Rodmoor (2 page)

“We’ll have long walks together there!” he
exclaimed
, interrupting himself suddenly with an almost savage gesture of ardent possession. If it had been any one but Baltazar Stork, he went on, who had sent him this timely invitation, he Would have rejected it at once, but from Baltazar he had no hesitation in
accepting
anything. They had been friends too long to make any other attitude possible. No, it was no scruple of pride that led him to hesitate—as he admitted to her
he had done. It was rather the strange and
indefinable
reaction set up in his brain by those half-sinister half-romantic syllables—syllables that kept repeating themselves in his inner consciousness.

Nance remembered more than once in a later time the fierce sudden way he turned upon her as they stood on the edge of the crowded square waiting the opportunity to cross and asked, with a solemn intensity in his voice, whether she had any presentiment as to how things would turn out for them in this place.

“It hangs over me,” he said, “it hangs over us both. I see it like a heavy sunset weighted with purple bars.” And then, when the girl did nothing but shake her head and smile tenderly, “I warn you,” he went on, “you are risking much—I feel it—I know it. I have had this sort of instinct before about things.” He shivered a little and laid his hand on her arm as if he clung to her for reassurance.

Nance remembered long afterwards the feelings in her that made her turn her face full upon him and whisper proudly, as if in defiance of his premonitions, “What can happen to us that can hurt us, my dear, as long as we are together, and as long as we love one another?”

He was silent after this and apparently satisfied, for he did not scruple to return to the subject of
Rodmoor
. The word gave him in those first days, he said, that curious sensation we receive when we suddenly say to ourselves in some new locality, “I have been here; I have seen all this before.”

Had he at that time, he told her, been less distracted by the emotions she aroused in him, he would have analysed to the bottom the dim mental augury—or
was it reminiscence?—called up by this name. As it was he just kept the thing at the back of his mind as something which, whatever its occult significance, at least spared him the necessity of agitating himself about his future.

Nance’s thoughts were brought back from their
half-attention
with a shock of vivid interest when he came to the point, amid his vague recollections, of his first entrance into her house. It was exactly a week ago, he reminded her, that he found himself one sunny morning securely established as a new lodger under her roof. In his impatient longing to secure the desirable room—across the narrow floor of which, he confessed to her, he paced to and fro that day like a hungry tiger—he had even forgotten to make the obvious inquiry as to the quarter of the London sky from which his
particular
portion of light and air was to come.

It was only, he told her, with a remote segment of his consciousness that he became aware of the fine, full flood of sunshine which poured in from the
southern-opening
window and lay, mellow and warm, upon his littered books and travel-stained trunk.

Casual and preoccupied were the glances he cast, each time his mechanical perambulation brought him to that pleasant window, at the sun-bathed traffic and the hurrying crowd. London Bridge Road melted into his thought; or rather his thought took possession of London Bridge Road and reduced it to a mere
sounding
-board for the emotion that obsessed him.

That emotion—and Nance got exquisite pleasure from hearing him say the words, though she turned her face away from him as he said them—took, as he paced his room, passionate and ardent shape. He did
not re-vivify the whole of her,—of the fair young being whose sweetness had got into his blood. He confined himself to thinking of the delicate tilt of her head and of the spaciousness between her breasts, spaciousness that somehow reminded him of Pheidian sculpture.

He hadn’t anticipated this particular kind of escape—though it was certainly the escape he had been
seeking
—amid the roar of London’s streets; but after all, if it did give him his cup of nepenthe, his desired
anodyne
, how much the more did he gain when it gave him so thrilling an experience in addition? Why, indeed, should he not dream that the gods were for once
helping
him out and that the generous grace of his girl’s form was symbolic of the restorative virtue of the great Mother herself?

Restoration was undoubtedly the thing he wanted—and in recalling his thoughts of that earlier hour, to her now walking with him, he found himself enlarging upon it all quite unscrupulously in terms of what he now felt—restoration on any terms, at any cost, to the kindly normal paths out of which he had been so roughly thrown. He thrust indignantly back, he told her, that eventful morning the intrusive thought that it was only the Spring that worked so prosperously upon him. He did not want it to be the Spring; he wanted it to be the girl. The Spring would pass; the girl, if his feeling for her—and he glanced at the broad-rimmed hat and shadowy profile at his side—were not altogether illusive, would remain. And it was the faculty for remaining that he especially required in his raft of refuge.

