Rodmoor (24 page)

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.

T
HE 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
,
ward, 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 seawards 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!’”

He was interrupted at that moment by a roar of laughter from the group beside them and Baltazar rose and pulled him away. “Upon my soul, Adrian,” he whispered, as he led him back across the green, “you must behave better! You’ve given those honest fellows something to gossip about for a week. They’ll think you really are up to something, you can’t shout like that without being listened to and you can’t quarrel with the whole of humanity.”

Adrian turned fiercely round on him. “Can’t I?” he exclaimed. “Can’t I quarrel with humanity? You wait, my friend, till I’ve got my book published. Then you’ll see! I tell you I’ll strike this cursed human race of yours such a blow that they’ll wish they’d treated a poor wanderer on the face of the earth a little better and spared him something of their prying and
peering
!”

“Your book!” laughed Baltazar. “A lot they’ll care for your book! That’s always the way with you touchy philosophers. You stir up the devil of a row with your bad temper and make the most harmless
people
into enemies and then you think you can settle it all and prove yourselves right and everybody else wrong by writing a book. Upon my soul, Adrian, if I didn’t
love you very much indeed I’d be inclined to let you loose on life just to see whether you or it could strike the hardest blows!”

Sorio looked at him with a curiously bewildered look. He seemed puzzled. His swarthy Roman face wore a clouded, weary, crushed expression. His brow
contracted
into an anxious frown and his mouth quivered. His air at that moment was the air of a very young child that suddenly finds the world much harder to deal with than it expected.

Baltazar watched him with secret pleasure. These were the occasions when he always felt strangely drawn towards him. That look of irresolute and bewildered weakness upon a countenance so powerfully moulded filled him with a most delicate sense of protective pity. He could have embraced the man as he watched him, blinking there in the afternoon sunshine, and fumbling with the handle of his stick.

But at that moment Nance appeared, walking
rapidly
with bent head, up the narrow street. Baltazar looked at her with a gleam of hatred in his sea-coloured eyes. She came to rob him of one of the most
exquisite
pleasures of his life, the pleasure of reducing this strong creature to humiliated submissiveness and then petting and cajoling him back into self-respect. The knowledge that he left Sorio in her hands in this
particular
mood of deprecatory helplessness, remorseful and gentle and like a wild beast beaten into docility, caused him the most acute pain. With poisonous
antagonism
under his urbane greeting he watched
furtively
the quick glance she threw at Adrian and the way her eyes lingered upon his, feeling her way into his mood. He cast about for some element of discord
that he could evoke and leave behind with them to spoil the girl’s triumph for he knew well that Adrian was now, after what had just occurred, in the frame of mind most adapted of all to the influence of feminine
sympathy
. Nance, however, did not give him an
opportunity
for this.