Mrs. Renshaw smiled as Nance rose from her long scrutiny of this weird plant, a plant that might be imagined “rooting itself at ease on Lethe’s wharf” while the ghost-troops swept by, whimpering and wailing.
“I always like the horned poppy,” she remarked, “it’s different from other flowers. You can’t imagine it growing in a garden, can you? I like that. I like things that are wild—things no one can imprison.”
She sighed heavily when she had said this and, turning her head away as they walked on, looked wearily across the water.
“Bank-holidays are days for the young,” she went on, after a pause. “The poor people look forward to them and I’m glad they do for they have a hard life. But you must have a young heart, Nance, a young heart to enjoy these things. I feel sometimes that we don’t live enough in other people’s happiness but it’s hard to do it when one gets older.”
She was silent again and then, as Nance glanced at her sympathetically, “I like Rodmoor because there are no grand people here and no motor-cars or noisy festivities. It’s a pleasure to see the poor enjoying themselves but the others, they make my head ache! They trouble me. I always think of Sodom and Gomorrah when I see them.”
“I suppose,” murmured the girl, “that they’re human beings and have their feelings, like the rest of us.”
A shadow of almost malignant bitterness crossed Mrs. Renshaw’s face.
“I can’t bear them! I can’t bear them!” she cried fiercely. “Those that laugh shall weep,” she added, looking at her companion’s prettily designed dress.
“Yes, I’m afraid happy people are often hard-hearted,” remarked Nance, anxious if possible to fall in with the other’s mood, but feeling decidedly uneasy. Mrs. Renshaw suddenly changed the conversation.
“I went over to see Rachel,” she said, “because I heard you had left her and were working in the shop.”
She took a deep breath and her voice trembled.
“I think it was wrong of you to leave her,” she went on, “I think it was cruel of you. I know what you will say. I know what all you young people nowadays say about being independent and so forth. But it was wrong all the same, wrong and cruel! Your duty was clearly to your mother’s friend. I suppose,” she added bitterly, “you didn’t like her sadness and loneliness. You wanted more cheerful companionship.”
Nance wondered in her heart whether Mrs. Renshaw’s hostility to the complacent and contented ones of the earth was directed, in this case, against the hard-worked sewing girls or against poor Miss Pontifex and her little garden.
“I did it,” she replied, “for Linda’s sake. She and Miss Doorm didn’t seem happy together.”
As she spoke, she glanced apprehensively round to ascertain how near the others were, but it seemed as though Rachel had resumed her ascendency over the young girl. They appeared to be engaged in absorbing conversation and had stopped side by side, looking at the sea. Mrs. Renshaw turned upon her resentfully, a smouldering fire of anger in her brown eyes.
“Rachel has spoken to me about that,” she said. “She told me you were displeased with her because she encouraged Linda to meet my son. I don’t like this interference with the feelings of people! My son is of an age to choose for himself and so is your sister. Why should you set yourself to come between them? I don’t like such meddling. It’s interfering with Nature!”
Nance stared at her blankly, watching mechanically the feverish way her fingers closed and unclosed, plucking at a stalk of sea-lavender which she had picked.
“But you said—you said—” she protested feebly, “that Mr. Renshaw was not a suitable companion for young girls.”
“I’ve changed my mind since then,” continued the other, “at any rate in this case.”
“Why?” asked Nance hurriedly. “Why have you?”
“Because,” and the lady raised her voice quite loudly, “because he told me himself the other day that it was possible that he would marry before long.”
She glanced triumphantly at Nance. “So you see what you’ve been doing! You’ve been trying to interfere with the one thing I’ve been praying for for years!”
Nance positively gasped at this. Had Brand really said such a thing? Or if he had, was it possible that it was anything but a blind to cover the tracks of his selfishness? But whatever was the reason of the son’s remark it was clear that Nance could not, especially in the woman’s present mood, justify her dark suspicions of him to his mother. So she did nothing but continue to stare, nervously and helplessly, at the stalk which Mrs. Renshaw’s excited fingers were pulling to pieces.
“I know why you’re so opposed to my son,” continued Mrs. Renshaw in a lower and somewhat gentler tone. “It’s because he’s so much older than your sister. But you’re wrong there, Nance. It’s always better for the man to be older than the woman. Tennyson says that very thing, in one of his poems, I think in ‘The Princess.’ He puts it poetically of course, but he must have felt the truth of it very strongly or he wouldn’t have brought it in. Nance, you’ve no idea how I have been praying and longing for Brand to see some one he felt he could marry! I know it’s what he needs to make him happy. That is to say, of course, if the girl is good and gentle and obedient.”
The use of the word “obedient” in this connection was too much for Nance’s nerves. Her feelings towards Mrs. Renshaw were always undergoing rapid and contradictory changes. When she had talked of Smollett and Dickens in their little sitting room the girl felt she could do anything for her, so exquisitely guileless her soul seemed, so spiritual and, as it were, transparent. But at this moment, as she observed her, there was an obstinate, pinched look about her face and a rigid tightening of all its lines. It was an expression that harmonized only too well with her next remark.
“Your setting yourself against my son,” she said, “is only what I expected. Philippa would be just like you if I said anything to her. All you young people are too much for me. You are too much for me. But I hear what you say and go on just the same.”
The look of dogged and inflexible resolution with which she uttered this last sentence contrasted strangely with her frail aspect and her weary drooping frame.
But that phrase about “obedience” still rankled in Nance’s mind, and she could not help saying, “Why is it, Mrs. Renshaw, that you always speak as though all the duty and burden of marriage rested upon the woman? I don’t see why it’s more necessary for her to be good and gentle than it is for the man!”
Her companion’s pallid lips quivered at this into a smile of complicated irony and a strange light came into her hollow eyes.
“Ah, my dear, my dear!” she exclaimed, “you are indeed young yet. When you’re a few years older and have come to know better what the world is like, you will understand the truth of what I say. God has ordered, in his inscrutable wisdom, that there should be a different right and wrong for us women, from what there is for men. It may seem unjust. It may be unjust. We can no more alter it or change it than we can alter or change the shape of our bodies. A woman is made to obey. She finds her happiness in obeying. You young people may say what you please, but any deviation from this rule is contrary to Nature. Even the cleverest people,” she added with a smile, “can’t interfere with Nature without suffering for it.”
Nance felt absolutely nonplussed. The woman’s words fell from her with such force and were uttered with such a melancholy air of finality, that her indignation died down within her like a flame beneath the weight of a rain-soaked garment. Mrs. Renshaw looked sadly over the brightly-rocking expanse of sunlit water, dotted with white sails.
“It may appear to us unjust,” she went on. “It may be unjust. God does not seem in his infinite pleasure to have considered our ideas of justice in making the world. Perhaps if he had there would be no women in the world at all! Ah, Nance, my dear, it’s no use kicking against the pricks. We were made to bear, to endure, to submit, to suffer. Any attempt to escape this great law necessarily ends in misery. Suffering is not the worst evil in the world. Yielding to brutal force is not the worst, either. I sometimes think, from what I’ve observed in my life, that there are depths of horror known to men, depths of horror through which men are driven, compared with which all that we suffer at their hands is paradise!”
