made his way once more
through the crowded little street, the fixed and final impression all
these thoughts left upon his mind was the impression of Nance Herrick’s
face, pale, vanquished and helpless, staring up at him from the ground
beneath his feet.
XXIV
THE TWENTY-EIGHTH OF OCTOBER
Baltazar was not long in carrying out what, in bitter self-colloquy, he
called his Flambardian campaign. He deliberately absented himself from
his work in the Mundham office and gave up all his time to Sorio. He
now encouraged this latter in all his most dangerous manias, constantly
leading the conversation round to what he knew were exciting and
agitating topics and bringing him back again and again to especial
points of irritation and annoyance.
The days quickly passed, however, and Adrian, though in a strange
and restless mood, had still, in no public manner, given evidence of
insanity, and short, of course, of some such public manifestation, his
treacherous friend’s plan of having him put under restraint, fell to
the ground.
Meanwhile, Nance’s preparations for her marriage and for their entrance
into their new home advanced towards completion. It was within three
days of the date decided upon for their wedding when Nance, who had
had less time recently at her disposal for watching her sister’s
moods, came suddenly to the conclusion, as, on a wild and stormy
afternoon, she led her home from the church, that something was
seriously wrong. At first, as they left the churchyard and began making
their way towards the bridge, she thought the gloom of the evening
was a sufficient reason for Linda’s despairing silence, but as they
advanced, with the wind beating in their faces and the roar of the sea
coming to them over the dunes, she came to the conclusion that the
cause lay deeper.
But that night--it was the twenty-eighth of October--was certainly
desolate enough to be the cause of any human being’s depression. The
sun was sinking as the sisters started for their walk home. A blood-red
streak, jagged and livid, like the mutilated back of some bleeding
monster, lay low down over the fens. The wind wailed in the poplars,
whistled through the reeds, and sighed in long melancholy gasps like
the sobbing of some unhappy earth-spirit across the dykes and the
ditches. One by one a few flickering lamps appeared among the houses of
the town as the girls drew near the river, but the long wavering lines
of light thrown by these across the meadows only increased the general
gloom.
“Don’t let’s cross at once,” said Linda suddenly, when they reached the
bridge. “Let’s walk along the bank--just a little way! I feel excited
and queer to-night. I’ve been in the church so long. Please let’s stay
out a little.”
Nance thought it better to agree to the child’s caprice; though the
river-bank at that particular hour was dark with a strange melancholy.
They left the road and walked slowly along the tow-path in the
direction away from the town. A group of cattle standing huddled
together near the path, rushed off into the middle of the field.
The waters of the Loon were high--the tide flowing sea-ward--and here
and there from the windows of some scattered houses on the opposite
bank, faint lights were reflected upon the river’s surface. A strong
smell of seaweed and brackish mud came up to them from the dark stream.
“What secrets,” said Linda suddenly, “this old Loon could tell, if it
could speak! I call it a haunted river.”
Nance’s only reply to this was to pull her sister’s cloak more tightly
round her shoulders.
“I don’t mean in the sense of having drowned so many people,” Linda
went on, “I mean in the sense of being half-human itself.”
The words were hardly out of her mouth when a slender dusky figure that
had been leaning against the edge of one of the numerous weirs that
connect the river-tides with the streams of the water-meadows, came
suddenly towards them and revealed herself as Philippa Renshaw.
Both the girls drew back in instinctive alarm. Nance was the first to
recover.
“So you too are out to-night,” she said. “Linda got so tired of
practising, so we--”
Philippa interrupted her: “Since we _have_ met, Nance Herrick, there’s
no reason why we shouldn’t talk a little. Or do you think the people
about here would find that an absurd thing for us to do, as we’re both
in love with the same man, and you’re going to marry him?”
She uttered these words so calmly and in so strange a voice that
Nance for the moment was too startled to reply. She recovered herself
quickly, however, and taking Linda by the arm, made as if she would
pass her by, without further speech. But Philippa refused to permit
this. With the slow dramatic movement always characteristic of her,
she stepped into the middle of the path and stopped them. Linda, at
this, hung back, trying to draw her sister away.
The two women faced one another in breathless silence. It was too dark
for them to discern more than the vaguest outlines of each other’s
features, but they were each conscious of the extreme tension, which,
like a wave of magnetic force, at once united and divided them. Nance
was the first to break the spell.
