“To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes,Is delicate and rare—”
“To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes,Is delicate and rare—”
“To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes,
Is delicate and rare—”
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 sethimself, 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 biddingfarewell 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 byone, 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 everythingstruggles is only a name forwhat 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 hecouldn’tendure the thought of destruction. He understood it though, and confessed it, too. Spinoza helped him to see it. Ah, Phil, my girl,therewas 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 andbecomes 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 isthere. 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 isthe 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 thestubble field and then at the little wood where the alder trees differentiated themselves from the willows by their darker and more melancholy foliage.
“How frightening Dyke House looks from here,” remarked Philippa, “it looks like a haunted house.”
A sudden idea struck Sorio’s mind.
“Phil,” he said, letting go his companion’s hand and pointing with his stick to the house by the river, “you often tell me you’re afraid of nothing weird or supernatural. You often tell me you’re more like a boy in those things than a girl. Look here, now! You just run over to Dyke House and see how Rachel Doorm is getting on. I often think of her—alone in that place, now Nance and Linda have gone. I’ve been thinking of her especially to-day as we’ve come so near here. It’s impossible for me to go. It’s impossible for me to see any one. My nerves won’t stand it. But I must say I should be rather glad to know she hadn’t quite gone off her head. It isn’t very nice to think of her in that large house by herself, the house where her father died. Nance told me she feared she’d take to drink just as the old man did. Nance says it’s in the Doorm family, that sort of thing, drink or insanity, I mean—or both together, perhaps!” and he broke into a bitter laugh.
Philippa drew in her breath and looked at the white mist covering the river and at the ghostly outlines of the Doorm inheritance.
“You always say you’re like a boy,” repeated Sorio, throwing himself down where four months ago he had sat with Nance, “well, prove it then! Run over to Dyke House and give Rachel Doorm my love. I’ll wait for you here. I promise faithfully. You needn’t do more than just greet the old thing and wish her well.She loves all you Renshaws. She idealizes you.” And he laughed again.
Philippa regarded him silently. For one moment the old wicked flicker of subtle mockery seemed on the point of crossing her face. But it died instantly away and her eyes grew childish and wistful.
“I’m not a boy, I’m a woman,” she murmured in a low voice.
Sorio frowned. “Well, go, whatever you are,” he cried roughly. “You’re not tired, are you?” he added a little more gently.
She smiled at this. “All right, Adrian,” she said, “I’ll go. Give me one kiss first.”
She knelt down hurriedly and put her arms round his neck. Lying with his back against the trunk of an alder, he returned her caress in a perfunctory, absent-minded manner, precisely as if she were an importunate child.
“I love you! I love you!” she whispered and then leaping to her feet, “Good-bye!” she cried, “I’ll never forgive you if you desert me.”
She ran off, her slender figure moving through the growing twilight like a swaying birch tree half seen through mist. Sorio’s mind left her altogether. An immense yearning for his son took possession of him and he set himself to recall every precise incident of their separation. He saw himself standing at the side of the crowded liner. He saw the people waving and shouting from the wooden jetty of the great dock. He saw Baptiste, standing a little apart from the rest, motionless, not raising even a hand, paralyzed by the misery of his departure. He too was sick with misery then. He remembered the exact sensation of it and how he enviedthe sea-gulls who never knew these human sufferings and the gay people on the ship who seemed to have all they loved with them at their side.
“Oh, God,” he muttered to himself, “give me back my son and you may take everything—my book, my pride, my brain—everything! everything!”
