John Powys - Rodmoor

There was hardly any air in the room, in spite of the open windows, and Nance fancied that she discerned an odour proceeding from the wainscoting that resembled the dust that had once greeted her from a cupboard in one of the unused bedrooms in Dyke House, dust that seemed to be composed of the moth-eaten garments of generations of dead humanity.

She felt that she could have borne these things — the whining dog, and the wailing infant — if only Linda, lying with her face to the wall, were not listening to them also, listening with feverish intentness. Yes, she could have borne it if the whole night were not listening — if the whole night were not listening to the turnings and tossings of humanity, trying to ease the itch of its desire and never able to reach, toss and turn as it might, the place where the plague-spot troubled it.

With a cry she leapt from her bed and, fumbling on the dressing-table, struck a match and lit a candle. The flickering flame showed Linda sitting bolt-upright with lamentable wide-open eyes.

Nance went to the window which looked out on the yard. Here she turned and threw back from her forehead her masses of heavy hair. “God help us, Linda!” she whispered. “It’s no use. Nothing is any use.”

The young girl slowly and wearily left her bed and, advancing across the room, nestled up against her sister and caressed her in silence.

“What shall we do?” Nance repeated, hardly knowing what she said. “What shall we do? I can’t bear this. I can’t bear it, little one, I can’t bear it!”

As if in response to her appeal, the dog and the infant together sent forth a pitiful wail upon the night.

“What misery there is in the world — what horrible misery!” Nance murmured. “I’m sure we’re all better off dead, than like this. Better off dead, my darling.”

Linda answered by slipping her arms round her waist and hugging her tightly. Then suddenly, “Why don’t we dress ourselves and go out?” she cried. “It’s too hot to sleep. Yes, do let’s do that, Nance! Let’s dress and go out.”

Nance looked at her with a faint smile. There was a childish ardour about her tone that reminded her of the Linda of many years ago. “Very well,” she said, “I don’t mind.”

They dressed hurriedly. The very boldness of the idea helped them to recover their spirits. Bareheaded and in their house-shoes they let themselves out into the street. It was between two and three o’clock. The little town was absolutely silent. The infant in the house opposite made no sound. “Perhaps it’s dead now,” Nance thought.

They walked across the green, and Nance gave a long wistful look at the windows of Baltazar’s cottage. The heavy clouds had lifted a little, and from various points in the sky the stars threw down a faint, uncertain glimmer. It remained, however, still so dark that when they reached the centre of the bridge, neither bank was visible, and the waters of the Loon flowing beneath were hidden in profound obscurity. They leant upon the parapet and inhaled the darkness. What wind there was blew from the west so that the air was heavy with the scent of peat and marsh mud, and the sound of the sea seemed to come from far away, as if it belonged to a different world.

They crossed the bridge and began following the footpath that led to the church. Coming suddenly on an open gate, however, they were tempted, by a curious instinct of unconscious self-cruelty, to deviate from the path they knew and to pursue a strange and unfamiliar track heading straight for the darkened fens. It was on the side of the path removed from the sea that this track began, and it led them, along the edge of a reedy ditch, into a great shadowy maze of silent water-meadows.

Fortunately for the two girls, the particular ditch they followed had a high and clearly marked embankment, an embankment used by the owners of cattle in that district as a convenient way of getting their herds from one feeding-ground to another. No one who has never experienced the sensation of following one of these raised banks, or dyke-tracks, across the fens, can conceive the curious feelings it has the power of evoking. Even by day these impressions are unique and strange. By night they assume a quality which may easily pass into something bordering upon panic-terror. The palpable and immediate cause of this emotion is the sense of being isolated, separated, and cut-off, from all communication with the ordinary world.

On the sea-shore one is indeed in contact with the unknown mass of waters, but there is always, close at hand, the familiar inland landscape, friendly and reassuring. On the slope of a mountain one may look with apprehension at the austere heights above, but there is always behind one the rocks and woods, the terraces and ledges, past which one has ascended, and to which at any moment one can return.

In the midst of the fens there is no such reassurance. The path one has followed becomes merged in the illimitable space around; merged, lost and annihilated. No mark, no token, no sign indicates its difference from other similar tracks. No mark nor token separates north from south or east from west. On all sides the same reeds, the same meadows, the same gates, the same stunted willow-trees, the same desolate marsh pools, the same vast and receding horizons. The mind has nothing to rest itself upon except the general expanse, and the general expanse seems as boundless as infinity.

Nance and her sister were not, of course, far enough away from their familiar haunts to get the complete “fen-terror,” but, aided by the darkness, the power of the thing was by no means unfelt. The instinct to escape from the burden of their thoughts which drove the girls on, became indeed more and more definitely mingled, as they advanced, with a growing sense of alarm. But into this very alarm they plunged forward with a species of exultant desperation. They both experienced, as they went hand in hand, a morbid kind of delight in being cruel to themselves, in forcing themselves to do the very thing — and to do it in the dead of night — which, of all, they had most avoided, even in the full light of day.

Before they had gone much more than a mile from their starting-point they were permitted to witness a curious trick of the elemental powers. Without any warning, there suddenly arose from the west a much more powerful current of wind. Every cloud was driven sea-ward and with the clouds every trace of sea-mist. The vast dome of sky above them showed itself clear and unstained; and across the innumerable constellations — manifest to their eyes in its full length — stretched the Milky Way. Not only did the stars thus make themselves visible. In their visibility they threw a weird and phantom-like light over the whole landscape. Objects that had been mere misty blurs became distinct identities and things that had been absolutely out of sight were now unmistakably recognizable.

The girls stood still and looked around them. They could see the church tower rising squat and square against the line of the distant sand-dunes. They could see the roofs of the village, huddled greyly and obscurely together, beyond the dark curve of the bridge. They could make out the sombre shape of Dyke House itself, just distinguishable against the high tow-path of the river. And Nance, turning westward, could even discern her favourite withy-copse, surrounded by shadowy cornfields.

There was a pitiable pathos in the way each of the girls, now that the scene of their present trouble was thus bared to their view, turned instinctively to the object most associated with the thoughts they were seeking to escape. Nance looked long and wistfully at the little wood of willows and alders, now a mere misty exhalation of thicker shadow above the long reaches of the fens. She thought of how mercilessly her feelings had been outraged there; of how violent and strange and untender Sorio had been. Yet even at that moment, her heart aching with the recollection of what she had suffered, the old fierce passionate cry went up from her soul—“better be beaten by Adrian than loved by all the rest of the world!”