Rodmoor

by John Cowper Powys

  Quite quietly, quite calmly, he gathered together all the forces of his nature to accomplish this one end. His hatred rose to the level of a passion. He vowed that nothing should make him pause, no scruple, no obstacle, until he saw that beaten look in Nance’s face. Like all dominant obsessions, like all great lusts, his purpose associated itself with a clear concrete image, the image of the girl’s expression when at last, face to face with him, she knew herself broken, helpless and at his mercy.

  He walked swiftly down the High Street, crossed the open space by the harbour and made his way to the edge of the waves. Surely that malignant tide would put some triumphant idea into his brain. The sea—the sterile, unharvested sea—had from the beginning of the world, been the enemy of woman! Warden of the Fishes! He laughed as he thought of Sorio’s assuming such a title.

  “Not yet, my friend—not quite yet!” he murmured, gazing across the stormy expanse of water. Warden of the Fishes! With a strong, sweet, affectionate wife to look after him? “No, no, Adriano!” he cried hoarsely, “we haven’t come to that yet—we haven’t come to that quite yet!”

  By some complicated, psychological process he seemed to be aware, as he stared at the foaming sea-horses, of the head of his mute friend Flambard floating, amid the mist of his own woman-like hair, in the green hollows of the surf. He found himself vaguely wondering what he—the super-subtle Venetian—would have done had he been “fooled to the top of his bent” by a girl like Nance—had he been betrayed in his soul’s deepest passion. And all at once it came over him, not distinctly and vividly but obscurely and remotely as if through a cloudy vapour from a long way off, from far down the vistas of time itself, what Flambard would have done.

  He stooped and picked up a long leather-like thong of wet, slippery seaweed and caressed it with his hands. At that moment there passed through him a most curious sensation—the sensation that he had himself—he and not Flambard—stood just in this way but by a different sea, ages, centuries ago—and had arrived at the same conclusion. The sensation vanished quickly enough and with it the image of Flambard, but the idea of what remained for him to do still hovered like a cloud at the back of his mind. He did not drag it forth from its hiding place. He never definitely accepted it. The thing was so dark and hideous, belonging so entirely to an age when “passional crimes” were more common and more remorseless than at the present, that even Baltazar with all the frozen malice of his hate scrupled to visualize it in the daylight. But he did not drive it away. He permitted it to work upon him and dominate him. It was as though some “other Baltazar” from a past as remote as Flambard’s own and perhaps far remoter—had risen up within him in answer to that cry to the inhuman waters. The actual working of his mind was very complicated and involved at that moment. There were moments of wavering—moments of drawing back into the margin of uncertainty. But these moments grew constantly less and less effective. Beyond everything else that definite image of Nance’s grey eyes, full of infinite misery, confessing her defeat, and even pleading with him for mercy, drove these wavering moments away. It was worth it, any horror was worth it, to satiate his revenge by the sight of what her expression would be as he looked into her face then. And, after all, the thing he projected would in any case, come about sooner or later. It was on its way. The destinies called for it. The nature of life demanded it. The elements conspired to bring it about. The man’s own fatality was already with a kind of vehemence, rushing headlong—under the fall of these Autumn rains and the drifting of these Autumn leaves—to meet it and embrace it! All he would have to do himself would be just to give the wheel of fate the least little push, the least vibration of an impulse forward, with his lightest finger!

  Perhaps, as far as his friend was concerned, he would really, in this way, be saving him in the larger issue. Were Adrian’s mind, for instance, to break down now at once, rendering it necessary that he should be put, as they say in that appalling phrase, “under restraint,” it might as a matter of fact, save his brain from ultimate and final disaster. It is true that this aspect of what he projected was too fantastic, too ironically distorted, to be dwelt upon clearly or logically but it came and went like a shadowy bird hovering about a floating carcass, round the outskirts of his unspeakable intention. What he reverted to more articulately, as he made his way back across the littered sand-heaps to the entrance of the harbour, was the idea that, after all, he would only be precipitating an inevitable crisis. His friend was already on the verge of an attack of monomania, if not of actual insanity. Sooner or later the thing must come to a definite climax. Why not anticipate events, then, and let the climax occur when it would save him from this intolerable folly—worse than madness—of giving himself up to his feminine pursuer? As he made his way once more through the crowded little street, the fixed and final impression all these thoughts left upon his mind was the impression of Nance Herrick’s face, pale, vanquished and helpless, staring up at him from the ground beneath his feet.

  XXIV

  THE TWENTY-EIGHTH OF OCTOBER

  BALTAZAR was not long in carrying out what, in bitter self-colloquy, he called his Flambardian campaign. He deliberately absented himself from his work in the Mundham office and gave up all his time to Sorio. He now encouraged this latter in all his most dangerous manias, constantly leading the conversation round to what he knew were exciting and agitating topics and bringing him back again and again to especial points of irritation and annoyance.

