Rodmoor (28 page)

Sorio’s suggestion outraged something in her that went down to the very root of her personality.
Walking
with him, swimming with him, rowing in a boat with him—all those things were harmonious to her mind and congruous with her personal charm. None of these things interfered with the play of her
intelligence
, with the poise, the reserve, the aloofness of her
spiritual challenge. She was exceptionally devoid of fear in these boyish sports and could feel herself when she engaged in them with him, free of the limitations of her sex. She could retain completely, as she indulged herself in them, all the equilibrium of her being—the rhythm of her identity. But this proposal of Sorio’s not only introduced a discordant element that had a shrewd vein of the ludicrous in it, it threw her into a physical panic. It pulled and tugged at the inmost fibres of her self-restraint. It made her long to sit down on the ground and cry like a child. She wondered vaguely whether it was that Adrian was revenging
himself
upon her at that moment for some accumulated series of half-physical outrages that he had himself in his neurotic state been subjected to lately. As to his actual sanity, it never occured to her to question
that
. She herself was too wayward and whimsical in the
reactions
of her nerves and the processes of her mind to find anything startling, in
that
sense, in what he was now suggesting. It was simply that it changed their relations—it destroyed her ascendency, it brought things down to brute force, it turned her into a woman.

Her mind, as she stood hesitating, reviewed the moth incident. That sort of situation—Adrian’s fantastic mania for rescuing things—had just the opposite
effect
on her. He might poke his stick into half the ditches of Rodmoor and save innumerable drowning moths; the only effect
that
had on her was to make her feel superior to him, better adapted than he to face the essential facts of life, its inherent and integral cruelty for instance. But now—to see that horrible rope-end dangling from that gaping hole and to see the eager, violent, masculine look in her friend’s eyes—it was
unendurable
;
endurable; it drove her, so to speak, against the jagged edge of the world’s brute wall.

she found herself quoting, with a horrible sense that the humour of the parody only sharpened the sting of her dilemma.

“I won’t do it,” she said resolutely at last, trying to brave it out with a smile. “It’s a ridiculous idea. Besides, I’m much too heavy. You couldn’t pull me up if you tried till nightfall! No, no, Adriano, don’t be so absurd. Don’t spoil our time together with these mad ideas. Let’s sit down here and talk. Or why not light a fire? That would be exciting enough, wouldn’t it?”

His face as he listened to her darkened to a kind of savage fury. Its despotic and imperious lines
emphasized
themselves to a degree that was really terrifying.

“You won’t?” he cried, “you won’t, you won’t?” And seizing her roughly by the shoulder he actually
began
twisting the rope round her body.

She resisted desperately, pushing him away with all the strength of her arms. In the struggle between them, which soon became a dangerous one, her hand thrusting back his head unintentionally drew blood with its delicate finger-nails from his upper lip. The blood trickled into his mouth and, maddened by the taste of it, he let her go and seizing the end of the rope, struck her with it across the breast. This blow seemed to
bewilder
her. She ceased all resistance. She became docile and passive in his hands.

Mechanically he went on with the task he had set
himself, of fastening the rope round her beneath her arm-pits and tying it into a knot. But her absolute submissiveness seemed presently to paralyze him as much as his previous violence had disarmed and
paralyzed
her. He unloosed the knot he was making and with a sudden jerk pulled the rope away from her. The rope swung back to its former position and dangled in the air, swaying gently from side to side. They stood looking at each other in startled silence and then, quite suddenly, the girl moved forward and flung her arms round his neck.

“I love you!” she murmured in a voice unlike any he had heard her use before. “I love you! I love you!” and her lips clung to his with a long and
passionate
kiss.

Sorio’s emotions at that moment would have caused her, had she been conscious of them, a reaction even less endurable than that which she had just been through. To confess the truth he had no emotion at all. He
mechanically
returned her kisses; he mechanically
embraced
her. But all the while he was thinking of those water-beetles with shiny metallic coats that were
gyrating
even now so swiftly round that reedy pool.

