Rodmoor

POWYS
is rather like Shakespeare in that his early work shows no faltering, but springs out, like the birth of Athene, ready-armed.
Rodmoor
was his second novel, and the only one that has never been published in England. It has nevertheless a quality all its own. It is a strange book, but grips the reader, holding him with a keen suspense. It is the most dramatic of all Powys’s books.

I have called it ‘strange’. The hero, Adrian Sorio, has been in a mental home and is engaged in writing on destruction as the key to existence; a theme to be taken up again, with differences, in Powys’s next story,
Ducdame
, and, much later, in
The Inmates
. These rather mind-staggering simplicities mean much in Powys. He is fascinated by the phenomenal universe and also by the strange possibility of a universe composed of not-being, perhaps of what we today would call ‘anti-matter’. His last published work was, with exact purpose, entitled
All or Nothing
.

In human affairs, this poses the question of life and death. What is death? In
The Art of Happiness
Powys says that we should enjoy the prospect of death and alters Wordsworth’s famous line (Michael 77) to read, ‘the pleasure which there is in life and death’. We should enjoy the prospect of not-being, rather as we enjoy a dreamless sleep. The more, however, that we think of such blissful ‘not-being’ the more it assumes a positive quality, like the ‘Nirvana’ of Buddhist philosophy. Throughout Powys’s life-work
this problem, in various forms, continues to teaze. The gist of it all is, rather amazingly, already perfectly expressed in
Rodmoor
. Here we are told that there is something ‘beyond the point where every living thing ceases to exist and becomes nothing’. It is as a ‘blinding white light’ that is yet ‘neither light nor darkness’. All normal terms are inadequate except one: here Adrian will be reunited with his idealised son, the seraphic Baptiste.

It is natural that so strange a story should have human figures that are also strange. Our story is set by the sea, in East Anglia, the only Powys novel—with the exception of the opening chapters of
A Glastonbury Romance
—to be so located. Here the sea is, or seems, fearful, a threat, almost malignant. Of the people, Brand Renshaw is a Gothic monster of dark, mysterious, evil. The girl Philippa is an elfin creation at home with the elements and bisexually conceived. True, we have on the other side the wise Mrs Renshaw and the faithful Nance who stand for sanity as normally understood, but the balance favours the strange ones and is preceded by a vision of an ambisexual figure ‘seeking amid the dreams of all the great perverted artists of the world for the incarnation it has been denied by the will of God.’

The hero all but ends with Philippa, but drawn on by his visionary ‘Nirvana’ he leaves her for the sea, now blessed part of a serene infinitude, and after the exultant cry ‘Baptiste!’, he dies.

G. Wilson Knight

1973

I
T was not that he concealed anything from her.

He told her quite frankly, in that first real
conversation
they had together—on the little
secluded
bench in the South London park—about all the morbid sufferings of his years in America and his final mental collapse.

He even indicated to her—while the sound of
grass-mowing
came to them over the rain-wet tulips—some of the most secret causes of this event; his savage
reaction
, for instance, against the circle he was thrown into there; his unhappy habit of deadly introspection; his aching nostalgia for things less murderously new and raw.

He explained how his mental illness had taken so
dangerous
, so unlooked for a shape, that it was only by the merest chance he had escaped long incarceration.

No; it was not that he concealed anything. It was rather that she experienced a remote uneasy feeling that, say what he might,—and in a certain sense he said too much rather than too little—she did not really understand him.

Her feminine instinct led her to persuade him that she understood; led her to say what was most
reassuing
to him, and most consolatory; but in her heart of hearts she harboured a teasing doubt; a doubt which only the rare sweetness of these first love-days of her life enabled her to hide and cover over. Nor was this feeling about her lover’s confessions the only little cloud on Nance Herrick’s horizon during these memorable weeks—weeks that, after all, she was destined to look back upon as so strangely happy.

She found herself, in the few moments when her
passionate
emotion left her free to think of such things, much more anxious than she cared to admit about the ambiguous relations existing between the two persons dependent upon her. Ever since the death of her father—that prodigal sailor—three years ago, when she had taken it upon herself to support both of them by her work in the dressmaker’s shop, she had known that all was not well between the two. Rachel Doorm had never forgiven Captain Herrick for marrying again; she felt that instinctively, but it was only quite recently that she had grown to be really troubled by the eccentric woman’s attitude to the little half-sister.

Linda’s mother, she knew, had in her long nervous decline rather clung than otherwise to this grim friend of the former wife; but Linda’s mother had always been different from other women; and Nance could
remember
how, in quite early days, she never interfered when Miss Doorm took the child away to punish her.

