John Powys - Rodmoor

They stood still, hesitating.

“There she is,” cried Nance suddenly, “look — who’s she got there with her?”

“Oh, Nance, it’s Rachel, yes, it’s Rachel!”

“She must have gone to Dyke House to fetch her,” murmured the other. “Quick! Let’s go back.”

But it was already too late. Rising from the seat where they were talking together at the harbour’s edge, the two women moved towards the girls, calling them by name. There was no escape now and the sisters advanced to meet them.

They made a strange foreground to the holiday aspect of the little harbour, those two black-gowned figures. Mrs. Renshaw was a little in front and her less erect and less rigid form had a certain drooping pathos in its advance as though she deprecated her appearance in the midst of so cheerful a scene. Both the women wore old-fashioned bonnets of a kind that had been discarded for several years; but the dress and the bonnet of Rachel Doorm presented the appearance of having been dragged out of some ancient chest and thrust upon her in disregard of the neglected condition of her other clothes. Contrasted with the brightly rocking waters of the river mouth and the gay attire of the boat-load of noisy lads and girls that was drifting sea-ward on the out-flowing tide, the look of the two women, as they crossed the little quay, might have suggested the sort of scene that, raised to a poetic height by the genius of the ancient poets, has so often in classical drama symbolized the approach of messengers of ill-omen.

Mrs. Renshaw greeted the two sisters very nervously. Nance caught her glancing with an air of ascetic disapproval at their bright-coloured frocks and hats. Rachel, avoiding their eyes, extended a cold limp hand to each in turn. They exchanged a few conventional and embarrassed sentences, Nance as usual under such circumstances, giving vent to little uncalled for bursts of rather disconcerting laughter. She had a trick of opening her mouth very wide when she laughed like this, and her grey eyes even wider still, which gave her an air of rather foolish childishness quite inexpressive of what might be going on in her mind.

After a while they all moved off, as if by an instinctive impulse, away from the harbour mouth and towards the sea-shore. To do this they had to pass a piece of peculiarly desolate ground littered with dead fish, discarded pieces of nets and dried heaps of sun-bleached seaweed. Nance had a moment’s quaint and morbid intimation that the peculiar forlornness of this particular spot gratified in some way the taste of Mrs. Renshaw, for her expression brightened a little and she moved more cheerfully than when under the eyes of the loiterers on the wharf. There were some young women paddling in the sea just at that place and some young men watching them so that Mrs. Renshaw, who with Nance kept in advance of the other two, led the way along the path immediately under the sand-dunes. This was the very spot where, on the day of their first exploration of the Rodmoor coast, they had seen the flowerless leaves of the little plant called the rock-rose. The flowers of this plant, as Nance observed them now, were already faded and withered, but other sea growths met her eye which were not unfamiliar. There were several tufts of grey-leaved sea-pinks and still greyer sea-lavender. There were also some flaccid-stalked, glaucous weeds which she had never noticed before and which seemed in the moist sappy texture of their foliage as though their natural place was rather beneath than above the salt water whose propinquity shaped their form. But what made her pause and stoop down with sudden startled attention, was her first sight of that plant described to her by Mr. Traherne as peculiarly characteristic of the Rodmoor coast. Yes, there it was — the yellow horned poppy! As she bent over it Nance realized how completely right the priest had been in what he said. The thing’s oozy, clammy leaves were of a wonderful bluish tint, a tint that nothing in the world short of the sea itself, could have possibly called into existence. They were spiked and prickly, these leaves, and their shape was clear-edged and threatening, as if modelled in sinister caprice, by some Da Vinci-like Providence, willing enough to startle and shock humanity. But what struck the girl more vividly than either the bluish tint or the threatening spikes were the large, limply-drooping flowers of a pallid sulphurous yellow which the plant displayed. They were flowers that bore but small resemblance to the flowers of other poppies. They had a peculiarly melancholy air, even before they began to fade, an air as though the taste of their petals would produce a sleep of a deeper, more obliterating kind than any “drowsy syrups” or “mandragora” which the sick soul might crave, to “rase out” its troubles.

Mrs. Renshaw smiled as Nance rose from her long scrutiny of this weird plant, a plant that might be imagined “rooting itself at ease on Lethe’s wharf” while the ghost-troops swept by, whimpering and wailing.

“I always like the horned poppy,” she remarked, “it’s different from other flowers. You can’t imagine it growing in a garden, can you? I like that. I like things that are wild — things no one can imprison.”

She sighed heavily when she had said this and, turning her head away as they walked on, looked wearily across the water.

“Bank-holidays are days for the young,” she went on, after a pause. “The poor people look forward to them and I’m glad they do for they have a hard life. But you must have a young heart, Nance, a young heart to enjoy these things. I feel sometimes that we don’t live enough in other people’s happiness but it’s hard to do it when one gets older.”

She was silent again and then, as Nance glanced at her sympathetically, “I like Rodmoor because there are no grand people here and no motor-cars or noisy festivities. It’s a pleasure to see the poor enjoying themselves but the others, they make my head ache! They trouble me. I always think of Sodom and Gomorrah when I see them.”

“I suppose,” murmured the girl, “that they’re human beings and have their feelings, like the rest of us.”

A shadow of almost malignant bitterness crossed Mrs. Renshaw’s face.

“I can’t bear them! I can’t bear them!” she cried fiercely. “Those that laugh shall weep,” she added, looking at her companion’s prettily designed dress.

“Yes, I’m afraid happy people are often hard-hearted,” remarked Nance, anxious if possible to fall in with the other’s mood, but feeling decidedly uneasy. Mrs. Renshaw suddenly changed the conversation.

“I went over to see Rachel,” she said, “because I heard you had left her and were working in the shop.”

She took a deep breath and her voice trembled.

“I think it was wrong of you to leave her,” she went on, “I think it was cruel of you. I know what you. will say. I know what all you young people nowadays say about being independent and so forth. But it was wrong all the same, wrong and cruel! Your duty was clearly to your mother’s friend. I suppose,” she added bitterly, “you didn’t like her sadness and loneliness. You wanted more cheerful companionship.”

Nance wondered in her heart whether Mrs. Renshaw’s hostility to the complacent and contented ones of the earth was directed, in this case, against the hard-worked sewing girls or against poor Miss Pontifex and her little garden.

“I did it,” she replied, “for Linda’s sake. She and Miss Doorm didn’t seem happy together.”

As she spoke, she glanced apprehensively round to ascertain how near the others were, but it seemed as though Rachel had resumed her ascendency over the young girl. They appeared to be engaged in absorbing conversation and had stopped side by side, looking at the sea. Mrs. Renshaw turned upon her resentfully, a smouldering fire of anger in her brown eyes.