Rodmoor (31 page)

It is perhaps small wonder that among the counties of England these particular districts should have won for themselves a sinister reputation for impiety and perversity. Nothing so guards and establishes the virtue of a community than its sense of the presence in its midst of the ashes of its generations.
Consciously
and in a thousand pious usages it “worships its dead.” But East-Anglian coast-dwellers are not permitted this privilege. Their “Lares and Penates” have been invaded and submerged. The fires upon their altars have been drowned and over the graves of their fathers the godless tides ebb and flow without reverence. Fishes swim where once children were led to the font and where lovers were wedded the wild cormorant mocks the sea-horses with its disconsolate cry. It is easy to be believed that the remote
descendants
of human beings who actually walked and bartered and loved and philosophized on spots of ground now tangled with seaweed and sea-drift, and
with fathoms of moaning and whispering water above them, should come in their hour to depart in a measure from the stable and kindly laws of human integrity! With the ground thus literally
moving
—though in age-long process—
under their feet
, how should they be as faithful as other tribes of men to what is
permanent
in human institution?

There was perhaps a certain congruity in the fact that now, after all these ages of tidal malice, it was in the interests of so singular an alien as Sorio—one whose very philosophy was the philosophy of “
destruction
”—that this lingering on of offices, whose service had been sea-drowned, remained as characteristic of the place. But this is precisely what did occur.

There was in Rodmoor a local official, appointed by the local town council, whose title, “The Warden of the Fishes,” carried the mind back to a time when the borough, much larger then, had been a considerable centre of the fishing industry. This office, tenable for life, carried with it very few actual duties now but it ensured a secure though small emolument and, what was more important, the occupancy, free of rent, of one of the most picturesque houses in the place, an old pre-Elizabethan dwelling of incommodious size but of romantic appearance, standing at the edge of the
harbour
.

The last incumbent of this quaint and historic office, whose duties were so little onerous that they could be performed by a very old and very feeble man, was a notable character of the village called John Peewit Swinebitter, whose chief glory was not attained until the close of his mortal days, which ended under the table in the Admiral’s Head after a surfeit of the very
fish of which he was “warden” washed down by too copious libations of Keith-Radipole ale.

Since Mr. Swinebitter’s decease in June, there had gone on all through July and August, a desperate
rivalry
between two town factions as to the choosing of his successor and it was Mr. Traherne’s inspired notion to take advantage of this division to secure the post for Nance’s prospective husband.

Sorio, though of foreign blood, was by birth and nationality English and moreover he had picked up, during his stay in Rodmoor, quite as much familiarity with the ways and habits of fish as were necessary for that easy post. If, at any unforeseen crisis, more scientific and intimate knowledge was required than was at his disposal, there was always Dr. Raughty, a past master in all such matters, to whom he could apply. It was Mr. Traherne’s business to wheedle the local rivals into relinquishing their struggle in favour of one who was outside the contention and when this was accomplished the remaining obstacles in the way of the appointment were not hard to surmount. Luckily for the conspirators, Brand Renshaw, though the largest local landowner and a Justice of the Peace, was not on the Rodmoor council.

So skillfully did Mr. Traherne handle the matter and so cautious and reserved was Nance that it was not till after the final reading of their bans in the church on the marshes and the completion of the arrangements for their marriage at the end of the following week, that even Baltazar Stork became aware of what was in the wind.

Sorio himself had been extremely surprised at this unexpected favour shown him by the local tradesmen.
He had brooded so long upon his morbid delusion of universal persecution that it seemed incredible to him, in the few interviews which he had with these people, that they should treat him in so courteous and kind a manner. As a matter of fact, so fierce and obstinate were their private dissensions, it was a genuine relief to them to deal with a person from outside; nor must it be forgotten that in the appointment of Nance’s
husband
to the coveted post they were doing honour to the memory of the bride’s father, Captain Herrick
having
been by far the most popular of all the visitors to Rodmoor in former times. Most of the older members of the council could well remember the affable sailor. Many of them had frequently gone out fishing with him in the days when there were more fish and rarer fish to be caught than there were at present—those “old days” in fact which, in most remote villages, are
associated
with stuffed wonders in tavern parlours and with the quips and quirks of half-legendary heroes of Sport and Drink.

