Rodmoor

by John Cowper Powys

  “Let’s go in for just a minute, Adrian! Do you mind—only just a minute?”

  The slightest flicker of a frown crossed Sorio’s face but it vanished before she could repeat her request.

  “Of course,” he said, rising in his turn, “of course! Let’s go round and find the door.”

  They had no difficulty in doing this. The west entrance of the church was wide open and they entered and sat down at the back of the nave. Above them the spacious vaulted roof, rich with elaborate fan-tracery, seemed to spread abroad and deepen the echoes of the music as if it were an immense inverted chalice spilling the odour of immortal wine. The coolness and dim shadowiness of the place fell gently upon them both and the mysterious rising and sinking of the music, with no sight of any human presence as its cause, thrilled Nance from head to foot as she had never been thrilled in her life. Oh, it was worth it—this moment—all she had suffered before—all she could possibly suffer! If only it might never stop, that heavenly sound, but go on and on and on until all the world came to know what the power of love was! She felt at that moment as if she were on the verge of attaining some clue, some signal, some sign, which should make all things clear to her—clear and ineffably sweet!

  The deep crimsons and purples in the coloured windows, the damp chilly smell of the centuries-old masonry, the large dark recesses of the shadowy transepts, all blended together to transport her out of herself into a world kindlier, calmer, quieter, than the world she knew.

  “And—he—shall—feed—” rang out, as they listened, the clear flutelike voice of some boy-singer, practising for the morrow’s services, “shall—feed—his—flock.”

  The words of the famous antiphony, “staled and rung upon” as they might be, by the pathetic stammerings of so old a human repetition, were, coming just at this particular moment, more than Nance could bear. She flung herself on her knees and, pressing her hands to her face, burst into convulsive sobs. Sorio stood up and laid his hand on her shoulder. With the other hand—mindful of early associations—he crossed himself two or three times and then remained motionless. Slowly, by the action of that law which is perhaps the deepest in the universe, the law of ebb and flow, there began in him a reaction. Had the words the unseen boy singer was uttering been in Latin, had they possessed that reserve, that passionate aloofness in emotion, which the instinct of worship in the southern races protects from sentiment, such a reaction might have been spared him; but the thing was too facile, too easy. It might have been the climax of a common melodrama. It fell too pat upon the occasion. And it was insidiously, treacherously, horribly human. It was too human. It lacked the ring of style, the reserve of the grand manner. It wailed and sobbed. It whimpered upon the Almighty’s shoulder. It wanted the tragic abandonment of the “Dies Irae,” as it missed the calmer dignity of the “Tantum ergo.” It appealed to what was below the level of the highest in religious pathos. It humiliated while it comforted. The boy’s voice died away and the organ stopped. There was a sound of shuffling in the choir and the mutter of voices and even a suppressed laugh.

  Sorio removed his hand from Nance’s shoulder and stooping down picked up his hat and stick. He looked round him. A fashionably dressed lady, carrying a bunch of carnations, moved past them up the aisle and presently two younger women followed. Then a neatly attired dapper young clergyman strolled in, adjusting his eye-glasses. It was evidently approaching the hour of the afternoon service. The spell was broken.

  But the kneeling girl knew nothing, felt nothing, of all this. She, at all events, was in the church of her fathers—the church that her most childish memories rendered sacred. Had she been able to understand Sorio’s feeling, she would have swept it aside. The music was beautiful, she would have said, and the words were true. From the heart of the universe they came straight to her heart. Were they rendered unbeautiful and untrue because so many simple souls had found comfort in them?

  “Ah! Adrian,” she would have said had she argued it out with him. “Ah, Adrian, it is common. It is the common cry of humanity, set to the music of the common heart of the world, and is not that more essential than ‘Latin,’ more important than ‘style’?”

  As a matter of fact, the only controversy that arose between them when they left the building was brief and final.

  “I fancy,” remarked Sorio, “from what you tell me of her, that that’s the sort of thing that would please Mrs. Renshaw—I mean the music we heard just now!”

  Nance flushed as she answered him. “Yes, it would! It would! And it pleases me too. It makes me more certain than ever that Jesus Christ was really God.” Sorio bowed his head at this and held his peace and together they made their way to the bank of the Loon.

  What they were particularly anxious to see was an old house by the river-side about a mile east of the town which had been, some hundred years before, the abode of one of the famous East Anglian painters of the celebrated Norwich school—a painter whose humorous aplomb and rich earth-steeped colouring rivalled some of the most notable of the artists of Amsterdam and The Hague.

  Their train back to Rodmoor did not leave till half-past seven and as it was now hardly five they had ample time to make this little pilgrimage as deliberately as they pleased. They had no difficulty in reaching the river, and once at its edge, it was only a question of following its windings till they arrived at Ravelston Grange. Their way was somewhat impeded at first by a line of warehouses, between which and a long row of barges fastened to a series of littered dusty wharves, lay all manner of bales and casks and bundles of hay and vegetable. There were coal-yards there too, and timber-yards, and in other places great piles of beer-barrels, all bearing the name “Keith Radipole” which had been for half a century the business title of Brand Renshaw’s brewery. These obstacles surmounted, there were no further interruptions to their advance along the river path.