To Nance herself Rachel had always been something of an anxiety. Her savage devotion had proved over and over again more of a burden than a pleasure; and now that there was this increased tension between her and Linda, the thing began to appear invidious,
rapacious
, sinister.

She was torn, in fact, two ways over the situation. Her own mother had long ago—and it was one of her few definite recollections of her—made her swear
solemnly
never to desert this friend of former days; and the vows she had registered then to obey this covenant had grown into a kind of religious rite; the only rite, in fact, after all these years, she was able to perform for her dead.

And yet if loyalty to her mother kept her patiently tender with Rachel’s eccentricities, the much warmer feeling she had for her other parent was stirred
indignantly
by the thought of any unkindness dealt out to Linda.

And just at present, it was clear, Linda was not happy.

The young girl seemed to be losing her vivacity and to be growing silent and reserved.

She was now nearly eighteen; and yet Nance had caught her once or twice lately looking at Rachel Doorm with the same expression of frightened entreaty as she used to wear when led away from her mother’s side for some childish fault. Rachel’s father, a
taciturn
and loveless old man, had recently died, leaving his daughter, whom he had practically cast off, a small but secure annuity and a little house on the east coast.

It was now to this home of her ancestors, in the
village
of Rodmoor, that Rachel Doorm was anxious to transport both sisters; partly as a return for what Nance’s mother, and more recently Nance herself, had done for her support, and partly out of fanatical
devotion
to Nance.

The girl could not help experiencing a feeling of
infinite
relief at the thought of being freed from her
uncongenial
work in the dressmaker’s establishment. Her pleasure, nevertheless, had been considerably marred, in the last few days, by the attitude of her sister towards the projected change.

And now, with the realisation of this thrilling new passion possessing her, her own feeling about leaving London was different from what it had been at first.

None of these questions interrupted, however, on that particular afternoon, the girl’s dreamy and absorbed happiness.

In the long delicious intervals that fell between her and her lover with a perfume sweeter than that of the arrested rain, she let her mind wander in languid
retrospect
, from that seat in Kensington Park, over every one of the wonderful events that had led her to this.

She recalled her first sight of Adrian and how it had come over her, like an intimation from some higher sphere of being, that her fate was henceforth to lie, for good and for evil, in that man’s hands.

It was quite early in April when she saw him; and she remembered, sitting now by his side, how, as each day grew milder, and the first exquisite tokens of Spring penetrated one by one—here a basket of daffodils, and there a spray of almond-blossom—into the street she traversed to her work, she felt less and less inclined to struggle against the deep delicious thrill that suffused itself, like a warm indrawing wave, through every pulse of her body. That it should never have come to her
before
—that she should have lived absolutely fancy-free until so near her twenty-third birthday—only made her abandonment to what she felt now the more sweet and entire.

“It is love,—it is love,” she thought; “and I will give myself up to it!”

And she had given herself up to it. It had
penetrated
her with an exultant inner spring of delight. She had immersed herself in it. She had gone through her tedious drudgery as if she were floating, languidly and at ease, on a softly rocking tide. She had lived entirely in the present. She had not made the least movement even to learn the name of the man whose
wordless
pursuit of her had stirred her senses to this exultant response.

She had felt an indescribable desire to prolong these hours of her first love, these hours so unreturning, so new and so sweet; a desire—she remembered it well now—that had a tinge of unformulated fear about it; as though the very naming, even to herself, of what she enjoyed, would draw down the jealousy of the invisible powers.

So she had been careful never to stop or linger, in her hurried morning walks to the historic bridge;
careful
—after she had once passed him, and their eyes had met—never so much as to turn her head, to see if he were following.

And yet she knew—as well in those first days as she knew now—that every morning and night he waited, wet or fine, to see her go by.

And she had known, too—how could she not know?—that this mute signalling of two human souls must change and end; must become something nearer or something farther as time went on. But day by day she put off this event; too thrilled by the sweet dream in which she moved, to wish to destroy it, either for
better
or for worse.

If she had doubted him; doubted that he cared for her; all would have been different.

Then she would have taken some desperate step—some step that would have forced him to recognise her for what she was, his one of all, ready as none else
could
be ready, to cry with a great cry—“Lord, behold thine hand-maid; do unto her according to Thy will!” But she had known he did care. She had felt the magnetic current of his longing, as if it had been a hand laid down upon her breast.

And in answer she had given herself up to him; given herself, she thought, with no less complete a yielding than that with which, as she heard his voice by her side, reaching her through a delicate mist of delicious
dreaming
, she gave herself up to him now.

