Rodmoor

by John Cowper Powys

  A faint flush appeared in Linda’s pale cheeks and a glimmer of hope in her eyes. “Do you think, possibly, that there’s any chance? Can there be any chance? But no, no, darling, I know there’s none—I know there’s none.”

  “What makes you so sure, Linda?” asked Nance, rapidly changing her dress, and as she did so pouring herself out a glass of milk.

  “It’s Philippa,” murmured the other in a low voice. “Oh, how I hate her! How I hate her!” she continued, in a sort of moaning refrain, twisting her long hair between her fingers and tying the ends of it into a little knot.

  “Well, I’m off, my dear,” cried Nance at length, finishing her glass of milk and adjusting her hat-pins. “I’m going straight to find him. I may pick up Adrian on the way, or I may not. It rather depends. And I may have a word or two with Philippa. The chances are that I shall overtake her if I go now. She can’t have waited much longer down by the river.”

  Linda rushed up to her and clasped her in her arms. “My own darling!” she murmured, “how good you are to me—how good you are! Do you know, I was afraid to tell you this—afraid that you’d be angry and ashamed and not speak to me for days. But, oh, Nance, I do love him so much! I love him more than my life—more than my life even now!”

  Nance kissed her tenderly. “Make yourself some tea, my darling, won’t you? We’ll have supper whenever I come back, and that’ll be—I hope—with good news for you! Good-bye, my sweetheart! Say your prayers for me, and don’t be frightened however late I am. And have a good tea!”

  She kissed her again, and with a final wave of the hand and an encouraging smile, she left the room and ran down the stairs. She walked slowly to the top of the street, her head bent, wondering in her mind whether she should ask Adrian to go with her to the Renshaws’ or whether she should go alone.

  The question was decided for her. As she emerged on the green she suddenly came upon Sorio himself, standing side by side with Philippa. They both turned quickly as, in the flare of a wind-blown lamp, they perceived her approach. They turned and awaited her without a word.

  Without a word, too—and in that slow dreamlike manner which human beings assume at certain crises in their lives, when fate like a palpable presence among them takes their movements into its own hand—they moved off, all three together, in the direction of the park gates. Not a word did any of them utter, till, having passed the gates, they were quite far advanced along that dark and lonely avenue.

  Then Philippa broke the silence. “I can say to her, Adrian, what I’ve just said to you—mayn’t I?”

  In the thick darkness, full of the heavy smell of rain-soaked leaves, Sorio walked between them. Nance’s hand was already resting upon his arm, and now, as she spoke, Philippa’s fingers searched for his, and took them in her own and held them feverishly.

  “You can say what you please, Phil,” he muttered, “but you’ll see what she answers—just what I told you just now.”

  Their tone of intimate association stabbed like a knife at the heart of Nance. A moment ago—in fact, ever since she had left her by the weir—she had been feeling less antagonistic and more pitiful towards her vanquished rival. But this pronoun “she” applied mutually by them to herself, seemed to push her back—back and away—outside the circle of some mysterious understanding between the two. Her heart hardened fiercely. Was this girl still possessed of some unknown menacing power?

  “What I asked Adrian,” said Philippa quietly, while the pressure of her burning fingers within the man’s hand indicated the strain of this quietness, “was whether you would be generous and noble enough to give him up to me for his last free day—the last day before you’re married. Would you be large-hearted enough for that?”

  “What do you mean—‘give him up’ to you?” murmured Nance.

  Philippa burst in a shrill unearthly laugh. “Oh, you needn’t be frightened!” she exclaimed. “You needn’t be jealous. I only mean let me go with him, for the whole day, a long walk—you know—or something like that—perhaps a row up the river. It doesn’t matter what, as long as I feel that that day is my day, my day with him—the last, and the longest!”

  She was silent, feverish, her fingers twining and twisting themselves round her companion’s, and her breath coming in quick gasps. Nance was silent also, and they all three moved forward through the heavy fragrant darkness.

  “You two seem to have settled it between yourselves definitely enough,” Nance remarked at last. “I don’t really see why you need bring me into it at all. Adrian is, of course, entirely free to do what he likes. I don’t see what I have to do with it!”