Up and down his room, at any rate, he walked that day with a heightened consciousness such as he had
not known for many clouded months. “The Spring”—and in his imaginative reaction to his own memories he grew, so Nance felt with what was perhaps her first serious pang, almost feverishly eloquent—“the Spring, whether I cared to recognise it or not, waved thrilling arms towards me. I felt it”—and he raised his voice so loud that the girl looked uneasily round them—“in the warmth of the sun, in the faces of the wistful shop girls, in the leaves budding against the smoke of the Borough. It had come to me again, and you—you had brought it! It had come to me again, the Eternal Return, the antiphonal world-deep Renewal. It had come, Nance, and all the slums of Rotherhithe and Wapping, and all the chimneys, workshops, wharves and tenements of the banks of this river of yours could not stop the rising of the sap. The air came to me that morning, my girl!”—and he unconsciously
quickened
his steps as he spoke till, for all her long youthful limbs she could hardly keep pace with him—“as if it had passed over leagues of green meadows. And it had! It had, Nance! And it throbbed for me, child, with the sweetness of your very soul.” He paused for a moment and, as they debouched more directly
eastward
through a poor and badly lit street, she caught him muttering to himself what she knew was Latin.

He answered her quick look—her look that had a dim uneasiness in it—with a slow repetition of the
famous
line, and Nance was still quite enough of a young girl to feel a thrill of pride that she had a lover who, within a stone’s throw of the “Elephant and Castle,” could quote for her on an April evening that
“cras amet qui nunquam amavit”
of the youth of the centuries!

The rich, antique flavour of the words blent well
enough as far as she was concerned with the homely houses and taverns of that dilapidated quarter. The night was full of an indescribable balm, felt through the most familiar sounds and sights, and, after all, there was always something mellow and pagan and free about the streets of London. It was the security, the friendly solidity, of the immense city which more than anything just then seemed to harmonise with this classical mood in her wonderful foreigner and she wished he would quote more Latin as they went along, side by side, past the lighted fruit stalls.

The overhanging shadow of Adrian’s premonitions, or whatever they were, about Rodmoor, and her own anxieties about Rachel Doorm and Linda withdrew themselves into the remotest background of the girl’s mind as she gave herself to her happiness in this
favoured
hour. It was in a quiet voice, after that, that he resumed his story. The sound, he said, of one of the Borough clocks striking the hour of ten brought a pause to his agitated pacing.

He stretched himself, he told her, when he heard the clock, stretched his arms out at full length, with that delicious shivering sensation which accompanies the near fulfilment of deferred hope. Then he chuckled to himself, from sheer childish ecstasy, and made goblinish faces.

Nance could not help noticing as he told her all this, how quaintly he reproduced in his exaggerated way the precise gestures he had indulged in. “Per Bacco! I had only three pounds left,” he said, and as he shrugged his shoulders and glowered at her under a flickering lamp from eyes sunken deep in his heavy face, she
realised
of what it was he had been all this while vaguely
reminding her—of nothing less, in fact, than one of those saturnine portrait-busts of the Roman decadence, at which as a child she used to stare, half-frightened and half-attracted, in the great Museum.

The first thing he did, he told her, when the sound of the clock brought him to his senses, was to empty his pockets on the top of the chest-of-drawers which was, except for the bed and a couple of rickety chairs, the only article of furniture in the room. An errant penny, rolling aside from the rest, tinkled against the edge of his washing basin. “Not three pounds!” he
muttered
and leered at himself in his wretched looking glass.

It was precisely at that moment that the sound of voices struck his ears, proceeding from the adjoining room.

