Rodmoor (30 page)

He pulled out his tobacco pouch and gravely lit his pipe, swinging his head backwards and forwards as he did so. Nance could not help noticing the shrewd, humorous
animalism
of his look as he performed this function.

“But what can be done? Oh, Fingal, what
can
be done about Linda?” she asked with a heavy sigh.

He settled his pipe in his mouth and blew violently down its stem, causing a cloud of smoke to go up into the September air.

“Take her to Mrs. Renshaw,” he said solemnly. “That’s what I’ve been thinking all this time. That’s my conclusion. Take her to Mrs. Renshaw.”

Nance stared at him. “Really?” she murmured, “you really think
she
could help?”

“Try it—try it—try it!” cried Dr. Raughty, flinging a bit of moss at the fish in the water below them.

“It’s extraordinary,” he added, “that these dace should come down so far as this! The water here must be almost entirely salt.”

That afternoon Nance went to Mr. Traherne’s vesper service. She found Mrs. Renshaw in the church and invited both her and the priest to come back with them to their lodgings. She did this under the
pretense
of showing them some new designs of a startling and fascinating kind that she had received from Paris. The circean witcheries of French costumery were not perhaps precisely the right attraction either for Mrs. Renshaw or Hamish Traherne, but the thing served well enough as an excuse and they both took it as such. She was careful to hurry on in advance with Mr.
Traherne
so as to make it inevitable that Linda should walk
with Mrs. Renshaw. The mistress of Oakguard seemed unusually pale and tired that afternoon. She held Linda back in the churchyard until the others had got quite far and then she led her straight to Rachel Doorm’s grave. They had buried the unhappy woman quite close to the outermost border of the priest’s
garden
. Nothing but a few paces of level grass separated her from a row of tall crimson hollyhocks. The grave at present lacked any headstone. Only a bunch of Michaelmas daisies, placed there by Linda herself, stood at its foot in a glass jar. Several wasps were buzzing round this jar, probably conscious of some faint odour clinging still about it from what it had formerly contained. Mrs. Renshaw stood with her hand leaning heavily on Linda’s shoulder. She seemed to know, from the depths of her own fathomless morbidity, precisely what the young girl was feeling.

“Shall we kneel down?” she said. Linda began trembling a little but with simple and girlish docility, free from any kind of embarrassment, she knelt at the other’s side.

“We mustn’t pray for the dead,” whispered Mrs. Renshaw.
“He,”
she meant Mr. Traherne, “tells us to in his sermons, but it hurts me when he does for we’ve been taught that all that is wrong—wrong and
contrary
to our simple faith! We mustn’t forget the Martyrs—must we, Linda?”

But Linda’s mind was far from the martyrs. It was occupied entirely with the thing that lay buried before them, under that newly disturbed earth.

“But we can pray to God that His will be done, on earth, even as it is in Heaven,” murmured Mrs.
Renshaw
.

She was silent after that and the younger and the elder woman knelt side by side with bowed heads. Then in a low whisper Mrs. Renshaw spoke again.

“There are some lines I should like to say to you, dear, if you’ll let me. I copied them out last week. They were at the end of a book of poetry that I found in Philippa’s room. She must have just bought it or had it given to her. I didn’t think she cared any more for poetry. The pages weren’t cut and I didn’t like to cut them without her leave but I copied this out from the end. It was the last in the book.”

She hesitated a moment while Linda remained
motionless
at her side, trembling still a little and watching the movements of a Peacock butterfly which was then
sharing
with the wasps their interest in the ancient
honeyjar
.

Mrs. Renshaw then repeated the following lines in a clear exquisitely modulated voice which went drifting away over surrounding marshes.

Her voice sank. A slight gust of wind made the trees above them sigh softly as though the words of the kneeling woman were in harmony with the inarticulate heart of the earth.

Linda stopped trembling. A sweet indescribable calm began slowly to pervade her. Gently, like a child, she slipped her hand into her companion’s.

“Do you remember the Forty-third Psalm, Linda?” Mrs. Renshaw continued and her clear dramatic voice,
with a power of feeling equal to that of any great actress, once more rose upon the air.

Once more she was silent but with a slight veering of the wind, the sound of the waves beyond the sand-dunes came to them with pitiless distinctness. It seemed to mock—this voice of the earth’s antagonist—mock, in triumphant derision, the forlorn hope which that solemn invocation had roused in the girl’s heart. But in contending against Mrs. Renshaw’s knowledge of the Psalms even the North Sea had met its match. With her pale face uplifted and a wild light in her eyes, she continued to utter the old melodious incantations with their constant references to a Power more
formidable
than “all thy waves and storms.” She might have been one of the early converts to the faith that came from the sacred Desert, wrestling in spiritual ecstasy with the gods and powers of those heathen waters.

