John Powys - Rodmoor

He stooped down and picked up a stranded jelly-fish that lay — a mass of quivering, helpless iridescence — in the scorching sun. He stepped into the water till it was over his shoes and flung the thing far out into the oily sea. It sank at once to the bottom, leaving a small circle of ripples.

“Go on, go on!” cried the girl, looking at him with eyes that darkened and grew more insatiable as she felt his soul stir and quiver and strip itself before her.

“Go on! Tell me more about Nance.”

“I have told you,” he muttered, “I’ve told you everything. She’s good and faithful and kind. She gives me love — oh, endless love! — but that’s not what I want. She no more understands me than I understand — eternity! Little Linda reads me better.”

“Tell me about Linda,” murmured the girl.

Sorio threw a wild glance around them. “It’s her fear that taught her what she knew — what she guessed. Fear reads deep and far. Fear breaks through many barriers. But she’s changed now since she’s been with Brand. She’s become like the rest.”

“Oh, Brand—!” Philippa shrugged her shoulders. “So he’s come into it? Well, let them go. Tell me more about Nance. Does she cling to you and make a fuss? Does she try the game of tears?”

Sorio looked at her sharply. A vague suspicion invaded the depths of his heart. They walked along in silence for several minutes. The power of the sun seemed to increase. A mass of seaweed, floating below the water, caused in one place an amber-coloured shadow to break the monotony of the glittering surface.

“Does your son believe in you — as I do?” she asked gently.

As soon as the words had crossed her lips she knew they were the very last she ought to have uttered. The man withdrew into himself with a rigid tightening of every nerve. No one — certainly not Nance — had ever dared to touch this subject. Once to Nance, in London, and twice recently to his present companion, had he referred to Baptiste but this direct question about the boy was too much; it outraged something in him which was beyond articulation. The shock given him was so intense and the reaction upon his feelings so vivid that, hardly conscious of what he did, he thrust his hand into his pocket and clutched tightly with his fingers the book containing his work, as though to protect it from aggression. As he thus stood there before her, stiff and speechless, she could only console herself by the fact that he avoided her eyes.

Her mind moved rapidly. She must invent, at all costs, some relief to this tension. She had trusted her magnetism too far.

“Adriano,” she said, imitating with feminine instinct Baltazar’s caressing intonation, “I want to bathe. We’re out of sight of every one. We know each other well enough now. Shall we — together?”

He met her eyes now. There was a subtile appeal in their depths which drew him to her and troubled his senses. He nodded and uttered an embarrassed laugh. “Why not?” he answered.

“Very well,” she said quickly, clinching her suggestion before he had time to revoke his assent, “I’ll just run behind these sand hills and take off my things. You undress here and get into the water. And swim out, too, Adrian, with your back to me! I’ll soon join you.”

She left him and he obeyed her mechanically — only looking nervously round for a moment as he folded his coat containing the precious manuscript and laid a heavy stone upon it.

He plunged out into the waveless sea with fierce, impetuous strokes. The water yielded to his violent movements like a lake of quicksilver. Dazzling threads and flakes and rainbows flashed up, wavered, trembled, glittered and vanished as he swam forward. With his eyes fixed on the immense dome of sky above him, where, like the rim of a burnished shield, it cut down into the horizon, he struck out incessantly, persistently, seeking, in thus embracing a universe of white light, to find the escape he craved.

Strange thoughts poured through his brain as he swam on. The most novel, the most terrific of the points contained in those dithyrambic notes left behind under the stone surged up before him and, mingling with them in fierce exultant affection, the image of Baptiste beckoned to him out of a moulten furnace of white light.

Far away behind him at last he heard the voice of his companion. Whether she intended him to turn he did not know, for her words were inaudible, but when he did he perceived that she was standing, a slim white figure, at the water’s edge. He watched her with feelings that were partly bitter and partly tender.

“Why does she stand there so long?” he muttered to himself. “Why doesn’t she get in and start swimming?”

As if made aware of his thought by some telepathic instinct the girl at that moment slipped into the water and began walking slowly forward, her hands clasped behind her head. When the water reached above her knees she swung up her hands and with a swift spring of her white body, disappeared from view. She remained so long invisible that Sorio grew anxious and took several vigorous strokes towards her. She re-appeared at last, however, and was soon swimming vigorously to meet him.

When they met she insisted on advancing further and so, side by side, with easy, leisurely movements, they swam out to sea, their eyes on the far horizon and their breath coming and going in even reciprocity.

“Far enough!” cried Sorio at last, treading water and looking closely at her.

There was a strange wild light in the girl’s face. “Why go back?” her look seemed to say—“Why not swim on and on together — until the waters cover us and all riddles are solved?” There was something in her expression at that moment — as, between sky and sea, the two gazed mutely at one another — which seemed to interpret some terrible and uttermost mystery. It was, however, too rare a moment to endure long, and they turned their heads landwards.

The return took longer than they had anticipated and the girl was swimming very slowly and displaying evident signs of exhaustion before they got near shore. As soon as she could touch the bottom with her feet she hurried out and staggered, with stiff limbs, across the sands to where she had left her clothes.

When she came back, dressed and in lively spirits, her unbound hair shimmering in the sunshine like wet silk, she found him pacing the sea’s edge with an expression of gloomy resolution.

“I shall have to rewrite every word of these notes,” he said, striking his hand against his pocket. “I had a new thought just now as I was in the water and it changes everything.”

She threw herself down on the hot sand and spread out her hair to let it dry.

“Don’t let’s go yet, Adrian,” she pleaded. “I feel so sleepy and happy.”

He looked at her thoughtfully, hardly catching the drift of her words. “It changes everything,” he repeated.

“Lie down here,” she murmured softly, letting her gaze meet his with a wistful entreaty.

He placed himself beside her. “Don’t get hurt by the sun,” he said. She smiled at that — a long, slow, dreamy smile — and drawing him towards her with her eyes, “I believe you’re afraid of me to-day, Adrian,” she whispered.

Her boyish figure, outlined beneath the thin dress she wore, seemed to breathe a sort of classic voluptuousness as she languidly stretched her limbs. As she did this, she turned her head sideways, till her chin rested on her shoulder and a tress of brown hair, wet and clinging, fell across her slender neck.

A sudden impulse of malice seemed to seize the man who bent over her. “Your hair isn’t half as long as Nance’s,” he said, turning abruptly away and hugging his knees with his arms.