Her eyes had so strange and illumined an expression as she uttered these words that Nance could not help shuddering.
“We, too,” she murmured, “fall into depths of horror sometimes and it is men who drive us into them.”
Mrs. Renshaw did not seem to hear her. She went on dreamily.
“We can console ourselves. We have our duties. We have our little things which must be done. God has given to these little things a peculiar consecration. He has touched them with his breath so that they are full of unexpected consolations. There are horizons and vistas in them such as no one who hasn’t experienced what I mean can possibly imagine. They are like tiny ferns or flowers—our ‘little things,’ Nance, growing at the bottom of a precipice.”
The girl could restrain herself no longer.
“I don’t agree with you! I don’t, I don’t!” she cried. “Life is large and infinite and splendid and there are possibilities in it for all of us—for women just as much as men; just, just as much!”
Mrs. Renshaw smiled at her with a look in her face that was half pitiful and half ironical. “You don’t like my talk of ‘little things.’ You want great things. You want Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus! Even your sacrifice—if you do sacrifice yourself—must be striking, stirring, wonderful! Ah, my dear, my dear, wait a little, wait a little. A time will come when you’ll learn what the secret is of a woman’s life on this earth.”
Nance made a desperate gesture of protest. Something treacherous in her own heart seemed to yield to her companion’s words but she struggled vigorously against it.
“What we women have to do,” Mrs. Renshaw continued pitilessly, “is to make some one need us—need us with his whole nature. That is what is meant by loving a man. Everything else is mere passion and tends to misery. The more submissive we are, the more they need us. I tell you, Nance, the deepest instinct in our blood is the instinct to be needed. When a person needs us we love him. Everything else is mere animal instinct and burns itself out.”
Nance fumbled vaguely and helplessly in her mind, as she listened, to get back something of the high, inspiring tone of Mr. Traherne’s mystical doctrine. That had thrilled her and strengthened her, while this flung her into the lowest depths of despondency. Yet, in a certain sense, as she was compelled to admit to herself, there was very little practical difference between the two points of view. It was only that, with Mrs. Renshaw, the whole thing took on a certain desolate and disastrous colour as if high spirits and gaiety and adventurousness were wrong in themselves and as if nothing but what was pitched in a low unhappy key could possibly be the truth of the universe. The girl had a curious feeling, all the while she was speaking, that in some subtle way the unfortunate woman was deriving a morbid pleasure from putting thrilling and exalted things upon a ground that annihilated the emotion of heroism.
“Shall we go down to the sea now, dear?” said Mrs. Renshaw suddenly. “The others will see us and follow.”
They moved together across the clinging sand. When they approached the water’s edge, now deserted of holiday-makers, Nance searched the skyline for any sail that might be the one carrying Sorio and his friends. She made out two or three against the blue distance but it was quite impossible to tell which of these, if any, was the one that bore the man who, according to her companion’s words, would only “need” her if she served him like a slave.
Mrs. Renshaw began picking up shells from the debris-scattered windrow at the edge of the wet tide-mark. As she did this and showed them one by one to Nance, her face once more assumed that clear, transparent look, spiritual beyond description and touched with a childish happiness, which the girl had noticed upon it when she spoke of the books she loved. Could it be that only where religion or the opposite sex were concerned this strange being was diseased and perverted? If so, how dreadful, how cruel, that the two things which were to most people the very mainspring of life were to this unhappy one the deepest causes of wretchedness! Yet Nance was far from satisfied with her reading of the mystery of Mrs. Renshaw. There was something in the woman, in spite of her almost savage outbursts of self-revelation, so aloof, so proud, so reserved that the girl felt only vaguely assured she was on the right track with regard to her. Perhaps, after all, below that tone of self-humiliating sentiment with which she habitually spoke of both God and man, there was some deep and passionate current of feeling, hidden from all the world? Or was she, essentially and in secret truth, cold and hard and pagan and only forcing herself to drink the cup of what she conceived to be Christianity out of a species of half-insane pride? In all her utterances with regard to religion and sex there was, Nance felt, a kind of heavy materiality, as if she got an evil satisfaction in rendering what is usually called “goodness” as colourless and contemptible as possible. But now as she picked up a trumpet-shaped shell from the line of debris and held it up, her eyes liquid with pleasure, to the girl’s view, Nance could not resist the impression that she was in some strange way a creature forced and driven out of her natural element into these obscure perversities.
“I used to paint these shells when I was a girl,” Mrs. Renshaw remarked.
“What colour?” Nance answered, still thinking more of the woman than of her words. Her companion looked at her and burst into quite a merry laugh.
“I don’t mean paint the shell itself,” she said. “You’re not listening to me, Nance. I mean copy it, of course, and paint the drawing. I used to collect sea-weeds too, in those days, and dry them in a book. I have that book somewhere still,” she added, wistfully, “but I don’t know where.”
She had won the girl’s attention completely now. Nance seemed to visualize with a sudden sting of infinite pity the various little relics so entirely dissociated from Rodmoor and its inhabitants which this reserved woman must keep stored up in that gloomy house.
“It’s a funny thing,” Mrs. Renshaw went on, “but I can smell at this moment quite distinctly (I suppose it’s being down here by the sea that makes it come to me) the very scent of that book! The pages used to get stuck together and when I pulled them apart there was always the imprint of the seaweed on the paper. I used to like to see that. It was as though Nature had drawn it.”
“It’s lovely, collecting things,” Nance remarked sympathetically. “I used to collect butterflies when I was a child. Dad used to say I was more like a boy than a girl.”
Mrs. Renshaw glanced at her with a curious look.
“Nance, dear,” she said in a low, trembling voice, “don’t ever get into the habit of trying to be boyish and that sort of thing. Don’t ever do that! The only good women are the women who accept God’s will and bow to his pleasure. Anything else leads to untold wretchedness.”
Nance made no reply to this and they both began searching for more shells among the stranded sea-drift.
Over their heads the sea-gulls whirled with wild disturbed screams. There was only one sail on the horizon now and Nance fixed her thoughts upon it and an immense longing for Adrian surged up in her heart.
Meanwhile, between Linda and Miss Doorm a conversation much more sinister was proceeding. Rachel seemed from their first encounter and as soon as the girl came into contact with her to reassert all her old mastery. She deliberately overcame the frightened child’s instinctive movement to keep pace with the others and held her closely to her side as if by the power of some ancient link between them, too strong to be overcome.
“Let me look at you,” she said as soon as their friends were out of hearing. “Let me look into your eyes, my pretty one!”
She laid one of her gaunt hands on the girl’s shoulder and with the other held up her chin.
