Rodmoor

by John Cowper Powys

  He was interrupted at that moment by a roar of laughter from the group beside them and Baltazar rose and pulled him away. “Upon my soul, Adrian,” he whispered, as he led him back across the green, “you must behave better! You’ve given those honest fellows something to gossip about for a week. They’ll think you really are up to something, you can’t shout like that without being listened to and you can’t quarrel with the whole of humanity.”

  Adrian turned fiercely round on him. “Can’t I?” he exclaimed. “Can’t I quarrel with humanity? You wait, my friend, till I’ve got my book published. Then you’ll see! I tell you I’ll strike this cursed human race of yours such a blow that they’ll wish they’d treated a poor wanderer on the face of the earth a little better and spared him something of their prying and peering!”

  “Your book!” laughed Baltazar. “A lot they’ll care for your book! That’s always the way with you touchy philosophers. You stir up the devil of a row with your bad temper and make the most harmless people into enemies and then you think you can settle it all and prove yourselves right and everybody else wrong by writing a book. Upon my soul, Adrian, if I didn’t love you very much indeed I’d be inclined to let you loose on life just to see whether you or it could strike the hardest blows!”

  Sorio looked at him with a curiously bewildered look. He seemed puzzled. His swarthy Roman face wore a clouded, weary, crushed expression. His brow contracted into an anxious frown and his mouth quivered. His air at that moment was the air of a very young child that suddenly finds the world much harder to deal with than it expected.

  Baltazar watched him with secret pleasure. These were the occasions when he always felt strangely drawn towards him. That look of irresolute and bewildered weakness upon a countenance so powerfully moulded filled him with a most delicate sense of protective pity. He could have embraced the man as he watched him, blinking there in the afternoon sunshine, and fumbling with the handle of his stick.

  But at that moment Nance appeared, walking rapidly with bent head, up the narrow street. Baltazar looked at her with a gleam of hatred in his sea-coloured eyes. She came to rob him of one of the most exquisite pleasures of his life, the pleasure of reducing this strong creature to humiliated submissiveness and then petting and cajoling him back into self-respect. The knowledge that he left Sorio in her hands in this particular mood of deprecatory helplessness, remorseful and gentle and like a wild beast beaten into docility, caused him the most acute pain. With poisonous antagonism under his urbane greeting he watched furtively the quick glance she threw at Adrian and the way her eyes lingered upon his, feeling her way into his mood. He cast about for some element of discord that he could evoke and leave behind with them to spoil the girl’s triumph for he knew well that Adrian was now, after what had just occurred, in the frame of mind most adapted of all to the influence of feminine sympathy. Nance, however, did not give him an opportunity for this.

  “Come on,” she said, “we’ve only just time to catch the three o’clock train. Come on! Good-bye for a while, Mr. Stork. I’ll bring him back safe to you, sooner or later. Come on, Adrian, we really must be quick!”

  They went off together and Baltazar wandered slowly back across the green. He felt for the moment so lonely that even his hatred drifted away and sank to nothingness under the inflowing wave of bitter universal isolation. As he approached his cottage he stopped stone-still with his eyes on the ground and his hands behind his back. Elegantly dressed in pleasant summer clothes, his slight graceful figure, easy bearing, and delicate features, gave without doubt to the casual bystanders who observed him, an impression of unmitigated well-being. As a matter of fact, had that discerning historic personage who is reported to have exclaimed after an interview with Jonathan Swift, “there goes the unhappiest man who ever lived,” exercised his insight now, he might have modified his conclusion in favour of Baltazar Stork.

  It would certainly have required more than ordinary discernment to touch the tip of the iron wedge that was being driven just then into this graceful person’s brain. Looking casually into the man’s face one would have seen nothing perhaps but a dreamy, pensive smile—a smile a little bitter maybe, and self-mocking but with no particularly sinister import. A deeper glance, however, would have disclosed a curious compression of the lines about the mouth and a sort of indrawing of the lips as if Mr. Stork were about to emit the sound of whistling. Below the smiling surface of the eyes, too, there might have been seen a sort of under-flicker of shuddering pain as if, without any kind of anæsthetic, Mr. Stork were undergoing some serious operation. The colour had deserted his cheeks as if whatever it was he was enduring the endurance of it had already exhausted his physical energies. Passing him by, as we have remarked, casually and hastily, one might have said to oneself—“Ah! a handsome fellow chuckling there over some pleasant matter!” but coming close up to him one would have instinctively stretched out a hand, so definitely would it then have appeared that, whatever his expression meant, he was on the point of fainting. It was perhaps a fortunate accident that, at this particular moment as he stood motionless, a small boy of his acquaintance, the son of one of the Rodmoor fishermen, came up to him and asked whether he had heard of the great catch there had been that day.

