Rodmoor

by John Cowper Powys

  At six o’clock they were ready and Nance went down to announce their departure to Rachel Doorm. She found their driver asleep by the kitchen fire and, having roused him and told him to put his horse into the trap, she went out to look for her mother’s friend.

  She found Rachel standing on the tow path gazing gloomily at the river. She was bareheaded and the wind, wailing round her, fluttered a wisp of her grey hair against her forehead. Beneath this her sunken eyes seemed devoid of all light. She turned when she heard Nance’s step, her heavy skirt flapping in the wind as she did so, like a funereal flag.

  “I see,” she said, pointing at the light in the sisters’ room where the figure of Linda could be observed passing and re-passing, “I see you’re taking her away. I suppose it’s because of Mr. Renshaw. May I ask—if it’s of any interest to you that I should care at all—what you’re going to do with her? She’s been—she and her mother—the curse of my life, and I fancy she’s now going to be the curse of yours.”

  Nance wrapped herself more tightly in a cloak she had picked up as she came out and looked unflinchingly into the woman’s haggard face.

  “Yes, we’re going away—both of us,” she said. “We’re going to the village.”

  “To live on air and sea-water?” enquired the other bitterly.

  “No,” rejoined Nance gently, “to live in lodgings and to work for our living. I’ve got a place already at the Pontifex shop and Mr. Traherne’s going to pay Linda for playing the organ. It’ll be better like that. I couldn’t let her go on here after what happened yesterday.”

  Her voice trembled but she continued to look Miss Doorm straight in the face.

  “You were away on purpose yesterday, Rachel,” she said gravely, “so that those two might be together. It was only some scruple, or fear, on Mr. Renshaw’s part that stopped him meeting her in the house. How often this has happened before—his seeing her like this—I don’t know, and I don’t want to know—I only pray to God that no harm’s been done. If it has been done, the child’s ruin’s on our head. I cannot understand you, Rachel, I cannot understand you.”

  Miss Doorm’s haggard mouth opened as if to utter a cry but she breathed deeply and restrained it. Her gaunt fingers twined and untwined themselves and the wind, blowing at her skirt, displayed the tops of her old-fashioned boots with their worn, elastic sides.

  “So she’s separated us, has she?” she hissed. “I thought she would. She was born for that. And it’s nothing to you that I’ve nursed you and cared for you and planned for you since you were a baby? Nothing! Nothing at all! She comes between us now as her mother came before. I knew it would happen so! I knew it would! She’s just like her mother—soft and clinging—soft and white—and this is the end of it.”

  Her voice changed to a low, almost frightened tone.

  “Do you realize that her mother comes to me every night and sits looking at me with her great eyes just as she used to do when Linda had been rude to me in the old days? Do you realize that she walks backwards and forwards outside my door when I’ve driven her away? Do you realize that when I go to bed I find her there, waiting for me, white and soft and clinging?”

  Her voice rose to a kind of moan and the wind carried it across the empty road and tossed it over the fields.

  “And she speaks, too, Nance. She says things to me, soft, clinging, crying things that drive me distracted. One day, she told me that only last night, one day she’s going to kiss me and never let me go—going to kiss me with soft, pleading, terrified lips through all eternity, kiss me just as she did once when Linda lost my beads. You remember my beads, Nance? Real jade, they were, with funny red streaks. I often see them round her neck. They’ll be round her neck when she kisses me, jade, you know, my dear, with red streaks. I shall see nothing else then, nothing else while we lie buried together!”

  She lowered her voice to a whisper.

  “It was the Captain who brought them. He brought them over far seas. He brought them for me, do you hear—for me! But they’re always round her neck now, after that day.”

  Nance listened to this wild outburst with a set stern face. She had always suspected that there was something desperate and morbid about Rachel’s attachment to her father but never, until this moment, had she dreamed how far the thing went. She looked at the woman’s face now and sighed and with that sigh she flung to the blowing wind the covenant between herself and her own mother. All the girl’s natural sanity and sense of proportion were awake now and she stiffened her nerves and hardened her heart for what she had to do.

  “Between a vow to the dead,” she thought, “and the safety of the living, there can be only one choice for me.”