“Yes,” she remarked after a long scrutiny during which Linda seemed petrified into a sort of dumb submission, “yes, I can see you’ve struggled against him. I can see you’ve not given up without an effort. That means that you have given up! If you hadn’t fought against him he wouldn’t have followed you. He’s like that. He always was like that.” She removed her hands but kept her eyes fixed gloomily on the girl’s face. “I expect you’re wishing now you’d never seen this place, eh? Aren’t you wishing that? So this is the end of all your selfishness and your vanity? Yes, it’s the end, Linda Herrick. It’s the end.”
She dragged the girl slowly forward along the path. On their right as they advanced, the sun flickered upon the rank grasses which grew intermittently in the soft sand and on their left the glittering sea lay calm and serene under the spacious sky.
Linda felt her feet grow heavy beneath her and her heart sank with a sick misgiving as she saw how far they had permitted the others to outstrip them. Beyond anything else it was the power of cruel memories which held the young girl now so docile, so helpless, in the other’s hands. The old panic-stricken terror which Rachel had the power of exciting in her when a child seemed ineluctable in its endurance. Faintly and feebly in her heart Linda struggled against this spell. She longed to shake herself free and rush desperately in pursuit of the others but her limbs seemed turned to lead and her will seemed paralyzed.
Rachel’s face was white and haggard. She seemed animated by some frenzied impulse—some inward, demoniac force which drove her on. Drops of perspiration stood out upon her forehead and made the grey hair that fell across it moist and clammy under the rim of her dusty black hat. Her clothes, as she held the girl close to her side, threw upon the air a musty, fetid odour.
“Where are your soft ways now?” she went on, “your little clinging ways, your touching little babyish ways? Where are your whims and your fancies? Your caprices and your blushes? Where are your white-faced pretences, and your sham terrors, only put on to make you look sweet?”
She had her hand upon the girl’s arm as she spoke and she tightened her grasp, almost shaking her in her mad malignity.
“Before you were born your mother was afraid of me,” she went on. “Oh, she gained little by cutting me out with her pretty looks! She gained little, Linda Herrick! She dared scarcely look me in the face in those days. She was afraid even to hate me. That is why you are what you are. You’re the child of her terror, Linda Herrick, the child of her terror!”
She paused for a moment while the girl’s breath came in gasps through her white lips as if under the burden of an incubus.
“Listen!” the woman hissed at last, staggering a little and actually leaning against the girl as though the frenzy of her malignity deprived her of her strength. “Listen, Linda. Do you remember what I used to tell you about your father? How in his heart all the time he loved only me? How he would sooner have got rid of your mother than have got rid of me? Do you remember that? Listen, then! There’s something else I must say to you—something that you’ve never guessed, something that you couldn’t guess. When you were—” she stopped, panting heavily and if Linda had not mechanically assisted her she would have fallen. “When you were—when I was—” Her breath seemed to fail her then completely. She put her hand to her side and in spite of the girl’s feeble effort to support her she sank, moaning, to the ground.
Linda looked helplessly round. Nance and Mrs. Renshaw had passed beyond a little promontory of sand-hills and were concealed from view. She knelt down by Rachel’s side. Even then—even when those vindictive dark eyes looked at her without a sign of consciousness, they seemed to hold her with their power. As they remained mute and motionless in this manner, the prostrate woman and the kneeling girl, a faint gust of wind, blowing the sand in a little cloud before it and rustling the leaves of the horned poppies, brought to Linda’s senses an odour of inland fields. She felt a dim return, under this air, of her normal faculties and taking one of the woman’s hands in her own she began gently chafing it. Rachel answered to the touch and a shiver passed through her frame. Then, in a flash, intelligence came back into her eyes and her lips moved. Linda bent lower so as to catch her words. They came brokenly, and in feeble gasps.
“I loved him so, I loved him more than my life. He took my life and killed it. He killed my heart. He brought me those beads from far across the sea. They were for me—not for her. He brought them for me, I tell you. I gave him my heart for them and he killed it. He killed it and buried it. This isn’t Rachel’s heart any more. No! No! It isn’t Rachel’s. Rachel’s heart has gone with him—with the Captain—over great wide seas. He got it—out of me—when—he—kissed my mouth.”
Her voice died away in inarticulate mutterings. Then once more her words grew human and clear.
“My heart went with him long ago, after that, over the sea. It was in all his ships. It was in every ship he sailed in—over far-off seas. And in place of my heart—something else—something else—came and lived in Rachel. It is this that—that—” The intelligence once more faded out of her eyes and she lay stiff and motionless. Linda had a sudden thought that she was dead and, with the thought, her fear of her rolled away. Looking at her now, lying there, in her black dress and crumpled bonnet, she seemed to see her as she was, a mad, wretched, passion-scorched human being. It crossed the young girl’s mind how inconceivable it was that this haggard image of desolation had once been young and soft-limbed, had once danced out on summer mornings to meet the sun as any other child! But even as this thought came to her, Rachel stirred and moved again. Her eyes had a dazed expression now—a clouded, sullen, hopeless expression. Slowly and with laborious effort, refusing Linda’s assistance, she rose to her feet.
“Go and call them,” she said in a low voice. “Go and call them. Tell Mrs. Renshaw that I’m ill—that she must take me home. You won’t be troubled with me much longer—not much longer! But you won’t forget me. Brand will see to that! No, you won’t forget me, Linda Herrick.”
The girl ran off without looking back. When the three of them returned, Rachel Doorm seemed to have quite resumed her normal taciturnity.
They walked back, all four together, to the harbour mouth. The sisters helped the two women into the little cart and untied the pony. As they clattered away over the cobble-stones, Nance received from Mrs. Renshaw a smile of gratitude, a smile of such illumined and spiritual gaiety that it rendered the pale face which it lit up beautiful with the beauty of some ancient picture.
When the pony-cart had disappeared, Nance and Linda sat down together on the wooden bench watching the white sail upon the horizon and talking of Rachel Doorm.
Most of the holiday-makers had now retired to their tea and a fresh breeze, coming in with the turn of the tide, blew pleasantly upon the girls’ foreheads and ruffled the soft hair under their daintily beribboned hats. Nance, holding in her fingers the trumpet-shaped shell, found herself suddenly wondering—perhaps because the shape of the shell reminded her of it—whether Linda had left that ominous fir-cone behind her in her room or whether at the last moment she had again slipped it into her dress. She glanced sideways at her sister’s girlish bosom, scarcely stirring now as with her head turned she looked at the full-brimmed tide, and she wondered if, under that white and pink frock so coquettishly open at the throat, there were any newly created blood-stains from the rasping impact of that rough-edged trophy of the satyr-haunted woods of Oakguard.
The afternoon light was so beautiful upon the water at that moment and the cries of the circling sea-gulls so full of an elemental callousness that the elder girl experienced a sort of fierce reaction against the whole weight of this intolerable sex-passion that was spoiling both their lives. Something hard, free and reckless seemed to rise up within her, in defiance of every sort of feminine sentiment and, hardly thinking what she did or of the effect of her words, “Quick, my dear,” she cried suddenly, “give me that fir-cone you’ve got under your dress!”