  Philippa’s hot fingers closed tightly upon Sorio’s as she received this rebuff. “You see!” she murmured in a tone that bit into Nance’s flesh like the tooth of an adder. “You see, Adriano!” She shrugged her shoulders and gave a low vindictive laugh. “She’s a thorough woman,” she added with stinging emphasis. “She’s what my mother would call a sweet, tender, sensitive girl. But we mustn’t expect too much from her, Adrian, must we? I mean in the way of generosity.”

  Nance withdrew her hand from the arm of her betrothed and they all three walked on in silence.

  “You see what you’re in for, my friend,” Philippa began again. “Once married it’ll be always like this. That is what you seem unable to realize. It’s a mistake, as I’ve often said, this mixing of classes.”

  Nance could no longer restrain herself. “May I ask what you mean by that last remark?” she whispered in a low voice.

  Philippa laughed lightly. “It doesn’t need much explanation,” she replied. “Adrian is, of course, of very ancient blood, and you—well, you betray yourself naturally by this lack of nobility, this common middle-class jealousy!”

  Nance turned fiercely upon them, and clutching Sorio’s arm spoke loudly and passionately. “And you—what are you, who, like a girl of the streets, are ready to pick up what you can of a man’s attentions and attract him with mere morbid physical attraction? You—what are you, who, as you say yourself, are ready to share a man with some one else? Do you call that a sign of good-breeding?”

  Philippa laughed again. “It’s a sign at any rate of being free from that stupid, stuffy, bourgeois respectability, which Adrian is going to get a taste of now! That very sneer of yours—’ a girl of the streets’—shows the class to which you belong, Nance Herrick! We don’t say those things. It’s what one hears among tradespeople.”

  Nance’s fingers almost hurt Sorio’s arms as she tightened her hold upon him. “It’s better than being what you are, Philippa Renshaw,” she burst out. “It’s better than deliberately helping your brother to ruin innocent young girls—yes, and taking pleasure in seeing him ruining them—and then taunting them cruelly in their shame, and holding him back from doing them justice! It’s better than that, Philippa Renshaw, though it may be what most simple-minded decent-hearted women feel. It’s better than being reduced by blind passion to have to come to another woman and beg her on your knees for a ‘last day’ as you call it! It’s better than that—though it may be what ordinary unintellectual people feel!”

  Philippa’s fingers grew suddenly numb and stiff in Sorio’s grasp. “Do you know,” she murmured, “you ‘decent-feeling’ woman—if that’s what you call yourself—that a couple of hours ago, when you left me on the river bank, I was within an ace of drowning myself? I suppose ‘decent-feeling’ women never run such a risk! They leave that to ‘street-girls ‘and—and—and to us others!”

  Nance turned to Sorio. “So she’s been telling you that she was thinking of drowning herself? I thought it was something of that kind! And I suppose you believed her. I suppose you always believe her!”

  “And he always believes you!” Philippa cried. “Yes, he’s always deceived—the easy fool—by your womanly sensitive ways and your touching refinement! It’s women like you, without intelligence and without imagination, who are the ruin of men of genius. A lot you care for his work! A lot you understand of
his thoughts! Oh, yes, you may get him, and cuddle him, and spoil him, but, when it comes to the point, what you are to him is a mere domestic drudge! And not only a drudge, you’re a drag, a burden, a dead-weight! A mere mass of ‘decent-feeling’ womanliness—weighing him down. He’ll never be able to write another line when once you’ve really got hold of him!”

  Nance had her answer to this. “I’d sooner he never did write another line,” she cried, “and remain in his sober senses, than be left to your influence, and be driven mad by you—you and your diseased, morbid, wicked imagination!”

