As soon as the words had crossed her lips she knew they were the very last she ought to have uttered. The man withdrew into himself with a rigid tightening of every nerve. No one—certainly not Nance—had ever dared to touch this subject. Once to Nance, in London, and twice recently to his present companion, had he referred to Baptiste but this direct question about the boy was too much; it outraged something in him which was beyond articulation. The shock given him was so intense and the reaction upon his feelings so vivid that, hardly conscious of what he did, he thrust his hand into his pocket and clutched tightly with his fingers the book containing his work, as though to protect it from aggression. As he thus stood there before her, stiff and speechless, she could only console herself by the fact that he avoided her eyes.
Her mind moved rapidly. She must invent, at all costs, some relief to this tension. She had trusted her magnetism too far.
“Adriano,” she said, imitating with feminine instinct Baltazar’s caressing intonation, “I want to bathe. We’re out of sight of every one. We know each other well enough now. Shall we—together?”
He met her eyes now. There was a subtile appeal in their depths which drew him to her and troubled his senses. He nodded and uttered an embarrassed laugh. “Why not?” he answered.
“Very well,” she said quickly, clinching her suggestion before he had time to revoke his assent, “I’ll just run behind these sand hills and take off my things. You undress here and get into the water. And swim out, too, Adrian, with your back to me! I’ll soon join you.”
She left him and he obeyed her mechanically—only looking nervously round for a moment as he folded his coat containing the precious manuscript and laid a heavy stone upon it.
He plunged out into the waveless sea with fierce, impetuous strokes. The water yielded to his violent movements like a lake of quicksilver. Dazzling threads and flakes and rainbows flashed up, wavered, trembled, glittered and vanished as he swam forward. With his eyes fixed on the immense dome of sky above him, where, like the rim of a burnished shield, it cut down into the horizon, he struck out incessantly, persistently, seeking, in thus embracing a universe of white light, to find the escape he craved.
Strange thoughts poured through his brain as he swam on. The most novel, the most terrific of the points contained in those dithyrambic notes left behind under the stone surged up before him and, mingling with them in fierce exultant affection, the image of Baptiste beckoned to him out of a moulten furnace of white light.
Far away behind him at last he heard the voice of his companion. Whether she intended him to turn he did not know, for her words were inaudible, but when he did he perceived that she was standing, a slim white figure, at the water’s edge. He watched her with feelings that were partly bitter and partly tender.
“Why does she stand there so long?” he muttered to himself. “Why doesn’t she get in and start swimming?”
As if made aware of his thought by some telepathic instinct the girl at that moment slipped into the water and began walking slowly forward, her hands clasped behind her head. When the water reached above her knees she swung up her hands and with a swift spring of her white body, disappeared from view. She remained so long invisible that Sorio grew anxious and took several vigorous strokes towards her. She re-appeared at last, however, and was soon swimming vigorously to meet him.
When they met she insisted on advancing further and so, side by side, with easy, leisurely movements, they swam out to sea, their eyes on the far horizon and their breath coming and going in even reciprocity.
“Far enough!” cried Sorio at last, treading water and looking closely at her.
There was a strange wild light in the girl’s face. “Why go back?” her look seemed to say—“Why not swim on and on together—until the waters cover us and all riddles are solved?” There was something in her expression at that moment—as, between sky and sea, the two gazed mutely at one another—which seemed to interpret some terrible and uttermost mystery. It was, however, too rare a moment to endure long, and they turned their heads landwards.
The return took longer than they had anticipated and the girl was swimming very slowly and displaying evident signs of exhaustion before they got near shore. As soon as she could touch the bottom with her feet she hurried out and staggered, with stiff limbs, across the sands to where she had left her clothes.
When she came back, dressed and in lively spirits, her unbound hair shimmering in the sunshine like wet silk, she found him pacing the sea’s edge with an expression of gloomy resolution.
“I shall have to rewrite every word of these notes,” he said, striking his hand against his pocket. “I had a new thought just now as I was in the water and it changes everything.”