Linda’s hands rose at once and she clutched at her bosom, but her sister was too quick for her and too strong. Nance’s feeling at that moment was as if she were plucking a snake away. Rising to her feet when she had secured the trophy, she lifted up her arm and, with a fierce swing of her whole body, flung both it and the shell she had herself been holding far into the centre-current of the inflowing tide.
“So much for Love!” she cried fiercely.
The shell sank at once to the bottom but the fir-cone floated. For a moment, when she saw Linda’s dismay, she felt a pang of remorse. But she crushed it fiercely down. Behind her whole mood at that moment was a savage reaction from Mrs. Renshaw’s emotional perversity.
“Come!” she cried, snatching at her sister’s hand as Linda wavered on the wharf-brink and watched the fir-cone drift behind an anchored barge and disappear. “Come! Let’s go back and help Miss Pontifex water her garden. Then we’ll have tea and then we’ll go for a row if it isn’t too dark! Perhaps Dr. Raughty will be home by then and we’ll make him take us.”
She was so resolute and so dominant that Linda could do nothing but meekly submit to her. Strangely enough she, too, felt a certain rebound of youthful vivacity now she was conscious no longer of the rough wood-token pressing against her flesh. She also, after what she had heard from the lips of Rachel, experienced a reaction against the sorrow of “what men call love.” Their mood continued unaltered until they reached the gate of the dressmaker’s garden.
“Then it’s Dr. Raughty—not Adrian,” the younger girl remarked with a smile, “that we’re to have to row us to-night?”
Nance looked quickly back at her and made an effort to smile too. But the sight of the flower-beds and the carefully tended box-hedges of the little garden, had been associated too long and too deeply with the pain at her heart. Her smile died away from her face and it was in silence after all and still bowed, for all their brave revolt under the burden of their humanity, that the two girls set themselves to water, as the August sun went down into the fens, the heavily-scented phloxes and sweet lavender of the admirable Miss Pontifex. That little lady was herself at that moment staring demurely, under the escort of a broad-shouldered nephew from London, at a stirring representation of “East Lynne” in a picture show in Mundham!
XIX
LISTENERS
August, now it had once come, proved hotter than was usual in that windy East Anglian district. Before the month was half over the harvest had begun and the wheat fields by the river bank stood bare and stubbly round their shocks of corn. Twined with the wheat stalks and fading now, since their support had been cut away, were all those bright and brilliant field flowers which Nance had watched with so tender an emotion in their yet unbudded state from her haunt by the willow bed. Fumitory and persicaria, succory and corn cockles, blent together in those fragrant holocausts with bindweed and hawkweed. At the edges of the fields the second brood of scarlet poppies still lingered on like thin streaks of spilt red blood round the scalps of closely cropped heads. In the marshy places and by the dykes and ditches the newly grown rush spears were now feathery and high, overtopping their own dead of the year before and gradually hiding them from sight. The last of all the season’s flowers, the lavender-coloured Michaelmas daisies alone refused to anticipate their normal flowering. But even these, in several portions of the salt marshes, were already high-grown and only waiting the hot month’s departure to put forth their autumnal blossoms. In the dusty corners of Rodmoor yards and in the littered outskirts of Mundham, where there were several gravel-quarries, camomile and feverfew—those pungent children of the late summer, lovers of rubbish heaps and deserted cow sheds—trailed their delicate foliage and friendly flowers. In the wayside hedges, wound-wort was giving place to the yellow spikes of the flower called “archangel,” while those “buds of marjoram,” appealed to in so wistful and so bitter a strain by the poet of the Sonnets, were superseding the wild basil. The hot white dust of the road between Rodmoor and Mundham rose in clouds under the wheels of every kind of vehicle and, as it rose, it swept in spiral columns across that grassy expanse which, in accordance with the old liberal custom of East Anglian road-makers, separated the highway on both sides from the enclosing hedges. With the sound of the corn-cutting machine humming drowsily all day and, in the twilight, with the shouts and cries of the children as their spirits rose with the appearance of the moths and bats, there mingled steadily, day in and day out, the monotonous splash of the waves on Rodmoor beach.
To those in the vicinity, whom Nature or some ill-usage of destiny had made morbidly sensitive to that particular sound, there was perhaps something harder to bear in its placid reiterated rhythm under these halcyon influences than when, in rougher weather, it broke into fury. The sound grew in intensity as it diminished in volume and with the beat, beat, beat, of its eternal refrain, sharpened and brought nearer in the silence of the hot August noons there came to such nervously sensitive ears as were on the alert to receive it, an increasingly disturbing resemblance to the sistole and diastole, the inbreathing and outbreathing of some huge, half-human heart.
Among the various persons in Rodmoor from whom the greater and more beneficent gods seemed turning away their faces and leaving them a prey to the lesser and more vindictive powers, it is probable that not one felt so conscious of this note of insane repetition, almost bestial in its blind persistence, as did Philippa Renshaw. Philippa, in those early August weeks, became more and more aloof from both her mother and Brand. She met Sorio once or twice but that was rather by chance than by design and the encounters were not happy for either of them. Insomnia grew upon her and her practise of roaming at night beneath the trees of the park grew with it. Brand often followed her on these nocturnal wanderings but only once was he successful in persuading her to return with him to the house. In proportion as she drew away from him he seemed to crave her society.
One night, after Mrs. Renshaw had retired to bed, the brother and sister lingered on in the darkened library. It was a peculiarly sultry evening and a heavy veil of mist obscured the young crescent moon. Through the open windows came hot gusts of air, ruffling the curtains and making the candle flames flicker. Brand rose and blew out all the lights except one which he placed on a remote table below the staring dark-visaged portrait, painted some fifty years before, of Herman Renshaw, their father. The other pictures that hung in the spaces between the book-shelves were now reduced to a shadowy and ghostly obscurity, an obscurity well adapted to the faded and melancholy lineaments of these older, but apparently no happier, Renshaws of Oakguard. Round the candle he had left alight a little group of agitated moths hovered and at intervals as one or other of them got singed it would dash itself with wild blind flutterings, into the remotest corners of the room. From the darkness outside came an occasional rustle of leaves and sighing of branches as the gusts of hot air rose and died away. The oppressive heat was like the burden of a huge, palpable hand laid upon the roof of the house. Now and again some startled creature pursued by owl or weasel uttered a panic-stricken cry, but whether its enemy seized upon it, or whether it escaped, the eyes of the darkness alone knew. Its cry came suddenly and stopped suddenly and the steady beat of the rhythm of the night went on as before.
Brand flung himself down in a low chair and his sister balanced herself on the arm of it, a lighted cigarette between her mocking lips. Hovering thus in the shadow above him, her flexible form swaying like a phantom created out of mist, she might have been taken for the embodiment of some perverse vision, some dream avatar from the vices of the dead past.