Either by one of the fortunate coincidences which sometimes interrupt even the irony of nature or, as Mrs. Renshaw would herself have maintained, by a direct
answer
to her prayer, the weathercock on the church tower swung round again. North-east it swung, then north-north-east, then due north. And finally, even while she was uttering her last antiphony, it pointed to north-west, the quarter most alien and antagonistic to the Rodmoor sea, the portion of the horizon from which blew the wind of the great fens.

In a country like East Anglia so peculiarly at the
mercy of the elements, every one of the winds has its own peculiar burden and brings with it something
healing
and restorative or baleful and malefic. The east wind here is, in a paramount sense, the evil wind, the accomplice and confederate of the salt deep, the blighter of hopes, the herald of disaster. The north-west wind, on the contrary, is the wind that brings the sense of
inland
spaces, the smell of warm, wet earth and the
fragrance
of leaf mould in sweet breathing woods. It is the wind that fills the rivers and the wells and brings the fresh purifying rain. It is a wind full of memories and its heart is strong with the power of ancient love,
revived
even out of graves and sepulchres. To those sensitive to finer and rarer earth influences among the dwellers by the east coast there may be caught
sometimes
upon the north-west wind the feeling of pine woods and moorland heather. For it comes from the
opposite
side of the great plain, from Brandon Heath and even beyond and it finds nothing in the wide fen country to intercept it or break the rush of its sea-ward
passage
.

Thus, when the two women rose finally to their feet it was to be met by a cool, healing breath which, as it bowed the ranks of the hollyhocks and rustled through the trees, had in it a delicious odour of inland brooks and the coming of pure rain.

“Listen to me, child,” said Mrs. Renshaw as they passed out of the churchyard, “I want to say this to you. You mustn’t think that God allows any
intercourse
between the living and the dead. That is a wicked invention of our own sinful hearts. It is a temptation, darling—a temptation of the devil—and we must struggle against it. Whenever we feel it we
must struggle against it and pray. It is perfectly right for you to think gently and forgivingly of poor Miss Doorm. It were wrong to think otherwise. But you mustn’t think of her as anywhere near us or about us now. She’s in the hands of God and in the mercy of God and we must leave her there. Do you hear what I’m saying, Linda? Do you understand me?
Anything
else is wrong and evil. We are all sinners
together
and we are all in the same merciful hands.”

Never was the exorcising of powers hurtful to
humanity
more effective. Linda bowed her head at her words and then raising it freely, walked with a lighter step than for seven long days. She wished in her heart that she had the courage to talk to Mrs. Renshaw about an anxiety much more earthly, much less easy to be healed, than the influence of Rachel Doorm, alive or dead, but so immense was her relief at that moment to be free from the haunting phantom that had been
pulling
her towards that mound in the churchyard that she found it in her heart to be hopeful and reckless even though she knew that, whatever happened, there was bound to be pain and trouble in store for her in the not far distant future.

I
T will be found not altogether devoid of a strange substratum of truth, though fantastic enough in the superficial utterance, the statement that there are certain climacteric seasons in the history of places when, if events of importance are looming upon the horizon, they are especially liable to fall. Such a season with regard to Rodmoor, or at least with regard to the persons we are most concerned with there, may be said to have arrived with the beginning of Autumn and with the month of October.

The first weeks of this month were at any rate full of exciting and fatal interest to Nance. Something in the change of the weather, for the rains had come in earnest now, affected Sorio in a marked degree. His whole
being
seemed to undergo some curious disintegrating
process
as difficult to analyze as the actual force in Nature which was at that very time causing the fall of the leaves. We may be allowed to draw at least this much from Sorio’s own theory of the universal impulse to self-destruction—the possible presence, that is to say, of something positive and active, if not personal and conscious, in the processes of natural decadence. Life, when it corrupts and disintegrates; life when it finally falls away and becomes what we call death, does so sometimes, or seems to do so, with a vehemence and
impetuosity
which makes it difficult not to feel the
pressure
 
of some half-conscious “will to perish” in the thing thus plunging towards dissolution. The brilliant colour which many flowers assume when they approach decease bears out this theory. It is what the poet calls a “lightning before death” and the rich tints of the autumn foliage as well as the phosphorescent glories—only repulsive to our human senses in fatal association—of physical mortality itself, are symbols, if not more than symbols, of the same splendid rushing upon
nothingness
.

