Rodmoor (21 page)

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
tidemark
. 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
seaweeds
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.”