  “There’s a sight o’ fish still there, Mister,” the boy remarked, “some of them monstrous great flounders and a heap of Satans such as squirts ink out of their bellies!”

  Baltazar’s twisted lips gave a genuine smile now. A look of extraordinary tenderness came into his face.

  “Ah, Tony, my boy,” he said, “so there are fish down there, are there? Well, let’s go and see! You take me, will you? And I’ll make those fellows give you some for supper.”

  They walked together across the green and down the street. Baltazar’s hand remained upon the child’s shoulder and he listened as he walked, to his chatter; but all the while his mind visualized an immense, empty plain—a plain of steely-blue ice under a grey sky—and in the center of this plain a bottomless crevasse, also of steely-blue ice, and on the edge of this crevasse, gradually relinquishing their hold from exhaustion, two human hands. This image kept blending itself as they walked with all the little things which his eyes fell upon. It blent with the cakes in the confectioner’s window. It blent with the satiny blouses, far too expensive for any local purchaser, in Miss Pontifex’s shop. It blent with the criss-cross lines of the brick-work varied with flint of the house where Dr. Raughty lived. It blent with their first glimpse of the waters of the harbour, seen between two ramshackle houses with gable roofs. Nor when they finally found themselves standing with a little crowd of men and boys round a circle of fish-baskets upon the shore did it fail to associate itself both with the blue expanse of waveless sea stretched before them and with the tangled mass of sea shells, seaweed and sea creatures which lay exposed to the sunlight, many-coloured and glistening as the deeper folds of the nets which had drawn them from the deep were explored and dragged forward.

  Meanwhile Adrian and Nance, having safely caught their train, were being carried with the leisurely steadiness of a local line, from Rodmoor to Mundham. Jammed tightly into a crowded compartment full of Saturday marketers, they had little opportunity during the short journey to do more than look helplessly across their perspiring neighbours at the rising and falling of the telegraph wires against a background of blue sky. The peculiar manner in which, as a train carries one forward, these wires sink slowly downwards as if they were going to touch the earth and then leap up with an unexpected jerk as the next pole comes by, was a phenomenon that always had a singular fascination for Sorio. He associated it with his most childish recollections of railway travelling. Would the wires ever succeed in sinking out of sight before the next pole jerked them high up across the window again? That was the speculation that fascinated him even at this moment as he watched them across the brim of his companion’s brightly trimmed hat. There was something human in the attempts the things made to sink down, down, down and escape
their allotted burden and there was certainly something very like the ways of Providence in the manner in which they were pulled up with a remorseless jolt to perform their duties once more.

  Emerging with their fellow-passengers upon the Mundham platform both Sorio and Nance experienced a sense of happiness and relief. They had both been so long confined to the immediate surroundings of Rodmoor that this little excursion to the larger town assumed the proportions of a release from imprisonment. It is true that it was a release that Adrian might easily have procured for himself on any day; but more and more recently, in the abnormal tension of his nerves, he had lost initiative in these things. They wandered leisurely together into the town and Sorio amused himself by watching the demure and practical way in which his companion managed her various economic transactions in the shops which she entered. He could not help feeling a sense of envy as he observed the manner in which, without effort or strain, she achieved the precise objects she had in mind and arranged for the transportation of her purchases by the carrier’s cart that same evening.

  He wondered vaguely whether all women were like this and whether, with their dearest and best-loved dead at home, or their own peace of mind permanently shattered by some passage of fatal emotion only some few hours before, they could always throw everything aside and bargain so keenly and shrewdly with the alert tradesmen. He supposed it was the working of some blind atavistic power in them, the mechanical result of ages of mental concentration. He was amused, too, to observe how, when in a time incredibly short she had done all she wanted, instead of rushing off blindly for the walk they had promised themselves past the old Abbey church and along the river’s bank, she shrewdly interpreted their physical necessities and carried him off to a little dairy shop to have tea and half-penny buns. Had he been the cicerone of their day’s outing he would have plunged off straight for the Abbey church and the river fields, leaving their shopping to the end and dooming them to bad temper and irritable nerves from sheer bodily exhaustion. Never had Nance looked more desirable or attractive as, with heightened colour and little girlish jests, she poured out his tea for him in the small shop-parlour and swallowed half-penny buns with the avidity of a child.