“After all,” Brand murmured in a low voice, a voice that sounded as though his thoughts were taking shape independently of his conscious will, “after all, what do I want with Linda or any of them since I’ve got you?”
She made a mocking inclination of her head at this but kept silence, only letting her eyes cling, with a strange light in them, to his disturbed face. After a pause he spoke again.
“And yet she suits me better than any one—better than I expected it was possible for a girl like that to suit me. She’ll never get over her fear of me and that means she’ll never get over her love. I ought to be contented with that, oughtn’t I?”
He paused again and still Philippa uttered no word. “I don’t think you quite understand,” he went on, “all that there is between her and me. We touch one another in the depths, there’s no doubt about that, and our boat takes us where there are no soundings, none at least that I’ve ever made! We touch one another where that noise—oh, damn the wind! I don’t mean the wind!—is absolutely still. Have you ever reached a point when you’ve got that noise out of your ears? No—you know very well you haven’t! You were born hearing it—just as I was—and you’ll die hearing it. But with her, just because she’s so afraid, so madly afraid—do you understand?—I have reached that point. I reached it the other night when we were together. Yes! You may smile—you little devil—but it’s quite true. She put it clear out of my head just as if she’d driven the tide back!”
He stared at the cloud of faint blue smoke that floated up round his sister’s white face and then he met her eyes again.
“Bah!” he flung out angrily. “What absurd nonsense it all is! We’ve been living too long in this place, we Renshaws, that’s what’s the matter with us! We ought to sell the confounded house and clear out altogether! I will too, when mother dies. Yes, I will—brewery or no brewery—and go off with Tassar to one of his foreign places. I’ll sell the whole thing, the land and the business! It’s begun to get on my nerves. It must have got on my nerves, mustn’t it, when that simple break, break, break, as mother’s absurd poem says of this damned sea, sounds to me like the beating heart of something, of something whose heart ought to be stopped from beating!”
His voice which had risen to a loud pitch of excitement died away in a sort of apologetic murmur.
“Sorry,” he muttered, “only don’t look at me like that, you girl. There, clear off and sit further away! It’s that look of yours that makes me talk in this silly fashion. God help us! I don’t blame that foreign fellow for getting queer in his head. You’ve got something in those eyes of yours, Philippa, that no living girl ought to be allowed to have! Bah! You’ve made me talk like an absolute fool.”
Instead of moving away as she had been bidden, Philippa touched her brother with a light caress. Never had she looked so entirely a creature of the old perverse civilizations as she looked at that moment.
“Mother thinks you’re going to marry that girl,” she whispered, “but I know better than that, and I’m always right in these things, am I not, Brand darling?”
He fell back under her touch and the shadowy lines of his face contracted. He presented the appearance of something withered and crumpled. Her mocking smile still divided her curved lips, curved in the subtle, archaic way as in the marbles of ancient Greece. Whatever may have been the secret of her power over him, it manifested itself now in the form of a spiritual cruelty which he found very difficult to bear. He made a movement that was almost an appeal.
“Say I’m right, say I’m always right in these things!” she persisted.
But at that moment a diversion occurred, caused by the sudden entrance of a large bat. The creature uttered a weird querulous cry, like the cry of a newborn babe and went wheeling over their heads in desperate rapid circles, beating against the book-case and the picture frames. Presently, attracted by the light, it swooped down upon the flame of the candle and in a moment had extinguished it, plunging the room into complete darkness.
Philippa, with a low taunting laugh, ran across the room and wrapped herself in one of the window curtains.
“Open the door and drive it out,” she cried. “Drive it out, I say! Are you afraid of a thing like that?”
But Brand seemed either to have sunk into a kind of trance or to be too absorbed in his thoughts to make any movement. He remained reclining in his chair, silent and motionless.
The girl cautiously withdrew from her shelter and, fumbling about for matches, at last found a box and struck a light. The bat flew past her as she did so and whirled away into the night. She lit several candles and held one of them close to her brother’s face. Thus illuminated, Brand’s sinister countenance had the look of a mediæval wood-carving. He might have been the protagonist of one of those old fantastic prints representing Doctor Faustus after some hopeless struggle with his master-slave.
“Take it away, you! Let me alone. I’ve talked too much to you already. This is a hot night, eh? A hot night and the kind that sets a person thinking. Bah! I’ve thought too much. It’s thinking that causes all the devilries in the world. Thinking, and hearing hearts beating, that ought to be stopped!”
He pushed her aside and rose, stretching himself and yawning.
“What’s the time? What? Only ten o’clock? How early mother must have gone to bed! This is the kind of night in which people kill their mothers. Yes, they do, Philippa. You needn’t peer at me like that! And they do it when their mothers have daughters that look like you—just like you at this very moment.”
He leaned against the back of a chair and watched her as she stood negligently by the mantelpiece, her arm extended along its marble surface.
“Why does mother always say these things to you about my marrying?” he continued in a broken thick voice. “You lead her on to think of these things and then when she comes out with them you bring them to me, to make me angry with her. Tell me this, Philippa, why do you hate mother so? Why did you have that look in your face just now when I talked of killing her? What—would—you—Hang it all, girl, stop staring and smiling at me like that or it’ll be you I’ll kill! Oh, Heaven above, help us! This hot night will send us all into Bedlam!”
He suddenly stopped and began intently listening, his eyes on his sister’s face. “Did you hear that?” he whispered huskily. “She’s walking up and down the passage—walking in her slippers, that’s why you can hardly hear her. Hush! Listen! She’ll go presently into father’s room. She always does that in the end. What do you think she does there, Philippa? Rummages about, I suppose, and opens and shuts drawers and changes the pictures! What people we are! God—what people we are! I suppose the sound of her doing all that irritates you till your brain nearly bursts. It’s a strange thing, isn’t it, this family life! Human beings like us weren’t meant to be stuck in a hole together like wasps in a bottle. Listen! Do you hear that? She’s doing something to his window now. A lot he cares, six feet under the clay! But it shows how he holds her still, doesn’t it?” He made a gesture in the direction of his father’s picture upon which the candle-light shone clearly now, animating its heavy features.
“Do you know,” he continued solemnly, looking closely at his sister again, “I believe one of these nights, when she walks up and down like that, in her soft slippers, you’ll go straight up and kill her yourself. Yes, I believe you listen like this every night till you could put your fingers in your ears and scream.”
He moved across the room and, approaching his sister, shook her roughly by the arm. Some psychic change in the atmosphere about them seemed to have completely altered their relations.
“Confess—confess—you girl!” he muttered harshly. “Confess now—when you go rushing off like that into the park it isn’t to see that foreign fellow at all? It isn’t even to lie, as I know you love to do, touching the stalks of the poison funguses with the tip of your tongue under the oak trunks? It’s to escape from hearing her, that’s what it is! Confess now. It’s to escape from hearing her!”
He suddenly relaxed his grasp and stood erect, listening intently. The sweet heavy scent of magnolia petals floated in through the window and somewhere—far off among the trees—a screech-owl uttered a broken wail, followed by the flapping of wings. The clock in the hall outside began striking the hour. Before each stroke a ponderous metallic vibration trembled through the silent house.