“I’m surprised,” she said, “to hear you speak of love. I thought you
considered all that sort of thing sentimental and idiotic.”
Philippa’s hand went up in a quick and desperate gesture, almost an
imploring one.
“Miss Herrick,” she whispered in a very low and very clear tone, “you
needn’t do that. You needn’t say those things. You needn’t hurt me more
than is necessary.”
“Come away, Nance. Oh, please come away and leave her!” interjected
Linda.
“Miss Herrick, listen to me one moment!” Philippa continued, speaking
so low as almost to be inaudible. “I have something to ask of you,
something that you can do for me. It isn’t very much. It isn’t anything
that you need suspect. It is a little thing. It’s nothing you could
possibly mind.”
“Don’t listen to her, Nance,” cried Linda again. “Don’t listen to her.”
Philippa’s voice trembled as she went on, “I beg you, I beg you on
my knees to hear me. We two may never meet again after this. Nance
Herrick, will you, will you let me speak?”
Linda leapt forward. She was shaking from head to foot with fear and
anger. “No,” she cried, “she shall not listen to you. She shall not,
she shall not.”
Nance hesitated, weary and sick at heart. She had so hoped and prayed
that all these lacerating contests were over and done with.
Finally she said, “I think you must see, you must feel, that between
you and me there can be nothing--nothing more--nothing further. I think
you’ll be wise, I think you’ll recognize it afterwards, to let me go
now, to let me go and leave us alone.” As she spoke she drew away from
her and put her arm round Linda’s waist. “In any case,” she added, “I
can’t possibly hear you before this child. Perhaps, but I can’t promise
anything, but perhaps, some other day, when I’m by myself.”
She gave one sad, half-sympathetic, half-reproachful glance, at the
frail shadowy figure standing mute and silent; and then turning
quickly, let herself be led away.
Linda swung round when they were some few paces away. “She’ll never
listen to you!” She called out, in a shrill vibrating voice, “I won’t
ever let her listen to you.”
The growing darkness, made thicker by the river-mists, closed in
between them, and in a brief while their very footsteps ceased to be
heard. Philippa was left alone. She looked round her. On the fen side
of the pathway there was nothing but a thick fluctuating shadow, out
of which the forms of a few pollard-willows rose like panic-stricken
ghosts. On the river itself there shimmered at intervals a faint
whitish gleam as if some lingering relics of the vanished day, slow in
their drowning, struggled to rise to the surface.
She moved back again to the place where she had been standing at the
edge of the weir. Leaning upon the time-worn plank rotten with autumn
rains, she gazed down into the dense blackness beneath. Nothing could
be seen but darkness. She might have been looking down into some
unfathomable pit, leading to the caverns of the mid-earth.
A deathly cold wave of damp air met her face as she leaned over the
plank, and a hollow gurgling roar, from the heavy volume of water
swirling in the darkness, rose to her ears. She could smell the unseen
water; and the smell of it was like the smell of dead black leaves
plucked forth from a rain pool in the heart of a forest.
As she leaned forward with her soft breast pressing against the wooden
bar and her long slender fingers clutching its edge, a sinister line
of poetry, picked up somewhere--she could not recall where--came into
her mind, and she found her lips mechanically echoing it. “Like a
wolf, sucked under a weir,” the line ran, and over and over again she
repeated those words.
Meanwhile Nance, as they returned across the bridge, did her best to
soothe and quiet her sister. The sudden appearance of Philippa seemed
to have thrown the girl into a paroxysm of frenzy. “Oh, how I hate
her!” she kept crying out, “oh, how I loathe and hate her!”
Nance was perplexed and bewildered by Linda’s mood. Never had she known
the girl to give way to feelings of this sort. When at last she got
her into their house, and had seen her take off her things and begin
tidying herself up for their evening meal quite in her accustomed way,
she asked her point-blank what was the matter, and why to-day, on this
twenty-eighth of October, she had suddenly grown different from her
ordinary self.
Linda, standing with bare arms by the mirror and passing a comb through
her heavy hair, turned almost fiercely round.
“Do you want to know? Do you really want to know?” she cried, throwing
back her head and holding the hair back with her hands. “It’s because
of Philippa that _he_ has deserted me! It’s because of Philippa that
he hasn’t seen me nor spoken to me for a whole month! It’s because of
Philippa that he won’t answer my letters and won’t meet me anywhere!
