John Powys - Rodmoor

“Shall we go down to the sea now, dear?” said Mrs. Renshaw suddenly. “The others will see us and follow.”

They moved together across the clinging sand. When they approached the water’s edge, now deserted of holiday-makers, Nance searched the skyline for any sail that might be the one carrying Sorio and his friends. She made out two or three against the blue distance but it was quite impossible to tell which of these, if any, was the one that bore the man who, according to her companion’s words, would only “need” her if she served him like a slave.

Mrs. Renshaw began picking up shells from the debris-scattered windrow at the edge of the wet tidemark. As she did this and showed them one by one to Nance, her face once more assumed that clear, transparent look, spiritual beyond description and touched with a childish happiness, which the girl had noticed upon it when she spoke of the books she loved. Could it be that only where religion or the opposite sex were concerned this strange being was diseased and perverted? If so, how dreadful, how cruel, that the two things which were to most people the very mainspring of life were to this unhappy one the deepest causes of wretchedness! Yet Nance was far from satisfied with her reading of the mystery of Mrs. Renshaw. There was something in the woman, in spite of her almost savage outbursts of self-revelation, so aloof, so proud, so reserved that the girl felt only vaguely assured she was on the right track with regard to her. Perhaps, after all, below that tone of self-humiliating sentiment with which she habitually spoke of both God and man, there was some deep and passionate current of feeling, hidden from all the world? Or was she, essentially and in secret truth, cold and hard and pagan and only forcing herself to drink the cup of what she conceived to be Christianity out of a species of half-insane pride? In all her utterances with regard to religion and sex there was, Nance felt, a kind of heavy materiality, as if she got an evil satisfaction in rendering what is usually called “goodness” as colourless and contemptible as possible. But now as she picked up a trumpet-shaped shell from the line of debris and held it up, her eyes liquid with pleasure, to the girl’s view, Nance could not resist the impression that she was in some strange way a creature forced and driven out of her natural element into these obscure perversities.

“I used to paint these shells when I was a girl,” Mrs. Renshaw remarked.

“What colour?” Nance answered, still thinking more of the woman than of her words. Her companion looked at her and burst into quite a merry laugh.

“I don’t mean paint the shell itself,” she said. “You’re not listening to me, Nance. I mean copy it, of course, and paint the drawing. I used to collect seaweeds too, in those days, and dry them in a book. I have that book somewhere still,” she added, wistfully, “but I don’t know where.”

She had won the girl’s attention completely now. Nance seemed to visualize with a sudden sting of infinite pity the various little relics so entirely dissociated from Rodmoor and its inhabitants which this reserved woman must keep stored up in that gloomy house.

“It’s a funny thing,” Mrs. Renshaw went on, “but I can smell at this moment quite distinctly (I suppose it’s being down here by the sea that makes it come to me) the very scent of that book! The pages used to get stuck together and when I pulled them apart there was always the imprint of the seaweed on the paper. I used to like to see that. It was as though Nature had drawn it.”

“It’s lovely, collecting things,” Nance remarked sympathetically. “I used to collect butterflies when I was a child. Dad used to say I was more like a boy than a girl.”

Mrs. Renshaw glanced at her with a curious look.

“Nance, dear,” she said in a low, trembling voice, “don’t ever get into the habit of trying to be boyish and that sort of thing. Don’t ever do that! The only good women are the women who accept God’s will and bow to his pleasure. Anything else leads to untold wretchedness.”

Nance made no reply to this and they both began searching for more shells among the stranded sea-drift.

Over their heads the sea-gulls whirled with wild disturbed screams. There was only one sail on the horizon now and Nance fixed her thoughts upon it and an immense longing for Adrian surged up in her heart.

Meanwhile, between Linda and Miss Doorm a conversation much more sinister was proceeding. Rachel seemed from their first encounter and as soon as the girl came into contact with her to reassert all her old mastery. She deliberately overcame the frightened child’s instinctive movement to keep pace with the others and held her closely to her side as if by the power of some ancient link between them, too strong to be overcome.

“Let me look at you,” she said as soon as their friends were out of hearing. “Let me look into your eyes, my pretty one!”

She laid one of her gaunt hands on the girl’s shoulder and with the other held up her chin.

“Yes,” she remarked after a long scrutiny during which Linda seemed petrified into a sort of dumb submission, “yes, I can see you’ve struggled against him. I can see you’ve not given up without an effort. That means that you have given up! If you hadn’t fought against him he wouldn’t have followed you. He’s like that. He always was like that.” She removed her hands but kept her eyes fixed gloomily on the girl’s face. “I expect you’re wishing now you’d never seen this place, eh? Aren’t you wishing that? So this is the end of all your selfishness and your vanity? Yes, it’s the end, Linda Herrick. It’s the end.”

She dragged the girl slowly forward along the path. On their right as they advanced, the sun flickered upon the rank grasses which grew intermittently in the soft sand and on their left the glittering sea lay calm and serene under the spacious sky.

Linda felt her feet grow heavy beneath her and her heart sank with a sick misgiving as she saw how far they had permitted the others to outstrip them. Beyond anything else it was the power of cruel memories which held the young girl now so docile, so helpless, in the other’s hands. The old panic-stricken terror which Rachel had the power of exciting in her when a child seemed ineluctable in its endurance. Faintly and feebly in her heart Linda struggled against this spell. She longed to shake herself free and rush desperately in pursuit of the others but her limbs seemed turned to lead and her will seemed paralyzed.

Rachel’s face was white and haggard. She seemed animated by some frenzied impulse — some inward, demoniac force which drove her on. Drops of perspiration stood out upon her forehead and made the grey hair that fell across it moist and clammy under the rim of her dusty black hat. Her clothes, as she held the girl close to her side, threw upon the air a musty, fetid odour.

“Where are your soft ways now?” she went on, “your little clinging ways, your touching little babyish ways? Where are your whims and your fancies? Your caprices and your blushes? Where are your white-faced pretences, and your sham terrors, only put on to make you look sweet?”

She had her hand upon the girl’s arm as she spoke and she tightened her grasp, almost shaking her in her mad malignity.

“Before you were born your mother was afraid of me,” she went on. “Oh, she gained little by cutting me out with her pretty looks! She gained little, Linda Herrick! She dared scarcely look me in the face in those days. She was afraid even to hate me. That is why you are what you are. You’re the child of her terror, Linda Herrick, the child of her terror!”

She paused for a moment while the girl’s breath came in gasps through her white lips as if under the burden of an incubus.