  The aspect of the day, however, had grown less promising. A somewhat threatening bank of clouds with dark jagged edges, which the efforts of the sun to scatter only rendered more lurid, had appeared in the west and when, for a moment, they turned to look back at the town, they saw its chimneys and houses massed gloomily together against a huge sombre bastion whose topmost fringe was illuminated by fiery indentations. Nance expressed some hesitation as to the wisdom of going further with this phalanx of storm threatenings following them from behind, but Sorio laughed at her fears and assured her that in a very short time they would arrive at the great painter’s house.

  It appeared, however, that the “mile” referred to in the little local history in which they had read about this place did not begin till the limits of Mundham were reached and Mundham seemed to extend itself interminably. They were passing through peculiarly dreary outskirts now. Little half-finished rows of wretchedly built houses trailed disconsolately towards the river’s edge and mingled with small deserted factories whose walls, blackened with smoke, were now slowly crumbling to pieces. Desolate patches of half-cultivated ground where the stalks of potatoes, yellowing with damp, alternated with thickly growing weeds, gave the place that peculiar expression of sordid melancholy which seems the especial prerogative of such fringes of human habitation. Old decaying barges, some of them half-drowned in water and others with gaunt, protruding ribs and rotting planks, lay staring at the sky while the river, swirling past them, gurgled and muttered round their submerged keels. It was impossible for the two friends to retain long, under these depressing surroundings, their former mood of magical harmony. Little shreds and fragments of their happiness seemed to fall from them at every step and remain, bleakly flapping among the mouldering walls and weedy river-piles, like the bits of old paper and torn rag which fluttered feebly or fell into immobility as the wind rose or sank. The bank of clouds behind them had now completely obscured every vestige of the sun and a sort of premature twilight lay upon the surface of the river and on the fields on its further side.

  “What’s that?” asked Nance suddenly, putting her hand on his arm and p
ointing to a large square building which suddenly appeared on their left. They had been vaguely aware of this building for some while but one little thing or another in their more immediate neighbourhood had confined it to the remoter verge of their consciousness. As soon as she had asked the question Nance felt an unaccountable unwillingness to carry the investigation further. Sorio, too, seemed ready enough to let her enquiry remain unanswered. He shrugged his shoulders as much as to say “how can I tell?” and suggested that they should rest for a moment on a littered pile of wood which lay close to the water’s edge.

  They stepped down the bank where they were, out of sight of the building above, and seated themselves. With their arms around their knees they contemplated the flowing tide and the dull-coloured mud of the opposite bank. A coil of decaying rope, tossed aside from some passing barge, lay at Sorio’s feet and, as he sat in gloomy silence, he thought how like the thing was to something he had once seen at an inquest in a house in New York. As for Nance, she found it difficult to remove her eyes from a shapeless bundle of sacking which the tide was carrying. Sometimes it would get completely submerged and then again it would reappear.

  “Why is it,” she thought, “that there is always something horrible about tidal rivers? Is it because of the way they have of carrying things backward and forward, backward and forward, without ever allowing them either to get far inland or clear out to sea? Is a tidal river,” she said to herself, “the one thing in all the world in which nothing can be lost or hidden or forgotten?”

  It was curious how difficult they both felt it just then either to move from where they were or to address a single word to one another. They seemed hypnotized by something—hypnotized by some thought which remained unspoken at the back of their minds. They felt an extreme reluctance to envisage again that large square building surrounded by weather-stained wall, a wall from which the ivy had been carefully scraped.

  Slowly, little by little, the bank of clouds mounted up to the meridian, casting over everything as it did so a more and more ominous twilight. The silence between them became after a while, a thing with a palpable presence. It seemed to float upon the water to their feet and, rising about them like a wraith, like a mist, like the ghost of a dead child, it fumbled with clammy fingers upon their hearts.

  “I’m sure,” Sorio cried at last, with an obvious struggle to break the mysterious sorcery which weighed on them, “I’m perfectly sure that Ravelston Grange must be round that second bend of the river—do you see?—where those trees are! I’m sure it must! At any rate we must come to it at last if we only go on.”

  He looked at his watch.

  “Heavens! We’ve taken an hour already getting here! It’s nearly six. How on earth have we been so long?”

  “Do you know, Adrian,” Nance remarked—and she couldn’t help noticing as she did so that though he spoke so resolutely of going forward he made not the least movement to leave his seat—“do you know I feel as if we were in a dream. I have the oddest feeling that any moment we might wake up and find ourselves back in Rodmoor. Adrian, dear, let’s go back! Let’s go back to the town. There’s something that depresses me beyond words about all this.”

  “Nonsense!” cried Sorio in a loud and angry voice, leaping to his feet and snatching up his stick. “Come on, my girl, come, child! We’ll see that Ravelston place before the rain gets to us!”