  “So you’re going away,” began Miss Doorm again. “Well, go, my dear, go and leave me! I shan’t trouble the earth much longer after you’re gone.”

  She turned her face to the river and remained motionless, watching the flowing water. The heavy weight of the threatening storm, the storm that seemed as though some powerful earth-god, with uplifted hand, were holding back its descent, had destroyed all natural and normal daylight without actually plunging the world into darkness. A strange greenish-coloured shadow, like the shadow of water seen through water, hung over the trees of the park and the opposite bank of the river. The same greenish shadow, only touched there with something darker and more mysterious, brooded over the far fens out of which, in the remote distance, a sort of reddish exhalation indicated the locality of the Mundham factories. The waters of the Loon—as Rachel and Nance looked at them now—had a dull whitish gleam, like the gleam of a dead fish’s eye. The sense of thunder in the air, though no sound of it had yet been heard, seemed to evoke a kind of frightened expectancy. The smaller birds had been reduced to absolute stillness, their twitterings hushed as if under the weight of a pall. Only a solitary plover’s scream, at rare intervals, went whirling by on the wind.

  “Come back, come in, will you?” said Nance at last, “and say good-bye to us, Rachel. I shall come and see you, of course. We shall not be far away.”

  She stretched out her hand to help her down the slope of the embankment. Rachel made no response to this overture but followed her in silence. No sooner, however, had they entered the garden and closed the little gate behind them, than the woman fell on her knees on the ground and caught the girl round the waist.

  “Nance, my treasure!” she cried pitifully, “Nance, my heart’s baby! Nance, oh, Nance, you won’t leave me like this after all these years? No, I won’t let you go! Nance, you can’t mean it? You can’t really mean it?”

  The wind, blowing in gusts about them, made the gate behind them swing open on its hinges. Rachel’s dishevelled tress of grey hair flapped like a tattered piece of rag against the girl’s side.

  “Look,” the woman wailed, “I pray you on my knees not to desert me! You don’t know what you’re doing to me. You don’t, Nance, you don’t! It’s all my life you’re taking. Oh, my darling, won’t you have pity? You’re the only thing I’ve got—the only thing I love. Nance, Nance, have pity on me!”

  Nance, with tears in her eyes but her face still firm and hard-set, tried to free herself from the hands that held her. She tried gently and tenderly at first but Rachel’s despair made the attempt difficult. Then she realized that this appalling tension must be brought at all costs to an end. With a sudden, relentless jerk, she tore herself away and rushed towards the house. Rachel fell forward on her face, her hands clutching the damp mould. Then she staggered up and raised her hand towards the lighted window above at which Linda’s figure was clearly visible.

  “It’s you—it’s you,” she called aloud, “it’s you who’ve done this—who’ve turned my heart’s darling against me, and may you be cursed for it! May your love turn to poison and eat your white flesh! May your soul pray and pray for comfort and find none! Never—never—never—find any! Oh, you may well hide yourself! But he will find you. Brand will find you and make you pay for this! Brand and the sea will. find y
ou. Listen! Do you hear me? Listen! It’s crying out for you now!”

  Whether it was the sudden cessation of her voice, intensifying the stillness, or a slight veering of the wind to the eastward, it is certain that at that moment, above the noise of the creaking gate and the rustling bushes, came the sound which, of all others, seemed the expression of Rodmoor’s troubled soul. Linda herself may not have heard it for at that moment she was feverishly helping Nance to pile up their belongings in the cart. But the driver of their vehicle heard it.

  “The wind’s changing,” he remarked. “Can you hear that? That’s the darned sea!”

  The trap carrying the two sisters was already some distance along the road when Nance turned her head and looked back. They had blown out their candles before leaving and the kitchen fire had died down so that there was no reason to be surprised that no light shone from any of the windows. Yet it was with a cold sinking of the heart that the girl leaned forward once more by the driver’s side. She could not help seeing in imagination a broken figure stumbling round the walls of that dark house, or perhaps even now standing in their dismantled room alone amid emptiness and silence, alone amid the ghosts of the past.