She threw herself down on the hot sand and spread out her hair to let it dry.
“Don’t let’s go yet, Adrian,” she pleaded. “I feel so sleepy and happy.”
He looked at her thoughtfully, hardly catching the drift of her words. “It changes everything,” he repeated.
“Lie down here,” she murmured softly, letting her gaze meet his with a wistful entreaty.
He placed himself beside her. “Don’t get hurt by the sun,” he said. She smiled at that—a long, slow, dreamy smile—and drawing him towards her with her eyes, “I believe you’re afraid of me to-day, Adrian,” she whispered.
Her boyish figure, outlined beneath the thin dress she wore, seemed to breathe a sort of classic voluptuousness as she languidly stretched her limbs. As she did this, she turned her head sideways, till her chin rested on her shoulder and a tress of brown hair, wet and clinging, fell across her slender neck.
A sudden impulse of malice seemed to seize the man who bent over her. “Your hair isn’t half as long as Nance’s,” he said, turning abruptly away and hugging his knees with his arms.
The girl drew herself together, at that, like a snake from under a heavy foot and, propping herself up on her hands, threw a glance upon him which, had he caught it, might have produced a yet further change in the book of philosophic notes. Her eyes, for one passing second, held in them something that was like livid fire reflected through blue ice.
For several minutes after this they both contemplated the level mass of illuminated waters with absorbed concentration. At last Adrian broke the silence.
“What I’m aiming at in my book,” he said, “is a revelation of how the essence of life is found in the instinct of destruction. I want to show—what is simply the truth—that the pleasure of destruction, destruction entered upon out of sheer joy and for its own sake, lies behind every living impulse that pushes life forward. Out of destruction alone—out of the rending and tearing of something—of something in the way—does new life spring to birth. It isn’t destruction for cruelty’s sake,” he went on, his fingers closing and unclosing at his side over a handful of sand. “Cruelty is mere inverted sentiment. Cruelty implies attraction, passion, even—in some cases—love. Pure destruction—destruction for its own sake—such as I see it—is no thick, heavy, muddy, perverted impulse such as the cruel are obsessed by. It’s a burning and devouring flame. It’s a mad, splendid revel of glaring whiteness like this which hurts our eyes now. I’m going to show in my book how the ultimate essence of life, as we find it, purest and most purged in the ecstasies of the saints, is nothing but an insanity of destruction! That’s really what lies at the bottom of all the asceticism and all the renunciation in the world. It’s the instinct to destroy—to destroy what lies nearest to one’s hand—in this case, of course, one’s own body and the passions of the body. Ascetics fancy they do this for the sake of their souls. That’s their illusion. They do it for its own sake—for the sake of the ecstasy of destruction! Man is the highest of all animals because he can destroy the most. The saints are the highest among men because they can destroy humanity.”
He rose to his feet and, picking up a flat stone from the sea’s edge, sent it skimming across the water.
“Five!” he cried, as
the stone sank at last.
The girl rose and stood beside him. “I can play at ‘Ducks and Drakes’ too,” she said, imitating his action with another stone which, however, sank heavily after only three cuttings of the shiny surface.
“You can’t play ‘Ducks and Drakes’ with the universe,” retorted Sorio. “No girl can—not even you, with your boy-arms and boy-legs! You can’t even throw a stone out of pure innocence. You only threw that—just now—because I did and because you wanted me to see you swing your arm—and because you wanted to change the conversation.”
He looked her up and down with an air of sullen mockery. “What the saints and the mystics seek,” he went on, “is the destruction of everything within reach—of everything that sticks out, that obtrudes, that is simply there. That is why they throw their stones at every form of natural life. But the life they attack is doing the same thing itself in a cruder way. The sea is destroying the land; the grass is destroying the flowers; the flowers one another; the woods, the marshes, the fens, are all destroying something. The saints are only the maddest and wisest of all destroyers—”
“Sorio! There’s a starfish out there—being washed in. Oh, let me try and reach it!”