This change in Sorio was not at all to Nance’s
disadvantage
in the external aspect of the relations between them; indeed, she was carried forward by it to the point of coming to anticipate with trembling
excitement
what had begun to seem an almost impossible
happiness
. For Sorio definitely and in an outburst of
impatient
pleading, implored her to marry him. In the deeper, more spiritual association between them,
however
, the change which took place in him now was less satisfactory. Nance could not help feeling that there was something blind, childish, selfish, unchivalrous,—something even reckless and sinister—about this
proposal
and the passionate eagerness with which he pressed it upon her, considering that he made no more attempt than before to secure any employment and seemed to take it for granted that either she or
Baltazar
Stork or his own son in America, or some vague providential windfall would provide the money for this startling adventure. Side by side with her surprise at his careless disregard for all practical considerations, Nance could not help feeling a profound apprehension which she herself was unwilling to bring to the surface of her mind with regard to his mood and manner during
these days. He seemed to throw himself passively and helplessly upon her hands. He clung to her as a sick child might cling to its parent. His old savage
outbursts
of cynical humour seemed to have vanished and in their place was a constant querulousness and
peevishness
which rendered their hours together much less peaceful and happy than they ought to have been. All sorts of little things irritated him—irritated him even in her. He clung to her, she could not help fancying, more out of a strange instinct of self-preservation than out of natural love. She couldn’t help wondering
sometimes
how it would be when they were actually married. He seemed to find it at once difficult to endure her society and impossible to do without it. The
bitter
saying of the old Latin poet might have been his motto at that time. “
Nec sine te nec tecum vivere possum.
”

And yet, in spite of all this, these early October days were days of exquisite happiness for Nance. The long probation through which her love had passed had purged and winnowed it. The maternal instinct in her, always the dominant note in her emotions, was satisfied now as it had never been satisfied before, as perhaps unless she had children of her own it would never be satisfied again.

In these days of new hope and new life her youth seemed to revive and put forth exquisite blossoms of gaiety and tenderness. In a physical sense she actually did revive, though this may have been partly due to the cool crisp air that now blew constantly across the fens, and Linda, watching the change with affectionate sympathy, declared she was growing twice as beautiful.

She offered no objection when Sorio insisted upon having their “bans” read out in church, a duty that
was most willingly performed without further delay by Hamish Traherne. She did not even protest when he announced that they would be married before October was over, announced it without any indication of how or where they would live, upon whose money or under whose roof!

She felt a natural reluctance to press these practical details upon his notice. The bond that united them was too delicate, too tenuous and precarious, for her to dare to lean heavily upon it, nor did the few hesitating and tentative hints she threw out meet with any response from him. He waved them aside. He threw them from him with a jest or a childish groan of disgust or a vague “Oh,
that
will work itself out.
That
will be all right. Don’t worry about
that!
I’m writing to Baptiste.”

But, as we have said, in spite of all these difficulties and in spite of the deep-hidden dismay which his
nervous
, querulous mood excited in her, Nance was full of a thrilling and inexpressible happiness during these Autumn days. She loved the roar of the great wind—the northwest wind—in chimneys and house-tops at night. She loved the drifting of the dead leaves along the muddy roads. She loved the long swishing murmur of the rushes growing by the dyke paths as they bent their feathery heads over the wet banks or bowed in melancholy rhythm across the rain-filled ditches.

Autumn was assuredly and without doubt the
climacteric
season of the Rodmoor fens. They reluctantly yielded to the Spring; they endured the Summer, and the Winter froze them into dead and stoical inertness. But something in the Autumn called out the essential and native qualities of the place’s soul. The fens rose to meet the Autumn in happy and stormy nuptials.
The brown, full-brimmed streams mounted up joyously to the highest level of their muddy banks. The faded mallow-plants by the river’s side and the tarnished St. John’s wort in the drenched hedges assumed a pathetic and noble beauty—a beauty full of vague, far-drawn associations for sensitive humanity. The sea-gulls and marsh-birds, the fish, the eels, the water-rats of the
replenished
streams seemed to share in the general
expansion
of life with the black and white hornless cattle, the cattle of the fens, who now began to yield their richest milk. Long, chilly, rainy days ended in
magnificent
and sumptuous sunsets—sunsets in which the whole sky from zenith to nadir became one immense rose of celestial fire. Out of a hundred Rodmoor
chimneys
rose the smell of burning peat, that smell of all others characteristic of the country whose very soil was formed of the vegetation of forgotten centuries.

In the large dark barns the yellow grain lay piled roof-high, while in every little shed and outhouse in the country, damsons, pears and potatoes lay spread out as if for the enjoyment of some Dionysian gathering of the propitiated earth-gods.

The fishermen, above all, shared in the season’s
fortune
, going out early and late to their buoy-marked spots on the horizon, where the presence of certain year-old wrecks lying on the sand at the bottom drew the migratory fish and held them for weeks as if by a marine spell.