Meanwhile Philippa was rapidly approaching Dyke House. A cold damp air met her as she drew near, rising with the white mists from off the surface of the river. She walked round the house and pushed open the little wooden gate. The face of desolation itself looked at her from that neglected garden. A few forlorn dahlias raised their troubled wine-dark heads from among strangling nettles and sickly plants of pallid-leaved spurge. Tangled raspberry canes and over-grown patches of garden-mint mingled with wild cranesbill and darnel. Grass was growing thickly on the gravel path and clumps of green damp moss clung to the stone-work of the entrance. The windows, as she approached the house, stared at her like eyes—eyes that have lost the power to close their lids. There were no blinds down and no curtains drawn but all the windows were dark. No smoke issued from the chimney and not a flicker of light came from any portion of the place. Silent and cold and hushed, it might have been only waiting for her appearance to sink like an apparition into the misty earth. With a beating heart the girl ascended the steps and rang the bell. The sound clanged horribly through the empty passages. There was a faint hardly perceptible stir, such as one might imagine being made by the fall of disturbed dust or the rustle of loose paper, but that was all. Dead unbroken silence flowed back upon everything like the flow ofwater round a submerged wreck. There was not even the ticking of a clock to break the stillness. It was more than the mere absence of any sound, that silence which held the Doorm house. It was silence such as possesses an individuality of its own. It took on, as Philippa waited there, the shadowy and wavering outlines of a palpable shape. The silence greeted the girl and welcomed her and begged her to enter and let it embrace her. In a kind of panic Philippa seized the handle of the door and shook it violently. More to her terror than reassurance it opened and a cold wave of air, colder even than the mist of the river, struck her in the face. She advanced slowly, her hand pressed against her heart and a sense as if something was drumming in her ears.
The parlour door was wide open. She entered the room. A handful of dead flowers—wild flowers of some kind but they were too withered to be distinguishable—hung dry and sapless over the edge of a vase of rank-smelling water. Otherwise the table was bare and the room in order. She came out again and went into the kitchen. Here the presence of more homely and unsentimental objects relieved a little the tension of her nerves. But the place was absolutely empty—save for an imprisoned tortoise-shell butterfly that was beating itself languidly, as if it had done the same thing for days, against the pane.
Mindful of Sorio’s habit and with even the faint ghost of a smile, she opened the window and set the thing free. It was a relief to smell the river-smell that came in as she did this. She moved out of the kitchen and once more stood breathless, listening intently in the silent hall-way. It was growing rapidly darker; she longedto rush from the place and return to Sorio but some indescribable power, stronger than her own will, retained her. Suddenly she uttered a little involuntary cry. Struck by a light gust of wind, the front door which she had left open, swung slowly towards her and closed with a vibrating shock. She ran to the back and opened the door which led to the yard. Here she was genuinely relieved to catch the sound of a sleepy rustling in the little wood-shed and to see through its dusty window a white blur of feathers. There were fowls alive anyway about Dyke House. That, at least, was some satisfaction. Propping the door open by means of an iron scraper she returned to the hall-way and looked apprehensively at the staircase. Dared she ascend to the rooms above? Dared she enter Rachel Doorm’s bedroom? She moved to the foot of the staircase and laid her hand upon the balustrade. A dim flicker of waning light came in through the door she had propped open and fell upon the heavy chairs which stood in the hall and upon a fantastic picture representing the eruption of Vesuvius. The old-fashioned colouring of this print was now darkened, but she could see the outlines of the mountain and its rolling smoke. Once again she listened. Not a sound! She took a few steps up the stairs and paused. Then a few more and paused again. Then with her hands tightly clenched and a cold shivering sensation making her feel sick and dizzy, she ran up the remainder and stood weak and exhausted, leaning against the pillar of the balustrade and gazing with startled eyes at a half-open door.
It is extraordinary the power of the dead over the living! Philippa knew that in that room, behind that door, was the thing that had once called itself a womanand had talked and laughed and eaten and drunk with other women. When Rachel Doorm was about the age she herself had now reached and she was a little child, she could remember how she had built sand-castles for her by the sea-shore and sang to her old Rodmoor songs about drowned sailors and sea-kings and lost children. And now she knew—as surely as if her hand was laid upon her cold forehead—that behind that door, probably in some ghastly attitude of eternal listening, the corpse of all that, of all those memories and many more that she knew nothing of, was waiting to be found, to be found and have her eyes shut and her jaw bandaged—and be prepared for her coffin. The girl gripped tight hold of the balustrade. The terror that took possession of her then was not that Rachel Doorm should be dead—dead and so close to her, but that she shouldnotbe dead!