  The days quickly passed, however, and Adrian, though in a strange and restless mood, had still, in no public manner, given evidence of insanity, and short, of course, of some such public manifestation, his treacherous friend’s plan of having him put under restraint, fell to the ground.

  Meanwhile, Nance’s preparations for her marriage and for their entrance into their new home advanced towards completion. It was within three days of the date decided upon for their wedding when Nance, who had had less time recently at her disposal for watching her sister’s moods, came suddenly to the conclusion, as, on a wild and stormy afternoon, she led her home from the church, that something was seriously wrong. At first, as they left the churchyard and began making their way towards the bridge, she thought the gloom of the evening was a sufficient reason for Linda’s despairing spairing silence, but as they advanced, with the wind beating in their faces and the roar of the sea coming to them over the dunes, she came to the conclusion that the cause lay deeper.

  But that night—it was the twenty-eighth of October—was certainly desolate enough to be the cause of any human being’s depression. The sun was sinking as the sisters started for their walk home. A blood-red streak, jagged and livid, like the mutilated back of some bleeding monster, lay low down over the fens. The wind wailed in the poplars, whistled through the reeds, and sighed in long melancholy gasps like the sobbing of some unhappy earth-spirit across the dykes and the ditches. One by one a few flickering lamps appeared among the houses of the town as the girls drew near the river, but the long wavering lines of light thrown by these across the meadows only increased the general gloom.

  “Don’t let’s cross at once,” said Linda suddenly, when they reached the bridge. “Let’s walk along the bank—just a little way! I feel excited and queer to-night. I’ve been in the church so long. Please let’s stay out a little.”

  Nance thought it better to agree to the child’s caprice; though the river-bank at that particular hour was dark with a strange melancholy. They left the road and walked slowly along the tow-path in the direction away from the town. A group of cattle standing huddled together near the path, rushed off into the middle of the field.

  The waters of the Loon were high—the tide flowing seaward—and here and there from the windows of some scattered houses on the opposite bank, faint lights were reflected upon the river’s surface. A strong smell of seaweed and brackish mud came up to them from the dark stream.

  “What secrets,” said Linda suddenly, “this old Loon could tell, if it could speak! I
call it a haunted river.”

  Nance’s only reply to this was to pull her sister’s cloak more tightly round her shoulders.

  “I don’t mean in the sense of having drowned so many people,” Linda went on, “I mean in the sense of being half-human itself.”

  The words were hardly out of her mouth when a slender dusky figure that had been leaning against the edge of one of the numerous weirs that connect the river-tides with the streams of the water-meadows, came suddenly towards them and revealed herself as Philippa Renshaw.

  Both the girls drew back in instinctive alarm. Nance was the first to recover.

  “So you too are out to-night,” she said. “Linda got so tired of practising, so we—”

  Philippa interrupted her: “Since we have met, Nance Herrick, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t talk a little. Or do you think the people about here would find that an absurd thing for us to do, as we’re both in love with the same man, and you’re going to marry him?”

  She uttered these words so calmly and in so strange a voice that Nance for the moment was too startled to reply. She recovered herself quickly, however, and taking Linda by the arm, made as if she would pass her by, without further speech. But Philippa refused to permit this. With the slow dramatic movement always characteristic of her, she stepped into the middle of the path and stopped them. Linda, at this, hung back, trying to draw her sister away.

  The two women faced one another in breathless silence. It was too dark for them to discern more than the vaguest outlines of each other’s features, but they were each conscious of the extreme tension, which, like a wave of magnetic force, at once united and divided them. Nance was the first to break the spell.

  “I’m surprised,” she said, “to hear you speak of love. I thought you considered all that sort of thing sentimental and idiotic.”

  Philippa’s hand went up in a quick and desperate gesture, almost an imploring one.

  “Miss Herrick,” she whispered in a very low and very clear tone, “you needn’t do that. You needn’t say those things. You needn’t hurt me more than is necessary.”

  “Come away, Nance. Oh, please come away and leave her!” interjected Linda.

  “Miss Herrick, listen to me one moment!” Philippa continued, speaking so low as almost to be inaudible. “I have something to ask of you, something that you can do for me. It isn’t very much. It isn’t anything that you need suspect. It is a little thing. It’s nothing you could possibly mind.”

  “Don’t listen to her, Nance,” cried Linda again. “Don’t listen to her.”

  Philippa’s voice trembled as she went on, “I beg you, I beg you on my knees to hear me. We two may never meet again after this. Nance Herrick, will you, will you let me speak?”

  Linda leapt forward. She was shaking from head to foot with fear and anger. “No,” she cried, “she shall not listen to you. She shall not, she shall not.”

  Nance hesitated, weary and sick at heart. She had so hoped and prayed that all these lacerating contests were over and done with.

  Finally she said, “I think you must see, you must feel, that between you and me there can be nothing—nothing more—nothing further. I think you’ll be wise, I think you’ll recognize it afterwards, to let me go now, to let me go and leave us alone.” As she spoke she drew away from her and put her arm round Linda’s waist. “In any case,” she added, “I can’t possibly hear you before this child. Perhaps, but I can’t promise anything, but perhaps, some other day, when I’m by myself.”