It was a reversion to such “old days” to have a gentleman “Warden of the Fishes.” Besides it was a blow at the Renshaws between whom and the
town-council
there was an old established feud. For it was not hidden from the gossips of Rodmoor that the
relations
between Nance and the family at Oakguard were more than a little strained, nor did the shrewder ones among them hesitate to whisper dark and ominous hints as to the nature of this estrangement.

Baltazar Stork received the news of his friend’s approaching marriage with something like mute fury. The morning when Sorio announced it to him was one of concentrated gloom. The sea was high and rough.
The wind wailed through the now almost leafless
sycamores
and made the sign which bore the Admiral’s head creak and groan in its iron frame. It had rained steadily all through the night and though the rain had now ceased there was no sun to dry the little pools of water which lay in all the trodden places in the green or the puddles, choked up with dead leaves, which stared desolately from the edges of the road upon the sombre heaven. Sorio, having made his
momentous
announcement in a negligent, off-hand way, as though it were a matter of small importance, rushed off to meet Nance at the station and go with her to Mundham.

As it was Saturday the girl had no scruple about leaving her work. In any case she would have been free, with the rest of Miss Pontifex’s employees, in the early afternoon. She was anxious to spend as long a time as was possible making her final purchases
preparatory
to their taking possession of Ferry Lodge. The mere name of this relic of Rodmoor’s faded glory was indicative of how times had changed. What was once an inland crossing—several miles from the shore—had now become the river’s mouth and where farmers formerly watered their cattle the fishing boats spread their sails to meet the sea.

Nance had made a clean sweep of the furniture of their predecessor, something about the reputation of Mr. Peewit Swinebitter prejudicing her, in perhaps an exaggerated manner, against the buying of any of his things. This fastidiousness on her part did not,
however
, lessen the material difficulties of the situation, Sorio being of singularly little assistance in the rôle of a house-furnisher.

Meanwhile, with hat pulled low down over his
forehead
and his cane switching the rain-drenched grass, Baltazar Stork walked up and down in front of his cottage. He walked thus until he was tired and then he came and stood at the edge of the green and looked at his empty house and at the puddles in the road. Into the largest of these puddles he idly poked his stick, stirring the edge of a half-submerged leaf and making it float across the muddy water. Children passed him unheeded, carrying cans and bottles to be filled at the tavern. Little boys came up to him, acquaintances of his, full of gaiety and mischief, but something in his face made them draw back and leave him. Never, in all his relations with his friend, had Baltazar derived more pleasure from being with him than he had done during the recent weeks. That condition of helpless and wistful incompetence which Nance found so trying in Sorio was to Baltazar Stork the cause of the most delicate and exquisite sensations. Never had he loved the man so well—never had he found him so
fascinating
. And now, just at the moment when he, the
initiated
adept in the art of friendship, was reaping the reward of his long patience with his friend’s
waywardness
and really succeeding in making him depend on him exactly in the way he loved best, there came this accursed girl and carried him off!

