John Powys - Rodmoor

After this they walked for a long while in silence, he so possessed by the thrilling sense of having a new vista of thought under his command that he was hardly conscious of her presence, and she in obstinate bitter resolution wrestling with the remorse of her mistake and searching for some other means — any means — of sapping the strength of his independence.

As they moved on and the afternoon advanced, a large and striking change took place in the appearance of the scene. A narrow, clear-cut line of shadow made itself visible below the sand-dunes. The sky lost its metallic glitter and became a deep hyacinthine blue, a blue which after a while communicated itself, with hardly any change in its tint, to the wide-spread volume of water beneath it. In those spots where masses of seaweed floated beneath the surface, the omnipresent blue deepened to a rich indescribable purple, that amazing purple more frequent in southern than in northern seas, which we may suppose is indicated in the Homeric epithet “wine dark.”

As the friends approached the familiar environs of Rodmoor they suddenly came upon a fisherman’s boat pulled up upon the sand, with some heavy nets left lying beside it.

“Sorio!” cried the girl, stooping down and lifting the meshes of one of these, “Sorio! there’s something alive left here. Look!”

He bent over the net beside her and began hastily disentangling several little silvery fish which were struggling and flapping feebly and opening their tiny gills in labouring gasps.

“All right — all right!” cried the man, addressing in his excitement the tiny prisoners, “I’ll soon set you free.”

“What are you doing, Adrian?” expostulated the girl. “No — no! You mustn’t throw them back — you mustn’t! The children always come round when school’s over and search the nets. It’s a Rodmoor custom.”

“It’s a custom I’m going to break, then!” he shouted, rushing towards the sea with a handful of gasping little lives. His fingers when he returned, were covered with glittering scales but they did not outshine the gleam in his face.

“You should have seen them dash away,” he cried. “I’m glad those children won’t find them!”

“They’ll find others,” remarked Philippa Renshaw. “There’ll always be some nets that have fish left in them.”

THERE are hours in every man’s day when the main current of his destiny, rising up from some hidden channel, becomes a recognizable and palpable element in his consciousness. Such hours, if a man’s profoundest life is — so to speak — in harmony with the greater gods, are hours of indescribable and tremulous happiness.

It was nothing less than an experience of this kind which flowed deliciously, like a wave of divine ether, over the consciousness of Hamish Traherne on the day following the one when Sorio and Philippa walked so far.

As he crossed his garden in the early morning and entered the church, the warm sun and clear-cut shadows filled him with that sense of indestructible joy to which one of the ancient thinkers has given the beautiful name of —the Pleasure of the Ideal Now.

From the eastern window, flooding the floor of the little chancel, there poured into the cool, sweet-smelling place a stream of quivering light. He had opened wide the doors under the tower and left them open and he heard, as he sank on his knees, the sharp clear twittering of swallows outside and the chatter of a flock of starlings. Through every pulse and fibre of his being, as he knelt, vibrated an unutterable current of happiness, of happiness so great that the words of his prayer melted and dissolved and all definite thought melted with them into that rare mood where prayer becomes ecstasy and ecstasy becomes eternal.

Returning to his house without spilling one golden drop of what was being allowed him of the wine of the Immortals, he brought his breakfast out into the garden and ate it, lingeringly and dreamily, by the side of his first roses. These were of the kind known as “the seven sisters”—small and white-petaled with a faint rose-flush — and the penetrating odour of them as he bent a spray down towards his face was itself suggestive of old rich wine, “cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth.”

From the marshes below the parapet came exquisite scents of water-mint and flowering-rush and, along with these, the subtle fragrance, pungent and aromatic, of miles and miles of sun-heated fens.

The grass of his own lawn and the leaves of the trees that over-shadowed it breathed the peculiar sweetness — a sweetness unlike anything else in the world — of the first hot days of the year in certain old East Anglian gardens. Whether it is the presence of the sea which endows these places with so rare a quality or the mere existence of reserve and austere withholding in the ways of the seasons there, it were hard to say, but the fact remains that there are gardens in Norfolk and Suffolk — and to Hamish Traherne’s flower-beds in spite of the modesty of their appeal, may well be conceded something of this charm — which surpass all others in the British Isles in the evocation of wistful and penetrating beauty.

The priest had just lit his cigarette and was sipping his tea when he was startled by the sudden appearance of Nance Herrick, white and desperate and panting for breath.

“I had to come to you,” she gasped, refusing his proffered chair and sinking down on the grass. “I had to! I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop in that house. I saw him last night. He was walking with her near the harbour. I spoke to them. I was quiet — not angry or bitter at all and he let her insult me. He let her whip me with her tongue, wickedly, cruelly and yet so under cover, so sideways — you know the kind of thing, Hamish? — that I couldn’t answer. If I’d been alone with her I could have, but his being there made me stupid, miserable, foolish! And she took advantage of it. She said — oh, such mean, biting things! I can’t say them to you. I hate to think of them. They went right through me like a steel lash. And he stood there and did nothing. He was like a man in a trance. He stood there and let her do it. Hamish — Hamish — I wish I were at the bottom of the sea!”

She bowed her white, grief-distorted face until it was buried in the grass. The sun, playing on her bright hair, made it look like newly-minted gold. Mr. Traherne sank on his knees beside her. His ugliness, intensified by the agitation of his pity, reached a pitch that was almost sublime. He was like a gargoyle consoling a goddess.

“Child, child, listen to me!” he cried, his husky grating voice flinging itself upon the silence of her misery like a load of rubble upon a marble pavement.

“There are moments in our life when no words, however tender, however wise, can do any good. The only way — child, it is so — it is so! — the only way is to find in love itself the thing that can heal. For love can do this, I know it, I have proved it.”

He raised one of his arms with a queer, spasmodic gesture and let it drop as suddenly as he had raised it.

“Love rejoices to bear everything,” he went on. “It forgives and forgives again. It serves its beloved night and day, unseen and unfelt, it draws strength from suffering. When the blows of fate strike it, it sinks into its own heart and rises stronger than fate. When the passing hour’s cruel to it, it sinks away within, below the passing of every possible hour, beyond the hurt of every conceivable stroke. Love does not ask anything. It does not ask to be recognized. It is its own return, its own recognition. Listen to me, child! If what I’m saying to you is not true, if love is not like this, then the whole world is dust and ashes and ‘earth’s base built on stubble’!”