“It’s only ten now,” he said. “The clock in here is fast.”
As he spoke there was a loud ring at the entrance door. The brother and sister stared blankly at one another and then Philippa gave a low unnatural laugh. “We might be criminals,” she whispered. They instinctively assumed more easy and less dramatic positions and waited in silence, while from the distant servants’ quarters some one came to answer the summons. They heard the door opened and the sound of suppressed voices in the hall. There was a moment’s pause, during which Philippa looked mockingly and enquiringly at Brand.
“It’s our dear priest,” she whispered, “and some one else, too.”
“Surely the fool’s not going to try—” began Brand.
“Mr. Traherne and Dr. Raughty!” announced the servant, opening the library door and holding it open while the visitors entered.
The clergyman advanced first. He shook hands with Brand and bowed with old-fashioned courtesy to Philippa. Dr. Raughty, following him, shook hands with Philippa and nodded nervously at her brother. The two men sank into the seats offered them and accepted an invitation to smoke. Brand moved to a side table and mixed for them, with an air of resigned politeness, cool and appropriate drinks. He drank nothing himself, however, but his sister, with a mocking apology to Mr. Traherne, lit herself a cigarette.
“How’s the rat?” she began, throwing a teasing and provocative smile upon the priest’s perturbed countenance.
“Out there,” he replied, emptying his glass at one gulp.
“What? In your coat pocket on such a night as this?”
Mr. Traherne put down his glass and inserted his huge workman’s fingers into the bosom of his cassock.
“Nothing under this but a shirt,” he said. “Cassocks have no pockets.”
“Haven’t they?” laughed Brand. “They have something then where you can put money. That is, unless you parsons are like kangaroos and have some natural little orifice in which to hide the offerings of the faithful.”
“Is he happy always in your pocket?” enquired Philippa.
“Do you want me to see?” replied the priest, rising with a movement that almost upset the table. “I’ll bring him in and I’ll make him go scimble-scamble all about the room.”
The tone in which he uttered these words said, as plainly as words could say, “You’re a pretty, silly, flirtatious piece of femininity! You only talk about my rat for the sake of fooling me. You don’t really care whether he’s happy in my pocket or not. It’s only out of consideration for your silly nerves that I don’t play with him now. And if you tease me an inch more I will, and make him run up your petticoats, too!”
“Sit down again, Traherne,” said Brand, “and let me fill up your glass. We’ll all visit the rat presently and find him some supper. Just at present I’m anxious to know how things are in the village. I haven’t been down that way for weeks.”
This was a direct challenge to the priest to come, without further delay, to the matter of his visit. Hamish Traherne accepted it.
“We came really,” he said, “to see you, Renshaw. A little later, perhaps before we go, we must have our conversation. We hardly expected to have the pleasure of finding Miss Philippa sitting up so late.”
Dr. Raughty, who all this while had been watching with the most intense delight the beauty of the girl’s white skin and scarlet lips and the indescribable charm of her sinuous figure, now broke in impetuously.
“But it can wait! It can wait! Oh, please don’t go to bed yet, Miss Renshaw. Look, your cigarette’s out! Throw it away and try one of these. They’re French, they’re the yellow packets, I know you like them. They’re what you smoked once when we were on the river—when you caught that great perch.”
Philippa, who had risen to her feet at Traherne’s somewhat brusque remark, came at once to the Doctor’s side.
“Oh, the perch,” she cried, “yes, I should think I do remember! You insisted on killing it at once so that it shouldn’t jump back into the water. You put your thumb into its mouth and bent back its head. Oh, yes! That yellow packet brings it all back to me. I can smell the sticky dough we tried to catch dace with afterwards and I can see the look of your hands all smeared with blood and silver scales. Oh, that was a lovely day, Doctor! Do you remember how you twisted those things, bryony leaves they were, round my head when the others had gone? Do you remember how you said you’d like to treat me as you treated the perch? Do you remember how you ran after a dragon-fly or something?”
She stopped breathlessly and, balancing herself on the arm of the Doctor’s chair, blew a great cloud of smoke over his head, filling the room in a moment with the pungent odour of French tobacco.
Both Traherne and Brand regarded her with astonishment. She seemed to have transformed herself and to have become a completely different person. Her eyes shone with childish gaiety and when she laughed, as she did a moment afterwards at some sally of the Doctor’s, there was a ring of unforced, spontaneous merriment in the sound such as her brother had not heard for many years. She continued to bend over Dr. Raughty’s chair, covering them both in a thick cloud of cigarette smoke, and the two of them soon became absorbed in some intricate discussion concerning, as far as the others could make out, the question of the best bait to be used for pike.
The priest took the opportunity of delivering himself of what was on his mind.
“I’m afraid, Renshaw,” he said, “you’ve gone your own way in that matter of Linda Herrick. No! Don’t deny it. You may not have seen her as often as before our last conversation, but you’ve seen her. She’s confessed as much to me herself. Now look here, Renshaw, you and I have known one another for some good few years. How long is it, man? Fifteen, twenty? It can’t be less. Long enough, anyway, for me to have earned the right to speak quite plainly and I tell you this, you must stop the whole business!”
His voice sank as he spoke to a formidable whisper. Brand glanced round at the others but apparently they were quite preoccupied. Mr. Traherne continued.
“The whole business, Renshaw! After this you must leave that child absolutely alone. If you don’t—if you insist on going on seeing her—I shall take strong measures with you. I shall—but I needn’t say any more! I think you can make a pretty shrewd guess what I shall do.”
Brand received this solemn ultimatum in a way calculated to cause the agitated man who addressed it to him a shock of complete bewilderment. He yawned carelessly and stretched out his long arms.
“As you please, Hamish,” he said, “I’m perfectly ready not to see her. In fact, I probably shouldn’t have seen her in any case. To tell you the truth, I’ve got a bit sick of the whole thing. These young girls are silly little feather-weights at best. It’s first one mood and then another! You can’t be sure of them for two hours at a stretch. So it’s all right, Hamish Traherne! I won’t interfere with her. You can make a nun of her if you like—or whatever else you fancy. All I beg of you is, don’t go round talking about me to your parishioners. Don’t talk about me to Raughty! I don’t want my affairs discussed by any one—not even by my friends. All right, my boy—you needn’t look at me like that. You’ve known me, as you say, long enough to know what I am. So there you are! You’ve had your answer and you’ve got my word. I don’t mind even your calling it ‘the word of a gentleman’ as you did the other night. You can call it what you like. I’m not going to see Linda for a reason quite personal and private but if you like to make it a favour to yourself that I don’t—well! throw that in, too!”
Hamish Traherne thrust his hand into his cassock thinking, for the moment, that it was his well-worn ulster and that he would feel the familiar form of Ricoletto.