  Their two voices, rising and falling in a lamentable litany of elemental antagonism—antagonism cruel as life and deeper than death—floated about Sorio’s head, in that perfumed darkness, like opposing streams of poison. It was only that he himself, harassed by long irritating debates with Baltazar, was too troubled, too obsessed by a thousand agitating doubts, to have the energy or the spirit to bring the thing to an end, or he could not have endured it up to this point. With his nerves shaken by Baltazar’s corrosive arts, and the weight of those rain-heavy trees and thick darkness all around him, he felt as if he were in some kind of trance, and were withheld by a paralysing interdict from lifting a finger. There came to him a sort of half-savage, half-humorous remembrance of a conversation he had once had with some one or other—his mind was too confused to recall the occasion—in which he had upheld the idealistic theory of the arrival of a day when sex jealousy would disappear from the earth.

  But as the girls continued to outrage each other’s most secret feelings, each unconsciously quickening her pace as she poured forth her taunts, and both dragging Sorio forward with them, the feeling grew upon him that he was watching some deep cosmic struggle, that was, in its way, as inhuman and elemental as a conflict between wind and water. With this idea lodged in his brain, he began to derive a certain wild and fantastic pleasure from the way they lacerated one another. There was no coxcombry in this. He was far too wrought-upon and shaken in his mind. But there was a certain grim exultant enjoyment, as if he were, at that moment, permitted a passing glimpse into some dark forbidden “cellarage” of Nature, where the primordial elements clash together in eternal conflict.

  Inspired by this strange mood, he returned the pressure of Philippa’s fingers, and entwined his arm round the trembling form of his betrothed, drawing both the girls closer towards him, and, in consequence, closer towards one another.

  They continued their merciless encounter, almost unconscious, it seemed, of the presence of the man who was the cause of it, and without strength left to resist the force with which he was gradually drawing them together.

  Suddenly the wind, which had dropped a little during the previous hour, rose again in a violent and furious gust. It tore at the dark branches above their heads and went moaning and wailing through the thickets on either side of them. Drops of rain, held in suspension by the thicker leaves, splashed suddenly upon their faces, and from the far distance, with a long-drawn ominous muttering, that seemed to come from some unknown region of flight and disaster, the sound of thunder came to their ears.

  Sorio dropped Philippa’s hand and embracing her tightly, drew her, too, closely towards him. Thus interlocked by the man’s arms, all three of them staggered forward together, lashed by the wind and surrounded by vague wood-noises that rose and fell mysteriously in the impenetrable darkness.

  The powers of the earth seemed let loose, and strange magnetic currents in fierce antipodal conflict, surged about them, and tugged and pulled at their hearts. The sound of the thunder, the wild noises of the night, the strange dark evocations of elemental hatred which at once divided and united his companions, surged through Sorio’s brain and filled him with a sort of intoxication.

  The three of them together might have been taken, had the clock of time been put back two thousand years, for some mad Dionysian worshippers following their god in a wild inhuman revel.

  Inspired at last by a sort of storm-frenzy, while the wind came wailing and shrieking down the avenue into their faces, Sorio suddenly stopped.

  “Come, you two little fools,” he cried, “let’s end this nonsense! Here—kiss one another! Kiss one another, and thank God that we’re alive and free and conscious, and not mere inert matter, like these dead drifting leaves!”

  As he spoke he stepped back a little, and with a swing of his powerful arms, brought both the girls face to face with one another. Nance struggled fiercely, and resisted with all her strength. Philippa, with a strange whispering laugh, remained passive in his hands.

  “Kiss one another!” he cried again. “Are you kissing or are you holding back? It’s too dark for me to see!”

  Philippa suddenly lost her passivity, slipped like a snake from under his encircling arms, and rushed away among the trees. “I leave her to you!” she called back to them out of the darkness. “I leave her to you! You won’t endure her long. And what will Baptiste do, Adriano?”

  This last word of hers calmed Sorio’s mood and threw him back upon his essential self. He sighed heavily.

  “Well, Nance,” he said, “shall we go back? It’s no use waiting for her. She’ll find her way to Oakguard. She knows every inch of these woods.” He sighed again, as if bidding farewell, in one fate-burdened moment, both to the woods and the girl who knew them.

  “You can go back if you like,” Nance answered curtly. “I’m going to speak to Brand”; and she told him in a brief sentence what she had learned from Linda.