It’s because of Philippa that now--now when I most want him”--and she
threw the comb down and flung herself on her bed--“he refuses to come
to me or to speak a word.”
“How do you know it’s because of Philippa?” Nance asked, distressed
beyond words to find that in spite of all her efforts Linda was still
as obsessed by Brand as ever before.
“I know _from him_,” the girl replied. “You needn’t ask me any more.
She’s got power over him, and she uses it against me. If it wasn’t for
her he’d have married me before now.” She sat up on the edge of her
bed and looked woefully at her sister with large sunken eyes. “Yes,”
she went on, “if it wasn’t for her he’d marry me now--to-day--and, oh,
Nance, I want him so! I want him so!”
Nance felt an oppressive weight of miserable helplessness in the
presence of this heart-stricken cry. As she looked round the room
and saw her various preparations for leaving it and for securing the
happiness of her own love, she felt as though in some subtle way she
had once more betrayed the unhappy child. She knew herself, only too
well, what that famished and starving longing is--that cry of the flesh
and blood, and the heart and the spirit, for what the eternal destinies
have put out of our reach!
And she could do nothing to help her. What _could_ she do? Now for
the first time in her life, as she looked at that lamentable youthful
figure, dumbly pleading with her for some kind of miracle, Nance was
conscious of a vague unformulated indignation against the whole system
of things that rendered this sort of suffering possible. If only _she_
were a powerful and a tender deity, how she would hasten to end this
whole business of sex-life which made existence so intolerable! Why
could not people be born into the world like trees or plants? And being
born, why could not love instinctively create the answering passion
it craved, and not be left to beat itself against cruel walls, after
scorching itself in the irresistible flame?
“Nance!” said the young girl suddenly. “Nance! Come here. Come over to
me. I want to tell you something.”
The elder sister obeyed. It was not long--for hard though it may be to
break silence, these things are quickly spoken--before she knew the
worst. Linda, with her arms clutched tightly round her, and her face
hidden, confessed that she was with child.
Nance leapt to her feet. “I’ll go to him,” she cried, “I’ll go to him
at once! Of course he must marry you now. He must! He must! I’ll go to
him. I’ll go to Hamish. I’ll go to Adrian--to Fingal! He _must_ marry
you, Linda. Don’t cry, little one. I’ll make it all right. It _shall_
be all right! I’ll go to him this very evening.”
A faint flush appeared in Linda’s pale cheeks and a glimmer of hope in
her eyes. “Do you think, possibly, that there’s any chance? _Can_ there
be any chance? But no, no, darling, I know there’s none--I know there’s
none.”
“What makes you so sure, Linda?” asked Nance, rapidly changing her
dress, and as she did so pouring herself out a glass of milk.
“It’s Philippa,” murmured the other in a low voice. “Oh, how I hate
her! How I hate her!” she continued, in a sort of moaning refrain,
twisting her long hair between her fingers and tying the ends of it
into a little knot.
“Well, I’m off, my dear,” cried Nance at length, finishing her glass of
milk and adjusting her hat-pins. “I’m going straight to find him. I may
pick up Adrian on the way, or I may not. It rather depends. And I _may_
have a word or two with Philippa. The chances are that I shall overtake
her if I go now. She can’t have waited much longer down by the river.”
Linda rushed up to her and clasped her in her arms. “My own darling!”
she murmured, “how good you are to me--how good you are! Do you know, I
was _afraid_ to tell you this--afraid that you’d be angry and ashamed
and not speak to me for days. But, oh, Nance, I do love him so much! I
love him more than my life--more than my life _even now_!”
Nance kissed her tenderly. “Make yourself some tea, my darling,
won’t you? We’ll have supper whenever I come back, and that’ll be--I
hope--with good news for you! Good-bye, my sweetheart! Say your prayers
for me, and don’t be frightened however late I am. And have a good tea!”
She kissed her again, and with a final wave of the hand and an
encouraging smile, she left the room and ran down the stairs. She
walked slowly to the top of the street, her head bent, wondering in her
mind whether she should ask Adrian to go with her to the Renshaws’ or
whether she should go alone.
The question was decided for her. As she emerged on the green she
suddenly came upon Sorio himself, standing side by side with Philippa.
They both turned quickly as, in the flare of a wind-blown lamp, they
perceived her approach. They turned and awaited her without a word.