  They clambered up the bank and walked swiftly forward. Nance noticed that Sorio looked steadily at the river, looked at the river without intermission and with hardly a word, till they were well beyond the very last houses of Mundham. It was an unspeakable relief to her when, at last, crossing a little footbridge over a weir, they found themselves surrounded by the open fens.

  “Behind those trees, Nance,” Sorio kept repeating, “behind those trees! I’m absolutely sure I’m right and that Ravelston Grange is there. By the way, girl, which of your poets wrote the verses—

  ‘She makes her immemorial moan,

  She keeps her shadowy kine,

  O, Keith of Ravelston,

  The sorrows of thy line!’

  They’ve been running in my head all the afternoon ever since I saw ‘Keith Radipole,’ on those beer-barrels.”

  Nance, however, was too eager to reach the real Ravelston to pay much heed to his poetic allusion.

  “Oh, it sounds like—oh, I don’t know—Tennyson, perhaps!” and she pulled him forward towards the trees.

  These proved to be a group of tall French poplars which, just then, were muttering volubly in the rainsmelling wind. They hurried past them and paused before a gate in a very high wall.

  “What’s this?” exclaimed Sorio. “This can’t be Ravelston. It looks more like a prison.”

  For a moment his eyes encountered Nance’s and the girl glanced quickly away from what she read in his face. She called out to an old man who was hoeing potatoes behind some iron railings where the wall ended.

  “Could you tell me where Ravelston Grange is?” she enquired.

  The old man removed his hat and regarded her with a whimsical smile.

  “’Tis across the river, lady, and there isn’t no bridge for some many miles. Maybe with any luck ye may meet a cattle-boat to take ye over but there’s little surety about them things.”

  “What’s this place, then?” asked Sorio abruptly, approaching the iron railings.

  “This, mister? Why this be the doctor’s house of the County Asylum. This be where they keep the superior cases, as you might say, them what pays summat, ye understand, and be only what you might call half daft. You must a’ seed the County Asylum as you came along.’ Tis a wonderful large place, one of the grandest, so they say, on this side of the kingdom.”

  “Thank you,” said Sorio curtly. “That’s just what we wanted to know. Yes, we saw the house you speak of. It certainly looks big enough. Have there been many new cases lately? Is this what you might call a good year for mental collapses?” As he spoke he peered curiously between the iron bars as if anxious to get some sight of the “half daft,” who could afford to pay for their keep.

  “I don’t know what you mean by ‘a good year,’ mister,” answered the man, watching him with little twinkling eyes, “but I reckon folk have been as liable to go shaky this year as most other years. ’Tisn’t in the season, I take it, ’tis in the man or for the matter of that,” and he cast an apologetic leer in Nance’s direction, “in the woman.”

  “Come on, Adrian,” interposed his companion, “you see that guide-book told us all wrong. We’d better get back to the station.”

  But Sorio held tightly to the railings with both his hands.

  “Don’t tease me, Nance,” he said irritably. “I want to talk to this excellent man.”

  “You’d better do what your missus says, mister,” observed the gardener, returning to his work. “The authorities don’t like no loitering in these places.”

  But Sorio disregarded the hint.

  “I should think,” he remarked, “it wouldn’t be so very difficult to escape out of here.” He received no reply to this and Nance pulled him by the sleeve.

  “Please, Adrian, please come away,” she pleaded, with tears in her voice. The old man lifted up his head.

  “You go back where you be come from,” he observed, “and thank the good Lord you’ve got such a pretty lady to look after you. There be many what envies you and many what ’ud like to stand in your shoes, and that’s God’s truth.”

  Sorio sighed heavily, and letting go his hold upon the railings, turned to his companion.

  “Let’s find another way to the town,” he said. “There must be some road over there, or at worst, we can walk along the line.”

  They moved off hastily in the direction opposite from the river and the old man, after making an enigmatic gesture behind their backs, spat upon his hands and returned to his work. The sky was now entirely overclouded but still no rain fell.

  XXI

  THE WINDMILL

  WITH the
coming of September there was a noticeable change in the weather. The air got perceptibly colder, the sea rougher and there were dark days when the sun was hardly seen at all. Sometimes the prevailing west wind brought showers, but so far, in spite of the cooler atmosphere, there was little heavy rain. The rain seemed to be gathering and massing on every horizon, but though its presence was felt, its actual coming was delayed and the fields and gardens remained scorched and dry. The ditches in the fens were low that season—lower than they had been for many years. Some of them were actually empty and in others there was so little water that the children could catch eels and minnows with their naked hands. In many portions of the salt marshes it was possible to walk dry-shod where, in the early Spring, one would have sunk up to the warst, or even up to the neck.

  Driven by the hot weather from their usual feeding-grounds several rare and curious birds visited the fens that year. The immediate environs of Rodmoor were especially safe for these, as few among the fishermen carried guns and none of the wealthier inhabitants cared greatly for shooting. Brand Renshaw, for instance, like his father before him, refused to preserve any sort of game and indeed it was one of the chief causes of his unpopularity with the neighbouring gentry that he was so little of a sportsman.