Rodmoor

by John Cowper Powys

  He led her straight along the narrow, reed-bordered path, with a ditch on either side of it which ended in the bridge across the Loon. Before they reached the bridge, however, he swerved to the left and helped her over a low wooden railing. From this point, by following a rough track along the edge of one of the water meadows it was possible to reach the sand-dunes without entering the village.

  “Not to the sea,” pleaded Linda, holding back when she perceived the direction of their steps.

  “Yes, to the sea!” he cried, pulling her forward with merciless determination. She made no further resistance. She did not even protest when, arrived at the end of their path, he lifted her bodily over the gate that barred their way. She let him help her across the heavily sinking sand, covered with pallid, coarse grass which yielded to every step they took. She let him, when at last they reached the summit of the dunes and saw the sea spread out before them, retain the hand she had given him and lead her down, hardly holding back at all now, to the very edge of the water.

  They were both at that moment like persons under the power of some sort of drug. Their eyes were wild and bright and when they spoke their voices had an unnatural solemnity. In the absoluteness of the magnetic current which swept them together, they could do nothing, it seemed, but take all that happened to them for granted—take all—all—as if it could not be otherwise, as if it were unthinkable otherwise.

  When they reached the place where the tide turned and the tremulous line of spindrift glimmered in the dying sunlight, the girl stopped at last. Her lips and cheeks were pale as the foam itself. She tried to tear her fingers from his grasp. Her feet, sinking in the wet sand, were splashed by the inflowing water.

  “They told me you were afraid,” he muttered, and his voice sounded to them both as if it came from far away, “but I didn’t believe it. I thought it was some little girl’s nonsense. But I see now they were right. You are afraid.”

  He rose to his full height, drawing into his lungs with a breath of ecstasy the sharp salt wind that blew across the water’s surface.

  “But out of your fear we’ll make a bond between us,” he went on, raising his voice, “a bond which none of them shall be able to break!”

  He suddenly bent down and, scooping with his fingers in the water, lifted towards her a handful of sea-foam that gleamed ghostly white as he held it.

  “There, child,” he cried, “you can’t escape from me now!”

  As he spoke he flung, with a wild laugh, straight across her face, the foam-bubbles which he had caught. She started back with a little gasp, but recovering herself instantly lifted the hand which held her own and pressed it against her forehead. They stood for a moment, after this, staring at one another, with a hushed, dazed, bewildered stare, as though they felt the very wind of the wing of fate pass over their heads.

  Brand broke the spell with a laugh. “I’ve christened you now,” he said, “so I can call you what I like. Come up here, Linda, my little one, and let’s talk of all this.”

  Hand in hand they moved away from the sea’s edge and crouched down in the shadow of the sand-dunes. The rose-coloured light died out along the line of foam and the mass of the waters in front of them darkened steadily, as if obscured by the over-hovering of some colossal bird. Far off, on the edge of the horizon, a single fragment of drifting cloud took the shape of a bloody hand with outstretched forefinger but even that soon faded as the sun, sinking into the fens behind them, gave up the struggle with darkness.

  With the passing of the light from the sea’s surface, all that was left of the wind sank also into absolute immobility. An immense liberating silence intensified, rather than interrupted by the monotonous splash of the waves, seemed to stream forth from some planetary reservoir and overflow the world.

  Not a sea-gull screamed, not a sound came from the harbour, not a plover cried from the marshes, not a step, not a voice, not a whisper, approached their solitude or disturbed their strange communion.

  Linda sat with her head sunk low upon her breast and her hands clasped upon her knees. Brand, beside her, caressed her whole figure with an intense gaze of concentrated possession.

  Neither of them spoke a word, but one of the man’s heavy hands lay upon hers like a leaden weight bruising a fragile plant.

  What he seemed attempting to achieve in that conspiring hour was some kind of magnetizing of the girl’s senses so that the first movement of overt passion should come from her rather than from himself. In this it would seem he was not unsuccessful, for after two or three scarce audible sighs her body trembled a little and leant towards his and a low whisper uttered in a tone quite unlike her ordinary one, tore itself from her lips, as if against her volition.