At that moment, could she have brought herself to push that door wide open and pass in, it would have been much more awful, much more shocking, to find Rachel Doorm alive and see her rise to meet her and hear her speak! After all, what did it matter if the body of the woman was twisted and contorted in some frightful manner—orstandingperhaps—Rachel Doorm was just the one to die standing!—or if her face were staring up from the floor? What did it matter, supposing shedidgo straight in and feel about in the darkness and perhaps lay her hand upon the dead woman’s mouth? What did it matter even if shedidsee her hanging, in the faint light of the window, from a hook above the curtain with her head bent queerly to one side and a lock of her hair falling loose? None of these things mattered. None of them prevented her going straightinto that room! What did prevent her and what sent her fleeing down the stairs and out of the house with a sudden scream of intolerable terror was the fact that at that moment, quite definitely, there came the sound ofbreathingfrom the room she was looking at. A simple thing, a natural thing, for an old woman to retire to her bedroom early and to lie, perhaps with all her clothes on, upon her bed, to rest for a while before undressing. A simple and a natural thing! But the fact remains as has just been stated, when the sound of breathing came from that room Philippa screamed and ran panic-stricken out into the night. She hardly stopped running, indeed, till she reached the willow copse and found Sorio where she had left him. He did not resist now when breathlessly she implored him to accompany her back to the house. They walked hurriedly there together, Adrian in spite of a certain apprehension smiling in the darkness at his companion’s certainty that Rachel Doorm was dead and her equal certainty that she had heard her breathing.
“But I understand your feeling, Phil,” he said. “I understand it perfectly. I used to have the same sensation at night in a certain great garden in the Campagna—the fear of meeting the boy I used to play with before Iexpectedto meet him! I used to call out to him and beg him to answer me so as to make sure.”
Philippa refused to enter the house again and waited for him outside by the garden gate. He was long in coming, so long that she was seized with the strangest thoughts. But he came at last, carrying a lantern in his hand.
“You’re right, Phil,” he said, “the gods have takenher. She’s stone-dead. And what’s more, she’s been dead a long time, several weeks, I should think.”
“But the breathing, Adrian, the breathing? I heard it distinctly.”
Sorio put down his lantern and leant against the gate. In spite of his calm demeanor she could see that he also had experienced something over and above the finding of Rachel’s body.
“Yes,” he said, “and you were right about that, too. Guess, child, what it was!”
And as he spoke he put his hand against the front of his coat which was tightly buttoned up. Philippa was immediately conscious of the same stertorous noise that she had heard in the room of death.
“An animal!” she cried.
“An owl,” he answered, “a young owl. It must have fallen from a nest in the roof. I won’t show it to you now, as it might escape and a cat might get it. I’m going to try and rear it if Tassar will let me. Baptiste will be so amused when he finds me with a pet owl! He has quite a mania for things like that. He can make the birds in the park come to him by whistling. Well! I suppose what we must do now is to get back to Rodmoor as quick as we can and report this business to the police. She must have been dead a week or more! I’m afraid this will be a great shock to Nance.”
“How did you find her?” enquired the girl as they walked along the road towards the New Bridge.
“Don’t ask me, Phil—don’t ask me,” he replied, “She’s out of her troubles anyway and had an owl to look after her.”
“Should I have been—” began his companion.
“Don’t ask me, girl!” he reiterated. “I tell you it’sall past and over. Rachel Doorm will be buried in the Rodmoor churchyard and I shall have her owl. An old woman stops breathing and an owl begins breathing. It’s all natural enough.”