The hatred which he felt at that moment towards Nance was so extreme that it overpowered and swamped every other emotion. Baltazar Stork was of that
peculiarly
constituted disposition which is able to hate the more savagely and vindicatively because of the very fact that its normal mood is one of urbane and tolerant indifference. The patient courtesy of a
lifetime
,
the propitiatory arts of a long, had their revenge just then for all they had made him
endure
. In a certain sense it was well for him that he
could
hate. It was, indeed in a measure, an instinct of self-preservation that led him to indulge such a
feeling
. For below his hatred, down in the deeper levels of his soul, there yawned a gulf, the desolating
emptiness
of which was worse than death. He did not
visualize
this gulf in the same concrete manner as he had done on a previous occasion, but he was conscious of it none the less. It was as a matter of fact a thing that had been for long years hidden obscurely under the hard, gay surface of his days. He covered it over by one distraction or the other. Its remote presence had given an added intensity to his zest for the various little pleasures, aesthetic or otherwise, which it was his habit to enjoy. It had done more. It had reduced to comparative insignificance the morbid vexations and imaginative reactions from which his friend suffered. He could afford to appear hard and crystal-cold,
capable
of facing with equanimity every kind of ultimate horror. And he
was
capable of facing such. Under the shadow of a thing like that—a thing beyond the worst of insane obsessions, for his mind was cruelly clear as he turned his eyes inward—he was able to look contemptuously into the Gorgon face of any kind of terror. When he chose he could always see the thing as it was, see it as the desolation of emptiness, as a deep, frozen space, void of sound or movement or life or hope or end. There was not the least tinge of insanity in the vision.

What he was permitted to see, by reason of some malign clarity of intellect denied to the majority of
his fellows, was simply the real truth of life, its frozen chemistry and deadly purposelessness. Most men
visualize
existence through a blurring cloud of personal passion, either erotic or imaginative. They suffer, but they suffer from illusion. What separated
Baltazar
from the majority was his power of seeing things in absolute colourlessness—unconfused by any sort of distorting mirage. Thus what he saw with his soul was the ghastly loneliness of his soul. He saw this frozen, empty, hollow space and he saw it as the
natural
country in which his soul dwelt, its unutterable reality, its appalling truth. That was why no thought of suicide ever came to him. The thing was too deep. He might kill himself, but in so doing he would only destroy the few superficial distractions that afforded him a temporary freedom. For suicide would only fling him—that at least is what, with horrible clarity, he had come to feel about it—into the depths of his soul, into the very abyss, that is to say, which he escaped by living on the surface. It was a kind of death-in-life that he was conscious of, below his
crystalline
amenities, but one does not fly to death to escape from death.

It will be seen from this how laughable to him were all Sorio’s neurotic reactions from people and things. People and things were precisely what Baltazar clung to, to avoid that “frozen sea” lying there at the back of everything. It will be easily imagined too, how
absurd
to him—how fantastic and unreal—were the various hints and glimpses which Sorio had permitted him into what his friend called his “philosophy of
destruction
.” To make a “philosophy” out of a
struggle
to reach the ultimate horror of that “frozen sea,”
how lamentably pathetic it was, and how childish! No sane person would contemplate such a thing and the attempt proved that Sorio was not sane. As for the Italian’s vague and prophetic suggestions with
regard
to the possibility of something—philosophers always spoke of “something” when they approached nothing!—beyond “what we call life” that seemed to Baltazar’s mind mere poetic balderdash and
moonstruck
mysticism. But he had always listened
patiently
to Sorio’s incoherences. The man would not have been himself without his mad philosophy! It was part of that charming weakness in him that appealed to Baltazar so. It was absurd, of course—this whole business of writing philosophic books—but he was ready to pardon it, ready to listen all night and day to his friend’s dithyrambic diatribes, as long as they brought that particular look of exultation which he found so touching into his classic face!

This “look of exultation” in Sorio’s features had indeed been accompanied during the last month by an expression of wistful and bewildered helplessness and it was just the union of these two things that Baltazar found so irresistibly appealing. He was drawn closer to Adrian, in fact, during these Autumn days, than he had ever been drawn to any one. And it was just at this moment, just when he was happiest in their life together, that Nance Herrick must needs obtrude her accursed feminine influence and with this result! So he gave himself up without let or hindrance to his hatred of this girl. His hatred was a cold,
calculated
, deliberate thing, clear of all volcanic
disturbances
but, such as it was, it possessed him at that
moment
 
to the exclusion of everything else. He imagined to himself now, as with the end of his stick he guided that sycamore leaf across the puddle, how Nance would buy those things in the Mundham shops and what pleasure there would be in her grey eyes, that peculiar pleasure unlike anything else in the world which a woman has when she is indulging, at the same moment, her passion for domestic detail and her passion for her lover!