She snatched his stick from him and catching up her skirt stepped into the water.
“Let it be!” he muttered, “let it be!”
She gave up her attempt with an impatient shrug but continued to watch the steady pressure of the incoming tide with absorbed interest.
“What the saints aim at,” Sorio continued, “and the great poets too, is that absolute white light, which means the drowning, the blinding, the annihilating, of all these paltry-coloured things which assert themselves and try to make themselves immortal. The only godlike happiness is the happiness of seeing world after world tumbled into oblivion. That’s the mad, sweet secret thought at the back of all the religions. God—as the great terrible minds of antiquity never forgot—is the supreme name for that ultimate destruction of all things which is the only goal. That’s why God is always visualised as a blaze of blinding white light. That’s why the Sun-God, greatest of destroyers, is pictured with burning arrows.”
While Adrian continued in this wild strain, expounding his desperate philosophy, it was a pity there was no one to watch the various expressions which crossed in phantasmal sequence, like evil ghosts over a lovely mirror, the face of Philippa Renshaw.
The conflict between the man and woman was, indeed, at that moment, of curious and elaborate interest. While he flung out, in this passionate way, his metaphysical iconoclasm, her instinct—the shrewd feminine instinct to reduce everything to the personal touch—remained fretting, chafing, irritable, and unsatisfied. It was nothing to her that the formula he used was the formula of her own instincts. She loved destruction but in her subtle heart she despised, with infinite contempt, all philosophical theories—despised them as being simply irrelevant and off the track of actual life—off the track, in fact, of those primitive personal impulses which alone possess colour, perfume, salt and sweetness!
Vaguely, at the bottom of his soul, even while he was speaking, Sorio knew that the girl was irritated and piqued; but the consciousness of this, so far from being unpleasant, gave an added zest to his words. He revenged himself on her for the attraction he felt towards her by showing her that in the metaphysical world at any rate, he could reduce her to non-existence! Her annoyance at last gave her, in desperation, a flash of diabolic cunning. She tossed out to him as a bait for his ravening analysis, her own equivocal nature.
“I know well what you mean,” she said, as they moved slowly back towards Rodmoor. “Poor dear, you must have been torn and rent, yourself, to have come to such a point of insight! I, too, in my way, have experienced something of the sort. My brain—you know that, by this time, don’t you, Adriano?—is the brain of a man while my body is the body of a woman. Oh, I hate this woman’s body of mine, Adrian! You can’t know how I hate it! All that annoys you in me, and all that annoys myself too, comes from this,” and she pressed her little hands savagely to her breast as she spoke, as though, there before him, she would tear out the very soul of her femininity.
“From earliest childhood,” she went on, “I’ve loathed being a girl. Long nights, sometimes, I’ve lain awake, crying and crying and crying, because I wasn’t born different. I’ve hated my mother for it. I hate her still, I hate her because she has a morbid, sentimental mania for what she calls the sensitiveness of young girls. The sensitiveness! As if they weren’t the toughest, stupidest, sleepiest things in the world! They’re not sensitive at all. They’ve neither sensitiveness nor fastidiousness nor modesty nor decency! It’s all put on—every bit of it. I know, for I’m like that myself—or half of me is. I betray myself to myself and lacerate myself for being myself. It’s a curious state of things—isn’t it, Adriano?”
She had worked herself up into such a passion of emotional self-pity that great swimming tears blurred the tragic supplication of her eyes. The weary swing of her body as she walked by his side and the droop of her neck as she let her head fall when his glance did not respond were obviously not assumed. The revelation of herself, entered upon for an exterior purpose, had gone further than she intended and this very stripping of herself bare which was to have been her triumph became her humiliation when witnessed so calmly, so indifferently.
After this they walked for a long while in silence, he so possessed by the thrilling sense of having a new vista of thought under his command that he was hardly conscious of her presence, and she in obstinate bitter resolution wrestling with the remorse of her mistake and searching for some other means—any means—of sapping the strength of his independence.