  “What are you doing to me?” she murmured.

  While the invisible destinies were thus inaugurating their projected work upon Brand and Linda, Nance and Mrs. Renshaw issued forth from the churchyard.

  “If only life were clearer,” the girl was thinking, “it would be endurable. It’s this uncertainty in everything—this dreadful uncertainty—which I can’t bear!”

  “That was a beautiful psalm we had just now,” said Mrs. Renshaw, in her gentle penetrating voice as, after some minutes’ silent walking they emerged upon the bridge across the Loon. Nance looked down over the parapet and in her depressed fancy she saw the drowned figure of herself, drifting, face upward, upon the flowing water.

  “Yes,” she replied mechanically, “the psalms are always beautiful.”

  “I don’t believe,” the lady went on, glancing at her with eyes so hollow and sorrowful that it seemed as though the twilight of a world even sadder than the one they looked upon emanated from them, “I don’t believe I understand that little sister of yours. She’s very highly strung—she’s very nervous. She requires a great deal of care. To tell the truth, I don’t consider my son Brand at all a good companion for her. I wish they’d waited and not gone off like that. He doesn’t always remember what a sensitive thing the heart of a young girl is.”

  They had now reached the southern side of the Loon and were on the main road between Rodmoor and Mundham. A few paces further brought them to the first houses of the village. Something in the helpless, apologetic, deprecatory way with which, just then, Mrs. Renshaw greeted an old woman who passed them, had a strangely irritating effect upon Nance’s nerves.

  “I don’t see why young people should be considered more than any one else!” she burst out. “It’s a purely conventional idea. We all have our troubles, and what I think is the older you get the more difficult life becomes.”

  Mrs. Renshaw’s face assumed a mask of weary obstinacy and she walked more slowly, her head bent forward a little and her feet dragging.

  “Women have to learn what duty means,” she said, “and the sooner they learn it the better. Those among us who are privileged to make one good man happy have the best that life can give. It’s natural to be restless till you have this. But we must try to overcome our restlessness. We must ask for help.”

  She was silent. Her white face drooped and bowed itself, while her tired fingers relaxed their hold on her skirt which trailed in the dust of the road. Her profile, as Nance glanced sideways at it, had a look of hopeless and helpless passivity.

  The girl withdrew into herself, irritated and yet remorseful. She felt an obscure longing to be of some service to this unhappy one; yet as she watched her, thus bowed and impenetrable, she felt shut out and excluded.

  Before they reached the centre of the village—for Nance felt unwilling to leave Mrs. Renshaw until she had seen her safe within her park gates—they suddenly came upon Baltazar Stork returning from his daily excursion to Mundham.

  He was as elegantly dressed as usual and in one hand carried a little black bag, in the other a bunch of peonies. Nance, to her surprise, caught upon her companion’s face a look of extraordinary illumination as the man advanced towards them. In recalling the look afterwards, she found herself thinking of the word “vivacity”
in regard to it.

  “Oh, I’m always the same,” Mr. Stork replied to the elder lady’s greeting. “I grow more annoyingly the same every day. I say the same things, think the same thoughts and meet the same people. It’s—lovely!”

  “I’m glad you ended like that,” observed Nance, laughing. It was one of her peculiarities to laugh—a little foolishly—when she was embarrassed and though she had encountered Sorio’s friend once or twice before, she felt for some reason or other ill at ease with him.

  With exquisite deliberation Mr. Stork placed the black bag upon the ground and selecting two of the freshest blooms from his gorgeous bunch, handed one by the light of a little shop window to each of the women.

  “How is your friend?” enquired Mrs. Renshaw with a touch of irony in her tone. “This young lady has not seen him to-day.”