Without a word, too--and in that slow dreamlike manner which human
beings assume at certain crises in their lives, when fate like a
palpable presence among them takes their movements into its own
hand--they moved off, all three together, in the direction of the park
gates. Not a word did any of them utter, till, having passed the gates,
they were quite far advanced along that dark and lonely avenue.
Then Philippa broke the silence. “I can say to her, Adrian, what I’ve
just said to you--mayn’t I?”
In the thick darkness, full of the heavy smell of rain-soaked leaves,
Sorio walked between them. Nance’s hand was already resting upon his
arm, and now, as she spoke, Philippa’s fingers searched for his, and
took them in her own and held them feverishly.
“You can say what you please, Phil,” he muttered, “but you’ll see what
she answers--just what I told you just now.”
Their tone of intimate association stabbed like a knife at the heart
of Nance. A moment ago--in fact, ever since she had left her by the
weir--she had been feeling less antagonistic and more pitiful towards
her vanquished rival. But this pronoun “she” applied mutually by them
to herself, seemed to push her back--back and away--outside the circle
of some mysterious understanding between the two. Her heart hardened
fiercely. Was this girl still possessed of some unknown menacing power?
“What I asked Adrian,” said Philippa quietly, while the pressure of
her burning fingers within the man’s hand indicated the strain of this
quietness, “was whether you would be generous and noble enough to give
him up to me for his last free day--the last day before you’re married.
Would you be large-hearted enough for that?”
“What do you mean--‘give him up’ to you?” murmured Nance.
Philippa burst in a shrill unearthly laugh. “Oh, you needn’t be
frightened!” she exclaimed. “You needn’t be jealous. I only mean let
me go with him, for the whole day, a long walk--you know--or something
like that--perhaps a row up the river. It doesn’t matter what, as long
as I feel that that day is _my_ day, my day _with him_--the last, and
the longest!”
She was silent, feverish, her fingers twining and twisting themselves
round her companion’s, and her breath coming in quick gasps. Nance
was silent also, and they all three moved forward through the heavy
fragrant darkness.
“You two seem to have settled it between yourselves definitely enough,”
Nance remarked at last. “I don’t really see why you need bring me into
it at all. Adrian is, of course, entirely free to do what he likes. I
don’t see what I have to do with it!”
Philippa’s hot fingers closed tightly upon Sorio’s as she received
this rebuff. “You see!” she murmured in a tone that bit into Nance’s
flesh like the tooth of an adder. “You see, Adriano!” She shrugged her
shoulders and gave a low vindictive laugh. “She’s a thorough woman,”
she added with stinging emphasis. “She’s what my mother would call a
sweet, tender, sensitive girl. But we mustn’t expect too much from her,
Adrian, must we? I mean in the way of generosity.”
Nance withdrew her hand from the arm of her betrothed and they all
three walked on in silence.
“You see what you’re in for, my friend,” Philippa began again. “Once
married it’ll be always like this. That is what you seem unable to
realize. It’s a mistake, as I’ve often said, this mixing of classes.”
Nance could no longer restrain herself. “May I ask what you mean by
that last remark?” she whispered in a low voice.
Philippa laughed lightly. “It doesn’t need much explanation,” she
replied. “Adrian is, of course, of very ancient blood, and you--well,
you betray yourself naturally by this lack of nobility, this common
middle-class jealousy!”
Nance turned fiercely upon them, and clutching Sorio’s arm spoke loudly
and passionately. “And _you_--what are _you_, who, like a girl of
the streets, are ready to pick up what you can of a man’s attentions
and attract him with mere morbid physical attraction? _You_--what are
_you_, who, as you say yourself, are ready to _share_ a man with some
one else? Do you call _that_ a sign of good-breeding?”
Philippa laughed again. “It’s a sign at any rate of being free from
that stupid, stuffy, bourgeois respectability, which Adrian is going
to get a taste of now! That very sneer of yours--‘a girl of the
streets’--shows the class to which you belong, Nance Herrick! We don’t
say those things. It’s what one hears among tradespeople.”
Nance’s fingers almost hurt Sorio’s arms as she tightened her hold upon
him. “It’s better than being what _you_ are, Philippa Renshaw,” she
burst out. “It’s better than deliberately helping your brother to ruin
innocent young girls--yes, and taking pleasure in seeing him ruining
them--and then taunting them cruelly in their shame, and holding him
back from doing them justice! It’s better than that, Philippa Renshaw,
though it _may_ be what most simple-minded decent-hearted women feel.