She recalled with a proud gladness the fact that she had never—never for a moment—in all those days, bestowed a thought on the question of any possible
future
with him. In the trance-like hours wherein she had brooded so tenderly over the form and face of her
nameless
lover, she always pictured him as standing waiting for her, a tall, bowed, foreign-looking figure, clothed in the long weather-stained Inverness—the very
texture
of which she seemed to know the touch of—by that corner curb-stone where the flower-shop was.

Just in that manner, with just that air of ardent
expectation
, he might be found standing, she had felt, through unnumbered days of enchantment, and she
passing
by, in silence, with the same expectant thrill.

Such a love draught, not drained, not feverishly drunk of, but sweet in her mouth with the taste of a mystic consecration, seemed still, even now that she had him there beside her, to hold the secret, amid this warm
breath of London’s first lilacs, of a triumphant Present, wherein both Past and Future were abolished.

It seemed to the happy girl on this unique April afternoon, while the sliding hours, full of the city’s monotonous murmur, sank unnoticed away, and the gardeners planted their pansies and raked lethargically in the scented mould, as though nothing that could ever happen to her afterwards, could outweigh what she felt then, or matter so very greatly in the final reckoning. With every pulse of her young body she uttered her litany of gratitude. “
Ite; missa est
” her heart cried—“It is enough.”

As they walked home afterwards, hand in hand through the dusk of the friendly park, she made him tell her, detail by detail, every least incident of those first days of their encountering. And Adrian Sorio,
catching
the spirit of that exquisite entreaty, grew voluble even beyond his wont.

He told her how, in the confusion of his mind, when it was first revealed to him that the devastation he was suffering from did not deny him the sweet sting of “what men call love,” he found it impossible to face with any definite resolution the problem of his doubtful future. He had recognised that in a week or so every penny he possessed would be gone; yet it was impossible—and his new emotion did not, he confessed, alter this in the least—to make any move to secure employment.

A kind of misanthropic timidity, so he explained to her, made the least thought of finding what is popularly known as “work” eminently repellant to him; yet it was obvious that work must be found, unless he wished, simply and quietly, to end the affair by starvation.

This, as things went then, he told her, giving her
hand a final pressure as they emerged into the lighted streets, he did not at all urgently want—though in the first days of his return from America he had pondered more than once on the question of an easy and agreeable exit. It was as they settled down side by side,—her hat no longer held languidly in her gloveless hand,—to their long and discreet walk home through the crowded thoroughfares, that she was first startled by hearing the name “Rodmoor” from his lips. How amazing a coincidence! What a miraculous gift of the gods!

Fate was indeed sweeping her away on a full tide.

It seemed like a thing in some old fantastic romance. Could it be possible even before she had time to
contemplate
her separation from him that she should learn that they were not to separate at all!

Rachel Doorm was indeed a witch—was indeed working things out for her favourite with the power of a sorceress. She kept back her natural cry of delight, “But that is where we are going,” and let him, all
unconscious
, as it seemed, of the effect of his words,
unravel
in his own way the thread of his story.

It was about a certain Baltazar Stork she found he was telling her when her startled thoughts, like a flock of disturbed pigeons, alighted once more on the field of his discourse. Baltazar, it appeared, was an old friend of Sorio’s and had written to offer him a sort of
indefinite
hospitality in his village on the North Sea. The name of this place—had she ever heard of
Rodmoor
?—had repeated itself very strangely in his mind ever since he first made it out in his friend’s abominable hand.

At that point in their walk, under the glare of a great provision shop, she suddenly became conscious that he
was watching her with laughing excitement. “You know!” she cried, “you know!” And it was with
difficulty
that he persuaded her to let him tell her how he knew, in his own elaborate manner.

This refuge—offered to him thus out of a clear sky, he told her—did in a considerable sense lend him an excuse for taking no steps to find work. And the name of the place—he confessed this with an excited
emphasis
—had from the beginning strangely affected his imagination.

He saw it sometimes, so he said, that particular word, in a queer visualised manner, dark brown against a colourless and livid sky; and in an odd sort of way it had related itself, dimly, obscurely, and with the
incoherence
of a half-learnt language, to the wildest and most pregnant symbols of his life.

Rodmoor! The word at the same time allured and troubled him. What it suggested to him—and he made her admit that his ideas of it were far more definite than her own—was no doubt what it really implied: leagues and leagues of sea-bleached
forlornness
, of sand-dunes and glaucous marshes, of solitary willows and pallid-leaved poplars, of dark pools and night-long-murmuring reeds.