  Baltazar Stork was not wrong in his conjecture. Not since their early encounters in the streets and parks of South London had Sorio been in a gentler mood or one more amenable to the girl’s charm. As he looked at her now and listened to her happy laughter, he felt that he had been a fool as well as a scoundrel in his treatment of her. Why hadn’t he cut loose long since from his philandering with Philippa which led nowhere and could lead nowhere? Why hadn’t he cast about for some definite employment and risked, without further delay, persuading her to marry him? With her to look after him and smooth his path for him, he might have been quite free from this throbbing pain behind his eyeballs and this nervous tension of his brain. He hurriedly made up his mind that he would ask her to marry him—not to-day, perhaps, or to-morrow—for it would be absurd to commit himself till he could support her, but very soon, as soon as he had found any mortal kind of an occupation! What that occupation would be he did not know. It was difficult to think of such things all in a moment. It required time. Besides, whatever it was it must be something that left him free scope for his book. After all, his book came first—his book and Baptiste. What would Baptiste think if he were to marry again? Would he be indignant and hurt? No! No! It was inconceivable that Baptiste should be hurt. Besides, he would love Nance when he knew her! Of that he was quite sure. Yes, Baptiste and Nance were made to understand one another. It would be different were it Philippa he was thinking of marrying. Somehow it distressed and troubled him to imagine Baptiste and Philippa together. That, at all costs, must never come about. His boy must never meet Philippa. All of this whirled at immense speed through Sorio’s head as he smiled back at Nance across the little marble table and stared at the large blue-china cow which, with udders coloured a yet deeper ultramarine than its striped back, placidly, like an animal sacred to Jupiter, contemplated the universe. There must have been a wave of telepathic sympathy between them at that moment, for Nance suddenly swallowing the last of her bun, hazarded a question she had never dared to ask before.

  “Adrian, dear, tell me this. Why did you leave your boy behind you in America when you came to England?”

  Sorio was himself surprised at the unruffled manner in which he received this question. At any other moment it would have fatally disturbed him. He smiled back at her, quite easily and naturally.

  “How could I bring him?” he said. “He’s got a good place in New York and I have nothing. I had to get away, somewhere. In fact, they sent me away, ‘deported’ me, as they call it. But I couldn’t drag the boy with me. How could I? Though he was ready enough to come. Oh, no! It’s much better as it is—much, much better!”

  He became grave and silent and began fumbling in one of his inner pockets. Nance watched him breathlessly. Was he really softening towards her? Was Philippa losing her hold on him? He suddenly produced a letter—a letter written on thin paper and bearing an American stamp—and taking it with careful hands from its envelope, stretched it across the table towards her. The action was suggestive of such intimacy, suggestive of such a new and happy change in their relations, that the girl looked at the thing with moist and dazed eyes. She obtained a general sense of the firm clear handwriting. She caught the opening sentence, written in caressing Italian and, for some reason or other, the address—perhaps because of its strangeness to a European eye—fifteen West Eleventh Street—remained engraved in her memory. More than this she was unable to take in for the moment out of the sheer rush of bewildering happiness which swept over her and made her long to cry.

  A moment later two other Rodmoor people, known to them both by sight, entered the shop, and Sorio hurriedly took the letter back and replaced it in his pocket. He paid their bill, which came to exactly a shilling, and together they walked out from the dairy. The ultramarine cow contemplated the universe as the newcomers took their vacated table with precisely the same placidity. Its own end—some fifty years after, amid the debris of a local fire, with the consequent departure of its shattered pieces to the Mundham dumping ground—did not enter into its contemplation. Many lovers, happier and less happy than Sorio and Nance, would sit at that marble table during that epoch and the blue cow would listen in silence. Perhaps in its ultimate resting-place its scorched fragments would become more voluble as the rains dripped upon the tins and shards around them or perhaps, even in ruins—like an animal sacred to Jupiter—it would hold its peace and let the rains fall.

  The two friends, still in a mood of delicate and delicious harmony, threaded the quieter streets of the town and emerged into the dreamy cathedral-like square, spacious with lawns and trees, that surrounded the abbey-church. A broad gravel-path, overtopped by wide-spreading lime trees, separated the grey south wall of the ancient edifice from the most secluded of these lawns. The grass was divided from the path by a low hanging chain-rail of that easy and friendly kind that seems to call upon the casual loiterer to step over its unreluctant barrier and take his pleasure under the welcoming trees. They sat down on an empty bench and looked up at the flying buttresses and weather-stained gargoyles and richly traceried windows. The sun fell in long mellow streams across the gravel beside them, broken into cool deep patches of velvet shadow where the branches of the lime trees intercepted it. From somewhere behind them came the sound of murmuring pigeons and from further off still, from one of the high-walled, old-fashioned gardens of the houses on the remote side of the square, came the voices of children playing. Sorio sat with one arm stretched out along the top of the bench behind Nance’s head and with the other resting upon the handle of his stick. His face had a look of deep, withdrawn contentment—a contentment so absolute that it merged into a sort of animal apathy. Any one familiar with the expression so often seen upon the faces both of streetbeggars and prince-cardinals in the city on the Tiber, would have recogni
zed something indigenous and racial in the lethargy which then possessed him. Nance, on the other hand, gave herself up to a sweet and passionate happiness such as she had not known since they left London. While they waited thus together, reluctant by even a word to break the spell of that favoured hour, there came from within the church the sound of an organ. Nance got up at once.