“I had spent half the night,” he whispered, drawing his companion closer to his side as a couple of tipsy youths pushed roughly by them, “lying awake listening. I felt a queer kind of shame, yes, shame, as I realised how near I was to you. You know I knew nothing of you then, absolutely nothing except that you went to work every day and lived with some sort of elderly person and a younger sister. It was this
ignorance
about you, child, that made my situation so exciting. I waited breathlessly, literally petrified, in the middle of the room.”

Nance at this point felt herself compelled to utter a little cry of protest.

“You ought to have made some kind of noise,” she said, “to let us know you were listening.”

But he waved aside her objection, and continued: “I remained petrified in the centre of the room, feeling as though the persons I listened to might at any
moment
stop their conversation and listen, in their turn, to the frantic beating of my heart. I heard your voice. I knew it in a moment to be yours—it had the round, full sweetness”—his arm was about her now—“of your darling figure. ‘Good-bye!’ you called out and there came the sound of a door opening upon the passage, ‘Good-bye! I’m off. Meet me to-night if you like. Yes, soon after six. Good-bye! Look after each other.’

“The door shut and I heard you running down the stairs. I felt as though that ‘Meet me to-night’ had been addressed to myself. I crossed over to the
window
and watched you thread your way through the crowd in the direction of the Bridge. I knew you were late. I hoped you would not be scolded for it by some shrewish or brutal employer. I wished I had had the courage to go out on the landing and see you off. Why is one always so paralysed when these chances offer themselves? I might easily have taken a fellow-lodger’s privilege and bidden you good morning. Then I found myself wondering whether you had any inkling that I had been sleeping so near you that night. Had you, you darling, had you any such instinct?”

Nance shook her head, nor could he see the
expression
of her eyes in the quiet darkened square, across which they were then moving. They came upon a wooden bench, under some iron railings, and he made her sit down while he completed his tale. The spot was unfrequented at that hour, and above their heads—as they leaned back, sighing tranquilly, and he took
possession
of her hand—the branch of a stunted
beech-tree
stretched itself out, hushed and still, enjoying
some secret dream of its own amid the balmy perfumes of the amorous night.

“May I go on?” he enquired, looking tenderly at her.

In her heart Nance longed to cry, “No! No! No more of these tiresome memories! Make love to me! Make love to me!” but she only pressed his fingers gently and remained silent.

“I took up a book,” he went on, “from the heap on the floor and drawing one of those miserable chairs to the window, I opened it at random. It happened to be that mad lovely thing of Remy de Gourmont. I forgot whether you said you had got as far as French poetry in that collection of yours that Miss Doorm is so suspicious of. It was, in fact, ‘Le livre des Litanies,’ and shall I tell you the passage I read? I was too excited to gather its meaning all at once, and then such a curious thing happened to me! But I will say the lines to you, child, and you will
understand
better.”

Nance could only press his hand again, but her heart sank with an unaccountable foreboding.

“It was the Litany of the Rose,” he said, and his voice floated out into the embalmed stillness with the same ominous treachery in its tone, so the poor girl fancied, as the ambiguous words he chanted.

“Rose au regard saphique, plus pâle que les lys, rose au regard saphique, offre-nous le parfum de ton illusoire virginité, fleur hypocrite, fleur de silence.”

The strange invocation died away on the air, and a singular oppression, heavy as if with some undesired spiritual presence, weighed upon them both. Sorio did
not speak for some minutes, and when he did so there was an uneasy vibration in his voice.

“As soon as I had read those lines, there came over me one of the most curious experiences I have ever had. I seemed to see, yes, you may smile,”—Nance was far from smiling—“but it is actually true—I seemed to see a living human figure outline itself against the wall of my room. To the end of my days I shall never forget it! It was a human form, Nance, but it was unlike all human forms I’ve ever beheld—unless it be one of those weird drawings, you know? of Aubrey Beardsley. It was neither the form of a boy nor of a girl, and yet it had the nature of both. It gazed at me with a fixed sorrowful stare, and I felt—was not that a strange experience—that I had known it
before
, somewhere, far off, and long ago. It was the very embodiment of tragic supplication, and yet, in the look it fixed on me, there was a cold, merciless mockery.