The funeral of Rachel Doorm was a dark and troubled day for both Nance and Linda. Even the sympathy of Mr. Traherne seemed unable to console them or lift the settled gloom from their minds. Nance especially was struck dumb with comfortless depression. She felt doubly guilty in the matter. Guilty in her original acquiescence in the woman’s desire to have them with her in Rodmoor and guilty in her neglect of her during the last weeks of her life. For the immediate cause of her death, or of the desperation that led to it, their leaving Dyke House for the village, she did not feel any remorse. That was inevitable after what had occurred. But this did not lessen her responsibility in the other two cases. Had she resolutely refused to leave London the probability was that Rachel would have been persuaded to go on living with them as she had formerly done. She might even have sold Dyke House and with the proceeds bought some cottage in the city suburbs for them all. It was her own ill-fated passion for Sorio, she recognized that clearly enough, that was the cause of all the disasters that had befallen them.
Linda’s feeling with regard to Rachel’s death was quite different. She had to confess in the depths of her heart that she was glad of it, glad to be relieved of the constant presence of something menacing and vindictiveon the outskirts of her life. Her trouble was of a more morbid and abnormal kind, was, indeed, the fact that in spite of the woman’s death, shehadn’treally got rid of Rachel Doorm. The night before the funeral she dreamed of her almost continually, dreamed that she herself was a child again and that Rachel had threatened her with some unknown and mysterious punishment. The night after the funeral it was still worse. She woke Nance by a fit of wild and desperate crying and when the elder girl tried to discover the nature of her trouble she grew taciturn and reserved and refused to say anything in explanation. All the following week she went about her occupations with an air of abstraction and remoteness as if her real life were being lived on another plane. Nance learnt from Mr. Traherne, who was doing all he could think of to keep her attention fixed on her organ-playing, that as a matter of fact she frequently came out of the church after a few minutes’ practise and went and stood, for long periods together, by Rachel’s grave. The priest confessed that on one of the occasions when he had surprised her in this posture, she had turned upon him quite savagely and had addressed him in a tone completely different from her ordinary one.
It was especially dreadful to Nance to feel she was thrust out and alienated in some mysterious way from her sister’s confidence.
One morning towards the end of September, when they were dressing together in the hazy autumnal light and listening to the cries of sea-gulls coming up from the harbour, Nance caught upon her sister’s face, as the girl’s eyes met one another in their common mirror, that same inscrutable look that she had seen upon itfive months before when, in their room at Dyke House they had first become acquainted with the eternal iteration of the North Sea’s waves. Nance tried in vain all the remainder of that day to think out some clue to what that look implied. It haunted her and tantalized her. Linda had always possessed something a little pleading and sad in her eyes. It was no doubt the presence of that clinging wistfulness in them which had from the first attracted Brand. But this look contained in it something different. It suggested to Nance, though she dismissed the comparison as quite inadequate almost as soon as she had made it, the cry of a soul that was beingpulled backwardsinto some interior darkness yet uttering all the while a desperate prayer to be let alone as if the least interference with what destiny was doing would be the cause of yet greater peril.
The following night as she lay awake watching a filmy trail of vaporous clouds sail across a wasted haggard moon, a moon that seemed to betray as that bright orb seldom does the fact that it was a corpse-world hung there with almost sacrilegious and indecent exposure, under the watchful stars, she noticed with dismay the white-robed figure of her sister rise from her bed and step lightly across the room to the open window. Nance watched her with breathless alarm. Was she awake or asleep? She leant out of the window, her long hair falling heavily to one side. Nance fancied she heard her muttering something but the noise of the sea, for the tide was high then in the early morning hours, prevented her catching the words. Nance threw off the bed-clothes and stole noiselessly towards her. Yes, certainly she was speaking. The words came in a low, plaintive murmur as if she were pleading withsome one out there in the misty night. Nance crept gently up to her and listened, afraid to touch her lest she should cause her some dangerous nervous shock but anxious to be as close to her as she could.