  At that moment Nance realized that she hated this melancholy being whom a chance encounter with her husband’s son seemed to throw into such malicious spirits. She felt that everything Mrs. Renshaw was destined to say from now till they separated, would be designed to humiliate and annoy her. This may have been a fantastic illusion, but she acted upon it with resolute abruptness.

  “Good-bye,” she exclaimed, turning to her companion, “I’ll leave you in Mr. Stork’s care. I promised Rachel not to be late to-night. Good-bye—and thank you,” she bowed to the young man and held up the peony, “for this.”

  “She’s jealous,” remarked Baltazar as he led Mrs. Renshaw across the green under the darkening sycamores. “She is abominably jealous! She was in a furious temper—I saw it myself—when Adrian took her sister out the other day and now she’s wild because he’s friendly with Philippa. Oh, these girls, these girls!”

  An amused smile flickered for a moment across the lady’s face but she suppressed it instantly. She sighed heavily. “You are all too much for me,” she said, “too much for me. I’m getting old, Tassar. God be merciful! This world is not an easy place to live in.”

  She walked by his side after this in heavy silence till they reached the entrance of the park.

  VIII

  SUN AND SEA

  AS the days began to grow warmer and in the more sheltered gardens the first roses appeared, Nance was not the only one who showed signs of uneasiness over Adrian Sorio’s disturbed state of mind.

  Baltazar was frequently at a loss to know where, in the long twilights, his friend wandered. Over and over again, after June commenced, the poor epicure was doomed to take his supper in solitude and sit companionless through the evening in the grassy enclosure at the back of his house.

  As the longest day approached and the heavily scented hawthorn tree which was the chief ornament of his small garden had scattered nearly all its red blossoms, Stork’s uneasiness reached such a pitch that he protested vigorously to the wanderer, using violent expressions and, while not precisely accusing him of ingratitude, making it quite plain that this was neither the mood nor the treatment he expected from so old a friend.

  Sorio received this outburst meekly enough—indeed he professed himself entirely penitent and ready to amend his ways—but as the days went on, instead of any improvement in the matter, things became rapidly worse and worse.

  Baltazar could learn nothing definitely of what he did when he disappeared but the impression gradually emphasized itself that he spent these lonely hours in immense, solitary walks along the edge of the sea. He returned sometimes like a man absolutely exhausted and on these occasions his friend could not help observing that his shoes were full of sand and his face scorched.

  One especially hot afternoon, when Stork had returned from Mundham by the midday train in the hope of finding Adrian ready to stroll with him under the trees in the park, there occurred quite a bitter and violent scene between them when the latter insisted, as soon as their meal was over, on setting off alone.

  “Go to the devil!” Adrian finally flung back at his entertainer when—his accustomed urbanity quite broken down—the aggrieved Baltazar gave vent to the suppressed irritation of many days. “Go to the devil!” the unconscionable man repeated, putting down his hat over his head and striding across the green.

  Once clear of the little town, he let his speed subside into a more ordinary pace and, crossing the bridge over the Loon, made his way to the sea shore. The blazing sunshine, pouring down from a sky that contained no trace of a cloud, seemed to have secured the power that day of reducing even the ocean itself to a kind of magnetised stupor. The waters rolled in, over the sparkling sands, with a long, somnolent, oily ripple that spent itself and drew back without so much as a flicker or flake of foam. The sea-gulls floated languidly on the unruffled tide, or quarrelled with little, short, petulant screams over the banks of bleached pungent-smelling seaweed where swarms of scavenging flies shared with them their noonday fretfulness.

  On the wide expanse of the sea itself there lay a kind of glittering haze, thin and metallic, as if hammered out of some marine substance less resistant but not less dazzling than copper or gold. This was in the mid-distance, so to speak, of the great plain of water. In the remote distance the almost savage glitter diminished and a dull livid glare took its place, streaked in certain parts of the horizon by heavy bars of silvery mist where the sea touched the sky. The broad reaches of hard sand smouldered and flickered under the sun’s blaze and little vibrating heat waves danced like shapeless demons over the summit of the higher dunes.