“Water-beetles!” he thought, as the girl’s convulsive kisses, salt with her passionate tears, hurt his wounded lip. “Water-beetles! We are all like that. The world is like that! Water-beetles upon a dark stream.”

She let him go at last and they moved out together hand in hand into the open air. Above them the
enormous
windmill still upheld its motionless arms while from somewhere in the fens behind it came a strange whistling cry, the cry of one of those winged intruders from foreign shores, which even now was perhaps
bidding
 
farewell to regions of exile and calling out for some companion for its flight over the North Sea.

With his hand still held tightly in hers, Philippa walked silently by his side all that long way across the meadows and dykes. Sorio took advantage of her
unusually
gentle mood and began plaintively telling her about the nervous sufferings he endured in Rodmoor and about his hatred for the people there and his
conviction
that they took delight in annoying him. Then little by little, as the girl’s sympathetic silence led him on, he fell to flinging out—in short, jerky, broken sentences—as if each word were torn up by the roots from the very soil of his soul, stammered-references to Baptiste. He spoke as if he were talking to himself rather than to her. He kept repeating over and over again some muttered phrase about the bond of abnormal affection which existed between them. And then he suddenly burst out into a description of Baptiste. He rambled on for a long while upon this topic, leaving in the end only a very blurred impression upon his hearer’s mind. All, in fact, the girl was able to definitely
arrive
at from what he said was that Baptiste resembled his mother—a Frenchwoman of the coast of Brittany—and that he was tall and had dark blue eyes.

“With the longest lashes,” Sorio kept repeating, as if he were describing to her some one it was
important
she should remember, “that you, or any one else, has ever seen! They lie on his cheek when he’s asleep like—like—”

He fumbled with the feathery head of a reed he had picked as they were walking but seemed unable to find any suitable comparison. It was curious to see the shamefaced, embarrassed way he threw forth, one by
one, and as if each word caused him definite pain in the uttering, these allusions to his boy.

Philippa let him ramble on as he pleased, hardly
interrupting
him by a gesture, listening to him, in fact, as if she were listening to a person talking in his sleep. She learnt that it was only with the greatest difficulty that he had persuaded Baptiste to keep his position in New York and not fling everything up and follow him to London. She learnt that Baptiste had copied out with his own hand the larger portion of Sorio’s book and that now, as he completed each new chapter, he sent it by registered mail straight to the boy in “Eleventh Street.”

“It will explain my life, my whole life, that book,” Adrian muttered. “You’ve only heard a few of its ideas, Phil, only a few. The secret of things being found, not in the instinct of creation but in the instinct of destruction, is only the beginning of it. I go further—much further than that. Don’t laugh at me, Phil, if I just say this—only just this: I show in my book how what every living thing really aims at is to escape from itself, to escape from itself by the destruction of itself. Do you get the idea in that, Phil? Everything in the world is—how shall I put it?—these ideas are not easy, they tear at a person’s brain before they
become
clear!—everything in the world is on the edge, on the verge, of dissolving away into what people call nothingness. That is what Shakespeare had in his mind when he said, ‘the great globe itself, yea! all which it inherits, shall dissolve and—and—’ I forget exactly how it runs but it ends with ‘leave not a rack behind.’ But the point I make in my book is this. This ‘
nothingness
,’ this ‘death,’ if you like, to which everything
struggles is only a name for
what lies beyond life
—for what lies, I mean, beyond the extreme limit of the life of every individual thing. We shrink back from it,
everything
shrinks back from it, because it is the annihilation of all one’s familiar associations, the destruction of the impulse to go on being oneself! But though we shrink back from it, something in us, something that is deeper than ourselves pushes us on to this destruction. This is why, when people have been outraged in the very roots of their being, when they have been lacerated and flayed more than they can bear, when they have been, so to speak, raked through and combed out, they often fall back upon a soft delicious tide of deep large happiness, indescribable, beyond words.”