It’s better than being reduced by blind passion to have to come to
another woman and beg her on your knees for a ‘last day’ as you
call it! It’s better than _that_--though it _may_ be what ordinary
unintellectual people feel!”
Philippa’s fingers grew suddenly numb and stiff in Sorio’s grasp.
“Do you know,” she murmured, “you ‘decent-feeling’ woman--if that’s
what you call yourself--that a couple of hours ago, when you left me
on the river bank, I was within an ace of drowning myself? I suppose
‘decent-feeling’ women never run such a risk! They leave that to
‘street-girls’ and--and--and to us others!”
Nance turned to Sorio. “So she’s been telling you that she was
thinking of drowning herself? I thought it was something of that kind!
And I suppose you believed her. I suppose you always believe her!”
“And he always believes _you_!” Philippa cried. “Yes, he’s always
deceived--the easy fool--by your womanly sensitive ways and your
touching refinement! It’s women like you, without intelligence and
without imagination, who are the ruin of men of genius. A lot _you_
care for his work! A lot _you_ understand of his thoughts! Oh, yes,
you may get him, and cuddle him, and spoil him, but, when it comes to
the point, what _you_ are to him is a mere domestic drudge! And not
only a drudge, you’re a drag, a burden, a dead-weight! A mere mass of
‘decent-feeling’ womanliness--weighing him down. He’ll never be able to
write another line when once you’ve really got hold of him!”
Nance had her answer to this. “I’d sooner he never _did_ write another
line,” she cried, “and remain in his sober senses, than be left to
_your_ influence, and be driven mad by you--you and your diseased,
morbid, wicked imagination!”
Their two voices, rising and falling in a lamentable litany of
elemental antagonism--antagonism cruel as life and deeper than
death--floated about Sorio’s head, in that perfumed darkness, like
opposing streams of poison. It was only that he himself, harassed by
long irritating debates with Baltazar, was too troubled, too obsessed
by a thousand agitating doubts, to have the energy or the spirit to
bring the thing to an end, or he could not have endured it up to this
point. With his nerves shaken by Baltazar’s corrosive arts, and the
weight of those rain-heavy trees and thick darkness all around him,
he felt as if he were in some kind of trance, and were withheld by a
paralysing interdict from lifting a finger. There came to him a sort
of half-savage, half-humorous remembrance of a conversation he had once
had with some one or other--his mind was too confused to recall the
occasion--in which he had upheld the idealistic theory of the arrival
of a day when sex jealousy would disappear from the earth.
But as the girls continued to outrage each other’s most secret
feelings, each unconsciously quickening her pace as she poured forth
her taunts, and both dragging Sorio forward with them, the feeling grew
upon him that he was watching some deep cosmic struggle, that was, in
its way, as inhuman and elemental as a conflict between wind and water.
With this idea lodged in his brain, he began to derive a certain wild
and fantastic pleasure from the way they lacerated one another. There
was no coxcombry in this. He was far too wrought-upon and shaken in his
mind. But there was a certain grim exultant enjoyment, as if he were,
at that moment, permitted a passing glimpse into some dark forbidden
“cellarage” of Nature, where the primordial elements clash together in
eternal conflict.
Inspired by this strange mood, he returned the pressure of Philippa’s
fingers, and entwined his arm round the trembling form of his
betrothed, drawing both the girls closer towards him, and, in
consequence, closer towards one another.
They continued their merciless encounter, almost unconscious, it
seemed, of the presence of the man who was the cause of it, and without
strength left to resist the force with which he was gradually drawing
them together.
Suddenly the wind, which had dropped a little during the previous hour,
rose again in a violent and furious gust. It tore at the dark branches
above their heads and went moaning and wailing through the thickets on
either side of them. Drops of rain, held in suspension by the thicker
leaves, splashed suddenly upon their faces, and from the far distance,
with a long-drawn ominous muttering, that seemed to come from some
unknown region of flight and disaster, the sound of thunder came to
their ears.
Sorio dropped Philippa’s hand and embracing her tightly, drew her, too,
closely towards him. Thus interlocked by the man’s arms, all three of
them staggered forward together, lashed by the wind and surrounded by
vague wood-noises that rose and fell mysteriously in the impenetrable
darkness.