  Turning his face northward, Sorio began walking slowly now and with occasional glances at the dunes, along the level sand by the sea’s edge. He reached in this way a spot nearly two miles from Rodmoor where for leagues and leagues in either direction no sign of human life was visible.

  He was alone with the sun and the sea, the sun that was dominating the water and the water that was dominating the land.

  He stood still and waited, his heart beating, his pulses feverish, his deep-sunken eyes full of a passionate, expectant light. He had not long to wait. Stepping down slowly from the grass-covered dunes, past a deserted fisherman’s hut which had become their familiar rendezvous, came the desired figure. She walked deliberately, slowly, with a movement that, as Sorio hastened to meet her, had something almost defiant in its dramatic reserve.

  They greeted one another with a certain awkwardness. Neither held out a hand—neither smiled. It might have been a meeting of two conspirators fearful of betrayal. It was only after they had walked in silence, side by side and still northwards for several minutes, that Sorio began speaking, but his words broke from him then with a tempestuous vehemence.

  “None of these people here know me,” he cried, “not one of them. They take me for a dawdler, an idler, an idiotic fool. Well! That’s nothing. Nance doesn’t know me. She doesn’t care to know me. She—she loves! As if love were what I wanted—as if love were enough!”

  He was silent and the girl looked at him curiously, waiting for him to say more.

  “They’d be a bit surprised, wouldn’t they,” he burst out, “if they knew about the manuscripts he”—he uttered this last word with concentrated reverence,—“is guarding for me over there? He understands me, Phil, and not a living person except him. Listen, Phil! Since I’ve known you I’ve been able to breathe—just able to breathe—in this damned England. Before that—God! I shudder to think of it—I was dumb, strangled, suffocated, paralyzed, dead. Even now—even with you, Phil,—I’m still fumbling and groping after it—after what I have to say to the world, after my secret, my idea!

  “It hurts me, my idea. You know that feeling, Phil. But I’m getting it into order—into shape. Look here!”

  He pulled out of his pocket a small thick notebook closely written, blurred with erasures and insertions, stained with salt-water.

  “That’s what I’ve done since I’ve known you—in this last month—and it’s better than anything I’ve written before. It’s clearer. It hits the mark more crushingly. Phil, listen to me! I know I’ve got it in me to give to the world somethi
ng it’s never dreamed of—something with a real madness of truth in it—something with a bite that gets to the very bone of things. I know I’ve got that in me.”

  He stooped down and picked up a stranded jelly-fish that lay—a mass of quivering, helpless iridescence—in the scorching sun. He stepped into the water till it was over his shoes and flung the thing far out into the oily sea. It sank at once to the bottom, leaving a small circle of ripples.

  “Go on, go on!” cried the girl, looking at him with eyes that darkened and grew more insatiable as she felt his soul stir and quiver and strip itself before her.

  “Go on! Tell me more about Nance.”

  “I have told you,” he muttered, “I’ve told you everything. She’s good and faithful and kind. She gives me love—oh, endless love!—but that’s not what I want. She no more understands me than I understand—eternity! Little Linda reads me better.”

  “Tell me about Linda,” murmured the girl.

  Sorio threw a wild glance around them. “It’s her fear that taught her what she knew—what she guessed. Fear reads deep and far. Fear breaks through many barriers. But she’s changed now since she’s been with Brand. She’s become like the rest.”

  “Oh, Brand—!” Philippa shrugged her shoulders. “So he’s come into it? Well, let them go. Tell me more about Nance. Does she cling to you and make a fuss? Does she try the game of tears?”

  Sorio looked at her sharply. A vague suspicion invaded the depths of his heart. They walked along in silence for several minutes. The power of the sun seemed to increase. A mass of seaweed, floating below the water, caused in one place an amber-coloured shadow to break the monotony of the glittering surface.

  “Does your son believe in you—as I do?” she asked gently.