“I am good now,” she heard her say, “I am good now, Rachel. You can let me out now! I will say those words, I am good now. I won’t disobey you again.”
There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of the Sea and the beating of Nance’s heart. Then once more, the voice rose.
“It’s down too deep, Rachel, you can’t reach it with that. But I’ll go in. I’m not afraid any more! If only you’ll let me out. I’ll go in deep—deep—and get it for you. She can’t hold it tight. The water is too strong. Oh, I’ll be good, Rachel. I’ll get it for you if only you’ll let me out!”
Nance, unable to endure any more of this, put her arms gently round her sister’s body and drew her back into the room. The young girl did not resist. With wide-open but utterly unconscious eyes she let herself be led across the room. Only when she was close to her bed she held back and her body became rigid.
“Don’t put me in there again, Rachel. Anything but that!”
“Darling!” cried Nance desperately, “don’t you know me? I’m with you, dear. This is Nance with you. No one shall hurt you!”
The young girl shuddered and looked at her with a bewildered and troubled gaze as if everything were vague and obscure. At that moment there came over Nance that appalling terror of the unconscious, of thesub-humanwhich is one of the especial dangers of thosewho have to look after the insane or follow the movements of somnambulists. But the shudder passed and the bewildered look was superseded by one of gradual obliviousness. The girl’s body relaxed and she swayed as she stood. Nance, with a violent effort, lifted her in her arms and laid her down on the bed. The girl muttered something and turned over on her side. Nance watched her anxiously but she was soon relieved to catch the sound of her quiet breathing. She was asleep peacefully now. She looked so pathetically lovely, lying there in a childish position of absolute abandonment that Nance could not resist bending over her and lightly kissing her cheek.
“Poor darling!” she said to herself, “how blind I’ve been! How wickedly blind I’ve been!” She pulled the blanket from her own bed and threw it over her sister so as not to disturb her by altering the bed-clothes. Then, wrapping herself in her dressing-gown she lay back upon her pillows resigned for the rest of the night to remaining wakeful.
The next day she noticed no difference in Linda’s mood. There was the same abstraction, the same listless lack of interest in anything about her and worst of all that same inscrutable look which filled Nance with every sort of wild imagination. She cast about in despair for some way of breaking the evil spell under which the girl was pining. She went again and again to see Mr. Traherne and the good man devoted hours of his time to discussing the matter with her but nothing either of them could think of seemed a possible solution.
At last one morning, some days after that terrifying night, she met Dr. Raughty in the street. She walkedwith him as far as the bridge explaining to him as best she could her apprehensions about her sister and asking him for his advice. Dr. Raughty was quite definite and unhesitating.
“What Linda wants is a mother,” he said laconically. Nance stared at him.
“Yes, I know,” she said. “I know well enough, poor darling! But that’s the worst of it, Fingal. Her mother’s been dead years and years and years.”
“There are other mothers in Rodmoor, aren’t there?” he remarked.
Nance frowned. “You think I don’t look after her properly,” she murmured. “No, I suppose I haven’t. And yet I’ve tried to—I’ve tried my very best.”
“You’re as hopeless as your Adrian with his owl,” cried the Doctor. “He was feeding it with cake the other day. Cake! He’d better not bring his owl and our friend’s rat together. There won’t be much of the rat left. Cake!” And the Doctor put back his head and uttered an immense gargantuan laugh. Nance looked a little disturbed and even a little indignant at his merriment.
“What do you mean byothermothers?” she asked. They had just reached the bridge and Dr. Raughty bade her look over the parapet.
