John Powys - Rodmoor

The girl drew herself together, at that, like a snake from under a heavy foot and, propping herself up on her hands, threw a glance upon him which, had he caught it, might have produced a yet further change in the book of philosophic notes. Her eyes, for one passing second, held in them something that was like livid fire reflected through blue ice.

For several minutes after this they both contemplated the level mass of illuminated waters with absorbed concentration. At last Adrian broke the silence.

“What I’m aiming at in my book,” he said, “is a revelation of how the essence of life is found in the instinct of destruction. I want to show — what is simply the truth — that the pleasure of destruction, destruction entered upon out of sheer joy and for its own sake, lies behind every living impulse that pushes life forward. Out of destruction alone — out of the rending and tearing of something — of something in the way — does new life spring to birth. It isn’t destruction for cruelty’s sake,” he went on, his fingers closing and unclosing at his side over a handful of sand. “Cruelty is mere inverted sentiment. Cruelty implies attraction, passion, even — in some cases — love. Pure destruction — destruction for its own sake — such as I see it — is no thick, heavy, muddy, perverted impulse such as the cruel are obsessed by. It’s a burning and devouring flame. It’s a mad, splendid revel of glaring whiteness like this which hurts our eyes now. I’m going to show in my book how the ultimate essence of life, as we find it, purest and most purged in the ecstasies of the saints, is nothing but an insanity of destruction! That’s really what lies at the bottom of all the asceticism and all the renunciation in the world. It’s the instinct to destroy — to destroy what lies nearest to one’s hand — in this case, of course, one’s own body and the passions of the body. Ascetics fancy they do this for the sake of their souls. That’s their illusion. They do it for its own sake — for the sake of the ecstasy of destruction! Man is the highest of all animals because he can destroy the most. The saints are the highest among men because they can destroy humanity.”

He rose to his feet and, picking up a flat stone from the sea’s edge, sent it skimming across the water.

“Five!” he cried, as the stone sank at last.

The girl rose and stood beside him. “I can play at ‘Ducks and Drakes’ too,” she said, imitating his action with another stone which, however, sank heavily after only three cuttings of the shiny surface.

“You can’t play ‘Ducks and Drakes’ with the universe,” retorted Sorio. “No girl can — not even you, with your boy-arms and boy-legs! You can’t even throw a stone out of pure innocence. You only threw that — just now — because I did and because you wanted me to see you swing your arm — and because you wanted to change the conversation.”

He looked her up and down with an air of sullen mockery. “What the saints and the mystics seek,” he went on, “is the destruction of everything within reach — of everything that sticks out, that obtrudes, that is simply there . That is why they throw their stones at every form of natural life. But the life they attack is doing the same thing itself in a cruder way. The sea is destroying the land; the grass is destroying the flowers; the flowers one another; the woods, the marshes, the fens, are all destroying something. The saints are only the maddest and wisest of all destroyers—”

“Sorio! There’s a starfish out there — being washed in. Oh, let me try and reach it!”

She snatched his stick from him and catching up her skirt stepped into the water.

“Let it be!” he muttered, “let it be!”

She gave up her attempt with an impatient shrug but continued to watch the steady pressure of the incoming tide with absorbed interest.

“What the saints aim at,” Sorio continued, “and the great poets too, is that absolute white light , which means the drowning, the blinding, the annihilating, of all these paltry-coloured things which assert themselves and try to make themselves immortal. The only godlike happiness is the happiness of seeing world after world tumbled into oblivion. That’s the mad, sweet secret thought at the back of all the religions. God — as the great terrible minds of antiquity never forgot — is the supreme name for that ultimate destruction of all things which is the only goal. That’s why God is always visualised as a blaze of blinding white light. That’s why the Sun-God, greatest of destroyers, is pictured with burning arrows.”

While Adrian continued in this wild strain, expounding his desperate philosophy, it was a pity there was no one to watch the various expressions which crossed in phantasmal sequence, like evil ghosts over a lovely mirror, the face of Philippa Renshaw.

The conflict between the man and woman was, indeed, at that moment, of curious and elaborate interest. While he flung out, in this passionate way, his metaphysical iconoclasm, her instinct — the shrewd feminine instinct to reduce everything to the personal touch — remained fretting, chafing, irritable, and unsatisfied. It was nothing to her that the formula he used was the formula of her own instincts. She loved destruction but in her subtle heart she despised, with infinite contempt, all philosophical theories — despised them as being simply irrelevant and off the track of actual life — off the track, in fact, of those primitive personal impulses which alone possess colour, perfume, salt and sweetness!

Vaguely, at the bottom of his soul, even while he was speaking, Sorio knew that the girl was irritated and piqued; but the consciousness of this, so far from being unpleasant, gave an added zest to his words. He revenged himself on her for the attraction he felt towards her by showing her that in the metaphysical world at any rate, he could reduce her to non-existence! Her annoyance at last gave her, in desperation, a flash of diabolic cunning. She tossed out to him as a bait for his ravening analysis, her own equivocal nature.

“I know well what you mean,” she said, as they moved slowly back towards Rodmoor. “Poor dear, you must have been torn and rent, yourself, to have come to such a point of insight! I, too, in my way, have experienced something of the sort. My brain — you know that , by this time, don’t you, Adriano? — is the brain of a man while my body is the body of a woman. Oh, I hate this woman’s body of mine, Adrian! You can’t know how I hate it! All that annoys you in me, and all that annoys myself too, comes from this,” and she pressed her little hands savagely to her breast as she spoke, as though, there before him, she would tear out the very soul of her femininity.

“From earliest childhood,” she went on, “I’ve loathed being a girl. Long nights, sometimes, I’ve lain awake, crying and crying and crying, because I wasn’t born different. I’ve hated my mother for it. I hate her still, I hate her because she has a morbid, sentimental mania for what she calls the sensitiveness of young girls. The sensitiveness! As if they weren’t the toughest, stupidest, sleepiest things in the world! They’re not sensitive at all. They’ve neither sensitiveness nor fastidiousness nor modesty nor decency! It’s all put on — every bit of it. I know , for I’m like that myself — or half of me is. I betray myself to myself and lacerate myself for being myself. It’s a curious state of things — isn’t it, Adriano?”

She had worked herself up into such a passion of emotional self-pity that great swimming tears blurred the tragic supplication of her eyes. The weary swing of her body as she walked by his side and the droop of her neck as she let her head fall when his glance did not respond were obviously not assumed. The revelation of herself, entered upon for an exterior purpose, had gone further than she intended and this very stripping of herself bare which was to have been her triumph became her humiliation when witnessed so calmly, so indifferently.