John Powys - Rodmoor

With exquisite deliberation Mr. Stork placed the black bag upon the ground and selecting two of the freshest blooms from his gorgeous bunch, handed one by the light of a little shop window to each of the women.

“How is your friend?” enquired Mrs. Renshaw with a touch of irony in her tone. “This young lady has not seen him to-day.”

At that moment Nance realized that she hated this melancholy being whom a chance encounter with her husband’s son seemed to throw into such malicious spirits. She felt that everything Mrs. Renshaw was destined to say from now till they separated, would be designed to humiliate and annoy her. This may have been a fantastic illusion, but she acted upon it with resolute abruptness.

“Good-bye,” she exclaimed, turning to her companion, “I’ll leave you in Mr. Stork’s care. I promised Rachel not to be late to-night. Good-bye — and thank you,” she bowed to the young man and held up the peony, “for this.”

“She’s jealous,” remarked Baltazar as he led Mrs. Renshaw across the green under the darkening sycamores. “She is abominably jealous! She was in a furious temper — I saw it myself — when Adrian took her sister out the other day and now she’s wild because he’s friendly with Philippa. Oh, these girls, these girls!”

An amused smile flickered for a moment across the lady’s face but she suppressed it instantly. She sighed heavily. “You are all too much for me,” she said, “too much for me. I’m getting old, Tassar. God be merciful! This world is not an easy place to live in.”

She walked by his side after this in heavy silence till they reached the entrance of the park.

AS the days began to grow warmer and in the more sheltered gardens the first roses appeared, Nance was not the only one who showed signs of uneasiness over Adrian Sorio’s disturbed state of mind.

Baltazar was frequently at a loss to know where, in the long twilights, his friend wandered. Over and over again, after June commenced, the poor epicure was doomed to take his supper in solitude and sit companionless through the evening in the grassy enclosure at the back of his house.

As the longest day approached and the heavily scented hawthorn tree which was the chief ornament of his small garden had scattered nearly all its red blossoms, Stork’s uneasiness reached such a pitch that he protested vigorously to the wanderer, using violent expressions and, while not precisely accusing him of ingratitude, making it quite plain that this was neither the mood nor the treatment he expected from so old a friend.

Sorio received this outburst meekly enough — indeed he professed himself entirely penitent and ready to amend his ways — but as the days went on, instead of any improvement in the matter, things became rapidly worse and worse.

Baltazar could learn nothing definitely of what he did when he disappeared but the impression gradually emphasized itself that he spent these lonely hours in immense, solitary walks along the edge of the sea. He returned sometimes like a man absolutely exhausted and on these occasions his friend could not help observing that his shoes were full of sand and his face scorched.

One especially hot afternoon, when Stork had returned from Mundham by the midday train in the hope of finding Adrian ready to stroll with him under the trees in the park, there occurred quite a bitter and violent scene between them when the latter insisted, as soon as their meal was over, on setting off alone.

“Go to the devil!” Adrian finally flung back at his entertainer when — his accustomed urbanity quite broken down — the aggrieved Baltazar gave vent to the suppressed irritation of many days. “Go to the devil!” the unconscionable man repeated, putting down his hat over his head and striding across the green.

Once clear of the little town, he let his speed subside into a more ordinary pace and, crossing the bridge over the Loon, made his way to the sea shore. The blazing sunshine, pouring down from a sky that contained no trace of a cloud, seemed to have secured the power that day of reducing even the ocean itself to a kind of magnetised stupor. The waters rolled in, over the sparkling sands, with a long, somnolent, oily ripple that spent itself and drew back without so much as a flicker or flake of foam. The sea-gulls floated languidly on the unruffled tide, or quarrelled with little, short, petulant screams over the banks of bleached pungent-smelling seaweed where swarms of scavenging flies shared with them their noonday fretfulness.

On the wide expanse of the sea itself there lay a kind of glittering haze, thin and metallic, as if hammered out of some marine substance less resistant but not less dazzling than copper or gold. This was in the mid-distance, so to speak, of the great plain of water. In the remote distance the almost savage glitter diminished and a dull livid glare took its place, streaked in certain parts of the horizon by heavy bars of silvery mist where the sea touched the sky. The broad reaches of hard sand smouldered and flickered under the sun’s blaze and little vibrating heat waves danced like shapeless demons over the summit of the higher dunes.

Turning his face northward, Sorio began walking slowly now and with occasional glances at the dunes, along the level sand by the sea’s edge. He reached in this way a spot nearly two miles from Rodmoor where for leagues and leagues in either direction no sign of human life was visible.

He was alone with the sun and the sea, the sun that was dominating the water and the water that was dominating the land.

He stood still and waited, his heart beating, his pulses feverish, his deep-sunken eyes full of a passionate, expectant light. He had not long to wait. Stepping down slowly from the grass-covered dunes, past a deserted fisherman’s hut which had become their familiar rendezvous, came the desired figure. She walked deliberately, slowly, with a movement that, as Sorio hastened to meet her, had something almost defiant in its dramatic reserve.

They greeted one another with a certain awkwardness. Neither held out a hand — neither smiled. It might have been a meeting of two conspirators fearful of betrayal. It was only after they had walked in silence, side by side and still northwards for several minutes, that Sorio began speaking, but his words broke from him then with a tempestuous vehemence.

“None of these people here know me,” he cried, “not one of them. They take me for a dawdler, an idler, an idiotic fool. Well! That’s nothing. Nance doesn’t know me. She doesn’t care to know me. She — she loves! As if love were what I wanted — as if love were enough!”

He was silent and the girl looked at him curiously, waiting for him to say more.

“They’d be a bit surprised, wouldn’t they,” he burst out, “if they knew about the manuscripts he ”—he uttered this last word with concentrated reverence, — “is guarding for me over there? He understands me, Phil, and not a living person except him. Listen, Phil! Since I’ve known you I’ve been able to breathe — just able to breathe — in this damned England. Before that — God! I shudder to think of it — I was dumb, strangled, suffocated, paralyzed, dead. Even now — even with you, Phil, — I’m still fumbling and groping after it — after what I have to say to the world, after my secret, my idea!

“It hurts me, my idea. You know that feeling, Phil. But I’m getting it into order — into shape. Look here!”

He pulled out of his pocket a small thick notebook closely written, blurred with erasures and insertions, stained with salt-water.

“That’s what I’ve done since I’ve known you — in this last month — and it’s better than anything I’ve written before. It’s clearer. It hits the mark more crushingly. Phil, listen to me! I know I’ve got it in me to give to the world something it’s never dreamed of — something with a real madness of truth in it — something with a bite that gets to the very bone of things. I know I’ve got that in me.”