“What exquisite bellies those dace have!” he remarked, snuffing the air as he spoke. “There’ll be rain before night. Do you feel it? I know from the way those fish rise. The sea too, it has a different voice—has that ever caught your attention?—when there’s rain on the wind. Those dace are shrewd fellows. They’re after the bits of garbage the sea-gulls drop on their way up the river. You might think they wereafter flies, but they’re not. I suppose George Crabbe or George Borrow would switch ’em out with some bait such as was never dreamed of—the droppings of rabbits perhaps or ladybird grubs. I suppose old Doctor Johnson would wade in up to his knees and try and scoop ’em up in his hands. There’s a big one! Do you see? The one waving his tail and turning sideways. I expect he weighs half a pound or more. Fish are beautiful things, especially dace. Isn’t it wonderful to think that if you pulled any of those things backwards through the water they would be drowned, simply by the rush of water through their gills? Look, Nance, at that one! What a silver belly! What a delicate, exquisite tail! A plague on these fellows who philander with owls and rats! Give me fish—if you want to make a cult of something.” He lowered his voice to a whisper, “I should think Lubric de Lauziere must have kept a pet fish in his round pond!”
“Good-bye, Fingal,” said Nance, holding out her hand.
“What! Well! Where! God help us! What’s wrong, Nance? You’re not annoyed with me, are you? Do you think I’m talking through my hat? Not at all! I’m leading up to it. A mother—that’s what she wants. She wants it just as those dace want the water to flow in their faces and not backwards through their gills. She’s being dragged backwards—that’s what’s the matter with her. She wants her natural element and it must flow in the right direction.Youwon’t do. Traherne won’t do. A mother is the thing! A woman, Nance, who has borne children has certain instincts in dealing with young girls which make the wisest physicians in the world look small!”
Nance smiled helplessly at him.
“But, Fingal, dear,” she said, “what can I do? I can’t appeal to Mrs. Raps, can I—or your friend Mrs. Sodderley? When you come to think, there are very few mothers in Rodmoor!”
The Doctor sighed. “I know it,” he observed mournfully, “I know it. The place will die out altogether in fifty years. It’s as bad as the sand-dunes with their sterile flora. Women who bear children are the only really sane people in the world.”
He ran his thumb, as he spoke, backwards and forwards over a little patch of vividly green moss that grew between the stones of the parapet. The air, crisp and autumnal with that vague scent of burning weeds in it which more than anything else suggests the outskirts of a small town at the end of the summer, flowed round them both with a mute appeal to her, so it seemed to Nance, to let all things drift as they might and submit to destiny. She looked at the Doctor dreamily in one of those queer intermissions of human consciousness in which we stand apart, as it were, from our own fate and listen to the flowing of the eternal tide.
A small poplar tree growing at the village end of the bridge had already lost some of its leaves and a few of these came drifting, one by one, along the raised stone pathway to the girl’s feet. Over the misty marsh lands in the other direction, she could see the low tower of the church. The gilded weather-vane on the top of it shimmered and glittered in a vaporous stream of sunlight that seemed to touch nothing else.
Dreamily she looked at the Doctor, too weary of the struggle of life to make an effort to leave him and yet quite hopeless as to his power to help her. FingalRaughty continued to discourse upon the instinctive wisdom of maternity.
“Women who’ve had children,” he went on, “are the only people in the world who possess the open secret. They know what it is to find the ultimate virtue in exquisite resignation. They do not only submit to fate—they joyfully embrace it. I suppose we might maintain that they even ‘love it’—though I confess that that idea of ‘loving’ fate has always seemed to me weird and fantastic. But I laugh, and so do you, I expect, when our friends Sorio and Tassar talk in their absurd way about women. What do they know of women? They’ve only met, in all their lives (forgive me, Nance!) a parcel of silly young girls. They’ve no right to speak of life at all, the depraved children that they are! They are outside life, they’re ignorant of the essential mystery. Goethe was the fellow to understand these things, and you know the namehegives to the unutterable secret?The Mothers.That’s a good name, isn’t it? The Mothers! Listen, Nance! All the people in this place suffer from astigmatism and asymmetry. Those are the outward signs of their mental departure from the normal. And the clever ones among them are proud of it. You know the way they talk! They think abnormality is the only kind of beauty. Nance, my dear, to tell you the truth, I’m sick of them all.Myidea of beauty is the perfect masculine type, such as you see it in that figure they call ‘the Theseus’—in the Elgin marbles—or the perfect feminine type as you see it in the great Demeter. Do you suppose they can, any of them, get round that? Do you suppose they can fight against the rhythm of Nature?”