It may be noted from this futile and unconscious gesture, how much hangs in this world upon insignificant threads. Had the priest’s fingers touched at that moment the silky coat of his little friend he would have derived sufficient courage to ask his formidable host point-blank whether, in leaving Linda in this way, he left her as innocent and unharmed as when he crossed her path at the beginning. Not having Ricoletto with him, however, and his fingers encountering nothing but his own woolen shirt, he lacked the inspiration to carry the matter to this conclusion. Thus, upon the trifling accident of a tame rodent having been left outside a library or, if you will, upon an eccentric parson having no pocket, depended the whole future of Linda Herrick. For, had he put that question and had Brand confessed the truth, the priest would undoubtedly, under every threat in his power, have commanded him to marry her and it is possible, considering the mood the man was in at that moment and considering also the nature of the threat held over him, he would have bowed to the inevitable and undertaken to do it.
The intricate and baffling complications of human life found further illustration in the very nature of this mysterious threat hinted at so darkly by Mr. Traherne. It was in reality—and Brand knew well that it was—nothing more or less than the making clear to Mrs. Renshaw beyond all question or doubt, of the actual character of the son she tried so conscientiously to idealize. For some basic and profound reason, inherent in his inmost nature, it was horrible to Brand to think of his mother knowing him. She might suspect and she might know that he knew she suspected, but to have the thing laid quite bare between them would be to send a rending and shattering crack through the unconscious hypocrisy of twenty years. For certain natures any drastic cleavage of slowly built-up moral relations is worse than death. Brand would have felt less remorse in being the cause of his mother’s death than of being the cause of her knowing him as he really was. The matter of Linda being thus settled between the two men, if the understanding so reached could be regarded as settling it, they both turned round, anxious for some distraction, to the quarter of the room where their friends had been conversing. But Philippa and the Doctor were no longer with them. Brand looked whimsically at the priest who, shrugging his shoulders, poured himself out a third glass from the decanter on the table. They then moved to the window which reached almost to the ground. Stepping over its low ledge, they passed out upon the terrace. They were at once aware of a change in the atmospheric conditions. The veil of mist had entirely been swept away from the sky. The vast expanse twinkled with bright stars and, far down among the trees, they could discern the crescent form of the new moon.
Brand pulled towards him a spray of damask roses and inhaled their sweetness. Then he turned to his companion and gave him an evil leer.
“The Doctor and Philippa have taken advantage of our absorbing conversation,” he remarked.
“Nonsense, man, nonsense!” exclaimed the priest. “Raughty’s only showing her some sort of moth or beetle. Can’t you stop your sneering for once and look at things humanly and naturally?”
His words found their immediate justification. Turning the corner of the house they discovered the two escaped ones on their knees by the edge of the dew-drenched lawn watching the movements of a toad. The Doctor was gently directing its advance with the stalk of a dead geranium and Philippa was laughing as merrily as a little girl.
They now realized the cause of the disappearance of the sultriness and the heat. From over the wide-stretching fens came, with strong steady breath, the north-west wind. It came with a full deep coolness in it which the plants and the trees seemed to drink from as out of some immortal cistern. It brought with it the odour of immense marsh-lands and fresh inland waters and as it bowed the trees and rustled over the flower-beds, it seemed to obliterate and drive back all indications of their nearness to the sea.
Raughty and Philippa rose to their feet at the approach of their friends.
“Doctor,” said Brand, “what’s the name of that great star over there—or planet—or whatever it is?”
They all surveyed the portion of the sky he indicated and contemplated the unknown luminary.
“I wish they’d taught me astronomy instead of Greek verses when I was at school,” sighed Mr. Traherne.
“It’s Venus, I suppose,” remarked Dr. Raughty. “Isn’t it Venus, Philippa?”
The girl looked from the men to the sky, and from the sky to the men.
“Well, you are a set of wise fellows,” she cried, “not to know the star which rules us all! And that’s not Venus, Doctor! Don’t any of you really know? Brand—you surely do? Well, I’ll tell you then, that’s Jupiter, that’s the lord-star Jupiter!”
And she burst into a peal of ringing boyish laughter. Brand turned to the Doctor, who had moved away to cast a final glance at the toad.
“What have you done to her, Fingal?” he called out. “She hasn’t laughed like that for years.”
The only answer he received to this was an embarrassed cough, but when they returned to the library and began looking at some of the more interesting of the volumes in its shelves it was noticed by both Brand and Mr. Traherne that the Doctor treated the young girl with a frank, direct, simple and humorous friendliness as if completely oblivious of her sex.
XX
RAVELSTON GRANGE
The hot weather continued with the intermission of only a few wet and windy days all through the harvest. One Saturday afternoon Sorio, who had arranged to take Nance by train to Mundham, loitered with Baltazar at the head of the High Street waiting the girl’s appearance. She had told him to meet her there rather than at her lodging because since the occasion when they took refuge in the cottage it had been agitating to her to see Linda and Baltazar together. She knew without any question asked that for several weeks her sister had seen nothing of Brand and she was extremely unwilling, now that the one danger seemed removed, that the child should risk falling into another.
Nance herself had lately been seeing more of her friend’s friend than she liked. It was difficult to avoid this, however, now that they lived so near, especially as Mr. Stork’s leisure times between his journeys to Mundham, coincided so exactly with her own hours of freedom from work at the dressmaker’s. But the more she saw of Baltazar, the more difficult she found it to tolerate him. With Brand, whenever chance threw him across her path, she was always able to preserve a dignified and conventional reserve. She saw that he knew how deep her indignation on behalf of her sister went and she could not help respecting him for the tact and discretion with which he accepted her tacit antagonism and made any embarrassing clash between them easy to avoid. At the bottom of her heart she had never felt any personal dislike of Brand Renshaw, nor did that peculiar fear which he seemed to inspire in the majority of those who knew him affect her in the least. She would have experienced not the slightest trepidation in confronting him on her sister’s behalf if circumstances demanded it and meanwhile she only asked that they should be left in peace.
But with Baltazar it was different. She disliked him cordially and, with her dislike, there mingled a considerable element of quite definite fear. The precise nature of this fear she was unable to gauge. In a measure it sprang from his unfailing urbanity and the almost effusive manner in which he talked to her and rallied her with little witticisms whenever they met. Nance’s own turn of mind was singularly direct and simple and she could not avoid a perpetual suspicion in dealing with Mr. Stork that the man was covertly mocking at her and seeking to make her betray herself in some way. There was something about his whole personality which baffled and perplexed her. His languid and effeminate manner seemed to conceal some hard and inflexible attitude towards life which, like a steel blade in a velvet scabbard, was continually on the point of revealing its true nature and yet never actually did. She completely distrusted his influence over Sorio and indeed carried her suspicion of him to the extreme point of even doubting his affection for his old-time friend. Nothing about him seemed to her genuine or natural. When he spoke of art, as he often did, or uttered vague, cynical commentaries upon life in general, she felt towards him just as a girl feels towards another girl whose devices to attract attention seem to be infringing the legitimate limit of recognized rivalry. It was not only that she suspected him of every sort of hypocritical diplomacy or that every attitude he adopted seemed a deliberate pose; it was that in some indescribably subtle way he seemed to make her feel as if her own gestures and speeches were false. He troubled and agitated her to such an extent that she was driven sometimes into a mood of such desperate self-consciousness that she did actually become insincere or at any rate felt herself saying and doing things which failed to express what she really had in her mind. This was especially the case when he was present at her encounters with Sorio. She found herself on such occasions uttering sometimes the wildest speeches, speeches quite far from her natural character, and even when she tried passionately to be herself she was half-conscious all the while that Baltazar was watching her and, so to speak, clapping his hands encouragingly and urging her on. It was just as if she heard him whispering in her ear and saying, “That’s a pretty speech, that’s an effective turn of the head, that’s a happily timed smile, that’s an appealing little silence!”