As they moved on and the afternoon advanced, a large and striking change took place in the appearance of the scene. A narrow, clear-cut line of shadow made itself visible below the sand-dunes. The sky lost its metallic glitter and became a deep hyacinthine blue, a blue which after a while communicated itself, with hardly any change in its tint, to the wide-spread volume of water beneath it. In those spots where masses of seaweed floated beneath the surface, the omnipresent blue deepened to a rich indescribable purple, that amazing purple more frequent in southern than in northern seas, which we may suppose is indicated in the Homeric epithet “wine dark.”
As the friends approached the familiar environs of Rodmoor they suddenly came upon a fisherman’s boat pulled up upon the sand, with some heavy nets left lying beside it.
“Sorio!” cried the girl, stooping down and lifting the meshes of one of these, “Sorio! there’s something alive left here. Look!”
He bent over the net beside her and began hastily disentangling several little silvery fish which were struggling and flapping feebly and opening their tiny gills in labouring gasps.
“All right—all right!” cried the man, addressing in his excitement the tiny prisoners, “I’ll soon set you free.”
“What are you doing, Adrian?” expostulated the girl. “No—no! You mustn’t throw them back—you mustn’t! The children always come round when school’s over and search the nets. It’s a Rodmoor custom.”
“It’s a custom I’m going to break, then!” he shouted, rushing towards the sea with a handful of gasping little lives. His fingers when he returned, were covered with glittering scales but they did not outshine the gleam in his face.
“You should have seen them dash away,” he cried. “I’m glad those children won’t find them!”
“They’ll find others,” remarked Philippa Renshaw. “There’ll always be some nets that have fish left in them.”
IX
PRIEST AND DOCTOR
THERE are hours in every man’s day when the main current of his destiny, rising up from some hidden channel, becomes a recognizable and palpable element in his consciousness. Such hours, if a man’s profoundest life is—so to speak—in harmony with the greater gods, are hours of indescribable and tremulous happiness.
It was nothing less than
an experience of this kind which flowed deliciously, like a wave of divine ether, over the consciousness of Hamish Traherne on the day following the one when Sorio and Philippa walked so far.
As he crossed his garden in the early morning and entered the church, the warm sun and clear-cut shadows filled him with that sense of indestructible joy to which one of the ancient thinkers has given the beautiful name of —the Pleasure of the Ideal Now.
From the eastern window, flooding the floor of the little chancel, there poured into the cool, sweet-smelling place a stream of quivering light. He had opened wide the doors under the tower and left them open and he heard, as he sank on his knees, the sharp clear twittering of swallows outside and the chatter of a flock of starlings. Through every pulse and fibre of his being, as he knelt, vibrated an unutterable current of happiness, of happiness so great that the words of his prayer melted and dissolved and all definite thought melted with them into that rare mood where prayer becomes ecstasy and ecstasy becomes eternal.
Returning to his house without spilling one golden drop of what was being allowed him of the wine of the Immortals, he brought his breakfast out into the garden and ate it, lingeringly and dreamily, by the side of his first roses. These were of the kind known as “the seven sisters”—small and white-petaled with a faint rose-flush—and the penetrating odour of them as he bent a spray down towards his face was itself suggestive of old rich wine, “cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth.”
From the marshes below the parapet came exquisite scents of water-mint and flowering-rush and, along with these, the subtle fragrance, pungent and aromatic, of miles and miles of sun-heated fens.
The grass of his own lawn and the leaves of the trees that over-shadowed it breathed the peculiar sweetness—a sweetness unlike anything else in the world—of the first hot days of the year in certain old East Anglian gardens. Whether it is the presence of the sea which endows these places with so rare a quality or the mere existence of reserve and austere withholding in the ways of the seasons there, it were hard to say, but the fact remains that there are gardens in Norfolk and Suffolk—and to Hamish Traherne’s flower-beds in spite of the modesty of their appeal, may well be conceded something of this charm—which surpass all others in the British Isles in the evocation of wistful and penetrating beauty.
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