He pulled out his tobacco pouch and gravely lit his pipe, swinging his head backwards and forwards as he did so. Nance could not help noticing the shrewd, humorousanimalismof his look as he performed this function.
“But what can be done? Oh, Fingal, whatcanbe done about Linda?” she asked with a heavy sigh.
He settled his pipe in his mouth and blew violently down its stem, causing a cloud of smoke to go up into the September air.
“Take her to Mrs. Renshaw,” he said solemnly. “That’s what I’ve been thinking all this time. That’s my conclusion. Take her to Mrs. Renshaw.”
Nance stared at him. “Really?” she murmured, “you really thinkshecould help?”
“Try it—try it—try it!” cried Dr. Raughty, flinging a bit of moss at the fish in the water below them.
“It’s extraordinary,” he added, “that these dace should come down so far as this! The water here must be almost entirely salt.”
That afternoon Nance went to Mr. Traherne’s vesper service. She found Mrs. Renshaw in the church and invited both her and the priest to come back with them to their lodgings. She did this under the pretense of showing them some new designs of a startling and fascinating kind that she had received from Paris. The circean witcheries of French costumery were not perhaps precisely the right attraction either for Mrs. Renshaw or Hamish Traherne, but the thing served well enough as an excuse and they both took it as such. She was careful to hurry on in advance with Mr. Traherne so as to make it inevitable that Linda should walkwith Mrs. Renshaw. The mistress of Oakguard seemed unusually pale and tired that afternoon. She held Linda back in the churchyard until the others had got quite far and then she led her straight to Rachel Doorm’s grave. They had buried the unhappy woman quite close to the outermost border of the priest’s garden. Nothing but a few paces of level grass separated her from a row of tall crimson hollyhocks. The grave at present lacked any headstone. Only a bunch of Michaelmas daisies, placed there by Linda herself, stood at its foot in a glass jar. Several wasps were buzzing round this jar, probably conscious of some faint odour clinging still about it from what it had formerly contained. Mrs. Renshaw stood with her hand leaning heavily on Linda’s shoulder. She seemed to know, from the depths of her own fathomless morbidity, precisely what the young girl was feeling.
“Shall we kneel down?” she said. Linda began trembling a little but with simple and girlish docility, free from any kind of embarrassment, she knelt at the other’s side.
“We mustn’t pray for the dead,” whispered Mrs. Renshaw. “He,” she meant Mr. Traherne, “tells us to in his sermons, but it hurts me when he does for we’ve been taught that all that is wrong—wrong and contrary to our simple faith! We mustn’t forget the Martyrs—must we, Linda?”
But Linda’s mind was far from the martyrs. It was occupied entirely with the thing that lay buried before them, under that newly disturbed earth.
“But we can pray to God that His will be done, on earth, even as it is in Heaven,” murmured Mrs. Renshaw.
She was silent after that and the younger and the elder woman knelt side by side with bowed heads. Then in a low whisper Mrs. Renshaw spoke again.
“There are some lines I should like to say to you, dear, if you’ll let me. I copied them out last week. They were at the end of a book of poetry that I found in Philippa’s room. She must have just bought it or had it given to her. I didn’t think she cared any more for poetry. The pages weren’t cut and I didn’t like to cut them without her leave but I copied this out from the end. It was the last in the book.”
She hesitated a moment while Linda remained motionless at her side, trembling still a little and watching the movements of a Peacock butterfly which was then sharing with the wasps their interest in the ancient honey-jar.
Mrs. Renshaw then repeated the following lines in a clear exquisitely modulated voice which went drifting away over the surrounding marshes.