But if the days had their especial quality, the nights during that October were more significant still. The sky seemed to draw back, back and away, to some purer, clearer, more ethereal level while with a radiance tender and solemn the greater and lesser stars shed down their
magical influence. The planets, especially Venus and Jupiter, grew so luminous and large that they seemed to rival the moon; while the Moon, herself, the mystic red moon of the finished harvest, the moon of the
equinox
, drew the tides after her, higher and fuller and with a deeper note in their ebb and flow than at any other season of the year.

Everywhere swallows were gathering for their long flight, everywhere the wild geese and the herons were rising to incredible heights in the sky and moving
northward
and westward; and all this while Nance was able, at last really able, to give herself up to her passion for the man she loved.

It was a passion winnowed by waiting and suffering, purged to a pure flame by all she had gone through, but it was a passion none the less—a long exclusive passion—the love of a lifetime. It made her
sometimes
, this great love of hers, dizzy and faint with fear lest something even now should at the last moment come between them. Sometimes it made her strangely shy of him too, shy and withdrawn as if it were not easy, though so triumphantly sweet, to give herself up body and soul into hands that after all were the hands of a stranger!

Sorio did not understand all this. Sometimes when she thrust him away as if the emotion produced by his caresses were more than she could bear or as if some incalculable pride in her, some inalienable chastity
beyond
the power of her senses, relucted to yield further, he grew angry and morose and accused her of jealousy or of coldness. This would have been harder to endure from him if there had not existed all the while at the bottom of her heart a strange, maternal pity, a pity
not untouched with a sort of humorous irony—the eternal irony of the woman as she submits to the
eternal
misunderstanding of the man, embracing her without knowing what he does. He seemed to her sometimes in the mere physical stress of his love-making almost like an amorous and vicious boy. She could not resist the consciousness that her knowledge of the mystery of sex—its depth and subtlety not less than its flame and intensity—was something that went much further and was much more complicated and involved with her whole being than anything he experienced. Especially did she smile in her heart at the queer way he had of
taking
it for granted that he was “seducing” her, of
deriving
, it seemed, sometimes a satyrish pleasure from that idea, and sometimes a fit of violent remorse. When he was in either of these moods she felt towards him precisely as a mother might feel towards a son whose egoism and ignorance gave him a disproportioned view of the whole world. And yet, in actual age, Sorio was some twenty years her senior.

In her own mind, as the weeks slipped by and their names had already been coupled twice in the Sunday services, Nance was taking thought as to what, in solid reality, she intended to do with this child-man of hers when the great moment came. She must move from their present lodging.
That
seemed certain. It also seemed certain that Linda would have still to go on living with her. Any other arrangement than that was obviously unthinkable. But where should they live? And could she, with the money at present at her
disposal
, support three people?

A solution was found to both these problems by Mr. Traherne. There happened to exist in Rodmoor, as
in many other old decaying boroughs on the east coast, certain official positions the practical service of which was almost extinct but whose local prestige and
financial
emoluments, such as they were, lingered on
unaffected
by the change of conditions. The relentless encroachments of the sea upon the land were mainly responsible for this. In certain almost uninhabited villages there existed official persons whose real raison d’être lay with the submerged foundations of former human habitations, deep at the bottom of the waters.

It was, indeed, one of the essential peculiarities of life upon those strange sea-banks this sense of living on the edge, as it were, of the wave-drowned graves of one’s fathers. It may have been the half-conscious knowledge of this, bred in their flesh and blood from infancy, that gave to the natives of those places so many unusual and unattractive qualities. Other abodes of men rest securely upon the immemorial roots of the past, roots that lie, layer beneath layer, in rich historic continuity endowing present usages and customs with the consecration of unbroken tradition. But in the villages of that coast all this is different. Tradition remains, handed down from generation to generation, but the physical continuity is broken. The east-coast dwellers resemble certain of the stellar bodies in the celestial spaces, they retain their identity and their names but they are driven, in slow perpetual movement, to change their physical position. In scriptural phrase, they have no “abiding-place” nor can they continue “in one stay.”

The fishing boats of the present generation set their brown sails to cross the water where, some hundreds of years before, an earlier generation walked their
cobbled
 
streets. The storm-buoys rock and ring and the boat lanterns burn their wavering signals over the drowned foundations that once supported Town-Hall and church tower, Market place and Village Tavern. It is this slow, century-delayed flight from the
invading
tide which so often produces in East Anglian coast towns the phenomenal existence of two parish churches, both it may be still in use, but the later and newer one following the heart of the community in its enforced retreat. Thus it is brought about in these singular localities that the very law of the gods, the law which utters to the elements the solemn “thus far and no further” is as a matter of fact, daily and momently, though with infinite slowness, broken and defied.