  She gave one sad, half-sympathetic, half-reproachful glance, at the frail shadowy figure standing mute and silent; and then turning quickly, let herself be led away.

  Linda swung round when they were some few paces away. “She’ll never listen to you!” She called out, in a shrill vibrating voice, “I won’t ever let her listen to you.”

  The growing darkness, made thicker by the rivermists, closed in between them, and in a brief while their very footsteps ceased to be heard. Philippa was left alone. She looked round her. On the fen side of the pathway there was nothing but a thick fluctuating shadow, out of which the forms of a few pollard-willows rose like panic-stricken ghosts. On the river itself there shimmered at intervals a faint whitish gleam as if some lingering relics of the vanished day, slow in their drowning, struggled to rise to the surface.

  She moved back again to the place where she had been standing at the edge of the weir. Leaning upon the time-worn plank rotten with autumn rains, she gazed down into the dense blackness beneath. Nothing could be seen but darkness. She might have been looking down into some unfathomable pit, leading to the caverns of the mid-earth.

  A deathly cold wave of damp air met her face as she leaned over the plank, and a hollow gurgling roar, from the heavy volume of water swirling in the darkness, rose to her ears. She could smell the unseen water; and the smell of it was like the smell of dead black leaves plucked forth from a rain pool in the heart of a forest.

  As she leaned forward with her soft breast pressing against the wooden bar and her long slender fingers clutching its edge, a sinister line of poetry, picked up somewhere—she could not recall where—came into her mind, and she found her lips mechanically echoing it. “Like a wolf, sucked under a weir,” the line ran, and over and over again she repeated those words.

  Meanwhile Nance, as they returned across the bridge, did her best to soothe and quiet her sister. The sudden appearance of Philippa seemed to have thrown the girl into a paroxysm of frenzy. “Oh, how I hate her!” she kept crying out, “oh, how I loathe and hate her!”

  Nance was perplexed and bewildered by Linda’s mood. Never had she known the girl to give way to feelings of this sort. When at last she got her into their house, and had seen her take off her things and begin tidying herself up for their evening meal quite in her accustomed way, she asked her point-blank what was the matter, and why to-day, on this twenty-eighth of October, she had suddenly grown different from her ordinary self.

  Linda, standing with bare arms by the mirror and passing a comb through her heavy hair, turned almost fiercely round.

  “Do you want to know? Do you really want to know?” she cried, throwing back her head and holding the hair back with her hands. “It’s because of Philippa that he has deserted me! It’s because of Philippa that he hasn’t seen me nor spoken to me for a whole month! It’s because of Philippa that he won’t answer my letters and won’t meet me anywhere! It’s because of Philippa that now—now when I most want him”—and she threw the comb down and flung herself on her bed—“he refuses to come to me or to speak a word.”

  “How do you know it’s because of Philippa?” Nance asked, distressed beyond words to find that in spite of all her efforts Linda was still as obsessed by Brand as ever before.

  “I know from him,” the girl replied. “You needn’t ask me any more. She’s got power over him, and she uses it against me. If it wasn’t for her he’d have married me before now.” She sat up on the edge of her bed and looked woefully at her sister with large sunken eyes. “Yes,” she went on, “if it wasn’t for her he’d marry me now—to-day—and, oh, Nance, I want him so! I want him so!”

  Nance felt an oppressive weight of miserable helplessness in the presence of this heart-stricken cry. As she looked round the room and saw her various preparations for leaving it and for securing the happiness of her own love, she felt as though in some subtle way she had once more betrayed the unhappy child. She knew herself, only too well, what that famished and starving longing is—that cry of the flesh and blood, and the heart and the spirit, for what the eternal destinies have put out of our reach!

  And she could do nothing to help her. What could she do? Now for the first time in her life, as she looked at that lamentable youthful figure, dumbly pleading with her for some kind of miracle, Nance was conscious of a vague unformulated indignation against the whole system of things that rendered this sort of suffering possible. If only she were a powerful and a tender deity, how she would hast
en to end this whole business of sex-life which made existence so intolerable! Why could not people be born into the world like trees or plants? And being born, why could not love instinctively create the answering passion it craved, and not be left to beat itself against cruel walls, after scorching itself in the irresistible flame?

  “Nance!” said the young girl suddenly. “Nance! Come here. Come over to me. I want to tell you something.”

  The elder sister obeyed. It was not long—for hard though it may be to break silence, these things are quickly spoken—before she knew the worst. Linda, with her arms clutched tightly round her, and her face hidden, confessed that she was with child.

  Nance leapt to her feet. “I’ll go to him,” she cried, “I’ll go to him at once! Of course he must marry you now. He must! He must! I’ll go to him. I’ll go to Hamish. I’ll go to Adrian—to Fingal! He must marry you, Linda. Don’t cry, little one. I’ll make it all right. It shall be all right! I’ll go to him this very evening.”