He was too absorbed in what he was saying to notice that as he made this remark his companion murmured a passionate assent.

“They do! They do! They do!” the girl
repeated
, with unrestrained emotion.

“That is why,” he continued without heeding her, “there is always a fierce pleasure in what fools call ‘cynicism.’ Cynicism is really the only philosophy worth calling a philosophy because it alone recognizes ‘that everything which exists ought to be destroyed.’ Those are the very words used by the devil in Faust, do you remember? And Goethe himself knew in his heart the truth of cynicism, only he loved life so well,—the great child that he was!—that he
couldn’t
endure the thought of destruction. He understood it though, and confessed it, too. Spinoza helped him to see it. Ah, Phil, my girl,
there
was a philosopher! The only one—the only one! And see how the rabble are afraid of Spinoza! See how they turn to the contemptible Hegel,
the grocer of philosophy, with his precious ‘self-
assertion
‘and ‘self-realization’! And there are some idiots who fail to see that Spinoza was a cynic, that he hated life and wished to destroy life. They pretend that he worshipped Nature. Nature! He denied the existence of it. He wished to annihilate it, and he did annihilate it, in his terrible logic. He worshipped only one thing, that which is beyond the limit, beyond the extremest verge, beyond the point where every living thing ceases to exist and
becomes nothing!
That’s what Spinoza worshipped and that’s what I worship, Phil. I worship the blinding white light which puts out all the candles and all the shadows in the world. It blinds you and ends you and so you call it darkness. But it only
begins
where darkness is destroyed with everything else! Darkness is like cruelty. It’s the opposite of love. But what I worship is as far beyond love as it is
beyond
the sun and all the shadows thrown by the sun!”

He paused and contemplated a nervous water-rat that was running along close to the water of the ditch they walked by, desperately searching for its hole.

“I call it white light,” he continued, “but really it’s not light at all, any more than it’s darkness. It’s
something
you can’t name, something unutterable, but it’s large and cool and deep and empty. Yes, it’s empty of everything that lives or makes a sound! It stops all aching in one’s head, Phil. It stops all the persecution of people who stare at you! It stops all the sickening tiredness of having to hate things. It’ll stop all my longing for Baptiste, for Baptiste is
there
. Baptiste is the angel of that large, cool, quiet place. Let me once destroy everything in the way and I get to
Baptiste
—and nothing can ever separate us again!”

He looked round at the grey monotony about them, streaked here and there by patches of autumnal yellow where the stubble fields intersected the fens.

“I prove that I’m right about this principle of
destruction
, Phil,” he went on, “by bringing up instances of the way all human beings instinctively delight to
overthrow
one another’s illusions and to fling doubt upon one another’s sincerity. We all do that. You do, Phil, more than any one. You do it to me. And you’re right in doing it. We’re all right in doing it! That accounts for the secret satisfaction we all feel when something or other breaks up the complacency of
another
person’s life. It accounts for the mad desire we have to destroy the complacency of our own life. What we’re seeking is
the line of escape
—that’s the phrase I use in my book. The line of escape from
ourselves
. That’s why we turn and turn and turn, like fish gasping on the land or like those beetles we saw just now, or like that water-rat!”

They had now reached the outskirts of Nance’s withy-bed. The path Sorio had come by deviated here sharply to the east, heading sea-wards, while another path, wider and more frequented, led on across the meadows to the bank of the Loon where the roof and chimneys of Dyke House were vaguely visible. The September twilight had already begun to fall and
objects
at any considerable distance showed dim and wraith-like. Damp mists, smelling of stagnant water, rose in long clammy waves out of the fens and moved in white ghostly procession along the bank of the river. Sorio stood at this parting of the ways and surveyed the shadowy outline of the distant tow-path and the yet more obscure form of Dyke House. He looked at the
stubble field and then at the little wood where the alder trees differentiated themselves from the willows by their darker and more melancholy foliage.