  Sorio seized her hand and clutched it savagely. “Yes, yes,” he cried, “yes, yes, let’s go together. He must be taught a lesson—this Brand! Come, let’s go together!”

  They moved on rapidly and soon approached the end of the avenue and the entrance to the garden. As Sorio pushed open the iron gates, a sharp crack of thunder, followed by reverberating detonations, broke over their heads. The sudden flash that succeeded the sound brought into vivid relief the dark form of the house, while a long row of fading dahlias, drooping on their rain-soaked stems, stood forth in ghastly illumination.

  Nance had time to catch on Adrian’s face a look that gave her a premonition of danger. Had she not herself been wrought-up to an unnatural pitch of excitement by her contest with Philippa, she would probably have been warned in time and have drawn back, postponing her interview with Brand till she could have seen him alone. As it was, she felt herself driven forward by a force she could not resist. “Now—very now,” she must face her sister’s seducer.

  A light, burning behind heavy curtains, in one of the lower mullioned windows, enabled them to mount the steps. As she rang the bell, a second peal of thunder, but this time farther off, was followed by a vivid flash of lightning, throwing into relief the wide spaces of the park and the scattered groups of monumental oak trees. For some queer psychic reason, inexplicable to any material analysis, Nance at that moment saw clearly before her mind’s eye, a little church almanac, which Linda had pinned up above their dressing-table, and on this almanac she saw the date—the twenty-eighth of October—printed in Roman figures.

  To the servant who opened the door Nance gave their names, and asked whether they could see Mr. Renshaw. “Mr. Renshaw,” she added emphatically, “and please tell him it’s an urgent and important matter.”

  The man admitted them courteously and asked them to seat themselves in the entrance hall while he went to look for his master. He returned after a short time and ushered them into the library, where a moment later Brand joined them.

  During their moment of waiting, both in the hall and in the room, Sorio had remained taciturn and inert, sunk in a fit of melancholy brooding, his chin propped on the handle of his stick. He had refused to allow the servant to take out of his hands either his stick or his hat, and he still held them both, doggedly and gloomily, as he sat by Nance’s side opposite the carved fireplace.

  When Brand entered they both rose, but he motioned them to remain seated, and drawing up a chair for himself close by the side of
the hearth, looked gravely and intently into their faces.

  At that moment another rolling vibration of thunder reached them, but this time it seemed to come from very far away, perhaps from several miles out to sea.

  Brand’s opening words were accompanied by a fierce lashing of rain against the window, and a spluttering, hissing noise, as several heavy drops fell through the old-fashioned chimney upon the burning logs.

  “I think I can guess,” he said, “why you two have come to me. I am glad you have come, especially you, Miss Herrick, as it simplifies things a great deal. It has become necessary that you and I should have an explanation. I owe it to myself as well as to you. Bah! What nonsense I’m talking. It isn’t a case of ‘owing.’ It isn’t a case of ‘explaining.’ I can see that clearly enough”—he laughed a genial boyish laugh—“in your two faces! It’s a case of our own deciding, with all the issues of the future clearly in mind, what will be really best for your sister’s happiness.”

  “She has not sent—” began Nance hurriedly.

  “What you’ve got to understand—you Renshaw—” muttered Adrian, in a strange hoarse voice, clenching and unclenching his fingers.

  Brand interrupted them both. “Pardon me,” he cried, “you do not wish, I suppose, either of you, to cause any serious shock to my mother? It’s absurd of her, of course, and old-fashioned, and all that sort of thing; but it would actually kill her—” he lose as he spoke and uttered the words clearly and firmly. “It would actually kill her to get any hint of what we’re discussing now. So, if you’ve no objection, we’ll continue this discussion in the work-shop.” He moved towards the door.

  Sorio followed him with a rapid stride. “You must understand, Renshaw—” he began.

  “If it’ll hurt your mother so,” cried Nance hurriedly, “what must Linda be suffering? You didn’t think of this, Mr. Renshaw, when you—”

  Brand swung round on his heel. “You shall say all this to me, all that you wish to say—everything, do you hear, everything! Only it must and shall be where she cannot overhear us. Wait till we’re alone. We shall be alone in the work-shop.”