  XIV

  BRAND RENSHAW

  WHILE the sisters were taking possession of their new abode and trying to eat—though neither had much appetite—the supper provided for them by Mrs. Raps, Hamish Traherne, his cassock protected from the threatening storm by a heavy ulster, was making his promised effort to “talk” with the master of Oakguard. Impelled by an instinct he could not resist, perhaps with a vague notion that the creature’s presence would sustain his courage, he carried, curled up in an inside pocket of his cloak, his darling Ricoletto. The rat’s appetite had been unusually good that evening and it now slept peacefully in its warm nest, oblivious of the beating heart of its master. Carrying his familiar oak stick in his hand and looking to all appearance quite as formidable as any highwayman the priest made his way through the sombre avenue of gnarled and weather-beaten trees that led to the Renshaw mansion. He rang the bell with an impetuous violence, the violence of a visitor whose internal trepidation mocks his exterior resolution. To his annoyance and surprise he learnt that Mr. Renshaw was spending the evening with Mr. Stork down in the village. He asked to be allowed to see Mrs. Renshaw, feeling in some obscure way suspicious of the servant’s statement and unwilling to give up his enterprise at the first rebuff. The lady came out at once into the hall.

  “Come in, come in, Mr. Traherne,” she said, quite eagerly. “I suppose you’ve already dined but you can have dessert with us. Philippa always sits long over dessert. She likes eating fruit better than anything else. She’s eating gooseberries to-night.”

  Mrs. Renshaw always had a way of detaching herself from her daughter and speaking of her as if she were a strange and somewhat menacing animal with whom destiny had compelled her to live. But the priest refused to remove his ulster. The interest of seeing Philippa eat gooseberries was not strong enough to interrupt his purpose.

  “Your son won’t be home till late, I’m afraid?” he said. “I particularly—yes, particularly—wanted to see him to-night. I understand he’s at the cottage.”

  “Wait a minute,” cried the lady in her hurried, low-voiced tone. “Sit down here, won’t you? I’ll just—I’ll just see Philippa.”

  She returned to the dining-room and the priest sat down and waited. Presently she came hurrying back carrying in her hands a plate upon which was a bunch of grapes.

  “These are for you,” she said. “Philippa won’t touch them. There! Let me choose you out some nice ones.”

  The servant had followed her and now stood like a pompous and embarrassed policeman uncertain of his duty. It seemed to give Mrs. Renshaw some kind of inscrutable satisfaction to cause this embarrassment. She sat down beside the priest and handed him the grapes, one by one, as if he were a child.

  “Brand orders these from London,” she remarked, “that’s why we get them now. I call it extravagance, but he will do it.” She sighed heavily. “Philippa,” she repeated, “prefers garden fruit so you mustn’t mind eating them. They’ll get bad if they’re not eaten.”

  The servant hastened on tip-toe to the dining-room door, peered in, and returned to his post. He looked for all the world, thought Mr. Traherne, like a ruffled and disconsolate heron. “He’ll stand on one leg soon,” he said to himself.

  “When do you expect your son home?” he enquired again. “Perhaps I might call at the cottage and walk back with him.”

  “Yes, do!” Mrs. Renshaw cried with unexpected eagerness. “Do call at the cottage. It’ll be nice for you to join them. They’ll all be there—Mr. Sorio and the Doctor and Brand. Yes, do go in! It’ll be a relief to me to think of you with them. I’m sometimes afraid that cousin Tassar encourages dear Brand to drink too much of that stuff he likes to make. They will put spirits into it. I’m always telling them that lime juice would be just as nice. Yes, do go, Mr. Traherne, and insist on having lime juice!”

  The priest looked at the lady, looked at the servant and looked at the hall door. He felt a faint scratching going on inside his cloak. Ricoletto was beginning to wake up.

  “Well, I’ll go!” he exclaimed, rising to his feet.

  At that moment the figure of Philippa, exquisitely dressed in a dark crimson gown, emerged from the dining-room. She advanced slowly towards them with more than her usual air of dramatic reserve. Mr. Traherne noticed that her lips were even redder than her dress. Her eyes looked dark and tired but they shone with a mischievous menace. She held out her hand sedately and as he took it, fumbling with his ulster, “I hope you enjoyed your grapes,” she said.