His presence seemed to perplex and bewilder the very basis and foundation of her confidence in herself. What was natural he made unnatural and what was spontaneous he made premeditated. He seemed to dive down into the very depths of her soul and stir up and make muddy and clouded what was clearest and simplest there. The little childish impulses and all the impetuous girlish movements of her mind became silly and forced when he was present, became something that might have been different had she willed them to be different, something that she was deliberately using to bewitch Adrian.
The misery of it was that she couldn’t be otherwise, that she couldn’t look and talk and laugh and be silent, in any other manner. And yet he made her feel as if this were not only possible but easy. He was diabolically and mercilessly clever in his malign clairvoyance. Nance was not so simple as not to recognize that there are a hundred occasions when a girl quite legitimately and naturally “makes the best” of her passing moods and feelings. She was not so stupid as not to know that the very diffusion of a woman’s emotions, through every fibre and nerve of her being, lends itself to innumerable little exaggerations and impulsive underscorings, so to speak, of the precise truth. But it was just these very basic or, if the phrase may be permitted, these “organic” characteristics of her self-expression, that Baltazar’s unnatural watchfulness was continually pouncing on. In some curious way he succeeded, though himself a man, in betraying the very essence of her sex-dignity. He threw her, in fact, into a position of embarrassed self-defence over what were really the inevitable accompaniments of her being a woman at all.
The unfairness of the thing was constantly being accentuated and made worse by the fact of her having so often to listen to bitter and sarcastic diatribes from both Adrian and his friend, directed towards her sex in general. A sort of motiveless jibing against women seemed indeed one of the favourite pastimes of the two men and Nance’s presence, when this topic came forward, appeared rather to enhance than mitigate their hostility.
On one or two occasions of this kind, Dr. Raughty had happened to be present and Nance felt she would never forget her gratitude to this excellent man for the genial and ironical way he reduced them to silence.
“I’m glad you have invented,” he would say to them, “so free and inexpensive a way of getting born. You’ve only to give us a little more independence and death will be equally satisfactory.”
On this particular afternoon, however, Baltazar was not encouraging Sorio in any misogynistic railings. On the contrary he was endeavouring to soothe his friend who at that moment was in one of his worst moods.
“Why doesn’t she come?” he kept jerking out. “She knows perfectly how I hate waiting in the street.”
“Come and sit down under the trees,” suggested Baltazar. “She’s sure to come out on the green to look for you and we can see her from there.”
They moved off accordingly and sat down, side by side, with a group of village people under the ancient sycamores. Above them the nameless Admiral looked steadily sea-wards and in the shadow thrown by the trees several ragged little girls were playing sleepily on the burnt-up grass.
“It’s extraordinary,” Sorio remarked, “what a lot of human beings there are in the world who would be best out of it! They get on my nerves, these people. I think I hear them more clearly and feel them nearer me here than ever before in my life. Every person in a place like this becomes more important and asserts himself more, and the same is true of every sound. If you want really to escape from humanity there are only two things to do, either go right away into the desert where there’s not a living soul or go into some large city where you’re absolutely lost in the crowd. This half-and-half existence is terrible.”
“My dear, my dear,” protested his companion, “you keep complaining and grumbling but for the life of me I can’t make out what it is that actually annoys you. By the way, don’t utter your sentiments too loudly! These honest people will not understand.”
“What annoys me—you don’t understand what annoys me?” muttered the other peevishly. “It annoys me to be stared at. It annoys me to be called out after. It annoys me to be recognized. I can’t move from your door without seeing some face I know and what’s still worse, seeing that face put on a sort of silly, inquisitive, jeering look, as much as to say, ‘Ho! Ho! here is that idiot again. Here is that fool who sponges upon Mr. Stork! Here is that spying foreign devil!’”
“Adrian—Adrian,” protested his companion, “you really are becoming impossible. I assure you these people don’t say or think anything of the kind! They just see you and greet you and wish you well and pass on upon their own concerns.”
“Oh, don’t they, don’t they,” cried the other, forgetting in his agitation to modulate his voice and causing a sudden pause in the conversation that was going on at their side. “Don’t they think these things! I know humanity better. Every single person who meets another person and knows anything at all about him wants to show that he’s a match for his little tricks, that he’s not deceived by his little ways, that he knows where he gets his money or doesn’t get it and what woman he wants or doesn’t want and which of his parents he wishes dead and buried! I tell you you’ve no idea what human beings are really like! You haven’t any such idea, for the simple reason that you’re absolutely hard and self-centred yourself. You go your own way. You think your own thoughts. You create your own fancy-world. And the rest of humanity are nothing—mere pawns and puppets and dream-figures—nothing—simply nothing! I’m a completely different nature from you, Tassar. I’ve got my idea—my secret—but I’d rather not talk about that and you’d rather not hear. But apart from that, I’m simply helpless. I mean I’m helplessly conscious of everything round me! I’m porous to things. It’s really quite funny. It’s just as if I hadn’t any skin, as if my soul hadn’t any skin. Everything that I see, or hear, Tassar—and the hearing is worse, oh, ever so much worse—passes straight through me, straight through the very nerves of my inmost being. I feel sometimes as though my mind were like a piece of parchment, stretched out taut and tight and every single thing that comes near me taps against it, tip-tap, tip-tap, tip-tap, as if it were a drum! That wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t that I know so horribly clearly what people are thinking. For instance, when I go down that alley to the station, as I shall soon with Nance, and pass the workmen at their doors, I know perfectly well that they’ll look at me and say to themselves, ‘There goes that fool again,’ or, ‘There goes that slouching idiot from the cottage,’ but that’s not all, Tassar. They soon have the sense to see that I’m the kind of person who shrinks from being noticed and that pleases them. They nudge one another then and look more closely at me. They do their best to make me understand that they know their power over me and intend to use it, intend to nudge one another and look at me every time I pass. I can read exactly what their thoughts are. They say to themselves, ‘He may slink off now but he’ll have to come this way again and then we’ll see! Then we’ll look at him more closely. Then we’ll find out what he’s after in these parts and why that pretty girl puts up with him so long!’”