Rodmoor (10 page)

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.”

T
HERE 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.

The priest had just lit his cigarette and was sipping
his tea when he was startled by the sudden appearance of Nance Herrick, white and desperate and panting for breath.

“I had to come to you,” she gasped, refusing his proffered chair and sinking down on the grass. “I had to! I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop in that house. I saw him last night. He was walking with
her
near the harbour. I spoke to them. I was quiet—not angry or bitter at all and he let her insult me. He let her whip me with her tongue, wickedly, cruelly and yet so under cover, so sideways—you know the kind of thing, Hamish?—that I couldn’t answer. If I’d been alone with her I could have, but his being there made me stupid, miserable, foolish! And she took advantage of it. She said—oh, such mean, biting things! I can’t say them to you. I hate to think of them. They went right through me like a steel lash. And he stood there and did nothing. He was like a man in a trance. He stood there and let her do it. Hamish—Hamish—I wish I were at the bottom of the sea!”

She bowed her white, grief-distorted face until it was buried in the grass. The sun, playing on her bright hair, made it look like newly-minted gold. Mr. Traherne sank on his knees beside her. His ugliness, intensified by the agitation of his pity, reached a pitch that was almost sublime. He was like a gargoyle
consoling
a goddess.

“Child, child, listen to me!” he cried, his husky
grating
voice flinging itself upon the silence of her misery like a load of rubble upon a marble pavement.

“There are moments in our life when no words,
however
tender, however wise, can do any good. The only
way—child, it is so—it is so!—the only way is to find in love itself the thing that can heal. For love
can
do this, I know it, I have proved it.”

He raised one of his arms with a queer, spasmodic gesture and let it drop as suddenly as he had raised it.

“Love rejoices to bear everything,” he went on. “It forgives and forgives again. It serves its beloved night and day, unseen and unfelt, it draws strength from suffering. When the blows of fate strike it, it sinks into its own heart and rises stronger than fate. When the passing hour’s cruel to it, it sinks away within, below the passing of every possible hour, beyond the hurt of every conceivable stroke. Love does not ask anything. It does not ask to be recognized. It is its own return, its own recognition. Listen to me, child! If what I’m saying to you is not true, if love is not like this, then the whole world is dust and ashes and ‘earth’s base built on stubble’!”

His harsh voice died away on the air and for a little while there was no sound in that garden except the
twitter
of birds, the hum of insects, and the murmur of the sea. Then she moved, raised herself from the ground and rubbed her face with her hands.

“Thank you, Hamish,” she said.

He got up from his knees and she rose too and they walked slowly together up and down the little grass plot. His harsh voice, harsher than ever when its pitch was modulated, rose and fell monotonously in the sunny air.

“I don’t say to you, Nance, that you shouldn’t
expect
the worst. I think we always should expect that and prepare to meet it. What I say is that in the very
power of the love you feel there is a strength capable of sustaining you through your whole life, whatever
happens
. And it is out of this very strength—a strength stronger than all the world, my dear—than all the world!—that you’ll be able to give your Adrian what he needs. He needs your love, little one, not your jealousy, nor your self-pity, nor your anger. God knows how much he needs it! And if you sink down into your heart and draw upon that and wait for him and pray for him and endure for him you will see how, in the end, he’ll come back to you! No—I won’t even say that. For in this world he may never realize whose devotion is sustaining him. I’ll say, whether he comes back or not, you’ll have been his only true love and he’ll know it, child, in this world or another, he’ll know you for what you are!”

The sweet, impossible doctrine, older than the
centuries
, older than Plato, of the supremacy of spiritual passion had never—certainly not in that monastic garden—found a more eloquent apologist. As she listened to his words and her glance lingered upon a
certain
deeply blue border of larkspurs, which, as they paced up and down mingled with the impression he made upon her, Nance felt that a crisis had indeed arrived in her life—had arrived and gone—the effect of which could never, whatever happened, altogether disappear. She was still unutterably sad. Her new mood brought no superficial comfort. But her sadness had nothing in it now of bitterness or desperation. She entered, at any rate for that hour, into the company of those who resolutely put life’s sweetness away from them and find in the accepted pressure of its sharp sword-point a pride which is its own reward.