  “You ought to apologize to Mr. Traherne for appearing before him at all in that wild costume,” remarked Mrs. Renshaw. “You wouldn’t think she’d been at the dentist’s all day, would you? She looks as if she were in a grand London house, doesn’t she, just waiting to go to a ball?

  “Yes, at the dentist’s,” Mrs. Renshaw went on, speaking quite loudly, “at the dentist’s in Mundham. She’s got an abscess under one of her teeth. It kept her awake in the night. I think your face is still a little swollen, dear, isn’t it? She oughtn’t to stand in this cold hall, ought she, Mr. Traherne? And with so much of her neck exposed. It was quite a large abscess. Let me look, dear.” She moved towards her daughter, who drew hastily back.

  “She won’t let me look at it,” she added plaintively. “She never would, not even when she was a child.”

  Hamish, fumbling with his fingers inside his ulster, made a grotesque grimace of sympathy and once more intimated his desire to say good-night. He discerned in the look the girl had now fixed upon her mother an expression which indicated how little sympathy there was between them. It was nearly half past nine when he reached Rodmoor and knocked at Baltazar’s door. There was some sort of village revel going on inside the tavern and the sound of this blended, in intermittent bursts of uproar, with the voices from Stork’s little sitting-room. Both wind and rain had subsided and the thunder-feeling in the air had grown less oppressive.

  Traherne found himself, as he had been warned, in the presence of Raughty, Sorio and Brand. Ushered in by the urbane Baltazar he greeted them all with a humorous and benignant smile and took, willingly enough, a cup of the admirable wine which they were drinking. They all seemed, except their host himself, a little excited by what they had imbibed and the priest observed that several other bottles waited the moment of uncorking. Dr. Raughty alone appeared seriously troubled at the new-comer’s entrance. He coughed several times, as was his habit when disconcerted, and glanced anxiously at the others.

  Sorio, it seemed, was in the midst of some sort of diatribe, and as soon as they had resumed their seats he made no scruple about continuing it.

  “It’s all an illusion,” he exclaimed, looking at Mr. Traherne as if he defied him to contradict his words, “it’s all an absolute illusion that women are more subtle than men. The idea of their be
ing so is simply due to the fact that they act on impulse instead of by reason. Any one who acts on impulse appears subtle if his impulses vary sufficiently! Women are extraordinarily simple. What gives them the appearance of subtlety is that they never know what particular impulse they’re going to have next. So they just lie back on themselves and wait till it comes. They’re eminently physiological, too, in their reactions. Am I not right there, Doctor? They’re more entirely material than we are,” he went on, draining his glass with a vicious gulp, “they’re simply soaked and drenched in matter. They’re not really completely or humanly conscious. Matter still holds them, still clings to them, still drowns them. That is why the poets represent Nature as a woman. The sentimental writers always speak of women as so responsive, so porous, to the power of Nature. They put it down to their superior sensitiveness. It isn’t their sensitiveness at all! It’s their element. Of course they’re porous to it. They’re part of it! They’ve never emerged from it. It flows round them like waves round seaweed. Take this question of drink—of this delicious wine we’re drinking! No woman who ever lived could understand the pleasure we’re enjoying now—a pleasure almost purely intellectual. They think, in their absurd little heads, that all we get out of it is the mere sensation of putting hot stuff or sweet stuff or intoxicating stuff into our mouths. They haven’t the remotest idea that, as we sit in this way together, we enter the company of all great and noble souls, philosophizing upon the nature of the gods and sharing their quintessential happiness! They think we’re simply sensual beasts—as they are themselves, the greedy little devils!—when they eat pastry and suck sugar-candy at the confectioner’s. No woman yet understood, or ever will, the sublime detachment from life, the victory over life, which an honest company of sensible and self-respecting friends enjoy when they drink, serenely and quietly, a wine as rare, as well chosen, as harmless as this! Women hate to think of the happiness we’re enjoying now. I know perfectly well that every one of the women who are connected with us at this moment—and that only applies,” he added with a smile, “to Mr. Renshaw and myself—would suffer real misery to see us at this moment. It’s an instinct and from their point of view they’re justified fully enough.