This mood of hers still lasted on, when, some hours later, she found herself in the main street of the little town, staring with a half-humorous smile at the
reflection
of herself in the bow-window of the
pastry-cook
’s. She had just emerged from the shop adjoining this one, a place where she had definitely committed
herself
to accept the post of “forewoman” in the
superintendence
of half a dozen young girls who worked in the leisurely establishment of Miss Pontifex, “the only
official
dress-maker,” as the advertisement announced, “on that side of Mundham.”

She felt unspeakably relieved at having made this plunge. She had begun to weary of idleness—idleness rendered more bitter by the misery of her relations with Sorio—and the independence guaranteed by the eighteen shillings a week which Miss Pontifex was to pay her seemed like an oasis of solid assurance in a desert of ambiguities. She cared nothing for social prestige. In that sense she was a true daughter of her father, the most “democratic” officer in the British Navy. What gave her a profound satisfaction in the midst of her unhappiness was the thought that now, without
leaving
Rodmoor, she could, if Rachel’s jealousy or
whatever
it was, became intolerable, secure some small,
separate
lodging for herself and her sister.

Linda even, now her organ-playing had advanced so far, might possibly be able to earn something. There were perhaps churches in Mundham willing to pay for such assistance if the difficulty of getting over there on Sundays when the trains were few, could in some way be surmounted. At any rate, she felt, she had made a move in the right direction. For the present, living at Dyke House, she would be able to save every penny Miss
Pontifex gave her, and the sense of even this
relative
independence would strengthen her hand and
afford
her a sort of vantage-ground whatever happened in the future.

She was still standing in front of the confectioner’s window when she heard a well-known voice behind her and, turning quickly round, found herself face to face with Fingal Raughty. The Doctor looked at her with tender solicitude.

“Feeling the heat?” he said, retaining her fingers in his own and stroking them as one might stroke the petals of a rare orchid.

She smiled affectionately into his eyes and thought how strange an irony it was that every one, except the person she cared most for, should treat her thus
considerately
.

“Come,” the Doctor said, “now I’ve got you I’m not going to let you go. You must see my rooms! You promised you would, you know.”

She hadn’t the heart to refuse him and together they walked up the street till they came to the tiny
red-brick
house which the Doctor shared with the family of a Mundham bank-clerk. He opened the door and led her upstairs.

“All this floor is mine,” he explained. “There’s where I see my patients, and here,” he led her into the room looking out on the street, “here’s my study.”

Nance was for the moment inclined to smile at the use of the word “study” as applied to any room in Rodmoor High Street, but when she looked round at walls literally lined with books and at tables and chairs covered with books, some of them obviously rare and valuable, she felt she had not quite done justice to the
Doctor’s taste. He fluttered round her now with a
hundred
delicate attentions, made her remove her hat and gloves and finally placed her in a large comfortable
armchair
close to the open window. He pulled one of the green blinds down a little way to soften the stream of sunshine and, rushing to his book-case, snatched at a large thin volume which stood with others of the same kind on the lowest shelf. This he dusted carefully with his sleeve and laid gently upon her lap.

“I think you’ll like it,” he murmured. “It’s of no value as an edition, but it’s in his best style. I suppose Miss Doorm has all the old masters up at Dyke House bound in morocco and vellum? Or has she only county histories and maps?”

While his visitor turned over the pages of the work in question, her golden head bent low and her lips smiling, the doctor began piling up more books, one on the top of another, at her side.

“Apuleius!—he’s a strange old fellow, not without interest, but you know him, of course? Petronius
Arbiter
! you had better not read the text but the
illustrations
may amuse you. William Blake! There are some drawings here which have a certain resemblance to—to one or two people we know! Bewick! Oh, you’ll enjoy this, if you don’t know it. I’ve got the other volume, too. You mustn’t look at
all
the vignettes but some of them will please you.”

“But—Fingal—” the girl protested, lifting her head from Pope’s Rape of the Lock illustrated by
Aubrey
Beardsley—“what are
you
going to do? I feel as if you were preparing me for a voyage. I’d sooner talk to you than look at any books.”

“I’ll be back in a moment,” he said, throwing at her
a nervous and rather harassed look, “I must wash my hands.”